Who Is Trying to Dominate the World?

President Obama and his administration seem to be extremely interested in telling the American public that the threat from al Qaeda is on the run and that the threat from terrorism in the Middle East is markedly less than it was when he became President. Is there truth to this claim? The debacle at Benghazi seems to belie that claim. Al Qaeda in North Africa has posted a real gain in the terrorist threat, and denying that fact is disingenuous. The steady advance of nuclear capability in Iran is also disquieting, to say the least; and it represents extreme danger to our ally, Israel—which the mullahs of Iran want to wipe off the face of the earth. We see Muslims fighting among themselves in Yemen, Egypt, and Syria—all trying to establish which competing party is sufficiently Muslim. They do not seem hesitant to kill one another to determine that question, either! 

The President seems determined to distance himself from the idea that the terrorist threats in the Middle East are due to any ideological phenomenon in the combatants—certainly not in their religion, Islam. Statements by White House counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, call attention to the idea that grievances of the terrorists come from “political, economic, and social forces that can make people fall victim to the cancer of violent extremism.” Mr. Brennan, as well as the President, are unwilling to say that Islamist terrorists are bound to their violent behavior by ideological beliefs that stem directly from their religion, i.e., Islam. Mr. Brennan has said that the Obama administration does not “describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.” He failed to mention that jihad also means holy war. Of note, also, is the fact that Eric Holder, the Attorney General, has never identified a terrorist as a Muslim in any of his public pronouncements. Mr. Obama said in his Cairo speech in 2009 that “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism.”  However, these organizations, themselves, claim that their violent behavior is a demonstration of the fact that they are acting in defense of Islam. I wonder why our leaders do not take the word of the violent organizations, themselves, about their motives. (Wall Street Journal, Oct 10, 2012, page A 13)

As I have said before in these pages, a careful read of the Muslim instruction book, the Qur’an, will reveal dozens of references to violence where Muslims are advised to “beleaguer, ambush, and destroy” enemies of Allah. Violence is no stranger to the pages of the Qur’an.

There is a strong current in liberal American thinking that blames America for much of the terrorist attacks on our country and its allies. Liberals claim that both Christianity and Islam aim at world domination; and they point out that the West, prodded on by Christian religionists, is forcibly pushing its own agenda. The tenet is true that both Islam and Christianity are trying to dominate the world; but there is a huge difference in the way these two religions go at their goal. Christianity wants to dominate the hearts of men and will do so only on the basis of persuasion, not by violent means. Islam seeks to dominate minds and hearts, also; but in addition, it wants to dominate police departments. Islam seeks not only religious domination; it seeks political domination. And…Islam, unlike Christianity, has a system in place with which to do just that—Sharia Law, a system of jurisprudence worked out 1400 years ago, which does not comport with modern ideas of women’s rights, freedom of religion, speech, and the press (all of which are dear to the hearts of today’s people, especially in the Western world). Sharia Law is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia deals with many topics addressed by secular law, including crime, politics, and economics, as well as personal matters such as sexual intercourse, hygene, diet, prayer, and fasting.  Islam seems ready and eager to impose that system of law on all the peoples of the world. It also ignores the Western principle of jurisprudence that insists that the punishment for crime must equal the offence.

I am not sufficiently familiar with Islam to know if Muslims can throw off the mantle of violence from the Qur’an without doing harm to their sacred book, but I know if they do not do it, they will never be a safe neighbor. And…it does no good to world order to continue disclaiming that terrorism is not related to Islam. In order to know what to do about the terrorist threat, we must recognize where that threat is coming from.  

 

Moving Leftward—Will the Welfare State Overpower Private Enterprise?

In 2011, welfare spending in the United States (Federal+State spending) topped $1 trillion. That was more than the previous year, which was $800 million. That spending is a very significant piece of money considering that the GDP of the United States is $15 trillion.

