Apparently millions of American voters believe the federal government should be required by law to provide things for the folks – education, healthcare, good jobs, financial security in old age, on and on.
That belief runs counter to how America was established in the late 18th century when our first-elected officials put their game plan into effect.
Basically their vision was a limited one. Citizens would have basic freedoms to worship, vote, speak openly without being punished, assemble without interference, and pursue happiness within the framework of the law.
It was entirely up to the folks how they would use those freedoms. No one was forced to go to the voting booth as they are in Australia, no one was forced to believe in God as they were in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Today the question of individual choice -- the quest to succeed or fail on your own -- has almost been obliterated by politicians and judges who don't respect the concept of competition and the struggle to prosper.
In short, they are evolving away from how this country was established.
In addition, they are deceiving the American people into believing that their success and well-being will be almost assured by a giant federal nanny state, which is absolutely impossible in a nation of nearly 320 million people.
Politicians deceive because it is an easy way to seduce voters unhappy with their circumstance in life.
When Bernie Sanders tells Americans that the economic system is rigged against them, he destroys incentive.
Why work hard if the big banks will harm you no matter what? If I am failing, it's not my fault -- the phantom billionaires are hurting me.
Sanders is correct that the feds need to stop fraud in the marketplace, but his message of wall-to-wall capitalist corruption is false and pernicious.
When a guy like Rand Paul tells Americans that they should be able to intoxicate themselves at will and public safety be dammed, he gives license to behavior that has destroyed untold billions of people the world over. Not to mention the message that legalized drugs sends to children.
We don't live in a vacuum here. The condition of others can directly affect us, just look at the drunk-driving stats.
When Al Sharpton and his grievance lobby assert that black Americans are oppressed by a racist system bent on hurting them, he provides an excuse for a litany of apathetic and destructive behaviors.
The kid struggling in a bad school with parents who don't care needs all the encouragement leadership can give him or her, not a list of historical atrocities that can cause even more bitterness.
The cold fact is very few powerful people are willing to address vexing problems by telling the truth to the folks.
Here's what the government owes us:
Protection from foreign concerns who would harm us.
Protection from criminals who would harm us.
A secure border system whereby our immigration laws are enforced and respected.
An infrastructure of mass transportation that is safe and efficient. What the U.S. airlines are doing to their passengers is a scandal and the fact that we don't have a high-speed rail system is flat out irresponsible.
The government also has an obligation to protect our constitutional rights and to protect private property.
Seizing assets after an American dies is abhorrent. Many Americans work hard all their lives to give their children a better situation than they had.
Finally, it is the duty of those in power to foster a system that allows every single American a truly fair shot at material and emotional success.
That means schools with strong educational and disciplinary standards; subsidized benefits for the poor and infirmed that are delivered responsibly with clear guidelines; also, protections in the workplace against companies that would violate labor laws and exploit powerless employees.
That's the heart of what the government owes us and social engineering is not part of it, nor is free education, nor free health care, nor a free income if you choose to lay about.
Workers pay taxes to support the government, as well as for personal social security in old age, which the feds have mismanaged in the extreme.
We deserve honesty and responsible spending, not wasteful programs designed to secure votes.
Last week I spoke with Donald Trump about his promise to return jobs from overseas.
Mr. Trump, Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton all say they will punish American companies who move jobs abroad.
A president could certainly make life very difficult for corporations that ship jobs out, but the truth is that many of the lost jobs pay little and even if they do come back it's a marginal play.
The big problem is that millions of Americans are so poorly educated and personally irresponsible they simply cannot compete in the free marketplace.
So what are the power-seekers going to do about that?
Blank stares.
Now the race hustlers, who apparently have not walked the streets of poor neighborhoods lately, immediately accused me of racism.
And that is why the acute problem of cultural deprivation among underclass children of all colors is never addressed. The smear merchants hammer anyone who does so.
It is beyond disgraceful that powerful people look away from the real problem.
Mr. Trump is noble in his intent to create jobs and train Americans to do them.
But that will require much more than trade deals and rhetoric.
It will require a cultural change in many working class and poor precincts. If you reject the conventional road to success -- education and hard work -- you will fail in our capitalistic system … no matter what kind of outlandish promises Bernie Sanders makes.
It is all about personal responsibility and motivation, and who is preaching that message?
Who?
The truth is that individual motivation is being destroyed by phony politicians seeking power by promising an endless series of entitlements to a population that is moving away from achievement and into the gimme zone … gimme, gimme, gimme.
Until that deep cultural flaw is exposed, until the phonies, race hustlers and corporate greed heads are called out, we will continue to see big lies spouted by deceivers and enabled by a gutless media.
God help America.
And that's the memo.
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Showing posts with label government waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government waste. Show all posts
2016-04-18
The Big Lie of the Presidential Campaign
2016-01-18
Obamacare Revealed
“Weeks after leaving office, Obama discovers a leak under his sink so he calls a plumber to fix it…”
The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a socialist scheme that does nothing more than funnel money away from the successful and into the hands of the not-so-successful.
While it might sound charitable at first glance, be very wary, for socialism in any form always produces the most horrific of results, as this example demonstrates:
Only weeks after leaving office on Jan. 20, 2017, former President Barack Obama discovers a leak under his sink, so he calls Troy the Plumber to come out and fix it.
Troy arrives and takes his tools into the house. He is led to the guest bathroom that contains the leaky pipe under the sink. Troy assesses the problem and tells Obama that it’s an easy repair that will take less than 10 minutes. Obama asks Troy how much it will cost. Troy checks his rate chart and says, “$9,500.”
“What?! $9,500?!” Obama asks, stunned, “But you said it’s an easy repair. Michelle will whip me if I pay a plumber that much!”
