Child Tax Credit Increase or Tax Code Reform? Families Need Help

Good summation on helping struggling families to support themselves and their children - reforming the tax code to lessen the burden on new families and those that want to expand existing ones, is far better then expanding entitlement programs that have to many strings attached and are usually a waste of tax dollars as this article points out.

A tax code reform for everyone would  be far better and more evenly resourceful to help families cope with our dynamic society. The struggle is bad enough for a single person let alone the family of four or more.

Should the United States Expand the Child Tax Credit?
Source: Reihan Salam, "How Expanding the Child Credit Can Help Conservatives Achieve Their Goal," National Review Online, June 22, 2014; Ben Domenech, "Should The Government Define The American Dream?" Federalist, June 10, 2014.

July 18, 2014

Reihan Salam of National Review argues that Republicans should support the expansion of the child tax credit, contending that the policy would garner more political support than would cutting taxes on high earners.

Salam writes that the GOP should focus on what he calls family-friendly tax reform, saying that calls for a broad consumption tax or corporate tax reform are unlikely to be as compelling to voters as expanding the child tax credit for middle-income families. Salam identifies what he sees as the political benefits of raising the child tax credit:

• Expanding the credit could have a large impact on after-tax incomes for middle-class households, particularly in swing states.
• Latino and Asian households are more likely to be composed of married couples with children than are other households in the United States. Expanding the child tax credit could appeal to those voters.
• A survey of American women by the YG Network found that 78 percent supported expanding the child tax credit.

But not everyone is on board with Salam's proposal. Ben Domenech at the Federalist writes that there are other policy tools that would be far more impactful than the child tax credit, such as broad-based tax cuts or abolishing the payroll tax. If families want to have children but feel that a child is too much of a financial burden, Domenech writes, a more limited policy solution would be to peel back those government-imposed burdens, not expand an entitlement that subsidizes one group.

Reforming the tax code to lower burdens on all Americans, he writes, should be the goal of tax reform.
 

Export-Import Bank Politically Flaudulent? : 'Corporate Cronyism'?

It make good sense to abolish an organization that require taxpayer funds to subsides so few organizations. This smacks of 'crony capitalism' - since it is a function of the Export Import bank to distribute monies to corporations, it stands to reason if the Obama administration has a anything to do with the distribution of taxpayer funds, rest assured there will be influence as to where the funds will go.  

As with any other governmental institution that is controlled by progressive democrats, it will be corrupt. If you don't believe this even in the face of what has transpired over the last five and a half years, then you must have just arrived on the latest shuttle from the planet Zogon.

Ex-Im Benefits a Few, Has Minor Impact on Exports
Source: David Stockman, "Why Killing The Ex-Im Bank Is Crucial To The Future Of Capitalism," Contra Corner, July 8, 2014.

July 18, 2014

David Stockman, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, writes that the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank -- a federal program that provides loans and loan guarantees to foreign purchasers of American products -- should not be reauthorized.
Stockman breaks down the details regarding Ex-Im financing:

• The Ex-Im bank was responsible for less than 2 percent of the $2.2 trillion in U.S. exports in 2013.
• Only $12 billion in Ex-Im funds were used to "meet competition from a foreign, officially sponsored export credit agency," meaning that just 0.6 percent of exports allegedly would not have occurred without Ex-Im financing.
• Of that $12 billion, $8 billion went to a single company, Boeing. Boeing's financial director has stated that the company could find alternative, non-Ex-Im, funding sources.
• In 2013, the top 10 Ex-Im beneficiaries received 75 percent of Ex-Im subsidies.

It is the shareholders of these few large corporations that benefit from the Ex-Im subsidies. The company could discount its prices to make up for the loss of any subsidies. Any resulting change to the company's earnings per share would be modest, Stockman says, and the difference would have "no bearing on the public interest whatsoever."
 

Planned Parenthood Advocates Violent Behavior (Video) as Normal for Teen Girls

What in the world is happening? What are these people using for common sense and moral equivalence to justify saying and advocating this kind of thing to teen age girls? And doing so using tax dollars?

 Who are these people? Who would advocate destruction as a tool for education that will be destructive to the moral fabric of our society?  Easy - they have come out of hiding - progressive socialist liberal democrats!

In Undercover Videos, Planned Parenthood Suggests Sadistic Sex to Teen Girls
Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness   (The Daily Signal) Heritage Foundation       

(Video) SEXED 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pE1feXDfsyc

“Choking,” “whipping,” and “tying up” are a few of the sadistic sexual behaviors Planned Parenthood staffers in Denver were caught on camera promoting to underage girls as part of Obamacare-supported “sex education” inside their facilities.

