If your home caught fire while you were asleep would you really care who yelled to wake you up and save your family’s life? Would his/her race, age or religion matter? Of course not.
Well America, our financial house is on fire and the only person out there screaming to wake us up is Glenn Beck. To my liberal friends and to my moderate friends that have heard negative things about Glenn Beck: I don’t care what you think of him, you need to listen to the message he is delivering. Ignore that it’s Glenn. Ignore the fact that it’s Fox News. Ignore the pink shirt. Listen to the message.
The first video is actually the fourth segment from this particular show (aired on Nov 17), but I think it is a good starting point for those of you that have never watched Beck, or for those that perhaps watched his early shows on HNN. All I ask is that you watch the first clip below. If it piques your curiosity or captures your attention, please watch the remaining clips. They include compelling data that should shock you into reality about America’s financial sitation.
Hopefully the video above opened your eyes. Now for some details:
Can anyone tell me where Glenn or his guests are wrong? Can you then explain why nobody else is yelling fire?
I’m sure that everyone that fell for the $4500 cash for clunkers program was duly informed that the $4500 credit would be counted as taxable income. After all, Barack Obama is the Transparency President, right?
This reminds me of Oprah’s super awesome car giveaway where everyone screamed, then got mad when they had to pay taxes on their new gift.
- That $4500 counts as taxable income. Assuming you are a low income earner that needed the help to buy a car, here’s how much you may owe in taxes on your “free” money:
- 10% (your income is between $0 and $8,025)= $450 goes back to Uncle Sam next April 15
- 15% ($8,025 and $32,550) = $675
- 25% ($32,550 and $78,850) = $1,125
- You pay sales tax on the vehicle price, which includes the $4500 check from the government. So you are paying sales tax on top of the Income Tax. At 8% that’s $360.
- It is possible that states that have state income taxes may count this as income too. Insert your tax rate here. Each state has different rules though. I live in Texas, no state income tax here!
- Are you a car dealer? Welcome to the last-minute notification that these rebates will be taxed.
So, if you make $50k a year and you sold a clunker, your $4500 gift is now a $1,125 tax bill, plus sales tax on the $360 sales tax (at 8%), plus whatever state income tax you may need to pay. Therefore, $4,500 – $1,125 – $360 = $3,015 – sales tax = transparency? Don’t forget to put that $1,125 in the bank for next April. I’m sure you still have it in the bank, right?
I talk to so many people that are politically apathetic or uninformed. Their opinions are the ones captured by sound bites, Letterman jokes and Saturday Night Live skits. Theirs are the votes that gave us President Obama. People make mistakes, but you cannot get too upset over mistakes caused by ignorance. Willful defiance is a different story though; there’s not much we can do to change those minds. My focus has been and will continue to be the education of the casual voter, the moderate, the soccer mom and over-worked, politically apathetic dad.
Last week we learned that just one section of the proposed Obama health care plan will cost $1 trillion over the next ten years. A different section will cost $1.6 trillion. Trillion. Sadly, the masses are becoming desensitized to the word. How much is a trillion exactly? One trillion is a million million. It is twelve zeros.
To help put this in perspective, the sum total of every product created, item sold and service performed in the US in 2006 totaled just over thirteen trillion dollars. Every business, every paperboy, every mechanic, doctor, bartender, computer programmer, teacher, athlete. Every local bar, street corner bakery, seamstress, doughnut shop, as well as every US-based big oil, big pharma, big retailer, et al… every penny that they generated in that year totaled $13,000,000,000,000. That’s thirteen million millions of dollars.
In that same year the IRS collected just over one trillion dollars in tax revenue from almost 136 million tax returns. (source: IRS) If you look at the evil “top 5%” that Barack-O loves to soak and complain about, this group generated more than 60% of that revenue while earning only 36% of the revenue in the US that year.
“So what. Why should I care?” Here’s why.
The projected defecit for 2009 is $1.85T. It will have to be restated because it is based on optimistic numbers, including a peak of 8% unemployment. We are way past that now and there is no sign of the trend slowing.
- The Top 1% of earners in 2006 contributed $408B to the IRS in 2006 (source).
- The hated Top 5% contributed $615B.
- The Top 25% contributed a total of $883B.
Folks, we are still a trillion short. Where will the rest come from? It will come from me and you. Do you think your income is too low to be snatched up by the Obama administration?
- The average salary of Americans in the Top 5% is $153,542.
- The average salary in the Top 25% of tax payers is $64,702.
Do you make more than $64,702? Hell, do you make less? This is your wake-up call. The government can’t pay the current deficit, never mind the massive debt that Obama has requested and is generating. This will hit your pocket, sooner than later. The math is plain for everyone to see, you just need to be willing to accept the reality of our situation and stand up for what is right.
Get over your hate or frustration with George Bush. He is no longer in office. Obama is the one driving us off the cliff, and the only thing we can do is let our representatives know that we do NOT want any more debt. TARP, Healthcare, Stimulus, auto bailouts and the like. Tell your representatives and senators that you have had enough!
