OMB Director: Trump budget rebuilds military, cuts waste

A big concern for many conservatives has been President Trump’s promises of increased spending in many areas. Trump’s promises of more money for the military and infrastructure have many worried that the increased spending will explode the deficit. However, the director of the Office of Management and Budget pointed out in a new budget blueprint that Trump’s spending increases will be offset by cuts in other areas.

In the Washington Free Beacon, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said, “This is the ‘America First' budget. In fact, we wrote it using the president's own words—we went through his speeches, articles that have been written about his policies, we talked to him, and we wanted to know what his policies were, and we turned those policies into numbers.”

A big winner in the first Trump budget is defense, which is slated for a $54 billion increase split between the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. The Defense Department budget would be increased by nine percent and Homeland Security by seven percent.

“We've worked very closely with the Defense Department to make sure, a couple of things, that this funds their needs but does so in a responsible fashion in terms of what they can actually spend this year,” Mulvaney said. “The Defense Department has told us this is the amount of money they need and can spend effectively this year. We are not throwing money after a problem and claiming that we have fixed it.”

The budget also allocates $4.1 billion over two years for Mr. Trump’s border wall. The figures for the first two years include tests to determine the efficiency and safety of different types of barriers. Mulvaney noted that a 10-year cost projection would accompany the full budget when it is released in May.

Mulvaney pointed out that these spending increases would be offset by cuts in other parts of the budget. “You will see reductions exactly where you would expect it from a president who just ran on an ‘America First’ campaign,” Mulvaney said. “You’ll see reductions in many agencies as he tries to shrink the role of government, drive efficiencies, go after waste, duplicative programs, those types of things.”

“The president ran saying he would spend less money overseas and more money back home,” Mulvaney said. “So when you go to implement that policy you go to things like foreign aid, and those get reduced. If those had been in the Department of Education you'd see a dramatic decrease in education.”

In fact, the Department of Education’s budget was cut overall, but charter school funding and school choice programs saw an increase. Some of the other notable items in the budget blueprint include:

• ·         Cuts Homeland Security grants to local and state agencies
• ·         Raises TSA security fees for airline passengers
• ·         Eliminates funding for 49 National Historic Sites
• ·         Cuts funding to reimburse state and local governments for detaining illegal immigrants
• ·         Increases funding and lawyers for illegal immigrant removal
• ·         Eliminates climate change prevention programs
• ·         Reduces funding for UN peacekeeping
• ·         Privatizes the air traffic control system
• ·         Eliminates funding for many transportation projects
• ·         Cuts NASA budget by one percent

According to the Washington Post, the big losers in the new budget are the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department, which lose almost a third of their budgets. The Department of Agriculture and the Labor Department also received cuts greater than 20 percent. Other departments on the chopping block with cuts of more than 10 percent included Health and Human Services, Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Interior.

The full budget will be released in May and will include more detail on the cuts and a 10-year projection for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicaid. Entitlement and safety net programs make up more than half of the federal budget according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The full budget is subject to approval and amendment by Congress.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Trump speech was mixed bag for conservatives

President Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress last night (text here) was a triumph for the president. Without a doubt, Mr. Trump delivered one of the most effective speeches of his political career.

Stylistically, the president was smooth and practiced. The speech was in sharp contrast to his disjointed stump speeches and press conferences. Mr. Trump proved that he can deliver a polished, rehearsed speech with minimal ad libbing. In a word, Mr. Trump seemed presidential.

To a conservative, the content of the speech was a mixed bag. Much of what I heard involved new federal spending by a government that is broke. While I applaud Mr. Trump’s desire to expand the defense budget and believe that rebuilding the military is long overdue, I would have liked to hear that the new spending would be balanced by spending cuts elsewhere. Instead, I heard that there would be more spending domestically.

“America has spent approximately six trillion dollars in the Middle East, all this while our infrastructure at home is crumbling,” Trump said in a statement that sounded like it could have come from Barack Obama. “With this six trillion dollars we could have rebuilt our country --- twice.”

Trump continued, sounding even more like Obama circa 2009, “To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking the Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure of the United States -- financed through both public and private capital --- creating millions of new jobs.”

