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Making Sense

Phil Mickelson choked on a gimme putt this week, but it wasn’t on a golf course.

According to the AP’s golf writer, America’s most popular golfer “put his popularity on the line with polarizing comments about how much he has to pay in state and federal taxes.”

“Polarizing comments”?

Good grief.

Now it’s “polarizing” for an American to hint that because of the higher federal and state income tax rates on millionaires leveled by Sacramento and Washington, he might have to migrate to Florida or Texas?

Though he had every right to, Mickelson didn’t knock Obama or gripe like a Tea Partier about the federal, state and local tax bite on his estimated $45 million in annual earnings — about 62 percent.

Mickelson spoke the truth. Most pro golfers already live in Florida, and for good reason. It’s not because of the warm weather, it’s because there’s no state income tax.

Tiger Woods, who bravely stuck up for Mickelson, has admitted without shame that he moved to Orlando years ago to escape California’s income tax, which is now set at 13 percent on California’s 35,000 remaining millionaires.

Ditto for Rush Limbaugh, who became a Floridian because of New York’s confiscatory state and local taxes.

It’s outrageous that any American — Mickelson, Woods, Mitt Romney or super-liberals like Babs Streisand or Bobby Redford — is forced to fork over 60 percent of their honest earnings to government.

But it isn’t just wealthy pro golfers who are being driven out of California by high taxes.

Before Jan. 1, an older surgeon I know closed his practice, laid off his four employees, sold his house and moved to Nevada.

He was still a practicing surgeon, not because he needed the money but because he loved being a surgeon.

But the higher income tax rates now in effect under Proposition 30 for those earning more than $250,000 were too much for him and so the Broken State of California lost a good surgeon and four other jobs.

It’s a shame Mickelson turned out to be such a wuss. Wouldn’t it have been great if he had stood tall and become a tax-protesting hero — the Gerard Depardieu of America?

Depardieu, the wealthy and popular French actor, shocked the liberal intelligentsia of Europe with his defiant, politically incorrect and very public stand against France’s confiscatory tax on the rich.

Decrying the 75 percent levy his socialist government is trying to put on millionaires, he moved to Belgium, gave up his French passport, and accepted the grant of citizenship from Russia, where the income tax is a reasonable, flat 13 percent.

Mickelson, meanwhile, chickened out.

He issued a sniveling apology this week, saying, “Finances and taxes are a personal matter, and I should not have made my opinions on them public. I apologize to those I have upset or insulted, and assure you I intend not to let it happen again.”

How pathetic.

Now it’s apparently an insult to the poor — or a thought crime — for a rich and successful American to publicly point out that his taxes are so high he’s thinking of moving to where they’re lower.

It’s too bad about Mickelson. Instead of apologizing and backtracking, he should be telling everyone about how high taxes are driving rich and successful people like him out of the state, demanding serious tax cuts and threatening to run for governor.

California is a state that already has more takers than makers. It can’t afford any more wusses.

—–Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

What do Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, David Gregory of “Meet the Press” and President Obama have in common — besides their liberal politics?

They all send their kids to Sidwell Friends School.

With campuses in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, Md., the highly selective private school is where the Clintons and the Gores sent their kids, along with Joe Biden’s grandchildren.

It’s also where the local 1 Percenters and the government-media elites who can afford to shell out about $32 grand a year send their children to be indoctrinated — excuse me, educated — and to be safe.

Unlike parents across America who are worrying about how to protect their school kids in the wake of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn., Sidwell parents spend their days worry-free.

Their children are better protected than the printing presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. And it’s not because of the heavily armed Secret Service detail posted on campus to protect first-kids Sasha and Malia Obama.

It’s because Sidwell Friends — a Quaker school, by the way — is defended by guards with loaded guns. In addition to the Secret Service with its Uzis and large ammo clips, Sidwell has its own security staff of 11.

I didn’t hear President Obama mention Sidwell Friends’ solution to school safety on Wednesday when he announced his sweeping plans to reduce gun violence by banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, instituting tougher gun-registration laws and taking steps to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

None of Obama’s measures would have prevented the slaughter of innocents in Connecticut, but that’s not the point. The point is pure politics and the president and his crew want to take full advantage of the Newtown shootings to advance their anti-gun agenda.

At his White House media extravaganza, the president used lawmakers, law enforcement officials and children as his props. The kids, drawn from across the U.S., had written letters to the president saying they were worried about gun violence and school safety. You can bet there were no Sidwell kids on stage with him.

While Washington’s grandstanders and anti-gun nuts prepare to fire their latest round of ineffective, politically correct, feel-good federal laws at law-abiding gun owners, at least six states are preparing new legislation that will allow teachers to carry guns into schools or require several teachers in the building to be armed.

