Democrats Could Lose Even Old Safe Seats

As the New York Times story at the link below demonstrates, even the liberal media have to admit that the Democrats' creation of massive new Big Business subsidies and shoving of fascist health care down our throats have created such a backlash against the Democrats that they might lose even some of their traditionally safe seats in Congress. It's the very likelihood that Democrats will suffer major losses in November that leads them to their current scorched earth policy, trying to impose as much fascist control as possible over our lives now, knowing that when they're back in the minority they can use the filibuster to stop Americans from repealing the fascism that Democrats are imposing on us now. I don’t expect Democrats to lose the 40 House seats required to lose their majority entirely this November alone, nor to lose the Senate (which would require Democrats to lose every competitive contest). I do expect, however, that they will suffer substantially more than the traditional midterm congressional losses, losing their ability to overcoming virtually any filibuster in the Senate while losing a practical, working House majority in support of most of their fascist policies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/us/politics/25campaign.html?th&emc=th

Gallup: Obama & Democrats at All-Time Lows

With the majority of Americans opposed to Obama's imposition of fascist health care on us, it's not surprise that passage of ObamaCare hasn't stopped his downward slide in the polls:

Gallup: Obama Numbers at All-Time Low
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-gallup-poll-numbers/2010/04/12/id/355405?s=al&promo_code=9BC3-1

nor that Democrats have also reached their all-time low in the polls:
Gallup: Democrats' Approval at Historic Low
http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/gallup-democrats-approval-healthcare/2010/04/12/id/355438

and are trailing in reelection races for November--where they haven't already announced that (because they're trailing) that they're retiring. In the wake of Scott Brown's upset in the great state of Taxachusetts--arguably the most liberal state in the union--probably no seat is safe for Democrats in the wake of their imposition of fascist health care, with its taxes, cuts in medical care, regulations, and prison sentences. As the second story above indicates, Democrats on spring recess are scattering like cockroaches exposed to the light, largely refusing to meet with (angry) constituents who opposed ObamaCare. The real question right now is: how much more damage to American can the liberal Democrats do before those (angry) constituents throw the bums out in November? I think we can expect the Democrats to continue their slash-and-burn tactics to impose as much government control as possible between now and then, lying, cheating and stealing as they did when the House pretended to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare and Obama pretended he could amend legislation by executive order in promising to pro-life Democrats that despite the Senate version's funding of abortions, Obama wouldn't fund any abortions. But hey, welcome to the Democrats, the party of compassion!

Liberal Baucus Proposes Fine for No Health Insurance

One definition of totalitarianism is a society where everything not forbidden is mandatory. Despite their penchant for using government to threaten the use of force (and sometimes actually use force) to achieve their social goals, liberals, however, tended to prefer a society where everything not forbidden is simply subsidized. As the following article demonstrates, however, liberals have been moving increasingly toward imposing a society where everything not forbidden is not merely subsidized but mandatory.

When I couldn't afford to pay my own rent even one month out of the year, I tended not to be able to afford health insurance either. The liberal "solution" that liberal leader Max Baucus proposes would have fined me about three months' rent when I couldn't even pay one month rent. Making someone who cannot even pay his own rent pay months' worth of rent for not buying health insurance would be funny, if it weren't an actual proposal from liberal Democrats. Welcome to liberal Democrat "compassion," better known as totalitarianism.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090908/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_health_care_overhaul

But Liberals HATED The Taliban!!

Some liberals, apparently, don't feel too happy with Obama right now, even though he had the lowest (most liberal) rating from the National Taxpayer's Union of any member of the US Senate. Liberal Democrats, it turns out, now want ONLY the "public option" or communist health care, and don't want something with even a little less government, like the fascist health care plan proposed by Hillary a scant 16 years ago that they all supported.

