Alexandra Swann's Blog, page 19
August 2, 2013
To Smart Growth, Sustainable Development, Downtown Arena Ball Parks and the Politicians Who Love Them--Just Say NO Part II
This post is a follow up to the post I wrote at the end of May about the ever-expanding money pit we in El Paso fondly call our Downtown Arena Ballpark.
As I explained when I last wrote on this subject, El Paso has spent the last couple of years trying to figure out how to redefine itself. Our rabidly "progressive" city council passed a new landscape ordinance which requires more green spaces and less parking as a part of a plan to beautify our city. Our newly adopted master plan calls for smart growth and a redeveloped downtown where multi-storied, mixed use buildings comprised of retail on the bottom and apartments on the upper levels will line narrow streets. We are spending $27 million on upgrading our notoriously badly run bus system--Sun Metro. And the crowning jewel of this new, green us is a brand new Triple A ballpark stadium which we are building on the site of our former city hall. We imploded the latter building, which was only about 30 years old, on April 14, and moved our city offices, so that we could build a new arena stadium for a minor league baseball team which is moving to El Paso. Combined costs for moving the city offices, imploding city hall and building the arena ball park were initially estimated at between $85 and $100 million. After two years of meetings and investment in a public relations firm, we even have a new city motto--"El Paso: It's All Good."
The problem, of course, is that it's not all good. Our redevelopment comes at the cost of nearly half a billion dollars. According to a news story by KVIA-TV's Matthew Smith, our city will not break even on the stadium expense for 250 years. The initial cost of this project was estimated to be $50 million, but at the end of May the team owners came back to city council requesting an additional $10 million for "upgrades" to the stadium that were not part of the original plan. The official groundbreaking ceremony for the stadium happened at the end of May, although construction had begun a couple of weeks prior but the city was already overbudget before the groundbreaking even took place. The project manager informed city council that if the additional funds were not appropriated El Paso voters would not get the ballpark they were promised.
As it happens, the voters did not get any say on this project in the first place. If they had, I am quite certain that there would be no stadium under construction and city hall would still be standing. City council made the decision to build the stadium without waiting for an election because they said that this was too great an opportunity to pass up. Voters did vote on nearly half a billion dollars in quality of life improvement bonds and a new hotel tax, but these ballot issues were sold to us with the explanation that the stadium was a "done deal". El Pasoans could not be trusted to understand the benefits of the stadium well enough to be allowed a vote on it, so we could vote only on whether we as a city would pay for the costs with higher property taxes or whether visitors would pay for it with higher fees.
What the voters in El Paso DID get to decide was whether they wanted to reward the city council members who brought us this travesty with more power. On June 15th Steve Ortega, the city councilman who had worked diligently to promote the Downtown Ballpark and other leftist agendas in El Paso was soundly defeated by businessman Oscar Leeser. The message from the voters was crystal clear--Leeser, who owns a highly successful auto dealership and campaigned on running the city the way he runs his business--beat Ortega, who campaigned on pressing forward with big government and increased funding for more expansive projects, by 75% to 25%.
One of Leeser's first acts as mayor was to make sure that the owners of the Triple A ball team understood that if they want any more changes to the design of the stadium, they have to foot the cost themselves. Of course, in the last city council meeting of the outgoing mayor and city council, the team owners made sure that they got their 10 million dollar overage funded by the outgoing council since they probably anticipated that the gravy train had been derailed with the election.
Now, we have a new city council, a new mayor and a ball park that we are now constructing at a cost of $60.8 million. But as bad as all of this is, at least we can now relax a little, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, for El Paso, the Downtown Arena Stadium is the gift that keeps on giving. Like all projects of its kind, the stadium is being financed through the sale of bonds. But this week, the city manager informed city council that in order to sell these bonds, the city must raise the interest rates on the bonds 1.5%. Otherwise, the bonds will not sell, construction on the ball park will stop, and the city will find itself embroiled in a lawsuit with the owners of the team who purchased the Triple A ball team because the city had agreed to build the stadium.
Raising the interest rate on the bonds will cost El Paso an additional $17 million in this project, or a cost over $566,000 a year. The city has repeatedly assured us that the money to cover this cost cannot come from property taxes--it must come from sales taxes and fees. That is supposed to make everyone feel better, except for one tiny little detail, which no one is mentioning. When the money from other taxes is diverted to pay for the interest on the bonds, the city has less money in the general fund to pay all of it other expenses: police, fire, city workers, street repair, etc. So in order to make up the shortfall--you guessed it--the city will have to raise property taxes. El Paso already has high property taxes, high sales taxes, and high school taxes. But we can look for them to go up--a lot.
In an irony worthy of great English literature, the excuse for raising the interest rates on the bonds is that because Detroit filed bankruptcy nobody will purchase the bonds unless the rate of interest is higher. Detroit filed bankruptcy due to liberal management and decades of progressive policies that drove the city into the ground. As Detroit goes, so go we also unless we get stop the madness.
What is saddest of all about the Downtown Arena Ballpark is that it was a financially losing proposition from the start. As deputy city accounting manager Bill Studer told Matthew Smith in that KVIA-TV interview last fall, "They [minor league downtown sports arenas] all lose money from a strictly accounting thing." Apparently, they also all lose money from a strictly non-accounting thing. According to a study conducted last year by Colgate University, only 8 of 55 downtown stadiums constructed with at least 25% public funds are currently fostering economic development. A February 2, 2012 article on Bloomberg.com titled, "As Superbowl Shows, Build Stadiums for Love and not Money" candidly addresses this issue. According to Bloomberg, "Public funding for sports stadiums has been found in dozens of studies over several decades, to fall short of the promised benefits and to cost taxpayers more than expected." Bloomberg cites a study by Harvard associate professor of urban planning Judith Grant Long, who found that the cost of public funding for stadiums typically runs 40% higher than initially promised. These stadiums are the gift that keeps giving--taxpayers continue to pay for the stadiums decades after they are no longer in use. Further, stadiums do not bring economic development to most regions; they just move entertainment dollars around the city. Bloomberg cites a study by Jordan Rappaport and Chad Wilkerson of the Federal Reserve bank of Kansas City which says that even when bringing in a professional sports team the number of jobs created "is almost certainly less than 1000 and likely to be much closer to zero." Other studies cited in the same article indicate that bringing in sport teams kills some jobs and reduces wages. The higher taxes needed to fund stadium projects--such as our hotel tax--can have the net effect of dissuading would-be visitors, and the types of jobs the stadium produces are low wage seasonal jobs. Bloomberg's conclusion: "public funding for new sports stadiums should be up to voters to decide. Cities should make sure the public has access to independent evaluations of the costs and benefits of building a stadium--not just the inflated 'economic-impact studies' done at the behest of team owners and publicized in the media."
As of today, we are into the Downtown Arena Ballpark for $27 million dollars more than was originally projected and construction has only just begun. That does not include any cost for maintenance, repairs or any other unexpected items which will undoubtedly continue to balloon this cost. When it is finished, I hope the residents really enjoy the ball games, because we are going to pay for the pleasure of watching minor league baseball in a renovated downtown for a very long time to come. In our zeal to renovate our downtown, we are designating tax dollars from downtown to be placed in the revitalization fund and used to further beautify downtown--at the expense of the general fund. As one of our current city reps explained to KVIA this week, this is a reasonable expense for the taxpayers to absorb because "downtown belongs to all of us." I beg to differ--downtown belongs to a few mega-rich developers who have secured concessions from the city to renovate it at everyone else's expense. Stripping money out of the general fund means that all of us who own property in El Paso have to absorb greatly increased taxes so that the property owners downtown can see their values rise. The only thing more absurd than the fact that we are in this situation is that those who originally voted for this mess continue to attempt to justify it to us.
As I said in my original post in May, El Paso deserved better than what we are getting.
Your city, wherever it is located, does too. So when the snake oil salesmen come to your town promising downtown redevelopment involving "green" housing, smart growth and sustainable development anchored by an arena stadium or some other massively expensive entertainment venue paid for by public funds, do yourselves a favor. Just say no.
Learn more about how Smart Growth, Smart Code and Sustainable Development strip funds out of cities and lead to bankruptcy and ruin by watching this video:
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
As I explained when I last wrote on this subject, El Paso has spent the last couple of years trying to figure out how to redefine itself. Our rabidly "progressive" city council passed a new landscape ordinance which requires more green spaces and less parking as a part of a plan to beautify our city. Our newly adopted master plan calls for smart growth and a redeveloped downtown where multi-storied, mixed use buildings comprised of retail on the bottom and apartments on the upper levels will line narrow streets. We are spending $27 million on upgrading our notoriously badly run bus system--Sun Metro. And the crowning jewel of this new, green us is a brand new Triple A ballpark stadium which we are building on the site of our former city hall. We imploded the latter building, which was only about 30 years old, on April 14, and moved our city offices, so that we could build a new arena stadium for a minor league baseball team which is moving to El Paso. Combined costs for moving the city offices, imploding city hall and building the arena ball park were initially estimated at between $85 and $100 million. After two years of meetings and investment in a public relations firm, we even have a new city motto--"El Paso: It's All Good."
The problem, of course, is that it's not all good. Our redevelopment comes at the cost of nearly half a billion dollars. According to a news story by KVIA-TV's Matthew Smith, our city will not break even on the stadium expense for 250 years. The initial cost of this project was estimated to be $50 million, but at the end of May the team owners came back to city council requesting an additional $10 million for "upgrades" to the stadium that were not part of the original plan. The official groundbreaking ceremony for the stadium happened at the end of May, although construction had begun a couple of weeks prior but the city was already overbudget before the groundbreaking even took place. The project manager informed city council that if the additional funds were not appropriated El Paso voters would not get the ballpark they were promised.
As it happens, the voters did not get any say on this project in the first place. If they had, I am quite certain that there would be no stadium under construction and city hall would still be standing. City council made the decision to build the stadium without waiting for an election because they said that this was too great an opportunity to pass up. Voters did vote on nearly half a billion dollars in quality of life improvement bonds and a new hotel tax, but these ballot issues were sold to us with the explanation that the stadium was a "done deal". El Pasoans could not be trusted to understand the benefits of the stadium well enough to be allowed a vote on it, so we could vote only on whether we as a city would pay for the costs with higher property taxes or whether visitors would pay for it with higher fees.
