All posts by Wintery Knight

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Commentary

Are Obama’s policies weakening America’s security, liberty and prosperity?

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In this American Spectator piece entitled “Obama the Destroyer“, Quin Hillyer recounts the many deeds that Obama performed in order to weaken America.

Hilyer writes:

If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely “change America,” and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.

He then lists some of the specific areas that Obama has weakened:

  • contract law (which is part of the foundation of capitalism and free enterprise)
  • strict interpretation of the Constitution
  • counter-terrorism (released interrogation techniques)
  • responsible spending and size of government
  • energy production
  • missile defense
  • military preparedness and research
  • border security
  • transparency and free/open debate on legislation
  • freedom of choice in health care
  • the integrity of the voting/census system
  • diplomacy and foreign policy

I could name at least a half-dozen more areas not on that list, such as the Western Experience’s post about Obama’s decision to weaken our nuclear capabilities. In fact, Jason has a whole article on the Obama’s naive, weak foreign policy.

But foreign policy is one thing, what about the cost of the trillions in spending? Writing in the Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer explains that there are only two ways out of the massive deficits that Obama has run up: Higher taxes, which destroys economic growth and ships jobs overseas, and hyperinflation, which impoverishes the poorest among us by making them pay more for everything.

He lists all the mistakes that the ACORN lawyer has made, and concludes:

We are also certain to see the portion of our pay that we actually get to take home decline significantly. The debt that Obama is running up will have to be repaid. Already, there are grumblings in the market about the future of the dollar, with the Chinese not the only one of our creditors worrying that we will inflate our way out of our obligations. Run the presses, make dollars cheaper, and use the debased currency to repay debts.

…But inflation is not the only possibility. Instead, politicians, remembering the fate of Jimmy Carter when he allowed inflation to climb towards 20 percent, will try to restore fiscal sanity by raising taxes. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who supported the president’s stimulus package, puts the needed tax increase at $1.1 trillion over the next decade; the International Monetary Fund puts the figure at $1.9 trillion, a sum the magnitude of which is better understood when written as $1,900,000,000,000.

And don’t forget the looming problem of entitlements. You remember. Social Security and Medicare? Costs ballooning out of control? Matthew Continetti writes about it in the Weekly Standard:

The trustees conclude that a combination of lavish benefits, an aging population, and a moribund economy has brought the United States’s social insurance system close to bankruptcy. Medicare is already running a deficit, and the trustees say that it will be totally out of money by 2017. Social Security will be in the red as soon as 2016. That’s a problem not only for Social Security. It’s a problem for the federal budget.

…Meanwhile, bizarrely and perversely, Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill say that the only way to fix America’s spending problem–we are not making this up–is to spend more money. More on energy. Health care. Education. The three pillars of the president’s “new foundation.” Don’t worry about the cost, Obama says. The rich guy at the other table will pick up the bill.

What sort of person would spend trillions of dollars in a recession with a looming entitlement crisis? Oh, I know. An unqualified spendthrift who can’t even keep his own financial house in order.

Gateway Pundit reminds us that the Democrats understand that their cap and trade bill with hurt the poorest people the most. And they don’t care! Most of them are probably like Al Gore, who owns assets that will benefit from the unnecessary government regulations.

Gateway Pundit writes at the American Issues Project:

The potential cost of the democrat’s cap and trade policy is enormous. It will likely cost $700 to $1,400 dollars per family per year. The Department of Energy estimated that a similar bill, S. 2191, the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal, will increase the cost of coal for power generation by between 161 percent and 413 percent. Human Events reported that the DOE estimated GDP losses (see chart) over the 21-year period they forecast, at between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion. There are estimates that the bill could increase unemployment by 2.7 percent or about 4 million jobs.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag was on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos in March. During his interview Orszag admitted that Obama’s proposed cap and trade energy legislation will increase energy costs for everyone. The Heritage Foundation reported that cumulative GDP losses for 2010 to 2029 approach $7 trillion. Single-year losses exceed $600 billion in 2029, more than $5,000 per household. Job losses are expected to exceed 800,000 in some years, and exceed at least 500,000 from 2015 through 2026. In Missouri and the Midwest where energy is “cheap” the democrat’s legislation would cause electricity rates to double. Even the far left Huffington Post admits that the approach taken by the Waxman-Markey bill does not alleviate the problem whereby household consumers will pay higher energy costs.