If that's not bad enough, some liberal Democrats don't feel too happy about Obama actually trying to destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan. You might recall that it was Hollywood liberals who, in the 1990s, make such a big fuss over the Taliban and how they treat women as property. Well liberals, what did you THINK was going to get rid of the Taliban--singing "Kumbaya" and holding candlelight vigils? What do a bunch of mass-murdering Muslim monsters care about your songs and candles? They're MURDERERS. Really liberals, if you'd try to think rationally a little more and emote a little less we'd all be better off. So Obama is doing what you WANTED him to do--getting rid of the Taliban--and you want to dump him for someone even further left. Good luck with that.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/afghanistan/20_say_pull_all_troops_out_of_afghanistan_immediately


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/september_2009/does_obama_face_a_2012_challenge_in_his_own_party

Dems Don't Realize How Leftist Their Leaders Are

This supports what said recently when I discovered that Democrats are evenly split over whether to cut taxes or increase spending to help the economy, even though Obama, Senate Majority Leader Reid and Speaker of the House Pelsoi have imposed literally trillions of dollars of additional spending but haven't passed a single tax cut. Democrats, although somewhat out of touch even on taxes and spending with the rest of America, are closer on spending and taxes to other Americans than they are to their own leadership. Democrats really need to start getting some information from other sources than the standard liberal media--it won't make them conservatives, but it might open their eyes to the extreme leftism of their party leaders.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2009/democrats_see_their_congressmen_holding_similar_views_to_democratic_voters

GOP Maintains Slim Lead in Generic Congressional Ballot

In a noticeable shift from last summer, Republicans now hold as small edge over Democrats, an edge they've maintained since the end of June. With the Democrats, and especially their leftist leadership, so out of touch with the rest of America, you have won wonder who are the people so ignorant of the Democrat desire for progressively more government control that they support Democrats who are completely out of touch with them? If you're not a diehard leftist, I recommend that you dial down your watching of PMS NBC and the Commie News Network, and dial up Fox News for a bit. There's a whole different world out here from the one portrayed by the liberal media.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot

62% Prefer Tax Cuts to Government Spending

While a 62% majority of Americans support tax cuts over more government spending, Democrats divide equally over the issue, showing that they're not nearly as out of touch with America on taxes and spending as they are on health care. The even split among Democrats over taxes versus spending does show, moreover, that the leftist Democrat leadership remains out of touch not just with Americans generally, but even with rank-and-file Democrats. Democrats, it's time to wake up and stop voting for leftists like Obama, Reid and Pelosi!

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/taxes/august_2009/62_like_tax_cuts_over_more_government_spending

Support for ObamaCare Falls to New Low

After all the demonization of protesters by Obama and his liberal proxies, opposition to his socialist seizure of our health care has risen to from a plurality to a majority. While predictably 69% of Democrats favor the plan and 79% of Republicans oppose it, a stunning 62% of unaffiliated voters oppose it too, demonstrating that on health care socialization, Democrats remain radically at odds with the rest of America.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/august_2009/support_for_congressional_health_care_reform_falls_to_new_low

Obama Popularity Reaches New Low

Obama's popularity reaches yet another new low; even a majority of Democrats no longer strongly approves of him.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

How Limited Socialism Spreads

After reading my blog about how many non-liberals support limited, targeted socialism, one of my conservative friends admitted that he supports targeted socialism too, and asked me how it might be possible to limit the limited or targeted socialism to the specified target, without allowing it to grow into the massive socialist boondoggle we call government today in America. (He blamed Obama for the massive boondoggle, which by the way is my term, not his, but in truth the cancer of socialism has been growing in American government since at least the "Progressive Era" in the first decade and a half or so of the 20th century, and arguably since even earlier.)

I suggested that he read Milton Friedman's Free to Choose to find examples of well-crafted, limited socialist policies proposed by someone who understands full well why markets work better than government. Free to Choose ironically, while advocating limited socialism (written at a time when almost no politician in American supported merely limited socialism), has done more to persuade people of the benefits of free markets than any other single book. Some libertarians simply loathe Friedman for not being sufficiently pure, and yet Friedman has done more to persuade people of the benefits of free markets and limited government than any single other libertarian writer. (I also suggested that my conservative friend read David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, Bastiat's Economic Sophisms and indeed anything by Benjamin Constant to learn why even limited government interventions, targeted socialist policies, produce bad results; Friedman should serve as a start, not an end, to one's education about the blessings of free markets and the curse of government intervention.)

