pattygreen

I see what you are saying here, but I disagree. Sometimes the bible doesn't come right out and give a verse that is perfectly clear on a subject, yet the principles taught within the book as a whole will confirm the view as correct. For instance, The bible does not come right out and say, "To pay taxes is stealing." Ther is no such verse. Yet, it teaches that you should not take from others to use for your own desire, whatever that may be. Taxation is a sign of sovereignty, if the civil authorities demand more than ten percent of a person`s income, they are declaring they are more important than God, and deserve a larger portion of a person`s wealth than God does. If they demand the same amount as the tithe, they are saying that they are at least equal with God and deserve the same taxes from individuals. This is undoubtedly wrong on the part of the civil authorities. It teaches that to take something that God says you are not entitled to is theft. For the government to take people`s property (in this case, money) that it is not entitled to is theft. While we are instructed to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,"(Matthew 22:21) we in America do not have a Caesar. We have no Czar, no Lord, no King. In fact the Founding Fathers boldly claimed, "We have no king but Jesus!" Abraham Lincoln made it clear, "We are a government of the people, by the people and for the people." God charges us with the responsibility of being good stewards of our money, all our money. "Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful." (1 Corinthians 4:2) This faithful stewardship means the proper use of our money, all our money. The stewardship of your money was not given to the government or any other person or organization. Personal responsibility for all our dollars is required. Like the Pharisees of Jesus' day,who were a government of the people back then, "For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers" (Matthew 23:4) we have a system that requires us to retain and remunerate expensive professionals to process a complicated and almost undecipherable system in order to be in compliance. Jesus was against this then and I think He is against it now. <SPAN style="COLOR: rgb(0,0,0)"><SPAN style="COLOR: rgb(0,0,0)"><SPAN style="COLOR: rgb(0,0,0)">

You need to read the bible. All of it. Not just pull a verse out of nowhere and expect it to make sense. Once you read it and continue to read it more and more, God reveals more and more to the reader. He explains his words as being "alive". For the Word of God is Living and Active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Hebrews 4:12 The Old Testament was written to cast a foreshadow of the things that were to come. (Jesus dying on the cross in order to save mankind from their sins) Those who lived in those days looked forward to the coming of the Christ and put their faith in God who said He would send a Savior to mankind. Because of their faith in the promise of God, which would soon come, they can live in Heaven one day.:eek: The New Testament was written to show the world what God had already done in sending his Son Jesus to save themn from their sins. We today, look back to the cross and put our faith in God who sent his Savior to mankind. Because of our faith in the promise of God, which already came to pass, We can live in Heaven one day.:mad: It's all about faith.

The language of the bible is of three kinds. Figurative, Literal, and Symbolic. Such expressions as "harden not your heart" or "Let the dead bury their dead" are figurative, and their meaning is made clear in the context. Symbolic language like the description of Nebuchadnezzar's "Colossus", Daniel's "Four wild beasts", or Christ in the midst of the "seven candlesticks" is explained either in the same chapter or somewhere else in the bible. The rest of the language of the bible is to be interpreted according to the customary rules of grammar and rhetoric. That is, we are to read the bible as we would read any other book, letting it say what it wants to say without allegorizing or spiritualizing its meaning. It is this false method of interpreting scripture that has led to the origin of so many religious sects and denominations. There are 3 things that we must avoid in the handling of God's word. The misinterpretation, the misapplication and the dislocation of Scripture. The trouble is men are not willing to let the scriptures say what they want to say. This is mainly due to their training, environment, prejudice, or desire to make the scriptures teach some favorite doctrine.

I am not saying that I have it perfectly figured out. All I know is that anyone and everyone that was ever Catholic and THEN read the scriptures has concluded that they were duped by the Catholic church. It is one thing to say that our "interpretations" are different, but that's not it at all. There is only ONE way to interpret certain verses in the bible. "There is only one mediator between man and God, and that is Christ Jesus." Now, tell me another way to interpret that? Does that mean Mary and the Saints can also mediate between God and man? I don't think so. Come on now, let's not play games. It means what it says. There is ONE mediator, Jesus and Him only. Now that one bit of falsehood that the Catholic church gives their congregation could be overlooked if there weren't just soooo many bits of falsehoods that they teach that could be confirmed with scripture. To say I am arrogant because I know the pope to be wrong on that issue is just plain wrong. God gives wisdom to those who desire with their heart and seek to know the truth. I have asked Him for that wisdom, and he has blessed me with the truth of the word of God. Just like He will bless anyone who asks to learn more about Him.

