Year One List: 81 major Trump achievements, 11 Obama legacy items repealed

With the passage of the GOP tax bill this week, the Trump administration has scored 81 major achievements in its first year, making good on campaign promises to provide significant tax cuts, boost U.S. energy production, and restore respect to the United States, according to the White House.

And along the way, President Trump even outdid his own expectations and slashed at least 11 major legacy items of former President Barack Obama, including cracking down on the open border, slowing recognition of communist Cuba and effectively killing Obamacare by ending the mandate that everyone have health insurance or face a tax.

According to the White House, the 81 accomplishments are in 12 major categories and include well over 100 other minor achievements.

The unofficial list helps to counter the impression in the mainstream media and among congressional Democrats that outside the approval of Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch and passage of the tax reform bill little was done.

Administrations typically tout their achievements broadly at the end of each year, but Trump plans to list jobs added, regulations killed, foreign policy victories won, and moves to help veterans and even drug addicts.

And in a sign of support for conservatives, the White House also is highlighting achievements for the pro-life community.

Below are the 12 categories and 81 wins cited by the White House.

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5 Dirty Little Secrets About the Bush Tax Cuts

Investor's Businss Daily

...not to say that the Bush tax cuts weren't flawed. They were phased in over time — limiting their effectiveness — and they came with an expiration date.

As a result, taxes will automatically go up unless Congress votes to extend the Bush tax rates.

That alone is the reason for the fierce political debates today over which parts to extend and which to let expire.

Reagan's tax cuts, in contrast, were permanent, so the only way Congress could increase taxes on anyone was to actually vote for a tax hike.

JOHN F. KENNEDY ON WHY U.S. (STILL) NEEDS TAX CUTS

Forty-nine years ago, with the economy still recovering from a 10-month recession that ended in 1961, President Kennedy sketched out a bold plan to get the economy moving again. It focused on deep, across-the-board cuts in taxes. Those cuts, made after Kennedy's tragic death in November 1963, created a boom that lasted through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Contrast his tax-cutting rhetoric of nearly 50 years ago with today's tax-hiking rhetoric of President Obama and his Democratic colleagues. Following is an abridged version of Kennedy's remarks to the Economic Club of New York on Dec. 15, 1962.

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Will he or won't he?

The tax cut trap

We hear the White House is now floating a compromise that would extend the middle-class tax cuts for four years, and those on higher earners for only two years. We hope the GOP doesn't fall for what is a transparent scheme to make it easier to let the rates on higher earners expire the next time around. If Mr. Obama wants a deal on taxes, Republicans should demand that he cooperate on pro-growth tax cuts, or a tax reform that lowers rates in return for ending loopholes...

The policies of spend, tax and regulate have undermined the recovery, causing capital to flee to Asia or the sideline and employers to forswear or delay new hiring. The American public has listened and watched and is slowly concluding that the hope they placed in these "progressive" policies was mistaken. This political reality is slowly dawning on Democrats, which is why so many of them are now denying paternity for the policies of the last four years.

The Democratic Tax Retreat

A review of over 200 fiscal adjustments in 21 countries shows that spending discipline and tax cuts are the best ways to spur economic growth.

Tax Cuts vs. 'Stimulus': The Evidence Is In

Our results were striking: Over nearly 40 years, expansionary adjustments were based mostly on spending cuts, while recessionary adjustments were based mostly on tax increases. And these results would have been even stronger had our definition of an expansionary period been more lenient (extending, for example, to the top 50% of the OECD). In addition, adjustments based on spending cuts were accompanied by longer-lasting reductions in ratios of debt to GDP.

In the same paper we also examined years of large fiscal expansions, defined as increases in the cyclically adjusted deficit by at least 1.5% of GDP. Over 91 such cases, we found that tax cuts were much more expansionary than spending increases.

Petition to Renew the Bush Tax Cuts

Sen. Fred Thompson for the League of American Voters: Sign here

REMEMBER: Tax cuts don’t cost money; government programs do!

“How will we pay for the tax cut?”

Six Months to Go Until The Largest Tax Hikes in History

From Ryan Ellis on Thursday, July 1, 2010 4:15 PM

In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011:

Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates. The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:

- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%

Higher taxes on marriage and family. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level. The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.

The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax. For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.

Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011. The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011. These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include:

The “Medicine Cabinet Tax” Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).

The “Special Needs Kids Tax” This provision of Obamacare imposes a cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs) of $2500 (Currently, there is no federal government limit). There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are thousands of families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education.

