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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Taxes</title>
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		<title>Taxes and the Tale of Two Cities</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/taxes-and-the-tale-of-two-cities/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taxes-and-the-tale-of-two-cities</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/taxes-and-the-tale-of-two-cities/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:35:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al sharpton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245599</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two sets of tax rules for those inside and outside the Democratic Party power structure. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obamasharpton.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obamasharpton-450x348.jpg" alt="*Apr 21 - 00:05*" width="383" height="296" /></a>In America and in New York City – much like anywhere else with law and order, there must be boundaries and rules.  There can’t be two sets of rules.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reverend Al Sharpton is a fixture for New Yorkers, and in the last few years, left-leaning cable news viewers have come to rely on his political and social commentary. Love him or hate him, he has been around forever and his brand has matured since the Tawana Brawley days.  Particularly in the current de Blasio administration, Sharpton has grown quite powerful; so powerful, that, as the New York Post says, he <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/08/02/cop-who-used-deadly-chokehold-should-be-charged-sharpton/">dictates policy to the police commissioner</a>. He is also very close with President Barack Obama, the United States Commander-in-chief.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Leaving aside Sharpton’s “colorful”<i> </i>history, how is it possible that powerful elected officials in this nation associate with and take advice from a national leader who does not pay his taxes?  Politicians avoid shady characters, and taxes are a matter of fact issue (which in fact pays the salaries of these folks.)</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As the uber-liberal New York Times reported today, in records they reviewed it was apparent that Sharpton owes, “more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses.”  While Sharpton’s friends de Blasio and Obama have been in power, his tax bills have grown – and the organization which he runs, the National Action Network, has not paid federal payroll taxes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Maybe the IRS has been too busy harassing the Tea Party to look at people on their own side of the political fence.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">During the 2012 election cycle, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/sheldon-adelson-isn%E2%80%99t-to-blame-for-failing-leftist-newspapers/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">billionaire Sheldon Adelson</span></a>, an outspoken Republican donor, said a second Obama term would bring government “vilification of people that were against him [Obama].” In 2013 his words came true when the IRS admitted that conservative organizations were unfairly targeted and audited during the 2012 election.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #c0504c;"><a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/jaysekulow/">Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice said the IRS&#8217;s activity was </a></span>“McCarthyism” – and, in fact, the Obama Administration targets and harasses conservatives while allowing Obama allies to openly cheat the system.  During the 2012 election billionaire Frank VanderSloot raised up to $5 million for Romney’s campaign.  He was labeled by Obama election propaganda as a “presidential enemy;” and soon after, this American businessman – who had never before had legal issues — was audited by the Labor Department and IRS.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In this tale of two cities – or of two countries, where some of us pay taxes, and some do not &#8212; right-wingers have been harassed unfairly by the IRS, while left-wingers who evade taxes are giving counsel and setting policy. Are these American tactics or is Obama learning from Putin?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Do Obama and de Blasio ask Sharpton about taxes when he whispers in their ears? Does anyone in their offices even care that he is in violation of American law?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is ridiculous that Reverend Al Sharpton has a different set of rules than the rest of America.  <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/ronn-torossian-reverend-al-sharpton-pay-your-taxes"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Reverend Al: Pay your taxes.</span></a></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>FTC Should Pursue NY&#8217;s Empire State Development Agency</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/ftc-should-pursue-nys-empire-state9-development-agency/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ftc-should-pursue-nys-empire-state9-development-agency</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2014 05:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York State]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NY Economic Development Corporation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax Index]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unfriendly]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245321</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[False advertisers try to sell New York as a good state for business -- after another dismal ranking. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/14810025-mmmain.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245322" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/14810025-mmmain-421x350.jpg" alt="14810025-mmmain" width="321" height="267" /></a>I almost fell off the treadmill this morning when I saw advertisements from the Empire State Development agency touting how great it is to do business in New York and <a href="http://www.bighappenshere.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">their website</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The powers that be in Albany, NY’s state capital, are trying to spin their way out of explaining the recent <span style="color: #305cb6;"><a href="http://taxfoundation.org/article/2015-state-business-tax-climate-index">2015 State Business Tax Climate Index</a><b> </b></span><span style="color: #232323;">from the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C., based research organization that ranked New York as the 49</span><span style="color: #232323;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="color: #232323;"> worst state in the country in which to do business. </span></p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The tax index ranked only the Garden State lower than the Empire State as the worst state to do business in America based upon tax considerations.  Imagine the punishment that Jersey faces.  Jerseyans have the very punishment of living there, the awful Jets, <em>and</em> New Jersey is one of just two states to levy both an inheritance and an estate tax. Quite the combo.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">However, for entrepreneurs, New York ranked dead last in the report when it came to the individual income tax component of the state business tax climate index – which means that as an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RonnTorossian"><span style="color: #1255cc;">individual entrepreneur</span></a> there is nowhere worse to work for yourself.  Higher taxes hurt entrepreneurs, investments, hiring, morale and more.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">I have said it before, but perhaps as part of my self-help process its worth repeating:  As a resident of Manhattan, I pay over 50% taxes – 35% federal, 8.25 percent New York State taxes, and 4 percent local taxes. Add in Medicare, Social Security, payroll, workers compensation, commercial rent taxes, and who knows what other tax and it is more than 50 percent. In what world is that normal, fair or decent?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Wyoming ranks as the top state to do business in – and it&#8217;s <a href="http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/wyoming"><span style="color: #1255cc;">illegal there for women</span></a> to stand within five feet of a bar while drinking – so who knows what makes sense?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Federal Trade Commission should enforce truth-in-advertising laws – and force Empire State Development to clarify that the “BIG” that is referred to in its ads about doing business in NY doesn’t refer to opportunity – it refers to taxes, major government obstacles, barriers and the fact that there are taxes on <a href="http://observer.com/2014/06/new-yorks-death-tax-and-selfies-with-tigers/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">everything in New York</span></a>.</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>Andrew Klavan: Europe Is For Real</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:58:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heath care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241802</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">In this special episode, our whimsical host, Andrew Klavan, takes a look at the faith-based story of a young man who dies and goes to the promised land, only to find that it&#8217;s a giant lie propped up by the American taxpayer and military. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nG5qF3V0Sq8" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Today, in a special religious edition of the Revolting Truth, we’d like to take a look at the new faith-based bestseller, “Europe Is For Real.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">“Europe is for Real” tells the inspiring story of the adorable 5-year-old Iowa boy Derpy Lipschitz.  One fateful day, in April of 2005, little Derpy complained to his mother of stomach pains and was rushed to the hospital where doctors discovered he had accidentally swallowed a copy of the New York Times while trying to bite the head off his pet canary.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Derpy was taken into surgery but the emergency worsened when the doctors tried to remove the Times’ op-ed page from the child’s colon and couldn’t determine which was which.  In the confusion, a column by Paul Krugman traveled through the boy’s bloodstream to his head causing instantaneous brain death.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It was then that a miracle happened.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">As 5-year-old Derpy later told his parents, he felt his soul leave his body.  It traveled down the hall to a broom closet where he saw Mommy praying to Jesus, although she pronounced it Hay-soos.  Then, in a spiral of light, Derpy felt himself lifted up to a wondrous place beyond his wildest imagination.  It was a place where there was never any war, health care was free, and energy was green.  Yes, Derpy was in Europe.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, the surgery was a success.  The doctors were able to remove the New York Times from Derpy’s brain and colon in a revolutionary procedure called pulling the head out of the ass.  When Derpy woke up in the hospital room, he saw his parents standing over him smiling, and he said, “Daddy, I’ve been to Europe!”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And Derpy’s Daddy said to him, “Derpy, Europe is not for real.  Europe is an expensive socialist fantasy which was paid for by American capitalism for 65 years and is now going broke anyway.  They financed their so-called free health care with money they would have had to spend on defense if our military didn’t keep them safe.  Oh, and by the way, the pharmaceutical companies can give them their meds at cheap rates because we pay inflated prices that pick up the slack and fund research and development.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">As for European energy being green, ten years ago Germany trumpeted a transition to renewable resources that was supposed to create jobs, provide cheap electricity and save the planet.  It failed on every front and all across the European Union, green energy initiatives are being quietly abandoned.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It’s true there’s no war in Europe because they’re protected from outside attack by America.  But as Socialism drains the money and the life out of their societies, and their populations quickly dwindle, the European nations are being conquered from within by Islamist monsters who rape and vandalize almost at will.  No one’s allowed to criticize these animals because that would violate a pious leftist nonsense called multiculturalism&#8230;  and since leftism has destroyed every vestige of patriotism on the continent, no one has the conviction or the guts to stand up to this alien evil anyway.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So you see, Derpy, Europe is just the myth of a false religion called leftism.  But don’t worry:  Heaven is for real.  Although Mommy can’t go there because of what she did with Haysoos.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</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>Hypocrite Warren Buffett Uses Canada as a Tax Shelter</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/hypocrite-warren-buffett-uses-canada-as-a-tax-shelter/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hypocrite-warren-buffett-uses-canada-as-a-tax-shelter</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 04:10:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Burger King]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[canada]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Warren Buffett]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240045</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Taking advantage of tax loopholes while promoting tax hikes on those beneath him. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/warren-buffett.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240047" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/warren-buffett-446x350.jpg" alt="BUFFETT CREDIT" width="279" height="219" /></a>Warren Buffett, you may be the world’s greatest investor.  Clearly, you are a brilliant, successful man.  However, you are also a major hypocrite.</p>
<p>I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors, raised by a single-mother, a graduate of the New York City public schools. I founded a company out of a tiny office – and through many hours of hard work today employ over 110 people and own one of the largest independently owned <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">US PR firms</span></a>.  As a NYC resident, I pay over 50% taxes – 35% federal, 8.25 percent New York State taxes, and 4 percent local taxes. Add in Medicare, social security, payroll, workers compensation, commercial rent taxes, payroll tax, and who knows what other tax and it is more than 50 percent. I spend many, many hours with my accountant – and there is no way around these outrageous tax bills.</p>
<p>There is something so un-American in forcing me to hand over more than half a year’s pay to the government. Meanwhile, uber-rich like Buffet have a special way with the system, whereby, as he claims, he pays about 17 percent of his income to the government in taxes. Buffett makes most of his money from dividends and capital gains – at the 15 percent tax rate. For a simpleton like me it seems a deviation from the concept of all money being green.  And he has the gall to proclaim that the wealthy need to pay more taxes (which Obama defines as over $200k annually).</p>
<p>Headlines this week featured Buffett&#8217;s plans to provide financing for Burger King’s purchase of Canadian chain Tim Horton’s, which would allow Burger King to pay Canadian tax rates.  While it is wholly natural for capitalists to take advantage of loopholes to maximize profit, there is an issue when he does it with his foot on the neck of hard-working entrepreneurial Americans. It&#8217;s hypocritical to weasel out of American taxes.</p>
<p>Tax codes are broken when Buffett’s $46 billion net worth will largely escape all federal taxation. Some years ago, the billionaire signed a letter, calling for a “strong estate tax” because it is “right morally and economically” and “promotes democracy by slowing the concentration of wealth and power.” He uses tax laws to dodge taxes – yet, my heirs will pay another 50% taxes after my death on monies which have already been taxed. Even if I was to move overseas, and give up my American citizenship, I’d have to pay “exit fees” in taxes.  In the same breath, <span style="color: #151515;">multi-billion-dollar corporations are able to evade the law.  <i>Rather warped.</i> </span></p>
<p>I live in a city where there is a city council that is openly anti-business, a “progressive” mayor (and governor), and our 2014 State Business Tax Climate Index placed <a href="http://observer.com/author/ronn-torossian/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">New York</span></a> 50th (out of 50 States) as a result of high income, corporate, sales, and property taxes. And we should pay more while Mr. Buffett weasels his way into Canada?</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>Ending Abbas’s Winning Streak</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/ending-abbass-winning-streak/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ending-abbass-winning-streak</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2014 04:52:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jen Psaki]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mahmoud abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[unity]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The time has come to shut off the money supply to the Palestinians. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Palestinian-leader-Mahmoud-Abbas.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233440" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Palestinian-leader-Mahmoud-Abbas-450x300.jpg" alt="Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas holds a" width="312" height="208" /></a>Mahmoud Abbas must be great at cards.</p>
