Whatever happened to humanity? Ya we’ve driven ourselves to insanity We are human waste in a race to the finish Now we know that we’re all gonna get it
Do something stupid like some dumbass kids Hiding in the dark, hunting down our friends We are Lord of the flies till the very end Now we know that we’re all gonna get it Whoa twenty-twenty four hours to go
Hey kids, boys and girls Now we’ve really done it, it’s the end of the world ‘Cause, hey kids, we were warned Tonight we’re going out, going out like the dinosaur
Hoping heaven’s gonna let you in But your God is wondering where you been When idiocracy is all there is Now we know that we’re all gonna get it
Carl Sagan rollin in his grave We all lie to ourselves saying it’s just a phase Yeah, we’re all f$&@&$@ yeah we can’t be saved Now we know that we’re all gonna get it Whoa ten-nine hours to go
Hey kids boys and girls Now we’ve really done it, it’s the end of the world So pray big, oh my lord Now we better run, better run Come with me, now we’re free Let’s all just purge the ending Hey kids, we were warned Tonight we’re going out, going out like the dinosaur
Whoa only one minute to go
Hey kids boys and girls Now we’ve really done it, its the end of the world So pray big, oh my lord Now we better run, better run
Come with me, now were free Lets all just purge the ending Hey kids, we were warned Tonight we’re going out, going out like the dinosaur
Theory of a Deadman – Story by Charles Ken, photo by Jimmy Fontaine
Listen to “Dinosaur” from Theory of a Deadman, a song that takes the band back to their roots
Theory Of A Deadman are back with a new single, “Dinosaur,” out via Roadrunner Records. The song features a crunchy riff and catchy chorus, which fits with Theory’s longstanding hard rock sound. Watch the official visualizer for the song below.
“‘Dinosaur’ takes us back to our roots with this riff-driven rocker,” vocalist Tyler Connolly said in a statement. “To me, it feels like it could fit on any of our albums, but I will say if you like the old Theory Of A Deadman, you’ll love the new Theory Of A Deadman.”
“Rock is where we made our bed for all these years,” guitarist Dave Brenner added. “It’s been a while since we had an up-tempo in-your-face track like this – and it felt good.”
Martin Terefe (Jason Mraz, YUNGBLUD) produced “Dinosaur.” The song marks the band’s first bit of new music since 2020’s “Say Nothing.” The group is also pushing the single as a “return to form stylistically,” with it being more of the classic rocker upon which Theory of a Deadman’s following was built.
Theory of a Deadman features Connolly and Brenner, alongside bass player Dean Back and drummer Joey Dandeneau. The guys got their start “Jamming together in basements throughout high school,” according to a release, and came out of their small hometown of North Delta, British Columbia, to release their 2002 self-titled debut. Since then, the guys have a plethora of multi-platinum albums and singles, including “All Or Nothing,” “Bitch Came Back,” “Lowlife,” “Angel,” “Hate My Life,” “Bad Girlfriend,” “Not Meant To Be” and “RX (Medicate).”
“Dinosaur” is the last of new music of Theory Of A Deadman’s upcoming studio album. They promise to release “a barrage of anthems” with the new set. Details on the new album are forthcoming.
Theory of a Deadman – Dinosaur (Official Visualizer)
“Eve of Destruction” is a protest song written by P. F. Sloan in mid-1964.[1] Several artists have recorded it, but the best-known recording was by Barry McGuire. This recording was made between July 12 and July 15, 1965 and released by Dunhill Records. The accompanying musicians were top-tier LAsession players: P. F. Sloan on guitar, Hal Blaine (of Phil Spector‘s “Wrecking Crew“) on drums, and Larry Knechtel on bass. The vocal track was thrown on as a rough mix and was not intended to be the final version, but a copy of the recording “leaked” out to a DJ, who began playing it.[2] The song was an instant hit and as a result the more polished vocal track that was at first envisioned was never recorded.
The song had initially been presented to The Byrds as a Dylanesque potential single, but they rejected it. The Turtles, another LA group who often recorded The Byrds’ discarded or rejected material, recorded a version instead. Their version was issued as a track on their 1965 debut album It Ain’t Me Babe, shortly before McGuire’s version was cut; it was eventually released as a single and hit number 100 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970. The song was also recorded by Jan and Dean on their album Folk ‘n Roll in 1965, using the same backing track as the McGuire version, and by The Grass Roots on their first album Where Were You When I Needed You in 1966.
McGuire also mentioned that “Eve of Destruction” was recorded in one take on a Thursday morning (from words scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper), and he got a call from the record company at 7:00 the following Monday morning, telling him to turn on the radio—his song was playing.[3]
After becoming a born-again Christian, McGuire re-recorded “Eve of Destruction” as the lead track on his second contemporary Christian release: “Lighten Up”. McGuire updated the lyrics when he performed at a reunion of folksingers, with the line about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches replaced by the words “Columbine, Colorado“, referring to the student massacre of 1999. On March 12, 2008, McGuire appeared on the Australian music comedy/game show Spicks and Specks, performing an updated version of “Eve of Destruction”, with new lines such as “You’re old enough to kill/ you just started voting” and “…can live for ten years in space”. The reference to “Red China” was also removed, and in its place were the more generic “Now think of all the hate, still living inside us/ its never too late, to let love guide us”.
In the first week of its release, the single was at number 103 on the Billboard charts. By August 12, Dunhill released the LP, Nick Featuring Eve of Destruction. The LP reached its peak of number thirty-seven on the Billboard album chart during the week ending September 25. That same day the single went to number one on the chart, and repeated the feat on the Cashbox chart, where it had debuted at number thirty.[4] McGuire would never again break into the top forty of the Billboard Hot 100. It went to number one in Norway for two weeks.[5]
Due to its controversial lyrics, some American radio stations, “claiming it was an aid to the enemy in Vietnam”,[7] and Radio Scotland[8] banned the song.[9] It was placed on a “restricted list” by the BBC, and could not be played on “general entertainment programmes”.[10]
In the late 1970s, Los Angelespunk band The Dickies recorded a cover of “Eve of Destruction”.[11]New wave group Red Rockers covered the song in their 1984 album Schizoprenic Circus.[12]Johnny Thunders recorded it on his 1984 album Hurt Me[13] and also frequently covered the song in concert (a live version is included on his 2000 CD, Belfast Nights), while veteran Canadian punk outfit D.O.A. also covered the song on their 2004 album Live Free Or Die. Tiny Tim included a 23-minute cover of the song as the final track of his 1993 album Rock. The song has also been covered by Australian band Screaming Jets on their 1997 album World Gone Crazy. Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman released his cover version on a maxi-single CD in 2004.[14] Left-wing Christian punk band Crashdog also covered it on their album Cashists, Fascists, and Other Fungus. Post-Industrial psychedelic rock outfit Psychic TV released “Eve Of Destruction” as a limited edition single in the late 1980s. In 2003, the reggae singer Luciano recorded a version of the song. The band Bishop Allen also released a song titled “Eve of Destruction” on their 2003 album, Charm School, which takes its chorus from this song. The Cookeville, Tennessee, rock band MerseySide released a rocked up version in 2012 with the lyric “Think of all the hate there is in Al Qaeda”, with the Mayan Calendar as the cover. Irish singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy also covered the song on her 2011 album Alone, and often performs the song live with the lyrics altered to acknowledge more contemporary issues.
The Temptations‘ song “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)” mentions the song title. The song was briefly featured on Stephen King‘s 1994 miniseries The Stand. With a burning Des Moines, Iowa as a backdrop, Larry Underwood sits atop the hood of a car, belting out the song to amuse himself until interrupted by another survivor of the superflu. It also appeared in The Simpsons episode GABF16, “The Girl Who Slept Too Little“, and was also featured in Michael Winterbottom‘s 1997 film Welcome to Sarajevo. A Joey Scarbury cover was played repeatedly in the original airing of The Greatest American Hero episode “Operation Spoil Sport” to encourage the hero to prevent an automated nuclear strike being triggered by a renegade U.S. general (the aliens who provided the hero’s super-powers commandeered his car radio and tuned it to stations playing the song). Due to copyright issues, the song does not appear in the DVD version of the episode. A French translation is used in the closing credits of Michael Moore‘s film Sicko. An Italian version, “Questo vecchio pazzo mondo” (“This old crazy world”), was recorded by Gino Santercole in 1967; a 1984 recording by Adriano Celentano was included in his album I miei americani (a collection of US hits translated into Italian). This song also makes an appearance in The Doors (directed by Oliver Stone), as the opening act performs it before The Doors take the stage in Miami.
The song is played during the fourth-season finale of The A-Team, “The Sound of Thunder,” when the team returns to Vietnam and flashbacks recall their tours of duty. The song is featured in the fourth level of the Vietnam War video game Men of Valor. While the song is playing, the main character’s lieutenant is dying of his wound on the battlefield.
The song, like many other popular songs of the day, gave its name to a gun truck used by United States Army Transportation Corps forces during the Vietnam War. The truck is on display at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum and is believed to be the only surviving example of a Vietnam era gun truck.[15]
“Eve of Destruction” is featured in the video game Mafia III, released October 7, 2016.
“You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin'” refers to the fact that in the United States at that time men were subject to the draft at age 18, while at that time the minimum voting age (in all but four states) was still 21, before a Constitutional amendment changed it in July 1971.
“You may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place” refers to the June 1965 mission of Gemini 4, which lasted just over four days.
ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman, famous for inventing nicknames for sports figures, and often bringing song titles into the play on words, dubbed slugger Mark McGuire as “Mark ‘Eve of Destruction’ McGuire”.
The indie rock group Bishop Allen performs a version of “Eve of Destruction” borrowing heavily from the original, but with an even more sharply apocalyptic theme. It includes the lyrics “And if this moment is gone in a flash/ And my hand in yours becomes ash in ash”, followed in the next verse by an imagining of rejection from Heaven: “Then we’ll have a dance, yeah a dance, on the head of a pin/ Then God will grin, and shoo us away”.
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 8 Rolling Stones – Hoo Doo Blues Blue & Lonesome is the album any Rolling Stones fan would have wished for – review 9 Comments Evergreen: The Rolling Stones perform in Cuba earlier this year CREDIT: REX FEATURES Neil McCormick, music critic 22 NOVEMBER 2016 • 12:19PM The Rolling […]
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 7 Rolling Stones – Everybody Knows About My Good Thing The Rolling Stones Alexis Petridis’s album of the week The Rolling Stones: Blue & Lonesome review – more alive than they’ve sounded for years 4/5stars Mick Jagger’s voice and harmonica drive an album of blues covers that returns […]
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 6 Rolling Stones – Just Like I Treat You Music Review: ‘Blue & Lonesome’ by the Rolling Stones By Gregory Katz | AP November 29 The Rolling Stones, “Blue & Lonesome” (Interscope) It shouldn’t be a surprise, really, but still it’s a bit startling to hear just how well […]
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 5 Rolling Stones – Everybody Knows About My Good Thing Review: The Rolling Stones make blues magic on ‘Blue & Lonesome’ Maeve McDermott , USATODAY6:07 p.m. EST November 30, 2016 (Photo: Frazer Harrison, Getty Images) Before the Rolling Stones were rock icons, before its members turned into sex […]
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 4 Rolling Stones – Little Rain Rolling Stones, ‘Blue & Lonesome’: Album Review By Michael Gallucci November 30, 2016 1:34 PM Read More: Rolling Stones, ‘Blue & Lonesome’: Album Review | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/rolling-stones-blue-lonesome-review/?trackback=tsmclip The Rolling Stones were never really a thinking band. A shrewd one, for sure, […]
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 3 The Rolling Stones Mick Jagger chats about new album “Blue & Lonesome” on BBC Breakfast 02 Dec 2016 Rolling Stones – I Gotta Go Rolling Stones – ‘Blue & Lonesome’ Review Barry Nicolson 12:52 pm – Dec 2, 2016 57shares The Stones sound their youngest […]
_____________ Carpenters Close To You Karen Carpenter’s tragic story Karen Carpenter’s velvet voice charmed millions in the 70s… but behind the wholesome image she was in turmoil. Desperate to look slim on stage – and above all desperate to please the domineering mother who preferred her brother – she became the first celebrity victim of […]
carpenters -We’ve Only Just Begun The Carpenters – Yesterday Once More (INCLUDES LYRICS) The Carpenters – There’s a kind of hush The Carpenters – Greatest Hits Related posts: MUSIC MONDAY Paul McCartney Mull Of Kintyre November 13, 2016 – 10:29 am Paul McCartney Mull Of Kintyre-Original Video-HQ Uploaded on Nov 25, 2011 Paul McCartney Mull Of […]
The first four rounds of my New York vs. Florida contest (available here, here, here, and here) largely focused on Florida’s superior economic policies and superior economic results.
So you won’t be surprised to learn that Round #5 continues that tradition.
We’ll start today’s column with a remarkable comparison put together by the Wall Street Journal.
Notice that Florida now has more population (thanks in large part to interstate migration), yet New York’s budget is twice as big.
That means a much higher tax burden.
And New York’s onerous fiscal burden doubtlessly helps to explain why Florida has been growing so much faster, and also has a much lower unemployment rate.
The Wall Street Journal connected the dots as part of its editorial.
Comparative governance is a useful course of study, not least because bad governance is so costly to people and prosperity. We often write about the migration from the Northeast to Florida and other states, but sometimes the contrast is best illuminated with some data. …As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger.Yet, believe it or not, Florida’s state budget as measured in the latest proposals from the two governors, is only half the size of New York’s. This is in part a reflection of their tax burden, which in Florida is much smaller. …Florida has no state income tax, while New York’s top tax rate is 10.9%. In New York City, the top rate is 14.8%, while in Miami it’s zero. …Florida’s jobless rate was 2.5% in December, well below the January national 3.4% rate. New York’s rate was 4.3%, tied with Alaska and Michigan for fifth worst in the country… State GDP growth in Florida in 2012 dollars from 2016-2021 was more than double New York’s—17% to 8%. These comparative statistics…show that better governance yields better fiscal and economic results.
Amen.
I’ve written that there’s a link between national policy and national prosperity.
P.S. A reader sent me a fill-in-the-blanks essay generator for leaving New York. It focuses on quality of life rather than public policy, but I nonetheless made some choices.
The first four rounds of my New York vs. Florida contest (available here, here, here, and here) largely focused on Florida’s superior economic policies and superior economic results.
So you won’t be surprised to learn that Round #5 continues that tradition.
We’ll start today’s column with a remarkable comparison put together by the Wall Street Journal.
Notice that Florida now has more population (thanks in large part to interstate migration), yet New York’s budget is twice as big.
That means a much higher tax burden.
And New York’s onerous fiscal burden doubtlessly helps to explain why Florida has been growing so much faster, and also has a much lower unemployment rate.
The Wall Street Journal connected the dots as part of its editorial.
Comparative governance is a useful course of study, not least because bad governance is so costly to people and prosperity. We often write about the migration from the Northeast to Florida and other states, but sometimes the contrast is best illuminated with some data. …As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger.Yet, believe it or not, Florida’s state budget as measured in the latest proposals from the two governors, is only half the size of New York’s. This is in part a reflection of their tax burden, which in Florida is much smaller. …Florida has no state income tax, while New York’s top tax rate is 10.9%. In New York City, the top rate is 14.8%, while in Miami it’s zero. …Florida’s jobless rate was 2.5% in December, well below the January national 3.4% rate. New York’s rate was 4.3%, tied with Alaska and Michigan for fifth worst in the country… State GDP growth in Florida in 2012 dollars from 2016-2021 was more than double New York’s—17% to 8%. These comparative statistics…show that better governance yields better fiscal and economic results.
Amen.
I’ve written that there’s a link between national policy and national prosperity.
P.S. A reader sent me a fill-in-the-blanks essay generator for leaving New York. It focuses on quality of life rather than public policy, but I nonetheless made some choices.
I have a seven-part series (here, here, here, here, here, here and here) comparing Texas and California, mostly to demonstrate that the not-so-Golden State has hurt itself with excessive taxation and a bloated government.
Today, we’re going to augment our comparisons by looking at a very practical example of how California’s approach is much worse.
