What Is a "Fair Share"?

The Democrats and mainstream media have demagogued the idea that the "rich" in America need to pay their "fair share" of taxes.  They have never defined or quantified what that "fair share" is (and they never will because they do not know).  According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2009 (the latest figures available), the top 1 percent paid 22 percent of federal taxes while earning just 13.4 percent of household income. The top 5 percent paid 40 percent of all federal taxes, despite earning only 26 percent of all income (this takes into account all forms of income).

So, what is their "fair share"? 

It's really an easy question to answer.  The rich's "fair share" is enough to keep buying Democrats votes and elections, and transfer enough wealth to keep a substantial number of people--hopefully a majority--in dependency.  It is not in government's interest for people to become self-reliant and responsible; for, if that happens, government is no longer needed.

Freedom and government are enemies.  Our Founding Fathers knew it well; so does the modern Democratic Party.

One Reason Why Twinkie Died....

From Thomas Sowell's recent article, "Killing the Goose":

"The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa."

Unions...

This Is What America Has Become

Here is a recent statement from a New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial aimed at Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a perfect illustration of what the United States has become:  "With every decision Jindal makes, the message becomes clearer to hundreds of thousands of Louisiana residents who are uninsured: The state has no interest in helping you."  There is nothing here about self-reliance, about individual responsibility, about the fact that people should take care of themselves.  No, the whole theme of the "intelligentsia" in America today is:  the government will--should--take care of you and any politician who thinks otherwise is unfeeling, uncaring, and uncompassionate.  You have the right to live off somebody else's hard work and money.

And it appears, given the recent election, that the majority of Americans now believe that.  That it is the government's responsibility to provide "entitlements" to Americans, not Americans' responsiblity to go out and earn them.  With Karl Marx--and this is pure Marxism--"progressive intellectuals" believe that the rich have become rich by robbing the poor, and that it is the obligation of the government to right that wrong--to take away what the rich have and redistribute it back to the poor, who had it stolen from them in the first place.  Barack Obama, of course, accepts that totally--or at least, that is the direction of his policies.  America, not learning from the failures of 20th century Marxist states, has itself become a Marxist country.  Massive numbers of people in the United States soak that up.  Mitt Romney was exactly right:  Barack Obama bought the election with promises of free gifts to enough people.  May I refer the reader again to Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler's quote of over 200 years ago? (Click on the following link:  "Who Is Going To Win?")  This is no surprise to anyone who knows history.

No, folks, the American government is not 16+trillion dollars in debt because "the rich" don't pay enough taxes.  America is in debt because too many people have lost the virtues of hard work and individual responsibility, too many Americans want something for nothing and believe they are entitled to it, too many Americans want the government to provide them near cradle-to-grave benefits, but they aren't willing to pay for it themselves through their own higher taxes.  They want somebody else to pay for it.   And they have been demogogued that such is their "right."  That is the religious dogma of the left, and it controls the country.  But even if Obama took every dime from every person making over a million dollars in America, he still wouldn't have enough to pay for what his sycophants crave; and, of course, he would utterly destroy the American economy, and nobody would have anything.  That may be what he wants.  That--i.e., nothing--is what everybody in the Soviet Union and Maoist China had--everybody but the party nomenkletura, i.e., Stalin, Mao, and their cronies.

The tide cannot be held back much longer.  When us "old white guys" finally die off...when the men, like my father, who built America with the sweat of their brow, conquered a continent and brought it untold spiritual and material blessings (even for those they conquered!), gave their lives in wars for their countrymen, who sacrificed for their families, communities, and country, men who had a strength of character, virtue, duty, and responsibility that Obama's Americans have absolutely no clue about....and when the women, like my mother, who stood behind those men, raising strong families, teaching their children moral values, civilizing the next generation of Americans like God intended mothers to do, women who knew they were women and not men, and were proud to be so and to do their duty to their husbands, children, churches, and society...when those people finally die off, America will be a patsy for any rogue state with a water pistol.  No, our forefathers were not perfect, of course; perfection, as I've said many times before, lies on the other side of the grave, not this one.  America's Founding Fathers knew that, too, but today's leftist secularists don't.  Regardless of their faults, the virtues of our fathers far outweighed their vices, and that's why America succeeded.  Today, it is all too obvious, that, for the mass of Americans, the scale has tipped in the other direction--vice trumps virtue, and so the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune can write what would have been absolutely unthinkable in the earlier, great America--literally, unthinkable.  Nobody would have thought of it. 

