News

Ted Cruz’s roommate at Princeton: Craig Mazin or David Panton?

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David Panton and Ted Cruz do Princeton and Harvard conservative-style
David Panton and Ted Cruz do Princeton and Harvard conservative-style

My Dad asked me last night why Ted Cruz’s roommate doesn’t like him, and I couldn’t understand who he was talking about, because I know that Cruz’s roommate at Princeton and Harvard is a big success and a great friend of Ted Cruz.

A little research resolved the issue. Ted Cruz had a liberal artist / comedian roommate from Brooklyn, NY in his first year at Princeton, and then a black conservative roommate from Jamaica as a roommate for his remaining years at Princeton and then again at Harvard Law School.

Here is an article in the Jamaica Observer about the second roommate from 2015.

It says:

AS Jamaica welcomes US President Barack Obama on his first visit to the island, former Jamaica Labour Party senator David Panton is backing Republican candidate Ted Cruz to become the next American president.

Republican senator Cruz became the first US politician to announce his candidacy for the American presidency recently. Widely viewed as an ultra-conservative, he has the full support of his close friend, Panton — now chairman of his own PCH holdings, an investment company based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Outside of politics, Obama, Cruz and Panton all share at least one thing in common — they worked for the prestigious and influential Harvard Law Review. Obama was the first black president of that institution, while Panton was the second, and Cruz was a primary editor.

“I support Ted’s candidacy not only because of our close friendship, but because I believe he has the bold, consistent, principled leadership that America needs. He is also the most brilliant person I know,” Panton told the Jamaica Observer.

Politically, Panton has donated more than US$150,000 to Cruz in various capacities — when he was running for the Senate, and to support his bid for the presidency.

Panton, a former Rhodes Scholar and the first head of Generation 2000 (G2K), the group of young professionals affiliated with the JLP, believes that much of what the media has reported about Cruz is wrong.

Cruz and Panton started their friendship decades ago, when they were roommates first at Princeton University in New Jersey (for four years) and then at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (for one year).

The two were also debate partners, and were named the number one team for the American Parliamentary Debate Association, with Cruz declared the number one speaker and Panton number two.

At Princeton, both were involved in student politics. Panton first entered student politics at Belair School in Mandeville where he won election as president of the student council. He built upon that victory at Princeton, by winning election as the president of the Undergraduate Student Government. Meanwhile, Cruz was chairman of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC), where we worked closely on undergraduate student affairs.

Cruz was also elected president of the Cliosophic Society, a conservative political organisation at Princeton, and appointed Panton as his whip (deputy). Both worked closely on conservative politics on campus.

As President Obama gets ready for his first visit, Cruz has visited Jamaica on several occasions — including as the guest speaker for a G2K event, where former Prime Minister Edward Seaga was present, and also spoke.

Cruz also attended the wedding of Panton to current minister of youth, Lisa Hanna. Cruz is godfather to their son, Alexander, and he came to Jamaica to attend the christening. Panton was Cruz’s best man at his wedding to Heidi Cruz.

Cruz has also invested in Jamaica, and was a partner in the firm that Panton, Nigel Clarke, and Jeffrey Hall formed to invest in the Caribbean.

“I speak with, and see Ted frequently as a close friend, but deliberately do not discuss his campaign strategy,” Panton told the Business Observer.

“As an active supporter of a SuperPac that supports him, I am not able to discuss campaign strategy with him.

“Unlike the media portrayal of him as a firebrand, Ted is one of the kindest and most caring people I know. He cares deeply about other people and making a difference in their lives, as he did in mine, as a loyal friend, strong supporter, and committed mentor.

“When I was elected as president of the Harvard Law Review, my first call was not to my parents or family members, but to Ted, who at the time was clerking for Judge Michael Luttig, prior to his clerkship on the Supreme Court, as the first Hispanic clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist,” Panton said.

Although the first out of the blocks, Cruz currently has an approval rating of only about two per cent among the presumed Republican candidates. But that in itself may not overly concern him, as when Cruz ran for senator in Texas, he was also at two per cent in the polls — and joked that the margin of error was three per cent.

Cruz ran against the establishment, his opponent being David Dewhurst — the multi-millionaire incumbent lieutenant governor of Texas, who was endorsed by the governor, Rick Perry, and most of the Republican establishment in Texas.

