Obama vs. the Job Creators

Obama vs. the Job Creators
I don’t get it.  I understand how a young person can be radicalized by leftist professors in college.  I can even understand how some really nutty congressmen, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, cling to the belief that socialism really works.  But how can a man as smart and educated as Obama really believe that raising taxes on the job creators will spur economic growth?

Where is the evidence that raising taxes has ever spurred economic growth?  Who are the so-called rich who he wants to tax and tax and tax?  A very large group of them are the job creators.  After all, the strength of the American economy is small business.  And most small businesses are subchapter S corporations.  

What is a subchapter S corporation?  It is a corporation where all the income and bills flow through to the businessman or woman who created the business.  He or she pays taxes directly on corporate profits.  When Obama says he is going to squeeze the rich, he is primarily squeezing the life out of America’s small business community.  He’s not just raising taxes on some group of people who have accumulated wealth, or people who run publicly held corporations, he is punishing the segment of the economy that creates American jobs.  He is attacking the folks that employ the vast majority of working Americans.

It may make a good sound bite, but taxing the so-called rich simply destroys jobs.  It’s good Marxist dogma, but stupid economics.  And there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that it works!  None.  It may be appealing in the classroom, but taxing America’s job creators is like filling your gas tank with water.  When you do that your engine will sputter and then die and the same thing will happen to the American economy if we keep raising taxes on America’s job creators.

I don’t know how the President could say in a recent news conference that “Government, like the American people, must live within its means.”  This, coming from the President who has squandered and wasted more money and created more debt than all the Presidents who came before him from George Washington to George W. Bush?

Our economy is teetering on the brink of economic collapse because President Barack Obama (with eager help from Pelosi and Reid) has spent our children’s and grandchildren’s future.  Trillions have been wasted on silly green jobs projects which actually destroy jobs.  Trillions have been used to bail out union employees.  Billions have been spent taking over banks and businesses that should have been left to survive or fail in the marketplace.

Liberals have no faith in the marketplace.  They say that success in the marketplace is just a matter of luck.  When they say they have no faith in the marketplace they are really saying that they have no faith in the millions and millions of decisions made by free Americans to purchase and sell what they want, where they want, and when they want.  Liberals believe in government deciding what we wear, what we eat, what we drive, where we live, and what we can listen to.  Liberals believe in a few select elite making decisions for you instead of you making decisions for yourself.  It’s as simple as that.

Liberals prattle on about the masses, but they don’t care about people.  They only believe in themselves and they seek power over others.  They are guilty of the original sin in the Garden of Eden, wanting to be like God.  That leads to the sin of being jealous of those who are more successful than they are.  It leads to the sin of pitting white against black, the sin of setting female against male, the sin of stirring up dissent between the worker and the employer, the sin of dividing America between poor and rich, and the sin of setting the young against the old.  It is pure Marxism and it is morally, ethically, and practically wrong.

Let us hope and pray that the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives will stand firm in their resolve to stop all wasteful spending and bring the country back from the brink of disaster.  And let us also hope that the American people will be fooled no more and that regardless of the bias of the news media, the true American ideals of limited government, individual responsibility, and traditional morals will triumph in 2012.

Create a Mess, Let Someone Else Clean It Up

Create a Mess, Let Someone Else Clean It Up 

In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats created Social Security as “insurance.”  But of course, it wasn’t insurance.  Anyone in the insurance industry who ran their company into the ground by creating unfunded liabilities would quickly find themselves behind bars.  It was a con job to make people more dependent upon government.  Subsequent Democrats used this dependency as a political tool to beat down any sensible alternatives or modifications to Social Security.  In fact, Social Security quickly became the “third rail” of politics.  Anyone who mentioned it at all was demagogued as wanting to destroy Social Security.  They were labeled as uncaring, dangerous, etc.  It was the worst form of political dishonesty, but it worked.  As the years went along the politicians kept adding more and more people to the Social Security rolls, people who had contributed little or nothing into it, but received benefits from contributions by others.  The social security tax continued to increase by raising the minimum amount that had to be contributed each year.  And while those who contribute into Social Security think of themselves as contributing just 6.2% into the program, the truth is that they are contributing 12.4% into the program because their 6.2% is matched by their employer (note the amount contributed in 2011 is reduced as a so-called “stimulus”).  In other words, the program was dishonest from the very beginning.  But it got worse.  As the years rolled by and the unfunded liabilities grew, the politicians became even more greedy and cynical as they eventually spent all the money in the Social Security fund and left it empty with only an IOU note.  Today the program is completely unfunded and worse yet, the point has come where the amount of contributions going into the fund each year is less than the withdrawals that year.  By accepted accounting standards, the kind that you and I live by, Social Security is insolvent.  It was a dishonest scheme to begin with and now the day of reckoning has come.