The example that you use is of a woman who has mental health issues and therefore, is NOT your typical born again Christian.

I see that you've only made 6 posts so far. Why not join in the conversations? I'd love a new persons input.

The pope is just a human being, like you or me, appointed by other human beings to pretend he is more important in God's eyes than any of the rest of His creation. He's not. The Catholic denomination of Christianity will have quite some answering to do before God when they stand before Him one day, I believe. Notice that I didn't say they wouldn't be in Heaven. Those who truly asked Jesus to save them will be there. But those who pretend will not. I know all about this, for I used to be Catholic, before I really found Jesus and became born again. I went to thier church and to Catechism, and went through all the formalities they say are required for Heaven. (infant baptism, holy communion, confession, confirmation, etc.) THEN, I read the bible and began to study it. I felt completely decieved by the Catholic church once I read the truth. I left that denomination and found one that is closer to the truth. For no denomination is perfectly aligned with the word of God. But many are much, much closer than the Catholic church to teaching truths, IMO.

It doesn't matter who made the bill. The new president owns it now. If he truly understands that we are spending too much and can't afford to, then any spending that Bush created should be eliminated by him. He's in charge. HE needs to end it. He said he was going to stop the war. Why hasn't he? He promised while campaigning. The person in the driver seat is the one who has to end the spending, dispite who made the bills. I am sick and tired of hearing about how Bush is at fault for everything. SO WHAT! DO something about it then. STOP THE SPENDING NOW!!! When does Obama own it? You think that the health care bill isn't going to cost anything? Wow are you in for a rude awakening. CBO: Health Care Bill Will Cost $115 Billion More Than Previously Assessed May 12, 2010 9:08 AM [/url] The director of the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the health care reform legislation would cost, over the next ten years, $115 billion more than previously thought, bringing the total cost to more than $1 trillion. The revised figure is due to estimated costs to federal agencies to implement the new health care reform bill – such as administrative expenses for the Internal Revenue Services and the Department of Health and Human Services -- and the costs for a "variety of grant and other program spending for which specified funding levels for one or more years are provided in the act." CBO had originally estimated that the health care reform bill would result in a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion from 2010-2019; this revised number would eliminate most of that savings. In a statement, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said that the new CBO analysis "provides ample cause for alarm. This comes just weeks after the Obama administration itself released an analysis confirming that the new law actually increases Americans’ health care costs. The American people wanted one thing above all from health care reform: lower costs, which Washington Democrats promised, but they did not deliver. These revelations widen the serious credibility gap President Obama is facing." Office of Management and Budget spokesman Kenneth Baer said in response that the health care law "will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in the first decade, and that will not change unless Congress acts to change it. If these authorizations are funded, they must be offset somewhere else in the discretionary budget. The President has called for a non-security discretionary spending freeze, and he will enforce that with his veto pen." Baer also pointed a reporter to comments made by OMB director Peter Orszag on his blog in March in which the budget director says that Congress has the power to pay for the $115 billion costs with cuts elsewhere, or not act on those budget authorizations in the bill at all. -Jake Tapper

