A Time For Choosing

This October 27 will be the 46 year anniversary at which Ronald Reagan give his famous speech, A Time For Choosing. Once again, folks will be going to the polls November 2, and it will be a time for choosing. A time to vote out of office those government officials who haven't been representing the American people but who have been more self-serving. Remember...

VOTE November 2.

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A Time For Choosing
Ronald Reagan
October 27, 1964

Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but
unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used "We’ve never had it so good."

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We have raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations in the world. We have $15 billion in gold in our treasury—we don’t own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are $27.3 billion, and we have just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.

As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach
the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well, I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

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DON'T FALL FOR CAP AND TAX

FROM:
The Phyllis Schlafly Report


Don't Fall for Cap and Tax

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Barack Obama promised that he won't raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. He neglected to mention that this tax exemption will go only to those who don't use electricity, gasoline, heating oil, or natural gas.

The truth of the matter is that Obama will raise taxes on practically all middle-class Americans. But that's not all; in addition to new taxes on all those necessities (just think of all the appliances in your home that use electricity), he will drastically reduce our standard of living.

Obama warned during his campaign in Oregon that we can no longer keep our homes set at 72 degrees (warmed in the winter and cooled in the summer), eat whatever foods we want (if, like meat and milk products, they come from cows that have to be fed), and drive SUVs (to accommodate our family and friends). He said we cannot continue to consume 25 percent of the world's resources when we have only 4 percent of the world's population.

But why not? Americans have built a free-enterprise, private-property, rule-of-law, respect-for-contracts, innovation-receptive society that has enabled us to enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. We designed it by adoption of our unique and long-lasting U.S. Constitution, we worked for it and we paid for it, so why can't we enjoy the fruits of our labor?

This increase in our taxes and decrease in our standard of living is being sold under the slogan "cap and trade," which means giving the government the power to put a cap on the amount of carbon emissions (CO2) produced by the production of electricity, gasoline, and heating oil, and forcing businesses to buy permits for the emissions they are allowed. The process should be called "cap and tax": a cap in our standard of living, and a tax (an increase in cost) on our use of products whose manufacture emits CO2.

The Obama administration hopes that increased energy costs will force us to shift away from the use of fossil fuels to various alternatives. To nuclear plants? The left won't tolerate that. To windmills and solar panels to capture wind and sun? They now provide less than 1 percent of our energy, so the gain won't be much even if we double or triple the output. To "clean coal technology"? More likely, cap and trade would just kill the coal industry.

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