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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; federal government</title>
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		<title>Rick Perry: Restore the 10th Amendment, Restore Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:54:47 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Former governor of the Lone Star State sheds light on the path to liberty at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Gov. Rick Perry’s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114532350" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>David, as we gather here for this 20th anniversary celebration of the Freedom Center, it was similar circumstances that this country found itself in when you had the first Restoration weekend in 1994. Two decades ago Republicans had swept into power in both of the Houses, a revolution that changed the balance of power for the first time, Cleta, in 40 years. Twenty years later, Republicans again have won historic victories in the midterm elections and once again we are controlling both houses of Congress. In addition to picking up eight seats in the U.S. Senate, we picked up at least a dozen House seats, three governorships, several state legislative chambers. Today, Republicans control 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. That is the most in the history of our party. And we stunned the pollsters. It was a beautiful thing. We stunned the pollsters even more than we stunned President Barack Obama, who apparently doesn&#8217;t realize that November 4 even happened. He&#8217;s too busy representing those who didn&#8217;t vote to listen to those who did vote. But even if he didn&#8217;t hear the message, the American people delivered one. They said enough of the slow growth tax policies, enough of the smothering debt, they said enough to this colossal bureaucracy that we&#8217;ve seen, and these agencies of government that all too often are unaccountable to the people. They rebelled against government-run healthcare schemes, against a President who refuses to secure the border, and against bureaucracies that are broken, arrogant and abusive of power. That&#8217;s what the American people said Tuesday. The American people made it clear. They want a clean break from the economic policies that have slowed our recovery at home, and the foreign policies that Jim did an incredible job of laying out that have weakened our standing abroad.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m here to say that a congressional majority is a terrible thing to waste. The power that has been newly granted by the people must be used wisely to serve the people, that it&#8217;s not good enough to state what we are against. We must articulate what we are for. The election results leave us with a truly once in a generation opportunity to usher in an era of renewal and reform. You are here tonight through your commitment to the Freedom Center, and you&#8217;re going to be on the front lines of this battle. One of the ideas that has returned to the fore of the conversation, to the forefront of people&#8217;s minds, if you will, is the proper place of states within our constitutional system. Indeed, we have spent the last six years challenging edicts out of Washington that amount to federal control of our classrooms, our healthcare, and our environment and our economy. Washington&#8217;s assault on state sovereignty and individual freedom is a well-documented assault on the Constitution and, in particular, the Tenth Amendment. Some have ridiculed the binding power of the Tenth Amendment, but, of course, Jay, without that amendment, the Bill of Rights would have been incomplete, and the Constitution would never have been ratified. The question is whether Republicans in Washington, now in control, will pursue Washington-centric solutions to the problems that plague us, or will they look to and empower the states.</p>
<p>It was the liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who called the states laboratories of democracy which &#8220;tried novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.&#8221; Yet Brandeis&#8217;s political descendants have forgotten that lesson. In fact, they flipped it around trying these grand experiments in federal power, ostensibly for the common good. I like that Tocqueville observed that in the American system the actions of the federal government would be rare, but the reality is the federal government is involved in all kinds of things the Constitution doesn&#8217;t empower it to do, while ignoring basic responsibilities like securing our border. And it&#8217;s the states that are pushing back against federal overreach and the courts are starting to take notice.</p>
<p>In the infamous Obamacare case of 2012, Chief Justice Roberts upheld the law, but the Supreme Court also struck down the mandatory Medicaid expansion as a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Now a new Obamacare case is about to be heard. It uses the letter of the law to challenge the federal government&#8217;s use of subsidies on many of these healthcare insurance exchanges. Now we know that the federal government overstepped its powers. We know that, partly because we know there is now a new smoking gun: One Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare. In less than a week&#8217;s period of time the Washington sin of prevarication has come to be known as &#8220;Gruber-ing.&#8221; He said repeatedly, I think, what is there now, six videos that we have, that the federal government had to lie to the voters because we are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for us. That shows exactly why the states are so important to defending individual freedom; because the states have stood up to the abuses of federal power in Obamacare. The law, as a matter of fact, it may collapse upon its own weight.</p>
<p>So if the states are these laboratories of democracy, I would suggest to you that Texas has found the formula for success. You know, it&#8217;s interesting, some people call it the Texas miracle, and I tell them, I said it&#8217;s not a miracle. I can&#8217;t explain a miracle. This I can explain. This is really pretty simple. This is not rocket science. You don&#8217;t spend all the money. Keep the taxes low, a regulatory climate that is fair and predictable, a legal system that doesn&#8217;t allow for over-suing, and accountable public schools so you&#8217;ve got a skilled workforce. This will work. It&#8217;ll work anywhere. Jay, it&#8217;ll even work in California, I swear to God, I&#8217;m telling you it will. And the results have been rather stunning. When you look at job creation, one-third, one-third of all the jobs created in the United States in the last 13 plus years have been in the Lone Star State. Over the last ten years, we have created four times more jobs than the state of New York, we have created nine times more jobs than the state of California. And some would say well it&#8217;s because you have all of that energy, and I will suggest to you we are glad we have that energy. America is glad we have that energy. But it&#8217;s not singularly the energy boom, that&#8217;s only part of the reason for our success. We&#8217;ve added jobs across the spectrum – 228,000 workers in education and healthcare, 156,000 in professional services, 162,000 in hospitality services, 130,000 in trade and transportation, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I am particularly proud of the fact that as of January of this year, Texas became the number one high-tech exporting state in the nation, passing up California and the famed Silicon Valley. And we&#8217;ve been continuing to reach out to give California companies the opportunity to relocate to the great state of Texas, companies like Toyota, who moved their North American headquarters to Plano this last year, companies like Space-X, and we&#8217;re going to keep doing it.</p>
<p>And my point is, I want the Golden State to succeed. We need California to be a powerful, successful country. That was a Freudian slip. We would really like to bring them into the United States and be a part of this country. You know, for ten consecutive years now, Chief Executive Officer magazine has chosen Texas as the number one state to do business, and, thanks to the governor of this state, Rick Scott, they are doing a good job to push us. Rick Scott is an extraordinary governor, and Floridians were really wise to put this man back into office again because he really understands what the future of our nation, the future of this state is all about, and the focus on creating that environment, where the citizens of this state will be free.</p>
