Days before the election, Barack Obama flew to New Jersey to not let the crisis of Sandy go to waste and a photo of him comforting Donna Vanzant was widely circulated.
Ms. Vanzant is the owner of North Point Marina in Brigantine which was practically wiped out.
Ms. Vanzant notes that her insurance company is dragging its feet, FEMA is no where to be found and the President responded to her plea for help with a form letter thanking her for supporting the troops.
“When you get a hug from the President of the United States, you feel like there’s something there. A promise was made,” she said.
A big thank you to the emotion-driven, low-information voters who returned this incompetent phony to the White House.
2012 Bad Laws Listed By Liberty Index — Here are some laws passed in Pennsylvania that have a major and adverse affect on liberty as determined by Bob Guzzardi of LibertyIndex.Com
Act 13 of 2012 (HB 1950 signed into law Feb. 14) The Marcellus Shale Impact Tax/Fee
The Liberty Index scores Act 13 of 2012 a Tier 3 (Major Impact on Liberty)– which means that it is against liberty and against the forgotten taxpayer –because the misnamed “Impact Fee” is, in reality, a tax. A real Impact Fee would be segregated in a fund to compensate people for damage from “externalities” of Marcellus Shale drilling. This phony fee does not do that but redistributes profits without regard to merit.
One would think that if natural gas were discovered in your backyard, you would be thrilled. Instead we tax it. It’s Pennsylvania’s number one job creator. And we tax it more. Lower energy costs mean a higher standard of living, more production of more goods and services for more people. And we tax it more.
The money generated is not based on any real world damage or impact but on a formula unrelated to impact.
The Marcellus Shale Impact “Fee” is redistributed by the number of wells, yet Philadelphia County and Bucks County, both of which have moratoriums (Act 87 of 2012 for Bucks County) get millions despite hostility to Marcellus Shale drilling:
Act 16 of 2012 (SB 1237 signed into law Feb 14) –Keystone Opportunity Zone for Shell Cracker Facility
The Liberty Index scores Act 16 of 2012 a Tier 3 because it is gives a special tax subsidy to one specific business. This is, in effect, a tax cut for one business not available to other productive businesses.
Act 16 adds a new Keystone Opportunity Zones (KOZ), tax free areas designed to promote economic development.
Elizabeth Stelle of Commonwealth Foundation wrote on March 19, 2012 “Astute readers may remember that last month Pennsylvania earned the dubious distinction of the highest taxes for mature businesses and the second highest taxes for new businesses.
So how did Pennsylvania just beat out Ohio and West Virginia for the Shell Oil Co. cracker plant that is estimated to create more than 10,000 construction and 10,000 permanent jobs?
The Post Gazette has the answer, “Gov. Tom Corbett and his closest advisers spent months wooing the company.” In other words, “corporate welfare. “ Pennsylvania’s corporate taxes are so awful that the Corbett administration had to wine and dine company officials and hand over special tax exemptions and subsidies to seal the deal.”
The concept of Keystone Opportunity Zones is that lower taxes promote productive growth. KOZs are problematic in that it is difficult to measure whether the intended purpose has been achieved by targeted tax subsidy and if tax cut promotes jobs and an increased standard of living, why not tax cuts for all and let a decentralized, diversified and independent individual human actors in the Free Market make the decisions rather than a few statist elitist technocratic central planners?
ACT 85 of 2012 (HB 761 signed into law on July 2) which amends the Tax Reform Code of 1971 contains both EITC and the Shell Cracker Tax Credit and Subsidy.
The Liberty Index scores Act 85 a Tier 3 because this omnibus bill falls far short of what is needed to grow Pennsylvania’s productive economy. Like Act 25 of 2011 which gave the appearance of being taxpayer friendly, Act 85 of 2012 misdirects and does little to effect hoped for results. For example, although Act 85 doubles the Education Improvement Tax Credit to $150 million this is an infinitesimal percentage of the more than $26 billionspent by the unionized, government K-12 system. Omnibus Bills are a Mixed Bag – Three Card Monte – good mixed with bag to swindle The Forgotten Taxpayer.
Act 87 of 2012 (SB 1263 signed into law July 2) Fiscal Code –Marcellus Shale drilling moratorium Bucks County and Harrisburg Bond Bailout
The Liberty Index scores Act 87 Tier 3 because of several special, target provisions that impact commerce despite statements that there is no fiscal impact. Omnibus Bills are difficult to score because of their complexity and because seemingly minor and innocuous provisions are hidden, stealth special and targeted legislation to benefit a particular narrow interest.
Act 87 also seems to violate the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Single Subject Rule which says No bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title, except a general appropriation bill or a bill codifying or compiling the law or a part thereof.
The bill bans natural gas drilling in Bucks County. There is a great natural gas potential in a strata of rock stretching from Nockamixon State Park in Bucks County to Gettysburg called the South Newark Basin. In the waning late-night hours of this year’s passage of the state budget, Pennsylvania Republicans inserted an addition to the state’s fiscal code placing a moratorium on natural gas drilling there.
