A perfect example is the obsession Democrats have with expanding the federal employee workforce.  The Left knows that the more people working for the government, the more votes they can count on as they promise more and more increases in salary and benefits.  Liberals pose this as a "political" issue, pitting their compassionate benevolence against the miserliness of cold-hearted conservatives and Republicans. but it is actually an ideological (and common sense) one more than anything else.

The Left believes in bigger government and redistributing wealth.  The Right believes in economic freedom, the superiority of the private sector in creating jobs and generating wealth, and personal responsibility.  The government cannot create jobs without taking money from people already working.  Everyone agrees we need a certain number of public sector employees to guard our streets and maintain public utilities, but there is a limit to what any economy can fund.  For the Obama administration to claim that they are "creating jobs" by putting more workers on the government's payroll is disingenuous at best.

The Heritage Foundation has an interesting new study on the whole matter of "public vs. private sector" workers and job creation.  Here's an excerpt:

Salaries and benefits—for identical jobs—are 30 percent to 40 percent higher in the federal government than in the private sector. Claims that this dramatic discrepancy in compensation is warranted because of government workers’ high skills are unjustified, as this study shows. Equally unjustified is the fact that federal workers can rarely be fired, no matter how poor their job performance. Congress should align federal salaries and benefits with market rates—a simple, and fair, move that could save taxpayers nearly $47 billion in 2011. Heritage Foundation labor policy analyst James Sherk provides detailed data on why Congress should not overtax all Americans to overpay the privileged workers in the civil service.

Read the full report here, and please send it to 10 friends or family members.  This isn't some peripheral issue: it gets to the heart of the differences between Right and Left in this country.  It involves the economic solubility and future of our economy (and way of life).

In his most recent column, Dr. Sowell discusses the Republican party's frustrating insistence upon falling for the same promise from Democrats that they will cut spending if the GOP will go along with higher taxes.

People who remember the old comic strip “Peanuts” will recall an often-repeated situation where Lucy offers to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick. Then, as Charlie comes running up to kick it, Lucy snatches away the ball, and Charlie Brown loses his balance and goes crashing on his backside.

The reason this same scene remained funny, despite how often it was repeated, is that in the later repetitions Charlie Brown would express suspicion at Lucy, recalling how she had tricked him before. She would then come up with some claim that she wasn’t going to do that anymore — and of course she did.

There is a similar routine that has been repeated many times in Washington over the years, with the Democrats playing Lucy and Republicans playing Charlie Brown.

It goes like this: Democrats start spending money wildly, handing out goodies to a wide range of people whom they want to vote for them, while Republicans complain about deficits and the national debt. Then, when the public becomes alarmed about the debts that are piling up, the Democrats get the Republicans to vote for higher taxes to deal with the debt crisis, in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

Sometimes the deal is sweetened by the Democrats’ promising to make spending cuts if the Republicans vote for higher taxes, so that there can be one of those “bipartisan” solutions so beloved by the media. But, after the Republicans vote for the tax increases and come running up to find the spending cuts, the Democrats snatch away the spending cuts and the Republicans fall right on their backsides, just like Charlie Brown.

But we must not fall prey to the tempting position of only blaming our politicians.  "We the people" put those politicians in place, and continue to vote for them even after they've proven to be wholly untrustworthy and/or incompetent.

Republicans are not the only suckers in this game. The voting public’s willingness to believe fancy rhetoric and ignore hard facts is a crucial part of this scam.

When the Obama administration said that it could provide health insurance to millions of additional people without increasing the national debt, shouldn’t common sense have told you that somebody was insulting your intelligence?

When the 2,000-page bill was rushed through Congress too fast for anybody to read it, shouldn’t that have made you realize that you were being played for a sucker?

When this bill, which was passed with lightning speed, was scheduled to take effect only after the 2012 election, didn’t that suggest that they didn’t want you to find out how it would work in practice in time to turn against Obama when he came up for reelection?

Stop the madness by equipping yourself with information, facts, and a passion for being the best citizen-activist you can be.  Please.

This is Keynesian Economics in its purest form. John Maynard Keynes was a 20th century economist who postulated (to the delight of socialists, collectivists, and Marxists everywhere) that due to the volatile nature of the free market economy, the federal government must move from its role as umpire and become one of the key players in the economic game. Speaker Pelosi has taken this dis-proven theory to new lows by flatly stating that unemployment checks from Uncle Sam should now be considered the equivalent of private sector job creation.

But who is paying for those "stimulus" checks?

Liberal and progressive Democrats do not wish to be bogged down with the messy details of economics. There is no self-congratulatory rush of warm emotions from telling the American people that fiscal responsibility (and math) dictate that we cannot sustain our current parade of government hand-outs. Nowhere better than in Illinois do we understand that unsustainable nature of Leftist economic policies.

