Politics

We would be wiser and stronger to take the advice of Thomas Jefferson, the second Governor of Virginia who said, “A wise and frugal Government, shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

Many people wish to prevent the rich from earning more money, even if that results in smaller tax revenues and a less productive economy.

At least 40% of the federal gasoline taxes are wasted on non-highway items of dubious general welfare. And 2.86 cents of the revenue is used to subsidize mass transit unused by all but a few large cities.
As an additional inequity, Virginia is a donor state. That means that Virginia, like most southern states, sends the government more in gasoline taxes than it receives in federal pork. We don’t even get to waste our own money! Most of the pork is sent to the Northeast and to states with more influential senators.

If market forces drive up the price of gasoline, any efforts to reduce it aside from supply and demand punishes the exercise of economic freedom and personal responsibility. If you find the moral argument of freedom unconvincing, free markets can still win the pragmatic debate.

We act as if being a business owner is trivial enough to burden them with the responsibility of funding, implementing, and enforcing whatever social programs are in vogue. Then we exempt ourselves from taking the risk.

The amount of money involved in foreign aid is often large enough to politicize the economic life of a small country and lead to massive graft, corruption, and waste.

Here is a rule for building stable economic systems: Who pays for a service and who is empowered to decide if a service should be given and who actually benefits from the service should all be the same person.

We can have our benefits and lower taxes if we are willing to admit that socializing retirement benefits was a mistake and we return to trusting once again, the in power of free markets.

Despite your political persuasion, Governor Gray Davis shows how even the golden goose can be cooked. His mistakes rightly deserve the ridicule he has received.

The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore.

If you add the costs of complying with government regulations, the cost to society is over 50%. Imagine the economic boom if the other half of workers’ labor were set free to boost productivity!

The current distorted tax system has resulted in a steady decline of dividend payouts over the past two decades and was a major contributing factor in the stock market bubble of 1999 and recent three-year bust.

In the US we allow companies to go bankrupt when they cannot succeed in business.

I say, “Let the rich be rich!”

Let’s not change those things that made us successful in the first place: Maximum freedom for the individual.

We all must become volunteers in fight against terrorism in order to maintain the new world order.

Despite the small decrease, the size of the federal government is still at an unprecedented level.

Higher energy prices will encourage alternative sources of energy that are more environmental friendly.

Filing federal taxes accounts for 82 percent of the federal government’s entire paperwork burden.

These are no longer the questions of the idle rich desiring to hoard their inherited wealth.

Let’s have a tax code that looks like it was developed on purpose!

The major mistake was in not indexing the age of retirement to life expectancy.

Big Government has become a vast machine to redistribute income from those who earn it to those who yearn for it.

Anyone of us could design a better system, but 500 congress people cannot resist the pressure groups who want to twist the code to benefit their particular constituencies.

In 1996, President Clinton said that “the era of big government is over?”