THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF PROGRESSIVE DOMINATION?

Other signs suggest we shouldn’t start celebrating. The lefts’ demolition of the American social and political order has reached deep into our schools, popular culture, and political policies. There are 66 million Millennials, the worst-educated cohort in American history, steeped in the progressive world-view since kindergarten. The shibboleths, clichés, mythemes, and transparent lies of that world view are second nature to them, signs of intellectual sophistication and class superiority. Their favorite oracles, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube, are morphing into Big Brother censors and manipulators of information on behalf of progressives. And these Millennials are going to be around for a long time, unlike the aging Boomers, among whom are most of the last remnants of the old America.

More ominous, the progressive redistributionist entitlement state and the habits of dependence it fosters are unlikely to be reformed, even as the increasing debt to finance this “kinder, gentler” Leviathan continues to drive us toward bankruptcy. The vast wealth and physical comfort we Americans enjoy fool us into thinking that all these cultural and political pathologies are affordable, nothing to worry about as long as the shelves of Costco are full, the cat videos keep coming on Facebook and YouTube, the new CGI superhero cartoons are showing at the Cineplex, and new Silicon Valley toys continue to be available. We can keep on enjoying our bread and circuses and not think about the Goths and Vandals gathering on the horizon.

So, beginning of the end of the leftist cultural regime, or a transient, doomed resistance? One thing for sure, we have a couple of national elections coming in 2018 and 2020 that will answer that question.

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Oh, SNAP: What They Forget to Say About Food Stamp Cuts

At the end of October, supplemental aid to the federal food stamp program — officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — ran out.

USA Today reported "[v]ulnerable populations will be hardest hit." CNN posted a column by Feeding America's Bob Aiken that warned of the new "strain on millions of families struggling with food insecurity." Currently, there are 47 million Americans receiving SNAP entitlements. There were just over 28 million enrolled in 2008.

What's largely missing from the coverage is why cuts happened in the first place.

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How Obamacare Screws the Working Class…Hard

Obamacare is set to sink into the flesh of the American entitlement system not unlike a bear's claws sink into the flesh of its prey. . .

Here are some of the new taxes you're going to have to pay to pay for Obamacare:

▪ A 3.8% surtax on "investment income"( dividends, interest, rent, capital gains, annuities, house sales, partnerships, etc.) when your adjusted gross income is more than $200,000, $250,000 for joint-filers. What is "investment income?" (WSJ)

▪ A 0.9% surtax on Medicare taxes for those making $200,000 or more, $250,000 joint. (WSJ)

▪ Flexible Spending Account contributions will be capped at $2,500. Currently, there is no tax-related limit on how much you can set aside pre-tax to pay for medical expenses. (ATR.org)

▪ The itemized-deduction hurdle for medical expenses is going up to 10% of adjusted gross income. (ATR.org)

▪ The penalty on non-medical withdrawals from Healthcare Savings Accounts is now 20% instead of 10%. (ATR.org)

▪ A tax of 10% on indoor tanning services. This has been in place for two years, since the summer of 2010. (ATR.org)

▪ A 40% tax on "Cadillac Health Care Plans" starting in 2018.Those whose employers pay for all or most of comprehensive healthcare plans (costing $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for families) will have to pay a 40% tax on the amount their employer pays. (ATR.org)

▪ A "Medicine Cabinet Tax" that eliminates the ability to pay for over-the-counter medicines from a pre-tax Flexible Spending Account. (ATR.org)

▪ A "penalty" tax for those who don't buy health insurance.

▪ A 2.3% excise tax on medical devices costing more than $100. (Breitbart.com)

So those are some of the new taxes you'll be paying that will help pay for Obamacare...

Note that these taxes are both "progressive" (aimed at rich people) and "regressive" (aimed at the middle class and poor people).

COMMUNITY

The left talks about community a great deal, but their vision of community is a giant till where everyone is forced to put their money and their bureaucracy decides how many people get to keep what percent of their money and how many get to keep other people's money. There is none of the individual responsibility that makes a community work, only the obligation to follow orders all the time for the greater good. There is no community, only ranks of addicts waiting to be taken care of.

Addicts In America

Have you ever questioned why Congress does not reduce spending and balance the budget?

The answer will shock you: they can’t!

CBS: MEDICARE BUSTED BY 2017!