Having read Free to Choose some months back, my conservative friend asked if Milton Friedman's negative income tax served as the inspiration for the earned income tax credit we currently have in the Internal Revenue Code.

In case you're not familiar, here's how a negative income tax works. Let's say that currently the Internal Revenue Code provides for a standard deduction of $5700 for a single individual, and a personal exemption of $3650, for a total of $9350. Under the negative income tax, the government would subsidize the $9350 for an individual who earned less than $9350. Friedman himself proposed a rate of 50% for the negative income tax. If you earned zero income, for instance, the federal government would pay you, right through the income tax system, 50% of $9350, or $4,675, instead of giving you a host of welfare benefits which you could get under the current system of federal social programs. For every dollar you earned, the federal government would reduce your subsidy by only 50 cents, so your after-tax (or after-subsidy) income would rise. At no point would you be worse off by earning more, as you'd gain 50 cents extra for every dollar that you earn.

The whole point of the negative income tax is that it reduces the disincentives to work provided by standard welfare programs. Under standard welfare programs you simply lose all benefits when you earn too much income, creating an extremely high marginal income tax rate at low levels of income. (Say, for example, that under the current welfare system, if you earn $5,000 in income you lose $10,000 of food stamps and $5,000 of AFDC, or a total of $15,000 in benefits. Losing $15,000 of benefits for earning $5000 of income produces a tax rate of 300%!!! Technically too that's just the average tax rate, not the marginal rate. If you get $15,000 of benefits at $4,999 of earned income and $0 benefits when you earn $5,000 income, you have a marginal tax rate--a rate of tax on your one extra dollar, of 1,500,000%!!)

The negative income tax works so that for every dollar you make, you lose less than a dollar, so your marginal income tax rate is always less than 100% and you always have more income after the income tax by earning more. Friedman also said that the negative income tax rate itself must be low, or the marginal tax rate of phasing it out becomes high (even though it's below 100%). Many people would rather stay on the negative income tax than to earn only 10 cents on the extra dollar. So if your negative income tax rate is only 25% (low subsidy) then your marginal tax rate for phasing out the negative income tax as your income rises will be only 25%. If the government is "generous" and subsidizes your personal and standard deductions 75% instead of 25%, then your suffer a 75% marginal tax rate getting off of the negative income tax, keeping only an extra 25 cents per extra dollar you earn.

So what happened to Friedman's negative income tax idea? Back in 1973, Democrats in Congress said, "Another welfare program! Hot damn!" and then voted to turn it into one of dozens of tax credits and welfare programs. President Nixon said, "Well, Friedman suggested it, so it must be a good idea," and he supported it too, as did Republicans in Congress, not bothering to read Friedman's caution that a negative income tax would reduce the disincentive to work inherent in our current welfare system only if we abolished all other welfare programs and relied solely on the negative income tax. Friedman also warns in Free to Choose that the current welfare system has too many vested interests for Congress to allow the negative income tax to become the only socialist program for the poor, and that Congress and such interests would always have an incentive to increase the subsidy rate above the 50% he suggested. The higher the rate, as I showed above, the more the disincentive to get off of the subsidy. Henry Hazlett has a decent article at http://mises.org/story/2406 about how the earned income credit did just what Friedman predicted--although for some odd reason Hazlett refused to admit that Friedman predicted it--grew out of control, until it has become the largest cash benefit for low-income Americans (and aliens) of any social program for the poor. (Of course the Social Security system, the massive socialist program for the retired elderly, the wealthiest age cohort in America, dwarfs even the earned income credit.)

The mutation of the negative income tax as the only welfare program into the earned income credit as merely the largest of dozens of welfare programs for the poor demonstrates how even the most well-crafted of limited socialism turns into just another tumor as targeted socialism metastasizes across the American body politic.

