I'm Shocked...Shocked, Poll Says Americans Evenly Split Over Extending Tax Cuts For Wealthy

This poll was released this morning shows that the country is just about evenly split over the Bush tax cuts issue:

As top Democrats and Republicans begin negotiations over extending the Bush-era tax cuts, a national poll indicates that the public remains divided on whether the wealthiest Americans should continue to receive those cuts.

Four in ten questioned in a USA Today/Gallup survey released Wednesday say that the cuts should be extended for all Americans, with 44 percent saying they support extending the tax breaks but setting limits on how much of wealthy Americans’ income is eligible for the lower rates, and 13 percent saying the cuts should be allowed to expire at the end of the year.

An Associated Press-CNBC poll released Tuesday indicates that half questioned wanted tax cuts to be extended only for families making under $250,000 a year, with 34 percent saying they should be extended for all Americans, and 14 percent calling for the cuts to sunset for everyone at the end of the year.

Forty-nine percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey conducted in the middle of November said the tax cuts should be extended for families making less than $250,000 a year, with another 15 percent that said the cuts should not be extended for anyone. That left 35 percent who favor an extension of the tax cuts for all Americans regardless of how much money they make.

This really shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, but it was still worth mentioning.

Small Business Owners to Washington: Stop Scaring Us to Death With Deficits, Where’s the Stimulus?

While guest co-hosting on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Rep. Paul Ryan asks the National Federation of Independent Business’s (NFIB) Chief Economist : what is bothering them about what is going on with the federal government and why are they “holding back”:



Higher taxes, in the form of VATs, and skyrocketing deficit spending is bad for all business big and small. Who knew?

With all of this talk of coming out of Washington, it is making many business owners trepidatious about taking any risks, right now, like hiring more people, expanding their businesses or opening new ones. This is why the unemployment rate is going staying steady around 10%.

Good News: Obama Uses the Oil Spill Crisis in the Gulf to Push Higher Taxes on Gas, Oil

In the spirit of Rahm's motto never wasting a good crisis, this time it's the crisis of the BP oil spill of the coase of Louisiana in the Gulf, Obama and the Democrats have begun to push clean energy legislation that will cripple the existing carbon-based energy industry and every other industry that relies on carbon-based energy, which is just about every major industry in America:

Obama also leverages the massive oil spill in the Gulf as a means of winning Senate approval for a clean energy bill that, in his words, finally puts "a price on carbon pollution."

Conceding Senate opposition has killed the idea of carbon-based taxes -- under the rubric of cap-and-trade or any other mechanism - Obama vowed to devote the remaining months of this legislative session to find the votes.

"I will work with anyone from either party to get this done," Obama's prepared text reads. "But we will get this done. The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century."

In reality, it'll be the clean energy industry that'll hold the carbon-based industries hostage, if Obama and the rest of the liberal Democrats get their wish. Nothing good can come out of crippling the great majority of the nation's economy in the of a severe recession. Of course, he tried to mask what he really meant, although he did so rather poorly, by calling new or raised taxes a "price", but most people saw right through it and called a spade a spade.

Now, I'm not against creating a clean energy industry. In fact, I'm all for it. After all, the world's oil reserves won't last forever. Clean energy'll be the energy of the future, but we shouldn't have to sacrifice our present for the future. If our economy collapses in the present because of laws that'll choke the life out of the carbon-based industries and in turn our entire economy, the it'll have that much harder of a time recovering enough to be able to create the new industry that'll support our future. We need a strong economy to create new industries quickly and efficiently. It'll take much longer to create one, especially an industry as important as this one will be, if the economy is weak and sluggish.

We must do all we can to ensure that the economy stays strong so that we can make the transition to the clean energy based economy as soon as possible.

The oil spill is tragic and an environmental disaster, but Obama should be focusing on making sure that another spill like this never happens again and fixing the oil industry not destroying it because as the oil industry goes so does the American economy (and the world's economy, for that matter).