Update: You Are Not Living In A Free Country... - The Desruction of Freedom and Liberty In the United States And How To Repair The Damage

As we start the new year, one would hope that we could look forward to better times and better lives. However, in the U.S. democracy, that might be a tall order, given the obscene growth and reach of the Federal government in this country and the politicians that operate it. We have previously discussed this erosion of freedom and the perverting of liberty principles in the following popular post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-freedom-pyramid-where-it-is-and.html

Given this review of how a democracy should work, read the following and then you decide if you think you are still living in a free country:

- You are not living in a free country if your retirement medical care, via Medicare, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.

- You are not living in a free country if a large percentage of your retirement cash flow, via Social Security, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.

- You are not living in a free country if your pre-retirement medical care, via the ramifications of Obama Care, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.

- You are not living in a free country if your ability to go to college, via student loans, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.

- You are not living in a free country if your ability to get a home mortgage, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is dependent on the actions and whims of Federal government politicians.

- You are not living in a free country if almost a third of your annual earnings go to taxes to support all levels of wasteful inefficient, and criminally infested government programs and entities.

- You are not living in a free country if the Federal government’s executive branch can commit U.S. military resources and taxpayer wealth to foreign military actions (e.g. Libya, Yemen, Syria) without Congressional or Constitutional approval.

- You are not living in a free country if the Federal government’s executive branch can independently and arbitrarily designate any American for assassination and then actually commit that assassination without due process of law (e.g. Anwar al-Awlaki).

- You are not living in free country when the Federal government can hold a U.S. citizen in prison for an indefinite period of time without due process of law if that government arbitrarily defines that citizen as a potential threat to national security (National Defense Authorization Act - NDAA)

- You are not living in a free country when a President can seize control of all forms of communications when he alone decides it is in the national interest (Executive Order - Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions)

- You are not living in a free country when the Federal government can collect and store every electronic communication any citizen makes (e.g. email, text messages) in massive data storage centers (e.g. Bluffdale, Utah) without due process, a warrant, or privacy protection.

- You are not living in a free country when the Federal government executive branch thinks it can affix a GPS tracking device to any citizen’s car without a warrant (see U.S. Vs. Jones decision).

- You are not living in a free country when the executive branch thinks it has the power to arbitrarily ignore judicial rulings and existing laws (e.g. Gulf Of Mexico drilling moratorium and DOMA).

- You are not living in a free country when government agents, via TSA, are allowed to grope and grab U.S. citizen’s body parts in the name of national security.

- You are not living in a free country if government and political class spending has rung up trillions of dollars of national debt that will eventually have to be paid by you, your children, and your grandchildren.

- You are not living in a free country if you privacy rights can be almost arbitrarily be violated by the Patriot Act.

- You are not living in a free country when crony capitalism wastes billions of taxpayer dollars every year without any redeeming societal benefits (e.g. Solyndra, Fisker, Telsa).

- You are not living in a free country if your political leaders hold you and your opinions in contempt:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - those Americans that opposed Obama's health care reform effort are un-American.
• Congressman Charles Rangel - those Americans that opposed Obama's health care reform effort are like the racists that opposed the civil rights movements in the 1960s.
• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - American tourists that come to D.C. in the summer physically smell.
• Congressman Dick Grayson - those Americans with a different opinions from him are knuckle dragging Neanderthals.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - those Americans against the building of a mosque close to Ground Zero in New York City needed to be investigated.
• Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee - Tea Party members used to wear Ku Klux Klan white sheets.
• Congresswoman Maxine Walters - Tea Party advocates “can go to hell."
• Czar Van Jones - those opposed to the President's policies are a_ _ h_ _ _ s.

- You are not living in a free country if the executive branch can circumvent Constitutionally mandated government appointment reviews via a "czar" politburo.

- You are not living in a free country when politicians can use billions of taxpayer dollars, via earmarks, to finance their perpetual re-election campaigns.

- You are not living in a free country where politicians decide what private companies live (e.g. Citigroup) and what private companies die (e.g. Lehman Brothers.)

- You are not living in a free country when those in office can maximize their re-election chances with favorable gerrymandering of Congressional districts.

- You are not living in a free country if your selection of a Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party via the primary and caucus system can be overturned by a small cadre of insiders in the upper echelon of the party called "super delegates."

- You are not living in a free country when sitting politicians can automatically grant themselves annual pay increases regardless of how poorly they led the nation during the past year.

- You are not living in a free country when sitting politicians cannot be removed from Congressional committee posts regardless of how poorly they performed their jobs on those committees (e.g. Intelligence committee members who did not foresee the 9-11 attacks, Finance committee members who did not foresee the coming of the "Great Recession", Interior Department committee members that did not properly oversee the BP oil rig inspection process, etc.)

- You are not living in a free country when any level of government can seize your property for a supposedly fair price and turn it over to developers for a private sector development project.

- You are not living in a free country when perceived and actual voter fraud casts significant doubt on whether or not your vote was counted fairly and if the true winner prevailed.

So let's review. Politicians control our pocketbooks, our health care, our retirement funding, who we vote for, invade our privacy, read our electronic communications, pontentially manipulate our voting results, violate our property rights, and control our ability to get a mortgage or student loan while calling us names if we dare to disagree with them. Hardly sounds like the traditional definition of a democracy to me.

The beauty of this system, that the political class has worked out for themselves, is that they are able to keep us fighting among ourselves. This diverts our attention to the fact that our freedom and liberty have slowly been stripped away. We have reached a point in this country that a great portion of our lives is no longer controlled by our brains, our energy, our freedom, and our initiative but by about 600 people sitting in Congress and the executive branch of the Federal government.

We vehemently, and fruitlessly, fight among ourselves over relatively trivial issues while the political class strips us of our wealth and our liberty without ever solving a major issue:

• We are no closer to a rational drug policy in this country since Nixon declared War On Drugs in the 1960s, with this void allowing a narco state to develop just south of our border with Mexico.
• We are no closer to a rational and coherent national energy policy despite the oil crises from the 1970s.
• We are no closer to having world class public schools despite the warning of failing public schools from early in the Reagan administration and the expenditure of trillions of dollars since then.
• We are no closer to having a coherent and effective immigration plan and strategy.
• We are no closer to having an effective strategy for containing escalating health care costs.
• We are no closer to having a sane, balanced budget process for the Federal government with the political class spending trillions of dollars more than they bring in in revenue.

