JESUS IS THE WAY!

Don't even have cable seems like years now been bombarded with ads warning of the doing away of rabbit years (analog) and switching to the DTV format.

  Is the government going to be your friend, and buy you that converter?  What a burden the government has that I need that DVT.  I could have been on Gilligan’s Island stuck out in the middle of the ocean and not known of this deal.  Why are they selling so many of these free converter boxes on garage sales and eBay?  Are people selling this thing they get free from the government?

Government is worried that you don’t have digital TV

Like my Christian brethren should be worried about friends and family

I know we’re an odd ball, because we don’t have cable

Please give us a right not to take part in mediocrity

To watch that American Idol all the summer day

But if we had a burden, for our Christian brethren

Every time I hear them advertising, the many times about that stupid Digital Box I must go a buying

I find a strange urge to hurl on my own TV

To the media it’s some great thing

If we don’t have that stupid idiot box is my guessing

To plummet us to their goal

Please my friends watch your soul

Useful idiots are what big brother wants us to be anyway.

I wish cooking was as easy as Rachel Ray makes it look

Every time I try it, I get so messed up

Sure cooking is easy but not as it looks

You may say you must get the job done

If you want to eat that grub

Seen from nasty vids from that Persian state over there

The press is more than prejudice, they seem so unfair

A girl I seen blown away so no apparent reason

Just goes to show you what lurks in mans heart a hidden

Look there America, at totalitarian regime

I’ll tell you don’t want it, it is so obscene

The viciousness of government that is so unchecked

Please help me from my own heart, the evil I don’t want any part

We seen in history, it will play a part in infamy

I am reminded of Hitler that is playing again today

Something the German people want to not replay

You see they wanted to push Jesus down the hill

They call it the hill of the jumping as the gospels tell

As the brown shirts SS troops come a knocking

It’s that Totalitarian with his private policia

Here to wake your nice comfy bed

Now go with him and don’t you dread

Don’t think of the ovens, the contraptions diabolical

Just know there is a God in heaven concerned of our problems

Not as easy a cooking as Rachel Ray

Makes it look on TV and its not A-Okay

I must stop a thinking of dictorian

Les I get traumatic distress syndrome

So I cannot dwell on Iran video

But rather I think of Jesus, prophecies foretold

http://susie1114.com/10percentisgoodenough.html

Biblically speaking, why do taxes exist? The Apostle Paul wrote:

This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes... (Romans 13:7)

So taxes exist to pay the salaries of those who govern.

Yet among us, there are many who feel that the purpose of taxes is primarly to redistribute wealth -- to make the poor richer and make the rich poorer, to level things out. Does the bible support such an idea?

In the Hebrew Bible, the "Old Testament", God institutes a theocracy -- and it's a virtually tax-free society. Instead of taxes, he asks for tithes -- and again, the purpose is not to redistribute wealth, but to (a) support worship, and (b) demonstrate that everything belongs to God by giving him the first and best of everything.

Note that these tithes were "flat." God demanded a tenth. It didn't matter if you were rich or poor, God wanted the exact same proportion. His idea of "fair" apparently rather different than the redistributionists.

Later, when the Israelites want a larger, more powerful and centralized government (they want a king -- more 1Samuel 8), God tells them several things: (1) Their desire for a powerful government comes from a rejection of God. (2) Their government will levy taxes, and God explicitly warns them that this is a bad, not a good thing.

Currently, we have a progressive tax system: the rich pay a far larger percentage than the poor. Under George W. Bush, that "progressive" nature only increased. Yet his critics on the left screamed as though he had made the tax less "progressive" -- not more. The political 'left' claims that having a flat tax system -- where everyone pays the same percentage (after reasonable cost of living deductions) -- would be "unjust" -- it is "just", apparently, to treat the poor more favorably than the rich.

Yet the bible is against this kind of thinking. Neither the poor nor the rich should be favored; instead, everyone should be treated the same.

Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit. (Ex 23:2)

Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. (Lev 19:15)

The bible teaches us it is wrong to reflexively side with "the little guy"; we must have a higher standard of justice than that. Reflexively favoring the poor, the bible teaches, is perverting justice, not administering it.

In the New Testament (John 6) Jesus feeds a group of hungry, poor peasants. Yet the next day, they desire more bread -- they are after all, phenomenonally poor by our standards -- and what does Jesus do?

He refuses to feed them.

Instead, he rebukes them because want they want is a socialist system which guarantees free bread for the poor. In fact, they make his support for such socialism a spiritual test: he is not "prophetic" if they he doesn't feed them and endless supply of manna, as (they claim) Moses did.

Instead, Jesus attempts to get them to stop thinking of the kingdom of God in materialistic terms, and points these people -- these poor, poor peasants -- to a truth he considered much more important:

I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die... he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

So Jesus was apparently not interested in setting up a system which guaranteed free bread to the poor, even though he'd demonstrated he was more than capable of doing so. That kind of materialistic analysis denied the true point of the miracle: Eternal life had come.

In summary, I'd like to point out several things.

