Author Archives: Bryce Buchanan

The Tiresome Imperial Schtick

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Obama HaloPresident Obama presented his budget yesterday and at his press conference we saw the ‘performance’ we have learned to expect from him.  There can be variations in the subject matter, but the form of the speech, in brief, goes something like this:

The body posture is erect.  The manner is self-assured.  With his chin raised, he pans the room, gazing above the crowd in an imperious manner.  He pauses for dramatic effect.  We are lucky to be in his presence as he imparts his wisdom from on high.  He speaks:

I am here to announce a bold new initiative.  We need to expand the size and scope of government in these ways ______________.  This will help everyone.  All the experts agree with me that this is a good idea.  All reasonable people agree with me.

There are some backward extremist people who don’t agree with me.  They don’t care about people like I do.  They just care about rich people who do not pay their fair share at all and are taking advantage of you.  I am going to take money from those rich people to pay for this expansion of government power.

The teleprompter provides a customized version of this speech everywhere this performer appears.  The speech is usually full of bold lies.  You can get the flavor of the lies and demagoguery in yesterday’s performance with these clips from the speech:

…here’s a clear and unassailable fact: our deficits are already falling.Over the past two years, I’ve signed legislation that will reduce our deficits by more than $2.5 trillion — more than two-thirds of it through spending cuts and the rest through asking the wealthiest Americans to begin paying their fair share.

My budget will reduce our deficits by nearly another $2 trillion, so that all told we will have surpassed the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction…

Our deficits are falling at the fastest pace in years.

But if we’re serious about deficit reduction…

When it comes to deficit reduction, I’ve already met Republicans more than
halfway.  So in the coming days and weeks, I hope that Republicans will come
forward and demonstrate that they’re really as serious about the deficits and
debt as they claim to be.

 [Because the numbers in the budget do not work and the document is filled with smoke and mirrors, the President closed with...]  “The numbers work.  There’s not a lot of smoke and mirrors in here.”

In addition to the press conference, the President sent a letter to Congress about his budget.  The letter further illustrates his willingness to misrepresent the facts.  Some excerpts:

[My budget]  implements the Affordable Care Act, giving every American access to the high-quality, affordable health care coverage they deserve, and reducing the deficit by more than $1 trillion…  [It is probably difficult for him to suppress laughter at this statement.]

The Budget does all of these things as part of a comprehensive plan that reduces the deficit.

…these initiatives and ideas are fully paid for, to ensure they do not increase the deficit by a single dime.

…we have moved aggressively to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.

 …we have begun to ask the wealthy to do their fair share  ….so the wealthiest pay their fair share    …so millionaires and billionaires do their fair share to cut the deficit.

Finally, this Budget continues my commitment to reforming and streamlining our Government    …targeting and eliminating wasteful spending wherever we find it.

But this Budget shows how we can live within our means.

Can we agree that this man is either detached completely from the real world or is confident that his imperial schtick will will continue to snooker about half the population.  It may be a combination of the two.

The Obama budget increases the rate of government spending.  It continues the wild growth of government and expands 79 welfare programs. It increases the deficit. And it calls for a trillion dollars in economy-damaging tax increases.  Like his previous budgets, this budget makes it clear that this President has no intention of slowing the growth of government.

REALITY

REALITY

Margaret Thatcher – A Woman of Substance

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The writers at Power Line blog have written tributes to The Great Lady that are worth reading.  Steven Hayward’s piece begins with this quote written about Churchill upon his death:

The death of Churchill reminds us . . . of our duty.  We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence.  For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.

And ends with this picture…

Thatcher

 

What Happens if Work is Punished?

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e unum pluribusIt is an economic truth that what you subsidize you get more of and what you tax you get less of.  So if you were to punish work and reward slothfulness you would get less of the former and more of the latter.  A government can buy as many poor people as it is willing to pay for.  If the pay is good, people will seek non-work in large numbers.

In our country, the non-work pay can be quite good as the following stories demonstrate.  First, a clip from the Tyler Durden column, When Work is Punished:

Exactly two years ago, some of the more politically biased progressive media outlets took offense at our article “In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year.”   In it we merely explained what has become the painful reality in America: for increasingly more it is now more lucrative – in the form of actual disposable income – to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantified, and explained by Alexander, “the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.“

Do follow the link to Durdens column.  It is a good elaboration on the trend that will devour us.

Another trend demonstrates how enticing an entitlement hammock can be.  Ask yourself if there is there something about a recession that would cause widespread disability?  I don’t think so either.  Let’s ask the question a different way.  Is there something about being paid for doing nothing that would be enticing to people?

