Money

What Should Be Done To RINOs Like John McCain That Betray Us Over And Over Again?

By destroying the last chance that the Republicans in the Senate had to repeal Obamacare, John McCain has ensured that he will go down in history as a backstabbing traitor that cared nothing for true conservative values.  For decades, RINOs like McCain have promised to uphold conservative values while campaigning, but once they have gotten into office they have betrayed us over and over again.  How much more are we going to take before we say enough is enough?  I hope that you will join me in my effort to remove every RINO from Congress.  What John McCain has just done should make all of us absolutely sick.  Thanks to him, Obamacare is going to remain the law of the land for the foreseeable future even though the Republicans have control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.  If I go to Washington, I am going to declare war on RINOs like McCain, but the only way that will be possible is if thousands of good conservatives help fund this campaign.  So far my campaign has created an enormous amount of buzz all over the state, but the only way that we are going to be able to capitalize on all of that buzz is if you all stand with me.

If what John McCain did on Friday does not make you angry, I am not sure what will.  Together with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, McCain killed the very last chance of repealing Obamacare in the Senate.  The following comes from the Washington Post…

A convergence of contentious issues, as well as embarrassing infighting and shake-ups at the White House, have a number of Republicans suddenly in open resistance to President Trump on a number of fronts.

The most dramatic moment came in the early-morning hours Friday, when Sen. John McCain, an ailing war hero and onetime Republican presidential standard-bearer, joined two other GOP dissidents, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, to cast the deciding vote to kill a scaled-back plan to dismantle tenets of the Affordable Care Act — and with it, perhaps, Trump’s promise to repeal Obamacare.

McCain had specifically campaigned on repealing Obamacare in 2010 and in 2016.  In fact, just last year he was running campaign ads in which he boldly proclaimed that he was “leading the fight to stop Obamacare”.

Now he has done this.

And it was quite a dramatic moment when he finally cast his vote.  Some even believe that it is going to go down as the most famous “thumbs-down” in Senate history…

The clerk read the Arizona senator’s surname in the microphone of the tense Senate chamber. The two words were met with silence — John McCain had stepped out of the room minutes before.

But moments later, he reappeared. By then, the alphabetical roll call had reached Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan. McCain walked over to the front of the chamber, raising his right arm. He held it up in the air until he had the attention of the clerk.

“No,” he said, with a swift thumbs-down.

In response, we need to give our own “thumbs-down” to every RINO on the federal, state and local levels all around the country.

If you are sick and tried of RINOs like McCain, then I would like to ask for your support.  My team has set up a brand new website called Help Michael Win where you can help us raise $3,000 to print more than 20,000 brochures.  We have volunteers that are ready to get brochures into the hands of potential voters, but the only way that we can do this is if the funding comes in.  If 300 of you were to donate just 10 dollars each, we will be able to meet our goal.

But if we all sit back and do nothing, RINOs such as McCain will continue to rule Washington.  Just before he cast his decisive vote, McCain actually went over to the Democrats to tell them what he was about to do.  The following comes from the Washington Post…

Shuffling across the chamber, Mr. McCain convened with Democrats, informing them of his choice. “They can read my lips,” he said to laughs, fearing his hand would be tipped ahead of time from inside the gallery.

At one point, the senator joined Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski, telling them they had done the right thing.

“We talked about how if anyone knew about doing the right thing it was John McCain,” Ms. Collins recalled. “It was very moving.”

I am the only candidate in this race that is openly going to go to war with McCain and others like him in Congress.

Since there is no incumbent, my race is totally wide open, and it will ultimately be decided by the enthusiasm of people like you.  If everyone in my district that is familiar with my work ends up voting for me in the Republican primary next May, I will win and it won’t even be close.

I am so tired of just sitting back and doing nothing while RINOs like McCain slap us in the face over and over again, and other conservative authors feel the exact same way.  Here is just one example…

“For American voters expecting their Republican-dominated House, Senate and White House to honor their years of repeal promises and actually, well, repeal Obamacare, McCain’s thumbs-down was a face-slap moment that will be remembered in history as a textbook classic case of political betrayal. McCain may feel liberated. But his name will go down in conservative history books as a traitor to the cause.”

