This Hill Magazine article shows that it’s never too early for Democrats to play the Social Security scare card. Here’s what the Hill is reporting:

National Democrats continue to bet heavily on Social Security privatization as a trump card in the 2008 elections, launching attack ads in three more districts Tuesday that accuse GOP candidates of supporting risky private accounts.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is now up with at least eight ads on the topic, while Senate Democrats are using the issue in ads in Louisiana and Oregon.

Tuesday’s additions go after a pair of Pennsylvania candidates, Rep. Phil English and top challenger Lou Barletta, as well as former Rep. Mike Sodrel (R-IN). And in another Pennsylvania race, Rep. Jason Altmire (D) is also up with a new ad linking former Rep. Melissa Hart (R) to President Bush’s privatization plan.

Alicia Collins, the campaign manager for Melissa Hart, took issue with the Altmire campaign for running ads that were intended to scare people. Here’s what Ms. Collins said in response to the DCCC’s ads:

“It seems that Jason Altmire is once again getting his direction from the Obama/Pelosi playbook, scare the public about any idea put forward, but offer no ideas of your own,” said Campaign Manger, Alicia Collins.

Collins added, “Instead of airing untrue and extremely misleading advertisements to scare people about their financial future, Congressman Altmire should get back to work in Washington and address the current financial crisis.”

I’m personally calling Jason Altmire out on this. It’s a gutless thing to let an ad like that run. It’s intellectually bankrupt. It’s indefensible. Most importantly, it tells me that he doesn’t have a positive agenda to run on. (continue reading post »)

The minute I saw the Washington Times’ interview with Phil Gramm, I knew that the McCain campaign would throw Sen. Gramm under the bus. It’s a sad day when the McCain campaign can’t stand up for the truth. It’s time that Sen. McCain developed a spine on domestic issues. Here’s what Sen. Gramm said in the interview:

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

“We’ve never been more dominant; we’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today,” he said. “We have benefited greatly” from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.

Here’s how the McCain campaign responded: (continue reading post »)

by Dick McDonald

Barack Obama has made no bones about it. He is going to eliminate the cap on payroll taxes to save the Social Security/Medicare programs. Those making over $97,000 a year will be hit with an additional 15.3% in payroll taxes for anything they make over $97,000.

Let’s assume you are a $20 million a picture actor and you make two pictures a year. Obama is going to ask you for an additional $6,130,000 of new taxes over and above the $14,000,000 you pay at 35%. In other words he wants you to pay a 44% increase in your taxes to compensate for Congress’s irresponsible use of the pay-as-you-go method of funding those programs over the years and promising more than they could afford – to be precise $45 trillion more and counting.

Now if you are a run-of-the-mill celebrity and only make an extra million above the $97,000 cap it is only going to cost you an extra $153,000 in new taxes over the $350,000 you pay to the IRS.

Assuming you are a Hollywood liberal the price of being one has just gone up – thanks to your new liberal political idol. The tragedy of such liberal philosophy is that raising taxes on the rich never makes the poor wealthy. Raising taxes on the rich will merely reduce the capital in the private sector used to keep the economy humming. Obama’s raising the cap won’t make the poor wealthy, it merely covers up the screw-ups of Congress and keeps massively inadequate retirement programs called Social Security and Medicare from being scrapped for better ones.

There are better programs that not only promise benefits 20 times better than the present plans, but will increase the value of the US Dollar as well as increase the net worth of America and Americans as well.

Hopefully someone in Hollywood is paying attention. Why would Hollywood feel obligated to pay for political mistakes even if those mistakes were made by politicians in Hollywood’s favored party? It doesn’t seem fair to Hollywood. Their salaries are going to be the hardest hit. Corporate types will just alter their compensation packages to avoid this 15.3% punishment.

