CRUZ: Five for Freedom

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426886/ted-cruz-five-freedom

Five for Freedom

Bringing government spending under control.

At the last Republican presidential debate, I presented the Simple Flat Tax — which, for a family of four, exempts the first $36,000 from all income tax, and above that amount collects one low rate of 10 percent for all Americans. It eliminates the death tax, the payroll tax, the corporate income tax, and the Obamacare taxes; ends the corporate carve-outs and loopholes; and requires every business to pay the same simple business flat tax of 16 percent. That plan will unleash unprecedented growth, create millions of new jobs, raise after-tax incomes for all income levels by double-digit percentages — and abolish the IRS as we know it.

But eliminating the IRS is only the first step in my plan to break apart the federal leviathan that has ruled Washington and crept into our lives. We can’t stop there. In addition to eliminating the IRS, a Cruz administration will abolish four cabinet agencies. And we will sharply reduce the alphabet soup of government entities, beginning with the ABCs that should not exist in the first place: The Agencies, Bureaus, Commissions, and other programs that are constitutionally illegitimate and harmful to American households and businesses. It’s time to return to a federal government that abides by our constitutional framework and strips power from unelected bureaucrats.

The need is urgent. The total federal debt currently stands at $18.6 trillion, larger than our entire economy. That is up 75 percent since the current president took office, and by the end of his tenure, he is expected to have added almost as much to the national debt as all past presidents combined.

And what does the Obama administration have to show for its uncontrolled spending? A stagnant economy, lagging job creation, and the lowest labor-force participation since the Carter administration. The Obama economy has burdened each American household with the equivalent of $57,000 of federal debt. Under such stifling circumstances, it’s no wonder that 84 percent of college graduates do not have a job lined up after graduation, and 13.2 percent of young adults are out of work. The current level of spending is not only irresponsible, but immoral and unjust to future generations.

The current level of spending is not only irresponsible, but immoral and unjust to future generations.

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It is time for bold change. Change that stops Washington from squandering Americans’ money; that creates jobs and restores growth with a single, fair, low rate for everyone; that reins in Washington’s costly regulations; that honors the people’s work with the dignity it deserves; and that finally gets the government out of our pockets and off our backs.

Of course, because entitlements constitute roughly two-thirds of federal spending, no government spending plan is complete without addressing entitlement reform. And in the coming months, I will be laying out a detailed plan to do just that, to strengthen and preserve Social Security and Medicare and to ensure their fiscal strength for decades to come. But we should start with federal discretionary spending.

First, to begin the process of reducing the scope and cost of government, I have identified the Five for Freedom: During my first year as president, I will fight to abolish the IRS, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. To do that, I will press Congress relentlessly. And I will appoint heads of each of those agencies whose central charge will be to lead the effort to wind them down and determine whether any of their programs need to be preserved elsewhere because they fall within the proper purview of the federal government. I do not anticipate the lists to be long.

The IRS and these cabinet agencies are unnecessary and will be shuttered for the following reasons:

Internal Revenue Service – to dramatically simplify the tax code and enable everyone to fill out their taxes on a postcard or smartphone app.

Department of Education – to return education to those who know our students best: parents, teachers, local communities, and states. And to block-grant education funding to the states.

Department of Energy – to cut off the Washington cartel, stop picking winners and losers, and unleash the energy renaissance.

Department of Commerce – to close the “congressional cookie jar” and promote free enterprise and free trade for every business.

Department of Housing and Urban Development – to offer real solutions that lift people out of hardship, rather than trapping families in a cycle of poverty, and to empower hurting Americans by reforming most of the remaining programs, such as Section 8 housing.

Second, besides these unnecessary cabinet agencies and the IRS, we will sharply reduce the agencies, bureaus, commissions, and other programs that are harming American households and businesses — including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Together with the four departments and the IRS, our conservative estimate of the effects of these eliminations and reductions is a savings of over $500 billion over ten years. And that’s just a start. The true savings — of scaling down the scope of the federal government, of restoring to the states their rightful authority, and of unleashing the people’s ingenuity — cannot be measured by a number. We are uprooting the centralized power that we have lived under for far too long.

