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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Spending</title>
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		<title>Budget Battle Royale</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/budget-battle-royale/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=budget-battle-royale</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/budget-battle-royale/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:25:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cromnibus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[omnibus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vote]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247279</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The “CRomnibus" bill pushes through. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141027-electionpoll-editorial.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247280" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141027-electionpoll-editorial-450x300.jpg" alt="As Deadline On Debt Reduction Impasse Looms, Super Committee Meets Over Weekend" width="353" height="235" /></a>Thursday was filled with chaos in the capital. By a razor thin margin, the Republican-controlled House voted in favor of the $1.1 trillion “CRomnibus” funding bill. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was forced to cajole conservative GOPers to switch their votes after it appeared it was headed for defeat earlier in the day. All of the machinations were aimed at preventing a government shutdown beginning at midnight.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">For a brief moment in time early Thursday, the nay votes outnumbered the yeas for the current <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/11/Boehner-Omnibus-Bill-Size-Grows-An-Extra-171-Pages-Overnight-Now-1774-Pages-Long"><span style="color: #1255cc;">1,774-page bill</span></a> allocating $1.01 trillion of federal spending for FY2015. That’s because conservative Republicans remain infuriated by the reality ObamaCare remains <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/12/09/whats-in-the-spending-bill-we-skim-it-so-you-dont-have-to/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">fully funded</span></a>, save for a $10 million budget cut for Independent Payment Advisory Board, and the president’s executive amnesty program remains funded until February. Nonetheless, $948 million has been allocated for the Department of Health and Human Service’s (DHS) unaccompanied children program, increasing that budget by $80 million, and another $14 million is aimed at helping school districts absorb new immigrant students. Adding insult to conservative injury, the State Department is on track to receive $260 million to assist the Central American countries responsible for the onslaught of children crossing the Southwest border over the summer.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“The fix is in, which I’ve been saying all along,” <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/10/Conservatives-Express-Anger-That-Amnesty-Not-Defunded-In-Omnibus-The-Fix-Is-In"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) following the Republican conference Wednesday morning. “Promises around here&#8211;regardless of who they are made by&#8211;don’t seem to mean anything,” he added, further explaining that lawmakers’ phones have been “lighting up” with constituents asking them to “do what [they] were elected to do.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Salmon was one of sixteen Republicans, including Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Dave Brat (R-VA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Broun (R-GA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), Walter Jones (R-NC), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Steve King (R-IA), Raul Labrador (R-ID), Tom Massie (R-KY), Bill Posey (R-FL), and and Steve Stockman (R-TX) who refused to accommodate GOP leadership on the debate vote.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Democrats were equally resistant, with most of their opposition aimed primarily at two riders. The <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/226788-dems-to-boehner-change-the-bill"><span style="color: #0433ff;">first one</span></a> waters down the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, allowing Wall Street banks to trade the risky derivatives banned by that bill. The second provision allows wealthy political donors to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/12/09/spending-deal-would-allow-wealthy-donors-to-dramatically-increase-giving-to-national-parties/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">dramatically increase</span></a> the amount of money they can donate to national political parties. &#8220;Stakeholders from across the progressive community&#8211;including the AFL-CIO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Public Citizen, Communications Workers, Common Cause, and many others&#8211;have expressed their opposition to passing a funding bill that includes these dangerous provisions,” said leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who were urging Democrats to vote no.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet many Democrats remained ambivalent due to the 2014 election that eliminated their Senate majority and increased Republican numbers in the House. While they don’t like the CRomnibus, some see it as their last chance to exert any influence over spending while they still retain their Senate majority. Furthermore, they were all aware of the reality that if the bill failed, GOP leadership was prepared to move forward with a shorter alternative.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">President Obama offered his support for the package both <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/226817-white-house-signals-support-for-cromnibus-ahead-of-critical-vote"><span style="color: #1255cc;">before</span></a> and <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/113/saphr83h_20141211.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">shortly after</span></a> the vote took place. GOP leadership needed 50-60 Democrats to make up for the likely conservative defectors in their own party, and it appeared the president was well aware of that reality.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet even as Obama expressed his support, several Senate Democrats <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/226824-liberal-senators-threaten-to-oppose-omnibus"><span style="color: #1255cc;">rallied</span></a> around Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), viewed by many as that party’s newest star, to express their opposition to the aforementioned provisions for Wall Street and political donors. &#8220;It’s a very black mark on the omnibus if it comes over to the Senate with that in it. I certainly would consider voting no on it,&#8221; said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR). Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also contended there would be a “problem” if the current language on Dodd-Frank remained intact. Warren remained adamant. “A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street,” she insisted.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Warren might have a tad more credibility were it not for the reality that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two lending giants at the center of the housing meltdown, will once again be <a href="http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2014/12/09/mortgage-down-payments"><span style="color: #1255cc;">offering</span></a> 3 percent down payments on mortgages to “qualified” home buyers. Those would be the same Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae left <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/272368/dodd-frank-s-fannie-trap-john-berlau"><span style="color: #1255cc;">untouched</span></a> by Dodd-Frank.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Two upsides for conservatives in the package includes a $60 million cut in the EPA’s budget to $8.1 billion. That brings the agency’s budget down a total of 21 percent since 2010, and staffing to its lowest level since 1989. The IRS also takes a $345.6 million hit, and the bill includes a future ban on their now infamous efforts to target organizations seeking tax-exempt status based on their ideological beliefs.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">At 2 p.m. the drama intensified, when House leaders <a href="http://www3.blogs.rollcall.com/218/lacking-sufficient-support-house-gop-leaders-delay-cromnibus-vote/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">called</span></a> for a recess instead of a vote, with a GOP aide insisting “leadership teams are still talking to their respective members. We still plan to vote this afternoon,” the aide added. At that point, whether they were voting on the CRomnibus package or a short-term Continuing Resolution remained unclear. The delay indicated GOP leadership was having trouble corralling enough of their own membership, while Nancy Pelosi sought to undercut support by Democrats and Obama with a fiery floor speech, saying she was “enormously disappointed” with the Obama administration.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ironically, it was a Tea Party congressman defeated by the GOP establishment who <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/394438/reindeer-farmer-saves-boehner-dramatic-procedural-vote-joel-gehrke"><span style="color: #1255cc;">managed</span></a> to get Boehner past the initial hurdle. With the vote tied at 213-213, Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) change his no vote to a yes. The outgoing reindeer farmer saved Boehner from enduring a major embarrassment that not only had forced Boehner to cast a vote himself (a rarity), but forced him to keep the vote going after time had officially expired. Frustrated Democrats shouted, “Call the vote,” but the Speaker ignored them until he got the result he wanted.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Irrespective of that vote, Obama’s immigration excesses and the healthcare bill remain sticking points for the GOP. Regarding immigration, GOP leadership <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/226737-government-shutdown-would-not-stop-obama-action-on-immigration"><span style="color: #1255cc;">posits</span></a> they’ll be better positioned to take on de facto amnesty a month from now, when they get their Senate majority and larger share of the House. “If you’re gonna start a bar fight, start it when you’ve got as many friends in the bar as you can possibly have. Why would you start it now?” said Boehner ally Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK). A leadership aide echoed that contention, insisting the GOP has an “array of legislative and legal options” they can employ—without specifying any of them. The two flies in the proverbial ointment include an Obama veto, and regardless of funding or lack thereof, how many DHS workers could be deemed “essential,” preventing them from being furloughed. That’s why conservative GOPers preferred to fight using the entire budget as a hammer.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">ObamaCare is a different story. Obama still has veto power, but several Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Harry Reid (D-NV), have <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/04/after-midterm-drubbing-senior-dems-voicing-regret-over-obamacare/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">expressed</span></a> regret regarding its passage, and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber embarrassed himself <a href="http://qpolitical.com/thats-the-best-you-got-trey-gowdy-embarrasses-gruber-on-his-insulting-comments-about-americans/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">during</span></a> testimony on Capitol Hill. There was also <i>another</i> video released yesterday in which he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/11/in-a-new-video-jon-gruber-boasted-that-he-helped-write-obamacare/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">claimed</span></a> he “helped write” the bill. Moreover, the Supreme Court is <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/health-care/how-the-supreme-court-can-kill-obamacare-without-overturning-it-20141117"><span style="color: #1255cc;">poised to rule</span></a> on <i>King v. Burwell, </i>a case where the plaintiffs contend only healthcare exchanges “established by the state” can provide IRS tax subsidies to ObamaCare enrollees. If the Court rules according to the law as written, the roughly 4 to 5 million people now receiving financial assistance would lose it in the 36 states that didn’t set up their own exchanges. And the law, as <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/poll-obamacare-approval-112948.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">unpopular as ever</span></a> with the public, would essentially be gutted. All of this may provide impetus for a bipartisan effort to make majors changes to the law—even changes that might garner enough support to override a veto by Obama.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">At around 5:30 p.m. Democrats <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/2015-gop-budget-back-up-plan-113498.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">convened</span></a> a closed meeting to discuss the bill following a series of phone calls from Obama and Vice President Biden, urging party members to vote for it. Pelosi remained against it, insisting Republicans &#8220;don’t have enough votes,” while GOP leadership indicated they could either pass a three-month stop-gap measure avoiding a shutdown, or a weeklong measure giving Boehner more time to marshal support. “We expect the bill to pass with bipartisan support today, but if it does not, we will pass a short-term CR to avoid a government shutdown,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The American public? <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/11/amnesty-protestors-crash-capitol-hill-switchboard/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Jamming</span></a> the congressional switchboard with calls most likely opposed to even a temporary funding of Obama’s de facto amnesty, much like a similar wave of calls opposing immigration legislation attempted by both parties in 2006 and 2007.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the end, the status quo—the member-added pork, the absurd outlays for outrageous inanities, the deficit spending adding to a national debt that now tops $18 trillion, and the public-insulting passage of bills unread by the people who pass them—remains undisturbed. The express train to fiscal oblivion, in a country where national sovereignty is becoming an anachronism in pursuit of cheap labor and cheap votes, and the concerns of the elitist few overwhelm those of an outraged public deemed too “stupid” to know what’s good for them, remains on track.</p>
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		<title>America: Unprepared for War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/america-unprepared-for-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-unprepared-for-war</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/america-unprepared-for-war/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Aug 2014 04:49:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's determination to downsize the military -- and its catastrophic consequences.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/4401592829_ddb5cd5dd5.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237966" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/4401592829_ddb5cd5dd5-450x326.jpg" alt="4401592829_ddb5cd5dd5" width="283" height="205" /></a>A bipartisan <a href="http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/Ensuring-a-Strong-U.S.-Defense-for-the-Future-NDP-Review-of-the-QDR_0.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">critique</span></a> of the Obama administration’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) by the National Defense Panel is a devastating takedown of the administration’s determination to reduce America’s military to <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/military-spending-cuts/pentagon-set-slash-military-pre-world-war-ii-levels-n37086"><span style="color: #1255cc;">pre-WWII</span></a> levels. “Since World War II, no matter which party has controlled the White House or Congress, America’s global military capability and commitment has been the strategic foundation undergirding our global leadership,” the report states. &#8220;Given that reality, the defense budget cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011, coupled with the additional cuts and constraints on defense management under the law’s sequestration provision, constitute a serious strategic misstep on the part of the United States.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The report emphasizes the myriad number of threats of which most Americans are well aware, including “a troubling pattern of assertiveness and regional intimidation on China’s part, the recent aggression of Russia in Ukraine, nuclear proliferation on the part of North Korea and Iran, a serious insurgency in Iraq that both reflects and fuels the broader sectarian conflicts in the region, the civil war in Syria, and civil strife in the larger Middle East and throughout Africa.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Other threats include the &#8220;rapidly expanding availability of lethal technologies to both state and non-state actors; demographic shifts including increasing urbanization; diffusion of power among many nations, particularly rising economic and military powers in Asia; and heated competition to secure access to scarce natural resources.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It further noted that the shrinkage of U.S. forces, resulting from the severe budget cuts imposed on our fighting forces constitutes a “serious strategic misstep on the part of the United States,” and that force levels in the president’s QDR are “inadequate given the future strategic and operational environment.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The panel was also critical of the president’s reduction of the nation’s global mission has long enabled the military to fight two wars simultaneously, to one where we are capable of defeating one enemy while keeping another one in check. “We find the logic of the two-war construct to be as powerful as ever and note that the force sizing construct in the 2014 QDR strives to stay within the two-war tradition while using different language. But given the worsening threat environment, we believe a more expansive force sizing construct — one that is different from the two-war construct but no less strong — is appropriate,” the report stated. It called on Obama to expand his current mission statement—one driven far more by budget concerns than global threats.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/31/obama-military-strategy-too-weak-future-security-p/?page=all"><span style="color: #1255cc;">addressed</span></a> the misplaced priorities. “It is the same conclusion many Americans have already reached,” he said. “There is a cost when America does not lead, and there are consequences when America disengages. What the president fails to understand — which the report points out — is that a strong military underwrites all other tools our nation has for global influence.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The report, which concludes that the “Navy and Air Force should be larger,” reveals that we are moving in the opposite direction. It explains that the Navy is “on a budgetary path to 260 ships or less,” giving them far fewer ships than 323 to 346 previously recommended. The report further notes that an even larger fleet could be necessary “if the risk of conflict in the Western Pacific if increases.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">An even grimmer picture of the Air Force emerges, with the report explaining that it is currently fielding the “smallest and oldest force in its history,” despite the need to project a “global surveillance and strike force able to rapidly deploy to theaters of operation to deter, defeat or punish multiple aggressors simultaneously.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The panel understands the fiscal challenges facing the government, but states that attempting to solve those problems on the backs of the military is not only &#8220;too risky,” but “won’t work.” “America must get her fiscal house in order while simultaneously funding robust military spending,” the panel concludes. In a shot across the administration’s bow, the panel explains that health care spending in the military and overall is “stunning wasteful,” consuming “more than a third of the federal budget.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s actually worse than that, if one includes benefits and entitlements, driven primarily by &#8220;non-means tested government programs,” defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as those that provide benefits to Americans regardless of their income levels. In 2013, the federal government <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/americans-got-2-trillion-benefits-federal-government-2013"><span style="color: #1255cc;">paid out</span></a> more than $2 trillion in such programs, which consumed 58.1 percent of the $3.4 trillion in total federal outlays. In the first eleven months of FY2013 the federal government <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/2472542000000-record-taxation-through-august-deficit-still-755b"><span style="color: #1255cc;">received</span></a> a record-setting $2.4 trillion in revenue, yet still ran a deficit of $755 billion. This year revenues are expected to top $3 trillion, but the deficit is still projected to be $648 billion.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Clearly something has to give. Unfortunately as far as the Obama administration is concerned, the welfare state, rather than the military that makes it possible, takes precedence.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In fact, the administration has recently put the pedal further to the metal. At the beginning of the month, the Army <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/02/army-to-force-out-550-majors-some-to-get-news-while-in-afghanistan/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">announced</span></a> it will downsize the number of majors by 550, including some still serving in combat operations in Afghanistan. This move follows another recent effort to slash 1,200 captains from the force as well. &#8220;The ones that are deployed are certainly the hardest,&#8221; Gen. John Campbell, the vice chief of the Army told reporters. &#8220;What we try to do there is, working through the chain of command, minimize the impact to that unit and then maximize the time to provide to that officer to come back and do the proper transition, to take care of himself or herself, and the family.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The cuts are being made among majors who joined the service between 1999 and 2003, and while some will have enough time on the job to retire, many won’t. The effort is all part of the aforementioned move by the Obama administration to reduce the size of the military from its current level of 514,000 soldiers to 490,000 by October 2015, and 450,000 by 2019. Automatic budget cuts currently in place could ultimately reduce the number of soldiers to 420,000— a number leaders contend would leave the nation incapable of fighting even <i>one</i> sustained military conflict.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">None of this was lost on the panel. Writing for National Review, House and Senate Armed Services Committee member, Rep. Jim Talent (R-MO), who was part of the panel, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/384267/stunning-rebuke-our-current-defense-policies-jim-talent"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a> that while there were the &#8220;usual arguments over specific wording and programmatic recommendations&#8230;the broad conclusions were easy to reach. In fact, they were obvious to anyone with eyes to see the rapid deterioration of our armed forces and the worsening global threats that became manifestly more dangerous even during the months the panel was deliberating.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He then gets to the heart of the matter. Citing our &#8220;rudderless and sometimes unreal foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East,” he further explains that the problem &#8220;isn’t just an Administration that <i>acts</i> as if America is weak. The problem is also that America <i>is </i>weak, and becoming weaker, relative to the threats posed by its adversaries – which is the only measurement of military power that really matters.” This leads Talent to a stark conclusion. &#8220;The world will get a lot messier until that changes,” he warns. It is a warning the Obama administration ignores at its peril—and that of the entire nation.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Spending and Morality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/spending-and-morality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=spending-and-morality</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2014 04:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[general welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235828</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The curious practice of government theft for the "common good." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Government-Money.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235829" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Government-Money-426x350.jpg" alt="Government-Money" width="286" height="235" /></a>During last year&#8217;s budget negotiation meetings, President Barack Obama told House Speaker John Boehner, &#8220;We don&#8217;t have a spending problem.&#8221; When Boehner responded with &#8220;But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem,&#8221; Obama replied, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting tired of hearing you say that.&#8221; In one sense, the president is right. What&#8217;s being called a spending problem is really a symptom of an unappreciated deep-seated national moral rot. Let&#8217;s examine it with a few questions.</p>
<p>Is it moral for Congress to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another? I believe that most Americans would pretend that to do so is offensive. Think about it this way. Suppose I saw a homeless, hungry elderly woman huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. To help the woman, I ask somebody for a $200 donation to help her out. If the person refuses, I then use intimidation, threats and coercion to take the person&#8217;s money. I then purchase food and shelter for the needy woman. My question to you: Have I committed a crime? I hope that most people would answer yes. It&#8217;s theft to take the property of one person to give to another.</p>
<p>Now comes the hard part. Would it be theft if I managed to get three people to agree that I should take the person&#8217;s money to help the woman? What if I got 100, 1 million or 300 million people to agree to take the person&#8217;s $200? Would it be theft then? What if instead of personally taking the person&#8217;s $200, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take the person&#8217;s $200? The bottom-line question is: Does an act that&#8217;s clearly immoral when done privately become moral when it is done collectively and under the color of law? Put another way, does legality establish morality?</p>
<p>For most of our history, Congress did a far better job of limiting its activities to what was both moral and constitutional. As a result, federal spending was only 3 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product from our founding until the 1920s, in contrast with today&#8217;s 25 percent.</p>
<p>Close to three-quarters of today&#8217;s federal spending can be described as Congress taking the earnings of one American to give to another through thousands of handout programs, such as farm subsidies, business bailouts and welfare.</p>
<p>During earlier times, such spending was deemed unconstitutional and immoral. James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.&#8221; In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, Madison stood on the floor of the House of Representatives to object, saying, &#8220;I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.&#8221; Today&#8217;s Americans would crucify a politician expressing similar statements.</p>
<p>There may be nitwits out there who&#8217;d assert, &#8220;That James Madison guy forgot about the Constitution&#8217;s general welfare clause.&#8221; Madison had that covered, explaining in a letter, &#8220;If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.&#8221; Thomas Jefferson agreed, writing: Members of Congress &#8220;are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare. &#8230; It would reduce the (Constitution) to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.&#8221;</p>
