Tag: liberty

“Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.” –George Washington

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad.

“But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.

“Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic.

“…The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

“… For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic. ” —Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

So, too, would I include those would refer to themselves as: African-American, Hispanic-American, Arab-American, Asian-American, et al. We are one people of many ethnicities, but one unique culture: American. If you feel you cannot refer to yourself as such without hyphenation, then do as Roosevelt suggested and leave. (Thanks to Rick for the link.)

“It is almost pathetic to see the emerging lineup of Democratic presidential hopefuls slobbering all over themselves in search of a defining issue —anything—to justify their pursuit of the land’s highest office. When you watch these guys explaining their decisions to run you can’t help but get the impression they are trying to convince themselves they have a legitimate reason to displace an exceedingly popular president during wartime.

“…Unless things go way south with the war and the economy, Democrats will be in trouble because they have no constructive solutions. So they’ll fall back on their tired strategy of demonizing Republicans and scaring and dividing voters, along economic, race, gender and religious lines. The more bereft they are of ideas, the nastier they will get. Which means it’s not going to be pretty.” —David Limbaugh

“The first thing to keep in mind is that it is almost impossible to cut any tax without making the people who pay that tax richer. And, rich people pay a lot more taxes than poor people do.

“According to the Tax Foundation, more than five out of every six dollars collected by the federal government were paid by the top 25 percent of taxpayers. You need a gross adjusted income of $55,225 to qualify as a member of the top quarter. Now, if all these people qualify as ‘rich,’ so be it. If cutting their taxes makes them richer, so be that, too.

“The top 1 percent, by the way, pay 37 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. Democrats keep talking about how little poor people will get from an income tax cut. That’s true—because poor people pay so little in income taxes.

“How about creating a tax system in this country that makes everybody feel like they’re paying their fair share? I don’t want to raise taxes on anybody—I want to cut them for everybody. But having a system where vast segments of the working population are clients of the government and a small number are funders of it is not only institutionalized class warfare, it’s the exact opposite of shared sacrifice.” —Jonah Goldberg [emphasis added]

“The central question in this debate is not whether government should decide how much money it will allow us to keep. Rather, it is how much of our money we will allow the government to spend.” —Cal Thomas

A return to the constitutionally-granted powers of the federal government would go a long way toward bringing down the tax burden on all Americans.

Friday’s Federalist opined on President Bush’s proposed economic policy, and this gem on tax cut vernacular:

“And Sociocrats depend on one tactical tool–control the debate using their army of sycophants in the Leftmedia. Together, the political and chattering tribes conspire to control the debate by manipulating the vernacular: government spending becomes ‘investment,’ tax cuts ‘cost’ the government, letting you keep your money become ‘a rebate,’ and they ask questions like can government ‘afford the tax cuts’ and suggest that reducing taxes causes deficits when anyone with half a wit knows that spending causes deficits.”