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Tonight's Crazy Story:
Mayor of Alaska Village Walks on Four Paws
If you are in Talkeetna, Alaska, and need to talk to the mayor, be prepared to hear 'meow' for a response. Read the story about Stubbs's rise to the village's highest office.
Topic One: Entitlements
In the age of joblessness, Americans are turning to disability: "after two years, anyone receiving SSDI benefits is automatically eligible for Medicare. So the burgeoning ranks of the “disabled” contribute to the Medicare crisis. The CBO report says that in 2011, Medicare costs for SSDI recipients added up to $80 billion. What should we make of an ever-healthier country that produces a steadily growing number of citizens who think their best option is to be disabled? This is a financial problem; a political problem; but above all, a cultural problem. One thing we can say for sure, however, is that an administration that encourages economic growth rather than squashing the private sector will create more opportunities for those who would really rather not be disabled."
The goal of all entitlements is to round up votes: "In the end, it’s not about helping people, whether it’s subsidized flood insurance, food stamps, low-cost student loans, keeping kids on their parents’ insurance until their 26, government-backed mortgages, it’s about creating a permanent dependent class of voters who will vote for more government and more power. The latest example is the Obama administration running ads on Spanish-language stations to encourage Hispanics to sign up for food stamps. The ads made it clear that even non-citizens are eligible. By capturing their bellies, they’ll capture their votes. It’s that simple."
Obama is eliminating the incentive and benefit of work: "Poor, misinformed Mitt Romney. People shouldn’t have to work if they don’t want to. Government is supposed to plant clean, green money trees on everybody’s front lawn. That eighteen-month-old daughter of mine, she’s been promised the life of Julia! That is what the Modern Left shoots for. A life of total dependency. This is not done out of concern for anyone’s future. State-sponsored benevolence is not undertaken for the sake of altruism. It revolves around power. It revolves around control. Anyone who gives you your living can make those gifts as conditional as they desire. As we saw with the fiasco that is Obamacare; we’ll just have to pass the bills to see what is in them. So when President Obama denigrates hard work and self-sufficiency as fake and contrived while opening the spigots to poor out more welfare, he is telling you how he would prefer that America works. The more you depend upon the state and the less you employ individual initiative, the more that state controls you; the closer that state comes to owning you."
Time for a Laugh:
"According to a new report, the average Canadian is now richer than the average American. This is bad news for Americans and worse news for those Mexicans who now have to tunnel all the way to Canada."
-Conan O'Brien
Topic Two: Unions
Union pensions and crime: "It gets harder to keep New York safe as the number of cops falls. Little more than a decade ago, in 2000, the city had 40,451 police officers. Today, it’s 34,413 cops — an 18 percent drop. ... What happened? Yes, Wall Street collapsed, and tax revenues plummeted. The city thought things would be better by now — and they aren’t. But the other huge factor is cops’ pensions. Last year, New York City taxpayers put nearly $2.1 billion into the cops’ $24.7 billion pension fund to pay for future benefits — up from more than four-fold from the 1999-2000 average. (Cops’ own contributions are $207 million, but they pay only 9 percent of the total.) If pension costs for cops had “only” doubled in a decade, we’d have an extra $1 billion a year — enough to hire at least 5,000 cops."
How unions violate free speech: "Judging from the near hysterical response to [the Citizens United] case, one might have thought that all corporations were devils, such that their total exclusion from political discourse should be required. But even if those radical critiques of Citizens United are mercifully put to one side, a more serious issue remains. Is it possible, in dealing with this issue, to retain some semblance of the balance of power between corporations and unions? In principle, that outcome is fairly inferred from the majority view in Citizens United. It is a generally salutary principle that in any area of political contention, the federal government should not tilt the table in favor of either side. But in the struggle between management and labor, the execution of this particular plan runs into a set of technical difficulties, given that corporations and unions are, as will become clear, organized under very different principles."
Debt Watch:
$15,875,734,673,516.05
(
As of Monday, July 16, 2012
)
Change: +$4,567,961,245.20
Your share as a citizen: $50,711.47
Share per household: $138,973.14
Debt since Obama inauguration: $5,248,857,624,602.95
Topic Three: Civil Rights Perversion
Obama and the NAACP are perverting civil rights through the homosexual movement: "Herein lies the ongoing rift between the NAACP leadership, its rank and file and the African-American community at large. By recently joining with President Obama to endorse counterfeit “same-sex marriage,” the NAACP leadership betrayed the very constituency it presumes to represent. It blundered its way directly into conflict with the vast majority of African-Americans.
“Traditional marriage enjoys steadfast support in America, especially among African-Americans,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in response to Romney’s pro-family pledge. “Just this past May, an overwhelming percentage of black voters supported a marriage protection amendment in North Carolina, just as they did several years ago in California and in other states,” continued Brown."
Tweet of the Day:
Paul Combs (@PAC43):
The truth. Government is not what enables American citizens to maximize their potential and productivity. It is what hampers us the most
Topic Four: The "Fair Share"
The income tax was originally designed to make the rich pick up the entire tab: "A look at history shows that the original designers of our income tax system understood this reality all too well. Before 1913, when the income tax was started, the main way the federal government financed itself was through tariffs. But tariffs hit the little guy. Every time you bought an imported good, the price was marked up. Moreover, domestic prices were artificially high, because they didn’t have to compete with cheap foreign goods. It all made for appreciably lower purchasing power for everyone in the nation.
"Therefore, in 1913, Congress devised a switch whereby the tariff would be lowered, in exchange for a small rate of income taxation on the very rich. The top rate of the income tax was at first all of 7% (compared to 36% today). The receipts from this income tax were counted on to replace those of the tariff. Under the new system, the public at large would not carry the brunt of taxation—only those with high incomes would.
"This arrangement was fated to work very well, with two important caveats. The first was that the income-tax rate had to be kept low. If ever that rate got high, the rich would begin to hide their income, through tax-shelters and so on, such that their income would no longer be available for taxation. Second, government had to be kept small. If government got big, taxes on even the rich would not be enough to fund it."
Food for Thought - A Quote from our Founders
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species."
-James Madison
Topic Five: Energy
Rich Galen asks if it is time to consider using natural gas as a transportation fuel: "Using natural gas as a fuel for 18-wheelers is a different issue. Over the road trucks tend to ru the same routes on a regular schedule and their drivers tend to pull into the same truck stops to eat, rest and refuel so the random nature of refueling passenger vehicles doesn't exist for heavy-duty trucks.
"The Strait of Hormuz is the bottleneck at the southern end of the Persian Gulf through which, in 2011, some 17 million barrels of oil (about 35 percent of the world's seaborne traded oil) flows every day, according to the EIA.
"We have enough natural gas to last more than 100 years and changing over our national fleet of heavy trucks from diesel to that domestic resource would not only help clean up the air (natural gas produces about a third less greenhouse gasses as diesel or gasoline) but would reduce our need for OPEC oil by about half."
Tomorrow in History
July 18, 1925
-
Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf.
Grab Bag - Interesting and Important Stories to Conclude Your Evening:
Correcting the spin: The House has voted to repeal ObamaCare twice, not 33 times
Dems threatening taxpayers
Barack Obama, Ph.D.-Hypocrisy
Education Secretary devalues college degrees
Hillary Clinton breaks travel record
Sewing needles found in sandwiches on Delta flights
What the government does for business
How the politicians gutted ObamaCare's tax penalty
Five ways liberalism destroys virtue
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