President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.
Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.
The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.
Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.
I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
The cost of living varies enormously across the country.
Joe Biden campaigns in Cleveland, Sept. 30.
PHOTO: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Rep. Donald Norcross (“Biden’s Good Case for a $15 Minimum Wage,” Letters, Oct. 12) bases his argument for an increase in the minimum wage, in part, on the cost of apartment rent in New Jersey. He has no one to blame but himself. Rents are driven by high taxes (sales, income, real estate, energy, employment, etc.) and restrictions on building new housing imposed by politicians like himself. Cut the taxes and red tape and rents will follow.
George Roeck
Westfield, N.J.
The cost of living varies enormously across the country—ask anyone living in New York or San Francisco. These people likely need far more than $15 an hour to survive with one job. However, people living in many other places can do well enough on a lower minimum wage. The basic economic laws of supply and demand will determine what wages actually are, as evidenced in the three years before the Covid-19 virus decimated the economy. We had full employment, wages were rising rapidly across all levels, especially at the bottom, and the “employees wanted” sections of newspapers across the nation were larger than ever.
Some states recently raised their minimum wage which, not surprisingly, resulted in employers laying off workers, the net result being that those most in need suffer the most. So what we have again are politicians, most of whom have never actually run a business, trying to manipulate something to gain votes in an election. Kindly let us run our businesses as we know how to do it far better than you.
Peter I. Volny
Fountain Hills, Ariz.
Rep. Norcross, says that “the federal minimum wage . . . isn’t livable no matter where you reside.” That statement doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Most of those earning the minimum wage aren’t heads of households, as Mr. Norcross implies. They are unskilled workers who are starting out, typically teenagers. More than doubling the minimum wage would effectively price them out of the workforce, snatching away from them the first rung of the ladder of economic advancement, denying those laborers the opportunity to learn skills that would enable them to move up to higher levels of income.
To paraphrase Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman: “Would you rather have no job at $15 an hour than a job at $7.25 an hour?”
Scott Kaufmann
Kansas City, Kan.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
Ronald Reagan Bill Clinton with a jar of jelly beans in November of 1992.
January 19, 2021
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
The financial system was in a meltdown and taking the American economy with it. Although Iraq had been the biggest issue at the start of our campaign, I had always made the need for more progressive economic policies a central part of my argument for change. As I saw it, the combination of globalization and revolutionary new technologies had been fundamentally altering the American economy for at least two decades. U.S. manufacturers had shifted production overseas, taking advantage of low-cost labor and shipping back cheap goods to be sold by big-box retailers against which small businesses couldn’t hope to compete. More recently, the internet had wiped out entire categories of office work and, in some cases, whole industries. In this new, winner-take-all economy, those controlling capital or possessing specialized, high-demand skills—whether tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, LeBron James, or Jerry Seinfeld—could leverage their assets, market globally, and amass more wealth than any group in human history. But for ordinary workers, capital mobility and automation meant an ever-weakening bargaining position. Manufacturing towns lost their lifeblood. Low inflation and cheap flat-screen TVs couldn’t compensate for layoffs, fewer hours and temp work, stagnant wages and reduced benefits, especially when both healthcare and education costs (two sectors less subject to cost-saving automation) kept soaring. Inequality also had a way of compounding itself. Even middle-class Americans found themselves increasingly priced out of neighborhoods with the best schools or cities with the best job prospects. They were unable to afford the extras—SAT prep courses, computer camps, invaluable but unpaid internships—that better-off parents routinely provided their kids. By 2007, the American economy was not only producing greater inequality than almost every other wealthy nation but also delivering less upward mobility. I believed that these outcomes weren’t inevitable, but rather were the result of political choices dating back to Ronald Reagan. Under the banner of economic freedom—an “ownership society” was the phrase President Bush used—Americans had been fed a steady diet of tax cuts for the wealthy and seen collective bargaining laws go unenforced. There had been efforts to privatize or cut the social safety net, and federal budgets had consistently underinvested in everything from early childhood education to infrastructure. All this further accelerated inequality, leaving families ill-equipped to navigate even minor economic turbulence. I was campaigning to push the country in the opposite direction. I didn’t think America could roll back automation or sever the global supply chain (though I did think we could negotiate stronger labor and environmental provisions in our trade agreements). But I was certain we could adapt our laws and institutions, just as we’d done in the past, to make sure that folks willing to work could get a fair shake. At every stop I made, in every city and small town, my message was the same. I promised to raise taxes on high-income Americans to pay for vital investments in education, research, and infrastructure. I promised to strengthen unions and raise the minimum wage as well as to deliver universal healthcare and make college more affordable. I wanted people to understand that there was a precedent for bold government action. FDR had saved capitalism from itself, laying the foundation for a post–World War II boom.
—
You seem to blame Ronald Reagan and conservative policies for the 2008 meltdown but in fact Bill Clinton should get a lot of the blame.
PUBLISHED SAT, MAY 28 2016 12:50 AM EDTUPDATED SAT, MAY 28 2016 9:06 AM EDTLawrence Kudlow and Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation SHARE
We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It’s a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and all the greatest investment gurus over the years. Ready?
Buy low, sell high.
It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, and it helps account for his amazin business success.
A bank owned sign is seen in front of a foreclosed home.Getty Images
Campaigning in California last week she complained that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hard working families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.”
She’s assailing Trump for being a good businessman—something she would know almost nothing about because she’s never actually run a business, though she did miraculously turn $1,000 into $1 million in the cattle futures market many years ago.
What is so hypocritical about the Clinton attacks is that it wasn’t Trump, but Hillary, her husband, and many of her biggest supporters who were the real culprits here.
Before Hillary is able to rewrite this history, let’s look at the many ways the Clintons and cronies contributed to the Great Recession.
The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Under Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.
These new HUD rules lowered down payments from the traditional 20 percent to 3 percent by 1995 and zero down-payments by 2000. What’s more, in the Clinton push to issue home loans to lower income borrowers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a common practice to virtually end credit documentation, low credit scores were disregarded, and income and job history was also thrown aside. The phrase “subprime” became commonplace. What an understatement.
Next, the Clinton administration’s rules ordered the taxpayer-backed Fannie and Freddie to expand their quotas of risky loans from 30 percent of portfolio to 50 percent as part of a big push to expand home ownership.
Fannie and Freddie were securitizing these home loans and offering 100 percent taxpayer guarantees of repayment. So now taxpayers were on the hook for these risky, low down-payment loans.
Tragically, when prices fell, lower-income folks who really could not afford these mortgages under normal credit standards, suffered massive foreclosures and personal bankruptcies. So many will never get credit again. It’s a perfect example of liberals using government allegedly to help the poor, but the ultimate consequences were disastrous for them.
Additionally, ultra-easy money from the Fed also played a key role. Rates were held too low for too long in 2002-2005, which created asset price bubbles in housing, commodities, gold, oil, and elsewhere. When the Fed finally tightened, prices collapsed. So did mortgage collateral (homes) and mortgage bonds that depended on the collateral.
Many bond packages were written to please Fannie and Freddie, based on the fantastical idea that home prices would never fall. Fannie and Freddie, by the way, cost the taxpayers $187 billion.
Just to make this story worse, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama voted to filibuster a Republican effort to roll back Fannie and Freddie. But on top of all this, while Hillary was propping up Fannie and Freddie, she was taking contributions from their foundations.
