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Clinton's main argument is that Molosovich is just like Hitler and we need to stop him now before he starts WWIII. Well it may be true that Molosovich is similar to Hitler in terms of his ethnic cleansing, Milosovich's behavior doesn't come anywhere near to Hitler's madness. Also, Clinton's notion that the Serbs are as much of a threat to the world as the Third Reich was is absurd, they don't have anywhere near the firepower or ability to make war on their neighbors that the Nazis did.
I guess what bothers me the most about this policy is that we are attacking a country that is having a conflict within their own borders. That's right, Kosovo is a part of the country of Serbia, so our actions would be no different than if England had supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War. We even have recent events in the US such as the Montana freemen or the Waco standoff where we've had extremist groups declaring themselves separate from the US and our response was swift and punishing - isn't this a little hipocritical?! What about the crazies that recently wanted Texas to secede from the US, what would we have thought if the old Warsaw pact wanted to supply them with weapons?!
It just seems to me like our actions have gone too far on this, I mean if the Serbs cross their border and go into Albania, then we should annihilate them, but at this point it seems clear that they are dealing with an internal conflict. Of course they have crossed the line by murdering innocent men, women and children as a part of their conflict with the Kosovo Liberation Army, but is our attack the best solution for the world community to deal with this? Also, don't forget that the US recently signed an agreement related to genocide atrocities which included a process of what to do if such atrocities occur. This process essentially is to go to the UN security council and work through the options to an agreed action that the council supports. I'm not saying that I overall support the UN making these kind of decision, I'm just saying that there is an agreed process in place and that our actions are in violation of this agreement.
Which reminds me of something else absurd I heard Clinton say. He mentioned that we should consider that if we had acted early before WWII, we might have been able to prevent Hitler and the war. First of all, WWII occurred not because of Hitler, but because of the terms of surrender for after WWI that were devastating to the German economy - if Hitler hadn't come to power, someone else would have to start that war. But second, here we have Clinton, evidently claiming if we had someone like him back then, we could have prevented the war - isn't this guy amazing in his arrogance?!
So here is our great leader Clinton, claiming to be preventing WWIII by leading NATO to attack a sovereign country that is having an internal conflict. Clinton however may be making the biggest mistake of his presidency - he claims to be trying to prevent WWIII when in actuality he may be starting it!! Only time and history will tell.........
I think it is VERY dangerous for the government to be in the position of investing our Social Security savings in the market. In a sense, the government would be crossing the line of just passing legislation that might affect the economy and markets, to actually directing capital as it sees fit and participating in the ownership of companies in the private sector.
This can provide some real big distortions in the market because the government will be influencing the prices of individual private companies depending on which companies they allocate the funds to. Do you think we have special interest problems in the government now? Just wait until the government is allocating billions of dollars of investment capital into the private markets - I can only imagine the amount of lobbying and corruption that will go on as companies try to encourage the government to throw investment dollars their way!
Clearly the government needs to stay out of the market as much as possible. The more the government participates in the market, the more grey the line between government and the market and thus the more the government will control the market. This reminds me a little of Clinton's attempt to take over 1/5th of the US economy with his socialized health care plan. Funny how ALL of Clinton's solutions to our problems involve the direct participation of the government. Of course along with this direct participation comes a continued increase in the size of the government and the size of be bureaucracy that goes along with it. And with the bureaucracy comes the cost of administering the bureaucracy.
So let's see if we can sum up Clinton's plan. We should continue to take money from the current working families through the payroll tax, funnel this money to an increasingly large bureaucracy known as the federal government, and then let this bureaucracy pick and choose which companies it want's to invest in based on who lobbies the best and provides the most campaign contributions!! Folks, this is an absolutely INSANE idea and just another way for the liberals to increase their power by increasing the size of the federal government. The government needs to get out of our pockets and let the individual citizens decide where they want to invest their own savings! Oh by the way, it's good to see that Alan Greenspan agrees with me!
Let's take a look at a few facts regarding the current tax code. The current IRS code has over 7 million words in it. This code is incredibly complex, even the IRS has troubles with it - they gave out 8.5 million wrong answers last year to questions about it! The code is so complex that Americans spend 5.4 billion hours complying with the tax code which is more time than it takes to produce every car, truck and van in the US. That is 5.4 billion hours that the American people spent to meet the needs of an bloated government beurocracy! Wouldn't it be better if these 5.4 billion hours were spent on something productive like making products that people want or providing services that people need?
Clearly this is a waste of human capital and we need to do something to remidy this. Can we make the current code simpler? This is doubtful given the current complexity of the system. Every time congress tries to modify the code, it only gets more complex. It seems to me that the only solution is to start from scratch and replace the current code with something much simpler that won't require an army of people to interpret, advise, and enforce. The new code should also be based on the fundamental principles that our country was founded on: equality of treatment under the law. This doesn't mean that everyone is equal, just that everyone is treated the same (the true essence of fairness!). There are several good proposals currently coming from the Republicans, and in my opinion, the flat tax is the best choice.
