Are You Kidding Me?

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote an article entitled “Our Fantasy Nation?” His article centers on the desire of Tea Party conservatives and many Republicans to block the raising of the debt ceiling and offers an example of a nation that “lives up to their ideal”.

The nation he compares us to is Pakistan where he claims fewer than 2% of the people pay any taxes, government is limited and burdensome regulation never kills jobs. He further uses as examples of comparison that Pakistani society embraces traditional religious values, nobody objects to school prayer, same sex marriage is not imaginable and criminals are never coddled. Citizens are deeply patriotic and nobody burns flags.

And on this basis he concludes that the Republicans and Tea Party conservatives are moving America in the direction of Pakistan?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Although he admits Sarah Palin and John Boehner do not intend to turn Washington into “Islamabad-on-the-Potomac” and that long-term budget issues need to be addressed (I assume he means by both Democrats and Republicans although he does not say this) he makes a very strong point that when Republicans insist on “starving the beast” of government, cutting taxes, regulations and social services, those are the steps to America becoming Pakistan.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

The rest of the article goes on to state how disastrous a Republican budget victory would be. For evidence he states the following:

history has taught us that government must take on more responsibility
citizens must pay more taxes
citizens of the Congo:
pay minimal taxes
there is high inequality
there is free-wheeling business and high military expenditures
the conclusion, I guess, is we are becoming like the Congo!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

And again we get the familiar argument that too much wealth is concentrated in too few hands, that the wealthiest 1% of Americans have greater net worth than the bottom 90%. Is this the fault of the wealthiest of our citizens?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

And if this were not enough nonsense, Mr. Kristof quotes G. Jeremiah Ryan, president of Bergen Community College in New Jersey. Mr. Ryan states that when the school was founded in 1965, two-thirds of the cost of running it was supposed to be paid by state and local governments and one-third by students. He goes on to say that today students bear 78% of the cost.

Is that the fault of the conservatives and Republicans? Perhaps that is not the conclusion that Mr. Kristof intended but the implication certainly is there. This is an example of the state government promising more than it could deliver, plain and simple. To imply otherwise is just not fair.


Yes, America is in an economic malaise and something must be done to spur employment, improve the housing market and aid the poorest of our citizens. It has been said that a society can be judged on how it treats its poor and I believe there is some truth to that.

But, in my opinion, the answer is not in government bailouts, re-distribution of wealth or taking from the rich to give to the poor. These are all the result of a president, and most who surround him, that is anti-business and believes all problems can be solved by taxing the rich.


I DISAGREE!

You really want to know why we have persistently high unemployment in excess of 9%?
You really want to know why we continue to have a lagging real estate market?
You really want to know why stock prices do not reflect growth in corporate profits?

It is because we have an administration that has an entitlement attitude. Mr. Obama and his supporters believe:

Re-distributing wealth is the answer to the nation’s economic woes
If you tax the “rich” enough, you have the solution to the nations’ economic woes
If you impose enough taxes on business - those dastardly hard-working Innovators who had the guts to start and attempt to grow a business - you will solve the nations’s economic woes
Growth of capital is not important

Mr. Obama and his administration are imposing on the American people social engineering at its worst. They display the attitude of the community organizer - look to the government to solve all problems. Turn the rich into the enemy. Blame successful businesses for all the nation’s ills.

Mr. Obama spent the first 2 years of his administration blaming everything on president Bush. He never acknowledge that by 2010, the Democrats had controlled Congress for 4 years! Then he discovered that government cannot do it all so he embarked on his campaign of soak the rich. How innovative!

We expect and deserve more from our president.

America will never return to greatness or realize its potential with an administration that pursues re-distribution of wealth and entitlement to the needy.

Businesses, both small and large, will not hire when they are unsure of what is the next piece of legislation that will adversely affect them and average workers are being hurt by this administration’s agenda.

Let me give you 2 examples.

In early 2009, the Obama administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which came to be known as the ARRA law. One of its provisions required an employer to pay 65% of COBRA insurance premiums for 9 months for any employee terminated involuntarily. The Obama administration claimed that the expense would be offset by a payroll tax credit.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

This is an example of the empty-head thinking of administration officials who never ran a business, were never responsible for meeting a payroll and do not have a clue of what it takes to build a successful business.

Many small businesses did not have enough people remaining on payroll for the tax credit to offset the cost of the insurance premiums so it was a net loss to the business owner. The business owner was left holding the bag, including the expense of keeping track of all this and being penalized for this social legislation. I know this to be true for I was establishing COBRA administration plans for businesses and saw the devastating affect of this supposedly beneficial law. Time and time again I listened to business owners question how they could comply with all the new paperwork and the expense of that paperwork. And that, of course, is never considered by policy makers that have no business experience.

There was a ripple affect from this law. Companies like my former employer that did COBRA plan administration had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to communicate the provisions of this law to clients to be sure they were compliant. This all had a negative impact on the bottom line with absolutely no assistance from the government.

As a result, many businesses stopped hiring as times were so uncertain they did not want to face the prospect of paying COBRA premiums for additional involuntary terminations.

Another example.

Under “Obama Care” the ability of a worker to pay for over-the-counter drugs on a pre-tax basis as part of an employer sponsored flexible spending plan was eliminated. The administration justified this by saying mainly high income workers took advantage of this tax break.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I can tell you from personal experience of establishing these pre-tax plans for many companies, many moderate income people participated. And since the amount of payroll being set aside for pre-taxing OTC medical expenses also gave a tax break to the employer, the elimination of this benefit also hurt the business owner.

This effectively RAISED the cost of OTC drugs for all flexible plan participants who could no longer take advantage of the tax break. Yet you never heard this from the Obama administration. All we heard is that Obama Care would REDUCE costs. How dishonest!

So, I submit that the Fantasy Nation is not what Mr. Kristof says the Republicans are moving us toward, it is the Nation we currently have!