Tag Archives: State

Government now pays the rent for 1 out of every 5 homes in Britain

Story from the Daily Mail. (H/T Weasel Zippers via ECM)

Excerpt:

Four in ten households in some parts of the country have their rent paid for by the state, Whitehall figures revealed yesterday.

They showed, on average, one in five homes is supported by housing benefit, the taxpayer handout which covers the rent for those on low incomes.

And in London, the figures revealed nearly a quarter of households are now reliant on the benefit.

The figures, disclosed in the Department of Work and Pensions’ spending tables, also show that in the North-East, the North-West and Scotland around one in four receive the benefit.

The payout, which was first introduced in 1992 to bring clarity to state rent payments, cost £14.7billion when Labour came to power in 1997.

That figure has since risen by 18 per cent to £17.4billion and is expected to reach almost £21billion next year.

I’m currently reading Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom”, which describes how the UK government promotes irresponsibility and immorality among the poor. I think we really need to be careful about moving in the same direction as the British. Things don’t seem to be working out to well for them. They seem to believe in taxing people who work hard and live morally in order to reward the most irresponsible people in society.

Why did 77% of young unmarried women vote for Obama in 2008?

Consider this analysis from a left-wing site of the 2008 election.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, the nation made history. It made history in electing the first African American president; it made history in building a bigger margin for the first female Speaker of the House; it made history in delivering the biggest Democratic margin since 1964; it made history in sending a record number of people to the polls and the highest percentage turnout since the 1960 election.

[…]But one thing is immediately clear. Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and in changing this nation. They delivered a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin to Barack Obama and delivered similarly strong margins in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Although unmarried women have voted Democratic consistently since marital status has been was tracked, this election represents the highest margin recorded and a 16-point net gain at the Presidential level from 2004.

In particular, note the chart that shows that younger unmarried women voted 77-22 for Obama. 77-22 for Obama. This is actually in keeping with my previous post on this topic, which documented how women have continuously voted for bigger and bigger government since they started voting. The problem with big government policies is that they drain money from the family which is then redistributed outside of the family.

To have a strong family, you need more than just money. You need independence so that you can keep your vision distinct and separate from the vision of the government. If a family depends on the government, then they are beholden to the government’s values. The government can even overrule conscience rights and religious liberty. Keeping the family strong and separate from government is especially important for Christian parents who have a specific goal of passing on their faith to their children.

Here are just a few of the things I thought of that help make a marriage strong: (there are many more)

  • low taxes so the household has more money to spend on the things we need for our plan
  • access to low cost energy provided by domestic energy production by private firms
  • access to low cost, high quality consumer goods through increased free trade
  • the ability to choose homeschooling or private schools (and the more school choice, the better)
  • the ability to fund a retirement plan that covers the family – not anyone else
  • the ability to purchase a health care plan that covers the family – not anyone else
  • the ability to own firearms for protection of the home and the family
  • the ability to pass Christian convictions on to children without interference from the state
  • the ability to speak and act as a Christian in public without reprisals from secular left special interest groups
  • low threat of being the victim of criminal activity
  • low threat of being bankrupted by the costs of divorce court
  • low threat of being arrested on a false domestic violence charge (e.g. – verbal abuse)
  • low threat of never seeing your children because of loss of custody after a divorce
  • low threat of being imprisoned due to failure to pay alimony and child support after a job loss

It seems to me that a vote for Obama is a vote against all of these things. So then why did unmarried women (especially Christian women) vote for him? It seems as thought they are less interested in marriage and family and more interested in having the government provide incentives for anti-child, anti-family behaviors like pre-marital sex, contraceptives, abortions, welfare for single mothers, divorce courts, government coercion of husbands, state-run day-care, government-run schools, in-vitro fertilization, etc. I don’t mind if people need these things, but they should pay for it themselves. but I don’t see why unmarried women should favor family money being spent on government programs that help other people to avoid the cost and consequences of their own decisions.

Obama cuts off aid to pressure Honduras into communist dictatorship

Post from Hans Bader at the CEI’s Open market blog.

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration is about to cut off aid to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Earlier, the Obama Administration blocked travel to the United States by the people of Honduras.

[…]State Department lawyers, who are not experts on Honduran law, plan to declare the ex-president’s removal a “military coup” to justify cutting off aid, even though Honduras has a civilian president, and the ex-president was lawfully removed from office (although his subsequent exile may technically have violated Honduran law).

[…]Confronted with the sound legal basis for removing the ex-president under his country’s constitution, the Obama Administration has responded with a series of increasingly weak rationalizations for stubbornly seeking to force his return on the Honduran people.

[…]Obama’s demand that Obama reinstate its would-be dictator has emboldened other elected leaders in Latin America to try to make themselves dictators. (Even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, admitted in an editorial by Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl that the Obama Administration has shown a “willful disregard of political oppression” by left-wing dictators in Latin America).

Obama’s demand that Honduras’s ex-president be returned to office has been supported by the Cuban communist dictator Castro and the Venezuelan socialist dictator Chavez, who counted Honduras’s deposed president as an ally, despite his background as a wealthy and corrupt landowner.

But allying with Castro and Chavez to force the return of Honduras’s would-be dictator has not even improved U.S. relations with their countries. The dictators Castro and Chavez continue to attack and oppose the United States at every turn, and oppose all of its Latin American initiatives, like its plans for bases in Colombia to fight drug trafficking. Obama has received nothing in exchange for his appeasement of Latin America’s left.

The article details the flaws in Obama’s support for a communist dictatorship in Honduras.