Tag Archives: United State

Christian worldview

Questions to ask the Occupy Wall Street crowd

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Wow, these people are the gift that keeps on giving!  The contrasts to the Tea Party couldn’t be more glaring.  We could run these 24×7 for the next year.

And here’s another set of . . . uh . . . well-informed critics who are not sure if Al Qaeda is Worse than Evangelical Christians.

Then there are these jewels about Communism.

In a better world the mainstream media would ask these fairly obvious questions.

1. What percentage of total income tax receipts should the top 1% of earners pay?  Now, they might say something silly like 100%, because their overriding motive seems to be coveting.  But it would be interesting to see if they would say a figure higher than 38% (the actual amount).

2. Did you know that Barack Obama got 20% of his record 2008 contributions from Wall Street?  Did you know that he is the largest recipient of Wall Street donations ever?  Did you vote for him?  Will you vote for him again?

3. Do you approve of violent means to make the top 1% pay their “fair share” and/or to overturn capitalism?

Dear OWS folks: Please, please, please don’t go away.  The more attention we get on you the better.  Nothing could advance conservatism faster than people learning more about you.

Christian worldview

Thoughts on the “Occupy Wall Street” self-parody

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I’d rather be part of the 53% movement (workers who pay taxes) than the 99% movement (covetous, spoiled whiners who fail at basic economics).

1. The OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement is sad.  I see lots of college-educated people who can’t see how ridiculous this movement is.  They live in a liberal echo-chamber and never consume any conservative media, so they are hopelessly uninformed.  They spout inane things finally making the rich pay, even though the top earners pay wildly disproportionate amounts of taxes.

2. They tend to be petty and bitter as well.  They continually refer to the Tea Party by the “teabagger” pejorative.  I guess they must be homophobes, because why else would they call conservatives the term of a gay sex act?  Haters!  Hate speech!

3. The anti-capitalists have rightly been mocked for using all sorts of capitalist tools to convey their message.  And they’ll need capitalists to clean up the filth they are leaving behind.

4. Do they really expect us to believe that 99% of the country is poor?  Have these people ever seen real poverty?  They should get outside of the U.S. sometime.  I’ve met countless people who would love to upgrade to being “poor” in America.

5.  Sad but true.  But they are the tolerant ones, right?

6. Their hero and leader, Barack Obama, got 20% of his record funding from Wall Street and he took more money from them than any candidate, ever.  His fans don’t know that so they don’t see the hypocrisy.

7. This is not a grass roots thing.

Politics

Queue the crickets on the impact of the overturned gun control laws

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Don’t miss both important lessons here:

1. Contrary to predictions by gun control proponents, overturning gun control laws caused crime to plummet.

2. If you only consume mainstream media, you wouldn’t know that.  And that should bother anyone with intellectual integrity.  Do not pretend to be fully informed if you aren’t consuming conservative media along with your liberal media.

Via Media Silence Is Deafening About Important Gun News:

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Politicians predicted disaster. “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets . . . .”

The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court’s “unwise” decision that there is a right for people “to keep guns in the home.”

But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated — they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.

Not surprisingly, the national media have been completely silent about this news.

One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen. In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year – back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.

 

Economics

With friends like these . . .

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Reading How Obama’s plan to raise the minimum wage will hurt young black men reminded me of how counterproductive so many Liberal policies are for blacks.

The abortion rate is three times higher for blacks than whites, and Liberal dreams of taxpayer-funded abortions will deliberately take that higher.  Yet they are the ones claiming to have the long term best interests of blacks at heart?  Planned Parenthood kills more blacks in a week than the evil KKK did since their inception (and ironically enough, the KKK is pro-life).

They support teacher’s unions without fail and oppose charter schools, yet they are the ones claiming to have the long term best interests of blacks at heart?

They assume that poor blacks will always be poor and set up the welfare to perpetuate that, yet they are the ones claiming to have the long term best interests of blacks at heart?

Now here’s part of the post about how minimum wage increases hurt young black men.  I encourage you to read it all.

Moderate economist Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University lists the policies that are accepted by virtually all economists.

