By Andi Elliott

Folks, we are asking people to send this to their representatives so that Idaho can be certain that candidates that appear on Idaho ballots are actually eligible to be there. It is up to the Chairmen of the political parties to “vet” the candidates. This is not always done. Georgia and Texas and a handful of other states have begun this process and this legislation is modeled after their legislation.

This is a draft of the proposed legislation that folks all over the state are asking their representatives to sponsor/cosponsor.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks, Andi Elliott
208-662-5808
straighttalkidaho@yahoo.com

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED
AN ACT relating to certification for placement on the ballot of candidates for president or vice-president of the United States.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF IDAHO:

SECTION 1. Section_________, Election Code, is amended by amending Subsection (__) and adding Subsection (___) to read as follows:

(a) Except as provided by Subsection (__) or (___), the secretary of state shall certify in writing for placement on the general election ballot the names of the candidates for president and vice-president who are entitled to have their names placed on the ballot.

(d) The secretary of state may not certify the name of a candidate for president or vice-president unless the candidate has presented the candidate’s certified and/or notarized copy of his or her original birth certificate indicating that the person is a natural-born United States citizen.

SECTION 2. The secretary of state shall perform a background check on presidential candidates to ensure they meet the Constitutional qualifications, including whether not they are a NATURAL Born Citizen of the United States – born of 2 U.S. citizen parents within the United States according to the U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 1875. Candidates for president and vice-president who are entitled to have their names placed on the ballot shall complete the same Federal I-9 form that every other employee in the country is required to complete to prove that they are legally able to work in the United States. The secretary of state shall certify that said Federal I-9 form has been completed.

SECTION 3. An emergency existing therefore, which emergency is hereby declared to exist, this act shall be in full force and effect on and after its passage and approval.

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Idaho Chooses Life

The pro-Life community is buzzing with the tremendous news that Planned Parenthood has lost the legitimizing cover of the breast cancer lobby. The Komen Foundation’s decision to end its partnership with the Abortion Industry is a huge blessing – on many levels.

There is the money which Komen has transferred from life-loving citizens to those promoting the death of women and babies. Seeing Planned Parenthood lose several millions in charitable support is certainly encouraging.

And we are all excited by the fact that pro-Lifers will no longer have to argue or wince or boycott fundraising efforts designed to end the scourge of breast cancer. In fact, we encourage our readers to at least send the Komen Foundation an email to express our gratitude; a donation in the name of innocent children would be better. Komen deserves sincere praise for protecting the integrity of the effort to treat and cure breast cancer.

But in the long term, the best aspect of this development is that Planned Parenthood can no longer hide its evil behind the skirt of “fighting breast cancer” – as if it were principally concerned about the health or lives of women. Whenever their killing operations have been exposed, they seek to change the subject by pointing to their work with Komen.

That ruse just got a lot harder.

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By Richard Larsen

The president, in his State of the Union address declared, “The problems we’re overcoming are not the heritage of one person, party, or even one generation. It’s just the tendency of government to grow. And there’s always that well-intentioned chorus of voices saying, ‘With a little more power and a little more money, we could do so much for the people.’ For a time we forgot the American dream isn’t one of making government bigger; it’s keeping faith with the mighty spirit of free people under God.”

If you don’t recall that opening line, it’s understandable, for it wasn’t in the latest State of the Union, and it wasn’t this president. The president was Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1984. Whether one agreed with him or not, there was remarkable consistency in what he said, and his message didn’t vary based on the venue, his audience, or the grandness of the stage. Even more remarkable was his policies and recommendations to congress and the American people were consistent, at least incrementally, with what he said. This is an increasingly rare commodity, especially in politics, as we observed firsthand this week.

In this week’s State of the Union we heard, “What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.” I couldn’t agree more! But what does he think those values are? The historical version of those “American values” and Obama’s are not synonymous. For the rest of the speech the only words uttered with greater frequency than “fair” and “fairness” were “I,” “me,” and “my.”

From what Obama said Tuesday night, his notion of our “American values” is not based on freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness, or any of the ancillary principles or traits that have made America great. His overarching theme was “fairness,” which is simply a euphemism for class envy, based on increased taxation of the most financially successful Americans, to pay for more regulation, agencies, and programs. This concept of “values” is very un-American. They are distinctly antithetical to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that encompassed the nation’s political value system for two centuries.

