Extraordinarily Difficult to Reduce Entitlements

[From article]
The entitlements that dominate our consciousness are big ticket items such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unfunded sinkholes ranging from 50 to 200 trillion, depending on who’s counting. These staggering obligations may threaten to wreck national budgets and lay waste to society, but they have little to teach us about the fundamental, and very scary, nature of entitlements. Life’s little lessons are far more instructive. Lesser entitlements that resonate with our everyday experience are more human-size: a pay raise, an inflated school grade or a free drink at Moe’s Tavern on your birthday. We rarely think of these examples as entitlements, but once awarded, just try to get them back.
[. . .]
psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky discovered a profound asymmetry in human behavior they dubbed loss aversion. Through a gamut of social experiments, they demonstrated that people strongly prefer avoiding loss to acquiring gain, a human imbalance that initiated the rewrite of traditional cost–benefit models.
[. . .]
The principle of loss aversion describes how a benefit – any benefit – becomes an entitlement.
[. . .]



Life, for our forebears, was at least precarious and challenging, if not truly “solitary, nasty, brutish and short,” as opined by Thomas Hobbes. Resources were precious. An extra caribou in the larder, a few more fur skins to guard against the elements or a roomier cave were certainly causes for celebration, but the loss of any amount of food, clothing or shelter was dangerous. Gain was valuable, but loss could be lethal; loss aversion makes evolutionary sense. Whether loss aversion remains beneficial or simply vestigial, it appears to be deeply embedded in our genes.
[. . .]



The political wishful thinking that we can cut, manage or even tame big ticket entitlements, if and when we so choose, belies eons of human history.
The time to plan for the control of entitlements is at their inception.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/the_only_way_to_cut_entitlements.html

April 19, 2016
The Only Way to Cut Entitlements
By Dean Kedenburg

Entitlement, Most Toxic Word

[From article]
During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes.
One of these words is "entitlement." To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from "affordable housing" to "a living wage."
But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don't produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don't build housing, then we are not going to have housing, "affordable" or otherwise.
[. . .]
If we are all "entitled" to things, irrespective of whether we produce anything ourselves, then the question becomes: Why are some people getting so much more than others?

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/02/09/toxic-words-n2116546/page/full

Toxic Words
Thomas Sowell

Feb 09, 2016

Opposing Migrants From Middle East Makes Sense

[From article]

The United States is the most generous nation in the world, and we have taken many refugees from foreign lands. Europe has not offered to take refugees from Central America, so why are some politicians here insisting that we take many thousands of refugees from the Middle East?
While refugee crises are tragic, crimes committed by transplanted peoples against unwarned, unprotected victims in our own country are even more tragic. Politicians demanding that American neighborhoods accept thousands of refugees, without proper screening or any indication by the migrants that they genuinely want to assimilate into our culture, should be rejected.
Americans are horrified by images of tens of thousands of people, mostly young unattached Muslim men from the Middle East and Africa, crossing unguarded borders into Europe. The news media often describe these people sympathetically as refugees from the civil war in Syria, but many could be migrants seeking a more comfortable life in a rich society with a cradle-to-grave welfare state.
The scene is eerily reminiscent of the tens of thousands of people from Central America who crossed into the United States last summer. Often described sympathetically as unaccompanied minors fleeing gang violence, most of those Central American arrivals were able-bodied, tough young men who left their families in search of better economic opportunities.
Wealthy European nations did not offer to help out by accepting thousands of migrants from Central America. We did not expect that of them, and they should not expect it of us now.
The Muslim migrants follow a route through Turkey, Macedonia and Serbia into Hungary, the European country closest to the Middle East, and from Hungary they can travel throughout 26 European nations. That route may soon close when Hungary completes the razor-wire fence it is building along its entire 108-mile border with Serbia.
[. . .]



