Since You Asked...

When the President’s own supporters skewered him in his town hall meeting this week, he dodged their questions by challenging the tea party movement to name specific spending cuts we would approve. Ok, since you asked…

Abolish the Department of Education; leave the money in the hands of local school boards and parents.  Implement FairTax and abolish the IRS.  Abolish the Agriculture Department, and privatize the FDA.  Abolish the Department of Energy, and maybe we would finally have enough of it.  Sell public lands to someone who will take care of them, abolish the Forest Service, and scrap the Department of Interior while you are at it.  We already have 50 departments of the interior – they are called States.

End all corporate welfare – subsidies, tax credits, preferences, trade protections, price supports, grants, loan guarantees, and earmarks – and devolve personal welfare programs back to the states where they belong.  If we quit rewarding lousy business managers and slackers we would have a lot fewer of both.     

And how about reducing the number of Presidential vacations?  I’ve been here 20 years and don’t get that much time off. Or make Harry Reid’s entourage drive Priuses (or is it Prii?). Freeze federal pay scales until the average private sector catches up.  Raise the retirement age for federal employees to 65 and graduate the scale to 70; eliminate double dip pensions.  They might get mad and quit?  Bonus!

The Labor Department exists to counter the clout of the Commerce Department, so eliminate them both. Dump all of the special trade negotiators; let people trade with people.  If we repeal ineffective drug laws, we have no need for the DEA or half the federal prisons. Nix the NEA; people will buy art they like.  Ditto NPR and the Kennedy Center. Give veterans vouchers and dismantle the VA hospital system – we owe our veterans the best care available anywhere in the nation. 

Abolish anything run by a Czar – anything.  

Close all foreign military bases and eliminate all foreign aid.  The Europeans can defend themselves if they are so dang healthy.  Defend our borders and let South Korea worry about its own. We won in Iraq; now bring ‘em home.  Do the same in Afghanistan. Pull out of the U.N, the IMF, WTO, WHO, the World Bank, and any other international organization run by world bureaucrats to benefit world bureaucrats.        

Repeal Health Care Reform. Don’t spend whatever is left of the stimulus money.  Get the TARP money back from the banksters.  Cut off the water to AIG, Fannie and Freddie, and sell the public stake in the auto companies.  Drop that $8,000 bribe to buy one of those loopy GM Volts.  Leave student loans to banks. End the Fed and privatize the money supply.

Don’t replace any members of your economic team who quit and return to teaching.  An empty chair is better than a credentialed fool and way cheaper.  Oh, no - we’re not done yet.

Round up every single department, agency, and program created to fight the War on Poverty and shut them down. Trillions of dollars have been thrown down that feel-good rat hole for half a century and poverty is higher than when we started. Same for Affirmative Action; either it worked and we don’t need it, or it didn’t work and we don’t need it.  Either way, we don’t need it.

And what’s the deal with trains?   Probably some kind of Freudian obsession of emasculated lefties.  I’ll buy your fare when you buy me a Harley – deal?                

Abolish the ATF – we don’t particularly care to fund agencies wholly devoted to constraining the Bill of Rights.  And if you are not going to use INS or ICE, cut them loose to find some private sector security work.  Do we really need so many TSA’s to disarm citizens of their gels and nail clippers?  I think not.   

How about we repeal the Patriot Act and leave us patriots alone.  Let’s keep the Department of Justice, but not the parts of it that sue us or defend torture and indefinite detention now that Obama has control of the apparatus.  And you can cut out half of the research grants to your university buddies – welfare for Ph.D.s who can’t teach.

That leaves Social Security and Medicare.  Medicare is easy; give people the $11,000 that government spends to insure them and let them choose their own – cut out the middle man.  Social Security is not so difficult either; give people the option of either staying in the current system or pulling out what they have contributed and funding their own retirement savings accounts.  Transition both entitlements completely to personal account ownership over a 25 year period.  Yes, we can.

And give people the option of working past 65 and keeping every penny they earn; that’s right, zero taxes of any kind if you keep working and put off your benefit draw. The savings in deferred benefit payments would be enough to salvage social security, which is more than can be said for the accounting gimmicks proposed by either establishment Party. 

I know it’s a small thing, but how about we fire the guy who names laws.  Taking our liberties away with legislation so awful it has to be disguised as “Protect Puppies and Orphans from All Harm Act” is not just juvenile, it’s offensive.  And if government wasn’t so reliably offensive, we would not need a tea party movement.  

