Back to Basics

I know border security hucksterism when I see it — whether it’s from Democrats or Republicans. Longtime readers will remember that when pro-shamnesty President Bush and the GOP backed a Secure Fence Act in 2007, I called it what it was: The Fence in Name Only. Sadly, the call was all too right.

Today, the president will sign a $600 million border security measure passed by the Senate yesterday. It’s another election-year gesture in the wake of Arizona’s SB1070 backlash against federal immigration non-enforcement.

Stewart Baker at the Volokh Conspiracy breaks it down:

It funds about 1000 new Border Patrol agents, adding to the 20 thousand already on the force. That’s a continuation of Bush Administration policies, which roughly doubled the size of the Border Patrol from 10 to 20 thousand over eight years. A five percent increase in border staffing won’t make a big difference, but it’s better than the Obama administration’s initial budget, which proposed to cut the size of the force by one percent. It also adds around 250 new officers at ports of entry – the legal crossing points from Mexico. That makes sense. As illegal crossings get harder, smuggling through the ports of entry will increase, and these officers will be needed.

The bill adds money for a couple more drones, again following Bush Administration policy. Drones have value, but I can’t help wondering how much these will add. The real problem in using them has been the extreme reluctance of the FAA to allow UAV flights along the border (or anywhere else, for that matter).

…Much was made of the fact that these increases were “paid for.” That’s true, sort of. It looks as though a lot of it was “paid for” by canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in fence-building and air security spending.

Same old, open-borders business as usual.

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I am going to be trying this particular tactic out for a couple of weeks and see how it works out. As it typically has worked out these days, I write my article, fully hoping to engage in discussion, only to go to work the next day and not be able to discuss the topic that I wrote about! For example the only comment I got in today was a response to Charlie during my lunch break. So what I am going to do is take two days for the discussion from Monday morning. As it stands I have been posting an article Monday morning around 2:00am and then allowing discussion for two days and doing open mic Wednesday morning. Rather than post no article on Monday night / Tuesday morning, I am going to write a follow up that answers some of the comments from the discussion of that day. Since the Monday morning article is usually the “heavy” one for the week, it will help to ensure that I continue to follow up on my thoughts and engage those of you that take the time to comment on my articles. Plus I can take a bit more time and answer a thought or two more thoroughly. I will start tonight with the idea of de-regulation.

I get those that feel complete de-regulation is the path to ruin. Charlie, I know you are a smart guy and I respect your opinion. But I do think that we are having a disconnect if we believe that the correct path forward is to further regulate the markets. That is wrong for two reasons. First, the path of regulation is not only more corrupt, it has zero effectiveness. Second, the result of no government intervention is not nearly as dire as many make it out to be.

Government regulation of business is not a needed thing. More important, it is a tactic that has zero effectiveness. We have been heaping regulations on everything from financial transactions to the allowed size of a sellable banana (which would be a hysterical example if it weren’t true). Regulations have done no good in stopping the bad things from happening to those we are trying to protect. The reality is that the only effect regulations have had thus far in industry are the following:

- They increase the costs associated with production. This raises the cost of the good or service. There is no regulation in history that did not increase costs and there is no increase in costs in history that were not passed on to the consumer. Those costs that were unable to be passed on to the consumer resulted in the failure of business (General Motors, for example).

- They spell out to the letter what a company who is not honest must do to LEGALLY defraud its customers, while simultaneously creating a situation where the consumer has no recourse for what was done because there was no law prohibiting said action.

- They put the power to curtail regulation in the hands of government officials, which leads to campaign contribution demands, corruption, and corporate favoritism. Essentially it gives the government officials, instead of the market, the power to determine the fate and level of success of private industry. Companies rise and fall at the whim of politicians and federal officials rather than based on market need, market desire, and proper business feasibility.

- They cause the public to no longer take responsibility for their own outcome, safety, or potential consequences. The FDA is a prime example. Because it exists, people simply have no idea what is safe and what is not unless the FDA tells them so. And the FDA system is as corrupt and manipulative as any in America. Industry doesn’t have to meet the standards of consumers, it only has to meet the standards of the FDA, which are lower and suspect at that. Other perfect examples are the EPA, the Department of Education, the SEC, the IRS, and just about every other federal regulatory agency.

