The Cost Of Dying In 2013; It's more than you think

The New Face Of Tax Collectors

The 2001 tax relief bill (EGTRRA), drastically reduced the impact of the death tax over the course of a decade, so that it was eliminated entirely for one year in 2010, a good year to die. The bill lowered marginal rates and increased the applicable exclusion amount, but it also included a provision allowing individuals to carry over exclusion dollars that were unused by their spouse at the time of the rich persons death. This “portability” measure effectively increased the applicable exclusion for many households, in some instances putting millions of dollars beyond the reach of the federal government.

The death tax rose from the grave at the end of 2010, with a Bush-era top rate of 35% and an applicable exclusion amount of $5 million ($5.12 million in 2012).

Scheduled Changes

In 2013, the death tax will revert to its antiquated, pre-2001 form. The applicable exclusion amount will plummet to $1,000,000, and the top marginal rate will leap twenty points to 55%. A 5% surtax will also return, to be levied on estates between $10 million and $17 million. This raises the top effective rate of the death tax to 60%.

ATRF Analysis

According to research by the Tax Policy Center, if the current death tax expires, then the resulting, stricter exemption threshold will force 114,600 estates to file for the tax in 2013 — this represents a 13-fold increase from the previous year’s 8,800 estates, and countless wasted hours filling out tax paperwork. Of that cohort, an unfortunate 52,500 will be liable for the tax, way up from 3,300.

Milton Friedman

While those 52,500 taxpayers only represent 2% of those who die each year, no one should be fooled into thinking that the effects of this tax fall only on the proverbial “one percent.” The economic incidence of the death tax is far broader, because it causes many wealthy individuals to save less, choosing instead to retire early or, as Milton Friedman put it, “dissipate their wealth on high living.” This reduction in savings means a concomitant reduction in investment, lessening the flow of capital to businesses and organizations where countless ordinary Americans are employed.

Additionally, use of estate planning lawyers, life insurance trusts, and inter vivos gifting (all common practice in upper-income circles) allows many wealthy individuals to minimize their estate liability, so that the death tax ends up harming only those who could not or chose not to navigate a maze of legal loopholes. 

 Must view this video to better understand the gravity of our future tax burden

This is how the government takes the bulk of your money after you're dead

But the ills of a 55% death tax are not just speculative. Prior to 2001, when the death tax stood at 55%, a 1994 study by the Tax Foundation found that a 55% estate tax “has roughly the same effect on entrepreneurial incentives as a doubling of income tax rates.” The same death tax today, then, would have similar decision-distorting economic effects as an 80% income tax on affected parties. A 1992 study that was generally pro-redistribution piled on, finding that the paperwork and compliance costs of the estate tax largely cancelled out any revenue raised from the tax.

This consistent finding, that the death tax is effectively revenue neutral, and is a net economic drain exposes the class warfare aims of death tax advocates. The other reasons listed merely reinforce the point: that the death tax increase should be vigorously opposed.

A recent report from the Tax Foundation about the Estate (aka Death) Tax is receiving some publicity for the small amount of actual tax dollars at stake, as well as the fact that it costs more to enforce the laws than the tax generates. 

In a sane world, this would motivate our rulers to dispense with the Death Tax as too inefficient.  That misses the real reason behind the Estate Tax.

As I have been explaining for quite sometime now, two of the main planks of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto are Heavy Progressive Income Tax and Abolition of all rights of inheritance.  Both of these concepts are part of the DemonRat agenda, which is itself almost indistinguishable from Marx’s. 

However, the real world experience is that neither one of these concepts generates more money for the government.  Higher marginal tax rates actually result in less economic activity and less overall tax revenue, while lower rates encourage people to work more, with much higher revenues to the Treasury as a result. 

                          Why don't liberals understand this?

So why would the Dims be against higher government revenues?  It’s found in the first plank of the Communist Manifesto, Abolition of Private Property.  Their overall goal is to reduce the amount of wealth in private hands.  They would rather confiscate 90% of everyone’s income and have less government money than only take 15% with higher government revenues, because the latter would leave 85% of the income in private hands. Did you get that? Progressive liberals hate the fact that you are allowed to keep any of your money, so they invent slogans like "Pay your fair share and Tax the rich, feed the poor". 

