Tag Archives: Socialism

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House Republicans pass “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”: Obama vows veto

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I'm Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this bill
I’m Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this bill

From The Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

The House voted Tuesday night to pass Congressman Chris Smith’s (R-N.J.) No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which expands bans on federal funding of abortions and requires that the Obamacare insurance exchanges clearly describe which plans cover abortion.

The act forbids Obamacare insurance subsidies from being used toward plans that cover abortion. It would make the Hyde Amendment, a 1976 law that prohibited Medicaid from funding abortions, a permanent fixture of national law. It also disqualifies abortion payments from tax benefits. The bill provides for exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and endangerment of the life of the mother.

In the past, multiple polls have shown that Americans disapprove of public funding for abortion.

The bill also mandates “prominent display” of abortion coverage in all plans offered on the new insurance exchanges, and disclosure of any surcharges that apply to abortion procedures.

[…]White House aides have already suggested that they would recommend vetoing the bill, should it pass both chambers of Congress.

CNS News reports that the Obama administration handed $540 million taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood in FY 2013.

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood’s net revenue increased 5% to total of $1.21 billion in its organizational fiscal year ending on June 30, 2013, according to its newAnnual Report 2012-2013, and about 45% of that revenue–$540.6 million–was provided by taxpayer-funded government health services grants.

In the same report, Planned Parenthood said that in the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2012 it did 327,166 abortions.

Clinics in Iowa, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Montana and New Hampshire also received $655,192 in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services to serve as Obamacare “navigators,” as CNSNews.com reported earlier.

The 2012-2013 Planned Parenthood report states on its second page, “We are the most effective advocate in the country for policies that protect access to safe and legal abortion and advance women’s health, actively lobbying in every state legislature ….”

Planned Parenthood’s affiliates spent $26 million on public policy this past year, while the national office spent $31.3 million on building “advocacy capacity.”

Planned Parenthood lobbied heavily for the Affordable Care Act’s mandatory contraception coverage, and the ACA, or Obamacare,  is celebrated throughout the annual report as “a historic advance for women’s health.”

Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortions in the USA.

Now even if you were a pro-choice person, it seems to me that you should be in favor of this bill to ban taxpayer-funding of abortion. After all, if you’re “pro-choice” then you should have to pay for your own choices. If you look at it from a pro-life view, it’s like I am being forced to pay you to murder babies. Or from a slavery analogy, I am being forced to buy you slaves. If I have an objection to something you are choosing to do, then I shouldn’t have to pay for it. That sounds like common sense, but as you can see, the Democrats are opposed to it. They have no problems at all stealing from my earnings in order to subsidize acts that violate my conscience.

However, in states where the Democrats are not in control, these laws to ban taxpayer-funding of abortion do get passed.

Consider this story from Fox News.

Excerpt:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill to cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to taxpayer money funneled through the state for non-abortion services.

Arizona already bars use of public money for abortions except to save the life of the mother, but anti-abortion legislators and other supporters of the bill have said the broader prohibition is needed to make sure that no public money indirectly supports abortion services.

“This is a common sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly,” said Brewer, a Republican. “By signing this measure into law, I stand with the majority of Americans who oppose the use of taxpayer funds for abortion.”

Arizona has said a funding ban would interrupt its preventive health care and family planning services for nearly 20,000 women served by the organization’s clinics. The organization has said it will consider a legal challenge.

The measure targeting funding for Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services was one of several approved by Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature related to contentious reproductive health care issues during a 116-day session that ended Thursday. Brewer is a Republican.

Other approved Arizona bills include one generally banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Brewer has already signed, and one loosening a state law that generally requires health care plans to cover contraception.

So the bottom line is, if you don’t want to pay for someone else’s “choices”, then vote Republican. And remember, whatever you tax, you get less of. Whatever you subsidize, you get more of.

News

Global warming causing accidents and deaths in the South, thousands stranded

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Leftist CNN explains the results of global warming.

Excerpt:

Chicago saw a record low of minus 16 (minus 27 C) on Monday. The day’s high was minus 11, with a windchill of minus 34. It’s part of an Arctic blast that plunged deep into the central United States on Monday, leaving Nashville, Tennessee, 40 degrees colder than Albany, New York; Memphis 20 degrees colder than Anchorage, Alaska; and Atlanta colder than Moscow — Russia or Idaho, take your pick.

