Tag Archives: Wealth Redistribution

News

Projected increases in electricity prices under Obama’s cap-and-trade policy

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Over at Michele Bachmann’s blog, I noticed that she has posted about the expected increase in electricity prices (per person) under Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade legislation. The numbers are provided by Ways and Means Ranking Member Dave Camp.

Here are a couple of the bigger increases:

  • Alabama $1,528.26
  • Indiana $1,627.46
  • Kentucky $1,798.23
  • Montana $1,717.63
  • North Dakota $4,350.56
  • West Virginia $3,972.29
  • Wyoming $7,249.54

Looks like the effect is to transfer wealth from pro-business red states to anti-business blue states. Redistribution of wealth. Equalization of outcomes. Welfare. After all, a lot of these blue states have been spending like drunken sailors, and will need to grab some money from their red-state neighbors, if they are to continue acting irresponsibly.

Here is an interesting quotation in Michele’s post, provided by the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Dr. Douglas Elmendorf on the proposed cap-and-trade legislation:

At a Ways and Means hearing today, Congressman Camp questioned Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Douglas Elmendorf  about the impact of this policy on consumers in other ways as well.  As Dr. Elmendorf said, “at any point in which we are putting a price on carbon emissions, that would be passed through to the cost that consumers face on energy products but also all other products that are made using fossil fuels….I don’t know if there are any goods that use no energy in their production.  It seems to me unlikely.”

I blogged here about the proposed tax hikes on oil companies, and here on the proposed cap-and-trade system and here on the proposed carbon tariffs Obama wants to impose on imported goods. And we’ve also seen that global warming is just a myth – useful crisis that leftists sell to the public in order to justify government control of the free market.

Videos

Evan Sayet explains why progressives believe what they believe

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One of the tragedies of being an active blogger is that you don’t get to visit all the blogs you used to visit before you started blogging. Well, since Ace linked to my notice about the upcoming debate of the century between Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig, I figured: now is the time. So I went over there and scrolled around, catching up on who is drinking Valu-Rite vodka, and who is polishing LauraW’s hump.

And I noticed that the brilliant Jewish comedian Evan Sayet, a 9/11 Democrat, has given another speech at my favorite think tank, the Heritage Foundation. If you missed Evan’s first brilliant speech, (brilliant because you learn TONS of stuff that you’ve never heard before!), don’t miss it now. But do not even think about watching this speech if you are a thin-skinned special-interest leftist. You can’t handle it.

Here is the link to his FIRST speech for the Heritage Foundation  if you missed it:

Here is the audio (MP3) and video of the second speech.

Topics of the second video include:

  • What progressives believe: postmodern skepticism, moral equivalence, creative anti-realism
  • How progressives side with evil instead of good so that everyone will be equal
  • How progressives believe that failure is never an individual’s responsibility, but always the fault of some group of oppressors
  • How progressives believe that success can only achieved by oppressing others
  • Why progressives believe in redistribution of wealth and zero-sum game economics
  • and more

I really like listening to this guy, and so will you! Listen to both of his speeches. You are never going to hear direct truth, as from a fire hydrant, like you will by listening to Evan Sayet. Pay attention to what he says at the end of the second speech. Our hope lies in our individual willingness to speak out intelligently to our neighbors about what we believe and why we believe it.

Commentary

Why Obama’s big government socialism leads to secularism

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I have been browsing on a few forums, including forums that discuss Christian apologetics. Imagine my surprise when I encountered pro-Obama, pro-socialism statements by people who are supposed to be informed about these issues.

Well, I found an article over at Mercator Net, (an Australian web site), which might be useful for Christians who are sympathetic with Obama’s pacifism, redistribution of wealth and creeping fascism. I want to argue that his policies are inconsistent with Christianity.

First of all, the article notes that Obama did gain a significant number of votes  from religious Christians.

In 2008, according to CNN exit polls, Obama won forty-three percent of the presidential vote among voters who attend religious services once a week or more, up from Senator John Kerry’s thirty-nine percent in 2004. Obama did especially well with Black and Latino believers. But he also made real inroads among traditional white Catholics, according to a recent article by John Green in First Things.

The article describes Obama’s spending, (which I discussed here), and then comments on the significance of that spending for religious institutions, like churches and charities.

To fund his bold efforts to revive the American economy and expand the welfare state, Obama is proposing to spend a staggering $3.6 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year. Obama’s revolutionary agenda would push federal, state, and local spending to approximately 40 percent of Gross Domestic Product, up from about 33 percent in 2000. It would also put the size of government in the United States within reach of Europe, where government spending currently makes up 46 percent of GDP.

Why is this significant for the vitality of religion in America? A recent study of 33 countries around the world by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, political scientists at the University of Washington, indicates that there is an inverse relationship between state welfare spending and religiosity. Specifically, they found that countries with larger welfare states had markedly lower levels of religious attendance, had higher rates of citizens indicating no religious affiliation whatsoever, and their people took less comfort in religion in general. In their words, “Countries with higher levels of per capita welfare have a proclivity for less religious participation and tend to have higher percentages of non-religious individuals.”

The article goes on to explain the chain of casusation from big government to secularization. Read the whole thing.

But this should be no surprise when you recall Nobel prize winning economist F. A. Hayek’s thesis in his landmark book “The Road to Serfdom”. His thesis is that the natural endpoint to all systems of government that control the means of production is fascism.

Fascism is a left-wing ideology, in which the state substitutes its own values, meanings and purposes for the values, meanings and purposes of individuals. There is no such thing as fascism on the right, because people on the right are free market capitalists who prefer small government and individual liberty.

To see how fascism destroys individual liberty and freedom of conscience, consider:

  • Obama’s plan to force hospital workers to perform abortions against their conscience
  • Obama’s forcing of taxpayers to pay for abortions here and abroad against their conscience
  • Obama’s forcing of taxpayers to pay for embryonic stem cell research against their conscience
  • Obama’s forcing of students to attend government run schools instead of private schools of their choice
  • Obama’s discrimination against religious schools in his spendulus bill
  • Obama’s plan to force some workers to join unions against their will and fun left-wing union political activism against their will
  • Obama’s forcing individuals to let Washington run their health-care

I could go on. And on. And on and on and on. But the point is that electing a socialist put us on the road to fascism. As IBD notes, socialists want to force-feed (podcast audio) their worldview onto an unwilling populace by any means – from government-run schools to news media.

I think that Christians need to do a much better job of understanding how our religious liberty hangs on small government and the free market. And remember: this crisis that Obama is “fixing”: it’s the Democrats who caused it, while Republicans tried to stop it.