VIDEO: My Linda Sarsour ‘Interview’
Thanks to the magic of Facebook Live, I was able to have an “interview” with Islamic supremacist Linda Sarsour!
Listen to her opine on the 2016 Election, Donald Trump, Progressives, the LGBT community and more!
How Donald J. Trump became the leader of ‘America’s Second Revolution’
Unprecedented, impossible, stunning were words used to describe the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America. On November 9th, 2016 world leaders reacted to the election of Trump with everything from congratulations to trepidation. However, Dutch MP Geert Wilders tweeted, “Congratulations, @realDonaldTrump! A historic victory, a revolution!”
On November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall and with it on December 26, 1991 the former Soviet Union fell. Twenty-eight years later on November 9, 2017 Donald J. Trump was elected. During his inaugural address President Trump stated:
Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.
For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.
[ … ]
The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.
[ … ]
That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.
How did this happen? Why did this happen? What should we do now? Can one man return power to US? If you want the answers to these and many more questions read John Michael Chambers’ latest book “Trump and the Resurrection of America – Leading America’s Second Revolution.”
John Michael Chambers’ book reminded me of “Common Sense” a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–76 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. At the time Paine wrote “Common Sense,” most colonists considered themselves to be aggrieved Britons. Before the election of President Trump most citizens considered themselves to be aggrieved Americans.
John Michael Chambers considers himself “a long-term optimist but a short-term realist.” Chambers tasks us to:
Observe the obvious, trust but verify, practice critical thinking, question authority, question everything, and think for yourself. Surround yourself with people of like mind who do indeed truly understand the times in which we live, and expand those circles of relationships.
Being a realist can be challenging. One must first be able to recognize truth from something other than truth.
Chambers warns that, “We are living in the age of an increasing number of smarter phones and an increasing number of dumbed-down people.”
John Michael Chambers
Chambers identifies the enemies of America. He unequivocally notes,
“The trouble, as outlined in this book, is the shadow government’s systems and institutions such as central banks and the debt-based monetary and economic systems. Governments, international bankers, corporations, Hollywood, “big pharma”, secret societies [Skull and Bones], religions [Radical Islam], and others preventing forward progress in exchange for both profit and control and are again using a world of betrayal after trust while utilizing clever deceptive techniques [Hegelian dialectic].”
Chambers predicts that President Trump will continue to come under attack from what he calls “merchants of chaos” who “take our space and make it small.” They, according to Chambers, “[S]tamp out free will and keep us tied and bound. They direct our attention and control our minds for their evils deeds.” Many see this happening with the growing violence perpetrated by groups such as: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and Organizing for Action.
But Chambers gives us hope. Chamber says his mission is, “to awaken, inspire, and motivate people.” Chambers notes:
We must realize that [with the election of President Trump] a major paradigm shift is underway and that we have been living in a web of deceitful lies designed to entrap us and move us away from the spirit and more toward vanity and worldly possessions as we march blindly like useless idiots down the road to serfdom.
Chambers concludes with this, “The opposite of love is not hate; it is fear. So choose to love. As you obtain more and more truths, then take the correct steps in implementing change, the fear subsides.”
I recommend this book to all those who are dealing with a world that seems to have gone mad with envy, corruption and fear. I chose love.
EDITORS NOTE: John Michael Chambers will be one of the speakers at the America – The Truth Conference: ELECTION DAY 2018 — Truth or Consequences? being held in Sarasota, Florida on October 21st, 2017. Below is a short video introduction to the three speakers and information about this event:
More Bad Defenses of Amoris Laetitia [On Divorce and Adultery]
Fr. Gerald E. Murray on more attempts to justify giving Communion to those remarried without annulment: assertions in opposition to Jesus.
The claim was widely made during the two Synods on the Family that the innovation of allowing persons living in adulterous second unions to receive Holy Communion, as proposed by Cardinal Kasper and others, was not a change in doctrine, but simply in discipline. I did not believe this to be true then (or now) and, apparently, neither did many of the supporters of this innovation.
The first evidence of that was the seemingly universal refusal to identify these unions as adulterous in fidelity to Christ’s words: “Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.” (Lk 16:18) Instead of adulterous these sinful relationships were called “irregular” unions. This tactic reduces Christ’s teaching to the level of a regulation. The use of scare quotes further diminished the stature of Christ’s teaching by casting doubt on whether we should really consider these unions to be irregular at all.
A conference on the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia was recently held at Boston College. Further evidence of the rejection of Christ’s plain teaching on marriage, divorce and adultery is found in the reported comments of two speakers: Professor Cathleen Kaveny and Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.
Kaveny used curious language to describe Our Lord’s teaching on marital fidelity: “Jesus clearly disfavored adultery.” No, Jesus forbade adultery. One can disfavor things that are good in themselves, but simply do not appeal to one for a variety of reasons. One can never claim as good and right something that God has clearly forbidden.
Kaveny continued: ”It’s clear that he rejects divorce and remarriage as contrary to the original will of God. But nothing in Jesus’ words or conduct demand that the sin involved in divorce and remarriage must be conceptualized as a sin that continues indefinitely, without the possibility of effective repentance.”
Well, the original will of God remains in force unless God himself has indicated otherwise. Jesus clearly reaffirmed the prohibition of divorce and remarriage, harkening back to God’s original plan for man and woman as revealed in the Book of Genesis.
Click here to read the rest of Father Murray’s column . . .
Fr. Gerald E. Murray
The Rev. Gerald E. Murray, J.C.D. is pastor of Holy Family Church, New York, NY, and a canon lawyer.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery by Guercino, 1621 in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.
Gun Rights Are Women’s Rights
The right to bear arms isn’t just a constitutional issue — it’s a women’s rights issue. Author and commentator Katie Pavlich explains why guns are the great equalizer between men and women.
RELATED ARTICLE: NRA Spokeswoman Dana Loesch Forced to Flee Own Home After Anti-Gun Advocates Make Death Threats – American News
TRANSCRIPT:
GUNS RIGHTS ARE WOMEN’S RIGHTS WITH KATIE PAVLICH
Do you want equality between men and women?
I do. Which is why I own a gun. My Glock 43 is my equalizer.
Too NRA for you? Then, let’s take a step back and think about this. I will start with this premise: Men are physically stronger than women.
I know: even this is controversial these days. But men have more muscle mass and greater bone density; they run faster, and punch harder. It’s called “biology.” If a woman is going to protect herself against a man who intends to do her serious harm, she needs to even the odds. And what’s the best way for her to do that? Own a gun — and know how to use it.
Given this, you would think that feminists would be lining up in front of gun shops, spending quality time at the shooting range, and filing for concealed carry permits. But when was the last time you heard a feminist speak out for women owning guns? You haven’t, because
feminists aren’t for gun ownership. They’re for taking guns away from women.