Living in a fiscal dream world Here is a little fairy tale: Imagine it's the end of the year. A man sorts through his checkbook and other financial records, then announces to his family: "Hey, we're in pretty good shape. We had more money come in than we paid out during the last 12 months, so we finished the year in the black." The man's wife exclaims, "Great! I enjoyed our Caribbean cruise last year, and this year I want to vacation in Cancun." The man smiles and replies, "Sounds good, dear." The man's daughter says, "The 42-inch flat screen TV we bought last year is nice, but I think we need a 56-inch. Let's buy a new one." "Great idea," the man says. "We'll go to the appliance store this afternoon." Finally, the teenage son chimes in: "I'm sick of driving Mom's old Buick. I want a new BMW." "OK," the man says, "we'll stop by the BMW dealership right after we go to the appliance store." Sounds like a very prosperous family, doesn't it? But what if during the just-concluded year, to make ends meet, the man had to borrow $30,000 from his elderly parents; then he took out a home equity loan for $50,000; then he stopped paying the family's health-insurance premiums; and then he did not bother to pay his property taxes? Would you still think this family is in good financial shape? Of course not. You'd have to be living in a dream world to claim the family's budget is "in the black." The state recently made just such a dream-world announcement. On July 1, state officials proudly announced a budget surplus of $243 million for the fiscal year just ended. The Nutmeg State, they proclaimed, finished the year "in the black." But wait a minute. To show a $243 million surplus, the state had to employ short-term budget gimmicks similar to those used by my hypothetical, fairy-tale family. The state received a huge chunk of federal "stimulus" money last year, hot off of Washington's money-making printing press, meaning it added to the nation's crushing level of debt. Also, the state raided the Rainy Day Fund, did not make scheduled payments to the state employee pension fund, and borrowed about $1 billion by selling long-term bonds to pay short-term expenses. Even a sixth-grader with a C-minus in math can understand the hypothetical, fairy-tale family will soon be in big trouble unless it immediately cuts spending, especially on the frivolous stuff. Does anyone at the Capitol understand big trouble is just around the corner if immediate spending reductions are not implemented? Apparently not. Oh, sure, lawmakers and the government have offered some cost-cutting proposals. State agencies now will recycle paper clips, and future state employees may be unable to retire at 48 with a full and immediate pension. That will help — a quarter-century from now. (Visit the Yankee Institute's Web site, www.yankeeinstitute.org, for more examples of the state's unwillingness to make even modest spending cuts.) When individuals and businesses use outrageous accounting gimmicks, they often go bankrupt, or they get charged with fraud. When government officials use the same gimmicks, there's not only no penalty, but there's often re-election. I guess if you make the laws, you don't have to follow the laws. It must be nice to live in a fairy-tale world. It must be nice to be a politician in the Nutmeg State. Bill Dunn

The selective modesty of Barack Obama By Charles Krauthammer Friday, July 9, 2010 Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama's vision of NASA's mission, : "One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Apart from the psychobabble -- farcically turning a space-faring enterprise into a self-esteem enhancer -- what's the sentiment behind this charge? Sure America has put a man on the moon, led the information revolution, won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation by far -- but, on the other hand, a thousand years ago al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra. Bolden seems quite intent on driving home this message of achievement equivalence -- lauding, for example, Russia's contribution to the space station. Russia? In the 1990s, the Russian space program fell apart, leaving the United States to pick up the slack and the tab for the missing Russian contributions to get the space station built. For good measure, Bolden added that the United States cannot get to Mars without international assistance. Beside the fact that this is not true, contrast this with the elan and self-confidence of President John Kennedy's 1961 pledge that America would land on the moon within the decade. There was no finer expression of belief in American exceptionalism than Kennedy's. Obama has a different take. As he said last year in France, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Which of course means: If we're all exceptional, no one is. Take human rights. After Obama's April meeting with the president of Kazakhstan, Mike McFaul of the National Security Council reported that Obama actually explained to the leader of that thuggish kleptocracy that we, too, are working on perfecting our own democracy. Nor is this the only example of an implied moral equivalence that diminishes and devalues America. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reported that in discussions with China about human rights, the U.S. side brought up Arizona's immigration law -- "early and often." As if there is the remotest connection between that and the persecution of dissidents, jailing of opponents and suppression of religion routinely practiced by the Chinese dictatorship. Nothing new here. In his major addresses, Obama's modesty about his own country has been repeatedly on display as, in one venue after another, he has gratuitously confessed America's alleged failing -- from disrespecting foreigners to having lost its way morally after 9/11. It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply. It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I." Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to Cabinet members and other high government officials as "my" -- "my secretary of homeland security," "my national security team," "my ambassador." The more normal -- and respectful -- usage is to say "the," as in "the secretary of state." These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution -- not just the man who appointed them. It's a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama's exalted view of himself. Not surprising, perhaps, in a man whose major achievement before acceding to the presidency was writing two biographies -- both about himself. Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama's modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence -- yet not of his own country's.

