Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
For years Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most thoughtful and erudite public servants we have had, published a document New York and the Federal Fisc that described the flow of dollars from New York and the great imbalance on the return trip. Steve Israel seems to have taken up that mantle but his votes in the House are baffling.
I still find myself in awe of our Founding Fathers who created our form of government. The competing ideas that they sifted through to come up with our Constitution and the safeguards in it is wondrous. The designs upon it by the progressives is by equal measure disturbing.
Comedian Lewis Black visited the Wall Street Journal and talked about the Tea Party and how he doesn’t understand them. I couldn’t have made a stronger argument for the Tea Parties by pointing out how little the leftists and the statists don’t understand.
You Have To Pay For Stuff
I happen to enjoy watching Lewis Black entertain. His hook is that of a very angry man sputtering about what is dumb and frustrating in the world and for me it really hits a chord. It’s a pity he doesn’t see what is so dumb about his view of the Tea Parties. In the WSJ interview he mentioned that he was poor at one time and the government actively pursued him for his last quarter. That’s your first hint, Lewis. He says now he is rich and when the government takes some of his money, guess what, he’s still rich. Okay, good for you. The Tea Party believes you are entitled to that and that is the American way. But then he steps on his argument and says, you’ve got to pay for: policemen, firemen, educate our children and provide water. I can’t argue with that, but what has that got to do with an out of control federal government? That’s the problem. Most members of the Tea Party aren’t protesting paying for police, firemen, education and water. We don’t get those from Washington, we get them and pay for them locally. We don’t believe there is a phenomenal brain trust in Washington that knows all and sees all and can tell us how to live our lives better than we can.
Later in the interview Black actually says, “I can agree with the Tea Parties in the way it [money] is used some times.” What does the Tea Parties really believe in? Limited federal government. Limited to the powers granted to it by the Constitution. Everything else, such as police, firemen, education, and water, should be provided by the state and local government. Lewis, it sounds like you actually agree more with the Tea Partiers than against them if you only took the time to understand what we stand for. You might actually find some new material for your act, such as:
“The Department of Education… THE Department of EDUCATION!!..those morons need an education. Ever since that nitwit Carter created the damn thing they spent a TRILLION F*%!&#G DOLLARS, and now no one graduates HIGH SCHOOL!!! BRILLIANT!!!”
If Lewis Black watched any of the town hall meetings over the summer they looked like his act. The only difference being there were 150 Lewis Blacks (the citizenry) and one member of the audience (Congressperson), except the Congressperson wasn’t visibly laughing.
So, Lewis, should I look for you at the next Tea Party?
Let’s say you were having a problem with your knee. So you go to the doctor and tell him your problem. The doctor examines you and says he has to act quickly. He says you need an operation and if you have it, you will experience some mild pain for a brief time, but if you don’t the pain will get worse. How bad you ask? On the pain scale, designed by Andrea Mankoski, you are currently at a 6, described as, “Can’t be ignored for any length of time, but you can still go to work and participate in social activities.” He says without the operation you will probably reach a 9, “Unable to speak. Crying out or moaning uncontrollably — near delirium.” With the operation you will probably peak at 8, “Physical activity severely limited; you can read and converse with effort; nausea and dizziness set in as factors of pain,” but then things will progressively improve. The pressure he is putting on you to decide is intense, so you give him the go ahead.
The good doctor performs the operation and as he predicted the pain does get worse, but it doesn’t stop. You are beyond delirium, you are reaching level 10, “Unconscious. Pain makes you pass out.” Your medical proxy, demands the doctor tell her what went wrong. The doctor shrugs and says it was worse than anybody thought, but then says the surgery is working better than expected. ”What the hell did you do in that surgery, you screw-up?” your proxy demands. The doctor, just smiles, and turns on his heel ands walks away, leaving your proxy standing there sputtering, desperately trying to find the words to express her disbelief and outrage. When she finally regains her composure, standing there all alone, she reaches for her cell phone to call a malpractice attorney.