The National Association of State Budget Officers publishes an interesting document (at least if you’re a budget wonk) entitled State Expenditure Report.
And if you to to Table 2 of that report, you’ll find the most important measure of state fiscal policy, which shows how fast the burden of government spending increased over the past two years.
Lo and behold (but to no one’s surprise), California politicians increased the spending burden much faster than their Texas counterparts.
As you can see, both states were irresponsible the first year, thanks in large part to the all the pandemic-related handouts approved by Trump and Biden.
But California was twice as bad. Politicians in Sacramento used federal handouts to finance a grotesque spending binge (whereas the spending binge in Texas deserves a more mild adjective, such as massive).
Both states were better the second year, with California’s spending burden climbing by 2.2 percent in 2022 and Texas actually delivering a spending cut.
Remember, though, that the spending burden exploded between 2020 and 2021, so the 2022 numbers only look reasonable compared to the bloated trendline.
Now let’s consider whether California’s grotesque spending binge had negative consequences.
The answer is yes, according to a Wall Street Journaleditorial.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last year touted a $100 billion budget surplus as evidence of California’s progressive superiority. He was less triumphant…when announcing a $22.5 billion deficit in the coming year, a contrast to Texas’s record $32.7 billion surplus. …California’s problem, as usual, is that Democrats baked too much spending into their budget baseline. They expanded Medicaid to undocumented immigrants over the age of 50, enacted universal pre-school and school lunches, extended paid family leave by two weeks, and boosted climate spending by $10 billion. …Much of Texas’s surplus this year owes to surging sales-tax revenue from inflation and population growth—i.e., Californians moving to Texas and spending their tax savings. Mr. Newsom claimed Tuesday that California has a more “fair” tax system than the Lone Star State and that Texans pay more in taxes. This is disinformation. According to the Census Bureau, California’s per capita state tax collections ($6,325) were second highest in the country in 2021 after Vermont. Texas’s ($2,214) were second lowest after Alaska. …California’s budget problems will grow as more of its rich and middle class move to lower-tax states like Texas.
Per-capita state tax collections are the most striking numbers in the editorial. The average Californian is paying $6,325 for state government, nearly three times as much as the $2,214 that is paid by the average Texan.
Does anyone think that Californians are getting nearly three times as much value as their counterparts in the Lone Star State?
TRY BORROWING AT A BANK WITH A FINANCIAL CONDITION LIKE THE USA HAS:
The problem in Washington is not lack of revenue but our lack of spending restraint. This video below makes that point. WASHINGTON IS A SPENDING ADDICT!!!
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The Honorable John Barrasso of Wyoming United States Senate Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Barrasso,
On September 16, 2021 my post “46 REPUBLICAN SENATORS VOW NOT TO HELP DEMOCRATS RAISE THE DEBT CEILING (HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!!!)” and you were one of the 46 Senators who pledged not to raise the debt ceiling but you folded like a wet leaf just like I predicted:
I have written before about those heroes of mine that have resisted raising the debt ceiling but in the end I have always been disappointed and here we go again!
But first let me give you a taste of something I wrote about 10 years ago on this same issue!
What would happen if the debt ceiling was not increased? Yes President Obama would probably cancel White House tours and he would try to stop mail service or something else to get on our nerves but that is what the Republicans need to do.
All but four Republican senators have signed a pledge that they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling, sending another warning to Democrats that they are on their own on the pressing issue.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) circulated a letter during the chamber’s vote-a-rama on the $3.5 trillion budget resolution Wednesday, signing up a majority of his fellow Republicans in an effort to link the Democrats’ proposed spending package with the statutory debt limit imposed on the federal government by Congress, which covers spending that has already been approved and must be paid by the U.S. Treasury.
In the letter, which is addressed to “Our Fellow Americans,” the Republican signatories claim that Democrats are responsible for increased federal spending and so must be responsible for raising the debt limit. “We will not vote to increase the debt ceiling, whether that increase comes through a stand-alone bill, a continuing resolution, or any other vehicle,” the letter says. “Democrats, at any time, have the power through reconciliation to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, and they should not be allowed to pretend otherwise.”
The Republicans who didn’t sign the letter are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Richard Shelby of Alabama.
Why now: A two-year suspension of the debt ceiling expired at the end of July, forcing the U.S. Treasury to begin taking “extraordinary measures” to keep paying its bills as it waits for Congress to either raise or suspend the limit before the country is forced to default. Democrats opted not to include an increase in the debt ceiling in their budget resolution, which would have made it possible to raise the limit without Republican support, though they still have the option of revising the resolution to include such a provision.
What Democrats say: Democrats point out that much of the increased debt in recent years was produced during former President Trump’s administration. “I cannot believe that Republicans would let the country default,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Wednesday. “It has always been bipartisan to deal with the debt ceiling. When Trump was president I believe the Democrats joined with him to raise it three times.”
President Biden told reporters Wednesday that trillions in debt were added “on the Republicans’ watch” but said he was confident that the GOP would act in time. “They are not going to let us default,” he said.
The bottom line: No one expects Congress to allow the U.S. to default, but it looks like we could be in for a high-stakes game of chicken in the coming weeks — and the markets are starting to notice. According to Reuters Wednesday, “Some U.S. Treasury bill yields are beginning to reflect concerns that lawmakers may wait until the last minute to increase or suspend the debt ceiling.”
Will you stand up against the Democrats in the future and make the Government ONLY SPEND WHAT IT BRINGS IN? We are becoming an entitlement society and we must stop this trend!!!!
PS: In 2010 we had a group of conservatives get elected in the House and many of them stood up to President Obama when he wanted to raise the debt limit and I praised these 66 heroes of mine on my blog in 2011 and Representative Andy Harris of Maryland was one of those. Here is what I wrote about him:
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 37)
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 from a liberal.
Rep. Emanuel Clever (D-Mo.) called the newly agreed-upon bipartisan compromise deal to raise the debt limit “a sugar-coated satan sandwich.”
“This deal is a sugar-coated satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see,” Clever tweeted on August 1, 2011.
Washington, DC – Today, Rep. Andy Harris voted against the debt ceiling increase. The plan did not require passage of a balanced budget amendment, which Rep. Harris feels is essential to bringing permanent common sense accountability to Washington.
“A balanced budget amendment is the only way to make sure the federal government spends what it takes in and lives within its means,” said Rep. Andy Harris. “Over the past few weeks I have repeatedly voted for reasonable proposals to raise the debt ceiling that included passage of a balanced budget amendment. But I didn’t come to Washington to continue writing blank checks. Maryland’s families and job creators sent me to Congress to permanently change the way Washington does business. I appreciate Speaker Boehner’s remarkable, historic efforts to craft a proposal to solve the debt ceiling issue. But today’s debt ceiling deal just doesn’t go far enough to build an environment for job creation by requiring passage of a balanced budget amendment to bring permanent common sense accountability to Washington.”
Currently, the U.S. Government has a national debt of $14.3 trillion and runs an annual deficit of $1.65 trillion.
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 49) 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 45) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 44) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 43) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 42) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 41) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 40) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 39) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 38) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 37) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 36) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 35) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 34) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 33) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 32) 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 […]
Congressmen Tim Huelskamp on the debt ceiling Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 31) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 30) 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 […]
Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 29) 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 […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 28) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 27) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 26) 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, […]
Uploaded by RepJoeWalsh on Jun 14, 2011 Our country’s debt continues to grow — it’s eating away at the American Dream. We need to make real cuts now. We need Cut, Cap, and Balance. The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 25) This post today is a part of a series […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 23) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 22) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 21) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 20) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 19) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 18) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 17) 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, […]
The Sixty Six who resisted “Sugar-coated Satan Sandwich” Debt Deal (Part 16) 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, […]
Neither of the techniques mentioned above is a very accurate way to measure each president’s impact on the national debtbecause the president doesn’t have much control over the national debt during their first year in office.
For example, President Donald Trump took office in January 2017. He submitted his first budget in May. It covered the 2018 fiscal year, which didn’t begin until October 1, 2017. Trump operated the first part of his term under President Barack Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2017, which ended on Sept. 30, 2017.2
fusing, Congress intentionally sets it up this way. An advantage of the federal fiscal year is that it gives the new president time to put together their budget during their first months in office.
The Best Way to Measure Debt by President
The best way to measure a president’s debt is to add up their budget deficits and compare that total to the debt level when they took office. A president’s budget reveals their administration’s priorities.
Note
Though they sound similar, deficit and debt are two different things. A deficit is a budget shortfall, whereas debt is the running total of all deficits and surpluses. Deficits add to the debt, while surpluses reduce it.
Top 5 Presidents Who Contributed to the Debt by Percentage
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945)
President Roosevelt added the largest percentage increase to the national debt. Although he only added $236 billion, this was an increase of about 1,048% from the $22.5 billion debt level left by President Herbert Hoover before him. The Great Depression and the New Deal contributed to FDR’s yearly deficits, but the biggest cost was World War II—it added $186.3 billion to the debt between 1942 and 1945.3
Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
President Wilson was the second-largest contributor to the debt, percentage-wise. He added about $21 billion, which was a 723% increase over the $2.9 billion debt of his predecessor. World War I contributed to the deficits that raised the national debt.3
Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)
President Reagan increased the debt by $1.86 trillion, or by 186%. Reagan’s supply-side economics didn’t grow the economy enough to offset the lost revenue from its tax cuts. Reagan also increased the defense budget by 35%.4
George W. Bush (2001-2009)
President Bush added $5.85 trillion to the national debt. That’s a 101% increase, putting him in fourth. Bush launched the War on Terror in response to the 9/11 attacks, which led to multi-trillion-dollar spending on the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq. Bush also dealt with the 2001 recession and the 2008 financial crisis.5
Barack Obama (2009-2017)
Under President Obama, the national debt grew the most in dollar terms ($8.6 trillion) and was fifth by percentage at 74%. Obama fought the Great Recession with an $831 billion economic stimulus package and added $858 billion through tax cuts. Even though the fiscal year 2009 budget was set by President Bush, Obama added to it with the Economic Stimulus Act in 2009.657
US Debt Increase by President Per Fiscal Year
The U.S. Treasury Department has historical tables that report the annual U.S. debt for each fiscal year (FY) since 1790. We’ve compiled this data from that source to create the figures used below.81
Joe Biden
In January 2023, the nation hit the $31.4 trillion debt limit Congress passed in 2021.9Republican lawmakers control the House of Representatives and said they won’t raise the debt limit unless Democrats, who control the Senate, agree to budget cuts.
On Oct. 1, 2021, at the end of fiscal year 2021, the national debt was $28.4 trillion. Between the end of fiscal year 2020 and the end of fiscal year 2021, the national debt grew $1.5 trillion, a 5.6% increase year over year. For fiscal year 2022, President Joe Biden’s budget included a deficit of $1.84 trillion, and by August 2022, the national debt had grown to $30.8 trillion.110
When Biden took office, the economy and household finances were still reeling from the pandemic, and Biden continued his predecessor’s policy of spending heavily to keep households afloat. In March 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, which showered taxpayers with pandemic relief cash in the form of stimulus checks and extra unemployment payments, and temporarily expanded child tax credits, plus other help. It all came with a cost to future budgets: The bill would add $1.9 trillion to the national debt by 2031, the Congressional Budget Office estimated.11
The bipartisan infrastructure bill, signed by Biden in November 2021, which provided new funding for highways, railways, broadband Internet expansion and other projects, added to the debt too, with estimates on its 10-year impact ranging from $374 billion to $400 billion, depending on how it’s calculated.1213
Some of Biden’s actions cut the other way. In August 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, an anti-climate change bill that spent money on new green energy programs and tax credits as well as to make drugs cheaper for patients, and paid for it by raising taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The bill should reduce the national debt by $102 billion by 2031, the CBO estimated.14
Biden followed up this bill with an executive action that forgave up to $10,000 of federal student loan debt per borrower, and $20,000 for those who received Pell Grants. He also proposed a new, cheaper income-driven student loan repayment program for future borrowers. However, he also announced that student loan interest and required payments, both of which had been frozen since the pandemic hit, would resume in January 2023.15
In August 2022, the government did not have an official estimate for how these measures would impact the national debt. One piece of it—forgiving $10,000 of debt per student loan borrower—would cost $329.7 billion over 10 years, according to an estimate by the Wharton School of Business.16
Donald Trump
At the end of fiscal year 2020, the debt was $26.9 trillion. Trump added $6.7 trillion to the debt between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2020, a 33.1% increase, largely due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and 2020 recession.
In his FY 2021 budget, Trump’s budget included a $966 billion deficit.17 However, the national debt actually grew by $1.5 trillion between October 1, 2020, and October 1, 2021.
FY 2021: $1.5 trillion
FY 2020: $4.2 trillion
FY 2019: $1.2 trillion
FY 2018: $1.3 trillion
Barack Obama
President Obama added about $8.6 trillion, about a 74% increase, to the national debt at the end of President Bush’s last budget in 2009.
FY 2017: $671 billion
FY 2016: $1.42 trillion
FY 2015: $326 billion
FY 2014: $1.09 trillion
FY 2013: $672 billion
FY 2012: $1.28 trillion
FY 2011: $1.23 trillion
FY 2010: $1.65 trillion
FY 2009: $253 billion (Congress passed the Economic Stimulus Act, which spent $253 billion)18
George W. Bush
President Bush added $5.85 trillion to the national debt, a 101% increase from the $5.8 trillion debt at the end of Clinton’s last budget for fiscal year 2001.
FY 2009: $1.63 trillion (this was Bush’s deficit without the impact of the Economic Stimulus Act)
FY 2008: $1.02 trillion
FY 2007: $501 billion
FY 2006: $574 billion
FY 2005: $553 billion
FY 2004: $596 billion
FY 2003: $555 billion
FY 2002: $421 billion
Bill Clinton
President Clinton increased the national debt by almost $1.4 trillion, almost a 32% increase from the $4.4 trillion debt at the end of President H.W. Bush’s last budget.54
FY 2001: $133 billion
FY 2000: $18 billion
FY 1999: $130 billion
FY 1998: $113 billion
FY 1997: $189 billion
FY 1996: $251 billion
FY 1995: $281 billion
FY 1994: $281 billion
George H.W. Bush
President H.W. Bush added $1.55 trillion to the debt, a 54% increase from the $2.857 trillion debt at the end of Reagan’s last budget.4
FY 1993: $347 billion
FY 1992: $399 billion
FY 1991: $432 billion
FY 1990: $376 billion
Ronald Reagan
President Regan added $1.86 trillion to the national debt, a 186% increase from the $997.8 billion debt at the end of Carter’s last budget.4
FY 1989: $255 billion
FY 1988: $252 billion
FY 1987: $225 billion
FY 1986: $302 billion
FY 1985: $251 billion
FY 1984: $195 billion
FY 1983: $235 billion
FY 1982: $145 billion
Jimmy Carter
President Carter added $299 billion to the debt, a 42.7% increase from the $698.8 billion debt at the end of Ford’s last budget.4
FY 1981: $90.1 billion
FY 1980: $81.1 billion
FY 1979: $54.9 billion
FY 1978: $72.7 billion
Gerald Ford
President Ford added $223.7 billion to the debt.4
FY 1977: $78.4 billion
FY 1976: $87.2 billion
FY 1975: $58.1 billion
Richard Nixon
President Nixon added $121.1 billion to the national debt, a 34% increase from the $353.7 billion debt at the end of President Johnson’s last budget.4
FY 1974: $16.9 billion
FY 1973: $30.8 billion
FY 1972: $29.1 billion
FY 1971: $27.2 billion
FY 1970: $17.1 billion
Lyndon B. Johnson
President Johnson added $41.8 billion to the national debt, just a small 13% increase from the $312 billion debt at the end of President Kennedy’s time in office in 1964.4
FY 1969: $6.1 billion
FY 1968: $21.3 billion
FY 1967: $6.3 billion
FY 1966: $2.6 billion
FY 1965: $5.5 billion
John F. Kennedy
President Kennedy added $22.6 billion to the national debt.4
FY 1964: $5.8 billion
FY 1963: $7.6 billion
FY 1962: $9.2 billion
Dwight Eisenhower
President Eisenhower added $22.8 billion to the national debt.4
FY 1961: $2.6 billion
FY 1960: $1.6 billion
FY 1959: $8.3 billion
FY 1958: $5.8 billion
FY 1957: $2.2 billion surplus
FY 1956: $1.6 billion surplus
FY 1955: $3.1 billion
FY 1954: $5.1 billion
Harry Truman
President Truman added $7.3 billion to the national debt.43
FY 1953: $6.9 billion
FY 1952: $3.8 billion
FY 1951: $2.1 billion surplus
FY 1950: $4.5 billion
FY 1949: $478 million surplus
FY 1948: $6 billion surplus
FY 1947: $11 billion surplus
FY 1946: $10.7 billion
Franklin D. Roosevelt
President Roosevelt increased the national debt by $236 billion, a 1,048% increase from the $22.5 billion debt at the end of Hoover’s last budget.3
FY 1945: $57.7 billion
FY 1944: $64.3 billion
FY 1943: $64.2 billion
FY 1942: $23.5 billion
FY 1941: $6 billion
FY 1940: $2.5 billion
FY 1939: $3.2 billion
FY 1938: $740 million
FY 1937: $2.6 billion
FY 1936: $5 billion
FY 1935: $1.6 billion
FY 1934: $4.5 billion
Herbert Hoover
President Hoover added about $5.7 billion to the national debt.3
FY 1933: $3 billion
FY 1932: $2.8 billion
FY 1931: $616 million
FY 1930: $746 million surplus
Calvin Coolidge
President Coolidge reduced the national debt by about $5.3 billion.3
FY 1929: $673 million surplus
FY 1928: $907 million surplus
FY 1927: $1.1 billion surplus
FY 1926: $873 million surplus
FY 1925: $734.6 million surplus
FY 1924: $1 billion surplus
Warren G. Harding
President Harding reduced the national debt by about $1.6 billion thanks to budget surpluses.3
FY 1923: $614 million surplus
FY 1922: $1 billion surplus
Woodrow Wilson
President Wilson added about $21 billion to the national debt, a 723% increase from the $2.9 billion debt at the end of Taft’s last budget for fiscal year 1913.3
FY 1921: $1.9 billion surplus
FY 1920: $1.4 billion surplus
FY 1919: $12.8 billion
FY 1918: $9.8 billion
FY 1917: $2.1 billion
FY 1916: $551 million
FY 1915: $146 million
FY 1914: $0 (slight surplus)
Note
All presidents from 1790 to 1913 added a total of $2.8 billion to the national debt.8
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Which president has put the United States the most in debt?
