There is no such thing as free stuff...
The folks who are getting the free stuff don't like the folks who are paying for the free stuff, because the folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.
And, the folks who are paying for the free stuff want the free stuff to stop, and the folks who are getting the free stuff want even more free stuff, on top of the free stuff they are already getting!
Now ... the people who are forcing the people who pay for the free stuff have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff that the people who are PAYING for the free stuff are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.
So... the people who are GETTING the free stuff have been convinced they need to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff by the people who are forcing some people to pay for their free stuff and giving them the free stuff in the first place.
We have let the free-stuff giving go on for so long that there are now more people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.
Now understand this. All great democracies have committed financial suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded. The reason? The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in exchange for electing them.
The United States officially became a Republic in 1776, about 235 years ago. The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff. We have one chance to change that in 2012. Failure to change our direction spells the end of the United States as we know it. Barack Obama has to go.
Steve Caddy
Cave Creek
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Obama’s phony $4 trillion in deficit ‘reduction’
Only in Washington, D.C. can a proposed budget that increases spending and borrowing every single year be considered to somehow reduce the deficit. The latest Obama budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 — and how the Administration is spinning it — was no exception.
According to Barack Obama himself, the proposal would somehow “reduce” the deficit by $4 trillion. By every measure, however, there is simply no way to get there.
An even bigger whopper was tossed out by departing White House Budget Director Jack Lew, who on Meet the Press said, “The president’s budget has $1 of revenue for every $2.50 of spending cuts.”
The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) baseline for 2013-2022 says outlays will total $47.053 trillion. Obama’s proposed budget takes that to $46.959 trillion. Since spending actually increases every year under Obama’s proposal, the only cut is off of the baseline — and that’s just $94 billion of so-called “cuts.”
Meanwhile, OMB says revenues over the next ten years will total $38.391 trillion. Under Obama’s proposal, that goes up to $40.274 trillion — an increase of $1.883 trillion in taxes, mostly on job creators.
By our count, that’s about $20 of tax increases for every dollar of “cuts,” and those are not even real cuts to the actual budget. Spending would still increase every single year under Obama’s proposal. Meanwhile, the tax hikes are real.
No wonder we’re sinking into the Abyss. The national debt is more than $15.3 trillion and increases by $1 trillion every year. Politicians do not even know how to add and subtract.
At best, Obama’s budget can claim $1.977 trillion in deficit reduction off of the current baseline, but over 95 percent of that is because of tax increases.
So, how did Obama get to $4 trillion? By his own admission, he includes “the cuts that we’ve already made” under the so-called debt deal. But even then, what was supposedly $1 trillion of savings only cut actual spending in 2013, and then only by a paltry $62 billion. Every other year under the baseline, spending will increase, too.
Everything Obama says is suspect. His budget director’s claims are just more imaginary numbers from the government — pure propaganda designed to prevent the American people from seeing the true dire straits our fiscal house is in.
The fact is, this quarter the national debt will grow to be larger than the entire economy, probably never to return to below 100 percent of the GDP. The reason is because while the economy only grows at a tepid pace of less than 2 percent, the debt continues to expand by about 10 percent every year.
By 2021, under Obama’s budget, the national debt will total $25 trillion.
No country has ever sustained such borrowing. Remaining the world’s preeminent economic superpower is impossible under such policies. Obama is pursuing a purposeful policy of national decline. It will take new leadership to get the Ship of State back on course.
Bill Wilson
President of Americans for Limited Government
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Elephant in the room
The debates and the responses of the Republican presidential candidates to the challenges that we face as a nation thus far have not inspired trust or confidence. The priorities of the debate moderators have guided the questioning, which has intentionally avoided addressing the proverbial elephant in the room.
Consider the following: More than 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day and the trend will persist for the next few decades. Economists agree that the Social Security system is a Ponzi scheme and is unsustainable in its present form. Where will the money to pay the retirees come from?
The war on poverty has spanned the terms of eight Democratic and Republican presidents, yet 48 percent of Americans today receive some form of government assistance. Why is that? If the economy is getting better, then why are 46 million Americans, an all-time record number, now on food stamps?
