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Tax rise on middle class 'highest in the West'
Middle-class families are paying an extra £1,250 a year after suffering the sharpest rise in their tax bill of any leading Western country over the past five years, figures show.

• Your view: What should Alistair Darling do for the middle classes?

In a major blow for Alistair Darling hours ahead of his first Budget, comprehensive research has shown that the middle classes have shouldered one of the world's biggest increases in their tax since 2002.

During the same period the average tax burden in most countries actually declined, according to the report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD].

But British families with two children and one earner on the average wage saw their tax bill increase by some £1,243 between 2002 and 2007, based on the current median annual wage of £19,856.

The Chancellor is today expected to raise the tax burden for millions more families. Measures introduced by Gordon Brown last year, but set to be confirmed today and introduced next month, are due to raise the tax bill for 5.3 million of Britain's poorest households.

C'mon, let's be fair. This is, quite simply, a way of motivating people to do better; become more productive and the like. Stiff upper lip, mates. It's only just begun.

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said: "Here is proof that while the rest of the world is successfully reducing the burden on families, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown are doing the exact opposite."

The OECD said that the proportion of salary paid by a typical family in taxes and National Insurance contributions increased from 25.8 per cent to 28.3 per cent between 2002 and 2007. The 2.5 percentage point rise is in stark contrast to most other developed countries. In the United States, tax bills dropped by a full two percentage points, while even in Germany, renowned for its high taxes, it dropped 0.1 percentage points.


As The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Tuesday, Mr Darling will delay the 2p rise in fuel duty for six months.

The Chancellor is expected to say that while he takes environmental considerations seriously, with oil now $107 a barrel and pump prices having risen by 20 per cent in the past year, he believes motorists are paying enough.

A source said: "The decision has been taken because this is not a time to be taking that sort of money out of the economy."

Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "Tax rises have damaged consumer confidence and reduced families' security and savings - everyone else has realised that this is a harmful policy."

A Treasury spokesman said: "The report shows that the UK is a relatively lightly taxed economy. The total UK tax burden continues to be well below both the OECD and G7 averages."

• Unleaded petrol yesterday topped £5 [US$10.06, ed.] a gallon at the Cherwell Valley services on the M40, said the AA.

Via The Telegraph

The Glitter Is More Like Pyrite Than Gold

Obama Unplugged
Let's start with the ending: Barack Obama has just finished giving a stump speech to around 200 residents of Washington, D.C.'s impoverished Anacostia neighborhood. Wednesday's speech covered basic principles and dealt with poverty and wealth. Obama has said just about everything a candidate who wants to win the poor vote needs to say, delivering each speech with a healthy serving of what campaign managers call "soul food."

But the applause at the end is miserable. It begins in the first row, where the local dignitaries are sitting. It drags itself over to rows four and five, where a huddle of apathetic young people are lolling around. It struggles to reach row 14 at the back of the room. The man at the podium, who was earlier hailed as the "next president of the United States of America," is surrounded by silence as he departs. The applause doesn't even carry as far as backstage. His shoes make a clicking sound on the wooden floor.

The crowd gathered in the small lecture hall of the Town Hall Education Art and Recreation Center, less than 10 miles from the White House, was not merciless in its reaction, just honest. The senator from Illinois is recognizably not the product which he is being sold as. At the beginning he was described as a rising African-American star. That was back when people were still being modest. Then the political marketing people reached up onto the top shelf, and started referring to him as the new Kennedy, the new Martin Luther King Jr., the first black president.

And he remains Senator Thunderthighs' worst nightmare.

[....]

... Obama does exactly what populists like to do most: He compares apples and oranges. A kids project in Harlem that he would like to see extended across America costs $46 million a year -- the kind of money that is spent in just one morning in the Iraq war, he says. Let's invest this money better, he calls out to the audience. The applause speaks for the effectiveness of these kinds of comparisons. But it also speaks against the candidate.

Buying toys instead of weapons is the surest way for America to lose its status as a superpower. The conflict with an aggressive Islam could not be won in this way. Naturally Obama knows this -- that's why in an article for Foreign Affairs he writes that in his opinion the US military urgently needs to be "revitalized." That means more money, more soldiers and more ground forces -- he suggests an increase of around 100,000 men and women. "A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace," he writes.

Get ready, Ron Paul. You're about to inherit the nutroots.

But Foreign Affairs is hardly daily reading in America's poorest neighborhoods. The lack of education bemoaned by Obama the social policy specialist renders valuable services to Obama the foreign policy expert.

The candidate proceeds on the basis that no one in the audience is capable of mental arithmetic. After all, if his speech became government policy tomorrow, then the new president would have to head straight to the International Monetary Fund the next day to ask for a loan.

Not neccessarily. Madame Botox and Harriet Reid will celebrate winning the revolution by including in the budget bill, a minimum 35% reduced-index tax rate on individuals and small businesses; a Progressive tax, so to speak.

Obama is demanding what the Republicans call "big government," a free-spending state. He promises to bring in socialized medicine without mentioning how he will finance it. He wants to found an American bank for the poor based on the concept of the World Bank, he wants to give money to after-school centers and transform the minimum wage into a real living wage, which would automatically increase with any rise in inflation.

Italy had this "mobile scale" for decades. It proved to be a unique program for devaluing the currency, which is why the Italian politicians were so unsentimental in ditching the lira for the euro.

There's much, much more.

BDS Extends to Education

Democrats move to slash Reading First
House Democrats want to put their own stamp on federal education spending by increasing Title I and other programs they favor and slashing Reading First and other priorities set by President Bush.
In the $56 billion fiscal 2008 spending bill for the Department of Education unveiled by the Democrats, No Child Left Behind Act programs would receive a $2 billion increase, with the Title I program for disadvantaged students receiving $1.5 billion of that.
But the $1.03 billion Reading First program—which the Bush administration points to as one of its biggest accomplishments under the NCLB law—would take a cut of $630 million, or 61 percent. What’s more, the administration’s latest proposals for private school vouchers and new mathematics programs would not be funded at all.


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Continued symptoms of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome)

It would decline to provide the $325 million the president proposed for private school choice to give such options to students who attend chronically low-performing public schools.
The bill also would not fund math programs for elementary schools and middle schools proposed by Mr. Bush. And it would give only level funding to the $31.9 million Striving Readers program for middle schoolers, far less than the Bush administration request of $100 million.
Rep. Obey said that the bill’s price tag has raised the prospect that President Bush would veto it. [ed.- You just have to love that reason in light of all the pork they tried to put into the military budget for Iraq] But the Appropriations Committee chairman, who also leads the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee, had significant support from Republicans on the subcommittee to finance the programs Congress sees as a priority.

One other item of note is that all though the article they constantly refer to the President as Mr. Bush.
So who is Rep. Obey? Why he is the guy trying to become the pork barrel king of Washington.

Bloggers are particularly irked by reports that Obey will only add earmarks to House-Senate conference agreements that generally cannot be amended on the floor. In the past, earmarks have been included in the separate House and Senate versions of appropriations bills and the committee reports that accompany them.


So Mr Obey who is part of that party who was going to change that “culture of congress” is reporting for duty and has decided that rather then do something to get rid of the shading spending plans in congress he simply wants to hide them or make it so that you, the taxpayer, has no say in where your money goes. More here.

Apparently the main method the Dems wish to use to make sure "No Child is left Behind" is to also make sure no child succeeds.