Illegal immigrants will receive huge payments from American taxpayers under rules now being imposed by President Barack Obama’s unilateral amnesty.
The illegals will get work-permits and Social Security cards, and will be required to pay taxes, according to Cecilia Munoz, the former immigration lobbyist who is now a top Obama aide.
That means they’re part of the tax system, she said, when she was asked if the illegals would get annual payments under the Earned Income Tax Credit program.
“They are subject to our tax law,” she said, carefully.
Most households of illegals have very low income, and pay little in taxes. For example, in 2011, roughly 22 percent of immigrant households — both legal and illegal — were classified as living in poverty. In contrast, only 13 percent of American households were in poverty.
However, once illegal immigrants are enrolled in the tax system, they would be entitled to EITC payments.
The payments may be huge, and will rise each year.
According to the Internal Revenue Service, two parents with three or more children would receive up to $6,143 in 2014 if they earn less than $46,997.
A family with two kids, and an income of $20,000, would receive $14,590 in taxpayer funds this year alone.
Parents who earn less than the threshold would get $3,305 if they have one child, and $5,460 if they have two children.
The EITC program is already poorly monitored and may be subject to large amounts of fraud, according to critics.
Who is Cecilia Munoz? She used to work for “La Raza” for 20 years. La Raza means “The Race” in Spanish. They are a pro-amnesty group.
You would think that the Democrats would use their own money to bribe people to vote Democrat, but they would rather use yours. That’s what Obama was talking about when he talked about how society is better when he spreads the wealth around. You didn’t need that money you earned for anything, did you? Obama needs to spread it around to people who haven’t worked for it.
It all sounds so compassionate until somebody loses their job or can’t afford to provide for their own families with money they earned.
Roman Catholic marriage defender Sherif Giris speaks to about 1500 Southern Baptists at the 2014 ERLC National Conference on “The Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage.” This is a very good introduction to the defense of marriage.
Topics:
his experience doing formal debates on the definition of marriage in the most liberal universities
the gay marriage side has no argument for redefining marriage it’s all emotions
on their view, what makes a marriage is a strong emotional bond
however their view does not rationally ground any of traditional marriage norms
it does not rationally ground the norm of marriage being permanent
it does not rationally ground the norm of marriage being sexually exclusive
it does not rationally ground the norm of marriage being for only two people
it does not rationally ground the norm of marriage involving sexual activity
it does not rationally ground the norm of marriage involving a connection to family life
if we redefine marriage to mean “emotional bond” all these features are not essential
the community of marriage involves cooperation: common actions towards a common end in a context of commitment
marriage unites two people at all levels
it unites them sexually for purpose: not for feelings, but for reproduction
the sexual act in marriage is oriented to generating family life, which requires commitment
family life leads naturally into the norms of permanence and exclusivity
the redefined view of marriage as emotional bonding is opposed to all of this
we can see the priorities of the redefiners in their support for no-fault divorce
they we acting on their view of making marriage about emotional fulfillment
they pushed by saying “how would no-fault divorce affect your marriage?”
no-fault divorce was the first marriage redefinition and it undermined permanence
it affected the entire community – a generation of kids raised without father
it causes a host of problems to kids, crime, lower test scores, earlier sexual activity, etc.
this is why marriage matters – to give children what they need
defending marriage as part of the Christian life
we have to understand the motives of the marriage redefiners and addressing their needs
I think it’s a good point to bring up no-fault divorce to show us how people on the secular left who want a more adult-friendly definition of marriage do their redefining at the expense of children. If this life is the only one you have, and there is no design for how humans ought to be, then it makes a lot of sense to maximize your own freedom and view your children as competitors against your happiness. Or, maybe you lie to yourself and say that fatherlessness and instability doesn’t really hurt children, because “children are resilient”.
The capacity for humans to deceive themselves when it comes to having freedom to “be happy” knows no bounds. It falls to us as Christians, then, to speak out for children – born and unborn. We are the only ones who still believe that in a conflict between adult selfishness and a child’s rights, that the child’s rights should win out. Children are not commodities, and there are more important things than our own happiness to consider. There are more important things than appearing “nice” to our peers to consider.
Basically, there was an atheist who challenged the idea that nature is designed because there are things in nature which cause suffering, like earthquakes and volcanoes.
