This is Representative John Campbell letting the Democrats have it with both barrels.
I found the video linked on his blog, where he has some advice for how to explain to your neighbors what this budget will really cost taxpayers.
Excerpt:
If you want to see what a 30% tax increase looks like, take your paycheck and multiply the total taxes deducted by 1.3. Then, subtract that from your gross income and that will be close to your new net income. So, if you made $3,000 gross and $2,000 net, you will now only net $1,700. Oh, and that won’t include the cuts your employer has to make in order to pay for their tax increases. By the way, this budget includes all kinds of things that are minor in the grand scheme of things, but big to certain people. For instance, it would repeal the use of the ‘Last In, First Out’ (LIFO) inventory accounting method. This will dramatically raise taxes on all retail businesses who carry inventory.
Gateway Pundit has a list of the top 10 facts about the budget here. On economist Robert P. Murphy’s blog, I found a link to this story in Bloomberg.
Excerpt:
The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.
New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.
Representative John Shadegg has a list of the taxing/spending records that Obama’s budget is breaking in a post on Red County. And remember, the Democrats caused this mess and the Republicans tried to stop them. More details from John Boehner and Mike Pence about what’s in Obama’s budget here. The Republican alternative budget is here.
FedEx Corp. is threatening to cancel the purchase of billions of dollars worth of new Boeing Co. cargo planes if Congress passes a law that would make it easier for unions to organize at the package-delivery company.
A company spokesman said Tuesday that FedEx may cancel plans to buy as many as 30 new Boeing planes should Congress pass a bill that would remove truck drivers, couriers and other employees at FedEx’s Express unit from the jurisdiction of the federal Railway Labor Act of 1926, the law which today also governs labor organizing at U.S. airlines.
I blogged about Obama’s card check bill and its effects here.
This is a follow-up to my previous post on Walter Bradley’s lecture about the scientific evidence for an Creator and Designer of the universe. Dr. Walter L. Bradley (C.V. here) is the Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Baylor, and a great example of the integration of Christian faith and a stellar academic career.
Is there truth in religion?
Another one of Bradley’s lectures is on the question “Is There Objective Truth in Religion?“. In the lecture, he describes a book by Mortimer Adler, called “Truth in Religion”. In the book, Adler makes a distinction between two kinds of “truth”.
Trans-cultural truth – also known as objective truth. This is Adler’s term for the correspondence theory of truth. A claim is true if and only if it is made true by corresponding to the state of affairs in the mind-independent external world. It is irrelevant who makes the claim. The claim is either true or false for everyone, e.g. – “the ice cream is on the table”. Either it is, or it isn’t, for everyone.
Cultural truth – also known as subjective truth. This is Adler’s term for claims that are arbitrarily true for individual and groups of subjects. For example, your personal preference for a certain flavor of ice cream, or the cultural preference for a certain style of dress or cooking. The claim is true for the person or group, e.g. – “I/we prefer chocolate ice cream and wearing tuxedos”.
The question that Bradley addresses in the lecture is: are religious claims trans-cultural truth or cultural truth?
Why do people want to believe that religious truth claims are subjective?
People want to believe that religious truth claims are subjective because religious claims differ, and people lack the courage to tell some group of people that their beliefs about the world are wrong. By reducing religion to personal preference, no one is wrong, because everyone who believes in any religion, or no religion, is just expressing their own personal preferences.
But, if religious truth claims are trans-cultural claims, e.g. – the universe began to exist, then some religions are going to be wrong, because religions disagree about reality. It’s possible that no religion is right, or that one religion is right, but it is not possible that they are all right because there is only one reality shared by all people. Religions make contradictory claims about reality – so they can’t all be true.
Suppose religious claims are trans-cultural? How would you test those claims?
I credit E.J. Carnell with a test for truth that I still use today. It is the same test used by Adler and Bradley.
Logical consistency (the claim cannot violate the law of non-contradiction)
Empirical verification (the claim is verified against the external world)
Adler says that other trans-cultural truth claims, such as those from math and science, must all pass the test for logical consistency, as a minimum. And so with religion, if it is like math and science. Once a proposition passed the test of the law of non-contradiction, then you can proceed to step 2 and see if it is empirically verified.
Adler surveys all the major religions in his book, and concludes that only 3 of them – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – pass the test of the law of non-contradiction. He ends the book by recommending to seekers that they proceed to evaluate the historical claims of these 3 religions, in order to see which if any passes the empirical tests.
Conclusion
Bradley concludes with the claim of the resurrection of Jesus could be investigated using historical methods, in order to decide which of these 3 religions might be true, if any. He also mentions the stories of a few people who performed the investigation and changed their initial opinion of the resurrection in the face of the historical evidence.
WINTERY KNIGHT 