United Liberty

You didn’t read the headline wrong. Bill Maher, an entertainer who has staked himself out as a leftist on his HBO talk show, has just about had it with California’s tax burden. During the show on Friday, Rachel Maddow, a MSNBC host, complained that the new House GOP budget is too helpful to “rich people.”

“The Ryan budget is a document that says the big problems in America right now are that rich people do not have enough money, they need relief from confiscatory tax rates,” she said sarcastically. “And poor people have too much access to affordable healthcare, and those things must stop. And if we fix those things, America will be on a better path.”

As Maddow started praising the atrocious House Progressive Caucus’ budget, which was blasted by David Brooks earlier this week, it was noted by former Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) that the House budget also raises real issue — that Washington has a spending problem.

Maddow continued, explaining that post-9/11 defense spending should be cut. Maher jumped in. “That’s the key!” he said. But he turned the conversation towards taxes, which went against Maddow’s argument.

“You know what? Rich people –- I’m sure you’d agree with this — actually do pay the freight in this country,” he said, pointing to Davis. “I just saw these statistics. I mean, something like 70 percent.”

Written by David Boaz, executive vice president at the Cato Institute. It is cross-posted with permission from Cato @ Liberty.

The radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens is enjoying a rediscovery as the moral center of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. As portrayed in the film, he confronts the sort of dilemma faced by many people of strong ideological convictions forced to deal with political reality: Will he disavow his radical belief in full racial equality in order to ease passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery? (No spoilers here.)

Stevens’s belief in equality under the law went beyond race, as Karen Tumulty notes in a Washington Post article on the fiscal cliff negotiations:

House Ways and Means Chairman Thaddeus Stevens (now enjoying a return to popular consciousness as Tommy Lee Jones’s character in the movie “Lincoln”) denounced the idea of a graduated rate structure as a “strange way to punish men because they are rich.”

Written by Daniel J. Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Posted with permission from Cato @ Liberty.

President Obama supports higher taxes, but he usually claims he only wants higher tax rates on rich people. Heck, he promised back in 2008 that “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

I guess we’re supposed to forget the higher tax burdens that were imposed on the middle class by Obamacare in 2010 and the SCHIP legislation in 2009.

Obama’s other rhetorical trick is to claim he wants a “balanced approach.” Translated from Washington-speak to English, that means he wants more of our money. But it’s a soothing way to demand more money. After all, who’s against “balance”?

Who would have thought Mitt Romney’s tax returns would be a welcome distraction? That’s what happened on Friday, after a week of being beat up for his remarks from a May fundrasier where he said that he’d written off 47% of voters, Romney campaign released his tax returns for 2011 along with a summary of this average tax rate from the previous decade:

Mitt Romney paid $1.9 million in federal taxes in 2011 on income of $13.7 million, an effective rate of 14.1% that reflects the Republican presidential candidate’s dividends, capital gains and other returns that are assessed at some of the lowest tax rates.

Romney’s tax return, which he released Friday, showed that he boosted his effective tax rate by not declaring all of the $4 million in charitable contributions that he made during 2011, instead only reporting $2.3 million. By doing so he stayed consistent with an earlier public statement that his tax rate for the year would not drop below 13%.

That last point about Romney not declaring all of this charitable contributions has made the Left apoplectic. They’re literally upset that Romney paid more in taxes than he was supposed to. Not only that, the substantial charitable giving — Romney gave almost 30% of his income to charity in 2011 and 13.4%  from 1990 to 2009 — takes away from the Left’s narrative that he is out of touch.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who baselessly suggested last month that Romney had not paid any taxes in years past, once again slammed Romney over the issue:

Mitt Romney has found himself in a bit of trouble. He spoke at a fundraiser where he claimed 47% of all Americans did not pay taxes and felt entitled to government handouts. This rhetoric has been seized upon by the Obama campaign and its allies to portray Romney as elitist and out of touch. However the image of Romney the elitist is only a small part of the problem he faces. Romney’s overall problem is that he is running a campaign that ultimately stands for nothing and does a terrible job reaching out to ordinary voters.

Even though the economy is in terrible shape with virtually nonexistent growth and unemployment hovering around 8%, Obama has consistently maintained the lead in both the national polls and in the important battleground states. You would think that in terrible economic conditions any challenger would be running stronger against Obama. However, that just hasn’t been the case this year. The American people may not like Obama’s job performance, but right now they do not see Mitt Romney as a viable alternative. They just don’t like the man. He comes off as cold and arrogant to many voters. Winning votes is essentially a sales job and people only buy things from people they like.

While closing a speech in 1998 at Loyola University, Barack Obama, then a state senator in Illinois, spoke against the “propaganda campaign against the possibility of government action.” Though Obama noted that “some of it has been deserved,” but further explained his desire to see government “pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everbody’s got a shot.”

Here’s the audio:

This isn’t surprising. During a 2008 campaign stop, where he was questioned about his tax plan by “Joe the Plumber,” Obama did exactly hid from his belief in redistribution, saying, “[W]hen you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” That actually sounds worse than what Obama said in the audio above, at least from my perspective.

There is no denying that Mitt Romney has had a rough go of things lately. President Barack Obama managed to get a decent bounce out of the Democratic National Convention, though it seems to be diminishing in recent polls, and the aftermath of the attack on the United States Embassy in Libya was contentious thanks to the media focusing on his criticisms of Obama rather than the substance of his comments about the incident.

The latest outrage is that Mitt Romney has written off 47% of voters who he says will never vote for him because they are too dependent on the government:

During a private reception with wealthy donors this year, Mitt Romney described almost half of Americans as “people who pay no income tax” and are “dependent upon government.” Those voters, he said, would probably support  President Obama because they believe they are “victims” who are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”