President Barack Obama campaigned on the notion that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000. Or was it $225,000? Or maybe it was $200,000. Anyway, that’s what he said, even though the figures changed from time to time… depending on his mood, I guess.

But of course we’re seeing that that was just one of his many li… er, deceptions. Because, as a recent Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) report revealed, there’s a “…Tax Tsunami On The Horizon.”

Beginning in 2011, when the tax cuts instituted under President George W. Bush expire, all sorts of tax increases will hit the American taxpayer—for those making more than $200,000 and for those making less.

Here are some of them, according to IBD:

• The Federal Estate tax goes from zero this year to 55 percent on estates of $1 million or more.
• The tax brackets change. The lowest bracket increases from 10 percent to 15 percent, the next increases from 25 percent to 28 percent and the old 28 percent bracket increases to 31 percent. At the higher end, the 33 percent bracket goes up to 36 percent and the 35 percent bracket increases to 39.6 percent.
• The marriage penalty returns.
• Capital gains taxes increase from 15 percent to 20 percent. The tax on dividends will go from 15 percent to 39.6 percent. That’s an astonishing jump of 164 percent. And both of these will increase more in 2013 as the healthcare reform bill adds a 3.8 percent Medicare tax for those making $200,000 and joint filers making $250,000.
• The tax credit for children decreases from $1,000 per child to $500.

According to IBD, letting the Bush tax cuts expire will cost taxpayers $115 billion next year alone, and $2.6 trillion through 2020, Congressional Budget Office figures show.

And this is just the first wave. The IBD article outlines billions of dollars of new taxes brought on by Obamacare that kick in over the coming years, such as the increase in the number of people affected by the alternative minimum tax (ATM) from 4 million families this year to 28.5 million next year.

The biggest con game of all is that tax increases are sold as necessary to fund the operations of government. Taxes do not to fund government. They are merely a means for government to steal more of your wealth.

The unemployment rate keeps climbing and the polling results for the President and Congress keep falling. Conservatives are well aware that the Obama administration has relentlessly pursued legislation harmful to the economy, but just how bad it is and how bad it will become in 2011 may not have sunk in fully for the public in general.

Nothing among Obama’s legislative agenda and executive orders has done anything other than push the nation more and more toward bankruptcy. Perhaps the oddest aspect has been the action of the Federal Reserve which is, in theory, an independent entity. Suffice to say, it is pursuing policies that reflect the same disastrous actions that prolonged the 1930s Great Depression. Not surprisingly, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has pronounced the outlook “unusually uncertain.”

The worst is yet to come because the end of the Bush tax cuts on December 31, 2010 will generate major increases in taxation that will affect all but the appalling 40% who pay no taxes at all. This isn’t redistribution of wealth. It is a penalty levied on investors, entrepreneurs, and those who still have jobs.

One of those policies, the president’s shut-down of drilling in the Gulf, twice rejected by the courts, will add thousands more to the ranks of the unemployed without any justification.

When the tax cut deadline comes at midnight on December 31, the “death tax” on estates will return, increasing 55% on estates of $1 million or more, but it won’t just be “the rich” who are affected. As reported in Investor’s Business Daily, “The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50%, to 15% from 10%.” These brackets will increase 25% to 39.6% for others.

The marriage penalty returns and the capital gains tax “will jump 33%” and “the tax on dividends will go all the way from 15% to 39.6%–a 164% increase.” Wall Street will hit a wall of resistance from investors.

A spending-crazed Congress will have $115 billion more to waste and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it will reach $2.6 trillion by 2020, a mere decade from now. These funds are theoretically going to be allocated toward paying for the vastly expanded Obamacare “reform” of the already insolvent Medicare program.

A series of articles from Grover Norquist (Newsmax.com) in late June flagged us to a series of articles most of which covered the huge set of taxes on everything that breathes or not.

This is the shoe that we’ve been waiting to hear drop; only it will be more like a 100 megaton thunder clap that will ring in your ears and wallets for a long, long time.  As we have all found out since the stealthy passage of ObamaCare by means of bribes, job offers, and traitorous actions of Dem Congresspersons who had said they would not vote for it but then did, as all untrustworthy Democrats are wont to do, there are a very high number of new taxes that will be imposed on Americans beginning in July 2010.

