Category Archives: Cato Institute

FBI, Tech Giants Miss New York Subway Shooting Suspect’s Hateful Social Media Trail 

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FBI agents and NYPD officers escort Frank James from the 9th Precinct after his arrest Wednesday in the shooting attack the day before at the 36th Street subway station in Brooklyn. (Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images)

The man charged with shooting commuters on a New York subway train Tuesday left a trail on social media in which he disparaged whites and complained about racism, homelessness, and violence. 

“What are you doing, brother?” Frank James, 62, of Milwaukee, said in one video, addressing New York Mayor Eric Adams. “What’s happening with this homeless situation?”

James, who like Adams is black, also talked about numerous conspiracy theories on YouTube, according to the Justice Department, and asserted: “And so the message to me is: I should have gotten a gun, and just started shooting mother——s.” 

Two days before the shootings, which wounded or injured 23, James posted a video in which he asserted:

 

This is what white b—–s and white m———ers’ expect you to be … when you blow one of their … brains out—this is what you asked for. This is how you wanted me to be, obviously.

Among other offenses, James is charged with “terrorist attacks or other violence against a mass transportation system” in the mass shooting at the Sunset Park subway stop in Brooklyn, according to a Justice Department press release.

For more than a year, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) have pledged to flag domestic extremists

The FBI—criticized for pursuing Russian collusion theories, “white supremacists,” and, more recently, school parents—also had access to monitor social media posts by James or anyone else. 

“Yesterday, as everyday New Yorkers commuted through Brooklyn on our subway system, Frank James—as alleged—committed a horrific act that resulted in an around-the-clock effort by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the NYPD, and the ATF to find him and bring him to justice,” Michael J. Driscoll, assistant director in charge at the FBI’s New York field office, said Wednesday in a public statement. 

“Thanks to the incredible work by all involved to identify James and get the proper information out to the public, he’s in federal custody and New Yorkers can breathe a little easier in our city today,” Driscoll said.

James was arrested Wednesday after he and at least two other tipsters called Crime Stoppers to alert police to his whereabouts in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, the New York Post reported.

During a press conference Wednesday, Driscoll said news reports that James previously had been investigated in New Mexico and was on a terrorist watch list were inaccurate. 

Social media giants as well as the Justice Department, which includes the FBI, seem to have focused elsewhere, said Kara Frederick, director of the Tech Policy Center at The Heritage Foundation, which is the parent organization of The Daily Signal. 

“We are experiencing the dichotomy between what the [Biden] administration calls domestic extremists and what really are domestic extremists,” Frederick told The Daily Signal.

“Parents at school board meetings or someone online supposedly spreading COVID misinformation or disinfomaiton are viewed as … a leftist concept of terrorists, as opposed to an actual domestict terrorist threat,” she said.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies also have been slow to catch up with actual examples of hate speech, she said. 

“Frankly, it has just been misprioritization of moms talking about COVID cloth masks and [missing] threats that don’t comport with a narrative,” Frederick said. 

James has been arrested at least 12 times by the NYPD between 1984 and 1998 on charges ranging from burglary to criminal sexual acts, the New York Post reported

Reached by email about whether the subway shooting in New York was preventable, an FBI spokesperson referred The Daily Signal to the contents of the press conference Wednesday and declined to comment further.

A spokesperson for Google, the corporate owner of YouTube, did not respond Thursday to an inquiry from The Daily Signal for this report. 

James posted messages on Facebook about guns and bullets, and about the 9/11 terror attacks being an inside job. 

In one video, James said: “This nation was born in violence, it’s kept alive by violence or the threat thereof, and it’s going to die a violent death.” 

The criminal complaint against James says that for the attack during morning rush hour Tuesday, he used a Glock 17 pistol that he bought in Ohio.  

Prosecutors say that James, wearing a surgical mask, set off a smoke-emitting device in a train car before firing at subway riders.  

James had arrived in New York earlier that day in a rental van driven from Pennsylvania, authorities said. He parked the van on Kings Highway, about two blocks from the Sunset Park station entrance. 

After the attack, James left behind a bag that included fireworks, a plastic container containing gasoline, and a torch.

In another video, extending previous racial rants, James said: “There is no natural reason for there to be such a thing as an American Negro, African American, there is no reason for it. Except for you to be a slave. That is your rightful place, it always will be.”

James took video of his journey from Milwaukee to New York that began March 20, with stops in Illinois and Pennsylvania, saying at one point while looking at the camera: “All I can say is, good riddance. I will never be back again alive.” 

 

left undermines America width=

The left praises democracy when elected but claims the right will destroy democracy when it loses. Pictured: Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discusses the 2016 election during her 2017 book tour. (Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers, NurPhoto/Getty Images)

 

 

Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.

As a result, the left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when it expects to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when it fears losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.

A cynic might suggest that those on the left praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.

After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old 50-state union?

Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?

The Constitution also clearly states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of former President Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?

Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?

The left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.

Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration new potentially lifesaving COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.”

The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?

In summer 2020, many local- and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.

Currently, the Biden administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.

The Biden administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border—in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.

The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.

Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.

At various times in our nation’s history—1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63—America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.

In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.

Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.” Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and herself claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander in chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.

Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.

All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.

The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.

We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish, one-day rioters on Jan. 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property—all under the banner of revolutionary justice.

Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.

 

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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.

 

The Honorable Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Washington D.C.

Dear Representative Adam Kinzinger, 

I noticed that you are a pro-life representative that has a long record of standing up for unborn babies! It was in the 1970’s when I was first introduced to the works of Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop and I wanted to commend their writings and films to you.

I recently read about your impressive pro-life record:

Washington, DC – Today, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (IL-16) joined his House Republican colleagues in a press conference urging Democratic leadership to allow a vote on the Born Alive protections. The proposal would protect babies who survive abortion and provide them with the same medical care that any other premature baby would receive. Yesterday, the Democrats blocked the proposed legislation—for the 17th time—from coming before the House for a vote.

Joining the Congressman and House Republican leaders at the press conference this morning was Jill Stanek, an Illinois nurse and pro-life advocate who has witnessed the devastating realities of these pro-abortion laws. The Illinois legislature is currently debating two abortion bills, similar to the extreme pro-abortion agendas in New York and Virginia. 

It seems you have a grudge against President Trump while our freedoms under President Biden are being taken away. I recommend to you the article below:

The January 6 Insurrection Hoax

 • Volume 50, Number 9 • Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball
Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion

Mr. Kimball concludes his article with these words: 

That’s one melancholy lesson of the January 6 insurrection hoax: that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.

Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”

 

Bingo.

You can google and get Roger Kimball article “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax”

NOW WHAT DID YOU DO TO TURN YOUR BACK ON OUR LIBERTY AND PERPETUATE THE HOAX THAT JANUARY 6TH WAS AN INSURRECTION? Read below!! 

9 Republicans voted to hold Trump aide Bannon in contempt of Congress

 

There were a few Republicans Thursday who surprised observers when they voted in support of holding former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress and referring him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

Prior to the vote, four Republicans were considered a lock to approve the criminal referral, according to Capitol Hill sources: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.

 

Cheney and Kinzinger are on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and have for months stood alone as the only two House Republicans willing to speak out against former President Donald Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 election. They were the only two House Republicans to vote for the formation of the select committee on June 30.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed the select committee after Republicans rejected a bipartisan commission that would have been evenly split between five Democrats and five Republicans. Only 35 Republicans voted for that measure when itpassed the House of Representatives, and it was defeated by a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 27:  (L-R) Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on July 27, 2021 at the Canon House Office Building in Washington, DC. Members of law enforcement will testify about the attack by supporters of former President Donald Trump on the U.S. Capitol. According to authorities, about 140 police officers were injured when they were trampled, had objects thrown at them, and sprayed with chemical irritants during the insurrection. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

 

 
More

Upton has served in the House for more than three decades, since 1987, and will face a primary challenge next year because of his willingness to stand up to Trump.

Gonzalez is retiring from Congress next year, after only four years in the House. “While my desire to build a fuller family life is at the heart of my decision, it is also true that the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision,” Gonzalez said in September when heannounced he would not seek another term.

 

The remaining five Republicans included three who voted for impeachment — Peter Meijer of Michigan, John Katko of New York and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington — and two House Republicans who did not vote to impeach Trump: Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

Do you realize that Americans rights are being taken away from them and would you like an example? I am going to quote Mr. Kimball again.  You can google and get Roger Kimball article “The January 6 Insurrection Hoax”

Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club. 

Maybe Trump understands this now. I have no insight into that question. I am pretty confident, though, that the 74 plus million people who voted for him understand it deeply. It’s another reason that The Club should be wary of celebrating its victory too expansively. 

Friedrich Hayek took one of the two epigraphs for his book, The Road to Serfdom, from the philosopher David Hume. “It is seldom,” Hume wrote, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Much as I admire Hume, I wonder whether he got this quite right. Sometimes, I would argue, liberty is erased almost instantaneously.

I’d be willing to wager that Joseph Hackett, confronted with Hume’s observation, would express similar doubts. I would be happy to ask Mr. Hackett myself, but he is inaccessible. If the ironically titled “Department of Justice” has its way, he will be inaccessible for a long, long time—perhaps as long as 20 years. 

Joseph Hackett, you see, is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building. 

As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.

Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have beenbranded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.

Let me recommend that you read this letter below from Senator Ron Johnson and his colleagues:

Sen. Johnson and Colleagues Request Answers from DOJ on Unequal Application of Justice to Protestors

 

 

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), along with senators Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), sent a letter on Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting information on the unequal application of justice between the individuals who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, and those involved in the unrest during the spring and summer of 2020. The senators sent 18 questions to the attorney general on what steps the DOJ has taken to prosecute individuals who committed crimes during both events, and requested a response by June 21.

“Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances,” the senators wrote. “This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning.”

 

The full text of the letter can be found here and below.

 

 

June 7, 2021 

The Honorable Merrick B. Garland

Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20530

 

Dear Attorney General Garland:

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently dedicating enormous resources and manpower to investigating and prosecuting the criminals who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We fully support and appreciate the efforts by the DOJ and its federal, state and local law enforcement partners to hold those responsible fully accountable.

We join all Americans in the expectation that the DOJ’s response to the events of January 6 will result in rightful criminal prosecutions and accountability.  As you are aware, the mission of the DOJ is, among other things, to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.  Today, we write to request information about our concerns regarding potential unequal justice administered in response to other recent instances of mass unrest, destruction, and loss of life throughout the United States. 

During the spring and summer of 2020, individuals used peaceful protests across the country to engage in rioting and other crimes that resulted in loss of life, injuries to law enforcement officers, and significant property damage.[1]  A federal court house in Portland, Oregon, has been effectively under siege for months.[2]  Property destruction stemming from the 2020 social justice protests throughout the country will reportedly result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion in paid insurance claims.[3] 

                In June 2020, the DOJ reportedly compiled the following information regarding last year’s unrest:

  • “One federal officer [was] killed, 147 federal officers [were] injured and 600 local officers [were] injured around the country during the protests, frequently from projectiles.”[4]
  • According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), “since the start of the unrest there has been 81 Federal Firearms License burglaries of an estimated loss of 1,116 firearms; 876 reported arsons; 76 explosive incidents; and 46 ATF arrests[.]”[5]

Despite these numerous examples of violence occurring during these protests, it appears that individuals charged with committing crimes at these events may benefit from infrequent prosecutions and minimal, if any, penalties.  According to a recent article, “prosecutors have approved deals in at least half a dozen federal felony cases arising from clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Oregon last summer. The arrangements — known as deferred resolution agreements — will leave the defendants with a clean criminal record if they stay out of trouble for a period of time and complete a modest amount of community service, according to defense attorneys and court records.”[6]       

                DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.  To date, DOJ has charged 510 individuals stemming from Capitol breach.[7]  DOJ maintains and updates a webpage that lists the defendants charged with crimes committed at the Capitol.  This database includes information such as the defendant’s name, charge(s), case number, case documents, location of arrest, case status, and informs readers when the entry was last updated.[8]  No such database exists for alleged perpetrators of crimes associated with the spring and summer 2020 protests.  It is unclear whether any defendants charged with crimes in connection with the Capitol breach have received deferred resolution agreements.

Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.  This constitutional right should be cherished and protected.  Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted.  However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning.  In order to assist Congress in conducting its oversight work, we respectfully request answers to the following questions by June 21, 2021:  

Spring and Summer 2020 Unrest:

  1. Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the unrest in the spring and summer of 2020?  If so, how many times and for which locations/riots?  
  1. How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020 were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
  1. How many individuals were incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020? 
  1. How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement?  What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
  1. How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
  1. How many of these individuals were released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
  1. How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?[9]
  1. How many DOJ prosecutors were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
  1. How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?

January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol Breach:

  1. Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the January 6, 2021 protests and Capitol breach?  If so, how many times and how many additional arrests resulted from law enforcement utilizing geolocation information?
  2. How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
  1. How many individuals are incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
  1. How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement?  What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
  1. How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
  1. How many of these individuals have been released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
  1. How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?
  1. How many DOJ prosecutors have been assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
  1. How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?

Sincerely,

 

Ron Johnson

United States Senator

 

Tommy Tuberville

United States Senator

 

Mike Lee                                                            

United States Senator

 

Rick Scott

United States Senator

 

Ted Cruz

United States Senator

 

###

 


[1] Jennifer Kingson, Exclusive: $1 billion-plus riot damage is most expensive in insurance history, Axios, Sept. 16, 2020, https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html.

[2] Conrad Wilson and Jonathan Levinson, Protesters, federal officers clash outside Portland’s courthouse Thursday, OPB, Mar. 12, 2021, https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/12/protesters-vandalize-portlands-federal-courthouse-again/.

[3] Jennifer Kingson, Exclusive: $1 billion-plus riot damage is most expensive in insurance history, Axios, Sept. 16, 2020, https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html.

[5] Id.

[6] Josh Gerstein, Leniency for defendants in Portland clashes could affect Capitol riot cases, Politico, Apr. 14, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/portland-capitol-riot-cases-481346.

[7] Madison Hall et al., 493 people have been charged in the Capitol insurrection so far. This searchable table shows them all., Insider, accessed June 4, 2021, https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-arrests-charges-names-2021-1.

[8] Capitol Breach Cases, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, accessed May 21, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases?combine=&order=title&sort=asc.

[9] Josh Gerstein, Leniency for defendants in Portland clashes could affect Capitol riot cases, Politico, Apr. 14, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/portland-capitol-riot-cases-481346.

