As a 10-year veteran of the NFL, I had a unique perspective weekly to see the heartfelt commitment of the fan. Regardless of years of disappointing and winless seasons, the true fans remained die-hard in their loyalty to "the Team." The true fans were capable of not only painting their cars and homes their team colors, but also naming family pets and offspring after famous NFL all-stars.
On our way to the Super Bowl XV Championship, the Oakland Raiders played a frigid 1981 AFC playoff game in Cleveland, in which the temperatures plunged to -35 degrees. I remember looking up in the stands to see a dedicated Cleveland Brown fan celebrating topless. I've often wondered if there was a price that young man later paid for his rambunctious youthful zeal. Would there be in his future some physical accountability for this fanatical commitment to "The Team"?
I've since wondered: when does this type of loyalty and willingness to sacrifice all that is dear begin? Does it stem from decades of family tradition, a love of the team colors, or did his high school team share the same mascot? The answer is found under the heading of pure emotion.
There was a different, visionary team commitment that guided the black community at the beginning of the 20th century, best envisioned by educator, entrepreneur, and founder of Tuskegee University Booker T. Washington. He articulated a pathway, via meritocracy and capitalism, by which the black community could experience independence and self-sufficiency. He felt that respect and acceptance could be commanded from others through a good work ethic, business ownership, and commitment to morality and to family. Washington once stated, "Say what you will, there is something in the human nature which makes one man, in the end, recognize and reward merit in another, regardless of race."
Unfortunately, over the last five decades, far too many Americans have lost the belief in the ideals of meritocracy and capitalism that once empowered past generations of American visionaries. Now almost half of our country's populace and over 90% of the black community cling in fan-like loyalty to an ideology as reality-defying as the fanatical bare-chested young man in Cleveland celebrating in the dangerously frigid -35-degree weather, showing his dedication to "the Team," heedless of commonsense understanding of the fundamentals of personal health and welfare.
Over the last 50 years, the black community has, en masse, worn the uniform of an ideology that has left its communities and schools totally bankrupt. Through decades of empty promises and investment of human life and capital, it has shown a total dedication to an ideology whose strategy has resulted in consistent and dismal losing seasons. Unfortunately, unlike in the entertainment world of sports, where fans go home or simply turn off their wide-screen and then debate what might have been, these losing seasons have had dire human consequences that cannot simply be walked away from. These consequences can be documented in every predominately black community where liberal and socialist policies rule. From cities like Detroit, where the population has dropped by 25% over the last decade and 47% of those remaining are deemed functional illiterate, to Oakland, where a liberal school board attempted to legitimized a debased "urban" slang called Ebonics, highlighting its low expectations of its minority children, to D.C. and Chicago, which alternate as our country's murder capitals, these cities reflect the culminating impact of citizens trapped in government-mandated hopelessness. They reflect the intergenerational failure that has been embraced as the norm, with statistics of single black mothers at an astounding 70%, where abortion profit centers find a welcome home and take the lives of an average of 325,000 black babies each year since 1973, where 50% of black teenagers are unemployed, and where a failed educational system guarantees that far too many are unemployable.
The ideological teams of liberalism, socialism, and progressives have been granted over 50 years to prove the validity of their strategy. For Americans of all backgrounds who are committed to a successful outcome for their fellow citizens, who won't settle for perpetual excuses, it has become crystal-clear that it is time for a new coach and a new strategy. The message in November to Coach Obama and his Democratic team needs to be...it's all about the Team, and "Team America" is priority #1 with us.
Burgess Owens is the author of the soon-to-be-released book It's All about Team - Exposing the Black Talented Tenth. He is a former first-round draft pick of the NY Jets, who concluded an All-Pro career with the Oakland Raiders after a career-highlight win in Super Bowl XV over the Philadelphia Eagles. Learn more at www.BurgessOwensTalks.com.
The study—from the non-profit New America Foundation—argues the U.S. is seriously in danger of losing its entrepreneurial spirit because the number of small business created has been declining since the 1970s.
"We see entrepreneurship declining per person and what figures there are have over-counted the number of small businesses," Khan says
There are several problems that are all interconnected here.
One of the common mantras is that "financing" is critical to small business. This is a lie. What's critical to small business is capital. Financing is not capital -- it spends the same way (credit) but is the near-opposite of capital as capital is previously-earned economic surplus, while credit is tomorrow's expected economic surplus.
