• Pragerisms

    For a more comprehensive list of Pragerisms visit
    Dennis Prager Wisdom.

    • "The left is far more interested in gaining power than in creating wealth."
    • "Without wisdom, goodness is worthless."
    • "I prefer clarity to agreement."
    • "First tell the truth, then state your opinion."
    • "Being on the Left means never having to say you're sorry."
    • "If you don't fight evil, you fight gobal warming."
    • "There are things that are so dumb, you have to learn them."
  • Liberalism’s Seven Deadly Sins

    • Sexism
    • Intolerance
    • Xenophobia
    • Racism
    • Islamophobia
    • Bigotry
    • Homophobia

    A liberal need only accuse you of one of the above in order to end all discussion and excuse himself from further elucidation of his position.

  • Glenn’s Reading List for Die-Hard Pragerites

    • Bolton, John - Surrender is not an Option
    • Bruce, Tammy - The Thought Police; The New American Revolution; The Death of Right and Wrong
    • Charen, Mona - DoGooders:How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help
    • Coulter, Ann - If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans; Slander
    • Dalrymple, Theodore - In Praise of Prejudice; Our Culture, What's Left of It
    • Doyle, William - Inside the Oval Office
    • Elder, Larry - Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card--and Lose
    • Frankl, Victor - Man's Search for Meaning
    • Flynn, Daniel - Intellectual Morons
    • Fund, John - Stealing Elections
    • Friedman, George - America's Secret War
    • Goldberg, Bernard - Bias; Arrogance
    • Goldberg, Jonah - Liberal Fascism
    • Herson, James - Tales from the Left Coast
    • Horowitz, David - Left Illusions; The Professors
    • Klein, Edward - The Truth about Hillary
    • Mnookin, Seth - Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media
    • Morris, Dick - Because He Could; Rewriting History
    • O'Beirne, Kate - Women Who Make the World Worse
    • Olson, Barbara - The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
    • O'Neill, John - Unfit For Command
    • Piereson, James - Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
    • Prager, Dennis - Think A Second Time
    • Sharansky, Natan - The Case for Democracy
    • Stein, Ben - Can America Survive? The Rage of the Left, the Truth, and What to Do About It
    • Steyn, Mark - America Alone
    • Stephanopolous, George - All Too Human
    • Thomas, Clarence - My Grandfather's Son
    • Timmerman, Kenneth - Shadow Warriors
    • Williams, Juan - Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It
    • Wright, Lawrence - The Looming Tower

I Think The Congressmen Are Lying About the Spitting and Slurs

That is what I believe, and I’ll tell you why!

Blacks have used the race card nearly all of my adult life.  I believe these Congressmen are lying.  Lying is a great part of the male lingo in this inner city minority community.  Truth doesn’t matter.  What matters is what one wants to believe, not what is.  I have more to comment on after the article.

Kerry Picket of the Washington Star wrote this blog article:

“Congressional Black Caucus member, Andre Carson, Indiana Democrat, claims that tea party protesters today hurled racial slurs at fellow CBC member Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia. Mr. Carson said that “hundreds of people” were chanting “kill the bill” and he heard “at least 15 times” the “n – word” being thrown around.

“It just happened on the way to votes. Coming out of [Cannon Building]…John Lewis’ chief of staff came with us. It was just the three of us walking down the steps. ‘Kill the bill, Kill the bill…n-word,’ fifteen times,” he said. “Capitol Police finally became aware and began protecting us.”

A U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman said she was unaware of any law enforcement inquiry into the incidents.

Missouri Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, a black congressman from Missouri, claimed he was spat on by a protester. Mr. Cleaver’s office reportedly said Capitol Hill Police arrested the protester, but his office did not press charges. However, Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the U.S. Capitol Police said in an e-mail to the L.A. Times: “We did not make any arrests today.” “

I don’t believe for a moment that these people were either spat on or cursed.  The question arises, “Are these folks who cook up stories?”

Yes……….because to curse, to shout threateningly, to spit is long been accepted in these minority communities  when they go on their rampages whether the reason is rational or simply mob rule.    In my high school teaching years, black ruffians would throw stones at our bus after a football game or two at their grounds.   I was a regular chaperone to such events including at our school’s  home events.  There never ever, ever was a demonstration or even an individual misbehaving at our home sports events in northeast Minneapolis…black or white.   However, go visiting over at North Senior High School, one expected trouble, including stones thrown, spitting, obscenities, including once when the entire bus was attacked with rocks and windows broken and a couple girls injured.

