Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/19/2003 08:49:00 AM (Archive Link)
Yesterday, I discussed some of the uproar surrounding the recent tax cut and how people who don’t pay taxes didn’t get it (at least at first). I forgot to mention this item from the Media Research Center. It concerns media coverage of a protest against House Majority Leader Tom Delay. This particular protest involved mothers pushing strollers as an illustration of the 12 million children that they say will be hurt by Republican cruelty. Leaving aside the fact that the protest only had about two dozen participants but it was covered by all the major networks, let’s look at one of the protestors. Colleen McCrystal, a lawyer from a D.C. suburb said, “It seems like everything we have done for tax breaks in the last year or two is about the wealthiest top percent and, frankly, people probably like me, who really don't need it, and to keep taking from the folks who we're supposed to be here to help. The government, that's what it's supposed to be about, is helping those who have a whole lot less.” She’s protesting and she doesn’t even need the tax cut. Instead, she’s out there for the people who they’re supposed to be there to help. In other words, the poor, dumb folk need the rich, smart ones to tell them what they want and what they need. This is a keystone of liberal philosophy. The downtrodden are uneducated and they need intelligent, yet benevolent, overseers to lead the way for them; they need leaders to tell them what’s best for them since the poor are too stupid and oppressed to know for themselves. Ah, the poor proletariat. See a theme here?

Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/19/2003 08:44:00 AM (Archive Link)
You may have come across this already. It’s a little Flash cartoon on the official website of the Democratic National Committee called Bush-enstein. In it, George Bush plays the mad scientist creating the ultimate extremist Supreme Court Justice. The monster judge then proceeds to destroy the Supreme Court building while declaring, “Civil Liberties Bad!” It’s really quite hilarious but not for the reasons most liberals think it is. It does more to illustrate how the Democrats view prospective Bush nominees and how scared they are of them. They know there’s an ideological fine line in the Court and that any new conservative justice can make quite the difference in future cases. So they’re doing everything they can to try and dull the conservativeness of nominees and make sure said nominee is more to their liking.

They’re even trying to put the onus on Bush. Tom Daschle recently warned Bush to consult with him about any nominees because he “believe[s] that it is not necessary to have a divisive fight over a Supreme Court appointment.” By this, he’s trying to make it seem that any fight would be Bush’s fault. Note that it’s the Democrats who have been filibustering appeals courts nominees. Any divisive fight would be their fault, not Bush’s. The President has a Constitutional right to appoint judges to the federal bench. While the Senate approves the judges, the role is meant to be sure that the nominee isn’t some crony who has serious mental, moral, or qualification issues, it’s not meant to test ideology. It’s the President’s prerogative to appoint who he wants and the Senate Democrats are trying to usurp that prerogative. Sen. Charles Schumer even helpfully provided Bush with a list of possible nominees that he finds acceptable. These actions are also unproductive for them in the long term. Someday, hopefully far in the future, there will be another Democratic president. And when he tries to appoint judges, the Republicans will not have forgotten the Democrats’ current actions.

Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/19/2003 08:42:00 AM (Archive Link)
Could it be Condi vs. Hilary in 2008? I myself have wondered about such a match up and apparently there is some speculation about it. Condoleezza Rice is by far the superior potential candidate. Her academic, personal, and professional résumés are sterling. Hilary’s, by comparison, or maybe purely on their merit, are covered with mud. Riding your husband’s coattails to a carpet bagging Senate seat is not exactly a good qualification for President. As a side-note to this, can you imagine a worse nightmare for the Democrats whose entire existence is based on race-baiting, gender-baiting, and class warfare than that the first female president and the first black president be a Republican? Better poetic justice can only be found in stories.

Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/18/2003 12:13:00 AM (Archive Link)
You may already be familiar with the row that occurred recently over the child tax credit. As part of the overall tax cut package, the Republicans increased the credit for having kids by $400 per child. However, at the last moment, they decided to make this not apply to people who don’t pay taxes in the first place… families with incomes between $10,500-$26,625. If you have kids and fall into this income bracket, you already don’t pay income taxes and if you do, it sure ain’t much. This makes sense. If you don’t pay taxes, what is there to cut? You especially don’t want the cut to act so that the non-payers get refunded the money. In other words, so that even if you don’t pay taxes, you get a $400 refund check anyway. Since the purpose of tax cuts is that the government is allowing you to keep more of your money, this methodology would mean that other people are getting to keep more of your money. More than that, it acts as a form of welfare. It’s absurd! And yet, it’s exactly what the Left wants to do. And sadly, it's also exactly what’s happening. After the political uproar, the Republicans caved because of the bad publicity. So let’s look at some of that uproar.

