Oppression

Well, with the new Health Care bill signed into law, we have even more Liberal laws to follow and taxes to pay. Every U.S. citizen will be required to have a health care insurance policy, and if you don’t, Obama’s gonna fine you. And if you can’t afford a normal policy, you’ll be able to buy a cheaper one from the government, giving them EVEN MORE CONTROL over your personal life! All this means is even more control and socialist reform for the government that can’t figure out how to spend our trillions of tax dollars wisely, and is to this day, broke.

I don’t think this is the kind of reform the country was looking for, and the biggest problem is that the dems don’t even care.  The reason being that this bill gets their feet in the door of total government control, and they will sacrifice anything to get there, even if they lose elections in November because of it.  It is a total violation of the Constitution and everyone’s personal rights to have the Government tell you that you MUST buy this policy.  Thankfully my state is one of several that is going to court against the feds on this new reform law, go John Suthers!

Picture obtained from thebsreport.wordpress.com

Arrogance?

I’m sorry to share another email with you but this one is something that I feel everyone needs to see and realize how big our sacrifices have been in other countries, and this isn’t number isn’t including a lot of other countries we have fought wars and buried service members in, these numbers are from both World Wars.

A Veteran is someone who, at one point in his/her life, wrote a blank check made payable
to “The United States of America,” for an amount of “up to and including my life.”

“ADAPT,IMPROVISE,OVERCOME”
Apologize For What?
Our European arrogance in alphabetical order

1. The AmericanCemetery at Aisne-Marne , France . A total of 2289 of our military dead.

2. The AmericanCemetery at Ardennes , Belgium . A total of 5329of our dead.

3. The AmericanCemetery at Brittany, France . A total of 4410of our military dead.

4. Brookwood , England American Cemetery. A total of 468 of our dead.

5. Cambridge , England .. 3812of our military dead.

6. Epinal , France American Cemetery. A total of 5525of our Military dead.

7. Flanders Field , Belgium . A total of 368 of our military.

8. Florence , Italy . A total of 4402of our military dead.

9. Henri-Chapelle , Belgium . A total of 7992of our military dead.

10. Lorraine , France . A total of 10,489of our military dead..

11. Luxembourg , Luxembourg . A total of 5076of our military dead.

12. Meuse-Argonne. A total of 14246of our military dead.

13. Netherlands , Netherlands . A total of 8301of our military dead.

14. Normandy , France . A total of 9387of our military dead.

15. Oise-Aisne , France . A total of 6012of our military dead..

16. Rhone , France . A total of 861 of our military dead.

17. Sicily , Italy . A total of 7861of our military dead.

18. Somme , France . A total of 1844of our military dead.

19. St. Mihiel , France . A total of 4153of our military dead..

20. Suresnes , France . a total of 1541of our military dead.

Apologize to no one.
Remind those of our sacrifice and don’t confuse arrogance with leadership.
If I added correctly the count is 104,366dead.
And we have to watch an American elected leader who apologizes to Europe and the Middle East that our country is “arrogant”!
How many French, Dutch, Italians, Belgians and Brits are buried on our soil, defending us against our enemies?  We don’t ask for praise, but we have absoulutely no need to apologise.

What Deficit?

Are you confused by our national debt and how big that number is?  Well its just a little over 12.3 trillion dollars, many people just can’t comprehend that big of a number, so I wanted to find a way of showing you how big that number is.   Just count to one trillion, if you count at one number per second, you’ll be just over 31,700 years old by the time you get there, that’s 380,400 years if you count the entire national debt!

On a side note, for those of you who actually follow our national  debt, China has been our largest creditor for a long time now.  They have purchased over $750,000,000,000 dollars worth of U.S. Treasury Bonds, which is about 20% of our public debt.  China has recently been selling their shares to Japan which has effectively made Japan our largest creditor, as of December 2008 at 768.8 Billion dollars, or 21% of our public debt.  The only thing I can think, other than China simply trying to flex some muscle, is that China has lost its faith that the U.S. will be able to repay these bonds, due to the large increases in U.S. Government spending the last year.

Scrambled thoughts about taxes

Just an interesting thought about how our government spends its money, when looking at how our different presidents have used money and budgeted, we find some interesting facts.

I decided to take a look at the Government Printing Office’s (GPO) website, I’d like to first show you a small portion of the 2008 budget written by President Bush:

“The President’s 2008 Budget also outlines a comprehensive series of budget reforms that will
improve transparency and accountability in Government spending, including earmark reform.
Earmarks are provisions included in legislation that are often not subject to adequate legislative or
public scrutiny and that often lead to wasteful Federal spending. They have grown dramatically,
nearly tripling in the last decade. The President has called for full disclosure of all earmarks,
prohibiting earmarks from being slipped into so-called report language instead of actual legislation,
and cutting the number and amount of earmarks by half. The President has also called on the
Congress to enact a legislative line-item veto. This would help the Executive and Legislative
Branches work together to strike unwarranted earmarks and other wasteful and unnecessary
spending from the budget.”

I couldn’t agree more with the elimination of earmarks being slipped into certain bills and other legislation that keeps our political world going in circles, ie. beaurocracy!

Here is an excerpt from President Obama’s 2011 Budget:

“In addition to closing loopholes that allow wealthy investment managers to not pay income taxes
on their earnings and ending subsidies for big oil, gas, and coal companies, the Budget eliminates
the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year and devotes those resources instead
to reducing the deficit. Our Nation could not afford these tax cuts when they passed, and it cannot
afford them now.”

