Where has the American work ethic gone? Our nation was founded on the principles of liberty, freedom, hard work and self-reliance but all of these are present in unacceptably low levels today. Thanks to the indoctrination of our children with ubiquitous progressive ideology, motivation and a strong work ethic are sadly lacking … and getting worse.
Not surprisingly, a record high percentage of these “future leaders” of America believe that socialism as opposed to capitalism is the better system. This belief combined with apathy and complacency will mean far less future productivity, a lower standard of living, relatively fewer individuals supporting far more, overall high taxation rates and big government/nanny state.
Such a scenario can and must be averted but it will take a spectacular reversal of political fortunes and the imbuing in the younger generation or the important principles of motivation, responsibility and self-reliance rather than dependency, victimization and “guaranteed economic fairness” leading to wealth redistribution philosophies.
Once Self-Reliant, Now A Nation Of Takers
Scott Hodge 04/07/2010
Are you a giver or a taker? No, that is not a bad pickup line from an Internet dating site — it's a question every American should be asking themselves these days. "Do I take more than I give?"
I'm sure most of us want to be considered givers, not takers. After all, we grew up with the old adage that "it is better to give than receive." But we all know people who are more takers than givers.
We've all seen someone who brings a small salad to the potluck but piles lots of your casserole on his plate. Or, there is always one person in the lunch group who orders the most expensive meal on the menu because she knows you are all splitting the check.
The same thing happens with government. A growing number of Americans are contributing little but taking a lot, and a shrinking number are giving a lot but taking little.
Recent IRS data for 2008 reports that a record 52 million Americans — or 36% of all filers — filed a tax return but had no income tax liability because of the generosity of the credits and deductions that have been enacted over the past 15 years.
The tax code has always had exemptions to protect the poorest Americans from paying income taxes, but the new credits — such as the child tax credit, Making Work Pay credit, and First Time Homebuyer credit — are now exempting middle-class families from the income tax.
Remarkably, a family of four earning up to $52,000 can expect to pay no income taxes because of these various tax credits. That too is a record.
Many more of these taxpayers are now getting checks back from the IRS even though they pay no income taxes. The IRS paid out $70 billion in "refundable" checks to non-payers in 2008. In essence, lawmakers have turned the IRS into an ATM machine for welfare benefits — and ATM now stands for Another Taxpayer's Money.
Sadly, millions of people now see April 15 as payday, not tax day.
President Obama's policies, from health care to taxes, are all intended to increase the number of takers in America while reducing the number of givers. Our analysis of Obama's FY 2011 budget plan shows that it would increase the amount of redistribution from the top 10% of families by nearly $100 billion per year — to a total of $854 billion — while expanding the amount of government benefits targeted to the middle and upper-middle classes.
Economists have identified a phenomenon they call "fiscal illusion." When people perceive the cost of government is less than what it really is, they will demand ever more government. The real danger today is not just that we have so many non-payers, but that the $1.5 trillion deficit is making the cost of government look cheap for all of us. So much spending is raining down on us that it now seems like "free money" in a sense.
Every marketing guru will tell you that people love free stuff and that they will take as much as they can get whether they need it or not. But for a nation, this is a recipe for fiscal disaster.
Once upon a time, Americans took pride in being self-reliant and there was a stigma about taking handouts from government. It is time we renewed that sense of pride and reject the notion that we are entitled to handouts from government.
Repeat after me: "I will no longer be a taker ... ."
• Hodge is president of the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization that has monitored fiscal policy at the federal, state and local levels since 1937.
Few in Hollywood are Conservatives and even rarer are those who are outspoken on these beliefs. One of those individuals is Jon Voight. Given that most people associated with Hollywood are supporters of the far-left and with many zealots among them, opening admitting that one is a Conservative often is a career killer.
Jon Voight was a guest on the Mike Huckabee show on April 10th, 2010. On the show he read an open letter to America and to Barack Obama where he discussed the future of America and the need for us all to get involved in our individual states Tea-Party movement in order to save our nation.
