Last night, most interested in learning more about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop’s paid lobbyist, Kevin Appleby, who lobbies for amnesty among other things, I was pleased to find the 2014 Annual Report for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration Fund.
By the way, according to Guidestar, the Bishops don’t have to file a Form 990 with the IRS because they are a “church.” So, we can’t find out what salary and benefits package Mr. Appleby is pulling down. Whatever happened to the separation of church and state?
Unbelievable! Hereis a link to the report, or see below as a pdf we downloaded (so it doesn’t disappear anytime soon!).
*** Refugees are required to repay their airfare, however the USCCB does the collecting and is permitted to keep a cut for themselves. In other words, the entire amount of the travel loan is not returned to the US Treasury.
That means that YOU, US taxpayers, are funding the Bishops to the tune of 97% of their budget.
They could not exist without putting their hands into Caesar’s treasury!
I’ll have more tomorrow because I want to give this to you in little bites.
By the way, we had seen their annual report for 2012, but hadn’t seen one since. In 2014 they received around $16 million more from you than they did in 2012! Did the record number of Unaccompanied Alien Children they encouraged to come to the southern border account for the jump in income? We know the USCCB has been compensated for years to take care of the UACs.
Endnote: We have written about the USCCB and its government funding on many previous occasions, but since we have so many new readers and since our friend Jim Simpson has just come out with his report on the Red-Green Axis which includes the role the Catholic Church has played in advancing the agenda of the open borders political Left, I’m looking into all this again.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/catholic-bishops-migration.jpg390640Ann Corcoranhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAnn Corcoran2015-07-25 12:29:392015-07-25 12:29:52Your Tax Dollars Paid 97% of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration Fund Budget
A hostile force is trying to take over Boston, and people who agree on little else have united to keep it out. The force is the US Olympic Committee, which wants to occupy the city in 2024.
The Olympics is the unquestioned world leader in sports cronyism. Compliant politicians help it shove people aside, allocate public roads to itself, stifle free speech, and militarize cities.
For the 2012 London Olympics, 17,000 military personnel stood on alert, missile launchers sat on the rooftops of residential buildings, and the Royal Navy’s largest battleship was moored in the Thames. Snipers buzzed around in helicopters. The government enforced censorship of advertising in Olympic “event zones”: ads that used words like “games” or “2012” were subject to heavy fines.
The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi showed how well the Games suit an authoritarian state. They cost Russians $51 billion, much of which went toVladimir Putin’s friends. Human rights violations piled up. The aftermath has been a city full of white elephants and a series of financial scandals.
When the US Olympic Committee chose Boston as its candidate city for 2024, certain people were thrilled. The bid offers huge opportunities for those who get the contracts; someone will build an 80,000-seat stadium, a 100-acre Olympic Village, and other major structures.
A lot of Bostonians weren’t impressed, though. They saw what the Olympics had done in other cities, with a consistent pattern of making taxpayers cover cost overruns. A group called No Boston Olympics led a grassroots campaign, making heavy use of social media. Other groups, mostly informal, have popped up to add to the opposition.
WGBH News says, “It’s hard to remember another issue in state politics that’s brought left and right together like Boston’s Olympic bid.” The plan offers something for everyone — except those on the cash pipeline — to hate. For many, it’s the expected costs and the organizers’ uncommunicative arrogance. When the town of Brookline voted to keep the Olympics out of its part of Boston’s urban area, these were the big reasons.
A lot of Bostonians are outraged that the Games would take away favorite local spots. The proposal to turn Boston Common into a garish beach volleyball stadium struck a special nerve. The adjacent Public Garden holds the much-loved “Make Way for Ducklings” statues, but people would have to make way for the Olympic cronies instead, as the statues would be placed off-limits. The bid organizers eventually backed down on using the Common.
Plans to attack civil liberties have contributed to the outrage. A public records request revealed that Mayor Walsh had signed an agreement to prohibit city employees from making comments that “reflect unfavorably upon, denigrate or disparage, or are detrimental to the reputation” of the Games.
On getting caught, Walsh claimed that the language was mere “boilerplate,” though he had in fact signed it, and he was forced to remove it from the agreement.
Walsh’s deal wasn’t the only case of hiding facts. Boston magazine had to file another public records request to get the full bid documents. They included high cost figures that the USOC had removed from the public version and contained information contradicting previous claims that taxpayer money would be used only for security.
The Olympic organizers and their supporters have tried to mock the opposition. Shirley Leung, writing for the Boston Globe, claimed that Bostonians are “difficult people” who “will throw tantrums like 2-year-olds.” Her explanation of the overwhelming public opposition was “PTSD after suffering through more than 100 inches of snow this winter.” The ridicule has only increased the critics’ determination. In polls, opponents of letting the Olympics use Boston have consistently outnumbered supporters.
If Bostonians are “difficult,” maybe it’s because they remember how the city came to a grinding halt for the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The city’s main traffic artery from the north was shut down, along with all trains to North Station. The police attempted to confine protesters to a caged “free speech zone.” Commuters stayed home, and much of the city seemed like a ghost town.
If Boston hosts the Olympics, 55 miles of road lanes, including major highways and local streets, will be handed over to its exclusive use. The Democratic Convention was a mere practice run by comparison.
The organizers are now making vague claims that they’ll obtain insurance which will guarantee that taxpayers won’t get stuck. They haven’t explained how any insurance company can or will insure against overspending. The idea of insurance assumes that the covered party will act responsibly but may encounter unforeseen costs; insurance against acting irresponsibly would be a blank check.
Boston College law professor Patricia A. McCoy said that “almost every Olympics in the recent past has had major cost overruns. Any suggestion that private insurance will pick that up is smoke and mirrors.”
I have covered every Summer Olympics since 2004 in Athens, Greece. In other words, every Olympics since 9/11, when security concerns morphed into turning Olympic sites into police states.
At each site I’ve seen debt, displacement and the militarization of space, alongside spikes in police harassment of the most vulnerable citizens.
Boston’s rejection of the Olympic bullies will be a firm lesson that they can’t just walk in and take over.
Gary McGath is a freelance software engineer living in Nashua, New Hampshire.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/man-diving-into-water.jpg283460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-24 14:22:402015-07-24 14:22:40Cities Can’t Win the Olympics — They Can Only Lose by Gary McGath
“I’m tired of hearing that ‘liberty’ will take care of it!”
My young friend was explaining to me why she’s become less enthusiastic about libertarianism than she was a few years ago. I suspect she speaks for many smart young people who are just learning about libertarianism and getting a lot of bumper sticker ideas. Our belief in human freedom can strike them more as religious doctrine than as reason.
“Liberty Will Take Care of It!”
I had been pointing out a building going up in my neighborhood that blocked a significant part of the public’s view of the Brooklyn Bridge. I said something to the effect that, if it were up to me, I’d lop off the top three floors of that thing because many, including myself, feel it exceeds the limit agreed to with local community organizations, and I thought there was probably some misrepresentation going on.
That’s when she told me how tired she is of the standard libertarian refrain: every time some social issue comes up in her discussions with libertarians — spillovers, poverty, inequality, health care, racial discrimination, the environment — their response is that the free market will solve the problem.
My faith in freedom isn’t blind. It’s not really a form of faith, either — more of a shorthand for my understanding of theory and history.
Suppose, for example, that 50 years ago, when AT&T still had a government-granted telephone monopoly in the United States, someone asked how phone service could be provided by private companies that didn’t have that legal privilege. How, without eminent domain to take private property for those essential telephone lines and exchanges, would people be able to make and receive calls from their homes and businesses?
Fast-forward to today and we see practically every person over the age of 13 (and quite a few much younger) in the developed world carrying a cell phone or a smartphone small enough to fit in their pocket that combines telephone, Internet service, and a video camera. There are no cumbersome telephone poles, cables, or exchanges, and there’s not much eminent domain. The 1960s question was, “Who will build the heavy telephone infrastructure?” Today, who needs a heavy telephone infrastructure?
To say that liberty will take care of a problem need not be a shut-up argument, and it shouldn’t be used that way. But a free market operates on the principle that as long as people don’t initiate physical violence or fraud against anyone, anything else is okay.
That’s “okay” in the sense that, although you may not approve of what goes on, you are willing to tolerate it because it doesn’t infringe on your rights to your person or property. In that sort of social and psychological space, almost anything can happen. Smartphones can be invented. Medical centers can open in Walmarts, and urgent care facilities can pop up in city storefronts. Facebook and Google can emerge. Thousands of craft breweries and coffeehouses, serving beverages immeasurably superior to anything you could find even 25 years ago, can open their doors. We could each name countless other examples.
In that sense, the free market not only takes care of the problems we’re aware of; it also reveals flaws and gaps that we would otherwise never know existed.
The Seen and the Unseen
We who support the freedom philosophy are always at a disadvantage when arguing against interventionist proposals to provide nationalized health care, to impose regulations to address climate change, and the like precisely because appreciating and understanding the open-endedness and unpredictability of the social order are central to our political philosophy.
It’s easy to see an individual’s hourly pay go up from $7.25 to $15.00 after new legislation raises the minimum wage. It’s harder to see that she no longer gets tips, or that her benefits are lower — or that someone else, someone who is less skilled, is now going have an even harder time finding a job.
If AT&T had retained its legal monopoly until today — as the US Postal Service has — we might see every home with a handset in every room and in every car, but what we wouldn’t see are smartphones. We probably wouldn’t see broadband Internet access in so many homes, either — or wireless hotspots in so many public places.
Unlike many on the left, most libertarians take the limits of human knowledge and reason seriously, so we also take seriously the open-endedness of a liberal social order. Markets can be creative and spontaneous to the extent that billions of resourceful minds at every moment are free to use local, contextual knowledge to discover and address myriad problems large and small, simple and complex. With the right rules of the game — including private property, free association, and the rule of law — the creativity at the heart of that open-endedness will tend to promote social cooperation and well-being. That’s not faith. That’s an understanding of cause and effect in the social world.
But the temptation to substitute planning for spontaneity and coercion for liberty remains ever present because, as Henry Hazlitt argued in Economics in One Lesson, the short-term and local are usually more obvious than the long-term and global. It takes practice to see the unseen.
