The Associated Press: FACT CHECK: Netanyahu speech ignores rival claims

The Associated Press: FACT CHECK: Netanyahu speech ignores rival claims

Response to E-Mail "How to Fix Congress"

I received this e-mail below from a friend. It starts out with a quotation from Patrick Henry. I've seen this e-mail, in various forms, quite a few times. I agree with parts and disagree with other parts.

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests”.
- Patrick Henry -

I have totally cleaned this e-mail from all other names, sending it to you in hopes you will keep it going and keep it clean. This is something I will fight for and I hope you all read it all the way through. You will be glad you did.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

I'm asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.
The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people, it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!
If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete. You are one of my 20+. Please keep it going.

Here are my thoughts and recommendations concerning the e-mail:

Some items that the petition proposes to "fix" are very misleading. For example: the one about social security -- see Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/socialsecurity/pensions.asp

I agree with the proposal about medical care -- I think everyone in the US should be covered through the Government equally. The 30% of the money that the US spends on medical care "insurance overhead" could then either be saved -- our partially converted to improvements in actual care.

On the other hand, I think we do need some sort of financial incentive to compensate or reward people who are willing to devote a big chunk of their life and their time to serving in public office. In order to get to US Congress/Senate, they really need to spend time in a city, county or state legislative body, which often pays very little. US Senate & House pay needs to be better than the lower tiers of Government to attract the best from those lower offices, and compensate them for having to maintain two households.

Do you think the rewards are adequate enough to attract you into running for office? Would you risk spending years of your time working at lower offices, and then spend a lot of your money and time campaigning for a "shot" at the office? If we don't pay them well, all we will get are the people who are already wealthy, who can afford to spend the money to get into office or people who are "sponsored" by the wealthy or large contributors (or corporations). I think that situation would be very good for the right-wing, but not good for the true, grass roots of the country.

No, I think the absolute best way to "fix" congress is to extend their terms of office and simultaneously enact some term limits. Two year terms in congress is much too short to be able to learn "the job" -- It also requires much too frequent campaigning. When the country was founded, the congressmen had to make a long trip home to talk to constituents every two years. Now, with internet and CSPAN we are in continuous communication.

I could see Congressmen be elected for 5 years with 2 term limit and Senators have one 12 year term. That way, they won't be continuously campaigning, won't need to be raising money etc. They should receive a pension that is commensurate with their term of service -- but not exorbitant, of course. I believe I have seen e-mail circulate with similar provisions included.

U.S. tax burden at lowest level since '58 - USATODAY.com

The latest news confirms what I've suspected for a long time. Our US taxes are very low. See this article in USA Today.

U.S. tax burden at lowest level since '58 - USATODAY.com

Our taxes are not only low from a historical perspective, but they are also low compared to the rest of the western world.

I'm not sure why they need to go lower? Our nation's infrastructure is crumbling --other countries have brand new or better roads, education, security, consumer protection etc. Why do we need to sacrifice? We can afford better!

Why we need a Value Added Tax (VAT) in the US

There was a recent Associated Press report that the super rich are paying even less income tax now and over half of the US pays no income tax. (See this link)

Can we continue like this? No, I don't think our current income tax system sustainable in the long haul. Not only are wealthy individuals able to dodge the income tax, the corporations are also avoiding taxes and doing even better! There was a good report on 60 minutes a few weeks ago about how all of the major corporations are now "offshore" and avoiding most of the state and federal income taxes. (If you didn't see it, click here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7360932n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.10

Our income tax laws are far too complex! They are welfare programs for the accountants and lawyers --and, of course, the tax preparers. Filing taxes invades our privacy, and makes us "guilty" until we prove our innocence by filing our deductions. The incentives in our tax system to encourage social improvements are no longer very effective because of the complexity in the system. For example, if I buy a new solar panel for my roof, what is the net savings in taxes? It is difficult to figure out without running Turbo Tax on a pro-forma tax situation. When an individual or corporation makes a decision it is not obvious what the tax implications of that decision will be. It used to be much more simple.