Putting guards with guns in places that need to be protected from bad guys or crazies is not a radical idea. It’s perfectly sensible.

Politicians and celebrities use armed bodyguards all the time. We have armed guards in banks, jewelry stores and malls. After 9/11 we armed airline pilots and armed federal marshals posing as passengers.

Only politicians and hysterical celebrity dummies like Piers Morgan can’t understand why making schools gun-free zones attracts mass-murders and reduces the chances that anyone with a gun will stop them to zero.

The president never thought of using Sidwell Friends as an example of how armed guards at schools can make them safer.

He was too busy trying to score points by attacking the NRA, dreaming up laws to further oppress law-abiding gun owners and making fun of the people who know the Second Amendment isn’t about protecting duck hunters’ rights, it’s about the right of the people to protect themselves from their government.

Meanwhile, here in Los Angeles, the Catholic grade school where my daughter teaches didn’t wait around for the president or Joe Biden to come up with complicated new laws to allegedly ensure the safety of their children.

The officials at my daughter’s school decided for themselves the best way to make their campus safer. Taking a cue from the smart folks who run the Sidwell Friends School, they did a simple, effective and rational thing. They hired an armed guard.

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

We have junk food, junk mail and junk bonds.

Now, thanks to our dysfunctional and devious Congress, we have junk laws like the “Taxpayer Relief Act.”

Junk laws are really nothing new. The people we send to Washington to represent us have been passing legislation larded with pork or special privileges for their friends in business, agriculture and labor since the country was born.

Insiders have always known how this cynical bipartisan game is played. But now, thanks to the failure of Congress to deal with the government debt crisis it in large part created, the average American is starting to become aware of these junk bills.

Even the liberal media were outraged by what went on when Congress passed the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012″ — which, ironically, raised the taxes of every working American by 2 percent by returning the Social Security tax to its usual 6.2 percent level.

The “Fiscal Cliff Bill” did virtually nothing to solve the federal government’s money problems or create a single job. But it was junked up with nearly $70 billion of pure pork — including tax credits for the owners of NASCAR racetracks, wind turbine makers, Hollywood moviemakers and rum-makers in Puerto Rico.

While President Obama was promising to raise taxes on the rich but really shafting the working poor, congressional folk were so busy loading up the “Fiscal Cliff Bill” with presents for their friends that they forgot to pass the relief bill to benefit victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Members of Congress are grandmasters of deceit and dishonesty. Taking maximum advantage of every crisis or disaster that comes along, they attach their favorite pieces of pork to dishonestly named bills such as the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012″ and the “Affordable Healthcare Act.”

Members know these big important super-bills have to pass to avert a crisis, so they junk them up with their $200 million “Bridges to Nowhere” and their $59 million tax credits for the algae-growing industry.

A perfect example of how Congress gets its junk bills passed has to with the way it funds FEMA. Congress always underfunds the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Why?

Because Congress knows each year there will always be a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy that FEMA will need billions of federal dollars to address.

And when FEMA comes asking for emergency funding, members of Congress will clean out their closets and throw every piece of junk legislation they have into the relief bill, which they know will automatically pass without scrutiny.

Another reason we get junk laws is that few members of Congress actually read these monster bills before they vote for them. Nancy Pelosi’s career quote is going to be her comment on the healthcare bill, “But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”

Law-making is not supposed to work that way. There’s a rule in Congress that a bill has to be posted for 48 hours before it can be voted on. But that rule has become a joke.

Just watch C-SPAN the next time a vote is being taken in the House. You’ll probably hear someone say something like, “Under suspension of the rule, we’ll now vote.”

What arcane parliamentary rule are they talking about? The 48-hour rule. No wonder Congress is always finding out after they vote what they just voted for. If members of Congress don’t read the damn bill, they shouldn’t vote on it.

I’m getting real tired of people saying, “My guy’s a good guy and your guy’s a bad guy.” They’re all acting like bad guys.

We need to start holding every member of Congress accountable. And we need more up-and-down votes in Congress, so that the next important piece of legislation doesn’t become another “Fiscal Cliff Junk Bill.

—–Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

The latest horror movie from Washington — “The Fiscal Cliff” — finally came to an exciting end in the early hours of 2013.

But after two years did its climax — more taxes, more spending and more chicken-livered can-kicking by our politicians — really shock any of you over the age of six?

Didn’t think so.

Spinning the budget deal as a last-minute victory for the American people, the White House and Congress are saying that all the actors knuckled down, did the right thing and created a compromise budget deal that kept the country from going over the fiscal cliff.

