Choosing The Right Lane To Travel

In pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Obama: Give Me Debt Ceiling Power Or I’ll Veto My Own Tax Proposal by Tim Brown

In case there is still anyone out there that continues to believe that the 2008 campaign lines that Barack Obama gave about changing the way Washington works, stopping “politics as usual,” and providing more transparency in government are true, then get a load of this. On Wednesday, Obama demonstrated just how partisan and how much of a power grabber he is. He indicated that if he were not given unlimited powers to raise the debt ceiling, apart from Congressional approval, that he might just veto his own tax hike proposal should it come to his desk.

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Congress and White House to Put Thousands of Charities Out of Business by Giacomo

Most charities in the United States rely on donations as their primary source of income.  When donations are made to a non-profit charity, they become a tax deduction to the person or corporation giving the donation.  Subsequently, many people only give donations because of the tax deduction they receive.   This can be seen in the fact that many non-profit charities receive a third to half of their annual donations in the month December as people begin to think about income taxes and the need for deductions. Now, those tax deductions are in danger of being reduced or disappearing all together and if they do, a large percentage of donations will also disappear resulting in many a charity having to close their doors and it all has to do with the infamous fiscal cliff. One of the economic plans being put forth by Democrats calls for the reduction of allowable charitable tax deductions.  Others are proposing a cap on the amount of allowable charitable tax deductions and yet others are abdicating dropping all tax deductions for charitable donations. Any of these plans will have a drastic impact on many non-profit charities.  Reducing the deduction amount or placing a cap on allowable deductions will hurt many charities.  Dropping all tax deductions will be devastating to non-profit charities resulting in many of them no longer being able to afford to help those in need.  Hundreds and thousands of charities will cease to exist.

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Unemployment and the Fiscal Bluff

November's jobs numbers are out and, though they're "better than expected," they're far short of a real recovery. The U.S. economy added 146,000 jobs in November, and headline unemployment dropped to 7.7 percent, the lowest rate since December 2008. But that number is deceptive. The rate dropped because some 542,000 people left the workforce. If labor participation remained the same as it was in January 2009, headline unemployment would be 10.7 percent. The U-6 rate, which includes the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work, is 14.4 percent. Notably, the unemployment for blacks, who gave Barack Obama 96 percent of the vote, is 13.2 percent. Additionally, September and October numbers were revised down by a total of 49,000 jobs -- awfully convenient now that the election is over! The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that under "current law," i.e., if (when) we go over the cliff, the federal budget will still increase by 55 percent over the next 10 years, while tax collection will soar to an all-time high of 21.4 percent of GDP. CBO estimates, however, assume no economic change from higher taxes, which is unrealistic. In other words, higher rates won't necessarily bring in the projected revenue because businesses and consumers will change their behavior to avoid taxes. Government spending is also a tax in the sense that every dollar spent by the government must first be taken out of the economy. A final fiscal cliff note: Barack Obama is demanding a return of the top tax rates to those in effect during the supposed nirvana of the Clinton years, and he's likely to get all the rates of Clinton's era. In fact, that's what former DNC chief Howard Dean said is necessary. "[T]he truth is everybody needs to pay more taxes, not just the rich," Dean admitted. "[W]e're not going to get out of this deficit problem unless we raise taxes across the board, to go back to what Bill Clinton had and his taxes." They're coming for the middle class, too, and some of them aren't afraid to say so.

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Egyptian Reporter Given a Disturbing Look Inside the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Torture Chambers’

A chilling report recently published in the Egyptian newspaper, al-Masry al-Youm, reveals that the torture chambers once utilized by the Hosni Mubarak regime to tamp down protesters are being put to the same if not greater use by the country’s new, self-proclaimed dictator, Mohammed Morsi. Despite the Obama administration and worldwide media’s insistence that the election of the Muslim Brotherhood leader was a watershed moment for democracy in the Middle East, it would seem those hopes are on a rapid downward trajectory as reports of savage beatings and brutality against Egyptian protesters, abound. This disturbing revelation came to light just days ago when an al-Masry al-Youm reporter, with the help of a Brotherhood-owned and operated television station, was given an exclusive tour of the torture chambers. While one might think the decision to grant a journalist access to such a chilling look into the way the Muslim Brotherhood treats its critics as counter-intuitive, it makes perfect sense. After all, what could possibly ever serve as better warning for those even thinking of resisting Morsi’s push for a totalitarian regime based on sharia law than to know what will happen to them if they do?

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Obama Agriculture Secretary: Rural America “Becoming Less And Less Relevant”…

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has some harsh words for rural America: It’s “becoming less and less relevant,” he says. A month after an election that Democrats won even as rural parts of the country voted overwhelmingly Republican, the former Democratic governor of Iowa told farm belt leaders this past week that he’s frustrated with their internecine squabbles and says they need to be more strategic in picking their political fights. “It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with folks in rural America,” Vilsack said in a speech at a forum sponsored by the Farm Journal. “It’s time for a different thought process here, in my view.” He said rural America’s biggest assets – the food supply, recreational areas and energy, for example – can be overlooked by people elsewhere as the U.S. population shifts more to cities, their suburbs and exurbs.  So, conservative rural America can simply become irrelevant?  Where is the outrage? While large cities become enclaves for the government's children waiting on a hand out?

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Navy SEAL Killed in US Hostage Rescue

A US Navy SEAL was killed in Sunday's rescue mission in Afghanistan that freed an American doctor kidnapped by the Taliban, the White House said. "Our special operators in Afghanistan rescued an American citizen in a mission that was characteristic of the extraordinary courage, skill and patriotism that our troops show every day," the White House said in a statement. "Tragically, we lost one of our special operators in this effort. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family, just as we must always honor our troops and military families."  U.S. General John Allen, commander of NATO-led foreign forces in Afghanistan, said he ordered the mission in eastern Afghanistan when intelligence showed that Joseph was "in imminent danger of injury or death."

