Groundhog day on Democrat Lies on Tax Cuts

How many things are wrong with this picture?

New York Senate Democrats are trying again to come up with a way to let State University of New York (SUNY) and City University of New York (CUNY) campuses charge more for tuition without getting legislative approval.

I count at least three.

1. Democratic lawmakers are trying to raise tuition rates by… circumventing Democratic lawmakers.

2. The same people who always say they want college to be more affordable are trying to make college… less affordable.

3. The same people who want to subsidize private college educations are trying to… increase the amount of money they’d have to subsidize.

It’s hard to think of any situation more likely to increase the cost of education long-term, while increasing the tax burden of doing so.

What follows is an email I got from Mark Kalinowski of the North New Jersey Tea Party Group.

Fellow Tea Partiers,

Should you have the time, we ask YOU to attend one of this Monday’s (July 12th’s) town hall meetings to be hosted by Steve Rothman, the U.S. congressman from New Jersey’s 9th congressional district. I plan to be in attendance for both the Lodi town hall meeting and the Edgewood town hall meeting, and hope to see you there!

*** Specifically, we request that you try to ask Rothman as many of the questions below (please see below) as possible. Then, following the town hall meeting, please contact us at nnjteaparty@gmail.com to let us know if you were able to ask your question. If not, that is important information for us to know. If so, then let us know that, and also let us know what you thought of Rothman’s response. ***

The times and locations of Monday’s town hall meetings are as follows:

* Monday, July 12th, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM, Lodi Senior Center, 15 Walnut Street, Lodi NJ 07644

* Monday, July 12th, 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM, Englewood Municipal Court, 73 South Van Brunt Street, Englewood NJ 07631

I encourage you to check the following webpage just prior to these two scheduled events just to make sure that the plans/details don’t change:

http://www.rothman.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1271&Itemid=1

New Jersey’s 9th congressional district consists of most of Bergen County, and parts of Passaic and Hudson counties. That said, you do NOT have to be a citizen of these counties to attend. Keep in mind, Rothman’s numerous harmful votes negatively affect ALL Americans!

We request that you ask Rothman as many of the following questions as possible:

1. Congressman Rothman, during your town hall meeting on August 10, 2009 in North Arlington, you looked us in the eye and said you would not vote for ObamaCare if it lacked portability of health insurance. ObamaCare lacks portability, and yet you broke your word by voting for it anyway. Wouldn’t the fine folks of New Jersey’s 9th congressional district be better served by someone other than you, meaning, somebody with integrity enough to actually attempt to keep his word?

Note: a video of Rothman from the 8/10/09 town hall meeting in which he says he won’t vote for a health-care bill if it lacks portability is on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/nnjteaparty#p/u/13/VradLPeiynQ

2. Congressman Rothman, during your town hall meeting on August 10, 2009 in North Arlington, you looked us in the eye and said you would not vote for any health care reform if rationing of medical services was included. It is obvious that rationing is included in ObamaCare, for example, even Obama’s nominee to head Medicaid and Medicare — Donald Berwick — has admitted, “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care. It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” To cite another example, on September 3rd, 2009, your fellow congressman Bill Pascrell Jr. said at a town hall meeting in Montclair that ObamaCare’s rationing was OK with him because, in his words, “we already have rationing.” Donald Berwick and Bill Pascrell Jr. understand that rationing is inherent in ObamaCare, for which you voted. Wouldn’t New Jersey’s 9th congressional district be better served by a congressman other than yourself, one smart enough to understand what bills up for vote contain?

3. Congressman Rothman, during your August 10th town hall meeting in North Arlington, you claimed — multiple times — to be “undecided” about whether or not to vote for ObamaCare. But your staffers put up four large posters containing several phrases in support of ObamaCare, and not a single word against it. This made it obvious that you were not in fact “undecided.” Predictably, you did end up voting for ObamaCare. Do you believe such dishonesty is what your constituents deserve, or do you believe that your constituents deserve better? If you believe your constituents deserve better, will you drop out of this year’s congressional race to show that — for once — you actually mean what you say? Or does your word continue to mean absolutely nothing to folks who value honesty?