We no longer live in a free country and we have allowed the politicians to do it to us. That is why it is so important to begin the cleansing process and the restoration of freedom with the implementation of the following steps, some of which were laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government:"

1. Step 1 - reduce Federal spending by 10% a year for five years in order to tame our out of control political class spending.
2. Step 14 - implement specific and fair processes to eliminate the current gerrymandering process for Congressional districts.
3. Step 17 - eliminate the "Super Delegate" process
4. Step 19 - strengthen eminent domain laws to prevent the arbitrary confiscation of private property.
5. Steps 20, 21, 22 - Make the following changes to the Patriot Act to protect the privacy of citizens: review every section of the Act to see if each part is still really needed for national security, make it illegal to intercept any form of communications of a citizen without a judge-approved warrant, notify any citizen if they have been investigated and cleared by any government agency investigation, and finally appoint the members to the oversight committee of the Act, a committee that has never been staffed.
6. Step 28 - repeal Obama Care, an atrocity that imposes thousands of rules and dozens of taxes on the nation without solving the root causes of our escalating health care costs and replace it with a the process described in Step 28.
7. Step 34 - implement a citizen approval process that would remove politicians from Congressional committees for gross dereliction of duty.
8. Step 37 - eliminate the Congressional process that automatically grants an annual pay increase to Congressional members, replacing it with a citizen satisfaction based pay system.
9. Step 39 - implement term limits for all Federal politicians in order to get some fresh thinking and problem solvers involved with the myriad issues facing America, "one and done."
10. Disband the czar process and restore the Constitutionally mandated checks and balances of our government processes.

Time is running out to fix what the political class has destroyed in this country from a liberty, privacy, freedom, budget, economic, and Constitution perspective. We have allowed this situation to arise and we are the ones that need to fix it. Otherwise, some morning we will wake up and realize that fifty years ago, Nikita Khrushchev got it right when he said:

"You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept communism outright; but we'll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have communism. We won't have to fight you; we will so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." Nikita Khrushchev, 1962
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Christmas Week Guest Commentators Part 4 - How Younger Americans Are Being Screwed By Obama Care

We will be doing a long series on the coming disaster known as Obama Care in early January. It is not a pretty picture as this disasterous piece of legislation is about to destory our economy, our health care industry, and most importantly, the future of our kids.

The following article is from a recent edition of Forbes magazine from November 27, 2012, written by Chris Conover. It clearly lays out how Obama Care is going to financially burden/screw younger American workers, those at the bottom of the pay scale vs. older, more established, and usually wealthier Americans and ironically, undercut the legislation's obnoxious component that forces Americans to pruchase health care insurance for themselves.

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It’s official: the health care law will unduly stick it to young Americans by making them pay far higher (health care insurance) premiums starting January 1, 2014. New rules announced this month are even worse than expected when it comes to shoveling an unfair burden onto our nation’s youth. Moreover, they also perversely increase the incentives of young people to remain uninsured.

The newly announced rules limit insurers to charge their oldest customers no more than three times as much as younger ones. As shown in the following chart based on estimates by international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman (double click on the graph for a larger view),

the rule will force insurers to hike rates for 18- to 24-year-olds by 45 percent even as rates for those 60 and older drop by 13 percent in most states.

That means a 22-year-old waitress paying $2,068 for her health insurance will have to fork over $3,000 when Obamacare takes effect. And these figures even underestimate the actual impact.

Analysts based these estimates on average premiums for 5-year age groups (i.e. 55-59, 60-64, etc.). However, the new rules say that the restriction must apply to 1-year age groups (i.e. 25, 26, 27, etc.). Since health spending rises steadily by age—about 3.5 percent per year between 25 to 64—expected spending for 64 year-olds is higher than for the 60-64 year-old age group as a whole. That means insurance companies will have to charge 18-year-olds at least 10 percent more using the 1-year age groups to ensure their premiums fall within the mandated range of those of 64 year-olds.

The real-world consequence of this regulatory misjudgment is that young people will have an even greater economic incentive to simply pay the $695 annual penalty for not having coverage and wait until they are sick before they purchase it. In short, it is now even more likely that Obamacare will amplify the perverse incentives for “free-riding” that it was intended to counter.

Clearly, until we observe actual behavior next January, we won’t know precisely how large an adverse selection problem has been unnecessarily created by these new rules. But what we can say for certain is that for young adults who elect to have health coverage, it will be way more expensive next year than it is today.

Is this fair? Ask the typical 20-24 year-old—whose median weekly earnings are $461—whether it’s fair to be asked to pay 50 percent higher premiums so that workers age 55-64—whose median weekly earnings are $887—can pay lower premiums. Think about that. The median earnings for older workers are $420 a week more than those of younger workers, or roughly $20,000 more a year. How is mandating a price break on health insurance for this far higher income group at the expense of the lower income group possibly fair?

The difference in mean health spending for those age 45-64 and those age 18-24 is a mere $4,100—less than $350 a month. In short, the group benefiting from this transfer earns enough extra in a single week to cover the expense of their high health insurance premiums. I’m in the age category that would benefit from this type of transfer, yet even I can see how grossly unfair it is to the typical young worker.

As well, this unnecessary and undesirable feature of Obamacare is complicating discussions about how to reform Medicare. One very logical tweak to the program is to raise the age of eligibility to age 67 (so that it matches the eligibility age used for Social Security).

After all, life expectancy at age 65 has risen by 4.5 years since Medicare’s inception. But because of the restrictions placed on premiums under Obamacare, such a simple change would require the premiums of young adults obtaining coverage through the exchanges to increase by at least eight percent, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study.

This is what comes of “taxation by regulation.” If older people truly are deserving of help in paying for their premiums, then we should be relying on honest and open subsidies to assist them. This would permit the burden to be borne by society in general in a fashion that we can agree is distributionally fair. In contrast, loading all of these generational cross-subsidies onto young people is manifestly unfair. When we see “Occupy Obamacare” protests, we’ll know that young people have finally figured this out.

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This type of stupidity and inane math makes one more and more sure that the politicians who wrote and voted on this legislation never read it and never understood the consequences of voting for it, much to the detriment of all Americans, but especially the younger generaiotn of Americans. 

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Guest Commentary Christmas Week, Part 3: An Open Letter To Michigan Workers

This is the third in a series of guest commentaries that we are presenting this Christmas week, commentaries that provide a different perspective but same conclusion: the political class in this country, at all levels of government, are destroying our economy, our freedom, and our futures with their self serving selfishness, divisive rhetoric and actions, and short sighted, ignorant plans and legislation. Today’s commentary is by a former resident of Michigan, Steve Deace. His opinion piece appeared on the Western Center For Journalism on December 14, 2012.

A little background on his topic. Earlier in December, the Michigan state government passed a right-to-work law that allows Michigan workers to opt out of a union, and the associated dues, if they desire. Theoretically, and in the real world, right-to-work states in America have seen better job growth and lower unemployment rates than states that retain right-to-work laws.

Since Michigan has had a chronically high unemployment rate for years, as Mr. Deace points out, the state politicians took the quite bold move of making Michigan a right-to-work state, also in the hope of attracting and retaining businesses in Michigan and thus, driving down the state’s unemployment rate.

Given the strong union history and presence in Michigan, I give the state politicians a round of applause for taking a bold step and making their state a right-to-work state. This is one of the few times in recent history I can positively use the words “politicians” and “bold” in the same sentence. They faced a lot of vicious name calling, threats, and antagonism from union bosses and members who wanted the status quo retained.