President Joe Biden is on track to add the most to the budget deficit, largely due to the costs associated with continuing to battle the coronavirus pandemic. In late 2021, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling.
Why does the United States owe so much debt?
Continued decreases in the amount of taxes paid by corporations and the wealthiest Americans have resulted in less money coming in. At the same time, spending on pandemic relief and the military continues to increase.
March 31, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Please explain to me if you ever do plan to balance the budget while you are President? I have written these things below about you and I really do think that you don’t want to cut spending in order to balance the budget. It seems you ever are daring the Congress to stop you from spending more.
“The credit of the United States ‘is not a bargaining chip,’ Obama said on 1-14-13. However, President Obama keeps getting our country’s credit rating downgraded as he raises the debt ceiling higher and higher!!!!
Washington Could Learn a Lot from a Drug Addict
Just spend more, don’t know how to cut!!! Really!!! That is not living in the real world is it?
Making more dependent on government is not the way to go!!
Why is our government in over 16 trillion dollars in debt? There are many reasons for this but the biggest reason is people say “Let’s spend someone else’s money to solve our problems.” Liberals like Max Brantley have talked this way for years. Brantley will say that conservatives are being harsh when they don’t want the government out encouraging people to be dependent on the government. The Obama adminstration has even promoted a plan for young people to follow like Julia the Moocher.
Imagine standing a baby carrot up next to the 25-story Stephens building in Little Rock. That gives you a picture of the impact on the national debt that federal spending in Arkansas on Medicaid expansion would have, while here at home expansion would give coverage to more than 200,000 of our neediest citizens, create jobs, and save money for the state.
Here’s the thing: while more than a billion dollars a year in federal spending would represent a big-time stimulus for Arkansas, it’s not even a drop in the bucket when it comes to the national debt.
Currently, the national debt is around $16.4 trillion. In fiscal year 2015, the federal government would spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion to fund Medicaid expansion in Arkansas if we say yes. That’s about 1/13,700th of the debt.
It’s hard to get a handle on numbers that big, so to put that in perspective, let’s get back to the baby carrot. Imagine that the height of the Stephens building (365 feet) is the $16 trillion national debt. That $1.2 billion would be the length of a ladybug. Of course, we’re not just talking about one year if we expand. Between now and 2021, the federal government projects to contribute around $10 billion. The federal debt is projected to be around $25 trillion by then, so we’re talking about 1/2,500th of the debt. Compared to the Stephens building? That’s a baby carrot.
______________
Here is how it will all end if everyone feels they should be allowed to have their “baby carrot.”
How sad it is that liberals just don’t get this reality.
While living in Europe in the 1760s, Franklin observed: “in different countries … the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee(15 October 1747 – 5 January 1813) was a Scottish lawyer, writer, and professor. Tytler was also a historian, and he noted, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
[Jefferson affirms that the main purpose of society is to enable human beings to keep the fruits of their labor.— TGW]
To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, “the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.” If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra taxation violates it.
[From Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert E. Bergh (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), 14:466.]
_______
Jefferson pointed out that to take from the rich and give to the poor through government is just wrong. Franklin knew the poor would have a better path upward without government welfare coming their way. Milton Friedman’s negative income tax is the best method for doing that and by taking away all welfare programs and letting them go to the churches for charity.
_____________
_________
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
We got to act fast and get off this path of socialism. Morning Bell: Welfare Spending Shattering All-Time Highs Robert Rector and Amy Payne October 18, 2012 at 9:03 am It’s been a pretty big year for welfare—and a new report shows welfare is bigger than ever. The Obama Administration turned a giant spotlight […]
We need to cut Food Stamp program and not extend it. However, it seems that people tell the taxpayers back home they are going to Washington and cut government spending but once they get up there they just fall in line with everyone else that keeps spending our money. I am glad that at least […]
Government Must Cut Spending Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Dec 2, 2010 The government can cut roughly $343 billion from the federal budget and they can do so immediately. __________ Liberals argue that the poor need more welfare programs, but I have always argued that these programs enslave the poor to the government. Food Stamps Growth […]
Milton Friedman – The Negative Income Tax Published on May 11, 2012 by LibertyPen In this 1968 interview, Milton Friedman explained the negative income tax, a proposal that at minimum would save taxpayers the 72 percent of our current welfare budget spent on administration. http://www.LibertyPen.com Source: Firing Line with William F Buckley Jr. ________________ Milton […]
Dan Mitchell Commenting on Obama’s Failure to Propose a Fiscal Plan Published on Aug 16, 2012 by danmitchellcato No description available. ___________ After the Welfare State Posted by David Boaz Cato senior fellow Tom G. Palmer, who is lecturing about freedom in Slovenia and Tbilisi this week, asked me to post this announcement of his […]
Is President Obama gutting the welfare reform that Bill Clinton signed into law? Morning Bell: Obama Denies Gutting Welfare Reform Amy Payne August 8, 2012 at 9:15 am The Obama Administration came out swinging against its critics on welfare reform yesterday, with Press Secretary Jay Carney saying the charge that the Administration gutted the successful […]
Thomas Sowell – Welfare Welfare reform was working so good. Why did we have to abandon it? Look at this article from 2003. The Continuing Good News About Welfare Reform By Robert Rector and Patrick Fagan, Ph.D. February 6, 2003 Six years ago, President Bill Clinton signed legislation overhauling part of the nation’s welfare system. […]
Uploaded by ForaTv on May 29, 2009 Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/18/James_Bartholomew_The_Welfare_State_Were_In Author James Bartholomew argues that welfare benefits actually increase government handouts by ‘ruining’ ambition. He compares welfare to a humane mousetrap. —– Welfare reform was working so good. Why did we have to abandon it? Look at this article from 2003. In the controversial […]
Thomas Sowell If the welfare reform law was successful then why change it? Wasn’t Bill Clinton the president that signed into law? Obama Guts Welfare Reform Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley July 12, 2012 at 4:10 pm Today, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on July 10, 2012. I don’t know which letter of mine generated this response so I have […]
All of the analysis in the video is still accurate, but two of the numbers need to be updated.
Social Security’s long-run deficit is now $56 trillion rather than $24.9 trillion as was the case back in 2008.
Social Security payroll taxes now apply to income up to $162K rather than $102K as was the case back in 2008.
If you don’t have time to watch a 9-minute video, I can summarize the issue by noting that Social Security was designed as an “earned benefit,” which means workers contribute to the system in exchange for future benefits. The more you earn, the more you pay, and the more benefits you receive.
But because Social Security is supposed to be akin to an insurance program, there’s a limit on both the amount of benefits any retiree can receive and the amount of taxes that any worker must pay (the same principle applies in many other nations).
Some politicians want to get rid of the limit (the “wage base cap”) on the amount of taxes workers must pay. Instead of applying the 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax on the first $162,000 of income, they want to impose the tax on all income.
In some cases, they want this big increase in marginal tax rates in order to prop up the Social Security system while in other cases they actually want to expand the program.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Travis Nix explainswhy this would be counterproductive.
…lawmakers in both parties are mulling the idea of lifting the payroll tax cap. The resulting increase in revenue would do little more than delay the inevitable by extending the program’s life a few more years. …European countries cap payroll taxes at much lower incomes than the U.S. does. Germany caps payroll taxes for health insurance at about $62,000 and the Netherlands caps theirs for social security at $40,370.Uncapping the payroll tax in the U.S. would only widen the disparity and make America a less attractive country in which to work and invest. …Uncapping the payroll tax would raise the top tax rate on Americans’ labor income—income and employee payroll tax combined—to as high as 43.2%. This excludes state taxes and the employer payroll tax, which make the rate even higher. The U.S. hasn’t seen labor tax rates that high since before Ronald Reagan. …European countries that cap their payroll taxes at relatively low incomes understand that you can’t fund a social-safety net without providing an incentive to work. The U.S. should too.
Let’s also look at what Mark Warshawsky of the American Enterprise Institute wrote last year.
…imposing a massive tax increase — 12.4 percentage points — on the earnings of about 10 million highly productive, mostly middle-class workers earning more than $160,200 would have several notable consequences. It would reduce their support for the program,severely discourage their labor market participation, and encourage payroll tax avoidance through converting earnings to incentive stock options and other forms of employee stock ownership. …In many instances, these workers would have their wages taxed at federal, state and local levels at rates exceeding 70 percent. …almost 20 percent of current and future covered workers are projected to earn above the taxable maximum in any one year.
And here is some of Allison Schrager’s analysis from 2020.
When it comes to financing the future of Social Security, many Democrats have a simple and wrong solution: lift the cap on earnings subject to the payroll tax. …there are costs to these plans. A 12.4% marginal tax increase is significant.If the cap is eliminated, an individual who makes $250,000 a year would see their Social Security tax liability increase by 88%. …many households—especially those in states with high state taxes—will be paying more than 60% in federal, state, and local income and payroll taxes… only 6% of the population earns more than the cap. But income varies over people’s lives: 36% of Americans will be in the top 5% of earners at least one year of their career.
I’ll close by observing that it we’ve had big fights under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden about whether the top personal income tax rate should go up by about 3 percentage points or down by 3 percentage points.
I enjoyed this article below because it demonstrates that the Laffer Curve has been working for almost 100 years now when it is put to the test in the USA. I actually got to hear Arthur Laffer speak in person in 1981 and he told us in advance what was going to happen the 1980’s and it all came about as he said it would when Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts took place. I wish we would lower taxes now instead of looking for more revenue through raised taxes. We have to grow the economy:
Mitt Romney repeatedly said last night that he would not allow tax cuts to add to the deficit. He repeatedly said it because over and over again Obama blathered the liberal talking point that cutting taxes necessarily increased deficits.
Romney’s exact words: “I want to underline that — no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”
The fact of the matter is that we can go back to Calvin Coolidge who said very nearly THE EXACT SAME THING to his treasury secretary: he too would not allow any tax cuts that added to the debt. Andrew Mellon – quite possibly the most brilliant economic mind of his day – did a great deal of research and determined what he believed was the best tax rate. And the Coolidge administration DID cut income taxes and MASSIVELY increased revenues. Coolidge and Mellon cut the income tax rate 67.12 percent (from 73 to 24 percent); and revenues not only did not go down, but they went UP by at least 42.86 percent (from $700 billion to over $1 billion).
That’s something called a documented fact. But that wasn’t all that happened: another incredible thing was that the taxes and percentage of taxes paid actually went UP for the rich. Because as they were allowed to keep more of the profits that they earned by investing in successful business, they significantly increased their investments and therefore paid more in taxes than they otherwise would have had they continued sheltering their money to protect themselves from the higher tax rates. Liberals ignore reality, but it is simply true. It is a fact. It happened.
Then FDR came along and raised the tax rates again and the opposite happened: we collected less and less revenue while the burden of taxation fell increasingly on the poor and middle class again. Which is exactly what Obama wants to do.
People don’t realize that John F. Kennedy, one of the greatest Democrat presidents, was a TAX CUTTERwho believed the conservative economic philosophy that cutting tax rates would in fact increase tax revenues. He too cut taxes, and he too increased tax revenues.
So we get to Ronald Reagan, who famously cut taxes. And again, we find that Reagan cut that godawful liberal tax rate during an incredibly godawful liberal-caused economic recession, and he increased tax revenue by 20.71 percent (with revenues increasing from $956 billion to $1.154 trillion). And again, the taxes were paid primarily by the rich:
“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”
So we get to George Bush and the Bush tax cuts that liberals and in particular Obama have just demonized up one side and demagogued down the other. And I can simply quote the New York Times AT the time:
WASHINGTON, July 12 – For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.
A Jump in Corporate Payments On Wednesday, White House officials plan to announce that the deficit for the 2005 fiscal year, which ends in September, will be far smaller than the $427 billion they estimated in February.
Mr. Bush plans to hail the improvement at a cabinet meeting and to cite it as validation of his argument that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and ultimately help pay for themselves.
Based on revenue and spending data through June, the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $251 billion, $76 billion lower than the $327 billion gap recorded at the corresponding point a year earlier.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be “significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion.”
The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.
And of course the New York Times, as reliable liberals, use the adjective whenever something good happens under conservative policies and whenever something bad happens under liberal policies: ”unexpected.” But it WASN’T ”unexpected.” It was EXACTLY what Republicans had said would happen and in fact it was exactly what HAD IN FACT HAPPENED every single time we’ve EVER cut income tax rates.
The truth is that conservative tax policy has a perfect track record: every single time it has ever been tried, we have INCREASED tax revenues while not only exploding economic activity and creating more jobs, but encouraging the wealthy to pay more in taxes as well. And liberals simply dishonestly refuse to acknowledge documented history.
Now let’s take a look at the utterly fallacious view that tax cuts in general create higher deficits.
Let’s take a trip back in time, starting with the 1920s. From Burton Folsom’s book, New Deal or Raw Deal?:
In 1921, President Harding asked the sixty-five-year-old [Andrew] Mellon to be secretary of the treasury; the national debt [resulting from WWI] had surpassed $20 billion and unemployment had reached 11.7 percent, one of the highest rates in U.S. history. Harding invited Mellon to tinker with tax rates to encourage investment without incurring more debt. Mellon studied the problem carefully; his solution was what is today called “supply side economics,” the idea of cutting taxes to stimulate investment. High income tax rates, Mellon argued, “inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw this capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities. . . . The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up, wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people” (page 128).
Mellon wrote, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower taxes.” And he compared the government setting tax rates on incomes to a businessman setting prices on products: “If a price is fixed too high, sales drop off and with them profits.”
And what happened?
