Dave Ramsey - Politicians Can't Fix Your Life

Great message about empowerment from Dave Ramsey.

Open Question to Trump Supporters

I admit I don't understand the Trump phenomenon.  I hope a Trump supporter will explain it to me.  I'm open to being convinced, but I just don't see a lot to like about that guy or his approach to the Presidency.

I get that there's a lot of frustration right now with the direction of the country.  From economic to foreign policy, the current administration leaves a lot to be desired.  Unfortunately, I don't think Donald Trump is the right person for the job.  

I have never heard Donald Trump talk about the Constitution, limits on executive power, or what his guiding principles as a leader would be.  I suspect he doesn't have any firm principles; his convictions are decided issue-by-issue, and he does what he thinks is best.

News flash - so does President Obama.  And that's my real problem with Trump - it's 'new boss same as the old boss'; another egotistical person sitting in the White House who thinks he/she has all the answers.  I don't want a Monarch to 'do what he thinks is best'.  I want a leader who will respect the limits of the office, uphold the laws that have been passed, and work with Congress to improve those laws that need improving (not 'go it alone' with his pen and a phone).  

Beyond governing philosophy, I think it's embarrassing how Trump responds to any criticism with personal attacks (Oh yeah, well, you're stupid, you have bad hair, you're weak, you're falling in the polls, your magazine is dying, etc. - all actual responses from Trump in response to criticism).  

So, to recap - the Republican headliner is an unlikable guy who attacks anyone who disagrees with him like a middle schooler, describes no guiding principles and has an approach to the Presidency that can be summed up as "I'll do it better".  

What a disgrace.   

Killing the Golden Goose of Capitalism

What kind of fantasy land do politicians live in that they think their efforts to impose costs on businesses will not result in a reaction from those businesses?  No one should be surprised - when you raise the cost of something, demand goes down.  That's basic economics, and should be easily understood by everyone.

Killing the golden goose of capitalism


Jan. 21, 2016

 
By ADAM B. SUMMERS / Staff columnist

The financial world, and quite a few employees, were taken aback recently when Wal-Mart announced that it will be closing 269 of its 11,600 stores, including 154 in the U.S., although it still plans to open 300 stores worldwide in the coming year.

Oakland officials “expressed shock” at Wal-Mart’s decision, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington, D.C., leaders were “furious,” according to a Washington Post headline.

They only have themselves to blame.

While Wal-Mart President and CEO Doug McMillon was quick to dispel the notion that Wal-Mart’s voluntary “investment in wages” had anything to do with the store closures, some have noted a pattern among the more poorly performing stores getting the axe: they tend to be located in cities with high government-imposed minimum wages and other costly anti-business policies.

A San Francisco Chronicle report noted that Wal-Mart stores were closing in San Jose and Oakland, which each adopted minimum wages higher than the state rate – currently $10.30 and hour and $12.55 an hour, respectively – while the two stores in San Leandro, a city that did not increase the minimum wage, will remain open.

“I think it really is a little discouraging,” Oakland Councilman Larry Reid told the Chronicle. “The minimum wage in the city of Oakland played a factor, was one of the factors, they considered in closing the stores.”

Among the seven stores closing in Southern California are two in the city of Los Angeles (Chinatown and the Crenshaw District), L.A. County (Altadena) and Long Beach (on East Fifth Street). Both the city and county of L.A. adopted ordinances last summer that will hike the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Long Beach just approved a measure Wednesday that will raise the minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2019, and possibly to $15 by 2021.

City officials were also upset in the District of Columbia, where Wal-Mart is keeping its three existing stores but announced that it could no longer move ahead with plans for two additional stores in poor areas east of the Anacostia River, where the jobs they would bring were eagerly anticipated (as was the sales tax revenue they would generate for the district). The retailer had only been allowed to operate in the city by virtue of a “handshake deal” in 2013 whereby it agreed to open stores in poorer neighborhoods.

“It’s an outrage,” former mayor Vincent C. Gray told the Washington Post. “A deal’s a deal,” snapped Councilman Jack Evans.