There you go, Mr. President – roughly 70% of federal spending eliminated and plenty left over to perform the 17 essential functions of government authorized by the Constitution.  Too radical?  Did you expect a Libertarian to follow a road map?  

The tea party is a movement, not a mercenary outfit like ACORN or SEIU.  We are millions of Americans from across the political spectrum with minds of our own and ideas of our own.  There is no national tea party teleprompter for us to read from.

This is just one guy’s opinion.  There are hundreds of even better ideas of where government spending can be cut - that’s why we have comments at the end of this post.  Since the President was kind enough to ask for our help, it is the least we can do to point him in the right direction.  Let’s hear ‘em.      

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”

Tax The Rich

100 of us go to a tavern; the richest guy buys 42 tap beers, the next 9 buy 48 tap beers, 43 buy 10 tap beers, and 47 of us drink tap beers for free.  In Wisconsin, we say “thank you” when someone else buys our beer; apparently in Chicago, they go find a community organizer and demand martinis. 

The top 1% of income earners in this country - nice people like Oprah and Aaron Rodgers - make 28% of the income, yet they pay 42% of the income tax.  47% of Americans pay no income tax.  Is that fair?  President Obama doesn’t think so; he thinks the rich should pay even more.   

Why?  Why should they pay more when almost half of us pay nothing?  How is that fair?  What do they get in exchange?  Will they have their own Bentley lanes on the Interstate Highways?  Do they get extra protection if the Canadians invade?  Will their trademarks and copyrights last twice as long as ours?  No, we will offer nothing; we will simply take their money because we want it. 

Paul Krugman calls them “belligerent” for wanting to keep it.  Is that what we have come to?  When did we turn into a nation of looters?  Why do we revile the strong and revere the weak?  Why do we punish the champion and reward last place?  It should be obvious to anyone that rich people consume less government services than poor people and pay most of the taxes.  We should be grateful to have them; instead we demonize them.   

It is stupid to hate rich people; all of us either work for rich people, or work for organizations funded by the taxes they pay or donations they make.  We will not earn more when they keep less.  Taxing them is a lose/lose proposition, which unfortunately has become this administration’s signature move.  

Wealth is neither moral nor immoral; it is simply the difference between what is produced and what is consumed over a lifetime.  People who spend more than they earn become poorer, people who earn more than they spend become richer.  With the obvious exceptions of crooks and shnooks, rich people only get that way by providing us with the things we want.  Only a fool – or a jealous socialist - would want to punish someone for that.

And besides, who really suffers when we “tax the rich”? Your dentist is undoubtedly rich under Mr. Obama’s fluid definition; so where will she get the money to pay the new taxes she will owe next year?  You will give it to her one filling, crown, cleaning, and bridge at a time.  Ditto your doctor, your car dealer, your landlord, your store keeper, your favorite artists, etc.  Trickle-down economics works for taxes, too. 

Every time the hucksters in Congress pretend to sock it to “big fill-in-the-blank”, it is the little fill-in-the-blanks who get screwed.  You are already feeling the love this year if you tan, smoke, drink, drive, buy health insurance, or register a gun.  A recent study showed that the President’s proposed tax increases will cost $1,500 for a Wisconsin family of four making $60,000.  That is not rich to me.   

Another recent study revealed that White House appointees owe a combined $817,000 of back income taxes, and that government employees nationwide are over $2 billion in arrears.  These tax cheats’ average income is $120,000 per year and their health care benefits cost us $21,000.  Isn’t that just ducky?   

We ask the parasites to recycle a few drops of blood to pay the unemployment benefits for the millions of people their bungling incompetence have made jobless, and they can’t be bothered.  Too busy calling us greedy.  Too busy calling us selfish, uncaring, imperialist, exploiters, racist.  Too busy telling us we don’t pay our fair share; that we owe them more.  

How about this for a tax policy: we don’t pay another dime until all of the government deadbeats are current.  Let those 16,000 new IRS agents squeeze the blood out of their own turnips before they come after the rest of us.

Increasing taxes on the wealthy will not stimulate economic growth and it will not eliminate the deficit.  The President’s tax increase on the richest 1% would only balance the budget for 9 days.  In fact, we could take all of their earnings and it would still not pay for all of the spending in Washington.  Reality check: we spend 50% more than we tax – 50%.  

