1. The world is a dangerous place to live — not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it. — Albert Einstein

2. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. — George Orwell

3. History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. — Ronald Reagan

4. The terror most people are concerned with is the IRS. — Malcolm Forbes

5. There is nothing so incompetent, ineffective, arrogant, expensive, and wasteful as an unreasonable, unaccountable, and unrepentant government monopoly. — A Patriot

6. Visualize World Peace — Through Firepower!

7. Nothing says sincerity like a Carrier Strike Group and a U.S. Marine Air-Ground Task Force.

8. One cannot be reasoned out of a position that he has not first been reasoned into.

2011-11-24

Equal Opportunity -- Not Outcome

It's Time to Talk Turkey About Income Inequality

By Michael Goodwin
Published November 23, 2011 | New York Post

Imagine it’s 1621 in Plymouth and, instead of the Pilgrims and the Indians gathering for the First Thanksgiving, it’s conservatives and liberals. They are sitting down to share their harvests happily and express gratitude for survival.

Yeah, right.

In truth, they’d be fighting over who brought more and who ate more. Those who didn’t get a drumstick would shatter the idyllic scene with shrieking charges of “Turkey Inequality” and wails for “my fair share.”

I jest to make a point. The point being that, 390 years after the first symbol of gratitude created by Europeans on this continent, Americans are locked in a bitter conflict of ingratitude. The tug-of-war over the turkey wishbone is now a polarizing class struggle.

The dividing line is the loaded phrase “income inequality.” It’s all about who eats and who pays.
On one level, income inequality is real, and growing. Yet as a bedrock and urgent political issue, it’s pure hokum, cooked up in the socialist faculty lounges and the back rooms where the government unions pull the strings of puppet pols. The aim is to hijack emotions and grow the government pie so favored voters get a bigger slice.

It has surprisingly wide appeal. People from the vagabonds playing drums in Zuccotti Park to the billionaire mayor of New York who rousted them, Michael Bloomberg, say income inequality is a big problem.

Color me skeptical. I see the raging battle as little more than a ploy to get into other people’s wallets.

Even on paper, the movement won’t do anything to help the huge middle class, which is losing ground and deserves help.

Instead, the focus on income inequality serves only the ideological prejudices and political aims of proponents, while throwing more obstacles in front of growth and job creation.

Start with the assumptions behind “income inequality.” The pairing of words is a triumph of feelings over facts because any inequality, in the coded conversations of liberals, is always a bad thing. Inequality of incomes is then a very bad thing.

The words also reveal the goal: income equality. That would be utopia.

Ah, but how to get there from here, and what does it cost? In the literature and speeches, the only answers offered are massive tax hikes and more entitlements to spread the wealth around. That redistribution is also couched in code: stimulus, investment, compassion, fairness.

The fuzzy gambit is easily undressed in two ways. First, the only thing “equal” in America is the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Opportunity is equal, outcomes are not.

Of course, we mitigate the differences in outcomes and provide for the common good through a limited redistribution. The hand of government takes from one to give to another, while, naturally, skimming for itself.

But that illustrates the real problem — redistribution doesn’t expand wealth, it only shuffles it. And it exacts a price on the future. Around the world and throughout history, higher levels of redistribution have led to lower levels of growth.

As economist David Malpass, writing on Forbes.com, put it, “The policy issue is whether our goal as a society should be higher incomes for all or less disparity between incomes — countries almost never achieve both.”

That’s the rub, and a warning against class warfare. Having given up on the meaning of America, which is about expanding opportunity and liberty for everyone, income equalizers are pitting Americans against each other in a fight certain to make losers of us all.
Michael Goodwin is a New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor. To continue reading his column on other topics, including Newt Gingrich, click here.

U.S. Last --- China First

Black Friday: China, Wal*Mart, the Social Bifurcation Engine and Inevitable Disaster

by Greg Autry

Y = C + I + X_n + G

- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

In Keynes’ famous GDP equation the size of nation’s economy is measured by its Consumption (C), Business Investment (I), Net Exports (X), and Government Spending (G). Of these four factors only two really offer an eventual return: Business Investment and positive Net Exports both create new wealth for a nation. Investment (1) results in improved production efficiencies, (2) funds new technologies, (3) and generally raises standards of living in the most efficient way yet discovered. When a nation exports more value in goods and services than it imports, it recognizes a profit, like any business, and its people reap the dividends (albeit not always equally).

