This Economics 101 video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity gives seven reasons why the political elite are wrong to push for more taxes. If allowed to succeed, the hopelessly misguided pushing to raise taxes would only worsen our fiscal mess while harming the economy.
The seven reasons provided by the video against this approach are as follows:
1) Tax increases are not needed;
2) Tax increases encourage more spending;
3) Tax increases harm economic performance;
4) Tax increases foment social discord;
5) Tax increases almost never raise as much revenue as projected;
6) Tax increases encourage more loopholes; and,
7) Tax increases undermine competitiveness
President Obama is insistent that taxes must go up to close the deficit. He says it’s just common sense that taxes must go up, because the math says so. But if he gets his way, the numbers won’t add up the way he says they will.
President Obama wants to raise taxes on “the rich.” But the Treasury will never collect the revenue he says will come from such hikes, because the rich will change their behavior to escape the punitive levies.
The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period. Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.
This should be no surprise. When governments raise taxes on the rich, the rich change their behavior to avoid the higher taxes. Liberals understand this phenomenon when they raise taxes on cigarettes to discourage smoking, but they never seem to apply the same principle to income. If you tax income more heavily, you’ll end up with less income to tax, just like if you raise taxes on cigarettes, smokers purchase fewer packs.
Work less. They can work less, thereby earning less income to tax. This makes sense for high earners when their rate hits or exceeds 50 percent. Who wants to work when you take home half or less of the additional money you earn?
Earn differently. They can also change the composition of their income. In the U.S., capital gains and dividends are properly taxed at a lower rate than wage and salary income (ideally, they wouldn’t be taxed at all). Since the rich are often business owners, they can shift their compensation from wages and salaries to these less-taxed forms. They can also take compensation in forms that are excluded from taxation, like more comprehensive health insurance plans.
Seek shelter. Lastly, when the IRS comes calling for more, the rich can pay high-priced lawyers and accountants to scrounge the tax code for every last deduction, credit, and exemption to minimize their tax liability. This diverts resources that could’ve gone into creating jobs in other areas of the economy.
Taxing the rich more heavily distracts from the real cause of our debt and deficit woes: entitlements like Social Security and Medicare driving overspending. Washington has an overspending problem, not an under-taxing one. It would be better for Congress and the President to focus on the true cause of the problem than to waste time on counterproductive tax hikes that would never raise the expected revenue and would slow the already stagnant economy to boot.
On Tuesday I went to the downtown post office with a relative of mine. I noticed that the Occupy Little Rock tents were right next to the parking lot. I suggested that she lock the door while I was in the post office and she replied there was no way she was staying in the car!!! Before leaving the post office I received a lot of change and the person commented, “You got so much change you can buy something to eat on the ride home.” I joked, “I just have to walk a few feet since I live in one of those tents over there.” Several people turned immediately to get a better look at me. Then I admitted that I was joking and we all had a laugh.
Plans apparently are underway to begin an end of the all-night camps, though City Hall hasn’t yet revealed the specifics of its plan. To date, the city has been remarkably tolerant. The Occupy LR group has had remarkably long staying power, given its lack of a central, concrete mobilizing action agenda.
I also think the city of Little Rock has “been remarkably tolerant.” However, Brantley and I probably disagree on what should be the “mobilizing action agenda.”
I think their main emphasis should be in the Washington area and should be criticizing big government. Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute has pointed out :
A new report from MSN Money illustrates how the political elite is getting very rich by plundering honest Americans. America has 3,033 counties, and they identified the 15 richest jurisdictions from that list.
Of those 15 super-elite counties (the top 1/2 of one percent), 10 are in the Washington metropolitan area.
It is clear to me that outrage should be directed in this direction instead of the private market. Below is the complete article by Dan Mitchell:
A new report from MSN Money illustrates how the political elite is getting very rich by plundering honest Americans. America has 3,033 counties, and they identified the 15 richest jurisdictions from that list.
Of those 15 super-elite counties (the top 1/2 of one percent), 10 are in the Washington metropolitan area. I’ve identified them with stars in the map.
So if you really want to be cynical, you could count them as auxiliary counties of Washington, DC. That’s probably an unfair conclusion, but TARP was unfair to honest and hard-working people, so I don’t feel too guilty.
As far as I can tell, the only untarnished jurisdiction in the top 15 is Douglas County, Colorado. And given that these are the folks who are implementing a good school choice plan, it seems that we have a group of productive people who also believe in doing the right thing.
