A Nail in The Coffin of Keynesian Economic Theory

A Nail in The Coffin of Keynesian Economic Theory

Federal deficit least in 5 years on revenue hike, spending cuts

The deficit is the gap between the government’s tax revenue and its spending. The gap narrowed for the budget year that ended on Sept. 30 because revenues rose while spending fell.

For those on the Left that are continuing to defend the bankrupt theory of Keynesian Economics, pay close attention. We have factual proof that Keynesian Economics does not work and that free market Capitalism along with spending restraints do. 

The government says the deficit for the 2013 budget year totaled $680.3 billion, down from $1.09 trillion in 2012. That’s the smallest imbalance since 2008, when the government ran a $458.6 billion deficit. However, hold on to your hate as the Left blusters as to why it was not increased economic activity and spending restraints!
Even with a lackluster economy tax revenues were up enough to make a huge difference.  Fortunately this was not offset by reckless spending by the White House and Democrats.  One would think this would be enough proof to have even the most hardliner change their mind.  But, that won't happen.  Why? The deficit reduction does not fit the Liberal World Veiw.  Good news such as this MUST be connected to and dependent upon the government.  Since it is the result of the market and not government, the Left will find reasons NOT to celebrate.

Revenue jumped 13.3 percent to $2.77 trillion, reflecting a slightly better. And spending declined 2.4 percent to $3.45 trillion, in part because of across-the-board spending cuts that took effect in March.

The above facts are not to be ignored as we move into the negotiations over the debt limit and spending.

DOJ Argues International Treaty Can Trump the Constitution

DOJ Argues International Treaty Can Trump the Constitution

Justice Department attorneys are advancing an argument at the Supreme Court that could allow the government to invoke international treaties as a legal basis for policies such as gun control that conflict with the U.S. Constitution, according to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Their argument is that a law implementing an international treaty signed by the U.S. allows the federal government to prosecute a criminal case that would normally be handled by state or local authorities.

That is a dangerous argument, according to Cruz.

“The Constitution created a limited federal government with only specific enumerated powers,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner prior to giving a speech on the issue today at the Heritage Foundation. “The Supreme Court should not interpret the treaty power in a manner that undermines this bedrock protection of individual liberty,” Cruz said.

Justice and State departments blocking access to survivors of Benghazi attack

Justice and State departments blocking access to survivors of Benghazi attack

By Catherine Herridge

The Justice and State departments are now citing a year-old FBI investigation and a future criminal prosecution to block access to survivors of last year’s Benghazi terror attack. In an Oct. 28 letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Julia Frifield, refers to "significant risks" and "serious concerns about having the survivors of the attack submit to additional interviews."

Graham has been asking since last year for the FBI’s transcripts of interviews with State Department and CIA survivors who were evacuated to Germany after the Sep.11 attack on the U.S. consulate.

He and other Republicans believe the transcripts will show the survivors told the FBI it was a terrorist attack and made no mention of a video or anti-U.S. demonstration at the consulate. This intelligence was  likely available to the president, his national security team and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who five days after the assault blamed it on an anti-U.S. demonstration and inflammatory video.

"You can't hide behind a criminal investigation," Graham told reporters during a news conference on Capitol Hill.  "That's not a good reason to deny the Congress witness statements 48 hours after the attack."

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and its Republican Chairman, Darell Issa, recently interviewed – against the Justice Department’s wishes -- two State Department security agents who have firsthand knowledge of the attack, leading one Democratic lawmaker to predict the move would create inconsistencies and complicate a trial.

"As a prosecutor, you never want your witnesses to be interviewed by multiple sources. It just lends itself to the possibility of unintentional conflicts within their statements," Rep.Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News. "It concerns me that that was not a higher priority for the chairman, to make sure that we could bring these people to justice, than to carry on this political exercise." But waiting for a criminal prosecution and appeal to be wrapped up, according to Republicans, doesn't pass the sniff test.