America has already tried a near-trillion-dollar stimulus. It failed to stimulate the economy or the job market. It didn’t work. We woke up afterward with eight years of economic stagnation and a national debt that had almost doubled.

“I believe strongly in free trade but it also has to be FAIR TRADE,” Donald Trump said.

I distrust politicians who talk about fairness. Fairness is the opposite of freedom because it relies on government to determine what is fair. Fairness is subjective. What is fair is at the discretion of who defines fairness. When fairness is the goal, government grows because government is the ultimate arbiter of fairness… if you can hire enough lobbyists to advance your notion of fairness.

When Barack Obama said that he wanted people to pay their “fair share,” I held onto my wallet. When I hear Donald Trump talk about fair trade, I expect that, if he gets his way, I will be paying more when I go to the store.

President Trump’s speech did have plenty for conservatives to applaud. His support for the repeal and replacement of Obamacare was much needed. Hopefully, he will take the lead on unifying congressional Republicans around a single plan. Trump’s promise of tax reform is also much needed. His victory lap over the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court was well deserved. His support for law enforcement after Barack Obama’s equivocations was reassuring.

Also reassuring was President Trump’s expressed support for immigration reform. While Trump did stress violent crimes carried out by illegal immigrants and promised again to build his wall, he did open the door to the bipartisan compromise that will be necessary to resolve the problem of illegal immigration. The claim that Mexico would pay for the wall was conspicuously absent.

There was a shortage on specifics in general, but especially on how a broke government will pay for his many programs.

The most moving part of the night – and probably the longest of many ovations – was for President Trump’s salute to US Navy Senior Chief William "Ryan" Owens, who recently died on a raid against al-Qaeda in Yemen. It is doubtful if there was a dry eye in the house as the president recognized Ryan’s widow, Carryn.

Reaction to the speech will largely depend on what camp the listener falls into. Trump supporters will justifiably claim that he hit a homerun. Trump opponents will point to flawed policies and very questionable claims and statistics.

As a conservative who voted for “none of the above,” I can at least think that Trump is, so far, better than Hillary would have been. Other than not withdrawing from the TPP, I cannot think of anything that Hillary would have said that would have been more palatable than Mr. Trump’s speech. A low bar, I know. President Trump, for all his flaws, has so far supported at least a partially conservative agenda and appointed some (not all) very good people to very important jobs.

Nevertheless, as the speech opened and closed, it’s easy to hear Trump saying, “Generations from now, we will look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

How did that work out?

Originally published on The Resurgent

Details of the Trump-Carrier deal

Donald Trump’s first big coup as president-elect came this week with the announcement of a deal to save 1,000 jobs in Indiana. A Carrier gas furnace plant, along with a United Technologies Electronic Controls plant owned by the same company, had been slated to move to Mexico. The moves, which would cost more than 2,000 jobs, had been a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s during the campaign.

During the presidential campaign, Trump frequently criticized companies who moved from the United States to other countries. Many of the companies that leave the US do so to flee the US corporate tax rate, which is the highest in the free world. Trump had threatened to punish corporations that moved to other countries with a 35 percent tariff on goods that they imported back to the US.

According to the Indy Star, taxes weren’t the only factor in the move to Mexico. The 1,400 Carrier employees are unionized and make as much as $26 per hour. They can earn $70,000 annually with overtime. Mexican workers would earn $3 per hour. The Indiana employees would have been laid off in three waves starting in 2017. Fortune reports that the company would save $65 million annually from the move.

Early news about the deal, which would keep Carrier in Indiana, but not the other United Technologies plant, was sketchy. The number of jobs staying in Indiana has been described as “close to 1,000” and “more than 1,000” at various times according to ABC News. Fox News reported that “the deal spares about 800 union workers,” citing a federal official who had been briefed by the company.

Unverified reports on the deal in Fortune say that Indiana will retain “800 manufacturing jobs at the Indiana plant that had been slated to move to Mexico, as well as another 300 engineering and headquarters jobs.” The report says that “some 1,300 jobs will still go to Mexico, which includes 600 Carrier employees, plus 700 workers from UTEC Controls,” the other Indiana plant. Affected workers will be offered employment and relocation in UTC’s aerospace division or provided funding for reeducation.