Check out this editorial from Time’s Joe Klein. He himself admits that the people cut out of the original Senate tax cut package don’t pay taxes… but they should get money anyway! To quote, “So the Republicans decided that the working poor, who pay little or no income taxes — families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625--should not receive the expanded child tax credit. Almost 12 million children were effectively denied stipends of up to $400.” That 12 million children figure was also pulled out of thin air. I’d like to see the supporting math for it. But, of course, when you want to make a point, make sure you can make it look like kids will be hurt and the more, the better. Klein continues, “Indeed, it was ironic, and fairly nauseating, to hear spokesman Ari Fleischer argue last week that this was a matter of principle: the money should go to people who actually pay income taxes.” Well, yeah. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and tax cuts go to people who pay taxes. Klein says that Ari’s comment was nauseating because Bush campaigned so hard in favor of the poor and as he says, “The Republicans have never been defenders of the poor.”

This brings us to another issue. Do Democrats really defend the poor or just use them? To the Left, defending the poor means throwing money at them. More generally, it means throwing government money at the problem of poverty. People are poor and that’s bad, so what we need is a lot of dollars from Uncle Sam to “solve” it. Klein also wants to guilt people into taking care of the poor:

“In 1997 Wehner — a devout Evangelical — wrote a courageous Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post that began with a question: ‘During His ministry, Christ spoke out most often about (a) the evils of homosexuality, (b) the merits of democracy, (c) family-friendly tax cuts or (d) the danger of riches? It turns out Christ said nothing about the first three and a lot about the last one. But you would never know it based on the rhetoric of many modern-day Christians — particularly politically active ones.’ Wehner recounted some of the most famous New Testament parables in which Jesus castigates the wealthy, and he concluded, ‘It's unwise for Christians to keep averting our gaze from warnings that Christ placed in bright neon lights.’”

This is all true. The problem, though, is that according to the Left, the federal government must take money from people and then apply it to Welfare programs. When Jesus spoke about giving money to the poor, it was in the sense that you had to make the choice to give it. There’s not much spiritual point in being forced to be charitable. Jesus also said to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to give unto God what is God’s. The viewpoint Klein is taking here is that you should give everything to Caesar and then he’ll figure out what to give to God. That doesn’t exactly roll down to the individual so that it counts in the big book’s “good deed” column. Also, in the case of the U.S. government, Caesar is terribly inefficient. For every dollar that’s paid into welfare, about 60% of it is eaten up in administrative costs. That mean that only 40 cents on the dollar is actually getting to the people it’s supposed to help. Contrast this with a private charity like the Salvation Army which has overhead of just 20%. That means 80 cents of every dollar paid in is put to use in serving the poor and needy. And government welfare programs are notoriously bad at getting people off welfare. In some states, you can actually have a higher income by taking money from Uncle Sam than you can from working a full-time minimum wage job. That’s hardly an incentive to be a productive member of society.

I could go on about how welfare does far more to hurt the poor to help. However, given that and the fact that the government handles cash in a typically inefficient bureaucratic way, we’d be far better off just getting rid of public welfare programs (in which the federal government doesn’t have any business being involved anyway) and relying on private charities. They existed long before national welfare and were the social safety net. They’re efficient and have personal commitments to the people they help. They endeavor to help people out of poverty instead of just forking over cash and allowing the poor to stay that way. Americans have always been a charitable people, more so than any other culture, past or present, and would increase giving when they have more of their own money to give.

Another note on Klein’s Christ-based appeal is how he notes Jesus’ extensive preaching about the danger of riches. Klein apparently believes that it is the government’s responsibility to save us from this potential sin by taking our riches from us. Again, that policy is hardly saving anybody’s soul. And given what government welfare has done to keep down the poor, it looks far more likely that it can only hurt our chances for the Pearly Gates.

Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/16/2003 11:18:00 PM (Archive Link)
I’m a little behind in my blogging. In fact, there was a Washington Post story I was going to comment on but you now have to pay to access it. It concerned Bill Clinton’s continued influence in the Democratic party and how their various candidates are getting constant advice from Bill. As I recall, one of my favorite parts was a quote from one of the folks complimenting Clinton on his many successes as president. He cited North Korea as one of them. That’s like saying you had great success at disciplining your child by grounding him to his room filled with toys, a computer, a tv, and a Playstation. Considering what an unmitigated failure the NK agreement has turned out to be, it’s really quite amazing that some (prominent) Democrats believe it otherwise. It’s also frightening. Bribery of dictators has never really worked too well.

