Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Taxes’ Category

The dam has broken, the curtain has been lifted, and the flood of scandals coming to light this week is finally beginning to open people’s eyes.

1. Benghazi.  Four Americans were abandoned to die in the middle of a terrorist attack.  In the aftermath the administration changed the talking points, lied about a stupid video being to blame, and spent months trying to hide the truth as they intimidated and blocked access to witnesses.

2.  The IRS admits to targeting Tea Party groups.  It turns out they were also targeting pro-life groups, pro-Israel groups, religious groups, and pretty much anybody who dared to criticize Obama’s policies.   They were also leaking confidential information about the opposition to their political friends.

3.  The Department of Justice secretly obtained months of phone records from over 100 AP reporters and sources, including Congress.   Guess the Obama administration likes to keep a jealous eye on his favorite mistress.

4. HHS Secretary shakes down companies she regulates for “donations” to implement Obamacare.   It’s the Chicago way.

5. The EPA applies a double standard when dealing with conservative vs. liberal groups.   If you’re “green,” you’re clean.  If you oppose EPA power grabs and agenda, you’re treated as an enemy.

Lest we forget, there is also Sestak, Solyndra, Pigford, and Fast & Furious.

So how is Obama trying to squirm his way out of trouble?

One unique excuse being offered by David Axelrod is that the government is simply too big for Obama to know what’s going on.  Yes,  you heard that right…the liberals’ favorite argument that more government is the solution to every problem has suddenly turned into an excuse for ruling class ignorance and incompetence.

Another approach has been to claim that Obama is simply a passive and aloof leader who tends to distance himself from the nitty gritties of governing, and therefore has no clue what his underlings are up to.

Obama’s consistent claim that he always finds out about these scandals the same way that we do – when they first appear on the news – has become such a running joke that even Jon Stewart tore into him over the absurdity of it all.

Whoever created this meme summed it up beautifully:

Yep.  That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

Scandal-Ridden Obama: Republicans Are Making Americans “Cynical About Government”

Obama Scandal Scorecard

A Quick Guide to the Four Major Scandals that May Bring Down the Obama Administration

And Then There Were Five Obama Scandals…?

Scandals Here, There and Everywhere

What we know Obama doesn’t know grows daily

What does the scandal cascade teach us about trust in government power?

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood government that Obama arms, funds and supports is violently persecuting religious minorities, using our tax money to do it:

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s governing majority, is not actually crucifying the nation’s Christians. But they are nonetheless actively persecuting Coptic Christians who are said to be one-tenth of the population of the largest Arab country. A photograph of two young men set afire during recent demonstrations is pretty striking.

Demonstrations have turned into riots as Egypt’s police cracked down on the Copts. The Copts were protesting against increasing sectarian violence directed at the country’s Christian minority.

Typically, what has been happening is the Copts protest against Islamist violence directed at them and their churches. St. Mark’s Cathedral has been the target of Muslim extremists in recent week. When the Copts face police, they get tear gassed. And then they are the ones arrested. The Muslim Brotherhood authorities will pick up Coptic youth—hopefully the ones not yet set on fire—and jail them.

Then, the police grab some of the Islamists perpetrators and jail them. Later, following a much-ballyhooed “reconciliation,” the authorities release all—perpetrators and victims alike.

Read more at Townhall

In Syria, the rebels that the U.S. is supporting – who are trying to overthrow Assad – are Islamic extremists who are threatening to exterminate any Christians left behind who don’t convert to Islam:

Syria’s Christians fear an Islamist takeover should the current government be overthrown. During the ongoing civil war there has been a well-documented rise in the number of salafi-jihadist groups operating in Syria that pose a direct threat to Syria’s Christian community. These militant opposition forces espouse an Islamist ideology, which incorporates elements of Wahhabism and Salafism and whose stated goals and objectives are by definition hostile towards Christians. Firsthand accounts from Syrian Christian refugees in Lebanon reported by award winning investigative journalist Nuri Kino detail the horror in which they described kidnappings, rapes, harassment, theft and other violent reprisals at the hands of Islamist groups.

Those who survived reported “just being Christian is enough to be a target,” disproving theories that violence and kidnapping directed towards Syrian Christians is purely incidental or for economic reasons.

Read more at Weasel Zippers

Once again, our taxpayer money is going towards funding Islamic extremism and the suppression of religious liberty.

Islam’s Collective Punishment of Christians

Brutal Sharia Law Now Official Law Of Egypt

Syrian Rebels Attack Christians, Impose Sharia law

Christian Massacres Are Result Of Disastrous U.S. Foreign Policy

Obama Complicit In The Persecution of Christians?

How did we get to the point where we not only murder innocent children, but use tax dollars to pay the hit men?

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

Dave Boyer reports at The Washington Times:

President Obama offered a defiant defense of government funding for Planned Parenthood Friday and urged the group’s members to help his administration sign up more women for benefits under his besieged health-care law.

The first sitting president to address Planned Parenthood, Mr. Obama accused conservative politicians of trying to “roll back the clock” on abortion rights and health-care services for women.

“They’ve been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health,” Mr. Obama told the group’s annual convention in Washington. “When politicians try to turn Planned Parenthood into a punching bag, they’re not just talking about you, they’re talking about the millions of women who you serve. And when they talk about cutting off your funding, let’s be clear, they’re talking about telling many of those women, ‘You’re own your own.’