What the voters in El Paso DID get to decide was whether they wanted to reward the city council members who brought us this travesty with more power. On June 15th Steve Ortega, the city councilman who had worked diligently to promote the Downtown Ballpark and other leftist agendas in El Paso was soundly defeated by businessman Oscar Leeser. The message from the voters was crystal clear--Leeser, who owns a highly successful auto dealership and campaigned on running the city the way he runs his business--beat Ortega, who campaigned on pressing forward with big government and increased funding for more expansive projects, by 75% to 25%.
One of Leeser's first acts as mayor was to make sure that the owners of the Triple A ball team understood that if they want any more changes to the design of the stadium, they have to foot the cost themselves. Of course, in the last city council meeting of the outgoing mayor and city council, the team owners made sure that they got their 10 million dollar overage funded by the outgoing council since they probably anticipated that the gravy train had been derailed with the election.
Now, we have a new city council, a new mayor and a ball park that we are now constructing at a cost of $60.8 million. But as bad as all of this is, at least we can now relax a little, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, for El Paso, the Downtown Arena Stadium is the gift that keeps on giving. Like all projects of its kind, the stadium is being financed through the sale of bonds. But this week, the city manager informed city council that in order to sell these bonds, the city must raise the interest rates on the bonds 1.5%. Otherwise, the bonds will not sell, construction on the ball park will stop, and the city will find itself embroiled in a lawsuit with the owners of the team who purchased the Triple A ball team because the city had agreed to build the stadium.
Raising the interest rate on the bonds will cost El Paso an additional $17 million in this project, or a cost over $566,000 a year. The city has repeatedly assured us that the money to cover this cost cannot come from property taxes--it must come from sales taxes and fees. That is supposed to make everyone feel better, except for one tiny little detail, which no one is mentioning. When the money from other taxes is diverted to pay for the interest on the bonds, the city has less money in the general fund to pay all of it other expenses: police, fire, city workers, street repair, etc. So in order to make up the shortfall--you guessed it--the city will have to raise property taxes. El Paso already has high property taxes, high sales taxes, and high school taxes. But we can look for them to go up--a lot.
In an irony worthy of great English literature, the excuse for raising the interest rates on the bonds is that because Detroit filed bankruptcy nobody will purchase the bonds unless the rate of interest is higher. Detroit filed bankruptcy due to liberal management and decades of progressive policies that drove the city into the ground. As Detroit goes, so go we also unless we get stop the madness.
What is saddest of all about the Downtown Arena Ballpark is that it was a financially losing proposition from the start. As deputy city accounting manager Bill Studer told Matthew Smith in that KVIA-TV interview last fall, "They [minor league downtown sports arenas] all lose money from a strictly accounting thing." Apparently, they also all lose money from a strictly non-accounting thing. According to a study conducted last year by Colgate University, only 8 of 55 downtown stadiums constructed with at least 25% public funds are currently fostering economic development. A February 2, 2012 article on Bloomberg.com titled, "As Superbowl Shows, Build Stadiums for Love and not Money" candidly addresses this issue. According to Bloomberg, "Public funding for sports stadiums has been found in dozens of studies over several decades, to fall short of the promised benefits and to cost taxpayers more than expected." Bloomberg cites a study by Harvard associate professor of urban planning Judith Grant Long, who found that the cost of public funding for stadiums typically runs 40% higher than initially promised. These stadiums are the gift that keeps giving--taxpayers continue to pay for the stadiums decades after they are no longer in use. Further, stadiums do not bring economic development to most regions; they just move entertainment dollars around the city. Bloomberg cites a study by Jordan Rappaport and Chad Wilkerson of the Federal Reserve bank of Kansas City which says that even when bringing in a professional sports team the number of jobs created "is almost certainly less than 1000 and likely to be much closer to zero." Other studies cited in the same article indicate that bringing in sport teams kills some jobs and reduces wages. The higher taxes needed to fund stadium projects--such as our hotel tax--can have the net effect of dissuading would-be visitors, and the types of jobs the stadium produces are low wage seasonal jobs. Bloomberg's conclusion: "public funding for new sports stadiums should be up to voters to decide. Cities should make sure the public has access to independent evaluations of the costs and benefits of building a stadium--not just the inflated 'economic-impact studies' done at the behest of team owners and publicized in the media."
As of today, we are into the Downtown Arena Ballpark for $27 million dollars more than was originally projected and construction has only just begun. That does not include any cost for maintenance, repairs or any other unexpected items which will undoubtedly continue to balloon this cost. When it is finished, I hope the residents really enjoy the ball games, because we are going to pay for the pleasure of watching minor league baseball in a renovated downtown for a very long time to come. In our zeal to renovate our downtown, we are designating tax dollars from downtown to be placed in the revitalization fund and used to further beautify downtown--at the expense of the general fund. As one of our current city reps explained to KVIA this week, this is a reasonable expense for the taxpayers to absorb because "downtown belongs to all of us." I beg to differ--downtown belongs to a few mega-rich developers who have secured concessions from the city to renovate it at everyone else's expense. Stripping money out of the general fund means that all of us who own property in El Paso have to absorb greatly increased taxes so that the property owners downtown can see their values rise. The only thing more absurd than the fact that we are in this situation is that those who originally voted for this mess continue to attempt to justify it to us.
As I said in my original post in May, El Paso deserved better than what we are getting.
Your city, wherever it is located, does too. So when the snake oil salesmen come to your town promising downtown redevelopment involving "green" housing, smart growth and sustainable development anchored by an arena stadium or some other massively expensive entertainment venue paid for by public funds, do yourselves a favor. Just say no.
Learn more about how Smart Growth, Smart Code and Sustainable Development strip funds out of cities and lead to bankruptcy and ruin by watching this video:
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
August 1, 2013
Agenda 21: Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You Courtesy of HUD's Fair Housing Rules
I have written extensively about Agenda 21 over the past two years, but I have seen a sharp increase in its U.S implementation since the 2012 presidential elections. President Obama, who once told us his Administration was focused "like a laser beam" on jobs, is using his second term to focus like a laser beam on climate change policies and promoting Smart Growth and sustainable development initiatives. In the absence of a federal climate change bill, most Americans don't take these efforts very seriously, but the president has used the power of executive order coupled with existing federal agencies such as the EPA to implement many of his anti-business, pro-environment policies sans Congressional involvement.
For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented.
The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:
Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both.
What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.
Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.
As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print.
The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask , talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.
Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.
That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval.
HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.
Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation. We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Read Joyce Swann's Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother Free on Kindle now through August 6th.
For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented.
The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:
Today, it’s about more than just addressing outright discrimination and access to the housing itself. It’s also about giving every community access to important neighborhood amenities that can make a tremendous difference in a person’s life outcome.
I’m talking about good schools, safe streets, jobs, grocery stores, healthcare and a host of other important factors. To help families gain this access – HUD is working to strengthen our stewardship of federal dollars to maximize the impact they have on communities in advancing fair housing goals.
As all of you know, HUD’s programs provide funding to partners at the state and local level. As part of the Fair Housing Act—for members of the protected classes—these partners have an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing opportunities – otherwise known as AFFH.
But as you and many others, including the Government Accountability Office, have noted, this has proven largely to be a meaningless paper exercise without any teeth. The process has long been broken and we’re determined to fix it and help it reach its full promise.
That’s why I am proud to announce that this week we will publish a new rule to bring affirmatively further fair housing into the 21st century. This rule focuses on the traditional tenets of discrimination – and also gets at the essential issues of access to opportunity so imperative to 21st century equity.
Specifically, this new rule will:
• provide a clear definition of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing;
• outline a standard framework with well-defined parameters; and
• offer targeted guidance and assistance to help grantees complete this assessment.
Perhaps most important—for the first time ever—HUD is providing data for every neighborhood in the nation, detailing what access African American families, and other members of protected classes, have to the community assets I talked about earlier – including jobs, schools and transit.
With this data and the improved AFFH process, we can expand access to high opportunity neighborhoods and draw attention to investment possibilities in underserved communities.
Make no mistake: this is a big deal. With the HUD budget alone, we are talking about billions of dollars. And as you know, decades ago, these funds were used to support discrimination. Now, they will be used to expand opportunity and bring communities closer to the American Dream.
Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both.
What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.
Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.
As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print.
The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask , talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.
Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.
That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval.
HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.
Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation. We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Read Joyce Swann's Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother Free on Kindle now through August 6th.
Agenda 21: Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You Courtesy of HUD's Fair Housing Rules
I have written extensively about Agenda 21 over the past two years, but I have seen a sharp increase in its U.S implementation since the 2012 presidential elections. President Obama, who once told us his Administration was focused "like a laser beam" on jobs, is using his second term to focus like a laser beam on climate change policies and promoting Smart Growth and sustainable development initiatives. In the absence of a federal climate change bill, most Americans don't take these efforts very seriously, but the president has used the power of executive order coupled with existing federal agencies such as the EPA to implement many of his anti-business, pro-environment policies sans Congressional involvement.
For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented.
The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:
Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both.
What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.
Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.
As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print.
The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask , talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.
Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.
That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval.
HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.
Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation. We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Read Joyce Swann's Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother Free on Kindle now through August 6th.
For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented.
The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:
Today, it’s about more than just addressing outright discrimination and access to the housing itself. It’s also about giving every community access to important neighborhood amenities that can make a tremendous difference in a person’s life outcome.
I’m talking about good schools, safe streets, jobs, grocery stores, healthcare and a host of other important factors. To help families gain this access – HUD is working to strengthen our stewardship of federal dollars to maximize the impact they have on communities in advancing fair housing goals.
As all of you know, HUD’s programs provide funding to partners at the state and local level. As part of the Fair Housing Act—for members of the protected classes—these partners have an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing opportunities – otherwise known as AFFH.
But as you and many others, including the Government Accountability Office, have noted, this has proven largely to be a meaningless paper exercise without any teeth. The process has long been broken and we’re determined to fix it and help it reach its full promise.
That’s why I am proud to announce that this week we will publish a new rule to bring affirmatively further fair housing into the 21st century. This rule focuses on the traditional tenets of discrimination – and also gets at the essential issues of access to opportunity so imperative to 21st century equity.
Specifically, this new rule will:
• provide a clear definition of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing;
• outline a standard framework with well-defined parameters; and
• offer targeted guidance and assistance to help grantees complete this assessment.
Perhaps most important—for the first time ever—HUD is providing data for every neighborhood in the nation, detailing what access African American families, and other members of protected classes, have to the community assets I talked about earlier – including jobs, schools and transit.
With this data and the improved AFFH process, we can expand access to high opportunity neighborhoods and draw attention to investment possibilities in underserved communities.
Make no mistake: this is a big deal. With the HUD budget alone, we are talking about billions of dollars. And as you know, decades ago, these funds were used to support discrimination. Now, they will be used to expand opportunity and bring communities closer to the American Dream.
Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both.
What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.
Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.
As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print.
The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask , talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.
Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.
That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval.
HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.
Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation. We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Read Joyce Swann's Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother Free on Kindle now through August 6th.
Agenda 21: Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You Courtesy of HUD's Fair Housing Rules
I have written extensively about Agenda 21 over the past two years, but I have seen a sharp increase in its U.S implementation since the 2012 presidential elections. President Obama, who once told us his Administration was focused "like a laser beam" on jobs, is using his second term to focus like a laser beam on climate change policies and promoting Smart Growth and sustainable development initiatives. In the absence of a federal climate change bill, most Americans don't take these efforts very seriously, but the president has used the power of executive order coupled with existing federal agencies such as the EPA to implement many of his anti-business, pro-environment policies sans Congressional involvement.
For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented.
The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:
Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both.
What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.
Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.
As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print.
The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask , talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.
Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.
That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval.
HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.
Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation. We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
For anyone unaware, Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations' policy document that calls for using radical environmental initiatives to destroy the wealth and affluence of Western nations--particularly the United States. Agenda 21 proponents call for an end to private property ownership and national sovereignty. People are to be packed into densely crowded urban areas which the document calls "human settlements" and much of the U.S. is to be rewilded into national forests and nature preserves. Western wealth and affluence are the enemy of global environmentalism, and the processes which produce these, including individual rights, national sovereignty, the Constitution and our entire way of life as Americans has to be destroyed for the goals of Agenda 21 to be fully implemented.
The latest and most disturbing effort I have seen to implement the "sustainable" living initiatives is the new HUD Fair Housing Rule announced on July 16. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, speaking at the NAACP convention on that date, announced a new series of Fair Housing initiatives designed to counter what he calls a "subtle" form of discrimination against minorities and the underprivileged:
Today, it’s about more than just addressing outright discrimination and access to the housing itself. It’s also about giving every community access to important neighborhood amenities that can make a tremendous difference in a person’s life outcome.
I’m talking about good schools, safe streets, jobs, grocery stores, healthcare and a host of other important factors. To help families gain this access – HUD is working to strengthen our stewardship of federal dollars to maximize the impact they have on communities in advancing fair housing goals.
As all of you know, HUD’s programs provide funding to partners at the state and local level. As part of the Fair Housing Act—for members of the protected classes—these partners have an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing opportunities – otherwise known as AFFH.
But as you and many others, including the Government Accountability Office, have noted, this has proven largely to be a meaningless paper exercise without any teeth. The process has long been broken and we’re determined to fix it and help it reach its full promise.
That’s why I am proud to announce that this week we will publish a new rule to bring affirmatively further fair housing into the 21st century. This rule focuses on the traditional tenets of discrimination – and also gets at the essential issues of access to opportunity so imperative to 21st century equity.
Specifically, this new rule will:
• provide a clear definition of what it means to affirmatively further fair housing;
• outline a standard framework with well-defined parameters; and
• offer targeted guidance and assistance to help grantees complete this assessment.
Perhaps most important—for the first time ever—HUD is providing data for every neighborhood in the nation, detailing what access African American families, and other members of protected classes, have to the community assets I talked about earlier – including jobs, schools and transit.
With this data and the improved AFFH process, we can expand access to high opportunity neighborhoods and draw attention to investment possibilities in underserved communities.
Make no mistake: this is a big deal. With the HUD budget alone, we are talking about billions of dollars. And as you know, decades ago, these funds were used to support discrimination. Now, they will be used to expand opportunity and bring communities closer to the American Dream.
Having worked in real estate finance for 15 years, I can say for a certainty that Fair Housing laws that have been in place for over 40 years protect minorities against discrimination in housing choices. There are laws against redlining (refusing to lend in neighborhoods comprised of primarily one ethnic group), laws against refusing to lease or sell to people of a specific ethnic group, and numerous fair lending laws. Donovan knows perfectly well that minorities in the US who are well qualified--with good credit and high incomes--are able to purchase homes wherever they choose and obtain excellent financing. The issues come into play with borrowers who have poor credit history, sketchy job history, or both.
What Donovan is talking about is not traditional Fair Housing laws, but rather the type of mixed income housing that Smart Growth, Sustainability and New Urbanism require. Because Agenda 21 requires that people live very densely together, it seeks to make high income people neighbors with low income people--an arrangement which usually is pleasing to neither group. Plus, Smart Growth and Sustainable development city plans have the effect of making housing units very expensive, which hits low income and lower middle income families hardest. So rather than improving the situations of lower income people, Smart Growth policies tend to make their housing situations worse.
Stanley Kurtz has written an excellent article in the National Review Online about how the HUD initiative is just the latest attempt by the Obama Administration to force people out of suburbs and into tightly packed urban housing where rich and poor live together. What HUD is doing is basically proactively requiring communities with no proven history of discrimination to integrate their communities so that lower income families will have a chance to live in higher income communities. This is the heart of New Urbanism.
As an example of such an attempt, Kurtz details the case "Plan Bay Area", a metropolitan plan which would essentially end suburbs in the San Francisco area by forcing all new development to take place in the city's existing urban foot print.
The bullying tactics that Kurtz' article describes in the Plan Bay Area meetings are actually a very normal part of the process for pushing through metropolitan planning initiatives that promote New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Residents (of all income levels) tend to really resist these initiatives, so the town hall meetings and other public forums are primarily just for show. Participation is meant to be limited at these meetings so that as few residents as possible will know what is happening to change their communities and the resistance that does show up can be contained. Rosa Koire, founder of Democrats Against Agenda 21, and author of Behind the Green Mask , talks about her experiences dealing with this in California as Smart Growth planners tried to shout down all efforts to stop city plans that would "Manhattanize" communities. My own experience of dealing with the "Plan El Paso" initiative mirrors Koire's--the city planners don't want input at all--they just want to silence dissent.
Even though George H.W. Bush signed onto the principles of Agenda 21 and every U.S. President since has upheld and furthered its objectives, without a national climate change bill, those initiatives have not moved very far forward. Even the Plan Bay Area initiative had to be scaled back and confined to just a few neighborhoods because of public outcry.
That makes what the Obama Administration is doing now so crucial--and so scary. By using HUD as a hammer to proactively charge developers of communities with discrimination if they do not comply with Smart Growth and sustainable housing initiatives, the President is implementing Agenda 21's housing policies without the need of Congressional approval.
HUD's new rule can even be used to bully states like Alabama that have passed laws rejecting Agenda 21. By using Fair Housing laws as an enforcement piece, the President can make sure that his radical initiatives for remaking this country are enforced in every city and every state, regardless of what we the people think.
Kurtz ends his article by saying that it is time for us to have a national conversation about Obama's war on the suburbs. He is right, but we need more than a conversation. We need to stand up and pull the mask off his policies and expose them for what they are--a radical attempt to remake our society. The Obama Administration is using federal agencies to push a globalist agenda that is at odds with personal liberty, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights and all of the freedoms that these documents afford us. We need to demand that our Congressional representatives hold him accountable for his actions. And we need to do it sooner rather than later, while we still have freedoms to protect.
Find out more about Agenda 21, what it means, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it by watching this video: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
July 25, 2013
A Bitter Bargain
Yesterday President Obama gave his much anticipated speech on the economy. Since I am on the White House's email list (a hold over from my days as chair of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce when I was on the email list of every politician who might need a vote from El Paso) shortly after the speech I received an official White House email, with President Obama's name in the address line, explaining the high points of his new focus on jobs and the economy, which he calls, "A Better Bargain."
"The basic bargain of this country says that if you work hard, you can get ahead--you can build a secure life for your family, and know that your kids will do even better someday. But for more than a decade, that bargain has frayed, and a devastating recession made it worse....In the weeks ahead, in towns across the country, I'll be talking about my ideas for building on the cornerstones of middle-class security: Good jobs with good wages. An education that prepares our children and our workers for a new economy. A home to call your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you're not rich. A better bargain for the middle class and for all who are striving to join it."
As I read the email, I had to wonder whether Obama actually remembers that he has been president four and a half years out of the last decade. I also have to ask whether he and his cronies in DC are even remotely aware of how hollow his words sound when Americans who are paying any attention at all know that his policies have cost us jobs and incomes.
As a small business owner of fifteen years who had to close my mortgage company April 1st of this year because it was crushed under the weight of regulations imposed by the Dodd Frank bill, I know firsthand that Obama is not only not helping the middle class, he is annihilating it. So today I want to point out some inconvenient truths about how the Obama Administration is handling the economy in each of the areas he stressed yesterday:
JOBS
Remember when the Obama White House was supposedly focused like a laser beam on jobs? Or was that a DeathStar? The June 2013 jobs report revealed that America is sinking further and further into unemployment and under employment under the weight of massive regulations which make it difficult and expensive to keep the doors open and which disincentivize companies from hiring.
The facts of the current job market are these:
Although the Labor Department recorded 195,000 net new hires in June, it also recorded 247,000 "discouraged workers" who have stopped looking for work. The U.S. labor participation rate is now 63.5% and more than 20 million Americans are either unemployed but have quit looking for work or are working part-time and can't find full time work. The rate of under employed and unemployed--no longer looking--jumped to 14.3% of Americans in June. Over eight million of those were part-time workers who cannot find full time work. Only 47% of adult Americans are working full time right now. More than any other single statistic, the 47% figure really speaks to the true state of the economy. Part-time workers are not eligible for the benefits that Obama touts. And of course, since Obamacare labels employees full time at a 30 hour week, more and more Americans are seeing their hours cut so that their employers don't have to pay insurance for them. This is true not only of private employers, but also of quasi-government entities, like state universities and community colleges who are cutting the class times they allow their part-time contract instructors to teach to make sure that nobody exceeds the 30 hour threshold.
Even though the Obama White House has delayed the employer mandate for a year, employers have already begun to redefine "full" and "part" time. Successful companies plan their hiring and expansion strategies well ahead of time, so a one year delay in the implementation of Obamacare may cause certain employers to postpone layoffs but it is unlikely to cause any employer to go on a hiring spree. So unemployment and under employment will remain high in a crisis that the president created by forcing liberal policies that don't work on America's employers.
