Common Sense Is Timeless

John C. Calhoun

“The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”

John C. Calhoun, Disquisition on Government, 1848 — Via The Other McCain

Obama Bragged About Bringing Down the Debt More Than Any Other Administration ~ Rick Santelli Explains the Washington `Shell Game`

  1. Still largest deficit compared to other admins;
  2. Lowered the most because he increased it the most;
  3. see “1”

Three Question Liberals NEVER ask:

  1. compared to what?
  2. at what cost?
  3. what hard-evidence do you have?

 

If Detroit is an example of small government-God Help Us All!!

God Help us All!!

If Detroit is an example of small government… God Help Us All!! Melissa Harris Perry forgets that Detroit has been run by unions and big government Democrats for over 5 decades, and was then bailed out and over-regulated by the current administration… how convenient.

As the Chicks on the Right mention…

….Meanwhile, back in Reality-Land, National Review’s writer Kevin Williamson gave us all the real picture of Detroit back in 2011, while it was on its path to bankruptcy, when he penned the following:

Detroit maintains 13,000 government workers but has 22,000 government retirees burrowed into the body politic, and their health-care subsidies alone account for nearly $200 million of the city’s budget. Pensions alone already account for a quarter of city spending; in three years, they will account for half. Pensions and city workers’ health-care subsidies account for $561 per year from every resident of Detroit, which has a very poor population — average monthly income of barely $1,200 before taxes, a fifth of the population in poverty, etc. The official unemployment rate is 30 percent; the real rate is much higher.

But never mind all that. The answer to EVERYTHING for MHP and all her little commie friends at MSNBC is government, government, government, dontchaknow.  If Detroit JUST would’ve had more GOVERNMENT and more spending….then it would’ve been fine, minions

Gay Patriot brought my attention to a failed prophecy of Obama’s wonderful handle on economics 101.

As Michael Barone reported yesterday in the Washington Examiner:

National Journal’s Major Garrett has an excellent column today looking back on President Obama’s 2011 Labor Day speech in Detroit. “This is a city that has been to heck and back,” Obama said then. “And while there are still a lot of challenges here, I see a city that’s coming back.” Noting that Obama cited the “advanced battery industry taking root here in Michigan,” Garrett points out that the battery firm in question, A123 Systems, received $249 million in Energy Department grants–and is now bankrupt. And of course so is the city of Detroit.

In matters economical, this man’s powers of prognostication aren’t particularly strong.

…read more…

Moonbat points out — of course — that the “official” numbers from the White House, even if true, are REAL BAD!

Barack Hussein Obama set out to be a transformative president. He has already succeeded. Presidential spokesliar Jay Carney recently credited the Regime with creating 7.2 million private sector jobs. Even if that preposterous boast were true, it would hardly put a dent in Obama’s legacy:

Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!

That means that 1.3 Americans have dropped out of the labor force for every one job the administration claims to have created.

There are 15 million more Americans on food stamps today than when Obama assumed office. …

That means that more than two Americans have been added to the food stamp rolls for every one job the administration says it has created.

If we were to take how many jobs the Regime actually has created — limited mainly to the overstaffing of the largely useless federal bureaucracy — and subtract from it the number of jobs it has destroyed through ObamaCare and excessive taxation and regulation in general, the number of new jobs for which Obama deserves credit would be millions in the negative.

…read more…

Government Guarantee Limits Creativity and Information ~ George Gilder

Dennis Prager interviews George Gilder about his new book, “Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World.” I found this small bit on Dodd-Frank interesting as it leads to government interference creating a business atmosphere that nets zero information — or — creativity, entrepreneurial investment, or new growth in small business.

`Rotting, Decaying, and Bankrupt!` ~ Detroit (Democrat Controlled Future)

Rotting, Decaying And Bankrupt – If You Want To See The Future Of America Just Look At Detroit,” Via Gay Patriot

1 – Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

2 – Over the past 60 years, the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

3 – At this point, approximately 40 percent of all the streetlights in the city don’t work.

4 – Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

5 – 210 of the 317 public parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down.

6 – According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.

7 – Approximately one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

8Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

9 – If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

10 – According to one very shocking report, 47 percent of the residents of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

11 – Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

12 – Ten years ago, there were approximately 5,000 police officers in the city of Detroit.  Today, there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.

13 – Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

14 – The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

15 – Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.

16 – Right now, the city of Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities.  That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

Job Creation Best from Free-Market or Government? plus, FDR vs the Constitution

Via Gay Patriot,

From Zero Hedge,

“Governments are good at creating work, but they are not good at creating value-generating jobs,” is the conclusion from this insightful 3-minute clip from Professor Steve Horwitz. Too often the jobs that politicians ‘create’ are simply to their own benefit. Critically, Horwitz explains that transitions (from agriculture to manufacturing to service to information for instance) are temporarily painful but relatively quickly re-allocated. If, however, politicians attempt to prevent this transition – to stall the free market’s signals – this will halt innovation, growth, and create more poverty (ring any bells). Creating meaningful valuable jobs (something we saw earlier today is not occurring) does not appear too complex – “the best job-creation program in human history is the free market and the entrepreneurship it generates” – it simply means our politicians must get out of the way.