The following is the text of the letter:
“In one year, the American people are witnessing the greatest lie that is cleverly orchestrated by President Obama and his whole administration. The lie is a potent aggression that feeds the needs of people who either have not educated themselves enough to understand the assault upon us all or the very poor and needy who live to be taken care of.
President Obama feeds these people poison, giving them the idea that they are entitled to take from the wealthier who have lived and worked in a democracy that understands that capitalism is the only truth that keeps a nation healthy and fed. Now the lie goes very deep and President Obama has been cleverly trained in the Alinsky method and it would be very important that every American knows what that method is.
It is a socialistic, Marxist teaching and with it, little by little, he rapes this nation, taking down our defenses, making new language for the Islamic extremists. The world looked up to us as a symbol of hope and prosperity now wonders what will become of the entire world if America is losing its power.
The American people who understand exactly what is taking place have come together in the thousands, vowing to try to stay together as a unit of love and freedom for all men and women, from all walks of life, shivering to think that this once great nation will be a third world country.
This will be the first president to ever weaken the United States of America. President Obama uses his aggression and arrogance for his own agenda, against the will of the American people when he should be using his will and aggression against our enemies.
Every loving American for peace and truth and the security of our nation must come out and join the Tea Parties in their states. The opposition will continue their tactics; they will lie and plant their own bullies amongst us. Everyone must pay close attention to who stands next to them. We can weed out the liars and agitators.
Let us all stay in Gods light. Let no man put asunder. We can and we will prevail. God bless us all!”
Anyone who doesn’t think that Obama is at minimum a socialist President has not been paying attention to his words and actions starting even before his run for the Presidency. His mantra ”spread the wealth around”, repeated thousands of times, reinforces this position. The ideological underpinnings of Obamacare follow this as does his position for expansion of welfare as delineated in the following editorial.
Tax the rich! All Americans should have …! His attitude is that it is unfair for people not to have houses, college educations, iPods (with his speeches on them) even when they don’t make any attempts to work or make sacrifices in order to better themselves. So… SPREAD THE WEALTH!
Obama’s attitude punishes and denigrates hard work and dedication which are basic tenets of the American way and why we have been the greatest country. It penalizes hard working Americans and disincentivizes those who could and should be productive and contributing members of our society.
This will lead to the indolence and complacency so characteristic of Socialism – that will drive our country into the abyss of mediocrity and excessively high taxes.
We must all vigorously oppose this course.
Welfare Un-Reform
Investors Business Daily 03/23/2010
The Dole: In urging Congress to extend jobless benefits again, the White House warned that unemployment could remain high through the year. Benefits may be part of the problem.
In a joint statement to Congress, the president's top economic advisers hedged against expectations of lower unemployment this year, saying the jobless rate — still hovering around 10% — will "remain elevated for an extended period."
"We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year," the White House budget director, top economist and Treasury secretary testified.
What's got them so pessimistic? Possibly an abnormally high job vacancy rate.
Normally the job vacancy rate goes down after a recession, as the job market stabilizes. But January, the latest reported month, showed an 11% spike in unfilled jobs. Vacancies are now at 2.1% — the highest since February 2009, the Labor Department says.
That means people are not taking jobs as expected at this point in the recovery. Why? Because many don't have to — thanks in part to 99 weeks and counting of unemployment benefits.
Add to that record food stamp payments and other welfare, and the unemployed have been perversely incentivized to keep holding out for better jobs, rather than take less-than-desirable or lower-paying ones. Forty percent of jobless Americans have been out of work for at least 27 weeks — the highest level since the government began keeping records in the 1940s.
"Those programs subsidize unemployment," University of Chicago economist Robert Shimer says. "There could be good reasons to do it, but we should be clear on the cost. It has a pretty substantial impact."
Generous jobless benefits alone account for as much as 1.5 points of the nation's 9.7% jobless rate, Shimer reckons.
There are also new incentives for Americans to go on the dole permanently, thanks to a provision in the stimulus package that includes a $5 billion emergency fund for states to meet demand for more welfare assistance.
The administration is expanding that supposedly temporary fund an additional $2.5 billion. The fund matches states 80 cents on the dollar for each new welfare case, making it more generous than the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) system.
In effect, Obama is paying states a bonus to sign up new welfare recipients.