As the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to say: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money."

From Bloomberg:

Chancellor Angela Merkel championed German export strength as “the right thing” for her country, spurning President Barack Obama’s call to boost private spending as both leaders prepare for Group of 20 talks.

Merkel, addressing a business audience in Berlin today, said she told Obama in a phone call that cutting government debt is “absolutely important for us,” exposing a second point of contention ahead of the June 26-27 G-20 summit in Canada.

Reducing the budget deficit by 10 billion euros ($12 billion) per year “won’t put a brake on the world’s economic growth,” Merkel said, relating what she told Obama yesterday. Germans are more likely to spend money if they feel the government “is taking precautions” to ensure solid finances, she said.

Europe has tried the welfare state as its governing economic worldview, and it has failed.  Miserably.  As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once put it: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money."

For all the talk of pragmatism and rational, prudent judgment when media pundits describe President Obama's governing style, the man seems to know very little about how economics (aka "math") works in the real world.  The administration has been putting pressure on Germany not to get their own financial house in order, but to "Spend, Baby, Spend!"

Four days before world leaders meet in Toronto, Germany is heading for conflict with the rest of the G-20 over tighter financial regulation, a banking levy and U.S. calls to boost growth rather than cut debt.

Of course none of this is a surprise to the voters in a city like Chicago and of a state like Illinois.  Higher taxes, stifling regulation on business, unchecked spending, and rampant corruption all follow the economic policies of big-government liberals wherever they go.

Whether we're talking about Berwyn, IL, or Berlin, Germany, we desperately need political leaders who are willing to take tough, perhaps even unpopular, stances when it comes to government spending.

Here is Dr. Walter E. Williams, an economist at George Mason University, explaining some of the problems that stem from debt, deficits, and inflation spending:

Some snake-oil salesman named "Reverend Billy" made a documentary called "What Would Jesus Buy?" that encouraged Christians to stop buying stuff around Christmas time.  Why?  Good question.

With a lot of heart, and very little head, Reverend Billy made his way to the Fox Business Channel to make his thoroughly naive and under-informed case to the world.

Unfortunately for Billy, and fortunately for us, Father Robert Sirico, founder of the free-market think-tank The Acton Institute, was on-hand to bring Rev. B's fantasy land a healthy dose of reality.

Now, of course Billy is right to say that American consumers spend way too much on far too many pointless, wasteful, indulgent items each year...but that's where his being right and the truth part company.  As Father Sirico astutely points out, the stores Billy Boy is protesting against employ millions of Americans.  Lives move from government dependency to personal liberty, freedom and dignity when someone can find a job on their own, even if it is at Starbucks or Wal-Mart or any other mega-chain that religious liberals decide to rail against.

The Mall of America being filled with workers and consumers isn't the problem in this country; its churches and parishes being increasingly empty of thoughtful, well-informed, passionate proponents of the truth Scripture teaches about everything from private property to the priority of culture is the problem.

Say what you will about him, but Glenn Beck is willing to go deeper with his audience than chalk-boards and heated rhetoric.  Last week, Beck did an entire hour on the impact Road to Serfdom has had on the West since it was first published nearly 70 years ago.  Watch these clips and learn something.

Honestly, after doing an hour on my favorite book, one of the most important books of the past century, Beck could do a week of juggling on a unicycle on his show and I'd still defend him for this.

For a small glimpse of what a candid, honest, and un-compromising Republican actually looks (and sounds) like, PLEASE watch this:

Preach it, brother!

I love how the first lady who complained said that, in her mind, she wasn't making enough money...and when reminded by Gov. Christie that, like the rest of society, she "didn't have to" pick the line of work she was in, suddenly remembered that she (and all teachers) only do their jobs because they want to and they love it.

Oh, and by the way, that woman's name is Rita Wilson, and she works in the Rutherford School District...and makes $86,000 per year.

The point here is not that teachers aren't as valuable to society as say a professional baseball player, but simply that the state (and federal government) is not an endless supply of funds as the governor pointed out.  You can't run a budget based on emotional outbursts form angry women in a townhall meeting.  School choice, something I would have thought open-minded liberals would love, is the best alternative for well-qualified, hard-working teachers, as I'm sure Ms. Wilson is.  I WANT good teachers to be rewarded, but when the unions (who are also the single biggest contributors to the political campaigns of Democrats) rule a state like they do in New Jersey, California or Illinois, we're forced as a society to pay the horrendous ones more and more as well.  This is unsustainable.

Everyone loses when there is no competition and people are guaranteed jobs for life.

The American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public sector unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.

Mort Zuckerman is the Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, and was an initial supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009. But lately, Mr. Zuckerman has changed his tune as he (and America) has watched the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid throw economic caution and fiscal responsibility to the wind.