<p>The bottom line is that spending is not our basic problem. We&#8217;ve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that larger problem.</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>The Return of Earmarks?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/the-return-of-earmarks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-return-of-earmarks</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2014 04:20:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[bills]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225432</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ominous signals from Congress that groundbreaking reforms may soon be reversed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/r620-921c71eafb5ae62d70f90f236fc7e7c3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225433" alt="r620-921c71eafb5ae62d70f90f236fc7e7c3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/r620-921c71eafb5ae62d70f90f236fc7e7c3-450x329.jpg" width="360" height="263" /></a>Last week members of the Senate Republican Steering Committee met over lunch to discuss the potential revival of that long-gone facet of backroom politics: the congressional earmark. Given the Committee’s direct involvement in the Senate and House rule-making process and Harry Reid’s defense of earmarks on the Senate floor earlier that week, it’s perhaps time Americans were given a re-cap on the vileness that is earmarking.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To remind, earmarking is the tailoring of certain pieces of legislation in order to reward targeted congressional members with federal spending in their districts and states. It is spending used solely to push narrow political interests, such as pet projects or awards to donors, rather than the interests of the broad American public. Because spending provisions that are earmarked are usually negotiated privately in congressional committees, where deals can be arranged to advance personal and political goals, the practice evades the usual procedures for public debate and expert review.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Because of an initiative started by President George W. Bush, which was later copied by President Obama, earmarking was banned in the House and Senate in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Since then, thanks to these moratoriums, this non-transparent and ethically questionable practice has pretty much ended and tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been saved.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The ban on earmarks was partly in response to the 2005 &#8220;Bridge to Nowhere&#8221; </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=aWA7joXO0bRk">debacle</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> which involved a fishing village on Alaska’s Gravina Island. Despite having a population of around 50 Tsimshian natives, inserted into that year’s transportation bill was a provision for the island to receive a 9,000-foot-long bridge, which, if then-Governor Sarah Palin hadn’t stepped in, would’ve cost taxpayers nearly a quarter of a </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">billion</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> dollars.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Your average politician’s voracious drive for re-election and desire to stay in office is what fuels these types of abusive projects. Describing his tenure as Chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Don Young, the Representative for Alaska responsible for the &#8220;Bridge to Nowhere&#8221; earmark, said at the time of the controversy, “I’d be silly if I didn’t take advantage of my chairmanship… I think I did a good job.” Rep. Young is still in office and is no doubt supportive of an earmark revival.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is key committee chairmen like Young who benefit most from earmarked spending, as they have the most power during bill mark-ups. Since chairman-roles are usually held by the most senior incumbents, the districts and states that get the big earmarked dollars generally depends on who has the most seniority and power in Congress. Young, in fact, is the fourth most senior representative in House. In a perverse feedback loop, the practice of earmarking leads to more support from constituents, which then leads to greater entrenchment of the incumbent, which leads to more and bigger earmarks. Breaking such a system is difficult and it explains why the practice persisted for many decades before Tea Party activism in the mid-2000s finally forced Congress to act. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That earmarks help powerful, senior incumbents is worrisome, but most troubling is that earmarks lead to bad legislation. As House Speaker </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.examiner.com/article/speaker-boehner-bemoans-lack-of-earmarks-to-grease-highway-bill">Boehner</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> has noted, “You take the earmarks away and guess what? All of a sudden people are beginning to look at the real policy behind it.” By banning earmarks, our representatives have to consider whether the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">entire</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> bill is good for their district and the country. This is of course what the Founders intended.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Notable is the connection the mainstream media routinely makes between congressional gridlock and &#8220;Tea Party intransigence.&#8221; The refrain from liberal pundits usually goes something like, &#8220;Obama’s forced to push through initiatives like amnesty because the Republicans in the House just can’t seem to control Tea Party extremists!” The more convincing explanation for this slowdown, however, is simply the current restraint on Committee members from earmarking for on-the-fence members. Without grease on the wheels the legislative machine does begin to slow down. But in a country that has on its books 4,000 federal criminal laws and counting, there is no urgency for new bills. It’s certainly better to have higher quality bills that are good for all the American people.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The caveat of course is that we have a lawless and tyrannical president who, because of a &#8220;gridlocked&#8221; Congress, feels the need to push through his own initiatives, just like he did with administrative amnesty. But as long as we force our representatives to stand up to the President, we can end such abuse, just like we ended earmarks.</span></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>The War on Poverty &#8212; $21 Trillion Later</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:53:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[war on poverty]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222428</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The big fat leftist failure. Now where is the mea culpa? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/poverty.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222437" alt="poverty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/poverty.jpg" width="280" height="280" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fifty years and trillions of dollars after the &#8220;War on Poverty&#8221; was launched, poor Americans aren&#8217;t much better off, according to a study published by Republican reformers in Congress.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in actual poverty, states the 205-page </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> unveiled last month by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The paper, created in the hope of starting a discussion in Congress about reforming America&#8217;s bungled poor-relief programs, came out before Ryan </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/politics/paul-ryan-budget.html?_r=0">released</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the GOP&#8217;s new budgetary blueprint yesterday that lays out how to balance the budget in 10 years. That document calls for reducing federal government spending by $5.1 trillion over a decade largely by getting a grip on out-of-control social programs. The House Budget Committee could vote on the fiscal plan as soon as Friday. Leadership in the Democrat-dominated Senate, which hasn&#8217;t even tried to adopt a budget in recent years, isn&#8217;t planning to craft a fiscal blueprint this year, either.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The heart of the War on Poverty report is its observation that most federal poverty-alleviation programs are essentially useless or incapable of having their impact measured in the real world.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The study observes that in 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent. This means taxpayers blew a staggering $20.7 trillion over the last half century in order to achieve a paltry 2.3 percentage point decrease in poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Broken down into less mind-blowing, easier-to-grasp figures, between 1965 and 2012 the average family of four spent roughly $146,000 per percentage-point drop in poverty, or $335,000 per family for the whole 2.3 percentage-point reduction.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Only the most blinkered or jaded among us in the body politic believe that sucking $9 trillion out of the private, productive economy for each single percentage-point reduction in the poverty rate constitutes an acceptable return on investment.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which brings us to the modern &#8220;progressive&#8221; Left.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Those on the Left consider the gentle statistical dip in poverty over five decades to be social progress achieved by way of holy coercive redistribution. Mere results have always been less important to the Left than intentions.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Although a sane person would consider the extremely modest reduction in poverty a humiliating defeat, left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, hurling epithets, smearing opponents, and intimidating adversaries, all in an effort to move the discussion away from their 50 years of human misery-generating policy failures.</span></p>
<p>The Obama White House self-servingly slices and dices the statistics to portray the War on Poverty as a smashing, if flawed, success.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the Obama administration admits that some of the government&#8217;s poverty-fighting approaches are less than optimal, President&#8217;s Obama Council of Economic Advisers issued a ringing endorsement of the War on Poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50th_anniversary_cea_report_-_final_post_embargo.pdf">that body</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, poverty has declined by more than one-third since 1967. &#8220;The percent of the population in poverty when measured to include tax credits and other benefits has declined from 25.8 percent in 1967 to 16.0 percent in 2012.&#8221; Predictably, the council opines that &#8220;[d]espite real progress in the War on Poverty, there is more work to do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>The council also obsequiously slaps President Obama on the back, praising him for taking steps to &#8220;further increase opportunity and economic security by improving key programs while ensuring greater efficiency and integrity.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It then moves from servile flattery to outright revisionism, claiming that Obama&#8217;s actions have &#8220;prevented millions of hardworking Americans from slipping into poverty during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ever the class warrior, in a December address on income inequality, Obama showed just how much a prisoner he is of his own self-imposed ideological bubble. Without mentioning the devastating impact that the high tax rates and runaway social spending he ardently supports have had on American society, the president argued that it&#8217;s all deterministic, all the fault of capitalism. He said:</span></p>
<p>&#8220;But we know that people’s frustrations run deeper than these most recent political battles. Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles &#8212; to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Big government, a lawless administration, and radical attacks on civil society aren&#8217;t worth worrying about, according to Obama.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is &#8220;a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain &#8212; that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is &#8220;the defining challenge of our time,&#8221; he said, even though Americans don&#8217;t give a farthing&#8217;s cuss about economic inequality. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That challenge consists of &#8220;making sure our economy </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">works</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for every working American,&#8221; Obama declared, slyly anthropomorphizing the economy, an intangible abstraction, in order to push the illusion that markets, like animals or streams, can somehow be controlled and centrally managed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All of this rhetorical blatherskite had its heyday in the awful 1960s, an era historian Paul Johnson correctly described as &#8220;America&#8217;s suicide attempt.&#8221; Instead of being satisfied with New Deal-era programs like Social Security, left-wingers resolved to move America even farther away from its founding ideals, fundamentally changing the country by erecting a supremely sclerotic behemoth welfare state answerable to no one.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society. This war really should have been called the war on American values. As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, social evils have not only been encouraged but subsidized with taxpayer dollars. For example, out-of-whack financial incentives have caused out-of-wedlock birthrates to mushroom, as David Horowitz and John Perazzo </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/government-versus-the-people/">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in &#8220;Government vs. the People.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite an orgy of federal spending, blacks and other minorities have suffered the most from big government poverty alleviation efforts. The anti-marriage, anti-family tilt of welfare policies has devastated black communities and society at large.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay. He exhorted Congress to launch a new belligerency against a perpetually ineradicable foe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Let this session of Congress be known,&#8221; Johnson exclaimed, &#8220;as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 became the centerpiece of the new war.  It expanded the nation&#8217;s social safety hammock, turning government resources into war materiel to be used against the American system of constitutionally limited government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty gave taxpayers’ money to so-called community groups like ACORN and Saul Alinsky&#8217;s Industrial Areas Foundation in order to encourage them to agitate against the status quo. This, in turn, stimulated demand for more government spending as taxpayer dollars became a kind of ever-increasing subsidy for pro-big government activism. The federal government still hands out significant grants to left-wing groups to subsidize their efforts to take away our economic freedoms. Many of the EOA-created programs still exist today, including VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America), now known as AmeriCorps VISTA, Job Corps, and Head Start.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Many more excuses for handouts were created after the mid-1960s &#8212; so many, in fact, that it is difficult nowadays for poor people to tiptoe through the ever expanding minefield of government assistance unscathed. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Loud calls for yet more welfare spending continue unabated from the echo chambers of the Left every single day whether the national economy is good or bad.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These calls come even after the country has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-povertys-biggest-casualties/">saturation-bombed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> poor people with welfare over the past 50 years, to the tune of $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every actual, non-figurative war it has fought. Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is now 16 times greater than when this phony war was declared, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While millions of Americans remain stuck in poverty, the House Budget Committee&#8217;s white paper from March inventories a dizzying array of expensive failed programs on which mountains of money have been lavished.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The federal government now administers at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. There are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs. The federal government spent $799 billion on these programs in fiscal 2012 alone, according to the report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Among more than 15 programs, more than $100 billion was spent on food aid. More than $200 billion was spent on cash aid. Spread over more than 20 programs, more than $90 billion was spent on education and job training. Almost $300 billion was spent on health care and close to $50 billion was spent on housing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Let&#8217;s look at some of the eye-popping numbers involved in the major aid category of cash aid.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There were three federal agencies involved in spending $220 billion on cash aid in fiscal 2012. They are the Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of the Treasury.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Created in 1974, the Supplemental Security Income program provides cash benefits to elderly, blind, or disabled persons with limited income and assets. It weighs in at $50 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1935, provides assistance to needy families. In 2012 it weighed in at $16.7 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Earned Income Tax Credit, established in 1975, provides cash assistance to low-income working families. The EITC, which some analysts consider to be a rare federal anti-poverty success, is the largest measure in the tax code that is aimed at reducing poverty. In 2012, its budget was $59 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Child Tax Credit, enacted in 1997, provides assistance to families with children. The IRS spent a little over $57 billion on total child credits in 2013.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Title IV-E Foster Care/Adoption Assistance program, created in 1997, helps states pay for arranging temporary homes for disadvantaged children or for facilitating their adoption. The federal government spent $6.8 billion on the program in 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But most of the 92 federal poverty-alleviation programs have a mediocre to downright dreadful track record of helping people in need.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To make matters worse, over the past three years, “deep poverty” has reached its highest level on record and about 21.8 percent of children live below the poverty line, the report states. Although changing demographics and slow economic growth contribute to continued poverty, federal policies are also discouraging work. For example, a rapid increase in disability caseloads has shrunk the labor force.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;But a large problem is the &#8216;poverty trap,&#8217;&#8221; the report states. &#8220;There are so </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">many anti-poverty programs—and there is so little coordination between them—that they often work at cross purposes and penalize families for getting ahead.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Because these programs are means-tested—meaning that benefits fall as recipients earn more money—poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government, in effect, is discouraging them from making more money.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Congress has taken a haphazard approach to this problem; it has expanded programs and created new ones with little regard to how these changes fit into the larger effort. Rather than provide a roadmap out of poverty, Washington has created a complex web of programs that are often difficult to navigate.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some programs work, some don&#8217;t, and with many of them, &#8220;[t]here&#8217;s little evidence either way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Federal programs are not only failing to address problems in society; in some ways they are making the problems worse. &#8220;Changes are clearly necessary, and the first step is to evaluate what the federal government is doing right now,&#8221; the report said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But President Obama, neo-Marxist ideologue that he is, isn&#8217;t interested in making changes to anti-poverty programs. Obama is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-budget-proposal-obama-to-seek-more-money-for-anti-poverty-programs/2014/03/03/e86cf5bc-a306-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html">seeking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $56 billion in new spending for a variety of programs expanding educational offerings for preschoolers and job training for laid-off workers. No doubt he&#8217;ll find a way to lard still more billions of dollars in so-called emergency spending onto the budget as the year progresses.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The two sides have converged in terms of the problems they’re diagnosing,” said Alan D. Viard of the American Enterprise Institute. “But the solutions are very far apart.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><i>That</i> is an understatement.</p>
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		<title>Sacrificing the Military to Entitlements</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2014 05:30:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Achilles' heel of democracy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hagel-defense-cuts.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220112" alt="hagel-defense-cuts" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hagel-defense-cuts.jpg" width="267" height="210" /></a>Vladimir Putin, playing geopolitical chess while our president plays tiddlywinks, has effectively taken over Crimea. Armed men, looking suspiciously like Russian military personnel, have seized both airports and established border checkpoints decorated with Kalashnikovs and Russian flags. This comes after other armed men seized two government buildings and raised Russian flags, as the legislature appointed a pro-Russian regional leader. Meanwhile Russian military forces are gathering on the border, with Russia’s parliament unanimously voting to approve deploying troops in Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is just Putin’s latest revanchist expansion of Russian power throughout the region. He’s been at this for a while. Remember that during the Bush administration he stole chunks of Moldova and Georgia, using the same argument of ethnic self-determination that served Hitler so well in 1938, when he made the Sudeten Germans the pretext for gobbling up Czechoslovakia. Remember when in 2005 Putin said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union––the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century, as he put it–– “tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory”? And just as England and France did nothing except talk about Hitler’s aggression, so too the West has blustered and threatened and indulged “diplomatic engagement” in response to Putin’s depredations. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Vladimir is dismissing Obama’s flabby threat of “costs” and damage to Russia’s “standing in the international community” if Russia annexes part of Ukraine––as if the ruthless Putin, currently arming and backing the Syrian butcher Assad and the genocidal mullahs in Iran, gives a hoot about his international reputation. And after so many of Obama’s toothless “deadlines,” “red lines,” “game-changers,” “I don’t bluffs,” and “no options are off the table,” who can possibly take this administration seriously? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But let’s not forget why the president has gotten away with this foreign policy of apology, retreat, and appeasement in a world bristling with brutal aggressors. Too many Americans are sick of military involvement abroad, with 52% in a Pew </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.people-press.org/2013/12/03/public-sees-u-s-power-declining-as-support-for-global-engagement-slips/">poll</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last December saying the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” More important, many don’t want to spend money on defense if it means cuts to entitlements.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consider that at the same time the Ukraine crisis was heating up, more cuts to our defense budget were announced. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiled plans to reduce the army’s strength from 520,000 active-duty personnel to between 450,000 and 420,000 soldiers, eliminate the A-10 Warthog ground-support aircraft, mothball 11 Navy cruisers, put in doubt funds needed to retrofit the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, and cut 8,000 Marines from the Corps. And things could get much worse if sequestration remains in effect after 2015. Max Boot </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/02/24/defense-budget-incoherence/">points out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the obvious dangers of these cuts: “The world is a more chaotic place than ever and we face the need to respond to a multiplicity of threats, from pirates and terrorists and narco-traffickers to rogue states like Iran and North Korea to potential great power rivals such as China and Russia to failed states such as Yemen and Syria. And not only do we have to be able to project power in traditional ways, but we also have to be able to protect new domains such as outer space and cyberspace.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prudence dictates that we be prepared for those contingencies. But apologists for the cuts premise their arguments on a lack of money and on fantastic projections about the future. A </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial approving the cuts asserts, “The truth is that the United States cannot afford the larger force indefinitely, and it doesn’t need it. The country is tired of large-scale foreign occupations and, in any case, Pentagon planners do not expect they will be necessary in the foreseeable future.” The claim that we cannot “afford” a larger military is preposterous. The same week Hagel announced the cuts, Obama proposed spending $302 billion on roads. In 2013 defense spending was 4% of GDP, while mandated entitlement spending and interest payments on the debt were 14.5%. The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over eleven years, $1.4 trillion, was only 4% of federal spending, and nine-tenths of 1% of the $163 trillion the economy produced during that same period. Yet half the amount of the $1 trillion in the 2011 budget sequester cuts are coming from defense, while the real engines of our debt and deficits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, were left untouched. We have the money, but we just choose to spend it on ourselves rather than on ensuring that we have the military power to defend our security and interests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for the rosy projections that large forces will not “be necessary in the foreseeable future,” such rationalizing prognostications are dangerous, as history shows. After World War I, English military planners formulated the “Ten Year Rule,” which assumed that “the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years, and that no Expeditionary Force is required for that purpose,” as military planners announced. The defense budget was reduced by four fifths in just 2 years. In 1928, the rule was extended. There were similar reductions in shipbuilding and air power, with the result that in 1934, the whole defense budget would have been necessary just to restore the cuts to the army. Meanwhile, Germany was secretly rearming, training its officer corps, and improving its tanks and planes. By 1938-39, Germany was spending 5 times more on its military than England was. Wishful projections about future threats forget that the enemy always has a vote on what is “necessary.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial, however, does hit on one accurate cause: many Americans don’t want to spend more money on defense </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">if</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it means reductions in entitlement spending. That’s why cutting the defense budget isn’t the political “third rail” that reducing Social Security or Medicare is. The preference for butter over guns, except when there are direct attacks on the homeland, is typical of democracies going back to Athens in the 4</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century B.C. Then citizens received state-pay for serving on juries or in the Assembly, and even for attending the tragic performances and other religious festivals. Indeed, it was a capital crime even to propose transferring surplus funds to the war-fund rather than to the fund for subsidizing attendance at religious festivals.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as Philip II of Macedon began his campaign of aggression against the southern Greek city-states, the Athenians refused to finance a defense build-up. While trying to rouse the Athenians to defend the city of Olynthus against Philip’s attacks, the great orator and defender of political freedom Demosthenes scolded the Athenians on just this score. “With regard to the supply of money,” he orated, “you have money, men of Athens; you have more than any other nation has for military purposes. But you appropriate it to yourselves, to suit yourselves.” Later historians linked Philip’s defeat of Athens and its subsequent loss of political freedom to the Athenians’ refusal to spend money on their military instead of on themselves. The historian Theopompus blamed the law financing festival attendance for making the Athenians “less courageous and more lax” and for “squandering state revenues.” Two millennia later, England’s reductions in defense spending during the twenties and thirties were similarly motivated in part by the desire to devote more funds to social welfare programs. Cuts in military spending were more politically palatable than cuts in subsidized housing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As justified as the criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy are, we have to remember that we citizens create priorities with our votes. If we do not vote into office effective leaders who can convince us that we must prepare for future threats by building a military deterrence, and who have the political spine to back up words with deeds to make sure that deterrence works, then we must share some of the blame for the consequences sure to follow when our enemies and rivals are emboldened by our seeming acceptance of empty bluster as an instrument of foreign policy, and by our willingness to prefer butter to guns.</span></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>Gutting the Army</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/gutting-the-army/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gutting-the-army</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Feb 2014 05:55:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[army]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cut]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219643</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration's warped priorities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/0224-chuck-hagel-2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219644" alt="0224-chuck-hagel-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/0224-chuck-hagel-2.jpg" width="233" height="207" /></a>On Monday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/24/hagel-proposed-budget-will-reportedly-shrink-army-to-pre-wwii-numbers/">recommended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reducing size of the U.S. Army to its lowest level since before the nation&#8217;s entry into WWII. &#8220;We must now adapt, innovate, and make difficult decisions to ensure that our military remains ready and capable &#8212; maintaining its technological edge over all potential adversaries,&#8221; Hagel said during a Pentagon news conference. Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, illuminated the administration&#8217;s dubious priorities. President Obama and Hagel are trying to “solve our financial problems on the backs of our military — and that can’t be done,” he explained.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The reductions are stark. The Army had already been tasked with reducing troop numbers from a wartime high of 570,000 to 490,000. Hagel proposes bringing that number down to the either 450,000 or 440,000. He defended those cuts, claiming they will allow more money to be spent on &#8220;technological superiority,&#8221; &#8220;cyber resources,&#8221; and Special Operations forces. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Retired Gen. Jack Keane </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/general-keane-proposed-budget-cuts-into-bone-of-army/">contended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the reductions would “cut into the bone and the capabilities of the Army,” even as he ridiculed the thinking behind them. &#8220;The assumption that’s being made in the Pentagon, and it’s almost laughable if it wasn’t so serious, is they don’t believe the United States will involve itself in a ground war of any consequence again,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;The fact of the matter is those assumptions have been made after World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War, and every single time they have been proven wrong. Here we are making that same assumption again. The Army is taking a much more severe cut, and the numbers of the Army are going down to pre-World War II numbers, which, on the surface of it, is irresponsible. Anybody looking at that knows it is far too much.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Actually, they don’t. The Pentagon, which has long believed that America should be capable of fighting two ground wars simultaneously, as we did in Asia and Europe during WWII, and Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, has seemingly abandoned that idea. According to the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, more recent budget and strategy documents reveal that the military must be prepared to win one conflict decisively, and fight a holding operation with a second adversary until a sufficient number of forces could be redeployed to win conflict number two. “Our analysis showed that this [reduced] force would be capable of decisively defeating aggression in one major combat theater…while also defending the homeland and supporting air and naval forces engaged in another theater against an adversary,” Hagel contended.</span></p>
