I would like to invite my readers to view my new website www.corson.org. I have changed this website from a family-album oriented site to one which contains my blogs (political, economic, sociological and theological pages) along with commentaries from over 20 conservative columnists, like Thomas Sowell, George Will, Pat Buchanan, Cal Thomas, David Limbaugh, Larry Elder, Ann Coulter and others. My wife and I are adding to it daily.

Please join us over at www.corson.org and feel free to e-mail us (go to the contact page) with your comments, complaints, suggestions, etc.

---John---

Retirement, for me, was just around the corner.  Two years ago, while just 52 years of age, I was pretty much putting things in order for a decent retirement by the age of 67.  Although I thought I would be able to retire much earlier, I was liking what I was doing, ministering to a nice congregation of people and living in a quiet sub rural community.

When I came to this church I really wanted to make this my last "hurrah."  I hate moving and I don't like change.  Even though I was a believer of moving forward, I certainly didn't want to move backward and I certainly didn't want to stay the course in any mundane status quo that would lead me or my church to mediocrity.

It seems that when things roll along, even if slowly but surely, something comes along and pulls the program down.  It goes without saying, that which came along was a declining economy and the Obama Administration.  There is no doubt that the former caused the latter as more than a majority of the citizens of this country believed that a change was needed in order to positively address the demands of the economy.  With that we got socialism.

With the downturn of the economy came the decline in contributions to charitable organizations, including the church.  There also came the decline in my 403-B retirement account.  Between the end of September and March I lost nearly 60 percent of my 403-B.  Fortunately that was not the only retirement account I have, but the other two render less than 2 percent interest and I didn't contribute as much to those as I had before.

Is retirement possible now?  Absolutely not.  My wife and I did a little accounting the other day and we came up with a conservative date for my retirement.  Barring a complete stock market crash, a great depression in which stagflation reaches worse proportions than that under Jimmy Carter and the elimination of deductions on charitable giving, we came up with December 31, 2039 - my 85th birthday!

But, we are on the verge of a depression, just how "great" remains to be seen, but if history is any indicator, it will be "GREAT."  History teaches us that raising taxes, government programs and government intrusion into the private sector leads to prolonged economic pain.  You need only look back to FDR's first two terms to see just how disastrous socialistic programs are.

Now comes President Obama with his proposals for reductions in tax deductions for charitable contributions.  As Dick Morris pointed out last week, the president was rather glib when he went before the camera to give his reasons for cutting the deductions.  He noted that Obama's "pathetic defense at his press conference -- that he would still give a $100 dollar check even if he got $11 less of tax deduction from it was both disingenuous and beside the point."

It is now certainly the buzz of the philanthropy world.  This is all a part of the president's fiscal 2010 budget blueprint.  It will first affect Americans in the top income brackets. While some fear a falloff in donations, others are asking about motive. Would wealthy Americans really stop giving to charities if their deductions were reduced?

Under the president's plan, itemized tax deductions for charitable giving and mortgages would be capped for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Changes would be phased in gradually over the next few years. So in 2010, instead of getting a 33% or 35% deduction for charitable donations, Americans in the top income brackets, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, would get somewhere in the neighborhood of 28%.

In the Obama budget, the cuts on tax deductions for upper-income Americans -- coupled with cuts in government spending -- are projected to help raise $634 billion for a kind of big federal piggy bank that would be used to extend health coverage to the more than 47 million people in America who are uninsured and subsidize premiums for others who can't afford what they have.

Critics are already voicing concern that charities, hard hit by a decline in donations because of sinking stock prices on Wall Street, could suffer further. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the No. 2  Democrat in the House, said the potential loss of philanthropic giving is "clearly one of our concerns." And CNBC's Maria Bartiromo said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today that the Obama blueprint comes with "such unintended consequences" and said of charitable donations, "Get ready for those to go off a cliff."

Add this dilemma on top of the fact that each day nearly 18,000 Americans (on average) lose their jobs and another 20 million or so are underemployed and you have the recipe for a drop in church contributions, not to mention other charitable giving.

I minister to a church wherein the giving once topped off back in the late summer of 2008 and has slowly declined since.  Mine is not the only church.  A recent survey of over 1600 churches across the country, rural and suburban, shows that offerings have steadily declined over the last six month.  The "average" church's giving has slipped some 8 percent but most of that due to fears of job loss, cutback in pay or the mere saving for that certain rainy day.

