This week I attended a funeral. A three-year old special needs child had passed away. The sun broke through the overcast day, when the gates of Heaven opened up to receive her—at least that’s how it seemed to all the believers gathered there at the graveside singing hymns, mourning, and bearing witness to how precious a little life can be.
People of faith believe that identity is always intact. God keeps us safe with Him, where we are always looking and acting our best in the image He created us in. People of faith believe their purpose extends beyond the temporal material world and into Eternity. Everything in this physical life therefore is couched in the context of a relatively brief mortal existence on earth, and the Life and Time indestructible elsewhere. People of faith tend to live according to discretion and morals, by virtue of a continuous reference to the Life that is to come. This reference smoothes out some emotional rough edges, allays disappointment, enables forgiveness to occur, and displaces class envy. The crash or the burn-out, or so-called “postal” bouts of anger and revenge, are more often characteristic of someone without faith or someone who enters into a crisis of faith.
In politics faith has implications too. Government is seen as a portion, or mere functional piece, of that relatively brief mortal existence here on earth. Caesar is to be respected certainly, but a person’s natural rights—even a little person’s—are more important. Government is subordinated to one’s spiritual journey. Government is subordinated to certain values, which constitute the duty of a faithful and faith-filled people to their God. People of faith are always, potentially, revolutionary. The Declaration of Independence is their civil creed.
The First Amendment to the Constitution had once established a useful firewall, even as the advance of secularism continued over two centuries to affect the democratic society at large. States even towards the end of the Twentieth Century remained sovereign with respect to most matters of religion, in the context of our federated Republic. Within the states themselves moreover, a high regard for matters of the spirit and of religion, provided for a libertarian approach that gave space and freedom for entire communities of faith to deviate from the majority norms in their pursuit of happiness. People also knew how to mind their business then. Property more or less ensured privacy, because it wasn’t lightly taken away, or heavily taxed, or invaded by the government. The advance of secularism, coupled with a corrosive leveling form of democracy, eventually dismantled the federalist construct of our government and has all but killed the Constitution. It was only a matter of time before every remaining pocket of religious freedom and faith-based “deviant” institution would be under attack.
Today any semblance of resistance to the secular norm is quashed at every level of government and society. A consolidated national democratic and secular majority-will, skewed, corrupted and expressed by a conformist and no-longer-federal government, invades every family and household in the country. People of faith are about to be extinguished—or rather, the faith of the people, which is the real aim of attack. Ironically, faith can inform and cause people to respond in two very different ways whenever their Caesar presumes upon the prerogatives of their God and His people. It is, of course possible, to take solace and comfort from the fact that life is short and there are sure rewards and perfect justice in Heaven. The other way is to live heroically, knowing that whatever the cost or ultimate sacrifice, it is well worth the teaching and the example of the Lord, in order to bring His Prayer to fruition: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). It is certainly worth the fight if done in defense, and for the future of freedom and the future of America’s posterity. It is worth voting too when the ballots are not bullets, and when a peaceful way forward presents itself in order to bring about political revolution.
There is indeed a time for every season, but much involves the choice that free men and women make as it were, in time. People without faith will vote for their stomachs every time. They will give in to fear and to fearful political exhortations of envy, because they never see beyond the grave. They empower government to take from others what they think they need, and acknowledge no higher authority than their own selfish greed and that of greed’s henchman, the bureaucrat with a badge and snub-nosed gun. After all, they have nothing else to reconcile, nothing more to redeem, nothing to justify outside the narrow confines of incidental breath and an accidental heartbeat. The truth is that it was never unconstitutional according to the Founders’ Original Intent to have prayer in schools, public or otherwise—it is entirely unconstitutional, however, to have the Federal Government telling sovereign states what they can and cannot do and defining what is or isn’t allowed in their schools.
The underlying problem has never been about prayer or monuments. It isn’t about how or whether to teach objectivity, critical thinking, logic or the scientific method. It sure isn’t about studying Chinese in kindergarten, and whether to double up on increasingly ungraded math and science homework! The crisis in schools is massive, and the failure to educate readily apparent. The solution, as with so much else, involves transmission and receipt of our cultural inheritance and of history again. It involves preparing kids and young people for the workplace and for society, concentrating on skills but also on discipline and character. Education will fix itself, when the Republic is restored and the American people, including all people of faith are free again. The biggest problem we face today isn’t phonics or bilingualism. It isn’t the amount of money thrown at something, or the quality of teachers in low-income neighborhoods. It has everything to do with the Federal Government and its massive overreach in terms of raw power. It has to do with entire branches of the Federal Government, which no longer serve the best interests of the American people! The solution has to do with knocking the Federal Government back down to a proper constitutional size and scope. GOOD CHRISTIAN: IF YOU VALUE ANYTHING AT ALL IN THIS LIFE, YOU MUST VOTE!
