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Eight years of socialism: more debt, more regulation, fewer Americans working:

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Has the economy been doing well lately? When I ask Democrats that question, they often point me to the stock market. I know that the stock market has done very well in the last 8 years. But I really question which Democrat policies have been responsible for this winfall.

Certainly, policies like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, green energy subsidies, blocking Keystone XL, creating a student loan bubble, and even loosening mortgage lending again to create another housing bubble, cannot cause any economics growth. My personal opinion is that all the growth came from adding over $10 trillion dollars to the debt – a process that started with the election of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the House and Senate majorities, respectively, in 2007.

Look at the national debt:

Gross public debt, Democrats control spending in 2007
Gross public debt, Democrats control spending starting in 2007

If you add $10 trillion to the national debt in 8 years then OF COURSE the stock prices will go up. You would look richer too if you took your credit card balance from $8,500 to $18,500. But what is behind all this consumer spending and government spending? Just trillions of dollars of new debt.

I think a better measure of how the economy is doing is to ask job creators how it is doing. For example, we can ask small businesses, since they are responsible for so much of the job creation in this economy.

Here’s an article from the Daily Signal about that.

It says:

More than five years after the end of the “Great Recession,” only 21 percent of small businesses* say they have fully recovered. During the recession, lack of sales ranked as the top problem small business faced. Taxes placed second, and “government regulations and red tape” placed third. And since 2012, at least one in five small business owners identify government regulations as their most important problem.

The reason for this is simple—small business owners directly feel the impact of federal regulation in the daily life of their businesses. The small business owner is often the main person in a business who bears the burden of complying with regulations and paperwork requirements. According to a 2010 study, small businesses spend $10,585 per employee on regulation, which amounts to 36 percent more per employee than larger companies spend.

With that as a backdrop, it is easy to see how small business owners continue to wonder why Washington just does not get it when it comes to regulation. For decades, Congress has sought to solve societal problems through mandates on business. Too many Americans without health insurance? Congress tries to solve that by requiring businesses to provide health insurance to their employees (regardless of whether or not they can afford it) or pay hefty penalties. Too many Americans unable to care for a sick relative? Congress seeks to address that by mandating that a business keep a position open three months out of every year for qualified employees, using a cumbersome reporting system.

Always entrepreneurial, with a keen focus on the bottom line, the American small business owner looks for ways to minimize the time and money spent on things other than running his or her business. Since many of these regulations wisely exempt the smallest of small businesses, some employers purposefully do not increase hiring because they do not want to have to comply with the regulatory regimes that await businesses that expand to 10, 15, and 50 or more employees.

This might be why the labor force participation rate is at a 38-year low.

CNS News explains:

A record 94,031,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month — 261,000 more than July — and the labor force participation rate stayed stuck at 62.6 percent, a 38-year low, for a third straight month in August, the Labor Department reported on Friday, as the nation heads into the Labor Day weekend.

[…]In August, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 251,096,000. Of those, 157,065,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 157,065,000 who participated in the labor force equaled only 62.6 percent of the 251,096,000 civilian noninstitutional population — the same as it was in July and June. Not since October 1977, when the participation rate dropped to 62.4, has the percentage been this low.

So… do you still think that the economy is in good shape? Any economy is going to look better if you take an $8.5 trillion debt and run it up to $18.5 trillion. But if you look a little closer, you see that small businesses are hard-pressed, and it’s affected the real unemployment rate.

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How same-sex marriage will be used as a weapon against religious conservatives

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

This Public Discourse article talks about the new “Equality Act” proposed by Democrats who are anxious to destroy Judeo-Christian values by using the government as a weapon against faith-based organizations, and individuals.

Excerpt:

So, in concrete terms, what would the proposed law do? Here are just a few of the potential areas of impact, given how the Equality Act would amend various provisions of the Civil Rights Act:

– Employment: would amend Title VII to create new protected classes for “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” with no countervailing exemptions for faith-based organizations that maintain internal standards of sexual conduct rooted in longstanding religious tenets.

– Federal Programs: would amend Title VI, historically limited to race, color, and national origin, to create new protected classes for “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity,” with no countervailing protections for faith-based providers who willingly serve every program-eligible person but maintain internal standards of sexual conduct rooted in longstanding religious tenets.

