About Me

Name: Juliana Johnson
Loading...

Create Your Own Blog Find Other Townhall Blogs

Comments

Archives

Search

Blog Roll

 

People Who Play By The Rules Party

Posted by Juliana Johnson on Monday, October 27, 2008 11:41:19 AM
During this Presidential cycle, America has truly become the land of short term memory.

Both political parties embrace socialism as if the ravages of that failed ideology were never visited upon the 20th Century.

On the campus of the University of Chicago, the legacy of Milton Friedman is protested while the presence of Bill Ayers across town at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) is heralded.

Against this backdrop, I am proposing the creation of a new party. Not a party for "working families" or the "middle class", two categories stretched beyond recognition and rendered meaningless by overuse.

I want to be explicit. All successful political parties define their constituencies and defend them. So today I am launching the People Who Play By The Rules Party.

In this country, one has to accomplish three things to virtually guarantee never living in poverty: get a high school diploma; get married after the age of 20; and get married before having a child. The People Who Play the Rules Party is their party.

When you hear that 1 in 9 home mortgages are in foreclosure, the political-media establishment complex pay attention to the 1 in foreclosure and treat the other 8 as if they exist only as a source of spare parts to salvage the 1. The People Who Play By The Rules Party is for the 88% of American homeowners who, without fanfare, budgeted for the home they bought.

The People Who Play By The Rules Party is for the top 40% of income earners in this country--which gets all the way down to $55,000 per year--who pay 99.4% of all federal incomes taxes in the name of "fairness".

The People Who Play By The Rules Party is for the 99.7% of U.S. employers with fewer than 500 employees, the small businesses that don't have lobbyists and that don't get bailed out by their Wall Street friends in government when they make bad strategic decisions. All that these employers do, the true entrepreneurial sector, is create jobs and create wealth.

The People Who Play By The Rules Party is also a compassionate party, a party that recognizes America to be a place of second chances and that desires to help those who veered off course get back on track. What we are not, however, is Party that believes in the woozy, bipartisan la-la land of socializing the consequences of individual, private choices.

If you fit this description, please stand up and be counted. For if the People Who Play By The Rules that made this country great do not, there are those who seek to institute new rules to re-make this country into something it is not and should never be.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Joe Plumbers of the World Unite

Posted by Juliana Johnson on Thursday, October 16, 2008 11:27:48 AM
It wasn't exactly a Red Dawn moment but it is as close as John McCain has come to date.

McCain finally put the face paint on and sounded the alarm for America's productive, play-by-the-rules class that Barack Obama and his spread-the-wealth, leftist guerillas are advancing.

McCain's Manifesto in Wednesday night's final Presidential debate: Joe the Plumbers of the World Unite!

McCain capitalized on Comrade Obama's unintentional moment of candor earlier in the week wherein he told Joe the Plumber from Holland, Ohio, an aspiring small business owner, that the Obama plan is to "spread the wealth". In so doing, McCain for the first time framed the choice Americans have in this race between his pro-growth tax policies and Obama's virulent brand of wealth redistribution for its own sake.

Watching Obama sell the need for so-called fairness in our tax system, I was reminded of the infomercial hucksters hawking no money down real estate schemes.

Fairness is the problem when the top 5% of income earners in America pay 60% of the total federal incomes taxes collected and the bottom 35% pay no federal incomes tax at all?

In the name of fairness we should inhibit capital formation by increasing the capital gains tax; we should close markets to American goods by discarding free trade agreements; and we should prevent would-be small business owners like Joe the Plumber from ever getting there by imposing additional tax burdens on businesses that already pay the second highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

McCain effectively stripped away Obama's flowery, Platonic rhetoric and exposed the component parts of the grand Fairness Regime that Senator Government (a well-timed Freudian slip by McCain) seeks to inflict upon our nation.

If McCain ruthlessly prosecutes the fault lines he exposed last evening and defiantly stands up for job-creators and risk-takers, then McCain, and America for that matter, will indeed have been mistakenly written off once again.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Paying cash for grades cheats education

Posted by Juliana Johnson on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 5:25:46 PM
William Butler Yeats once wrote, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

The city education establishments in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., beg to differ. The leaders of these abysmally performing systems believe education is indeed the filling of a pail - with money. For a change, their latest gambit is not aimed at funneling taxpayer dollars into bureaucracies but rather raising private funds to pay students for good grades.

Chicago Public Schools became the latest to adopt the "Green for Grade$" test program whereby a control group of 5,000 freshmen at 20 high schools will get graduated cash payments for academic performance: $50 for an A; $35 for a B; and $20 for a C.

CPS Superintendent Arne Duncan told the Chicago Tribune, "I'm always trying to level the playing field. This is the kind of incentive middle-class families have had for decades."