 This report and video contain graphic language about disturbing practices.

Today, in two undercover videos released by the pro-life group Live Action, counselors  for Planned Parenthood are seen offering advice about “BDSM”— a practice  in which sexual partners beat, lash, or otherwise inflict pain on each other — to girls who the staffers think are 15- and 16-year-olds.
The videos, “Sex-Ed Two: Planned Parenthood’s Dangerous Sex Advice for Kids,” are part of Live Action’s nationwide campaign to spread awareness of Planned Parenthood’s track record:

The motto at Planned Parenthood seems to be ‘sex with no strings attached.’ Teens are told they can have sex whenever, however, with whomever, as long as it’s contracepted.

In the undercover footage, staff for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains tells minors that “sexual exploration is normal.” One counselor suggests the 15-year-old read the erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” and search online “to see kind of how they execute it.”
Lila Rose, president of Live Action and an undercover  actor in many of the group’s videos, told The Daily Signal in a telephone interview this morning:

Planned Parenthood promotes themselves as a clearinghouse for sex advice for teenagers, and that’s one of their justifications to receive taxpayer money. They’re promoting dangerous sexual behavior as normal and OK for kids to practice. … As a sex educator, they’re not to be trusted.

Planned Parenthood’s “sex education” funding through Obamacare is a fraction of the more than $500 million it receives annually from taxpayers. The organization is the largest provider of abortions in America.
“Here’s an abortion corporation, which gets 45 percent of its budget from the taxpayers, telling 15- and 16-year-olds not only to have sex, but also to choke each other in the process,” Rose said of the undercover video in an earlier prepared  statement.  “Police should be busting down its door.”
Rose voiced concerns over staffers undermining and invalidating a fundamental rule in relationships, that “no means no.”
In the video, Live Action’s investigator is advised that a young girl using words such as “stop” when she is uncomfortable “can get mixed up.” A second counselor concurs: “Usually, a lot of people will say ‘stop’ even though it feels good, so that’s usually not something that is used.”
Live Action is campaigning for Colorado residents to take action, in particular to ask schools with links to Planned Parenthood: “Are you OK with this sort of behavior being pushed on my children?’
A Planned Parenthood facility in Denver already was under fire over accusations that clinic staff failed to report on the suspected sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl by her stepfather.
According to a report by Life News, the man took his pregnant stepdaughter to an abortion appointment on May 3, 2012. After the procedure, Planned Parenthood staffers returned the girl to her stepfather’s custody, and the abuse continued.
The stepfather is  behind bars on multiple counts of felony sex abuse.  On June 20, the girl’s mother filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, arguing that four staffers failed in their responsibility to report suspected child sex abuse, which in Colorado is required by law.
“Parents need to get involved on the community level and ensure there’s no relationship between the schools and Planned Parenthood,” Rose told The Daily Signal:

Planned Parenthood does not take sexual abuse seriously and they even go as far as covering it up. We’ve documented it for years; we found over a dozen clinics [where staff] have coached underage girls to lie about their age to put power in the hands of their sexual abuser.

Planned Parenthood has not responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Obama's DOJ 'Choke Point Operation' : Destroy the Opposition

And the beat goes on. The "Choke Point" operation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) is just one more of many operations that are designed and installed to control out-comes in this country strictly on the basis of ideology.

The Obama administration, under the guise of justice from the DOJ to target business they don't like, read this as businesses that do not fit an agenda that is favorable to progressive socialists, has used a governmental departments that are supported entirely by taxpayers to attack taxpayers and their institutions.

Taxpayers, citizens, have become 'enemies of the state'.

If this sound reminiscent of the IRS, the EPA, the FBI, HHS, the Treasury and nearly every other department in this government, it is. The government is using taxpayer funded institutions to attack and destroy this administrations opponents.

I wonder what this would be called it this were occurring in a third world country?

Lawmakers Throw Light on Secretive ‘Operation Choke Point’
Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness (The Daily Signal)

Is “Operation Choke Point” about to get choked by Congress? Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sure hopes so.
Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is calling for the dismantling of what he calls a secretive initiative launched by the Obama administration in early 2013.
Critics say that Operation Choke Point, so dubbed by Department of Justice officials under Attorney General Eric Holder,  seeks to weed out businesses from the marketplace that the Obama administration considers objectionable. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was an outgrowth of the Financial Fraud Task Force, established by President Obama’s executive order early in his first term.

The initiative, Issa said last week, is a slippery slope:

“If you empower the government to pick winners and losers within a lawful enterprise, then there is no place to stop.”

