In First 100 Days, Obama Moves Too Fast, Spends Too Much

I believe Mary Kate is the best thinker US News has here. I missed commenting on her article about the necessity of everyone paying taxes. If we had something like a flat tax along with pay as you go requirements for normal times, we would all then feel the pain of taxes. Many of the President’s fans don’t pay much and make comments like here that everything will be okay if we get the rich to pay more. But the rich already are paying a disproportionate share of income tax, as she points out in her other article, where the poor pay nothing. So it becomes a situation where we all have a vote and the majority decides we want big government with the rich paying for it.

But we would all become fiscal hawks as Mary Kate points out if we all feel the pain of taxation, which would happen if we had something closer to a flat tax without exemptions.

She wrote this in the other article. “According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 20 percent of taxpayers—whose average household pretax income of $250,000 drops to $180,000 after taxes—are paying 69 percent of all federal income taxes and a whopping 86 percent of all individual income taxes.”

Elsewhere I have read where the bottom 50% earners pay only 3%. So if they have to pay more and feel the pain of it, they will want smaller, cheaper government just like the bad old Republicans.

During the campaign this president sounded like Robin Hood, take from the rich via taxes and give to the poor via government programs, but the rich are already getting taken to the cleaners (I am not rich) and he wants to pile on much more.

The traditional Republican model is small simple government which addresses only the essentials, fixing roads, providing defense and so forth, all while cultivating the business environment so that the “pie” gets bigger. Here we are wrecking our economy, the pie is shrinking and we will be fighting each other over scraps. Cultivate business to increase our nations prosperity and minimize government. We are going in the wrong direction with our Robin Hood president.

Peter of WA 3:56AM April 30, 2009

I have never heard of a broke deadbeat getting out of debt and putting his house in order by getting more credit cards and stealing from his grandchildren. Just as I have never heard of an alcoholic who needed, "just one more drink" to get off the booze.

Furthermore, it should be apparent to anyone, with more than air between their big ears, that loading more costly, dogmatic enviro- regulations and taxes on a already over regulated, staggering economy is probably not a real smart thing to do.

But it's probably just me... After all Barak has his magic Obamawand - we just have to believe.

R.L. Schaefer of CA 12:20PM April 29, 2009