Quite apart from the morality of taking what belongs to someone else so you can use it for ends you happen to think are more important than theirs, or from banning someone else’s nonviolent actions because you don’t like them — and quite apart from the problems of corruption and cronyism that always accompany even the most well-meaning interventions — to the extent that you accept the practicability of central planning (even limited examples such as minimum guaranteed incomes or the minimum wage), you’re assuming that unpredictable human choices won’t find a way to mess up what you’re trying to do.
That assumption is demonstrably false. And because it’s false, you’ll find yourself encroaching further and further into the lives of ordinary people and constraining and directing their choices more and more in a futile effort to fix the problems caused by past interventions.
It is not a knee-jerk position to defend freedom when coercion’s track record is so bad.
Worshipping the Market versus Worshipping the State
I’m not defending all libertarians. I’ve often heard our critics charge, “You free-market types treat the market like some kind of god that will solve all our ills.” They’re right. Some market advocates do place a blind faith in freedom. Some may even worship the free market as a sort of deus ex mercatum (“god from the market”) that magically and inexplicably solves social problems. That’s perhaps because their commitment to economic freedom is in fact a part of their religious beliefs.
Others, like me, don’t see the need or the wisdom in linking political economy to a religious tradition, even if we do practice one of the traditional world religions. We already have a religion and we don’t need to worship the free market or the state.
Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/WORSHIP-DOLLAR-e1437761581116.jpg317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-24 14:14:252015-07-24 14:14:25Don’t Worship the Free Market: Faith in Freedom Need Not Be Blind by Sandy Ikeda
The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it.
Paul Krugman has always praised and supported the European project? Really? Here’s Prof. Krugman in his own words on the centerpiece of the European project, the euro:
Paul Krugman, “The Euro: Beware Of What You Wish For”, Fortune, December 1998: “But EMU wasn’t designed to make everyone happy. It was designed to keep Germany happy — to provide the kind of stern anti-inflationary discipline that everyone knew Germany had always wanted and would always want in future.So what if the Germans have changed their mind, and realized that they — along with all the other major governments — are more worried about deflation than inflation, that they would very much like the central bankers to print some more money? Sorry, too late: the system is already on autopilot, and no course changes are permitted.”
Paul Krugman, “Can Europe Be Saved?”, NY Times, January 12, 2011: “The tragedy of the Euromess is that the creation of the euro was supposed to be the finest moment in a grand and noble undertaking: the generations-long effort to bring peace, democracy and shared prosperity to a once and frequently war-torn continent.But the architects of the euro, caught up in their project’s sweep and romance, chose to ignore the mundane difficulties a shared currency would predictably encounter — to ignore warnings, which were issued right from the beginning, that Europe lacked the institutions needed to make a common currency workable. Instead, they engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the nobility of their mission transcended such concerns.”
Paul Krugman, “Europe’s Many Economic Disasters”, NY Times, July 3, 2015: “What all of these economies have in common, however, is that by joining the eurozone they put themselves into an economic straitjacket.Finland had a very severe economic crisis at the end of the 1980s — much worse, at the beginning, than what it’s going through now. But it was able to engineer a fairly quick recovery in large part by sharply devaluing its currency, making its exports more competitive. This time, unfortunately, it had no currency to devalue. And the same goes for Europe’s other trouble spots. Does this mean that creating the euro was a mistake? Well, yes.”
When reading Prof. Krugman’s works, it’s prudent to fact check. Prof. Krugman has always been in the Eurosceptic camp. Indeed, the essence of many of his pronouncements can be found in declarations from a wide range of Eurosceptic parties.
Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/krugman.jpg284460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-24 09:41:332015-07-24 09:41:33Paul Krugman Is Even Wrong about What Paul Krugman Thought by Steve H. Hanke
Why does federal spending matter? There are many reasons, but perhaps the most fundamental is that free markets allocate resources better than governments because markets rely on price instead of politics. Many industries show this observation to be true, but the emerging field of “green banks” offers perhaps one of the clearest recent examples.
A green bank is a “public or quasi-public financing institution that provides low-cost, long-term financing support to clean, low-carbon projects by leveraging public funds…to attract private investment.” Right now, only a handful of green banks are scattered across Connecticut, California, New York, Rhode Island, and Hawaii.
Free marketers rightly doubt whether public funds should be used to finance private startups. But regardless of where one stands in that debate, the states’ struggles serve as a valuable testing ground for future investments.
The State of Connecticut operates under a fairly significant budget deficit. California has been calculating its budgets without taking unfunded pension liabilities into account, and it’s gambling with its ability to service its debt. New York continues to live beyond its means. Rhode Island’s newest budget does little to rehabilitate its deficit spending addiction, and, despite having a balanced budget clause in its state constitution, Hawaii has a pattern of operating at a deficit.
In fact, a state solvency report released by the Mercatus Center has each of these five states ranked in the bottom third of the country, with their solvency described as either “low” or “poor.”
This all raises the question of whether these governments are able to find sound investment opportunities in the first place. Rhode Island couldn’t even identify a bad investment when baseball legend Curt Schilling wanted $75 million to make video games about something other than baseball!
Recently, though, there have been calls to extend the struggling green banking system to the federal level. Mark Muro and Reed Hundt at the Brookings Institute argued in favor of federal action in support of green banks. Somewhat paradoxically, they assert that demand for green banking institutions and the types of companies they finance is so strong that the existing state-based green banks cannot muster enough capital to meet demand.
Wherever there is potential for profit and a sound business plan, lending institutions are likely to be found, willing to relinquish a little capital for a consistent and reasonable rate of return. So where are the private lenders and other investment firms who have taken notice and are competing for the opportunity to provide loans to such highly sought-after companies and products?
Even assuming that there is demand for green banking services, recent experience shows that a federally-subsidized system would likely lead to inefficiency, favor trading, and failure. For instance, the Department of Energy Loan Program is designed to facilitate and aid clean energy startup companies. Its portfolio exceeds $30 billion, but following a series of bad investments like Solyndra, Inc., new loan guarantees have been few and far between. The program has already lost over $700 million.
Even the rosiest measurements do not show particularly exciting returns from this system. The Department of Energy itself estimates that over the lifetime of the loans it’s guaranteed, there exists the potential to see $5 billion in profit. However, those estimates also depend on the peculiar accounting methods the DoE itself employs.
This problem is apparent in other government sectors. For instance, determining how much profit the federal government makes off of student loans depends on who is asked. Some say none, while others say it’s in the billions. Gauging the economic impact or solvency of government programs is notoriously difficult, and different methods can yield what look like very different results. Add to that the consistently uncertain nature of the energy market, and profits are hardly guaranteed.
Examples abound of wasteful federal spending, and the growing green technology and renewable energy industry is no exception. The DoE Loan Program has already faced issues that go well beyond Solyndra: Abound Solar, a Colorado-based solar panel manufacturer, was given a $400 million DoE loan guarantee, only to later file for bankruptcy, potentially costing taxpayers $60 million. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a 175,000 unit heliostat array in California, received a $1.6 billion federal loan and, because it failed to produce the amount of power estimated, was forced to later request more than$500 million in federal grants from the Treasury Department. A recent Taxpayers Protection Alliance study showed that risky investments in heavily subsidized solar energy could even lead to a bubble similar to the disastrous 2008 housing bubble.
Those who want to expand the government’s role in green banking likely want to see more clean and renewable energy reach the consumer market, and a lot of people probably applaud that goal — but the real question is whether the proposed means can reliably achieve that end. A wise manager with a solid business plan can find investors who will willingly take a chance. Considering the struggles of several states, trusting the federal government to build an even bigger system would exponentially increase that risk.
In contrast, the market offers opportunity to entrepreneurs in the green technology and renewable energy industries. For instance, GreatPoint Energy, a company specializing in clean coal, successfully went the route that other companies do: Design a product or service, find investors, and compete in the marketplace.
SolarCity, a California-based and publicly traded corporation of over 2,500 employees, entered the industry before many government loan programs were established. Thanks to a sound business model and subsequent horizontal and vertical expansion, it has become a leader in the industry. SolarCity’s success, however, cannot be touted by the Department of Energy’s Loan Program, which declined to invest in the company, leading SolarCity to try — and succeed — in finding private investment.
If GreatPoint or SolarCity had failed, only those who willingly participated in the startup would suffer the consequences. The issue with green banking — and indeed government “investments” more generally — is that taxpayers are not party to the negotiations but are the ones ultimately on the hook for failures.
In absolute terms, these billions of dollars are a lot of money. But in the grand scheme of government spending, the amount of money invested in green banks and renewable energy production is relatively small. If Social Security is the Atlantic Ocean, and wasteful defense appropriations are the Mediterranean, then green energy investments fall somewhere in the range of the Y-40 pool: easily measurable but certainly not insignificant.
Your odds of drowning may be smaller in the pool than the ocean, but that doesn’t make the drowning itself any more pleasant. The federal government is already under water; adding new liabilities on the hope that politicians can guess the future of energy is merely a step towards the deep end, not the ladder out.
Jonathan Bydlak is the founder and president of the Institute to Reduce Spending and the Coalition to Reduce Spending.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/wind-solar-power.jpg283460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-22 17:20:112015-07-22 17:21:36“Green Banks” Will Drown in the Red by Jonathan Bydlak
We first posted a fact sheet in 2007, updated it again in 2010 and again in 2013. Here are facts you need to know about refugee resettlement to the United States:
1. Since 1975, the U.S. has resettled over 3 million refugees, with annual admissions figures ranging from a high of 207,000 in 1980 to a low of 27,110 in 2002 (in the aftermath of 911) .
The average number of refugees admitted annually since 1980 is about 98,000. Additionally, in recent years, another 40,000 or more per year come in as asylum seekers and Cuban/Haitian entrants – all with the same rights and entitlements as refugees.
All these flows detonate their own chain migration flows in addition to the refugee influx. These follow-on flows have easily multiplied the original admission numbers by a factor of 4 or more.
The quota for 2013 is 70,000 and it looks like it will be met this year. There is strong political pressure to get refugee numbers back to over 100,000.
2. The U.S. takes more than twice as many refugees as all countries from the rest of the industrialized world combined.
3. One of the operative assumptions of those in the refugee industry is that, since the U.S. is behind most of the chaos in the world – Syria, here we come!, it is morally obligated to take the lead in resettling the world’s refugees. Yet, for 2012 the leading countries, in order of numbers of refugees sent to the U.S., were Bhutan, Burma, Iraq, Somalia, Cuba, Dem. Rep. Congo, Iran, Eritrea, Sudan. All America’s fault? In very recent memory the MSM was celebrating Bhutan and suggesting the U.S. had something to learn from the Bhutanese concept of a “Product of National Happiness”.