Third, we will bring back a proven approach from the prosperous days of the Reagan administration: a private-sector panel to assess federal spending levels and evaluate areas of waste and fraud for removal. At President Reagan’s behest, the Grace Commission recommended 2,478 “cost-cutting, revenue-enhancing” suggestions, without raising taxes, weakening defense, or harming social welfare. It was a major success among other policies that created a great economic boom, and it deserves a reprise.

Fourth, we will hold Congress accountable; it too often delegates its authority to unelected bureaucrats. We will enact a strong Balanced Budget Amendment. And, by enacting the REINS Act, we will require that a majority of members approve any major, cost-inducing regulations.

Fifth, we will put in place a hiring freeze of federal civilian employees across the executive branch. For those agencies in which it is determined that a vacant position needs to be filled, I will authorize the hiring of a maximum ratio of one person for every three who leave. And rather than automatically increasing federal workers’ pay annually, workers will have more opportunities for merit-based pay increases.

The full details of this plan can be found at www.tedcruz.org. It’s past time to dramatically reduce the size of government and restore congressional accountability to the people. Doing so, along with instituting fundamental tax reform and regulatory reform, will reignite the promise that has made this the freest and most prosperous nation in the world.

— Ted Cruz is a U.S. senator from Texas and a Republican candidate for president.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/11/carson_unbound.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook

Carson Unbound

November 8, 2015

By J.R. Dunn

Now that the media has been routed in its attempt to take down the uppity Dr. Ben Carson, It appears that the fallback position is that Carson “lost it” while refuting the West Point “exposé”.

The incident in question is the press conference the Dr. Carson gave this past Friday to answer Politico’s bogus accusation that he’d “lied” in his memoirs concerning an offer to attend the military academy. The network mutants are in transparent feral mode as they attempt their tried and true badger-the-victim tactic:

 

Here’s how RealClearPolitics describes the scene:

After taking questions for about seven minutes, Carson (for lack of better words) snaps, yelling and mocking reporters in a manic tone: "Obama goes to Occidental college, doesn't do well, somehow ends up at Columbia University, I dunno? Why?"

Clearly, nothing of the sort happens here. Dr. Carson merely raises his voice slightly to be heard over the tumult of the journalistic Legion spewing pea soup and turning their heads 360˚. (While it could be argued that raising his voice a hair above a normal tone does in fact represent manic raving in someone as soft-spoken as Carson, no such contention is attenpted here.) He’s simply trying to make his point above all the squeaks and howls.

And it works. The questions immediately shift to other subjects, with only a couple of half-hearted efforts to return to the original bear-trap queries. In particular, note the final whine “Why should we believe you?” Why should a legacy media journalist believe somebody. Think about that for a minute. Lack of self-awareness on this level is difficult to credit – but it’s all too typical of millennial media.

All this was a cynical attempt to create a win/win situation for the media – if the original accusation sticks, fine. But if it doesn’t, turn instead to making the candidate look foolish in his rebuttal. Carson threw it back in their faces in textbook fashion. This video should be closely studied by all GOP candidates along with such figures as McCain and Ryan. But it won’t be.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/there_is_no_such_thing_as_transgendered.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook

There Is No Such Thing as 'Transgendered'

Conservatives win when people have the truth, because modern liberal causes are always built on lies.

When conservatives buy into the lie, we lose.  For example, gay marriage is culturally accepted, in part, because for 30 years conservatives have been unwilling, out of misplaced sympathy, to correctly describe the gay lifestyle.

Sexually active gays are essentially never monogamous, die young due to diseases they get from their promiscuous lifestyle, are depressed and despondent, are likely to use drugs, and are fixated on sex, not love.  Being a sexually active gay is worse for one's health than being a smoker.