And believe me, it’s just the beginning, my fellow country men and women.  So far there have been 21 new taxes uncovered in the ultra large bill and as Grover Norquist via Newsmax.com reports that Obama had pledged that “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.”

Well, guess what?  He lied.  But by now we also have found out that he does that with frequent regularity.  It’s part of his charm; lie to the people and SMILE showing all those glossy white teeth which we’ve also come to know to be as deadly as a shark’s.  I believe that the only time we can trust what he says is when he when he is not talking.  In his case, silence is golden.

Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but the very first tax to go into effect from the ObamaCare bill will take effect on July 1 is the 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning services, per Norquist.  So, you say, my $10 session will cost me $11 now; big deal.  Yes friend, big deal; but don’t forget to add up the cumulative effect when all TWENTY ONE new taxes from this bill hit you between your greenbacks.

Norquist also explains that “at least seven (of these new taxes) directly break Obama’s central campaign promise.”

The big time spenders in Congress (liberal Democrats) have a plethora of other spending bills that shouldn’t have necessarily been that way.  These bills are part of the Congressional Financial Reform that liberals talk about a lot, but seldom DO anything about it.

All societies, even the most primitive, established laws to ensure that relations between people did not lead to the worst offenses such a murder, rape, and thievery of all descriptions. As societies evolved, the number of laws did as well, ever rising to meet the many ways thought necessary to keep the peace.

In ancient societies, punishments were by our modern standards, draconian. Death was not an uncommon sentence for most offenses. We can measure modern societies by this rule and it is no surprise that Middle Eastern and North African nations, operating under Islamic Sharia law, frequently impose this penalty.

In an effort to maintain decorum or conformity, regimes often passed laws regarding what people could and could not wear. The Greeks and Romans were particularly concerned about trousers or slacks. The Codex Theodosanus, around 443 CE, banned them. England’s Dress Act of 1746 banned kilts and tartans, but the act was later repealed in 1782. In Iran, the wearing of a mullet hair style was just banned.

Virtually nothing is beyond the interest of lawmakers. In the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota, it is against the law to assault a police dog, throw a snowball on public or private property or break into a dog pound. In Little Rock, Arkansas, it is illegal to honk your horn after 9 PM any place where sandwiches or cold drinks are served. In Canada, a person does not have to accept more than twenty-five pennies.

The general rule is that the larger a central government grows, the more laws and regulations it generates. As we have seen with Obamacare, the fact that sixty percent or more of the citizens affected opposed it made no difference as the Democrat controlled Congress engaged in all manner of bribery and chicanery to achieve its passage. This is likely to be repeated with Cap-and-Trade and other nation-killing legislation.

With laws come the regulations to enforce them. In April, The Heritage Foundation published a report, authored by James Gattuso and Stephen Keen, on the rising tide of regulation under the Obama administration.

“These regulatory taxes do not appear on any balance sheet, yet cost Americans about $1 trillion every year. The regulatory burden on Americans continued to surge during 2009, with record increases in costs, thanks to both the Bush and Obama Administrations.”

Margaret Thatcher once said that, “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”.  One could easily add that another problem is that the other people eventually want to get paid back.

It’s a problem that is becoming more real with each passing day.  As the interest on that borrowed money consumes more of our nation’s economy, our options and our future will be increasingly limited.  The result is a threat to our individual freedoms and economic liberty, and eventually even our national security.

In the last fiscal year federal spending was almost twenty-five percent of GDP, and we now have the biggest annual budget deficit since World War II, (over one a half trillion).  Annual federal government spending is on pace to exceed forty percent of GDP within our children’s lifetimes, and our national debt, (the total of all annual deficits), will triple by 2020.

What will our economy look like after the government raises taxes or inflates the dollar to cover interest payments on our the debt?  What will our personal liberty or prosperity look like?

The problem, as Reagan used to say, is government.  It’s too big and it spends too much, usually in the name of helping people.  But does it help anyone if their government goes broke in the process?

More spending on government means more money taken from taxpayers that would otherwise be put to more productive economic ends and grow our economy, thus helping the same people those expensive programs are supposed to help.

