Completely Missing the Point

Last Friday, December 14^th, in the Sandy HookSprings Elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, a lone gunman by the name of Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty-six people, most of them first-grade children, in what can only be described as pure evil on display.  The killer (notice that I did not say “alleged killer”), when emergency service people started to show up, then took his own life with the weapons he had just cut down so many innocent lives moments before.

The echoes of the weapon firing had not even stopped ringing through those halls before the president immediately began talking of the problem being a “gun control” issue.  The problem is not that people have the right “to keep and bear arms”.  The problem in the Sandy Hook Massacre is that there is a lack of personal responsibility being taught to our children.

Our culture condones everything in school except prayer by students and teachers in public school.  When God was kicked out of the public school systems back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, all we had left was a void which had to be filled.  You can read about a man who had a void in, of all places, the Bible, in Matthew 12:43-45, where a man who had a demon ejected from him life became worse because of the void that was produced by the vacancy of that evil spirit.  “When it (the evil spirit) arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.  Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” (Matt 12:44-46 NIV)  Every book on biology and nature will tell you that nature will not abide a void.  Something will come in to replace that which has been displaced.  It has taken almost forty years, but something has filled the void that was created when God left.

Before the 50’s and throughout most of the 60’s, schoolroom discipline was generally not a problem.  The teacher had complete control of her classroom and dealt with problems head-on without so much as batting an eye.  Children who where unruly or disrespectful in those days found themselves sitting in the principal’s office waiting to get punished by a swift swat on the behind or standing quietly in a corner in the classroom. But when God was kicked out, people like the ACLU came in and said that paddling a child was a form of child abuse and making a child stand in a corner in front of the rest of the class could hurt the child’s self esteem.  These are probably the same people who said that any consensual sex, even in a marriage, was a form of rape.  The discipline problems of that era were talking out of turn, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, dress code infractions and littering. 

In the 1990’s, the problems were drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Teachers were almost afraid to discipline their students for fear of retaliation.   When I was in high school from 1974 until 1977, there was an armed Cincinnati police officer who was part of the school staff as well as several security personnel who roamed the hallways to insure no one was outside his or her classroom while school was in session.  And that is still almost twenty years ago from where we are today.

The gun did not kill the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School any more than the bottle of whiskey drove a car into oncoming traffic and killed a family of four or the computer sent bullying messages by itself to a troubled teenager who committed suicide because of it.  These “tragedies” were caused by a human being acting in a way that is not even considered “animalistic”, since animals usually have a valid reason for the things they do or the way they act.  As long as we take personal responsibility out of the public arena, we will continue to have problems like these.  Adam Lanza sought to avoid such responsibility.  When the emergency response personnel showed up, he turned the gun on himself and killed himself.

All the reporters from the liberal press are saying that we need more gun control laws.  They are saying that we need more ‘gun free’ zones.  Unfortunately, to a psychopath like Adam Lanza, who killed his own mother while she slept in her bed, a ‘gun free’ zone is more like the ‘target rich environment’ he is used to in the violent video games he played in the basement of his home.  The National Rifle Association spokesman, Wayne LaPierre said it correctly when he said that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  The killer of twenty-six people, when he saw an armed response to his mayhem, took his own life rather than face the just consequences of his evil actions.  LaPierre said that policies banning guns at schools leave schoolchildren “utterly defenseless” and create a place that “insane killers” consider “the safest place to inflict the maximum mayhem with minimum risk.” (http://www.krdo.com/news/NRA-School-gun-bans-create-dangerous-places)        

Failure to Look Past the End of Their Noses

Billionaire Warren Buffet recently made comments in the New York Times that the president’s plan to “soak the rich” is not bad, it just needs some adjustments.  He feels that the bar for raising these taxes should be raised to people like him who make over 1 million dollars a year, no matter where they get their income. 

This would put an end to creating wealth through strategic investment and would greatly hamper anyone from becoming as wealthy as he is.  In a New York Times piece he wrote, he said, “Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”  He also wrote in that same piece that wealthy people like him “have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”

 Why would someone who has made a lot of money through his own efforts and hard work ask for the government to take more of his money away?  It just defies all common reason and logic.  Warren Buffet has done this for some very specific reasons.

1. Warren Buffet wants desperately to be liked by the political “in crowd” and all of their hanger-ons.  He’s afraid of the potential public relations problems he might face if he tells people who don’t have what he has, for any number of reasons, that he has a right to keep his own money without fear of the government taking it from him and wasting it on some cockamamie, hare-brained scheme to “make life more fair by spreading the wealth around” to everybody, no matter if they work or not.  He wants to be invited to the political dinners and be thought of as someone who‘s really an ‘okay guy for a rich guy’.  As they say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”  I never thought someone like him would be afraid of a little bit of bad publicity from people who haven’t got what it takes to do what he has done in his life.

