Tag Archives: Liberty

Humor

Friday night funny: Nancy Pelosi, Michele Bachmann and capitalism

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Here’s Canadian-raised comedian Steven Crowder’s latest video. This one made me laugh out loud, and you will too! (H/T IMAO.us)

And here’s the lovely Michele Bachmann staying calm against Barney Frank. Beauty and the Beast! (H/T The Maritime Sentry)

Remember, Democrats caused the recession and Republicans tried to stop it! And Barney Frank was one of the main players in causing this recession, as you can see from the linked New York Times article. Now Michele has to come in and try to clean up their mess.

Fun cartoons

Here is an old-fashioned video on capitalism. I feel so subversive even showing them to you. This is the kind of thing real Americans used to learn about before the public schools were taken over by marxists, feminists and draft-dodging leftists! (H/T IMAO.us)

Part 1:

Part 2:

More old-fashioned capitalist propaganda here! This one is about energy production, enterprise and competition. It has little green men with pointy ears!

Happy Friday!

Videos

Selling single-payer health care with lies

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Holy Snark!

You will watch this 3 minute video about the Democrats’ plan for single-payer health care right now! (H/T Heritage Foundation)

This video is courtesy Verum Serum, the same guys who brought us that Jan Schakowsky video where she admits that Obama’s plan will destroy private medical insurance. They seem to be a Christian blog, so I blogrolled them, along with Bush White House economist Keith Hennessey, who I linked to twice.

Quick quote from Heritage Foundation’s post:

As Yale professor Jacob Hacker says in the video: “Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single payer and I said well its not a Trojan Horse, right? Its just right there.”

And then later:  “One of the virtues of it though is that you can at least make the claim that there is a competitve system between the public and private sectors.”

Don’t forget some other videos I posted on health care, (that post has a link to Laura’s amazing post on health care that was on Hot Air, which had more helpful videos!).

Michelle Malkin has some ideas about what the grassroots can do! We can fight this.

A comprehensive, point-by-point refutation of government-run health care is here, at the Heritage Foundation.

They cover:

  • the hidden costs of government-run health care, that are paid by the private sector
  • the low efficiency and low quality of existing government plans like Medicare and Medicaid
  • how government-run health care would lead to controls on your private life to reduce health costs
  • the real solution to the health care mess: competition, de-regulation and consumer choice

Some good news on health care

OK, Heritage Foundation had this story on a bill introduced by Republican senators Tom Coburn and Richard Burr. It’s called the “Patient’s Choice Act”.

Excerpt: (I bolded the stuff I liked)

As Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos with American Enterprise Institute note in The Wall Street Journal, the legislation “provides a path to universal coverage by redirecting current subsidies for health insurance to individuals. It also provides a new safety net that guarantees access to insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.”

By restructuring the tax treatment for health insurance, the plan would give every taxpayer direct assistance to buy private health insurance, and end the inequities that plague the current system. The bill would shift the $300 billion annual tax exclusion for employer-based health benefits toward refundable tax credits for families and individuals. Families would get $5,700 a year and individual consumers would get $2,300 a year to purchase private plans and invest in health savings accounts (HSAs).

Low-income families would receive a supplemental debit card worth up to $5,000 that would help them pay for health coverage and out-of-pocket medical bills. They’d also be incentivized to make the most of their health care dollars since the remaining balance on their card would roll over to the next year. The expected expansion of private health plans would reduce the dependence of many uninsured Americans on the hospital emergency rooms for routine care, saving American taxpayers billions of dollars.

“The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance,” Turner and Antos add.

This is what Republicans would do if we could elect enough of them.

Commentary

Are Obama’s policies weakening America’s security, liberty and prosperity?

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In this American Spectator piece entitled “Obama the Destroyer“, Quin Hillyer recounts the many deeds that Obama performed in order to weaken America.

Hilyer writes:

If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely “change America,” and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.