It was, and sometimes is still commonplace for gangs or merely groups interested in action in these communities to attack police when the police themselves might be  called to quell a distrubance within the minority neighborhood….a time when one could get at Whitey!

In the black community so often its the community  against any white….any white at all, including the blacks  who are actually the police  officers.  They work “whitey”. 

The key, here is, it is assumed that whites behave exactly the same way in white neighborhoods.  They don’t behave any different from anywhere else. 

In Minneapolis, where and when I taught, that simply was not the case.  I don’t think it is today, either.

When I was transferred to a predominantly black senior high school in Minnepolis in 1972, the school was out of control.  The black led administration tried very hard to provide some kind of order, but lying, cheating, beatings, extortions all by minority students were weekly affairs.   The attackers were always blacks, every time, every single attack.  The victims were split racially about fifty/fifty.   The administration played many games of lets pretend……”Oh, this really wasn’t meant to be a robbery, now was it?”……a lie……..”Oh, he didn’t mean to steal your wallet, now did he?”……he wound up with the wallet in his pocket, so what?……Bricks were thrown into a classroom mostly of white students …thrown so hard one broke in half when it hit a radiator……”Let’s not report this.  You should have locked your doors during class time anyway.”

Yes, that is nearly 40 years ago.   Show me where cultural, ethical, moral, civil behavior has improved in the inner city’s teenage life since then.   A lot more are murdered these days  than back then.

By giving these examples to show telling the truth in the black community is common.   Conning becomes a useful skill.   The kids were taught to have great pride, whether they had earned it or not. 

A girl threw a knife at another girl who had been sleeping with her man the night before.  I had good control over my class, but that happened so quickly…in my classroom just before the bell had rung to start things going.  The girl missed….but it made quite a noise when it hit the blackboard.  When things calmed down….consider the choice of words the two girls expressed in the exchange of ideas that followed….as the rest of the class, racially even in number, tried to pretend nothing really had happened.  They were used to pretending.

I suggested to the class that in my twelve years of teaching in predominantly white schools,  I had never been even sworn at, never had heard a curse word uttered in my classroom, nor had any student ever been accosted in the halls….and I listed a few other offenses…robberies….white girls didn’t dare bring their wallets to school….and one half of the students in the classroom had been accosted, one beaten so much she had her front two teeth knocked out.  I assured them such behavior simply wasn’t part of school where I had previously taught.

“I have taught in two schools here in the city.  There is more crime and disorder occuring in one Monday through Friday time period than in all those twelve years of teaching.”   I told the truth.

The black kids wouldn’t believe me.  I was white, therefore I was lying……That is what the majority of these kids are told from before they enter kindergarten.    These kids believed that white schools were just as disgusting in their chaos and disorder as black schools only “Whites never report about it in the newspapers.”    

I do not believe these black Congressmen were assaulted in any way whatsoever.   I’d bet they had never experienced  a white political protest before.  These people, age 55, 65, 70 were expected to slur and spit.   A group or two of our Prager members, conservative church going folks from Minnesota, attended the Tea Party gathering in Washington, D.C. earlier last summer.  This is an older crowd…..they would not have been pleased to see such ugly behavior.  Also pictures are available and not one indicates anything but the chanting, “Kill the Bill!”

The group was expected to behave like those in the big city.  Ugliness  wouldn’t have been allowed by the group itself. 

Some of the  Congressmen have been offered ten thousand dollars to be given to their favorite charity if they would take a lie detector test about their claims.

And the American Jewish Left Still Loves Obama?

The following article was written by Paul Mirengoff at Powerline…..

“Only 9 percent of Israeli Jews believe that President Obama is pro-Israel, according to a poll taken by Smith Research on behalf of the Jerusalem Post. 48 percent said that the Obama favors the Palestinian side, while 30 percent said his administration is neutral. The remaining 13 percent expressed no opinion.

The 9 percent number is up from 4 percent last August, but the difference is only slighly outside the margin of error. Moreover, the poll was taken before Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chily reception at the White House on Sunday.

President Bush was considered pro-Israel by 88 percent of Israeli Jews, with only 2 percent believing he was pro-Palestinian. And in May of last year, on the eve of the first White House meeting between Netanyahu and Obama, 31 percent labeled Obama pro-Israel, with only 14 deeming him pro-Palestinian.

Obama needs numbers like he had last May, or better, if he is to influence Israeli public opinion in a way that helps achieve his goals. I take those goals to be (1) causing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians and (2) causing the downfall of the Netanyahu government. Stated differently, Netanyahu is in a good position to tell Obama what he can do with his demands, though he is best advised to do so circumspectly.