A few of the candidates also complimented Clinton’s handling of the economy. This is similar to how Hilary Clinton, in the Barbara Walters’ interview, said that it broke her heart what Bush had done to the Clinton economy… the economy that Bill had “turned around.” This is an old canard. Can anybody give me specific examples of how Bill Clinton’s policies were responsible for the economic boom of the 90’s? Anybody? Or was the boom… could it be?... the result of market forces related to technology and the internet? Also, let’s not forget that the economy had already started to turn at the end of 1992 before Clinton had a chance to do squat and that it solidly started on its downturn during 2000 when he was still prez. This is an aspect that Clinton has unfairly appropriated. However, since the good economy is the only real positive thing that occurred during his two terms (even if he was in no way responsible for it), he’s desperate to take credit for it. Then he can delude himself into thinking that a century from now, he’ll be remembered as something more than that president who got impeached for lying about an improper ual relationship and who passed the buck on terrorism so that we wound up with 9/11.

Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/02/2003 10:49:00 PM (Archive Link)
So France (or is it Freedom?) is trying to improve its image in the United States. All the jokes, food name changes, and vitriol has gotten to them. So who do they hire as their PR man? Woody Allen. You’re already getting the urge for some Dom Perignon, aren’t you? In one of the new ads, he says the following, “I don’t want to freedom kiss my wife, I want to French kiss her.” This would be well and good, except his wife is Soon-Yi Previn, his former step-daughter. You remember that whole fiasco, right? In this light, his pro-French joke just sounds… qu’est-ce que c’est?… icky. Was Jerry Lewis too busy?

French ambassador Jean-David Levitte also had this to say, “It's my job to remind that these funny little jokes are not so funny, because they are taken seriously on the other side of the Atlantic. We may differ on very serious issues — war and peace, pre-emptive war, international law, but is it a good reason to have this campaign of French-bashing? It goes beyond calls for French products. When you insult the French people, simply because they are French, then it's a kind of racist campaign.” So all the jokes and comments were part of a “racist campaign” against… the French. Hopefully, Levitte has already notified Jesse Jackson. He could be right but it’s hard to tell since the government doesn’t keep record of American-on-French hate crimes. Where’s the NAAFP when you need it? Really, the whole concept just invites a whole new round of jokes. Could it be that all the mocking and the boycotts are the result of American irritation at France’s pointed opposition to the United States? That it has openly declared its intention to be a “counterbalance,” i.e. opposition force, to the U.S.? That in the run-up to the Iraq war, it aggressively pursued a course intended only to thwart and embarrass the U.S.? That it may have shared intelligence with Saddam Hussein and helped leading Baathist officials escape Iraq under French visas? That for all its noble talk, it had significant financial interests in the Hussein regime? That in spite of its condemnation of unilateral action, France itself has acted unilaterally in Africa on a great number of occasions? Could any of those be possible reasons for why a lot of Americans don’t much like the French right now? Nah… this is America, after all. It’s gotta be racism! Let's get the French some reparations! Oh wait... we already did that. At the time, it was called "The Marshall Plan."

Posted by Dan Ewert : 6/02/2003 10:49:00 PM (Archive Link)
Check out this piece by Mark Steyn. He toured around Iraq and has come to the conclusion that things aren’t that bad. In fact, he found that the locals are more worried about NGOs (non-governmental organizations) than they are about Americans. And well they should be. These groups include Oxfam, World Food Program and others. They are essentially welfare organizations that go around “discovering” problems no matter how small or non-existent they may be. The problem with any sort of welfare group, though, is they think they must save the world. That’s noble enough, except they also think the goal must and can only be accomplished with money. So they’ll start throwing money at Iraq, start giving away things and they’ll be the ones who will make the country a slave state incapable of self-sufficiency, not America, though America will surely get the blame. If you get a people used to receiving things for free and for which they put forth no effort to attain, they’ll have little incentive to do things on their own. Not only do you corrupt a populace but you also disrupt the natural capitalist dynamics which further suppress growth.

It’s interesting how Steyn refers to the NGOs as the “new imperial class.” He explains it thus, “Like many imperialists, they're well-meaning: they see their charges as helpless and dependent, which happy condition has the benefit of justifying an ever-growing aid bureaucracy in perpetuity.” You’ll, of course, remember how Bush was supposed to be the imperialist. The American position is no secret, however. We want to set up a new, friendly, and self-sufficient government in Iraq. The NGO agenda, though, is far more nebulous. At any rate, the attitude of these organizations is patently racist and screams cultural arrogance (again, isn’t it the U.S. that’s supposed to be guilty of this?). These liberal groups believe the Iraqis unable to support themselves and incapable of taking care of their own basic needs. The sad thing is that once they start meddling, they’ll only prove the theory correct without ever realizing that they were the ones that caused it.