Yet conservatives generally haven't objected to the lie that gays are just like heterosexuals.  But once one agrees to that, it's really hard to explain to low-information voters why gays don't make great parents and shouldn't be allowed to marry.  On the other hand, conservatives have been constantly pointing out the lies of the climate alarmists, and as a result, the average American couldn't care less about climate change.  Given the truth, the vast majority of people will pick the conservative position most of the time.

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http://newsbangers.com/blog/2015/11/02/its-official-cces-says-obamas-2008-victory-due-to-illegal-votes/

IT’S OFFICIAL: CCES SAYS OBAMA’S 2008 VICTORY DUE TO ILLEGAL VOTES – UPDATED

UPDATED WITH NEW VIDEO

SEE THE APPENDED STORY

A large number of non-citizens cast ballots in U.S. elections and it’s possible that the illegal votes were responsible for President Obama’s 2008 victory, according to an in-depth academic study that confirms Judicial Watch’s assessment that foreign nationals have helped Democrats steal elections.

Non-citizens tend to favor Democrats and Obama won more than 80% of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 sample gathered by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a large-scale academic survey project operated by teams of researchers from across the country. In fact, enough ineligible voters cast ballots in 2008 to conceivably account for Democratic victories in a few close elections, CCES researchers found. A respected Ivy League professor is coordinator of the CCES which has produced national sample surveys, stratified by state and type of district, in every federal election since 2006. This allows the optimal study of congressional and state races as well as an ideal setting for understanding the relationship between the congressional and presidential elections.

The CCES is an esteemed and highly respected operation that recently published shocking information, gathered from big social science survey datasets, that supports Judicial Watch’s work in this area. In 2012 JW launched the Election Integrity Project, a widespread legal campaign to clean up voter registration rolls and support election integrity measures across the country. Our investigations immediately uncovered data that proved voter rolls in a number of states—including Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Florida, California and Colorado—contained the names of individuals who are ineligible to vote.

Now the CCES confirms this, specifically that large numbers of foreign nationals vote in U.S. elections. The “participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,” according to a mainstream newspaper article written by two of the political science college professors that conducted the study. “Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,” the researchers write. “Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.”

Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races, the professors confirm. More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote and some actually voted. Based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010. This is outrageous, to say that least, and illustrates the need to clean up voter rolls in this country.

“This is a major story and confirms JW’s working theory that foreign nationals illegally vote in federal elections in large numbers and have allowed Democrats, including this president, to steal elections,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This is why the Left does not want voter ID, loves same day registration, by mail voting, etc. and craves amnesty and open borders. It is not about the Hispanic vote – it is about the illegal alien vote (and the legal alien vote), it is about stealing elections.  Makes all the talk about targeting, messaging, issues, candidates, and policy seem quaint.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/04/the-house-freedom-caucus-wants-party-leaders-to-loosen-control-this-is-what-would-happen-if-they-did/

The House Freedom Caucus wants looser party control on the floor. This is what would happen if they got it.

(Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Former House speaker, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), was often attacked by fellow Republicans for influencing House processes to get policy outcomes that he wanted. We all know what’s happened since. Boehner resigned, and his heir apparent, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), withdrew. In the meantime, the House Freedom Caucus outlined a list of policy and process demands for the next speaker, who we now know is Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

One demand was a return to “regular order.” Republican senators were asking for the same while they were in the minority. “Regular order” is a vague concept, but most consistently, those asking for it don’t want party leaders to restrict them from offering floor amendments to bills.

[Can Paul Ryan disarm the Freedom Caucus?]

No one knows yet what will come of these demands. But it hasn’t happened yet in the Senate, if that’s any indication of what might happen under Speaker Ryan. True, since taking over as majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has led the Senate to consider many more amendments than did his predecessor, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). But members of both parties have still criticized McConnell sharply for shutting off amendments on several important bills.

So why not let House members offer amendments at will?