A Washington Times investigative reportconcluded that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s political action committee and individuals linked to the companies donated $75,500 to Mrs. Clinton’s senatorial campaign. And on top of that, the embattled Clinton Foundation received a $50,000 contribution from Freddie Mac, according to the Times.
To be clear, there was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story with plenty of blame all around. And the Fannie/Freddie story is still not solved. It now includes profit sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.
Meanwhile, Hillary’s attempt to blame Donald Trump is utterly absurd. Buying low and selling high is not against the law. In fact, Mr. Trump’s investment acumen may serve America well in the not too distant future.
Commentary by Larry Kudlow, a senior contributor at CNBC and economics editor of the National Review. Follow him on Twitter @Larry_Kudlow.
Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.
Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.
The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.
Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.
But near-universal $1,400 checks are not good policy, no matter how popular they might be. States and local governments have the ability to make their own taxing and spending decisions and should not expect or require federal aid—and certainly not when the federal government is in such dire fiscal straits on its own. And ambitious plans to increase social spending and hike wages that don’t have anything to do with the pandemic should be considered separately.
I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
In the US elections, Florida voters approved 60:40, a proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage rate to $15 an hour by 2026. President-elect Joe Biden supports an increase in the national minimum wage, unlike Trump. In high-income economies, a national minimum wage policy does raise incomes of low-wage workers, given better enforcement and governance standards. It also increases demand, with the propensity to consume higher at lower income levels. And that is crucial in the pandemic-struck economy.
Florida is the eighth state in the US to raise its hourly minimum wage to $15. The change would be incremental. Employers are required to raise the minimum wage, currently $8.56, annually by $1 for the next several years; once the $15-mark is reached, subsequent wage hikes would be inflation-adjusted. In the past, free-market economists like Milton Friedman have argued that a national minimum wage would lead to unemployment as firms would be unable to pay workers.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
“Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies.”
I have a lot of respect for you as a father and a husband, and you have many good qualities in your life. However, your support of abortion has been very damaging to our nation.
LifeNews.com Note: Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. This article previously appeared in Public Discourse:
Within a year after Roe v. Wade, however, Nathanson began to have moral doubts about the cause to which he had been so single-mindedly devoted. In a widely noticed 1974 essay in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, he revealed his growing doubts about the “pro-choice” dogma that abortion was merely the removal of an “undifferentiated mass of cells,” and not the killing of a developing human being. Referring to abortions that he had supervised or performed, he confessed to an “increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”
Still, he was not ready to abandon support for legal abortion. It was, he continued to insist, necessary to prevent the bad consequences of illegal abortions. But he was moving from viewing abortion itself as a legitimate solution to a woman’s personal problem, to seeing it as an evil that should be discouraged, even if for practical reasons it had to be tolerated. Over the next several years, while continuing to perform abortions for what he regarded as legitimate “health” reasons, Nathanson would be moved still further toward the pro-life position by the emergence of new technologies, especially fetoscopy and ultrasound, that made it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to deny that abortion is the deliberate killing of a unique human being–a child in the womb.
By 1980, the weight of evidence in favor of the pro-life position had overwhelmed Nathanson and driven him out of the practice of abortion. He had come to regard the procedure as unjustified homicide and refused to perform it. Soon he was dedicating himself to the fight against abortion and revealing to the world the lies he and his abortion movement colleagues had told to break down public opposition.
In 1985, Nathanson employed the new fetal imaging technology to produce a documentary film, “The Silent Scream,” which energized the pro-life movement and threw the pro-choice side onto the defensive by showing in graphic detail the killing of a twelve-week-old fetus in a suction abortion. Nathanson used the footage to describe the facts of fetal development and to make the case for the humanity and dignity of the child in the womb. At one point, viewers see the child draw back from the surgical instrument and open his mouth: “This,” Nathanson says in the narration, “is the silent scream of a child threatened imminently with extinction.”
Publicity for “The Silent Scream” was provided by no less a figure than President Ronald Reagan, who showed the film in the White House and touted it in speeches. Like Nathanson, Reagan, who had signed one of the first abortion-legalization bills when he was Governor of California, was a zealous convert to the pro-life cause. During his term as president, Reagan wrote and published a powerful pro-life book entitled Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation–a book that Nathanson praised for telling the truth about the life of the child in the womb and the injustice of abortion
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.
Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.
Democrats may still need Republican votes for much of Biden’s plan. The reconciliation process could be used to amend existing tax and budget matters with a simple majority vote in the Senate—perhaps to do something like adjusting the amount of the child tax credit—but relief checks and a state government bailout will likely require 60 votes.
The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.
Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.
Previously, Biden has indicated that he will push for higher taxes on corporations and on individuals making more than $400,000 annually.
But near-universal $1,400 checks are not good policy, no matter how popular they might be. States and local governments have the ability to make their own taxing and spending decisions and should not expect or require federal aid—and certainly not when the federal government is in such dire fiscal straits on its own. And ambitious plans to increase social spending and hike wages that don’t have anything to do with the pandemic should be considered separately.
I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
Tens of millions of workers are unemployed right now as the economy struggles to rebound from the COVID-19 crisis and ensuing government lockdowns. But if Joe Biden and Democrats sweep the board in November, even more people could find themselves out of jobs at the worst possible time.
Remember, the “moderate” Democratic presidential nominee has endorsed a $15 federal minimum wage. Meanwhile, House Democrats have already passed a bill that would mandate a $15 hourly rate in all 50 states, even those where it would constitute a more than doubling of the current minimum wage. And a new analysis by the fiscally conservative Employment Policies Institute finds that enacting this proposal would destroy 2 million jobs by 2027.
“Texas projects to have the highest losses, totaling over 370,000 jobs lost by 2027,” the report finds. “Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia are all expected to see over 100,000 jobs lost in the next six years as well.”
The two economists who authored the study, William Even of Miami University and David Macpherson of Trinity University, also conclude that the job losses from a $15 minimum wage would disproportionately hurt young people and women. Of all the impacted jobs currently filled by African Americans, 9% would be eliminated entirely.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. As free-market economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once wrote, “The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.”
It’s easy to understand the basic economics of why minimum wage laws don’t work. Here is economist Thomas Sowell: “By the simplest and most basic economics, a price artificially raised tends to cause more to be supplied and less to be demanded than when prices are left to be determined by supply and demand in a free market,” he writes in his book Basic Economics. “The result is a surplus, whether the price that is set artificially high is that of farm produce or labor.”
Think about it like this: What would you do if the government passed a mandate tripling the price of a household good? You would buy less of it, of course, because the previous market price was representative of what that product was actually worth to consumers like you.
And don’t think that this new study is some outlier either. A 2019 survey, also conducted by the Employment Policies Institute, revealed that 3 in 4 economists oppose increasing the minimum wage, even though most respondents were registered Democrats or independents.
Moreover, a research review by the Cato Institute concluded, “The main finding of economic theory and empirical research over the past 70 years is that minimum wage increases tend to reduce employment.”
As the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe has noted, even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected millions of jobs lost nationally from a federal $15 minimum wage.