For further information, go to Rise Up America

One of the biggest reasons why I’m an unabashed Fred supporter is because Fred’s the only person capable of explaining why we need to take terrorism, and Iran, seriousl. Fred’s also the only candidate who (a) understands the entitlement crisis and (b) has a plan to reform entitlements. Fred’s also the man with the credibility and resolve to stop illegal immigration in its tracks.

Fred’s plan for topping Iran’s mullahs is to establish the equivalent of Reagan’s Radio Free Europe. Though RFE existed long before Reagan took office, it wasn’t the effective tool it should’ve been. Reagan hired people who were familiar with the culture, not just people who could speak the language. Reagan also did away with the ‘don’t offend somebody’ diplomats that didn’t preach the message of freedom.

Fred’s idea for toppling the mullahs is to preach a message of hope, optimism and freedom to the oppressed Iranian citizenry. The idea is to tell them that we’ll stand with them as they topple their mullahs.

Needless to say, Fred’s the only candidate who’s devised a detailed plan for Iran.

Another major item on Fred’s agenda is reforming Social Security and Medicare. During the Des Moines Register/Schoolmarm debate, Fred said that “We need to tell the Warren Buffetts that” we can’t afford to give them medicare benefits. Fred’s plan to fix Social Security is to tie COLAs to inflation, not wage increases.

Again, Fred’s the only candidate who’s thought things through enough to put a proposal together. (continue reading post »)

Admittedly, I haven’t been watching the entire debate but I thought Rudy’s best moments were his saying that he’d veto the federal legislation making abortion a crime. He correctly said that it’s a states’ rights issue.

Rudy’s answer to the kid from Atlanta was possibly the best, most direct response of the debate that I’ve seen. Rudy gets an A+ on that.

Fred Thompson’s YouTube hit on Romney and Huckabee was surgical and powerful. Romney’s ‘I’m not perfect’ response was lame at best. His saying that he consistently chose the side of life doesn’t square with the fact that his health care program has a $50 co-pay for abortions. MAJOR OOPS!!!

As the debates roll on, there are a couple thing that are predictable:

Paulites actually believing that bin Laden wouldn’t have attacked America if we hadn’t put forces in Saudi Arabia and Hugh ignoring objective criteria to declare Mitt Romney the winner of the debate.

Let’s deal with the last item first. It’s embarassing to hear someone who is as intelligent as Hugh ignore basic conservative principles out of self interest. That’s the only reason I can think of why he’s sticking to the line that Romney is a conservative. He’s to the left of President Bush. That isn’t a conservative. As I stated earlier, Romney’s health care plan has a $50 co-pay for abortions.

That information demands an answer to this question: When exactly did Romney’s conversion happen? RomneyCare was one of the last things he did as governor. Hugh knows this but still touts Romney. It’s a sad thing to watch. I didn’t think I’d see the day when Hugh Hewitt became part of the Agenda Media but it’s happened. What’s particularly shameful is that he’s doing this to support a closet liberal like Romney.

Another thing that’s obvious is that Ron Paul’s supporters blindly follow him. Tom Tancredo’s reply that “I don’t know what world Ron’s living in” but it doesn’t sound like the real world nailed it. You know that something’s wrong when Tom Tancredo sounds like the voice of reason on a subject.

I thought a couple of Fred’s answers were right on target. His response to the “Name 3 things you’d cut” question was fabulous. He started off by citing the need for entitlement reform, then moving onto the list of programs he listed in his report as chairman of the Government Reform Committee was the best answer of the night. Fiscal conservatives are cheering that answer.

I also thought that his answer on the question on whether he’d veto a bill to ban abortions should Roe v. Wade was overturned was strong and predictable. One of Fred’s strength is his belief in states’ rights.

This is another question where Mitt Romney stumbled a bit. When he said that he’d sign it, it was his attempt to capture a few extra pro-life votes, nothing more. It said that he isn’t a states’ rights person. That’ll lose him more libertarian votes than pro-life votes he gained.

