…we live in the real world, with real choices and real consequences. Right now, we’ve got significant deficits to close.  We’ve got serious investments to make to keep our economy growing.  And we can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for millionaires who don’t need them and didn’t even ask for them.

So in the President’s Orwellian vocabulary when a taxpayer keeps some of his own income it’s “spending money.”  But when government spends money it’s “investment.”

The perception Obama hopes to plant in the mind of the listener is that the government’s cash shortage is caused not by his massive spending surge, but by the tax rates that apply to million dollar incomes.

The chart tracks income tax revenue from taxpayers earning over $1 million from 2000 through 2009, the latest year for which IRS statistics are available.  It shows a dramatic revenue increase after tax rates were reduced in 2003.   As the red line shows, the average, effective tax rate paid by millionaires went down because the Bush tax cuts of 2003:

• lowered the top tax bracket rate for “ordinary income” (salaries and business profits) from 39.6% to 35%
• Lowered the top rate for capital gains from 20% to 15%
• Lowered the top rate for stock dividends from 39.6 to 15%.

A taxpayer’s “effective tax rate” is the amount of tax dollars paid divided by adjusted gross income.  Typically, high income taxpayers’ effective rate results from a blend of ordinary income taxed at 35% and capital gains and dividend income taxed at 15%.

The “Bush tax cuts” enacted in 2003 are still in effect.  In 2007 more tax revenue was collected from millionaires than any previous year, ever.

However, the recession was particularly harsh on millionaires.

• In 2007  approximately 3 of every 1,000 taxpayers earned more than $1 million.
• By 2009 the number had fallen by 40% to fewer than 2 of every 1,000 taxpayers earning over $1 million.

As a consequence the chart above shows that revenue from millionaires went down, even as their effective tax rate went back up, because the recession drove down income from capital gains and dividends.

If Obama’s only goal were to maximize revenue to the government he would enthusiastically support the current tax rates as – to use one of their favorite words for government policy – “smart” because:

• The capital gains tax is voluntary.  It comes due only when an asset that has appreciated in value is sold.  Obviously, people are more likely to sell when the tax is lower.  Throughout it’s history the capital gains taxed has consistently generated more revenue at lower rates and less revenue at higher rates.
• Stock dividends are the investors’ share of corporate profits remaining after payment of corporate income tax, as high as 35%.  Thus the investor’s individual tax is a second levy on the same corporate profits.  When the individual tax rate on dividends was higher companies paid smaller dividends or no dividend at all because investors wanted to avoid double taxation and preferred profits to be deployed in ways that might enhance the market value of the stock.  After the tax rate on dividends was reduced investors looked for stocks that paid dividends and companies responded by paying more.  Thus, the government is now collecting taxes on dividend income that did not exist when tax rates were higher and would disappear if the rates went back up.

In addition to to generating more revenue to the government, lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains also benefit the economy in general and those who seek jobs in particular:

• When people sell an asset they look for new investments for the funds they receive, including business start-ups and business expansions that generate jobs.  If the capital gains tax rate is higher they are less likely to sell and those new start-ups are less likely to come into existence.
• When investors receive dividends they seek new investment opportunities for those funds, including job creating business start-ups and expansions.

By the way, taxpayers in all brackets pay lower rates on capital gains and dividends than they do on ordinary income.  In fact capital gains are tax free for taxpayers whose ordinary income rate is 15%, which would include most families who earn less than about $80,000, and some who earn even more.

…the best neighbors in the world.  Always ready with a tool, an ingredient, or a jump-start for the car.  Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it.  They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.

But, when a friendly evening of scotch drinking and poker playing drifted into politics she was horrified at what she learned about these fine folks:

He is white and his wife is African American. And they belong to the tea party. They don’t care who becomes our next president as long as it isn’t Barack Obama.

After heated political debate her opinion of her neighbors changed:

I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. I think they are not kind or empathetic.

Not kind or empathetic?  These are the same people of whom she just said: “whatever you need, if they have it they will give it.”  To summarize her position  she says:

My views…seem so logical to me. Of course we need to take care of those less fortunate; of course we want everybody to have the joy and legal benefits of a life partner; of course we want every baby to be wanted and every person to be safe, healthy, informed and looking forward to a better future.  These things are no-brainers to me, and it kills me that my neighbor disagrees.

