Getting Our Government Back on Track

Suppose you made $50,000 a year but your family was spending $60,000, do you think you might have a family meeting real quick and try to figure out a way to cut spending?  Then suppose your teenage son says: “Hey, don’t worry.  We’ve got credit cards.”

This is a picture of our government on a smaller scale.  This is not limited to the federal government, but this is the focus here.

The biggest indicators that our government has gone wrong in its focus and priorities is the massive debt that it has accumulated relatively recently in our nation’s history and the fact that it shows no signs of changing that.

The response of the Democrats is always to raise taxes and never to cut spending (unless it is for the military), and never to ask if maybe the government has gone off course.

Republicans usually focus on lowering taxes and hoping that this causes an increase in jobs and economic activity that leads to overall higher tax revenues.

But very few people talk about cutting spending, apart from obvious wasteful spending.  And none of them are Democrats. They don’t believe in cutting government spending.  And nobody is asking if our priorities and the whole direction of our government has gone astray.

So, what is the correct course of government, and how do we know it?

The answer, of course, is found in our founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, particularly the Preamble, which addresses this question.

Consider this quote from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Note four things here:

1)         God gave people certain unalienable rights, rights that precede government and that government cannot take away.

2)         People form governments for the purpose of securing those rights.  The definition of ‘secure’ from the Webster dictionary of that time has an interesting definition:

“To make certain; to put beyond hazard. Liberty and fixed laws secure to every citizen due protection of person and property. The first duty and the highest interest of men is to secure the favor of God by repentance and faith, and thus to secure to themselves future felicity.

Government, our government, exists to see that we enjoy those rights and to protect us from those that would take them away.

3)         The government’s power comes from the consent of the people.  The government has no right to force things on people and then to tell them to like it. 

4)         The paramount goal of the government is to effect the safety and happiness of its people. 

When was the last time you felt happy over our government?   The word ‘happiness’ was used a lot in the early writings of our country to describe the people living in our country.  It’s definitely not used today as our people are encouraged to protest every perceived injustice, every disagreement, every variance from a particular vision of how things should be.  I should add that, yes, it is the Democrats who are encouraging this unrest.   

 

So, what changed?

One very big thing that changed is that our government is now more concerned about the people coming to our country than the ones who are already here.  Again, it is primarily Democrats who push this.  Even when they are a minority in Congress, they often get what they want, because they make the most commotion.

Why are they more concerned about the people who might come here rather than those who are already here?  Simple answer: votes.

It’s easier to get new immigrants to vote for a government that is constantly offering them things that don’t cost them anything and that depend on higher taxes on other people than to vote for a government that just offers them freedom.  They don’t know what true freedom is or where it comes from.  They didn’t learn it in their old countries, and we certainly don’t teach it to them here.

We no longer teach our immigrants what the United States is all about, its foundation, the core beliefs behind our liberty, that our freedoms come from a belief in God as found in the Bible.  We are being told constantly that we are a secular nation with no distinct American value system or culture that we believe is better than any other culture.

And again, it is the Democrats who most strongly oppose teaching new immigrants the foundation of our country.  Besides considering all the cultures of these other countries as equal to our own, they are quite content to do away with the unalienable rights given to us by God and to stick with rights given to us by the government.  There is a big difference between the two that we will talk about at another time.

Many countries in Europe today are being flooded with immigrants.  There are a lot of other countries a lot closer to where they came from, but they don’t offer the benefits that these European countries do.  When I say benefits, I don’t mean advantages.  I mean benefits as in total monetary value of assistance.  It’s like they, and we, are paying people to move here.  For Democrats, it’s essentially paying people for their vote.

Yes, we are a nation of immigrants, but when we give them more money in benefits than they can make in their home countries working, of course, you’re going to have far more people trying to come here than you would otherwise and not in the mold of the immigrants of old..  In the ‘old days’ of immigration, they came with nothing, we gave them nothing but freedom, and they then made something out of nothing. 

All those immigrants in the past that made us what we are today didn’t get thousands of dollars a year in benefits.  We had jobs then, but then the government in its arrogant infinite wisdom sent the jobs to other countries.  Again, our government was caring more for other nations than its own people.

So the first step to getting our government on the right course is to expect it to think of the happiness of its citizens more than that of people who are not.  That statement will be construed by Democrats as being selfish and uncaring, but thinking of the happiness of its own citizens is the reason government exists in the first place. 