<p>Freedom is what this is all about. It is in the pursuit of freedom, and, on average, there is a thousand people every day moving to the state of Texas because they are in pursuit of freedom. Freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. That is what needs to be the powerful Republican message as we go forward inside the boundaries of this country. And here are some of the results of those policies. Our crime rate is now the lowest that it&#8217;s been since 1968. We&#8217;re shutting prisons down in the state of Texas, not building them.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s the result of good, thoughtful public policy? There are those that would stand up and say you cannot have a growing economy and take care of your environment. That is an absolute false lie. Nitrogen oxide levels are down 63 percent in the state of Texas in the last decade, ozone levels are down by 23 percent during that same period of time, our carbon footprint which, by the way, is not a pollutant, but is down by 11 percent during that period of time because we understand that, even if it is, we want to make sure that we&#8217;re doing everything that we can to make that environment as pleasing as it can be for the future generations, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done in the state of Texas. Part of that&#8217;s been because of policies that we&#8217;ve put into place to move old polluting types of engines, diesel engines, out of the fleets. Part of it&#8217;s been moving to that natural gas. That&#8217;s what can happen all across this country. This isn&#8217;t a miracle. It&#8217;s a model and it&#8217;s a model that will work anywhere. We are an increasingly diverse state. We got a little of something for everybody. We have Austin, Texas. As I told you, we are a diverse state. I refer to it as the blueberry in the tomato soup. And, David, I encourage you to visit from time to time. You can talk philosophy and tenure to the professors at the University of Texas. They would love to have you.</p>
<p>But, in all seriousness, can we do more? Yes. Should we try to do more? Absolutely. But what Texas shows is that with a rapidly growing economy all else becomes possible. Clearly Texas is a model that works, but we&#8217;re not alone. America has just experienced a great test of governing principles. In the days leading up to the 2014 mid-term elections, we were told that Republican governors were in trouble. You read it everywhere. You saw it on multiple outlets. Scott Walker&#8217;s public union reforms in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback&#8217;s tax-cutting in Kansas, Rick Scott&#8217;s pro-growth policies in Florida, all were going to be punished by the voters. For example, the campaign for America&#8217;s future said that seven Republican governors were now &#8220;being judged harshly by voters now that their right-wing policies had failed to deliver.&#8221; It went on to say that these states were laboratories for the kind of small government trickle-down economics that Senate candidates hoped to bring to Washington, impose on the nation, and there is a real danger that the failed experiments in these seven states will be brought to Washington by a Senate Republican majority. But the experiment wasn&#8217;t quite over, and the voters decided in a very powerful conclusion on November 4. Not only did six of those seven governors win re-election, but Republicans picked up governorships in solid states for Democrats like Massachusetts, Illinois, and even Maryland. And there were a lot of people, a lot of people that were responsible for those Republican victories including a number of you, if not all of you, in this audience tonight. Yet in the end it was the people who decided. They told fellow Americans that the experiment and conservative governance is a resounding success and they want more of it.</p>
<p>There were a few places that bucked the trend though. Jay, your California being one of them. See, I tell people, I say California, for example, is as liberal as Texas is conservative. But that is not an argument against federalism. In fact, California is an example of how the state&#8217;s Tenth Amendment powers work for liberals too. You think about this. California has some policies that no other state in the union have tried, and in most other states, don&#8217;t want to try. Take cap and trade, for instance. I mean, not even Barack Obama, in those heady early days of his first administration, could pass cap and trade, but California has it. And it&#8217;s making new companies like Tesla a lot of money, even as it is at the same time forcing a lot of companies out of that state.</p>
<p>Nearly 20 years ago, California also became the first state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. In 2012, Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana entirely. This year Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia followed suit. The governor of Colorado said that he regrets it. Most conservatives oppose it. The federal government&#8217;s still fighting it, and the United Nations said this week that legalizing marijuana violates international law. But that is the beauty of the Tenth Amendment. I&#8217;m telling you, that is the beauty of federalism. If states can make their own decisions on matters of general policy, then we can have the kind of political diversity among the states that gives meaning to the pursuit of happiness. People can vote with their feet, they can vote with their pocketbooks, they can invest their dollars where they want, and that gives states an incentive to attract them, and to innovate. The reason welfare reform became so popular nationwide was because it succeeded in Wisconsin. The reason state provided healthcare is unpopular nationwide is they proved that it was costly in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Some states want to cling to policies for various reasons. California is addicted to spending. Therefore, it&#8217;s addicted to debt and taxes. So, there&#8217;s a result. It&#8217;s losing people, and entrepreneurs, and homeowners, and that is another benefit of federalism. You can do what you want in your state. But you are forced at some point to pay the costs.</p>
<p>So, how do we ensure that the states protect and, I might say, regain their Tenth Amendment rights? One way is by continuing to fight the encroachments of the federal government. Whether bad laws like Obamacare, bad spending like the stimulus of 2009, or bad faith in immigration policy, but beyond that we can take political action. We can show the American people concrete results, how states work better, how states compete against each other, and, I might add, better than the federal government could do. And that&#8217;s exactly how Governor-elect Larry Hogan over in Maryland, that was the point that he made. He laid out the data. He showed people in that state how many people had left the state, how many billions of dollars it was costing the state because of the bad policies. If we show people the difference between conservative policies and liberal policies, I happen to think they&#8217;re going to demand conservative policies almost every time just as they did last Tuesday. And when people understand, when people understand that they have the power to choose these policies, they&#8217;ll resist. They&#8217;ll resist any attempt by the federal government to take that power away. There is a reason that people and states are included together in that Tenth Amendment. Individual liberty has shone brightest when it&#8217;s been protected from big government. Only successful states are strong enough to protect our freedom from those in Washington who think they know better. States are the essence of our national motto e pluribus unum, from many one. That is the common creed of the David Horowitz Freedom Center that defends it every day. They defend it now and I will suggest to you they will defend it 20 years from now. And that is what each of us must fight for every day.</p>
<p>God bless you, and thank you all for coming and being a part of this.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Why Conservatives Have the Winning Argument</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 04:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[And why David Horowitz is a conservative champion.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240273" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nb-450x245.jpg" alt="nb" width="299" height="163" /></a>Why David Horowitz is a conservative champion:</p>
<blockquote><p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/42JK3ukEIbo" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Universal Pre-School Push</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obamas-universal-pre-school-push/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-universal-pre-school-push</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:40:50 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[The president seeks to add another statist layer to society. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obamas-universal-pre-school-push/state-of-union/" rel="attachment wp-att-178640"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-178640" title="State Of Union" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/130212_obama_state_of_union_speaking_ap_605.jpg" alt="" width="228" height="193" /></a>The first and most obvious question about the &#8220;universal preschool&#8221; idea President Barack Obama proposed in <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/12/transcript-obama-state-union-speech/">his State of the Union address</a> has to be: &#8220;How in the world did we ever survive without it?&#8221;</p>
