Washington D.C. Is Essentially Just A Gigantic Money Machine - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

Washington D.C. Is Essentially Just A Gigantic Money Machine Posted: 19 Jul 2017 Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG If you have ever wondered why our leaders in Washington D.C. seem to act so strangely, the truth is that it almost always comes down to just one thing.  It has been said that “money makes the world go round”, and that is definitely true in Washington.  This year the federal government will spend more than 4 trillion dollars, and that represents well over one-fifth of our national GDP.  With so much money coming in and so much money going out, the stakes are incredibly high, and that is why so much money is poured into political campaigns on the national level. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that those that live the closest to this gigantic money machine have benefited greatly.  Forbes just released their brand new rankings for 2017, and they found that five out of the top 10 wealthiest counties in the entire country are suburbs of Washington D.C.… Virginia’s Loudoun County holds the title of the nation’s richest county with a median household income of $125,900. While nearly 10,000 residents commute to the District, according to Forbes, about 11,700 businesses employ 161,000 county residents, with Dulles International Airport, Loudoun County Public Schools and the Department of Homeland Security leading that charge. The nearby city of Falls Church, Fairfax and Arlington counties in Virginia and Howard County in Maryland also lead the nation based on wealth. In general, salaries for federal workers are significantly higher than in the private sector, and benefit packages are usually much better. But in addition to having a very high concentration of federal workers, the D.C. area is also home to hordes of lawyers, lobbyists, defense contractors and other government vendors.  Big government means big business for those guys, and business has been very good in recent years… The federal government has a lot to do with this: The Capitol and the economy orbiting around it (including lawyers, defense contractors, computer engineers along the Dulles Corridor, and doctors near NIH) attract college graduates who reliably contribute to six-figure households. Crucially, there was a $1.7 billion increase in lobbying between 1998 and 2010, as Dylan Matthews explained. With each $1 million of lobbying “associated with a $3.70 increase in the D.C. wage premium,” the money pouring into Washington wound up in the pockets of its residents. This certainly isn’t the limited government that our founders intended. So where did we go wrong? One of the big turning points came in 1913.  That is the year when the Federal Reserve and the modern version of the income tax were established.  The Federal Reserve was designed by the elite to get the federal government very deeply into debt, and an income tax was needed to help service that debt and to help pay for the much larger government that the progressives were wanting. Back then, D.C. was nothing like it is today.  In fact, even in the 1970s there were still large farms inside the Beltway.  But the federal government just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it is a four trillion dollar monstrosity. What I believe we should do is to dismantle as much of that monstrosity as we possibly can.  Instead of asking which government agencies we should close, I believe that we should be asking which government agencies we really need to leave open. A great place to start would be by abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS and the income tax.  Those institutions are at the very core of the Washington money machine, and so it would essentially be like tearing the heart out of big government. And don’t worry, the federal government would still have plenty of money coming in.  The individual income tax only accounts for about 46 percent of all federal revenue, and theoretically we could still have an absolutely enormous federal government without an income tax.  I once wrote an article that listed 97 different ways that various levels of government get money out of us each year, and so getting rid of the federal income tax would still leave 96 ways for the politicians to extract money from us. As I remind my readers so frequently, the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no income tax and no central bank.  But I know that a lot of people out there love the 1.33 percent average yearly GDP growth rate that we have been experiencing over the past decade and would have a really hard time giving that up. Unfortunately, it would actually be a very tough transition to a much more limited federal government because so much of our society is geared around the enormous money machine in Washington.  In 2018, more than a billion dollars will be spent on the mid-term elections, and most of that money will be going to incumbents that are committed to maintaining the status quo. If we ever want things to really start changing in Washington, we have got to start sending people there that haven’t been bought off by the big money interests. In my congressional district there is no incumbent running in 2018, and nobody else in the race is nearly as conservative as I am.  But since I can’t be bought by the special interests, I am going to have to rely on grassroots support. Donald Trump showed us that anything is possible in American politics.  When Jeb Bush decided to run for president, he had an extremely long list of endorsements and a hundred million dollars behind him, and he still got trounced by Trump because Trump had a much stronger message. If we stand united, we can take our government back and there won’t be anything that the establishment will be able to do about it. But if we sit back and do nothing, the cesspool of corruption in Washington D.C. will just continue to get deeper and deeper. Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

‘When I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing’ - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

‘When I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing’

Posted: 19 Jun 2017  Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

The quote in the headline comes from Ron Paul, and it should be the goal of every conservative lawmaker in the entire country.  When professional politicians tell you that they are in favor of reforming the tax code or reducing taxes a little bit, essentially what they are telling you is that they are perfectly fine with the status quo.  They may want to tweak things slightly, but in general they are content with big taxes, big spending and big government. 

I spent an entire year getting a Master of Laws in Taxation at the University of Florida Law School, and in my opinion the best thing that Congress could do to the tax code would be to run it through a shredder and put it in a dumpster.  As I noted the other day, the tax code is now more than four million words long and it takes Americans about six billion dollars a year to comply with it. 