It’s like you hired someone to cut your grass, but they cut your neighbor’s grass instead and sent you the bill.  You can pay it if you want, but nobody should expect you to. But your grass still isn’t cut.  So you have to hire somebody else to cut your grass.  If our government won’t do what it was formed to do, then maybe it’s time for a new one. 

If the people alive today had lived during the time of the War for Independence, there never would have been a revolution.  And if the people alive then were alive today, there already would have been another one.

Our Government Has Lost its Way

I am writing articles for a Congressional candidate in my district.  This is the latest.

Our Government Has Lost its Way

If you were to go on a long road trip to places you had never been before, do you think you might look at the map a lot to be sure you’re still on the right road?

I feel that way about our federal government. 

Why?

It’s now 21 trillion dollars in debt with no sign of slowing down.  That’s more money that anyone is able to comprehend.  We owe both Japan and China over a trillion dollars each.  Does nobody find it at least a little embarrassing to ask another country to loan us money so we can pay our bills?  I am embarrassed and ashamed. 

Now if you look at a graph of our federal debt, you will see that it didn’t really start going anywhere until the 1960s, picked up steam in the 1980s, and then after 2000, the government just seemed to give up any thoughts of not living on borrowed money. 

While both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for this debt, the blame is not to be divided equally.  I don’t think you will find one Democrat who wants to cut spending.  They feel it is their job to spend money, and the more they spend, the better they like it.  The only time they will show concern for the debt is when Republicans want to cut taxes.  A Democrat is always looking for new ways to tax people, more things to tax.  And the more money you make, the more they feel they have a right to take more of it from you. 

The Bible which formed our moral foundation for almost 200 years taught a flat tax.  Everybody paid the same rate, even the poor.  When people don’t pay any taxes at all, why would they care about whether the government is in debt?  For people who are not the very, very rich, a progressive tax often discourages people from working longer and harder, because they don’t feel it is worth it.  We should never discourage people from doing that.  The only time people should choose to not work longer and harder is if they have more important things to do, like spend time with their family or to pursue other things.

Democrats believe that it is the government’s job to solve every problem.  And the way to solve a problem is to pass a law and start a program.  If the program isn’t working, it’s only because they’re not spending enough money.  If the problem no longer exists, they will increase spending, because the program must have worked, and they don’t want the problem to come back.  They won’t end the program.

It was the 1960s when our country basically changed direction.  A lot happened in the 60s, but two seemingly unrelated events stand out for this change.

The first was in 1962 and 1963 when the court called supreme removed prayer and Bible reading from our public schools.  The court believed that the government must be neutral toward religion and can’t therefore favor one religion over another.

The problem here is that the court showed a complete misunderstanding of religion.  For a lot of people, a religion is simply a system of beliefs about God and particular beliefs about worship and conduct.  That’s only partially true.

A religion is a description of reality and life, all of it, about what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is good and bad, what is important and what is not, what are the rules, are there any rules.  In other words, a religion is a worldview.  And guess what?  Everybody has a worldview, and every nation has a worldview.  Everybody and every nation has a basic set of beliefs that form the framework out of which people and nations make their decisions

A religion is a worldview that believes there is a God who has shown to the world what He is like and what the world is like.  Atheism is a worldview that doesn’t believe there is a god.  There is just matter.  When we die, that’s it.  There is nothing else or more, and we humans have to figure out for ourselves how best to live our lives.

When the court ruled that government cannot favor one religion over another, it essentially said that our nation must be a secular nation.  In other words, indifferent toward and unconcerned about religion.  One is as good as another, meaning, it’s fine for what you do in the privacy of your home, but it has no place in America’s public life.  We will conduct our business as a nation as if there is no God. 

To say that there is a God would be to promote theism (a belief in God) over atheism, and the First Amendment doesn’t allow that, according to that court.  If the court had actually read the writings of the Founders, they would have known that the issue was about the federal government establishing a national church as they have and still have in Europe and not theism.  It was about favoring a particular Christian denomination over another.  Prayer and Bible were always part of our public education and public life from the beginning.  You don’t think the Founders knew what they meant by the First Amendment?   

