Why are we in a recession? Maybe it’s because the people running the country believe that unemployment checks and welfare are better than earned paychecks for “stimulating” the economy.
Here’s CNS News to explain what Democrats are trying to achieve:
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that food stamps and unemployment insurance are the two “most stimulative” things you can do for the economy.
During a pen and pad briefing with reporters on Capitol Hill, Hoyer was asked if any Democrats are “reconsidering the wisdom” of letting the Bush tax cuts expire at year’s end for the top income earners given the still struggling U.S. economy.
“I haven’t talked to any who are of that mind,” said Hoyer. “If you talk to economists, they will tell you there are two things that are the most stimulative that you can do — one’s unemployment insurance, the other’s food stamps, okay?”
“Why is that?” he said. “Because those folks who receive those resources must spend them. And they’ll spend them almost upon receipt. Most economists with whom I talk believe that those with significant discretionary income, that that’s not the case.”
Unless action is taken by Congress, the Bush tax cuts will expire on Jan. 1, 2013. Originally enacted in 2001 and 2003, President Barack Obama and Congress renewed the cuts for all income-brackets for two years in 2010.
[…]The Congressional Budget Office (CBO has projected that if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of 2012, coupled with the defense cut sequester, it will lead to a 1.3 percent contraction in GDP after Jan. 1, 2013.
If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, it is expected that 710,000 people will lose their jobs. This will achieve the Democrats goal of “stimulating the economy” with higher unemployment and more food stamps. This continues the Democrat plan of increasing the record number of people on welfare and food stamps. They will pay for this “stimulus” by adding more debt to the $8 trillion they have already run up since January 2007. The debt will be paid by young people and children. The real plan behind making millions of people dependent on government is, of course, to be able to buy their votes and to control them. Democrats are the anti-freedom party. You have too much freedom when you have a job. It leads to “inequality”. If everyone received their daily bread from the government, and rode on mass transit to labor camps instead of driving in cars, and slept in identical apartments with identical furniture and identical television programs to watch, then the world would be more equal. And equality is what Democrats want most.
So what is the Republican alternative plan for the economy? To let job creating businesses keep their own money and hire people to do work. Republicans want to stop taxing and regulating job creating businesses so that people can be put back to work, and have the confidence to spend money. That’s how you stimulate the economy – we know this because it has worked for Reagan and Bush before. Obama’s approach has never worked. The Democrats have been running the show since January 2007. And that’s why we are down 5 million jobs since Steny Hoyer became the House Whip in January of 2007. This is not going to end until the Democrats are voted out.
An editorial from the Wall Street Journal caused me to wonder why I have had to weekends for 6 weeks straight in order to make a deadline when 35% of my income is going to people who don’t even work for a living.
Here’s the anecdote the author recounts:
Recently I had to run into that store and, sizing up the three lines, chose to stand behind a woman with one item in her cart. It was one of those large ice-cream cakes. When the checkout person said “Forty-one dollars,” I wasn’t the only one who blanched. The shopper’s son, around 12, repeated it as a question: “Forty-one dollars?”
I quickly calculated that the woman’s cake was eight times more expensive than the kind I make at home to celebrate birthdays. The mother ignored her son’s question.
She took out her benefits card, swiped it through the machine, and they were off. My turn.
I stood there, wondering what lesson the young boy takes away from this transaction. Does he grow up with the faintest understanding of delayed gratification—that you have to earn your money before you can buy candy—or, in this case, an ice-cream treat? I wondered how we arrived at this point as a nation. I also felt like a chump.
How can this happen? Here’s how:
[O]ver the last four decades, our government has quietly done away with almost all of the restrictions once placed on food assistance. SNAP cards (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) can be used to purchase practically anything with the exception of liquor and cigarettes. These cards are also openly and illegally sold for cash, which allows the recipient to buy anything they want, including cigarettes and liquor.
