The Foundation

“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.” –John Marshall

Editorial Exegesis

“President Obama unveiled part two of his American Jobs Act on Monday, and it turns out to be another permanent increase in taxes to pay for more spending and another temporary tax cut. No surprise there. What might surprise Americans, however, is how the President is setting up the U.S. economy for one of the biggest tax increases in history in 2013. Mr. Obama said last week that he wants $240 billion in new tax incentives for workers and small business, but the catch is that all of these tax breaks would expire at the end of next year. To pay for all this, White House budget director Jack Lew also proposed $467 billion in new taxes that would begin a mere 16 months from now. The tax list includes limiting deductions for those earning more than $200,000 ($250,000 for couples), limiting tax breaks for oil and gas companies, and a tax increase on carried interest earned by private equity firms. These tax increases would not be temporary. What this means is that millions of small-business owners had better enjoy the next 16 months, because come January 2013 they are going to get hit with a giant tax bill. … For the White House, the policy calendar is dictated above all by the political necessities of the 2012 election. Mr. Obama will take his chances on 2013 if he can cajole the private economy to create enough new jobs over the next year to win re-election, even if those jobs and growth are temporary. Business owners and workers who would prefer to prosper beyond Election Day aren’t likely to share Mr. Obama’s enthusiasm once they see the great tax cliff approaching. Look out below.” –The Wall Street Journal

Upright

“When President Obama outlined his $450 billion jobs plan in a speech before Congress last week, he promised it would all be ‘paid for,’ and assured us he would present another plan outlining how he planned to do so. … So much for the ‘balanced approach’ Obama was so fond of during the debt ceiling debate. The administration will cover the cost of the spending in its new jobs proposal solely by increasing taxes. … Sound familiar? Recall this line from Obama’s speech last week: ‘This isn’t political grandstanding. This isn’t class warfare. This is simple math.’ Republicans chuckled when he said that. And now the administration has shown why their laughter was warranted.” –National Review’s Andrew Stiles

“President Obama’s jobs program calls for cuts in both sides of the payroll tax. That tax finances Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare are already taking in less money than they need to pay retirees. So they will have to cash in more of the Treasury IOUs left behind when previous surpluses were used to finance general expenditures. But the Treasury is also already running a deficit, a trillion dollars-plus. So it will have to borrow more in the capital markets in order to pay back the Social Security and Medicare funds. Unless Obama makes up the lost revenue by changing the tax code. But then money will be withdrawn from the economy in the form of higher taxes so it can be put back into the economy through the payroll-tax cut. Somehow that’s supposed to stimulate the economy.” –Freeman editor Sheldon Richman

“The White House’s proposed means of paying for the ‘jobs bill’ the president called on Congress to adopt last week really sheds light on the cynicism and confusion at the heart of the president’s new campaign theme. In order to be able to insist that he is proposing ideas but Republicans are unwilling to act, the president will apparently propose exactly the same set of massive tax increases that even Democrats in a Democratically-controlled Congress were unwilling to consider in the midst of the Obamacare debate in 2009. … If telling voters you’re unable to do your job were a wise re-election strategy, this might be a clever way to do it. But it isn’t.” –Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center

“The fact that a mere seven years after being attacked by Muslims, we elected a guy who spent his early years in Islamic schools in Indonesia; his most formative years being raised in Hawaii by white socialists and tutored by a black communist; and his adulthood, attending a black racist church in Chicago, while hanging around with unrepentant radical terrorists, strongly suggests that America should have had its head examined.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

Essential Liberty

Point: “Many people think that when the government takes payroll tax from their paychecks, it goes to something like a savings account. Seniors who collect Social Security think they’re just getting back money that they put into their ‘account.’ Or they think it’s like an insurance policy – you win if you live long enough to get more than you paid in. Neither is true. Nothing is invested. The money taken from you was spent by government that year. Right away. There’s no trust fund. The plan is unsustainable.” –columnist John Stossel

Counterpoint: “Americans might listen to someone who calls Social Security a ‘Ponzi scheme,’ if he goes on to explain that what he means is that it cannot deliver the benefits it promises without significant reforms. But someone who seems eager to get the federal government out of the business of ensuring retirement security altogether will find a less receptive audience.” –National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru

“Regardless of whether you believe the Social Security system, as now structured, satisfies the precise elements of a Ponzi scheme, you have to admit that if it had been correctly designed and administered, it would not be approaching insolvency and threatening our liberty and prosperity.” –columnist David Limbaugh

Insight

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” –British Prime Minister William Pitt (1759-1806)

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.” –French economist, statesman and author, Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

The Demo-gogues

Broken record: “This is the bill that Congress needs to pass. … No games. No politics. No delays.” –Barack Obama, gamer and hardball politico