Troy says, “Yes, but what I do is charge those who make more than $250,000 per year a much higher amount so I can fix the plumbing of poorer people for free. This has always been my philosophy. As a matter of fact, I lobbied the Democrat Congress, who passed this philosophy into law. Now all plumbers must do business this way. It’s known as the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act of 2014’. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”
In spite of that, Obama tells Troy there’s no way he’s paying that much for a small plumbing repair, so Troy leaves. Obama spends the next hour flipping through the phone book calling for another plumber, but he finds that all other plumbing businesses in the area have gone out of business. Not wanting to pay Troy’s price, Obama does nothing and the leak goes un-repaired for several more days. A week later the leak is so bad Obama has had to put a bucket under the sink.
Michelle is not happy as she has Oprah and guests arriving the next morning. The bucket fills up quickly and has to be emptied every hour, and there’s a risk the room will flood, so Obama calls Troy and pleads with him to return.
Troy goes back to Obama’s house, looks at the leaky pipe, checks his new rate chart and says, “Let’s see, this will now cost you $21,000.”
Obama quickly fires back, “What? A few days ago you told me it would cost $9,500!”
Troy explains, “Well, because of the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act,’ a lot of wealthier people are learning how to maintain and take care of their own plumbing, so there are fewer payers in the plumbing exchanges. As a result, the price I have to charge wealthy people like you keeps rising. Not only that, but for some reason the demand for plumbing work by those who get it for free has skyrocketed! There’s a long waiting list of those who need repairs, but the amount we get doesn’t cover our costs, especially paperwork and record-keeping. This unfortunately has put a lot of my fellow plumbers out of business, they’re not being replaced, and nobody is going into the plumbing business because they know they can’t make any money at it. I’m hurting too, all thanks to greedy rich people like you who won’t pay their ‘fair share’. On the other hand, why didn’t you buy plumbing insurance last December? If you had bought plumbing insurance available under the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act,’ all this would have been covered by your policy.”
“You mean I wouldn’t have to pay anything to have you fix my plumbing problem?” asks Obama.
“Well, not exactly,” replies Troy. “You would have had to buy the insurance before the deadline, which has passed now. And, because you’re rich, you would have had to pay $34,000 in premiums, which would have given you a ‘silver’ plan, and then, since this would have been your first repair, you would have to pay up to the $21,000 deductible, and anything over that would have a $7,500 co-pay, and then there’s the mandatory maintenance program, which is covered up to 17.5%, so there are some costs involved. Nothing is for free.”
“WHAT?!” exclaims Obama. “Why so much for a puny sink leak?!”
With a bland look, Troy replies, “Well, paperwork, mostly, like I said. And the internal cost of the program itself. You don’t think a program of this complexity and scope can run itself, do you? Besides, there are millions of folks with lower incomes than you, even many in the ‘middle class’, who qualify for subsidies that people like you must support. That’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act’! Only people who don’t make much money can afford it. If you want affordable plumbing, you’ll have to give away most of what you have accumulated and cut your and Michelle’s income by about 90%. Then you can qualify to get your ‘Fair Share’ instead of giving it.”
“But who would pass a crazy act like the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act’?!” exclaims the exasperated Obama.
After a sigh, Troy replies, “Congress… because they didn’t read it.”
This anecdote, while amusing, is also extraordinarily truthful, in that Obamacare functions just like the fictional “Affordable Plumbing Act.”
It inflates the costs of health care, drives providers out of business and reduces the incentive for hard work — because why should one work hard when he or she can get healthcare (or plumbing) for absolutely free?
Socialism basically does to the country the same thing it did to it in Ayn Rand’s classic novel, “Atlas Shrugged” — it turns it upside down.
It also does nothing to fix the real problem, much like the “Affordable Plumbing Act” did nothing whatsoever to help poor Barry with that awful leak in the bathroom!
The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a socialist scheme that does nothing more than funnel money away from the successful and into the hands of the not-so-successful.
While it might sound charitable at first glance, be very wary, for socialism in any form always produces the most horrific of results, as this example demonstrates:
Only weeks after leaving office on Jan. 20, 2017, former President Barack Obama discovers a leak under his sink, so he calls Troy the Plumber to come out and fix it.
Troy arrives and takes his tools into the house. He is led to the guest bathroom that contains the leaky pipe under the sink. Troy assesses the problem and tells Obama that it’s an easy repair that will take less than 10 minutes. Obama asks Troy how much it will cost. Troy checks his rate chart and says, “$9,500.”
“What?! $9,500?!” Obama asks, stunned, “But you said it’s an easy repair. Michelle will whip me if I pay a plumber that much!”
Troy says, “Yes, but what I do is charge those who make more than $250,000 per year a much higher amount so I can fix the plumbing of poorer people for free. This has always been my philosophy. As a matter of fact, I lobbied the Democrat Congress, who passed this philosophy into law. Now all plumbers must do business this way. It’s known as the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act of 2014’. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”
In spite of that, Obama tells Troy there’s no way he’s paying that much for a small plumbing repair, so Troy leaves. Obama spends the next hour flipping through the phone book calling for another plumber, but he finds that all other plumbing businesses in the area have gone out of business. Not wanting to pay Troy’s price, Obama does nothing and the leak goes un-repaired for several more days. A week later the leak is so bad Obama has had to put a bucket under the sink.
Michelle is not happy as she has Oprah and guests arriving the next morning. The bucket fills up quickly and has to be emptied every hour, and there’s a risk the room will flood, so Obama calls Troy and pleads with him to return.
Troy goes back to Obama’s house, looks at the leaky pipe, checks his new rate chart and says, “Let’s see, this will now cost you $21,000.”
Obama quickly fires back, “What? A few days ago you told me it would cost $9,500!”
Troy explains, “Well, because of the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act,’ a lot of wealthier people are learning how to maintain and take care of their own plumbing, so there are fewer payers in the plumbing exchanges. As a result, the price I have to charge wealthy people like you keeps rising. Not only that, but for some reason the demand for plumbing work by those who get it for free has skyrocketed! There’s a long waiting list of those who need repairs, but the amount we get doesn’t cover our costs, especially paperwork and record-keeping. This unfortunately has put a lot of my fellow plumbers out of business, they’re not being replaced, and nobody is going into the plumbing business because they know they can’t make any money at it. I’m hurting too, all thanks to greedy rich people like you who won’t pay their ‘fair share’. On the other hand, why didn’t you buy plumbing insurance last December? If you had bought plumbing insurance available under the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act,’ all this would have been covered by your policy.”
