Winners of Elbert County Republican Women’s Essay Contest meet Commissioners.
Archives for 2010
Bonniwell on Voorhis
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not the party of no
GOP Idea Man Charts Course For Solvency
By GEORGE F. WILL
Posted 02/05/2010 06:25 PM ET
In 2013, when President Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor, is counting his blessings, at the top of his list will be the name of his vice president: Paul Ryan. The former congressman from Wisconsin will have come to office with ideas for steering the federal government to solvency.
Not that Daniels has ever been bereft of ideas. Under him, Indiana property taxes have been cut 30% and for the first time, Standard & Poor’s has raised the state’s credit rating to AAA.
But in January 2010, Ryan released an updated version of his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a cure for the most completely predictable major problem that has ever afflicted America.
Some calamities — the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 — have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America’s Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
Funding entitlements — especially medical care and pensions for the elderly — requires reinvigorating the economy. Ryan’s map connects three destinations: economic vitality, diminished public debt, and health and retirement security.
To make the economy — on which all else hinges — hum, Ryan proposes tax reform. Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system. Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard.
It would have just two rates: 10% on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25% on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health care tax credit (see below).
Today’s tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice: Every wrinkle in the code was put there to benefit this or that interest. Since the 1986 tax simplification, the code has been recomplicated more than 14,000 times — more than once a day.
At the 2004 Republican convention, thunderous applause greeted George W. Bush’s statement that the code is “a complicated mess” and a “drag on our economy” and his promise to “reform and simplify” it. But his next paragraphs proposed more complications to incentivize this and that behavior for the greater good.
Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world’s second highest, would be replaced by an 8.5% business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive — and more able and eager to hire.
Medicare and Social Security would be preserved for those currently receiving benefits, or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today). Both programs would be made permanently solvent.
Universal access to affordable health care would be guaranteed by refundable tax credits ($2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families) for purchasing portable coverage in any state. As persons under 55 became Medicare-eligible, they would receive payments averaging $11,000 a year, indexed to inflation and pegged to income, with low-income people receiving more support.
Ryan’s plan would fund medical savings accounts from which low-income people would pay minor out-of-pocket medical expenses. All Americans, regardless of income, would be allowed to establish MSAs — tax-preferred accounts for paying such expenses.
Ryan’s plan would allow workers under 55 the choice of investing more than one-third of their current Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts similar to the Thrift Savings Plan long available to, and immensely popular with, federal employees. This investment would be inheritable property, guaranteeing that individuals will never lose the ability to dispose every dollar they put into these accounts.
Ryan would raise the retirement age. If, when Congress created Social Security in 1935, it had indexed the retirement age (then 65) to life expectancy, today the age would be in the mid-70s. The system was never intended to do what it is doing — subsidizing retirements that extend from one-third to one-half of retirees’ adult lives.
Compare Ryan’s lucid map to the Democrats’ impenetrable labyrinth of health care legislation. Republicans are frequently criticized as “the party of no.” But because most new ideas are injurious, rejection is an important function in politics. It is, however, insufficient.
Fortunately, Ryan, assisted by Republican representatives Devin Nunes of California and Jeb Hensarling of Texas, has become a think tank, refuting the idea that Republicans lack ideas.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=520346
perspectives
Of course, it is not fair to compare our current American democratic leaders with the Bolsheviks.Yes, they both use the same slogans in their speeches.
Yes, they both stir up envy and class warfare to distract from their failures.
Yes, both political movements sought control of the banks as the foundation for their new egalitarian vision.
And yes, they are both opposed to free speech, as was made clear by the reaction of American leftists to the recent Supreme Court decision.
But you would never find a Czar anywhere in the Soviet government.
By SVETLANA KUNIN
evenin’
9th Annual Essay Contest
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Sheriff Frangis’ Keynote Speech
Pat Tillman – An American Patriot
A Perfect Example Of An American Patriot
God Bless Our Troops – The Loyal Dedicated Soldier
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mornin’
Can caucus-o-crats become conservatives?
The tea party movement led the way back to fundamental conservative principles, a trend now shown to have legs. Will the Colorado Republican caucus club become born again conservatives? Will they send their RINOs packing? Will they give up their liberal ways? If they don’t, they’ll lose again.
Colorado Republicans Strain to Ride Tea Party Tiger
“In late November, hoping to avoid a primary fight in the governor’s race, Mr. Wadhams and Mr. McInnis introduced a “platform for prosperity,” echoing the language and demands of the Tea Party groups: less government intrusion, protecting states’ rights under the 10th amendment, opposition to federal stimulus bills.
But that was not enough for the Tea Partiers. They were angry that another candidate, Dan Maes, who has been endorsed by at least three Tea Party groups across the state, was excluded from the drafting of the platform.”
Thomas Sowell – Are Republicans “Due”?
“Minorities have been the biggest losers from numerous liberal policies promoted by the Democrats — whether in maintaining the monopoly of failing public schools for the sake of the teachers’ unions, restricting the building of housing for the sake of the environmentalists, turning criminals loose in minority communities for the sake of the American Civil Liberties Union and like-minded “progressives” or artificially expanding unemployment among minority young people with minimum wage laws.
