Articles tagged as

Big Government

The Icing on The Accountability Cake

c/o Ed Morrissey… In my column today forthe Fiscal Times, I argue that this epidemic of sudden incompetence and ignorance completely undermines the argument for large, activist government.  That’s true whether one believes that these executives are either telling the truth or lying about their knowledge and involvement: So what are we to think about … Read more

Abuse of Power Scandals Make the Case for Limited Government

I’m frequently bewildered when I observe the Big Gov pom-poms shaken, Big Gov banners unfurled, and its flags waved with roaring cheers and applause. I wonder if those doing the somersault splits have actually thought through what they are doing flips over. Have they thought beyond the obvious short term, immediate consequence of more Government goodies in their grab bags? Have they truly considered all of the aspects, long term, intended, and possible unintended consequences?

I don’t believe many of the Big Gov cheerleaders have really thought about the consequences of much of what they’re advocating, or perhaps they have and are simply insouciant about it. Because many of the “solutions” to problems the Big Gov folks advocate for, more often than not, distill down to more Government. Therein lies the problem.  Even Obama’s confidant David Axelrod admitted the other day that “we have a large government” and that the “government is so vast” to really know what’s going on down in its depths. So, how does making it bigger help anything? It doesn’t.

But it’s not just the size.  Big Government as defined by most on the right does not refer to its size

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Decay Point: Bureaucratic Sclerosis

Alas, as a society decays, its parts shrivel and wither in interestingly tragic ways. An exemplar of such decay occurred just the other day. Big Government’s bureaucratic sclerosis hit a Fire Department so hard that it felt it necessary for its, “…22 firefighters and six vehicles…” to remain idle on the shore and watch a man drown in icy water for 13 minutes, according to the Daily Caller. They “…didn’t launch an inflatable boat until just before he disappeared. The firefighters pulled Brown’s body out of the water roughly an hour after they arrived.”

“‘They followed our ice rescue guidelines pretty much to a T,’ Champaign Deputy Fire Chief Eric Mitchell told The News Gazette.”. Whew! Thank goodness.  I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be cited for noncompliance. Allay your fears great citizens of Champaign, Illinois, there will be no lawsuits or fines today, only one less citizen, because our Fire Department followed the rules to a “T”. That sounds like a decent trade off, eh?

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Fiscal Cliff Deal? A classic case of the Left embiggining Government

Update:

  • Current tax rates would be permanently extended for singles making $400,000 or below, and permanently extended for couples making $450,000 or below
  • For singles, capital gains and dividends of $400,000 or below would be permanently taxed at 15 percent; capital gains and dividends above $400,000 would be permanently taxed at 20 percent
  • For couples, capital gains and dividends of $450,000 or below would be permanently taxed at 15 percent; capital gains and dividends above $450,000 would be taxed at 20 percent
  • The Alternative Minimum Tax would be permanently patched
  • Estates over $5 million would be taxed at 40 percent, and that tax rate would be permanently extended

Nothing on spending cuts (like, I’m surprised??)

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Or “Running out the clock always results in running out with somebody else’s wallet.”

The Corner is reporting that the AP is writing that a deal has been struck:

  • We shall punish the hardworking and successful:

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MYTH 3: We have a “revenue” problem

You can read Myth’s 1, 2 and 4 here should you care to; my purpose for the moment is to mug and pummel the idea that spending is not the problem and this helps illustrate that.

The revenue problem refers to the notion that revenues are too low. Typically, special attention is drawn to the tax rates paid by the “wealthy.” However, taxes are not too low. In actuality, taxes are too high. Once again, take a look at the last 20 years. In 1992, federal tax revenue totaled $1.642 trillion in 2012 dollars. In 2012, revenue skyrocketed to $2.435 trillion in 2012 dollars. While federal spending has eclipsed revenue by more than $1 trillion each of the last four years, too little revenue has not been the culprit!

Put another way, imagine that you are earning 793 billion more dollars today than you were twenty years ago and yet your lifestyle still exceeds your income by more than a trillion dollars a year.

Do you think the someone with the Name tag that reads ‘Hello My Name is: Federal Government” could use a little  intervention?