If I am elected, I promise to work very hard to defeat John McCain and every other RINO in Congress.  I know that won’t make me very popular with the Republican establishment, but I don’t care.

And if you believe in what I am trying to do, I hope that you will visit HelpMichaelWin.com and MichaelSnyderForIdaho.com.

It isn’t going to be easy, but together we can change the way that things are done in Washington.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Scientists Warn That The Countdown To The Extinction of The Human Race Is Accelerating

Humanity is steamrolling toward a date with extinction, and yet most people have absolutely no idea that this is happening.  Most of us like to think that we are part of the smartest, tallest and fastest generation in human history, but science has actually shown that the exact opposite is true.  Compared to our ancient ancestors, we are shorter, slower and we have been losing mental capacity for thousands of years.  And just this week, a groundbreaking study that discovered that large numbers of human males in the western world may soon be incapable of reproducing made headlines all over the planet…

Humans could become extinct if sperm counts in men from North America, Europe and Australia continue to fall at current rates, a doctor has warned.

Researchers assessing the results of nearly 200 separate studies say sperm counts among men from these areas seem to have halved in less than 40 years.

The 185 studies that the researchers took their data from were all conducted between 1973 and 2011.  Dr. Hagai Levine was one of the lead scientists involved in the study, and he found that for men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, sperm concentrations declined by 52.4 percent during the study period, and total sperm count declined by a whopping 59.3 percent.

If these trends continue, we will soon have tens of millions of young men that are incapable of producing children.  The following comes from the Washington Post…

The most important data points in the new study involved sperm concentrations for what are known as “unselected” men who haven’t yet proven they are fertile. These are men in the studies who are on the younger side and are not yet fathers or do not have partners who are pregnant. Researchers estimated that these men had an average sperm concentration of 99 million per milliliter in 1973 but that that had dropped to an average 47 million per milliliter in 2011.

That is a disturbing number given that, according to World Health Organization criteria, men with a sperm concentration of less than 40 million are considered to have an impaired chance of conceiving and those with a sperm concentration of less than 15 million per milliliter are unlikely to be able to have children.

If that sounds extremely serious to you, that is because it is extremely serious.

According to Dr. Levine, we could potentially be looking at “the extinction of the human species” in the not too distant future…

“If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future,” he said.

“Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species.”

So what is causing this alarming drop in sperm levels?

There are certainly lots of factors involved, but one study from a few years ago pointed much of the blame at our heavy use of cellphones…

The new study shows that having a mobile phone close to the testicles – or within a foot or two of the body – can lower sperm levels so much that conceiving could be difficult.

The findings have led to a leading British fertility expert to advise men to stop being addicted to mobile phones.

Professor Martha Dirnfeld, of the Technion University in Haifa, said: “We analysed the amount of active swimming sperm and the quality and found that it had been reduced.

“We think this is being caused by a heating of the sperm from the phone and by electromagnetic activity.”

And of course where do most men carry their phones?

Most of us carry them in our pockets, and that is about the worst possible place that we could carry them.

But even if sperm counts were not dropping so precipitously, humanity would still be facing rapid extinction due to a phenomenon known as “mutational meltdown”.  Below is an excerpt from a study that was originally published by Gerald H. McKibben and Everett C. McKibben, and I have shared this previously, but since I am talking about the possibility of human extinction in the not too distant future in this article I wanted to share it again…

Geneticists have long worried about the impact of mutations on the human population, and that at a rate of one deleterious mutation per person per generation, genetic deterioration would result. Earlier reports were based on estimates of mutation rates considerable lower than what we now know to be the case. Findings going back to 2002 show that the human mutation rate is at least 100 mistakes (misspellings) per person per generation. Some scientists believe the rate is closer to 300.

Even a rate of 100 has profound implications, and the mutation rate is itself increasing. Furthermore, most, if not all, mutations in the human genome must be deleterious.  “And nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, even if further mutations could be stopped.”  It would appear that the process is an irreversible downward spiral that will end in “mutational meltdown”.

Let me try to break this down very simply so that everyone can understand.

DNA mutations are passed from one generation to another, and each generation has more mutations than the previous generation.

This process appears to be accelerating, and at some undetermined point in the future human DNA will become so corrupt that the human race simply will not be able to continue.