Such a deal is ridiculous on its face, however, since business owners in a free society are not blackmailed or otherwise coerced to operate or not operate in certain areas. They open their stores where they deem fit and profitable, and consumers make the ultimate decision about the wisdom of their location decisions.

As Councilman Evans related to the Post, Wal-Mart’s decision was influenced by the city’s $11.50 hourly minimum wage – which could rise to $15 an hour if voters approve a ballot measure in November – and proposals to require a minimum number of hours for hourly workers and force employers to pay into a fund for employees’ family and medical leave.

It is unfortunate that those in poor neighborhoods who are most in need of the jobs, and wide selection of goods and produce at cheap prices that Wal-Mart offers will be deprived of these things due to the greedy and shortsighted policies of their governments, which make it too costly to operate at all. Wal-Mart is a business, not a charity. It is an employer, not a make-work jobs program.

For too long, big government elected officials and advocates have treated businesses as cash cows for their pet programs, many of which are used to buy votes at election time. It is time that they learned that they cannot keep biting the hand that feeds them without deleterious consequences.

Gun control won't protect us

'American Sniper' widow: Gun control won't protect us

By Taya Kyle

Restricting our freedoms to protect against the very few who want to do evil would be a mistake

I am sharing my thoughts with you because I feel I can relate to people on both sides of the issue of gun control. I have been afraid of guns, I have sworn I would never use a gun on another person and so did not need one, and I have wanted to deny the existence of evil.

I have also become a gun owner, am prepared to defend myself with a firearm, and understand the fear of my freedoms being taken away.

I have been touched by extreme violence and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil. Because I have felt, and lived, all of these things, I have spent much time thinking about evil, freedom and not only the world we live in, but the country too.

There are many facts and statistics people will use to argue both sides of the gun control issue. We can use other countries as examples and we can use crime rates of cities, states and countries. And no matter how thoroughly researched the statistics are, people have an emotional reaction to this issue that almost always overrides the statistics presented, other than this one: The violent crime rate in the United States has gone down substantially in the last 20 years.

Our fears, though, have gone up, because of the high-profile incidents of mass killings of people caught unaware. Killers have taken lives in churches, schools, hospitals, government buildings, the site of a marathon, the Twin Towers and even a part of a military base where soldiers were known to be unarmed.
Our vulnerability

These killings highlight the fact that any of us, and any of our loved ones, are vulnerable when caught with our guard down against another person who desires to do harm.

Does it matter what weapon they used? If it was a rifle, a pipe bomb, a truck of fertilizer, a pressure cooker or a plane -- the end result is the same. Yet millions of other people have the freedom to have those very same things and will never use them to kill.

These horrific mass killings were committed by a very small number of people who wish to harm and kill others. When they do it, we flock to the scene and ask "Why?" Who are these people who choose to do harm? What is their story? What went wrong? What are they trying to tell us?

Ultimately, in our horror, we give them a voice they would never have had otherwise. Is our insatiable need to know and find out how their lives might have gone wrong part of the result they are looking for? Is that part of the reason there is an incentive to do such harm to innocent people? We know it isn't the availability of the weapon, because they used different methods, different weapons.

We can't legislate human nature. If we add up the number of these mass killers over the last decade, how many people are we talking about? Fewer than 40 over the last decade? Do we want to make laws for millions based on the choices of fewer than 40 evildoers?

Can we fix these people? Can we legislate out of them the desire to kill? Those in the business of fighting crime and analyzing mental illness can look into the lives of each of these killers and tell you the red flags that popped up before the massacre.

Why don't we deal with that instead of banning the tools very few use? By the very nature of these crimes, we know that evildoers don't care about the laws. After all, murder is against the law, and they are choosing to ignore the law from the moment they plan to harm people.

Beyond that, who among us has the right to tell me I will murder someone because I have a gun? And who can tell me that I can only defend and protect myself in a way they feel comfortable with?