<p>The answer, until the nation and its culture began losing its way during the 1960s and 1970s, is that we mostly did just fine. Rich or poor, most families contained a married couple that stayed together. Their children generally grew up to competent with the help of strong reinforcing support structures in our neighborhoods, churches and communities.</p>
<p>Now we largely don&#8217;t have intact families. We&#8217;re paying for this devolution dearly in more ways than I can hope to enumerate in a single column. But I will note the primary result: Too many of our children are not being raised in home environments conducive to healthy early (or later) development. I will also note why this has happened: For decades, government policies have discouraged marriage while encouraging family break-ups.</p>
<p>Now the same people who brought us 30 years of a welfare system which did those very things (until 1996, when welfare reform began to improve that situation, but only marginally, because the culture by then had changed so markedly for the worse), an urban education system which has been failing children for decades (with the rot spreading to the suburbs and exurbs faster than more people recognize), and urban neighborhoods which have become virtual battle zones, are offering yet another &#8220;solution&#8221; which won&#8217;t solve anything, and could possibly do significant harm. But it will expand the government&#8217;s power and influence, which is what all of this is really about.</p>
<p>In his speech before Congress, Obama treated the dispute over the real value of universal preschool the way the left has treated global warming &#8212; y&#8217;know, the thing that really hasn&#8217;t been happening <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/21/update-and-confirmation-of-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/">for the past 16 years</a> &#8212; i.e., as supposedly settled science:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8230; today, fewer than three in ten 4-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can&#8217;t afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. So, tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.</p>
<p>&#8230; Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than seven dollars later on, by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime. In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children &#8212; like Georgia or Oklahoma &#8212; studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is another one of those major exercises in statism which somehow won&#8217;t &#8220;increase our deficit by a single dime.&#8221; It can be said Obama is right in a sense. It will surely increase our deficit and the national debt by hundreds of millions, and probably more like billions, of dimes.</p>
<p>It is clear that Obama&#8217;s definition of &#8220;a high-quality preschool program&#8221; is one that lasts all day. &#8220;A few hundred bucks a week&#8221; means at least $10,000 per nine-month school year. A small percentage of parents nationwide pay that much (<a href="http://www.stcatharineschool.com/preschool/tuition">many pay far less</a>), and those who do are usually leaving their child in the care of others all day.</p>
<p>Thus, Obama has admitted, perhaps inadvertently, that he wants the nation&#8217;s children between roughly the ages of 3-1/2 and 5 years old housed all day long in what will surely be government-regulated and eventually effectively government-controlled situations.</p>
<p>Is there solid evidence that all-day preschool has lasting beneficial effects? Not really.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/02/20/universal-preschool-state-of-the-union/1934361/">USA Today editorial</a> on Wednesday, citing <a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/head_start_report.pdf">government-sponsored research</a>, noted that &#8220;intensive study of Head Start, the nation’s largest and oldest preschool program, finds that the beneficial effects, which are real, wear off by third grade,&#8221; because &#8220;for decades now, the American family has been breaking down.&#8221;</p>
<p>But it goes beyond that.</p>
<p>First, there are strong arguments relating to emotional attachment why many kids of preschool age shouldn&#8217;t be away from their parents for that long. The fact that this is so should not be seen as some kind of negative childhood trait.</p>
<p>Even more important, the driver behind the more aggressive preschool efforts is the belief that teaching children writing and math at an earlier age gives them a leg up in tackling their studies from that point forward. That premise seemed to be where Obama placed his emphasis in last week&#8217;s address. The trouble is, it erroneously assumes that preschoolers are ready for these tasks. From a strictly biological development standpoint, they&#8217;re often not.</p>
<p>David Elkind, at the time a professor of early childhood development at Tufts University, <a href="http://www.homeeducator.com/FamilyTimes/articles/13-6article5.htm">laid out the argument</a> against rushing academics in 2005:</p>
<blockquote><p>Those calling for academic instruction of the young don’t seem to appreciate that math and reading are complex skills acquired in stages related to age.</p>
<p>Children will acquire these skills more easily and more soundly if their lessons accord with the developmental sequence that parallels their cognitive development.</p></blockquote>
<p>The reality is that children have to be far along in developing general motor skills (e.g., working with blocks containing letters, numbers, and colors) before they can effectively work on fine motor skills (e.g., holding a pencil, writing letters, doing simple math calculations). Elkind pointed to research showing that attempts to force fine motor skill work onto kids before their general motor skills have been adequately honed will leave children frustrated, anxious, and perhaps demotivated.</p>
<p>Elkind noted why there is so much pressure for doing what has been shown not to work:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8230; the movement toward academic training of the young is not about education. It is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in what they regard as an increasingly competitive and global economy.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama&#8217;s attempt to capitalize on this anxiety to impose yet another statist layer on society is among his more cynical and potentially diabolical moves. The better solution is the harder one: Rebuild a culture of personal and parental responsibility.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Social Security: Even More Insolvent Than You Thought</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:35:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Blumer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[accounting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bankrupt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shortfall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172631</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Its actuaries have been blowing the calculations, and there is no “buffer.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/social-security-even-more-insolvent-than-you-thought/fe_da_intro_boostsocialsecurityslideshow/" rel="attachment wp-att-172644"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172644" title="FE_DA_Intro_BoostSocialSecuritySlideshow" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/FE_DA_Intro_BoostSocialSecuritySlideshow.jpg" alt="" width="230" height="167" /></a>At first, one doesn&#8217;t know whether to laugh or cry at research findings reported by two Ivy League profs <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/opinion/sunday/social-security-its-worse-than-you-think.html?_r=1&amp;">in a co-authored column</a> in the Sunday <em>New York Times</em> titled &#8220;Social Security: It’s Worse Than You Think.&#8221;</p>
<p>Actually, white-hot anger is more appropriate, given that what <a href="http://gking.harvard.edu/">Gary King</a>, a professor of government and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, and <a href="http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~ssoneji/">Samir S. Soneji</a>, a demographer and assistant professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, really told us, namely that the New Deal-era retirement system, thanks to its use of ossified actuarial calculations, is more insolvent than almost all of us knew.</p>