The Jersusalem Post’s poll may, at first, seem inconsistent with the results of a Dialog poll published last week in Haaretz. Both the English and Hebrew editions of Haaretz led with the headline: “Poll: Most Israelis see Obama as fair, friendly toward Israel” and the Englishe edition claimed that 69 percent of those polled said Obama is “fair and friendly.”

However, as the Jerusalem Post notes, in reality only 18 percent of respondents considered Obama “friendly” toward Israel. An additional 51 percent agreed to a description of Obama’s approach to Israel as “inyani.” According to the Post this word can be translated as matter-of-fact or businesslike but not as fair. And Haaretz’s pollster, Tel Aviv University Prof. Camil Fuchs, called the way the results of the poll were presented by that paper “misleading.”

Thus, the Haaretz poll actually confirms that Obama lacks the standing with Israeli Jews that he likely needs seriously to influence Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. As important, he lacks the standing he likely needs to convince the Israeli public that the U.S. takes the threat Iran poses to Israel seriously enough.”

Comment:  I confess that at this moment, I feel there are three groups in contemporary American culture which lie at the bottom, the very bottom of human expression, the bottom where the crud of life collects……the dishonorable, untrustworthy, hating, bigotted, arrogant, obnoxious, loud,  insensitive, those totally unable to conduct human conversation…..the racist blacks, the political gay and lesbian, and the leftwing, atheistic, anti-Israeli leftwing Jew.  

I admit, I believe them all to be traitors to human honor and decency.  Truth almost never rises from  their mouths, and then only when convenient.    None of them seem  even vaguely interested in anything but themselves and their self importance……and none of them seem to have a clue to who they really are……for they all support “Human Rights”  ferociously.

Not long ago I attended an AIPAC gathering here in the Twin Cities.   Standing before this large group dediacated to the survival of democratic Israel, was Al Franken, heir presumptive to the  Minnesota United States Senate seat.  

Al was in humble position and tone, with head in a rather drooping,  sorrowful pose,  speaking religiously, softly, gently, piously, calling on God to protect the state of Israel.  

It seemed others paid attention to Al as closely as I did…….and there appeared to be great shifting of human body weight….wigglings in the chairs…..various displays of   discomfort and, as I looked around, quite a number of reddening faces.     But the embarrassment passed and the Senator to be, received a tumultuous applause anyway…….but not from me.

I feel the same way about Barack H. Obama, an Al Franken with a mission. 

There are just some people who have no awareness and therefore no concern that they are pathologically unable to speak or recognize  truths.   Words are spoken with the expressed purpose to hide or twist  truth…..That is the skill that counts.  It is done primarily to avoid any chance for civil discussion.  One might discover how limited in knowledge these “disingenuous” really are.

 That is the disease which has paralyzed nearly all of the Democrats presently in Congress…..as well as some Republicans until Allen Specter left the Party.  He took nearly all of the Party’s lying skills with him.

Racist blacks enjoy playing the race card… It has worked well for them for years.  Yesterday a couple D.C. solons  claimed they were spat on by a Tea Party crowd.  Both seem to be blatant lies, for cameras were running continuously and rewards were offered to anyone who was witness to this despicable act.   No one has come forth.

And then the minority Congressmen were offered  a ten thousand dollar gift to be given to the charity of their choice, if they would agree to take a lie detector test. 

Only in America……it still is such an exciting place to live, work, and study the weird ways of humanity.  I wonder how long this will last.   Marxist societies are remarkably boring.    After all, what can be expected from drones?

I wonder if anyone has surveyed Israelis to find out what percentage of American Jews they believe are anti-Israel?

I wonder what Noam Chomsky really feels about America, he has made so much money abroad berating it……..but he probably lies to himself as well.

Netanyahu: Rally The American People To Help Israel Build Your Jerusalem Apartments!

The following piece is from an article at Powerline, by Paul Mirengoff:

“Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited the White House. The details of the meeting have been slow to come out, but we are now learning what transpired. The Telegraph reports that Obama opened the meeting by presenting a list of 13 demands to Netanyahu. One was a complete freeze on Jewish building in eastern Jerusalem.

When Netanyahu did not immediately agree to the demands, Obama went to eat dinner. In one account he told Netanyahu to consider “the error of his ways.” In another he said, “I’m still around. Let me know if there is anything new.”

Obama reportedly returned after an hour to repeat his demands. Because Netanyahu still did not agree, there was no joint statement or normal press coverage.