The article continues here.

Remember when Obama said this in 2008?

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Businesses would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that cost onto consumers.”

What? You voted for Obama and the MSM didn’t tell you that he said that? I’m shocked.

News

Who has the better economy? Canada or the USA?

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Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports:

1.2 million Americans have lost their jobs since the $800 billion stimulus package was signed into law.

The stimulus package has directly destroyed tens of thousands of jobs. A provision in the stimulus package that blocked 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads “caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade,” destroying 40,000 American jobs.

It also ignited a trade war with Canada. In response to vague “buy American” provisions in the stimulus package, “A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”

Yet, Obama had the audacity to claim that only passing the stimulus package would save us from “irreversible decline” and economic ““disaster”.

Obama’s policies echo those of Herbert Hoover, who helped spawn the Great Depression through his protectionism and tax increases.

Remember how Democrats used to complain about Bush and his “tax cuts for the rich”? Yeah, it’s strange how only people who pay taxes (59% of the public) can actually get tax cuts, isn’t it. But Obama has an even better idea: “tax hikes for the poor”.

The Washington Post reports on Obama’s new car tax: (H/T Heritage Foundation, Michelle Malkin, Stop the ACLU, Gateway Pundit)

A senior administration official said the new standards would raise the cost of an average car by $1,300, $600 of which could be attributed to the rules being announced today.

This is not to mention the electricity tax (cap and trade), the cigarette tax, taxing employee health care plans, and the rising cost of living caused by protectionism.

On the other hand, let’s take a look at Canada in relation to the United States, courtesy of the Cato Institute. (H/T Heritage Foundation)

The Cato Institute writes:

Spending: Spending by all levels of the Canadian government peaked at 53 percent of the country’s GDP in the early 1990s, then plunged to 40 percent in 2008. U.S. government spending has risen, reaching 39 percent of GDP in 2008. And with the stimulus package, that number is likely to jump even higher.

Government spending as % of GDP
Government spending as % of GDP

Debt: The Canadian government cut its debt from 71 percent of GDP in 1995 to 32 percent in 2008. Under President Obama’s budget plan, U.S. federal public debt will jump from 41 percent of GDP in 2008 to more than 60 percent next year.

Federal debt as % of GDP
Federal debt as % of GDP

Deficits: Canada has balanced its budget every year since 1998 — not by raising taxes, but by cutting spending. The United States balanced its budget for four years in the late 1990s, but now deficits are so large that it’s difficult to imagine that ever happening again.

Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP
Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP

Corporate Taxes: Canada has cut the corporate tax rate from 28 percent to just 15 percent, and most provinces have trimmed corporate taxes as well. The U.S. federalstate rate stands at about 40 percent, and the Obama administration is planning to increase corporate taxes.

Corporate tax rates
Corporate tax rates

It’s important to note that the Liberal party in Canada is socially progressive, but moderate on fiscal issues. Of course, now that the Conservatives have been running things, it’s gotten even better. It would be great if they could win a majority. The biggest problem in Canada right now is the fascist Human Rights Commissions, but there are candidates from the Conservative Party who intend to abolish the HRCs in BC and Ontario.

Polemics

Is morality rational, on atheism?

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UPDATE: Welcome readers from the the Western Experience! Thanks for the link, Jason!

Last week, I posted a list of 13 questions that Christians could use to get discussions going with their atheist friends. We got 10 responses to the questions. Yesterday, we took a look at the minimal requirements for robust, prescriptive morality. Today, we’ll evaluate atheism, as represented by the 10 respondents to the survey, to see whether the minimal requirements are rationally grounded by atheism.