<p>Given America&#8217;s recent track record, one might be forgiven for wondering what constitutes winning <i>period</i>, much less winning decisively. President Obama and his fellow Democrats have made it clear that troop withdrawal &#8211; on a timetable and virtually irrespective of conditions on the ground &#8212; was their top priority in Iraq, and will be their top priority in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the president&#8217;s <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203554104577003931424188806">indifference</a> towards negotiating a status of forces agreement, and his determination to leave behind an insufficient number of troops to protect the gains we made in that nation, turned victory into defeat. It is a process being repeated in Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2014/01/karzai-no-security-deal-without-peace-talks-20141259122260833.html">rejected</a> a security pact with America unless the Taliban are included in the process, and where Obama once again <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-examines-afghanistan-option-that-would-leave-3000-troops-in-kabul/2014/02/23/a0870034-9b32-11e3-ad71-e03637a299c0_story.html">wants</a> to leave behind a far smaller contingency of troops than his military advisors recommend to maintain our gains there.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even if we had an administration committed to winning wars, it appears they are willing to sacrifice greater numbers of Americans to do so. Officials who saw an early draft of Hagel&#8217;s announcement admit that carrying out two large-scale military operations at the same time would make success more elusive, and engender higher numbers of casualties. Just as importantly, they conceded a smaller military might give rise to increased adventurism by our adversaries. Hagel seemingly concurred. “As a consequence of large budget cuts, our future force will assume additional risk in certain areas,” he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Those budget cuts include </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/military-spending-cuts/pentagon-set-slash-military-pre-world-war-ii-levels-n37086">far more</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> than a reduction in troops. The U-2 spy place would be abandoned in favor of drones that operate more cheaply. The A-10 “warthogs,” an entire class of Air Force attack jets capable of effective attacks against tanks, is also facing the chopping block and will be replaced by F-35s. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Navy would purchase two destroyers and two attack submarines per year, even as 11 cruisers would be decommissioned until they were modernized. Training helicopters would be retired, and the National Guard would give its more weaponized Apache helicopters to the Army in exchange for Black Hawks, better suited for disaster response and other peacetime activities. Drone growth would be diminished from an around-the-clock force of 65 Reaper and Predator aircraft to 55 in total. The Pentagon will also ask for another round Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) in 2017.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the personnel side, a one percent raise in pay would be enacted, but it would be offset by changing healthcare benefits, making personnel pay for some of their housing costs and cutting a billion dollars from commissary subsidies that allow for discounted goods for military families. General and flag officers would be subjected to a one-year pay freeze.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hagel warned that making these cuts is a better alternative than enduring even deeper ones imposed by sequestration. Sequestration cuts would necessitate retiring an aircraft carrier, decommissioning six more cruisers, eliminating the KC-10 tanker fleet, slowing down the buying of destroyers, cutting flying hours, and dropping troop levels still further to 420,000. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contended that number of troops would undermine the military&#8217;s ability to deploy for combat. &#8220;I&#8217;m telling you &#8212; 420 (sic) is too low,&#8221; he declared.</span></p>
<p>Sequestration itself is a farce. It reflects Congress&#8217;s seemingly permanent inability to forestall the nation&#8217;s headlong rush towards insolvency, even as it completely preserves the ever-increasing outlays required by the primary drivers of that insolvency. The nation&#8217;s spending is <a href="http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/">divided</a> into three main categories: interest on the debt, discretionary spending and mandatory spending. As projected for 2014, America will spend approximately $3.8 trillion for the entire budget. Servicing our national debt will consume six percent of that total. Discretionary spending will eat up another 30 percent, with the military consuming 57 percent of that discretionary slice. Mandatory spending accounts for 64 percent of our annual budget, the lion&#8217;s share of which goes to entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Unemployment and Labor programs, as well as Medicare and other Health programs.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The amount of discretionary spending is determined by annual appropriations. Mandatory spending, on the other hand, is determined by eligibility. Thus it is far easier to make cuts to the military, such as Hagel is proposing, because Congress can merely trim the budget. Changing mandatory spending requires changing eligibility criteria, such as age for Social Security or income level for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).</span></p>
<p>It is no accident that proposed cuts in mandatory spending are often referred to as dealing with &#8220;third rail&#8221; issues, in that they inevitably engender massive, and possibly career-ending resistance from a dependency-addicted nation. Such resistance is aided and abetted by a Democratic Party that derives much of its power from promoting and maintaining that dependency. In short, when cuts become inevitable, the military is vulnerable, while entitlement programs remain virtually sacrosanct.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus, when House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) contends that military preparedness is &#8220;being sacrificed &#8230; on the altar of entitlements,&#8221; he is spot on.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Moreover, there is an appalling lack of consistency among Democrats who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/01/08/obama-extending-unemployment-benefits-creates-jobs-n1773077">insist</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that entitlement programs and unemployment insurance create millions of jobs, even as they remain utterly sanguine about military budget cuts that will adversely affect millions of non-military Americans whose communities </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/military-spending-cuts/proposed-military-cuts-loom-over-tucson-air-force-base-n37521">depend</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Defense Department expenditures and activities.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Pentagon press secretary Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby said that Hagel had consulted with military service chiefs on how to go about finding the proper balance between the nation&#8217;s defense and budget requirements. &#8220;He has worked hard with the services to ensure that we continue to stand for the defense of our national interests &#8212; that whatever budget priorities we establish, we do so in keeping with our defense strategy and with a strong commitment to the men and women in uniform and to their families,&#8221; Kirby said. &#8220;But he has also said that we have to face the realities of our time. We must be pragmatic. We can&#8217;t escape tough choices,&#8221; he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But as noted above, the Obama administration and Democrats </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">are</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> escaping the tough choices. The Constitution </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/01/why-provide-for-the-common-defense">requires</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the federal government to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">provide</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for the common defense and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">promote</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the general welfare of the nation. Democrats and Obama have it exactly backwards. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That is not to say that some cuts to the military aren&#8217;t warranted. Yet for a nation awash in red ink, one that still faces serious and unforeseen threats from Islamist terror, an increasingly aggressive China, and Russia&#8217;s Vladimir Putin, who may yet play a hand in Ukraine, a serious discussion of national priorities is in order. One that puts everything on the table for the simplest of reasons: absent national security, everything else is irrelevant. There will be no victorious enemy willing to provide Americans with anything remotely resembling the massive and overly generous safety net we take largely for granted. And hope and change are not viable substitutes for military strength, preparedness and deterrence.</span></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>Dumb Politicians Won&#8217;t Get Elected</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:03:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When trashing the Constitution is the politically smart thing to do. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213800" alt="VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640-432x350.png" width="302" height="245" /></a>Politicians can be progressives, liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, and right-wingers. They just can&#8217;t be dumb. The American people will never elect them to office. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>For years, I used to blame politicians for our economic and social mess. That changed during the 1980s as a result of several lunches with Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., which produced an epiphany of sorts.</p>
<p>At the time, I had written several columns highly critical of farm subsidies and handouts. Helms agreed, saying something should be done. Then he asked me whether I could tell him how he could vote against them and remain a senator from North Carolina. He said that if he voted against them, North Carolinians would vote him out of office and replace him with somebody probably worse. My epiphany came when I asked myself whether it was reasonable to expect a politician to commit what he considered to be political suicide — in a word, be dumb.</p>
<p>The Office of Management and Budget calculates that more than 40 percent of federal spending is for entitlements for the elderly in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing and other assistance programs. Total entitlement spending comes to about 62 percent of federal spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending will consume all federal tax revenue by 2048.</p>
<p>Only a dumb politician would argue that something must be done immediately about the main components of entitlement spending: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Senior citizens indignantly would tell him that what they&#8217;re receiving are not entitlements. It&#8217;s their money that Congress put aside for them. They would attack any politician who told them that the only way they get Social Security and Medicare money is through taxes levied on current workers. The smart politician would go along with these people&#8217;s vision that Social Security and Medicare are their money that the government was holding for them. The dumb politician, who is truthful about Social Security and Medicare and their devastating impact on our nation&#8217;s future, would be run out of office.</p>
<p>Social Security and Medicare are by no means the only sources of unsustainable congressional spending.</p>
<p>There are billions upon billions in handouts going to farmers, corporations, poor people and thousands of federal programs that have no constitutional basis whatsoever. But a smart politician reasons that if Congress enables one group of Americans to live at the expense of another American, then in fairness, what possible argument can be made for not giving that same right to other groups of Americans? Making a constitutional and moral argument against the growth of handouts would qualify as dumb.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine some statements of past Americans whom we&#8217;ve mistakenly called great but would be deemed both heartless and dumb if they were around today. In 1794, James Madison, the father of our Constitution, irate over a $15,000 congressional appropriation to assist some French refugees, said, &#8220;I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill intended to help the mentally ill, saying, &#8220;I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity&#8221; &#8230; and to approve such spending &#8220;would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.&#8221;</p>
<p>Grover Cleveland vetoed hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s. His often stated veto message was, &#8220;I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.&#8221;</p>
<p>If these men were around today, making similar statements, Americans would hold them in contempt and disqualify them from office. That&#8217;s a sad commentary on how we&#8217;ve trashed our Constitution.</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>ObamaCare: A Word of Warning from Britain</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/enza-ferreri/obamas-disastrous-healthcare-model/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-disastrous-healthcare-model</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Dec 2013 05:12:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Enza Ferreri]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212795</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The NHS: A "remedy" that has become far worse than the illness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nurse_1470102c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212957" alt="nurse_1470102c" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nurse_1470102c.jpg" width="291" height="228" /></a>In light of the ongoing ObamaCare debacle, it can be interesting to see how a state-run national health system free for all, like Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) – Obama’s favourite model &#8211; has failed to deliver.</p>
<p>The UK is one of the few countries in the world – mostly concentrated in Europe &#8211; to have completely free universal health. It sounds cuddly and comfy, but, like in all utopias and fairy tales, reality is a different matter.</p>
<p>The NHS is Britain&#8217;s sacred cow. No party, if it wants to be elected, can scrap it or reform it in any real sense. All parties have to recite the mantra: &#8220;The NHS is safe with us. We are ring-fencing the NHS.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 2009, British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, interviewed on Fox News (see video below) about the impending Obamacare bill, warned Americans that the NHS is a “60-year-old relic” and claimed he “would not wish it on anyone.” Hannan was then condemned back home as “evil,” “unpatriotric” and “a traitor.”</p>
<p>Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson said that the NHS is “the closest thing that the British have to a religion.”  And Labour politicians have managed to create a climate in which this institution is considered sacrosanct, untouchable by criticism.</p>
<p>But it’s becoming increasingly impossible now to keep that pretence.</p>
<p>The NHS, born on 5 July 1948, is the first system of free universal medical care ever established. The 1942 Beveridge Report, influential in founding the UK’s modern welfare state of which the NHS is part, was conceived and implemented during a special time, when the population was not only ethnically and culturally homogenous, but also feeling like a great family, bound together by the heroic struggle of WW2.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Health_Service_(England)">fundamental principles of the NHS</a>, then as now, have been: 1) services provided free at the point of use; 2) services financed from central taxation; 3) everyone eligible for care (even people temporarily resident or visiting the country).</p>
<p>According to Treasury figures, NHS spending almost doubled in real terms from £57 billion in 2002/03 to £109 billion in 2012/13, and is forecast for £129 billion in 2014.</p>
<p>Britain spends 18.5% of its annual budget on health, the second highest expenditure.</p>
<p>The NHS has always been beleaguered by problems and cash crises, and needing reform.</p>
<p>All “reforms” attempted through the years have only amounted to internal changes and restructurings &#8211; giving similar bodies different names. The current “reform” is no exception. Crisis has always been the NHS’s permanent condition.</p>
<p>Its original ideal is too expensive even in the best conditions and, with health care becoming more costly and population aging, the conditions are going to worsen.</p>
<p>But more money doesn’t mean better care. The Department of Health admits that, despite significant and consistent increases in funding, <a href="http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/1011491.pdf">hospital productivity has fallen</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)60355-4/abstract">study in the prestigious <i>Lancet</i></a> of health data over 20 years in 19 countries shows Britain lagging behind in 12<sup>th</sup> place.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21654536">BBC reported on the research</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Many deaths happen because the NHS is not good enough at preventing people getting sick or because treatment does not rival that seen elsewhere in Europe, says Mr Hunt who is responsible for health policy in England.</p></blockquote>
<p>By cancer survival rate comparisons, the NHS is one of the worst health systems in the Western world, even overtaken by former European communist countries.</p>
<p>The remedies are worse than the ills. After having created problems and produced terrible results, governments, to save their face and not risk losing votes, try to find band-aid solutions that make things even worse.</p>
<p>One instance of that is <a href="http://melaniephillips.com/how-the-welfare-state-undermines-altruism">setting targets</a>, which has led to patients being neglected to meet them:</p>
<blockquote><p>Another example occurred at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, where over three years from 2005 between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly as managers ruthlessly cut costs — particularly nursing numbers — to meet targets the Labour government laid down to win ‘foundation’ hospital status.</p>
<p>Doctors were diverted from critically-ill patients in order to deal with less serious cases to meet the target of discharging all patients from Accident &amp; Emergency units within four hours of admission.</p>
<p>Vulnerable patients were left starving, in soiled bedsheets or screaming in pain. Some became so dehydrated they drank from flower vases…</p>
<p>Apparently, the [Francis] report will damn not just the Mid-Staffordshire management but a ‘culture of fear’ from Whitehall down to the wards, as managers became fixated on meeting targets and protecting ministers from political criticism.</p>
<p>Countless families in Mid-Staffordshire have been left grieving for loved ones who were, in effect, killed by the National Health Service.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is by no means an exceptional case. Inquiries follow scandals and are followed by new horror stories.</p>
<p>Top public health officials, from the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt down to Medical Director of NHS England Sir Bruce Keogh, have acknowledged that in many cases patients were abused, neglected and bullied, and have expressed serious concerns about the service at some NHS trusts.</p>
<p>In July of this year, 14 trusts were found to have <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article3817753.ece">unusually high mortality rates</a>. In August, up to 42,000 deaths a year due to kidney failure were linked to dehydration in <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419563/Thousands-dying-sepsis-poor-NHS-care-Delays-diagnosis-means-chances-save-lives-missed.html">patients who were not given water by NHS staff</a>. In September, it was discovered that 13,000 every year die of sepsis because of <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419563/Thousands-dying-sepsis-poor-NHS-care-Delays-diagnosis-means-chances-save-lives-missed.html">delays in diagnosis and treatment</a> – negligence which also costs the NHS more money.</p>
<p>In October: the previous Labour government was accused of a pre-election cover-up about <a href="http://metro.co.uk/2013/10/04/labour-covered-up-nhs-hospital-scandal-before-election-4134031/">hospitals with higher-than-normal death rates</a>, “with inspectors finding blood stains on floors and curtains and badly soiled mattresses”; NHS doctors were discovered to have been <a href="http://www.networks.nhs.uk/editors-blog/nhs-doping-scandal-they-were-all-at-it">routinely giving performance-enhancing drugs to patients</a> to “enhance their recovery rates”; and NHS managers getting hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundancy <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/nhs/10419406/NHS-couple-received-1-million-payoff-before-being-given-new-management-jobs.html">just before being given other NHS jobs</a> – this was due to the latest NHS “reform,” which is simply a reshuffling.</p>
<p>In November, it was found that <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2514942/Dementia-patients-left-hungry-hours-scandal-hit-NHS-trust-staff-running-like-headless-chickens.html">NHS dementia patients were left hungry</a> for hours and not given medication at the right time; a <a href="http://www.sundaypost.com/news-views/scotland/anger-over-200-million-nhs-fraud-scandal-1.151559">£200 million NHS fraud scandal</a> was uncovered, with patients illegally claiming free services, and dentists, agencies and firms working for the NHS committing fraud and sending false invoices; 19 more <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/29/hospitals-investigated-jimmy-savile-allegations">hospitals were investigated over their links to allegations of sexual abuse</a> by late TV celebrity Jimmy Savile; it was discovered that the NHS spent nearly a fifth of its budget for maternity services on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24863160">clinical negligence insurance</a> in England in 2012, nearly £500m; there was news that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2013/nov/07/colchester-cancer-scandal-nhs-culture">Colchester hospital has been fiddling with patient records</a> to improve its waiting times for cancer treatment, with potentially life-threatening consequences. In December, it’s been disclosed that up to <a href="http://checklist.co.uk/170-operations-cancelled-each-day-as-nhs-struggles-with-lack-of-beds/">170 operations are cancelled at the last minute each day by NHS hospitals</a> for bed shortages, faulty equipment and lack of staff.</p>
<p>This is just a sample, in no way a complete record. Not bad for less than a half year’s work.</p>
<p>A former London correspondent for <a href="http://business.time.com/2013/10/28/foroohar-what-obamacare-can-learn-from-britains-national-health-service/">Time</a> sounds very reassuring:</p>
<blockquote><p>Health care was more psychically seamless in the U.K. Nobody worried about going bankrupt if they got sick.</p></blockquote>
<p>Nobody goes bankrupt individually, but everybody will go bankrupt with the rest of the country because the NHS and the whole welfare state are taking Britain on the verge of economic collapse, with an unsustainable and growing national debt.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10162848/NHS-is-about-to-run-out-of-cash-top-official-warns.html">Tim Kelsey</a>, a director at NHS England, the central body in charge of the health service, warned in July:</p>
<blockquote><p>We are about to run out of cash in a very serious fashion&#8230;  our analysis will disclose that <b>by 2020 there will be a £30bn funding gap in the healthcare system</b>. [Emphasis added]</p></blockquote>
<p>Senior NHS doctors and managers said that up to 20 hospitals across the country may have to close to save the NHS from financial ruin.</p>
<p>Although the American system of employer-provided medical care is different from the British system, comparisons of the latter with Medicare, Medicaid and Obama’s “vision” for public healthcare can be made. When healthcare is mostly paid by a third party, there’s little incentive to economize on it, and as a consequence expenditures rise dramatically. Late US economist Milton Friedman would call the NHS a plan for the “socialisation of medicine,” flawed like all government programmes to control social fields.</p>
<p>Two weeks ago, during a visit to Vladimir Bukovsky, I asked him if he thought that looking after the health of a whole country is a task a government can be efficient at. He replied: &#8220;There are very few things that governments are efficient at.&#8221;</p>
<p>Interestingly, the US has always been used as a bogeyman to scare Europeans into believing that they need universal healthcare. Look at what happens in America, where there is no state-run health system, Leftists and media say.</p>
<p>However, that the question &#8220;Are you insured?&#8221; asked in US hospitals is caused by lack of free healthcare for all, European-style, is far from the truth. It was free medical care provided by employers during the war &#8211; to attract workers at a time of price and wage controls &#8211; that led to the current situation in the US. Most Europeans have never heard of the existence of Medicare and Medicaid, and believe that Americans who can’t afford insurance are practically left to die.</p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315"src="//www.youtube.com/embed/00mCXaG8-rg"frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></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>Sen. Ted Cruz: Turning America Around</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/sen-ted-cruz-turning-america-around/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sen-ted-cruz-turning-america-around</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2013 05:43:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A conservative warrior explains the path to victory at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of Sen. Ted Cruz&#8217;s keynote speech at the Freedom Center&#8217;s 2013 Restoration Weekend. Restoration Weekend took place November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80239401" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80239401">Senator Ted Cruz</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Ted Cruz:</strong> Thank you. Wow. What a tremendous introduction. What a tremendous comparison to the Last Lion, Winston Churchill.</p>
<p>You know, I have to note &#8212; I can think of at least one person on the face of the earth who, in a tiny, tiny, tiny aspect, would agree with that comparison. And that is President Obama.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Because he would, I think pretty assuredly, like to send my head back to England.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Let me say a word about David Horowitz. David is profoundly principled. And he commits one very simple act that has incredible power over and over again. He tells the truth. Telling the truth is so rare in our modern world that it seems utterly bizarre. And yet, the truth has a powerful, powerful impact. And David is fearless. Utterly fearless.</p>
<p>You know, in Texas, we&#8217;re proud of a lot of Texans. The one Texan we&#8217;re particularly proud of is Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is a tough guy.</p>
<p>You know, a lot of kids across this country wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And Chuck Norris wears David Horowitz pajamas.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, the night is getting late. So I&#8217;m going to make a promise to you. I&#8217;m going to try my very, very best to speak for under 21 hours.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But you will know that I&#8217;m nearing the end if and when I begin to read &#8220;The Cat in the Hat.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Twenty-one hours is a long time. I mean, it&#8217;s really a long time. That&#8217;s almost as long as it takes to sign up on the Obamacare website.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, I haven&#8217;t talked about Forest Gump. I think President Obama has discovered Obamacare is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you&#8217;re going to find.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>All of us are here tonight because we love this country. We&#8217;re here tonight because we love our kids, we love our grandkids. And we&#8217;re worried about the future. And one of the great things of being a parent is that kids, I think, have a unique ability to instill humility, frankly, whether you want it or not.</p>
<p>Couple of weeks ago, Heidi and our girls &#8212; we have two daughters, Caroline and Catherine. Caroline&#8217;s five, Catherine&#8217;s two. Just turned three. They were up in DC. And it was a Sunday afternoon, we were driving down to Mount Vernon. And we&#8217;re driving down there, and Caroline asks her little sister, Catherine, she says &#8212; Catherine, what do you want to do when you grow up? And Catherine says &#8212; I want to work in the US Senate.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I want to work with Daddy. And Caroline says &#8212; oh Catherine, that&#8217;s boring.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We&#8217;re going to be in a rock band. And then she throws in the zinger. She says &#8212; besides, Daddy will be dead by then.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This is a true conversation. I&#8217;m sitting there, driving, going &#8212; hello, I&#8217;m right here.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Frankly, I kind of wondered if maybe Caroline had been speaking with Republican leadership.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>If maybe she knew something I didn&#8217;t know.</p>
<p>These are times of big challenges in this country. And yet, I want to come with a word of encouragement. I&#8217;m incredibly optimistic for turning this country around. And I want to tell you three things that we need to do together to turn this country around.</p>
<p>Number one &#8212; champion growth and opportunity. Number two, defend American interests. And number three, empower the people.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s start with the first one. You know, in the last four years, our economy has grown 0.9 percent a year on average. 0.9 percent. I can tell you, in the less than a year I&#8217;ve served in the Senate, every day my top priority has been bringing back economic growth, bringing back jobs. The reason is simple &#8212; because growth is foundational to every other challenge.</p>
<p>You want to turn around unemployment? You want to turn around our national debt? You want to maintain the strongest military in the world to protect our national security? You got to have growth.</p>
<p>You know, there&#8217;s only one other four-year period since World War II of less than one percent growth on average &#8212; 1979 to 1982. Coming out of the Jimmy Carter Administration, it was the same failed economic policies &#8212; out-of-control taxes, spending, and regulation. But it doesn&#8217;t work. Produced the exact same stagnation.</p>
<p>Now, President Obama is fond of saying that he inherited the worst economy in the history of the universe. Anyone here remember the 1970s?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Double-digit unemployment, 22 percent interest rate, stagflation, gas lines? And yet, in 1981, a very different President came into office.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Ronald Reagan came into office and implemented policies the exact opposite of Barack Obama&#8217;s. Instead of jacking up taxes by $1.7 trillion, Reagan cut taxes and dramatically simplified the tax code. Instead of exploding national spending and the debt, Regan restrained the growth of spending. And instead of unleashing regulators like locusts to destroy small businesses, Reagan pulled back federal regulation. The result was some of the most incredible economic growth this country has ever seen.</p>
<p>By the fourth year of Reagan&#8217;s presidency, 1984 &#8212; anyone know what GDP growth was? 7.2 percent. 7.2. Now, what does that mean? What does that mean in a real sense? One point David makes all the time &#8212; Republicans, we talk like a bunch of accountants. We put on green eyeshades. I&#8217;ll tell you, a friend of mine who&#8217;s an accountant said &#8212; how do you tell an extroverted accountant? He looks at your shoes when he&#8217;s talking to you.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Now, in the interest of all the accountants in the room, I&#8217;m obliged to tell a lawyer joke in response, which is that I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve heard, a number of laboratories across the country have started using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This is true, this is true, this is true. But really, for two reasons. Number one, the scientists were getting too attached to the rats.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And number two, there&#8217;s some things even rats won&#8217;t do.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>What does that growth mean? What does 7.2 percent mean? It means that if Barack Obama coming into office, inheriting the same lousy economy Ronald Reagan inherited, had implemented the same economic policies Reagan implemented, and if the same economic growth had resulted, by today, we would have an additional seven million new jobs. Seven million. That is the equivalent of taking every single person who is unemployed in 46 of the 50 states and finding a new job for every one of them.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s transformational. That&#8217;s what we need to stand for. How do you get growth back? You do what has worked every time we&#8217;ve implemented it. You do tax reform, you do regulatory reform, you unleash entrepreneurs and get the economy growing. It worked in 1980, it worked in 1960, it worked in 1920. We stand for growth.</p>