But her neighbor doesn’t disagree with those lofty goals with the probable exception of “legal benefits of a life partner,” code for gay marriage.  What they don’t agree with is the liberal notion that government can, given enough power and financial resources,  achieve those outcomes.  Consider the data in this chart: [article continued below the chart]

Every federal program included in the cost of entitlements was sold to the voters in the form an outcome like those Ms. Wagman finds “no-brainers.”  Politicians never say “We’re going to increase spending on entitlements by x%.”  They always say something like “This program will ensure that no child goes without…” or “we’re making sure all Americans can look forward to a better future.”

But the actual outcomes, after a half century of steady increase are disappointing to say the least.

• In 1970, when the government took 6.4% of GDP for entitlements the official poverty rate was 12.6%.
• Forty years and $31 trillion later the 2010 poverty rate was 15.1%.
• In 2007, the last year before the recession it was 12.5%.

We Conservative, tea party types disagree with political programs that are sold as “no-brainer” help for people but in fact infringe on liberty and diminish economic opportunity without delivering the promised Utopian results.  These government programs and have had the added negative effect of eroding the moral character of the population, resulting in even more of the behaviors that generate poverty and despair.  The CDC just released a report showing that 40% of American births are to teenage girls and unmarried women, up from 18% in 1980.  This is a national tragedy that followed the expansion of entitlements, not the justification for starting them.

The taxing and borrowing necessary to fund the welfare state diminishes economic opportunity in the private sector resulting in higher unemployment and lower wages for those who are employed.  The very people most in need of help, the unskilled and under-educated are those most likely to be denied economic opportunity.

Ms Wagman says “we want every baby to be wanted,” which is code, not for a hope that all babies receive love, but for terminating the lives of of more babies before they are born.  But abortion is a barbaric practice that kills the potential victim, not a cure for the societal forces that result in lack of love.  And that unwed birth rate screams the truth that legalized abortion has not made America a better society.

The greatest anti-poverty program ever devised was the US Constitution that chartered a government of limited powers, leaving care for the needy to the states or to the people themselves.  Even today, with federal and state governments spending around $4 Trillion per year it is still churches and private charities that are most successful at lifting people out of poverty, and transforming them into confident, productive citizens.

Conservatives and tea party folks believe the people themselves, using their own resources, and limitless  ideas, innovations and strategies can, without government regulation and interference, best deal with poverty, suffering and lack of love.

Senate Republicans…oppose our plan [for] a tiny sur-tax on on a tiny fraction of America’s highet earners…Republicans call our plan a tax on job creators, but I say so-called job creators…Millionaire Job creators are like Unicorns – they don’t exist.  That’s because only a tiny fraction of people who make over a million dollars, probably less than one percent, are actually business owners.

The pie chart displays data available to anyone who takes the time to look on the IRS website.  Seventy six percent of taxpayers who reported more than $1 million in adjusted gross income were owners of small businesses that must report income and expenses on the owners’ personal tax return.

There are only two possibilities:

• The most likely possibility is that Reid is fully aware of this IRS data and simply lied through his teeth.
• The other possibility is that Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate, arguably the second or  third most powerful position in Washington really is ignorant of the truth and repeated something he heard from an unreliable source (MSNBC?).

Either way, he is wrong.  Surprisingly he did not repeat the economic theory of the political-media establishment, that a tax hike on small business owners would have no effect on job creation.  Apparently, the Democrats have polling data that tells them what is only logical, that a tax increase transfers resources from the business owner to the government, making her less able to add new employees to her payroll.

This week the august Senators and Congressmen head into their final, dramatic days of deliberations.  Their assignment is to propose $1.2 trillion of “deficit reduction” over ten years, beginning 2013.

In Washington the phrases “spending cuts” and “deficit reduction” are more political slogans to deceive the people than legitimate accounting terms.  Even if the committee reaches an agreement that Congress approves spending will increase every year and future deficits could be greater than the 2011 deficit.

Congress operates on a corrupt system called “baseline budgeting,” driven by the assumption that virtually every government program and function will receive a funding increase, every year.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produces reports called “baselines” that project spending increases in each of the next ten years.  In this context a “cut” does not mean  that future spending will be less than current spending.  It means that – on paper – the “baseline” will be adjusted.

