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		<title>Two Americas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/boblonsberry/two-americas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=two-americas</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2014 04:41:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bob Lonsberry]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[divide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239299</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real divide in the United States. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/divided.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239301" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/divided-450x292.jpg" alt="divided" width="307" height="199" /></a>Reposted from <a href="http://www.lonsberry.com/writings.cfm?story=3651&amp;go=4">Bob Lonsberry.com</a>. </strong></p>
<p>The Democrats are right, there are two Americas.</p>
<p>The America that works, and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t.</p>
<p>It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don’ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, to obey the law and support themselves and contribute to society, and others don’t.</p>
<p>That’s the divide in America.</p>
<p>It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country.</p>
<p>That’s not invective, that’s truth.</p>
<p>And it’s about time someone said it.</p>
<p>The politics of envy was on proud display last week as the president said he would pledge the rest of his term to fighting “income inequality.” He notes that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that’s not just.</p>
<p>It was the rationale of thievery.</p>
<p>The other guy has it, you want it, Obama will take it for you.</p>
<p>Vote Democrat.</p>
<p>It is the electoral philosophy that gave us Detroit. It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America.</p>
<p>And it conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense. It ends up not being a benefit to the people who support it, but a betrayal. The Democrats have not empowered their followers, they have enslaved them – in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victimhood and anger instead of ability and hope.</p>
<p>The president’s premise – that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful – seeks to ignore and cheat the law of choices and consequences. It seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices.</p>
<p>Because, by and large, the variability in society is a result of different choices leading to different consequences. Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure.</p>
<p>And success and failure can manifest themselves in personal and family income.</p>
<p>You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education. You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course, you have them in wedlock and life is apt to take another course.</p>
<p>Most often in life our destination is determined by the course we take.</p>
<p>My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome. But, our lives also have had an inequality of effort. Whereas my doctor went to college and then gave the flower of his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I got a job in a restaurant. He made a choice, I made a choice. And our choices led us to different outcomes.</p>
<p>His outcome pays a lot better than mine.</p>
<p>Does that mean he cheated and Barack Obama needs to take away his wealth?</p>
<p>No, it means we are both free men.</p>
<p>And in a free society, free choices will lead to different outcomes.</p>
<p>It is not inequality Barack Obama will take away, it is freedom.</p>
<p>The freedom to succeed, and the freedom to fail. And there is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure.</p>
<p>The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy.</p>
<p>Even if the other guy sat on his arse and did nothing.</p>
<p>Even if the other guy made a lifetime’s worth of asinine and shortsighted decisions.</p>
<p>Barack Obama and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort. The simple Law of the Harvest – as ye sow, so shall ye reap – is sometimes applied as, “The harder you work, the more you get.”</p>
<p>The progressive movement would turn that upside down.</p>
<p>Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society. Entitlement has replaced effort as the key to upward mobility in American society.</p>
<p>Or at least it has if Barack Obama gets his way.</p>
<p>He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive and fosters equality through mediocrity.</p>
<p>He and his party speak of two Americas.</p>
<p>And their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other.</p>
<p>America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts. And by the false philosophy that says one man’s success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man’s victimization.</p>
<p>What the president offered was not a solution, but a separatism. He fomented division and strife, he pitted one set of Americans against another.</p>
<p>For his own political benefit.</p>
<p>That’s what progressives offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow.</p>
<p>Two Americas, coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln’s maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand.</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>Part-Time Nation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/part-time-nation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=part-time-nation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/part-time-nation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2014 04:50:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[full time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[part time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A deceptive jobs report obscures the dark truth about the Obama economy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/o-FAST-FOOD-WORKER-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235823" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/o-FAST-FOOD-WORKER-facebook-450x314.jpg" alt="Fast Food Freebies" width="298" height="208" /></a>Last Thursday, an Obama-centric mainstream media <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/03/investing/june-jobs-report/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">trumpeted</span></a> the creation of 288,000 jobs and the reduction in the unemployment rate from 6.3 percent to 6.1 percent. Lost in the manufactured euphoria are the sobering details: America is well on its way to becoming a nation where millions of workers can only find part-time, lower-paying jobs.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">On the surface, the numbers are impressive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the aforementioned 288,000 jobs gain, while the household survey reported a gain of 407,000. Yet those numbers pale in comparison to the rise in the number of voluntary and involuntary part-time jobs, coming in at 840,000 and 275,000, respectively. Since the BLS uses seasonally-adjusted figures to calculate jobs data, one cannot subtract the total number of part-time jobs from full-time jobs. However, data regarding seasonally-adjusted full-time jobs <i>can</i> be compared on a month-to-month basis and therein lies the true tale of woe.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A whopping 523,000 full-time jobs were <i>lost</i> in June.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As the graphs <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-03/june-full-time-jobs-plunge-over-half-million-part-time-jobs-surge-800k-most-1993"><span style="color: #1255cc;">here</span></a> indicate, this is the second largest decline of full-time jobs in the past year, but by far the largest addition of part-time jobs. So far this year the economy has created 926,000 full-time jobs and 646,000 part-time jobs. Overall, America now has 118 million full-time jobs compared to 28 million part-time jobs, according to the BLS. Thus, 23.7 percent, or nearly one-out-of-every four Americans, is working part-time.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Just over a year ago, it was <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/25/a_nation_of_part-timers_119356.html#ixzz2aThQSM2y"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reported</span></a> that economist Scott Anderson analyzed employment gains since January 2009 and found that in June part-time jobs accounted for 19.5 percent of total employment, amounting to &#8220;exactly the average share &#8230; since January 2009.” One might think an increase of nearly 18 percent in that average share might be cause for concern amidst the euphoria.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One would be wrong. For those uninterested in the details, the quantity of jobs rather than the quality of jobs is all that matters.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet it is precisely that quality that should concern every American. As the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> noted while June jobs gains were broad-based, &#8220;lower-wage sectors continued to account for the bulk.” While there was an increase of 67,000 jobs in the professional and business services sector, they were offset by the more than 40,000 jobs in the retail industry and 30,000 jobs in leisure and hospitality businesses. &#8220;Higher-paying sectors continued to lag behind in the jobs recovery,” the paper reported. &#8220;Manufacturing added 16,000 new jobs and construction added 6,000.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As for the &#8220;official unemployment rate” of 6.1 percent, the number listed under BLS’s &#8220;U-3&#8243; heading, more and more Americans are becoming aware of the bogus nature of this particular statistic, given that it doesn&#8217;t account for such realities as the number of part-time workers who want full-time jobs, or the number of people marginally attached to the workforce. The more accurate U-6 number, which takes these factors into account, puts the unemployment rate at 12.1 percent.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet both of those numbers would be even higher if they took into account the number of people who have dropped out of the labor force altogether. While the economy ostensibly surged, the number of Americans 16 and older who did not participate in the labor force <i>really</i> surged to a <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-number-americans-not-labor-force-june"><span style="color: #1255cc;">record-setting</span></a> 92,120,000 in June. That number represents a jump of 111,000 since April, and the labor force participation rate of 62.8 percent matched a 36-year low. In other words, job growth isn’t keeping up with population growth.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Another factor that skews the job numbers is something called <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/06/02/labor-dept-s-p-e-e-distorts-jobs-numbers/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Performance Enhancing Estimates</span></a> (P.E.E.). They are little more than educated guesstimates regarding the aforementioned seasonal adjustments as well as birth/death estimates determining how many companies were created or destroyed. In ominous context, a Brookings Institution study released last month <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/05/u-s-businesses-are-being-destroyed-faster-than-theyre-being-created/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reveals</span></a> that the U.S.&#8217;s economy is less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last 30 years. Moreover, from 2009-2011, the last three years the study looked at, businesses were dying faster than they were being born—a dubious first time achievement. Thus, unless one assumes there has been a radical turnaround in the last three years, the long-term trend for job creation will be what the authors contend is &#8220;a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Federal Reserve seemingly <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-interest-rates-20140706-story.html#page=1"><span style="color: #1255cc;">concurs</span></a>. While Fed policy-makers have insisted a growing economy will lead to higher interest rates, 12 of the 16 members of the policy committee expect those rates to rise only as high as 1.5 percent by the end of 2015, and a majority expect a rise to 2.5 percent or less a year after that. For comparison sake, the interest rate in 2007 was more than double, at 5.25 percent. Anemic interest rates portend an economy like that of Japan’s, which has remained largely stagnant for more than two decades. Such conditions will more than likely exacerbate income inequality as well, because low interest rates favor corporate borrowers and the stock market, even as they crush those who want a decent return on their savings.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Does ObamaCare figure into the part-time employment mix? In March, the Huffington Post was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/07/obamacare-part-time_n_4919117.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">sure</span></a> the dire predictions <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101196459#"><span style="color: #1255cc;">made</span></a> a year ago were overwrought and that the &#8220;opposite seems to be happening&#8221; because the number of part-time workers had fallen to 27.3 million in February. The addition of 700,000 part-time jobs since then is inconclusive, but the Obama administration’s grim determination to unilaterally <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/obamacare-employer-mandate-108578.