<p>The pair&#8217;s core finding, as presented in the <em>Times</em>: &#8220;[T]he Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out — to the tune of $800 billion by 2031.&#8221;</p>
<p>There are at least three justifications for feeling righteously outraged.</p>
<p>The first has to do with the delay between when King and Soneji originally reported their core findings to the academic community and when they deigned to let the rest of the country in on their virtual secret.</p>
<p>The pair&#8217;s research paper, &#8220;<a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0106-z/fulltext.html">Statistical Security for Social Security</a>,&#8221; reported that &#8220;Social Security, especially the OASI program, may be in a considerably more precarious position than officially thought&#8221; because the government&#8217;s actuaries are ignoring the financial implications of life expectancy increases due to &#8220;the steady decline in smoking,&#8221; which more than offset decreases relating to &#8220;the rapid rise in obesity.&#8221; The estimated net effect they reported in their paper was &#8220;$730 billion less in the OASI and SSDI (Old Age and Disability) Trust Funds&#8221; by 2031 (I will get to the &#8220;Trust Funds&#8221; fiction and the $800 billion/$730 billion discrepancy later in this column).</p>
<p>The paper first appeared in <em>Demography</em> <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SocSecPaperOnShortfall051712.png">on May 17, 2012</a>; the link from the their Sunday <em>Times</em> column <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13524-012-0106-z">to the web page</a> containing the paper&#8217;s abstract is labeled &#8220;August 2012.&#8221;</p>
<p>This means that King and Soneji had credible evidence that Social Security is in far worse shape than most of us thought well in advance of the November 2012 elections. Apparently, they made no special effort to bring their work to the nation&#8217;s attention, even though virtually any credible center-right news outlet would have been extremely interested in their findings. In their <em>Times</em> column, King and Soneji almost seem to crow about the fact that Social Security was not a contentious item in the presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: &#8220;It was a rare issue on which both men agreed — and both were utterly wrong.&#8221; Well guys, if you knew they were wrong, why didn&#8217;t you say anything?</p>
<p>Further blame assignment is in order. How could Romney&#8217;s largely Northeast-based advisers have missed the article&#8217;s publication? Isn&#8217;t setting up Google Alerts on key terms supposed to part of Campaigning 101? Though it appears that <em>Demography</em> has been coding its web pages <a href="http://link.springer.com/robots.txt">to avoid search engine detection</a>, a Google Web search <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=The+financial+viability+of+Social+Security%2C+the+single+largest+U.S.+government+program%2C+depends+on+accurate+forecasts+of+the+solvency+of+its+intergenerational+trust+fund.&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=zYrrUOD-C7G_0QGZz4H4Aw&amp;ved=0CCEQpwUoBg&amp;source=lnt&amp;tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A01%2F01%2F2012%2Ccd_max%3A09%2F01%2F2012&amp;tbm=">on the research paper&#8217;s first sentence</a> shows that it should not have escaped detection last summer.</p>
<p>A very sad and worse possibility which cannot be ruled out is that Team Romney learned of the research and didn&#8217;t believe that bringing up Social Security&#8217;s unprecedented decay <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/social-securitys-implosion-continues/">during Obama&#8217;s presidency</a> would be a good idea. As we have so often seen but Republican campaigns have failed to learn, timidity does not win elections.</p>
<p>The second reason for outrage is the government&#8217;s decades-long failure to modernize its actuarial methodologies. King and Soneji show that the system currently uses assumptions based on &#8220;a combination of linear extrapolation and qualitative judgments,&#8221; which, though they were the best available frameworks many years ago, are now dangerously outdated and divorced from reality. Unfortunately, this is all too typical of what happens when entrenched government bureaucracies simply go through the same processes year after year after year without giving adequate or sometimes even any thought to whether they could or should be improved.</p>
<p>This debacle would never have happened if Social Security&#8217;s trustees had been outsourcing their annual actuarial reviews to one of the industry&#8217;s leading firms. These organizations live or die on their ability to develop credible and state of the art mortality estimates for their private and public clients. Social Security&#8217;s trustees should make outsourcing this work in future years while ordering the firm selected to follow the best available practices one of their first orders of business. Odds are they won&#8217;t &#8212; and that if they try, Obama and Harry Reid&#8217;s Senate won&#8217;t let them.</p>
<p>The final source of outrage relates to King&#8217;s and Soneji&#8217;s fictional presentation of how Social Security supposedly works in their research paper, their <em>Times</em> column, and that column&#8217;s accompanying flowchart.</p>
<p>Sentences from each of the pair&#8217;s three documents will demonstrate that what they tell readers about the Social Security&#8217;s &#8220;trust funds&#8221; is an exercise in sheer fantasy:</p>
<p>• Their research paper engages in laughable historical revisionism: &#8220;As a result of payroll taxes that generated revenue in excess of annual benefit outlays over the last 25 years, the trust funds have amassed large surpluses in preparation for the aging population.&#8221;</p>
<p>• Among their column&#8217;s claims: &#8220;(The trust funds are) a $2.7 trillion buffer built in anticipation of retiring baby boomers &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>• They saved the worst howler for their column&#8217;s graphic: &#8220;Current workers’ payroll taxes go into the Social Security Trust Funds — a bank account for current and future beneficiaries &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>What rubbish. Jay Leno could use these assertions as jokes on <em>The Tonight Show</em> and have most of his audience rolling in the aisles.</p>
<p>The real facts are these:</p>
<p>• The &#8220;trust funds&#8221; consist almost entirely of IOUs from the rest of the federal government. Congress has taken Social Security&#8217;s annual surpluses and spent them on other things for decades.</p>
<p>• The rest of the government currently has a balance of $11.5 trillion in &#8220;<a href="http://www.savingsbonds.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np">debt held by the public</a>&#8221; (i.e., excluding &#8220;intergovernmental holdings&#8221; like the &#8220;trust funds&#8221;).</p>
<p>• Our supposed betters in Washington have run deficits of over $1 trillion during each of the past four years, and have added an even greater amount to the national debt during that time. Fiscal 2013, despite the fiscal cliff deal, appears to be on track to stretch that streak to five.</p>
<p>• Part of the government&#8217;s annual deficit now includes money needed to cover Social Security&#8217;s annual cash shortfalls, which, as King and Soneji have noted, began in 2010.</p>
<p>• Social Security&#8217;s ability to continue to pay benefits at current levels depends largely on the government&#8217;s ability to cover those annual cash deficits, which are projected to grow as far as the eye can see. Given that <a href="http://reason.com/24-7/2013/01/07/boehner-obama-insisted-we-dont-have-a-sp">Obama insists</a> that &#8220;we don&#8217;t have a spending problem,&#8221; there is substantial reason to believe that the government will not be able to cover those cash deficits several years from now.</p>
<p>The serious deterioration in Social Security&#8217;s viability we have seen in the past four years is partially due to the recession, but really has far more to do with the fact that the economy under Obama has failed to adequately recover from that recession. If the economy only grows by 2 percent per year, those paper entities known as the &#8220;trust funds&#8221; will run dry in an accounting sense well before 2031, perhaps by as much as a decade &#8212; assuming that the rest of the government&#8217;s finances don&#8217;t collapse sooner.</p>
