The Pravda Strategy

Correcting President Obama's Myriad Tax Fallacies - Forbes: "An emerging, disabling problem with our democracy is that increasingly we cannot even engage in intelligent public discussions of critical issues facing our country.  The strategy of central political players today is to calculate what busy voters working hard and taking care of their families do not and will not know, and take advantage of that with abusive rhetoric that cannot be characterized as intellectually honest.  Contributing greatly to that is the decline of what was formerly known as the mainstream media into effectively a party controlled press.

For example, for 30 years now the South American nation of Chile has demonstrated the enormous benefits to working people of empowering them with the freedom to choose personal savings, investment and insurance accounts in substitution for old fashioned social insurance programs hailing intellectually out of the late 19th century. Other countries have followed that lead in adopting similar reforms, including Great Britain and Australia. But in America we cannot even discuss this issue intelligently. ...

The Obama/Buffett ruse arises just like any other magician’s trick. It focuses attention on just one tax rate paid on income arising from capital investment – the capital gains tax rate of 15%. The florid abusive rhetoric distracts from the multiple taxation of capital investment income, which is actually taxed at least four separate times under our tax code. Capital investment income is taxed first by the above mentioned, abusive, internationally uncompetitive corporate income tax. If any is paid out as dividends, then it is taxed again by the individual income tax. If the value of the capital interest, say a share of stock, manages to increase in the Obama depression, then it is taxed again by the capital gains tax. If anything is left at death, then it is subject to taxation again by the death tax."