As has always happened in the past, even these illusory, baseline “cuts” won’t last.  The current Congress has authority only over the current budget and cannot force the elected members of 2013 or 15 or 18 Congress to comply with a baseline published by CBO bureaucrats in 2011.  But the tax increases Democrats demand in exchange for their phony “cuts” would be real.  They would be enacted into law immediately.  If the currently serving Republicans allow themselves to be suckered by this scam all the Conservative/Tea Party victories of 2010 will have been for nothing.

The charts below show what genuine deficit reduction could look like.  The first is a summary of the government’s tax revenue, spending and deficits from 2007 through the 2011 fiscal year that ended September 30. [continued below the chart]

Each of Obama’s three deficits about three times 2008, the largest of the Bush era.  The Obama deficits are in part the outcome of falling tax revenue due to the recession.  But mostly they result from massive increases in spending he and the Democrats initiated in 2009.

The next chart illustrates what could have been a budgeting alternative to achieve smaller deficits.  What if instead of huge spending increases for almost every department of government Congress had frozen spending at 2007 levels, allowing exceptions only for Social Security, Medicare, Defense and Veterans’ Benefits?  This chart shows that the Obama deficits deficits would have been $1.3 trillion less.  [continued below the chart]

A partial spending freeze could have resulted $1.3 trillion of real deficit reduction in three years vs the $1.2 trillion over ten years of illusory deficit reduction the Super Committee is tasked with proposing.  Congress cold have driven those deficits even lower by actually cutting some programs below 2007 levels and/or changing Social Security and Medicare eligibility rules very slightly.

Few Americans would remember 2007 as a year of national suffering because the federal government spent a third less than it does now.  Barack Obama’s campaign began in 2007 and he would have been booed off the stage if he had promised to increase federal spending by 32% from 2007 to 2011.

Since the government-caused recession began in 2008 most Americans have had to cut their household and business budgets and reduce their standard of living even as government spending exploded.  Many now wish they still lived as well as they did in 2007 when unemployment was at 4.7% (Vs 9% today) and the deficit was $161 Billion.  The Obama government borrows $161 billion every six weeks!

All the Super Committee and the current Congress have to do is ask future Congresses to spend an average of $120 billion per year less by voting to instruct the CBO to modify its “baseline” schedules.  $120 billion is about 1.5% of 2011 spending.  No tax increases would necessary.  Does this simple task really justify the Congressional and Presidential anguish and wrenching emotion on display in the media?

When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow.’  Not, ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.

But he did attract votes by planting the impression in the mind of gullible voters that he had a spiritual power to bring about immediate “change.”  Then, after he was elected, he sold Congress and the people with the promise that massive deficit spending would, in his words:

immediately jumpstart job creation and long term growth

Today, in the wake of the debt downgrade and the carnage wrought by his economic agenda, Obama is reduced to scolding the voters who were taken in by his campaign hype for… believing his campaign hype!

In the prologue to his second book Barack Obama wrote what would become the conceptual foundation of his Presidential campaign:

“…I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Candidate Obama went on to exploit this blank screen concept for maximum political gain.   He built a cult of personality around himself, with huge audience events where he delivered soaring but largely meaningless rhetoric about “hope and change.”  He encouraged supporters to project their own visions of desirable change onto his blank screen by telling the cheering throngs that the campaign was about them, not him, and by talking about “change from the bottom up.”

The key to Obama’s success was attracting  people whose vision of change was ambiguous or impossible to implement or Unconstitutional, and different from the vision of the people standing with them in the adoring crowds.   They voted for Obama because they believed he would bring their own visions to life through his Presidency.

But now, of course, most are disappointed.  It’s safe to assume that today not a single Obama voter has experienced the vision he or she projected on the blank screen.  Some expected a lot of free stuff, most expected a more streamlined, less acrimonious legislative process in Washington, leading quickly to full employment, higher wages, free healthcare and prosperity.  None of them foresaw Obama’s radical agenda awakening the tea party sleeping giant.  None anticipated a moment 33 months later when a defensive and failed President would be scolding them for believing his campaign promises that “change” would be immediate!