Disability claims are skyrocketing.  The government now spends more on disability than food stamps and welfare combined.  Since the recession supposedly ended in 2009, around 150,000 jobs have been created each month.  But an average of 250,000 people have applied for disability each month.  It’s good non-work, if you can get it.  And it is increasingly easy to get.  In one Alabama county, 1 out of 4 working-age adults is lying in this golden hammock.  USA Today reports that it is common for people to accept unemployment ’compensation’ until it runs out and then become disabled.

Just like poverty, a society can buy as much disability as it wants to pay for.  The economic law that you get more of what you subsidize is true everywhere.  So in Britain, where disability benefits were easily available, millions signed up.  Like all utopian welfare states, Britain itself is becoming disabled with debt, so a decision was made to review each disability claim to check for fraud.  Jonah Goldberg reports:

[Britain] asked everyone receiving an “incapacity benefit” to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn’t even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work.

So that’s around one-fourth who legitimately need help and around 75% who were scammers to differing degrees.  Beyond the economic cost, it is not a good sign for the future of a country when this many adults are comfortable living as parasites.

Daniel Greenfield reports that if those on disability formed a state, the State of Disability would be the 11th largest state.  One of the currently favored maladies in this state is “mood disorders”.

redistribution

On a related subject, do not be fooled by the reported employment statistics.  As bad as they are, reality is much worse.  One key to understanding the truth is to know that 663,000 people dropped out of the labor force in March.  There are now 90 million working age Americans who are not even looking for work.  The deception in the reported statistics is that these people are not counted as unemployed.  So, if everyone dropped out of the workforce, the unemployment rate would be zero….    and the media would report it as a vindication of Obamas brilliant policies.

Daniel Amerman has a detailed explanation of the employment deception here.  An excerpt:

…a  detailed look at the government’s own data base shows that about 9 million  people without jobs have been removed from the labor force simply by the  government defining them as not being in the labor force anymore.  Indeed – effectively all of the decreases  in unemployment rate percentages since 2009 have come not from new jobs, but through  reducing the workforce participation rate so that millions of jobless people are  removed from the labor force by definition.

socialism for you

A Co-operative Relationship?

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islam will dominate

It looks to me like a co-operative relationship may be developing among two of the world’s large religious groups.  I may be wrong here, but if one group seeks religious domination and one group signals meek submission, that should minimize the conflict as we transition to an Islamic world.

The word Islam means submission.  Islam is a political movement as well as religious. Many of its leaders openly seek and predict total world domination where all people submit to Islam.  Islam is therefore the enemy of those who wish to live outside of Islamic domination.

Though it does not receive much coverage in the press, Christians are being slaughtered and persecuted around the world by Muslims.  Here is a list of violent atrocities against Christians in this century.  The long list may seem sterile in its chart-like format, but remember that each incident involves real-life people who were tortured or murdered for their beliefs.  They had not submitted to Islam and they were tortured and killed as a punishment….  as suggested here.

In some countries, Islamists have achieved their goal.  In Afghanistan, the last Christian church has now been destroyed.  And it’s not just Christians being persecuted.  Islamists are persecuting Buddhists in Thailand and Hindus in India.

Pope Francis lies as he prays during the Celebration of the Lord's Passion in Saint Peter's Basilica at the VaticanSo if you are a Catholic and your goal is to minimize conflict, you should be pleased that the new Pope is signalling his submissive intentions.  In his March 29 sermon, Pope Francis supported the sentiments found in Matthew 5 and Luke 6, saying, “Christians must respond to evil with good”.

Matthew said, “resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn pope and inmateto him the other also….  Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

So if we have people who want to do some smiting and people who want to submit to smiting, that should make for a compatible relationship….  like a good bondage relationship with a dutifully submissive partner.

Let’s see how this turns out.  My guess is that this strategy will have all the effectiveness of a gun free zone.  That’s where nearly all the mass shootings are.

Let’s be honest with each other about biblical ethics.  Consider these moral rules:

If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives.”  (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

A man or a woman who acts as a medium or fortune teller shall be put to death by stoning; they have no one but themselves to blame for their death.  (Leviticus 20:27 NAB)

All who curse their father or mother must be put to death.  They are guilty of a capital offense.  (Leviticus 20:9 NLT)

If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.  (Leviticus 20:10 NLT)

We don’t kill witches and gay people and disobedient children any more because we are better than that.  We are smarter than that.  We should be smart enough to see that advice like, “resist not evil” and “judge not, that ye be not judged” are the negation of ethics. 