Bull. As usual.

The Washington In-Crowd didn’t save the country from going over the fiscal cliff, which of course they created in the first place. They just shoved the edge of the cliff a couple of months down the road.

After two years of arguing over taxes, the federal debt, government spending and how to fix the ticking fiscal time bombs of Social Security and Medicare, the professional politicians solved nothing.

They merely did the easy, politically painless stuff.

They raised tax rates from 35 percent to 39.6 on the so-called rich who make more than $400,000 individually or $450,000 as a couple. They extended unemployment benefits for a year.

They extended the Bush-era tax cuts and made them permanent, something even President Obama secretly favored because he knows that ending them would throw the economy into another recession.

But the Washington In-Crowd failed the American people yet again. They didn’t reduce the deficit by a single dollar. They didn’t create a single job. They didn’t cut or cap federal spending. They did nothing about Social Security or Medicare.

The revenues they’ll bring into federal coffers with their higher taxes on the rich will be spent by the end of the week. They were so busy doing the easy stuff they never even got around to passing a bill to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Meanwhile, while everyone was watching the chessboard to see how high taxes were going to be jacked up on the rich and successful, Congress shafted the middle class and the working poor by voting to let President Obama’s two-year-old, 2 percent payroll-tax cut expire.

The Obamamedia won’t be making a big deal out of it, of course, but nearly everyone who earns a paycheck was given a tax hike. According to the Tax Policy Center, about 77 percent of households making between $50,000 and $200,000 will be paying higher FICA taxes in 2013.

On average, starting this week, about $1,600 of an individual’s income will again be taken from his or her paycheck annually and sent directly to the bankrupt coffers of Social Security.

President Obama and the advocates of Bigger Government were the winners in our latest fiscal melodrama. Obama set the agenda and he got what he wanted. Republicans who wanted real spending cuts or some semblance of fiscal responsibility got rolled.

In two months, it’ll be time for Congress to vote on raising the federal debt ceiling. We’ll hear the same arguments and scare stories from the White House and the media about what will happen if we don’t allow the Washington In-Crowd to borrow a few more trillion dollars to keep their borrowing-and-spending racket going.

America will find itself being forced to watch another Washington horror flick. And unless voters wake up and the GOP gets its act together, “Fiscal Cliff, Part 2” is going to have the same unhappy ending for conservatives as the original.

Copyright ©2013 Michael Reagan. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

“On December 23, 1981, Reagan held a private meeting at the White House with the Polish ambassador, Romuald Spasowski. That very day, Spasowski and his wife defected…

As Spasowski’s wife wept, the ambassador said to Reagan: “May I ask you a favor, Mr. President? Would you light a candle and put in the window tonight for the people of Poland?”

…In the speech, he connected the spirit of the season with events in Poland: “For a thousand years,” he told his fellow Americans, “Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.”

…said Reagan. “Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished.”

The candles, said Reagan, would also shine as a Christmas reminder of our blessings and “solemn obligation” to “the God who guides us.”…

Yet, there was another story behind the speech that isn’t remembered, but is likewise revealing. Reagan had started the speech with a wonderful opening about the reason for the season: the Christ child…

But, alas, …the next day, those opening lines to Reagan’s speech were removed from the transcript printed in the newspaper.

To read the complete article and see what Reagan really said click on this link: https://spectator.org/archives/2012/12/24/candles-in-solidarity?nomobile=1

Making Sense

It’s not tougher gun control, stupid.

No matter how much tougher we make our gun laws we’ll never prevent future tragedies like last week’s murder of those innocents in Newtown, Conn.

We won’t stop future Newtowns if we outlaw every military-style assault weapon in America.

We won’t stop future Auroras if we outlaw semi-automatic pistols or rifles, or mandate that no magazine clip can ever hold more than 10 rounds.

We won’t stop future Virginia Techs if we make it tougher to buy a gun legally or if we shut down all gun shows on the continent for the rest of time.

Let’s get real. America has an estimated 300 million guns. We could make owning a gun a capital crime today and by tomorrow 100 million guns would be hidden in our closets and buried in our backyards.

Good people, bad people and crazy people would still have access to tens of millions of guns and the ammunition they need. All the strict laws Mayor Bloomberg or Sen. Feinstein can dream up won’t change that.

Some of the strictest gun laws in the country don’t stop the gang-bangers of Chicago from slaughtering each other by the hundreds each year over drug turf.

Connecticut already had tough gun laws. So did Norway, where last year an evil extremist used guns and bombs to randomly kill 77 people — mostly teenagers.