Oh, and it’s not as if a $15 minimum wage is the only disastrous economic policy Biden is running on — not even close. In fact, a Stanford study just found that the Democrat’s confiscatory tax policies and harsh regulatory regime would destroy 5 million jobs and reduce median household income by $6,500. And that’s to say nothing of Biden’s support for anti-gig economy legislation that would make millions of people’s flexible livelihoods illegal.
In spite of all this, Biden has campaigned on the notion that he alone can steer the country back from the COVID-19 downturn and that he cares about blue-collar workers. Maybe if Biden ever comes out of his basement, someone will force the candidate to explain why he’s running on a platform that would wipe out millions of jobs with the stroke of a pen.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is opinion editor at the Foundation for Economic Education and a Washington Examiner contributor.
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
DEBT LIMIT – A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY.
President Clinton Signing the Balanced Budget Bill (1997)
Newt Gingich Explains How He Balanced the Budget as Speaker of the House
Ronald Reagan Talks About Balancing the Budget on Johnny Carson’s Tonigh…
President Reagan’s Remarks on Balanced Budget Amendment on July 12, 1982
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January 17, 2021
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots… and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of NEWT GINGRICH …and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.
Page 607
As it so happened, the same mid-December week we announced the deal with McConnell, Bill Clinton joined me in the Oval Office dining room for a visit. Whatever tensions had existed between us during the campaign had largely dissipated by then, and I found it useful to hear the lessons he’d learned after suffering a similar midterm shellacking at the hands of Newt Gingrich in 1994. At some point, we got into the nitty-gritty of the tax agreement I’d just made, and Clinton couldn’t have been more enthusiastic. “You need to tell that to some of our friends,” I said, noting the blowback we were getting from certain Democratic circles. “If I have the chance, I will,” Clinton said. That gave me an idea. “How about you get the chance right now?” Before he could answer, I walked over to Katie’s desk and asked her to have the press team rustle up any correspondents who were in the building. Fifteen minutes later, Bill Clinton and I stepped into the White House briefing room. Explaining to the startled reporters that they might like to get some perspective on our tax deal from the person who’d overseen just about the best U.S. economy we’d experienced in recent history, I turned the podium over to Clinton. It didn’t take long for the former president to own the room, mustering all of his raspy-voiced, lip-biting Arkansas charm to make the case for our deal with McConnell. In fact, shortly after the impromptu press conference began, I realized I had another commitment to get to, but Clinton was clearly enjoying himself so much that I didn’t want to cut him off. Instead, I leaned into the microphone to say that I had to leave but that President Clinton could stick around. Later, I asked Gibbs how the whole thing had played. “The coverage was great,” Gibbs said. “Though a few of the talking heads said that you diminished yourself by giving Clinton the platform.” I wasn’t too worried about that. I knew that Clinton’s poll numbers were a whole lot higher than mine at the time, partly because the conservative press that had once vilified him now found it useful to offer him up as a contrast to me, the kind of reasonable, centrist Democrat, they said, that Republicans could work with. His endorsement would help us sell the deal to the broader public and tamp down any potential rebellion among congressional Democrats. It was an irony that I—like many modern leaders—eventually learned to live with: You never looked as smart as the ex-president did on the sidelines.
Larry Elder rightly noted:
In 1995, Time magazine named Newt Gingrich “Man of the Year”: “Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable. Newt Gingrich belongs in the category of the exceptional. All year — ruthlessly, brilliantly, obnoxiously — he worked at hammering together inevitabilities: a balanced federal budget, for one. … Today, because of Gingrich (emphasis added), the question is not whether a balanced-budget plan will come to pass but when.
When Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention, he took credit for balancing the budget. That Clinton basked in his achievement, of course, surprises no one. Nor is it surprising the media failed to remind people of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and his role in pulling this off.
Still, at one time, the media, without reservation, gave credit to Gingrich for making a balanced budget a priority — and for pushing Clinton toward the center to achieve it. Back then, even when writing negatively about Gingrich, the major media routinely credited Gingrich with pushing a recalcitrant President Clinton toward a balanced budget.
Let’s go to the videotape:
In 1995, Time magazine named Newt Gingrich “Man of the Year”: “Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable. Newt Gingrich belongs in the category of the exceptional. All year — ruthlessly, brilliantly, obnoxiously — he worked at hammering together inevitabilities: a balanced federal budget, for one. … Today, because of Gingrich (emphasis added), the question is not whether a balanced-budget plan will come to pass but when.
“Gingrich has changed the center of gravity. From Franklin Roosevelt onward, Americans came to accept the federal government as the solution to problems, a vast parental presence. … Newt Gingrich wants to reverse the physics, make American government truly centrifugal, with power flowing out of Washington, devolving to the states.”
And what of Clinton’s role?
Time continues: “Having organized an insurrectionist crew in the House, Gingrich seized the initiative from a temporarily passive president(emphasis added) and steered the country onto a heading that the speaker accurately proclaimed to be revolutionary.”
In 1996, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas wrote: “More than anything else, Gingrich wanted to dismantle the ‘beauractic welfare state.’ To do that, he understood, he had to attack Congress’ addiction to deficit spending. When he assumed power in 1995, he consulted CEOs who had downsized their own companies; they advised him to stake out bold positions and force others to follow. … Under Gingrich the House passed a budget that truly restrained the growth of federal spending.”
In 1998, Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote: “If Clinton has always had a gift for turning weakness into opportunity, Gingrich has a gift for turning opportunity into rubble. Newt was the one who made unbalanced budgets a thing of the past, but it was Clinton who somehow got credit for it(emphasis added), rode to re-election (and) hauled his own party toward a more sensible center. … Voters might have retired Clinton in 1996 for moving too far to the left (emphasis added) had Gingrich not come along and yanked the whole enterprise too far to the right.”
Even the current Bill Clinton biography entry in The New York Times reads: “Mr. Clinton sought to remake a once-broken Democratic Party in a more centrist mold. … Part of Mr. Clinton’s centrism came out of necessity (emphasis added). After the attempt to reform the health care system, led by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, foundered, Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress in 1994, ending four decades of control of the House.”
But collective amnesia apparently set in, and many in the media no longer give Gingrich the credit they once did.
About Clinton’s speech at the Democratic convention, the Los Angeles Times, for example, wrote: “Clinton’s endorsement was meant to signal a ‘good economy seal of approval’ for Obama, a promise that Obama’s policies will bring back the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, when a booming economy created millions of jobs, stocks soared and a flood of tax revenues helped balance the federal budget for the first time in a generation. … Clinton, who served from 1993 to 2001, came into office at the end of a recession (emphasis added) and is credited by some for helping the nation achieve a budget surplus. With millions still out of work and trillion-dollar deficits sending the national debt soaring, Obama is looking for Clinton to vouch for his approach.
“Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said that Clinton has ‘enormous credibility’ with voters — and not just Democrats — because of his handling of the economy and the national debt. He ‘knows how to explain difficult economic ideas in a way that everyone can relate to, not just in a historical context, but in a way that really touches people,’ she said. ‘People trust him on economic issues, and he’s an important person to discuss how we got where we are and what is the choice we need to make between two different directions.'”
The recession ended 22 months before Clinton took office. Gross domestic product growth the quarter before Clinton took over was a snappy 4.2 percent. And the lengthy Times article makes no mention of Gingrich or the Republican Congress of the ’90s.
