Tag Archives: Ted Cruz

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Ted Cruz crosses the street and confronts Trump mob in Indiana

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Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event

Everything you need to understand about the 2016 election is in one video.

First, the back story from the New York Times: (H/T Mysterious H.)

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had a date with a waiting car.

It was the second of five stops on Monday, the eve of Indiana’s critical primary, and the event at a restaurant here had been billed as little more than a meet-and-greet.

When he got back outside, a half-dozen protesters who supported Donald J. Trump were waiting across North Washington Street, some holding signs.

“Vote Trump!” one shouted.

“Say something really funny!” a Cruz supporter replied.

“Ted Cruz is going to win!” a Trump fan in dark sunglasses shot back.

Then Mr. Cruz did something unusual: He crossed the street.

Then the video:

Here is the rest of the New York Times article, which has additional material about the confrontation:

With a phalanx of aides and reporters trailing him, Mr. Cruz approached his critics with a question.

“What do you like about Donald Trump?” he asked.

“Everything,” said the man in the sunglasses, who later refused to give his name.

When the protester mentioned the Second Amendment, Mr. Cruz said he had defended gun rights in front of the Supreme Court. The man appeared unimpressed.

When he mentioned immigration, Mr. Cruz was ready with a bit of opposition research.

“May I ask you something?” the Texas senator said. “Out of all the candidates, name one who had a million-dollar judgment against them for hiring illegal immigrants. Name one. Donald Trump.”

“Self-funding,” the man replied.

“O.K.,” Mr. Cruz said, “so you like rich people who buy politicians?”

The man asked Mr. Cruz where his “Goldman Sachs jacket” was, alluding to the employer of Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, who took a leave from her job for the campaign.

Mr. Cruz responded that he had attracted more than a million campaign contributions, with an average of $60. He was interrupted sporadically by shouts of “Lyin’ Ted” from the protester’s peers.

“Sir, with all respect,” Mr. Cruz said, “Donald Trump is deceiving you. He is playing you for a chump.”

Mr. Cruz conjectured that Mr. Trump would not have walked over to meet the protesters.

“If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn’t have come over and talked to you,” he said. “You know what I would have done? I would have told the folks over there, ‘Go over and punch those guys in the face.’ That’s what Donald does to protesters.”

The catcalls of “Lyin’ Ted!” returned.

“O.K., stop,” Mr. Cruz said. “What word did I say was a lie?”

“About Donald telling people to punch people,” the man said.

“O.K., let me ask you, sir,” Mr. Cruz responded. “Just go home and Google ‘Donald-punched-in-the-face-protester.’ This is on national television.”

The man ignored him to make a conjecture of his own: “You’ll find out tomorrow. Indiana don’t want you.”

Mr. Cruz turned toward the cameras, as if making a closing argument in court.

“A question that everyone here should ask,” he began.

“Are you Canadian?” the man interjected.

“Do you want your kids,” Mr. Cruz continued, “repeating the words of Donald Trump?”

Mr. Cruz said he respected the man and believed in the people of Indiana to show good judgment. He started walking to his car.

A television reporter asked why he had bothered to engage.

“Because I believe in the democratic process,” he said.

[…]Moments later, when the cameras cleared out, the man strolled east, crossing railroad tracks with his peers in tow. He reached for a cigarette.

Mr. Cruz’s nerve had surprised him, he allowed, but failed to impress him.

“Anything that Donald Trump talks about,” he said, “that’s what I’m about.”

What you see in the video is a microcosm of this entire election.

Ted Cruz is a Princeton and Harvard educated Tea Party conservative who has a record of conservative achievements that runs all the way back to his days in high school, when he traveled around giving lectures on the Constitution and fiscal conservatism to different groups in his community. Ted Cruz has a 100% conservative record from Heritage Action and he has been endorsed by the National Right to Life because of his record of pro-life actions.  He defended the second amendment and religious liberty at the Supreme Court and won. And there are many, many more conservative achievements. Ted Cruz is a man who is confident in his views, and he believes that he can win over the average American voter if he is able to dialog with them, and compare arguments and evidence. He respects the American voter.

