Wilson County Tea Party Reports – YOU DECIDE!

A 200 page document has been issued outlining the issue positions of Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney.

If you are unsure whether or not Mitt Romney is the candidate for you, we urge you to take a look at his political positions through the years.

Romney Political Positions

We need your help!

We have been asked to participate in a petition drive to stop the encroachment of the Agenda 21 program on our lives by making a plea to our legislators to do whatever is necessary to protect us from this horrific program. Agenda 21, once described as an ‘all encompassing tyranny’ is an United Nations-backed program designed to eliminate just about every individual right that we currently enjoy.

This is how AmericanPolicy.org defines the Agenda 21 project (otherwise known as ‘sustainable development’):

“According to its authors, the objective of sustainable development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity. Sustainablists insist that every societal decision be based on environmental impact, focusing on three components; global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction.”

Read the entire description of the Agenda 21 project here.

The petition drive will take place at our January 23rd WCTP meeting (more info here). We ask you to PLEASE attend & participate in our petition drive!

The State Senate and House approved the new redistricting plans this past week with only a few minor changes.

These maps will be used in the 2012 election process this fall.

The TN State House has released their redistricting map.

Middle TN old map

Statewide new map

The TN State Senate has released their redistricting maps.

Middle TN old map

Middle TN new map

For more info on other Senate redistricting info, please click here.

Wilson County will remain in District 17 (currently Mae Beaver’s district). Senator Beaver’s district will remain relatively intact other than the loss of Trousdale County (which will move to the 18th district).

The Congressional redistricting map for TN was recently released based on 2010 Census statistics. According to the Republican majority, it will correct some of the gerrymandering in the previous district divisions that were designed to keep the left in power. (Article)

Current map

New map

In a move welcomed by many conservative voters in the west part of Wilson County, the new map eliminates the Congressional split in Wilson County between the 5th and 6th Congressional District. It will be incorporated into the 6th District.

March 6, 2012 is Primary Election Day in Tennessee!

To assist you in determining which candidate to vote for, we’ve put together these 2 charts comparing the campaign platforms of six of the top candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination. The first eight rows under each candidate lists their campaign promises and beliefs as outlined on their campaign website. We have taken the words from their websites as much as possible.

The remaining two rows contain bits of info NOT provided by the candidate but are items we believe are critical to understanding the candidate.

We urge you to compare the positions of each of these candidates before arriving at your voting decision. We also encourage you to investigate other candidates running for this position who are not listed on these charts such as Jon Huntsman, Gary Johnson and others.

Each chart contains 3 of the Republican primary candidates. The candidates are listed in alphabetical order and their order on the charts in no way reflects our support for a candidate. Chart 1 contains Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Chart 2 contains Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

Chart 1: Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul

Chart 2: Perry, Romney, Santorum

We MUST defeat Barack Obama in 2012! Please participate in the voting process!

Obama’s latest ‘We Can’t Wait’ ploy is an attempt to change the Obamacare legislation to correct some of the ‘problems’ in it without the input of Congress!

According to a recent article written in The Blaze website, the Administration is proposing an IRS rule that shows a blatant disregard for Congress as well as past Supreme Court rulings on similar situations:

“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.)

This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.

The Obama administration wants to avoid that legislative debacle, so this summer it proposed an IRS rule to offer premium assistance in all exchanges “whether established under section 1311 or 1321.” On Nov. 17 the IRS will hold a public hearing on that proposal. According to a Treasury Department spokeswoman, the administration is “confident” that offering premium assistance where Congress has not authorized it “is consistent with the intent of the law and our ability to interpret and implement it.” (Full article)

We urge you to call or write your U.S. Rep’s office as well the offices of both of our U.S. Senators and DEMAND that they stop the President from bypassing Congress and, therefore, the American people on this issue. Congress wrote this law and ONLY Congress can change it.

Rep. Black: http://black.house.gov/
Rep. Cooper: http://cooper.house.gov/
Sen. Corker: http://corker.senate.gov/public/
Sen. Alexander: http://alexander.senate.gov/public/

Please do not allow the President to make the voice of the people irrelevant!

In case you haven’t heard, legislation was recently signed into law that requires TN residents to provide identification in order to vote. We fully support this legislation but also want to ensure that each and every person is prepared to vote in 2012.

Here are the new requirements. If you do not already have the proper ID, we urge you to begin the processing now of obtaining an ID.

