A Hailstorm of Tax Hikes Heading for Wyoming

Wyoming Liberty Group  | By Sven Larson
June 14, 2012


On Thursday June 14, the Heritage Foundation releases its “Taxmageddon” report. Taxmageddon is a $494-billion tax increase waiting to hit the U.S. economy on January 1, 2013. Time is running out for Congress to prevent this disaster, but even if it does, the Wyoming economy could be hit by its own hailstorm of tax hikes.

The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reports (Wednesday June 13):

"An increase in the state’s fuel tax is on the table. Toll roads are not. On Tuesday a state legislative supercommittee reviewed ways to raise money for Wyoming highways. The group will develop a draft bill for state lawmakers to consider in 2013. The draft bill will include a proposal for a higher gasoline tax, based on the committee’s direction. The amount has not been determined. It will also include increases in motor vehicle registration and driver license and services fees. It will apply a sales tax to fuel, too."

A higher gasoline tax is nothing new. In October 2010 the Transportation Committee sponsored a bill that would phase in a ten-cent increase over three years. The idea was to take the state gasoline tax to 24 cents per gallon. Conservative estimates showed that the higher tax would cost drivers $35 million extra per year, though some estimates suggested higher numbers.

These proposals are not the only ones that will raise our taxes. The 2012 legislative session authorized counties to seek voter approval for a one-cent increase in sales taxes. At the end of the legislative session some legislators also speculated about a one-cent increase in the state sales tax.

It is not good for Wyoming that whenever our legislators talk about our economy, their conversation centers in on tax increases. This is not a good trend, especially since there is a risk that the state will face spending cuts up to $75 million.

When spending cuts are coupled with tax cuts they are good for the economy. When spending cuts are coupled with higher taxes, the opposite is true. This combination increases government’s drainage of resources from the economy. Government is a burden on the private sector already as it is; we don’t need to increase that burden by having government take more of our money and give even less back.

Even if at the end of the day there will be no spending cuts, higher taxes will be bad enough for the Wyoming economy. It is fair to assume that the gasoline tax increase would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the 2010 proposal, phased in over three years. Furthermore, let us also assume that all counties vote to raise the sales taxes by one percent. Lastly, we add a one-cent state sales tax increase and allow the higher total sales tax to cover gasoline as well.

A simulation using a so called CGE macroeconomic model of the Wyoming economy gives a rather disturbing picture of what these proposed tax increases would do to the Wyoming economy. The following numbers are for 2015 and compare to a scenario without any tax increases:

• There will be 6,800 fewer private-sector jobs;
• Private corporate investments will be $110 million lower;
• Wyoming families will have $458 million less in disposable income;
• Local governments will see a net loss of $28 million in tax revenue.

Depending on what type of spending cuts would be added to this, the net effect could be considerably worse.

There is no doubt that Wyoming needs better roads. However, massive tax increases is not the way to pay for them. A much better approach is to build closer ties between road usage and the cost of that usage. A gasoline tax is an imprecise instrument in this respect: the gasoline tax affects all drivers, even those who do mostly local driving. At the same time, interstate drivers are increasingly able to get through the state without paying anything for using our highways. More and more passenger cars can, for example, travel the entire stretch of the I-80 through Wyoming without filling up even once, leaving Wyoming drivers with the entire bill for road maintenance.

The tax hikes currently being discussed will actually increase the incentives of out-of-state drivers to avoid a gas fill-up within our borders. This makes it even more surprising that our legislators are entirely unwilling to consider a tolling system or find cost reductions.

By talking tax increases and generic spending cuts, our elected officials are showing us that they are stuck in the same old conventional thinking about government’s role in the economy. Rather than trying to squeeze a fiscally obese government into an economy that is already too small to fit into, our lawmakers should reconsider what role government should actually play in our economy. A smaller, leaner government with fewer spending programs is more able to focus on such things as highway maintenance–and the net burden on taxpayers would go down in the bargain.

