The Things Autocratic Capitalistic Countries Are Doing Right That the United States Is Not

I understand the thinking of President Obama and the others on the political left. I understand the logic behind the Buffett Tax. It is playground bullying times a trillion. If Timmy Turner has more marbles than the other kids on the playground and a bully takes Timmy’s extra marbles to make it fairer to everyone else, that’s the Buffett tax. That’s the death tax and the millionaire tax.

The Buffett rule, or tax, is the Obama administration’s latest nomenclature for the millionaire tax, and is named after Warren Buffett, a wealthy billionaire who is in arrears with the IRS over unpaid taxes, but who thinks people like him should pay more taxes to the U.S. treasury. Makes sense, right? The Obama administration apparently thinks that if a tax is named after a rich man, (thereby giving it the Millionaire Seal of Approval) that Americans will hop on board and agree to increasing the tax burden on all those shiftless wealthy people.

The problem with millionaire taxes (and higher taxes in general) is that they may bring in a little more revenue in the short run, but at the expense of money that would have stayed in the economy generating economic growth and job creation.

Why are citizens who make more money and who already pay more taxes than I do responsible for paying a larger share of their income to support the government? They are not.

It is class envy. It is class warfare. It is playground redistribution. It is neo-Marxism.

I paid roughly $10,000 in taxes to the federal government last year. My neighbor, Bob, made a million dollars last year and paid the federal government roughly $200,000. Twenty times what I paid. Who on Earth can say that my neighbor isn’t paying his fair share? He paid what 20 people making my salary pay in income tax! Good for him!

But that’s not good enough for Progressives, and liberal Democrats like Barack Obama. You see, they want Bob to pay $396,000 on his million dollar earnings. Thirty-nine times what I am paying! Because Bob is successful, they want him to pay what 39 average tax payers pay in taxes. And, they want to take away as many deductions from him as they can so that he has a harder time lowering his tax burden than I do.

I think Bob is paying his fair share. He is paying MORE than his fair share. He is an “engine” in the economy of the community. What would be truly fair, in the spirit of American fairness, would be a flat tax, or a Fair tax that would involve everyone paying SOMETHING to the U.S. treasury, including the 47% of Americans who now pay nothing in federal income tax. Russia has a 13% flat tax that everyone pays and that has been very successful…. Russia!

No one person should have to pay a higher percentage of his or her income than another person to the federal government. Check it: In the small island nation of Singapore, everyone is capped at $2500 of their income, no matter how high their income is. And this is an autocratic government. (However, the country does have many other taxes that the U.S. does not.)

It is fundamentally unfair in a nation that is supposed to be fair, and provide a level playing field to expect Bob to pay a higher percentage of his income to the federal government than I do. That is not fair, it is punishment for being successful. The progressive income tax (where one person pays 0%, another person pays 25% and another pays 39% of their incomes) is government theft from people who have been successful, or lucky in their lives.

Why take away the incentive for Bob to spend his extra dollars on boosting the U.S. economy by buying expensive products and services, which provide jobs, or hiring extra employees for his business?

President Obama, if you want to spur consumer spending, excite the economy, and jump start job growth, you need to cut federal spending. You also need to cut the corporate income tax (which at 40% is among the highest in the world -- even the communist-capitalist-dictatorship Red China has a lower corporate income tax). You also need to make permanent the Bush tax rates, and level the tax burden playing field so that everyone has “skin in the game.”

Perhaps Congress should pass a special tax on all people who think they and others aren’t being taxed enough. I think a 90 percent rate would be fair.

If You Want Employment to Rise, Buy American

The headline of this article makes a certain amount of sense, don’t you think? More on common sense in a moment. But first some good news.

Today it has been reported that the unemployment rate has fallen to 8.8 percent, a one tenth of one percent drop from February. This is due to the economy adding 216,000 jobs in March, the second month in a row that jobs were added at that rate. Hopefully this number won’t be adjusted down in the coming days as is often the case with unemployment numbers. These figures are good news and come in spite of the President’s anti-business policies such as the Stimulus, Obamacare, Quantitative Easing, and the previous Congress’s neverending unemployment insurance extensions. It’s no surprise that Mitt Romney says in his USAToday opinion piece that the rate of new jobs production would be much higher (and the unemployment rate lower) by now if it were not for Obama’s policies. This is part of the common sense I was talking about earlier, and it’s a view held by a large and growing portion of the American population.

But we as Americans can (and should) do more to make the employment numbers rise in our towns and states. We can buy American-based services and products. We can buy local. It is only common sense. Do you think buying Japanese Playstations made in China will help U.S. unemployment numbers? Or would buying a Microsoft Xbox 360 be a better idea? Would buying a Toshiba laptop be a good idea? Or would buying an Apple, Dell, or HP product help more? Of course the latter would help more.

But we Americans don’t always do what is common sense when it comes to what we buy. Americans most often buy whatever is the lowest-priced product or service, generally not paying attention to (or caring) where something is made. For instance, if Moammar Gadhafi was selling gasoline at $2 a gallon in New York City right now, there’d be a line into the gas station as long as Fifth Avenue. That’s the way it is for many American consumers. Too often today there is no choice but to buy products made in China by foreign national companies. Although buying Korean cell phones and automobiles does involve employment for the people selling those goods in this country, there are not as many people employed as if the product were designed, made, and sold by an American company. In addition the tax benefits accrued by the various taxing authorities are fewer leading to lower tax revenues flowing into the various governing authorities. Not to mention greater debt and lower employment.

