More Massive Government Waste - Eliminate It NOW!

Ag Department Needs To Be Plowed Under

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Posted 06/24/2011 06:29 PM ET

The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead it is a vast, self-perpetuating, postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion — a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year.

In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished — comprising now only about 1% of the American population.

Net farm income is expected in 2011 to reach its highest levels in more than three decades, as a rapidly growing and food-short world increasingly looks to the U.S. to provide it everything from soybeans and wheat to beef and fruit. Somebody should explain that good news to the Department of Agriculture: This year it will give a record $20 billion in various crop "supports" to the nation's wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10% receiving over 70% of all the redistributive payouts. If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the Department of Agriculture borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them?

At least $5 billion will be in direct cash payouts. Yet no one in the USDA can explain why cotton and soybeans are subsidized, but not lettuce or carrots. In fact, 70% of all subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybean farmers. Most other farmers receive no federal cash. Yet somehow peach, melon and almond growers seem to be doing fine without government checks in the mail.

Then there is the more than $5 billion in ethanol subsidies that goes to the nation's corn farmers to divert their acreage to produce transportation fuel. That program has somehow managed to cost the nation billions, to send worldwide corn prices sky-high, and to distort global trade in ethanol at the expense of far cheaper sugarcane. And while the Obama administration discourages new production of far cheaper transportation fuels derived from natural gas, oil, shale oil and tar sands — whose newly discovered known reserves are nevertheless reaching all-time highs — it is borrowing billions to pay farmers to grow uncompetitive fuel.

Deal With The Devil

About every 10 years or so, public outrage forces Congress to promise to curtail the subsidy programs. But when the deadline arrives, our elected officials always find a trendy excuse like "green energy" or "national security" to continue welfare to agribusiness.

Free-market conservatives don't dare touch the Department of Agriculture, given the senatorial clout of Midwest farm states and the mythology of the independent American yeoman farmer. Don't expect left-wing Democrats to object either. In a brilliantly conceived devil's bargain, the department gives welfare to the wealthy on the one hand, while on the other sending more than $70 billion to the lower income brackets in food stamps.

Originally, the food stamp program focused on the noble aim of supplementing the income of only the very poor and the disabled. But now eligibility is such that some members of the middle class find a way to manipulate such grants. In fact, 2011 could be another sort of record year for the Agriculture Department, as it may achieve an all-time high in subsidizing 47 million Americans on food stamps — nearly one-sixth of the country.

If 30 years ago the public had sympathy for the strapped family who pulled out clumsy paper coupons to buy essentials like rice and bread at the checkout line, today it is often turned off by the now common spectacle in our superstores of plastic government credit cards being used for food purchases — freeing up the shopper's cash for another basket of snacks, alcohol and other nonessential goods.

The Department of Agriculture is now sending more than $1 billion to African-American farmers who sued the government, alleging past discrimination in federally subsidized farm lending programs. But such understandable reparations are experiencing mission creep, as the number of would-be recipients claiming past discrimination far exceeds the number who actually farmed — prompting all sorts of other racial groups to demand that they also be given their own farm reparation cash in equal measure.

The multilayered department has no real mission, much less a methodology other than to provide cash to congressional pet constituencies. Its vital functions such as crop reporting and forecasting, food inspection and scientific research are buried beneath politically driven cash transfers and could easily be farmed out to other agencies.

In these days of record federal deficits and unsustainable national debt, it is long past time to eliminate the department — or least rename it "The Department of Food Subsidies."

Marxism in America

Is Marxism coming to America faster that you know?  Check out the video in the following link:

Marxism in America - by Lt. Gen. (Ret) W.G. Boykin

"Iran And The Bomb" Coming To A Theater Near You!

Iran to Test First Nuclear Bomb by 2012?

Reports claim that Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered the testing program to proceed immediately.

June 9, 2011 - 11:00 am - by 'Reza Kahlili'

According to sources in the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered them to proceed immediately with the completion of the Iranian atomic bomb project, including testing and arming of missiles with nuclear payload.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s decision is based on a belief by the Islamic regime’s strategists that both America and Israel lack the courage and the ability to dismantle the Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranian regime believes that America and Israel fear Iran’s retaliation, and that it has had them frozen in place and confused as to what action to take next. They have concluded that this presents a great opportunity for the Iranian regime to become a nuclear-armed state without any interference from the outside.

Khamenei offered the same message on June 1 at the Imam Hussein Military Academy:

The Great Satan, since the early days of the Revolution, has mobilized its military, financial, propaganda, and political empire to defeat the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian nation, but the political realities in Iran and the region show that the U.S. has been brought to its knees by the Islamic Revolution.

He further stated that the failure of the U.S. policies in the Middle East and the promising revival of Islam in the region are the realization of the divine promises to the Iranian nation — and that the recent events herald the realization of God’s promise that Islam and the Muslims will ultimately triumph.