Here’s the problem with calls for making it easier for members to amend bills. As we show in our recent white paper, members behave much differently than they once did when allowed the freedom to act independently on the floor. These changes make party leaders’ jobs much more difficult, at a time when leaders also need to deal with increased time demands stemming from a heavier overall workload and members’ need to spend more time in their districts campaigning and raising reelection funds.

Here’s where we got our data. 

To evaluate how members’ behavior has changed over time, we took advantage of a new dataset on congressional amendments and roll calls from the University of Georgia Amending Project. Since 2010, 53 undergraduate students and two high-school students have worked with two faculty members and eight graduate students to collect data on 29,860 amendments to 497 landmark enactments across 40 Congresses, from the 45^th (1877-1878) through the 111^th (2009-2010). The data include information on, among other things, how an amendment was dispensed with (roll call vote, division, teller, voice, withdrawn, not voted on); whether it was offered by way of a motion to recommit; whether it was dispensed with by some other procedure (a point of order, motion to table, failed cloture vote, etc.); whether it passed or failed; what it sought to amend (i.e., the bill, another amendment); who the sponsor was; and if it was offered on behalf of a committee.

While the data are preliminary, we found substantial shifts in senators’ approach to amending bills. For one thing, the number of amendments filed for each landmark bill passed has generally increased. For another, the amending process has gotten steadily more partisan. The figure below shows the percentage of non-committee amendments sponsored by minority-party senators.

Most of these minority-party amendments fail on the floor — and senators generally know that even before they’re offered.

Filing amendments to send a message slows Congress down. A lot. 

So why bother? Because their real purpose is electoral messaging. Perhaps the most famous recent electoral-messaging amendment was from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to bar Affordable Care Act premium subsidies to plans that covered Viagra for child molesters and rapists. Democrats dubbed it a “crass political stunt.” Republicans featured the vote in electoral ads.

But in addition to forcing members to take difficult votes, such amendments also burden party leaders with far more demands on their time. That’s made still worse by the rapid increase in how many amendments are now subjected to roll calls. The default voting mechanism in Congress is the unrecorded voice vote. Those votes usually go quickly, and no records are kept of who voted how.

But there’s a catch. The Constitution’s Article I, Section 5 specifically states:

the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.

In other words, any member can request a roll call vote, if supported by a sufficient second.

The figure below plots the percentage of Senate amendments granted floor consideration that receive roll-call votes.

Of the 17,838 Senate amendments in our dataset, 2,467 (or 13.83 percent), went to roll call votes. But during the four most recent Congresses for which we have data (the 104^th, 106^th, 109^th and 111^th), that jumps to 34.8 percent. This surge in “messaging” amendments comes alongside a spike in competitive (as opposed to uncontested) elections and a dip in Congress’s ability to work on policy, both because it has cut its own legislative staffing and because of increased deference to the executive and judicial branches.

[If Congress keeps cutting its staff, who is writing your laws? You won’t like the answer.]

As goes the Senate, so goes the House?

Back in May, Sarah Binder warned here that McConnell would have a hard time keeping his promise to operate the Senate according to “regular order.” Her Monkey Cage post pointed out that polarization between the Democrats and Republicans on the one hand, and deep divisions within the GOP on the other, would force McConnell to curb floor amendments in order to bypass filibusters and enact legislation.

[Will the Senate get “regular order"? Here’s why that’s unlikely]

Binder was right. Individual senators have strong electoral incentives to introduce floor amendments when they can. McConnell was forced to use his position as Senate majority leader to block amendments on several key bills.

Here’s an educated guess about how many amendments House members would try to introduce. (It’s a lot.)

It’s hard to know how much “demand” there might be waiting in the House for the ability to offer amendments freely. For most of the 20^th century, the House Rules Committee has restricted amendments on controversial bills.