For more information about the overcompensation of bureaucrats, this video is loaded with information.
There Are too Many Bureaucrats and They Are Paid too Much
America has too many bureaucrats and they are dramatically overpaid. This mini-documentary uses government data to show how federal, state, and local governments are in fiscal trouble in part because of excessive pay for a bloated civil service.
___________________
Most important of all, remember that any proposals to increase government spending will further widen the income gulf between the political elite and regular Americans. And any initiative to boost the tax burden would lead to the same result.
Science Matters #2: Former supermodel Kathy Ireland tells Mike Huckabee about how she became pro-life after reading what the science books have to say.
Everyone remembers Kathy Ireland from her Sports Illustrated days and actually she has became a very successful business person. However, I wanted to talk about her pro-life views.
Back on April 27, 2009 Fox News ran a story by Hollie McKay(“Supermodel Kathy Ireland Lashes Out Against Pro Choice,”) on Ireland.
It’s no secret that the majority of Hollywood stars are strong advocates for a woman’s right to choose whether or not she wants to terminate a pregnancy, however former “Sports Illustrated” supermodel-turned-entrepreneur-turned-author Kathy Ireland has gone against the grain of the glitterati and spoken out against abortion.
“My entire life I was pro-choice — who was I to tell another woman what she could or couldn’t do with her body? But when I was 18, I became a Christian and I dove into the medical books, I dove into science,” Ireland told Tarts while promoting her insightful new book “Real Solutions for Busy Mom: Your Guide to Success and Sanity.”
“What I read was astounding and I learned that at the moment of conception a new life comes into being. The complete genetic blueprint is there, the DNA is determined, the blood type is determined, the sex is determined, the unique set of fingerprints that nobody has had or ever will have is already there.”
However Ireland admitted that she did everything she could to avoid becoming a believer in pro-life.
“I called Planned Parenthood and begged them to give me their best argument and all they could come up with that it is really just a clump of cells and if you get it early enough it doesn’t even look like a baby. Well, we’re all clumps of cells and the unborn does not look like a baby the same way the baby does not look like a teenager, a teenager does not look like a senior citizen. That unborn baby looks exactly the way human beings are supposed to look at that stage of development. It doesn’t suddenly become a human being at a certain point in time,” Ireland argued. “I’ve also asked leading scientists across our country to please show me some shred of evidence that the unborn is not a human being. I didn’t want to be pro-life, but this is not a woman’s rights issue but a human rights issue.”
My good friend Dr. Kevin R. Henke is a scientist and also an atheistic evolutionist. I had a lot of discussions with Kevin over religious views. I remember going over John 7:17 with him one day. It says:
John 7:17 (Amplified Bible)
17If any man desires to do His will (God’s pleasure), he will know (have the needed illumination to recognize, and can tell for himself) whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking from Myself and of My own accord and on My own authority.
I challenged Kevin to read a chapter a day of the Book of John and pray to God and ask God, “Dear God, if you are there then reveal yourself to me, and I pledge to serve you the rest of my life.”
Kevin did that and he even wrote down the thoughts that came to his mind and sent it to me and these thoughts filled a notebook.
Kevin did not become a Christian, but I am still praying for him. I do respect Kevin because he is an honest man. Interestingly enough he told me that he was pro-life because the unborn baby has all the genetic code at the time of conception that they will have for the rest of their life. Below are some other comments by other scientists:
Dr. Hymie Gordon (Mayo Clinic): “By all criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth (Harvard University Medical School): “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”
Dr. Alfred Bongioanni (University of Pennsylvania): “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.”
Dr. Jerome LeJeune, “the Father of Modern Genetics” (University of Descartes, Paris): “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence.”
The fundamental principal of the free society is voluntary cooperation. The economic market, buying and selling, is one example. But it’s only one example. Voluntary cooperation is far broader than that. To take an example that at first sight seems about as far away as you can get __ the language we speak; the words we use; the complex structure of our grammar; no government bureau designed that. It arose out of the voluntary interactions of people seeking to communicate with one another. Or consider some of the great scientific achievements of our time __ the discoveries of an Einstein or Newton __ the inventions of Thomas Alva Edison or an Alexander Graham Bell or even consider the great charitable activities of a Florence Nightingale or an Andrew Carnegie. These weren’t done under orders from a government office. They were done by individuals deeply interested in what they were doing, pursing their own interests, and cooperating with one another.
