Although China is called a major trading partner, it treats U.S. companies like suckers, cheating them coming and going. China even intimidates U.S. businessmen so they don't dare to criticize China's unfair trade tactics.I'll put it very succinctly, for the umpteenth time: there is no such thing as free trade, despite what some libertarian-leaning economists (You can scarcely get a libertarian to admit that the government has a legitimate power to tax at all, let alone get them to admit that tariffs are legitimate.) will tell you, despite what libertarians who would love for you to believe that free trade is a "bedrock conservative principle" will tell you. Other countries find ways to protect their markets. That's the reality.
Take, for example, the attitude of CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric, the company now laying off hundreds of U.S. workers and giving those jobs making light bulbs to Chinese workers. He won't comment about the current U.S. case in the World Trade Organization accusing China of giving illegal subsidies to Chinese wind-turbine makers.
A few years ago, GE caved in to the Chinese government's demand that it build a large wind-turbine factory in China. Since GE owns a crucial patent for wind turbines, this demand was based on the Chinese anti-free trade policy called indigenous innovation (which China expert James McGregor calls "a blueprint for technology theft on a scale the world has never seen before").
China then developed its own wind-turbine manufacturers and is now directing purchasers to buy from those Chinese firms instead of from GE. That's the reality in what free traders naively believe is the world's fast-growing market for U.S. goods.
China wants to be the world's biggest exporter based on stealing U.S. know-how and subsidizing local manufacturers. China blatantly violates international trade laws and has no plans to be a market for U.S. products; China's principal imports are and will continue to be U.S. jobs.
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Some people foolishly call our relationship with China "free trade." But there is nothing free or fair about it. It is trade war between an aggressively protectionist communist government and a U.S. that is shackled by foolish and out-of-date illusions about free trade.
Despite our nation being founded out of a rebellion over taxes, with the cry, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," we've been saddled with more tyranny than what we threw off. England's taxation of the colonies was paltry compared to our current tax load.
When our nation was founded, the federal government spent the equivalent of about $3 million a year--about $1 per person. By 1910, after 120 years of operation, our federal government spent just over $600 million--about $6.75 per person. (There had been modest inflation in the intervening years.) But that's pocket change compared to today. By contrast, now the federal government spends $10 billion every day (almost $12, 000 per person per year). How did this come to pass?
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Taxation with representation has turned into a nightmare. Government is the "senior partner" in every American business, and its tax burden is the largest item in every working man's budget. Americans pay more for "being governed" than for food, clothing, and shelter combined. In 1929--the last year before massive federal expansion under Franklin Delano Roosevelt--federal, state, and local taxes equaled about 10 percent of our GDP. Today, combined taxes are over 26 percent of the economic earnings, but because governments are running such huge deficits, there is another 12 percent of our economy that the government is spending, which is essentially "deferred taxes" imposed on the next generation of young Americans. Total "current" plus "deferred" taxes were about 38 percent of the economy in 2009.
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Obama and other liberals would like you to believe that high-income earners in the United States are under-taxed and do not pay their "fair share." Obama's campaign promise was that he would increase taxes on couples earning more than $250, 000 per year and give tax breaks to those earning less. The reality is that the top 1 percent of taxpayers already pays almost 40 percent of all personal income taxes, and that share has nearly doubled over the last quarter-century. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers pay less than 5 percent of federal personal income taxes.
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Shifting taxes to corporations is a fantasy. Businesses do not pay taxes; only people pay them. An increase in corporate income tax, for example, is paid by customers in the form of increased prices, employees in the form of lower wages and shareholders in decreased dividends. So we the people pay for the tax increase, but the politicians like it because the taxes are rendered less visible to us.
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Consider the fiscal problems of European countries such as Greece, Britain, and Spain these days. They have massive and growing piles of government debt even larger than our own (although we are heading in that direction). Yet every European country has income and payroll taxes, as we do, plus a Value Added Tax (VAT) that rakes in even more cash for the government. The average VAT rate in Europe--20 percent!--means that every purchase a European citizen makes hands a chunk of change over to the government, making everything at least 20 percent more expensive. History confirms that high taxes don't solve a deficit problem; they just encourage politicians to spend more money.
As Brutus, the Anti-Federalist writing during the debates on ratifying the Constitution, warned:The power to tax, exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every corner of the city, and country--it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlor, preside over the table, and note down all he eats and drinks; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office, or study; it will watch the merchant in the counting house, or any store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop, and in his work, and will haunt him in his family, and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labor...it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE, GIVE.