<p>One indicator of how serious the system&#8217;s decay is can be seen in the fact that the $730 billion shortfall estimated in King&#8217;s and Soneji&#8217;s research paper ballooned to the $800 billion noted above in their <em>Times</em> column&#8217;s presentation. Though they may have refined their life expectancy data in the meantime, the higher number more likely occurred because their original paper used data from the 2011 Social Security Trustees Report containing calendar 2010 data, while their Times column instead used data from <a href="http://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2012/index.html">the 2012 report</a>.</p>
<p>Parting question: What kind of impact would the failure to consider the life expectancy estimation problems King and Soneji cited have on the financial projections for Medicare and ObamaCare? None of us should be surprised if the twenty-year impact on those programs runs to several trillion dollars.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Too Much College</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/too-much-college/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=too-much-college</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/too-much-college/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2012 04:03:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Higher Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[loans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pell grants]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[What has all that federal funding really accomplished?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/students.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-136075" title="students" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/students.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>In President Barack Obama&#8217;s 2012 State of the Union address, he said that &#8220;higher education can&#8217;t be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.&#8221; Such talk makes for political points, but there&#8217;s no evidence that a college education is an economic imperative. A good part of our higher education problem, explaining its spiraling cost, is that a large percentage of students currently attending college are ill-equipped and incapable of doing real college work. They shouldn&#8217;t be there wasting their own resources and those of their families and taxpayers. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>Robert Samuelson, in his Washington Post article &#8220;It&#8217;s time to drop the college-for-all crusade&#8221; (5/27/2012), said that &#8220;the college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it&#8217;s now doing more harm than good.&#8221; Richard Vedder — professor of economics at Ohio University, adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and director of The Center for College Affordability &amp; Productivity, or CCAP — in his article &#8220;Ditch &#8230; the College-for-All Crusade,&#8221; published on The Chronicle of Higher Education&#8217;s blog, &#8220;Innovations&#8221; (6/7/2012), points out that the &#8220;U.S. Labor Department says the majority of new American jobs over the next decade do not need a college degree. We have a six-digit number of college-educated janitors in the U.S.&#8221; Another CCAP essay by Vedder and his colleagues, titled &#8220;From Wall Street to Wal-Mart,&#8221; reports that there are &#8220;one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degrees.&#8221; More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, taxi drivers and salesmen. Was college attendance a wise use of these students&#8217; time and the resources of their parents and taxpayers?</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a recent study published by the Raleigh, N.C.-based Pope Center titled &#8220;Pell Grants: Where Does All the Money Go?&#8221; Authors Jenna Ashley Robinson and Duke Cheston report that about 60 percent of undergraduate students in the country are Pell Grant recipients, and at some schools, upward of 80 percent are.</p>
<p>Pell Grants are the biggest expenditure of the Department of Education, totaling nearly $42 billion in 2012.</p>
<p>The original focus of Pell Grants was to facilitate college access for low-income students. Since 1972, when the program began, the number of students from the lowest income quartile going to college has increased by more than 50 percent. However, Robinson and Cheston report that the percentage of low-income students who completed college by age 24 decreased from 21.9 percent in 1972 to 19.9 percent today.</p>
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		<title>Catholics vs. Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/suing-for-religious-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=suing-for-religious-freedom</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 23 May 2012 04:50:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Cardinal Dolan]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A lawsuit finds the administration on the losing side of a war it started with the Church. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/10041.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-132836" title="_10041" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/10041.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>On Monday, 43 Roman Catholic organizations <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/us/catholic-groups-file-suits-on-contraceptive-coverage.html">filed</a> lawsuits in a dozen different federal courts, challenging the Obama administration&#8217;s mandate requiring insurance coverage for &#8220;preventive health services&#8221; inimical to their faith. The litigation represents the latest stage of a battle that began January 20th, when the administration <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300627/mandate-war-george-weigel%23">announced</a> that the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would require Catholic institutions and individual Catholic employers to provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs to all of their employees. The Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services Departments are being sued by Jones Day, a law firm representing all the plaintiffs pro bono. “We have tried negotiations with the administration and legislation with the Congress &#8212; and we’ll keep at it &#8212; but there’s still no fix,” said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan in a statement.</p>
<p>Cardinal Dolan further <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505267_162-57438959/dolan-white-house-is-strangling-catholic-church/">illuminated</a> the Church&#8217;s position on &#8220;CBS This Morning&#8221; yesterday. &#8220;They tell us if you&#8217;re really going be considered a church, if you&#8217;re going to be really exempt from these demands of the government, well, you have to propagate your Catholic faith and everything you do, you can serve only Catholics and employ only Catholics,&#8221; Dolan said. &#8220;We&#8217;re like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry?&#8221;</p>
<p>Perhaps the best answer to that question would be Friday, February 10th, when the administration <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/catholic-bishops-criticize-new-contraception-proposal.html?_r=1&amp;ref=us">claimed</a> they would &#8220;accommodate&#8221; Catholic concerns with a &#8220;compromise,&#8221; whereby insurance providers would provide coverage for the disputed services. It was initially well received by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who called it “a first step in the right direction.” Twenty-four hours later the compromise was rejected. “In the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns,” the Bishops decided.</p>
<p>At that juncture, the administration managed to peel away some of the more left-leaning Catholic organizations, such as Catholic Charities, the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals across the country, as well as individual Catholic Democrats and other liberals who applauded the ostensible compromise. James Salt, executive director of Catholics United, a liberal advocacy group aligned with the administration, castigated the bishops, whose &#8220;blanket opposition appears to serve the interests of a political agenda, not the needs of the American people.” Apparently for Mr. Salt and other like-minded thinkers, it is Catholics who have a political agenda, not a federal government that mandates that they violate their religious beliefs.</p>
<p>During the next phase of the battle, a hopelessly compromised mainstream media not only took the Obama administration&#8217;s side on the issue, but amplified it into a &#8220;war on women.&#8221; A <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/the-vatican-vs-the-nuns-what-would-jesus-say/2012/04/24/gIQA7WzkeT_blog.html">column</a> by Sally Quinn claimed &#8220;Jesus would be rolling over in his grave if he hadn’t already left it,&#8221; because Vatican bishops issued a report critical of nuns who aligned themselves with President Obama on the issue of birth control mandates. The <em>New York Times&#8217;</em> Maureen Dowd was equally apoplectic. &#8220;It has become a habit for the church to go after women,&#8221; she wrote, further noting that church leadership &#8220;never recoiled in horror from pedophilia, yet it recoils in horror from outspoken nuns.&#8221; <em>OpEdNews</em> columnist Gregory Paul contended that &#8220;the Catholic patriarchy is engaged in a global conspiracy to deny women their reproductive rights.&#8221;</p>