The same goes for the Estate Tax.  They welcome any chance to reduce the amount of wealth in private ownership and couldn’t care less if it costs the government two dollars for every dollar they can confiscate from private owners.  Communism has never been a logical system, nor can it ever be, even in the hands of our supposed messiah, Barrack Hussein Obama, and his gang of Fellow Travelers.

While critics have dismissed Sarah Palin's "death panels" to dole out medical care as fiction, a tax loophole may in fact give the heirs of some wealthy people a financial incentive to make this new year their loved one's last.

For example, a wealthy person who dies on December 31, 2012, and left her heirs $10 million would really be leaving them $5.05 million because of taxes. If they died a day later, the heirs could receive less than 14% of the $10 million.

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman appears to be the first to explain the potential pitfall for some elderly individuals, writing in May 2001 in the New York Times that it should have been called the "Throw Momma From the Train Act of 2001."

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Since then other economists have noted the impact tax changes might bring, including bestselling authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, who wrote in SuperFreakonomics that it would mean heirs would want their benefactors to make it to 2010, but not beyond.

"With this incentive, it's not hard to imagine such heirs giving their parent the best medical care money could buy, at least through the end of the year. Indeed, two Australian scholars found that when their nation abolished its inheritance tax in 1979, a disproportionately high number of people died in the week after the abolition as compared with the week before.

Not So Fast

Roberton Williams

To be sure, Congress could enact legislation to reinstate the estate tax and make it retroactive to the start of the year, so the notion of a wealthy family receiving a windfall by having a relative die in 2010 might be moot. But while many expect that to happen, "I thought there was no way we'd get to this point without having done something about 2010," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute.

Although he said the estate tax would likely be restored in some form, part of the problem may be legislative priorities.

"If there are other issues like health care reform or cap and trade, this is relatively small potatoes, so who's going to use what political leverage is the name of the game."

Still, Williams said, people wanting to off themselves for their heirs' sake may want to make sure they make it far enough in this year to ensure nothing changes the law where they will be taxed anyway. "Death is a rather permanent thing," he said.

The estate tax has been a contentious issue, as it is perceived by some as a "double tax" -- since some assets are being taxed that were taxed previously.

Advocates of the tax point out that it only affects the wealthiest, and it prevents people from accumulating a windfall simply because their parents were wealthy.

Either eliminating the tax permanently or reinstating it would avoid the issue with the law as it stands now, but debate seems to have put it in place.

In 2001, a largely Republican coalition tried to repeal the estate tax permanently, but their majority could not get the bill past a filibuster, and so instead the changes were put into the tax code, meaning they had to be revisited after 10 years. So a gradual phase-out (done to keep some revenue flowing into the budget) and finally full repeal in 2010 would be reinstated in 2011.

"They anticipated that somewhere during the 10-year window they would just go back and repeal it completely," said Williams. "When they did this in the first place, they never thought 2010 would come around as being the only year. It was not intended that way; it was forced up on them by parliamentary rules in the Senate."

Indeed, it does not seem there was too much concern over the law when it came about.

Dr. Paul McHugh

Dr. Paul McHugh, the former chairman of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, served on the President's Council on Bioethics under Bush. He said that while the idea that people would attempt to die by Dec. 31, 2012 to avoid a tax was discussed casually by members, it was never part of official meetings.

"We certainly didn't discuss this in a serious fashion," said McHugh. "There was a kind of presumption that the idea that taxing people again and again would eventually be seen as unfair."

"They thought that was going to be an unstable proposition," he said of the tax law, adding that he feels "It's going to be hard to bring it back without something of a fuss."

The estate tax only affects the wealthiest; roughly 1 person in 400 pays the estate tax when they die, and only about 5,500 estates are expected to owe estate taxes this year, according to the Tax Policy Institute.