“As secretary of the treasury, Mellon promoted, and Harding and Coolidge backed, a plan that eventually cut taxes on large incomes from 73 to 24 percent and on smaller incomes from 4 to 1/2 of 1 percent. These tax cuts helped produce an outpouring of economic development – from air conditioning to refrigerators to zippers, Scotch tape to radios and talking movies. Investors took more risks when they were allowed to keep more of their gains. President Coolidge, during his six years in office, averaged only 3.3 percent unemployment and 1 percent inflation – the lowest misery index of any president in the twentieth century.
Furthermore, Mellon was also vindicated in his astonishing predictions that cutting taxes across the board would generate more revenue. In the early 1920s, when the highest tax rate was 73 percent, the total income tax revenue to the U.S. government was a little over $700 million. In 1928 and 1929, when the top tax rate was slashed to 25 and 24 percent, the total revenue topped the $1 billion mark. Also remarkable, as Table 3 indicates, is that the burden of paying these taxes fell increasingly upon the wealthy” (page 129-130).
Now, that is incredible upon its face, but it becomes even more incredible when contrasted with FDR’s antibusiness and confiscatory tax policies, which both dramatically shrunk in terms of actual income tax revenues (from $1.096 billion in 1929 to $527 million in 1935), and dramatically shifted the tax burden to the backs of the poor by imposing huge new excise taxes (from $540 million in 1929 to $1.364 billion in 1935). See Table 1 on page 125 of New Deal or Raw Deal for that information.
FDR both collected far less taxes from the rich, while imposing a far more onerous tax burden upon the poor.
It is simply a matter of empirical fact that tax cuts create increased revenue, and that those [Democrats] who have refused to pay attention to that fact have ended up reducing government revenues even as they increased the burdens on the poorest whom they falsely claim to help.
Let’s move on to John F. Kennedy, one of the most popular Democrat presidents ever. Few realize that he was also a supply-side tax cutter.
“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now … Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”
– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president’s news conference
“Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased – not a reduced – flow of revenues to the federal government.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 17, 1963, annual budget message to the Congress, fiscal year 1964
“In today’s economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarges the federal deficit – why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”
“It is no contradiction – the most important single thing we can do to stimulate investment in today’s economy is to raise consumption by major reduction of individual income tax rates.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”
“Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort – thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, message to Congress on tax reduction and reform, House Doc. 43, 88th Congress, 1st Session.
“A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues.”
– John F. Kennedy, Sept. 18, 1963, radio and television address to the nation on tax-reduction bill
Which is to say that modern Democrats are essentially calling one of their greatest presidents a liar when they demonize tax cuts as a means of increasing government revenues.
So let’s move on to Ronald Reagan. Reagan had two major tax cutting policies implemented: the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981, which was retroactive to 1981, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Did Reagan’s tax cuts decrease federal revenues? Hardly:
We find that 8 of the following 10 years there was a surplus of revenue from 1980, prior to the Reagan tax cuts. And, following the Tax Reform Act of 1986, there was a MASSIVE INCREASEof revenue.
So Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenue. But who paid the increased tax revenue? The poor? Opponents of the Reagan tax cuts argued that his policy was a giveaway to the rich (ever heard that one before?) because their tax payments would fall. But that was exactly wrong. In reality:
“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”
So Ronald Reagan a) collected more total revenue, b) collected more revenue from the rich, while c) reducing revenue collected by the bottom half of taxpayers, and d) generated an economic powerhouse that lasted – with only minor hiccups – for nearly three decades. Pretty good achievement considering that his predecessor was forced to describe his own economy as a “malaise,” suffering due to a “crisis of confidence.” Pretty good considering that President Jimmy Carter responded to a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering,“It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
Reagan whipped inflation. Just as he whipped that malaise and that crisis of confidence.
Carl Sagan, in full Carl Edward Sagan, (born November 9, 1934, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died December 20, 1996, Seattle, Washington), American astronomer and science writer. A popular and influential figure in the United States, he was controversial in scientific, political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and religion. Sagan wrote the article “life” for the 1970 printing of the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929–73).
Sagan attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in physics in 1955 and 1956, respectively, and a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. From 1960 to 1962 he was a fellow in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1962 to 1968 he worked at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His early work focused on the physical conditions of the planets, especially the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter. During that time he became interested in the possibility of lifebeyond Earth and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a controversial research field he did much to advance. For example, building on earlier work by American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, he demonstrated that amino acids and nucleic acids—the building blocks of life—could be produced by exposing a mixture of simple chemicals to ultraviolet radiation. Some scientists criticized Sagan’s work, arguing that it was unreasonable to use resources for SETI, a fantasy project that was almost certainly doomed to failure.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
In the 1st video below in the 45th clip in this series are his words and my response is below them.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
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CARL SAGAN interview with Charlie Rose:
“…faith is belief in the absence of evidence. To believe in the absence of evidence, in my opinion, is a mistake. The idea is to hold belief until there is compelling evidence. If the Universe does not comply with our previous propositions, then we have to change…Religion deals with history poetry, great literature, ethics, morals, compassion…where religion gets into trouble is when it pretends to know something about science,”
Carl Sagan stated, “So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg–despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby–why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?”
Newsweek answered the question life begins long ago (see below).
This address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, in our seminars for Whatever Happened to the Human Race, often said that (speaking for himself), “When I graduated from medical school, the idea was ‘how can I save this life?’ But for a great number of the medical students now, it’s not, ‘How can I save this life?’, but ‘Should I save this life?’”
Believe me, it’s everywhere. It isn’t just abortion. It’s infanticide. It’s allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor’s concept of a quality of life worth living. I’ll just say in passing — and never forget it – it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death. And I’d say something else that we haven’t stressed enough. In abortion itself, there is no abortion method that is not painful to the child — just as painful that month before birth as the baby you see a month after birth in one of these cribs down here that I passed — just as painful…
The January 11 Newsweek has an article about the baby in the womb. The first 5 or 6 pages are marvelous. If you haven’t seen it, you should see if you can get that issue. It’s January 11 and about the first 5 or 6 pages show conclusively what every biologist has known all along, and that is that human life begins at conception. There is no other time for human life to begin, except at conception. Monkey life begins at conception. Donkey life begins at conception. And human life begins at conception. Biologically, there is no discussion — never should have been — from a scientific viewpoint. I am not speaking of religion now. And this 5 or 6 pages very carefully goes into the fact that human life begins at conception. But you flip the page and there is this big black headline, “But is it a person?” And I’ll read the last sentence, “The problem is not determining when actual human life begins, but when the value of that life begins to out weigh other considerations, such as the health or even the happiness of the mother.”
We are not just talking about the health of the mother (it’s a propaganda line), or even the happiness of the mother. Listen! Spell that out! It means that the mother, FOR HER OWN HENDONISTIC HAPPINESS — selfish happiness — can take human life by her choice, by law. Do you understand what I have said? By law, on the basis of her individual choice of what makes her happy. She can take what has been declared to be, in the first five pages [of the article], without any question, human life. In other words, they acknowledge that human life is there, but it is an open question as to whether it is not right to kill that human life if it makes the mother happy.
And basically that is no different than Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, killing who they killed for what they conceived to be the good of society. There is absolutely no line between the two statements — no absolute line, whatsoever. One follows along: Once that it is acknowledged that it is human life that is involved (and as I said, this issue of Newsweek shows conclusively that it is) the acceptance of death of human life in babies born or unborn, opens the door to the arbitrary taking of any human life. From then on, it’s purely arbitrary.
I understand many humanists support financially NARAL.Did you know that the founder of NARAL left the abortion business because as technology advanced he discovered that the unborn baby experienced pain? Here is a little more about Dr. Bernard Nathanson:
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.
My last question to you today is WHAT ABOUT UNBORN WOMAN’S RIGHTS? Don’t little baby girls who are just months away from being born have the right to life? This letter has been about politics but the spiritual answers your heart is seeking can be found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Without the Bible then we are left with Schaeffer’s final conclusion,“If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.”
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
FIRST ON FOX – As he seriously considers a run for the White House, former two-term Republican Gov. of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson will get a helping hand from an outside group that’s launching with some early financial backing.
The America Strong and Free Action super PAC, which will support Hutchinson if he goes ahead and launches a 2024 GOP presidential campaign, is now up and running. The super PAC, whose launch was shared first with Fox News, has been funded with an initial $1 million contribution from a single donor in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Former Hutchinson campaign manager Jon Gilmore, who served as the governor’s deputy chief of staff, is chairman of the new group, which shares a name with America Strong and Free, a political advocacy group aligned with Hutchinson.
“Governor Asa Hutchinson’s voice is important to the national stage. His background is second to none with experience at all levels of government and the private sector. He is a voice of reason in tumultuous times and his vision for our Party means getting back to the principles that made the Republican Party strong — principles inspired in Hutchinson from one of his mentors, President Ronald Reagan,” Gilmore told Fox News in a statement.
Former Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas (right) teams up with newly inaugurated Iowa Lt. Gov. Adam Gregg, on Friday Jan. 13, 2023 in Des Moines Iowa (America Strong and Free PAC)
Hutchinson left office in January due to term limits, and was succeeded by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary during then-President Trump’s administration and the daughter of former longtime Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. As he concluded his tenure as governor, Hutchinson made back-to-back trips to Iowa, the state that for a half century has kicked off the presidential nominating calendar.
Kenneth Ryan James (mgr of Bruce Westerman’s campaign), Rex Nelson, and Mike Ross at 2014 Grady Fish Fry
Asa Hutchinson at Grady Fish Fry
Sherwood Haisty Sr. in the straw hat and below is a story by Rex Nelson on Sherwood in the story done a couple of years ago.
At the first of every year, I mark the annual Grady Lions Club Catfish Supper on my calendar.
It’s always the third Thursday in August. Always.
It’s always in the Ned Hardin pecan grove.
And it’s almost always hot.
Commonly known as the Grady Fish Fry, it’s among my favorite annual events. I’ve written about it before.
In an election year, the politicians flock to Grady. Among congressional and statewide officeholders and candidates, I saw Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Sen. Mark Pryor, Rep. John Boozman, Jim Keet, Shane Broadway, Mark Darr and Beth Anne Rankin there last night.
There likely were others who left before I arrived or maybe I just just missed seeing them. The event begins at 4 p.m. and ends at 8 p.m. As I said in a post at this time last year, the Grady Fish Fry marks the unofficial end of summer for me. Bring on football season.
I also mentioned last year (but must mention again) what is perhaps the most fascinating contraption in the state — the famed Grady hushpuppy machine, constructed decades ago from pieces of equipment found on area farms. One after another, the huspuppies come out of the machine and are put into the hot grease. If they ever stop using it, it should be donated to the Smithsonian as an example of American ingenuity.
I had a great visit last night with Sherwood Haisty, 85, a Lions Club member who has been a part of 40 of the 55 fish fries. He told me how the members of the Lions Club once worked for days in the hot sun setting up tables, bringing in the products, etc.
Then somebody had the bright idea of asking the Arkansas Department of Correction for help. For years now, it has been a mutually beneficial relationship.
For the Lions Club members, there’s a captive workforce, if you will.
For those who work at the nearby state prisons, there’s a carrot they can dangle in front of inmates – in exchange for good behavior, you can get out for one night and receive a great meal in the process.
Those men from around Arkansas in their white prison garb who are handing out slices of watermelon, filling glasses of iced tea and cleaning off the tables are now just as much a part of the event as the giant pecan trees in the Hardin grove. And the prison band sounded better than ever last night. The lead vocalist has true talent.
Think about it. There are politicians shaking hands. Inmates wearing white and guards wearing blue. A pecan orchard. People cooling themselves with the funeral home-style fans handed out by the politicians. Catfish. Hushpuppies. Watermelon. It just doesn’t get more Southern. It’s like something out of a movie.
Sadly, as the population of rural southeast Arkansas grows older and smaller, we lose members of the Lions Club each year. Rev. Clyde Venable passed away in 2009. Earlier this year, charter members Bill Blankenship and R.C. Johnson died.
Hopefully, there’s some young blood in the area to keep this landmark event going.
A lot of people help out. Hardin Farms supplies the watermelons. Simmons First supplies the plates. St. Michaels Farms supplies catfish. I could go on and on.
Money raised from this annual event (it’s $12 each for all you can eat) allows the Grady Lions Club to provide college scholarships, pay for eye exams and pay for glasses for those who could not otherwise afford them.
_________ 59th Annual Grady Fish Fry Tonite!!!! Grady Fish Fry August 17, 2012 By Patty Wooten Every year, on the third Thursday in August, the population triples for four hours in Grady, a small farming community in Southeast Arkansas where the local Lions Club hosts a catfish supper that draws people from all over the […]
Grady Fish Fry Published on Aug 15, 2013 We visit the annual fish fry at Hardin Farms in Grady, Ark., where the hushpuppies are popping, the Cummins band is playing and the politicians are plentiful. We have brief chat with Arkansas House District 16 candidate Ken Ferguson. ____________________ I had a good visit down at the […]
Grady Fish Fry is Thursday 0 Comments Posted by Patty Wooten on 08/12/2013 at 10:36 am One of Southeast Arkansas’ favorite and time-honored traditions gets underway Thursday afternoon when the Grady Lions Club hosts its 58th annual fish fry. Every year, on the third Thursday in August, people from all over the state travel to Grady […]
AR Sen. Mark Pryor praises Barack Obama (and Clinton arrives I was sad to learn that the 56th Grady Fish Fry fell on the week I was gone to Boston. Last year I got to go and enjoyed meeting all the politicians like Pryor, Boozman, Lincoln, Darr and many others. This year Pryor was back […]
I went to the Grady Fish Fry last year and got to visit with Rex Nelson, Senator Pryor and Boozman, Lt. Gov. Mark Darr and many others. Below is a story by Rex Nelson on last year’s fish fry: Back to Grady (and other Arkansas favorites) At the first of every year, I mark the […]
I couldn’t be more proud of my good friend Melvin Pickens tonight. He showed how people with handicaps can overcome huge odds and work hard with a positive attitude and do amazing things in their life. At age 81 Melvin is still working hard. Not many people know that he is a cancer survivor too. […]
On the Road: 81-year-old salesman sweeps customers off their feet Published on Sep 20, 2013 As part of our continuing series “On the Road,” Steve Hartman meets an 81-year-old salesman who’s been in business for over six decades selling one simple product that everyone needs. ___________ CBS EVENING NEWS video of Melvin Pickens from 9-20-13 […]
On the Road: 81-year-old salesman sweeps customers off their feet Published on Sep 20, 2013 As part of our continuing series “On the Road,” Steve Hartman meets an 81-year-old salesman who’s been in business for over six decades selling one simple product that everyone needs. ___________ Melvin Pickens was featured on CBS EVENING NEWS tonight […]
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly a press secretary for President Donald Trump, will give the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Tuesday. Pictured: Sanders and Trump on June 13, 2019, in the East Room of the White House. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
A former White House press secretary, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, will deliver the Republican response to Democratic President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
“She is a servant-leader of true determination and conviction,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said of Sanders in announcing the selection Thursday.
“I’m thrilled Sarah will share her extraordinary story and bold vision for a better America on Tuesday,” McCarthy added. “Everyone, including President Biden, should listen carefully.”
Here are four things to know about the former presidential press secretary-turned-Arkansas state chief executive:
1) Who Is Sarah Huckabee Sanders?
Sanders was elected as the first female governor of Arkansas on Nov. 8 and took office on Jan. 10. She is currently the youngest governor in the country at 40 years old.
Sanders served as President Donald Trump’s White House press secretary for nearly two years, from late July 2017 to early July 2019. Sanders published a memoir, “Speaking for Myself,” in 2020.
The mother of three children, Sanders graduated in 2004 from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where she studied political science and mass communications.
Sanders and her father, Mike Huckabee, are the first father-daughter duo to win the same governorship. Huckabee served as Arkansas governor from 1996 to 2007.
“Love the people. Serve them, regardless of whether they voted for her,” Huckabee advised his daughter.
Huckabee ran for president in 2008 and 2016. Sanders served as her father’s campaign manager in 2016. With a background as a Baptist pastor, Huckabee hoped to win the evangelical vote, but dropped out of the 2016 race after a weak showing in the Iowa Republican primary, a state he had won in 2008. He hosts the news talk show “Huckabee,” which started on Fox News but has since moved to the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
2) What’s She Done as Arkansas Governor?