One comes from industry and hard work, the other from leverage. One is a measure of success previously put forward and then risked in an effort to compound one's gains, the other is an attempt to skim off a piece of the action without putting up one's former success first.
This is almost-universally intentionally misrepresented in the media. Yet throughout American history, most small businesspeople did not rely on financing to start and build their businesses. They began in their garage or with equity infusions from their relatives and friends, often as co-conspirators (partners, etc.) All were exposed to the risk of personal loss of funds already made in the new venture, not a speculative bet "on the come" financed with some sort of hinky loan (or worse, a draft written on their family residence!)
The SBA has made this situation worse rather than better, as it has reinforced a false paradigm.
By doing this they have damaged entrepreneurs who actually start businesses and risk their own capital in doing so. This in turn means that reckless skimmers, who simply do not care if their venture is sustainable as their own ass is not on the line, become "competitors" and engage in practices that nobody would if it was their own money. Reckless lending is just one example; would Lehman have gotten as far upside down as it did were the executives actual money on the line as partners? Nope. But as soon as you allow people to counterfeit credit competition is no longer about calculation of risk and reward since the risk is not yours.
Second, offshoring has made the large business able to smash into the dirt the small operator who cannot possibly compete at that scale. This works fine for someone in a niche business, but as soon as you find mass-market appeal you get pounded through blatantly-unethical acts by far-larger firms. Leaving aside ability, entrepreneurs who have an ethical problem with slave labor and poisoning the environment to get a 25 cent advantage in price with which to undercut their competitors have no clear options available to them.
Then there are government costs and intrusions. I dealt with this when I ran MCSNet; some of the rules, regulations and taxes were just plain silly, but the cost of compliance was real. It's only gotten worse since the 1990s.
Finally there are situations like Blitz. You probably have one of their gas cans in your garage. The tort bar claims they sold "defective" gasoline cans. You'd think that the "defect" would involve a can that, for example, split open and spilled gasoline where it could catch fire.
“The lawsuits have involved adult individuals who have used gasoline to start a fire or accelerate a fire,” she said.
Got it?
Let's put in plain language -- the lawsuits involved people who poured gasoline out of a Blitz can either onto something they then lit on fire (and got burned when it flashed) or poured gasoline on an existing fire.
As a result of our so-called "liability" system when someone is a five-alarm dumb-ass and lights themselves on fire by pouring gasoline on a lit fire, or uses gas as a firestarter and fails to do so in a way that precludes themselves from being immolated, it's the container manufacturer's fault.
And as such this small business, which employed 300 people, is gone.
I have a number of ideas for small businesses. I have capital to deploy in an attempt to start and run them too.
I will start and run exactly zero of them until and unless the three points above are addressed.
And that, my friends, is why entrepreneurship in America is in decline.
Even after the call for police officers to strike until Americans turn in their guns went viral and Mayor Michael Bloomberg had to say he didn't mean it "literally," he continues his gun control rampage. He has now run a full page ad in USA Today in which he demands President Obama and Gov. Romney create and present gun control plans to the American people.
Here's a curious question: does Bloomberg know that guns are used nearly 25 times more often for self defense than they are for crime?
Seriously, the ratio for self-defense uses versus criminal uses is about 25 to 1, yet Bloomberg and his ilk seem determined to spend all their energy taking away the guns of the 25 defenders rather than punishing the one offender to the full extent of the law.
For those of you interested in the raw numbers, the figures of between 2 million and 2.5 million uses of guns for self-defense annually can be found in studies and reports by John Lott, Gun Owners of America, and the National Rifle Association. These are countered by the use of guns for criminal purposes at a rate of 100,000 to 135,000 times a year.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that we ought to be able to own guns because of a ratio, for we keep and bear arms because it's a God-given right which our Founding Fathers said "shall not be infringed." But the ratio of 25 to 1 is icing on the cake, and it reminds us just how myopic gun-grabbers like Bloomberg can get when they set out to promote schemes that disarm the American people.
My 84-year-old dad has nuggets of wisdom which he forgets he has shared with me numerous times. One is about deception. Dad said a snake can swim underwater a very long time, just like a fish. But eventually, it must come up for air. Why? Because it is not a fish -- it is a snake.
