四 川 铁 FourRiverIron

The government deserves 9 percent of what we earn???

  Or government rulers love to tell us that they are "public servants" and that they work for us. But when is the last time you hired a servant that, told you if you didn't hire the servant he was going to put you in jail.

And when is the last time you hired a servant that told you how much you were going to pay him instead of you telling the servant the pay rate and letting him decide if he should accept the job.

Did you know the so called "public servants" in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate pay themselves $174,000 a year. Don't get angry that isn't for a full time job. They only work 109 days a year. That is a measly $1,596 for each of those 109 days they work.

Yes our hard working Senators and Congressmen will tell you that I am making them look like a bunch of lazy bums who don't deserve the $1,596 a day pay they earn.

They will complain the at when they are not on the floor of the House or Senate they are hard at work raising millions in campaign contributions to help them get reelected to their cushy jobs.

I suspect they make a lot more a day when they are out raising bribes, opps, I mean campaign contributions then they make from their real job as a Congressman or Senator, but I don't have those figures so I can't.

Local government bureaucrats also like to claim they are public servants too. Did you know that Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman gets paid $54,409 as Mayor of Tempe? Remember that is a part time job where he works one day a week. That's a measly $1,046 a day for a lousy 4 hour job of attending boring city council meetings. When is the past time you paid one of your servants $1,046 for a lousy 4 hours of work.

Don't feel bad for Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman and his lousy job that pays a measly $1,046 for a lousy 4 hours of work. He also gets $500 a month to cover his car expenses.

And it gets a few other perks. Along with bodyguards. I suspect Mayor Hallman's bodyguards are there to protect Mayor Hallman from people like you, who he pretends to be a servant of.

The royal city councilmen and councilwoman of the People's Republic of Tempe are the highest paid elected officials in the Phoenix area.

But don't feel bad for other elected officials or public servants in the Phoenix area. They pay themselves almost as well as the royal rulers of Tempe do.

When will you consider yourself a government slave.

If the government takes 10 percent of you income do you consider yourself a government slave? How about 20 percent? How about 30 percent?

Now remember we have several levels of government. There is you local city government, which in my case is the People's Republic of Tempe.

You have a county government, which in my case is Maricopa County.

You have a state government which is Arizona for me, and we all have Uncle Sam who is our royal government master at the Federal government level.

To get the total taxes and an indication of you slave status you have to combine all the taxes stolen from you by the city, county, state and Federal governments.

8 percent sales tax tax freedom day http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday/ (April 2 in Arizona) (Connecticut May 2) Tax Freedom Day® will arrive on April 12 this year, the 102nd day of 2011. That means Americans will work well over three months of the year, from January 1 to April 12, A conservative thinks that we owe the government 9 percent of what we earn, along with 9 percent of what we spend along with 9 percent of any money we earn from investments in corporation?????

I suspect the founders would call Mr. Cain a socialist. Hmmm... If Mr. Cain is a socialist, what's that make Obama?

Source

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 economic plan gets lukewarm reviews from conservatives — and a Cain consultant

Posted by Aaron Blake at 02:03 PM ET, 10/12/2011

Herman Cain’s opponents in the presidential campaign aren’t the only ones who aren’t on board with his 9-9-9 plan for the economy.

Herman Cain, 2012 candidate for President of the United States of America So do many major conservative groups and even — wait for it — one of Cain’s own consultants.

The plan, which would overhaul the tax code with a 9 percent sales tax, a 9 percent income tax, and a 9 percent corporate tax, was the most touched-upon subject at Tuesday night’s Washington Post-Bloomberg News debate.

And Cain’s opponents — from Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum — sought to invalidate it.

“When you take the 9-9-9 plan and you turn it upside down, I think the devil is in the details,” Bachmann said Tuesday. (6-6-6. Get it?)

But Bachmann and her cohorts aren’t the first to raise major concerns about a plan which, on the surface at least, is a great political sell.