HEALTH CARE
And speaking of Obamacare, Obama seems to be blissfully unaware of the fact that Americans now know that the law that bears the president's name does not actually cut costs by $2500 a year as he had promised but is instead causing insurance premiums to skyrocket. In some states, premiums are increasing by 80%. Young people who had affordable catastrophic care coverage will no longer be able to maintain such coverage because it does not align with the requirements of Obamacare. And every individual, including those 8 million part-time Americans who cannot find full time work or are seeing their hours cut, will be required to start paying a fine if they can't afford to purchase health insurance in 2014. Small wonder that critics have now renamed Obamacare the Unaffordable Care Act.
HOUSING
The White House email references that all Americans should have "a home to call their own," but the Dodd Frank legislation that he championed will regulate almost 60% of Americans who qualified to purchase a home in 2010 out of the housing market. The qualified mortgages and qualified residential mortgages will transform our nation from a nation of home owners to a nation of permanent renters--many of whom will never be able to purchase a home. And the Obama Administration's love of Smart Growth, Smart Code and Sustainability ultimately endangers the future of all homeownership in the U.S. as the Administration promotes New Urbanism and policies designed to force Americans out of their suburban homes and into tiny apartments above retail shops.
BUSINESSES
While we are on the subject of Dodd-Frank, I would be remiss in not addressing the fact that the same legislation that will put the American dream out of reach for millions of Americans has also destroyed myriad small businesses and will destroy myriad more. The real estate and housing industries have been solid economic drivers for many decades. The housing crash of 2007 and 2008 did a lot of damage, but the Dodd Frank bill ensures that these industries will never recover. Ironically, the bill creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an elite army of some of the highest paid civil servants in U.S. history, who work for a director who is answerable to no one but the President himself. This behemoth is now bringing federal civil lawsuits against private businesses who compensate their employees in ways that the CFPB doesn't like. Where does that fit into the "good jobs with good wages" model that the president rolled out yesterday?
Of course, the CFPB is not the only enemy of business. We must not forget Obama's EPA and his war on coal which will destroy the jobs and businesses of many Americans across the nation in the name of improving our country.
EDUCATION
The educational system in America is a mess--no doubt about it. And the failure of the educational system is one reason that the rest of our country is failing as well. Forty-six percent of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate, according to an article published last week in the National Review. And we can see the results of this ignorance in poor choices at the ballot box that have led to Detroit's financial ruin. But Obama's answer to this catastrophe is more big government--Common Core Standards that emphasize textbooks with social justice messages and revisionist history. The solution to education in America is to get the Department of Education out of the way and to have each local community hold its own school boards accountable. And yes, parents are going to have to get involved in their own children's educations. The government does not force any person to have a child, and people who do have children are not "victims" that the rest of us need to feel sorry for. Parenting is a responsibility and a privilege, and people who sign up for it need to take ownership of their children's futures. We don't need a massive bureaucracy to get education straightened out. We need to scale back the big government and give parents the tools they need to make the right choices for their own families and their own kids. And we need to hold schools accountable for their results. If we don't we are going to continue pumping money into a system that graduates high schoolers who can't read but are completely fluent in the key points of socialism. Then again, that type of "education" does fit perfectly into a new economy where everyone is dependent on the government and less than half of the population are able to find a full time job.
RETIREMENT
With $17 trillion dollars in national debt staring back at us, looming shortfalls in Social Security, and $700 billion in cuts to Medicare to fund Obamacare, the very thought of retirement seems ridiculous. The President could assure Americans a prosperous retirement by letting them work full time during their most productive years and allowing some privatization of Social Security tax funds, but that would not mesh well with his "cradle to grave" big government mindset. In The Planner, I envision an America in which the government asks seniors to sign all of their assets over to the federal government in exchange for life long care in a Smart community. In real life, in the world of Obama speak, "a secure retirement" might mean just about anything, but we can be sure that it does not mean anything good.
Consider this: When Obama vents about the distinctions between the wealthy one percent and the middle class, he ignores the very blatant fact that each policy he has championed has benefited the wealthy at everyone else's expense. The very Wall Street crowd that he pretends to despise have made untold millions off of Bernanke quantitative easing policies that forced stocks high by keeping interest rates and Tbond rates artificially low. But these same policies tend to hurt seniors and retirees who are more likely to have their homes paid for and are living on the interest on their investments. Further, while the Wall Street crowd is seeing record highs, fewer and fewer Americans can invest in the stock market, which means that Wall Street's record breaking profits are being enjoyed by a shrinking class of people. The Christian Science Monitor highlighted this disparity in a May 8, 2013 article pointing out that while U.S. stocks have doubled since the lows of 2009, only about 52% of Americans now own stock--either outright or as part of a mutual fund or self-directed retirement account. This is the lowest level of stock ownership since Gallup has been tracking these statistics since 1998. By contrast, in 2007, 65% of Americans owned stock. That ownership represented many Americans who were "not rich" but who had been able to invest in something for their futures. And the greatest decline in stock ownership is in the 30-64 age bracket--those Americans who are "not rich" but are looking forward to making an investment in their own secure retirement rather than depending on the government to decide what they can and cannot have.
When Obama makes speeches like the one he made yesterday, he is insulting the intelligence of every one of us who is actually watching what is happening. If he truly had any concern for the middle class he would reverse his job killing, business killing, prosperity killing policies and allow the engines of economic growth to begin to work again. But that's not about to happen. The American people voted for four more years of Obamanomics, and we are on the receiving end of a very bitter bargain indeed.
Cities across America are going bankrupt from liberal, progressive policies. Find out why and what you can do about it in this informative presentation. Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia, One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
"The basic bargain of this country says that if you work hard, you can get ahead--you can build a secure life for your family, and know that your kids will do even better someday. But for more than a decade, that bargain has frayed, and a devastating recession made it worse....In the weeks ahead, in towns across the country, I'll be talking about my ideas for building on the cornerstones of middle-class security: Good jobs with good wages. An education that prepares our children and our workers for a new economy. A home to call your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you're not rich. A better bargain for the middle class and for all who are striving to join it."
As I read the email, I had to wonder whether Obama actually remembers that he has been president four and a half years out of the last decade. I also have to ask whether he and his cronies in DC are even remotely aware of how hollow his words sound when Americans who are paying any attention at all know that his policies have cost us jobs and incomes.
As a small business owner of fifteen years who had to close my mortgage company April 1st of this year because it was crushed under the weight of regulations imposed by the Dodd Frank bill, I know firsthand that Obama is not only not helping the middle class, he is annihilating it. So today I want to point out some inconvenient truths about how the Obama Administration is handling the economy in each of the areas he stressed yesterday:
JOBS
Remember when the Obama White House was supposedly focused like a laser beam on jobs? Or was that a DeathStar? The June 2013 jobs report revealed that America is sinking further and further into unemployment and under employment under the weight of massive regulations which make it difficult and expensive to keep the doors open and which disincentivize companies from hiring.
The facts of the current job market are these:
Although the Labor Department recorded 195,000 net new hires in June, it also recorded 247,000 "discouraged workers" who have stopped looking for work. The U.S. labor participation rate is now 63.5% and more than 20 million Americans are either unemployed but have quit looking for work or are working part-time and can't find full time work. The rate of under employed and unemployed--no longer looking--jumped to 14.3% of Americans in June. Over eight million of those were part-time workers who cannot find full time work. Only 47% of adult Americans are working full time right now. More than any other single statistic, the 47% figure really speaks to the true state of the economy. Part-time workers are not eligible for the benefits that Obama touts. And of course, since Obamacare labels employees full time at a 30 hour week, more and more Americans are seeing their hours cut so that their employers don't have to pay insurance for them. This is true not only of private employers, but also of quasi-government entities, like state universities and community colleges who are cutting the class times they allow their part-time contract instructors to teach to make sure that nobody exceeds the 30 hour threshold.
Even though the Obama White House has delayed the employer mandate for a year, employers have already begun to redefine "full" and "part" time. Successful companies plan their hiring and expansion strategies well ahead of time, so a one year delay in the implementation of Obamacare may cause certain employers to postpone layoffs but it is unlikely to cause any employer to go on a hiring spree. So unemployment and under employment will remain high in a crisis that the president created by forcing liberal policies that don't work on America's employers.
HEALTH CARE
And speaking of Obamacare, Obama seems to be blissfully unaware of the fact that Americans now know that the law that bears the president's name does not actually cut costs by $2500 a year as he had promised but is instead causing insurance premiums to skyrocket. In some states, premiums are increasing by 80%. Young people who had affordable catastrophic care coverage will no longer be able to maintain such coverage because it does not align with the requirements of Obamacare. And every individual, including those 8 million part-time Americans who cannot find full time work or are seeing their hours cut, will be required to start paying a fine if they can't afford to purchase health insurance in 2014. Small wonder that critics have now renamed Obamacare the Unaffordable Care Act.
HOUSING
The White House email references that all Americans should have "a home to call their own," but the Dodd Frank legislation that he championed will regulate almost 60% of Americans who qualified to purchase a home in 2010 out of the housing market. The qualified mortgages and qualified residential mortgages will transform our nation from a nation of home owners to a nation of permanent renters--many of whom will never be able to purchase a home. And the Obama Administration's love of Smart Growth, Smart Code and Sustainability ultimately endangers the future of all homeownership in the U.S. as the Administration promotes New Urbanism and policies designed to force Americans out of their suburban homes and into tiny apartments above retail shops.
BUSINESSES
While we are on the subject of Dodd-Frank, I would be remiss in not addressing the fact that the same legislation that will put the American dream out of reach for millions of Americans has also destroyed myriad small businesses and will destroy myriad more. The real estate and housing industries have been solid economic drivers for many decades. The housing crash of 2007 and 2008 did a lot of damage, but the Dodd Frank bill ensures that these industries will never recover. Ironically, the bill creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an elite army of some of the highest paid civil servants in U.S. history, who work for a director who is answerable to no one but the President himself. This behemoth is now bringing federal civil lawsuits against private businesses who compensate their employees in ways that the CFPB doesn't like. Where does that fit into the "good jobs with good wages" model that the president rolled out yesterday?
Of course, the CFPB is not the only enemy of business. We must not forget Obama's EPA and his war on coal which will destroy the jobs and businesses of many Americans across the nation in the name of improving our country.
