What will he say this time?

Is it just me, or are people really not listening to our political candidates. I can understand people not listening to John McCain. He has nothing to say and has been using the same lame attacks for about three weeks now. However, why aren’t people listening to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden. They have a ton to say. In fact, the more they talk, the more they reveal themselves. Here is one example and here is another example.

Some general talking points from these audio clips include:

• The Constitution doesn’t say what the federal government must do on my behalf. (Actually it does. It says that the federal government is to protect me and create an environment for me to prosper in. However, it condones little else.)
• The Supreme Court is wrong for not addressing the redistribution of wealth or the economic injustice in this society (My goodness, keep the courts out of this. If they courts [especially the Supreme Court] are supposed to interpret the Constitution, why would they even touch this issue seeing as it is not addressed in the Constitution.)
• Civil Rights movements didn’t break free from the constraints of the Constitution. (No, it redefined the Constitution to protect all citizens of the United States. It was not supposed to give give people the liberty to steal the money of hard working Americans.)
• The Constitution is actually a list of negative liberties. (Darn right it is. The Constitution was supposed to be a restraint on Government and all its dealings, not on the citizens. Remember where the founding fathers came from? Yah, they didn’t want an oppressive government.)
• The civil Rights movement didn’t do enough to bring about a “redistribution of uh, um, uh change” (you wanted to say wealth, right?)
• Redistribution of wealth is an administrative responsibility. ( Keep your butter finger government hands out of my pocket. You are supposed to do a good enough job for us to want to give you money, or at least not mind paying our taxes. That is the administrative role. Do a good job, earn our respect. Earn our dollar. Then manage the money to OUR advantage. But, since you can’t properly manage the redistribute halfway legitimate taxes [anyone remember Social Security], why would I want to trust you with the stealing and redistribution of my money.)
• The Constitution reflects “The” fundamental flaw that continues to this day. (What, the lack of a redistribution of wealth to the lazy or the down right racism that is rampant in all parts of the United States? Guess what, I have news for you, the majority of the U. S. is color blind now. Take a trip to California. It is hard to find racism there, unless it is directed at Mexican-Americans [and the African-Americans are the primary proponents of that racism]. However, Mr. Obama, you will find racism if you look for it. I mean, just look at the fact that estimates say that 95% of African-Americans will be voting for you.)

And here are a couple gems from this article.

People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama’s words. Earlier, after a long, tortured discussion about whether it was better to be called “black” or “African-American,” . . . According to Mr. Ogletree, students on each side of the debate thought he was endorsing their side. “Everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me,” he said.

[In a Robotic Tone] Yes Master . . . Lead on oh Great One . . . The world will bow before your superior rhetoric . . .

But mainly, Mr. Obama stayed away from the extremes of campus debate, often choosing safe topics for his speeches. At the black law students’ annual conference, he exhorted students to remember the obligations that came with their privileged education. His speeches, delivered in the oratorical manner of a Baptist minister, were more memorable for style than substance, Mr. Mack said. “It’s the inspiration of the speech rather than the specific content,” he said.

Yes Great One . . . another great showing . . . your superior speaking ability sent shivers down my spine . . .

a mouse infestation at the review office provoked a long exchange about rodent rights — as well as some uncertainty about what Mr. Obama himself thought about the issue at hand.

In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice.

Yes master . . . you listen to my needs . . . you know who I am and what I want . . . you will give me my deepest desire . . . All will see you as our Savior from . . . um, uh, um  . . . What can you save us from, I didn’t hear that part?

In interviews, Mr. Obama was modest and careful. (In a rare slip, he told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”)

Shout-Outs!

Here’s to my blogging buddies across the ’sphere…

To Neil from 4Simpsons:

Tax and free trade basics: Taxes affect behavior.  You get less of what you tax.  More tax on investments = less investments.  More tax on businesses = less businesses to tax (and less employees to pay taxes and more people needing welfare).

To Wes at AnimateMatters:

Truth: I saw a bumper-sticker, today, that said:
“If Hillary Clinton is the answer, then it must have been a stupid question.”

Barb from XerraireArt:

Strange Bedfellows - Friends of Obama: “Life is partly what we make it, and partly what is made by the friends whom we choose.” ~ Tehyi Hsieh

Keeping the heat on everybodies (in Illinois) (least) favorite governor: The BloggingOnBlagoBlog:

Admitting you’re wrong is not easy - especially if you are running for Congress: Looks like once again Majority Leader Halvorson was able to slip by without any questioning as to why she personally stalled the previous ethics package for more than a year as Senate Rules Chairman, allowing Rod Blagojevich to continue raising money from state contractors.