Obama deceived millions to win the White House. All the obvious clues into the true nature of the first black presidential candidate were ignored by the media. Voters were duped into believing Obama when he presented himself as a moderate, a messiah, "the one we have been waiting for."
Early into his presidency, Obama came up for air, exposing his great deception. Every day, with unbridled arrogance, the handsome, deceptive beast reveals more and more of his despicable agenda hidden just beneath the surface.
Barack Hussein Obama is not presidential, nor is he a moderate -- far from either, in fact. This man is a far-left, radical, anti-America, plain-old-Chicago-thug politician.
Obama is the most anti-Christian president in American history. Phyllis Schlafly brilliantly chronicles Obama's unprecedented attacks on Christianity in her book, No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom.
Despite swearing an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, Obama urinates on our sacred document whenever it hinders the implementation of his vow to "fundamentally transform America."
In short, Obama is a con man. To win re-election, Obama has unleashed an army of con men and women to deceive voters, yet again, via intimidation, class envy, lies, and a white guilt trip.
Obama and company's despicable white-guilt-trip tactic says, if you do not vote for Obama, you are a racist!
Obama has very little respect for average Americans. At a private fund-raising event with his liberal homeys, Obama described small-town America as bitter folks who cling to religion and guns and don't like people who do not look like them. Thus, the president thinks a large segment of Americans is racist.
A further display of Obama's low opinion of Americans is his "give-away-the-farm" campaign to win re-election votes. Outrageously, almost half the country is on food stamps, and Obama is advertising for more folks to sign up. Obama is giving away free cell phones. With a wave of his executive order scepter, King Obama legalized millions of illegal aliens. His list of handouts and freebies goes on and on. Obama promises to punish and get even with achievers. Everything Obama does is designed to seduce voters by appealing to their lowest instincts. Obama obviously believes that a majority of Americans are lazy and entitlement-minded and that they resent achievers.
As I stated, Obama has unleashed an army of really smart-sounding con artists to intimidate into silence anyone daring to disagree with our imperial dictator and to lay a white-guilt-trip on voters.
A prime example of an Obama con artist is black former NY Times writer and NBC reporter Bob Herbert, who recently made the most absurd and offensive statement. Herbert said, "A majority of whites have never favored equal rights in this country. Never, ever, ever, ever. It's never even been close -- it is a fantasy to talk about the idea of a majority of whites supporting the rights of blacks." Herbert also said most whites voted for McCain/Palin. Herbert further implied that all white votes against Obama were racially motivated.
Mr. Herbert, if America is so anti-black, how did you end up as a reporter on NBC television and writing for the NY Times?
Another example of an Obama con artist is Cornel West, professor of African-American studies at Princeton.
On Book TV, West went on and on about institutional racism and how America is racist and evil.
As a black conservative listening to West, I kept thinking, "Rather than filling black youths with victim crap, why aren't you telling blacks to get an education, stop having babies out of wedlock, and get a job? Am I too simplistic? Is it more complicated and I just don't get it?"
Patriots, please, please, please do not be intimidated or silenced by Obama's con artists.
Ronald Reagan said, "We had strayed a great distance from our Founding Fathers' vision of America. They never envisioned vast agencies in Washington telling our farmers what to plant, our teachers what to teach, and our industries what to build."
Reagan's horrific nightmare scenario is well underway. A second term for Obama equals the end of America and freedom as intended by our Founding Fathers.
Our Constitution and America as founded were inspired by God. Therefore, Obama's vow to fundamentally transform America goes against God's intention -- thus making this coming election look a lot like a battle of good vs. evil.
My confidence and hope are in the Lord. I pray for my country and trust that true patriots will not be conned or intimidated into silence and submission. With God's help, we will outnumber Obama's evil minions and deadbeat parasites come election day.
In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories. For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published. If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign. The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost. But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns. According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington". In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it. This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke. What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves. People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media. The following quote comes from the recent article in the New York Times mentioned above and it is absolutely jaw dropping.... The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative. They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name. Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script — is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message... It was difficult to find a news outlet that had not agreed to quote approval, albeit reluctantly. Organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters and The New York Times have all consented to interviews under such terms. All I can say about these people I once considered “colleagues” is that I am so ashamed of them. I am mortified. They are humiliating themselves and a vital institution for any free society. It seems the biggest threat to the American tradition of a free and independent press is not government coercion. It’s the willing submission of the press to being handled and managed by government and politicians. .