And the welfare state seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. During the past four years, the Obama administration’s aggressive promotion of the food-stamp program has increased the number of recipients by 18.5 million. By executive order President Obama has eliminated the work application requirement for the TANF program. (Temporary Aid to Need Families) The present administration also increased the possible duration of unemployment payments from 72 weeks to 99 weeks. Interestingly, claims for disability payments also rose apace. In 1992, only 3% of the American labor force drew disability benefits from the government. Today, 6% of the labor force is on disability compensation. The number of workers qualifying for disability since the recession ended in 2009 has grown twice as fast as private employment. The federal government’s 120 means-tested programs for disability payments have grown 2½ times faster during the Obama presidency than in any other comparable period in American history. Now, almost 10.7 million receive Social Security Disability. (Huffington Post 5/3/12)

That latter fact strongly suggests that American workers are using disability payments to follow-up on unemployment payments, even after 99 weeks of receiving unemployment money. I just have to wonder where all that previously undiscovered disability came from!

To be fair to the question, it must be admitted that the change may not be a reflection of people looking for another government handout as much as it is an indication of the psychological toll the recession has had upon this country. Although some people may not have been disabled at the onset of their unemployment, the long-term effects of continual job rejections and financial stressors have caused many to become anxious or depressed.

Nevertheless, dependence on the government is unquestionably increasing. And...we can’t help noticing that the number of Americans collecting disability is rising at an unprecedented and alarming rate. This cannot be because of increasing danger of injury in the workplace. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that workplace safety is constantly improving. The problem must be caused by better discovery of disabling physical and/or psychological damage or falsified malingering by people looking for a government hand-out. I can tell you from personal experience with Social Security disability claims that many people are claiming disability payments because of psychiatric complaints or muscle pains for which no cause can be found. Not all of these are awarded payments; but they are certainly looking for disability money.

I believe that all this increased dependence on government handouts is bound to affect the outcome of this election. Could any reasonable person believe that a person dependent on government largess would ever vote against the hand that feeds him. 

 

 

 

                 

Religious Freedom? What Happened To It?

Every week, it seems, I receive a mailing bemoaning the fact that the Federal Government is eroding into our freedom of speech and freedom of religion, which are guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. I must admit that most of the dire warnings I just shrug off, because these things do not impact my life directly. But…I cannot ignore these warnings any longer; they are just becoming too big!

1)       Recently I have learned that a U.S. District Court Judge, Barbara Crabb has ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional. She has compared the National Day of Prayer to practicing magic!

2)       At the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, the student chapter of the Christian Legal Society was denied any status on campus because it would not abandon its requirement that members commit themselves to Christian norms regarding sexual morality. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling in 2010 held that the student group’s rights were not violated by a “take all comers” policy.

3)       Following this lead, Vanderbilt University has rewritten its student organizations policy and effectively chased every traditionally Christian student group off campus, denying them regular access to campus facilities.

4)       At the University of Illinois, an adjunct professor of religion, hired to teach a course on Catholicism, was let go because a student complained about his patient explanation of the Catholic Church’s natural law teachings on human sexuality. (He was later restored to his teaching duties, but at the expense of the Newman Center, not on the state payroll.)

5)       Authorities in Washington state and Illinois have attempted to force pharmacists, against their conscience, to dispense “morning after” pills when other pharmacists short distances away make these abortifacients available.

6)       New York City has barred church congregations—and them alone—from using public school buildings outside school hours.

7)       In New Mexico, a Christian wedding photographer was fined for violation of a state “human rights act” because she refused to take the business of a same-sex couple who claimed to want her services at their civil union ceremony.

8)       In Massachusetts, Illinois, San Francisco, and the District of Columbia, the adoption and fostering agencies of Catholic Charities have been shuttered because they will not place children with same-sex couples, as the local authorities demand.

9)       The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court recently ruled that a Wisconsin public high school could not rent space for its annual graduation exercises in a local church lest it be seen as “endorsing religion” and “coercing” its students to view Christianity in a positive light.

10)    In 2010, Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled that Proposition 8, preserving marriage in the California constitution as the union of one man and one woman, was unconstitutional. He held that the affinity between traditional religion and the moral case against same-sex marriage was reason enough to strike down the popular referendum and went so far as to say that religious doctrines holding homosexual acts to be sinful are in themselves a form of “harm” to gays and lesbians.

