by Austin Hill
“Is this still America?” Congressman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) asked rhetorically last Friday, as he and other members of the House Ways and Means Committee questioned IRS officials about the agency’s “targeting” scandal. With all due respect to the Congressman, here’s a rhetorical answer: this is Obama’s America, and it is unlike anything we’ve known before. And here are, perhaps, a couple of more pertinent questions that we should all be asking right now: do sufficient numbers of Americans actually see how our country has been transformed over the past four years or so, and do sufficient numbers of us care about it?
Conservative America has been ranting and raving over the past several days, as the truth of the Obama Administration’s IRS scandal slowly unfolds. “They Knew Last June” a headline at Drudgereport.Com stated, as it linked to a Wall Street Journal article suggesting that “high ranking” administration officials knew about the targeting of conservative and religious organizations last June in the midst of the President’s re-election campaign. Similarly, other groups and individuals compared the crisis to President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and quickly concluded that Obama’s IRS scandal is far worse.
Objectively speaking, this scenario is horrific. Yet the indignant blog posts and impugning Facebook remarks quickly become irrelevant to a culture that neither understands, nor cares about the injustice of the IRS targeting certain people groups. And if you don’t think that it’s a “tough sell” to get people to actually care about this, consider these two realities:
Participation in America’s labor force is dreadfully low: The labor statistic that gets the most attention in the media on a regular basis is the unemployment rate, yet look beneath the headlines, and you’ll find a more enlightening figure known as the “labor force participation rate.” This data point offers a clear picture of what percentage of the population is working, and what percentage is – for whatever reason-not working. And for the past three years, the labor force participation rate has been just slightly over 60%, which is roughly a thirty year low.
Furthermore, over the past four years a staggering 49% of American households have been receiving some sort of monthly government welfare benefit, while President Obama has slated for a $500 billion annual expansion of direct welfare payments to households between now and 2016. Why is this relevant to the IRS scandal? It’s pretty simple. Logic would suggest that those who choose to live off of government subsistence are probably less likely to be critical of their government, even in the face of malfeasance – to do otherwise would be tantamount to biting the hand that feeds you. And, in any event, government welfare recipients are likely less inclined to either operate non-profit groups, or to donate to them. Put yourself in these shoes, and then realize that the IRS scandal is too easily dismissed as “somebody else’s problem.”
Faith-based Americans have, at least for the time being, fully embraced big government: One might think that the IRS scandal would have special relevance for American religious groups, given the discovery that an IRS agent demanded that a non-profit prolife organization reveal “the content of your members’ prayers.” The emergence of new government “prayer monitors” here in the U.S. is eerily reminiscent of things that Jews encountered in the early days of Hitler’s Germany (before he brought about the Holocaust), or that Christians and Jews alike faced in the former Soviet Union.
But try searching for news last week about Christian groups protesting this egregious new government intrusion in to private religious practice. You probably won’t find any. What you will find, however, are lots of headlines noting both Protestant and Catholic groups asking for more government.
Specifically, after the House Agriculture Committee chose to cut $2.5 billion in funding for the federal Food Stamps program last week, several Protestant and Catholic groups are stamping their feet demanding that the funding be restored. Do an online search for that, specifically, and you’ll find plenty of headlines.
History demonstrates that a government which is big enough to meet one’s need for food is a government that is big enough to strip away one’s right to worship freely, and logic suggests that you can’t credibly demand government intervention in to one area of private life while demanding that government stay out of another. But never mind history and logic. The cries of American Christians demanding more government welfare are – at least for the time being – far louder and more plentiful than Christians who are decrying the threats to their liberty.
Is the IRS scandal serious, and might it lead to criminal charges? Yes, and yes. But the root of our nation’s problems won’t be addressed until Americans abandon their ambivalence about big, abusive government.
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
Showing posts with label Big Government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Government. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2013
Sunday, February 10, 2013
France Wakes Up To A Socialist Reality: Will America?
by Austin Hill
“People call this the ‘new normal.’ Let me assure you there is nothing normal about this at all. It’s the new ‘abnormal,’ and it won’t last, because as free people we won’t stand for it…”
With those remarks, business magnate and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes drew thunderous applause from his audience.