Food assistance is helping many families keep their heads above water when they would otherwise not get by, and many of these families watch every dime. But the system also allows people to flagrantly disregard the program’s original purpose.
Of course there are instances of fraud in every corner of the government, from Congress to defense spending. Why single out food stamps? Because, with over 48 million Americans now using some form of food assistance and few restrictions, the possibilities of waste are unlimited.
Is there no shame in laziness and irresponsibility any more?
There are only 311 million people in the United States, and 48 million of us are on some welfare program, while half of us don’t even pay income taxes. Why am I working to pay for these other people? Why do people who vote for big government social programs think that I can afford to get married and have a family when I have to pay for all of the single mothers on welfare? Why does everyone think that they are being generous by giving away the money I earn? Why does everyone think it’s OK for people who don’t work to steal from people who do work?
Maybe instead of redistributing money, we should redistribute work ethic.
Professor Mike S. Adams is pro-life, but he posted something on Facebook that I must disagree with.
He posted this:
Over 80% of post-abortive women said they would have had the baby if the guy had been supportive. Five guys find out their girl is pregnant: The first two pressure abortion, the third walks away or was never present, the fourth sticks around for 80 to 120 days, and the fifth steps up totally. This not a woman’s problem. It is a lack-of-manhood problem.
Mike has about 5000 friends, and 44 of them liked it. I would think that most of these people would call themselves pro-life conservatives. But I don’t think what he posted promotes the pro-life cause.
I replied to him with this:
Mike I could not disagree more. It’s a woman’s problem unless it is rape, since the woman consents to sex with a man she is not married to. In fact, the cause of abortion is YOUR opinion – namely, the opinion that women should not be obligated to be chaste or to think rationally about who they are having sex with. There is a path to marriage that goes through courtship, and that path has a name: self-control. Stop enabling the poor choices of women, because we have to stop the murder of unborn children.
Many of Mike’s friends supported him. So I wrote this:
Wow. I had no idea that so many of Mike’s friends think that the Bible is a pack of lies when it says that fornication is morally wrong. I guess you guys aren’t Christians then, since you feel so free and easy about revising the Bible when you feel like it.
If fornication is wrong, it’s wrong for women AND men. And you don’t fornicate and then expect happy outcomes from it. There is a word for a person who sins and then expects a good outcome. A FOOL.
Then Mike replied to me:
Sorry Wintery. Where I come from the man leads and is, therefore, responsible.
I replied to that with this:
Mike, I agree with male leading – IF the man is a Christian. But the men that these women chose are not Christians. And you can’t expect men to act morally unless they have a theistic framework that grounds morality.
Women should not be told, by you and others, that they can choose to have sex with immoral men and then expect the immoral men to act morally. That is just enabling abortion by justifying a lack of prudence and wisdom. Instead, we should be holding women accountable to choose men who WILL control themselves.
We should not be supporting the fantasy view of love that says that recreational sex magically leads men to commit to protect, provide and lead women for life. That view is neither wise nor Biblical. On the contrary, recreational sex leads men to NOT commit. Women have to learn how to select men, to evaluate them for marriage, and to make them prove themselves. We need to tell men AND women that sex before marriage is morally wrong. And we need to be convincing by showing them how recreational sex does not lead to stable marriages, and puts children, unborn and born, in harm’s way. Telling the truth about the danger of premarital sex is the best way to stop the killing of unborn children.
Here’s an example to make the point. We do not blame bears for mauling campers. Bears are bears, and they were bears before the campers showed up in their cave. We ought to blame the camper for choosing to wander off the trail and into the bear’s den in order to PET THE BEAR. Wild bears may eat free food that is offered to them, but they are not going to let you pet them and hug them. Women, like campers, need to be responsible. They need to choose the right man for marriage. They need to exercise self control. They need to make the man prove his ability to commit and support a family BEFORE they have sex with him. No one hires an employee without understanding what job they need done and then making sure that the candidate they choose can do the job. And that’s what we need to tell women.
