Tuesday, August 31, 2010

TAX CHANGES IN 2011


This was sent to me by a gentleman whom I've known for years--a democrat, a liberal, a business owner and an Obama supporter.....last election.
What follows is shocking and will profoundly and negatively effect us all. In my opinion, if something is not done the whole nation will enter universal servitude to the whims and agendas of politicians by means of the Federal Law. But look at it and decide for yourself. I recommend you give it close attention, because it's all about you and those you know and love.
the armadillo

This is so very important. You and everyone you know need to know this. Below is a summation of the tax changes that will start to take effect on 1/1/11. Please read each one and think about the effect that it will have on our country. These tax hikes are serious and will hit all working Americans and the businesses that employ them.


James G. Peterson
Financial Advisor

920 2nd Avenue South
Suite 1100
Minneapolis, MN 55402


Three great waves


In just six months, on January 1, 2011, 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, heres what happens... (read it to the end, so you see all three waves)...

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
only, there is no death tax. (Its a quirk!) 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, a business,
a retirement account,could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones. Think of the farmers who dont make much money, but their land, which they purchased years ago with after-tax dollars, is now worth a lot of money. Their children will have to sell the farm, which may be their livelihood, just to pay the estate tax if they dont have the cash sitting around to pay the tax. Think about your own familys assets. Maybe your family owns real estate, or a business that doesnt make much money, but the building and equipment are worth $1 million Upon their death, you can inherit the $1 million business tax free, but if they own a home, stock, cash worth $500K on top of the $1 million business, then you will owe the government $275,000 cash! Thats 55% of the value of the assets over $1 million! Do you have that kind of cash sitting around waiting to pay the estate tax?



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 a
re 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 not be used to pay for this type of special
needs education.


The HSA (Health Savings Account) 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
(AMT) 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 beheld 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
currently 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 andexperimentation 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.



PDF Version Read more: <;;
http://www.atr.org/six-months-untilbr-largest-tax-hikes-a5171##ixzz0sY8waPq1


And worse yet?


Now, your
insurance will be INCOME on your W2's!

One of the surprises
we'll find come next year, is what follows - - a little "surprise" that 99% of us had no idea was included in the "new and improved" healthcare legislation . . . the dupes, er, dopes, who backed this administration will be astonished!

Starting in 2011, (next year folks), your W-2 tax form sent by
your employer will be increased to show the value of whatever health insurance you are given by the company. It does not matter if that's a private concern or governmental body of some sort.

If you're retired? So what... your gross
will go up by the amount of insurance you get.

You will be required to pay taxes on a large sum of money that you
have never seen. Take your tax form you just finished and see what $15,000 or $20,000 additional gross does to your tax debt. That's what you'll pay next year.

For
many, it also puts you into a new higher bracket so it's even worse.



This is how the government is going to buy insurance for the15% that don't
have insurance and it's only part of the tax increases.

Not believing this??? Here is a research of the
summaries.....

On page 25 of 29: TITLE IX REVENUE
PROVISIONS- SUBTITLE A: REVENUE OFFSET PROVISIONS-(sec. 9001,
as modified by sec. 10901) Sec.9002 "requires employers
to include in the W-2 form of each employee the aggregate cost of applicable employer sponsored group health coverage that is excludable from the employees gross income."



-
Joan Pryde is the senior tax editor for the Kiplinger letters.
- Go to Kiplingers and read about 13 tax changes that could affect you. Number 3 is what is above.



Why am I sending you this? The same reason I hope you forward this to every single person in your address book.

People have the right to know the truth because an election is
coming in November!

--
"Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological."
Flannery O'Connor

Monday, August 30, 2010

‎State's Rights and the Hope of Liberty

State's Rights and the Hope of Liberty

By Tom Ridenour

The South faces the best of times, and the worst. Those outside the Southern tradition believe the times to be uniformly bad. In themselves, the times are bad––very bad, but they are pregnant with hope. For instance, recent events indicate that ultimate independence may not necessitate a direct and bloody confrontation. The whole imperial scheme, rooted upon the perilous and plastic philosophy of “equality,” is being discredited daily as the central government collapses under the weight of its own corrupt policies and overreaching, unconstitutional acts.

