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Everything Millennials Need To Know About Politics And Economics in 25 Quotes
Townhall.com ^ | October 25, 2014 | John Hawkins

Posted on 10/25/2014 5:19:54 AM PDT by Kaslin

1) No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind. — Thomas Sowell

2) We tolerate, even promote, many things we once regarded as evil, wrong, or immoral. And then we seek “explanations” for an act that seems beyond comprehension. Remove societal restraints on some evils and one can expect the demons to be freed to conduct other evil acts. —Cal Thomas

3) What would you think of a person who earned $24,000 a year but spent $35,000? Suppose on top of that, he was already $170,000 in debt. You’d tell him to get his act together — stop spending so much or he’d destroy his family, impoverish his kids and wreck their future. Of course, no individual could live so irresponsibly for long. But tack on eight more zeroes to that budget and you have the checkbook for our out-of-control, big-spending federal government. —John Stossel

4) As my father-in-law once said, when they talk about taxes it’s always for teachers, firemen, and police – but when they spend your taxes, it always seems to go to some guy in a leather chair downtown you never heard of. —Glenn Reynolds

5) America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance–and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. — Ayn Rand

6) If there is no moral foundation for a system of laws, then the law is reduced to “These are the rules. They’re the rules because I say so, and I control all of the guys with guns.” We can ask those who survived Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao how that worked out…

So the law is either codification of morality or it is thuggery. The real argument is about which moral code will be implemented by the law. To claim to reject a moral underpinning for the law is either a wish to live in a place where the law is whatever one guy says it is today, or else it is a disingenuous attempt to substitute your own moral code for the one that has already been codified. —Beregond

7) A rising tide (in the economy) lifts all boats. — John Kennedy

8) I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. —Ben Franklin

9) When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union — like public housing in the United States — look decrepit within a year or two of their construction… —Milton Friedman

10) Repeatedly asking for government help undermines the foundations of society by destroying initiative and responsibility. It is also a fatal blow to efficiency and corrupts the political process. When everyone gets something for nothing, soon no one will have anything, because no one will be producing anything. —Charles Koch

11) Right now, politicians have the power to suddenly decide to tax us all at 100% and then spend the money replacing all of our roads with a high-speed rail system. What keeps them from doing that? Common sense? Come on, look at the morons we have in government – Congress is filled with idiots who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and who have grand visions to transform the nation. No, the only thing stopping them is that they’re divided into two parties who viscerally hate each other. If they ever got along, a big new government overreach like the Patriot Act or a giant boondoggle like Obamacare would be passed every couple weeks. By the end of the year, we’d have the government spying on our every movement as we lived flat broke in shanty towns, eating our government-allotted corn cob half we’d get every other day. —Frank J. Fleming

12) Far from having the 21st-century equivalent of an Edwardian class system, the United States is characterized by a great deal of variation in income: More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives; 73 percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent, and 39 percent will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year. Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives. --Kevin Williamson

13) Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book’s words), regulation should not “be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly” —Margaret Thatcher

14) "The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble." —Henry Hazlitt

15) Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process. —Ronald Reagan

16) By government giveaway programs, individuals are often hurt far more than they are helped. The recipients of these programs become dependent on the government and their dignity is destroyed. Is it compassionate to enslave more and more people by making them a part of the government dependency cycle? I think compassion should be measured by how many people no longer need it. Helping people to become self-sufficient is much more compassionate than drugging them with the narcotic of welfare. —Rush Limbaugh

17) With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. —Rand Paul

18) There used to be no income inequality in China because everyone was poor. This is a tradeoff you accept for growth and freedom. —Michele Caruso-Cabrera

19) Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. —Will and Ariel Durant

20) The total present value of payments expected under Social Security and Medicare beyond what is expected to be collected under current tax laws is about $100 trillion. One way to put that amount of money in context is to note that it is about twice the amount of all the net private assets that exist in America today. To answer cw’s question directly, the best back-of-envelope estimate is that meeting this unfunded portion of our Social Security and Medicare commitments would require roughly an immediate 80 percent increase in federal income taxes, sustained forever. –Jim Manzi

21) The real story is that our social safety net was supposed to be like one of those, “Take a Penny, Leave a Penny” tills that depend on the honor and neighborliness of a community. And we don’t have that community. What we have is a fragmented mess of givers and takers who are not the same people. —Daniel Greenfield

22) If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. — Somerset Maugham

23) Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will occur because we have a meeting of the mind. Now suppose there’s the imposition of a 30 percent income tax on you. That means you won’t receive $200 but instead $140. You might say the heck with working for me – spending the day with your family is worth more than $140. You might then offer that you’ll do the job if I pay you $285. That way your after-tax earnings will be $200 – what the job was worth to you. There’s a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to me, not $285. So it’s my turn to say the heck with it. This simple example demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of eliminating transactions, and hence jobs. — Walter Williams

24) Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks-no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea, if there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. -- James Madison

25) Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks — drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it’s the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives. – Mark Steyn


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: economics; millenials; politics

1 posted on 10/25/2014 5:19:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin
26) A is A.