“The incentives offered by the state were an important consideration,” a statement by Carrier said, but exactly what Carrier got in return is uncertain at this point. There is widespread speculation that the deal involves favorable tax treatment by the state and local governments. Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, is currently the governor of Indiana and would have had great influence over any deal between the State of Indiana and Carrier. The Fortune source reports that Carrier received roughly $700,000 annually in state tax incentives for an unknown number of years in exchange for staying in Indiana.

United Technologies Corporation, the parent company of the two plants, had reimbursed the state and local governments for tax abatements and grants in advance of the move. According to ABC News, the company repaid $380,000 to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and $1.2 million in tax abatements to the city of Indianapolis.

Carrier also cited the changing presidential administration as a reason for its decision. “Today’s announcement is possible because the incoming Trump-Pence administration has emphasized to us its commitment to support the business community and create an improved, more competitive U.S. business climate,” the statement said. This may refer to Republican promises to reform the federal tax structure and lower the corporate tax rate.

While Carrier’s non-move may generate goodwill with the Trump Administration and help preserve the company brand, an even larger factor might be the federal funds that directly affect the company’s bottom line. The Indy Star notes that “United Technologies receives about $5.6 billion a year in federal money, constituting about 10 percent of its overall revenue.” Much of this money comes from federal contracts through Pratt and Whitney, a jet engine manufacturer that supplies engines for the new F-35 Lightning II fighter, and Sikorsky, the manufacturer of the military UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. As parent to both companies, United Technologies is one of the country’s largest defense contractors.

“United Technologies is a huge company, and the Carrier deal is a very, very small part of it,” said John Mutz, a board member of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, in Politico. “This is a much different set of circumstances if you’re talking about all of the contracting work that United Technologies does for the federal government. That’s a big deal.”

Claude Barfield of the American Enterprise Institute called the approach “crony capitalism” in Politico. “For market-based economists or analysts, this is really a version of crony capitalism, and it’s the kind of thing you really don’t want to get into or have government get into,” Barfield said. “This gets back to who … actually has the ear of the government. So you get the situation where decisions are not made in terms of their economic sense, but in terms of gaming the political system.”

While using defense contracts as leverage to keep Carrier may have worked in this instance, it does nothing to change the underlying problems that American companies face. Carrier may have won state tax breaks and preserved its federal contracts, but it still faces a high federal corporate tax, high labor costs with its unionized workforce, high turnover rates and a dense regulatory environment. It is these issues that the Trump Administration must address for prevent companies from fleeing the United States.

While the underlying problems for businesses remain, Trump’s deal with Carrier was beneficial for the president-elect. Trump used Carrier to buy time and goodwill for the incoming administration. He has also earned political capital for the deal. It will be interesting to see how he uses these assets once he takes office.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Voters oppose further cuts to military spending

A new Rasmussen poll indicates that a majority of Americans feel that United States military spending is either just right or not enough. The poll, released on Dec. 1, found that 64 percent of likely voters approve of the current level of military spending or would like to see it increased.

The poll comes as the Obama Administration touts a new deal that would delay the Iranian nuclear program for six months in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Another Rasmussen poll from last week found that voters were split on the Iran deal. Forty-one percent favor the deal while 43 percent are opposed.

American foreign policy is also being challenged in the Far East. After China declared an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the disputed Japanese Senkaku Islands. President Obama sent a flight of U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortresses to challenge what Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, director of Asia-Pacific programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace, called “a bolder foreign policy in light of an anticipated U.S. decline” in CNN.

In light of the recent foreign policy news, the Rasmussen poll found that only 29 percent say the U.S. spends too much money on defense. Twenty-seven percent say that the U.S. currently spends the right amount on defense. A plurality, 37 percent, say that the U.S. does not spend enough on defense and national security in spite of the fact that the federal defense budget spends more than the next 10 countries combined.

The percentage of Americans supporting the current level of military spending has increased sharply since a February 2013 Gallup poll. The poll of adults found that 36 percent felt that military spending was too high and 35 percent found it about right. Only 26 percent thought that military spending was too low. The trend toward more support for military spending was already underway, however.