Most gaze in disbelieving horror at this slow-motion Imperial train wreck. Few know what to do or where to turn. What if the world woke up tomorrow and saw the Empire has no clothes (a.k.a. money) and a collapse followed fast upon such an epiphany?

PREPARING FOR CHAOS

Most regions would fall into chaos at first, not unlike 1775. In that protracted tumult some won and some lost. The winners won because they knew what they were fighting for. They were prepared. Oh, not with so many days of food, water and ammunition; they were prepared intellectually, with a sustaining vision in their hearts and clear understanding in their minds. We, too, must prepare, but how?

There are many good texts and sources that can help shed light on the national delimma. But few writings illuminate the present as well as those of the anti-Federalists. With amazing insight they lade bare the proposed constitution’s centralizing tendencies and exposed the weaknesses that are now leading inexorably to national collapse. Who can deny that history has vindicated their fears and insights a thousand times over?

In the writings of anti-Federalists, Virginian Patrick Henry or New Yorker Robert Yates (Brutus), one can find a common devotion to State's rights, self-determination and personal liberty. Clearly, they saw these concepts as allies: preserve them and tyranny is held in abeyance, separate them and liberty is lost.

UPROOTING THE HEDGE OF STATE'S RIGHTS

Today State's Rights is dismissed as “provincialism”––a mere means of perpetuating “racist policies.” Few see State's Rights as did anti-Federalists and Federalists alike: the protective constitutional hedge preserving individual and societal liberty.

As we all know, that hedge was ruthlessly uprooted by the unconstitutional invasion of the Southern republics. When Lee surrendered Lincoln-appointed Supreme Court chief justice, Salmon P. Chase, all but danced on Jefferson's grave, publicly proclaiming, “State's rights died at Appomattox.”

Chase's words laid bare the true purpose of the war. Lincoln's Secretary of State, Edwin Stanton echoed Chase, declaring that it was now the federal government's intention to make men love their country more than their state or region. In other words, Jefferson had won the debate, but Hamilton had won the war. Therefore, the patriotism of locality was to be supplanted by an imperialist nationalism. The rest, as they say, is history.

THE WAR TO END LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Present day political correctness tries to justify the struggle between North and South by portraying it as nothing more than a war to end slavery. But unbiased examination of the historical record reveals something quite different.

That “something different” is clearly disclosed in the words of Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, who lamented,

If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity.”

Jefferson Davis later echoed Stephen's sentiments, saying simply, "The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form."

That principle Davis spoke of was not slavery but slavery's very antithesis –– self-determination. Self-determination, not union or equality was the American Revolution's conceptual bedrock.

Today it is commonly said that we live in Jefferson's America on paper, but in Hamilton's America in practice. This intolerable and unsustainable contradiction was not wrought by the express will of the people through constitutional means. Rather, it was forced upon American by Mr. Lincoln's brutal and unconstitutional war. By such tyrannical means the free nature of the American Compact was changed to one characterized by coercive force. The seceding states were not knitted back into the Union Flag with knitting needles but with the points of bayonets extended beyond the ends of rifle barrels.

With that tragic change Self-determination was swept aside and replaced with Mr. Lincoln's “Proposition Nation,” founded on the shifting sands of randomly evolving visions of Equality as interpreted through the distorted lenses of black robed, elitist oligarchs and Jacobin-style revolutionaries.

They give us slavery and call it freedom.

SLAVERY OR FREEDOM?

Within a decade of the War’s end taxes quadrupled throughout the nation. Today, before we earn a penny to care for our families, we labor over half the year to feed the Empire’s gluttonous appetite. In the Middle Ages a lord could take only a quarter of his serf's production. We surrender much more of the fruit of our labors to our governmental lords. No Medieval lord could treat his serfs as tyrannically as our imperial masters and hope to have workers for his land. Yet, somehow the serfs were slaves and we are free.

Picture this! What thrall is more hopelessly enslaved than one tricked into believing he is free? Diabolical as it is, this encapsulates the yankee political genius. By this means Southerners are charmed under the spell of Stockholm Syndrome, in which the victims identify and sympathize with their Imperial captors.