<p>The PLO chief has no real assets to speak of.</p>
<p>He’s physically unattractive. He has zero charisma. He’s old.</p>
<p>And no matter how hard he tries, Abbas can’t do much of anything to dampen public support for Hamas or raise public support for himself. By many accounts, if elections are ever held, Hamas would win them in a walk.</p>
<p>As for money, beyond the PLO’s slush fund, all Abbas has is what outsiders give him. He is completely dependent on the Americans, the Israelis, the Europeans and the Gulf states. Without them, he would have nothing to buy people’s loyalty with.</p>
<p>If the money ever stops coming in, he’ll go broke and lose power immediately.</p>
<p>Militarily, if Israel ever stops lending military support to Abbas’s forces, it will be a matter of weeks, or perhaps days, before Abbas will be forced to surrender to Hamas.</p>
<p>And yet today Abbas is sitting pretty on the top of the volcano that is Arab politics, dictating terms for people with real power while playing mind-boggling radical politics.</p>
<p>And he’s winning big.</p>
<p>This has been a great year for Abbas. In exchange for agreeing to humor the Obama administration with “negotiations” consisting of rejecting pro-Palestinian American peace proposals while refusing face-to-face contact with Israel for nine months, he got the Americans to force Israel to release several dozen terrorist murderers from prison.</p>
<p>He then abandoned the negotiations and effectively ended the peace process when he signed onto 15 international agreements as “the president of Palestine,” seeking to gain international recognition for a Palestinian state that is in a de facto state of war with Israel.</p>
<p>From there he went on secure his own power at the helm of Palestinian politics by signing the unity deal with Hamas.</p>
<p>It’s a win-win deal for Abbas and the genocidal jihadist group.</p>
<p>The deal frees Hamas from the financial burden of governing Gaza. The slack will be made up by the PA’s US, European and Israeli-financed budget. Hamas will be able to go back to using all of its own funds to run its 20,000-man army and expand its already massive arsenal of missiles.</p>
<p>Just as important, it will be able to rebuild its military and political infrastructures in Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>Moreover, as a partner in the government, Hamas will have veto power over many of the Palestinian Authority’s governing decisions, so there will be no negotiations, no recognition, no cessation of terror assaults and no peace with Israel with this Palestinian government. Then again, none of these things was forthcoming with Abbas at the helm at any time.</p>
<p>As for Abbas, by signing the deal, he gets to deploy a ceremonial force to Gaza that will enable him to tell willfully credulous Americans that he is now in charge of Gaza, so they should feel comfortable giving him more taxpayer funds.</p>
<p>Abbas’s unity deal with Hamas renders the entire Palestinian Authority a terrorist organization. Modeled on Hezbollah’s deal with the Lebanese political leadership, the unity agreement formalizes the PLO’s role as Hamas’s protector and defender on the international scene. And it enables Hamas, as a member of the PA, to receive open assistance of every kind for its terrorist operations in Gaza and Judea and Samaria alike.</p>
<p>Since unlike Fatah, Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, the EU, the unity deal makes it unlawful for any of them to continue to cooperate with, let alone support, the PA in any way.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t seem to matter.</p>
<p>The US and the EU raced to see which one would recognize the new government first, while pledging to continue funding the PA to the tune of nearly $2 billion per year.</p>
<p>In Israel, the Left, led by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, insists that Israel mustn’t cut off the PA, for doing so would end the peace process, which of course would be a disaster.</p>
<p>As for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of his government, their non-rhetorical responses have been anemic.</p>
<p>So far the only financial steps the government has taken to curtail funding to the PA involves using some of the tax revenues Israel transmits to the PA to pay off some of the massive debt the Palestinians owe the Israel Electric Corporation. But Israel still turns over the remaining tax revenues to the PA. Israel remains the PA’s financial lifeline.</p>
<p>And this brings us back to Abbas.</p>
<p>Abbas is a successful politician because he knows what he wants and he is able to make the most of the cards he’s been dealt.</p>
<p>Abbas knows that his American, European and Israeli supporters are convinced they can’t make it without him. They don’t care that he is a radical. They will believe any lie – no matter how flimsy – to keep up the game of proclaiming him a moderate and a man of peace.</p>
<p>Abbas was certain that the same US, EU and Israeli Left that supported him through his demand to free terrorists, and to abrogate the property rights of Jews, the same forces that uphold him despite his rejection of Israel’s right to exist, his material breaches of the agreements he personally signed, and his general bad faith, would support his decision to join forces with Hamas.</p>
<p>The Israeli Left’s support for Abbas makes sense. Without Abbas it has no reason to exist. Without the myth that Israel has a Palestinian partner in peace, no one would give the likes of Livni the time of day. So she clings to him.</p>
<p>As for Netanyahu and his allies, their paralysis isn’t rooted in dependence on Abbas. They, like Israel would be far better off without him.</p>
<p>They are paralyzed by their fear of President Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Netanyahu and his colleagues know that like Abbas, the Obama administration has no problem with Hamas. Obama was courting Hamas through his then-campaign adviser Robert Malley as early as the 2008 presidential election. Malley is now a senior director on Obama’s National Security Council. And according to media reports in the US, Obama’s representatives have been holding talks with Hamas for the past six months.</p>
<p>In her statement on the new Fatah-Hamas government, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki didn’t even pretend that the administration has a problem supporting the terror tag team. Psaki said that since Hamas terrorists are not serving as ministers in the “technocratic” government that serves at their pleasure, the US will continue funding it.</p>
<p>This leaves us with the US Congress.</p>
<p>Congress may cut off funding to the PA despite Israeli cowardice. Certainly, initial responses from Republican and Democratic leaders alike have signaled that US lawmakers intend to abide by the laws that they passed and end all US financing of the PA terror government.</p>
<p>But it is still early in the game.</p>
<p>Congress understands that voting to cut off aid to the PA places its members on a collision course with the administration.</p>
<p>That’s fine for Republicans. But for Democrats, choosing the law over Obama may be a bridge too far. Past attempts have all failed.</p>
<p>And this brings us back to our frightened leaders.</p>
<p>All of Abbas’s great accomplishments over the past year have harmed Israel. Israel is more isolated today than it has ever been.</p>
<p>And this isolation redounds in large part to Abbas’s ability to exploit the US’s addiction to him. His success not only in forming the government with Hamas, but in securing US and EU support for it, is the worst blow so far. Israel now finds itself weaker diplomatically not only than Abbas, but than a genocidal terrorist group run by Iran.</p>
<p>This simply cannot continue.</p>
<p>The fact is that Israel has gotten nothing from playing along with American coddling of Abbas. It receives less support from Obama every day. And its willingness to go along to get along has demoralized and angered the Republicans who oppose what Obama is doing. It has given cover to Democrats who are loath to oppose the White House.</p>
<p>The time has come for Israel to stop playing this game, where the PLO gets to materially breach its agreements and so render them effectively null and void, while Israel, the sucker, keeps upholding them.</p>
<p>The time has come for Israel to stop collecting tax revenues for the PA. All of the money Israel collects and transfers to the PA is now serving Hamas directly.</p>
<p>And it isn’t enough to keep collecting, but stop transferring the revenues. The monies always end up being transferred eventually.</p>
<p>The only way to end this is by actually ceasing to serve as the PA’s taxman.</p>
<p>Obama won’t like it. But what’s he going to do? Facilitate Iran’s nuclear weapons program? Blame Israel for Palestinian aggression against it? Recognize and fund Hamas? The only way to get off this train is to get off. And disembarking is also the only way to impact US behavior. No single act by Israel will do more to empower the US Congress to stop funding the Palestinians than that.</p>
<p>And once that happens, a virtuous circle is formed, where at a minimum, Abbas’s winning streak will end.</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>Does Tax Refund Fraud Benefit Democrats?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/does-tax-refund-fraud-benefit-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=does-tax-refund-fraud-benefit-democrats</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Apr 2014 04:06:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fraud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223516</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A disturbing look at who appears to be the biggest profiteer. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tax-fraud.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223539" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tax-fraud-450x337.jpg" alt="tax-fraud" width="315" height="236" /></a>In the lead up to Tax Day, the mainstream media devoted some deserved attention to the huge tax refund fraud problem we have in this country. But as usual, they failed to get specific about the root causes of the issue. That the Democrats in government gain from keeping the tax credit system as dysfunctional as possible is probably a good guess why.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week the AP </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/04/10/bogus-tax-refunds-problem/7557897/">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the “$4 billion” lost every year due to “fraudulent tax refunds.” The story coincided with a recent video produced by the Department of Justice wherein Attorney General Holder reminds us to not worry, they’re on the case. The AP report isn’t specific about what types of “fraudulent tax refunds” are in issue, but $4 billion is definitely a low number compared to the total problem.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Earned Income Tax Credit alone costs taxpayers a whopping $12-14 billion in fraudulent payments every year. This is especially troubling considering the program pays out in total </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/key-elements/family/eitc.cfm">$56 billion</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> per year, meaning its average “improper payments rate” is around </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2011reports/201140023fr.pdf">25 per cent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Medicaid fraud, which is very well publicized and has its own federal task force, hovers at around 8-10 per cent a year.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">More troubling still is that the EITC is the government’s fastest growing entitlement program. Since its start in 1980 the program’s grown </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/docs/tsc_earned_income_tax_credit_2013mar20.pdf">44-fold</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Compare this to the 8.5x increase in total entitlement spending in the same period.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The credit, which pays out up to $5,800 to a family of three, requires a valid Social Security number in order to be claimed. This restriction is easily nullified by the use of fake or stolen Social Security numbers and felony identity theft. As a result, millions of Americans, especially </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.examiner.com/article/utah-attorney-general-appears-to-put-the-interests-of-illegal-aliens-ahead-of-utah-children">children</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, have their Social Security numbers compromised every year. Who’s doing much of the thieving? </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011">Analysts</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> say illegal aliens. The Center for Immigration Studies’ Steve Camarota found that </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/mexico/toc.html">40 percent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of illegals use the program (over triple the use among natives) while other analysts have found </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_19_3/tsc_19_3_rubenstein_eitc_speech.shtml">rampant</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> EITC abuse among illegals. So much for the left’s use of the term “undocumented” immigrants. Many “undocumented” immigrants are already documented; just </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/myth-law-abiding-illegal-alien">illegally</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> so.   </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">DHS Secretary under George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mario-ramos.com/blog/archives/2006/12/remarks_by_secr.html">called</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the rampant identity theft surrounding the EITC, “a violation of the privacy rights and the economic rights of innocent Americans.” Since he made that statement, the EITC fraud rate has ballooned by a further </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/04/24/irs-issued-billions-in-improper-refunds-report-says/">22 per cent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. It’s no coincidence that this increase </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/reports/eitc_2011apr/eitc_2011apr_part_3_fraud.pdf">correlates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> with the jump in the illegal alien population over the last few years.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As one NBC </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6814673#.U0g7JElZQcA">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from 2005 noted, a compromised SSN can mess up one’s work history, Social Security benefits records and one&#8217;s credit report. Documenting the experiences of one female victim, NBC found that she was “haunted by bills and creditors [and] received threatening letters from the IRS asking her to pay taxes on money earned by her imposters.” She was told to “re-pay unemployment benefits she had received, after the government discovered she was &#8220;working&#8221; while &#8220;drawing benefits.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite such a horrific scenario and despite legislative efforts such as the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Improper Payments Elimination Act</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, which requires all agencies to keep their entitlement programs’ improper payments rate to below 10%, no significant improvement has been made in reducing EITC fraud. Just like our lack of border security, e-Verify and an entry-exit biometric system at each of our ports, all of which are on the law books but are simply not enforced, beefing up the policing of EITC fraud and SSN theft would harm one of Obama’s key </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/22/are-unauthorized-immigrants-overwhelmingly-democrats/">future constituencies</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">: illegal aliens. Polls of illegals and Hispanics in general consistently show a deep preference for </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/edwards/key-latino-vote">Democratic policies</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/hispanics-favor-bigger-role-for-government/">big government</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Along with our unenforced immigration laws, a failed EITC system keeps the magnet for illegal aliens switched on and the Democrat’s base intact.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">AP quotes Mr. Holder as saying the scams &#8220;are carried out by a variety of actors, from greedy tax return preparers to identity brokers who profit from the sale of personal information to gangs and drug rings looking for easy access to cash.&#8221; The biggest profiteer from this fraud may just be the Democrat-controlled government itself.</span></p>