Initially, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, officials targeted small-dollar, nonbank lenders. But it grew to include other legal, legitimate businesses such as gun dealers and tobacco vendors at Walmart and Bass Pro Shop.

Issa, speaking on Operation Choke Point at Cato Institute, called it “proactive, progressive activity” by government against banks and other legitimate businesses. “Fraud should be prosecuted,” Norbert Michel, research fellow in financial regulations at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “They don’t have to use the banking system to shut out every single player in an industry to do that.”
House Republicans already have passed legislation prohibiting funding for Operation Choke Point. This week, the Justice Department initiative comes under further scrutiny in three House settings:

• This morning at 10, the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on the Justice Department initiative.
• Today at 2 p.m., the Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on financial institutions was set to hold a hearing on a new bill by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), the “End Operation Choke Point Act of 2014.”
• Thursday at 9:30 a.m., the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on regulatory reform will hold a hearing entitled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent?” on whether Justice has the legal authority to execute the operation and possible collateral damage to legitimate businesses.

One official at Justice, quoted anonymously in a  Wall Street Journal report last summer, said the initiative was intended to change “the structures within the financial system that allow all kinds of fraudulent merchants to operate,” with the intent of “choking them off from the very air they need to survive.”

By “air,”the DOJ means money. The Obama administration uses Operation Choke Point to intimidates banks from doing business with merchants it deems “high risk,” Issa and other critics say.

 Operation Choke Point: FDIC Cooperated with Justice Department

For example, Issa said in his remarks last week, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation officials make “inappropriate” phone calls to banks and payday lenders, pressuring them to sever ties with businesses the government considers “reputational risks.”

Mark Calabria, Cato’s director of financial regulation studies, said FDIC pressure is an enormous weight over the financial industry. “When the federal government maintains the discretion to decide which bank gets rescued and which does not, it should be clear that banks in practice have little choice but to cooperate,” Calabria said.

Despite his opposition to the initiative, Issa has yet to endorse legislation to end Operation Choke Point. Instead, he said:

We’ve got to do what baseball pitchers do anytime somebody’s crowding the plate. And that is, we’re going to put the ball close enough that either they’re going to jump back, or we’re going to hit them with the ball. … What they’re doing is wrong, and we’ve got to show that.

Moral Equivalence In Gauza? : Israel Stand & Wait to Be Killed?

Hamas attacks only civilians with thousands of rockets directed into Israel, but the American media, and the democrat party, can find fault only with the Israelis for protecting themselves from attack when they fight back.

But then this has been the policy of the Obama administration from the beginning, so why not the main stream media as they are one and the same. Go figure.


(This from the Heritage Foundation) - The Daily Signal

The Moral Difference Between Israel and Hamas equivalence
Steven Bucci/ @SBucci

What most Americans—and the world—hear about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas goes something like this: “125 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed by Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. No Israelis have yet been killed.” This may be true, but there is absolutely no context to it. One must look at the methodologies of the two sides.

Hamas sets up rocket launchers—as well as supply dumps and command-and-control sites—in the midst of apartment buildings, mosques and schools. From these sites, its fighters launch dozens of rockets in salvos, targeting population centers with no discrimination at all. They have been firing almost continuously of late. But normally, they fire when Israeli school children move from their homes, which have safe shelters, to their schools, which also have shelters. They do this deliberately to try and catch the kids in the open. They don’t seek to minimize collateral damage – they seek to maximize it.

Israel, on the other hand, fires only at specific, intelligence-derived military targets. Since these targets are deliberately intermixed with the civilian population by Hamas, Israel must take steps to minimize the collateral casualties.

Before the Israelis strike a building, every home in it gets a call on its landline phone, as do all the cell phones associated with the inhabitants of the building—the cells additionally get text messages—telling them that in a few minutes the building will be targeted. Finally, to make sure everyone gets the message, Israel drops a dud bomb—one containing no explosives—onto the roof of the structure. Minutes later, the building is destroyed. There is no instance in modern military history where a force has taken greater measures to give the innocents as much chance to get out of the way. It is as “discriminant” as a modern military can be.

Additionally, Israel has developed its much-touted—and rightly so—Iron Dome rocket defense system, which renders most of Hamas’ efforts of no effect. Between the Iron Dome shooting down the rockets that might otherwise do damage, and the “Red Alert” app that alerts civilians on their cell phones in real time when a terrorist rocket attack is launched, and where it is headed, the civilian casualties in Israel have been negligible.