By such convenient means Lincoln-worshiping centralizers have done their worst to turn America into a Godless, materialistic culture; a land inhabited by a lazy and impatient people, strangers to critical thought. Is it any surprise that Americans are so easily manipulated and controlled? We have become, in fact, a passive people––a people who King George would have greatly preferred to the firebrands for Liberty whom God raised up to oppose him.

PIERCING THE VEIL: THE SOUTHERN VISION

Will follows intellect. St. Paul knew as much. He knew what he fought for, because his mind had been renewed. If Southerners are to protect their families and their culture we must labor to achieve a like renewal: the truth that enlightens and frees our minds will also unite us as a freedom-loving people.

Alone we can do little, but with a common vision we can fearlessly stand together, mutually aiding each other, while the Empire crumbles around us.

Practically speaking, effective resistance requires a rebirth of State's Rights, local patriotism, and reviving local institutions and economies. Hopeful signs hint that all these things may come to pass––but not if people are passive and disengaged.

Yet neither unity nor numbers are in themselves sufficient. We cannot hope to be free and remain ignorant. We must prepare ourselves with the understanding of free men––there is no option here. Once we do we will contend, not “wildly beating at the air,” but with clear purpose. We will, in fact, become that people “at another time” President Davis spoke of, contending for the priceless jewel of self-determination.

For liberty-loving Southerners the present is the most hopeful time since 1865, yet how tempting it is despair in the face of difficulties. When you are so tempted, recall the words of Jesus speaking of the end times: “When you see these things come to pass rejoice, for the time of your salvation draws near.” If that applies to momentous and eternal things, how much more does it apply to temporal things?

This is not to say that we ought not recognize and admit the many difficulties. We must see, face and overcome them. But they must not overshadow our vision: the end of tyranny in our Southland and the birth of the Free Republic we hope to establish in its stead. Ω

Thursday, August 26, 2010

THE BIG RIP


The Big Rip: 1. The scientific theory that the ever expanding universe resulting from the Big Bang will end in the destruction of matter, where everything rips apart. 2. The political and economic fact that the election of Barack Obama, his excesses (6 vacations already this year), essentially turning the U.S. Treasury into his family's personal four year "Make a Wish Foundation," and the institution of his disastrous regressive, socialistic economic policies will result in the destruction of what little remains of the American Republic.

THE PIED PIPER

Double click on image to view




Monday, August 23, 2010

A Second Response on Ron Paul site

JC wrote:
“if we force this community center to move it will mean that we let the terrorists change who we are and what we stand for.”

First, there is no means of “force,”—what is being ASKED is sensitivity and respect. But that is not why I’m responding to this quote.
What I’m responding to is:
“it will mean that we let the terrorists change who we are and what we stand for.”
Just who are we? I can’t answer for everyone here, but I’m a Libertarian, but as I understand Libertarianism that does not mean I also have to be a fool. If it does I will cease to be a Libertarian, for I damned sure don’t intend to be played a fool–––especially by a force any and all except the ideologically blind can see to be malevolent and dangerous to freedom.
I’ve heard this over and over and it makes me nauseous. Such thinking in no way comports with reality or reason. It is truly mindless Libertarian Ideology—mindless, NOT principled.
Consider:
Those who have a mutual, MUTUAL commitment to Liberty and individual Freedom can sanely and safely treat and regard each other the same.
However, it is not a contradiction, nor do we lose who we are, if we treat and regard those differently who hate liberty and whose only interest in liberty and freedom is the game the system, take it over and establish their draconian ideology and unique legal system. (FACT: The Imam who is pushing the Mosque is in favor of establishing Sharia here in America.)

Consider this analogy:
If I live in a community where certain standards of behavior are common, no one there says, “Let’s make sure that we always do all we can to accommodate and treat robbers and thieves with the same standards of free movement and courtesy in our neighborhood that we share among one another—if we don’t we might lose who we are.”
No sheep says “let’s all remember to treat the wolves the just as we do each other, lest we cease being sheep.”
Madness. Treating the wolf the same will not only not preserve your "sheepishness"- is the surest way of insuring you will cease to be altogether! Ah, but you would have kept your strict adherence to your ideology. FOOL!

It’s simple nonsense to claim we’re obligated, in principle, to treat those who want to steal our valuables with the same liberty and freedom of access as those who respect our valuables as we respect theirs.
Has ideology made mindless idiots of us?!?