Well, you might say, if no one owned a gun, then everybody would be safer. Yes…and it would be nice if cheesecake was a diet food.
There are over 300 million guns in the United States and that’s not going to change any time soon. But even if we could build a giant magnet, fly it across the country and snap up every gun, it wouldn’t much matter to women’s safety.
In Great Britain, where it’s almost impossible to get a gun, a woman is three times more likely to be raped than in America, according to a study by David Kopel, a professor of constitutional law at Denver University.
Here’s another telling comparison between gun-free UK and gun-owning US: In the United States, only about 13 percent of home burglaries take place when the occupants are home, but in the UK, almost 60 percent do.
Professor Kopel explains the disparity: “American burglars . . . avoid occupied homes because of the risk of getting shot. English burglars prefer occupied homes, because there will be wallets and purses with cash.”
And, by the way, an assailant doesn’t need a gun to be dangerous. What do you do if you’re a woman and a man comes at you with a knife? Or just his bare hands? If you want to depend Free Courses for Free Minds.com on pepper spray or a whistle, okay—but I think your finger on the trigger of a gun would be more effective.
Take the example of mail carrier Catherine Latta. After she had been assaulted and raped by her ex-boyfriend, Latta tried to purchase a firearm. She was told it might take a month to get a permit. “[I’ll] be dead by then,” she recalls telling the clerk. That afternoon, she went to a rough part of town and bought a handgun. Five hours later, her ex-boyfriend attacked her outside of her home. She shot him in self-defense, and saved her life.
I should add that firing a gun is very rare. Just carrying it—let alone brandishing it—is a deterrent.
And, isn’t that the issue? Personal safety? How is a woman supposed to defend herself? What if an intruder breaks into her home?
Liberal TV personality Sherri Shepherd answered this question a few years ago.
“At one in the morning, the alarm in our house went off,” Shepherd told her co-hosts on the popular daytime show, “The View.” As the alarm blared, her husband, Sal, went downstairs to look around. If something happened to him, a terrified Shepherd realized, she had no way to protect herself or her son, Jeffrey. “ …All I had was this wicker basket…[I] don’t have a bat, nothing.”
“‘We’re going to get a gun,’” I told Sal. “[This] just made me realize how vulnerable you are if you can’t protect your home. And the police [were] wonderful; they came about seven minutes later, but to me, that’s seven minutes too late.”
Luckily for Shepherd, the incident was a false alarm. But there are lots of cases where the alarm is real, especially in high crime areas. Yet every year, progressives push for more and more gun control without ever considering who will pay the price.
It won’t be the bad guys. They always get the guns they want. It will be the good women who need to equal the odds in a dangerous confrontation with a man.
Women owning guns shouldn’t be a partisan issue. In fact, it’s a women’s rights issue.
I’m all for equality between the sexes. And I practice what I preach.
That’s why I own a gun.
I’m Katie Pavlich for Prager University.
Janet Jackson ‘Felt Like a Prisoner’ in Marriage to Muslim
Islamic teachings command such a relationship. My latest in PJ Media:
Janet Jackson’s now-estranged Muslim husband Wissam Al Mana, according to insiders, “swept in at just the right time” when they first met in 2010, and Jackson was at a low point in her life. Al-Mana “bailed her out and whisked her away to the Middle East.” Soon, however, Jackson began to feel “like a prisoner” in the marriage. Al Mana wanted “a traditional wife who stuck with Muslim traditions,” and Jackson began to chafe in the role.
That’s not surprising. Jackson felt “like a prisoner” because that’s exactly what Islamic law expects of “a traditional wife who stuck with Muslim traditions.” South Carolina Muslim cleric Muhammad Sayyed Adly recently said that the man owns the woman and that women should be “as prisoners in your hands or in your house.”
Adly is no “extremist.” A manual of Islamic law certified by Al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, as “conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,” stipulates:
[A] woman may not leave the city without her husband or a member of her unmarriageable kin accompanying her, unless the journey is obligatory, like the hajj. It is unlawful for her to travel otherwise, and unlawful for her husband to allow her to. (Reliance of the Traveller m10.3)
As a traditional Muslim wife, Jackson could also have expected to be beaten if she got out of line. This is because the Qur’an says:
[M]en have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. (4:34)
Nowhere, of course, does the Qur’an teach that a woman can beat a man under any circumstances.
The Qur’an also likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills:
Your women are a tilth for you, so go to your tilth as you will. (2:223)
It declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man:
Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as you choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her (2:282).
It allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls (those “your rights possess”) also:
If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if you fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly, then only one, or one that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice (4:3).
The Qur’an has more that oppresses women. It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter:
Allah directs you as regards your children’s inheritance: to the male, a portion equal to that of two females (4:11).
It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4).
Islamic law stipulates that a man’s prayer is annulled if a dog or a woman passes in front of him as he is praying. This is because Muhammad’s favorite wife, his child bride Aisha, is depicted in a hadith (a report of Muhammad’s words and deeds) saying:
The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, “Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people).” I said, “You have made us (i.e. women) dogs.” I saw the Prophet praying while I used to lie in my bed between him and the Qibla. Whenever I was in need of something, I would slip away, for I disliked to face him. (Sahih Bukhari 1.9.490)
Another hadith depicts Muhammad saying that the majority of the inhabitants of hell are women:
I looked into Paradise and I saw that the majority of its people were the poor. And I looked into Hell and I saw that the majority of its people are women. (Sahih Bukhari 3241; Sahih Muslim 2737)…
Read the rest here.
RELATED ARTICLES:
UK: Muslim accused of honor killing 19-year-old woman
Texas: Muslim who joined ISIS first became religious and started spending more time at the mosque
VIDEO: The Truth About Hollywood
Paul Joseph Watson published a YouTube video titled “The Truth About Hollywood” on Oct 15, 2017.
Watson states:
More and more people are beginning to feel jaded by popular culture.
Pop culture is defined as, “modern popular culture transmitted via mass media and aimed particularly at younger people.”
Hollywood has become the global trader in pop culture. Pop culture is miles wide but an inch deep. What has pop culture done for any culture? That is the question that parents, when they take their children to the movies, must ask themselves. What is the social redeeming value of the movie I am paying for? How does it benefit me, the parents, and our children?
QUESTION: What is the value system of pop culture?
ANSWER: It has none.
Pop culture and Hollywood are void of values, morals, responsibility and the worst voice of any culture or society. Values are derived from a moral society built upon long standing and proven beliefs and laws that hold the family in high esteem. Hollywood’s pop culture must tear down these beliefs, laws and the family.
Watch Watson’s short description of Hollywood:
This College Professor Is Under Siege for Challenging Transgender Orthodoxy
A Boise State University professor recently learned what happens when you challenge left-wing social narratives on college campuses.