Starting New Year's Day 10,000 Will Reach Eligibility for Program Every Day for 19 Years, Risking Its Bankruptcy by 2017

Medicare Bound to Bust as First Boomers Hit 65

THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE YOU WILL READ THIS YEAR

Government is broken and the economy is gasping. The reason is the same: Americans no longer feel free to roll up their sleeves and make the choices needed to fix things. Governors come to office and find that 90% of the budget is pre-committed to entitlements and mandates enacted by politicians long dead. Teachers no longer have authority to maintain order in the classroom.

Legal mandates and entitlements have accumulated, like sediment in the harbor, until it is almost impossible for Americans to get anywhere without trudging through a treacherous legal swamp. Only big businesses, not small entrepreneurs, have the size (and legal staffs) to power through the legal sludge.

Drowning in Law: A flood of statutes, rules and regulations is killing the American spirit

CBO's bad news today

6/30/10:

...Specifically, Elmendorf noted that spending on major mandatory health care programs such as Medicare is on track to double by 2035, up to 10% of GDP from 5% today. That increase is the equivalent of $700 billion this year in additional spending, Elmendorf said.

Add in the less dramatic increase in Social Security spending, and the cost to federal coffers of mandatory entitlement programs will reach 16% of GDP by 2035. That's not very far below what the government has spent on all federal programs and activities on average over the past 40 years...

And later in the article:

The only way to bring the federal budget into better balance would be to sharply reduce U.S. spending, drastically increase taxes to rates never before seen in the United States or some less dramatic combination of the two, Elmendorf said.

Read the whole thing

The boiling of the frog

The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don't make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.

The ObamaCare Writedowns

The Roadmap for America's Future

by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan:

It's a remarkably comprehensive, daring manifesto that tackles every part of the budget on a presidential scale, from Social Security to tax policy to health-care reform...

Obama's new adversary

The Real Cost of Health Care

by Dick McDonald

The cost of keeping me alive for the last ten years has been astronomical. And who has been paying for it - the taxpayers of the United States. I am on Medicare and have run up probably $1 million in hospital and doctor charges of which Medicare paid $300,000 and the healthcare industry ate $700,000. Due to careful planning, I didn’t pay Medicare taxes most of my life. My contribution to the program was negligible.

The bill for my recent Gall Bladder surgery is a window into why (1) insurers make so little profit from covering health, (2) the entire medical industry is dysfunctional financially and (3) the problem is government’s intrusion into the health care industry.

Total charges                                                      $86,999.31

Amount paid by Medicare                                                             13,128.08)

Your Medicare discount                                                             (73,621.23)

Amount you paid                                                                             0.00

Total Amount You Owe                                          $   250.00

This was the charge for a three-day stay. I didn’t get the bill for my 7-way heart bypass surgery in 2002 but I assume it was a dozy too – my share was $200 for that one. I have Stage II diabetes; have had two cataract surgeries and assorted maladies all of which cost me about $10 a visit.

I don’t have to explain why Medicare is loved by the beneficiaries and eventually unsustainable financially. The bill clearly illustrates why seniors want to keep their benefits and many like me are getting benefits they didn’t even partially help cover.

Neither politicians nor the people are addressing how to solve this enormous entitlement problem. A precious few are trying to make the program solvent but only have temporary fixes that merely kick the can down the street to another Congress. There is a way to solve it but it is not on the table – that is privatizing the program which would enable people to afford these high-priced medical costs.

The unfunded cost of entitlements is presently $111 trillion dollars. There is no way to pay off this amount by raising taxes or cutting benefits without serious political consequences. Privatizing the program correctly could deliver the wealth necessary so that every American could afford the best medical care on the planet. It is tragic that the principle that the Founders built our country on – privatizing – should have been so demeaned that it now stands for destroying social programs like Medicare.

If you have the courage to fight the battle to revive our economy and straighten out the big government intrusion, join with us at www.riseupamerica.us to fashion the weapon that will unseat the politicians who refuse to do the right thing and work for the people.

NEWSWEEK: The president needs to tell the truth on taxes, entitlements, and how to really reform health care—before it's too late.

Obama’s Other Deficit

The budget that President Obama released yesterday for fiscal 2011 is one of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history...

If this budget is Mr. Obama's first clear demonstration of his long-term governing priorities, then it's hard not conclude that this spending boom is deliberate...

Rescuing Blacks from the Slavery of Dependency

Dick McDonald Ownership Society Institute

On his program yesterday Fox’s Glen Beck was criticizing Democrats for the debilitating effects of big government dependency on the African American community. One of the all-black panelists put forth the idea that the disintegration of the black family may have been the root cause for the increase in dependency inasmuch as only 20% of black children were born out of wedlock in 1960 whereas today that figure has sky rocketed to 80%.

