Let’s “Tax the Poor” Says Mayor Bloomberg

By Lowell Ponte

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of America’s richest billionaires, now wants to heavily tax poor people.

Such taxes, says Bloomberg, would be a “good thing” for those already in poverty.

Like most self-righteous leftist Progressives, Michael Bloomberg is paternalistically proposing what economists call “Pigovian” taxes, designed not only to enrich government but also to impose social engineering.

He wants to use taxes as back-door regulation to impose his desired social policies, as proposed by English economist Arthur Pigou, who died in 1959.

If poor people are dying from the health effects of smoking or of drinking sugary soda pop, as Bloomberg believes, then they will be able to buy and consume far less of these harmful products if a heavy tax is added to soda’s and tobacco’s price.

Those poor who divert money from paying rent or buying new shoes for their children will continue to buy such things, but government will have lots more money to treat their health problems.

“Two things in life…are absolutely certain. One is death, the other is tax. So you use one to defer the other,” said Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund before which Bloomberg was discussing his plans to tax the poor.

“That’s correct. That is exactly right. Well said,” responded Bloomberg to the globalist audience that showered him with applause. Progressives want the future to be a socialist paradise controlled not by commoners with a right to vote and as individuals to choose what each wants, but by a superior paternalistic elite that decides what is best for everyone and imposes it on them for their own good.

As Mayor of New York City, Bloomberg had no doubt that his peculiar values were to be imposed. Buying a “Big Gulp” soda pop was prohibited. Cigarettes were taxed so heavily that a criminal underground emerged to provide those hooked on nicotine with a cheaper smoking “fix,” and police were diverted from fighting violent crime to enforce this lucrative tax.

Such “Pigovian” taxes were, of course, regressive; they hurt the poor economically far more than the well-to-do. But as “revenue” measures, such taxes could be put into law far more easily than legislation that would require Mayor Bloomberg to prove his biases were scientifically valid as “sin” taxes. Progressives not long ago were dogmatically telling us that dietary fat was hazardous and should be replaced by sugary carbohydrates; they were wrong then and could be wrong now.

Pigovian taxes have already been used to restrict our use of carbon, CFCs, cigarettes, dietary fat, high fructose corn syrup, soda pop, tobacco, alcohol, and much else. Pigovian subsidies are behind tax breaks in so-called “enterprise zones” in economically-disadvantaged neighborhoods; trouble is, to sustain an enterprise zone, government needs to make the zones around it less-than-optimally-friendly to business and enterprise. And Mayor Bloomberg, a notorious gun-grabber, is more than eager to use sky-high Pigovian taxes to limit the sale and ownership of firearms and ammunition.

Would high Pigovian taxes be a “good thing” for the health of the poor? Taxes are a major cause of stress, anxiety, and fear. So, too, is poverty, which such taxes would greatly increase. And such stresses cause heart attacks, cancer, and a thousand other potentially-deadly health risks.

Michael Bloomberg and his authoritarian taxes aimed at the poor are hazardous to the health of millions of Americans. It is frightening to think that Mayor Bloomberg and his arrogant fellow Progressives believe they are superior to, and entitled to impose their lethal values onto, the rest of us.

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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

“Eight More Years!”

by Lowell Ponte

Democracy is supposed to be a peaceful form of change that transfers power from one leader or lawmaker to another not by war, revolution, or assassination, but by society’s mutual agreement.

When Republican candidate Donald Trump in the final 2016 presidential debate said that he would not automatically accept the election’s result, his Democrat rival former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton replied:

“That’s horrifying. Let’s be clear about what he is saying and what it means. He is denigrating – he is talking down our democracy. And I am appalled that someone who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that position…. That is not the way our democracy works.”

But since Mr. Trump’s overwhelming victory – 304 Electoral Votes to only 227 for Clinton – she and her media comrades and other unelected members of the Deep State have claimed that Ms. Clinton won, or should have been declared the true winner of, the 2016 election.

This has turned into more than a rant against President Trump. It has become a relentless attempt to delegitimize his presidency and remove him from office. It has, as many have observed, become on ongoing coup d’etat, a “taking down” of our democracy.

Media create a social contagion of violence, showing children they can gain fame by shooting others, and glorifying celebrities who advocate ways to assassinate President Trump. If the Left cannot get power with ballots, it will use bullets.

This ceaseless hate campaign has partially succeeded. The votes of the people removed majority power from elected Democrats. But the unelected power of politically-appointed judges and bureaucrats has combined with the propaganda power of the dominant liberal hate-Trump media in a “Resistance” to prevent a transfer of governmental power to the choice of the voters.