That's right, Pattygreen, a CONSUMER ADVOCACY GROUP, not the government, wants the clown to retire. But typical neocon reaction: blame the government. Geez. Consumer advocacy groups (people)bring laws to the governments attention and they are passed that way.

[cleosmom quote] Most of the people in this country were dependent on the government long before Obama became president. It only became an issue when he did, however, again reflecting on the never ending hypocrisy. No. The government has been causing dependency of the people for a very long time, this is true, but it is only recently that the people have decided that enough is enough. It mostly got them riled up when Obama began his spending sprees that far outnumbered any in history! When he campaigned on "change" and then there was just more of the same, it pissed people off. He wasn't planning to 'change' anything. He became worse than all the rest.

Who are you directing this question to? And, self pay for what?

The average federal employee earns an annual salary almost 60% higher than the average private-sector employee — $79,000 vs. $50,000. Federal employees do have more education (on average) than private-sector workers. Their unions argue that this justifies their higher pay. But it doesn't. Even after controlling for education and experience, federal employees get paid significantly better — 22% more per hour, on average — than private-sector workers. Not all federal workers earn above-market pay. The government bases raises on seniority, not performance, so the most skilled and hardest-working federal employees are actually underpaid. Overall, though, government workers earn well above what their private-sector counterparts make, even before you consider benefits. Oh, the benefits Those benefits include more than one type of retirement plan. Federal employees can enroll in a Thrift Savings Plan that works like a 401(k). But they also get a "defined contribution" plan, which lets a worker with 30 years of experience retire at 56 with full benefits. Government workers also can enroll in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. There are no age, health, or pre-existing condition restrictions. Paid leave? Check. Federal employees with just three years of experience get 20 days annually, and those who have logged more than 15 years get 26 paid days off. Group life insurance? Check. And many federal buildings even offer on-site child care. To be sure, many large private employers offer two or three of these benefits, but very few offer them all. Job security Once you add up these benefits, the gap in total compensation rises even higher — 30% to 40% above comparable private-sector workers. Federal civil servants enjoy another perk: near-absolute job security. Private businesses cut hiring and increase layoffs when sales drops. From 2007 through 2009, the adult unemployment rate in the private sector more than doubled, from 4.2% to 9.4%. Not in government. The percentage of federal employees who lost jobs barely budged, going from 2.0% to 2.9%. This is largely because of civil service rules. It's virtually impossible to fire federal employees for bad performance once they've passed a one-year probationary period. Not surprisingly, federal employees rarely quit. In good economic times, they voluntarily leave at roughly a third the private-sector rate. And that disparity has only grown since the recession began. Why should taxpayers care? Because it's costing them money. If Congress were to set up a payment system like the private sector's, it would save about $47 billion a year. That's serious money. Lawmakers can take other steps: reducing benefits, contracting more non-essential tasks to private-sector companies, and making it easier to dismiss underperforming employees. "Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for," Will Rogers once said. Indeed. With a little effort, we could even pay less for the government we have. James Sherk

Why do you think the cost of living has been so high? Why is it that at one time, you could afford to pay your rent with just one of the 4 paychecks you got each month and now it takes 2 of them? Why is it that gasoline, electricity, groceries, water, etc. is killing us to pay each month? Do you think that the government has anything to do with it? It does. Just HOW do you think that the federal employees get their paychecks each week? The money does not appear out of nowhere. Taxes have to be collected in some way from someone and then given to them. When those people who make alot of money pay their taxes to the government, they have to get the money from someone else. They are businessmen, and when their taxes go up, the product or service that they sell increses in price and the consumer (you and me) pay more. You and I, the little man, do not "directly" pay taxes to the government. The money is still taken from us in other ways. Either way WE pay! Yes, the government must get their money out of the community one way or another to pay these federal employees salaries. Directly from big businesses and the wealthy, which means you and I are paying for their salaries through higher cost of living. These big businesses are not going to take a loss. They will just pass their loss onto the consumer. The little people who don't pay any taxes directly to the government, they pay higher prices for EVERYTHING instead. (same thing, IMO)