We have to spend less, not tax more, if we want our economy to recover. 

They have figured this out in Germany, France, Greece, Britain, China, Venezuela, and even Cuba, where Castro will cut a million government jobs in the next year.  He is down there channeling Chris Christie while our guys are high-fiving over the millions of cube jockeys they have added – the mind boggles.

My advice to candidates who want to get elected this year: name the programs, agencies, and departments you would eliminate and the amounts you would cut from the budgets of those which remain.  The truth will not just set you free, it will send you to Washington and Madison.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”

Taxing and Spending

Some have questioned how President Obama paid for his Ivy League education; I wonder why he paid for it.  If you can graduate from Columbia and Harvard without knowing the difference between taxing and spending, you should ask for your money back.

At his press conference last week, the President, for the umpteenth time, described leaving the existing tax rates alone as “spending”.  He said we had “better things to spend our money on” than not raising taxes.  

Did he really say “our money”?  Oh yes, he did.  That’s what they call your paycheck these days over at the White House; and you keeping what you earned is now considered foolish spending.  The press corps – more refund-eligible Ivy League alumni who apparently majored in economic illiteracy and minored in Marx – did not call him on it. 

Perhaps in the Obama household, Barack resisting his urge to steal Sasha’s babysitting money is the same thing as Michelle buying a dozen pair of Jimmy Choos.   

But for us rubes who grew up in small towns and worked our way through state schools, the distinction between not-stealing and spending is quite obvious.  In fact, most of us figured out complicated things like taxes, spending, and the income gap long before we ever graduated from high school. 

When we were 5 or 6, we shoveled snow for a nickel a sidewalk.  The kids who shoveled a lot of sidewalks had a lot of money for candy.  Those who did one or two and then went sledding didn’t have as much.  There’s your income gap.

When we were 8, we got paper routes.  Some kids took bigger routes, worked longer and carried the heavier bags, and we made more money than the kids who took the short routes and got done earlier to go play.   There’s your income gap.

When we were 10, we were big enough to pick rocks in the fields; we got paid by the rock. The longer and harder you worked the more you made.  Some kids hit it all day long, and some kids were off riding their bikes by noon.  There’s your income gap.

Later in summer, we picked strawberries and got paid by the quart. If you could squat all day and had nimble fingers, you made serious cash.  The 10 year-olds weren’t very good at it, but by 14, we became skilled and (comparatively) wealthy.  There’s your income gap.

Where I grew up, we had a different idea about entitlements – if another kid tried to steal your stuff, you were entitled to a bob him in the nose. And when his parents found out why he had a shiner, he was entitled to a heaping dose of shame and punishment at home. We didn’t do lawyers or community organizers up North.    

At 15, we started to work in stores, run errands for contractors, or work for our dads who were tradesmen.  Our first real paychecks, and the awful discovery of tax withholding.  The Governor took it?  Can I bop him in the nose?  I already had a bad attitude before Civics and Econ class confirmed my worst suspicions of government.    

Summers, after school, weekends – an introduction to time-and-a-half and punitive tax rates on those who worked longer and produced more.  But the kids who went the extra mile made a lot more than the kids who went swimming.  There’s your income gap.  

At 16 (well, close – I told you I’m from up North) you could drive, and that opened up a whole different world of income potential.  When I could drive the painting contractor’s car to pick up supplies, I got a big raise because I was more valuable to the crew.  There’s your income gap.

And the income gap was important when you were a 16 year old guy up North.  The guys who had worked and saved enough to get a car were cool, and girls went on dates with them.  Those of us without cars were jealous; but we would never think of demanding they share their cars, their money, or their girls. 

To be honest about it, if we could have “spread the wealth around” back then, we would have gone for the girls – to heck with the money and cars.  Maybe that is coming next from Mr. Obama, and why not; if the insured owe health care benefits to the uninsured, don’t married people owe conjugal benefits to unmarried people?    There is your morality of redistribution.      

Now, if you think the slop just falls out of the sky into the trough, then you probably think that the biggest, fattest pigs must have got that way by abusing the skinny, timid ones.  Those fat hogs must be punished and the slop must be redistributed by a benevolent and infallible farmer who cares that every little oinker gets a fair and equal portion. 