Since taking office, Sanders has signed 15 executive orders, including directives freezing government hiring, reducing government rules and regulations, limiting government overreach and bureaucracy, improving the integrity of the Unemployment Insurance Program, lifting COVID-19 restrictions, and improving education.
Executive Order 5 prohibits the teaching of critical race theory as “indoctrination” opposed to “traditional American values.”
“It emphasizes skin color as a person’s primary characteristic, thereby resurrecting segregationist values, which America has fought so hard to reject,” Sanders said in the order.
Education is her top priority in the 2023 legislative session, she said. An executive order, “Arkansas LEARNS,” called for an expansion of Arkansas charter schools, a review of parental access to public school curriculums, and more financial incentives for high-performing teachers.
Arkansas’ 47th governor also banned the TikTok app on state devices, citing concerns about “significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party.” Another order will eliminate the politically correct term “Latinx” from state documents because “one can no more easily remove gender from Spanish than one can remove vowels and verbs from English,” Sanders said.
3) How Was Her Stint as Trump Press Secretary?
Sanders was the third woman and first mother to hold the position of White House press secretary.
Before stepping down in 2019, Sanders shortened the daily press briefings, which traditionally ran for about an hour, to about 20 minutes, before reducing them to once a month or less.
“I have loved it. I love the president. I love the team I’ve had the opportunity to work for—the most incredible and talented people you could ever imagine. It has been a special experience,” she said after her resignation. “The only one that I can think of that might top it a little bit is that I’m a mom. I have three amazing kids, and I’m going to spend a little more time with them.”
Sanders recently sidestepped a question about whether she would support Trump for president in 2024.
“My focus right now has been on 2022, winning the election in November, preparing through transition and getting ready to take office, as I did this past week,” Sanders said on “Fox News Sunday” on Jan. 15. “I love the president. I have a great relationship with him. I know our country will be infinitely better off if he was in office right now instead of Joe Biden.”
4) Is a Return to White House in Her Future?
Pundits have already begun speculating on Sanders’ political future, but she insists her focus is on the 2022 Arkansas General Assembly legislative session, not on 2024.
“Right now, my focus isn’t 2024. It’s focusing here, in Arkansas, in doing what we can to empower the people of this state, and make sure that I’m delivering on the promises that I laid out over the course of the last two years,” she told Fox News.
Arkansas talk-show host Roby Brock said Sanders would make a strong Republican vice presidential option in 2024.
“On the strength of the fact that she’s got some national brand already from her time in the White House, the fact that she will have accomplished something in the next two years as governor, particularly with the legislative session coming up, and she’s just a well-known commodity and she’s from the South, that may help out,” Brock said.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
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The Incredible Steven Weinberg (1933-2021) – Sixty Symbols
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RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!!
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Steven Weinberg, Author
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Steven Weinberg Discussion (4/8) – Richard Dawkins
I am grieved to hear of the death of Dr. Steven Weinberg who I have been familiar with since reading about him in 1979 in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Dr. C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer. I have really enjoyed reading his books and DREAMS OF A FINAL REALITY and TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD were two of my favorite!
C. Everett Koop
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Steven Weinberg Discussion (5/8) – Richard Dawkins
Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, who helped produce theories about the fundamental forces of the universe, died aged 88 on Friday.
Weinberg was born in New York City in 1933 and began pursuing science as an interest when he was a teenager, spurred by encouragement from his father.
He studied at Cornell and then at the University of Copenhagen, before obtaining a doctorate at Princeton. He went on to be a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and eventually the University of Texas at Austin in 1982, where he worked until his death
William Rory Coker, a professor in the physics department at University of Texas at Austin, tweeted on Saturday that Weinberg died in the ICU of a local hospital late on Friday evening.
“He was considered to be the greatest living theoretical physicist by essentially all his colleagues, certainly by me,” Coker said.
Weinberg’s Nobel Prize-winning work regarded the four forces of the universe: gravity, electromangetism, the strong force, and the weak force. Since the 1970s he produced research on a theory in which electromagnetism and the weak force could be unified.
Jay Hartzell, president of The University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement: “The passing of Steven Weinberg is a loss for The University of Texas and for society. Professor Weinberg unlocked the mysteries of the universe for millions of people, enriching humanity’s concept of nature and our relationship to the world.
“From his students to science enthusiasts, from astrophysicists to public decision makers, he made an enormous difference in our understanding. In short, he changed the world.”
He also gained public recognition for his ability to explain complex scientific ideas in an understandable way, demonstrated in his 1977 book The First Three Minutes, which explains how the universe was like just minutes after the Big Bang.
Below are some quotes from Weinberg on science, humanity, and religion.
“In the beginning there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning, with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle.” From The First Three Minutes, 1977, page 5.
“Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather.” From The First Three Minutes, 1977, pages 154 – 155.
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” From The First Three Minutes, 1979 edition, page 144.
“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art.” From a PBS interview, date unknown.
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” From a PhysLink article based on a talk he gave at a 1999 science conference.
“Scientists have discovered many peculiar things, and many beautiful things. But perhaps the most beautiful and peculiar thing that they have discovered is the pattern of science itself.” Page 1, Chapter 2, Dreams Of A Final Theory.
Steven Weinberg (R) standing with physicist Sheldon Glashow (L) in 1979. Weinberg studied the fundamental forces of the universe.GETTY / BETTMANN
Handwritten Letter sent on 8-5-14
Sent August 5, 2014
I know that I had written you about Israel back in May of this year, but Israel has jumped into the news a great deal since then so I thought I needed to write you again. Zechariah 12:3 (KJV) notes, “And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people.”
It is amazing how up to date the Bible can be in many ways.
Mike Huckabee opened up his 8-2-14 Fox news show up with these words:
“You bet it is tragic that many civilians in Gaza have died, but when Palestinians pack their population around their military hardware and weaponry and then they fail to heed the leaflets, radio transmissions, dud warning bombs, phone calls and text messages, the results will be tragic…. I wonder if the Jew-haters would feel better if Israel was terrible at protecting and there were thousands of dead Jewish children?,,,,Every single agreed to cease-fire agreement pushed for by President Obama has resulted in Hamas violating it by firing more rockets right into civilian targets in Israel.”
Furthermore, Bible believers are not surprised that Israel doesn’t get along with their cousins in the Middle East because Genesis 16:12 notes concerning Israel’s neighbors “…he will live in hostility towards all his brothers.” Also we were not surprised when the Jews returned to the Holy Land after War World II because Isaiah 11:12 asserts, “And He will … gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.”
I visited Israel in 1976 and our tour guide was my pastor Adrian Rogers. During the trip he asserted that the Jews had a divine right to be in the land, but they would never have peace until Christ came back.
Rogers also made 4 other points concerning the young nation of Israel.
First, the Old Testament predicted that the Jews would regather from all over the world and form a new reborn nation of Israel. (Isaiah 11:11-12)
Second, it was also predicted that the nation of Israel would become a stumbling block to the whole world. (Zechariah 12:3)
Third, it was predicted that the Hebrew language would be used again as the Jews’ first language even though we know in 1948 that Hebrew at that time was a dead language! (Zeph 3:9; 2 Thess 2:3-4).
Fourth, it was predicted that the Jews would never again be removed from their land.(Amos 9:14-15)
I was fascinated to read a few years later these groundbreaking words by a famous columnist who happened to be a Jew. Irving Kristol in his article, “The Political Dilemma of American Jews,” COMMENTARY MAGAZINE, 7/1/84 , wrote:
The rise of the Moral Majority is another new feature of the American landscape that baffles Jews…One of the reasons—perhaps the main reason—they do not know what to do about it is the fact that the Moral Majority is strongly pro-Israel. Some Jews, enmeshed in the liberal time warp, refuse to take this mundane fact seriously. They are wrong… In short, is it not time for an agonizing reappraisal?
In a letter to me dated September 21, 1995 Irving Kristol wrote this comment, “I am leery of taking Biblical prophecies too literally. They always seem to get fulfilled, some way or other, whatever happens. They are inspiring, of course, which enough for me.”
It is my view that there is a master plan that is getting played out on the world stage and Israel is in the center of the plan. Jesus spoke to the skeptical Jews of his day with his words from John 7 :16-17, “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” In other words, if you are an honest doubter and are willing to search out the truth and live by the results then God will reveal to you that Christ is his son. However, if you are a dishonest doubter then you are just unwilling to serve God and that is the core problem. You can’t find God for the same reason a thief can’t find a policeman.
Just recently I got to visit with Irving Kristol’s son Bill in a political meeting in Hot Springs, Arkansas on July 18, 2014. I gave him copies of letters I had received from both his father and their family friend Daniel Bell. He was amazed. He read the letters on the spot and thanked me for them. I told that Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel was the subject of the letters. Then I told him how much I respected his mother’s historical work and asked how she was doing.
Is there a master plan and does the universe have an ultimate purpose? The events playing out in the Middle East today seem to indicate that these Old Testament prophecies concerning the country of Israel returning to prominence are correct. Do you wish to explain them away like Irving Kristol did?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher, P.O.Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, everettehatcher@gmail.com,
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Francis Schaeffer : Reclaiming the World part 1, 2
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
_________________
Below you have picture of Dr. Harry Kroto:
______________
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
In the 1st video below in the 50th clip in this series are his words.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
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Steven Weinberg: To Explain the World
I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
Breaking The Habit [Official Music Video] – Linkin Park
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In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:
The man who followed on from that point was English–Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). He proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person’s own head. With Huxley’s idea, what began with the existential philosophers – man’s individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself – came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one’s own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.
This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.
Together with the advent of the “drug Age” was the increased interest in the West in the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: “This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today.” Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world. They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life. By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.
Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase “of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope.” As modern man searches for answers it “many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine.” For many people having the “occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning” is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.
Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. —
Johnny Cash had a long struggle with drugs and his story was told in an earlier post.
Breaking The Habit [Official Music Video] – Linkin Park
“Breaking the Habit” is a song by American rockband Linkin Park. It is the ninth track from their second studio album, Meteora, and was released as the fifth and final single from the album. The song was a hit; it became the fifth consecutive single from Meteora to reach number one on the BillboardModern Rock Tracks chart, a feat unmatched by any other artist in the history of that chart. It was also the third single from the album to reach number one on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.[4] The song also peaked at number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was certified Gold by the RIAA.[5][6] The song was also successful in many other countries, except in the UK where it became their first single to chart outside of the top thirty, faring only better than their previous single “From the Inside” which failed to chart. On September 4, 2012, “Breaking the Habit”, “Shadow of the Day“, “New Divide“, and “Burn It Down” were released in the “Linkin Park Pack 02” as downloadable content for the music rhythm video game, Rock Band 3.[7]
“Breaking the Habit” features a strong electronica-influenced opening, live strings and guitar. It is an exception from their previous nu metal/rap rockperformances as no distorted guitar riffs are included nor are there any rapping vocals from Mike Shinoda, a style they would further explore on their later albums.
A common misconception about the song is that it was written by lead singer Chester Bennington due to his struggles with substance abuse. Band member Mike Shinoda began writing the song before he met Bennington based on another close friend’s drug addiction.
In the album notes, it was said that the song was originally going to be an instrumental track lasting a little over three and a half minutes, but Shinoda was convinced by the band to change it. The instrumental was later released on the Underground 9.0 Fan Club as a demo track titled “Drawing”.
Shinoda had a lyrical idea of an emotion he had been trying to express for 5 to 6 years before the production of Meteora. To him, the lyrics had sounded wrong until listening to the “Drawing” demo one night and they fell together.[8] He showed the lyrics he wrote to Bennington who read them and teared up, relating to the words to a point where he had difficulty performing the song live for almost a year after the release of Meteora.
An original 2002 demo of this song with different lyrics and Shinoda on lead vocals appears on LP Underground XIV.
The music video for “Breaking the Habit” was animated by Studio Gonzo;[9] it was directed by Joe Hahn and co-produced by Eric Calderon. It uses an anime stylization which was supervised by Kazuto Nakazawa, who had previously directed the animated segment of Quentin Tarantino‘s Kill Bill: Volume 1 among other things.[10][11] The video was shot of the band performing the song and was later rotoscoped.[12] The video has gone on to be a favorite amongst MTV viewers, going as far as winning the 2004 MTV VMA Viewer’s Choice Award.
As the video begins, a deceased man is shown lying on a car’s roof. The surrounding area has been taped off and is littered with investigating police officers as well as onlookers. The video cuts to another character, a girl who breaks a mirror, then writes “I’m nothing” onto a sheet of paper. She picks up a shard of glass, clenches it in her hand, and smears her blood on the note. Throughout the different scenes, a wisp of smoke meanders around the characters as their stories play out, and the human face of Chester Bennington singing the song flashes various times. Another character is a young woman throwing tomatoes at a man. At a point, the ubiquitous smoke drifts over the deceased man’s body and enters his mouth, and the video begins to seemingly rewind itself, the woman throwing tomatoes at the man who is her husband or boyfriend, is shown coming home to see the man with another woman in bed suggesting they just had sex. The body of the deceased man begins to rise, falling in reverse, towards the roof of a tall building. It is revealed that the body is that of Chester, who had apparently fallen to his death. Upon landing on the roof, he joins with the rest of the band in performing the remainder of the song.
As of July 2022, the song has 280 million views on YouTube.
There is also a second music video, titled “Breaking the Habit (05.28.04 3:37 PM)”, showing the band in their studio performing the song. The video was directed by Kimo Proudfoot and is available on the Breaking the Habit DVD.[13][14][15]
“Breaking the Habit” was not initially performed in the tour for Meteora, until it received a full performance on November 15, 2003, in San Bernardino. Since then, it has found itself in the majority of their concerts. From its debut up until the end of the tour cycle for the band’s 3rd album, Minutes to Midnight, “Breaking the Habit” was played with a piano intro, where the first verse and chorus were played, and after that, the actual song would start. “Breaking the Habit” is also sometimes played live with an extended outro consisting of an a cappella performance of the chorus. After Linkin Park’s ‘Concert for the Philippines’ on January 11, 2014, “Breaking the Habit” was dropped from the band’s setlist. It would not be played live again until May 17, 2015, at Rock on the Range in Columbus, Ohio.[citation needed]
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
Back in the early 1990’s I started attending a hardware convention in Florida every February and I would always attend Idlewild Baptist Church in the Tamps area and get a chance to visit with my friends who grew up with me at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis in the 1970’s and 1980’s like Jack Oliver, Henry Beiber, Ronnie Upton, Ken Whitten, and Reno Zunz. Since 2018 when my wife Jill and I last attended that convention, I have only got to visit Idlewild once more in 2021 with my son Wilson and his wife Camille. It is with a joyful heart that I post this video looking back at the great things done for the Lord’s work during the 33 years of Ken Whitten’s ministry there!!!
What a great morning it was. Thank you Pastor Ken Whitten for giving Idlewild the past 33 years of your ministry. We will continue to be Grateful for everything you have been to this church as our Pastor.
Here you can find a replay of the “Grateful” service on Jan 29. Watch again as Thousands attended Pastor Ken Whitten’s farewell service as Senior Pastor at Idlewild.
Grateful Service – 01-29-23
Ken Whitten did a great series on Ecclesiastes and I have blogged about them in the past and also included portions of the sermons on several of my letters to Hugh Hefner. Below is the story of how I got interested in Ecclesiastes back in 1976 and have been studying it ever since!!!
I have been bugging people at Bellevue Baptist tape library in Memphis for this following message for 29 years and it now has become available. In fact, I had to construct from my memory from 1976 what the outline from that sermon and I incorrectly said it was
HERE BELOW IS SOLOMON’S SEARCH IN THE AREA OF THE 6 “L” WORDS. He looked into learning (1:16-18), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20).
In fact, now I have rediscovered that it actually was:
LEARNING, LAUGHING, LIQUOR, LUXURY, LUST, and finally he looked in the last chapter of ECCLESIASTES and stopped looking for meaning in life from other things and turned his attention to obeying the LORD!