The problem, of course, is that our nation is based on Christian beliefs about God and human rights.  And they got them from the Bible.  When the Declaration of Independence said that we were endowed by our creator with unalienable human rights, how did they know that?  And what God were they talking about?  Short answer: the God of Christianity as taught in the Bible.  How can we teach our future voters, whether our children or the millions of immigrants, what our nation is based on without teaching them the Bible and talking about God?  And if we don’t, we will lose our country, because they won’t believe in unalienable human rights.  Only those given by the government and / or the consensus of the people.

Then a few years later, the federal government started welfare programs as we know it.  Prior to this time, welfare, or charity as it used to be called, was done primarily by churches and other non-profit organizations, and it was voluntary.  But if as a nation we must be separate from religion in our public life, then government now becomes responsible for people.  Instead of people looking to God for help, now they are supposed to turn to the government.  Government is now looked upon to solve every problem and meet every need. 

They have given trillions of dollars to poor people, and it hasn’t solved the problem of poverty.  They (Democrats primarily) just want more money to spend on them.  Other people think poor people need jobs and better jobs.  That’s why we need to bring the jobs back to America.  I haven’t heard any Democrats talking about that.  Not too many Republicans either.  I will, but then if I am not elected, who’s going to listen to me?

People will say that the government should give a lot of money to poor people and, no, it’s not voluntary.  That’s the way it should be.  If you want a secular nation, then yes.  But that’s not what we were founded to be, and it certainly looks like secularism is going to bankrupt our country.

We know our country was never meant to be a secular nation, because the First Amendment promised freedom of religion.  It couldn’t promise freedom of religion unless religion, and in this case specifically Christianity, was consistent with the highest values of the land.  In a secular country, secular values are the highest values in the land, and they would supersede religious values whenever a conflict would arise between religion and the laws, and these conflicts would be inevitable.  

When we live on borrowed money, everything costs more.  Not the things in themselves, but we pay for the debt from our taxes and more borrowed money.  We are spending (wasting) a half trillion dollars a year just on interest for that debt.  That’s one untalked-about reason why the Federal Reserve wanted to keep interest rates so low during the Obama years: so people wouldn’t notice how much we were spending on interest. 

Before our country changed, people used to retire and live off the interest they had on their savings accounts.  Now many of them are dependent on a government that has to borrow money to pay its bills.  That’s not a good place to be.  But that’s a discussion for another time.

The government needs to get out the road map that guides our country.  Where is that road map?  It is found in the Preamble to the Constitution, the Constitution itself, and the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain the new Constitution and to encourage people to vote for it.  James Madison wrote both the Constitution and many of the papers.  We will look at these in future articles.

Another Look at the Second Amendment

I don’t think most people understand the Second Amendment.  I haven’t talked to most people, but I can read what is going on at least as the media report it.  We’re not teaching our children or the people who come here what this country is all about

Most people think that the Second Amendment gives people the right to bear and carry arms.  That’s wrong on two accounts.

First of all, the Amendments to the Constitution, at least the original ones, didn’t give rights.  They describe rights the people already had and that everybody knew they had. 

The Founders even debated whether they should include a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.  They were concerned that people might think that these rights came from the government, that they might think that the government can take them away or modify them, like is happening today with free speech and guns, and they were concerned that people might think that the only rights they had were those spelled out specifically in the Constitution. 

They asked in the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain and encourage the people to ratify the new Constitution, why they should declare that the press should be free, if the Constitution didn’t give the government any power to restrict it   Some found this unnecessary and misleading.  They eventually decided to add them.  This is why they are Amendments and not a part of the body of the Construction.  Today we talk about repealing or changing Amendments.  When we do that, it shows that we are failing to understand what our Founders intended and gave us.

Secondly, people often think that we have the right to bear and carry arms only because of the need for well-regulated militias.  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  So if we no longer need well-regulated militias, we no longer have a right to bear and carry arms. 

No.  The right to bear and carry arms is still there.  The Amendment is just reminding the federal government and the people why they should not try reduce those rights.  The right exists nonetheless.

And the Founders would not agree that we no longer need militias.  The Founders were students of history, and they certainly know European history.

In the Federalist Papers, our nation was described as an “armed” people, and that was considered a good thing, unlike in Europe where they were unarmed and ruled by tyrants and kings.  They considered guns in the hands of the citizens as their best protection against a tyrannical government.  They even present the scenario of the federal government sending troops to subject a state in a matter, and the state militia, every able-bodied person joining together, would be able to repel them.  It is said that in World War 2, the reason that Japan didn’t invade the United States was that everybody here had a gun.