The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes

When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. The major items include:

The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.

Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”

Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.

Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.

Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.

AMERICANS FOR TAX REFORM

President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday...

Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said. Interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.

National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says...

When Deficits Become Dangerous

Welcome to our great fiscal Titanic! Here are a few highlights from this WSJ article today:

Mr. Obama and Congress added hundreds of billions of dollars a year of ineffective "stimulus" spending—more accurately characterized as social engineering and pork—when far more effective, less expensive options were available.

The Obama 10-year budget—unprecedented in its spending, taxes, deficits and accumulation of debt—is by a large margin the most risky fiscal strategy in American history. [emphasis mine] In his Feb. 1 budget message, Mr. Obama said, "We cannot continue to borrow against our children's future." But that is exactly what he proposes to do.

Former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker famously called Reaganomics—with its defense buildup, tax cuts and budget deficits—a "riverboat gamble." (Which, by the way, worked out well.) Mr. Obama's fiscal strategy is more akin to the voyage of the Titanic. Let's hope he changes course soon enough to prevent disaster.

"A payroll tax cut would have been better than any government stimulus."

Scott Brown: 'People Aren't Stupid'

...substantial American economic collapse coming to us in 2011

Government spending has already hugely increased, and so has the size and scope of government, but next year there will also be substantial tax increases for a great many Americans. The first reason will be the expiration of the Bush tax cuts . The top personal income tax rate will rise next Jan. 1 to 39.6% from 35%, a hike of nearly one-eighth. The dividend tax rate will rise to 39.6%, more than 2½ times the current 15%. And the capital gains tax rate will rise by a third, to 20% from 15%. If the House health care bill had passed, all three of these rates would have risen to 45%.

The estate tax, which fell to zero this year under the Bush tax cuts, will return in 2011--or sooner, if Congress acts to restore it. Another likely tax increase will be on the income of private equity and hedge-fund managers, from the capital gains rate of 15% to the new higher income tax rates. It has already been passed by the House and is supported by the Obama administration, as is an additional 10-year, $90 billion tax on banks aimed at "rolling back bonuses for top earners." It would affect some 50 banks, insurance companies, and large broker-dealers.

Meanwhile a number of last year's tax deductions have disappeared due to the failure of Congress to extend them into this year. The tax deduction for state and local sales taxes is one; the deduction for college tuition and fees is another; and the 50% write-off for small businesses for capital purchases--equipment, machinery or building a new plant--has disappeared as well, which will have a negative effect upon the construction of new business operation facilities.

Add on to all of these increases the biggest government deficits and spending increases (to 26.5% of gross domestic product from 21%) in half a century, the protectionism of free trade downsizing through the "buy American" requirements, China import restrictions, and the administration limitations of Columbia, South Korea, and Panama free trade agreements, and we have a very different, and not very prosperous, America ahead of us.

Or as economist Arthur Laffer wrote in his January Economic Outlook, we "cannot have a prosperous economy when government is overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over-regulating and restricting the free flow of goods and services across national boundaries." We are, in his words, simply "moving in the wrong direction."

***

But what Mr. Laffer sees as most important is a substantial American economic collapse coming to us in 2011...

Read the whole thing

U.S. Chamber warns of 'double-dip' recession because of Dem policies

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue warned the U.S. faces a double-dip recession because of the taxes and regulations under consideration by the Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama.

“Congress, the administration and states must recognize that our weak economy simply could not sustain all the new taxes, regulations and mandates now under consideration. It’s a sure-fire recipe for a double-dip recession, or worse,” Donohue said in a speech providing the Chamber's outlook for 2010.

Donohue said the lawmakers should not let former President George W. Bush's tax cuts expire at the end of year and lambasted Democratic efforts on healthcare and financial regulatory reform as well as climate change.

If the tax cuts are allowed to expire, “we will likely end up with even bigger deficits and greater economic misery,” Donohue said...

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Entrepreneurship, the kind that creates industries and jobs on the scale we'll need in the next century, is about two things: Ideas that spring randomly from some slightly crazed dreamer's head; and worse, they often get filthy rich if the dreams are real. The left likes neither. --Daniel Henninger (WSJ)

"We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation."

At the jobs summit, Mr. Obama said "I want to hear from CEOs what's holding back our business investment." Really?

How about the world's highest corporate tax rate? How about the 5.4% health-care surtax on top of the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will push the top marginal individual rate, paid at the outset by many entrepreneurs, well over 40%?