The bitter cold that a “polar vortex” is pushing into much of the United States is not just another winter storm. It’s the coldest in 20 years in many areas. The South was downright balmy compared to the Great Lakes region, where temperatures hovered in the negative 20s — before wind chill, which dropped temps to the negative 40s and in places like Minneapolis.

[…]Authorities have blamed a total of 15 deaths on the cold so far, 11 of them from traffic accidents.

But the the death of an Indianapolis woman found in her backyard early Monday “is believed to be weather-related,” police spokesman Kendale Adams told CNN. A man in Wisconsin died of hypothermia, and an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease who wandered away from her home in New York state was found dead in the snowy woods about 100 yards away, authorities there said.

In addition, hypothermia was a contributing factor in the death of a patient at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, hospital spokesman George Stamatis told CNN.

[…]The deep freeze has also snarled air traffic across the country, with more than 3,800 flights canceled by Monday evening, according to flightaware.com.

More leftist CNN:

A winter storm that paralyzed the South churned up the Eastern Seaboard Tuesday, threatening heavy snowfalls and more misery for the Northeast.

The Southern storm left a trail of treacherous conditions from Arkansas to the Atlantic, closing schools and government offices and contributing to the traffic deaths of at least three people.

Southern states were crippled — covered in sheets of ice that formed on roads, pavements, cars and atop the crunchy snow.

Meanwhile, with memories still fresh of a monster Christmas weekend storm, Northern states again braced for heavy accumulations of snow and potential blizzard conditions. The National Weather Service predicted 4 to 8 inches of snow in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area, 4 inches or more in northern New Jersey and 2 to 6 inches in southern Delaware from Tuesday afternoon into Wednesday morning.

It will be all snow as well for the Interstate 95 corridor Tuesday night and Wednesday, with 8 to 12 inches predicted for the New York City area and between 12 to 16 inches in Boston, Massachusetts. The National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning for coastal Massachusetts, including Boston, on Tuesday night.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo activated the state’s emergency management plan in an effort, he said, to ensure resources and equipment are positioned to clear roadways and respond to the approaching storm.

Officials declared a “weather emergency” and advised motorists to stay off the roads. The move restricts parking and allows authorities to remove vehicles that block roadways or impede snow plows.

[…]The city of Philadelphia declared a snow emergency Tuesday night, while public schools in Boston will be closed Wednesday because of the predicted snowfall.

At least 30 states were under some sort of winter storm watch or warning Tuesday, and states of emergencies were declared in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. Florida is currently the only U.S. state with no snow, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Snow emergencies and record low temperatures, all caused by high carbon emissions and global warming.

Expert predicts 20 yeas of global cooling

Why is this happening after we have spent billions on trying to stop the global warming that all the leftists predicted?

CNS News explains what comes next:

Dr. Don Easterbrook – a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase – says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades.

Easterbrook’s predictions were “right on the money” seven years before Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for warning that the Earth was facing catastrophic warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide, which Gore called a “planetary emergency.”

“When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they’re not even close. They’re off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That’s more than the entire amount of warming we’ve had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it’s luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button,” Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.

“For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC,” said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and  author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including “Evidence Based Climate Science,” which was published in 2011. (See EasterbrookL coming-century-predictions.pdf)

In contrast, Gore and the IPCC’s computer models predicted “a big increase” in global warming by as much as one degree per decade. But the climate models used by the IPCC have proved to be wrong, with many places in Europe and North America now experiencing record-breaking cold.

Easterbrook noted that his 20-year prediction was the “mildest” one of four possible scenarios, all of which involve lower temperatures, and added that only time will tell whether the Earth continues to cool slightly or plunges into another Little Ice Age as it did between 1650 and 1790.

“There’s no way to tell ‘til you get there,” he told CNSNews.com. But he lamented the fact that governments worldwide have already spent a trillion dollars fighting the wrong threat.

We really should be listening to people who made predictions that have been proven right – not people who are just looking for grant money and political power.

The real motivation of global warming alarmism is socialism

My good friend Letitia posted this Daily Caller article, which discusses a possible motive for pushing a theory that is in conflict with the evidence we have.

Excerpt: (links removed)

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model.

China may be the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is “doing it right” when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres.

That’s what all this nonsense is really about.

We have had no statistically significant warming in 17 years, and now we have record cold, with predictions now of 20 years of global cooling. What is really driving this counter-factual mythology is socialism. It certainly isn’t science.

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News

Sweden turning to capitalism as money for government spending runs out

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I hear a lot of people in my office predicting doom and gloom for the United States. Rubbish. The worst that’s going to happen is that we have the kind of slow economy that France has, and that will only last until we run out of money to borrow.

