Prisons – Another Government Failure

The latest news of the day is about Immigration and Customs Enforcement releasing 36,000 convicted criminals who are in the country, illegally and legally. This information is being presented as an anti Obama campaign. No matter how bad Obama is made to look, he will continue to be president for 3 more years. What's important, is this narrative distracts us from the real message contained in those numbers.

To fully understand the numbers we must know that the initial report listed 87,818 immigrants who were released, 36,007 were slated for deportation. All of my numbers will come from the complete list of 87,818. Of this huge number of criminals, most were convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs , of which many were slated for deportation.

When we break the numbers down, less than half of the 87,000 or 36,000 were violent criminals. When it came to rape and murder we find the numbers are much lower. Now this has been reduced to the worst case, let's look into who is at fault.

Homicide ------------------------------- 184

Kidnapping ------------------------------ 228

Voluntary—manslaughter ------------ 14

Sex offenses ----------------------------- 727

Sexual assault --------------------------- 426

Do Nothing Congress – A Good Thing?

I have to begin by asking – are we worse off if congress never showed up for work? The 113^th Congress is being touted as the least productive in history. If that is the case then I declare a partial victory for America. A good year for congress would be if no new laws were passed and many were repealed. Speaker Boehner said much the same thing, but his actions tell us otherwise.

The Constitution requires only that each house of Congress meet once per year. Congress was never intended to be in session for most of the year. Being a Senator or Representative was never intended to be a full time job. It is because governing has become a full time job that they become corrupt. Politicians spend more time in Washington, DC than they do in their home districts. This is why they lose touch with the people for whom they were elected to represent.

Because they continuously live and work in DC, the Lobbyist become their friends and a part of social groups. It has reached the point that Congress is judged by how long they are in session and and by the number of new laws passed. With each Congress government grows. For those who want central planning this is a good thing. For those of us who want more power reserved for the states as designed by the Constitution – more Congress is a bad thing.

Economic Truths

Today we hear a lot about economic and social justice. There seems to always be talk of raising the minimum wage in order to have it keep up with inflation. We hear about the great wealth divide where the gap between wealthy and poor widens. This is spoken as if there is a limited numbers of dollars and if one person gets wealthy they must be taking it from someone at the bottom. This is a fallacy.

Today, we have a global market. There is massive trade between countries. Goods and services are exchanged between countries. I could give you the total global accumulated wealth, but that changes daily. The amount of a country's currency changes daily. The USA is creating $84 billion a month. This doesn't include dollars created out of thin air that is loaned to banks. Even if that currency is temporary, it becomes temporally a part of total currency. Gold and other commodities are converted to cash through Rehypothification in the form of bonds.

Each day wealth is taken and returned to the government. Currently the death tax (estate tax) is 40% of assets above $5.5 million. When the government takes that money it's often returned to the economy in various ways. Eventually that money becomes available to be earned once more. To be sure, this isn't in support of the death tax, but just an explanation of how currency moves. This does show, especially under the current taxing system, the rich cannot accumulate wealth to the point that the poor can have no chance of moving to the middle class.

Death isn't the only way that wealth trickles down to the poor. Much of the wealth lies with business – be it small or large. Most businesses are always looking to expand. They will spend money on building facilities in which to produce more products or services. When expansion happens, more workers are hired. Careful thought is given to the number of employees needed. In order to make that decision they must look to see how much of their budget can be set aside for labor. They, then, look at the labor market and decide what is the lowest wage that can be offered to attract the necessary labor. Skilled labor always comes at a premium, while manual labor is usually easier to find at a lower cost.

Knowing History—The Pledge of Allegiance

The Pledge of Allegiance is something I thought little about as I stood in my grammar school class each day repeating the phrase. My only thoughts were that my nation was something about which to take great pride. I feel no differently today. The only difference today is that I often have to seek out corrections to history as taught by our schools and perpetuated by the different political ideologies. The simple Pledge of Allegiance is one of those things.

Where did the pledge originate?

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in August 1892 by the socialist, Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy (1855-1931). It was originally published in The Youth's Companion on September 8, 1892. Bellamy had hoped the pledge would be used by citizens in any country. Years after the Civil War had ended the nation was still divided. This was an attempt to bring the nation together under one flag.