Posted on Monday, July 23, 2012 9:05:57 AM by expat1000
So That This Never Happens Again Posted: 22 Jul 2012 09:14 PM PDT The first reaction to the Aurora Massacre was the usual call for making sure that "this never happens again". Everyone from New York City Mayor Bloomberg to author Salman Rushdie to mystery writer Patricia Cornwell called for imposing gun control to insure "this never happens again".
And yet if we were to confiscate every privately owned firearm and outlaw the manufacture of new ones in the country, if we were to forcibly institutionalize anyone suspected of being mentally ill, and if we added naked scanners to movie theaters; we still could not insure that this will never happen again.
And yet Colorado has half the murder rate of Illinois, as adjusted for population. Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and New Hampshire, all full of guns, have far lower murder rates than gun control states like New York, California and Illinois. According to Bloomberg, "If we had fewer guns, we would have a lot fewer murders." But guns are not proportional to murders.
Utah has the second highest gun ownership rate in the country and the eighth lowest homicide rate. Wyoming, the state with the fourth highest gun ownership rate has the fourth lowest homicide rate. Meanwhile New York is 48th in gun ownership, but is the 18th highest in its murder rate.
We escape tragedy by searching for control and this is an obscene gift that we give to liberalism and its counterpart, the police state. Both promise us a better and safer world in exchange for our freedom. After every tragedy they promise us that they can keep it from happening again. They can't. No one can.
The illusion of control attempts to tie James Holmes to some larger issue, whether it's gun control or movie violence. It ignores the banality of individual evil, to make him into some larger monster that we can fight. But sometimes there is no meaning to evil except that it exists. No way to make sense of it or transform into a social crusade. Evil just is.
We can make war on organized or semi-organized enemies. We can bomb Hiroshima, round up the Mafia, launch drone strikes on Al-Qaeda leaders and break up cartels. We cannot however make war on the evil that lurks unexpectedly in human brains.
The edifice of government towers over public life. It is built for fighting systems, groups and "Isms'" and it can be used to ban guns, lock up the mentally ill or launch another one of its incessant public education campaigns. Its ability to stop an individual bent on causing harm to other individuals is highly limited at best.
That is where the illusion of control breaks down. The system can promise to stop gun violence, but it can't stop a man with a gun. All it can do is exploit the tragedy for more power. Only individuals can stop individuals. The only control we can possibly have comes from living in a society where the people do the right thing... and are empowered to do the right thing.
But that is not the society that the gun-controllers and police-staters want to create. The society they want is a place where everyone sits quietly, offers no resistance, contacts the authorities and waits for the accredited branches of the government to do something. A place where everyone knows that if they do something, they may be arrested or sued by the criminal afterward. A place where people are expected to be willing to die, but not fight back.
It takes a great deal of conditioning to break the reflex of leaving things up to the proper authorities. It takes something like seeing two towers fall in burning rubble while sitting on a plane that is clearly headed toward a similar mission. But shortly afterward the proper authorities will be back on the job, reminding everyone to fly planes, submit to some profiling-free groping, and pay no attention to the man with the beard and the itchy underwear chanting "Allah Akbar" to himself in the window seat.
Bloomberg replied to a suggestion that if more people in the theater had guns they might have been able to fight back, with, "To arm everybody and have the wild west all the time is one of the more nonsensical things you can say." And in Bloomberg's world it is nonsensical. By "Wild West", he means anarchy and when you're running a major city that has more employees than some countries have people, the last thing you want is anarchy.
Systems respond to a failure of control by intensifying control. Going the other way is "nonsensical" to them. To Bloomberg the Aurora Massacre was a failure of control, which every "rational" person has to respond to by agreeing that we need more control. Find the "loopholes" and close them. Tighten the noose and this will never happen again... until the next time it does, when it will be met with the same response.
More loopholes, more nooses and more zero tolerance. Make a law, name it after a murdered child and sit back confident that nothing like this can ever happen again because the big book of laws just had another forty pages added to it.
That is the government world, a place where every problem can be solved if you throw enough money, manpower and laws at it. And that world is as imaginary as the comic book world playing on the movie screen during the massacre. That is why gun control is so appealing. Unlike murders, guns can be banned.
