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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (30067)	5/3/2010 8:23:21 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 103300

Teasing From The Captain (from LindyBill) JUST ONE MINUTE Captain Ed is sneak-previewing a new Barack-basher, The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists. A hint of things to come: >>> In just one of the revelations in this politically radioactive release, the book uncovers for the first time where and how Obama first met Weatherman founder Bill Ayers – and it is much earlier than previously believed.<<< Previously believed by whom - our credulous mainstream media, who were lied to throughout the campaign by Team Obama? (David Remnick of the New Yorker preferred the word "disingenuous" to describe Obama's behavior, and contradicted another aspect of the official Obama/Ayers story.) Still, for those scoring at home the current implausible Team Obama story is that Obama met Bill Ayers in 1995. In their latest telling Bill Ayers toiled for a year pulling together the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, maintaining harmonious relationships with other backers and founders before, during and after the process. However, for no discernible reason Bill Ayers played no role at all in selecting the Chicago Annenberg Challenge chairman, the post that went to Barack Obama in 1995, after which Obama and Ayers met. Only the NY Times could believe that, or pretend to; Steve Diamond's pushback is here. And my guess as to when they met? 1988 seems like easy money - per "Dreams From My Father", Obama was working on a city-wide push for education reform as part of a coalition coordinated by Bill Ayers. Per this hypothesis, Ayers then resumes his collaboration with Obama in 1995 on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. But Steve Diamond wants to go even further back: >>> Barack Obama visited the house of Tom and Mary Ayers, parents of former Weather Underground activist turned education professor Bill Ayers, in the mid-1980s to thank the Ayers' for their support of his education, according to Allen Hulton, the letter carrier who delivered mail to the Ayers' Glen Ellyn home at that time. Glen Ellyn is a suburb of Chicago, southwest of the city. Hulton spoke to King Harvest at length about his experience. The statement by Hulton is the first eyewitness account of a possible relationship between Obama and Tom Ayers and the first that dates his relationship with the Ayers family to the mid-1980s.<<< The postman always rings twice, and apparently was chatty with the missus: >>> "Mrs. Ayers told me that her family had been helping out a brilliant young black man," Hulton said and whom he believes she said was from Kenya. Hulton said that over the period of six to ten years that he delivered mail to the Ayers home he had numerous conversations with Mrs. Ayers, one conversation with Thomas Ayers and several brief encounters with Bernardine Dohrn who he said lived at the home for several months at one point in time. He never met or saw Bill Ayers at the home.<<< As to the encounter: >>> As Hulton was on the sidewalk walking away from the Ayers house a tall and thin young black man was coming up the same sidewalk towards the Ayers house. Hulton recalls that Obama said hello and introduced himself and stopped to chat with him in front of the Ayers house. "I recall that his ears stuck out a little bit. He was more gaunt then than he appears now. His name was an unusual one and when I saw his photo during the campaign it brought back my memory of the event," Hulton said. Mr. Obama explained that he had taken the train out from Chicago to visit the Ayers' in order to thank them for their help with his "education." At this time, Mr. Obama had recently graduated from Columbia and would soon enter Harvard Law School. Hulton and Obama "spoke for a few minutes, first chatting about the Ayers family," Hulton said. Hulton said he did not learn whether the help Obama received from the Ayers' was financial or in some other form.<<< Puzzling. I will say this - I will be shocked if the new revelations in the latest book shock me. DO WE HEAR "COLUMBIA"?: Well, Obama was there when Bill Ayers was studying a few blocks away and everyone was protesting for South African divestment. Of course, the Weathermen robbed a Brinks truck and became radioactive, so Obama will never admit to this; now, he pretends that he never heard of the Weathermen and thought they did their criminal stuff in the late 60's when he was a mere lad. If one is looking for a motive for Obama to continue the cover-up, this would work." justoneminute.typepad.com

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (30067)	5/3/2010 8:47:27 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 103300

Greece’s Problem Is High Tax Rates, not Tax Evasion by Dan Mitchell The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country’s fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is grossly inaccurate. A quick look at the budget numbers reveals that tax revenues have remained relatively constant in recent years, consuming nearly 40 percent of GDP. The burden of government spending, by contrast, has jumped significantly and now exceeds 50 percent of Greek economic output. The article also is flawed in assuming that harsher enforcement is the key to compliance. As the video shows, even the economists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development admit that tax evasion is driven by high tax rates (which is remarkable since the OECD is the international bureaucracy pushing for global tax rules to undermine tax competition and reduce fiscal sovereignty). Ironically, the New York Times article quotes Friedrich Schneider of Johannes Kepler University in Austria, but only to provide an estimate of Greece’s shadow economy. The reporter should have looked at an article that Schneider wrote for the International Monetary Fund, which found that: Macroeconomic and microeconomic modeling studies based on data for several countries suggest that the major driving forces behind the size and growth of the shadow economy are an increasing burden of tax and social security payments… The bigger the difference between the total cost of labor in the official economy and the after-tax earnings from work, the greater the incentive for employers and employees to avoid this difference and participate in the shadow economy. …Several studies have found strong evidence that the tax regime influences the shadow economy. …In Austria, the burden of direct taxes (including social security payments) has been the biggest influence on the growth of the shadow economy… Other studies show similar results for the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and the United States. In the United States, analysis shows that as the marginal federal personal income tax rate increases by one percentage point, other things being equal, the shadow economy grows by 1.4 percentage points. …A study of Quebec City in Canada shows that people are highly mobile between the official and the shadow economy, and that as net wages in the official economy go up, they work less in the shadow economy. This study also emphasizes that where people perceive the tax rate as too high, an increase in the (marginal) tax rate will lead to a decrease in tax revenue. It is worth noting the Schneider’s research also shows why Obama’s tax policy is very misguided. The President wants to boost the top tax rate by nearly five percentage points, and that’s on top of the big increase in the tax rate on saving and investment included in Obamacare. Based on Schneider’s research, we can expect America’s underground economy to expand. Shifting back to Greece, Schneider does not claim that tax rates are the only factor determining compliance. But his research indicates that more onerous enforcement regimes are unlikely to put much of a dent in tax evasion unless accompanied by better tax policy (i.e., lower tax rates). Moreover, compliance also is undermined by the rampant corruption and incompetence of the Greek government, but that problem won’t be solved unless politicians reduce the size and scope of the public sector. Needless to say, that’s not very likely. So when I read some of the details in this excerpt from the New York Times, much of my sympathy is for taxpayers rather than the greedy politicians that turned Greece into a fiscal mess: In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools. So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools. That kind of wholesale lying about assets, and other eye-popping cases that are surfacing in the news media here, points to the staggering breadth of tax dodging that has long been a way of life here. …Such evasion has played a significant role in Greece’s debt crisis, and as the country struggles to get its financial house in order, it is going after tax cheats as never before. …To get more attentive care in the country’s national health system, Greeks routinely pay doctors cash on the side, a practice known as “fakelaki,” Greek for little envelope. And bribing government officials to grease the wheels of bureaucracy is so standard that people know the rates. They say, for instance, that 300 euros, about $400, will get you an emission inspection sticker. …Various studies have concluded that Greece’s shadow economy represented 20 to 30 percent of its gross domestic product. Friedrich Schneider, the chairman of the economics department at Johannes Kepler University of Linz, studies Europe’s shadow economies; he said that Greece’s was at 25 percent last year and estimated that it would rise to 25.2 percent in 2010.