If the health care reform law is so beneficial and vital to our economy, why were more than 1,200 companies granted waivers from part of Obamacare by the Department of Health and Human Services? Even though almost all Republicans – and most Americans in general – believe that Obamacare is bad, why is Mitt Romney, the candidate who created the model for it when he was governor of Massachusetts, leading in the polls?
If our Founding Fathers intended a limited central government, then why does the federal government’s power and influence continue to get bigger and stronger? Since 1964, the incumbent re-election rate for members of the House of Representatives has never fallen below 85 percent. They are a privileged class that rules with few restraints, so why do we continue to send them back to Washington over and over again?
Both parties working together over decades have spent, borrowed and printed money, moving us closer to the brink of bankruptcy. Our nation is like the Titanic; we’ve struck an iceberg and we need a Congress that will do more than rearrange the deck chairs and take food and beverage orders from the passengers.
Ed Konecnik
Flushing, New York
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Unhappy anniversary for Obama's failed stimulus!
In 2009, President Obama introduced his $825 billion stimulus program with the promise that the unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent. Since that declaration from the president, America's unemployment rate has been well over 8 percent for 36 consecutive months. Wil Cardon, Mesa businessman and candidate for U.S. Senate, issued the following statement in regards to the anniversary of President Obama's complete economic failure:
"It has been three years since President Obama's failed stimulus took effect, and our country has witnessed the longest stretch of unemployment since the Great Depression.
Spending our way to growth is a failed economic strategy, and the president has demonstrated that with this boondoggle of a stimulus program. There is a clear lack of common sense in Washington. The career politicians think we can spend our way out of a debt crisis. Anyone who has worked in the private sector and has ever balanced a budget understands that is not the way to economic prosperity. On the third anniversary of President Obama's failed stimulus, I think the biggest present we can give Americans is to fire this economically inept president."
Wil Cordon
Mesa
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Pinocchio politics
I was appalled at the message White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew delivered about Obama care’s mandate of insurance coverage with respect to religious freedoms. The spin he put on it about giving women choices, is simply more of their Pinocchio politics. This is about the government over stepping its power and breaching the first amendment that prohibits the making of any law impeding the free exercise of religion. And when asked where the government had the right to do that, Mr. Lew said the administration granted itself the power in the ObamaCare legislation…the one they “had to pass so they could see what was in it” (Pelosi).
With some exceptions, our politicians will say and do anything for power and money. This administration has flip-flopped on numerous campaign promises and now is stepping outside the bounds of our constitution. If we do not say no, we will wake up one day and find our freedoms gone. Free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably assemble, freedom against unreasonable search and seizure – to name a few – are indeed precious things. Think about that and then go to goooh.com and help restore integrity to government. Time is short. 2012 is the year.
C.C. Rice
Texas City, Texas
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The road ahead
Perhaps you have heard by now that I will be seeking re-election to Congress in the newly-drawn 6th Congressional District. Tiffany and I gave careful consideration to these decisions -- first, whether to run again and second, to evaluate the final lines drawn in the redistricting process.
In the end, the decision was easy for us. The work to be done in Washington obviously remains, and having served there now for a brief time we feel called to continue building on what we have begun. Our country is facing the most serious of challenges at home and abroad. Arizona needs faithful representation and strong voices against an overbearing executive branch, and the same motivations that moved me to seek a congressional seat two years ago have only grown stronger with the experience of a year in Washington and the joyful birth of our first child a few months ago. Our daughter, Evie, joins her cousins to form the fifth generation of our family to live in Arizona.
The decision to run in the new 6th District boiled down to one simple fact: nearly 70 percent of our current district, District 3, has been drawn into District 6. These are the Arizonans who elected me to Congress in 2010; these are the Arizonans I have been serving and learning from since; and these are the Arizonans whose values, hopes and aspirations we share. They know us and we know them. These constituents comprise the communities which will support us in the hard work of putting Washington and the arrogant, self-interested elements who have corrupted it in their proper place.
I explained this in last week's announcement of our course. I also issued a sincere call to current District 5 Representative David Schweikert, who has chosen to run in District 6, and any other Republicans who might join the race, to join me in a campaign which honors our party with its tone and brings clarity to the critical issues facing our state and nation.