But his commentary asks the relatively simple question: on a coherent, logical and rational basis, why would someone want the status quo retained in the labor market in Michigan, given that:

• Under the status quo, only about 7% of 8th graders in Detroit schools are proficient in reading.
• Under the status quo, Michigan was the only state in the 2010 Census to lose population.
• Under the status quo, only one month since 2008 has the state’s unemployment rate been below 8.5.
• Under the status quo, in 34 of the past 50 months the unemployment rate has been above 10%.
• Under the status quo, only two other states in the union have a lower school graduation rate than Michigan.
• Under the status quo, Michigan hasn’t ranked among the top 30 states in per capita personal income since 2004. It hasn’t ranked in the top 20 since 2000. It hasn’t ranked higher than 17th since 1990. These facts all debunk the status quo argument that right-to-work states have significantly lower wages.
• Under the status quo, Mr. Deace correctly points out that Michigan is starting to look a like the economic basket case that is California.

Mr. Deace’s writing points out what is wrong with this status quo thinking in Michigan but his logic and sanity could also be extrapolated to the U.S. Federal government. The status quo is not working. Consider what has happened in the past four years, since Obama has been in office:

• The status quo has been retained with the U.S. public school system still failing miserably in educating our kids relative to the rest of the word’s kids.
• The status quo has been retained in that health care costs are continuing to skyrocket (despite Obama Care).
• The status quo has been retained in the energy field in that we still do not have a long term, coherent energy strategy.
• The status quo has been retained in that we still do not have secure borders and an associated enforceable yet compassionate illegal immigration plan.
• The status quo has been retained in that we are still losing the war on drugs.
• The status quo has been maintained in foreign policy where we still meddle in far too many countries and areas of the world at great expense, in both blood and wealth.

Michigan politicians are making the right, logical decisions in serving their citizens with their right-to-work bravery and boldness and Mr. Deace captures that boldness in his writing. If only the Washington politicians, from Obama on down, had that same logic, clarity of thought, and boldness to stop doing what is not working and start doing the right things for the country, not the selfish things for their own self-enrichment and egos.

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An Open Letter To Michigan’s Workers

December 14, 2012 By Steve Deace

I love the state of Michigan. I grew up there. I may live in Iowa, but my mancave is adorned in maize-and-blue. I still allow the Detroit Lions to rip my still-beating heart out of my chest and show it to me 16 Sundays per year. I use Detroit Red Wings championship banners for curtains. I can still recite the entire everyday lineup – in order – of the 1984 World Series champion Detroit Tigers.

I say this to point out I am one of you. Heck, I was also a Teamster. I worked at the nation’s first automated UPS plant in Grand Rapids as a truck loader to put myself through Grand Rapids Community College. When I stopped working there, I made sure to pay up all my dues to leave as a member in good standing. I grew up with a stepdad who was an active Teamster at Grand Rapids Gravel driving ready-mix trucks.

I think unions historically have been an imperfect but mostly necessary check-and-balance against corporatism, which I and most other liberty-loving Americans loathe. I can’t stand crony capitalism any more than you can. It’s an oxymoron like “gay marriage”, “moderate Arab nation”, and “local celebrity.” There’s no such thing as “crony capitalism” because capitalism is based on the objective worth of an asset as determined by a free and competitive market. Whenever cronyism gets involved, it becomes about the subjective nature of palm-greasing and back-scrubbing, which is antithetical to capitalism.

I agree with you that it’s hypocritical for those claiming to be for economic growth to fight Obamcare and then fight to nominate as an alternative in the other party the guy who gave the administration the idea in the first place. I agree it’s hypocritical of ruling class Republicans to say that a union worker in Toledo making $15/hour at the local Chrysler plant doesn’t deserve a bailout from the federal taxpayer, but their buddies at “too big to fail” Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs do.

I share many of your laments, but what you’re being sold as the solution to these problems is actually what caused the problem.

You’re being used as sympathetic cannon fodder/human shields by those who don’t have the love for America you do but would rather take America down the same road to perdition they’ve already taken Greece, France, Spain, and most of Western Europe. They are manipulating you with talk of “fairness” and “equality”, except historically anytime in human history these people have had their way, what they’ve actually done is produced a tyranny that imposes itself on folks like you first and foremost.

Think I’m wrong?

Then ask yourself some very simple questions. Those selling you on magical thinking have had their way in state government for at least a decade, so they’ve got a record of accomplishment – or lack thereof – to be held accountable to.

Are your kids any more literate and equipped to compete in the workforce? Those promising you the moon control the education system in your state. Only 7% of 8th graders in Detroit are proficient in reading. That’s right—just 7%. Where else could you fail at your job 93% of the time and still have one, let alone demand raises and an increase in benefits? Florida and Georgia are the only top 10 population states with a lower graduation rate, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Are your children growing up and staying close to home after high school/college? Are they finding a job and raising your grandchildren close by? Michigan was the only state in the 2010 U.S. Census to actually lose population, with the city of Detroit dropping to its lowest population total since 1910—before Henry Ford invented the assembly line.

Have they delivered on all the jobs they promised you? Only once since August of 2008 has Michigan’s unemployment rate been below 8.5%; and in 34 of the previous 50 months, the unemployment rate has been 10% or higher. Furthermore, the unemployment rate in Michigan soared to 12% or higher for 20 consecutive months at one point in 2009 and 2010, right before a new governor and legislature were elected by the state’s voters.

Is that a record to be proud of and persist in pursuing? Albert Einstein once famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result each time.” Isn’t it time for some sanity to be restored to the Great Lakes State?

Suppose you actually persist in this insanity. What would happen? Look no further than California for evidence. That’s a state that’s about a decade further down the drain.

The state’s population is the next to face a demographic winter, with more people moving out than moving in. And where has most of that exodus gone? Why, to Texas of course, whose policies are almost the polar opposite and have therefore produced much more opportunity and prosperity.

Other than Hollywood, about the only people prospering in California nowadays are government employees. The state has over 245,000 employees, by far the most government workers in the nation. Those workers are paid an average of $60,317 in salary plus a phenomenal retirement/benefits package, also by the far the best in the nation. And the $963 million California taxpayers shelled out in overtime pay to state workers in 2011 is more than the next 7 most populous states combined. By the way, on average, the typical California state employee makes over 30% more than Californians employed in the private sector.

That is simply unsustainable because government jobs aren’t the result of wealth creation but rather wealth redistribution. In other words, when a business owner or entrepreneur has a concept he wants to produce for consumers, he needs to hire employees in order to produce and distribute that concept. If the venture is successful, that creates wealth and job opportunities that previously didn’t exist.

However, government doesn’t create wealth but confiscates it. To meet its needs, it must confiscate the resources of those who have wealth in order to acquire its own. The more wealth the government accumulates to meet its needs, the less wealth there is for a business to meet its needs (paying off vendors, expenses, employees, shareholders, general cost of doing business, etc.). When a business gets to the point that it can no longer meet its expenses, it will either go out of business or re-locate to a place where it can. Either way, it takes those jobs with them. Most of the businesses creating new jobs are small businesses that aren’t “too big to fail,” so they can’t bully their legislature or Congress into a handout.

This explains why California trails only New York in state debt, and thus why people and businesses are leaving a state that for generations was flocked to for perpetual sunshine and opportunity.

Those selling you on the idea that the gravy train is endless don’t live in the real world. They either live off the dues your hard work provides for their salary, or they live in a subsidized Valhalla like academia where they can bully gutless politicians, who themselves live outside of economic reality. People simply will not continue working for someone else to get paid if they have other options, and that’s why they are leaving states like yours and California.