This reverses the historic 1996 welfare reform, which took more than 2.7 million families off the dole by making welfare truly temporary under the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. TANF lowered the poverty rate for black children as a record number of single mothers learned skills and took jobs. Fixed block grants to states ended Washington paying states on a per-capita basis for every person who entered the welfare rolls.
New succor doesn't stop there. Socialized medicine threatens to add 15 million uninsured to the Medicaid rolls, which are already bloated from the recession. Working Americans with household income well above the poverty line will be eligible for a program once reserved only for the poor.
Overall, ObamaCare represents the biggest federal entitlement since Medicare and Medicaid were passed in the '60s.
Obama is overturning the welfare reform signed by his Democrat predecessor and is rapidly rebuilding the welfare state.
If more and more go on the dole instead of filling jobs that are starting to open up, it will only stall the recovery and widen the deficit.
If unemployment "remains elevated for an extended period," it's because Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue extended unemployment and welfare benefits while refusing to incentivize small businesses — the job engine of the economy — to take risks and staff up.
If Democrats lose Congress in November over chronic unemployment and record deficits, they have only themselves — and the head of their party — to blame.
A significant majority of college students and young people were mesmerized by Obama's cool yet disingenuous campaign rhetoric and marketing and therefore voted for him. If they really stopped and analyzed the situation, they probably would have reached an opposite conclusion.
This video is a succinct explanation of the advantages of Capitalism over Socialism that even a college student can understand. Those of us who are very knowledgeable about this should make concerted efforts to educated and enlighten the younger generations who have been largely indoctrinated to a far-left way of thinking. It is our duty otherwise America, the land of the free and of opportunity, may be forever lost.
The big, centralized government rhetoric of the Democratic Party is eerily reminiscent of that of the old Soviet Union which doesn’t bode well for the country or economy. Adding to the problem is the sinister brainwashing of our children to believe in the virtues of a large, powerful centralized government and denigrate capitalism and free choice.
Inexplicably, those who have the most to lose such as American Jews, are actually the most ardent supporters of these far left ideologies.
Perspectives Of A Soviet Immigrant (No. 6)
By Svetlana Kunin
There was an old Soviet saying: If you need to find food to fill your refrigerator, plug it into the microphone of a party leader giving a speech.
Today in America, if we plug a refrigerator into our leader's teleprompter, I suspect the refrigerator will stop working.
Democratic party leaders speak incessantly of limiting profits and regulating salaries.
It brings back to memory another Soviet line: You pretend you are paying us salaries, and we pretend we are working. If bureaucrats predetermine the value of your work, there is no incentive to be productive. This is the quickest way to kill a dynamic economy.
I never expected to hear this kind of rhetoric in the USA. Today, the American educational machine teaches exactly the same points the Soviets taught.
It idealizes Socialist societies and denigrates America, especially its economic system.
American students are brainwashed to despise economic freedom and to yearn for a big government state.
Freed from their parents' control, but intimidated by the relentlessly negative portrayal of America, young Americans look for politicians to show them the way.
As someone who experienced real government-approved anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, I am amazed by the obliviousness of American Jews, the most fervent supporters of left-wing politics.
They support a party that is obsessed with pitting one group against another, and that incessantly plays on envy and hatred for bankers, rich people, big business and doctors.
They fail to notice that the success of Jews, as well as other minorities, in the sciences, business and arts is directly correlated to their freedom from oppressive, centralized control. American Jews who support big government do not understand what their ancestors escaped from.
Persecutions of Jews throughout history all have one thing in common: a centralized power that manipulates and directs people's anger away from themselves onto an easy target.
No matter how much Jews align themselves with the power structure and work for noble causes, they will remain an easy target.
As they said in the Soviet Union pertaining to Soviet Jews: They don't beat your record; they beat your face — meaning that no matter how much you try to assimilate, no matter how many good deeds you do, the centralized power can direct populist anger toward you and crush you when it suits them.
When the Bolsheviks took power after the 1917 proletarian revolution, their first steps were to take control of the banks and the media.
Of course, it is not fair to compare our current American democratic leaders with the Bolsheviks.
Yes, they both use the same slogans in their speeches.