Of course, the politicians weren’t satisfied with creating a political dependency through Social Security.  The next step was to add Medicare, another phony “insurance” program that was just another step on the road to socialized medicine.  Socialized medicine was first proposed under Truman and, as we now know, is reality under an abomination called Obamacare.  And what’s the purpose of all these programs?  Is it compassion?  If it’s compassion, it’s a distorted form of compassion.  It’s more likely that the driving force is political avarice.  The idea of a compassionate liberal is, to put it charitably, a myth.  Studies now confirm that liberals are among the stingiest of Americans when it comes to giving their own dollars.  Who gives to charity?  About 65% of all personal giving originates with conservatives and Christians.  What the liberals do contribute to is generally non-charitable in nature.  They give to politicians and to liberal advocacy groups, but their personal giving to true charities is miserly, at best.

But I’ve gotten a bit off track.  President Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have put our nation in a desperate financial situation by spending money we don’t have on wasteful projects that have made the recession worse.  Their belief that the government can spend its way into national prosperity has taken our nation to the brink of economic collapse.

They have created a national debt that threatens to doom our children to permanent economic malaise.  They have done everything possible to steal the American dream from minorities and all Americans.  And now, when the bills for their reckless spending come due, they punt.

They created unsustainable economic models in Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare by telling lies, things that simply were not true.  FDR took the reins of government from another progressive, Herbert Hoover.  It looked like a short depression until the wild and uncontrolled spending of the New Deal Democrats drove the nation into the worst and longest depression in the history of the United States.

Did President Obama and the Democrats hear the outrage of the American people and cut back spending?  Absolutely not!  The new Obama budget, if you can call it that, calls for spending over a trillion dollars more than what the government brings in.   If passed it will drive us even closer to the brink of insolvency.  But even more cynically, the President refuses to deal with the real problems of Social Security and Medicare insolvency.  His budget ignores these very real issues completely.

His totally political approach is to ignore the situation and make the Republicans deal with these issues.  And then when they do so, fry them on the third rail of politics—Social Security and Medicare.

Apparently his attitude is “to hell with the United States” as long as we can remain in power.  Today is the day of decision for America.  Will we succumb to further government welfare programs and degenerate into a weak European socialist state, or will we have sufficient character to return to the principles of those who founded this nation?  The left is counting on there being a majority of Americans who will rebel at any attempt to stop the spending and balance the budget by dealing with Social Security and Medicare.  They believe they have found a way to crush the Tea Party Revolt. 

Are they right, or are there still a majority of clear thinking, honest, hard working Americans who will make sacrifices so that their children can enjoy the blessings of the greatest, most free, most moral nation in the history of the world?  Are there enough Americans of character and understanding who will ignore the screams and lies of the left and deal like adults with this problem that has been created solely by ideologues on the left?

Those of us who are committed to freedom and traditional moral values are engaged in the greatest battle for the soul of America since the founding of our Republic.  Whether good intentioned or ill, those aligned against us seek a powerful, centralized government that will use its power to run our lives.  They see individual freedom as an obstacle to their plan to create a better world.  It will be a world in which those who see themselves as smarter, wiser, and more moral will decide how we live, the limits of free speech and religion, what freedoms we are allowed, and the limit of our personal aspirations. 

Theirs is not the America our Founders dreamed of, nor is it the one you and I grew up in.  But do not doubt that they are powerful and will do anything to achieve their goal.  They still control the national new media that marches lockstep with them in their drive toward a European socialist state. 

The election of 2012 will determine the fate of our nation.  We made a great comeback in 2010, but let there be no doubt that the 2012 election will be a hard fought contest whose outcome will affect how our children and grandchildren live.  Will they inherit the America of our Founding Fathers, or will they be reduced to wards of the state?

Right now, today, we must all re-dedicate ourselves to working, donating and praying for a great victory in 2012 that will put the United States of America back on the course of fiscal sanity and personal responsibility.  We must work hard for a return to limited, Constitutional government.  With God’s blessing we will triumph!

Three Indispensable Presidents

Three Indispensable Presidents
Among the United States’ 44 presidents, there have been some good ones and some bad ones.  But, I believe there have only been three indispensable Presidents.