There isn’t a true conservative who isn’t a big Tenth Amendment person. Romney failed that test miserably.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney, Abortion, Tenth Amendment, States Rights, Hugh Hewitt, Agenda Media, Rudy Giuliani, Crime, Fred Thompson, Entitlement Reform, Fiscal Conservatism

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

How many of you have gotten tired of hearing liberals ask how we’ll “pay for tax cuts”? Well, it appears as though the answer is simple: by enacting tax cuts so revenues can increase. Here’s evidence that that works:

Federal revenue collections hit an all-time high in April, contributing to a further improvement in the budget deficit for the year.

Releasing its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Thursday that through the first seven months of this budget year, the deficit totals $80.8 billion, significantly below the $184.1 billion imbalance run up during the first seven months of the 2006 budget year.

So far this year, tax revenues total $1.505 trillion, an increase of 11.2 percent over the same period last year. That figure includes $383.6 billion collected in April, the largest monthly tax collection on record.

There you have it. Cut taxes and they’ll pay for themselves and then some. These statistics don’t lie. Economists have credited the Bush tax cuts for making the 2001-2002 recession the shallowest in history. Now they’re directly responsible for creating the single biggest monthly tax collection in history. (continue reading post »)

That seems to be the message behind the shrinking deficit story that President Bush touted Wednesday. That still didn’t satisfy Democrats, though:

“Only a president with such a historically bad economic record would be this excited about a $248 billion deficit,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D-NY). “Under his watch…record surpluses turned into record deficits as far as the eye can see.”

Those record surpluses Ms. Maloney talked about were the result of Clinton not sufficiently investing in national security more than anything else. Ms. Maloney’s statement is intellectually dishonest on another level. She’s comparing a peacetime economy to an economy that’s beared the burdens of paying for major homeland security upgrades, two wars in the GWOT and overcome the economic consequences of the biggest terrorist attack in our nation’s history. Simply put, if President Bush hadn’t had to fight the terrorists, he’d be posting surpluses.

Now for the hard facts:

• Corporate income tax receipts grew from $278.3 billion to $353.9 billion, a 27% increase.
• Personal income tax receipts grew from $927.2 billion to $1.044 trillion, an increase of $116.8 billion.
• The deficit dropped from $318.7 billion to $247.7 billion, a drop of $71 billion or 22%

Kent Conrad, the ever-whining senator from North Dakota, still tried painting this as negative news:

Democrats said the narrowing of the deficit would be temporary as the pending retirement of 78 million baby boomers will send costs of the government’s big benefit programs soaring. “The fact that some are trumpeting this year’s deficit number as good news shows just how far we’ve fallen. Our budget picture is extremely serious by any measure,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee.

Shame on Sen. Conrad for talking about the troubles we face when baby boomers retire. His was the party that said we didn’t have a problem. His was the party that opposed any changes in Social Security. His was the party that ignored former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s advice to utilize private account growth rates to compensate for the predicted shortfall. His words ring rather hollow in light of those facts.

That’s the epitome of a do-nothing congressional caucus.

Technorati Tags: President Bush, Budget Deficits, Treasury Department, Social Security, Democrats

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

I just saw an NY Times article on RCP talking about MN-6, my home district. The author, Charlie Baxter, titled the article A Campaign in Crisis Mode. The article would be blank if not for the hyperventillating progressivism found in the article. Here’s a taste of Mr. Baxter’s liberalism:

Compared to Ms. Bachmann, a suburban radical of an increasingly familiar sort, Patty Wetterling seems rather tame and pleasant and sensible, conservative, that is. In the view of Ms. Wetterling (who came into local prominence when her son was abducted at gunpoint and disappeared in 1989) we are not in the end times but in a stable world shaped by well-financed public education, Social Security, benefits for veterans, a decent respect for the opinions of others, a reluctance to engage in foreign adventures, and balanced budgets.