Bill Clinton’s genius lies in abandoning liberal positions — whether HillaryCare or a multibillion dollar “stimulus plan” — while convincing his supporters he did no such thing. Dazzling. The man could talk a monkey out of his last peanut — and sell it back at list price.
Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.
There are two main things that Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton teamed up on and accomplished and they were a balanced budget and welfare reform!
I have posted articles on my blog (www.thedailyhatch.org) about the balanced budget efforts of very prudent people like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
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President Reagan’s Remarks on a Constitutional Amendment for a Balanced …
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PAY IT BACKWARDS: The Federal Budget Surplus with Milton Friedman
How to Reduce Debt and Grow the Economy: Milton Friedman on Budget Recon… ——
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 48) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in spending out of control | Edit | Comments (0)
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 47) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, but […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in spending out of control | Edit | Comments (0)
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 46) This post today is a part of a series I am doing on the 66 Republican Tea Party favorites that resisted eating the “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal. Actually that name did not originate from a representative who agrees with the Tea Party, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in spending out of control | Edit | Comments (0)
Ronald Reagan with Milton Friedman Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5
I am currently going through his film series “Free to Choose” which is one the most powerful film series I have ever seen. TEMIN: We don’t think the big capital arose before the government did? VON HOFFMAN: Listen, what are we doing here? I mean __ defending big government is like defending death and taxes. […]By Everette Hatcher III | Edit | Comments (0)
I am currently going through his film series “Free to Choose” which is one the most powerful film series I have ever seen worked pretty well for a whole generation. Now anything that works well for a whole generation isn’t entirely bad. From the fact __ from that fact, and the undeniable fact that things […]By Everette Hatcher III | Edit | Comments (0)
I am currently going through his film series “Free to Choose” which is one the most powerful film series I have ever seen. PART 5 of 7 MCKENZIE: Ah, well, that’s not on our agenda actually. (Laughter) VOICE OFF SCREEN: Why not? MCKENZIE: I boldly repeat the question, though, the expectation having been __ having […]By Everette Hatcher III | Edit | Comments (0)
I am currently going through his film series “Free to Choose” which is one the most powerful film series I have ever seen. PART 4 of 7 The massive growth of central government that started after the depression has continued ever since. If anything, it has even speeded up in recent years. Each year there […]
I am currently going through his film series “Free to Choose” which is one the most powerful film series I have ever seen. PART 3 OF 7 Worse still, America’s depression was to become worldwide because of what lies behind these doors. This is the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Inside […]
I am currently going through his film series “Free to Choose” which is one the most powerful film series I have ever seen. For the past 7 years Maureen Ramsey has had to buy food and clothes for her family out of a government handout. For the whole of that time, her husband, Steve, hasn’t […]By Everette Hatcher III | Edit | Comments (0)
Friedman Friday:(“Free to Choose” episode 4 – From Cradle to Grave, Part 1 of 7) Volume 4 – From Cradle to Grave Abstract: Since the Depression years of the 1930s, there has been almost continuous expansion of governmental efforts to provide for people’s welfare. First, there was a tremendous expansion of public works. The Social Security Act […]
Michael Harrington: If you don’t have the expertise, the knowledge technology today, you’re out of the debate. And I think that we have to democratize information and government as well as the economy and society. FRIEDMAN: I am sorry to say Michael Harrington’s solution is not a solution to it. He wants minority rule, I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
PETERSON: Well, let me ask you how you would cope with this problem, Dr. Friedman. The people decided that they wanted cool air, and there was tremendous need, and so we built a huge industry, the air conditioning industry, hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous earnings opportunities and nearly all of us now have air […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
Part 5 Milton Friedman: I do not believe it’s proper to put the situation in terms of industrialist versus government. On the contrary, one of the reasons why I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government industrialists take it over, and the two together form a coalition against the ordinary […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
_________________________ Pt3 Nowadays there’s a considerable amount of traffic at this border. People cross a little more freely than they use to. Many people from Hong Kong trade in China and the market has helped bring the two countries closer together, but the barriers between them are still very real. On this side […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
Aside from its harbor, the only other important resource of Hong Kong is people __ over 4_ million of them. Like America a century ago, Hong Kong in the past few decades has been a haven for people who sought the freedom to make the most of their own abilities. Many of them are […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
“FREE TO CHOOSE” 1: The Power of the Market (Milton Friedman) Free to Choose ^ | 1980 | Milton Friedman Posted on Monday, July 17, 2006 4:20:46 PM by Choose Ye This Day FREE TO CHOOSE: The Power of the Market Friedman: Once all of this was a swamp, covered with forest. The Canarce Indians […]
If you would like to see the first three episodes on inflation in Milton Friedman’s film series “Free to Choose” then go to a previous post I did. Ep. 9 – How to Cure Inflation [4/7]. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980) Uploaded by investbligurucom on Jun 16, 2010 While many people have a fairly […]
Charlie Rose interview of Milton Friedman My favorite economist: Milton Friedman : A Great Champion of Liberty by V. Sundaram Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of three US Presidents – Nixon, Ford and Reagan – died last Thursday (16 November, 2006 ) in San Francisco […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
Stearns Speaks on House Floor in Support of Balanced Budget Amendment Uploaded by RepCliffStearns on Nov 18, 2011 Speaking on House floor in support of Balanced Budget Resolution, 11/18/2011 ___________ Below are some of the main proposals of Milton Friedman. I highly respected his work. David J. Theroux said this about Milton Friedman’s view concerning […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Milton Friedman | Edit | Comments (0)
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. We must not head down the path of socialism like Greece has done. Abstract: Ronald Reagan […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Milton Friedman, President Obama | Edit | Comments (1)
What a great defense of Milton Friedman!!!! Defaming Milton Friedman by Johan Norberg This article appeared in Reason Online on September 26, 2008 PRINT PAGE CITE THIS Sans Serif Serif Share with your friends: ShareThis In the future, if you tell a student or a journalist that you favor free markets and limited government, there is […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.
The package is the first part of what Biden called a two-step plan to get America through the rest of the pandemic. The second part will be the centerpiece of Biden’s first State of the Union address, scheduled for next month.
Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.
Democrats may still need Republican votes for much of Biden’s plan. The reconciliation process could be used to amend existing tax and budget matters with a simple majority vote in the Senate—perhaps to do something like adjusting the amount of the child tax credit—but relief checks and a state government bailout will likely require 60 votes.
That may also explain why some other Democratic priorities, such as the restoration of the state and local tax deduction (the “SALT” deduction), are not included in the package Biden outlined Thursday. The abolition of the SALT deduction was a major element of the tax overhaul passed by Republicans in 2017, and undoing that would likely cost Biden any shot at GOP support for this proposal.
The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.
Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.
Previously, Biden has indicated that he will push for higher taxes on corporations and on individuals making more than $400,000 annually.
In the coming days, Biden intends to outline his plans for a national vaccination effort, including an ambitious goal to deliver 100 million vaccinations during the new administration’s first 100 days. To the extent that Biden can in fact streamline the process and get more shots in more arms, that’s welcome. So too is a push to reopen the schools as soon as possible. And targeted relief for unemployed workers will help people harmed by the pandemic and by the government-imposed lockdowns it inspired.
But near-universal $1,400 checks are not good policy, no matter how popular they might be. States and local governments have the ability to make their own taxing and spending decisions and should not expect or require federal aid—and certainly not when the federal government is in such dire fiscal straits on its own. And ambitious plans to increase social spending and hike wages that don’t have anything to do with the pandemic should be considered separately.