The Trump supporters know absolutely nothing about Senator Cruz’s career, and his record of going against the Republican establishment. And everything they know about Donald Trump’s record was what they saw when they watched him clowning around on reality TV shows and beauty pageants. In short, they know literally nothing about his past positions and past actions. They like him because he talked about his penis size in a national debate. They think that is “telling it like it is” and “not being politically correct”. They don’t know that he has always been a Democrat, and that he has always donated to Democrat causes. To them, entertaining words have more value than the patterns of past actions.

Trump supporters have done literally no homework at all in trying to look into the past actions and achievements of the candidates. The only thing they know how to do when confronted with Trump’s liberal record, and Cruz’s conservative record, is to try to drown out the truth with slogans that they obtained from the liberal media, or from their idol Trump himself. The reason why they support an airhead leftist con man like Donald Trump is because they are just not willing to invest the time to know what the candidates have done. They want to figure out who to vote for by watching television, not by researching or reading.

Trump supporters like Trump because they want to blame others for their own failure to grow up and achieve the American dream. America is a country where penniless first-generation immigrants who could not even speak English were able to come here and raise children who would later run for President, e.g. – Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Unfortunately, America is a country where too many who are born here think that they are entitled to such success without having to do any work to earn it. But I suspect that this failure has more to do with an attitude that disrespects knowledge and dismisses hard work.

By the way, this isn’t a one-off video… this happens all the time. One previous example occurred in Iowa, where Cruz took time to talk with an angry Iowa farmer about why he opposed ethanol subsidies:

Donald Trump not only supports ethanol subsidies, he pandered to Iowans and offered to raise them – passing the costs of this vote buying on to other taxpayers.

If Ted Cruz loses this election, it will be because too many natural-born Americans abandoned learning about their own history and heritage. To learn those things, they would have to turn off the TV and do their own research. One thing is for certain – if you meet a Trump supporter, you can absolutely assume about that person that he knows literally knows nothing about the Constitution, economics, American history, foreign policy, or anything else that matters.

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News

Which presidential candidate will simplify the tax code and create jobs?

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How can we make the complicated tax code simpler?

Steve Forbes explains what would work, in Forbes magazine.

He writes:

NEXT TO THE UNSTABLE DOLLAR, the biggest deadweight today on the American economy is the horrific federal income tax code. It is past time we junked this incomprehensible, opportunity-killing and corrupting monstrosity and replaced it with a simple flat tax. The returns we, the people, must file by today (even if you file for an extension, you have to pay what you owe Uncle Sam by this date) should be the last time we have to suffer through this ordeal.

More than 40 countries and jurisdictions (such as Hong Kong) have variations of a flat tax, and those systems have worked well.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a flat tax is a single-rate income tax system that has few or no deductions. You could literally fill out your return on a single sheet of paper or with a few keystrokes on your computer.

The most basic and profound argument for a flat tax is moral.

The IRS estimates we spend 6 billion hours a year filling out tax forms. Experts calculate we spend over $200 billion a year complying with the income tax code.

The nice thing about the flat tax is that you can already see what happens in countries that have adopted it, by looking at the change in GDP growth in the years before the flat tax was adopted compared to the years after the flat tax was adopted.

Here’s a comparison of 3 countries that adopted flat tax rates at different times:

Forget the rhetoric: what happens to GDP growth after enacting a flat tax policy?
Forget the rhetoric: what happens to GDP growth after enacting a flat tax policy?

(Source)

As you can see, when people waste less time filling in their taxes, they have more time for productive activities. And don’t let anyone fool you: a productive economy creates more jobs, and builds the resumes of the workers so that they can be resilient to layoffs and other challenges to their peace of mind and security.

So which candidate is going to give us a flat tax, and the economic growth that goes with it?

Ted and Heidi Cruz have a plan to simplify the tax code
Ted and Heidi Cruz have a plan to simplify the tax code

The centrist Forbes magazine summarizes Cruz’s flat tax plan:

Ted Cruz claims that his tax plan would supercharge economic growth, boosting GDP by as much as 5% a year for a decade or more. That’s, umm, an ambitious goal to be sure. However, there is actually good reason to believe that he’s right. As long as we’re careful about how we define GDP growth and also as long as we consider all the ways in which his plan will change the economy. This does mean being a little perverse in our assumptions: but also correct in our assumptions.