My only mistakes in my memory was changing LUST to LADIES and the subject of LABOR was also covered in discussion on LUXURY. I also didn’t realize he added one more L word in with the LORD.
Here is the link to that message I heard in April of 1976 at Evangelical Christian School by Adrian Rogers:
I want to share a message that Adrian Rogers loved to share with young people and I had been able to access this message again until recently when my son and grandson pointed me to the OUT OF THE VAULT series and the APP which I added to my phone! Since I just discovered this I started working on this post and I have included the message THE QUEST FOR THE BEST at this link https://subsplash.com/loveworthfinding/lb/mi/+h3z74mr and the edited transcript below. But first let me give you a summary of what took place after I heard this message back in April of 1976 when I was 14 and in the 8th grade.
There are 5 events that took place from April of 1976 to May 15, 1994 that affected my blog (2011-present) more than any other events.
First, I heard a sermon THE QUEST FOR THE BESTby Adrian Rogers on Ecclesiastes at my Junior High Chapel that started my life long love of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Second, the song DUST IN THE WIND by the rock group KANSAS was released in January of 1978 and I linked it’s message to that of Ecclesiastes.
Third, in 1981 on the 700 Club that both Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope of KANSAS had been born again and put their faith alone in Christ for their eternal salvation.
Fourth, in 1990 I heard a recorded message from the 1960’s by Francis Schaeffer on the Book of Ecclesiastes. It shows the 5 pessimist conclusions humanists must come to when looking at life UNDER THE SUN (without God in the picture).
Fifth, I sent out over 250 letters on Ecclesiastes and Evolution to prominent skeptics and scientists across the world with the song DUST IN THE WIND in the first 3 minutes on the audio tape followed by Adrian Rogers sermon FOUR BRIDGES THE EVOLUTIONIST CAN NOT CROSS.
This message on Ecclesiastes was originally given by Adrian Rogers on June 20, 1973 under the title THE QUEST FOR THE BEST but I heard him give it to the Evangelical Christian School Junior High Chapel in April of 1976 when I was a 14 year old 8th grader. That started me on a journey of studying the Book of Ecclesiastes and on January 16, 1978 the song DUST IN THE WIND was released and the song peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of April 22, 1978, That song told me that Kerry Livgren the writer of that song and a member of Kansas had come to the same conclusion that Solomon had. I remember mentioning to my friends at church that we may soon see some members of Kansas become Christians because their search for the meaning of life had obviously come up empty even though they had risen from being an unknown band to the top of the music business and had all the wealth and fame that came with that.
Livgren wrote:
“All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
Kansas – Dust in the Wind (Official Video)
Both Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope of Kansas became Christians eventually. Kerry Livgren first tried Eastern Religions and Dave Hope had to come out of a heavy drug addiction. I was shocked and elated to see their personal testimony on The 700 Club in 1981 and that same interview can be seen on youtube today. Livgren lives in Topeka, Kansas today where he teaches “Diggers,” a Sunday school class at Topeka Bible Church. Hope is the head of Worship, Evangelism and Outreach at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida.
Kerry Livgren/Dave Hope: 700 Club Interview (Kansas) Part 1
Kerry Livgren/Dave Hope: 700 Club Interview (Kansas) Part 2
Over and over I have read that Hugh Hefner was a modern day King Solomon and Hefner’s search for satisfaction was attempted by adding to the number of his sexual experiences.
Have you made any New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and get into shape? Many Americans have great intentions at the start of a new year. Perhaps you have already purchased a gym membership or a piece of exercise equipment. If so, good for you! It’s important to get in shape and be healthy. I own a recumbent bike…and I love it. I work out on it nearly every day. I cycle miles on this bike and burn calories and increase my heart rate. The cool thing is: I don’t even have to leave my house…and in the rainy Pacific Northwest, this is a blessing. But if I am honest, it is a terribly boring and tedious way to exercise. When I look down at the odometer and it says I’ve cycled five miles, I’ve actually gone nowhere. I work up a sweat and ride until I am weary, yet I know that I am going to have to hop back on the bike all over again tomorrow. It is rather depressing!
Life is like riding on a recumbent bike. It is a boring, tedious, and repetitive ride. A thoughtful person will ask, “What is the purpose in life?” Have you ever asked this question? Most people have. For some of us, this question has plagued us over the course of our lives…even our Christian lives. A few years ago, scientists at John Hopkins University surveyed nearly 8,000 college students at forty-eight universities and asked what they considered “very important” to them. What do you think these college students said? Make a lot of money? Get married? Get a job? Buy a home? I can tell you this: only 16 percent answered “making a lot of money.” But a whopping 75 percent said that their first goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”3 This is a staggering piece of research, isn’t it?
In this New Year, maybe you are seeking to discover a purpose and meaning to your life. If so, the book of Ecclesiastes will guide you in this endeavor…but not in the way you might think.4Ecclesiastes has been dubbed, “the strangest book in the cannon [Bible].”5 It is an enigma for many Christians, for the bulk of this book is the memoirs of a man that is sharing his observations about what is wrong with life. In Eccl 1:1-11, we learn that life is fleeting and disappointing.
1. Life is fleeting (1:1-7).
In this first section, we will come to grips with the temporary nature of life. Inthe first three verses, the author introduces himself and his theme. Verse 1 begins: “The words6 of the Preacher,7 the son of David, king in Jerusalem.”8Although our author chooses not to identify himself, his titles or pen names give him away as Solomon.9 Solomon’s story is recorded for us in the first eleven chapters of 1 Kings. Although King David had many sons, it was his son Solomon who was chosen to be heir to the throne. God so favored Solomon that He appeared to him in a dream offering Solomon whatever blessing he desired. Solomon astutely asked God for wisdom to lead the nation well. He asked for wisdom instead of riches and fame. God honored Solomon’s request, granting him not just unparalleled wisdom, but wealth and recognition as well.
Solomon wrote three books of the Bible: Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes. He is considered the wisest and perhaps richest man that has ever lived. He had a fleet of ships that would bring gold to him every day from far off lands. Tragically, Solomon married a foreign woman, which was forbidden by God because of the temptation to be led astray spiritually. Ironically, it was this unwise decision to gain favor from different nations by taking foreign wives that diverted Solomon’s eyes from the one true God. Scripture records that he had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Truly, this diverted Solomon’s devotion, so that it is often said of him that he had a divided heart.
If we were to depict Solomon as someone more modern, he might be considered a mix between Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, HUGH HEFNER, and Brad Pitt. In Ecclesiastes, what philosophical conclusions does this rich powerful genius come to after living a life with everything at his fingertips? We would expect Solomon’s sermon to be entitled “Seven Habits of Highly Successful Kings.”10 In 1:2, Solomon gives the theme of his book.
“‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher, ‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.’”
[Solomon has argued that life is fleeting. In 1:8-11, he shares a second problem with life.]
2. Life is Disappointing (1:8-11).
In these next four verses, Solomon demonstrates that everything and everyone in life will ultimately disappoint us. There are three basic reasons for this: There is no satisfaction under the sun, there is nothing new under the sun, and no one is remembered under the sun.
No satisfaction under the sun (1:8). Solomon states that nothing is truly fulfilling. He writes, “All things are wearisome; man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear filled with hearing.”27The Rolling Stones made famous the song, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Sadly, this song could have been written by Solomon himself. Just like Mick Jagger and the rest of the Stones, Solomon had it all…and then some, yet everything was wearisome to him since one can never say, see, or hear enough. Man just can’t get NO satisfaction! Have you seen a good movie? Read a good book? Listened to a great song? Enjoyed a restful vacation? Delighted in a special experience? It is never enough. It never satisfies, for ultimately you want MORE.
__
Many of the sermons that I heard or read that inspired me to write Hugh Hefner were from this list of gentlemen: Daniel Akin, Brandon Barnard,Matt Chandler, George Critchley, Darryl Dash, Steve DeWitt, Steve Gaines, Norman L. Geisler, Greg Gillbert, Billy Graham, Mark Henry, Dan Jarrell, Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., R. G. Lee, Chris Lewis, Kerry Livgren, Robert Lewis, Bill Parkinson, Ben Parkinson,Vance Pitman, Nelson Price, Adrian Rogers, Philip Graham Ryken, Francis Schaeffer, Lee Strobel, Bill Wellons, Kirk Wetsell, Ken Whitten, Ed Young , Ravi Zacharias, Tom Zobrist, and Richard Zowie.
In the letter I base most of what I had to Mr. Hefner on a sermon I heard from Ken Whitten. I also quoted Francis Schaeffer too.
April 18, 2016
Hugh Hefner Playboy Mansion 10236 Charing Cross Road Los Angeles, CA 90024-1815
Dear Mr. Hefner,
Over and over again I have written you and compared your life to that of King Solomon the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes and today I am at it again. If there was one word to describe your life the word PLEASURE is probably that word. As you know I have written you every week since October of 2015 in the hope that you will be willing to reflect back on your life of pleasure UNDER THE SUN like King Solomon did and see what proper reflections your life has rendered. Francis Schaeffer has rightly noted concerning you that your goal with the “playboy mentality is just to smash the puritanical ethnic.” In fact, in your own personal life you definitely have gone the opposite direction of Puritanism.
King Solomon
___
Today we will look at the last chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes and also look at the sermon on that chapter by Ken Whitten of Idlewild Baptist Church in Tampa, Florida. The sermon today is very appropriate for you since you are approaching your deathbed. In the article, “Hugh Hefner: 10 Truths Behind the Playboy Legend, 6:22 PM PDT 9/21/2011 by THR Staff the article notes:
8. HEFNER DOESN’T TALK ABOUT DEATH
He hardly ever talks about death, a close colleague says: “Even when [a longtime assistant] died, after the memorial, he never mentioned her again.” Is he afraid of the prospect? “No,” insists Hefner, an agnostic who professes no faith in any afterlife. “My mother lived to 101.”
Below is a portion of the Ecclesiastes sermon by Ken Whitten delivered in December 1998:
The conclusion of the whole matter. Solomon has been a philosopher instead of a preacher. God had called him as a preacher but even preachers can get to the place where they think they are smarter than God. Solomon has left his first love. Solomon is the Old Testament prodigal. Solomon is the preacher who we get to gain from his mistakes. He has chased all the pretty bubbles in life. He has tried to find his life in wisdom and education but found it not. He tried to find his wealth and he thought like the world thinks and like Madison Ave teaches that if you get more than you are more, and if you are more then you will be more, and he tried that but came up empty. He tried women. He tried lust. He had some many wives and so many concubines that even the beautiful gift that God gives to a husband and wife, he lost the treasure of that.
(Hugh you gave up your family to chase the skirts)
One by one he checks off his life and says “That’s not, that’s not, that’s not and he is coming back to God and Solomon wants us to understand as he remembers his life previously and where he is now. He goes back to the beginning of his life and he starts out by saying in Chapter 12:
Remember God in Your Youth
12 Remember [thoughtfully] also your Creator in the days of your youth [for you are not your own, but His], before the evil days come or the years draw near when you will say [of physical pleasures], “I have no enjoyment and delight in them”; 2 before the sun and the light, and the moon and the stars are darkened [by impaired vision], and the clouds [of depression] return after the rain [of tears]; 3 in the day when the keepers of the house (hands, arms) tremble, and the strong men (feet, knees) bow themselves, and the grinders (molar teeth) cease because they are few, and those (eyes) who look through the windows grow dim;4 when the doors (lips) are shut in the streets and the sound of the grinding [of the teeth] is low, and one rises at the sound of a bird andthe crowing of a rooster, and all the daughters of music (voice, ears) sing softly. 5 Furthermore, they are afraid of a high place and of dangers on the road; the almond tree (hair) blossoms [white], and the grasshopper (a little thing) is a burden, and the [a]caperberry (desire, appetite) fails. For man goes to his eternal home and the mourners go about the streets and market places. 6 Earnestly remember your Creatorbefore the silver cord [of life] is broken, or the golden bowl is crushed, or the pitcher at the fountain is shattered and the wheel at the cistern is crushed; 7 then the dust [out of which God made man’s body] will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.8 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher. “All [that is done without God’s guidance] is vanity (futility).”
Purpose of the Preacher
9 Furthermore, because the Preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; and he pondered and searched out and arranged many proverbs. 10 The Preacher sought to find delightful words, even to write correctly words of truth.
11 The words of the wise are like [prodding] goads, and these collected sayings are [firmly fixed in the mind] like well-driven nails; [b]they are given by one Shepherd. 12 But beyond this my son, [about going further than the words given by one Shepherd], be warned: the writing of many books is endless [so do not believe everything you read], and excessive study and devotion to books is wearying to the body.
13 When all has been heard, the end of the matter is: fear God [worship Him with awe-filled reverence, knowing that He is almighty God] and keep His commandments, for this applies to every person. 14 For God will bring every act to judgment, every hidden and secret thing, whether it is good or evil.
Life is moving forward not backward. You are heading somewhere. Give attention to your salvation is what Solomon is saying here. FEAR GOD is the Old Testament way of saying BELIEVE ON THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND BE SAVED. You are come to the place where you face God and make sure of your salvation. FEAR GOD AND KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS. The word of God is a road map to our life. The word of God says FEAR GOD AND KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS this is the whole of man. The word DUTY is in italics and this means the whole of man. Our whole what? Our whole body our whole soul, our whole body, our whole spirit.
The word of God has something to say to your body, your soul to your spirit. To your health, to your holiness, to your happiness. Fear God and keep his commandments. You know what I think Solomon is saying. If I had to do it over again I would have a little more fun, a little more faith and a little more fear in life. I would have feared God more and Ecclesiastes 12:14 “For God will bring every act to judgment, every hidden and secret thing, whether it is good or evil.” All of us have secrets in our life that we probably would be ashamed of if you knew what we were thinking.
Someone asked John Quincy Adams how he is doing. “John Quincy Adams is quite well. But the house where he lives is becoming dilapidated. It is tottering. Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it, and it is becoming quite uninhabitable. I shall have to move out soon. But John Quincy Adams is quite well, thank you.”
John Quincy Adams
Stuart Hamblen wrote:
It is no secret what God can do What He’s done for others, He’ll do for you With arms wide open, He’ll pardon you It is no secret what God can do
There is no night for in His light You never walk alone Always feel at home Wherever you may go
There is no power can conquer you While God is on your side Take Him at His promise Don’t run away and hide
Stuart Hamblen
___
Stuart Hamblen also wrote another song called THIS OLD HOUSE:
This ole house is a-gettin’ shaky This ole house is a-gettin’ old This ole house lets in the rain This ole house lets in the cold On my knees I’m gettin’ chilly But I feel no fear or pain ‘Cause I see an angel peekin’ Through a broken window pane
Stuart Hamblen is talking about our body.
If you take 24 hour day and compare the minutes to a life’s span then when you are 15 years old it is 8:51am and when when you are 20 yrs old then it is 11:05am and 30 yrs old 1:25 pm and when you are 40 yrs old and it is 4:16pm and when you are 60 it is 10:11 pm and when you are 70 yrs old it is near midnight.
Solomon closes his Book of Ecclesiastes after saying to fear God is the final conclusion. ARE YOU READY TO MEET GOD TONITE?
Let me share with you the gospel according to the Book of Romans. Here is how it goes:
Because of our sin, we are separated from God. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)
The Penalty for our sin is death. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.(Romans 6:23)
The penalty for our sin was paid by Jesus Christ! But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
If we repent of our sin, then confess and trust Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we will be saved from our sins! For whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. (Romans 10:13) …if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9,10)
PS:This was the 31st letter that I have written to you and many of those letters have been on the Book of Ecclesiastes. Again it today is was responding to a quote from you.
Basim Magdy was born in 1977 in Assiut, Egypt. He now lives in Basel and Cairo. His interest in the unconscious and memory is at the root of his often-surreal works on paper, film, photography, and installation.
Growing up with an artist father, Magdy was influenced by such artists as Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Marc Chagall, as well as Hamid Nada, Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, and Ragheb Ayad. Magdy has produced work that deals with both the imagined future as envisioned in the 1960s and the reality that ensued, exploring the space between reality and fiction and the role that media systematically plays in filling up that space. Since reading Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Paul Sartre as a teenager, the artist has honed his use of absurdity to make visually arresting works.