Now these utopians want you to help them raise millions more to recall the Michigan politicians who are actually giving you a chance to prosper again. Just as they did in Wisconsin, which failed twice. Just like they did in Michigan this year, when they tried to enshrine their schemes into the state Constititution and lost by 16 points.

Ask yourself a simple question: if they lose an election by 16 points with Barack Obama winning at the top of the ticket, how do they expect to win an election without his coat-tails? Is that really the wisest investment of your hard-earned resources? Wouldn’t a better investment be to provide job training to create a more skilled workforce that can really compete in a technologically-advanced age?

When you really care about workers, you do what’s in their best interests. When you really care about currying favor with the ruling class to maintain your seat at the table, you do what’s in yours. Do you really think the president of the UAW making $618,000/year, or the president of AFSCME making $480,000/year, can really relate to what you’re going through on a daily basis? Do they care more about what you think, or what the ruling class thinks?

Futilely challenging Michigan’s duly enacted Right-to-Work law will enrich no one other than your six-figure salaried national union officials, as well as the six-figure salaried political operatives/media consultants in both political parties. And you’ll get the bill for their expense reports, too.

Besides, why would you want to overturn the Right-to-Work law when the top 7 states with the lowest unemployment are Right-to-Work states, and 9 of the top 10 states to do business according to CNBC are Right-to-Work states? By the way, remember when we said Texas is the place where most Californians are fleeing? It’s the top-rated state on CNBC’s list and is also a Right-to-Work state.

Look at some of the neighboring states you’ll be competing with in the so-called “rust belt.” Wisconsin isn’t yet a Right-to-Work state but has passed measures recently to make it more competitive and limit union domination. Indiana is now a Right-to-Work state. Concerned about the population shift to the south? Perhaps that population is shifting to where the jobs are, and half of the 24 states that have Right-to-Work laws are in the south.

Perhaps you’ve been told that it’s true Right-to-Work states produce more jobs, but they’re low paying jobs. Suppose that’s correct for a second. Is it better to have no job, or any job? Of course, you’d rather have any job; so the point of that argument is without merit on its face.

Not to mention the fact the argument is false to begin with. The truth is that Michigan hasn’t ranked among the top 30 states in per capita personal income since 2004. It hasn’t ranked in the top 20 since 2000. It hasn’t ranked higher than 17th since 1990, which is the furthest back I could research. Michigan isn’t alone.

Other “rust belt” states with similar union influences have suffered similar fates. Ohio has never been in the top 20 states by personal income (measured by an individual’s annual average earnings) in the past 22 years, and neither has Indiana. Wisconsin has only done it twice in 1998 and 1999.

On the other hand, job growth in Right-to-Work states grew by 3.7% from 1999-2009 and fell by 2.8% in forced unionism states. From 1999-2009, personal income in Right-to-Work states grew by 28.7%, compared to 14.7% in forced unionism states.

Which would make sense because more jobs equals more demand for workers. Higher demand for workers increases competition for employees. More competition for employees means higher wages and better benefits as companies compete to attract the best human resources.

That’s how a free market works, which your leaders have been trying to exempt you from. Instead, all they’ve done is exempt you from freedom and prosperity, all the while lining their own pockets to exempt themselves from the recession they helped to cause.

For the sake of your children and grandchildren, don’t repeat this mistake for another decade. You’ve already lost too many young families like my own, who can maintain a better standard of living by living someplace else.

Michigan deserves better, and so do you and your families.

Note: Mr. Deace's original commentary can be accessed at:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/an-open-letter-to-michigans-workers/

At this link you can click on all of the original data sources that contain the statistics he references in his writing.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Guest Commentators Christmas Week, Part 2 - America's Lost Decade

This Christmas week we will be sharing the views of other Americans from across the country regarding freedom and liberty. These citizens also realize that we currently are living with a political class that has enlarged government from a servant of the people into an overbearing, intrusive, obese waste of resources that is endangering our personal and economic futures, much along the lines of Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars.

Today’s post comes from an article by Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas Star entitled: “The Obama Years Could Become Our ‘Lost Decade’.” The primary value of Mr. McClanahan’s position is to shed light on the reality of economic history. Specifically, he destroys the myth that people like Obama and other liberals like to espouse is that higher tax rates can produce a healthy, growing economy. These people often point to the 1950s era of high tax rates and good economic growth.

They fail to point out a number of faults in this argument:

• First, while marginal tax rates were higher, the number of deductions was also extremely high. For those of you old enough, you probably remember that at one point in time people could right off the cost of the infamous “three martini lunch,” their membership at private golf courses, and a whole host of other frivolous tax deductions that made a mockery of the high marginal rates. The correct analysis, something these people never do, is to look at the effective, actual tax rates, not the published marginal tax rates.
• Life today is far different than it was in the 1950s. Today, there is a global economy and global competition which is cut throat. High taxes in one country forces companies to move production and manufacturing to other lower tax countries. This was not the case in the 1950s. The world and much of its ability to manufacture had been destroyed by World War II. The U.S. was one of the few remaining economic giants. That is not the case today and to think we can use 1950s economic theory and tax rates is nonsense.
• These liberal leaning economists and politicians like Obama miss the whole point of freedom: you cannot have personal freedom if you do not have economic freedom. As the government confiscates, and eventually wastes, more and more of our wealth via taxes, we have less freedom to live where we want, to send our kids to the schools we want, to start up a new business, etc. Their cold, academic, analytical approach to the economy and economic policy is void of human compassion and respect for freedom.

Given this nonsensical viewpoint and infatuation with high taxes, the author worries if we are going to live through a decade of bad economic policies, much like Japan has lived through several decades of similar bad policies. Let’s be very clear, the first four years of the Obama term in office has been a very bad stretch, a lost four years, of economic policies and results:

• Record high unemployment and underemployment for record lengths of time.
• Record high deficits spending to the tune of over $5 TRILLION in just four years.
• One failed economic policy after another including Cash For Clunkers, Cash For Appliances, Economic Stimulus Program, HARP Mortgage program, etc.
• The first ever credit rating downgrade in the history of the country.
• Record high numbers of Americans on food stamps and collecting unemployment benefits.
• Cronyism economics that has led to dozens of failed political crony-linked businesses, which has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, including Solyndra, A123, ENER1, Abound Solar, SpectraWatt, Fisker Motors, etc.
• Energy prices are up well over 50% over the past few years, creating a heavy drag on the economy.
• A Federal government bureaucracy that is bloated and riddled with criminal fraud and inefficiency, creating a another heavy drag on economic growth.

Now, many would still blame Bush for these problems, an argument that becomes weaker and more ridiculous every day, every week, and every month that Bush is out of office. But the reality is that unemployment was under 5% and the annual budget deficits were decreasing year over year and were well within reasonable limits until the Democrats took over Congress in 2007, and gas prices were under $2.00 when Bush left office. I was never a Bush fan, never voted for him, but blaming him for the large number of economic failures of Obama is ludicrous and nonconstructive.

