Local, state and federal governments are becoming increasingly intrusive in our private lives in accord with the liberal philosophy that "the government knows better".
Guess what (there is no need for guessing here)?
The government doesn't know better and it has no right dictating our choices (as long they are "legal").
In a Chicago school, children are not allowed to bring in their own lunch anymore because the administration feels that the parents are incapable of feeding their children properly. The school forces the children to eat there ... and what it deems that they should eat. California and N.Y. are the most well known for their restrictive, intrusive and punitive culinary restrictions for restaurants.
Soon, governments may decide what kind of toilet paper we must use and the number of sheets that can be used before being subjected to a fine.
These intrusive actions, signs of large and powerful governments and unrestrained politicians, must be abrogated!
Obama’s little more than 2 years in office as President has revealed a multitude of noxious traits, actions and ideologies, a high proportion of which serve to abet his agenda to the detriment of the American public. Many even openly flout the Constitution and other legalities.
Probably the most vile and dangerous of these to the American public are his concerted attempts to consolidate power and control while concurrently thwarting the opposition. Obama acts much like a dictator though an inept one at that. He also has sought to implement ideologies which abrogate many of our rights and freedoms through the use of myriad regulations and Presidential edicts rather than through democratic channels like Congress. This even includes attacks on the right to free speech – including political speech and contributions.
Through Presidential edict, Obama is now seeking to legislate away the rights of supporters of his opponents while at the same time, allowing groups supportive of him and the Democratic machine (such as unions) to keep making their massive political contributions unscathed.
Obama's Executive Order coming to cut off funding to his political opponents?
Ed Lasky April 20, 2011
From the man who said he would bring a gun to a knife fight, the latest ploy to cut his opponents off at their knees. This one is not based on arguments or facts, but on sheer abuse of the powers he has as President.
Kenneth Vogel writes in Politico that President Obama is "considering a number of measures to compel disclosure of the kind of anonymous campaign contributions that helped finance millions of dollars of attack ads against Democrats during the 2010 elections."
These measures appear broad in scope:
The White House last week began circulating a draft executive order that would require companies seeking government contracts to disclose contributions -- including those that otherwise would have been secret -- to groups that air political ads attacking or supporting candidates.
The proposed order follows several actions by regulatory agencies that have a similar intent of making corporate and individual donations more transparent.
Last month the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a decree that could result in shareholders having more say in corporate election spending. Democratic appointees to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission are pushing measures that could make public currently anonymous contributions to outside groups.
Administration critics, including the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are seizing on the White House's draft executive order, in particular, as evidence of an attempt to use executive power to punish or silence political adversaries, while rewarding supporters.
Calling the draft executive order "an affront to the separation of powers ... (and) to free speech," chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff said it "lays the groundwork for a political litmus test for companies that wish to do business with the federal government" and is "less about disclosure than intimidation."
One White House ally, Craig Holman, applauds these plans since the 2010 election brought too many Republicans into Congress to hold out hope that these "reforms" could happen through legislation. So President Obama intends to use brute force to take these measures that would chill free speech and the campaign efforts of his critics. Apparently, a great deal can be achieved administratively through a regulatory approach and by executive order. A draft of the executive order requires disclosures of contributions made by companies' executives and board members to support candidates and third-party groups (such as the very effective American Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity groups).
Tellingly, the draft order would not apply to Democratic-allied groups that receive grants from the federal government (such as Planned Parenthood) or to unions, which bankroll so many Democratic campaigns and which have trumpeted that their spending power helped elect Barack Obama and makes them the king of the (Capitol) hill. Unions are among the biggest campaign spenders in America and they give their money to Democrats. "We're the big dog," said Larry Scanlon, the head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees).
Similar efforts to compel disclosure are being made through the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FCC and through the Federal Election Commission.
While the nation reels from a faltering economy with the lowest labor force participation rate in decades, with a deficit and debt crisis that may merit a S & P downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, with a geopolitical earthquake in the Middle East, Barack Obama finds time to figure out ways to hurt his political opponents (or his "enemies" as he would characterize them).
Public disclosure of campaign contributions can lead to boycotts of companies whose executives give to political campaigns (as happened when Target came under fire for its campaign contributions, when boycotts targeted campaign contributors to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker; similar efforts to punish people for their political views litter the political landscape).
Barack Obama wants to chill political speech to further his chances to win reelection. He made clear his views towards the law as decided by the Supreme Court when he crassly lambasted them last year during the State of the Union address for supporting the First Amendment in their Citizens United decision (a law he basically wants to undercut by using the powers of the Presidency in a particularly underhanded way).
Barack Obama , when he ran his campaign for state senator, had his opponents thrown off the ballots by challenging the signatures on their petitions to run. He cleared the ballot of all opponents.