<p>Fundamental tax reform &#8212; you know, every year we spend roughly $500 billion on tax compliance? That&#8217;s about the entire budget of our military. Wasted, pure deadweight loss. Lawyers and accountants filling out government paperwork. We need to dramatically simplify the tax code. I think the best solution of all &#8212; we should abolish the IRS.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You look at regulatory reform. The most important regulatory reform we could do is to repeal every single word of Obamacare.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And let me make a point about Obamacare. Boy, it is amazing how things can change in a couple of weeks.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Three, four weeks ago, in DC, people asked over and over again &#8212; why are you guys fighting so hard on this? Today, nobody asks that.</p>
<p>You know, a couple of weeks ago, Jay Leno came out on his show. He said &#8212; so, President Obama called me. He said &#8212; Jay, if you like your job, you can keep it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Last week on Leno, Leno came out and said &#8212; so, holiday season is coming up. Thanksgiving. You know, the first Thanksgiving, the pilgrims said to the Indians &#8212; if you like your land, you can keep it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>What a powerful indication, a barometer of where this country is. Look, Obamacare is a disaster.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>It is the biggest job-killer in this country. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, millions of people have been forced into part-time work. Over five million people have already had their health insurance canceled.</p>
<p>Now, this compassionate President says &#8212; well, your health insurance was substandard. So now you don&#8217;t get any.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Thanks a lot!</p>
<p>And you know, the shoes will keep falling. One of the next steps that more and more people are going to discover is you can&#8217;t see the doctor that you&#8217;ve been seeing. We&#8217;re seeing hospital chains all over this country &#8212; Texas Oncology, one of the leading cancer providers in Texas, has just said it&#8217;s out. It&#8217;s not dealing with Obamacare at all. Visit with a cancer survivor whose doctor they suddenly can&#8217;t go to anymore.</p>
<p>One of the next steps we&#8217;re going to see this spring, since nobody is signing up for this thing &#8212; it was actually funny, &#8220;Saturday Night Live,&#8221; when they made fun of this, they made a joke saying &#8212; we designed the website for six people to sign up.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then we discovered, on the first day, six people signed up.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We talk about life imitating comedy. This spring, we&#8217;re going to see premiums skyrocket. Skyrocket, as people are going to get &#8212; they&#8217;ve already been hit with higher premiums. But more is coming. And in the next stage, you&#8217;re going to see the 90 million-plus people that have employer-provided healthcare getting their healthcare dumped and getting them pushed on the exchange.</p>
<p>This thing isn&#8217;t working. And we know now that the President said &#8212; 28 times at least, he committed a flat-out deliberate willful falsehood. Now, if you read the New York Times &#8212; well, that&#8217;s your first mistake.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But the New York Times Editorial Board said he misspoke.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, there are times when you don&#8217;t need to ridicule the Left. They engage in self-parody. Which part of &#8220;if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it, period&#8221; &#8212; that&#8217;s not misspeaking. That&#8217;s not being less than clear. That is perfectly clear, and entirely false.</p>
<p>We need to champion growth. And I&#8217;ll tell you the biggest reason we need to champion growth. Because growth is foundational to opportunity. The single biggest lie in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of the rich. Complete and utter nonsense.</p>
<p>You know what? The rich do great with big government. Big business does great with big government. They get in bed with big government, they have armies of lobbyists and accountants and lawyers.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You know, the top one percent, the millions and billionaires that President Obama demagogues all the time &#8212; top one percent today earn a higher share of our national income than at any time since 1928. And everything worked out real well after &#8217;28.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Who are the biggest losers under the Obama economy? Mainstream media will never tell you this. The biggest losers are the people who are struggling the most. They are the most vulnerable among us. They are young people, Hispanic, African Americans, single moms. Why is that? Because they&#8217;re the ones who are losing their jobs. They&#8217;re the ones who are pushed into part-time work. They&#8217;re the ones who are losing their health insurance.</p>
<p>Opportunity &#8212; for a long, long time, I&#8217;ve advocated what I call opportunity conservatism. That every policy we think about, we talk about, should focus like a laser on opportunity, on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder, on how it impacts those who are struggling to achieve the American dream.</p>
<p>What the men and women in this room understand is the free-market system in the United States of America has been the greatest engine for prosperity and opportunity the world has ever seen. Why is it that millions have come from all over the world to America? Because there has been no land in the history of the world where so many people could start with nothing &#8212; and it doesn&#8217;t depend on who your daddy was, doesn&#8217;t depend on what you born with &#8212; but start with nothing and, based on your talent and perseverance, and the content of your character, achieve anything.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The most tragic casualty of these failed Obama economic policies is the American dream. The American dream is becoming a more and more distant reality every day for people who are struggling.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re a single mom working a job who suddenly had your hours reduced to 29 hours a week, you can&#8217;t feed your kids on 29 hours a week. So what do you do? You get another job at 29 hours a week. Now you got two jobs at once, with two bosses at once, both of whom want you to work on Tuesday. And you&#8217;re driving from one to the other. You still don&#8217;t have healthcare. But now you have two jobs, and you see your kids even less.</p>
<p>Those are the real people who are hurting. We need to be all about opportunity, all about creating an environment where people can achieve the American dream. That&#8217;s the first thing.</p>
<p>The second thing we need to do is we need to defend American interests. Let me say something to each of you who are here, who are supporting the Horowitz Freedom Center. David and the men and women here speak out about defending our nation at a time when that is sadly uncommon. We are facing a global war, not initiated by us, but launched by radical Islamic terrorists across the globe.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And we have a President of the United States who seemingly cannot utter the words &#8220;radical Islamic terrorists.&#8221; You can&#8217;t fight something if you won&#8217;t even acknowledge what it is. You know, my history book may be wrong. But I don&#8217;t recall on September 11th that it was 21 ticked-off boy scouts on those planes.</p>
<p>In Texas, you look at the 14 innocent souls that were murdered at Fort Hood by Major Hasan, and this administration calls that workplace violence. That wasn&#8217;t workplace violence. That was a radical act of terrorism. And I have to say the single greatest threat to US national security right now is the threat of a nuclear Iran.</p>
<p>You know, we just saw &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; in the past couple of weeks, John Kerry, on behalf of the President, attempt to negotiate a deal with Iran. That was a spectacularly horrible deal. It was &#8212; let&#8217;s call off the sanctions in exchange for what? Don&#8217;t dismantle even a single centrifuge. Don&#8217;t turn over even a pound of enriched uranium. But just give us a promise that maybe, kind of sort of, you&#8217;ll slow down and not sort of do the nuclear weapons tomorrow, maybe.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know how many of y&#8217;all saw the video statement that Israel&#8217;s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, put out. It was extraordinary. And if you haven&#8217;t watched it &#8212; it&#8217;s one thing to read it; watch it &#8212; it was incredible as he looked in the camera and said &#8212; this is a very, very bad deal.</p>
<p>Now, there are a lot of men and women in this room who have followed US-Israeli relationships very closely for a long time. It is extraordinary. It is almost without precedent for an Israeli prime minister to so explicitly, so directly call out US foreign policy. And it illustrates how spectacularly dangerous what was about to happen was. But he felt he had no choice but to speak up.</p>
<p>You know, if there&#8217;s one principle true from time immemorial, it&#8217;s that bullies and tyrants don&#8217;t respect weakness. Appeasement doesn&#8217;t work. A responsible President of the United States would stand up and say on the world stage &#8212; under no circumstances will the nation of Iran be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons capacity.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And we will use every available tool to prevent it from happening, including overwhelming military force.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, the reason is simple. The risk of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons capacity is utterly unacceptable. Because if they acquire it, no reasonable person would be willing to risk that they will use those weapons against the United States or against our allies, like the nation Israel.</p>
<p>You know, a lot has been written about President Rouhani, the moderate. Well, he uses Twitter, so he&#8217;s got to be okay.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Mean, what utter nonsense. He&#8217;s described Israel as a wound. And his response was &#8212; well, I was taken out of context.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Okay, what was the context? Give the context that explains that.</p>
<p>One of the leading generals of the Iranian Guard &#8212; his last will and testament said that he wanted on his tombstone the words &#8220;This man sought the annihilation of Israel.&#8221; Well, God has a sense of humor. So he was assassinated, many expect, perhaps by the Mossad.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a simple bit of advice &#8212; if somebody tells you they want to kill you, believe them.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>When Iran refers to Israel as &#8220;the little Satan&#8221; and the United States as &#8220;the great Satan,&#8221; those are not terms of endearment.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, one illustration of that, that ought to be spoken of much, much more, is the tragic circumstance of Pastor Saeed Abedini. I suspect most of you all are very familiar with Pastor Saeed&#8217;s situation. Was born in Iran, but he&#8217;s an American from Idaho. Went back to Iran to start an orphanage. And he was sentenced to eight years prison time for preaching his faith.</p>
<p>So many of us take for granted the incredible constitutional liberties we have here in the United States to worship God with all of our heart mind and soul. He went sent to prison for doing that. First to the Evan Prison, a terrible, terrible place. And then, just over a week ago, he was transferred from the Evan Prison to the Rajai Shahr Prison, the infamous prison where they keep their death row, they keep the worst of the worst; and they send people to be tortured and disappeared.</p>
<p>The day he was transferred happened to be the 34th anniversary of the Iranian taking of American hostages. What they call Death to America Day. Mind you, this is by the moderate President Rouhani.</p>
<p>Everyone here realizes these are perilous times. I think the safety and security of Israel has never been more in jeopardy than it is right now.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll tell you, when the issue of the US-Israel alliance comes up &#8212; and in my view, US support for Israel should be absolute and unshakable.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But when our alliance comes up, many characterize the $3 billion in military aid we provide as foreign aid. I think that completely mischaracterizes the relationship. It is fundamentally a strategic partnership. A strategic partnership that yields immense national security benefits for the United States of America.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And there is right now a powerful illustration of that. Sadly, I think the mullahs in Iran have little to no reason to fear military reaction from the United States for continuing to develop and acquire a nuclear weapon. And as much as that may dismay every one of us, there is one Commander in Chief, and only one person who has the authority to order our military forces into combat.</p>
<p>And I will tell you, when I travel Texas, a point I make all the time that gives great comfort is if Iran gets too close to acquiring nuclear weapons capacity, I have deep confidence that Israel will act.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And what an incredible, incredible benefit to US national security interests for Israel to act to take out Iran&#8217;s nuclear weapon capacity.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, let&#8217;s be clear &#8212; Israel shouldn&#8217;t have to act; the United States should take care of its own problems. But I will underscore to the men and women in this room &#8212; the urgency is growing greater by the day. I think we could see a military attack within weeks or months. If that happens, the international pressure on Israel will be deafening. And I worry greatly about the response of this administration. And it will be incumbent on the men and women in this room and the men and women across this country to make clear that the United States stands with Israel. And we stand together, protecting our national security.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The third thing we need to do is empower the American people. If you remember nothing I said tonight, then you probably had too many glasses of wine.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>If you remember just one thing I said tonight, let it be this &#8212; that I am profoundly, profoundly optimistic about where we are, and that together we&#8217;re going to turn this country around.</p>
<p>You know, Harrison&#8217;s talk about the space program, and John F. Kennedy&#8217;s commitment that let us commit together we&#8217;re going to send a man to the moon, inspired me. And let me say, collectively, let us commit together today that we should send Congress to the moon.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And the best thing is, we only need to worry about one-way travel.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The answers to this country are not going to come from Washington. But the reason I am so excited is that we are seeing a new paradigm in politics. We are seeing the rise of the grass roots.</p>
<p>The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us there&#8217;s nothing new under the sun. And I think where we are right now is very, very much like the late 1970s. We had dismal economic conditions caused by failed presidential politics. You had a President in the late 1970s telling people to accept malaise. We had a President wringing his hands in impotence as our hostages languished in Iran for 444 days.</p>
<p>And yet, we saw in the late 1970s a movement, a grassroots movement, sweep this country &#8212; the Reagan Revolution &#8212; millions of men and women. A lot of the men and women in this room who bear the scars of that fight, who stood up and said there is a better way. We can get back to the free-market principles, the constitutional principles, that are the foundations of this country.</p>
<p>You know, if you look at the big fights we&#8217;ve had this year, you look back to the fight we had on guns &#8212; following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama, instead of saying let&#8217;s go after violent criminals &#8212; and I think we ought to come down like a ton of bricks on violent criminals &#8212; but instead, he said &#8212; let&#8217;s go after the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.</p>
<p>And Washington, the political class, said this is unstoppable. And what happened? The American people rose up in overwhelming numbers and said &#8212; no. Protect our rights.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You look at what happened on immigration, where the President came out and said he supported a plan that doesn&#8217;t secure our borders and yet grants amnesty. And Washington said &#8212; this is unstoppable, you got to do it. It cannot be stopped. And you know what? The American people rose up in overwhelming numbers and said &#8212; we want our borders secured, and we don&#8217;t want amnesty.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And then you look at the fight over Obamacare. The fight over Obamacare, when it started months and months and months ago, it was clear that Washington had no interest in doing anything to stop Obamacare. And we saw, all across this country &#8212; we saw over two million people across this country sign a national petition at dontfundit.com and melt down the phone lines &#8212; calling and saying stand up and stop this train wreck of a law. What an incredible, breathtaking demonstration of the American people.</p>
<p>And we saw the House of Representatives stand up and stand strong and say &#8212; we&#8217;re going to fund the federal government and not fund Obamacare. Washington was shocked! Just a couple of months ago, they said it was impossible that would happen. And you know what? The House, people like Louie and Trent, stood strong and listened to the American people.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>That new paradigm, the rise of the grass roots, terrifies Washington. Terrifies them out of their minds.</p>
<p>You know, the single biggest complaint that my colleagues raised during the whole fight? They&#8217;d pound the table and say &#8212; my constituents keep calling me!</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I kind of thought we worked for them. That&#8217;s changing the rules of Washington.</p>
<p>You know, one of the powerful things with Obamacare is telling human stories. We&#8217;ve launched a national website &#8212; makedclisten.org. Makedclisten.org. It&#8217;s a portal where people can go and upload their stories about Obamacare, how it&#8217;s impacted their lives, their jobs, their healthcare. You can record on an iPhone your own video. And we&#8217;re trying to help tell those stories in a very real sense.</p>
<p>Let me just close. It&#8217;s always dangerous to pause after that phrase.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The terror you have at any remarks is when you say &#8220;in conclusion,&#8221; and rapturous applause bursts out.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But let me just close by observing that what I&#8217;m fighting for, what you&#8217;re fighting for, what all of us are fighting for, is the same thing. Freedom is not something we read about in a book. It&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve experienced in our lives. It&#8217;s part of who we are.</p>
<p>You know, I think of my mother, Irish and Italian. Her mother was the second youngest of 17 kids. They were Irish Catholic. They didn&#8217;t know what else to do on a Saturday night.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>My mom became the first in her family to go to college. Got a degree in math from Rice University in 1956. Went to work at Shell as a computer programmer in the 1950s, the dawn of the computer age. My mom used to tell me all the time when I was a kid &#8212; she very deliberately didn&#8217;t learn how to type. She said &#8212; listen, it was the 1950s. I understood the world I was living in. She said &#8212; I&#8217;d be walking down the hall, and men would stop me. And they&#8217;d say &#8212; sweetheart, would you type this for me?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And my mother wanted to be able to smile very, very sweetly and say &#8212; I would love to help you out, but I don&#8217;t know how to type.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I guess you&#8217;re going to have to use me as a computer programmer instead.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then, my dad &#8212; many of y&#8217;all have gotten to know my father.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>As you know, he is a shy, retiring wallflower.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One of my favorite reactions, David, was when he was actually on Glenn Beck. And he talked about, in Cuba, they had the Ministry of Disinformation. And he said &#8212; you know what? We have that here. It&#8217;s called the mainstream media.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Tell you a true story about my father that you&#8217;ll appreciate. April 15th, 2009, when the Tea Parties first started, my dad spoke in Dallas. About 20,000 people in downtown Dallas. My father stood up and said &#8212; you know, when I was a young man, I saw a young and charismatic leader come to power. And he promised hope and change. My father then described the enormous suffering and misery that Fidel Castro visited upon Cuba.</p>
<p>Now, at the end of those remarks, I posted a portion of it on my Facebook page. And some liberal journalists &#8212; although I repeat myself &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; posted a story about how crazy this was &#8212; this was ridiculous to compare Barack Obama to Fidel Castro. And about 1:30 in the morning, I&#8217;m reading all of these commentators, all of these lefties, who are just going nuts about how terrible it was. I did something I&#8217;d never done before &#8212; I signed up online, using my own name, and I said &#8212; I&#8217;ve just been reading through all of these hysterical comments about my father&#8217;s remarks. I want to make one simple point &#8212; if you look at what he said, he never once mentioned the words &#8220;Barack Obama.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Now, what does it say about you that you hear what Fidel Castro did, and you immediately think &#8212; that&#8217;s got to be Barack Obama?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But I&#8217;ll tell you, at every stage, when I think about the challenges we face, I think about them from the perspective of being the child of an immigrant who risked everything to come here. Fifty-five years ago, when my dad fled Cuba, he&#8217;d been imprisoned, he&#8217;d been tortured. He&#8217;d been beaten almost to death. When he landed in Austin, fleeing the Batiste regime, he was 18. He couldn&#8217;t speak English, he had $100 sewn into his underwear. Michael, I don&#8217;t advise carrying money in your underwear.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>His first job was washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour. Why&#8217;d he get that job? Because he couldn&#8217;t speak English. You didn&#8217;t have to speak English to stick a dish under hot water.</p>
<p>He learned English quickly. His next job was as a cook. Same restaurant, better job, paid a little more. With the money he made washing dishes and cooking, he paid his way through the University of Texas.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> [Book 'im].</p>
<p><strong>Ted Cruz:</strong> Book &#8216;im.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>From there, he got a job as a teaching assistant, teaching math to undergrads. And then he got hired by IBM as a computer programmer in the early 1960s. And then he went on to start a small business, a seismic data processing company in the oil and gas business, and worked towards the American dream.</p>
<p>Now, you know what? If he doesn&#8217;t get that first job washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour, he doesn&#8217;t get the second job. Or the third job, or the fourth job. He doesn&#8217;t get to start his business. The people who are being hurt &#8212; if my father were washing dishes today, he&#8217;d been one of the people that maybe is laid off because of Obamacare. He&#8217;d be one of the people forced into part-time work because of Obamacare. He&#8217;d be one of the people losing his health insurance because of Obamacare.</p>
<p>And as much as my dad is my hero, what I find most incredible &#8212; every person in this room could walk up here right now and tell a story just like that.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The most fundamental DNA of what it means to be an American is we are all the children of those who risked everything for freedom. That&#8217;s what we are fighting for.</p>
<p>And I got to say, the window is short. We don&#8217;t have decades to turn this country around; we have a window right now. And the way we do it is the same way we did it in the 1970s &#8212; we energize and empower the American people to get back to free-market principles, get back to the Constitution, to get back together to that shining city on a hill that is the United States of America.</p>
<p>Thank you. And God bless.</p>
<p>(Applause)</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>Entitlement Madness: Is There a Way Out?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/entitlement-madness-is-there-a-way-out/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=entitlement-madness-is-there-a-way-out</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Oct 2013 04:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208952</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can budget-busting programs be reined in before they collapse? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/shutterstock_money_whirlpool.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208954" alt="shutterstock_money_whirlpool" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/shutterstock_money_whirlpool-436x350.jpg" width="262" height="210" /></a>According to a recent Fox News poll, 73 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, up 20 points from 2012. Americans sense that there&#8217;s a lot going wrong in our nation, but most don&#8217;t have a clue about the true nature of our problem. If they had a clue, most would have little stomach for what would be necessary to arrest our national decline. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>Between two-thirds and three-quarters of federal spending, in contravention of the U.S. Constitution, can be described as Congress taking the earnings or property of one American to give to another, to whom it does not belong. You say, &#8220;Williams, what do you mean?&#8221; Congress has no resources of its very own. Moreover, there&#8217;s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy who gives it resources. The fact that Congress has no resources of its very own forces us to recognize that the only way Congress can give one American one dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American through the tax code.</p>
<p>If any American did privately what Congress does publicly, he&#8217;d be condemned as an ordinary thief. Taking what belongs to one American to give to another is theft, and the receiver is a recipient of stolen property. Most Americans would suffer considerable anguish and cognitive dissonance seeing themselves as recipients of stolen property, so congressional theft has to be euphemized and given a respectable name. That respectable name is &#8220;entitlement.&#8221; Merriam-Webster defines entitlement as &#8220;the condition of having a right to have, do, or get something.&#8221; For example, I am entitled to walk into the house that I own. I am entitled to drive the car that I own. The challenging question is whether I am also entitled to what you or some other American owns.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s look at a few of these entitlements. More than 40 percent of federal spending is for entitlements for the elderly in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing and other assistance programs.</p>
<p>The Office of Management and Budget calculates that total entitlement spending comes to about 62 percent of federal spending. Military spending totals 19 percent of federal spending. By the way, putting those two figures into historical perspective demonstrates the success we&#8217;ve had becoming a handout nation. In 1962, military expenditures were almost 50 percent of the federal budget, and entitlement spending was a mere 31 percent. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending will consume all federal tax revenue by 2048.</p>
<p>Entitlement spending is not the only form of legalized theft. The Department of Agriculture gives billions of dollars to farmers. The departments of Energy and Commerce give billions of dollars and subsidized loans to corporations. In fact, every Cabinet-level department in Washington is in charge of handing out at least one kind of subsidy or special privilege. Most federal non-defense &#8220;discretionary spending&#8221; by Congress is for handouts.</p>
<p>Despite the fact that today&#8217;s increasing levels of federal government spending are unsustainable, there is little evidence that Americans have the willingness to do anything about it. Any politician who&#8217;d even talk about significantly reining in unsustainable entitlement spending would be run out of town. Any politician telling the American people they must pay higher taxes to support handout spending, instead of concealing spending through deficits and running up the national debt and inflation, would also be run out of town. Can you imagine what the American people would do to a presidential candidate who&#8217;d declare, as James Madison did in a 1794 speech to the House of Representatives, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government&#8221;?</p>
<p>If we are to be able to avoid ultimate collapse, it&#8217;s going to take a moral reawakening and renewed constitutional respect — not by politicians but by the American people. The prospect of that happening may be whistlin&#8217; &#8220;Dixie.&#8221;</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>John Kerry&#8217;s Jobs Program for Would-Be Jihadists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/john-kerrys-jobs-for-potential-jihadists-program/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=john-kerrys-jobs-for-potential-jihadists-program</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Oct 2013 04:28:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Hundreds of millions to be wasted on the discredited theory that poverty causes terrorism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/20130301_john_kerry_large_2013.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206216" alt="20130301_john_kerry_large_2013" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/20130301_john_kerry_large_2013-450x300.jpg" width="252" height="168" /></a>Last Friday in New York, at a meeting of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), Secretary of State John Kerry and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu launched what they called the “Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience,” which <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/kerry-potential-terror-recruits-need-more-economic-opportunities" target="_blank">CNSNews.com</a> said was intended to “support local communities and organizations to counter extremist ideology and promote tolerance.” It will do this essentially by giving potential jihad terrorists money and jobs – an initiative that proceeds from the false and oft-disproven assumption that poverty causes terrorism.</p>
<p>Kerry demonstrated his faith in this false assumption when he spoke about the importance of “providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment” into jihad groups. The GCTF is devoting $200 million to this project, which it calls “countering violent extremism” (CVE).</p>
<p>Kerry said this money would be used for “challenging the narrative of violence that is used to justify the slaughtering of innocent people.” But it doesn’t seem as if any significant amount of time or money will be devoted to any effort to convince young would-be jihadis that the al-Qaeda understanding of Islam is wrong, and that Islam is actually a Religion of Peace.</p>
<p>Rather, the GFCER of the CVE program of the GCTF bears more than just a passing resemblance to the WPA and the TVA and the rest of FDR’s alphabet soup of Depression-era recovery agencies. It is little more than a large-scale jobs program, as Kerry explained: “Getting this right isn’t just about taking terrorists off the street. It’s about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment. In country after country, you look at the demographics – Egypt, the West Bank – 60 percent of the young people either under the age of 30 or under the age of 25, 50 percent under the age of 21, 40 percent under the age of 18, all of them wanting jobs, opportunity, education, and a future.”</p>