In other words, the human race is wearing out, and the clock is ticking down to the eventual extinction of our race.

So even if we don’t kill ourselves off, which we are certainly more than capable of doing, the truth is that normal processes will eventually wipe all of us out anyway.

I know that this may sound very negative, but if you know the rest of the story it actually isn’t.

Our lives are just like the flowers of the field.  They are here today and they are gone tomorrow, but what we do with them will echo for all of eternity.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

If America Does Not Turn Back To God, There Isn’t Going To Be An America

I know that politicians aren’t supposed to talk like this, but I don’t care. I am not a politician and I never will be. And I am not running for Congress because I want a career in politics. We have enough career politicians right now, and so we definitely don’t need another one. So I am not going to carefully craft a message that I think that the voters want to hear. Instead, I am just going to tell the truth, and I believe that people all over America are going to stand with me. And the truth is that if America does not turn back to God, there isn’t going to be an America.

Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, close to 60 million American children have been murdered by the abortion industry.

The blood of 60 million children is crying out from the ground against us, and if we continue to slaughter children on an industrial scale there will be absolutely no future for our nation.

So no, I don’t plan to tone down my message. I have been urged to compromise on my message in order to attract more voters, and that is how it always starts. Politicians start making compromise after compromise, and after a while they become spineless jellyfish that don’t really stand for anything.

Just look at what has been happening in Congress. We gave the Republicans control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives and Planned Parenthood has still not been defunded. Earlier this year the Democrats threatened to shut down the government, and the spineless Republicans gave them virtually everything that they wanted – including full funding for Planned Parenthood for the rest of the fiscal year.

You cannot be Pro-Life and vote for funding for Planned Parenthood.

Do you know what is going on at Planned Parenthood clinics all over the nation? After an abortion is performed, organs are harvested from that dead child and sold off to the highest bidder. We now have undercover video after undercover video proving this, and yet nobody has been arrested.

Instead, the federal government continues to give Planned Parenthood approximately 500 million dollars a year.

I am on a personal mission to stop this. I am so deeply frustrated with politicians that use the “Pro-Life” label to get our votes but that then turn around and keep on voting to fund Planned Parenthood year after year.

So I am pledging that I will NEVER vote for any bill that includes even a single penny of funding for Planned Parenthood, and I am calling on all Pro-Life voters to refuse to vote for any candidate that will not make the same pledge.

In addition, if I am elected I will use the full power of my office to go to war with Planned Parenthood. That means that I am going to do whatever I can to force Planned Parenthood out of business, and I will greatly rejoice when the last Planned Parenthood clinic in America finally shuts down for good.

This is what our “Pro-Life” politicians should be doing, and I hope to be part of a nationwide movement to force them to start standing up for the unborn.

If you believe in what we are trying to do, I would encourage you to prayerfully consider supporting our campaign. We are a 100% grassroots campaign, and so that means that the only way that we will be able to get our message out and the only way that we will be able to win this campaign is if true conservatives like you get behind us.

And the good news is that we have already created a tremendous amount of buzz all over the state of Idaho. This district has never had someone so bold and so conservative run for this seat, and the liberals are already beginning to freak out.

If you live in north Idaho, I would encourage you to attend a campaign event that we are having this Thursday at 7PM in Bonners Ferry. It is going to be at the Providence Bible Presbyterian Church which is really easy to find. If you have any questions about how to locate it, just let me know. I hope to meet as many of you as possible there…

And I want to remind everyone that my brand new book has just been released. It is entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters”, and if you loved my previous books then I think that you will really enjoy this one as well.

Throughout this campaign I am going to do my best to keep all of you updated on what is happening. Like I have explained previously, there is no incumbent in this race because the individual currently holding this seat is running for governor instead.

So the race is completely wide open, and if we can get my message to every voter in this district I believe that we will win by a very wide margin.

If you believe in what I am trying to do, then I would like to ask you to consider contributing to the campaign. The Lord has put me into a position where I am forced to depend on my brothers and sisters, and there is no way that this can happen without you. Right now we are in need of brochures, signs and other basic things that a campaign needs, and if you would like to help out you can do so right here.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were able to raise millions upon millions of dollars from Americans that are deeply committed to promoting abortion. I believe that there are even more Americans out there that are deeply committed to defunding Planned Parenthood and ending abortion in America, and the only way that is going to happen is if we start sending deeply committed Pro-Life people to Washington.