“You mean I wouldn’t have to pay anything to have you fix my plumbing problem?” asks Obama.
“Well, not exactly,” replies Troy. “You would have had to buy the insurance before the deadline, which has passed now. And, because you’re rich, you would have had to pay $34,000 in premiums, which would have given you a ‘silver’ plan, and then, since this would have been your first repair, you would have to pay up to the $21,000 deductible, and anything over that would have a $7,500 co-pay, and then there’s the mandatory maintenance program, which is covered up to 17.5%, so there are some costs involved. Nothing is for free.”
“WHAT?!” exclaims Obama. “Why so much for a puny sink leak?!”
With a bland look, Troy replies, “Well, paperwork, mostly, like I said. And the internal cost of the program itself. You don’t think a program of this complexity and scope can run itself, do you? Besides, there are millions of folks with lower incomes than you, even many in the ‘middle class’, who qualify for subsidies that people like you must support. That’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act’! Only people who don’t make much money can afford it. If you want affordable plumbing, you’ll have to give away most of what you have accumulated and cut your and Michelle’s income by about 90%. Then you can qualify to get your ‘Fair Share’ instead of giving it.”
“But who would pass a crazy act like the ‘Affordable Plumbing Act’?!” exclaims the exasperated Obama.
After a sigh, Troy replies, “Congress… because they didn’t read it.”
This anecdote, while amusing, is also extraordinarily truthful, in that Obamacare functions just like the fictional “Affordable Plumbing Act.”
It inflates the costs of health care, drives providers out of business and reduces the incentive for hard work — because why should one work hard when he or she can get healthcare (or plumbing) for absolutely free?
Socialism basically does to the country the same thing it did to it in Ayn Rand’s classic novel, “Atlas Shrugged” — it turns it upside down.
It also does nothing to fix the real problem, much like the “Affordable Plumbing Act” did nothing whatsoever to help poor Barry with that awful leak in the bathroom!
2015-02-22
Race Relations and Law Enforcement
Race Relations and Law Enforcement
Jason L. Riley
2015 January
Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
Thomas Sowell once said that some books you write for pleasure, and others you write out of a sense of duty, because there are things to be said—and other people have better sense than to say them. My new book, Please Stop Helping Us, falls into that latter category. When I started out as a journalist 20 years ago, I had no expectation of focusing on race-related topics. People like Sowell and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and a few other independent black thinkers, to my mind at least, had already said what needed to be said, had been saying it for decades, and had been saying it more eloquently than I ever could. But over the years, and with some prodding from those guys, it occurred to me that not enough younger blacks were following in their footsteps. It also occurred to me that many public policies aimed at the black underclass were just as wrongheaded as ever. The fight wasn’t over. A new generation of black thinkers needed to explain what’s working and what isn’t, and why, to a new generation of readers. And the result is this book, which I hope will help to bring more light than heat to the discussion of race.
The book is not an autobiography or a memoir, but I do tell a few stories about growing up black and male in the inner city. And one of the stories involves a trip back home to Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised. I was visiting my older sister shortly after I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”
She was just teasing, of course. I smiled and they enjoyed a little chuckle at my expense. But what she said stayed with me. I couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.
I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this, and I wasn’t. My siblings, along with countless other black friends and relatives, teased me the same way when I was growing up. And other black professionals have told similar stories. What I had forgotten is just how early these attitudes take hold—how soon this counterproductive thinking and behavior begins.
New York City has the largest school system in America. Eighty percent of black kids in New York public schools are performing below grade level. And a big part of the problem is a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example. In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and sounding white by the time they are in second grade.
Another big part of the problem is a reluctance to speak honestly about these cultural shortcomings. Many whites fear being called racists. And many black leaders have a vested interest in blaming black problems primarily on white racism, so that is the narrative they push regardless of the reality. Racism has become an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes, be they social or economic. If you disagree and are white, you’re a bigot. If you disagree and are black, you’re a sell-out.
The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.
Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”
The Left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and poverty, but back in the 1940s and ’50s, when racial discrimination was legal and black poverty was much higher than today, the black crime rate was lower. The Left wants to blame these outcomes on “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.
Some insist that our jails and prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to racist drug laws, but the reality is that the drug laws are neither racist nor driving the black incarceration rate. It’s worth remembering that the harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were passed in the 1980s were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. In other words, black legislators in Washington led the effort to impose tougher drug laws, a fact often forgotten by critics today.
When these laws passed, even their opponents didn’t claim that they were racist. Those charges came later, as the racially disparate impact of the laws became apparent. What’s been lost in the discussion is whether these laws leave law-abiding blacks better off. Do you make life in the ghetto harder or easier by sending thugs home sooner rather than later? Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on black victims.
Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent. What drives black incarceration rates are violent offenses, not drug offenses. Blacks commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of blacks being picked on by cops who are “over-policing” certain neighborhoods. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the 911 calls originate.
If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing. As recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent households. Today, more than 70 percent are not, and the number can reach as high as 80 or 90 percent in our inner cities. For decades, studies have shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and other bad social outcomes increases dramatically when fathers aren’t around. One of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken in this regard concluded that black boys without a father are 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father—that overall, the most critical factor affecting the prospect of young males encountering the criminal justice system is the presence of a father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important.
As political scientist James Q. Wilson said, if crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character, if weak character is more likely among children of unmarried mothers, if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods, if boys become young men with no preparation for work, if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having sold out—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing the crime rate among low income blacks anytime soon is slim.