<p>This will be $200 million down the drain, for a lack of “economic opportunities for marginalized youth” doesn’t fuel Islamic jihad terrorism in the first place. Is it poverty and a lack of economic opportunities that leads the fantastically rich House of Saud to finance that jihad worldwide? If Kerry were correct and terrorism is simply a byproduct of poverty, why isn’t Haiti a terrorist state? Why isn’t the world plagued with Bolivian suicide bombers?</p>
<p>In reality, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/008414.php" target="_blank">study after study has shown</a> that jihadists are not poor and bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated than their peers. CNS noted that “according to a Rand Corporation <a href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG849.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”</p>
<p>But none of this has sunk in among the political elites. According to CNS, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama talked in October 2001 about “some of the root causes of this terrorist activity,” noting that “for nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, or much of the Middle East, young men have no opportunities. They see poverty all around them and they are angry by that poverty.”</p>
<p>In reality, as the <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/04/al-qaeda-lures-middle-classes-to-join-its-ranks.html" target="_blank">Times Online</a> reported as far back as April 2005, “three-quarters of the Al-Qaeda members were from upper middle-class homes and many were married with children; 60% were college educated, often in Europe or the United States.”</p>
<p>There are innumerable examples of affluent Muslims becoming jihad terrorists. One was Maher “Mike” Hawash of Portland, Oregon, a well-regarded Intel executive who made $360,000 a year at the crest of a highly successful career. Around the year 2000 Hawash began to become more religious, growing his beard long, rejecting the nickname “Mike,” and attending the supremacist Islamic Center of Portland. Ultimately he served a seven-year prison term for conspiring to aid the Taliban.</p>
<p>More recently, there was Sabirhan Hasanoff, a graduate of Baruch College who was a senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then CFO of a large company in Dubai. Hasanoff was sentenced last Monday to eighteen years in prison for aiding al-Qaeda. Contrite at his sentencing, Hasanoff didn’t say anything about lacking economic opportunities – on the contrary, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/30/nyc-accountant-gets-18-years-for-aiding-al-qaida/2896997/" target="_blank">he said</a>: “I made a good living and my family and I enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle. And then, for reasons that I still have trouble confronting, I threw that all away.”</p>
<p>Those reasons that he had trouble confronting, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/30/nyc-accountant-gets-18-years-for-aiding-al-qaida/2896997/" target="_blank">according to AP</a>, were rooted in Islam: “Inspired by radical clerics, he said his desire to strengthen his Muslim faith and fight atrocities committed against Muslims around the world mixed with guilt about his comfortable life.”</p>
<p>That would suggest that this new initiative of the Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience is not only doomed to fail, as it obviously is, but that it could be actively counter-productive: what if one (or more) of the potential jihadis who find gainful employ thanks to John Kerry and Ahmet Davutoglu start to feel guilty about their “comfortable lifestyle,” and turn to jihad in order to compensate for it, as did Sabirhan Hasanoff?</p>
<p>One thing is certain: John Kerry and Ahmet Davutoglu will never consider that question, and no member of the mainstream media will ever ask them to. Another certainty is that jihad terrorism will continue despite this new financial windfall for young Muslim men, and given the way these throw-money-at-the-problem solutions have worked in the past (cf. the billions we gave the Pakistanis to fight al-Qaeda, that instead ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda), it is likely that some or most of this money will end up financing that jihad terror. One wonders how long this madness can go on without anyone in the loyal opposition in Washington ever getting the clue that it is time for some accountability.</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>The Worst Part Of Obamacare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/the-worst-part-of-obamacare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-worst-part-of-obamacare</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Sep 2013 04:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Death Panels]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203305</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the multitude of problems stemming from the law have prevented us from noticing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/obamacare-supreme-court-cropped-proto-custom_28.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203470" alt="obamacare supreme court-cropped-proto-custom_28" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/obamacare-supreme-court-cropped-proto-custom_28-450x336.jpg" width="315" height="235" /></a>If you were to ask a group of Americans to name the worst part of ObamaCare, you undoubtedly would get a wide variety of answers.</p>
<p>Trying to pick the worst aspect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a daunting task. There isn’t enough space in one article even to list all of its problematical aspects, but let’s mention several.</p>
<p>Surely, it’s sad to see the growing number of American hourly workers whose employers are cutting their hours to less than thirty per week to avoid triggering Obamacare expenses. Another bummer is that millions of Americans are finding—surprise!—that their health insurance premiums are rising smartly, despite Obama’s campaign promises that this wouldn’t happen.</p>
<p>I suspect that many voters are really ticked that Obama has colluded with Congress to exempt them and their high-income staffs from Obamacare. This brazen double standard—government officials being exempt from the very laws that they impose on citizens—is an egregious departure from the principles of American government.</p>
<p>Also worrisome is the noticeable increase in physicians planning to take early retirement. Doctors don’t want to deal with the oppressive bureaucratic heavy-handedness of Obamacare. Who can be happy about a healthcare-related law that shrinks the number of practicing physicians, thereby making health care less available?</p>
<p>While Obamacare is shrinking both the number of practicing physicians and the work weeks of many Americans, we must acknowledge that this law has some positive impacts on employment, too. The law calls for hiring 16,500 additional IRS agents and as many as 40,000 additional federal employees to manage the mountains of Obamacare-related paperwork. Golly, doesn’t that make you feel healthier already?</p>
<p>We should all feel uneasy about the arbitrariness inherent in the language of the law and in Obama’s implementation of it. Hardly a week goes by without the president unilaterally announcing that he has suspended this or that provision of the PPACA. And in regard to whatever parts of the law actually do take effect, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will have discretionary authority to determine what hundreds of ambiguous phrases in the law actually mean.</p>
<p>One of the least popular provisions of Obamacare involves the so-called death panels. Despite Team Obama’s vigorous denunciations of such a characterization of the Independent Payment Advisory Board that will handle the unpleasant task of rationing health care resources, but what else would you call an unaccountable, unelected panel whose budgetary mandate inevitably will lead to decisions to withhold treatments from patients who consequently will die? It may take awhile for IPAB to “advance” as far as its United Kingdom counterpart whose decisions to withhold care, according to some reports, are responsible for close to one-sixth of all deaths there.</p>
<p>In case you think that Team Obama is too compassionate to let such cold-blooded calculations enter into public policy, you should recall the administration’s policy towards Honduras about three years ago. The Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, acting in accordance with the clear language of their country’s constitution, removed from office President Manuel Zelaya. It turns out that Zelaya, apparently aspiring to be the next Castro or Chavez in Latin America, was organizing a campaign to rewrite the constitution to pave the way for him becoming “president for life.” Zelaya told Hondurans that those who refused to sign his petition would be denied access to government-funded health care. Obama, Clinton, and the rest of the administration energetically backed this monster. Do we really want such people to control American health care?</p>
<p>Another troublesome aspect of the PPACA is how it already has warped our own constitution with the complicity of the Supreme Court. I am referring, of course, to Chief Justice John Roberts’ astounding Supreme Court decision a few months ago, in which he affirmed Obamacare in such a way as to pave the way for the federal government to use its taxing power to exert evermore control over our economic life.</p>
<p>Indeed, the implementation of Obamacare has ridden roughshod over the very concept of the rule of law. Avik Roy’s <i>Forbes</i> blog on August 18 revealed the existence of an unpublished Congressional Research Service study showing that Team Obama already has missed half of the 82 explicit deadlines stipulated in the Affordable Care Act. Once again we see an ugly double standard: Government officials that fail to meet legal deadlines get a free pass, but private individuals or businesses that miss such deadlines are penalized, often quite severely.</p>
<p>Another glaring defect of Obamacare is that those who apply for Obamacare subsidies will not have to provide documentation of their income, other health insurance options, and other information that influence how much of a federal subsidy they qualify for. HHS bureaucrats will simply take them at their word. <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> astutely compared this policy to the “no-doc liar loans” that helped to inflate the housing bubble in the previous decade. How much do you want to bet that many of these “helpful” bureaucrats will be ACORN retreads and Democratic partisans?</p>
<p><i>Investors Business Daily</i> has been all over several disturbing developments that recently have come to light. Government employees, called “navigators,” will steer people into what supposedly will be the best decisions regarding their health care insurance. I have a close friend who is an insurance agent, and I know how hard he has to study to pass rigorous examinations demonstrating extensive, thorough understanding of an insurance product before he is licensed to sell it. Obamacare’s navigators, by contrast, will have Mickey Mouse training before they are turned lose to “help” you.</p>
<p>Another problem with the Obamacare navigators is that they will have access to all sorts of personal, confidential information about the citizens they interview, but because Team Obama is in a hurry to get the ball rolling, they have waived criminal background checks for these workers. Combined with the fact that Obamacare is moving full speed ahead on mining huge amounts of such data, and that the “Hub”  where all this information will be stored has not been tested for security, it could be that Obamacare will prove to be a bonanza for identity thieves and computer hackers.</p>
<p>It’s time to bring this to a close with my own choice for the worst aspect of Obamacare. While all of the above-mentioned aspects of the PPACA are disturbing, the most pernicious effect is all the brouhaha and confusion that Obamacare has caused. Why? Because Obamacare has been one gigantic distraction that has kept us from addressing the most crucial economic issue of all—the ticking fiscal time bomb that is Medicare and Medicaid. Federal spending on health care is projected to more than double from approximately $771 billion this year to $1.59 trillion in 2023—a mere ten years away. While we fuss and dither over Obamacare (which itself would add another $200 billion to annual federal health care spending) Medicare and Medicaid expenditures continue to soar, speeding us to the fiscal train wreck that will put the big hurt on us all.</p>
<p>That’s just my take on it. Feel free to enter your choice for the worst aspect of Obamacare under “Comments” up by the title of this article.</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>The Summer of Americans&#8217; Discontent with Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/daniel-flynn/the-summer-of-americans-discontent-with-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-summer-of-americans-discontent-with-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Aug 2013 04:23:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[approval]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200642</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Big government has rarely looked so vulnerable.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/071913-politics-barack-obama-550x309.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200643" alt="071913-politics-barack-obama-550x309" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/071913-politics-barack-obama-550x309.jpg" width="262" height="212" /></a>Barack Obama isn’t very popular anymore. Gallup pegged his job approval rating over the weekend at 41 percent, twenty-seven points below his Inauguration Day numbers. It’s not Obama’s approval nadir—he dipped below 40 percent several times last year—but one can’t help but notice the downward trajectory. If Obama were a stock, America would be short selling.</p>
<p>Why doesn’t Obama provoke the thrill up the leg that he once did?</p>
<p>The answer can be found in a new book, <i>Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Be Stopped?</i>, by James Antle. Therein, Antle, a veteran reporter who serves as an editor for the <i>Daily Caller</i>, chronicles the expansion of the federal government during the Obama presidency. “Big government has never looked so invincible,” he contends. But as the summer approaches its end one might revise: big government has rarely looked so vulnerable. At least that’s true for the once-formidable political figure who personifies big government. Obama isn’t popular because his animating philosophy doesn’t work.</p>
<p>The president has grown the state. The economy? Not so much. And as the previous successful Democratic presidential candidate reminded itself, “It’s the economy, stupid.”</p>
<p>On the economy, Obama launched his presidency by signing the largest spending bill in human history into law. The stimulus worked as a sleeping pill.</p>
<p>The president’s health care law, has similarly unleashed unintended consequences. Examples include employers reducing worker hours to avoid paying for their medical coverage and insurance rates that “could double or even triple” for healthy people who buy plans on their own, according to Louise Radnofsky of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>. The Affordable Care Act makes care less affordable.</p>
<p>The administration’s fetishization of public “investment” in private projects has harmed both sectors. Green jobs have been a boondoggle for crony capitalists, perverting entrepreneurship toward pleasing the bureaucracy instead of the market. To put the federal government’s foray into auto manufacturing in perspective, Antle points out that Ford sold ten times as many Edsals as General Motors has sold of its Volt. For whatever reason, Edsal is a punch line and Volts still roll off assembly lines.</p>
<p>Such failures often prompt Washington to double down when they should fold. “Big government is the only institution that is touted as the solution to its own failures,” <i>Devouring Freedom</i> explains. “If there is a major national security breach because some government agency didn’t do its job, the immediate response is to give the agency more power. It’s as if, at the height of the Enron scandals, people concluded that the problem was that Ken Lay didn’t have enough authority.”</p>
<p>The effects on the economy, health care, and the cars driving on the roads weren’t what the administration hoped for. Neither was the effect on the deficit, which has skyrocketed from under $11 trillion to almost $17 trillion during the Obama presidency.</p>
<p>The president, who brought a wealth of experience in government and the classroom to his office, never worked in private enterprise. Not familiar with what it takes to create a job, Obama unsurprisingly appears obtuse to the concerns of job creators. With unemployment at 8 percent or more for in excess of three years of his presidency, Obama oversaw the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. The gross domestic product expanded at 1.7 percent for the second quarter after growing by an anemic 1.1 percent during the first three months of 2013. Stocks approach record highs. So do the number of young people living at home. If Obama were a Republican, this would be an opposition talking point. He’s a Democrat, so it remains an unspoken irony.</p>
<p>At various times during his tenure, the president has blamed his predecessor, amorphous “headwinds,” the Arab Spring, European instability, the Japanese tsunami, and Republicans in Congress for the stalled economy. The man historian Michael Beschloss labels the “smartest guy ever to become president” surely isn’t the most introspective person to hold the office. Considering whether his policies cause his, and the country’s, problems seems beyond him. The pivot never comes for those stuck in their ways.</p>
<p>That’s why the morass in which Obama finds himself, much like the morass in which many Americans find themselves, may be the new normal—at least until a change of administrations. Surely the president isn’t about to change his mind on the virtues of an activist state. “As government grows beyond its constitutional boundaries,” Antle concludes, “it really does devour freedom.” It eventually devours job approval numbers, too.</p>
<p><i>Daniel J. Flynn is the author of</i> The War on Football: Saving America’s Game <i>(Regnery, 2013)</i>.</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>The Left&#8217;s War on Father&#8217;s Day</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:00:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fathers Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[out of wedlock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192418</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the holiday became a yearly reminder of progressives' assault on minorities.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Black-father-and-son-from-clipart-j0428644.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192421" alt="Lifestyles" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Black-father-and-son-from-clipart-j0428644-450x329.jpg" width="270" height="197" /></a>&#8220;We know the statistics,&#8221; said President Barack Obama, &#8220;that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Journal of Research on Adolescence found that even after controlling for varying levels of household income, kids in father-absent homes are more likely to end up in jail. And kids that never had a father in the house are the most likely to wind up behind bars.</p>
<p>Tupac Shakur, the rapper killed in an unsolved and possibly gang-related murder, once said: &#8220;I know for a fact that had I had a father, I&#8217;d have some discipline. I&#8217;d have more confidence.&#8221; Tupac admitted he began running with gangs because he wanted structure and protection: &#8220;Your mother cannot calm you down the way a man can. Your mother can&#8217;t reassure you the way a man can. My mother couldn&#8217;t show me where my manhood was. You need a man to teach you how to be a man.&#8221;</p>
<p>Where have all the fathers gone?</p>
<p>When I was a child, my father and mother often complained about &#8220;people going on the county,&#8221; a term they used for the rare young mother in our neighborhood who relied on government welfare. My parents, who often disagreed politically, saw eye-to-eye in their opposition to what they called wrongheaded incentives that encourage people to have children without marriage. &#8220;The worst thing that ever came down the pike,&#8221; Dad would often call &#8220;county money.&#8221;</p>
<p>In &#8220;Dear Father, Dear Son,&#8221; my latest book, I write about my rough, tough World War II Marine staff sergeant father, whose gruff exterior I mistook for lack of love. Born in the Jim Crow South of Athens, Ga., he was 14 at the start of the Great Depression.</p>
<p>He never knew his biological father. The man with the last name of &#8220;Elder&#8221; was one of his mother&#8217;s many boyfriends, only this one stayed in my dad&#8217;s life a little longer than the others. A physically abusive alcoholic, Elder would give my father&#8217;s mom money from his paycheck to ensure it would not blow it on booze and gambling. After a couple of days, Elder would get drunk and demand his money back. She would refuse. He would beat her and take the money back.</p>
<p>My father witnessed this ugly scenario over and over. &#8220;Why she just didn&#8217;t give him the damn money,&#8221; Dad told me, &#8220;I&#8217;ll never understand.&#8221;</p>
<p>One day, my father, then 13, came home from school, and his mom&#8217;s then-boyfriend accused him of making too much noise. They quarreled. His mother, siding with the boyfriend, threw my father out of the house. He never returned.</p>
<p>Growing up, I watched my father work two full-time jobs as a janitor. He also cooked for a rich family on the weekends and somehow managed to go to night school to get his GED. When I was 10, my father opened a small restaurant that he ran until he retired in his mid-80s. &#8220;Hard work wins,&#8221; Dad would tell my brothers and me. &#8220;The world doesn&#8217;t owe you a living.&#8221; My parents drilled into us the importance of education and self-reliance. &#8220;Go out into the world unprepared,&#8221; Dad would say, &#8220;and you&#8217;re going to get your behind kicked and your feelings hurt.&#8221;</p>
<p>Studies back up the link between the explosive growth in government welfare — begun in the &#8217;60s — and the increase of out-of-wedlock births.</p>
<p>In 1960, 5 percent of America&#8217;s children entered the world without a mother and father married to each other. By 1980 it was 18 percent, and by 2000 it had risen to 33 percent. Today, the number is 41 percent. For blacks, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 25 percent in 1965 to 73 percent today. The ethnic group with the next-highest percent of births to unmarried mothers is that of Native Americans, at 66 percent. For whites, out-of-wedlock births stand at 29 percent. For Hispanics, out-of-wedlock births are at 53 percent.</p>
<p>In every state, a woman with two children &#8220;makes&#8221; more money on welfare than were she to take a minimum wage job. The array of federal and state programs amounts to over $60K spent for every poor household. But because of costs, the recipient household ends up getting far less.</p>
<p>How do we know that the welfare state creates disincentives that hurt the people we are trying to help? They tell us. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times asked whether poor women &#8220;often&#8221; have children to get additional benefits. Most of the non-poor respondents said no. When the same question was asked of the poor, however, 64 percent said yes.</p>
<p>People, of course, need help. A humane society does not ignore those who cannot or even will not fend for themselves. But good faith does not substitute for sound policy. The welfare state is an assault on families.</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>UN Pressures Germany to Bow to &#8216;Hate Speech&#8217; Hysteria</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod-and-sam-nunberg/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 04:10:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod &#38; Sam Nunberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CERD]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamopobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Turks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189649</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An ominous indication of the United Nations' growing Islamist sympathies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/United-Nations-sign.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-189667" alt="United Nations sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/United-Nations-sign.jpg" width="292" height="202" /></a>A recent <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">decision</a> by the United Nation’s (UN) <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/">Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination</a> (CERD) foreshadows an ominous future for free societies should Muslim entities like the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/home.asp">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a> (OIC) achieve their goal of having “Islamophobia” defined internationally as a form of prejudice.</span></b></p>
<p>Former German central bank board member <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thilo_Sarrazin">Thilo Sarrazin</a> has got himself in trouble with the UN, as the <a href="http://tbb-berlin.de/?id_presse=225">Turkish Union in Berlin-Brandenburg</a> (<i>Türkischer Bund in Berlin-Brandenburg</i> or TBB) stated with satisfaction in an April 18, 2013, German-language <a href="http://tbb-berlin.de/?id_presse=225">press release</a>.  The spokesman of this German-Turkish interest group, Hilmi Kaya Turan, praised a February 26, 2013, “historic decision” by the CERD condemning Germany for not having prosecuted Sarrazin’s criticism of Arab and Turkish immigrants.</p>
<p>Sarrazin, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (<a href="http://www.spd.de/"><i>Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands</i></a> or SPD), produced a <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-man-who-divided-germany-why-sarrazin-s-integration-demagoguery-has-many-followers-a-715876.html">storm of controversy</a> with his August 2010 book <a href="http://www.amazon.de/Deutschland-schafft-sich-unser-setzen/dp/3421044309"><i>Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie Wir Unser Land aufs Spiel Setzen</i></a> (“<i>Germany Abolishes Itself:  How We Are Risking Our Country</i>”).  In the context of this controversy, CERD’s detailed 19-page <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">decision</a> extensively excerpted in English translation a fall 2009 <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/wp/uploads/2009/10/sarrazin_interview1.pdf">interview</a> with Sarrazin.  In the interview, the Berlin magazine <a href="http://www.lettre.de/content/frank-berberich_klasse-statt-masse"><i>Lettre International</i></a> discussed some of the upcoming book’s themes.</p>
<p>CERD <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">complained</a> that “[i]n this interview, Mr. Sarrazin expressed himself in a derogatory and discriminatory way about social ‘lower classes’, which are not productive’ and would have to ‘disappear over time’ in order to create a city of the ‘elite’.”  Sarrazin specified that about 20% of Berlin’s population depended on welfare payments, which he wanted to cut, “above all to the lower class.”</p>
<p>Berlin’s indigent included within the immigrant population a “<a href="http://www.lettre.de/content/frank-berberich_klasse-statt-masse">large</a> number of Arabs and Turks in this city, whose numbers have grown through erroneous policies, have no productive function, except for the fruit and vegetable trade.” Compounding the problem for Sarrazin was a birthrate among Arabs and Turks about three times their percentage of the population.  Sarrazin thereby saw “Turks…conquering Germany just like the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: through a higher birth rate.”  Sarrazin “wouldn’t mind if” these immigrants “were East European Jews with about a 15% higher IQ than the one of Germans.”  Central to Sarrazin’s <a href="http://www.lettre.de/content/frank-berberich_klasse-statt-masse">thesis</a> was the assumption that “human ability is to some extent socially contingent and to some extent hereditary.” Sarrazin’s “solution to this problem” was “to generally prohibit influx, except for highly qualified individuals and not provide social welfare for immigrants anymore.”</p>
<p>As noted by <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">CERD</a>, Sarrazin’s interview comments prompted on October 23, 2009, a criminal complaint by the TBB under the <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html">German Criminal Code’s Article 130</a> against “Incitement to Hatred” (<a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html"><i>Volksverhetzung</i></a>).  Yet upon review, German prosecutors suspended their investigations on November 23, 2009, deciding that Sarrazin’s views fell under the protection of free speech contained within Article 5 of Germany’s <a href="https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/index.php?navi=1&amp;subnavi=68&amp;anr=80201000">Basic Law</a> (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/aufgaben/rechtsgrundlagen/grundgesetz/index.html"><i>Grundgesetz</i></a>).  Prosecutors quoted by CERD had judged Sarrazin’s statements as a “contribution to the intellectual debate in a question…very significant for the public.”</p>
<p>Following this domestic defeat, the TBB turned in 2010 to Article 14 of CERD’s governing convention (Article 14), the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx">International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination</a>.  Article 14 provides that the CERD may “consider communications from individuals or groups of individuals within” a consenting State Party’s “jurisdiction claiming to be victims of a violation by that State Party of any of the rights set forth in this Convention.”  In response, CERD agreed with TBB that Sarrazin had made discriminatory comments and that the German “State party failed to provide protection against such discrimination.”  CERD thus wanted the “State party” to “review its policy and procedures…to give wide publicity to the Committee’s Opinion,” and to deliver “within 90 days, information from the State party about the measures taken.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">CERD’s</a> decision did not involve Islam directly, for Sarrazin had referenced the ethnicity of Arabs and Turks, not their majority-Muslim faith.  Yet <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">CERD’s</a> decision noted various party submissions according to which in Germany the “labels ‘Turks’ or ‘Arabs’ are applied as synonyms for Muslims.”  Citing various evidence examples, CERD agreed with one submission that “Mr. Sarrazin’s statements led to public vilification and debasement of Turks and Muslims in general.”</p>
<p>Any such foreign judgment of a country raises sensitive questions of national sovereignty, particularly when involving limitations of free speech.  Sarrazin’s case was no exception, especially in light of CERD members mocked by the German conservative website <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/2013/04/uno-kritisiert-deutschland-wegen-sarrazin/#more-318358"><i>Politically Incorrect</i></a> as “torches of democracy and human rights.” Analyzing this <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/members.htm">roster</a>, Germans might well wonder what they could learn in equality under the law from members hailing from Algeria, Burkina Faso, China, Niger, Pakistan, Russia, Togo, and Turkey, among other countries.</p>
<p>The Sarrazin case exemplifies how international law and its institutional developments can impact domestic matters.  Observers of the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/home.asp">OIC</a>, an international organization of 57 majority-Muslim nation-states (including “Palestine”), would be well advised to keep Sarrazin in mind when considering the OIC’s longstanding <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/deborah-weiss/oic-ramps-up-islamophobia-campaign/">campaign</a> against “<a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/page_detail.asp?p_id=182">Islamophobia</a>.” This campaign would only too willingly extrapolate from Sarrazin’s comments about Arab and Turk immigrants, however controversial, to a condemnation of criticizing Islamic ideas as well.</p>
<p>Defenders of free speech should beware.  The transnationalist, multiculturalists and OIC have a new mechanism to override domestic legal hate speech decisions.  Precedent is slowly but surely being set.</p>