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">postpone</span></a> the implementation of the so-called business mandate—twice—in the last year is at least somewhat indicative. So is a 2013 Duke/CFO magazine <a href="http://www.cfosurvey.org/13q4/PressRelease.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">survey</span></a> indicating that 38 percent of the 60 percent of businesses that increased their proportion of part-time workers cited ObamaCare as a reason. And a regularly updated <a href="http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/062414-669013-obamacare-employer-mandate-a-list-of-cuts-to-work-hours-jobs.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">chart</span></a> complied by Investors Business Daily shows that 429 mostly public employers have cut hours of employment (when they’re not eliminating jobs outright) below the 30-hour “full time employee” threshold that would subject them to the healthcare mandate.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Human Events staff writer John Hayward has a far more Machiavellian view of the &#8220;Great Leap Forward in the Obamanomics transformation of the American economy into a shrunken, underemployed workforce.” He contends the American left has figured out a way to eliminate the inevitable tension between the Makers and the Takers that thwarts their quest for a social utopia. &#8220;The true Middle Class is defined by its <i>independence,&#8221; </i>he writes<i>.</i> &#8220;Get them hooked on government subsidies, and they lose that independence.  Make enough of them truly <i>dependent </i>on those subsidies for the necessities of life, and their political threat is permanently neutralized.” (Italics in the original.) Part-time jobs and ObamaCare produce such hybrid Maker/Takers who ultimately come to believe that &#8220;prosperity is something the government must seize and redistribute.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One can choose to believe or dismiss Hayward’s assessment, but there is little doubt the economy remains as fragile as ever. Even if one buys into the media-anointed “jobs surge” it is impossible to dismiss the gargantuan number of part-time workers that drove it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And that’s while the stock market remains at or near record highs that may be as <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/07/05/why-the-17000-dow-is-bound-to-crash/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">illusory</span></a> as our so-called economic recovery. “The US middle class and low-income workers are broke,” contends Chadwick Financial Advisors CEO Mike Chadwick. “They are leveraged up to the hilt.” Corporate earnings remain stagnant and sales remain flat. “Corporations are squeezing more out of workers, outsourcing jobs, whatever they can do&#8211;everything except generating additional sales,” says Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&amp;P Capital IQ.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And finally, Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist of the Economic Outlook Group, sees a <a href="http://www.theleafchronicle.com/article/20140706/NEWS01/307060026/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">shift</span></a> in the way employers view employees that may indicate where the full-time vs. part-time jobs picture is <i>really</i> headed. “Companies view labor more as inventory that is to be hired when they need it and let go when they don’t need it,” he said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One hopes for better days ahead. But an economy where more businesses are dying than are being born—and human being are viewed as “inventory”—does not inspire anything resembling enduring confidence.</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>&#8220;The Ant and the Grasshopper&#8221; Today</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-today/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-today</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-today/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2014 04:14:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fable]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[idleness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[success]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Ant and the Grasshopper.]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224885</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the fable may look like today.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ant1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224939" alt="ant" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ant1-450x218.jpg" width="315" height="153" /></a>America as a country is rapidly changing – morals, ideals and more.  As such, I decided to provide a modern-day adaptation of <em>The<b> </b>Ant and the Grasshopper.</em> The story is known as one of Aesop&#8217;s Fables, providing an ambivalent moral lesson about the virtues of hard work and the need to plan for the future. As a self-made entrepreneur who has sacrificed so much in order to build my business, the adaptation below is an interpretation of what such a fable may look like today.</p>
<p>In the ancient fable, the ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and saving supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away (as so many of us would want to). Of course, come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold. The ending of the version which I was read as a child has two sayings at the end: &#8220;Idleness brings want,&#8221; and &#8220;To work today is to eat tomorrow.”</p>
<p>In the modern version, the ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and preparing for the winter.  He works hard, pays 50% in taxes to the government and spends ample time complying with government regulations as he prepares supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.</p>
<p>Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.  The liberal media lines up and supports protests against the rich ant – as they run ad naseum supporting stories of the shivering grasshopper.</p>
<p>The grasshopper hosts regular press conferences – and shocks Americans with the sharp contrast. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, &#8220;It&#8217;s Not Easy Being Green.&#8221;  Occupy Wall Street stages a demonstration in front of the ant&#8217;s house where the news stations film the group ranting and raving against the 1%.  Harry Reid stands up and calls the ant “un-American.”</p>
<p>The liberal Democrats blame President Bush, President Reagan, and others for the maligned grasshopper&#8217;s plight. There are countless petitions and wall-to-wall media coverage about how the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.</p>
<p>The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs. The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his friends finishing up the last bits of the ant&#8217;s food in a bid for equality.</p>
<p>In a country where today people like Lloyd Blankfein and Sheldon Adelson are demonized, one wonders if America is on a path for a better tomorrow.  Lloyd Blankfein is the chairman of Goldman Sachs who was raised in housing projects in the Bronx – his father was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service (after he lost his job driving a bakery truck), and his mom was a receptionist. As a boy, he worked as a concession vendor at Yankee Stadium.  Blankfein attended Harvard University on scholarship and had to work in the cafeteria to pay bills. The man is demonized – due to his success and it is vastly unfair.</p>
<p>Sheldon Adelson was born into a poor immigrant family, the son of a Boston cab driver – and today is the world’s 14th wealthiest man with a net worth approaching $25 billion dollars. He is ideological, driven and focused – and lives by the principles his father instilled in him: “honesty and integrity.” Yet, people like Adelson are demonized.</p>
<p>Success takes sacrifice – and rather than taking from the uber-successful, one should learn from and seek to emulate the uber-successful.  It takes sacrifice and is not done easily &#8211; Making money and being successful is something to aspire to – not to take from them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Why Democrats Hate Work</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-democrats-hate-work/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-democrats-hate-work</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-democrats-hate-work/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:41:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Insurance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Healthcare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[job]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[job lock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218626</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Explaining the Left's celebration of 2.5 million dropping out of the workforce because of ObamaCare. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/30nap.600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218627" alt="30nap.600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/30nap.600-450x336.jpg" width="315" height="235" /></a>Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report discussing the ramifications of Obamacare. The report revealed that the work-hour equivalent of approximately 2.5 million jobs would disappear from the workforce, thanks to Obamacare, in a voluntary process in which employees would simply dump out of their jobs, knowing they could get health care through expanded Medicaid and federal subsidies they would lose by working.</p>
<p>Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., an ideological leftist thought leader, spun the report as a massive positive for Obamacare: &#8220;The single mom, who&#8217;s raising three kids (and) has to keep a job because of health care, can now spend some time raising those kids. That&#8217;s a family value.&#8221; And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., celebrated the report as a defeat for the dreaded condition known as &#8220;job lock&#8221; — the situation in which you have to stick at a job you don&#8217;t like for the benefits. &#8220;We have the CBO report,&#8221; Reid stated, &#8220;which rightfully says, that people shouldn&#8217;t have job lock. If they — we live in a country where there should be free agency. People can do what they want.&#8221;</p>
<p>But, of course, people can only do what they want by taxing other Americans, borrowing from foreign creditors, and burdening future generations with unsustainable debt. And unfortunately, Schumer&#8217;s proclamation that the greatest beneficiaries of Obamacare will be single mothers turns out to be false: One of the studies relied upon by the CBO stated that those who benefit from the end of job lock are disproportionately white, single and of work age.</p>
<p>In reality, the Democratic vision of the world centers on the notion that work itself is a great evil to be avoided, and that any program allowing people to free themselves of work — whether to finger-paint or start a garage band — is an unmitigated good.</p>
<p>&#8220;Job lock,&#8221; according to the definition Reid gives, goes by another name, according to those who live in the real world: &#8220;having a job.&#8221; There are times that everyone hates his or her job. Were they freed from the economic consequences of having these jobs, they&#8217;d drop out of the workforce.</p>
<p>There are only two problems with this strategy: First, someone has to pay for it; second, it is not the recipe for human fulfillment. Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There&#8217;s a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going.</p>
<p>This doesn&#8217;t mean every job fulfills us, naturally. But we have all worked rotten jobs in order to get to jobs we like. Capitalism doesn&#8217;t mean, as my grandmother used to say, that you don&#8217;t have to walk through some manure to get to the roses. It just means that if you walk through enough manure, you&#8217;ll likely get to the roses sooner or later. In the leisure-first world of the left, however, wallowing in mire is a preferred road to happiness over the hard work that brings true fulfillment.</p>