Government is not god, though it often seems to aspire to the job. No amount of regulations can exercise complete control over the world around us. All they do is create a hedge maze within which both we and the criminals operate. And criminals will always be better at navigating that hedge maze.
Those who follow the law will always be proportionally more dis-empowered by regulations than those who do not. The flip side of a police state in the anarchy boiling underneath. The more laws there are, the more they are broken. The more control is centralized, the more corrupt the controllers become until the criminals are in power and those who are in power are criminals.
A police state is not a perfectly-controlled society where everyone follows the law or gets locked up. It's thugs with shotguns, tattoos and uniforms, dark sunglasses covering their eyes, collecting bribes from the criminals they are in league with. It's a president with forty mansions to his name and an entire apparatus of party loyalists who feed the bribes up to him. It's not a place that's free of crime; it's a place that's saturated with a crime, where everyone is a criminal from the leaders down to the little boy picking your pocket because otherwise the gang leader who runs the block will beat him.
We can turn America into that place in 10-15 years. All we need to do is spread the failed liberal policies that destroyed the country's greatest cities to the rest of the country. Then try to lock down that anarchy with gun control, SWAT teams and 5 million regulations. Give it time and we'll manage to achieve the current Democratic Party platform of being just like Mexico.
In America the police state has emerged as an attempt to manage the consequence of liberal social policies. Import enough immigrants from lawless countries, put them side-by-side in major cities and it will take a police state to manage the consequences. Destroy values, promote cultural anarchy while running regulatory totalitarianism, and you will need a police state. Destroy manufacturing and keep enough men of all races out of work, and the police state will be needed to manage the violence. Import enough followers of a religion in which terrorism is a mandate, and it will take a police state to maintain even temporary normalcy.
Officially liberals don't like the police state very much, and yet the police state is the only thing that prevents the countries afflicted by their policies from completely melting down. And when faced with a problem, whether it's a man filling in a swamp on his own property or individuals owning firearms, they resort to the power of the police state. Right now they are telling us that if we just had a police state where all the firearms were controlled by the police, this will never happen again.
Adulthood means knowing that this will happen again. That madmen will kill people and it is our responsibility to prevent that not by passing a few laws that invest more power in a police state, but by being aware and taking action when necessary. And knowing that this too may not be enough.
We have some impressive technologies, but those don't make us gods. We have information at our fingertips, but that is not the same thing as control. We do not control the world and we certainly do not control other people. And it is important that we remember that.
The actions of James Holmes are not a reflection on us or on that imaginary village that raises all of us. It is a reflection on him. To forget that by assigning responsibility to the gun or the movie is to abdicate individual responsibility and throw up our hands to the liberal gods of government and the police state to come and save us from ourselves. And they will eagerly answer the call.
The power of the individual to do good comes from a sense of individual responsibility. Take away that responsibility and the country begins to rot. Bury it deep enough and there are only sheep waiting for a wolf.
Oddly, there are no calls for more gun control in the wake of the weekly Chicago massacre. Once you have the stiffest gun control laws on the books, you should probably look at the root of the problem... "Three men are dead and at least 23 other people wounded from gun violence across the city since Friday night."
In fact, Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy is "accentuating the positives" of the bloody results of his city's oppressive gun ban, which prevents only the law-abiding from defending themselves by force of arms:
McCarthy noted this weekend's numbers were half the total of shootings for the same weekend last year. He also said that while 2012 shootings are up by eight percent over 2011, they've decreased considerably since March when the year-to-year increase was 40 percent...
...McCarthy also said the murder rate is well below the record of 970 set in 1974, although it's still on pace to reach 450 murders and that the murder rate is increasing as overall violent crime in Chicago is showing a decline.
In other words, an Aurora massacre occurs every 10 days in Chicago, the gun-control capital of the U.S. Like Washington DC, New York City, Mexico City and London -- to name but a few -- "gun-free" cities are truly areas where the innocent are targeted by predators who have no intention of abiding by any law.
President Obama’s instantly infamous “You didn’t build that” speech is a major turning point of the 2012 election not because it was a gaffe but because it was an accurate and concise summary of core progressive fiscal dogma. It was also a political blunder of epic proportions because in his speech Obama unintentionally proved the conservatives’ case for limited government.
This essay will show you how.