If we do not stop the slaughter of our children, there isn’t going to be an America for our children and our grandchildren. Time is running out, and I hope that you will help me share this message.

Washington D.C. Is Essentially Just A Gigantic Money Machine

If you have ever wondered why our leaders in Washington D.C. seem to act so strangely, the truth is that it almost always comes down to just one thing.  It has been said that “money makes the world go round”, and that is definitely true in Washington.  This year the federal government will spend more than 4 trillion dollars, and that represents well over one-fifth of our national GDP.  With so much money coming in and so much money going out, the stakes are incredibly high, and that is why so much money is poured into political campaigns on the national level.

And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that those that live the closest to this gigantic money machine have benefited greatly.  Forbes just released their brand new rankings for 2017, and they found that five out of the top 10 wealthiest counties in the entire country are suburbs of Washington D.C.…

Virginia’s Loudoun County holds the title of the nation’s richest county with a median household income of $125,900. While nearly 10,000 residents commute to the District, according to Forbes, about 11,700 businesses employ 161,000 county residents, with Dulles International Airport, Loudoun County Public Schools and the Department of Homeland Security leading that charge.

The nearby city of Falls Church, Fairfax and Arlington counties in Virginia and Howard County in Maryland also lead the nation based on wealth.

In general, salaries for federal workers are significantly higher than in the private sector, and benefit packages are usually much better.

But in addition to having a very high concentration of federal workers, the D.C. area is also home to hordes of lawyers, lobbyists, defense contractors and other government vendors.  Big government means big business for those guys, and business has been very good in recent years…

The federal government has a lot to do with this: The Capitol and the economy orbiting around it (including lawyers, defense contractors, computer engineers along the Dulles Corridor, and doctors near NIH) attract college graduates who reliably contribute to six-figure households. Crucially, there was a $1.7 billion increase in lobbying between 1998 and 2010, as Dylan Matthews explained. With each $1 million of lobbying “associated with a $3.70 increase in the D.C. wage premium,” the money pouring into Washington wound up in the pockets of its residents.

This certainly isn’t the limited government that our founders intended.

So where did we go wrong?

One of the big turning points came in 1913.  That is the year when the Federal Reserve and the modern version of the income tax were established.  The Federal Reserve was designed by the elite to get the federal government very deeply into debt, and an income tax was needed to help service that debt and to help pay for the much larger government that the progressives were wanting.

Back then, D.C. was nothing like it is today.  In fact, even in the 1970s there were still large farms inside the Beltway.  But the federal government just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it is a four trillion dollar monstrosity.

What I believe we should do is to dismantle as much of that monstrosity as we possibly can.  Instead of asking which government agencies we should close, I believe that we should be asking which government agencies we really need to leave open.

A great place to start would be by abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS and the income tax.  Those institutions are at the very core of the Washington money machine, and so it would essentially be like tearing the heart out of big government.

And don’t worry, the federal government would still have plenty of money coming in.  The individual income tax only accounts for about 46 percent of all federal revenue, and theoretically we could still have an absolutely enormous federal government without an income tax.  I once wrote an article that listed 97 different ways that various levels of government get money out of us each year, and so getting rid of the federal income tax would still leave 96 ways for the politicians to extract money from us.

As I remind my readers so frequently, the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no income tax and no central bank.  But I know that a lot of people out there love the 1.33 percent average yearly GDP growth rate that we have been experiencing over the past decade and would have a really hard time giving that up.

Unfortunately, it would actually be a very tough transition to a much more limited federal government because so much of our society is geared around the enormous money machine in Washington.  In 2018, more than a billion dollars will be spent on the mid-term elections, and most of that money will be going to incumbents that are committed to maintaining the status quo.

If we ever want things to really start changing in Washington, we have got to start sending people there that haven’t been bought off by the big money interests.

In my congressional district there is no incumbent running in 2018, and nobody else in the race is nearly as conservative as I am.  But since I can’t be bought by the special interests, I am going to have to rely on grassroots support.