Message from the Tennessee Secretary of State

New Voter ID Requirements for 2012

FROM THE AUGUST ISSUE OF THE WCTP NEWSLETTER:

The American people were the big losers in the recent debt ceiling scam perpetrated by the Washington elitists who truly believe that the citizens of this country are simpletons unable to absorb pertinent facts and reach a logical conclusion. Frankly, their ‘compromise’ deal fixed NOTHING and WE KNOW IT! The almost-immediate S&P credit downgrade proved us right!

The ‘right’ touted the debt compromise as the ‘best they could do’ since they only control the U.S. House while the left controls the Senate, the Presidency and the forth wing of liberal government, the media. The left, on the other hand, spewed a headache-inducing rant calling for increased taxes coupled with the status quo in Social Security and Medicare spending along with their promise to punish the evil rich and their evil corporations.

Despite the right’s promise that they achieved ‘cuts that equal more than the debt ceiling increase’, they actually got nothing. Why? Because the 900-pound gorilla remains in the room and it continues to suffocate us.

What is the gorilla?

It is baseline budgeting and, until it is eliminated and replaced with zero baseline budgeting we will continue to dig our economic grave.

Baseline budgeting was born in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. That legislation required the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prepare projections of federal spending for the upcoming fiscal year based on a continuation of the existing level of governmental services. It also required the newly established Congressional Budget Office to prepare five-year projections of budget authority, outlays, revenues, and the surplus or deficit.

Essentially, baseline budgeting is a budget projection of current services. The only change that has been made to this economic farce in the last two+ decades is that the projections are now made for 10 years rather than the original 5 years into the future.

Baseline budgeting assumes that every government agency needs to increase their budget 3-10% each year regardless of the amount of money actually needed by that agency the previous year. These spending increases are AUTOMATIC! An increase in spending is expected while there is nothing to reward fiscal responsibility. The process encourages waste and abuse by each government agency. It also allows our federal officials to spew propaganda to the American people by falsely claiming that budgets are being ‘cut’ when, in reality, they are simply not being raised or being raised by a smaller amount than originally projected.

In a recent monologue, radio personality Rush Limbaugh described baseline budgeting like this (full transcript):

Baseline budgeting is based on the presumption that every item in the budget will automatically increase between three and 10% depending on what the item is, every year, regardless what happened in the previous year. This is why, for example, at the end of the year the agriculture department starts advertising for food stamp applicants because they want their budget to increase. So they don’t look at the reality, and say, “You know what, we don’t need this much money in this department. We have more money than we need. We don’t have as many people needing food stamps as we have food stamps.” They don’t look at it and then cut back and tell the government, “You know what, you can cut us here.” They will go out and give away food stamps in order to make sure they get that three to 10% increase. But that three to 10% increase every year becomes the starting point for every budget negotiation.

So, for example, when Obama passes the stimulus bill, another trillion dollars effectively is added to the baseline. No consideration is given to whether or not the money was spent wisely, wasted effectively or whatever. It was just spent. And because it was spent, there must be an increase in that line item every year. The way this manifests itself in Washington, the best way I have ever found to illustrate this is to put yourself in the situation where you’re going to go buy a new car. You’ve looked at your budget, and you have decided that you can afford the monthly payment on a $40,000 car. So you go to the showrooms or you go to the Internet or you go wherever you look to buy a car, and you find a car you really love for $70,000 that the dealer tells you is on sale, that you can get it for 60.

So you and the family discuss it, and if you’re like Washington, what you do is you tell yourself, “You know what? Let’s get that $70,000 car that only costs 60, and we will save ourselves $10,000.” But you haven’t. You have spent $20,000 more than you originally allocated. You originally said you’re gonna buy a $40,000 car, then you find one you really like for 70, on sale for 60, you plop down the 60, which is 20 more than you wanted to spend, and tell yourself you saved ten. That’s how it works. That’s baseline budgeting. That is how a cut or a saving is actually an increase.

Therefore, the ‘tax increases’ constantly touted by the Democrats as the solution to our debt crisis would only add to the baseline budget in the year following their implementation – essentially increasing our debt in the long term. Remember, we do NOT have a revenue problem!

Baseline budgeting is legalized fraud and the taxpayers are the unsuspecting victims. For instance, a 3 percent increase in the budget of a program that was originally expecting an increase of 8 percent is still a budget increase – NOT A BUDGET CUT. However, under baseline budgeting, any increase less than the increase projected by the OMB is considered be a cut. Former CEO of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca, once stated that if the business world used baseline budgeting the way Congress does “they’d throw us in jail.”