Scott Yenor, a tenured professor, has been under siege on campus after publishing articles with The Heritage Foundation and The Daily Signal about feminism and the transgender movement.
In those articles, Yenor explained the similarity in philosophy between the early feminists and modern transgender movement and how they aim at undermining traditional family values.
He wrote in a Daily Signal article on Aug. 2:
Transgender rights activists are seeking to abridge parental rights by elevating the independent choices of young children. Respecting the sexual and gender “choices” of ever-younger children erodes parental rights and compromises the integrity of the family as an independent unit.
In response, students, activists, and even staff members at Boise State are now waging a relentless campaign to get Yenor fired or shut down.
A petition to have Yenor fired—which has now gained thousands of signatures—has been passed around on campus. Activists have posted flyers attacking him, and some have called for other faculty to come out and officially condemn him.
Despite these calls, Boise State has said it will not fire Yenor, according to The College Fix.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy sailing for Yenor, who continues to be lambasted and isolated.
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Yenor explained how the crusade against his work and others that challenge left-wing orthodoxy on campus is undercutting free speech at our colleges and universities.
The result of the reaction to his work, Yenor said, is that “there has been a very chilling effect on not only my speech, but those who would speak in defense of me both on the substance, and on the principle of academic freedom.”
The blowback came in earnest, according to Yenor, when the School of Public Service posted his article on its Facebook page. The dean received immediate negative reactions and anger from students and LGBT activists.
The dean, Corey Cook, then posted a statement on Facebook saying that while Yenor had a right to publish, his work violated the university’s aspirations of diversity and civility.
This didn’t stop the waves of attacks that would soon come upon Yenor.
The campaign against him became a “cause célèbre” for the new student diversity and inclusion hire, Francisco Salinas, according to Yenor.
In August, Salinas wrote an article condemning Yenor and tying his work to the recent events in Charlottesville and to Nazism.
And at an Aug. 29 faculty senate meeting, Boise State professor Lynn Lubamersky said that while she believes in free expression, she thinks that because of the opinions expressed in The Daily Signal article, Yenor “violated clear policies that govern our institution, our statement of shared values, and the State Board of Education policy regarding academic freedom and most important, our concern for our students.”
“The majority of our university is made up of women and transgendered people,” Lubamersky continued. “[Yenor’s] public statements published with the byline: Boise State University (BSU) professor of political science, a real violation of the rights of women and transgendered students.”
Lubamersky said:
When someone expresses bigoted, homophobic, and misogynistic views as a representative of a university, I think that we do have the right and responsibility to at least make a statement that we do not share these values and they are not represented of our university.
Since Yenor published the Daily Signal article in August, he received a constant stream of criticism and calls for his work to be shut down.
“The position seems to be that anyone who would do research in areas that don’t affirm the contemporary views, should be shut down,” Yenor said.
Boise State student Ryan Orlando called for his school to “part ways” with Yenor in an article he penned for The Odyssey.
“There are a multitude of morally reprehensible notions in Yenor’s writing which constitute a dangerous ideology that warrants separation from the university,” Orlando wrote.
“In our belief, this is hate speech, and it’s alienating a lot of folks in this Boise State community,” said Joe Goode, a member of the Boise State Young Democrats, according to KTVB.
“We want to show that our university stands for more than hate, we are a community of equality and inclusivity.”
While he has received withering personal attacks over his research, Yenor said that few have engaged with the ideas or have seriously attempted to refute his arguments.
Yenor said the personal attacks don’t bother him, but he worries about the long-term impact on people worried that their views will not be argued with, but simply attacked on campus.
“That’s been one of the most disappointing things,” Yenor said. “Everyone in academia could live with having a debate about ideas, but a debate has to start with an understanding what the other person is arguing.”
“It strikes me that there has really been, first of all, no effort to first understand what I’m arguing, and second of all, to get anywhere beyond name-calling and labeling,” Yenor said.
Yenor said only a handful of students have come out to publicly defend him or even make the simple argument that he should be allowed to speak on his views without getting fired, though he has received a lot of private support.
Yenor said he’s made new friendships, especially among those who privately share his views or actually want to understand what he has to say.
Nevertheless, he said he now feels like an “alien” on campus.
“There’s a kind of feeling that there’s a mob,” Yenor said. “And you don’t run across a mob.”
What’s been worst about all the flak he’s received on campus, according to Yenor, is this larger impact on speech.
While Yenor said he will not back down about writing about gender and other areas that he studies, he is worried about what the attacks mean for free speech and others who are afraid to have their careers derailed.
“The problem with what is happening is that the idea that I’m in violation of the campus civility policies is intended to have a chilling effect on my speech and the speech of anyone who would agree with me,” Yenor said. “That is the bottom line with how I’m being injured.”
This, according to Yenor, will damage institutions of higher learning.
“What is primarily at stake in my case, I think, is the development of a culture of victimization on campus or a social justice framework for understanding education,” Yenor said in a follow-up email.
The article has been corrected to reflect that the quotes from the Aug. 29 faculty meeting were from Professor Lynn Lubamersky.
COMMENTARY BY
Jarrett Stepman
Jarrett Stepman is an editor for The Daily Signal. Send an email to Jarrett. Twitter: @JarrettStepman
A Note for our Readers:
Trust in the mainstream media is at a historic low—and rightfully so given the behavior of many journalists in Washington, D.C.
Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.
Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.
Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. That’s why The Daily Signal exists.
The Daily Signal’s mission is to give Americans the real, unvarnished truth about what is happening in Washington and what must be done to save our country.
Our dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts rely on the financial support of patriots like you.
Your donation helps us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and report the facts.
You deserve the truth about what’s going on in Washington.
Please make a gift to support The Daily Signal.
EDITORS NOTE: Emphasis has been added to this column by Mr. Stepman that was not in the original op-ed.
The Freudian Slip – and Fall
Robert Royal writes that the reputation of the founder of psychoanalysis is waning, as it should, being so far from truth.
My friends and family sometimes berate me (gently) for my longstanding habit – since my teen years – of reading the New York Review of Books. And, true, many other things might lay greater claim to your attention. Though it’s America’s premiere book review, NYRB is very ingrown. (It could be called theNew York Review of Each Other’s Books.) Mostly Jewish, secular, New York liberal – and almost always pushing a point of view you can predict without having to read. There are days when I wonder myself if NYRB and most of the American intellectual class are merely fretting and fiddling with frivolous secular obsessions while our whole civilization burns.
But in addition to reviews of books you might not otherwise hear about, NYRB is a convenient way to take the temperature of the culture. And sometimes there’s a surprise, as in a recent article by Frederick Crews about the scholarly demolition of Sigmund Freud. No one talks much about Freud these days. But he’s a prime example of a much bigger phenomenon in modern culture: the way that some dead intellectual, as John Maynard Keynes once famously said, continues to enslave even practical men and women of the world, despite the fact that his theories, once thought the last word in rationality and social revolution, have proven false.