This makes perfect sense if you are a barnyard animal - or a liberal Democrat. 

But if you are a thinking human being who ever shoveled snow, picked rock, or worked weekends, you know that the slop does not fall from the sky; it is the product of someone’s labor, and it belongs to the people who earned it.  It is not “our money”; it is their money.  

And, Mr. President, leaving it alone is not the same as spending it; those are two different things and you can expect a figurative bop on the nose in November for trying to take what doesn’t belong to you.  If you need money, get yourself a refund from Columbia and Harvard and leave the rest of us alone.     

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”

 

Liberty and Prosperity

This November’s choice between capitalism and socialism is not about whether you are rich or poor right now; it is about which of those two you wish to be tomorrow.

The inescapable lesson of economic history is that free market economies make everyone unequally richer, while state-controlled economies make everyone equally poorer.  Which do you prefer – rich or equal?  Free people overwhelmingly choose rich, which is why socialism can only be imposed by force or fraud. 

Nobel-winning economist F.A. Hayek’s profound insight was that socialism fails because all of the information needed to make rational choices for millions of people can not possibly be known.  Conversely, capitalism works because all of the information we need to make rational choices is known – it is known to us, and we make our own choices according to our own self-interest. 

Self-interest is not immoral; it is simply the public interest reduced to its smallest indivisible component part.  In fact, self-interest is the only kind of interest there is.  If it were possible to establish a public interest by government decree, we would not need divorce lawyers.  And if State power can not bind two people who love each other, how could we expect it to herd 300 million strangers?

The simple answer is we can’t, and we are proving Hayek’s theorems daily.  It has been nearly four years since the election of 2006 that gave control of Congress to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  No one will confuse them with Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman; their agenda is anti-capitalist and socialistic, if not definitively socialist.  The results speak for themselves: 15 million people have no jobs, the average work week for those who do has declined to 34.1 hours, property values have shrunk, the markets are still down, and the dollar has weakened.  We are getting poorer.     

People do not save, invest and produce in order to benefit the State; they do so to benefit themselves and their families.  That is why our economy has not, does not, and will not respond to the prompting of the President’s socialist economic agenda or the deceptive pleadings of his minions.  Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke finally spoke the truth last month when he told Congress that it will be years before the jobless situation improves - years.      

Chairman Bernanke is not clairvoyant; rather, he understands a basic economic principle: the bigger the rake, the less the take.  Having learned nothing from their failures, our socialists in Congress plan to impose the largest tax increase in the history of the world this fall when they repeal the Bush tax reductions enacted almost a decade ago.  This is the plan for reducing their deficit – to increase yours.       

Think about the effect that just one of those tax increases – the inheritance tax – will have on job creation.  The rate increases from 0% to 55%; children will have to sell the family business just to pay the death tax.  Now, do you think this will encourage more people to start new family businesses? Congratulations!  You and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve understand that people will not risk their life savings and work like a dog to bequeath their rewards to the IRS. 

However, our President and his socialist colleagues in Congress don’t get it.  They are obsessed with their own jealous resentments and  their brains are marinated in leftist economic gibberish.    

Confiscating earnings from high earners does not make the poor richer anymore than cutting the heads off of tall people makes short people taller.  All it does is increase government power and control over rich and poor alike, which is what the upcoming tax debate is really all about.  It has been what all of the debates have been about for quite some time, now.   

        

Recent polls show that 75% of Americans trust free markets, not government, to secure their prosperity.  Less than 30% believe the President’s economic stimulus plan has worked.  Less than 20% approve of the job Congress is doing.  Congress should listen to the People; we have it right, and they have it wrong.  Any fool can see that now, unless they work in the media or teach in a University. 

It is not complicated:  reduce taxes, cut spending, shrink government, de-regulate markets, and let us live free and prosper – that is the answer to our economic problems, not higher taxes and bigger government.  Prosperity is not an entitlement program; it can not be legislated into being and delivered by the apparatus of the State.  It is the product of free people pursuing their individual self-interest; engaging in voluntary economic cooperation and adding value in the marketplace.     

Liberty is prosperity, and vice versa.  Candidates who get this deserve your support in the upcoming elections, regardless of party affiliation or endorsement; candidates who don’t deserve to be shelved, regardless of party affiliation or endorsement.   

Want to save the nation?  Find a candidate who gets it and help them win their campaign for liberty.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”