I think it is time the US converted to a Value Added Tax (VAT) similar to what most other Western nations use. It is self-auditing and easy to administer. It taxes "consumption" and rewards saving and conservation. It promotes quality products rather than "throw away" VAT also "taxes" the people who work "under the table" since everyone has to buy stuff. Illegal immigrants, drug dealers, smugglers, and homeless bums will all have to pay VAT when they buy something.

There should be a small tax on interest and dividends that is collected by the banks and corporations and deducted before being sent to individuals. Eliminate capital gains tax -- that encourages people to invest for the future, rather than spend today. That helps to reduce inflation.

A lot of economists like the VAT. See this article on CBS News. However there is plenty of opposition and resistance to change.

• Liberals in US have traditionally fought against it because it looks like a "sales tax" and argue it would affect the "poor" more than the "rich" -- But helping the poor through taxes isn't as effective as direct help for medical, housing, education, or food.
• Conservatives like the laws as they are, because they can take advantage of it and pay very little corporate or personal income tax.
• All lawyers, accountants and tax preparation companies, of course, would be against a VAT for job protection. (Majority of our Congress/Senate are lawyers). The tax preparation companies have huge lobby budgets and contribute to most politicians re-election funds.
• Most people wouldn't care or be affected on their "bottom line"--but we are all concerned that if a new tax (VAT) is created, the old one (income tax) should be completely eliminated --otherwise it results in simply more taxes and more complications. Once a tax is created, it is difficult to "kill" it.

A VAT will eliminate a lot of wasted effort in our economic system. For example: Most corporations need to keep two sets of books for tax laws. It will also discourage the "off shoring" of our corporations which is also just a big tax scam and waste.

Finally, it will put our companies on an equal footing with competitors in other countries. VAT doesn't have to be collected when the end item is exported which puts our US corporations at a competitive disadvantage.

Our taxation system is going to "choke" on the baby boom generation now starting to retire. As more of us retire, there will be a smaller percentage of workers with "taxable" income. However, since everyone "consumes" a VAT will be able to tax us baby boomers even though we're not earning much income.

I think it will be a tough sell to the US citizens to get a VAT implemented. However if we could get some real leadership in our Government, with careful explanation, I think it could be done. Maybe Obama could pull it off in a second term.

Response to Mencken's Ghost -Fatherless Families

Mencken's Ghost wrote about Obama setting a goal to reduce fatherless families in America -- a Sputnik moment for families! (See full text of e-mail below in this blog)

I agree that it would help our country if we had fewer fatherless families. All kids have two grandfathers too -- where are they? I've seen the problems my NCOs had with their children while they have been deployed. Similar problems happen when fathers take jobs at remote locations -- such as oil rigs in Alaska. During those periods, if Grandma and Grandpa are very close by, the problems of not having Dad around can be mitigated. Otherwise, the problems are the same as if the father was never around! Children have short memories and live for today.

For the past 15 years the US has had a VERY aggressive program of getting father's names on birth certificates of the children born out of wedlock. I believe that now it is extremely rare when a birth certificate doesn't have "dad's" name on it. So we now know Dad's name, and he is required to financially support his offspring. I believe that is now happening in most of the country. But financial support isn't the same as having Dad in the household. I think the "welfare queen" is no longer a problem.

Yes, some of the fatherless children are the result of Dad being in prison..and Mom not wanting Dad back with the kids when he gets out of prison..probably not a bad decision on Mom's part. Sadly the majority of the fatherless children are the result of divorce.

If Obama set a national goal what would the country have to do to reach that goal:

• First of all, we would have to forbid divorce or separation when children are involved. --how would that "sell" to the country?
• Second, we would have to REQUIRE couples to marry if they have a child. Take the "shotgun" away from the Girls father, and give it to Uncle Sam? --That wouldn't sell to anyone! -- After all, now with DNA tests, there's no question about who's the daddy.
• We could probably "waive" the above two requirements, if Grandma and Grandpa agree to legally adopt the children.

