Who Owns Your Money: You or the Government?
Susan Stamper Brown, FloydReports.com
Ever heard the phrase, “Perception is reality?” To the honest person, understanding this concept can inspire you to excel. To the dishonest, perception becomes the mask under which lies vulnerability or perhaps a more sinister reality.
This is true in the court system, as we have witnessed this week with the Casey Anthony verdict. It’s all about perception and persuasion. The same is true in the world of politics. It’s rarely about righting wrongs or serving humanity; it’s about the furtherance of an ideological agenda.
A classic example is the ongoing debate over whether wages earned by an individual is fair compensation for his or her hard work, or is that compensation actually owned and controlled by the government.
How many times have we heard Democrats tell job creators it’s time to cough up a little more cash, and then complain that the government is somehow “losing” money — unless it raises taxes?
How can you lose money that was never yours to begin with? You can’t. But a whole lot of Americans have bought into that perception – because they’ve heard it repeatedly, and now perceive it as fact.
The demonization of corporate jet owners….
Obama’s Drug of Choice: Welfare Addiction
Susan Stamper Brown, FloydReports.com
Once upon a time, people’s hands were busy putting food on the table and they were too busy or too proud to consider extending those same hands out to the government for a handout. But that time has long passed, and time is running out before America the Great turns into America the Nanny State.
Let this Conservative go on record: When used properly, welfare can be a force for good for those most in need. Unfortunately, we have an administration, whose failed (0-97 in the Senate) 2011 budget bulged with middle-class handouts meant to expand the welfare state. Democrats are bent on making addicts of otherwise perfectly capable citizens to the designer drug of taxpayer dollars. In an attempt to make this addiction permanent, the administration rolled out Obamacare.
In 2008, anxiety over a failing economy and soaring costs of healthcare helped to propel Obama to the White House, but, three years later, and after the passing of Obamacare, the anxiety has morphed into anger – as the truth about this poorly constructed bill unfolds to find that it is nothing more than a compilation of mistakes, bloopers, paybacks and blunders that fix healthcare about as well as handing a bandage and bottle of blood thinner to a gunshot victim.
The most recent “blunder,” which involves dropping people from the middle class and rolling them onto the welfare rolls, will not only add billions of dollars of cost to the bill; it will throw millions of middle class retirees into the Medicaid program. Medicaid was created to help the most needy in our society. Medicare actuary, Richard Foster, told the House Budget Committee that a provision in Obamacare did not consider social security benefits when calculating eligibility for early retirees, effectively branding those making up to $64000 per year as destitute. Talk about the destruction of the middle class.
Most troubling is the White House admits Democrat lawmakers knew this provision was in the bill and passed it anyway….
Video: Obama’s Failed Secular, Socialist Ideas are Destroying the USA
Obama’s Commerce Secretary’s Plan for Global Socialism
Chuck Roger, The American Thinker
The wise man smiled and proclaimed that government should use “regulatory steps” as well as market forces to intervene in the power generation sector. The man also told his UC Berkeley audience that government should set higher targets for non-fossil-fuel-based energy production and penalize producers that don’t comply. The issuer of these decrees was John Bryson, who at the time just happened to be CEO of Edison International, a company whose fortunes would increase under alternative energy mandates. Bryson now happens to be President Obama’s nominee to head the Commerce Department. Just another day in Barack Obama’s crony capitalist paradise.
Mr. Bryson is a progressive, a member of that species of critter that favors government intervention to force “society” to adhere to policies that know-it-alls deem best. In textbook progressive style, as a prescription for stopping people in undeveloped countries from clearing forests, Bryson proclaimed to a 2009 UN energy conference that “we’ve got to… find ways to map out the affected lands, to develop plans for addressing them, find economic models in which the people who are driven to do these things to try to raise the livelihoods of their families, find alternative means.” [Awkward wording reproduced as is.]
Global wealth redistribution, pure and simple.
Obama’s EPA Pushes UN Socialism — Err, “Environmental Justice”
Susan Stamper Brown, FloydReports.com
The United Nations’ (UN) current plan to discuss a treaty proposal granting more rights to “mother earth” than humans is nothing more than an elaborate attempt to re-market the climate change program in a neatly wrapped package called “environmental justice.”