Freud famously wrote about God as the psychological projection of a great big Father in his book The Future of an Illusion, and he’s responsible for no small part of modern secularism – and the sexual revolution. But as is often the case with people who are themselves psychologically disturbed, it was Freud who was doing the projecting – projecting a whole raft of notions he claimed were scientific but have increasingly been shown to be peculiar to a certain sector of Vienna in his time and, even more telling, to his own peculiar psyche.
Several biographers, even some who want to continue defending Freudianism, have noted the inconsistencies and outright contradictions in Freud’s work, beginning with his lack of careful observation or real insight into the people and world around him. Though he worked hard to make his daughter Anna his intellectual as well as physical heir, for example, he never noticed that she was lesbian.
But that’s just for starters.
Click here to read the rest of Robert Royal’s column . . .
Robert Royal
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by Ignatius Press. The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, is now available in paperback from Encounter Books.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is a portrait of Sigmund Freud from Madam Tussauds, Vienna.
What Is The Biggest Threat We Face?
So what is the biggest threat we face? It’s ignorance.
Seems it is most difficult to confront who we are, how we tick and then breaking the non-optimal and non-survival habits. We are habitual in nature. People are 100% disciplined and committed to their existing habits. Change your habits-change your life, change the world. Let’s talk about ignorance as the biggest threat we face and how to begin to overcome this. This link covers an important aspect of this subject and this link can help us identify truth from lies. A nation led by lies dies. Also be sure to pick up your copy of the newly released book Trump-“What One Man Can Do”. A link has been provided at the end of this post.
What Is The Biggest Threat We Face
I talked about this in “The Process” under “Discovery and the Evolution of Change”. Arriving at the truth: This is where one begin to question things as they are and begin to embark upon what can be an uncomfortable journey as deceitful lies are revealed and truths come to light. This is where the change really begins as one acquires a new operating basis as a free critical thinker and truth seeker. This is the first and most important grounding and empowering step.
We are a busy people. There are all the things and complications that life seems to place before us. It is most difficult in this fast paced world as we are bombarded with images and information to actually sort out and sift out fact from fiction. But we must. We must realize that the biggest threat we are facing is our own ignorance. Seek the truth.
“The searching-out and thorough investigation of truth ought to be the primary study of man”- Cicero, 106 BC-43 BC. I would suggest becoming a truth seeker. Become a critical thinker. Think for yourself. Question everything and break your habitual circuits of believing what it is you are being spoon fed. Forget about acceptance and group-think. Come to understand exactly which people and organizational structures are in control and wreaking all this global havoc and know who they are and what they are setting out to accomplish as their end goal for humanity. I wrote about this to some extent in this blog post titled “Creating A Better World For Posterity”. In order to shift the direction we are heading in and to have the pendulum swing in the other direction, we must combat our own individual ignorance, the biggest threat we face, then help others. Start now before its too late.
Free Book
Subscribe here and I will send you a complimentary copy of my 2015 book “Misconceptions and Course Corrections – A Collection of Critical Essays for Our Times”. This eye opening book may be a great tool to pass along to others in the effort to shift the pendulum from division to unity against the real merchants of chaos. And on a more direct political note, pick up your copy of my latest Donald Trump book, “What One Man Can Do”, 10% of all book sales go to the Trump campaign. Learn more.
The Scandalous Truth about Obamacare Is Laid Bare
A government program that is ruined by permitting more choice is not sustainable.
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
It’s not just that Obamacare is financially unsustainable. More seriously, it is intellectually unsustainable, even though this truth has been slow to emerge. This has come to an end with President Trump’s executive order.
What does it do? It cuts subsidies to failing providers, yes. It also redefines the meaning of “short term” policies from one year to 90 days. But more importantly–and this is what has the pundit class in total meltdown–it liberalizes the rules for providers to serve health-coverage consumers.
In the words of USA Today: the executive order permits a greater range of choice “by allowing more consumers to buy health insurance through association health plans across state lines.”
The key word here is “allowing” – not forcing, not compelling, not coercing. Allowing. Why would this be a problem? Because allowing choice defeats the core feature of Obamacare, which is about forcing risk pools to exist that the market would otherwise never have chosen. If you were to summarize the change in a phrase it is this: it allows more freedom.
The tenor of the critics’ comments on this move is that it is some sort of despotic act. But let’s be clear: no one is coerced by this executive order. It is exactly the reverse: it removes one source of coercion. It liberalizes, just slightly, the market for insurance carriers.
Here’s a good principle: a government program that is ruined by permitting more choice is not sustainable.
The New York Times predicts:
Employers that remain in the A.C.A. small-group market will offer plans that are more expensive than average, and they will see premiums increase. Only the sickest groups would remain in the A.C.A. regulated risk pool after several enrollment cycles.
Vox puts it this way:
The individuals likely to flee the Obamacare markets for association plans would probably be younger and healthier, leaving behind an older, sicker pool for the remaining ACA market. That has the makings of a death spiral, with ever-increasing premiums and insurers deciding to leave the market altogether.
The Atlantic makes the same point:
Both short-term and associated plans would likely be less costly than the more robust plans sold on Obamacare’s state-based insurance exchanges. But the concern, among critics, is that the plans would cherry-pick the healthiest customers out of the individual market, leaving those with serious health conditions stuck on the Obamacare exchanges. There, prices would rise, because the pool of people on the exchanges would be sicker. Small businesses who keep the more robust plans—perhaps because they have employees with serious health conditions—would also likely face higher costs.
CNBC puts the point about plan duration in the starkest and most ironic terms.
If the administration liberalizes rules about the duration of short-term health plans, and then also makes it easier for people to get hardship exemptions from Obamacare’s mandate, it could lead healthy people who don’t need comprehensive benefits to sign up in large numbers for short-term coverage.
Can you imagine? Letting people do things that are personally beneficial? Horror!
Once you break all this down, the ugly truth about Obamacare is laid bare. Obamacare didn’t create a market. It destroyed the market. Even the slightest bit of freedom wrecks the whole point.
Under the existing rules, healthy people were being forced (effectively taxed) to pay the premiums for unhealthy people, young people forced to pay for old people, anyone trying to live a healthy lifestyle required to cough up for those who do not.This is the great hidden truth about Obamacare. It was never a program for improved medical coverage. It was a program for redistributing wealth by force from the healthy to the sick. It did this by forcing nonmarket risk pools, countering the whole logic of insurance in the first place, which is supposed to calibrate premiums, risks, and payouts toward mutual profitability. Obamacare imagined that it would be easy to use coercion to undermine the whole point of insurance. It didn’t work.
And so the Trump executive order introduces a slight bit of liberality and choice. And the critics are screaming that this is a disaster in the making. You can’t allow choice! You can’t allow more freedom! You can’t allow producers and consumers to cobble together their own plans! After all, this defeats the point of Obamacare, which is all about forcing people to do things they otherwise would not do!