<p>The common thread? Like so many progressives, these three and countless others believe the Church should accommodate a &#8220;more enlightened&#8221; (read progressive) ideology, even where that ideology is utterly antithetical to Catholic tenets. For genuine Catholics, that kind of reasoning is exactly backwards. Yet it is precisely this same backward reasoning that animates an Obama administration willing to &#8220;negotiate&#8221; its way around that part of the First Amendment that doesn&#8217;t fully &#8220;accommodate&#8221; ObamaCare.</p>
<p>Soon after that, the Catholic war on women became the Republican war on women. A Georgetown law student named Sandra Fluke got her 15 minutes of fame <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/03/lib-hero-sandra-fluke-free-birth-control-is-a-natural-human-right-i-wont-be-silenced/">bemoaning</a> the fact that the Catholic university didn&#8217;t provide her and her classmates with free birth control, further arguing that free contraceptives were &#8220;a natural human right.&#8221; Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius <a href="http://www.alternet.org/rss/1/676946/sebelius%253A_republicans_want_to_roll_back_the_last_50_years_of_women%255C%2527s_health_progress/">accused</a> Republicans of wanting to &#8220;roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America.&#8221; Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) trolled for campaign donations to counter Republicans&#8217; &#8220;unprecedented assault on women’s rights.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Stopping the EPA</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/susan-brown/stopping-the-epa/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stopping-the-epa</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2012 04:11:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Susan Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[EPA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[strait of hormuz]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[An eleventh-hour court ruling saved the day for struggling Americans. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/jackson-obama-epa.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-118261" title="jackson-obama-epa" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/jackson-obama-epa.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>An eleventh-hour ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. to delay an Environmental Protection Agency&#8217;s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) scheduled to go into effect January 1, 2012 saved the day for Americans who are doing their best to make ends meet in this struggling economy and cannot afford higher electricity bills.</p>
<p>The cost of CSAPR is extremely high according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released a December 31, 2011 statement claiming had the ruling not been blocked, CSAPR combined with other current and pending EPA regulations, would have raised consumers&#8217; electricity bills and jeopardized up to 1.6 million jobs &#8212; at a consumer cost of nearly $21 billion annually. Very much like the administration&#8217;s &#8220;jobs saved or created&#8221; verbiage, the administration makes &#8220;lives saved&#8221; or illnesses &#8220;prevented&#8221; claims on its EPA website. One can make a case for anything until, over time, facts prevail.</p>
<p>The delay buys Americans some time, and one can only hope it is enough time to get a new president in office to change the atmosphere in Washington. After all, don&#8217;t we have more pressing matters to attend to? Iran&#8217;s recent threat to seal off the Strait of Hormuz could, in effect, interrupt the shipment of nearly one-fifth of the world&#8217;s oil supply. And while Iran&#8217;s threat will likely remain just that, there is no time like the present to ratchet up domestic oil drilling and explore cleaner ways to produce energy from our own natural resources.</p>
<p>But it won&#8217;t happen on Obama&#8217;s watch. Nor will it happen until the EPA&#8217;s power is either reduced or nullified altogether. The Gulf Oil spill was a dream-come-true for many, in that the crisis gave the administration an excuse to tighten regulations and put a choke-hold on future production. There is no doubt, that when it comes to matters that truly matter to him, President Obama is an uncompromising ideologue. I recall no one, save a minute percentage of Americans, who wanted Obamacare, but we got it anyway &#8212; because the Democrat-controlled Congress handed it to him on a silver platter. Not to mention the Stimulus plan and the government takeover of banks and the automobile industry. He promised &#8220;fundamental change&#8221; and he meant what he said.</p>
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		<title>Government Lies and Gullible Americans</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/walter-williams/government-lies-and-gullible-americans/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=government-lies-and-gullible-americans</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/walter-williams/government-lies-and-gullible-americans/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2011 04:24:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cellphone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diving ban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal income tax]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[National Transportation Safety Board]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=117359</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the proposed federal cellphone-driving ban is another camel's nose under the tent. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Ban-on-cell-phone-while-driving.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117360" title="Ban-on-cell-phone-while-driving" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Ban-on-cell-phone-while-driving.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman has called for states to mandate a total ban on cellphone usage while driving. She has also encouraged electronics manufacturers — via recommendations to the CTIA-The Wireless Association and the Consumer Electronics Association — to develop features that &#8220;disable the functions of portable electronic devices within reach of the driver when a vehicle is in motion.&#8221; That means she wants to be able to turn off your cellphone while you&#8217;re driving.</p>
<p>With very little evidence, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration claims that there were some 3,092 roadway fatalities last year that involved distracted drivers. Americans ought to totally reject Hersman&#8217;s agenda. It&#8217;s the camel&#8217;s nose into the tent. Down the road, we might expect mandates against talking to passengers while driving or putting on lipstick. They may even mandate the shutdown of drive-in restaurants as a contributory factor to driver distraction through eating while driving. You say, &#8220;Come on, Williams, you&#8217;re paranoid. There are already laws against distracted driving, and it would never come to that!&#8221; Let&#8217;s look at some other camels&#8217; noses into tents.</p>
<p>During the legislative debate before enactment of the 16th Amendment, Republican President William Taft and congressional supporters argued that only the rich would ever pay federal income taxes. In fact, in 1913, only one-half of 1 percent of income earners were affected. Those earning $250,000 a year in today&#8217;s dollars paid 1 percent, and those earning $6 million in today&#8217;s dollars paid 7 percent. The 16th Amendment never would have been enacted had Americans not been duped into believing that only the rich would pay income taxes. It was simply a lie to exploit American gullibility and envy.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that the founders of our nation so feared the imposition of direct taxes, such as an income tax, that Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says, &#8220;No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.&#8221; It was not until the Abraham Lincoln administration that an income tax was imposed on Americans.</p>
