Grinch Obama Steals Christmas in February

Wow, I just read about Obama’s plan to reduce charitable tax deductions. I can’t find the exact formula, although I see the rate goes down from 35 percent to 28 percent, for those evil productive citizens we call “the rich.”

Let’s see. I don’t recall the exact figure, but in one of the years preceding the 2000 election, Dick Cheney and his wife gave something like 10 million dollars to charity. That’s the correct order of magnitude. So under Obama, the deduction would go from $350,000 to $280,000. What happens when the rich see consequences like this on their returns? Obviously, they donate less. So Barack Obama’s plan to finance idiotic things like research to combat nonexistent global warming is to take food out of the mouths of the poor.

If global warming is caused by human industry, we already solved the problem. We elected a team whose backward economic ideas are going to make industry cease.

Under conservatism, the government considers people smart enough to decide what to do with their money, so it tries not to take too much of it. Under liberalism, the government considers our money its money, and it taxes us as much as possible, leaving what amounts to an allowance. But in the past, liberals were willing to allow us to decide what to do with our charitable donations. Now, by discouraging giving, they’re pulling the leash tight. Bureaucrats and left-wing fat cats with government connnections will get the money. The poor can go pack sand. And that makes sense, because liberalism was never about helping the poor. It was about consolidating money and wealth in the hands of a central government: the Mommy Dearest state. Conservatism is about liberty; liberalism is about being taken care of, necessarily including being told what to do.

Will this affect people who donate to religious charities? Surely not. Wouldn’t there be a first amendment issue? I know Obama hates other parts of the Bill of Rights, but I didn’t realize he was trying to repeal this one.

I know this. Liberals would love to cut off donations to churches, because they hate God, and because they want the state to be in charge of charity. A person who gets a hot meal and a clean bed from the church might convert! Marx forbid!

It’s very scary. For a long time, I’ve been pointing out that America seems to be a permanently defeated nation. Our sins wiped out our blessings, so now we’re going to be like the poor quasi-prisoners who make up the citizenry in socialist Europe. I’ve seen it coming, but it didn’t seem real. Now it’s hitting home. My beautiful country is on its heels, and soon it may be a memory, like pre-Castro Cuba.

At least capitalist Cubans got to leave. We have nowhere to go.

European prosperity seems to be in an even steeper nose dive than our own. It looks like the Swiss may be in big trouble. For decades, they’ve profited by helping American tax evaders. Remarkably, they thought our government would never do anything about it. How could they believe that? Now the piper is knocking on their door. And he’s going to get paid. Secret Swiss bank accounts are a thing of the past for Americans. The Swiss don’t have the leverage to say no to our courts.

A whole bunch of Americans are going to get fined or go to jail, and some of them will be famous. It will be a strange pageant of bad judgment and repercussions. I wonder how much this will hurt the Swiss banks. We’re not the only people who use them, but I’m sure our business is important. And I don’t know whether there is a good reason, other than secrecy, to use a Swiss bank.

This is not the way to save money for our nation. The way to save is not to spend the money in the first place. When you’re a complete fool and you think it’s a good idea to pass out doomed, ineffective multi-trillion-dollar bailouts while trying to buy an impossibly expensive national health care system, you aren’t going to save the country by stealing crumbs from soup kitchens.

That’s liberalism for you. When they run the show, you can have somebody else’s cake and eat it, too.