But I talk too much. Let Mr. McClanahan explain how Obama’s “taxing the rich” strategy and divisive rhetoric will likely cause us to waste away another four years, eight years total, chasing economic polices and theories that have been proven wrong, both in the real world in and in the world of logic.

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The Obama years could become our ‘lost decade’

By E. Thomas McClanahan


Updated: 2012-12-02T00:07:20Z

After five years of lousy economic performance, you would think people would be sick of it by now. Guess not. How else to explain why we’re having a big fight over inequality instead of arguing over how to jump-start growth?

There’s no denying inequality has increased. Median wages haven’t kept up while families in the upper tax brackets have prospered. But even so, getting the economy back on its typical growth path of 3.4 percent a year should be the overriding imperative.

That would do wonders for the immediate problem of too few jobs and too many jobless — not to mention the problem of lagging incomes and insufficient federal revenue.

Sadly, that’s not the topic du jour.

Prosperity harbors a contradiction. Rapid economic growth requires a relatively high degree of inequality, which is more tolerable when the pie tends to grow for all.

In hard times, those who succeed and enrich themselves draw more envy and the political left amps up its obsession with punishing the rich — expressed in the form of taxes that impair the economy’s potential.

The current inequality obsession has gotten so bad some people think we would be better off running the top tax rate back up to 91 percent, where it was in the 1950s. Those were prosperous times, they say. Businesses were still created. Investment was healthy. And there was less inequality!

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman gave this a try in a recent column, with the added notion that we would also be better off — less inequality! — if organized labor had the same heft it did in the ’50s. As a Nobel laureate, he had to know better.

Today, the economy is weak even with relatively low tax rates. Yet Krugman and his fellow travelers say the solution to our woes is a job market dominated by labor monopolies — unions — and a tax rate that gives upper-income investors and business owners virtually no incentive to earn an additional dollar.

Krugman forgot that the 1950s were a unique period in our history. Much of the developed world’s industrial capital was incinerated in war and was still being rebuilt. Of course the American economy prospered. How could it not?

Moreover, as James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute recently pointed out, jobs were plentiful in those years in part because the post-war boom came at a time when the size of the labor force was reduced, not only by a Depression-era birth dearth but the loss of potential workers killed or wounded in war.

Krugman would profit from reading a recent column by his Times colleague, Eduardo Porter. It includes several passages that were amazing to find in The Times.

A sample: The U.S. tax system is “one of the most progressive” in the developed world. It does “more to redistribute resources and reduce inequality” than tax codes in other countries. But progressive taxes “make it hard to raise money” because they “encourage people to reduce their tax liability rather than to increase their pretax income.” And:

Hitting top earners with high rates “can discourage work and investment.”

Porter was arguing for flatter, European-style taxes like the value-added tax or a carbon tax — levies few people can avoid, which produce revenue like gangbusters. Porter doesn’t think Washington does enough to support low-income families compared with big-government social democracies, which rake in much more revenue.

The European debt crisis, however, highlights the flaws in that model.

It’s true we must have more revenue and the Simpson-Bowles plan, once assumed to be a roadmap for the fiscal cliff talks, would have produced more by carving loopholes from the tax code. But it also would have encouraged growth by rolling back the top rates. Forget it: Obama now insists we dispense with the rollback. To heck with growth: He wants to carve out the loopholes and raise the rates.

If he gets his way, we could face four more years of economic anemia — which means we may someday look back on the Obama years as the Japanese look back on their “lost decade.”

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Guest Commentators Christmas Week Specials, Part 1: An Ode To The Role Of Big Government (Not!) By Dr. Elaina F. George

This Christmas week we will be sharing the views of other Americans from across the country regarding freedom and liberty. These citizens also realize that we currently are living with a political class that has enlarged government from a servant of the people into an overbearing, intrusive, obese waste of resources that is endangering our personal and economic futures, much along the lines of Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars.

Today's post is an essay on government ineffectiveness and inefficiency from Dr. Elaina George, a member of the national advisory council of the Project 21 black leadership network. She is a board-certified otolaryngologist and host of a weekly talk radio show, "Medicine On Call," that explores health issues and the politics of medicine. Comments may be sent to Project21@nationalcenter.org. She is assoicated with Project 21, the National Leadership Network Of  Conservative African-Americans.

Dr. George touches on the many shortcomings and overreaching of government including the failure of public/government schools, the government funding of obesity in the country, the "nanny state," and the loss of freedom in this country.


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An Ode To The Role Of Big Government


by Elaina F. George, MD 

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a vision of the federal government as our savior is being perpetuated by the media and the left.

This romanticized vision of the benefits of an ever-expanding government assuming command of everything — from disaster relief to managing our waistlines to promoting breastfeeding to mandatory vaccinations and to how we live and die — needs to be given serious thought.

What price are we paying to allow the government to extend far beyond its constitutional mandate to "provide for the common defense" and "promote the general welfare" to the degree that America is descending into a nanny state that doesn't "secure the blessings of liberty"?

Despite the praise for the government's response to Hurricane Sandy, the sight of people standing in lines for hours for gasoline or huddled in their homes with limited or no supplies of food and water seems to provide an answer to the question.

Dependence on the government has led to potentially tragic vulnerability. As a people, too many of us have voluntarily ceded our individual authority and responsibility to a system designed to treat us as a collective group of children incapable of making decisions for our own good and the security of our families.

Fear is the predominant driving force encouraging so many to remain passive — apparently valuing safety above the freedom to speak, think and strive to achieve the full extent of one's God-given talent — which is systematically stripped away by government intervention.

Does the good of the many really outweigh the needs of the few when we are moving ever more rapidly towards creating a society that is increasingly more petty, selfish and small-minded in the name of fairness and spreading the wealth around?

Some might consider it a fair compromise if the government actually took measures to protect us from harm. But the assumption really doesn't meet the reality:

• Instead of the endless campaigns against obesity that rely on proposed moratoriums on Big Gulps and large servings of movie popcorn, how about scaling back taxpayer subsidies on sugar and corn? Studies suggest that high fructose corn syrup plays a substantial role in rising obesity rates despite the government essentially paying for its production. Yet the government promotes them and props them up with public monies.
• Instead of watching the cancer rates rise and simply spending increasing amounts of money on treatment leading to exploding health care costs, there are those who say that the government should look more into controversial practices such as organic farming and genetically-modified foods.
• The government should stop promoting policies that lock children in bloated, wasteful and ineffective public schools where teachers and administrators essentially pride themselves for fostering mediocrity — especially among the poor and minority children. Instead of acquiescing to recent decisions such as the one in Florida, where the state's board of education set academic goals on the basis of race, perhaps it is time to give power back to parents, teachers and the children who are left without a choice and are unable to compete successfully in our society.

Chest-thumping about the wonders of FEMA and the alleged efficiency of the federal government leaves lingering doubts. Remember the people affected by Hurricane Katrina who were forced into formaldehyde-laced trailers? How about the prolonged fiasco surrounding the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

This is the recent past — government has not changed. And declining goods and services in the northeast may yet reveal that a big government hasn't really been the solution to Hurricane Sandy's victims.

Expanding government can still be controlled. But America is coming to a potential point of no return. Emotions cannot be allowed to dominate the promulgation of policy. An explosion of government interference will not help our nation, and — once big enough — cannot be stopped.