Those that believe that they are offering the American people a “solution” by proposing to tinker with this abominable mess are just fooling themselves.

The only long-term solution that is going to work is to get rid of the entire steaming pile of garbage.  Ron Paul understood this, and we would be very wise to take his advice.  The following is the full version of the quote from the headline above…

“By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.”

If I run for Congress, and I am very strongly leaning in that direction, this is what my position on taxes is going to be.

Of course we are going to have to dramatically change the composition of the House and the Senate in order to get this done, so in the short-term we may have to focus on reducing tax rates and the size of the tax code by as much as possible.

But ultimately, the goal will be to abolish the tax code and the IRS altogether.

We have become so accustomed to an income tax that many of us couldn’t possibly imagine a society without one.  But today there are seven states that do not have one, and that includes very big states such as Texas and Florida.  And from 1872 to 1913, there was no federal income tax.  When a federal income tax was finally reinstituted in 1913, the rates were extremely low.  The following comes from Politifact…

The 1913 law imposed a tax of 1 percent on income up to $20,000, for both individual and joint filers. However, exemptions from the tax — the first $3,000 of income for individuals and the first $4,000 for joint filers — meant “virtually all middle-class Americans” were excused from paying, according to W. Elliot Brownlee’s book, Federal Taxation in America. The law also put in place a graduated surtax on incomes above $20,000; the highest rate paid, 7 percent, applied to Americans making more than $500,000 (about $11.4 million in 2011 dollars).

So how did things go for our country during the four decades when there was no federal income tax?

Well, if you regularly follow my work you already know the answer to that question.

That period of time just happened to be the best period of economic growth in U.S. history.
Oh, but we wouldn’t want to change from the way things work today, would we?  After all, the U.S. economy has grown at a blistering average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent over the past decade, and we are actually behind that pace so far in 2017.

If you want a no growth economy and a steadily shrinking middle class, then our current system is perfect for you.

But I believe that we can do so much better.

So how are we going to fund the federal government if we eliminate the income tax?
Well, the truth is that taxing individual incomes accounts for only 46.2 percent of all federal revenue.  The federal government has lots of other ways that it raises money, but of course we wouldn’t be able to keep the massively bloated federal bureaucracy that we have today.  We would need to reduce the size and scope of the federal government to an appropriate constitutional level, and of course most politicians on the left would resist this greatly.

There are some federal agencies and programs that we could completely eliminate altogether.  If it was up to me, the EPA, the Department of Education and the BATFE would be good places to start.  Any essential functions that they are currently performing could easily be absorbed by other agencies.

There are very few politicians in our entire country that will still talk like this, because our leaders have taken us so far down the road toward “a social state” that most Americans don’t even know what “limited government” looks like anymore.

I would like to share with you an old newspaper clipping that was posted to Facebook by Get Involved, You Live Here…

Over the past several decades, the left has made a tremendous amount of progress toward achieving the goals that Saul Alinsky originally outlined in Rules for Radicals.  Obamacare was a giant step toward federal control over our healthcare system, poverty is exploding as the middle class shrinks, we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt, our public schools have become left-wing indoctrination centers, and God has been pushed out of almost every corner of public life.

We should be very thankful that we got Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton, but many radical leftists consider Trump to simply be a bump in the road on the way to completely eradicating our way of life.

They want to criminalize what we believe by making it “hate speech”, they want to steal the minds of the next generation by dominating our system of education, and they want to use government institutions and the legal system as tools to completely reshape society in their image.

The only way that we are going to defeat this tyranny is if we stand up and fight for our country, and that is precisely what we are going to do.

Debunking The 'Separation of Church and State' Myth - MATT BARBER CHARISMA NEWS

Remain undaunted by the threat of government intervention or punitive action by the state. (Reuters)

Debunking The 'Separation of Church and State' Myth

 2/2/2016 MATT BARBER  charisma news

The American church has a problem. It's one part fear, one part confusion and one part apathy. Pastors, priests and rabbis have long swallowed the false notion that all things religious and all things political are somehow mutually exclusive—that never the twain shall meet.

Leading up to Ronald Reagan's landslide presidential victory in 1980, Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty University, captured the crux of the church's apathy problem. "I'm being accused of being controversial and political," he said. "I'm not political. But moral issues that become political, I still fight. It isn't my fault that they've made these moral issues political. But because they have doesn't stop the preachers of the gospel from addressing them. ..."

"What then is wrong?" he continued. "I say the problem, first of all, is in the pulpits of America. We preachers must take the blame. For too long we have fearfully stood back and failed to address the issues that are corrupting the republic. I repeat Proverbs 14:34: 'Righteousness exalteth a nation.' Not military might, though that's important. Not financial resources, though that has been the enjoyment of this nation above all nations in the last 200 years. But spiritual power is the backbone, the strength, of a nation."