Yahoo News explains what happens when socialists run out of money.

Excerpt:

The Nordic model, known for high taxes and its cradle-to-grave welfare system, is getting a radical makeover as nations find themselves cash-strapped.

[…]In the wake of a banking crisis in the early nineties, Stockholm scrapped housing subsidies, reformed the pension system and slashed the healthcare budget.

A voucher-based system that allows for-profit schools to compete with state schools was introduced, and has drawn attention from right-wing politicians elsewhere, including Britain’s Conservative Party.

In 2006, conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s government accelerated the pace of reform, tightening the criteria for unemployment benefits and sick pay while lowering taxes.

Income tax in Sweden is now lower than in France, Belgium and Denmark, and public spending as a share of GDP has declined from a record 71.0 percent in 1993 to 53.3 percent last year.

Just so you know, his numbers might be out of date.

The latest Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom says this:

The top individual income tax rate is 57 percent, and the top corporate tax rate has been cut to 22 percent. Other taxes include a value-added tax (VAT) and a capital gains tax. The overall tax burden is 44.5 percent of GDP. Public expenditures make up about half of GDP, and public debt is below 40 percent of GDP. The government is attempting to expand investment in infrastructure and research while reining in welfare spending.

The United States had this:

The top individual income tax rate has risen to 39.6 percent, and the top corporate tax rate remains at 35 percent. Other taxes include a capital gains tax and excise taxes. The payroll tax holiday expired at the beginning of 2013. The overall tax burden amounts to 25.1 percent of gross domestic income. General government expenditures are slightly over 40 percent of GDP. Total public debt equals over 100 percent of the size of the economy.

So we are actually worse than Sweden now, in terms of government spending as a percent of GDP.

Denmark, too

More from the Yahoo News article:

If Sweden is the Nordic country to have gone the furthest in shrinking its welfare state, Denmark has moved the fastest.

When her Social Democratic government took power in 2011, there was little to suggest Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt would make any dramatic changes to the country’s cherished welfare state — funded by the world’s highest tax burden.

After a centre-right government had raised the retirement age and reduced the unemployment benefits period from four to two years, “Gucci Helle” — as she is known among her detractors — went on to cut corporate taxes to 22 percent from 25 percent.

Other reforms have included requiring young people on benefits to undertake training, and withdrawing student aid to those taking too long to finish their studies.

Denmark has been spurred into action by a persistently sluggish economy since a housing bubble imploded in 2007, leading to anaemic household spending.

But among Danes there is also a sense that the welfare state was ballooning out of control.

In 2011, a TV report aiming to show what life was like for the poor in Denmark visited the home of a single mother on benefits, whose disposable income turned out to be 15,728 kroner (2,107 euros, $2,860) per month.

“Poor Carina”, as she was later nicknamed, sparked a national debate on the level of unemployment benefits, with one pollster crediting her with fuelling a rise in the number of people who felt benefits were too high.

It would be nice if we had journalists who could do a story like that.

A different article from a Swedish newspaper called The Local has more on the new Sweden.

Excerpt:

One in ten Swedes now has private health insurance, often through their employers, with some recipients stating it makes business sense to be seen quickly rather than languish in national health care queues.

More than half a million Swedes now have private health insurance, showed a new review from industry organization Swedish Insurance (Svensk Försäkring). In eight out of ten cases, the person’s employer had offered them the private insurance deal.

“It’s quicker to get a colleague back to work if you have an operation in two weeks’ time rather than having to wait for a year,” privately insured Anna Norlander told Sveriges Radio on Friday. “It’s terrible that I, as a young person, don’t feel I can trust the health care system to take care of me.”

The insurance plan guarantees that she can see a specialist within four working days, and get a time for surgery, if needed, within 15.

I used to make fun of Sweden for being so socialist, but then I started to read more about them on Reason.com and from the Cato Institute (two libertarian sites) and my mind changed. These new articles confirm for me  that Sweden is improving their economy by embracing the free market system and rejecting socialism. Obviously, there is more to do, but the trend is good, and the results cannot be questioned. What could the United States do if we acted more like Sweden? It seems like just as they are moving away from government control of health care, we are moving towards it! We are embracing old ideas, and we need something new.

I am still worried about the European countries because of the breakdown of the family, the disrespect of marraige and the low fertility rates. But still, this is a good sign for those of us who are worrying that we need to cheer up. This is how socialism ends. We’ll get there.