Since that phantasmagorical election night spectacle in Chicago’s Grant Park a an old fashioned, and ruthless, progressive, power-to-the-government agenda has played out across the blank screen.  Those who projected more secure financial future than they felt in the closing months of the Bush era are the most disappointed.  But it should be no surprise that a President with no experience in, or respect for private enterprise has not been able to fulfill his promise of millions of new jobs.

ffffffff

July 4, 1776:

Visionary men wrote radical ideas that forever altered the march of history.

The Declaration of Independence

We humbly suggest that part of every American family’s Independence Day Weekend should be rereading and reflecting on the great truths of The Declaration of Independence, the document that inspired creation of this website.  We individual, patriotic citizens must make sure children are exposed to this greatest of all political documents. We can no longer depend on government schools.

The full text is here.

This revolutionary document established as “self-evident truth” that we are all created equal and that our rights come directly from God, our creator. The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect, not to dispense or withhold those preexisting, God-endowed rights.

Astounding history from Ronald Reagan’s Second Inaugural Address:

Two of our Founding Fathers, a Boston lawyer named Adams and a Virginia planter named Jefferson, members of that remarkable group who met in Independence Hall and dared to think they could start the world over again, left us an important lesson.

They had become political rivals in the Presidential election of 1800. Then years later, when both were retired, and age had softened their anger, they began to speak to each other again through letters. A bond was reestablished between those two who had helped create this government of ours.

In 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, they both died. They died on the same day, within a few hours of each other, and that day was the Fourth of July.

In one of those letters exchanged in the sunset of their lives, Jefferson wrote: “It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right to self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us, and yet passing harmless … we rode through the storm with heart and hand.”

The chart  tracks the debt as a percentage of GDP since it’s previous peak at the end of World War II when it was even higher than today.

War spending and debt was a temporary condition.  When the war ended the government cut spending by 68% in three years.   Today’s monstrous debt results from funding permanent programs to keep promises by politicians of the past six decades.  It is not a temporary condition that can be resolved quickly and relatively painlessly.  Spending must be cut and millions of individuals, farmers and companies will receive less from the government than they are accustomed to receiving or expect to receive in the future.

Response from the political-media establishment to S&P’s downgrade was bizarre.  Some commentators called S&P a tool of the corporate elite trying to harm “working people.”  That’s just silly.  US Treasury bonds are traded by the Billions of dollars worth every day on open markets all over the world.  Their interest rates fluctuate second by second, around the clock.  When “the market” meaning a consensus of investors believes the risks have become too great for the current low interest rates those rates will rise, with or without advice from S&P.

S&P had no choice but to do something.  Their credibility would be in doubt if they didn’t react to what every investor on the planet knows, that the US Government is coming dangerously close to piling up more debt than it can service.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post claims the downgrade in S&P’s long term outlook was a response to “political gridlock” over the looming debt ceiling vote, even though S&P didn’t mention the debt ceiling in it’s downgrade announcement.  Klein blames Republicans who demand spending cut commitments in exchange for their votes to raise the debt ceiling.  But less spending is the only way to prevent the debt from growing to high enough, with risk of default great enough to drive away investors.

Other commentators claimed this warning means the Republicans and Tea Party activists and advocates like Liberty Works are wrong to oppose tax increases.  Yet S&P’s announcement included this:

Standard & Poor takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures the Congress and the Administration might conclude are appropriate.

As we reported here and here there is simply no way to raise enough tax revenue to solve this problem

Congress and the President are beginning what will become an historic two-year debate over the cost and appropriate role of government.  Spending has increased so much in the past two years that in 2011 the government will have to borrow 43¢ of every dollar it spends, compared to 15¢ in 2008 and 6¢ in 2007.  But Democrats are unwilling to cut anything.

An emerging Democrat-media budget deception is about “tax breaks for the rich,” enacted under President Bush in 2003.   Even before he was elected President Obama announced his intention to raise the top two bracket rates to from 33% and 35% to the pre-Bush rates of 35% and 39.6%.  But so far, he has been unable to convince Congress to enact the increases.

The Democratic-Media talking point we’ve heard this week is that if “the wealthy paid their fair share”- meaning the pre-Bush rates -  “we could afford” Obama’s massive increase in the cost of government.

So, we ran a “what-if.”  As the chart below shows increasing tax rates on the rich to the pre-Bush rates,  or even doubling them to 66% and 70% would not make a significant dent in the astronomical deficit.

