February 10, 2005

Lower Tax Rates Are Resulting In Higher Tax Revenue

This surprising news is reported by Larry Kudlow, Economics Editor of National Review Online, and host of CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer:

...at lower tax rates, Treasury coffers are rapidly filling up with rising tax collections. The Laffer Curve is alive and well. Over the past twelve months individual income-tax collections have increased by 15 percent. Non-withheld individual collections, which include stock market-generated capital gains and dividends, have increased 14 percent.

This didnt happen on its own. In June 2003 the president signed tax-reform legislation that immediately lowered the top personal tax rate to 35 percent. Investment tax cuts were also part of that reform. The economys recovery rate subsequently doubled from the new dose of supply-side incentives.

...Deficit teeth-gnashing will go on forever. But there is no evidence that a temporary deficit increase to finance recovery investment has had any ill effect on the economy. Well-run businesses sometimes borrow to invest in future expansion. So must the federal government. The latest government statistics show that private-sector GDP growth is rising at better than 5 percent, while core inflation is a tame 1.5 percent. At 5.2 percent unemployment, the economy is moving steadily towards full utilization of the available workforce.

More Ways to Stop Islamofascism on U.S. Soil

As noted here previously, the Saudis are teaching people to “hate” and “kill” Americans, and they’re doing it in mosques on U.S. soil.

And they use our own freedoms of religion and of speech to protect them from us as they plot to kill us. We need to put a stop to it.

From Orson Scott Card:

It’s ironic that a religious group that absolutely rejects religious freedom or even religious tolerance—Wahhabism and Islamism—shelters its subversive, anti-American activities under the protection of the First Amendment.

But as Abraham Lincoln pointed out during the Civil War: The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

When our nation is under dire threat, and our enemies are using our very freedoms as a protection for their subversive activities, then we have to make temporary exceptions to those freedoms.

Those exceptions always go too far. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the anti-sedition laws of World War I; even the Alien and Sedition Acts early in American history—these are black marks in our history.

But they were all temporary. Not one of them resulted in a permanent curtailment of freedom. We do not have a history of “slippery slopes,” where curtailment of freedoms leads to a permanent loss of those freedoms.

Instead we have a very clear history of vigilance, and the moment the threat is over, we get rid of the onerous exceptions to our Constitutional freedoms.

There are times when national survival and safety trump particular instances of particular freedoms. Geraldo Rivera doesn’t have a right to draw a map for the camera, showing where our troops are going for their next mission.

And a foreign government does not have a right to distribute subversive literature in America that is designed to recruit people for anti-American activities in time of war and encourage murder of people who exercise the American freedom to change religious affiliation according to our conscience.

It’s as simple as that. Saudi Arabia is a foreign country. It does not have any freedom of the press within its own borders, and, not being a citizen of the United States, it does not have the right to distribute subversive, seditious, and criminal instructions to potential agents in our country.

Card continues with specific suggestions on how to deal with this circumstance:

...as we once again face active subversion and recruitment by a foreign power inside our borders during time of war, here’s one place to start:

It’s time for anyone—a church or a group or an individual—receiving funding from the Saudi government or from Wahhabist sources to be registered as agents of a foreign nation … and publically listed.

Any imam who allows this hate literature from Saudi Arabia to be available in his mosque should be listed as a foreign agent.

This is not an onerous burden. Lobbyists hired to represent foreign nations’ interests before Congress and U.S government agencies already register as foreign agents.

I’m simply suggesting that there should not be an exception for religious leaders.

After all, American Christians wishing to operate as missionaries in other countries outside the West are invariably registered and must have the permission of the government to operate inside their borders. And those American missionaries are not advocating murder of apostates and subversion of the local government!

*

Here is a potential second step:

It should be required that any publication imported into the United States in Arabic should have an accurate side-by-side English translation in the same publication. Publications in Arabic alone should be turned back at the border.

This runs up against the problem that in Muslim eyes, the only true Quran is the Arabic original; many believe that translations are evil on their face.

So the Quran itself should be the sole exception. As long as it consists of the Quran and only the Quran, it can be entirely in Arabic. But any commentary must be in Arabic and English.

He’s got more. Read the whole thing.

For a sample letter to write to your Congressperson about this, click here.