<p>The European style of living is seductive: fewer hours worked, more hours at the cafe, less concern over self-betterment. But that style of living does not produce a purposeful life. Perhaps we&#8217;d all be happier in the short run were we somehow freed of our job lock. But we certainly would not contribute to the betterment of ourselves or the community around us. We&#8217;d leave the world worse than we found it. The opt-out society opts us out of societal happiness.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare: &#8216;Liberating&#8217; the Workers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamacare-liberating-the-workers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-liberating-the-workers</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Feb 2014 05:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2 million]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberating]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218098</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left explains why choosing not to work because of the health care law is a good thing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-Shot-2014-02-06-at-4.21.52-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218132" alt="Screen Shot 2014-02-06 at 4.21.52 AM" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-Shot-2014-02-06-at-4.21.52-AM.png" width="257" height="179" /></a>On Tuesday, a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45010">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed that ObamaCare will have a &#8220;substantially larger&#8221; impact on the job market than the originally anticipated reduction of 800,000 full-time workers. Instead, the CBO predicts that the law will reduce the workforce by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, and 2.5 million </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/02/04/no-cbo-did-not-say-obamacare-will-kill-2-million-jobs/">over</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the next decade. Most people would consider that bad news. Yet according to media organizations that have devolved into little more than Obama administration cheerleaders, most people are wrong. In short, for an American left working overtime to save the ongoing disaster known as ObamaCare, bad news is good news.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unsurprisingly, the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is leading the charge, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/opinion/freeing-workers-from-the-insurance-trap.html?_r=0">characterizing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the more than tripling in the reduction of workforce participation as &#8220;liberating.&#8221; They contend ObamaCare &#8220;will free people, young and old, to pursue careers or retirement without having to worry about health coverage. Workers can seek positions they are most qualified for and will no longer need to feel locked into a job they don’t like because they need insurance for themselves or their families. It is hard to view this as any kind of disaster.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">LA Times, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">offers a different </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-cbo-20140204,0,3106578.story#axzz2sS2c0Hf9">spin</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, saying that &#8220;the CBO estimates that on balance, the ACA will increase aggregate demand for goods and services, in part by relieving lower-income people of the burden of health insurance or healthcare expenses, so they can increase their spending on other things. In turn, that will &#8216;boost demand for labor,&#8217; especially in the near term, while the economy remains slack.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">CBS News anchor Scott Pelley </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-hadro/2014/02/04/networks-echo-white-house-spin-obamacare-wont-cut-jobs">contended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the CBO report was &#8220;both surprising and widely misunderstood,&#8221; and that reduction in labor aren&#8217;t &#8220;necessarily jobs being lost. They&#8217;re also workers choosing to work less.&#8221; ABC&#8217;s Jonathan Karl also played up the good news angle, noting that people &#8220;can qualify for subsidized health care without a full-time job. And again, others will actually find it&#8217;s just not worth it to work full-time.&#8221; NBC&#8217;s Brian Williams noted the reduction in jobs or working hours, but insisted that &#8220;the White House is cautioning, for its part, that those departures are more a result of workers&#8217; flexibility to leave their jobs and still have health insurance.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">White House Press Secretary Jay Carney went much further than that. In a released </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/04/statement-press-secretary-today-s-cbo-report-and-affordable-care-act">statement</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, he insisted that &#8220;individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods,&#8221; and that they &#8220;would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/04/reid-obamacare-doesnt-cost-jobs-it-turns-workers-into-free-agents/">chimed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in as well, claiming the CBO report &#8220;rightfully says, that people shouldn’t have job lock. If they&#8211;we live in a country where there should be free agency. People can do what they want,” he told reporters.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If all of this &#8220;liberation&#8221; has a familiar ring, it&#8217;s because Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pelosi-aspiring-musicians-quit-your-job-taxpayers-will-cover-your-health-care">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> virtually the same thing four years ago. She spoke about musicians and other creative types who could quit their jobs and focus on developing their talents. “We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care,” Pelosi declared at the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet who, exactly, is being liberated? As the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> explains, one of the driving forces behind this newfound freedom is &#8220;the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums associated with ObamaCare.&#8221; The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">LA Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is less specific, contending that &#8220;burden&#8221; of ObamaCare&#8217;s costs will be relieved.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality such subsidies and relieved burdens amount to nothing more than cost shifting. That means millions of Americans will indeed be bound to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">their</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> jobs to pay for the subsidies and burdens of other Americans. Adding insult to injury, in Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s universe, much of those costs will apparently be borne by those less artistically inclined and/or creative.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, that&#8217;s only </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/02/05/congressional-budget-office-sends-death-blow-to-obamacare/">half</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the story. Because the aforementioned premium subsidies are reduced or disappear as workers reach certain levels of compensation, ObamaCare provides a massive disincentive to work more, or even work at all. “If those subsidies are phased out with rising income in order to limit their total costs, the phaseout effectively raises people’s marginal tax rates thus discouraging work,” the report states. The CBO report also addresses the possibility that ObamaCare subsidies might need higher levels of taxation to finance them, dealing another blow to the labor market. “If the subsidies are financed at least in part by higher taxes, those taxes will further discourage work or create other economic distortions, depending on how the taxes are designed.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus, it should come as no surprise that CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/05/budget-office-chief-obamacare-creates-disincentive-to-work/">testified</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> yesterday before Congress that ObamaCare &#8220;creates a disincentive for people to work,&#8221; in response to a question asked by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). No doubt in response to Democrat and White House criticism that Republicans were mischaracterizing the findings of the report, Ryan affirmed that the CBO did not say people would be laid off, only that more and more of them would choose not to work. Ryan then noted that a lower labor supply lowers economic growth. Elmendorf agreed, but insisted that premium subsidies would improve the lives of lower-income people, and that they would be &#8220;better off&#8221; as a result.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The idea that people are &#8220;better off&#8221; due to increased dependency on government is the essence of progressivism. Gene Sperling, Obama’s top economic-policy adviser, inadvertently added fuel to that particular fire. &#8220;What this report said is a rather obvious point, which is that as people have greater access to healthcare, there is going to be some two-parent families where someone says I’m going to work a little less because we can get healthcare and I’m going spend time raising my children,&#8221; he contended. &#8220;There is going to be somebody out there who because they can afford healthcare has wanted to retire and may retire earlier. This is about giving Americans more choices.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wrong. This about giving </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">some</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Americans more choices at the expense of other Americans who are being forced to underwrite their fellow Americans&#8217; insurance subsidies. As the CBO report mentions, if such underwriting comes in the form of increased taxes, there will be two parent families forced to work a little more and see </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">their</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> children a little less. Some Americans will be forced to retire later, rather than sooner.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Two items in the report </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626804579362691500388668">tilted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the Democrats favor. There was a &#8220;broad and persistent&#8221; slowdown in Medicare costs. And through 2024, the government will collect $8 billion more from the &#8220;risk corridor&#8221; provision &#8212; whereby insurers with healthier and more profitable risk pools subsidize those with sicker, less profitable ones &#8212; than it will be required to pay out.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Democrat claim a third statistic, that premium costs will be 15 percent cheaper than projected for 2014, works out in their favor as well. But the stat is misleading because insurance companies did many things to make their plans cheap, such as narrowing networks and selling policies with high deductibles. That may also be the case next year, when the risk corridors that remain in place until 2017 allow the insurance companies to once again low-ball their prices before there 2014 election. What happens to premiums when those risk corridors disappear is impossible to say, but more than likely, costs will soar without a government net below the insurer tightrope. If projections of those cost increases appear while our &#8220;make law up as I go along&#8221; president remains in power, bet on a unilateral extension of the risk corridor provision. One that will rapidly morph from a profit, to the taxpayer bailout Republicans envision.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The little bit of good news was more than offset by the reality that there will still be 31 million Americans uninsured in 2024, despite almost $2 trillion in new expenditures. The report also states that &#8220;between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.” But the most troubling statistic once again concerns government dependency. The federal government will be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/02/04/five-takeaways-on-new-health-care-projections/">subsidizing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> five out of six million policies in 2014, and a whopping 19 million out of 24 million in 2024.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration, Democrats and their media allies apparently believe such dependency is, as the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> puts it, &#8220;liberating.&#8221; Perhaps it is, as long as one ignores the reality that, more often than not, it is achieved by kicking one&#8217;s dignity, decency and ambition to the curb.</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>May 2014 Bring Back America&#8217;s Strong Work Ethic</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/may-2014-bring-back-americas-strong-work-ethic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=may-2014-bring-back-americas-strong-work-ethic</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/may-2014-bring-back-americas-strong-work-ethic/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Dec 2013 05:18:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Darren Hardy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ethic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[habits]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hard work]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inspiration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[success]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214134</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What separates the successful from the unsuccessful? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/share-work-ethic3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214137" alt="share-work-ethic3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/share-work-ethic3-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>&#8220;As a nation, our entire populace seems to have lost appreciation for the value of a strong work ethic. We’ve had two, if not three, generations of Americans who have known great prosperity, wealth, and ease. Our expectations of what it really takes to create lasting success—things like grit, hard work, and fortitude—aren’t alluring, and thus have been mostly forgotten. We’ve lost respect for the strife and struggle of our forefathers.” “The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, France, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success. Once-dominant empires have failed for this very reason. People get to a certain level of success and get too comfortable.”</p>
<p>This is an excerpt from the inspirational book written by the publisher of <em>Success Magazine</em>, Darren Hardy, titled “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/159315724X/ref=la_B003SRT5B2_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1388268849&amp;sr=1-1">The Compound Effect: Jumpstart your income, your life, your success</a>,” which I wish every single American – including President Obama – would read. Unfortunately, in today’s America, hard-work isn’t a value which resonates with many.</p>
