The Patriot Post Brief 3-5-2012

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The Patriot Post Brief 3-5-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

"If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check." --Thomas Jefferson

Political Futures

"Many people are looking to the many primary elections on March 6th -- 'Super Tuesday' -- to clarify where this year's Republican nomination campaign is headed. It may clarify far more than that, including the future of this nation and of Western civilization. If a clear winner with a commanding lead emerges, the question then becomes whether that candidate is someone who is likely to defeat Barack Obama. If not, then the fate of America -- and of Western nations, including Israel -- will be left in the hands of a man with a lifelong hostility to Western values and Western interests. ... The election next November will not be just another election, and the stakes add up to far more than the sum of the individual issues. Moreover, if reelected and facing no future election, whatever political constraints may have limited how far Obama would push his radical agenda will be gone. He would have the closest thing to a blank check. Nothing could stop him but impeachment or a military coup, and both are very unlikely. A genial corrupter is all the more dangerous for being genial. The four remaining Republican candidates have to be judged, not simply by whether they would make good presidents, but by how well they can cut through Obama's personal popularity and glib rhetoric, to alert the voters as to the stakes in this year's election. ... Do any of the Republican candidates seem ideal? No. But, the White House cannot be left vacant, while we hope for a better field of candidates in 2016. We have to make our choice among the alternatives actually available, of which Obama is by far the worst." --economist Thomas Sowell1

Who will get your vote on Super Tuesday?2

Opinion in Brief

"Of course, there have been improvements in the economic numbers of late. And the mainstream-media pundits are ready to hand the general election to President Obama because of it. But they're way overboard on this game. The public knows there's a debt bomb coming from Medicare and that this debt bomb could lead to a huge tax-increase bomb. In fact, Ben Bernanke just warned Congress that the economy could hit 'a massive fiscal cliff' by Jan. 1, 2013, as the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut expire. This could knock gross domestic product growth down to 1 percent. And even with the recent economic improvement, which is threatened by surging oil and retail gas prices, the economic recovery still ranks as one of the lowest on record. GDP growth averaged 2.5 percent annually over the past two and a half years. Compare that to the Ronald Reagan recovery average of 6 percent growth over the same period and a postwar average of 4.6 percent. I'm not here to badmouth the improving economy. I'm glad of it. It shows the resilience of free-enterprise business. But I am here to question the new conventional belief that it hands the election to Obama. It's going to take more than that." --columnist Lawrence Kudlow3

Essential Liberty

"President Obama apologized [last] week for the U.S. military's accidental burning of Qurans in Afghanistan. ... The Qurans were only burned in the first place because terrorists were writing messages in them to their friends. ... Let's say you're driving on a city street with your daughter in the car. You accidentally rear end a sketchy looking fellow in a pickup truck, scraping his bumper. He immediately climbs out of the truck, baseball bat in hand, and proceeds to wallop your little girl in the head. Should you apologize for rear ending him? Or should you try to protect her from the second shot by killing this psychotic monster? The liberal answer is an odd version of the legal eggshell-skull approach to torts -- you leave the victim as you find him. From the liberal perspective, this means that if you scraped a guy's bumper, it's your fault if he goes berserk and murders your child. The same holds true on foreign policy: It was our burning of the Qurans that caused the psychotic behavior." --columnist Ben Shapiro4

Government

"As David Brooks recently wrote in the New York Times, 'the U.S. does not have a significantly smaller welfare state than the European nations. We're just better at hiding it.' Whereas European countries 'provide welfare provisions through direct government payments,' the U.S. does it 'through the back door via tax breaks.' For instance, 'European governments offer public childcare. In the U.S., we have child tax credits.' European governments openly 'subsidize favored industries.' We provide 'special tax deductions and exemptions' for Washington's favored industries. This back-door approach allows Americans to indulge in the fantasy of their self-reliance and rugged individualism without actually being self-reliant or rugged. ... When you include both direct and back-door social spending, our welfare state is bigger than Italy's. It is 'far above average' when compared to other industrialized nations. Unless we intend to leave our children and grandchildren with an unconscionable debt burden, that must change." --author Chuck Colson5

For the Record

"The President pretends increasing taxes is just removing oil industry subsidies. They are tax increases. For instance, the unfair tax break that makes up nearly half of what Obama calls 'subsidies' is the manufacturing tax credit. All manufacturers except the oil and gas industry get to deduct 9 percent of their revenues before calculating their tax bills. (It's worth noting that 'manufacturing' is so broadly defined that it includes newspapers and software companies in addition to producers of wind turbines and solar panels.) Though oil and gas producers get the deduction, they are singled out for a lower 6 percent deduction. ... When the tax increases on oil and gas companies were proposed last year, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) was asked to analyze the impact. ... The CRS says there are two ways of looking at the impact of the tax increases: 1) They will increase gasoline prices and dependence on foreign oil; or 2) They will and should increase gasoline prices, because gasoline is 'artificially inexpensive.' Everybody get that? There is no question about which direction gasoline prices will go if oil industry taxes are raised." --Heritage Foundation's David Kreutzer, Ph.D.6