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		<title>50% Taxes When Alive, 50% Taxes When You Die</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/50-taxes-when-alive-50-taxes-when-you-die-and-taxes-for-plastic-bags/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=50-taxes-when-alive-50-taxes-when-you-die-and-taxes-for-plastic-bags</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:05:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plastic bags]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[New York: the "Must-Leave State." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/taxes_Flickr_401K.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223013" alt="taxes_Flickr_401K" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/taxes_Flickr_401K-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>I, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://insights.wired.com/profile/RonnTorossian">Ronn Torossian,</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> am a born and bred New Yorker, who raises a family here, owns a business – and loves all this city has to offer.  Yet I would be among the first to advise people not to live or move to New York if they don’t have to.  If they have ambition or drive, New York isn’t the place to be. From the non-stop energy to the culture, indeed, this city deserves its title as capital of the world.  Yet from a business perspective, there are so many obstacles for living – and dying – in New York that one shouldn’t do it unless they absolutely have to. Why? The issue is really quite simple – while you are alive, if successful, you will pay 54% taxes as a resident of New York City.  And if you are successful, your heirs will be taxed on the monies which you kept after the government took their share.</span></p>
<p>The latest report from the Tax Foundation notes yet again in 2014, New York ranks as the highest taxed state in America. New Yorkers spend 12.6% of their per capita income on state and local taxes, the highest percentage of any state in the nation. 2014 marked the third consecutive year that New York had the highest tax burden in the nation. And New York ranks 50th in the Tax Foundation&#8217;s State Business Tax Climate Index. The Index compares the states in five areas of taxation that impact business: corporate taxes, individual income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, and taxes on property, including residential and commercial property.</p>
<p>Of course, there was a much ballyhooed change of the law for estate-taxes. As of January 1, 2019, the exemption will jump to the inflation-indexed federal level, which by then will be about $5.8 million.  Anyone who goes over that amount will see their family pay more than half of it out to the government.  Given those facts, it should come as no surprise that New York has indeed become the Must-Leave State. Census Bureau estimates show that 104,470 more people moved out of New York than moved into it during the 12 months ending July 1.  This comes off a decade where more than 1.6 million New Yorkers moved out of state between 2000 and 2010. (And if the awful winter which we saw in 2014 continues next year, I am sure the trend will only further increase).</p>
<p>Against this backdrop, The New York City Council introduced a bill that would impose a 10-cent fee on plastic and paper bags. While sane people review and consider this, one may wonder if New York City can possibly get any more expensive – <i>or absurd.</i> With all the issues that exist, is this really something for New York government to be involved with? <i>(And as an aside, won&#8217;t these costs be passed along to consumers? How about all the companies who make these bags – how many people will be fired because Americans stop using bags?)</i> Do politicians need another tax?</p>
<p>New York cost of living is very high &#8211; as are individual income taxes and property taxes. Despite all that New York has to offer, between cost of living and taxes, this is increasingly becoming the State not to live in. (And it has long been &#8211; and remains &#8211; the State not to die in.) As a 39-year-old born and bred New Yorker, I work very hard for my money, and I must ask, when is enough enough? Why does this government insist on putting so much strain on hard-working, successful people? New York taxes energetic people who sacrifice every day to create opportunities for others as well as themselves.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rest assured, however, I am standing now in my </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR Firm New York</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> office– and the good news is there are no longer people drinking Big Gulps – and soon people will not be carrying plastic bags in the Land of the Free.  They will, however, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">between life and death,</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> pay the majority of their income in taxes.</span></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Ruthless Assault on the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And our health. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219279" alt="healthcare.gov__0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0-450x310.jpg" width="270" height="186" /></a>Liberals are winning wild praise for their candor in admitting problems with Obamacare. It shows you the level of honesty people have come to expect of our liberal friends. Now, liberals are applauded for not lying through their teeth about something.</p>
<p>What are they supposed to say? <i>This Obamacare website is fantastic! And really, haven&#8217;t you already read all the magazines in your current doctor&#8217;s office anyway?</i></p>
<p>The New York Times has described Obama&#8217;s repeated claim that you could keep your insurance plan and keep your doctor under Obamacare as a mere slip of the tongue: &#8220;Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.&#8221;</p>
<p>Misspoke? How exactly does one misspeak, word for word, dozens of times, over and over again?</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t misspeaking &#8212; it was a deliberate, necessary lie. Even Democrats couldn&#8217;t have voted for Obamacare if Americans had known the truth. It was absolutely vital for Obama to lie about people being able to keep their insurance and their doctors.</p>
<p>Of course, it was difficult for voters to know the truth because every time Republicans would try to tell them, the White House and the media would rush in and call the critics liars.</p>
<p>The White House posted a specific refutation of the &#8220;disinformation&#8221; about not being able to keep your doctor or insurance plan. That claim, the website said, was being disseminated by Republicans &#8220;to scare people.&#8221;</p>
<p>Their proof consisted of a video of Obama <i>clearly </i>stating, &#8220;If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you&#8217;ve got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.&#8221;</p>
<p>A video of someone asserting the very fact in dispute does not rise to the level of &#8220;evidence,&#8221; but it was more than enough for MSNBC.</p>
<p>Even when pretending to be critical of Obamacare, liberals lie about the real problems. They tell us they&#8217;re worried about the percentage of young people signing up for Obamacare. The mix of young and old people in Obamacare is completely irrelevant. It won&#8217;t help if a lot of young people sign up because their premiums are negligible.</p>
<p>To keep the system afloat, what Obamacare really needs is lots of healthy people, preferably healthy older people. Their premiums are astronomical &#8212; and they won&#8217;t need much medical treatment.</p>
<p>Premiums are set by your age, not your health. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you never go to the doctor. Obamacare punishes you for having a healthy lifestyle. The Obamacare tax is a massively regressive poll tax on the middle-aged and the middle class.</p>
<p>Apart from those who are subsidized, everyone pays the exact same amount in penalties or insurance premiums for his age group. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you don&#8217;t make as much money as Bill Gates. Any 58-year-old male who doesn&#8217;t qualify for a subsidy will pay the same Obamacare tax as Gates.</p>
<p>When Margaret Thatcher tried to impose the same tax per person, as a &#8220;community charge,&#8221; there were riots in the street.</p>
<p>Our extremely progressive tax system, where nearly half the country pays no income tax at all, and the other half pays about 40 percent of their income, may not be fair. But most people also don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fair to tax a guy making $80,000 a year the identical amount as one making $80 million a year. That&#8217;s exactly what Obamacare does.</p>
<p>With Obamacare, the Democratic Party has foisted the most regressive tax possible on America. This ruthless assault on the middle class is all so we can have a health care system more like every other country has.</p>
<p>Until now, the United States has had the highest survival rates in the world for heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Cancer comparisons are the most useful because all Western countries keep careful records for this disease.</p>
<p>For all types of cancers, European men have only a 47.3 percent five-year survival rate, compared to a 66.3 percent survival rate for American men.</p>
<p>European women have only a 55.8 percent chance of being alive five years after being diagnosed with any type of cancer, compared to 62.9 percent of American women.</p>
<p>American survival rates for breast, prostate, thyroid and skin cancer are higher than 90 percent. Europeans do not have a 90 percent survival rate for one of those cancers.</p>
<p>The European rates are even worse than they sound because many cancers are not discovered until the victim&#8217;s death &#8212; twice as many as in the U.S. All those cancers were excluded from the study.</p>
<p>Canadian cancer survival rates aren&#8217;t much better than the European rates &#8212; and they&#8217;ve been able to sneak into to the U.S. for treatment! Women in the U.S. have a 61 percent survival rate for all cancers, compared to a 58 percent survival rate in Canada. Men in the U.S. have a 57 percent survival rate compared to 53 percent in Canada.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why your insurance premiums have to go through the roof and your Obamacare tax is the same as Bill Gates&#8217;. So across the world, we&#8217;ll all be equal, dying of cancer, heart disease and diabetes as often as everyone else.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not that Obama doesn&#8217;t believe in American exceptionalism; it&#8217;s that he wants to end it.</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>Stop Discriminating Against the Successful</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/stop-discriminating-against-the-successful/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stop-discriminating-against-the-successful</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:25:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Francois Hollande]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[successful]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219196</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lessons from the French President.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/017424737_30300.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219198" alt="0,,17424737_303,00" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/017424737_30300-445x350.jpg" width="312" height="245" /></a>How can anyone with a brain be surprised after reading today’s <em>New York Times</em>, which says that President François Hollande of France has begun a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/business/international/hollande-throws-open-frances-doors-to-business.html?hpw&amp;rref=business">“major charm offensive to convince the world that France is open for business in a bid to lure back investments.”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> What? You mean that Hollande’s 75 percent tax rate on the successful isn’t working? A campaign which drove out the successful by choking them has backfired and created huge economic problems? </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">You don’t say!</i></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As even the uber-liberal <em>Times</em> was forced to admit, “the United Nations conference on trade and development reported that foreign direct investment in France </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/webdiaeia2014d1_en.pdf">plunged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 77 percent in 2012,&#8221; the sharpest decline of any Group of 20 nation. Hollande promised “change” and it spooked businesses away, rightfully. The article quoted a business owner, who paid double in France what he paid in Britain &#8212; and why would he want to do business in a place where he is penalized? Businesses and successful people work hard and deserve to be rewarded, not penalized. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The lessons of France are something which </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronn-torossian/">I, Ronn Torossian,</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> hope that New York officials will learn from, as their current demonizing language is something more apt for a country with a socialist nature like France. And as France’s efforts are failing, if NY continues to seek to “soak” millionaires, they may just flee.  When that happens, it will not take long until NY will be forced to similarly chase money just as France’s President now does.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Along those lines, </span>why is it that discrimination against the wealthy is one of the few accepted forms of discrimination?<i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While President Obama mentioned the word &#8220;inequality&#8221; 26 times in his State of the Union address, no one mentions the unequal treatment which is afforded to the successful amongst us. Why penalize the successful and have a system where the top one percent pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 90 percent? That is the very definition of unequal, discriminatory treatment. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, 1.36 million taxpayers pay a larger share of the federal income tax than the bottom 90 percent &#8212; or 122 million taxpayers. </span>Discrimination which should come to an end.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With Obama’s policies, the discrimination gets worse. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency that provides independent analysis of economic and budgetary issues, said that the impact of President Obama&#8217;s plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44995">can be up to 1 million lost jobs by 2016</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.  Raising wages 40 percent is too much, too quickly – in the midst of crippling tax raises and a still struggling economy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course, let’s not forget that the Congressional Budget Office also said that </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cbo-obamacare-2-million/2014/02/04/id/550803">Obamacare would cost the economy 2.5 million workers</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by 2017.  The reason for that is clear &#8212; small companies will cut back on workers&#8217; hours to avoid requirements that full-time workers be offered health insurance. Raise taxes, raise costs &#8212; and bosses will eventually get fed up.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rather than working to ensure that entrepreneurs can earn more, which would create jobs, it destroys jobs by continually overtaxing the successful.  As an entrepreneur, as I have said before, there is a current system of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/taxing-the-successful-to-death/">taxing the successful to death</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, and it doesn’t work or motivate those who need to create jobs.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">America must stop discriminating against the successful and create income tax equality.</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>Killing the 1% Golden Goose</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/killing-the-1-golden-goose/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=killing-the-1-golden-goose</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2014 05:14:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why class warfare has no future.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215208" alt="NYC Mayoral Candidate Bill de Blasio Campaigns In Brooklyn" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fr.jpg" width="280" height="255" /></a>Two years before Occupy Wall Street’s band of radical grad students set up their tents and cardboard signs in Zuccotti Park, Mayor Bloomberg warned the City Council against frivolous tax hikes. &#8220;One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50% of the taxes. In the city, that&#8217;s something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral.&#8221;</p>
<p>And then the 1 percent became the target of the left’s answer to the Tea Party. It wasn’t unusual to see bus riders wearing “We Are the 99%” buttons the way they had once carried I Heart New York bags.</p>
<p>New York City now has a radical leftist in Gracie Mansion, Bill de Blasio, a radical leftist City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and a radical leftist public advocate, Letitia James. The city is now run by the Working Families Party/ACORN and tax hikes will be used to finance generous payoffs to unions.</p>
<p>But the unions who rigged this election may never see those payoffs. New York City’s <a href="http://www.nytorch.com/?p=7841">unfunded pensions are</a> estimated as being as high as $136 billion. The crash may only be four years away.</p>
<p>The top 1 percent pay half the income taxes in the city and <a href="http://www.thenewyorkworld.com/2012/09/18/state-local-tax/">the top 10 percent</a> pay 71 percent. Drive them away with tax hikes for municipal union goodies and the unions will have as much trouble collecting even basic benefits from New York as they do from Detroit.</p>
<p>On the other coast, the situation is even worse.</p>
<p>That 1 percent pays 41 percent of California’s income taxes while half the state pays no income taxes at all. That’s an even worse ratio than New York State where only 39 percent pay no state income tax.</p>
