Terence P. Jeffrey, "Generational Debt: U.S. Debt Per American Under 18 = $218,676" (CNSNEWS.com, November 4, 2012)
- 4 Yrs at Private College = $130,468
- Median-Priced Existing Home = $173,100
- U.S. Debt Per American Under 18 = $218,676
People supporting Obama are not supporting him because of his sterling economic policies. They're supporting him because of his ideological stances, as was made abundantly evident during the Democratic National Convention, when one child-murdering supporter and sodomy supporter after another walked up to the podium and hailed this man.
We do not know how this will turn out, but we do know this: if Obama wins, and the pace of social and cultural destruction quickens, which it certainly will, none of it will be happening without God in heaven allowing it. Obama winning may in fact be God's judgement on a wicked and perverse generation -- not our judgement on who is the best man to occupy the White House.
Voris is right.
ReplyDeleteI've been saying since the early years of Bush's presidency that the Republic is done for.
I just hope the inevitable collapse comes swiftly. Lingering sucks.
The American experiment is a failure. Time to clear the rubble and get about reestablishing Christendom.
Do you really think that the religiously twisted, money grubbing fiend MR was going to improve matters? You yourself can see that he wants no part of the Kingship of Christ. "The love of money is the root of all evil," and he and his minions were going to hit the ground running to facilitate greed, with not a wit of concern for the poor. The twin evils we both decry- abortion and homosexuality- are symptoms of this "moral rot," not its basis, as you seem to suppose. (Our Lord took much harsher measures with the money changers than the harlot at the well.) They arose within the context of a materialistic, individualistic society, values MR champions. I don't like the anti-Catholic provisions in Obamacare any more than you do. And I will continue to oppose them with all my might. But, unlike you, I do agree with the President that something must be done to make health care affordable for the millions of Americans whom MR's cronies in the insurance business REFUSE to help. Government solutions to such problems are not intrinsically evil; the government exists to protect citizens against enemies both foreign and domestic. Corporations surely qualify as the latter. Here's the other thing: the fight against the baby killers and Sodomites is winnable, especially on a personal level, within families and amongst friend, legislation notwithstanding. But there would have been no stopping the rape of working people and the war against Iran a Romney win portended, making BO the lesser of 2 evils.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your campaign coverage.
I hated both choices and didn't vote since it counts not in NJ whose electoral votes were foreordained and we had no critical ballot issues. But I saw Romney as causing more abortions not through law but through medicaid cuts which his stingy "increases" amounted to via medical and nursing home inflation which is way high. So to me Obama winning means de facto less abortions because funding births...money...is more real than ideological laws.
ReplyDeleteGay marriage? Is US legal marriage for heteros a Sign of Christ's permanent love for the Church when the US has always allowed divorce and made it easier with no fault?
Did I think Repubs fiscally conservative? No. Bush's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan cost $4 trillion according to a study out of Brown U. Romney and Ryan, never in the military just like Bush 2 (really...Air National Guard during Vietnam... he was fleeing Vietnam just like Cheney did through 5 deferments prior to seeing action by shooting his friend in the face while skeet or duck shooting). Romney and Ryan and their non veteran love of things military...looked to me like " here we go again" with the vicarious warriors.
Romney was so thin on what he stood for ( outside of keeping control over one's money) that the Catholic right spent hours on Benghazi as Obama's fault while they totally excused both Ratzinger and John Paul II of thousands of clergy molestations over a 20 year period.
Mr. Allen,
ReplyDeleteThe notion that Democrats have HISTORICALLY supported the working class and poor is true, back in the day. I voted Democrat through the first term of Reagan. But it's no longer true except as an empty slogan. If you want to help the poor you don't abandon them, as Obama has (there are more beneath the poverty line on food stamps as a result of Obama's policies). If you want to help the working class, you don't feed the greed of unions, like the teachers' unions in Detroit where 75% of students never graduate from high school and teachers make $75K/year, well-above American median income and obscene given the context. Neither do you bankrupt the country by running up the national credit card by bailouts and social program with proven records of failure, ensuring that there will be NO safety net but perhaps the mercy of euthanasia in years ahead.
Mr. Bannon,
Your drive-by media rationale for lower abortions under Obama is, I'm sorry to say, a red herring, given that Mr. Obama's ploy was to massively rob Medicare funds in order to pay for his other social programs.