Now the first thing to note is that atheists commonly think that God’s job is to make humans happy. If he doesn’t make humans feel happy – regardless of their knowledge of him and relationship with him – then he is a big failure. Many atheists think that, it is one of the most common reasons why people become atheists. But of course anyone who reads the Bible and reads the story of Jesus knows that the purpose of life on God’s view is for humans to know him and to be disciples of a suffering Messiah who sacrifices himself in order to obey God the Father. So that’s the first thing to say – purpose of life not happiness, but knowledge of God and being a disciple of Jesus. This may involve all kinds of suffering, and that’s to be expected.
Second, there is a response to the problem of evil based on the necessity of natural laws. The argument goes that you can’t have genuine morality without a predictable, knowable system of natural laws.
But I want to talk about something different in this post. In the video, Dr. Rana thinks that many of the things that cause suffering in the natural world are actually necessary for life to exist at all. He provides the example of plate tectonics in his video above, and I want to take that one and add to it the example of heavy element production and the stellar lifecycle. These are both from a book called “Rare Earth”, which is written by two non-Christians – Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, but I’ll link to web sites to make the case.
Plate tectonics.
Here’s an article from Reasons to Believe by Dr. David Rogstad, who has a PhD in physics from Caltech – the top school for experimental science. The article not only goes over the basic plate tectonics to carbonate-silicate cycle connection, but it adds a newer discovery to boot.
Excerpt:
Earthquakes are a byproduct of plate tectonics, a theory in geology developed in recent years for explaining motions near the surface of the Earth. One of the benefits from plate tectonics is that Earth maintains the right levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to compensate for the Sun’s increasing luminosity. This is accomplished by what is called the carbonate-silicate cycle. CO2 is removed from the atmosphere through weathering. The weathered products are eventually drawn into the Earth’s interior via plate tectonics. Processes inside the Earth’s interior release the CO2 back into the atmosphere via volcanoes. While all aspects of this mechanism are not yet fully understood, it has been instrumental in providing a stable environment for life on the Earth for billions of years.
New research provides yet another component that appears fine-tuned for life. In a letter in the September 27, 2007 issue of Nature together with a corresponding news release from the University of Bonn, Arno Rohrbach and his colleagues have discussed another mechanism similar to the carbonate-silicate cycle. It also depends on plate tectonics but, in this case, the mechanism controls the amount of oxygen on the surface of the Earth.
Oxygen becomes bound up in various oxides which are then drawn into the Earth’s interior, where various processes result in its being incorporated into an exotic mineral called majorite. The results reported in this letter established that majorite functions as a kind of “reservoir” for oxygen, and when the majorite ascends nearer to the surface of the Earth it breaks down and releases its oxygen. Some of this oxygen also binds with hydrogen released from the interior of the Earth to form water. The authors have referred to the whole process as an “oxygen elevator.”
They go on to say that “without the ‘oxygen elevator’ in its mantle the Earth would probably be a barren planet hostile to life. According to our findings, planets below a certain size hardly have any chance of forming a stable atmosphere with a high water content.”
This research confirms the existence of one more finely tuned mechanism that depends on plate tectonics and contributes to an environment that can support life. It also gives humans one more reason to be appreciative rather than dismayed when we experience an earthquake that breaks some precious possessions beyond repair.
Astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross who has a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Toronto and did a 5-year post-doctoral work at Caltech, adds to this with another discovery.
Excerpt:
In the December 2007 issue of Astrobiology Stanford University geophysicists Norman H. Sleep and Mark D. Zoback note that the higher tectonic activity during Earth’s early history could have played a key role in cycling critically important nutrients and energy sources for life. The production of numerous small faults in the brittle primordial crust released trapped nutrients. Such faults could also release pockets of methane gas and molecular hydrogen. The methane and hydrogen could then provide crucial energy sources for nonphotosynthetic life. Finally, the production of faults could bring water to otherwise arid habitats, such as rocks far below Earth’s surface.
Faulting, generated by active and widespread tectonics, allowed a youthful Earth to support diverse and abundant life. This enhanced diversity and abundance of life quickly transformed Earth’s surface into an environment safe for advanced life. Also, the buildup of biodeposits for the support of human civilization occurred more rapidly due to active tectonics.