Set aside income taxes as the unransomed hostages of progressive dogma. Justify this: The Senate health-reform bill imposes a $4 billion annual excise tax on medical devices and diagnostic equipment. In a slow-innovation economy, which is what we have now, medical and diagnostic miracles sit at the intersection of American science, technology, education and IQ. That stuff defines American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. If the Obama Democrats will tax these people, they'll tax anything that produces income, no matter how innovative or job-creating.

The Obama bet is that the U.S. can be a Franco-German welfare state, with a mammoth public sector, and still compete with China, India, Brazil, Korea and the rest. This is a pipedream. We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation.

ObamaJobs: Uncle Sam's Hiring Hall

WSJ: Stimulus Spending Doesn't Work

Our new research shows no evidence of a Keynesian 'multiplier' effect. There is evidence that tax cuts boost growth.

WSJ: Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles

This is an extremely important article. I wish everyone would read it all!

Here are three excerpts:

While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy's relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy's relapse in 1937.

Further down in the article:

The damage caused by high taxation during the Great Depression is the real lesson we should learn. A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity. If there were one warning I'd give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.

And a summary (I haven't included his discussion of the gold standard and how that figures into our current situation):

The lessons here are pretty straightforward. Inflation can and did occur during a depression, and that inflation was strictly a monetary phenomenon.

My hope is that the people who are running our economy do look to the Great Depression as an object lesson. My fear is that they will misinterpret the evidence and attribute high unemployment and the initial decline in prices to tight money, while increasing taxes to combat budget deficits.

Please read the whole thing!

Here's how you are going to be stimulated

THE STIMULUS PLAN
Where the Money Goes – Selected programs from the $789.2 billion bill
(Friday, Februay 13, 2009, Wall Street Journal)

Spending (24%)

$30 billion
Modernization of the electric grid, advanced battery manufacturing, energy efficiency grants

$19 billion
Payments to hospitals and physicians who computerize medical-records systems

$8.5 billion
National Institutes of Health biomedical research into diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer and heart disease

$5 billion
Home weatherization grants to low and middle-income families

$6.3 billion
Energy efficiency upgrades to federally-supported and public housing, including new insulation, windows and frames

$29 billion
Road and bridge infrastructure construction and modernization

$8.4 billion
Public transit improvements and infrastructure investments

$8 billion
High-speed rail investments

$18 billion
Grants and loans for water infrastructure, flood prevention and environmental cleanup

Tax Cuts (38%)

$6.6 billion
Tax credit for first-time homeowners buying between April 2008 and June 2009 is raised from $7.500 to $8,000, and will not have to be repaid

$116.2 billion
Workers earning less than $75,000 will get a payroll tax credit of up to $400; married couples filing jointly for less than $150,000 get up to $800

$69.8 billion
Middle-income taxpayers get an exemption from the alternative minimum tax of $46,700 for an individual and $70,950 for a married male

$5.1 billion
Businesses can more quickly deduct the cost of investments in plant and equipment from taxable income

Aid (38%)

$40.6 billion
Aid to local school districts to balance education budgets, prevent cutbacks and modernize schools

$87 billion
Temporary increase in federal funding for Medicaid to states

$2 billion
Funds for communities to buy and rehabilitate foreclosed and vacant properties

$8 billion
Aid to states for public safety and critical services

$14 billion
Education tax credit: Partially refundable $2,500 credit for tuition and books expenses

$17.2 billion
Increase in student aid, including raising maximum Pell Grant to $5,350 in 2009 and to $5,550 in 2010

$200 million
Extra grants for colleges’ work-study programs

$27 billion
Jobless benefits extended to a total of 20 weeks on top of regular unemployment compensation, and 33 weeks in 29 states with high unemployment

President Obama: Half Right

President Obama, a smart man, says that tax cuts for the wealthy are the main reason we're now in such economic trouble. Someone needs to tell him how utterly — and dangerously — wrong that is.

"We have tried that strategy time and time again," the president said Monday of "tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans," and "it's only helped lead us to the crisis we face right now."

Well, he's half-right: We have tried it again and again. But rather than create crises, economic growth has been restored. The evidence is pretty much beyond dispute.

Get the evidence here

Obama's big, huge, monstrous tax cuts

Here's what you will get: You'll notice a whopping extra $13 a week around June which will fall to around $8 per week next January.

Here 'tis

Plus, the stimulus contains some interesting healthcare plans...like, if you're fat you'll be charged more and if you're old, well, you just may not get much.

So, this is what those bastards who voted for THE GREAT ONE get, isn't it?