The road to a smaller, leaner government goes through principles-based, thoughtfully executed structural elimination of entitlement programs. That takes time, but Wyoming has the financial padding to take that time. Best of all, the payoff from concentrating government to non-redistributive functions are enormous for the state economy.

Occupy Wall Street: Discerning Not Dismissing

Occupation is the big new thing. The social motions and explosions are ever more frequent . While I believe it’s a misguided, unrealistic exercise overall, I want to caution myself and likeminded observers from dismissing the protesters, but for reasons that go beyond politics.
News coverage of city governments kicking hapless demonstrators out of municipal parks implies that the very oppression they so vaguely protest is being wielded against them. Meanwhile, conservatives (many Christians included) call out the movement as insular, selfish, self-defeating and pointless. One called protesters idiots. Many characterize them as rehashed hippies of the 1960s. Yet some look like average American middle-classers. It all raises some trite as well as some profound questions.

Should individual Christ-followers welcome or even join in the universal decrying of greed, corporate participation in (entanglement?) with government, perceived favoritism and lobbying? Perhaps this is a chance to join in calling for social justice. Or maybe it’s time to call out sloppy thinking and irresponsibility—or both.

That’s a judgment call for each believer. But whether we join in, give modified ascent, or critique, we’re called to biblical discernment. The Apostle Paul, wrote in Piilippians 1: 9 that he prayed that they would “grow yet more and more” in God-given super-knowledge and discriminating spiritual discernment so that they might remain pure and ultimately give God glory. Paul wanted his charges to grow up. I’m concerned that well-meaning people of biblical faith not be drawn into unthinking responses either way; that is, let’s be grown up even if we are sure the occupiers aren’t.

Socialist movement in America – 1905

A Case Study in Changing our Nation’s Culture

"The article below is a brief history of how Socialism came to America. Take special note of the infiltration into all areas of society, but most especially the  educational system. This is why our schools need to be entirely overhauled - from curriculum to teaching methods. For it is not the quality of teachers that is in question, but rather the method and content of what they are required to teach." – Ricki Pepin

On September 12, 1905, approximately 100 people  met in a loft over Peck's Restaurant, at 140 Fulton Street, in lower Manhattan. The purpose of the meeting was to strategize the overthrow of the Christian worldview that still pervaded much of American culture and to replace it with the ideas of a then rather unknown writer by the name of Karl  Marx. They called the organization they formed that day the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

The godfather of the organization was a 27-year-old author named Upton Sinclair. The first
president chosen was the author Jack London,  age 29. Also present was Clarence Darrow, the
attorney.

The strategy of the organization was to infiltrate their ideas into academia by organizing chapters in
as many colleges and universities as possible. And organize they did. Walter Lippmann, later author
and director of the Council on Foreign Relations, was the president of the Harvard chapter. Walter
Reuther, the future president of the United Auto Workers, headed the Wayne State chapter; and
Eugene Debs, who went on to become the five-time Socialist candidate for president, was the leader
at Columbia.

The society grew. The first annual convention was held in 1910, and by 1917 they were active on 61
campuses and a dozen graduate schools. Other early activists included W. E. B. DuBois, who would
become an official of the NAACP and later a Communist Party member, and Victor L. Berger of
Wisconsin, who became the first Socialist elected to Congress.

In 1921, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society took its next organizational step, changing its name to
the League for Industrial Democracy. Its purpose was "education for a new social order based on production
for use and not for profit." Norman Thomas, another perennial Socialist candidate for president, was the
leader behind the scenes. The renamed organization’s first president was Robert Lovett, editor of
the New Republic, and field secretary with Paul Blanshard, who later became an author.

The college chapters of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society now became the Student League for
Industrial Democracy. As members graduated from college, some entered the pulpit, others the
classroom; some wrote textbooks while others into the labor movement in both political parties.
When the New Deal began in 1933, they were prepared. At the time the leak had only 5,652
members that they were in positions of leadership everywhere.

By 1941 John Dewey, the founder of progressive education in the league VP in the 1930s, was its
honorary president, and Reinhold Niebuhr, the  theologian, its treasurer. Dewey had already
organized the Progressive Education Association  and the American Association of University
Professors.