Both of you: Mr. Romney would have done one thing that Obama has shown no inclination to do: strike down the HHS Mandate.
As to materialism, both capitalism and communism are materialistic. Capitalism wants to grow the individual's own piece of the money pie bigger, while communism wants to grow the whole pie bigger -- but they're both all about the money pie.
Nevertheless, the record of history amply ironically shows that the former succeeds, as a by-product, in growing the whole pie bigger, while the latter ends up with no pie at all. That's why collectivist programs never work, and that's why America, Germany, and Japan after WWII had rapidly growing, prosperous middle classes.
We agree that the Pax Americana is not the Pax Christi and that neither party is an unambiguous "fit" for Catholics, but if either of you believes in the parity of each party in terms of supportable values, then we do have a disagreement. Watch and see.
PP
ReplyDeleteMedicare is not Medicaid.....cutting the latter will produce abortions. Didn't get my data from media but from the net.
..but if either of you believes in the parity of each party in terms of supportable values, then we do have a disagreement. Watch and see.
ReplyDeleteThe AmBishop's flocks flocked to the polls to vote for the man who is crushing their Church.
If we thought his first term was bad, wait for the second term of the Mulatto Mengele; he has so cowed the republicans that he will be at liberty to legislate from the Oval Office via Executive Orders and the Stalinist Press will savage any republican with the moxie to oppose him - there is existing dirt to be shoveled on any republican - but, for me, the real interesting thing to watch is what will the reaction of the AmBishops be?
I pray they fight; I fear they will take flight and make their theological schism from Catholic Tradition even starker.
Obama bids well to completely crush - Kulturkampf style - the Catholic Church in America.
At "The Brussels Journal," there was a long series of articles, "Meccania to Atlantis" that, wisely, warned Americans (among others) that those alive today could see their country completely destroyed via radical change despite the complacency of the "Oh, everything will be ok" Pollyanna Philosophy that suffuses the masses.
Pollyanna is dead. Now, where is Cassandra?
PP,
ReplyDeletePlease allow me to briefly respond.
I don't think that the Dems actively support the working class, as in days gone by. I think that their policies do less harm to it than the Repubs'. My family, for one, was much better better off under Clinton than Bush. The Repubs allowed, nay encouraged the capitalists to lower our incomes, raise health care premiums and gas and food prices, and gut our pensions.
I am not a Collectivist but a Bellocian Distributivist. Mr. Bannon is moreover surely correct in pointing out the role that the unjust war in Iraq has played in the current economic downturn.
As for the HHS mandate, Catholics can defeat it on their own. There would have been no stopping the evil Romney would have unleashed. Moral "parity" or not, the Repubs, backed by the plutocrats, are a much greater force to be reckoned with.
Bill,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to imply that drawing a red line beyond which we should not allow Iran to go is a matter of warmongering. Remember Neville Chaimberlin? Policies of appeasement dressed up as "diplomacy" are sometimes the surest path to unwanted war. Witness Hitler. For that matter, witness Obama's obscene reluctance to call the concerted para-military attack on Benghazi and the murder of four Americans a "terror attack," instead attempting to innoculate it with a fairy tale about a politically incorrect film, of all things.
And "nation building" is not the exclusive province of Republicans. Witness LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin pretext for dragging us (against Isenhauer's earlier warning to him: "Never get yourself bogged down in an Asian land war) into the protracted disaster of Vietnam, which, by its insane policy justifications, set a generation-defining record in shaping the next half-century in the arts of mendacious rationalizations.
"Peace through strength" would never have become a slogan if it didn't contain SOME truth.
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ReplyDeleteDear Dr. Things could be worse. It could be 2016 and we could be waiting for the voting results to see in Michelle "Lurleen Wallace" Obama has been elected POTUS.
ReplyDeleteI mean, Hilary knew she'd have to be elected Senator first before running for POTUS but the Obama's think differently than other humans
Bill,
ReplyDeleteOkay, it's Medicare, not Medicaid that Obama's defunding to the tune of $716 million over the next decade.
More important is the America being promoted by the two parties, both historically and currently. Except for the large percentage of 'takers' those who vote for Obama don't do so because of his sterling economic record, but for the life-style values his vision of America promotes, which is sympatico with their own. We all know what that is, it's one that sees restricting contraception and abortion as an "attack on women's rights" and "healthcare," which sees the DOMA as an attack on gays and lesbians, which sees traditional family values as a throwback to an oppressive ethos of the 1950s or worse.