11)    In 2009, an Iowa Supreme court held that the state’s law restricting marriage to a man and a woman was an expression of a religious viewpoint, and for that reason unconstitutional.

12)    In 2009, President Obama spoke at a Notre Dame commencement and opined that to disagree with his views on abortion and other social issues is fundamentally irrational, and thus to be relegated to the private sphere; he ruled them out of order in public debate.

13)    The administration has been opposed to legislation that protects the conscience statements of military chaplains and other military personnel who continue to hold and to express the view, on religious grounds, that sexual relations are morally permitted only in a marriage between a man and a woman.

14)    In the recent term of the Supreme Court, the administration’s lawyers took the position that there should be no “ministerial exception on religious freedom grounds for employers such as religious schools from federal anti-discrimination laws. Church schools and other religious institutions, they argued, have only as much protection as non-religious institutions do on “freedom of association” grounds—as though the religious clause of the First Amendment added no ground whatsoever for a unique religious freedom claim. Fortunately, the Supreme Court threw out the administration’s argument by a 9-0 decision. The Court held that the Obama Justice Department’s view was “remarkable,” “untenable, and “hard to square with the text of the First Amendment, itself.”

15)    And of course, there is the infamous Health and Human services “contraception mandate,” which is designed to force people of faith, and particularly Catholics to provide drugs for contraception and for producing abortion to early pregnancies. The use of these drugs clearly violates the religious consciences of many people in the United States, and not Catholics only. Protestants, Catholics, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim peoples have joined together to oppose this blatant violation of the First Amendment.

         Our society and government is demonstrating a blundering impatience whenever countervailing claims are made in the name of religious conscience, the integrity of religious institutions, or the foundational character of religious communities, as part of American civil society. The government is failing to perceive the legitimate contribution of religion to public discourse and the establishment of moral and ethical policy.

         I just wonder where all this Constitutional violation is going to end. Our government is openly taking away primary and basic freedoms from our people. I hope something changes at the next election to counter this trend toward godlessness in America.

          (Much of this blog post was excerpted from Imprimis Sept 2012, Vol. 41, Number 9.)

Are Tax Cuts A Panacea? Probably Not.

(The following blog post is a direct quote of an essay written by Thomas Sowell and published in The Patriot Post 9/19/12. I agree with all of it except with his comment that investing in tax-free municipal bonds loses the investment money to the economy. All that is lost by these investments is the taxable revenue the government could collect if the investments were in some other kind of issue.)

There was a time when Democrats and Republicans alike could talk sense about tax rates, in terms of what is best for the economy, without demagoguery about "tax cuts for the rich."

Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy spoke plainly about the fact that higher tax rates on individuals and businesses did not automatically translate into higher tax revenues for the government. Beyond some point, high tax rates on those with high incomes simply led to those incomes being invested in tax-free bonds, with the revenue from those bonds being completely lost to the government -- and the investments lost to the economy.

As President John F. Kennedy put it, "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now." This was because investors' "efforts to avoid tax liabilities" make "certain types of less productive activity more profitable than more valuable undertakings," and this in turn "inhibits our growth and efficiency."

Both Democratic president Woodrow Wilson and Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush said virtually the same thing.

This disconnect between higher tax rates and higher tax revenues is not peculiar to the United States. Iceland and India both collected more tax revenue after tax rates were cut. In Iceland, the corporate tax rate was cut from 45 percent to 18 percent between 1991 and 2001 -- and the revenue from corporate taxes tripled at the lower rate.

It doesn't always have to be this way. Everything depends on how high the tax rate is initially and how other things are going in the economy. But at least we can do without the claims that tax cuts are just ways of helping "the rich" or that we have to raise the tax rate because we have a deficit. We need more tax revenue, not higher tax rates that can backfire.

This has not always been either a partisan issue or an ideological issue. John Maynard Keynes said in 1933 that "given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the budget."

New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt recently took the "no panacea" approach to rebut the argument for tax cuts. Presidents Bush 41 and Bill Clinton both raised tax rates, and the economy continued to grow, while the economy declined after President Bush 43's tax rate cuts, Leonhardt argued.