One Israeli newspaper summarized the encounter this way:

There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage. Bibi received in the White House the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea.

But Obama would never treat the president of Equatorial Guinea that way.”

Comment:    Prime Minister Netanyahu;  To Hell with this unAmerican undemocratic disingenuous president.  Rally the American people to help your democratic Israel  build your Jerusalem apartments!

Sean Penn: “Any Journalist Who Calls Chavez a Dictator Should Be Put in Jail!”

Two of the ugliest men in public “entertainment” , Bill Maher and Sean Penn chatted recently about the glories of Hugo Chavez, dictator of Venezuela.

The description, “dictator of Venezuela”, is enough to put me in jail, according to the Hollywood celebrity, Sean Penn.  Judge Sean did not announce the length of my sentence, he simply belched, “Any journalist who calls Chavez a dictator should be put in jail.”

But, then I could claim, I am just a blogger sharing my observations and knowledge.   Somehow, being the  Lefty ideologue Penn  is, I don’t think that line would save me.

Both Maher and Penn are prime examples of the fixed bodies of the American Jewish Leftwing.  There is a great army of them including Howard Zinn who recently left the living, and Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz, and Paul Krugman of the New York Times.

I know little  about Maher, except for his  consistently magnificently obnoxious “entertaining” self.  I usually do not find the smell of rotting garbage entertaining, but, out of duty to see what the obnoxious Left  is up to, I feel it imperative to give his performance  on television a glance. 

I don’t last long, for almost immediately I realize I have to clean up.  I need  a shower. 

Such Maher smells are quite new to American television.  Folks used to watch “I Love Lucy” and “Happy Days” and “Mary Tyler Moore”.  And before that there was Bob Hope and Jack Benny.  It used to be fun watching American television.

The Sean Penns have been around for some time, however.  Poor Sean was born with hate in his blood, possibly  inherited  from his dad.   

Dad Penn was Leo Penn, also a kind of entertainer, but not as gifted as a professional actor, and disgruntled, so disgruntled he championed Soviet communism and bragged about it.

Dad Leo Penn fell in love with Stalin’s  communism in the late 1930s.  When Stalin allied the good old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics empire to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1939 and invade Poland that September, Dad Leo cheered  Adolph’s glorious Germany……(I wonder if he, if interviewed then, would have wished  ” Any journalist who calls Hitler a dictator  should be put in jail!)

To the good, Leo Penn did serve his country……or perhaps, he served, in his view, the Soviet Union, by becoming a bomber pilot during the second World War……..for America, by the way.

Leo Penn was so hateful of his native land he became active in the Communist Party.   He became “blacklisted” as the Hollywood left likes to advertise during the McCarthy era by the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee.   The Hollywood Left would like Americans to believe the Leo Penns of that day were innocent babes in the woods gobbled up by the vicious wolves of the vast  American right wing police state. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990′s and the files of the Soviet Secret Police were opened for public review, the Communist infiltration in Hollywood was exposed.  Stalin had been funding writers, directors, and actors to advertise the glories of Marxist ideals and accentuate the failures of Western life in their professional work…….exonerating Senator McCarthy in this particular chapter of his anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s.

Readers should remember that the international communist movement of the Leo Penn era was funded by Stalin’s Soviet empire.    The Soviets didn’t hide from the purpose of this funding:  to destroy the United States by any means possible…… in those days, that ideally meant violent revolution including the slaughter of the upper classes.  A quiet collapse of the nation economically and culturally would do, however less heroic it would be for the Soviet glory story.

The Cold War existed, not as described by so many Marxists, feminists, black racists, and the sex fanatics teaching at our American young at our  colleges and universities down the street. 

America was under attack. ……attempting to defend its way of life from the  Marxist  police state of mass murder and goverment run terror, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The battle against Marxism continues to this day.   We aren’t winning it, fellow Americans.

In this morning’s newspaper I see the headline, “Venezuela Arrests TV Executive Critical of Chavez”.   Hugo Chavez must have listened to his fellow Marxist, Sean Penn’s advice.

Venezuela used to be a thriving democracy……..Do any of you remember that?

Hugo Chavez has ruined his country.    Like Barack Hussein Obama, he was elected by the Venezuelan voters.   Like this American president , Hugo Chavez  promised to bring “Change” to his country.   Woe to us all.