<p>California’s <a href="http://reason.org/blog/show/caltax-california-wall-of-debt-at-4">unfunded liabilities are estimated</a> at $640 billion and the state is trying to dig its way out with taxes and spending sprees. Governor Jerry Brown is hoping to finance his $68 billion toy train with nearly a billion in carbon “credits” which companies must buy in order to do business in California.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the 1 percent and the 10 percent are unaccountably fleeing California. “Go West young man,” Horace Greeley advised. “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable.”</p>
<p>These days California is a lot like Washington and the arrow of opportunity has flipped around from west to east as those young men with a future and the companies they work for are fleeing the state.</p>
<p>California lost 5.2 percent of its businesses in 2012. <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/State-leaders-closely-watch-migrating-millionaires-5135090.php">A San Francisco Chronicle story</a> describes an emergency row on a flight crowded with emigrants from California and Texas neighborhoods filled with cars with California license plates.</p>
<p>Brown and the liberal elites have insisted that the wealthy won’t leave because taxes go up, but it’s the wealthy that have the means to leave. Or as a Californian quoted in the article said about taking a loss on his new $2 million home, “I can make half of it back in one year of tax savings.”</p>
<p>California is experiencing an exodus of the wealthy and the working poor who have the most mobility. It’s the middle class that can’t afford to walk away from homes and businesses and is tied down and crushed by the left’s escalating war on the middle class.</p>
<p>The wealthy will weather Bill de Blasio and Jerry Brown or they will depart and take the tax base with them, leaving only the middle class to be squeezed dry to fund all the social workers, prisons, hospitals, schools and community centers of the welfare class.</p>
<p>Targeting the 1 percent kills the goose that lays the golden tax revenues and states and cities that are already close to the edge can’t afford to drive away their tax base. The welfare class is taught to blame the rich, but without the rich its lifestyle implodes, its social dysfunction increases and in the final phase of urban collapse, the middle class abandon their homes block by block and retreat to the suburbs as the city collapses.</p>
<p>There is no better demonstration of that than Detroit.</p>
<p>Detroit has the highest property taxes of the 50 largest cities in the country. Its property taxes are twice as high as the national average and barely half of property owners even bother paying property taxes. Five of the wealthier neighborhoods paid 15 percent of the city’s property taxes. Another 19 percent came from a handful of companies, including casinos and Motor City’s shaky automobile industry.</p>
<p>The population fled, the tax base shrank and the city raised property taxes which drove away more property owners leaving a shrinking tax base that had to be compensated for with higher taxes. The cycle left a bankrupt ghost town filled with abandoned properties and outlaw property owners.</p>
<p>To make up the difference, Detroit began borrowing more money. Under Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted of everything from racketeering to extortion, debt hit $9 billion while revenues plunged to nearly $1 billion. Income taxes fell from $378 million in 2000 to $245 million in 2010. At the same time, Detroit lost nearly 200,000 people; the worst implosion of an American city in the last decade.</p>
<p>One out of three people in Detroit is poor. Three of the top five employers in Detroit are the city government and the national government. Whatever middle class it has left consists of government employees and they are a net loss. They can never pay as much into the system as they take out of it.</p>
<p>The only liberal solution to the Detroit disaster is to expand its boundaries into the suburbs and tax the ones who got away. Similar regionalization proposals are being flirted with on a national level but they are nothing more than wealth redistribution schemes that only encourage the tax base to flee farther, destroying the city as a business center by transforming it into a regional financial plague instead.</p>
<p>In all its economic experiments, the left has refused to accept that there is no substitute for income generation and that when you kill the golden goose, you don’t get an unlimited supply of golden eggs.</p>
<p>Drive away the rich, destroy the middle class and all you’re left with is Detroit. 8 million New Yorkers depend on 40,000 millionaires and billionaires. The same California voters who supported Proposition 30 depend on the taxes of the very people they are taxing into leaving.</p>
<p>Wealth is not a crime and it is not redistributable. Money can be taken and put into a common pot, but the ability to perpetuate it through wealth cannot. That is a skill like any other and the practitioners of that skill are the only reason that the Jerry Browns and the Bill de Blasios have any money to play with.</p>
<p>The only thing separating Bill de Blasio from Detroit’s former mayor Dave Bing are those 40,000 of the 1 percent and if he kills the golden goose, the only egg will be on his face.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,” How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></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>Taxed Legal Pot More Expensive than Untaxed Illegal Pot</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/taxed-legal-pot-more-expensive-than-untaxed-illegal-pot/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taxed-legal-pot-more-expensive-than-untaxed-illegal-pot</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 17:48:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[legalizing marijuana]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marijuana]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214543</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Prices hit close to $400 per ounce, not including taxes]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Legalize-Weed-uncle-sam.gif"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-214545" alt="Legalize Weed uncle sam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Legalize-Weed-uncle-sam.gif" width="240" height="240" /></a></p>
<p>This shouldn&#8217;t be too much of a surprise. Legal cigarettes are much more expensive than illegal cigarettes.</p>
<p>Advocates for drug legalization have argued that people would choose to buy drugs if they were legalized, cutting off the drug dealers. But as it turns out, the street price for drug dealers is cheaper than the legalized price because drug dealers don&#8217;t need to buy licenses, insurance and jump through all the hoops that it takes to run a business. Especially a business selling a controversial highly regulated product.</p>
<p>And <a href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/02/22149509-high-demand-price-of-legal-marijuana-soars-in-colorado?lite">that gets passed along in the markup</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The high times in Colorado are coming with high costs for cannabis consumers.</p>
<p>Hemp hunters who waited for hours early Wednesday to be among the first to legally purchase marijuana from state retailers found sticker shock at cash registers.</p>
<p>On the first day of legal weed sales, Gillette said she found retailers selling top-shelf marijuana to recreational users at prices close to $400 per ounce, not including taxes.</p>
<p>The state does not impose any pricing structure for pot purveyors, leaving the market open to  supply and demand. One dispensary was selling high-quality marijuana on Wednesday at $70 for one-eighth of an ounce — a markup from $25 for the same amount the day before, according to The Associated Press.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is what happens when a product goes legal&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Prices were also increased by the new 25 percent tax &#8212; 15 percent excise and 10 percent sales &#8212; on all marijuana purchases in the state that voters approved in November, along with any other local jurisdictional taxes on top of that. Marijuana sales are expected to generate nearly $70 million in tax revenue for Colorado in 2014.</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s a 25 percent tax on top of whatever the cost of doing business already is. So legalizing an illegal product just makes it more expensive.</p>
<p>The Socialist solution would be to blame the businesses for raising prices and nationalize sales of pot through the government. But the government has<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/thoroughbreds-at-losing-2011-1"> lost money running gambling</a> operations and <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/union-fights-to-hold-on-to-government-liquor-monopoly-in-pennsylvania/">selling liquor</a>. There&#8217;s little doubt it could manage to lose money selling drugs.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>The Pope and Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-pope-and-capitalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-pope-and-capitalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-pope-and-capitalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:17:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213361</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Explaining the great blessing of the free market system to humanity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PopeFrancis-finger.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213362" alt="PopeFrancis-finger" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PopeFrancis-finger-450x339.jpg" width="315" height="237" /></a>Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation, levied charges against free market capitalism, denying that &#8220;economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world&#8221; and concluding that &#8220;this opinion &#8230; has never been confirmed by the facts.&#8221; He went on to label unfettered capitalism as &#8220;a new tyranny.&#8221; Let&#8217;s look at the pope&#8217;s tragic vision.</p>
<p>First, I acknowledge that capitalism fails miserably when compared with heaven or a utopia. Any earthly system is going to come up short in such a comparison. However, mankind must make choices among alternative economic systems that actually exist on earth. For the common man, capitalism is superior to any system yet devised to deal with his everyday needs and desires.</p>
<p>Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. With the rise of capitalism, it became possible to amass great wealth by serving and pleasing your fellow man. Capitalists seek to discover what people want and produce and market it as efficiently as possible as a means to profit. A couple of examples would be J.D. Rockefeller, whose successful marketing drove kerosene prices down from 58 cents a gallon in 1865 to 7 cents in 1900. Henry Ford became rich by producing cars for the common man. Both Ford&#8217;s and Rockefeller&#8217;s personal benefits pale in comparison with that received by the common man by having cheaper kerosene and cheaper transportation. There are literally thousands of examples of how mankind&#8217;s life has been made better by those in the pursuit of profits. Here&#8217;s my question to you: Are people who, by their actions, created unprecedented convenience, longer life expectancy and a more pleasant life for the ordinary person — and became wealthy in the process — deserving of all the scorn and ridicule heaped upon them by intellectuals, politicians and now the pope?</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine the role of profits but first put it in perspective in terms of magnitude.</p>
<p>Between 1960 and 2012, after-tax corporate profit averaged a bit over 6 percent of the gross domestic product, while wages averaged 47 percent of the GDP. Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is its role in guiding resources to their highest-valued uses and satisfying people. Try polling people with a few questions. Ask them what services they are more satisfied with and what they are less satisfied with. On the &#8220;more satisfied&#8221; list would be profit-making enterprises, such as supermarkets, theaters, clothing stores and computer stores. They&#8217;d find less satisfaction with services provided by nonprofit government organizations, such as public schools, post offices and departments of motor vehicles.</p>
<p>Profits force entrepreneurs to find ways to please people in the most efficient ways or go out of business. Of course, they can mess up and stay in business if they can get government to bail them out or give them protection against competition. Nonprofits have an easier time of it. Public schools, for example, continue to operate whether they do a good job or not and whether they please parents or not. That&#8217;s because politicians provide their compensation through coercive property taxes. I&#8217;m sure that we&#8217;d be less satisfied with supermarkets if they, too, had the power to take our money through taxes, as opposed to being forced to find ways to get us to voluntarily give them our earnings.</p>
<p>Arthur C. Brooks, president at the American Enterprise Institute and author of &#8220;Who Really Cares,&#8221; shows that Americans are the most generous people on the face of the earth. In fact, if you look for generosity around the world, you find virtually all of it in countries that are closer to the free market end of the economic spectrum than they are to the socialist or communist end. Seeing as Pope Francis sees charity as a key part of godliness, he ought to stop demonizing capitalism.</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>I Work for the Government</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/i-work-for-the-government/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=i-work-for-the-government</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/i-work-for-the-government/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Nov 2013 05:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuomo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=211764</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How entrepreneurs spend more time toiling for the state than for their families. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/shackled.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211765" alt="shackled" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/shackled.jpg" width="219" height="156" /></a>My name is Ronn Torossian and I work for the government.  <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/ronn-torossian/">Avid readers of Front Page Magazine</a> may have thought I was a public relations firm owner and author, however, I work for the government more than I work for anyone else.  This week, I was shocked when my accountant provided me with 2013 tax estimates showing that as a New York City resident, my effective tax rate will be 55 percent. What you read is correct, 55 percent of the year I work for the American government!</span></b></p>
<p>That being said, unlike most other government employees, I don’t have a guaranteed pension, don’t work plush hours of 9-to-5 with four weeks guaranteed vacation, actually have to be held accountable for what I do, assume responsibility for the employment of over 100 people, balance a budget…and work hard.</p>
<p>Let’s review where my astounding 55 percent taxes went. Nineteen percent of the federal government’s budget pays for “defense and security-related international activities,” which basically can be translated as ensuring that our country provides for despots and dictators while making sure no one harms Iran’s precious nuclear weapons. Of course, it will also pay to create havoc in the Middle East – none of which is in America’s interest. Twenty-two percent of the federal government’s budget pays for Social Security, which likely won’t exist when it’s my turn to depend on it.</p>
<p>Large percentages of my federal taxes go for “Three health insurance programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP),” which is also supplemented by that broken program called ObamaCare (although unlike a certain government website, the website for my agency actually works). My family and my employees’ healthcare is a tremendous expense, and every time we do anything at the doctor&#8217;s we pay deductibles. Six percent of the federal taxes I pay go to pay interest on the national debt – since, unlike entrepreneurs, the government doesn’t actually need to balance a checkbook.</p>
<p>Top that off with the fact that New York State is the worst state in America to do business according to the “<a href="http://www.sbecouncil.org/news/display.cfm?ID=4689">Small Business Survival Index</a>” by the Tax Foundation. A Mercatus Center report said New York, NY has “the highest taxes in the country: three and a half standard deviations above the national mean.”  Our Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, raised rates to 8.82% in 2011, while New York City and state’s combined top tax rate is currently 12.70%. There is also an additional “unincorporated business tax” (UBT) of 4% on pass-through entities and sole proprietorships, which puts the rate at 16.70%. All these taxes – and what do we get?</p>
<p>From housing to all services, everything – EVERYTHING – is expensive.  Our new Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks we aren’t paying enough, and in classic socialist language speaks of “two cities” where of course the successful should be penalized. New York City public schools are so overcrowded that many of us choose private schools to ensure our children receive a quality education. As an employer, I pay significant annual taxes to the MTA, a tax called the metropolitan commuter transportation mobility tax (MCTMT) – yet still pay full fare when I take the subway. Of course, the train regularly breaks down or has some sort of issue.</p>
<p>Naturally, even though I volunteer 55 percent of my year for the government, the local, state and federal governments are all operating at a deficit. I lie – its more than 55 percent, for as an entrepreneur, we pay payroll taxes, workers compensation, NYC commercial rent taxes, payroll tax, employees who go on jury duty and countless other taxes I may not even be aware of.</p>
