Homeless in Arizona

Yea, if you believe that I have some land I want to sell you in Florida.

This editorial by Michael Barone seems to say that Barack Obama thinks the only reason people are successful in America is because they received help from the government.

I suspect Obama knows that is a crock of BS. But then Obama uses that to justify the government's theft of successful people's income.

You know, if the government gave successful people the money, then it has the right to steal the money back. So I guess Emperor Obama thinks we are dumb enough to believe that justifies his governments stealing 90+ percent of rich people income.

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Obama Believes Success Is a Gift From Government

Posted: July 19, 2012 in Featured, Political

Perhaps the rain made the teleprompter unreadable. That’s one thought I had on pondering Barack Obama’s comments to a rain-soaked rally in Roanoke, Va., last Friday.

Perhaps he didn’t really mean what he said. Or perhaps — as is often the case with people — when unanchored from a prepared text he revealed what he really thinks.

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back,” he began, defending his policy of higher tax rates on high earners. “They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

“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.”

In other words, Steve Jobs didn’t make Apple happen. It was the work of a teacher union member — er, great teacher — and the government agencies that paved I-280 and El Camino Real that made Apple happen.

High earners don’t deserve the money they make, Obama apparently thinks. It’s the gift of government, and they shouldn’t begrudge handing more of it back to government.

And that’s true, as he told Charlie Gibson of ABC News in 2008, even if those higher tax rates produce less revenue for the government, as has been the case with rate increases on capital gains. The government should take away the money as a matter of “fairness.”

The cynical might dismiss Obama’s preoccupation with higher tax rates as an instance of a candidate dwelling on one of his few proposals that tests well in the polls. Certainly he doesn’t want to talk much about Obamacare or the stimulus package.

Cynics might note that he spurned super-committee Republicans’ willingness last year to reduce tax deductions so as to actually increase revenue from high earners, without discouraging investment or encouraging tax avoidance as higher tax rates do.

But maybe Obama’s Captain-Ahab-like pursuit of higher tax rates just comes from a sense that no one earns success and that there’s no connection between effort and reward.

That kind of thinking also helps to explain the approach taken by Sen. Patty Murray in a speech at the Brookings Institution Monday. She wants a tax rate increase on high earners so badly she said she’d prefer raising everyone’s taxes next year to maintaining current rates.

Murray was first elected in 1992 as a state legislator who had been dismissed by a lobbyist as “just a mom in tennis shoes.” But in 20 years she’s become an accomplished appropriator and earmarker.

“Do no harm,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told members of Congress at a hearing yesterday, urging them to avoid the sharp spending cuts and tax rate increases scheduled for year’s end.

But Murray is threatening to do exactly that kind of harm. Those prattling about how irresponsible Republicans are might want to ponder her threat.

And to consider that Republicans remember what happened to the last Republican who agreed to such rate increases, George H.W. Bush in 1990. Seeking re-election in 1992, he won only 37 percent of the vote. Republicans won’t risk that again.

The Obama Democrats seem to believe that there’s no downside risk in threatening huge tax increases for everyone and in asserting that if you’re successful “someone else made that happen.”

But The Wall Street Journal’s Catherine McCain Nelson reported yesterday how affluent Denver suburbanites have soured on Obama. Obama tied John McCain 49 to 49 percent among voters over $100,000 income in 2008, but in NBC/WSJ polls this year they’ve favored Mitt Romney 50 to 44 percent.

Affluent voters trended Democratic over two decades on cultural issues. But economic issues dominate this year, and they may not appreciate Obama’s assertion that they don’t deserve what they’ve earned.

Did the state make you great?

Source

Did the state make you great?

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 19

“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

— Barack Obama,

And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad.

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.

The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.

More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.

Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.

Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Rob Robb on "Did the state make you great?"

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Obama inadvertently frames campaign

From the political notebook:

* Barack Obama may have inadvertently framed the presidential campaign with remarks he made while campaigning in Virginia a little over a week ago.

In making his usual case that successful people haven’t become that way on their own, Obama used a formulation that will be endlessly repeated and parsed for the remainder of the political season. This is the official White House transcript of what he said:

“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.”

There’s been more attention to the word “that” in that formulation than to any word since Bill Clinton pondered the deeper epistemological mystery of “is”.

Republicans pounced on the statement, claiming that the “that” refers to “business” and Obama was saying business owners didn’t build their own businesses.

I think that’s nonsense. From Obama’s delivery, the “that” pretty clearly refers to “roads and bridges” in the previous sentence.

But it doesn’t really matter. The entire riff was a denigration of the centrality of individual initiative in individual achievement. According to Obama, people don’t succeed because they are smart and hardworking. That’s not what distinguishes those who succeed from those who don’t. He said that pretty plainly.

Now, there’s a certain amount of truism to what Obama is saying. Individuals do depend on living and working within a system in which individual initiative can matter. And that system is, for the most part, collectively provided through government. But it’s fatuous for him to suggest this is something that somehow divides the parties.

The Ryan budget would increase federal spending from $3.6 trillion to $4.9 trillion over 10 years. At the end of the 10 years, federal spending would still be 20 percent of GDP. That’s still a whole lot of collective providing.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Obama believes that what we do collectively is at least as important to our success as what we do individually, perhaps more so.

That’s not the way Americans have historically viewed themselves or their country. Downplaying the role of individual initiative in individual achievement goes against our grain.

This could be a very big deal.

* I doubt that Republicans are going to get very far in their efforts to convince judges to invalidate the redistricting maps adopted by the Independent Redistricting Commission. But they have produced some very strong circumstantial evidence that the lines were finagled to favor Democrats.

All districts are supposed to have the same population. On the congressional map, the IRC hit the mark on the button. For the legislative map, there were some substantial deviations and there was a distinct pattern to the deviations.

Of the 12 districts with less than the average in population, 10 have a Democratic plurality in registration. Of the 18 districts that are overpopulated, 16 have a Republican plurality.

So, the effect of the population deviations is to stuff more Republicans in Republican districts, advantaging Democrats in the remainder.

The IRC in its court response claims this is to create more districts where Latinos can influence the outcome. The Republican statistical analysis, however, convincingly disputes this, leaving the partisan effect as the primary outcome.

The map still tilts Republican, which is inevitable so long as the Voting Rights Act requires racial gerrymandering. But the Democratic pickup from the population deviations could amount to 3,000 votes or so in some districts.

Courts tend to turn a blind eye to finagling the lines for partisan advantage so long as minority voting strength isn’t weakened in the process.

But the partisan effect of the population deviations makes the IRC’s claim of political neutrality hard to accept.

* In ordering Secretary of State Ken Bennett to process the signatures for the sales tax initiative, Judge Robert Oberbillig reportedly said that the case was “silly.” That suggests a judge that didn’t seriously consider the important legal issue at stake. Bennett owes it to the state to appeal to some judges who might.

State law requires that, before an initiative is circulated, proponents fill out an application provided by the Secretary of State that includes the text of the initiative. The application is only available in paper form. Proponents of the sales tax initiative filled out that paper form and included a paper copy of the text of the initiative.

They also gave the Secretary of State an electronic version of the initiative that differed materially. They then circulated the electronic version rather than the version that was officially filed in compliance with state law.

According to Oberbillig, Bennett should have just ignored the version that was filed with the paper application. He cited no constitutional or statutory authority for Bennett to do so.

Whether an official text of an initiative has to be filed before being circulated and what constitutes the official text aren’t silly matters.