Congress should scrutinize each element of Biden’s “part one” relief plan, and pass only the proposals that will directly and immediately help to end the pandemic or relieve its effects.
I wanted to let you know what I think about the minimum wage increase you have proposed for the whole country and I wanted to quote Milton Friedman who you are familiar with and you made it clear in July that you didn’t care for his views!Let me challenge you to take a closer look at what he had to say!
Companies Are Preparing to Cut Jobs and Automate if Biden Gets $15 Minimum Wage Hike, Reporting Shows
Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s minimum wage fantasies never become law—or workers will pay the price for his economic naiveté.
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once said that “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” When it comes to the $15 minimum wagehike supported by Joe Biden and many of his fellow Democrats, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the results will be ugly.
New reporting reveals that Chief Financial Officers at top American companies are “considering raising prices, cutting workers’ hours and investing in automation to offset a potential rise in labor costs.”
CFOs are gearing up to raise prices, reduce workers’ hours and ramp up technology investments as they face the possibility of higher labor costs under a Biden administration, @markgmaurer reports for @CFOJournal@WSJ. https://t.co/t6Kscf5lu6
“Companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., Potbelly Corp. and Texas Roadhouse Inc. are already doing the math to assess what a higher federal minimum wage could mean for their operations and cost base,” the Wall Street Journalreports.
“Some executives fear that increases to the federal pay floor would drive up wages across income classes, hurting profits and forcing businesses to find savings to offset higher spending on labor,” the paper continues.
First and foremost, we can expect businesses to respond to artificially-high wage mandates by cutting jobs and reducing employee hours.
Why?This new reporting is bad news for low-skilled workers—the very group that a $15 minimum wage is supposed to help.
Well, labor is a product like any other. If the cost of soda was artificially mandated at $10 per can by the government, the simple fact is that consumers would buy less of it. When employers are legally forced to pay more for labor than it is worth in the market, they naturally and inevitably do the same.
“By the simplest and most basic economics, a price artificially raised tends to cause more to be supplied and less to be demanded than when prices are left to be determined by supply and demand in a free market,” famed economist Thomas Sowell wrote inBasic Economics. “The result is a surplus, whether the price that is set artificially high is that of farm produce or labor.”
“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero,” Sowell concluded. “And that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage.”
The government may determine and decree a “living wage” under a minimum wage law, but unless the worker actually finds an employer willing to pay him that much, he will remain unemployed with a hypothetical right.
Ample evidence confirms these theoretical predictions.
For example, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that enacting a $15 minimum wage nationwide would destroy from 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs. Similarly, analysis from the Employment Policies Institute concludes that a federal $15 minimum wage would kill 2 million jobs.
These studies aren’t outliers. A research review by the Cato Institute concluded, “The main finding of economic theory and empirical research over the past 70 years is that minimum wage increases tend to reduce employment.”
So, it’s fair to assume that the warnings CFOs are offering about potential slashes in employment can be extrapolated beyond their specific companies. Proponents of a $15 minimum wage might intend to help workers, but they will inevitably and invariably put millions of them out of work altogether if their efforts are successful.
Meanwhile, other companies told the Journal they would pass the costs onto consumers by hiking prices. (Is that a win for the working class?)
And in an another twist, some companies said they would seek additional opportunities to invest in automation and eliminate their demand for labor altogether in lieu of paying mandated wages that far exceed a worker’s value.Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s minimum wage fantasies never become law—or workers will pay the price for his naiveté.
“Pool Corp., a distributor of swimming pool supplies, plans to ramp up investments in technology to offset the potential rise in labor costs,” the Journalreports. “The company would look to reduce manual processes such as product orders and certain warehouse operations.”
“[Automation is] the most significant investment that we can make…when it comes to lowering the impact of potentially higher labor costs down the road,” Pool Corp CFO Mark Joslin said.
All of this is bad, bad news for workers. You know, the group that a $15 minimum wage is supposed to help.
So, let’s hope that Joe Biden’s minimum wage fantasies never become law—or workers will pay the price for his naiveté.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
Trump: Let me be clear, I condemn the KKK, white supremacists and the President Trump
Gutfeld on Trump getting rid of critical race theory
Ben Carson: I’ve never seen evidence of Trump being racist
January 16, 2021
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
Over the years, that trust proved difficult to sustain. In particular, the fault line of race strained it mightily. Accepting that African Americans and other minority groups might need extra help from the government—that their specific hardships could be traced to a brutal history of discrimination rather than immutable characteristics or individual choices—required a level of empathy, of fellow feeling, that many white voters found difficult to muster. Historically, programs designed to help racial minorities, from “forty acres and a mule” to affirmative action, were met with open hostility. Even universal programs that enjoyed broad support—like public education or public sector employment—had a funny way of becoming controversial once Black and brown people were included as beneficiaries. And harder economic times strained civic trust. As the U.S. growth rate started to slow in the 1970s—as incomes then stagnated and good jobs declined for those without a college degree, as parents started worrying about their kids doing at least as well as they had done—the scope of people’s concerns narrowed. We became more sensitive to the possibility that someone else was getting something we weren’t and more receptive to the notion that the government couldn’t be trusted to be fair. Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.
Martin Luther King was confident in the belief that the success of his quest for equality was rooted in the promise of America’s founding vision and documents and the progress that has been made toward their realization. Pictured: King gives his “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd before the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in Washington, D.C., Aug. 28, 1963. (Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images)
Robert L. Woodson Sr. is founder and president of the Woodson Center, formerly known as the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.
One name that goes conspicuously unmentioned by those self-proclaimed champions of racial justice such as Black Lives Matters is an internationally acclaimed American hero who lived his life for racial equality. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for it, too.
King’s quest for equality and his legacy are inconvenient for today’s vigilantes because his efforts contrasted sharply with theirs—both with regard to their goal and means.
While today’s self-righteous violent protestershave left vulnerable inner-city neighborhoods devastated and residents in tears of anguish, Kingstaked all he had on a belief in the unifying power of passive resistance and nonviolence, as did others who brought about worldwide change, from Mahatma Gandhi to Nelson Mandela.
Today’s racial-grievance opportunists portray blacks as impotent victims, unable to move forward or upward under the weight of a legacy of slavery and the all-purpose villain of institutional racism.
Stand for your principles in 2021—even in the face of Congress, the media, and the radical Left ganging up on conservatives and our values. Learn more now >>
In their agenda, equality of opportunitymakes no difference. Instead, their proclaimed goal is to demand equality of outcome by monetizing the suffering of their ancestors as reparations—checks that would be handed to them.
The demand for reparations ignores problematic issues of who should pay for and who should receive remuneration and the situation of the descendants of blacks who owned slaves and of those who arrived on our nation’s shores—penniless but filled with hope—long after the end of slavery.
The accounts of sports superstars of the NFL and NBA who were once millionaires but ended up bankrupt can serve as cautionary tales regarding the inconsequential impact of cash payouts in the absence of qualities such as delayed gratification, personal restraint, and foresight.
In contrast with today’s racial justice vigilantes, King did not advocate lowering the bar for standards of behavior and ethical values among those he represented. The most aspirational element of his famous Dream was that his children would one day be judged by the content of their character.