This kind of voluntary cooperation is built so deeply into the structure of our society that we tend to take it for granted. Yet the whole of our Western civilization is the unintended consequence of that kind of a voluntary cooperation of people cooperating with one another to pursue their own interests, yet in the process, building a great society.
DISCUSSION
Participants: Robert McKenzie, Moderator; Michael Harrington, Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee; Milton Friedman; Russell Peterson, Governor of Delaware, 1969_1973; Robert Galvin, Chairman, Motorola, Inc.; Congressman Barber B. Conable, Jr., Ways and Means Committee, U.S. Congress
McKENZIE: It seemed to me he was saying that the golden age for America, when it was truly a land of opportunity, was the late 19th, early 20th century, no regulations, no permits, no red tape.
HARRINGTON: I would argue that the government played a decisive role in an enormous grant to the railroads in creating an America capitalist economy. And secondly, if you go back to that golden age, you find that the government constantly intervened in a rather characteristic way, it used troops against strikers. American labor history has been the most violent, bloody class struggle anywhere in the world, and the government, up until 1932, the law, the courts, the society, always sided with business, always sided against working people. Therefore, I would argue that both economically and in terms of repressing the attempts of people to assert their freedom, our government prior to the rise of the welfare state in this country was more or less owned by business.
McKENZIE: Milton Friedman.
FRIEDMAN: Michael Harrington is seeing the hole in the barn door and he’s not looking at the barn door itself. The plain fact is during the whole of that period, while government did intervene from time to time, and mostly to do harm, I agree with him that government intervention was, in the main, not a good thing; tariffs, for example. On the other hand, throughout that whole period government spending, Federal Government spending, central government spending, never was more than 3 percent of the national income. It was trivial. The land grants to the railroads were a minor factor. I’m not. I don’t approve of them. I’m not saying they were a good thing, but they were a very minor factor. One has to have a sense of proportion and that goes to the whole discussion, that I am not an anarchist. I am not in favor of eliminating government. I believe we need a government, but we need a government that sets a framework and rules within which individuals, pursuing their own objectives, can work together and cooperate together not only in economic areas.
McKENZIE: I want to hold you for a moment, though, to that golden age theory, that we were best when we were regulated least in the late 19th and early 20th century, because remember the sweatshop analogy comes out of there, when there was no attempt to restrict hours of work or to regulate working conditions. Now is that a view you accept of that period?
PETERSON: Well I think it’s necessary to contrast what’s happened in the interim. I don’t see how we can talk about that without comparing it with the interim period. Now you talked earlier about the fact that during the last fifty years we had squandered some of our inheritance of freedom, and I believe during the last fifty years we really have improved our freedom. I spent over half that time working for one of the world’s largest industrial companies, the Dupont Company, deeply involved with the launching of new ventures; and got to know the free enterprise system well, and have a very healthy respect for it. But during that interval, and particularly during the last few years when I have been more involved with government and with environmental matters, I have become convinced that our freedom was improved when the people are allowed to add to their freedom in the marketplace, the freedom to vote with their ballots in the polling place, to put some restraints on the excesses of the marketplace, particularly when you’re concerned with such things as the long-term impact on our health from the pollution of our environment, the introduction of carcinogenic materials, or the radiation of our people with nuclear products.
FRIEDMAN: What about putting some restraints on the excesses of government. Hasn’t that become an ever more serious problem? How is it that a government of the people, supposedly, does things which a very large fraction of the people would really prefer not to have done, such as overtax them, over govern them, over regulate them. I think you’re looking, again, at one side and not the other. And, of course, I agree we have to look at what’s happened in the interim. We’re better off than we were fifty years ago. Never would deny that. But we stand on the shoulders of the people that went before us, and we have to look at how much they achieved from where they started, and that was the period in which you had the tremendous influx of immigrants from abroad, millions and millions and millions of them, when you opened up a new continent, when you had achievements.
McKENZIE: Milton, are you saying, though, that there’s any sense, in which you’d rather go back to those circumstances where there are no regulations of factory work, no hours, limitations of hours worked. Do you want to return to that or do you say that was a stepping stone to where we are now?
FRIEDMAN: It depends on what you mean by circumstances. I don’t want to have to go back to using a horse and buggy instead of an automobile, but I would prefer to go back to the kinds of governmental regulations, or absence of regulations, the greater degree of freedom which was given to individuals to pursue one activity or another, which prevailed then, than which prevails now.
