Turn around our economy? It's not really that hard

Neal Boortz

Well now! That was quite a ride last week for the American economy, don’t you think? We raised the debt ceiling and within 36 hours America’s debt exceeded our GDP. Then there was the stock market … yeah, that very same stock market that Chairman Obama told us had “come roaring back” in his last State of the Union message. All of those roaring gains for the year were erased in one day.

We then top off the week with a Standard & Poor’s downgrade of America’s credit rating – the first downgrade EVER! Well howdy! Now there’s some change you can believe in. A change for the worse … but then it’s been a constant change for the worse since the dumb masses put this unqualified (but clean looking and eloquent) man into the presidency.

Would you hire someone who hates to cook to be the executive chef at a fine restaurant? Why not? We were mindless enough to hire someone who detests capitalism and free enterprise to oversee our economy, why not hire someone who hates to cook to run our kitchen? And now we profess to be surprised at how things turned out?

OK .. I hear you. “All you ever do is complain, Boortz. What great ideas do YOU have to get our economy going again?” Well, as a matter of fact, I’m glad you asked … I do have some ideas. I’m going to help turn things around right here. And to make things more difficult, I’m going to do this without cutting spending or raising taxes … and I’ll do it backwards and in high heels.

Ready? Here we go; step-by-step.

1. Do you have any idea how much one trillion is? The average human life span is around 2.8 billion seconds. If someone was just now approaching their one trillionth second of life they would have been born in 29,000 BC. NOW do you have a grip on a trillion? Good --- because first we need to address the trillions of dollars of American-owned wealth that are legally resting in overseas accounts where they are safe from American confiscatory taxation. Declare a tax amnesty. Allow that money to come home to work in our economy without taxing it. Can you imagine what a few trillion dollars pumped into the private sector and not into political vote-buying schemes might do for our economy?

2. Thanks to generations of government education most Americans don’t realize that corporations and businesses don’t pay taxes. They collect taxes from customers, employees and shareholders and merely pass them on to the federal government. All wealth in this country is held by individuals, and all taxes are paid by individuals. So let’s get smart and reduce business income taxes immediately --- especially corporate income taxes. To do otherwise is to operate on the belief that the federal government would do a better job of spending this money (shrimp on treadmills?) than would the people who actually did the work and earned it.

3. We’re currently wasting around $100 billion a year on the Department of Education. There has not even been a hint of an improvement in government schools since this useless support system for teacher’s unions was created. Abolish the Education Department and send that $100 billion to the states with the mandate that it be used specifically for education programs to prepare young adults for employment upon graduation from high school and not for college prep. We have far too many English, social studies, LGBT and history majors running around now whose workdays consist of endless repetitions of the phrase “would you like French fries with that?

4. End the hideously expensive war on drugs. At the state and federal level we are spending over $1,700 per second in drug war costs. There’s over $15 billion a year to be saved here. Studies have shown that treatment is a more effective means of reducing drug usage than criminalization and incarceration. Bonus: We reduce crime and make our streets safer.

5. Repeal Davis-Bacon. Allow governments to pay prevailing private sector wages, not inflated union wages, on public works projects. The tax money set aside for these projects would go a lot further, more people would be hired, and the more work could be done.

6. Repeal ObamaCare and the Chris-Dodd consumer finance reform act. Both of these hideous pieces of legislation have been shown to be jobs killers. There is no right to health care, and caveat emptor should still mean something.

7. Immediately halt all regulatory rule-making processes at the federal level. We have enough regulations now to get the job done. More than enough. Businessmen aren’t hiring or expanding because they don’t know what the rules are going to be. Would you obligate yourself for a mortgage if the lender told you they would just fill in the terms later? Yeah … some of you probably would; especially Obama voters.

8. Eliminate capital gains taxes. Too many of us are sitting on investments that have pretty much maxed out, but we won’t cash out because we don’t want to pay the tax. Eliminating these taxes would allow a free flow of investment capital that would enable countless new business startups … and that means new jobs.

9. Make every state a right-to-work state. Completely outlaw compulsory unionism. Nobody should ever have to join a union in order to work. 10. Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s another jobs killer and inhibits corporate growth and profitability. Google it.