The idea of creating nations without borders, allowing the free movement of people inside a common perimeter, was pushed by President George W. Bush when he met with Mexico's president and Canada's prime minister in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005. Soon after that first summit of "the three amigos," the Council on Foreign Relations published "Toward a North American Community," which called for a "seamless market" with "a more open border for the movement of goods and people."
[. . .]
Stark financial problems also stand against welcoming so many strangers into our country. More than 90 percent of recent refugees from the Middle East are on welfare, according to official statistics published by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
Our welfare system is already strained by the Central American migrants who entered our country illegally and never went home. There are a potential six billion people in the world who would like to partake in the American welfare system if given the opportunity, but we cannot afford to foot the bill for everyone in the world who does not have a job.

http://www.creators.com/conservative/phyllis-schlafly/america-has-taken-more-than-our-share-of-refugees.html

America Has Taken More Than Our Share of Refugees
Phyllis Schlafly
Creators.com

White House and Democrats Urge More Money To Prevent More Urban Unrest

[From article]
I’ll give POTUS credit: He can lay it on thicker than a John Deere manure spreader.
Let’s talk “massive investments,” shall we?
In 2009, Obama and the Democrats rammed the $840 billion federal stimulus package through Capitol Hill under the guise of immediate job creation and economic recovery. An estimated $64 billion went to public school districts; another nearly $50 billion went for other education spending. This included $13 billion for low-income public school kids; $4.1 billion for Head Start and childcare services; $650 million for educational technology; $200 million for working college students; and $70 million for homeless children.



How’s that all working out? Last week, economists from the St. Louis Federal Reserve surveyed more than 6,700 education stimulus recipients and concluded that for every $1 million of stimulus grants to a district, a measly 1.5 jobs were created. “Moreover, all of this increase came in the form of nonteaching staff,” the report found, and the “jobs effect was also not statistically different from zero.”



[. . .]
In 2010, President Obama signed the so-called Edujobs bill into law — a $26 billion political wealth redistribution scheme paying back Big Labor for funding Democratic congressional campaigns. A year later, several were spending on the money to plug budget shortfalls instead of hiring teachers. Other recipients received billions despite having full educational payrolls and not knowing what to do with the big bucks.
[. . .]



The “social innovation” slush fund was intended to “create new knowledge about how to solve social challenges in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development and school support, and healthy futures, and to improve our nation’s problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities.” The biggest beneficiaries? Obama’s progressive cronies.
Apparently, the richly funded “social innovators” haven’t reached the looter-prone neighborhoods of Baltimore yet. But it’s not ideologically bankrupt Obama’s fault. It’s ours.

http://michellemalkin.com/2015/04/28/debunking-obamas-bilious-baltimore-babble/

Debunking Obama’s bilious Baltimore babble
By Michelle Malkin
April 28, 2015 10:12 PM

Creators Syndicate

Will Government Issue Permission Slips For Sex?

Sex is not a civil right. In the name of civil rights the Department of Education with vigorous support from Harvard's Faustian administration, appears to work toward eliminating sex on campus, by students, faculty and staff. Is the goal returning Harvard to its Puritan roots?

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/4/23/ocr-solicits-student-input/

Civil Rights Office Interviews Students for Title IX Probe
By NOAH J. DELWICHE and IVAN B. K. LEVINGSTON

Harvard CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
April 23, 2015

Wild Pigs A Parable; Plus Poverty, A Film

TRAPPED - Feral hogs captured in a corral trap. 

(Image courtesy Billy Higgenbotham, Texas AgriLife Extension Service, bugwood.org.)
Wild Pigs - A Reminder For All

A thought to remember, Marx said, "Remove one freedom per generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one would have noticed."

There was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class.

One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter.

The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist regime.

In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question.

He asked: "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said that it was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free food.

"When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

"They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.

"The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tax exemptions, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare entitlements, medicine, drugs, etc., while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.