PETERSON: I think that, really, our industrial leaders have been dragged into the future screaming. They resisted the Child Labor Laws, they resisted Social Security, labor unions, and now the environmental movement. Once the government forced them to pay attention to those, by the voting of the people in the ballot box and in the polling place, then the industrial leaders, business leaders, paid attention to those rules and have done a good job in most cases of abiding by them.
FRIEDMAN: Excuse me.
McKENZIE: Now Bob Galvin is an industrialist, now come on, is that a fair statement?
GALVIN: Maybe the industrialists have a clearer view of history and its prospects. The most precious asset we possess is freedom. The easiest way to lose one’s freedom is to go into receivership; and I mean economic receivership. Because a receiver is a dictator. And to the degree that we employ the costs and the burdens of government that lead us in the direction of further debt, ultimate receivership, and then the political consequence of the imposition of the political dictator over the economic and the job and the living rights of the individual, maybe the industrialists can see farther down the pike as to the consequence of all this.
McKENZIE: Michael Harrington.
HARRINGTON: I just think that __ two things. One, to view freedom positively. I think people over 65 years of age in the United States today are freer now because of Medicare. I do not think that the freedom to die from the lack of medicine was a very good thing. Secondly, related to industrialists, I think that one of the startling things about American history is that when Franklin Roosevelt was saving the system from itself, the main beneficiaries were screaming bloody murder at him for being a traitor to his class. When he was in fact the salvation of that class. And I think if you, therefore, if you look at our history, I do think you find a tremendous myopia on the part of industrialists, and you find that the positive increments to our freedom, interestingly enough, have not come from the college graduates, but often from people with __ not from the best people, it’s come from working people. It’s come from poor people, it’s come from blacks and Hispanics and the like.
McKENZIE: Milton, would you reply, but then tell us why you took us to Hong Kong to prove something.
FRIEDMAN: Sure. Unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with Michael Harrington, I will agree in part with what he’s just said.
Steve Jobs, the late Apple founder and digital pioneer, told President Obama in a 2010 meeting that his anti-business attitude and enthusiasm for federal regulations could spell doom for his re-election bid, according to an upcoming biography of the iconic entrepreneur.
Jobs specifically cited a number of impediments to job creation and future economic growth, including onerous business regulations and stubborn teachers’ unions preventing reform of the country’s education system.
The Huffington Post, which obtained an advance copy of the book – titled “Steve Jobs” – said the man “seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.”
“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.
Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.
If Obama did not become more business friendly, Jobs warned, he would be “headed for a one-term presidency.”
Jobs’s legacy, wrote Heritage President Ed Feulner, is antithetical to the president’s approach to governing. The man “was a living refutation of all that liberals constantly tell us about our country,” Feulner wrote.
Steve Jobs was raised as a conservative Lutheran but he chose to leave those beliefs behind. Below is a very good article on his life. COVER STORY ARTICLE | Issue: “Steve Jobs 1955-2011″ October 22, 2011 A god of our age Who was Steve Jobs? A revered technology pioneer and a relentless innovator, the Apple […]
COUNTER-DEMONSTRATION: At Kappa Sigma house in Fayetteville. The Drew Wilson photo above went viral last night — at least in Arkansas e-mail and social media users — after the Fayetteville Flyer posted it in coverage of an Occupy Northwest Arkansas demonstration in Fayetteville. The 1 percent banner was unfurled briefly on the Kappa Sigma frat […]
(If you want to check out other posts I have done about about Steve Jobs:Some say Steve Jobs was an atheist , Steve Jobs and Adoption , What is the eternal impact of Steve Jobs’ life? ,Steve Jobs versus President Obama: Who created more jobs? ,Steve Jobs’ view of death and what the Bible has to say about it ,8 things you might not know about Steve Jobs ,Steve […]
(If you want to check out other posts I have done about about Steve Jobs:Some say Steve Jobs was an atheist , Steve Jobs and Adoption , What is the eternal impact of Steve Jobs’ life? ,Steve Jobs versus President Obama: Who created more jobs? ,Steve Jobs’ view of death and what the Bible has to say about it ,8 things you might not know about Steve Jobs ,Steve […]
It is strange that the New Yorker Magazine did no research. (If you want to check out other posts I have done about about Steve Jobs:Some say Steve Jobs was an atheist , Steve Jobs and Adoption , What is the eternal impact of Steve Jobs’ life? ,Steve Jobs versus President Obama: Who created more jobs? ,Steve Jobs’ view of death and what the Bible […]
According to published reports Steve Jobs was a Buddhist and he had a very interesting quote on death which I discussed in another post. Back in 1979 I saw the film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? by Francis Schaeffer and I also read the book. Francis Schaeffer observes in How Should We Then Live: The Rise […]
