Tax cuts for the Rich

“Another article by Thomas Sowell

Sometimes a phrase betrays a whole mindset. Someone quoted in the New York Times recently referred to the Bush tax cut as one in which "most of the benefits would be showered on the richest taxpayers."

Keeping money that you yourself earned is called having benefits "showered" on you! By this reasoning, anyone who has the power to take something from you and doesn't take it all is "showering" benefits on you. Anyone who has a gun and doesn't use it to kill you is showering life itself on you.

Big spenders and big taxers never want to face the fact that wealth is not created by government, but by the people that the government taxes. Moreover, these are seldom simply people who "happen to have money."

Most people who have money usually got it by providing other people with something they wanted badly enough to pay for it. This is never called "public service" by the politically correct. Selling people what they want, in order to get what you want, is called "greed."

It's public service when you decide what other people "really" need and impose it at the taxpayers' expense. It's public service when you create hoops for other people to jump through -- rules to follow, forms to fill out, lives to be lived as you prescribe -- all for their own good.

Given this mindset, you can see why letting people keep more of the money they earned is considered to be indulging them with benefits that the government "showers" on them. It is like subsidizing sin.

Anyone who has read "The Federalist Papers" -- or who has read between the lines in the Constitution -- knows that the people who founded this country had a great fear of government's power over individuals. They knew that there are always busybodies who cannot be happy unless they are telling other people what to do and forcing them to do it.

Property rights were put into the Constitution to keep politicians on a short leash, instead of letting them roam at will over the land and treat the wealth created by others as something for them to dispense as largess and use to buy votes.

People had the right to bear arms, so that they could defend themselves, instead of letting their safety and the safety of their families be yet another playground for bright ideas about crime and criminals, such as unsubstantiated theories about "root causes" and pious hopes about "rehabilitation" of criminals and "prevention" of crime.

It is not just a question about the rightness or wrongness of particular notions in isolation, but the unending proliferation of these notions. Every little wonderful bright idea has its rationale. It will make us safer, or smarter, or more sensitive. Above all, it will make us more like the anointed who have thought up these grandiose ideas.

If they think it is more important to look out for caribou than to look out for people, then you must be a slob if you think people are more important than caribou.

When you add up all the requirements, restrictions, re-education, and re-diculous ideas dreamed by all the 57 varieties of busybodies, you end up hemmed in like a rat backed into a corner.

Literally from the moment you wake up in the morning and take a shower (with a government-prescribed rate of water flow) to the time you flush the toilet (also with a government-prescribed water flow rate) for the last time before going to bed, your life has been laid out for you.

Incidentally, the government also subsidizes water for farmers from federal irrigation projects, so that farms end up wasting far more water growing things like rice in the California desert, when the same rice can be grown in parts of the country where ample water is provided free of charge from the clouds.

But consistency is not the bottom line. The bottom line is having you and the farmers both being directed by the anointed.

To people with this mindset, the government all but owns us.

It is no more than a logical corollary that they own our money. Therefore it is just an irresponsible indulgence when tax cuts "shower" us with the money we earned.”

“Amen, brother!”

“May I suggest that all you America hating whiners move to Korea, Japan or Mexico?


http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/tables/International/GIF/tax_gdp.gif" alt="">”

“Amen, V!”

“Sorry, Violin, I don't understand what you are saying. Are the UnAmerican whiners the ones who are paying all thee taxes, or the ones that think the ones who earn it should pay more?

I guess I'm not one of the rich ones, but I'd like to be rich some day.”

“Violin, do you know what they get in return for those high tax rates (at least in some of those countries)?”

“Free beer?”

“So Europe should be our model? 35 hour work week, 1 month vacation, and high unemployment. Europe comes to us for the dirty work, not the other way around.”

“My philosopy is that tax revenues should equal spending. No more borrowing from my kids and grandkids to run this country.

We all want lower taxes. Maybe an emphasis on lower spending is in order.”

“We have a winner! I think chili nailed it.”

“I say we dump all the tea into Boston Harbor!!”

“I have no clue about the unemployment rates Dayhiker. But I don't know a person in the world, who isn't for a 35 hr. work wk. and some frickin' badly needed chill out time (like a month of it).

And no, Violin, not free beer.”