The pledge in its original form:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

"The government always has"

Frequently we hear people say, “The government has always done it this way.” when we hear that we should stop and take pause. That statement alone exemplifies the problems in this country. We have reached a time when the Constitution no longer matters and government picks and chooses which laws to enforce.

I was recently told that we should support flawed Bills and that the Executive Branch has always picked and chosen which laws they enforced. The argument to the latter was there are only so many resources and they must be allocated according to need.

Click to enlarge

If we have more laws than can be enforced, then that should tell us one thing—we need less laws or more enforcement. Enforcement is expensive, so that leaves only one thing, which is to have less laws to enforce. The chart shows we imprison more people than almost any country in the world. Many of these incarcerations are drug related. Too often violent criminals are freed through early parole in order to make room for drug offenders.

No matter whether you are for drug legalization or not, the country has reached a crisis point. Enforcement doesn't have the manpower to sometimes go after potential terrorists who entered the country illegally. We have Justice Department officials deciding which laws to enforce, and too often that decision is guided by political and ideological beliefs.

The Not So New Deal

I recently came across this image and text on Facebook. I found the image to be over the top and the accompanying text interesting. I decided to take each bullet point and add my commentary.

(name removed) did a little research and came up with the following about Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

1. Brought the country back from financial collapse.

2. Established and protected Social Security.

3. Worked toward ending a war.

4. FDR was completely opposed to everything Hitler stood for - the biggest threat to national security. Hitler died on April 30, 1945 by taking poison and then shootin

g himself with a pistol. (corrected)

5. Wife was an advocate of the disadvantaged

6. Invested in jobs and the nation's infrastructure.

7. Spoke to the people not at them.

8. Strong advocate of the military and its soldiers and sailors.

9. Strong foreign policy record in the presence of tyrants.

10. Established and sustained regulation of Wall Street.

11. A champion of minority groups.

12. Ended discrimination in the military.

Sound familiar?

FDR is consistently considered one of the top three Presidents in history but the Tea Party consider him a dangerous Progressive much as they have maligned Obama.

Obama: ”We built this country together.”

In the beginning there were the 13 original colonies. It was those intrepid people who were the foundations of this country. They came to this country for many reasons. Some came to escape religious persecution, while others came to be free of oppressive governments. For whatever their reason they sometimes formed small communities and worked together to build their small portion of the country. These people later formed local governments which have become the foundations of this country.

In time these colonies decided it would be in their best interested if they formed a partnership to provide for a common defense and create free trade agreements. Many knew that tariffs among the young colonies could be their downfall. For these and other reasons the United States of American was formed.

Why Does Congress Not Read The Bills?

The Democrats roll out a 2000 page $1.1 trillion spending bill and tried to ram it through congress. They have no idea who wrote the bill; what’s worse, they don’t care. The people stood up and screamed when the Democrats did the same thing with the 2400 page health-care bill. It would take a team of lawyers a week to just read these bills.

We now know the health-care bill had been written years ago by the left wing Apollo Foundation to which Soros gives millions. Are we ever told by congress who writes the bills? Do they expect Americans to be so gullible as to believe these bills were written that month? The Democrats have now been in power for four years. They have taken all this time to write, amend, or edit bills written by any number of organizations, and then waited for the waning days of the lame-duck congress in which to ram these bills through. The Democrats wanted to be sure no one else had the time to read these bills.

Federal Failure

Today was a good day in America. Congress worked together to come up with a new immigration law. Today that law failed to come to vote and was sent back to committee, where most go to die. This bill will reemerge, but at least this version is effectively dead. Those for the bill claimed that it had to pass this one or to continue the status quo of doing nothing.

Those of us that have opposed this bill do so for one reason, why pass more laws when no one wants to enforce the current ones. Once the current laws are enforced, there is true effort to build the 720 miles fence that congress has already approved, and then only can we look at changing the current laws.

No doubt we need to expand the quota of immigrant workers. I doubt anyone will argue that point. The Kennedy-McCain bill did provide for that. That bill had a lot of good points. There were also many bad points. There is no need for me to go over that bill verbatim.