Ironically, the U.S. refugee program diverts resources from assistance on the ground to those very countries in the developing world which carry the main burden of refugee crises.
4. In recent years up to 95% of the refugees coming to the U.S. were referred by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or were the relatives of UN-picked refugees. Until the late 90’s the U.S. picked the large majority of refugees for resettlement in the U.S.
Considering that the refugee influx causes increases in all legal and illegal immigration as family and social networks are established in the U.S., the U.N. is effectively dictating much of U.S. immigration policy.
5. NIMBYists gone wild: As a Senator, Sam Brownback harshly rejected the resettlement of Somali Bantu in his own state even though he was a major advocate among evangelicals for increased refugee immigration to the U.S..
The state of Delaware has resettled less than 10 refugees annually in recent years even though then Sen. Joe Biden was a sponsor of the 1980 Refugee Act – the bill which defines the refugee program we have today.
Upon entry, a network of private, “nonprofit” agencies (so-called “voluntary agencies”) selects the communities where refugees will live. The agencies are either headquartered in Washington DC or have lobbying offices there.
Washington DC took less than 200 refugees between 2007 and 2012.
6. According to a July 2012 GAO report (Refugee Resettlement:
Greater Consultation with Community Stakeholders Could Strengthen Program: “most public entities such as public schools and health departments generally said that voluntary agencies notified them of the number of refugees expected to arrive in the coming year, but did not consult them regarding the number of refugees they could serve”.
7. This same GAO report quotes a state official who notes “that local affiliate funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates (private contractors) have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”
8. Refugee resettlement is a self-perpetuating global enterprise. Staff and management of the hundreds of taxpayer supported U.S. contractors are largely refugees or immigrants whose purpose is to gain entry for more refugees, usually for their co-ethnics.
9. According to David Robinson, a former acting director of the State Department’s refugee bureau, writing about the refugee contractors: “the federal government provides about ninety percent of its collective budget” and its lobbying umbrella “wields enormous influence over the Administration’s refugee admissions policy. It lobbies the Hill effectively to increase the number of refugees admitted for permanent resettlement each year ….If there is a conflict of interest, it is never mentioned…. The solution its members offer to every refugee crisis is simplistic and the same: increase the number of admissions to the United States without regard to budgets…” How Public Opinion Shaped Refugee Policy in Kosovo, 2000, David M. Robinson, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA432218
We hesitate to quibble with an authoritative source on the percentage of federal money floating the refugee industry, but from an accountant’s perspective that percentage is actually over 100 % given the amount of money the industry is able to pocket without any proof that it was spent on refugees.
10. According to Ken Tota, Deputy Director at HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement, Congress has never in his 25-year tenure questioned the refugee quota proposed by the administration. By law, Congress is supposed to consent to the annual quota but obviously refuses to take this role seriously.
11. Refugee “self-sufficiency” is an important measure of success and a basis for assigning refugees to agencies in future contracts. The definition of “self-sufficiency” has been steadily defined downward and today is virtually meaningless. A refugee can be considered “self-sufficient” while using all of the programs listed in item 16 below with the exception of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
12. Assimilation is no longer a goal for any agency involved in refugee resettlement – government or private contractor. The private contractors’ engagement with the refugee is so short – less than 4 months in most cases, that nothing approaching assimilation could even be considered. The term “assimilation” is no longer a part of government lexicon and does not even occur in dozens of recent reports and papers generated about refugee resettlement. The operative term in vogue now is “integration” with its clear intent of maintenance of ethnic identity.
13. A refugee or an asylum seeker must show a “well-founded” fear of persecution on account of a political view or membership in a racial, ethnic, religious or social group. The definition of a refugee has been widely stretched by all 3 branches of the government – the Judiciary, the Congress and the Administration.
In fact, Congress can name whatever group it wants to be a refugee or asylum seeker. For instance Congress passed a law declaring China’s one-child policy to be an example of persecution based upon a political view. Not surprising: China now heads up the list of successful asylum seekers.
People may seek asylum in the U.S. based upon domestic abuse, FGM and even lack of services for the disabled.
The government does not publicize rates of admission by category so it is not possible to tell, for instance, if the vague and easy to fake ‘social group’ category is more commonly used than the vague and easy to fake ‘political group’ category.
Because of the privacy rights accorded the new arrivals, we have no idea which category was used by Tamerlane Tsarnaev’s parents to gain admission to the world’s most generous immigration program.
14. The Obama administration has placed a priority on LGBTQI asylum seekers and refugees. This has resulted in an upsurge of asylum requests on this basis – even from countries like England! Since the State Department does not keep data about numbers admitted by reason for admission, we can’t obtain exact numbers of those admitted on the basis of LBGTQI persecution, but one private refugee agency has set up an office in Nairobi, Kenya to assist intending LBGTQI refugees. This office also advises about how to get into the refugee pipeline. In other words, a private contractor is recruiting refugees who will eventually become the contractor’s profit-generating clients. At the 2012 conference of refugee contractors sponsored by the DHHS Office of Refugee resettlement a refugee contractor demanded that Medicaid pay for sex change operations if needed by newly arrived refugees.
15. The program has gradually shifted towards the resettlement of refugees from Muslim countries. Some individuals from Muslim countries are Christians or other minorities, but most are Muslims. In the early 90’s the percentage of Muslim refugees was near 0; by 2000 the program was 44% Muslim. The Muslim component decreased after 911, but today is back up to about 40% and is set to rise from here.
Membership in a U.S.-registered Islamic terrorist group is not a bar to entry on the program as long as the refugee was not a “direct participant” in “terrorist” activity.
16. Refugees, successful asylum seekers, trafficking victim visa holders, “Cuban-Haitian Entrants” (which are mostly Cuban), S.I.V’s (for Iraqis and Afghanis) and other smaller humanitarian admission groups are eligible for ALL federal, state and local welfare programs 30 days after arrival.
Refugee access to welfare on the same basis as a U.S. citizen has made the program a global magnet.
The federal programs available to them include:
∙Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) formerly known as AFDC
Medicaid
Food Stamps
Public Housing
Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
Social Security Disability Insurance
Administration on Developmental Disabilities (ADD) (direct services only)
Child Care and Development Fund
Independent Living Program
Job Opportunities for Low Income Individuals (JOLI)
Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)
Postsecondary Education Loans and Grants
Refugee Assistance Programs
Title IV Foster Care and Adoption Assistance Payments (if parents are ⌠qualified immigrants – refugees, asylees, etc)
Title XX Social Services Block Grant Funds
17. Welfare use is staggering among refugees. Welfare usage is never counted by officials as part of the cost of the program. Yet, when it is included, the total cost of the refugee program soars to at least 10-20 billion a year.
As some Americans are pushed off of time-limited welfare programs many refugees are going on to life-time cash assistance programs. For instance, 12.7% of refugees are on SSI – a lifetime entitlement to a monthly check / Medicaid for elderly or disabled. This rate of usage is at least 4 times higher than the rate of usage for SSI among the native-born population and is reportedly rising from these already very high levels.
Permanent and intergenerational welfare dependence has been allowed to take hold to a significant degree in some refugee groups.
Find table TABLE II-14: Public Assistance Utilization Among refugees who arrived during the 5 years previous to the survey 57.7% are on government medical assistance such as Medicaid, about 25% have no health insurance at all, 70.2% are receiving food stamps, 31.6% are in public housing (an additional percentage is on a public housing waiting list), and 38.3 % are getting cash assistance such as TANF or SSI.
The figure of 57.7% dependent upon government medical assistance is actually an undercount since it excludes children under 16.
18. Medium size towns, such as Bowling Green, KY, Nashville, TN, Ft. Wayne, IN, Boise, ID and Manchester, NH, are serving as the main reception centers for the refugee program.
19. Refugees are not tested for many diseases, such as HIV. Refugees are a major contributing factor to TB rates among the foreign-born. TB among the foreign-born now accounts for about half of the TB in America.
20. The money the U.S. spends bringing one refugee to the U.S. could have helped 500 individuals overseas in countries where they currently reside.
21. It has never been reported in the U.S. that 47% of loans made to refugees for transportation to the U.S. are unpaid leaving an unpaid balance of $450 million. This amount – slightly out of date, does not include interest or an unknown amount that has been written off. We will announce the new balance as soon as it is available.
22. Refugee resettlement is profitable to the organizations involved in it. They receive money from the federal government for each refugee they bring over. They have almost no real responsibilities for these refugees. After 4 months the “sponsoring” organization is not even required to know where the refugee lives.
There are 9 main major refugee resettlement organizations (Volags from “Voluntary Agency”) with approximately 450 affiliated organizations throughout the country; many are run by former refugees. Below are the 9 Volags that operate today:
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB),
Lutheran Immigrant Aid Society (LIRS),
International Rescue Committee (IRC),
World Relief Corporation,
Immigrant and Refugee Services of America (IRSA),
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS),
Church World Service (CWS),
Domestic and Foreign Missionary Service of the Episcopal Church of the USA,
Ethiopian Community Development Center (ECDC),
Below are some of the sources of income for Volags:
a. $1,850 per refugee (including children) from the State Department.
b. Up to $2,200 for each refugee by participating in a U.S. DHHS program known as Matching Grant. To get the $2,200, the Volag need only show it spent $200 and gave away $800 worth of donated clothes, furniture or cars.
c. The Volag pockets 25% of every transportation loan it collects from refugees it “sponsors”.
d. All Volag expenses and overhead in the Washington, DC HQ are paid by the U.S. government.
e. For their refugee programs, Volags collect money from all federal grant programs – “Marriage Initiative”, “Faith-based”, “Ownership Society”, etc., as well as from various state and local grants.
The program is so lucrative that in some towns the Catholic Church has lessened support for traditional charity works to put more effort into resettlement. It uses collection offerings to promote the refugee resettlement program.
23. Despite their rhetoric, refugee agencies have steadfastly refused to use their own resources to maintain the U.S. refugee resettlement program. Public money has thoroughly driven out private money.
