Do you feel like the federal government spends too much, and that it affects your personal budget? You are in the supermajority of people.
BankruptingAmerica.org put together a video exposing their latest findings:
Hat tip: Gateway Pundit
I haven’t seen Waiting for Superman, but I intend to do so as soon as I can.
From what I understand, it started as a project to investigate why people were so busy trying to get into the few charter schools across the country. What the filmmaker, Davis Guggenheim, the director of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, ends up showing is that only in the free market can kids get the top education they deserve. It is the teacher’s unions who artificially suppress the schools and keep the kids in sub-par education with no way out.
I’ve known for a very long time that the only way to truly fix our education system is to take our schools away from the teachers, state legislatures, and congress and put the parents in charge.
Parents don’t have to be very smart to demand that schools perform for their children. No one, no teacher nor politician, can claim any more compassion or empathy or a desire to succeed for the child than that child’s parent.
If we want to reform our schools in Washington State, the easiest way would be to simply stop funding it altogether. Yes, that’s right—leave the parents left to find education for their child, and let them decide how much they will spend their money on education. You can be dang sure that whatever school a parent sends their child to, they will make certain that the teachers, administration, and facilities are at the top level for the budget.
Of course, such a system would inspire countless charitable foundations to either build charity schools or provide scholarships to those who can’t afford the top schools. We know this because this is exactly what happens in the competitive education industry at the college level. No child would be left behind as long as people who cared about the poor and had the means to do something about it existed.
The best part is that all waste in education would disappear almost overnight. Schools would be left to justify every penny they spend, and to make sure they spend their money first and only on those things that actually produce a better education for the children. Otherwise, parents will leave that school and go to schools that do provide a better education for less money.
I don’t think any legislator is going to propose such a bill in the coming years. Instead, we can settle for programs that tend towards that direction, such as charter schools, tax subsidies for education spending (individuals or foundations), and vouchers.
Of the three, I believe tax subsidies is likely the most probably to pass and the most efficacious. How it would work is that the government would simply allow people to write off money they spend on education from their taxes. This could either be money parents spend on private schools or money that people donate to education foundations or scholarships.
This would increase the spending on education from the private sector, and allow private schools to compete on equal footing with the public schools.
Over time, more and more people would choose to spend their money on education rather than taxes, and more and more children would be able to attend private schools. The best part is that since the people get to decide how to spend the money, they get to use it to keep the quality of education high.
Under such a system, the teacher’s union would lose all political power. They would be left simply doing what a union is supposed to do—ensure fair contracts for their teachers.
And especially, under such a system, the people will grow to realize that they have always had the power to deliver a superior education to every child, and government is not necessary to deliver it.
It hardly makes sense to entrust the same organization that wages war, writes our laws, and punishes criminals to set our education policy.
President Obama is apparently a closet fan of Glenn Beck. (Remember, Clinton used to secretly listen to Rush Limbaugh.) He breaks out a folksy talking guy in front of a white board to explain the tax cuts he is proposing.
Except it doesn’t work.
First, the guys accent makes him sound either like a hick from the hills or a thugs from the mafia. I guess to the elite in Washington DC everyone’s accent sounds the same to them. Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s accents, however, reflect real people that live in the real world, far away from Washington DC.
Second, he draws circles that are supposed to represent something or other. I guess the bigger circles mean you get more tax cuts. The funny thing is, President Obama doesn’t have any tax cuts on the table. The House has already voted to recess, meaning nothing will happen until after the election. Guess who voted to go and who voted to stay? The democrats led the charge to leave all the unfinished business until after the elections, while the republicans and many sane democrats tried to keep the house in session so they could, you know, vote on whether to extend the Bush Tax Cuts.
This reminds me of when President Obama talked about “his” health care proposal, when he never proposed a thing. I guess “his” tax cuts are exactly the same kind of smoke and mirrors.
Finally, the spokesperson argues that tax cuts on the rich have never worked. Oddly, he doesn’t say what they would work for. If you’re goal is to bring everyone into equality in poverty, then of course tax cuts on the rich won’t work. After all, whenever you allow rich people to keep their money, everyone gets a lot richer.
But if your goal is to help regular people find jobs and move up the social ladder, then tax cuts on the rich is a very powerful tool to do so. Combined with limited government spending and regulation, and you’ll see the middle class explode into the upper class, and the lower class following hot on their heels.
It’s called trickle-down economics, and it works whenever it is tried.
Folks, don’t let the democrats fool you. They have no tax cut plans, and intend to raise taxes on everyone. They already have. Only the Republicans are offering a plan to not only reduce the tax burden but also cut spending across the board.
Unelect Murray, pass I-1082, and defeat I-1098 so we can create jobs in this state.
A Swedish scientist explains the 33° C “Greenhouse Effect” as a result of gravity plus the specific heat of the atmosphere. Thus, if you want to change the net “Greenhouse Effect”, you need to change gravity (impossible) or the specific heat of the atmosphere (extremely difficult). (link)
The core of his argument is this: When you calculate the temperature of a certain piece of air, you need to consider the pressure of that piece of air. As you move up, the pressure decreases according to gravity, while the makeup of the air doesn’t really change much. (Modifying the content of a gas doesn’t change the specific heat of the gas all that much—all gasses are roughly similar to each other.)
The 33° C temperature difference between the air at the ground and the upper layer of the earth is thus accounted for.
In other words, there is no measurable “Greenhouse Effect”: All the temperature gradient is explained simply with gravity.
Folks, go ahead and fill the atmosphere with CO2. The plants love it, and it isn’t harmful, even at high concentrations. The very fact that CO2 is the by-product of the burning of natural gas and oil means that by doing so, we are actually helping people in poor parts of the world grow more crops and have more natural resources, such as wood and animals, to build up their economies with.
Other gasses that are a byproduct of burning fossil fuels are dangerous, but we have the technology to limit them.
Earlier, I wrote about a church in Florida that wanted to burn a Koran.
Today, a group of Muslims in North America issued a proclamation declaring that people have a right to insult Islam, either by drawing derogatory pictures of Mohammed or burning Korans, and while that is offensive, what is more offensive are those who confess Islam yet preach violence against those who insult Islam. (link)
This is an important step. Muslims who agree with this proclamation should share it with their fellow muslims.
We must remember that there are two elements out there, barely related to one another.
On the one hand, we have a very large group of devout muslims who want nothing more than to live in peace and be left alone. These are our friends and we should welcome them and protect their right to practice their religion with our very lives.
On the other hand, we have a large group of devout muslims who want nothing more than to kill and murder in the name of Allah. (Interestingly, the do not distinguish between Kuffir and Muslim who disagree with them, except that they pursue Muslims who disagree with them more vigorously.) These are our enemies, and we should hunt them down and kill them no matter where they are in the world until they realize that the sanctity of life is more important than the practice of religion. If we allow them to continue to exist, our lives will forever be in jeopardy at their whim.
It is interesting to note that the one group is helping us in our war with the other. The one group, in fact, does not consider themselves separate from us at all, except in religion, but call themselves American or Canadian.