To politicians, banning all semi-automatic weapons or large magazines in guns sounds like a good solution to stop mass murders, but it isn’t.

Those laws might keep the death toll in the single digits, but they won’t stop another killing spree like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary from occurring in the first place.

I want to prevent mass murders from happening in schools, not merely reduce their number of victims. I’m not willing to accept six dead first-graders instead of 20. I’m not willing to accept a single dead teacher or principal or schoolchild.

And the only way to bring the death toll down to zero in our schools is to put trained armed guards in every one of them.

Not a retired policeman or a fat guy in a cheap uniform who sits in a chair all day. A real guard with a real loaded gun that he or she knows how to use and is authorized to shoot.

It could be a local police officer or a private security guard. And taxpayers would be willing to pay the price for knowing their kids were being protected by more than security cameras and locked doors.

Security is never foolproof. When my father was shot in 1981, he was the most protected person in America, surrounded by heavily armed and trained bodyguards.

The disturbed man who tried to kill him didn’t use an assault rifle or a semi-automatic to carry out his plan. Before he was wrestled to the ground, he got off six shots in 1.7 seconds — with a revolver.

I’ll never forget what Mike Luty, the head of the Secret Service detail who was with me the day my father was shot, said to me when I asked, “How can you allow this to happen?” Luty said, “We train 24/7, but we can’t stop the crazies.”

We can’t stop every crazy in America who is intent on committing mass murder, either, but we can try. We need to fix our mental health system so it’s better able to identify potential killers before they kill, and we need to find ways parents can provide help to their kids over 18 without needing a court order.

But no matter what we do, evil people, crazy people and troubled suicidal young white males will always have access to guns and they’ll plan their lethal attacks in secret and carry them out.

More gun control and gun-free zones won’t stop them, but guns will. Putting armed guards — with loaded weapons — in our schools is the only sure way we can keep our future mass murderers from hurting any more of our innocent children.

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

As President Obama and Democrats urge Republicans to increase taxes, liberals curiously invoke the name of Ronald Reagan, the ultimate tax-cutting Republican. They insist that even Reagan was willing to compromise with Democrats on tax increases; thus, John Boehner and Republicans should as well. In truth, this is (at best) a false parallel.

It is correct that Ronald Reagan occasionally compromised on certain tax increases, as he did in 1982. He did so in exchange for promised spending cuts from Democrats that (not surprisingly) never materialized, to his great regret. Reagan would constantly point back to this broken promise by Democrats.

More importantly, however, President Reagan never budged on income taxes. He flatly refused to increase income taxes, which is what President Obama demands of Republicans right now. Reagan understood that not all taxes, and thus not all tax increases, were equal.

For insight into Ronald Reagan’s thinking, consider what he did in 1981, when faced with a stagnant economy: At his California ranch on August 13, 1981, Reagan, working with a Democratic House and Republican Senate, secured a 25% across-the-board reduction in income tax rates over a three-year period beginning in October 1981. Eventually, through this and later cuts, the upper income-tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%.

After a slow start through 1982-83, the stimulus effect of the tax cuts was extraordinary, sparking a huge peacetime economic expansion. The “Reagan Boom” produced not only prosperity but—along with the Soviet collapse that he worked to precipitate—helped generate budget surpluses in the 1990s.

And contrary to the history that liberals continue to rewrite, the Reagan tax cuts did not decrease the revenue to the U.S. Treasury. To the contrary, tax revenues under Reagan rose from $599 billion in 1981 to nearly $1 trillion in 1989. The problem was that outlays (i.e., government spending) all along exceeded revenues, soaring from $678 billion in 1981 to $1.143 trillion in 1989.

The cause of the Reagan deficits—bear in mind that Reagan inherited a chronic deficit—was the decline in revenue from the 1982-83 recession and (as is always the case) excessive federal spending.

Spending has long been, and still remains, the primary reason for our fiscal crisis. This has been especially true since the massive growth of the federal government begun in the 1960s by LBJ’s Great Society.

Proof of this is as easy as Googling the words “historical tables deficit.” You will see two go-to sources for budget data: “OMB historical tables” and “CBO historical tables.” “OMB” is Office of Management and Budget. “CBO” is Congressional Budget Office. To keep it simple, look at the data from OMB, President Obama’s own budget office. At the OMB link is Table 1.1, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789-2016,” an official report of all federal spending since the founding of the republic.

A close read of that chart offers a stunning display in fiscal irresponsibility. As the first two columns show, receipts (i.e., revenues) and outlays (i.e., expenditures) moved up and down throughout the first roughly 180 years of our history. In 1965, however, something historically perverse began: Spending started increasing every single year, without exception, into the Obama presidency, from 1965-2009. A slight decrease came only in 2010, but then spending promptly ratcheted right back up, and remains on a steady upward trajectory through 2017.