This contrast is observed even more starkly with the 1986 State of the Union address when President Reagan put the role of fairness in proper perspective. “Private values must be at the heart of public policies.” He elaborated, “Americans have always valued faith, character, hard work, personal responsibility, self-reliance, discipline, competition, charity, fairness, and achievement. Values originate from what people believe, especially what they believe about God.” Clearly, from Obama’s speech, those are not his idea of “American values.”

Editors at The Washington Post observed this as well, when they said of Obama’s speech, “None of the proposals constitutes a single bold stroke to revive the economy, but the heart of Obama’s message was that America’s wealthiest citizens must do more to cement the economic recovery and pull the country from its dire fiscal condition.”

We should, with every major speech like the State of the Union, assess the consistency in speech and actions. If one tells us one thing but does another, that’s not just duplicity, it’s hypocrisy and prevarication. Here’s a perfect example from Obama’s speech the other night, “But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” He obviously doesn’t really believe that, since government now is expanding and encroaching into our lives more than ever before and he proposed even more government “solutions” in his speech.

In describing the period leading up to Reagan’s 1984 address, Reagan said, “There was a feeling government had grown beyond the consent of the governed. Families felt helpless in the face of mounting inflation and the indignity of taxes that reduced reward for hard work, thrift, and risk-taking. All this was overlaid by an ever-growing web of rules and regulations.” Sound familiar?

Every solution for Obama is another government program or more spending. This is clearly not an American value. But this one is, “I think the best possible social program is a job.” That, too, was Ronald Reagan. He also correctly assessed the relationship between expansion of government and individual liberty, when he declared factually, “As government expands, liberty contracts.”

For those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the contrast between our president from thirty years ago and our current incarnation could not be more stark. They are diametrically opposed in the role of government in our lives, the American values that define us culturally and economically, and in the inherent trust of people, versus a trust of the government.

History and our founding documents provide a documented transcript of what our “American values” are, and that transcript provides a narrative much different from what our current president portrays.

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Idaho Chooses Life

President Obama issued a public statement this past Sunday honoring the Supreme Court for its heinous act 39 years ago this week:

“We must remember that [Roe v. Wade] not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.”

That is special. As the present leader of a movement to strip Americans of privacy and their right to pursue happiness and retain the fruits of their labor – the one area Obama would acknowledge “privacy” is in the matter of destroying an innocent life. In his view, the destruction of a defenseless human being should remain a “personal” matter between a mother and her abortionist.

How truly sad it is that the “leader” of the free world has nothing more to offer than legitimizing moral chaos in the name of “freedom”.

We ask that you join us in praying to the Lord Almighty that He would raise up a righteous man to help restore America’s moral grounding by tearing down the high altars of libertinism.

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By Richard Larsen

It’s too bad that we can’t rely on the headline numbers that our own government gives us. The headline numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases each month obfuscate the real unemployment malaise across the country. Yet ironically, it’s in the BLS releases that we find a more complete unemployment picture, we just have to dig deeper for it.

When the BLS reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5% with December’s year-end data, media pounced on the headline figure but almost none delved deeper into the official report. What they report is the demographic composition of the workforce as calculated in Table A-1 of their monthly report. Since 1994, these are the primary data for headline purposes. They also “tweak” the figures for “seasonal adjustment.”

For a more complete picture, however, look at the BLS monthly employment report, table A-15. U-6 on that table indicates as a percentage of the total civilian workforce, the number of unemployed (those included in Table A-1), those who have given up looking for jobs, plus those who are working marginal part-time jobs who need fulltime positions. In the latest report, that percentage is 15.2%. This is a much more accurate indication of the state of the economy relative to unemployment and job creation.

It’s easy to understand why those figures wouldn’t be reported in the headlines. They don’t look good. But to understand how current economic policies have failed so dramatically in job creation, it’s imperative that we look at the full picture.

Based solely on BLS data, for example, we learn the following. Over the past year alone, the civilian workforce population rose by 1,726,000. That means we need to add an average 166,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the demand of those who are entering the job market. Yet over the past year the number of people actually working fell by 67,000.

In November alone, when the headlines across the nation reported that unemployment dropped from 9.1% to 8.6%, job creation was not what caused the decline. The cause of the drop, which should’ve been the real headline, was that 487,000 fellow Americans stopped looking for work.

In the 30 months since the recession ended officially, according to BLS data, nearly one million previously employed workers have dropped out of the labor force. That means that not only are they not working, but they’ve become discouraged and given up finding a job, and aren’t even looking for a job anymore.

Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) reports that this anemic job growth is atypical in post-recession recoveries. Their research indicates that in the past nine recession recoveries the labor force “had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point.” After the recession in 2002-2003, job growth exploded with over 4 million jobs created, culminating in an official unemployment rate of 4.4% by this point in the recovery.

Instead, we have a net job loss over the past few years. The participation rate, which is the percentage of the number of people either working or looking for work compared to the civilian working-age population, is now 64%, which is down nearly two points from when the recession officially ended in June 2009. The only time that figure was lower, according to BLS, was several decades ago when women began entering the workforce en mass. And total payrolls are still a whopping 6.1 million lower than when they peaked in 2008.

The nonprofit Employment Policy Institute tracks this data closely. They take the number of jobs lost since the recession began and add in the growth of the working age population. The resulting figure they report as a “jobs deficit,” and they calculate we have a current deficit of 10.8 million jobs, even factoring in the 1.4 million jobs added since the recession ended,

The anemic job situation has a pejorative impact even on those who are fortunate enough to still have one. According to Sentier Research, real median annual household income has declined 5.1% since the recession ended 30 months ago. That represents even more of a drop than what happened during the recession itself, which declined 3.2%.

Corporate profits have continued to improve over the past two years, but companies are still reluctant to start hiring again. Most small business owners and corporate officers cite the uncertain regulatory environment, high corporate tax rates, and new regulation implementation costs as obstacles.

If anything, it’s a testament to the resiliency of our private sector that we’ve had any jobs created in this hostile environment that Washington has created. What jobs have been added is in spite of, not because of what the administration has been doing to the private sector.

The only real hope for revitalizing America’s job market lies in policies emanating from Washington that are conducive to job creation, rather than punitive. Let’s hope November elections facilitate that most critical change.

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By Richard Larsen

President Hugo Chavez, over the past several years, has systematically nationalized entire sectors of Venezuela’s economy, created new positions for his cronies to centralize his power, and ignored constitutional limitations. This systematic dismantling of a Latin American constitutional democracy has transformed his democratically elected presidency into a virtual totalitarian dictatorship.

If it is true that that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then our president has an abundance of praise for the Latin American dictator. In spite of their occasional verbal spats, it seems increasingly like both rulers must’ve attended the same Capone School of Political Science in Chicago, majoring in totalitarianism, for they both have proven adept at centralizing their power by trampling their respective constitutions.

Speaking of their verbal posturing, the occasional exchanges between apparent ideological kin have themselves proven interesting. Just two weeks ago, President Obama criticized Chavez for his questionable human rights record and support of Iran. Obviously not appreciating the criticism, especially in light of Obama’s emulation, Chavez responded by calling Obama a “clown,” and astutely remarked further, “take care of your own business, focus on governing your country, which you’ve turned into a disaster. Leave us alone.”

The trampling of the respective constitutions is what is most distressing. The most recent example (and there are many over the past three years) here is nothing short of spectacular. Having been rebuffed by the Democrat controlled senate in an attempt to make several appointments, Obama made “recess” appointments of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Protection Agency and named three others to the National Labor Relations Board. Recess appointments are frequently used by presidents to seat their desired appointees when they can’t garner the necessary senatorial support for confirmation. Such appointments only last a year.

But the key from a constitutional perspective is that the Senate has to be in recess for such appointments to be made. Recesses of congress occur when both houses agree to adjourn and a session is ended by formal resolution. No such formal resolution was passed by either chamber of congress before the holiday break, which means they are not in recess. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has maintained a pro forma session of the Senate which means as far he’s concerned, they’re not in recess either. In fact, at the end of the Bush administration, Reid did the same thing to prevent George W. Bush from making recess appointments.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, declared that Obama’s disregard of the Constitution in making these appointments, “arrogantly circumvented the American people.” He continued, “Breaking from this precedent lands this appointee in uncertain legal territory, threatens the confirmation process and fundamentally endangers the Congress‘ role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.”

Since the Senate, which must confirm many presidential appointments, is not in recess, a “recess appointment” constitutionally cannot be made. But when we have an ideologically motivated president with an insatiable appetite for power, and with such little regard for the Constitution, apparently nothing is beyond the scope of possibility.

And lest we think that the Constitution has no relevance, every president promises that they will “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That oath of office, that he declares he will “faithfully execute,” as stated in Article Two, Section One, Clause Eight of the Constitution, clearly indicates that it is relevant. What are we to think of a president with such little regard for the oath he takes and the document upon which our laws are based that he vows fealty to and promises to uphold? How can it be conscionable for someone to promise to uphold the Constitution, and then violate it whenever it conflicts with his agenda?