11. Institute loser pays at the federal level and urge states to do the same. This means that if you file a lawsuit against someone and you win, good for you. If you lose, you pay the other side’s legal fees. I used to be a member of the American Trial Lawyer’s Association, (now called The American Association for Justice --- bwahahahahah), and I can tell you that many trial lawyers look at filing a lawsuit as comparable to buying a lottery ticket. Not much to lose, but a lot to gain. Put some risk into this equation.

12. Eliminate most business and professional licensing requirements. Why should you need the state’s permission to braid hair or to match pillows with drapes? And while we’re at it find that loon in Florida who said that ending the licensing of interior designers would cost 80,000 lives a year and put her in a glass cube in the Museum of Idiocy. If there isn’t such a museum, start one. It will have to be a huge facility.

13. Send a balanced budget amendment to the states. Most states have to operate under just such a restriction, and they’ll be more than happy to see to it that the federal government does as well.

14. Last – but certainly not least – set a date certain for the expiration of our current tax code. That will force congress to come up with a better plan. I happen to have some ideas along those lines as well.

More ideas? Of course I have more ideas. But they won’t give me any more room here. Stay tuned.

SOURCE

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New Obamacare Violations of Personal Liberty

Star Parker

Who can forget that rare moment of honesty during the campaign to pass Obamacare when Nancy Pelosi said “We have to pass the bill in order for you to find out what’s in it”?

Now we have it and almost daily there are new revelations about the staggering extent to which our private lives and individual freedoms have been stomped on.

We learn now that free birth control in the form of contraceptives, morning after pills, and sterilization is part of the grand Obamacare socialist dream-come-true.

The health insurance that Obamacare mandates that all employers provide and that all citizens acquire must pay 100 percent for these birth control products and services, with no deductible or co-pays. Birth control gets more preferential treatment than cancer or heart disease.

Liberals say government should be kept out of your bedroom. What they mean by this is that it shouldn’t interfere with what you do there, not that it shouldn’t force taxpayers to pay for it.

The provision mandating “preventive services” for women was grafted onto the thousand plus page bill, as it passed through the Senate, by Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski.

After Obamacare became law, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius farmed out this general directive to the Institute of Medicine to determine what such “preventive services” should be.

This is cast as an arms length objective procedure. But in Washington, nothing is objective. There are only interests.

The Institute of Medicine’s website says it’s “an independent non-profit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public.”

But this “independent” organization gets 55 percent of its funding from the federal government. And it also gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry.

So, after months of lobbying by Planned Parenthood, financed in part by the $300 million dollars it gets each year from us taxpayers, the Institute of Medicine offered its “unbiased” recommendations that “preventive services” for women include birth control pills and morning after pills.

Obamacare is a masterpiece in its achievement of leaving no corner of our personal freedoms unviolated. It hijacks our pocketbook, our autonomy of action, and our conscience. The result is to leave us economically and morally impoverished.

A tiny and narrow exemption is carved out so that non-profits with a defined religious mission, whose employees and target audience shares those same values, are not forced to provide insurance that includes free birth control services.

Liberals are committed to religious freedom as long as those religious values do not conflict with their liberal values. Which, practically, means all religion.

Meanwhile, what we have is another in a vast universe of mandated new health care entitlements that is Obamacare. It is the convoluted logic of the liberal mind to use government power to mandate and subsidize free goodies, to sever all links between individual behavior and its consequences, and then claim this will lead to lower costs and more efficiency.

It is no wonder that the financial markets have been tanking since the passage of the debt ceiling bill. That bill simply slaps a band-aid on a fiscal rupture that will start gushing red ink as soon as Obamacare kicks in full tilt in 2014.

The perverse truth is that Obamacare, sold by our president and congressional Democrats as fiscally responsible, is exactly the opposite.

The Congressional Budget Office forecasts huge deficits and growing debt, double what they are today, driven primarily by health care spending, fueled by Obamacare mandated entitlements.

Michele Bachmann was onto something by demanding repeal of Obamacare as a condition for increasing the debt limit.