I think I agree that our welfare system doesn't "discourage" out of wedlock children --and may facilitate the situation. Teens may be more responsible if they knew that if they had children, they would be forced to move into homes with Grandma and Grandpa in order to make ends meet...rather than receiving their "reward" of subsidized housing, food stamps, and medical care. But the alternative is to force a significant percentage of those children into worse situations: no home, inadequate diet, etc.

Mencken's Ghost, wrote a very good article, and clearly identified the problem.. He would like to see a goal set --but he offers no solution to reach that goal. He refers to the "Sputnik moment." In Sputnik's case, we knew there was a path using technology to solve the problem. What is a real solution to this situation? I firmly believe that we won't be able to put that genie back into the bottle. We will never be able to return to the Ozzie and Harriet days. The religious right-wing believes that if everyone went to church, and practiced abstinence or celibacy all problems would be solved. Of course to implement that they would want us to ban all sexually arousing books, photos, movies etc Maybe all women should be covered with full-length bathing suits, and maybe wear shad-ors when around men?

I believe the following is the best solution to the situation:

• Thorough and complete sex-education of children at appropriate levels at all ages.
• Keeping it secret until they grow up actually makes sex more desirable
• Convenient, inexpensive birth control for all teens who want it.
• Kids still have problems getting it. Girls need parents permission etc.
• Voluntary sterilization (free) for everyone and all teens over 13 upon request--
• Of course there should be some mandatory counseling before they have it done
• The population of the world is too large --anything we can do to reduce the growth is good.
• The cost of sterilization is more than made up in savings from not having one more child in the country.
• Convenient, easy to obtain abortions, with no stigma.
• The abortion" pill" and morning after pills are all safe and effective.
• Why should unwanted children be brought into the world?

Of course, the "organized religions" of the world continually "fight" these recommendations every way possible. Their motivations are based upon old biblical concepts developed when children were considered "wealth" and religion wanted to spread, so the more children the faster the religion would expand. The first "Christian" teaching resulted from St. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274 after developing the revolutionary theology that ended up banning birth control, abortion and sex education. A lot has changed in the world since the 13th century.

.

Steve Maschue
999 N Pacific #D310
Oceanside CA 92054
Phone 760-433-3271

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Sputnik moment for saving America: cut the number of fatherless families in half

By Mencken’s Ghost

Dec. 10, 2010

President Obama announced this week that the nation needs a “Sputnik moment” of investing in science and education to be more competitive in the world economy. At about the same time, international rankings were released of student test scores in math and science, showing that Honk Kong, where the average class size in secondary schools is 30 pupils, was at the top and the United States was in the middle.

It’s not a coincidence that the rate of out-of-wedlock births is eight times higher in the USA than in Hong Kong.

Nor is it a coincidence that among Americans, Asian Americans have the highest test scores and the lowest rates of out-of-wedlock births and fatherless families. Conversely, African Americans have the lowest test scores and the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births and fatherless families.

This is more than correlation. It is cause and effect.

If Obama were the visionary, the deep thinker, the problem solver, and the non-ideologue that many people somehow still believe he is, his Sputnik moment would have sounded like this:

Today I am setting a national goal of reducing the number of fatherless families by 50 percent by 2030, which will take us back to the levels that existed 45 years ago, prior to the Great Society and War on Poverty. This in turn will result in a 25 to 50 percent reduction in crime, prison population, school dropouts and poverty. It will also raise our test scores in international rankings to the 90th percentile while cutting the size and cost of government and closing our deficit.

Of course, Obama will never say this and threaten the powerful welfare industry, although the cause-and-effect relationships between fatherless families and social pathologies and poverty are well-documented. The sobering statistics won’t be repeated here, but suffice it to say that children in fatherless families are considerably more likely to have behavioral problems, to live in poverty, to commit crimes, and to drop out of school.