Until Marx.  Until Franklin Roosevelt.  Until Lyndon Johnson.  Until Barack Obama. 

Yes, Let's Have More "Progressivism" and Less Christianity

The sordid affair of General David Petraeus is simply symptomatic of a greater disease in America, i.e., the increasing cultural rot euphemistically known as "progressivism."   "Progressive" "freedom’ is nothing more than sexual licentiousness; it is designed, largely, to protect two things—homosexuality and abortion.   We should not be surprised, with such a philosophy so rampant in our society, that it filters into the highest, most powerful corridors of the country.

James Madison said, "I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom."   What a laugh, at least as it has come to pass in Barack Obama's America.  Madison’s statement presupposes what John Adams so perceptively noted: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.   It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."  Of course, except in structural matters (elections, branches of government, etc.), the United States government today pays absolutely no attention to the Constitution—or the principles that underlay it.   And the latter is the real key.

Incidentally, none of these recent disasters—Petraeus or Benghazi—will touch Barack Obama.  Did Obama know about the Petraeus affair before the election?   Almost certainly he did, but ordered his people to sit on it until after the election.   Anybody who thinks it is a mere coincidence that this broke just a few days after the election is naïve to the highest degree. Nor will we ever know the entire truth about the Benghazi affair.  If what has dribbled out is even close to the truth, then Obama is supremely culpable in the deaths of four Americans.  If nothing else, his apologizing foreign policy is.  But, again, we’ll probably never know the truth, for sure.  Evil is in the ascendancy right now in America, folks.   For the foreseeable future, evil is going to win.   Just accept that as the way things are, until God finally gets sick of it and does something.   The Democrats, most major media outlets, and academia are going to protect Obama, come what may.   They are not going to let anything happen to him.  So anybody who believes that any of this stink will rub off on the President is…naïve to the highest degree.

Yes, what America needs is more "progressivism" and less Christianity (and pardon my sarcasm).   We certainly do not want a country where there is more love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control.   What we all want is a nation full of adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like….Any virtue that "progressivism" does  promote has been taught by the Bible for 1,000s of years and is rooted in the eternal nature of God.  So why do we need "progressivism" when Christianity gives us the good without the rot?

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The secession movement is actually kind of funny.   The latest information I’ve been able to obtain is that petitions for secession have been filed in all 50 states and that 7 of them have garnered sufficient signatures to warrant the White House analyzing and responding to them.  Of course, nothing will come of this right now.   But it is a start.   Perhaps some day, in the not-too-distant future, the country will do the right thing—something that should have happened in the 1860s—and there will be a (hopefully) peaceful parting of the ways.   The United States is more divided now than it was in 1860; it’s worse now, because it is an ideological, in effect, a religious, split, not an economic one, as in 1860.   The "left" and the "right", in America, will never agree, and the feelings are bitter.   Liberals hate George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Republicans, Jesus and anything to do with Christianity, and liberal arrogance, elitism, and moral degeneracy tries the patience and tolerance of even the most devoted child of God.   So, let the liberals have everything north of the Mason-Dixon line, plus the west coast, and let conservatives have the South and West.   Spend some of that "stimulus" money to subsidize people moving to whatever part of the country they want to live in.  I'm even willing to contribute to that.

And then build a wall on the Ohio River to keep the liberals from moving south again when they realize, as they will in a very short time, that their country looks like Detroit, Chicago, and California--three places where liberalism, not God, Christ, and conservatism, has ruled for a long time.

