Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton called for a new era of shared prosperity in America and told thousands at a presidential campaign rally Saturday that workers can trust her to fight for them. "It's America's basic bargain," Clinton said. "If you do your part, you ought to be able to get ahead, and when everybody does their part, America gets ahead too. "That bargain inspired generations of American families, including my own," the former secretary of state and first lady said.

Gaza is home to Palestinian people, who have suffered injustices and have a history of legitimate grievances against both Israel and Arab governments. If there's one immutable fact of life, it is that history cannot be changed or controlled. What can be changed and controlled is the future. That points to the most tragic aspect of people in poor territories such as Gaza -- focusing attention on the past, which they can do nothing about, and not paying enough attention to the future. In the case of Palestinians, the first order of business is to recognize that they cannot militarily...

Scott Walker is killing it with Republicans. The Wisconsin governor is one of his party's rising stars—thanks to his ongoing and largely successful war against his state's labor unions, a fight that culminated Monday with the signing of a controversial "right-to-work" bill. Now (for the moment, anyway), he's a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple weeks ago, he polled a close second to three-time winner Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by a significant margin. It probably won't...

Like many Freepers, I was raised in a Christian denomination that did not teach the Prosperity Gospel (PG). In the last few years, I have tried to make sense of the prosperity teachings, and it is possible that I may not fully understand them. But I will explain the PG teachings as best as I am able to understand them. The Prosperity Gospel teaches that rich people are rich, because they engage in the behavior that God approves of, and this means that rich people are blessed by God. But poor people are poor, because they engage in behavior that...

[When] Obama delivered his first State of the Union address in 2009, 53% of Americans considered themselves middle class. Six years later, just 44% of Americans define themselves that way..... The middle class itself, however, has changed notably during the relatively short time Obama has been in office, as the chart below shows. The portion of Americans who consider themselves middle class has dropped (as has the portion considering themselves upper class), while the ranks who call themselves lower class have swelled.

We live in an age of miracles. Throughout all of human history, material progress essentially didn’t exist until around 1800. The economic trajectory was flat until the human lot began to improve in ways that would have been unimaginable in prior millennia. This change gave us the world as we know it. In her brilliant book on the transformation, Bourgeois Dignity, Deirdre McCloskey writes how the average person in the world subsisted on roughly $3 a day during humanity’s long economic stasis. Then, with the breakout, countries that experienced modern growth over the past couple of centuries saw their material...

Since when did, “I’m offended,” become an argument that trumps all facts, logic and common sense? When did regularly claiming to be aggrieved on behalf of some splinter of the population become a high paying gig? How did we get to a point in America where people are PROUD to tell you that they’re “victims?” There are a lot of reasons things have gone so wrong on this front, but ironically, the biggest is that our nation has had so much success. Americans are now considerably richer and more educated as a group than Americans were a few generations ago....

This morning I woke up and read an article about the Olsteen Predicament. It was kind of weird because the issue of the prosperity gospel has been coming up a lot lately. I watched the video of Victoria Olsteen’s sermon and wondered why anyone would believe that crap. It is so easy to see that her preaching that our happiness is the ultimate goal of following Christ is completely opposite of what Jesus Himself says in the Gospel. My problems with the Olsteens and people like them such as TD Jakes, Joyce Meyer and so many mega church pastors are...

Email from Joel Osteen. I have posted the daily email that Joel Osteen sends out. Ordinarily people are not allowed to debate this email. In this case you may but please be respectful of others who may follow Osteen. http://www.joelosteen.com/Pages/MessageViewer.aspx?date=2014-09-03

With the in-your-face display of greed and arrogance of the so-called pastors on the reality show Preachers of L.A., I began to wonder: when will black Christians wake up and say enough is enough?  Although there are some white pastors of mega-churches who have a net worth of almost triple their congregants as well, I want to focus on the plight of the black saints who sit under the ministry of black pastors (and some white pastors) Sunday after Sunday and continue to live paycheck to paycheck.After some years of attending mega-churches pastored by both black and white men and...