Heirs Of A Fortune After The Estate Tax Was Paid

However, the concern illuminates an issue faced by many at the end of life, who are concerned that the resources they consume to extend their lives may diminish what they can leave for their children.

"These are the kinds of pressures people can feel," said McHugh, although as a staunch opponent of physician-assisted suicide, he said it was not a justification for taking one's life. "This death with dignity idea is made even more ridiculous in that this is death for dollars."

Generational Tension

People respond to the pressure of what they leave to their children differently.

"For some people it's a major concern, for some people it's totally irrelevant," "It depends on the character of the person, and their priority and values."

But would some people's concern for their children cause them to somehow arrange to die during a year with no estate taxes? I don't think that many people would resort to physician-assisted suicide to escape the estate tax.

"You can easily imagine the hypothesis, but there's no evidence supporting the notion that would happen. It's very hard to imagine people doing that for money.

But some say that the lack of an estate tax may give some who are clinging on to life just another reason to check out early. Eileen Fitzpatrick is an attorney and coauthor with her sister Jeanne, who is a physician, of "A Better Way of Dying" A book that deals with decisions to avoid life-saving measures (but not euthanasia) in order to avoid living beyond the time one wants to. She explained that many who die in 2010 of their own accord would likely die from choosing to avoid certain treatments rather than actively attempting suicide.

"People at the end of life reach a point where extending life ceases to be a good thing for that person because the quality of life has so degraded that quality of life has become miserable," Fitzpatrick said.

As If By Magic

February 2009, there were 141.748 million Americans employed in the United States and the labor force participation rate was 65.6%.  In September 2012, 140.025 million Americans were employed and the labour force participation rate had fallen to 63.6%.  Between February 2009 and September 2012, the civilian non-institutional population grew by 8.859 million adults; yet, 1.723 million fewer Americans were working.  In the last year alone, 1.1 million Americans left the work force.

Given the massacre in Denver and next month's election -- "unexpected" drop in the unemployment rate requires a willing suspension of disbelief.  The "spontaneous uprising" in hiring of a whole 114,000 jobs allegedly caused a drop in the U-3 rate of 0.3%.  In August, the US economy added 96,000 and the unemployment rate went from 8.3% to 8.1%.  In July, the US economy added 163,000 jobs and the unemployment rate went up to 8.3% from 8.2% in June when only 80,000 jobs were created.  Go figure.

Somehow...in a economy growing at a miserly 1.2%...873,000 people managed to find jobs.  Of course, 582,000 jobs were part-time jobs, which the Left used to say weren't "real jobs."  The addition of 873,000 jobs, which, according to CNBC, is “the highest one-month jump in 29 years.”  That would have been in November, 1983...when the GDP was 8.5%.  Once again, the annualised GDP rate for Q2 in 2012 was 1.2%. If the labour force participation rate was constant, the U-3 rate would be 10.7%.  

By the way, at a rate of adding 114,000 jobs per month, we wouldn't return to full employment until 2025.   114,000 jobs per month would be great...if we were living in the late 1950s.  We need twice that many just to maintain current employment.  A robustly growing economy requires job creation in the range of 300,000+.  Take a look at the number of jobs that were being created during the Reagan Recovery when GDP was 7-8%. 

Based upon its most recent Household Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that the unemployment rate in the United States decreased from 8.1% to 7.8% in September.  This apparent improvement in our labor markets is deceptive for the following reasons:

1.  Two-thirds of the new jobs claimed by the Report (582,000 jobs) are part time jobs.

2.  Of the claimed 582,000 new part time jobs, only 268,000 are real.  The remaining 314,000 part time jobs are the result of a "seasonal adjustment" by the BLS.

More jobless people

3.  The BLS reported dramatic increases in seasonally adjusted part time employment in September of 2011 (483,000 jobs) and September of 2010 (579,000 jobs) only to report significant decreases in such jobs in each of the following Octobers (419,000 jobs in 2010 and 480,000 jobs in 2011) with continuing decreases in November and December.  It is therefore reasonable to expect that the increase in part time jobs this year and the resulting improvement in the unemployment rate is also temporary.