The authorization for nuclear weapons by the supreme leader has been followed by the recent announcement by the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Fereidoon Abbasi, that Iran will start the installation of more advanced centrifuges at the previously secret site, the Fordo plant near the city of Qom. He also said that this will triple Iran’s production of 20 percent enriched uranium.

A chilling article titled “The Next Day after the Iranian Nuclear Bomb Test Will be a Normal Day” recently appeared on an Iranian website, Gerdab.ir, which is run by the Revolutionary Guards. This is the first time that an outlet belonging to the Iranian government openly talked about a nuclear bomb — Iran has insisted repeatedly that their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

The commentary states that after the Iranian nuclear bomb test, everyone will be able to go about their business as usual. The explosion will not be so strong as to bring destruction to the neighboring areas, though not so weak that the Iranian scientists have difficulties with their test. But it will be a day for Iranians to be filled with pride. The article even predicts playfully how Western media will cover the event.

Most chilling is how the article ends with a quote from the Quran (Al Enfal 60):

And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah.

Iran, which was for years enriching only to the 3.5 percent level due to fear of retaliation by the international community, started its enrichment to the 20 percent level last year after the Obama administration’s soft approach toward the regime. Twenty percent enrichment is 80 percent of the way to weaponization.

Iran currently has over 3600 kilograms of enriched uranium at 3.5 percent, enough for three nuclear bombs if enriched further. It also has an announced inventory of 40 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium. If true, it will take the Iranians only two months to further enrich that stockpile into 20 kilograms of enriched uranium over 90 percent, sufficient for one nuclear warhead.

The IAEA revealed in a recent report that Iran has sought and experimented with certain technologies that could make a type of atom bomb known as an implosion device, considered more advanced than the bomb America used on Hiroshima.

I revealed on May 31 that the Revolutionary Guards are now in possession of two nuclear capable warheads, with eight more to be delivered within the next ten months. The Guards expect to have at least two fully armed nuclear warheads before the end of the current Iranian calendar year, March 2012.

America and its European allies have continuously tried to change the behavior of the regime with incentives and negotiations. The Iranian leaders refused every time to accept any offer, buying time in order to get to the point of no return. The jihadists in Iran will have their nuclear bomb, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. A Time to Betray, his book about his double life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was published by Simon & Schuster on April 6.

Obama --- It's the Economy, Stupid!

Editorial: Want More Jobs? The Ideas Are Out There

 Posted 06/06/2011 07:03 PM ET

Employment: The latest talking points from the Democrats on the slumping economy and jobs recession go like this: Gee, we've tried everything, but nothing works — and Republicans haven't put forward any ideas at all.

This was on full display Monday when former White House aide David Axelrod, carrying water for the administration, said Republicans should stop "yammering" about President Obama's pathetic jobs record and come up with their own plan.

"Yammering"? The GOP has two good, workable plans already put forward — Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to restore fiscal balance to our nation, and another by House Speaker John Boehner to revive jobs growth.

Clearly, Democrats in the White House and Congress haven't tried everything, contrary to their assertions. They've focused on old Keynesian tricks like more spending, higher debt and higher taxes on entrepreneurs. Things that have never worked and never will.

To help Axelrod and other economically benighted left-wing pundits, we've made a list of things to do right now — virtually overnight — to get jobs growing again.

• U.S. businesses face the highest tax rates in the industrial world. The corporate rate today is 34%, well above the 27% average for other rich nations. Meanwhile, Obama threatens to raise taxes on the "rich" to as high as 40% — a de facto tax on entrepreneurs. As the House GOP suggests, cut the top business tax rate to 25% and they'll grow, hire and compete again.

• Keep capital gains tax rates low. Democrats threatened to raise the tax on capital gains by a third — from 15% to 20%. Bad idea. This would kill investment and millions of jobs. Making the cap-gains rate permanent — or better yet, zeroing it out — would create a flood of new investment and millions of jobs to go with it. We've been this way before — Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and even Clinton signed cap-gains cuts during their time in office. Two were Democrats. And each time the economy boomed.

• Stop harassing U.S. champions, like Boeing. The National Labor Relations Board wants to stop Boeing, the world's most successful plane maker, from building planes in South Carolina. Why? It wouldn't use union workers there.

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But unions have become an albatross for many former industrial states, which is why there are already 22 right-to-work states, where workers can't be forced to join a union or pay dues to one. From 1999 to 2009, those states added 1.5 million private-sector jobs for an increase of 3.7%; states without right-to-work lost 1.8 million, a decrease of 2.3%.