Freedom or coercion: these are the two paths.
This revelation is, as they say, somewhat awkward.What we should have learned from the failure of Obamacare is that no amount of coercion can substitute for the rationality and productivity of the competitive marketplace.
Even if the executive order successfully liberalizes the sector just a bit, we have a very long way to go. The entire medical marketplace needs massive liberalization. It needs government to play even less of a role, from insurance to prescriptions to all choice, over what is permitted to be called health care and who administers it.
Freedom or coercion: these are the two paths. The first works; the second doesn’t.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, economics adviser to FreeSociety.com, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books, most recently Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty, with a preface by Deirdre McCloskey (FEE 2017). He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.
Unlikely that today’s refugees will be like yesterday’s self-reliant immigrants to America
Reader Bob Enos sent us his thoughts after reading Ms. Wolfe’s paean (in Foreign Policy) to grandpa (in which the author takes the opportunity to, like all good Leftists, use hot button words to describe RRW). See my post here with a link to “journalist” Lauren Wolfe’s opposition to the idea of “assimilation.” (You may be able to get the Foreign Policy article the first time without registering.)
In 2015, Enos spoke about refugees. Last time I checked this video had over 61,000 views. Read about it and watch it here:
Enos tells us this:
The article penned by Ms. Lauren Wolf – a New York liberal presumably of Russian Ashkenazi Jewish extraction – for Foreign Policy magazine was yet another piece of revisionist history designed to obscure a 27 year-old change to immigration policy that the American public neither understood nor asked for.
In her fantasy depicting Russian Jewish immigrants as ethnic culturists fiercely holding on to cultural identity in contrast to the American “melting pot,” she conveniently omits the major difference between then and now: the concept of the “public charge.” Her ancestors entered the United States, as did mine, with three pre-conditions in place. One, they were represented by American citizens acting as sponsors – often a rabbi or parish priest. Two, private, unsubsidized housing had been arranged ahead of time. Three, the new immigrants had jobs arranged for them ahead of time. The concept was a simple one: entrance to the United States is a privilege, not a right. Freedom of opportunity provides the means to support oneself, to “sing for your supper,” and to pose no burden to your new home country.
The Immigration Act of 1980 abandoned the 100+ year-old standard of the public charge – at least for refugees.
This is the story of my paternal grandparents, Manuel and Maria Ignacia, from the island of St. Michael, in the remote chain of archipelago islands called the Azores, 1,000 miles off the coasts of both Europe and America in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Portuguese language was spoken in the home. My grandfather worked full-time in the Glenwood Stove factory, and part-time for a local Jewish merchant and landlord, Mr. Steinberg, who rented apartment and sold home furnishings to “green horns” fresh off the boat. My grandparents were Roman Catholic, but Mr. Steinberg’s religion meant nothing to my grandparents. “Mr. Steinberg is like a god to us!”, my grandmother exclaimed, more than once.
Once my grandparents learned the ropes from Mr. Steinberg, they began investing their savings in their own tenement houses and became landlords. During World War II, they bought a meat market, selling what my “vo-vo” (Nana) called “midnight meat” – black-market meat sold out the back door, in the middle of the night, to circumvent rationing restrictions during the war. I’d often thought that, had my grandmother been born in the US about 50 years later, she would have been running General Motors.
Now, to the assimilation part of the story. As in many Portuguese homes in the area, there were four portraits adorning the living room walls. First, a portrait of Jesus Christ. Second, the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. The church is at the center of family life in traditional Portuguese households. Third, a picture of Cardinal Umberto Medieros, the Archbishop of the Boston Diocese, the first Archbishop of an American Catholic diocese of Portuguese extraction. And last, a portrait of President John F. Kennedy.
One running quip was that Portuguese men preferred smoking Winston cigarettes and drinking Carling-Black Label beer, because the packaging contained the colors of the American flag.
Once, as a teenager, I asked vo-vo if she and voo-voo (grandpa) ever thought about returning home for a visit. She laughed at me; “Ai, cuzao (don’t ask)! Go where? Sao Miguel? Whadda you talkin’ about? I know what it looks like! THIS is our home!”
Enough said.
My grandparents never became citizens. I don’t know why. They were proud of the United States and grateful to be here. It could be that, Portugal having been ruled by a repressive military dictatorship for many years, my grandparents simply distrusted government. They never had a bank account. My grandmother accepted public assistance only once. A bureaucrat from city hall called her at home. Vo-vo was a widow by now. Vo-vo was asked if she would like 100 gallons of home heating oil for free. “Sure,” she replied. When my parents learned of this, they were mortified. They asked her, “why did you take that?” She laughed, “I didn’t ask for nothing. I didn’t call them, they called me!” Of city hall, she said they were idiots.
Both of my grandparents died in nursing homes, one at a time. They financed their nursing home stays with their own money. They came to the US with no money. They died in the US with no money. They left no money to bequeath; only mementos of sentimental value and memories. What they did leave, the really important stuff: opportunities for their progeny to thrive in the greatest land of opportunity the world has ever known.
Our family has been, and continues to be, grateful for the opportunities this wonderful social experiment called the United States has provided us. Today, my grandparents have one grandchild who is a retired Wall Street executive, one grandchild who is chief financial officer and treasurer for one of the most important technology companies in America, and a great-grandchild who graduated with honors from Yale University, and is an associate at the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
This story, my friends, is one that, sadly, is largely lost on the current crop of refugees, in my opinion.
And for those of my fellow Americans who insist that the current crop of refugees will blend in and thrive, no different than previous immigrant waves, I refer you to the caveat of every legitimate stock broker and investment advisor: “past performance is no guarantee of future returns.”
This post is filed in my Comments worth noting/guest posts category.
See another guest column by Mr. Enos about the issue of refugees and the public charge, here.
A refugee designation is the most desired form of entry to the US for wannabe immigrants because it is the only category where the immigrant is legally (there may be migrants receiving illegally) allowed to receive welfare within weeks of arrival. In fact, the major job of the resettlement contractors is to get their assigned refugees enrolled at local welfare offices ASAP.
RELATED ARTICLES:
Lancaster, PA where we are told that the Amish welcome one and all
Uptick in Mediterranean rescues as more attempt to get to Europe from Libya
The Humanitarian Hoax of Socialism: Killing America With Kindness
The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.
The distinguishing feature of fascism, communism, and Islamism is totalitarian centralized government. All power is vested in a central government and all aspects of life are controlled by its foundational ideology whether secular or religious.