– Public Accommodation: would drastically expand the Title II definition of “public accommodation” to cover “gatherings” and facilities historically owned and operated by churches or religious organizations—“shelters,” “food banks,” and “care centers”—extending far beyond the categories at issue during the Civil Rights Movement: common carriers (bus, taxi, train, and air lines), public utilities, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues.

– Public Education: would amend Title IV definitions of “desegregation” to include new protected classes for “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” placing in the litigation crosshairs all sex-restricted facilities like dormitories, restrooms, or locker rooms.

– Religious Freedom Restoration Act: would omit exemptions for religious organizations contained in prior drafts of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and expressly state that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) may not be used as a defense or a basis for challenging the Equality Act.

– Sex: would enter a congressional finding that “federal agencies and courts have correctly interpreted [] prohibitions on sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes,” thereby adopting the EEOC’s most aggressively extra-textual recent rulings.

– Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications: would amend Title VII exemptions for employers who have sex-based “bona fide occupational qualifications” (BFOQ) for specialized jobs—for example, male security guards in a maximum security prison or female undercover officers in a sex-trafficking sting operation—to require recognition of persons “in accordance with their gender identity.”

Unlike ENDA, the Equality Act does not even feign an equal balancing of sexual liberty and religious liberty. Like some voracious legal Pac-Man, the Obergefell-fueled Equality Act devours any preexisting constitutional rights that might impede absolute victory in the march for “marriage equality”: speech, association, assembly, and the free exercise of religion. The Equality Act boldly declares that some constitutional rights are “more equal than others.”

It seems like every day I am getting a messages from some Christian friend about how his or her co-workers, family or friends are attacking the traditional definition of marriage. And I tell them not to respond directly, but to instead write about it under an alias. It seems like we can no longer even speak in defense of traditional marriage without running into all kinds of legal problems from people who are “offended”. Somehow, their offending us with their view doesn’t draw any ire from the law. But the reverse is not true – it’s open season on pre-sexual-revolution views of dating, sex and marriage.

Marriage is something I really believe in, and have always believed in. And I don’t mean the new post-sexual-revolution definition of marriage. I mean the traditional view of marriage: chastity, courting, commitment, fidelity, parenting. It seems really obvious to me that marriage is something beautiful, something that is above our selfish desires, something that helps us to grow and love someone of a complementary nature self-sacrificially. There is a mystery in the way that a man and woman come together to make children and then raise them, balancing out their different male and female natures for a common purpose. But if I say anything like that in public under my real name in so many places where the topic comes up, then suddenly I would get into so much trouble.

We really need to be focused about restoring our freedom to express our support for traditional marriage, and the natural family in public.

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Donald Trump should be running as a Democrat, he has no conservative views

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Donald Trump should stick to Miss Universe pageants
Donald Trump should stick to Miss Universe pageants

I’ve been trying not to pay attention to the fact that a leftist is leading the Republican primary. You see, I’m actually familiar with Trump’s previous positions on things like taxes (he’s for raising them), partial-birth abortion, i.e. – infanticide (he supports it), amnesty (he’s for that), government-run health care (he’s for it)… and so on. In fact, Donald Trump’s record is not conservative on a single issue. He has never advocated for conservative policies. Not one. He’s a leftist, through and through.

What this 90-second video, showing Trump in his own words:

Leftist clowns like him do not change their positions short of some serious study, and there is no evidence that he has studied a thing.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg writing in National Review to express how frustrating it is to people like me who prefer conservative candidates who have actual records of achievement on conservative issues.

Jonah says:

Yes, I know Trump has declared himself pro-life. Good for him — and congratulations to the pro-life movement for making that the price of admission. But I’m at a total loss to understand why serious pro-lifers take him at his word. He’s been all over the place on Planned Parenthood, and when asked who he’d like to put on the Supreme Court, he named his pro-choice-extremist sister.

Is that real? Yes, you can read about it here. Trump has no pro-life record. You cannot believe anything that a person running for office says during his campaign speeches. We already had that happen when Obama promised so many things in speeches that he never delivered on. And yet here we are in a GOP primary and a bunch of lazy Republican voters are just believing everything that a candidate says, and not looking at his actual record.

