Archive for May, 2011
Take a Look at Herman Cain
So far, I like what I see in Herman Cain!
Cain sees nation in crisis, but not without hope
By Lynda Waddington
CEDAR RAPIDS — America is facing some massive problems, said Herman Cain, and it’s time for politicians and elected officials to be honest about the magnitude of what is before the nation.
Cain highlighted seven separate areas that need to be addressed — a moral crisis, an economic crisis, an energy crisis, an entitlement spending crisis, an immigration crisis, a national security crisis and a deficiency of leadership crisis in Washington, D.C.
“Now, we have other problems, but those are our seven crises — and I stopped at seven because it has sort of a Biblical significance. I like Biblical significance,” he said.
“Those are the seven biggest crises that we face. But here’s the good news: We can face them, and they aren’t going to face themselves.”
While most presidential candidates attend Iowa events with a box of swag comprised of bumper stickers, pamphlets and sign-up sheets for supporters, Cain came to Cedar Rapids with two items — a small tri-fold brochure with a detachable and mailable card for those wanting to donate to his Presidential Exploratory Committee and a 20-page, full-color brochure that lists that contains mini white papers on each of the crisis areas he’s identified. Pages three through 17 of the document, which measures roughly 3 inches wide by six inches long, contains only one photograph amid page after page of text.
Many of the problems before America, he notes, have plenty of “low-hanging fruit” ideas that could begin a move in the correct direction.
“If you think about it, there are a lot of simple and good ideas that come to Washington, D.C. and die because of liberal ideology,” he said.
If elected president, Cain said one of his first self-imposed jobs would be to jump-start the economy — “the biggest thing that we have got to turn around.” Toward that end, he would lower the nation’s highest level of corporate taxes from 35 to 25 percent.
“We are the only country in the world that has not lowered its top corporate tax rate in 15 years,” he said. “How dumb is that?! … And we wonder why jobs are leaving this country. It is all about the tax structure, that’s why jobs are leaving this country.”
Tax rates for America’s highest individual earners, he said, should also be reduced, the Capital Gains tax rate should be taken to zero, and taxes on employers and employees should be taken to zero for a year.
“I know that the liberals are going to say, ‘All you want to do is give tax breaks to the rich.’ That’s their usual class-warfare rhetoric,” he said. “But, you know, when Herman Cain becomes President, I’m going to make a breaking news announcement to all of America: It’s OK to succeed in America.”
And, when the tone has change, Cain says he plans “to put a bow around it” by making his new lowered tax structure permanent.
“We have to get this uncertainty off of this economy,” he said. “I plan to get Congress to do this in the first 90 days of my administration.”
Other items of note in Cain’s brochure:
•Labor Unions — “While labor unions once provided a representative body to lobby for fair wages and safe working conditions for employees, the now principally serve as a political mechanism for the Left. Forced unionization through the dishonesty named ‘Employee Free Choice Act,’ or ‘card check,’ would drive up the costs of goods and services, cause hundreds and thousands of jobs to be lost and ultimately, a more powerful system of liberal fundraising to be maintained.”
•Entitlement Programs — “Though it might not be politically popular to modernize and eliminate some of our entitlement programs, responsible leaders should be willing to do it all the same. … We must return to free market-based solutions that empower our nation’s workers to take control over their professional and retirement futures.”
•Ethanol & Other Energy Subsidies — “Subsidies on agricultural products, like ethanol-producing corn, have become a mechanism for the government to pick and choose industries it favors, while doing little to enhance our ability to harness real alternative energy resources. Instead, we must allow all forms of energy the ability to develop in a free market system.”
•Immigration — “Illegal immigration has only exacerbated illegal activity, such as the horrendous crimes of drug smuggling and human trafficking. Illegal immigrants who are repeat offenders are harder to track, making it difficult for law enforcement to prevent crime. Further, weak borders have caused a compounding problem of terrorists assimilating with illegal immigrants, crossing the border with them and entering the U.S.”
•Repeal of Health Care Reform — “Patient-centered free market health care reforms have already been developed and introduced in Congress, but they are stuck in committee and can’t get out. With the right leadership we can get them out and get them passed.”
•Financial Reform — “We must repeal financial regulatory ‘deform.’ We must enact real reforms that protect the roots of our economic system. We must not compromise them with excessive regulation and the federal government’s ‘pay-to-play’ politics.”
•Government Regulation — “We pay for regulations with every bite of food we eat, with every drop of gasoline we put in our cars and with every good or service we obtain. … Alleviating the burdens of cumbersome regulations would be an immediate boost for our weakened economy. It would signal to businesses and investors that the government intends to improve conditions that allow for them to thrive, not to bog them down with additional costs they must inevitably pass on to consumers.”
•Education — “A critical component of improving education in our country is to decentralize the federal government’s control over it. … Another way we can put kids first is to offer school choice as a real option for educational competition. This means expanding school vouchers and charter schools.”
LINK: http://iowaindependent.com/56463/cain-sees-nation-in-crisis-but-not-without-hope
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )5 Common Political Beliefs That Simply Are NOT True
Excellent article – I totally agree!
