“A tax cut is not a handout. It simply means government steals less.”

– John Stossel

According to the Small Business Administration (SBA)…

[Heritage.org] Rules and restrictions imposed from Washington now cost Americans some $1.75 trillion each year. That is sharply higher that the $1.1 trillion in costs reported in 2005 in the SBA’s last such study.

Some of this increase comes from identification of regulatory costs that were not included in earlier reports. Yet much represents new regulatory burdens—including a $445 billion increase in the cost of economic regulation.

No matter how you slice it, $1.75 trillion is a lot of money. It is far more than Americans pay in income taxes each year. It’s about the same as the GDP of Italy. Per household, the regulatory tab works out to some $15,000—almost as much as the average family spends on housing.

The study, co-authored by economists Nicole V. Crain and Mark Crain, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. During the past few years, spanning two presidencies, the tide of regulation has risen at an alarming rate. And more is to come: 2010 promises to be a record year for imposing rules, and the full impact of new health care and financial regulations have yet to be felt.

Earlier this week in a CNBC town hall meeting a woman, self-described as chief financial officer for a veterans organization with — and this is key as it underscores both her economic class and the key disconnect between liberal Democrats and the rest of America — “two children in private school,” told President Obama that she voted for him but was exhausted from defending him. She further questioned if the American dream was attainable.

You know its bad for the Democrats when on top of their almost 10-percent unemployment rate their top economic adviser, former Clintonite Larry Summers, resigns, and the president’s own economic blue-ribbon panel suggests cutting the corporate tax rate at the very time the White House is publicly demonizing the business sector, particularly when  it comes to tax policy!

Earlier this week a White House spokesperson was quoted saying:

So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multibillion dollar businesses. So that creates a narrower base because we’ve literally got something like 50 percent of the business income in the U.S. is going to businesses that don’t pay any corporate income tax.

This is classic liberal slight of hand — Yes, partnerships, s-type corporations and limited-liability companies (LLCs) do not pay corporate income tax because they pay traditional income tax! The White House wording implies you’ve got the vast majority of business just not paying tax. It’s an outrageous lie, and there’s a 10-percent unemployment rate and failing businesses from Sacramento to Albany to prove it.

And hence the disconnect for the disillusioned CFO with two kids in private school above — she doesn’t realize that she is considered “rich” by the likes of President Obama, Democrats and the IRS. She doesn’t realize that when Democrats are vilifying those who make $250,000, or $125k each for a husband and wife filing jointly, they are vilifying all those entrepreneurs, partnerships, s-corps, and LLCs by placing them in the SAME TAX BRACKET, THE HIGHEST TAX BRACKET, as multi-millionaires like George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, et. al.

The small business group, which the White House is implying we punish more in the tax code, is the lifeblood of the American economy. They make up 92% of all business (c-type corporations make up 7.5%); and have created 64% of net new jobs in the last 15 years.

Obama brags about “squeezing” this and that — Wall Street, Pharmaceuticals, Insurance, Credit Card companies. Well, when he squeezes the c-corporations and the truly rich, he’s also inadvertently or not squeezing the non-corporate entities, the small businesses, the job creators, and the exhausted woman who worked her whole life to become a chief financial officer and send two kids to private school.

It doesn’t help matters for Obama when the public recognizes a hypocrite when they see one — Obama has a treasury secretary who cheated on his income tax, and just reported this month, some 41 Obama aides owe $830,000 in back taxes (more than $20,000 each). If they aren’t paying their taxes, why should you and I? And was that aide who bashed small business before the media this week for their supposed tax cheating someone who is an actual tax cheat?

And so the misnomered “Tea Party” isn’t a party at all, isn’t something that one can pin down, has no national committee like the DNC or RNC, but is rather just a bunch of ordinary Americans — and a slew of exhausted business owners — sick and tired of the high taxes, egregious spending and draconian government policy imposing in their life. All the things Obama seems to favor.

Mr. Obama seems steeped in self-pity of late, noting how hard this recession was. Well, the United States has had far harsher recessions — at least Obama hasn’t had to deal with inflation or stagflation or 1970s gas lines –  but which lasted less time precisely because those presidents helped the job creating abilities of the private sector instead of looking to “squeeze” them.

The simple truth is that the Tea Party movement could be defanged in a matter of months were the Democrats simply to choose economic common sense over leftist economic ideology.

So long as they don’t, well… we can see November from our houses.

Here’s Michelle Malkin:

Every day is a Western flag-burning day somewhere in the Muslim world for every reason under the sun (see here here here here here and here, for starters).

