Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Stop the Tax on Religion

Stop the Tax on Religion
 
As the Supreme Court recently ruled, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare, is a tax and our religious institutions will now be taxed. This is being done by provisions tucked away in various corners of the bill that are additional taxes to fund the ACA.  As the law currently stands, a tax can be imposed on employers that have objections to mandates in Obamacare, based on the core tenets of their beliefs. According to a February 2012 Congressional Research Service Report, insurers and employers that do not comply with the HHS mandate could face a federal tax of $100 per day per employee, or a yearly tax of $36,500 per employee. Can our religious institutions afford paying the government this amount and still fund local causes and charities? This will stop much of the money now going to local soup kitchens and food banks from religious institutions that fund programs like these.
 
If I remember correctly, our constitution allows us to practice our religion without interference by government. Also, the progressive tax system was set up so that religious institutions were never taxed. Why does the government now feel obligated to tax all religious institutions? Is it because they need money to pay for something that was originally estimated to cost us $800,000,000,000 ($800 billion) and now has an estimated cost of over $2,000,000,000,000 ($2 trillion)? This tax is more than $2000 per taxpayer per year. The government is literally robbing Peter to pay Paul (pun intended).
 
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-WI, has authored a new bill to remedy this. It's called the Religious Freedom Tax Repeal Act, H.R. 6097. Please call your Representatives and urge them to co-sponsor the Sensenbrenner bill, which will stop the tax on religious freedom!

Quote from James Garfield "Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen."

Randy Kubetz
Wisconsin Citizens Involvement

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Great Opinion piece from John Kass @Chicago Tribune

When President Barack Obama hauled off and slapped American small-business owners in the mouth the other day, I wanted to dream of my father.

But I didn't have to close my eyes to see my dad. I could do it with my eyes open.

All I had to do was think of the driveway of our home, and my dad's car gone before dawn, that old white Chrysler with a push-button transmission. It always started, but there was a hole in the floor and his feet got wet in the rain. So he patched it with concrete mix and kept on driving it to the little supermarket he ran with my Uncle George.

He'd return home long after dark, physically and mentally exhausted, take a plate of food, talk with us for a few minutes, then flop in that big chair in front of the TV. Even before his cigarette was out, he'd begin to snore.

The next day he'd wake up and do it again. Day after day, decade after decade. Weekdays and weekends, no vacations, no time to see our games, no money for extras, not even forMcDonald's. My dad and Uncle George, and my mom and my late Aunt Mary, killing themselves in their small supermarket on the South Side of Chicago.

There was no federal bailout money for us. No Republican corporate welfare. No Democratic handouts. No bipartisan lobbyists working the angles. No Tony Rezkos. No offshore accounts. No Obama bucks.

Just two immigrant brothers and their families risking everything, balancing on the economic high wire, building a business in America. They sacrificed, paid their bills, counted pennies to pay rent and purchase health care and food and not much else. And for their troubles they were muscled by the politicos, by the city inspectors and the chiselers and the weasels, all those smiling extortionists who held the government hammer over all of our heads.

I thought about this after I heard what Obama told a campaign crowd the other day, speaking about business owners and why they were successful.
"You didn't get there on your own," Obama said. "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.
"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."

If you've got a business, you didn't build that? Somebody else made that happen?

Somebody else, Mr. President? Who, exactly? Government?

One of my earliest memories as a boy at the store was that of the government men coming from City Hall.

One was tall and beefy. The other was wiry. They wanted steaks.

We didn't eat red steaks at home or yellow bananas. We took home the brown bananas and the brown steaks because we couldn't sell them. But the government men liked the big, red steaks, the fat rib-eyes two to a shrink-wrapped package. You could put 20 or so in a shopping bag.

"Thanks, Greek," they'd say.

That was government.

We didn't go to movies or out to restaurants. Everything went into the business. Uncle George and dad never bought what they could not afford. The store employed people, and the workers fed their families and educated their children and put them through college. They were good people, all of them. We worked together and worked hard, but none worked harder than the bosses.

It's the same story with so many other businesses in America, immigrants and native-born. The entrepreneurs risk everything, their homes, their children's college funds, their hearts, all for a chance at the dream: independence, and a small business of their own.

Most often, they fail and fall to the ground without a government parachute. But some get up and start again.
When I was grown and gone from home, my parents finally managed to save a little money. After all those years of hard work and denying themselves things, they had enough to buy a place in Florida and a fishing boat in retirement. Dad died only a few years later. You wouldn't call them rich. But Obama might.