He does not play fair -- and never has. That is his modus operandi. He learned everything he needed to know about politics in Cook County and he has brought its mores to Washington.
Change, yes, change; but in a wrong direction and in a way that the media would scorn had a Republican tried to derail opposition by these tactics.
In the following speech in the Senate by Sen. Rand Paul, he rails against a large, omnipotent central government, the "Collective", and instead exhorts Senators to consider the protection and expansion of the rights, freedoms and choices of the individual. He cites Ayn Rand and her prescient novel, "Anthem", in his discussion.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has proposed massive, desperately need federal government spending cuts as well as tax rate reductions in his “Road to Prosperity”. Troves of empirical data support this approach – benefiting all except the demagogic Liberal politicians.
The vast majority of the Democrats still irrationally support continued unrestrained federal spending and high and increasing taxes, tax rates and fees. They never can have enough of other people’s money to spend. A larger, more controlling and intrusive government that knows best is their ideology. Control the masses, engender their dependency and buy votes by wealth transfer from those who work, particularly the higher wage earners.
Cal Vs. Krug
Investor’s Business Daily 04/11/2011
Taxes And Spending: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's bold entitlement reform plan goes beyond taming spending. It recognizes that the history of cutting taxes vindicates Calvin Coolidge, not Paul Krugman.
Rep. Ryan has emerged as someone the country has been waiting for: a fearless, energetic politician with the guts to propose a detailed reform of the out-of-control, until-now-untouchable federal mandatory spending programs. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, with their annual automatic spending increases, now make up roughly 60% of outlays.
Some might find irony in Ryan ending up as spending hawk-in-chief, since back in the 1990s he was an aide to supply-side icons like Jack Kemp and Bob Kasten. Both were accused of caring too little about spending cuts as they fought for tax cuts to grow the economy and create millions of private jobs.
Today, after years of unchecked Democratic control of Congress and the White House, the problem of untamed government spending has become a runaway locomotive hurtling us toward a fiscal cliff.
The American public has reacted, spawning the populist Tea Party movement. And in this new environment, tax-cutting politicians are also spending-cutters.
But Ryan still recognizes, as did Kemp and Kasten, that low tax rates are key to restoring the greatness and vibrancy of the U.S. economy.
So when the New York Times' spending-addict columnist Paul Krugman launched his error-riddled attack on Ryan's plan last week, his first volley targeted not spending but Ryan's tax cuts. Ryan would bring both the individual top tax rate and the soon-to-be-highest-in-the-world U.S. corporate tax rate down to 25%.
According to Krugman, "Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves" because they "would set off a gigantic boom."
It's so many years after Ronald Reagan's tax cuts produced the longest peacetime economic expansion in history — extending past the brief George H.W. Bush recession to the Internet revolution of the 1990s. One might have hoped that the losers of the tax-cut debate would, by now, have gone the way of the Berlin Wall.
But then, had history been heeded, the Krugmans actually would have been laughed off the political stage long before Reagan. John F. Kennedy knew when he bucked fiscal liberals in his party and pushed hard for cutting tax rates — including those on high incomes — that President Calvin Coolidge had proved tax cuts do exactly what Krugman says they don't: produce new jobs and fill government coffers with new revenues.
As Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, pointed out in a paper for the Cato Institute, "detailed Internal Revenue Service data show that the across-the-board rate cuts of the early 1920s — including large cuts at the top end — resulted in greater tax payments and a larger tax share paid by those with high incomes."
De Rugy found that as "the marginal tax rate on those high-income earners was cut sharply from 60% or more (to a maximum of 73%) to just 25%, taxes paid by that group soared from roughly $300 million to $700 million per year." From 1922 to 1929, real GNP grew 4.7% a year and unemployment fell from 6.7% to 3.2%.
What Krugman mocks as "trickle-down" was actually a tsunami of prosperity that expanded by 84% those making between $10,000 and $100,000 annually.
Taxes and spending can't be divorced. The Krugman way of big spending and high tax rates condemns future generations to never-ending government dependency.
Ryan's way not only reforms and saves entitlements. It saves us from the left's goal of a Europeanized American economy.
With the 2011 and 2012 budgets occupying much of the news these days, coverage of attempts to defund and dismantle Obamacare by the Republicans have been relegated to low priority and interest by the liberal “mainstream” media. We must make sure that the anathema of Obamacare be relentlessly publicized.
This dangerous, disastrous and extraordinarily expensive government take-over of healthcare and usurpation of our rights must be abrogated. The American people have unequivocally voiced their antipathy of this government confiscation. They know what this will lead to and on virtually all accounts, it is extremely bad.