4.  The U-6 unemployment rate, which is the broadest measure of unemployment, in that it includes among the unemployed those persons who are working part time but would rather be working full time, was unchanged in September at 14.7%.



In conclusion, in the third year of an alleged recovery, the unemployment problem in the United States did not really change in September. This is not good news for the United States or the continued employment prospects of President Obama.

Conservatism Unplugged: Where did all the money go?

Politics brings out the worst in us. One is more vile the more there is at stake.

Leveraging a little animus, It turns mere opposition into hate.

The lava bubbling underneath each heart, Inhibited by guilt or love or fear, Comes bursting forth, by scribes with subtle art Stoked vigorously as new elections near.

If ever there has been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama. Voters acknowledge that President Obama has mishandled the economic recovery, failed to confront our fiscal problems, embraced unpopular legislation, contravened the law through executive orders, broken numerous pledges on taxes, taking public monies, hiring lobbyists and publishing bills before they are signed, managed to blame his problems on anyone handy and cynically chosen to severely divide the country. And yet, in spite of these monumental shortcomings, Mr. Obama is deemed “likeable” and is running even with Romney.   

With the billions in stimulus dollars that was given to foreign companies, mostly to subsidize their own green energy projects. AFP President Tim Phillips said “The Obama Administration continues to waste our tax dollars trying to pick winners and losers. This leads to overspending, no new job creation, and inevitably creates government cronyism. The President wasted some $530 million on Solyndra, but now we’re finding billions more given to ‘green energy’ companies overseas. The American people deserve to know the disturbing details of how their tax dollars are being wasted in pursuit of an ideological agenda.”

The purpose of this posts is to review what I call "random wasteful spending" that exists throughout most, if not all, of the Federal bureaucracy. This is different from what I call "systemic wasteful spending" that is anything but random. Systemic wasteful spending occurs everyday, every month, every year, in the same manner, almost like clockwork. 

After following various reports of jailed convicts and illegal immigrants receiving unemployment checks from U.S. taxpayers, the Obama Administration has admitted that in fiscal year 2011 the government “overpaid” around $14 billion in benefits.

Wishing For A Bonner

Obama's $840 billion stimulus contained more than a million dollars to study erectile dysfunction, and yes, I know, any complaint will be identified as a war on men.

That would be in addition to a Republican war on women as alleged by zanies not liking perfectly sound criticisms of Obama's health insurance mindlessness.

That’s a chunk of change for a nation suffering through a painful debt crisis that’s topped $15 trillion. Like most bloated government programs, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) unemployment benefits— paid by state treasuries and the federal government—is rife with fraud and corruption. 



Estimates of stimulus benefits cannot possibly calculate the pluses of leaving more money in the private economy, and the Congressional Budget Office is among those worrying about long-term harm offsetting current advantages.
Thanks not just to the stimulus, but to fervor for more spending generally when revenues are down, the debt has grown by $5 trillion under Obama. That renders us vulnerable to immediate danger on top of saddling our grandchildren with impoverishing repayments.

The president has ignored corrective recommendations of his own debt commission, and this year offered a $3.8 trillion budget defeated 99-0 in a Senate vote that left Democrats making flimsy excuses for what was really a rejection of ruin.

Ours is a president of spectacular negligence. A prime example has been his refusal to propose changes in Social Security, Medicare (beyond cuts that were not overall budget deductions) and Medicaid, even though those three entitlements and debt interest will consume all federal tax revenues as soon as 2025 if not restructured.

Obama himself has even acknowledged that something has to be done, but instead of doing it, created a new health care entitlement worsening the jam we are in by more than a trillion dollars over the next decade. If you want an idea of how absurd Obama's $3.8 trillion budget request for 2013 is, consider the fact that he actually wants to increase funding for the U.S. Department of Energy.

CBS News reported this year that it found 12 "green" companies that got billions from Washington "then declared bankruptcy or are suffering other serious financial issues."

