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A Taxing Time...at Tax Time

Was it as bad for you as it was for me? Sending Washington money we earn, but Washington doesn’t, I mean? It’s not just being part of half the nation that pays taxes while the other half doesn’t that bothers me. It’s the waste and unnecessary programs and agencies that have long outlived whatever usefulness they once had (if they were ever necessary). And still President Biden wants to raise taxes even more without proposing a single dollar be cut to reduce our unsustainable $34 trillion debt. As The Washington Times reported: “(Biden) wants to impose a 25% minimum tax on all income not currently taxed — including unrealized gains on assets — for Americans with a net worth of $100 million. Mr. Biden has also urged Congress to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% up from 21%.” No American should be forced to endure the annual torture of compiling records and filling out tax returns. Many other nations have far simpler systems. Even the instructions for filling out forms for the IRS need instructions to understand. It is why so many must hire tax attorneys, who fulfill the role of language translators. Just one example: Enter your gross farming and fishing income reported on Form 4835, line 7; Schedule K-1 (Form 1065), box 14, code B; Schedule K-1 (Form 1120-S), box 17, code AN; and Schedule K-1 (Form 1041), box 14, code F. See instructions. Got it? The Congressional Budget Office predicts the U.S. will add an average of $2 trillion in debt annually for the next decade. That’s more than$5 billion of debt daily for the next 10 years. We borrow more than$200 million every hour. That’s $3 million every minute, $60,000 every second. If that’s not enough to make your blood boil, consider a tiny fraction of the misspending that occurs in Washington. For the past nine years, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has published a“Festivus Report” exposing outrageous examples of unnecessary federal spending. In his latest report he writes: “I am highlighting a whopping $900,000,000,000 of waste (emphasis his), including an NIH grant to study Russian cats walking on a treadmill, Barbies used as proof of ID for receiving COVID Paycheck Protection Program funds, $6 million to promote tourism in Egypt, and $200 million to ‘struggling artists’ like Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Lil Wayne. No matter how much money the government has already wasted, politicians keep demanding even more.” There’s much more. Google Festivus Report and be aghast at what we are doing to ourselves. Ultimately, this is the fault of voters who won’t restrain politicians and don’t select people who will restore America’s financial future and balance the budget, as was so recently done during the administration of Bill Clinton. If too many voters keep fueling the gravy train, the only option will be an Article V constitutional convention, provided by the Founders for such a moment we are now facing. If a future Congress refuses to attack the debt an Article V constitutional convention will be the only way to balance the budget and return power to where the Founders originally intended it – to the people. Nineteen of a required 34 states have already passed resolutions calling for a Convention of States. Other states have passed it in one legislative chamber, and still others have it under consideration. Our current oppressive tax system can be analogized to Dracula, who is never satisfied with the blood he sucks out of one victim, but must constantly look for new sources to bite. We must drive a stake in the blood- sucking government’s heart, or we will end up driving one in ourselves and the country we have known and loved will be no more.

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The Empires Begin to Strike Back

With all that is occurring in our political and cultural life, there are signs some Americans have had enough. Google recently fired 28 employees from its New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel. The reason given by the company’s vice president for global security, Chris Rackow, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, was that the sacked employees “took over office spaces, defaced our property and physically impeded the work of other Googlers,” violating company policies. They apparently aren’t familiar with this sage advice: don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Another optimistic sign. Columbia University decided they had enough of protesters disrupting the campus and shouting antisemitic, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas slogans. Police were called and arrested 108 protesters who had set up shanty-like tent camps on school property. Columbia President Minouche Shafik said the occupiers posed a “clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” The definition of “student” ought to bring some humility to these don’t-know-it-alls: “ a person formally engaged in learning.” For too long and in too many places – and not only on many college campuses – adults have ceded their leadership responsibilities to teenagers and twenty-somethings, too many of whom regurgitate what they have been told by leftist professors and friends on social media. At Columbia, at least three tenured professors dispense propaganda about the history of the Middle East. The New York Post identified them: “ Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and history, has faced widespread calls to be fired ever since he referred to the Oct. 7 attack inflicted by Hamas terrorists (on Israel) as ‘awesome.’” Mohamed Abdou, who is described on Columbia’s website as “a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization.” Abdou declared on social media, “Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.” There is also Hamad Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies. The Post reports Dabashi “has come under fire in recent years for a slew of controversial social media posts, including a since-deleted one in which he blamed Israel for every “dirty” problem in the world: “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name ‘Israel’ will pop up in the atrocities,’ Dabashi wrote in a 2018 Facebook post, cited by the Jewish Journal.” There are likely more professors with views like these at Columbia and elsewhere, but you get the picture. It may be a generalization, but too many young people have been treated as though they were the font of all wisdom while older, wiser, and more experienced people have been sidelined and their views silenced. Few speak of responsibility or accountability for actions once deemed illegal, immoral, impractical, uninformed, duped and just plain stupid. Students who take out big loans to learn propaganda and worthless subjects at too many universities now expect those loans to be forgiven at taxpayer expense. When I flunked out after my freshman year at American University in Washington, my father said he wasn’t going to pay the bills anymore. When I went back a year later and paid my own way a remarkable thing happened. My grades went up because I was now invested in my education and had to take responsibility for the outcome. I also paid back my student loan. Let’s hope that others follow the lead of Columbia’s president and Google management and we stop wet nursing kids who for too long have demonstrated their ignorance and in some cases denounced America while reaping its benefits.