Some of this may seem farfetched today, but there are people working very hard today to disarm the American people and to increase the power of government.  A few more generations, who knows?  At some point, we may find that the government wants to impose some policy on the whole country and one or more states says it’s not going to happen here.  And the federal government wants to force them, and the states say no;

The modern Webster’s dictionary defines infringe as an encroachment, so infringing the right to bear and carry arms would be the myriad ways that government tries to discourage and minimize gun ownership through taxes, zoning, the high number of gun laws and rules to weary all but the most ardent gun owners, and the imminent danger of being charged with a crime even if you use a gun in self-defense.

If you go back to the original Webster’s in the early 1800s, very near to the time of the Second Amendment’s writing, the definition is a little different.  Encroachment is not even mentioned as a definition of infringement.  They understood infringement as a breaking of a contract, a violation.  There is also the meaning of hindering, which is not too far from encroachment.

So the Founders weren’t thinking primarily of incremental infringements of the rights of gun owners, but they saw any restrictions as a violation of an unwritten contract that our nation would honor the unalienable right of gun ownership.

Guns have always been a major part of American life.  If now, after 240 years, we are having a problem with them, we need to ask what changed.  I answer that we have removed God from public life and education.  Secularism, which is essentially atheism, does not and cannot form or build a cohesive society where people care for each other.  This is not to say that an atheist cannot be a moral person, but the first atheistic countries in human history were responsible for the deaths of 100 million of their own people in the 20^th century.  There just isn’t the same value of human life in secularism or atheism. 

Our second President, John Adams, said: “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In speaking about religion, Adams was referring to Christianity, because that was the foundation of their beliefs in human rights and freedom.  True freedom involves a good measure of self-restraint and high moral conduct, otherwise you will need a strong government to force correct behavior.

And this is what we are having more of today.  More and more laws and regulations in an attempt to reduce gun violence when for almost all of our nation’s history, this was done by individuals who respected the lives of others, because they believed that we are all created in the image of God and God tells us to love our neighbors.

The secular moral code is summed up in four words: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Our only responsibility is to tolerate other people.  The government is responsible to see that everything is equal, fair, and diverse.  To tolerate somebody means simply to put up with them, or more practically, to ignore them.

If you don’t teach people to love their neighbors but just to tolerate them, you will not have a cohesive, united society where people are bonded with their neighbors and are eager to help them when needed.  Oh, yes, there are always people who respond in emergencies, but our society is becoming increasingly fragmented, and many places, like Chicago, have an epidemic of gun violence. 

The court called supreme was wrong to remove the Bible from public schools, because that taught us the morality that keeps us from killing each other, or wanting to.  It taught people to love each other and not just tolerate them or ignore them. 

Religion, specifically Christianity, believes that people are accountable for their actions, even those not seen by other people and gives other good reasons for moral behavior.  When you believe that God wants you to love your neighbor and that this is the most important thing you can do, it changes you.  When you believe and are taught that people are just intelligent apes, formed through chance chemical processes, there is less need to get involved with them, let alone love them.  When you see people as created by God and in His image, it changes everything.

The answer to gun violence in our country is to return to our roots.  God gave us rights, but He also gave us a lot more.  He showed us how to live.  Our Founders believed in the Bible, and the Bible was used for almost 200 years in our public schools to teach our children love, honor, purity, integrity, hard work, compassion, kindness, helping people in need, mercy, forgiveness, giving, sacrifice, honesty, responsibility, respect, courage, self-control, discipline, humility, and patience.  The Bible also taught our children to save yourself for marriage, not to have children out of wedlock, mothers and fathers loving, living, and staying together raising their children to do what is right, honoring and respecting them and other authorities, and working through hard marriages rather than breaking up a family.

They believed in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  And, of course, Love your neighbor as yourself.  This gave our country a moral consensus and bonded us with others.

Our country is trying to solve a gun problem by spending billions of dollars on law enforcement, hiring thousands of more personnel, laws, regulations, rules, mental health, security forces instead of trying to make better people, which is what we did for the first 200 years of our existence.

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

Our country has never been more divided than it is today.  If you look at the Constitution, the very first reason it states why our Founders decided to create the government that they did was in order to form a more perfect union. 

Now they may have been thinking more of uniting the States rather than the people, but the divided people divides states as well.  The states can’t be united if the people are not.