<p><em>This article was sponsored by the Legal Project, an activity of the Middle East Forum.</em></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>Economic Misery: The New Normal</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/economic-misery-the-new-normal/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=economic-misery-the-new-normal</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 04:45:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187992</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Obama administration is fudging the numbers on our economic decline. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/michigan-unemployment-claims.gi_.top_1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187997" alt="michigan-unemployment-claims.gi.top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/michigan-unemployment-claims.gi_.top_1.jpg" width="240" height="176" /></a>The weakest recovery in the nation&#8217;s history continues. On Wednesday, payroll processing firm ADP <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100693906">reported</a> that private sector businesses created a disappointing 119,000 jobs in the month of April. Once again, to use a word that should embarrass those who support the Obama administration&#8217;s Keynesian economic policies, this meager total was &#8220;unexpected.&#8221; Economic &#8220;experts&#8221; surveyed by <i>Reuters</i> had predicted at least 150,000 new jobs. &#8220;Nearly every industry has seen slower growth since the beginning of the year,&#8221; said Moody&#8217;s economist Mark Zandi. &#8220;Smaller businesses are experiencing much weaker growth.&#8221;</p>
<p>Most of the jobs were created in the service industries, which added 113,000 positions, while goods production accounted for the other 6,000. Both figures represented 7-month lows in growth. Adding to the misery, ADP&#8217;s March total of 158,000 jobs gained was revised downward to 131,000, and the latest data <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100694122">show</a> the manufacturing sector, which lost 10,000 jobs, has plateaued, or may be slowing down again.</p>
<p>The level of economic weakness is daunting. According to Bespoke Investment Group, the seven year stretch of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth below three precent, occurring from 2006 to the present, represents the longest one since 1929, the year which marked the beginning of the Great Depression.</p>
<p>Furthermore, despite a U3 unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, <a href="http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm">used</a> by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to calculate &#8220;official&#8221; unemployment, the U6 rate that far more accurately reflects reality, is 13.8 percent. The reason the U3 rate is misleading is because people who have given up looking for work aren&#8217;t counted as unemployed. Since America&#8217;s workforce participation rate is at its <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/04/07/march-labor-force-participation/2057887/">lowest level</a> since 1979, reality is being manipulated to make the Obama administration&#8217;s dismal economic policies look better than they actually are.</p>
<p>Still more manipulation is being pursued by the feds. They are going to revise how GDP growth is calculated. Research and development spending, as well as the capital value of all “intellectual property,” such as books, movies, records, television programs and plays&#8211;produced <i>since 1929</i>&#8211;will be added to the total. Michael Pento, founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies, cut to the heart of the subterfuge. &#8220;When GDP numbers are chronically bad and the labor force participation rate is perpetually falling, our government will do the same thing they did for the inflation data&#8211;tinker with the formula until you get the desired result,&#8221; he explained.</p>
<p>Pento further notes that no amount of manipulation can obscure the reality that federal revenue intake has remained stagnant for six years, even as the national debt has soared by nearly $7 trillion. &#8220;It&#8217;s a shame they won&#8217;t just implement real measures to grow the economy like reduce regulations, simplify the tax code and balance the budget.&#8221;</p>
<p>For progressives, such solutions are completely antithetical to their desire for ever-expanding government. Despite historically anemic growth, and $7 trillion of additional debt that is nothing more than stimulus by another name, the Obama administration will continue to pursue such destructive policies.</p>
<p>Thus, it was no surprise that Federal Reserve&#8217;s Open Markets Committee (FMOC) <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100695681">voted</a> 11-1 Wednesday to maintain their latest quantitative easing project that consists of keeping interest rates near zero and maintaining $85 billion of asset purchases ($45 <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100673025">billion</a> in Treasurys and another $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities) per month. The one notable change: asset purchases would increase or decrease depending on economic conditions. &#8220;The Committee is prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its purchases to maintain appropriate policy accommodation as the outlook for the labor market or inflation changes,&#8221; a statement said.</p>
<p>Moreover, they <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/may/01/federal-reserve-congress-cuts-policy">criticized</a> the so-called budget cuts imposed by sequestration for holding back the economy. One is left to wonder what held back the economy for the four years preceding the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts. Those years included stimulus spending <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444873204577537244225685010.html">totaling</a> more than $4 trillion in borrowed money. That “pump priming” was supposed to bring unemployment below 6 percent, a number as inaccurate as the Obama administration&#8217;s overly optimistic growth predictions that also fell <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/gdp-growth-the-latest-a-series-of-incorrect-obama-economic-forecasts">short</a>&#8211;unexpectedly&#8211;year after year.</p>
<p>Ken Griffen, head of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100686676">explains</a> what companies do in an artificially created, low-interest rate environment. &#8220;As we&#8217;ve all learned over the years, if you reduce the cost of capital you increase your use of fixed assets and you take out jobs. Corporate America, seeing an ever increasing cost for its employee base and extraordinarily low interest rates, is taking every step it can possibly take to reduce employment, to build factories abroad and domestically to substitute technology and automated processes for people,&#8221; he contends.</p>
<p>The most onerous increasing cost for an employee base? Obamacare.</p>
<p>Beginning next year, companies with 50 or more employees in 2013 will have to provide health insurance for their workers. As Mark Zandi notes, business with 20 to 49 employees have <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ADP?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2013-05-01-09-45-17">cut</a> hiring for three straight months, from 53,000 in January to just 17,000 in March. Other businesses are cutting back employee hours, because only full time workers&#8211;defined as those who work 30 or more hours a week&#8211;are required to be covered. The food service industry, which currently <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/050113-654297-obamacare-threatens-jobs-income-and-health-care.htm?p=2">accounts</a> for one out of every 13 jobs, has acknowledged that keeping shifts below 30 hours may be the difference between remaining open, or going bankrupt. Employers forced to reduce the hours of their workers are now known by a telling nickname: &#8220;The 29ers.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet it is not just the food service industry that is hurting. The 22,000-member United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International who initially supported the healthcare law, is now calling for its <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2013/04/17/obama-supporting-union-calls-for-full-re">repeal</a>. The union contends the law will &#8220;jeopardize our multi-employer health plans, have the potential to cause a loss of work for our members, create an unfair bidding advantage for those contractors who do not provide health coverage to their workers, and in the worst case, may cause our members and their families to lose the benefits they currently enjoy as participants in multi-employer health plans.&#8221;</p>
<p>Another factor weighing down the economy is <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100684601">weak</a> corporate sales growth. While company earnings haves been robust, sales have been dismal. According to Zacks Investment Research, 38 percent of the 271 S&amp;P 500 companies reporting as of last Friday showed an overall sales decline of 1.45 percent. &#8220;The loss of momentum in the U.S. economy has been palpable, but what looks to be a soft patch in yet another 2 percent year for real economic growth now has the potential to morph into something more painful,&#8221; said RBC Capital Markets economists Tom Porcelli and Jacob Oubina in a report.</p>
<p>The report then spelled out where that pain would be felt. &#8220;What is important to consider on the back of these results is that employment tends to become the victim of a disappointing revenue backdrop,&#8221; it stated. &#8220;In other words, headcount tends to become the focus in any effort to extract savings and boost bottom line results.&#8221;</p>
<p>The bigger picture is even clearer. Despite the populist facade erected by this administration, Wall Street is doing record level business, even as Main Street remains mired uneconomic stagnation and enduring unemployment.</p>
<p>Friday, the &#8220;official&#8221; unemployment rate for April will be revealed. Measured within the context the smallest labor participation rate since 1979 it will also be irrelevant. Millions of Americans will remain victimized by a reprisal of the Keynesian economic philosophy that turned the 1930s into a lost decade of misery, desperation and despair.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work….we have just as much unemployment as when we started&#8230; And an enormous debt to boot.&#8221; Those words were <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/02/guess_who_107804.html">spoken</a> by the Treasury Secretary. Not Obama&#8217;s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. <i>FDR&#8217;s</i> Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau&#8211;in 1939. Thus, the “new normal” is a lot older than most Americans realize.</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>The Internet Sales Tax: Another Assault On The Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/the-internet-sales-tax-another-assault-on-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-internet-sales-tax-another-assault-on-the-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2013 04:28:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187656</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can a last minute conservative backlash stop the anti-consumer bill from being rammed through Congress?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/internet-sales-tax.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187672" alt="internet-sales-tax" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/internet-sales-tax-450x307.jpg" width="270" height="184" /></a>It’s amazing how fast Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) can act when he wants to. Having doodled and dawdled for about four years without even producing a budget, Reid suddenly shed his torpor during the last two weeks in April. So eager was he to pass a bill authorizing state governments to collect tax on interstate Internet sales that he bypassed the normal committee process of holding hearings so senators could examine the pros and cons. The bill was introduced (actually, reintroduced) on April 16, and if Reid had gotten his way, it would have passed already. Opponents barely managed to postpone the vote on it until May 6.</p>
<p>One of the interesting aspects of this bill (known by the Orwellian title of “Marketplace Fairness Act”) is that 27 Republican senators currently favor it. Only 24 or 25 senators currently oppose the bill—a bipartisan combination of senators from the five states that do not have a sales tax, plus some economic conservatives from the Tea Party wing of the GOP, such as Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz.</p>
<p>The reason so many senators favor the Marketplace Fairness Act is simple: State governments are desperate for revenue to fund their ever-escalating expenditures, and their allies in the U.S. Senate are trying to help them collect it. Internet sales in the US totaled $226 billion last year, and a revenue stream that large easily becomes a tempting target for big spenders.</p>
<p>Proponents of the tax focus on “fairness.”  They claim that out-of-state online vendors enjoy a competitive advantage against local brick-and-mortar companies that must pay sales tax to their state governments, and that this inequitable situation must be corrected. This is economically ignorant. The whole point of economic competition is that some businesses have competitive advantages over others. This gives consumers choices and they end up buying from the businesses that give the most value for the least money.</p>
<p>There are, of course, two possible ways for state governments to eliminate the existing disparity: Impose the same tax burden on out-of-state Internet-based competitors, or remove the sales tax burden under which in-state businesses labor. The problem with eliminating the sales tax for in-state firms is that those firms consume various government-provided services (roads, courts, state police, perhaps even business subsidies) and it is only right that the businesses pay for those benefits. The problem with initiating taxes on out-of-state firms is: Why should out-of-staters pay taxes to a government when they consume none of the services or wealth transfers provided by that government? Why should they pay taxes to political entities for whom they are not eligible to vote and who are completely unaccountable to them? That is taxation without representation—a major principle for which American patriots fought the Revolutionary War—and there is nothing fair about it (hence, the Orwellian character of putting “fairness” in the name of the bill).</p>
<p>Allowing state governments to begin imposing sales tax on out-of-state businesses is worse than unfair: It’s unconstitutional. The federal government has no such authority. Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 5 on the United States Constitution stipulates, “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles Exported from any State.” Article I, Section 10, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution states, “No state shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports…” The constitution created the world’s first large free-trade zone—the United States of America—and for a majority of United States senators to place expediency above constitutional integrity is unconscionable.</p>
<p>One of the sadder aspects of the move to rush this new form of taxation through the Senate was that supply-side guru, the famous economist Arthur Laffer, quickly jumped on board. Laffer and his supply-side allies deserve great credit for reviving an understanding of how marginal tax rates create incentives for individuals, and for showing how some government taxes are less harmful than others. However, the Achilles’ heel of the supply-siders always has been their tendency to focus more on taxation than on the fundamental economic danger: Government spending. Laffer repeats that error today by endorsing the Marketplace Fairness Act.</p>
<p>Writing in The Wall Street Journal on April 18, Laffer cites data showing that state governments could have garnered at least $23 billion in 2012 by taxing Internet sales. He laments that this “lost” revenue resulted in marginal tax rates being raised. While Laffer is correct that raising marginal tax rates is harmful, he is too quick to assume that state governments will lower them if they gain the power to tax Internet sales. Worse, he doesn’t even attempt to make the case that state governments should spend less as the optimal way to stimulate the economic growth that he wants. When it comes to spending, Laffer takes the road of least resistance and comes down on the side of the status quo—clearly a political decision more than an economically sound one.</p>
<p>Indeed, on an economic level, it is amazing that so many senators feel safe in supporting the Marketplace Fairness Act. Having states add a tax to interstate Internet sales will raise the prices that consumers pay. Of course, that is SOP (standard operating procedure) for government; after all, government&#8217;s war against higher standards of living by imposing higher prices on consumers in a multiplicity of ways—e.g., subsidies, quotas, tariffs, business taxes, antitrust law, hyper-regulation, et al. With all those policies, government makes economic goods more costly to consumers.</p>
<p>At the time of this writing, it looks like the expansion of states’ taxing power is a done deal. One can only hope that the Supreme Court will uphold a challenge to the Marketplace Fairness Act’s constitutionality later on. However, in 2009 the Supremes declined to hear a case challenging a Massachusetts law taxing out-of-state corporations that generated sales in Massachusetts. Add to that the contorted verbal gymnastics that were used to uphold the Affordable Care Act last year, and it is hard to feel optimistic about our constitutional rights being safe. It appears to me that federalism is dying and state and national legislators are colluding to extract more money from the private sector.</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>Dogfight Ahead in Stockton, CA Bankruptcy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/dogfight-ahead-in-stockton-ca-bankruptcy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dogfight-ahead-in-stockton-ca-bankruptcy</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:16:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A precedent-setting government spending case likely headed to the Supreme Court.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/dogfight-ahead-in-stockton-ca-bankruptcy/ap_stockton_bankruptcy_nt_120625_wg/" rel="attachment wp-att-184318"><img class=" wp-image-184318 alignleft" title="ap_stockton_bankruptcy_nt_120625_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ap_stockton_bankruptcy_nt_120625_wg-450x298.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="179" /></a>On Monday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-stockton-bankrupt-20130401,0,7979388.story">ruled</a> that the city of Stockton, CA, will be allowed to enter bankruptcy. Klein noted the move was necessary so that the city could continue to provide basic municipal services to its residents. &#8220;It&#8217;s apparent to me the city would not be able to perform its obligations to its citizens on fundamental public safety as well as other basic government services without the ability to have the muscle of the contract-impairing power of federal bankruptcy law,&#8221; Klein <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100578156">said</a>. Yet the real story has yet to unfold: it must still be determined whether the city&#8217;s creditors or its public employee retirement funds get paid off first.</p>
<p>Klein himself was unsure. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know whether spiked pensions can be reeled back in,&#8221; he said during his ruling. &#8220;There are very complex and difficult questions of law that I can see out there on the horizon.&#8221;</p>
<p>The biggest part of Stockton&#8217;s debt is the $900 million it owes to the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS). Since this is the first Chapter 9 bankruptcy case challenging state pension obligations, what Klein is essentially <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-04-01/stockton-bankruptcy-decision-only-the-beginning">referring</a> to is whether the <a href="http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am10.html#gsc.tab=0">10th Amendment</a> of the Constitution preserving states&#8217; rights trumps federal bankruptcy law. Thus, it is likely this case will eventually end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.</p>
<p>During the hearing, Klein twice noted that the city&#8217;s creditors had acted in bad faith, referring to the reality that they had refused to negotiate with the city unless it cut its payments to CalPERS during the 90 mediation period required by state law. The creditors challenging the city are the ones who lent it $165 million in 2007 to fund CalPERS. The debt associated with CalPERS skyrocketed during the recession, when Stockton property values plummeted, leaving the city unable to meet its pension obligations. The creditors had sought to keep the city out of bankruptcy because it will enable Stockton to avoid repaying what it owes in full. Toward that end, they argued Stockton had not sufficiently cut expenses or raised taxes. City attorneys contended they had cut their expenses to the bone. The judge agreed with the latter assessment.</p>
<p>&#8220;The creditors got a big black eye today,&#8221; said Karol Denniston, an attorney who helped draft the legislation guiding the mandated mediation process that preceded the bankruptcy protection filing. &#8220;Now the stage is set for the real dogfight.&#8221; Despite the ruling in the city&#8217;s favor, Bob Deis, Stockton&#8217;s city manager, was less than enthused. &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing to celebrate about bankruptcy,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But it is a vindication of what we&#8217;ve been saying for nine months.&#8221;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a Pyrrhic vindication. During the go-go years preceding the real estate crash, this bedroom community of San Francisco passed several bond resolutions to fund new municipal buildings. Public employees were promised overly generous pensions, as well as the state&#8217;s <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100578156">most generous</a> healthcare plan: lifetime benefits for each retiree plus one dependent&#8211;<em>irrespective</em> of how long they had worked for the city. Since then, Stockton has tried to restructure some of its debt by cutting employment, slashing services, renegotiating some of their labor contracts, and cutting some of those health benefits.</p>
<p>The cutbacks, especially those in the Police Department, which now only responds to emergencies in progress, has turned the city into a <a href="http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/murder-rape-robbery-and-assault-skyrocket-in-bankrupt-stockton-california_10242012">war zone</a>. The murder rate is four times the national average, and the sobering reality is that 1-in-17 city residents face the likelihood that their car will stolen, or their house will be broken into, this year alone. In short, Stockton has become one of the most dangerous cities in the nation.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the city&#8217;s creditors are arguing that the pain of bankruptcy should be shared, and that currently untouchable pensions negotiated when the city thought the boom years would last forever should be part of the equation. It is expected that creditors will address this reality in the next phase of the process. &#8220;That&#8217;s where it will be precedent-setting,&#8221; contended Denniston. &#8220;Does bankruptcy code apply to CalPERS or not? If bankruptcy code trumps state law, then that&#8217;s huge and it has huge implications in terms of what happens next for other municipalities across California.&#8221;</p>
<p>The state pension plan manages $255 billion in assets, but it is dealing with an $87 billion shortfall. CalPERS is determining new rates to offset the deficit, but those rates will more than likely put additional strain on at least two dozen other cities in the state, including San Bernardino, San Jose, Compton, Fairfield, Watsonville, and Atwater. If an eventual ruling comes down that allows cities to stop fully funding CalPERS by declaring bankruptcy, many of them may follow Stockton&#8217;s lead.</p>
<p>Yet in the bluest of blue states, it is likely that the progressive worldview will prevail. &#8220;Greedy&#8221; Wall Street bondholders will be expected to take the hit, while &#8220;put upon&#8221; public sector employees will have their pensions and health benefits, bloated as they may be, preserved. Yet such inevitable posturing obscures the reality that <a href="http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/politics-blue-collar/2013/apr/1/stockton-california-bankrupt-expect-cyprus-solutio/">75 percent</a> of outstanding muni bonds are owned by small, mom-and-pop retail investors, whose own pensions and healthcare costs were to be underwritten by their investments in the ostensibly &#8220;safe&#8221; securities that muni bonds represented.</p>
<p>Until now.</p>
<p>And it is precisely that uncertainty that could reverberate far beyond Stockton. Since the 1930s, and possibly earlier, bond holders involved in major municipal bankruptcies have had their principle <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-stockton-bankruptcybre9310z7-20130402,0,4110290.story">repaid</a> in full. If that equation changes? As of now, the $3.7 trillion U.S. municipal bond market is a major source of funding for cities and towns across the nation, many of whom would be forced to file for bankruptcy should that funding dry up.</p>
<p>Many muni bond sellers dismiss this reality. Dan Heckman, senior fixed income strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management, expressed the prevailing attitude. &#8220;There are lots of areas where the city can go before looking for a big discount from bondholders,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We don&#8217;t think it will be as much a negative as many believe.&#8221; Peter Hayes, head of the municipal bonds group at BlackRock, which oversees $109 billion, echoed that assessment. &#8220;We&#8217;ve seen this coming for quite some time and the market has expected it, so it&#8217;s not the big attention grabbing headline that would necessarily create volatility or a selloff in the market,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Of course, this attitude is eerily reminiscent of the prevailing attitude that preceded the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2007. That crisis too was allegedly  &#8220;contained.&#8221;</p>
<p>To reiterate the other side of the equation, if the ultimate determination here is that cities burdened by unsustainable public employee contracts can get even partial relief from those contracts via bankruptcy, that too will drive many of them to embrace insolvency. Thus, one way or the other, the eventual outcome of this case will be precedent-setting.</p>
<p>A partial solution for the future comes to mind. Perhaps every major municipality in the nation should constitute some sort of citizen review board that would be invited to the party whenever government and union officials negotiate public service employee contracts. Such a change would go a long way towards ensuring that the people who actually pay for those contracts have a voice at the table. For far too long, the quid pro quo of unions donating large campaign contributions to politicians who, once elected, are expected to negotiate municipal contracts with those same unions, has been left unchallenged. Yet it is plain that such an arrangement has, in numerous cities across the nation, amounted to nothing less than legalized collusion. The city of Stockton is the latest example proving such an arrangement is unsustainable. Sadly, it won&#8217;t be the last city to do so.</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>Steve Moore: The Fight Is Never Over</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:45:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[One of the country's sharpest economic minds explains how conservatives can save America from left-wing destruction. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor’s note: Below is the video of economist Steve Moore&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the lecture follows.</em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/62601211" frameborder="0" width="500" height="281"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/62601211">Obama&#8217;s Second Term</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Steve Moore:</strong> All right.  I want to talk a little bit about the sequester and the economy.  Joe, if you wouldn&#8217;t mind putting up some of these slides I want to show you?  Let me start with this, on the sequester.</p>
<p>And I want to simply say that what is going on now with respect to the overheated rhetoric is like nothing that I have ever seen in the 25 years I&#8217;ve been in Washington.  In fact, what you&#8217;ve seen in the last couple weeks is just a prelude to one of the greatest, the most massive propaganda campaign by the Left you&#8217;re ever going to see &#8212; planes falling from the sky, prisons opening up, school children not having schools to go to, not being immunized &#8212; on and on and on and on.</p>
<p>I was really annoyed this morning, I read the front page of the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>.  Here&#8217;s what they say about the sequester &#8212; each side had expected cooler heads to prevail, assuming the other would set aside its political preferences and compromise to prevent the economic problems that are widely expected from a sudden reduction in the flow of federal funds.  If the sequester goes through, some economists believe this will lead to 750,000 lost jobs.</p>
<p>Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is bull crap.  This is the most outrageous lie.  And you know, I&#8217;ve got to say this &#8212; of all the things I&#8217;ve done in my life, one of the things that I&#8217;m most proud of is that twice a year, when I would go to San Francisco, I would have dinner with the great Milton Friedman, who was the greatest economist the last hundred years.</p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll never forget my last dinner with him.  He was 96 years old.  He and Rose were just such an adorable couple, and there&#8217;d just be four or five of us having dinner.  And I remember the last thing I asked him, the last dinner we had &#8212; I said &#8212; Milton, if you could wave your wand and we could do three things to reenergize the American economy, what would you do?  And he said, without hesitation &#8212; first, free trade.  Number two, he said, was school choice.  As most of you know, this was something he dedicated the later years of his life to.  And he said &#8212; the third thing we have to do to make the economy grow faster is to cut government spending.  And I said &#8212; well, Milton, by how much?  And he said &#8212; Steve, by as much as possible.</p>
<p>And I thought that was an incredibly insightful insight given the fact of where we are today, where everyone is talking about the fact that all these government spending cuts are going to hurt the economy.</p>
<p>Now, look, I listened to the congressman this morning, I agree entirely with him.  I am for a strong defense.  I do think, by the way &#8212; I lived in the shadows of the Pentagon &#8212; I believe there&#8217;s enormous amount of waste in the Pentagon.  And I think we can cut out the waste without cutting the bone.</p>
<p>But you know, I&#8217;m going to state this point very succinctly &#8212; government spending cuts are good for the company; they&#8217;re not bad for the economy.  And it&#8217;s just very &#8212; let me just give you some statistics on this that demonstrate this point.  I looked through the last 75 years, I just went through the historical tables of the federal budget.  Just wanted to give you some historical numbers.  In 1946, after World War II ended, the government spending as a share of GDP, and at the peak of World War II, was about 45 percent of our GDP.  So almost half of everything we were spending during the war years was government, obviously, to win the war.</p>
<p>Government spending as a share of GDP went from 45 percent of GDP in 1946 to 19 percent of GDP by 1948.  Isn&#8217;t that an amazing thing?  We cut government spending by almost 30 percent of GDP, well over 100 times greater than the cut that they&#8217;re talking about that&#8217;s supposed to take place on March 1st.</p>
<p>And yet, what happened to the US economy in the post-World War II years?  The economy actually boomed.  This was something that totally shocked the Keynesians.  Because one of the things that was going on during the war years was that all these Keynesian economists &#8212; the same people who are saying this today &#8212; were saying &#8212; oh, my God, the economy&#8217;s going to go into a second Great Depression once the war is over and we don&#8217;t have all this government spending.  And in fact, just the opposite happened.</p>
<p>The same thing if you look at what happened under President Reagan.  President Regan cut government spending from about 23 percent of GDP to 20 percent of GDP, even with the increases in military spending.  And the economy went through its greatest boom in the last 75 years.</p>
<p>And I would make the case this actually happened under Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.  If you look at what happened to government spending in the 1990s, we saw a dramatic reduction in government spending.  Government spending fell by about four percentage points of GDP.  And the economy went through an incredible boom in that era, too.</p>