Koran-burning isn’t the real “provocation.” Or Mohammed cartoons. As I’ve said many times over the years, the mere existence of infidels is what provokes and inflames the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Retaliating against Koran-burners or targeting cartoonists is a lingering pretext to demonstrate that centuries-old, Koran-inspired hatred. If it isn’t cartoons, it’s always something else. From fresco rage to book rage to film rage to beauty pageant rage to Koran-dropping rage to cartoon rage to Pope rage, to ceramic Mohammed bobblehead rage to teddy bear rage to Burger King ice cream cone rage to blasphemous soccer ball rage, it never ends.

They never forget and they never forgive. Which is why we must never submit.

It’s not just flags, but Christians too: [June 2007] — Christians in Gaza Fear for Their Lives as Muslims Burn Bibles and Destroy Crosses. Other than a few words of “we regret this act” blah, blah, blah by the politically correct Western governments, there is no response to this or any of the above acts. And so, the West must reap what it sows. If the West cannot issue stronger words than a few regrets, then why should moderate Muslims — under threat of violence in many countries — do so? Where is the leadership?

Never forget.

The “falling man” photograph is to me one of the most horrifying reminders of that dark day. What hell they must have endured that throwing themselves from 100 stories was the least agonizing option.

A word about all the proposed “Koran burnings.” It’s idiotic, and in this case does accomplish drawing moderate and sensible persons into a war of extremities. Having said that, as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9-11 just 365 days away, it’s also a lesson in the folly of appeasement. For 9 years and two administrations our government and most of our media have gone out of their way to avoid addressing what 9-11 really was. Is it any wonder that all of that political correctness and appeasement has empowered our own elements of extremism? — Ironically, the very thing the kumbayah “Coexist” bumper-sticker movement has championed has made it more likely that a preacher in middle American can feel justified in burning a stack of Korans. Taking a line from the “root cause” playbook, perhaps had our government and media not always taken the side of political correctness, and outlandish double standards, and been a little tougher in some responses to terrorism, such frustration would not be ingrained in the populace.

No matter, as former Sen. Fred Thompson pointed out, when the 9-11 mosque was announced these appeasement fools — including but predictably our president — focused on the legality instead of the sensibility of such an act. Conversely, they do not back a Gainesville preacher’s legal right to burn Korans, rather the sensibility.

That’s the double standard that empowered this act to begin with.

Well, at least a few journalists are doing their jobs and finding previously published words of the proposed-WTC mosque backer, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf. Here’s the WSJ:

In a letter published on November 27, 1977, Mr. Rauf commented on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic trip to Israel and encouraged his fellow Muslims to “give peace a chance.” That John Lennon lyric sounds good. But he added: “For my fellow Arabs I have the following special message: Learn from the example of the Prophet Mohammed, your greatest historical personality. After a state of war with the Meccan unbelievers that lasted for many years, he acceded, in the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, to demands that his closest companions considered utterly humiliating. Yet peace turned out to be a most effective weapon against the unbelievers.”

He’s referring to a treaty in the year 628 that established a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and Meccan leaders and was viewed by Muslims at the time as a defeat. But Muhammad used that period to consolidate his ranks and re-arm, eventually leading to his conquest of Mecca. Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat’s olive branch in the same way, as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.

To drive that point home, he added in the same letter that “In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”

Nice, eh? There’s more at the link.

It’s reminiscent of a quote, the author whom I cannot remember, who basically stated, “If the Palestinians unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be peace and their own state. If the Israelis unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be no Israel or Jews remaining.” Time and again so many “moderate” Islamist political figures say one thing to the West but hide their true feelings when the spotlight is upon them.

I’d be curious to see the retorts from every Hollywood Chavez loving Leftist:

Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why
By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives…

Venezuela is struggling with a decade-long surge in homicides, with about 118,541 since President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a group that compiles figures based on police files. (The government has stopped publicly releasing its own detailed homicide statistics, but has not disputed the group’s numbers, and news reports citing unreleased government figures suggest human rights groups may actually be undercounting murders).

There have been 43,792 homicides in Venezuela since 2007, according to the violence observatory, compared with about 28,000 deaths from drug-related violence in Mexico since that country’s assault on cartels began in late 2006.

Caracas itself is almost unrivaled among large cities in the Americas for its homicide rate, which currently stands at around 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela who directs the violence observatory.

That compares with recent measures of 22.7 per 100,000 people in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and 14 per 100,000 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. As Mr. Chávez’s government often points out, Venezuela’s crime problem did not emerge overnight, and the concern over murders preceded his rise to power.

But scholars here describe the climb in homicides in the past decade as unprecedented in Venezuelan history; the number of homicides last year was more than three times higher than when Mr. Chávez was elected in 1998.