Duncan, like others in charge of government monopolies, is defiantly unbounded by his own hypocrisy. For it is Mr. Duncan and his friends running the teacher's unions that oppose pay-for-performance reforms such as merit pay for teachers who produce results in the classroom.

Speaking of the incentivized middle class, a more reflective person might contemplate why middle-class families, who make up a significant portion of the 3 million people living in Chicago, have abandoned CPS as Duncan correctly implies.

A system from which only six in 100 students will go on to earn a bachelor's degree by the age of 25 is a system that parents who have the ability to flee will flee.

Some critics of the "Green for Grade$" program have said such payments for grades are getting students to do the right things for the wrong reasons and will fail to cultivate a real interest in learning. Others have been more pointed, saying the payments amount to bribes.

The fundamental problem with cash-for-grades programs is that they are yet another bailing-out-the-Titanic-with-a-teaspoon approach to education reform.

As these programs gain traction in our nation's worst-performing school systems, we must recognize them for the misdirection plays that they are and not allow ourselves to be taken on a tangent that moves us away from a discussion of long-term, systemic school reform.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

McCain's Debate Hurdle #2

Posted by Juliana Johnson on Monday, October 06, 2008 11:23:43 AM
On Thursday night, Governor Sarah Palin cleared the credibility hurdle she faced in the estimation of swing voters, even earning some begrudging kudos from Democrats.

On Tuesday night, it's John McCain's turn to do the same.

The Teddy Roosevelt-style populist rhetoric about earmarks and Wall Street greed is an okay warm-up act, but McCain needs a show-stopper.

McCain should speak to Obama in that same father-to-son fashion as to how the world works when it comes to pocketbook issues like he did as to foreign policy in the first debate.

Here's what McCain should say:
Barack Obama wants to make this campaign about Wall Street versus Main Street.

Senator Obama clearly needs directions.

Because this campaign is about K Street versus Pennsylvania Avenue. It's about the lobbyists who've corrupted politicians and compromised our politics. And it's about the need for a President to stand up to those who seek to game the system for personal gain.

Senator Obama says our current financial difficulties result from the failed Bush-McCain economic philosophy. First, Senator Obama, I take great umbrage at the insinuation that I am not my own person. If you think I take my cues from George W. Bush or anyone else, then you are neither familiar with my public record nor my personal sacrifice. And if you care to make such an assertion, Senator, then please be man enough to do it straight away and to my face.

Second, what Senator Obama terms a failed philosophy is nothing more than a common-sense belief that Americans should keep more of what they earn because families make better decisions on how best to spend their earnings than does the political class in Washington.

And what of Senator Obama's economic philosophy?

It is Senator Obama who initially proposed doubling the capital gains tax and has now scaled that back to a 33% increase in that tax. That would be devastating to our economy. At the core of our financial problems is the credit crunch. Senator Obama's tax hike would further restrict credit and inhibit capital formation. This is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing. Senator Obama clearly realizes this since he diminished the magnitude of his own tax increase proposal but still insists upon a massive hike. So who is the ideologue?

Senator Obama decries deregulation but it is Obama's team of economic advisors formerly at the helm of Fannie Mae--Franklin Raines, Tim Howard, and Jim Johnson--who engaged in the reckless lending policies, encouraged by President Clinton at the time, that extended loans to subprime borrowers. (Here McCain could hold up the Sept. 20, 1999 New York Times article entitled, "Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending" that outlines this policy change in detail).

And since Senator Obama has such newfound concern for windfall profits, perhaps he can start with his campaign's economic advisors, the three of whom parachuted out of the Fannie Mae death spiral with close to $300 million before the corporate jet crashed on the roofs of Main Street homeowners.

Senator Obama carries on about job creation but advocates job-killing protectionism and an antagonistic posture towards our trading partners. He wants to renegotiate trade agreements that will inevitably close markets to American goods.

Senator Obama is selling you a bill of goods, America.

He casts himself as a reformer and yet springs from the bosom of political corruption and machine politics, against which he did nothing.

Senator Obama speaks of his fondness for the middle class and yet cannot contain his contempt for middle America when he is at a San Francisco fundraiser or when he is confronted by the strong, conservative female Governor running with me.

I know there is anxiety. I know there is fear because I understand that things are difficult financially for millions of American families. But don't let yourself be ruled by that fear or by the contrived class envy rhetoric that the radical left wing has been trying to sell you since the 1960s. For all his talk of change, Senator Obama is intent on pursuing the very same policies with the very same people that got us into this mess.

We will turn our economy around by pursuing common-sense policies that ease our tax burdens, restrain government spending, incentivize savings and investment, and encourage small business growth.

These will be the first principles of a McCain presidency. This is the way back for America.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive
« Previous1Next »