Donald Trump showed us that anything is possible in American politics.  When Jeb Bush decided to run for president, he had an extremely long list of endorsements and a hundred million dollars behind him, and he still got trounced by Trump because Trump had a much stronger message.

If we stand united, we can take our government back and there won’t be anything that the establishment will be able to do about it.

But if we sit back and do nothing, the cesspool of corruption in Washington D.C. will just continue to get deeper and deeper.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Every RINO Needs To Go

It looks like the effort to repeal Obamacare is completely dead, and that says a lot about the current state of the Republican Party.  For decades, RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) have been using labels such as “Republican”, “conservative”, “pro-gun” and “pro-life” to get elected, but then once they get into office they govern like Democrats.  There was so much hope when Donald Trump won the election last November, but thanks to the RINOs in Congress not much has actually been accomplished so far.  In fact, this is being called “the most unproductive Congress in 164 years”.  The following is an excerpt from an article published by The Week…

Just six months ago, it looked like the Republican Party was about to go on a legislative blitzkrieg, shredding law after law passed by the Obama administration. ObamaCare would be vaporized and replaced with a nickel rattling inside an empty Mountain Dew can. Dodd-Frank was sure to be tossed aside for a transparent giveaway to Wall Street. And Republicans would pass their regressive tax reform, their perplexing border-adjustment tax, and so much more. The GOP hadn’t held total power in American politics since 2006, and the party had become much more conservative in the interim.

Most of us were anticipating that so much would get done over the past 6 months, but instead we have seen nothing but gridlock.

The most recent example of this has been the Obamacare debacle.  After failing to push through “Obamacare 2.0”, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided that he would switch gears and try to get a clean Obamacare repeal bill through the Senate, but unfortunately that effort has already failed…

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s sudden move to try to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan appeared doomed Tuesday as at least three moderate Republicans rejected the idea.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said they will not support a motion to proceed to the bill, which would repeal Obamacare in two years. Without their support, McConnell cannot get the 50 votes he needs to pass a repeal bill.

Collins, Capito and Murkowski are perfect examples of what I am talking about when I use the term “RINOs”.  They are essentially Democrats, but they have been able to successfully use the Republican label to get elected.

Unless we are able to start kicking the RINOs out of Congress, most of Trump’s agenda is going to go nowhere.

Obviously Trump is not happy about what has transpired in the Senate, and now his plan is to basically sit back and let Obamacare fail…

Now his plan is to “let Obamacare fail; it will be a lot easier,” he said. “And I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll just let Obamacare fail.”

“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it,” the president said. “I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us.”

But will the Democrats come to the Republicans ready to compromise as Obamacare comes apart at the seams?

I seriously doubt it.

I think that they are convinced that they can successfully point the blame at the Republicans as our health care system continues to deteriorate.

Personally, I believe that the more the federal government gets involved in health care the worse it is going to get.

Unfortunately, once you establish a program that gives out free goodies to people it is hard to take that back.  For RINOs such as Collins, Capito and Murkowski, one of the biggest obstacles to repealing Obamacare is that it would roll back the Medicaid program to pre-Obamacare levels.

Today, more than 74 million Americans are on Medicaid and CHIP, and more than  58 million Americans are on Medicare.  That means that more than 130 million Americans are enrolled in these government programs at this point.

That is nearly half the country.

Of course many Democrats would like to go all the way and put everyone in such programs, but then we would have a completely socialized health care system.

The big problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.  Everybody likes free stuff, but somebody has to pay for all of that free stuff somewhere along the line.

And if people are forced to expend time and effort in order to get their free stuff, interest in the free stuff drops substantially.  In Alabama, food stamp enrollment plunged dramatically once work requirements were re-instituted…

Alabama began 2017 by requiring able-bodied adults without children in 13 counties to either find a job or participate in work training as a condition for continuing to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

According to AL.com, the number of those recipients declined from 5,538 to 831 between Jan. 1 and the beginning of May – an 85 percent drop.

Similar changes were implemented in select counties in Georgia and by the end of the first three months, the number of adults receiving benefits in three participating counties dropped 58 percent, according to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation.

In my brand new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters”, I open up about why I want to run for Congress.  For way too long we have had a federal government that has just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.  We need to swing the pendulum way back in the other direction, and we need to educate people on the benefits of having a very limited central government.