EDUCATION
The educational system in America is a mess--no doubt about it. And the failure of the educational system is one reason that the rest of our country is failing as well. Forty-six percent of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate, according to an article published last week in the National Review. And we can see the results of this ignorance in poor choices at the ballot box that have led to Detroit's financial ruin. But Obama's answer to this catastrophe is more big government--Common Core Standards that emphasize textbooks with social justice messages and revisionist history. The solution to education in America is to get the Department of Education out of the way and to have each local community hold its own school boards accountable. And yes, parents are going to have to get involved in their own children's educations. The government does not force any person to have a child, and people who do have children are not "victims" that the rest of us need to feel sorry for. Parenting is a responsibility and a privilege, and people who sign up for it need to take ownership of their children's futures. We don't need a massive bureaucracy to get education straightened out. We need to scale back the big government and give parents the tools they need to make the right choices for their own families and their own kids. And we need to hold schools accountable for their results. If we don't we are going to continue pumping money into a system that graduates high schoolers who can't read but are completely fluent in the key points of socialism. Then again, that type of "education" does fit perfectly into a new economy where everyone is dependent on the government and less than half of the population are able to find a full time job.
RETIREMENT
With $17 trillion dollars in national debt staring back at us, looming shortfalls in Social Security, and $700 billion in cuts to Medicare to fund Obamacare, the very thought of retirement seems ridiculous. The President could assure Americans a prosperous retirement by letting them work full time during their most productive years and allowing some privatization of Social Security tax funds, but that would not mesh well with his "cradle to grave" big government mindset. In The Planner, I envision an America in which the government asks seniors to sign all of their assets over to the federal government in exchange for life long care in a Smart community. In real life, in the world of Obama speak, "a secure retirement" might mean just about anything, but we can be sure that it does not mean anything good.
Consider this: When Obama vents about the distinctions between the wealthy one percent and the middle class, he ignores the very blatant fact that each policy he has championed has benefited the wealthy at everyone else's expense. The very Wall Street crowd that he pretends to despise have made untold millions off of Bernanke quantitative easing policies that forced stocks high by keeping interest rates and Tbond rates artificially low. But these same policies tend to hurt seniors and retirees who are more likely to have their homes paid for and are living on the interest on their investments. Further, while the Wall Street crowd is seeing record highs, fewer and fewer Americans can invest in the stock market, which means that Wall Street's record breaking profits are being enjoyed by a shrinking class of people. The Christian Science Monitor highlighted this disparity in a May 8, 2013 article pointing out that while U.S. stocks have doubled since the lows of 2009, only about 52% of Americans now own stock--either outright or as part of a mutual fund or self-directed retirement account. This is the lowest level of stock ownership since Gallup has been tracking these statistics since 1998. By contrast, in 2007, 65% of Americans owned stock. That ownership represented many Americans who were "not rich" but who had been able to invest in something for their futures. And the greatest decline in stock ownership is in the 30-64 age bracket--those Americans who are "not rich" but are looking forward to making an investment in their own secure retirement rather than depending on the government to decide what they can and cannot have.
When Obama makes speeches like the one he made yesterday, he is insulting the intelligence of every one of us who is actually watching what is happening. If he truly had any concern for the middle class he would reverse his job killing, business killing, prosperity killing policies and allow the engines of economic growth to begin to work again. But that's not about to happen. The American people voted for four more years of Obamanomics, and we are on the receiving end of a very bitter bargain indeed.
Cities across America are going bankrupt from liberal, progressive policies. Find out why and what you can do about it in this informative presentation. Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia, One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
July 19, 2013
Spread the Poverty: Increase Minimum Wage
In February during President Obama's State of the Union address he advocated raising minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. In March, during a Senate hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked why minimum wage is not $22.00 an hour--adding that it would be if it kept pace with inflation.
Ever increasing minimum wage is a long-standing sacred cow of liberalism. Under the guise of "helping the little guy" they consistently promote requiring higher and higher salaries for entry level unskilled jobs. I wrote about some of the perils of this mindset in March in my post: Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin. I found Warren's position particularly interesting because though she touts excessively high minimum wage for unskilled workers, she also advocated for setting price caps for trained professionals during her tenure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hopefully, we will not see an increased federal minimum wage any time in the near future, but the Progressive Hell we fondly call Washington D.C. is experimenting with its own increase to minimum wage. The "Large Retailer Accountability" bill passed city council and now just needs the D.C. mayor's signature.
Called the anti-Wal-Mart bill, the law mandates a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour to be paid by businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 75,000 square feet of space. D.C.'s current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour--the living wage is a 50% premium over the current minimum. The law is supposed to apply immediately only to future Wal-Marts, but existing stores would have to comply within four years.
D.C. is a very expensive town where the elites live like royalty and the number of homeless people on the streets is always alarming to me. But even in the upside-down, backwards world of socialist progressives, this law makes no sense. REBusinessOnLine.com estimates that if the mayor of D.C. refuses to veto this ordinance, the new law will cost D.C. as many as 4000 jobs--3000 full time and 1000 in the construction sector. That is four thousand local residents who would have been earning at least $8.25 an hour and would have been working for corporations where they at least have an opportunity for training, promotion and advancement, who will be denied that opportunity because the great minds on city council believe that entry level pay should be $12.50 rather than $8.25 an hour. (And this is a false comparison anyway, because the choice is not between $12.50 and $8.25 an hour--it is between $8.25 an hour and unemployment. Wal-Mart has already announced that if the law is passed they will scrap plans to open additional stores in D.C.)
When I wrote on the minimum wage issue in March, I made the point that wages have to be graduated to give people incentive to work, to improve their situations, to take advantage of training and to get the skills they need to be able to improve their lives. If an entry level person can start at $22.00 an hour, they have no incentive to do anything to try to move up. A free market system works only if there are rewards for hard work and initiative--take those away and no one has any incentive to do anything.
,
But in the case of the D.C. city council, they are killing a major opportunity for people to get hired and start improving their lives. Unfortunately, this mindset is inherent to progressive socialism, which despises and punishes effort, hard work and initiative and encourages everyone to sit idly by, dependent on government for everything. While liberals nationwide are cheering the D.C. city council and hoping that other cities will adopt their model for running off Wal-Mart the rest of us should be shaking our heads in disgust at a mindset that prefers unemployment to gainful work.
Find out what Agenda 21 is, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia--One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Ever increasing minimum wage is a long-standing sacred cow of liberalism. Under the guise of "helping the little guy" they consistently promote requiring higher and higher salaries for entry level unskilled jobs. I wrote about some of the perils of this mindset in March in my post: Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin. I found Warren's position particularly interesting because though she touts excessively high minimum wage for unskilled workers, she also advocated for setting price caps for trained professionals during her tenure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hopefully, we will not see an increased federal minimum wage any time in the near future, but the Progressive Hell we fondly call Washington D.C. is experimenting with its own increase to minimum wage. The "Large Retailer Accountability" bill passed city council and now just needs the D.C. mayor's signature.
Called the anti-Wal-Mart bill, the law mandates a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour to be paid by businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 75,000 square feet of space. D.C.'s current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour--the living wage is a 50% premium over the current minimum. The law is supposed to apply immediately only to future Wal-Marts, but existing stores would have to comply within four years.
D.C. is a very expensive town where the elites live like royalty and the number of homeless people on the streets is always alarming to me. But even in the upside-down, backwards world of socialist progressives, this law makes no sense. REBusinessOnLine.com estimates that if the mayor of D.C. refuses to veto this ordinance, the new law will cost D.C. as many as 4000 jobs--3000 full time and 1000 in the construction sector. That is four thousand local residents who would have been earning at least $8.25 an hour and would have been working for corporations where they at least have an opportunity for training, promotion and advancement, who will be denied that opportunity because the great minds on city council believe that entry level pay should be $12.50 rather than $8.25 an hour. (And this is a false comparison anyway, because the choice is not between $12.50 and $8.25 an hour--it is between $8.25 an hour and unemployment. Wal-Mart has already announced that if the law is passed they will scrap plans to open additional stores in D.C.)
When I wrote on the minimum wage issue in March, I made the point that wages have to be graduated to give people incentive to work, to improve their situations, to take advantage of training and to get the skills they need to be able to improve their lives. If an entry level person can start at $22.00 an hour, they have no incentive to do anything to try to move up. A free market system works only if there are rewards for hard work and initiative--take those away and no one has any incentive to do anything.
,
But in the case of the D.C. city council, they are killing a major opportunity for people to get hired and start improving their lives. Unfortunately, this mindset is inherent to progressive socialism, which despises and punishes effort, hard work and initiative and encourages everyone to sit idly by, dependent on government for everything. While liberals nationwide are cheering the D.C. city council and hoping that other cities will adopt their model for running off Wal-Mart the rest of us should be shaking our heads in disgust at a mindset that prefers unemployment to gainful work.
Find out what Agenda 21 is, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia--One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Spread the Poverty: Increase Minimum Wage
In February during President Obama's State of the Union address he advocated raising minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. In March, during a Senate hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked why minimum wage is not $22.00 an hour--adding that it would be if it kept pace with inflation.
Ever increasing minimum wage is a long-standing sacred cow of liberalism. Under the guise of "helping the little guy" they consistently promote requiring higher and higher salaries for entry level unskilled jobs. I wrote about some of the perils of this mindset in March in my post: Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin. I found Warren's position particularly interesting because though she touts excessively high minimum wage for unskilled workers, she also advocated for setting price caps for trained professionals during her tenure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hopefully, we will not see an increased federal minimum wage any time in the near future, but the Progressive Hell we fondly call Washington D.C. is experimenting with its own increase to minimum wage. The "Large Retailer Accountability" bill passed city council and now just needs the D.C. mayor's signature.
Called the anti-Wal-Mart bill, the law mandates a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour to be paid by businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 75,000 square feet of space. D.C.'s current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour--the living wage is a 50% premium over the current minimum. The law is supposed to apply immediately only to future Wal-Marts, but existing stores would have to comply within four years.
D.C. is a very expensive town where the elites live like royalty and the number of homeless people on the streets is always alarming to me. But even in the upside-down, backwards world of socialist progressives, this law makes no sense. REBusinessOnLine.com estimates that if the mayor of D.C. refuses to veto this ordinance, the new law will cost D.C. as many as 4000 jobs--3000 full time and 1000 in the construction sector. That is four thousand local residents who would have been earning at least $8.25 an hour and would have been working for corporations where they at least have an opportunity for training, promotion and advancement, who will be denied that opportunity because the great minds on city council believe that entry level pay should be $12.50 rather than $8.25 an hour. (And this is a false comparison anyway, because the choice is not between $12.50 and $8.25 an hour--it is between $8.25 an hour and unemployment. Wal-Mart has already announced that if the law is passed they will scrap plans to open additional stores in D.C.)
When I wrote on the minimum wage issue in March, I made the point that wages have to be graduated to give people incentive to work, to improve their situations, to take advantage of training and to get the skills they need to be able to improve their lives. If an entry level person can start at $22.00 an hour, they have no incentive to do anything to try to move up. A free market system works only if there are rewards for hard work and initiative--take those away and no one has any incentive to do anything.