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Loss of Manufacturing is the Federal Government’s Fault (Issue #471)
Anne Marie Cox of Catholic News Service (CNS) reported on the president during his recent campaign swing through four states. On September 29th President Barack Obama visited a Mid-West family in a Des Moines, Iowa neighborhood and spoke to a group assembled in backyard lawn chairs. The local parish priest, Father Michael Amadeo of the Holy Trinity School, was the last one to pose a question. The priest shared a story about a parishioner. Apparently the 55-year-old father had lost his manufacturing job over one year ago and the family was struggling. The priest asked what the president’s economic policies would do in the next year to help people in that circumstance. If anyone were looking for hope, however, they might as well have phoned a call center in India.
President Obama responded that many of the manufacturing jobs simply will not return, because modern factories are so efficient and require fewer workers. Moreover, some jobs are moving overseas where wages are cheaper. His concluding advice was for the unemployed man to keep his skills honed and to be ready when the economy finally turns around again. The president plugged clean energy as a promising business alternative and then left. Not only was the president less than empathetic to the priest’s question or the plight of unemployed man, his administration has got its economics all wrong and government policies are sure to drag this recession all the way to Kingdom Come.
The following analysis is taken from Tom Pauken’s excellent book, Bringing America Home (2010). In it he details those policies behind our nation’s marked economic decline. A central reason for huge trade deficits and the shift of economic power from Main Street to Wall Street is a business tax system that gives private-equity moguls incentives to take imprudent risks with the companies they control. In this respect, they have a distinct advantage over owners of U.S. companies who would like to run their businesses in a tried and true conservative fashion or pursue capital accumulation-based strategies, but find that our tax structure “disincentivizes” them. The United States has a corporate income-tax rate of 35 percent. That rate is an economic incentive for financiers to load a company up with high levels of corporate debt in order to avoid taxation. It is a no-brainer—you can write off debt on your taxes, but savings and investments get taxed heavily. No rational businessman would want his company to accumulate significant savings if the interest on those savings is taxed at 35 percent.
American businesses that have their plants and employees in the United States also do not operate on a level playing field with our trading partners or competitors. Every major trading country in the world except for the United States provides a tax advantage for domestic manufacturers. Even as other countries have removed tariffs over the past four decades, they have been careful to put into place value-added taxes or VATs that provide their companies with a significant economic advantage over foreign businesses. Austin business economist David Hartman has developed data on the effects of a border-adjusted VAT. Starting with France in the mid-1960s, European countries began adopting border-adjusted VATs that now average 19 percent. All Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, made up of over 30 developed countries—all except the United States, that is—have since adopted VATs or their equivalents averaging 18 percent. As a result, U.S. goods carry the full burden of federal, state, and local taxes, plus an added tax averaging 18 percent when they are shipped to foreign markets. To make matters worse, foreign goods that are shipped into the United States enjoy an 18-percent VAT abatement—yet are subject to none of the taxes imposed on U.S. manufacturers.
It really is small wonder that so many big companies have moved their manufacturing outside the United States. It is more of a wonder why the rest haven’t gone! The hollowing out of our manufacturing base and the resultant unemployment and regrettable socio-economic inequalities that have been produced, were predictable. They were caused by the federal government’s regressive tax and trade policies. The president shows every indication of perpetuating the same policies of what Doug Ingram has called a design for “exporting prosperity.” In the past ten years the United States has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. Obama did not start the problem, but Obama’s deficits after less than two years in office already exceed President George W. Bush’s after eight years. Unemployment is stuck at nearly ten percent and is likely to remain there for two more years. The Democrat Congress, for the first time in recent memory has not even passed a part of the proposed budget out of committee for the fiscal year that already began. In other words, the president honestly can’t give much hope to the priest in reply to his question. Either the president doesn’t know what to do in the next year, or else his intent is for more of the same that got us in this mess in the first place.
President Obama responded that many of the manufacturing jobs simply will not return, because modern factories are so efficient and require fewer workers. Moreover, some jobs are moving overseas where wages are cheaper. His concluding advice was for the unemployed man to keep his skills honed and to be ready when the economy finally turns around again. The president plugged clean energy as a promising business alternative and then left. Not only was the president less than empathetic to the priest’s question or the plight of unemployed man, his administration has got its economics all wrong and government policies are sure to drag this recession all the way to Kingdom Come.
The following analysis is taken from Tom Pauken’s excellent book, Bringing America Home (2010). In it he details those policies behind our nation’s marked economic decline. A central reason for huge trade deficits and the shift of economic power from Main Street to Wall Street is a business tax system that gives private-equity moguls incentives to take imprudent risks with the companies they control. In this respect, they have a distinct advantage over owners of U.S. companies who would like to run their businesses in a tried and true conservative fashion or pursue capital accumulation-based strategies, but find that our tax structure “disincentivizes” them. The United States has a corporate income-tax rate of 35 percent. That rate is an economic incentive for financiers to load a company up with high levels of corporate debt in order to avoid taxation. It is a no-brainer—you can write off debt on your taxes, but savings and investments get taxed heavily. No rational businessman would want his company to accumulate significant savings if the interest on those savings is taxed at 35 percent.