All that needs to be explained — and explaining is what Republicans have been neglecting for years, except for Ronald Reagan, who knew that you can have your big tent and your principles at the same time, but only if you took the trouble to make your case to the public in plain English.
Republicans have the time to do some real homework on issues and on explaining issues. Whether they will use that time for that purpose is the big question for them — and for the country.”
Will GOP Hear Scott Brown’s Clear Message?
“An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. For the Ted Kennedy Democrats, that box has been a loser for decades. But for timid Republicans always on the defensive, now is the time to break out and adopt the Scott Brown theme.
This is what Reagan did. This is why the Gipper touted JFK’s across-the-board tax cuts. Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals, and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts.”
Saul Bellow
Op-Ed: Papuans and Zulus by Saul Bellow
Despots do not accept the autonomy of the literary imagination. Freedom of the imagination, dangerous to them, is related to the independence of the soul. This independence is not peculiar to artists, it is common to all human beings.
….In the U.S., we were protected in the past by a sense of humor. In the days of Mark Twain, of Mr. Dooley and H. L. Mencken, we were still able to kid ourselves. Mencken’s wicked jokes on Boobus Americanus — his term for the average man — had a salutary influence on the discussion of public questions and on public behavior. Sometimes crude, openly prejudiced but often very funny, he banged away at the professors, the politicians and the Jim Crow South. But fanatics and demagogues had far less influence in those pre-sensitive days. Child gangsters did not then kill the kids who “dissed” them.
Righteousness and rage threaten the independence of our souls.
Rage is now brilliantly prestigious. Rage, the reverse of bourgeois prudence, is a luxury. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority’s admission of guilt for past and present injustices, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and “justly” angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism.
As a onetime anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo.
We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.
As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
Saul Bellow, professor of literature at Boston University, won the Nobel Prize in 1976.
Pikes Peak region
a choice? a right?
This is not a right to choose. It’s a license for homicide.
Blood Confession – How Lying Marketers Sold America on Unrestricted Abortion – David Kupelian
“In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy, Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion and to videotape what happens.
“We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening,” he says.
“It was made into a film called The Silent Scream. It was shattering, and the pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering and pamphleteering into a high-tech argument. For the first time, the pro-life movement now had all of the technology and all of the smarts, and the pro-abortion people were on the defensive.”
Nathanson’s film provoked a massive campaign of defamation on the part of the pro-abortion movement, including charges that he had doctored the film. He hadn’t. “I was accused of everything from pederasty to nepotism. But the American public saw the film.”
In 1987 Nathanson released another, even stronger film called Eclipse of Reason, introduced by Charlton Heston. “The Silent Scream dealt with a child who was aborted at twelve weeks,” said Nathanson. `But there are four hundred abortions every day in this country that are done after the third month of pregnancy. Contrary to popular misconception, Roe v. Wade makes abortion permissible up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy. I wanted to dramatize what happens in one of these late abortions, after the third month.
“They took a fetuscope, which is a long optical instrument with a lens at one end and a strong light at the other. They inserted the fetus-cope into the womb of a woman at 19 1/2 weeks, and a camera was clamped on the eyepiece and then the abortionist went to work. [Read more…]
mau-maued savings and loan
IBD Editorials
The War On Banks
Posted 01/14/2010 06:50 PM ET
Financial Crisis: The White House wants to impose a stiff new tax on banks to punish them for their role in the financial meltdown. That’ll really get them lending again … won’t it? We have to admit we’re a little perplexed. The White House and Congress have complained over and over again about the banks’ “failure to lend” to get the economy moving. Yet they now want to impose massive new taxes on the industry through an Orwellian “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee” — supposedly to recoup TARP bailout funds and rein in bank risk-taking.
“When you try to value the degree of benefit that they received from this exceptional government assistance … this is essentially the least they could do,” a senior White House official told the Washington Post. Such thinking defies reason. The fee would add $90 billion to banks’ taxes over the next decade. And as we’ve noted repeatedly, anything you tax, you get less of. Tax the banks, you’ll get less lending. Guaranteed. Consumers will pay the “bank” tax, not banks. Moreover, suggesting that banks aren’t “paying back” is simply false. The TARP program doled out nearly $250 billion to the banks, many of which were forced to take the money. Yet, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner noted recently, the government expects to earn a $20 billion profit from its TARP loans. Compare that with the government’s own mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which, as of the third quarter, had a combined book value of negative $4.8 billion. Treasury has already injected $111 billion into Fannie and Freddie, giving it a real loss on a mark-to-market basis of $115.8 billion.
Nevertheless, Congress recently lifted the $200 billion caps on cash infusions to the two agencies. They are now entitled to unlimited funding to cover any level of continued losses. So who’s really losing money here? This is so destructive of our financial system that we can only think it must be intentional. Indeed, it’s been a long-held desire among those on the left to control the nation’s private financial system — to harness its massive amounts of capital as a funding source for their social-planning agenda.