Is your neighbor out of work? Are you? What better way to support them than to buy American, and even better to buy LOCAL. Being from Michigan originally, I have always supported American automobile makers. Especially nowadays, the vehicles Detroit makes are stylish, and built with real quality. I had friends in the auto business, in addition to having a brother who works directly in that industry. I felt that if I ever bought a vehicle that wasn’t made in America, that I’d be doing my small part in diminishing the business that he depends on for his family’s bread and butter. It’s not much to ask of a family member or neighbor to support the company that employs them and provides a tax base to the state and local governments where you live, instead of supporting the workers and the tax base of some city, say in Germany.

If you lived in a town full of bakeries, some of them run by your relatives, would you buy bread from Denmark? If you lived in Idaho would you buy potatoes from Michigan? If you would, let me just remind you that you only have two feet that you can shoot.

Buying local, means, as much as possible, eating in your town, buying gasoline in the burg where you pay your real estate taxes, grocery shopping in your town, and buying your car and your cell phone where you live. This supports the businesses that pay taxes in your town, thereby keeping the pressure on raising your taxes lower.

It’s hard sometimes to find American-made options, but in the car market, it’s easy. Besides American automakers, there are many foreign companies that manufacture cars in the U.S. now, which is a good alternative for consumers who don’t like Detroit’s big three automakers. Honda makes many Accords, Civics and Acuras in the U.S., as does Toyota with their Camry, Hyundai’s Sonata, BMW’s Z series, Mercedes, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Subaru all make cars in the U.S. using American workers. These car buying options are good for those people wanting to support American jobs, and as with American automakers you have to look at them on a model-by-model basis to see if they are actually “Made in the USA”. Look at the sticker on the window for the country of origin.

Other options for American-made goods are bath towels which I found at Bed, Bath and Beyond which were luxurious and only slightly higher cost than their Chinese and Pakistani-made counterparts in the store. Oh, and buy American-made bottled water. There’s really no excuse for buying water from Fiji, or France, from an ecological standpoint or from an ideological standpoint. Same for beer and wine. There are so many super California wines that there is no excuse for buying wine from anywhere else. And small and large American breweries have a wide variety of tasty beers these days that employ American workers. Buy some American beer if you’re imbibing this weekend. You’ll feel great about it. Without going into everything that’s made in the U.S., some of the bigger items like appliances from Whirlpool, Maytag, and Kenmore are made in the U.S. as are most lawn tractors, and heavy equipment from companies like John Deere, Caterpillar, and Komatsu among others.

The more we Buy American, not because we are against other countries, but because we are for our neighbors, family members, and fellow citizens, the better the chance we’ll have of digging ourselves out of this jobless, economic funk that the U.S. currently finds itself in, despite the monetary policies of the government which continue to choke economic growth.

For more exhaustive lists of American-made products, check out these Made in the USA links:

http://www.usstuff.com/index.htm

http://madeinusa.com/

Layoffs at Work

Yesterday we had another round of layoffs at work (a cyclical occurrence at the company I work for). I feel bad for those who were cut. (I was laid off by the same company three or four years ago and hired back six months later.) But people laid off today have ninety-nine weeks of unemployment to fall back on, so if you're going to lose your job, then now is the time to do it.

I do hope my former co-workers find work quickly however, because I know that it's easy to start feeling down and like you're not contributing to society if you don't have a job for a long period of time. I have a few pointers gained from my experience with being laid off.

First of all, shine up that resume. Make sure it's up to date and everything is spelled properly. Have it proofread or edited by someone else. But seriously, it's a very good idea. We can read something a hundred times and miss something someone else will see after reading it just once. A resume must be perfect.

Next, sign up for LinkedIn, a professional networking website and connect with all your former co-workers and friends. The more contacts you have on there the better the chance you will have of finding work. Get some referrals from them while you're still fresh in their minds. Sign up on and search Careerbuilder.com, Monster.com, and Hotjobs.com. And don't fall for the "make 1000 dollars a week on your computer" scam postings. Also use craigslist.org to search for jobs. There are plenty of legitimate job listings on the site along with the scams. You'll just have to learn to discern between the two. And if you're serious about finding work, put in your status on Facebook that you're looking for work. It can't hurt.

What I also suggest to my former office mates and what I will do myself next time I find myself in that position is to, yes, spend time looking for work every day, but not eight hours a day. You need to spend time advancing any entrepreneurial or freelance projects you may have been thinking of. This is the perfect time to nurture those ideas you may have had to be your own boss.

In my case, I would have spent more time writing and getting things sent out to publishers. But you may want to start a business, and so should put aside some time each day toward reaching that goal. Write a business plan, create some artwork for your portfolio, sell some Avon, take a course in Real Estate. Anything, as long as it is helping you advance your career goals and dreams in some way. It doesn't have to be Careerbuilder, Monster, and resumes all day long.

And after eight hours on the job hunt and the personal career development hunt, "Go home", as usual and do your normal after work routine. Exercise, cook, help your kids with their homework, go bowling. Operating in this way will help to keep you sane and calm in a distressing time.

Good luck on your future my friends. I hope it is full of success and happiness. It was a pleasure working with you.