Glen noted that Bill Cosby had brought this up before but got hammered for it. He asked Brandon Brice (a community organizer and a Republican) for his comment. Brandon opined that Cosby had called for black males to be more responsible - he then made a 360 departure, changed the subject and said the following:

The more important thing when we look at things as Republicans and conservatives and when we talk of the fear of big government we have to remember that big government whether you like it or not - it’s the perceived notion that they are taking care of much of low income America right now especially at this time of depression. Maybe the solution should be a smarter and more responsible government and I believe that if that happens what you will have – you will shift to automatically smaller government because it will be based on principle. Right now much of the low income neighborhoods are dependent on this so you can’t speak against something that is supporting the lower masses whether you like it or not.

The community organizer hit it right on the head. Unfortunately it flew right over Beck’s. Brice opined that a smarter government would use principled legislation which would naturally result in a smaller government. Voila- an economic solution to poverty. That is what our Founders bequeathed to us. If the government were smaller the taxes taken from the people wouldn’t be so great and they could use that extra money to grow the economy and create and compound their own wealth.

Unfortunately instead of pursuing an economic line of reasoning Beck and the panel headed off into a rehash of the “social” effects of dependency. They eventually compared the black community to domesticated dogs who had to rely on their owners because they were never taught how to survive on their own. What a sad analogy – and from an African-American panelist yet.

The panel didn’t pursue how being smarter and more principled could possibly lead to an “economic” solution to poverty and the eradication of this endemic condition in so many parts of the black community. It was just another chance Beck missed to uncover a solution – a wall he butts into almost daily.

To change a cultural dynamic like poverty you have to have a reason for blacks to make a change. So why in the world would the black community presently vote for Republicans when Republicans have nothing to offer but the admonition to be “responsible”? Do Republicans believe they can shame blacks into voting to cut off their free food, free housing and free health care by proving that Democrats are corrupt capitalists posing as socialists? It hasn’t worked in the past and it won’t work in the future save a massive change in the Republican political arsenal. Today Republicans are not even a perceived threat to blacks as they have been accommodating blacks for years by appeasing the entitlement cabal that has run up a $118 trillion debt.

So what is a smart principled legislature? Well it is one that knows a $118 national funded and unfunded debt is unsustainable and moves to extinguish at least the $110 trillion portion that represent entitlements. It would repeal and replace entitlements (or the “free stuff”) with programs that use capitalist principles to eradicate poverty, lower taxes and increase benefits. No matter how daunting a task this appears to be on the surface, it is doable today without sacrificing the relatively paltry benefits government presently doles out in entitlements nor cost a dime more than the taxpayer presently pay. The people would continue to be paid their full entitlement benefits required by law today as they would be legislated as a “safety net” under which no future benefits would fall. .

Increasing benefits like Social Security’s monthly check from $1,000 to $33,000 seems like a pipe dream. How could a legislature do that? Actually it can be done quite simply by removing the government from the equation - by privatizing Social Security, Medicare and Disability and letting the taxpayer keep the 15.3% in payroll taxes presently confiscated from him or her and letting them use those funds in a personal investment account to grow and accumulate over the years into a nest egg. Let’s take a simple example.

The average American household presently makes over $50,000 a year. That means they pay over $7,500 a year in payroll taxes. Over a 40-year working life that $7,500 amounts to a contribution of $300,000 to the government for which the taxpayer gets no nest egg. However, if those payroll taxes were the taxpayer’s own money and invested weekly in the stock market for 40 years the average nest egg accumulated would be $4,000,000. Just the earnings off the $4 million in the 41st year would equal $33,000 a month.

If you doubt these figures go to the tables on www.riseupamerica.us and review them. Even low-income taxpayers will end up with million-dollar nest eggs and tens of thousands in monthly retirement checks. As a policy matter individual and national wealth will accumulate and grow as it is willed from one generation to the next. We call the plan the Rise Up America plan (RUA) and the personal investment account a “USA” - universal savings account. It will end endemic poverty in the black community.

RUA and the USA are the type of tools it will take to motivate blacks to vote for Republicans and vote for capitalism. Today we have blacks like Oprah Winfrey mistakenly touting Denmark and its socialist government as the answer black Americans are looking for. When the richest black woman in America who has reached that pinnacle through her understanding and use of capitalism starts promoting socialism Republicans should wake up to the fact that they need to offer the black community more than an encouraging word to be more responsible. They need a pocketbook issue like RUA. It can be the one that ends black dependency on government.