It was October of 2012, about 2 weeks before our last presidential election. Forbes was speaking to a crowd of 10,000 in the comforts of a beautiful indoor sporting area (the “Idaho Center”). He was headlining the “Power Up!” business and motivational seminar with Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and Zig Ziglar protégé Krish Dhanam (fyi-we need more native-born Americans to understand American liberty as well as this guy from India named “Krish” understands it).
Forbes had just finished explaining why a confluence of cheap credit, billions of dollars in stimulus spending, lots of new taxes on “rich people,” and a growing-by-the-second government debt have all failed to stimulate our economy. He was confirming with his technical explanation, what many of us instinctively know in our hearts: the reality that no organization- no individual or family, no business, no government – can spend its way out of debt and re-distribute its way to prosperity.
We should all hope that Forbes will be proven right – that, eventually, “as free people, we won’t stand for it.” Because in the election that occurred two weeks after Forbes’ speech, Americans didn’t merely “stand for it” - we asked for more of “it.”
Yet here is our reality: if Americans continue to vote (either blindly or intentionally) for politicians who viciously take expanding portions of wealth away from our society’s producers, and then selfishly redistribute that wealth to the people of their choosing, eventually the producers will stop producing as much wealth, the politicians will run out of other’s people’s money to redistribute, and we will all suffer the consequences.
The social disorder and collapse of Greece and Spain could be our future in the U.S., if, “as free people,” we don’t choose more wisely.
For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, examples abound in this present day of how not to construct a national economy. Greece and Spain qualify, yes, and so does Venezuela. And within the last few months the news from France, another bureaucratic, debt-laden, and not-so-free-anymore part of the world, should be a wake-up call to Americans, as well.
After five years of service from President Nicolas Sarkozy, a leader who sought to reduce government controls of the economy and to stimulate private enterprise, French voters tossed him aside last May in favor of a presidential candidate who was nominated jointly by both the French Socialist Party, and France’s “Radical Left Party.” Francois Hollande campaigned with a set of 60 propositions - referred to as his “manifesto” – which included raising taxes on corporations; raising taxes on banks; raising taxes on “rich” individuals; lowering the official retirement age back down to age 60 from 62; hiring 60,000 new government school teachers; and establishing government subsidized “youth jobs programs” in regions of high unemployment (does any of this sound familiar?).
Today, many French citizens seem horrified that – shock! – President Hollande is doing precisely what he pledged to do. “The situation is very serious” noted Laurence Parisot, head of France’s largest labor union MEDEF in an interview with the London Telegraph. “Some business leaders are in a state of quasi-panic” he claimed, as the Telegraph reported that “France is sliding into a grave economic crisis and risks a full-blown ‘hurricane’ as investors flee rocketing tax rates.”
Within his first six months in office, French President Hollande managed to raise national capital gains taxes from 34.5% to 62.2%, and now the French people are freaking-out. Juxtapose that with the hatred that American Golfer Phil Mickelson experienced when he acknowledged last month that, between federal and California state income taxes, he’s having “62, or 63%” of his earnings taken away each year, and the reality-check is even more striking.
In short, the French apparently now believe that this level of taxation is a dangerous and destructive thing. In America, however, “rich guy” Phil Mickelson is a dangerous and destructive thing.
And consider this: Laurence Parisot, a major, national labor union leader (arguably a counterpart of Teamsters leader James P. Hoffa here in the U.S.) is upset because a Socialist President is taking more money from “the rich” and re-distributing it to others via government employment programs. Such policies would seem like a dream come true for the AFL-CIO, yet the union leader in France seems to understand that the “rich” in his country play a vital role in other people’s livelihoods, and simply seizing more of their money is harmful for everybody – even unionized workers.
The backlash that the Socialist President is enduring suggests that maybe the citizenry is waking up and facing reality. But are Americans facing economic reality yet?
We observed in the so-called “fiscal cliff negotiations” that President Obama’s political abilities to raise income and capital gains taxes are limited. And the suffering among lower and middle income Americans from the infliction of higher payroll taxes, and Obamacare taxes and penalties is so real that last week, even the New York Times had to report on it.
Let’s hope that Steve Forbes is right – that this is not our “new normal;” that we will reject politicians who are vicious with society’s wealth creators. It may, however, have to get much worse in America, before we embrace reality.
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
“People call this the ‘new normal.’ Let me assure you there is nothing normal about this at all. It’s the new ‘abnormal,’ and it won’t last, because as free people we won’t stand for it…”
With those remarks, business magnate and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes drew thunderous applause from his audience.
