Either enough Americans wake up and retake control of the government that is rightfully ours, or we pack up now and head for the hills. I feel a revolution coming, and unless enough Americans wake up soon enough to make it a peaceful one at the ballot box, it’s going to be ugly.
Monday, April 06, 2009
LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
WorldNetDaily
Will bill give Obama control of Internet?
Proposed new powers called ‘drastic federal intervention’
Posted: April 04, 2009
10:35 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
WorldNetDaily
Sen. John “Jay” Rockefeller, D-W.V. |
A pair of bills introduced in the U.S. Senate would grant the White House sweeping new powers to access private online data, regulate the cybersecurity industry and even shut down Internet traffic during a declared “cyber emergency.”
Senate bills No. 773 and 778, introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., are both part of what’s being called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, which would create a new Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor, reportable directly to the president and charged with defending the country from cyber attack. (What ever happened to the idea of SMALLER government? That baby got thrown out with the fiscal restraint bath water)
A working draft of the legislation obtained by an Internet privacy group also spells out plans to grant the Secretary of Commerce access to all privately owned information networks deemed to be critical to the nation’s infrastructure “without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.” (NOTHING you do online will be private, not that it really is now. But your government will have unrestrained access to ANYTHING you do online. George Orwell was a prophet. His predictions were just 25 years ahead of their time.)
Privacy advocates and Internet experts have been quick to sound the alarm over the act’s broadly drawn government powers.
“The cybersecurity threat is real,” says Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which obtained the draft of S.773, “but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.”
“The whole thing smells bad to me,” writes Larry Seltzer in eWeek, an Internet and print news source on technology issues. “I don’t like the chances of the government improving this situation by taking it over generally, and I definitely don’t like the idea of politicizing this authority by putting it in the direct control of the president.“
According to a Senate document explaining the bill, the legislation “addresses our country’s unacceptable vulnerability to massive cyber crime, global cyber espionage and cyber attacks that could cripple our critical infrastructure.”
In a statement explaining the bill’s introduction, Sen. Rockefeller said, “We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs – from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records – the list goes on.” (It’s the “at all cost” liberal laundry service again. Scare, tax, spend, repeat.)
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who is co-sponsoring the bill, added, “If we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber-Katrina.” (Olympia Snowe is NOT a republican. She is a RINO, and a liberal. She must go.)
Critics, however, have pointed to three actions Rockefeller and Snowe propose that may violate both privacy concerns and even constitutional bounds:
First, the White House, through the national cybersecurity advisor, shall have the authority to disconnect “critical infrastructure” networks from the Internet – including private citizens’ banks and health records, if Rockefeller’s examples are accurate – if they are found to be at risk of cyber attack. The working copy of the bill, however, does not define what constitutes a cybersecurity emergency, and apparently leaves the question to the discretion of the president. (Once again, the Obama power grab rears its ugly head. In Obama’s America, he or his people will CONTROL EVERYTHING. You will have no rights, privacy, security, personal property, wealth, or anything you associate with freedom and prosperity. Mr. Hussein Obama will start by deciding that conservative blogs and news sights are a “threat” to America (“threat to America” defined as “could potentially reveal the truth about Obama and his actions) and he will shut them down. Anything else on the internet that doesn’t dovetail with his agenda will soon be declared to be a “cybersecurity threat,” and will be shut down. It’s coming, People. Unless enough of us wake up and do what is necessary to stop it.)
Second, the bill establishes the Department of Commerce as “the clearinghouse of cybersecurity threat and vulnerability information,” including the monitoring of private information networks deemed a part of the “critical infrastructure.”
Third, the legislation proposes implementation of a professional licensing program for certifying who can serve as a cybersecurity professional.
And while the critics concede the need for increased security, they object to what is perceived as a dangerous and intrusive expansion of government power. (Are you seeing this? This is just a small piece of what adds up to marxist, totalitarian control. Don’t doubt me on this…)
“There are some problems that we face which need the weight of government behind them,” writes Seltzer in eWeek. “This is not the same as creating a new federal bureaucracy setting rules over what computer security has to be and who can do it.” (Uh, what? It sounds like you’re saying there is no BLACK and WHITE, just white and melanin impaired.)
“It’s an incredibly broad authority,” CDT senior counsel Greg Nojeim told the Mother Jones news website, troubled that existing privacy laws “could fall to this authority.”
Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Mother Jones the bill is “contrary to what the Constitution promises us.” (The U.S. Constitution be damned if you’re a liberal or B. Hussein Obama. They have already discarded the constitution and no one is doing a D@#$ thing about it.)