<p>Now, let&#8217;s put this in perspective.  We&#8217;re talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of $75 billion of spending cuts.  $75 billion of spending cuts is somewhere in the neighborhood of about half a percentage point of GDP.  This is nothing.  This is nothing.  And the idea that this is going to torpedo the economy, I think, is very wrongheaded.</p>
<p>Point number two &#8212; I want to mention something about Obamacare.  Because one of the reasons I think we&#8217;ve gotten off track as a movement is we have stopped talking about Obamacare and what a dreadful law this is, and the dramatically negative impact this is going to have not just on our economy but also on our health.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s interesting, I was looking &#8212; if you look at the 2010 election, as you know, this was, as the congressman said this morning, one of the great elections for the conservative movement in history.  What was the number-one issue in the 2010 election?  It was Obamacare.  There&#8217;s no question about it.  The number-one issue that Americans had on their mind when they went to the polls in 2010 was this dreadful healthcare bill.</p>
<p>You know, in 2012, the polls show that Obamacare was even less popular by 2012 than it was in 2010, but it wasn&#8217;t an issue.  Why?  Why wasn&#8217;t it an issue?  Because the Republicans had stopped talking about it.  Right?  In fact, I saw a poll &#8212; Kellyanne Conway showed me a poll that one third of Americans had thought that Obamacare had already been repealed.  They thought it&#8217;d been repealed.  Why?  Because Republicans never talked about it.</p>
<p>One of the things we need to do as a movement &#8212; every single sentence that comes out of Republicans&#8217; mouths &#8212; especially this next week, as the sequester approaches &#8212; is to say of course, the first thing &#8212; whatever the question is &#8212; you know, Democrats are so much more disciplined than we are &#8212; whatever the question is, the first answer to whatever question it is every Republican politician is asked, the answer should be &#8212; of course, the first thing we have to do is repeal Obamacare.  Right?  They should do that in a very disciplined manner.</p>
<p>By the way, I have a piece in the Journal, if you haven&#8217;t seen the weekend education that came out yesterday.  We looked at the impact that Obamacare is having on hiring, and it is really scary.  We talked to, literally, scores of people who own Dunkin Donuts and Burger Kings and McDonalds.  And these are people on the front line of the economy &#8212; Red Lobster Restaurants and so on.  And what they are saying is because of the Obamacare law, they will not hire a 50th worker.  Because if you hire over 50 workers, you get affected by this law.  So we call these people 49ers.  You&#8217;re going to see businesses across America that are capping their &#8212; in fact, it&#8217;s already happening &#8212; they are capping their employment at 49.</p>
<p>But there&#8217;s another part of this story &#8212; that the law also says that if you hire someone for over 30 hours a week, that worker is considered a full-time employee.  And if you have over 50 employees, you have to provide health insurance for that person.</p>
<p>And so what all of these businessmen and -women are telling us is, guess what?  They are going to start hiring workers for only 28, 29 hours a week, and they&#8217;re not going to hire people for 30 hours a week.  This is a big problem for our economy.  If you look at the employment statistics over the last five years, there are now eight million to 10 million Americans that are what we call involuntary part-time jobs.  They can&#8217;t find a full-time job.  Obamacare is going to make that significantly worse.</p>
<p>Just one quick story &#8212; I gave a talk a couple weeks ago to the International Franchise Association.  These are people who own these franchise restaurants.  And one of the things that &#8212; after I gave my speech, these two guys came up to me, and they said, you know, they both live in Houston.  And one of them owns Wendy&#8217;s restaurants and the other one owns Burger Kings.  You know what they do now?  They have a job-sharing arrangement where the workers work 20 hours a week at the Burger King, and they go across the street and they work 20 hours at the Wendy&#8217;s.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I mean, you know, we applaud that.  But that is a terrible thing for America &#8212; you can&#8217;t hire full-time people.</p>
<p>Last thing &#8212; I wanted to show you the other big cancer.  Some of you have seen this.  This is just showing you what happened with the American economy.  Look, the big thing that happened in the American economy over the last 50 years was Reagan.  Right?  Reagan turned the economy around.  You can see what happened in the stock market from the dreadful &#8217;70s.</p>
<p>By the way, another talking point that our movement does not make enough is, Barack Obama says, over and over and over again &#8212; every speech he gives, he says &#8212; I inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  Right?  We&#8217;ve all heard him say that a thousand times.  It is not true.  Ronald Reagan inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, you can see that.</p>
<p>How many of you remember 20 percent mortgage interest rates?  Remember that?  And 14 percent inflation?  And you can see that on this scale.  And look at what happened when we changed directions from Jimmy Carter to Reagan &#8212; we saw the biggest economic growth spurt in American history.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;ll show the next chart &#8212; some of you have seen this before.  I always show this chart because I think it&#8217;s the &#8212; and I gave this exact presentation two weeks ago to the House Republican Conference at the retreat, and they were blown away by this.  The blue line is the top income tax rate in the United States.  You can see we went from 70 to 50 to 28 percent in the 1980s under Reagan.  So we&#8217;re now about half of where we were in the 1970s.  Look at the red line.  Look at the red line.  This is the share of taxes paid by the richest one percent.  Isn&#8217;t this an amazing chart?  The lower the tax rates have gone, the higher the share of taxes paid by the rich.</p>
<p>I mean, it&#8217;s an amazing thing.  I wish Tim Geithner and Joe Biden and Barack Obama were sitting right there, I could show this to them, because they just don&#8217;t have their tray tables in the upright and locked position when it comes to this stuff.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And look at this.  Mr. President, with all due respect, if you want to get more tax revenues out of rich people, cut their tax rates, don&#8217;t lower them.  If you show the next one &#8212; I mean, I&#8217;m sorry if you&#8217;ve seen me recite this before, but it&#8217;s my favorite quote from recent modern American history.  John F. Kennedy said &#8212; it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low.  And the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.</p>
<p>How many Democrats in Washington today believe that?  They want to raise the rate to 40, 50, 60 percent.  I just want to show you one last chart.  By the way, go back for one second.</p>
<p>This is what&#8217;s happened to our monetary supply.  I know this is kind of a boring subject.  But ladies and gentlemen, look at the money creation that has happened at the Fed.  I mean, this is an abomination.  We have seen a more than doubling in the amount of dollars in the American economy over the last five years.  A lot of the enormous debt that has been issued over the last five years under the last year of Bush and the first four years of Obama has been financed, ladies and gentlemen, by the Federal Reserve printing money and buying up the debt.  This is what we call monetizing the debt.  It&#8217;s what Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and other countries do when they get in trouble.</p>
<p>I would make the case to you this story doesn&#8217;t have a happy ending.  And by the way, the Fed is now very well engaged in QE3.</p>
<p>But the last chart I&#8217;m going to show you is the next one.  And this is just a very interesting one for people to ponder.  This is showing what happened to interest rates over the last 50, 60 years.  You can see what happens.  Reagan comes in when we have the 20 percent mortgage interest rates.  And then, over the next 30 years, you see this very steady and healthy decline in interest rates &#8212; so much so today, though, that we have interest rates now &#8212; a 10-year Treasury bill is selling at a 1.8 percent interest rate.</p>
<p>Now, this is &#8212; I would make the case that this is not a sign of economic health.  This particularly low interest rate is a sign of economic weakness.  And here is why.  When you look at that 1.8 percent interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bill, what that is telling you, ladies and gentlemen, is that &#8212; what is the inflation rate in the American economy today?  The inflation rate is running somewhere at about two and a half percent.  What that means is &#8212; and by the way, we as economists used to believe that this was an impossibility.  What this is telling you, ladies and gentlemen, is we have negative real interest rates in the American economy today.</p>
<p>For the non-economists in this room, let me make this very simple.  What this is saying is that everyone in this room, everyone around the country, is buying a 10-year Treasury bond from the United States government.  And the United States government is promising us, in 10 years&#8217; time, they&#8217;re going to pay us back less money than we lent to them.  Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is psychotic behavior, right?  Why would anybody do that?  Why would we lend the government money, and they&#8217;re going to give us back less money 10 years from now?  Anybody know the answer to that question?</p>
<p>It&#8217;s fear, exactly.  It&#8217;s that four-letter F-word.  Fear.  This is the last point I&#8217;m going to make, and then I&#8217;ll turn it over to the rest.  The overriding sentiment in this American economy today, what is holding back what should be a vibrant expansion &#8212; my lord, this economy&#8217;s been in a five-year depression, thanks to Obama &#8212; the only thing that is holding back our economy is fear.  And why is there such widespread fear?</p>
<p>And by the way, I would add, it&#8217;s fear and risk aversion.  Everybody is totally risk averse.  You have American businesses that are holding onto $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion of capital that&#8217;s sitting on their balance sheet that is not getting re-injected into the economy.  And I would submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, the reason that is happening is because of the person we&#8217;ve elected to the White House.  This man is so anti-business, so anti-growth, so antithetical to all of the ideas that we believe in.</p>
<p>You know, I wrote this piece in the Journal about a year ago called &#8220;Reaganomics vs. Obamanomics.&#8221;  There&#8217;s no comparison &#8212; both Presidents took over during an economic crisis.  At this stage of the Reagan expansion, the US economy grew at 6.8 percent, 6.8 percent.  We&#8217;re growing at negative right now.</p>
<p>That is why our ideas triumph, that is why we have to &#8212; the last thing I told the Republicans at that retreat two weeks ago, I said &#8212; look, we as conservatives don&#8217;t expect you to win every fight.  We know you are against a very formidable opponent and enemy.  But we do expect this &#8212; fight, fight, fight for Republican principles and conservative principles.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>John Lott:</strong> I was in Colorado this last week, at the invitation of several state representatives there.  And the big talk was about how just over the previous few days the Obama Administration had been calling up individual members of the Democrats in the state House there to kind of twist their arms to go and vote for gun control bills that were there.  It&#8217;s the first time I&#8217;ve heard of where the White House will call up a state representative someplace, threaten to get somebody to run against them in a state House primary next year if they vote the wrong way on a bill, or to campaign for them if they vote the right way.  And my understanding is the White House &#8212; in particular, Vice President Biden, making the calls &#8212; was able to get seven members of the Democrats in the state House to switch their votes.  And it was enough to get the four gun control bills that they had up there being passed.</p>
<p>And the irony is some of these bills were things like making you have a pay a fee for buying a gun.  And one of the amendments that the Republicans put up was to have an exemption for poor people so they didn&#8217;t have to pay the fee.  But the Democrats voted all together, as a result of this pressure, to make sure that there&#8217;d be these fees even for poor people buying guns.</p>
<p>So anyway, as I said, it&#8217;s the first time I think I&#8217;ve heard &#8212; maybe Steve or somebody else has heard &#8212; a White House getting involved so heavily.  And this is the type of lobbying you do for a member of Congress, not for somebody in the state House in a state passing a state bill.  But it&#8217;s my understanding, they so want these gun control bills to pass, not only because they want them passed, but also because they&#8217;re going to use them to go and fight for the federal legislation, saying &#8212; look, even a relatively pro-gun state like Colorado is adopting all the bills that the President wants to have passed at the national level.</p>
<p>So one of the things, I guess, I&#8217;ve stopped getting amazed by is just how dishonest the Obama Administration is with using numbers and what have you.  And the gun debate is actually no different.  I&#8217;m just going to focus on the one part of the debate that seems to be &#8212; they seem to think most likely will pass, and that&#8217;s these background checks, the so-called universal background checks.</p>
<p>And there are two claims that have been the central arguments that the Obama Administration has made.  The first one has been that 40 percent of gun sales don&#8217;t go through background checks.  And the second one has been that about 1.7 million prohibited individuals are prevented from buying guns because of the Brady Act.  Both of the claims are completely false.  And it just has to do with kind of obvious changes in language that I think anybody should be able to understand.</p>
<p>But you can see the President, for example, on the 40 percent point said &#8212; but it&#8217;s hard to enforce the law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check, that&#8217;s not safe.  Biden &#8212; I mean, I could give you a couple dozen US senators who&#8217;ve made the same types of arguments.</p>
<p>Now, here&#8217;s the deal.  If you push them, what they&#8217;re referring to is a 1997 study by the National Institute of Justice during the Clinton Administration.  And it was a small survey of about 251 purchases of guns over a three-year period from 1991 to 1994.  And what that survey said was that 36 percent of all transfers of guns were done without background checks.</p>
<p>So there&#8217;s a huge difference between talking about transfers and talking about sales.  The vast majority of transfers fall into gifts and inheritances.  For some reason, I don&#8217;t think it would have quite the impact if the President had said &#8212; look, there&#8217;s a lot of parents giving gifts to their sons of guns, and we really need to crack down on them.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But in fact, almost all of the inheritances and all of the gifts are within family gifts and transfers.  And then, of course, they rounded up the 36 percent to 40 percent &#8212; that&#8217;s minor.</p>
<p>But the thing is, the Brady Act, the federal background checks, didn&#8217;t even go into effect until February 28th, 1994.  So most of this period of time, almost 80 percent of the period, covers times when the federal Brady Act, with the federal background checks, wasn&#8217;t in effect.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s even worse than that.  I mean, I could go on about the problems with it.  But if you were to just take this survey, and look at just sales, the way the President uses the term, it&#8217;s about 13 percent of sales would not &#8212; you know, again, most of this pre-Brady &#8212; would not have been going through federally licensed dealers.  I think if you adjust some other things, you would be talking about a number that would be, at highest, in the low single digits.  And I&#8217;d be happy to go through that.</p>
<p>There are a lot of other problems with this.  One of the big problems is we&#8217;ve had a huge change in the number of federally licensed dealers.  If you go back to &#8217;92, &#8217;93, there are about 284,000 dealers.  By the end of the Clinton Administration, you&#8217;re down to about 100,000.  The reason why that&#8217;s important is that almost all that 180,000 that were eliminated were so-called kitchen table dealers, who would go and sell guns from their house or at a gun show or something.  And surveys that I&#8217;ve done talking to those dealers from that period of time indicates that, you know, it&#8217;s not like they&#8217;d have a sign or tell anybody that they were federally licensed dealers.  And the survey was merely asking buyers whether they thought they were dealing with licensed dealers, not whether they actually were or not.  And I think if you corrected that, it would adjust the numbers even further.</p>
<p>And you can see for the inheritances &#8212; about 93 percent of the gifted guns were within family, about 91 percent of the inherited guns were within family.</p>
<p>Now, what about this other claim? President Obama says over the last 14 years it&#8217;s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on guns.  Senator Schumer said background checks have &#8220;blocked 1.7 prohibited individuals from buying a gun.&#8221;  Senator Leahy, others I could go through.  And again, it&#8217;s just a big change in the language here.  Rather than saying prohibited individuals who were prevented from buying a gun, what they really should&#8217;ve said is that there were 1.7 million initial denials.</p>
<p>And I think the way to think about that a little bit is &#8212; you may remember, the late Senator Ted Kennedy was on the no-fly list five times.  Apparently, there&#8217;s somebody who they really wanted to stop from flying who had the same name, Ted Kennedy.  And would we count &#8212; so those were what I would call initial denials in terms of flying.  He later flew.  But would we want to count those five times that Senator Kennedy was stopped from flying as five times we stopped a terrorist from flying?  I presume not.  I presume the President wouldn&#8217;t use that type of terminology.  But yet, he uses that exact terminology when he&#8217;s describing gun purchases.</p>
<p>And the reason why it&#8217;s so dramatically wrong is that when you actually go through the annual reports for the [nix] system, what you find is that it looks like about &#8212; you can&#8217;t tell precisely because they go out of their way to make things vague &#8212; but it looks like about 95 percent or so of these initial denials are false positives.</p>
<p>So why is that important?  Well, the reason why it&#8217;s important is for the vast majority of these initial denials, it may simply be an inconvenience.  You know, they&#8217;re stopped for months from being able to buy a gun.  But for some significant portion &#8212; it&#8217;s small; I&#8217;m not going to say it&#8217;s large &#8212; for some portion of that 1.7 million, being stopped for months being able to buy a gun could be a significant risk to their safety.   They may be individuals who are stalked or threatened and feel the need to be able to go and get a hold of a gun quickly for self defense, and they&#8217;re being stopped from doing that.</p>
<p>What you really need to compare is the number of criminals who are stopped from buying guns versus the number of law-abiding citizens who are being prevented from being able to get access to a gun relatively quickly.  And I think when you look at these numbers, it&#8217;s pretty lopsided.</p>
<p>You can look at the numbers for 2010.  I could go through the whole list, but there were basically 62 cases that were referred for prosecution.  Prosecutors declined to go forward with 18 of those.  Thirteen resulted in guilty pleas or verdicts.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not the end of the problem.  Because there&#8217;s another number that&#8217;s about five to seven times larger than these initial denials each year which are just delays, which are not instant checks.  They&#8217;re about &#8212; a lot of checks go through in two hours; those are classified as instant checks.  But about five to seven percent of all the purchases take longer than that &#8212; almost all of those take three days.  And even a three-day delay for this very large number of individuals can have some impact on safety.  My research shows that a delay of that long is associated with about a two percent increase in rape rates and about a two percent increase in aggravated assaults against women.  Again, it&#8217;s not a huge number.  But it&#8217;s showing that the net effect of these types of provisions actually are to hurt safety.</p>
<p>So there&#8217;s one question I just want people to ask and think about.  And that is &#8212; can you name one place in the world that&#8217;s banned guns that&#8217;s seen murder rates fall?  I can&#8217;t find it.  Every place that we have crime data, both before and after a ban, we see murder rates go up by at least some and, many times, very dramatic increases.</p>
<p>I think Americans have some familiarity with what happened in Washington, DC and Chicago.  They may not know the magnitude of the changes that were involved there.  But usually people on the other side will say &#8212; well, those weren&#8217;t fair tests &#8212; that unless you go &#8212; because they&#8217;ll concede that murder rates and violent crime rates soared after the bans, but they&#8217;ll say the problem was you didn&#8217;t have the ban everyplace, that as long as criminals could go and get guns from Maryland or Virginia, or from the rest of Illinois, or from Indiana, that&#8217;s the type of thing that&#8217;s going to happen.  You&#8217;re going to have those bad effects.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t really think that explains it.  The fact that they could get those guns from those other places to begin with &#8212; it may explain why murder rates didn&#8217;t fall, but it&#8217;s not going to explain why a ban caused a big increase in murder rates in those places.  And besides, you can look around the world.  And I&#8217;ll just show you, if we have time, some graphs from places that &#8212; even island nations, where the entire island adopts a ban, no neighbors to go and blame &#8212; you see the same phenomenon in increased murder rates.  You see that happen time after time.</p>
<p>And finally, I would just say, if they really believed that murder rates were going to go up after the bans, it would&#8217;ve been nice if they&#8217;d kind of let us in on that before they passed the bans.  And I could go &#8212; you know, when DC and Chicago had the Supreme Court cases, there was long quotes &#8212; I&#8217;ll give you 30 pages of quotes about people predicting disasters afterwards.</p>
<p>Now, I want to point out &#8212; there&#8217;s one huge difference between DC and Chicago in terms of the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court cases.  Both of them struck down the gun bans.  That really hasn&#8217;t been that important.  Because the new rules that have placed are so restrictive, you literally only have a few thousand people in either DC or Chicago that have been able to qualify for getting a handgun, and those tend to be fairly wealthy people.  And my research shows it&#8217;s basically the poor minorities who benefit the most from owning guns.  And they have almost zero change in their handgun ownership after those bans have been struck down, because it costs so much money to go through the process.</p>
<p>The big change for DC, though, is that prior to the Heller case, it was a felony to use a long gun defensively.  It was a five-year felony to actually chamber a bullet in either a rifle or to put a shotgun shell in a shotgun.  When the Supreme Court struck down the handgun ban, said &#8212; look, if we&#8217;re going to let the law stand that it&#8217;s going to be a felony to actually load the gun, then it doesn&#8217;t do any good to say people have a right to self defense.  And so they struck down the gun law.</p>
<p>The reason why that&#8217;s important for DC is that in 2008 you had about 72,000 adults in the city who were licensed and registered to own long guns in the city who now &#8212; all the sudden, about a quarter of the adult population, who are now instantly able to go and use those guns for self defense when it would&#8217;ve been a felony for them to have done it just before the Supreme Court case.</p>
<p>Anyway, just to show you some things &#8212; there&#8217;s lots of ways I could go and show you the crime rates.  One simple way for DC is just to say &#8212; look, how did DC rank among the top 50 largest cities?  Prior to the ban, DC ranked around 20th or so.  After the ban, in the 30 years, it was either number one or number two in terms of murder rates, half the time; two thirds of the time it was in the top four.  Nothing remotely similar to that prior to the ban.</p>
<p>Another way to do it is just to take the average for DC&#8217;s murder rate relative to the other 50 largest cities.  Prior to the ban, which went into effect in February &#8217;77, the murder rate was falling.  Afterwards, it rose.  You can see it bouncing around 40 to 60, finally about 80 percent higher when you get about 13 years afterwards.  When you get a little bit farther than that, it shoots up even higher &#8212; there&#8217;s about four years when there was a crack cocaine epidemic, and that helps explain it.  I think because individuals weren&#8217;t able to defend themselves, the crack cocaine epidemic hit DC worse than others, but we can talk about it.  But even after the crack cocaine epidemic, DC&#8217;s murder rate relative to the other ones was very high.</p>
<p>Now, I just want to show you something really quickly here.  And that is what&#8217;s happened after we changed the laws in DC, and particularly this quarter of the population that&#8217;s now able to use guns defensively.  I just have the first seven months of the year.  I could do it over the whole year if you wanted to, but just the part of the year &#8212; because in &#8217;08, the law was only in effect for the first seven months, we just want to compare the first seven months.  So it&#8217;s &#8217;07, &#8217;08, &#8217;09, 2010, 2011, 2012.</p>
<p>In the last seven months that the ban and the gun lock laws were in place, you had 107 murders, homicide.  In &#8217;09 it was 82, in &#8217;10 it was 70, in 2011 it was 62, and this last year it was 51.  That&#8217;s a 52 percent drop in murder rates after the change that was there.  Violent crime rates have fallen across the board.</p>
<p>And there are about five interesting things I could tell you here, but I&#8217;ll just tell you one.  This is a phenomenon I&#8217;ve seen generally.  And that is, when civilians are allowed to own guns, gun crimes fall more than non-gun crimes.  If you look at robberies without guns, it was essentially flat.  Robberies with guns fell by 11 percent.  Aggravated assaults without guns fell by four percent; aggravated assaults with guns fell by about 31 percent.  And you can see Chicago &#8212; its murder rates were falling relative to other cities prior to its ban, rising afterwards.</p>
<p>And this is for England.  You can see it was flat, rising afterwards.  And then it fell here after about seven years.  And the reason why that did is because there was about a 20 percent increase in the number of police officers right at that period of time; it had nothing to do with the delayed effect from the ban.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s Ireland.  You can see the huge increase in murder rates right after the ban occurred there.  This is for Jamaica.  And I could go on.</p>
<p>But anyway, I&#8217;ll just mention one other quick fact.  And that is, if you look at all these multiple-victim public shootings in the United States since at least 1950, with just two exceptions, all these multiple-victim public shootings are taking place where guns are banned.</p>
<p>Look at the &#8220;Batman&#8221; movie theater shooting this last summer.  There were seven movie theaters within a 20-minute drive to the killer&#8217;s apartment that were showing the premiere of the &#8220;Batman&#8221; movie.  The killer didn&#8217;t go to the movie theater that was closest to his home &#8212; there was one that was only 1.2 miles away.  He didn&#8217;t go to the movie theater which advertises itself prominently as having the largest auditoriums by far in the state of Colorado.  You&#8217;d think if he wanted to kill a lot of people on a premiere night, that would be a great place to go.  Instead, he went to the single movie theater that had posted signs banning permit-concealed handguns.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s what we see time after time in these mall shootings or other things, where these killers have multiple venues to choose from &#8212; they keep on choosing the one place where the potential victims aren&#8217;t able to go and defend themselves.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re going to do healthcare in a second when we get up.  Okay.</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s basically the destruction of what&#8217;s been the best healthcare system in the world.  You know, we can look and see things like pharmaceutical companies shutting down entire research divisions or hollowing out the ones that are remaining.  You can look at things like the 20 percent increase in health insurance premium costs from January 2011 to the end of this last year.  If you take the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index, which adjusts for quality, healthcare insurance premiums were actually falling from the end of 2007 to 2010, up until they got to the point where the Obamacare regulations started kicking in.  And you can see the huge increase that&#8217;s occurred since then.</p>
<p>But probably the biggest problem that&#8217;s going to happen is just kind of the end of private insurance as we know it in January.  And one of the big things is that we have two sets of rules that are just going to pretty much end it fairly quickly, I think.  One is the changes in preexisting conditions.  Essentially, there&#8217;s going to be nothing that the insurance companies can do to kind of penalize you or make you pay in any way for preexisting conditions, or even waiting for benefits from it.</p>
<p>And the second thing is we&#8217;re told that there are going to be these penalties if you don&#8217;t have insurance.  There are two things about it.  One is these penalties are very small.  If you&#8217;re talking about somebody who&#8217;s making $50,000 in 2016, it&#8217;s going to be about $1,600.  If you&#8217;re making 100,000, it&#8217;s going to be about 2,900.  The cost for the cheapest individual insurance plan in 2016 is going to be about $7,100, so there&#8217;s a big gap there.</p>
<p>But even then, the big problem is the IRS has no enforcement rules for making you pay even those amounts of money.  The things that they can normally do for making you pay if you&#8217;re in arrears on taxes &#8212; things like imposing liens, seizing assets, freezing bank accounts, charging civil or criminal penalties &#8212; they&#8217;re explicitly forbidden from doing that in the Obamacare legislation.  The only thing they can do to make you pay even these relatively modest fines is &#8212; if you have paid too much in taxes and are supposed to get a rebate, then they can hold your rebate.  But you can fix that by just reducing your withholdings.</p>
<p>And the way to think about this is it&#8217;s going to be like &#8212; if you could wait until you got into a car accident before you got car insurance, and then as soon as you got the car fixed you dropped the car insurance again, what would happen to the car insurance market?  The price of car insurance would essentially be the price of fixing the car each time.  You&#8217;ll have some people who are going to feel bad that they&#8217;re somehow abusing the system by waiting to get insurance until they&#8217;re sick.  But after awhile, they&#8217;re going to feel like schmucks.  Because they&#8217;re going to be paying &#8212; you know, if you&#8217;re talking about family insurance, the difference is going to be like $10,000 a year or so that they could save by simply waiting until they got sick to go and buy the insurance.</p>
<p>And as more and more people take advantage of that, the remaining health insurance prices are going to rise, and you&#8217;re going to eventually force even these individuals who are trying to do the right thing, not trying to game the system, of eventually dropping it.</p>