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I want to recommend to you a video on YOU TUBE that runs 28 minutes and 39 seconds by Francis Schaeffer entitled because it discusses the founding of our nation and what the FOUNDERS believed: 

How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 5 | The Revolutionary Age

 

Thank you for your time, and again I want to thank you for your support of the unborn little babies!

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, 13900 Cottontail Lane, AR 72002, cell 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org

——————————————————————————————

——

Dr. Francis schaeffer How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 5 | The Revolutionary Age

 

– Whatever happened to human race? PART 1 Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)

C. Everett Koop
C. Everett Koop, 1980s.jpg
 
13th Surgeon General of the United States
In office
January 21, 1982 – October 1, 1989

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 2 | Slaughter of the Innocents

Francis Schaeffer – Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 3 | Death by Someone’s Choice

Mr. Hentoff with the clarinetist Edmond Hall in 1948 at the Savoy, a club in Boston.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human Dignity 

Image<img class=”i-amphtml-blurry-placeholder” src=”data:;base64,Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.

________________

______________________

March 23, 2021

President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view. Although we are both Christians and have the Bible as the basis for our moral views, I did want you to take a close look at the views of the pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff too.  Hentoff became convinced of the pro-life view because of secular evidence that shows that the unborn child is human. I would ask you to consider his evidence and then of course reverse your views on abortion.

___________________

The pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff wrote a fine article below I wanted to share with you.

Nat Hentoff is an atheist, but he became a pro-life activist because of the scientific evidence that shows that the unborn child is a distinct and separate human being and even has a separate DNA. His perspective is a very intriguing one that I thought you would be interested in. I have shared before many   cases (Bernard Nathanson, Donald Trump, Paul Greenberg, Kathy Ireland)    when other high profile pro-choice leaders have changed their views and this is just another case like those. I have contacted the White House over and over concerning this issue and have even received responses. I am hopeful that people will stop and look even in a secular way (if they are not believers) at this abortion debate and see that the unborn child is deserving of our protection.That is why the writings of Nat Hentoff of the Cato Institute are so crucial.

In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthanasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

Francis Schaeffer

__________________________

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.  Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

_____________________________________

 

Dr. Francis schaeffer – from Part 5 of Whatever happened to human race?) Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 5 | Truth and History

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – A Christian Manifesto – Dr. Francis Schaeffer Lecture

Francis Schaeffer – A 700 Club Special! ~ Francis Schaeffer 1982

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – 1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaeffer

________________

Jewish World Review June 12, 2006/ 16 Sivan, 5766

 

Insisting on life

http://www.NewsandOpinion.com | A longtime friend of mine is married to a doctor who also performs abortions. At the dinner table one recent evening, their 9-year-old son — having heard a word whose meaning he didn’t know — asked, “What is an abortion?” His mother, choosing her words carefully, described the procedure in simple terms.

“But,” said her son, “that means killing the baby.” The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. “But,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what month. It still means killing the babies.”

Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old’s clarity of thought and vision.

The boy’s spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.

“That,” he continued, “was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned.”

This passionate reverend used to warn: “Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized us … The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do — and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.”

That preacher was Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency — and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Jackson had by now become “pro-choice” — much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.

The last time I saw Jackson was years later, on a train from Washington to New York. I told him of a man nominated, but not yet confirmed, to a seat on a federal circuit court of appeals. This candidate was a strong supporter of capital punishment — which both the Rev. Jackson and I oppose, since it involves the irreversible taking of a human life by the state.

I asked Jackson if he would hold a press conference in Washington, criticizing the nomination, and he said he would. The reverend was true to his word; the press conference took place; but that nominee was confirmed to the federal circuit court. However, I appreciated Jackson’s effort.

On that train, I also told Jackson that I’d been quoting — in articles, and in talks with various groups — from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he’d had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.

Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, “I’ll get back to you on that.” I still patiently await what he has to say.

As time goes on, my deepening concern with the consequences of abortion is that its validation by the Supreme Court, as a constitutional practice, helps support the convictions of those who, in other controversies — euthanasia, assisted suicide and the “futility doctrine” by certain hospital ethics committees — believe that there are lives not worth continuing.

Around the time of my conversation with Jackson on the train, I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the “death with dignity” movement.

He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia into the American press.

“But then,” Humphry told me, “a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me.”

“What was that wonderful thing?” I asked.

“Roe v. Wade,” he answered.

The devaluing of human life — as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly — did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word “baby” does not appear in Roe v. Wade — let alone the word “killing.”

And so, the termination of “lives not worth living” goes on.

 

______________________

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. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith.  I  respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,

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Dan Mitchell article: Democrats want to give $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to audit millions of Americans each year. Yet…after the progressive website ProPublica first published the secret tax information of rich Americans, the tax agency still can’t explain what happened.

Harboring Criminals at the IRS

At the risk of understatement, I am not a fan of the Internal Revenue Service. But, as shown in this closing segment from a recent interview, I get especially outraged when IRS bureaucrats engage in criminal behavior and nobody cares.

This should outrage everyone that we have officials at a powerful agency illegally leaking confidential information.

My daughter’s dogs even registered their disapproval during the interview (I’m dog sitting for a few days).

We don’t know how many IRS bureaucrats were involved, and we also don’t know whether the motive was money, ideology, or partisanship.

Maybe all three.

This is very reminiscent of what happened about a dozen years ago when other IRS bureaucrats stifled Tea Party groups in order to boost President Obama’s reelection prospects.

Despicable then, and despicable now.

A few months ago, the Wall Street Journaleditorialized about this latest scandal.

Democrats want to give $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to audit millions of Americans each year. Yet…after the progressive website ProPublica first published the secret tax information of rich Americans, the tax agency still can’t explain what happened.…IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig…promised when the leak occurred…to find out what happened, but in September he told Senators, “We do not yet have any information concerning the source.” Since then it’s been crickets. …The leak is a crime, but tracing it isn’t merely a matter of criminal enforcement. The breach highlights the general failure of the IRS to protect taxpayer data.  …As troubling is the limp response by the IRS. A separate GAO report this May found that the tax agency failed even to enforce its own authentication protocols, which would help to detect breaches when they occur. …The new money for the IRS is harmful on its own terms, but it’s all the worse when it is provided without strings to an agency that has no idea who is stealing private tax data.

Amen.

Hopefully Republicans won’t be stupid (again) and go along with big budget increases for the corrupt IRS bureaucracy.

By the way, ProPublica this morning published a new story based on their stolen data.

Written by Paul Kiel, it claims rich people pay a very low tax rate.

If your company’s stock shoots up and you grow $1 billion richer, that increase in wealth is real. …From 2014 to 2018,the 25 wealthiest Americans grew about $400 billion richer, according to Forbes. To an economist, this was income, but under tax law, it was mere vapor, irrelevant. And so this group, including the likes of Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett, paid federal income taxes of about 3.4% on the $400 billion, ProPublica reported. We called this the group’s “True Tax Rate.”

There are two points worth making after reading this nonsense.

  1. The left generally makes misleading claims about the tax rate on rich people by ignoring the fact that any dividends and capital gains they receive also are subject to the corporate income tax. The bottom line is that Warren Buffet does not pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.
  2. The new version of this claim, as illustrated by the ProPublica excerpt, is that the rich have a low tax rate because they aren’t hit with a tax when their assets increase in value. But that’s because an increase in wealth is not an increase in income, just as a decrease in wealth isn’t a loss of income.

If ProPublica wants to add a wealth tax on top of the current income tax, they should be honest and openly make that argument.

Instead, they opted to concoct and disseminate a make-believe tax rate.

The takeaway is that the IRS budget should not be increased, period. And it definitely should not be increased because that would reward criminal bureaucrats.

P.S. Don’t forget that the IRS has embraced a ludicrous claim about a $1 trillion tax gap.

The result of having lots of taxes is the mean IRS.

The IRS: Even Worse Than You Think

Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell

Since it is tax-filing season and we all want to honor our wonderful tax system, let’sgo into the archives and show this video from last year about the onerous compliance costs of the internal revenue code.

Narrated by Hiwa Alaghebandian of the American Enterprise Institute, the mini-documentary explains how needless complexity creates an added burden – sort of like a hidden tax that we pay for the supposed privilege of paying taxes.

__________

The Onerous Compliance Cost of the Internal Revenue Code

Uploaded by  on Apr 12, 2010

The tax system is a complicated nightmare that forces taxpayers to devote ever-larger amounts of time, money, energy, and other resources in hopes of complying with the internal revenue code and avoiding IRS persecution. This CF&P Foundation video shows that this corrupt mess is the result of 97 years of social engineering and industrial policy that began almost immediately after that dark day in 1913 that the income tax was created. www.freedomandprosperity.org

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Two things from the video are worth highlighting.

First, we should make sure to put most of the blame on Congress. As Ms. Alaghebandian notes, the IRS is in the unenviable position of trying to enforce Byzantine tax laws. Yes, there are examples of grotesque IRS abuse, but even the most angelic group of bureaucrats would have a hard time overseeing 70,000-plus pages of laws and regulations (by contrast, the Hong Kong flat tax, which has been in place for more than 60 years, requires less than 200 pages).

Second, we should remember that compliance costs are just the tip of the iceberg. The video also briefly mentions three other costs.

    1. The money we send to Washington, which is a direct cost to our pocketbooks and also an indirect cost since the money often is used tofinance counterproductive programs that further damage the economy.
    2. The budgetary burden of the IRS, which is a staggering $12.5 billion. This is the money we spend to employ an army of tax bureaucrats that is larger than the CIA and FBI combined.
    3. The economic burden of the tax system, which measures the lost economic output from a tax system that penalizes productive behavior.

The way to fix this mess, needless to say, is to junk the entire tax code and start all over.

I’ve been a big proponent of the flat tax, which would mean one low tax rate, no double taxation of savings, and no corrupt loopholes. But I’m also a big fan of national sales tax proposals such as the Fair Tax, assuming we can amend the Constitution so that greedy politicians don’t pull a bait and switch and impose both an income tax and a sales tax.

But the most important thing we need to understand is that bloated government is our main problem. If we had a limited federal government, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, it would be almost impossible to have a bad tax system. But if we continue to move in the direction of becoming a European-style welfare state, it will be impossible to have a good tax system.

Dan Mitchell: The Biden Administration, for instance, claimed the economy would benefit if Congress approved a costly $1.9 trillion “stimulus” plan last year. Yet we wound up with 4 million fewer jobs than the White House projected!

 

Another Failure for Keynesian Economics and Interventionist Government

Keynesian economics is based on the misguided notion that consumption drives the economy.

In reality, high levels of consumption should be viewed an indicator of a strong economy.

The real drivers of economic strength are private investment and private production.

After all, we can’t consume unless we first produce.*

Not everyone agrees with these common-sense observations. The Biden Administration, for instance, claimed the economy would benefit if Congress approved a costly $1.9 trillion “stimulus” plan last year.

Yet we wound up with 4 million fewer jobs than the White House projected. We even wound up with fewer jobs than the Administration estimated if there was no so-called stimulus.

So what did we get for all that money?

Some say we got inflation. In a column for the Hill, Professor Carl Schramm from Syracuse is unimpressed by Biden’s plan. And he’s even less impressed by the left-leaning economists who claimed it is a good idea to increase the burden of government.

Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz rounded up another 16 of the 36 living American Nobel Prize economists to declare, in an open letter, that…there was no threat of inflation. …The Nobelists’ letter showed that those signing had bought Team Biden’s novel argument that its enormous expansion of social welfare programs really was just a different form of infrastructure investment, just like roads and bridges. …The laureates seemed to have overlooked that previous COVID benefits had often exceeded what tens of millions of workers regularly earned and that recipients displaced by COVID were never required to look for other work. While the high priests of economic “science” were cheering on higher federal spending, larger deficits and increased taxes, employers were and are continuing to deal with inflation face-to-face. …The Nobelists assured that we would see a robust recovery because of President Biden’s “active government interventions.” Their presumed authority was used to give credence to the president’s continuously twisting storyline on inflation — that it was “transitory,” good for the economy, a “high-class problem,” Putin’s fault for invading Ukraine, and the greed of oil and food companies… Today’s fashionable goals seem to have displaced the no-nonsense pragmatism that has long characterized economics as a discipline. …Don’t expect a mea culpa from Stiglitz or his coauthors any time soon. …They can be wrong, really wrong, and never pay a price.

The New York Post editorialized about Biden’s economic missteps and reached similar conclusions.

President Joe Biden loves to blame our sky-high inflation on corporate greed and Vladimir Putin. But a new study from the San Francisco Fed shows it was Biden himself who put America on this grim trajectory. …other advanced economies…haven’t seen anything like the soaring prices now punishing workers across America. Which means that the spike is due to something US-specific, rather than global prevailing conditions. That policy, was, of course, Biden’s signature economic “achievement.” …The damage it did has been massive. …inflation…to 7%… Put in concrete terms, a recent Bloomberg calculation translates this to an added $433 per month in household expenses for 2022. And historic producer price inflation, a shocking 10%, guarantees even more pain ahead.

For what it’s worth, I don’t fully agree with Professor Schramm or the New York Post.

They are basically asserting that Biden’s wasteful spending is responsiblefor today’s grim inflation numbers.

I definitely don’t like Biden’s spending agenda, but I agree with Milton Friedman that it is more accurate to say that inflation is a monetary phenomenon.

In other words, the Federal Reserve deserves to be blamed.

The bottom line is that Keynesian monetary policyproduces inflation and rising prices while Keynesian fiscal policy produces more wasteful spending and higher levels of debt.

I’ll close with a couple of caveats.

  • First, Friedman also points out that there’s “a long and variable lag” in monetary policy. So it is not easy to predict how quickly (or how severely) Keynesian monetary policy will produce rising prices.
  • Second, Keynesian deficit spending can lead to Keynesian monetary policy if a central bank feels pressure to help finance deficit spending by buying government bonds (think Argentina).

*Under specific circumstances, Keynesian policy can cause a short-term boost in consumption. For instance, a government can borrow lots of money from overseas lenders and use that money to finance more consumption of things made in places such as China. The net result of that policy, however, is that American indebtedness increases without any increase in national income.

P.S. You can read the letter from the pro-Keynesian economists by clicking here. And you can read a letter signed by sensible economists (including me) by clicking here.

P.P.S. Keynesianism is a myth with a history of failurein the real world.

It’s also worth pointing out that Keynesians have been consistently wrong with predicting economic damage during periods of spending restraint.