Yes, they both stir up envy and class warfare to distract from their failures.
Yes, both political movements sought control of the banks as the foundation for their new egalitarian vision.
And yes, they are both opposed to free speech, as was made clear by the reaction of American leftists to the recent
Supreme Court decision.
But you would never find a Czar anywhere in the Soviet government.
• Kunin lived in the Soviet Union until 1980, working as a civil engineer. She is now a retired software developer living in Connecticut.
The recession keeps dragging on despite close to a trillion dollars in stimulus money and other focal incentives wasted by the federal government. What is happening?
Small businesses, the real engines of our economy, are extremely worried about present conditions and future prospects including massive government regulations and more than 2 trillion dollars of proposed tax hikes that would destroy thousands of businesses. Consequently, they are being advisably circumspect, prudent and conservative, trying to protect the viability of their businesses rather than take aggressive actions that could jeopardize their survival.
For starters, we would all benefit from a massive across the board decrease in taxes, major reduction in government spending, and abolishing useless and costly regulations...
A Real Cure For What Ails Small Biz
Investors Business Daily 02/09/2010
Jobless Recession: Small business has been a key part of plans to stimulate the economy from the very start of the Obama presidency. So why is this crucial job-creating sector of our economy doing so poorly?
The latest soundings from small business are not reassuring. In its annual poll of 2,114 members, for example, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) found that "small-business owners entered 2010 the same way they left 2009 — depressed." Meanwhile, the ADP Small Business Report for January shows companies with fewer than 50 workers shed an additional 22,000 jobs.
These are the businesses that account for 48 million jobs, or 44% of all private nonfarm employment — and two-thirds or more of all employment growth in recent years. But despite efforts by government to "fix" their problems, they've only grown worse. The programs were ineffective or never got off the ground.
Last year, amid much hoopla, the White House announced plans to give tax credits to "green" energy companies. As a result, according to reporter Renee Schoof of McClatchy Newspapers, the U.S. installed a record 9,900 megawatts of wind-power generating capacity last year — enough to power 2.4 million homes.
A boon for conservation jobs? Hardly. Indeed, the American Wind Energy Association reports the industry cut 2,000 jobs last year, in part because some of the wind energy equipment is made overseas.
Then there was the program unveiled in March to spend $15 billion to "unlock" lending to small businesses. That grew to a $30 billion program later in the year after TARP funds were added to the mix. But as noted by ABC News reporter and blogger Jake Tapper, this is a "phantom" jobs program.
Even Neil Barofsky, head of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, admitted as much. As of Dec. 31, he wrote recently, "the details of the initiative under this program had not been announced and no funds had been disbursed."
In short, the White House talked about $30 billion in aid to small businesses, but never did anything about it.
Meanwhile, President Obama announced a sweeping small-business aid program in his State of the Union. He knows this is key to the economy's recovery, if only because he hears it all the time from Democrats and Republicans.
Among the president's new proposals for small business are a $5,000 tax credit to hire new workers, elimination of capital gains taxes and new incentives to invest in plants and equipment. Will anything come of it? Based on recent history, we doubt it.
Congress, correctly interpreting its sinking poll numbers, has also jumped on the jobs bandwagon and is eagerly crafting another big-time jobs stimulus — this one rumored to be $80 billion in size.
Some of Obama's ideas aren't bad. But even if passed, they likely wouldn't help much. The problems that small businesses have aren't about small businesses per se; they're about the economy.
Small businesses have the same doubts as the rest of us. Besides all these "jobs programs," they see a failed $862 billion stimulus, a $700 billion TARP program that has turned into a politicized auto and bank bailout fund, Cash for
Clunkers, attempts in Copenhagen to impose massive taxes on America to stave off global warming, a $1 trillion health care overhaul, new "responsibility fees" on banks, and worry for our economy's future.
Worse, the new budget contains $2 trillion in tax hikes over a decade, mostly on multinationals and successful entrepreneurs. These taxes undo all the good the White House and Congress would do with their "incentives" and "credits" and whatnot.