A program known as the Private Sector Initiative allowed sponsoring agencies to bring over refugees if the agencies were willing to cover costs of resettlement and support. It was discontinued for lack of use in the mid-1990s. Today the agencies are on record as opposed to diverting more federal refugee dollars to overseas refugee assistance (where each dollar will go further in helping refugees) because it might mean fewer dollars for them!
As with other government-dependent industries there is a revolving door between the refugee industry and the federal government which pays its bills.
24. To give an idea of the staying power of the refugee program:
When we began taking Southeast Asian refugees in the late 70’s, the refugee agencies hired temporary workers, thinking the program would only go for a few months. More than 37 years after the last American left Vietnam we are still taking refugees from South East Asia. At least 1.5 million have come in as refugees alone. As well, it has detonated chain migration of non-refugee immigrants.
25. The program is rife with fraud and corruption at all levels. UN personnel often sell access to the program and once here refugees make false claims of family relationship in order to facilitate wider immigration. Government grant fraud is common among local refugee service providers.
26. The refugee program has a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy. It also affects internal and foreign policies of other nations by allowing them to rid themselves of unwanted minorities or close their borders to asylum seekers in the knowledge that the U.S. will take them in.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/RefugeeResettlementWidget1.png390640Ann Corcoranhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAnn Corcoran2015-07-21 09:12:352015-07-21 09:21:38Refugee Resettlement Fact Sheet: What You Need to Know!
Khalid “Ken” Quran moved to America in 1997, leaving behind a life as a fireman in a town ten miles north of Jerusalem, near Ramallah. Ken now lives in Greenville, N.C., with his wife, Dina, and their four kids.
Shortly after moving to this country, Ken purchased a small convenience store in Greenville, located on a dusty patch of land near the airport. Ken worked days and nights for years, often opening and closing the store, in order to build his business. He made a living selling goods at razor-thin margins and hardly ever taking a vacation.
Then, in June 2014, the government seized his entire bank account — more than $150,000. This was money that Ken worked for years to earn, and that he was counting on for his retirement. Ken had no prior warning before the government seized the account. The government told him they were taking the money because he withdrew cash from the bank in amounts under $10,000.
But the truly shocking thing is what happened next. A group of government agents — both from the IRS and local police — came to Ken’s store with an agreement already written up, under which Ken would agree to forever forfeit the money to the federal government.
The agents searched his store with dogs, barred the entrance to keep out customers, and then demanded that he sign the paper. Ken initially refused, explaining that he did not read English well and did not want to sign an agreement he could not understand.
Then, under compulsion — after one of the local police yelled and demanded that he sign, and after one of the IRS agents made clear that, otherwise, their next stop would be to talk to Ken’s wife to pressure her — Ken agreed to sign.
Anything Peaceful is FEE’s new online ideas marketplace, hosting original and aggregate content from across the Web.
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has conducted a research to find out how the sexual orientation influences the body build.
The U.S. taxpayers have already paid $3.5 million for the ‘significant’ project, and it is to last till June 30.
According to the study, “It is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, with nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians overweight or obese, compared to half of heterosexual women. In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.”
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/fat-women.jpeg389585Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-07-14 10:11:192015-07-14 10:13:51PRAVDA: U.S. Taxpayers pay $3.5M to Study Lesbian Obesity
Jason Kuznicki, in his wonderful post on marriage and the state, included this baffling chart of how the marriage penalty/bonus affects couples jointly filing tax returns:
Kuznicki points out that the penalty/bonus part is just an inevitable artifact of the progressive income tax system. The math just works out that way.
But, my friend Sean J. Rosenthal points out, the chart also shows Director’s Law: “Public expenditures are made for the primary benefit of the middle classes, and financed with taxes which are borne in considerable part by the poor and the rich.”
George Stigler, channeling the work of the great Chicago economist Aaron Director, coined the term in a 1970 article in the Journal of Law and Economics.
The logic of Director’s Law is:
Government has coercive power, which allows it to engage in acts (above all, the taking of resources) which could not be performed by voluntary agreement of the members of a society.
Any portion of the society which can secure control of the state’s machinery will employ the machinery to improve its own position.
Under a set of conditions… this dominant group will be the middle income classes.
Stigler went on to describe the Public Choice calculus for a wealthy modern democracy. In a society like ours, with our electoral institutions, the interests of the middle class will always have the biggest sway on public policy, since most people fall in the middle of the income distribution, rather than at bottom or the top.
Politicians will (and must) try to gratify the middle’s desires and shift the costs somewhere else — i.e., the rich and the poor and future generations, since they have relatively less influence on public policy. (Though this general rule is not to say that there aren’t also policies that primarily benefit the poor or the wealthy.)
This explains a lot of features of public policy that don’t fit with the normal “welfare is all about the poor” or “the rich run everything” paradigms.
For instance, Obamacare’s insurance scheme is basically all a big subsidy for older, relatively wealthier middle class people at the expensive of younger, poorer people. The other half of Obamacare, the Medicaid expansion, increases eligibility for Medicaid up to 400% of the poverty line — that safety net is catching some pretty middling fish at this point.
Medicare and Social Security, the marriage penalty/bonus distribution, college student loans, tax write-offs for mortgage payments and employer-sponsored health insurance, small business favoritism, and a host of other policies are essentially giveaways to the middle class, at the expense of the rich and poor.
Nonetheless, we should expect politicians to continue harping on the plight of the middle class, stroking voters’ fears and concerns about the “shrinking middle,” promising to “rebuild the middle class,” pass “tax cuts for the middle class,” save “Main Street,” and on, and on.
And who could ever be against helping middle class? Nobody. And that’s how we end up being content with a marriage policy that punishes poor (and rich) working couples, even while pundits bemoan the state of marriage.
Update #1: As with many later developments in economics, Frederic Bastiat anticipated Public Choice by more than a hundred years. In his Selected Essays on Political Economy, recently republished by FEE, he wrote,
When, under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices.
Now, is it the most unfortunate who gain in this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
Update #2: I see that Director’s Law was first mentioned in the Freeman, before Stigler published on it in JLE, in John Chamberlain’s coverage of the 1969 Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Venezuela.
Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/family-marriage.jpg284460Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-14 07:27:592015-07-14 07:27:59Marriage and the (Forgotten) Middle Class Welfare State by Daniel Bier
Would the situation really be worse than it is now if, instead of all this money spent on Sharia, the U.S. had stood up for its own values, and made it clear that money would only flow to those who stood for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights of all people before the law?
“Watchdog: U.S. Taxpayers Funded Development of Sharia Law System in Afghanistan,” by Edwin Mora, Breitbart, July 8, 2015:
The U.S. government has spent more than $1 billion in American taxpayer funds on programs to develop the rule of law in Afghanistan, including efforts to improve a judicial system that incorporates Islamic Sharia law, reports a watchdog agency appointed by Congress.
According to the watchdog agency known as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the Departments of Defense (DOD), Justice (DOJ), State (State), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have spent more than $1 billion since 2003 on at least 66 completed and ongoing programs aimed at developing the rule of law in Afghanistan.
“This effort has focused on areas such as the judicial system, corrections system (detention centers and prisons), informal justice system, legislative reform, legal education, public outreach, and anticorruption efforts,” explains SIGAR.
Citing the U.S. Army’s Center for Law and Military Operations’ Rule of Law Handbook, John Sopko, SIGAR’s inspector general, reports that the legal system in Afghanistan consists of two separate judicial systems that coexist — a formal and an informal system, both of which incorporate Sharia law.
The formal system of law is “practiced by state authorities relying on a mixture between the civil law and elements of Islamic Sharia law,” notes Sopko in the report, while the informal legal system is “based on customary tribal law and local interpretations of Islamic Sharia law.”
“Experts we consulted describe a complex legal system in Afghanistan that incorporates hundreds of years of informal traditions, Islamic Sharia law, former Soviet judicial practices during the 1980s, and modern Western influence since the fall of the Taliban in 2001,” he adds.
A portion of the more than $1 billion spent on rule of law development efforts has been devoted to improving the formal and informal systems in Afghanistan that incorporate Sharia law.
SIGAR does note that “because DOD, DOJ, State, and USAID did not systematically measure and report on their programs’ achievements, it remains unclear what overall outcomes and impact have resulted from the expenditure of more than $1 billion to develop the rule of law in Afghanistan.”…
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/BURQA-e1436697595970.jpg369640Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2015-07-12 06:41:522015-07-12 06:42:32U.S. Taxpayers Spent $1 Billion to Fund Sharia in Afghanistan
It’s hard to find anything written or spoken about Greece that doesn’t contain a great deal of hand-wringing about the alleged austerity — brutal fiscal austerity — that the Greek government has been forced to endure at the hands of the so-called troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund).
This is Alice in Wonderland economics. It supports my 95% rule: 95% of what you read about economics and finance is either wrong or irrelevant.
The following chart contains the facts courtesy of Eurostat.
Social security spending as a percentage of GDP in Greece is clearly bloated relative to the average European Union country — even more so if you only consider the 16 countries that joined the EU after the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1993.*
To bring the government in Athens into line with Europe, a serious diet would be necessary — much more serious than anything prescribed by the troika.
* Ed. note: The treaty created the EU and the euro and also obligated EU members to keep “sound fiscal policies, with debt limited to 60% of GDP and annual deficits no greater than 3% of GDP.” Ha!
Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
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At midnight, the gears of crony capitalism ground to a halt at 811 Vermont Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.
After 81 years of funneling taxpayer dollars to favored companies, projects, and geopolitical outcomes under the guise of advancing some vague conception of the “U.S. economic interest,” the Export-Import Bank of the United States will end its financing operations at midnight tonight.
No more subsidies to Fortune 100 businesses. No more siphoning revenues from unwitting U.S. firms and industries. No more loan guarantees to wealthy, autocratic foreign governments. No more crowding out of private lending. No more taxpayer exposure to a Fannie Mae-like fiasco. No more bribery and corruption scandals. No more collaboration and lending to China’s Export-Import Bank – you know, the entity whose support for Chinese companies is alleged to threaten U.S. exporters and jobs, and is the most frequently cited imperative for reauthorizing Ex-Im.
No more of any of this… for now.
Champions of small government and market capitalism should savor this rare victory. It was won with solid arguments, including over 20 years of analyses from Cato Institute scholars including Ian Vasquez, Aaron Lukas, Steve Slivinsky, Chris Edwards, Doug Bandow, Sallie James, and – perhaps most comprehensively and tirelessly – Veronique de Rugy.