"So we are going to wait three years when we had a terrorist attack, which is very different than your average criminal case that Senator Graham talked about, to get the truth and think about what we know to prevent future terrorist attacks?" asked Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.  As Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., renewed his call for a select committee; lawmakers also cited the reporting of Fox News, followed by CBS’ “60 Minutes,” that the main Benghazi suspects have strong ties to Al Qaeda senior leadership.

At the same time, another Republican turned the tables on the media and its apparent lack of curiosity about Ambassador Chris Stevens' final days. "Does it bother you whether or not you know why Chris Stevens was in Benghazi?" asked Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. "Do you know why we were the last flag flying in Benghazi after the British had left and the Red Cross had been bombed? Do you know why requests for additional security were denied?" Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Tex.,chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry with 84 congressional signatures asking why his department was not offering a reward for tips leading to the Benghazi suspects. The “Rewards for Justice” program, described on the State Department’s own website as a valuable tool in counter-terrorism cases, offers millions of dollars for information about suspects who are not accused of murdering Americans.

Yet there is no reward for information leading to those who murdered  Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Kerry's staff refuses to discuss it. "I don't have anything new for you on the Al Qaeda suspects from Benghazi," 

The Great Lie of Modern Unions

The Great Lie of Modern Unions

Editorial By Wendy McElroy

Few aspects of America's past are as thoroughly misunderstood as the history of the labor movements that thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The modern union that arose and usurped their place was the antithesis of what it claimed to be. It did not voice workers' rights. It silenced them.

Modern unions were created through an alliance between big government, big business and big labor in order to control the power of the work force. The alliance was not always a comfortable one, to be sure, and it sometimes broke down. Nevertheless, the modern union arose because it was convenient to all parties involved. It also effectively killed what was deemed the larger threat; namely, labor organizations that were not under government control. Modern unions are rooted in the New Deal legislation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and they were championed by leaders of industry such as Gerard Swope, then-president of General Electric. The Wagner Act (1935) established the legal "right" of workers to unionize if a majority within a business voted to do so. These unions were handed the legal privilege of certification. That is, the union received government authorization as the sole representative of labor within a certain industry or business with whom the employer was required to negotiate. The monopoly union then prevented other labor groups and individuals from negotiating their own contracts. Workers in the industry could choose not to join the union but they remained bound by its contracts and they had to pay union fees. Thus, the modern union was a forced transfer of authority and rights away from individual workers to a government-created monopoly.

Big business applauded the Wagner Act because it eliminated the need to negotiate contracts with multiple groups or individuals. The monopoly union also acted as an enforcement arm, which ensured that its members complied with contracts. The union prevented the wildcat strikes which were a significant problem; it punished unsanctioned boycotts, work slowdowns and the other labor tactics that had proven so effective in the past. Leaders of big labor were well aware of the benefits they offered to big business. The union leader John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) for decades, assured employers with whom he negotiated that a contract with him "is adequate to protect against sit-downs, lie-downs, or any other kind of strike." The power of labor became centralized in such hands.

Prior to the modern union, labor organizations had a marked tendency toward decentralization. Consider the Knights of Labor, a labor federation established in 1869. By 1886, its membership peaked at about 700,000 with local chapters acting with considerable autonomy. The voluntary chapters prospered because they offered services to members; for example, support networks were established to insure members against injury or ill health.

Labor movements flourished in every niche of America. In Michigan, for example, a woman named Sabina (Bina) West Miller rebelled against the inability of working women to secure the life insurance that could keep a family intact in case of an earner's death. By contrast, men often had life insurance through fraternal societies such as the Knights of the Maccabees with which Bina associated.

In the 1890s, she created women's auxiliaries within the Maccabees. In 1916, the Milwaukee Sentinel carried an advertisement for the Women's Benefit Association (WBA), Bina's umbrella organization. The WBA declared itself to be "The Largest, Strongest, and Most Progressive Fraternal Benefit Society for Women in the World; Offers more opportunities to women than any other fraternal insurance society; Non-political and non-sectarian; Established in 55 states and provinces; Organized October 1, 1892." The advertisement reported the membership to consist of 188,008 women.