Socialized medicine has been an abysmal failure worldwide and there were and are so many models that exemplify this. Canada and Great Britain are quintessential examples of this. Both countries are have been seeking radical changes in order to improve their abject care and bankrupting costs.
We must continue to keep the pressure on our politicians for the repeal of Obamacare. This corruptly passed (and probably unconstitutional) legislation was all about power and control by the Democrats – and not about costs or access.
Pain And Suffering
Investor’s Business Daily 04/06/2011
Health Care: Recall the complaints that the U.S. is the only developed nation in the world that doesn't provide universal medicine? So how's that arrangement working elsewhere? Rather poorly, particularly in Britain.
Agitators for government health care can no longer, as they did at one time, hold up the British system as the model the U.S. should follow. They've learned to stay away — and for good reason. The system has followed the path that all socialist systems must follow: It is breaking under its own weight.
The nation with the reputation for rotten dental care is quickly developing a reputation for delays in medical treatment. "Devastating and cruel" is how British surgeons are now describing the long waits for operations.
It's the National Health Service's way, reports the BBC, of finding nearly $33 billion in efficiency savings by 2015. To achieve those savings, knee and hip replacements apparently have been limited by the bureaucratic rationing teams.
"We've started to get reports over the last nine months that access to these services is being restricted," Peter Kay, president of the British Orthopaedic Association, told the BBC. Of the 692 surgeons contacted by the broadcaster, 106 said "routine operations had been put on hold in their area. Others described new limits on when patients qualify for hip or knee replacements."
Meanwhile, "152 specialists said patients now have to be more disabled or in greater pain, and 118 told us hip and knee surgery had been regarded as a procedure of low priority."
The consequences of trying to treat everyone through the government go far beyond the pain and suffering of missed joint-replacement surgery. Sometimes, the wages are death.
That's how it ended for Margaret Hutchon, who happened to be a former NHS director. She died last month, the Daily Mail reported, "after waiting for nine months for an operation — at her own hospital" (emphasis ours).
She "had been waiting since last June for a followup stomach operation," but "her appointments to go under the knife were cancelled four times and she barely regained consciousness after finally having surgery."
Not only are treatments being delayed, so is NHS legislation that would, among other provisions, make the system less bureaucratic and increase private-sector involvement.
The political left, which clings tenaciously to government programs that permit the exercise of power over others, has demagogued the legislation, sounded the dreaded "privatization" alarm and won a delay.
Britons should be outraged. If the government taxes them to fund universal care, they should get the care. If the government can't do the job — which clearly it can't — it should get out of the business of meddling in people's lives and let everyone take care of his or her own health care.
Americans should be outraged as well, because a Democratic Congress and White House have forced on them a program that will be no more successful than the British health care wreck.
Yes, ObamaCare is an unpopular law with low approval ratings. But the antipathy toward it and those who engineered its passage over constitutional limitations and public opposition is not as intense as it should be.
Pressure for ObamaCare's repeal should be so sharp that official Washington will be left with no other option. If not, the British health care problems of today will be America's health care problems tomorrow.
Congressional Republicans are continuing a welcomed pattern of pursuing fiscal responsibility by the federal government – just what the voters charged them to do. Their political counterparts and their ideological antithesis, the Democrats, instead are plotting to sabotage talks on federal spending and speciously blame and attack the Republicans. Their philosophy is that there can really never be too much spending.
Prudently, the Republicans are resurrecting the idea of a balanced budget amendment in order to force restraint in spending and taxation. They are conflating ideas from the past with new ones to create a Constitutional Amendment that will facilitate this.
In the end, they will irrefutably show that they are the party of fiscal responsibility and restraint so that the taxpayers can keep more of what they earn and all of us can enjoy a higher standard of living.
Budget Balance By Law
Investor’s Business Daily 03/28/2011
Fiscal Policy: The balanced budget amendment idea has lain dormant for years. But Republicans are bringing it back. In a day when runaway spending is running away faster than ever, we need a mechanism to rein it in.
GOP leaders expect in the next two weeks to introduce to the public a balanced budget amendment that they believe will fix the profound debt and deficit problems that lawmakers have created for the taxpayers. Done correctly, a balanced budget amendment might do just that.
Congressional Republicans had planned to announce their intention to amend the Constitution in the middle of the month, but decided to wait for a few weeks until they could come up with a bill they could all support.
Once lawmakers have agreed to a piece of legislation, the GOP will go public with it — and the promise is the process will be highly transparent.
In other words, Congress won't have to pass the amendment before everyone finds out what's in it.
"We will have a genuine rollout," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, guaranteed Human Events, "so the American people can know what we're doing and they can call, and email, and fax, and demand their senators and congressmen support it and create a true grass-roots effort."