-John Galt-
2 posted on 10/25/2014 5:28:25 AM PDT by Hoodat (Article 4, Section 4)
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To: Kaslin

Excellent collection of wisdom. Thx for posting it.


3 posted on 10/25/2014 5:40:12 AM PDT by Nervous Tick (There is no "allah" but satan, and mohammed is his demon)
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To: All
All of the great insights posted above dissolve into nothingness when we consider that Democrats are flacking the greedy/grabby billionaire Clintons back into office.

==============================================

The mega-wealthy Clintons are relying heavily on "white privilege" to get back into office. The Clintons' have benefitted from, and are climbing back into office, using privileges far beyond those of the "community of color" to whom they planned to appeal.

"White privilege" denotes the array of advantages the Clintons have cultivated over years in public office. The gold-plated, endless perks of "white privilege" include:

<><> their personal massive wealth in the $2 billion range....

<><> ownership of multiple homes in posh enclaves....

<><> unknown secret offshore bank accounts...

<><> unrevealed investment profits...

<><> the chain of high public offices they've held....

<><> privileged friends in high places....

<><> global connections....

<><> constant affirmations of their own worth....

<><> greater social status...

<><> the expansive freedoms wealth and connections provide...

<><> unlimited access to the press to speak freely.....

<><> their memoirs made millions....

<><> Dec 2000 book deal $8 million; 2014 book deal $14 mill....

<><> three tax-exempt Clinton family foundations worth hundreds of millions....

<><> Clinton foundation "endowment" skyrockets to $200 million overnight....

<><> Hillary's $200,000 speeches.......

<><> Bill's tax-paid cushy pensions/benefits....

<><> tax-paid Clinton Library (Hollywood honey Sultan of Brunei a donor).....

<><> Chelsea's paid-for $10 million uber-condo.

2016 Hillary was relying on the "income equality" bugaboo to hoist herself into office......as good a definition of "white privilege" as any. The Clintons strategy is to label others as "different" while presenting themselves as "normal."

========================================

The Clinton "normal" is couple billion dollars laying around, accumulated without ever having a real job. The Never-Enough Clintons had planned to run a populist campaign, critical of the Wall Street types”....that's after the world was informed that speaker Hillary was pocketing $200,000 a throw from Goldman Sachs.....and other corporate giants.

The Clintons went from "dead broke" to multi-billionaires in an astonishing short period of time----without holding jobs The greedy, mega-wealthy Clintons have money pouring in from everywhere without lifting a finger...said to be worth couple BILLION dollars.

Never-enough Bill/Hillary look to cash in w/ another go-round in the White House. The Clintons owe bigtime......money is pouring into their three tax-exempt foundations......and these donors expect payback.

=========================================

Clintons raised $2-3 billion in two decades
The Hill ^ | July 2, 2014 | Alexandra Jaffe / FR Posted by Cincinatus' Wife

Bill and Hillary Clinton raised $2-3 billion in the two decades they’ve been prominent on the national stage, according to the WSJ.

The Journal tallied the Clintons’ speaking fees, fundraising for their foundation and the sums raised for Bill Clinton’s two presidential campaigns for the DNC while he was in office and for Hillary Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns.

Between $1.3-2 billion came from U.S. companies and industry sources, making up at least 75 percent of the sum — more than the 60 percent industry sources contributed to the two Bushes’ political operations.

The Journal reports that if Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, as expected, she could return such donors to the Democratic Party, a source of concern for Republican fundraisers as they gear up for what’s expected to be the most expensive presidential election in history.

Overall, the Clintons’ political operations raised $1.2 billion, their nonprofit drew between $750 million and $1.7 billion and they made about $100 million in speaking fees. --SNIP--

=================================================

The figures are what THE CLINTONS ALLOW us to know. DOES NOT include (1) amounts secreted in numbered offshore bank accounts,(2) investment holdings, (3) safe deposit boxes holding coins, gold, valuables, etc, (4) other holdings in real estate, businesses, (5) rental, interest accrued, investment income, etc .....

Here's how the "dead broke " Clintons got their geedy hands on billions of dollars.......being president and Secretary of State has an astoundingly good monetary return.

Hundreds of millions flow into the Clintons three tax-exempt foundations which the Clintons calculatedly morphed into hundreds of separate fund-raising machines.

The Clintons' recently formed "The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Family Foundation" gives them even more fund-raising capabilities......w/ a friendly "family" aura.

============================================

Earlier, a NYT's expose chronicled the shady financing of the tax-exempt Clinton Global Initiative foundation.

CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE
you can peruse 276 web pages of obscure programs
all of them vehicles to raise money
all of them salivating for payback w/ Hillary in the WH.

1271 Avenue of the Americas 42nd Floor
New York, NY 10020
212-348-8882

WEB SITE http://www.clintonfoundation.org/clinton-global-initiative

4 posted on 10/25/2014 5:49:54 AM PDT by Liz
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To: Kaslin

This is a keeper.


5 posted on 10/25/2014 5:50:41 AM PDT by VRW Conspirator (There will be another crusade in our lifetime.)
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To: All
Clintons cont.

To whom are the Clinton beholden for their vast wealth....accumulated in a short time after they exited the WH....in Hillary's words...."dead broke"?

BACKSTORY When Billy, the Boy From Hope, burst upon the political scene as a presidential candidate....he duped the voters and coached his Arkansas Mafia friends to say, “Money doesn’t mean anything to Bill Clinton"........

Now we hear he got a hundred million dollars while his wife controlled the State Dept checkbook......monies that were meant for Haiti (the place where the Clintons spent their honeymoon). Plus hundreds of millions flowing into their tax-exempt foundations which the Clintons morphed into eleven separate fund-raising machines.

BETTER ADD THIS IN, TOO News reports say the State Department announced it has "no idea" what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors..... a special “management alert” warned “significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at State has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years....under Hillary's watch.

Becoming president has a pretty good monetary return. That poor boy from Hope, Ark, made over $200,000,000.00 (that we know of) as a “public servant.”

=============================================

Lawyers Bill and Hillary have held no other jobs but “public service”---they didn't have a pot to *** in in Arkansas---didn't even own a home. But they are experts at gaming the "public service" system for themselves. The Clintons conniving has enriched them. They are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.....and counting.

How did they make the money? In several ways.

(1) Bill's calculated moves w/ his presidential pen and official policies profited numerous cronies and entities.....who are now being hit up for donations to the three Clinton tax-exempt "foundations which they evolved into some 14 fund-raising mechanisms.....and to enrich Hillary.

(2) Bill's pardon pen was useful in pardoning diverse voting blocs which got Hillary elected to the US Senate as a prelude to her presidential ambitions.

(3) The Clintons game the system 24/7....

6 posted on 10/25/2014 5:50:54 AM PDT by Liz
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To: Kaslin

Given the choice between being a “bird on a wire” or a “bird in a cage” too many Americans have chosen the cage. They get fresh water and the same bird seed every day. Someone changes the paper on the bottom of the cage once in a while. But they will never know what it means to soar in the wind and perch on the highest branch of the tree.


7 posted on 10/25/2014 5:52:22 AM PDT by Senator_Blutarski
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To: Kaslin

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

- Benjamin Franklin


8 posted on 10/25/2014 5:55:32 AM PDT by cutty
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To: Kaslin

bfl


9 posted on 10/25/2014 5:59:51 AM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
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To: Kaslin

Bookmark


10 posted on 10/25/2014 6:00:40 AM PDT by aquila48
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To: Kaslin

ping politicians goals


11 posted on 10/25/2014 6:12:16 AM PDT by TNoldman (AN ..AMERICAN FOR A A MUSLIM/BHO FREE AMERICA.)
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To: Kaslin
“Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”

-Hillary "Sir Edward" Clinton

Yes. Direct quote. She said this yesterday. Tell the world. The media won't.

12 posted on 10/25/2014 6:26:03 AM PDT by St_Thomas_Aquinas ( Isaiah 22:22, Matthew 16:19, Revelation 3:7)
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To: St_Thomas_Aquinas
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
13 posted on 10/25/2014 6:31:03 AM PDT by Crazieman (Article V or National Divorce. The only solutions now.)
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To: Senator_Blutarski
But they will never know what it means to soar in the wind and perch on the highest branch of the tree.

However, they might one day learn what it's like to be plucked and thrown into a pot.

Regards,

14 posted on 10/25/2014 6:32:28 AM PDT by alexander_busek (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)
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To: Liz

15 posted on 10/25/2014 6:36:35 AM PDT by Brother Cracker (You are more likely to find krugerrands in a Cracker Jack box than 22 ammo at Wal-Mart)
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To: Kaslin

What millenials KNOW:

“You’re entitled to benefits.”


16 posted on 10/25/2014 6:49:14 AM PDT by Organic Panic
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To: Brother Cracker; Grampa Dave
Love it.


17 posted on 10/25/2014 6:53:36 AM PDT by Liz
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To: St_Thomas_Aquinas

roflmto...and at least half of the country want her making our decisions....


18 posted on 10/25/2014 7:20:26 AM PDT by Kackikat (Two wrongs do NOT make a right.... unless you are a Democrat!)
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