But, like Obama, Cruz ran a grassroots campaign that focused on the base, and, even though he was heavily outspent, he defeated Dewhurst in a run-off by 14 points and won the general election by 26 points.

During that election he received about 40 per cent of the Latino vote on the same ballot where Latinos gave then-candidate Mitt Romney 27 per cent of their vote.

“I believe that — like when the voters of Texas got to know Ted, the person, not the caricature — the American people will also eventually recognise that as a Hispanic with a Cuban father who fled oppression, and as a principled, experienced, eloquent advocate for the Constitution, he has the background, skills, and abilities to be an outstanding president of the United States,” Panton said.

So, who is the roommate we should care about? The Hollywood liberal who tweets vulgarities at a third-grade level against a sitting U.S. senator and candidate for President? Or should we care more about the close friendship of the black conservative from Jamaica, who has a stellar education and career in areas that actually matter.

Hollywood is a clown industry. People dress up in costumes, and recite make-believe in order to entertain. We should not care what a little liberal perverted clown from Hollywood thinks of Ted Cruz. But we should care about what a black conservative immigrant who achieved great success thinks of Ted Cruz.

Commentary

Is it brave to quote the Bible to atheists who want to silence you?

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C.S. Lewis has some words to live by for you
C.S. Lewis has some words to live by for you

I was asked by a commenter whether my advice in a previous post was mistaken. I advised people not to make comments on issues under their real names, where the opposition is irrational and dangerous. I said that you should use an alias so that you can write frequently and effectively about controversial issues, without being subject to threats, intimidation, vandalism, violence, loss of employment etc. – common tactics of the unthinking mobs on the secular left.

So here is what I replied to him in a comment:

I didn’t advise people to be silent at all. Obviously, I have been blogging on this issue for the last 7 years – before it ever entered the radar of most Christians. So I haven’t been silent. I have blogged debate summaries, secular arguments against same-sex marriage, horror stories about gay adoption and child abuse, peer-reviewed papers about the impact of no-mom or no-dad parenting, CDC health data about HIV and STIs, the impact of donor-conception on children, specific laws related to the gay agenda, and every specific case where Christian business owners were punished – in America and across the world.

My alias has given me protection from the bad guys so that I could be FAR more productive and effective than the Bible-quoters who jump up in front of machine guns and call that feelings-driven irresponsibility “piety”. When did being INEFFECTIVE become a Christian virtue? Seems to me that people who address the issues of the day by repeating Bible verses to people who don’t accept the Bible aren’t being effective. My goal is to reach more people with arguments they will actually change their minds. My blog post on a secular case against same sex marriage was linked by the Secular Outpost, a major atheist blog – THOSE are the people we need to be reaching. And so what if they were offended? Because of my alias, they couldn’t get me.

Christianity is about making a difference. It is not about being feeling holier-than-thou. It’s about defending Christ’s honor effectively and efficiently. It’s about getting the job done.

Here is what doesn’t work: e-mailing Bible verses to the Human Rights Campaign along with the name of your employer and your home address. That will get you out of the game really fast. What does work is doing what Ryan T. Anderson is doing – getting a PhD and debating the issue with professors on college campuses. Or you could get a law degree and fight out the issue at the supreme court. But trying to spout Bible verses to people who don’t believe the Bible who can then get you fired is not the answer – that doesn’t work.

Suppose we are playing baseball. Your team is down by 1 run and there is a runner on third and no outs. Suppose you go up to the plate and swing for the fences at the first three pitches that the pitcher throws – all of which were obvious unhittable. You get out and you hurt your team. I guess you could brag later about “I would never do anything other than try to hit a home run every time” and then claim that those who didn’t were cowards. But that wouldn’t change the fact that you would be out and you would have let your team down.

Similarly, when you are on your own 20 yard line, down by 6 with 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter, you don’t get out on the field and throw four hail mary passes and then turn the ball over on downs. Expecting Jesus to bail you out when you act recklessly doesn’t work in any area of life.

The best thing is to be intelligent. What should I study to help Jesus that will work? What job should I get to help Jesus that will work? How can I have an influence to help Jesus that will work? Doing what feels good and expecting a bailout is reckless and doesn’t do anything to help Jesus. When you hand the other side your employer and your place of business and your home address, you are handing them things that they can use to hurt you. Why would you let them have something they can use to stop you from having an influence, when you can withhold that information and strike at them with impunity? These are not difficult things for a rational person to understand.