That is a bold-faced lie.  Pro-life groups do more to support and provide services for women in crisis pregnancies than anyone else.   And those services don’t involve murdering a child and scarring a woman for life!

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said Mr. Obama should have reproached Planned Parenthood officials for not doing more to stop the alleged violations at the clinic of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Planned Parenthood officials in Philadelphia said they encouraged patients who complained to them about the clinic to report it to state authorities.

“President Obama blatantly ignored this inconvenient truth about the abortion industry’s horrific lack of oversight, and disparaged the pro-life advocates who wake up each morning with the goal of saving the lives of unborn children and women from the pain of abortion,” Ms. Dannenfelser said in a statement.

Instead, the president decried efforts across the country to limit women’s access to abortion services.

Read more at The Washington Times

As he ended his speech, Obama blasphemously called on God to “bless” the largest child murder organization in the country.

“As long as we’ve got to fight to make sure women have access to quality, affordable health care, and as long as we’ve got to fight to protect a woman’s right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you’ve also got a president who’s going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way,” said Obama. “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.”

Murdering children is NOT health care, and the choice to kill a child is NOT a choice about one’s one health, but to end the life of another human being.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” ~ Isaiah 5:20

Steve Deace observed:

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, referred to blacks as “human weeds” and “reckless breeders.” Ironic the first black president is the first president to speak to a child killing organization founded by a racist who targeted blacks. KKK should be applauding Obama’s speech today, for they had the same goals as Sanger.

Ironic, indeed.

Obama takes swipe at pro-life activists, ignores Gosnell during Planned Parenthood speech

Obama’s Twisted, Symbiotic Relationship With the Abortion Industry

Obama’s War on the Pro-life Movement

Obama’s 5 Most Controversial Comments About Abortion,’Women’s Rights’ During Planned Parenthood Speech

Every Ninety-Four Seconds Planned Parenthood Aborts a Life – Obama Asks God to “Bless” Their Work

Obama Attacks Pro-Lifers: They Want To Turn Clock Back To 1950′s

Obama Asks Planned Parenthood To Help Him Implement Obamacare

Planned Parenthood Awards ‘Margaret Sanger’ Award to Short German Offering Final Solution for Undesirable Children

Obama Gives Millions In Taxpayer Dollars To Planned Parenthood After States Defund Them For Medicaid Fraud

Federal government refers women to Planned Parenthood, sites condemning pregnancy resource centers

Who needs a Bill of Rights or due process of law?   The same government that claims to be “of the people, by the people, for the people”  really considers itself completely above the law and unaccountable to the people.

When will Americans finally stand up to these abuses of power and say, “ENOUGH”?

Declan McCullagh reports at CNET:

The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail.

Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy “generally no privacy” in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications — meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge.

That places the IRS at odds with a growing sentiment among many judges and legislators who believe that Americans’ e-mail messages should be protected from warrantless search and seizure. They say e-mail should be protected by the same Fourth Amendment privacy standards that require search warrants for hard drives in someone’s home, or a physical letter in a filing cabinet.

An IRS 2009 Search Warrant Handbook obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that “emails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual’s computer.” The handbook was prepared by the Office of Chief Counsel for the Criminal Tax Division and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Read more at CNET

By that reasoning, a letter or package that leaves your home on it’s way to the intended recipient would would have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” either….except that it DOES.

If the government is not permitted to snoop through your physical mail without a warrant, neither should they be permitted to snoop through your electronic communications.

IRS to taxpayers: We don’t need a warrant for email snooping, GPS tracking

IRS Goes On Hiring Frenzy To Enforce Obamacare Penalties/Tax Hikes

ATF Seeks ‘Massive’ Database Of Americans’ Most Personal Info

U.S. To Allow Spy Agencies To Snoop Through Americans’ Financal Records Without Warrants

Planned Parenthood is one of Obama’s biggest fans.  They poured millions of dollars and volunteer hours into his re-election campaign, and have been rewarded handsomely for their support.

Obama has directed millions in federal taxpayer dollars into their coffers, sending his Justice Department to sue any state that tries to block taxpayer funding of abortion.

He is forcing all employers – even those with religious objections – to purchase insurance policies that include abortions.   And Obamacare is on the verge of creating an enormous boom in business to the abortion industry, which they are preparing for by building enormous new abortion clinics.

Is it any wonder they invited him to be the keynote speaker at their annual fundraiser dinner?

David Limbaugh observes at Human Events:

It bears repeating that Obama strongly opposed the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which would have required doctors to assist babies born as a result of a failed abortion. How about his opposition to a bill that would have prevented partial-birth abortion?

If Obama wanted to make abortion rare, would he be such a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and its notorious abortion industry? No one could be more in bed with that organization than Obama, who is planning on attending the organization’s fundraising gala this coming Thursday.

Obama and the pro-abortion left don’t want to call attention to the grisly practices of Gosnell for a number of reasons. You can disguise the practice of abortion with euphemisms, such as “they snipped the baby’s spinal cord,” but in the end, we are talking about the intentional killing of human life, and it follows that a facility so morally corrupt as to routinely engage in that despicable practice might not dot and cross all its other ethical i’s” and t’s.