Many on the Left sincerely want to help the black underclass. The problem is that liberals believe bigger government is the best way to help. But having looked at the track record of government policies aimed at helping the black underclass, I’m skeptical.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting Rights Act two months later. And he used the speech to talk about what the government should do next on behalf of blacks. These two laws marked merely the end of the beginning, he said:
But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public policy makers risk creating more problems and barriers to progress when the goal is equal outcomes?
The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century exemplified liberalism at its best. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote. All Americans can be proud of these accomplishments. But what about the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?
In 1988, right around the 25th anniversary of the Great Society, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer published a book called the The Limits of Social Policy. Glazer analyzed Great Society programs from the perspective of someone who believed that government action was the best way to improve the lot of blacks. But his assessment humbled him. He concluded that in many ways, the Great Society programs were causing just as many problems as they were solving—that good intentions aren’t enough.
Unlike Nathan Glazer, many policy makers today are still riding high on good intentions. They don’t seem particularly interested in reconsidering what has been tried, even though 50 years into the war on poverty the result isn’t pretty. While gains have been made, significant racial disparities remain in some areas and black retrogression has occurred in others. The black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade and the black poverty rate is no longer falling. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960. And the black unemployment rate has, on average, been double the white rate for five decades.
Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for more of the same solutions. Last year, President Obama announced yet another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks—an increase in preschool education, even though studies (including those released by his own administration) have shown no significant impacts in education from such programs. He said that he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. He continues to call for job-training programs of the sort that study after study has shown to be ineffective.
Fred Siegel, an expert on urban public policy, has written extensively about the liberal flight from evidence and empiricism that began in the 1960s. The Left, wracked by guilt over America’s diabolical treatment of blacks, decided to hold them to different standards of behavior. Blacks, Siegel writes, were invited to enter the larger society on their own terms. Schools, which had helped poor whites, ceased incorporating poor blacks from the South into the mainstream culture. Discipline as a prerequisite for adult success was displaced by the authentic self-expression of the ill-educated. Blacks were not culturally deprived but simply differently-abled—more spontaneous and expressive and so forth. Liberals tried to improve conditions for blacks without passing judgment on antisocial black culture. And this sort of thinking continues to this day. Walter Williams once wrote that he’s glad he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. He received a more honest assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, he says, than black kids today are likely to receive from white teachers and employers who are more interested in being politically correct.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the verdict this way. Blacks understand, he said, that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to that history. In other words, Obama was doing exactly what the Left has been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more about revelling in their good intentions or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in white America, is still prejudiced.
The more fundamental problem with these well-meaning liberal efforts is that they have succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing bad behavior. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites.
Blacks ultimately must help themselves. They must develop the same attitudes and behaviors and habits that other groups had to develop to rise in America. And to the extent that a social policy, however well-intentioned, interferes with this self-development, it does more harm than good.
This concept of self-help and self-development is something that black leaders once understood quite well, and at a time when blacks faced infinitely more obstacles than they face today. Asked by whites in 1865 what to do for freed blacks, Frederick Douglass responded: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength . . . let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was essentially saying, give blacks equal opportunity and then leave them alone.
Booker T. Washington, another late 19th century black leader who had been born a slave, once said that it is important and right that all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.
Douglass and Washington didn’t play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that blacks would get equal rights eventually, although neither man lived to see that day. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.
Jason L. Riley
2015 January
Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal
Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
Thomas Sowell once said that some books you write for pleasure, and others you write out of a sense of duty, because there are things to be said—and other people have better sense than to say them. My new book, Please Stop Helping Us, falls into that latter category. When I started out as a journalist 20 years ago, I had no expectation of focusing on race-related topics. People like Sowell and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and a few other independent black thinkers, to my mind at least, had already said what needed to be said, had been saying it for decades, and had been saying it more eloquently than I ever could. But over the years, and with some prodding from those guys, it occurred to me that not enough younger blacks were following in their footsteps. It also occurred to me that many public policies aimed at the black underclass were just as wrongheaded as ever. The fight wasn’t over. A new generation of black thinkers needed to explain what’s working and what isn’t, and why, to a new generation of readers. And the result is this book, which I hope will help to bring more light than heat to the discussion of race.
The book is not an autobiography or a memoir, but I do tell a few stories about growing up black and male in the inner city. And one of the stories involves a trip back home to Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised. I was visiting my older sister shortly after I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”
She was just teasing, of course. I smiled and they enjoyed a little chuckle at my expense. But what she said stayed with me. I couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.
I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this, and I wasn’t. My siblings, along with countless other black friends and relatives, teased me the same way when I was growing up. And other black professionals have told similar stories. What I had forgotten is just how early these attitudes take hold—how soon this counterproductive thinking and behavior begins.
New York City has the largest school system in America. Eighty percent of black kids in New York public schools are performing below grade level. And a big part of the problem is a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example. In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and sounding white by the time they are in second grade.
Another big part of the problem is a reluctance to speak honestly about these cultural shortcomings. Many whites fear being called racists. And many black leaders have a vested interest in blaming black problems primarily on white racism, so that is the narrative they push regardless of the reality. Racism has become an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes, be they social or economic. If you disagree and are white, you’re a bigot. If you disagree and are black, you’re a sell-out.
The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.
Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”
The Left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and poverty, but back in the 1940s and ’50s, when racial discrimination was legal and black poverty was much higher than today, the black crime rate was lower. The Left wants to blame these outcomes on “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.
Some insist that our jails and prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to racist drug laws, but the reality is that the drug laws are neither racist nor driving the black incarceration rate. It’s worth remembering that the harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were passed in the 1980s were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. In other words, black legislators in Washington led the effort to impose tougher drug laws, a fact often forgotten by critics today.
When these laws passed, even their opponents didn’t claim that they were racist. Those charges came later, as the racially disparate impact of the laws became apparent. What’s been lost in the discussion is whether these laws leave law-abiding blacks better off. Do you make life in the ghetto harder or easier by sending thugs home sooner rather than later? Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on black victims.
Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent. What drives black incarceration rates are violent offenses, not drug offenses. Blacks commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of blacks being picked on by cops who are “over-policing” certain neighborhoods. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the 911 calls originate.
If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing. As recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent households. Today, more than 70 percent are not, and the number can reach as high as 80 or 90 percent in our inner cities. For decades, studies have shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and other bad social outcomes increases dramatically when fathers aren’t around. One of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken in this regard concluded that black boys without a father are 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father—that overall, the most critical factor affecting the prospect of young males encountering the criminal justice system is the presence of a father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important.
As political scientist James Q. Wilson said, if crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character, if weak character is more likely among children of unmarried mothers, if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods, if boys become young men with no preparation for work, if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having sold out—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing the crime rate among low income blacks anytime soon is slim.
Many on the Left sincerely want to help the black underclass. The problem is that liberals believe bigger government is the best way to help. But having looked at the track record of government policies aimed at helping the black underclass, I’m skeptical.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting Rights Act two months later. And he used the speech to talk about what the government should do next on behalf of blacks. These two laws marked merely the end of the beginning, he said:
That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. . . . But freedom is not enough. . . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. . . . The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights [is] . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public policy makers risk creating more problems and barriers to progress when the goal is equal outcomes?
The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century exemplified liberalism at its best. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote. All Americans can be proud of these accomplishments. But what about the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?
In 1988, right around the 25th anniversary of the Great Society, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer published a book called the The Limits of Social Policy. Glazer analyzed Great Society programs from the perspective of someone who believed that government action was the best way to improve the lot of blacks. But his assessment humbled him. He concluded that in many ways, the Great Society programs were causing just as many problems as they were solving—that good intentions aren’t enough.
Unlike Nathan Glazer, many policy makers today are still riding high on good intentions. They don’t seem particularly interested in reconsidering what has been tried, even though 50 years into the war on poverty the result isn’t pretty. While gains have been made, significant racial disparities remain in some areas and black retrogression has occurred in others. The black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade and the black poverty rate is no longer falling. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960. And the black unemployment rate has, on average, been double the white rate for five decades.
Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for more of the same solutions. Last year, President Obama announced yet another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks—an increase in preschool education, even though studies (including those released by his own administration) have shown no significant impacts in education from such programs. He said that he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. He continues to call for job-training programs of the sort that study after study has shown to be ineffective.
Fred Siegel, an expert on urban public policy, has written extensively about the liberal flight from evidence and empiricism that began in the 1960s. The Left, wracked by guilt over America’s diabolical treatment of blacks, decided to hold them to different standards of behavior. Blacks, Siegel writes, were invited to enter the larger society on their own terms. Schools, which had helped poor whites, ceased incorporating poor blacks from the South into the mainstream culture. Discipline as a prerequisite for adult success was displaced by the authentic self-expression of the ill-educated. Blacks were not culturally deprived but simply differently-abled—more spontaneous and expressive and so forth. Liberals tried to improve conditions for blacks without passing judgment on antisocial black culture. And this sort of thinking continues to this day. Walter Williams once wrote that he’s glad he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. He received a more honest assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, he says, than black kids today are likely to receive from white teachers and employers who are more interested in being politically correct.
After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the verdict this way. Blacks understand, he said, that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to that history. In other words, Obama was doing exactly what the Left has been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more about revelling in their good intentions or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in white America, is still prejudiced.
The more fundamental problem with these well-meaning liberal efforts is that they have succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing bad behavior. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites.
Blacks ultimately must help themselves. They must develop the same attitudes and behaviors and habits that other groups had to develop to rise in America. And to the extent that a social policy, however well-intentioned, interferes with this self-development, it does more harm than good.
This concept of self-help and self-development is something that black leaders once understood quite well, and at a time when blacks faced infinitely more obstacles than they face today. Asked by whites in 1865 what to do for freed blacks, Frederick Douglass responded: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength . . . let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was essentially saying, give blacks equal opportunity and then leave them alone.
Booker T. Washington, another late 19th century black leader who had been born a slave, once said that it is important and right that all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.
Douglass and Washington didn’t play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that blacks would get equal rights eventually, although neither man lived to see that day. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.
2014-10-01
In the Obama Administration, Incompetence Is Unbounded!
Incompetence Running Wild
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Accountability: Turns out the Secret Service — which has one job to do — let a knife-wielding intruder all the way into the East Room of the White House. Can't anyone in government do anything right these days?
Time was when the Secret Service seemed an exemplar of professionalism and dedication, an agency with a focused mission and largely immune from the bureaucratic bumbling inherent to big government. In recent years, it's seemed more like Animal House.
The intruder blew past one guard and was stopped only by an off-duty officer.
And this was one of hundreds of apparent security breaches. Even before the latest fiasco, there've been plenty of other examples of dereliction.
One agent was found passed out in a Netherlands hotel hallway this March after a booze-filled night.
Several others were charged with bringing prostitutes to a hotel in Colombia. And let's not forget that the Secret Service failed to notice several bullets had hit the White House until days after a shooter fired them.
It would be bad enough if the Secret Service were the only agency under Obama suffering from what looks like the Peter Principle on steroids.
Veterans have died waiting for the Veterans Affairs system to treat them, despite a rising budget and vows by the president to make the VA run better.
The IRS leadership was ignorant of or complicit with the agency's politically motivated targeting of conservative groups, compounding that with changing stories and ridiculous claims of crashed hard drives and lost emails.
HHS officials spent $2 billion on HealthCare.gov — supposedly Obama's top legislative priority — which failed spectacularly at launch. It still suffers security weaknesses and remains unfinished. A Government Accountability Office audit found rampant management failures and lack of accountability to blame.
The Justice Department sold guns to drug cartels in Mexico, one of which killed a border agent.
The State Department's failure to secure its consulate in Benghazi led to four deaths.
The Border Patrol is incapable of patrolling the border.
Obama seems routinely ill-informed by his staff.
