Clinton Tax Returns Tell Fascinating Story

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“I don’t know why people get obsessed with people making a lot of money,” said Kirsten Powers on Fox News on April 4.

Surely a Republican, Ms. Powers was expressing what conservatives always have believed, that a person should be able to reap the fruits of his or her labors and not be criticized for economic success.

Unfortunately, however, Ms. Powers is a Democrat party strategist, and her comment came within two hours of the release of tax information that showed that Bill and Hillary Clinton earned a whopping $109 million in the years 2000 through 2007.

Powers’ feigned upset is so transparent. Is it not her own Democrat party that for decades has been instructing us how, why, when and where to be angry with anyone who has more wealth than we do? Why has Powers suddenly taken such a conservative slant on the issue of wealth? Could it be because the rich people in question are not petroleum executives or Wal*Mart bigwigs but, well… liberal Democrats?

In the tax filing, it is reported that Bill Clinton has earned more than $51 MILLION in speaking fees alone since he left office. Does anyone remember the absolute explosion of indignation when Republican Ronald Reagan gave one speech in Japan after he left office for $75,000? No, that doesn’t jog the memory.

Bill Clinton reported more than $30 million from book sales, most notably from his cut-and-paste autobiography My Life, while Hillary had book revenues of $10 million. Add up speaking fees, book sales and all their extraneous incomes like Hill’s US Senate salary and Bill’s prez pension and it comes to… $94 million.

Which doesn’t quite add up to $109 million.

So what is going on here?

What is going on is that Billary are hiding $15 million in income, a tactic strangely reminiscent of the evil rich Republicans that Democrats like the Clintons have been warning us about since they left small-time corruption behind in Arkansas and headed for the big show in Washington and beyond.

And most troubling is that the Clintons’ hidden income reportedly is tied to his dealings with billionaire American supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation of Dubai. And this convenient threesome simply represents Bill Clinton (again) selling out his political influence for millions while the usual media ‘wealth watchdogs’ will remain silent. After all, it is their wealth we are talking about now.

What we are witnessing with the Clintons is a third-world form of greed, part of a big movement in “wealth appropriation” to people on the political left. Here in America, as jobs are shipped overseas, as our energy supply is restricted by environmentalists, and as the economy shrinks, socialists are making life more and more difficult for new “wealth creation” by imposing more and more taxation, regulation, enviro restrictions, union demands and bureaucracy on new capitalist enterprises. Meanwhile, Clinton and his friend Al Gore, and thousands like them, are getting richer and richer as the people of America get poorer and poorer.

When Gore was given the Nobel Prize for his ‘global warming’ (GW) theory, it was announced that he was worth somewhere between $80 million and $100 million. So how did Gore get so rich? After all, he left office in January 2001 as a so-so Vice President without a whole lot of glitz attached.

Here is how he accumulated that wealth: By giving speeches, making a movie, writing books and building his worldwide political influence. Sounds like Bill Clinton, does it not?

By anointing himself the GW czar of the entire planet, and by accumulating vast sums of cash for speeches and personal appearances, Gore is luring moneyed interests into his increasingly influential power circle. And as this silly GW theory takes root all over the world – even in the face of falling global temperatures over the last 10 years – Gore could become one of the most powerful men on the globe. And his wealth will grow along with that power. He’ll be a billionaire in 20 years. Maybe sooner.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has estimated that ‘global warming’ emission goals will cost the Japanese economy $500 billion (about 9% of GDP) to cut CO2 and other emissions by 11% over the next decade. This translates into more than $1 trillion in GDP loss in the United States, or more than 10 million jobs.

As Gore and Clinton get richer and richer.

So Democrats Clinton and Gore - of the “party of the people” - in fact have traded on their positions to get money and to peddle influence in the most crass way. Meanwhile, Clinton’s Global Initiative has garnered $500 million in its endowment while at the same time Clinton and Gore are quoting chapter and verse from the Democrat playbook and urging that people who earn $80,000 a year should pay more in taxes!

Gimme a break…

“Keep the people poor!” is the timeless call of the socialist elite, so that that elite can control them. This is the stranglehold that socialism is exerting all over the world through increasing wealth appropriation, with rich and powerful forces using their money and influence to increase their hold on capitalism while promoting worldwide socialism… which makes Bill and Al even richer, with no scrutiny from the leftist media.

Conservatives, on the other hand, always have believed in enriching the common man through his own labors in private enterprise. Period. End of story.
 
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Throughout history, people have attained wealth either by plundering and stealing; by amassing political power (which often includes plundering and stealing); or by creating fortunes through manufacturing, mining, railroad building, agriculture etc. This third conservative capitalist force is the one that has been most beneficial to mankind overall since new technologies and businesses in free-market economies have created new wealth and jobs for the largest number of people all up and down the economic chain. In railroading, for instance, new jobs and wealth are created from the track laborer to the locomotive manufacturer to the division manager to the president of the company.

Yet when Mitt Romney, the Republican Massachusetts governor who ran for president this year, was reported to have amassed $250 million in net wealth, the media savaged him, even though he did it in the business world. At the same time the media adored Democrat John Edwards even though he accumulated $100 million by working as a trial lawyer and suing people.

So who was been the more positive force in this world? It looks like Romney has. How many jobs had Edwards created for his fellow man? Practically zero, except for some people in his law office.

In her wheezing run for president, Hillary Clinton said that she is going to appoint a “poverty czar” who will report to her each and every day on what the government is doing to better the lives of struggling people. This is the most blundering form of political pandering coming from someone who has too much money for her own good. We already have seen countless efforts by the government to “solve” poverty, when in fact it is the government itself that today is causing most of our poverty.

When Hillary decries the wretched state of public education all over America, she is backhandedly maligning the teacher unions who absolutely control the schools… and who support her wholeheartedly. Yet she will do nothing to try and change that system because teachers give the Democrat party huge amounts of money.

When Hillary laments the poverty of rural America, she never mentions the restrictions that Democrat environmentalists have imposed on every form of rural economic development from mining to oil drilling to cattle ranching.

When she talks about millions of people in inner cities with no hope, she fails to mention that those cities are controlled lock, stock and barrel by the Democrat party and its big-government philosophy.

Conservatives have, and always have had the answer. Just consider any capitalist success story like that of Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics, whose Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank has pioneered the use of micro-loans (yes, capitalism!) to allow desperately poor people to start their own businesses and better their lives.

But the idea that poor people might use market capital to improve themselves is anathema to people like the Clintons and their billionaire friends because they want power over all the people, including the poor. And should the poor or anyone else become aware that there is a way to create wealth on their own without government intervention, and without the blessing of bureaucrats like Gore and Clinton, that is not going to sit very well with the new elites.

Because truth is their most potent adversary, just as the sunlight of truth will expose the Clinton tax returns for the greed that they truly represent.