Economic Stimulus Surgery
Dr. Obama told us, upon taking office, that we desperately needed a stimulus package or the unemployment rate would continue to rise. He said without a stimulus package, the unemployment rate would rise to 9%, if we did NOTHING! His able assistants, Harry “the Healer” Reid, and “Nurse” Nancy Pelosi, slammed through the $787 billion package. We were saved! Unemployment would not rise above 8% before starting to fall. But there isn’t a happy ending to this fairy tale. The unemployment rate rose past 8%; it rose past 9%; it rose past 10%. So when Dr. Biden steps to the microphone and says the stimulus is working better than expected, why isn’t someone putting a straight-jacket on him and carting him off? Why isn’t someone pointing out that the stimulus may have actually made the problem worse? Team Obama said themselves that it would have been better to do nothing. The unemployment rate would have peaked at 9%. Why are they getting pass?
Non-stimulating Stimulus
Look more closely at the stimulus, which we now have had time to do. Extending unemployment benefits does not create jobs. Giving teachers a raise, does not create jobs. Spending 80% of the stimulus funds so far in the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education doesn’t speak to job creation. It speaks to a sop to their union backers and the creation of their impossible to measure metric “jobs saved.” Only $4 billion so far has gone to the Department of Transportation and their “shovel ready” projects. Even these, while a help to construction workers, doesn’t do a thing for laid off bank tellers, software engineers, or FedEx employees.
The Obama administration is spending us into oblivion, while pouring gasoline on to the unemployment fire with their ill conceived and basically botched stimulus plans. What is needed are tax cuts that will allow the market to direct the resources where they will do the most good and get the economy moving again. Instead Obama is taxing and spending our way to economic disaster. What we need is a sharp curtailment in government spending and to shrink the size of the federal beast. Is there a good economic malpractice trial lawyer out there?
There was a commercial not too long ago where a young man looked out his window to the village green where a bundle of money had just fallen. He calls his wife/girlfriend over to show her. She suggests running down and getting it, but he says, no, let’s wait. Next you see a frizzy headed guy down on the green who screams, “MONEY!!!!” In seconds, people came out of the woodwork and scoffed up all the money while the young couple looked on.
The image of that commercial popped into my head as I considered the job summit being led by President Obama. To me, the young couple represented the government pondering how to direct the economy to achieve this specific goal or that. The mob on the green was the free market. While the government dithers over what kind of legislation to write, which special interest groups to pay off to pass it, how to develop incentives to get private industry to do this or that, if they would just cut taxes and get out of the way, the free market would get to work creating jobs where they are needed, not where some bureaucrat thinks they should go.
Uncertainty
The biggest cloud overhanging this economy is uncertainty. The Obama administration is slamming through enormous changes: a $787 billion Porkulus package, cap and trade, health care. Businesses look at this combined with the accumulation of massive government debt, tax increases rather than cuts (yes letting the Bush tax cuts expire is a tax increase, not just the expiration of tax cuts as Speaker Pelosi tries to spin it) and they don’t know what hiring that extra employee is going to cost, let alone what it will cost to keep the employees they already have. So they don’t hire until the dust settles and they can calculate the impact.
“Tax incentives for job creation are “worthy of further consideration,” he said, while adding that the administration is also set on making a big push in the area of green jobs.” – President Obama at Jobs Summit
“Worthy of further consideration”? Since conservatives have been calling for tax cuts for a year now, this kind of statement in Obama-ese translates thusly, “I have to make a nod to the right, to acknowledge that I heard them, but it ain’t happening.” Couple that with the “big push in the area of green jobs.” We are in the midst of the scientific scandal that the “settled science” of man-made global warming could be the greatest hoax since Bernie Madoff, and Obama wants a big push in the area of green jobs. What if that area collapses because the urgency that Al Gore has been screaming about is no longer urgent? It’s government planning on the order of Soviet five-year plans or Mao’s Great Leap Forward programs. It harkens back to Jimmy Carter’s giant Synfuels project that was going to convert coal into oil, until oil prices fell and the project imploded, but not before billions of tax dollars were poured into that rat hole.
How Simulating!