<p>The other thing is, what are we giving up here?  And I&#8217;ll just give you briefly something here.  Often people think about healthcare in terms of life expectancy.  That&#8217;s not really the right way to look at it.  Because there&#8217;s so many things that individuals do, like obesity &#8212; Americans take a lot of risk in terms of driving accidents, things like that.  But there&#8217;s not much healthcare can go and do and try to solve.</p>
<p>The right way to look at the problem and say if you&#8217;re sick, what&#8217;s your probability of living, let&#8217;s say, five years with cancer, or some other types of disease? And the bottom line is if you&#8217;re sick, the country you will have wanted to be in in the past was the United States.  And there&#8217;s no doubt about that.</p>
<p>I just have some numbers here for cancer.  This is for data from 2000-2002.  This is the survivor rate for the United States for prostate, melanoma, breast, uterine cancer, colorectal cancer and so on.  And you can see the huge differences on average between the survivor rate in the United States and the survivor rate in Europe for having these different types of cancers, the five-year survival rate.  If you have any of these types of cancers, the country you would want to be in in order to get cures has been the United States.</p>
<p>The other thing just to look at a little bit is &#8212; if you look at the polls, Americans have personally loved their own healthcare that they&#8217;ve been receiving.  The reason why they&#8217;ve been upset with healthcare generally in the country has been the perception that the uninsured haven&#8217;t been well taken care of.  This is just a survey from 2007 from USA Today.  And you can see here that 89 percent of Americans were personally happy with their healthcare.  Ninety-three percent of those who had recently been seriously ill were satisfied.  Ninety-five percent of those who had suffered chronic illness were satisfied.  But only 44 percent were satisfied with the overall quality.</p>
<p>The amazing thing is that the uninsured were generally happy with the quality of the healthcare that they were receiving.  Even the uninsured who had been ill were generally happy.  Sixty-two percent of the uninsured were satisfied with the quality of their healthcare.  And if you look at people who are both uninsured and very dissatisfied, that&#8217;s only about two percent of Americans.</p>
<p>Since I think, because of the disaster that I described to begin with we&#8217;re going to be moving very quickly to a single-payer plan, I just thought I&#8217;d compare the United States with Canada.  And it turns out, by most measures, Americans who are insured are extremely happy.  But the Americans who are uninsured are about as happy with the quality of healthcare that they receive as Canadians are with theirs.</p>
<p>And you can break it down in terms of your ability &#8212; you know, the quality of care, your ability to get an appointment with the doctor, ability to see top-quality medical specialists, how satisfied are you to get the most sophisticated medical treatments.  The uninsured in America, by all those criteria, are almost exactly as happy as the Canadians are with their healthcare.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for your time.</p>
<p><strong>William Voegeli:</strong> Brother Greenfield has directed me to address the question of how eight years of the Obama presidency will change the scope of the welfare state in general and federal entitlement programs in particular.</p>
<p>I assume that all of you woke up this morning already quite conversant with the grim economic implications of that trajectory.  You know more than you did even then, now, thanks to Stephen Moore.  So I would like to focus instead on the political implications, specifically the risks of the growing welfare state to the American experiment in self-government.</p>
<p>The liberal project, now in its second century, rejects the idea that democracy is inherently precarious, that fear permeates our founding documents, especially the Federalist Papers.  But liberals have dismissed it as an overwrought excuse to prevent government from enacting an endless list of social improvements.  Thus, the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy, according to the philosopher John Dewey.</p>
<p>The political scientist Harvey Mansfield has a bracing explanation for why James Madison was right and Dewey was wrong on this point.  Good, small-d democrats think democracy can be good, Mansfield wrote.  And when they see it as not, they take responsibility for reforming it.  To do this, they must think that good government as a standard is above democracy.  They must not think that government is automatically good merely by being democratic, as this belief can make them both fanatic in their zeal for democracy and complacent as to its behavior.</p>
<p>Good government encompasses many things.  But one of them is always that government pays its bills.  In order to do so, it must align the benefits it promises to people with the burdens it imposes on them.  Establishing and maintaining that alignment obligates political leaders not to indulge but to disabuse citizens of the fantasy that generous benefits are compatible with insignificant burdens.</p>
<p>Barack Obama seemed to acknowledge, at a high level of abstraction, the importance of such discipline when he said in 2007 that to reach out to citizens who&#8217;ve lost trust in their government but want to believe again, it was imperative for the Democratic Party to tell the American people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear.  So far, so good.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>By the fall of 2008, however, Obama was telling voters something that sounded much more like what they wanted to hear than what they needed to hear.  Specifically, candidate Obama made what he called a firm pledge two months before the election &#8212; no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase under my administration, he said.  Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.</p>
<p>Well, the problem with exempting 97 percent of American households from any federal tax increase is that it makes it impossible to pay for the expensive obligations that were baked in the cake when President Obama took office in 2009, much less the expensive obligations that government has taken on since then, Obamacare chief among them.</p>
<p>But don&#8217;t take my word for it.  The New Republic magazine&#8217;s Timothy Noah, a zealot for income redistribution, wrote in 2012 that &#8212; if Obama does not relent and seeks tax increases on the middle class, the President &#8220;can forget about achieving meaningful deficit reduction.&#8221;  After winning reelection, the term-limited President had the opportunity of a lifetime to tell the people what they needed to hear instead of what they wanted to hear.  With the Fiscal Cliff deal, however, he responded by making his reckless campaign promise of 2008 even more reckless, agreeing to exempt not 97 percent of Americans from federal tax increases, but something more like 99.5 percent.</p>
<p>Now, this approach could be fiscally sound, leaving aside all questions of its economic impacts and justice, if the President and his party would advocate, or at least tolerate, recalibrating Social Security and Medicare and other entitlement programs, and federal spending generally, until those outlays could be sustained by revenues from a tax system that takes more money only from a sliver of the population. But of course, they haven&#8217;t done that.</p>
<p>And so, America&#8217;s current majority party opposes the tax increases that would make their spending plans work and opposes the spending cuts that would make their tax system work.  That a party could embrace such imbecilities while winning more elections than it loses justifies the fears of 1787 that self-government is fated to traverse thin ice forever.</p>
<p>The economic and governmental threats that come from liberalism in practice proceed from essential features of liberalism in theory, ones which guarantee that the new era of responsibility President Obama promised in his first inaugural address will always remain beyond the horizon.  Assert, as liberals have for 80 years, that people have rights to social welfare benefits, and we cannot be shocked when demands for those rights routinely exceed the resources made available to satisfy them.</p>
<p>Conservatives believe that rights are what they are.  Liberals believe that rights are what we say they are, that they change over time as we interpret new circumstances.  Franklin Roosevelt said in 1932 &#8212; the task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of civil rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.  By 1944, FDR felt that the social order had changed and grown to the point where the 18th century roster of rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and trial by jury, had proven inadequate to, in his words, assuring us equality in the pursuit of happiness.  In his State of the Union address that year, FDR proclaimed a second Bill of Rights which included the right to a useful job, a decent home, adequate medical care and a good education.  Though his list was extensive, FDR left the door ajar by stipulating that the second Bill of Rights included &#8220;these and similar rights.&#8221;</p>
<p>Indeed.  In 1943, one of the New Deal alphabet soup agencies, the National Resources Planning Board, had urged recognition of its own honor roll of social welfare rights, including the right to rest, recreation and adventure.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Such pie-in-the-sky promises either mean nothing or mean a lot, including things that are ominous.  Conservatives think markets are efficient and productive but favor limited government for the more fundamental reason that the only alternative to it is government that&#8217;s unlimited, unlimited with respect to both the ends it pursues and the means it employs.</p>
<p>Though disappointed at the 2012 elections, conservatives still believe that electoral democracy deserves to be politically determinative.  It does not follow, however, that we are compelled to respect democratic outcomes as metaphysically dispositive.  If 51 percent of the voters endorse the proposition that two plus two equals seven &#8212; which is a rough summary of last November&#8217;s results as they pertain to fiscal policy &#8212; those of us still convinced that two plus two equals four have been rebuked but not refuted.</p>
<p>The conservative mission to sustain our experiment in self-government by discerning and resisting democracy&#8217;s self-destructive tendencies remains.  Patriotism and republicanism &#8212; two sides of the same American coin &#8212; require prosecuting that mission with all the intelligence and determination we can summon.  In the arenas of policy and politics, there are many things we can do, including many we have yet to do often or well enough.</p>
<p>There are, however, only so many things we can do.  Conservatives cannot guarantee victory &#8212; as Winston Churchill said &#8212; amidst graver challenges, but only deserve victory.  We will deserve and hope to achieve victory by taking with the utmost seriousness our duty to transmit the republic founded in the 18th century to Americans of centuries to come so that they may join the honored ranks of those who have defended and preserved it.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Michael Walsh:</strong> One of my favorite figures from gangland history &#8212; I&#8217;m kind of a historian of gangland, which is why I now write about politics &#8212; comes from Chicago, lesser-known gangster named Murray the Camel Humphreys.  Murray the Camel Humphreys has the distinction &#8212; at a time when the Irish, the Italians and the Jews ran the rackets in America &#8212; of being the only Welsh gangster in American history.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So a dubious claim to fame.  But he did say one thing that&#8217;s so important that we need to remember as we head into the excitement of the second term of Barack Hussein Obama.  Murray said, talking to reporters &#8212; if you ever have to cock a gun in a man&#8217;s face, be sure you kill him.  Because if you don&#8217;t, the next day he&#8217;s going to come back and kill you.</p>
<p>And that was the ethos of gangland, that was the ethos of the Capone mob, that was the ethos of the Chicago political establishment.  And it&#8217;s still their ethos.  We have to understand where they come from in order to be able to fight them.</p>
<p>So we&#8217;ve heard the word &#8220;fight.&#8221;  Steve said it.  Senator Sessions and I were talking about it the other day.  I think we all agree &#8212; we don&#8217;t mind losing; we do mind not fighting.  We want our guys out there, in the arena combating, with a clear understanding of the nature of the enemy, which is not a word I&#8217;m afraid to use &#8212; and how we can beat them, which &#8212; I&#8217;ll give you some suggestions at the end of my little talk &#8212; and what they want to do with us.</p>
<p>Because the first thing you need to know is that everything that&#8217;s happening to you today is on purpose.  They mean it.  They have waited for this moment since 1965.</p>
<p>Now, David Horowitz and I go back to the &#8217;60s together.  We know these guys.  I&#8217;ve watched this movie for 45 years.  And this is the moment they have been waiting for all their lives.  They think that in Barack Obama they&#8217;ve found the perfect avatar to create the world that they dreamed of in 1965, the free speech movement at Berkeley with the revolutions of 1968.  This is their time, this is their moment.  I believe the President even said that.  Take him at his word.</p>
<p>In other words, we are in a fight.  And how do you fight?  Well, one of my heroes is a good Irish Catholic &#8212; Archbishop John Hughes, in the 19th century.  1844 John Hughes, the first Irish-born archbishop of New York &#8212; the first archbishop of New York born in Ireland &#8212; was faced with a nativist threat to Old St. Patrick&#8217;s Cathedral, which is down on Mott Street.  And the nativists were threatening to come and burn down the church because of all the anti-Irish sentiment in New York City at the time.  And the Archbishop went and gathered a couple hundred paddies with pitchforks and torches and clubs and knives, and whatever other weapons they could get.  And he said to the nativists &#8212; if you touch a brick on this church, we will burn your city down.  Have a nice day.  Guess what?  No trouble at St. Patrick&#8217;s Cathedral.</p>
<p>Later on, President Lincoln sent Archbishop Hughes to London during the Civil War with a message for the English, who, as you know, were thinking about coming into the war on the side of the South, certainly supporting the South because of the cotton and the need for cotton in the mills of England.  And Archbishop Hughes said &#8212; you really need to stay out of the American Civil War.  The English said &#8212; why?  And he said &#8212; because if you don&#8217;t, and if you try to raise troops in Ireland to come and fight, you will have so much trouble with the Irish community in America it&#8217;s not worth your while to try it.  And the English, oddly enough, agreed with Archbishop Hughes and did not come into the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s fighting.  You must &#8212; now, I grew up in the Marine Corps, so naturally I would think this way &#8212; that you must meet force with force.  And you must know the nature of your enemy, and you must be able to call your enemy by his name, because he calls you an enemy.  Why is this always a one-way street?  Right?  Why do we get punched, and they just punch away?  Why don&#8217;t we fight?</p>
<p>I want to read you something really quick that I wrote the night of the election in 2008, on National Review Online, where I&#8217;m usually on the corner Monday through Friday.  We got this &#8212; this was after the defeat was clear &#8212; the old fashioned way &#8212; we earned it.  The other side took the fight to us, and we never took the fight to the other side.  Honorable campaigns are for losers.</p>
<p>Another point &#8212; age matters.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Thank you.  McCain ran an honorable campaign because he never really understood in his heart that the other guy had no intention of doing the same thing.  So he didn&#8217;t get Obama&#8217;s generation or David Axelrod&#8217;s.  Obama would lie about public financing, &#8220;oppose gay marriage,&#8221; but also oppose Proposition 8 and never see it as morally contradictory.  The world McCain understood and operated in &#8212; and I would say now, by extension, the entire GOP establishment &#8212; is vanishing, and tonight is visible evidence.</p>
<p>And finally, understand once and for all the old media is part of the Democratic Party now.  Ignore it.  Never send Michele Bachmann onto &#8220;Hardball&#8221; again.  You all remember how she got cut up so badly by Chris Matthews.  Never send Sarah to play nice with Katie.  We need to develop and create our own workarounds &#8212; Fox, talk radio, NRO, et cetera; and use them.  Don&#8217;t play by their rules &#8212; make your own.  And that&#8217;s what we absolutely must do.</p>
<p>Now, as you know, in Hollywood, we have a super-top secret &#8212; oh, gee, maybe I shouldn&#8217;t &#8212; yes, a super-top secret organization of Hollywood conservatives.  And as one of the ones who&#8217;s pretty much out of the closet, I sometimes meet with the new kids.  And they say &#8212; well, you know, when we feel pressure, what should we do?  What should we do with all those lefties?  And I say &#8212; oh, it&#8217;s simple, just punch them in the face.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Well, not physically, unless you, of course, want to.  But punch them in the face metaphorically.  Representative Gohmert was talking about bullies.  That&#8217;s how you deal with bullies.  You punch them in the face, you break their nose, and then that&#8217;s usually the end of the problem.  The Democrats are our bullies.  And we continually don&#8217;t punch them in the face.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s face it &#8212; the Democratic Party, as I like to say, is a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.  It&#8217;s always been that way.  Let&#8217;s go over a little bit of the history, shall we?  It&#8217;s the party of segregation &#8212; of slavery, segregation, secularism, sedition.  It&#8217;s antithetical to everything we believe as patriotic Americans.  As someone just said, patriotic Americans, Republicans &#8212; two sides of the same coin &#8212; I think Bill said that.</p>
<p>They stand in opposition.  Well, let&#8217;s put it this way &#8212; you can argue that Aaron Burr, who was the founder of Tammany Hall &#8212; the first Vice President for President Jefferson &#8212; was in a sense the first Democrat &#8212; what did he do?  Oh yeah, he murdered one of the Founding Fathers!  I mean, this is a great start to a political party!</p>
<p>During the Tammany Hall reign &#8212; which I&#8217;m proud as an Irishman was mostly an Irish criminal organization, but it was also the Democratic machine in New York, and of course elsewhere around the country &#8212; George Washington Plunkitt &#8212; who didn&#8217;t write a book, but there&#8217;s a book called &#8220;Plunkitt of Tammany Hall,&#8221; which distills all the wisdom of Plunkitt and the Irish gangsters who ran New York City machine politics &#8212; said &#8212; what&#8217;s the Constitution among friends?  And this is their attitude to the Constitution, and it remains their attitude to the Constitution to this day.  The only thing I&#8217;m surprised about, having been through all this since 1965, is that their loathing for the Constitution is now so out and so proud.</p>
<p>You heard someone mention Professor Seidman&#8217;s attack on the Constitution, which was in the New York Times.  They&#8217;re now &#8212; they&#8217;re swarming.  They really feel this is their moment.  I think that&#8217;s the most important thing for you to take away today is that they are at their zenith.  And they can&#8217;t wait to finish the job, which is to crush you.</p>
<p>Therefore, a couple years ago, I wrote, under my pseudonym, David Kahane, who&#8217;s a crazy lefty 30-something screenwriter in Hollywood who has a column in the National Review and manages to get every single thing wrong &#8212; I had him write a book called &#8220;Rules for Radical Conservatives.&#8221;  And I&#8217;m often asked &#8212; what should we do?  So let me just give you the 10 rules, and we can kick them around later on if we like.</p>
<p>Here they are.  First rule &#8212; know your enemy, his intentions and his weapons; and use them against him.  I got some blowback on this when I wrote this book, and I was being interviewed here and there.  And they said &#8212; Mike, Dave, or whatever your name is, are you saying we should actually stoop to the tactics of the Left?  And I said &#8212; you&#8217;re goddamned right, we should.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>If you don&#8217;t play by their rules, you&#8217;re going to lose.</p>
<p>I saw a note on something I wrote or somebody wrote, saying &#8212; in World War II &#8212; as you may know, if any of you had fathers fighting World War II &#8212; in the Pacific theater, it was as brutal a war as we&#8217;ve ever fought.  Our side took heads, took scalps, gouged out Japanese eyes, cut their teeth out, wore them in necklaces around their neck, wore skulls on their belts.  Came home, never talked about it again.  An old man wrote in, and he said &#8212; we didn&#8217;t make the rules in the Pacific theater; the Japanese did.  We just played by the same rules.</p>
<p>Now, that&#8217;s a really brutal thing.  Well, (inaudible) we can&#8217;t (inaudible), you know &#8212; we bought the [meme] that conflict avoidance is the most important thing in life.  It&#8217;s not.  Fighting back is.</p>
<p>So start by using their own tools against them.  Become what you behold.  Be like them.  Just believe what we believe.  The culture is the message, so seize it.</p>
<p>As you know, I worked for Andrew Breitbart, the late Andrew Breitbart, the anniversary of whose death is coming up on March 1st.  And we created the Big Journalism website.  And Andrew was &#8212; as a Hollywood guy, as an LA guy, was obsessed with seizing the culture.  It&#8217;s very important.  Ben&#8217;s talked about it, other people have talked about it &#8212; terribly important.  Send your kids to Hollywood, make them novelists.  Don&#8217;t make them all go into business school.  Come on, guys, we need some reinforcements out here on the West Coast.</p>
<p>Rule number four &#8212; get on offense, and stay on offense &#8212; take no prisoners.  No prisoners, don&#8217;t be nice to them.  I like to distill this rule down to the phrase &#8212; treat them with exactly the amount of respect they treat you &#8212; none.</p>
<p>Rule number five &#8212; let the dismantling begin.  To all the congress people here, we will believe you&#8217;re going to cut the budget when we see wreckers balls outside the Commerce Department and the Education Department, and you tear those buildings down.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Until then, we don&#8217;t believe you.</p>
<p>At all times, think constitutionally.  If they&#8217;re going to make the Constitution their whipping boy, let&#8217;s defend the Constitution.</p>
<p>Rule number seven &#8212; adapt the time-honored conservative message for a new kind of America, a new kind of American.  That has to do with immigration.  That&#8217;s a whole other thing.  But let&#8217;s believe in our own country and the power of America to transform what used to be foreigners into Americans.  They did it for the Irish, they did it for the Italians, they did it for the Jews.  We can do it for the Mexicans, we can do it for everybody else who comes here.  Believe in your own country.</p>
<p>Rule number eight &#8212; I love the anecdote about Speaker Boehner &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; get better officers.</p>
<p>Rule number nine &#8212; never stop fighting till the fight is done, a great David Mamet line from &#8220;The Untouchables.&#8221;</p>
<p>Rule number 10 &#8212; you all know it &#8212; the fight&#8217;s never over.  Let&#8217;s fight!</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Steve Moore:</strong> You know, I&#8217;ve been speaking at these conferences now for at least three or four years in a row.  And I keep making this wrong prediction.  So as an economist, I&#8217;ll admit I was wrong.  Every conference for the last four years I&#8217;ve predicted that interest rates are going to go up, and they keep going down.  And it&#8217;s interesting &#8212; anybody know the last time interest rates were this low?  The Great Depression.  The Great Depression.  And gold didn&#8217;t do all that well in the Great Depression, either.</p>
<p>I think that I&#8217;m going to stick with my wrong prediction.  If you guys are nice enough to have me back, one year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now, I&#8217;ll bet anybody $100 in this room &#8212; any and all takers &#8212; that interest rates will be higher, inflation will be higher, and gold price will be higher.  Anybody want to take me up on that?</p>
<p>So I just think that &#8212; and by the way, if I&#8217;m right about that, one of the reasons this fiscal situation is so dangerous is &#8212; the only thing that&#8217;s even holding us up right now is &#8212; who&#8217;s the biggest debtor in the world?  Who is the biggest beneficiary of these low interest rates?  Uncle Sam, right?  And if we &#8212; just to give you a sense of how much trouble we&#8217;re in &#8212; if I&#8217;m right and interest rates start to rise, even if we, let&#8217;s say, have a 200- to 300-basis point increase in interest rates, which would only bring the rates back to a normal range &#8212; you know what, every 100-basis point increase in interest rates raises the 10-year deficit by $1 trillion.  So a 300-basis point increase in interest rates raises the debt by another $3 trillion on top of all the money we&#8217;ve got.</p>
<p>I want to make one other quick point &#8212; I know we&#8217;re running out of time.  But I want to make one optimistic point.  And this is a point I meant to make before, and I ran out of time.  The one really positive thing that&#8217;s going on in America, that I think is something we should all keep an eye on, is the red state-blue state divide.  To just cover this in a minute and a half &#8212; the red states in this election got redder; the blue states in America got bluer.  And now what you are seeing, to cut to the chase, is &#8212; I believe in the next 10 years, every Southern state is going to eliminate its state income tax.  So you are going to have an entire region of the country that is going to be income tax free.  Think about that.</p>
<p>By the way, there are five states right now in the South that are already looking this year at eliminating their income tax &#8212; being like Texas, being like Florida, being like Tennessee.  If that happens &#8212; and by the way, all the states in the South are for right-to-work.  States like California, my home state of Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts &#8212; those are all non-right-to-work states.  What you are going to see, I think, over the next two, five, 10 years, is a continued very rapid migration of capital workers and jobs out of states like California.</p>
<p>And by the way, how do you screw up this state?  I mean, really.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This is such &#8212; I mean, I&#8217;ve had such a great time here this weekend.  And what an incredible place California is.  Only politicians could screw this place up.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And so I do think this is going to force &#8212; this is the ingeniousness of our federal system, right, that we have 50 laboratories of experimentation.  And what is going to happen as a consequence of this is it&#8217;s going to force states like Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, California to change or die.  I really believe that.  And the one other thing I&#8217;d invest in right now is real estate in no-income tax states, because that&#8217;s where everybody is headed.</p>
<p><strong>John Lott:</strong> Well, I wanted to answer Michael&#8217;s question.  I guess I trust markets [a fair amount].  I would just look at the long-term bonds, and they seem to indicate very little belief that inflation&#8217;s going to be picking up there.</p>
<p>You know, the monetary base, obviously, has shown the big increase that Steve&#8217;s shown.  But if you look at broader measures of money supply, like M2 or whatever, there&#8217;s been relatively little change that goes on there.</p>
<p>And, you know, I do agree with the quote that Steve brought up to begin with, particularly about Milton Friedman.  And Friedman used to &#8212; of course, tells you how long ago this quote was &#8212; but he used to say he&#8217;d rather have a budget of $500 billion than, let&#8217;s say, have a trillion without any taxes and have it all financed by deficit.  Because his argument was, you know, kind of the total spending there is telling you what the total tax burden is ultimately going to be, whether it&#8217;s going to be now or in the future, the deficit really just says the taxes are in the future versus now.  And it&#8217;s the total taxes that are going to determine the incentive to go and invest in work that people have.</p>
<p>And finally, I just want to pick up on one thing that Steve just said about the red and blue state divide.  One of the reasons why I think Democrats feel so strongly about gun issues is &#8212; you know, it&#8217;s kind of like gun owners are to the Republicans, or NRA, as the unions are to Democrats in terms of getting people out to go and work on campaigns.  And they&#8217;re willing to go and look at these things in a long-term thing there.</p>
<p>And I think one of the reasons why they&#8217;ll do things like put taxes on people able to own guns is that they think &#8212; if I can discourage people from owning guns in the future, I&#8217;m going to go and make it &#8212; it&#8217;s going to be weakening one of the important Republican bases that are there.</p>
<p>But anyway, thanks very much.  Trying to turn the red states bluer, I guess, over time.</p>
<p><strong>Steve Moore:</strong> By the way, the way they&#8217;re going to try to do that &#8212; this is the Left&#8217;s strategy is to federalize everything, so that the distinctions between the states &#8212; that&#8217;s why they&#8217;ve done &#8212; what are they doing with Obamacare on Medicaid?  They&#8217;re basically bribing every state to join this system, even though in the long run it&#8217;s probably going to be a bad deal.  I mean, if you&#8217;re a Republican governor, it&#8217;s very hard to pass up 95 percent of the costs that are going to be picked up by Uncle Sam.  And that&#8217;s why we have to resist this federal impulse to federalize everything, which is part of that strategy, right?</p>
<p><strong>William Voegeli:</strong> Let me address the very good question about liberals&#8217; intentions, whether they&#8217;re benign or malign, the liberal worldview.</p>
<p>The word &#8220;compassion,&#8221; etymologically, means to suffer together.  Now, together is not the same as identically.  If I&#8217;m walking down the street and see a man with a sign that says &#8220;I haven&#8217;t eaten for three days,&#8221; I feel bad.  But I don&#8217;t feel hungry, I feel sorrow and agitation.  And I have, as a result, in a strange way, a sort of self-interested, or at least a self-regarding, motive for putting a dollar in his cup.  When I do so, I proceed down the street feeling better, feeling less bad.</p>
<p>I think the problem with the politics of compassion, the problem with the liberal agenda and worldview, is that this business of alleviating the bad feelings the compassionate, those who behold suffering, have unfortunately does not necessarily have to do &#8212; is not necessarily tightly connected to the sufferer&#8217;s improvement of their situation.  And so you have the roster of failure, as you mentioned &#8212; things like affirmative action and the welfare state &#8212; that have all managed to make the purported beneficiaries worse off, but have done so at the time of making the purported benefactors feeling &#8212; I&#8217;m a good person, I&#8217;m a nice guy.  I support nice things.</p>
<p>When various disasters happen, such as the Newtown shootings, or the Lehman Brothers crash of 2008, the cry goes up &#8212; the government has to do something.  But the problem isn&#8217;t that the government isn&#8217;t doing enough things; the problem is that the government isn&#8217;t accomplishing enough things.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s not accomplishing enough things because it has no rational disciplined alignment between its objectives and its mechanisms, so that what we need is not to endlessly broaden the government agenda, so that we&#8217;ll feel better about having done something &#8212; whether or not we&#8217;ve accomplished something &#8212; what we need is a more thoughtful and disciplined awareness of what the government can and cannot do and confine it to a limited number of things that it can do well, and insist that it do them well, rather than tolerate a system where the government miraculously manages to be simultaneously overbearing and ineffectual.</p>
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