<p>The Vice President of this country, Joe Biden has said that paying higher taxes is the “patriotic thing to do” and I could not disagree with the man any stronger. There is nothing redeeming about these taxes and I find them to be despicable.</p>
<p>As an entrepreneur who created my own success and hundreds of jobs, my duty is not to work 55 percent of the year so I can pay taxes. It is un-American and not something our forefathers would have ever envisioned.</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>Do Americans Prefer Deception?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/do-americans-prefer-deception/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=do-americans-prefer-deception</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/do-americans-prefer-deception/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[payroll taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211032</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do employers really pay half of all Medicare and Social Security taxes? Or do workers pay it all? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/social-security-taxes.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211046" alt="social-security-taxes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/social-security-taxes.jpg" width="289" height="181" /></a>There&#8217;s more to the deceit and dishonesty about Social Security and Medicare discussed in my recent columns. Congress tells us that one-half (6.2 percent) of the Social Security tax is paid by employees and that the other half is paid by employers, for a total of 12.4 percent. Similarly, we are told that a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent is levied on employees and that another 1.45 percent is levied on employers. The truth of the matter is that the burden of both taxes is borne by employees. In other words, we pay both the employee and the so-called employer share. You say, &#8220;Williams, that&#8217;s nonsense! Just look at what it says on my pay stub.&#8221; OK, let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>Pretend you are my employer and agree to pay me $50,000 a year, out of which you&#8217;re going to send $3,100 to Washington as my share of Social Security tax (6.2 percent of $50,000), as well as $725 for my share of Medicare (1.45 percent of $50,000), a total of $3,825 for the year. To this you must add your half of Social Security and Medicare taxes, which is also $3,825 for the year. Your cost to hire me is $53,825.</p>
<p>If it costs you $53,825 a year to hire me, how much value must I produce for it to be profitable for you to keep me? Is it our agreed salary of $50,000 or $53,825? If you said $53,825, you&#8217;d be absolutely right. Then who pays all of the Social Security and Medicare taxes? If you said that I do, you&#8217;re right again. The Social Security and Medicare fiction was created because Americans would not be so passive if they knew that the tax they are paying is double what is on their pay stubs — not to mention federal income taxes.</p>
<p>The economics specialty that reveals this is known as the incidence of taxation. The burden of a tax is not necessarily borne by the party upon whom it is levied. The Joint Committee on Taxation held that &#8220;both the employee&#8217;s and employer&#8217;s share of the payroll tax is borne by the employee.&#8221; The Congressional Budget Office &#8220;assumes — as do most economists — that employers&#8217; share of payroll taxes is passed on to employees in the form of lower wages than would otherwise be paid.&#8221;<a id="itxthook0" href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-williams.html#" rel="nofollow">Health</a> insurance is not an employer gift, either.</p>
<p>It is paid for by employees in the form of lower wages.</p>
<p>Another part of Social Security and Medicare deception is that the taxes are officially called FICA, which stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act. First, it&#8217;s not an insurance program. More importantly, the word &#8220;contribution&#8221; implies something voluntary. Its synonyms are alms, benefaction, beneficence, charity, donation and philanthropy. Which one of those synonyms comes close to describing how Congress gets Social Security and Medicare?</p>
<p>There&#8217;s more deceit and dishonesty. In 1950, I was 14 years old and applied for a work permit for an after-school job. One of the requirements was to obtain a Social Security card. In bold letters on my Social Security card, which I still possess, are the words &#8220;For Social Security Purposes — Not For Identification.&#8221; That&#8217;s because earlier Americans feared that their Social Security number would become an identity number. According to the Social Security Administration website, &#8220;this legend was removed as part of the design changes for the 18th version of the card, issued beginning in 1972.&#8221; That statement assumes we&#8217;re idiots. We&#8217;re asked to believe that the sole purpose of the removal was for design purposes. Apparently, the fact that our Social Security number had become a major identification tool, to be used in every aspect of our lives, had nothing to do with the SSA&#8217;s getting rid of the legend saying &#8220;For Social Security Purposes — Not For Identification.&#8221;</p>
<p>I wonder whether political satirist H.L. Mencken was right when he said, &#8220;Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.&#8221;</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>PunditFact/PolitiFact: Media Bias Strikes Again &#8212; At Me</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/punditfactpolitifact-media-bias-strikes-again-at-me/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=punditfactpolitifact-media-bias-strikes-again-at-me</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/punditfactpolitifact-media-bias-strikes-again-at-me/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:19:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fact check]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[false]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politifact]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Punditfact]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[truth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210730</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When "fact-checkers" can't be trusted. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/politifact-half-true.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210731" alt="politifact-half-true" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/politifact-half-true-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>When PunditFact — the new offspring from the folks at PolitiFact — contacted me, they wanted sources for &#8220;all of the claims&#8221; in the following statement I made Nov. 4 on CNN&#8217;s &#8220;Crossfire&#8221;:</p>
<p>&#8220;In 1900, at all three levels of government — federal, state and local — government took less than 10 percent of the American people&#8217;s money. Now, we&#8217;re talking about 35 percent, and when you add a dollar value to mandates, we&#8217;re talking almost 50 percent.&#8221;</p>
<p>What&#8217;s the problem? PunditFact rated the statement as &#8220;mostly false.&#8221; For added measure, PunditFact called the assertions &#8220;eye-popping.&#8221;</p>
<p>No, I was not &#8220;mostly false.&#8221; At worst, I was &#8220;mostly true.&#8221; Broken down, &#8220;all&#8221; of my &#8220;claims&#8221; consist of three assertions. They are:</p>
<p>1) On size of government in 1900: &#8220;Less than 10 percent.&#8221; PunditFact doesn&#8217;t bother to even mention their findings on this &#8220;claim&#8221; — no doubt because the number I gave is accurate. In essence, PunditFact admits I&#8217;m right.</p>
<p>2) On amount government now takes: &#8220;Now &#8230; 35 percent.&#8221; PunditFact admits I&#8217;m right.</p>
<p>3) On amount government takes at all levels when you &#8220;add a dollar value to mandates&#8221;: I said, &#8220;Almost 50 percent.&#8221; This requires judgment and assignment of value to things that are difficult to quantify. But there is a cost, even by the Elder-was-wrong experts PunditFact cited — and the cost is north of zero.</p>
<p>Yet PunditFact determined that since a) it is difficult to quantify the cost of mandates, and b) experts disagree, my entire statement — all three &#8220;eyepopping&#8221; assertions — are scored &#8220;mostly false&#8221;?! This is nonsense.</p>
<p>For added measure, PunditFact quoted one tax professor: &#8220;Mr. Elder&#8217;s statement is too vague to be useful for any purpose other than generating &#8216;hallelujahs!&#8217; from the choir he is preaching to.&#8221; Nice touch.</p>
<p>So I challenged PunditFact on my radio show, and to PunditFact&#8217;s credit, the editor agreed to an interview. After our interview, I sent him the following letter:</p>
<p>&#8220;Thanks again for coming on. You&#8217;re a stand-up guy.</p>
<p>&#8220;I respectfully and formally request that you re-visit your rating — in hopes that I will get a fair one. I made good arguments this evening in our interview — and you knew it.</p>
<p>&#8220;My quote consisted of three factual assertions.</p>
<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve admitted that the first two were correct, leaving us with the &#8216;cost&#8217; of mandates as our only unresolved issue.</p>
<p>&#8220;Katie&#8217;s letter (Katie Sanders is the reporter who wrote the piece) spoke of fact checking &#8216;all&#8217; my &#8216;claims.&#8217;</p>
<p>&#8220;In the &#8216;mostly false&#8217; fact check, you call my assertions — plural — &#8216;eye-popping.&#8217; Plural, of course, means you not only found my &#8216;almost 50 percent&#8217; claim &#8216;eye-popping,&#8217; but you had to have found at least one of my two other assertions &#8216;eye-popping,&#8217; as well.</p>
<p>&#8220;Katie said &#8216;all,&#8217; not &#8216;both.&#8217; &#8216;All,&#8217; to me, means three claims — not one, not two.</p>
<p>&#8220;Two of my &#8216;eye-popping claims&#8217; were true, but I still get &#8216;mostly false.&#8217;</p>
<p>&#8220;You essentially said that it was the most &#8216;eye-popping&#8217; of my claims — so you gave it more weight. That is also unfair.</p>
<p>&#8220;First, PunditFact switched the goal posts from being concerned about &#8216;all&#8217; my assertions, to ignoring the two that check out.</p>
<p>&#8220;Second, why do you think the &#8216;almost 50 percent&#8217; part was the most &#8216;eye popping&#8217; assertion? I don&#8217;t. I&#8217;m willing to bet, as I said in our interview, that Katie was gob-smacked when she heard that in 1900 government took less than 10 percent and now it takes 35 percent! But this &#8216;eye-popping&#8217; (and truthful) assertion checks out and gets ignored. Suddenly, you focus only on the &#8216;almost 50 percent&#8217; part. Unfair.</p>
<p>&#8220;Finally, you say &#8216;you could find no expert&#8217; to corroborate the 50 percent number. Really? I offered Grover Norquist&#8217;s organization, and it assigns an even higher number to the cost of mandates. You rejected that. Nobody at the American Enterprise Institute? Nobody at the libertarian Reason Foundation? Nobody at Heritage? Nobody at the Competitive Enterprise Institute?</p>
<p>&#8220;I won&#8217;t even bring up the lenient grade you gave Ed Schultz when he exaggerated the number of teachers Gov. Chris Christie supposedly &#8216;fired&#8217; by over 30 percent — and still got a &#8216;half truth.&#8217;</p>
<p>&#8220;Soft on lefties, hard on conservatives?</p>
<p>&#8220;Please reconsider. I take my credibility quite seriously, and you&#8217;ve slammed my character and integrity. Stuff like this affects one&#8217;s stature and even career. You should have been more considerate and respectful.</p>
<p>&#8220;I treated you with courtesy and respect tonight. I hope you will do likewise.</p>
<p>&#8220;Larry.&#8221;</p>
<p>Media tells us that the lost and &#8220;schizophrenic&#8221; GOP cannot decide between the tea party and &#8220;more mainstream candidates.&#8221; But if liberal media bias didn&#8217;t exist, it wouldn&#8217;t matter whether they nominated Texas&#8217; Sen. Ted Cruz or New Jersey&#8217;s Christie. UCLA Professor Tim Groseclose, author of the media bias book &#8220;Left Turn,&#8221; says that in presidential elections, liberal media bias gives Dems an 8 to 10 point advantage out of the gate. Were the media truly &#8220;fair and balanced,&#8221; the voting electorate, writes Groseclose, would resemble red state Texas.</p>
<p>The old line goes, &#8220;You&#8217;re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own set of facts. Yet leftwing fact-checkers give us leftwing &#8220;facts.&#8221;</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>Glitch?: IRS Funnels Billions to Illegal Aliens</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/glitch-irs-funnels-billions-to-illegal-aliens/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=glitch-irs-funnels-billions-to-illegal-aliens</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/glitch-irs-funnels-billions-to-illegal-aliens/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:49:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[child tax credit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Aliens]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207426</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the agency refuses to change its ways. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/hundred-dollar-bills.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207429" alt="hundred-dollar-bills" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/hundred-dollar-bills.gif" width="225" height="150" /></a>While many conservative organizations seeking tax exempt status were singled out for extra scrutiny by the IRS, a commensurate level of calculated disinterest was demonstrated with regard to illegal aliens. A bombshell <a href="http://www.cis.org/paying-illeglas-to-stay">report,</a> “Paying Illegals to Stay&#8221; written by Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) fellow David North reveals that the Treasury has paid out a whopping $4.2 billion to the families of illegal aliens.</p>
<p>&#8220;This particular paying-the-illegals-to-stay pattern revolves around the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), which is not so much a tax credit as it is an income-transfer program for low-income families, offering up to $1,000 per child to all resident families, including those of illegal aliens,&#8221; North explains.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the evolution of the abuse came about courtesy of what North refers to as a &#8220;fuzzy minded&#8221; Congress, which could have mandated that ACTC benefits, like Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC), could only be granted to people with valid Social Security Numbers (SSNs).</p>
<p>Instead, in 1996, as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), Congress determined that no federal &#8220;grant or benefit&#8221; could be given to illegals&#8211;even as they failed to define the terms. Subsequently, the decision as to what those terms meant became one for the executive branch of government (in this case the IRS) to make.</p>
<p>At some point the IRS decided completely on its own, &#8220;at a modest level of the IRS hierarchy,&#8221; according to North, that giving ATCTs to illegals was not a problem. “I’ve been in government and I know kind of how these things work out. It struck me that [GS-]15s, 16s, got together at some point and decided this is how we should handle it, and it stuck,” North <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/14/tax-credits-to-illegals-likely-from-midlevel-repor/?page=1">told</a> the <i>Washington Times. </i></p>
<p>As a result, 1996 was the same year the U.S. Treasury <a href="http://easternshoretax.com/en/itin-tax-id-number/history-of-high-number-tax-id-number">introduced</a> the Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN). This nine-digit tax-processing number is assigned by the IRS to individuals who are obligated to file a federal tax return, but who lack or are ineligible for a SSN typically required to file taxes.</p>
<p>ITIN numbers can only be issued to those who submit a Form W-7, along with documents that establish both the identity and the foreign status of the individual. Prior to their validation, those documents were supposed to be reviewed at the IRS processing center in Austin, TX, where they have a <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/irs-field-agent-heres-how-illegals-scam-system/">fraud unit</a>. Yet the IRS allowed other service centers with far less rigorous standards to process the documents. Moreover, standards become even <i>less</i> rigorous when an applicant decides to obtain ITINs for his children, nieces and nephews. And as North reveals, once an ITIN &#8220;has been issued, there seems to be little, if any, attempt to question the filer&#8217;s eligibility for ACTC benefits, so the refunds keep flowing.&#8221;</p>
<p>They might have kept flowing indefinitely were it not for the outstanding <a href="http://www.wthr.com/video?clipId=7054149&amp;topVideoCatNo=103348&amp;autoStart=true">efforts</a> of Bob Segall, a senior investigative reporter for WTHR-TV in Indianapolis. Running his first report on the scam on April 26, 2012, Segall related the story told to him by an anonymous Indiana tax consultant. The consultant revealed that several returns filed by illegal aliens were successfully claiming ACTC tax refunds of as much as $1000 for as many as a dozen dependents. “Here’s a return right here: we’ve got a $10,300 refund for nine nieces and nephews,” he said. “We’re getting an $11,000 refund on this tax return. There’s seven nieces and nephews,” he added, pointing to another set of documents. “I can bring out stacks and stacks. It’s just so easy it’s ridiculous.”</p>
<p>Segall tracked down a single illegal alien living at a southern Indiana home used by four more illegals who <i>didn&#8217;t </i>live there. Despite that reality, those workers claimed 20 children as dependents&#8211;and the IRS sent them checks totaling $29,608.</p>