Beacon Power, one such company, was deemed by Standard & Poor's credit rating agency to have a 70 percent chance of failing. Yet that didn't stop the administration from giving Beacon tens of millions of dollars -- after which the company went under.

Harry Reid

It was also via the Energy Department that the Obama administration halted the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Taxpayers had pumped billions of dollars into Yucca Mountain so that it could accommodate spent nuclear fuel from around the country. But to please Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and environmentalists, the administration ended the project, and another huge investment by the Energy Department was lost.

Does that seem like an agency on which the president should want to spend more money for "clean-energy development"?

Not surprisingly, the $4 trillion in deficit reduction supposedly sought in the budget proposal would come "over 10 years." So even if Congress approves the president's plan, a future Congress could readily restore the money, and more.

At any rate, the "reductions" are dubious. The president claims huge savings from winding down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those "savings" largely represent money that was not going to be spent anyway. It's an accounting gimmick.

And private economists are challenging the president's reliance in his budget figures on rosy projections of 3 percent economic growth this year and next, when actual growth is struggling to maintain 1 percent. They say that is far higher than growth is actually likely to be.

Meanwhile, a series of destructive tax increases would be imposed on "the rich," on banks, and on the oil, gas and coal companies that meet most of our nation's energy needs. Do you want to pay more to heat your home and fill your gas tank?

And the president's plan gives scant attention to reforming Medicare and other programs that are the key drivers of rising debt.

Finally, the president wants well over $100 billion in new "stimulus" spending, a big part of it to hire more government workers despite the 2009 stimulus' failure to produce the projected jobs.

The president's chief of staff, Jacob Lew, openly rejected talk of real spending cuts.

"The time for austerity is not today," he said on a Sunday talk show.

Bob Corker

We disagree, and so does U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

"An honest analysis of the president's budget virtually eliminates the White House's claims of deficit reduction when you remove the spending cuts previously enacted in law, alleged savings from money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that was never going to be spent, and nearly $2 trillion in new taxes," Corker stated in a news release.

Noting that our national debt -- $15.3 trillion -- is now as big as our entire economy, he added: "This budget makes a mockery of the American people. If a Republican or Democratic governor of Tennessee proposed a budget like this one, they would be run out of the state."

The president should start anew and offer a budget that relies on slashing wasteful and unconstitutional spending, not on growth-destroying tax increases and "stimulus."

Conservatism Unplugged

America's Future Under Obama

When the world is laid waste, and its celebrants are cinders, And its clothes ashes; When it is once again a dead rock; like the rock that encircles it; Its dust open to the poisonous wind; When we have wrought what we've wrought, and done what we've done, and there is no one left to look back in sorrow or anger: Ah, then, what a song will never be sung! 

In this election, we’re not having an argument that pits capitalism against socialism. We are trying to decide what kind of capitalism we want. It is a debate as American as Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay — which is to say that we have always done this. In light of the rise of inequality and the financial mess we're going through, it’s a discussion we very much need to have NOW. 

Mitt Romney

The back-and-forth about Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old company, is part of something larger. So is the inquest into the implications of multi-billion-dollar trading losses at JPMorgan Chase. Capitalism can produce wonders. It is also capable of self-destruction, and it can leave a lot of wounded people behind. The trick is to get the most out of what capitalism does well, while containing or preventing the problems it can cause. 

To describe this grand debate is not to deny that President Obama’s campaign has some, shall we say, narrower motives in going after Bain. Obama’s lieutenants need to undermine Romney’s claim that his experience in the private equity business makes him just the guy to get our economy back on track.

The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is wealthy.

Romney will focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He will tell about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.

That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like myself call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.

The Destruction Caused By Capitalism

This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

Does this approach cause unnecessary suffering among the employees of the companies in question and the communities that often lose plants and jobs as a result? Sucking pension and health funds dry to aggrandize investors seems less like a creative act than a betrayal of workers who made bargains with their employers in good faith.