The most recent data available from the IRS is from 2008.   The green column in the middle shows that $36 billion in additional revenue would be collected if the top two brackets had been raised to the pre-Bush rates.  The green column on the right shows how much additional revenue be collected if the top two brackets were doubled to 66% and 70%.

Obviously, these tax rate increases would not have raised nearly enough revenue to offset the enormous deficit the Obama Administration is planning for 2011.  But even the small increases in revenue shown in the chart are too optimistic because they don’t take into account the historically demonstrated fact that as tax bracket rates go up taxable income goes down.

High income people have the ability to defer part of their income to future years or to hire lawyers and accounts to devise exotic ways to shelter income, or to simply quit working before the end of the year if they decide the tax burden on additional income will be too great.  Thus, there would be less taxable income if the rates were higher and the additional revenue amounts shown in the chart are more than would actually be collected.

As the chart below shows tax revenue was falling before the Bush tax cuts of 2003 and the government collected more tax revenue from the rich after the tax rates were reduced.

Cost born by the middle class

Not only would pre-Bush tax rates fail to raise nearly enough revenue to balance the budget, there would be a cost to the economy and to the middle class in the form of fewer business start-ups and expansions and fewer new jobs created. Half the taxpayers in the upper brackets are small business owners.  Most small business expansion and job creation is funded from after tax profits.  Higher tax rates mean less in after tax profits and thus, fewer new jobs.

Congress has been arm wrestling over BOTH the 2011 and the 2012 annual budgets at the same time.  The media, apparently oblivious to historic events are immersed in petty speculation over the possibility of a government shut down and which party voters would blame.  People who lack the time or inclination to pore over budget details will be the targets of deceptive, emotional appeals by politicians and the media. There will soon be a continuous barrage of self-serving propaganda from the beneficiaries of government spending programs.

The 2011 Budget should have been passed last summer, well in advance of the October 1 start of the government’s fiscal year.  But President Obama and the Democrats, with commanding majorities in both the House and Senate that empowered them to spend any amount they wished, failed to pass a budget or any of the 13 appropriations bills that allocate funds to the government’s departments and authorize them to function.

Since October 1, 2010 the government has run without a budget or appropriations bills, on a series of temporary “Continuing Resolutions” or CRs.

Back in January the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed HR1 a CR that would have prevented all this angst and drama by funding the government for the remainder of the fiscal year.  But the Senate, controlled by Democrats rejected HR1 because it would make tiny, almost insignificant cuts, spending $61 Billion less than projected by the Obama Administration.

Had they followed normal legislative process the Senators would have passed an alternative CR or an amended version of HR1.  Then the House and Senate would have sent representatives to a conference committee to negotiate a compromise between the two bills.  But the Democrats have been unable or unwilling to pass any alternative to HR1 in the Senate.  Their only response so far has been to attack HR1 as “extreme.”

The latest temporary CR expires at the end of the week.  Without another CR parts of the government will shut down.

The 2012 budget debate opens as Representative Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee publishes his ten-year plan, proposing to spend $6.2 Trillion less than President Obama’s budget plan.  Unlike the trifling cuts Republicans proposed for 2011, the Ryan 2012 plan is a blueprint for substantial, long term reduction in the power, scope and cost of the federal government and will drive the historic debate that is certain to continue through the next election.  Media commentators are already calling the Ryan budget cruel, inhumane, draconian, extreme, radical, etc.

Liberty Works will analyze the Ryan budget plan, which includes an overhaul of the federal income tax, one piece at a time.  Stay tuned!

Economist and Progressive hero Paul Krugman, provides an example in his latest New York Times editorial:

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

What led Krugman to this conclusion?  He observed most Congressional Republicans and a few Democrats sharing The People’s alarm at the massive deficits and titanic debt being accumulated by their government.  Thus, spending cuts are at the top of the Congressional agenda.

Krugman continues, presenting the first myth:

In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s.

The Left/Progressive version of Great Depression history is a series of myths.  They want you to believe President Herbert Hoover, a Republican responded to a recession with Republican strategies: smaller government, less spending, balanced budgets, thus causing the Depression.

Hoover, certainly deserves a generous share of the blame for the Great Depression, eleven years of economic misery and ruinous unemployment caused by the government.