The first, of course, was George Washington, who after leading the Revolutionary Army to victory had the most difficult job of all, leading a new nation in a new system of governance.  Just a few missteps by Washington could have sent the nation off track and careening into despotism.  It’s difficult to imagine being in a position of leadership of an entirely new type of government of a brand new nation.  Everything Washington did set a precedent for those that followed him in the presidency, for good or bad.  

Perhaps the greatest challenge and feat of all that Washington did was setting aside his power and choosing not to run after his first two terms.  When his former enemy, King George III, heard that Washington intended to voluntarily step down as President, he said to the painter, Benjamin West, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”  Washington was thereafter often characterized as Cincinnatus, the famous Roman dictator who served Rome in a time of crisis from 458 BC to 432 BC and then, when the crisis had passed, set aside his power and stepped down as Roman dictator.  Indeed, George Washington was elected the first President General of the Cincinnatus Society in 1783 and served until his death in 1799.  The Cincinnatus Society exists until this day and maintains offices in Washington, D.C.  George Washington was the indispensible President of the 18th Century.

The second indispensable President was Abraham Lincoln, who ended the horrible scourge of slavery in the United States and saved the Union.  Lincoln was a man of steadfast character and unwavering principle.  As a man of strong Christian convictions, he sought freedom for slaves for moral reasons and because he knew that slavery was incompatible with the principles of individual freedom upon which the nation had been founded.  He knew that to continue slavery would have made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence itself, which contains these words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”  Abraham Lincoln was the indispensible President of the 19th Century.

The third indispensable President was Ronald Reagan, who was elected at a time of great financial and international crisis.  But the real crisis which Reagan faced was the growing threat to the very principles of a Republican form of limited government that is the foundation of a free society.  America and Americans had lost their way.  Beginning with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, a new anti-Founders philosophy had taken root in America.  It was a rejection of the concept of limited government replaced by a belief in bigger and stronger and more centralized government that personified the Wilson presidency.  Wilson expanded government’s power dramatically by persuading Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment saddling the American with the income tax.  This one step alone put massive amounts of money in and thus shifted a massive amount of power to the federal government.  The income tax was central to the creation of a powerful, centralized government.  

Wilson continued his attack on the federal system by urging Congress to repeal the 17th Amendment and replacing it with the direct election of US Senators.  This step dramatically weakened the power of the individual states and once again added to the power of the federal government.  Under Wilson’s leadership, the Federal Reserve System was created.  The Fed, as it is known, is essentially a national bank which had and has the power to arbitrarily regulate the supply of money.  

The “Progressive” attack on the principles of the Founders was renewed with a vengeance under Franklin D. Roosevelt who further expanded the central government, giving it more power and control over the lives of everyday Americans.  Wilson and Roosevelt saw government as the solution to America’s social ills, not the danger that our Founders understood.  Roosevelt even tried to stack the Supreme Court by adding more members just to get his way.  It was an expression of his contempt for the rule of law.  The same kind of contempt we see today as liberals mock and scoff at the meaning of the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Roosevelt was no Washington.  He wanted to be President for life and he was.  He flaunted the Cincinnatus example of Washington, running for President four times.  The “Progressive/Liberal” wave of attack on limited Constitutional government continued under Harry Truman with his Fair Deal and Lyndon Johnson with his Great Society that created a permanent black underclass in America, kicking the ladder of opportunity right out from under the people he thought he was helping.  Jimmy Carter was another progressive/liberal in the mold of Wilson and Roosevelt, and his disdain for the principles of the Founders was combined with a stumbling ineptitude.  All these Presidents sought and succeeded in expanding the role of government, and their Republican counterparts interspersed between their terms were only marginally better.  The toll on individual freedom was immense.  This rejection of Founding principles continued unabated until the election of Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

Washington was critical to the founding of our nation, Lincoln re-affirmed Founding principles, and Reagan, in turn, championed those principles.  That is what made these three presidents indispensable to our nation.  All three are classical liberals in the sense that they understood the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power in the hands of a few.  In Federalist paper 51 James Madison wrote,

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.  A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”  

What James Madison and the other Founders, along with Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan understood is that men are not angels.  They understood the Christian concept that men are imperfect, and sinful by nature.  Men and women have to be constrained from following their baser instincts.  They will either be constrained by their fear and love of God or they will be constrained by growing, more powerful government.

Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan were Christian men who understood that a big, all powerful government is the greatest threat to human freedom that exists in the world. 