If Obama or the leftist media were to shine a disinfecting light on the Gosnell trial, it might lead to a public discussion on abortion and an inquiry into how widespread such abuses are. The less attention the left permits to be drawn to this the better.

But there are additional sinister reasons Obama and his liberal media cohorts have suppressed the news on this story, knowing as they do just how horrendous Gosnell’s clinic was.

The pro-abortion left ridicules and condemns Second Amendment advocates for being paranoid purists in opposing all restrictions on gun rights, but in the purist and paranoia categories, they make gun advocates look like pikers.

Abortion is the left’s holy grail; it is liberals’ sacred ritual, about which nothing negative may be uttered for fear that it might lead to even the slightest infringement on it. Likewise, the abortion lobby simply will not countenance any restriction on abortion or any negative light to be cast on any abortion practice or clinic for fear that it could lead to a slippery slope whereby abortion might actually become significantly rarer. That would be a big setback for the lucrative abortion industry and for the campaign blood money it generates for supporting politicians.

Read more at Human Events

Exposing the Abortion Agenda: Blood Money

Planned Parenthood receives record amount of taxpayer funding

Obama Gives Millions In Taxpayer Dollars To Planned Parenthood After States Defund Them For Medicaid Fraud

Federal government refers women to Planned Parenthood, sites condemning pregnancy resource centers

Planned Parenthood Has Long History of Hiding Sexual Abuse

Planned Parenthood Argues For ‘Right’ To Murder Infants Already Born

Obama’s War on the Pro-life Movement

Funny how Marxists don’t recognize your unalienable right to keep the fruits of your labor (especially if you happen to be more successful than they think you should be), but they claim that they have a “right” to demand free goodies at the expense of others.

Erica Ritz reports at The Blaze:

Speaking outside on a sunny day, Harris-Perry says in an ad that aired Wednesday morning:

Americans will always want some level of inequality, because it’s a representation of meritocracy.  People who work hard and sacrifice and save their money and make major contributions — we think that they should earn a little more.  They should have more resources, and that’s fine.  But we also, however, have to have a floor under which nobody falls.  And if you’re below that — especially if you’re a child and you’re below that — we are not going to accept that.  You do have the the right to health care, and to education, and to decent housing and to quality food at all times.  ​[Emphasis added]

Read more at The Blaze

When something is a “right” (your life or conscience, for instance), it means you don’t have to do anything to earn it. You get to have it just for existing. It’s a gift from your Creator.

When you describe goods and services like food and housing as “rights,” you are saying that the people who produce these goods and services are obligated to provide them for you, whether you pay for them or not. There’s a word for this: slavery. Only slaves are forced to produce for others without compensation. TRUE rights come from God, and are unalienable. They cannot be provided by others, who could just as easily take them away.

You have an unalienable right to work and trade for goods and services. You do NOT have a “right” to demand them free of charge from others.

Sunstein: Obama Wants ‘Second Bill of Rights’

Barack Obama and “The Second Bill of Rights”

Where do your rights come from?

Mark Steyn: ‘Rights’ Have Been Perverted Into Gifts That Kings Bestow Upon Subjects

MSNBC Host: Kids Don’t Belong To Their Parents, They ‘Belong To Their Communities’

My grandparents sacrificed and saved for years so they could have a comfortable retirement and still leave an inheritance for their children.  They succeeded.   They live comfortably independent well into their 80′s, and left a legacy to be proud of.   We used to call this responsibility.

According to the Obama administration, however, people who make wise retirement choices need to be reigned in.   The government should decide how much you can save, and how “comfortable” your retirement lifestyle is permitted to be (keep in mind that with today’s lifespan, an average person can live up to 20 or 30 years after they retire, which means they need to save MORE than previous generations, not less).

As far as the Left is concerned, there is no such thing as private property.   There is only what the ruling class “allows” you to keep.

Peter Roff warns at US News:

What President Barack Obama has planned in his upcoming budget, while not exactly a Cypriot-style, government-based raid on private savings accounts, comes too close for comfort. As widely reported Monday, the Obama budget document – which is already a month late – will include a new proposal to limit the total amount an individual can put aside in tax deferred retirement savings like 401Ks and IRAs to an amount sufficient to generate an annual income in the golden years of less than $250,000 per year.

Why do it? According to a senior administration official, The Hill reported, “wealthy taxpayers can currently ‘accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.’”

Who says? It is true that some people use retirement savings plans as a form of tax avoidance, but tax avoidance was, the last time anyone checked, still legal. Major corporations that have the imprimatur of approval from the Obama administration like General Electric and General Motors do it all the time.

What the White House may propose is not a matter of fairness, as the president and his allies are sure to cast it, but one that strikes at the heart of the right to keep for ourselves the product of our hard work.

To Obama, that idea that some may have saved more than others for their retirement is unfair, So is the idea, apparently, that some people make more than others. It’s class envy at its most ugly, designed to appeal to the more than 40 percent of Americans who pay no income tax and who voted for the president in 2012.

It is not a legitimate function of government to determine when a person has saved enough for retirement. “Enough” is a nebulous word just like “rich.” If a cap is in the offing in the near term, can confiscation, a la Cyprus, be far behind?

Read more at US News

It’s theft.  Pure and simple.

