Thursday, January 31, 2019
Kamala Harris Has Made A Career Out Of Hurting Vulnerable People
Kamala Harris Has Made A Career Out Of Hurting Vulnerable People: Harris spent years doling out fines and jail time to poor parents whose kids were skipping school. Now she makes life more dangerous for prostitutes, too!
Kamala Harris Reveals Medicare For All Means Ending Private Insurance
If you thought Obamacare was bad, just wait and see what Democrats have in store if they win the presidency in 2020.
Kamala Harris Reveals Medicare For All Means Ending Private Insurance: We're a long way from the days of Barack Obama's favorite health care talking point, 'If you like your plan, you can keep it.'
Kamala Harris Reveals Medicare For All Means Ending Private Insurance: We're a long way from the days of Barack Obama's favorite health care talking point, 'If you like your plan, you can keep it.'
No Amount Of U.S. Intervention Is Going To Save Afghanistan Ever
No Amount Of U.S. Intervention Is Going To Save Afghanistan Ever: These failed pundits’ efforts are meant to shame President Trump into reversing his instinct to pull the United States out of Afghanistan.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
LOWMAN S. HENRY: Cycle of Dependency
The headline blared from the Sunday opinion page: Where's Washington's Heart? Rather than being an editorial on helping to lift people out of poverty it was instead - predictably - a robust and deeply flawed defense of government social welfare programs.
Decades after President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty" that turned out to be a massive expansion of government dependency programs, and after the expenditure of trillions of taxpayer dollars on those programs, the needle on poverty has barely moved.
What has changed is the number of Americans trapped on the government dole. The Left believes this is a good thing - government is assisting more people. And while helping people who truly need assistance is a shared goal across the political spectrum, conservatives want to take that one step further and return as many people as possible to self-sufficiency.
The term "cycle of dependency" is used by social scientists to describe how addiction to government aid gets handed down from one generation to the next. But, there is another "cycle of dependency" that explains the Left's fixation with growing the number of people receiving public assistance.
Here is how it works: more people dependent on government creates more voters will support those candidates pledging to preserve and expand their benefits; this results in the election/re-election of Left-leaning candidates who then work to increase the number of people dependent on such programs, repeat, repeat and repeat.
Attempt to break this cycle and the Left will attack saying you lack compassion, or as the headline put it "heart." This too is a favorite, and highly effective, tactic of the Left. Big government advocates are exceptionally good at messaging. They can take any government program, regardless of how ineffective or inefficient it might be, and make it sound like mom and apple pie. For example the "Affordable Care Act" made health care less available and more expensive; illegal immigrants become "dreamers" and the murdering of babies in the womb becomes "reproductive rights."
What triggered the editorial screed, augmented by the sub-headline "When it comes to helping hunger Americans, we have lost our humanity," was a move by the Trump Administration to allow states greater flexibility in moving people off the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, and into self-sufficiency.
You would think helping Americans become more self-sufficient and thus not needing government assistance would be an obvious goal. But, it would break the Left's electoral cycle of dependency so crank up the propaganda machine and declare such efforts to be heartless.
But are they heartless?
The Trump Administration's goal is to foster the movement of able-bodied adults without dependent children from dependency into the work place. A similar effort in Pennsylvania passed the General Assembly last year, but fell victim to a veto by Governor Wolf who saw the threat to his electoral coalition.
Opposition to this policy is the opposite of heartless; it restores human dignity. Nobody is proposing that children go unfed; or those with physical or mental disabilities are denied SNAP benefits. The goal is for those able to work, and for whom jobs are available, to do so.
This is, as conservative author Arthur Brooks termed it, the "conservative heart": Provide equality of opportunity through educational reforms such as expanded school choice and job training programs. Foster a pro-growth economy that makes available good, family sustaining jobs. This approach will break the classic cycle of dependency and move those who are able from being dependent on government to helping government through their tax dollars funding programs for those in actual need.
In fact, advocacy for the continued trapping of able-bodied, able-minded individuals on government assistance is what is truly heartless. Doing so with an ulterior political motive is not only heartless, but downright mean. It is time we stopped falling for the Left's spin and put into place those policies that restore more people to the dignity of self-sufficiency.
(Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.)
Why Does The Left Suspend Their Principles For Christian Minorities?