[Cleo'smom quote] You're the expert and the pope's wrong? Far more people believe him than you. Just because you studied something doesn't mean your interpretation is the correct one. You are mistaken about this. 52% of all Christians are protestant and don't believe the Pope at all. Only 24% of all Christians are Catholic who believe him. I guess more people are reading the bible instead of taking another mere human's word for what God has to really say.

Do you, by any chance, know how to post your words the way you would actually talk to someone? Or, is this how you actually talk: "In short and to no one's surprise from your insulated vacuum built of insecurity and predigested homilies, you miss the point." Really??!! WOW! Bye now.

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Then what are you doing here?

You seem to think that if I am not paying direct taxes to the government, that I am not 'paying' towards the expenses of government jobs. WE are all paying in one way or another through higher costs of living (food price increases, higher utility bills, gasoline prices, etc.) for the bills the federal government makes.

What are you talking about?

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Obama: Let’s spend $2 billion to create 5100 jobs Share301 posted at 11:00 am on July 3, 2010 by Ed Morrissey printer-friendly And I thought Barack Obama’s response to the jobs numbers yesterday was clueless. Obama proposed spending $800 million to create 5,000 jobs, which would install broadband technology where it hasn’t already expanded because of demand, which will cost $160,000 per job. Today, Obama has refined his approach in his weekly address, proposing to spend even more money to create jobs that will mainly disappear: That’s one of the reasons why we’re accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy and doubling our use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power – steps that have the potential to create whole new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in America. In fact, today, I’m announcing that the Department of Energy is awarding nearly $2 billion in conditional commitments to two solar companies. The first is Abengoa Solar, a company that has agreed to build one of the largest solar plants in the world right here in the United States. After years of watching companies build things and create jobs overseas, it’s good news that we’ve attracted a company to our shores to build a plant and create jobs right here in America. In the short term, construction will create approximately 1,600 jobs in Arizona. What’s more, over 70 percent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA, boosting jobs and communities in states up and down the supply chain. Once completed, this plant will be the first large-scale solar plant in the U.S. to actually store the energy it generates for later use – even at night. And it will generate enough clean, renewable energy to power 70,000 homes. The second company is Abound Solar Manufacturing, which will manufacture advanced solar panels at two new plants, creating more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs. A Colorado plant is already underway, and an Indiana plant will be built in what’s now an empty Chrysler factory. When fully operational, these plants will produce millions of state-of-the-art solar panels each year. If this is an example of how Obama will sell the green-jobs economy, he’d better hope that the public schools get a lot worse than they already are at teaching math. Obama proposes spending $2 billion to create a total of 5,100 jobs. That will cost $392,156.87 per job. That kind of money, in the private sector at least, should fund several jobs. Heck, even a government bureaucrat costs less than that; even at the Department of Transportation, that would cover two and have enough left over for a secretary. But that’s not the only folly in this proposal. Of the 5,100 jobs Obama promises, only 1,500 of them are permanent jobs. The others are construction jobs, which will only last as long as the money flows to the project. That means we will spend over $1.3 million per “permanent” job in building this “green economy,” which looks more like a red-ink economy with even a cursory check of the numbers. And let’s say that these 1500 jobs are all great-paying, tax-generating jobs that earn an average of $100,000 per year, and that these folks all pay an effective tax rate of 25%, which is an incredibly generous calculation. How long will it take to pay back that investment from the permanent jobs created by this effort? Why, only 53 years and 4 months! And that’s only if one doesn’t calculate the cost of money over that period of time and ignore the impact of inflation. We know that the motto of this administration is “never let a good crisis go to waste,” but it turns out that the real crisis is mathematical illiteracy — and Obama hopes it afflicts enough people to get away with this.