Great news! White House finds new ways to soak the wealthy

Obama Budget Proposes Prohibiting Individuals From Accumulating More Than 3 Million In Retirement Accounts

Democrats Push For Government Takeover Of Private Retirement Savings

Obama Begins Push To Confiscate Private Retirement Savings, Nationalize Retirement System

Uncle Sam coming after your retirement savings?

Obama Needs Your 401(k) to Balance His Budget

Obama’s Pension Grab

Class Warfare’s Next Target: 401(k) Savings

Welcome to the “new normal” under Obamanomics.  In Europe, where Keynesian economics and Democratic Socialism has dominated for decades, unemployment rates are in the 20′s.   For the younger generation, they’re even higher.    Yet, instead of learning from their mistakes, Obama and the Democrats insist on repeating them.    Millions of innocent people are being hurt in the process.

The Associated Press reports:

After a full year of fruitless job hunting, Natasha Baebler just gave up.

She’d already abandoned hope of getting work in her field, working with the disabled. But she couldn’t land anything else, either — not even a job interview at a telephone call center.

Until she feels confident enough to send out resumes again, she’ll get by on food stamps and disability checks from Social Security and live with her parents in St. Louis.

“I’m not proud of it,” says Baebler, who is in her mid-30s and is blind. “The only way I’m able to sustain any semblance of self-preservation is to rely on government programs that I have no desire to be on.”

Baebler’s frustrating experience has become all too common nearly four years after the Great Recession ended: Many Americans are still so discouraged that they’ve given up on the job market.

Older Americans have retired early. Younger ones have enrolled in school. Others have suspended their job hunt until the employment landscape brightens. Some, like Baebler, are collecting disability checks.

It isn’t supposed to be this way. After a recession, an improving economy is supposed to bring people back into the job market.

Read more at Fox News

Sadly, until we get rid of Obamanomics, the jobs won’t be coming back.  Business aren’t hiring because they never know when they’re going to be hit with a costly new regulation or tax.   Entrepreneurs aren’t willing to take the risk to start a new business in such a hostile business climate.

Donald Lambro at Human Events predicts that we’re in for “Four More Years of Pain“:

President Obama heads into the third month of his second term, still unable to find a cure for a sluggish economy, weak employment numbers and his own slipping job approval scores.

Second terms are usually challenging for presidents who have won re-election without having the slightest idea about what they will do over the next four years. And that’s what we are witnessing now with Obama, whose biggest problem is the anemic, job-challenged economy.

[...]  The depressing headlines of the past few days tell a sad tale of what the economy is like under his presidency:

– “Weekly Jobless Claims Get Weaker as Outlook Dims” was the gloomy headline over a Reuters news wire story Thursday morning on the CNBC website.

“The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose to its highest level in four months last week, suggesting the labor market recovery lost some steam in March,” Reuters reported.

– “Hiring Is Weaker at Private Companies,” a Washington Post headline blared Thursday.

“Companies hired at the weakest pace in five months in March as recent strong demand for construction jobs evaporated and growth in the vast services sector slowed, signs that the economic recovery could be hitting a soft patch,” the newspaper reported.

That’s the conclusion of the ADP National Employment Report Wednesday, which showed “that private employers added 158,000 jobs last month.” The ADP job survey said “the gain was the smallest since October.”

A separate report Wednesday on the services industry, the economy’s largest job sector, showed that employment growth “pulled back in March.”

You do not hear any of these reports on the nightly TV news because the networks cherry-pick reports that feed the White House line of a continuing economic recovery.

[...]  Thankfully, there are economic reporters who resist touting the White House line that everything is rosier under Obama’s policies.

“We’re approaching the four-year anniversary of the economic recovery, and it still doesn’t feel like much of one, what with the unemployment rate at 7.7 percent and wages stagnant over the past five years,” Neil Irwin, the Post’s veteran economic analyst, recently reported.

Read more at Human Events

Obama is so blinded by ideology that the tragic results of his policies on display all around him aren’t enough to convince him that his policies need to change.

The American workforce collapses on top of the young

Record 89,967,000 Not in Labor Force; Another 663,000 Drop Out In March

People Not In Labor Force Soar By 663,000 To 90 Million, Labor Force Participation Rate At 1979 Levels

Weak: Economy Adds Just 88k Jobs in March

Moody’s Chief Economist Previously Cited By White House Blames Obamacare For Jobs Numbers

Media Can’t Blame Dismal Jobs Report on the Sequester

Devastating Job Numbers Undermine Rationale for ‘Immigration Reform’

Hopenchange!

Wynton Hall reports at Breitbart:

Even as the Obama White House prepares for a star-studded White House concert featuring Queen Latifah, Cyndi Lauper, and Justin Timberlake, figures from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that roughly 50 million Americans—one in six—now live below the poverty line.

Additionally, one in five American children have fallen below the poverty line; the last time poverty levels were this high, Lyndon Baines Johnson was president.

“In the last three years, there’s been a great change in the kinds of people we are serving,” said Director of Community Services at Catholic Charities of Baltimore Mary Anne O’Donnell. “There are increasing numbers of people who owned a home, lost their jobs, end up living in their car and are coming with children to our soup kitchen.”

The U.S. government defines a family of four earning under $23,021 as living in poverty. Income used to compute poverty status does not include non-cash benefits, such as food stamps and housing subsidies.

