MARICOPA COUNTY
REPUBLICAN BRIEFS
RepComm@cox.net
June 10, 2010
“Your silence gives consent.” –Greek philosopher Plato (429-347 BC)
CORRECTION: The link in yesterday’s Briefs to AZ Teens learn harsh truth apparently didn’t work. Try these: AZ Teens learn harsh truth: Prayer disallowed in Obama’s Washington « Seeing Red AZ or http://seeingredaz.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/az-teens-learn-harsh-truth-prayer-disallowed-in-obama%e2%80%99s-washington/
The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium — something they actually oppose.
The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.
Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.
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When Glenn Beck urged his listeners, “Please, pick it up. The Road to Serfdom. Make it part of your essential library,” sales of Austrian Economist Frederick von Hayek’s book at Amazon.com pushed it to Number 1 the next day. Prior to the election of President Obama, “The book sold respectably at a clip of about 600 copies a month,” according to Bruce Caldwell, editor at the University of Chicago Press. “But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven’t slowed down since.”
When John Stossel, host of Fox Business, featured the book on his show on February 21, sales jumped again.
Opinions as to the remarkable interest in a book published in 1944 by an obscure economist vary, but most center on the book’s uncanny prediction that is now being fulfilled in the United States: centralized and expanding government and its increasingly obvious tyranny impacting citizens’ lives on a daily basis.
Caldwell said the book provides “arguments about the dangers of the unbridled growth of government … including the characterization of the health care debate as being about socialized medicine…. [The book] taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Furthermore,” he says, “a recurrent theme in the news is that, in contrast to the millions who are suffering, the politically connected are doing just fine.”
Professor Thomas Woods, senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who was Beck’s guest, said that Hayek was “warning about … people [who] think that there is a way to centrally-plan an economy, or run a society … that doesn’t involve methods that we would find utterly distasteful and barbaric.”
Today’s corporate profits reflect an income shift into 2010. These profits will tumble next year, preceded most likely by the stock market.
People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the nine states without an income tax are growing far faster and attracting more people than are the nine states with the highest income tax rates. People and businesses change the location of income based on incentives.
Likewise, who is gobsmacked when they are told that the two wealthiest Americans—Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—hold the bulk of their wealth in the nontaxed form of unrealized capital gains? The composition of wealth also responds to incentives. And it’s also simple enough for most people to understand that if the government taxes people who work and pays people not to work, fewer people will work. Incentives matter.
People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies. According to a 2004 U.S. Treasury report, “high income taxpayers accelerated the receipt of wages and year-end bonuses from 1993 to 1992—over $15 billion—in order to avoid the effects of the anticipated increase in the top rate from 31% to 39.6%. At the end of 1993, taxpayers shifted wages and bonuses yet again to avoid the increase in Medicare taxes that went into effect beginning 1994.”
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As President Obama’s poll ratings tumble and the Democratic majority in Congress continues to post record disapproval numbers, some on the Left have consoled themselves with the thought that the growing grassroots hostility to incumbent candidates transcends party and ideology. In this exegesis, liberal and progressive discontents are just as wound up – and just as influential – as their conservative Tea Party counterparts. If this week’s primary election results proved anything, it’s that this reading of the nation’s political map won’t wash. While the Tea Parties continued to notch victories in pivotal primary races, the Left’s insurgents were rebuffed.
The most prominent example came from Arkansas, where embattled Senator Blanche Lincoln staved off a bruising challenge from her union-backed rival, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. Lincoln drew Big Labor’s wrath for heresies like opposing “card check” legislation, which would have eliminated secret ballots to facilitate union organizing. As payback, unions, aided by a battery of progressive political action groups, put their full political clout into the race, sponsoring Halter to the tune of $10 million. But while the lavishly funded challenge did force Lincoln into a runoff, the unions’ purchasing power came up short. As one agonized Obama White House official told Politico: “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise.” Lincoln remains deeply vulnerable. Polls show she trails her Republican opponent John Boozman by some 25 points. But her defeat, if it comes, will be punishment for being too loyal to the Left’s agenda (Lincoln cast the decisive 60th vote to pass ObamaCare) rather than for straying too far from it.
From Seeing Red AZ
Wickenburg Christian Academy students had a rude awakening and a lesson they will not soon forget during a recent trip to Washington, D.C. when they, three parents and a teacher traveled to our nation’s Capitol on a Christian Discoveries study tour.
The Arizona students were asked to leave the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court because they were standing in a circle, heads bowed, praying.
On May 5, 2010, they participated in Capitol Hill Day. The first stop was the front steps of the Supreme Court. After taking a few pictures the group gathered off to the left at the top of the bottom level of steps to pray. Immediately the guard posted there ran down the steps and asked the group to go somewhere else to pray. He tapped teacher Maureen Rigo on the shoulder and said, “Ma’am, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t pray, but you can’t do it here. Please go somewhere else.” She asked, “Since when?” The answer, “This week.” So the group moved to the street level and prayed on the sidewalk instead.