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address Uploaded by StanfordUniversity on Mar 7, 2008 It was a quite moving story to hear about Steve Jobs’ adoption. Ryan Scott Bomberger (www.toomanyaborted.com), co-founder of The Radiance Foundation, an adoptee and adoptive father: “As a creative professional, [Jobs’] visionary work has helped my own visions become reality. But his […]
I have written several posts on Steve Jobs and they are listed below. Today I want to look at the eternal impact of Steve Jobs’ life. Below are the words of – R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.: “Christians cannot leave the matter where the secular world will […]
I loved reading this article below. (Take a look at the link to other posts I have done on Steve Jobs.) David Boaz makes some great observations: How much value is the Post Office creating this year? Or Amtrak? Or Solyndra? And if you point out that the Post Office does create value for its […]
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address Uploaded by StanfordUniversity on Mar 7, 2008 Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death […]
Things you may not know about Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs leans against his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs (Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis) For all of his years in the spotlight at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs in many ways remains an inscrutable figure — even in his death. Fiercely private, Jobs concealed most specifics about […]
Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011. I personally am very grateful to him for helping the world so much with his ideas and I have written about that before. Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute noted: He’s built a $360 billion company. That presumably means at least $352 billion of wealth in the […]
Did Steve Jobs help people even though he did not give away a lot of money? (I just finished a post concerning Steve’s religious beliefs and a post about 8 things you may not know about Steve Jobs) Uploaded by UM0kusha0kusha on Sep 16, 2010 clip from The First Round Up *1934* ~~enjoy!! ______________________________________________ In the short film […]
Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion).
On my blog www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, I did not see any of them in the recent debt deal that Congress adopted. Now I am trying another approach. Every week from now on I will send you an email explaining different reasons why we need the Balanced Budget Amendment. It will appear on my blog on “Thirsty Thursday” because the government is always thirsty for more money to spend.
In a private conference call with a handful of university students across the country, GOP Presidential hopeful — and President Obama’s former Ambassador to China — Jon Huntsman argued in support of one of the most far-reaching, controversial elements of the conservative political agenda.
As first reported in a broader piece by theHuffington Post, Huntsman argued in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to maintain a balanced budget — an innocuous-sounding, but radical plan pushed by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and numerous other congressional conservatives.
“We’re going to have to fight for a balanced budget amendment,” Huntsman said. “Every governor in this country has a balanced budget amendment. It keeps everybody honest. It’s the best safeguard imaginable.”
At its core, a balanced-budget amendment would make it unconstitutional for the government to spend more than it collects in revenue — a requirement that, without safeguards, would make stimulus and emergency spending impossible.
Faced with a similar requirement, states responded to the recession with budget cuts that exacerbated the downturn.
But Republicans on the Hill have taken the idea a step further to the right by including a provision that would make it functionally impossible for the government to raise taxes. The goal, then, is to force future Congresses to slash or eliminate federal spending programs — which disproportionately benefit the needy and elderly — to bring them in line with a revenue base that’s likely to shrink over time.
It’s unclear whether Huntsman supports this version of a Balanced Budget Amendment, or a less extreme one. But the nature of the idea is such that it allows conservatives to signal their support for slashing programs without providing the unpopular details. And in the GOP primary, this will likely be a key test for candidates hoping to curry favor with influential conservatives like DeMint
Over the last 20 or 30 years I have heard conservatives say that it is a real shame that we are headed towards a bankrupt European liberal socialist kind of state. However, we are now there.
Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.
With seemingly every day bringing more bad news from Europe, many are beginning to ask how much longer the United States has before our welfare state follows the European model into bankruptcy. The bad news is: It may already have.
This year, the fourth straight year that we borrowed more than $1 trillion to support the U.S. government, our budget deficit will top $1.3 trillion, 8.7 percent of our GDP. If you think that sounds bad, it’s because it is. In fact, only two European countries, Greece and Ireland, have larger budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Things are only slightly better when you look at the size of our national debt, which now exceeds $15.3 trillion, 102 percent of GDP. Just four European countries have larger national debts than we do — Greece and Ireland again, plus Portugal and Italy. That means the U.S. government is actually less fiscally responsible than countries like France, Belgium, or Spain.