There are few constants in the universe: gravity is one, the sun is another. Add another: spending by Washington; it goes up every year.

Worse, in 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress responded to the slow economy with a gigantic spending infusion: an $800-billion “stimulus” package that further exploded our record deficit/debt.

In short, this is why Republicans should not agree to Democrats’ demands for tax increases. This nation has a spending problem—a grave one—not a tax-revenue problem. Our problem today is reckless big government.

At his 1981 inaugural, Ronald Reagan, referring to the economic crisis he faced, declared that “government is not the solution … government is the problem.”

Just days after his inaugural, Barack Obama professed the opposite: “[A]t this particular moment, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs.”

Barack Obama is the anti-Reagan.

To repeat: Ronald Reagan never budged on marginal income-tax rates. He decreased them, big-time. Barack Obama is demanding that they be increased. Ronald Reagan, we suspect, would be fully supportive of current Republicans holding their ground on tax rates—especially given our federal government’s unparalleled inability to control its reckless spending.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan. He is a political consultant, founder and chairman of The Reagan Group, and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. He is the author of The New Reagan Revolution. Visit his website at www.reagan.com.

Original article and photos at: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/12/18/what-would-reagan-do-about-our-fiscal-crisis/#ixzz2FW5Q2bng

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Making Sense

All those union thugs who were rioting in Michigan Tuesday were angry about the wrong thing.

They were demonstrating — which in union-speak means breaking things and punching people — against Michigan’s decision to become a right-to-work state.

If you believe the union spin, or the mainstream liberal media’s spin, or the Obama spin, which all come from the same propaganda factory, that means Michigan no longer cares about workers, the right to organize, living wages, etc., etc.

But what Michigan’s new law really means is that the voters and a majority of the politicians in the state have miraculously decided that a citizen’s freedom of choice should extend to the freedom to be able to choose not to join a union.

What a concept.

It’s a great step forward for a troubled state that has seen its signature industry crippled to the point of near extinction by unions that had too much power over the lives of workers, American carmakers, politicians and the economy.

If those union thugs and their allies in the Democrat Party really had a clue, they would have been demonstrating — peacefully, if that’s possible — against what has happened to the once-great, but now pathetic, city of Detroit.

The statistics are staggering. Detroit — a union town if America ever made one — is a socialist hell on wheels.

Its city government is broke and nearly $50 million in the red, in part because it pays $1.08 in benefits to municipal workers and retirees for every $1 it pays in salaries.

Its population has fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 700,000 as of 2011, and too many of the Detroiters who are left don’t pay taxes, don’t form traditional two-parent families, don’t have jobs and aren’t interested in having one.

Of the roughly 224,000 residents who actually have a job, only 190,000 work in the private sector. A third of the populace is on food stamps. Oh, and 99,000 of Detroit’s 363,000 housing units are vacant.

Welcome to Obamaville — and the future Obama America.

If Michigan’s union thugs want to demonstrate about something beyond their own economic interests as seen through the lens of union fundraising, they might try raising a fist to the sorry state of education in Detroit.

Among students in city schools recently exiting eighth grade, only 7 percent are “proficient” in reading and only 4 percent are “proficient” in math.

Maybe the unions are happy with those shameful numbers, because they will be guaranteed a steady supply of uneducated kids who are only qualified to join a union.

But what were all those parents doing, supporting the union thugs and excusing thousands of schoolteachers who took the day off in solidarity? Those parents, if they had a common-sense proficiency in double digits, would be protesting the lousy education their kids are getting.

It’s interesting to see the left go wild in the streets to protest Michigan’s giant step for greater worker freedom.

It seems the left only wants you to have freedom of choice when you’re pregnant. After you give birth to the child, it’s those on the left — not the right — that want to deny your freedom to choose, whether it’s a school for your kid, the size of your soft drink, or to be in a union.

Michigan is going the right way — the opposite of the Obama Way that has doubled America’s homeless population to 636,000 and jacked up our food stamp population to 47 million.

Detroit has been destroyed by its own bad governments and the kind of federal policies Obama wants to expand. It may be beyond saving, except for growing crops where neighborhoods once were.

But Michigan has taken a dramatic step toward resurrecting its industrial economy. It’s no longer a union-made state.

It’s a state where freedom of choice extends to people who will no longer be forced to join a union or pay dues to a bunch of thugs who’ll spend it to elect more presidents like the one we’re stuck with now.

—–Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.