Given that Obama never owns up to his mistakes and the staffers under him are never held to account for theirs, is it any wonder everyone seems — even by government standards — so lackadaisical?
It doesn't help that he keeps appointing nincompoops to key positions. From Kathleen Sebelius to Eric Shinseki to Steven Chu to John Kerry to Chuck Hagel — it's hard to think of any Cabinet official who's up to the job.
In his first inaugural address, Obama promised that "those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account." Maybe he'll get around to that after his 200th round of golf.
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Accountability: Turns out the Secret Service — which has one job to do — let a knife-wielding intruder all the way into the East Room of the White House. Can't anyone in government do anything right these days?
Time was when the Secret Service seemed an exemplar of professionalism and dedication, an agency with a focused mission and largely immune from the bureaucratic bumbling inherent to big government. In recent years, it's seemed more like Animal House.
The intruder blew past one guard and was stopped only by an off-duty officer.
And this was one of hundreds of apparent security breaches. Even before the latest fiasco, there've been plenty of other examples of dereliction.
One agent was found passed out in a Netherlands hotel hallway this March after a booze-filled night.
Several others were charged with bringing prostitutes to a hotel in Colombia. And let's not forget that the Secret Service failed to notice several bullets had hit the White House until days after a shooter fired them.
It would be bad enough if the Secret Service were the only agency under Obama suffering from what looks like the Peter Principle on steroids.
Veterans have died waiting for the Veterans Affairs system to treat them, despite a rising budget and vows by the president to make the VA run better.
The IRS leadership was ignorant of or complicit with the agency's politically motivated targeting of conservative groups, compounding that with changing stories and ridiculous claims of crashed hard drives and lost emails.
HHS officials spent $2 billion on HealthCare.gov — supposedly Obama's top legislative priority — which failed spectacularly at launch. It still suffers security weaknesses and remains unfinished. A Government Accountability Office audit found rampant management failures and lack of accountability to blame.
The Justice Department sold guns to drug cartels in Mexico, one of which killed a border agent.
The State Department's failure to secure its consulate in Benghazi led to four deaths.
The Border Patrol is incapable of patrolling the border.
Obama seems routinely ill-informed by his staff.
Given that Obama never owns up to his mistakes and the staffers under him are never held to account for theirs, is it any wonder everyone seems — even by government standards — so lackadaisical?
It doesn't help that he keeps appointing nincompoops to key positions. From Kathleen Sebelius to Eric Shinseki to Steven Chu to John Kerry to Chuck Hagel — it's hard to think of any Cabinet official who's up to the job.
In his first inaugural address, Obama promised that "those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account." Maybe he'll get around to that after his 200th round of golf.
2014-09-29
Obama Is An "Appallingly Foolish Man"
"In the September 23 edition of The Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens confirms my (Alan Caruba) analysis, “Every administration tries to spin events its way; every president gets things wrong. Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those respects. Where he stands apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the president know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a lot.”
So, no, Obama is not an “evil genius.” He is an appallingly foolish man completely lacking any knowledge of history, thoroughly ignoring the intentions of Russia and China, doing nothing for the past six years to energize the economy, and spending most of his time either fund raising or playing golf."
Read full article by Alan Caruba here: http://www.faithfreedom.org/obamas-ignorance-by-alancaruba/
2014-09-15
Wal-Mart vs. The Idiots
1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approximately 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.
You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart to fix the economy.
This should be read and understood by all Americans: Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!!
To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature:
It is now official that the majority of you are corrupt and ineffective:
a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 237 years to get it right and it is broke.
b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 77 years to get it right and it is broke.
c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
d. The War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 48 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 47 years to get it right and they are broke.
f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 42 years to get it right and it is broke.
g. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 35 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.
You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars.
AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?
Folks, keep this circulating. It is very well stated. Maybe it will end up in the e-mails of some of our "duly elected' (they never read anything) and their staff will clue them in on how Americans feel.
AND We have lost our minds to "Political Correctness."
We're "broke" & can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless, etc.
In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, Japan and Turkey .... and Pakistan ..... previous home of Bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!
Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no extra aid nor do they get any special breaks --- nadda --- beyond shopping discounts.
Now, it is estimated that 90,000 illegal alien children under the age of 16 will be in our country by the end of the year. We will feed them, provide health and education and they will get everything a hard working American citizen gets — just for crossing the border illegally.
Obama is proposing we give millions of dollars to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to "help" the children. Do you really think this money is going to get to the children that really need it?
Meanwhile, Mexico is charging for allowing them to pass through Mexico to get to the US border, paid for by the drug cartels. They are keeping the Border Guards busy changing diapers while the drug lords funnel tons of drugs into the
US to turn our children into zombies.
In GITMO, the 147 Muslim terrorists have one doctor for every prisoner, a state-of-the art hospital system, are provided Korans and prayer rugs, food approved by the Koran, exercise and additional perks.
Our Veterans die waiting to see a VA doctor while the directors get bonuses.
AND Congress wants to freeze Social Security payments...
You do know that Congress voted themselves a pay raise for 2013? Google this--it's true!
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approximately 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.
You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart to fix the economy.
This should be read and understood by all Americans: Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!!
To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature:
It is now official that the majority of you are corrupt and ineffective:
a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 237 years to get it right and it is broke.
b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 77 years to get it right and it is broke.
c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
d. The War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 48 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 47 years to get it right and they are broke.
f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 42 years to get it right and it is broke.
g. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 35 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.
You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars.
AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?
Folks, keep this circulating. It is very well stated. Maybe it will end up in the e-mails of some of our "duly elected' (they never read anything) and their staff will clue them in on how Americans feel.
AND We have lost our minds to "Political Correctness."
We're "broke" & can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless, etc.
In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, Japan and Turkey .... and Pakistan ..... previous home of Bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!
Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no extra aid nor do they get any special breaks --- nadda --- beyond shopping discounts.
