Vin Suprynowicz

“President Obama believes America’s wealthiest households have become too wealthy and that the best way to ‘remedy’ this situation is to increase their federal tax burden,” Michael Franc of The Heritage Foundation wrote back on May 18. (www.heritage.org/research/taxes/bg2271.cfm)

In a message accompanying his Fiscal Year 2010 budget, Mr. Obama explained: “For the better part of three decades, a disproportionate share of the Nation’s wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy. Yet, instead of using the tax code to lessen these increasing wage disparities, changes in the tax code over the past eight years exacerbated them.”

In fact, IRS figures show that the top 5 percent of wage earners already pay 60 percent of total income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay virtually zero. If a lot of Americans continued to grow rich and invest in new job creation despite such an unequal levy, how is that bad?

Never mind. Mr. Obama and his congressional Democrats still believe the pie should be cut into equal pieces — the hard-working surgeon or engineer or factory owner making no more than the schoolmarm who can’t spell or the guy who lives under the bridge. So, whether or not their proposals will really generate enough to “pay for” their ambitious plans to socialize medicine and ban fossil fuels, “equalization” takes on a life of its own.

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Yes, enforcing the laws against illegal immigration might involve men with handcuffs leading away the nice lady who brings you chips and salsa at your favorite Mexican restaurant. I am not thoroughly happy with that prospect, since I agree it certainly seems young Maria is doing us no immediate harm, merely seeking a better life for herself and her kids, and I do enjoy the chips and salsa.

Nor am I happy with the prospect of my friends who “look Mexican” being stopped and asked to “show their papers.” (Though I don’t see why it would be unreasonable to start with the guys who hang around outside the plant nursery, or the folks mailing money to Mexico at the post office. How can it be constitutionally required that federal law enforcement agents have to pretend to be idiots?)

But while this might all argue for a restored “bracero” program, allowing willing workers from south of the border to come here, legally, for part of the year each year to do those alleged “jobs American won’t do,” that’s a far cry from saying Congress has no power or duty to establish an immigration policy, or that our police agencies should not try very hard to enforce those laws, or that we are “collectivist police state fascists” if we ask — given how many absurd laws WE’RE supposed to obey, right down to restrictions on the size of out toilet tanks and carrying mouthwash on airplanes and where we can smoke — why such thoroughly Constitutional laws are not rigorously enforced.

As I wrote last month to the Internet correspondent who declines to use his real name, and who I have thus dubbed “Buzz Spacecat”:

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A recent column on the euphemisms used by proponents of illegal-immigrant amnesty brought some irate buzzing from all seven members of the Young Anarchists’ League.

As near as I can figure, I’m “not allowed” to call for the enforcement of current immigration laws — or possibly of any laws, even those few (including the immigration laws) enacted within the powers delegated to Congress under the Constitution — since any such enforcement of the law amounts to some kind of “collectivist police state fascism” against people who have “not initiated force or fraud.”

I’m not sure how you cut through a border fence without “initiating force,” or how you rent an apartment, register a car, and go to work every day using someone else’s social Security number without “initiating fraud.”

I’m further “not allowed” to cite the cost to taxpayers of illegal alien trespassers swarming our public schools and hospitals, lest I be accused of somehow “supporting” tax subsidies for schools and hospitals. (Literally: “Why exactly do you want to save socialist policies like government control over schools and hospitals?” It’s as though I warned people what might happen if they let their children swim in a crocodile-infested river, only to be asked “Why exactly do you want to save hideous practices like the eating of small children by crocodiles?”)

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Don’t ask, for the moment, why Congressional Democrats need to find an extra trillion dollars to pay for a socialized medicine scheme they insist will “reduce costs.”

We’re WAY too far into Wonderland to worry about that.

As Democratic senators including Max Baucus of Montana and Ted Kennedy of Palm Beach — whoops, “Massachusetts” — struggled to make their unnecessary and vastly expensive government scheme more attractive, they quickly realized the first thing they needed to do was to make America’s existing private health care plans — with which 89 percent of Americans say they’re perfectly happy — LESS attractive.

So, both to raise more tax loot and to drive the private plans bankrupt, the Democrats want to tax private, free-market health benefits that are “too good” — better, that is, than the cut-rate, rationed, one-size-fits-all plan thy have in mind for us.