American businesses that have their plants and employees in the United States also do not operate on a level playing field with our trading partners or competitors. Every major trading country in the world except for the United States provides a tax advantage for domestic manufacturers. Even as other countries have removed tariffs over the past four decades, they have been careful to put into place value-added taxes or VATs that provide their companies with a significant economic advantage over foreign businesses. Austin business economist David Hartman has developed data on the effects of a border-adjusted VAT. Starting with France in the mid-1960s, European countries began adopting border-adjusted VATs that now average 19 percent. All Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, made up of over 30 developed countries—all except the United States, that is—have since adopted VATs or their equivalents averaging 18 percent. As a result, U.S. goods carry the full burden of federal, state, and local taxes, plus an added tax averaging 18 percent when they are shipped to foreign markets. To make matters worse, foreign goods that are shipped into the United States enjoy an 18-percent VAT abatement—yet are subject to none of the taxes imposed on U.S. manufacturers.
It really is small wonder that so many big companies have moved their manufacturing outside the United States. It is more of a wonder why the rest haven’t gone! The hollowing out of our manufacturing base and the resultant unemployment and regrettable socio-economic inequalities that have been produced, were predictable. They were caused by the federal government’s regressive tax and trade policies. The president shows every indication of perpetuating the same policies of what Doug Ingram has called a design for “exporting prosperity.” In the past ten years the United States has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. Obama did not start the problem, but Obama’s deficits after less than two years in office already exceed President George W. Bush’s after eight years. Unemployment is stuck at nearly ten percent and is likely to remain there for two more years. The Democrat Congress, for the first time in recent memory has not even passed a part of the proposed budget out of committee for the fiscal year that already began. In other words, the president honestly can’t give much hope to the priest in reply to his question. Either the president doesn’t know what to do in the next year, or else his intent is for more of the same that got us in this mess in the first place.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Texas is Winner in Debate about the Debate (Issue #470)
Debates provide information about candidates and their responses under pressure. In close contests, voters may wait for debates before deciding for whom to vote. This is especially true of independents, those voters who are not registered as members of a particular political party. Those who watch debates also tend to vote more often on the issues, whereas those who do not watch are more likely to vote on the basis of personality and feeling. The media not only report on a debate itself but also usually announce a “winner,” and of course the verdict affects voter behavior by creating a positive bandwagon effect. Candidates try to use debates to their advantage, in order to overcome negative perceptions or defuse certain issues. Debates are great for a candidate to reach sizeable television audiences, but just as easily debates can torpedo a campaign and are considered risky so long as the candidate enjoys a sizeable lead.
Big media agencies such as The Austin American-Statesman, Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Antonio Express-News, and The Houston Chronicle, together with KLRU “Public” TV are sponsors of the October 19th Texas Gubernatorial Debate in Austin at the UT Campus. There are five candidates running for Governor, and the sponsors changed their rules to allow two major and two minor party candidates to participate, they said to foster an exchange of ideas and promote the health of our “democracy.” They voted to allow every single candidate except one, however, to participate. The only candidate excluded by sponsors is the officially registered write-in candidate, Andy Barron, who collected thousands of petitioner signatures and then also paid the hefty registration fee. In other words, he met State Law for ballot access—and one would hope this were sufficient to be heard. The sponsors actually dropped their criterion down from ten percent to one percent of public support when Governor Perry declined to participate, but the substantiating poll the sponsors used did not pick up sufficient support for Barron’s write-in insurgent candidacy. Notwithstanding, a recent KWTX News Channel 10 poll showed support for Andy Barron in the Central Texas area to be in double digits.
The Andy Barron for Governor Campaign is currently paying for a prestigious outside research group to conduct a statewide scientific poll, on the outside chance that the campaign’s media ads have stirred recognition of their candidate and upped public support sufficiently to break the sponsors’ threshold for inclusion in the debate. The irony is that only Governor Rick Perry’s recalcitrance has materialized a debate involving more than two dominant party representatives. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules would not have allowed the sponsors to go forward with just one candidate, turning the planned debate essentially into an interview. Other candidates would have to be afforded equal time under such a circumstance. The Republican Governor has long demanded that Democrat Bill White release his 1990s income tax returns from when White served as Texas Democrat Party Chairman and Assistant U.S. Energy Secretary, or else he would not engage him in a debate.