5 Common Political Beliefs That Simply Aren’t True
John Hawkins
No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.” — John F. Kennedy
The sad truth of the matter is that most Americans don’t pay much attention to politics and those that do often just parrot doctrine instead of investigating issues with an open mind. This allows lies, myths, and dubious assertions to live on long after they should have shriveled and died in the light of day. Here are just a few of those diseased assertions that have continued to circulate in the body politic long after they should have been cured.
1) Affirmative Action is a pro-black policy. Sure, there are a few black Americans who are helped by Affirmative Action, but the cost of the policy is enormous.
For one thing, no matter how talented or deserving a black American may be, Affirmative Action casts a shadow over his accomplishments. Did she get into the college because she deserved it or because of Affirmative Action? Did he get the promotion because he earned it or because he is black? White Americans often think this privately and it causes even black Americans who oppose Affirmative Action to question the worth of their achievements.
If you want something more concrete than that, here’s Thomas Sowell giving a real world example of how Affirmative Action leads to black college students failing to graduate from college.
In other words, where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating. Other data tell the same story.
Compare racial preferences in Colorado, for example. At the flagship University of Colorado at Boulder, test score differences between black and white students have been more than 200 points — and only 39 percent of the black students graduated, compared to 72 percent of white students. Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado at Denver, where the SAT score difference was a negligible 30 points, there was also a negligible difference in graduation rates — 50 percent for blacks and 48 percent for whites.
How many millions of black Americans could have graduated from college, but didn’t because Affirmative Action “helped” them get into a college they weren’t ready to attend?
2) Being for Illegal immigration is a pro-Hispanic policy. It’s intriguing that being pro-illegal immigration is supposed to be the key way to appeal to Hispanic Americans because they’re being hurt much worse than the average American by illegal immigration.
Because illegal immigrants often don’t buy health care, don’t pay for auto insurance and cheat on their income taxes, they can afford to work for much lower wages than American citizens. There are no “jobs Americans won’t do,” although there may be jobs they won’t do at the same price as an illegal alien who doesn’t have to pay the same bills.
This is a particularly big issue for Hispanic Americans because they’re more likely than other Americans to end up directly competing with illegals. Take a look at the industries that are dominated by Hispanic workers.
Hispanic workers are the backbone of industries like meatpacking, food service, construction, agriculture, and domestic services. Hispanic workers land two out of every three new construction jobs.
Then there are the industries that are swarming with illegals.
According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement, as of March 2006 almost twenty four percent of all construction workers in the country were foreign born. Most of the immigrant construction workers are Hispanic, although not all Hispanic construction workers are immigrants, of course. In March 2006 a little over twenty-four percent of the construction workforce was Hispanic, compared to approximately six percent in 1980. Seventy percent of the 1.4 million Hispanic construction workers in the U.S. in 2000 were born outside the United States, and fifty-seven percent were not U.S. citizens.
Farmers likewise stress that access to migrant labor is critical for agriculture. There are about 1.6 million full-time farm workers in the US. About 80 per cent of those workers are foreign born and nearly seven out of 10 are working illegally.
There are still roughly 11 million illegal aliens in this country. If they weren’t here, the Hispanic unemployment rate, which is at 12.5 percent, would probably be much closer — or perhaps even better than the white unemployment rate of 8 percent.
3) We can fix our deficit problems by taxing the rich. This has become the de facto position of the Democrat Party. Forget spending cuts! We don’t need ’em! We’ll just tax the rich until the budget is balanced and we’ve paid off our debt.
There’s one huge problem with that: It won’t work, it can’t be done, it’s impossible. No matter how you massage it, the math won’t add up.
“(Even if we took) all the profits, all of the salaries, all of the assets, all of the expenses, all of the revenues and holdings of the rich and we liquidated them….(and we’d) scrape through for one year.”
Put another way, if we were to pull a “full Stalin” and take everything “the rich” in this country makes and owns, it would pay off the deficit for a single year. Then, when the next year rolls around, we’d have another trillion dollar plus deficit on the way, but with no tax revenue from the rich, no one who could invest in new businesses, and no entrepreneurs willing to bust their behind to make money the government would confiscate from them. Hello, new Depression. Hello, Doom.
We can discuss whether the rich should pay higher taxes, but what you can’t truthfully argue is that the government can get spending under control without dramatic spending cuts.
4) The more money we put into education, the better our schools will perform. We see the exact same scenario repeated again and again in this country. We hear claims that education is underfunded and it’s causing our schools to perform poorly. We respond by ramping up spending dramatically. There’s no improvement in performance. A few years later, the cycle repeats.
Of course, if money were really the problem, we’d already have at least the second best schools in the world.
According to the most recent OECD figures (2007), the Koreans spent $5,437 per primary-school pupil; we spent $10,229. For education as a whole, the Koreans spent $7,325 per pupil; we spent $14,269. They not only “outpace our kids in math and science”; they do it by only spending half as much. ….We spend more than anyone but the Swiss on education, and by any rational measure at least half of it is entirely wasted.