“I'd love to work 30 or 35 hours too, but realize that something else would have to get cut. In Germany they're lobbying for a work week that's like 32 hours, or something close to that. At the same time they're lobbying for more benefits. How does that work? Everyone wants that, but you have to be realistic.”

“We need a centrally planned global economy.”

“So we should work ourselves to death? I think that is part of America's problem.”

“No, we shouldn't work ourselves to death. But don't when you want to work half the time, don't complain when your pay is only half as much as when you were producing twice as much.”

“I hear yas New Girl. That's the trade-off. Work your fingers to the bone or let China take over the world. There are other "hungry" nations out there just waiting for American productivity to wane so they can jump in and fill the niche.

On a personal note, I'll take becoming second tier for a more lax work week and 6 weeks vacation a year. Oh yeah. And socialized medicine :)”

“me too, newgirl! i swear, i could get just as much done in half the time. i have a headache at the end of every work day, yuck. no one was made to sit in one place and stare at a stupid computer all day! i know there are lots of people who have different kinds of jobs, but you know what i mean.”

“Don’t worry. The downtrodden rich will see nearly total relief from any taxation if Smirk has his way:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/business/08COUN.html" target="_blank">White House Floats Idea of Dropping Income Tax Overhaul

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

ASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — President Bush, having already set off a firestorm over his proposals to cut taxes and revamp retirement accounts, suggested today that the time might be near to drop the income tax as a whole and replace it with some form of consumption tax.

The idea was outlined in the White House's annual economic report to Congress. The report, prepared by the White House Council of Economic Advisers and signed by Mr. Bush, offers a scathing critique of the current system and an exuberant description of radical alternatives.

The report does not make formal recommendations, and White House officials emphasized that sweeping tax overhaul was not an immediate policy goal.

But many administration officials have made no secret of their fondness for fundamental tax overhaul, and the report today lays out a detailed rationale for a system that taxes spending rather than income.

By eliminating the complexity and the thousands of arcane preferences in today's tax code, the report says, a consumption tax would not only increase efficiency but promote investment and growth.

"Most estimates suggest that a shift to a consumption tax base would generally increase the size of the capital stock in the long run," the report said. Economic output could increase as much as 6 percent, it added.

Michael Graetz, a professor of tax policy at Yale Law School and a longtime advocate of a tax on consumption, said the report was a clear signal about the administration's long-term thinking.

"It's unusual for something like that to be in the economic report of the president," Mr. Graetz said. "I don't believe the president has made a decision about what he would like to do. On the other hand, this shows they are serious about fundamental tax reform."
The idea of overhauling the system is not new. Paul H. O'Neill, President Bush's first Treasury secretary, was a passionate believer in at least simplifying the current system.
Republican lawmakers have periodically campaigned for a consumption tax in recent years. R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote numerous papers while at Columbia University about the merits of a consumption tax.
At its simplest, a consumption tax would eliminate traditional income taxes for most if not all taxpayers and replace those taxes with some kind of tax on spending. Corporations might still pay taxes, but they would abandon most of the rules for depreciating investment in new equipment or buildings and simply write off those costs as expenses in the year they occur.

The allure of such systems is their simplicity. Fans of the consumption tax said it would save ordinary taxpayers billions of dollars, eliminate the wasteful gaming of current rules and ultimately be more fair.

Critics of such proposals contend that the political challenges are too daunting, because attacking countless special preferences means challenging innumerable powerful lobbying groups — from oil companies that want their tax credits for drilling to home builders wanting to save the tax deduction for mortgage interest.

Politically, the most damaging criticism is that a consumption tax could obliterate the idea of a progressive tax system and shift much of the tax burden from the rich to middle-income people and the poor.

A consumption tax would leave investment income tax-free; investment income flows most heavily to wealthy taxpayers. Beyond that, opponents argue, a consumption tax is "regressive" in that the same rates apply to rich and poor people alike.

The president's report tries to refute those arguments. In a lengthy section called "Distributional Consequences of Tax Reform," it contends that people move very fluidly between lower- and higher-income brackets through the normal course of their careers.
Using a "lifetime" approach to income distribution, an idea embraced by Mr. Hubbard at the Council of Economic Advisers, the report cites studies showing that more than half of people followed over 10 years had moved into a different income bracket at the end of a decade.

"Consumption taxes are generally less regressive when viewed from a lifetime perspective," the report declared. "A one-year snapshot of the distributional effects of many tax changes can be misleading."

