Archive for September, 2011

Dan Calabrese

If you dread dealing with the TSA as you go through the airport, it’s just too bad for you that you’re not Herman Cain these days. Nothing succeeds like success, and the winner of last weekend’s Florida Straw Poll gets the sense from people that he’s on to something – because his momentum is based on a substantive idea that folks can understand.

“We left yesterday to go to New York for a fundraiser,” Cain told me on Wednesday. “After I put my stuff on the belt and it came through on the other side, there was a TSA agent standing there. The guy says, ‘Hello, Mr. Cain. 9-9-9!’”

The 9-9-9 plan, of course, is Cain’s proposal to overhaul the U.S. tax code. In place of the complicated myriad of taxes with which we struggle to comply today, Cain would institute a simple, three-pronged system:

- A 9 percent business flat tax on gross income less all investments and purchases from other businesses. Cain would end the double taxation of dividends.

- A 9 percent individual income flat tax, which would apply to all gross income less charitable contributions. No other deductions would be allowed.

- A 9 percent national sales tax.

It’s so simple, you could explain it in an interview on Jay Leno. In fact, Cain intends to do that very thing tonight when he appears on The Tonight Show.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brett Noel

cacartoon

cacartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

Larger version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

cartoon

cartoon

rtr

Herman Cain

The results of last Saturday’s Florida straw poll sent a message to Washington, D.C. and the media establishment. “We the people” are still in charge of this country. The actual vote still matters, not just what the political and media pundits anticipate.

My winning total of 37 percent of the vote eclipsed the so-called two front-runners combined. Both campaign camps have tried to spin the results for other than what they really suggest. Namely, the citizen’s movement is bigger and more influential than most people recognize, and that message is more powerful than money.

Governors Romney and Perry spent a considerable amount of money trying to influence the outcome of the Florida straw poll. We rented a bus and did some bus tours, which gave me an opportunity to give a lot of speeches about my solutions on how to fix our nation’s crises, instead of more political rhetoric and ideas that all sound the same.

For example, Mitt Romney said during the last presidential debate that when he served as governor of Massachusetts, he didn’t inhale. His plan for economic growth and jobs suggests otherwise. It tries to incorporate tax policy, regulatory policy, trade policy, energy policy, labor policy, human capital policy and fiscal policy all in one plan, which makes it complex. Worst yet, his ideas pivot off of the current tax code.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Calabrese

Quick, go find the nearest poor person and tell him you’re going to do him a favor. You’re going to urge some politician to talk about him.

That’ll keep the lights on and put food on the table.

At least that seems to be the case in the world inhabited by The Detroit Free Press editorial board, which lamented with great sadness this past Friday that no one in the political world is talking about the poor. It’s a very instructive editorial. It tells you a lot about the media’s growing inability to distinguish political words from actual solutions to problems.

Consider this passage, with emphasis added:

“It has become politically unfashionable to lament what’s happening to the poor in this country. Many in the GOP have embraced the cruel mantra that the poor got that way on purpose and are just too lazy to do any better.

Not one of the party’s presidential hopefuls even mentioned the poor during this week’s Tea Party debate. And in a shocking revelation of the party’s growing callousness, several audience members called “Yeah!” when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked if a sick patient with no health insurance should be left to die.

Democrats have been cowed by the right’s rhetoric and have stopped discussing poverty openly. During President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last week, he mentioned the poor exactly zero times and induced yawns across both aisles when he invoked themes of the nation’s responsibility to help those who are needy.”

Talk, people! Mention. Discuss. Lament. Invoke themes, even. That’s how you get things done.

Read the rest of this entry »

David Karki

As insane as Obama’s insistence on trillions of dollars of tax hikes on top of tax hikes on top of tax hikes is – his just-announced plan on top of Obamacare’s implementation starting and the Bush tax rates expiring on January 1, 2013 – there is also a usefulness to it all. And it can help to substantially change the political universe for the better come November 2012.

Not only has Obama pulled a Walter Mondale 1984 and set up himself up for a massive defeat on the same scale as the 49-state landslide wipeout loss that Mondale had to Ronald Reagan, but he might also just have created an electoral tsunami that will have down-ballot carryover.  Instead of following the Clinton rule of being as liberal as you want so long as you sound as conservative as possible while doing it (which admittedly requires being a very smooth liar, as Clinton was) and triangulating when necessary, Obama has been the hardcore far-left ideologue many of us knew he was while the media worshipped their phony messiah in 2008 and bamboozled far too many voters into falling for his bulls**t.

It’s not just a matter of Obama having already lost the independents and trying to keep his base from leaving him while there’s still time for them to find a primary opponent to rally around, combined with offering non-existent bills that he knows the GOP House won’t consider so he can run against a “do-nothing Congress”. (And if trillion-dollar tax hikes are the only thing that can be done, then “do nothing” is a badge that the GOP House should wear with pride and honor. Lord knows that Democrat Senators up in 2012 are fleeing from this the fastest of all, since you can’t gerrymander a state.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Brett Noel

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

Larger version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Herman Cain

The first step in solving a problem is to make sure you are working on the right problem. I know this observation sounds like common sense but it is void in the White House and Washington, D.C. We have become a nation of crises, and this administration continues to miss the target as to what the problems are, and therefore the crises get worse.

We have an economic crisis followed closely by crises in energy, immigration, foreign policy, national security and the most severe crisis – a deficiency of leadership.

The president’s recent jobs speech was just that, a speech. It was not a plan to stimulate jobs and economic growth, because it did not contain meaningful fuel for the economic engine of our economy, which is the business sector. His speech contained a lot more government spending and a few tax trinkets to businesses.

Stimulus I of nearly $1 trillion did not work. It is totally illogical to expect another package of nearly $450 billion to work. More spending is not the problem. Lack of economic growth is the problem. The economic outlook is dim.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Calabrese

I bet you didn’t know Democrats and their media allies were such fans of tax cuts. Actually, neither did they, until they figured out a way to turn them to their political advantage – and until they found a way to completely twist the notion of what a meaningful tax cut really is.

It’s true that President Obama proposed a temporary cut in the payroll tax, and for a man who is so concerned about what the Bush tax cuts supposedly cost the Treasury, he sure doesn’t seem too worried about its effect on Social Security, which is what the payroll tax funds.

But then again, Democrats are always telling us that Social Security is just fine, so hey, why collect the payroll tax at all?

Read the rest of this entry »

David Karki

In driving the economy and the country off a cliff, President Obama has performed one useful function: he has woken up a lot of previously ignorant people to the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of liberalism. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to look at how awful his incomprehensively gargantuan expansions of government have made things and realize that if these delusional ideas of his were even a tiny bit true, that things should be much better than they are.

To use a metaphor, Obama has, through taxing, spending, and regulating to near-infinite levels, jacked up the heat to maximum under the pot of boiling water and the frog in it that is the American people now might just jump out to safety rather than sit there and slowly but steadily cook to death as they had been doing in accepting a relentlessly growing federal government ever since FDR’s New Deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Brett Noel

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

cartoon

Larger version for newspaper publication.