So what do we get for the second highest spending level on planet earth? It’s not so impressive.
The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year- olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.
We can debate the reasons why our public schools do such a mediocre job until the cows come home and then we can spend twice as long trying to figure out how to fix it, but what we can’t rationally do anymore is blame it on our schools being underfunded.
5) Being tough on crime is a racist policy. It is true that percentage wise, black Americans are arrested and go to jail at a higher rate than other ethnic groups. So, some people look at that and declare that being tough on crime obviously must be racist.
However, they’re missing the all important other half of the equation. Black criminals are, for the most part, preying on other black Americans.
Blacks are only 13% of the population, but over 40% of the murder victims. Ninety Three percent of those black victims are killed by other black people.
In other words, nobody benefits more from a black criminal going to jail than other black Americans. The same goes for keeping black criminals in jail.
About 43 percent of prisoners who were let out in 2004 were sent back to prison by 2007, either for a new crime or violating the conditions of their release, the study found.
If racists really were in charge of our justice system, being soft on crime would be one of the most effective ways that they could hurt black Americans.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Government Creates Poverty
So true! This is why we should NOT let gov’t take control of our lives – they only make things worse!! Gov’t does not help, it hurts!
Government Creates Poverty
John Stossel
The U.S. government has “helped” no group more than it has “helped” the American Indians. It stuns me when President Obama appears before Indian groups and says things like, “Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans.”
Ignored? Are you kidding me? They should be so lucky. The government has made most Indian tribes wards of the state. Government manages their land, provides their health care, and pays for housing and child care. Twenty different departments and agencies have special “native American” programs. The result? Indians have the highest poverty rate, nearly 25 percent, and the lowest life expectancy of any group in America. Sixty-six percent are born to single mothers.
Nevertheless, Indian activists want more government “help.”
It is intuitive to assume that, when people struggle, government “help” is the answer. The opposite is true. American groups who are helped the most, do the worst.
Consider the Lumbees of Robeson County, N.C. — a tribe not recognized as sovereign by the government and therefore ineligible for most of the “help” given other tribes. The Lumbees do much better than those recognized tribes.
Lumbees own their homes and succeed in business. They include real estate developer Jim Thomas, who used to own the Sacramento Kings, and Jack Lowery, who helped start the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Lumbees started the first Indian-owned bank, which now has 12 branches.
The Lumbees’ wealth is not from casino money.
“We don’t have any casinos. We have 12 banks,” says Ben Chavis, another successful Lumbee businessman. He also points out that Robeson County looks different from most Indian reservations.
“There’s mansions. They look like English manors. I can take you to one neighborhood where my people are from and show you nicer homes than the whole Sioux reservation.”
Despite this success, professional “victims” activists want Congress to make the Lumbees dependent — like other tribes. U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., has introduced the Lumbee Recognition Act, which would give the Lumbees the same “help” other tribes get — about $80 million a year. Some members of the tribe support the bill.
Of course they do. People like to freeload.
Lawyer Elizabeth Homer, who used to be the U.S. Interior Department’s director of Indian land trusts, say the Lumbees ought to get federal recognition.
“The Lumbees have been neglected and left out of the system, and have been petitioning for 100 years. … They’re entitled, by the way.”
People like Homer will never get it. Lumbees do well because they’ve divorced themselves from government handouts. Washington’s neglect was a godsend.
Some Lumbees don’t want the handout.
“We shouldn’t take it!” Chavis said. He says if federal money comes, members of his tribe “are going to become welfare cases. It’s going to stifle creativity. On the reservations, they haven’t trained to be capitalists. They’ve been trained to be communists.”
Tribal governments and the Bureau of Indian Affairs manage most Indian land. Indians compete to serve on tribal councils because they can give out the government’s money. Instead of seeking to become entrepreneurs, members of tribes aspire to become bureaucrats.
“You can help your girlfriend; you can help your girlfriend’s mama. It’s a great program!” Chavis said sarcastically.
Because a government trust controls most Indian property, individuals rarely build nice homes or businesses. “No individual on the reservation owns the land. So they can’t develop it,” Chavis added. “Look at my tribe. We have title and deeds to our land. That’s the secret. I raise cattle. I can do what I want to because it’s my private property.”
I did a TV segment on the Lumbees that I included in a special called “Freeloaders.” That won me the predictable vitriol. Apparently, I’m ignorant of history and a racist.
The criticism misses the point. Yes, many years ago white people stole the Indians’ land and caused great misery. And yes, the government signed treaties with the tribes that make Indians “special.” But that “specialness” has brought the Indians socialism. It’s what keeps them dependent and poor.
On the other hand, because the U.S. government never signed a treaty with the Lumbees, they aren’t so “special” in its eyes. That left them mostly free.
Freedom lets them prosper.
LINK: http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2011/04/27/government_creates_poverty
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Herman Cain:Possible Presidential Candidate
I like Herman Cain. Check out the video below and see what he has to say…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkacOveF0
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
Don't Get Me Started... 