Although President Trump has achieved much, the anti-democratic tactics used against him have sapped his political capital and impaired his constitutional power to fulfill his campaign promises. Our unelected government is defying and spitting in the face of the voters. This is not the way our democracy is supposed to work.

Democracy delayed is democracy denied. Arrogant leftist stonewalling, obstruction, and collusion have stolen almost two years of the Trump Administration for which Americans voted.

Since the 2016 election, we have learned of Ms. Clinton’s undemocratic secret manipulation of the Democratic Party’s primary process, and of her own and the Democratic National Committee’s collusion through the Russian dossier used to get FISA warrants to spy on Trump activities.

We have learned of the cabal within the President Barack Obama-controlled Department of Justice and FBI that, as Mr. Trump suspected, bugged his campaign communications and planted at least one informant/agent provocateur [who reportedly received at least $800,000 in taxpayer money] among those in his campaign.

We have seen a legal assault on Mr. Trump reminiscent in form and frenzy of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, including a surprise raid to seize Trump’s lawyer’s papers in defiance of client-lawyer confidentiality.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is not investigating a crime, as our legal system requires, but pursuing President Trump in hopes of finding a crime, any crime. The techniques of Mueller’s team of mostly-Democratic partisan donors and operatives are those of England’s Star Chamber and of Tower of London threats of torture to elicit political confessions against the President. This, too, is not how democracy, or justice, are supposed to work.

If and when these anti-democratic leftist furies fail in their effort to undo the 2016 election, voters will rightly ask for justice. How can they reclaim their chosen President’s two stolen years of governing?

The U.S. Constitution has no provision to return two years robbed from a President held political hostage by the opposition party. But voters can and should give President Trump a 60-seat Senate majority and strong House majority this November. His last six years can thus be as liberating for Americans as having eight more years to liberate our republic.
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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.
For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

Why Obama’s Iran Deal Got Trumped

By Lowell Ponte

President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, said Mr. Obama – a self-described globalist “citizen of the world” – “is a serious mistake.”

Two former directors of Obama’s National Security Council committed an even larger ethical breach. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in a New York Times Op-Ed called on European nations to withdraw their diplomats from Washington, expel U.S. diplomats from their capitals, and respond to any U.S. sanctions for continuing to trade with Iran by imposing sanctions of their own against the United States.

The German weekly Der Spiegel – whose politics echo the Social [i.e., Socialist] Democratic Party (SPD), much as Britain’s Guardian and our New York Times act as propaganda auxiliaries of their nation’s main leftist parties – declared a day later in an editorial that it was “time for Europe to join the Resistance” to President Trump’s America.

“The West as we once knew it no longer exists,” wrote Der Spiegel. “Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership.”

The immediate reason for such high dudgeon is, of course, money. Germany was doing $6.0 Billion a year with Iran in the late 1970s, saw trade shrivel with the embargo, then watched business rebound to $3.5 Billion in 2017 under Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The European Union was Iran’s third largest trade partner, behind only China and the United Arab Emirates. EU exports to Iran grew by 31.5% and imports grew 83.9% during 2016-17.

Europe has been raking in money from Iran hand over fist, with a French oil company deal worth $4.8 Billion, an Airbus deal for 100 airplanes to Iran worth $18 Billion that otherwise might have gone to Boeing, and so forth. Such short-term riches are much nicer to contemplate than the coming destruction of Europe by nuclear weapons from the world’s leading supporter of terrorism, Iran.

Part of Europe’s short-sighted, selfish mindset is America’s fault, as Craig R. Smith and I analyze in our latest book Money, Morality & The Machine. After World War II we put a nuclear umbrella over Western Europe, saving its nations the cost of national defense against Soviet invasion. They spent this saved money on vote-buying welfare and built quasi-socialist states, which continue to distort their politics and economies. We infantilized these nations dependent on American money and protection.

Germany, of course, was also defeated because of American intervention in World Wars I and II, has had U.S. soldiers stationed on its soil since 1945, and has always quietly resented being bested by what it regards as an inferior people (17% — roughly one in six – of whom, according to the latest U.S. Census, have some German ancestry).

Of those we defeated in WWII, 57% of Japanese and 61% of Italians view America favorably, a 2017 Pew study found, but 62% of Germans view the U.S. unfavorably. As historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, “If German haughtiness works on a dependent Europe, it certainly does not always impress a wary America.” No wonder Der Spiegel recently editorialized: “It’s time to get rid of Donald Trump…a danger to the world.”

Even the left-of-center magazine The Atlantic titled a May 4 article: “The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd,” noting that this non-ratified non-treaty is merely the compromising whim of “America’s first ‘post-Western’ president,” and that Obama’s “paralyzing fear of war” led him to “wishful thinking” about the Middle East. Barack Hussein Obama even “speculated that his nuclear agreement with Tehran ought to allow the Iranians and the Saudis time to learn ‘to share’ the region.”