And as bad as things are right now, we are on an even worse course for the future. If one adds the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare to our official national debt, we really owe $72 trillion, by the Obama administration’s projections for future Medicare savings under Obamacare, and as much as $137 trillion if you use more realistic projections. Under the best-case scenario, then, this amounts to more than 480 percent of GDP. And, under more realistic projections, we owe an astounding 911 percent of GDP.
At that point does the United States cease being the United States as we have known it?
Meanwhile, counting both official debt and unfunded pension and health-care liabilities, the most indebted nation in Europe is Greece, which owes 875 percent of GDP. That’s right, the United States potentially owes more than Greece. France, the second most insolvent nation in Europe, owes just 549 percent of GDP. Even under the most optimistic scenario, we owe more than such fiscal basket cases as Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.
So far we have been able to avoid the consequences of our profligate ways because the very public turmoil in Europe has helped prop us up as the world’s safe haven for foreign investment. Compared to the euro’s problems, the dollar looks pretty safe. This means that others are still willing to lend us money at absurdly low rates. But that won’t last forever. In fact, already seven European countries, including Germany and Sweden, have better credit ratings than the U.S.
Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that our welfare state is not yet as big as Europe’s. But the key word here is “yet.” Today, our federal government spends more than 24 percent of GDP. Throw in state and local spending, and government at all levels consumes over 43 percent of everything produced in this country over the course of a year. As bad as that is, it’s still less than Europe, where the average of government spending at all levels is slightly more than 50 percent of GDP. But the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal-government spending in this country is currently on a path to exceed 42 percent of GDP by 2050. Government spending at all levels will exceed 59 percent of GDP. And CBO assumes state and local spending will decline in the future, which seems unlikely.
By way of comparison, today, Ireland is the only country in Europe with a bigger government than the U.S.’s will be in 2050. That’s right, one can look at countries like France and Greece, or even Denmark and Sweden, and realize that we will eventually have bigger governments than those quintessential welfare states have today.
At that point does the United States cease being the United States as we have known it? At the very least, can our economy survive such a crushing burden of government spending, and its attendant level of taxes and debt?
Given this looming disaster, President Obama has just submitted a budget that explicitly rejects “austerity,” avoids any reform of Medicare or Social Security, and adds some $7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years….
Minimum wage laws seem like a good idea, but arbitrarily mandating a certain wage can have terrible consequences. This CF&P Foundation mini-documentary reveals that business are not charities, so if the minimum wage is set above the market level, this eliminates job opportunities — particularly for the less fortunate members of society. Since employees and employers should have freedom of contract, the right minimum wage is zero. www.freedomandprosperity.org
A closer look at the unemployment data, though , suggests that minimum wage laws also deserve a big share of the blame. In this Center for Freedom and Prosperity video, a former intern of mine (continuing a great tradition) explains that politicians destroyed jobs when they increased the minimum wage by more than 40 percent over a three-year period.
Mr. Divounguy is correct when he says businesses are not charities and that they only create jobs when they think a worker will generate net revenue. Higher minimum wages, needless to say, are especially destructive for people with poor work skills and limited work experience. This is why young people and minorities tend to suffer most – which is exactly what we see in the government data, with the teenage unemployment rates now at an astounding (and depressing) 26 percent level and blacks suffering from a joblessness rate of more than 15 percent.
In a free society, there should be no minimum wage law. From a philosophical perspective, such requirements interfere with the freedom of contract. In the imperfect world of politics, thought, the best we can hope for is that politicians occasionally do the right thing. Sadly, the recent minimum wage increases that have done so much damage were signed into law by President Bush. It’s worth noting that President Obama’s hands also are dirty on this issue, since he supported the job-killing measure when it passed the Senate in 2007. When the stupid party and the evil party both agree on a certain policy, that’s known as bipartisanship. In the real world, however, it’s called unemployment.
Businesses should be allowed to fail if they lose money. It is amazing to me that GM was not allowed to go out of business and the same is true for any other business that is losing money.
In the video clip above Milton Friedman explains the necessity in a free market system of allowing unsuccessful businesses to go bankrupt w/out the government bailing them out. Profit/Loss system where the consumer decides who wins, NOT the federal government.