I've come to believe that many of the erroneous doctrines we are taught we easily believe them if they are taught "gently" and sincerely to us. Sometimes it is not until some bull-in-a-china-shop kind of preacher comes into our lives and kicks the doctrinal door down when we finally wake up and realize what we were taught all along was wrong.I can tell you what happens in most churches: people just assume that you aren't giving anything! Never mind that you know, since the stats on Christian giving in the United States are not difficult to look up--indeed, those very stats are frequently cited in sermons on giving--that they are not likely to be giving any more than you are. The logic is apparently: this person doesn't believe tithing is commanded for the Christian, therefore he must not be giving anything. It's very strange thinking, but I know where they're getting it. It's from all those sermons on tithing they've heard, heard without checking them out.
Here are some excerpts from Croteau's preface that give a glimpse of how he started on his journey:"I was driving to work in the fall of 1999 and listening to Christian talk radio. John MacArthur was in the middle of a sermon and he was explaining why the tithe was not applicable to Christians. I had never heard anyone actually challenge the applicability of the tithe before, so this took me totally by surprise."Most of us in Baptist pews have been taught this doctrine as fact for so long, even by well-meaning and sincere preachers. We have not heard SBC preachers dare to consider that the Old Testament tithing laws do not apply to Christians under grace. Preachers at best take a hybrid approach: that yes, we are obligated to tithe, but the New Testament says we should do the forking over joyfully and not under compulsion - in fact we should give more than the tithe as proof of just how darned joyful we are. As someone who was saved in a Southern Baptist Church as a teenager in college, I know the tithe has always been an expectation. It is planted into the minds of preschoolers. The Malachi 3:8-10 application to Christian tithing was never, ever to be questioned. If you don't tithe, you're a God-robber, a cheapskate, plain and simple. No one dares question the doctrine.
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Bring up this topic in your Sunday School class. Tell your Sunday School class when you next discuss money matters, something like this: "Christians are not under the Old Testament law of tithing. Malachi 3 has been misused for decades by taking it totally out of context. We are to follow the New Testament model to be generous, but there is no prescribed percentage." Try it and see what happens.
Pro-homosexual defenders are stuck with what could be called a Dawkins' Dilemma. It doesn't matter if it is people or animals. How did homosexual behavior arise naturally without the ability of homosexuals to reproduce? If we apply evolutionary dogma, homosexuals are mutations; rejects that should be selected against because of their inability to continue the health of the group population.
So in the overall debate with gay issues, if progressive liberals are to be true to their core, intellectual and scientific values, they unwittingly encourage the idea that gays are natural mutations, which make them worst bigots towards homosexuals than religious conservatives ever will be.
A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States.And you people who have never been in the military? Do be aware that I'm having a hard time understanding why I should take your opinion on the subject very seriously.
"Don't ask, don't tell" is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services.
Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.
Remarkable. The least respected of American institutions, Congress, with an approval rating of 13 percent, is imposing its cultural and moral values on the most respected of American institutions, the U.S. military.
Why are we undertaking this social experiment with the finest military on earth? Does justice demand it? Was there a national clamor for it?
No. It is being imposed from above by people, few of whom have ever served or seen combat, but all of whom are aware of the power of the homosexual rights lobby. This is a political payoff, at the expense of our military, to a militant minority inside the Democratic Party that is demanding this as the price of that special interest's financial and political support.
Among the soldiers most opposed to bringing open homosexuals into the ranks are combat veterans, who warn that this will create grave problems of unit cohesion and morale.
One Marine commandant after another asked Congress to consider the issue from a single standpoint:
Will the admission of gay men into barracks at Pendleton and Parris Island enhance the fighting effectiveness of the Corps?
Common sense suggests that the opposite is the almost certain result.
Can anyone believe that mixing small-town and rural 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Christian kids, aspiring Marines, in with men sexually attracted to them is not going to cause hellish problems?
The Marines have been sacrificed by the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to the homosexual lobby, with the collusion of no fewer than eight Republican senators.
To "beg" the question is to ask that the very point at issue be conceded, which is of course illegitimate.I know, I know: picayune stuff to get annoyed about, right? But I hear this one with some frequency, and dadgummit, people oughtta know better...