I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s favorite […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s favorite […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s favorite […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
_ I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
_____ I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were short and from one of Hef’s […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
_____ I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
_____ I started this series on my letters and postcards to Hugh Hefner back in September when I read of the passing of Mr. Hefner. There are many more to come. It is my view that he may have taken time to look at glance at one or two of them since these postcards were […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted | Edit | Comments (0)
|I saw this on the internet on June 20, 2017 _ Playboy’s Hugh Hefner on board a boat with Barbi Benton and friends sporting a striped navy shirt and a pipe in mouth and a real catch in hand during the 70s. ____________________________________ Below is the last letter I ever wrote to Hugh Hefner. […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Atheists Confronted, Francis Schaeffer | Edit |Comments (0)
I learned yesterday that Hugh Hefner had passed away. Just last year I visited Chicago and drove by his Chicago Playboy Mansion pictured below. ___ Playboy after dark filmed in Chicago Playboy Mansion During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian […]
By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Atheists Confronted, Francis Schaeffer, Milton Friedman | Edit| Comments (0)
Last year, I weighed in on the debate about whether companies should be operated for the benefit of owners (shareholders) or for the broader community (stakeholders).
Unsurprisingly, I sided with Milton Friedman and argued that businesses have a responsibility to maximize profits – assuming, of course, ethical behavior.
Moreover, I cited research showing how this is the approach that actually produces the maximum benefits for the rest of us (i.e., stakeholders).
But some people are not convinced by these insights.
David Gelles of the New York Times has a glowing profile of a former CEO, Hubert Joly, largely because of his apparent hostility to free markets.
Hubert Joly took over Best Buy in 2012… Since stepping down as chief executive in 2019, Mr. Joly has taken up a post teaching at Harvard Business School…In his book, on the speaking circuit and in meetings with other executives, Mr. Joly has taken up a campaign against the capitalist st atus quo. “…on the top of my F.B.I. most wanted list…is Milton Friedman, with his shareholder primacy — the excessive, obsessive focus on profits as the key thing that matters.”
Mr. Joly’s overt disdain for Friedman’s position seems noteworthy.
But it also seems hypocritical.
Why?
Because Joly did exactly what Friedman recommended. He is viewed as a successful CEO because he made changes that had the effect of making shareholders richer.
…the electronics retailer was struggling… Sales and profits were sagging, and the stock price had cratered. …Eschewing the conventional wisdom — that Best Buy should slash wages and cut costs in a bid to jack up profitability — Mr. Joly began investing in the company. He gave workers better perks… The strategy worked, and Best Buy shares soared during his tenure.
So why, then, is Mr. Joly so hostile to Friedman when he followed his approach?
Beats me, but I’m guessing he somehow thinks Friedman’s maxim means that a CEO should “slash wages” and close stores. And that sounds mean and heartless.
But Joly showed that Friedman’s maxim could be fulfilled in a different way. He figured out how to please consumers so that it was possible to expand the business and make workers better off.
Sometimes that happens because a poorly run company contracts (the seemingly heartless process of creative destruction) and sometimes that happens because a well-run company expands.
P.S. There’s one more quote from Mr. Joly that I want to address. As part of his interview with the NYT, he seemingly played the role of a guilt-ridden rich guy.
“I’m on the record saying that the more taxes I pay, the happier I am.”
To be fair, he didn’t actually say that he supported tax increases, either on himself or anyone else. It’s possible that he was really saying that he likes earning more money, which then results in a higher tax bill.
Back in 2016, I created a 2×2 matrix to illustrate the difference between redistributionism (tax Person A and give to Person B) and state planning (politicians and bureaucrats trying to steer the economy, either through direct ownership or industrial policy).
The main point of that column was to show that countries should try to be in the top-left section, where there is less redistribution and less government control.
But I also wanted to help people understand that redistributionism and socialism are not the same thing.
For instance, Sweden (in the bottom-left box) is a capitalist economy with a big welfare state, whereas China (in the top-right box) doesn’t have much redistribution but government has substantial control over economic activity.
From an American perspective, the good news is that the U.S. currently is in the top-left box.
The bad news is that President Biden wants the country in the bottom-left box. So, if we want to be technically accurate, we should not accuse him of socialism.
Instead, as Antony Davies and James Harrigan explained in a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, the real threat to the nation is “transferism.”
Socialism is state control of the means of production. …By contrast, capitalism is simply private ownership of the means of production. …more than four in ten Americans think “some form of socialism” is a good thing. But what is “some form of socialism?” A society is either socialist or it isn’t.The state either owns the means of production or it doesn’t. There is no middle ground. …It appears that what Americans really have in mind when they think about socialism is not an economic system but particular economic outcomes. …they are advocating what we should really call “transferism.” Transferism is a system in which one group of people forces a second group to pay for things that the people believe they, or some third group, should have. Transferism isn’t about controlling the means of production. It is about the forced redistribution of what’s produced.
Davies and Harrigan are correct.
Moreover, they deserve credit for predicting the future since they wrote the column in 2019!
Now let’s consider whether redistributionism (or transferism) is a good idea.
I’ve previously explained that a big welfare state causes economic damage, even if a nation otherwise is very pro-capitalist.
Consider, for instance, the remarkable data showing how Swedish-Americans and Danish-Americans generate much more prosperity than Swedes and Danes who still live in Scandinavia.
Or consider the income data showing how average Americans enjoy much higher living standards than their European counterparts (either in Nordic nations or elsewhere).
What’s worrisome is that Biden wants a much bigger welfare state and he doesn’t seem to understand that European-sized government means anemic European-style economic performance.
This is the message that Bret Stephens shared in one of his recent columns for the New York Times.
He starts by describing Biden’s agenda.
President Biden charts a course toward the largest expansion of government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. After signing a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill in March and proposing a $1.5 trillion discretionary budget in April (a 16 percent increase from this year, on top of what’s likely to be at least $3 trillion in mandatory spending on programs like Medicare and Medicaid), the president wants $2.3 trillion more for infrastructure and $1.8 trillion for new social programs. That’s $7.5 trillion in discretionary spending. To put the number in perspective, we spent $4.1 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars over nearly four years to wage and win the Second World War. What will America get for the money?
He then points out the potential consequences.
…before the U.S. takes this leap into a full-blown American social-welfare state, moderates in Congress like Senator Joe Manchin or Representative Jim Costa ought to ask: What’s the catch? …The real catch is that massive government spending has hidden costs that are difficult to capture in numbers alone. Take another look at Europe. Why does R&D spending in the European Union persistently lag that in the U.S. …Why does Europe’s tech start-up scene…so notably lag its competitors…? Perhaps…social safety nets typically come at the expense of risk-taking and economic dynamism. And why is France, which, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, spends more on social welfare than any other nation in the developed world, such an unhappy place, with chronically high unemployment, endless labor unrest, a decades-old brain drain, rising political extremism, a wealth tax that failed and a medical system that was on the brink of collapse long before Covid struck? …Beyond the gargantuan cost, Congress should think very hard about the real catch: transforming America into a kinder, gentler place of permanent decline.
Amen.
Biden’s agenda inevitably will erode societal capital, leading to less work (because of lavish freebies such as per-child handouts) and lower levels of entrepreneurship (because of tax penalties on investment and risk-taking).
Indeed, I’ve even pointed out how very small increases in annual growth can lead to big improvements in living standards over just a couple of decades.
But some folks on the left are not very receptive to this argument. They genuinely (but incorrectly) seem to think the economy is a fixed pie (which also explains, at least in part, why they are so focused on redistribution).
So let’s share some hard data in hopes of getting them to understand that more prosperity is possible.
We’ll start will this chart of inflation-adjusted per-capita economic output in the United States, which comes from Oxford University’s Our World in Data.
The obvious takeaway from this data is that Americans are much richer today than they were after World War II. Adjusted for inflation, we’re now about four times richer than our grandparents.
Some of our friends on the left may be thinking these numbers are distorted, that average output has only increased because the rich have gotten so much richer.
Well, it is true that the rich have gotten richer. But it’s also true that the rest of us have become richer as well.
Which is why I shared data earlier this year showing median living standards rather than mean (average) living standards.
Folks on the left may also suspect that the post-1950 data is an anomaly. In other words, maybe I’m guilty of cherry-picking data.
That’s a common practice in the world of policy, so I don’t blame people for being suspicious.
So take a look at this chart, which I also first shared earlier this year. It shows that the increase in living standards has been even more dramatic if you look at changes since 1820.
By the way, none of these observations are new. Back in 1997, Micahel Cox and Richard Alm wrote a must-read article for the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank’s Annual Report.
Here are some of their findings.
What really matters…isn’t what something costs in money; it’s what it costs in time. Making money takes time, so when we shop, we’re really spending time. The real cost of living isn’t measured in dollars and cents but in the hours and minutes we must work to live. …A pair of stockings cost just 25¢ a century ago. This sounds wonderful until we learn that a worker of the era earned only 14.8¢ an hour.So paying for the stockings took 1 hour 41 minutes of work. Today a better pair requires only about 18 minutes of work. …In calculating our cost of living, a good place to start is with the basics—food, shelter and clothing. In terms of time on the job, the cost of a half-gallon of milk fell from 39 minutes in 1919 to 16 minutes in 1950, 10 minutes in 1975 and 7 minutes in 1997. A pound of ground beef steadily declined from 30 minutes in 1919 to 23 minutes in 1950, 11 minutes in 1975 and 6 minutes in 1997. Paying for a dozen oranges required 1 hour 8 minutes of work in 1919. Now it takes less than 10 minutes, half what it did in 1950.
These two visuals from the article are very informative.
First, look at how consumer products went from rare luxuries early in the 20th century to everyday products by the end of the century.
Equally important, these products have become cheaper and cheaper over time.
As illustrated by this second visual from the article.
All the data in the Cox-Alm article is more than 20 years old, so the numbers would be even more impressive today.
Professor Don Boudreaux put these numbers in context a few years ago in a column for the Foundation for Economic Education. Here’s some of what he wrote.
What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916? …Think about it. …If you were a 1916 American billionaire you could, of course, afford prime real-estate. You could afford a home on 5th Avenue or one overlooking the Pacific Ocean… But when you traveled from your Manhattan digs to your west-coast palace, it would take a few days, and if you made that trip during the summer months, you’d likely not have air-conditioning in your private railroad car.…You could neither listen to radio (the first commercial radio broadcast occurred in 1920) nor watch television. …Obviously, you could not download music. …Your telephone was attached to a wall. You could not use it to Skype. …Even the best medical care back then was horrid by today’s standards: it was much more painful and much less effective. …Antibiotics weren’t available. …Dental care wasn’t any better. …You were completely cut off from the cultural richness that globalization has spawned over the past century. …I wouldn’t be remotely tempted to quit the 2016 me so that I could be a one-billion-dollar-richer me in 1916. This fact means that, by 1916 standards, I am today more than a billionaire. It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller.
The bottom line is that we have become richer and we can continue to become richer.
But how fast things improve is partly a function of government policy. If we can impose some restraints on the size and scope of government, that will give the private sector some breathing room to grow and prosper.
Some policies will improve with Biden in the White House, most notably trade, but also government spending (not because Biden is good, but rather because Republicans will go back to pretending to be fiscally conservative).
But some policies will move in the wrong direction. Biden is awful on tax policy, for instance, though I expect Republicans in the Senate will block his class-warfare agenda.
Biden is also very bad on regulatory issues. Unfortunately, this is an area where the new President (and his appointees) will have plenty of authority to shift policy in the wrong direction.
I’m especially worried that Biden will resuscitate an Obama-era policy of strong-arming banks so they won’t do business with unpopular industries. This video, which I first shared back in 2016, explains this reprehensible policy
Norbert Michel of the Heritage Foundation, in a column for Forbes, provides some additional background on the policy.
Choke Point consisted of bureaucrats in several independent federal agencies taking it upon themselves to shut legal businesses – such as payday lenders and firearms dealers – out of the banking system. Given the nature of the U.S. regulatory framework, this operation was easy to pull off.Officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), for instance, simply had to inform the banks they were overseeing that the government considered certain types of their customers “high risk.” The mere implication of a threat was enough to pressure banks into closing accounts, because no U.S. bank wants anything to do with extra audits or investigations from their regulator, much less additional operating restrictions or civil and criminal charges. Banks are incredibly sensitive to any type of pressure from federal regulators, and they know that the regulators have enormous discretion.
In a column for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon elaborated on the left’s campaign to politicize the banking system.
Banking was used as a weapon against legal, solvent businesses by the Obama administration during Operation Choke Point, a program to deny the disfavored access to banking services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. labeled certain businesses “high risk,” including firearms and ammunition dealers, check-cashers, payday lenders and fireworks vendors. Unelected regulators, not Congress or courts, marked these industries as “dirty business” and made it “unacceptable for an insured depository institution” to offer them banking services. …With Democrats unable to ban guns legislatively, Rep. Carolyn Maloney admonished banks at a recent hearing to not “finance gun slaughter.” When she urged JPMorgan to deny credit for legal firearm sales as other banks had done, the CEO responded, “We can certainly consider that. Yes.” At the same hearing, Rep. Rashida Tlaib challenged bank CEOs: “Will any of your banks make a commitment to phase out your investments in fossil fuels and dirty energy?” The CEOs declined to defend fossil fuels… Letting political intimidation dictate the availability of private credit endangers freedom and stifles productivity growth and job creation. …The use of political intimidation to allocate capital is an assault on economic efficiency and freedom.
There is, however, a bit of good news.
The Trump Administration ended Operation Choke Point back in 2017.
And, although it is happening at the last minute, the Trump Administration is now trying to strengthen the rule of law so banks won’t feel pressured to discriminate against certain industries in the future.
In a column published yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, Brian Brooks and Charles Calomiris of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) explain the new rule that their agency has unveiled.
…there have been too many allegations of banks cutting off vital services, credit and capital that legal businesses rely on to create jobs, meet community needs and support the economy. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where we serve as acting comptroller and chief economist, respectively, on Friday proposed a rule to prevent banks from discriminating against legal businesses and individuals.The rule would require bankers to do what they do best: assess risk and underwrite credit decisions. …politically driven discrimination against particular industries has threatened fairness in banking. Under the Obama administration, Operation Choke Point, in which the OCC did not take part, involved regulators discouraging banks from serving legal and constitutionally protected businesses such as payday lenders and gun and ammunition sellers. …the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 added to the OCC’s traditional mission of safety and soundness the obligation to ensure fair access to financial services… Banks may not exclude entire parts of the economy for reasons unrelated to objective, quantifiable risks specific to an individual customer.
Sadly, if Biden has the same attitude as Obama about the rule of law, a future OCC can reverse anything Trump’s people adopt.
I’ll close with a libertarian-minded observation.
Because I believe in freedom of association, I think banks should have the liberty to discriminate against specific businesses, or even entire industries.
But there’s a big difference between banks choosing to discriminate and being coerced into such behavior by government regulators.
So it was disgusting that Obama’s regulators went after industries they didn’t like, such as gun dealers.
But it would be equally reprehensible if a Republican Administration went after an industry it didn’t like, such as legal marijuana.
P.S. The broader lesson to learn from Operation Choke Point is that regulatory power for governments is a vehicle for corruptionand malfeasance.
But the main goal of that column was to explain that the internal revenue code already is heavily weighted against investors, entrepreneurs, business owners and other upper-income taxpayers.
And to underscore that point, I shared two charts from Brian Riedl’s chartbook to show that the “rich” are now paying a much larger share of the tax burden – notwithstanding the Reagan tax cuts, Bush tax cuts, and Trump tax cuts – than they were 40 years ago.
Not only that, but the United States has a tax system that is more “progressive” than all other developed nations (all of whom also impose heavy tax burdens on upper-income taxpayers, but differ from the United States in that they also pillage lower-income and middle-class residents).
In other words, Biden’s class-warfare tax plan is bad policy.
Today’s column, by contrast, will point out that his tax increases are impractical. Simply stated, they won’t collect much revenue because people change their behavior when incentives to earn and report income are altered.
