On the 11th Hour, of the 11th Day, of the 11th Month . . . . . .

"Of the four wars in my lifetime,

none came about because the U.S. was too strong."

- Ronald Reagan

Today we stop to thank the men and woman of the United States military who have always been there to defend the very umbrella of liberty that we as a nation prosper under. Nothing in this great country would be here if a tiny minority of our citizens were not willing to, as a quote from a movie once said, “pick up a weapon and stand a post”. 

As our government struggles with out-of-control spending that threatens to bankrupt our country, the progressives always try to balance their social spending with cuts to defense spending. The end result of this is that we send our sons and our daughters off to fight wars under-equipped and under-trained for the missions at hand. From Manassas in the Civil war to Corregidor in WWII to Pusan Perimeter in Korean to Black Hawk down in Somalia, American combat forces have died because of a lack of resolution of Americas to fund our military at the levels required to carry out what our elected official’s demand of them.

Let us never forget the sacrifice of the American fighting man and let us resolve to always pressure our government to maintain the best trained and best equipped fighting force on earth.

“Liberty must at all hazards be supported for Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.”   - John Adams

"Mighty men of valor, men trained for war, who could handle shield and spear, and whose faces were like the faces of lions."  - 1 Chronicles 12:8

"Duty, honor, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn."  - Gen. Douglas MacArthur

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."  - John Stuart Mill

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." –Ronald Reagan.

"He which hath no stomach to this fight let him depart. But we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!! For today, he that sheds his blood with me shall always be my brother.”  - William Shakespeare

 

Thank you to all Veterans past and present

and a special thanks to CAAT Black of the 2/2 Marines.

What’s in a name?

We are now over 5 years into the “Affordable Care Act”.  Our Democratic Senate leader declared we have to pass the bill to know what is in it and little did we know how true that was.

Now, over 30 delays in key provisions later, we find out:

• we can’t really keep our insurance if we like it as the President said, that was a lie
• we can’t really keep our doctor as the President said, that was also a lie.

There are a number of provisions in the law that may be beneficial and the goal of working toward good health care for everyone is commendable; but a 960 page bill and the federal government taking over 1/6^th of the US economy were not necessary to achieve those goals.

So what has the bill achieved?

As opposed to the stated purpose of the bill, to increase the number of people with insurance, the bill has caused upward of 6 million people to have their insurance canceled.

As stated, the main purpose of the bill was to reduce costs; yet a main prevision of the law is a 2.9% tax on all medical devises, therefore increase the cost of medical care.

The bill is so destructive that one of the bill’s main supporters, unions like the AFL-CIO, declared that the bill will “Destroy the Very Health and Well-being of Workers” and key a Democratic Senator referred to the bill as “a train wreck”.

The President stated many times in the run up to passage of the bill that “it will reduce health insurance premiums by $2,500 per family”, but now we know that the cost of health insurance has gone up, not down in the last year. 

Thousands of Americans come forward with horror stories after losing their insurance and getting caught in a bureaucratic nightmare when forced in to the health care exchanges and the democratic leader of the house calls them liars, and then contrary to the video showing him saying that exact thing returns to the floor of the house to deny he said it.

But the biggest lie of all, the biggest dishonesty about the whole program is the name itself, “affordable”. Nothing in the almost 1000 pages says or does anything to truly reduce the cost of health care. Except for a provision to cut the amount paid to doctors seeing Medicaid patents, which will just reduce the doctors who will accept Medicaid patents, the bill does nothing to lower the cost of health care, just shift who will pay for it.

There is a reason a bill supposedly about health care uses the word “tax” 210 times and the word “doctor” 0.

So –

• high wage earners get a 3.9% insurance tax surcharge
• low and middle class workers get a subsidy
• People are forced to buy policies that they will never use because the deductibles are so high,
• insurance companies get millions of new customer
• Millions more get included in the Medicaid rolls , paid for by the tax payers
• Doctors take a cut in pay, so their patents get lower premiums on the insurance
• anyone using a medical devise pays an extra 2.9% so the government can use that money to provide free insurance to someone else.
• The government gets thousands of new employees to administer the bill, including 5000 new IRS agents to oversee compliance to the new mandate and subsequent tax if you fail to comply, and
• the taxpayers get an increase in federal spending to pay for.

If the President and his progressive supporters were being honest (not one of their strong suits) they would have called it

 “The Wealth Redistribution Care Act” or  “The Government Takes Control of Your Healthcare Act”.

But I did say if….

"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

Margaret Thatcher

A Congressional Budget Office study released Tuesday reported that 2.3 million people will lose their full time jobs as a result of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The report said the ACA will lead to a decrease of total hours worked by 2% by 2017.

That’s not the scary part though, when questioned about this report, a White house spoke person said it was not a bad thing because many of those workers will voluntarily work less hours so they can keep their income low enough to continue to qualify for federal subsidies for their health insurance.

Today Nancy Pelosi released a statement that people now have more freedom because they can choose  to work less hours or not even work at all because their health insurance is being subsidized by the government  (using other tax payers money). 

No word from Ms. Pelosi about the freedoms of the people who ARE working to subsidized those collecting subsidies.

The President and Democrats in congress apparently believe that a federal incentive to stop supporting yourself and instead rely on someone else to pay a portion of your health insurance is a good thing.

