Obama Hits the Easy Button

Today the President announced a proposed pay freeze for Federal workers for the next two fiscal years. This was on my list of easy ways to cut spending immediately. Glad the President was paying attention. From my previous post:

Really easy spending cuts:

• End all stimulus spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• End all TARP spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• Freeze the pay of federal workers, since the CPI stayed flat last year, so too should have federal pay, but it went up. (Full disclosure, I work for the federal government.)
  
• De-Fund all of the committees, czars and regulatory boards for Obamacare.
• De-fund the Department of Education, for starters, since it doesn't educate anyone.

We presume that a majority of federal workers supported Obama, certainly their unions did. One of those unions immediately opposed the move, of course. Too bad, federal workers are supported by taxpayers who are also suffering, a pay freeze is unfortunately equitable under those circumstances.

Interestingly some Democrats didn't get the message from this month's election and are also opposing pay cuts.

Republicans welcomed the pay freeze but it drew silence from most top Democrats.
. . .
Representative Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, offered a lukewarm reaction to the pay freeze. Hoyer, whose Maryland district includes many federal workers, said he would "review closely President Obama's proposal.

At least they had the good sense not to directly oppose.

There are those who will say that this does not go far enough in controlling federal spending. I wholeheartedly agree; but it's a step.

Deregulation and Limited Government

The U-T article by James Durfee alleging partisanship by the Tea Party in Sunday's paper kicked off something of a food fight in the comments section. Leslie Eastman calls out the lie that is central to the article:

If all Tea Party Participants are "Republicans", then how do you explain the 13% of us DEMOCRATS who are involved in this citizens movement? Data Here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20001743-503544.html

Over 40% of SCTRC's members are Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, undeclared or are not otherwise connected to the GOP.

What also caught my attention was the frequently posted criticism that the Tea Party candidates do not have specific plans for spending cuts and deregulation. Leslie again responds:

True -- but I understand their hesitancy. Anything the candidates say that indicate specific programs (like Social Security), are distorted into vile, ineffectual attack ads by their opponents. Citizens need to research candidates thoroughly, and not rely on party literature, when selecting representatives.

But I also wanted to point to specific programs of cost cutting and deregulation that could easily be proposed, along with pointers to Tea Party candidates with specific proposals. Here are some easy ones from your author.

Really easy spending cuts:

• End all stimulus spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• End all TARP spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• Freeze the pay of federal workers, since the CPI stayed flat last year, so too should have federal pay, but it went up. (Full disclosure, I work for the federal government.)
  
• De-Fund all of the committees, czars and regulatory boards for Obamacare.
• De-fund the Department of Education, for starters, since it doesn't educate anyone.

Really easy deregulation:

• Repeal Obamacare. It is chock full of regulations.
  
• Simplify banking regulation by ending too big to fail, and requiring increasing capital reserves the larger any financial institution gets. Little additional regulation would be required.
• Simplify clinical drug trials, by only requiring that safety be proved, not efficacy. This will lower the cost of drugs.
• Require a cost benefit analysis be conducted for all new regulations proposed by any federal agency. Require a public comment period and allow court challenges to new regulations on the basis of lack of benefit commensurate with cost.

There, that wasn't too hard, was it?

About That 47%

Does it matter to our cause that 47% of Americans apparently pay no federal income taxes? Ramesh Ponnuru over at the Corner on NRO thinks not, and I had already been drifting in that direction. The number is a little misleading, because it implies that there are folks who are free riders on the system, getting benefits without paying their fair share. However, I notice that many of the folks at the Tea Party rallies might be in that group, but they are out there protesting government largess just the same. This is because the tax and spend structure of the government impacts them just the same. Further, people making under $50,000 are still paying a lot in taxes.

This average household would have paid 0.8 percent of its income in corporate taxes (through the stocks it owned), 0.9 percent in gas and other federal excise taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. Add these up, and the family’s total federal tax rate was 14.2 percent.

Further, these families are very hard hit in California by a sales tax of 8.75%, much of which goes to pay for federally mandated spending, set to increase under Obamacare.

The fact these households are still paying taxes, presents an opportunity and a challenge. The only way one can enact a tax cut for the lower middle class, would be to reduce the payroll tax, which would threaten social security. Obama has famously pledged he would not raise taxes on ... who can remember but it was a lie anyway. As the looming deficits hit, he will be forced to either cut spending, fat chance, or raise taxes on folks he promised he wouldn't. Meanwhile, those folks know this is coming, so they show up at the Tea Party rallies. The real issue isn't so much who is taxed, but the fact that government has grown overwhelmingly big, and no one can pay for it, no matter who we tax.

More from Ramesh Ponnuru:

The argument — which has been steadily picking up adherents on the Right for ten years — is that people who pay no income taxes are likely to perceive big government as a free good and therefore become more supportive of it than they would be if they paid income taxes. A secondary argument is that it is important, as a matter of both morals and civics, for everyone to pay taxes.

These claims, I think, overstate the importance of the distinction between income taxes and payroll taxes. I've never seen evidence that people who pay payroll taxes but have no income-tax liability regard themselves as not paying taxes or favor big government.

It's the Spending, Stupid!

Imagine my shock when Bill O'Reilly echoed a main theme of TLT on today's Talking Points Memo, laying into the unsustainable levels of spending at the federal, state and local levels. I normally find O'Reilly entertaining but not usually an inspiration for my blog, but he was spot on today. (Sorry for no link, Bill holds back his material from the web for a day, for business reasons, I suppose.) But this is the exact message of the Tea Party from day one, when we started by protesting the porkulus, the stimulus, and the bailouts. It's never been about race, it's the spending stupid. Why the left can't get this? Because it doesn't fit their narrative and it distracts people from the simple fact that excess spending is causing growing debts and deficits.

But, I think the word is getting out. More and more people identify with the Tea Party movement; the left's attempt at demonization has backfired. Every day we see more articles on the out of control spending, as O'Reilly called it. This is why we will be out in force on April 15. Now the liberals will say to the average tax payer, how has Obama increased your taxes? Answer: even if you don't see it on your tax bill Thursday we all know it's coming. Rich Lowry takes aim:

This is why the country has a roiling tax revolt prior to the imposition of any significant tax increases. The tea-party movement is an act of pre-emption, based on the simple calculation that higher spending eventually means higher taxes. For all the tsk-tsking about its supposed irresponsibility, the movement is attuned to the future in a way that the president -- who hopes to evade or hide the consequences of his budgetary choices for as long as possible -- is not.

Not only will be paying future taxes, we are already paying the price through increased inflation, higher interest, higher state taxes over mandated medicare spending, higher health insurance premiums and fewer jobs due to increased taxes on the rich and capital gains besides the tax increases for the grandkids. Just no increase in your personal income taxes... today. There, don't you feel better. What crap; the President thinks he can increase spending, while holding down middle class taxes and no one will notice? Memo for Team Barry, our level of economic ignorance does not match yours.

Time to get ready for Tea Party protests on Tax Day. The media is going to ask this very question of one of us at the protest, or some variation "Have your personal taxes gone up and if they haven't, why are you protesting?" Let's all be ready with our answer.

I couldn't resist one more paragraph of Rich Lowry's article to round this out:

"I like to pay taxes," Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said. "With them I buy civilization." With ours, we will buy a misbegotten stimulus program, bailouts, runaway entitlements, a costly new health-care program and a federal government where incontinence is a perpetual pre-existing condition. No matter what your tax bill this year, don't worry -- it'll go higher.