When Obama implied at the Roanoke, Virginia rally that some businessmen refuse to pay for public works from which they benefit, he presented a thesis which, like a three-legged stool, relies on three assumptions that must all be true for the argument to remain standing:
1. That the public programs he mentioned in his speech constitute a significant portion of the federal budget; 2. That business owners don’t already pay far more than their fair share of these expenses; and 3. That these specific public benefits are a federal issue, rather than a local issue.
If any of these legs fails, then the whole argument collapses.
For good measure, we won’t just kick out one, we’ll kick out all three.
“Small Government” Is Not the Same as “No Government”
Progressives critique the fiscal conservative/Tea Party/libertarian position by purposely misrepresenting it as anarchy. When fiscal conservatives say “We want smaller government,” progressives reply, “Oh, so you want no government?”
“Government” in this particular discussion is shorthand for “communal pooling of resources for mutual benefit.”
Fiscal conservatives have never called for no government — that’s the anarchist position, and contemporary anarchism is actually dominated by extreme leftists, not extreme conservatives. Instead, fiscal conservatives clearly and consistently call for limited government, or for smaller government — but not for the absence of government altogether.
So when President Obama and his mentor Elizabeth Warren justify their call for tax hikes by pointing out that all entrepreneurs benefit from communal infrastructure, they’re committing the classic Straw Man Fallacy by arguing against anarchy — a position that their opponents do not hold.
Here’s the shocking truth: President Obama and Elizabeth Warren are correct — we all benefit from certain taxpayer-funded collectivist government infrastructure projects and programs. And here’s the other shocking truth: Therefore, we should limit government expenditures to just those programs. Why? Because most of the other government programs either
• hinder, constrict or penalize entrepreneurial activity; or • benefit some people to the detriment of others; or • waste money on bureaucracy, overhead or ill-considered expenditures that end up indebting the nation and by extension all Americans.
Below are videos and transcripts of Obama’s speech as well as the Elizabeth Warren speech that inspired it. First watch or read both speeches, and then we’ll list all of the programs that they both mention, and see what percentage of our taxes goes toward those programs.
Obama’s Speech
Here is Obama’s game-changing speech from Friday, July 13 in Roanoke, Virginia:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. 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. (Applause.)
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. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
Warren’s Speech
And here’s Elizabeth Warren’s original 2011 speech, upon which Obama’s was based:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you!
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
OK, now that we have both speeches in front of us, let us list the exact government programs and projects that Obama and Warren use to justify their position:
• Education(Obama: “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.” Warren: “You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.”) • Transportation(Obama: “Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” Warren: “You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.”) • Public Safety(Warren: “You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” Obama: “There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own.”) • The Internet(Obama: “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”)
…and that’s it.
OK. Fine. Let’s absolutely concede this point to Obama and Warren: There are some government activities that benefit us all, including business owners.
And for the sake of argument let’s just allow for a moment that the federal government is the best, most efficient and only supplier of these benefits. You win, Elizabeth and Barack.
But having conceded this central point, let us now ask the key follow-up question, which is the first leg of their three-point hypothesis: What percentage of the federal budget is devoted to these universally beneficial public works?
And if you’re a progressive reading this, you’d better get off the stool because it’s about to fall down.
What percentage of this is devoted to education, transportation, public safety, and creating the Internet (i.e. basic research)?
I’m going to be as generous as possible to the progressive position and include ALL of defense spending in their column, since defense aids both basic research and public safety. Highways and roads are covered by the Department of Transportation. The Department of Education covers, well, education. And various other smaller departments — Department of Justice, National Science Foundation, etc. — contribute in varying degrees to public safety, research, and so forth.