Welfare program enrollments have exploded under President Barack Obama. Americans on food stamps now outnumber the combined populations of 24 U.S. states, costing taxpayers more than double the amount spent on food stamps five years ago. In January 2009, 31.9 million Americans received food stamps. Today, that figure is 47.79 million.

Read more at Breitbart

U.S. sees highest poverty spike since the 1960s, leaving 50 million Americans poor as government cuts billions in spending

More American Families Reduced To Food Banks And Food Stamps

Why we are on the brink of the greatest Depression of all time

Peter Schiff Warns of the Coming Collapse of the Dollar: “We’re not even near the bottom yet”

Cramer: We‘re ’Two Stages From a Financial Collapse So Huge It‘s Hard to Get Your Mind Around’

‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ Author: I’m Preparing For Economic Collapse, Stocking Up on Food & Guns

Boomtown 2: The Business Of Food Stamps

View on YouTube

For the Left, this is all part of the Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the system with impossible demands, bringing about an inevitable collapse that will set the stage for a Communist revolution.

For corporations vying for their turn at the taxpayer trough, this is a dance with the devil…and they don’t even realize it.

Tim Brown reports at Freedom Outpost:

“Boomtown 1: Washington, The Imperial City” exposed the cronyism and luxurious lifestyle of Washington, DC’s power elite. On Friday “Boomtown 2: The Business of Food Stamps” Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon exposed how politicians and corporations have used the country’s food stamps program to profit on the backs of tax payers.

Though the food stamps program was always meant to be a “safety net” to provide temporary assistance, Schweizer pointed out that it has “become an insider game of power and profit” for corporations who are attempting to get a slice of the $75 billiion provided by the taxpayers.

[...]  The GAI president points out that the food stamps program was intended to provide basic foods, but has grown to include all types of things including soft drinks and fast food. We have also pointed out that the food stamps program has been used to purchase guns, drugs and pay for strippers and massage parlors, not to mention that the USDA has targeted illegal aliens for the program.

The fraud of the food stamps program has grown since EBT cards were issued in 2002, which gave no reason for either government or corporations to look to reform the system or limit the fraud.

Read more at Freedom Outpost

Tom Fitten warns at Breitbart:

The Obama administration is proudly shattering welfare records with an astonishing number of people collecting public benefits long term, especially food stamps.

In fact, as I discussed in a special to be aired on Hannity tonight, Obama and his friends have actually found a way to meld corporate cronyism with food stamp abuse to line their pockets while undermining our election systems at the same time.

Under Obama, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, has exploded with a record number of people – 46 million and growing – getting free groceries from the American taxpayer. Adding insult to injury, a federal audit revealed last year that many who don’t qualify for food stamps now receive them under a new “broad-based” eligibility program that disregards income and asset requirements.

Obama says the food stamp extension is part of his intention to eradicate “food insecure households.” However, it’s really part of a massive redistribution of wealth. Last year, taxpayers were forced to pay more than $80 billion, including an estimated $750 million a year in outright fraud.

[...]  According to the study, the current food stamp Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card industry is dominated by three main players: J.P. Morgan Electronic Financial Services, Affiliated Computer Services, and eFunds. Together they collect money from 49 states and three territories. In fact, since 2004, 18 of 24 states that contract with J.P. Morgan have paid more than $560 million to the financial monolith.

There is little wonder then that those three companies appear to be perfectly content with the exploding food stamp rolls – and wholly unconcerned about rampant fraud and abuse. As the GAI study observed, “The more persons enrolled in the program, the more money the EBT industry makes.” That may also help explain why, when the state of Florida initiated an eight-month program to detect and prevent fraud among its three million EBT card users, J.P. Morgan saw fit to assign just one employee to the program.

And then there is this: During the 2008 election, Barack Obama received more than $800,000 from J.P. Morgan alone. After his election, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, initiated by Obama and passed by a compliant Congress, made two major changes to existing food stamp policies. First, it increased benefits by 13.6 percent. Second, it actively encouraged states to add more recipients to their food stamp rolls.

And the corporate cronyism and political payoffs don’t end there. The House and Senate Agricultural Committees have jurisdiction over all food assistance and distribution programs, including the food stamp program. So, just as one might expect, analysis by the GAI uncovered a clear trend of increasing contributions to Agriculture Committee members of both the House and Senate on the part of J.P. Morgan that clearly coincides with their entry into the lucrative EBT card, food stamp market.

Between 1998 and 2002, JP Morgan’s total contributions per election cycle averaged $82,897. After the bank entered the EBT services market until the 2010 election cycle, their average donation per cycle more than doubled to $215,120. And the Agriculture Committees, in turn, have broadly expanded the number of food stamp recipients.

Of course, the more recipients that are added to the food stamp rolls, the more voters Obama can count on at election time. And the offshoots of Obama’s former client and campaign partner ACORN not only assure that those voters are registered but also that they know to whom they are beholden for their government handouts.

