Don’t be afraid to say it: ‘We are the 1 percent’

It is time to stand up and be counted. I am the 1 percent. Let’s be plain about this. Though I have a good job and a good paycheck, I have virtually no wealth, no savings and no need for tax shelters. I have substantial debt. My family owns three vehicles, the newest of which is a 1999 Ford Windstar worth about $2,000. That’s our “good” car. If it breaks down, we would have to go further into debt to fix it or replace it. I cannot afford to put my three children — the oldest of whom is in high school, the youngest in diapers — through college. We vacation 20 miles away in Whitefish because we can’t afford airfare or gas for a long trip. We live in a hundred-year-old house without central heating and we are happy to have it. Sometimes we do look with envy at a our neighbors’ houses that have modern plumbing and electric systems that don’t short out when you run the pancake griddle and the space heater at the same time, and sometimes we do wonder why we can’t own a brand-new SUV like so many other families do. But envy is cheap; SUVs are not.

Cheer-up, America! The Case for American Optimism

Look for moments of maximum pessimism. To the legendary value investor Sir John Templeton, this was the secret to learning how to buy low and sell high.

In recent months, I’ve been feeling the pessimism in a big way. You probably have too. Watching the scroll of headlines on cable news channels this summer, I thought I was in an overdone disaster film. Riots break out across the globe, screamed a Drudge headline. Markets were crashing. An earthquake cracked the Washington Monument. In my hands, Mark Steyn’s new book After America — a rollicking read that makes a strong case that we should prepare for the apocalypse — arrived perfectly timed with the S&P’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. The end, surely, seems nigh.

AtlasNetwork.org

The mission of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, also known as the Atlas Network, is to discover, develop and support Intellectual Entrepreneurs worldwide who advance the Atlas vision of a society of free and responsible individuals.

Achieving Atlas’s vision of a “peaceful and prosperous society of free and responsible individuals” requires respect for the foundations of a free society: individual liberty, property rights, limited government under the rule of law, and the market order. To move public policy debates toward these classical liberal ideas, Atlas discovers and assists those Intellectual Entrepreneurs who have the talent and willingness to create effective institutions and programs – programs that will improve the climate of ideas over time via research, education, and advocacy. Atlas remains faithful to ideas of its late founder, Sir Antony Fisher, whose life story demonstrates how an Intellectual Entrepreneur with principles and perseverance can be the catalyst to enormous positive change.

Herman Cain: Runaway Slave

I keep having images of Herman Cain barefoot, covered in sweat and mud, wearing an old patchwork shirt and handmade burlap pants held up by a rope rather than a belt, out of breath and frantically running for his life; to freedom. Menacing sounds of barking dogs in the distance focused on Cain’s scent. Not far behind, hot on Cain’s trail, are black overseers determined to keep their fellow black slaves in check for their white liberal Democrat massas.

FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The Union Myth of Representing ‘Working People’

Unions and their mouthpieces continually bombard us with the catch phrases about standing for “working people,” “working families,” and the poor, oppressed and exploited “working” classes. Truth is, unions represent a privileged minority, a politically connected class, the aristocrats of middle-class workers. And the mainstream of American workers, the real working people agree; it’s why only 6.9% of private sector workers are in unions and union membership overall has decreased from nearly one-third of all workers in the 1940s.