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Do the forces now in charge of our energy future prefer that the American economy continue to grow based on the exploitation of plentiful and less expensive coal and other fossil fuels — or by rapidly bringing on line new reactors to exploit plentiful and less expensive nuclear fuel — or, finally, by replacing those older power sources with wind, solar, and other “renewable” sources, regardless of the cost?

Based on developments here in the Southwest last week, the answer would appear to be … that it was trick question, to begin with. Those in charge today have no intention of providing the foundering American economy with the new energy resources it needs to resume growing, at all.

Last week, tired of wasting time promoting a relatively clean, low-cost energy option opposed by the entire ruling political class from Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on down, electric utility NV Energy formally withdrew its application through the Nevada Public Utilities Commission to build the Ely Energy Center.

The $5 billion, 1,500-megawatt central Nevada plant would have generated enough energy to power 900,000 homes. It will now be delayed at least a decade, until costly technologies can be developed to capture all such a plant’s harmless emissions of carbon dioxide — a gas necessary to life on earth, a gas of which mankind’s production is dwarfed by that churned out by the oceans and volcanoes, but to which eco-loonies attribute the supposed danger of “global warming.”

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Utah’s U.S. senators say they want Congress to investigate the actions of federal agents who arrested two dozen people — four of them older than 70 — June 10 in an investigation of the “theft” of ancient artifacts in the Four Corners region.

A day later, one of the men arrested, a prominent local doctor, committed suicide.

Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, both Republicans, say the raid was overkill.

Bruce Adams, a commissioner in San Juan County in southern Utah where many of the arrests took place, said there have been reports of “regular neighbors” being roughed up and confronted by agents in bulletproof vests with weapons drawn. Some 300 federal agents — about half from the Bureau of Land Management — were involved.

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Remember the huge controversy brewed by congressional Democrats when president George W. Bush’s Justice Department dismissed seven United States Attorneys on Dec. 7, 2006?

Democrats conveniently ignored the fact their unlikely hero, President Bill Clinton, had sought the resignations of all 93 U.S. attorneys — including one who had been probing some of the crimes of the Clintons and their Arkansas cronies — upon taking office in 1993.

Well, the Obama administration seems to have grown unhappy over AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin’s probe into the misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds by Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who is now mayor of Sacramento and a prominent supporter of President Obama.

The heart of the matter is a dispute that began last year over Mr. Walpin’s recommendation that Johnson and his “St. HOPE” charity be barred from receiving and using federal grant money. The process is known as “suspension and debarment,” meaning that Johnson would be suspended from receiving federal funds under any current arrangement and might ultimately be barred from receiving any such funds in the future.

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We’re now instructed there are some functions which just have to be funded by government taxes — there’s simply no other way to do it.

Courts, police, fire departments, ambulances …

Well now, wait a minute. When I was a kid, growing up in a small Connecticut town of about 2,000 souls, my folks sent in $25 a year to belong to the volunteer ambulance association.

This wasn’t a tax — it’s still not, today, though the recommended membership donation at the Roy Pettengill Memorial Ambulance Association has grown to $100, which tells you something about inflation.

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On Monday, President Barack Obama pitched his scheme for a government “reform” of American health care and medical insurance to the American Medical Assn., continuing a public-relations blitz designed to push the pricey scheme through Congress.

As is becoming typical of his approach, the president warned all parties — doctors, hospitals, insurance companies — that each would have to “sacrifice” something under his plan, but then attempted to sweeten the pot by offering something back — in the doctors’ case, some partial protection from the fear of malpractice suits that now lead doctors to order (“just in case”) expensive medical tests most parties consider unnecessary.

Mr. Obama stopped short of endorsing an actual cap on malpractice “pain and suffering” awards, though. He IS a lawyer, after all — and a lawyer well-funded by other lawyers.

Americans — occupants of the wealthiest nation in the world — are now estimated to spend $2 trillion per year on health care. Mr. Obama’s position is that the current health care system is too costly and that it doesn’t make people better.

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A lot of things people do in an attempt to “think green” and “leave a smaller carbon footprint” can end up backfiring.

As complex eco-systems which man has never been able even to accurately predict — let alone control — are simplified to the level of Miss Nancy of Romper Room advising the children to wash their hands and “Do Be a Do-Bee,” should we be surprised?

If you’re up-to-date on your anti-nausea medication, join with us as we slog through the first several paragraphs of the English version of a piece of “objective news reporting” dished out by the Agence France Press over the June 6 weekend:

“You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint — the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change,” the French reporters gush.

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