I think it is very interesting that we will end subsidies for oil companies, where do you think the oil companies will make up that lost revenue?  Thats right, YOU AND ME, the people who are paying at the pump will pay for those deceased subsidies!  Not only does the budget eliminate the bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000/yr , it also eliminates many other tax cuts for businesses.  If you were wondering who makes over 250,000/yr, I’ll tell you, the people who employ most of the people living in the United States.  Those employers are going to be passing on the savings to us in the form of pay cuts and job losses. If our government could learn to spend wisely and conservatively than we would not need all of these tax hikes that the current administration is trying to push through I’ll elaborate on some of these below after I talk about gas taxes.

After thinking about gas taxes, and how much we pay, I decided to look a little more in depth on how much money the government brings in per gallon of automotive unleaded gasoline. It all starts at the federal level, with a fixed tax of 18.4 cents per gallon.  Then add in a state tax of any where from 8 cents a gallon (average is 27.2 cents/gal.) all the way up to 40+ cents a gallon.  And for the most part that doesn’t include excise tax, which drives the price up even higher, then we can add in charges for inspection fees, sales tax, ect.  On average oil companies make about 8% on the dollar profit, with the companies with higher prices bringing in closer to 10%.  So you do the math, depending on oil prices your government makes more money per gallon than the oil companies themselves do!  We need to lower taxes on everything.

When I looked at part of Obama’s initial tax hikes, I thought it was interesting that he wants to create more jobs with minimal tax breaks on hiring new employees when he wants to tax them so much on everything else, that cannot create jobs when we charge businesses so much to operate.  Below is a list of new tax increases under Obama’s new tax plan.

1) On people making more than $250,000.

$338 billion – Bush tax cuts expire
$179 billion – eliminate itemized deduction
$118 billion – capital gains tax hike

Total: $636 billion/10 years

2) Businesses:

$17 billion – Reinstate Superfund taxes
$24 billion – tax carried-interest as income
$5 billion – codify “economic substance doctrine”
$61 billion – repeal LIFO
$210 billion – international enforcement, reform deferral, other tax reform
$4 billion – information reporting for rental payments
$5.3 billion – excise tax on Gulf of Mexico oil and gas
$3.4 billion – repeal expensing of tangible drilling costs
$62 million – repeal deduction for tertiary injectants
$49 million – repeal passive loss exception for working interests in oil and natural gas properties
$13 billion – repeal manufacturing tax deduction for oil and natural gas companies
$1 billion – increase to 7 years geological and geophysical amortization period for independent producers
$882 million – eliminate advanced earned income tax credit

Total: $353 billion/10 years

Think about it.

Numbers and quotes obtained from the Government Printing Office, and abcnews blogger -jpt

My Generation

My Generation (Generation Y, 1982 to the early 21st century) is a very scary one for me as far as keeping this country, its values and freedoms intact.

I find that talking politics and current events with anyone around my age seems to go absolutely no where, lots of baseless claims and complete lack of any real knowledge.  Almost like we are just too busy to really care about what goes on in the political and governing side of our lives, so we just take our friends baseless advice on it.  So thats why I started this, so maybe I can give my ill informed friends some real raw facts, and I will be throwing in what I personally feel about all of this as well, so you’ve been warned!

So I am going to start with explaining the current large political parties in our country and some of their main beliefs, keep in mind not everyone in these parties feels the same way about all of these issues and this is a generalization.

I’ll start with the most popular party for my generation (47% democrat vs. 28% republican, the rest are considered unaffiliated):

Democrats:

Referred to as being on the “left”

Often referred to as Liberals, they believe in a larger role of government in our lives and a larger base of social services for the residents of our country.  The large role of the government in society and everyday life, be it laws such as anti-discrimination, corporate and personal taxation laws, gun control legislation, personal activities ect. They believe in higher taxes (especially on the wealthy) to allow them to provide more government based social support programs and activities. Democrats are generally pro-life and support gay marriage. Military and associated program funding is largely decreased with democratic control.  They also support a raise in the minimum wage.

Republican:

Referred to as being on the “right”

Often referred to as conservatives, they believe in a smaller role of government in our lives and smaller government size in general.  They stand for personal responsibility, and a view that represents Darwinism in a way, the strongest survive.  They are pro-business, anti-bureaucracy, anti-taxation, pro-military, pro-religion.  They believe that large government only stands in the way of getting things done and is very wasteful.  They believe that when businesses are allowed to make more money, they in turn create more jobs and help the economy.  They support a tax cut on all Americans (rich or poor), support the death penalty as a way to control crime and horrific acts against society, and are against large minimum wage rates as they hurt businesses.

Libertarian:

I’m not going to go too far in depth, but Libertarians believe in low taxes, smaller government, more freedom. Basically a more conservative view than even the republicans have.  Pretty much everyone does what they want with minimal government influence, if you really believe in Darwinism, this is the party for you!

That was all a brief generalization but I thought I would just throw it out there, just in case some of you didn’t know the differences.  I believe that everyone has the right to their own views, and that is what makes this country great!  I just wish more young people would base their political stance on real true facts rather than just doing and saying what their ill informed friends are doing or saying!  I’ll follow this all up with some bills and interesting facts on what our government is doing soon.

Also, on a totally different note, some awesome upcoming racing facts that are changing the 2010 racing seasons all over the world!