More to come tomorrow.

Predicted: Spectacular Failure

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer Blog, V. David Sartin lays out differences in the two Democrat candidates health-care plans.

Can two practical failures, moral evils, and spectacularly bad ideas be compared?

Hillary Clinton and Barak Hussein Obama can claim as many times as she pleases that their plan will only cost X, but when the plan is applied, there is no telling how high the actual cost will go.

A key fact of every other socialized health-care plan across the globe is that the actual costs far exceed the proposed cost.

And is it really going to be cheaper? In my current insurance setup I (a single, healthy person) am paying about $40 from each paycheck of $1200 (or 3.5%) every two weeks. Meanwhile I am paying about 15-20% in taxes from that same paycheck.

The most conservative estimates of the increase in fees due completely to taxes will be about double, with an expected load of 30-40% in taxes alone, most of this going to pay for the increased costs involved in Government shouldering the burden for health insurance.

Government is not efficient, it is really the antithesis of efficiency. If you were to give the government and a private company each a dollar, the private company will accomplish more with their dollar than the government. Much more, even with the corporate salaries and such. A business which does not use it’s dollars well fails.

Government has no such check. It can use it’s dollars as wastefully as it pleases and there is nothing to stop it besides oversight by you and I. And government does not like us watching it, despite it’s own desire to watch us and our business more and more closely.

Even beyond the obvious efficiency issues though, is a constitutional and moral issue: Is it the governments responsibility to provide health-care to each and every one of it’s citizens.

Individually we are each very much for personal freedom: allow us to do as we please, please.

If we surrender control of our health choices to the government, are we not giving an extremely powerful entity control over our lives to an unprecedented extent?

A private health insurance company can ask us to live more healthily, can raise our rates based on our risk factors and history. But it cannot compel us with force of law and punishment besides increased costs and denied service.

The government can.

And as the government seeks always to expand it’s grasp in every way: say as much as you like that it will not abuse it’s power. Government will compel us, with force of law and real punishment, to live according to it’s ideal of health.

Now is that freedom?

Or is having universal, expensive health-care really worth that cost?

End Of January Election Links

Obama and Clinton being children:
There’s a bold line between idealism and fantasy,
neither of them have grown enough to know the difference.

With big thanks to Sweetness & Light.

McCain is the front runner, but he’s not won yet. America’s Mayor has endorsed him after ending his own bid to become America’s President. The Governator is expected to endorse him as early as today. (Politico)

McCain will be a “hold-your-nose-and-vote” nominee because even he will be preferable to any alternative.

It is telling that, following exit polls, we know that liberals and moderates voted for McCain in Florida, while conservatives voted for Romney.

Speaking of Romney, he has some tough choices to make: Will he write the big check?

Huckabee needs to get his personal vendetta against Romney out of his eyes, drop out of the race, and endorse the one man who will support a real conservative agenda who still has a chance of winning.

Liberals Anonymous is looking for new members:

Liberals Anonymous (LibAnon) is a nationwide organization of current, former, and recovering American liberals and Democrats. Its sole mission is to establish and maintain recovery programs designed to help similar individuals overcome the plethora of congenital illnesses inherent in postmodern American liberalism with which they are embittered. Liberals Anonymous accomplishes this worthy goal by making the idiosyncratic elemental disease nature of liberalism self-evident to the afflicted individual.

(From the American Thinker)

Back to Romney, and Hugh Hewitt. Ace of Spades apologizes for not getting it right…

I can’t keep knocking Hewitt for being a bit overly enthusiastic about being, ultimately, right. If some of us had seen the lay of the land as well as Hewitt and supported Romney as the best realistic consensus conservative candidate, we might not be in the position we’re in now.

…and endorses Romney.

Jay, do you truly think the media darling candidate is your candidate? Come on, you’re better than that. I know it.

And Orson Scott Card thinks religion may play a bigger part of this than we realize:

After the Iowa caucuses, an African-American friend of mine from Los Angeles wrote to me, scoffing at the idea that Obama’s victory there meant that a black man could now be elected president.

I thought he was too pessimistic. But then came Hillary’s “comeback” in New Hampshire.

I keep hearing about how the pollsters “got it so wrong” and how Hillary’s victory came from the Democratic regulars getting out the vote for her.