From Awful to Worse: Harry Reid's medical malpractice

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats long ago gave up any pretense of working to rationally reform American health care. The exercise now underway in the Senate is a mad dash to get to 60 votes, and nothing more. That's why some Democratic senators who had no idea exactly what is in the "breakthrough deal" announced by majority leader Harry Reid last week immediately hailed it as a milestone. They're for anything that creates a sense of "momentum" and "inevitability."

But the substance does matter. If Congress passes something in the end, ordinary Americans know they will have to live with it. And from those voters' points of view the latest effort to strike a compromise among Senate Democrats would, based on press reports of what it involves, take the horrendous bill offered by Reid earlier this month and make it even worse.

In most ways, the new proposal is as terrible as Reid's original bill. It would spend hundreds of billions on a new entitlement even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers at a time of high unemployment, squeeze money out of Medicare without fixing the program, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today and pay even higher premiums.

But in one crucial respect, the new proposal is far worse than the last one.

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Obama's public pleas: "It's close to Peter Pan telling the children that thinking lovely thoughts will make them fly!"

President Obama in his public pleas for the plan appears to be truly upset that his benign view of it isn't obvious to all. In his op-ed Sunday for the New York Times he said, "We'll cut hundreds of billions in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid." Hundreds of billions? Just like that? This is nothing but an assertion by one man. It's close to Peter Pan telling the children that thinking lovely thoughts will make them fly.

Most people are aware that the big three entitlements we've got are underfunded. Medicaid is wrecking state budgets, Medicare goes broke in eight years, followed by the flatlining of Social Security.

King Canute ordered the tides to recede to prove to his courtiers that his powers were limited. President Obama appears to believe he can reverse the tides of entitlement. What evidence has government given to allow anyone to believe this?

In Government We Trust?

Liberals: Wolves in sheep's clothing

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves" — Matthew 7:15

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other- pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self- esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.

It should be apparent by now that these social policies and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage. The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.

Rossiter, Lyle, MD., (2006) The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness, St. Charles: Free World Books, LLC (pp 329-330)

Obama's Killing Field

by Dick McDonald

I have developed a marvelous plan to increase Social Security and Medicare benefits while at the same time substantially reducing the overall tax load all Americans bear - www.riseupamerica.us

The major resistance to my plan has been older people worried about losing their monthly Social Security check. If what Charles Krauthammer suggests in Obama: The Grand Strategy - that Obama’s plan is to pay for the trillions his socialist agenda will cost by a clever withholding of medical treatment to people in the last six months of their lives - then older people have something more serious than losing their Social Security check to worry about - like losing their life - in Obama’s modern version of the killing fields of Cambodia.

Death-by-delay has already been adopted by other state-run medical plans like those in England and Canada. Genocide by bureaucratic fiat is the norm. As fully a third to one-half of medical costs occur in the last six months of life withholding life-saving or life-extending procedures during that most painful period in one’s life appears to be the social justice Obama has in mind. The costs saved by withholding approval of treatment will run into the trillions. And Obama has to have trillions to pay for his socialist scheme of redistribution presently being legislated by a Congress either completely blind to Obama’s treacherous plan or complicit in implementing it.

President Obama and even Charles Krauthammer fail to realize that there is a more elegant solution to the Social Security and Medicare dilemma than raising taxes, reducing benefits and/or withholding treatment. That is to continue current programs as the floor under which no benefits can fall but change the funding to one in which the $1.5 trillion presently being withheld from citizens is placed in Personal Pension Accounts (PPA) owned by each taxpayer and involuntary invested by them in indexed-stock investments for their working life to compound into millions to allow them to self-finance the last months of their lives as well as enjoy an affluent and healthy retirement. See the above link. The fact that such a plan would solve our current economic crisis is just an added bonus.

Those of us complaining about the enormity of the debt Obama is incurring with our tax dollars and those of our children might start worrying about the genocide of our older folks. And if you are one of those older folks you might want to start worrying about Obama’s plan to withhold that heart bypass, hip replacement or kidney transplant you may need. That is the price one pays for installing a universal health plan run by heartless bureaucrats that kill by withholding treatment because a guy like Obama has decided you are not worth the cost.