Now, it is estimated that 90,000 illegal alien children under the age of 16 will be in our country by the end of the year. We will feed them, provide health and education and they will get everything a hard working American citizen gets — just for crossing the border illegally.
Obama is proposing we give millions of dollars to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to "help" the children. Do you really think this money is going to get to the children that really need it?
Meanwhile, Mexico is charging for allowing them to pass through Mexico to get to the US border, paid for by the drug cartels. They are keeping the Border Guards busy changing diapers while the drug lords funnel tons of drugs into the
US to turn our children into zombies.
In GITMO, the 147 Muslim terrorists have one doctor for every prisoner, a state-of-the art hospital system, are provided Korans and prayer rugs, food approved by the Koran, exercise and additional perks.
Our Veterans die waiting to see a VA doctor while the directors get bonuses.
AND Congress wants to freeze Social Security payments...
You do know that Congress voted themselves a pay raise for 2013? Google this--it's true!
2013-12-21
Can ObamaCare Possibly Be / Get Any Worse?
Story of the year
By Charles Krauthammer
The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical Obamacare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place.
Obamacare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime.
In fact, Obamacare is a full-scale federal takeover. The keep-your-plan-if-you-like-your-plan ruse was a way of saying to the millions of Americans who had insurance and liked what they had: Don’t worry. You’ll be left unmolested. For you, everything goes on as before.
That was a fraud from the very beginning. The law was designed to throw people off their private plans and into government-run exchanges where they would be made to overpay — forced to purchase government-mandated services they don’t need — as a way to subsidize others. (That’s how you get to the ostensible free lunch.)
It wasn’t until the first cancellation notices went out in late 2013 that the deception began to be understood. And felt. Six million Americans with private insurance have just lost it. And that’s just the beginning. By the Department of Health and Human Services’ own estimates, about 75 million Americans would have plans that their employers would have the right to cancel. And millions of middle-class workers who will migrate to the exchanges and don’t qualify for government subsidies will see their premiums, deductibles and co-pays go up.
It gets worse. The dislocation extends to losing one’s doctor and drug coverage, as insurance companies narrow availability to compensate for the huge costs imposed on them by the extended coverage and “free” services the new law mandates.
But it’s not just individuals seeing their medical care turned upside down. The insurance providers, the backbone of the system, are being utterly transformed. They are rapidly becoming mere extensions of the federal government.
Look what happened just last week. Health and Human Services unilaterally and without warning changed coverage deadlines and guidelines. It asked insurers to start covering people on Jan. 1 even if they signed up as late as the day before and even if they hadn’t paid their premiums. And is “strongly encouraging” them to pay during the transition for doctor visits and medicines not covered in their current plans (if covered in the patient’s previous — canceled — plan).
On what authority does a Cabinet secretary tell private companies to pay for services not in their plans and cover people not on their rolls? Where in Obamacare’s 2,500 pages are such high-handed dictates authorized? Does anyone even ask? The bill itself is simply taken as a kind of blanket warrant for HHS to run, regulate and control the whole insurance system.
Remember the uproar over forcing religious institutions to provide contraception coverage? The president’s “fix” was a new regulation ordering insurers to provide these services for free. Apart from the fact that this transparent ruse does nothing to resolve the underlying issue of conscience — God sees — by what right does the government order private companies to provide free services for anyone?
Three years ago I predicted that Obamacare would turn insurers into the lapdog equivalent of utility companies. I undershot. They are being treated as wholly owned subsidiaries. Take the phrase “strongly encouraging.” Sweet persuasion? In reality, these are offers insurers can’t refuse. Disappoint your federal master and he has the power to kick you off the federal exchanges, where the health insurance business of the future is supposed to be conducted.
Moreover, if adverse selection drives insurers into a financial death spiral — too few healthy young people to offset more costly, sicker, older folks — their only recourse will be a government bailout. Do they really want to get on the wrong side of the White House, their only lifeline when facing insolvency?
I don’t care a whit for the insurance companies. They deserve what they get. They collaborated with the White House in concocting this scheme and are now being swallowed by it. But I do care about the citizenry and its access to a functioning, flourishing, choice-driven medical system.
Obamacare posed as a free-market alternative to a British-style single-payer system. Then, during congressional debate, the White House ostentatiously rejected the so-called “public option.” But that’s irrelevant. The whole damn thing is the public option. The federal government now runs the insurance market, dictating deadlines, procedures, rates, risk assessments and coverage requirements. It’s gotten so cocky it’s now telling insurers to cover the claims that, by law, they are not required to.
Welcome 2014, our first taste of nationalized health care.
2013-12-17
More Astonishing Government Waste! It Never Ends!
Is it possible that government waste of our tax dollars could be more egregious? Read it and weep!
U.S. Federal Government WASTE - 2013
Sad!
U.S. Federal Government WASTE - 2013
Sad!
2013-12-03
Federal Extortion: And Just When You Thought Obama Couldn't Get Any Worse!
JPMorgan Shakedown Includes Acorn-Style Kickback
Investors Business Daily Editorial
2013 December 23
Extortion: Just when we thought its post-crisis probe of banks couldn't get more corrupt, the Obama administration has cut radical Democrat groups in on the record $13 billion JPMorgan Chase subprime loan deal.
On Page 5 of "Annex 2" of the recently released consent order, you'll find this little gem: The Justice Department mandates that JPMorgan fork over any unclaimed or unpaid consumer damages to a nonprofit group that finances Acorn clones and other shakedown groups.
They stand to reap millions. The "consumer relief" portion of the deal by itself totals $4 billion.
If the government "determines that a shortfall in that obligation remains as of Dec. 31, 2017," the agreement states, "JPMorgan shall make a compensatory payment in cash in an amount equal to the shortfall to NeighborWorks America to provide housing counseling, neighborhood stabilization, foreclosure prevention or similar programs."
Potentially billions could be distributed to Democrat activists through NeighborWorks, a government-funded "affordable housing" group that supports a national network of left-wing community organizers operating in the same vein as Acorn.