Ah "retirement."  A word that perhaps will remain only a word out of the mouth's of wishful thinkers and may become only a memory for those who are currently retired but must now face the probability of having to go to their local Wal-Mart to see if there is an opening.

I have recently asked my wife how I would look in a blue smock.  When she asked why, my response was, if the church can't pay a livable wage I will have to start using a new vocabulary: "Hi! Welcome to Wal-Mart."  To which she responded, "You're too young, better get a back brace and gloves."

This past Wednesday, my son called to tell me he was scared.  This young man, never one to be afraid of anything, let alone anyone, was now afraid because he had just heard that the government accounting office (GAO) reported that every American family will owe approximately $116,000 to help pay off the national debt.  Well, it ain't going to get better.  Thanks to the proposed White House budget and congressional additions to boot.

When my youngest grandson was born two years ago, he came into the world owing about $15,000! If my daughter-in-law (his mother) has her way he will soon have a little brother or sister and the stats reveal he, or she, will owe $26,000 - providing he, or she, is born before the end of the year.  

That figure (about the price of a new Camaro) represents the share of the public debt carried by anybody born in the United States today, according to the fiscal watchdog group The Concord Coalition. 

Take Jada Grace Larsen. She was born Sunday at New Jersey's Hackensack Medical Center.  "I'm nervous for her and her future and what she's being born into," mother Jeanmarie Larsen, 37, told FOXNews.com Wednesday. 

She and her husband Andrew, 35, said they plan to raise their newborn to know the "value of the dollar" by teaching her to live within her means and avoid frivolous spending. But if Washington doesn't do the same, the individual burden from the national debt only gets more expensive down the road. 

When Jada is 10 years old, for example, that per-person debt increases to about $51,000 -- based on the latest deficit and debt projections by the Congressional Budget Office, which looked at the impact of President Obama's budget proposal in 2019. 

Josh Gordon, policy director at The Concord Coalition, said such soaring debt levels, while sometimes hard to comprehend, have myriad adverse effects down the road. "The interest you're paying sucks up valuable resources," Gordon said. "It leads to a situation where we're more at the whims of international investors." 

The total national debt, as of this week, is above $11 trillion.  Add, what undoubtedly will be more bailouts and stimulus packages, as well as the additional I.O.U.'s the Democrats plan to pay back, then you have a recipe for disaster!

Gordon arrived at a per-person figure based only on the amount of debt held by the public, or $6.7 trillion. The price tag? $22,000 a head.  That does not include the total national debt as noted above ($11 trillion)

While Republicans argue that looming additions to the debt amount to generational theft, Obama says deficit spending, and his $3.6 trillion budget for next year, is needed to jump-start the economy and generate lasting financial stability. 

Dean Baker, co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, also said the size of the economy will play a bigger role than the debt in the quality of life for future generations. Plus he said a lot of that debt is picked up by buyers in the U.S. -- not just overseas. 

Jeanmarie Larsen said despite her concerns about what the future might hold, she is staying optimistic and banking on an economic turnaround. "We have to have faith in our new president that things will get better," she said.

Back to my son's phone call the other night: His fear, as is mine and I would say a whole host of Americans, is that the taxpayers will not only pay for the stimulus and bailout packages, but will have to help pay China back for all the loans they carry on us. 

Once you carry over government's outstanding deficits from prior years, the total national debt comes to just over $10.6 trillion right now. Every individual in the United States would have to chip in roughly $38,500 apiece to pay it off.  My son merely multiplied this figure by three (for him, his wife and son) and arrived at what the GAO has concluded would be the average debt the average family would owe!

Keep in mind that the total federal indebtedness has nearly doubled in just a decade and promises to jump another 1.2 trillion by the end of the year when Congress approves the Obama budget along with the additional goodies the Democrats will throw in.

Yeah, President Obama has promised to go throw the budget line by line and mark out any and all unnecessary spending.  Keep in mind "unnecessary" is the operative word and in a word where liberal politicians broaden their base by making promises that create spending, their "budget needs," collectively, are all necessary (at least to them)!  And, they are destructive to us!

Does anyone know what comes after "trillions" of dollars?  Can you say "Quadrillion"?

Here is a hot item: Would a person who used to be reliant upon a paycheck from a public radio station have to be a liberal Democrat to sustain his or her job?  I asked this question because that was the situation in which I found myself first, back in 1980 when I was working as an announcer for a Baltimore public radio facility.  That was the year of Ronald Reagan's victory over Jimmy Carter and the beginning of my journey as a Conservative.

