But Remember, It's the GOP Who Are Out of Touch With Average Americans

God bless Joe Biden. If anything were to happen to Old Joe, Obama may get smart and get a VP who actually has a clue what the hell he's saying. In the meantime, we still have Biden to say idiotic things whenever he opens his mouth:

Vice President Joe Biden addressed 87 wealthy Democrats last night attending a fundraiser at the home of Sen. John Kerry in Georgetown. As they dined on grass-fed New York strip steaks and white truffle mashed potatos underneath a outdoor tent, Biden criticized Republicans for being out of touch.

“These guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there,” Biden said according to the pool report, “They don’t know what it means to be middle class.”

87 guests paid a minimum of $10,000-per-couple to attend the dinner.

Yeah Joe, you are really in touch, buddy. Nearly a cool, half million collected at a fundraiser at $5,000-per-person is the kind of event that Joe Sixpack would be attending right before he went to work on the night shift. These people actually have said this shit for so long they now believe it.

This is easily the most tin-eared administration in history. Bombings in Iraq; Obama goes golfing. Korans accidentally get burned and American military officers get murdered and Obama apologizes inflaming the situation more.

I mean, imagine if Bush had done any of these things.

A Stunning Scene

Let CNN and MSNBC snark but what we saw yesterday was a collective roar from the middle class of this country. Politicians on both sides ignore it at their peril.

This from liberal hotbed Madison, WI (via Instapundit):



That cannot be explained away as some fringe right wingers.

Obama Inciting Class Warfare

Our new president was never hesitant to pull the race card to give him an advantage on the campaign trail. I guess we shouldn't be too surprised he's stoking the fires of class warfare:

But there is another, less generous way to describe them: class warfare. Under the administration’s scheme, two percent of income earners will be forced to subsidize what the budget calls “95 percent of working families,” including the 40 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes whatsoever – a redistributionist power grab in all but name. As it applies to politics, one definition of fairness holds that the government should be neutral between its citizens, regardless of the size of their paycheck. Plainly, that is not the definition favored by the Obama administration. And that’s just of one the flaws of the administration’s two-percent solution.

Supposing this soak-the-rich policy was justified, would it be sufficient to cover the costs of the administration’s budget? The answer, it seems, is “No.” After crunching the numbers, the Wall Street Journal concluded that even after increasing taxes on the top two percent of Americans, the administration would still fall far short of its funding ambitions. Indeed, using statistics from 2006, the latest year from which tax figures are available and one that preceded the economic downturn, the Journal concluded that even a “tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010.”

In other words, raising taxes on the highest earners won’t pay for the Obama budget. Either the administration will have to scale back its spending proposals or it will have to seek money from taxpayers making less than $250,000. In all the thoroughness of its hundred-plus pages, the budget released yesterday somehow neglected to mention that little detail.

We're starting to see a disturbing trend here; Obama will use fear as a tool to pass his agenda as was painfully evident during the stimulus debate. Now he's playing on the basest of human emotions: envy. In a time when many are hurting financially--a new paradigm for many--Obama and his allies are verbally crucifying those who worked hard to establish themselves, got themselves educated and used their wits to become successful. Many people have a loathing of anyone who makes more than them or is in a higher position in life and Obama is shamefully playing on that.

The Inquirer even made this a front page story but ran a story that is soft on criticism.

As stated above, it will never be enough to soak those who the Dems consider "rich" because those people are incredibly overtaxed as it is and shoulder the largest tax onus. Even if the were to pay 100% of their pay into the treasury (a liberals wet dream to say the least), we'd still never pay the huge bills amassed in a little over a month by this administration.

By marginalizing those who make $250,000, Obama and the Dems are making them the targets of scorn from those who are suffering the worst--a truly dangerous game to play. If you think I'm joking, why not ask the Germans.

The Obama Tax and Spend Nightmare

If we should be so unlucky after Inauguration Day, a President Obama will sign into law--with a compliant Congress--the most spectacular series of tax increases in memory (marketed as "tax cuts"). He will do this in the midst of a deep recession and he will do this with unemployment creeping upwards weekly.

The plan is so alarming that 100 tax professors have signed onto a letter agreeing that it would be disastrous in the short and long-term:

We are equally concerned with his proposals to increase tax rates on labor income and investment. His dividend and capital gains tax increases would reduce investment and cut into the savings of millions of Americans. His proposals to increase income and payroll tax rates would discourage the formation and expansion of small businesses and reduce employment and take-home pay, as would his mandates on firms to provide expensive health insurance.

After hearing such economic criticism of his proposals, Barack Obama has apparently suggested to some people that he might postpone his tax increases, perhaps to 2010. But it is a mistake to think that postponing such tax increases would prevent their harmful effect on the economy today. The prospect of such tax rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy. Businesses considering whether to hire workers today and expand their operations have time horizons longer than a year or two, so the prospect of higher taxes starting in 2009 or 2010 reduces hiring and investment in 2008.

It's a plan that would lead to further economic disaster. When five Nobel Prize winners in economics agree (but not including the newest member of that club) it must be one hell of a scary tax plan.

It's a double-whammy for sure. By forcing employers to pay for health insurance, those employers will opt to not hire new employees. It will also hurt those who can least afford it--low income wage earners. If an employer is looking for a mid-level manager for, say, $80,000 per annum, he's not going to sweat the insurance as much and offer the guy $75,000 instead to cut the cost. But a small business employer doesn't have that luxury so will just go without or pay another employee to work the overtime instead.

On top of that, the average worker will pay more in taxes without seeing any reciprocity in benefits. People are struggling and to take even more of their income would be a burden they couldn't handle. Unions will be forced to fight for higher pay raises to offset the loss in taxes while appeasing their members and companies will be forced to either play hardball when negotiating contracts, downsize or raise prices for consumers. A lose-lose any way you look at it.

We may be on the cusp of the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle and top classes to the bottom we've ever seen.

The Myth of the Shrinking Middle Class

Andrew Cassel takes a look at the supposedly deteriorating middle class in America and discovers some interesting things:

According to a new analysis by a group called Third Way, the American middle class is in better shape than many believe.

Take incomes. Official statistics say that median household income in 2005 was $46,326.That doesn't seem like much, particularly for a family with kids. If you imagine half of all such families trying to get by on less than that (median means half earn less, half more), it sounds fairly grim.

But as the Third Way paper points out, that median doesn't just include stereotypical nuclear families. It includes everyone - including single people in their early 20s and retirees living off pensions and Social Security, who together make up a third of U.S. households.

Narrow the sample to households headed by people between ages 25 and 60 and the median income is much higher. In 2005, it was $61,269.

For married couples the median is higher still - $72,216. And among couples who both work outside the home, the 2005 median income was $81,365.

$72 or $81K is not bad scratch and more than enough to comfortably raise a family.

I know Democrats are saying; who is Third Way, they must be some right-wing group supported by Fox News or the Weekly Standard. They would be wrong:

Third Way, which is affiliated with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, also takes issue with the notion that today's middle class is less economically secure.

That's right, they are an off-shoot of the Bill Clinton created DLC. Third Way describes their mission thusly:

Third Way is a non-profit, non-partisan strategy center for progressives. We are advancing a 21st century progressive agenda by working with elected officials, candidates, and advocates to create policies and market those ideas in the public debate.

No conservative organization there.