4. Congressman Rothman, you voted for ObamaCare, which raises the taxes on families making $250,000 or more per year. (Incidentally, in your congressional district, which is a high cost-of-living area, a family making $250,000 per year is solidly in the middle class and far, far from wealthy.) “Income tax” is a two-word phrase describing the legalized theft by government of income (a form of property) from peaceful, economically productive individuals. Is theft inherently immoral? Or, do you think that theft magically becomes morally OK when Washington D.C. votes for it?

5. Congressman Rothman, you voted for ObamaCare. ObamaCare includes a provision mandating that Americans buy health insurance, whether they want to or not. The penalty for not buying health insurance is higher taxation, and the penalty for not paying this higher taxation is imprisonment. Do you believe that it is moral to imprison peaceful Americans merely because they have different priorities — for example, a healthy 26-year-old male paying down debt he incurred during college — than buying health insurance?

6. Congressman Rothman, during 2009 you voted on a number of economic issues. Given your hostility to economic liberty, you earned a perfect score of 0% from The Club for Growth in its annual rankings of all 435 House of Representatives members. As such, you tied for dead last:

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/projects/scorecard/?year=2009&chamber=2

This is even worse than the woeful 6% score recorded by Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont, who admits that he is a socialist:

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/projects/scorecard/?year=2009&chamber=1

Given that your voting record nearly exactly matches that of the only person in Congress honest enough to admit that he’s a socialist, shouldn’t you also admit that you’re a socialist? If you don’t think you’re a socialist, why does your voting record almost perfectly match that of the admitted socialist Bernie Sanders? Is it possible that you are so fundamentally dishonest that you can’t bring yourself to admit — even to yourself, much less your constituents — that you are in fact a socialist?

Some final thoughts…

* Feel free to make printouts of the suggested questions above to hand out to other town-hall attendees. We hope as many attendees as possible use the above questions when they are provided the opportunity to question Rothman.

* If your question is not selected by Rothman’s staff — and don’t be surprised if this is exactly what happens, as Rothman may be too cowardly to answer very many questions peacefully presented by those of his constituents who oppose his hostility to liberty — use your ingenuity to find another way to (peacefully) ask Rothman your question(s); for example, approaching him as he is leaving the town hall meeting.

* We encourage all attendees to be 100% PEACEFUL.

* We also encourage all attendees to use their unalienable moral right to speak freely to give Rothman a much-deserved tongue-lashing for his consistently anti-liberty voting record. (Harmful congressmen need to learn that angry speech is one aspect of free speech, and morally warranted when tyrants — such as Pelosi and Rothman — vote to violate Americans’ unalienable individual rights.)

* VIDEOTAPE as much as you can of Congressman Rothman’s town hall meetings. He is thoroughly dishonest — most of all, with himself — and NO DOUBT you can catch him being dishonest given even a little bit of videotaping. THEN, upload your videos to YouTube, and inform the North New Jersey Tea Party Group of the YouTube links by e-mailing us at:

nnjteaparty [att] gmail [dott] com

We will publicize the best videos we receive!!!

* Here is a photo of Rothman proudly marching with Pelosi and several other Democratic politicians on the day they voted for the hostile takeover of our nation’s healthcare industry:

http://media.nj.com/njv_tom_moran/photo/nj-lawmakers-house-health-care-votejpg-193bd6e488f8eba3_large.jpg

REMEMBER: ROTHMAN = PELOSI!

*** As always, feel free to pass on the above information! ***

Mark Kalinowski
North New Jersey Tea Party Group
Liberty, Free Markets, and Individual Rights
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=172402990061

Someone on our local mailing list asked:

Does anyone know which saves more jobs–increasing taxes to avoid firing any public employees, or downsizing government to decrease taxes? Someone loses jobs EITHER WAY in the short term, the question is which leads to more jobs overall so that everyone, even those that lose their jobs, has a better chance of finding a new one.