Video description:

President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” has long been credited with rescuing the nation from the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Lee Ohanian, Professor of Economics at UCLA, challenges this conventional wisdom in a provocative examination of FDR’s economic policies.

Growing Costs of Obama-Care

Via Gateway Pundit:

In March 2010 leading democrats and their lackeys in the state-run media were “just giddy” to report that they crunched some numbers and found the nationalized health care bill they were pushing would reduce the deficit by $138 billion.

It was a lie. Democrats knew it was a lie…

But, after several backroom deals they rammed the bill through Congress anyway.

Then in May of 2010 the CBO corrected the numbers and said Obamacare will cost taxpayers at least $115 billion more than promised. Democrats pulled a fast one on the American public.

Democrats promised that Obamacare would cost $940 billion when they rammed it through Congress. The actual cost has gone up with each revision.

The latest CBO estimate says ObamaTax will cost $2.6 billion nearly three times as much as Democrats predicted.

Despite these facts the Obama White House continues to mislead Americans on the cost of Obamacare… And the media allows them to get about with it.

Read More: http://tinyurl.com/c97mgde

`Obama Misrepresenting My Work` ~ Princeton Professor Harvey Rosen (Plus: Eulogizing Killers)

…the United States is actually more dependent on rich people to pay taxes than even many of the more socialized economies of Europe. According to the Tax Foundation, the United States gets 45 percent of its total taxes from the top 10 percent of tax filers, whereas the international average in industrialized nations is 32 percent. America’s rich carry a larger share of the tax burden than do the rich in Belgium (25 percent), Germany (31 percent), France (28 percent), and even Sweden (27 percent). ~ Washington Times

To set the stage for lowering taxes and Mitt Romney’s tax plan — the rich… the American rich specifically, pay the most taxes when compared to the rest of the world

This lack of understanding by the left leads to how they fight and lie and misrepresent what Mitt Romney says and will even twist other peoples work to win the day:

Here is the Weekly Standard’s “blurb” of the Obama Campaign lie:

Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. “Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes,” said the Obama campaign press release. “In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000.”

But that’s not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney’s tax plan:

I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work.  It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal.  The main conclusion of my study is that  under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same.  That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.

Dennis Prager touched on the “wonderful eulogy” the New York Times gave the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and how the left loves killers, dictators, and Communists. Here is the Wall Street Journals take on all this:

In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps “just a detail in the history of World War II.” Explaining himself a few years later, the head of France’s National Front said: “If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail.”

Such remarks cemented Mr. Le Pen’s reputation as Europe’s leading fascist. So what was one to make of the reception accorded the publication, in 1994, of “The Age of Extremes,” by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm?

The book—subtitled “a history of the world, 1914-1991″—was hailed as “bracing and magisterial” by the New York Times. “Facts roll off Hobsbawm’s pages like thunderbolts,” gushed the New Republic. But search the index, and the words “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” never appear. Nazi concentration camps get about 10 or 15 lines. As for the Soviet gulags, Hobsbawm devoted exactly two paragraphs to them.

Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin’s tyranny “must be measured in eight rather than seven digits,” adding that the numbers are “shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.”

Yet Hobsbawm did justify them. “Like military enterprises which have genuine popular moral legitimacy, the breakneck industrialization of [Stalin’s] first Five-Year Plans (1929-41) generated support by the very ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ it imposed on the people,” he wrote. “Difficult though it may be to believe, the Stalinist system . . . almost certainly enjoyed substantial support.”

The rest of the book is shot through with similar rationalizations. That included the observation that “for most Soviet citizens the Brezhnev era spelled not ‘stagnation’ but the best times they and their parents, or even grandparents, had ever known.” As for Soviet dissidents, they were “anti-plebeian” elitists who “found themselves up against Soviet humanity as well as Soviet bureaucracy.”

None of this should have been surprising coming from a man who, over the years, gave his political assent to everything from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Asked by the BBC whether the achievement of a communist utopia would have justified “the loss of fifteen, twenty million people,” he answered “Yes.”

Yet what are we to make of the warmth with which Hobsbawm is now being eulogized? Only this: That the world is far from recognizing that the crimes of communism were no less monstrous than those of Nazism. In treating the gulag as a detail of his history, Hobsbawm proved himself to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Le Pen. And in treating Hobsbawm as a paragon among historians, his admirers prove they’ve learned nothing from history itself.