Perhaps therein lies the answer. One has to take the oath seriously, have respect for the Constitution, and have a conscience in faithfully preserving, protecting and defending it for the oath to mean something. None of which seem to apply to Obama.

Such abject disregard for the constitutional limitations leaves those of us who love this republic to wonder what others he will choose to ignore. If he’s following Chavez’s playbook, it might well be changing his own term of office, buying the next election through promises of populist government largesse to voters, or even going so far as suspending the election if he deems it necessary.

Is it a stretch to compare Obama with Hugo Chavez? Undoubtedly. But their modus operandi possess distinct similarities, including their disregard for their respective constitutions.

Our Constitution was brilliantly crafted to prevent excessive power being centralized in any one of the three branches of government. The checks and balances built into the Constitution are there precisely to prevent any one branch from running roughshod over the others. Indeed, they are there to prevent precisely what Obama did so egregiously this week.

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By Richard Larsen

Fundamental individual liberty and rights are central to our Constitution, and protection of the same from governmental infringement. Yet we see on a nearly daily basis, attempts by sometimes well-intentioned politicians, locally and nationally, to trample those fundamental rights in the name of a “greater good.”

The latest case in point, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed Congress with broad bi-partisan support, (proving once again that there is little difference between the two major political parties), and will reportedly be signed into law this week by President Obama.

The Act states, “Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons pending disposition under the law of war.” And just who are those “covered persons” that can be so detained? Section 1031 seems innocuous enough by identifying anyone who had a part in the 9/11/01 attacks or “A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities,” against the U.S. But then this Trojan Horse language follows, “including any person who has committed a belligerent act.”

A broad interpretation of “belligerent” includes “hostile and aggressive,” and is not limited to the more specific acts of war, which the drafters of the legislation may have intended. This language swings the door of interpretation wide open to include any threatening, antagonistic, contentious, or confrontational conduct perceived to be a threat to the nation. It is not beyond the realm of possibility to see this president or any future president use this provision as justification for military detention without due process of Tea Party protestors or Occupy Wall Street activists.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution has served to enforce due process and habeas corpus by preventing unlawful arrest and detention, yet this one Act (NDAA) grants virtually unlimited power to the president to detain potential “terrorists” indefinitely, with all the ignominy of a military Guantanimo-like detention. And one of the most striking components of the legislation is that the “battlefield” of the “War on Terrorism” is expanded to include the homeland of the United States of America.

The Act, itself a violation of law since it was drawn up, debated, and passed in closed committee sessions without a single hearing, is clearly a violation of posse comitatus, established in 1878 which proscribes the use of the military on domestic soil to enforce the laws of the land.

While I rarely find myself in agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), on this issue we’re of one accord. In their write-up of the NDAA they averred the Act “will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians.” They continue, “The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.”

Section 1031 of the Act concludes with an attempt at assuaging civil libertarian concerns by stating, “Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” It may not be “intended,” but the act does precisely that.

Section 1032 further attempts to mitigate the far-reaching affects of the legislation by stating that the, “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.” While not “required,” it clearly leaves the door wide open for the possibility of military detention of citizens.

For students of history, this legislation eerily has a parallel in the Enabling Act of 1933 in Germany, where rights enumerated in the Weimar constitution were repressed or precluded by expanded central government control. The subsequent staged attack on the Reichstag or parliament building, led to the Reichstag Fire Decree, finalizing the transition of Adolph Hitler from Chancellor of the Republic, to Fuhrer. Is that all it would take to make that final transition here?

At what point do we as citizens reject and stand up against such trampling of civil liberties? There was so much disapprobation over the Patriot Act, and this goes so much further. It’s impossible to not see another parallel from 20th century Germany in the words of Martin Niemoller, “First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me?and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

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By Richard Larsen

Liberals can find absolutely nothing positive about the remaining slate of Republican candidates for president. That shouldn’t surprise us; after all they have their messianic figure. I have a neighbor who still has a picture of him in their living room like most of us have a picture of Christ. I guess once you’ve been duped it’s hard to admit it.

What is surprising is the abject hatred displayed by some over the Republican candidates. Playing into the most predictable stereotyping, they’re portrayed as not just wrong, but evil. To one local columnist, Republicans are insultingly portrayed as either a Frankenstein-like amalgam that only people who “can’t think for themselves” would vote for, or as “kooks” in a reality cooking show, claiming none of them have any substance except a “Mormon waffle.” The attempt at humor does nothing to shroud the obvious disdain, which leaves all objectively thinking people wondering what precipitates such hate and anger!