Republican lawmakers and policy analysts generally doubt Mr. Bush will push for a radical tax overhaul anytime soon, given his already sprawling agenda of a likely war with Iraq and the huge tax bills he wants to push through this year.
But if Mr. Bush succeeds in pushing through his current agenda, and wins re-election in 2004, the report could turn out to be a blueprint for his goals in a second presidential term.”

“socialized medicine!! woo hoo!”

“Most of my graduate school classes were with foreign students. They worked their butts off. They wanted to succeed and knew how to do it. If China or India takes over the world, then they probably out worked us. I have nothing but admiration for those folks I saw first hand.”

“I haven't finished reading the article above, but did get to where it mentions changing retirement. SSI was started at a time when the average life span was less than 62 years old. It wasn't intended for the multitudes to live off of it for 20 years. The age should be adjusted because we live much longer now.”

“Yep, Rosey! When I mentioned the benefits some of the people in those European countries recieve for the high tax rate, I was refering specifically to socialized medicine. Let me tell you all a story: When I lived in Holland, I got an extremely horrific bladder infection. I called the local clinic. I said I had a bladder infection. They said bring us a pee sample. I brought them a sample, they confirmed that what I said was wrong w/ me, was in fact what was wrong w/ me. They gave me a prescription and sent me to the pharmacy. I got my meds. and promptly got rid of the infection. This all cost . . . maybe $5. It took about . . . 30 mins. I didn't have to pay for an office visit, 'cause I knew what was wrong. I didn't have to pay to have my piss sent to some lab in some other part of town. They did it right there, in about 10 seconds. Very nice. I'd be happy to be in "second place" as Rosey says, so that I could have medical care like that again.”

“Maybe I should just quit work and go hiking. Then, I wouldn't care what the tax rate is.”

“Thomas Sowell's second paragragh says it all. I, for one, am sick of my money being taken away from me and given to people who won't work for it.

If you truly want lower taxes, the place to start is spending cuts and lay-offs in government. Think about it: If you cut taxes some where, the services don't go away, they still need to be funded, from somewhere, so they levy ma new tax or increase taxes some where else.

I would do without whatever service you want to name to substantially lower my taxes. The only place I would keep equally funded is road maintenance and snowplowing, and of course, emergency services. Beyond that, cut everything. Example: Home garbage pickup. They hired the crew on a municipal budget years ago. This municipal crew, being entitled to a fair cost of living raise every year (that somehow, my employer needs not give me, or anyone else I know)after 20 years or so is being paid and benefited like the president. I can hire private service for a fraction, or take it to the dump myself.

$.02”

“The downside, Newgie, is that if you get something more serious, you may have to wait in line if you can't afford private care. Primary care under socialized medicine is better but in many cases, more elaborate care is not.”

“Hey! Bushie is reducing costs to the govt. I read yesterday that he's going to charge all our vets $250 a year for VA care! I'm sure those boys over in Iraq will be happy to hear that one.


GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BUSH!”

“My ex-beau's father is a M.D. I should ask him his opinion on the deal. He's a gastro-I can't spell the rest doctor.”

“Good point rosey. Birmingham is actually one of the 10 best medical regions in the whole country. People from all over the world come here for treatment. They don't go to Holland.”

“A dr. in Holland I mean. I guess he might know a bit on the situation.”

“My vet once told me a story about a dog getting a cat scan in Canada. Seems, a person had taken their dog to the vet for symptoms of strnage behavior. the vet recommended a cat scan and scheduled one for the following evening. The pet owner was dumbfounded. He knew people on the waiting list for cat scans who weren't sceduled to have their scan for months to come. The vet told him the waiting list was for humans since the cat scan facility was only in operation for humans during regular working hours. The facility was available after hours for contract work (and research, i believe) so it wa sno problem to get the dog in.

How true this story is, I don't know. My vet said she read it in her trade magazine.”

“"What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor."
–Gore Vidal”

“Good one.”

“What does a hairdresser know?”

“LMAO!”

“No wonder Japan and Korea have lower taxes. We would have lower taxes too if someone else covered our defence.

Pehaps you could compare the percentage of taxes used for defense between the USA, North Korea and South Korea. Without the US, South Korea would be paying the same taxes as North Korea.”