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Getting the Royal Finger by Big Gov, Raise Your Hand If You’re Surprised…

“Angry New Yorkers say Obama pledge to cut red tape ignored by FEMA” reports Fox News.

Looks like FEMA isn’t working again. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Those that are surprised deserve what they get. Big government can’t work, doesn’t work, can never work, has never worked, so to keep voting for it over and over again is a fools errand. Alas, given the results of the last election, there are evidently many fools en route.

“We are the people – we are the middle class, and we are getting the finger,” said fruhttp://granitegrok.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=40134&action=edit&message=1strated resident Scott McGrath, who personally spoke to President Obama and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo when they came to Staten Island to inspect storm damage earlier this month. “You were there when I met Obama, and I told the president … that the middle class was getting the royal finger. And he said, ‘FEMA works for me.’”

“FEMA ain’t doing nothing,” McGrath added. “They keep going around in circles.”

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So, Dems in Belknap county, that would mean that you will spend a lot, ignore the Constitution, and grow Govt? AGAIN?

2012 House Belknap 2 Dems - Front‘Tis the season of political surveys coming in on the phone.  Today, I think I got five, and a whole bunch of hangups which I take to be auto-dials by such companies looking for folks to call later or that with “predictive dialing”, there wasn’t an agent ready when “it” thought there would be when it dialed the number.  It is also the time for “mailers”; candidates trying to sell their message like these four Democrat ProRegressives: Kate Miller, Bill Johnson, Sandy Mucci, and MY fav Lisa DiMartino (she of the “my house is in the flight path – there might be a crash” fame.  More on that later).

They are running as a team.  That’s fine – my pick are the four Conservatives (that happen to be running on the Republican ticket) Colette Worseman, Herb Vadney, Bob Greemore, and my personal friend Kevin Leandro.

Back to the Dems – remember, the electorate (that would be you, the voters) decided that the Democrats were the extremists in 2010 – and told them emphatically that their social issue voting and their absolutely crazy spending were no longer to be tolerated.  So, what did these qwazy quad send as a message?  That would be on the flip side of the card:

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Mitt Romney and The 57.9%

Democrats want to tax you so that they can then engage in state managed, centrally planned, charity.   Conservatives, Libertarians, and some Republicans object to this for more reasons than I can enumerate here but here is one example worth considering…

As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusively on who wields the coercive power, on whose are the views that will prevail on all occasions.

-F. A. Hayek

Democrats want the government to decide.  And once they start, there is little that will not eventually fall under the gaze and control of the state.   And so, they feel very comfortable engaging in class warfare rhetoric to correct this problem, because taxes–to them–are the benchmark of other peoples charity (except their own, of course).   And they “do not approve,”  can not approve, of people engaging in charity the state does not control becasue most Americans give based on a set of values that Democrats do not share.

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Skip, Freedom Is The Symptom, The People The Cause

Skip, true. It is about freedom, but there’s more to it than that. I would suggest that state encroachment on individual liberties is a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself.  It’s about the people. It’s about people willing to cede their liberty and freedom to a faceless bureaucrat in exchange for the illusion of safety, for a handout, or both. It’s the values that people hold that they place themselves as a pet of the state; they willingly devolve themselves into the Burkean “flies of a summer”.

We’ve raised generations steeped in state dependency, and now we see the result of this societal mistake when there’s a problem. When there’s a problem or a challenge, the first reaction of too many people is to call in the Department of Personal Responsibility Absolution to handle it. They believe that they themselves are uncapable of handling the problem, that it’s somebody else’s responsibility.  If there are poor people, the government should handle it.  If there are sick people, government should handle it. Elderly, the government should care for them.

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How about a justification for slavery?

Last Friday President Obama gave a speech in Virginia where he said, among other things, “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own….If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute blog “Ideas” observed that the underlying meaning of those statements is this:

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Do You Have The Stones To Outlast the Federal Government?

