Why the tax code needs to be changed

What is someone's fair share? Shouldn't everyone pay at least something, since we all do get benefits from government?

A recent CNN Money article highlights the mess that our tax code is. Why 45 percent don't pay anything at all. The top 1 percent pay as much as the bottom 95 percent.

But there is truth that many higher-income people don't pay their fair share. Some of those who didn't pay taxes: About 18,000 were households taking in more than $500,000 -- and of those, 4,000 made more than $1 million.

Wouldn't it be nice to make a million bucks, tax-free?

This is ridiculous. Many deductions do favor the rich. It's about time we all paid, at least something. If you don't have any skin in the game, you're not going to really care.

Reactions to this week's news

Part of the problem in deciding if government is effective or not is trying to learn the truth of what is actually going on. With the Obama administration, in their attempts to be "transparent," they actually create a public relations nightmare.

While Obama made the right decision to go after Osama bin Laden, the spin doctors at the White House pretty much screwed things for the aftermath. However, while he did make the right decision, the ability to do so was not his doing. No, they were able to kill bin Laden because of programs and policies put in place during the Bush Adminstration, and continued by Obama.

But in the larger, more strategic, view of the world today, we have more problems than ever before.

By Star Parker, a former liberal turned conservative:

The morality of freedom transformed into the politics of race. The antidote of personal responsibility transformed into entitlements and victimization.


We've now gone beyond blacks just buying into the great welfare-state lie. We now have a black president who is leading us all into the abyss.

A black president more interested in protecting abortionists than babies, burying the nation hopelessly in debt, piling on more and more spending with increasingly worthless dollars, to pay for government programs that never have and never will work.

This is happening in a world increasingly in chaos. Millions in nations in the Middle East suddenly are aspiring toward freedom and mobilizing to achieve it as blacks did here in the 1960s.

But they are faced with the same dilemma. What does it mean to be free? It's easier to know what you don't want than what you do.

Unfortunately, the spreading chaos in the Middle East is exacerbated by the absence of leadership from an America, once the world's beacon for freedom.

How can those in the Middle East look to us when the American president's message is that the poor are poor because the rich are rich and that eternal moral truths are irrelevant to political freedom?

All the world is waiting for a new America to come forth that again understands that freedom isn't about politics but about moral truths and personal responsibility.

I couldn't have said it better.

In tribute to the killing of Osama bin Laden

Why are oil prices high?

There are, of course, a lot of ideas out there. I read this morning it was the fault of the Republican takeover of the House. Of course, the House hasn't been able to do anything that is actually constructive, because of the Senate and the White House.

Another group to blame are speculators. I'm sure they have something to do with it, but I don't think the blame is all theirs alone. Then there's the Middle East. Actually, most of the oil is still flowing, so that can't be it all by itself. And when hasn't there been turmoil in the Middle East?

Oil companies. Must be them. Let's investigate. Of course, this has been tried before. Or let's take away some of their tax breaks. That $4 billion would reduce the deficit. Oh wait. Obama wants to "invest" that money in green energy projects. The hell with the deficit. (Deficit under Bush was bad; deficit under Obama is good, right? Or at least that's what Krugman says.)

Or is it the policies of the Obama administration that is driving up the price? I don't think anything Obama or his minions have done has helped. Actually, I believe he wants higher prices to force us to adopt his "green" ideology. He has said so himself.

Most likely, it is a combination of all these factors. Here's some actual figures. You can come up with your own conclusion.

According to projections made by the Energy Information Administration in April 2010, the Gulf of Mexico should have produced 1.84 million barrels of oil a day in the fourth quarter of 2010. Instead, according to the most recent EIA estimate, due to the Obama permitorium, the Gulf only produced 1.59 million barrels. That is 250,000 barrels a day in lost production. Overall, since Obama instituted his drilling moratorium, oil production from the Gulf is down more than 10%.

But while Gulf oil production is down from pre-moratorium estimate, total oil consumption is actually higher than EIA predicted last year. Total crude oil input to refineries is up from an estimated 13.85 million barrels a day to an actual 14.25 million barrels. But if domestic production is down and consumption is up, where is the extra oil coming from?

Foreign oil.

While oil production in the Gulf is down more than 10% from April 2010 estimates, net crude oil imports are up 5%. At $83 dollars a barrel (the approximate average price of oil in the fourth quarter of 2010) that means Obama’s oil drilling permatorium increased American dependence on foreign oil by about $1.8 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of last year alone. The numbers only get worse as Obama’s permitorium further cuts into production. A Wood Mackenzie study predicts that for all of 2011 the permitorium will result in the loss this year of about 375,000 barrels of oil a day.