Instead, Iranian-armed guerillas are establishing a “Shiite Crescent” from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to Yemen under a corrupt, unstable theocratic dictatorship that believes in an apocalypse destined to bring the global triumph of Islam. Obama rolled out an unsecure JCPOA red carpet to Iranian nuclear weapons, and now tries to prevent Trump from being a new King Leonidas with his 300 Spartans stopping the Persians again at Thermopylae.
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For an amazing interview with veteran think tank futurist Lowell Ponte, contact Sandy Frazier at 1-516-735-5468.

For a media copy of Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte’s latest book, Money, Morality & The Machine: Smith’s Law in an Unethical, Over-Governed Age, contact David Bradshaw at 1-602-918-3296.

The “Fundamental Transformation” of Both Parties

by Lowell Ponte

Hillary Clinton’s latest excuse for losing the 2016 election is that she is a “capitalist” but that “41 percent of Democrats are socialists…”

Sadly, after her closest approach yet to truth, no journalist asked the obvious question: “Ms. Clinton, if you are a capitalist but your party is rapidly becoming socialist, why don’t you resign from the Democratic Party and urge your capitalist supporters to do likewise?”

In the Iowa caucuses, Clinton eked out a razor-thin 49.9% to 49.6% win over self-described socialist independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. His curmudgeonly candor made Sanders a pied piper for jobless Millennials still living rent-free in their parents’ basement, who liked the idea of government paying their way for a lifetime. They pay no taxes, so why not favor a life of Uncle Sam playing permanent Santa Claus?

Clinton said that no one seemed to listen when she described herself as favoring capitalism “with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability.” They did not hear her promising to raise taxes on corporations that are “disrupting our democracy” by increasing income inequality. They ignored her stated aim in a 2015 debate with Sanders to “save capitalism from itself.”

The very term “capitalist” was popularized by 19th Century socialist foes of private property such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx as a negative term used to argue against those who favor free markets and laissez-faire free enterprise.

Hillary Clinton is a “capitalist” as Marx used the term. She favors crony capitalism in which privileged elitists get rich via government favors. She rules a billion-dollar foundation that demanded kickbacks from those seeking favors from the Secretary of State….favors like a Russian company acquiring 20% of America’s precious uranium reserves while her foundation pocketed from Russian interests at least $145 Million. Her 2016 campaign may have laundered at least $84 Million in suspect campaign contributions.

Clinton echoed President Barack Obama’s statement to business that “You didn’t build that,” that companies owe their success and earnings to government, their de facto senior partner. Clinton and her fellow Progressives enforce their greedy grasp by “appropriate regulation and…accountability.” This is not our Framers’ goal of free enterprise.

The Communist Party USA until 1988 ran its own presidential candidates, using millions of dollars from Moscow. (President Obama’s CIA chief John O. Brennan admitted that he voted Communist in 1976; he is widely suspected of helping orchestrate the Deep State coup attempt against President Donald Trump, and is presently a pundit for MSNBC, a.k.a. Marxist-Socialist NBC.)

But from 1988 until the present, America’s Communist Party urged “voters to support the Democratic Party,” according to the website Marxists.org. So far as I know, no Democratic candidate sought such support, but neither has any Democrat publicly repudiated it – as journalists demand Republicans do whenever extremists endorse them. Is this collusion between the Democratic Party and political radicals once funded and commanded from Russia?

The larger point is that the Democratic Party has now moved so far to the left that even Communists eagerly support its ideology and candidates. Both parties come from the same godless collectivist movement of pseudo-scientific social engineering called Progressivism that advocates not progress towards freedom but a reactionary return to feudalism, elite rulers, and serfdom. The hijacked Democratic Party has become a radical socialist party unworthy of support by anyone who loves individual liberty.

Most of the Republican Party, meanwhile, thanks to President Trump, is moving away from the globalist, collectivist agenda of Progressivism that has ruled both parties since World War II. Mr. Trump is restoring both nationalism and America’s borders. He is returning America to its historic role as an experiment in liberty that unites enterprising, liberty-seeking citizens from around the world in the first “new nation,” a great model of free enterprise for Planet Earth to follow. Progressives in both parties eager to enslave us under global government are furious at Mr. Trump’s success.

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To schedule a fascinating interview with Lowell Ponte – a veteran think tank futurist and former Roving Science & Technology Editor of Reader’s Digest –
contact: Sandy Frazier at 516-735-5468 or email sandy@mystic-art.com.

For a free copy of the White Paper The Secret War – Part II: Weapons of Cash Destruction, contact: David Bradshaw at 602-918-3296 or email him at ideaman@myideafactory.net