Just having access to a deadly weapon doesn't turn someone into a killer. Have you ever felt road rage? Many of us who have cars have felt some form of extreme anger at other drivers because we feel they have put us in harm's way. We might even envision ramming their cars or cutting them off in return, but do we actually do it? No, because the overwhelming majority of us never want to take another human life.

Even special ops guys, military and police who are trained to kill for legitimate purposes, who are familiar with multiple weapons and have access to the weapons and ammunition -- even these people, who are experienced, will tell you they never know if they can pull the trigger until placed in a position to use deadly force to protect another person.

My government has proven that it's not able to protect me against people who want to kill. And I don't blame the government, because there is only one person to blame here: The man or woman who decided to kill.
Killers will use any means

If you put an assault rifle in my hands or yours, I am not going to murder anyone, and I am guessing you won't either. But what makes gun control advocates think that someone who decides to kill will not use any means necessary to do so?

The person who killed my husband, Chris, worked in an armory with daily access to every caliber of high powered weapon for years. He chose to kill when he got out of an environment of accountability and drug testing.

Simply having a weapon did not make him a murderer. His life choices did. What red flags did he display? Well, the prominence he got after he took the lives of Chris and Chad Littlefield resulted in many people hearing his claim of post-traumatic stress disorder. And yet, psychiatrists on both the prosecution and defense testified he did not have PTSD. He was however a known drug user. Based on testimony at his trial, people around him not only tolerated but sometimes participated in the drug use and enabled him by seeing him as the "victim." He repeatedly got out of trouble by claiming PTSD.

The officers would take him at his word, deliver him to a mental health facility where the facility would write a diagnosis which is known in that community as a label for likely drug use, and they would release him. Because of the HIPAA law and our desire to protect everyone's privacy, we allow bad behavior to slip through the cracks.

Imagine how different things would be if a mental health facility could tell police, "This is a drug user," and the police could go track him for drugs and put him in jail for breaking those laws instead of waiting for worse crimes in the future.

In the state of Texas, there is a fairly new certification process for our police where officers are trained to notice and recognize mental health issues and have knowledge of the drugs people take and the effects of them. So how they intervene is different based on whether they believe there is a mental health issue vs. a drug issue. Wouldn't it be a better use of our time to work through this issue? It gives police a different crisis intervention method.

Some advocates want to restrict certain kinds of guns -- perhaps allowing a pistol but not an assault rifle.

To those who don't know guns well, the term "assault rifle" brings to mind either a sniper's gun or a fully automatic weapon we have seen in the movies, meant to mow down large numbers of people. In actuality, fully automatic weapons are already highly restricted and require an additional license most gun owners will never have.

The lack of understanding makes it easy to develop rhetoric and legislation that will calm the fears of people who don't understand a given subject, but that doesn't really change any end result because we cannot legislate the evil side of humanity.
Freedom and responsibility

Cars are tools that is involved in about as many deaths as guns. If you are a driver prone to drinking and driving, should we only allow you to drive an ultracompact car? Not an SUV which could kill more people? No, we take away the drunk driver's access to legally drive any car. This is about freedom to do as you like until you prove incapable of showing good moral judgment.

In this country, we give freedom and take it away once you prove to be unworthy of the freedom we have given you. Nobody suggests taking away cars or going through a battery of tests to determine whether or not you might be a drunk driver one day.

Does every man commit rape? There is a human element here that is real and we cannot legislate. Would we take away the freedom of all men by castration because some cannot handle what they have? No, we allow freedom until an individual chooses to take something that others use for good and use it to do harm to another.

Are our current laws being enforced? Are felons and known drug users really put in jail when arrested for a lesser crime and known to have a gun? In most situations, no, because police have more pressing issues than to incarcerate a felon for having a gun that he or she hasn't used in a crime. We have plenty of laws on the books that we cannot or do not enforce. Let's start enforcing what we have before creating new laws.