<p>This week, Hardy is hosting an event for one of the<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vemma-bod-e/id492085189"> fastest growing companies in America, Vemma</a> – and it’s not surprising, as with hard work comes success.  Some inspirational quotes from Hardy’s book to take to heart:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Here is what it takes to be successful: hard work.”</p>
<p>&#8220;Earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous. Don’t get me wrong; you’ll see results in your life from following these steps almost immediately.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly, and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all, and you’ve made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS. They act as the filter through which you run all of life’s demands, requests, and temptations, making sure they’re leading you toward your intended destination. Getting your core values defined and properly calibrated is one of the most important steps in redirecting your life toward your grandest vision&#8221;</p>
<p>“The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.  Remember that; it will come in handy many times throughout life.”</p>
<p>“A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful amongst us from everyone else.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Framed around the office of my <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/">NY PR Agency</a> are some great inspirational quotes, and as we enter 2014, I wanted to share a few of them:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” &#8212; Dr. Napoleon Hill</p>
<p>“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” &#8212; Mark Twain</p></blockquote>
<p>Let’s hope that 2014 brings America back its work ethic and national pride.</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>Taxing the Successful to Death</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/taxing-the-successful-to-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taxing-the-successful-to-death</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Dec 2012 04:10:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[success]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[weath]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169480</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hard work and achievement come with a hefty price.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/taxing-the-successful-to-death/featured_taxes/" rel="attachment wp-att-169482"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169482" title="Featured_taxes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Featured_taxes.jpg" alt="" width="230" height="168" /></a>Writing this article I am sick to my stomach as my accountant has just left my office completing end of year taxes– literally sick and angered. I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors.  I grew up in a single-parent household in the Bronx and attended New York City public schools. I started working in a local pizzeria at the age of 12, and then attended a state university, which I finished in 3 years while working.  A few years later I started <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/if-seo-or-ppc-matter-public-relations-does-too/53797/">5WPR</a> out of a 400-square foot office.  Today as I sit here, I am being penalized for my vow as a kid that my family will never want for anything and I will be successful.</p>
<p>December 2012 marks the 10<sup>th</sup> anniversary since I founded this company as we now employ more than 100 people – and are one of the 20 largest <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/">US PR firms</a>.  Thankfully we do well and have healthy margins – I established a family foundation to give charity as I believe it is one’s obligation to give back to their community and important causes.</p>
<p>Yet today, I am sitting in shock after finishing end of year 2012 taxes of which I will pay more than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax">50%</a> – 35% federal, 8.25 percent New York State taxes, and 4 percent local taxes. Add in Medicare, social security, payroll, workers compensation, NYC commercial rent taxes, payroll tax, and who knows what other tax and it is more than 50 percent. I am being taxed to death.</p>
<p>My employees here work very hard to ensure we succeed – and are paid well. They all received generous end of year bonuses, and rightfully are looking forward to having off December 24<sup>th</sup> and 25<sup>th</sup>, December 31<sup>st</sup> and January 1<sup>st</sup>, other holidays, have two weeks of vacation and a week of sick time. Of course, there is jury duty which employees have to take, snow days, and all the rest.  By the way, I still pay rent on all of those days. Do successful entrepreneurs not deserve to also be treated as well as they treat their employees?</p>
<p>While office hours are 9 am- 6 pm, I rarely leave the office before 9 pm and have to travel a lot, so I miss my family on weekends and work non-stop thanks to technology.  I am married to my business &#8211; hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.  There is no rest; it is constant – and one always has to be the CEO and responsive to the needs of employees.</p>
<p>I work very, very hard – yet my motivation is drained by this constant tax.  Why is it that this country is penalizing me for becoming successful – and being so good to my employees, as I want to be?  I love summers in the south of France – I’d love to spend a lot more time there.  But I’ll be sure to become a resident of Belgium on the border rather than be taxed at an even higher rate than America.</p>
<p>Tonight I am leaving the office early because I am frankly angry – and I’d rather take my family out to dinner than think about all my tax dollars being wasted.</p>
<p>To get home I have to walk by the Occupy Wall Street fools who stand outside of Lloyd Blankfein’s house and yell about how evil he is.  Blankfein, the Chairman of Goldman Sachs who is now a billionaire is also from the Bronx.  He sold pretzels at Yankee Stadium in High School and worked in the Harvard cafeteria before he made money.  How does one explain to their children to work hard and to get ahead in life? Of the need to create a better life? Do I do that by telling them to work super hard so they get taxed?</p>
<p>I love America and am so proud to have been born in this country – but I have to tell you that this ain’t America the great today.  Taxing someone for making it isn’t the American way and surely isn’t what the constitution had in mind.  I am damn mad – and it’s only going to get worse.</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>America in Decline</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-puder/america-in-decline-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-in-decline-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2012 04:10:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164915</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is American exceptionalism evaporating? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-puder/america-in-decline-2/dream_over/" rel="attachment wp-att-164927"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164927" title="dream_over" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/dream_over.jpg" alt="" width="282" height="232" /></a>In these last few days after the 2012 U.S. elections America’s future, for many, appears to be bleak.  To those same Americans, an unfamiliar America is emerging in which traditional American values that made the U.S. exceptional are evaporating.  Qualities like self-reliance and a strong work ethic have been replaced by a big government that is taking care of nearly half of the populace, in one form or another, and encouraging others to reach out for assistance.</p>
<p>Mitt Romney’s defeat and Obama’s triumph is a victory for the liberal-left culture, which has achieved some level of political dominance in our society.  Its instruments:  political correctness (PC), multi-culturalism, and relativism-are creations of the New Left cultural Marxism and have shackled many Americans – especially white Americans consumed by guilt – to decline and decay.</p>
<p>Barack Hussein Obama savaged Mitt Romney with personal attacks during the campaign that were so brutal as to prompt Romney’s son to threaten Obama that he will “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/tagg-romney-obama_n_1976186.html">take a swing at him</a>.” PC factored into Romney’s constraint making him reluctant to fight back and attack Obama on unresolved personal issues such as his past associations, birthplace, religion, school grades, contributors, etc.  Romney feared the all powerful and deadly charge of being called a racist.  The competition between a white person and an African-American in the U.S. is rendered uneven by guilt over historical race relations, which demagogues try to keep fresh for purposes of political power.  With the pervasiveness of PC in the general public but especially among those in the media and academia, any charge of racism leveled against a white person or candidate can effectively damage or destroy his career.</p>
<p>Demographic changes in America – with a diminishing population of whites, also affected the outcome of the election. The Democrat Party has consolidated political power through a paternalistic embrace of non-white minorities, women, and young voters.  There is an “American Idol” mentality in this country which, coupled with the fact that young students want to be “cool” and accepted by their peers on campus, led to the Obama victory.  Influenced by leftist professors, students tend to gravitate towards the party that mirrors those PC views.  Young single women consider issues such as abortion, women’s rights, etc. a priority.  They see the world through a narrow lens of how their lives might be affected.</p>
<p>Hispanics, who represent the largest minority in America, consider immigration to be their primary issue.  Republicans, in upholding the laws of the land, have been tougher than Democrats on “legalizing” the illegal immigrants, and they have been punished as a result.  African-Americans, the second largest minority, are likely to vote for a fellow African-American<strong>, </strong>especially when his party stands for governmental support programs, and is a major employer within the African-American community.   Interestingly enough, no member of the PC mainstream media would dare accuse<strong> </strong>an<strong> </strong>African-American of racism. It seems only whites can be regarded as racist.  Jews, another Democrat constituency, are the most baffling of all groups.  The Democrat Party relies on their financial support but distances itself from Israel. And yet, it continues to get their support.  An old joke has it that Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans.</p>
<p>In addition to demography and race, this election showed that there will be a generational change in the future.  Romney will probably be one of the last baby-boomers to run for the presidency.  Henceforth, trends towards racial diversity will only expand in both parties.</p>
<p>The Democrat Party, once a truly patriotic party with figures like Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, is no longer.  Many of today’s flag-bearers of the party are leftist ideologues like Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, and Nancy Pelosi.  The party has consistently sought to reduce the military budget and increase social welfare.  On the international scene they are seen as appeasers and perceived as weak – especially among Middle East Islamists, and authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin.  The Democrats want to emulate Europe’s social welfare just when Europe is assessing the damage cradle-to-grave socialism has done to its economy.</p>
<p>President Obama hates Europe’s<strong> </strong>colonial past (<em>Dreams from My Father</em>) but loves EU bureaucrats whose actions often times override national interests.  He adores the power of these same bureaucrats who decide on how Europeans should live.  Obama-care, coupled with his efforts to transfer wealth from one group to another, will further cripple the already weakened U.S. economy.</p>
<p>Around the world Obama’s reelection has been celebrated albeit not because they love Obama or America but rather because he and his policies represent a weaker America, a less assertive America demanding consideration of its vital interests.  Russia’s Putin hopes Obama will keep his promise to be “<a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/27/etch-a-sketch-versus-flexibility-romney-obama/">more flexible</a>” in the second term.  Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, hailed Obama’s victory stating that “it would <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/11/201211781645126762.html">strengthen</a> the friendship between the two countries.”  Hamas, the Islamist terror group controlling Gaza issued a statement of congratulation saying, “There is a chance for Obama to <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/11/201211781645126762.html">change</a> the Israeli-biased American policy and build a new moral one that ends the double standards in dealing with various Middle East issues, and help the Palestinians to regain their rights.”</p>