So now we have a health insurance law that:

• did not sign up many of the people who were uninsured,
• caused hundreds of thousands of people to lose their health insurance,
• increased the cost of health insurance for millions,
• costs at least three times the amount the President told us it would (according to the most recent government numbers),

and on top of all that, destroyed full time jobs AND decreased American productivity.

What’s not to love?

Also this week, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that extended unemployment benefits have held the unemployment numbers at least 3% higher than if the benefits were not available.  And why not? Everyone is forced to pay into unemployment through mandated payments, it’s hard to argue with the logic that if the government is going to hand out money I might was well get some.

The problem is, the government is not handing out its own money, its handing out our money – yours and mine, and if it’s handing out a bunch, it’s going to have to turn around and ask citizens to just replace what has beend handed out.

So is there any mystery why the recovery from this recession that ended in 2009 is so slow, why unemployment is so high, why so many people have just given up looking for work? We have government policy after government policy that rewards not working and through higher taxes punishes working.  Much of the work force and most of the business that are so slow to recover from this recession are the same people and business that quickly recovered from the last recession.

Yet in 2013, the number of people in the work force is at the lowest point in 30 years, black participation in the labor force is at the lowest point ever recorded!  Unemployment is still at record levels, people on food stamps have doubled, people on disability is up from 4.3 million in 1990 to over 10 million today and the only three years the % of the population living under the poverty line has stayed above 15 % consistently is the last three years .  This has been the worse recovery in history and there is no end in sight.

The fact is this President’s economic policies have been a major factor in the total lack of a recovery and the suffering that goes along with them. The really sad thing is a majority of the people suffering believed in the rhetoric and voted for the current president.  

The scariest thing of all is I am not sure many of them learned a lesson,

The road to hell paving company

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

On this date in 1964 President Johnson declared a “War on Poverty”.

At the time of Johnson’s speech, the poverty rate in this country stood at about 19%. Poverty rates had been falling steadily since at least 1959 which was the first year there was a real statistic. At that time, most people agreed that poverty had been falling steadily since 1930. During the depression it is estimated the number of people living below the poverty rate reached 50%. We would have to attribute this decline in poverty to our basic economic system since there were virtually no government anti-poverty programs in place before President Johnson’s great initiative.

In fact, the poverty rate had been declining at almost 1% a year for the five years leading up to the President Johnson’s declaration of war.  From 1964 until 1970 the poverty rate declined further from the 19% to the historic low of about 13%. This was a little better than 1% a year. In other words, the poverty rate declined at about the same rate from 1959 until 1970. If we want to be fair we can say the rate of decline increased slightly after Johnson’s speech and we can even give the credit to the massive new anti-poverty program that was part of the president’s “war”.

But a funny thing happened after 1970, the poverty rate actually went up. The rate increased to 15% at the end of the recession in the early 80’s. Since then, the poverty rate has mostly hovered around 13-15% for the next 30 years and today stands at about 15.6% (the highest rate in over 40 years). This level of poverty has been constant whether Republican or Democrat leaders and both have largely maintained and expanded the federal programs of welfare, food stamps, head start, unemployment insurance, disability insurance and over 100 other programs designed to address poverty and its causes.

Despite the trillions of dollars spent on hundreds of federal government anti-poverty programs, the amount of people in this country living below the government defined poverty line remains about the same or even worse since at this date in time we are at a 40 year high

But it might be worse.  Remember before the “war on poverty”? When the poverty rate had steadily been declining?  What changed?  Our economic system that had been producing a steadily decreasing rate of poverty has only become stronger.  The number of jobs and our country’s level of efficiency have increased dramatically. The big difference between then - when the poverty rate was falling and now - when it has leveled out is the federal government programs.  You would have to be crazy to not at least consider that these programs have hurt people’s ability to get out of poverty.

It may be in a country this large that some percent will always live in poverty and maybe that percentage is where we are now.  But one absolute fact is that the almost $1,000,000,000.00 (one billion dollars) a year we spend to eradicate poverty is having no effect. And yet whenever anyone talks about changing, eliminating or modifying any entitlement program, the progressives absolutely explode. (Witness the recent debate on continuing unemployment benefits to pay for up to two years.)

For some reason the people in Washington think that if we keep doing the same thing over and over we will eventually get different results.

But what did I say about being crazy.

Your government at work.

During the 3-1/2 years of World War 2 that started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the Surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, the U.S. Produced;

 22 aircraft carriers,

8 battleships, 48 cruisers,

349 destroyers, 420 destroyer escorts,

203 submarines,

34 million tons of merchant ships,

100,000 fighter aircraft,

98,000 bombers,

24,000 transport aircraft,

58,000 training aircraft,

93,000 tanks,

257,000 artillery pieces,

105,000 mortars,

3,000,000 machine guns,

2,500,000 military trucks.

 

We put 16.1 million men in uniform in the various armed services,  invaded Africa, invaded Sicily and Italy, won the battle for the Atlantic, planned and executed D-Day, marched across the Pacific and Europe, developed the atomic bomb and ultimately conquered Japan and Germany.

It's worth noting, that during the almost exact amount of time, the Obama administration couldn't build a functioning web site.