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Biden's Title IX rule disaster latest in plan to destroy what's left of our country's moral foundations

The Biden administration has twisted the intent of the original Title IX law with its latest ruling. And I predict it's about to get even worse.

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Lessons From Other Campus Protests

The year was 1966 and Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California. A major part of his platform was to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” and other college campuses throughout the state that were experiencing protests and strikes over issues that included the military draft, civil rights and “women’s issues.” While not on a scale of the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-America and Jewish hatred we are witnessing now on several college campuses, Reagan’s response could instruct current college presidents and admissions officers to quell the unrest. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has preserved Reagan’s remarks and later actions as governor. In a campaign speech, Reagan said many leftist campus movements had transcended legitimate protest, with the actions of "beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates" having more to do "with rioting, with anarchy" than "academic freedom." He faulted university administrators and faculty, who "press their particular value judgments" on students, for "a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap" on campus, and suggested a code of conduct be imposed on faculty to "force them to serve as examples of good behavior and decency." Morality, good behavior and decency appear to be electives, not requirements, on too many of today’s university campuses whose “students” (and apparently not all are students) are now running the institutions of what might be called lower learning. Six months after becoming governor in 1967, Reagan wrote a letter to Glenn Dumke, chancellor of San Francisco State College, who opposed the unrest occurring on many California campuses. In it, Reagan condemned “these people and this trash” who used “the excuse of academic freedom and freedom of expression” to justify continuation of the protests. “We wouldn’t tolerate this kind of language in front of our families.” He called on Dumke to “lay down some rules of conduct and promised “you’d have (all the) backing I could give you.” We need to hear more of this type of talk to counter the anarchists and hatred of Jews and Israel and support of terrorist organizations on today’s college campuses. Even more than talk, action is needed. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Ira Stoll says the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Open Society Foundation headed by George Soros have been contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to leftist organizations that funnel money to groups that are behind these campus upheavals. At a minimum the IRS should take a look at their tax-exempt status to see if they have violated regulations pertaining to what is allowable for nonprofits. The government should also look at whether any of those shouting antisemitic and anti-American slogans are here on student visas. If they are those visas should be revoked and the students deported. Others who are found guilty of giving aid and comfort to terrorists should be expelled. Some wealthy donors to Columbia University and other schools have pledged to withdraw financial support if order and decorum are not restored. All of this feeds the view that America is coming apart. Where are the leaders like Ronald Reagan who label this behavior for what it is and then do something about it? Reagan ended his letter to Dumke with a question that should answer itself: “Hasn’t the time come to take on those neurotics in our faculty group and lay down some rules of conduct for the students comparable to what we’d expect in our own families?” If that time had come in 1967, surely it is long past due in 2024.

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The Slow Decline of the United Methodist Church

“O never give me over to my own heart’s desires, nor let me follow my own imaginations!”– John Wesley There are many reasons for the modern church’s loss of its prophetic voice, politics being just one of them. As in ancient times, trying to embrace what the rest of the world is doing has diminished the power of the church to address what used to be called “sinful behavior.” The latest, but surely not the last example, is what the United Methodist Church did last week at their convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Delegates voted 523 to 161 to replace the definition of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman and will now allow gay Methodist ministers to be ordained and perform same- sex marriages. They dropped language that said homosexual practice “is incompatible with Christian teaching.” African delegates voted against the change. What do they know that others have forgotten? Marriage between a man and a woman IS compatible with Christian teaching. The majority of delegates should read and obey the Scriptures that John Wesley, the founder of their denomination, preached without compromise. In Genesis, it says: “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two will become one flesh.” The idea is to express love through mutual pleasure and produce children. (Genesis 2:24) Jesus quotes that verse in the New Testament, affirming traditional marriage (Matthew 19:5-6) In Judges, it says: “In those days Israel had no king. Everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 21:25). We see that reflected in today’s attitudes about sex, marriage and so many other things. Paul writes that in the end times, “to suit their own desires, they will gather round them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Timothy 4:3). We have entered that age and not just when it comes to faith. It’s the same with politics and politicians, too many of whom are telling us what we want to hear, rather than what we need to hear. There are numerous warnings about what will happen – and has happened – if especially religious leaders ignore Scripture. The ancient Israelites were severely punished for doing just that and now too many Christian denominations are climbing into the same boat. But the boat is sinking, as reflected in the number of people who have left these churches. As The New York Times reported about Methodism three years ago, “ America’s second-largest Protestant denomination is in the final stages of a slow motion rupture that has so far seen the departure of a quarter of the nation’s roughly 30,000 United Methodist churches, according to the denomination’s news agency.” It has only gotten worse since then. What else should be expected if the preaching and teaching reflects what the secular world believes? Why attend these churches? Many congregants are fleeing to other denominations, spending their Sunday mornings at a local coffee shop or staying home. To put things on a secular level, most businesses that lose customers would change their way of doing business to win them back. Not the Methodists, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians, and a branch of Lutherans among others. They are doubling down. Strongly evangelical churches that believe and preach Scripture are growing. Heresy is a bad “business model” for the church. Martin Luther said: “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” If we can’t agree on truth, then anything goes. Historically, the church has been a moral voice when it stood for what Scripture calls “righteousness.” It affirmed doing right things and opposed wrong things. It was a major influence in ending slavery, promoting the right to vote for women and civil rights. While there was opposition to all these, the right prevailed. If the church has lost its voice, who will speak up against wrong things? Who will listen?