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Any form of argument in which the conclusion occurs as one of the premises, or a chain of arguments in which the final conclusion is a premise of one of the earlier arguments in the chain. More generally, an argument begs the question when it assumes any controversial point not conceded by the other side.
Liberals like Walters always assume that if you're liberal, you're smart; if you're conservative, you're either evil or stupid. Or both.There are, of course, exceptions. Not every liberal you meet is like this. But most of the ones I meet start our "relationship," such as it is, with a fairly obvious air of condescension, a fairly obvious assumption that I couldn't possibly have a clue what I am talking about. My appearance doesn't help, I suppose. I am almost always adorned with a worn-out ballcap, black jeans, and a Carhartt vest that make me the spittin' image of the average Oklahoma redneck. I guess I don't look like the studious type.
Irish rage at having to suffer to save Europe’s bondholders of Irish banks, the anarchy in England, riots in France to protest a rise in the retirement age to 62, the violence that wracked Greece, the precarious condition of Portugal and Spain, the anger of Germans at having to bail out their profligate EU partners — raise the question:No doubt about it, rough seas are ahead. America still has a lot going for it--I may go into detail sometime, but not today, I should be getting ready for work--that will enable it to come through the crisis in better shape than Europe, I think,though that may not be saying much.
Can Europe’s welfare states be downsized without violence surging, governments falling and populists coming to power who will default on debts rather than force the masses that elected them to suffer to save the bank investors?
Can European democracy deal with the gathering storm?
Is not a national default and a collapse of banks across Europe inevitable? And could such a collapse be contained in Europe when America’s big banks are all transnational institutions?
I’m glad the Senate came to its senses and killed the omnibus spending monstrosity. That outrageous trillion-dollar pork buffet was an outright slap in the face to the American public’s expressed wishes in the last election. It was as if Congress was earning its historically low 13 percent approval rating before our very eyes. I applaud senators like Jim DeMint, John McCain, and others who fought this and stopped it.Now, of course, some folks on the Left will immediately holler, "Of course we want to reduce the deficit! We've got to raise taxes!"
However, the very fact that some lawmakers on Capitol Hill thought such reckless spending was even remotely acceptable is disturbing. We’re facing trillion-dollar deficits and a record national debt, but some people still want to continue spending like there’s no tomorrow. If the European debt crisis teaches us anything, it’s that tomorrow always comes. Sooner or later, the markets will expect us to settle the bill for the enormous Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending binge. We’ve already been warned by the credit ratings agency Moody’s that unless we get serious about reducing our deficit, we may face a downgrade of our credit rating. Even the lamest of lame ducks can’t ignore this reality.
Multiculturalism creates a neurotic and dishonest society."Those who do not celebrate can bloody well not celebrate." That works for me. You don't like the holiday, save the money, don't buy the gifts, don't waste your time at the parade. Go light a winter solstice bonfire or something, if you can find a place that's legal to do it. Don't act like a DARNFOOL and insist that the rest of the society you live in alter the holiday to suit your tastes and preferences.
This is seen very plainly during the Christmas season. Those of us who celebrate Christmas are told that we must rip the very core of this season out, and replace it with a phony, soulless thing called "Holiday" or "Winter." This is dishonest because nobody celebrates winter. "Holiday" is a shallow term to describe Christmas; the term abuses language to impose a false meaning on a reality that most of us cherish.
"Holiday" and "Winter" are weasel words used by cultural appeasers who are too ashamed of their own culture to say what everybody knows to be true. That is, that most of us are celebrating Christmas. Maintaining Christmas is part of preserving the culture that gave us almost everything that we have worth keeping. The whole name-changing charade is neurotic because it forces people to pretend that our majority culture is not what it actually is.
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Make no mistake about it, those who rip Christmas out of public life are duplicitous and exploitative, no matter what they claim their victim status to be, and no matter how noble their motives. It is duplicitous to attack the majority culture under the pretense of tolerance, when the outcome of the ostensible tolerance is to be intolerant of the majority culture. It is exploitative to use privileged victim status to enforce personal preferences at the expense of a profoundly important cultural and, yes, religious observance. There are few things more self-centered than using privileged victim status to erase part of the culture one finds themselves in.
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At root, this toxic tolerance and holiday madness is produced by blending multicultural appeasement with a thoughtless liberal notion of equality- not equality brought about by merit or based on majority norms, but equality brought about by government coercion, leveling, and betraying the majority culture.