Similarly, an ABC News/Washington Post poll from March 2013 found that American adults supported federal budget cuts by a two-to-one margin, but that a nearly identical margin opposed cuts to the military budget. The poll specifically addressed the sequester’s five percent cut to overall spending and the eight percent cut to military spending.

The deal between Republicans and Democrats that ended October’s partial government shutdown authorized current spending levels through January 15, 2014. As budget negotiations heat up in the new year, it is likely that defense spending will again be an issue. MSNBC’s Timothy Noah points out that the next round of sequester budget cuts will come entirely from the military budget. If the president tries to force the military budget cuts to take effect or exchange military funding for tax increases, it may put him further against popular opinion.

 

Originally published on Elections Examiner

Obama vs. Bush

In the campaign for his re-election, President Obama often points to the fact that the country was in a deep recession when he took office. Obama’s reasoning is that the country was in such a dreadful state in 2008 that it is taking much longer than he originally thought to restore it to prosperity.

It can be instructive to look at the results of the policies of both President Bush and President Obama and compare them side by side. One common criticism of President Obama is his administration’s spending habits. When he recently claimed that “Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years,” CNS News and many other outlets fact checked the claim and found it to be untrue. In fact, a chart from USgovernmentspending.com shows that, as a percentage of GDP, President Obama’s spending is at a higher level than at any other time in our history except World War II. While spending did increase slowly under most of George W. Bush’s tenure, it was only in 2008, when TARP was enacted, that it jumped sharply.

A closer look shows that, according to figures from the Tax Policy Center, President Bush ran a deficit for all but the first year of his administration. As a percentage of GDP, Bush’s average deficit was about 2 percent. In dollars, Bush averaged deficits of about $251 billion per year. In contrast, in President Obama’s three years, he has averaged deficits of more than nine percent. In each year of his administration, the federal deficit has been more than $1 trillion. Obama’s average deficit in dollars was $1.33 trillion.

When viewing the data from the Tax Policy Center, it is easy to see why deficits increased so rapidly under President Obama. Even as President Obama was increasing federal spending with his various attempts at stimulus, tax revenues were falling due to the recession. Since spending increased at the same time that the government was taking in less money, the difference had to be made up in borrowing.

Borrowing leads to an increasing federal debt. It is true that the debt increased dramatically under George W. Bush. On January 1, 2001, just before President Bush took office, the federal debt stood at $5.6 trillion according to U.S. Treasury figures. When he left office on January 20, 2009, the debt stood at $10.6 trillion, an increase of almost five trillion dollars. As of June 1, 2012, the federal debt was at $15.7 trillion, an increase of $5.1 trillion. The federal debt has increased by as much under President Obama in three years as it did under Bush in eight. CNS News noted in October 2011 that President Obama had added more debt than all other presidents from George Washington to George Herbert Walker Bush.

The difference is even more stark if the election of 2006 is considered to be the dividing line. In 2006, Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. At the beginning of 2007, as the new Democrats took office, the debt was at $8.6 trillion, which means that three trillion dollars was amassed by President Bush and congressional Republicans. It also means that a staggering $7.1 trillion was borrowed by the Democrats from 2007 through 2012. A chart from USgovernmentspending.com illustrates how radically government spending increased after 2006, when Senator Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi assumed control of Congress.

Democrats argue that deficit spending was needed to combat the 2008 recession, but what did taxpayers get for their money? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment averaged 5.26 percent during the Bush years. The average during the Obama years was 9.26 percent.

Even more telling is the fact that the Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate, the percentage of Americans working, has declined from 67.2 percent in January 2001 to 65.7 in January 2009 and to 63.8 percent in May 2012. According to Multpl.com, the U.S. population increased in each of those years, from 285 million in 2001 to 306 million in 2009. The U.S. population now stands at 313 million according to the U.S. Census. This means that fewer total Americans are working now than when President Obama took office even though the population has increased by 7 million. When President Bush left office 20.1 million Americans were working. Today only 19.9 million are in spite of a population growth of seven million.