,
But in the case of the D.C. city council, they are killing a major opportunity for people to get hired and start improving their lives. Unfortunately, this mindset is inherent to progressive socialism, which despises and punishes effort, hard work and initiative and encourages everyone to sit idly by, dependent on government for everything. While liberals nationwide are cheering the D.C. city council and hoping that other cities will adopt their model for running off Wal-Mart the rest of us should be shaking our heads in disgust at a mindset that prefers unemployment to gainful work.
Find out what Agenda 21 is, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia--One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Ever increasing minimum wage is a long-standing sacred cow of liberalism. Under the guise of "helping the little guy" they consistently promote requiring higher and higher salaries for entry level unskilled jobs. I wrote about some of the perils of this mindset in March in my post: Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin. I found Warren's position particularly interesting because though she touts excessively high minimum wage for unskilled workers, she also advocated for setting price caps for trained professionals during her tenure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hopefully, we will not see an increased federal minimum wage any time in the near future, but the Progressive Hell we fondly call Washington D.C. is experimenting with its own increase to minimum wage. The "Large Retailer Accountability" bill passed city council and now just needs the D.C. mayor's signature.
Called the anti-Wal-Mart bill, the law mandates a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour to be paid by businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 75,000 square feet of space. D.C.'s current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour--the living wage is a 50% premium over the current minimum. The law is supposed to apply immediately only to future Wal-Marts, but existing stores would have to comply within four years.
D.C. is a very expensive town where the elites live like royalty and the number of homeless people on the streets is always alarming to me. But even in the upside-down, backwards world of socialist progressives, this law makes no sense. REBusinessOnLine.com estimates that if the mayor of D.C. refuses to veto this ordinance, the new law will cost D.C. as many as 4000 jobs--3000 full time and 1000 in the construction sector. That is four thousand local residents who would have been earning at least $8.25 an hour and would have been working for corporations where they at least have an opportunity for training, promotion and advancement, who will be denied that opportunity because the great minds on city council believe that entry level pay should be $12.50 rather than $8.25 an hour. (And this is a false comparison anyway, because the choice is not between $12.50 and $8.25 an hour--it is between $8.25 an hour and unemployment. Wal-Mart has already announced that if the law is passed they will scrap plans to open additional stores in D.C.)
When I wrote on the minimum wage issue in March, I made the point that wages have to be graduated to give people incentive to work, to improve their situations, to take advantage of training and to get the skills they need to be able to improve their lives. If an entry level person can start at $22.00 an hour, they have no incentive to do anything to try to move up. A free market system works only if there are rewards for hard work and initiative--take those away and no one has any incentive to do anything.
,
But in the case of the D.C. city council, they are killing a major opportunity for people to get hired and start improving their lives. Unfortunately, this mindset is inherent to progressive socialism, which despises and punishes effort, hard work and initiative and encourages everyone to sit idly by, dependent on government for everything. While liberals nationwide are cheering the D.C. city council and hoping that other cities will adopt their model for running off Wal-Mart the rest of us should be shaking our heads in disgust at a mindset that prefers unemployment to gainful work.
Find out what Agenda 21 is, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia--One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Spread the Poverty: Increase Minimum Wage
In February during President Obama's State of the Union address he advocated raising minimum wage to $9.00 an hour. In March, during a Senate hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked why minimum wage is not $22.00 an hour--adding that it would be if it kept pace with inflation.
Ever increasing minimum wage is a long-standing sacred cow of liberalism. Under the guise of "helping the little guy" they consistently promote requiring higher and higher salaries for entry level unskilled jobs. I wrote about some of the perils of this mindset in March in my post: Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin. I found Warren's position particularly interesting because though she touts excessively high minimum wage for unskilled workers, she also advocated for setting price caps for trained professionals during her tenure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hopefully, we will not see an increased federal minimum wage any time in the near future, but the Progressive Hell we fondly call Washington D.C. is experimenting with its own increase to minimum wage. The "Large Retailer Accountability" bill passed city council and now just needs the D.C. mayor's signature.
Called the anti-Wal-Mart bill, the law mandates a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour to be paid by businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 75,000 square feet of space. D.C.'s current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour--the living wage is a 50% premium over the current minimum. The law is supposed to apply immediately only to future Wal-Marts, but existing stores would have to comply within four years.
D.C. is a very expensive town where the elites live like royalty and the number of homeless people on the streets is always alarming to me. But even in the upside-down, backwards world of socialist progressives, this law makes no sense. REBusinessOnLine.com estimates that if the mayor of D.C. refuses to veto this ordinance, the new law will cost D.C. as many as 4000 jobs--3000 full time and 1000 in the construction sector. That is four thousand local residents who would have been earning at least $8.25 an hour and would have been working for corporations where they at least have an opportunity for training, promotion and advancement, who will be denied that opportunity because the great minds on city council believe that entry level pay should be $12.50 rather than $8.25 an hour. (And this is a false comparison anyway, because the choice is not between $12.50 and $8.25 an hour--it is between $8.25 an hour and unemployment. Wal-Mart has already announced that if the law is passed they will scrap plans to open additional stores in D.C.)
When I wrote on the minimum wage issue in March, I made the point that wages have to be graduated to give people incentive to work, to improve their situations, to take advantage of training and to get the skills they need to be able to improve their lives. If an entry level person can start at $22.00 an hour, they have no incentive to do anything to try to move up. A free market system works only if there are rewards for hard work and initiative--take those away and no one has any incentive to do anything.
,
But in the case of the D.C. city council, they are killing a major opportunity for people to get hired and start improving their lives. Unfortunately, this mindset is inherent to progressive socialism, which despises and punishes effort, hard work and initiative and encourages everyone to sit idly by, dependent on government for everything. While liberals nationwide are cheering the D.C. city council and hoping that other cities will adopt their model for running off Wal-Mart the rest of us should be shaking our heads in disgust at a mindset that prefers unemployment to gainful work.
Find out what Agenda 21 is, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia--One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Ever increasing minimum wage is a long-standing sacred cow of liberalism. Under the guise of "helping the little guy" they consistently promote requiring higher and higher salaries for entry level unskilled jobs. I wrote about some of the perils of this mindset in March in my post: Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings: Opposite Sides of the Same Coin. I found Warren's position particularly interesting because though she touts excessively high minimum wage for unskilled workers, she also advocated for setting price caps for trained professionals during her tenure with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Hopefully, we will not see an increased federal minimum wage any time in the near future, but the Progressive Hell we fondly call Washington D.C. is experimenting with its own increase to minimum wage. The "Large Retailer Accountability" bill passed city council and now just needs the D.C. mayor's signature.
Called the anti-Wal-Mart bill, the law mandates a "living wage" of $12.50 an hour to be paid by businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 75,000 square feet of space. D.C.'s current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour--the living wage is a 50% premium over the current minimum. The law is supposed to apply immediately only to future Wal-Marts, but existing stores would have to comply within four years.
D.C. is a very expensive town where the elites live like royalty and the number of homeless people on the streets is always alarming to me. But even in the upside-down, backwards world of socialist progressives, this law makes no sense. REBusinessOnLine.com estimates that if the mayor of D.C. refuses to veto this ordinance, the new law will cost D.C. as many as 4000 jobs--3000 full time and 1000 in the construction sector. That is four thousand local residents who would have been earning at least $8.25 an hour and would have been working for corporations where they at least have an opportunity for training, promotion and advancement, who will be denied that opportunity because the great minds on city council believe that entry level pay should be $12.50 rather than $8.25 an hour. (And this is a false comparison anyway, because the choice is not between $12.50 and $8.25 an hour--it is between $8.25 an hour and unemployment. Wal-Mart has already announced that if the law is passed they will scrap plans to open additional stores in D.C.)
When I wrote on the minimum wage issue in March, I made the point that wages have to be graduated to give people incentive to work, to improve their situations, to take advantage of training and to get the skills they need to be able to improve their lives. If an entry level person can start at $22.00 an hour, they have no incentive to do anything to try to move up. A free market system works only if there are rewards for hard work and initiative--take those away and no one has any incentive to do anything.
,
But in the case of the D.C. city council, they are killing a major opportunity for people to get hired and start improving their lives. Unfortunately, this mindset is inherent to progressive socialism, which despises and punishes effort, hard work and initiative and encourages everyone to sit idly by, dependent on government for everything. While liberals nationwide are cheering the D.C. city council and hoping that other cities will adopt their model for running off Wal-Mart the rest of us should be shaking our heads in disgust at a mindset that prefers unemployment to gainful work.
Find out what Agenda 21 is, how it is being implemented, and what you can do about it: Agenda 21: Bankrupting America into Utopia--One City at a Time.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
July 16, 2013
Obamacare, Rationing, and the Immutable Law of the Universal
Remember when Nancy Pelosi promised us that we would love Obamacare, but we would have to pass it to find out what was in it? Well now, we are just a few months away from the full implementation of this massive monstrosity, and it seems that most Americans are not feeling the love. With the potential impact of the bill's job killing incentives about to hit Americans full force, the Obama Administration has unilaterally decided that the employer mandate can be postponed for a full year, until after the 2014 elections. Unfortunately, we as individuals will still have to obtain our own health insurance or pay a penalty. Employers are cutting workers back to part-time to avoid the costs and penalties associated with Obamacare. Even the unions are now getting involved--last week the heads of three major unions sent an open letter to President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat members of Congress warning that Obamacare as it is being implemented threatens the middle class and "will destroy the health and well being" of every American unless changes are made. The letter reminds the president that the unions threw their full support behind him and he promised them, in turn, that they would be able to keep their present plans if they liked them, but now they are discovering that this is not really the case. Of course, the unions' solution to this chaos is to demand that government subsidies, which the Obama Administration set up to help lower income people buy health insurance, be used to pay for the union plans. When retiring Democratic Senator Max Baucus called Obamcare a "train wreck" he about summed up the situation perfectly--he just failed to mention that the entire nation is on the train about to go over the cliff.
I have read a lot of perspectives on how Congress should handle the president's decision to set aside the employer mandate for one year. Red State's Erick Erickson argues that the American people voted for President Obama twice, and they need to feel the full effects of his vision for our country, so Congress should insist that all parts be implemented. I respect Erickson's point of view on this, but as an American who had an excellent health insurance policy a few years ago that I had to let lapse as the economy grew worse, I also understand that in real terms a lot of Americans are hurting badly. Having more and more jobs cut, and higher and higher taxes imposed on us may be an appropriate "lesson" and motivation for our nation to begin to make better choices, but in human terms it just extends the misery that has already spread through our nation. I really am on the "delay/defund/repeal" side of the argument--delay implementation, defund the law, and repeal it in its entirety. No tweaks; no edits, no fixes--just straight out repeal.