<p>After that, the dam broke at the Austin servicing center, where workers told Segall that management was interested in the quantity, not the quality, of returns processed. The processing of documents written in foreign languages, and the IRS&#8217;s willingness to accept notarized photocopies of original documents also facilitated the fraud.</p>
<p>North notes the other hero of this story is Treasury Inspector General (IG) J. Russell George. “The magnitude of the problem has grown exponentially,” George said at the time, and issued audit reports to back up his statement. The 2011 report <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/09/02/IRS-Is-Paying-Illegal-Immigrants-Billions-of-Dollars.aspx%23page1">revealed</a> the upward trend: in 2005, the IRS paid out $924 million on ACTC claims. In 2010, illegal aliens <a href="http://www.cis.org/edwards/illegals-raiding-US-treasury">collected</a> $4.2 billion, more than quadruple the previous amount. The report also revealed that the number of illegal aliens who used the tax credit skyrocketed from 796,000 filers in 2005, to 1.5 million in 2008, and 2.3 million in 2010. For perspective sake, the report explained that 72 percent of tax returns filed using ITINs sought the child tax credit, compared to only 14 percent of non-ITIN filers seeking the same credit.</p>
<p>With the spotlight trained on them, the IRS made some changes to the system: only original comment and certified copies by the issuing authority can be used to process ITIN applications; ITIN numbers will expire after five years; quality not quantity is now emphasized at processing centers; and new review procedures have been instituted.</p>
<p>North notes these changes produced concrete results, with both an increase in the number of rejections, as well as a decrease in the total number of applications sent to the IRS.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the remedy is a half-hearted solution at best. In typical bureaucratic fashion, the IRS reforms only addressed the problems <i>moving forward. </i>Those already scamming the system&#8211;and continuing to do so&#8211;will be unaffected.</p>
<p>North notes the IRS could at least go after &#8220;low-hanging fruit,&#8221; and the examples of such are mind-boggling. He reveals that a single address in Atlanta, GA had 23,994 ITIN-related tax refunds sent to it. In another instance, 8,393 ITIN refunds were deposited into a single bank account. He further notes the IG&#8217;s report revealed that three towns &#8220;all small ones in labor-intensive agricultural areas,&#8221; had a highly disproportionate number of ITIN application relative to the general population.</p>
<p>In Thermal, CA, there were 67 assigned ITINs that received $402,000 in refunds, mailed to 95 addresses, in a town with a total population of 2,825. In Parksley, VA, 100 assigned ITINs received $163,711 in refunds mailed to 48 addresses in a town of 847. In Frankford, DE, 627 assigned ITINs received a total of $712,004 in refunds mailed to 183 addresses&#8211;in a town of only 862 people.</p>
<p>North personally visited Frankford and Parksley. Frankford officials demonstrated no awareness of the problem, or any interest in dealing with it. In Parksley, the woman running a one-woman post office operation told North he was not the first person to ask about the problem, but wouldn&#8217;t tell him who else did. Of the three tax preparers listed in the White Pages, one was aware of the problem, but blamed it on one of the other two.</p>
<p>North summed up his experience. &#8220;What I found, briefly, was this: that some unknown segment of the government (probably either the IRS or the postal inspectors) was active in one location, but apparently not in the other; that the IG&#8217;s office had not made any obvious effort to share its (partially redacted) story with local authorities; and that while people were polite to me and mildly interested in my story, there did not seem to be any deep, underlying concern about the presence of illegal aliens in their midst.&#8221;</p>
<p>After the 2011 IG report was issued, Republicans in Congress attempted to address the problem. Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) introduced <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr1956">HR 1956</a>: Refundable Child Tax Credit Eligibility Verification Reform Act. The bill would require individuals to produce a Social Security number in order to claim “the refundable portion of their child tax credit.” It <a href="https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr1956/report">died</a> on May 24, 2011.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the IRS continues to maintain that it does not have the authority to prevent illegal aliens from getting fraudulent tax refunds. It further contends it lacks the legal authority to deny claims, even when they fail to include documents showing the children actually live in the United States. That would be the same IRS whose scrutiny of conservative organizations seeking tax exempt status was meticulous at best, and illegal at worst. It is precisely those warped priorities that have many Americans wondering if the agency should be abolished altogether. When the IRS is &#8220;paying illegals to stay,&#8221; it might be an idea whose time has come.</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>Uber-Liberal Politicians Will Set NYC Back Many Years</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/uber-liberal-politicians-will-set-nyc-back-many-years/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=uber-liberal-politicians-will-set-nyc-back-many-years</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Sep 2013 04:05:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203861</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The destructiveness of class warfare. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/bloomberg-deblasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203862" alt="bloomberg-deblasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/bloomberg-deblasio-337x350.jpg" width="202" height="210" /></a></p>
<p>For Bill de Blasio and other ultra-liberal politicians, I am evil &#8212; because I am successful. The Public Advocate of New York, who came from nowhere to win the New York City Democratic primary and is now the frontrunner to be the mayor of the city, ran his campaign focused on vowing to address the issue which he deems “The Tale of Two Cities.” As someone born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, who now lives on the vaunted Upper West Side, I am indeed very familiar with the different neighborhoods, and the DNA of New York.</p>
<p>I was raised in the Bronx in a single-mother household, attended public school and worked in a local pizzeria many hours from the age of 12 until after I graduated college. I remember returning bottles for the 5 cent deposits (well before the days when anyone thought about the need to be “green” friendly) and the constant struggle for my mother to pay the bills so she could do everything in the world possible for my sister and I to get ahead. And indeed, my holy mother never failed, and we got ahead thanks to her love, sweat and tears.</p>
<p>I very clearly remember the dangerous streets filled with three-card monte games, hustlers, pickpockets, drug dealers and slimeballs. I remember the fear of riding the subway and of walking on the streets after dark. And indeed, while de Blasio, the Cambridge, Massachusetts transplant (who was then known as Warren Wilhelm) was getting his B.A. from New York University and then his masters in the Ivy League school of Columbia University, the great city of New York was suffering tremendously.  I am a proud graduate of the New York City public school system – although I remember cutting school often, and doing plenty of other things I don’t want my kids knowing about.</p>
<p>Today, when de Blasio speaks of “The Tale of Two Cities,” I understand the other side. I live in a uber-luxury condominium building in Lincoln Center, and my children attend private school.  Thanks to working very hard, at the age of 39, <a href="http://www.ronntorossian.com/">I own one of the largest PR agencies</a> in the city and employ over 110 people.</p>
<p>De Blasio, the uber-liberal believes I need to be penalized for my success.  He claims  “We don’t have to continue to live the Tale of Two Cities that confronts us today.” And indeed, in the great country of America, we don’t.  People in New York can work hard, take risks and get ahead – and all have opportunity.  Does everyone’s American dream mean they have to be wealthy? Or does it simply mean they have equal opportunity? Shouldn’t the 1<sup>st</sup> African American President in the White House tell all Americans that indeed anyone can do anything?</p>
<p>Why is it that New Yorkers should be taxed and penalized more because they are successful? De Blasio – like liberals throughout the US – is proposing a tax on the wealthy to fund universal pre-kindergarten and other radical ways to “address the city’s growing income inequality.” <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/occupy-wall-street-may-soon-occupy-new-yorks-city-hall/">De Blasio is an old-school liberal who will harm business interests throughout this city</a>.</p>
<p>Ads that the NY state government is running say, “In New York State, a business can grow as big as anyone can possibly imagine.” Why don’t the ads explain that one will pay more than 50% in taxes if they are successful in New York City? And clearly with extreme liberals in office that number will only go up. New York imposes high taxes on personal income, individual capital gains, corporate income, and corporate capital gains.  Everything here is expensive, and indeed for liberals, when you make it then you are to blame.</p>
<p>Too many liberal politicians fail to remember that the successful (wealthy) create jobs. They aren’t bad. They are good – and it’s the essence of capitalism. Stop demonizing the wealthy via class warfare – encourage kids and people to be successful.</p>
<p>Class warfare is something that turns this boy from the Bronx off – and should turn everyone off.  Demonizing the people who employ people, the people most likely to pay large taxes, the hard-working folks of this city – how does that make New York better? Shame on any politician who engages in class warfare.</p>
<p>P.S.:  Mr. de Blasio – During the campaign you spoke regularly of “$1,000 caviar pizza, and – for the same price –  a ‘Golden Opulence’ sundae for dessert.”  Would love to find out if I can have it delivered for lunch tomorrow to <a href="http://pinterest.com/5wpr/">5WPR</a>. Where from?</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>Obama&#8217;s Death and Taxes Economy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-death-and-taxes-economy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-death-and-taxes-economy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2013 04:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198216</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Masquerading social policies as economic policies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/obamad.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198234" alt="obamad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/obamad.jpg" width="322" height="202" /></a>It&#8217;s an iron law of nature as certain as the one about an angel getting its wings every time a bell rings or a snowstorm blanketing the area every time Al Gore comes to town to remind the carbon puffing infidels about global warming: every time Obama gives a speech, a thousand businesses go out of business.</p>
<p>On July 24th, Obama delivered yet another economic speech in which he castigated Republicans in Congress for the sequester that he proposed, promised big economic benefits for the entire country from green energy and illegal immigration and promised to spend every one of his remaining days trying to help working people; at least those days when he isn&#8217;t on the golf course, on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard or delivering useless speeches.</p>
<p>An economics speech, a creature that Barack Obama has been unleashing on the taxpayers, lawmakers and layabouts since his post-election days in 2008 of pretending to be president complete with an imaginary seal with the motto &#8220;Vero Possumus” (which can be translated very loosely as &#8220;God Help Us All&#8221;), is an entirely familiar breed.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s an FDR-on-crack assemblage of crackpot social plans masquerading as economic plans and homey testaments to American exceptionalism wrapped around bankrupt Euro ideas about how to run a country into the ground. And in the year 2013, the whole thing smells like last year&#8217;s leftovers.</p>
<p>There are the warnings about all the old bridges threatening to fall down and kill the trolls living under them. Despite a second term in office, a stimulus plan, a plan to stimulate the stimulus plan and years of assorted pork, there are apparently now more Damocles bridges in the land than there ever were before.</p>
<p>In 2009, Obama promised to fix all the crumbling roads and bridges with a $787 billion stimulus plan full of &#8220;shovel-ready jobs.&#8221; Two years later he joked to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, led by GE CEO Jeff Immelt, whose company is the 15th biggest government contractor, that the shovel-ready jobs were not shovel-ready. It would have been nice to know that before we spent the $787 billion.</p>
<p>And then there are the promises that we can fix all our problems with a green energy revolution that drives up electricity rates for everyone in order to buy windmills and solar panels from China. The green energy revolution has done a lot for Red China&#8217;s middle class while further eviscerating the standard of living for American middle class families who are just trying to keep the lights on.</p>
<p>And no Obama speech on the economy would be complete without urging us to invest more in education in order to get our hands on tomorrow&#8217;s jobs. &#8220;If you think education is expensive,&#8221; Obama said, borrowing his line from a bumper sticker, &#8220;wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century.&#8221;</p>
<p>But we don&#8217;t have to choose. As Detroit shows us, we can have both. Detroit has 5,000 teachers to 88,000 students. Its biggest challenge has been trying to win back another 5,000 students who escaped to charter schools to justify not laying off all the extra teachers. Its billion-dollar school budget is all the more shocking in a city that is deep in debt and suffers from a 47 percent illiteracy rate.</p>
<p>The education system fosters incredibly expensive ignorance. And that ignorance can not only be found in public schools in Detroit&#8217;s ghettos, but in the Ivy League alma maters of Obama and his financial advisers.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s 6 trillion dollar debt is a testament to the high price of ignorance; as are his economic speeches calling for more green energy, more education and more taxes to solve all of our ills. In his latest speech, he vowed that making &#8220;preschool available to every four year-old in America&#8221; would make America competitive in the &#8220;ocean of tomorrows&#8221; and &#8220;a sky of tomorrows.&#8221;</p>
<p>About the only thing in Obama&#8217;s entire 5,000-word speech that was at all interesting was in its opening as he pivoted from discussing the loss of middle class jobs to inveighing against the income inequality of the 1 percent. It was a convenient dodge that his average supporter was incapable of noticing, but it&#8217;s at the heart of what&#8217;s wrong with Obama&#8217;s economic logic.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s speech stayed in familiar class warfare territory. Its implication was that if the wealthy were made to pay their fair share, the lost manufacturing jobs would somehow come back. The economic logic of that is absurd. Even if we assume that the wealthy are the villains of the piece, taxing them at Hollandaise rates seems as likely to bring back the jobs as constructing cardboard factories in a cargo cult ceremony to summon the spirits of the lost jobs would.</p>
<p>But Obama, like most of his Socialist brethren, isn&#8217;t really interested in repairing the broken relationships of the economy. The logic running through his speech is that forcing the rich, or at least those of their class who haven&#8217;t written their timely checks to Organizing for America, to pay more will allow the government to create more jobs.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s perpetual motion tax machine is offering the same empty social welfare promises that more social services, more preschools, more free Internet, more green energy, more Obamacare, will turn the economy around, while shamelessly claiming that it has already done as much.</p>
<p>There are still the occasional nods to all the nation&#8217;s broken bridges that are just about to fall down, but mostly it&#8217;s the same empty Socialism that proposes to tax a country to death because it&#8217;s right and just to do so.</p>
<p>&#8220;In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,&#8221; Benjamin Franklin wrote to a French correspondent around the time that the United States Constitution took effect. Some two centuries later, government has combined death and taxes into one by taxing the economy to death.</p>
<p>Taxing economies to death is one thing that we have in common with the French. President Hollande began his disastrous term in office with a proposed 75% tax rate. France&#8217;s move to tax its economy to death hit a snag when its budget minister, a member of the Socialist Party in good standing, who was supposed to lead the crusade to make the rich pay their fair 75 percent share, admitted to hiding some $790,000 in a secret Swiss bank account.</p>