It was won because of columnist/scholar Tim Carney’s persistence in focusing the public’s attention on the corruption bred of corporate welfare and because of the analytical contributions of Heritage’s Diane Katz, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Young, and others who continued to make compelling arguments for shuttering the Bank, despite steep odds against that outcome.
It was won because certain libertarian groups and conservative activists made the issue a priority, recognizing that corporate welfare is as great a threat to liberty as is the Welfare State, and that reining it in should be a priority because success there would lend greater credibility to the effort to rein in the Welfare State.
It was won against great odds, including vast political expenditures and arm-twisting by U.S. business interests on Capitol Hill, a mainstream media that is reflexively unsympathetic to any cause associated with “Tea Party Types,” and a general aversion among establishment organizations to any challenges to the status-quo.
Radical and reckless, excessive and extreme, ideological and idiotic have been the characterizations assigned by media, politicians, and Boeing lobbyists in their attempts to discredit legitimate efforts to purge “crony” and make “market” the new brand of capitalism.
And it was won because House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, knowing the case against Ex-Im reauthorization was more substantive than the New York Times would allow, made good gatekeepers by putting the onus on Ex-Im proponents to answer the critics – a task at which they failed.
So, at midnight, the Export-Import Bank ceased in its capacity to issue new financing. That is something to cheer. It may also be short-lived.
Proponents of the Bank have been regrouping and strategizing to move legislation to reauthorize the Bank at the soonest possible chance. In fact the White House is hosting a conference call for the purpose of advancing that outcome. Here’s the text of the email:
Dear Friend,
Please join us for a conference call on Tuesday, June 30th, at 2:35 PM with President Barack Obama, Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, and Director of the National Economic Council, Jeff Zients, to discuss the importance of reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
The Export-Import Bank is a critical tool to help U.S. businesses and workers succeed in global markets and grow their exports – it supports high-quality jobs, is a vital tool for small businesses, and doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny. Its reauthorization is vital to U.S. competitiveness and leveling the playing field for American small business owners and workers. …
This call is off the record and is not for press purposes nor amplification on social media.
Thank you,
The White House Business Council
The battle may be over but the war continues. Given the sway that conservatives have had on this issue, it will be interesting to see whether and how Speaker Boehner tries to circumvent Hensarling’s committee to get a reauthorization bill to the floor. Majority Leader McConnell believes there’s enough support in the Senate for reauthorization, but most of the Republican presidential hopefuls have expressed opposition to reauthorization.
It seems to me that if Ex-Im reauthorization resurfaces in the weeks and months ahead, it will be an issue that provides Republicans with yet another opportunity to demonstrate commitment to limited government, free market principles. Maybe this time they’ll see the value in reclaiming that brand.
Dan Ikenson is director of Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, where he coordinates and conducts research on all manners of international trade and investment policy.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/zombie-land-e1435860828899.jpg318640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-07-02 14:15:342015-07-02 14:16:10The Ex-Im Bank Is Dead — But Watch Out for Corporate Welfare Zombies by Daniel J. Ikenson
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) delivered a speech at The Heritage Foundation revealing the cronyism that runs deep in Washington, powered by the Washington Cartel of establishment politicians and corporate lobbyists who continue to benefit big government and big business at the expense of millions of Americans.
“Washington has done a great job of one thing – picking winners and losers, except it’s clear each time who the losers are: American families, who are struggling to pay skyrocketing health care premiums and tuition costs; it’s our community banks and marketplaces that are going out of business; it’s young entrepreneurs and small business owners.”
“What’s happening in Washington is no accident,” Sen. Cruz said. “It is a concerted effort by corporate lobbyists and establishment politicians. Lobbyists and career politicians make up the Washington Cartel. Let me explain to you how it works: A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other, although you give the other a chance to outbid them. Or even worse, a very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers.”
Sen. Cruz discussed four examples of the Washington Cartel at work:
Regarding the Export-Import Bank, Sen. Cruz said:
“It is hard to imagine an institution that is more emblematic of cronyism than the Export-Import Bank…. The Export-Import Bank kills American jobs, and often favors foreign investment over American investment. It also has this terrible record of subsidizing unfriendly regimes with problematic human rights records. In 2013, just one year, the Ex-Im bank streamed $35 million to Venezuela banks and investors; $335 million to Argentina; $1 billion to Russian financiers; and $2.7 billion to communist China.”
Regarding renewable energy mandates, Sen. Cruz said:
“A two-year extension of wind credits alone costs taxpayers more than $13 billion, which is enough to pay the monthly electricity bills for 124 million Americans. How about putting that up for a referendum? Do we continue to benefit one favored industry, or do we pay the electricity bill for 124 million Americans? You know, I don’t think that would be a close vote for the American people. And what’s interesting: it’s not a close vote in Washington. Because the only people voting in Washington are the lobbyists with bags of cash. And the lawmakers in both parties eager to get that cash.
“For decades, the federal government has teamed up with specific industries to pick winners and losers in the energy industry. Aside from further complicating an already Byzantine tax code, this type of corporate welfare has only distorted the price of energy and empowered failed companies like Solyndra.”
Regarding sugar subsidies, Sen. Cruz said:
“This form of subsidy seems particularly un-American. After all, before the Tea and Stamp Act came the Sugar Act in 1764… and it was then that the cry of ‘no taxation without representation’ was widely voiced by the colonists. You know what, we do have representation, but our representatives are not representing us.
“The Wall Street Journal reported last December that at the time, sugar was 58 percent more expensive here at home than at the global market…. This price control increases food costs for businesses and families, particularly low-income households…. From 1997 to 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in domestic sugar-using industries.”
Regarding the Internet sales tax, Sen. Cruz said:
“The Internet has been an incubator for new ideas. It has been a haven for entrepreneurial opportunity. It has allowed millions of people to create small businesses…. Today, parents can purchase Christmas presents for their kids with the click of a button; a teenager can design an app that revolutionizes the way things were done; a mom can sell her hand-made cards on Etsy; with a few taps, an Uber can come to your doorstep.
“And yet Congress is talking about passing the Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act, we’ve seen the pattern of Washington fairness. What is Washington fairness? Hammer the little guy, help the big guy… [The Marketplace Fairness Act] would take every online retailer in America and tell them you must now collect sales taxes for over 9,600 different tax jurisdictions all across the country.”
Sen. Cruz concluded, “How do you break the Washington Cartel? You make the political price of doing the wrong thing higher than the price of doing the right thing, and that can only come from ‘we the people.’”
Here is the full speech by Senator Cruz at the Heritage Foundation:
Transcript of Sen. Cruz’s Remarks at the Heritage Foundation:
Thank you for the warm welcome. It is great to be with so many friends back at Heritage yet again. Today, what I want to address is the people versus the Washington Cartel. Restoring liberty in an age of cronyism. I want to start by thanking my friend Jim DeMint, who’s a big part of the reason that all of us are talking about Washington’s cronyism. Jim, when he was in the Senate, saw his colleagues eagerly packing pork into just about every bill. And he stood up and led a valiant fight against earmarks. When Jim started that fight, it was viewed as Don Quixote: tilting at windmills. And yet, today, thanks to his leadership, a Republican conference has officially sworn off earmarks.
But yet, that hasn’t solved the problem of cronyism in Washington. Indeed, just yesterday, the Senate voted for cloture for the Trade Promotion Authority Act. To leadership’s dismay, yesterday, I voted against it. Now I have always been for free trade, I campaigned on free trade. Free trade, I believe, creates more opportunities for Americans; when we open up foreign markets, it helps farmers, and ranchers, and manufacturers. And so I intended to support TPA. Indeed, when it first came up for a vote a couple of months ago, I did support TPA. But unfortunately when the package came back to the Senate floor, it had gone far beyond simply being about trade.
Once again, Congress has become enmeshed in backroom deals, and they were using TPA as an opportunity to promote, among other things, reauthorizing the Ex-Im bank and potentially even enabling President Obama’s illegal expansion of immigration.
And this seems to be an all-too-common trend in Washington. That whatever is happening, corrupt backroom deals dominate the end product.
When American families, when small businesses, and when the most vulnerable among us are hurting, Washington has a tendency to jump to action – but not to help those who need it the most. Washington is looking for solutions – for Washington. Not solutions that empower citizens across the nation to succeed.
Instead, Washington’s solutions invariably help the rich and well connected.
When the 2008 housing crisis hit millions of Americans leaving families with real estate at a fraction of the value, sunken savings accounts, and mortgages they couldn’t pay back, what did Congress do? Bail out big business. It handed out hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and institutions that were deemed “too big to fail.” Sadly the American workers is never deemed too big to fail.
This enabled the banks to concentrate even more power and, in fact, to buy out “weaker banks.” For example, PNC received $7.5 billion while National City didn’t receive anything, which then gave PNC the advantage, and then they turned around and bought out National City.
Since 2008, the big banks have only gotten bigger: As the Fed noted at the end of 2011, five banks held more than 8.5 trillion in assets… equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy and that’s up from 43 percent five years earlier. Remember, Dodd-Frank was sold to the American people as stopping “too big to fail”. What do we see today? The big banks are even bigger.
As car-owners struggled with high gas prices in 2009, the federal government responded by handing over $80 billion to GM and Chrysler and its suppliers.
In 2010, as many hard-working Americans crawled out from under the financial crisis to revive their communities and regain their financial footing, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, with 19,000 pages of regulations. No bill that large, no regulation that voluminous, could possibly be good for any small institutions. And since then, hundreds of community and regional banks have closed.
Now it’s important to understand, that was not an unintended consequence. That wasn’t, “oops, we didn’t know that was going to happen.” The lobbyists for big banks were sitting at the table when Dodd-Frank was written. It was designed by Washington to favor the big guys over the little guys. And I would note, the proponents of that regulations, inevitably, they claim they’re helping the little guy. Now, either they’re not telling the truth, or they’re really, really bad at what they do. Because every single time they jump in with massive regulations, it helps the giant corporations, and the people that get hammered are the little guys.
In 2013, When Obamacare went into effect it imposed huge burdens on small business owners and young people, union bosses and members of Congress received special favors and exemptions. The very people who wrote the law-Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats–they wanted out of it- and this administration was only too happy to oblige. Today, the taxpayers subsidize their platinum plans while millions of Americans across this country have lost their jobs, have been forced into part-time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, are facing skyrocketing premiums. Members of Congress retain their illegal exemptions from Obamacare.