And Mitt Romney’s defeat was also laid at the feet of many causes, none of which sounded particularly solid to me. Yes, McCain is something of a “favorite son” in New Hampshire now. But he also has another “virtue” that Romney and Huckabee both lacked: He’s not openly religious.

I suspect that racial and religious prejudice are both playing more of a role than anyone is willing to admit.

Read Card’s latest WorldWatch.

Riehl ponders:

Has anyone stopped to think that if McCain gets the GOP nod, there will come a time when the party has to draft a platform with an obstinate, if not defiant, McCain - an often angry man with a history of holding conservatives in disdain?

We need speeches like this more often. Bob Corker, Senator from Tennessee, in debate on the tax rebate checks said:

“What I see in this package is nothing but a political stimulus,” said Corker. “It’s a stimulus to make the American people think that we, as a body, are doing something to actually cause the economy to be stronger.”

(From Copious Dissent)

My chief argument against this package is that it is not tied to taxation. Those who pay no taxes will get as much as those who pay taxes. That is wrong.

This will tie economic stimulus and government largess together irrevocably. Government is a burden. A necessary burden, but a burden nonetheless. The way the government to affect the economy meaningfully is to lighten itself, not to quixotically throw money back to us who were compelled to surrender it to them in the first place. That is adding insult to injury.

Back to Romney. American Thinker asks why the other candidates hate Governor Romney. Some of the answers:

• He can win
• He isn’t beholden to special interest groups
• He believes America’s best days are ahead of it

And once more, from the American Thinker: What does that ACU score really mean for McCain?

So where did McCain differ from the ACU?  The big areas were taxes, campaign finance reform, the environment and, most recently, immigration.  There was also a smattering of support for trial lawyers; federal intervention in health, education, safety or voting issues; internationalism; and some social issues.

Healthcare, California Style

Either it pays for itself or it’s 4 billion of your dollars down the hole in 5 years.

The State of California (sometimes it’s more a state of mind than anything substantive) is facing a 14.5 billion dollar shortfall, and yet, in their reckless pursuit of assuaging all societal inequities, the majority of the Democrat Legislators and the Republican Governator are seeking to enact socialized medicine in California.

Using additional fees on each and every employer, worker, and hospital, plus a $1.75 tax hike on each pack of cigarettes, the system seeks to ensure universal coverage in the Golden State.

California’s big problem right now is that it’s legal climate has driven all meaningful business out of the state. It is getting more and more uneconomical to maintain a business in the state as stifling and confiscatory taxes, fees, and regulations increase alarmingly.

As businesses flee the state and close down, revenues will continue to decrease in an increasing trend.

California is a good example of liberal policy carried to it’s logical conclusion.

Soon, my parents and siblings and relatives will be waiting in line at the clinics to received government-mandated testing and/or procedures.

Think I’m getting a bit apocalyptic? What about the push to require the HPV vaccination of all girls? Somebody somewhere will have some golden idea that sounds great and looks like the “greater good” and someone else will believe them. That’s all it takes where there is no accountability and more stultifying bureaucracy.

The health care plan aims to extend insurance to roughly 70 percent of the state’s uninsured population by expanding government health programs, forcing businesses to provide coverage to workers or pay a fee to the state, and imposing new taxes on hospitals and tobacco. If the proposal wins the support of the Legislature, voters would have to approve a ballot initiative in November in order for it to become law.

In a best-case scenario, the plan’s revenues would cover its costs in the first year, Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill wrote in her review released Tuesday evening. However, by the fifth year, she estimates the program’s annual costs would exceed revenues by $300 million.

From the San Jose Mercury News.

Read more articles on this, from Google.

And what about the plans being touted by each and every Democrat running for president? If the State of California will suffer this badly, let us just tank the entire US economy while we’re at it.

Remember, reform is not worthwhile if it makes the problem worse.

Congestion: Hell On Wheels - Part II

Drew Carey has some ideas on how to improve transportation. One of them includes naming a freeway after himself. How? Just buy it.

Reason.tv host Drew Carey examines the costs and consequences of traffic jams and explores several solutions that can get our roads moving. How does a speedy trip on the “Drew Carey Freeway” sound? Plus, one lucky commuter gets a helicopter ride to work, courtesy of Drew.

So if we go. Click here to watch

Along a similar veign… 

While roads and the highway system will never be completely privatized, what will become of gas tax receipts? The taxes were levied to pay for road maintenance and construction. Today, they are increasingly used to supplement non-transportation projects such as health care, welfare, etc.