Indeed, it is not just within the church's purview, but it is the church's duty to insert itself into state matters relating to morality, public policy and culture at large.

Contrary to popular opinion, the words "separation of church and state" are found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. Yet many are misled into believing they are.

So why the confusion?

It's been intentionally fomented. It's the byproduct of a decades-long religious cleansing campaign. The First Amendment's "Establishment Clause," a mere 10 words, is the primary tool secular separatists misuse and abuse to "fundamentally transform" America to reflect their own anti-Christian self-image.

Yet these words remain abundantly clear in both scope and meaning. The Establishment Clause states merely: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. ..."

That's it.

And the founders meant exactly what they said: "Congress," as in the United States Congress, "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

In a letter to Benjamin Rush, a fellow-signer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, often touted by the left as the great church-state separationist, spelled out exactly what this meant then, and what it means today. The First Amendment's Establishment Clause was simply intended to restrict Congress from affirmatively "establishing," through federal legislation, a national Christian denomination (similar to the Anglican Church of England).

As Jefferson put it: "[T]he clause of the Constitution" covering "freedom of religion" was intended to necessarily preclude "an establishment of a particular form of Christianity through the United States."

The individual states, however, faced no such restriction. In fact, until as late as 1877, and after religious free exercise became absolute with passage of the 14th Amendment, most states did have an official state form of Christianity. Massachusetts, for example, sanctioned the Congregational Church until 1833.

Even so, today's anti-Christian ruling class insists on revising history. The ACLU's own promotional materials, for example, overtly advocate unconstitutional religious discrimination: "The message of the Establishment Clause [to the U.S. Constitution] is that religious activities must be treated differently from other activities to ensure against governmental support for religion," they claim.

This is abject nonsense. It's unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination—a twisted misrepresentation of the First Amendment. Secular "progressivism" depends upon deception as much as it relies upon revisionism. Yes, "separation" applies, but only insofar as it requires the state to remain separate from the church. That is to say, that government may not interfere with the free exercise of either speech or religion.

For decades, hard-left anti-theist groups like the ACLU, People for the American Way (PFAW) and Barry Lynn's Americans United (AU) have employed a cynical disinformation scheme intended to intimidate clergy into silence on issues of morality, culture and Christian civic involvement—issues that, as Falwell noted, are not political so much as they have been politicized; issues that are inherently "religious."

AU, for instance, annually sends tens-of-thousands of misleading letters to churches across the nation warning pastors, priests and rabbis that, "If the IRS determines that your house of worship has engaged in unlawful intervention, it can revoke the institution's tax-exempt status."

That's a lie.

In reality, there is no legal mechanism whatsoever for the Internal Revenue Service to take away a church's tax exemption. Churches are inherently tax-exempt, or, better still, "tax immune," simply by virtue of being a church. Churches do not need permission from the IRS, nor can the IRS revoke a church's tax immunity.

Since 1934, when the lobbying restriction was added to the Internal Revenue Code, not a single church has ever lost its tax-exempt status. Since 1954, when the political endorsement/opposition prohibition was added, only one church has ever lost its IRS letter ruling, but even that church did not lose its tax-exempt status.

The case involved the Church at Pierce Creek in New York, which placed full-page ads in USA Today and the Washington Times opposing then-Gov. Bill Clinton for president. The ads were sponsored by the church, and donations were solicited. The IRS revoked the church's letter ruling, but not its tax-exempt status. The church sued, and the court noted that churches are tax-exempt without an IRS letter ruling. It ruled that "because of the unique treatment churches receive under the Internal Revenue Code, the impact of the revocation is likely to be more symbolic than substantial." Not even this church lost its tax-exempt status, and not one donor was affected by this incident.

As Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel has observed, "Pastors can preach on biblical, moral and social issues, such as natural marriage and abortion, can urge the congregation to register and vote, can overview the positions of the candidates, and may personally endorse candidates. Churches may distribute nonpartisan voter guides, register voters, provide transportation to the polls, hold candidate forums, and introduce visiting candidates."

Since 2008, the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom has spearheaded a First Amendment exercise called "Pulpit Freedom Sunday." Since then, thousands of pastors across America have boldly exercised their guaranteed constitutional rights by addressing "political" issues from the pulpit. This has included directly endorsing candidates. These pastors have dared the IRS to come after them, and, not surprisingly, the IRS has balked.

Pastors, this election season follow the lead of Christ. Speak moral/political truths, in love, fearlessly. Remain undaunted by the threat of government intervention or punitive action by the state. And encourage your congregation to vote for candidates who sincerely reflect, in both word and deed, a biblical worldview and biblical principles.

Be "salt and light."

Because Christ didn't give us an option to do otherwise.

Matt Barber is founder and editor-in chief of barbwire.com. He is an author, columnist, cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on Twitter: @jmattbarber).

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