In 2011 alone, NeighborWorks shelled out $35 billion in "affordable housing grants" to 115 such groups, according its website. Recipients included the radical Affordable Housing Alliance, which pressures banks to make high-risk loans in low-income neighborhoods.
The recession has dried up funding for such groups. But Holder's massive bank shakedown could rebuild their war chests in a hurry.
He's written back-door funding for Democrat groups into other major bank deals he's brokered, including the $335 million Bank of America and $175 million Wells Fargo subprime mortgage settlements. In the fine print of those decrees, both defendants must turn over any leftover funds in escrow to affordable-housing groups aligned with Democrats.
In effect, lenders are bankrolling the same parasites that bled them for the risky loans that caused the mortgage crisis. Infused with new cash, they can ramp back up their shakedown campaign, repeating the cycle of dangerous political lending that wrecked the economy.
Under the dubious deal, JPMorgan is also obligated to donate forclosed homes to these "nonprofits" while offering home loans to "low to moderate income borrowers" in areas hit "hardest" by subprime foreclosures.
The consent order refers JPMorgan to a HUD map of "targeted" areas such as Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. In announcing the deal, Holder alleged JPMorgan "misled investors" in securities backed by subprime mortgages. Yet, oddly, the deal aids only deadbeat borrowers — not investors.
Like other recent bank shakedowns, the JPMorgan deal is really an anti-poverty program benefiting Democrat strongholds hit hardest by subprime foreclosures.
That off-budget welfare program — underwritten chiefly by JPMorgan, BofA, Wells, Citibank and other large banks — now totals $86 billion and climbing. It's a fraud, one using Wall Street to finance a social agenda.
2013-11-05
Will Insularity, Incompetence, and Lies Doom Obamacare?
Obama Is Now Lying About
His Former Lies About Obamacare?
By Ron Fournier
National Journal
2013 November 4
Insularity, incompetence, and deception doomed the launch of the Affordable Care Act, according to postmortems on President Obama's health insurance law. The president now has two choices: A) Accept the verdict and learn from it, or B) stick with insularity, incompetence, and deception.
Early signs point to Obama compounding rather than correcting his team's errors.
Staying the course is a losing option for Obamacare and the more than 40 million Americans who need health insurance. The trouble is far deeper than a "glitchy" website, according to numerous media reports, including an in-depth investigation by The Washington Post. Among other things,The Post uncovered a 2010 memo from a trusted outside health adviser warning that no one in the administration was "up to the task" of constructing an insurance exchange and other complexities of the 2,000-page law.
The good news is there is time to learn from--and recover from--the early stumbles. Here are four important lessons from the postmortems.
1) Reach out beyond your inner circle. Obama ignored efforts by Harvard professor David Cutler and his own economic team to get him to appoint an outside health reform "czar" with a background in technology, insurance, and business. Instead, the president stuck with his health policy team led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, a former Clinton appointee with a checkered record in the private sector. His team was built to pass legislation, not implement it.
"They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn't have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business," Cutler told The Post. "It's very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills."
Obama recently appointed manager-extraordinaire Jeff Zients to oversee efforts to fix the troubled website. It's not clear that Zients or any other accomplished leader will be put in charge of implementation at large. (Zients will become director of the National Economic Council in January.)
2) Don't lie. The Obama White House has a credibility problem, one that could infect his entire agenda. It started when the White House refused to release data on the number of people who enrolled in the online marketplace, an important metric for determining the effectiveness of the $400 million-plus site. Administration officials say they don't have the data, which is either a mark of extraordinary incompetence or a lie.
The problem was compounded when millions of self-insured Americans received notices that their health care policies were being canceled. For years, Obama pledged that "if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan. Period." According to The Wall Street Journal, Obama's advisers knew the president was making a promise he couldn't keep, and debated whether to have the president "explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches." In other words, they debated whether to tell the full truth and decided against it. They knowingly told a falsehood, which is by definition a lie.
Rather than acknowledge the deception, the White House has launched a public-relations effort to mitigate it. The most brazen example is the White House's use of Twitter in an attempt to discredit an NBC story that accurately described the White House's deception. "NBC 'scoop' cites normal turnover in the indiv insurance market," White House spokesman Josh Earnest tweeted to his 9,500 followers on Twitter, according to a Reuters story on the operation.
3) Create an efficient health insurance bureaucracy. According to The Post, the decision to put ACA implementation in the hands of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was fateful. Politics played a role. Administration officials thought it would protect the project from House Republicans who are trying to undermine the law. Money was another reason. The ACA did not include funding for the development of a federal exchange, and the White House knew Republicans would block any attempts to get it. The result was a disastrously fragmented process. As a source told The Post, "There wasn't a person who said, 'My job is the seamless implementation of the Affordable Care Act.' "
The White House and its allies blame Republicans for the lack of money and options. It's an understandable reaction. The GOP-controlled House wants to gut the law.
But it's no excuse. Obama pushed a partisan law through a Democratic-controlled Congress and now bears the responsibility for implementing it. If Obama fails, history will judge the chief executive more harshly than one chamber of the legislative branch. More important, mismanagement of ACA would give a generation of Americans reason to question the Democratic Party's core argument that government can do good things.
4) New leadership is needed. The Post reports that Obama frequently tried to keep his team on task. Hours after the bill passed, the president told celebrating aides that the hard work of implementation begins in the morning. During regular staff meetings to monitor progress, he invariably turned attention to the website. If it doesn't work, Obama said, "nothing else matters." In one meeting, he told senior advisers that implementing ACA was the most important job of his presidency. "We've got to do it right," Obama said.
Those anecdotes seem to belie the impression that Obama was disengaged. Even so, the president needs to do some soul-searching. What did I miss, and why? What was kept from me, and why? Who failed to do their jobs right? Who failed to tell me the job wasn't getting done right? Do I have the right people on the job?
Because as long as the president sticks with the team that failed the country and lied, it's fair to assume that he hasn't learned the most basic lessons from the launch.
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