If you listen to Joe Biden, the stimulus plan is working better than expected. But let’s take a closer look. As of about three weeks ago only $120 billion of the stimulus money had been spent. (So why is Congress looking at another stimulus with over $600 billion left to spend in the first one?) Of that money, 80% went to the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Labor. What about all the “shovel ready” projects? Only about $4 billion has gone to the Department of Transportation. Feel better?
Jobs Summit Attendees
So who is meeting with President Obama at the jobs summit? Well first let’s look at who was not invited:
I don’t know about you, but I think they might have an idea or two about how to create conditions that let the free market create jobs. As for the attendees:
How many jobs do unions create, not occupy, create? Think of the auto industry, steel industry, public K-12 education, the Postal Service, and government in general. Do they bring images of thriving, vibrant, engines of job creation? Or is the image more of the basket cases of the U.S. economy? This is not a slight against the union workers themselves, but rather of their leadership who create so many restrictions on job rules to artificially create the need for more jobs. There motto is: why have three people do the work, when you have five do it?
As far as big business is concerned, let me dispel the thought that conservatives and big business go hand in hand. In many cases big business looks to cut deals with the government to protect their industries and markets from upstart companies. They have gotten big and lethargic, rather than nimble and vibrant. Small businesses create about 80% of the jobs in the U.S. and they didn’t have a seat at the table.
So was the jobs summit about creating jobs or just jive talk? If you want a real jobs summit see what American Solutions was hosting in Cincinnati, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. They actually discussed ideas that would work.
But while state legislatures for decades have passed laws — and provided millions of dollars — to cap the size of classes, some academic researchers and education leaders say that small reductions in the number of students in a room often have little effect on their performance. — New York Times, Feb. 22, 2009
Well shut my mouth! School taxes have been growing at an extraordinary rate and at the same time a high school graduate comes in for a job interview who cannot even put together a comprehensible sentence. We created a federal Department of Education that since it’s inception has spent over $1.3 trillion dollars, with improvements in education that are marginal at best.
What happened?
This has not been an effort to improve education. If you cut the size of the class in half, you have to double the number of teachers. This has been a jobs program for the teachers’ union and the Democrats have wholly supported it because the teacher’s unions are in the Democratic camp. Once again we have our government conspiring to empower themselves at the expense of the American people.
When I went to K-12 school, my classroom was typically 28-33 students. My friends who went to Catholic school had some classes that numbered 50 students in a class. I learned, they learned. You would think that cutting class sizes in half would double academic performance or better. If not, why on earth would you do it? Why would you spend twice as much on teachers, since compensation is typically 80% of a school’s budget, if you were only going to get a 10% improvement in performance? If that is the extent of the return, you would probably look elsewhere such as in techniques or methods.
The Collapse of Discipline and the Supremacy of Self Esteem
I submit the reason for the lack of educational performance is lack of discipline. If a teacher can’t control their classroom, no one learns. The marginal improvement in performance with reduced class size is not because they are a significantly better learning environment, but because you have reduced the teacher’s span of control. Why can a class of 50 students in Catholic School still learn? Because when the nun snapped her finger, everyone came to attention. Everyone wore uniforms. Everyone paid tuition. If you got out of line, the nuns would put you back in line, pronto. If the nuns weren’t able to put you back in line, either your parents would or you would get bounced out of school. With a 50% drop out rate in the City of New York, John Cardinal O’Connor asked the mayor of New York to give him the bottom 10% of the students in the New York City school system and he would educate them. The mayor declined.
The other half of the problem is the focus on making sure everyone always feels good about themselves. When my daughter was three years old she got a trophy for playing soccer, not for outstanding performance, but just for playing. The trophy was almost as tall as she was. I asked, “What do they get if they actually achieve something? A car?”. I played Little League baseball because I loved baseball. When I got a paper certificate it was for making the All Star team or the World Series.
