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Herman Cain's Commentary Archive 2009-2012

July 25, 2010

Georgia shows: There is hope in the vote

July 25, 2010
By Herman Cain



The frustration and anger by conservatives about the direction of this country continue to grow. Even many moderates are starting to wake up to the failed policies and lack of leadership by the Obama Administration.


In the Georgia primary election last Tuesday, July 20, Republicans cast more ballots than Democrats for governor by a two-to-one margin. The other races on the ballot also showed that significantly more Republicans voted than Democrats, but the highest office on the ticket is a most telling sign about what could happen in November.


“Could happen” is the operative phrase, because Republicans could take back control of Congress if conservatives get out and vote the right way in November. The results in the recent Georgia primary are consistent with an on-going Gallup poll showing that conservatives outnumber liberals two-to-one. Moderates have a one-and-a-half head count advantage over liberals in the same poll.


I am not suggesting that Georgia is indicative of the entire country, but those results along with the Gallup poll provide a huge ray of hope for November.


The numbers are on our (conservatives) side, but we can’t stay home! We are the biggest danger to ourselves and the future of this country if we do not actively support good candidates, and encourage people to get out and vote in November.


I also encourage listeners and audiences to do three things if we are going to slow down the Obama-Reid-Pelosi socialism express in November 2010. Stay united. Stay informed. Stay inspired.


The recent accusation of racism by the NAACP toward the Tea Party movement was an attempt to divide and intimidate these citizen activists. The big government liberals also hoped the racism charge would discourage further criticism of the failed policies of this administration and Congress, as I discussed in my commentary last week. The accusation backfired because they had no credible proof of their claim.


Their baseless claim was highlighted by the baseless firing of a lady named Shirley Sherrod when then the NAACP, the White House and the Department of Agriculture had to backtrack and apologize after all of the facts were known. That incident diminished even further the credibility of the NAACP. This attempt to divide us did not work, but beware of future attempts, which start with name calling and false accusations.


Playing the racism card did not make people forget that the stimulus spending is not working and the economy is stalled. People are more informed than the Democrats think, because they think we are all stupid. Efforts by the White House to ignore Fox News did not work. Efforts to censor talk radio have not worked, because people can distinguish between facts and hate speech as the liberals claim.


Stay informed, because liberals love stupid people and they hate the facts.


And most importantly, stay inspired. Liberals want us to give up. They want us to believe that our votes do not count. They want us to believe that we can’t change control of congress, and that the United States of Europe is inevitable.


At dozens of rallies where I have spoken and proclaimed that “America is not going down that road” the reaction of the people has been enthusiastically the same. Not on our watch! The real change we want is coming in November.


The fight to take back our government is happening now. It is happening at Tea Party rallies, conferences, town hall meetings, in neighborhoods, get out the vote drives, on the Internet and support for conservative candidates all over this country.


This gives me great hope for our vote in November.

July 18, 2010

Calling Tea Party people racist is a S.I.N.

July 18, 2010
By Herman Cain

The NAACP is doing the dirty work for the failed policies of the Obama Administration and the Congressional Democrats. Accusing the Tea Party movement as being racist shifts (S) the attention from the mishandling of the Gulf oil tragedy, the failed $862 billion stimulus spending bill, the lack of private sector job growth and an economy stuck on stalled.

The NAACP’s accusation also shifts attention away from the problems in the black community which they ignore (I) in their name calling (N) rhetoric, such as increased high school drop-out rates, increased incarceration rates, increased out-of-wedlock birth rates and unemployment rates among blacks that are 50 percent higher than the national average.

Although my invitation to the NAACP annual convention in Kansas City got lost in the mail, I suspect there were plenty of speeches blaming George W. Bush and greedy capitalists for those problems.

When NAACP spokeswoman Leila McDowell says “hardcore white supremacist organizations have participated in and occasionally lead Tea Party rallies”, the mainstream lapdog media jumps all over such a blatantly baseless claim. When asked what the claim was based on, she said academic research on the Tea Party movement.

Of the nearly two dozen Tea Party rallies at which I have been a keynote speaker, I have yet to see or hear of anyone doing a survey, poll or research asking attendees if they were white supremacists. Nor has any of the Tea Party organizers indicated that such research was ever requested or being done.

Although it was not a scientific test, at a Georgia Tea Party event I attended last Friday July 16, which included a live broadcast of my radio show, I asked all of the white supremacists and KKK members to raise their hands. There were none. When I asked a show of hands of all the people who want the big government spending to stop, the legislative abuse to stop and the coming tax increases to be stopped, the over 3,000 attendees almost cheered the roof off the place!

Since there have been thousands of Tea Party and citizen rallies across the country beginning in early 2009, those researchers obviously attended the ones I did not attend. I would love to see the research, or hear or see one audio or video clip of a Tea Party speaker uttering one racist word. It does not exist!

It is unfortunate that a once-relevant and impactful organization is looking for relevance in the wrong place, namely, race. It should be about solving problems and uniting people instead of dividing people with baseless claims of racism.

I have also been called a racist among other names for disagreeing with the president’s policies and those of the Democrat-controlled Congress. But that does not discourage me or other black conservatives from fighting for what we believe, or challenging so-called black establishment organizations such as the NAACP.

Tea Party people are not racist. They are patriotic Americans who want the greatest country in the world to remain the greatest country in the world. We are exercising our right to speak out against bad public policy, even if the president is black.

This isn’t about race. This is about results, and the results by this administration and this Congress are missing in action.

The NAACP has lost its relevance and its way forward. That’s a sin.