If you take the shackles off, the free market system works incredibly well.  And once upon a time, the United States actually had a free market health care system and it was the best on the entire planet.

We can get there again, but first we need to get rid of the RINOs in Congress and replace them with people that deeply believe in true conservative values.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Cashless Society Alert: Visa Will Be Giving Up To $500,000 To Restaurants That Go ‘100% Cashless’

The push toward a cashless society is becoming more of a shove.  Before today I had never heard of “The Visa Cashless Challenge”, but after reading about it I have to say that I am quite alarmed.  Visa is trying to “encourage” businesses to go cashless, and one of the ways that they will be doing this is by “awarding up to $500,000 to 50 eligible US-based small business food service owners who commit to joining the 100% cashless quest”.  The food industry is still one of the last bastions where cash is used very heavily, and so it makes sense that Visa would want to target that segment.  Of course the more people that use cards to pay for meals, the more money that Visa will make.

When I go to restaurants, I almost always use cash, and I know a lot of other people that very much prefer to use cash in those situations as well.  But if Visa has their way, soon all of us will be forced to use some form of digital payment instead.  The following is an excerpt from the press release that Visa issued about this new “challenge”…

Today Visa (NYSE:V) announced it is launching a major effort to encourage businesses to go cashless. Aiming to create a culture where cash is no longer king, the program will give merchants increased ability to accept all forms of global digital payments. Visa will be encouraging and helping merchants go cashless by using innovation to their advantage in order to stay competitively connected to their customers.

To encourage businesses to go cashless, Visa is announcing The Visa Cashless Challenge, with a call to action for small business restaurants, cafés or food truck owners to describe what cashless means for them, their employees and customers. Visa will be awarding up to $500,000 to 50 eligible US-based small business food service owners who commit to joining the 100% cashless quest.

“At Visa, we believe you can be everywhere you want to be, and that it should be easy to pay and be paid in more ways than ever – whether it’s a phone, card, wearable or other device,” said Jack Forestell, head of global merchant solutions, Visa Inc. “With 70% of the world, or more than 5 billion people, connected via mobile device by 20201, we have an incredible opportunity to educate merchants and consumers alike on the effectiveness of going cashless.”

Visa would love to eliminate the use of cash entirely because it would mean much bigger profits for them.

And of course cashless systems hold a lot of appeal for governments as well because such systems would allow them to monitor and track the behavior of their citizens much more closely.

As our society transitions in that direction, we will be told that it is all about fighting money laundering, tax evasion and terrorism, but there are other ways to combat those issues.

In the end, many people like to use cash because of the privacy that it offers, and there are very powerful forces that would like to eliminate that privacy.

For now, however, advocates of a cashless society are pushing the economic benefits of such a system.  Here is more from Visa’s press release…

Visa has recognized the net benefits for merchants when they reduce dependency on cash transaction. Visa recently conducted a study that found that if businesses in 100 cities transitioned from cash to digital, their cities stand to experience net benefits of $312 billion per year. According to this study, in New York City alone, businesses could generate an additional $6.8 billion in revenue and save more than 186 million hours in labor, by making greater use of digital payments. This amounts to more than $5 billion annual costs savings for businesses in New York. The complete results with the benefits of going cashless for businesses will be included in the “Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments” report that will be released by Visa later this year.

And of course the push toward a cashless system is not just happening in the United States.

Over in Sweden, many banks will no longer take or give out cash, and about 95 percent of all retail transactions in the entire country are now cashless.

Of course the EU as a whole is rapidly moving in the direction of phasing out cash.  Not too long ago, the European Commission released an “Action Plan” which instructed member states to explore the possibility of “potential upper limits to cash payments”.

Some of the member states have already adopted such “upper limits” on cash transactions, and by slowly lowering those limits over time those countries could eventually phase out cash completely.

And down in Australia, a “Black Economy Taskforce” has been established to go after tax evaders…

The Black Economy Taskforce has been established to develop an innovative, forward-looking whole-of-government policy response to combat the black economy in Australia, recognising that these issues cannot be tackled by traditional tax enforcement measures alone.

The black economy refers to people who operate entirely outside the tax and regulatory system or who are known to the authorities but do not correctly report their tax obligations.