The one saving grace of the negative income tax comes from the fact that for the working poor it helps offset the most evil of all taxes, the Social Security tax, which starts at the very first dollar of income. Poor, uneducated people, disproportionately members of minority groups, have to start working earliest and paying the tax first, even though they're lucky if they can make ends meet once they lose their welfare benefits. What's surprising is not that so many of them remain on welfare indefinitely (or as long the law allows) but rather that anyone in their position bothers to work at all, given the imposing marginal income tax rates for the working poor. Yet poor people, especially poor minorities, have the shortest life expectancies, and so collect the least in SS benefits. And who collects the most in SS benefits--wealthy white women, who live the longest of any large demographic in America. So the SS tax is a massive redistribution of income from poor, minority workers to retired, wealthy white woman. Liberals should be ashamed that the system their hero FDR engineered punishes the people they claim to care about and rewards people that liberals often sound like they hate. Most liberals of course have no shame anymore, as whatever feels good to them goes in their postmodern world of "judge me not because only I get to judge."

Republicans too should be ashamed that the most massive socialist welfare program of all is the one in which they're most complicit by their refusal to do anything to fix it or stop it from redistributing income from the poor to the rich. If ever there were a policy that supports the liberal claim that Republicans want to make "the poor get poorer and the rich get richer" it's Republican complicity in maintaining the liberals' SS system.

The very fact that the working poor need the earned income tax credit to (partially) offset the regressive SS tax demonstrates how one government intervention leads to another--how one socialist tumor inevitably metastasizes across the American body politic. So if you want to get rid of the socialist cancer, you need to agree to cut out not only the tumors you don't like, but the one you do like. Otherwise we're in for a long, slow, painful death--and you helped kill us.

Oppose Obama Budget Sham

As you might know, the federal budget means nothing when it comes to spending. Congress actually spends money completely independent of the federal budget, through passing appropriations bill. Typically Congress passes about a dozen major appropriations bills, filled with billions of dollars of earmarks and pork, to make sure that the president cannot veto individual items--not that Obama would veto Democrat pork, no matter how outrageous. Remember that Obama in the Senate voted for Chris Dodd's amendment to guarantee that the AIG bailout money would go to paying AIG executives bonuses. (Dodd and Obama got the first and second largest contributions from AIG in 2008).

The federal budget is just a toothless guideline, when it comes to spending, and not once since the Budget Impoundment Act of 1973 (which took away the president's power to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress) has Congress spent as little as they said they would in the federal budget. So as insanely huge as Obama's multi-trillion dollar budget is, Congress will actually end up spending even more.

The one area where the budget does have some teeth comes in regard to our taxes: any tax hikes included in the budget actually go into effect, but tax hikes do not need an appropriations bill. That means that if Congress passes the Obama budget sham, Congress will actually impose Obama's $700 billion in new taxes on us right then and there, rich and working poor (like me) alike. No school of economics advocates raising taxes in the middle of a recession. Not the fatally-flawed Keynesian school, nor even the Marxist school, is so wrong as to advocate raising taxes in the middle of a recession.

Even the Democrats' own Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that Obama's budget will push the budget deficit to $1.85 trillion--that's $1,850,000,000,000--for fiscal 2010 alone, and add $9.3 trillion to the existing $11 trillion in federal government debt. Since the CBO always underestimates how much socialist pork programs will cost, and always overestimates how much tax hikes will raise, the CBO estimates mean that Obama's sham budget will lead to a deficit of at least $2 trillion this year, and probably more than double the federal debt.

So please join me in opposing the Obama sham budget by contacting your US Senators and Representative at
https://secure2.convio.net/cagw/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=573

Small Victory Against Obama's Anti-Israel Appointments

Recently I've documented how Obama has tried to appoint seven different anti-Israel and pro-terrorist nominees to his administration. You can read more details at http://david-lifelibertyandproperty.blogspot.com/2009/03/obama-intel-appointment-angers-israel.html.