As a massive and diverse network of labor movements grew in power, the threat to entrenched political interests also swelled. In 1877 and 1894, two massive railroad strikes dramatically illustrated that threat. The Great Railroad Strike lasted 45 days and the Pullman Strike eventually involved about 250,000 workers in 27 states. Troops were needed to break the strikes and to control the violence of some strikers.

But nothing seemed to slow the pace of voluntary labor organizations. Scholar Leslie Siddeley noted that:

 "by 1920 the National Fraternal Congress (NFC), an association of fraternal societies, boasted 200 member societies with 120,000 local affiliated lodges. These 200 societies insured nine million members with over $9,500,000,000 of life insurance in force. The member societies of the NFC were just the tip of the iceberg. For example, we know that in 1918 there were 313 non-NFC fraternal organizations providing insurance to the immigrant poor in Chicago alone. In fact, fraternal insurance was by far the most popular type of insurance among the immigrant poor, as well as among native blacks. Despite their poverty, these groups had levels of insurance equal to, and sometimes greater than, native whites."

By the 20th century, the power of labor movements had also become more blatantly political as exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies. Organized in 1905, the socialist Wobblies had strong leaders who enthusiastically embraced strikes. Indeed, and to the dismay of many businessmen, the Wobblies argued against signing labor contracts because the agreements were barriers to wildcat strikes. With a large immigrant membership, the Wobblies also became a potent voice against America's entry into World War I. This dismayed the Department of Justice. In September 1917, 48 IWW meeting halls were raided and 165 leaders were arrested under the new Espionage Act. Of those arrested, 101 of them went on trial; all were convicted and received sentences of up to 20 years.

Government and big business had learned a lesson. An uncontrolled labor movement was politically and economically dangerous. The situation worsened with the Great Depression in which unemployment rose as high as 25 percent. Hundreds of thousands of people roamed America, looking for work. A massive and migrating army of the unemployed is a formula for political revolt. Thus, Roosevelt offered a New Deal in order to create stability. Big business embraced the deal because it also created predictability. Ambitious labor leaders saw the power being proffered their way; they became big labor. It was a career move that some labor leaders had worked toward for years. For example, when Lewis became president of the UMWA, he did away with the union's decentralized structure and crippled the autonomy of local chapters. The modern union completed the centralization of labor under the government's authorization.

The main losers were small businesses that were forced to deal with big labor and the individual worker who was stripped of the right to contract in his own name, on his own terms. The very existence of the modern union violates worker's rights.

Election Integrity Activists: Obamacare 'Biggest Voter Registration Fraud Scheme in History'

Election Integrity Activists: Obamacare 'Biggest Voter Registration Fraud Scheme in History'

by Matthew Boyle

Conservatives point to the Obamacare website exploiting a strange loophole in the National Voting Rights Act to question whether the President's signature healthcare law had a political motive, as well.

Several election integrity activists have alleged that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Obamacare, does not appear to have been an effort to conduct healthcare reform to fix what was described in 2009 and 2010 as a broken healthcare system. 

The law passed Congress with just Democratic Party support. Instead of being an honest attempt to fix America’s healthcare woes, “I think [it] is the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world,” said Gregg Phillips, the founder of the election integrity group Voters Trust, in an interview with Breitbart News Wednesday morning.

Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht of True The Vote, another election integrity group, cite as proof what left-wing organizations are saying about how they plan to use Obamacare. Demos, a left-wing organization funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, published a report earlier this year titled: “Building a Healthy Democracy: Registering 68 Million People to Vote Through Health Benefit Exchanges.”

On page six of the report, author Lisa Danetz argues that Obamacare “will enroll 68 million individuals.”

“The ACA [Affordable Care Act] requires subsidized health insurance to be made available to low-income Americans, through a single application process, administered and operated in each state by an entity called a ‘Health Benefit Exchange,’” Danetz writes. “Governments must establish this application process by October 2013.”

Danetz is describing healthcare.gov, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website that has thus far faced enormous problems, forcing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to testify before Congress on Wednesday about the program’s ongoing failings. 