Why Does The Left Suspend Their Principles For Christian Minorities?: Progressives make such a big deal out of hateful and culturally appropriative depictions in other contexts, but not when Christians are the victims.
The Bigotry At The Heart Of The Covington Affair Belongs To The Left
The Bigotry At The Heart Of The Covington Affair Belongs To The Left: After days of outrage and condemnations, the Covington affair has revealed a disturbing bigotry among far too many media figures and outlets on the left.
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Lowman S. Henry: Gov. Tom Wolf's latest tax grab
Guest Columnist
Pennsylvania motorists already pay one of the highest state gasoline taxes in the nation thanks to what was effectively a 30-cent per gallon tax hike during the Tom Corbett Administration. Now, a new multi-state compact advocated by radical environment interests threatens to add to that tax burden.
As with most policies pushed by the Left this one has a lofty sounding name, it is called the Transportation and Climate Initiative. Its goal is to ratchet up the war on carbon-based fuels by setting new goals for the reduction of their use. And, of course there is the usual tug at the heart strings rhetoric as the "initiative" seeks to "maximize environmental, economic, social, and public health benefits."
If you cut through the spin what it actually is being proposed is a tax grab to fund dubious "low carbon technologies" which cannot compete in the marketplace because they are ineffective, overly expensive or both; and — surprise — re-direct more money to urban mass transit systems. As Inconvenient Facts author Greg Wrightstone puts it: "They want to take money from Perry County (rural Pennsylvania) and give it to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh."
As Wrightstone explained the compact on a recent edition of Lincoln Radio Journal the Wolf Administration has entered into an agreement with nine other mostly northeastern states to cap each of the states' carbon emissions from transportation (your car). The states have one year to come up with a plan. Such plans will most certainly include additional taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel. Then, Wrightstone concluded, the money will be "redistributed" to "low carbon transportation systems" — in other words urban mass transit.
Those urban transportation systems, specifically the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) in the Philadelphia region and Port Authority Transit (PAT) in the Pittsburgh area have an insatiable appetite for public dollars and annually develop new schemes to fleece taxpayers from other regions to subsidize the many and well documented inefficiencies and outright corruption that regularly plaque those agencies.
Thus the lofty sounding Transportation and Climate Initiative allows Governor Wolf to advance two of his top agenda items: establish a new revenue stream to keep urban mass transit afloat, and penalize users of carbon based fuels. Keep in mind those users include you every time you start your car or use a product that was delivered to the store by motor vehicle, which is to say everything.
In addition to the cost to consumers, higher taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel will increase the cost of doing business for companies based in Pennsylvania. This will put them at a competitive disadvantage with states that are not part of this ideologically driven compact. Notably, the state of Ohio declined to participate in the boondoggle, correctly seeing an opportunity to gain a competitive edge over Pennsylvania-based businesses.
All of this raises the issue of how new and or higher taxes will be imposed. Since this is an administrative agreement it is entirely possible, even likely, the Wolf Administration will attempt to bypass the General Assembly and impose the new cost as a regulatory fee.
There are many reasons to believe the governor will try that route. First, with Republicans in control of both houses of the General Assembly the chances of winning legislative approval for a fuel tax increase, especially in the House, are slim to none. Second, the General Assembly has a recent history of allowing its constitutional authority to be usurped by other branches of government without putting up an effective fight.
For example, last year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in clear violation of the state constitution abrogated the legislature's power to draw congressional district lines and instituted by judicial fiat a new congressional district map gerrymandered to favor Democrats in the 2018 election. Legislative Republicans howled in protest, even appealed to the federal courts. But they failed to take the one action that would have been effective: impeach the offending justices, especially one who in a blatant breech of judicial ethics campaigned on doing exactly what was done.
So Gov. Wolf can be forgiven if he believes he can impose an entire new layer of taxation on We the People of Penn's Woods without the legislature taking any effective action to stop him. But this is an issue where legislative leaders, particularly those in the state Senate, need to stiffen their spines and take a stand.
The policy goals of the Transportation and Climate Initiative are dubious at best, this is a clear tax grab for urban mass transit, and consumers are already over-burdened when it comes to gas and fuel taxes. Even for the legislative faint of heart this is a battle worth fighting.