The UN proposal, drafted by Bolivian socialist president Evo Morales (the same guy who claims that eating chicken causes male baldness and homosexuality), is similar to a new Bolivian law which elevates trees, animals, insects and “living things” to the same level as humans. Raised to this new level, mother earth and her “living things” would be assigned an authorized representative to hear complaints brought on their behalf and would have the right to seek financial compensation for damages.
All bug-stomping humans beware: Morales’ proposal does not stop at financial compensation but goes a step further to execute judgment upon the guilty by organizing a “tribunal for climate justice.”
Obama: America Was Not a “Great Country,” 1776-1965
Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com
As the nation digests Barack Obama’s plan to ride a tax hike to re-election, one phrase from yesterday’s budget speech confirms what this author has long stated: the president is fundamentally an anti-American Messianic figure who believes he was sent to save our nation from itself and its Founders. Speaking a line that was written in advance, approved by multiple layers of handlers and advisers, and spoken with relish, the president said America is only a great nation if we commit ourselves to big government spending. Obama began by contrasting the nation’s historic belief in “rugged individualism” with real “patriotism” — the kind that requires wealth redistribution. He said:
[W]e contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities. We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.
By that measure, America was not “a great country” for most of her history. Unemployment insurance did not exist in any state until Wisconsin adopted the program in 1931. FDR made the system national law in the Social Security Act of 1935. Lyndon Baines Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid by signing the Social Security Act of 1965.
That means America has been “a great country” for, at most, 46 years. Coincidentally, this time frame happens to overlap with Barack Obama’s life.
These commitments come with a price tag. In his desperate attempt to hang the national debt on Republicans, he fibbed….
Death (Panels) and Taxes
Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com
Barack Obama has unveiled his agenda for balancing the budget: Raising taxes on the living, then sending them to an early grave. In his speech this afternoon, Obama confirmed long-running suspicions that he views extravagant expenditures as “core investments,” believes all wealth belongs to the government, questions the “patriotism” of those who believe in limited government, and plans to set to establish a “commission” to deny seniors medical treatment he deems “unnecessary.”
Debt Service Lip Service
After 20 meandering minutes of strawman-smashing and hand-wringing over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, Obama outlined his four-step plan. He began by insisting he would “make the tough cuts” Republicans pried out of him, but he would never sacrifice “core investments”…like “broadband access” and “clean energy technology.” Such priorities allowed this president to rack up more debt in 19 months than all of his predecessors combined.
In a rare display of honesty, Obama vowed….
Video: Rep. Paul Ryan, Obama’s America is Becoming a Socialist State
Video: The UN’s Assault on Property Rights
Chaos Summer: Why Wisconsin is Only the Beginning
Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, FloydReports.com
I’m going to bankrupt this country by any means necessary, and if you try to stop me or slow me down, I’ll shut the government down and blame it on you. If you try to stop me, you can kiss your political careers good-bye. Isn’t this essentially what Barack Obama and his allies in the U.S. Senate are saying to the Republican leaders in Congress?
One thing is certain: it’s not an idle threat. Obama and his allies control the executive branch of the government and the United States Senate. They also control the mainstream media. On top of that, they control the unions, which they are sending into the streets.
Our great nation is on the verge of bankruptcy. The national debt stands at $14 trillion. When the people cried out and demanded that Washington put a stop to the out-of-control waste and spending, Barack Obama instead responded by proposing a budget that, by his own calculations, doubles our already untenable debt over the next decade.
Americans wrongly assumed that Obama would change accordingly after taking his election “shellacking.” He said the day after the elections, “And I told John Boehner and Mitch McConnell last night, I am very eager to sit down with members of both parties and figure out how we can move forward together.” His compromising rhetoric worked to get Americans to back-off and lower their defenses.
In reality, when the Republican-led House of Representatives put forth legislation to cut our out-of-control deficit by $61 billion — a mere 3.7 percent of our deficit and a scant 0.4 percent of our national debt — Barack Obama and his allies in Congress threatened to shut the government down.