Conservative groups from the tea party-aligned FreedomWorks to the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform have already begun raising questions about the plan, as has the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board. And one of Cain’s consultants said today that the plan is more of a grand idea than a practicable economic policy.

“You’re trying to go to a system that taxes income once and only once and quits double-taxing savings,” paid Cain consultant Gary Robbins told Politico. “That’s something that can really juice the economy; it’s probably worth 15 percent in growth. … The problem with the big-bang changes like that — the flat tax or the fair tax — is that they are so alien to the current system that it would be a great big shock.”

And Robbins has company.

An ATR official told The Fix that his group doesn’t outright oppose the idea but has “strong reservations” — particularly about a Value Added Tax that they think is too easy to raise.

“We are very, very opposed to that, so we would be very uncomfortable with transitioning business taxes over to a VAT,” said ATR tax policy director Ryan Ellis. “It’s pretty easy to raise that rate of the VAT when you’re in a budget crunch.”

Likewise, FreedomWorks legislative counsel Dean Clancy wrote a blog post last week hitting the plan for its practicality — or lack thereof. Clancy noted that Cain wants to eliminate the income tax too, which Clancy argues would require a 25 percent sales tax to maintain current revenue levels.

Clancy also contends that the sales tax represents the dreaded value-added tax, which many conservatives argue is the worst tax of all.

“It’s the most insidious of all taxes, because it is built into the price of everything and consumers can’t see how much of the price is due to the tax,” Clancy writes.

Asked if Clancy’s position was the official position of the tea party-aligned group, FreedomWorks spokeswoman Jackie Bodnar said, “I think it would be fair to say that’s the consensus around here.”

Added Cato tax policy director studies director Chris Edwards, in an interview with Bloomberg: “The business base would be much broader because businesses don’t get a wage deduction, but then it would be narrower because they get to deduct dividends paid to shareholders,” Edwards said. “That’s a significantly different base.”

Likewise, some conservative bloggers, including RedState.com’s Ben Howe, the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis and Townhall.com’s Guy Benson, have said the plan is a non-starter.

“Cain is correct in arguing that fixing our tax system will require fundamental reform,” Lewis writes. “His mistake is in proposing — as Bachmann said — to ‘give Congress another pipeline for revenue.’”

Added Benson: “If you don’t exempt basic staples, the sales tax could amount to a major tax hike on the working poor and middle class -- an obviously problematic outcome.”

Not everyone has been so critical, of course. The fiscally-conservative Club for Growth earlier this year gave Cain generally positive marks for his economic rhetoric, while stressing that it was based only on his words and not on a public record.

The review came out before Cain launched his 9-9-9 plan, though. Club spokesman Barney Keller said the group was reserving judgment on the plan, while praising its ingenuity.

“His 9-9-9 plan is bold, intriguing and appears strongly pro-growth,” Keller said. “We look forward to reviewing it in more detail in the future.”

Now, it’s important to note that these groups and people won’t necessarily turn your average voter off from Cain. That’s because most voters don’t dig far enough into the details of Cain’s plan to read these reviews. (See our piece this morning on the political savvy behind 9-9-9.)

But if a consensus grows among top conservative thinkers that Cain’s plan is not a serious one or that it could lead to trouble down the road -- most likely through that sales tax — it could cause problems for the Republican contender.

Right now, Cain is on the cusp of being considered a legitimate top tier candidate, and if his economic plan isn’t seen as the work of a serious candidate, he may not get the time of day with important donors, activists and opinion-makers.

Cain has already hamstrung himself in that regard by refusing to release his list of economic advisers (he names one: Rich Lowrie). That leads to the perception that the the former chairman of the board of directors of the Kansas City Federal Reserve doesn’t have smart people in his inner circle.

In the end, his plan will be evaluated on its merits; and right now, it’s not getting sterling reviews.

More on PostPolitics

Cain staff seeks to keep up with star candidate

9-9-9 plan simple and politically effective

Debate winners and losers

 


四 川 铁 Home

四 川 铁 Four River Iron