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		<title>Bureaucrats Paid for Not Working</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/tait-trussell/bureaucrats-paid-for-not-working/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bureaucrats-paid-for-not-working</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/tait-trussell/bureaucrats-paid-for-not-working/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:00:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tait Trussell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bureaucrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tax dollars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=116349</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's egregious executive order diverting federal money to unions. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/high-level-chic-bureaucrat.n.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-116429" title="high-level-chic-bureaucrat.n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/high-level-chic-bureaucrat.n.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a></p>
<p>By today’s standards, the amount of misused money is not large, it’s the practice that offends the sensibilities of any taxpayer aware of it. The practice is: paying federal employees <a href="http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/12/08/the_feds_pay_bureaucrats_137myear_not_to_work_99408.html">not to work</a>. The federal government paid employees $137 million for not doing their jobs. This was for the year 2010. For the previous year bureaucrats were paid only $129 million for not working. &#8220;How could his be?&#8221; you well may ask. This is happening while the federal government is doubled over with the load of a $1.3 billion deficit on its back.</p>
<p>This startling information was revealed by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of RealClearMarkets. Her revelation is being picked up by other publications as well.</p>
<p>The government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) reported that these non-working workers were, instead, busy acting as representatives of government unions. Some bureaucrats are hindered by a mentality which dictates that one has to put one’s shoulder to the wheel where the effort is most vital to one’s interests.</p>
<p>The time spent by these federal employees not working for us taxpayers is called by the grandiose label “official time.” According to the account by Furchtgott-Roth, the OPM explained that “official time is time spent by federal employees performing representational work for a bargaining unit in lieu of their regularly assigned work.”</p>
<p>So, when a federal worker is yawning and stretching in boredom and apparently doesn’t have anything important to do, the union-appreciative bureaucrat can be elected or appointed as a “union representative.” This grants the person the special privilege of still collecting the pay for what they were hired to do, but spending their time giving their all for a union—and there are plenty of unions.</p>
<p>All 59 executive departments and agencies, as well as the Government Printing Office and the Capitol Police, have employees representing their interests. The <a href="http://www.opm.gov/lmr/OfficialTimeUsage2009.pdf">OPM report</a> for 2009 said nearly 5 million “official time” periods were listed in that year. Each employee used about 4 percent of his or her time in this union work (instead of the job supposedly being done for the taxpayers).</p>
<p>“Labor organizations and collective bargaining are in the public interest,” said the OPM report. President Obama reinforced that concept with an Executive Order (No. 13522), I found. In that order, Obama enunciated his feelings about government unions with the words that they “will improve the productivity and effectiveness of the federal government.” How that is possible may remain one of the many mysteries of the Obama Administration.</p>
<p>These “union representatives” still collect not only their regular salary but also various generous fringe benefits, including, of course, medical benefits, which many private-sector workers “no longer receive,” as Furchtgott-Roth points out.</p>
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		<title>A New Era of Responsibility?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/vasko-kohlmayer/a-new-era-of-responsibility/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-era-of-responsibility</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:00:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vasko Kohlmayer]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[billions of dollars]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49343</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[President's proposed 2011 budget is a fiscal sham.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/obamaj.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49453" title="obamaj" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/obamaj-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>“We will continue to go through the budget, line by line, page by page, to eliminate programs that we can&#8217;t afford and don&#8217;t work,” declared President Obama in his State of the Union address on January 27.</p>
<p>Five days later the president delivered his Fiscal 2011 budget to the US Congress. This he did to much fanfare, seeking to cast it as a product of fiscal prudence. In the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/budget/03_Presidents_Message.pdf">message</a> that accompanied the document, he stated:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The Budget includes more than 120 programs for termination, reduction, or other savings for a total of approximately $23 billion in 2011, as well as an aggressive effort to reduce the tens of billions of dollars in improper Government payments made each year.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>At first sight this may look like the work of an earnest waste cutter. It is, however, nothing of the sort. The $23 billion of “savings” is actually only about one half of one percent of the $3.84 trillion total.</p>
<p>A question for the president: Is one half of one percent all the waste you can find in the federal government? After all, it is an institution whose financial profligacy is legendary. Should we assume, Mr. President, that all of the remaining 99.5 percent is spent wisely and un-wastefully?</p>
<p>It goes without saying that most of the meagre $23 billion will never be cut. Those involved with the agencies and programs slatted for reductions will make sure of that. Claiming that their work is indispensable for the well-being of the nation, they will make a hysterical run on Capitol Hill where their cause will receive much sympathy. When all is said and done most of their budgets will not only be restored, but many will walk away with increases.</p>
<p>But here is the larger point. By calling the proposed $23 billion of cuts “savings,” the administration makes it sound as if the government&#8217;s expenditures would go down by this amount vis-à-vis last year&#8217;s levels.  This, however, is not the case. The proposed $3.84 trillion budget represents a three percent plus increase over the 2010 total. So even as ordinary Americans are forced to cut back on their consumption, the federal government&#8217;s voracious appetite for spending continues to grow unabated. Needless to say, we can ill afford it. As a consequence, the government will post a deficit of $1.25 trillion, which will represent more than 8 percent of the nation&#8217;s GDP. These abysmal figures, however, have done nothing to detract from the president&#8217;s sense of humor. He chose to unveil his budget under the motto “a new era of responsibility.”</p>
<p>But all this is still apparently not enough for some of the president&#8217;s friends on Capitol Hill. Shortly after he introduced his 2011 budget proposal, Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/79039-clyburn-weve-got-to-spend-our-way-out-of-this-recession">opined</a> that looking for any more savings would only make things worse. “We&#8217;re not going to save our way out of this recession. We&#8217;ve got to spend our way out of this recession,” he said.</p>
<p>The insanity of this should be obvious to all. It is simply impossible to spend our way out of trouble when we are so deeply in debt already. Spending more will only make things worse. Having incurred astronomical debts, we are still able to borrow at low rates because of the dollar&#8217;s status as the world&#8217;s reserve currency. But this situation will sooner or later come to an end. In another sign that the day of fiscal reckoning is approach fast, Moody&#8217;s Investor Services <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a82cfe04-10f5-11df-9a9e-00144feab49a.html">warned</a> that at some point it may be forced to lower America&#8217;s triple A credit rating. The reason for this? The unrestrained spending of the federal government. Steven Hess, senior credit officer at Moody’s, told the <em>Financial Times</em> that the budget outlook submitted by the Obama administration last week “did not stabilise debt levels in relation to gross domestic product.” It would be interesting to hear the spend-happy James Clyburn comment on that one.</p>