  • They were wrong about growth after World War II (and would have been wrong, if they were around at the time, about growth when Harding slashed spending in the early 1920s).
  • They were wrong about Thatcher in the 1980s.
  • They were wrong about Reagan in the 1980s.
  • They were wrong about Canada in the 1990s.
  • They were wrong after the sequester in 2013.
  • They were wrong about unemployment benefits in 2020.

Call me crazy, but I sense a pattern. Maybe, just maybe, Keynesian economics is wrong.

The Failure of Bidenomics, Part V

Our series on the failure of Bidenomics has touched on four topics.

For our fifth edition, let’s turn our attention to the president’s misguided fiscal policy.

This means analyzing three pieces of legislation.

First, his so-called stimulus was approved last year, adding $1.9 trillion to the nation’s fiscal burden. The president and his team claimed it would lead to four million additional jobs, but the net result was a drop in employment compared to the White House’s own projections.

Second, his costly infrastructure plan also was approved last year, though only a small fraction of new spending was actually for roads and bridges (and even that spending should be handled by state and local governments).

Third, his “Build Back Better” proposal dramatically would expand the burden of government spending – by $5 trillion over the next decade! Along with a plethora of economy-sapping tax increases.

Regarding the third item, the president so far has not been able to convince all Democratic senators to support the scheme. And with the Senate evenly split between the two parties, Biden needs all of their votes to get his plan approved.

With any luck, that will never happen.

So what is the plan wrong? Along with several hundred other economists, I signed on to this letter explaining why Biden’s massive expansion of the welfare state would be bad news for the country.

The most important part of the statement is that bigger government would “reduce the number of people working, badly misallocate capital, and hobble economic growth.”

Based on research from the Congressional Budget Office, the damage would be enormous, reducing worker compensation by $1.6 trillion over the next ten years.

What about the other issues mentioned in the statement, such as debt and inflation?

It’s not good that debt goes up, of course, but that’s a symptomof the bigger problem, which is government consuming a greater share of the nation’s output.

Also, at the risk of being annoyingly pedantic, I don’t actually think Biden’s budget would increase inflation. That only happensif the Federal Reserve adopts bad monetary policy.

That being said, central banks are more likely to adopt bad monetary policy when politicians are following bad fiscal policy. So the core assertion is correct.

P.S. I don’t know whether to characterize this as absurd, pathetic, addled, or dishonest, but Joe Biden actually claimedhis budget plan has zero cost.

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)

C. Everett Koop
C. Everett Koop, 1980s.jpg
 
13th Surgeon General of the United States
In office
January 21, 1982 – October 1, 1989

Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 1 | Abortion of the Human Race (2010)

Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 2 | Slaughter of the Innocents (2010)

 

 

Abortion: What Is Your Verdict? – R.C. Sproul

John MacArthur on Romans 13

 
 
Image<img class=”i-amphtml-blurry-placeholder” src=”data:;base64,Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.

________________

______________________

September 6, 2021

President Biden  c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.

In the past I have spent most of my time looking at this issue from the spiritual side. In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthanasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

Francis Schaeffer

__________________________

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.

Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

July 9, 2021

Mr. Everette Hatcher III

Alexander, AR

Dear Mr. Hatcher,

Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter

Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.

As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.

Sincerely

Joe Biden

___________________

I especially noted this from your letter:

Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more OPTIMISTIC for the future of America.

President Biden, you have chosen to abandon your Christianity and pursue humanist concerns!! So how can you say humanism has an OPTIMISTIC POINT OF VIew?

H. J. Blackham was the founder of the BRITISH HUMANIST ASSOCIATION and he asserted:

On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility“( H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967).

I wanted to reach out to because of some of the troubling moral issues coming out of your administration. I recently read this article about the Humanist group that enthusiastically supported you for President:

‘Humanists for Biden-Harris’ to mobilize nonreligious vote

The group hopes to reach atheists, agnostics and other religiously unaffiliated voters who make up the largest belief group in the Democratic Party.

Materials line a table during a gathering of atheist, humanist and secular leaders in Temecula, California, for the first SoCal Secular Leadership Summit, which was held from March 1-3, 2019. Photo courtesy Heather AdamsMaterials line a table during a gathering of atheist, humanist and secular leaders in Temecula, California, for the first SoCal Secular Leadership Summit, which was held from March 1-3, 2019. Photo courtesy Heather AdamsSeptember 28, 2020By Jack JenkinsShareTweetShare

 

(RNS) — A new group is launching an effort to court nonreligious voters for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, hoping to mobilize a fast-growing — and deeply liberal — community to benefit Democrats in November.

The “Humanists for Biden” group, a project of the Secular Democrats of America, unveiled its plans on Monday (Sept. 28). The group is chaired by Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The humanist and nonreligious community is poised to be a very significant part of this presidential election in that we represent maybe 30% or so of Democratic voters,” Epstein told Religion News Service.

The group also announced a slate of co-chairs that includes Sarah Levin, who also co-chaired the Democratic National Convention’s Interfaith Council and heads Secular Strategies, an organization that mobilizes secular voters.

“Humanists for Biden marks the first time representatives of the nation’s growing number of secular Americans have been invited to participate in a coalition of communities of faith and conscience, working together on a Presidential campaign,” read a press release from the group. “The Biden-Harris campaign is working to create the most inclusive campaign and administration in the history of American politics, and we are honored to take part in this effort.”

Epstein said Humanists for Biden hopes to reach a broad swath of atheists, agnostics and other religiously unaffiliated voters who make up the largest belief group in the Democratic Party, constituting around 28% of its members, according to political scientist Ryan Burge.

While some are atheists and agnostics, other unaffiliated Americans still believe in God or pray regularly, according to a 2019 Pew Research study.

Even so, Epstein argued that the many nonreligious Americans are united by “humanistic values,” such as a belief in science as “the best tool that we have to create a healthy world,” as well as support for racial justice, pluralism and inclusion.

“We stand as humanists and people united by humanistic values for basic human decency, empathy and compassion that we feel that the Biden-Harris campaign represents far more than its competition,” he said.

 

Religiously unaffiliated voters, despite backing Democrats over Republicans in the 2018 midterms 75% to 22% according to Pew, have been criticized in the past for relatively low turnout on Election Day compared to other groups.

But Epstein pointed to new research that suggests religiously unaffiliated turnout is heavily impacted by the fact that it is largely made up of young voters who are also known for underperforming on Election Day.

What’s more, he said the group can only benefit from targeted mobilization, something Democrats have rarely done in the past.

“With a group like that that supports you so strongly and leans so heavily in your direction, you want to mobilize that group as much as possible,” he said.

Humanists for Biden is not officially part of the presidential campaign, but Epstein said campaign staff — including national faith outreach directors for both the Biden-Harris campaign and the Democratic Party — are slated to appear at the group’s first official event on Thursday.

“We feel supported and valued, and that has absolutely never been the case before for our community at this level,” he said, adding that Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and humanist, will also speak at their upcoming event.

The group has even selected a swing state where it can target its efforts: Arizona, where around 27% of the population is unaffiliated, according to Pew.

Epstein pointed out that Arizona is home to lawmakers such as Athena Salman, a state House member who identifies as an atheist and as a humanist. The state is also represented by Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat and the only U.S. Senator who identifies as religiously unaffiliated.

The ultimate goal of the initiative, Epstein insisted, was not only to generate “historic turnout” among secular and nonreligious Americans, but also to build a stronger coalition with religious liberals.

“We recognize that their deeply held religious values resonate strongly with our humanist values,” he said. “We simply want to be a part of the conversation. We want to be in the tent. We want to be able to fully help as equals.”

Francis Schaeffer in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO shows how today’s secular religion of humanism is now the most influential in the world today:

CHAPTER 4 THE HUMANIST RELIGION (Page 445)

 

The humanists have openly told us their views of final reality. The Humanist Manifesto I (1933), page 8 says

Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.
Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any super-natural or cosmic guarantees of human values.

And Carl Sagan indoctrinated millions of unsuspecting viewers with this humanistic final view of reality in the public television show Cosmos: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” The humanist view has infiltrated every level of society.

If we are going to join the battle in a way that has any hope of effectiveness – with Christians truly being salt and the light in our culture and our society – then we must do battle on the entire front. We must not finally even battle on the front for freedom, and specifically not only our freedom. It must be on the basis of Truth. Not just religious truths, but the Truth of what the final reality is. It is impersonal material or is it the living God?

(page 445)

The HUMANIST MANIFESTO I and II both state that humanism is a religion, a faith. [Manifesto I: pages 3 and 7; Manifesto II: pages 13 and 24.] Manifesto I, page 9, very correctly says: “Nothing human is alien to the religious.” Christians of all people should have known, taught, and acted on this. Religion touches all of thought and all of life. And these two religions, Christianity and humanism , stand over against each other as totalities.

The HUMANIST MANIFESTOS not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other non theistic religions.

On page 19 the HUMANIST MANIFESTO II says: “It [the state] should not favor any particular religious bodies through the use of public monies…” Ironically, it is the humanist religion which the government and courts in the United States favor over all others!

 

______________________________________

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. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith.  I  respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,

 

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Dan Mitchell: I’m not a fan of the government-distorted health system in the United States… Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.” But it’s even worse because doctors and nurses are directly employed by government, which means they have been turned into government bureaucrats!

Milton Friedman on Medical Care (Full Lecture)

The Deadly Impact of Government-Run Health, Part I

I’m not a fan of the government-distorted health system in the United States.

Various laws and programs from Washington have created a massive problem with third-party payer, which makes America’s system very expensive and inefficient.

But it’s possible to have a system that is even worse. Americans can look across the ocean at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.

Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.”

But it’s even worse because doctors and nurses are directly employed by government, which means they have been turned into government bureaucrats.

And government bureaucrats generally don’t have a track record of good performance. That seems to apply to health bureaucrats, as captured by this Alys Denby column for CapX.

Numbers are no way to express a human tragedy, but those in the Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are nonetheless devastating. The inquiry examined 1,592 incidents since 2000. It found that poor care led to the deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers;94 babies suffered avoidable brain damage; and one in four cases of stillbirth could have had a different outcome. That’s hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of families suffering unimaginable pain, all on the watch of ‘Our NHS’. …the report is strewn with examples of individual cruelty and incompetence. Bereaved parents…were given excuses, false information and even blamed for their own child’s death. The Health Secretary has said that vital clinical information was written on post-it notes that were swept into the bin by cleaners. …The NHS has a culture of arrogance, sanctimony and impunity.

And here are some excerpts from a 2021 article in National Review by Cameron Hilditch.

The NHS has proven itself comprehensively and consistently incapable of dealing with a regular flu season, something that crops up at the same predictable time of year in every country north of the equator. It has long been obvious that Britain’s single-payer health-care system isn’t fit for purpose even in normal times,much less during a global pandemic. Yet the NHS’s failures are systematically ignored. …age-standardized survival rates in the U.K. for the most common kinds of cancer are well below those of other developed countries, which translates into thousands of needless deaths… The excess deaths that the U.K. is suffering…along with the crushing physical and mental burdens borne by British doctors and nurses ultimately redound to this long-term failure of British culture. By transforming a medical institution into a cultural institution for the sake of forging a new, progressive national identity, Britons have underwritten decades of deadly failure.

This is damning information.

To be sure, mistakes will happen in any type of health system. But when government runs the show, the odds of appropriate feedback are much lower.

If you don’t believe me, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, hereand here.

Another Grim Reminder that Obamacare Has Made Healthcare More Expensive

Way back in 2009, some folks on the left shared a chart showing that national expenditures on healthcare compared to life expectancy.

This comparison was not favorable to the United States, which easily spent the most money but didn’t have concomitantly impressive life expectancy.

At the very least, people looking at the chart were supposed to conclude that other nations had better healthcare systems.

And since the chart circulated while Obamacare was being debated, supporters of that initiative clearly wanted people to believe that the U.S. somehow could get better results at lower cost if the government played a bigger role in the healthcare sector.

There were all sorts of reasons to think that chart was misleading (higher average incomes in the United States, more obesity in the United States, different demographics in the United States, etc), but my main gripe was that the chart was being used to advance the cause of bigger government when it actually showed – at least in part – the consequences of government intervention.

The real problem, I argued, was third-party payer. Thanks to programs such asMedicare and Medicaid, government already was paying for nearly 50 percent of all heath spending in the United States (indeed, the U.S. has more government spending for health programs than some nations with single-payer systems!).

But that’s just party of the story. Thanks to a loophole in the tax code for fringe benefits (a.k.a., the healthcare exclusion), there’s a huge incentive for both employers and employees to provide compensation in the form of very generous health insurance policies. And this means a big chunk of health spending is paid by insurance companies.

The combination of these direct and indirect government policies is that consumers pay very little for their healthcare. Or, to be more precise, they may pay a lot in terms of taxes and foregone cash compensation, but their direct out-of-pocket expenditures are relatively modest.

And this is why I said the national health spending vs life expectancy chart was far less important than a chart I put together showing the relentless expansion of third-party payer. And the reason this chart is so important is that it helps to explain why healthcare costs are so high and why there’s so much inefficiency in the health sector.

Simply stated, doctors, hospitals, and other providers have very little market-based incentive to control costs and be efficient because they know that the overwhelming majority of consumers won’t care because they are buying care with other people’s money.

To get this point across, I sometimes ask audiences how their behavior would change if I told them I would pay 89 percent of their dinner bill on Friday night. Would they be more likely to eat at McDonald’s or a fancy steakhouse? The answer is obvious (or should be obvious) since they are in box 2 of Milton Friedman’s matrix.

So why, then, would anybody think that Obamacare – a program that was designed to expand third-party payer – was going to control costs?

Though I guess it doesn’t matter what anybody thought at the time. The sad reality is that Obamacare was enacted. The President famously promised healthcare would be more affordable under his new system, both for consumers and for taxpayers.

So what happened?

Well, the law’s clearly been bad news for taxpayers.

But let’s focus today on households, which haveborne the brunt of the President’s bad policies. The Wall Street Journal had a report a few days ago about what’s been happening to the spending patterns of middle-class households.

The numbers are rather grim, at least for those who thought Obamacare would control health costs.

A June Brookings Institution study found middle-income households now devote the largest share of their spending to health care, 8.9%… By 2014, middle-income households’ health-care spending was 25% higher than what they were spending before the recession that began in 2007, even as spending fell for other “basic needs” such as food, housing, clothing and transportation, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by Brookings senior fellow Diane Schanzenbach. …Workers aren’t the only ones feeling the pain of rising health-care costs. Employers still typically pay roughly 80% of individual health-insurance premiums… In 2015, 8% of Americans’ household spending went toward health care, up from 5.8% in 2007, according to the Labor Department.