Finally, after being headquartered in Torrance, Calif., for half a century, Toyota has had enough of CaliforniaÂ’s anti-business, anti-growth policies and is packing its bags and moving to Plano, Texas, where the contrast couldnÂ’t be greater. And Toyota is not alone in fleeing California. You can tell a lot about the hot spots in America by tracking where Americans are moving to and where they are running from. Every year, about 3 million Americans move from one state to another; the combined adjusted gross incomes (AGI) of these movers and shakers is over $140 billion. Last week, the IRS...

FRENCH ECONOMIST and darling of the left Thomas Piketty is the latest in an endless array of economists who are clueless regarding profits and what brings about prosperity and a higher standard of living. In his call for ferocious wealth and income taxes on a global scale to combat what he believes is the growing inequality between the rich and everyone else, Piketty has become a media rock star. This merely underscores the fact that pundits and all too many journalists, politicos and economists know less about money and economics than their forebears did 100 years ago. No wonder the...

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, the 78-page report written by a then 38-year old Daniel Patrick ‘Pat’ Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor for policy in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, was never supposed to see the light of day. The Negro Family, which later came to be widely known simply as “The Moynihan Report,” did not even originally have Moynihan’s name on it’s cover–the document was only meant to be distributed to high-ranking members of the Johnson administration in order to spur discussion regarding what policies could be implemented in order to assist the Negro family...

The timing is impeccable: A dozen famed conservatives with liberty, tradition and smaller government on their minds gather a mere 72 hours before Tax Day dawns. That would be the Freedom Summit on Saturday, a daylong showcase organized by Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United, staged in Manchester, the most bustling town in New Hampshire.

America succeeds because Americans fail and forgive. That's the intriguing message -- or part of it -- of Megan McArdle's new book "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success." McArdle, a Bloomberg blogger and columnist, stands out among economic writers, and not just because she's the only woman among them who is 6 feet 2 inches. She combines a shrewd knowledge of economics and practical experience with a writing style that every so often segues into comedy monologue. Americans fail a lot, she argues. Most new businesses fail. Most predictions are wrong. As the...

**SNIP** In recent weeks Sen. Hagan has attempted to distance herself from President Obama and his administrations failed policies.

The United States is in the midst of an economic paradigm shift as evidenced by the evolution of state-level economies. States that used to be bastions of economic innovation are experiencing decline, while other states pick up the slack and replace them on the cutting edge of industry. In terms of public policy, the key to this shift lies in economic freedom and pro-growth tax and regulatory policies; states are realizing these policies are more likely to grow their economies rather than levying high taxes. Data show states with lower tax burdens vastly outperform their high-tax counterparts in nearly every...

Anyone that's familiar what the bible, anything like that, when Jesus said that you're going straight to hell if you didn't treat the less of his brothers and sisters, and what did he say, he said he was hungry. They give him food stamps. – Tax evading Congressman Charlie Rangel The demons are emerging from their pits, folks, and they're slithering toward the TV cameras. Cheatin' Charlie is not "familiar" with "the bible, anything like that." If he were, he would understand that "You Shall Not Steal" and "You Shall Not Covet" are two of the Ten Commandments, and that...

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told a gathering of Democrats, “The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it.” Ellison was discussing his ‘Inclusive Prosperity Act’ measure at the July 25th Progressive Democrats of America roundtable in Washington. “People like, George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sax, Dean Baker, Robert Poland, Larry Summers have said they all support a transaction tax,” Ellison said. “The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it,” Ellison continued, “The government...

If proverbial Martians descended on Earth and toured America's crowded shopping malls, traveled its congested highways and sampled its technological marvels - from the many cable channels to ubiquitous smartphones - these visitors would be hard-pressed to describe the United States as poor or its economy as failing. The truth is that, even in its current unsatisfactory condition, America is an immensely wealthy society. It produces $16 trillion in annual goods and services, provides 136 million jobs and supports a median household income of $50,000. I do not cite these facts to excuse our economic faults. But it's important to keep...