“I most emphatically do not hate America. I was not born in some foreign despotism, but in a domestic one known as Oklahoma, which I understand to be the very heart and soul of this country so far as culture and refinement are concerned. Moreover, for what it is worth, some of my ancestors had been living in North America for centuries before a handful of ragged, starving white men washed ashore on this continent, planted their flag, and claimed all the land they could see and a great deal they could not see on behalf of some sorry-ass European monarch. What chutzpah! I yield to no one in my affection for the Statue of Liberty, the Rocky Mountains, and the amber waves of grain, not to mention the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County. So when I am invited to get out of the country, I feel like someone living in a town taken over by the James Gang who has been told that if he doesn’t like being robbed and bullied by uninvited thugs, he should move to another town. To me, it seems much more fitting that the criminals get out.”
Archive for the 'Ron Paul' Category
Whenever I hear a proposal to “tax the rich”, they are talking about a couple making over $250,000 in EARNED (salary) income (or ‘S’ corporation business). I point out that in a high-cost area like New York City or Los Angeles, this would include a hypothetical couple consisting of a cop and a nurse, making a good bit of overtime, which is already drained away by high living expenses and local taxation. Peter Schiff explains why these “rich” are already being taxed at historically high levels;
“Today a married couple with a combined income of $250,000 (assuming each spouse earns 125,000) will pay about 40% of their combined incomes in Social Security, Medicare, and federal taxes, if they take the standard deduction. (I have included as part of their incomes and taxes the Social Security and Medicare taxes paid on their behalf by their employers – which in reality are borne by the employee anyway. I then added that figure to their incomes, and divided the total tax paid by that higher income. I did not factor in this year’s one time 2% payroll tax holiday.)
Compare that to a household in 1950 that earned $25,000 per year (the approximate equivalent to $250,000 today). Assuming all the income was earned by the husband, which was the norm at the time, the total tax take using the standard deduction and including both the employee and employer social security taxes, would have been just below 22%. In other words, despite claims that taxes are at their lowest levels in 50 years, today’s high earning couple pays over 80% more in federal taxes than their 1950 counterpart!”
via Don’t be Fooled by Political Posturing | Euro Pacific Capital.
This guy couldn’t reason his way out of a wet paper bag. And his subhead quote, intended of course to frighten principled anti-war people away from Dr. Paul, is dead-on;
“Welcome to Dr. Ron Paul’s (R.-Tx) prescription for America. If he ever becomes President, you won’t recognize the place.”
via Andrew Reinbach: President Ron Paul? Ron Paul and the John Birch Society.
“…libertarians have the reputation of being hardhearted. It’s not true, and Ron Paul–in so many ways–shows that. He is the Compassionate Libertarian.” – Lew Rockwell
via Lew Rockwell’s Political Theatre | The Comedy and Tragedy of the Political World.
“…the one potential Presidential candidate (Ron Paul) who wishes to stop killing innocent people in foreign wars and stop transferring the wealth of poor and working Americans to the corporate elites happens to be — this time around — a Republican.”
via Robin Koerner: If You Love Peace, Become a “Blue Republican” (Just for a Year).
OMG, I have been pounding home this point – that wireless completely obviates the “last-mile-monopoly” for YEARS, and people think I have a screw loose (more like 3). But in 2005, in rural Oklahoma, I built a 4-square mile 11 mbps, 100-duplex wireless network (for air monitoring instruments) and I am a blithering (networking) idiot;
You have a right to your life, you have a right to your liberty, and you have a right to your justly-acquired property. All three rights are aspects of a right to property. There is no way to derive a right to force others to pay for a service for you, whether it be healthcare or anything else. Moreover, the entire “healthcare” meme is a kind of fraud. Medical treatment has some moral sanction in society and has always been recognized as, while not a “right”, an obligation or duty placed upon the community. “Healthcare” as coined by modern statists contains a whole raft of things never dreamed of in four or more millenia of historical medicine. So even if there were some kind of vague “right” to medical treatment, appropriate to certain civilizational norms, a “right” to “healthcare” is simply a front for a particularly gross kind of corporatism, as illustrated by the ObamaCare Plan’s action of handing over 40 million new unwilling customers to the insurance companies at the point of a gun.
Remember, the game of the big commercial banks, central banks, and the IMF and World Bank is to get control of the entire world economy so as to do 2 simple things; 1) Run all commerce and trade through their books so they can profit off of every transaction by every single person on earth, regardless of the economy, and; 2) To juice economies around the world( by issuing bonds to governments, and inflation by central banks and fractional-reserve commercial banks) to increase the flows from which they skim. It is why, for instance, “conservative” governors have been elected in the US to try to balance state budgets – not to help the poor state taxpayer, but to keep the bonding party going. That is why ALL levels of government must DEFAULT.
Whatever your stand on the health-care legislation at the center of this article, this open revolt by libertarian members against local and state Republican parties should be applauded and encouraged;
Not your average Republican power broker
Sarah Anderson is peculiar. For one thing, she’s a Republican. At 22, that makes her a statistical anomaly, even in El Paso County.
She spent her formative years reading a series of books that explain the free-market theory to teens. She will gleefully argue the superiority of the market-based Austrian School economic model of F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises over the Keynesian mixed-economy version. On her Facebook page, she describes her political views as “a beautiful blend of Anarcho-Capitalism and Minarchism.”
Another thing: Anderson is a born campaigner. Home-schooled, with college on hold, she says she’s worked on more than 60 campaigns over the past seven years. She started at age 9, after pleading with her mother, by volunteering at county headquarters while Bill Owens was running for governor. Six years later, she went door-to-door for Douglas Bruce, then a party hero who wanted a seat on the county commission. From 2004 to 2007, she worked at the state Capitol for legislators including Sen. Kent Lambert of Colorado Springs.
This past February, at the meeting of the county GOP’s central committee, she was elected party secretary in a decisive victory over party stalwart Holly Williams, wife of County Clerk and Recorder Wayne Williams. Anderson says her speech — referencing work done for Lambert, former state Sen. Dave Schultheis, U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck and plenty more — clinched it.
“Let’s not just say we want youth in the party,” she told the crowd. “Let’s put experienced youth in leadership.”
Feisty, ambitious, intelligent and pretty, Anderson’s exactly the kind of person that the aging GOP is eager to draw into the fold. Except that, as she happily offers, “My beliefs aren’t popular with the majority of the powerholders of the Republican Party.”
Peter Schiff powns The Ben Bernank
“…by claiming that the dollars exchange rate has no effect on domestic prices, Mr. Bernanke demonstrates that he probably lacks the competence to be a bank teller, let alone Chairman of the Federal Reserve. A weaker dollar means Americans have to pay more for imported goods. But it also means domestic producers have to pay more for raw materials and imported components, which raises domestic production costs as well. It also means that more domestically produced goods are exported, reducing the supply and raising the price of what is left for Americans to consume. This is Econ 101.”
via It Aint Money If I Cant Print It! by Peter Schiff.