While I was not a vocal advocate for Reagan's agenda, I did, on many occasions, made pithy statements to my fellow employees like "I'm an ABC type of guy: 'Anybody But Carter!'" Yet, under Carter, subsidies for public broadcasting increased more than 65% and was being threatened with Reagan's proposal to virtually cut those funds in half. Was I a fool? Cutting my nose off despite my face?  Looking back on it, I saw it as a challenge.  If public television and radio needed money and the government was cutting it back to the bone, then let this media sell commercials!  Cut the ties with the government and be free!  What a fool I was thought to be!

Funding for public broadcasting was indeed cut during the Reagan years and increased very little under the elder Bush.  But in many states, funding increased, including in Maryland.  Since that time, I worked for public radio in Norfolk, VA, having been hired when Bill Clinton was in his first term and had already increased spending for this outlet by 6 percent.  Virginia, under Governors Chuck Robb, Gerald Baliles, and Douglas Wilder (all Democrats), increased funding by nearly 100 percent from 1982 and 1994. Public broadcasting survived through the efforts of the state government even when it looked like the death toll was sounded through the Reagan cuts. Hurray! No commercials!

Since the inception of PBS and later NPR, these two entities have been totally in step with the liberal establishment and, through their various news magazines like the McNeil-Lehrer Hour (now the Lehrer Hour), All Things Considered and Morning Edition they have consistently promoted a liberal bias only surpassed by the likes of MSNBC and the strange Obama bedfellows Chris Matthews and Keith Obermann.  MSNBC, as Bernard Goldberg (formerly of CBS News) has said "loves Barack Obama."  "They are in bed with him, they have a slobbering love affair with him.  MSNBC served as the Obama Campaign Headquarters throughout the 2008 campaign."

Hardly anybody with an IQ of 25 or above will argue this point.  Ann Coulter would agree with this since she has all but pointed out that liberals, for whatever reason, can't get their IQ to 25.  This being the case, my question is this: If Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and gang in Congress manages down the road to restore or come up with a version of the Fairness Doctrine and if Barack Obama signs it into law, will PBS, NPR and MSNBC be forced to give "equal time and equal consideration for "the other side"? 

For those of my reader unfamiliar with the Fairness Doctrine, this was once a policy of the Federal Communications Commission which mandated that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. The FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were "public trustees," and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance. The Commission later held that stations were also obligated to actively seek out issues of importance to their community and air programming that addressed those issues. With the deregulation sweep of the Reagan Administration during the 1980s, the Commission dissolved the fairness doctrine.

With the ending of the Fairness Doctrine, AM radio stations started to come alive again with talk-radio formats.  Rush Limbaugh went syndicated in 1988, and ever since we have seen a proliferation of talk radio political pundits and commentators.  An interesting result of this has been the huge success of conservative talk show host and the sad loss of a large majority of liberals.  The demographics who that listeners of talk radio tend to be white, male, an even split between white and blue collar workers, holding traditional values and believe in limited government.

With a possible return of the Fairness Doctrine, the less than successful liberal talk show hosts like the comedian Al Frankin (the Senator-wannabe from the state that would elect a crocodile if any lived in that state) would be forced on broadcasters at the expense of listenership. This veiled attempt by liberal Democrats to get airtime on AM radio will not fly!  Liberals have no message of substance and the average American will not sit by their radio to listen to haranguers blast them for being racist, xenophobic, homophobic, chauvinistic, right-wing religious nuts.  They will turn their radios off - simple as that! 

I wonder why the liberal Democrats just can't be satisfied with having most of the visual media in their pocket.  The virtually own MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN, and they certainly DO OWN PBS and on the radio side, they own NPR.  Come on Dems!  Can't we racist, xenophobic, homophobic, chauvinistic, right-wing religious nut have AM radio with it's static sounds and thin band frequency and one news outlet like FOX?

Pelosi, Reid and many in the Obama Administration say "NO" because we don't seem to know what is good for the country.  To them, what is good for the country is to bring back the Fairness Doctrine to limit American's exposure to right-wing zealotry.  The operative hyphenated word here is "RIGHT-WING"  Notice, nothing is said of "LEFT-WING."