In contrast, the United States is a federal republic that has a power sharing arrangement between its three branches of government. What distinguishes the governing structure of the United States is decentralization of power and the separation of Church and State. The U.S. government was designed by our Founding Fathers to specifically deny totalitarian rule to any political party or particular religion.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States and codifies the framework of our government. Interpretation of the Constitution and tensions between the m,federal government, state governments, and individual rights are integral to American politics and fluctuate according to the political party in power. Government agencies and institutions were designed to function as non-partisan components of the bureaucratic whole.
Probably the greatest source of political tension is the disagreement over the role of government in American life. In totalitarian governments there is no private property. The State owns all means of production and the people are basically employees of the State. There are two classes of people – the ruled and the rulers (masters and slaves). The decentralization of power in America and the individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution allowed private ownership of the means of production where people own, operate, and work for private businesses. Private ownership incentivized a strong extremely productive middle class and by WWII the United States of America was the most powerful country in the world. Our enemies were not happy.
It is the existence of private ownership and a strong middle class that provides the greatest defense against totalitarian rule which is precisely why enemies of the United States are determined to destroy the middle class and private ownership of means of production. This is where socialism enters the picture.
Ayn Rand
Socialism is a soft sell. As Ayn Rand famously said,
“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”
Ayn Rand also compared socialism and fascism saying,
“The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”
The humanitarian hucksters selling socialism in America deceitfully market it as the system that empowers the people by providing public ownership of the means of production. They disingenuously insist that the workers own the means of production without mentioning that the State manages the property. The State has the power in socialism – not the individual. Cuba and Venezuela are primetime examples of the outcome.
Fascism, communism/socialism, and Islamism are all totalitarian systems that have been or continue to be enemies of the United States. Theoretically all promise their adherents social justice and income equality provided by their centralized governments. Here is the problem – the application of fascism, communism, socialism, and Islamism exposes them as tyrannical and oppressive for all except the elite ruling class.
So why do people choose the fiction of the promise instead of the reality of the application? Why do people ignore the words of real people who have escaped the tyranny and oppression of totalitarianism?
The answer is that centralized governments are an escape from freedom. Their cradle-to-grave care appeals to the most dependent, regressive, and emotional parts of ourselves at the expense of our adult strivings for individual rights freedom and liberty. The government mommy and daddy control the infantalized citizens.
Decentralized governments provide freedom and appeal to the most independent rational adult parts of ourselves. Decentralized governments offer adult independence and freedom but require adult responsibility. The enemies of America did not go quietly into the night after WWII. They were determined to infantalize America and offer cradle-to-grave socialism to destroy the middle class.
America’s enemies understood that the U.S. would have to be defeated from within. They launched a deliberate effort to reverse traditional American strivings for adulthood, freedom, and independence in an effort to infantilize the American public and move the country toward socialism. Cry-bulliies on campus who now require safe spaces to protect themselves from unwelcome ideas are a glaring example of the success of the effort. The infantilized students at UC-Berkeley have similarly declared free speech dead on campus – opposing ideas apparently too threatening to their fragile egos.
Left-wing radical socialist Barack Obama, the quintessential humanitarian huckster, politicized every American government institution during his two lawless terms. Activist judges, activist lawyers, activist politicians, activist teachers, activist curriculum developers, activist administrators, activist IRS CIA FBI CDC. Activists are not just a bunch of out-of-control college students, they are men and women in positions of power intent on destroying American democracy and replacing it with socialism.
Activists are a broad seemingly disparate genus joined by their activist ideology. The reason they are so dangerous is that they embrace a lawless ends justifies the means mentality. So, now the country is confronted with whole institutions that lawlessly pursue a political agenda that is antithetical to American democracy. The censorship and disabling of accounts on social media is a particularly disturbing phenomenon.
In his famous 1961 farewell address President Eisenhower warned America against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. He advised the public to “guard against the grave danger that public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Eisenhower understood how the increasing power of the military-industrial complex could threaten the decentralized power sharing arrangement of the U.S. government. His words echoed the words of English aristocrat Lord Bertrand Russell in his 1952 book The Impact of Science on Society. Eisenhower’s words were a warning, Russell’s words were a promise of the new world order and one-world government.
Both men anticipated the power of the scientific-technological elite. Both could imagine industry (means of production) being consolidated into the hands of fewer multi-national conglomerates. But neither could have imagined the application of science and technology in a digital age of information wars where the manipulating and censoring of information could direct public opinion worldwide and destabilize governments including our own. The Internet and the World Wide Web did not exist in their time.
Neither men could have imagined the globalist elite being in control of the means of production AND a weaponized politicized worldwide information industry. Globalism is the clear and present danger to the United States of America today. It is the existential threat of the expanded military-industrial complex capable of creating a worldwide echo chamber that controls public opinion completely.
The left-wing radical socialist Barack Obama opened the doors for the globalist elite by soft-selling socialism to America. Globalism requires socialist nations that manage the means of production to be internationalized into their new world order of one-world government.
Eisenhower’s parting hope for America that our democracy “survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow” will be dead.
After 241 years of decentralized government and American freedom the world will be returned to the dystopian existence of masters and slaves because a willfully blind American public was seduced by Barack Obama, the quintessential humanitarian huckster, deceitfully promising hope and change for America. The Humanitarian Hoax of Socialism will have succeeded in killing America with “kindness.”
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on Goudsmit Pundicity.
After Nationalists’ Surprise Showing in Germany, is Austria Next?
With days to go before the balloting in the parliamentary elections, the issue of immigration dominates political debate. In 2015, as Germany’s Merkel was admitting refugees from Syria, whose ranks would reach one million, Austria received 90,000 asylum requests. In 2016, that number was 42,000. Inarguably, this flood of immigrants played into the hands of the Freedom Party. Its longtime charges that a tide of non-European Muslims will drain the welfare system, cost Austrian jobs, and drown the culture clearly resonate more than ever.
By John Gizzi
Freedom Party (FPO) leader Heinz-Christian Strache (left) and Sebastian Kurz of the People’s Party, OVP
The defeats of nationalist leaders Marine LePen of France and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands earlier this year afforded evidence that nationalism—also known as right-wing populism—was running out of steam in Europe.
But this attitude began to change on the evening of September 24. That’s when German voters, as widely predicted, re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel and her CDU-CSU (conservative) Party. But in a surprise move, voters gave an unexpectedly high 13.4 % of the vote to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party—which emphasizes a hardline on illegal immigration, an exit from the European Union, a revisionist (and more positive) narrative of Germany’s Nazi past, and a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Making the AfD showing all the more impressive is that the party is barely four years old—the “baby” of the nationalist parties that now bewilder political prognosticators and alter the political playing field of Europe.
All eyes are now increasingly focusing on neighboring Austria and its national elections October 15.
As it was in Germany, an escalating migration and refugee crisis, relations with Eastern European neighbors such as Hungary, and a national government that seems distant and aloof from the people are major factors setting the stage for the political drama now unfolding in neighboring Austria.