Now there’s a good chance Andy Barron will prove public support above the lowered threshold of one percent statewide and could possibly receive a late invitation to participate. If Barron is still not afforded an invitation to debate after showing sufficient scientific polling to prove his level of support above one percent, there could be basis for a lawsuit. Many in Barron’s campaign already suspect an anti-religious bias and specifically anti-Christian discrimination. If four or five candidates who were invited actually appeared, it will be the most interesting cross-section of political opinions ever represented before the public in Texas gubernatorial debate history. There would also emerge a most difficult situation for Perry, particularly if his lead in the polls narrows by a couple points. In that situation where four of five candidates are scheduled to appear and the race between Perry and White is close, Perry might be pressured to join the debate himself. Since 1984 the Presidential debates have become such an institution, that a candidate finds it difficult to avoid them no matter how big his lead, at least without making his refusal a big issue in its own right. We may be headed for a similar situation in the context of gubernatorial debates.
Tea Party support among candidates for Governor this year is divided between Governor Perry, who has the backing from Sarah Palin, but also Libertarian Kathie Glass, as well as “Other” party write-in candidate, Andy Barron. All three have expressed support for the key constitutional concept of nullification, a doctrine whereby states may prevent enforcement of Federal authority in cases where encroachment of the Federal Government on states’ rights exceeds Constitutional authority to do so in that area. Imagine a debate scenario in which three of five candidates for Governor of Texas actually support the sovereign right of the State to nullify unconstitutional acts of Congress and unconstitutional executive orders by the president! That would make Texas the winner no matter who finally wins election on Election Day, November 2nd.
Big media agencies such as The Austin American-Statesman, Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Antonio Express-News, and The Houston Chronicle, together with KLRU “Public” TV are sponsors of the October 19th Texas Gubernatorial Debate in Austin at the UT Campus. There are five candidates running for Governor, and the sponsors changed their rules to allow two major and two minor party candidates to participate, they said to foster an exchange of ideas and promote the health of our “democracy.” They voted to allow every single candidate except one, however, to participate. The only candidate excluded by sponsors is the officially registered write-in candidate, Andy Barron, who collected thousands of petitioner signatures and then also paid the hefty registration fee. In other words, he met State Law for ballot access—and one would hope this were sufficient to be heard. The sponsors actually dropped their criterion down from ten percent to one percent of public support when Governor Perry declined to participate, but the substantiating poll the sponsors used did not pick up sufficient support for Barron’s write-in insurgent candidacy. Notwithstanding, a recent KWTX News Channel 10 poll showed support for Andy Barron in the Central Texas area to be in double digits.
The Andy Barron for Governor Campaign is currently paying for a prestigious outside research group to conduct a statewide scientific poll, on the outside chance that the campaign’s media ads have stirred recognition of their candidate and upped public support sufficiently to break the sponsors’ threshold for inclusion in the debate. The irony is that only Governor Rick Perry’s recalcitrance has materialized a debate involving more than two dominant party representatives. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules would not have allowed the sponsors to go forward with just one candidate, turning the planned debate essentially into an interview. Other candidates would have to be afforded equal time under such a circumstance. The Republican Governor has long demanded that Democrat Bill White release his 1990s income tax returns from when White served as Texas Democrat Party Chairman and Assistant U.S. Energy Secretary, or else he would not engage him in a debate.
Now there’s a good chance Andy Barron will prove public support above the lowered threshold of one percent statewide and could possibly receive a late invitation to participate. If Barron is still not afforded an invitation to debate after showing sufficient scientific polling to prove his level of support above one percent, there could be basis for a lawsuit. Many in Barron’s campaign already suspect an anti-religious bias and specifically anti-Christian discrimination. If four or five candidates who were invited actually appeared, it will be the most interesting cross-section of political opinions ever represented before the public in Texas gubernatorial debate history. There would also emerge a most difficult situation for Perry, particularly if his lead in the polls narrows by a couple points. In that situation where four of five candidates are scheduled to appear and the race between Perry and White is close, Perry might be pressured to join the debate himself. Since 1984 the Presidential debates have become such an institution, that a candidate finds it difficult to avoid them no matter how big his lead, at least without making his refusal a big issue in its own right. We may be headed for a similar situation in the context of gubernatorial debates.
Tea Party support among candidates for Governor this year is divided between Governor Perry, who has the backing from Sarah Palin, but also Libertarian Kathie Glass, as well as “Other” party write-in candidate, Andy Barron. All three have expressed support for the key constitutional concept of nullification, a doctrine whereby states may prevent enforcement of Federal authority in cases where encroachment of the Federal Government on states’ rights exceeds Constitutional authority to do so in that area. Imagine a debate scenario in which three of five candidates for Governor of Texas actually support the sovereign right of the State to nullify unconstitutional acts of Congress and unconstitutional executive orders by the president! That would make Texas the winner no matter who finally wins election on Election Day, November 2nd.
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