<p>Obama has squandered money like Louis XVI and then pledged to lead a revolution to find where the rest of the money is. Surrounded by some of the most corrupt billionaires in the country, whose think-tanks help write the policy proposals that the teleprompter feeds into his brain, he inveighs against the 1 percent. And he tops it all off by claiming his disasters as successes.</p>
<p>Obama taxes Americans. He taxes their incomes, their lifebloods and their patience. He has put his entire faith in taxes, in grubbing up enough money to serve as collateral for his latest scheme. And the road that his paradise of amnesty for illegal aliens, green energy for electric poverty and more government employees to administer the whole mess leads to is Detroit.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>What&#8217;s Wrong with Sweden?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whats-wrong-with-sweden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=whats-wrong-with-sweden</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 04:10:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189970</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the all-powerful socialist state destroys the spirit of human freedom -- and why Swedes ask for more. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/swedishflag608.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190018" alt="swedishflag608" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/swedishflag608-450x329.jpg" width="315" height="230" /></a>Europe is slowly committing suicide, but Sweden is plainly determined to do itself in faster than the rest. Earlier this month, on a visit to Lagos, Nigeria, Sweden&#8217;s Minister of Finance, a fellow named Anders Borg, made one of those staggering <a href="https://www.realisten.se/2013/05/11/anders-borg-sverige-kommer-bli-som-afrika/%20">comments</a>, drenched with contempt for one&#8217;s own nation and culture, of the sort in which Swedish officials excel. Paying tribute to the beauty of Nigerian women&#8217;s colorful attire, Borg couldn&#8217;t just leave it at that; he felt compelled to use the occasion to complain that his own countrywomen too often wear dull, black outfits. Speaking with a reporter for <i>Expressen, </i>he expressed the hope and expectation that in ten years&#8217; time his own country, and Europe generally, will look far more like Africa. It&#8217;ll be more multicultural, he explained, and thus better.</p>
<p>But is Nigeria more multicultural than Sweden? Yes, if you&#8217;re referring to the fact that it has over 250 native ethnic and linguistic groups with a wide range of cultures, from Fula to Hausa to Yoruba. But if you&#8217;re talking about multiculturalism as an ideology that compels public servants to view the establishment of greater and greater ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity as an undivided virtue, regardless of all objective evidence to the contrary, Nigeria has nothing on Sweden. While only a tiny minority of Nigeria&#8217;s population is of foreign origin, over 25% of Sweden&#8217;s inhabitants have a foreign background. And people like Borg are determined to drive that number steadily higher, by hook or by crook – on the insane grounds that a nation like Sweden should look to a nation like Nigeria as a model for its own future development.</p>
<p>Indeed, it&#8217;s a measure of the utter irrationality of the modern religion known as multiculturalism that a Western politician like Borg is able to lavish such praise on an overpopulated, underdeveloped African country whose very name is synonymous with cheesy Internet scams; a country that has a life expectancy of 47 years, a 32% illiteracy rate, a political culture rife with corruption, and a deplorable human-rights record; a country where twelve of the 36 states are governed according to sharia law,  where over a hundred people perished in Muslim riots over the 2002 Miss World pageant, and where jihadist violence has taken hundreds of lives in recent years.</p>
<p>What the hell is up with Sweden? It&#8217;s a question people have been asking for decades, and in a new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Swedish-Story-extreme-experiment/dp/1484873831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1368901086&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=The+Swedish+Story+Sjunnesson">The Swedish Story</a><i>, </i>Swedish blogger Jon Sjunnesson sets out to answer it. And he does an effective job of it: even for those of us who have paid no small amount of attention to Sweden over the years, Sjunnesson&#8217;s book offers a helpful overview of the Swedish national character and the history of the Swedish welfare state, perceptively singling out the distinctive traits that have made Sweden the “extreme experiment” that it is and succinctly summing up some of the more notorious episodes in modern Swedish history.  But this isn&#8217;t all: he also illuminates socialism and the socialist mind in a way that I think will be useful for Americans – for what he&#8217;s drawn here is a vivid map of the territory into which our president and many of his cronies and supporters wish to lead us.</p>
<p>Take education. Of course, real education means, above all, helping students learn how to think critically. In a country like Sweden, however, schools and universities are primarily sites of indoctrination whose purpose is to create good socialists. If the Swedish system celebrates kids who are great at sports while all but punishing kids who stand out academically (“Excellence of bodies yes, brains no”), part of the reason is a fanatical devotion to equality of result, and part is an awareness that kids with first-rate minds are potential critics of the system. Hence socialism&#8217;s preference for mediocrity over excellence.</p>
<p>And, one might add, for social science over hard science. Yes, Sweden awards Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine, but its educational system discourages an interest in math and science – because, you see, experts in these fields end up serving industry, which exploits workers and produces environmentally hazardous waste. For decades, consequently, Sweden has suffered a deficit of scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians. Students who choose to enter these fields, furthermore, tend to be so ill-prepared that they “need remedial classes.” There&#8217;s also a lack of plumbers, construction workers, and other laborers – for just as Sweden&#8217;s social engineers distrust science, they look down on vocations involving manual labor.</p>
<p>In Sweden, the brainwashing starts early – not in school, but in day care. No fewer than 85% of Swedish children under age three are in municipal (or municipally administered) day care. This figure is probably the highest percentage in the world. It is, Sjunnesson notes, the kind of experiment in mass, government-controlled child-rearing that Plato envisioned in his <i>Republic </i>and that “was central in Orwell&#8217;s and Huxley&#8217;s dystopias<i>.” </i>If you&#8217;re a Swedish parent who doesn&#8217;t want your kid brought up to be a good little socialist soldier – well, good luck: you have few if any real alternatives. Parents who don&#8217;t put their kids in day care “are often suspect in the eyes of social authority.” As for home schooling, it&#8217;s forbidden under a 2010 law (the only such legislation in the EU aside from a German ban enacted in 1938 because “the Nazi party did not want anyone else to school the young”). In any event, the cause of home schooling hasn&#8217;t gained much traction among Swedes, who have been efficiently trained to view any expression of unease over state-run education as “deranged” and to accept the socialist proposition that children belong not to their parents but to the state.</p>
<p>Sjunnesson makes a crucial point about the high tax rates in Sweden and other Nordic countries. The high taxes are necessary, of course, to fund the welfare state. But they serve another purpose. Socialists recognize members of the middle class, who are all too frequently driven by an ambition to better their circumstances, as a potential threat to the authority of socialists, whose machinations make such ambitions harder to fulfill. How to nip this nuisance in the bud? Easy: impose sky-high taxes on them. For, as Sjunnesson points out, people who have been able to accumulate some savings in the bank are better positioned to “stand up against authority” and “rise with self-confidence”; they&#8217;re not “as servile as if they had nothing.” Sweden&#8217;s tax system, then, is designed to make it extremely hard for Swedes to save money – and it works: compared to other Western countries, “Swedes have unusually small amounts of savings.” And consequently, people who might otherwise be vocal critics of the socialist welfare state are very aware of being dependent on it, knowing that if they get sick or lose their jobs they won&#8217;t have their own resources to fall back on. Confiscatory tax, then, serves not only as a means of enriching and expanding the socialist state, but as a form, itself, of socialist control.</p>
<p>“Meek as sheep”: that&#8217;s how Sjunnesson describes his fellow Swedes. They&#8217;re afflicted with a “silent conformism,” the result of a “spiral of silence” driven by a “fear of exclusion” and a perceived need to maintain a social order founded on perceived consensus views. Whether the perceived consensus views actually <i>are</i> the consensus views doesn&#8217;t matter: “When no opposing views are heard, people do not believe there are any even if they themselves dissent.” Those who do dare to dissent are branded as extreme – even though those “extreme” views may be thoroughly mainstream in other Western countries – and are often targeted for violence by self-styled “anti-fascists” who behave exactly like fascists. Sweden is, note well, a country in which members of the anti-establishment Sweden Democrats Party are demonized for dissenting civilly and peacefully, while certain entertainers are celebrated for singing about their desire to commit acts of violence against Sweden Democrats. Then there&#8217;s the story of how a frank Fox News report on the Islamization of the city of Malmö led an irate member of Parliament to demand that the Swedish counterpart to the FCC close down Fox News&#8217;s operation in Sweden. As Sjunnesson sums it up: “freedom of speech means little in Sweden.”</p>
<p>There&#8217;s much more of interest in this book. About, for example, the inculcation of virulently anti-male attitudes at all levels of the Swedish educational system. (“Boys cry when they hear how bad they and their father are and men have always been.”) About how the system rewards irresponsibility on the part of young unmarried mothers and the men who impregnate them. (“With a baby, a single parent sidesteps all waiting lines and the child may be the only means to an apartment for decades.”) About a national self-hatred so fierce that “schools have asked pupils not to wear [Swedish flag] t-shirts or wave the yellow and blue flag as it could be interpreted as racist.” About a country where adults admire and envy youth beyond all reason, and accordingly exhibit greater levels of hedonism and infantilism than their counterparts anywhere else on the planet. And about levels of anti-Semitism that made international headlines yet again just the other day, when Israel&#8217;s Eurovision delegation was <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/israeli-eurovision-delegation-threatened-in-sweden-1.524399">harassed and threatened</a> on the streets of Malmö.</p>
<p>For an American reader, Sjunnesson&#8217;s book about a supposedly free country where the media march in lockstep and where dissent can be dangerous carries a special resonance in the wake of revelations that the IRS has targeted conservative groups and the Justice Department has snooped on AP and Fox News journalists. To some observers, the depth of the Obama administration&#8217;s hostility toward any hint of criticism in the media has been especially puzzling, given that most news media have in fact been absurdly supportive and protective of Obama throughout his presidency. But to a true socialist government, <i>any </i>dissent is intolerable. In Norway, where the domination of the news market by state-run TV channels and radio stations and by state-subsidized newspapers already give the government a very strong hand in shaping the media message about itself, officials have now gone a step further, proposing that the state award grants to fund journalistic projects of its own choosing – an outrageous suggestion in a democratic country, but a no-brainer for those with a socialist mindset.</p>
<p>In socialist countries, after all, the state doesn&#8217;t exist to serve the people; the people exist to be shaped into unquestioning servants of the state – servants who accept that the state <i>is</i> them and that they are the state. In such countries, it&#8217;s taken for granted that there&#8217;s no need to place any limit on state power or to provide mechanisms to protect citizens from that power, because, by definition, as Sjunnesson puts it, “the state always is good.” We may mock the European Union for banning jugs or bowls of olive oil on restaurant tables, but this is what socialism does: the powers that be need to have their fingers in every pie, need to minimize the number of situations under which freedom may actually be experienced, need to accustom citizens to a society in which their lives are increasingly regulated. They need, in short, to create a country in which the land and the system are, in the minds of the general public, one – a country, that is, in which the people simply cannot imagine the nation itself <i>without </i>the socialist state.</p>
<p>No so-called democracy on earth has gone as far in this direction as Sweden. For the Swedish people, Sjunneson says, “the country is the welfare state&#8230;Swedes have have no home but the welfare state and no identity outside its yarn” – outside, in other words, its narrative about itself. Winston Smith, Orwell&#8217;s narrator in <i>1984, </i>suggests that the only hope of overthrowing the totalitarian government of his native Oceania lies with “the proles”; Sjunneson, for his part, believes that his fellow Swedes are so brainwashed by welfare-state propaganda that the only way Sweden can save itself at this point is by admitting “one million new immigrants from India, China, Africa and Latin America” who have service skills or technical knowhow, who have no truck with jihadism or multiculturalism, who want to move to Sweden not for a handout but to study hard and work hard, and who will, in time, found more rigorous schools and start more vigorous businesses.</p>
<p>A pipe dream, I fear. Yet Sjunneson&#8217;s portrait of his country is a cautionary tale whose lessons the rest of us ignore at our peril.</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>Gov. Rick Perry: Why Texas Works</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/gov-rick-perry-why-texas-works/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gov-rick-perry-why-texas-works</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/gov-rick-perry-why-texas-works/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 04:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[The governor describes the keys to the Lone Star State's success at the Freedom Center's Texas Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of Gov. Rick Perry&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Texas Weekend. The inaugural event took place May 3rd-5th at the Las Colinas Resort in Dallas, Texas.</em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/65718340" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/65718340">Governor Rick Perry</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><strong>Rick Perry: </strong> And, David, it&#8217;s an honor to get to see you again and be in your presence.  And we&#8217;re certainly glad to have you here in Texas.  And even if your mailing address does continue to be in California.  (laughter)  I mean, really, California?  It &#8212; all the cool kids are moving to Texas, David.  (laughter)</span></p>
<p>But I&#8217;m just kidding because, I mean, God knows, if there is a place that needs David Horowitz, it is California.  (laughter) So, you know, the basic question I love to ask folks when I talk to people in California or Illinois or overseas, for that matter, is that, you know, what makes Texas so special?</p>
<p>And there&#8217;s a number of ways to go about that answer.  We are a unique culture.  We&#8217;re proud.  We are patriotic.  Fiercely dedicated to the values of individual freedom and responsibility.  We are a mix of backgrounds.</p>
<p>We are incredibly diverse state, culturally, ethically, philosophically.  No matter where you come from or what you believe, you can feel right at home in Texas.  Granted, if you&#8217;re a liberal, Austin&#8217;s probably about the only place that you&#8217;re going to feel really at home.  (laughter)</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s a great place and they love it there.  If you enjoy the finer things in life from world class orchestras to world class food, you can find it in Texas.  Same if you enjoy camping, fishing, hunting, hiking or even surfing, we have it all.</p>
<p>Of course, that&#8217;s what truly sets us apart over the last decade has been our economic climate.  And that&#8217;s something that we&#8217;ve worked very hard to develop, to cultivate.  It&#8217;s a climate built upon the fiscally conservative principles that have served us well through good economic times and throughout major national recessions.</p>
<p>CEOs are looking for something simple.  And that simplicity is predictability.  And in Texas, they know that they&#8217;re going to get just that.  They know they won&#8217;t be taxed into bankruptcy.  They know that they &#8212; that we have a low tax burden here.  That&#8217;s the foundation of this state&#8217;s tax philosophy.</p>
<p>We do that because we realize that more money in the hands of Texans is how you create more jobs in this state.  We realize that more jobs for hard working Texas tax payers means more options, more freedom, healthier Texas families.</p>