<p>Obama’s second term would enable him to recognize Hamas as a “partner”  in the Palestinian Authority in spite of its rejection of negotiations with the Jewish state and intransigence when it comes to recognizing Israel’s right to exist.  In his second term, Obama will likely forge a closer relationship with Muslim Brotherhood groups throughout the Middle East, particularly with Egypt.  He will “handle” the Iran issue by essentially allowing the Islamic Republic to reach a point of no return in assembling a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>The Communist Chinese are also happy with the Obama victory.  Romney threatened to be tough on China during the presidential debates, saying, “On day one, I’ll label China a <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/19/obama-romney-talk-tough-on-china/#ixzz2BZbtUjoa">currency manipulator</a> and that will allow me to apply tariffs where they steal our intellectual property and kill jobs.” Hu Jintao, China’s outgoing President, declared that there has been “positive progress” in Sino-U.S. relations over the past four years.</p>
<p>Obama’s electoral victory, regardless of his abysmal record in domestic and foreign affairs, is historical in scope.  No other president has ever been reelected with an unemployment record as high as 7.9% (the real unemployment figure is probably higher and does not take into account the under-employed).  But then no other previous president was African-American.  The PC media ignored his record and failed to vet him during the election campaign of 2008 and again in 2012.  Hollywood icons were on hand with their red carpet for the President – their American Idol – while never questioning what it is he actually accomplished that would justify another four year term.  Like them, the Norwegian Nobel Peace committee chose to award him with undeserved recognition, conferring the Nobel Peace Prize for doing absolutely nothing to advance the cause of peace.</p>
<p>Obama has been neither a healer of the nation nor a bridge builder, and yet he was reelected to the highest office of the land.  But he helped to assuage White guilt.  Interestingly, the Democratic Party, which touts itself as being for women’s rights, did not nominate Hillary Clinton for the presidency and chose instead someone far less experienced than she.</p>
<p>A day after the 2012 U.S. elections the Stock Market fell over 300 points reminding many of us that our economy is nearing the fiscal cliff.  All indications are that the young college students of today, who flocked to Obama, may very well find themselves dependent on government handouts as lucrative jobs in the private sector continue to disappear.  The road ahead for America is bleak indeed, thanks to the PC culture that gave us Obama for four more years.</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>Hating the Successful</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/hating-the-successful/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hating-the-successful</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2012 04:20:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Goldman Sachs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lloyd Blankfein]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164067</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the 1% deserve their condominiums and the Occupiers deserve their sleeping bags. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/hating-the-successful/occupy-lloyd-blankfein-goldman-sachs/" rel="attachment wp-att-164069"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164069" title="occupy-lloyd-blankfein-goldman-sachs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/occupy-lloyd-blankfein-goldman-sachs.gif" alt="" width="315" height="241" /></a>Living on the liberal Upper West Side of Manhattan, as a self-made successful entrepreneur who grew up in this great city, I see people every day who I think must come from another planet. When I see people in my über-luxury condominium building, where 1-bedroom apartments cost approximately $1 million dollars, sporting buttons and t-shirts for socialist causes, they get angry when I tell them if they want to share their wealth I’d be happy to take their money.  They aren’t humored (and I am not joking).</p>
<p>While plenty of them smoke pipes and wear tweed, none of them attended public schools in the Bronx or are the product of a single parent household.  I am yet to meet one of these elite socialists who started working from the age of 12 as I did in a pizzeria – although they did attend Ivy League schools, study philosophy and have lots of fancy degrees – none of which I have.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated New York City in a major way, a group of 100 or so (after their three day break due to weather conditions) have now re-gathered two blocks away from my home to gather outside of posh condominium 15 Central Park West representing “Occupy Wall Street” to complain about the “greed” of “evil” Lloyd Blankfein.</p>
<p>Blankfein is the chairman of Goldman Sachs who lives in the complex – and is “guilty” only of earning millions of dollars annually – as is his right in a free enterprise market.  These socialist Marxists don’t assist with much needed clean-up efforts in the city, where people still don’t have electricity and the elderly are stuck in their apartments. Instead, they complain about successful people.</p>
<p>Blankfein is a role model. The man was raised in housing projects in the Bronx – his father was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service (after he lost his job driving a bakery truck), and his mom was a receptionist. As a boy, he worked as a concession vendor at Yankee Stadium. He attended Harvard University on scholarship and had to work in the cafeteria to pay bills. Blankfein is an American hero – someone to respect, to learn from, and someone whose success any American would seek to emulate.  And naturally, no one is stopping these Occupy Wall Street folks from becoming the next Blankfein – or Mark Zuckerberg – or successful corporate executive.</p>
<p>Thanks to the success of Blankfein, thousands of people are employed, pay taxes, give to charity and do great things.  He himself is Gala Chairman of the Rockefeller family&#8217;s Asia Society in New York, and serves on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization seeking to alleviate poverty in New York.  Making money and being successful is one of the great things about America.</p>
<p>On 57<sup>th</sup> Street, four blocks away from Blankfein’s home are the offices of billionaire George Soros, from whom Occupy Wall Street gets much of its funding. Soros, one of the ten wealthiest Americans, walks through our office building with security (where my <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR agency</a> is also headquartered).  Soros, who recently said, “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States,” is ignored by protestors even though he’s a 1-percenter. Soros seems very much the capitalist to me with his chauffeured limousines and expensive real estate, although he says, “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”</p>
<p>Unlike the totalitarian Chinese government (which forbids protests and which Soros has said is “a better-functioning government than the United States”) here, unfortunately, the protests will continue.</p>
<p>These sick people are dangerous to this country. It takes strength from every fiber of my being to walk by these people on the way to work and on the way home.  It’s sickening – although empowers me to educate my children about how entrepreneurs like Blankfein work hard and deserve success – and those sleeping on the street and getting high deserve their sleeping bags on the sidewalk.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Democrats&#8217; Fear of Romney&#8217;s Little Housewife</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/the-democrats-fear-of-romneys-little-housewife/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-democrats-fear-of-romneys-little-housewife</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2012 04:50:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ann Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hilary Rosen]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Left loses its first attack against Mitt's "wild card." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ann_romney.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-128762" title="ann_romney" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ann_romney.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a>On Wednesday, when CNN&#8217;s Anderson Cooper noted that &#8220;women are seeing jobs come back much more slowly than men are&#8221; and wondered whether there was anything wrong with the Romney campaign reaching out to women on economic issues, political strategist and mouthpiece for the Democratic Party establishment Hilary Rosen couldn&#8217;t resist taking a shot at<em> both</em> Romneys. First up was Ann. &#8220;Guess what?&#8221; said Rosen. &#8220;His wife has never worked a day in her life&#8221; and therefore she was unqualified to champion women&#8217;s economic concerns. Rosen hysterically linked this to Mitt being &#8220;so old-fashioned when it comes to women&#8221; that &#8220;he doesn&#8217;t really see us as equals.&#8221;</p>
<p>Ms. Rosen doubled down on her derision Thursday when she initially refused to apologize for her remark, even as she attempted to cover herself by resorting to the Obama administration&#8217;s primary re-election strategy: fomenting class warfare. “This is not about Ann Romney,” Rosen contended. “This is about the waitress in a diner somewhere in Nevada who has two kids whose day care funding is being cut off because of the Romney-Ryan budget and she doesn’t know what to do&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Leaving aside Rosen&#8217;s lunatic hyperbole, the faux pas, a direct denigration of stay-at-home mothers, descended into a PR meltdown. In an informal <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-user-polls/post/ann-romney-hilary-rosen-mitt-romney-and-work/2012/04/12/gIQAfzFiCT_blog.html">poll</a> by the <em>Washington Post</em> asked whether Rosen was out of line because raising a family is a lot of work, or if Ann Romney was out of touch with the economic issues facing working women. <em>97 percent</em> thought raising a family is a lot of work.</p>
<p>So why take on Ann Romney? Because the 62-year-old mother of five is <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/74718.html">considered</a> a &#8220;wild card&#8221; by Obama strategists fearful that her winning personality and command of the issues could sway millions of American women to vote for her husband. They are equally worried she could &#8220;humanize&#8221; her husband, who is often seen as cold and aloof.</p>
<p>Thus, it was no surprise that Mrs. Romney <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/04/debuts-on-twitter-to-counter-dnc-advisors-insult/">defended</a> both herself and her husband with a graceful ease that set her off from Rosen and a Democratic Party that must stay in attack mode to deflect the election conversation away from the Obama administration&#8217;s dismal record. “My career choice was to be a mother,” Mrs Romney told <em>Fox News.</em> “And I think all of us need to know that we need to respect choices that women make. Other women make other choices to have a career and raise family, which I think Hilary Rosen has actually done herself. I respect that, that’s wonderful. But you know, there are other people that have a choice, we have to respect women in all those choices that they make.”</p>
<p>And she was quick to defend her husband against charges of inequality. &#8220;Now that bothers me,&#8221; she said, noting that her husband has had top female advisors going back to his days as the governor of Massachusetts.</p>
<p>She then took on the first of what will undoubtedly be numerous attempts to portray both her and her husband as the out-of-touch elitists Democrats and the Obama campaign need them to be. “I can tell you and promise you that I’ve had struggles in my life,&#8221; she said. &#8220;And I would love to have people understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling. That’s why we’re running,” she added. What struggles? Ann Romney is a breast cancer survivor currently suffering from multiple sclerosis. Hilary Rosen is undoubtedly aware of that as well, which makes her attack&#8211;in the &#8220;age of civility&#8221; demanded by Democrats following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords&#8211;all the more unseemly.</p>
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		<title>It Pays Not To Work</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/tait-trussell/it-pays-not-to-work/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=it-pays-not-to-work</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:03:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tait Trussell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119632</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Staying home and collecting a government check has never been so appealing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/no-work.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-119634" title="no-work" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/no-work.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="404" /></a></p>
<p>The benefit to millions of people for not working has risen dramatically during Obama’s Great Recession. Staying home and collecting a government check has never been so appealing.</p>
<p>The picture of a desperate, straggling army of jobless poor—magnified by the lefty news media&#8211; is a distortion of reality. The benefit of <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1971477">not working increased</a> from $10,000 to $15,000 a year for millions of Americans. Moreover, it unquestionably actually increased joblessness, the major political football of 2012.</p>