And the beneficiary is the Freedom Party (FPO), the voice of Austrian nationalism for more than a generation. According to a just-completed Unique Research/Haute and Austrian TV poll, the Freedom Party is drawing a strong 25 percent of the vote—not far behind the two major parties, the center-right OVP (People’s Party) being at 34 percent and the center-left SPO (Social Democratic Party) 27 percent.
Haider’s Legacy Today
If the five-year-old AfD is the “baby” of European nationalist parties, then the Austrian Freedom Party is surely their “father.”
Founded first in 1949 as VdU (Verband der Unabhangigen) and renamed in 1955 as FPO (Freedom Party) by onetime Minister of Agriculture and former SS officer Anton Reinthaller, the Freedom Party was initially a vehicle for former Nazis to reintegrate into the postwar political system. Seemingly doomed to single-digits in national elections, the FPO evolved into a party with two strands: near-libertarian, small-government party akin to Germany’s small Free Democratic Party, and a second strand of hard-core extreme members with much nostalgia for the German “Third Reich” of the Nazis.
If the Freedom Party had a defining moment, it was in 1986 when the charismatic (and controversial) Jorg Haider took over as its leader. Haider moved the FPO to its present status as a hard-liner on illegal immigration, a booster of a positive redefinition of Austria’s Nazi past, a proponent of more direct democracy such as U.S.-style initiatives, and an advocate of breaking up the state-run TV monopoly.
In 1989, the FPO scored big in state elections in Carinthia and made Haider governor. Haider became a more turbulent public figure with each passing year. In 1999, the FPO reached its high point in a national election (27.7 percent of the vote) and actually placed second in number of parliamentary seats.
The third place OVP agreed to a coalition with the FPO but Haider—who under normal circumstances would have become chancellor—abjured a role in government amid widespread international censure. Haider also stepped aside following the threat of sanctions by the European Union against the Austrian government over the participation of an extreme-right party in a Western EU member-state.
Among Haider’s incendiary actions and statements were to greet former Waffen-SS as “decent comrades” and to praise the Hitler government for a “decent employment policy” in a television interview.
(During an interview with this reporter in December 1994, Haider insisted his remarks about employment were in jest and were subsequently twisted by “the state-owned TV network.” He likened his tough stand on illegal immigration to that of California’s then-Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who had just won a landslide re-election after embracing an initiative to deny state services to non-citizens).
Haider would finally break with the FPO in 2004 and launch an insurgent party (BZO) of its own. In 2008, he died from injuries in an automobile crash.
Nearly a decade later, much of the agenda sculpted by Haider lives on in the present FPO leader, Heinz-Christian Strache. Under Strache, the old Haider insurgents of the BZO have come back to the FPO and, in an effort to shed its identification with Nazi sympathizers the party has had a major outreach to the extreme right in Israel (although Strache and his party have never been welcomed by the Netanyahu government).
Strache has also studied and praised the American “Tea Party” movement and considers as “good friends” France’s LePen, the Netherlands’ Wilders, and German AfD leader Frauke Petry.
Strache also brought his party closer to Putin. In December, he went to Moscow to sign a cooperation agreement with Putin’s United Russia Party and vow its opposition to Western sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine.
A “shoulder-to-shoulder” relationship between Vienna and Moscow, said Strache, would help bring peace to Syria.
Can Sebastian Kurz Stop the Freedom Party?
There is a sidebar in modern Austrian history that works to the advantage of “outsider” candidates and parties: the incestuous nature of the two major parties.
For 44 of the past 72 years, Austria has been governed by a “grand coalition” of the Social Democrats and the People’s Party. For much of that time, the party chieftains divided patronage at the federal, state and local level through a system called “Proporz.”
“It was a recipe for corruption and nepotism,” observed columnist Tony Barber of the Financial Times, “[T]his political establishment looked tired and out of ideas.”
That’s what the voters appeared to be saying. In the parliamentary elections of 2013, the major parties got an aggregate total of 50 percent of all votes cast—down from 79 percent cast for the “Big Two” parties in 2002.
Earlier this year, nominees for the ceremonial office of president of Austria failed to even make the run-off. The top vote-getter in the first round of the race (35.1 percent) was Freedom Party nominee Norbert Hofer, with Alexander van der Bellen of the Green Party placing second with 21.3 percent. (In a subsequent run-off that had to be re-run because of irregularities in the casting of some ballots, van der Bellen narrowly staved off Hofer.)
With days to go before the balloting in the parliamentary elections, the issue of immigration dominates political debate. In 2015, as Germany’s Merkel was admitting refugees from Syria, whose ranks would reach one million, Austria received 90,000 asylum requests. In 2016, that number was 42,000.
Inarguably, this flood of immigrants played into the hands of the Freedom Party. Its longtime charges that a tide of non-European Muslims will drain the welfare system, cost Austrian jobs, and drown the culture clearly resonate more than ever.
Aware of this, the People’s Party turned to a different kind of leader in this election: Sebastian Kurz, foreign minister and former immigration minister, and 30 years old.
Kurz endorses most of Strache’s anti-immigration agenda and is regarded by many commentators as the “soft-spoken Strache” who has moved the OVP considerably to the right of the political spectrum.
Kurz eschews the labels of “left” or “right” and makes statements designed to appeal to different political factions in a populist manner. As immigration minister, he targeted “people smugglers” and tried to reduce economic incentive for refugees to “flood” Austria. He favors U.S.-style tax cuts as well as increased public spending to jump-start Austria’s moribund economy.
But Kurz also eschews the tough, beer-hall rhetoric on immigrants that is a staple of Strache’s rallies. Moreover, he is a strong booster of the European Union, in sharp contrast to the Eurosceptic Freedom Party.
Given the People’s Party’s first-place showing in the polls at this time, the nomination of the “Austrian Macron” appears to have been a shrewd move. But a “Chancellor Kurz” may be forced to form a coalition with the Freedom Party rather than his party’s traditional ally, the Social Democrats headed by outgoing Chancellor Christian Kern.
“In this way, an extreme right-wing party which endorses xenophobic, nativist and anti-EU rhetoric would become part of the Austrian government again – a government which would probably move Austria closer to the ever more authoritarian policies of [Prime Minister] Victor Orban of Hungary,” says social scientist Ruth Wodak, professor at Lancaster University, UK, and author of “The Politics of Fear. What Right Wing Populist Discourses Mean.”
The Freedom Party sharing power after eleven years will be a much-reported story from Austria—and a defining moment in the saga of whether nationalism is here to stay in Europe or is just a passing fad.
John Gizzi
John Gizzi is the White House correspondent and chief political columnist for Newsmax. He is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis of the conservative-online-journalism center at the Washington-based Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research..