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A prediction on the "fiscal cliff" matter: there will be a deal reached before the end of the year, and the Republicans will cave.   You don’t need to be a prophet or an historian to see that.   The Republicans will give Obama the higher taxes on the rich that he wants (or most of them).  In return, Obama will "promise" some government spending cuts, none of which will ever happen, except those to the military, which the Democrats want to gut.   You will be able to tell how bad the agreement is by how loudly and long the "mainstream" media praises it.   When they trumpet how "reasonable" Republicans have been in the deal, that is nothing more than a code word for Republicans giving in.   "Compromise", to the Democrats, means the Republicans surrendering.   And that is what will happen.   You read it here first.

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Plato said, ""Ignorance is the root and the stem of every evil."  Somebody wiser than Plato (God) proclaimed, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:6), and "my people have gone into bondage because they have no knowledge" (Isaiah 5:13).  Read the Alexander Tytler quote again in my November 5 post "Who's Going to Win?"  And also remember the Theodore Roosevelt statement:  "A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education."  A PhD from Harvard is useless for the well-being of mankind if the owner of it doesn’t know and understand moral, eternal law.   The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are full of such people.  And it is why America is in the sad, tragic state that it is in.

Keep in mind, folks--never forget this:  government wants evil, shiftless, lazy, debauched people in a society because that gives government something to do.  Virtuous, hard-working, self-reliant, self-disciplined people don't need government, they take care of themselves, and that is exactly why liberalism and the Democratic Party encourages and promotes every kind of deviant, disorderly behavior they can.  Without evil, the Democratic Party ceases to exist.  The closer people get to Christianity, the less government needed.  Ergo, liberalism and Democrats hate Christianity with a passion exceeded only by their narcissism. 

That, and Christianity condemns their sexual licentiousness.

What Should the Republicans Do?

In the Old West, when your horse stepped in a gopher hole and broke his leg, the merciful thing to do was to put your gun to his head and pull the trigger.  The poor beast was in agony and wasn't going to live.  Rather than prolong its suffering, you surrendered to the inevitable and put him out of his misery.  Nobody disagreed with that approach, as sad and difficult as it must have been.

The United States is country that has stepped in a gopher hole and severely broken its leg.  It isn't going to live, at least not in the form that it was founded, and it has no chance of rising to greatness again, given its current leadership and the direction they are wanting to take the nation.  The best thing that could happen to America is for somebody to put a gun to its head and pull the trigger.  Rather than prolonging the agony of death, get it over with, and--here our analogy with the horse breaks down a bit--start the rebuilding process again as soon as possible.

The Republican Party should recognize this (but, of course, there is absolutely no way that it will).  What the Republicans should do is simply get out of Obama's way, give him everything he wants, because the sooner the Democratic Party destroys the country, reducing it to moral, spiritual, and economic rubble, the sooner the nation can start to heal and rebuild.  If the Republicans fight, all they will do is prolong the agony of the inevitable.  Let Obama finish the job he and the Democrats intend to do, and then, hopefully, the Democratic Party will, in its current degenerate manifestation, disappear from the face of the earth and true progress can be made.  Plus, under such a scenario, the Republicans could not be accused of "obstructionism."  It would all be at the feet of the Democrats and no guilt could accrue to the Republican Party. 

The Republicans, naturally, aren't going to follow this scenario.  They are going to fight--and lose most of the battles, because they are fighting against the tide of history.  The majority of Americans, as evidenced by the recent election, simply cannot see the cancer that has infested the country, and it has now spread too far, too wide, and too deep for any hope of recovery.  There is nothing the doctors can do; this patient is going to die.  The sooner, the better.  But because we are talking about a nation and not an individual, a remnant can survive, and from a remnant, the Lord can construct a mighty kingdom.  Get out of the way, Republicans.  Let the unavoidable happen as quickly as possible.  And then let America turn back to God and the Bible and restore true greatness and progress.
 

Go, Texas!