Washington thus has it wrong. Businesses aren't awaiting more "stimulus." As the NFIB suggested, they're clinically depressed, seeing the government's dead weight lying across the economy for years to come in all its spending, taxing and ad hoc rule-making.
What sensible entrepreneur would commit his wealth to a money-making project in such a high-tax, high-regulation environment — one in which those who make profits are routinely demonized?
This is a problem with a solution, and the solution is the same one that's worked in the past: Cut taxes across the board — for business big and small — and look for ways to cut regulations, not add more. At the same time, pull back on the insane surge in government spending.
By unlocking our nation's entrepreneurial spirit and reviving growth across the economy, we can put an end to this nightmare and help all Americans regain prosperity. Then small businesses can get back to doing what they do best: create lots of jobs.
America was once the quintessential free economy that served as a paragon for the rest of the world to emulate. Unfortunately, with an ever increasingly intrusive and regulatory government, we have fallen from this enviable position and are now looking up at those ahead of us. Embarrassingly, that includes socialized healthcare Canada as well. The consequences are quite significant and will restrain the growth of our economy - short and long term.
America's 'Free' Falling Economy
Investors Business Daily 02/01/2010
Competitiveness: The latest index of economic freedom shows America falling fast, being ranked for the first time as "mostly free." We've fallen behind Canada, and it's look out below.
Our accelerating descent into a command-and-control economy with government pulling the strings is taking its toll.
The Heritage Foundation's 2010 index of leading economic indicators shows that the land of the free is only mostly free, falling to eighth in the world from sixth last year, now sandwiched between Canada and Denmark.
That Canada, long considered a bastion of socialized medicine, is ranked as economically freer may surprise some. But our neighbor to the north has at least been trying to develop its domestic energy reserves, from hydroelectric to natural gas to oil extracted from its tar sands. Energy is the lifeblood of a free economy.
We have shackled our domestic energy producers with environmental regulations, leaving vast pools of energy lying offshore and in the ground. We regulate what you can build, where you can build it, even how. Endangered critters rank above equally endangered entrepreneurs. Climate change is more important than the business climate.
We have allowed our government to be the engine of stimulus when the only thing that's being stimulated is government itself. The public sector booms while the private sector languishes as the federal government sucks the financial oxygen out of the room. Businesses are afraid to move because they are unable to plan in an environment where government is trying to tax or regulate everything that moves and most things that don't.
Our government has taken upon itself the task of picking winners and losers, instead of letting the free market decide, and as a result we all lose. From car companies to financial institutions, the long arm of government has grabbed freedom by the neck, seeking to decide who gets paid what and how big companies and banks can grow.
Then there are the taxes, which are to business what vampires are to blood banks. A nation's corporate tax rate is important. Its effect on a country's competitiveness and its ability to draw or repel investment has a direct impact on economic health.
Companies are being driven offshore by a combined 39.1% federal and state tax rate that is second only to Japan's. In some states, the combination leads the world. California, which would have the world's eighth largest economy as an independent country, teeters on bankruptcy. If you were a CEO, would you headquarter there or in Switzerland or Ireland, which also rank above us?
The 2010 index shows the U.S. dropping from 80.7 points out of 100 in 2008 to 78 in 2009 and slipping from the "free" category to "mostly free." America's 2.7-point decline is among the fastest ever, ranking right up there with those of such socialist paradises as Bolivia, Libya and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, whose policies our administration czars are seeking to emulate.
The authors of the Heritage report — Kim Holmes, Anthony Kim and Terry Miller — cite the gargantuan growth of government in both size and power, noting that government spending last year equaled 37.4% of GDP. Spending increases totaled well over $1 trillion in 2009 alone, up more than 20% from 2008.
"Uncertainties caused by ongoing regulatory changes and politically influenced stimulus spending have discouraged entrepreneurship and job creation, slowing recovery," the report states.
"Tax rates are increasingly uncompetitive, and massive stimulus spending is creating unprecedented deficits. Bailouts of financial and automotive firms have generated concerns about property rights."
On these pages last November, former Microsoft COO Robert Herbold and Hoover Institution fellow Scott Powell noted that "ambiguity and the threat of new taxes from Washington, such as cap-and-trade, have already prompted 11 major U.S. companies to move offshore in the past year."