Here’s a chart from the story. It looks at data from 2007-2014, so it surely wouldn’t be fair to say Obamacare caused all the increase. But it would be fair to say that the law hasn’t delivered on the empty promise of lower costs.

Let’s close with a few important observations.

First, there’s a very strong case to repeal Obamacare, but nobody should be under the illusion that this will solve the myriad problems in the health sector. It would be a good start, but never forget that the third-party payer problem existed before Obamacare.

Second, undoing third-party payer will be like putting toothpaste back in a tube. Even though there are some powerful examples of how healthcare costs are constrained when genuine market forces are allowed to operate, consumers will be very worried about shifting to a system where they pay directly for a greater share of their healthcare costs.

Third, there’s one part of Obamacare that shouldn’t be repealed. The so-called Cadillac Tax may not be the right way to deal with the distorting impact of the healthcare exclusion, but it’s better than nothing.

Actually, we could add one final observation since the Obama era will soon be ending. When historians write about his presidency, will his main legacy be the Obamacare failure? Or will they focus more on the failed stimulus? Or maybe the economic stagnation that was caused by his policies?

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FRIEDMAN FRIDAY Whining Harvard Professors Discover Obamacare 3225 JAN 5, 2015 4:29 PM EST By Megan McArdle

Milton Friedman on Medical Care (Full Lecture) Published on Feb 2, 2014 Website:http://www.commonsensecapitalism.com Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Common-&#8230; Twitter:https://twitter.com/#!/CommonSenseCap I have written about Obamacare over and over again on this blog. Dan Mitchell has shared many funny cartoons about Obamacare too. Milton Friedman has spoken out about government healthcare many times in the past and his film […]

Milton Friedman on the Energy Crisis (and ObamaCare to come) By Robert Bradley Jr. — July 31, 2013

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 1/4 Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 2/4 Milton Friedman on the Energy Crisis (and ObamaCare to come) By Robert Bradley Jr. — July 31, 2013 July 31st is the birth date of one of the great intellectuals of the freedom philosophy. Milton Friedman (1912–2006) would have […]

Dan Mitchell: As Professor Friedman explained, the economics of price controls are very clear. When politicians and bureaucrats suppress prices, you get shortages (as all students should learn in their introductory economics classes)

<img srcset="https://s-libertaddigital-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/s.libertaddigital.com/2022/01/04/300/0/miltonfriedman.jpg.webp 300w, https://s-libertaddigital-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/s.libertaddigital.com/2022/01/04/600/0/miltonfriedman.jpg.webp 600w, https://s-libertaddigital-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/s.libertaddigital.com/2022/01/04/1200/0/miltonfriedman.jpg.webp 1200w" alt="El economista, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) | <span>Alamy

Portrait of Milton Friedman.jpg

 

The Case Against Price Controls, Part III

In Part I of this series, Professor Don Boudreaux explained the folly of price controls, and Professor Antony Davies was featured in Part II.

Now let’s see some commentary from the late, great, Milton Friedman.

As Professor Friedman explained, the economics of price controls are very clear.

When politicians and bureaucrats suppress prices, you get shortages (as all students should learn in their introductory economics classes).

Sometimes that happens with price controls on specific sectors, such as rental housing in poorly governed cities.

Sometimes it happens because of economy-wide price controls, as we saw during Richard Nixon’s disastrous presidency.

In all cases, price controls are imposed by politicians who are stupid or evil. That’s blunt language, but it’s the only explanation.

Sadly, there will never be a shortage of those kinds of politicians, as can be seen from this column in the Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler.

Here are some excerpts.

On the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden declared, “ Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” Wrong! …Lo and behold, inflation is running at 7.9%, supply chains are tight, and many store shelves are empty. Friedman’s adage “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” has stood the test of time. But what scares me most is the likely policy responses by the Biden administration that would pour salt into this self-inflicted wound.It feels as if price controls are coming. …Prices set by producers are signals, and consumers whisper feedback billions of times a day by buying or not buying products. Mess with prices and the economy has no guide. The Soviets instituted price controls on everything from subsidized “red bread” to meat, often resulting in empty shelves. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Agency fixed prices, prolonging the Depression, all in the name of “fair competition.” …Price controls don’t work. Never have, never will. But we keep instituting them. Try finding a cheap apartment in rent-controlled New York City. …Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a leader among our economic illiterate, noted in February that high prices are caused in part by “giant corporations…”

He closes with a very succinct and sensible observation.

Want to whip inflation now? Forget all the Band-Aids and government controls. Instead, as Friedman suggests, stop printing money.

In other words, Mr. Kessler is suggesting that politicians do the opposite of Mitchell’s Law.

Instead of using one bad policy (inflation) as an excuse to impose a second bad policy (price controls), he wants them to undo the original mistake.

Will Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren take his advice?

That’s doubtful, but I’m hoping there are more rational people in the rooms where these decisions get made.

Maybe some of them will have read this column from Professor Boudreaux.

Prices are among the visible results of the invisible hand’s successful operation, as well as the single most important source of this success. Each price objectively summarizes an inconceivably large number of details that must be taken account of if the economy is to perform even moderately well. Consider the price of a loaf of a particular kind and brand of bread.…The price at the supermarket of a loaf of bread, a straightforward $4.99, is the distillation of the economic results of the interaction of an unfathomably large number of details from around the globe about opportunities, trade-offs, and preferences. The invisible hand of the market causes these details to be visibly summarized not only in the price of bread, but in the prices of all other consumer goods and services, as well as in the prices of each of the inputs used in production. …These market prices also give investors and entrepreneurs guidance on how to deploy scarce resources in ways that produce that particular mix of goods and services that will today be of greatest benefit for consumers.

I have two comments.

First, Don obviously buys fancier bread than my $1.29-a-loaf store brand (used to be 99 cents, so thanks for nothing to the Federal Reserve).

Second, and far more important, he’s pointing out that market-based prices play an absolutely critical role in coordinating the desires of consumers and producers.

When politicians interfere with prices, it’s akin to throwing sand in the gears of a machine.

For more information on the role of prices, I strongly recommend these videos from Professors Russ Roberts, Howard Baetjer, and Alex Tabarrok.

By Ryan Bourne and Brad Subramaniam

Anti‐​price gouging laws prolonged shortages of certain goods that were in high demand early in the pandemic. Some analysis suggests these laws even worsened public health outcomes, because ongoing shortages of, say, hand sanitizer and toilet paper, led to consumers in states with these regulations searching for them more at physical retailers, actually increasing transmission of the virus.

But there’s an interesting question that’s often underexplored in regard to these laws: how does the expectation that these price controls will be triggered shape people’s beliefs about products’ availability and so customer search behavior?

That’s the topic of another fascinating new paper by economists Rik Chakraborti and Gavin Roberts. Using data for online searches for hand sanitizer and toilet paper across states, they harness the variation in when laws were introduced to research the question: is consumer search behaviour different in states with new anti‐​price gouging legislation introduced during the pandemic from states with pre‐​existing anti‐​price gouging laws?

Economic theory would suggest that any anti‐​price gouging legislation, whenever introduced, would lead to more consumer search for goods, due to the induced shortages. And, sure enough, after controlling for the effects of lockdowns, rising infections, and declines in travel which plagued the early stages of the pandemic, consumers in states with anti‐​price gouging laws were significantly more likely to search online for toilet paper and hand sanitizer than those in states without such laws.

More searching presumably reflects higher levels of hoarding and panic‐​buying creating the shortages—after all, having to resort to online shopping for goods that are commonly bought in stores means the local grocery or drug store has probably been emptied already.

But theory would also suggest that customers in states with past experience of anti‐​price gouging laws might search even more intensely, because people come to expect shortages again when crises hit. In other words, those who have experienced shortages before might be more likely to hoard and panic buy this time around, leading to even higher online search than in situations where new laws are introduced for the first time.

Again, Chakraborti and Roberts’ paper suggests economic theory is correct. States with anti‐​price gouging regulations on the books before the pandemic saw Google Shopping searches for hand sanitizer jump by 153 percent and toilet paper searches nearly double (a 99 percent increase) relative to states without anti‐​price gouging laws. This uplift was much larger than in states where the laws were introduced during the pandemic (100 percent and 46 percent, respectively).

The long and short is that consumers in states with pre‐​existing price controls searched most intensely online for hand sanitizer and toilet paper. This suggests customers learned from previous experience of these price regulations’ effects, with the higher search levels reflecting greater hoarding and panic buying in anticipation of shortages to come. As the authors state, this implies that longstanding anti‐​price gouging legislation is even worse for economic welfare than we might think. The anticipation of shortages actually compounds shortages as consumers become more “experienced,” with excessive and fruitless searching for products the wasteful result.

For more on the basics of anti‐​price gouging legislation in the pandemic, see my book Economics In One Virus. Other Cato pieces can be found here, here, and here.

Government, Markets, and the Supply Chain

Way back in 2009, I shared a meme that succinctly summarizes how Washington operates.

It’s basically a version of Mitchell’s Law. To elaborate, governments cause problems and politicians then use those problems as an excuse to make government even bigger.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I worry the same thing may be about to happen because of the current concern about “supply chain” issues, perhaps best illustrated by the backlog of ships at key ports, leading to shortages of key goods.

Some of this mess is fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s being exacerbated by bad policy.

In a column for Reason, J.D. Tuccille points out that government is the problem, not the solution.

…supply-chain issues…create shortages and push prices up around the world. …Lockdowns also changed people’s lives, closing offices and factories and confining people at home. That resulted in massive and unpredictable shifts in demand and unreliable supply. …”Market economies tend to be pretty good at getting food on the supermarket shelves and fuel in petrol stations, if left to themselves,” agrees Pilkington. “That last part is key: if left to themselves. Heavy-handed interference in market economies tends to produce the same pathologies we see in socialist economies, including shortages and inflation. That has been the unintended consequence of lockdown.” …The danger is that people see economic problems caused by earlier fiddling and then demand even more government intervention. …if the government were to further meddle in the market to allocate products made scarce by earlier actions, it’s hard to see how the result wouldn’t be anything other than increased supply chain chaos.

Allysia Finley opines for the Wall Street Journal about California’s role in the supply-chain mess.

The backup of container ships at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports has grown in recent weeks… The two Southern California ports handle only about 40% of containers entering the U.S., mostly from Asia. Yet ports in other states seem to be handling the surge better. Gov. Ron DeSantis said last month that Florida’s seaports had open capacity.So what’s the matter with California? State labor and environmental policies. …business groups recently asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and suspend labor and environmental laws that are interfering with the movement of goods. …One barrier is a law known as AB5. …Trucking companies warned that the law could put small carriers out of business and cause drivers to leave the state. …there’s little doubt the law hinders efficiency and productivity. …State officials have also pressed localities to attach green mandates to permits for new warehouses, which can be poison pills. …This boatload of regulations is making it more expensive and difficult to store goods arriving at California ports.

Needless to say, I’m not surprised California is making things worse.

The state seems to have some of the nation’s worst politicians.

But let’s set that aside and close with some discussion about one of the differences between government and the private sector.

This may surprise some readers, but people and businesses in the private sector make mistakes all the time.

So part of the supply-chain mess presumably is a result of companies and entrepreneurs making bad guesses.

That being said, there’s a big feedback mechanism in the private sector. It’s called profit and loss.

So when mistakes are made, there’s a big incentive to quickly change.

With government, by contrast, there’s very little flexibility (as we saw during the pandemic). And when politicians and bureaucrats do act, they often respond to political incentives that lead them to make things worse.

Big-Government Republicans Enable Big-Government Democrats

I get asked why I frequently criticize Republicans.

My response is easy. I care about results rather than rhetoric. And while GOP politicians often pay lip service to the principles of limited government,they usually increase spending even faster than Democrats.

Indeed, Republicans are even worse than Democrats when measuring the growth of domestic spending!

This is bad news because it means the burden of government expands when Republicans are in charge.

And, as Gary Abernathy points out in a column for the Washington Post, Republicans then don’t have the moral authority to complain when Democrats engage in spending binges.

President Biden is proposing another $3 trillion in spending… There are objections, but none that can be taken seriously. …Republicans had lost their standing as the party of fiscal responsibility when most of them succumbed to the political virus of covid fever and rubber-stamped around $4 trillion in “covid relief,”… With Trump out and Biden in, Republicans suddenly pretended that their 2020 spending spree happened in some alternate universe.But the GOP’s united opposition to Biden’s $1.9 trillion package won’t wash off the stench of the hypocrisy. …I noted a year ago that we had crossed the Rubicon, that our longtime flirtation with socialism had become a permanent relationship. Congratulations, Bernie Sanders. The GOP won’t become irrelevant because of its association with Trump, as some predict. It will diminish because it is bizarrely opposing now that which it helped make palatable just last year. Fiscal responsibility is dead, and Republicans helped bury it. Put the shovels away, there’s no digging it up now.

For what it’s worth, I hope genuine fiscal responsibility isn’t dead.

Maybe it’s been hibernating ever since Reagan left office (like Pepperidge Farm, I’m old enough to remember those wonderful years).

Subsequent Republican presidents liked to copy Reagan’s rhetoric, but they definitely didn’t copy his policies.

  • Spending restraint was hibernating during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
  • Spending restraint also was hibernating during the presidency of George W. Bush.
  • And spending restraint was hibernating during the presidency of Donald Trump.

I’m not the only one to notice GOP hypocrisy.

Here are some excerpts from a 2019 column in the Washington Post by Fareed Zakaria.

In what Republicans used to call the core of their agenda — limited government — Trump has been profoundly unconservative. …Trump has now added more than $88 billion in taxes in the form of tariffs, according to the right-leaning Tax Foundation. (Despite what the president says, tariffs are taxes on foreign goods paid by U.S. consumers.) This has had the effect of reducing gross domestic product and denting the wages of Americans.…For decades, conservatives including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan preached to the world the virtues of free trade. But perhaps even more, they believed in the idea that governments should not pick winners and losers in the economy… Yet the Trump administration…behaved like a Central Planning Agency, granting exemptions on tariffs to favored companies and industries, while refusing them to others. …In true Soviet style, lobbyists, lawyers and corporate executives now line up to petition government officials for these treasured waivers, which are granted in an opaque process… On the core issue that used to define the GOP — economics — the party’s agenda today is state planning and crony capitalism.