However, when a nation focuses its short-term economic hopes entirely on the importation and consumption of consumer products, the net result is spending on dead-end goods that do not contribute to production of wealth and are not exported for profit. Financing of the associated sustained trade deficit must result in either capital transfer (loss of savings or assets) or debt (borrowing against assets or future earnings), which reduces investment and retards future consumption.

When the inevitable shortfall is filled by government spending directed at increasing consumption rather than investment, the process of decline is accelerated. In the aggregate, funds can only be expropriated from the more productive sectors and are naturally reallocated to the ones that are most quickly failing. Factories close while housing prices and retail sales are artificially sustained. Houses do not produce new wealth; factories produce new wealth by adding labor value to raw material and creating something more valuable than the sum of its parts. Using tax revenues to subsidize the purchases of imported consumer goods simply expands the economic leakage.

The result of all this is simple to predict:

The demand, and hence value, of domestic labor falls
The demand, and hence value, of labor in the foreign producer rises
The returns on capital invested aboard rises

Bottom line: America has created a system perfectly designed to kill jobs, reduce middle class wages, and make the top-end of the investor class wealthier.

I call this our “Social Bifurcation Engine” and anytime the economy turns down, our citizens encourage our government (Democrat or Republican) to rev this engine up higher and higher in the mistaken belief that it will stimulate the economy into a return to production. Because of the giant leakage of consumer spending, however, and the accelerated flight of capital investment to China, such stimulus is no longer effective. At some point, probably not too long from now, this overworked engine will simply explode in an economic disaster with significant business and political consequences.

This is not an indictment of capitalism nor of appropriate government investment in things like infrastructure or R&D, it is an indictment of political naivety and CEO stupidity.

Now, if you wanted to make this scenario even worse, assume that your trading partner – the one who is making all the money from this absurdity – understands how it works and intentionally suppresses the cost of labor in its own nation by repressing worker’s rights, safety conditions, and also ignores massive environmental and health consequences. In other words, “China.” These factors all prevent the natural balancing mechanism that would check the death spiral of American wages by reducing the incentives for U.S. capital to flee to Shanghai.

When the Boys from Beijing beat striking workers with batons, poison Chinese kids with their unbreathable air, and slowly kill the elderly in their “cancer villages”, they don’t do it without reason. They do it because they know the never-ending trade deficit is destroying the American and European economies and that the Social Bifurcation Engine will eventually undermine the political stability of their enemy. The domestic collateral damage in China is simply a necessary and acceptable cost in their quest to stamp out liberal democracy and export their brand of National Socialism with Chinese characteristics to the world.

Understanding that the existence of a healthy and wealthy America has long driven Chinese yearnings for political reform – witness the Goddess of Liberty at Tiananmen in 1989 – Hu Jintao and co. It is clear to the Chinese leadership that in the end their unpleasant system cannot survive while democracy prospers.

The men who rule China have carefully crafted and sold the world a Big Lie. They have convinced the West that the policy of engagement will lead to Chinese political reform and eventually to shared prosperity through trade. Obvious to anyone who looks, there is no empirical evidence for either of these outcomes after three decades of experimentation. We have simply created a stronger, more repressive, communist China and a weaker, bifurcated America. For God’s sake, it’s time to stop!

You can start by skipping your Black Friday shopping trip to the Great Wall of Mart and instead invest your money in America by buying a U.S. made good or service from a local firm. Or you can save your money for the real Black Friday that is sure to come if nobody else heeds this call.

2011-11-20

Obama Mocks Immigration Law and Constitution!

President Obama's Immigration To-Do List Is Almost Complete

By Bob Dane and Kristen Williamson

Published November 13, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Advocates for open borders and illegal alien amnesty must be pleased. President Obama has accomplished almost everything on their Wish List, short of a massive amnesty bill. But the president’s checklist achieves almost the same thing, of course without Congressional approval. Public demand for secure borders and interior enforcement has been ignored while Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate immigration has been simply bypassed.

To date, the scope of President Obama’s immigration to-do list is shocking and nearly complete:

Enact backdoor amnesty

- Accomplish administratively what is not possible legislatively.

- Issue new ICE memos radically changing deportation policies.

- Create clandestine interagency working group to review 300,000 pending removal cases. Use new deportation polices to justify dismissing most.

- Grant work authorization to illegal aliens allowed to stay.

- Focus enforcement only on violent criminal aliens. Release most others and suggest that immigration violations, in and of themselves, are of little consequence.

