Welcome to 2010

It’s a new year. What lies ahead? A fork in the road.
As Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
One path is toward European-style socialism. We began veering sharply in that direction last year.
Without changes, the left’s existing entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – will, along with debt payments, consume 92 percent of the federal government’s spending within 10 years. And they are about to add another entitlement of gargantuan size.
About debt, no one put it better than Gordon Liddy: “A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man .... which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.”
Another portent: Within a year or two, more than half the people in this country will pay no federal income taxes.
“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner,” James Bovard said.
A majority can feed on a minority until there is nothing left but the bones. Then who eats what?
Politicians say the recession is over. I don’t buy it. Why would anybody invest money in such conditions, and with so much uncertainty about inflation and future taxes?
What we need are more people paying less taxes. Slash marginal tax rates and capital gains taxes, which are among the highest anywhere, and get the economy moving again.
Politicians created the problems and they can only make the problems worse.
Our choices at the fork in the road: More government and less prosperity or less government and more prosperity.