Zakaria is right about Republicans going along with most of Trump’s bad policies (as illustrated by this cartoon strip).*

The bottom line is that Republicans would be much more effective arguing against Biden’s spending orgy had they also argued for spending restraint when Trump was in the White House.

P.S. It will be interesting to see what happens in the near future. Will the GOP be a small-government Reagan party or a big-government Trump party?

Or maybe it will go back to being a Nixon-type party, which would mean bigger government but without mean tweets. And there are plenty of options.

If they make the wrong choice (anything other than Reaganism), Margaret Thatcher has already warned us about the consequences.

*To be fair, Republicans also went along with Trump’s good policies. It’s just unfortunate that spending restraint wasn’t one of them.

—-

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.

President Barack Obama speaks about the debt limit in the East Room of the White House in Washington. | AP Photo

 

“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.  

David Ramsey demonstrates in his Arkansas Times Blog post of 1-14-13 that very point:

Arkansas Politics / Health Care Arkansas’s share of Medicaid expansion and the national debt

Posted by on Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 1:02 PM

Baby carrot Arkansas Medicaid expansion image

 

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.

Here is what the Founding Fathers had to say about welfare. David Weinberger noted:

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.”

Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan

April 6, 1816

[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

Williams with Sowell – Minimum Wage

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell – Reducing Black Unemployment

By WALTER WILLIAMS

—-

Ronald Reagan with Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5

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Biden Doubles Down on Radical ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Kids 

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U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke—seen here testifying March 8 before the Senate Judiciary Committee—signed a letter Thursday to state attorneys general warning that they could be violating civil rights laws if they keep minors from receiving “gender-affirming care.” (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/ Getty Images)

Thursday, the final day of Women’s History Month, was dubbed the Transgender Day of Visibility by whatever star chamber makes up those sorts of things.

Given the trans-saturated news, however, the day is about as necessary as calling for a Will Smith Day of Visibility on the morning after the Oscars.

The fight between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Walt Disney Co. over the state’s just-signed Parental Rights in Education bill reached new levels. Disney called for the law to be repealed or struck down in court.

Ron “always on offense” DeSantis decided to take a look at a special land exemption that Disney has enjoyed since 1967. And investigative reporter Chris Rufo released a Zoom video of an executive meeting with Disney’s most trans-credentialed employees gushing about their efforts to push “LGBTQIA+” themes in the company’s parks and movies—for kids.

In the leaked video, executive producer Latoya Raveneau talked about the company’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” that involved “adding queerness” to kids’ entertainment. Disney General Entertainment President Karey Burke, the parent of “one transgender child and one pansexual child,” said she hoped for “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories.”

Warning to State Attorneys General

With such distracting news and video, you might have missed a related White House announcement. It plans to make trouble for states that protect kids from ghoulish interventions based on the myth that they are “born in the wrong body.”

OK, that’s putting it bluntly. More precisely, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has sent a letter to all state attorneys general warning that they could be violating civil rights laws if they keep minors from receiving “gender-affirming care.”

Biden released a video message reinforcing the point. “To parents of transgender children,” he insisted, “affirming your child’s identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.”

That’s a fog of cliches and euphemisms. After all, what is “gender-affirming care”? Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, points to a guide just issued by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs. It explains what the Biden administration means:

Gender-affirming … consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and nonmedical services for transgender and nonbinary people.

For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the health care system.

That’s vague and bureaucratic. But the guide then spells things out:

  • Social Affirmation: Adopting gender-affirming hairstyles, clothing, name, gender pronouns, and restrooms and other facilities. When: At any age or stage. Reversible.
  • Puberty Blockers: Using certain types of hormones to pause pubertal development. When: During puberty. Reversible.
  • Hormone Therapy: Testosterone hormones for those who were assigned female at birth; Estrogen hormones for those who were assigned male at birth. When: Early adolescence onward. Partially reversible.
  • Gender-Affirming Surgeries: “Top” surgery—to create male-typical chest shape or enhance breasts. “Bottom” surgery—surgery on genitals or reproductive organs. Facial feminization or other procedures. When: Typically used in adulthood or case-by-case in adolescence. Not reversible.

Fast Track to Sterilization

An acquaintance describes this as the “school-to-sterilization pathway.”

It starts with new pronouns and psychosocial training. Then it moves on to drugs and ends with surgery.

That might involve literal castration for boys and double mastectomies and hysterectomies for girls. But cross-sex hormones can do the job without scalpel or knife—since those drugs can lead to sterility.

“Gender-affirming” in this context, then, is really “sex-denying.” No cloud of verbal fog, no matter how thick, can obscure that brutal fact.

This sex-denial is so bizarre that many still treat it as comical. In fact, it’s tragic: If they’re not put on this pathway, most kids who suffer gender dysphoria will grow out of it. Some 61% to 98% of these kids will naturally reconcile with their sex after going through puberty. In many cases, puberty itself may be the cure for gender dysphoria.

But that healing can be thwarted if a child is socially transitioned at home and school, and put on puberty blockers and then cross-sex drugs. The further kids go down this pathway, the less likely they are to turn back. And the greater is the cost for those who detransition.

That’s why some states have started to take notice. The best response to date is Arkansas’ SAFE Act. It prevents doctors from prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or performing surgeries on minors to “affirm gender identity.” That is, it stops doctors from sterilizing children before the age of consent.

Biden opposes this. You read that right. The White House thinks that minors can consent to their own sterilization. And Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services claims that this is the proper standard of care for treating minors who struggle with their sexed bodies.

Bad Science

Of course, the White House claims the value of these “treatments” is based on good science. But that’s not true.

A glance at the resources for the HHS document reveals a rogue’s gallery of gender ideologues. That  includes the Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU, alongside captured agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health’s Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office.

The gender-transition pathway endorsed by Biden is based on a single, flawed Dutch studywith 55 subjects and no control group.

It’s no surprise then that countries such as theUnited Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, who took early leads on the transition protocol, are hitting the brakes. And yet this is the moment when Biden has decided to put the full weight of the federal government on the accelerator for childhood gender transition.

It’s now up to brave states and parents to stand in the way.

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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C. Everett Koop, 1980s.jpg
13th Surgeon General of the United States
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________________

______________________

September 9, 2021

President Biden  c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.

In the past I have spent most of my time looking at this issue from the spiritual side. In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthanasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

Francis Schaeffer

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I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.

Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

July 9, 2021

Mr. Everette Hatcher III

Alexander, AR

Dear Mr. Hatcher,

Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter

Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.

As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.

Sincerely

Joe Biden

___________________

This is the part of your letter that caught my attention:

Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day,

President Biden, I want to point out that your Christian views recognize the life of the unborn child and John MacArthur rightly noted, Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion;

I recently read this article below:

The Archbishop Who Fears for Joe Biden’s Soul

America’s second-ever Catholic president supports abortion rights, leaving the bishops unsure about how to move forward.By Emma Green

Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, at a Mass held on the eve of the 2020 March for Life in Washington, D.C.Gregory A. Shemitz

MARCH 14, 2021

Archbishop Joseph Naumann is anxious about President Joe Biden’s soul. The two men are in some ways similar: cradle Catholics born in the 1940s who witnessed John F. Kennedy become America’s first Catholic president. Both found a natural home in the Democratic Party—in Naumann’s midwestern family, asking Catholics if they were Democrats was a redundancy. Naumann became a priest and Biden became a politician, but their paths really diverged over the issue of abortion. Now in his 70s, Naumann watched Biden—America’s second Catholic president—transform into a vocal supporter of abortion rights while competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Naumann runs the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and also leads what the Catholic bishops describe as their pro-life activities. He has suggested that Biden should no longer call himself a devout Catholic. At the very least, Naumann says, Biden should stop receiving Communion, a holy sacrament in Catholic life.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently convened a working group to discuss how the bishops should interact with Biden, and how they should deal with the challenge of having a visibly Catholic president who defies Church teachings on a central issue. Naumann was part of that group. Conflicts have already arisen: Naumann recently co-authored a statement expressing moral concerns about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was developed and tested using cell lines from aborted fetal tissue. He also joined a statement from a group of the country’s top bishops celebrating the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, but called it “unconscionable that Congress has passed the bill without critical protections needed to ensure that billions of taxpayer dollars are used for life-affirming health care and not for abortion.”

John MacArthur gave a sermon in June of 2021 entitled “When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good” and in that sermon he makes the following points:

INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION OF ROMANS 13

GOVERNMENT CAN FORFEIT ITS AUTHORITY

THE WORLD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL

ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY IS PROGRESSING TOWARD A GLOBAL KINGDOM UNDER THE POWER OF SATAN

ONE FALSE WORLD RELIGION IS FINAL PLAY BY SATAN

REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT

PERSECUTION IN BOOK OF DANIEL

THE LAW IS KING AND NOT THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA

GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS

THERE IS A PLACE FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

DOES GOVERNMENT WIN?

Let me just share a portion of that sermon with you and you can watch it on You Tube:

GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS

One New Testament writer says that Romans 13 has “caused more unhappiness and misery . . . than any other . . . verses in the New Testament by the license they have given to tyrants . . . used to justify a host of horrendous abuses of individual human rights.” Hitler’s Holocaust, racism in the apartheid of South Africa, Cantrell says, “Both the Jews in Germany and blacks in South Africa were viewed as a threat to public health and national security. . . . “‘Trust us,’ said government . . . ‘we truly have your best interests at heart. All we want to do is help . . . keep you safe.’”

Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion; elevating the LGBTQ agenda, the bizarre transgender deception. The culture has become anti-truth, we all know that. The truth is the biggest threat to lies. William Pitt, well-known name in English history, said this: “Necessity (i.e., public health, common good) is the plea [of] every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants. “Get people afraid, and they’ll do whatever you want. A fearful society will always comply; panicking people will believe anything” [(Cantrell)].

“During the gruesome and bloody days of the French Revolution, when 40,000 innocent [people] lost their heads,” you would be interested to know who was operating the guillotine: the Committee for Public Safety [(Cantrell)]. One writer says, “Governments now get voted into power by promising to oversee housing, education, medicine, the economy, [the] currency, a minimum income, food, water, land, and the list goes on. The government become a parent, and the citizens are dependents. The government in this role becomes a monstrous juggernaut of bureaucracy, devouring taxes and trying to regulate every detail of life.” And they definitely want to regulate the church and silence its proclamation.

In his book The Glorious Body of Christ, Kuiper wrote, “Our age is one of ecclesiastical passivism. . . . When a church ceases to be militant it also ceases to be a church of Jesus Christ. . . . A truly militant church stands opposed to the world both without its walls and within. . . . Time and again in its history the church has found it necessary to assert its sovereignty over against usurpations by the state.” And Kuiper gave some biblical examples, like when King Saul or King Uzziah usurped the priesthood, stating, “In both cases a representative of the state was severely punished for encroaching [on] the sovereignty of the church.”

“Lord Macaulay of England summed up the Puritan reputation this way” [(Cantrell)]. He said of the Puritans, “He bowed himself in the dust before his Maker; [as] he set his foot on the neck of his king.” Kuiper says, “Ours is an age of state totalitarianism. All over the world statism is [rising] . . . . In consequence, in many lands the church finds itself utterly at the mercy of the state whose mercy often proves cruelty, while in others the notion is rapidly gaining ground that the church exists and operates by the state’s permission.” We do not operate by the state’s permission; we operate by the Lord’s command.

—-

Francis Schaeffer discusses this more in his fine book CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO:

PAGE 437

CHAPTER 3 THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH AND FREEDOM

And now it is all gone!

In most law schools today almost no one studies William Blackstone unless he or she is taking a course in the history of law. We live in a secularized society and in secularized, sociological law. By sociological law we mean law that has no fixed base but law in which a group of people decides what is sociologically good for society at the given moment; and wha they arbitrarily decide becomes law. Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841-1935) made totally clear that this was his position. Frederick Moore Vinson (1890-1953), former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” Those who hold this position themselves call it sociological law.

As the new sociological law has moved away from the original base of the Creator giving the “inalienable rights,” etc., it has been natural that this sociological law has then also moved away from the Constitution. William Bentley Ball, in his paper entitled “Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Frontier,” says:

i propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for two reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the “higher law”; second, because, that being so, secularism tends toward decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the “higher” criteria of a constitution. 

This moving away from the Constitution is not only by court rulings, for example the First Amendment rulings, which are the very reversal of the original purpose of the First Amendment (see pp. 433, 434), but in other ways as well. Quoting again from the same paper by William Bentley Ball:

Our problem consists also, as perhaps this paper has well enough indicated, of more general constitutional delegation of legislative power and ultra vires. The first is where the legislature hands over its powers to agents through the conferral of regulatory power unaccompanied by strict standards. The second is where the agents make up powers on their own–assume powers not given them by the legislature. Under the first, the government of laws largely disappears and the government of men largely replaces it. Under the second, agents’ personal “home-made law replaces the law of the elected representatives of the people. 

Naturally, this shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty. Mr. Ball closes his paper:

Fundamentally, in relation to personal liberty, the Constitution was aimed at restraint of the State. Today, in case after case relating to religious liberty, we encounter the bizarre presumption that it is the other way around; that the State is justified in whatever actions, and that religion bears a great burden of proof to overcome that presumption. 

It is our job, as Christian lawyers, to destroy that presumption at every turn. 

As lawyers discuss the changes in law in the United States, often they speak of the influence of the laws involved in the reentrance of the southern states into the national government after the Civil War. These indeed must be considered. But they were not the reason for the drastic change in law in our country. This reason was the takeover by the totally other world view which never have given the form and freedom in government we have had in Northern Europe (including the United States). That is the central factor in the change.

PAGE 439

It is parallel to the difference between modern science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and the materialistic science which took over the last century. Materialistic thought would never have produced modern science. Modern science was produced on the Christian base. That is, because an intelligent Creator had created the universe we can in some measure understand the universe and there is, therefore, a reason for observation and experimentation to be pursued.

Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.

There is exactly the same parallel in law. The materialistic-energy, chance concept of final reality never would have produced the form and freedom in government we have in this country and in other Reformation countries. But now it has arbitrarily and arrogantly supplanted the historic Judeo-Christian Consensus that provided the base for form and freedom in government. The Judeo-Christian consensus gave greater freedoms than the world has ever known, but it also contained the freedoms so that they did not pound society to pieces. The materialistic concept of reality would not have produced the form-freedom balance, and now that it has taken over it cannot maintain the balance. It has destroyed it.

Will Durant and his wife Ariel together wrote The Story of Civilization. The Durants received the 1976 Humanist Pioneer Award. In The Humanist magazine of February 1977, Will Durant summed up the humanist problem with regard to personal ethics and social order: “Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes, and fears.”