Washington’s favors have gone on for far too long.
If you take a look at a map of the U.S., our office took every county in the country and color coded it, for whether median income had gone up or gone down. It’s quite striking, that map looks almost exactly like a geological map of shale formations across this country. Indeed on the Senate floor, I put that map up with a clear plastic overlay of the shale formations. You can see up in the Bakken, North Dakota, the counties, all of those counties median income is static. You can see the Barnett shale, and the Permian and the Eagle Ford, median income has skyrocketed, you can see the Marcellus shale, median income has skyrocketed.
Although it’s interesting; Marcellus shale doesn’t end at the Pennsylvania border, the jobs do. Because the politicians in New York have decided, apparently, New Yorkers don’t want jobs, they don’t want to provide for their family; or their idiot politicians are going to stand in the way and prohibit them. So even though they have resources in New York, the very same resources that are in Pennsylvania, the line between the states is like the finger of God drew in on the ground. South of that line, there are jobs, median income has gone up. North of that line, not a single one of those counties’ median income has gone up.
You look at the Monterey shale in California-abundant resources. None of those counties have gone up because the California politicians, just like the New York politicians, think California men and women don’t want to provide for their families. But do you know the one notable exception to that rule? The counties in and around Washington, D.C. are bright, bright green. Six of the 10 most affluent counties in the country are located in the D.C. metropolis. Those who live off the federal government are getting fat and happy, and almost every other county in America, median income has stagnated.
Washington has done a great job of one thing: picking winners and losers. Except, it’s all too clear who the losers are each time; it’s American families, who are struggling to pay skyrocketing health care premiums and tuition costs; it’s our community banks and marketplaces that are going out of business; it’s young entrepreneurs and small business owners.
The majority of Americans don’t have the time, don’t have the resources to lobby Washington politicians. They are too busy going about their daily lives, working hard to provide for their families and take care of their kids.
For example, when Tesla successfully lobbied Washington for a $1.3 billion taxpayer subsidy, average Americans were hard at work, and certainly weren’t spending their time thinking about the need to subsidize rich yuppies to spend $100,000 to buy an electric car. Look, If rich people want to buy an electric car, knock yourself out. But why should we be hammering hard working taxpayers to add another car to the 4-car garage? That doesn’t make any sense.
While big government looks out for the powerful and well-connected, average Americans, over and over again, get the short end of the stick. With a ruling expected any day now in King v. Burwell, the Obama Administration has already, at the behest of the insurance companies, crafted a contingency plan that allows insurers to cancel plans in the event that their subsidies go away. But the fat cat insurers are taken care of by big government. ‘You guys are fine, here’s the contingency plan.’ But the average American taxpayer? They don’t have a contingency plan. The Obama Administration has no credible claim whatsoever for the millions of Americans who will be left to pay the full price of Obamacare’s big-government mandates.
The rich and well-connected keep getting more and more favors at the behest of hard-working Americans. And we have got to stop this. Here is a very simple rule of thumb, and it is contrary to everything our friends in the media tell us. Big government benefits big business. Small government benefits small business and hard working men and women. You will never hear that on the nighttime news because the purveyors of big government always promise they’re helping the little guy, and yet they keep getting the fat cats richer and richer and richer.
Lobbyists and career politicians today make up what I call the Washington Cartel. And it operates very much like other cartels. It operates like OPEC. I don’t know, like sheikhs, if they actually wear robes. But they nonetheless, on a daily basis are conspiring against the American people. Let me explain to you how it works:
A bill is set to come before Congress, and career politicians’ ears and wallets are open to the highest bidder. Corrupt backroom deals result in one interest group getting preferences over the other–although you give the other a chance to outbid them–or even worse, a very, very small interest group getting special carve-outs at the expense of taxpayers.
And those who don’t oblige, well, they are shunned by the Cartel – effectively locked out.
Just this week, we saw a shameful example of this as House leadership threw Representative Mark Meadows out of his chairmanship because of his principled objections to TPA. Just this morning, news broke that leadership is seeking to strip Ken Buck, another conservative in the House, of his leadership position. Why is it that Republican leadership always, always, always cuts deals with the Democrats, and with Washington, and throws overboard the conservatives that, come October and November in an election year, they are desperately asking to turn out at an election?
The Washington Cartel has amassed more and more power at the expense of the American taxpayer with the same recipe repeated over and over again.
So today, I want to look at four examples of the Washington Cartel at work. I want to talk about who their schemes are hurting. And how we can restore freedom, bring back jobs and growth and opportunity, and how we can defeat the Washington Cartel.
It is hard to imagine an institution that is more emblematic of cronyism than the Export-Import Bank.
The Export-Import Bank is essentially welfare for big corporations, both foreign and domestic.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as you all know is the source of much of progressivism, instituted the Bank.
What does the bank actually do? It provides loans and loan guarantees to hand-picked corporations. It’s one of the favored methods of cronyism: Washington handing out taxpayer money to selected giant corporations.
Now, on principle, there’s nothing wrong with loans being given except it’s not private investment. It’s not people actually risking their own capital and assessing the risk and reward. Rather, it’s funded on the taxpayer’s dime. Prior loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank have benefited such paragons of corporate virtue as Enron and Solyndra. As it stands now, taxpayers are currently on the hook for over $100 billion in loan guarantees. If the projects succeed, the giant corporations make a profit. If they fail, the taxpayers foot the bill. Now those are pretty good odds. In Vegas, that’s called playing with the house.
As it stands, today the Ex-Im Bank funds roughly 2 percent of American exports.
And yet, of that 2 percent, from 2007 to 2013, the majority of the benefits have gone to 10 select companies. It’s good to be the king and it’s good to be a major donor to the king and to be gathering billions of taxpayer dollars because of it. Along with subsidies that support foreign companies it’s not just domestic companies. Foreign companies do very well with the Ex-Im bank, at our expense.
For example: Air India, a state-owned company, that’s right now putting at risk approximately 7,500 American jobs with the help of Ex-Im. Or Australian Roy Hill mine, to the detriment of our manufacturers and ultimately resulting in an estimated loss of $1 billion of iron ore sales here in America. That’s the taxpayers funding the government, funding foreign corporations, to hurt American workers.
Ex-Im kills American jobs, and often favors foreign investment over American investment.
It also has this terrible record of subsidizing unfriendly regimes with problematic human rights records.
In 2013, just one year, the Ex-Im bank streamed $35 million to Venezuela banks and investors, $335 million to Argentina, $1 billion to Russian financiers, and $2.7 billion to communist China. Mind you, this is at the same time Russia is invading Ukraine. We’re saying, “this is unacceptable, by the way, here’s a billion dollars.” That sort of makes the foreign policy protestations of the administration a little bit hollow.
Several companies that have received taxpayer-backed Ex-Im financing even admitted to previously doing business in Iran through their subsidiaries, undercutting efforts to sanction the Iranian regime. Moreover, the Justice Department recently indicted former Ex-Im loan officer Johnny Gutierez, with bribery chargers. More charges could be coming. And this very institution, Heritage Foundation, uncovered some 74 cases of fraud and corruption at the Ex-Im since 2009.
The Washington Cartel’s favoritism and cronyism inevitably breeds corruption. When you have government officials giving out billions of dollars of taxpayer money, suddenly the people who want that taxpayer money have every incentive in the world to further that corruption both latent and blatant.
And yet, the process of passing TPA, it appears that Senate and House leadership have made a deal to schedule a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import bank, that that was part of the price of TPA. That was a major reason why I voted, “No.” Now, in response to my criticism, leadership in both chambers have said, there is no deal. Excellent. If there is no deal, we should let Ex-Im expire and let it stay expired. For once, all Congress has to do is do nothing and if Congress is good at anything, it’s doing nothing. If leadership, as it says this week, “there is no deal on Ex-Im,” then simply do nothing, let it expire, and end the gravy train for Washington lobbyists on the Export-Import Bank.
A second example, renewable energy mandates are arbitrary government regulations that distort the free markets and artificially raise the cost for American families and job opportunities.
In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, and one of the provisions in it was the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires that renewable fuels be mixed into our gasoline supply.
Now, I support renewable fuels, I support biofuels, but I don’t support policies from Washington that pick winners and losers in the market.
One of the mandates included was the ethanol mandate. Over the years, it has been proven there is a demand for ethanol in the market, but ethanol should stand on its own, not atop the footstool of the government.
The ethanol mandate requires 16 billion gallons of biofuels, requiring a plot of farmland roughly equal to the size of the state of Kentucky, as a result, that has diverted corn from livestock and the food supply, and has contributed to increased food prices.
Several months ago, there was an agriculture summit in the state of Iowa. Most of the Republican candidates for president attended that summit. Every single candidate but one pledged his support for continuing the Iowa ethanol mandate. It’s very easy for conservative politicians to talk about ending cronyism, but when you’re standing in front of people who are the beneficiaries, that’s when you separate talk from action.
Big government energy mandates don’t stop with ethanol. There are tax credits for almost every form of energy. Each designed to give one industry a leg up over the other. There’s enhanced oil recovery credits for producing oil and gas from marginal wells. There’s an advanced nuclear power generation credit. Clean coal investment credits. And a credit for plugging electric and fuel cell vehicles. And of course the infamous wind energy credit.
Talking about wind: A two-year extension of wind credits alone costs taxpayers more than $13 billion, which is enough to pay the monthly electricity bills for 124 million Americans. How about putting that up for a referendum? Do we continue to benefit one favored industry, or do we pay the electricity bill for 124 million Americans? You know, I don’t think that would be a close vote for the American people. And what’s interesting: it’s not a close vote in Washington. Because the only people voting in Washington are the lobbyists with bags of cash, and the lawmakers in both parties eager to get that cash.
For decades, the federal government has teamed up with specific industries to pick winners and losers in the energy industry. Aside from further complicating an already Byzantine tax code, this type of corporate welfare has only distorted the price of energy and empowered failed companies like Solyndra.
My good friend, Senator Mike Lee, has taken the lead in previous Congresses to level the playing field, to end the special interest handouts, and stop the energy cronyism. How about instead of picking one industry after the other after the other, and benefitting them all to compete against each other, we take the taxpayer out of the game and let them fight it out on a fair field. Senator Lee has introduced the Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act-a bill designed to eliminate all energy tax credits, and a bill that Senator Jim DeMint championed before Mike took lead.