Democrats “Gamed” Congressional Budget Office Report on Obamacare Cost: Dollar Is in Trouble

Yet more rot and stench permeate  the air surrounding anyone connected with Barack Hussein Obama.  The Congressional Budget Office is supposed to be a non-political office devoted to give the most honest estimates of the costs of pending legislation based on the information brought forth for examination.  The information was cooked to con the American people to believe Obamacare was a sound economic investment.   Lies, lies, and more lies describe the disingenuous, more disingenouos and most disingenuous president in American history.

Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner reports the following:

“Not many people noticed amid the Democrats’ struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks U.S. Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world’s safest investment.

The numbers are pretty clear. In February, Bloomberg News reports, Berkshire Hathaway sold two-year bonds with an interest rate lower than that on two-year Treasuries. A company run by a 79-year-old investor is a better credit risk, the markets are telling us, than the U.S. government.

Buffett’s firm isn’t the only one. Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s have been borrowing money at cheaper rates than Uncle Sam.

Democrats wary of voting for the health care bill may have been soothed by the Congressional Budget Office’s report that it would reduce federal deficits over the next 10 years. But bond buyers know that the Democrats gamed the CBO system to get a good score.

The realities, as former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin pointed out in The New York Times, are different. The real cost is disguised by the fact that the bill includes 10 years of revenue but only six years of spending. It includes $70 billion in premiums for long-term care that will have to be paid out later. It excludes $114 billion in discretionary spending needed to run the program. It includes nearly half a trillion dollars in unrealistic Medicare savings.

Holtz-Eakins’s bottom line: The bill will not lower deficits, but will raise them by $562 billion over 10 years. Treasury will have to borrow that money — and probably pay much higher interest than it’s paying now.

Moreover, once the bill is fully in effect, the Cato Institute’s Alan Reynolds points out, its expenses are likely to grow at least 7 percent a year — significantly faster than revenues. At that rate, spending doubles every 10 years.

No wonder that Moody’s declared last week that the Treasury is “substantially” closer to losing its AAA bond rating.

It’s not only the federal government that is heading toward insolvency. State governments will have to spend more under the health care bill — $735 million in Tennessee alone, according to Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen.

And state governments are already facing a huge problem called pensions. The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that state government pensions are underfunded by $450 billion. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Andrew Biggs argues in The Wall Street Journal that the real figure is over $3 trillion.

The reason: State governments set aside cash to invest in pensions, but they typically assume that their investments will rise 8 percent a year indefinitely. They haven’t been getting such high returns and are not likely to do so in the future. But they are under legal obligations, which courts won’t allow them to escape, to pay the pensions. Retirees get paid off before bondholders, which means that states are going to have to pay more interest when they borrow.

Back in the 1990s, Clinton adviser James Carville said that if he was reincarnated he would like to come back as the bond market — “because you can intimidate everybody.” Governments, like all organizations, need to borrow routinely. But investors won’t lend unless they think they will be paid back. And they will demand higher interest rates as their loans become riskier.

On Sunday, 219 House Democrats, soothed by their leaders’ gaming of the CBO scoring process, voted in reckless disregard of what the bond market has been telling them. Some may share Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s optimism that the government’s looming fiscal disaster can be avoided by imposing a value-added tax — in effect, a national sales tax.

But, as we know from the experience of high-tax Western Europe and relatively low-tax America over the last three decades, higher taxes tend to retard economic growth. Lower economic growth means less revenue for government than in CBO projections. Less revenue means more borrowing — and at some point lenders are going to call a halt.

Barack Obama’s project of transforming the United States into something like Western Europe is, according to the CBO, raising the national debt burden on the economy to World War II levels. I see train wrecks ahead — as the bond market forces huge spending cuts or tax increases first on states and then on the federal government. It will make what happened in the House Sunday look pretty.”

Fraud in Obamacare Exposed: Charles Krauthammer Predicts National Sales Tax to Pay for Obamacare Entitlement

Obama gamed the dollars he bragged about to pay for Obamacare.  He lied.   Are you surprised?  The dollars aren’t there.    According to Charles Krauthammer there is no way this entitlement debt can be paid for unless a vast new National Sales Tax is loaded onto the backs of the American tax payer.   Know the real Obama America elected president on November 4, 2008!

The following article is from realclearpolitics:

“We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare’s $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health care costs.

Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, “health care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost.” But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody’s is warning that the Treasury’s AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.

Hence his deficit reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.

What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.

But this won’t be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health care costs — which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.

That’s where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude — if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).

It’s the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.

American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.

Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes — then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.

As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.

Ultimately, even that won’t be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health care rationing.

It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.”

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