<p>People have gotten that message, too.  Our population continues to grow at somewhere north of 1,000 people every day move into this state.  Employers also know that they can put down roots in Texas.  That they won&#8217;t be tied up in miles and miles of government red tape.</p>
<p>That doesn&#8217;t mean that we don&#8217;t take care of our own.  That we don&#8217;t have appropriate regulatory climates.  As a matter fact, we&#8217;ve cleaned up our air in the last decade more than any other state in the nation during that same period of time.</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s proof that you can have thoughtful regulation and at the same time lift your environmental quality as well.  What it means is that we&#8217;re reasonable.  We&#8217;re efficient when it comes to the regulatory process.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t a &#8212; just take my word for it.  Ask people like Andy Puzder.  Andy was the CEO of Carl&#8217;s Jr.&#8217;s, headquartered out in California.  He said that opening a new restaurant in California takes eight months.</p>
<p>Eight months before you can even break ground to start the construction.  In Texas, it takes about six weeks.  That&#8217;s a big reason you&#8217;re seeing more Carl&#8217;s Jr.&#8217;s as you drive around, Pat.  I don&#8217;t know if you use that establishment or not but you&#8217;re going to see a lot more of them in Texas.</p>
<p>Employers know that the Texas court system, for instance, won&#8217;t allow for over suing.  Someone in the audience said a thank you as I walked in for &#8212; in 2003 we passed the most sweeping tort reform in the nation.  And there &#8212; and in 2011 we passed loser pay.</p>
<p>And again, sending the message (applause) that you can come to the State of Texas and you won&#8217;t be over sued.  The more time and money that&#8217;s spent in courtrooms is less time that you&#8217;re creating jobs in this state.</p>
<p>And then finally employers know that we have cultivated a work force that stands ready to fill any need as &#8212; that that employer may have.  Whether it&#8217;s on an assembly line, whether it&#8217;s on a sales line or whether it&#8217;s in a laboratory.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re about a decade into these efforts to improve our economic climate.  And I think the results speak for themselves.  <i>Foreign Direct Investment</i> magazine recently awarded Texas the 2012 Governor&#8217;s Award for being the most successful state in the nation in attracting foreign investment. And that publication is far alone in its praise for the Lone Star state.</p>
<p><i>Chief Executive</i> Magazine named Texas the country&#8217;s best state for doing business for the eighth consecutive year.  We&#8217;ve committed to making that nine, I would suggest to you, in the very short future.  (laughter)  Texas also received accolades from media outlets like <i>USA Today</i> and CNBC, <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, <i>Forbes,</i> <i>Site Selector</i> magazine.</p>
<p>More importantly than good press, though, is the fact that Texas continues to be the nation&#8217;s epicenter for job creation.  Texas employers have added more than a half million private sector jobs over the last two years alone.  A total of nearly 1.4 million jobs in the last ten years.</p>
<p>And as exciting as our present is, our future, I will suggest, is holding even more promise.  We remain very proud of our status as a national home to energy production.  Now, Mr. Hanley and I were talking about the energy industry in the State of Texas.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re likely to find even more of that in the near future, I would suggest to you.  Though our healthy economy and strategic investment in research and young, innovative companies is what I want you to focus on just a bit.</p>
<p>There &#8212; I think during the presidential race someone made the comment that, &#8220;Gosh, come on, it&#8217;s easy being governor of the State of Texas.  I mean, that&#8217;s like going, playing poker and drawing four aces, right?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not quite that easy, sir,&#8221; as I told him.  (laughter)  I said, &#8220;It&#8217;s not quite that easy in the State of Texas.&#8221;  The point they were making is you&#8217;ve got all that oil and gas so obviously your economy&#8217;s going to be good.</p>
<p>In 1984, right before Texas teetering on the brink and going down on a long, long journey downward economically, oil and gas made up approximately 14% of our Gross State Product.</p>
<p>Today, after all of the massive amounts of gas and oil that have been discovered over the course of the last five and six years in particular with George Mitchell&#8217;s extraordinary innovation of hydraulic fracturing and the hor &#8212; or the directional drilling that&#8217;s going on.</p>
<p>All of the shale gas that has been found, the Eagle Ford and the Barnett shale, the Haynesville and even in the old Permian Basin, renov &#8212; rejuvenated.  Even with all of that, and oil at close to $100 a barrel, oil and gas industry makes up less than 10% of the Gross State Product in the State of Texas today.</p>
<p>This state has exploded in a very diverse way.  In biotechnology and medical technology and manufacturing.  And after today at the N.R.A. I&#8217;m pretty sure we&#8217;re going to get some more weapons manufacturers moving into the State of Texas.  (applause)</p>
<p>Last year Batelle reached a study &#8212; released a study that said that Texas was the top job creator in biotech.  That trend will only increase as we go into the future.</p>
<p>Just a couple of months ago GlaxoSmithKline announced that they were going to join up with Texas A&amp;M University in a private sector effort there and public &#8212; profit partnership, expending $91 million to create a new vaccine facility at that university that is going to be able to address issues not only of terroristic threats but also pandemic events that can occur in the world.</p>
<p>So in Texas you&#8217;re going to see the ability to address.  Historically it took nine months to go from one strain to another strain because it was an egg-based concept.  An egg-based process.  And they have developed a process of which it&#8217;s cell-based.  And now they can go from one strain to another strain in 45 days.</p>
<p>Soon in Texas there will be a process in place to create vaccines so that half a world away where Third World countries are being decimated by diseases or viruses and to save literally the potential of millions of lives, that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re about in this state.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve created here because we&#8217;ve been innovative and we created an environment where entrepreneurs know that they can risk their capital and have a chance to have a return on their investment.  We&#8217;ve helped start-up companies keep their discoveries that are made here in Texas, instead of going to either coast.</p>
<p>That was historically when our universities came up with a great innovation it took off for the coast because that&#8217;s where the money was.  That&#8217;s where the technology and the researchers to take it to the next step, the gap funders, if you will.</p>
<p>That is truly changing and has changed where those companies are staying in Texas.  As a matter of fact, we are recruiting those mature companies from either coast to the State of Texas now.  (applause)</p>
<p>You think about, historically Texas has been a place where innovation did occur, whether it was the integrated circuit at T.I., whether it was during the space race of the &#8217;60s at Johnson Space Center, whether it was &#8212; again, I mentioned George Mitchell and that unlocking of the vast energy resources around the world.  That came from Texas technology.</p>
<p>And whether we&#8217;re on the cutting edge of energy or biotech or communications or commerce or privatized efforts to get our world back into space, Texas is going to be at the forefront of that movement.</p>
<p>The question before us now is how do we preserve and improve our economic health in the years to come?  Probably the biggest obstacle that we have, and this is part of human nature, is our own success.  With our economy surging, our revenues our collections are on a very steep upward trajectory primarily based on sales tax here in the State of Texas.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s led a lot of people, whether it was in the media, the newspaper, the television and our own legislature, to make the case that the time for fiscal conservatism is over.  They all talk about how much extra money we have floating around these days.</p>
<p>Of course, they&#8217;re ignoring that it&#8217;s our policies of restraining spending and limiting taxes that have led to that economic success.  They&#8217;re also ignoring the fact that there is no such thing as extra money.</p>
<p>And the tough decisions that we will make this session are no different than the tough decisions that we made in previous legislative sessions.  We still have to prioritize, we have to separate wants from needs.  We still have to think about what&#8217;s in the best interest, the long-term best interest of our communities and our state.</p>
<p>We still need to make good decisions now to ensure that we remain the economic power that we have grown to be.  And other states aren’t going to make it easy.  I saw Bobby Jindal today as we were passing.  And Bobby&#8217;s in the process of trying to do away with the personal income tax in Louisiana.</p>
<p>And I told him, I said, &#8220;You&#8217;re going to make me really uncomfortable if you do that.&#8221;  (laughter)  He said, &#8220;Good.&#8221;  And I said, &#8220;Awesome.&#8221;  I said, &#8220;That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re about to compete against each other.&#8221;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the future of this country, I will suggest to you.  To Washington to recognize these laboratories of innovation that we have in this country, to allow these states to compete against each other, to get away from this one-size-fits-all whether it&#8217;s on social issues or whether it&#8217;s financial decisions and economic decisions.</p>
<p>Allow the states to come up with the answers that they need, that they want for their people.  That&#8217;s the way that we make America strong again.  (applause)  This administration, and frankly this Congress, is &#8212; will continue to try to force these foolish, costly mandates down our throats.</p>
<p>And when we don&#8217;t go along with them is really, they&#8217;ll chide us and they will say that we&#8217;re not being properly cooperative, was the words that the President used this last week.  That&#8217;s how President Obama described it.</p>
<p>He said that we were not properly cooperative.  And I know that he did not mean that as a compliment but I took it as one.  (laughter)  I actually took it as a compliment.  I am not properly cooperative with them on that issue of Obamacare.</p>
<p>We said no to setting up a state exchange.  (applause)  And it&#8217;s only a state exchange.  It&#8217;s only a state exchange in name only.  They call it a state exchange but here are all the rules and this is what you have to &#8212; it has to look like this.  It&#8217;s totally and absolutely mandated by Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>We also refused on multiple occasions the idea of expanding Medicaid in the State of Texas.  (applause)  Medicaid expansion, simply put, is just misguided.  It is ultimately a doomed attempt to mask the shortcomings of Obamacare.</p>
<p>Just this week we started seeing warning signs across this country of insurance companies, insurance premiums going to skyrocket.  We&#8217;re hearing rumblings about a lot of people losing their jobs, Pat, because of Obamacare.</p>
<p>We realized early on that pouring millions of dollars into this broken system was foolish.  I made the example, David, that putting more people into Medicaid was no different than putting more people on the Titanic knowing how that was going to end up.  I mean, it truly is a place that is going to bankrupt your state if you participate in that.</p>
<p>Think about what&#8217;ll happen when the case loads explode.  It will be a massive disaster across this Texas.  I mean, across this country.  Excuse me.  And we are our own country, so to speak.  (laughter) We have a marketing campaign, David, that&#8217;s called Texas:  A Whole Other Country.  (laughter)  And some people get disturbed about that.  But it&#8217;s a fun thing.  So.</p>
<p>But anyway, I want to share with you in wrapping up what fiscally conservative, thoughtful policies, what having freedom, for me, and I think freedom for our founding fathers was about freedom from over taxation, freedom from over regulation, freedom from over litigation.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the pillars of a powerful economy.  For a little over a decade now we have put those into place in this state.  And let me share with you one of the byproducts that&#8217;s powerful.  And I want to share it with you in a bit of a &#8212; not in an anecdotal way but in just a story that reflects the point.</p>
<p>In 2001, in the spring of 2001 I&#8217;d been governor for six months.  And we got the call that one of the great names in the corporate world was considering relocating their corporate headquarters either in Chicago or Dallas-Fort Worth.  Boeing.</p>
<p>Boeing was moving out of the Pacific Northwest.  We became ecstatic.  We gathered up all of our staff and the economic development division, the Department of Economic Development and said, &#8220;We must go win this.&#8221;</p>
<p>Was only a hundred and &#8212; I think 135 jobs total.  But it was just the cache, it was the name of getting Boeing to come to Texas.  What a powerful message that would&#8217;ve been.  Well, we made a lot of smoke and not much fire and we found that we weren&#8217;t very good at economic development.  And Chicago was the winner.</p>
<p>But we came back and sometimes in defeat is how you become stronger.  I&#8217;m hoping that&#8217;s the case, anyway, Pat.  (laughter)  Sometimes in defeat it is how you become stronger.  We came back to Austin, Texas, and we analyzed our economic development effort in this state and realized that we weren&#8217;t very good at it.  And that we were cumbersome, we were not flexible, we didn&#8217;t have the ability to attract, we didn&#8217;t have incentive programs.</p>
<p>And that next legislative session in 2003 we created the Texas Enterprise Fund which is an incentive program to be able to lure these companies into the State of Texas.</p>
<p>We collapsed the Department of Economic Development into a trusteed agency and moved it into the governor&#8217;s office so it could very quickly move and be flexible without a board to have to go through.  And to work directly with the governor&#8217;s office.</p>
<p>We put into place the most sweeping tort reform in the nation during that legislative session and we filled a $10 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes to send the message that we truly were going to be responsive to businessmen and -women and not just say, &#8220;Oh, we can&#8217;t make the hard decisions.  We&#8217;re going to have to raise your taxes.&#8221;</p>
<p>And over the course of the next years we stayed, adhered to those principles.  Oh, and as an aside, about a year after that Boeing thing went down, we heard through very well placed sources that one of the reasons, a strong reason that the decision makers at Boeing chose Chicago was because the spouses of the decision makers felt that the cultural arts were more expansive in Chicago to their liking than in Dallas-Fort Worth.</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m not going to make that argument today whether that&#8217;s true or not.  But that was the perception.  And so much in this business perception is reality.  Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to fast forward with you in just a moment and go to 2011, a short decade later.</p>
<p>In Texas, Fort Worth has built a new museum of modern art.  The Kimbell has expanded greatly.  The Basses have built one of the great symphony halls in the world.  Dallas has finished two performing arts facilities.</p>
<p>The AT&amp;T, the Meyerson.  Nasher moved their sculpture gardens to Dallas.  The American Film Institute now is headquartered in Dallas.  Austin, Texas, the little government and university town, has a new museum of modern art.</p>
<p>They have the ba &#8212; the Long Center of Performing Arts.  The Topfers built a new wing onto the Zachary Theater.  San Antonio is building a new performing arts facility.  And Houston tonight has more theater seats available than any other city in America outside of New York City.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s happened in a decade.  And it&#8217;s happened, I will suggest strongly, because we&#8217;ve allowed the private sector to keep more of what they earn.  And they made the right decisions about putting that money into those charitable causes, into the cultural arts.</p>
<p>Today I can assure you as we recruit from New York or from the Silicon Valley or from Illinois.  As a matter of fact, I was in Chicago just ten days ago inviting those people to come.  That our cultural arts today are expansive and they get to keep more of what they work for.</p>
<p>That is a powerful message.  It&#8217;s what America needs to be talking about.  We need to have this great discussion across this country about red state policies and blue state policies.  (applause)</p>
<p>And if we do that, if we will stand up and unabashedly and when &#8212; courageously stand up and say, &#8220;These are the policies that will allow you to live free.  These are the policies that will allow your family to be secure.  This is the way that your family will have a better future.&#8221;  We will have an America for the next generation that we are proud of and that truly is a beacon for all the world.</p>
<p>Thank you and God bless you.  (applause)</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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