Most Americans would never last this long.  And that is exactly what the tyrannical bureaucracy depends on.  They need you to give up so they can abuse the people and their rights,  unchallenged.  But these folks went the distance and not only won, they embarrassed the EPA.  We need a few million more just like … Read more

US Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D): all too willing to use the fear of the IRS to stifle TEA Party opposition? How Orwellian of her…

Jeanne Shaheen Signature: IRS, get TEA Party“…those who cannot be co-opted are isolated and then destroyed.“

I had seen mention of the use of IRS going against TEA Parties (Richmond TEA Party, Ohio Liberty Council, it seems that others are in process) over at The TaxProf’s blog (via Instapundit, much more here at The Daily Caller on what the IRS is demanding for information), but loyal reader Steven sent this link along from Big Government.  Nice to see my US Senator Jeanne Shaheen all too willing to use the coercive force of Bigger Government (the IRS!) to silence her opposition!  This proves the phrase that I have been using: “The Bigger the Government, the smaller the citizen”.  We already have seen that Shaheen has no problem in using the force of the Federal Government:

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Gambling On Our Future

A few days ago I wrote this (among other things) about the risk of bringing casinos to New Hampshire… Years of Casino ‘revenue’ in Concord would inevitably create the opportunity for entrenched incumbency and make every race about money, and who can spend it.   The special interest money would favor those who support Casino interests … Read more

OK, here is my definition of what an “Elite” is

I love these meaningless labels you people employ to scare people. “Elite” why not “effete” why not “European minded”? Does an “elite” have lots of money, or is an “elite” just overeducated? Can you be a capitalist and an “elite” or are they mutually exclusive? Do you have to have travelled abroad to be an “elite” or can you be house bound and be elite as well? Please, go ahead and define an elite for me. Is Warren Buffet an “elite”? The Koch brothers support the NYC Ballet and Opera. That sounds pretty elite to me. Are they the “elite”?

-jklml

I normally just let these things stay in the comment area, but I’ve decided to break my informal guideline.  The above is the comment left on my post here pontificating that the Davos Elitist founder wants to scrap capitalism.  He demanded I give him a definition, so I have:

For the most part, we use “Elite” in two different ways.  When talking about people that just exude excellence in what they do (e.g., Navy Seals, top rated artists, pundits like Krauthammer and Steyn), they are at the elite levels of what they do.

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Guilty Until Proven Innocent

The big government liberals have favored the notion of guilty until proven innocent, mostly with their opponents, for as long as we can remember.  Most recently it’s been cries of hate and racism without evidence, and more recent still accusations of using foreign money in US elections, again without proof and without parity.  They take more money from similar groups, or have provided evidence of real hate and racism without any desire to do anything about it.

Unless you are a progressive, you are guilty until proven innocent.

Then there was the woman who had her baby taken from her by child and family services right after she gave birth, here in New Hampshire.  Another case of the big government bureaucrat reacting first and asking questions later.  And it has happened again.

This time in Pennsylvania.  A young mother loses her baby to the government because of the results of a hospital policy to test new mothers for drugs  when they come in to give birth.  (And the liberals like Carol Shea-Porter want to give the government complete control over your body and your life in the form of federally managed heath care, of your retirement accounts, your energy, everything.)

This is just another example of the ‘utopia’ they have planned for you. There are strict rules, to be mishandled by incompetent, unimpeachable bureaucrats, handed down by the incumbent ruling class, that only apply to the rest of us. And we see it everywhere in the Obama/Democrat majority. The left’s leadership has been showing you their cards.  The laws do not apply to them.  They will not prosecute their own ruling class or its supporters.  But you?  You are guilty until proven innocent.

This mother lost her newborn for five days….because of a bagel.  

(We have video on the jump.)

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Is Carol Coming Out Of The Commie Closet?

In Carol Seiu-Porter’s last debate she emphasized her commitment to government as a source for solutions and inferred that people who object to that position are just way out there, you know, extremists.

Why The Stimulus Had To Fail

It’s simple economics.  Government money comes from taxpayers.  The more government spends the more it relies on taxpayers to pay for its spending.  The less money taxpayers have the smaller the economy will be the fewer jobs there are, which means less income, less taxes, more debt.  The stimulus, the huge budget bills, the massive … Read more

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