“an insult to monkeys everywhere!”

“A couple people in the neighborhood have that flag hanging in their window! It's great!”

“I get so frustrated over this partisan bickering. Every penny of Government money is our money. I'm all for tax cuts, and I'm all for everyone paying their share based on their ability to pay.

I'm pissed that Bush keeps growing the Government and adding to the problem caused by the sham called the INS, and the FBI going after porn and drugs instead of people on the terror watch list.

This isn't a liberal/conservative problem it's a government problem. Our Representatives are only half-heartedly working for us! They are recieving so many perks and kick-backs from industry that they are only paying lip-service to the needs of the American people.”

“How Will Bush Deal With the Deficits? Connecting the Dots to Iraq

by Robert Freeman

Republican hearts are all aflutter over one quarter of strong GDP numbers. But the 8.2% third quarter growth was purchased on credit-the $374 billion budget deficit that was the largest in the country's history. All indications are that next year's deficit will be even larger, exceeding half a trillion dollars.

There is simply no magic to "growth" under these conditions. Any idiot with a hand full of credit cards charged to the next generation's children can gin up the short term illusion of prosperity. Until, that is, the bills come due.

George W. Bush inherited a $127 billion fiscal surplus but ran through all of that and more in his first year. He has turned a $5.6 trillion 10 year forecast surplus into a $3+ trillion forecast loss-an almost unimaginable reversal of $9 trillion in only three years. And this, in an economy that has grown for ten of the last twelve quarters.

The result of this almost psychotic profligacy, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will be a national debt of $14 trillion in 10 years. Interest payments alone will approach a trillion dollars a year and will exceed spending for all discretionary federal programs combined. Even more surreal, a study commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil indicated that the 50 year forecast U.S. deficit would reach $44 trillion. The study was suppressed. O'Neil was fired.

How does a nation deal with debts that so greatly outrun its ability to pay? There are basically only five strategies. All are unappealing. Most are calamitous.

The most difficult strategy is, not surprisingly, the honest one: raise taxes and pay your bills. This is what King George III did following the Seven Years War with France in 1763. England had quadrupled its national debt in fighting the War and needed money to pay it off. It turned to the richest people in the realm, the Colonists, and began taxing paper, glass, paint, lead, and, of course, tea. The result, as we know, was the American Revolution.

It was the same strategy-raising taxes on the rich-that Louis XVI attempted in 1789. The French national debt had grown 10 fold under the pharoic opulence of Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV. Louis called the nobility and the clergy together and told them they would have to ante up. They, after all, had been exempted from taxes by Louis XIV in order to buy their complicity in his autocratic reign. Indignant, they refused to pay, precipitating the French Revolution, the most explosive upheaval to established government in the last thousand years.

A second strategy to deal with excessive debts is simply to print money. This is what Weimar Germany did to address the crushing debt imposed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Before it was over the government had inflated the money supply by over a trillion times, leading some to comment that it was a waste of ink to put it onto paper worth so much less than the ink itself. The German middle class, whose assets were held at fixed amounts in government pensions, was destroyed. The collapse gave direct rise to Adolph Hitler.

A third strategy for dealing with onerous national debt is to sell off national assets. This is one of the first strategies the IMF imposes on third world countries that have gotten behind in their payments to western banks. Government-run industries, from telecommunications to water systems, are "privatized" and the country's natural resources are sold off to the highest foreign bidder. This is what Great Britain was forced to do in the aftermath of World War II.

Two world wars in only 30 years had ravaged the British economy and the pound sterling. Facing collapse at home (and revolution abroad), the government surrendered almost all of its colonies, from India and Pakistan to Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. These had been among the greatest wealth-producing properties of modern times, the ones that had made the British Empire what it was. Their loss left Britain a second-rate power with only misty memories of its once imperial greatness.

A fourth strategy for dealing with excessive debt is to just repudiate it. This was used for centuries in the early days of the modern world and was revived two years ago by Argentina which brazenly refused to pay some $110 billion in debts it had accumulated over prior decades. More ominously, it was this strategy that was used by the Bolsheviks after they took power in the Russian Revolution.

The new communist government refused to be bound by the debts of the overthrown Romanovs. But the French had loaned heavily to the Russian government for decades before World War I and now were left in a lurch. A cascading series of defaults from one bank to another caused a liquidity crisis on the continent, ultimately setting off the Great Depression.