So one of the obvious things this means is that it is not the role of government to do something that the people don’t want, cram it down their throats, and then tell them to like it.  Or to put it a little nicer, if there are issues that are controversial (again, a sign of our division), the role of government should be to try to find a consensus through debate and dialogue before acting rather than doing something that a very large portion of the population is against.

Politically, they would call this bi-partisanship.  In the past, that was common.  Now it is rare.  Why?  Simply, the political parties are just as divided as the people are.

Looking at that a little differently, it’s we the people who are forming this government to help unite us.  It is not the place of government to decide for the people what it deems best and then force the people to live under it.

But we first need to ask why our country is so divided.  How could a country whose first stated purpose for even existing is to promote unity become so divided?  One thing you can say for sure about this division is that it is not accidental. 

So what unites people?  In one word, it’s worldview.  Worldview is a way of looking at life, what you believe about it, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is important and what is not.   What are the rules?  Are there any rules? 

Now in some ways, everybody has their own worldview.  No two people think exactly alike, but there are larger, more universal worldviews, systems of belief that everybody pretty much falls into one of them.  Details may vary, but the basic framework is the same.

Our country started out with a common worldview.  Our government, primarily through the court called supreme, called promoting that worldview unconstitutional.  There are, of course, many other basic worldviews that exist, and those who believe in one often feel it their duty to try to get as many other people as possible to follow it as well. 

So while that original worldview would be challenged wherever people talk about ideas, the court called supreme essentially removed that worldview from even being discussed in our schools.  So, on the one hand, the original worldview that united our country was prohibited from public education and the public square, and then there is the push for a different worldview from the people who hold to them, and then add to that the millions of people who come to our country with no clue about the original worldview that formed and united our country and each bringing the worldview of their home country, and voila you have a divided country.

You may have guessed that I was really talking about Christianity.  Well, that’s what religions are, worldviews, a complete description of life with all the rules and values spelled out.

There are also secular worldviews, ones that don’t include God, gods, that you could essentially call a secular religion.  Defining a religion as only including a god, God, misses the whole point of worldview.  The idea is supreme value, the system of belief that you, or your country, live your life by.   

We are told that our government must be neutral when it comes to worldviews that include a god, God.  So we must replace that with a wolrldview that doesn’t? I’m sorry, but that is beyond the role of government.  We must replace one worldview with another, because the government says so?    So our country, no, our government replaced Christianity with secularism.

But you say, our country is too diverse to favor one religion, I mean, worldview, over another.  Again, that was not accidental.  That was an intentional decision of our government without asking the people of our country.

Our country was founded on Christianity.  Our country was founded as a unique country in human history.  It believed that God gave humans unalienable rights that government cannot take away.  That was Christianity.  No other country, or religion, or worldview, believed in that.  The Ten Commandments used to be our moral code.  Now it is: make it up as you go along. 

Actually, the tenets of our new national religion, worldview, moral code are: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.   Your only responsibility as a human being is to tolerate, meaning put up with, or ignore, other people.  The government has the responsibility of seeing that everything is equal, fair, and diverse.

Add to that the myriad of worldviews that others bring to our country while we don’t teach them the worldview that started our country, and you have division, a divided country. 

Going back to the beginning, the government’s role in our country is to form a more perfect union.  It is not to force, and that is the correct word, another worldview on its people and then expect them to live by it. 

I didn’t say that the original worldview was to be forced on everybody either.  But we have to recognize the worldview that our country was founded on.  Disagree with it, if you will, but our government has essentially banned even having the discussion.  We not only not teach our children and the millions of people who come here what our country is based on; our government even forbids that we even talk about it in the public square.  I call that a government takeover, a foreign or domestic enemy that our leaders took an oath to defend our country against. 

The fact that our country is so divided is proof that our government is not governing according to what it was created to do by our Constitution.

The Most Important Issue of our Time, and Nobody is Talking about It

If you watch the evening news a lot, you might come to think that if there isn’t a cell phone video of something that happened, then nothing important happened in the world. 

The most important developments are often those that unfold over generations.  Every new generation has a new starting point for what is normal, and it often takes an older person to see how much has changed over several generations.

Our nation was founded as a unique nation in human history.  It was based on a belief in human rights unknown anywhere else in the world at that time.