The same misguided arguments for a government bailout of GM made 30 years ago are being made today by President Barack Obama and the other statists in congress.
I hope there are more people out there as concerned as I am about this Administration’s assault on the free market. We need more Milton Friedmans in public policy today making the case for free enterprise and forcfully advocating on behalf of the market. We need more voices sounding the alarm about the ever-increasing attacks on our nation’s creators of wealth–small business.
The barons of big government in Washington are replacing our nation’s history of free-market capitalism with Crony Capitalism, where success depends not on your ability to produce a product the consumer wants to buy, but on how many lobbyists you have in Washington to force taxpayers to subsidize your company.
I agree with Milton Friedman 100 percent that government bailouts are an abomination and a disgrace.
RUSH: I mentioned earlier in the program that Santorum, people have dug deep and they found a speech that he gave back in 2008 in Ave Maria, Florida, at Ave Maria University. Drudge has this plastered up. The Democrats have found it. It’s all over the place. Think Progress and whatever leftist think tanks have dug this up, and it’s part of the predictable attempt to impugn Santorum as an absolute religious nut and wacko. But he did say these things and he’ll to have an answer for these things when queried. Let’s play these sound bites. We have three of them. This is where Santorum has said that Satan has set his sights on America. Again, this is at Ave Maria University, August of 2008, in Ave Maria, Florida.
SANTORUM: The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States, and that’s been the case for now almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.
RUSH: Okay, so he said it. Can we take you back to the United Nations? What was it, 2000… I don’t know, three or four or five or six. Hugo Chavez shows up, he speaks either the afternoon Bush spoke earlier or the next day, but he gets to the microphone at the United Nations and the General Assembly and starts sniffing around. (Sniffing) He says, “I can still smell the sulfur. The Devil was here,” and he had accused Bush of being the Devil. And the assembled monsters that look like they’re out of Star Wars bar scene that made up the UN General Assembly all started laughing. So we’re back to the double standard. Hugo Chavez can show up and call George W. Bush Satan. “Hey, hey! You know what, that’s right! That’s great. Let’s laugh about it. Let’s applaud it.” Santorum gives a speech in Ave Maria, Florida, back in 2008. “Oh, my God, we’re dealing with a nutcase! Oh, wow, what a fanatic weirdo. What are we gonna get next, an exorcism?” So the double standard does exist. Here’s more from the same speech from Santorum.
SANTORUM: Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of these strong plants that have so deeply rooted in American tradition. He was successful. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of “smart” people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different, pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it, “because we’re smart;” and so academia a long time ago fell.
RUSH: Satan conquered academia: Rick Santorum, August 29, 2008. And it was in 2006, September 20th, to be exact, where Hugo Chavez strode confidently to the microphones of the UN and was sniffing around and said, “The Devil came here yesterday. It still smells of sulfur today.” And let’s not forget, ladies and gentlemen, Saul Alinsky, who’s the primary mentor of “Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm!” Saul Alinsky, the author of the book Rules for Radicals — a book about which Hillary Clinton wrote her masters or doctoral thesis, whatever it was, when she was at Wellesley. Saul Alinsky, who Obama has studied and implements to this day and whose tactics he taught while ostensibly teaching law at the University of Chicago.
Saul Alinsky dedicated his book that all these leftists love to Lucifer, the Devil! Here’s Alinsky’s dedication: “Lest we forget, at least an over the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical from all our legends, mythology and history — and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins or which is which? The first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom: Lucifer.” Saul Alinsky made that dedication in his book Rules for Radicals. So Santorum is just joining the crowd here in discussing this. Here is the final sound bite.
SANTORUM: The next was the church. Now, you say, “Well, wait. The Catholic Church?” No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic, but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure, the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country, and the Protestant ethic. Mainstream, mainline Protestantism. And of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country, and it is a shambles.
RUSH: That’s Rick Santorum August 29, 2008. That stuff is out there. It’s headlined on Drudge and the left has it, and Santorum will have to deal with it. He’ll have to answer it. I don’t know. It’s just not the kind of stuff you hear a presidential candidate talk about. It’s not ordinary in that sense. Snerdley says, “Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of refreshing.” Snerdley likes devil stuff. I mean, he watches movies about it. He has The Exorcist on a loop at home and it helps with his sciatic pain.
The Daily Hatch 