For at least three years, the phrase “drilling moratorium” has been political profanity among Republicans who control both chambers of the Legislature and the Governor’s Residence
The only thing more shocking than a Republican-sponsored drilling moratorium was where it was located: suburban Philadelphia, far outside the gas-rich Marcellus Shale.
The bill also prevented the City of Harrisburg, from filing for bankruptcy from July 1, 2012, to Nov. 30, 2012.
In November, child actor Angus Jones—one of the stars of the hit sitcom Two and a Half men—publicly criticized the show that has made him a multi-millionaire. In effect, he condemned the vulgar tone of the program.
Anyone who has seen this program knows that the kid is only confirming what they already have seen and heard themselves. The plots are about sex, the characters are sex-driven, and the dialogue is not so much sexual innuendo as it is crude and openly sexual remarks that one could hear in any junior high school yard. Yes, 13-year-olds laugh like hell at this stuff.
But the success of this long-running sitcom is testament to the depths to which our culture now stoops when looking for 22 minutes-worth of mindless entertainment. I confess that I watched this program the first two years of its existence, but soon grew tired of the ever-increasing focus on the bedroom and the bathroom—the two rooms about which Two and a Half Men seems to be concerned.
In a December 1, 2012 column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, their television columnist found fault with Angus Jones, saying that he sabotaged his career by this “bizarre” rambling of his. Of course the columnist also noted that the 19-year old is “newly evangelized.”
Well, well…I think we’re finally getting to the meat of the criticism. How critical would the television critic have been if Jones say, spoke out against the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms, or passed negative judgment on the pro-life movement, or defended atheism as sober way of life? Personally, I think Jones would have been painted as a hero for speaking his young mind.
But the moment you announce that Christianity is the impetus behind your stand, you’ve committed one of the news media’s seven deadly sins: Thou shalt not try to profess your belief in God—at least not if you make your living in the entertainment industry. Morals be damned.
The columnist even went so far as to say that if the young actor was truly appalled at the bawdy nature of the show, shouldn’t he give away his hefty salary to the more needy, since this would be the truly Christian thing to do?
Just as the columnist gives his salary to the needy, I suppose.
Efficient and economical energy production lowers the cost and raises the standard of living for all.
Free market pricing, where misallocations are penalized, is the most efficient system to develop energy. Government is not a venture capitalist.
What the government giveth, the government taketh away. With Act 13 of 2012, the Republican General Assembly and Governor imposed at tax, obscuring it with the rhetorically inaccurate description “Impact Fee” which distributes tax revenues to all counties including counties, like Philadelphia and Bucks which have banned Marcellus Shale drilling (see Act 87 of 2012 below) and on the very same day, Feb. 14, 2012, the same Republican General Assembly and governor gave billion dollar private business Shell Oil a huge tax break by targeting a tax free “Keystone” zone for a Shell Cracker plant.
Again, with Act 85 of 2012 and on the same day, July 2, 2012, Republican Leadership again “privileges”, as the Leftists say, Shell Oil with billions in tax subsidies.
A group called Team Black Sheep posted this video of a homemade drone buzzing a helpless French police car in Paris. One does not need the imagination of Stephen King to be a tad concerned about how our ever-advancing technology is going to affect the future.
Maybe the Occupy Wall Streeters and “anonymous” hackers in their Guy Fawkes masks have the right idea. Fawkes, after all, had the goal of returning Catholicism to England.
There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. –Leo Tolstoy
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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle: In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.
James Clerk Maxwell
The “Milk Cliff” scares us as milk prices, supposedly, will skyrocket unless Farm Subsidies for privileged few producers are imposed . Farm Subsidies are, essentially, Republican ‘earmarks’ for their constituents.
James Bovard, in WSJ, lays out the problem. This is legislative dereliction of duty to the Forgotten Taxpayer, and the forgotten consumer, who is hammered with farm price subsidies. Will Republican Leadership sell us out again? Odds makers are giving odds they will. What do you think?
All tax cuts are not created equal; some are more equal than others in Obama’s State Capitalist word. To be accurate, though, it is a bipartisan Big Government State Capitalist Weltanschauung that infects the lawmakers in Washington and Harrisburg.
Billionaires benefit General Electric, inheritor of Enron’s wind energy program, German based Siemans, and, of course, Warren Buffet and his band of billionaire Big Government Socialists distributing wealth to themselves.
Wind subsidies, and other ‘renewable energy’ subsides, a bipartisan assault on The Forgotten Taxpayer, lobbyists swarm to save privileged tax cuts for billion dollar businesses while the rest of us taxpayers are Forgotten as the bipartisan Fiscal Cliff and Obamacare, an avalanche of new taxes, crushes the rank and file taxpayers, who is us.
Bipartisan, another word for Big Government Tax Increase.
Independence Hall Tea Party Association is having its 4th Annual Christmas Tea Party and After Party, Saturday, Jan. 5 from noon to 3 p.m. at the Independence Visitors Center Ballroom, 6th and Market streets, Philadelphia, Pa. 19106.
The tea party is free. The after-party which starts at 1 p.m. is $20 or $10 for college and high school students or $5 for children 13 and under.
For information call Teri Adams at 215-620-3055 or visit here.