Ready? Here we go:
Below is a list of all government expenditures, with Obama’s and Warren’s “public benefit” programs highlighted:
Social Security 19.63% Department of Defense 18.74% Unemployment/welfare/other mandatory spending 16.13% Medicare 12.79% Medicaid and SCHIP 8.19% Interest on the national debt 4.63% Health and Human Services 2.22% Department of Transportation 2.05% Department of Veteran’s Affairs 1.48% Department of State 1.46% Department of Housing and Urban Development 1.34% Department of Education 1.32% Other on-budget discretionary spending (1.8%): $149.67 Other off-budget discretionary spending (1.3%): $108.10 Department of Homeland Security 1.21% Department of Energy 0.74% Department of Agriculture 0.73% Department of Justice 0.67% NASA 0.53% Department of Commerce 0.39% Department of Labor 0.38% Department of Treasury 0.38% Department of the Interior 0.34% EPA 0.30% Social Security Administration 0.27% National Science Foundation 0.20% Corps of Engineers 0.14% National Infrastructure Bank 0.14% Corporation for National and Community Service 0.03% Small Business Administration 0.02% General Services Administration 0.02% Other agencies 0.56% Other off-budget discretionary spending 2.97%
So, let’s clear away the irrelevant government expenditures and list just the ones noted by Obama and Warren:
Department of Defense 18.74% Department of Transportation 2.05% Department of Education 1.32% Department of Homeland Security 1.21% Department of Justice 0.67% National Science Foundation 0.20%
TOTAL: 23.4%
And that, of course, is being absurdly generous to the Obama position, since in reality huge portions of the defense budget, the Department of Education budget, and so on, have basically nothing to do with promoting public safety or educating workers. And let’s be even more generous and round that 23.4% up to 25%, or one-fourth of the budget.
So what Obama and Warren are really stating is this:
Only one-fourth of your federal tax dollars go to projects and programs that benefit the general public and entrepreneurs; the other three-fourths are essentially a complete waste, or are at best optional.
Which of course is exactly what fiscal conservatives have been arguing all along.
So yeah, I agree with Obama: Let’s slash the federal budget by 75%, and only fund services and programs that directly serve the public good.
The first leg of their argument has snapped, and the stool has toppled over. Since the essential programs aiding “the commons” are only a small percentage of an overall bloated budget, we don’t need to raise taxes to fund them.
And now for the second leg.
The Wealthy Already Pay Far More Than Their “Fair Share”
Are you ready for the happy news? If we stick to Obama and Warren’s “essentials only” budget, we can eliminate all taxes for 99% of Americans, and even lower taxes for the top 1%, and still have enough to pay for defense, transportation, public safety, education and all the rest. How? Because the top 1% of all taxpayers — the wealthy elite businesspeople who benefit from roads and schools and firefighters — pay about 37% of all federal taxes, far more than enough to cover the essentials, plus interest on the debt and plenty of extras besides.
Clonk. That’s the second leg hitting the floor.
Kicking Out the Third Leg: Education, Public Safety and Roads Are Covered by Local Taxes, Not Federal Taxes
The final component in Obama’s thesis is far and away the weakest, but for some reason few pundits have noted it. Obama and Warren have intentionally conflated local taxes with federal taxes. In most localities across the country, public education, police and firefighters, and street repair are primarily paid for by property taxes, local sales taxes, and state taxes. Federal grants can supplement local funds, but rarely is a school district or a police department propped up entirely with federal money.
So if we revisit Obama’s and Warren’s speeches, they’re actually making an argument for increased local taxes. And yet they and their audiences somehow imagine that the arguments given are a legitimate rationale for increased federal taxes.
As I said at the beginning of this essay, Obama has just unintentionally proved the conservatives’ case for limited government, and for decentralization and local control.
The stool is now in pieces on the floor. But I just can’t stop kicking.
Obama’s Fallacy that the Goal of Government Research Is to Benefit the Private Sector
“The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
Now, everybody agrees that a great number of scientific and engineering breakthroughs have happened as a result of “government research,” primarily military research: not just the Internet but nuclear power, GPS systems, jet aircraft, and many more. But Obama is sorely mistaken in claiming that the Internet was created “so that all the companies could make money” off it. Actually, the Internet was created to facilitate defense-related research as well as to strengthen military command-and-control capabilities. It was most definitely not created “so that all the companies could make money,” as a very early ARPANet handbook explained:
It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business….Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal.
Ooops.
In this instance as well as almost every other instance, government-funded engineering or scientific breakthroughs were originally and exclusively for military purposes; it was only much later that entrepreneurs came along and found a profit-generating and society-benefitting civilian use for military hardware.
Similar contravening facts undermine other aspects of Obama’s and Warren’s emotional arguments. Take transportation, for example. Prior to 1956, the vast majority of roads and highways and rail lines in the United States were built either privately, by local communities, or by states. It was not until the arrival of the Interstate Highway System in 1956 that the federal government became deeply involved in building roads — and even then, as with the Internet and most other massive federal projects, it was originally for defense, not for commerce.