• Pass free-trade deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, which have already been negotiated and await votes in Congress. This would create at least 250,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

• End senseless regulation. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that federal regulations impose $1.75 trillion in costs on the economy — or about 12% of GDP. Today there are 4,225 regulations "in the pipeline." Overall, these cost U.S. companies $8,086 per employee. At a minimum, those regulations that cost more than their real benefit should be ended — saving hundreds of billions for U.S. businesses.

• Keep defense strong. Cranking up the U.S. arsenal of democracy — we face real threats from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran — will have economic benefits, too. A 2007 study by University of Massachusetts researchers Heidi Garrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin found that each $1 billion invested in defense spending created 8,555 jobs. That's real shovel-ready stimulus.

• Drill, baby, drill. Yes, it's a cliche. But massive new shale oil and gas finds in Texas, the Northeast's Marcellus formation and the Far West's Bakken field would cut energy prices, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and boost our energy independence.

In the Marcellus shale region alone, some 48,000 new jobs were created over the last 18 months, mostly in hard-pressed Pennsylvania. Ending the drilling ban on offshore oil would likewise unlock at least 180 billion barrels of oil, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs — the kind now missing from our "green" economy.

• Stop harmful climate change initiatives. Measures such as cap-and-trade and onerous new burdens on the coal industry will have an enormous impact on the economy and jobs.

The White House wants to slash output of CO2 emissions. But according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's own forecast, a proposed 70% cut in CO2 will cause gasoline prices to soar 77% above current forecasts, kill more than 3 million jobs and slice average household income by more than $4,000 a year over 10 years.

• End ObamaCare. Its estimated cost of $1 trillion is bad enough, but it will create a shortage of doctors and nurses and destroy medical and drug innovation, decimating employment in the device and pharmaceutical industries. Worse, it will discourage small businesses from hiring or offering health coverage at all.

• Enact tort reform. Texas, already on a job-creation roll, has just passed a "loser pays" provision as part of the 2011 Omnibus Tort Reform Act signed by Gov. Rick Perry on May 30. According to Towers Watson, tort costs in 2009 cost the economy $248.1 billion, or $808 per person. The impact is particularly severe in health care, where lawsuits add $30 billion to health care costs each year.

• Cut spending. This year, the federal government will spend about $3.8 trillion, with a $1.5 trillion deficit. It will spend an estimated $46 trillion over the next decade — up 77% from the last decade. Cutting spending, reducing our deficit and putting capital back to work in the private sector would be the best stimulus plan of all, creating millions of new jobs.

These are just a few things that would create jobs immediately. Maybe Axelrod and his pals, who have presided over the worst recovery in more than a generation, should stop "yammering" themselves and listen.

Administration Lies on Taxes --- Again!

The President's Low-Tax Lie

 Posted 06/03/2011 06:40 PM ET

Revising History: In the left's endless attempt to push tax hikes on our beleaguered economy, it's now peddling the bogus claim that tax rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years.

At the White House confab last week with House Republicans, President Obama reportedly tried to make the case for hiking taxes to close the nation's yawning deficit by claiming that, as ABC News' Jake Tapper put it, "the U.S. has the lowest tax rate as a percentage of GDP since the 1950s."

According to Tapper, Obama added that "we've been on an experiment of low tax rates for the last decade, and growth has been anemic."

This claim — that the U.S. has the lowest tax rates in decades — has been circulating among the left and clueless reporters for a while now.

USA Today ran a front page article in May headlined "Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950."

Former Reagan economist turned left-of-center tax-hike advocate Bruce Bartlett made the same argument in a New York Times piece, saying "federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years."

An MSNBC post repeated this as fact in a dispatch last week, as did Reuters, which claimed that the U.S. now has "the third lowest tax burden" of all OECD countries, and that the Bush tax cuts and the recession are the reason.

Also, a Huffington Post article quotes the Brookings Institution's Gary Burtless as saying "it's very hard to understand where the impression has come that we currently have high taxes."

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The argument then goes like this: Republicans claim taxes are too high and that any deficit reduction must focus on spending cuts. But look! Taxes are lower than they were 60 years ago. Surely there's room to raise them.

The claim is misleading at best.

It's true that tax revenues as a share of gross domestic product have fallen in the past three years.

They were 17.5% in 2008 and 14.9% in 2009 and 2010.

But this is simply a result of the prolonged recession and terrible recovery that killed incomes and corporate profits, blowing a hole in federal revenues. The amount of money raised through the individual income tax fell 21% from 2007 to 2009, while corporate tax payments plunged 63%.

That's neither a sign that we're undertaxed nor an indictment of the Bush tax cuts. In fact, tax revenues under Bush hit 18.5% of GDP by 2007. That's higher than the post-World War II average of 17.8%.

Indeed, a problem exists: It's not that we're taxed too little, but that the tax burden is heavily skewed toward an increasingly narrow, volatile tax base — businesses and the "rich."