The 800-pound gorilla that gets ignored by people who use these talking points is the dominant economic factor of those years -- namely the huge and unsustainable housing boom that led to a catastrophic housing bust that took down the whole economy on Bush 43's watch.

Tax cuts are not a panacea. In fact, nothing is a panacea or else, by definition, all the problems of the world would already be solved.

Ironically, it was Mr. Leonhardt's own newspaper that reported in 2006, "An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year."

Expectations are of course in the eye of the beholder. Rising tax revenues in the wake of a cut in high tax rates was a possibility expected by five different administrations, both Democratic and Republican, over a period of more than three-quarters of a century.

No one expected automatic and instant surges in economic growth. Both John F. Kennedy and John Maynard Keynes spoke in terms of the long-run effects of lower tax rates, not the kind of instant results suggested by Mr. Leonhardt's graph of growth rates -- least of all during a very volatile housing market in which American homeowners took trillions of dollars in equity out of their homes.

Back during the 1920s, when there was no such monumental economic factor as the housing boom and bust until 1929, there was a rapid increase in both tax revenues and jobs after the tax rates were cut. Today, the uncertainties generated by an activist and anti-business administration probably have more of a chilling effect on investments than the tax rate does.

 

Are American Women Only Interested in Contraception and Abortion Access?

If you listen to Democrat campaign messages aimed at the female vote, you would think so. But…it is not true. Women are interested in a variety of campaign issues. Look at the following from a group called “Independent Women’s Voice,” and educational advocacy group.

This women’s organization has taken a great interest in educating American women on the truth about the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare. The group contacted women in 24,000 households in America who are considered independent voters. They presented them with information from the Congressional Budget Office. The name of neither Presidential candidate was included in their mailing—only facts from the CBO regarding the ACA. The mailings were followed up with a questionnaire about which presidential candidate they favored. (Presidential candidate preference is considered to be a proxy for approval/disapproval of the candidates: Mr. Romney known to favor repeal of the ACA and Mr. Obama who favors implementing the law.)

In a control group who never received the mailings, independent women voters favored Mr. Romney in the presidential race by a 44%-42% margin. After receiving the information from the CBO, independent women voters approved of Mr. Romney over President Obama by a margin of 50%-34%. But…what was it in the CBO data that changed the minds of these women so dramatically?

·      Americans know that the ACA requires insurance companies to allow families to keep adult children up to age 16 on their parents’ policy. They are less likely to know that the provision increased the average family premium—even for families that did not add adult dependents—by $150-$450/month in 2011.

·      The average family’s health insurance premium has already increased by $1300/year.

·      Young workers who buy their own insurance will see a 19%-30% increase in their premiums.

·      Originally, CBO predicted that 700,000 people would use the ACA’s federal high-risk program. Only 78,000 have signed up, making the cost to the taxpayer millions of allocated dollars for each applicant.

·      The ACA was sold as the solution to covering the 47 million uninsured people in America; but now the CBO estimates that after the law has been implemented for 10 years, 30 million Americans will still be uninsured.

·      Adding new patients to the Medicaid program, which will be a result of the ACA, means that doctors will have to see patients more quickly and spend less time with each patient in order to cover the overhead costs of practice. This means that doctors will be less inclined to take new Medicaid patients.

If you want to check this data, look at HealthReformQuestions.com; but be careful, the Obama campaign has overlaid this web site with an advertisement that pretends to refute these facts from the Congressional Budget Office. When you Google “Health Reform  Questions,” select the url 2^nd from the top. The top selection is the Obamacare advertisement.

The bottom line of all this is that “There’s no such thing as a free lunch!” The money has to come from somewhere; and no entitlement program is free.    

Millions Flee the Most Liberal State in the Union

In their recent book, “Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson point out that over the past 22 years, 3.4 million Californians have quit the state in favor of states and nations that have lower tax rates. The causes of this mass exodus has not been taxes, alone. Other factors have been excessive business regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs.