1) Objective moral values: NOT GROUNDED

All ten respondents stated that moral values have no mind-independent existence. In other words, they are purely subjective. Eight of the respondents thought that each person should decide for themselves what is moral for them, and 2 thought that each person should act in accordance with the arbitrary social conventions of the culture where they lived. Those standards change over time and in different places, of course. They are arbitrary.

2) Objective moral duties: NOT GROUNDED

All ten respondents said that there was no such thing as objective moral values, and so there can be no objective moral duties either. Most people said that their own preferences were the source of subjective moral values. But a duty owed to oneself can be canceled when things get difficult. The best attempt was the social contract answer, but this fails because the social contract is arbitrary. There is no reason to limit your happiness because of an arbitrary social contract, so long as you can escape the social consequences of disobedience.

3) Moral accountability: NOT GROUNDED

Nine respondents did not believe in God. The one who did believe said that God did not care about our actions. Therefore, there is no accountability for the decisions we make. So long as we can avoid the consequences for violating the arbitrary fashions of the time and place where we live, nothing will happen to us if we put our happiness above the needs of our feelings of “empathy” for others.

4) Free will: NOT GROUNDED

All ten respondents were materialists, and therefore did not believe in minds or souls independent of the material that makes up the body. Therefore, everything that humans do is fully determined by the genetic programming and the sensory inputs. To expect moral choices or moral responsibility on atheism is like expecting the same from a computer. Physical systems don’t have free will. There is no “ought to do” for lumps of matter that are not designed by anyone for any specific purpose.

5) Ultimate significance: NOT GROUNDED

All ten of the respondents were materialists, so life ends in the grave for them. Scientists have discovered that in the future, the amount of usable energy, such as the heat and light emitted by stars, will run down to zero, the “heat death of the universe”. What this means is that the entire universe will become cold and lifeless at some point. Humans are therefore doomed to extinction no matter how they act.

Conclusion

On atheism, there is no reason for an atheist to constrain his pursuit of happiness. If he does take into account the needs of others because of feelings and emotions (“empathy”), he is acting irrationally. Feelings are not logical arguments. There is no such thing as a “moral” action on atheism, all actions are undertaken for pleasure or personal preference.

In the survey results, none of the ten respondents could oppose slavery on rational grounds, none of the ten respondents could perform self-sacrificial acts on rational grounds, and none of the ten respondents could explain why murder was wrong, on rational grounds. They may have chosen the right alternative, but only based on emotion, not on reason.

As Greg Koukl argues, morality is not rationally grounded on atheism. Now, it is true that atheists act inconsistently in ways that seem to be moral. This is because:

  1. Judeo-Christian morality is still floating around in out Western society, even though it is on the way out due to materialist persecution of public religious expression and the Judeo-Christian theology that grounded morality
  2. Regardless of what materialism says, God made the universe with objective moral values, and humans with free will, so even if people say that morality is relative and that they are machines, they may still act inconsistently to do the right thing, since their views are mistaken, especially if the costs are minimal

But when the heat is really on, they will cave in to their desires. Rational grounding is needed in order to do the right thing when there are consequences for doing the right thing.

Further study

You can get the full story on the requirements for rational morality in a published, peer-reviewed paper written by William Lane Craig here. You can also hear and see him present the paper to an audience of students and faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. The audio is clipped at 67 minutes, the video is the full 84 minutes. There is 45 minutes of Q&A, with many atheist challengers.

The video of this lecture is the best material you can get on this issue, and the Q&A from the hostile audience is vital to the lesson. More debates on atheism and morality can be found on the debate and lecture page.

You can find a post contrasting the morality of an authentic, consistent Christian with an authentic, consistent non-Christian here. A post examining how atheism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million innocent people in the 20th century alone is here. A post analyzing the tiny number of deaths that religion was responsible for is here.