Killing people who do not share your religious views is evil.  Our choice is to resist such people….  or submit.

dhimmitude-largerdhimmitude_no_thanks

For Them, The Cover Is Everything

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TourePiersThere are some particularly despicable men who spend their time promoting racial animosity.  MSNBC employs a few of them as show hosts, including the insufferably arrogant and shallow Toure Neblett .   Toure knows that the proper place for black people in this country is on the Democrat Plantation, where they should be perpetually angry and complaining that there is no real chance for a black man in this country.  As a plantation master, Toure works to stir up anger and to attack blacks who escape the plantation.  Race-baiters like Toure hold black people down as surely as any plantation master ever has.

When Real Men, like Ben Carson, escape the plantation, little men like Toure rush to attack them.  They cannot allow independent thinkers to flourish off the plantation.  Because Dr. Carson is proudly off the plantation, he must be punished.  So the little man recently spent some time ridiculing Dr. Carson on the air, calling him a token “black friend” for Republicans.  Toure said Dr. Carson has “intellectual tumors” and is “unserious”.

With good values and decades of hard work, Ben Carson made it from poverty to the top of his profession as a pediatric neurosurgeon.  People in the Racial Grievance Industry do not like stories like that.  So Toure belittled the accomplishment with an Obama-like ‘you didn’t build that’ rant.  Toure said Carson probably got government backed loans, so the self-made man story about Carson is false. It was government that made him who he is.

The classy Real Man responds to the little man here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlhOM8aJJP0&feature=player_embedded

“ I like to say the reason I don’t talk about race that often is because I’m a neurosurgeon. And I look at the thing that actually makes the person who they are. It’s not the cover. But for them the cover is everything, because they’re very superficial thinkers.”

Amen, brother.  To them the cover is everything because they are very superficial thinkers.

When the race-baiters were whipping up race mobs over Trayvon Martin, MSNBC was pushing lies and misinformation as fast as it could.  Toure was in the thick of it and ridiculed CNN host Piers Morgan for allowing Zimmerman’s side of the story on his program.  The resulting on-air battle between Morgan and Toure was an epic display of arrogant ignorance.  You can see a short clip of it here, and it is truly worth watching.  It’s Toure being Toure, and what a pathetic sight it is.

During the Presidential campaign, Toure found racism in every criticism of Obama.  In fact, the criticism of Obama did not sound like racism, so Toure explained it as secret coded racism.  For example, when Romney said Obama was running a campaign of anger and division, Toure said:

“That really bothered me. You notice he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us.
“… this is ‘niggerization…. You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

 

There were, in fact, campaign ads that included the phrase, “he’s not one of us”.  They were run by Obama in black districts.

Toure said that Paul Ryan,  ”loves this line of ‘our rights come from God and nature’, which is so offensive to so much of America.”   It’s offensive because
“our rights do not come from God or nature…. They come from the government…”

Last October, “The Cycle” hosted Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., the authors of “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.”  The book supports the self-evident point that pushing people into schools they are not prepared for does not help them.

Toure called their work “junk science” and said,  “ If we follow your prescription then the entire leadership of America would become entirely white.”

Toure is saying that black people could not succeed on intelligence or merit.  That is a terribly racist thing to say.  And it explains his fear of Dr. Ben Carson.

 

 

 

Dreaming About Free Stuff

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Here are some illegal aliens dreaming about free health care, “because health happens when we dream together”.

 

Does healthcare happen “when we dream together”, or is the delivery of healthcare a substantially more complicated process?

unicorn 3If wishing will give us free healthcare for all, why stop at our borders?  Why not get it for everyone in the world?  I wish that everyone in the world could have the the very best healthcare there is, for free.  Don’t you?  I wish unicorns would just fly it around everywhere.

But if it turns out that dreaming doesn’t do it, that raises a few more questions.

  • Would a culture that favors free exchange of goods and services be more likely to develop high quality medical care than a centrally controlled coercive society?
  • If a free society develops high quality medical care, is it likely to improve health care if we move toward a centrally controlled coercive system?
  • Is a person’s desire for free stuff a legitimate claim on the lives and property of others?

Visualizing Obamacare

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obmacare regs edHere is picture of the Obamacare regulations that have been printed so far. It is more than 20,000 pages. There are many more pages to come because the law calls for over 150 new bureaucratic boards and agencies, many of which have not been formed yet. Think of hordes of bureaucrats churning out regulations, processing forms, making critical healthcare decisions for people they do not know, and making excuses for why this monstrously inefficient system is so monstrously inefficient.