Read more at Breitbart

Food stamps recipients double under Obama; Result? Selling food stamps for an iPhone 5 is all the rage

15% of Americans Now Receive Food Stamps

Boomtown 2: Taxpayers Have Spent 15 Trillion On The War on Poverty

Taxpayers now fund 126 separate federal anti-poverty programs

Schweizer: ‘No One Representing Taxpayer’ In Food Stamp Program

Homeland Security ‘Welcome’ Materials Recruit New Immigrants Onto Overburdened Welfare Programs

Government Launches $3M Ad Campaign To Recruit More People Into Food Stamp Dependency

EBT: How The Culture of Welfare Creates A Parasitic Class That Devours Its Host

How Food Stamps Morphed From Temporary Relief to Permanent Entitlement

Government Benefits Are Destroying The Family, Creating More Poverty

Boomtown: New Series Exposes D.C. Ruling Class Living High On Taxpayer Money

What the Left Misunderstands about Poverty and Dependency

The application for Obamacare includes registration to vote. Guess which party they’ll be pressuring people to register with?

Mike Flynn reports at Breitbart:

ObamaCare provides millions of dollars in grants to hire community activists and others as “navigators” to assist individuals enroll in health insurance provided by state or federal exchanges and, according to recent reports, register people to vote. In a new rule proposed Wednesday, HHS lays out numerous guidelines for these “navigators”, including paying them up to $48/hour for their work. The rule, guidelines and voter registration effort are a potential vehicle to resurrect ACORN or an ACORN-like entity.

[...]  Requirements for “navigators” is that they have no existing insurance licenses or certifications, conflicting with several recently enacted state laws. They also must be attuned to racial, ethnic and cultural sensitivities, understand “underserved communities” and provide translation services for virtually every language. AARP, NAACP and SEIU are prominent members of Enroll America’s advisory board.

One health expert with close ties to HHS told Breitbart News, ”The navigator program, as evidenced by the leadership of Enroll America and yesterday’s rule from CMS, will be a jobs program for unemployable Obama For America campaign volunteers and ACORN remnants.”

[...]  October 1st is the first day individuals can enroll for a program through the exchanges. The government, as a result, will have to hire and train tens of thousands of workers on the complex subject of health insurance over the next few months. Think of it as an enormous census program with less training for a more complex subject.

Read more at Breitbart

Paul Bedard remarks at the Washington Examiner:

The rules allow navigators to come from the ranks of unions, health providers and community action groups such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood. They are required to provide unbiased advice.

Yeah, right.  Good luck enforcing that!

Suprise! Obamacare Application Doubles As Voter Registration, Sets Stage For Intimidation

Obama Admin To Pay Union Workers, Community Activists $48 An Hour To Work As Obamacare “Navigators”

Justice Department Partners With ACORN’s ‘Project Vote’ For Voter Registration Drives

Flashback: Obama Shakes Down Banks For $1 Billion To Pay For ‘Community Organizers’ For 2012 Campaign

CNN Exposes How ACORN Steals Votes For Democrats

The foundation for the housing crisis was laid with the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, where the government took it upon itself to encourage home ownership by pressuring banks to lend to lower-income buyers, often to meet arbitrary racial quotas. Obviously they haven’t learned a thing from where that got us.

Would it surprise anyone to learn that as a lawyer, Obama sued banks to force them to issue subprime loans?  He also worked for ACORN, which specialized in using the Community Reinvestment Act to shake down banks and pressure them to loan money to low-income minorities or face “discrimination” charges.

David Harsanyi reports at Human Events:

According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration is pushing big banks to make more home loans available to Americans with bad credit – the same kind of  government guidance that helped blow up the housing market:

In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Think about this statement. The administration is asking banks – banks that Washington bails out; banks that Washington crafts regulations for — to embrace risky policies that put the institution and its investors (not to mention, all of us) in a  precarious position. So precarious, in fact, that banks have to ask government if they can be freed of any legal or financial consequences.

Read more at Human Events

What could possibly go wrong?

John Perazzo warns at Front Page Magazine:

These types of government policies initially emerged the mid-1970s, when “progressive” Democrats in Congress began a campaign to help low-income minorities become homeowners. This led to the passage, in 1977, of theCommunity Reinvestment Act (CRA), a mandate for banks to make special efforts to seek out and lend to borrowers of meager means. Founded on the premise that government intervention is necessary to counteract the fundamentally racist and inequitable nature of American society and the free market, the CRA was eventually transformed from an outreach effort into a strict quota system by the Clinton administration. Under the new arrangement, if a bank failed to meet its quota for loans to low-income minorities, it ran the risk of getting a low CRA rating from the FDIC. This, in turn, could derail the bank’s efforts to expand, relocate, merge, etc.  From a practical standpoint, then, banks had no recourse but to drastically lower their standards on down-payments and underwriting, and to approve many loans even to borrowers with weak credit credentials. As Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell explains, this led to “skyrocketing rates of mortgage delinquencies and defaults,” and the rest is history.

The CRA was by no means the only mechanism designed by government to impose lending quotas on financial institutions. For instance, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) developed rules encouraging lenders to dramatically hike their loan-approval rates for minority applicants and began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers who failed to do so, regardless of the reason. This, too, caused lenders to lower their down-payment and income requirements.

Moreover, HUD pressured the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest sources of housing finance in the United States, to earmark a steeply rising number of their own loans for low-income borrowers. Many of these were subprime mortgages—loans characterized by higher interest rates and less favorable terms in order to compensate lenders for the high credit risk they were incurring.

