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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (61702)	1/27/2006 10:54:30 AM
From: JeffA	Respond to of 173976

Did you bother to read the contribution limits? Do you KNOW anything about what goes on up there or is this your typical Dem kneejerk hate reaction to anything conservative?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (61702)	1/27/2006 12:42:24 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 173976

kennyboy, demohacks lost all front teeth ? wearing denture ? New Poll Finds Mixed Support for Wiretaps By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER Americans are willing to tolerate eavesdropping without warrants to fight terrorism, but are concerned that the aggressive antiterrorism programs championed by the Bush administration are encroaching on civil liberties, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. In a sign that public opinion about the trade-offs between national security and individual rights is nuanced and remains highly unresolved, responses to questions about the administration's eavesdropping program varied significantly depending on how the questions were worded, underlining the importance of the effort by the White House this week to define the issue on its terms. The poll, conducted as President Bush defended his surveillance program in the face of criticism from Democrats and some Republicans that it is illegal, found that Americans were willing to give the administration some latitude for its surveillance program if they believed it was intended to protect them. Fifty-three percent of the respondents said they supported eavesdropping without warrants "in order to reduce the threat of terrorism." The results suggest that Americans' view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said. In one striking finding, respondents overwhelmingly supported e-mail and telephone monitoring directed at "Americans that the government is suspicious of;" they overwhelmingly opposed the same kind of surveillance if it was aimed at "ordinary Americans." Mr. Bush, at a White House press conference yesterday, twice used the phrase "terrorist surveillance program" to describe an operation in which the administration has eavesdropped on telephone calls and other communications like e-mail that it says could involve operatives of Al Qaeda overseas talking to Americans. Critics say the administration could conduct such surveillance while still getting prior court approval, as spelled out in a 1978 law intended to guard against governmental abuses.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (61702)	1/27/2006 8:25:48 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 173976

Dear Kenneth E. Phillipps you can chose to swallow whole the babble of a usatoday talking head expert, with a degree in tribal customs of mushroom and his analysis of the meaning of CBO data. But it seem others have done some analysis... And you being a total legal and everything else ignoramus will likely not comprehend anyway. "The 2003 Tax Cut on Capital Gains Entirely Paid for Itself I’m not just saying it — CBO is. NRO Donald Luskin To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (723098) 1/27/2006 3:40:13 PM From: Thomas A Watson Read Replies (1) of 723196 On Thursday the Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, and buried in one of its nearly impenetrable tables of numbers is a remarkable story that has gone entirely unreported by the mainstream media: The 2003 tax cut on capital gains has entirely paid for itself. More than paid for itself. Way more. To appreciate this story, we have to go back in time to January 2003, before the tax cut was enacted. Table 3-5 on page 60 in CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook published in 2003 estimated that capital-gains tax liabilities would be $60 billion in 2004 and $65 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $125 billion. Now let’s move forward a year, to January 2004, after the capital-gains tax cut had been enacted. Table 4-4 on page 82 in CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook of that year shows that the estimates for capital-gains tax liabilities had been lowered to $46 billion in 2004 and $52 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $98 billion. Compare the original $125 billion total to the new $98 billion total, and we can infer that CBO was forecasting that the tax cut would cost the government $27 billion in revenues. Those are the estimates. Now let’s see how things really turned out. Take a look at Table 4-4 on page 92 of the Budget and Economic Outlook released this week. You’ll see that actual liabilities from capital-gains taxes were $71 billion in 2004, and $80 billion in 2005, for a two-year total of $151 billion. So let’s do the math one more time: Subtract the originally estimated two-year liability of $125 billion from the actual liability of $151 billion, and you get a $26 billion upside surprise for the government. Yes, instead of costing the government $27 billion in revenues, the tax cuts actually earned the government $26 billion extra. CBO’s estimate of the “cost” of the tax cut was virtually 180 degrees wrong. The Laffer curve lives! This straight-A report card on supply-side tax-cutting was noted Thursday by Daniel Clifton of the American Shareholders Association — the man who predicted that exactly this would happen when the tax cuts were first enacted. Clifton wrote on his blog, a capital gains tax cut spurs the growth of new businesses, increases the wage of workers, enhances consumer purchasing power, and grows the economy at large, resulting in more overall gains to be taxed. When capital is taxed at a lower rate, any revenue losses are offset because there is more overall capital being produced, and thus more total revenue being generated. Using the same kind of analysis, we can see that attempts to raise tax revenues by raising tax rates simply doesn’t work. Consider the massive increase in personal income-tax rates imposed by President Clinton and a Democratic Congress in 1993. Compare actual total tax revenues for the four years from 1993 to 1996 to what had been estimated by CBO in 1992 before the tax hikes took effect. Despite increasing the top tax rate on incomes by 16 percent to 28 percent, actual revenues only beat the 1992 estimate by less than 1 percent. So what led to the gusher of tax revenues in the late 1990s that helped to put the federal budget into surplus? Simple: It was the capital-gains tax cut engineered by a Republican Congress in 1997. Compare actual total tax revenues for the three years from 1997 to 1999 to what had been previously estimated by CBO in January 1997. Despite cutting the capital-gains tax rate by 28 percent, actual total revenues beat the 1997 estimate by more than 11 percent. These are the numbers. They don’t lie. It’s the Left that lies — just like former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did this week in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal when he said The proponents of supply-side theory who assert that tax cuts will wholly — or even significantly — pay for themselves (through increased growth and federal tax revenues), appear to be no more accurate now than they were in the ’90s. The numbers show that supply-side theory is accurate now and that it was accurate in the ’90s. With the latest evidence from the CBO in hand, as Daniel Clifton says, “It’s time to make the capital gains and dividend tax cuts permanent. Congress has no excuse at this point.” — Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com. nationalreview.com