Representative Kevin Brady of Texas prepared a chart showing the labyrinthine bureaucratic mess that is Obamacare.  This chart and story below were published in 2010 here.  You can study the chart in detail here.

This chart was meticulously compiled over the last four months after perusing the 2,841 pages of Obamacare that no one who voted for the bill bothered to read. This so-called “reform” has morphed into a new monstrosity of mandates, taxes & rationing, it will hurt seniors and hand healthcare into a bureaucracy which has now taken over 1/6 of our economy. This is a massive expansion of government & the bewildering complexity of this new law is overwhelming.

The HHS czar, Kathleen Sebelius, has 2200 references in the law and 600 new authorities which cannot be challenged. On the chart everything in dark blue to the left are expansions, orange are those empowered with rationing healthcare in the future. In the bottom left hand corner in blue, 150 new bureaucracies and boards have been created between doctor and patient. Those in yellow are specific mandates and there are 17 new mandates on insurance. Rep. Brady stated this law is so complex he couldn’t get the chart to fit on one page, the chart is only actually 1/3 of the size of the law so he shows “bundles of bureaucracy.” For example, one brown bundle hides 59 grant programs. Green diamonds are the taxes this law has created. In the far right corner are 19 special interest provisions, including the “Louisiana Purchase” and special interests for unions.

Buried deep in the law are 19 special sections that cannot be challenged by the courts or any regulatory system. What the public is being sold and what the law actually has are 2 totally different things. House Republicans are dedicated to repealing this law. If they take back the House they plan to block the most egregious parts of this law & replace it with common sense reform. They are also backing states who want to block this law. Rep. Brady stated if these mandates are allowed to stand there are no boundaries to what this government can do.

And jobs created? Yes. Many. 16,500 new IRS agents to police the law and an explosion of jobs in the HHS Department with probably no jobs created in the private sector. This law will eventually need even more taxes to fund it and the US will have an “anchor around Her neck” with difficulty competing with other countries.      [end of quoted story.]

——–

I take issue with part of the quote above.  The statement, “House Republicans are dedicated to repealing this law” is false.  They are dedicated to acting like they would like to repeal it.  They are not, as a group, taking a principled stand against it.  They are not educating the public about the certain disaster that lies ahead.  In fact, the public is ahead of them in this regard.  The majority of Americans continue to oppose Obamacare.  But will the Republicans rally this army and engage in a real fight to overturn this horribly bad law? No, they won’t. They are unprincipled weaklings.

The House of Representatives has the power of the purse.  They can fund what they want and they can defund the programs they don’t want to support.  They are spending money to support the implementation of Obamacare.  Obamacare will be the largest black hole of debt ever created.  It will suck up resources faster than anything ever has.  It’s the end-game.  It’s socialist check-mate.

If you think about the images above, it is clear that Obamacare cannot be a cost-efficient way to provide health care.  You may wonder, “Why would someone who wants inexpensive health care propose such a system?”.   Because it is not about health care.  It is about centralized power and control and it achieves that goal very well.

Update: You can make the case that as the disaster of Obamacare unfolds, voters will see the light and will repeal it.  Betsy McCaughey makes that case very well today right here.  McCaughey has written a book on Obamacare and understands it as well as anyone.  Obamacare was written so that the popular provisions kicked in first with the more painful ones postponed until after the last Presidential campaign.  McCaughey details the pain that is coming and the backlash she expects.  It’s an optimistic scenario, so it’s a nice change of pace from doom and gloom.

Can We Borrow Our Way Out Of This Debt?

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Let’s face it, it’s tough to conceptualize the meaning of trillions of dollars of debt because the numbers are so big. There is an interesting visual representation of a trillion dollars here, that you should take a look at.  There is also a superb video below that reduces the debt and spending problem to an easily understandable human level.  Pay particular attention to the involvement of the child at the end of the video and ask yourself about the morality of using our children in this way.  [ Thanks to reader Kirsten Curtis for finding the video.]

If you would like another short explanation of the debt crisis, and our future, take a look at this:

In the midst of these insane and self-destructive levels of borrowing and spending, we have leaders who say that we do not have a spending problem or an entitlement problem.  In an interview that aired yesterday on ABC, Obama said, “we don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt. In fact, for the next ten years, it’s gonna be in a sustainable place“.   So it’s full speed ahead.  Patty Murray’s budget unveiled this week calls for huge increases in taxes and a 62% increase in spending over the next decade.  Party on!