<p>Of course, some Americans are needy. Many are searching honestly for work. The monthly unemployment insurance payment on average was $864 in 2006. It <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1971477">jumped to $2,667</a>, however, in 2010, economist Kevin Hassett writes. On an annual basis that would be over $32,000. That’s more money than the average annual pay for a barber, a fast-food supervisor, a teacher’s assistant, a security guard, a library technician, a nurse’s aide, a veterinarian assistant, a parking lot attendant, a home health aide, a floral designer, a diet technician, a bartender, a sports referee or umpire, and dozens of other <a href="http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm">occupations</a>, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics pay data.</p>
<p>The number of Americans in “poverty” (as defined by the government) in 2010 was 46 million. The official national poverty rate for 2010—the most recent figure—was 15 percent, according to the <a href="http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb11-157.html">U.S. Census</a> Bureau. Since 2007, the safety net for the financially needy has “expanded radically,” as Kevin Hassett, puts it. Hassett is a senior fellow and director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hassett quotes Casey E. Mulligan, economics professor at University of Chicago as saying the percentage of the country’s population in poverty rose by only 0.6 percent from 2007 to 2010. Amazing, considering the hard-times economy.</p>
<p>Spending outlays to help the poor expanded not only because of the long economic rough patch but because the requirements for eligibility expanded so generously for most programs. Those in need can’t say they have been given short shrift when spending per person, not just total spending has increased so dramatically. Professor Mulligan developed a chart showing the average amount of assistance per unemployed or under-employed from 2006 to 2010 for individuals under age 65. It’s extensive.</p>
<p>The chart includes consumer loan charge-offs (of credit cards, mortgages or other debts), home retention actions (which seek to help keep borrowers in their homes while mitigating risk for banks. One type of home retention action is loan modification, in which servicers modify one or more mortgage terms. Another type is a payment plan. In this case, no terms are contractually modified, but borrowers are given time to catch up on missed payments (or are allowed to show they can meet amended terms); other government transfers, such as Supplemental Security Income, which pays limited-income people who are disabled or blind, and food stamps, plus the Child and Adult Care Program, which makes reimbursements for meals in day-care facilities.</p>
<p>As recently as last fall, Obama was offering mortgage relief to hundreds of thousands, following up on his previous failed foreclosure relief proposals.</p>
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		<title>Terror Plot Foiled</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/matt-gurney/another-terror-plot-foiled/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=another-terror-plot-foiled</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/matt-gurney/another-terror-plot-foiled/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:56:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matt Gurney]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The arrest of Rezwan Ferdaus in Boston scores a major victory for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Picture-31.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107131" title="Picture-3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Picture-31.gif" alt="" width="375" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>Boston-area man Rezwan Ferdaus, 26, has been arrested and indicted on charges of plotting a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and the Pentagon. Ferdaus, an American citizen — born in America, no less — is alleged to have intended <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/man-accused-of-plotting-to-bomb-capitol-pentagon-indicted-in-boston.html">to fly remote control airplanes</a>, purchased from hobby shops, into the targets. It was his apparent hope that the remote control toys — the poor man’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, in this case — would carry explosive devices into the targets, setting them ablaze. As the buildings were evacuated, Ferdaus allegedly hoped to fire into the crowds with assault rifles and grenades.</p>
<p>Should these charges be proven in court, it will be a major victory for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. But those very same efforts are under attack by those who see closet <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/07/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future/">Islamophobes </a>behind every wiretap and sting operation. The arrest of Ferdaus could prove to be not only a win for the United States in the war on terror, but for America’s peaceful Muslims.</p>
<p>From what is known so far, the detection and arrest of Ferdaus is a major achievement for U.S. law enforcement. Prior to his arrest on terrorism charges, Ferdaus’s only brush with the law had been for a high-school prank where he and friends cemented doors to their school shut. When he radicalized is not yet known. But, apparently after Ferdaus began seeking fellow jihadists online, the FBI began to monitor him.</p>
<p>Indeed, it has been reported that over the last several months, Ferdaus had dealings with FBI agents that he believed were Islamists set on attacking America. Ferdaus, a physics graduate, designed detonators that he provided the agents, and was told these had been smuggled to Iraq and used to kill U.S. soldiers, much to Ferdaus’s delight. Ferdaus then began to request weapons and supplies from his FBI “allies.” He received six AK-47s, several grenades and 25 lbs. of what he believed was C4 plastic explosive. It was then that he was arrested.</p>
<p>This is classic police work. A suspect is identified, contacted, and allowed to incriminate himself before an arrest is made and without public safety being threatened. This is how child pornographers, drug smugglers and gun runners are identified and caught. It’s how stolen goods are traced. Don’t let the modern tools fool you — cellphones, Internet cafes and social media notwithstanding, any 19<sup>th</sup>-century detective worth their salt would recognize and applaud the kind of work that the FBI put into this case.</p>
<p>Such methods are still controversial for some, but absolutely necessary. Not every terrorism case will benefit from a major break such as the one that benefited Canadian police in 2006. In that case, a home-grown cell of Canadian Islamists were planning a series of bomb and gun attacks on the financial centre of Toronto and the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. A patriotic Canadian Muslim, who became aware of the plan and was appalled, gave up the group. A police sting operation very similar to the one that captured Ferdaus was initiated after the plot came to light, and the attack was averted.</p>
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		<title>Vampire Economics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/david-solway/vampire-economics-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=vampire-economics-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 12 May 2011 04:00:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[democratic socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kenneth minogue]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[social welfare state]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[william gairdner]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93045</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The administration refuses to give up a cherished illusion -- despite a mounting fact attack. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama-economy.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-93047" title="obama-economy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama-economy.gif" alt="" width="375" height="284" /></a></p>
<p>Americans, take heed, a vampire prowls among you. The redistributive policies and out-of-control spending of the current Administration, if it is not already obvious, are threatening an economic bloodletting of the first magnitude. Indeed, the social welfare state, part of the progressive Western experiment in political and economic egalitarianism, is foundering wherever we look, and yet it continues to be endorsed and promoted by an out-of-touch ruling political class. Our leaders—or far too many of them—are clearly in a state of denial, unable to give up a cherished illusion despite a mounting fact attack. Facing up to the truth does not demand profound economic thinking, only a modicum of common sense, which is clearly in short supply. Nor would a bandaid here and a bandaid there stop the bleeding.</p>
<p>Plain common sense tells us that, in the long run, so-called “democratic socialism” doesn’t work for a very simple reason: it must be constantly hiking taxes on a shrinking productive base while awarding exemptions to a constantly growing non-productive class. Canadian author <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Canada-Still/dp/155470247X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1304340290&amp;sr=1-1">William Gairdner</a>, co-founder of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Civitas_Society">Civitas</a> think tank, estimates that in the current welfare state only one third of the population constitutes the producing sector; another one third is affiliated with government, either clerically or contractually, and the remaining third consists of government dependents. Thus two thirds of the modern “social democratic” state is dependent for its maintenance on a dwindling minority of economic generators. Worse, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Servile-Mind-Democracy-Erodes-Moral/dp/1594033811/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1304340963&amp;sr=1-1">Kenneth Minogue</a> of the London School of Economics warns that once the tipping point of 51% of public clientage is reached, decline must inevitably set in.</p>
<p>What we have here is an iron recipe for creeping revenue depletion and societal decay. Wealth-creating and job-producing enterprises either shrivel due to rising costs or locate elsewhere to more favorable cost-effective regions, which leads to growing unemployment. A hyper-inflating bureaucracy—which must be paid for—to administer and distribute an ever-lengthening skein of entitlements and government programs—which must also be paid for—will eventually, as Margaret Thatcher said, run out of other people’s money. We can now see what the welfare state yields, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559604576176620582972608.html">writes</a> Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament: “burgeoning bureaucracy, more spending, higher taxes, slower growth and rising unemployment.”</p>
<p>Ultimately, a society predicated on single-payer medicare, cheap daycare, maternity and paternity leave, shorter work weeks, paid mensual vacations, mandated green energy, early retirement, special interests subsidies, public sycophancy, in short, the contemporary version of bread and circuses, cannot run on fumes. As Hannan points out, America is now imitating the European model, “expanding its government, regulating private commerce, centralizing its jurisdiction, breaking the link between taxation and representation.” The future looks increasingly grim. For when the day comes that the parasite has devoured the host, that is the day the system collapses.</p>
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		<title>Why Don&#8217;t Christians Help&#8230;Christians?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dennis-prager/why-dont-christians-help-christians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-dont-christians-help-christians</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:04:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A curious observation of the Christian world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/samplestop-violence-against-indian-christians.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90825" title="samplestop-violence-against-indian-christians" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/samplestop-violence-against-indian-christians.gif" alt="" width="375" height="315" /></a></p>
<p>In 1969, at the age of 21, I was sent to the Soviet Union. I was a young American Jew who spoke Hebrew and Russian and who practiced Judaism. My task was to bring Jewish religious items into the Soviet Union and the names of Jews who wished to leave the Soviet Union out of that country. Upon returning to the United States, I became the national spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, one of the most effective organizations for Soviet Jews in the world.</p>
<p>As such, I spoke before synagogues of every denomination, Hadassah groups, Jewish federations, Jewish groups on college campuses. If there was a Jewish organization, it cared about the plight of Soviet Jews. For decades, virtually every synagogue in America had a &#8220;Save Soviet Jewry&#8221; sign in front of it.</p>
<p>Over time, the plight of the Soviet Jews awakened me to the plight of all Soviet dissidents, whether secular ones — such as that great man, the physicist Andrei Sakharov — or Christian.</p>
<p>The latter were particularly persecuted. Though my work was with Soviet Jewry, I had no trouble acknowledging that Soviet Christians often had it worse. Few Soviet Jews were killed or locked away in dungeon-like conditions by the Soviet authorities, but Soviet Christians were.</p>