Today, in a relatively affluent school district I see about a dozen yellow jacketed security guards when I go to my children’s school. We never had security guards at our school and I grew up in a less affluent district. “Well, you can never tell, you know, with Columbine and everything.” People talk about Columbine and say it’s because of those kids had access to guns. Well kids have had access to guns since the Mayflower. Why did it take until 1999 for Columbine to occur? I believe it is because we are raising a generation of kids with eggshell egos. If you tap them they crack. That’s probably what happened to Klebold and Harris. They didn’t know how to take a hit to the ego and bounce back. They probably were never told, “Sorry, kid, you want the trophy you actually have to achieve something.” Life’s little failures build character. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” But if mommy and daddy are always jumping in to make sure little Johnny never has a bad day, look out.
Low Cost Way to Improve Education
We tried it their way for almost thirty years. Why not give this approach a try for 30 years. Oh, wait, we did try this for 360 years and it worked before we lurched off toward focusing on keeping Democrats in power rather than educating our children.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people — Amendment X, United States Constitution
“I’m Mad as Hell and I’m Not Going To Take It Any More”
That quote from the movie “Network” popped into my head as I read about a legislator in Oklahoma, calling for legislative support for the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. It passed the state assembly unanimously. So what does this mean? The sponsor of the bill, State Senator Randy Brogdan, explains:
The “federal government has been putting the screws on (the states) a little tighter and tighter each year” along with unfunded mandates of varying sorts.
And each time this happens, Brogdon explained, “We lose a little bit of our freedom and liberty.”
The federal government has been growing enormously and taking on more and more things that used to be handled locally, such as education, and welfare. Other programs have not changed as the economy has, for example, as the percentage of the population that farms has decreased dramatically has the Department of Agriculture shrunk accordingly?
You Must Obey!
The way the federal government works around this is by saying, okay, you don’t have to do what we tell you, but you will get no federal funding if you don’t. It seems like a Catch-22, no? Since the 16th Amendment, which authorized the income tax, the federal government can decide how much to tax incomes and there is little that the states can do about it. They take money from your pocket under threat of imprisonment, and will give it back to you only if you comply with their rules.
How Do We Fix This One?
It may require a constitutional amendment to fix as the 16th Amendment says:
The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. — 16th Amendment to the Constitution
I’ll leave the legal mechanics to those better qualified, but I would propose the following. That the federal budget shall include a breakdown of projected revenues derived from income taxes, broken down by source: individual, corporate, etc. A state should then be allowed to refuse mandates and programs from, say, the Department of Education, and withhold from the IRS that proportion of tax dollars destined for the Department of Education from that state.
Certain departments should be deemed mandatory, such as Defense, State, Treasure, to name a few as these departments serve all citizens.
The legislation under consideration in Oklahoma will have little effect if the federal government can suck up as much money as it wants to from the states, via their citizens and then just keep the money if the states refuse to participate in the programs. How do you determine which programs should be subject to the states discretion? No money should flow from a state, to Washington, and then back to the state. That is just plain stupid and wasteful, or a distribution of wealth, none of which is a government function. Paying for roads and infrastructure that does not cross state lines should be funded locally. It is ridiculous that the federal government pays 90% of the cost of a highway that lies entirely within a city. Look at the scandalous “Big Dig” in Boston. Billions of dollars spent and parts of it are falling down. Why should any of this be paid for by the people of Kansas, Oklahoma, Alaska, New York, Florida, et al.?
But the real answer is following the 10th Amendment. It clearly states that the role of the federal government is spelled out in the Constitution. If it’s not in the Constitution then that responsibility is left to the states or the people. Show me where in the Constitution it says that the federal government is responsible for education. It’s not in there and that department should be shut down tomorrow.
It’s Time to Rein the Monster In
The anger in the country is growing. Those who acted responsibly are being told they have to bail out the irresponsible. They are being told by “Buck a Day Biden” that it is their patriotic duty to pay higher taxes to help out. Meanwhile half a dozen Obama appointees haven’t paid the taxes they owe, let alone paying more. I give Biden the “Buck a Day Biden” moniker because that is how much this millionaire gives to charity. He doesn’t want to spend his own money on charity, he wants the government to take your money to fund government programs to do that.
If you don’t think the anger is growing take a look at this. Rick Santelli
