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26 October 2013

A Lesson On Government Spending, Welfare & The Constitution From Davy Crockett



 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/liveblog/files/2013/02/Davy-Crockett1358814911_image_1024w.jpg


From the book The Life of Davy Crockett by Edward Sylvester:

Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some members of congress, when our attentions was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many children suffering, I felt something had to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.

The next summer, when it began to be time to think about election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I was a man plowing the field and coming toward the road. I spoke to the man and he replied politely, but I thought rather coldly.

I began: “Well friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates and—”
The men replied “Yes I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again.”

I begged him to tell me what was the matter.

Well Colonel, it is hardly worthwhile to waste your time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended but you gave your vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. I intend this only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; And I will say to you what but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest. The man continued “But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the honest he is. “I admit the truth in all you say, but there must be some mistake. Through I live in the back woods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by fire in Georgetown. Is that true?

Colonel Crockett said, “Well my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just the same as I did.”

The farmer replied, “It is not the amount Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the U.S. who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you have the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give it all; and as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this could open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. The farmer continues; “Individual members give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this country as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about 240 members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week’s pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from necessity by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution. So you see Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.”

Colonel Crockett thought; I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go to talking and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I was fully convinced he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him and I said to him:

“Well. my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I may wish to be shot.”










A Shocking Number In The Age Of Obama



http://www.bet.com/news/national/2011/09/12/conservative-columnist-seeks-to-exploit-unemployed-blacks/_jcr_content/featuredMedia/newsitemimage.newsimage.dimg/091211-national-conservative-columnist-unemployed-blacks.jpg


The average African-American family is poorer than the average family in India.



By Kevin Williamson

The phrase “waving the bloody shirt” grew popular in the South as a description of Republicans’ alleged exaggeration of the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan, the paramilitary division of the Democratic party. It is an irony of history that waving the bloody shirt has in the Age of Obama become the Democrats’ primary mode of discourse. Oppose the Affordable Care Act? Racism. Like the Second Amendment? Racism. Black Barbie is on sale for half off, but white Barbie is full price? Racism. Black holes sucking the energy out of your quadrant? Why single out the black ones? Racism!

Waving the bloody shirt is not only about making an emotional appeal — it’s a strategy for distraction. It became a bitter joke in the Soviet Union — whether the issue was the crimes of Stalin or the fact that the Lada was a piece of junk, the answer was always the same: A u vas negrov linchuyut. The same principle is at work in today’s Democratic commentariat: As Americans start to notice what a fiasco Obamacare is . . . Oh, look! A Confederate flag! There is really nothing more satisfying to liberals than a Confederate flag sighting, though I wonder what they’d make of the fact that in my corner of Texas it is not unheard-of to see black men wearing Dixie belt buckles or T-shirts. (All of our necks are just different shades of red.) When Brad Paisley sings about the Confederate flag, it’s like Christmas morning for Touré. Yet, despite the daft insistence of Joan Walsh and the Affiliated Suburban Pearl-Clutchers of America, there is no neo-Confederate revanche just around the corner. The idea is, however, a useful distraction. But a distraction from what?

From $4,955.

Fifty years into the Democrats’ declaration of a war on poverty and President Kennedy’s first executive order for affirmative action, while spending $300 million a year on worthless diversity workshops and singing endless verses of “We Shall Overcome,” after enduring endless posturing from Barack Obama and the moral preening of his admirers, that is what black American families have to show for themselves: an average household net worth of $4,955. The average white household in these United States has a net worth of $110,729. Black Americans’ median net worth is less than 5 percent that of white Americans.

By way of comparison, black South Africans under apartheid had a median net worth about 6.8 percent that of white South Africans. Repeating: Black Americans are worse off relative to their white countrymen than black South Africans under apartheid were to theirs, a fact to which former Washington Post reporter Jon Jeter has drawn attention and from which he has drawn all the wrong conclusions. (Muppet News Flash: Washington Post straight-news reporter turns out to be a garden-variety liberal.) Philadelphia mayor John Street used to brag that “the brothers and sisters are running the city,” which would be more of a boast in a city with less criminal governance. Mayor Ray Nagin, whose fraud/conspiracy/money-laundering/bribery/tax-evasion trial should be getting under way any moment now, liked to promise that New Orleans would remain a “chocolate city.” A generation of one-party rule based on racial politics was enough to doom Detroit. Outside of the womb, the most dangerous place for a black American to be is in a city run by Democrats.

But somebody, somewhere, is flying a rebel flag.

And black Americans still have a median household net worth of less than half the price of a 2011 Ford Fiesta with 28,000 miles on it. The median black American household is poorer than the average household in India, which has a net worth of about $5,500, according to the Economic Times.

Forty acres and a mule? Have you checked the price of a good mule lately?

‎Everywhere it has been tried, the Democrats’ dependency agenda has been a social and economic catastrophe for black Americans — and a full-employment program for Democratic apparatchiks. This is not a conspiracy — it’s right out there in the open, every time a Democratic politician knows that he can count on 90 percent of the black vote without lifting a finger, winning the opportunity to add four more years to the 50 years of broken promises Democrats have made to black Americans, who lag their fellow countrymen on practically every social indicator. “These Negroes,” said alleged civil-rights hero Lyndon Baines Johnson, “they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppity-ness. We’ve got to give them a little something — just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

So far, the LBJ plan seems to be working perfectly.