Benghazi

The above story makes the whole Benghazi event even harder to swallow.  A General making a "in the moment" decision to save lives and doing so successfully.  The information hitting the news within hours of it happening with full disclosure of the details.  Yet, today we still do not know what supposedly happened in Benghazi and who is responsible for four American's deaths.  The excuses about Benghazi seemed to not be present in the above.  Disgusting to say the least!!

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Gingrich: Republicans Better Prepare for ‘Super Bowl’ in 2016 By Amy Woods

President Barack Obama “guarantees a permanent war” with Republicans by forcing the party’s hand on the issue of income-tax hikes on top earners, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday. “The president won,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The president has a very clear, simple position. He wants to prove he can dominate, and he proves he can dominate by getting the rates up, and he has a veto pen.” The Georgia Republican said he believes Obama wants to block House Speaker John Boehner on the issue of spending cuts and said that might lead to a political run on the House through 2014. “Personalities matter,” Gingrich said. “He guarantees a permanent war because everybody on the right at every level sooner or later is going to get sick of it.” On the issue of 2016, Gingrich and the others seated at the television program’s roundtable agreed Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee. If that’s the case, Gingrich said the party must evolve in order to compete. “Trying to win that will be truly the Super Bowl,” he said. “The Republican Party today is incapable of competing at that level. We didn’t blow it because of Mitt Romney. We blew it because of a party which has refused to engage the reality of American life."

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NYT: Conservatives May Have a Point About Welfare Dependency

In an eyebrow raising article, liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a startling concession: “This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.” Writing from Jackson, Kentucky, Mr. Kristof reported that numerous poor parents in Appalachian hill country are yanking their kids out of literacy classes in order to bag a $689 monthly Supplemental Security Income (S.S.I.) check per kid. The checks continue until the child reaches 18 years of age. “The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.” Cornell University Economics Professor Richard V. Burkhauser says parents are inducing illiteracy to keep the taxpayer-funded welfare checks rolling in. “One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school. If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive,” said Professor Burkhauser.

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Massive Revenue Loss Follows California Tax Hike Vote by Tad Cronn

During the recent election, Gov. Jerry Brown and supporters of Prop. 30 assured voters that there was no chance whatsoever that raising taxes again would drive away any of the state’s businesses or millionaires. Brown even commissioned a study from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality that found millionaires would rather stay put than let a little thing like government thievery drive them away.

Whoops

Although Chiang’s office did not comment on the whole “rich flight” issue, the breakdown of the trouble is an $842.5 million plunge in personal income taxes, $187.8 million decrease in corporate taxes, offset by an increase of $99 million in sales taxes. The sales tax rise probably has a lot to do with increasing consumer costs in the not-so-Golden State, although it wouldn’t be surprising if some of it was from happy liberals going on a binge after the election. Will reality finally soak in to the spending-addicted brains of liberal voters and politicians? Not likely. Liberals’ dogma dies hard.

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Fiscal Cliff Notes: Part II By Thomas Sowell
One of the big advantages that President Obama has, as he plays "chicken" with the Congressional Republicans along the "fiscal cliff," is that Obama is a master of the plausible lie, which will never be exposed by the mainstream media— nor, apparently, by the Republicans. A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered, is that President Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" cost the government so much lost tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit— so that the government cannot afford to allow the cost of letting the Bush tax rates continue for "the rich."

It sounds very plausible, and constant repetition without a challenge may well be enough to convince the voting public that, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives does not go along with Barack Obama's demands for more spending and higher tax rates on the top 2 percent, it just shows that they care more for "the rich" than for the other 98 percent. What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false Obama's argument is. That also makes it completely inexplicable why the Republicans have not done so. The official statistics which show plainly how wrong Barack Obama is can be found in his own "Economic Report of the President" for 2012, on page 411. You can look it up. You may be able to find a copy of the "Economic Report of the President" for 2012 at your local public library. Or you can buy a hard copy from the Government Printing Office or download an electronic version from the Internet.

For those who find that "a picture is worth a thousand words," they need only see the graphs published in the November 30th issue of Investor's Business Daily. What both the statistical tables in the "Economic Report of the President" and the graphs in Investor's Business Daily show is that (1) tax revenues went up— not down— after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cut in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit.

Indeed, the New York Times reported in 2006: "An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year." While the New York Times may not have expected this, there is nothing unprecedented about lower tax rates leading to higher tax revenues, despite automatic assumptions by many in the media and elsewhere that tax rates and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction. They do not.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction. This has happened as recently as the George W. Bush administration and as far back as the Reagan administration. Moreover, tax revenues went up when tax rates went down, as far back as the Coolidge administration, before there was a Congressional Budget Office to make false predictions.

The bottom line is that Barack Obama's blaming increased budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts is demonstrably false. What caused the decreasing budget deficits after the Bush tax cuts to suddenly reverse and start increasing was the mortgage crisis. The deficit increased in 2008, followed by a huge increase in 2009. So it is sheer hogwash that "tax cuts for the rich" caused the government to lose tax revenues. The government gained tax revenues, not lost them. Moreover, "the rich" paid a larger amount of taxes, and a larger share of all taxes, after the tax rates were cut.

That is because people change their economic behavior when tax rates are changed, contrary to what the Congressional Budget Office and others seem to assume, and this can stimulate the economy more than a government "stimulus" has done under either Bush or Obama.

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"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government." --Mercy Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805

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The Governmant rings the Doorbell!!  Watch