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We in America, and in the West as a whole, need to stop apologizing for our culture. We –or more accurately those who came before us- have created something great, and that is why people leave their non-Christian nations to come here and to other Western nations. How dare anyone say they have a right to the benefits of our society while at the same time attacking the root of our culture?
The norm needs to be reinforced: At Christmas time, we are celebrating the birth of the historical figure who gave rise to our culture, Jesus Christ. We who celebrate Christmas should be vocal in saying that we are offended when Christmas is ripped out of public life. Those who do not celebrate can bloody well not celebrate. It is selfish and insulting to demand that the majority alter something sacred, simply for the convenience or comfort of an unreasonable minority.
Here’s the errrrrrudite liberal journo Richard Wolffe mocking Sarah Palin for citing famed, beloved Christian author, novelist, lay theologian, and apologist C.S. Lewis as a source of divine inspiration (via The Daily Caller):Not to be uncharitable, but it certainly appears that Mr. Wolffe was completely unfamiliar with Lewis' philosophical and scholarly stature, apparently thinking of him "merely" as an author of children's books.
Incredibly, Wolffe derides the author of “Mere Christianity,” “The Abolition of Man,” “The Screwtape Letters,” and so many other seminal works as merely a writer of “a series of kids’ books” in order to jab at Palin.
Fellow Palin-basher Chris Matthews tried to save Wolffe from himself by counseling him not to “put down” Lewis. Wolffe ignored him.
When I think of Wolffe and his smug media peers in the intellectual establishment, I think of Lewis’s brilliant musings on Men Without Chests.
He had them pegged.
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Brian Faughnan called Wolffe out on Twitter. Here was his response. Seriously:
She said “divine inspiration”. Not the traditional reaction to theological essays, even formidable ones by Lewis.
And here’s a reminder again of Wolffe said on MSNBC:
WOLFFE: “Look, divine inspiration from a series of KIDS’ BOOKS. I don’t think, um, C.S. Lewis really would want that.”
MATTHEWS: “But…I wouldn’t put down C.S. Lewis down…”
Wolffe sputters about Newsmax, which Palin says she reads, before again hitting at Palin for — gasp! — drawing religious lessons from a profoundly religious author.
One running theme that emerges from the leaked cables is that the U.S. government consistently obscures the identity of the nation's foes, for example, depicting the hostile peoples of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States as "allies." It's not that such hostility is a secret, or even constitutes news. But the cables reveal that our diplomats actually recognize that these countries form the financial engine that drives global jihad, or, as they mincingly prefer to call it, "terrorism." But they, with the rest of the government, keep the American people officially in the darkNow, again, for those who wonder: I am not at all opposed to fighting terrorism. My main concerns have been that we ought, before fighting wars, to declare them in the constitutionally prescribed fashion, and that we not try fighting terrorism by trying to change a centuries-old culture to which millions upon millions of people are devoted. It is not at all realistic to suppose that we will secure freedom from terrorism by turning nations and peoples that have never shown any interest in government as the protector of the God-given rights of all men--believer and non-believer alike--into American-style representative republics. That is a fool's errand. Like it or not, American-style representative government is based squarely on a Judeo-Christian worldview, and its originators said repeatedly that it would not work without a people devoted to such a view (a state that we are too close to achieving, in my view). There is not the proverbial snowball's chance that it is going to work in Dar al Islam, but making it work there is the basis of much of our foreign policy.
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Whether such information was originally "classified," the body politic should be electrified by the fact, as revealed by the leaked cables, that nations from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia are regularly discussed as black holes of infinite corruption into which American money gushes, either through foreign aid or oil revenue, and unstaunched and unstaunchable sources of terror or terror-financing. If this were to get out -- and guess what, it did -- the foreign policy of at least the past two administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, would be unmasked as a colossal failure.
I have a dream!Personally, I'd recommend RyuTe instead of jujutsu or MMA, but that's a picayune criticism. I'm all for as many women as possible being armed, trained, and ready to defend themselves.
A dream where instead of reading about a cute college coed left dead and naked out in a vacant lot or bloated and floating in a river, the story reads: “dead jackass found double-tapped and dead on the curb as his soul wings its way to Hades—all because he messed with the wrong mama.”
A dream where it’s normal for girls to know Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts. A dream where they can shoot golf ball sized groups with their .38 at 15 feet. A dream where they have a BS detector that’s so sensitive they can read people and environments with godlike clarity within a nanosecond.