Black Americans did not leave the party of Lincoln for the party of Joe Biden; they left the party of Herbert Hoover for the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Or at least they thought they did. What they got instead was the party of sky-high crime, dangerous and dysfunctional schools, a joblessness rate for black men that is more than twice the rate for white men at 14 percent and rising. Twice the unemployment, twice the high-school dropouts, four times the abortions, four times the HIV, seven times the prison sentences, twelve times the babies born with congenital syphilis, fourteen times the murder victims, and nineteen times the gonorrhea.

All that and $4,955.





SoRo:
 

We have almost as many Americans on welfare as the entire populations of Sweden and Norway.

We have more people on food stamps than the entire country of Spain has people.

And, look at that last part.  Look at the number of states that make it more profitable to be on welfare than to work!

For all of the Left's faux outrage over one confederate flag at the WWII protest on Sunday and their screams that the Tea Party and associates want to return to slavery, they refuse to recognise one simple reality:  We already have slavery. Just look at what happened when the EBT system went down. The dependent slaves were lost when the massa prevented them from using their cheesecards.  Only a few were 'saved' by the 'evil' Wal-Mart.

Of all demographic groups, African-Americans should realise this the most considering their horrific history. Sure, maybe a white slaveowner isn’t beating them anymore, but they are still slaves if they’ve allowed themselves to become so dependent that they cannot even feed themselves without the plantation owner. No one even needs to beat them any longer. They are killing each other.  And, as even Tavis Smiley acknowledges, when Barack Obama leaves the White House, African-Americans will have lost ground in every economic indicator. 

Of course, it is racist, bigoted, and a sign of no compassion to point this out. To the Left, ‘compassion’ equals slavery and slavery is freedom. Orwell only began to describe it.

It is so depressing and to try to talk people out of slavery only leads to charges of racism.

Welfare is bribery by the wealthy Left to keep the ‘weeds’ from moving into their guarded gardens. At the same time, it’s a form of extortion by those that receive it. Either pay us or we will soooo crab-grass your lawn that you’ll be praying to the Round-Up God for help.

The idea that welfare is 'compassion' and 'charity' is a destructive lie.


‘Um, yes, y’all come to get the car. The car is not here. The car is in the shop and one part is at another shop. If y’all want it that bad, y’all can go pay that man to get it out and then pay the person to get the other part out.

I mean, cause y’all act like y’all couldn’t be patient. Y’all know that we was gonna get it taken care of so, if y’all want it that bad, y’all can go get it and pay the man and pay the other man and we can leave it as that. Cause we ain’t owing that much on the car. Y’all wanna trip on it now. Their, we’re only owing a thousand, two thousand on it. So you know what? God bless y’all. Y’all can go pick up the car. So, you know what? Give me a call back (inaudible) and I will let him know that y’all are gonna to be paying him to get it out because y’all don’t be patient. 

- Obama voter, 2008


I wonder how ‘rich’ she is today. Bet she would vote to reelect Barack Obama to a third term if she could and even if it meant she would be even worse off.

As Sinetta Jackson (Jesse’s daughter) says:


‘Too many blacks put pride over policy and end up hurting themselves in the process.’









25 October 2013

Pic of the Day: Just Your Garden Variety Progtard


Embedded image permalink



h/t Paul Combs (@PAC43) Via Weasel Zippers



The State of the Union: More In Than Out... (Pic)





'I liked math, but then it started to get harder.'

- President Barack Obama, 25 October 2013


 
No shit, Sherlock.

How long can a country survive when there are more in the cart than pulling it?

If you guys don't mind, I am just going to continue standing on the side of the road watching the biggest clusterfuck in world history.

As a country, the United States has gone from shirtless to shirttails to shirtless - again - in  237 years!

For the record...


With the exception of the WWII years and prior to Barack Obama, the United States had never spent more than 23.5% of GDP. This is Obama's spending record:

– 25.17% of GDP in 2009

– 23.84% of GDP in 2010

– 23.9% of GDP in 2011

– 23.09% of GDP in 2012

- 22.74% of GDP in 2013

According to his own budget, spending will never drop below 22.3% of GDP. Assuming that projection is correct, President Obama's spending would average 23.6% of GDP, which would be higher than any single non-war year.

By comparison and before the screams begin:

– 17.98% of GDP in 2000

– 18.11% of GDP in 2001

– 18.9% of GDP in 2002

– 19.38% of GDP in 2003

– 19.34% of GDP in 2004

– 19.58% of GDP in 2005

– 19.85% of GDP in 2006

– 19.45% of GDP in 2007

– 20.87% of GDP in 2008


Federal spending has soared:

FY2000: $1.789 trillion.

FY2001: $1.8629 trillion

FY2002: $2.0109 trillion

FY2003: $2.1599 trillion

FY2004: $2.2928 trillion

FY2005: $2.472 trillion

FY2006: $2.6551 trillion

FY2007: $2.7287 trillion

FY2008: $2.9825 trillion

FY2009: $3.5177 trillion

FY2010: $3.4571 trillion

FY2011: $3.6031 trillion

FY2012: $3.5371 trillion

FY2013: $3.685 trillion

FY2014: $3.7 trillion (est)

Over the last two decades, federal outlays have grown 71% faster than inflation.

And, Barack Obama has added $6,450,852,260,368.48 to the national debt since he became POTUS.



Fund Your Utopia Without Me.™