The basics of the plan are that income taxes will be cut for all. Also, that pretty much all business taxation will be replaced with a 16% flat tax. It is claimed (and Cruz has Art Laffer there claiming it with him) that such a relief from the burdens of taxation will produce an explosion of economic growth. This is not, I feel, entirely believable to put it mildly. While there may well be specific bottlenecks in the taxation system the total take, at 35 to 36% of GDP, isn’t large enough for it to be causing a general lack of economic growth. Not in my opinion at least and in the opinion of vanishingly few economists too.

Conservative economist Stephen Moore says this about the Cruz plan in The American Spectator:

Senator Ted Cruz has a flat tax plan borrowed from a blueprint in a book by Arthur Laffer and me called, Return to Prosperity.

[…]Conservatives should be excited about the Cruz flat tax. ‎It’s what tax filers have been waiting decades for:

First, the Cruz plan would give America the lowest tax rates since the income tax was ‎devised 100 years ago. For this reason, these plan are estimated by the Tax Foundation to grow the economy by a gigantic $2 trillion extra GDP per year after 10 years. That’s exactly the opposite effect of the Hillary and Bernie show plans.

Second, Cruz’s plan eliminates almost all deductions and credits — which is how they get the rate so low. The IRS could be dramatically shrunk in size. Don’t forget, when there are fewer deductions, there are fewer ways to cheat on your taxes. The lower the tax rate, the less incentive to cheat, which means greater voluntary compliance.

Third, because the Cruz plan is “border adjustable,” imports are taxed at the flat rate when they are brought into the U.S., but American products sold abroad are not taxed at all. This would level the global playing field for American manufacturers, tech firms, and drug companies and bring these jobs scampering back to the U.S. Blue collar union workers should love this.

[…]Some conservatives complain that the tax is too efficient and so it will raise too much money.

Moore works for the Heritage Foundation, the number one conservative think tank, which features conservative policy on social, fiscal and foreign policy issues. My favorite think tank.

And famous economist Art Laffer says this: (H/T Dad)

Art Laffer is a speaker for the American Enterprise Institute, which champions the free enterprise system that made America great.

If you are nervous about the economy, you need to vote for Ted Cruz and get this plan enacted. Imagine not having to worry about losing your job, losing work hours, and so on. I would like to get in on a stock market boom so that I can pay off my mortgage faster. If you all join me in voting for Ted Cruz, we can all stop worrying about money for the next 10 years. But we need people to get behind economic policies that work. Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Art Laffer are experts in tax policy. We need to listen to the experts, and we need to do what has been proven to work, not what sounds good.

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News

Ted Cruz’s position on gay marriage will work in the general election

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Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event

Some of you may be worried that Cruz is “too conservative” to win the general election, because he is indeed very conservative. One area where this is a concern is on the gay-marriage issue.

Is Cruz’s position on the same-sex marriage issue “too conservative” for the general election.

Take a look at how he answers this question:

Transcript:

“I am a constitutionalist and under the Constitution, marriage is a question for the states. That has been the case from the very beginning of this country- that it’s been up to the states. And so if someone wants to change the marriage laws, I don’t think it should be five unelected lawyers down in Washington dictating that. And even if you happen to agree with that particular decision, why would you want to hand over every important public policy issue to five unelected lawyers who aren’t accountable to you, who don’t work for you— instead if you want to change the marriage laws, convince your fellow citizens to change the laws. And by the way, it may end up that–we’ve got 50 states– that the laws in one state may be different than another state and we would expect that. We would expect the people of New York to adopt different laws than perhaps the people of Texas or California and that’s the great thing about a big, diverse country is that we can have different laws that respect different values.”

Part of me is so angry at losing the culture wars that I long for the President to push back against the leftists like a lawless dictator. Of course, that wouldn’t be Constitutional. And Ted Cruz is a Constitutional conservative. That means that he will appoint judges to the Supreme Court who do not make law from the bench, but he’ll leave decisions about controversial issues like the definition of marriage at the state level. That’s not as far as I would go, but it is Constitutional.

Besides, I could never get elected with my crazy top-down pro-marriage view. My conservative dictator view won’t fly in a general election, but Cruz’s Constitutional view will. If he wins and picks justices to reverse Obergefell, then people in red states will pass legislature that they want, people in blue states will pass what they want, and people who don’t want to be bullied by gay activists for disagreeing with redefining marriage will move to red states.

I’m sure I will be able to find a nice red state to live in that has the correct definition of marriage. I’m looking forward to a Cruz victory and no more threats to my religious liberty from the federal government.