Poor Will Durant! It is not just difficult, it is impossible. He should have remembered the quotation he and Ariel Durant gave from the agnostic Renan in their book The Lessons of History. According to the Durants, Renan said in 1866: “If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” And the Durants themselves say in the same context: “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”

PAGE 440

Along with the decline of the Judie-Christian consensus we have come to a new definition and connotation of “pluralism.” Until recently it meant that the Christianity flowing from the Reformation is not now as dominant in the country and in society as it was in the early days of the nation. After about 1848 the great viewpoints not shaped by Reformation Christianity. This, of course, is the situation which exists today. Thus as we stand for religious freedom today, we need to realize that this must include a general religious freedom from the control of the state for all religion. It will not mean just freedom for those who are Christians. It is then up to Christians to show that Christianityis the Truth of total reality in the open marketplace of freedom.

This greater mixture in the United States, however, is now used as an excuse for the new meaning and connotation  of pluralism. It now is used to mean that all types of situations are spread out before us, and that it really is up to each individual to grab one or the other on the way past, according to the whim of personal preference. What you take is only a matter of personal choice, with one choice as valid as another. Pluralism has come to mean that everything is acceptable. This new concept of pluralism suddenly is everywhere. There is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference. On a recent SIXTY MINUTES program on television, for example, the questions of euthanasia of the old and the growing of marijuana as California’s largest paying crop were presented this way. One choice is as valid as another. It is just a matter of personal preference. This new definition and connotation of pluralism is presented in many forms, not only in personal ethics, but in society’s ethics and in the choices concerning law,

PAGE 440

Now I have a question. In these shifts that have come in law, where have the Christian lawyers been? I really ask you that. The shift has come gradually, but it has only come to its peak in the last 40 or 50 years. Where have the Christian lawyers been? Surely the Christian lawyers should have been the ones to have sounded the trumpet clear and loud, not just in bits and pieces but looking at the totality of what was occurring. Now, a nonlawyer like myself believes I have a right to feel let down because the Christian lawyers did not blow the trumpets clearly between, let us say, 1940 and 1970. 

PAGE 441

When I wrote HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? From 1974 to 1976 I worked out of a knowledge of secular philosophy. I moved from the results in secular philosophy, to the results in liberal theology, to the results in the arts, and then I turned to the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. I read Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, and I must say, I was totally appalled by what I read. It was an exact parallel to what i had already known so well from my years of study in philosophy, theology, and the other disciplines.

In the book and film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? I used the Supreme Court abortion case as the clearest illustration of arbitrary sociiological law. But it was only the clearest illustration. The law is shot through with this kind of ruling. It is similar to choosing Fletcher’s situational ethics and point to it as the clearest illustration of how our society now functions with no fixed ethics. This is only the clearest illustration because in many ways our society functions on unfixed, situational ethics. The abortion case in law is exactly the same. It is only the clearest case. Law in this country has become situational law, using the term Fletcher used for his ethics. That is, a small group of people decide arbitrarily what, from their viewpoint, is for the good of society at that precise moment and they make it law, binding the whole society by their personal arbitrary decisions. 

But of course! What would we expect? These things are the natural, inevitable results of the material-energy, humanistic concept of the final basic reality. From the material-energy, chance concept of final reality, final reality is, and must be b it nature, silent as to values, principles, or any basis for law. There is no way to ascertain “the ought:” from “the is.” Not only should we have known what this would have produced, but on the basis of this viewpoint of reality, we should have recognized that there are no other conclusions that this view could produce. It is a natural result of really believing that the basic reality of all things is merely material-energy, shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.

No, we must say that the Christians in the legal profession did not ring the bell, and we are indeed very, very far down the road toward a totally humanistic culture. At this moment we are in a humanistic culture, but we are happily not in a totally humanistic culture. But what we must realize is that the drift has been all in this direction. if it is not turned around we will move very rapidly into a totally humanistic culture.

PAGE 442

The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.Thisis what has happened. The abortion law is a perfect example. The Supreme Court abortion ruling invalidated abortion lawsin all fifty states, even though it seems clear that in 1973 the majority of Americans were against abortion. It did not matter. The Supreme Court arbitrarily ruled that abortion was legal, and overnight they overthrew the state laws and forced their will on the majority, even though their ruling was arbitrary both legally and medically. Thus law and the courts became the vehicle for forcing a totally secular concept on the population.

______________________________________

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. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith.  I  respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,

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Dan Mitchell article Biden’s Farcical Tax Plan

Biden’s Farcical Tax Plan

I’ve already written that massive spending increases for various bureaucracies is the most offensive part of Biden’s new budget.

But I explicitly noted that these huge budgetary increases(well above the rate of inflation, unlike what’s happening to incomes for American families) were not the most economically harmful feature of Biden’s plan.

That dubious honor belongs to either his massive expansion of the welfare state or his big tax increases.

In today’s column, we’re going to focus on his tax plan.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized a couple of days ago about what the president is proposing.

A President’s budget is a declaration of priorities, so it’s worth underscoring that President Biden’s new budget for fiscal 2023 proposes $2.5 trillion in tax increases over 10 years. His priority is taking money from the private economy and giving it to politicians to spend.…Raising the top income-tax rate to 39.6% from 37% would raise $187 billion. Raising capital-gains taxes, including taxing gains like ordinary income for taxpayers earning more than $1 million would snatch $174 billion. Raising the top corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%—a tax on workers and shareholders—would raise $1.3 trillion. Fossil fuels are hit up for $45 billion. We could go on… Let’s hope none of these tax-increases pass, but the Democratic appetite for your money really is insatiable.

That’s a damning indictment.

But the WSJ actually understates the problems with Biden’s tax agenda.

That’s because the White House also is being dishonest, as explained by Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute.

The budget proposes $2.5 trillion in net tax hikes, almost entirely from businesses and high-income households, and touts policies that would “reduce deficits by more than $1 trillion” over the next decade. But a short note in the preamble to the Treasury Department’s report on the budgetreveals a sleight of hand: “The revenue proposals are estimated relative to a baseline that incorporates all revenue provisions of Title XIII of H.R. 5376 (as passed by the House of Representatives on November 19, 2021), except Sec. 137601.”In other words, the budget pretends that the failed effort to enact President Biden’s Build Back Better Act was a success and considers new budget proposals in addition to those policies. But you won’t find the price of the Build Back Better (BBB) Act (including its roughly $1 trillion in net tax hikes) in the budget tables.

I’m going to use this trick during my next softball tournament. I’m going to assume at the start that I’ve already had 20 at-bats and that I got an extra-base hit each time.

So even if I have a crummy performance during my real at-bats, my overall average and slugging percentage will still seem impressive.

Needless to say, my teammates would laugh at me, just as serious budget people understand that Biden’s budget is a joke.

But there is some good news. Barring something completely unexpected, Congress is not going to approve the president’s farcical plan.

P.S. Don’t fully celebrate. As I noted in my “Hopes and Fears for 2022” column, there is a risk that some sort of tax-and-spend plan might get approved. The only silver lining to that dark cloud is that it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as Biden’s full budget.

P.P.S. If that prospect gets you depressed, here are a couple of humorous images depicting Biden’s fiscal agenda.

March 7, 2021

President Biden  c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

The federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation. We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding  principles that made our country great.  We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruptionThe recent scandals in our government have proved my point. In fact, the jokes you made at Ohio State about possibly auditing them are not so funny now that reality shows how the IRS was acting more like a monster out of control. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.

I have written about 66 heroes of mine in the House of Representatives that voted “no” on the Obama/Biden  debt ceiling increase request in 2011. I believe we must have representatives that will vote to restore our freedom and that means voting to cut spending and lower taxes like the Patriots of long ago wanted. Today the Tea Party represented my views the most closely.  Lord knows I have written a lot about that in the past. . I have praised over and over and over the 66 House Republicans that voted no on that before. If they did not raise the debt ceiling then we would have a balanced budget instantly.  I agree that the Tea Party has made a difference and I have personally posted 49 posts on my blog on different Tea Party heroes of mine.

I have written and emailed Senator Pryor over, and over again with spending cut suggestions but he has ignored all of these good ideas in favor of keeping the printing presses going as we plunge our future generations further in debt. I am convinced if he does not change his liberal voting record that he will no longer be our senator in 2014.

I have written hundreds of letters and emails to President Obama in the past, and I must say that I have been impressed that he has  had the White House staff answer so many of my letters. The White House answered concerning Social Security (two times), Green Technologieswelfaresmall businessesObamacare (twice),  federal overspendingexpanding unemployment benefits to 99 weeks,  gun controlnational debtabortionjumpstarting the economy, and various other  issues.   However, the Obama/Biden policies have not changed, and by the way the White House after answering over 50 of my letters before November of 2012 has not answered one since.    The Obama/Biden administration was  committed to cutting nothing from the budget that I can tell. I am hoping your administration,  President  Biden, will be more open minded and look at the facts.

 I have praised over and over and over the 66 House Republicans that voted no on that before. If they did not raise the debt ceiling then we would have a balanced budget instantly.  I agree that the Tea Party has made a difference and I have personally posted 49 posts on my blog on different Tea Party heroes of mine.

THIS BRINGS ME TO ONE OF MY BIGGEST ECONOMIC HEROES AND IT IS THE LATE MILTON FRIEDMAN. Friedman had such revolutionary policies such as eliminating welfare and instituting the negative income tax and putting in school vouchers.

The problem in Washington is not lack of revenue but our lack of spending restraint. This video below makes that point.

Milton Friedman on School Vouchers

Great article.

March 8, 2013 6:40PM

The Continuing Debate Over Scholarship Tax Credits

Though there are currently more students participating in scholarship tax credit (STC) programs than voucher programs nationwide (about 151,000 to 104,000), the former have not received nearly as much attention as the latter. That has begun to change in recent years as growth in the number of STC programs has outpaced growth in voucher programs.

Over the past week, I have enjoyed engaging in a spirited debate over STC programs with Professor Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The debate was sparked by Valerie Strauss’ blog post at the Washington Post, which contained several significant errors that I addressed here. Welner then responded at Strauss’ blog and we continued to spar here and here. It is my sincere hope that readers who have followed the debate have found it illuminating.

Though I suspect that Welner might not share my aspiration for universal educational choice, we have a least found common ground in the belief that, given limited resources, such programs should first aid those most in need. I also agree that our three primary areas of contention are: 1) the differences between STC programs and vouchers and their significance; 2) the fiscal impact of STC programs; and 3) who receives tax-credit scholarships. I will address Welner’s latest arguments on these matters below.

First, however, I must make two important corrections to Welner’s last post. In explaining why he did not provide context for some of his remarks, Welner wrote: “Much of this change happened in the aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections, when Republicans swept into state offices in very large numbers.” Actually, only five out of the fourteen STC programs (in Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Virginia and one of the two in Pennsylvania) were adopted in the wake of the 2010 midterm elections. Moreover, there was strong support among Democrats in two of those states. Pennsylvania’s 2012 STC legislation passed with the support of 15 of 20 Democrats in the Senate and unanimous support in the House. In Louisiana, the legislation passed with the support of 11 of 15 Senate Democrats (32-7 total) and 32 of 45 House Democrats (66-37 total).

Scholarship Tax Credits vs. Vouchers

Welner wonders why I did not use the term he invented to describe scholarship tax credit programs. “Neovouchers” is a confusing term that appears nowhere in any of the fourteen STC laws. It also blurs the distinctions between STCs and vouchers, which I have described previously. I have likewise avoided the term “opportunity scholarships” because it is essentially meaningless as well. The terms “scholarship tax credits” or “education tax credits” accurately describe a program in which individuals or corporations receive tax credits for donating to scholarship organizations that fund low- and middle-income students attending nonpublic schools. I don’t begrudge Welner for using the term that shares a name with his book, but I also don’t see why he should expect that others should adopt.

In my previous posts, I argued that these two policies have similar ends but very different means and therefore should be called by different names. I then explained how the means are different, particularly their funding (public vs. private money) and administration (government-run/centralized/uniform vs. privately-run/decentralized/diverse). Welner then responds, essentially, “Yes, but their ends are nearly identical!” I would suggest that he misses the point.

Welner also takes issue with the examples I gave of courts that decided the question of whether tax credits constitute public or private money. Welner noted correctly that some of those cases did not pertain directly to scholarship tax credit programs. What he misses is that this fact strengthens my point. State courts have ruled that tax credits do not constitute “public funds” both with regard to STC programs and other forms of tax credits. This consistency shows that STC programs are not merely a legal loophole or “money laundering”, as Welner called it. The freedom of citizens to direct their own money makes such tax credit programs qualitatively different in policy terms and this difference is reflected in the law, not arbitrarily invented by it.

Credible Evidence of Savings

Welner points out that I overinterpreted his statement that he would not be surprised if Florida’s STC program generates savings. Instead, he holds that the available evidence does not support that conclusion. He argues that we do not have all the data necessary for a conclusive determination so he throws up his hands. In fact, there is credible evidence of savings.

The best available estimate of any STC program’s fiscal impact is from Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA). This is important since Florida’s STC program is the least likely candidate for realizing savings (with the possible exception of Georgia’s). Florida offers the maximum possible tax credit (100%) whereas programs in seven of the other ten states offer only partial credits, as low as 50% in Indiana and Oklahoma. Florida has the largest average scholarship size and the highest ratio of scholarship size to average public school operating per pupil expenditures, as shown in the table below. (Note that the National Center for Education Statistics’ calculation of total per pupil expenditures excludes unfunded pension liabilities. Moreover, low-income students generally cost the state more money than average to educate.)

State

Average scholarship size

Public school average per pupil expenditures

Scholarship size compared to PPE

Arizona (corporate)

$1,861

$9,641

19.3%

Arizona (individual)

$2,077

$9,641

21.5%

Florida

$3,664

$11,626

31.5%

Georgia

$3,494

$11,498

30.4%

Indiana

$880

$10,040

8.9%

Iowa

$1,031

$11,126

9.3%

Pennsylvania (individual)

$990

$13,712

7.2%

Rhode Island

$2,727

$14,897

18.3%

[This chart excludes Arizona’s STC program for special needs students and the STC programs in Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Virginia and Pennsylvania’s corporate program, which were only recently launched or have yet to launch. Table includes the most recent data available in each category.]