The situation has become so dire that a left-leaning think tank, The Future of Children, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, has developed a new term, “fragile families,” to describe the deleterious effects that generations of missing fathers have had on families and society. The full study can be found at:

http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=73&articleid=533

Unfortunately, the think tank sees the primary cause of fragile families as a lack of resources and not the welfare system. This runs counter to the findings of many other empirical studies and to what another left-liberal, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said when he was the Assistant Labor Secretary in the Kennedy administration. In his prescient report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” he warned that misguided welfare programs would have serious negative consequences for black families by essentially rewarding women for not marrying the fathers of their children.

Moynihan did not foresee that the problem would eventually spread to other races, albeit to a lesser degree than for blacks.

Since 1964, the states and the federal government have spent about $15 trillion on anti-poverty programs (welfare), including Medicaid. Today, there are 122 federal anti-poverty, or welfare, programs, costing nearly $600 billion per year. How much would these costs be reduced if the number of fatherless families were to shrink by 50 percent? Well, considering that fatherless families are twice as likely to be in poverty, the reduction would be substantial.

In addition to a reduction in welfare costs, there would be a reduction in the prison population, which now stands at 2.3 million, with another five million people on parole or probation. The current cost of corrections of nearly $70 billion per annum would see a corresponding reduction. (Given the high number of fractured black families, it’s not surprising that over 40 percent of prisoners are black, although blacks account for only 13 percent of the USA population.)

There also would be a reduction in per-capita education spending, which has doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 45 years. An indeterminable but substantial amount of this spending goes to remedial education and smaller class sizes in response to the behavioral, disciplinary, and learning problems of children from fatherless families--as teachers and school administrators have confided to me but are afraid to say publicly.

Then there is the huge opportunity cost of fatherless families; that is, what is lost in productivity, creativity, entrepreneurship, inventions, charitable work, international competitiveness, and tax revenue from children not becoming all they would otherwise be.

So how do we cut the number of fatherless families in half? Like Obama, we begin with a Sputnik moment and set a national goal. But unlike Obama we speak honestly about the problem instead of repeating the tired Democratic mantra about higher spending and more redistribution. Then we replace perverse incentives with positive incentives and work on changing cultural norms about fatherhood.

To his credit, Obama beat the odds and overcame the handicap of living some of his formative years without his father present, an accomplishment that was due in part to having a highly educated mother and supportive grandmother, and to growing up in locales far removed from American inner-city culture, including, interestingly enough, the Asian country of Indonesia, where traditional family values prevail. To his discredit, his Sputnik moment about science and education continues the evil tradition of throwing money at the problems and making them more entrenched instead of addressing the root cause.

____________

“Mencken’s Ghost” is the nom de plume of an Arizona writer who can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Immigration Checkpoints in Southern California

The US has continued to operate checkpoints on Interstate 5 near San Onofre, and on Interstate 15 just south of Temecula near Rainbow. The checkpoints are in operation at somewhat "random" times, and when they are in operation, the traffic backs up for miles. Northbound travelers have to sit in stop and go traffic for 10 to 15 minutes. When we finally get to the checkpoint an officer is standing in the center of two lanes waving his arms to allow one car at a time in each lane.
Very rarely does it appear anyone is actually stopped for an immigration check,however when they do, the traffic trapped in that lane have a much longer holdup. It appears that the immigration officers are looking for people who appear to be from other ethnic backgrounds, since I have never been stopped.
The checkpoints are not a secret, and stories have always been around that the actual immigration "smugglers" send pilot cars with cell phones ahead --if the checkpoint is in operation, the smugglers wait until it is shut down. If this is true, then the only people who are inconvenienced is our own citizens who expend so much time sitting in the checkpoint traffic backup.
Homeland Security has never been able to explain the value of these checkpoints. It looks like they require significant resources to operate. Many people are involved with many INS vehicles in the area. If it costs so much, and does so little, why are they there?

Is Teenage "Sexting" a crime?

I just read in the Wall Street Journal about "Sexting" -- something that I had never heard of before. It amazes me how internet connectivity raises so many new moral, ethical, and legal dilemmas.