Contract for the American Dream

Before I can tell you about way way out in left field liberal website and their “Contract for the American Dream”, we must first address the concept of the American Dream. My how THAT has changed! For generations, the American Dream has been rooted in the concepts of freedom, self reliance and liberty … the idea that through hard work and good decision making we could achieve a better life for ourselves as compared to the generations before us. Not only that, but we could set the stage for our children to enjoy a better life than we. The American Dream has always been based on the freedom to pursue your dreams and the enabler for the American Dream has always been our Constitution, the rule of law, and economic liberty. Our free enterprise system lifted more people out of poverty than any other system this earth has ever known. Government exists to protect your rights and to prevent other people from interfering with your pursuit these dreams, free of harm.

The American Dream is different for every person in this country. For some it is to own a home. For some it is to have a successful business. Whatever that Dream it is to be achieved through your own personal perseverance, drive, determination and responsibility. It’s not anybody else’s job to deliver your American Dream to your doorstep, and that includes the government. The American government is not in the business of achieving your American Dream. The American government is in the business of protecting the freedom of its citizens to pursue their dreams.

Unfortunately that is not the definition that all Americans are using nowadays, particularly the progs and the libs. Somehow, through generations of liberal-directed education in government schools, the definition of this dream has changed. Somewhere along the way, government became the provider of the American Dream, not the enabler. Liberals have managed to convince the American people that it is the role of the government to make them successful. The fundamental flaw in liberal logic is that it fails to believe in the power of the individual and puts its faith in the power of the collective – in this case, government.

So now that we understand the differences in my definition of the American Dream versus the prog definition … let’s talk about this “Contract for the American Dream” That has shown up on the Internet. Thus far there are about 150,000 people who have “signed” the online petition to put this contract into force.

This contract includes 10 critical steps to getting our economy back on track. Without further ado, these steps are as follows:

1. Invest in America’s Infrastructure
2. Create 21st Century Energy Jobs
3. Invest in Public Education
4. Offer Medicare for All
5. Make Work Pay
6. Secure Social Security
7. Return to Fairer Tax Rates
8. End the Wars and Invest at Home
9. Tax Wall Street Speculation
10. Strengthen Democracy

How many of these “critical steps” involve empowering individuals or securing our freedoms? Not one. How many of these steps involve empowering government, promoting government spending schemes, encouraging government dependency and growing the size of government? Pretty much every one. It is clear the Progs consider the American Dream to be MORE government with HIGHER taxes and LESS freedom. Is this what you think America should be?

But wait! There’s more! To really understand this leftist dream for America, all you have to do is scroll down the website a bit to see who the sponsors are. Here’s a partial list:

We have MoveOn.org, Demos, Color of Change.org, Center on Wisconsin Strategy, Democrats.com, Daily Kos, AFSCME, CWA, Progressive Congress.org, the FairShare alliance, Peace Action, Code Pink, People for the American Way, Democracy for America — yup, pretty much the spectrum of anti-Capitalist, pro-Government organizations. Just what you might expect.

And don’t even get me started on this “fairer tax rates” argument. More specifically, this means an end to the Bush tax cuts and the creation of two new tax brackets – a 45% rate for millionaires and a 49% tax rate for billionaires. Let me put this into perspective for you. Only 0.2% of households in America have incomes of a million dollars or more (about 200,000). And there are a lot more of those who earn closer to $1 million than $1 billion. But if we just wanted to shore up our deficit for one year – that doesn’t include any increase in spending like this prog plan has called for, but just close the deficit gap for this year – you would have to increase taxes on each of these millionaires and billionaires by $6 million each. That’s on top of what they already pay!

And what’s with this idea that strengthening our Democracy will somehow lead our economy out of the trenches? Don’t these people know that Democracy was once a dirty word … not to mention the fact that the United States is not a democracy? The only reason these Progs push democracy on the dumb masses it strengthens government. How so? If the dumb masses can be convinced that, since we are a democracy, the government should be able to do whatever the political class convinces the majority of Americans it should do … then we have stronger politicians and weaker protections for our rights. Simple as that.

Rand Paul pushing for vote of no confidence in Tim Geithner

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul announced early Wednesday morning that he plans to push the Senate to hold a vote of no confidence in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Unlike in the United Kingdom’s Parliament, where a no confidence vote would remove him, a U.S. Senate vote of no confidence would be a symbolic measure that sends a signal to the president.

“The stock market gave a vote of no confidence to Timothy Geithner yesterday and for the past 11 days,” Paul said in a statement. “Geithner has shown no acumen in predicting, diagnosing, or treating America’s economic woes. The time has come for him to resign.”

Earlier this summer it was widely speculated that Geithner would resign after the debt ceiling deal was complete. But as The Daily Caller reported this week, Geithner and the Treasury Department said he won’t be leaving. “Secretary Geithner has let the President know that he plans to stay on in his position at Treasury,” Jenni Lecompte, the assistant secretary for public affairs at Treasury, said in a statement. “He looks forward to the important work ahead on the challenges facing our great country.”

Read more here.

Riots in London

These riots in London have taken on a socio-economic bent, pinning the achievers in Great Britain against the moochers. The more we hear from these people who are rioting, the more we realize that many are using this as an excuse to act out and show those evil rich people that “we can do what we want.” Yeah, those evil rich people .. it’s all their fault that our government benefits are being cut! This is our way of showing that “we’re redistributing the wealth.” Interesting that they would blame the rich people for their benefits being cut, because without the taxes paid by rich people, there wouldn’t be any money for their precious government benefits.

Usually in this case, I would ask one simple question of these moochers who are blaming their problems on rich people: If, by chance, you were to decide to become employed, would you go try to get a job from a poor person? But we have this “if you were to decide to become employed” problem here. The argument can be made that Great Britain has become such a cesspool of welfare moochers that its citizens are no longer concerned with actually earning a living. They are owed a living by the government. These rioters are acting with little concern as to how their actions affect their fellow citizens who are trying to make it: the bus boys at the restaurants that they are vandalizing, the cashiers at the groceries they are stealing from, the local business owners whose livelihoods they are sending up in smoke. These people are trying to earn a living and are currently unable to do so because of the selfish and criminal actions of these rioting moochers. This is what happens when a society becomes reliant on a government for its survival … take a look at this insight from Brendan O’Neill on the welfare state of Great Britain:

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain “mentally fit”, has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

As Thomas Sowell says in his latest collection of random thoughts: “Today, the welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”