Proof Positive Obama's Spending Stimulus a Wash WASHINGTON -- There are well-grounded economic reasons that President Obama's spending stimulus was doomed to fail from the beginning. Foremost, it lacked serious incentives to spur capital investment, the mother's milk of new business formation and job creation. And it lacked sustainability. When the money runs out, as it has now, the stimulus stops. The best example of this was the $6,500 to $8,000 homebuyer tax credit that the government was dishing out to boost home sales. The tax credit expired April 30. Existing home sales fell 30 percent in May, double what forecasters expected. "The message is clear," said Washington Post economic analyst Frank Ahrens. "The tepid housing recovery we've seen over the past year was supported by the government handouts, not market demand." In this sense, Obama and the Democrats were running a kind of government spending Ponzi scheme, not unlike the scam that Bernie Madoff perpetrated on his victims. As long as the money continued to dish out returns, people seemed to benefit. But when the money ran out, so did the payments and its purported long-term benefits. We saw that happen to the aborted "Cash for Clunkers" program that left taxpayers holding the bag to the tune of $3 billion. In a deeper sense, most of the $800 billion Democrats stuffed into their so-called economic stimulus and jobs bill went into federal and state government agencies and programs. There were few federal departments and agencies that did not get a chunk of this money to fatten their budgets, with very little, if any, effect on economic growth. In other words, Obama's big spending stimulus was a fraud from the beginning. We see that in the 125,000 jobs that were lost in June. We see it in the embarrassingly anemic 83,000 jobs created in the private sector last month. We see it in weaker consumer spending, growing at half the pace recorded in the early recovery from the 1981-82 recession. And we certainly saw it in the wave of pessimism in the financial markets last week. The Dow was down by 10 percent. The broader S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq were down by more than 12 percent -- sacking the pensions and retirement savings of millions of ordinary hardworking Americans. Some readers of this column may recall that early in 2009, I wrote several columns about the inherent weakness of Obama's stimulus plan, particularly its public-works, pump-priming, spending programs. Economists, including some of Obama's own economic advisers in the campaign, had written scholarly papers questioning the spending stimulus plan's effectiveness and long-term sustainability. Among its fatal flaws: It took an inordinately long time to pump the stimulus money into the economic pipeline. Much of the money was often wasted or gobbled up by government. And money went out just as the recession was coming to an end or had in fact ended. But somehow Obama was able to sell this snake oil medicine to the voters, and to a lot of economically illiterate journalists, arguing that tax cuts do not work and are even detrimental to the economy. But the Kennedy tax cuts certainly worked in the 1960s, boosting economic growth, which in turn led to increased federal tax revenues that produced a balanced budget by the end of the decade. President Reagan's across-the-board tax cuts certainly worked in the early 1980s following the '81-'82 recession, at that time the worst recession since the Great Depression. There was a referendum on the success of those tax cuts in 1984. Reagan carried 49 states. And the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2002 unarguably helped the country recover from the tech bubble collapse and the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Alan Greenspan said the economy stopped breathing. There is no accepted school of thought that says you can raise taxes and other government-imposed costs in the midst of a weak economy without irreparably hurting its ability to recover. Yet this is what Obama and the Democrats are in the process of doing. The new health care plan comes with taxes, fees, penalties and other costs on businesses and families. The financial regulatory bill and the cap-and-trade energy bill just behind it carry a raft of other taxes and overhead expenses on our economy. But the real economic killer will be when the Democrats, with the president's blessing, will allow George W. Bush's tax cuts to expire at the end of this year for those making more than $250,000 a year (while preserving the tax rate cuts for all those in the mid-to-lower income brackets). These are the people who save, invest and spend the most, and are a key component of our economy. This is where venture capital investment comes from. This isn't a time to be increasing anyone's taxes. We need everyone pulling on the oars. "We have been in recovery for more than a year -- wobbly, furtive and paper-thin as it is," Frank Ahrens says. But the very weak data we've seen in recent weeks tell us what "we've really known for months now: This recovery has been fueled by government money. And eventually that runs out." Donald Lambro