Obviously, I was a little upset when I wrote that, but I hope it wasn’t too bad.
So what’s the point I was trying to make by being critical of Mike? I think the problem we have today is that men who are pro-life are unwilling to hold women accountable for their own poor decisions about sex and marriage. Basically, conservative and/or Christian men think that women don’t need to think through what choices are most likely to avoid abortion and most likely to achieve marriage. These men give tacit approval to the popular trend of trying to achieve marriage through premarital sex (or cohabitation), when the research shows that these behaviors do not result in long-lasting stable marriages. In fact, sex out of wedlock is a good way to get into a situation where an abortion will occur.
In my view, Mike is ainadvertently encouraging women to get into the situations where they will be pressured to abort by reinforcing the idea that there is nothing wrong with their plan to achieve marriage by having premarital sex (or cohabitating), and then expecting men to respond to their pregnancy by MARRYING them. Mike seems to be telling women that it is normal for them to expect that marriage will follow from premarital sex with men who have not been vetted for the roles of provider, protector and leader As if marriage is natural for men who don’t even have jobs and who are surrounded by women willing to have sex with them on the first date. Any man who will have recreational premarital sex with a woman is exactly the kind of person who will not commit to lifelong providing and fidelity – he is having sex before marriage because he wants recreation, without the commitment and self-sacrifice that marriage requires. Rationally speaking, it makes no sense for men to buy the cow, and to keep buying the cow with 40 years of labor, when they can get the milk for free. And that’s what we need to tell women – think with your minds, not with your emotions.
[A] recent study reveals that 88 percent of unmarried young adults (ages 18-29) are having sex. The same study, conducted by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, reveals the number doesnʼt drop much among Christians. Of those surveyed who self-identify as “evangelical,” 80 percent say they have had sex.
[…]In addition to having premarital sex, an alarming number of unmarried Christians are getting pregnant. Among unmarried evangelical women between the ages of 18 and 29, 30 percent have experienced a pregnancy (a number thatʼs actually 1 percent higher than among those who donʼt claim to be evangelical).
According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unintended. And of those, 40 percent end in abortion. More than 1 million abortions occur in the United States each year. But perhaps the most disturbing statistic for the Church: 65 percent of the women obtaining abortions identify themselves as either Protestant or Catholic (37 percent Protestant and 28 percent Catholic). Thatʼs 650,000 abortions obtained by Christians every year.
Christian women are not told that premarital sex is wrong by many Christians and conservatives – and out of that refusal by “Christians” and “conservatives” to take a stand, we get 650,000 abortions per year. We need to have more courage to tell women to be more self-controlled and responsible when they choose who to have sex with, and when to have sex. We need to tell women to make good decisions that lead to stable marriages. We need to tell women to study these issues and to support policies that produce strong, moral men who are willing to marry – for example, by reforming education so that our schools produce men who can find jobs, perhaps by having more male teachers in the classroom. We need to tell women to support policies that make marriage more friendly for men, like abolishing no-fault divorce, and promoting shared parenting. Christians in particular need to counteract the views of love and romance that are prevalent in popular culture with a view of relationships built around chastity and love. Although many people today are uncomfortable with moral absolutes and moral judgments, it would be a good be a good idea for women to promote these things, so that the men they are choosing from are more moral.
In the end, I agree with Mike S. Adams in one respect. Abortion may be caused by a lack of manhood problem. Only the lack of manhood doesn’t come from the men that women choose to have premarital sex with. The lack of manhood comes from men who refuse to hold women accountable for their own free foolish decisions that put unborn children in harm’s way. In addition to the abortion problem that results from those foolish decisions, there is also the explosion in out-of-wedlock births to weigh in the balance. Again, the more people tell women that they should expect men who engage in recreational sex to commit to marriage after premarital sex (or cohabitation), the more fatherlessness we get.
WINTERY KNIGHT 