The more rapid preparation of Earth for humanity is critical. Without such rapid preparation, humans could not come upon the terrestrial scene before the Sun’s increasing luminosity would make their presence impossible (due to excessive heat).
So that’s the science behind earthquakes. So that’s a brief look at why we need plate tectonics for life, and we just have to buck up and take the earthquakes with it. It’s not God’s job to give us happiness and health. That’s not his plan. People who complain about earthquakes have to show how God could get the life-permitting effects of earthquakes without wrecking his ability to succeed in his plan to make people know him and follow him. But how can an atheist do that? They can’t. I think that people just need to realize that humans are not in charge here and we have to live with that. We have to accept that we didn’t make the universe, and we don’t get to decide what purpose it has. God decides.
On to star formation.
Star formation
Atheists often complain that the universe is too big or too old (which is actually the same thing, since the more time passes, the more it expands). The fact of the matter is that life appeared the earliest it could appear – we needed the universe to be a certain age before it could support life.
The second parameter of the universe to be measured was its age. For many decades astronomers and others have wondered why, given God exists, He would wait so many billions of years to make life. Why did He not do it right away? The answer is that, given the laws and constants of physics God chose to create, it takes about ten to twelve billion years just to fuse enough heavy elements in the nuclear furnaces of several generations of giant stars to make life chemistry possible.
Life could not happen any earlier in the universe than it did on Earth. Nor could it happen much later. As the universe ages, stars like the sun located in the right part of the galaxy for life (see chapter 15) and in a stable nuclear burning phase become increasingly rare. If the universe were just a few billion years older, such stars would no longer exist.
The trick for getting from helium to the generation of planets, and ultimately to life, was the formation of carbon, the key element for the success of life and for the production of heavy elements in stars. Carbon could not form in the early moments following the Big Bang, because the density of the expanding mass was too low for the necessary collisions to occur. Carbon formation had to await the creation of giant red stars, whose dense interiors are massive enough to allow such collisions. Because stars become red giants only in the last 10% of their lifetimes (when they have used up much of the hydrogen in their cores), there was no carbon in the Universe for hundreds of millions to several billion years after the Big Bang—and hence no life as we know it for that interval of time.
[…]The sequence of element production in the Big Bang and in stars provided not only the elements necessary for the formation of Earth and the other terrestrial planets but also all of the elements critical for life—those actually needed to form living organisms and their habitats.
[…]The processes that occurred during the billions of years of Earth’s “prehistory” when its elements were produced are generally well understood. Elements are produced within stars; some are released back into space and are recycled into and out of generations of new stars. When the sun and its planets formed, they were just a random sampling of this generated and reprocessed material. Nevertheless, it is believed that the “cosmic abundance” mix of the chemical elements—the elemental composition of the sun—is representative of the building material of most stars and planets, with the major variation being the ratio of hydrogen to heavy elements.
[…]Many stars are similar in composition, but there is variation, mainly in the abundance of the heavier Earth-forming elements relative to hydrogen and helium. The sun is in fact somewhat peculiar in that it contains about 25% more heavy elements than typical nearby stars of similar mass. In extremely old stars, the abundance of heavy elements, may be as low as a thousandth of that in the sun. Abundance of heavy elements is roughly correlated with age. As time passed, the heavy-element content of the Universe as a whole increased, so newly formed stars are on the average more “enriched” in heavy elements than older ones.
[…]The matter produced in the Big Bang was enriched in heavier elements by cycling in and out of stars. Like biological entities, stars form, evolve, and die. In the process of their death, stars ultimately become compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or even black holes. On their evolutionary paths to these ends, they eject matter back into space, where it is recycled and further enriched in heavy elements. New stars rise from the ashes of the old. This is why we say that each of the individual atoms in Earth and in all of its creatures—including us—has occupied the interior of at least a few different stars.
What he’s saying is that heavy elements are created gradually because of the star formation lifecycle. The first generation of stars are metal-poor. The next generation of stars is better. And so on until we get to stars that can support life by providing a steady, stable amount of energy – as well as other benefits like planets with an atmosphere. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is about 14 billion years old. Simple life appears about 4 billion years ago on Earth. That means we got life practically immediately, given that we had to develop the heavy elements needed to make a life-supporting star, a life-supporting planet and our physical bodies.
WINTERY KNIGHT 