Americans need to sober up. The challenges facing us are formidable. Repeal of Obamacare is on a growing and most challenging list of things to do.

SOURCE

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America no longer the nation of the Self-Made Man

And Obama is replacing him with socialist man

The idea of the self-made man, the rugged individualist, armed with nothing but a superior work ethic, character, and talent has vanished from Obama’s vision of winning the future. Clearly, the president does not understand that in his bid to bludgeon Republicans into agreeing to additional tax hikes, he was simultaneously signaling his contempt and hostility for the self-made man. Amidst the bloviated debt ceiling talks was a stark reminder of just how badly Team Obama has damaged the nation.

Once upon a time, the image of the rugged individual, a person armed with nothing but a powerful idea, hard work ethic and the determination to persevere, was revered in our country. The notion that success or failure is dependent upon the character, work ethic and industry of each citizen has served as the bedrock American political creed for our nation’s entire history.

No longer. America has been transformed. Last week, Obama reminded us that millions of Americans are now completely dependent upon various government subsidy programs, without which, he says, they could not survive.

48.5 million Americans are dependent upon the government for food stamps to feed themselves. Another 55 million Americans are dependent upon social security. 21 million receive disability assistance subsidies. Still another 50.7 million need the government to provide their healthcare, with 60 million Americans on Medicaid.

Over 5 million Americans need the government to provide direct financial support for housing. Another 19.5 million require tuition assistance from the government to be able to go to college, while yet another 700,000 needed assistance to buy a car through Obama’s Cash for Clunkers. According to Obama’s philosophy, even mundane tasks such as weatherproofing windows and doors was, apparently beyond the ability of Americans to accomplish without direct government assistance.

Obama talked incessantly about these millions of Americans, now grown dependent upon government checks, as a way to increase political pressure on Republicans and force them to agree to a bad deal on the debt ceiling.

Obama wanted to remind Republicans and Tea Party loyalists that millions of Americans were going to be adversely impacted if government checks were not issued on time.

Add up all the millions now grown dependent upon the expanding entitlement system and Americans are left with the sobering fact that nearly 50% of our entire population is now dependent upon the government for some kind of subsidy for their food, housing, education and healthcare.

Instead of the idea of the self-made man, Obama tries to motivate Americans with a disturbing notion that government handouts, which until recently carried a negative stigma, are their right, and that entitlements should be showered upon anyone with almost any need.

Instead of success being earned through hard work and playing by the rules, Obama seems to believe that the government should provide. So, it is not surprising that Obama has already concluded that there is nothing morally wrong with pandering to the 50% of the population now dependent upon Team Obama, while taking money and opportunity away from others.

How far we have fallen! Government dependency and “getting something for nothing” carried with it a sense of shame. Benjamin Franklin advised anyone coming to America to be industrious and prepared to work hard. Franklin’s notions of thrift, self-improvement and industry were an essential part of the early Founders’ Protestant work ethic upon which our nation was founded.

Alexis DeTocqueville recognized that the American work ethic was the cornerstone of our rapid economic rise and success. Americans, observed DeTocqueville, were a perpetually busy and hard working people--“the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural and honest condition of human existence.”

Early settlers and immigrants to the United Sates were once provided stern warnings that “if you wish a calm and cheerful life, better stay home --the good advice pray and work is nowhere more to the point than in the United States.”

In his excellent book, Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington quotes Cuban American Alex Alvarez who, as recently as 1999, warned new Cuban immigrants of what they would confront in America. “Welcome to the capitalist system. Each of you is responsible for the amount of money you have in your pocket. The Government is not responsible for whether you eat, or whether you are poor or rich. The government doesn’t guarantee you a job or a house.”

In a shockingly short period of time, Team Obama has almost destroyed the American creed of hard work, industry, talent, thrift and delayed gratification. As a result of Obama’s policies, nearly 50% of our citizens are now encouraged or seduced into finding some subsidy program that is funded through the forced generosity of others. If no such program exists, Team Obama has promised to create one.

Democrats, led by Obama, are not happy with Republicans these days and they view the Tea Party as a group of jihadists. But Obama’s real war is on the American Dream and the idea of the Self-made man.

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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