This is especially true when looking at upper-income taxpayers who – compared to the rest of us – have much greater ability to change the timing, level, and composition of their income.
This helps to explain why rich people paid five times as much tax to the IRS during the 1980s when Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.
When writing about this topic, I normally use the Laffer Curve to help people understand why simplistic assumptions about tax policy are wrong (that you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates, for instance). And I point out that even folks way on the left, such as Paul Krugman, agree with this common-sense view (though it’s also worth noting that some people on the right discredit the concept by making silly assertions that “all tax cuts pay for themselves”).
But instead of showing the curve again, I want to go back to Brian Riedl’s chartbook and review his data on of revenue changes during the eight years of the Obama Administration.
It shows that Obama technically cut taxes by $822 billion (as further explained in the postscript, most of that occurred when some of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent by the “fiscal cliff” deal in 2012) and raised taxes by $1.32 trillion (most of that occurred as a result of the Obamacare legislation).
If we do the math, that means Obama imposed a cumulative net tax increase of about $510 billion during his eight years in office
But, if you look at the red bar on the chart, you’ll see that the government didn’t wind up with more money because of what the number crunchers refer to as “economic and technical reestimates.”
Indeed, those reestimates resulted in more than $3.1 trillion of lost revenue during the Obama years.
I don’t want the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington to have more tax revenue, but I obviously don’t like it when tax revenues shrink simply because the economy is stagnant and people have less taxable income.
Yet that’s precisely what we got during the Obama years.
To be sure, it would be inaccurate to assert that revenues declined solely because of Obama’s tax increase. There were many other bad policies that also contributed to taxable income falling short of projections.
Heck, maybe there was simply some bad luck as well.
But even if we add lots of caveats, the inescapable conclusion is that it’s not a good idea to adopt policies – such as class-warfare tax rates – that discourage people from earning and reporting taxable income.
The bottom line is that we should hope Biden’s proposed tax increases die a quick death.
P.S. The “fiscal cliff” was the term used to describe the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. According to the way budget data is measured in Washington, extending some of those provisions counted as a tax cut even though the practical impact was to protect people from a tax increase.
P.P.S. Even though Biden absurdly asserted that paying higher taxes is “patriotic,” it’s worth pointing out that he engaged in very aggressive tax avoidance to protect his family’s money.
The good news, as I wrote earlier this year, is that he probably isn’t serious about some of his worst ideas.
Biden is a statist, but not overly ideological. His support for bigger government is largely a strategy of catering to the various interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party. The good news is that he’s an incrementalist and won’t aggressively push for a horrifying FDR-style agenda if he gets to the White House.
But what if Joe Biden’s health deteriorates and Kamala Harris – sooner or later – winds up in charge?
And it doesn’t appear that being Biden’s choice for Vice President has led her to moderate her views. Consider this campaign ad, where she openly asserted that “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”
The notion that we should strive for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity is horrifying.
For all intents and purposes,Harris has embraced a harsh version of redistributionism where everyone above average is punished and everyone below average is rewarded.
This goes way beyond a safety net and it’s definitely a recipe for economic misery since people on both sides of the equationhave less incentive to be productive.
I’m not the only one to be taken aback by Harris’ dogmatic leftism.
Robby Soave, writing for Reason, is very critical of her radical outlook.
Harris gives voice to a leftist-progressive narrative about the importance of equity—equal outcomes—rather than mere equality before the law. …Harris contrasted equal treatment—all people getting the same thing—with equitable treatment,which means “we all end up at the same place.” …This may seem like a trivial difference, but when it comes to public policy, the difference matters. A government shouldbe obligated to treat all citizens equally, giving them the same access to civil rights and liberties like voting, marriage, religious freedom, and gun ownership. …A mandate to foster equity, though, would give the government power to violate these rights in order to achieve identical social results for all people.
And, in a column for National Review, Brad Polumbo expresses similar reservations about her views.
Whether she embraces the label “socialist” or not, Harris’s stated agenda and Senate record both reveal her to be positioned a long way to the left on matters of economic policy. From health care to the environment to housing, Harris thinks the answer to almost every problem we face is simply more government and more taxpayer money — raising taxes and further indebting future generations in the process.…Harris…supports an astounding $40 trillion in new spending over the next decade. In a sign of just how far left the Democratic Party has shifted on economics, Harris backs more than 20 times as much spending as Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016. …And this is not just a matter of spending. During her failed presidential campaign, Harris supported a federal-government takeover of health care… The senator jumped on the “Green New Deal” bandwagon as well. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution in the Senate that called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” …she supports enacting price controls on housing across the country. …The left-wing group Progressive Punch analyzed Harris’s voting record and found that she is the fourth-most liberal senator, more liberal even than Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Similarly, the nonpartisan organization GovTrack.us deemed Harris the furthest-left member of the Senate for the 2019 legislative year. (Spoiler alert: If your voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders, you might be a socialist.)
To be fair, Harris is simply a politician, so we have no idea what she really believes. Her hard-left agenda might simply be her way of appealing to Democratic voters, much as Republicans who run for president suddenly decide they support big tax cuts and sweeping tax reform.
But whether she’s sincere or insincere, it’s troubling that she actually says it’s the role of government to make sure we all “end up at the same place.”
Let’s close with a video clip from Milton Friedman. At the risk of understatement, he has a different perspective than Ms. Harris.
Since we highlighted Harris’ key quote, let’s also highlight the key quote from Friedman.
Amen.
P.S. It appears Republicans will hold the Senate, which presumably (hopefully?) means that any radical proposals would be dead on arrival, regardless of whether they’re proposed by Biden or Harris.
After Barack Obama took office (and especially after he was reelected), there was a big uptick in the number of rich people who chose to emigrate from the United States.
There are many reasons wealthy people choose to move from one nation to another, but Obama’s embrace of class-warfare tax policy (including FATCA) was seen as a big factor.
Joe Biden’s tax agenda is significantly more punitive than Obama’s, so we may see something similar happen if he wins the 2020 election.
Given the economic importance of innovators, entrepreneurs, and inventors, this would be not be good news for the American economy.
The New York Timesreported late last year that the United States could be shooting itself in the foot by discouraging wealthy residents.
…a different group of Americans say they are considering leaving — people of both parties who would be hit by the wealth tax… Wealthy Americans often leave high-tax states like New York and California for lower-tax ones like Florida and Texas. But renouncing citizenship is a far more permanent, costly and complicated proposition. …“America’s the most attractive destination for capital, entrepreneurs and people wanting to get a great education,” said Reaz H. Jafri, a partner and head of the immigration practice at Withers, an international law firm. “But in today’s world, when you have other economic centers of excellence — like Singapore, Switzerland and London — people don’t view the U.S. as the only place to be.” …now, the price may be right to leave. While the cost of expatriating varies depending on a person’s assets, the wealthiest are betting that if a Democrat wins…, leaving now means a lower exit tax. …The wealthy who are considering renouncing their citizenship fear a wealth tax less than the possibility that the tax on capital gains could be raised to the ordinary income tax rate, effectively doubling what a wealthy person would pay… When Eduardo Saverin, a founder of Facebook…renounced his United States citizenship shortly before the social network went public, …several estimates said that renouncing his citizenship…saved him $700 million in taxes.
Here are some excerpts from a 2017 Bloomberg story.
Australia is luring increasing numbers of global millionaires, helping make it one of the fastest growing wealthy nations in the world… Over the past decade, total wealth held in Australia has risen by 85 percent compared to 30 percent in the U.S. and 28 percent in the U.K… As a result, the average Australian is now significantly wealthier than the average American or Briton. …Given its relatively small population, Australia also makes an appearance on a list of average wealth per person. This one is, however, dominated by small tax havens.
Here’s one of the charts from the story.
As you can see, Australia is doing very well, though the small tax havens like Monaco are world leaders.
I’m mystified, however, that the Cayman Islands isn’t listed.
But I’m digressing.
Let’s get back to our main topic. It’s worth noting that even Greece is seeking to attract rich foreigners.
The new tax law is aimed at attracting fresh revenues into the country’s state coffers – mainly from foreigners as well as Greeks who are taxed abroad – by relocating their tax domicile to Greece, as it tries to woo “high-net-worth individuals” to the Greek tax register.The non-dom model provides for revenues obtained abroad to be taxed at a flat amount… Having these foreigners stay in Greece for at least 183 days a year, as the law requires, will also entail expenditure on accommodation and everyday costs that will be added to the Greek economy. …most eligible foreigners will be able to considerably lighten their tax burden if they relocate to Greece…nevertheless, the amount of 500,000 euros’ worth of investment in Greece required of foreigners and the annual flat tax of 100,000 euros demanded (plus 20,000 euros per family member) may keep many of them away.
The system is too restrictive, but it will make the beleaguered nation an attractive destination for some rich people. After all, they don’t even have to pay a flat tax, just a flat fee.
Italy has enjoyed some success with a similar regime to entice millionaires.
Last but not least, an article published last year has some fascinating details on the where rich people move and why they move.
The world’s wealthiest people are also the most mobile. High net worth individuals (HNWIs) – persons with wealth over US$1 million – may decide to pick up and move for a number of reasons. In some cases they are attracted by jurisdictions with more favorable tax laws… Unlike the middle class, wealthy citizens have the means to pick up and leave when things start to sideways in their home country. An uptick in HNWI migration from a country can often be a signal of negative economic or societal factors influencing a country. …Time-honored locations – such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands – continue to attract the world’s wealthy, but no country is experiencing HNWI inflows quite like Australia. …The country has a robust economy, and is perceived as being a safe place to raise a family. Even better, Australia has no inheritance tax
Here’s a map from the article.
The good news is that the United States is attracting more millionaires than it’s losing (perhaps because of the EB-5 program).
The bad news is that this ratio could flip after the election. Indeed, it may already be happening even though recent data on expatriation paints a rosy picture.
The bottom line is that the United States should be competing to attract millionaires, not repel them. Assuming, of course, politicians care about jobs and prosperity for the rest of the population.
P.S. American politicians, copying laws normally imposed by the world’s most loathsome regimes, have imposed an “exit tax” so they can grab extra cash from rich people who choose to become citizens elsewhere.
P.P.S. I’ve argued that Australia is a good place to emigrate even for those of us who aren’t rich.
While acknowledging that Social Security and Medicare also are in desperate need of modernization, I wrote that Medicaid reformshould be the first priority.
But I’d be happy if we made progress on any type of entitlement reform, so I don’t think there are right or wrong answers to this kind of question.
We have the same type of question this week. A reader sent an email to ask “Which federal department should be abolished first?”
I guess this is what is meant when people talk about a target-rich environment. We have an abundance of candidates:
Simply stated, there is no legitimate argument for HUD. And I think there would be the least political resistance.
As with the answer to the question about entitlements, this is a judgment call. I’d be happy to be proven wrong if it meant that politicians were aggressively going after another department. Anything that reduces the burden of government spending is a step in the right direction
I identified four heroes from the “Battle of Ideas” video I shared in late August – Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Here’s one of those heroes, Milton Friedman, explaining what’s needed to control big government.
Libertarians and others are often torn about school choice. They may wish to see the government schooling monopoly weakened, but they may resist supporting choice mechanisms, like vouchers and education savings accounts, because they don’t go far enough. Indeed, most current choice programs continue to rely on taxpayer funding of education and don’t address the underlying compulsory nature of elementary and secondary schooling.
Skeptics may also have legitimate fears that taxpayer-funded education choice programs will lead to over-regulation of previously independent and parochial schooling options, making all schooling mirror compulsory mass schooling, with no substantive variation.
Friedman Challenged Compulsory Schooling Laws
Milton Friedman had these same concerns. The Nobel prize-winning economist is widely considered to be the one to popularize the idea of vouchers and school choice beginning with his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education.” His vision continues to be realized through the important work of EdChoice, formerly the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, that Friedman and his economist wife, Rose, founded in 1996.
July 31 is Milton Friedman’s birthday. He died in 2006 at the age of 94, but his ideas continue to have an impact, particularly in education policy.
Friedman saw vouchers and other choice programs as half-measures. He recognized the larger problems of taxpayer funding and compulsion, but saw vouchers as an important starting point in allowing parents to regain control of their children’s education. In their popular book, Free To Choose, first published in 1980, the Friedmans wrote:
We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther. (p.161)
They continued:
The compulsory attendance laws are the justification for government control over the standards of private schools. But it is far from clear that there is any justification for the compulsory attendance laws themselves. (p. 162)
The Friedmans admitted that their “own views on this have changed over time,” as they realized that “compulsory attendance at schools is not necessary to achieve that minimum standard of literacy and knowledge,” and that “schooling was well-nigh universal in the United States before either compulsory attendance or government financing of schooling existed. Like most laws, compulsory attendance laws have costs as well as benefits. We no longer believe the benefits justify the costs.” (pp. 162-3)
Still, they felt that vouchers would be the essential starting point toward chipping away at monopoly mass schooling by putting parents back in charge. School choice, in other words, would be a necessary but not sufficient policy approach toward addressing the underlying issue of government control of education.
Vouchers as a First Step
In their book, the Friedmans presented the potential outcomes of their proposed voucher plan, which would give parents access to some or all of the average per-pupil expenditures of a child enrolled in public school. They believed that vouchers would help create a more competitive education market, encouraging education entrepreneurship. They felt that parents would be more empowered with greater control over their children’s education and have a stronger desire to contribute some of their own money toward education. They asserted that in many places “the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location” and suggested that voucher programs would lead to increased integration and heterogeneity. (pp. 166-7)
To the critics who said, and still say, that school choice programs would destroy the public schools, the Friedmans replied that these critics fail to
explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn’t, why anyone should object to its “destruction.” (p. 170)
What I appreciate most about the Friedmans discussion of vouchers and the promise of school choice is their unrelenting support of parents. They believed that parents, not government bureaucrats and intellectuals, know what is best for their children’s education and well-being and are fully capable of choosing wisely for their children—when they have the opportunity to do so.
They wrote:
Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else. Social reformers, and educational reformers in particular, often self-righteously take for granted that parents, especially those who are poor and have little education themselves, have little interest in their children’s education and no competence to choose for them. That is a gratuitous insult. Such parents have frequently had limited opportunity to choose. However, U.S. history has demonstrated that, given the opportunity, they have often been willing to sacrifice a great deal, and have done so wisely, for their children’s welfare. (p. 160).
Today, school voucher programs exist in 15 states plus the District of Columbia. These programs have consistently shown that when parents are given the choice to opt-out of an assigned district school, many will take advantage of the opportunity. In Washington, D.C., low-income parents who win a voucher lottery send their children to private schools.
The most recent three-year federal evaluationof voucher program participants found that while student academic achievement was comparable to achievement for non-voucher students remaining in public schools, there were statistically significant improvements in other important areas. For instance, voucher participants had lower rates of chronic absenteeism than the control groups, as well as higher student satisfaction scores. There were also tremendous cost-savings.
In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has served over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools.
According to Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and a prolific researcher on the topic, the recent analysis of the D.C. voucher program “reveals that private schools produce the same academic outcomes for only a third of the cost of the public schools. In other words, school choice is a great investment.”
In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created in 1990 and is the nation’s oldest voucher program. It currently serves over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools. Like the D.C. voucher program, data on test scores of Milwaukee voucher students show similar results to public school students, but non-academic results are promising.
Increased Access and Decreased Crime
Recent research found voucher recipients had lower crime rates and lower incidences of unplanned pregnancies in young adulthood. On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.
According to Howard Fuller, an education professor at Marquette University, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and one of the developers of the Milwaukee voucher program, the key is parent empowerment—particularly for low-income minority families.
In an interview with NPR, Fuller said: “What I’m saying to you is that there are thousands of black children whose lives are much better today because of the Milwaukee parental choice program,” he says. “They were able to access better schools than they would have without a voucher.”
Putting parents back in charge of their child’s education through school choice measures was Milton Friedman’s goal. It was not his ultimate goal, as it would not fully address the funding and compulsion components of government schooling; but it was, and remains, an important first step. As the Friedmans wrote in Free To Choose:
The strong American tradition of voluntary action has provided many excellent examples that demonstrate what can be done when parents have greater choice. (p. 159).
On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.
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 […]
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