Israel just wants to be left alone; Hamas wants the destruction of Israel. There is no moral equivalence there, and the tactics of the two sides prove the point.

Food Stamps Consume the Soul : Mr Obama Recognized

After having willing accepting responsibility for increasing the number of people on food stamps to more the 50 million and growing, it seems only appropriate that something should be done to recognize Mr Obama's and his progressive socialist democrat party accomplishments.

Just think, if only half of these people vote democrat every election, there really won't be any need for elections.

And if you still don't understand why the progressive socialist democrats are doing everything they can to increase the number of people on food stamps and welfare, this should help your understanding.

Divide and conquer. Class warfare. Those that have verses those that don't. Chaos. Mr Obama promised "Fundamental Change in America". Need I say more.

Opinions Share Alternatives : Mr Obama's Opinion IS Final

I'm sure you have heard this from your boss or you have told a suburbanite, 'I like to hear your opinion but we will do it my way'.

Mr Obama is much like the boss or dominating family member, he shakes your hand and delivers the big toothy smiles all the while explaining your task in life is to accept my intellectual judgment as final. There are no alternatives. My way or the highway.

Your opinion is of no consequence. This not a suggestion but a threat.

Resource Mining Reform Needed : A National Security Issue

If one needs a reason why our mining situation has become untenable in America, look no further then Wisconsin. Wisconsin has always been big on mining, the state flag even has a depiction of mining, but to understand what happened to the will to use this natural resource to best effect for the state and the country can be summed up in one word, democrats.

When the state had the opportunity to begin a mining operation in the northern part of the state which would bring more then 2000 high paying jobs to an area of the state that is hurting for an economic turn around, and bring in more then 1.3 billion in revenue, and if that's not enough, the industry that produces mining equipment is huge in this state would create hundreds of new jobs for job strapped Milwaukee.

But happened is when the vote to begin this operation and bring in huge prosperity to the state, every last democrat voted against the bill. The democrats said it would bring too much environmental destruction even though the Core of Engineers and even the EPA gave their blessing to the project. In reality, the democrats voted against the bill because it would make the governor look good in the face of the democrat effort to recall Governor Scott Walker's election that was soon to come.

So it was totally about politics from the democrats, not about creating jobs and being in new revenue to the state, just the politics of revenge. This is the true face of the democrat party, and not just in the state of Wisconsin, but the agenda and ideology of the democrats nation wide.

America Needs Mining Reform
Source: Mark Perry, "Don't neglect mining in America," Detroit News, July 10, 2014.

July 18, 2014

While mining policy is far from the minds of most voters, the United States' increasing reliance on other nations -- predominately China -- for strategic minerals is a serious concern, explains Mark Perry, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
U.S. mining policy does nothing to encourage investment:

• The United States has a complex, delay-ridden system for mine permitting. It takes an average of seven to 10 years to receive a mining permit in the United States, five times longer than in Canada.
• The Environmental Protection Agency has asserted the right to take away mining permits that have already been granted, creating uncertainty and crippling investment.
• The government restricts, or has banned, new mining operations on more than 50 percent of federally owned public land.

The United States imports $119 billion worth of minerals each year, and our reliance on other countries makes domestic manufacturers vulnerable to supply disruptions and price spikes. In fact, the United States is solely reliant on imports for 18 different minerals. This is a problem as rare earth metals such as neodymium and dysprosium are critical parts of defense and energy technologies, as well as automobiles and electronics.

Both Indonesia and China, major minerals producers, have banned exports of certain metals, creating a pricing system in which American manufacturers pay an inflated price for certain materials. Some companies in the United States have moved their operations overseas in order to obtain these minerals at lower costs.

The United States needs its own mineral supply chain, writes Perry, but it cannot do so without strong mining investment. While the American share of world mining investment was 21 percent in the early 1990s, it sits at just 8 percent today.
 

Progressive Democrat Word Smith : Mr Obama Word Use and Abuse

In Mr Obama's own words, "there just words" and that's the end of it. He lives by words and how he can use them to gain control of all our lives.

The sadist part of all this is millions are more then willing to allow it to happen. People are ready to believe even in the face of living their own destruction.

How did this come to be? We are living history.

Golfer Falls But Mr Obama Is There to Help Recovery (Humor)

A woman was playing golf  when she took a big swing and fell.
 The party waiting behind her was a group from  
Washington, DC that included Barack  Obama.
  Barack quickly stepped forward and helped her to her feet.
  She thanked him and started to leave, when he said,
"I'm Barack Obama and I hope you'll vote Democratic in the next election.
  She laughed and quickly said, "I fell on my ass, not my head."