From the campaigner in chief: “[M]y job as president of the United States is not to worry about my job.” –Barack Obama, who plans to spend $1 billion campaigning to keep his job

Hope: “Now, my hope is that when we are on the other side of it, folks will look back and say, ‘You know, he wasn’t a bad captain of the ship.’” –Barack Obama, U.S.S. Titanic

False choices: “I urge reasonable Republicans to resist the voices of the Tea Party and others who would oppose this legislation and [instead] root for our economy. We must not continue to bow to the Tea Party Republicans willing to do anything to hurt the president. [We] cannot allow their radical agenda to crowd out America’s jobs agenda.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) urging Congress to resist the Tea Party and pass Obama’s jobs plan

Civility: “What I saw [Monday night] in that debate, Andrea, was Republican candidates for president worshiping at the altar of the Tea Party.” –DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Dezinformatsia

Blind partisanship: “What happened after 9/11 – and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not – was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. … The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.” –New York Times columnist Paul Krugman

Misunderstanding sacrifice: “But this is a war – if you use the Bush terminology, the war against terrorism – that has been very costly to this country and continues to be costly. … And when the president goes before the Congress and has to beg for money to modernize schools and build science labs, that’s just one small example of the cost we’ve paid with the obsessive focus on terrorism this last decade.” –Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift

Sycophants: “Occurs to me we are sitting 30 feet from Harry Truman’s official White House portrait. Members of your base are asking: ‘When are you going to get your Harry Truman on?’” –NBC’s Brian Williams to Obama

Conservatives are dangerous: “This is what [the Tea Party] wanted to hear from these candidates [in Monday night’s GOP debate]. There are a lot of people around the country who are just like the folks in this room. And yet there are a huge number of people, an equal number of people, who I think were horrified by what they heard in this room. I was getting notes about they ought to keep these people locked up and not let them out. Don’t let them do anything to the country.” –CNN political analyst David Gergen

Newspulper Headlines:

Out on a Limb: “FACT CHECK: Obama’s Jobs Plan Paid For? Seems Not” –Associated Press

We Blame Global Warming: “Obama Gets Cool Response From Republicans, Even Some Dems” –TheHill.com

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “Can Obama’s Rhetoric Lift the Economy?” –Christian Science Monitor

Math Is Hard: “Hillary Clinton Says Chances She Will Run Against Barack Obama ‘Below Zero’” –Mediaite.com

News You Can Use: “Waving Robotic Crab Arm Attracts Females” –BBC website

Bottom Story of the Day: “Al Gore in 24-Hour Broadcast to Convert Climate Skeptics” –Reuters

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

Village Idiots

Twisted “logic”: “I have to say that I think the president’s team has been rather brilliant putting this [jobs bill] together. If the American Jobs Act – that’s a terrific name for it – and he’s paying for it by doing something that 70 percent of Americans believe would be the right thing to do, which is to raise taxes on the people who got us into this mess in the first place. So now the Republicans are going to have to vote to, if they want to kill this bill, they’re gonna have to vote to give all the people that Americans can’t stand more money. And in doing so they’ll keep ordinary Americans from getting jobs.” –former DNC head Howard Dean

All or nothing: “We want [Congress] to act now on this [Obama jobs] package. We’re not in a negotiation to break up the package. And it’s not an a la carte menu. It is a strategy to get this country moving.” –former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod

Gun grabbers: “[T]he underlying activity of possessing or transporting an accessible and loaded weapon is itself dangerous and undesirable, regardless of the intent of the bearer since it may lead to the endangerment of public safety. Access to a loaded weapon on a public street creates a volatile situation vulnerable to spontaneous lethal aggression in the event of road rage or any other disagreement or dispute…. [I] hold that the state has an important government interest in promoting public safety and preventing crime. … As crafted, the statute seeks to limit the use of handguns to self-defensive purposes – a use which, although in this context existing outside the home, is nonetheless a hallmark of Heller – rather than for some other use that has not been recognized as falling within the protections of the Second Amendment.” –Southern District Judge Cathy Seibel of New York claiming that gun carry permits are not a constitutional right

Short Cuts

“Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override?” –economist Thomas Sowell

“Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, ‘I’ll stand drinks for everyone in the house,’ and then adds, ‘Those guys over there are going to pay for them.’” –political analyst Michael Barone

“L.A. is considering a ban on both plastic AND paper grocery bags. Fine. If I ever go shopping in L.A., my bags will be made from the fur of animals I killed myself.” –former Senator Fred Thompson

“President Obama’s speechwriter Jon Lovett resigned to pursue what he called a more fulfilling life in Los Angeles writing comedy. He helped write the stimulus bill, the health care law and the president’s jobs plan. His work as a comedy writer in Washington is done.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“Government statistics show the U.S. economy created zero jobs in August. President Obama now says he’s confident this month he can double that.” –comedian Jay Leno

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team