Understandably, we want a solution to ensure that we and our loved ones will never be in the situation of being caught unaware by someone who chose to do evil. Mass killers have targeted churches, businesses, movie theaters, schools and hospitals, but they could as easily take their violence to a place where people are armed. Yet they do not.

Even at Fort Hood, the killer chose a place on the base where he knew soldiers would be unarmed. What does that tell us? That evil targets those who are unprepared for the evil to strike.

When Chris and I were looking into our personal security after the book "American Sniper" came out, we took measures and thought of different scenarios, and Chris told me that still, based on his experience, "Babe, if someone wants to kill me, they will."

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were arguably some of the best-protected men in our country. Did it stop someone from shooting them?

As Reagan once said, "You won't get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. There is only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and criminals, lock them up and if you don't actually throw away the key, lose it for a long time."
The evil few; the responsible majority

And what we need to do is find the courage to accept that from the dawn of time until the day man no longer walks the earth, evil will find a way. Murder is nothing new, it is not going away and it is not dependent on one method of killing or another.

We can forge ahead knowing that while evil is among us, it involves the few. The good, responsible people are the vast majority. We can trust each other with basic freedoms until one of us proves to be untrustworthy by maliciously, intentionally harming another of us.

If you have never owned a weapon, or have never known the masses of peaceful gun owners who love their families and are in nurturing professions such as counseling, nursing, social work and pastoral jobs, may I suggest you talk to them about why they cherish their freedom to have these weapons?

We have slipped into a land of government that has promised the moon, seldom delivered and driven us into a world of more laws, more government, and less freedom -- and none of that has stopped murder, pain and suffering.

No government can provide the utopia many seek. My hope for this country is that we remain a people who value freedom, who have the courage to face the realities with faithful hearts instead of anxious ones. I hope our people hold tight to the notion that we do not have to be a fear-ridden country focused on restrictions, but rather that we remain the land of the free and home of the brave.

God bless you and thank you for giving me some of your time.

Gun Laws + Limits on Presidential Power

I have my doubts that historians will criticize Obama's "overreach", but the author makes excellent points here about how divorced public expectations (The president should do something!) are from the design of our constitutional system (It is Congress who does things, and the President who enforces the laws passed by Congress).  The President going around the elected officials to enforce his views should be not celebrated by the public.  

Mr. Harsayni's example of the outcry that would result if a Republican President passed restrictions on abortion in a similar fashion is an excellent parallel - you can guarantee that would not be celebrated.  

Laws should be left to the legislature - the President is free to propose new legislation and persuade others to share his viewpoint, but he should not be "making laws".  Note the headline on the TV screen below from today.  I bet the President wishes he could just "announce new laws", but that's now how it works in the US.    
 

Obama’s Legacy Will Be Executive Overreach
Obama can't do much on guns, but he has mainstreamed a dangerous idea about governing.


By David Harsanyi
January 5, 2016

Over the winter break I finally got around to binge-watching “Parks and Recreation.” In case you missed the show’s seven-year run, it’s about a fascistic, small-town councilwoman who believes it’s a politician’s job to impose her notions of morality, safety, and decency on everyone, no matter what voters want or what the system dictates. She is justifiably recalled by the people of her town after attempting to regulate portion sizes at fast food restaurants, but ends up running a federal office where she can do big things without the consent of the people.

Now, I realize that most of the show’s fans see the narrative in a vastly different light and the protagonist, Leslie Knopes, as the sort of idealist, compassionate, and principled politician Americans should love. “Parks and Rec” can be fantastically funny (and it has a big heart), but as I watched I was often reminded that many people glorify ideas like “public service” — a preposterous term that treats politics as if it were a sacrifice without pay, power, or prestige — and “doing something” as a moral imperative no matter how politicians get it done.

When I got back from my winter vacation, America was still being run by a two-term president who believes it’s his job to impose his notions of morality, safety, and decency on everyone, often trying to work around the limits the system places on him. This week Barack Obama is going to institute new restrictions on Americans unilaterally — expanding background checks, closing supposed “loopholes,” and tightening the process for law-abiding gun owners — because Congress “won’t act” and also because he believes it’s the right thing to do. Neither of them are compelling reasons to legislate from the White House.