California has been naturally blessed in the past with some of the most attractive natural resources in the world. California has nearly 850 miles of pristine Pacific Ocean coastline; some of the world’s most breathtaking forests, deserts, and mountains; abundant oil, gold, and agricultural resources. In the heavily populated coastal regions, is located one of the world’s very rare Mediterranean climates—warm summers and a relatively warm, very wet winter—this combination, along with the fertile soil will grow almost any agricultural product needed by man. Grafted on top of that natural bounty is an equally impressive cultural abundance: the verve for experimentation and innovation that birthed the entertainment industry in Southern California and Silicon Valley in the north.

But…what happened? The Golden State is beset by high unemployment (10.6 percent in August, behind only Rhode Island and Nevada) and consistently ranks as the nation’s worst business atmosphere.

What’s the reason for this social catastrophe? Bad government, high taxes, and overly enthusiastic business regulation. All this coupled with a penchant for buying things where there is no money to pay for them. For instance, California recently voted to fund a multimillion dollar project to study and advance the use of embryonic stem cells, a technology with very questionable probable outcomes.

Across the nation, states that embrace free-market principles are beating jurisdictions that prefer big government to within an inch of their lives. The conclusion is—states should be more like Texas and less like California.

States with unobtrusive government fare much better than governmental behemoths like California.  A comparison between the nine states with the highest and lowest tax burdens, for instance, shows remarkable disparities:

During the decade that ended in 2010, GDP in the low-tax states grew by 20 percent more than in the high-tax jurisdictions. Population growth in the low-tax states was nearly four times greater than in the high-tax states. And the low tax rates didn’t exactly make paupers out of the states that embraced them either; those jurisdictions actually realized substantially larger increases in the growth of state and local tax revenue than did their more confiscatory brethren.

The conclusion is obvious: States that embrace conservative policies – low taxes, restrained regulation, free labor markets, a friendly business environment consistently outperform states where big government carries the day.

Oh! How I wish the United States federal government could learn this lesson from the states.

 

 

Where Do Our Moral and Political Values Come From?

Today’s blog post is largely taken from a book by Jonathan Haidt, a liberal professor at New York University and the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.  

Did you ever wonder why you believe the things you believe and why other people don’t see things the way you do? There have been three answers suggested to this question.

1)   Plato thought that our moral decisions were determined by our reason; and that our emotional responses followed those rational, thought-out, concepts.

2)    David Hume, the Scottish philosopher of the 18^th Century, thought that our emotional life is the prime mover in our moral decisions (and, thus, our political viewpoints). He thought that our rational selves then worked to justify what our emotions directed us to believe.

3)   Thomas Jefferson thought that our rational thinking and our emotional attitudes exist alongside of one another; they compete with one another, and the one that proves the stronger wins out in the end.

In his book, Haidt examines each of these possibilities through a series of very interesting experiments. He concludes that Hume is right—our emotional life is the determining factor in our belief systems. Our rationality follows what our emotions and our intuitions tell us is the right path of belief.

He points out that since our intuitions and our emotional mindsets are the final arbiters of our morals and our beliefs, it is useless to try to argue those who do not believe the way we believe into changing their attitudes in order to comport with our own. He reports that we can, however, influence others and cause them to come around to our way of thinking. But…it must be done on an emotional level and not on a rational, logical basis. In order to influence others, we must become their friend, their ally, their confidant. Sometimes, just showing them that we care about them and expressing our support for a point of view or a candidate that we support is enough to get them to look seriously at changing their affinities. That is the reason that yard signs work—the well-known technique of name recognition. They show that we, as constructive and helpful citizens, support one candidate or another. But…we cannot argue anyone into our political camp.

Here ends Haidt’s contribution to this post. Barack Obama is ahead in the polls not because he has the best program and certainly not because he has such a good record as a president. He is ahead because he connects with people on a more emotional level than does Mitt Romney. Obama exudes an attitude of confidence and every-day communication ability. He is likable! I only wish that there were a way of showing the American electorate that likability will not improve our situation with the national debt; and it will not help mend our damaged leadership position in the Middle East. Likability will not overcome the problems of out-of-control spending on give-away programs.

An end of likability will eventually come when America reaches the point where Greece and Spain have arrived—when there is no money available to borrow and where the free enterprise system has been stressed so badly that it can no longer grow and produce. Then…we will know the truth about likability!