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POPSThat 5% Pay All The Taxes Of course, you must parse the words of any Democrat extremely closely. He is saying you won't pay any more in taxes NEXT YEAR. But the old tax rates don't come back until 2010.
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POPSBetter tax plan Who has the better tax plan? According to the Tax Policy Center, and The Washington Post, it would be McCain.
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POPSFINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL Fed Pumps Further $630 Billion Into Financial System (Update3) The Fed's expansion of liquidity, the biggest since credit markets seized up last year, came hours before the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry. The crisis is reverberating through the global economy, causing stocks to plunge and forcing European governments to rescue four banks over the past two days alone. Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression. The Fed increased its existing currency swaps with foreign central banks by $330 billion to $620 billion to make more dollars available worldwide. The Term Auction Facility, the Fed's emergency loan program, will expand by $300 billion to $450 billion. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahwz_k5JvuB8&refer=worldwide
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POPSWhy Would Warren Buffett Stoop So Low?
The market still works! With all due respect to Buffett, nobody has yet made a compelling case to me that there is, in fact, a crisis that extends much beyond overleveraged banks with bad business practices. There's a simple fact lost among all of this fearmongering and jawboning about how bad things could get if the government doesn't throw $700 billion (or more) at failing financial institutions. The stock and vulture-capital markets are still generally working, in spite of the cries from politicians and failing speculators to the contrary. The market also has a really good mechanism to help struggling financial companies get money. It's called "price," and it's still functioning. You can see it in action by looking at the one-year CD rates that various banks are offering to entice people to deposit money with them. When the people lobbying the hardest for a bailout are those who stand to benefit from it, you have to ask whether their motives are altruistic or self-serving.
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POPSWe were warned Despite these warnings, Woodrow Wilson signed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. A few years later he wrote: I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men. -Woodrow Wilson
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POPSGovernment on a diet
Most governments have reduced their top tax rates and spending-to-GDP ratios over the last decade or so, according to data published by the OECD, IMF and World Bank. But slimmer governments have done so at a faster pace, and to significantly lower levels. Their highest tax rate on personal income fell to a group average of 30% in 2006 from 36% in 1996. Top corporate rates were lowered to an average of 22% from 30%. Their average ratio of total government outlays to GDP fell to 31.6% in 2007, from an average peak level during the previous two decades of 40.4% Investment growth jumped to an average annual rate of 5.9% in 2000-2005, from 3.8% over the previous decade. Exports have risen by 6.3% annually since 2000. The net result was a surge in economic growth. The IMF reports that GDP soared in the slimmer-government group at a 5.4% average annual rate from 1999-2008 (including its forecast for the current year), up from a 4.6% rate over the previous decade. Over that same period,
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POPSThe US economy These gains in income and wealth have resulted directly in a better standard of living for virtually every segment of American society—including the poor. Among families living below the official poverty line in the early 1970s, less than 40 percent had a car, almost none had color televisions, and air conditioning was virtually unheard of; in 2004, 46 percent owned their own homes, almost 75 percent owned a car (indeed, 30 percent owned two or more cars), 97 percent had color TVs, and 67 percent had air conditioning. The poor in the U.S. have an average of 721 square feet of living space per person, as compared with 430 in Sweden and 92 in Mexico.
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POPSDrilling for Oil..in Downtown L.A. This is soooo interesting. I had no idea this was going on. FTA: "California is the nation's biggest consumer of gasoline and is fourth among oil-producing states behind Texas, Alaska and Louisiana..."
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POPSGas Comparisons..... (sigh) When will the US act? How long will Congress ignore it's citizens? Do you know China is in Cuba sucking out our oil off the Atlantic coast? I support ALL efforts towards energy independence.
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POPSBritain Slips from Fully "Free" Economic Countries Just why would you believe that the government would be able to spend all this money better than its individual citizens? Well, they have "free" health care, and "free" pensions and lost of "free" stuff that they get by shoveling 45% of their entire economy into the maw of bureaucrats. And then they wonder why they aren't happy?
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POPSEnd Of Bull Market? If U.S. stocks open Tuesday at the levels futures are indicating, it would push major indexes dangerously close to the 20% drop from their peak in October that would mark a bear market.
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POPSObama's Worn Out Economic Ideas There is much current political interest in so-called "predatory lending" -- the charging of high interest rates for loans to poor people or to people with low credit ratings. Nothing will be easier politically than passing laws to limit interest rates or make it harder for lenders to recover their money -- and nothing will cause credit to dry up faster to low-income people, forcing some of them to have to turn to illegal loan sharks, who have their own methods of collecting. The underlying reality that politicians do not want to face is that here, too, prices convey a reality that is not subject to political control. That reality is that it is far riskier to lend to some people than to others. That is why the price of a loan -- the interest rate -- is far higher to some people than to others. Far from making extra profits on riskier loans, many lenders have lost millions of dollars on such loans and some have gone bankrupt.
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POPSBush oil price 'begging' is 'pathetic': Clinton What nerve! What hypocrisy! What happened to 'talking' instead of bombing....'diplomacy' instead of cowboying? The man is damned if he does; damned if he doesn't. And what political party (or dominating portion of it) has blocked every effort to give the US energy independence? No refineries, no coal plants, no nuclear power, no off-shore drilling, no wind, etc.....just let's raise taxes on gasoline, heating oil, petroleum companies and everyone ride a bike.
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POPSEco-Dogma::Every Child Should Be Unwanted At the recent climate jamboree in Bali, the Reverend Al Gore told the assembled faithful: "My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress here." Really? The American Thinker's website ran the numbers. In the seven years between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here's what happened: Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%. Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%. Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%. Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%. It's hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world's elites. If you're one of that dwindling band of westerners who'll be celebrating the birth of a child, "homeless" or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example.