Of course this represents a major crackdown on cash, because most people that operate in the “underground economy” tend to use cash very heavily.  According to Martin Armstrong, there has even been a proposal in Australia to put “nano-chips” into large notes for tracking purposes…

Michael Andrew, the head of this 1984 style Taskforce to spy on citizens, has proposed that the government should keep track of your $100 and $50 notes by implanting hi-tech nano-chips. He could simply scan your house to see where you are hiding money that the government can confiscate.

Many of us are alarmed by the rise of a cashless society because we know where it could eventually lead.

If government authorities can watch, track and monitor everything that we do and everywhere we go, that opens the door for great tyranny.

And going cashless would also potentially allow government authorities to act as “gatekeepers” for the system.  In other words, the government could require all of us to meet certain conditions before we were allowed to participate in the cashless system, and if we refused to meet those conditions we would be unable to buy, sell, open a bank account, get a job or do much of anything else in society.

The potential dangers to our liberties and freedoms are great, and hopefully we can get more people to understand what going to a fully cashless society could ultimately mean for all of us.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Michael Snyder’s New Book Entitled ‘Living A Life That Really Matters’ Has Just Been Released

Have you ever reached a point in life where things have gotten so bad that it seems impossible to ever turn things around?  In my new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters”, I begin by sharing such a point in my own life about 20 years ago.  If someone would have told me at the time what my life would be like today, I would have laughed at them.  But God took the broken pieces of my life and turned them into a beautiful thing, and He can do the exact same thing for anyone else.

This is the most personal book that I have written, and it is quite a departure from my normal work.  If you follow my work on a regular basis, than you know that I like to write about politics, economics and the hard issues of our day in a way that the average person on the street can understand.  And I heavily document the points I make with facts, figures and statistics, and there are still lots of facts, figures and statistics in my new book.

But in this new book I hope to inspire people to reach for something more.  Instead of focusing so much on the problems, this book is absolutely packed with solutions.  In many ways, it is patterned after the Book of Proverbs.  There are literally hundreds of secrets that I have learned over the course of my 47 years embedded throughout the chapters of this book, and I wish that someone had shared all of these secrets with me when I was a young man.

So it is not a book that you will want to speed through.  There are literally life changing truths on every single page, and you may find yourself going back over some portions of the book time and time again.

This book is not written on a theoretical level.  I know that the secrets contained in this book work, because they have absolutely revolutionized my life.  But of course I didn’t invent these secrets.  Ultimately, every bit of wisdom that any of us have been given comes from the One that created us all.  Without God nothing is possible, but with Him all things are possible.

As I was writing this book, I often struggled to find the words to describe what it was about.  Sometimes my wife would even look at me with a puzzled look when I tried to explain it to her.  It is not a “self-help book” that will help you to become wealthy, famous or successful.  Neither is it an “inspirational” book that will give you warm fuzzies.  Rather, it is a book that is absolutely packed with life lessons that nobody else seems to want to talk about.  The following is the description of the book that is on Amazon…

Deep inside all of us is a yearning to live a life that is filled with meaning and purpose. We all want to feel good about our lives, and we all want something to look forward to when we get out of bed in the morning. As little children we were filled with hopes and dreams for the future, but for so many of us those dreams have long since faded. Instead, many of us drag ourselves through life feeling down, depressed and defeated. In this book Michael Snyder is going to share with you what he has learned about living an overflowing life. We were designed to love, to laugh, to discover, to create and to live lives that are filled with passion. Unfortunately, so many of us have bought into lies that have enabled the enemy to steal all of that from us. No matter how bad things may seem right now, God can take the broken pieces of your life and turn them into a beautiful thing. But you have got to be willing to break your old patterns and start doing things that will produce good fruit in your life. This book will help you to do that.

In order for our lives to function the way that they should, God must be at the center of our lives.  And He has given us instructions for how we are to live, but most of the population is completely disregarding those instructions.

Following His instructions will lead to life, love, blessing and peace, but so many people have been living another way for so long that they don’t even know that such a life is possible.

This book is going to be extremely controversial, and it is going to deeply challenge you as you read it.  But for those that embrace what I am sharing, it will be a completely life-changing experience.  In fact, I believe that this book is going to change more lives than anything else I have ever written.