According to Granick, granting the Department of Commerce oversight of the “critical” networks, such as banking records, would grant the government access to potentially incriminating information obtained without cause or warrant, a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against unlawful search and seizure. (Duh. That’s exactly what they want. Big Brother. BIG BROTHER.)
“What are the critical infrastructure networks? The examples provided are ‘banking, utilities, air/rail/auto traffic control, telecommunications.’ Let’s think about this,” writes Seltzer. “I’m especially curious as to how you take the telecommunications networks off of the Internet when they are, in large part, what the Internet is comprised of. And if my bank were taken offline, I would think about going into my branch and asking for all of my deposits in cash.”
S. 778, which would establish the Office of the National Security Advisor, and S. 773, which provides for developing a cadre of governmental cybersecurity specialists and procedures, have both been read twice and referred to committee in the Senate.
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The Wide Awake Patriot 
Obama Raising Taxes $26,000 per year on Tax Paying Families Over Next Decade
Don’t look behind the curtain. These are not the tax cuts you’re looking for. What we’ve got here is failure to realize your failed communist policies have failed every time in history they have been tried. Our wannabe-communist liberals believe that the only reason communism failed is that not enough freedom was taken, not enough taxes were confiscated, and not enough money was spent. Well, now they have their chance to prove their point and have ALREADY demonstrated the historic truth that communism and socialism are simply and demonstrably failed ideologies. Over spending and borrowing what you can’t afford to pay back are what got America into its current mess. So why is it suddenly a good idea to borrow TRILLIONS of dollars we can’t afford to pay back just so we can spend most of it on pork projects designed to get politicians re-elected? These lying, power-hungry scumbags are taxing and spending us into oblivion. We can’t afford any more of Obama’s lies or broken promises. We can’t even afford for Uh-Bama to tell the truth. The few times he’s honest, we get a glimpse into the “1984” Big-Brother future he has planned for us. He promises to raise a civilian security force as well funded as the military (Brown Shirts). He promises to destroy the coal mining industry in this country. He promises to make other countries like us again (by destroying us so we are no longer the lone super power). America can not afford Obama.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. TERM LIMITS. The liberals are shredding the constitution as fast as they can feed it into the shredder. What is it going to take to MAKE THEM STOP?
Obama’s $163,000 Tax Bomb
Families well below the president’s ‘no-tax’ threshold will get a six-figure bill.
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN
The House and Senate are preparing to pass President Barack Obama’s radical budget blueprint, with only minor modifications, by using (abusing would be more accurate) the budget “reconciliation” process. This process circumvents the Senate’s normal rules requiring 60 votes to prevent a filibuster. Reconciliation was created by Congress in the mid-1970s to enforce deficit reduction, the opposite of what the president and his party are aiming for.
The immense increase in nondefense spending and taxes, and the tripling of the national debt in Mr. Obama’s budget, have been the subject of considerable scrutiny since it was announced. Mr. Obama and his economic officials respond, not without justification, that he inherited an enormous economic and financial crisis and a large deficit. All presidents present the best possible case for their budgets, but a mind-numbing array of numbers offers innumerable opportunities to conjure up misleading comparisons.
Mr. Obama’s characterizations of his budget unfortunately fall into this pattern. He claims to reduce the deficit by half, to shave $2 trillion off the debt (the cumulative deficit over his 10-year budget horizon), and not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. While in a Clintonian sense correct (depends on what the definition of “is” is), it is far more accurate to describe Mr. Obama’s budget as almost tripling the deficit. It adds $6.5 trillion to the national debt, and leaves future U.S. taxpayers (many of whom will make far less than $250,000) with the tab. And all this before dealing with the looming Medicare and Social Security cost explosion.
Some have laid the total estimated deficits and debt projections (as more realistically tallied by the Congressional Budget Office) on Mr. Obama’s doorstep. But on this score the president is correct. He cannot rightly be blamed for what he inherited. A more accurate comparison calculates what he has already added and proposes to add by his policies, compared to a “do-nothing” baseline (see nearby chart).
The CBO baseline cumulative deficit for the Obama 2010-2019 budget is $9.3 trillion. How much additional deficit and debt does Mr. Obama add relative to a do-nothing budget with none of his programs? Mr. Obama’s “debt difference” is $4.829 trillion — i.e., his tax and spending proposals add $4.829 trillion to the CBO do-nothing baseline deficit. The Obama budget also adds $177 billion to the fiscal year 2009 budget. To this must be added the $195 billion of 2009 legislated add-ons (e.g., the stimulus bill) since Mr. Obama’s election that were already incorporated in the CBO baseline and the corresponding $1.267 trillion in add-ons for 2010-2019. This brings Mr. Obama’s total additional debt to $6.5 trillion, not his claimed $2 trillion reduction. That was mostly a phantom cut from an imagined 10-year continuation of peak Iraq war spending.