While few Republicans may be totally enthralled with the available choices, any of the candidates would be far better than what we currently have in the Oval Office. I’ve heard it said that the only way to have a candidate that you agree with 100% of the time, is for you, yourself, to run. There’s a lot of truth to that aphorism.

Sometimes we have to take a little different perspective on candidates for public office, and this is a perfect time to employ such a paradigm shift. Let’s look at what none of the remaining Republican or even third party candidates have done, or any of the people that work for those candidates.

None of them have brought the nation to the brink of insolvency by nearly doubling federal spending in three years creating a “national security risk,” according to Hillary Clinton, by racking up so much debt that we’re left little wiggle room for dealing with any other threats to the republic.

None of them ramrodded an ideologically motivated health care takeover bill through Congress, virtually eliminating Medicare to make the CBO scoring look better, and got away with it.

None of them have taken over entire sectors of the national private sector economy, like the financial services sector and the auto industry. None of them have not run anything before. Yes, I know, it’s a double negative. Think it through.

None of them have proven for the past three years that they know absolutely nothing about basic economics. None of them have egregiously expanded government regulatory control over all components of the economy stymying economic growth and job creation.

None of them have presided over an economy that has lost 7.5 million jobs and has had 6.5 million people just stop looking for work. None of them have bailed out Wall Street firm after Wall Street firm, and bank after bank, claiming they’re doing right for the American people for doing so.

None of them have presided over an economy with runaway inflation, with gas 115% higher, corn up 78%, sugar up 164%, unemployment up 25%, food stamp recipients up 35%, long-term unemployed up 146%, poverty rate up 8.3%, and the highest misery index since Jimmy Carter.

None of them have claimed to be constitutional law experts while displaying complete ignorance of that document’s contents. None of them have hired a cadre of known socialists to run important components of the government and called them czars.

None of them shut down oil production in the gulf or prohibited domestic drilling and oil exploration contributing to record high gas prices nor did any of them ignore court orders to lift that ban. None of them have been using some guy’s social security number from Vermont. None of them have hoodwinked the mainstream media into portraying everything they do as successful.

None have run illegal gun operations over the Mexican border only to have the same contraband weaponry show up at the murder scenes of U.S. law enforcement agents.

None of them have jetted around the world apologizing for America. None of them showed up ostentatiously at G8 meetings in Europe during austerity talks due to excessive government spending, with an entourage of 500 people.

Not one of them promised to “bring everybody together,” and then violated that promise by engaging in the most divisive rhetoric of class warfare ever employed by a national leader. Not one of them have been implicated in making shady half-a-billion dollar loans to questionable “green energy” companies which went broke, and connived with them on layoffs to manipulate unemployment numbers.

See how a paradigm shift improves ones perspective? All of those “accomplishments” by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue make any and all of those remaining Republican candidates look awfully appealing. Unless you’re an ostrich.

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Idaho Chooses Life

It seemed all but certain that women and girls would be able to get “Emergency Contraception” straight from the grocery store shelves after intense lobbying by drug makers seeking to expand their profits. They were partnered with the Abortion Industry, which blindly seeks to increase the number of babies killed in the womb.
And the heck with those girls and babies who may be destroyed in the process.

Under regulations adopted during the Clinton Administration, Emergency Contraception can be obtained by women “behind the counter”, at the local pharmacy. Girls under 17 need a doctor’s prescription.

Responding to the long-term lobbying campaign, the FDA approved changes in regulation of the deadly drug – treating “Emergency Contraception” essentially like Tums or aspirin.

This drug regimen contains super-doses of the hormones contained in “The Pill” – which, by the way, requires a prescription. The reasons that normal contraceptive pills need professional involvement are known to anyone watching television commercials, in which drug manufacturers list many potential serious complications stemming from the use “The Pill”. (We have also seen many lawyers trolling for clients in lawsuits against those drug companies).

The point is that “Emergency Contraception” pills are potentially dangerous to both girls and the babies who may be killed by their use. It is unbelievable that the FDA would ignore the dangers and obvious opportunity for abuse. We have heard direct testimony from counselors at Idaho pregnancy centers regarding the prevalent abuse by teenage girls of the “Morning After Pill”. (Readers should also know that the FDA has NEVER conducted research on the long-term impact of EC on the health of teenage girls who avail themselves of the drug).

Imagine how much worse it could be without any kind of hurdle to obtaining the drugs!