I do want to point out, however, that there is much that we as a nation can learn from our experience with Obamacare which could be instructive for our collective futures. The last week of June, I attended the Las Cruces, NM Tea Party meeting. The local Tea Party had invited a state rep from Las Cruces who is also a physician and a cardiologist from Las Cruces to talk about the impact of the law on the administration of health care. The cardiologist said plainly that one of the immediate effects of the implementation of Obamacare will be that sick people will not be able to get care because the law incentivizes doctors for having "well patients" and punishes them for having sick patients. No doctor wants to be penalized, so they are going to tend to refuse to treat the sick. After many years as a cardiologist, he is making so little money that his physician's assistant is earning more than he is. Much of his time is spent completing onerous amounts of paperwork for which he receives no compensation; he receives very little compensation for the patients he does treat. He is about to reach a place where he has to bring in his own funds to keep his practice open, and at that point it will no longer be cost effective for him to continue practicing medicine.
I really empathized with this doctor, because the problems he was describing with running his practice were nearly identical to the problems that invaded mortgage finance after the Dodd Frank bill was passed. This man has spent several decades of his life treating sick patients, but now he is being regulated into retirement by a bureaucracy created by people who know nothing about medicine and have set arbitrary rules into place that govern how patients can be treated.
I have always been completely opposed to the Affordable Care Act, but as I sat in this meeting listening to these two doctors, I had a new appreciation for what the law really is and what it really does. Remember that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to provide insurance for the 30-40 million uninsured Americans. However, a couple of months ago we learned from the Congressional Budget Office that because of holes in the law it will still leave about 30 million Americans uninsured. The law does not provide equal health care to all--no such law is even possible. What it does do is create a system where wealthier Americans who have cash to pay for their healthcare can afford to visit doctors in cash only practices, while Americans who rely in insurance, Medicare or Medicaid will have to accept whatever treatment the government or their insurance companies will authorize on their behalf.
When Obamacare was being debated, many conservatives and opponents of the law levied the charge that the Affordable Care Act would cause rationing. That is not quite correct. A more correct statement would be that the Affordable Care Act IS rationing. Anything "universal" is rationed--once a commodity or a service or a way of life is designated as a "universal right" it is only a few short steps away from becoming the exclusive property of an elite few. The idea that every American should own a home led to the housing crash, which in turn led to Dodd Frank which will turn 60% of Americans into permanent renters with no chance of home ownership. Likewise, the "universal" right to healthcare will mean that only a few elite Americans will have access to medical care. (And don't say--"well that's the way it was anyway." I have had some personal experience with the U.S. healthcare system via uninsured family members who needed extensive medical care, and they received excellent treatment in the pre-Obama system without insurance.)
Much has been made of the fact that Obamacare levies heavy taxes on the "Cadillac plans"--the types of health insurance policies that union members, for instance, have access to through their unions. One supporter of Obamacare commenting on Fox News referred to these plans as being "over insured" and stated plainly that no one needs a policy that good. I am not a fan of anything union, but the fact is that in America every citizen should be able to have the fanciest plan he can afford, if he chooses to spend his money on that. If I want an insurance plan that pays to paint my toenails and I can afford to pay the premiums, then to do so should be my personal right and none of anyone else's business. Likewise, millions of twenty-somethings who feel invincible and therefore carry only a catastrophic insurance plan should have the right to do that. If a twenty-six year-old in otherwise good health needs to access the insurance at all, it probably is because of a catastrophic event. No government board should be able to tell someone what kind of insurance they have to purchase, or whether they have to purchase any kind of insurance.
Whenever we tie the moniker "universal" to any item, we can be assured that, to paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles, if everyone is entitled to a particular thing, then in fact no one is. This is the immutable law of the "universal".
It is my sincere hope that Americans will look up and realize that they have been sold a huge pack of lies and completely reject Obamacare, and the socialist single-payer system which is following right behind it. But I also hope that we will learn as a nation to reject any "universal" right--whether it be a "universal" right to nutritious food, or housing, or preschool, or safety, or anything else. I hope that we will understand that it is not possible for any government to guarantee our happiness or our fulfillment in life or our access to everything we would like to have. May we always remember our experiences the last three years and bear in mind that when "everyone" has something, that's really another way of saying that no one does.
Learn about Agenda 21, the United Nations' policy document for sustainability, how it is implemented and what you can do about it.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
I have read a lot of perspectives on how Congress should handle the president's decision to set aside the employer mandate for one year. Red State's Erick Erickson argues that the American people voted for President Obama twice, and they need to feel the full effects of his vision for our country, so Congress should insist that all parts be implemented. I respect Erickson's point of view on this, but as an American who had an excellent health insurance policy a few years ago that I had to let lapse as the economy grew worse, I also understand that in real terms a lot of Americans are hurting badly. Having more and more jobs cut, and higher and higher taxes imposed on us may be an appropriate "lesson" and motivation for our nation to begin to make better choices, but in human terms it just extends the misery that has already spread through our nation. I really am on the "delay/defund/repeal" side of the argument--delay implementation, defund the law, and repeal it in its entirety. No tweaks; no edits, no fixes--just straight out repeal.
I do want to point out, however, that there is much that we as a nation can learn from our experience with Obamacare which could be instructive for our collective futures. The last week of June, I attended the Las Cruces, NM Tea Party meeting. The local Tea Party had invited a state rep from Las Cruces who is also a physician and a cardiologist from Las Cruces to talk about the impact of the law on the administration of health care. The cardiologist said plainly that one of the immediate effects of the implementation of Obamacare will be that sick people will not be able to get care because the law incentivizes doctors for having "well patients" and punishes them for having sick patients. No doctor wants to be penalized, so they are going to tend to refuse to treat the sick. After many years as a cardiologist, he is making so little money that his physician's assistant is earning more than he is. Much of his time is spent completing onerous amounts of paperwork for which he receives no compensation; he receives very little compensation for the patients he does treat. He is about to reach a place where he has to bring in his own funds to keep his practice open, and at that point it will no longer be cost effective for him to continue practicing medicine.
I really empathized with this doctor, because the problems he was describing with running his practice were nearly identical to the problems that invaded mortgage finance after the Dodd Frank bill was passed. This man has spent several decades of his life treating sick patients, but now he is being regulated into retirement by a bureaucracy created by people who know nothing about medicine and have set arbitrary rules into place that govern how patients can be treated.
I have always been completely opposed to the Affordable Care Act, but as I sat in this meeting listening to these two doctors, I had a new appreciation for what the law really is and what it really does. Remember that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to provide insurance for the 30-40 million uninsured Americans. However, a couple of months ago we learned from the Congressional Budget Office that because of holes in the law it will still leave about 30 million Americans uninsured. The law does not provide equal health care to all--no such law is even possible. What it does do is create a system where wealthier Americans who have cash to pay for their healthcare can afford to visit doctors in cash only practices, while Americans who rely in insurance, Medicare or Medicaid will have to accept whatever treatment the government or their insurance companies will authorize on their behalf.
When Obamacare was being debated, many conservatives and opponents of the law levied the charge that the Affordable Care Act would cause rationing. That is not quite correct. A more correct statement would be that the Affordable Care Act IS rationing. Anything "universal" is rationed--once a commodity or a service or a way of life is designated as a "universal right" it is only a few short steps away from becoming the exclusive property of an elite few. The idea that every American should own a home led to the housing crash, which in turn led to Dodd Frank which will turn 60% of Americans into permanent renters with no chance of home ownership. Likewise, the "universal" right to healthcare will mean that only a few elite Americans will have access to medical care. (And don't say--"well that's the way it was anyway." I have had some personal experience with the U.S. healthcare system via uninsured family members who needed extensive medical care, and they received excellent treatment in the pre-Obama system without insurance.)
Much has been made of the fact that Obamacare levies heavy taxes on the "Cadillac plans"--the types of health insurance policies that union members, for instance, have access to through their unions. One supporter of Obamacare commenting on Fox News referred to these plans as being "over insured" and stated plainly that no one needs a policy that good. I am not a fan of anything union, but the fact is that in America every citizen should be able to have the fanciest plan he can afford, if he chooses to spend his money on that. If I want an insurance plan that pays to paint my toenails and I can afford to pay the premiums, then to do so should be my personal right and none of anyone else's business. Likewise, millions of twenty-somethings who feel invincible and therefore carry only a catastrophic insurance plan should have the right to do that. If a twenty-six year-old in otherwise good health needs to access the insurance at all, it probably is because of a catastrophic event. No government board should be able to tell someone what kind of insurance they have to purchase, or whether they have to purchase any kind of insurance.
Whenever we tie the moniker "universal" to any item, we can be assured that, to paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles, if everyone is entitled to a particular thing, then in fact no one is. This is the immutable law of the "universal".
It is my sincere hope that Americans will look up and realize that they have been sold a huge pack of lies and completely reject Obamacare, and the socialist single-payer system which is following right behind it. But I also hope that we will learn as a nation to reject any "universal" right--whether it be a "universal" right to nutritious food, or housing, or preschool, or safety, or anything else. I hope that we will understand that it is not possible for any government to guarantee our happiness or our fulfillment in life or our access to everything we would like to have. May we always remember our experiences the last three years and bear in mind that when "everyone" has something, that's really another way of saying that no one does.
Learn about Agenda 21, the United Nations' policy document for sustainability, how it is implemented and what you can do about it.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
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Obamacare, Rationing, and the Immutable Law of the Universal
Remember when Nancy Pelosi promised us that we would love Obamacare, but we would have to pass it to find out what was in it? Well now, we are just a few months away from the full implementation of this massive monstrosity, and it seems that most Americans are not feeling the love. With the potential impact of the bill's job killing incentives about to hit Americans full force, the Obama Administration has unilaterally decided that the employer mandate can be postponed for a full year, until after the 2014 elections. Unfortunately, we as individuals will still have to obtain our own health insurance or pay a penalty. Employers are cutting workers back to part-time to avoid the costs and penalties associated with Obamacare. Even the unions are now getting involved--last week the heads of three major unions sent an open letter to President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat members of Congress warning that Obamacare as it is being implemented threatens the middle class and "will destroy the health and well being" of every American unless changes are made. The letter reminds the president that the unions threw their full support behind him and he promised them, in turn, that they would be able to keep their present plans if they liked them, but now they are discovering that this is not really the case. Of course, the unions' solution to this chaos is to demand that government subsidies, which the Obama Administration set up to help lower income people buy health insurance, be used to pay for the union plans. When retiring Democratic Senator Max Baucus called Obamcare a "train wreck" he about summed up the situation perfectly--he just failed to mention that the entire nation is on the train about to go over the cliff.