Lowman S. Henry is chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion Research and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal. His email is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org
Wednesday, January 09, 2019
GUEST COLUMN: Time to eliminate property taxes in Pennsylvania
Guest columnist
There have been discussions about eliminating property taxes for decades.
In November 2017, a constitutional amendment passed by substantial margin to allow for the elimination of property taxes. With that amendment, it would only be necessary for legislation to be enacted to rid the Commonwealth of this regressive tax.
The question then becomes what is the status of the bill to eliminate property taxes?
In December 2018, I circulated a co-sponsorship memo in the PA House for a bill which will eliminate property taxes 100% for all properties if enacted. The objective of the bill is simple — to eliminate all property taxes. The tricky part is the replacement tax.
That very simple statement will be the subject of eight detailed articles I intend to write explaining the issues in detail to solicit your feedback and to allow the best possible solution to come about as quickly as possible.
The eight articles will include:
1. Critical economic reasons for eliminating property taxes.
2. Problems with the existing property tax system.
3. Unfunded pension liabilities.
4. Funding formulas for school districts under current laws.
5. Property tax elimination and impact on senior citizens.
6. Property tax elimination and impact on working families.
7. Property tax elimination and impact on schools and teachers.
8. Proposed property tax elimination bill.
Eliminating the property tax is critical to the economic survival of the Commonwealth and our citizens!
In my 40+ years as a certified public accountant and expert in helping organizations avoid bankruptcy, I can think of no more complicated problem to the financial survival of the Commonwealth than eliminating property taxes.
The reason this is so complicated is because our current system of taxation and funding schools is so fundamentally flawed that even minor fixes to peripheral elements of the system may have significant unintended consequences.
For example, the funding formulas for the schools result in Palmyra Area School District receiving $1 Million less per year than it would receive under a newly enacted funding formula which will take almost 20 years to fully implement. This means that Palmyra School District must fund that shortfall from the state by either cutting spending and or with property tax increases.
The Independent Fiscal Office five year outlook provides an insight into Pennsylvania’s stagnant growth and substantial budget shortfalls over the next five years. When combined with declining population for citizens under age 60 and significantly increasing population for citizens over 65, the trends continue to be negative for the Commonwealth.
If we take decisive action now to reform our tax policies for working families, seniors, businesses, and school districts with the fundamental shift in the elimination of property taxes we can reverse these negative trends. I am extremely optimistic if we take the problem seriously.
Efforts in the past to eliminate property taxes have not been successful because of a whole bevy of reasons.
The primary reasons for the failure of prior efforts revolve around the following:
A. The proposed replacement taxes involve funds going to the Commonwealth rather than to local control.
B. The impact of property tax elimination on people who rent rather than own their homes.
C. The perceived lack of stability in school funding under the replacement formula.
D. The expansion of the sales tax base was a problematic for some powerful stakeholders.
E. The proposed replacement taxes were directed predominantly at working families.
The system that I am proposing will address these issues and provide for an orderly phase in so that the schools and the community are able to adapt to a new system with no major disruptions to the educational opportunities of our students.
I cannot emphasize enough how severe the problem is with property taxes. The funding formula itself which is a separate issue is equally problematic and leads to the difficulty in solving this problem. It is critical however that everyone understand that if we do not resolve this problem together the probability of surviving the next economic downturn is limited.
Our financial rescue plan that I proposed when I first got elected two years ago discusses all the efforts we need to turn around the finances in Pennsylvania. We are well on the way to enacting these bills and property tax elimination is a major component of it.
I look forward to your input and comments on the particles that we will be submitting and ask you to please get active in this and provide me the guidance that you feel needs to be included in any legislation. We cannot afford to make a mistake.
A copy of our financial rescue plan can be found at my website www.repfrankryan.com.
Frank Ryan, CPA, USMCR (Ret.) represents the 101st District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He is a retired Marine Reserve Colonel, a CPA and specializes in corporate restructuring. He has served on numerous boards of publicly traded and non-profit organizations. He can be reached at FRYAN1951@aol.com
Thursday, January 03, 2019
Tuesday, January 01, 2019
3.2 Million Page Views at Tony Phyrillas on Politics
As we begin a new year, my site counter has reached another milestone: 3.2 million visitors to Tony Phyrillas on Politics. Thanks for checking out my blog ... and come back again.
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