Here’s Greg’s list, together with the percentage of economists who agree:

  1. A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available. (93%)
  2. Tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general economic welfare. (93%)
  3. Flexible and floating exchange rates offer an effective international monetary arrangement. (90%)
  4. Fiscal policy (e.g., tax cut and/or government expenditure increase) has a significant stimulative impact on a less than fully employed economy. (90%)
  5. The United States should not restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries. (90%)
  6. The United States should eliminate agricultural subsidies. (85%)
  7. Local and state governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises. (85%)
  8. If the federal budget is to be balanced, it should be done over the business cycle rather than yearly. (85%)
  9. The gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged. (85%)
  10. Cash payments increase the welfare of recipients to a greater degree than do transfers-in-kind of equal cash value. (84%)
  11. A large federal budget deficit has an adverse effect on the economy. (83%)
  12. A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers. (79%)
  13. The government should restructure the welfare system along the lines of a “negative income tax.” (79%)
  14. Effluent taxes and marketable pollution permits represent a better approach to pollution control than imposition of pollution ceilings. (78%)
All this makes the race-baiting of false teachers like Chuck “Jesus is not the only way” Currie and the Leftist media so galling.  Tea Party members love people like Herman Cain because his ideas are so superior to those on the Left.  Yet they are the ones claiming to have the long term best interests of blacks at heart and that Tea Partiers are racist?  Leftists like that have no shame.
Politics

Yea for the 2nd Amendment!

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See Why The Constitution Matters: Woman Shoots, Kills Would-Be Rapist

A thug broke into a suburban Atlanta woman’s home, and attacked her at knifepoint at 6:30 a.m. while she was in the shower. A struggle ensued, during which the woman was injured. Eventually, though, she was able to get her hands on her .22, and shortly thereafter, the woman pumped 9 rounds into her assailant. He staggered outside and was later pronounced dead at the hospital.

Morals of the story:

  • The Second Amendment ain’t about hunting.
  • You can’t assume the police  will be there when you need them.
  • If you’re a woman and you live alone, you should buy a gun and learn how to protect yourself with it. (Actually, everyone should do this, but single women especially.)

I will never, ever vote for a candidate who would have preferred that this woman get raped (i.e. any candidate who opposes guns in the hands of law abiding citizens).

If this woman lived in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, England, Australia, and much of the rest of the world, she would have had two choices:

  • Get raped at knifepoint (and probably murdered at knifepoint afterwards)
  • Get arrested and imprisoned for owning and using a handgun

This reminds me of a friend of ours who turned someone in to CPS for sexually abusing an infant.  The perpetrator correctly inferred that it was her and called with death threats and stood outside her yard in a menacing way.  I will always want to protect the right of someone like her to go get a gun that day.

I also know of someone who got death threats from a former employee who was arrested for theft.  The criminal’s threats weren’t deemed sufficiently dangerous by a judge so he wouldn’t even issue a restraining order.  I definitely want that victim to be able to get a gun if he wants.

Roundup

Repeat after me: There is no Social Security “trust fund”

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The disingenuous / lazy media and politicians are at it again with Social Security “trust fund” myth:

WASHINGTON – Sick and getting sicker, Social Security will run at a deficit this year and keep on running in the red until its trust funds are drained by about 2037, congressional budget experts said Wednesday in bleaker-than-previous estimates.

The massive retirement program has been suffering from the effects of the struggling economy for several years. It first went into deficit last year but had been projected to post surpluses for a few more years before permanently slipping into the red in 2016

This year alone, Social Security will pay out $45 billion more in retirement, disability and survivors’ benefits than it collects in payroll taxes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said. That figure nearly triples — to $130 billion — when the new one-year cut in payroll taxes is included.

via Social Security fund now seen to be empty by 2037 – Yahoo! News.

But there is no trust fund.  No. Trust. Fund. As I’ve noted before, anyone claiming there is such a thing is ignorant and/or trying to deceive you.

The government does not have the capability to set aside funds in a bank account like we do.  When the Social Security funds come in they are spent on Social Security, or, as they have done for decades, on other spending projects they didn’t want to raise taxes to fund.  Decades of dishonesty and financial mismanagement by both parties are becoming more visible.

If Social Security taxes stopped today there wouldn’t be a penny saved to meet the commitments the government made.  It is the world’s largest Ponzi scheme.

If some of these Social Security funds went to private investments that you could control then that would limit how much the politicians could abuse.  But they don’t want to lose control, so they play on your fears that something bad will happen.

Yes, the market could crash and you could lose your investments.  It is a risky world.  But think about this: Whether your private account crashed or not it isn’t like the government is saving our taxes today to pay out tomorrow.  Either way the payouts they will make 10 years from now will come from taxes paid 10 years from now.

Simply put, we can’t lose by having at least part of current contributions devoted to private accounts.  The politicians will lose because they’ll have to find a way to fund current spending, or not spend the money at all.

Don’t let fear-mongering by politicians fool you.  The system has been broken for a long time.  Democrats didn’t want you to be informed and Republicans didn’t try hard enough to inform you.  But it isn’t that complicated.