Obama: The Grand Strategy

www.riseupamerica.us

RISE UP AMERICA

1. Making the poor and middle-class rich

2. Making America wealthier

3. Cutting the national budget in half – eliminating the entitlement bureaucracy

4. Enacting the biggest tax cut in history

5. Immediately extinguishing $45 trillion in unfunded entitlement debt

6. Flooring old age benefits at their present levels – forever guaranteed

7. Taking the national savings rate from -1 ½ % to positive 15%

8. Annually infusing over $1.3 trillion of new capital into the economy

9. Eliminating the need for business to cover retirement costs for workers

10. Immediately reducing the national debt from $9 trillion to $5 trillion.

11. Reducing the need for millions of public and private retirement plans

12. Stabilizing and increasing the value of the dollar internationally

13. Reducing crime and incarceration caused by financial hardship

14. Economically emancipating women

15. Reduce labor-management conflicts and costs

16. Eliminate the need for state and local government retirement plans

17. Ending endemic poverty

18. Giving hope to the powerless

19. Getting a pool of capital for everyone to participate in the economy

20. Eliminating the socialism of the government’s entitlement bureaucracy

21. Return power to the people

www.riseupamerica.us

Throwing off the entitlement mindset

Written by Star Parker
Posted: November 3, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

The U.S Comptroller General and head of the GAO, Government Accountability Office, has described the entitlements crisis facing this country as a "tsunami" that approaches while we continue to party on the beach

What GAO head David Walker is talking about are the massive upcoming obligations under Social Security and Medicare that we have no funds to meet. Tens of trillions of dollars of supposed commitments, promises made to us by our government, that today we have no clue how we'll pay.

In those rare moments when our political "leaders" screw up sufficient courage to acknowledge this dark and ominous fiscal cloud hanging over us, the discussion is invariably technical. Proposed tax increases, cap increases, retirement age increases, benefit cuts, indexing -- all geared to "save the system."

But who has considered that, despite all the discussion about unfunded liabilities, what we really have on our hands is, at root and core, a moral crisis?

No one explains this better than my friend Jose Piñera. And no one has better credentials to talk about this problem.

Twenty seven years ago, in November 1980, Chile, Dr. Piñera's home country, approved Social Security reform in which a tax-based, pay-as-you go government retirement system -- essentially identical to what we have here -- was replaced with an ownership based system of individually owned retirement accounts. Yes, in principle the kind of reform that President Bush proposed.

As the then-youthful Minister of Labor and Social Security of Chile, Piñera was the godfather, mastermind, architect, navigator, and quarterback of the reform.

Key in execution was to allow every Chilean worker the dignity of choice.

They could choose to stay in the existing system, continue to pay payroll taxes, and qualify for government benefits at retirement, or they could get out and use those same funds to open and invest in their own personal retirement account.

Within months, 90 percent of the Chilean workforce opted out of the government system and into their own personal ownership regime.

The result has been more than just an enormously successful transformation of a failed government retirement system. Chile's social security privatization -- if I may use the word that politicians, even the conservative ones, choke on these days -- has been a driving piston in Chile's economic engine, now the most powerful in Latin America.

The average real (adjusted for inflation) annual return of Chile's personal retirement accounts over the last 26 years has been over ten percent (the historical real annual return on stocks in the U.S. is 7 percent).

And Chile catapulted from one of the lowest per capita GDP countries in Latin America in 1980 to the highest today.

But, where, amidst all this great economic news is the moral lesson?

In talking about the transformation of all pension systems -- government and private alike -- from defined benefit (controlled by others and they tell you what you'll get) to defined contribution (you own it, and put your own funds into it), Piñera touches the root of the problem of today's welfare state He sums things up, pointing out that "life is not a defined benefit."

When our founding fathers signed off, in our Declaration of Independence, on the words that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights," they meant "rights" to live your life freely and unimpeded by others. Government's job, as the Declaration goes on, is "to secure these Rights." It's there to protect you.

Over the years, as we've become intoxicated with our own success, and detached from our own roots and principles, our understanding of "rights" and government has morphed into things altogether different. "Rights" have become what everyone is allegedly entitled to (our claims on others) and we look to government to enforce delivery of these entitlements.

The ocean of Social Security and Medicare red ink in which we are about to drown speaks to the efficacy of the entitlement mindset. The nanny state violates, rather than protects, our rights. It doesn't work.

Today we must look to Chile to learn what America's founders knew. Freedom is built on and fueled by personal responsibility

In an international survey released by the Pew Global Attitudes project last July, 62% of Chileans responded that they expect the next generation to be better off than their parents -- highest in Latin America.

In a just released USA Today Gallup poll, only 46% of respondents in the U.S. expressed optimism that the next generation in our country would "live better than their parents."

The entitlements crisis is a moral crisis and we ought to grasp that ownership is part of the "values" agenda. Life is not a defined benefit.

Star Parker is a regular commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News as well as author of White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Throwing off the entitlement mindset"

READ ABOUT THE SOLUTION HERE!