Obama's Campaign Strategy for 2012

"The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living."

Obama's Crony Capitalist trap door

Here are the details of Obama’s latest crony capitalist ploy. Yesterday, the President proposed reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent. That’s certainly a landmark moment – a liberal President calling for a lower corporate tax rate is a Nixon goes to China moment. It’s also long overdue, considering that the U.S. corporate tax rate is the second highest in the world, making it nearly impossible for American companies to compete in the global economy. But here’s where the trouble begins.

Under the President’s “framework,” he singles out specific industries he doesn’t like — oil and gas, insurance, and small aircraft manufacturers, for example — and proposes to close what he asserts are their loopholes, thereby raising their taxes. But with his other hand, he opens a trap door and waves his friends through, cutting their tax rates to 25 percent “and to an even lower rate for income from advanced manufacturing activities.”

The President’s best friends get access to second trap door leading to even lower rates. Who slides on through? Those who qualify for tax incentives designed to “encourage investment in clean energy.” The net effect of all this tax reform subterfuge will be a free pass for the “right” industries, a downfall for the “wrong” ones, and a windfall for lobbyists who can get their clients through the trap doors.

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/23/morning-bell-obamas-crony-capitalist-trap-door/

Why I Deny Global Warming

David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He writes " Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?"

http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming6.1.1.html

Barack Obama's Tax Plan

This site is a non-partisan site dedicated to the economic policies of Barack Obama. Our goal is to explain Barack Obama's Tax Plan, and how it will affect the United States Economy. Our aim is to educate voters, not attack any particular candidate.

The idea of the redistribution of wealth is an appealing one, especially for people who don’t consider themselves wealthy. Many people believe that economic equality is the only way to truly make people equal. After all, one of history’s most famous urban legends - Robin Hood - took from the rich and gave to the poor.

However, what many people don’t realize is that Robin Hood was actually stealing from thegovernment - an oppressive aristocracy which was taxing its citizens unfairly - and giving back money which was originally the poor’s in the first place.

But does wealth redistribution actually help society? Is it more beneficial to the rich than it is to the poor? Is it a cheap stunt used by politicians to get votes? In this article, we’ll examine the concept of wealth redistribution, its effect on the United States, and more importantly - how it effects your average taxpayer.

http://www.barackobamataxplan.com/obamas-wealth-redistribution/

Thought for the Day

"... judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy." Senator Sam Ervin (1896-1985) United States Senator NC-D (1954-1974)

American Catholicism's Pact with the Devil

In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork. They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/American-Catholicism-s-Pact-With-the-Devil

Daniel Hannan at CPAC 2012

Don’t repeat our mistakes… Europe is a grizzly image of the future towards which your present rulers are intent on taking you… Stick to the principles on which the republic was founded.” Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan gave a rousing speech at this year’s CPAC. Hannan not only seems to understand the importance of America as a beacon of freedom and opportunity more than many of our politicians, but he articulates it better than many of them as well. Watch the full speech below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U6v0pZ9f6k

Thought for the Day

Given the increasing dependence of the US citizenry on the federal government, Samuel Adams hit the nail on the head with this quote:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” – Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House on August 1, 1776.

The Depression You've Never Heard Of: 1920-21

It’s not that the government boosted the budget at a slower rate, or that the Fed provided a tad less liquidity. On the contrary, the government slashed its budget tremendously, and the Fed hiked rates to record highs. We thus have a fairly clear-cut experiment to test the efficacy of the Keynesian and monetarist remedies.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-depression-youve-never-heard-of-1920-1921/

Wall Street Couldn't Have Done It Alone

A letter to Occupy Wall Street by Sheldon Richman:

To Occupy Wall Street:

Wall Street couldn’t have done it alone. It takes a government and/or its central bank, the Federal Reserve System, to:

• Create barriers to entry for the purpose of sheltering existing banks from competition and radical innovation, then regulate for the benefit of the privileged industry;
• Issue artificially cheap, economy-distorting credit in order to, among other things, give banks incentives to make shaky but profitable mortgage loans (and also to grease the war machine through deficit spending);
• Make it lucrative for banks – and their bonus-collecting executives — to bundle thousands of shaky mortgages into securities and other derivatives with the knowledge that government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other companies, all subject to powerful congressmen looking for campaign contributions, would buy them after a government-licensed rating cartel scores them AAA;
• Inflate an unsustainable housing bubble by the foregoing and other methods, enticing people to foolishly overinvest in real estate.
• Work closely with lending companies to establish a variety of programs designed to lure people with few resources or bad credit into buying houses they can’t afford;
• Attract workers to the home-construction bubble, setting them up for long-term unemployment when the bubble inevitably burst;
• Implicitly guarantee big financial companies and/or their creditors that if they get into trouble they would be rescued;
• Compel the taxpayers to bail out those companies and/or creditors when the roof finally fell in.

No bank or group of banks could do these things on its own in a freed market. It takes a government-Wall Street partnership – the corporate state — to create such misery and exploitation.

So demonstrators, you are right. Something is dreadfully wrong. But your list of culprits is far from complete. So go ahead and protest outside Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. But also spend some time outside the White House, the Fed, the Treasury, and the Capitol Building. Together they are responsible for our current economic woes. These are the entities that control our fate and over which we have no real say. It’s time for things to change.

Greed without political power is boorish. Greed with political power is dangerous.

The freed market is the alternative to what you properly despise.

There is no free lunch, and there is no free birth control

Peter Schiff on the issue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U73xKgbXh68

USA Obituary - born 1776, died ?

In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of
Edinborough, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some
2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a
permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until
the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts
from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for
the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with
the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal
policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of
history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations
always progressed through the following sequence:

>From bondage to spiritual faith;
>From spiritual faith to great courage;
>From courage to liberty;
>From liberty to abundance;
>From abundance to complacency;
>From complacency to apathy;
>From apathy to dependence;
>From dependence back into bondage."

Although we are a Constitutional Republic, and not a democracy, the principle above still applies. The recent dependence of the US constituency on the government has grown substantially over the last 20 years. Nearly half of all Americans do not pay income tax. I think we have reached the apathy to dependency stage.

2012 Index of Dependence on Government

The great and calamitous fiscal trends of our time—dependence on government by an increasing portion of the American population, and soaring debt that threatens the financial integrity of the economy—worsened yet again in 2010 and 2011. The United States has long reached the point at which it must reverse the direction of both trends or face economic and social collapse. Yet policymakers made little progress on either front since the 2010 Index of Dependence on Government was published. Today, more people than ever before—67.3 million Americans, from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries—depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. Related to these disturbing trends, publicly held debt continued its amazing ascent without any plan by the government to pay it back.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/02/2012-index-of-dependence-on-government

Obamacare's latest victim Religious Freedom

The Obama Administration recently reaffirmed a rule under Obamacare that requires many religious employers to provide health care coverage for all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and related education and counseling. On the grounds that certain FDA-approved contraceptive methods can sometimes “cause the demise of embryos both after and before uterine implantation,” many groups also believe that the rule forces them to cover abortion.

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/02/morning-bell-obamacares-latest-victim-is-religious-freedom/

The Prescience of Thomas Jefferson

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world."

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."