<p>Needless to say, losing the triple A rating would have a devastating effect on this nation&#8217;s finances as it would make servicing the national debt far more expensive. The only way to avert this outcome is by slashing spending and cutting deficits. Unfortunately, those in charge lack the political will to do so. Instead of offering real solutions, the president tries to posture as a fiscal hawk while proposing laughable savings of one half of one percent. As if this was not bad enough, the third most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives thinks that cutting further would be outright harmful.</p>
<p>Even as Obama and Clyburn were talking up the proposed budget, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer worked quietly behind the scenes to line up votes to raise the <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hEkfx_bpGC-zVoeKNR38gWLcjXdw">debt ceiling</a> by another $1.9 trillion. The effort to pass the record hike was triggered by the Treasury&#8217;s warning that the national debt is on the track to hit $14.3 by the end of this month. If the Treasury&#8217;s estimate is correct, the national debt will have grown by more than one third in less than thirteen months of Obama&#8217;s term. This expansion of national indebtedness is as astounding as it is unprecedented. But if this should frighten you there is no need to worry, because we have just entered “a new era of responsibility.”</p>
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		<title>On the Road to Trouble</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/vasko-kohlmayer/on-the-road-to-trouble/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=on-the-road-to-trouble</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:00:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vasko Kohlmayer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47504</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How will our government pay all its debts?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47507" title="road" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/road.jpg" alt="road" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>“Is America&#8217;s Financial Collapse Inevitable?” asks the title of a recent <a href="http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&amp;pageId=122030">piece</a> by Patrick Buchanan. The article points out something we have repeatedly discussed here: There is no way the federal government can meet its financial obligations.</p>
<p>If our government were ever to do so, it would first have to eliminate its colossal deficits. For this to happen deep budget cuts would be required. But this is something that is not conceivable in today&#8217;s environment. We will understand why when we look at the largest budget items, which are Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, defense and interest on the debt. Since these constitute the bulk of government expenditures, any meaningful deficit reduction would require that substantial cuts be made there. The problem is that all of the above are for all practical purposes untouchable.</p>
<p>Interest on the debt is out of question, since not paying it in full would put our federal government in default. This cannot be allowed to happen as it would result in the immediate collapse of our currency. As far as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are concerned, no elected official will touch them with a ten foot pole, since doing so would mean political suicide. When it comes to defense the prospect of any reductions is likewise nil. The ongoing operations in Iraq, our deepening commitment in Afghanistan as well as numerous challenges presented by the War on Terror make any deep cuts a practical impossibility.</p>
<p>But what about taxes? Could they not be raised to increase revenue and close the budget gap that way? To begin with, any sharp hikes are out of question for the increasingly unpopular president who pledged during the campaign not to raise taxes on the middle class. To even suggest such a thing would be politically precarious if not suicidal. But even if Obama would somehow managed to do it, higher taxes would only further depress the already-overtaxed and over-regulated economy. This would in turn shrink the tax base and forestall the possibility of higher revenue intake.</p>
<p>Buchanan asks how are we ever going to get a handle on our runaway finances if “taxes are off the table, Afghan war costs are inexorably rising and cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and entitlement programs are politically impossible.” There is, of course, no satisfactory answer. The truth is that our government is not going to get its fiscal house in order. And even though Buchanan does not state so explicitly, the implied answer to his starting question – is America&#8217;s financial collapse inevitable – is “yes.”</p>
<p>Pat Buchanan is not alone suffering from dark premonitions. Last week legendary investor and market commentator Marc Faber pulled no punches when asked what he thought of America&#8217;s prospects. “We are doomed,” was his <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-marc-faber-we-are-doomed-2010-1">response</a>. The reason for his bleak assessment? The immense and rapidly growing indebtedness of the federal government. In addition to all the other problems, Faber predicts that the rate interest that the government has to pay on the debt will shoot up rapidly in the next few years. Last year interest claimed about 12 percent of the government&#8217;s tax revenue. Faber estimates that within five years the figure will climb to some 35 percent. It goes without saying that such a jump would have a devastating impact on the already overextended federal budget.</p>
<p>Marc Faber is not the only one who worries about this. It has been pointed out by a number of finance experts that up until now the federal government has been able to borrow at very low rates due to the dollar&#8217;s status as the world&#8217;s reserve currency. But there are clear signs that this favorable situation is coming to an end. Sensing that the US will not be able to make good on its debt, governments and investors have been growing increasingly wary of financing our borrowing by buying treasuries. But even as they plead with Washington to end its spendthrift ways, they have been earnestly searching for an alternative to the dollar. Admittedly, this is no easy task, since there is no major government today that can be trusted to conduct its fiscal affairs in a way that would guarantee a stable currency.</p>
<p>It would seem that long-term currency stability is not a realistic possibility in the era of central banking. This is because politicians will invariably exploit the looseness of fiat money to satisfy their insatiable spending urges. But the advantage is only temporal. In the end there is always a price to pay for spending more than one has. This applies to everyone including sovereign governments. In their case the price that is paid is the depreciating currency as central banks print money in order to pay for politicians&#8217; promises. It is paradoxical that the brunt of this is born by ordinary people and not by those who are most directly responsible for the situation. While politicians keep promising and getting elected, the population bears the cost as the real value of their assets and savings decreases with the depreciating currency. This is the situation that we see taking place in this country today.</p>
<p>It may be objected that the people themselves are ultimately responsible, because they vote for politicians who promise all those expensive programs. Perhaps so. There are, however, encouraging signs that the American people are becoming increasingly aware of where the problem lies. In what amounted to a referendum on President Obama&#8217;s expansive agenda, the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts showed that even a left-leaning electorate can grow wary of government&#8217;s ability to provide and finance massive undertakings such as national healthcare. Another sign of shifting sentiment can be detected in a recent Washington Post ABC News <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/59933">poll</a> which asked this question: “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?” Only 38 percent wished for a larger government with more services while 58 percent wanted a smaller government with fewer services.</p>
<p>This is good all news, but it still does not solve that <a href="http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/ba662.pdf">$100 trillion question</a>: How is our government going to pay for all the massive obligations that it has so unadvisedly assumed?</p>
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