While there are competing versions of the balanced budget amendment among Republican lawmakers, Human Events reported last week that the likely final version of the amendment will:
• Cap spending at 18% of GDP. Under President Obama, spending has soared to 23.8% (fiscal 2010) and 24.7% (current fiscal year) of GDP.
• Allow federal spending to exceed federal revenue only when two-thirds of both chambers approve a specific dollar amount beyond government income.
• Prohibit tax hikes to balance the budget unless two-thirds in both chambers vote to override the limitation. The significance of this can't be overstated. Any amendment that enforces a balanced budget without such a restraint would only make matters worse. A large number of Democrats and a few soft Republicans would be giddy at the prospect of endlessly raising taxes.
• Require increases in the debt limit to be approved by three-fifths of both chambers.
• Force the president to submit a balanced budget each year to Congress.
In return for allowing the debt ceiling to exceed its current $14.2 trillion threshold, the GOP is demanding that Congress vote on a balanced budget amendment.
Should Republicans get their vote, and two-thirds of each chamber approve the amendment, it will go to the state legislatures. It must then be ratified in three-fourths of the states to be added to the Constitution.
To get it through the House, Republicans will need help from Democrats. Their 49-seat majority does not reach the two-thirds level required to approve an amendment. But a balanced budget amendment bill introduced this year by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., has 215 co-sponsors, with 13 Democrats among them.
The GOP will also need help from Democrats, who have 51 of the 100 seats, to move it through the Senate. With votes from all 47 Republicans, the amendment will have to attract support from 20 Democrats.
While the numbers would indicate that passage in the Senate is unlikely, the prospect isn't entirely hopeless. Human Events notes that there are four Democrats who voted for the balanced budget amendment in 1997 who still serve in the Senate.
Democratic Sens. Mark Udall — who has offered his own balanced budget amendment — and Claire McCaskill — who has pushed for a 20.6% of GDP cap on spending — are two others who might vote for another balanced budget amendment.
But even if it gets hung up in one or both chambers, Cornyn still believes that the balanced budget amendment will at least be a useful guide to politics.
"I think the voters would know," he told Human Events, "with very stark clarity, who is for a balanced budget and who is not."
Typically all anyone needs to know about where a politician stands on a balanced budget is party affiliation. But maybe the shocking behavior of the Obama spending machine will clear up some Democrats' thinking. For those who refuse to learn, there are the elections of 2012.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-WI) is taking his responsibilities as House Budget chief very seriously – just what the electorate wants but will clearly pay a high price for his diligence. He will soon unveil a concrete, effective plan for entitlement reform that unfortunately will be resoundingly attacked by the Democrats and receive little support from many Republicans.
The reasons?
Politics. Plain and simple.
The Democrats see this as an opportunity to sway voters who are addicted to entitlements and don’t want them reduced. Republicans are afraid that being fiscally prudent and responsible will cost them votes – and re-election.
This explains, in essence, why the issues of massive government spending with increasing deficits and debt have not been definitively addressed in the past.
Ryan Drumroll
Investor’s Business Daily 03/25/2011
Fiscal Responsibility: House Budget chief Paul Ryan will soon propose detailed entitlement reform. That he is sure to be savaged — even by fellow Republicans — shows how little Washington appreciates courage.
Ryan, a conservative Wisconsinite, will in early April unveil a budget that promises to be among "the boldest fiscal documents in history."
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the House Democrats' fundraising arm — already has a website, stopbenefitcuts.com, condemning the plan as "an extreme Republican scheme that will dismantle Social Security and Medicare as we know it."
At the Manhattan Institute's Reagan Centennial conference on supply-side economics last Tuesday, former Reagan and Bush administration economist Lawrence Lindsey said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi believes the GOP won the House because senior citizens abandoned the Democrats, and she wants them back.
"She is going to make the issue be, 'We are not going to cut your entitlements,'" Lindsey told the audience.
Ryan is also sure to be attacked by anti-spending purists like Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. But House leaders and key GOP senators, such as Senate Budget Committee ranking Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama and freshman Marco Rubio of Florida, can be expected to give Ryan support.
The inevitable "dime-store Democrat" Republicans who will score political points by criticizing Ryan for his boldness are the most deplorable ones.
Based on past remarks, Ryan would change Medicaid to give governors freedom to tailor their states' plans to meet the needs of their particular low-income populations, in the spirit of the 1990s welfare reform.
Medicare would be reformed to give future beneficiaries a payment they could use to choose from a list of Medicare-approved plans. Social Security reform is not likely to take center stage in Ryan's plan.
Quibbles may be justified, but even hard-core Tea Party supporters should applaud Ryan when he makes history early next month by doing what no politician — not even Ronald Reagan — has ever done: get dead serious about cutting the spending of the most difficult-to-control programs of the federal government.
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