Here is a site that shows the federal budget

over the past 3 years, including charts. This is by the National Debt Awareness Center. There are lots of other links on there to check out too but, again, I am short on time today.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2009/02/25/hot-docs-bleak-and-uncertain-federal-budget-outlook-as-deficit-climbs.html

I saw today where they passed a budget to take us through the next couple months to the tune of $896B. Filled with pork. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to look it up tomorrow.

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A Provo, Utah newspaper has confirmed our earlier story - a Mormon geneological Web site does in fact list President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as having been baptized into the Mormon faith after her death (and presumably without her, or her son's, consent). The Mormon church has yet to confirm to numerous reporters' inquiries whether they did in fact baptize the President's dead mother last year in the middle of the presidential campaign. If true, and it's looking increasingly likely, this could cause the Mormons quite a bit of trouble politically and in the public relations sphere.

At the same time that Barack Obama sealed the Democratic nomination for president last year, someone in the Provo LDS Church temple was performing a baptism and temple rites for his dead mother.

The move is a serious breech of protocol for church members, who in the past have been criticized for performing such proxy baptisms for victims of the Holocaust.
"Church members are specifically instructed not to submit the names of persons not related to them," reads a statement on the LDS Chuch Web site. "Before performing temple baptisms for a deceased family member born within the last 95 years, members are instructed to get permission from the person's closest living relative."

Officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have yet to confirm the incident, but records on their FamilySearch.org genealogical site clearly show that Stanley Ann Dunham received proxy rites in the Provo temple on June 4 and June 8 of 2008. The birth and death dates of the person for whom the rites were performed match those of Obama's mother.

The budget funds Volunteer America, and includes a provision to set up a commission to STUDY whether or not "mandatory volunteerism" should be established. My prediction is that it won't happen.

1. Roll back a significant portion or all of the stimulus that has not yet been distributed as of 2010.

2. Indiiduals earning less than $50,000 or couples earning less than $100,000 could either file under the current tax provisions or pay a flat 10%. Others earning more would pay a flat 25%. All who choose the flat tax rate could literally file their taxes on a form the size of a single index card.

You have to think about some of the implications of these tax ideas to understand the less obvious benefits, among which would be the stanching of the flow of investment outside the country and attraction of foreign investment, and an enormous savings in the waste of time and money that presently go to nothing more productive than filing taxes. A simple scheme like this would also be much more difficult to defraud than the complex system currently in place.

On this last point, just consider all the back taxes that Obama has collected from his tax-scofflaw political appointees - over $100,000! Not one of the excuses that any of them offered for not paying their taxes - i.e., that the tax laws are too complicated even for that "brilliant" idiot, Geithner (who now heads up the IRS). Not one of them could have skated by "paying their back taxes" while apologizing that they just couldn't get a handle on what they're supposed to pay. Now, multiply just those people by all the other tax cheats in this country who couldn't use similar excuses (or schemes, whichever term you prefer).

It's simple: What do you make? Withhold 10% and you owe nothing at the end of the year. Fill out your card, send it in, and you're done. And you tax accountants who have helped your clients avoid taxes for years...we need accountants for other purposes, so you won't starve either.

Peter Peterson. (Photo: Reuters)

Peter Peterson is coming to get your Social Security and Medicare. Peterson was the commerce secretary in the Nixon administration. He then went on to make billions of dollars as one of the top executives at the Blackstone Group, a private equity fund. Mr. Peterson is known as one of the top beneficiaries of the fund managers' tax break, through which he personally pocketed tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Peterson has been using his Wall Street wealth to attack these social insurance programs for decades, but he recently stepped up his efforts. Last year, he spent $1 billion to endow the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to further his efforts.

In politics, it's not easy to counter the impact of $1 billion. In addition to its money, the Peterson crew enjoys the support of many important news outlets, most importantly The Washington Post, which pushes his line on both its editorial and news pages.

In fact, The Post even went so far as to identify Peterson's foundation by its boilerplate, an organization that "advocates for federal fiscal responsibility," instead of telling readers of its political leanings, the normal mode of identification for such organizations. (The Center for Economic and Policy Research was established "to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives.")

While the Peterson crew may have the money and the support of the media, the rest of us can rely on logic and ridicule to counter the attack. In this spirit, we have the Peter G. Peterson Intergenerational Fairness Tax Credit. (Mr. Peterson is apparently fond of having things named after him. In addition to his new Peter G. Peterson Foundation, he also has a think tank named after him, the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics.)

The Peterson tax credit would essentially take the Peterson crew at their word. They claim that they are worried that huge tax burdens will leave future generations worse off than the generations that preceded them.

