Organizations Assisting in Restoring Transparency in Society which will facilitate Affordable Health Care and Private Health Plans

by admin on 04/30/2019 12:01 AM

• Citizens Against Government Waste, www.CAGW.org, America’s Taxpayer’s Watch Dog.

Founded in 1984 by the late businessman J. Peter Grace and the late Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jack Anderson, CAGW is the legacy of President Ronald Reagan’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also known as the Grace Commission. President Reagan directed the Grace Commission to “work like tireless bloodhounds to root out government inefficiency and waste of tax dollars.” Led by 161 corporate executives and community leaders, the commission did just that, issuing a 47-volume, 21,000-page report with 2,378 recommendations.

This report constituted a vision of an efficient, well-managed government that is accountable to taxpayers. Since its founding, CAGW has worked to make that vision a reality and, in 35 years, has helped save taxpayers more than $1.8 trillion through the implementation of Grace Commission findings and cost cutting recommendations.

President Reagan himself described CAGW’s work as “vital in the battle against budget deficits and vital to the strength and resilience of the democratic system and public confidence in our government.” The work of the CAGW includes:

1. The nationally-renown Congressional Pig Book, which identifies specific “pork-barrel” earmarks that lawmakers use to fund their favorite, wasteful pet projects.
2. Our annual Prime Cuts report, which gives policymakers a blueprint for cutting Washington’s wasteful spending and getting the nation on a path toward fiscal sanity.
3. Porker of the Month will introduce you to some of government’s worst pork-barrel offenders.

President Trump inherited a massive federal budget that grows on autopilot year after year. Data compiled by CAGW shows that:

• The federal government spent a record $4.1 Trillion in 2018
• The federal budget deficit hit $782 billion last year and is on course to reach $1 trillion by 2020
• The national debt is now at nearly $22 trillion and climbing—an unsustainable level.
• As a tax payer, your share of this debt is almost $179,000
• Current calls to expand federal spending include “Medicare for All” with an estimated cost of $32     trillion over 10 years, and subsidized college tuition with a $75 billion annual cost.

With President Trump stating a commitment to reining in over bearing big government we must seize every opportunity to get runaway wasteful spending under control now, before it is too late. CAGW specific recommendations for doing so include:

• A 25% reduction in America’s funding for the United Nations.
• Eliminating subsidies for the unprofitable Amtrak train system.
• Ending Depression-era sugar, dairy, and peanut subsidies
• Permanently banning federal earmarks
• Current review of defense spending priorities to eliminate waste and abuse
• Enhanced auditing of Medicare to eliminate improper payments.

“To advocate an efficient, sound, honest government is neither left-wing nor right-wing, it is just plain right.” –J . Peter Grace, CAGW Co-Founder

TO SUPPORT THIS CRITICAL MISSION, PLEASE SEND A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE CONTRIBUTION OF $25 OR $50 OR $100 OR MORE PAYABLE TO:

CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT WASTE
PO BOX 96564, WASHINGTON, DC, 20077-7200

A NONPARTISON NONPROFIT 501 (c)(3) ORGANIZATION REPRESENTING MORE THAN ONE MILLION MEMBERS AND SUPPORTERS NATIONWIDE.
YOURS AND OUR COUNTRY’S FUTURE MAY DEPEND ON OUR SUPPORT

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• The MARS HILL AUDIO Journal takes the measure of it all—the heights and the depths—issue after issue. There is no more intelligent, comprehensive, lively, accessible, and just plain enjoyable window into the crucial currents in our culture.” The MARS HILL AUDIO Journal is a bimonthly “audio magazine” featuring over one hundred minutes of conversation with perceptive and engaging thinkers examining the ideas, institutions, practices, and fashionable assumptions that shape our cultural lives.  Its host and producer, Ken Myers, was previously an art and humanities editor for National Public Radio and has over 30 years of experience in cultural journalism.

Each edition of the Journal, published on CD and MP3, features interviews with six to eight guests from a wide range of disciplines as well as commentary by Ken Myers.  Most of the guests have authored books examining either some aspect of our cultural experience or the interaction of historical forces that have created the cultural conditions in which we presently live. 

The Journal does not offer neatly packaged answers to predictable questions.  Rather, our guests enlarge the framework of understanding within which Christians can more wisely discern the meaning of current cultural life. 

Our guests have included scholars Francis Fukuyama, Robert George, and Stanley Fish; poets Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, and Larry Woiwode; journalists Nicholas Carr, Ross Douthat, and Thomas de Zengotita; social commentators John McWhorter and Rochelle Gurstein; painters Makoto Fujimura and Cathy Prescott; historians Daniel Walker Howe, Mark Noll, and Steven Shapin; scientists John Polkinghorne and Stephen Barr; novelists Neal Stephenson, P. D. James, and Ron Hansen; psychiatrists Elias Aboujaoude and Paul McHugh; theologians David Bentley Hart, Stanley Hauerwas, and David Schindler; philosophers Mortimer Adler and Albert Borgmann; sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and James Davison Hunter; musicians Jeremy Begbie and Julian Johnson; and hundreds of other public intellectuals who offer incisive commentary on the important ideas that shape contemporary culture.

A recent issue had an excellent interview with Professor John Witte, Jr on why the law needs to be understood in the context of its relationship with other practices and disciplines, including religion. And a very erudite further discussion on the historical models for the relationship between Church and State. He goes into detail on the four types of relationships since the first century which were present prior to the time of the reformation.

1. The first type in the first century was the apostolic model in which the church chose to separate itself from the world with a wall of separation between you in the kingdom of light vs everyone else in the kingdom of darkness.
2. The second type in the third century which is the imperialist model where the state is superior to the church, the Emperor is superior to the Pope, which is still practiced in its most pristine form in the Anglican tradition.
3.  The third type of church-state relationship was the Colossian type in the fifth century in his protest to Romanization of the church where the spiritual and temporal were side-by-side, each with its own jurisdiction, which is the current Lutheran understanding of the relationship.
4. The fourth type of church-state relationship emerges in 15^th century, as the papalist model, wherein the church is superior to the state—Bishops and Priests were superior to Kings and Princes, the division which is the Calvinist understanding, which was worked out in great detail as recorded in the reformation of human rights.

Read more for our professional inquiry: https://marshillaudio.org/page/journal