They can be accused of being greedy, but not of being stupid.
We must stop bailing out failure and punishing success through regulation and taxation. Only then can the land of the free be economically free to thrive and prosper.
The ever increasing magnitude of anger that is being generated by American citizens in response to what we see as an imperious, arrogant, dictatorial government is nothing short of remarkable. We are being treated contemptuously by a Government that disregards the will of the people, seeks to tax us to oblivion and “legally” redistribute the fruits of our labors, and aims to insinuate itself in every activity of our daily lives, restricting our freedoms and rights. Our present political and socioeconomic milieu is far more dire and repressive than what the Colonists contended with under King George just before the American Revolution.
Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a political perfect storm which threatens the whole underpinnings of our culture, rights, freedoms, and economic system. Our government has been hijacked by the extreme far left which has malevolent intentions for America. It has a super-majority that is essentially unstoppable legislatively but is also willing to employ corrupt, heavy handed tactics if warranted. Complicit in this and facilitating the situation is the vast majority of the press whose role in the past had always been to serve as a watchdog to protect the average American and keep the government more honest and in check.
Millions of Americans are not only concerned by our present situation but also by the perceived malignant intentions of our government starting with Obama on down. The rhetoric of these politicians is indisputably incongruous with their legislative actions whether it pertains to healthcare reform, the national debt or even our rights. These Democrats and radicals are actively and aggressively seeking to destroy the free America we knew and instead, transform it into a pseudo-dictatorship with the likes of Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank and Schumer at the helm.
It is imperative that we all understand the gravity of our present circumstances and then aggressively and pertinaciously act in whatever manner necessary to oppose and reverse this course. Unfortunately, with the Government’s relentless consolidation of power by means of unfettered legislative actions, a political solution may be difficult if not impossible to obtain.
We must do whatever it takes to reclaim our country!
The following article brilliantly, insightful and thoroughly explains why what we see as illogical actions by Obama and other “representatives of the people” are instead intentional, calculated, rational but malignant moves that can and may destroy America. This is a must read!
Cloward-Piven Government
By James Simpson
It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government. Since then, the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck television show, Bill O'Reilly, and now Mark Levin.
The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America who taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May 1966 Nation magazine article titled "The Weight of the Poor," they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.
The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces ... for major economic reform at the national level."
They implemented the strategy by creating a succession of radical organizations, most notable among them the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with the help of veteran organizer Wade Rathke. Their crowning achievement was the "Motor Voter" act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 with Cloward and Piven standing behind him.
As we now know, ACORN was one of the chief drivers of high-risk mortgage lending that eventually led to the financial crisis. But the Motor Voter law was another component of the strategy. It created vast vulnerabilities in our electoral system, which ACORN then exploited.
ACORN's vote registration scandals throughout the U.S. are predictable fallout.
The Motor Voter law has also been used to open another vulnerability in the system: the registration of vast numbers of illegal aliens, who then reliably vote Democrat. Herein lies the real reason Democrats are so anxious for open borders, security be damned.
It should be clear to anyone with a mind and two eyes that this president and this Congress do not have our interests at heart. They are implementing this strategy on an unprecedented scale by flooding America with a tidal wave of poisonous initiatives, orders, regulations, and laws. As Rahm Emmanuel said, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."
The real goal of "health care" legislation, the real goal of "cap-and-trade," and the real goal of the "stimulus" is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves except in their ability to deliver power. They and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.
This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized, and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat. As Barney Frank said, "the middle class will be too distracted to fight."
These people are our enemies. They don't use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined, and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.
It is time we fully internalized and digested this fact, with all its ugly ramifications. These people have violated countless laws and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so -- the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant. Their spending is off the charts and will drive us into hyperinflation, but it could be rescinded, had we the political power. These policies are toxic, but they could be stopped and reversed, had we the political power. Their ideologies are poisonous, but they could be exposed for what they are, with long jail sentences as an object lesson, had we the political power.