Published by the National Center for Public Policy Research. Reprints permitted provided source is credited. New Visions Commentaries reflect the views of their author, and not necessarily those of Project 21, other Project 21 members, or the National Center for Public Policy Research, its board or staff.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Bonus Post: Eight Days Of Logic and Sanity That Prove No American Should Pay Another Penny In Taxes - Protecting Our Kids and Schools

Over the past eight posts we have gone through an extensive list of why no American, rich or poor, should pay another cent in taxes of the Federal government, given how wasteful, inefficient, and criminally infested most government programs are. Our final post on Friday showed how to reduce our staggering $16 TRILLION national debt by a healthy $9 TRILLION over the next decade or so with minimal pain to most Americans AND no increase in taxes.

Well, we thought that would be our last post in this series, a series that shows how ridiculous, stupid, and divisive President Obama has been in these fiscal cliff negotiations. Yesterday, I came across a website post from the Independent Journal Review that listed out the 22 worst expenditure of taxpayer wealth in 2012 which requires an additional post in this series:

http://www.ijreview.com/2012/12/26278-22-of-the-worst-government-expenditures-of-2012/23/

We have covered many of these atrocious wastes of money in previous posts, based on sound research into other news sources, so I believe that most of these are legitimate, actual wastes of taxpayer wealth from 2012.

I would like to review these 22 instances of waste today with two objectives in mind:

1) Reinforce the proof we laid out over the past week of posts that we need to cut overspending by the Federal government, not raise taxes on any American.

2) Consider what these unneeded expenses could have done to prevent the tragic school shooting in Connecticut.

Thus, the Independent Journal Review’s vote for the worst Federal spending in 2012:

1. Tax loopholes for the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) – professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits pay nothing in Federal income taxes($91 million worth of taxes)
2. Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)
3. Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)
4. The building of a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel”- part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
5. Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)
6. Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)
7. Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)
8. “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)
9. Oklahoma’s layover boondoggle, a scarcely used airport in Oklahoma receiving nearly half-a-million in taxpayer dollars only to transfer funds elsewhere in the state ($450,000)
10. The 2012 Alabama Watermelon Queen tour, paid for in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “to promote the consumption of Alabama’s watermelon through appearances of the Alabama Watermelon Queen at various events and locations” ($25,000)
11. Out-of-this-world Martian – $947,000 – NASA is studying what food astronauts could eat on Mars by simulating a Mars outpost at a barren location in Hawaii
12. ObamaPhones’ – $1.5 billion. Enrollment in the Lifeline program has skyrocketed as people sign up to get free cell phone for which they qualify if they are on federal tested programs
13. Speed reading faces – $30,000. NSF funds used to study whether people can determine a person’s sexual orientation with just a glance.
14. Fighting obesity with giant graffiti carrots – $13,000. Anti-obesity funds pay for a giant graffiti mural focused on sustainability.
15. Another bridge to nowhere – $520,000. A covered bridge in Ohio that is not used by cars or tied to any walking or bike trail will be rehabilitated with federal funds
16. Free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees – $142,419. A Department of Transportation grant paid for free bus rides during the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Average prices for Super Bowl tickets are around $3,000
17. Movie theater field trip to see “Red Tails” – $57,000. Federal education funds were misused in Texas to send fifth-grade boys to a movie theater to see “Red Tails” (girls were left behind).
18. Self-reflection video game using Henry David Thoreau’s 1845 writings – $40,000. National Endowment for the Humanities funding pays for video game simulating Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond.
19. U.S. Iraqi police State Department training program burns through hundreds of millions, crashes in flames – $400.2 million. State Dept’s Iraq police training program has failed miserably, according the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. No objectives were created, and classes did not help Iraqis at all. The State Department will hand over to the Iraqis several building projects that ended up being unnecessary
20. The streetcar named No Desire – $35.6 million. Federal transportation money will help build a trolley in St. Louis that has been called the “Streetcar Named No Desire” by one local. It duplicates existing light rail and public transportation, some say.
21. Sidewalks to nowhere anger local citizens – $1.1 million. Department of Transportation funds are used for “sidewalks to nowhere” in Florida and Michigan that have local citizens angered. In Florida, the sidewalk was a “safe route to school” that was still unsafe. In Michigan, Federal requirements forced a county to make sidewalk ramps at an intersection without sidewalks.
22. Congressional salaries total almost $100 million. Seems like they should be able to get something done for that much money? Especially since these people will work only 13 Fridays in 2012 and worked less than three weeks in the three months leading up to the November elections.

These 22 wasteful spending expenses total $2,160,420,419. Let’s do some simple math, in light of the Connecticut school shootings:

• According to the Federal government, there 132,183 private and public schools in this country up through high school. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average police officer in this country earns about $55,000 a year.
• If we decided to place an armed, trained police officer in every school in America, the annual cost would be about $7.3 billion a year.
• If we could somehow magically redirect the above wasteful spending away from these trivial expenses to funding protection for our kids in school, we would be able to put a trained, armed police officer in 30% of the nation’s schools. ($7.3 billion in police officer costs divided into the $2.16 billion in spending on the 22 projects/program listed above.)
• Thus, if we could find another 50 or so other, similarly wasteful Federal government spending instances (something that would be extremely easy to do), we could annually put a trained, armed police officer in EVERY U.S. school, without raising taxes on any American.
• Another approach would be to magically redirect the $2.16 billion to protecting 30% of our schools and charge every American household just $.85 a month in taxes to cover the other 70% of schools.
• Still another approach is to consider the fact that the U.S. has needlessly deployed over 130,000 troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Rather than using taxpayer money to defend Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, maybe it is time to maybe it is time to use that taxpayer money to defend our kids within the confines of this country.

The bottom line is that, as nation, we have the wealth and ability today to more fully protect our kids in their schools without killing any vital Federal program or project, without going through the fruitless and divisive political debate of gun control, and without raising taxes on any American.

We have the ability… but we probably do not have the politicians with the courage to do so. We could have done the same thing after the Columbine school killings, the same types of wasteful spending were going on that year also but the political class did not redirect wasteful spending then either. Unless we decide to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire, our kids will continue to be under protected, the Federal government will continue to spend our tax wealth on totally inane and unnecessary expenditures, and in the coming years when the next maniac goes wild, we will wring our hands and wonder why nothing was done.

If you do not want history to repeat itself, may I suggest you make a call to your politicians and start insisting that we can actually magically redirect wasteful spending to start protecting our kids and stop worrying about what a computer simulation of prom week might look like.