Additional pressure toward this end was applied by community organizations like the pro-socialist ACORN. By accusing banks—however frivolously or unjustly—of having engaged in racially discriminatory lending practices that violated the mandates of the CRA, these groups commonly sued banks toprevent them from expanding or merging as they wished. Barack Obama, ACORN’s staunch ally, was strongly in favor of this practice. Indeed, in a 1994 class-action lawsuit against Citibank, Obama represented ACORN in demanding more favorable terms for subprime homebuyer mortgages. After four years of being dragged through the mud, a beleaguered Citibank—anxious to put an end to the incessant smears (charging racism) that Obama and his fellow litigators were hurling in its direction (to say nothing of its mounting legal bills)—agreed to settle the case.

Forbes magazine puts it bluntly: “Obama has been a staunch supporter of the CRA throughout his public life.” In other words, he has long advocated the very policies that already have reduced the real-estate market to rubble. And now he is actively pushing those very same practices again.

Read more at Front Page Magazine

Housing Crisis Redux: ‘Community Reinvestment Act’ that caused mortgage crisis is back, as if 2008 never happened

How Obama Enabled Unscrupulous Banks to Foreclose on Innocent Homeowners

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

Democrats in their own words: Covering up the Fannie/Freddie scam that caused our Economic Crisis

The Free Market Was Framed: Government Intervention Caused The Financial Crisis

The Law of Unintended Consequences: How Government Created the Subprime Mess and Led Us to the Brink of Financial Disaster

Terrifying Chart Proves Obama’s Policies Lead Towards Catastrophic “Cloward-Piven” Orchestrated Financial Crisis

Obama Pushing Banks to Offer Sub-Prime Mortgages Again

Holder Launches Witch Hunt Against ‘Racist’ Banks That Won’t Lend To Minorities With Bad Credit

If the goal is to save lives, liability insurance isn’t going to do it.  But of course, this isn’t really about saving lives.  It’s about control.  It’s about putting up as many hurdles as they can think of between the average, law-abiding American and their right to self-defense.

Alex Pappas reports at The Daily Caller:

A contingent of liberal Democrats in Congress is proposing a new federal gun control idea: mandatory liability insurance for gun owners.

When New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney introduced the legislation last month with eight other Democrats, she boasted that it is “the first bill to require liability insurance of gun buyers nationwide.”

Maloney’s “Firearm Risk Protection Act” requires gun buyers to have “a qualified liability insurance policy” before they are able to legally purchase a firearm.

It also calls for the federal government to impose a fine as much as $10,000 if a gun owner doesn’t have insurance on a firearm purchased after the bill goes into effect.

Read more at The Daily Caller

Want to guess who this would hurt most?  You got it: poor people living in dangerous neighborhoods, who would be barred from defending themselves due to the high cost of insurance.

The smart ones will go to the black market and arm themselves anyway.

Firearms Risk Protection Act Could Stick Gun Owners With $10,000 Fine

NRA Urges Americans to ‘Stand and Fight’ In Powerful New Video

Justice Dept. Admits Obama’s Gun Control Plan Would Require Universal Registration, Confiscation

2nd Amendment Preserves The God-given Right To Shoot Tyrants, Not Deer

The Second Amendment: Much Ado about Firearms

What We Believe, Part 5: Gun Rights

You can’t make this stuff up!  And no, it wasn’t an April Fools joke!

Terence P. Jeffrey reports at CNS News:

President Barack Obama, who has increased the national debt by $53,377 per household, has proclaimed April“National Financial Capability Month,” during which his administration will do things such as teach young people “how to budget responsibly.”

“I call upon all Americans to observe this month with programs and activities to improve their understanding of financial principles and practices,” Obama said in an official proclamation released Friday.

[...]  The proclamation on the White House website links to two other government websites: the site for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and MyMoney.gov, which includes materials from 21 federal agencies.

Listed among the “popular topics” on MyMoney.gov is “Managing Debt and Credit,” which includes a link to a page on the Federal Reserve’s website called “Getting the most from your credit card.” Tip 2 on that page is: “Stay Below Your Credit Limit.”

When Obama was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, the total debt of the federal government was $10,626,877,048,913.08. As of the close of business on March 28, 2013, the total debt of the federal government was $16,766,988,432,792.62—an increase of $6,140,111,383,879.54 since Obama took office.

That means that under Obama the federal debt has increased $53,377 for each one of the 115,031,000 households the Census Bureau says there are now in the United States. The president is required by law to submit a budget proposal for the next fiscal year by the first Monday in February.

Thus far, Obama has not submitted his budget proposal for fiscal 2014.

Read more at CNS News

Jeannie DeAngelis observes at Clash Daily:

It’s the liberal way to perceive yourself as diametrically opposed to what and who you actually are. Therefore, Barack Obama being a financially incapable liberal is precisely the reason why the man who has yet to submit a budget proposal for 2014 feels he’s qualified to teach young people “how to budget responsibly.”

What’s next, Bill and Hillary Clinton running a Marital Cohesiveness and Fidelity Seminar? How about first daughters Sasha and Malia, who took not one but two spring break vacations, sharing with the younger set how to spend a week at the Atlantis in the Bahamas and River Run in Sun Valley, Idaho on a limited budget? Sorry, but if Barack Obama is financially capable, then outgoing MSNBC host Ed Schultz is qualified to host a new “Eradicate Bias in the Media” show.