Thanks to quick action by pro-Israel Republicans and Democrats alike, the most recent anti-Israel nominee, Charles Freeman, has withdrawn his name from nomination after the conservative media revealed that Freeman serves on the payroll of Saudi Arabia, and after the liberal media picked up the story from the conservative media. While the withdraw of Saudi agent Freeman provides us with a small victory against Obama's pro-terrorist, anti-Israel policy, remember that Obama's already appointed 6 other anti-Israel thugs to his administration and gotten Congress to send millions of dollars to the mass-murdering Muslim terrorists in Hamas. Obama wants to make friends with Iran's Terrorist-in-Chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has promised to destroy Israel and America, and now has more than a ton of uranium, enough to make his own nuke. Even as I write, Obama is in the process of surrendering Afghanistan to the mass-murdering Muslim terrorists in the Taliban--against whom Hollywood's liberals railed in the 1990s--and handing Afghanistan over to the Taliban so they can return to murdering innocent Muslims there. So we have a long way to go to defeat Obama's anti-Israel and pro-terrorist evil, but at least we've made a start. You--especially my liberal Jewish friends and family who voted for Obama and have contacts inside his administration or with Democrats in Congress--need to keep up the pressure on the Obama administration.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/4975999/Intelligence-candidate-Charles-Freeman-pulls-out-after-objections.html

Save the Secret Ballot!

Image that, when you went to vote, you had to do it in the open, with everyone watching you. If you voted against the people in power locally, you could expect dangerous repercussions. You might even find that "accidents" started to happen to your property, or even to yourself and family members. Can you image the hue and cry that liberals, who don't want you to even have to show an ID to vote, would send up if we wanted to take away their secret ballots and force them to vote in public?! They'd scream "voter intimidation!" at the top of their lungs.

Yet that's exactly what liberals want to do on behalf of Big Labor, which these days basically serves as another arm of the Democrat party. Democrats want to remove the secret ballot from labor union elections, so that labor union thugs and bullies can intimidate workers into voting for their corrupt unions. From a peak of 34.7% in 1954, union membership as a share of the workforce has fallen precipitously over the decades, and now represents (as of 2008) only 12.4% of the workforce. Only union gains among "public employees"--i.e., professional bureaucrats--has stopped union membership from declining into single digits. Even with the rise of the professional bureaucrat unions, union membership as a percentage of the workforce has fallen back to the levels that existed before the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 transformed labor unions into government-backed labor cartels (monopolies). As Big Labor has become increasingly a liberal arm of the Democrat party, fighting for abortion, homosexual marriage, higher taxes, more government spending and other issues of no relevance to workers as workers, the workforce has increasingly left Big Labor.

Desperate to force workers back onto the Big Labor plantation, where the Democrats can siphon workers' wages into political campaign funds, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are trying to take away the secret ballot and allow their union thugs to intimidate honest workers into voting for their corrupt unions.

While hypocrisy and hostility toward honest working people from liberals and Democrats come as no surprise, that doesn't mean we should do nothing about it. You can sign the petition at http://www.americansolutions.com/Actioncenter/Petitions/Default.aspx?guid=87f7f73f-48bc-44c9-965b-e86805571adf opposing the dishonestly-named "Employee Free Choice Act," which would go better under the name "Union Thug Stimulus Act."

Obama Gives "Stimulus" to 300,000 Illegals

If it weren't bad enough that Obama and the Democrats are bailing out rich executives of American Big Business, it turns out now that Obama is bailing out illegal immigrants with your tax dollars too. During the last election ACORN registered as many illegal aliens as possible, and Democrats fought tooth and nail against efforts to require voters to show an actual ID, so thousands if not tens of thousands of illegals came out to vote for Obama. Obama's stimulus "loophole" is his way of paying them back for illegally voting for him.

So under Obamanomics, rich American get your money, and poor anti-Americans who come here in violation of the law get your money. Obamanomics certainly qualifies as class warfare--warfare against the American middle class!

http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/stimulus_illegals_jobs/2009/03/09/190028.html?s=al&promo_code=7BCE-1