Which of those two visions of America do you think would most readily promote abortions? It's far from being a mere economic matter. Even if it were (and it's not), does it make sense to shape public policy on the basis of unintended by-products of decisions? Remember the principle of double effect St. Thomas describes in his treatment of killing in self-defense?
Not Spartacus,
Always appreciate your comments, and I fear you are right, both about the "Mulatto Mengele" (how apt) and the US bishops. My hunch is that many Catholics will be afforded opportunities for heroism, which means that faithful Catholics will suffer immensely, given the trajectory we're on now. And Cassandra, indeed: where is she now?!
Mr. Allen,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate what you're saying here. Please understand. As I've told many before, I votes straight ticked Democrat through Reagan's first term. The party has changed radically, not I. At least, so I see it by my best lights.
But this does not mean I favor what the Republicans have been doing in toto over the last couple of decades. Bush may have been a far better man personally than Bill Clinton, but he was far from being a traditional "conservative," both in terms of his economic policies and his Rockefeller-style nation-building, regime changing foreign adventurism.
You describe yourself as a Distributivist. I have been using as one of my textbooks in my course on Political Philosophy with my seminarians, the book entitled The Church and the Libertarian, by Christopher Ferrara, also the author of the impressive tome, Liberty, the God that Failed. As such, you may gather that I hold no truck for "Austrian Libertarianism" of the von Mises and Rothbard variety. I wrote a piece sometime ago on "Trotskyite Republicans," detailing the alliances of American Neo-Conservatives with the tradition of ex-Trotskyite Jewish converts to Neo-conservatism, like Leo Strauss and his spiritual stepchildren, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kegan, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, and others like Dick Cheney, William Bennett, Ronald Rumsfeld, and Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox New, The Wall Street Journal, and, I believe, the New York Post and Weekly Standard).
But despite these powerful Republican affiliates, there are still significant traditional constituents within the Republican party that gave rise to the likes of Ronald Reagan, who became a far better president than I ever would have imagine of an ex-film star from Hollywood.
(continued ...)
(... Continued)
ReplyDeleteThere is also the uncontested record of the free enterprise tradition (in the broadest sense possible) in the West yielding far more prosperity for the country as a whole than the incentive-shackling 5-year plans of Soviet Socialism or other experiments in collectivism. As you know, Distributivism is not the same thing as socialist re-distribution-ism, but rather a localist philosophy promoting the self-reliance of families and small communities. It permits something close to the vision of Rerum Novarum, a mitigated communalism wedded to the incentive of free enterprise.
I would also deny that Obama is any less in bed with big business and Wall Street than the Republicans, despite Obama's efforts to link himself with the "Occupy Wall Street" protests across the country. That, at least, is what my study suggests to me.
As to the unjust war(s) in Iraq, I recall that all our most prominent Democrats voted in conformity with Republicans to back the Gulf War. People like to make a great deal about not finding weapons of mass destruction. But that is true only if one means a nuclear program with nuclear missles and bombs. Was not the nerve gas by which Saddam Hussein obliterated massive numbers of Kurds a weapon of mass destruction? One also hears that we went into the Gulf for its oil. In what way have the Republicans managed to pilfer Iraqi oil to the benefit of Americans, I keep wondering.
I'm also curious about two final things. How do you propose Catholics can stop the HHS Mandate on their own? Abp Dolan's gift of photo-ops to Obama at the Al Smith dinner didn't seem particularly fruitful
How do you identify Romney as the greater evil than Obama? That I do not understand. What have the bishops been counselling us: that we cannot vote for any intrinsic evil; and they have gone on to identify this specifically with candidates supporting abortion, and not far behind, the promotion of same-sex "marriage," and undermining of religious freedom, etc.