But the highway system is by now already in place. And the cost of maintaining it and building whatever new highways are needed is a tiny fraction of our federal budget, far less than even 1%. And the business owners who benefit from roads are already paying more than enough taxes to cover their cost.
Rebuttal?
Progressives have been so intoxicated first with Warren’s speech and now with Obama’s that I’m not so sure they’re even aware that anyone has presented a criticism; progressives probably think that conservatives just avoid this whole topic because the entire arc of Warren’s and Obama’s line of reasoning is so convincing and devastating that it’s best to change the subject. But I predict that the pushback against this speech will grow so large that eventually word of it will reach the far left, and when that happens they may come back with the following retort:
Warren and Obama were just presenting a few examples, not a comprehensive list of public benefits from taxation. These were just off-the-cuff speeches, not policy papers. There are many other federal programs from which business owners benefit and toward which they should therefore contribute.
If so: Let’s see that list. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.
Did businesses benefit when in cities across the country HUD built massive housing projects which instantly turned into pre-fab ghettos?
Do businesses benefit when the EPA awards itself unilateral power to impose its interpretation of environmental laws, with no hearings and no warning?
Will businesses benefit when they are forced to abide by byzantine, onerous and expensive Obamacare regulations?
The progressive stance might be: “But we all benefit when everyone is healthy, when global warming is stopped, when children have high self-esteem, when no American goes hungry!”
But by this stage we’ve already passed from measurable physical benefits like roads to fire-fighting to vague claims about intangible potential benefits for which there is no proof. Obama said, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges” because the audience could understand a concrete example; he didn’t get up and say “Somebody invested in high self-esteem” because it would expose the slippery slope underneath this line of reasoning.
Should businesses pay enough taxes to support the nation’s basic physical infrastructure? Yes. Of course. And they already do. But should they pay taxes to fund every progressive social fantasy? That’s open for debate, and that’s not the point Obama and Warren were making. Overtly, at least.
We should thank President Obama for finally revealing the central justification for his economic policy. Now that we see what’s at the heart of his fiscal philosophy, we can demonstrate that he has only ended up proving the opposite of what he intended.
Others Debunking Obama’s Speech
This wouldn’t count as a comprehensive takedown if I didn’t note and link to some of the other pointed critiques of Obama’s speech. Here are some of the best, many of which cover points I didn’t even mention here:
- LauraW at Ace of Spades HQ “[Warren and Obama] completely discount risk (and hard work). Risk is nearly the whole game. The whole thing, this entire American enterprise, rests on people who are willing to take a risk.”
- Paul Ryan “As all of his big government spending programs fail to restore jobs and growth, he seems to be retreating into a statist vision of government direction and control of a free society that looks backward to the failed ideologies of the 20th century.”
- Rick Moran at PJM’s The Tatler “The notion that it takes a village to build a business ignores the idea of a voluntary community and smacks of forced altruism. To Obama, we are all cogs in a machine with individual rights and achievements taking a back seat to a collective sense of worth imposed by a soulless government.”
Charles Krauthammer “And it’s completely a straw man argument as if conservatives and Republicans are arguing to disband the fire department and the police department so we could all individually do it on our own. The idea that infrastructure is necessary and good is as old as the republic. It’s older than that. The Romans had the Via Appia, and that wasn’t exactly a new idea.”
- Mitt Romney “The governor notes that the money that created those roads and bridges came out of the pockets that Obama is now looking to pick in the name of fairness.”
- Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club “The key ideas are familiar. Spread the wealth. Tax people so that they may “give something back.” Limit incomes at the top to maintain fairness….If no business can exist in a vacuum, neither can any politician’s talking points. It is perfectly understandable that Barack Obama’s economic and political philosophy are not entirely of his own making. Most of it is derivative.”
Tom Blumer “I challenge anyone to find more than a small handful of highly successful businesspersons who have actually said the equivalent of ‘I got there on my own’ in first-person singular….Obama and Warren aren’t mad because successful people are out there saying ‘I did it on my own’ — because they’re not. They’re mad because these successful people aren’t saying ‘I did it because the government helped me.’”
Abraham Lincoln “The[se] are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden.”
Bookworm Room “Obama has declared the un-Constitution, one that holds that all men are created dependent, with their only inalienable right being their continued obligation to support the governing system into which they are born. This is the antithesis of what our Founders sought to create, and it runs counter to the contract between government and people that we know as the Constitution.”