The dirty little secret is that when it comes to helping people, the political argument is not over whether or not to help those who truly need it.  The debate is over how.  And liberals want to do so in such a way that controls options, rather than enables and empowers individuals.  They take money, then dole it back out as they see fit.  It’s called redistribution, or “spreading the wealth around” as Obama referred to it, and it leads to greed, corruption and gargantuan waste.

Felipe Calderon’s understanding of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban is no more accurate than it is about Arizona’s new immigration law.

During his trip to the United States Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón received a lot of attention for falsely claiming that Arizona’s new immigration law uses “racial profiling.” Calderon’s attacks on U.S. policies continued during his address to Congress on Thursday. Immigration wasn’t his only topic. He spent over four minutes of his address lecturing Americans and calling them on to renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that sunset in September 2004.

Calderon’s message was simple: the reason that Mexicans are losing the drug war is because the U.S. assault weapons ban expired. Yet, Calderon’s understanding of what the Federal Assault Weapons Ban is no more accurate than it is about Arizona’s new immigration law. Let’s review the assertions he made to Congress:

– Calderon claimed that these were “powerful weapons.” It is a common misunderstanding as the “assault weapons” ban conjures up images of machine guns used by militaries. Yet the 1994 federal assault weapons ban had nothing to do with machine guns, only semiautomatics, which fire one bullet per pull of the trigger. The AK-47s banned by the assaults weapons ban were civilian, semiautomatic versions of the gun. The banned guns fired the same type of bullets, with the same rapidity, and doing the same damage as deer hunting rifles. Their inside guts are essentially the same as deer hunting rifles — some people just like to own these “military-style” weapons because of the way they look on the outside. The firing mechanisms in semiautomatics and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semi-automatic gun has to be gutted and replaced to turn it into a military AK-47.

Just as Mexican drug cartels are able to bring drugs into their country, they are also able to bring in really powerful weapons from around the world to defend both their valuable drugs as well their turf against competing drug dealers. Reports indicate that grenades and rocket launchers are not even available for sale in the United States and come from countries such as South Korea, Israel, and Spain. Two thousand two hundred thirty nine grenades were seized by the Mexican government from 2007 to 2009. Similarly, machine guns in Mexico originate from China, Israel, and South Africa.

It is hard to believe that Mexican drug cartels would want to get look-alike “military-style” weapons from the U.S., when they can get the real military weapons elsewhere.

Calderon also asserted: “And if you look carefully you will notice that the violence in Mexico started to grow a couple of years before I took office in 2006. This coincides, at least, with the lifting of the assault weapons ban in 2004.”

It is almost beyond comprehension that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) will introduce the Cap-and-Trade Act on Wednesday, May 12th, for consideration by the Senate. It is being passed off as a “climate bill” with provisions for more oil drilling, but it is an assault on reality, on science, on common sense, and on any future economic growth of the nation.

The nation’s prisons are filled with men still claiming to be innocent after trials filled with evidence of their guilt. Denial of the truth is their last resort and this metaphor reflects what is happening in the utterly corrupt community of “global warming” liars and their associates in the U.S. government.

Recently 225 “scientists” wrote a letter defending global warming. It was published in the journal “Science”, one of the many such publications that have become as corrupt as those at the center of the global warming scam.

Based on last November’s leaked emails among those most responsible for the data at the heart of the global warming scam, it was revealed that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been systematically publishing false climate information and analysis.

Moreover, the photo used to illustrate the “scientists” letter was photo-shopped to show a polar bear on a small piece of ice surrounded by water. The deception included the fact that many of the signatories to the letter lack credibility. Among the first 20 listed, none work in the field of climate science.

As reported by Tony Hake of Climate Change Examiner, “Pediatric surgeons, an expert in the Maya and Olmec civilizations, a chemist that studies bacteria, and a ‘computer pioneer’ with Microsoft, an electrical engineer, the chairman of a biotechnology firm, and even an expert studying corn are but a few of the 225 experts that signed the letter.”

Dr. Gerhard Kramm, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, fired off a letter disputing the usual claim that human activity is causing carbon dioxide emissions that are, in turn, causing global warming. “Until today, there is no scientific evidence that an increase of the globally averaged near-surface temperature by less than one Kelvin during the last 160 years can be linked to the increase of the atmospheric concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases.”