First, the biblical purpose of taxes is to pay the wages of those who govern -- not redistribute wealth. If someone wants to argue this is a good idea for secular, practical reasons, go right ahead, but let's be done with this nonsense where so many on the left degrade any conservative Christian as a traitor or perverter of the faith for failing to support socialism and coercive, confiscatory policies targeted at the wealthy.

Second the 'progressive' idea of justice -- that is, reflexively favoring the poor, and looking at a person's wealth or social status before deciding which standard to apply -- is what scripture plainly calls a "perversion" of justice. God abhors "differing weights and measures."

Third, the bible tells us that our desire to look to a strong, centralized government to solve our problems is rooted in a rejection of God's rule and kingdom, not an embrace of it. Certainly, government has a legitimate role to play -- but it is not the giver of our daily bread, nor the solution to every single problem that confronts us. When we think that way, we've made an idol.

I'm not saying everyone who disagrees or supports these policies has ill will. We all make mistakes for the best of reasons. I'm simply and sincerely asking my 'progressive' Christian political opponents to please, please re-think some of their cherished assumptions, and either correct me or reconsider accordingly. 

Between federal, state and local governments in the United States, about 40% of Americans’ income goes to taxes and various statutory fees. And that’s why you’re having so much trouble getting ahead.

By Kevin Hassett

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Last week, just in time for the Halloween season, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel gave American voters a chilling glimpse of what U.S. tax policy will look like if a Democrat wins the White House in 2008.

For those of you wondering what the details of taxing the rich to pay for Democratic spending proposals might look like, Rangel, a close ally of Hillary Clinton, has provided a tour of the abyss. If the ``mother of all reforms,'' as he calls his tax plan, had a name, it would be Mrs. Bates. But, unlike Norman's mother in the Alfred Hitchcock classic ``Psycho,'' this lady is very much alive.

In terms of revenue, Rangel's reform would be the biggest tax increase in history. Compared to a baseline where President George W. Bush's tax cuts are extended and the dreaded alternative minimum tax isn't allowed to swallow millions of taxpayers whole, the bill raises taxes by a whopping $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the office of Representative Jim McCrery of Louisiana, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee.

To put that in perspective, that's about $2 trillion more than the 10-year cost of the Bush tax cuts enacted back in 2001.

But the revenue grab isn't the scariest part. That honor belongs to the increase in marginal tax rates, which is almost unfathomable in its scale. Rangel's main objective is to repeal the alternative minimum tax, which was originally designed to capture taxes from wealthy individuals but over the years has taken in more and more middle-income families.

48% Tax Rate

To accomplish that, and still collect the AMT revenue, he would enact a surtax on the adjusted gross incomes of wealthy taxpayers. If your family's income is above $200,000, then your surtax is 4 percent. If it's above $500,000, it's 4.6 percent.

But the tax increase on the wealthy doesn't stop there. When the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, the top marginal rate goes back to 39.6 percent. In addition, Rangel would restore the phase-out of itemized deductions and personal exemptions that was repealed in Bush's 2001 bill.

Adding it all up, and adjusting for the tax rate on Medicare, the Rangel bill would raise the federal marginal tax rate on incomes above $500,000 to close to 48 percent.

To put that tax rate in perspective, after adjusting for state and local income taxes, it would be about 13 percentage points higher than the average of U.S. trading partners in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And it would give the U.S. the fourth-highest combined top marginal tax rate in the OECD, behind only Denmark, Sweden and France.

Specious Argument

For years, Democrats, led by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, have pedaled the economically ridiculous notion that increasing marginal tax rates would improve the economy. They reason that workers wouldn't adjust their behavior much with the higher rates and that the greater tax revenue would reduce long-term interest rates.

This view has a couple of holes in it. First, ample research by Nobel Prize winner Edward Prescott of Arizona State University and separately by Stephen Davis of the University of Chicago has shown that individuals respond in the expected way to higher tax rates: They work less. That hurts the economy. Second, the link between the higher revenue and interest rates is fairly weak.

Still, Rubin's minions continue to pitch the idea that high marginal rates will deliver prosperity. A sign that you are promoting a falsehood is often that you do so in a manner that has internal logical flaws.

Why Stop There?

One internal inconsistency within this rhetoric has always been that Democrats have only publicly advocated the repeal of the Bush tax cuts. But if what Rubin says is true, then you should be able to really stimulate the economy with an even bigger tax increase.

Why stop at a marginal tax rate of 39.6 percent if tax increases are so wonderful? Why not go back to the 70 percent rate of the 1970s, or even the 91 percent rate of the 1950s?

Rangel's bill reveals that this is exactly what Democrats have in mind for us. It uses smoke and mirrors to get the rate back up close to 50 percent.

There is no question that this tax hike has no chance of taking place while Bush is in office. He would veto the bill, and so would any Republican.

But if Clinton is elected, you can bet that something like it will become law. The Clinton campaign signaled as much last week when it was asked to comment on the plan: ``Senator Clinton and Representative Rangel share the broad goal of progressive tax reform,'' said Phil Singer, a campaign spokesman.

So while most scares will come and go this Halloween season, the Rangel tax proposal will be around, at least until November of 2008.

To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at khassett@aei.org

Last Updated: October 29, 2007 00:14 EDT

Luke 13:3