The history of the black community is replete with evidence that, even against the greatest odds and oppression, moral qualities of personal responsibility, determination, integrity, and mutual assistance were sufficient to empower men and women to achieve success.
In 1917, in the Bronzeville area of Chicago, there were 731 black-owned businesses. Blacks owned $100 million in real estate there in 1929. Some 192 local churches provided social services.
In Philadelphia, blacks dominated the catering business until the end of the 19th century, making that city’s catering famous across the country. James Forten, one of Philadelphia’s principal sailmakers, employed more than 40 white and black workers and had a fortune of $100,000 in the 1830s.
The Chesapeake and Marine Railroad and Dry Dock Co. was formed by black Baltimore dockworkers after 1,000 black workers lost their jobs in 1863. In St. Louis, Madam C. J. Walker made a million dollars with the invention of the first commercially successful hair-straightening process.
In the first 50 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, black Americans had accumulated a personal wealth of $700 million. They owned more than 40,000 businesses, 40,000 churches, and 937,999 farms. The literacy rate had climbed from 5% to 70%.
Black commercial enclaves in Durham, North Carolina, and the Greenwood Avenue section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were together known as the Negro Wall Street.
In an era of legalized discrimination, the marriage rate in the black community was higher than it was in the white community despite times of economic deprivation and racism.
In 1925 in New York City, 85% of black families had a man and woman raising children. In stark contrast, the current rate of births to unwed mothers is above 75%.
Today, young black men who take responsibility to raise and nurture their children significantly increase those children’s chances for academic success and educational attainment and decrease the likelihood that they will drop out of school, spend time in prison, or engage in destructive or self-destructive behavior.
King said that we must reach down into the deep, dark regions of our souls and sign our own Emancipation Proclamation. In looking back, we need to rediscover the standards and institutions that blacks historically embraced to accomplish the liberation of mind and spirit that allowed them to survive and thrive.
Intertwined with the agenda of today’s racial justice warriors is the ultimate goal of the destruction of the nation. King was confident in the belief that the success of his quest for equality was rooted in the promise of America’s founding vision and documents and the progress that has been made toward their realization. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” he wrote:
One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence … . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation because the goal of America is freedom … and our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
President-elect Joe Biden called Thursday night for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package that will include another round of relief checks for most Americans, a bailout for state and local governments, boosted unemployment payments, and a higher federal minimum wage.
The package is the first part of what Biden called a two-step plan to get America through the rest of the pandemic. The second part will be the centerpiece of Biden’s first State of the Union address, scheduled for next month.
Biden’s proposals combine elements of last year’s COVID-19 bills with some Democratic priorities that didn’t make the cut. Biden will have slim Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but he stressed the need for bipartisan support on a spending package that he described as a response to a “crisis of deep human suffering.”
“During this pandemic, millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have lost the dignity of a job and a paycheck,” Biden said. “It’s tested us beyond measure.”
About half the total cost of the proposal is aimed at households and unemployed workers. Biden wants Congress to approve $1,400 checks—on top of the $600 that individuals who earned less than $87,000 in 2019 received this month, as well as the $1,200 payments approved as part of the first COVID stimulus bill Congress passed in March 2020. It is unclear if there will be income cut-offs for the new payments, but Biden said he would push Congress to include adult dependents (such as college students) in the payments to households, even though they had been excluded from the $600 payments that Congress approved last month.
According to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets, the new round of direct payments would cost $465 billion. Biden also called for Congress to expand the federal child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child, which would reduce federal revenue by about $120 billion per year.
Another major element of Biden’s plan is a $400-per-month federal supplement to state unemployment payments, which will continue through September. That comes with a price tag of $350 billion.
Biden is also proposing $170 billion to assist in reopening schools and a $350 billion bailout of state and local governments. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Those last two details may be the most contentious details. Democrats pushed for a similar bailout in earlier negotiations over COVID stimulus bills, but Senate Republicans blocked them. Democrats will have a slim Senate majority once the winners of two Georgia run-off elections are sworn-in, but the case for a state bailout remains shaky.
Democrats may still need Republican votes for much of Biden’s plan. The reconciliation process could be used to amend existing tax and budget matters with a simple majority vote in the Senate—perhaps to do something like adjusting the amount of the child tax credit—but relief checks and a state government bailout will likely require 60 votes.
That may also explain why some other Democratic priorities, such as the restoration of the state and local tax deduction (the “SALT” deduction), are not included in the package Biden outlined Thursday. The abolition of the SALT deduction was a major element of the tax overhaul passed by Republicans in 2017, and undoing that would likely cost Biden any shot at GOP support for this proposal.
The big unanswered question is how Biden plans to pay for it all. Thanks to years of poor budgeting and overzealous spending by Congress and President Donald Trump, America faces a $3 trillion budget deficit and a national debt that’s zooming towards $30 trillion. An additional $1.9 trillion will only add to the nation’s already overburdened credit card.
Biden did not address plans for spending offsets or tax increases in his speech. An unnamed Biden official toldThe Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the president-elect did not believe now was the time for worrying about widening budget deficits and that Biden’s focus was on the more immediate emergency.
Previously, Biden has indicated that he will push for higher taxes on corporations and on individuals making more than $400,000 annually.
In the coming days, Biden intends to outline his plans for a national vaccination effort, including an ambitious goal to deliver 100 million vaccinations during the new administration’s first 100 days. To the extent that Biden can in fact streamline the process and get more shots in more arms, that’s welcome. So too is a push to reopen the schools as soon as possible. And targeted relief for unemployed workers will help people harmed by the pandemic and by the government-imposed lockdowns it inspired.
But near-universal $1,400 checks are not good policy, no matter how popular they might be. States and local governments have the ability to make their own taxing and spending decisions and should not expect or require federal aid—and certainly not when the federal government is in such dire fiscal straits on its own. And ambitious plans to increase social spending and hike wages that don’t have anything to do with the pandemic should be considered separately.
Congress should scrutinize each element of Biden’s “part one” relief plan, and pass only the proposals that will directly and immediately help to end the pandemic or relieve its effects.
Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released updated budget projections. The most important numbers in that report show what’s happening with the overall fiscal burden of government – measured by both taxes and spending.
As you can see, there’s a big one-time spike in coronavirus-related spending this year. That’s not good news, but more worrisome is the the longer-run trend of government spending gradually climbing as a share of economic output (and the numbers are significantly worse if you look at CBO’s 30-year projection).
Most reporters and fiscal wonks overlooked the spending data, however, and instead focused on the CBO’s projection for government debt.
That being said, Figure 3 from the CBO report shows that there’s also an upward-spike in federal debt.
And it is true (remember Greece) that high levels of debt can, by themselves, produce a crisis. This happens when investors suddenly stop buying government bonds because they think there’s a risk of default (which happens when a government is incapable or unwilling to make promised payments to lenders).
I think some nations are on the verge of having that kind of crisis, most notably Italy.
In other words, what nations are approaching a tipping point?
A new study from the European Central Bank may help answer these questions. Authored by Pablo Burriel, Cristina Checherita-Westphal, Pascal Jacquinot, Matthias Schön, and Nikolai Stähler, it uses several economic models to measure the downside risks of excessive debt.