Engelbrecht and Phillips believe that all of those promises about healthcare were never meant to be true. They believe one of the underlying intents is to collect personal data and voter registration information and share it with the federal government, which would in turn share it with left-wing groups—in Obamacare they are called “Navigators”—to conduct what is essentially a taxpayer-funded Get-Out-The-Vote operation for the Democratic Party.

“Approximately 68 million individuals, most of them low-income, will eventually enroll in subsidized health care under the law,” Demos’ Danetz writes in the report. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that approximately 16 million people will apply for health insurance through various subsidized programs in 2014, an additional seven million will apply in 2015 and an additional ten million will apply in 2016. By 2022, Medicaid and CHIP enrollment is expected to reach 43 million individuals, a number that includes those enrolled before the ACA plus those that become eligible as a result of the ACA. Affordable Insurance Exchanges will are expected to enroll an additional 25 million individuals.

On page seven of the Demos report, Danetz ties Obamacare back to the 1993 passage of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), colloquially known as “Motor Voter” because it is the law that allowed voter registration at places like the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). “In each state, a Health Benefit Exchange will handle the majority of Covered Transactions for Insurance Affordability Programs,” she writes. “The ACA requires a single streamlined application process for all programs, administered in each state by the Health Benefit Exchange. The Health Benefit Exchange will also handle renewals and changes of address for a certain subset of individuals who obtain health insurance through programs under the ACA.”

Danetz lays out how 17 states and Washington, D.C., have elected to run their own exchanges, seven states have opted for so-called “partnership exchanges,” and 26 states have decided to become a part of the federal exchange. “Under the NVRA, Health Benefit Exchanges are entities that administer public assistance, and, as such, are required to incorporate voter registration services into operation of Insurance Affordability Programs,” she writes. Throughout the rest of the report, Danetz lays out the nuts and bolts of how the left plans to use Obamacare as a voter registration tool.

Phillips, the founder of election integrity group Voters Trust and an expert in analyzing big data, told Breitbart News in an in-person interview Wednesday that the left also attempted this in the early years of the Clinton administration. 

“All of the pieces and parts for this story have been in place for years until the exchanges were created,” Phillips said. “The exchange is sort of the catalyst... We didn’t know this until the feds started showing up on the states’ doors with tens of thousands of cases. In Texas, they have 25,000. You’ve got every state all over the country seeing these cases.” By “cases,” Phillips is talking about Medicaid enrollment numbers increasing.

Phillips said Obamacare has nothing to do with reforming people’s healthcare coverage. “When HealthCare.gov was set up, everyone was led to believe that this was about the exchange and the insurance exchange and getting coverage and what your premium is going to be, and what your deductible is going to be and all that,” he said. “It’s one piece [of what the website really is]. To get there, however, the website makes a suggestion based on your income. If you say you make zero income, you’re not going to the exchange because you’re not qualified for it. You’re going to the Medicaid side of it.” 

Income verification is not required for these submissions, so that is where much of the fear of fraud comes from. Phillips noted that Obamacare has technically undone many of the fraud protections at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that came as part of the 2002 Improper Payments Act.

Engelbrecht, the head of election integrity group True The Vote, told Breitbart News in a phone interview on Wednesday that this voter information is collected via the Motor Voter law. Motor Voter, Engelbrecht noted, “was among the first bills signed by Bill Clinton.”

“This was never about the exchanges, there’s no question about that,” Engelbrecht said of Obamacare. 

That’s why the exchanges seem now to be so ill-conceived; they weren't meant to be the focus. The administration put their time and energy and effort into developing pipes into 50 states so that they could funnel through Medicaid enrollees and voter registrations. That’s what this is about. That’s the game. As part of that strategy, we'll have millions of new voters by virtue of the new Medicaid patients that are flooding in. And if you legitimately qualify for Medicaid, so be it, but according to security experts that specialize in identifying Medicaid fraud, the federal government is not adequately checking applicant qualifications. The floodgates have been opened and now both our healthcare system and the integrity of our electoral process are in jeopardy.