I am thankful that during my lifetime I lived when America was blessed by an indispensable President, Ronald Wilson Reagan.  He wasn’t perfect, he was sinful just like you and me, but because he believed in someone who was perfect and because he understood the danger posed by the frailty of human nature, he helped to get our nation back on course.  Even though he faced powerful political opposition he successfully led our nation from the brink of financial collapse to new heights of prosperity.  He defeated the Soviet Union by being the first President who executed a plan to bring down that evil, totalitarian state.  And he made Americans once again proud to be Americans.  Ronald Reagan was the indispensible President of the 20th Century.

Ronald Reagan was a President for the ages.  I salute him on his 100th birthday and look toward the next indispensable President who will take the reins of government and re-establish the Founders’ principles of limited, Constitutional government in the 21st Century.  It is only by clinging to those principles that my children and my grandchildren will live in freedom as did those who came before me.  May God continue to bless the United States of America!

The GOP is on the Wagon, for Now

The GOP is on the Wagon, for Now 

Like a drunk who swears off booze, the leadership of the Republican Party has sworn off earmarks, at least for the next two years.  All we can do is to encourage them as we would a lush, with the understanding that they may fall off the wagon at any time.  Most drunks do.

Earmarks create the worst type of corruption.

They are corrosive to our Constitutional form of government because they go beyond the mandate of the Constitution and certainly the intent of the framers of the Constitution.  As discussed previously, the idea of the federal government having the authority to spend money for matters other than national defense, the maintenance of the judicial system and other items specifically enumerated in the Constitution, is simply wrong.  The liberals’ argument that the federal government has the power to do so hangs by a very slender, in fact, non-existent thread.  Their flimsy claim that the government has the power to spend money outside of the enumerated responsibilities in the Constitution is based on the general welfare clause which is not even in the Constitution (only in the Preamble as a statement of general objectives) and on the so-called “necessary and proper” clause found in Article I, Section 8 which specifically limits itself to the enumerated powers.

Every earmark degrades the Constitution.  It turns a representative or senator into a bag man for his district or state.  It’s a con game.  First I tax you to the hilt, and then I spend a small amount of money in the district or in the state (building monuments or on some other boondoggle) so that you will be beholden to me and will re-elect me.  Congressmen and senators have been buying votes with our money.  It’s a pretty slick scheme, but it’s wrong.  It is unconstitutional and the sort of thing that our Founders feared would transpire.  That’s why they did not give the federal government the power to spend money in that fashion.  And voters, like drug addicts, cheer on and re-elect men and women who give them back a small pittance of what they take from them to keep the con going.

Earmarks and pork in general, change your senator or representative from being your public servant, into being your master.  When a man or woman thinks of public service as a career, they have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid.  They begin to think they are smarter and wiser and nobler than you and me.  They think of themselves as our keepers, our betters.  They have gone from being our public servant into being our master.

But there’s another way earmarks corrupt.  It’s not the total cost of earmarks that is the problem.  It’s their use as a bribe to pass bad legislation like Obamacare that is really frightening.  You either have to laugh or cry when you see a senator hold out for a $100 million+ bribe as did Ben Nelson in Nebraska and Mary Landrieu in Louisiana.  We send people to jail for a lot, lot worse.  Guys that pay off a city councilman to get a beer license at least spend their own money.  Nelson and Landrieu and their cohorts took bribes that you and I paid for.

The Republican Party became the worst abuser of earmarks in the history of the United States.  They’d do it again today if they thought they could get by with it.  United States Senator Jim DeMint calls himself a “Recovering Earmarker.”  It’s a good description.  Another corrupting factor of earmarks is that they give undo power to the leadership of the party (Republican or Democrat) to control how your representative or senator votes.  If he or she don’t play ball and vote the way the leadership wants, their earmark doesn’t get included.  It is bribery.

Jim DeMint hasn’t fallen off the no-earmark wagon and now he has reinforcements.  Why does he have support?  The answer is that he broke with the leadership and actively raised funds through his Senate Conservatives Fund (www.senateconservatives.com) to defeat liberal Republicans like Charlie Crist and Bob Bennett, career politicians who had the backing of the GOP establishment.  We don’t need any more Republicans that vote and act like Democrats. 

Now we need leadership in the US House of Representatives from someone like Michele Bachmann to do the same thing there.  It is almost as urgent to clean out the GOP as it is to defeat Barack Obama in 2012.  I said almost.  If the Republicans continue to act and vote like Democrats, they are finished.

This is not time to celebrate our 2010 victory.  We need to start working and helping now to defeat all RINOs and Barack Obama in 2012.  Only if we do that will the GOP regain the support and respect that it deserves.  In 2010 we gave the Republican Party one more chance to act in concert with the United States Constitution.  They will win in 2012 only if they are faithful to that responsibility.

How do I know?  I read it in the tea leaves.