To do that, they need a compliant banking sector — one that fears being pilloried for its admittedly bad behavior during the financial meltdown. That role is being played by the Financial Crisis Commission. This ad hoc group kicked off a year of hearings this week with a sideshow attack on bank executives — but not a word about Fannie and Freddie, the bankrupt government entities that caused the meltdown in the first place.
It gets worse. Also this week, the Justice Department announced that it would go after banks and mortgage lenders for “bias in lending.” Yet this is the very thing that led to the debacle that brought our financial system to its knees. In his latest book, “Architects of Ruin,” Peter Schweizer argues plausibly that all of this is part of a long-term campaign to give extreme-left “community activists” control of our banks. Starting in the 1960s, and spearheaded in Chicago by far-left “organizer” Saul Alinsky, it has worked like a charm. Today our banks seem terrified of being publicly mau-maued for supposed racial and class insensitivity. They dare not stand up for themselves.
As angry as Americans may be with the banks, they need to see these moves for what they are: An outrageous attempt to seize control of a private banking sector that needs profits to grow. If you cherish having a credit card, securing a home loan based on your ability to pay or getting money to start a small business, you will oppose this attack on banks with all your might.
abortion and the holocaust
In the latter days of World War II, the crematoriums in Germany burned 24 hours a day to dispose of Europe’s declared undesirables. Many Germans benefited economically from the redistribution of wealth and property from those undesirables, and from the occupied territories. The Reich kept the existence of the ovens quiet and attempted to destroy all evidence of them as the Allies advanced on positions where they had operated. At Dachau the American army found the crematorium wired with explosives and were able to defuse it before it could be blown up.
Though it took more than a decade for the status of the undesirables to deteriorate from persecution to extermination in the holocaust, in the end the linkage between extermination and the improvement of the average German’s economic status was firmly established.
A very similar linkage exists today with the practice of abortion sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and with the perpetuation of sexualized lifestyles in America and escape from the financial and liberty burdens presented by raising children.
The holocaust and abortion both involve mass death linked to benefits conferred upon a demographic majority. America, Russia and their allies defeated the culture of death that the Third Reich had become. Today, who will save America from the genocide it now perpetrates on the most defenseless of its own people?
Every baby should see a sunrise.
the matrix
David Kupelian, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell us Corruption Disguised as Freedom, Nashville, 2005. p. 183.
tea
My cup of tea today is Dong Ling with a spoonful of honey. It’s rumored to be medicinal. We’ll see if it turns the tide against the chest cold inhabiting my lungs since 2010 began. Leave out the honey and you won’t find a more bitter tea drink. It must be good medicine since it requires a spoonful of sugar, though I’ll have to wait for the outcome before I can say for sure.
Outcomes get short sheeted these days in politics. Politicians, their appointees, handlers and apprentices, devote themselves with great linguistic artistry to public products with no measurable outcomes. The art of government today is to a) get the money, to b) do the things you want, without c) creating any grounds for critical assessment of what you did.
Politicians in Congress, the Executive branch, and the Judiciary, at all levels of government from the local to the federal, skillfully parse out causes from effects. Like paints on a canvas, causes and effects are freely blended to fit social, economic, political, regulatory, judicial, and administrative theories as the need arises. This soup of ad-hoc connected parts and theories oozes out of the public bureaucracy to bind us with an endless stream of laws, orders and judgments, each layer more unfounded than its precedents.
As political men become more estranged from American reality, the passion employed by their defenders becomes more intense. Fanaticism goes up as reality fades.
In 2009, tea partying got serious. Tea partyers are a sober bunch of stakeholders in the American ideals that have guided our country to outcomes of success, peace, wealth, learning, growth, health, stability, strength, spirituality, accountability, morality and freedom. Tea partyers connect real causes to real effects. Their social, economic and political philosophies integrate to, and reflect reality. As a people connected to causation, they understand that reality has its limits. They know we live in a world of scarcity, of limited means and unlimited wants. They know that power corrupts people, and that governments are run by people.
Real causation radically departs from our modern political culture based on selling the illusion of unlimited means to the fulfillment of unlimited wants. Ironically, while attempting to satisfy all of men’s desires, modern politicians actually prevent the lasting accomplishments necessary to advance mankind’s condition and capacity. This happens because they force wealth into their unsustainable visions instead of the outcomes that free men would otherwise choose–outcomes that would actually produce something to improve the human condition.
The meaningful class divisions in America today are not between the rich and the poor, or the legal resident and the illegal alien, or between those covered by health insurance and those without health insurance (albeit who still have access to free health care.) All of those divisions are surmountable by free people acting within the bounds of the American constitutional system.
The key class division in America, not so easily overcome, is between those who create/consume (sell & buy) political illusions, and those who don’t. This boundary separates the brainwashed believers in statist myths from citizens with free minds. Multiple wars were fought in the 20th century over this division and some continue today. The statist disease is pernicious. It promises the easy buck and appeals to scammers and the get rich quick crowd.
The tea I’m drinking at the moment will not cure me because I want it to. Thousands of words of slick marketing, executive orders or tortured judicial reasoning will not change that fact. Neither will thousands of pages of incomprehensible legislation.