The useless Oklahoma $450,000 airport:

The $520,000 Ohio bridge to nowhere:

The $1.1 million sidewalks to nowhere:

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
 



Part 8: Eight Days Of Logic and Sanity That Prove No American Should Pay Another Penny In Taxes

This is the final post in a series of eight that prover conclusively that no American, rich or poor should pay another penny in taxes, given how wasteful, inefficient, incompetent, redundant, and how rife with criminal acitvity current political class and government actions always are:

• Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security lose well over $200 billion a year to waste and criminal fraud.
• The IRS is so incompetent that even they admit that they fail to collect over $380 billion a year from U.S. tax evaders.
• Food stamp, unemployment benefits, and other government programs lose billions of dollars a year to waste and criminal fraud.
• Hundreds of redudant Federal government programs waste tens of billions of dollars every year on job training, teacher education, and a myriad of other worthless Federal programs.
• The Federal government recently spent over $300 million on two Navy ships it never used, the State Department recently built an $80 million Afghanistan consulate building it will never use, the TSA recently purchased almost $200 million worth of airport security equipment that it will never use, etc., etc., etc.,

You get the idea. We have a totally inefficient and ineffective government that wastes hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars every year. There is no need for any American's taxes to rise until the Washington political class proves it can run a competent, cost effective government. To prove our case, consider the following analysis we did earlier this year when we took over $9 TRILLION worth of debt out of the national debt and Federal government spending stream WITHOUT RAISING ANYONE'S TAXES.

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012


United States of Purple Presidency - A Plan To Resolve Our National Debt Problem

The political class has driven the financial viability of the nation's economy, democracy, and future to the edge of collapse by running up over $15 TRILLION in Federal government debt. This is the equivalent of saddling every American household with over $130,000 of debt.

The Obama administration would like us to think that it can solve this atrocious debt situation by taxing the wealthy more. But how viable is that? Let's look at some different scenarios, using the IRS tax data we used yesterday to see if his idea of taxing the rich is even viable.

- Let's assume that Obama put a 10% surtax on every dollar any American earning over $1,000,000. Using the 2009 tax return data, this would generate about $727 billion over ten years, assuming that these Americans were still motivated enough to continue earning this much money every year. This tactic would result in paying off less than less than 5% of the $15 TRILLION national debt.

- Let's get really crazy and assume that Obama confiscated every dollar those million dollar earners earned in 2009. This would give the Federal government about $549 billion to pay down the national debt (assuming that they actually did use this windfall to pay down debt). This would pay off less than 4% of the national debt.

Unfortunately, you could not replicate this tactic for ten years because no sane person would continue to earn over a million dollars a year through hard work if the government was only going to confiscate all of it.

- Let's next assume that the whole country kicked in extra taxes to pay off the national debt. What if every American tax filer, regardless of earnings, paid an extra 3% in Federal income taxes? Over ten years this would generate about $2.5 TRILLION which would only pay off about 17% of the $15 TRILLION national debt.

- If we jumped that extra tax percentage up to 10%, it would come up with about $8.5 TRILLION and cover just over 50% of the national debt. However, it is doubtful the economy would stay healthy if a full 10% the nation's wealth was annually diverted to the Federal government to pay down debt. This would cause major problems elsewhere in the economy.

And all this assumes the national debt stays at $15 TRILLION. Given the budget plans that have come out of the Obama administration over the past year or so, if nothing changes, the Federal government is likely to add more than $9 TRILLION to the $15 TRILLION current national debt in the next ten years. Thus, you cannot increase taxes fast enough, on any or all Americans, to keep up with the excessive spending of the political class, regardless of what Obama say.

But what if we could take more than $9 TRILLION out of the national debt without confiscating any more of Americans' personal wealth? What if you could take out $9 TRILLION without significant adverse effects on most Americans' lives?

The data below comes from a wide range of government and non-government sources, representing some heavy analytical work and research into how to make our Federal government more efficient and effective without causing unnecessary harm or hardship on most American citizens. Sources for the following government budget cuts include:

•U.S. Public Interest Group
•The National Taxpayer Union
•General Accountability Office
•Congressional Budget Office
•Associated Press
•Senate Reports
•The Cato Institute
•Housing And Urban Development

1) Annual taxpayer wealth lost to waste, inefficiencies, and criminal fraud in the following Federal programs:

•Medicare: $60 - $90 billion
•Medicaid: $40 - $60 billion
•Social Security: $100 billion
•One Federal Unemployment Program: $19 billion
•One Federal Food Stamp Program: $2 - $3 billion
•Total: $221 - $272 billion, midpoint = $246 billion
•Savings over ten years if you just eliminated the waste, inefficiencies and fraud - $2,460,000,000,000 ($2.46 TRILLION)

2) Annual uncollected taxes due to the Federal government but not collected from tax evaders: $385 billion

•Savings over ten years if you just reduce the illegal tax evasion by 50% - $1,925,000,000,000 ($1.925 TRILLION)

3) The U.S. has about 84,000 combat troops unnecessarily stationed in Europe, about 30,000 combat troops unnecessarily stationed in South Korea, and about 25,000 combat troops unnecessarily stationed in Japan, serving defense purposes that were obsoleted decades ago. The Obama administration is about to unnecessarily deploy about 2,500 troops in Australia. If 75% of these troops were brought home, the country would save about about $212,000,000,000 over ten years.

4) If we cancel the production of the V-22 Osprey aircraft because it is over budget, likely to under perform, and has been designated as not critical by the Sustainable Defense Task Force, we would save $6.2 billion over the next five years.

5) If we cancel the production of the F-35 jet fighter which, according to the Sustainable Defense Task Force, "may represent all that is wrong with our acquisition process" and "would provide a capability that is not warranted considering emerging threats," we would save $22.5 billion over the next five years.

6) If we cancel the military Space Tracking and Surveillance System, which can be replaced with lower cost and more reliable options, we would save the Pentagon $5 billion over the next five years.

7) If we cancel the outdated, unreliable, and unneeded Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, because the General Accountability Office has cited the program's history of cost growth, schedule misses (14 years late), and performance failures as reasons for terminating the program, we would save $16.3 billion over the next five years.

8) The General Accountability Office found that the Army, Navy and Air Force are wasting billions of dollars a year by purchasing items that were either never used or were never required. The GAO identified purchasing reform processes that could save $36.9 billion a year or about $369 billion over ten years.

9) Terminating various unneeded corporate welfare programs would produce substantial savings. These programs include the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Market Access Program, trade association subsidies for foreign marketing, subsidies to large agriculture business and wealthy farmers, tax credits for the blending of ethanol, the ultra-deepwater natural gas and petroleum research program, public timber sales subsidies, and Southeastern Power Administration. Just ending these corporate welfare programs would save about $12 billion a year or about $120 billion over ten years.

10) The Federal government owns more than 55,500 buildings that are either not used or are underused. A detailed analysis suggests that if 50% of these buildings were eliminated over the next five years, not an unrealistic target, savings in the area of $48 billion would be realized.

11) According to government audits of Housing and Urban development, the Federal government wastes about $4.5 billion a year due to bad accounting and billing processes. Fix this problem and save about $45 billion over twelve years.

12) Using conservative estimates, annual earmarks, which are usually nothing more than thinly disguised ways for incumbent politicians to fund their re-election campaign with taxpayer money, cost the Federal government about $16 billion a year in unneeded expenses. Eliminating earmarks would save $160 billion over ten years.

13) According to the General Accountability Office:

•The Federal government has 15 different agencies overseeing food safety laws.
•It has more than 20 programs helping the homeless.
•It has 80 programs to help economic development.
•It has 82 agencies working on improving teacher quality, few of which are working if you see how poorly American kids are being educated vs. the rest of the world.
•It has 47 agencies working on job training.
•It has 18 programs working on food and nutrition assistance.