Now Welner is certainly correct that savings depend on the ratio of switchers to stayers, but the data I’ve provided thus far indicates that the percentage of switchers does not have to be very high to realize savings in most states. Welner was rightly skeptical of OPPAGA’s 2008 report, which made an educated guess that 90% of scholarship recipients were switchers. However, OPPAGA’s 2010 report and 2012 revenue estimating conference relied on U.S. Census data and found that their previous estimate of switchers had been too low, since 94.6% of scholarship-eligible low-income students were attending public schools in the year before the STC program took effect. As Jon East explained in RedefinED, “The estimating conference went even further, combining American Community Survey data from 2005-09 with private school enrollment data to make projections about the actual number of low-income students enrolled in each grade level in private schools in 2012.” The more recent report projected savings of $57.9 million for Florida in 2012-13.

Welner is also correct that the analysis of the total fiscal impact of STC programs should not stop there. States that offer less than Florida’s 100% tax credit should also account for the impact of the deduction of non-credit eligible portion of the donation, as well as the caps on deductions. A complete fiscal analysis would also have to include other government programs or tax credits that are available in a given state. I agree with Welner that in most states, we need more data. However, the evidence of savings in Florida is strong, even accounting for Welner’s caveats. And if there are savings in the least likeliest of states, then there are likely savings elsewhere.

Clear Benefit to Low-Income Families

In my previous posts, I criticized Strauss for claiming that low-income families do not benefit from tax-credit scholarships. Welner admits that STC programs “provide financial assistance to many lower-income families” but says that he “didn’t read [Strauss’] statement to be saying that zero low-income families receive neovouchers. ” Once again, Strauss correctly noted that tax-credit scholarships do not cover the full cost of tuition, then incorrectly concluded: “Poor families can’t make up the difference. Guess who can.” That’s a fairly unambiguous statement. Strauss didn’t even qualify her claim by referring to “most” or “some” low-income families, let alone provide any evidence to support her claim. If she wants to be taken seriously as a responsible commentator, she should correct the record.

Likewise, Strauss has not yet rescinded her fallacious charge that STC programs are “welfare for the rich” because the donors somehow benefit from the tax credits. As I have demonstrated, the donors break even at most. Even Welner abandoned that line of argument in his latest post. Again, Strauss has a duty to correct the record.

In his latest post, Welner conceded that all of the STC programs are means-tested but for Georgia’s and one of Arizona’s two programs. However, Welner expressed skepticism about the organization that issued the study showing that two-thirds of scholarship recipients in Arizona fall under 185% of the federal poverty line. He also noted correctly that the income thresholds in some states allow some middle-income families to qualify as well. That said, it is unclear why he ignored the evidence I provided from state governments showing that the average income of scholarship recipients is far below the means-testing thresholds. For example, the average income of recipient families in Pennsylvania was only $29,000, just under half of the state’s income threshold at the time. Welner has not explained why we should assume that recipients in other states look significantly different, especially when there is evidence of similar patterns.

Welner calls for more a more comprehensive state-level reporting system. I am sympathetic to this suggestion, though I believe that states should proceed with caution. Scholarship organizations are already more regulated than ordinary nonprofits, like the Salvation Army or Red Cross. While regulations vary by state, STC programs generally have more stringent accounting standards, reporting requirements, and some states even require background checks for employees. Every STC program requires that scholarship organizations spend no more than 10% on administrative costs, the exceptions being Florida’s 3% maximum and Pennsylvania’s unnecessarily high 20% maximum. (It’s important to note that a government study found that 62% of Pennsylvania scholarship organizations disbursed 100% of their collected funds while only 5% used the maximum administrative expenses.)

Our education system should empower families to choose the education that best meets their kids’ individual needs. Scholarship tax credit programs move our education system toward that goal. As with all government programs, we should constantly reassess whether STC programs are achieving their desired ends and make any necessary changes. I would like to thank Professor Welner for taking the time to discuss this important matter.

[Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly labeled total per pupil expenditures as operating per pupil expenditures.]

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,

Williams with Sowell – Minimum Wage

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell – Reducing Black Unemployment

By WALTER WILLIAMS

—-

Ronald Reagan with Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5

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By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in spending out of control | Edit | Comments (0)

______________________

Biden’s Budget Deficits 

A.F. Branco for Oct 21, 2021


The Biden administration has released its federal budget for 2023. One of the themes is deficit reduction. The president says the budget “keeps us on track to reduce the deficit this year to less than half of what it was before I took office.” The administration will be “the first in history to reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year.”

Finally, someone is taking an axe to the bloated federal budget!

Or maybe not. Under the Biden budget:

  • Deficits are currently falling, but would start rising again in 2024, as shown in the chart.
  • Spending would rise from $5.85 trillion this year to $8.87 trillion in 2032.
  • Debt held by the public would rise from $24.8 trillion this year to $39.5 trillion in 2032, or 102.4 percent of GDP to 106.7 percent.
  • Taxes would be increased $2.5 trillion over 10 years, but these hikes likely won’t pass Congress, so deficits would be higher than proposed unless spending is restrained.
  • Interest rates on federal debt are projected to remain low, with the rate on 10‐​year debt only rising to 3.3 percent by 2032. Thus the budget says the “burden of debt would stay low,” which seems very optimistic. Every 1 percentage point increase in average borrowing costs on $25 trillion of federal debt is $250 billion in added annual interest outlays.
d

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.

President Barack Obama speaks about the debt limit in the East Room of the White House in Washington. | AP Photo

“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.  

David Ramsey demonstrates in his Arkansas Times Blog post of 1-14-13 that very point:

Arkansas Politics / Health Care Arkansas’s share of Medicaid expansion and the national debt

Posted by on Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 1:02 PM

Baby carrot Arkansas Medicaid expansion image

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.

Here is what the Founding Fathers had to say about welfare. David Weinberger noted:

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.”

Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan

April 6, 1816

[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

Williams with Sowell – Minimum Wage

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell – Reducing Black Unemployment

By WALTER WILLIAMS

—-

Ronald Reagan with Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5

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Dan Mitchell: Joe Biden is pushing for a massive tax increase, for instance, but his proposed spending increase is far larger.

The Case Against Higher Taxes

I’ve identified seven reasons to oppose tax increases, but explain in this interview that the biggest reason is that it would be a mistake to give politicians more money to finance an ever-larger burden of government spending.

I had two goals when responding this question (part of a longer interview).

First, I wanted to help viewers understand that America’s fiscal problem is too much government spending and that red ink is simply a symptom of that problem.

Over the years, I’ve concocted all sorts of visuals to make this point. Like this one.

And this one.

And this one.

Second, I wanted viewers to understand that higher taxes will simply make a bad situation even worse.

From my perspective, the biggest problem with tax increases is that they will enable a bigger burden of government spending.

But even the folks who fixate on red ink should adopt a no-tax increase position.

Why? Because politicians who want big tax increases want even bigger spending increases.

Joe Biden is pushing for a massive tax increase, for instance, but his proposed spending increase is far larger.

We also have decades of evidence from Europe. There’s been a huge increase in the tax burden in Western Europe since the 1960s (largely enabled by the enactment of value-added taxes).

Did that massive increase in revenue lead to less red ink?

Nope, just the opposite, as I showed in both 2012 and 2016.

If you don’t agree with me on this issue, maybe you should heed the words of these four former presidents.

P.S. Some people warn that endlessly increasing debt is a recipe for an eventual crisis. They’re probably right. Which is why it is important to oppose tax-increase deals that wind up saddling us with more red ink. Besides, the long-run damage of tax-financed spending is very similar to the long-run damage of debt-financed spending.

P.P.S. As I mention in the interview, the only real solution is spending restraint. And a spending cap is the best way of enforcing that approach.

Biden’s Boondoggle(s) and the Burden of Government Spending

First we got Biden’s $1.9 trillion so-called stimulus.

Then we got his $1 trillion-plus infrastructure boondoggle.

Now Congress may be on the verge of approving the President’s budget, which (if we use honest numbers) is a $5 trillion plan to expand the welfare state.

And…

So it’s hardly a surprise that recent changes will lead to a much-larger burden of government spending.

This is bad news for our economy, as measured by my recent study (with similar findings from a wide range of academics – as well as normally left-leaning bureaucracies such as the IMF, World Bank, and OECD).

For purposes of today’s column, let’s put America’s fiscal decline in global context.

Here are some excerpts from a very depressing article in the Economist, starting with some discussion of how Biden’s spending binge is similar to the mistakes made by other nations.

President Joe Biden is building on what started as emergency pandemic-related policy, expanding the child-tax credit, creating a universal federally funded child-care system, subsidising paid family leave and expanding Obamacare. America’s government spending remains somewhat below the developed-world average. But this change is not just a matter of catching up; the target is moving. Government spending as a share of gdp in the oecd as a whole has consistently inched higher in the six decades since the club was formed in 1961.

There’s then some discussion about how a few nations – most notably Sweden and New Zealand – enjoyed period of genuine spending restraint, but accompanied by depressing observations about how fiscal responsibility is very rare.

Examples of genuine state retrenchment in developed countries are few and far between. Sweden managed it in the 1980s. In the early 1990s Ruth Richardson, then New Zealand’s finance minister, cut the size of the state drastically. …State spending is now six percentage points lower as a share of gdp than it was in 1990. But this is a rare achievement, and perhaps one doomed to pass. …This is a sorry state of affairs if you believe that low taxes and small government are the right, and possibly the only, conditions for reliable, enduring economic growth. …an argument made by Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian philosopher, Milton Friedman, an American economist, and others in the mid-20th century.

There’s also some historical analysis showing how the burden of government used to be relatively minor.

From 1274 to 1691 the English government raised less than 2% of gdp in tax. …In the 1870s the governments of rich countries were spending about 10% of gdp. In 1920 it was nearer 20%. It has been growing ever since (see chart 2).

Here’s the aforementioned chart 2, and there are a lot of depressing numbers, though notice how Switzerland does better than other nations.

I’ve previously shared a version of this data, calling it the “world’s most depressing chart” – all of which was made possible by the imposition of income taxes.

But there is some good news. The ever-rising fiscal burden of government has been somewhat offset by reductions in other bad policies.

Governments have not grown more powerful by all measures. Bureaucrats no longer, as a rule, set wages or prices, nor impose strict currency controls, as many did in the 1960s or 1970s. In recent decades the public sector has raised hundreds of billions of dollars from privatisations of state assets such as mines and telecoms networks. If you find it faintly amusing to hear that, from 1948 to 1984, the British state ran its own chain of hotels, that is because the “neoliberal” outlook on the proper place of government has triumphed.

Last but not least, there’s some discussion of “public choice,” which explains why politicians and bureaucrats have incentives to expand the size and scope of government.

Governments and bureaucrats are at least partly self-interested: “public-choice theory” says that unrestrained bureaucracies will defend their turf and seek to expand it. …Politicians have their own incentives to expand the state. It is generally more rewarding for a politician to introduce a new programme than it is to close an old one down; costs are spread across all taxpayers while benefits tend to be concentrated, thus eliciting gratitude from interest groups

I’ll close by reiterating my warning that ever-rising spending burdens not only lead to less growth, but they also will lead to Greek-style fiscal crises.

Europe will get hit first, but it’s just a matter of time before the United States suffers a similar fate.

P.S. There is a simple solution to avoid such crises, and a specific policy to achieve that solution. But don’t hold your breath waiting for politicians to tie their own hands.

Biden’s Economic Alchemy: $3.5 Trillion = Zero

Last week, I wrote about a new study which estimates that Biden’s fiscal agenda of bigger government and higher taxeswould reduce economic output by about $3 trillion over the next decade.

Perhaps more relevant, that foregone economic growth would translate into more than $10,000 of lost compensation per job. And a lifetime drop in living standards of more than 4 percent for younger people.

And these numbers are based on research by the Congressional Budget Office, which is hardly a bastion of libertarian analysis.

The Biden White House has a different perspective.

How different? Well, the President actually claims that expanding the burden of government won’t cost anything.

I’m not joking. Here are some excerpts from an article in the Washington Post by Seung Min Kim and Tony Romm.

President Biden promised Friday that his sweeping domestic agenda package will cost “nothing” because Democrats will pay for it through tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations… The remarks were an attempt by Bidento assuage some of the cost concerns pointedly expressed by the moderate Democrats about the size of the legislation… The total spending outlined in the plan is $3.5 trillion… “It is zero price tag on the debt we’re paying. We’re going to pay for everything we spend,” Biden said in remarks from the State Dining Room at the White House.

Biden’s strange analysis has generated some amusing responses.

For instance, Gerard Baker opined in the Wall Street Journalabout Biden’s magical approach.

…this is a novel way of estimating the cost of something. That eye-wateringly expensive dinner you had last week didn’t really cost you anything because you paid for it. …You could have used the money to investin your children’s college fund. You could have paid off some of your credit card bill, the debt on which has quadrupled in the last year. But you chose instead to blow it on a few morsels of raw fish and a couple of bottles of 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild. Don’t worry, It didn’t cost you anything.

Biden and his team definitely deserve to be mocked for their silly argument.

For all intents and purposes, they want us to believe that there’s no downside if you combine anti-growth spending increases with anti-growth tax increases – so long as there’s no increase in red ink.

But there’s actually a fiscal theory that sort of supports what the White House is saying.

  • Capital (saving and investment) is a key driver of productivity and long-run growth.
  • Budget deficits divert capital from the economy’s productive sector to government.
  • Budget deficits raise interest rates, reducing incentives for investment.
  • Therefore, budget deficits are bad for prosperity.

For what it’s worth, all four of those statements are correct.

But the theory is nonetheless wrong because it elevates one variable – fiscal balance – while ignoring other variables that have a much bigger impact on economic performance.

For instance, the Congressional Budget Office at one point embraced this approach – even though it led to absurd implications such as growth being maximized with tax rates of 100 percent.

For further background, here’s a table I prepared back in 2012.

The White House today is basically embracing the IMF’s “austerity” argument that deficits/surpluses are the variable that has the biggest impact on growth.

P.S. Folks on the left must get whiplash because some days they embrace the Keynesian argument that deficits are good for growth and other days they argue that a big expansion of government will have zero cost because there is no increase in the deficit.

P.P.S. The folks on the right who focus solely on tax cuts also are guilty of elevating one variable while ignoring others (humorously depicted in this cartoon strip).

Two (Humorous) Images to Understand Biden’s Fiscal Policy

Yesterday’s column was a completely serious look at five graphs and tables that show why Biden’s tax plan is misguided.

Today, we’re going to make the same point with satire. And we’ll only need two images.

