U.S. Gov't Financial Regulators Earn Tax-Funded Salaries of $225,000-Plus

(CNSNews.com) – Federal employees at several financial regulatory agencies – including the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – are earning six-figure salaries and taking home bonuses up to $5,000, according to federal records obtained by Judicial Watch. At least 228 such regulators make $225,000 a year.

In comparison, members ofCongress make $174,000 a year; the Speaker of the House makes $223,500; and the majority and minority leaders pull in $193,400 a year.

The records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show the number of employees at five of the six major financial regulatory agencies.

In addition to the CFPB, the personnel documents come from Wall Street regulatory agencies including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Treasury Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The forms reveal that hundreds of regulators earn in excess of $225,000 per year, not counting bonus income awarded by some of the agencies.

The CFPB – created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation law – has hired a dozen employees at more than $225,000 per year, Judicial Watch reported on Tuesday. The massive new financial regulator has also hired a college student intern, paying her $42,036 per year, despite being listed as a “student trainee” in federal records. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/us-govt-financial-regulators-earn-tax-funded-salaries-225000-plus

If I Were a Liberal by Ann Coulter

If I were a liberal, I would have spent the last week in shock that a Democratic audience in Flint, Mich., cheered Vice President Joe Biden's description of a policeman being killed. (And if I were a liberal desperately striving to keep my job on MSNBC, I'd say the Democrats looked "hot and horny" for dead cops -- as Chris Matthews said of a Republican audience that cheered for the death penalty.)

Biden's audience whooped and applauded last week in Flint when he said that without Obama's jobs bill, police will be "outgunned and outmanned." (Wild applause!)

I suppose liberals would claim they were applauding because they believe Obama's jobs bill will prevent these murders. Which reminds me: Republicans believe the death penalty prevents murders!

In a case I have previously mentioned, Kenneth McDuff was released from death row soon after the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972 and went on to murder more than a dozen people.

Which belief bears more relationship to reality? 

William Jordan and Anthony Prevatte were sentenced to death in 1974 for abducting a teacher, murdering him and stealing his car. They came under suspicion when they were caught throwing the murder weapon from the stolen vehicle in a high-speed car chase with the cops and because they were in possession of the dead man's wallet, briefcase and watch.

The Georgia Supreme Court overturned their capital sentences in an opinion by Robert H. Hall, who was appointed by Gov. Jimmy Carter.

Hall said that the death sentences had to be set aside on the idiotic grounds that the jurors had overheard the prosecutor say that the judge and state supreme court would have the opportunity to review a death sentence, which might have caused them to take their sentencing role less seriously.

(If the facts had been the reverse, the court would have overturned the death sentences on the grounds that the jurors did not take their sentencing decision seriously, under the misapprehension that no judge or court would second-guess them.)

Prevatte was later released from "life in prison" and proceeded to murder his girlfriend. Jordan escaped and has never been found.

As president, Carter appointed Hall to a federal district court.

Darryl Kemp was sentenced to death in California in 1960 for the rape and murder of Marjorie Hipperson and also convicted for raping two other women. But he sat on death row long enough -- 12 years -- for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional. He was paroled five years later and, within four months, had raped and murdered Armida Wiltsey, a 40-year-old wife and mother.

http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2011/10/26/if_i_were_a_liberal

The ObamaCare games being played on us

If ever you needed proof that our government should not be entrusted with control of our healthcare, a clear case sits before you now. Even so, the Obama Administration remains confident you will not take the time to understand what has happened. Most citizens won’t.

On a recent Friday late afternoon the Administration announced the CLASS Act portion of ObamaCare will not be implemented. Friday afternoon announcements are timed with the hope they will be little noticed, a strategy of both Democrat and Republican administrations. But if you open your eyes to comprehend what happened here, you may realize what they hope you overlook, that you and I are being played by our government.

Caring for an elderly family member soon becomes a strain as it consumes more of your time, competes with spouses and children for your attention, interferes with work schedules, twists sibling relationships over the sharing of time and expenses and builds stress like a pressure cooker; never mind that it also changes the relationship with the elder needing care.

The CLASS Act (Community Living Assistance Services and Support) is an ObamaCare program ostensibly to provide benefits for long-term care (LTC). Anyone who has been a caregiver for grandma as she becomes too old and frail to care for herself knows meeting that family duty of loving care can turn life on its head.

Finally, making the decision on a nursing home placement will break your heart even though you put it off as long as possible. 

http://www.thecitizen.com/blogs/terry-garlock/10-25-2011/obamacare-games-being-played-us

9-9-9 tax plan not worth supporting

Other side of the coin.

Is "9-9-9" the best economic solution that a Republican presidential candidate can present? The prospect of a 9 percent national sales tax on top of a 9 percent federal income tax has been proposed by Republican candidate Herman Cain.

He seems to be unaware that most of us are already inundated with local, county and state sales taxes now hidden in our phone bills, fuel bills and food bills (until Wyoming ended the food tax), etc.

Imagine a national sales tax on everything you buy! Some economists say it would add $2,000 tax annually on a family of four.

Cain would try to get Congress to never raise the national sales tax and, like the health plan, would kick in deductions for inner-city residents or other special interests.

What should Americans do if politicians give us this bone of contention? This dog won't hunt!

Nora Marie Lewis

Basin, Wyo.

Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_f5bfbe34-5ea3-5e1b-ae27-88a52204cb9e.html#ixzz1btCX8t9z

OUR WONDERFUL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

Government cannot create private sector jobs

The Obama administration and the Occupy Wall Street crowd have at least one thing in common: Both, apparently, have bought into the progressive fantasy that corporate profits are evil and that only increased government spending will create jobs.

Now it's true that governments can create jobs in the public sector; they do it all the time and President Barack Obama's recently rejected $400 billion "jobs bill" would have done more of it. Governments can hire consultants, school teachers, social workers, and millions of bureaucrats to administer its thousands of programs and enforce its myriad of regulations.

Importantly, however, the funds for these public jobs must be provided by either taxation or by money borrowed from the private sector. Thus as almost all economists recognize, any increase in public sector employment must come — in some real sense — at the expense of lost opportunities for private sector employment.

To see why this is so, assume that $1 million is raised by taxation to, say, fund new staffing at the Environmental Protection Agency. No debate; public sector jobs get created. But note that the very same $1 million cannot now be spent by taxpayer/consumers on new washing machines or trips to Las Vegas or newspaper subscriptions. Thus for every job created by government spending there must be a trade-off of jobs not created (or maintained) in the private sector.

Private sector jobs are created by an entirely different process; if they are sustainable, they are self-financing. Private employees are hired with the expectation that their wages will be paid by the additional profit that they generate for some employer. Individuals that work for a washing machine retailer or for a travel agency or for a newspaper must generate a stream of benefits for the company that more than compensate for the wages they are paid — or they will be fired. In short, private firms create jobs if and only if it is profitable for them to do so.

We can now see why the Bush and Obama jobs programs of the past all failed to create private sector jobs; simply put, hard-earned tax money was not invested profitably. The most notorious programs involved channeling your tax money and mine to politically well-connected private firms in so-called green industries. Predictably, bureaucrats are notoriously poor at selecting "winners" and many of these firms went belly up. The $528 million that was wasted on the solar panel company Solyndra (only the tip of the iceberg) could have been spent by consumers supporting local retailers and their employees. Instead, it was classic crony capitalism debacle with money and jobs down the drain.

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2011/oct/24/dom-armentano-occupy-wall-street-protestors-dont/

Social injustice a disincentive to tax paying

AS A GENERAL rule, most people do not like paying taxes and will avoid doing so if they feel they can get away with it. This is why in all developed states, Inland Revenue and other tax collection services have sweeping powers while courts impose severe punishments on individuals found guilty of cheating the tax authorities. 

Big fines and prison sentences are powerful deterrents to tax evasion, because if the authorities took a lax approach to tax collection, as they had done in Greece, very few people would pay their dues. Effective tax collection is also dependent on the standard of services offered by the state. People would be less inclined to engage in tax evasion if the state was offering a high standard of education and healthcare and other services free of charge, the case in Scandinavian countries.

In countries, like Cyprus in which the state does not offer a good standard of service to its citizens and squanders the taxpayer’s money on populist measures and on paying public employees obscene wages and pensions, many people, understandably resent paying taxes, because they cannot see any benefit. This is not to say there are no greedy individuals who would avoid paying taxes no matter how good the services offered by the state were, but the current state of affairs does not put any moral pressure of people to pay their taxes.

For instance, union bosses have been demanding for the last two years that the government clamp down on tax evasion by the self-employed rather than dock the wages of public sector workers. But could we blame a plumber or an electrician if he chooses not to declare his full income, choosing instead to invest part of it in a private pension plan. The alternative is to pay the amount to the state Social Insurance Fund, and subsidise the generous pensions paid to public employees, who contributed less to the Fund but would be paid a pension at least twice as high as the plumber’s. And by declaring a higher income, they might not be eligible to free, state healthcare which public employees are guaranteed regardless of their earnings.

Businesspeople are in a similar position. They have to pay tax on every cent they receive from the company for justified expenses, whereas senior state officials and deputies are entitled to a ‘representation allowance’ (€18,000 for the former and even higher for the latter) which is tax-free but still goes towards the calculation of the state pension. Even the use of a company car is taxed as a benefit in kind, but it is not in the case of state officials; as for deputies they have the privilege of not having to pay any taxes when they buy a car.

We have not heard any union bosses complaining about this legalised tax evasion, but they wasted no time expressing their objections when they heard that finance minister Kikis Kazamias was considering taxing the big retirement bonuses paid to public sector employees. The tax privileges of the workers of the broader public sector are a ‘workers’ conquest’, insist union bosses while demanding a clampdown on tax evasion. But is not being exempt from paying taxes on benefits such as low interest loans, the use of government cars, free healthcare, cheap holiday homes not tax evasion, even if it is sanctioned by the state? Private sector workers pay tax on these benefits.

If the government is serious about clamping down on tax evasion, as its union comrades have been demanding, the first step should be to end the tax discrimination and create a level playing field. All citizens must be treated equally by the tax authorities and be subject to the same taxation rules and regulations. What sort of democracy and rule of law do we have when the state taxes all the benefits of one set of citizens and none of the benefits (not even big cash allowances) of another set? This is social injustice.

Once we are all treated equally, there may be fewer resentful citizens willing to cheat the tax authorities. There should also be a clampdown on tax evasion that should be exercised much more effectively than has been the case so far, but the priority must be the equal treatment of all citizens by the tax authorities. Now, that the State is desperate for cash is the perfect time to introduce a fair, non-discriminatory taxation system.   

http://www.cyprus-mail.com/taxes/our-view-social-injustice-disincentive-tax-paying/20111023