The problem here is that economists should know the answer, and if you ask five economists a question you’ll get at least ten completely different answers. Which of these many experts are you supposed to trust?

Here are three factors that decide the issue for me. They’re in terms that I understand, which might not be the ones sanctioned by the various schools of economics.

1. Government jobs typically have social value, but not high economic value.

   Cops, firefighters, social workers, teachers, and so on all contribute to our society: They have “social value”. But there’s usually no profit motive, stockholder benefit, or other economic benefits.Meanwhile, private-sector employees are generally focused on increasing revenue and / or profits, which are activities with “economic value”.

   That doesn’t make either one good or bad. I wouldn’t want to do without cops and teachers, but we could lose iCarly and I wouldn’t blink. This is also an oversimplification, so I know that people will be able to argue with me. But I don’t think it’s crazy, as a general principle.

   Now, to pay a government employee, you need to take tax money from a business or individual. In other words, you need to reallocate money, taking it away from something of economic value and giving it to something of social value.

   There’s nothing wrong with that — social value is valuable! — but it implies that we need to find the right balance: How much of our economy should be directed toward social value, and how much to economic value?

   In times of economic crisis, I’d say our default position would be to redirect more effort to economic value than to social value: Focus on job creation and retention in the private sector, not job retention in the public sector.

   To make this local: During times of financial crisis, I think ItalMart, Kmart, Subway, General Cinema, etc. are more important to our recovery than librarians, teachers, cops, and garbage collection. If Subway went out of business, that would be less money to pay librarians, teachers, cops, and garbage collectors in the future; better to take a hit on the public-sector side now and improve our local economy than to protect the public-sector jobs this year and have less money to pay them next year.

   To preempt the obvious objection: I don’t want to lay off all the teachers or shut down the library. I want a balance, but the balance needs to favor the private sector.

2. Governments frequently take on debt in order to keep spending in times of economic crisis, and don’t pay it off.

   Someone named Warren on the mailing list used a “Keynesian” approach (named after the guy who codified it) to economics in his post. Many in government favor it, and I’d warrant that many Democrats are Keynesians first, and like the Democratic party because it adheres to Keynesian economics.In a bad economy, the Keynesians say, the government should continue to spend, perhaps even increasing its spending, in order to stimulate the economy. Since it’s a bad economy, the government is spending more at a time when there’s less money to spend. That leads to increasing debt.

   That’s okay, the Keynesians say, because during good times (which will come faster because of the stimulus) you can pay off the debt.

   I can see why they’d say that. But we usually act on the first part and ignore the second part: We say “It’s a crisis! Spend more money!” during bad times, and “Let’s expand these great government programs!” during good times.

   We’re too undisciplined to adhere to Keynesian economics, so we shouldn’t pretend we’re following Keynesian principles. Even if the Keynesians are right, it doesn’t matter, because we don’t do what Keynes said we should do!

   To put it a different way: Warren linked to a Paul Krugman article (he’s a Nobel-winning economist and a Keynesian) that opens, in his usual condescending way, with, “Spend now, while the economy remains depressed; save later, once it has recovered. How hard is that to understand?” It’s not hard to understand, Paul, we just have no evidence that we will actually follow through on the saving part. We’re not stupid, we can just see how obviously undisciplined our governments are.

   Therefore, we shouldn’t let the government go significantly more into debt during bad times. Therefore, we should be prepared to cut the government side during a downturn rather than increasing debt.

3. The more money and power government has, the more dependent and less free its citizens are.

   Someone recently said he couldn’t understand the connection here. I will make only two points:

   • People become less free in a nanny state because they get the mentality that the state will take care of them. The dependency is mental and moral, not legal, but it’s still caused by the state having too much influence over their lives.
   • When states (by which I mean US states and nations) get more money and power, they take over more aspects of people’s lives. By definition, even. If a state gets money, it has to spend it on things, and those things affect its citizens.

   I think there’s an ideological gap between us that will be hard to overcome, so I won’t elaborate further. You either get this or you don’t.

There you go: why we should ignore the Keynesians even if they’re right.