In his latest column, Zuckerman makes the critically important point that there is rampant and nefarious collusion between the public employee unions and the politicians they work tirelessly to elect.

The business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. The public sector unions organize voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether they are sustainable. And what is happening with California is happening in slower motion in the rest of the country. It must be one of the reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor unions generally has plummeted "amid growing public skepticism about unions' power and purpose."

There has been a transformation in the nature of our employment. Labor is no longer dominated by private sector industrial workers who were in large part culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. Over recent decades public sector employment has exploded and public workers have come to dominate the labor movement. These public sector employees have a unique and powerful advantage in contract negotiations. Quite simply it is their capacity to deliver political endorsements and votes for the very people who are theoretically on the other side of the negotiating table. Candidates who want to appear tough on crime will look to cops, sheriffs' deputies, prison guards, and highway patrol officers for their endorsement.

The point here isn't to pile blame on every union and every member of those unions. But to deny that there is a conflict of interest for the politician who marries his or her campaign to the same union workers that are being paid (exorbitantly) with the tax dollars that this same politician will have some control over.

City government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink government spending. It is particularly difficult when public sector unions have such a unique lever of pressure.

We have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of local municipalities. The electorate won't swallow any more red ink.

Free markets aren't perfect, but state-controlled economies, the kind we're seeing implode in Greece, always lead to societal collapse.

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville

The governor of Arizona, a Republican woman named Janice Brewer, signed a bill into law last week that will allow law enforcement agents in her state to arrest people for breaking the law.

That’s what I call “edgy” policy-making, no?

In the minds of our progressive-liberal friends on the Left, the crime of entering the United States of America illegally pales in comparison to the seemingly unforgivable transgression of pointing out that entering the United States of America illegally is, well – illegal.

Unfortunately for all of us, one of the loudest critics of we illegal immigration “whistle-blowers” happens to be the Commander-in-Chief and 44^th president of those same United States of America.

Barack Obama, a man sworn to defend the Constitution, to uphold the integrity of our republic, to defend our borders, shows more public disdain and disapproval when one of the nation’s 50 executive leaders legislatively declares that circumventing the law is no longer a tolerable option, than he does about Iranian and North Korean nuclear “activities.”

The actions by the Arizona legislature threaten “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans,” Obama said.

Really?  How so?  With all due and proper respect for a Community Organizer of President Obama’s stature, what in the world could be more unfair than to allow more than 11 million people to get away with breaking America’s laws?  How fair do you think it is to the millions waiting (and desperate) to get into the U.S. legally?

“Surely we can all agree that when 11 million people in our country are living here illegally, outside the system, that’s unacceptable,” Obama said. “The American people demand and deserve a solution.”

But only if that solution doesn’t involve any of those pesky American people, clinging to their “guns and religion”, deciding for themselves how best to deal with the “unacceptable” problem, right?  Those yahoos can’t be trusted with a spork to eat their mashed potatoes at KFC, let alone with decisions pertaining to the legal, cultural and economic fate of their beloved nation.

What happened to the Man of Hope who, according to he and his wife Michelle, wasn’t going to allow us to “sit on the sidelines” anymore?  How can the politician interested in getting people on the local and community levels involved in the political process now be upset that a state (full of people living in local communities) is handling the immigration matter in-house?

Is President Obama tearing down the actions of concerned citizens with “a lot of talking”?

Here’s the message I’ve been receiving from Washington D.C. for the last four years regarding illegal immigration: The decisions of individual citizens, municipalities, counties, and states can’t be trusted (or possibly be fair), but the same people who brought you FEMA, Fannie and Freddie, the public education system that is ranked 35^th in Math and 29^th in Science in the world, and the “Cash for Clunkers” program last summer will set crooked paths straight, right every wrong, and wipe every tear from every illegal immigrants eye…eventually.  (Just stop trying to fix things on your own, you tax-paying, law-abiding, meddling twits.)

“Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others,” Obama said.  “That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona.”

Absolutely true, Mr. President: the legislative and executive branches of our federal government have thoroughly failed the American taxpayer by their dereliction of duty to deal with the out-of-control border situation and immigration dilemma.

But my question is this: Why does it always have to be Big Brother that corrects every important problem in every area of the country?  Why should a state like AZ trust you, President Obama, to be any more serious about addressing the unsustainable situation we’re currently facing than previous leaders?

Why is the default position always, no matter what, that the federal government needs to come in and “fix” things?  Especially in light of the fact that it has been Big Brother’s unwavering unwillingness to act that has led to an exodus of upwards of 20 million undocumented, law-breaking people to our shores.

