And what have been Obama’s own debt-reduction ideas? In last week’s news conference, he railed against the tax break for corporate jet owners — six times.Sometimes, knowing a little math can be pretty important.
I did the math. If you collect that tax for the next 5,000 years — that is not a typo — it would equal the new debt Obama racked up last year alone. To put it another way, if we had levied this tax at the time of John the Baptist and collected it every year since — first in shekels, then in dollars — we would have 500 years to go before we could offset half of the debt added by Obama last year alone.
Obama’s other favorite debt-reduction refrain is canceling an oil-company tax break. Well, if you collect that oil tax and the corporate jet tax for the next 50 years — you will not yet have offset Obama’s deficit spending for February 2011.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Friday, July 08, 2011
Using Math To Illustrate
Charles Krauthammer does an excellent job in this column of showing just how much trouble we're in financially, and just how unserious the president is about getting us out of that trouble:
Plus, Krauthammer doesn't factor in the taxes lost and unemployment/welfare paid when jobs in the jet industry are lost due to lower sales due to Obama's taxes.
ReplyDeleteThe yacht industry was almost destroyed a few years back. Be the same type of thing.
ReplyDeleteI usually enjoy Charles, but he uses one example that Obama offered of the type of tax break and subsidy that can be closed as a deficit reduction, and he implies that it's Obama's entire argument or plan. That's pretty weak. Charles knows that, and he's just pandering to the crowd - one that doesn't want to think beyond the literal.
ReplyDeleteWeak, Charles, weak.
No, he illustrates one point that the president seemed to harp on. Six times.
ReplyDeleteFor a "crowd" that likes to scream that Republicans want to throw starving seniors in the streets and require women who want abortions to have to resort to bloody hangers in a back alley, I'll cut Krauthammer a little slack if using math and a funny example is the right's way of "pandering".
What I liked about his article was that he created a strong visual for us about the impracticality of this idea instead of just throwing the big numbers at us...LOVED the John the Baptist reference...it REALLY drove it home that the numbers we are dealing with too ridiculous to make an impact.
ReplyDeleteOf course that's not his only idea, but darned if most of his ideas aren't just as pathetic in my mind.