A plug for Ted Cruz

Below is a video by a Leftist saying what is bad about Ted Cruz.  It sounds like a list of reasons to vote for him to me.  It is however a good indicator of Leftist priorities.



The speaker is Robert Reich.  He was the Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997.

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New York Times: Young Female Voters Not Warming to Hillary

    In the sun-drenched student center on the Pennsylvania State University campus here, a few days after Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont trounced Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire Democratic primary last week, Renee Tillman, Melanie Suarez and Kamryn Sandidge were picking at their lunchtime salads when they were asked if they considered themselves feminists.

    The three, all sophomores, shook their heads. “I couldn’t even tell you what a feminist is,” said Ms. Tillman, 19, who is African-American. She and her friends note that the nation already has a black president; they see themselves in a postgender world. As Ms. Sandidge, also African-American, said, “I don’t find gender that important.”

    A few tables away, Caela Camazine, a 19-year-old freshman, said she was “definitely” a feminist. Reproductive rights are her top priority, and the idea of a woman in the White House evokes her childhood dream of a career in medicine. It always bothered her, she said, when people referred to doctors as “he” or “him.”

    “Having a female president to me means opening the door for that pronoun to shift,” she said. Yet she plans to vote for a man: Mr. Sanders.

    It is as if Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, based partly on revealing the power of female voters, has instead revealed something else: a generational schism that threatens to undermine it. Mrs. Clinton lost the women’s vote in New Hampshire by 11 percentage points. Broken down by age, the results were even more striking: She led by 19 points among women 65 and older, but trailed by a huge margin, 59 points, among millennial voters, ages 18 to 29.

Gee, Hillary's people skills aren't serving her well when it comes to connecting to young people? Who'd have seen that coming?

You can almost forgive Hillary for being so off the mark here. Establishment Democrats truly believe that nothing has changed in the way of racial, ethnic, or gender equality in the last sixty years. In fact, their entire electoral strategy is pretty much based on convincing the voters that it's 1956. Young female voters who've had an African-American president since they were drinking juice boxes and watching Hannah Montana definitely aren't buying it.

Many think Bernie's appeal is in the constant promise of free stuff to a portion of the electorate too young to understand that's a lie, and much of it certainly is. However, the biggest difference between the Democratic front-runners is in level of authenticity.

Hillary has none.  Everything she says and does comes across with a calculation that doesn't appeal to the voters of the party that's goes after emotion and nothing else.

Bernie may be insanely wrong about everything, but one can easily tell that he believes in everything he's saying with every fiber of his being. In the battle between the judgmental grandma who trots out an octogenarian to slut shame young women into voting for her and the crazy uncle who keeps promising that this next birthday will be your best ever, the latter will win every time.

Another thing at play here is the fact that Hillary Clinton isn't a real feminist, or even an empowered woman. She's where she is solely because she rode the coattails of two extremely successful men who publicly embarrassed her, one personally and the other professionally. She's an old-school Democrat who views people as members of voting blocs and not individuals.

To her horror, young, free-thinking American women are, well, thinking freely.

SOURCE

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Almost Half of US Residents Still Pay No Federal Income Tax

According to data published by the IRS and the U.S. Census Bureau, 44.2 percent of U.S. residents paid no federal income tax in 2013 (the most recent year for which data is available).

No doubt many of the non-payers would willingly pay income tax in exchange for the chance to work in a more dynamic economy that generated more and better jobs. But our labor market has been hobbled by government regulations, cronyism, government power grabs, a tax code nobody understands, and federal waste.

In 1962, the percentage of people who did not pay federal income taxes themselves and who were not claimed as dependents by someone who paid federal income taxes stood at 24.0 percent; it fell to 12.6 percent by 1969 before beginning a ragged and ultimately steady increase.

By 2000, the percentage was 34.1 percent; by 2009, it was 49.6 percent. The number dropped to 44.7 percent in 2011, and it has hovered around 44 percent ever since.

An astounding 33.67 percent of tax returns are filed only to claim benefits while not paying any income tax. That is up from 18.64 percent in 1990.

As President Ronald Reagan said on Jan, 20, 1981, in his inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

The federal government stands in the way of success for too many people. Establishing a limited federal government is as critical now as when Reagan said those words.

SOURCE

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The Lure of Socialism

By Thomas Sowell

Many people of mature years are amazed at how many young people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders, and are enthusiastic about the socialism he preaches.

Many of those older people have lived long enough to have seen socialism fail, time and again, in countries around the world. Venezuela, with all its rich oil resources, is currently on the verge of economic collapse, after its heady fling with socialism.

But, most of the young have missed all that, and their dumbed-down education is far more likely to present the inspiring rhetoric of socialism than to present its dismal track record.

Socialism is in fact a wonderful vision — a world of the imagination far better than any place anywhere in the real world, at any time over the thousands of years of recorded history. Even many conservatives would probably prefer to live in such a world, if they thought it was possible.

Who would not want to live in a world where college was free, along with many other things, and where government protected us from the shocks of life and guaranteed our happiness? It would be Disneyland for adults!

Free college of course has an appeal to the young, especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money.

Consider the costs of just one professor teaching just one course. He or she has probably spent more than 20 years being educated, from kindergarten to the Ph.D., before ending up standing in front of a class and trying to convey some of the knowledge picked up in all those years. That means being fed, clothed and housed all those years, along with other expenses.

All the people who grew the food, manufactured the clothing and built the housing used by this one professor, for at least two decades, had to be compensated for their efforts, or those efforts would not continue. And of course someone has to produce food, clothing and shelter for all the students in this one course, as well as books, computers and other requirements or amenities.

Add up all these costs — and multiply by a hundred or so — and you have a rough idea of what going to college costs. Whether these costs are paid by using money in a capitalist economy or by some other mechanism in a feudal economy, a socialist economy, or whatever, there are heavy costs to pay.

Moreover, under any economic system, those costs are either going to be paid or there are not going to be any colleges. Money is just an artificial device for getting real things done.

Those young people who understand this, whether clearly or vaguely, are not likely to be deterred from wanting socialism. Because what they really want is for somebody else to pay for their decision to go to college.

A market economy is one in which whoever makes a decision is the one who pays for that decision. It forces people to be sure that what they want to do is really worth what it is going to cost.

Even the existing subsidies of college have led many people to go to college who have very little interest in, or benefit from, going to college, except for enjoying the social scene while postponing adult responsibilities for a few years.

Whether judging by test results, by number of hours per week devoted to studying or by on-campus interviews, it is clear that today’s college students learn a lot less than college students once did. If college becomes "free," even more people can attend college without bothering to become educated and without acquiring any economically meaningful skills.

More fundamentally, making all sorts of other things "free" means more of those things being wasted as well. Even worse, it means putting more and more of the decisions that shape our lives into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who control the purse strings.

Obamacare has given us a foretaste of what that means in reality, despite how wonderful it may sound in political rhetoric.

Worst of all, government giveaways polarize society into segments, each trying to get what it wants at somebody else’s expense, creating mutual bitterness that can tear a society apart. Some seem to blithely assume that "the rich" can be taxed to pay for what they want — as if "the rich" don’t see what is coming and take their wealth elsewhere.

SOURCE

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