People who call for more borrowing and spending are called the moderate and reasonable people by the mainstream press.  People who fear the destruction of this unsustainable course, the Tea Party types, are called extremist kooks.

You decide.

Forward

Some Lessons

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pie-chart

Sequestration:  Originally a legal term referring generally to the act of valuable property being taken into custody by an agent of the court and locked away for safekeeping, usually to prevent the property from being disposed of or abused before a dispute over its ownership can be resolved.          from auburn.edu glossary of political terms

As I see it, valuable property, in ever-increasing amounts, is being taken into custody by the State, but not for safekeeping.  Through debt, the valuable property of our children and grandchildren is being taken into custody, but not for safekeeping.  Most people understand that our rapid growth in spending and debt is unsustainable and will result in economic destruction.

The question before us in the current ‘sequestration battle’ is this:  Are our politicians willing to make even small adjustments to slow the rate of growth of government?

No, they are not willing.  They are kicking and screaming against even a slowdown in the rate of growth.  Imagine the impossibility of making real cuts in spending, where we spend less next year than this year.  Imagine the impossibility of getting on a sustainable path.

So we will stay on an unsustainable path of wildly increasing debt.  You can count on it.  And we will go to where that path leads.  I believe the current administration knows this and is focused solely on making sure the blame for the economic destruction is placed on their enemies.  If you create chaos and can successfully blame it on your enemies, then the chaos you created increases your power.  That’s the Cloward-Piven way.

The fact that there was not a healthy recovery in Obamas first four years was successfully blamed on George Bush.  Obamas’ economic policies will not allow a healthy recovery in the next four years either.  But he and the lap-dog press control the narrative, so all economic problems will  be blamed on Republicans.  ”If only they had not forced the draconian cuts of the sequester…” .  In Obama’s press conference this morning he said that the economic problems we will see in the future should all be blamed on the Republicans and how they handled the sequester.  He did not have to tell the media to do this.  They would have done it anyway.

A short but great Cato video on “Sequestration Panic:

Take a minute to read Charles Krauthammers’  Hail Armageddon .   Really.  It’s worth reading.

Here are some lessons we can take from the sequestration drama:

1. The “firemen first rule” still applies.  If we ask government to spend less of our money, they will say, “OK, we are going to lay of the firemen and teachers and let the prisoners out of jail.”  It’s a form of extortion.  Give us what we want, or else…

2. Obama is comfortable with lying (something we already knew).  His administration created the sequester plan.  He verbally supported the plan when he wanted to look like a budget cutter, saying he was absolutely not going to let the Republicans block the automatic cuts.  Now he is absolutely against these same automatic cuts that he says the cold-hearted Republicans are pushing.  It is worth noting that one or two people in the mainstream press have called him out on his lies.  Journalists doing real journalism is news.

3. It is increasingly clear that Obama’s Presidency is not about finding solutions to problems.  His Presidency is a performance aimed at creating divisions and laying blame.  It’s a constant campaign.  The sequestration deadline and the debt ceiling deadlines are known long in advance.  He does no work to solve these problems in advance.  He simply performs the blame campaign as the deadlines arrive.  This has worked quite well for him so far.

4. Obama’s “balanced approach” means:  more taxes.   He wants a ‘balanced approach’ where serious budget cutting is something we might do some day in the future and raising taxes is something we need to do right now.

5. People still get away with pretending that a modest cut in the rate of growth is a draconian cut in spending.  When you spend more next year than this year, that is an increase in spending.  If you were planning to spend an extra 100 billion next year and you instead spend an extra 98.5 billion, that is called an increase in spending.

6. The primary lesson is that there is no chance that the growth of government will be stopped.  What needs to be done will not be done.  We must plan accordingly.  [It would be more accurate to say that politicians will not reverse the growth of government, but that reality will bat last and will cut the size of government in some very unpleasant ways.  Reality will not allow the borrowing and spending to continue indefinitely.]

7.  People are asking the wrong question.  They are focusing on the negative effects of slowing the rate of growth of government.  The more important question is, what are the negative effects of not slowing the rate of growth of government.

=====================

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading” ― Buddha
Things that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be.  Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be. —                        –Glen Reynolds

For more, see: Things That Can’t Go On Forever, Won’t

Update: Mark Steyn asks -

Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?

If you really believe that, then America is going to die, and a gullible citizenry willing to give this laughable charade the time of day will bear ultimate responsibility.