2. Mr. Buffet apparently doesn't want anyone to be as wealthy as he is.  He’s not only at the top of the economic ladder, he wants to pull the ladder up so no one else can get to the heights he has reached.  For any young entrepreneur coming up, sorry, but there’s no room in the inn for you.

3. “The Oracle of Omaha”, as he is called is old and will probably not be here to face the consequences of his actions in the future.  At eighty years old, he’s not only in the autumn of his life, he’s in the dead of winter with eight feet of snow on his grave site.  But the taxes he will have to pay are probably of no consequence to him because he has enough to keep himself comfortable and that’s all that matters to him.  It reminds me of another very wealthy and powerful man who had the same attitude. 

There is a story in the book of 2 Kings about King Hezekiah, king of Judah.  He was sick and God told him through the prophet Isaiah to “put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.” (II Kings 20:1 NIV)  Hezekiah prayed to God with tears and God relented, allowing him to live another fifteen years.  A little later, the king of Babylon sent emissaries to him and Hezekiah showed them all the wealth of the kingdom.  When Isaiah asked what these men saw, Hezekiah told him that they saw everything in his palace.  God told him through Isaiah that the time would come when all his wealth would be taken away from him and his descendants would be slaves to the king of Babylon.  Hezekiah’s response?   “The word of the LORD you have spoken is good,” Hezekiah replied. For he thought, “Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?” (2 Kings 20:19 NIV)

There are a few things that maybe even Warren Buffet may not have considered, but then again, he probably has. The first is, and I’m no expert in economics and haven’t even taken an economics class in college, that anything you overtax will by its very nature shrinking in size.  The state of South Dakota had a referendum and passed a new tax of $1.00 per pack on every pack of cigarettes sold in the state in 2008.  The revenue generated was supposed to go to the schools.  Sales of cigarettes plummeted almost immediately with some people who lived on the borders of states like Iowa and Nebraska going across state lines to buy their cigarettes and others just quitting smoking altogether rather than pay such an exorbitant tax on their habit.  Even the state of California, which is almost bankrupt after years of democrat control, has lost almost two and a half million residents in the past ten years due to the excessive taxation of the people producing wealth.  According to a Manhattan study, “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look”, by Thomas Gray and Robert Scarmadilia (October 2012), roughly 225,000 residents vacate California each year and have done so consistently in the last decade.  And they take their money with them.  California has one-eighth of the country’s population but one-third of its welfare recipients.

France found out that “soaking the rich” is an invitation for the wealthy to find a more suitable climate to live when Gerard Depardieu, one of France’s most famous and beloved actors established a residence in the small village of Nechin in Belgium, just across the border from France, to avoid France’s 75% millionaire tax implemented by the socialist government of President Francois Hollande.  And he is not alone.  France’s richest man and head of the LVHM luxury goods empire, Bernard Arnault, and the Mulliez family, billionaire owners of Decathlon sports and the Auchan supermarkets also moved to Belgium to avoid excessive taxation of their wealth.  Others, like actor Johnny Depp, French  singer Johnny Hallyday and Alain Delon have also left the country of France to live, and pay taxes, elsewhere.    

Another thing people need to consider is that wealthy people are not stupid.  They did not get wealthy by just allowing the government or anybody for that matter, to just rob them blind.  The Warren Buffets of this world can leave this country and take up residence in any country they choose.  They don’t have to renounce their citizenship or anything drastic like that.  And when they are living in another country, that particular country gets the benefits of their wealth.

Costco and many other companies, The Washington Post included, are giving their yearly dividends before the new capital gains taxes taking effect on January 1^st.  This helps many wealthy people, Warren Buffet included, to avoid the new taxes that are obviously coming down the pike in the next few weeks.  I told you these people are not stupid.

Here’s a solution to Warren Buffet’s problem that he’s not paying enough taxes: Simply write a check made out to the IRS and mail it in to Washington DC.  There is no law against rich people giving more of their money, or all of their money if they so choose, to the federal government.  But making everybody do the same thing whether or not they want to or can afford to is just wrong-headed.

Both Warren Buffet and King Hezekiah are about as short-sighted as a man can be.  Both men’s thinking is exactly the same.  Neither of these two men could see past the end of their own noses and are only thinking about right now, right here.  Warren Buffet must be fairly intelligent to be as wise in business and to have such a great acumen at making wealth.  But his lack of foresight for his heirs and this country is about as selfish as a man can get.  He’s called the “Oracle of Omaha” and is supposed to be really smart.  These words and actions don’t seem all that smart to me.  They just seem selfish and petty.