July 11, 2010

Coming soon from the Democrats: The worst tax increases of 2011

July 11, 2010
By Herman Cain

All tax increases are bad, but there are some that are just plain unfair and punitive for no logical reason. The marriage penalty, the small business penalty, the retirement penalty, and the death penalty are in that category.

Everyone except the most clueless “mushrooms” of our society know that tax rates will return to 2000 levels if the Democrat-controlled Congress does nothing to stop them.

And they have shown a real skill for doing nothing but legislative carnage to this country in the last 18 months. That carnage has included the publicly unpopular Health Care Deform bill, the House-passed Cap and Trade and Tax and Kill (Jobs) bill, and the newly proposed Dodd-Frank Financial Deform bill. The full negative economic impact of those penalties on our economy continues to unfold.

Most people are equally unaware that these automatic tax increases come about because of a sunset clause in the 2000 tax decrease legislation. In order for the then Republican-controlled Senate to get enough Democratic votes to pass the legislation, they had to agree to the sunset clause. The Republicans were betting that the benefits of the tax cuts would be so obvious that the Democrats would not dare let them expire. The Democrats were betting that they could bad mouth the so-called “Bush” tax cuts enough that the “mushrooms” would believe the tax cuts were a big reason for our runaway deficits.

The Democrats won and they insured their bet by being the catalyst for exponentially escalating deficit spending. The Republicans got sucker punched by the Democrats again, because collectively they thought there was no way the Democrats would allow obviously unfair tax penalties to be re-instated. And just as the Democrats do not care if legislation is good or bad as long as it enhances their big government agenda, they do not care about fairness in the tax code.

Americans for Tax Reform reports that as of January 1, 2011 the standard deduction for married couples will no longer be double that for a single person. They are also penalized for having children, since the child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 per child to $500.

Small businesses (Subchapter S corporations) will no longer be able to expense equipment purchases up to $250,000. The new limit will be $25,000 which is equivalent to a tax increase. To add insult to injury, their business profits will be taxed at the higher personal income tax rates, if they make a profit.

Many retirees work and save all of their careers to be able to retire on dividends on their savings, stocks and bonds. These dividends will no longer be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of 15 percent. They will now be taxed as ordinary income at a top bracket rate of 39.6 percent.

The dreaded death tax will return to a 55 percent top rate on estates over $1 million. It does not take very long to be worth $1 million when you start adding up the value of your home, automobiles, savings, investments and even life insurance proceeds. “Selling the farm to save the farm” is back.

The reality of these punitive policies is that they will not generate a net increase in tax revenues, because they discourage taking business risks to create jobs, as well as marriage, savings and dying. We cannot stop dying, but we do not need to be unfairly killed by taxes while we are alive.

Even worse, we should not be killing an economy that’s already on life support.

That will surely happen if the Democrats do nothing.

July 4, 2010

I return from vacation, and dang, you people are stressed out! But no wonder .

July 4, 2010
By Herman Cain

I did it!

I did not read, watch or listen to any news stories about what is going on in this country for seven days. There were no exceptions! Nada! Nor did I do any of my radio shows.

I took a vacation from the problems of America. I came back relaxed!

When I re-engaged with the news I realized just how stressed out America is with its problems. It was like looking at America’s problems from 50,000 feet and seeing the forest and not just the daily “trees” in the news. Although there was nothing new in the news, seven major stress points appeared to have only gotten worse in seven days.

The Gulf oil tragedy got worse. The first thing that flashed on the news program I watched was “Day 71” and the oil spill was still gushing. The oil was threatening the Louisiana shoreline, and the federal response was still slow and bureaucratic.

The Obama Administration is still in denial about the seriousness of Arizona’s southern border insecurity. Instead of providing serious support for Arizona and other border states, the administration put up some signs near the border warning people of the dangers, and pressed forward with their legal challenge to the new Arizona immigration law.

The war in Afghanistan has a new general in charge, but the outlook for “victory” is still bleak. It will be difficult even for General Petraeus because it is widely recognized that the Afghanistan government is corrupt, and the “rules of engagement” to protect civilians increases the dangers to our troops. The Taliban has only one rule of engagement: Kill!

The American debt crisis continues to get worse with the administration and the Democrat-led Congress still on a spending binge. Our crisis here is made worse by the situation in Europe, which could trigger another worldwide financial meltdown and the USA would not be spared.

A jobless economic recovery is not a recovery. As the administration continues to say the “stimulus” is working, the facts continue to indicate otherwise. Unemployment for June was just reported to be 9.5 percent with June job losses at 125,000, while 650,000 people dropped out of the labor force so they were not counted. Nearly 15 million people are still unemployed.

But President Obama says “we are headed in the right direction.”

The confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan were just Washington political theater. Political analysts believe she will be confirmed and will tip the balance of the Supreme Court to be more liberal-leaning than Constitutional-leaning.

This seventh major stress point was an “ah-ha” scary moment. Although the president’s approval ratings are down, the scariest statistic is the 45 percent of the public who think he’s doing a good job. Who are these people?

This means that all Obama has to do to get re-elected is to swoon six more percentage points of voters with a slick speech or political ad and he wins. That’s scary. It also means that those of us who are not part of the scary-45 percent have our work cut out for us.

The good news is that the numbers are in our favor. Conservatives out-number liberals two-to-one according to an ongoing Gallup poll, and moderates outnumber liberals nearly two-to-one.

We have to work harder at educating, mobilizing and inspiring people to vote the right way in November 2010 and 2012, because America’s problems are not going to take a vacation.