After the states get the Medicaid applications forwarded to them from healthcare.gov, they will have to sort through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of applications that are automatically generated by a computer system. Since the states likely cannot handle the high number of applications expected to come in, most of those applications will likely be hastily approved. 

After an application with a voter registration form attached to it is approved, an actual voter registration card is mailed out automatically. No human being ever sees the card between the time someone logs onto healthcare.gov to type any information, true or untrue, into the system and when a card is mailed out. At that point, when the card shows up in the mail, whoever receives it just needs to sign it and mail it back to the authorities, and they will have registered to vote without ever being in front of any official person. 

To pull this off, technically, Phillips notes, President Obama’s administration is interpreting a visit to healthcare.gov as a visit to a physical government office. “The law is clear,” Phillips said of Motor Voter. “It states that all of this [voter registration] has to happen in an office, face-to-face with an individual. The very idea that I get to open up my website and call that my office does that mean al Qaeda on their 5,000 websites, that those are their offices? Of course not.  It’s ridiculous.” Nonetheless, the administration has been able to pull that off thus far.

“What the portal does is it forces you to get out,” Phillips said of the Obamacare website. 

It forces you to say, "I do not want to register to vote." If you don’t do that, it forces you through to registration. When it gets to the states, like Texas, it’s going to send you the voter registration no matter what you put in the exchange. It’s going to mail it to your house and no human ever touches it and no government official or even any person ever eyeballed you to verify you are a real person or what.

Unlike at the DMV or other government agencies, Engelbrecht said with Obamacare signups it is assumed people will say yes when asked if they want to register to vote—and they have to specify they would like to opt-out of voter registration if they choose not to do so. Because of this change in philosophy from how, say, the DMV registers people to vote, Engelbrecht said it allows left-wing organizations to search and target voters using the federal government collected in a way that has never been seen before.

With Obamacare, "Applicants are prompted mid-application with a request to register to vote,” Engelbrecht said. "That’s the psychology: 'After asking pages of questions related to my healthcare, now you’re suggesting to me that I should register to vote, okay, sure, whatever, why would I risk upsetting the apple cart by opting out?' Most people will just do what they think the government wants them to do. What they want is free healthcare."

Also, since technically the Motor Voter law requires that anyone who is registering to vote can receive help if they want it from those government officials at the agency they are registering to vote with, the federal government has been able to create a task force called “Navigators” who will help people register to vote and sign up for Obamacare by visiting people’s homes. The data that has been collected thus far through healthcare.gov, and data that will be collected moving forward, will likely be shared with the Navigators groups.

The Navigators groups consist of organizations like former ACORN organizers, Organizing For America (OFA)—President Obama’s old campaign spinoff—and other groups that have built themselves on winning elections for Democrats. 

Engelbrecht said people should listen carefully to what the left is saying, because they have publicly discussed this aspect of the Obamacare website. Danetz’s Demos report earlier this year, Engelbrecht notes, is hardly the only place the left has talked openly about this. Liberals have made similar suggestions on the pages of Mother Jones magazine and on the liberal Daily Kos website, both in late-September pieces. Talking Points Memo, another left-wing media outlet, has covered it as well. 

A coalition of left-wing organizations—Demos, HealthCare for America NOW, Project Vote, Fair Elections Legal Network, and the League of Women Voters—have discussed elements of this plan specifically in open, publicly-available comments made to HHS about the implementation of the Navigators program. 

Rush Limbaugh hinted at the breaking of this story on his program on Wednesday, calling it a “slam dunk” theory of what is “really going on” with Obamacare. “Remember when we first learned who was getting money to set up exchanges in California?” Limbaugh asked listeners. “The SEIU covered California; it was a bunch of left-wing activists. And the NAACP.  And from that universe of people, the navigators are hired. What do you think is really going on? Voter registration. In addition to you going to get your healthcare, there is obviously massive Democrat voter registration going on at these exchanges.”

Limbaugh even cited Danetz’s report for Demos, asking listeners: “What if the end result here, in addition to everything else, is 68 million new registered Democrat voters?”