Finally, there is plunder. When a nation's debt load becomes so huge it cannot plausibly reassure creditors regarding repayment, it must seek some source of wealth, any source, to keep the borrowed money flowing. This, naked predation, is what kept the Roman Empire alive for the last two hundred years of its existence. It is the strategy adopted by the Spanish Empire-silver and gold from America-and which eventually destroyed the vitality of its own merchant and civil servant classes.

Government economists are not unawares of these imperatives. So, which of the five above strategies has the U.S. adopted to deal with its exploding debt problem?

Clearly, the Bush administration will not adopt the first strategy, raising taxes. In fact, as a result of Bush's mammoth tax giveaways, federal receipts as a percentage of GDP are at 16%, their lowest level since the 1950s. Raising taxes, or even simply reversing prior tax cuts, would betray the very purpose for which the rich installed Bush in the first place. And just as clearly, Bush cannot cut back on his prodigious spending-at least not yet-for that is the basis on which he has bought the short-term illusion of prosperity mentioned above.

Nor will the government resort to inflation, the second strategy. As we know from the German experience, inflation erodes the value of fixed income payments. The current U.S. debt, now in excess of $7 trillion, is held primarily by the very wealthiest of the world's citizens. They clip some $200 billion a year in coupons on this debt. If they were to see the U.S. government beginning to inflate, they would quickly sell off these instruments, precipitating a massive collapse. Alan Greenspan's quasi-religious stand against inflation can be understood first as his defense of the pecuniary prerogatives of this global investor class and second as the requisite fix to keep the funding flowing.

What about selling off assets, the third strategy? Now the story starts to get more interesting. As the dollar declines in value relative to foreign currencies, U.S. assets, denominated in dollars, become relatively cheaper. It costs foreigners less and less to buy more and more of the U.S. economy at fire sale prices. Some purchases will go into U.S. treasuries. Some will find their way into the stock market. Some will go into passive assets such as real estate. And some will go to buy active ownership and management of U.S. companies.

This is the dynamic that led the Japanese during the Supply Side-inspired dollar collapse of the 1980s to buy up Rockefeller Center, Firestone Tire, Pebble Beach, 7-Eleven, and countless other icons of America's commercial and cultural patrimony. It has the virtue (or vice, depending on your perspective) of appearing to be the result of "market forces". Government borrowing is settled by foreigners redeeming dollar-based IOUs in U.S. markets, denuding the private sphere of its productive assets and putting them into foreign hands. This is the reason Toyota is the biggest employer in Alabama and Honda is the second biggest employer in Indiana.

The fourth strategy, repudiation of debts, is more immediate than most American citizens realize. A significant portion of those $44 trillion future shortfalls come from under-funding of Medicare and Social Security. The recent Medicare bill is the first step toward official privatization. This will be accomplished by turning the program and its recipients over to the renowned stewardship of the insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industries and getting the liabilities off the government's books. Similarly, if Bush is elected in 2004, one of his first priorities will be a comparable privatization of Social Security. Not only will it prove an incalculable boon to the securities industry, it will substantially decrease the government's obligations to the Baby Boomers.

In terms of how a nation deals with excessive debt, the logic of these repudiation schemes is impeccable: it is far wiser for a country to repudiate the debts it holds to its own people-especially if they are not politically powerful-than it is to alienate its wealthy domestic and international underwriters. But asset sales and repudiation alone will not suffice to keep the funding flowing.

Already international investors are beginning to bail out of dollars. In 2003, the dollar was down 19% against the Euro with the fall accelerating since November. The dollar is now at its lowest level since the Euro was created in 1991. Even more telling is that international capital inflows to the U.S. dropped to $5 billion in August, down from $96 billion the year before. Nobody wants to hold dollars. But if the money flow stops, the U.S. economy collapses.

This is what happened in 1987. The massive Supply Side deficits of Ronald Reagan required the U.S. to borrow furiously from abroad. For a while the Japanese were our bankers, handily recycling their substantial trade surpluses into U.S. treasuries. But the Japanese soon realized they were being played for suckers. While they were making 5% returns on their treasuries, they were losing 15% on dollar depreciation. They stopped buying treasuries in October and the ensuing loss of liquidity caused the stock market to implode, the worst collapse since the Great Depression.