Our Founders believed that our Creator gave humans unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government.  That means that government didn’t giver them and government can’t take them away or even reduce or restrict them.  They are also not from the consensus of the people such that they are subject to votes, polls, or laws.

Sorry, atheists, but our nation is based on a belief in God.  The court called supreme was wrong to say that government cannot favor or aid religion, and we are wrong to remove God from our public schools, because how can we teach our children what our nation is all about otherwise?

But wait a second.  How did our Founders know that God gave them rights, and which God are they talking about?  Every nation in the world at that time had their religions, and none of them believed in human rights like we did. 

Short answer is that our Founders believed in the Bible as telling us about God and His laws.  That is why the Ten Commandments were such a part of our country for most of our history.  The court called supreme was wrong to remove the Ten Commandments from public life.  That provided the moral framework for our country.

Now we no longer teach these to our children, because we think we can’t talk about God in public schools.  And we don’t teach them to the millions of immigrants who come to our country, because that would be culturally insensitive. 

We are told that all cultures are of equal value, except that no other culture or country in the world gave us the human rights that we have.

So in a generation or two as our children and our immigrants enter the political process, they won’t know what made us what we are.  Why would they?  And they will vote and legislate and conduct our business as a nation just like any other nation, and we will lose what it was that made us who we are. 

It’s already happening as college campuses are abridging free speech to protect people’s feelings and the right of gun ownership is infringed upon for the sake of public safety.

John Adams, our Second President, said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Sorry, secularists.  We are not a secular nation.  The court called supreme was wrong to say that our government cannot favor one religion over another.  Our rights came from a Christian understanding of God.

Our Constitution cannot guarantee freedom of religion unless religion was consistent with the highest values of our land.  Otherwise, secular values would be higher, and conflicts would inevitably result between the two.  And as we’ve already seen, it was only the Christian religion that showed us that we have unalienable rights from God and that gave us the moral code for our nation: the Ten Commandments.

So the biggest issue of our time is that we are losing the foundation on which our country was built, because we are not teaching it to our children and our immigrants.  Another generation or two and nobody will believe that our rights come from God.  And we will become like a blending of all the nations, and we will cease to be the unique nation we were founded to be.

We will lose the rights and the nation that our Founders fought a war in order to be able to create.  And why would we want to do that? 

The Single Most Important Thing We Can Do to Make our Economy Prosper

There is a man running for Congress in my district who I offered to help.  This is the fourth article I have written for him. 

Before I talk about the best thing to do for our economy, let me first talk about one of the worst things we do..  The only reason I mention one of the worst things is that it is something that Democrats strongly believe in, and that is government spending.

Imagine you are with your neighbors at a gathering.  There are 10 of you, and you all make around $50,000 a year.  You decide to form a small government for your block, and so you hire someone from the next block to oversee things on your block.  You pay him the same as what you make, and your pay immediately shrinks to $45,000 a year.  That’s $5,000 in taxes per person to pay for your new government. 

Add up all the taxes you pay, federal, state, property, sales, Social Security, Medicare, utility, excise, and you might well end up paying half your income in taxes.  Democrats are on a mission to increase government spending.  They don’t feel they are doing their job if they don’t constantly find more things to spend money on.  Then every few years they will try to raise taxes, because the debt is so high.  We already pay about a half trillion dollars a year in interest alone on our federal debt.  That’s money that just wasted.  Like burning it.

Democrats also like to have a lot of people receiving government assistance.  They feel like they are helping people.  If it was for a little while to help somebody get through a rough time, that would be one thing.  But they really don’t care if a person ever gets off government assistance.  They would probably be happiest if every person got a check from the government for something, unless, of course, you are very rich, in which case they feel they have the right to tell you how much or how little of your money you get to keep for yourself.

I believe the single most important thing we can do to give us the best possible economy is to bring the jobs back to America.

We used to make all of our stuff here.  Good paying full time jobs with medical insurance were standard in our country.  Middle class families were raising large families on one income, and as the population increased, so would the demand, and so would the jobs. 

Then in the 1990s, free trade became all the rage, and companies left our country like mice running out of sight when you turn on the lights.  You can always make something cheaper somewhere else in the world, so free trade sent millions of our jobs to other countries.  It’s hard to find anything made in America anymore, and most jobs here now don’t pay enough to support a family by themselves.