I didn't think much more about Social Security until I started working at about age 16 and noticed that my paycheck showed an enormous deduction from somebody named FICA. I asked my parents about this and they explained to me that my FICA was how I was funding my retirement through Social Security. This didn't sound too bad, because even though I was being forced to make the payment, at least my money was going towards into my own Social Security account. I knew that Social Security was also for helping people that have had family disasters in life, but I was confident that a majority of my deductions were going into my account and therefore I could feel "secure" about my future. Hey, it was my money, right?! I think that it is likely that a majority of Americans over the years have thought that Social Security worked this way, but in actuality this was the cornerstone of the big Social Security lie.
In fact, this is not anywhere close to how the Social Security system works. Social Security is administered by using the current-year payroll deduction amounts to fund current-year payments to Social Security recipients. This means that my contributions don't go into my "account", instead they are used to pay for current-year recipients. This approach works great as long as you have a lot of people paying into the system, and not too many people taking out of the system. However, over time as the ratio of payers into the system vs people taking out of the system declines (as it will with the baby boomers), then the payments out will exceed the payments in and the system becomes insolvent. Wait a second, isn't this illegal, hey McFly!?! This sounds like one of those illegal pyramid investment schemes where people put their money into and then get to sign up additional people and receive payments from them, and the new people sign up more people and receive money from them and so on. Eventually, however the result is always the same, the number of new participants dries up and those that entered near the end of the pyramid are stuck with receiving far less than they put in. So instead of a majority of my deductions from my friend FICA going to my own account, they end up just being re-distributed to other participants in the system. My "account "never did or never will exist!
You know I'm always hearing how the Social Security system is the most successful government program that the United States has ever introduced. To date, this might be true, but just like any pyramid scheme, the early years are always successful, it's the later years where the scheme starts to crumble and is then revealed for what it is - a scam! And here we are in the late 90's looking forward to the retirement of the baby boomers. Clearly, the Social Security pyramid scheme is getting ready to implode! When the boomers start retiring and claiming their share of Social Security, there won't be enough payers into the system to pay for the boomer's withdrawals, and therefore the system will become bankrupt. So now they're talking about how to make minor adjustments to the system like increasing the taxes, increasing the retirement age and so on to keep it from going bankrupt. But folks, this is not addressing the key issue of the system, which is that it really isn't my own account on my Social Security card, my payments are just being redistributed to someone else.
The only clear, honest answer to the Social Security pyramid mess that we've found ourselves in is privatization. By that I mean that just like I thought, and my parents thought, and their parents thought we were actually doing with the Social Security system, lets establish actual individual accounts for all Americans, just like we currently have with 401Ks through our employers. The majority of our deductions would then go into our own accounts and we could choose what kind of investment risk we want to take with our money. A small minority of our contributions would be used to pay for those that don't have sufficient funds to cover their needs. I also realize that there is no way we can change over to this all at once, we clearly need some kind of phase-in time period to allow the system to change over gradually so that noone falls through the cracks.
Privatization to me is the clear way to fix the Social Security system, but whatever we choose to do, we need to do it soon, because the Social Security pyramid scheme is about to collapse!
This claim that the flat tax is unfair just boggles the mind! How can you say that a single rate applied to all Americans would be unfair to anyone?! To me, the definition of fairness is to treat all Americans equally - preety simple stuff. Instead, the democrats have engineered a tax system over the years that treats all Americans differently depending on their income level - clearly this is descrimination based on income level! How can the democrats constantly claim that they saviors of fairness and then support the current tax system which is obviously so unfair?
The Bill of Rights is clear when it states that "all men are created equal", and therefore should be treated equally under the law. In fact, we do this naturally all over the place in our country. For example, when you go to the grocery store and purchase milk and eggs, there is not a different price at the checkout counter depending on what your income level is. When you go to the gas station, we all pay the same price for a gallon of gas regardless of our income, and so on. So why do we start to discriminate when it comes time to calculate the amount of tax we pay to the government?
The democrats would say that it is important for those that make more money to pay more taxes. However, this is the case with the flat tax as well. Not only is it fair because we all pay the same rate, but as your income increases you naturally pay a higher amount of taxes because you make more. You don't need a higher rate to accomplish this! In addition, any approve flat tax plan would include generous deductions for the lower income tax filers, therefore those that truly need help will not have to pay any income taxes at all!!
Clearly the democrats are trying to nuke the idea of a flat tax because it will hurt their power base and they will no longer get to promise special treatment to a particular segment of the country like they haved so much in the past. To them it's just about votes and power, the more handouts they can give, the more they can try to divide different segments of our country, the more they think they will be able to retain and expand their power base. That doesn't sound very "fair" to me!
The Democrats say "use caution" when deciding what to do about any possible budget surplus. This is a special code phrase for "don't let the Republicans talk about tax cuts"! The media likes to pick up on this and try to show how Democrats are so much better at 'thinking through' the problem than the extremist Republicans, who only want to have drastic tax cuts. This is also a smoke screen that helps the democrats to talk about so-called "investments" that they would like to make in education, child-care, social security, need I go on?
Clearly, Rep. Kasick got it right when he discussed this issue on Meet the Press. What we should do if we truly end up with a surplus is use some of it to pay down the debt, and then give the rest back to the people that we took it from in the first place - the taxpayers! It's their money!! What we definately should not do is to start talking about spending any possible surplus on expanding government programs, which is exactly what the Democrats want to do!
Bill Corbridge © 1997 @ corbrwl@yahoo.com
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