Intimidate every state that dares to enforce existing federal immigration laws

- Sue Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina. Threaten other states even thinking about enacting immigration bills.

- Claim federal preemption precludes states from participating in enforcement while simultaneously preventing federal authorities from enforcing the law. Create chaos and constitutional crisis when no one is allowed to do it!

Allow state and local law enforcement to thwart federal authorities

- Ignore Illinois, Massachusetts and New York efforts to stop participating in the Secure Communities program.

- Do not intervene in sanctuary cities that impede federal immigration enforcement.

Continue to push blanket amnesty in Congress

- Encourage Senate Democrats to pass the DREAM Act. Blame Republicans each time it fails.

- Include DREAM Act beneficiaries in the aforementioned new administrative amnesty policies – just in case the American public and Congress reject the bill, yet again.

Falsely claim that the border is secure

- Declare the border is secure, despite only 32 miles of the 700 mile double fence being completed.

- Scale back transportation checks at hubs along the northern and southern borders. Ignore national security implications of doing so

Allow illegal and legal immigrants to displace American workers

- Do not include E-Verify in any jobs or economic plans.

- Ignore 9 percent unemployment and continue blindly conceding to big business and tech industry demands for higher levels of legal immigration.

- End pro-active worksite enforcement operations except for auditing I-9s.

- Lift ban on cross-border trucking agreement with Mexico.

Yes, the special interests are quite pleased. Although this is not to be confused with being satisfied which they never will be until the United States abolishes all barriers to entry, all criteria for admission, and abrogates national sovereignty.

Congress must reassert its authority and responsibility to regulate immigration laws before the complete and permanent dismantling of all immigration enforcement becomes the final checked item on Obama’s to-do list.

President Obama's Immigration To-Do List Is Almost Complete

By Bob Dane and Kristen Williamson

Published November 13, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Advocates for open borders and illegal alien amnesty must be pleased. President Obama has accomplished almost everything on their Wish List, short of a massive amnesty bill. But the president’s checklist achieves almost the same thing, of course without Congressional approval. Public demand for secure borders and interior enforcement has been ignored while Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate immigration has been simply bypassed.

To date, the scope of President Obama’s immigration to-do list is shocking and nearly complete:

Enact backdoor amnesty

- Accomplish administratively what is not possible legislatively.

- Issue new ICE memos radically changing deportation policies.

- Create clandestine interagency working group to review 300,000 pending removal cases. Use new deportation polices to justify dismissing most.

- Grant work authorization to illegal aliens allowed to stay.

- Focus enforcement only on violent criminal aliens. Release most others and suggest that immigration violations, in and of themselves, are of little consequence.

Intimidate every state that dares to enforce existing federal immigration laws

- Sue Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina. Threaten other states even thinking about enacting immigration bills.

- Claim federal preemption precludes states from participating in enforcement while simultaneously preventing federal authorities from enforcing the law. Create chaos and constitutional crisis when no one is allowed to do it!

Allow state and local law enforcement to thwart federal authorities

- Ignore Illinois, Massachusetts and New York efforts to stop participating in the Secure Communities program.

- Do not intervene in sanctuary cities that impede federal immigration enforcement.

Continue to push blanket amnesty in Congress

- Encourage Senate Democrats to pass the DREAM Act. Blame Republicans each time it fails.

- Include DREAM Act beneficiaries in the aforementioned new administrative amnesty policies – just in case the American public and Congress reject the bill, yet again.

Falsely claim that the border is secure

- Declare the border is secure, despite only 32 miles of the 700 mile double fence being completed.

- Scale back transportation checks at hubs along the northern and southern borders. Ignore national security implications of doing so

Allow illegal and legal immigrants to displace American workers

- Do not include E-Verify in any jobs or economic plans.

- Ignore 9 percent unemployment and continue blindly conceding to big business and tech industry demands for higher levels of legal immigration.

- End pro-active worksite enforcement operations except for auditing I-9s.

- Lift ban on cross-border trucking agreement with Mexico.

Yes, the special interests are quite pleased. Although this is not to be confused with being satisfied which they never will be until the United States abolishes all barriers to entry, all criteria for admission, and abrogates national sovereignty.

Congress must reassert its authority and responsibility to regulate immigration laws before the complete and permanent dismantling of all immigration enforcement becomes the final checked item on Obama’s to-do list.

Bob Dane is Communications Director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Kristen Williamson is Communications Assistant at FAIR.

URL

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/11/13/president-obamas-immigration-to-do-list-is-almost-complete-and-all-without/