Then again, this is the president who is expert at exempting himself from what he insists others do. That is why a person who clearly has no understanding of sound financial principles can say with a straight face: “I call upon all Americans to observe this month with programs and activities to improve their understanding of financial principles and practices.”

Wait! When Obama says “all Americans” does “all” include himself and the $10 million dollar vacationer he’s married to, or does “all” just mean everybody except Mr. and Mrs. Obama?

Either way, the president must truly believe that he’s an authority on stretching a dollar, because in his “National Financial Capability Month” proclamation, he said that his “[a]dministration is dedicated to helping people make sound decisions in the marketplace.” That marketplace, by the way, is the same marketplace that he’s currently in the process of destroying. It could be that President Obama thinks that the soundest way to save money in the marketplace is to exchange the marketplace for something altogether different.

Read more at Clash Daily

Federal Government Goes Deeper in Debt to Warn Young People About Dangers of Overspending

What Awaits Young Americans

What Can Washington Politicians Learn From America’s Moms?

Federal Budget vs. Household Budget: How Do They Compare?

To Pay For Current Spending Commitments, U.S. Government Would Have To Raise Taxes 64%

US Gov’t Is Bankrupt, System of Republican Constitutional Gov’t Is At Stake

In Cyprus, politicians are trying to bail themselves out by stealing directly from people’s bank accounts.   In America, the government is more subtle.

It’s been stealing from us for years – through inflation.  Thomas Sowell explains:

One of the big differences between the United States and Cyprus is that the U.S. government can simply print more money to get out of a financial crisis. But Cyprus cannot print more euros, which are controlled by international institutions.

Does that mean that Americans’ money is safe in banks? Yes and no.

The U.S. government is very unlikely to just seize money wholesale from people’s bank accounts, as is being done in Cyprus.

But does that mean that your life savings are safe?

No. There are more sophisticated ways for governments to take what you have put aside for yourself and use it for whatever the politicians feel like using it for.

If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save, before you are even aware, much less alarmed.

That is in fact already happening.

When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about “quantitative easing,” what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do — and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.

When the federal government spends far beyond the tax revenues it has, it gets the extra money by selling bonds. The Federal Reserve has become the biggest buyer of these bonds, since it costs them nothing to create more money.

This new money buys just as much as the money you sacrificed to save for years. But more money in circulation, without a corresponding increase in output, means rising prices.

Although the numbers in your bank book may remain the same, part of the purchasing power of your money is transferred to the government. Is that really different from what Cyprus has done?

Read more at Investors Business Daily

Adam Taggart of Peak Prosperity blog warns:

Through the centuries – in historic cultures like that of Yap Island who used giant, immovable stone disks for commerce, to today’s United States, whose Dollar fiat currency exists primarily in digital form – “money” is able to be exchanged for goods and services because society agrees to accept it (at a certain rate of exchange).

But what happens when a society starts doubting the value of its money?

Fed, the Great & Powerful

The podcast goes into the mind-blowingly simple process by which new money is created in America by the Federal Reserve (or the “Fed”). That is to say:

1. The Fed holds a meeting
2. Those in the room decide how many more dollars they think the world needs
3. Someone walks over to a computer and adds that many dollars to the banks, with a few clicks of the keyboard

The banks then, if they want to, lend this new money out into the economy on a fractional basis, adding even more “thin air” dollars to the nation’s money supply.

This unique ability in America lends the Fed enormous power. The power to create new money from nothing. With no limit.

And with that power, the Fed can control and/or influence economies and markets the world over.

Should such power exist? And if so, should a single private entity owned by the major players in the banking system be allowed to wield it?

Such power certainly has its dangers.

[...]  Money is not wealth. It is merely a claim on wealth.

You can’t print your way to prosperity. History is abundantly clear on that.

With the clarity of hindsight, it’s now obvious how the Fed has now painted itself into a corner.

[...]  Cyprus has awakened the world to the reality that central planners can appropriate their money with the bang of a gavel. And while we don’t yet know with certainty how things will unfold in Cyprus, we can project that events there have shaken society’s confidence in the soundness of fiat currency in general. If we know it can be confiscated or devalued overnight, we are less likely to unquestioningly accept its stated value. This doubt that strikes at the very foundation of modern monetary systems.

Cyprus is meaningful in the way that it shines a light on both the importance of hard assets and the risk it poses to market stability. It certainly increases the risk of our prediction of a 40%+ stock-market correction by September, as investors begin to realize that current high values are simply the ephemeral effect of too much money, instead of a sign of true value.

At this point, prudence suggests we prepare for the worst (by parking capital on the sidelines, investing in our personal resilience, etc.) and add to our hard asset holdings (like precious metals bullion, productive real estate, etc.) as insurance to protect our purchasing power. The dollar may strengthen for a bit versus other currencies and perhaps the financial markets, but the long-term trend is a safer and surer bet: Dollars will be inflated. There will be more of them in the future than there are today. So, while our dollars still have the purchasing power they do, we should use the window of time we have now to exchange paper money for tangible wealth at today’s prices.

Read more at Zero Hedge

Fire Up The Presses! Fed Prepares To Print More Monopoly Money

Baby Boomers to Suffer From Dollar’s Decline

The Government Is Expropriating Private Wealth at a Rapid Rate

Politicians steal your money through inflation

The Immorality of Government Inflation

Fed Up with the Fed