A third example: sugar subsidies that artificially drive prices higher for the benefit of the few.
It should come as no surprise that another poster child for big government picking winners and losers traces its origins back to the New Deal. The Sugar Act imposed quotas on U.S. sugar production and restrictions on imports of sugar all while subsidizing U.S. production.
Now, I will note, this form of cronyism seems particularly un-American. After all, before the Tea and Stamp Act, came the Sugar Act in 1764. You’ll recall, we fought kind of a bloody revolution over that. And it was then that the cry of “no taxation without representation” was widely voiced by the colonists.
Well you know what, we, do have representation now, but our representatives aren’t representing us. They’re representing large corporations and lobbyists rather than the American people. And it’s the exact same circumstance of no taxation without representation. How about the representatives in Washington actually represent the men and women back home that we’re supposed to be working for?
The sugar program imposes restrictions on how much sugar can be sold-it provides a “benevolent” allotment for each processor and makes it illegal to sell more than the government’s designated amount.
Now, one could be forgiven for thinking this kind of centralized planning came from former Soviet apparatchiks: “You go sell that! You go sell that!” I mention the cartel. It’s what OPEC does every year. They sit around a table and say, “you go sell that. You go sell that, we’re going to conspire against the American taxpayers.” Both cartels, by the way, have the same principal victims.
Unfortunately, both Republican and Democrat administrations have kept this program essentially unchanged for eighty years-increasing the cost of sugar for Americans.
The Wall Street Journal reported last December that at the time, sugar was 58 percent more expensive here at home than at the global market. Why should Americans pay 58 percent more for sugar than people in the rest of the world? Only because the Washington cartel is taking that additional money and giving it to the select few favored lobbyists. And it’s not just sugar that you put into your coffee or your tea. Sugar is an ingredient in a great amount that we eat. From pastries to sodas-and as my two little girls will tell you, treats on a nightly basis.
And this price controlling increases food costs for businesses and families, particularly low-income households. If you’re a single mom struggling to make ends meet, if you see the food costs when you go to the grocery store and try to feed your kids, prices go up and up and up and your salary doesn’t seem to match it, part of the reason is that the Washington cartel isn’t listening to you, and they’re happy to take money from your paycheck and make fat cats even fatter. That’s the corrupt game that’s going on.
In fiscal year 2013, the average price for American raw sugar was 6 cents per pound higher than the average world price. As a result, Americans paid an unnecessary $1.4 billion extra for sugar. Now, there’s some Americans who don’t even make 1.4 billion in a year. That’s real money. And every time Washington picks winners and losers, the winners are concentrated, but the losers you could identify.
From 1997 to 2011, nearly 127,000 jobs were lost in domestic sugar-using industries. 127,000 jobs-think of the men and women who were working in chocolate factories, working in bakeries, working in soda factories, who now are unemployed, and one of the reasons is, the federal government is driving up the cost of their inputs, and valuing the interests of the lobbyist more that your job.
According to a 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, for every sugar-growing job that stems from artificially high sugar prices, approximately three manufacturing jobs are lost. Now that’s math that makes sense only in Washington, D.C.
And here’s the kicker – you want to understand the concentration: Sugar companies make up just 0.2 percent of the farms in America, anyone know what percentage of the crop industries total lobbying expenditures come from sugar? 40 percent. 0.2 percent of the farms generate 40 percent of the lobbying. Why?
Because if your lobbying is yielding 1.8 billion dollars, that’s good math. And the single mom who’s paying higher food prices, the chocolate factory owner who’s laying off, neither one of them have lobbyists. Neither one of them have a whole lot of representatives who are listing to them.
The fourth and final example: Internet sales tax.
We’ve looked at one example of how the Washington Cartel helps foreign nations and foreign investors, how it chooses winners and losers among American industries.
Now let’s look to an industry that’s been-blessedly-largely free from government regulators: the Internet. I want to turn to how it wants to make its network even broader and more intrusive – what’s the one thing that’s been left largely unmitigated by the government until now – the Internet.
The Internet has been an incubator for new ideas, it has been a haven for technological creativity. It is allowing millions of people to create small businesses. And by the way, the people who are the most freed up on the internet are the most vulnerable. It’s young people, Hispanics, African Americans, single moms, people who want a better life.
You know, it used to be, 20 years ago, if you wanted to start a business, you needed some capital. You needed to be able to buy an inventory. You needed a warehouse. You needed a distribution system. That took money. If you’re just getting started, if you’re a teenage immigrant, like my dad was in 1957, washing dishes, making 50 cents, an hour you’re not likely to have the capital to start a business. What does the internet do? It transform it. You have a good or service you want to sell– You can set up a website and suddenly you have a worldwide market. Someone clicks on the website says, “I want to buy your good or service, you can send it on Fed-Ex and boom, you can send it anywhere in the world, You know who that terrifies? Politicians in Washington. This freedom thing is very, very scary for politicians in Washington. Washington is all about power.
Today, parents can purchase Christmas presents for their kids with the click of a button. A teenager can design an app that revolutionizes the way things are done. A mom can sell her hand-made cards on Etsy. Or with a few taps, an Uber can come to your doorstep.
And by the way, the next time you take Uber-I’ll let you know, I don’t have a car in Washington. Uber is transformational. The next time you take an Uber, ask the Uber driver how he or she likes his job. I have yet to find an Uber driver who isn’t thrilled at the freedom of becoming a small business owner that the Internet has enabled.
And yet, what is Congress talking about doing ? It’s talking about passing the Orwellian-named Marketplace Fairness Act. Now, we’ve seen the pattern of Washington fairness. What is Washington fairness? Hammer the little guy, help the big guy. That’s very fair to lobbyists.
What would the Marketplace Fairness Act do? It would take every online retailer in America and tell them you must now collect states taxes for over 9,600 taxing jurisdictions all across this country, in real time. I want you to think about it. Let’s suppose you’re that single mom who started the business you’re selling online. You’re supposed to collect the Albany school taxes. Now Bret, do you know what the Albany school tax is? Do you know there’s a hearing scheduled next week to try to change it? Well, if you decide to start a small business, you’re expected to know.
And you could face an audit from 9,600 jurisdictions across this country if you haven’t correctly collected the Albany school tax, and you don’t know that they raised it by a quarter point in their last vote., which I have no idea if they did or not.
Why does the Marketplace Fairness Act have support? It has support because it’s a perfect storm for lobbyists. Number one, the Big Box stores, a major bricks and mortar retailers, they want to hammer the heck out of these online retailers. But here’s the interesting thing that’s shifted, so do the big online retailers. Of the 20 largest online retailers, 19 of them have physical presences, and so collect sales taxes in each of the states that has sales taxes. So suddenly you have the big box stores, the brick and mortar retailers, the big guys, and the giant online retailers, joining forces and suddenly they have a common enemy: all of these pesky little startups that have the temerity to try to take their customers.
And in Washington, there’s nothing more beautiful than when the lobbyists all align. When all the money is pointing in the same direction. Suddenly you see Republicans, and Democrats saying, “that is an inspired policy.” And yet, all of the millions of young people, of entrepreneurs, of people with an idea that want to topple the next giant company, they don’t have a single lobbyist. The American people are with us on this. The 2013 Gallup poll showed 57 percent of likely voters opposed taxing the Internet. Among young people, the demographic that represents the future of this country, 73 percent oppose a tax on the Internet. We should stand with the people. It is time to break the Washington Cartel.
We should stand with the people. It is time to break the Washington Cartel.
Instead of cutting blue-collar jobs by investing millions in foreign mining corporations, we should welcome jobs and production here at home. Instead of giving ethanol producers an automatic check, we should let the market determine their viability, and stop hurting farms from Connecticut to California. Instead of forcing restaurants and bakers and families to pay more for sugar – and undercut competition – we should welcome lower prices. And instead of handing over more power to big corporations and regulators, let’s keep the Internet free and encourage young entrepreneurs to keep innovating and to keep government’s hands off the Internet.
How we beat back the Washington Cartel, how do we restore power to the people?
The answer is simple – Americans across the country rise up, they engage on the issues, and we bring back the voice of the people.
The book of Ecclesiastes tells us there’s nothing new under the sun. I think where we are today is very much like the late 1970s. I think the parallels between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are uncanny: the same failed domestic policy, the same misery, stagnation, and malaise, and the same feckless and naiveté foreign policy. In fact, the very same countries, Russia and Iran, openly laughing at and mocking the President of the United States. The one person in America thrilled with the job Barack Obama’s doing is Jimmy Carter.
Why does that analogy give me so much hope? Because we know what comes next. The late ‘70s and 1980s, there was a grassroots movement of millions of men and women who rose up and became the Reagan revolution, and it didn’t come from Washington – Washington despised Ronald Reagan. If you see a candidate who Washington embraces, run and hide. And in 1980, Reagan rose up to break the Washington Cartel. How did he do it? He changed the rules: 1978, 1979, Reagan didn’t get on a plane and fly to Washington and sit down with the old bulls in Congress, sit down with Republicans and say, come on guys, you got to stand for something. He recognized that then and now they weren’t listening to the American people. Instead, he took the case to the American people. And it transformed this nation. How do you change, how do you break the Washington Cartel. You change the rules. You know, there’s an old saying that politics is Hollywood for ugly people.
But there is nothing that focuses the minds of elected politicians like the prospect that they might be voted out of office and have to find an honest job. How do you break the Washington Cartel? You make the political price of doing the wrong thing higher than the political price of doing the right thing, and that can only come from ‘we the people.’ It’s the only power strong enough. That’s what the Reagan revolution demonstrated. Washington despised Reagan until the revolution swept in, and suddenly a bunch of politicians said holy cow, ‘I’m not messing with that,’ and magically they supported lower taxes and lower regulations and stopped the favoritism and standing up and defeating the Soviet Union.
I think 2016 will be an election like 1980. As Reagan said, we win by painting in bold colors and not pale pastels.
I am going to close with a story.
We all know the story of the Wright brothers.
But a name we don’t as often hear is that of Samuel Langley. The Department of War gave him $50,000 to create a flying machine. Upon its launch, “it fell like a ton of mortar,” according to one reporter.