This isn't true. There is no plausible scenario, short of war or environmental disaster, that would leave future generations worse off than their parents or grandparents. But we don't have to argue with the billionaire; let's just give future generations the option to trade places with their parents or grandparents who made out so well.

This is where the tax credit comes in. The tax credit would allow an individual to trade her after-tax income for the after-tax income that someone born 20 or 40 years sooner would have earned at the same age. For example, if someone born in 1990 believes in 2020 that their grandparents got a better deal, they would simply check off the year 1940, and they would have their taxes adjusted so that they would have the same after-tax income of a person born in 1940, when they were also age 30.

Of course, the young ones would end up big losers in this story. Real wages, on average, will be more than 50 percent higher in 2020 than they were in 1970. Even if tax rates were, on average, 5 percentage points higher, workers in 2020 will still have after-tax wages that are more than 40 percent higher than their counterparts in 1970.

This means that anyone who chose to take advantage of the intergenerational equity tax credit would end up as a big loser. That is why it can help solve the deficit problem. If people check off the tax credit, they will pay more in taxes and, therefore, increase government revenue.

It might be hard to convince large numbers of people to voluntarily pay more in taxes. This is where the Peterson Foundation comes in. They are spending huge amounts of money trying to convince young people that they are being ripped off by their parents and grandparents. They are even promoting front groups of young people to advance this effort.

With his billion dollars, Peterson could convince a huge number of gullible young people to tax advantage of the intergenerational equity tax credit. Insofar as he is successful in this effort, he can help to generate billions of dollars that can be used for items like health care, preschool education, and other pressing needs.

So, let's join efforts with Mr. Peterson and encourage his followers to take advantage of the Peter G. Peterson Intergenerational Fairness Tax Credit. There is a word for taking money from willfully ignorant young people who would deny their parents and grandparents the Social Security and Medicare benefits they need to survive: justice.

So the Federal govt is gonna cut back in entitlement programs to fund the rebuilding of NO? Not gonna cease his tax cuts for the rich, just gonna cut back on programs for.....the disadvantaged, of course, the ones whose voices will not be heard..Whose fault was NO? Bush and his administration. I say Bush should donate some of his millions to the rebuilding of NO, let some of the unfortunate ones camp on his 1700 acres that he boasts about..He got us into this awful mess. His speech the other night was a joke..Just another press moment, trying to pull on Americans heart strings but it aint working, LOL..**Long live equality**..Three more years? Oh gee, can we survive? What will be the next catastrophe under this fool? 9/11, Iraq and now NO..**America where are you**?

Don't get so upset. I think most of that link is just to fire up people's imagination. What do you think they would do with the prisoners in these federal prisons???? Turn them loose? Don't think so. It's scare tactics.

Stop throwing accusations at one another and blaming whatever party on Capitol Hill you hate!!!!!!!!! All this blame game crap is absolutely nauseating..... all parties have been part of the government since way back when. The parties in Washington at this moment had absolutely NOTHING to do with the situation at hand......the problem started decades ago with an absolutely desperate president who started up the Federal Reserve program, trying to coax people into believing their money was safe to put in the banks after the banks collapsed. They were lulled into a false sense of security in hopes they would start putting their money back in the bank and being told their government would guarantee it.........nothing to do with rep or dem, just a desperate president at the helm at the time and all those idiots who should have known better but let it continue nonetheless.

The corrupt companies in this fix now have been allowed to go this route because of an institution that was started up a looooong time ago, this just didn't happen overnight or a few years.

there were no exemptions whatsoever. If, say you earned a dollar, you owed a dime. No exceptions regarding where the money comes from. Tax welfare benefits too. Social Security is already taxed for some recipients. Those of us who receive Social Security and have enough income to pay taxes on 85% (maximum) of it ALL had the opportunity for a better life. Some took advantage of that and some didn't. Young people today have little hope of receiving Social Security and they also have little hope of being able to live while saving for their future.

(AP) Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.

The study by the Government Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate.

"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called "S" corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

"Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code," Edwards said.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren't paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices - amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities. The GAO did not suggest which companies might be doing this.

"It's time for the big corporations to pay their fair share," Dorgan said.

One was killed while going for his gun after being shot at. The gun was so high powered, it severed his hand. He was married and a father. I don't think Wounded Knee is anything to be proud of.

true character of our president-elect. He is stepping up to the rudderless ship regardless of the consequences. His presidency is not a desire for power, a desire to upstage daddy, or a way to ensure future big bucks giving speeches or sitting on a board of a corporation. He is doing it simply for the love of his country. Bless him.

Here is a site that shows the federal budget

Most Companies Pay No Federal Income Tax

GAO Study Also Finds 68% Of Foreign Companies In U.S. Avoid Corporate Taxes