I have read a lot of perspectives on how Congress should handle the president's decision to set aside the employer mandate for one year. Red State's Erick Erickson argues that the American people voted for President Obama twice, and they need to feel the full effects of his vision for our country, so Congress should insist that all parts be implemented. I respect Erickson's point of view on this, but as an American who had an excellent health insurance policy a few years ago that I had to let lapse as the economy grew worse, I also understand that in real terms a lot of Americans are hurting badly. Having more and more jobs cut, and higher and higher taxes imposed on us may be an appropriate "lesson" and motivation for our nation to begin to make better choices, but in human terms it just extends the misery that has already spread through our nation. I really am on the "delay/defund/repeal" side of the argument--delay implementation, defund the law, and repeal it in its entirety. No tweaks; no edits, no fixes--just straight out repeal.
I do want to point out, however, that there is much that we as a nation can learn from our experience with Obamacare which could be instructive for our collective futures. The last week of June, I attended the Las Cruces, NM Tea Party meeting. The local Tea Party had invited a state rep from Las Cruces who is also a physician and a cardiologist from Las Cruces to talk about the impact of the law on the administration of health care. The cardiologist said plainly that one of the immediate effects of the implementation of Obamacare will be that sick people will not be able to get care because the law incentivizes doctors for having "well patients" and punishes them for having sick patients. No doctor wants to be penalized, so they are going to tend to refuse to treat the sick. After many years as a cardiologist, he is making so little money that his physician's assistant is earning more than he is. Much of his time is spent completing onerous amounts of paperwork for which he receives no compensation; he receives very little compensation for the patients he does treat. He is about to reach a place where he has to bring in his own funds to keep his practice open, and at that point it will no longer be cost effective for him to continue practicing medicine.
I really empathized with this doctor, because the problems he was describing with running his practice were nearly identical to the problems that invaded mortgage finance after the Dodd Frank bill was passed. This man has spent several decades of his life treating sick patients, but now he is being regulated into retirement by a bureaucracy created by people who know nothing about medicine and have set arbitrary rules into place that govern how patients can be treated.
I have always been completely opposed to the Affordable Care Act, but as I sat in this meeting listening to these two doctors, I had a new appreciation for what the law really is and what it really does. Remember that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to provide insurance for the 30-40 million uninsured Americans. However, a couple of months ago we learned from the Congressional Budget Office that because of holes in the law it will still leave about 30 million Americans uninsured. The law does not provide equal health care to all--no such law is even possible. What it does do is create a system where wealthier Americans who have cash to pay for their healthcare can afford to visit doctors in cash only practices, while Americans who rely in insurance, Medicare or Medicaid will have to accept whatever treatment the government or their insurance companies will authorize on their behalf.
When Obamacare was being debated, many conservatives and opponents of the law levied the charge that the Affordable Care Act would cause rationing. That is not quite correct. A more correct statement would be that the Affordable Care Act IS rationing. Anything "universal" is rationed--once a commodity or a service or a way of life is designated as a "universal right" it is only a few short steps away from becoming the exclusive property of an elite few. The idea that every American should own a home led to the housing crash, which in turn led to Dodd Frank which will turn 60% of Americans into permanent renters with no chance of home ownership. Likewise, the "universal" right to healthcare will mean that only a few elite Americans will have access to medical care. (And don't say--"well that's the way it was anyway." I have had some personal experience with the U.S. healthcare system via uninsured family members who needed extensive medical care, and they received excellent treatment in the pre-Obama system without insurance.)
Much has been made of the fact that Obamacare levies heavy taxes on the "Cadillac plans"--the types of health insurance policies that union members, for instance, have access to through their unions. One supporter of Obamacare commenting on Fox News referred to these plans as being "over insured" and stated plainly that no one needs a policy that good. I am not a fan of anything union, but the fact is that in America every citizen should be able to have the fanciest plan he can afford, if he chooses to spend his money on that. If I want an insurance plan that pays to paint my toenails and I can afford to pay the premiums, then to do so should be my personal right and none of anyone else's business. Likewise, millions of twenty-somethings who feel invincible and therefore carry only a catastrophic insurance plan should have the right to do that. If a twenty-six year-old in otherwise good health needs to access the insurance at all, it probably is because of a catastrophic event. No government board should be able to tell someone what kind of insurance they have to purchase, or whether they have to purchase any kind of insurance.
Whenever we tie the moniker "universal" to any item, we can be assured that, to paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles, if everyone is entitled to a particular thing, then in fact no one is. This is the immutable law of the "universal".
It is my sincere hope that Americans will look up and realize that they have been sold a huge pack of lies and completely reject Obamacare, and the socialist single-payer system which is following right behind it. But I also hope that we will learn as a nation to reject any "universal" right--whether it be a "universal" right to nutritious food, or housing, or preschool, or safety, or anything else. I hope that we will understand that it is not possible for any government to guarantee our happiness or our fulfillment in life or our access to everything we would like to have. May we always remember our experiences the last three years and bear in mind that when "everyone" has something, that's really another way of saying that no one does.
Learn about Agenda 21, the United Nations' policy document for sustainability, how it is implemented and what you can do about it.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
I have read a lot of perspectives on how Congress should handle the president's decision to set aside the employer mandate for one year. Red State's Erick Erickson argues that the American people voted for President Obama twice, and they need to feel the full effects of his vision for our country, so Congress should insist that all parts be implemented. I respect Erickson's point of view on this, but as an American who had an excellent health insurance policy a few years ago that I had to let lapse as the economy grew worse, I also understand that in real terms a lot of Americans are hurting badly. Having more and more jobs cut, and higher and higher taxes imposed on us may be an appropriate "lesson" and motivation for our nation to begin to make better choices, but in human terms it just extends the misery that has already spread through our nation. I really am on the "delay/defund/repeal" side of the argument--delay implementation, defund the law, and repeal it in its entirety. No tweaks; no edits, no fixes--just straight out repeal.
I do want to point out, however, that there is much that we as a nation can learn from our experience with Obamacare which could be instructive for our collective futures. The last week of June, I attended the Las Cruces, NM Tea Party meeting. The local Tea Party had invited a state rep from Las Cruces who is also a physician and a cardiologist from Las Cruces to talk about the impact of the law on the administration of health care. The cardiologist said plainly that one of the immediate effects of the implementation of Obamacare will be that sick people will not be able to get care because the law incentivizes doctors for having "well patients" and punishes them for having sick patients. No doctor wants to be penalized, so they are going to tend to refuse to treat the sick. After many years as a cardiologist, he is making so little money that his physician's assistant is earning more than he is. Much of his time is spent completing onerous amounts of paperwork for which he receives no compensation; he receives very little compensation for the patients he does treat. He is about to reach a place where he has to bring in his own funds to keep his practice open, and at that point it will no longer be cost effective for him to continue practicing medicine.
I really empathized with this doctor, because the problems he was describing with running his practice were nearly identical to the problems that invaded mortgage finance after the Dodd Frank bill was passed. This man has spent several decades of his life treating sick patients, but now he is being regulated into retirement by a bureaucracy created by people who know nothing about medicine and have set arbitrary rules into place that govern how patients can be treated.
I have always been completely opposed to the Affordable Care Act, but as I sat in this meeting listening to these two doctors, I had a new appreciation for what the law really is and what it really does. Remember that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to provide insurance for the 30-40 million uninsured Americans. However, a couple of months ago we learned from the Congressional Budget Office that because of holes in the law it will still leave about 30 million Americans uninsured. The law does not provide equal health care to all--no such law is even possible. What it does do is create a system where wealthier Americans who have cash to pay for their healthcare can afford to visit doctors in cash only practices, while Americans who rely in insurance, Medicare or Medicaid will have to accept whatever treatment the government or their insurance companies will authorize on their behalf.
When Obamacare was being debated, many conservatives and opponents of the law levied the charge that the Affordable Care Act would cause rationing. That is not quite correct. A more correct statement would be that the Affordable Care Act IS rationing. Anything "universal" is rationed--once a commodity or a service or a way of life is designated as a "universal right" it is only a few short steps away from becoming the exclusive property of an elite few. The idea that every American should own a home led to the housing crash, which in turn led to Dodd Frank which will turn 60% of Americans into permanent renters with no chance of home ownership. Likewise, the "universal" right to healthcare will mean that only a few elite Americans will have access to medical care. (And don't say--"well that's the way it was anyway." I have had some personal experience with the U.S. healthcare system via uninsured family members who needed extensive medical care, and they received excellent treatment in the pre-Obama system without insurance.)
Much has been made of the fact that Obamacare levies heavy taxes on the "Cadillac plans"--the types of health insurance policies that union members, for instance, have access to through their unions. One supporter of Obamacare commenting on Fox News referred to these plans as being "over insured" and stated plainly that no one needs a policy that good. I am not a fan of anything union, but the fact is that in America every citizen should be able to have the fanciest plan he can afford, if he chooses to spend his money on that. If I want an insurance plan that pays to paint my toenails and I can afford to pay the premiums, then to do so should be my personal right and none of anyone else's business. Likewise, millions of twenty-somethings who feel invincible and therefore carry only a catastrophic insurance plan should have the right to do that. If a twenty-six year-old in otherwise good health needs to access the insurance at all, it probably is because of a catastrophic event. No government board should be able to tell someone what kind of insurance they have to purchase, or whether they have to purchase any kind of insurance.
Whenever we tie the moniker "universal" to any item, we can be assured that, to paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles, if everyone is entitled to a particular thing, then in fact no one is. This is the immutable law of the "universal".
It is my sincere hope that Americans will look up and realize that they have been sold a huge pack of lies and completely reject Obamacare, and the socialist single-payer system which is following right behind it. But I also hope that we will learn as a nation to reject any "universal" right--whether it be a "universal" right to nutritious food, or housing, or preschool, or safety, or anything else. I hope that we will understand that it is not possible for any government to guarantee our happiness or our fulfillment in life or our access to everything we would like to have. May we always remember our experiences the last three years and bear in mind that when "everyone" has something, that's really another way of saying that no one does.
Learn about Agenda 21, the United Nations' policy document for sustainability, how it is implemented and what you can do about it.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