On December 17, 1903, only 9 days after Langley’s second experiment failed, two young Ohio boys with only $2,000 set out at Kitty Hawk, and to become the first men to sail in the air.
$50,000 on failed government programs picking winners and losers versus two entrepreneurs, two brothers with a vision and a dream and just $2,000. One a miserable failure; the other transformed the world.
That is power of American innovators free from the government. It’s the can-do spirit that has propelled scientists and entrepreneurs and immigrants who came with nothing, pioneers, and farmers to make this land the greatest nation on earth.
And it remains just that if we come together and break the Washington Cartel that is telling us far too much about what we can do and can’t do. And if we instead return the power to the people so they can do what they have always done best – achieve the unimaginable and leave a landscape of greater opportunities for generations to come.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/cruz-pointing-e1427227385287.jpg427640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-06-26 05:09:482015-06-26 05:46:34VIDEO: Senator Ted Cruz on Washington, Congress and “The Age of Cronyism”
“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” – Chief Justice John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819
My vision for federal government revenue system is simple:
Abolish the IRS
Scrap the existing tax code
Establish a new, simple, fair, pro-growth tax system worthy of the American people
As an essential step in reforming taxes and returning to constitutional government, the Internal Revenue Service should be abolished. The IRS is a vast bureaucracy, costing $12.5 to $13 billion annually. It would not be necessary under the FairTax.
The IRS has directly abused and harassed individual American citizens and organizations to advance political and policy agendas. The IRS has been used as a political weapon to suppress First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights and influence elections.
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Sixteenth Amendment, which established the income tax, effectively negated the Fourth Amendment by assigning the power to seize assets in payment of taxes due and implicitly violates the provision against “unreasonable searches” in the extent of information that must be reported. The Sixteenth Amendment should be repealed.
The federal income tax system has been used to distort the free market and drive social policies and agendas. Myriad tax loopholes encourage politically favored behavior with economic rewards. The constitutional “general welfare clause” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1) requires that federal laws provide for the general welfare of all citizens rather than the specific welfare of particular individuals, groups or classes. Income tax loopholes violate that concept.
Beyond distorting the economy and favoring specific groups, numerous provisions of the complex U.S. tax code directly discourage economic growth. Taxpayers are required to report complex details of their personal financial life, costing Americans billions of hours in non-productive tax compliance efforts every year. Onerous “death taxes” often force liquidation of businesses and the sale of family farms, forcing not only the elimination of viable businesses and jobs but also economic inefficiencies in tax avoidance schemes. Tax penalties in the existing code discourage the repatriation of capital earned in international enterprises. This diminishes potential capital investment in the United States, dampening economic growth and employment.
I favor implementing the FairTax to replace the current federal tax code. The FairTax would raise similar amounts as current federal taxes while being less intrusive, less coercive, less abusive, and less frustrating than the current system.
The FairTax replaces most existing federal taxes with a simple sales tax on all new goods and services at the retail level. The FairTax does not distort markets, manipulate behavior, or create economic inefficiencies by favoring or penalizing businesses’ or individuals’ economic decisions.
Taxes will be transparent rather than hidden in the cost of goods. Unlike the current system, prices will not include hidden income and payroll taxes paid for labor at every step of production and will not be masked from the worker by employers “withholding” estimated taxes owed from paychecks.
The FairTax is simple to collect and places the burden of proof on the government rather than the taxpayer. The collection of the FairTax is administered by the states, 45 of which already have sales tax, so collection is simplified. Under the FairTax, the regressive nature of consumption taxes is eliminated by “prebates” paid to everyone to cover taxes paid on basic necessities.
Abolishing the IRS, scrapping the existing federal tax code, and establishing a simple, fair, pro-growth tax system such as the FairTax will be a move toward constitutional, limited government and a strong economy. It will also be a great relief to individual Americans.
ABOUT CONGRESSMAN JIM BRIDENSTINE (R-OK)
U.S. Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) is a member of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee environment subcommittee. He has a triple major from Rice University in Economics, Business, and Psychology and an MBA from Cornell.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/fairtax-logo.jpg333620Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2015-06-19 16:52:112015-06-19 16:52:49A Constitutional Federal Revenue System by Congressman Jim Bridenstine
Many of us have done the research and then try to teach exactly what is happening with our lawmakers. Florida’s reputation for corruption and deceit is at the top of the charts. There is a great deal to be said regarding one party being in control for far too long – and that is certainly the case in Florida.
We have been lied to over education, environmental issues, Enterprise Florida, Charter School legislation, Public Private Partnerships and the list goes on.
Today we find out the Florida lawmakers have made very little progress in regard to budget negotiating sessions and their special session is almost over. Standing at the fore front of the disagreements between the Florida House and Senate are health care, education and the environment.
Now comes the truth – House members want to borrow nearly $300 million in bonds for projects related to Amendment 1, a referendum passed by the very voters we tried to educate before the last election showing the false statements being made in relationship to the environment. Legislators were contending they were going to use the money for conservation and environmental clean-up projects.
Voters didn’t listen to the warnings!
Sen. Alan Hayes, R-Umatilla doesn’t want to use any bonds in relationship to any Amendment 1 projects. “B-O-N-D is a four letter word” Hayes said.
House environmental budget chief Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, withdrew bonding from the House’s latest offer Sunday, calling it an “olive branch.” “I cannot be any more clear: the House is very interested and supportive of bonding as (budget negotiations) go forward ,” Albritton said.
Now why would the legislators want to do this when Amendment 1 didn’t call for raising taxes one nickel; using bond money or borrowing any funds? Amendment 1 was merely about prioritizing, forcing the state to set aside a tiny percentage of its massive budget for clean water, fresh air and preserved land. (Specifically, we’re talking a third of existing doc-stamp taxes on real-estate, which equals about 1 percent of the state’s $77 billion budget.)
At least that is what the legislators wanted us to believe. Today, June 7, 2015 Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel did a marvelous job of exposing the Florida legislators and the massive shell games they continue to play:
Remember the Lottery? Florida Politicians May Try the Same Shell Game With the Environment!
by Scott Maxwell
Most Floridians are painfully familiar with the Florida Lottery shell game.
It was the political con of the century — one that involved tens of billions of dollars.
It started in 1986 when voters were told that, if they approved a lottery, the money would go to education.
We even called it “The Education Lottery.” That way, when you plunk down 10 bucks for a scratch-off, you’re not really gambling … you’re donating to a scholarly cause. How altruistic of you.
Well, folks started “donating” by the droves. A billion bucks. Then $10 billion. Then $20 billion … all of it supposed to improve our schools.
But Floridians didn’t notice much change in education. We still had one of the lowest-funded school systems in America. We still do.
In fact, 20 years after the lottery started, the Sentinel did an investigation and determined that education funding had actually dropped from 59 percent of the state budget in 1987 to 51 percent in 2007.
Yes, after the “Education Lottery” raised billions of dollars, the percentage actually went down.
How? Well, politicians played shell games.
Yes, they spent the lottery money on schools. But they took money they had previously spent on schools and started spending it on other things.
Admittedly, it was important things, like renovating the Legislature’s dining room, but it was other things, nonetheless.
Now, we may be doing the whole sick shell-game thing again … only this time with the environment.
Last fall, Florida voters approved Amendment 1 to demand that Florida spend more on the environment.
The amendment didn’t call for raising taxes one nickel. It was merely about prioritizing, forcing the state to set aside a tiny percentage of its massive budget for clean water, fresh air and preserved land. (Specifically, we’re talking a third of existing doc-stamp taxes on real-estate, which equals about 1 percent of the state’s $77 billion budget.)
It’s hard to overstate how overwhelming the support was. Amendment 1 passed with 75 percent. No statewide candidate got anything close to that.
But Legislators are once again playing shell games.
For instance, the House budget proposes spending $38 million of this money on existing payroll for the state’s park services and $40 million on existing forest service employees.
Gov. Rick Scott’s proposal included $17.5 million for a wastewater-treatment project in the Florida Keys.
The Senate has $10 million for salaries in the Environmental Protection division.
Were you able to keep your eye on the pea? Did you see the shells move?
Most of those endeavors aren’t new. None of them involve land preservation.
Environmental groups are crying foul. So are government watchdogs. The Florida Today newspaper in Melbourne took the rare step of running a front-page editorial last week demanding that lawmakers “Respect voters, Obey Constitution on Amendment 1.”
Many critics complain there isn’t enough money for Florida Forever land preservation — practically nothing ($8 million-$15 million) this year compared to the days when Jeb Bush was governor ($300 million).
I don’t think we should be buying land simply for buying’s sake. But I do think we need to honor the amendment.
That means protecting natural areas, restoring wetlands and cleaning up our water supplies. Fixing the Everglades, improving the Indian River Lagoon and providing recreational trails.
There is no shortage of worthy ways to spend money in a state where water is both polluted and scarce enough that we have restrictions.
The amendment’s title was clear: “Water and Land Conservation: Dedicates funds to acquire and restore Florida conservation and recreation lands.”
And this time, those pushing it were smart. They included a provision that said this money can’t be “comingled” with the general funds the state had already been using.
That means if legislators play shell games with this money, there may be grounds to sue them.
It needn’t come to that.
Lawmakers and Gov. Rick Scott are looking at a record budget. And they are free to spend 99 percent of it on education, roads, incentives, public safety, their own health-care plans — or whatever else they want.
They simply have to dedicate 1 percent to the environment.
It’s what voters wanted — and now what the constitution demands.
Scott Maxwell June 7, 2015 Orlando Sentinel smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
I smell a lawsuit in relation to the use of the funds to be collected from the doc-stamp taxes on real-estate. The Florida legislators have proven to us numerous times they are not to be trusted and this reaches to Governor Scott’s office also.
The lies, deceit, manipulation and corruption have been on-going for far too many years. Time for them to have to answer to the people who not only pay their salaries, but put them in those seats in Tallahassee.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/shell-game-money.jpg400600Diane Kepushttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDiane Kepus2015-06-08 06:06:422015-06-12 08:16:05Florida Voters Refused To Listen – Now They Have Been Taken Again!
Would the situation really be worse than it is now if, instead of all this money spent on Sharia, the U.S. had stood up for its own values, and made it clear that money would only flow to those who stood for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights of all people before the law?
ABOUT CONGRESSMAN JIM BRIDENSTINE (R-OK)