He then lists some of the specific areas that Obama has weakened:

  • contract law (which is part of the foundation of capitalism and free enterprise)
  • strict interpretation of the Constitution
  • counter-terrorism (released interrogation techniques)
  • responsible spending and size of government
  • energy production
  • missile defense
  • military preparedness and research
  • border security
  • transparency and free/open debate on legislation
  • freedom of choice in health care
  • the integrity of the voting/census system
  • diplomacy and foreign policy

I could name at least a half-dozen more areas not on that list, such as the Western Experience’s post about Obama’s decision to weaken our nuclear capabilities. In fact, Jason has a whole article on the Obama’s naive, weak foreign policy.

But foreign policy is one thing, what about the cost of the trillions in spending? Writing in the Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer explains that there are only two ways out of the massive deficits that Obama has run up: Higher taxes, which destroys economic growth and ships jobs overseas, and hyperinflation, which impoverishes the poorest among us by making them pay more for everything.

He lists all the mistakes that the ACORN lawyer has made, and concludes:

We are also certain to see the portion of our pay that we actually get to take home decline significantly. The debt that Obama is running up will have to be repaid. Already, there are grumblings in the market about the future of the dollar, with the Chinese not the only one of our creditors worrying that we will inflate our way out of our obligations. Run the presses, make dollars cheaper, and use the debased currency to repay debts.

…But inflation is not the only possibility. Instead, politicians, remembering the fate of Jimmy Carter when he allowed inflation to climb towards 20 percent, will try to restore fiscal sanity by raising taxes. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who supported the president’s stimulus package, puts the needed tax increase at $1.1 trillion over the next decade; the International Monetary Fund puts the figure at $1.9 trillion, a sum the magnitude of which is better understood when written as $1,900,000,000,000.

And don’t forget the looming problem of entitlements. You remember. Social Security and Medicare? Costs ballooning out of control? Matthew Continetti writes about it in the Weekly Standard:

The trustees conclude that a combination of lavish benefits, an aging population, and a moribund economy has brought the United States’s social insurance system close to bankruptcy. Medicare is already running a deficit, and the trustees say that it will be totally out of money by 2017. Social Security will be in the red as soon as 2016. That’s a problem not only for Social Security. It’s a problem for the federal budget.

…Meanwhile, bizarrely and perversely, Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill say that the only way to fix America’s spending problem–we are not making this up–is to spend more money. More on energy. Health care. Education. The three pillars of the president’s “new foundation.” Don’t worry about the cost, Obama says. The rich guy at the other table will pick up the bill.

What sort of person would spend trillions of dollars in a recession with a looming entitlement crisis? Oh, I know. An unqualified spendthrift who can’t even keep his own financial house in order.

Gateway Pundit reminds us that the Democrats understand that their cap and trade bill with hurt the poorest people the most. And they don’t care! Most of them are probably like Al Gore, who owns assets that will benefit from the unnecessary government regulations.

Gateway Pundit writes at the American Issues Project:

The potential cost of the democrat’s cap and trade policy is enormous. It will likely cost $700 to $1,400 dollars per family per year. The Department of Energy estimated that a similar bill, S. 2191, the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal, will increase the cost of coal for power generation by between 161 percent and 413 percent. Human Events reported that the DOE estimated GDP losses (see chart) over the 21-year period they forecast, at between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion. There are estimates that the bill could increase unemployment by 2.7 percent or about 4 million jobs.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag was on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos in March. During his interview Orszag admitted that Obama’s proposed cap and trade energy legislation will increase energy costs for everyone. The Heritage Foundation reported that cumulative GDP losses for 2010 to 2029 approach $7 trillion. Single-year losses exceed $600 billion in 2029, more than $5,000 per household. Job losses are expected to exceed 800,000 in some years, and exceed at least 500,000 from 2015 through 2026. In Missouri and the Midwest where energy is “cheap” the democrat’s legislation would cause electricity rates to double. Even the far left Huffington Post admits that the approach taken by the Waxman-Markey bill does not alleviate the problem whereby household consumers will pay higher energy costs.

The article continues here.

Remember when Obama said this in 2008?

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Businesses would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that cost onto consumers.”

What? You voted for Obama and the MSM didn’t tell you that he said that? I’m shocked.