News Story of the Day: The United States federal government stole, er, generated a record $2,672,414,000,000 in federal tax revenues through the first 10 months of the 2015 fiscal year. The Treasury Department said in its monthly statement.
It is also up roughly $183,397,970,000 in constant 2015 dollars from the $2,489,016,030,000 received in the first 10 months of fiscal 2014. Despite collecting about $17,955 for each American with a full- or part-time job in July, it’s running a massive deficit.
The record tax revenues come from the tax increases imposed by President Obama in his negotiations with the Republicans in 2012 and 2013. Washington raised the top income tax rate from 35 to 39.6 percent, increased the top tax rate on dividends and capital gains from 15 to 20 percent and applied an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains, dividends, interest and royalties.
A large portion of revenues came from the individual income tax that gave the Treasury $1,276,630,000,000. Payroll taxes generates another $894,374,000,000. The corporate income tax took in just $266,068,000,000.
The federal government spent $3,137,953,000,000 in those same 10 months. This mean it ran a deficit of $465,539,000,000 during this period.
Chart of the Day: The Federal Reserve released a new chart that looks at dissents by Reserve Bank presidents and Fed Governors since 1938. The dissenting ceased in 1996. Economic Policy Journal’s Robert Wenzel writes this regarding the new chart:
Something clearly happened under the Greenspan chairmanship. The Fed governors do not now stray, at all, from what is essentially chairmanship policy.
There, of course, has always been strong bankster influence at the Washington D.C. and New York offices of the Federal Reserve, but in the last two decades that influence appears to be absolute. The branch presidents in the hinterlands, don’t have a chance at influence. The NYC banksters, who fly in private jets between NYC and Washington D.C., the way every day New Yorkers take the subway. appear to be in absolute charge. They certainly can target the Fed chairman, when they want to influence, and be very comfortable that dissent from the chairman by the governors will be near zero.
As I say, the absoluteness of the control started under the Fed chairmanship of Greenspan, who just so happened to have worked early in his career at the powerful Wall Street investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman (Prescott Bush was a general partner), and he sat on the board of directors of the bankster firm JPMorgan, just before he became Fed chairman.
Illustration of the Day: How many college students will graduate this upcoming school year with yet another Liberal Arts degree? Well, the number will probably be high again. But this cartoon suggests that the idea of trades is still for “losers” and those “intellectually inferior,” which is utter nonsense. Tradesmen have a high starting salary and leave school with very little debt.
Quote of the Day: Today’s quote of the day comes from former Texas Republican Congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul. With most of the Republican presidential candidates in last week’s debate talking about bombing and refusing to embrace a non-interventionist foreign policy, this quote from Dr. Paul is important to remember. It’s also important to remember that he got booed by a Christian audience for citing the Golden Rule.
“Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don’t do to other nations what we don’t want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?”
Video of the Day: Let’s have another reminder of government meddling in the economy with currency controls, price controls, production quotas and so on. Venezuelans can’t even have access to the simplest of items, like bread. They have to rely on the black market, hording and sharing limited quantities of bread. And people want socialism?!
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