Even though the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, five months into Obama’s presidency and three years ago, the economy and the job markets have not recovered. By many measures, the economy is worse today than it was three years ago. The Federal Reserve announced last week that American wealth had decreased by 40 percent between 2007 and 2011. Home prices, which crashed in 2008, have not recovered and continue to decline in many markets. The Wall St. Journal reports that economists are “increasingly pessimistic” and more are predicting that the stagnant recovery will turn into another recession.

Foreign policy was an area where President Bush faced intense criticism. The 9/11 attacks, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, were the defining events of his time in office. President Obama campaigned against the wars and Bush policies such as the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Three years later, the prison there remains open. Many leftists decried Bush’s “illegal wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan even though he sought and obtained congressional approval. President Obama did not notify Congress or seek approval before intervening in Libya.

In fact, Obama has quietly adopted a defense policy that is similar to that of President Bush. Perhaps the biggest difference is George W. Bush’s policy of capturing and interrogating terrorists where Obama primarily targets them from afar with drones. Obama’s personal involvement in targeting terrorists is reminiscent of President Lyndon Johnson’s personal involvement in selecting targets – and placing others off limits - during the Vietnam War. Obama did remove all but a token force of U.S. troops from Iraq, but American forces remain in Afghanistan. Perhaps this, along with his reluctance to embrace uprisings in Muslim countries, is why many Arab countries have an even more negative view of the United States under Obama than they did under President Bush according to Pew Global.

With respect to Iran, President Obama’s record is mixed. Obama resisted toughening sanctions on Iran until he was mandated by Congress. Obama also continued Bush’s program of cyber attacks against the Iranian nuclear program, but leaks from his administration detailing these and other intelligence matters have hurt U.S. interests. Breaches of security from the administration may have led to the life sentence for treason of Shakil Afridi, a doctor in Pakistan who helped the CIA determine bin Laden’s location.

Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of the Obama era was the president’s failure to capitalize on the 2009 Green Revolution uprising in Iran. A secret memo obtained by the Washington Examiner reveals that leaders of the dissidents had requested American help in toppling the regime. President Obama failed to act and, as a result, the Iranian government is growing ever closer to becoming a nuclear power.

President Obama’s greatest triumph, foreign policy or domestic, was undoubtedly the killing of Osama bin Laden, yet if Obama had his way the programs that generated much of the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s whereabouts would have been closed down years ago. As Real Clear Politics explains, the enhanced interrogation techniques used during the Bush Administration uncovered much of the intelligence that led to bin Laden. Obama should get credit for issuing the order to attack, but President Bush should also get credit for making the attack possible.

Liberals charge that Bush’s defense and war spending is what led to the massive federal debt. A chart from USgovernmentspending.com does show that defense spending in total dollars increased under President Bush, but it has also continued to increase under President Obama. However, between 2002 and 2008, defense spending as a percentage of GDP remained between four and five percent under President Bush. Total defense dollars and defense spending as a percentage of GDP both increased under President Obama. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, defense spending makes up 20 percent of the federal budget and is dwarfed by Social Security, Medicare, other safety net programs and interest on the federal debt, which together account for 60 percent of the budget.

As Americans head to the polls this November, President Obama is unlikely to ask, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” as President Reagan famously did in 1984. Three years after the official end of the Great Recession, President Obama and his policies deserve the blame for the lack of recovery. Obama has yet to offer any new tactic that has not been tried previously without success. On foreign policy, Obama’s position has evolved, but he has displayed little desire to take strong and decisive action, resulting in many missed opportunities.

Read this article on Examiner.com:

Barack Obama’s doomsday tax plan

While President Obama has been stumping for his proposed Buffett Rule, a minimum 30 percent tax on the wealthy, the United States is hurtling toward a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that will automatically go into effect at the end of the year. If Congress does nothing, these across-the-board tax increases will likely cause the already stagnant U.S. economy to slide back into recession. Many economists are calling the looming increases “Taxmageddon.”

The danger is realized by all sides. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently warned Congress that the nation is “headed for a massive fiscal cliff.” As reported by The Hill, Bernanke said, “Under current law, on Jan. 1, 2013, there’s going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases.” He continued, “All those things are hitting on the same day, basically. It’s quite a big event.”