Frankly, I am at the point now where I view the spouting of Bible verses to dangerous, destructive people as a mental disorder, as much as I would view it as a mental disorder if someone decided to travel to North Korea and do street evangelism. I would urge all the Bible-quoting martyr wannabes to prove their bravery to me by doing that, if they think that the point of Christianity is to be feelings-led and reckless about the consequences of actions. Or maybe they can travel to Saudi Arabia and evangelize the people there. On the bible-quoting rule, to not do this is “cowardice”. I think we are reaching the point where the sexual revolutionaries are just as dangerous as militant atheists in North Korea, or radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia.

Studying all of these issues the way I do and then writing about them costs me about 3-4 hours a night – and that’s every day that I’ve been writing this blog. I have had 6.2 million hits in 7 years of writing. My goal is to influence people to make better decisions. And I think I’ve been able to be more effective at doing that when I don’t hand my enemies personal information that they can use to neutralize my influence. Why would I make it easy for them to stop me from having an influence? No Christian should deny Christ when asked directly. But that doesn’t mean that you should make it easy for them to destroy you.

News

How exposed is your state to the problem of underfunded pensions?

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I am thinking about moving to a new state in the future, and one of the factors I am considering is underfunded pension liabilities. This basically refers to the ability of a state to pay out pensions to retiring public sector employees going forward. I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to solve this problem in this post.

First, Investors Business Daily explains the problem:

A new report by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Joshua Rauh shows that, unless action is taken soon, many local governments could face bankruptcy because they can’t meet their pension obligations.

[…]The problem is surprisingly simple: States and cities overestimate returns on their pension fund investments, while systematically underfunding them. The result is a growing deficit that will require massive tax hikes or dramatic and painful cuts in government services and promised pensions to public workers.

Rauh’s study looked at 564 state and local pension systems, representing $4.8 trillion in pension liabilities and $3.6 trillion in assets — for an apparent current deficit of just $1.19 trillion.

So far, so good. But Rauh notes the average expected return on pension assets is about 7.6% — which means a doubling every 9.5 years. He calls that assumption “wildly optimistic,” and says a more realistic assumption would be the Treasury bond rate of 3% or lower — less than half the expected return.

Unless pension managers, politicians and voters do something now, the unfunded liabilities of the national system will continue to grow out of control, reaching $3.4 trillion in just 10 years. States and cities across the country would have to raise taxes massively to keep from becoming insolvent.

Right now, state and local governments set aside about 7.3% of revenues for public pensions. To keep the funding gap from exploding and taking down governments across the nation, pension spending would have to rise to  17.5% of revenues on average — roughly equal to a 240% tax increase.

How did things get so bad? Generations of feckless politicians have refused to face down public employee unions, which have negotiated massively expensive pensions for their members while concealing their true cost. Politicians have gone along with it because, heck, it’s not their money and anyway, the problems will take place long after they’re out of office. That’s where we are now.

States and cities will come under intense pressure to raise taxes on local citizens to pay for this travesty. Instead, they should get rid of the public employee unions that have plundered the public for too long and have made local government inefficient, expensive and dysfunctional. If not, they can expect to face the same economy-crippling effects as Detroit, San Bernardino and a number of other cities have — financial insolvency.

Now, obviously states with kick-ass governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin are not going to have the same exposure to such problems as incompetent governors like Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. Scott Walker know how to rein in public sector unions.

Let’s get the numbers to confirm this hypothesis.

Bloomberg has the numbers:

Bloomberg ranked 49 U.S. states based on their pension funding ratios in 2014 under GASB 25. (Delaware is not included because of insufficient data for GASB 25.)

Here are the best states… Wisconsin is 100% funded:

States with the best-funded pension liiabilities
States with the best-funded pension liiabilities

And actually there is a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal solvency of all the states right here from George Mason University.

Here’s the map:

Overall fiscal solvency by state
Overall fiscal solvency by state

I notice that the deep blue states like California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, etc. are just horrible states. No wonder everyone is fleeing them in droves. Socialism doesn’t work. Eventually, the money runs out.

So, if you’re thinking of moving to a new state, look at that. And if you don’t want to move, then vote for governors like Scott Walker who will take on public sector unions – otherwise, you’re headed for a big tax hike in the future, to pay for the big spending liberals of the past.