The League for Industrial Democracy was so successful that those who held membership in the
movement or were cooperating with it could have been a list for Who's Who in America: Robert N.
Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union; Charles Beard, the historian; Carroll Binder, editor of the  Minneapolis Tribune; Helen Gahagan Douglas, the Congresswoman who was defeated by Richard Nixon for the U.S. Senate;  Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice; Sidney Hook, the educational social philosopher; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet; Henry Morganthau Jr., one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's most trusted  economic advisers; Walter and Victor Reuther, United Auto Workers; Will Rogers Jr., humorist; Franklin Roosevelt Jr., the president signed; and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian.

The obscure loft in Manhattan where they organized has long been forgotten, but what began there
that night permeates America's institutions and culture, having replaced the Bible-based values of the 19th century with the liberalism based on Marxism.

Consider
To what extent do you feel that you have been influenced by the anti-Christian forces of modern culture? Do you think you have picked up any of the values of the League for Industrial Democracy? Unfortunately, all of us are the products of our own backgrounds. Even after we become Christians we still are influenced by our culture. We need to evaluate our presuppositions against the truth revealed in God's Word.

[Excerpted from - The One Year Book of Christian History,  by E. Michael and Sharon Rusten,
published by Tyndale House, Wheaton IL,  2003. Pages 512-513.                     ISBN 0-8423-5507-3]

Occupy Wall Street solidifies message.

Until recently the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement has been criticized for not having a consistent message, making it difficult for bystanders – the true 99%, the general populace – to understand what the movement’s protests represent or are about.

While organizers have been busy chanting it is about economic & political equality the truth is slowly being revealed. Have you identified the primary message?

The one message that is consistent throughout is same sex partnership. Yes, the LGBT community has commandeered the movement to advance their agenda of normalizing sexual immorality under the banner of ‘Equality’.

Stephanie Donald of LGBT Today recently wrote;

"As far as allying the LGBT civil rights movement with the OWS movement, in the case of the OWS and union protesters in Washington State, the gay and lesbian alliance threw their whole-hearted support behind the union and OWS movement and this past week the executive board of the UFCW Local 21 has endorsed and petitioned the Washington State Legislature to pass marriage equality.

We’ve reached a point of critical mass with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The more opposition they encounter the more support the movement gets from people previously uninvolved. The Oakland, California debacle is turning out to be a disaster for the Police Chief and the Mayor and the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet with Governor Jerry Brown and I’m quite sure he will have something very biting to say about how the situation was handled."

Notice that there is no emphasis on economic or political equality. Notice that the LGBT community is being encouraged to resort to hostility in an effort to draw support from those on the sidelines who are unaware of the underlying LGBT agenda. Hostility and aggression, as demonstrated during the Proposition 8 vote in the 2008 California election, is a tactic that has become trademark of the more extreme and militant LGBT faction.

Is it about equality at all or is it about a very small minority forcing the normalization of immorality at society’s expense? Indeed, isn’t the LGBT community actually doing exactly what the OWS movement is supposedly protesting against – a few dictating to the masses?

Word of God Proclaimed to Wall Street Occupiers

Repent America proclaimes the Gospel

While the "Occupy Wall Street" movement has been erupting in various cities across the country, RA has utilized the gatherings as opportunities to proclaim the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

One of the last commissions of Christ was to "[g]o ye therefore and teach all nations... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20) During the Occupy protests, the ministry preached and addressed a number of topics raised by the occupiers from a Biblical standard.

Repent America recently preached to crowds outside of City Hall in Philadelphia and in Liberty Square in New York City as hundreds gathered to express their outrage against corporate greed, many of whom blatantly espoused socialist and communist views. The ministry exhorted the occupiers to realize the sin in their own hearts, for they must change and be born again just as much as those that they are protesting against. The ministry also explained that there must be a foundation for absolute truth to determine right from wrong, and that God's law is the standard. His law must govern our lives both individually and as a nation.
 
Please pray that the Lord will use these and future outreach efforts to encourage many to put their trust in Jesus Christ.