Over 25,000 people in the state of Texas have signed a petition and sent it to the White House asking for permission to peacefully secede from the United States (other states are also raising petitions for the same purpose). I say, Go, Texas! If the people of that state want to secede from America, more power to them. To deny their right to do so is to deny the very principles upon which the United States was founded, for what did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et al do except secede from England? 

For those who say Texas does not have a right to secede, perhaps you can explain to us why Texas had a right to secede from Mexico in 1836 but cannot do so from America. Or perhaps Texas didn’t have a right to secede from Mexico and thus, rightfully, should belong to that country. A country, of course, which, in 1821, seceded from Spain…

The wisdom of secession might be debated, but the right is denied only by tyrants. Government, to be legitimate, must be by "the consent of the governed", and when a people no longer consent to that government, it is their right to be governed by those whom they desire. Otherwise, there is government by tyranny and slavery. Of course, Texas will not be allowed to secede; that war was fought, and lost, in the 1860s (Texas won its secession war in 1836 as did America in the 1770s). And that is the greatest tragedy in American history—the defeat of the South in their war for independence—for it destroyed the country as established by its founders and paved the way for the tyrannical, out-of-control monster that now exists in Washington, D.C.

Those who argue for secession are not traitors, not if the government has broken the contract with its people and gone beyond its constitutionally authorized limitations.  Again, only a tyrant or an ignoramus would argue that the federal government of the United States remains within the boundaries of the powers given to it in the Constitution.  It is the government, not the people, who has broken the contract.  That frees the people to form a contract with another government, if they so desire.

As I said, secession is not going to happen (a majority of Texans might not even want it; they could lose their free Obamaphone, Obamacare, and food stamps!), but there is little doubt that, if Texas did secede, some other states would follow.  And probably a lot of Yankees would be happy to see Texas (and other states) go.  Indeed, New York might even join Texas; after all, when the Southern states seceded in 1861, the mayor of New York City wanted to secede with them because his city had become the largest, richest port in the country shipping slave-grown Southern cotton to the rest of the world.  The North finally decided that, financially, it wouldn't be a good idea to let the South go ("Where then would we get our revenue?" Abraham Lincoln asked, since the southern states were paying over 80% of federal taxes with about 30% of the population).  Money was the reason for the Civil War, not slavery.  And money will be the reason no state will secede today.

Secession is only a last option—but it must be an option for a people, or there is no way to prevent a government from becoming tyrannical and destroying the rights of a free citizenry. Voting won't do it because, as we saw in this latest election, government politicians can buy enough votes to win an election and destroy foundation principles.  "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty (emphasis added), to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security." That is from America’s Declaration of Independence, in case the reader doesn’t recognize it. I suspect about 99% of Americans today would not recognize it.

But then, America’s founders wouldn’t recognize their government today, either.

Go, Texas!

So Now We Know

This election wasn’t even close.

Those who believe in the founding principles America—God, hard work, individual initiative, virtue, responsible freedom--have become the minority in the country.  A clear, distinct minority.  And those who believe in government dependency, group identification, and “every man does that which is right in his own eyes” have become a decided majority.  It happens, every time, in the history of peoples.  It was inevitable in America, and it has occurred.  America has reached the point of no return.

It is possible, I suppose, for the Republicans to elect another President in the future.  But at the moment, it is hard to see how.  It appears the Republicans would have to nominate a pop star, someone deeply rooted in the cultural rot that now infests the country, someone more at home on David Letterman’s show and “The View” than a serious, respectful, dignified man who will talk to the American people as adults, not adolescents.  It will be difficult for the Republicans to find a candidate like that.