Bernie Goldberg is right when he says, we had the Fairness Doctrine when Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Reagan were president.  ABC, NBC and CBS had a hard time finding anything good to say about them, their policies or their private lives.  But they feel all over themselves with Kennedy, Johnson and Carter were in the White House.  Was that fair?  Absolutely not!  As I have said elsewhere on these pages, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  The return of the Fairness Doctrine, if history is any authority here, will only weaken the voice of conservatives and nothing will change on NPR, PBS, MSNBC, et. al.

Fairness? No!  It's not fairness, it fascism!  Oops! Now the liberal Democrats will accuse me of misusing a word they have reserved for us racist, xenophobic, homophobic, chauvinistic, right-wing, blah, blah, blah...

Philosopher George Santayana is the one credited with what has come to be a very true, yet pithy observation: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There have been several variations to this quote including the very accurate phrase: "He who does not learn from the past is destined to repeat it."  The statements vary, but have the same effect, viz. we must learn from the past!

Some past events are, for many people, worth repeating.  Things such as a successful business venture, a great vacation, a family get-together, winning the lottery, etc.  Who wouldn't want to repeat buying a winning lottery ticket?  But every person who has lived through any catastrophe, loss of a job, death of a loved one, a fire that destroys a home, or an economic disaster, does not want to live through these things again!  Unless, of course, they are brain-dead or evil!  This being the case, I ask, is the Obama Administration brain-dead or just plain evil?

On can argue that the President, along with the liberal Democrat who hold the majority in Congress, are brain-dead.  After all, ceaseless bailouts, deficit spending, raising taxes and the restructuring of the American society as a whole is rather careless and downright stupid. It is interesting to note that some in the Obama White House are not aware of past programs and political decisions which drove our country into chaotic times.  Historical events of past presidents like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society created a generation of people who have been hurt by laws and executive orders which radically changed tax codes, business ventures, lifestyles and person liberty.  Many people became dependent on government instead of being free to pursue their own dreams.

In recent decades many economists have questioned whether New Deal policies contributed to recovery or prolonged the depression. Many have pointed out that the most troubling issue with the New Deal was the persistence of high unemployment throughout F.D.R.'s first two terms.  Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway in their book Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America noted that from 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2 percent. At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent!  Even, in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9 percent of American workers were unemployed.

Jim Powell in his landmark book on the failures of F.D.R.s New Deal has noted that in recent years scholarly investigators have raised some provocative questions.  In FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression Powell detailed how New Dealers made it more expensive of business owners to hire people, how FDR's Justice Department filed over 150 lawsuits threatening big employers, how New Deal policies discouraged private investment and how because of that private employment failed to revive.  He also points out how many of FDR's programs pushed up the cost of living, proved how New Dealers destroyed food while people went hungry, showed to what extent New Deal labor laws penalized blacks, and how the FDR Administration pushed to break up the strongest banks in the country. Two more issues Powell discusses are why didn't FDR's public works projects bring about recovery? and why was so much of the New Deal relief spending channeled away from the poorest people?

Stephen Moore with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, has pointed out that the greatest and most enduring economic myth of the 20th century is the idea that Roosevelt's New Deal pulled American out of the Great Depression.  He notes that this fantasy is very prevalent today in that liberal Democratic leaders in Congress call for a "new" New Deal to lift the incomes of the middle class and shelter American workers from the anxieties attached to the competitive forces of a global economy.

We are now informed that free market ideas have become old-fashioned, outdated and irrelevant and what Americans need now are new government regulations, guard rails, and some 80 programs to correct the excesses of capitalism, such as the housing bubble.

Time Magazine, November 15, 2008 issue featured a cover picture of Barack Obama in FDR persona with the featured article centering in on the new President's appeal to many of the ideas of Roosevelt's New Deal.  It is as if Obama wants a return to the era of FDR in dealing with this great recession which stands on the precipice of a Great Depression.  But I would remind Mr. Obama of the famous testimony FDR's Treasury Secretary made to the House Ways and Means Committee in May, 1939:

We have tried spending money.  We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.  And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job.  I want to see this country prosperous.  I want to see people get a job.  I want to see people get enough to eat.  We have never made good on our promises....I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started....And an enormous debt to boot!

Here we are on the throws of another New Deal era!  Congress and the Obama White House are wanting to spend, spend and spend - doubling the federal debt to nearly 23 trillion dollars by the end of his first term and there is no assurance that things will get better.  In the days to come, I will compare and contrast FDR's New Deal and the state of the country in the 1930s to the programs and proposals of the current administration which, all hints point to, adds up to a "New" New Deal.