<p>At some point in my early years, it dawned on me that I had not seen a single church with a &#8220;Save Soviet Christians&#8221; sign. Even more amazingly, I encountered Christian clergy — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox — at every one of the scores of Soviet Jewry rallies at which I spoke. But while these wonderful Christians were outspoken on behalf of Soviet Jews, they were nearly all silent regarding — or even simply ignorant of — the dire plight of Soviet Christians.</p>
<p>Making matters worse, the world&#8217;s most famous Christian evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, went to the Soviet Union in 1982, and in his talk at a church told Christians to obey the authorities — the same authorities who were rounding up Christian dissidents inside and outside the very church at which Graham spoke. As columnist George Will wrote at the time:</p>
<p>&#8220;The Washington Post reports that when Graham spoke in two churches, both &#8216;were heavily guarded, with police sealing off all roads leading to them. Hundreds of KGB security agents &#8230; were in the congregation.&#8217; Graham told one congregation that God &#8216;gives you the power to be a better worker, a more loyal citizen because in Romans 13 we are told to obey the authorities.&#8217; How is that for a message from America? Graham is America&#8217;s most famous Christian. (Aleksandr) Solzhenitsyn is Russia&#8217;s. The contrast is instructive.&#8221;</p>
<p>This history is repeating itself.</p>
<p>In the Muslim world, Christians are being murdered, churches are being torched, entire ancient Christian communities — the Iraqi and Palestinian, for example — are disappearing.</p>
<p>And, again, 2 billion Christians react with silence. There are some Christian groups active on behalf of persecuted Christians around the world. They do important work, and are often the primary source of information on persecuted Christians. But they would be the first to acknowledge that the Christian world is overwhelmingly silent when it comes to the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world.</p>
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		<title>British Muslims for Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/british-muslims-for-israel-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=british-muslims-for-israel-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:40:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Pro-Israel groups in Europe step up their efforts to combat the anti-Israel establishment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/israel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90039" title="israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/israel.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="311" /></a></p>
<p>To Hasan Afzal, the reaction to his new pro-Israel group may demonstrate just why the organization is necessary.</p>
<p>“I’ve been really overwhelmed just by how shocked people have been that there’s been a group called British Muslims for Israel,” Afzal said.</p>
<p>That surprise isn’t surprising. The debate over Israel and the broader Middle East conflict has become so tense and toxic that a group calling itself British Muslims for Israel inspires a mix of suspicion and fascination. But Afzal’s group is real. Formed by young Muslim professionals in Britain in January under the umbrella group Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, it really took off after Afzal was interviewed by Israel’s Channel 10. Their Web site (BritishMuslimsForIsrael.com) received thousands of hits and the group began receiving letters of all kinds, from “thank you for what you said” to “how can we help?” One writer offered to help jazz up their Web site, and several spoke admiringly of the group’s bravery.</p>
<p>“Although I never for one second thought I was being brave, I just thought I was being obvious in what I was saying,” Afzal told me. “We were worried that the dialogue, when it comes to the Middle East and especially Israel, had in the past five or six years moved from how do Muslims build an independent Palestinian state and coexist with Israel, to nonsense questions like should Israel even exist, or should the Jews even have a homeland,” Afzal said. “And we found that disturbing for two reasons: first is, it’s a completely delusional question to even ask if Israel should even exist.”</p>
<p>Afzal likes to pose the following hypothetical to anyone willing to discuss Israel’s right to exist: Suppose the argument was about India-Pakistan, and Afzal said to his interlocutor, “you know, I really support India’s right to exist”—how silly would he sound? In addition, Afzal knows where such a question, with respect to Israel, would lead. Once you start asking if Israel has a right to exist, Afzal said, “that is almost like a back door Trojan horse entry to some pretty dark aspects of Islamism.”</p>
<p>The media environment in Britain can be downright hostile to the Jewish state. Part of Afzal’s work is countering the misinformation in British media. “I’m sure you know that the UK has an infamous leftwing newspaper which can’t help itself but print editorials or op-eds linked to members of Hamas. And I’m talking about the <em>Guardian</em> here.”</p>
<p>Afzal points to the coverage of the massacre of the Israeli family in Itamar. It was mostly ignored in British media, he said, and when the BBC finally covered it, they did so in a “dehumanizing and insulting way,” insinuating that since the family lived in the West Bank, they got what they deserved.</p>
<p>Jonathan Weckerle knows what Afzal is dealing with. Weckerle is chair of the Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin and spokesman for STOP THE BOMB, two German organizations that advocate for Israel and against the Iranian nuclear program and Germany’s economic, cultural, and political ties to Iran. Weckerle told me that the debate over Israel in the German media and among German intellectuals is mostly one-sided, and his groups seek to correct that.</p>
<p>“We try to get some new ideas into the German discourse on Israel and the conflict and the region,” Weckerle said. “The public and also the think tanks and the press here are partly against Israel, but nearly all of them really lack an understanding of the situation of Israel, for example its strategic threats by radical Islam.”</p>
<p>Weckerle said their work, as expected, is an uphill battle.</p>
<p>“It’s very hard work for us,” he said. “But this is also because what we are doing is really something new.” He said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel travels to Israel and reaffirms the special relationship between Germany and Israel, but “that doesn’t reflect the mood of the country.”</p>
<p>Weckerle’s group, to change this, organizes debates between pro-Israel commentators (largely from abroad) and German intellectuals. From there, pro-Israel groups get a sense of the most effective arguments in Israel’s favor.</p>
<p>“What you learn from the media is that Israel is building the settlements and that this is the main and even the only obstacle to peace,” Weckerle said. “And what Palestinian leaders are doing and saying and what the goals of organizations like Hamas are, what’s happening in Arab and Palestinian media—if you tell people these things a couple of them start to see things another way.”</p>
<p>Weckerle said they educate the public on Germany’s common interests with Israel, and the threats they both face. He said Germany does have a unique obligation to help Israel, especially considering the Nazi-like rhetoric used by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—but that argument only gets you so far.</p>
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		<title>The Last Full Measure of Devotion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rich-trzupek/the-last-full-measure-of-devotion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-last-full-measure-of-devotion</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 04:31:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rich Trzupek]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=61596</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Memorial Day, and the way we remember our fallen troops, defines today’s great ideological divide. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em> </em></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/memorial.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-61597" title="memorial" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/memorial.gif" alt="" width="400" height="293" /></a></p>
<p>While official observance of Memorial Day – then Decoration Day – began in 1868, the seeds of our national day of remembrance were planted five years earlier, in a small Pennsylvania college town during the fall of 1863 when a backwoods lawyer struggled to define the nature of sacrifice and dedication, utilizing a little over 250 hastily-chosen, but carefully-crafted, words to make his point. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address became the gold standard by which all tributes to fallen heroes and the causes for which they fight are judged. Nearly a century and a half later, no one has more clearly defined the character of this nation, or of the valiant warriors who risk everything in the defense of that vague ideal we call liberty, than the sixteenth president of the United States did on that distant day.</p>
<p>In the course of two minutes – a speech so brief that a photograph of the event could not be recorded for posterity with the cumbersome equipment in use at the time – Lincoln both clarified America’s mission and advanced a theorem describing our character, eloquently summarizing the ideals of a young nation that was then not yet a century old and defining the principles that would guide it guide it for a century more to come. Eighty-five powerful words formed the crescendo of that speech; eighty-five words that once resonated in the soul of virtually every American, but which now serve to define the deep divisions emblematic of the ongoing conflict for our nation’s soul:</p>
<p>“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…”</p>
<p>Actions, Lincoln said, speak far louder than words. What ultimately mattered is “what they did here.” Their work – their bloody work – was “nobly advanced” and in doing so “they gave the last full measure of devotion…” The vast majority of Americans in 1863 instinctively understood these tenets, just as they did in 1776 and the as they would in 1963. For almost two centuries the nobility, the devotion and the selflessness of those who defended America and who protected liberty was never a matter of debate, except in the most extreme and obscure, dusty corners of American thought. At Gettysburg, Lincoln brought this part of our national character into its sharpest focus.</p>
<p>But what of the rest of us: the civilians who form the preponderance of any populace? What of those of us who are protected by the noble few standing ready to give their last full measure of devotion? How might we honor these brave defenders of liberty?</p>
<p>Lincoln was the consummate American president, a principled pragmatist. In answering that question, Lincoln recognized both the need to defend representative government and the powerful forces aligned in opposition to doing so. The simple message that he delivered at Gettysburg powerfully reinforced the former and skillfully undermined the latter. Americans, he declared, are not so foolish as to risk – and ultimately give – the “last full measure of devotion” for anything less than a cause worth that ultimate sacrifice. If such sacrifices were to have meaning, then the public has an obligation not just to honor the causes that cost these heroes their lives, but to increase their own devotion to such causes. Anything less would dishonor those we had lost, tantamount to declaring that their sacrifices had been in vain.</p>
<p>For nearly two hundred years, no American would claim that anyone who fell in combat defending our nation had died in vain, much less to even suggest that doing so was anything less than honorable. Then came the dreadful decade of the 1960s, and all that went with it: disillusionment, self-doubt and despair. In military and geo-political terms, America was no longer the underdog, as we had been since the nation was founded. Liberals, who had previously not only supported our military efforts around the world, but who had in fact been responsible for getting us into most of our conflicts for idealistic (and honorable) reasons, soured on the idea that America could protect the downtrodden and spread liberty about the globe. After spending two centuries supporting America’s efforts to defend the notion of freedom against powerful would-be oppressors, the left took one look at the war in Viet Nam and concluded that we were no longer the underdog, upstart nation that King George, Santa Ana, the Kaiser and Hitler had sneered at. We were now the dominant power on the globe and, it followed, we must therefore now be an oppressor ourselves. And, if that point needed to be reinforced, there was also this: our sworn enemy – the only other super-power on earth – was a nation that had embraced the liberal dream of replacing capitalism with statism. For the left, by fighting in Viet   Nam, not only was America flexing its newly-found muscle as bullies always do, we were putting the collectivist, socialist ideal in grave danger.</p>
<p>And so, what had been unconscionable in 1960 became common-place, and in some quarters fashionable, by 1970: the devotion and selflessness of those who served our nation in combat wasn’t merely questioned. We zoomed past self-doubt into something far more insidious. The combatants themselves were ridiculed, mocked and insulted. America abandoned honor in the sixties, and with it, lost her soul. The ideal that Lincoln had so eloquently expressed, that of taking increased devotion to a cause for which heroes had made the ultimate sacrifice, was replaced in liberal quarters by the notion that the warriors serving such a cause were as foul as the cause supposedly was itself.</p>