The Numbers Are in: Social Security Robs the Working Poor
The Social Security Administration’s own numbers reveal that a private investment pays more than Social Security.
by Tom Eddlem
Back in 2011, investment guru Warren Buffett famously complained in the New York Times that his secretaries were paying higher federal payroll tax rates than he was:
Our leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’ But when they did the asking, they spared me…. what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income – and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”
Buffett used some creative accounting for his numbers; he used only “taxable income,” which means he didn’t count all the deductions his employees were using to write off their income taxes. For middle-class workers making about $75,000 per year, that’s typically a heavy percentage of their income. Moreover, for the tax rates Buffett claimed applied to his assistants, they must have been paid in the range of $200,000 per year or more.
Despite Buffett’s accounting trickery, there was a level of truth to his complaint: the burden of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes does fall almost exclusively upon the poor and middle classes. And Buffett acknowledged this fact in his New York Times op-ed:
The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.”
The Questionable Benefit of Paying Those Heavy Taxes
Buffett was correct to claim the poor and middle class pay heavy payroll taxes for the Social Security program. But do the poor and middle classes receive benefits from Social Security compared to the “investment” the federal government requires they make?
The Social Security Administration’s website now allows its “customers” to enter income numbers over a career and pull out a precise benefit level. So it’s relatively easy today for anyone to contrast private investments with Social Security benefit levels with an unprecedented level of precision. (This author has run the numbers several times before in the past few decades using the SSA’s PIA calculator application.)
While it has long been known that middle class and wealthy people do not profit by “investing” their money in Social Security compared with a private retirement fund, the impact of Social Security upon a worker trapped in a minimum wage job throughout his career has been left uncalculated – until now.Thus, the following question can be answered authoritatively:
Is it possible for a minimum wage worker to do better putting his money into Social Security than if he were allowed to invest his money in a private fund earning interest at the same rate as the S&P 500?
And the answer is this: No, it’s not possible. In every conceivable scenario, the private fund pays more than Social Security to the minimum wage worker.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Consider the case of a person who works 50 weeks per year, 40 hours per week at the legal minimum wage, beginning in 1970 and retiring at the end of 2017.
Only the Old Age and Survivors’ Assistance proportion of the Social Security tax can be added to the private fund, not Disability Insurance or Medicare, which in 2017 is 10.6 percent of total income (out of the 15.3 percent total tax imposed upon the self-employed). The worker must purchase a term insurance policy with a private fund to cover the “survivors” part of the risk in the Social Security program, and (to keep things fair) a 0.75 percent “management fee” is deducted from the retirement account annually.
Most couples in that salary range are actually two-income families.
At the end of his career, the minimum wage worker ends up with a retirement fund of $262,551.02 from the wages he otherwise would have paid into the Social Security “trust fund.”
From this account, a person could safely withdraw just over seven percent per year, with the fund replenishing itself in perpetuity without losing value – meanwhile, the S&P has grown at just over 11 percent annually, and inflation has been a little less than four percent during the same last 50 years. That’s an average monthly income of over $1,500, adjusted upwards for inflation over time, it is far more than the $974.00 that the Social Security Administration’s website claims it will pay its customers.
The numbers favor a private account even if one uses favorable circumstances for receiving Social Security, with a single income earner in a two-couple household where the spouse gets half the Social Security benefit of the wage-earner. The spousal benefit increases the monthly Social Security payment to $1,461.00, while the private fund remains the same at $1,579.68.
And this scenario is highly unlikely: A couple with just one worker making the legal federal minimum wage is a rarity; most couples in that salary range are two-income families. In a two-income minimum wage family, the private fund pays $3,159.36 versus a $1,948 monthly benefit from Social Security. In every family scenario, whether single, married with one income or married with two incomes, the difference is that Social Security is cheating poor retirees out of several hundred thousand dollars in benefits (see table below).
Single or Married, Alike
All three family scenarios assume a 2017 bull market with earnings of 10.62 percent increase in S&P 500-based private fund for 2017 (based upon YTD as of August 23). But what if the retirement date is at the bottom of a 2008-level stock market crash? Even in that scenario (in calendar year 2008, nearly 37 percent of the S&P 500’s value was erased by the bear market), every possible permutation of family arrangement makes more total money from the private fund than from Social Security. Whether single earners, two-income couples, and one-income couples, all make more than Social Security in a private fund.
There’s only one artificial scenario that could be constructed where Social Security could claim to be of partial benefit to a poor family. If:
- The minimum wage worker retires at the bottom of a 2008-style recession, and
- One were to count only monthly payments (not discounting a death benefit of the value of $166,588.62 in the recession-reduced private fund), and
- It is a single-income married family.
Then, Social Security pays a slightly higher monthly benefit. Over a typical benefit lifespan – 256 months for women and 215 months for men – Social Security’s monthly payments make up for nearly two-thirds of the death benefit in a private fund.
When the leftist mainstream media reported about Warren Buffett’s column, they focused exclusively upon the income tax proportion of the tax burden. They ignored how Buffett’s column acknowledges that Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes are not “contributions” to a “trust fund” to care for workers, akin to private sector 401k plans, but are instead regressive taxes imposed upon the working classes.
This admission belies a political establish core tenet of faith that goes back to the New Deal, that Social Security serves as an investment to protect poor and middle-class workers and is not as a general revenue tax. Buffett’s essay busted that myth by correctly claiming that Social Security impoverishes working people with general revenue taxation.
But even if one assumes Social Security taxes are an “investment” made by the poor for their retirement like a 401k plan, the numbers provided by the Social Security Administration itself reveal it’s still a financial rip-off for the very poorest of the working poor.
Tom Eddlem
Thomas R. Eddlem is a freelance writer who has been published in more than 20 periodicals, and a high school history and economics teacher. He’s the author of Primary Source American History, available on TeachersPayTeachers.com and his blog is located at teddlem.blogspot.com.
Department of Health and Human Services: ‘Life Begins at Conception’
In a stunning turn of events President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has declared that life begins at conception.
The 2018-2022 DHHS draft strategic plan reads:
Mission Statement
The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to enhance the health and well-being of Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.
Organizational Structure
HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.
Readers may share their thoughts on each part of the draft strategic plan.
Download the HHS DRAFT Strategic Plan FY 2018 – 2022 – PDF
The Federalist’s Harvest Prude reports:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just released their 2018-2022 plan, which unequivocally states that life begins at conception and deserves protection. In the introduction it says,
“HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.”
The draft mentions conception five times total. The overwhelmingly pro-life stance in the draft is welcome news to many.
The debate over the personhood of unborn children has been a central issue of the abortion debate. Ever since Roe v. Wade in 1973, pro-life advocates have been trying to establish constitutionally protected rights for the unborn. In the ruling’s majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that Roe v. Wade would collapse if “the fetus is a person.”
In support of the HHS’s draft, author and bioethics expert Wesley J. Smith wrote, “life ‘beginning at conception’ … is a fact of basic biological science.”