Furthermore, the Republican Party will have to concoct a strategy to out-give the Democratic Party; just to be brutally honest, creating dependency and promoting moral debauchery is what the Democrats are all about.  There is nothing spiritually positive about their digressive message.  It is all about taking from the hard-working, productive sectors of the society (which discourages such behavior, of course), distributing it to those who have no shame in accepting what they have not earned (encouraging that kind of behavior), and egging on as much lewd moral behavior as possible, which also creates reliance upon government to rescue such people from the consequences of their own conduct.  Such behavior has been in the ascendancy for a few decades now, and since it is now clearly in the majority, how can the Republicans ever hope to win a national election again without appealing to it and further encouraging it?  Oh, they can win in local areas where there still exist pockets of freedom and decency.   But national elections will be increasingly problematic.  It will be interesting to see what strategy the Republicans adopt.  How can they appeal to Hispanics and blacks?  Those two groups, huge minorities and growing, trust in dependency; it’s all they have ever known.  As a whole, neither of those ethnic groups believes in hard work and individual initiative and personal responsibility.  I don’t mean to be slandering those people and it has nothing to do with race; at the risk of being nauseatingly redundant, it’s history!  The culture Hispanics came out of, from colonial Spain to the Latin American countries, is a culture of one-man rule and dependency.  As a whole, they have not assimilated into America, indeed, they demand America change to accommodate them.  The Republican Party offers them everything that, historically, they don’t understand and, yes, fled from, but not knowing—or being taught—anything else, they will surely revert to the patterns they are accustomed to—government submission and dependence.

Blacks are the same way.  Africans—on that continent—obviously have no history of a wealth creating economy, and with Southern slavery, and now welfare slavery, huge numbers of American blacks still understand nothing about the process.  The Democratic Party keeps them in slavery today—reliance upon government.  It’s not called slavery, of course, but that’s basically what it is.  Blacks could leave it, but they won’t.   Why should they?  They can have everything they want, given to them by the Democratic Party, without having to work for it.  Blacks aren’t going to vote against the hand that feeds them.  That liberalism has basically destroyed the black family and greatly degraded them as a people is something that, tragically, black Americans cannot see.   As a whole, they have not been able to break away from their addiction to government; it has been no easier for them to do so than for a drug addict to sever his dependency.   What can the Republicans put forward to counter it?  Responsible freedom is no longer popular in the United States.

The “Tea Party”—the Romney supporters, the people who built America, the people who make it work—are now the minority.  An increasing number of Anglos are even turning against the founding principles, and there just aren’t enough left any more to elect someone of those beliefs.  Perhaps the next four years will be such a disaster for the country that there will be a backlash in 2016 and a Republican can win the presidency again.  But the last four years have been horrible, too, and Obama won re-election easily.  The understanding of moral and economic law is virtually nil in the majority of Americans today.  They can be easily demogogued and the Democrats are much better at that than the Republicans are.  There is at least a little bit of honesty left in the Republican Party (though not much).  The Democrats have no morals at all, except when expediency demands it.  And, increasingly in America, as this current election shows, expediency is not demanding it.

Ultimately, as I’ve said before, America’s problem is not economic or political, America’s problem is moral and spiritual; it’s not an imbalance on the bottom line of a budget, but a rot deep in the hearts of too many people.   It doesn’t matter what kind of government a country has, if it has lousy people, it’s going to be a lousy country, and it will elect lousy leaders—a reflection of that populous.  A nation can exist, for a while, on the moral, spiritual capital of preceding generations; Rome did it for a rather long time.  An old building can stand for an extended period if it has a strong foundation.  Hosea announced Israel’s unavoidable doom at least 40 or 50 years before it happened (Hosea 1).  So there’s no timetable here, only an inevitability.

There is no perfection, of course, in either political party or in any human being.  Mitt Romney was a better option than Barack Obama, but the Republican candidate wasn’t ideal, either.  Perfection exists only on the other side of the grave.  We can point the way, but we cannot force humans to believe it.  And, if we are wise—which very few people are—we will study the Bible and history to learn its lessons.  Since so few people do that, nations decline and fall—the predictable outcome of ignoring God and His will.

Now it is America’s turn.  It was, frankly, ultimately inescapable from the beginning of the nation because Americans really aren’t special, they are humans, too, and subject to all the inexorable laws of God and the consequences of rejecting them.  We are the lucky ones who get to watch it.