The claim to reduce the deficit by half compares this year’s immense (mostly inherited) deficit to the projected fiscal year 2013 deficit, the last of his current term. While it is technically correct that the deficit would be less than half this year’s engorged level, a do-nothing budget would reduce it by 84%. Compared to do-nothing, Mr. Obama’s deficit is more than two and a half times larger in fiscal year 2013. Just his addition to the budget deficit, $459 billion, is bigger than any deficit in the nation’s history. And the 2013 deficit is supposed to be after several years of economic recovery, funds are being returned from the financial bailouts, and we are out of Iraq.
Finally, what of the claim not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year? Even ignoring his large energy taxes, Mr. Obama must reconcile his arithmetic. Every dollar of debt he runs up means that future taxes must be $1 higher in present-value terms. Mr. Obama is going to leave a discounted present-value legacy of $6.5 trillion of additional future taxes, unless he dramatically cuts spending. (With interest the future tax hikes would be much larger later on.) Call it a stealth tax increase or ticking tax time-bomb.
What does $6.5 trillion of additional debt imply for the typical family? If spread evenly over all those paying income taxes (which under Mr. Obama’s plan would shrink to a little over 50% of the population), every income-tax paying family would get a tax bill for $163,000. (In ten years, interest would bring the total to well over $200,000, if paid all at once. If paid annually over the succeeding ten years, the tax hike per year would average almost $26,000.) That’s in addition to his explicit tax hikes. While the future tax time-bomb is pushed beyond Mr. Obama’s budget horizon, and future presidents and Congresses will decide how it will be paid, it is likely to be paid by future income tax hikes as these are general fund deficits.
We can get a rough idea of who is likely to pay them by distributing this $6.5 trillion of future taxes according to the most recent distribution of income-tax burdens. We know the top 1% or 5% of income-taxpayers pay vastly disproportionate shares of taxes, and much larger shares than their shares of income. But it also turns out that Mr. Obama’s massive additional debt implies a tax hike, if paid today, of well over $100,000 for people with incomes of $150,000, far below Mr. Obama’s tax-hike cut-off of $250,000 (over $130,000 in ten years and over $16,000 a year if paid annually over the following ten years). In other words, a middle-aged two-career couple in New York or California could get a future tax bill as big as their mortgage.
While Mr. Obama’s higher tax rates are economically harmful, some of his tax policies deserve wide support, e.g., permanently indexing the alternative minimum tax. Ditto some of the spending increases, including the extension of unemployment benefits, given the severe recession.
Neither a large deficit in a recession nor a small increase from the current modest level in the debt to GDP ratio is worrisome. And at a 50% debt-to-GDP ratio, with nominal GDP growing 4% (the CBO out-year forecast), deficits of 2% of GDP would not be increasing the debt burden relative to income.
But what is not just worrisome but dangerous are the growing trillion dollar deficits in the latter years of the Obama budget. These deficits are so large for a prosperous nation in peacetime — three times safe levels — that they would cause the debt burden to soar toward banana republic levels. That’s a recipe for a permanent drag on growth and serious pressure on the Federal Reserve to inflate, not the new era of rising prosperity that Mr. Obama and his advisers foresee.
Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.
This story has been corrected. An earlier version included in two parenthetical statements calculations of additional taxes derived from the debt occurring over the period, rather than present discounted values.
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Filed under: 9. Politics, Communism, Econonomics, Government, Marxism, Opressive Government, Socialism | Tagged: 10-year, accurate, add-ons, added, additional, adds, advisers, afford, almost, already, annually, anyone, baseline, bill, billion, borrow, boskin, bring, budget, burden, calculates, cbo, claim, commentary, Communism, compared, comparison, Congress, correct, cumulative, current, cuts, debt, deficit, demonstrably, discounted, distributing, do-nothing, dollar, economic, enough, failed, family, far, financial, fiscal, fund, future, GDP, going, growing, half, higher, hikes, history, horizon, idea, immense, imply, included, income, income-tax, increase, inherited, interest, Iraq, larger, leave, level, liberals, likely, mostly, nation, Obama, paid, pay, permanent, policies, present, present-value, President, process, projects, proposes, prosperous, raise, ratio, recession, reconciliation, reduce, reduction, relative, senate, severe, shares, social, spending, Tax, ten, term, time-bomb, times, total, trillion, tripling, worrisome, year | Leave a comment »