The 2009 global financial and economic crisis left a legacy of historically high levels of public debt in advanced economies, at a scale unseen during modern peace time. …The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a different type of shock that has dramatically affected global economic activity… Fiscal positions are projected to be strongly hit by the crisis…once the crisis is over and the recovery firmly sets in, keeping public debt at high levels over the medium term is a source of vulnerability… The main objective of this paper is to contribute to the stabilisation vs. sustainability debate in the euro area by reviewing through the lens of large scale DSGE models the economic risks associated with regimes of high public debt.
Here’s what they found, none of which should be a surprise.
…we evaluate the economic consequences of high public debt using simulations with three DSGE models… Our DSGE simulations also suggest that high-debt economies…can lose more output in a crisis…have less scope for counter-cyclical fiscal policy and…are adversely affected in terms of potential (long-term) output, with a significant impairment in case of large sovereign risk premia reaction and use of most distortionary type of taxation to finance the additional public debt burden in the future.
Here’s a useful chart from the study. It shows some sort of shock on the left (2008 financial crisis or coronavirus being obvious examples), which then produces a recession (lower GDP) and rising debt.
That outcome isn’t good for nations with “low” levels of debt, but it can be really bad for nations with “high” debt burdens because they have to deal with much higher interest payments, much bigger tax increases, and much bigger reductions in economic output.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the study actually gives us any way of determining which nations are near the tipping point. That’s because “low” and “high” are subjective. Japan has an enormous amount of debt, yet investors don’t think there’s any meaningful risk that Japan’s government will default, so it is a “low” debt nation for purposes of the above illustration.
By contrast, there’s a much lower level of debt in Argentina, but investors have almost no trust in that nation’s especially venal politicians, so it’s a “high” debt nation for purposes of this analysis.
The United States, in my humble opinion, is more like Japan. As I wrote last year, “We probably won’t even have a crisis in the next 10 years or 20 years.” And that’s still my view, even after all the spending and debt for coronavirus.
The study concludes with some common-sense advice about using spending restraint and pro-market reforms to create buffers (some people refer to this as “fiscal space“).
Overall, once the COVID-19 crisis is over and the economic recovery firmly re-established, further efforts to build fiscal buffers in good times and mitigate fiscal risks over the medium term are needed at the national level. Such efforts should be guided by risks to debt sustainability. High debt countries, in particular, should implement a mix of fiscal discipline and wide-ranging growth-enhancing reforms.
P.S. Here’s another chart from the ECB study that is worth sharing because it confirms that not all tax increases do the same amount of economic damage.
We see that consumption taxes (red line) are bad, but income taxes on workers (green line) are even worse.
P.P.P.S. There’s a related study from the IMF that shows how excessive spending is a major warning sign that nations will be vulnerable to fiscal crisis.
Back in 2017, I compared the welfare state vision of “positive rights” with the classical liberal vision of “negative rights.”
To elaborate, here’s a video from Learn Liberty that compares these visions.
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like the terms “positive rights” and “negative rights” for the simple reason that an uninformed person understandably might conclude that “positive” is good and “negative” is bad.
Needless to say, I don’t think it’s good for people to think they have a right to other people’s money.
That’s why I prefer Professor Skoble’s use of the terms “liberties” and “entitlements,” which we also find in this slide from Professor Imran Ahmad Sajid of the University of Pakistan.
As you might expect, there are plenty of politicians who try to buy votes with an agenda of “positive rights.” Bernie Sanders, for instance, constantly argued that people have a “right” to all sorts of goodies.
But he wasn’t the first to make the case for unlimited entitlements.
Let’s see what some other people have to say about this topic.
In his National Reviewcolumn, Kevin Williamson looks at the logical fallacy of positive rights.
Positive rights run into some pretty obvious problems if you think about them for a minute, which is why so much of our political discourse is dedicated to moralistic thundering specifically designed to prevent such thinking. Consider, in the American context, the notion that health care is a right. Declaring a right in a scarce good such as health care is intellectually void, because moral declarations about rights do not change material facts.If you have five children and three apples and then declare that every child has a right to an apple of his own, then you have five children and three apples and some meaningless posturing — i.e., nothing in reality has changed, and you have added only rhetoric instead of adding apples. In the United States, we have so many doctors, so many hospitals and clinics, so many MRI machines, etc. This imposes real constraints on the provision of health care. If my doctor works 40 hours a week, does my right to health care mean that a judge can order him to work extra hours to accommodate my rights? For free? If I have a right to health care, how can a clinic or a physician charge me for exercising my right? If doctors and hospitals have rights of their own — for example, property rights in their labor and facilities — how is it that my rights supersede those rights?
And here’s what he says about “negative rights.”
A negative right is a right to not be constrained. The right to free speech, for example, implies only non-interference. The right to freedom of the press doesn’t mean the government has to give you a press. The good of negative freedom is, in the economic sense, not rivalrous — your exercise of free speech doesn’t leave less freedom of speech out there for others to enjoy
And Larry Reed opines on the issue for the Foundation for Economic Education.
America is a nation founded on the notion of rights. …Despite the centrality of rights in American history, it’s readily apparent todaythat Americans are of widely different views on what a right is, how many we have, where rights come from, or why we have any in the first place. …if you need something, does that mean you have a right to it? If I require a kidney, do I have a right to one of yours? Is a right something that can or should be granted or denied by majority vote?
He helpfully provides a list of negative rights (a.k.a., liberties).
And he argues that positive rights (a.k.a., entitlements) are not real rights.
The bottom line, he explains, is that so-called positive rights impose obligations on other people.
Indeed, they can only be provided by coercion.
The first list comprises what are often called both “natural rights” and “negative rights”—natural because they derive from our essential nature as unique, sensate individuals and negative because they don’t impose obligations on others beyond a commitment to not violate them. The items in the second are called “positive rights” because others must give them to you or be coerced into doing so if they decline. …while I believe neither you nor I have a right to any of those disparate things in the second list, I hasten to add that we certainly have the right to seek them, to create them, to receive them as gifts from willing benefactors, or to trade for them. We just don’t have a right to compel anyone to give them to us or pay for them.
There’s not much I can add to this issue, given the wisdom contained in the video and in the articles by Williamson and Reed.
So I’ll close with the should-be-obvious point that a system based on entitlements only works if there are enough people pulling the wagon to support all the people riding in the wagon.
Which means, as Margaret Thatcher warned us, that positive rights can’t be provided when politicians run out of other people’s money.
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Free-market economics meets free-market policies at The Heritage Foundation’s Tenth Anniversary dinner in 1983. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his wife Rose with President Ronald Reagan and Heritage President Ed Feulner.
Since the passing of Milton Friedman who was my favorite economist, I have been reading the works of Daniel Mitchell and he quotes Milton Friedman a lot, and you can reach Dan’s website here.
Mitchell in February 2011.
Wikipedia noted concerning Dan:
Mitchell’s career as an economist began in the United States Senate, working for Oregon Senator Bob Packwood and the Senate Finance Committee. He also served on the transition team of President-Elect Bush and Vice President-Elect Quayle in 1988. In 1990, he began work at the Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, Mitchell worked on tax policy issues and began advocating for income tax reform.[1]
In 2007, Mitchell left the Heritage Foundation, and joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow. Mitchell continues to work in tax policy, and deals with issues such as the flat tax and international tax competition.[2]
In addition to his Cato Institute responsibilities, Mitchell co-founded the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, an organization formed to protect international tax competition.[1]
January 29, 2020
President Biden, c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
The FOUNDERS never intended the government to get into the welfare business!!!!