I am sorry to report in this correspondence that the Schweikert campaign has, to put it mildly, declined the invitation. Their response has been a sequence of emails which are manipulative at best but otherwise blatantly false, and relayed malignant talk in the community and to the press. While these communications openly speak ill of me, they really speak much more loudly about those who sent them. We have received a lot of calls and other input to that effect.
The 6th District does not belong to David, as his campaign communications assert, nor does it belong to me or to any office seeker. It belongs to the people who live there. David's claim to ownership of this district is as weak as it is unflattering to him. Only about 30 percent of his current constituents live in this district. In fact, a large majority of David's current constituents – more than 60 percent – live in the newly drawn District 9.
Now, in contrast with the Schweikert campaign, despite this fact we have not presumed to tell him where he ought to run. Nor have we falsely asserted the interests of the Republican Party in telling him where to run. But if one wished to do that, the case is much stronger that David should run in District 9, where a majority of his current constituents live.
Unfortunately, though, that would not be in the best interests of the party either, because the Schweikert campaign apparently has a hard time telling the truth and would therefore surely lose.
Among the falsehoods in the emails sent by the Schweikert campaign were the assertions that we have conducted polling in the 9th District, when, in fact, we have conducted no polling at all in any district; and that our campaign headquarters is located there, when, in fact, it is not. If you see the candidate or members of his team, you might ask them for evidence for these assertions. None exists; none could exist. They simply fabricated these things and emailed them to voters.
Rep. Schweikert announced he would move to the 6th District when his own residence had at that point been drawn out of it. The redistricting commission drew my residence out of it by a matter of a few hundred feet, so that our residence is in one district and the church to which we walk on Sunday is in another. We will in due course move our residence to rejoin the constituents from whom we have been momentarily separated by the new line.
But the larger problem with the Schweikert campaign's actions has nothing directly to do with district lines and house locations. The larger problem is that a candidate seeking a high federal office would traffic in such half-truths and whole-cloth falsehoods, and still more that he would so readily seek to cast himself as a victim when he is simply another political candidate who has been inconvenienced by unfortunate events. These are common behaviors in Washington, but not those of effective leaders for conservative principles and values.
I urge the Schweikert campaign, once again, to turn away from these tawdry tactics and pretenses and commit itself to an honorable engagement around the very serious issues we face as a nation and a community. The voters who do in fact own District 6 deserve no less.
Ben Quayle
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Rules for immigrants
I was appalled by the imprisonment and torture of the 19-year old woman by members of her own family. Note to the Iraqi-born Altameemi family: 1) You are welcome as a legal immigrant, but you are expected to leave behind your Seventh Century code of ethics. 2) In America, women are not chattel. 3) In America, we learn to speak English. 4) In America, we do not imprison or torture our family members. 5) In America, we expect immigrants to adopt and respect our customs without losing contact with customs from the old country – provided such customs are not in violation of human rights in the USA.
If you insist on following your barbaric customs, go back to your country of origin! Do not expect the USA to change just for your convenience.
J-P. A. Maldonado
Phoenix
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Did Tony Bennett leave his mind in San Francisco?
Have you noticed how the booze and drug crazed, liberal Hollywood crowd would love to set our standards of morals and life styles. Alex Baldwin, Charlie Sheen do what they choose with no repercussions. Now Whitney Houston is dead and "ex-druggie" Tony Bennett is calling for the U.S. government to legalize drugs as a tribute to her. Will the media actually ask Mr. Bennett if he left his mind in San Francisco? Channel 13 recently focused on Tony and we heard how he did not want to waste his life on drugs! Was he just blowing smoke? Why are we worried about sports figures using performance enhancing drugs when the same congressmen and senators ignore the epidemic of "performance" inducing drugs in the entertainment field? I'd like to run urine tests on our elected leaders.
It might explain a lot of what is now going on!
Joseph DuPont
Towanda, Pennsylvania
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The Obamie 2013 budget
Obamie has adapted a new campaign slogan: “You make it, and I’ll take.”
Tom Zbytek
Phoenix
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