A particularly favorite ploy of the left is the attempt to ‘get a rise’ from the uninformed public by issuing blatantly false statements indicating that the right is cutting funding for favorite programs when, in reality, the right has only suggested a cut in the growth rate of spending for these programs or agencies. “Draconian cut” is a favorite rhetorical rant and, unfortunately, it resonates with the ignorant or apathetic voting public.

Rush’s 7/27/11 monologue also describes the preposterous way our government budgetary agency would look at a freeze in government spending:

“One final thought to illustrate the absurdity of our baseline, and I’ll leave you alone. If Speaker Boehner –” now, listen to me very carefully, folks “– if Speaker Boehner were to propose that we simply freeze all government spending immediately, including mandatory and discretionary, meaning including the entitlements, if we just freeze everything and spend no more this year than we spent last year, the Congressional Budget Office would score that as a nine and a half trillion-dollar cut.”

In fact, the OMB has projected that the cumulative total of our automatic baseline increases for the next ten years is approximately $9.5 TRILLION. Therefore, if we cut $2.1 to 2.4 TRILLION from our debt over the next 10 years (the amount promised by the recent debt ‘compromise’), our debt will still increase by about $7.1 TRILLION over 10 years! The ‘compromise’ passed by our Congress and signed by the President last week didn’t do one thing to stop our massive spending because baseline budgeting still exists and there is nothing in this legislation to stop the automatic increases given to each agency year after year. As Rush also points out, the baseline budget for 2021 is already $5.7 TRILLION. Necessary or otherwise, it’s a done deal under our current budget system. The baseline budget for 2013 is $2 TRILLION more than 2012 budget even though not one of your representatives in Washington got together to discuss the merits of a single agency receiving the increase in spending – not one meeting to decide if a program was effective or if your money was being spent wisely. (You might want to keep in mind that these automatic increases in agency budgets are taking place while our government is telling seniors that there is no inflation and, therefore, there is no need to increase the amount of Social Security benefits they receive. So, why then, do agency budgets need to increase so dramatically?)

What can we do about this deceitful process?

We need to eliminate baseline budgeting IMMEDIATELY by passing legislation that will stop the automatic increase in federal spending each year. At least one such bill (HR920 Zero Baseline Budget Act of 2011) was introduced in the U.S. House in March of this year and currently has 34 co-sponsors. Unfortunately, neither Wilson County Representative (Diane Black or Jim Cooper) has signed on as co-sponsor. There may, however, be other such bills that we are unaware of which address the same issue. Any representative serious about achieving true fiscal reform, however, must support legislation of this type because, without it, we are on a fast train to financial ruin.

It is time to end the farce known as baseline budgeting. The budget of each federal program/agency should start at ZERO each year! Each agency/program should have to justify their current expenditures and thoroughly document their need for an increase. As long as we are federal debt, increases should be non-existent or, at least, very minimal. Instead, each agency should be cutting their budget year after year until fiscal responsibility is brought back to this government. A cut should be called a cut and a spending increase should be called a spending increase. The deliberate deceit must stop and it must stop now.

We urge you to contact the offices of Reps Diane Black and Jim Cooper as well as the offices of our two TN Senators, Alexander and Corker, to insist (politely, of course) that they support and pass a zero-baseline budget bill. We need to ensure that this will be an issue in the 2012 election so please pass on this information to your friends and family.

Whether you realize it or not, Congress put the federal government on fiscal auto-pilot in 1974. Since that time, we have all been foolish enough to believe that we were sending representatives to Washington to make a difference, to change things for the better. Unfortunately, we’ve been scammed because each representative that has gone to Washington since that time has issued well-crafted falsehoods in the form of press releases leading us to believe that they were getting tough on waste, fraud and abuse. They assured us that they were reigning-in out-of-control government. In reality, however, each of them knew – upon arriving in D.C. – that the system was profoundly broken yet almost none of them had the courage to stand up before the American people and tell the truth. Instead, they lined up behind the others who had come to Washington before them and did nothing to truly address the problems plaguing our government for fear of losing their high profile job. Most of our reps in Washington chose the path of least resistance and pretended to represent the unsuspecting citizens of this country. For this, we will ALL pay a heavy price.