First, here’s a look at what happens when politicians create never-ending handouts financed by ever-higher taxes on an ever-smaller group of rich taxpayers.

In the past, I’ve referred to this as “Greece-ification” and Biden’s fiscal plan definitely qualifies.

It’s also a different way of looking at the second cartoon from this depiction of how a welfare state evolves over time.

This Chuck Asay cartoon makes the same point.

Second, here’s a cartoon that nicely captures why I think Biden’s agenda will erode the nation’s societal capital.

The same theme as this excellent cartoon.

While amusing, there’s a very serious point to be made. Politicians already have created a system that rewards people for doing nothing while punishing them for creating wealth.

Those policies hinder American prosperity (as honest folks on the left acknowledge), but we can survive with slower growth. What really worries me is that we may eventually reach a tipping point of too many people riding in the wagon (and out-voting the people who pull the wagon).

Simply stated, we don’t want America to become another Greece.

I have put up lots of cartoons from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism,  Greece,  welfare state or on gun control.

My Cato colleague, Mark Calabria, recently explained how the minimum wage destroys jobs, and I’ve written on several occasions why government-mandated wages can create unemployment by making it unprofitable to hire people with low work skills and/or poor work histories. And I’ve attacked Republicans for going along with these job-killing policies, and also pointed out the racist impact of such intervention.

But this cartoon may be a more effective argument for getting government out of the business of interfering with market forces. It’s simple, direct, and gets the point across. I’m not sure that always happens with my writing.

My former intern, Orphe Divougny, also did a very good job in explaining why politicians shouldn’t interfere with the right of workers and employers to enter into labor contracts.

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2 cartoons illustrate the fate of socialism from the Cato Institute

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Taking on Ark Times bloggers on the issue of “gun control” (Part 3) “Did Hitler advocate gun control?”

Gun Free Zones???? Stalin and gun control On 1-31-13 ”Arkie” on the Arkansas Times Blog the following: “Remember that the biggest gun control advocate was Hitler and every other tyrant that every lived.” Except that under Hitler, Germany liberalized its gun control laws. __________ After reading the link  from Wikipedia that Arkie provided then I responded: […]

Taking on Ark Times bloggers on the issue of “gun control” (Part 2) “Did Hitler advocate gun control?”

On 1-31-13 I posted on the Arkansas Times Blog the following: I like the poster of the lady holding the rifle and next to her are these words: I am compensating for being smaller and weaker than more violent criminals. __________ Then I gave a link to this poster below: On 1-31-13 also I posted […]

Dan Mitchell article Spending Caps and Speed Limits

Spending Caps and Speed Limits

Two days ago, I explained that spending caps are better than anti-deficit rules. In this clip from the same panel discussion, I talk about how a spending cap should be designed.

The key design issue is how fast spending should increase.

For libertarians and Reaganite conservatives, the goal is to shrink the burden of government. This means a cap that fulfills my Golden Rule of having government grow slower than the private sector.

So if long-run nominal GDP is projected to grow by, say, 5 percent per year, the cap might allow government to grow 2 percent or 3 percent annually.

That’s somewhat like the TABOR rule in Colorado, which limits government to grow no faster than inflation plus population.

For more moderate types, the goal might be to maintain the status quo.

In other words, don’t attempt to shrink government, but also don’t allow government to expand.

Perhaps that would mean a spending cap tied to nominal personal income growth, which might mean allowing spending to grow 4 percent or 5 percent each year.

That sound anemic, but it is definitely better than nothing since it would force lawmakers to somehow prevent the huge future spending increases that will be caused by America’s poorly designed entitlement programs.

But then there’s the issue of how a spending cap gets enforced.

I was cited in a 2020 article about this challenge in Hawaii.

Hawaii’s existing cap is too easily ignored by lawmakers. …So what would a “spending cap with teeth” look like? Mitchell said there are many types of spending caps that could be adopted. Hawaii added a spending cap to its Constitution in 1978, but it was essentially arbitrary due to an escape clause that allows the Legislature to override the cap with a two-thirds vote. “That escape clause, especially in a state where one party dominates the government, basically means that your spending cap isn’t very effective at all,” said Mitchell. So what would be better? Mitchell is especially fond of the spending cap that Colorado voters adopted in 1992, which Colorado’s Department of the Treasury estimated in 2019 had returned more than $2 billion to state taxpayers since it was implemented. Called the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights Amendment, it pegs state spending to population growth plus inflation. Colorado’s legislature can still propose a budget that exceeds the spending cap, but “the politicians have to go to the voters and ask for permission, and the voters in almost all cases say no.”

The bottom line is that spending caps are like speed limits in a school zone.

With small children present, the best speed limit might be 20 miles per hour.

By contrast, a speed limit of 45 miles per hour seems unwise. Then again, it would be better than nothing.

And we can’t forget that any speed limit won’t be worth much if there’s no enforcement.

I’ll close by sharing this table, which shows various nations that got very good results with multi-year periods of spending restraint (government growing, on average, by less than 2 percent annually).

P.S. The advantage of a numerical spending cap (such as limiting spending increases to no more than 2 percent annually) is that politicians would have a big incentive to keep inflation under control (meaning Biden’s economic team would not have allowed him to make vapid remarks about inflation during his state of the union address).

Sen. Rand Paul releases annual Festivus Report, which focuses on what he sees as wasteful spending

Paul’s office identified $52,598,515,585 what it sees as wasteful spending

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., kept his annual tradition going this year by releasing his “Festivus Report 2021,” where he airs his grievances about wasteful spending in the federal government, and where the money could have been better spent.

Festivus, of course, was made famous in a December 1997 “Seinfeld” episode called “The Strike.” The fictional holiday occurs on Dec. 23—a day before Christmas Eve—and instead of basking in the glow of family members and candlelight, participants confront each other about annoyances endured during the year. The holiday is marked by an “unadorned aluminum pole.”

Paul’s office identified $52,598,515,585 what it sees as waste, including money spent on “a study of pigeons gambling on slot machines, giving kids junk food, and telling citizens of Vietnam not to burn their trash,” according to a statement.

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, released his annual Festivus Report on Wednesday. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, released his annual Festivus Report on Wednesday. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

His list reads like a menu with bulleted items next to their price tags. He posted about the $549 million on Afghanistan Air Force planes he said were later sold as scrap, the $2.4 trillion in the construction of buildings in Afghanistan that essentially went unused and the pigeons playing slot machines study that cost $465,339.

<img class=”i-amphtml-blurry-placeholder” src=”data:;base64,AUGUST 31, 2021: Taliban fighters wielding American supplied weapons, equipment and uniforms, at the Kabul International Airport. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

AUGUST 31, 2021: Taliban fighters wielding American supplied weapons, equipment and uniforms, at the Kabul International Airport. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES) (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

Paul’s statement said the average U.S. taxpayer pays about $15,332, which he said means the government wasted the taxes from about 3.4 million Americans.

The statement, which had footnotes to support his claims, said that $52 billion could have been spent on 13,149 miles of 4-lane highway construction across the U.S., 4.5 months of operating Veterans Affairs or giving every person in the world $6.78.

Another Case Study Comparing the Private Sector and Government

I periodically look at issues (social security, education, infrastructure, TSA, etc) to compare the private sector and the public sector.

This new video from John Stossel gives us another example

The video reminds us that incentives matter.

Normally, the private sector does a better job then government because of competition. More specifically, profit-seeking companies fight for our dollars by offering goods and services based on quality and/or price.

But even when competition isn’t a big factor – such as the operation of a park, we can see how the private sector produces superior outcomes.

The surrounding businesses benefit if there is a clean and safe park. So when they actually got the authority to run the park, they put in place effective policies.

People in government are not opposed to clean and safe parks, of course, but they often make decisions on the basis of political factors (rewarding certain contractors, providing patronage jobs, etc).

The net result is that government involvement is a bad recipe for higher costs and poor performance (click here for another example from New York City).

P.S. The superiority of the private sector is a big reason to reject industrial policy. As shown in this video, we get better resultswhen businesses focus on attracting customers, not attracting subsidies.

Defending Capitalism, Part I

I was a big fan of (and occasional guest on) John Stossel’s TV show, and I’m now a big fan of his videos (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

So it was an honor to appear in his latest video about “Capitalism Myths.”

It’s a two-part series. In this first video, we discussed three myths about free enterprise.

Myth #1 – Capitalists get rich by ‘taking’ money from others.

Since voluntary exchange, by definition, is mutually beneficial, this is a truly absurd argument. Indeed, only the most vapid politicians and pundits suggest otherwise.

The most definitive research in this area came from Professor William Nordhaus of Yale, who estimated that, “innovators are able to capture about 2.2 percent of the total social surplus from innovation.”

Translated from economic jargon, that means the rest of society gets nearly 98 percent of the value created by rich entrepreneurs.

Myth #2 – The rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer.

This is an issue I’ve repeatedly addressed, showing how poverty was the natural state of humanity until capitalism appeared a few hundred years ago.

Now we are incomprehensibly rich by comparison. At least in market-oriented nations.

Focusing on more-recent data, I’ve shown that living standards have dramatically increased in the post-World War II era.

In the video, John and I also discussed the Census Bureau’s data showing that the middle class is shrinking, but only because more people are becoming rich.

Myth #3 – Monopolies destroyed the free market.

Supporters of government intervention commonly argue that capitalism produces monopolies, meaning big producers capture the market and exploit consumers.

This is a rather puzzling argument since monopolies almost always are the result of government favoritism.

Even if we go back to the days of the so-called Robber Barons, we find that the consumers were only exploited when politicians decided to prohibit competition.

P.S. Next week, the second video will look at four other myths about capitalism.

P.P.S. On a related note, I have a five-part series (Part IPart IIPart III, and Part IV, and Part V) on “The Case for Capitalism.”

The climate-change hustle

John Stossel: Through 50 years of reporting on scares, only COVID proved true

I hear that climate change will destroy much of the world.

“There will be irreversible damage to the planet!” warns a CNN anchor.

Joe Biden says he’ll spend $500 billion a year to fight what his website calls an “existential threat to life.”

Really?

I’m a consumer reporter. Over the years, alarmed scientists have passionately warned me about many things they thought were about to kill Americans.

Asbestos in hair dryers, coffee, computer terminals, electric power lines, microwave ovens, cellphones (brain tumors!), electric blankets, herbicides, plastic residue, etc., are causing “America’s cancer epidemic”!

If those things don’t get us, “West Nile Virus will!” Or SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, flesh-eating bacteria or “killer bees.”

Experts told me millions would die on Jan. 1, 2000, because computers couldn’t handle the switch from 1999. Machines would fail; planes would crash.

The scientists were well-informed specialists in their fields. They were sincerely alarmed. The more knowledge you have about a threat, the more alarmed you get.

Yet, mass death didn’t happen. COVID-19 has been the only time in my 50 years of reporting that a scare proved true.

Maybe you accepted the phrase I used above: “America’s cancer epidemic.” But there is no cancer epidemic. Cancer rates are down. We simply live long enough to get diseases like cancer. But people think there’s a cancer epidemic.

The opposite is true. As we’ve been exposed to more plastics, pesticides, mysterious chemicals, food additives and new technologies, we live longer than ever!

That’s why I’m skeptical when I’m told: Climate change is a crisis!

Climate change is real. It’s a problem, but I doubt that it’s “an existential threat.”

Saying that makes alarmists mad.

When Marc Morano says it, activists try to prevent him from speaking.

“They do not want dissent,” says Morano, founder of ClimateDepot.com, a website that rebuts much of what climate activists teach in schools.

“It’s an indoctrination that’s so complete that by the time (kids) get to high school, they’re not even aware that there’s any scientific dissent.”

Morano’s new movie, “Climate Hustle 2,” presents that dissent. My new video this week features his movie.

Morano argues that politicians use fear of global warming to gain power.

“Climate Hustle 2” features Sen. Chuck Schumer shouting: “If we would do more on climate change, we’d have fewer of these hurricanes and other types of storms! Everyone knows that!”

But everyone doesn’t know that. Many scientists refute it. Congress’ own hearings include testimony about how our warmer climate has not caused increases in the number of hurricanes or tornadoes. “Climate Hustle 2” includes many examples like that.

“Why should we believe you?” I ask Morano. “You’re getting money from the fossil fuel industry.” After all, Daily Kos calls him “Evil Personified” and says ExxonMobil funds him.

“Not at all,” he replies. “I’m paid by about 90% individual contributions from around the country. Why would ExxonMobil give me money (when) they want to appear green?”

Morano’s movie frustrates climate activists by pointing out how hypocritical some are.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio says he lives a “green lifestyle … (using) energy-efficient appliances. I drive a hybrid car.”

Then he flies to Europe to attend a party.

I like watching Morano point out celebrities’ hypocrisy, but think one claim in his movie goes too far.

“Stopping climate change is not about saving the planet,” says narrator Kevin Sorbo. “It’s about climate elites trying to convince us to accept a future where they call all the shots.”

I push back at Morano: “I think they are genuinely concerned, and they want to save us.”

“Their vision of saving us is putting them in charge,” he replies.

And if they’re in charge, he says, they will destroy capitalism.

—-
State of the Union 2013

Published on Feb 13, 2013

Cato Institute scholars Michael Tanner, Alex Nowrasteh, Julian Sanchez, Simon Lester, John Samples, Pat Michaels, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Michael F. Cannon, Jim Harper, Malou Innocent, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus and Neal McCluskey respond to President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address.

Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.

_______________

In the past I have written the White House on several issues such as abortion, medicare, welfare,  Greece, healthcare, and what the founding fathers had to say about welfare programs,   and have got several responses from the White House concerning issues such as Obamacare, Social Security, welfare,  and excessive government spending.

Today I am taking a look at the response of the scholars of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute scholars to the 2013 State of the Union Address.

Amy Payne

February 13, 2013 at 8:22 am

State of the…Climate?

Swept into office four years ago based, in part, on promises to slow sea-level rise, President Obama initiated a radical climate agenda. It seems we are seeing a rerun in 2013. It is worth asking what is different four years after his first State of the Union Address?

There have been four more years of no global warming. In 2010, there had been no significant world temperature increase for over a decade. The streak is now 16 years long. We have four years of costly lessons on the waste and inefficiency of green-energy subsidies.

The scientific basis for catastrophic climate change gets weaker and weaker. The economic argument for green subsidies has already collapsed. It is time for the administration to quit using both arguments to justify a regulatory and fiscal power grab.

David W. Kreutzer, PhD, research fellow in energy economics and climate change, Center for Data Analysis

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