Maggie's Farm

Giving this power-sotted President even more authority in McConnell's crazy plan to raise the debt ceiling is proof-positive that the Republican Congressional leadership remains as brain dead as ever.
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I love Taranto's story about Obama not understanding the difference between collision coverage and liability coverage in his automobile insurance policy. This is of a piece with the (apparently false) story Obama repeatedly told during his election campaign about his mother's difficulties with her health insurance.

The way Obama told it, his mother's insurance company refused to pay for her health care because her cancer was a pre-existing condition. Now, according to a new book from a former NYT reporter, it turns out that it was his mother's request for disability payments that the company declined to pay; in fact, her cancer treatments were covered by her insurance policy and were paid, except for a small deductible.

What makes this story so interesting to me is that (1) in a letter to the insurance company, Dunham wrote that she had turned collection efforts over to her son, whom she named as her attorney, and (2) this happened in 1995, when BHO was 34 or 35 years old, and therefore old enough (especially as an attorney taking on a client's claims case) to know the difference between HEALTH insurance and DISABILITY coverage. The only conclusion anyone can reach in this instance is that throughout his campaign Obama intentionally lied about the circumstance surrounding his mother's death from cancer. In my book, that makes Obama every bit as sleazy as the detestable John Edwards....but of course I already knew that.

RE: Who's not paying their fair share?

The data on tax rates and the tax burden of different income groups can be sliced and diced for political effect, in the same way the unemployment numbers and job creation numbers are sliced and diced by Pelosi-Reid & Co. to sow confusion in order to counter criticism from the Republican side of the aisle. Some helpful numbers about taxes appeared yesterday in a column by Michael Franc, which was posted on-line at the National Review.

"Today the wealthiest 1 percent of American households earn 20 percent of all income — more than twice the share they earned in 1980 and no doubt a class-warfare crime of the first magnitude. But they pay 38 percent of all income taxes, up from the 19 percent they paid in 1980.

"Back in 1981, the bottom half of wage earners paid 7.45 percent of all taxes; today, their share is barely a third of that (2.7 percent).

"[T]he IRS reports that the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers, who account for fully 70 percent of all income-tax receipts, send Uncle Sam an average of 18.7 percent of their income. The next wealthiest 40 percent face an average tax rate of barely 8 percent. Finally, the average tax rate paid by the bottom half of Americans stands at a mere 2.6 percent."

Franc's is the most nearly complete list of the relevant numbers that I have ever seen in print. I particularly like the statistics on the effective tax rates of different income groups, given the controversy that was once started by billionaire Warren Buffet over who pays taxes at a higher rate, himself or (IIRC) his secretary.

The only significant number that appears missing is the share of total income that is earned by the lowest 50% of taxpayers, to go along with the same number given for the wealthiest taxpayers. That would provide a clear comparison of the tax burden of each income group with the share of federal income taxes each one pays. The comparison is relevant because it is implicit in the Dems' call for higher taxes on the rich that the lowest 50% of income taxpayers DO pay a fair share when you take into account how "little" of the nation's income is theirs. The numbers cited by Franc already suggest otherwise.

Whoops, it looks as if I got carried away in editing my last comment and actually over-edited the original. In the final paragraph, I intended to write:

"....comparison of the tax burden of each income group with the share of income each one earns."

Sorry 'bout that.