It was October of 2012, about 2 weeks before our last presidential election. Forbes was speaking to a crowd of 10,000 in the comforts of a beautiful indoor sporting area (the “Idaho Center”). He was headlining the “Power Up!” business and motivational seminar with Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and Zig Ziglar protégé Krish Dhanam (fyi-we need more native-born Americans to understand American liberty as well as this guy from India named “Krish” understands it).
Forbes had just finished explaining why a confluence of cheap credit, billions of dollars in stimulus spending, lots of new taxes on “rich people,” and a growing-by-the-second government debt have all failed to stimulate our economy. He was confirming with his technical explanation, what many of us instinctively know in our hearts: the reality that no organization- no individual or family, no business, no government – can spend its way out of debt and re-distribute its way to prosperity.
We should all hope that Forbes will be proven right – that, eventually, “as free people, we won’t stand for it.” Because in the election that occurred two weeks after Forbes’ speech, Americans didn’t merely “stand for it” - we asked for more of “it.”
Yet here is our reality: if Americans continue to vote (either blindly or intentionally) for politicians who viciously take expanding portions of wealth away from our society’s producers, and then selfishly redistribute that wealth to the people of their choosing, eventually the producers will stop producing as much wealth, the politicians will run out of other’s people’s money to redistribute, and we will all suffer the consequences.
The social disorder and collapse of Greece and Spain could be our future in the U.S., if, “as free people,” we don’t choose more wisely.
For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, examples abound in this present day of how not to construct a national economy. Greece and Spain qualify, yes, and so does Venezuela. And within the last few months the news from France, another bureaucratic, debt-laden, and not-so-free-anymore part of the world, should be a wake-up call to Americans, as well.
After five years of service from President Nicolas Sarkozy, a leader who sought to reduce government controls of the economy and to stimulate private enterprise, French voters tossed him aside last May in favor of a presidential candidate who was nominated jointly by both the French Socialist Party, and France’s “Radical Left Party.” Francois Hollande campaigned with a set of 60 propositions - referred to as his “manifesto” – which included raising taxes on corporations; raising taxes on banks; raising taxes on “rich” individuals; lowering the official retirement age back down to age 60 from 62; hiring 60,000 new government school teachers; and establishing government subsidized “youth jobs programs” in regions of high unemployment (does any of this sound familiar?).
Today, many French citizens seem horrified that – shock! – President Hollande is doing precisely what he pledged to do. “The situation is very serious” noted Laurence Parisot, head of France’s largest labor union MEDEF in an interview with the London Telegraph. “Some business leaders are in a state of quasi-panic” he claimed, as the Telegraph reported that “France is sliding into a grave economic crisis and risks a full-blown ‘hurricane’ as investors flee rocketing tax rates.”
Within his first six months in office, French President Hollande managed to raise national capital gains taxes from 34.5% to 62.2%, and now the French people are freaking-out. Juxtapose that with the hatred that American Golfer Phil Mickelson experienced when he acknowledged last month that, between federal and California state income taxes, he’s having “62, or 63%” of his earnings taken away each year, and the reality-check is even more striking.
In short, the French apparently now believe that this level of taxation is a dangerous and destructive thing. In America, however, “rich guy” Phil Mickelson is a dangerous and destructive thing.
And consider this: Laurence Parisot, a major, national labor union leader (arguably a counterpart of Teamsters leader James P. Hoffa here in the U.S.) is upset because a Socialist President is taking more money from “the rich” and re-distributing it to others via government employment programs. Such policies would seem like a dream come true for the AFL-CIO, yet the union leader in France seems to understand that the “rich” in his country play a vital role in other people’s livelihoods, and simply seizing more of their money is harmful for everybody – even unionized workers.
The backlash that the Socialist President is enduring suggests that maybe the citizenry is waking up and facing reality. But are Americans facing economic reality yet?
We observed in the so-called “fiscal cliff negotiations” that President Obama’s political abilities to raise income and capital gains taxes are limited. And the suffering among lower and middle income Americans from the infliction of higher payroll taxes, and Obamacare taxes and penalties is so real that last week, even the New York Times had to report on it.
Let’s hope that Steve Forbes is right – that this is not our “new normal;” that we will reject politicians who are vicious with society’s wealth creators. It may, however, have to get much worse in America, before we embrace reality.
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