When the burden of road maintenance and construction on public entities are reduced, are drivers going to apathetically acquiesce to the diversion of transportation dollars to non-transportation causes simply because gas taxes have always been charged?

Of course, it could be a non-issue because we might all have electric vehicles by that time. Not likely though.

Congestion: Hell On Wheels - Part I

This article was posted by twisted1ogic a few days ago, but we were having difficulty getting the video to work. We’ve fixed it now and I’ve bumped it up.
~matthew

Is there any hope to the increasing congestion that plagues so many of us? Is congestion a weapon in the hand of progressives to push commuters from the suburbs into high-density housing communities centered around mass transit venues.

I’m not into the conspiracy theories, but read about Washington state’s Sound Transit, a monolithic monster of a light rail program that is a decade behind schedule and asking for a tax increase to pay for cost overruns, $10 billion of them. That’s a “1” with ten “0” behind it… a lot of overrun.

Some people like the idea of the rail, but others have the impression it is going down. One columnist asks:

If we really want to encourage a significant increase in public transportation usage, why would anybody in their right mind spend tens of billions on a light rail system that only has 12 stops, when we can expand a bus system that already has 9,141 stops and can serve many, many more people for a fraction of the price?

Duh.

Some news personalities are going to vote for it because they think it looks pretty. But what else should we expect when reducing congestion is not a priority for the state’s transportation department. Anything could look pretty to the poor souls sucking car fumes in multiple-hour commutes.

22 Million Ways To Support SCHIP

Bush may have vetoed SCHIP, but you can still help children (even children from wealthy families) recieve government health care. At the same time, you will be paving the way for the rest of us to get it too sometime soon.

All you have to do is… smoke!

Sin taxes are an unreliable and temporary source of income. “Sin” comodities (cigarettes, alcohol, etc.) aren’t necessary for survival so when taxes increase, demand, and thus revenue, decrease.

It is political suicide to put massive government expansions like SCHIP on the government doll immediately, so politicians use sin taxes knowing that, when funds run short, they will shift the burden over to more permanent sources of income.

Vocab Lesson For The Day

Do you have one of those dictionary services that send you a “Word of the Day”? If not, here’s your “Words of the Day” courtesy of the Americans for Tax Reform blog.

-myopic: raising taxes on a declining revenue source to pay for wealthier children’s health care

-louche: politicians that run on a Pledge to work against tax increases, then turn around and vote their constituents higher taxes — see also: recreant

-pyrrhic victory: “successfully” pushing through massive spending increases at the cost of economy-dampening taxes and innovation-stifling regulations

-oniomania: the virtue exhibited in the Democrat budget

-verbigeration: what Democrats prefer to do rather than allow up or down votes on judges and Jim Nussle for OMB director

Unless Congress learns some new words quickly, taxpayers would be better off if they decided to estivate.

OMG! I Agree With Hillary

I saw an article today in which Hillary Clinton said the following:

“I prefer a ‘we’re all in it together’ society. I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none.”

She was referring specifically to big, bad businesses that get tax breaks, ship jobs overseas and pay their top employees millions of dollars.

I agree with her. Not because I believe in socialism and a nanny state, but because I do not believe politicians should pick the winners and losers in a community, including businesses. Rather, the government should ensure a level playing field on which all can compete.

What are government subsidies?

Government subsidies are carrots officials dangle in front of businesses to get them to locate in a specific place. There are three primary arguments in favor of this approach.

When a business locates in a specific location it 1) creates jobs to build the infrastructure to support the business (buildings, roads, etc.), it 2) creates jobs to run the business, and it 3) creates revenue for the local government by generating taxes.

Often, business incentives come in the form of waiving building fees, which for big businesses, are in the millions of dollars. Other times, such as for professional sports facilities, the government sells bonds.

Government officials rationalize these handouts in three ways.

First, they argue that they don’t have the money in their bank accounts right now, so they aren’t actually loosing or giving the business money.

Second, they argue that primary and secondary taxes (property taxes, sales taxes and income taxes) paid by the new business will generate enough revenue to make up for the loss in income.

Third, public officials argue that if they don’t offer a good enough incentive, neighboring jurisdictions will and they will not get any new revenue.

These arguments do not stand up to scrutiny and I will explain why tomorrow. Again, public officials should not be in the business of picking the winners and losers in a community.