Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.

Police Find Crack In Suspect’s Butt: Ramon Blair Arrested In Florida

The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don’t care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left, it would undermine its central program of promoting fear and dependence on a social safety net and a rights infrastructure administered by them.

The left is not very good at discussing the economy. Ask its leaders to apportion blame for economic problems and they are right there with denunciations of the banks, corporations and a thousand other factors. But ask it how to repair an economy and after some mumbling the answer is usually to fund a bunch of its pet projects that have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with its social agenda.

The left’s goal is to transform society, not to empower individuals to make their own choices. That is why an arena like birth control is its natural territory. A society with state subsidized birth control has a low birth rate, low marriage rate, high demand for social subsidies and a high demand for immigrants to compensate for the low birth rate and pay for the social subsidies. Now whether or not you think such a society is a good thing, it is the kind of society that the left wants.

Given a choice between universal birth control and universal free market jobs, the former is a priority and the latter a threat. It’s not just birth control, there are any number of elements, which may be benign in and of themselves, but which fit into a larger picture of the kind of society it wants.

The Communist era left thought big. If there was hunger, they would grow more wheat. If there weren’t enough jobs, they would create more factories. It was a grandiose insanity that eventually brought down Communism, but it was healthier than the post-human left which is declinist. If there is hunger, then their solution is to raise the price of food with a tax that will subsidize meals for the poor. If there aren’t enough jobs, the solution is for more people to go on the dole and for everyone to make do with less.

From a distance this looks like wealth redistribution, but it’s actually a program for teaching everyone to make do with less. That is why Obama has done everything possible to hike energy prices, by making it harder to get to oil, coal and natural gas, while promoting expensive “clean energy” and “energy efficiency”.

Faced with a challenge, the new left’s solution is always make do with less. Less heat, less food and less children. The old left still had some faith in human aspirations. The new left only sees humanity as foolish children who have to be regimented and taught self-discipline. To sacrifice not for a better world, but for a more sustainable existence. There is less of Marx to it and more of Gandhi in that.

Yes, those elite liberal geeeeeniuses, like Wile E. Obama and the rest of the ACME Economic Destruction Co. want to transform America. Conservatives want to transform America, too, but the society they envision is diametrically opposite the one the liberals want. If we don’t swing the balance of power back toward the right this year, the left -led by Obama- is going to chip away at all sorts of freedoms until they have enough control to achieve their dystopian vision. That is a society we don’t want to live in.

Read the rest: Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield.

The challenges that Congress faces in reforming these entitlement programs are heightened by the rapid growth of other dependence-creating programs, such as subsidies for food and housing and college financial aid, and by the growing number of Americans who incur no obligations for receiving them. How likely is Congress to reform entitlements in any meaningful way under such circumstances? Can Congress rein in the massive middle-class entitlements in an environment of fast-expanding dependence programs?

In 1962, the first year measured in the Index of Dependence on Government, the percentage of people who did not pay federal income taxes themselves and who were not claimed as dependents by someone who did pay federal income taxes stood at 23.7 percent; it fell to 12 percent by 1969 before beginning a ragged and ultimately steady increase. By 2000, the percentage was 34.1 percent; by 2009, it was 49.5 percent.[9] In short, the country is now at a point where roughly one-half of “taxpayers” do not pay federal income taxes, and where most of that same population receives generous federal benefits. (See Chart 1.)

This trend should concern everyone who supports America’s republican form of government. If the citizens’ representatives are elected by an increasing percentage of voters who pay no income tax, how long will it be before these representatives respond more to demands for yet more entitlements and subsidies from non-payers than to the pleas of taxpayers to exercise greater spending prudence?

While an ever-increasing number of Americans don’t pay any income taxes, the percentage of federal spending that goes to dependence programs has reached an all-time high:

I don’t know if there are enough legislators in either party with the will to do anything about these twin terrors. Obama’s 2013 budget obviously makes no attempt to address either of these situations. On the contrary, it seems that the CEO of the ACME Economic Destruction Co. seems intent on making both situations worse.