Together, income taxes paid by corporations and the wealthiest 5% of Americans account for a stunning 41% of all federal revenues. At the other end of the spectrum, almost half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all.

As a result, federal revenues now swing more wildly between boom and bust. Here's why:

Although liberals will never admit it, the rich typically suffer big income losses during recessions.

An IBD analysis of Internal Revenue Service data shows that the total adjusted gross income of the top 5% of taxpayers fell 11% from 2007 to 2008 (the most recent year for which the IRS has data), while the bottom half of taxpayers saw their AGI decline just 0.3%.

As a result, tax payments from the top 5% plunged $70.6 billion — accounting for 84% of the revenue loss over those two years, the IRS data show.

And as corporate profits dry up in a downturn, so do corporate tax payments.

Broadening the tax base would minimize this whipsaw effect, as evidenced by the fact that even as income tax revenues plunged, the far more broad-based payroll taxes — paid by every worker — climbed slightly.

If Democrats have their way, the federal tax burden will be even more skewed toward the "rich," which will, in turn, make federal revenues still more volatile.

You might want to keep all this in mind the next time a liberal tries to argue that we are undertaxed.

Why Liberals and the News Media Are So Despicable!

Outrage Fades When Dems Do What GOP Did

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Posted 06/03/2011 06:20 PM ET

Democrats in Congress recently went all out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll — and stay — in college. Most who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse.

An insolvent California — still struggling with its $15 billion deficit — is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions. At about the same time, the state has announced plans to release roughly 40,000 inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding.

Highly taxed Californians can borrow to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.

Americans still seethe about the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. But the "fat-cat bankers," in fact, were players in a far larger fraud made possible by liberal executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bill Clinton's appointees and insider friends such as Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick and Robert Rubin made millions while agencies and banks they oversaw lost billions.

It was just disclosed that Rep. Barney Frank helped land a job at Fannie Mae for his then-live-in boyfriend Herb Moses — despite at the time sitting on a House oversight committee that monitored the federally regulated agency. Fannie Mae went belly up. Moses made a lot of money. And Frank kept assuring the public in hearings that the nearly insolvent agency was in no financial danger.

When news surfaced about Frank's conflict of interest, he scoffed, "There is no rule against it at all," and predicted the story would die. He was right, it will. But substitute scary names like Dick Cheney or Halliburton and it would not have.

Last week, President Obama quietly signed a renewal of the once-hated Patriot Act — rather nonchalantly from the United Kingdom via mechanical autopen. There was no media outrage, there were no hyperbolic campus protests, no juvenile outbursts from a Hollywood celebrity about shredding the Constitution. Most even forgot that senatorial candidate Barack Obama promised to help repeal the Patriot Act.

But then such moral outrage belongs to the now fossilized age of George W. Bush's presidency, when the exalted goal of stopping a conservative Texan justified any means of opposition necessary. We may continue almost all of his antiterrorism protocols, but they can no longer earn elite outrage.

The same holds true of the ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that somehow reverted to back-page news. Moveon.org couldn't care less about the new involvement in Libya, and the media now couldn't care less about Moveon.org — in the same manner that Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore are now no more than extinct dinosaurs of a forgotten Jurassic age. After all, Iraq magically went from the "worst" mistake in U.S. foreign policy history to one of the Obama administration's "greatest achievements."

Social Security and Medicare are nearing implosion. The aging baby boomers are about ready to retire in mass. They have no reputation for either stoic acceptance or self-sacrifice. The people are overtaxed, and the government is running a $1.6 trillion annual deficit. So either the retirement age must be upped, benefits cut, high payroll taxes further increased or portions of the entitlements privatized to spur competition and efficiency.

And the progressive response to proposed remedies? Instead of a plan of salvation, we see ads showing a Rep. Paul Ryan look-alike throwing an elderly woman out of her wheelchair and over a cliff.

There is a vast machinery of selective liberal outrage, fueled and lubricated by the media, universities and celebrity entertainment. When the redistributive welfare state starts to run out of money, the gears and pulleys are flipped on and shrill charges of greed, cruelty, nativism and racism spew out of the production line. The machine sputters and shuts down when an aggrieved liberal suddenly either must make cuts or adapt the very policies that he used to damn.

Understand the mechanics of selective outrage, and our upside-down politics become comprehensible: A state suing to enforce immigration law is tantamount to a racist intrusion on federal jurisdiction, but a state openly flouting federal statutes for the Dream Act is acting in enlightened humanitarian fashion.

Greedy Wall Street insiders at the center of the 2008 meltdown could not possibly include progressive bureaucrats and their liberal enablers in Congress, who are interested in people first, profits last. Everything in 2006 that we were told was near fascistic about national security suddenly evolved into what is wonderful and necessary.

Heck, Gen. "Betray-Us" is now Obama's pick to run the CIA!