"But God said unto him, 'Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?' So is he that layeth up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." - Luke 12:20-21

From Secularism to Atheism to Socialism to …

The changing landscape of America.

Current events have given us a glimpse into our future. The Occupy Wall Street movement is no exception. Though their message is not cohesive and varies widely, not only among individuals but also by location – one thing is clear. Their underlying message is wealth redistribution through entitlement and regulation, aka Socialism.

Where does this ideology come from? It originates as Secularism, that is to remove God from the public square and from any discussion related to public policy. After a generation or two Atheism becomes the worldview that is dominant I shaping ideology and policy. Out of this the culture is eager to embrace Socialism not realizing or ignoring the natural progression that has been demonstrated and proven many times throughout history.  

Former Atheist Peter Hitchens reminds his readers that Atheism and the political system it spawns – Socialism, comes at a great price to the 99% while catering to the elite.            

Peter Hitchens, brother of outspoken “New Atheist” Christopher Hitchens, is a British journalist and author of the book The Rage Against God, published in 2010. At age fifteen, young Peter set fire to his Bible on the playing field of his Cambridge boarding school and set out on a life of denying the existence of God.

Peter attributes his return to faith to seeing Socialism in practice during his years as a correspondent in Eastern Europe and in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his book, he describes what it was like for the Russian people who were living under the tyranny of godless Communism

 “Soviet citizens all knew life was like this. They knew the daily drudgery of finding anything decent to eat....They knew that if they wanted anesthetics at the dentist, or antibiotics at the hospital, or co-operation from their child’s teacher, or a holiday by the sea, they would need to bribe someone to get them. Even in Moscow, the show city of the Evil Empire, they knew that they dwelt in the suburbs of hell, that in mile after mile of mass-produced housing you would be hard put to find a single family untouched by divorce, that no mother reared her own children, that the schools taught lies, that secret government establishments leaked radiation into air and water. Fresh eggs were an event. ‘No’ meant ‘How much will you pay me?’ Rats were commonplace and played merrily among the trashcans of apartment blocks and in the entrances of railway terminals. Windows were filthy as a matter of course...

 “While most struggled to survive, a secret elite enjoyed great privilege - special living spaces, special hospitals with Western drugs and equipment, special schools in which their children were well taught in English, special waiting rooms in stations and airports, and special lanes along which the Politburo’s giant armored limousines roared at 90 miles an hour, shouldering aside anyone who dared get in the way. The elite had privileged access to good food, foreign travel and books, and the groveling servility of the organs of the state, which oppressed the common people and extorted money from them. This society, promoted by its leaders as an egalitarian utopia, was in truth one of the most unequal societies on earth.” ~ Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens describes life in Russia in the early 1990’s as harsh and dangerous. In 1990 there were 6.46 million abortions in the USSR and only 4.85 million live births.

Quote from Peter Hitchens’ book “The Rage Against God : how atheism led me to faith”

Worldview Blinders

There is a very good reason this blog is called Salt & Light Perspective

Occupy...?

Occupy Casper - October 15, 2011

Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum by holding demonstrations across the country. Wyoming is no exception. Casper was the site of the first Wyoming event held Saturday October 8^th. That gathering was attended by just over 40 people. Some traveled from as far away as Laramie.

By the following week gatherings were planned and held in Cheyenne, Casper and Jackson on Saturday & Sunday, October 15^th  – 16^th, respectively.

Despite their attempt to distance themselves from any political Party or platform the vast majority are Democrat. As evidenced by many of the statements reported in the media the movement seems to be fueled by Liberal ideology or dogma.

The underlying message is wealth redistribution through entitlement and regulation. While their message is being honed to sound more like that of conservatism in an effort to achieve their means the conclusion, if successful, will be a loss of personal liberty through the expansion of government ushered in by a society who has turned away from God and embraced entitlement mindset. 


Indeed, the focus is on the financial system but the reality is that our current economy is the by-product of moral relativism – the breakdown of the moral ethic that gave birth to the greatest nation on earth.