This type of redundancy results in tremendous waste and unneeded overhead, duplicate responsibilities, and inefficient service. A formal Senate report and analysis of the situation, estimates that between $100 billion and $200 billion a year could be saved by consolidating and downsizing these functions. If we take the midrange of the estimates, we end up with $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 TRILLION) in savings over ten years.

14) A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report identified savings in the area of government spending on Science, Space and Technology - savings over ten years - $25.26 billion

15) The CBO found Agriculture savings over ten years - $3.87 billion. This does not include the termination of unneeded ethanol subsidies and other farm support programs that are no longer needed, given how well the American farming industry is doing today.

16) CBO - Natural Resources and Environment savings over ten years - $32.23 billion. These savings are mostly concentrated in programs that support corporations, not endangering basic government environmental programs.

17) CBO -Commerce and Housing savings over ten years - $5.42 billion. This does not include the savings that could be found by cutting back on the widespread fraud and mismanagement in government housing programs.

18) CBO - Transportation savings over ten years - $141.64 billion

19) CBO - Community and Regional Development savings over ten years - $21.94 billion

20) CBO - Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services savings over ten years - $45.42 billion

21) CBO - Income Security savings over ten years - $68.83 billion

22) CBO - Veterans Benefits and Services savings over ten years - $21.50 billion

23) CBO - Allowances savings over ten years - $2.54 billion

24) CBO - Administrative of Justice savings over ten years - $10.26 billion

25) CBO - Social Security savings over ten years - $388.52 billion. Part of these savings are compatible with the recommendation from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" which was to raise the retirement age to 70.

Not included the $388 billion is another step from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," which was to uncap the total amount of earnings subject to Social Security tax. The CBO estimates that raising the cap amount the way they want to would provide an additional revenue of $503.4 billion to the Social Security finances over ten years.

This estimate also does not include the final "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" Social Security recommendation which was to terminate Social Security payments to anyone whose net worth is over $3 million in assets, i.e. people like Donald Trump, Warren Buffet, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates who do not need the checks to live comfortably will not get them.

27) CBO - General Government expense savings over ten years - $5.21 billion

28) Since Obama came into office, the Federal payroll has grown by 231,000 civilian employees despite reduced tax receipts, the lingering impacts of the Great Recession, and the overall dire employment situation throughout the country. Since most of us would agree that we have not seen a corresponding rise in the quality of government service since these people have been hired. Getting rid of them, like most efficient businesses would do, would not result in a degradation in Federal government services.

If we conservatively estimate that the weighted taxpayer cost (wages, benefits, and retirement costs) for these newly hired employees is $80,000 a year, than letting them go would result in annual savings of about $18.48 billion a year or $184.8 billion over ten years.

29) In any measure of education attainment, U.S. kids usually fare very poorly when compared to the education received by kids in other countries. Usually the U.S. is bested by a dozen or more countries when it comes to comparing standardized test results. The Department of Education has been around for about thirty years and has done nothing to change this low performance.

Thus, given its nonperformance, the entire department should be eliminated. Cato suggests that this ill performing government entity be terminated at once, its responsibilities becoming the responsibility of the states to educate their own kids and the American taxpayer can save the annual $107 billion cost of the department. I would put a twist to this termination recommendation

I would phase out the department over a four year period but would send the department's budget as block grants to the states during that four year phase out. The states could use the block grants to improve the teaching ability of their own state's teachers, improve their technology infrastructure, improve their curriculums, and improve their universities' teacher education curriculum.

At the end of four years, the states would be in a much better position to educate our kids, heaven knows the Federal Department of Education has not done anything worthwhile. 10 year savings - $909.5 billion.

30) Much like the Department of Education, the Federal government's Department of Energy has done nothing to get us to a coherent national energy strategy and policy and has not funded any breakthrough energy technologies. Terminate the entity and let the private market research and development new energy technologies. 10 year savings according to Cato - $382.8 billion.

31) Cato has done similar analyses on just about every other Federal organization, some of which we have already touched on. In order to avoid double counting, I will not go into their agriculture subsidy reductions and military spending reductions, given what we have already identified some of them above.

However, they have identified 10 year savings of $21.2 billion from the Commerce Department and if you conservatively accept only half of their Department of Transportation cuts, you get another 10 year savings of $424.4 billion.

These cuts alone would save the Federal government over $9 TRILLION in expenses and costs over the next ten years with minimal impacts on needy Americans and ordinary American citizens. The $9 TRILLION+ does not include additional savings that would come from the following areas:

•More military cuts not listed above.
•Reining in Medicare and Medicaid costs beyond the fraud and waste savings listed above.
•Deny Social Security payments in retirement to any American who had a net wealth of over $3 million.
•Savings from interest payments not paid because the Federal government took $9 TRILLION of debt out of play.
•The repeal of Obama Care which would save the country from expending an additional $300 billion over the next ten years, if you believe the recent analysis from the head actuary of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
•The termination of the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac government agencies and the associated hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies they are likely to consume in the next ten years.
•Elegantly privatize some government functions such as what Canada and other European countries have successfully done with their national air traffic control processes and postal systems and allow private contractors do the TSA screening function at all U.S. airports since we know from experience that they can do a far better job for less budget money than government employed TSA screeners.

People far smarter than me can determine the value of these additional efficiencies in government operations. In fact, Cato has already done all of this work and summarized it at their fabulous website, http://www.downsizinggovernment.com/. Their comprehensive analysis found a way to reduce annual Federal government spending over time by about $1.16 TRILLION a year, creating a ten year debt reduction of $11.6 TRILLION.

This is in the same ball park of our $9 TRILLION in identified savings and the additional unquantified savings in the list above. Two separate analyses, about the same results, indicating that this is doable without raising taxes on any American, rich or poor.

The above cuts are a great start. However, one of the first acts as President in the United States of Purple would be to convene a commission of smart Americans that have already analyzed the need for drastically reduced government spending, put them in a room, and have them work together to overlay their plans together to come out with one overall plan, based on their expertise and past experiences in this area.

Members of this commission would be drawn from at least the following organizations:

1.President Obama's defunct and severely underutilized Deficit Reduction Commission

2.The Cato Institute

3.The Concord Coalition

4.The General Accountability Office

5.The Congressional Budget Office

6.The Urban Institute

7.The National Taxpayer Union

8.The U.S. Public Interest Group

9.Bipartisan Policy Center

10.Others TBD

Most of these cost cuts would have minimal impact on the average American. More importantly, it would reduce government expenses, allowing more Americans to keep more of their personal wealth, it would increase our personal freedom, it would unmuddy the uncertainty that the Obama administration has injected into the economy, and it would keep the social programs that many Americans rely on (e.g. Social Security, Medicare, etc.) viable and fiscally solvent.

That is how life would be in a Purple Presidency. Given the history of the Obama administration and the rest of the political class, this solution is beyond their capabilities and comprehension. Otherwise, they would have done these things already.

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And this is why no American, rich or poor, should pay another penny in taxes. Eigth days of logic and sanity prove it.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w