More generally, while some of the innovations in the financial sphere have been beneficial to growth, it’s far from clear that this is true of all or even most of them. Some of them helped cause the downturn we are still trying to escape and created incentives for the dangerous risk-taking that led to JPMorgan’s troubles. And there’s little doubt that our new financial system has transferred wealth from other sectors of the economy to the people at the top of the financial business.

Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change. I almost hated to say that, but Please, bare with me here.

“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”

Romney, by contrast, is wary of dismantling any of these nifty new Wall Street inventions, which is one reason why any conservative would wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.

We need to have this great national argument. To borrow a term pioneered by Germany’s Christian Democrats, we can try to build a social market. Or we can have an anti-social market. An election is the right venue for deciding which one it will be.

Everything we thought was true was not true. Everything we thought was right was wrong. The leaders whom we idolized were madmen, Mass murderers, whose crimes were helped along. 
                     

We were the volunteers for this economic genocide, the dupes who gave out leaflets for the devil, for whom obscene dictatorships were good and our own democracies were evil. Obama is the organizers of the poor, for who's numbers are swelling, the builder of immoral unions, the champion of unconstitutionality, sacrificing society only to serve his mortal yearning for significance. We were blind in service to our passions. We were deaf in service to our need. Now I will drive the truth straight through our hearts that we might die at peace with what we did, and for our crime against liberty, Forgiveness denied.

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Obama's Dream Of Re-Election

Much controversy has arisen recently about the Obama administration leaking details of Israel's planned raid on Iranian nuclear sites by using Azerbaijan as a staging area. The reason for the leaks is simple: if Israel attacks Iran, Obama will lose the presidential election this fall, and Obama will do anything to prevent that from happening.






If Israel were to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear weapons capability, Iran would retaliate by attempting to close the Strait of Hormuz as it has often threatened.

U.S. Fifth Fleet

The U.S. Fifth Fleet patrolling the area would likely be called upon to keep the Strait open, and expanded American military involvement in the region could not be ruled out. World oil and financial markets would be roiled. Israel would be hit with a barrage of rockets and international condemnations. And relations with strategic competitors such as China and Russia would hit the deep freeze. President Obama would have many 3AM telephone calls to deal with.

The good news: We now have a new set of talks on Iran’s nuclear program scheduled for mid April in Istanbul. The bad news:  Washington and its allies have not prepared the ground for these talks. We are a negotiating table away from $5-a-gallon gasoline and a failed economic recovery. Or was the story all part of a complex and devious disinformation campaign by the Obama administration to box Israel in, or one targeted at the president?

Real pain for Obama would come from the political price he would pay as Americans saw gasoline prices skyrocket again, dead and wounded U.S. soldiers and sailors coming home from the Middle East again, plummeting financial markets again, possible terror attacks on U.S. soil again, and internet disruptions from Iranian cyberwar. 

No president could survive politically from such a series of calamities. Thus president Obama is desperate to delay any Israeli attack on Iran until after the November elections, even to the extent of foiling Israel's near-term military plans.





We have all observed Obama's willingness to sacrifice anything to win re-election. His trips and speeches have little to do with policy and everything to do with politics. His cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline was a blatant move to solidify his position with the radical environmentalists, even at the expense of 100,000 lost jobs. 

The administration's contraception ruling affecting Catholic hospitals and universities, and Obama's exploitation of the Sandra Fluke incident were meant to cement his radical feminist base, although many Catholics were alienated. Obama has ratcheted up his race- and class-based rhetoric, most recently with the Treyvon Martin incident, to ignite racial resentments in a cynical ploy to increase Democratic voter turnout at the expense of the cordial race relations 2008 candidate Obama had promised. 

His recent budget, rejected 414-0 in the House, was more a political statement of his hostility to the Congress than an actual policy document. Obama's latest effort to undercut the strategic interests of a valued ally are of the same cloth, as Israel joins far too many Americans under the bus.

Perversely, the world sees these two allies, the U.S. and Israel, struggling with each other right out in the open. What could possibly be next?  What 2013 Obama policies are so important that Israel means so little?