No post-World War II president has justified his executive overreach by openly contending he was working around the law-making branch of government.

Perhaps no post-World War II president (and maybe none before) has justified his executive overreach by openly contending he was working around the law-making branch of government because it has refused to do what he desired. Whether a court finds his actions constitutional or not, it’s an argument that stands, at the very least, against the spirit American governance. Today, many liberals call this “leadership.”

The most likely result of his new gun push will be that hundreds of thousands of Americans who understandably fear the mission creep of government will end up buying a whole bunch of guns (Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co. stocks rose against the dipping market on Monday). The flow of donations to Second Amendment advocacy groups will almost certainly rise, and gun violence — which has fallen considerably over the past 20 years of gun ownership expansion — will not be addressed.

But more consequentially — and this may be the most destructive legacy of the Obama presidency — is the mainstreaming of the idea that if Congress “fails to act” it’s okay for the president to figure out a way to make law himself. Hillary’s already applauded Obama’s actions because, as she put it, “Congress won’t act; we have to do something.” This idea is repeated perpetually by the Left, in effect arguing that we live in direct democracy run by the president (until a Republican is in office, of course). On immigration, on global warming, on Iran, on whatever crusade liberals are on, the president has a moral obligation to act if Congress doesn’t do what he wants.

Perhaps Obama’s most destructive legacy is the mainstreaming of the idea that if Congress ‘fails to act’ it’s okay for the president to make law himself.

To believe this, you’d have to accept two things: 1) That Congress has a responsibility to pass laws on the issues that the president desires or else they would be abdicating their responsibility, and 2) That Congress has not already acted.

In 2013, the Senate rejected legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases and to ban certain weapons and ammunition, and they would almost certainly oppose nearly every idea Obama has to curb gun ownership today. Congress has acted, just not in the manner Obama desires.

“Change, as always, is going to take all of us,” Obama theorized the other day. “The gun lobby is loud and well organized in its defense of effortlessly available guns for anyone. The rest of us are going to have to be just as passionate and well organized in our defense of our kids. That’s the work of citizenship — to stand up and fight for the change that we seek.”

Get it? You can be with the loud and reprehensible gun lobby who supports allowing criminals to obtain guns “effortlessly,” or you can stand with the kids. Your choice!

Well, not exactly your choice. As a reactionary, I wonder is it really the duty of “citizenship” to cheer on a president who single-handedly constrains Americans from practicing one of their constitutional rights? If President Bush had instituted a series of restrictions on the abortion industry — since it has a loud, well-organized, and well-funded lobby that wants to make abortions “effortlessly” available — without congressional input, would that have been procedurally okay with liberals? You know, for the children? I don’t imagine so.

Is it really is the work of ‘citizenship’ to cheer on a president who single-handedly constrains Americans from practicing one of their constitutional rights?

Or is it okay this time because the president claims (and many in the media ape) that his initiatives will “combat gun violence in the U.S.?” Is the threat of violence enough to empower the executive branch to place strictures on rights clearly laid out in the Constitution without any debate? Does the same go for fighting terrorism when a Republican becomes president?

The truth is, Obama has attempted to govern without Congress ever since Democrats rammed the Affordable Care Act through. It was the first time any consequential reform was instituted by a single political party, poisoning any chance of building consensus on major legislation in the foreseeable future. Since then, Republicans have frustrated Democrats, and on nearly every issue that matters to Obama. Obama has gone as far as he can, and sometimes farther, to administer law through our loudest, largest, most powerful, and well-funded bureaucracies.

A lot of people justify this behavior for the most obvious reason: they don’t care about process; they only care about issues. It’s true that the upside of executive orders and actions is that they can be easily undone when a new president is elected. But with the intractability of both parties only becoming more pronounced, the temptation to use the Obama model of legislating through the executive branch will become increasingly attractive to politicians and their supporters.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.