The conservative king himself, Ronald Reagan, mistakenly thought that the illegal immigration problem could be fixed with amnesty at the federal level in 1986 when only about 1 million people were involved.  President Reagan was led to believe that if he gave out a few “Get out of having to return to the country you swam through shark-infested waters to get to America from” Cards back then, it would motivate legislators at the federal and state levels to “get serious” about border enforcement so we would be safer and more secure by now.

Errrrr. Wrong.

When you incentivize illegal behavior, then reward it by refusing to punish the wrong-doers, who in their right mind thinks that the illegal behavior will not continue (and, as we’ve witnessed the past twenty years, exponentially expand)?  If I lived in a hell-hole of a country, with a corrupt government and abysmal economy, and I knew that I could come to the United States, get work, avoid any sort of legal repercussions for my illegality, and have politicians fighting over who could get me on the welfare’s dole quicker (so they could stay in office), I would absolutely make the same choice to do whatever it takes to get here.

But what makes the United States of America a country worth risking your life to come to isn’t just a stronger economy or free health care from your increasingly-bloated Uncle Sam.  Those things are only even possible because of something we used to like to call, “the rule of law.”  Nations don’t become prosperous and then decide to look into “that whole 'protecting ourselves and our property rights' thing.”

We are worth escaping to for the very things that allowing millions of foreigners to enter our borders illegally undermine and deteriorate.

The “we’re all immigrants” mantra that well-meaning people regurgitate in hopes that no one will actually ask them to think about their position on the immigration problem leaves out the fairly important word “legal” between “all” and “immigrants.”

And now, in light of the failures of Reagan’s 1986 Amnesty, and a crystal-clear track-record of the federal government being unable and unwilling to tackle the immigration issue in a way that doesn’t include Amnesty, and with anywhere between 11-20 million illegals already among us, we’re supposed to believe that the answer is to give the federal government another college-professor try?

Your position on the immigration problem is what is really wrong, President Obama, not just the methods you want to employ in solving it.

When congress attempted to force amnesty down the American people’s throats back in 2006, the nation responded in force by flooding Capitol Hill with calls, letters, emails, faxes, and, if Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL) ever got them, a few of my favorite carrier pigeons.

America’s message to the philosopher-kings in Washington: Get real, clowns.  We’re not racists, but we’re not suckers either.  You padding your voter-base with 20 million new, appreciative, potential ballot-casters at the expense of the country’s economic, legal and health care system are the kind of “change” societal destruction can conceive in.

If all it takes for me to be granted citizenship (and be eligible for welfare entitlements) is that I promise my eventual vote to a politician, I won’t have to hire Lewis and Clark to explore uncharted territories to find me a willing accomplice in congress.

By wrapping the immigration issue (and themselves) in moral terms, by presenting the issue as a “Lovers of immigrants vs. Haters of immigrants,” the White House and racially-charged groups like La Raza (backed by a progressive-Left, sympathetic media) clearly have their sights set on a new and the-opposite-of-improved version of the 2006 amnesty bill.  To suggest otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

The insinuation of President Obama’s negative reaction to the new law in Arizona is that our law enforcement agents are too racist to handle the responsibility of arresting perpetrators of illegal behavior (in any and all forms).

The only other conclusion, if that one does not strike your fancy, is that the administration and leadership in congress are radical Leftist ideologues who believe so deeply in growing the size and control of the federal government that facts, figures, history and the prevailing sentiments of the American people are nothing more than obstacles in the way of a utopian vision we’ll thank them for when it’s finished.

I love that we live in a nation people want to come to.  The immigrants that I have had the distinct pleasure of working with in various odd jobs growing up have always been the hardest working employees.  Many of them are here to send funds back to relatives who need money in their native lands.  But none of that changes the fact that we need REAL change in our approach to our borders and immigration policy at the federal and state levels.

Send more troops and guards to our borders.  Grant more work visas.  Make English the official language of the country.  Encourage all states to have their law enforcement agents check for the same identification I have to show at the nearly-extinct Blockbuster Video by my house.  Incentivize lawful actions by your citizenry and those hoping to come and work and/or live here.

Fair = judging someone by the content of their character.

Fair = punishing all law-breakers the same.

Fair = upholding the Constitution you ensured voters in January of 2009 you would “protect and defend.”

Arizona acted out of necessity.  Is the law perfect?  By no means.  Few laws are.

But here is what we know: the border is out of control, businesses fear little reprisal for hiring illegals, the federal government has done its best to convince us all to join a local Tea Party, and the nation is in a fiscal mess.  In that environment, for a state like Arizona to make a decision on how best they will address the concerns they have in-state seems entirely reasonable to me.

We here at AVITW will monitor the AZ law, and if there are aspects of it that we don't care for, or if there are abuses perpetrated under the cover of it, we'll be unafraid to highlight them for you, the reader.

Our intent is not to tell you what to think, but simply to remind you to think, and think hard, about what kind of city, state, and country you want to live in (and hope to leave for your children).