Tag Archives: Welfare

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.

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.

Polemics

Debt and the return of real men?

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Captain Capitalism posted this rant which is an excellent, although very snarky, read. He starts with the fictitious case of Cindi, a suburban princess whose every need was provided for by her hard-working Daddy. But Daddy had to take on enormous amounts of debt in order to buy Cindi everything her heart desired.

Much like debt misled suburbanite Cindi to think free Audi’s, nightly dinners at Applebee’s, free food clothing and shelter, and avoiding any real career that requires math was “standard,” the amount of debt the government and economy as a whole has taken on has brainwashed nearly 3 generations of Americans to be similarly overly optimistic as to just how easy their lives should be. Debt has allowed pretty much every American to live above their means of support. Debt has allowed pretty much every American to live a life that does not produce the wealth necessary to support it. If you can’t afford a car, take it out of your home equity line. You don’t like math or science? That’s alright, piss away some of your dad’s money majoring in political science. Don’t have a down payment for a house? Don’t worry about it, we’ll loan you 100% of the money anyway. But the problem is not just the obvious unsustainability of this behavior, but even worse is how it corrupts and destroys society’s ability to live in the real world.

And where has this avoidance of math and science, normalization of debt and instant gratification led us?

You think the divorce rate in this country isn’t due to people being spoiled rotten brats and thinking marriage is some kind of trial balloon?

You think the childish and [very bad] behavior of people having “kids” and then dumping them off at daycare to have somebody else raise them because the kid was too much of a burden for them to handle, but they still wanted them anyway would have flown during the frugal 40’s?

Would teenage pregnancy even exist if the government wouldn’t perpetually bail these losers out because the government can perpetually “rollover” its debts and borrow more to finance a litany of social programs?

Would you have such a volume of frivolous lawsuits and parasitic lawyers in this country driving up the cost of doing business and destroying the standards of living?

Would you have seemingly endless legions of “environmentalists”… who have no real talents or skills, but find themselves pointless, effortless, made-up crusades to give their meaningless lives meaning at the expense of our freedoms and $3 per gallon gas?

He goes on to argue that the worsening economy will be a boon to real men. The decline of government revenues will reduce the availability of social programs to “solve” social problems that result from poor decision making. (And by poor I mean lacking wisdom, lacking respect for the moral law).

When Jimmy gets Cindi pregnant at 15 and the government is out of money, there will be two real men (the father of Jimmy and the father of Cindi) with shotguns and baseball bats ensuring Jimmy gets a job, goes to school and marries Cindi, not for Cindi’s sake, but for the child’s sake.

When somebody breaks into the house and the cops are too understaffed dealing with the crime wave that happened once the state released all those prisoners to “save money,” he’ll be the one shooting the burglar to protect himself and his family.

When a woman wants to get married and have children, the real man will wait until he’s financially stable, the country has a future, and make sure he is able to provide the kid a decent upbringing ALL THE WHILE MAKING SURE HE DOESN”T GET DIVORCED.

I am worried that the rising tax rates and inflation will cause men to withdraw irreversibly from any enterprising behavior. Big government may help people to feel more secure about making poor decisions. But responsible men fear higher taxes and punitive divorce courts… they are less likely to work hard and to marry.

Real men are just not in demand so long as marxist-feminist welfare state is there to provide everything that real men used to be sought after for. And the big appeal of the state is that it doesn’t ask for anything in return from its dependents.  But why should real men work to pay for social programs to fix the problems of other people?

One of my best friends, Andrew, got married to a fabulous Christian woman who spent time as a missionary in Russia. Men are in a terrible state in Russia – there are few real men. Her experience in Eastern Europe really helped her to understand how important the right man is for the responsibilities of marriage and parenting.

She chose to marry someone who would not only care for and provide for her, but who also understood Christian beliefs and would be able to pass them on to her children in an informed and persuasive way. But today, there is no vision for men as husbands or fathers, nor any vision of marriage as a worldview-incubator for children.