One is the growing welfare state. I have posted an article below about what the welfare state is doing to England because we need to learn from their mistakes.
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 4-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 3-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 1-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Washington is lecturing us about eating too much when they are spending addicts!!!! Let’s Fix the Real Obesity Problem in Washington May 11, 2013 by Dan Mitchell Whenever someone proposes that we need more intervention from the federal government, I always go to the Constitution and check Article I, Section VIII. This is because I’m old fashioned and […]
You want a suggestion on how to cut the government then start at HUD. I would prefer to eliminate all of it. Here are Dan Mitchell’s thoughts below: Sequestration’s Impact on HUD: Just 358 More Days and Mission Accomplished March 12, 2013 by Dan Mitchell As part of my “Question of the Week” series, I had […]
Real Time with Bill Maher March 16 2012 – Alexandra Pelosi Interviews Welfare Recipients in NYC Published on Mar 18, 2012 by vclubscenedotcom Real Time with Bill Maher March 16 2012 – Alexandra Pelosi Interviews Welfare Recipients __________ President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I […]
Real Time with Bill Maher March 16 2012 – Alexandra Pelosi Interviews Welfare Recipients in NYC Published on Mar 18, 2012 by vclubscenedotcom Real Time with Bill Maher March 16 2012 – Alexandra Pelosi Interviews Welfare Recipients __________ Liberals like the idea of the welfare state while conservatives suggest charity through private organizations serve the […]
Washington Could Learn a Lot from a Drug Addict What kind of intervention does Congress need to get it to spend with its spending addiction? Back in 1982 Reagan was promised $3 in cuts for every $1 in tax increases but the cuts never came. In 1990 Bush was promised 2 for 1 but they […]
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below: Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so (at 4:04 pm CST on April 7th, 2011, and will continue to do so in the […]
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
___________________
We need to let more freedom back in the USA and get the big federal government off of our backs.
Funding Government by the Minute
Published on Mar 28, 2012
At the rate the federal government spends, it runs out of money on July 31. What programs should be cut to balance the budget and fund the government for the remaining five months of the year? Cutting NASA might buy two days; cutting the Navy could buy fifteen. It seems that balancing the budget may require more than just cutting government programs. What should be done?
It is sad to me that we can’t learn from history. So many european countries are so far down the socialist road that there is little economic growth and there is massive budget problems. Under Obama we are heading the same way as this cartoon demonstrates today on Dan Mitchell’s blog.
One tiny correction, though. The Europeans aren’t socialists anymore. It’s more accurate to describe the policy in France, Italy, and elsewhere as cronyism, corporatism, or statism.
What about providing some evidence that Obama’s making America more like Europe? Well, just check out the data from the latest Economic Freedom of the World annual report.
There are now six European nations that score above the United States, including two of my favorite places – Switzerland and Estonia!
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Max Brantley is wrong about Tom Cotton’s accusation concerning the rise of welfare spending under President Obama. Actually welfare spending has been increasing for the last 12 years and Obama did nothing during his first four years to slow down the rate of increase of welfare spending. Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation has noted: […]
I have put up lots of cartoons from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. I think Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog was right to point out on 2-6-13 that Hillary […]
I thought it was great when the Republican Congress and Bill Clinton put in welfare reform but now that has been done away with and no one has to work anymore it seems. In fact, over 40% of the USA is now on the government dole. What is going to happen when that figure gets over […]
Again we have another shooting and the gun control bloggers are out again calling for more laws. I have written about this subject below and on May 23, 2012, I even got a letter back from President Obama on the subject. Now some very interesting statistics below and a cartoon follows. (Since this just hit the […]
watch?v=llQUrko0Gqw] The federal government spends about 10% on roads and public goods but with the other money in the budget a lot of harm is done including excessive regulations on business. That makes Obama’s comment the other day look very silly. A Funny Look at Obama’s You-Didn’t-Build-That Comment July 28, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I made […]
I have written a lot about this in the past and sometimes you just have to sit back and laugh. Laughing at Obama’s Bumbling Class Warfare Agenda July 13, 2012 by Dan Mitchell We know that President Obama’s class-warfare agenda is bad economic policy. We know high tax rates undermine competitiveness. And we know tax increases […]
Dan Mitchell Discussing Dishonest Budget Numbers with John Stossel Uploaded by danmitchellcato on Feb 11, 2012 No description available. ______________ Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute has shown before how excessive spending at the federal level has increased in recent years. A Humorous Look at Obama’s Screwy Budget Math May 31, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I’ve […]
Sometimes it is so crazy that you just have to laugh a little. The European Mess, Captured by a Cartoon June 22, 2012 by Dan Mitchell The self-inflicted economic crisis in Europe has generated some good humor, as you can see from these cartoons by Michael Ramirez and Chuck Asay. But for pure laughter, I don’t […]
Another great cartoon on President Obama’s efforts to create jobs!!! A Simple Lesson about Job Creation for Barack Obama December 7, 2011 by Dan Mitchell Even though leftist economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that unemployment insurance benefits are a recipe for more joblessness, the White House is arguing that Congress should […]
Dan Mitchell hits the nail on the head and sometimes it gets so sad that you just have to laugh at it like Conan does. In order to correct this mess we got to get people off of government support and get them in the private market place!!!! Chuck Asay’s New Cartoon Nicely Captures Mentality […]
Cato Institute scholar Dan Mitchell is right about Greece and the fate of socialism: Two Pictures that Perfectly Capture the Rise and Fall of the Welfare State July 15, 2011 by Dan Mitchell In my speeches, especially when talking about the fiscal crisis in Europe (or the future fiscal crisis in America), I often warn that […]
John Stossel report “Myth: Gun Control Reduces Crime Sheriff Tommy Robinson tried what he called “Robinson roulette” from 1980 to 1984 in Central Arkansas where he would put some of his men in some stores in the back room with guns and the number of robberies in stores sank. I got this from Dan Mitchell’s […]
I have put up lots of cartons and posters from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. Amusing Gun Control Picture – Circa 1999 April 3, 2010 by Dan Mitchell Dug this gem out […]
We got to cut spending and stop raising the debt ceiling!!! When Governments Cut Spending Uploaded on Sep 28, 2011 Do governments ever cut spending? According to Dr. Stephen Davies, there are historical examples of government spending cuts in Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and America. In these cases, despite popular belief, the government spending […]
I have put up lots of cartons and posters from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. On 2-6-13 the Arkansas Times Blogger “Sound Policy” suggested, “All churches that wish to allow concealed […]
Gun Free Zones???? Stalin and gun control On 1-31-13 ”Arkie” on the Arkansas Times Blog the following: “Remember that the biggest gun control advocate was Hitler and every other tyrant that every lived.” Except that under Hitler, Germany liberalized its gun control laws. __________ After reading the link from Wikipedia that Arkie provided then I responded: […]
On 1-31-13 I posted on the Arkansas Times Blog the following: I like the poster of the lady holding the rifle and next to her are these words: I am compensating for being smaller and weaker than more violent criminals. __________ Then I gave a link to this poster below: On 1-31-13 also I posted […]
A bank owned sign is seen in front of a foreclosed home.Getty Images
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