Dumb and Dumber: Raising taxes and other matters
The Left constantly craves greater government revenues, always striving to raise taxes on the very people and businesses that create our nation’s jobs and economic progress. Ironically, raising taxes results in a decrease in government revenues. By contrast, when Presidents Kennedy (D) and Reagan (R) achieved large cuts in the marginal income-tax rates for individuals and reduced taxes on business, they netted huge increases in government revenues. But the Left never seems to learn from history.
Colorado provides a current example. A legislator from the Peoples’ Republik of Boulder is proposing a state-wide tax increase in the form of Proposition 103 which, if approved, would sabotage chances of an economic recovery in Colorado and, therefore, result in a decrease in state revenues. Reminds one of the Jim Carrey-Jeff Daniels motion picture: “Dumb and Dumber.” To add to the plausibility of its story-line, the film was “set” in the Peoples’ Republik of Aspen, but filmed elsewhere.
Turning to international affairs: Conventional wisdom suggests our hearts go out to the American backpackers held in Iran. But even the characters in “Dumb and Dumber” would have known that arrest for crossing the borders of a nation hostile to the United States could result in long prison terms or a bail-out by the American taxpayers. Based on previous “hostage” situations, we can safely predict Iran wants the release of certain terrorists currently held at Guantanamo and at least $1 million of our tax dollars to spend on more terrorism.
While some will hail the backpackers as free spirits who had the misfortune to be caught inside a nation that fancies itself as America’s number-one enemy, this writer sees them as spoiled youth determined to do whatever they felt like doing, heedless of the harm that they might do to the interests of the United States. Were they CIA agents? No, just dumb and dumber.
New subject: Many of us who were marching around in the South in the 1960s on behalf of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were mainly concerned about equal treatment of people of all colors by governments at all levels. If we gave any thought at all about the election of a black president, I suppose we would have conjured up the image of someone like Bill Cosby in the 1965-1968 TV series “I Spy,” or “The Cosby Show,” or black scholars such as: Dr. Walter E. Williams, Dr. Thomas Sowell, or Dr. Shelby Steele. At the time, Mr. Obama was about seven-years-old. He would not have come to mind.
In 2007, Dr. Steele, who, like Mr. Obama, is the son of a black father and a white mother, wrote a book about presidential Candidate Obama in which Dr. Steele opined that the use of “victimization” is of great hindrance to black Americans. He says, as a way of salving their guilty consciences, many whites view blacks as “victims.” Blacks, according to Dr. Steele, try to turn their status as victims into a kind of currency that buys them nothing of lasting value. For blacks to get ahead, Dr. Steele says blacks must stop “buying into the zero-sum game,” and adopt a “culture of excellence and achievement,” and stop relying on “set-asides and entitlements.”
As the current presidential campaign unfolds, what the Obama Administration has done or failed to do since January, 2009, will be portrayed by the mainstream-electronic media, the Internet media, and the print media, with whatever spin the Administration’s media supporters or detractors wish to apply to it. If it develops, as it looks like it might, that the Obama Administration can be truly characterized as cronyism-corrupt, opaque, and pursuing policies that diminish rather than enhance the United States of America that is clearly not what we were marching for in the 1960s.
Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.
©2011. William Hamilton.
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