More imported oil also means higher prices at the pumps. The EIA explains: “Retail gasoline prices tend to be higher the farther it is sold from the source of supply.” It costs more money to transport oil to your gas station from the Persian Gulf than from the Gulf of Mexico.

And another factor not mentioned: Our huge deficits, and the falling value of the dollar. Oil is traded with dollars and when the dollar goes down in value, it takes more dollars to pay for oil.

Isn't it time we adopt an energy policy based on reality? Or just maybe a policy at all?

Are gas prices high enough yet?

What's happening to the oil market is exactly what Obama and his fellow socialists want.

By Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner:

President Obama says there's not much the federal government can do to bring down gas prices any time soon. Michael Bromwich, Obama's chief bureaucrat in charge of issuing permits for oil and gas companies to drill off-shore, said the same thing yesterday:

“‘Even if we permitted the hell out of everything tomorrow -- every pending permit, some permits that haven't even been filed yet -- it would not have a material effect on gas prices. That's the simple, clear reality,” said the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE).

Both Obama and Bromwich either are purposely lying or they simply don't know what they are talking about. Check out the chart that accompanies this post. Notice what happened on July 14, 2008? Oil prices suddenly plummeted from their historic high of $145 a barrel. Why?

Because that was the day President George W. Bush signed an executive order lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Overnight, the price per barrel of oil plunged, and that plunge was reflected at the pump soon thereafter.

In other words, Obama could with the stroke of a pen sign an executive order telling his appointees at EPA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy to stop throwing up obstacles to increased U.S. oil and natural gas production and instead work with the energy industry on a crash program to "drill here, drill now."

Welcome to the New World

When the U.S. Government can prevent Boeing, a private company, from building a new plant in South Carolina because of union pressure, we are no longer free. Period.

When a local union with 9 employees in a workforce of 92 can shut down an operation, then we are no longer free.

Just two examples. There are so many more that I could write a book...

Remember in 2008 when oil prices peaked at $140? How it must have been Bush's fault because all his buddies were in the (big) oil business. So now what? Well, it certainly can't be Obama's fault. But he'll get to the bottom of it, for sure.

Investors Business Daily gets it right:

In his radio address last Saturday, President Obama bragged that his attorney general had just two days earlier "launched a task force with just one job: rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, including any illegal activity by traders and speculators.

"We're going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain."

Last month, the president promised that his administration was "taking various measures to deal with oil prices, and (is) watching out for price-gouging."

This is the sort of rhetoric that beleaguered consumers, aching from soaring fuel prices, are vulnerable to. Obama is giving them a straw man on which they can vent their frustrations. But their focus should be on the presidential candidate who said while campaigning in 2008 that under his environmentalist regime, "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

On the day Obama took office, gasoline was $1.83 a gallon. On Tuesday, according to the American Automobile Association's Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the national average was $3.87. While electricity prices haven't yet necessarily skyrocketed, gasoline prices sure have.

Obama could have prevented this. But he's done nothing to push crude supplies up and thereby bring gasoline prices down. In fact, it appears that his goal is to reduce domestic supply. Among the energy roadblocks his administration has thrown up:

• An illegal moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

• The rescission of permits that had already been issued for drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.

• The withholding of air permits for drilling, prompting Shell to walk away from an estimated 27 billion barrels of Arctic oil.

No, the oil in those reserves would not be in tomorrow's pipeline. But the promise of more oil in the future has an effect on prices today. The opposite — a future of artificial scarcity — is the reason oil is currently trading at elevated levels.

Despite its denials, the administration has also increased gasoline prices through its promotion of a weak dollar. Because oil is traded in U.S. dollars, those who sell it on the open market demand more dollars for the same amount of crude because those dollars are worth less.

This administration includes an energy secretary who has pined for European — meaning $8-a-gallon — gas prices. But the White House would rather the public remain ignorant of its role in driving prices higher. So it cynically kicks off probes of investors and oil industry executives that will turn up absolutely nothing.

And then when Bill Maher gets on Leno and says that "tea-baggers are corporate America's idiots" and Keith Olbermann thinks that S.E. Cupp should have been aborted, just because she disagrees with him, I'm about ready to scream.

It's gotten so ridiculous that it's hard to take. But we need to keep up the good fight against the left before they bury us all, as promised in 1961.