The root of the problem lies in the fact that Congress has been solving problems with temporary solutions for years. Some recent examples of this include the vote in 2010 to extend the low Bush-era tax rates for another two years and the extension of the payroll tax cut in February 2012 through the end of the year.

Perhaps the most egregious example of kicking the can down the road was the formation of the super committee on deficit reduction in August 2011. The committee was part of a compromise, the Budget Control Act of 2011, which allowed President Obama to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a federal default without making significant spending cuts. The committee’s job was to find a bipartisan path for deficit reduction, but by November the committee announced that its members had “come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee's deadline" according to CNN. As a consequence of the committee’s failure, $1.2 trillion in automatic across-the-board cuts were scheduled to go into effect beginning in 2013.

The problem with these cuts is that they are not targeted to wasteful or unnecessary programs. Because they are general cuts to almost all government programs except Social Security and Medicaid vital programs such as national defense will face draconian cuts unless Congress acts. According to ABC News, half of the $109 billion in annual cuts would come from defense spending. Medicare would also face cuts of up to $11 billion.

The New York Times and the Wall St. Journal provide partial lists of the tax increases that will go into effect on January 1, 2013. These include the expiration of the low Bush-era tax rates which would increase the top individual rate to about 42 percent when the phase out of deductions is included. The capital gains tax would increase to 20 percent from 15 percent today. President Obama’s payroll tax cut for employees would increase by two percent. CBN adds that many temporary fixes, such as those for the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax, will disappear at the same time. The child tax credit will be halved from $1,000 per child to $500.

There are also new taxes scheduled to go into effect at the same time. These include provisions of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) such as an additional 0.9 percent tax on taxpayers earning more than $200,000 and a 2.9 percent tax on investment and interest income.

In all, the Wall St. Journal estimates that investment taxes would see a total increase of about 60 percent within a year. The New York Times notes that the tax increase for a middle-class family earning $50,000 would be almost $2,000. Many low-income families taken off the tax rolls by President Bush’s tax cuts would have to start paying taxes again as well.

The only way to avert the coming catastrophe is for Congress to act. Given the past history of the current divided Congress, action is not likely to be forthcoming before the election. Republicans are willing to reform the tax system, but have proven unwilling to bow to Democratic pressure for tax increases. For their part, the Democrats have proven resistant to the smallest spending cuts even though spending is at record-high levels for peacetime.

If a deal is not made before the election, the matter will go before the lame-duck Congress and, possibly, a lame-duck president as well. If the Democrats lose control of the senate and Mitt Romney becomes the president-elect, President Obama and the current crop of congressional Democrats could still force the nation’s taxes to rise sharply by simply failing to act. The new president and Congressmen would not take office until late January 2013, too late to stop the automatic tax increases and budget cuts.

What this means is that even if President Obama is not re-elected, he can force the country to pay higher taxes simply by doing nothing. At the same time, he could likely avoid much of the blame for his actions. He would be out of office by the time the tax increases were felt and the economy faltered. Aided by the media, he could deny culpability and blame the incoming administration and Congress even though they never had a chance to address the problem.

These tax increases would be far more extensive than the Buffett Rule tax on the wealthy that the president has been pushing. For all the hype, the Buffett Rule would not produce enough revenue to pay for even one percent of President Obama’s federal budget according to an analysis by the Senate Finance Committee. Theoretically, the 2013 tax increases would produce more revenue, but this does not take into account the fact that they would cause the economy to slip back into recession. As profits fall, so would tax revenues.

The longer the delay in resolving the Taxmageddon problem, the more likely it is that the economy will suffer the consequences. Businesses plan investments months or years in advance. If it appears that there will be massive tax increases at the beginning of the year, businesses will defer investments and move money into tax shelters as the date of the tax hikes approaches. This would mean fewer jobs and less spending throughout the economy. The longer Congress takes to address the looming issue of Taxmageddon, the more likely it is that the nation will again face economic hard times, regardless of who wins the election.