I can’t believe that people get paid for writing this type of trash. Mr. Baxter spins Patty Wetterling’s radical anti-war views into her being reluctant “to engage in foreign adventures.” That isn’t sensible policy; it’s stupid policy. As Sen. Bachmann said in Monday’s debate, the “terrorists have declared their intentions and they haven’t changed.” What’s so virtuous about being reluctant to kill terrorists? What’s so virtuous about ignoring Ahmadinejad or Chavez?

Somewhat predictably, she draws her support largely from evangelicals. The centrist Republicans I know, those few who are still around, tend to regard her as superficial. President Bush visited Wayzata, Minneapolis’s most affluent suburb (though not in the Sixth District) to speak on her behalf. The two are quite in sync.

I hate breaking this to Mr. Baxter but Central Minnesota folks are centered enough to know that people whose views are shaped by religion are quite sane. It’s raging secularists like himself that we worry about. (continue reading post »)

It’s standard procedure for both sides to declare victory after a debate. I’m used to that spin. There ought to be a law against spinning a bloodbath into a ‘win’. Such is the case here:

“The first Senate debate between Bob Casey and Rick Santorum wasn’t even close, Casey won,” said Phil Singer, spokesman for the DSCC. “Santorum, looking unhinged, offered more of the same, while Bob Casey outlined a new direction and made the case for change. Casey went head to head on Santorum’s home turf and got the better of him.”

Mr. Singer must be a close relative, if not brother of Baghdad Bob, to be saying such nonsense. Either that or he’s a bald-faced liar. That isn’t spinning; that’s lying. PERIOD. Casey lost the fight on his statement about Social Security alone. Here’s that statement (and Tim Russert’s reaction to it):

“I don’t think you’re talking about a crisis,” the Democrat said during an hourlong debate yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Mr. Casey said the program, raided for years by federal lawmakers to pay for other government programs, will fix itself.
“So [we'll have] double the people on Social Security and Medicare, and life expectancy approaches 80. And the solution is ‘do nothing’?” moderator Tim Russert asked. Mr. Casey suggested reinstating the estate tax and then hoping for a booming economy to “grow” the program out of the peril that actuarial tables and demographics predict.

Does that sound like Casey “went head to head on Santorum’s home turf and got the better of him”? I’d say that he came as close as you could imagine to eliminating himself from serious consideration for election this fall. I’ll guarantee that Kate Michelman and Co. won’t be working overtime to get him elected. They’ll let Santorum win and hope to beat him in 2012. Remember that she almost challenged him because he isn’t pro choice enough for them.

Follow this link for more Casey-Santorum debate analysis. Frankly, I didn’t think it was close. I thought it was almost a clean knockout with Casey leading with his chin most of the bout.

Technorati: Bob Casey, Jr, Rick Santorum, Election 2006, Meet the Press, Tim Russert

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

“There are two dirty little secrets behind the debate over the illegal alien issue that even the advocates of securing the borders first have failed to discuss. The first secret is that the estimated twelve to twenty million aliens living and working illegally in the United States have to commit identity theft to secure employment. The second secret is that without illegals’ payroll tax contributions, filed under stolen or fraudulent Social Security numbers, the Social Security system would collapse years earlier than estimated.

Hard to believe, here are the facts.”

Why does the government, Social Security, protect illegal aliens using fraudulent social security cards? Since 2% of the employers hire 30% of the illegal aliens, why doesn’t government investigators close those businesses?

These are questions being raised by Herman Cain, a business leader from Georgia and the chairman of Godfathers Pizza.. Worse, the Feds have information, exact information on the name of the every employer that hires illegal aliens (and still pays into Social Security). Is it possible that almost overnight we could end the onslaught of illegal aliens just by enforcing the laws? Imagine if each company that hired illegal aliens were sent a notice that they ha, and the current law allows it, to pay a $10,000 fine per illegal aline that they hired? Just a letter. Then, the Feds could use private collection agencies to collect the money..so no government resources would be needed. This would cause a new industry to be developed, attorneys and collection agencies would get a percentage of the collections, and if the business did not pay, action could be taken to close the business. (continue reading post »)