After you have read the book, I hope that many of you will write to me and share how it has affected you.  Writing this book was an emotional experience for me, and I believe that it will help a lot of you wrestle with things that you have been dealing with for a very long time.

Near the end of the book I also share about why I am running for Congress, although in the future I hope to do an entire book about why we desperately need to try to get this nation to change course.

But this book is primarily about matters of the heart.  Most people I encounter in life are not living victorious lives.  Instead, most people out there seem to have had the life completely sucked out of them by all of the pain, heartache and trials that they have been through.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You can live an overflowing life, and the greatest chapters of your life can still be ahead of you.

But if you keep falling into the same patterns that you have been following all along, you will keep getting the exact same results.

God has a better plan for you, and it starts with doing things His way.

So I very, very much encourage you to get my new book and to read it all the way through.  If you embrace what I share in this book and apply these principles to your own life, they will turn your life completely upside down.

Now that the book is finally out, you can find it in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  It will also be available from many other online retailers, but if you want to get it right away Amazon will be the place to go.

No matter what you have been through, God still has a plan for you.  And if He can turn my life completely around and use me to touch millions of people all over the world, then He can do it for anyone.

Thank you again for being such faithful readers.  Without all of you, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do, and I can’t wait to hear what you all think of this new book…

3 Examples That Show How Common Core Is Destroying Math Education In America

Whenever you let federal bureaucrats get their hands on anything they are probably going to ruin it.  During the Obama administration, the Department of Education spearheaded a transformation of American education that was absolutely breathtaking.  Over a period of about five years, Common Core standards were implemented in almost every state in the entire nation.  Unfortunately, this has resulted in a huge step backward for public education in this country.  Common Core has been called “state-sponsored child abuse”, and it is a big reason why U.S. students are scoring so poorly on standardized tests compared to much of the rest of the world.

According to Wikipedia, at one point 46 states had adopted Common Core, but now some states are having second thoughts…

46 states initially adopted the Common Core State Standards, although implementation has not been uniform. At least 12 states have introduced legislation to repeal the standards outright,[1] and Indiana has since withdrawn from the standards.

Sadly, many parents don’t even understand how dramatically our system of education has been tampered with.  In her book entitled The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids, Joy Pullmann exposes how the Gates Foundation has been one of the key players in the effort to get Common Core introduced into classrooms all over America…

Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach … not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature … but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.

But this isn’t just an issue about control.  The truth is that the approach to teaching basic fundamentals such as how to add and how to subtract is fundamentally different under Common Core.

Let me share just three examples that show how much Common Core is changing the way that U.S. students learn math.  All of these examples have been floating around Facebook, and if you have never seen these before they are likely to make you quite angry.

If I asked you to subtract 12 from 32, how would you do it?  Well, the “new way” is much, much more complicated than how we were all taught to do it…

If that first one seemed bizarre to you, than you really aren’t going to like this one…

And this last one was so confusing that a parent with a degree in engineering decided to include his own commentary on his child’s homework…

How are kids supposed to function in the real world if this is how they are learning to do basic math?

Personally, I am going to teach my daughter that 9 + 6 equals 15.  But that isn’t how it is supposed to be done under Common Core.  You can watch a video of a teacher explaining the very convoluted Common Core way to solve that math equation right here.

And of course it isn’t just math that is the problem.  Common Core is systematically “dumbing down” our young people, and that may help to explain why the average U.S. college freshman now reads at a seventh grade level.

So what is the answer?

The first step in fixing our education system is to repeal Common Core.  But even in red states such as Idaho there is a lot of resistance…

Since their inception, the Idaho Core Standards have been enmeshed in controversy.

Some legislators and citizens have pushed for a repeal of the Idaho Core Standards, the state’s version of Common Core standards in math and English language arts. Those repeal efforts have gone nowhere in the Legislature.

I don’t know what is wrong with our legislators.  The Republicans have full control in this state, and so there is absolutely no excuse for not getting something done.

As I end this article, I want to give you an idea of just how far the quality of education in America has fallen over the past 100 years.  In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 made a lot of headlines when it was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum.  As you can see, it is doubtful whether many of our college students would be able to pass such an exam today…

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