Read this article on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/article/barack-obama-s-doomsday-tax-plan

The end of western civilization

The pages of history are littered with the ruins of empires and civilizations. School children learn about ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Churchgoers are privy to the history of ancient Israel. These civilizations disappeared and their remnants became subject to other, more powerful, empires.
Even in modern times, empires have disappeared, sometimes before our very eyes. Britain won and lost three empires in America, Africa, and India over the last 300 years. Russia saw the disappearance of both the Tsarist and the communist empires in the 20^th century. The rise and fall of the Third Reich of Germany occurred in less than 20 years.
Given that empires and civilizations around the world have proved fleeting throughout human history, it isn’t absurd to think that American and western civilization will someday be replaced by some new world power. Given the current state of affairs in the western democracies, it isn’t even absurd to think that day might be rapidly approaching.
Since WWII, the trend in Europe and North America has been toward more economic socialization. The result of this trend has been increased social spending and declining military budgets. Large parts of national economies were given over to entitlements and salaries and benefits for government workers. Retirement ages did not keep pace with increases in life expectancy, so younger workers were taxed to support retired workers for ever-increasing periods of their lives. This naturally led to slower economic growth, which increased the need for social spending as well as increasing national debt.
As the economy slowed in 2008, the pressure to continue social “safety net” spending led to rapidly increasing national debts. The situation finally became untenable for some countries. Notably, Greece became the canary in the coal mine as it neared default and was forced to implement austere budgets. The debt crisis was by no means limited to Greece, however, and has been spreading throughout Europe. It is also threatening to cross the Atlantic as the U.S. federal debt reaches levels not seen since the closing days of WWII.
The fundamental problem faced by the social democracies, including the U.S., is that mushrooming obligations for entitlement programs are crowding out other government responsibilities. As Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with the increasing interest payments required to finance the increasing debt, take up an ever greater share of the federal budget, it leaves less money to pay for everything else, from national defense to roads and bridges.
The response of many European nations over the past few decades has been to whittle away at defense budgets to pay for more social spending. In effect, much of Europe is relying on the goodwill of their neighbors and the U.S. military for protection. In recent months, we have seen how a small, sustained bombing campaign in Libya has stretched European military budgets to the breaking point, even without committing ground forces. Most western nations would probably not have the resources to wage a sustained major war, even if their national survival was at stake.
If, as President Obama and the Democrats seem to want, the United States follows suit with more domestic social spending and a smaller defense budget, it would leave the western world vulnerable to the aggressors of the world. The most obvious threat is from radical Islamic nations and groups. Most notably, Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them via ballistic missiles. If the Muslim world aligns behind a nuclear Iran, the prospect of millions of jihadists backed up by nuclear weapons is a grim one.
Other nations that would seek to expand their role in a post-western world include Russia and China. The physical and economic sizes of these nations make them forces to be reckoned with. Russia, under the practical rule of Vladimir Putin, has rid itself of much of its communist bureaucracy even as it cracked down on dissent at home and launched a series of aggressive moves against its neighbors. China is expanding its military presence in the Pacific with a new aircraft carrier and an advanced technology stealth fighter that could threaten U.S. air supremacy.
The end of western civilization or the American “empire” would not necessarily mean the end of the United States. It might take the form of a decline in American power and prestige to the point where the U.S. can defend its own borders, but not project peace and stability to the far corners of the world. For example, American support has kept Taiwan free from communist rule since 1949 in spite of the fact that communist China claims the island as part of its territory. Similarly, U.S. pressure on Russia in 2008 helped to end the Russian invasion of Georgia after five days. A decline in American power would likely mean an expansion of totalitarianism around the world.
The effect of socialistic policies on economic growth is evident not only by looking at different countries, but also from examining different states. States such as Michigan and California that follow the social democracy model of high taxes and extensive social services are experiencing stagnant growth while states with low taxes and a business-friendly regulatory climate, like Texas and North Dakota, are leading the nation in economic growth. Georgia ranks 15 out of the 50 states in the economic freedom index compiled by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
There are no certainties in life, but the best way to preserve American civilization seems to be to return to the policies that made the country strong in the first place. Ultimately national security depends on a strong economy along with a strong military. The current series of elections and showdowns over deficit spending represent a crossroads in which Americans are deciding whether to travel the path of the social democracies into debt and irrelevance or return to its roots.
Photo credit:  Public Domain/Bjarki Sigursveinsson
Read this article on Examiner.com:
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/the-end-of-western-civilization