So what to do?

Finally, then, we come to the most sensitive and incendiary debt management strategy of all. Plunder. The purported rationale for the U.S. invasion of Iraq-that it possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction-is now known to have been a wholesale fiction. Not a single one of the administration's dozens of claims of WMD possession or imminent threat have borne the scrutiny of the most massive inspection regime in history. Of all the world's people, only the thuggishly propagandized American people ever believed (or still believe) this to have been the real purpose for the War. Not even Bush himself pretends otherwise anymore.

And the ex post facto rationale-that we are bringing Democracy to Iraq-is equally fictive given Paul Bremer's statement that the U.S. will not allow a Shi'ite government to take control there. Shi'ites, as Bremer well knows, make up 60% of Iraq's population. And no, it's not links to terror. And no, it's not connections to 9-11. What then? A simple thought experiment demonstrates the real truth about the U.S. invasion: would the U.S. have carried it out if, instead of sitting on the world's second largest supply of oil, Iraq was the world's second largest producer of, say, pomegranates? Or figs? Only the most pathologically Republican of cynics can even pretend to give this question a thought.

Control of oil gives the U.S. control of the industrial world and effective control of its own strategic competitors, Europe and China. This is the same strategy that made Alexander the Great so Great. As he entered new territories in pursuit of conquest, the first thing Alexander always did was capture and fortify the local water well. Within a day, two at the most, resistance collapsed. Oil is the water of today. It is the most widely traded commodity in the world. It is the one commodity without which modern civilization cannot function.

Control of oil allows the U.S. to extract all of the surplus wealth created by its rivals, ensuring that they remain forever subservient. This explains why Europe and China were so vociferous in their denunciation of the War. It also ensures that the U.S. has a universally desired, fungible, liquid commodity to collateralize its massive debts. Iraqi oil is a magical two-fer: it solves the U.S.'s primary strategic and economic challenges in a single fell swoop. But its capture can only be justified by deceit and accomplished through plunder.

The problem for most of Bush's Democratic challengers is that they know the above situation to be true. That is why-Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich excepted-they went so sheepishly along with Bush's notoriously transparent casus belli in Iraq. They are left with petty quibbling about the adequacy of post-invasion planning. It is why they raised hardly a peep of protest over the ramming through of the Medicare package. It is why they bleat only procedural protests about the incivility of discourse as the three-quarters-of-a-century legacy of the New Deal is being peremptorily dismantled.

There was a time in the late 1990s when it looked as if the U.S. might be able to regain control of its fiscal destiny. Bill Clinton reversed the suicidal predations of Reagan's Supply Side Economics and produced the longest sustained economic expansion in U.S. history. One of the byproducts of that expansion was a series of budgetary surpluses that allowed the government to begin paying down the crippling debts run up under Reagan and Bush I.

But that halcyon era is already just a memory. Bush's massive debts are the nation's new fiscal master. And they have been run up solely to further enrich the already extremely wealthy the expense of the still desperately needy. The staggering costs of servicing these debts will drive interest rates into the stratosphere, destroying all possibilities of rebuilding a competitive economic infrastructure. The conservative British business magazine, The Economist, said it most presciently: "Long after Dubya is back on his ranch, Americans will be trying to recover from the mess he created."

It is breathtaking to imagine it could have happened so quickly but all federal policy, indeed, decisions concerning war and the very character of the nation itself, will now be defined by the stark new fact of our collective indenture.”

“That is a nice comprehensive piece Violin. Thanks for sharing!”

“Who is this fellow named Rich?....and why is he getting tax cuts?”

“Yeah VioliN, it would be a good idea for Americans to remove their heads from their asses regarding the future.”

“".......and why is he getting tax cuts?"

Because he contributed to the Bush campaign.”

“I was/am against all those tax cuts but since I will have a sizable drop in what I have to send to the feds next week--well it feels good on a personal basis.”

“Can I at least get a kiss or a reach this time around!?!?!?!”

“I think I'll invest in the compnay that makes Vasaline. It's obvious that a lot of peeps are getting phucked.”

“Yeah Mary Phyl, but watch out for the hang over.”

“Even more surreal, a study commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil indicated that the 50 year forecast U.S. deficit would reach $44 trillion. The study was suppressed. O'Neil was fired.

Does anyone have any idea where we could get our hands on this?”