And that says nothing about the ease with which predators could buy supplies of the drug to enable their continued abuse of teenage girls.

So – how to explain the completely uncharacteristic decision by Kathleen Sebelius to overrule the FDA? This rabid abortion champion has gone to unseemly lengths over her public career to advance abortion-on-demand; going so far as to facilitate the shredding of Planned Parenthood records during her tenure as Governor of Kansas.

One can only say that some sort of miracle has taken place. There may be more mundane explanations available – but we can say with certainty that the Abortion Industry must be as stunned as we at Sebelius’ intervention.

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By Richard Larsen

Black Friday occurs the day after Thanksgiving, and signifies the day when most retailers go into the “black,” or profitability, for the year. For understandable reasons, it’s a day highly anticipated by retailers, and by consumers, for there are typically “killer deals” offered to draw traffic into the stores.

If national governments weren’t so dysfunctional, every nation would have a Black Friday equivalent, when revenue would catch up with expenditures, and there would be no budgetary deficit. European countries right now have to be wishing they could celebrate such a day, as several European countries are currently undergoing the equivalent of a fiscal colonoscopy being by exogenous institutions, the European Union and the European Central Bank, because they cannot get a handle on government spending. Many European nations have expenditures far outpacing their tax revenue, but the most pressing to the EU now are Greece and Italy. Their appetite for spending has pressed the EU to the verge of collapse.

Here at home, we find our own country sprinting toward the precipice of fiscal collapse with yearly spending at $3.7 trillion exceeding tax receipts of $2.2 trillion by 60%. We’re just $500 billion short of spending twice as much as we receive in tax revenues. In July, congress infamously raised the debt ceiling from $14 trillion, and in just four months, we’ve already surpassed $15 trillion. Anyone with any cognitive capacity can clearly see this is unsustainable. At what point such debt causes financial implosion is unclear.

But we may be getting the signals that we’re not that far away. China is the number one buyer of U.S. debt, in the form of bonds, notes, and bills. This week, after the “Super Committee” of twelve congressmen and senators was unable to reach any compromise on reducing spending, Xinhua, the official state news source had some unusually harsh words for our lawmakers. “Washington’s political elites … are obligated to muster the courage to defuse the ticking debt bomb and start to show the world they have the wisdom and determination not to further jeopardize the fragile global economic recovery,” Xinhua said. I’m inclined to think they chose their words carefully, especially in reference to “the ticking debt bomb.” Implosion could well occur when the Chinese are no longer willing to take the risk associated with buying our debt.

And no wonder they’re so concerned. Just four years ago our total debt (not counting unfunded entitlements) was at $7.2 trillion, with a budget of $2.5 trillion and a deficit of $252 billion. Even while fighting two wars, the projections indicated the deficit would be erased by 2011. Now, at $15 trillion of debt, a yearly budget of $3.7, and a deficit of $1.4 trillion, our “leaders” have dug a fiscal hole so deep it is questionable if we can ever climb out of it.

Just since 2008, the five largest growth areas in spending have added significantly to the total debt and the yearly deficit. Spending has increased by 30% in federal pensions; 50% in health care; 30% in national defense; 60% in federal welfare; and 50% in discretionary spending. And we should not forget that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi failed to even pass a budget for two years, as required by law. That’s like giving a spend-thrift spouse a no-limit credit card and telling her or him to go buy all the influence and power a limitless credit line can buy!

Yet with all that spending, the super committee couldn’t come up with $1.2 trillion savings over the next ten years. The Congressional Budget Office projects from 2012-2021 government spending will total $46.05 trillion. That means they couldn’t agree on a nickels worth of spending cuts!

Tax increases are economically unviable in our present condition. Peer reviewed research by former head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, illustrates how an exogenous tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces real GDP by 2-3%. With our real GDP at under 3%, we can’t afford tax increases to reduce economic growth any more. We need jobs more than anything, and a contracting economy is decimating to job growth.

According to IRS data, 1.93% of Americans make over $250K per year. If we taxed 100% of their income, we could generate $1.41 trillion, which would be enough to cover the deficit. But that would be fiscal suicide, for that revenue would be nonexistent for all future years.

It wasn’t lack of revenue that got us into the problem we’re now in, it was a lack of discipline on spending. If the country is fiscally salvageable, it will come from a serious attempt to unwind some of the recent spending increases, and then look at potential revenue “enhancements” to make up some of the difference if necessary. We cannot tax our way out of the problem without destroying job growth, but we can, with discipline and some backbone, cut our way out of it.

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