Obama's changed. Gone is that young knight drawing the sword from the stone, selling Hopium to the adoring media, preaching an end to the broken politics of the past. These days, he wears a new presidential persona: the multimillionaire with the Chicago clout, playing the class warrior, fighting for that second term.
And he offers an American dream much different from my father's. Open your eyes and you can see it too. He stands there at the front of the mob, in his shirt sleeves, swinging that government hammer, exhorting the crowd to use its votes and take what it wants.

Link

America, Where Art Thou? | Intellectual Takeout (ITO)

 A really good article on what has happened to us as a country.

America, Where Art Thou? | Intellectual Takeout (ITO)

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Obama's Socialist Mantra: Risk Takers Are Free Riders

Link:

Ideology: In his war on American exceptionalism, President Obama has turned the sights on exceptional Americans. If you've built a successful business, it wasn't your dream or your sweat — somebody else made it happen.

The unbridled disdain President Obama has for the entrepreneurs who work hard and risk everything was made plain when he told supporters in Roanoke, Va.: "If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

This was stunning news and a colossal slap in the face to the millions of small-business owners who get up every day and by the sweat of their brow and the drive of their ambition still pursue the American dream in spite of the obstacles and hurdles this administration has put in front of them.

In Obama's collectivist world view, we are all ants on a socialist ant farm. We are sheep being led by a government shepherd. Wealth, as we now know, is not to be created but to be redistributed in the manner of the Marxist slogan — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.

Your success, Obama says, is not your own. There "was a great teacher somewhere in your life," he tells us, and that somebody "invested in roads and bridges."

Is it a coincidence that virtually the only people President Obama gives credit to for anything are teacher and construction unions?

And, with apologies to Al Gore, we are told: "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."

So Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the founders of Google, Facebook and Twitter, are all parasitic pretenders.
Without government, there would have been no Mac computer or iPad? Michelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel, you know. Credit must be given to the folks who built the scaffolding and the inventor of paint.
Of course, this is the president who, in a speech delivered at a high school in Osawatomie, Kan., last December, argued while a limited government that preserves free markets "speaks to our rugged individualism," such a system "doesn't work" and "has never worked" and that Americans must look to a more activist government that taxes more, spends more and regulates more.

Free-market capitalism and limited government took us from a colonial backwater to an economic and military superpower that could defeat Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union and then put men on the moon simply because we wanted to.

Now we have an administration that says the American people are helpless without it while it outsources space travel to the Russians.

Forget Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers and the risk-taking dreamers still among us. They have a harder time these days, shouldering the highest tax and regulatory burdens in the world and beset by bureaucrats, regulators and environmentalists.

President Obama, the community organizer who never ran a business or met a payroll, wants to increase their energy and health insurance costs.

The president's plan to raise taxes on earnings above $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers) would hit 1.2 million small-business employers who pay their taxes through the individual income tax.

This condemnation of rugged individualism and the entrepreneurial spirit comes from a leader who has been dubbed the "food stamp president" and who has done more to increase dependence on government than any other. Let us see your college transcripts, Mr. President. And who helped you on your way besides Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers?

If risk-takers succeed, Mr. President, they do so in spite of government, not because of it. You want to take credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

Look at the wreckage of your policies, sir, and take the blame instead.

Friday, July 13, 2012

2016: Obama's America | Official Movie Site

This movie explains so much of why O'bama is doing what he is doing to America and why he apologized for our country all over the world. Please see this!

2016: Obama's America | Official Movie Site

Monday, July 2, 2012

More corruption from the welfare society

A four-month investigation of the $340 million taxpayer-funded "Wisconsin Shares" welfare childcare program found the program rife with abuse and loopholes.

In one instance, research conducted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that four sisters with 17 children bagged $540,000.00 in taxpayer monies since 2006 by simply staying home and babysitting for each other.  The most shocking part: it's perfectly legal.

"It's a loophole," said Laurice Lincoln, administrative coordinator for child care with the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services. "Do we have concerns about it? Yes, it can be a problem. But if it's allowed, it's allowed. We really can't dispute it."
There's more.
The Wisconsin Shares program also allows parents to work at childcare facilities where their kids attend. In one instance, the newspaper found an employer and parent team accused of bilking taxpayers for over $360,000. 
Part of the problem is that the Wisconsin Shares childcare subsidy program has wide parameters for what the state considers "work."  For example, the investigation found that mothers who "claimed to work ironing a man's shirts, drying fruit and selling artwork they made during art class" all received taxpayer-funded checks.
The program is so lax, it even pays parents to sleep.   As the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel points out, "Counties have no way to monitor whether parents are actually sleeping while their kids are in day care."
An estimated 34,000 Wisconsin families presently take advantage of the $340 million taxpayer-funded Wisconsin Shares program.