More from Jonah:

In his embarrassing interview with Hugh Hewitt last night, Trump revealed he knows less than most halfway-decent D.C. interns about foreign policy. Twitter lit up with responses about how it doesn’t matter and how it was a gotcha interview. They think that Trump’s claim that he’ll just go find a Douglas MacArthur to fix the problem is brilliant. Well, I’m all in favor of finding a Douglas MacArthur, but if you don’t know anything about foreign policy, the interview process will be a complete disaster. Yes, Reagan delegated. But he knew enough to know to whom to delegate.

Yeah, guess what? A clown like Donald Trump knows nothing about foreign policy. He could not tell the difference between Iran’s Quds force and the Kurds in northern Iraq. I am only a software engineer, and even I have blogged about the Quds force, and their leader many, many times. I understand that lay people don’t need to know about the Quds force, or the threat they pose to us, but presidential candidates do need to know. Trump’s ignorance on national security and foreign policy ought to terrify us. We can’t afford to elect someone completely unqualified.

More from Jonah:

If you want a really good sense of the damage Donald Trump is doing to conservatism, consider the fact that for the last five years no issue has united the Right more than opposition to Obamacare. Opposition to socialized medicine in general has been a core tenet of American conservatism from Day One. Yet, when Republicans were told that Donald Trump favors single-payer health care, support for single-payer health care jumped from 16 percent to 44 percent.

I blogged before about the horrors of government-run health care in Canada and the UK. And yet the TV-watching clowns who support Trump cannot be bothered to look at the research. If Trump praises single-payer health care (and he has), does that one sentence from a clown override the good, solid data from studies? Are Republican voters too busy watching TV to do any research? Or do we just accept whatever a “confident” clown tells us without looking at the evidence for ourselves? Can facts be established by a clown’s confident words?

You know, I really thought that we were electing the leader of the free world here. Someone who has a record of moving laws and policies that solve the actual problems we are facing: Iran nuclear weapons, loss of religious liberty, abortion, gay marriage, demographic crisis, $18.5 trillion dollar debt, record low labor force participation, aging ballistic missile submarine fleet, only 10 carrier strike groups, aggression from Iran, Russia and China, rising health care costs, rising tuition costs, poorly-educated young Americans who can’t find work, aging Minuteman ICBMs, declining entrepreneurship because of over-regulation, Obamacare, Social Security funding, Medicare funding, welfare reform, Keystone pipeline, and on and on and on. I didn’t realize that we were so pleased with the last incompetent comedian we elected that we want to elect another one. Is this a serious country? Or do we think that presidential elections are for our amusement?

I really recommend that you take a look at this article from the leftist Washington Post, which looks over some of Trump’s past words, past actions, and past affiliations. In it, you will find that Trump does not have any record of achievements as a Republican. He just hasn’t moved the conservative ball forward in any way, shape or form.

Look:

Abortion

Then: On “Meet The Press” in 1999, Trump said he was “very pro-choice.” “I hate the concept of abortion,” he said. “I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. … but I just believe in choice.”
Now: In an interview with Bloomberg Politics in January, Trump said, “I’m pro-life and I have been pro-life.” He said he believed there should be exceptions in cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother.

Healthcare

Then: In an interview with Larry King in 1999, Trump said he was “very liberal when it comes to health care” and that he believes in “universal healthcare.”
Now: During his announcement, he called Obamacare “a disaster called the big lie” and said the deductibles were so high they were “virtually useless.”

Hillary Clinton

Then: Either Trump or his son donated to Clinton in 2002, 2005, 2006 and 2007, he invited her to his 2005 wedding in Florida, where she sat front row, and he’s donated at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. He also said in an appearance on the Howard Stern show in the mid-2000s that she was a fantastic senator.
Now: On NBC on Wednesday, he called Clinton “the worst secretary of state in the history of our nation” and said she would be “a terrible president.”

The Stream has an article talking about where candidates stand on de-funding of Planned Parenthood. All the Republican candidates who have addressed the issue are either clearly for de-funding Planned Parenthood (Cruz, Carson, Fiorina, etc.), or even better – they’ve actually done it as governor (e.g. – Jindal, Walker, Perry, Bush, etc.). Trump is the only one who has waffled on the issue, which is not surprising given his past statements on abortion. Republican voters – there is a huge difference between “I de-funded Planned Parenthood as governor” and clowning in front of cameras. When assessing candidates, we have to look at the past record of the candidates, not their words during a campaign.