One should always remember two truths:

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and you can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

* * *

http://video.pbs.org/video/2296684923/

Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream
Broadcast 11/12/2012
54 minutes

Expires: 11/05/2019

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) presents his take on the gap between rich and poor Americans in Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream. Gibney contends that America's richest citizens have "rigged the game in their favor," and created unprecedented inequality in the United States.

Republicans Win Election, Lose Their Spines

US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

[From article]
Poll after poll showed Americans ranking illegal immigration as the No. 1 most important problem facing the nation. We haven’t changed our minds. Last week, an Associated Press-Gfk poll showed that Obama’s single most unpopular policy is his position on illegal immigration.
In other words, Obamacare is more popular than amnesty. That’s like losing a popularity contest to Ted Bundy.
[. . .]
McConnell’s spokesman at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Brad Dayspring, predicted that Obama’s amnesty threat would drive voters to “elect a new Senate (that) will stand up to the president.”
Check! Mission accomplished! Done and done! Officially off our bucket list. OK, guys, your turn. When do you start standing up to the president? Hello? Hell-oooo?
[. . .]
Why don’t Republicans attack the media? People hate the media! Their power is eroding — and it would erode a lot faster if Congress would challenge them. Instead of submitting to the media’s blackmail, my suggestion is, take their gun away.
Tell voters what the media won’t: that Obama’s “amnesty” will give illegal aliens Social Security cards and three years of back-payments through the Earned Income Tax Credit, even though they never paid taxes in the first place.
[. . .]
Why don’t Republicans spend all their airtime attacking the media for lying about what Obama’s amnesty does and what the Democrats are doing? It’s hard to avoid concluding that Republicans aren’t trying to make the right arguments. In fact, it kind of looks like they’re intentionally throwing the fight on amnesty.
If a Republican majority in both houses of Congress can’t stop Obama from issuing illegal immigrants Social Security cards and years of back welfare payments, there is no reason to vote Republican ever again.
http://humanevents.com/2015/02/18/gop-double-crossing-traitors/?utm_source=coulterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

GOP double-crossing traitors

Ann Coulter

Wednesday Feb 18, 2015 10:49 PM

NBA Team Too White?

http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/nba-team-suddenly-not-black-enough/

NBA TEAM SUDDENLY 'NOT BLACK ENOUGH'
'How did we get a roster that resembles the 1955 Lakers?'
Joe Kovacs
October 31, 2012

Golf Rule Changes


Obama's Golf Czar has announced there is a possibility of MAJOR rule
changes to the game of golf, this may occur sometime after March 1, 2010.
This is only a preview as the complete rule book is being rewritten now.
Here are a few basic changes:

Golfers with handicaps:
- below 10 will have their green fees increased by 35%.
- between 11 and 18 will see no increase in green fees.
- above 18 will get a check each time they play.

The dollar amount placed in bets will be as follows-for handicaps below 10, an additional $10.
-between 11 and 18, no additional amount.-above 18, you will receive the total amount in the pot even if you
do not play.

The term "gimme" will be changed to "entitlement" and will be used as follows:
-handicaps below 10, no entitlements.-handicaps from 11 to 17, entitlements for putter length putts.
-handicaps above 18, if your ball is on green, no need to putt, just pick it up.

These entitlements are intended to bring about fairness and, most importantly, equality in scoring.
In addition, a Player will be limited to a maximum of one birdie or six
pars in any given round. Any excess must be given to those fellow players
who have not yet scored a birdie or par. Only after all players have
received a birdie or par from the player actually making the birdie or par,
can that player begin to count his pars and birdies again.

The current USGA handicap system will be used for the above purposes
but the term 'net score' will be available only for scoring those players with
handicaps of 18 and above.

This is intended to 'redistribute' the success of winning by making
sure that in every competition, the above 18 handicap players will
post only 'net score' against every other player's gross score.
These new Rules are intended to CHANGE the game of golf..


Golf must be about Fairness. It should have nothing to do with Ability.