But there’s evidence to suggest that the pent-up demand is quite strong. A forthcoming paper from Michael S. Lynch, Anthony Madonna and Jason Roberts analyzes the demand for amendments under structured rules. Structured rules are rules issued by the Rules Committee that allow a limited set of amendments to be considered on the floor. Members must submit their amendments to the Rules Committee for review.

[If there were more women in Congress, a lot would change.]

The authors show that, from the 109^th to 111^th Congress, or between 2005 and 2010, House members proposed 7,250 amendments for consideration under structured rules. Of these, only one-third (or 2,440 amendments) actually reached the floor.

That’s a lot of demand. Allowing House members to introduce amendments freely  — and to have lengthy debates and votes, as the Senate does — would likely bring the House to a halt.

Anthony Madonna is an associate professor of political science at the University of Georgia and can be found on Twitter @TonyMadonna5. Kevin R. Kosar is the director of the Governance Project at the R Street Institute and is on Twitter @kevinrkosar.

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http://www.theamericanmirror.com/listen-texas-refugee-group-details-plethora-of-services-for-incoming-syrians/

LISTEN: Texas refugee group details plethora of services for incoming Syrians

Is it possible Syrian refugees will be better off in America than many Americans?

Liberty News recently published an audio recording it says is a phone call between a representative of Refugee Services of Texas and a man posing as a potential volunteer.

The services detailed in the call — being paid for by U.S. taxpayers — is staggering.

“Every refugee receives a sum of money from the government that’s welcome money. It’s $925 per person — a one-time sum,” the organization employee tells the caller.

That’s only the beginning. She also rattled off a laundry list of services offered to incoming refugees intended to make them “self-sufficient and indeptendent,” including:

• Being picked up at the airport
• Finding and securing an apartment
• Setting up the apartment “so it’s livable”
• Providing bus orientation
• Transporting them to Social Security office to apply for card
• Helping find employment
• Eight weeks of English as Second Language (ESL) classes

The employee says volunteers help by setting up apartments. The organization gives the volunteer a Walmart gift card to buy “all the items needed for the refugee’s apartment.”

The RST worker said there are three apartment complexes in Fort Worth they’re currently using to place refugees in the community.

During the call, the employee says refugees are able to attend a job readiness class after they “graduate” from the ESL class. There, they’re taught how to compete against Americans for jobs by learning “how to be professional in the United States, how to fill out a job application.

“We also have employment case managers who sit down with that refugee and help them fill out some job applications and take them to interviews and know the employers in the area that are able to hire people with lower English skills. So we really help them find a job.”

In addition to the “welcome money,” refugees are also eligible to sign up for a few “cash assistance programs” but are supposedly only eligible to enroll in one.

Liberty News reports Refugee Services of Texas, “one of the largest networks set to receive Syrian refugees,” received $1,243,000 in tax dollars last year. That amount is expected to “increase significantly” this fiscal year, according to the news site.

Listen to the call here:

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Jaw-Dropping News in the Solar vs. Fossil Fuels Debate

In brief: A thousand gas-fired power plants built in the U.S. do not operate properly in white knuckle emergencies. Reliability is threatened by this failure in basically all new gas plants and this is going unreported. 

http://blog.ucsusa.org/solar-vs-fossil-fuels-810

Jaw-Dropping News in the Solar vs. Fossil Fuels Debate

You know the cliché about work that can be 59 minutes of boredom and one minute of white knuckle excitement and danger? In the electric power industry, this happens when a major power plant loses its connection to the grid, instantly and dramatically unbalancing the supply and demand of electricity. Blackouts follow if there isn’t an instant response.

Last week I had a similar exciting moment at a conference of utility commissioners, where I learned that a key grid reliability requirement during these emergencies has not been provided by new natural gas plants.

Assumptions are not always true

Throughout the electricity engineering community, there is an assumption that, when that kind of supply-demand imbalance incident happens, there will be an automatic response within 5-6 seconds from conventional (gas, coal, hydro) generators that stabilizes the power supply. How valid this assumption is matters, because it is used by practically every utility study and commentary aimed at highlighting limits to using renewable energy to replace fossil-fuel power plants. (See here, for example.)