<p>Today, the left has backed off of that ugly mindset somewhat, but only somewhat. As our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line to fight fundamentalist, fascist extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, this latest generation of noble American warriors have been transformed in progressive eyes from dangerous co-conspirators to unwitting dupes. To the left, those serving in the armed forces are merely that segment of our society that could not find a better job flipping burgers. The notion that these brave Americans might actually believe in their mission never occurs to the average liberal. Accordingly, no “increased devotion” is necessary on their part. There is only an exit strategy to pursue.</p>
<p>Here on the right, we see the valor of our troops in entirely different terms. Their devotion means that we must rededicate ourselves to ensuring the success of their mission. Their sacrifices require that we ensure those sacrifices are not in vain. Their courage demands our commitment. For, on this day, and every Memorial Day, there is only one reason that Americans willingly place themselves in harm’s way on distant shores: that we “shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Nothing less will – or should – do.</p>
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		<title>Unemployment and the Immigration Glut</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/virgil-goode/unemployment-and-the-immigration-glut/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=unemployment-and-the-immigration-glut</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 May 2010 04:00:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Virgil Goode]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=61081</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Coming to do the work Americans want to do. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/480996667_390290d2ef.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-61383" title="480996667_390290d2ef" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/480996667_390290d2ef-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>With 10% unemployment, one would think that the government would consider lowering the number of green cards issued to foreign workers until Americans were back on their feet.  Amazingly, recently released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows that we have actually increased immigration.  Far from reflecting supply and demand, our legal immigration numbers continue to climb no matter the state of the national economy.</p>
<p>The latest figures come from fiscal year 2009.  The fiscal year began on October 1, 2008, which is when our economic collapse began and continued through September of 2009.  Over five million Americans lost their jobs over that period.</p>
<p>America issued 1,130,818 permanent green cards, 808,478 of which were given to immigrants of working age.  This is an increase over 2008 and 2007.  Excluding the extra green cards given after the 1986 amnesty, this was the second highest number of green cards issued since 1914.  From 2000 though 2009, we issued 10,299,430—the highest decade in American history.</p>
<p>In addition to the green cards, the government issued 881,840 temporary work visas and gave refugee or asylum status to 96,721 aliens.  The total increase to the American workforce was 1.75 million foreign workers. According to the Census Bureau, 1 out of every 6 workers is foreign born.</p>
<p>What are the possible justifications for this policy?  Are these immigrants taking jobs Americans won’t do?  With the unemployment rate at nearly 10%, no one can say this with a straight face.</p>
<p>Does this create diversity?  The pool of legal immigrants is rather un-diverse. Less than 10% of them come from Europe.</p>
<p>Does this decrease illegal immigration?  If that were the case, you would have expected the illegal immigration numbers to decline as legal immigration increased.  In fact, they have both skyrocketed.</p>
<p>Instead of talking about reducing these numbers, politicians are calling for raising the level of legal immigration.  Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Harry Reid (D-NV) recently released an outline for their ideas for “comprehensive immigration reform.” They call for adding an additional 3.4 million family visas and 550,000 work visas.</p>
<p>In the house, Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Solomon Ortiz’s (D-TX) introduced the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America&#8217;s Security and Prosperity Act (H.R. 4321) which makes the same proposals for increasing family and work visas, but one ups them by adding a special new visa category of 100,000 permanent green cards a year to go specifically to Latin American countries.</p>
<p>There are two bills in Congress that will reduce legal immigration.  Rep. Phil Gingrey’s  (R-GA) Nuclear Family Priority Act (H.R.878) will limit family based immigration and reduce 111,800 green cards.  Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-VA) SAFE for America Act (H.R.2305 ) will eliminate the Visa Lottery category that grants 50,000 visas a year.  Unfortunately, the Republican leadership is not backing these bills and they only have 30 and 57 co-sponsors, respectively.</p>
<p>These bills are a great start, but even if they passed we’d still issue nearly one million green cards a year. If we really want to put Americans back to work, we need a moratorium across nearly all categories of legal immigration.  A moratorium will free up jobs for American citizens, reduce the stress on social services, and allow the immigrants already here to assimilate.</p>
<p>The only people who will lose out from a moratorium are the ethnic interests who want new constituents and the business lobbies who want cheap labor.  Unfortunately, both political parties are more concerned with the well-being of these special interests than the well-being American citizens.</p>
<p><em>Virgil Goode represented Virginia’s 5<sup>th</sup> Congressional District from 1997 to 2009.</em></p>
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		<title>David Irving: Anti-Semite &amp; Holocaust Denier</title>
		<link>http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2456&#038;utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=david-irving-anti-semite-holocaust-denier</link>
		<comments>http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2456#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2010 16:56:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Discover The Networks]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[In his bestselling 1977 work, Hitler&#8217;s War, historian David Irving sought to present history “through Hitler’s eyes,” claiming that although Hitler was a “powerful and relentless military commander,” he was also a “lax and indecisive political leader.” Hitler’s War ultimately laid the basis for Irving’s lifelong claim that Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust. It was during the 1980s that [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/David-Irving.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-59535" title="David Irving" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/David-Irving.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="539" /></a></p>
<p>In his bestselling 1977 work, <em>Hitler&#8217;s War</em>, historian David Irving sought to present history “through Hitler’s eyes,” <a href="http://www.adl.org/Learn/ext_us/irving.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&amp;LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&amp;xpicked=2&amp;item=Irving#return2">claiming</a> that although Hitler was a “powerful and relentless military commander,” he was also a “lax and indecisive political leader.” <em>Hitler’s War</em> ultimately laid the basis for Irving’s lifelong claim that Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>It was during the 1980s that Irving’s gradual journey toward Holocaust denial became complete. He <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2001/fall/lying-about-the-holocaust?page=0,1">began to give </a>incendiary speeches around the world, calling the camps of Auschwitz a myth: “I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It’s baloney. It’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?”</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2456">To view the full David Irving profile, click here.</a></strong></p>
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		<title>History as Indictment</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/history-as-indictment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=history-as-indictment</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:00:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How selective filtering of history undermines American society and Western civilization.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Torn-American-Flag-791882.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-59080" title="Torn-American-Flag-791882" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Torn-American-Flag-791882-300x219.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="219" /></a></p>
<p>Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa.</p>
<p>At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus— and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.</p>
<p>I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks— which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian or whatever.</p>
<p>The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.</p>
<p>Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read— not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species— because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality.</p>
<p>If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings— no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.</p>
<p>But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.</p>
<p>It is true, just as it is true that I don&#8217;t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans— more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United   States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.</p>
<p>The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton.</p>
<p>But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to &#8220;Roots,&#8221; and our schools and colleges don&#8217;t pound it into the heads of students.</p>
<p>The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of &#8220;our society&#8221; or the sins of a particular race.</p>
<p>If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance.</p>
<p>Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery— on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.</p>
<p>It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.</p>
<p>Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.</p>
<p>An ancient adage says: &#8220;Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.&#8221; But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.</p>
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		<title>The Limits of Power</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/the-limits-of-power/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-limits-of-power</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:00:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[slave owners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Slavery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Virginia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why did some slave masters pay certain slaves throughout history?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/slaves2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58660" title="slaves2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/slaves2.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="281" /></a></p>
<p>When I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America&#8217;s antebellum South, among other places.</p>
<p>In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring any serious consequences.</p>
<p>There could hardly be a greater power of one human being over another than the arbitrary power of life and death. Why then was it necessary to pay certain slaves? At the very least, it suggested that there were limits to what could be accomplished by power.</p>
<p>Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.</p>
<p>Tasks involving judgment or talents were different because no one can know how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.</p>
<p>Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.</p>
<p>At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia&#8217;s tobacco factories.</p>
<p>The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone.</p>
<p>Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seem to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.</p>
<p>Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.</p>
<p>As those benefits became clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market principles were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country&#8217;s life, where tight control from the top down remains the norm.</p>
<p>Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.</p>
<p>The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether &#8220;affordable housing&#8221; or &#8220;universal <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell.html#" target="_blank">health care</a>&#8221; or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.</p>
<p>Friedrich Hayek called this mindset &#8220;the road to serfdom.&#8221; But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.</p>
<p>Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.</p>
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