The U.S. economy shuts down in 2027? Had you heard about that? It’s like the ultimate Presidents’ Day sale: Everything must go — literally! At such a moment, it may seem odd to find the political class embroiled in a bitter argument about the Obama administration’s determination to force Catholic institutions and, indeed, my company and your company, if you’re foolish enough still to be in business in the United States to provide free prophylactics to their employees. The received wisdom among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless sex lives as them. I notice that in their coverage NPR and the evening news shows generally refer to the controversy as being about “contraception,” discreetly avoiding mention of sterilization and pharmacological abortion, as if the GOP have finally jumped the shark in order to prevent you jumping anything at all.

It may well be that the Democrats succeed in establishing this narrative. But anyone who falls for it is a sap. In fact, these two issues — the Obama condoms-for-clunkers giveaway and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 900 percent by 2075 — are not unconnected. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., an upside-down family tree. As I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, “If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off?” Most analysts know the answer to that question: Greece is demographically insolvent. So it’s looking to Germany to continue bankrolling its First World lifestyle.

So who’s going to bankroll our ridiculously profligate government’s excessive lifestyle? At the rate we’re going, there won’t be enough of our children or our children’s children to ever pay it off. The crazy spending has got to stop, and soon: the abyss is just ahead.

Read the rest: Contraception Misdirection – Mark Steyn – National Review Online.

Testifying before the House Budget Committee today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Chairman Paul Ryan the following: “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

Actually, President Obama sort of did have a definitive solution. He created a debt commission, which devised a long-term debt reduction plan. Which the president rejected. And instead, we get this new budget proposal, which makes no effort to deal with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—the long-term drivers of U.S. federal debt. The debt curve never gets bent, as the above White House (!) chart shows. (Yes, the chart comes from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.) It just goes up and up and up—until the heat death of the universe or the economy is struck by a Greek-style debt crisis.

Here’s what the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says about the president’s plan:

Over the long-term, the President’s budget would not constrain rising debt, as retirement and health care costs continue growing faster than the economy. According to the Administration’s own estimates, debt would grow as a share of the economy past 2022 exceeding 93 percent by 2035 and nearly 125 percent by 2050. These levels would be both economically constraining and ultimately unsustainable.

The post also includes two charts: one, a frightening picture of the U.S debt as a percentage of GDP is things continue as Obama has proposed, and

the other, a view of the future if we inject a little sanity into the budget, with Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity:”

Since Wile E. Obama and his ACME Economic Destruction Co cohorts have no intention of trying to reduce the size of government or even produce a budget (1000+ days and counting without one), our best bet would be to vote the whole lot of them out in November. The only question is how much damage will be done by January 2013 with these guys running the show?

Read the rest at The Enterprise Blog

Plus, it’s just a great looking watch.

Photo from Gear Patrol

From the RSC Press Release:

Tomorrow, February 17, 2012, will be exactly 3 years since President Obama signed his infamous stimulus package into law. It was a plan designed to create jobs by growing the size of government, and its record has not been good.

Democrats said their costly plan ($1.2 trillion, including interest) would “save or create” up to 4 million jobs and bring the unemployment rate down to about 6% today. The unemployment rate has not fallen below 8% at any point in the last 36 months. Furthermore, the official unemployment rate does not actually count unemployed people who have given up looking for work.

The above chart shows the “labor force participation rate.” This statistic represents the share of working-age Americans who are either employed or unemployed but looking for work. It is not a pretty picture. Only 63.7% of working-age Americans are currently in the workforce – the lowest in almost 29 years!

To put it another way, 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking.

After 3 years of failure, it’s time to try something that will work. Let’s ramp up energy production. Let’s cut away government red tape that slows down job creation. And let’s design a new tax code that is simpler, flatter, and fairer. Let’s pass the Jobs Through Growth Act, and create jobs by growing the economy – not the government.

Meanwhile, the President and his pointy-headed operatives are busy trying to distract Americans with their ginned-up “contraception controversy.”

Couldn’t guess? It’s the White House. It was completely gutted and restored during the Truman Administration. Photos from Retronaut (H/T Coyote Blog)