Every single citizen who cares about this country should be spending every minute of his or her spare time lobbying, organizing, writing, and planning. Fight every initiative they launch. It is all destructive. If we are to root out this evil, it is critical that in 2010 we elect competent, principled leaders willing to defend our Constitution and our country. Otherwise, the malevolent cabal that occupies the government today will become too entrenched.
After that, all bets are off.
Businessman and Examiner.com columnist Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst.
The following is the third editorial posted here that was written by Svetlana Kunin, a Russian immigrant who lived in the communist Soviet Union. It offers her unique insights into the parallels of life and rhetoric in Russia and what is occurring here in the United States under Obama, Pelosi and Co. We must be vigilant, aggressive, proactive and vocal and do whatever is necessary to thwart these changes or this will be another example of history repeating itself to our severe detriment.
Perspective Of A Russian Immigrant (No. 3)
By Svetlana Kunin
Whenever I speak about my experiences living in the USSR, my American friends respond that such things can never happen in a democracy like the United States.
They don't understand why I am repulsed when I hear the president talk about "sacrificing for the collective good," which sounds so compassionate, as opposed to greedy capitalism.
"Sacrifice for the collective good" is one of the founding principles of socialism, where the collective, not the individual, is the basis of society.
Revolutionaries in Russia did not go around boasting about destruction; they made inspiring speeches about fairness, equality, justice and the greater good. After securing power and their own access to material goods, government officials decided what to give and take from the masses, according to their definition of what is good.
When party leaders talk about the "collective good," what they are really talking about is their right to determine what is good for the collective. Government bureaucrats decide what level of sacrifice is needed and who needs to sacrifice. They replace voluntary charity with the forceful redistribution of other people's private property.
Why do people born into a free society accept a failed 100-year-old ideology? It seems Americans are simply unaware of modern history. They don't know the theory behind slogans such as "fairness and equality" and "sacrifice for the collective good," much less how it works when implemented. They buy into old utopian slogans masquerading as new progressive ideals for "Hope and Change."
In the USA, people move up and down the economic ladder all the time. In Western Europe, a milder form of a socialist-democratic political system resulted in higher unemployment, less innovation and less social mobility compared with the U.S. European youth face a continuing decline in their standard of living, as they are burdened with an unsustainable welfare state.
In the USSR, China, North Korea and Cuba, a much harsher form of socialism led to mass murder and mass misery under the banner of "sacrificing for the collective good," "fairness and equality" and service to the state.
The USSR provides numerous examples of what an oppressive centralized government can lead to:
Millions of talented artists, writers and scientists were sent to prison because they did not conform to government standards. Government control of agriculture led to constant shortages of food in one of the largest and most resource-rich lands in the world.
Americans think they are protected. The Constitution is a uniquely American document that specifically limits the power of the government and protects individual liberties. But if all branches of government will ignore this unique document, and people will allow them to do so, there will be nothing different about America.
Americans are not different from people in Russia, Germany, China, Korea or anywhere else. It is human nature to seek power and control, just as it is human nature to seek profit. Deny profit and you destroy any incentive for people to produce and innovate. Give up enough of your liberty to any centralized power and the result is entirely predictable.
Compare North Korea to South Korea, East Germany to West Germany before the fall of the wall — these are examples of the same people living under two different systems: socialism vs. capitalism.
Laws are necessary in a civil society, and this includes laws that regulate the free market. But a government takeover of the economy will result in the transformation of the land of opportunity into a land of apathy and stagnation, a land in which individuals become cogs moving and turning according to government regulations.
In the USSR, they taught us in school that socialism is good and capitalism is bad. That they now teach the same in American schools I find strange.
The road that our government has taken thus far regarding providing bailouts and assuming management of the auto industry has been traveled on before – by the British government. And guess what? It was an unmitigated disaster. History is in the process of repeating itself.
Our government has already poured (wasted) $101 billion tax dollars in trying to keep the auto industry afloat and there will be more to come unless there is a change of sentiment and ideology. (Chances are nil and none!) We strongly recommend that the government quickly extricate itself from involvement in the car industry and cuts off any additional funds. Let GM either sink or swim. We should not be wasting tens of billions of dollars more for an inefficient, essentially moribund company.
The following is an excellent review of the failures of the British auto industry and how our present situation parallels it.
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