Our government leaders, I’m told, are trying to get other countries to buy more of our goods, so that our export industry can provide jobs for our workers.  I think that’s good, but not good policy.    Trying to build an economy on exports means that we are hoping that all the other countries prosper first so they can buy our products so that we can prosper.  We are tying the success of our economy on others having success first.  That’s just dumb.

We used to tax all imports to our country.  Taxes on imports used to pay for almost our entire federal budget.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913, and that was only meant for the very rich, and it was only a small amount.

Now when everything is made outside of our country and the wages for the jobs left in our country are dismal, yes, taxing imports raises the cost of a lot of products, and people are encouraged to complain about this.

But we have to bring the jobs back here.  More people will be working at better paying jobs with better benefits, like employer based medical insurance. 

But, but but . . .  then other countries will tax our imports to their countries, as if they aren’t doing that already. 

When Toyota first came into the American market, they were taxed, and they cost more than similar American cars.  And they wore that like a badge of honor.  They wouldn’t negotiate prices, and Americans flocked to buy them, because they saw themselves as getting something special. 

Foreign products were always available in our country, and they were always more expensive, and nobody cared, because they were, well, foreign products.  But they were true foreign products, like French wine, and Swiss chocolate.  They weren’t American goods made somewhere else and then shipped back here. 

Democrats always talk about how they are for the American workers, but they never talk about bringing the jobs back.  They are content to have half the country on government assistance programs, so they are seen as the compassionate ones.  They would rather people be dependent on the government than independent, self-reliant, and prosperous. 

When people don’t have jobs, not only does the government lose their tax revenues, but it also ends up paying people for not working.  We lose twice.  And so, when people have good jobs, they pay taxes on their incomes, and everybody else doesn’t have to support them.

I should add too that after the jobs left our country, the government got short on money, so they increased taxes on the companies that were still here, and that caused a lot of other companies to leave the country.  Republicans lowered corporate taxes last year that removed some of the incentive for companies to leave our country, but the country is divided over the issue of taxing imports.

As the country is divided, it makes it harder for businesses to know what to do, because they don’t want to invest a lot of money moving their operations and then find everything going back the way it was in a few years. 

But the jobs left as we stopped taxing imports, and I don’t see another way to bring them back without taxing them again.  We should tax them all and probably at the same rate.  Exceptions could be made in special cases.  Not sure yet what those would be.

Yes, there will be some pain and adjustment for a while, because some prices will go up before the jobs come back, but when you have half a dozen appliance manufacturers making the same thing, prices will go down again with the competition. 

Many of our politicians have given up the idea of bringing the jobs back.  They say it can’t be done.  I don’t believe that.  And why in the world would we not even try?  When people are working at good paying jobs, they feel good about themselves, and the government won’t have to borrow billions of dollars from other countries just to pay its bills.

The Most Important Issue on Immigration, and Nobody is Talking About It

Yes, the United States is a nation of immigrants, but are we to understand by that that the United States is just the lowest common denominator of all those people, a harmonious blending of all the nations and cultures of the world.

Or, is there a particular culture that defines us as a nation and that we are supposed to teach this culture to our immigrants, and they are expected to assimilate to it to become an American?

The American experiment is based on a level of human rights and freedom unparalleled anywhere else in the world.  Our Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish this country with the Constitution that is currently in place. 

The basic idea for American freedom and rights is explained in our Declaration of Independence [please read this slowly]:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (i.e. we don’t believe in kings, a ruling class), that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed  -- that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

It is a safe assumption that no immigrant understands or believes these things when they come to our country.  Why would they?  The countries they come from don’t believe in them, and how would they know what we believe?  We don’t even talk about this anymore.

Many of our immigrants we already know will not agree with these beliefs.  Islam, for example, had been in existence for 1,000 years prior to the founding of our country, and there is no Muslim country then or now in the world with a Constitution anything like ours.  A Muslim would deny the whole premise of our Constitution.

We as a nation no longer talk about God-given rights, because we are told that any mention of God constitutes an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  So when millions of immigrants vote in our elections and have no idea of or belief in what it is that makes the United States what it is, we will eventually lose the freedoms we fought a war to gain. 

This won’t happen suddenly, but gradually as more and more people vote according to their understanding of rights and not according to our Founders.  I dare say we don’t even teach these to our own children, given the hostility to anything having to do with God in our public schools.

We are losing our nation.  Without a war, without a revolution, without anyone even noticing it.

Is this really what we want to do?