The surprise when regulators learned of false reliability of gas plants. Credit: Memorial University

The assumed difference between conventional power plants has figured prominently in current debates about the adoption of renewable energy versus an over-reliance on natural gas and coal.

Surprised looks all around 

But what if that assumption turned out to be wrong? In a thinly attended session on a Sunday at the summer meeting of NARUC, (the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners) I attended, a representative from NERC (the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation) committee process made an astounding revelation, that this assumption has indeed been mistaken.

The reality is that a thousand gas-fired power plants built in the U.S. do not operate properly in white knuckle emergencies. In the discussion with regulatory staff, Troy Blalock, reliability expert at South Carolina Electric & Gas, explained how jaws hit the floor as NERC’s investigation into reliability questions found that all three of the gas generator manufacturers (GE, ABB, Siemens) predominant in the U.S. had for years been delivering equipment that fail to provide this “essential reliability service”. As word spread around the 3-day NARUC conference, this news caused the same speechless, open-mouth expression.

Fossils vs. Renewables

This new information has huge implications for debates about power plant retirements and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. NERC has not been supportive of a transition away from coal and into wind and solar, but at least one of their key concerns has been based on this misunderstanding that gas plants can always respond to these emergencies while wind and solar can’t.

To the point, just weeks before releasing a controversial report assessing the reliability concerns related to the EPA Clean Power Plan, NERC sent a red letter warning to the power industry and held a webinar saying that reliability was threatened by this failure in basically all new gas plants.

This revelation that U.S. grid reliability has been weakened by a thousand new gas-fired power plants negates the findings of several dramatic statements and studies that warn about impacts from increased use of renewables. California energy policy, FERC inquiries, and LBNL lab reports were all misled by the lack of this information that the gas-fired units are not contributing to frequency response during emergencies caused by sudden trips of large conventional generators.

Solar makes changes to improve reliability, and wind can do it too

Even more offensive to renewables advocates than the exaggerated, mistaken reliance on an assumed performance from gas plants, the power industry and media has repeated ad nauseum a story of German solar power equipment needing to change its control settings to make sure it helped, not hurt reliability—when all that time, the same thing was needed at gas-fired power plants.

As it happens, solar can make those changes, and has, a whole lot more quickly than gas plants. In Hawaii earlier this year, the solar industry successfully changed the control settings on 800,000 solar panel inverters through internet connections to make solar in Hawaii support frequency and voltage in similar emergencies.

Recognizing that grids need this service, a variety of wind turbine manufacturers have designs that provide the frequency response that is missing from the gas turbines (see here, here, here, and here, for example).

Perhaps the lack of incentives is the root of the problem

Because there is a lack of incentives for any generator to provide the frequency response we’ve been discussing, there hasn’t been a technology-neutral accounting of this service. It’s a win-win-win to fix this. We can do it in a way that leads to the grid of the future, rather than incorrectly relying on the grid of the past to maintain reliability.

Fixing the gas plants would be cheap

In last week’s session, NERC’s representative said that the cost to correct the mistake in controls at each of the gas-fired power plants is on the scale of the budget for coffee for the operators of these power plants. Despite the problem going unreported for 25 years, NERC suggested that a few memos, and no regulatory interventions, would be adequate to get the gas-fired fleet back up to expected reliability.

No mention was made by this representative of the bigger picture, and the inappropriate accusations over the years that wind and solar, rather than gas plants, are the cause of this problem. It’s time to set the record straight—and get back to our 59 minutes of boredom.

Posted in: Energy, Fossil Fuels Tags: California, clean energy, Clean Power Plan, Renewable energy, solar power, wind power

About the author: Michael Jacobs is a senior energy analyst with expertise in electricity markets, transmission and renewables integration work. See Mike's full bio.

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