But “belt tightening” was not Hoover’s sin.  As the upper chart shows, Hoover dramatically escalated federal spending.

Krugman implies that “belt tightening” made the Depression and unemployment worse when in reality Hoover made the Depression worse the same way Obama and the Democrats are making the current recession worse, with a spending surge financed by borrowing.

The lower chart of current era spending is eerily  similar to the Hoover model that kicked off a decade of economic misery.  The difference between Hoover and Obama is not that Hoover cut spending but that he increased spending by an even greater percentage than Obama, and the result for The People of the Thirties was 24% unemployment.

Astoundingly, in previous editorials Krugman said the high unemployment of the past two years resulted from Obama and the Democrats not borrowing and spending enough.  But had they come closer to the disastrous 1930s level of spending they might have achieved the disastrous 1930s unemployment rate

Obama’s proposed budget for 2012 calls for government to spend 25% more than in 2008.  His rationale is the same as was offered first by Hoover and again by the next President, Franklin Roosevelt:  Increased taxation and borrowing from the private economy to fund more government intervention into the private economy will – somehow – cause private businesses  to hire more employees.

The second Hoover myth is that he made the Depression worse by insisting  on balanced budgets instead of running deficits.  In the current issue of The Nation Economics Professor William Mitchell warns:

The Great Depression taught us that without government intervention, capitalism is inherently unstable and prone to delivering lengthy periods of unemployment. The Hooverian orthodoxy of balanced budgets, tried during the 1930s, failed.

But the real lesson taught by the Depression was that government intervention, from limits on crop production to drive up food prices, to draconian tax increases, scared away the investment capital that starts and expands job creating enterprises.

Once again the  actual data, displayed in the chart to the left contradicts the notion that  Hoover was guided by an “orthodoxy of balanced budgets.”  His last two budgets borrowed just under 60¢ of every dollar the government spent, more than either Roosevelt’s or Obama’s.

The third Hoover myth is that he refused to raise taxes on the rich.  The truth is Hoover inherited a top bracket rate of 25% and in 1932 he raised the top bracket rate to 63%.  So, the only Hoover policy Obama hasn’t yet been able to copy, but still promises to implement in the future, is an income tax rate hike.

The Bottom Line

The leftist folklore we’ve heard all our lives about President Hoover turns out to be disinformation.  His borrowing, spending and tax policies were the same as, not different from Roosevelt’s.  He helped cause the Depression not by shrinking government budgets but by radical expansion of government borrowing and spending.  ObamaNomics is a rerun of HooverNomics, and the results are similar to, if not yet as awful as the Depression: massive accumulation of government debt, mass foreclosures and high unemployment.

Below are excerpts from Dr. Maritn Luther King’s last speech, given in Memphis on April 3. 1968.  The following day he was assassinated. 

First, Dr. King’s narrative of a previous attempt to take his life

I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, “Are you Martin Luther King?”

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, you drown in your own blood–that’s the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they…allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in.

I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I’ve forgotten what those telegrams said. I’d received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I’ve forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School.

And I looked at that letter, and I’ll never forget it. It said simply, “Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School.” She said, “While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.

Next, he mentioned his flight from Atlanta to Memphis earlier that day.  The flight had been delayed by a bomb threat:

I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, “We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.”

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say that threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

The final paragraphs are called prophetic and indicate that Dr. King did not expect to live much longer:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.

I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight.  I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Twas the fight before Christmas in 2010
The House passed a monstrosity
And to the Senate did send…
Then up on the Senate floor a loud groaning was heard
As our hero,DeMint,asked to hear EVERY WORD!
When what to our wondering ears we engaged
As the clerk ,of the Senate, rose to read every page.
The moon on the crest of DC’s new fallen snow
Would rise at least twice with 2000 pages to go!
On Nancy, on Barney, on Watson and lame ducks,
We the people believe YOUR Omnibus sucks!!
So squeezing real hard to plug up our noses,
We heard of obscene pork & earmarks the reading exposes!
We wondered how anyone with a sane mind
Could propose to spend good money on trash of this kind.
So read on all the bills so the people can know
why to vote out these spenders wherever they go!
Senators sleeping, while the clerk reads is a sight,
Merry Christmas dear Senators… and have a good night!