Friday, August 7, 2009

No Problem! Corporate Tax Revenues Down Only 57%


Via The Strata-Sphere comes this graph of the results of a report by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Obama's bean counters have noticed that tax receipts from corporations are down a bit, a mere 57%.

That's right. As part of the Democrat-sponsored economic upturn, corporations are paying less than half of the taxes they used to pay, in fact, only 43%.

In the antique America that wasn't yet being remade by Obama, where the law of the land was still (dare I mention it?) The Constitution of the United States, corporations weren't yet subject to government takeovers or planned obsolescence. They were nasty, voracious entities that existed to make profits, which they split with the government to pay for whatever Congress wanted. America kept corporations around for some now-forgotten reason or other, probably in part because they produced goods and services and offered jobs.

That's all over. Now the Democrat-controlled Congress wants what the Democrat president wants: a complete remake of the United States of America. Obviously Congress no longer needs corporations to help supply them with money: instead, individual taxpayers are going to do it.

In the interest of fairness, it should be mentioned that there is one wrinkle in Obama's plan that he hasn't yet had time to smooth out: Many individuals, like the unemployed (about 16 million at the moment) and the underemployed, also are dropping less money into the federal tax-collection basket.

AP Writer Stephen Ohlemacher broke it down:

Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.

The last time the government's revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.

But not to worry. Give Obama some time; all he needs is a little more time for his policies to kick in. I hear this all the time from my neighbors here in Progressive Paradise.

Think of it! This is a moment of opportunity! A unprecedented moment to remake American health care at the cost of a mere $1 trillion over the next ten years. And wait until the Senate okays the House vote to raise the budgets for government agencies by 11%. That will help a lot. And then there's that Cap'n Trade tax on every product that uses energy in its production, like food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, if you can get them. Plus that new trillion-dollar stimulus package bill that's being cooked up.

If you or I were as smart as the Democrat administration, we'd have been the ones to pour pork gravy over every bill in Congress, in fact, so much gravy that the bills are too massive even to read, saving Congress the trouble of pretending to read them, as they had to do in the vintage, un-remade United States. Those kooks who suspect that amendments tacked onto 1,000 page bills at 3:00 a.m. don't require tax savings for Americans? Well, what can anyone say? They must be extremists or something.

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Today's ichthyological curiosity:

The Potomac snakehead. This is an invasive predatory species of fish with "beedy little eyes" and a mouthful of dangerous teeth. Endemic to Indonesia, it was released into American waters where it is now considered a pest.

Hat tip: Washington Post via The Florida Museum of Natural History


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