As to economic issues (I'm not addressing morality here), while wars cost money, they have also nearly always amounted to emergency programs of "quantitative easing" in recent history, producing massive amounts of immediate jobs both abroad and at home. But such limited periods of quantitative easing are a drop in the bucket compared to the $16 TRILLION Obama has run up on the national credit card. And if there were a moral aspect to this disastrous fact, it lies in (1) his willingness to pass on this debt to our children, which they will have no way of paying (I've read that Americans under 18 each now owe $218,676 on the national credit card), and (2) his relative unconcern with the fact that we are fast approaching a financial tipping point, what concerned experts have been referring to as a "fiscal cliff," which could utterly destroy any solvency and hope of sustaining social programs for the poor and needy in our country. Even John F. Kennedy, while admitting the seeming irony of his proposal, argued in favor of LOWERING taxes in order to raise the standard of living for all. This commonplace wisdom has been completely cast aside by our current Democrats.
Thanks, - PP
Not Spartacus,
ReplyDeleteI don't suspect Michelle "Lurleen Wallace" Obama would allow herself to be elected POTUS. It would be too taxing on her vacation schedule. She might opt for Empress of America and double her retinue of ladies in waiting from 40 to 80 or so. But of course our affirmative action white guilt prevents us from nationally criticizing the Obamas. Speaking of teflon . . .
John,
ReplyDeleteI agree with being ready on Iran which I never mentioned. I want it done "smart war" ...from the air. I was in the military and 2 years ago tracked down and fought a ghetto thug who had broken into my home and stole a lethal weapon...inter alia. No pacifist here. But Romney Ryan have that glazed look of the barcolounger general who's never been in a street fight. I can picture them invading North Korea and then building hospitals and schools there for ten years like Afghanistan while here in the US, we give the mentally ill enough welfare money to live in dangerous neighborhoods rather than institutionalized them.
PP
ReplyDelete$16 trillion is the projected decades long national debt and is not Obama...4.7$ trillion is Obama as 4.9$ trillion was Bush ( without counting long term mideast invasion implications...so Bush is understated here at fact checker:
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/dueling-debt-deceptions/
Bill, yes of course. Bush may have been a good man personally, and ask any Planned Parenthood or NOW or NARAL operative and he was clearly perceived as a more of a threat on the right to kill babies than he ever was in actual effect; and -- to the point here -- he raised taxes, contrary to his promises, and ran up the national debt, most precipitously in the 2007 meltdown during the bailout that allegedly stabilized US finances. But Obama takes the cake for running up the deficit more rapidly during the first three years of his presidency than any prior president, no questions asked.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I like your reply to John, so far as Iran goes, and I'm familiar with your lethal weapon exploits, which I'd love to see made into a film played by Daniel Craig. =)
You've pegged Romney about right, but I wouldn't go so far as you (or certainly Robert Allen) in demonizing him. One has to look at the whole picture, of course.
No matter how you look at it, though, I think the Republic was pretty much lost during the Carter era. The rest: the philandering Clinton, the post-conservative Bushes, the appalling mendacity of Obama's evil, which decadent post-liberal culture allows him to pass of as merely banal, recalling Hannah Arendt's remark about the "banality of evil," is merely inexorable history.
I have come to despise the "lesser of the two evils" argument as a way of justifying the vote one is itching to make, but cannot justify making intellectually or morally. It is a form of subterfuge, even self-deception, giving cover for indulging one's prejudices. With Obama we will have the seven capital sins legitimized as human rights. With Romney we would have had continuing obeisance to soul-killing corporate values, and more more more war -- for a Republican neo-con of the type with which Romney was planning to stock his foreign policy team, there is always one more Muslim infestation, one more festering turd of tribal squalor, that must be turned into a liberal democracy. So what was to be gained by voting for either of them?
ReplyDeleteThat said, I voted for Romney in a moment of weakness -- I do so despise President Black Jesus. Not that such a vote mattered in my midnight blue state, which BJ won handily. The more creditable decision would have been to vote for neither, as neither have anything to offer a Catholic, except perhaps another cross to bear.
What about "religious freedom"? What about the bishops? Sorry but I do not feel obligated to carry water for Catholic leaders who are howling now that their institutional cash cows are under threat of being compromised by secularists -- not when these same leaders have rubbed elbows with those same secularists with nary a blush on their plump pink cheeks. The gutless, mincingly nuanced positions of the USCCB over the years, their speak-nice-to-power refusal to indict Catholic politicians who excrete on the faith in the name of "conscience," their fat satisfaction with the status quo -- all of this tells me that Catholicism is as doomed in the United States as it was in the formerly communist countries. Although, it must be said, communism made Cardinal Mindzenty possible. There are no Mindzentys in the USCCB.