We are saying the same thing to an extent. As long as many different religious and irreligious perspectives are influencing public policy where the common good of all is targeted then we have progress. However, to do so with one domineering perspective excludes the civil body politic who have views different from the majority.

Our debt as % of GDP is RISING contrary to your assertion. In 2011 we exceeded public debt as 90% of GDP and for 2012 it will exceed 100%. We need to reduce our spending and social programs.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html

The sainted UK PM Margaret Thatcher said it best “”The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”

Our decentralized government allows government to be as close to the people it governs which is where government works best. We don’t believe that national government needs to micromanage us and attempt to mold our behavior.

1. Your neighbor’s religion is none of your concern.

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

“Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.”

Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813

2. You shall not mingle religion with politics.

And here, without anger or resentment I bid you farewell. Sincerely wishing, that as men and Christians, ye may always fully and uninterruptedly enjoy every civil and religious right; and be, in your turn, the means of securing it to others; but that the example which ye have unwisely set, of mingling religion with politics, may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense. PDF download from “The Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government.” Pg. 51, Appendix.

3. You shall not establish any religion above any other.

‘We the subscribers, citizens of the said Commonwealth, having taken into serious consideration, a Bill printed by order of the last Session of General Assembly, entitled “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion,” and conceiving that the same if finally armed with the sanctions of a law, will be a dangerous abuse of power, are bound as faithful members of a free State to remonstrate against it, and to declare the reasons by which we are determined. We remonstrate against the said Bill…

…

“3. Because it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?”

James Madison. Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. C. June 20, 1785

4. You shall not bar your neighbor from public office on the basis of his beliefs.

“The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.”

Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:546

5. All religions shall have equal recognition.

“The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally past; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Thomas Jefferson, July 27, 1821, Autobiography. ME 1:67.

6. You shall be religiously neutral.

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, “thus building a wall of separation between Church

& State.”

Jefferson, Thomas. “Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists: The Final Letter, as Sent.” The Library of Congress Information Bulletin: June 1998. Lib. of Cong., June 1998. Wednesday, 7 Aug.

2010.

7. You shall exclude the clergy of any religion from your public schools.

“Ministers of the Gospel are excluded [from serving as Visitors of the county Elementary Schools] to avoid jealousy from the other sects, were the public education committed to the ministers of a particular one; and with more reason than in the case of their exclusion from the legislative and executive functions.”

Thomas Jefferson: Note to Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:419

8. You shall not disturb the religion and peace of other nations with missionaries.

“I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the religion and peace of other countries, who may think themselves bound to extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we give the name of conversions, and quote our own example for it. Were the Pope, or his holy allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests to convert us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and treat it as a national aggression on our peace and faith.”

Thomas Jefferson to Michael Megear, 1823. ME 15:434

9. You shall not ban any books.

“I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this [i.e., the purchase of an apparent geological or astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? …. for God’s sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.”

Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:127

10. You shall question the Bible.

“The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

The Age of Reason. Thomas Paine. Chapter I – The Author’s Profession of Faith.

EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

Ibid. Chapter II – Of Missions and Revelations.

IT is upon this plain narrative of facts, together with another case I am going to mention, that the Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.

Ibid. Chapter IV – Of the Bases of Christianity.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

Ibid. Chapter VII – Examination of the Old Testament.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

To make any serious dent in the deficit would require both spending reductions and tax rises. This is what Thatcher did in 1980-81, and what Cameron is doing now. Of course, this approach can lead to serious problems with regard to economic growth. The Falklands business probably saved Thatcher to ‘fight another day’; the Cameron government is in trouble, although his problems are mitigated by a relatively weak (for now) opposition.

If an incoming Republican administration were to take the necessary measures substantially to cut the deficit quickly, the result would probably be an fairly big shift in the balance of seats in Congress in the 2014 Election. People want quick answers, but the economic problems we face are very deep-seated. They are much much worse in the UK, of course, since our manufacturing base has all but disappeared. At least you still have GM!

I understand your point about (arguably) overweening national government. My reading of the situation is that both party programmes are in their different way tending in this direction; it’s really a matter of which ways one might prefer to be ‘interfered with’! In my view, it was really only Ron Paul who presented a coherent political programme that moved things in the direction of ‘decentralization’. Apologies if this sounds a little cynical!

Bronxboy – There are plenty of issues for everybody to research. As good as her work is, just relying on someone else is not intellectually satisfying. Also, we looked at many issues other than the ones she has examined.

No respected historian would allow his supporting evidence to be left out knowing critics would come after it. I spoke with Thomas Kidd at a summer history colloquia at Baylor and we were discussing his appearance on Glenn Beck’s “Founders’ Fridays ” in 2009. He received a substantial amount of heat from the academic community. I would assert that any PhD in history worth her or his salt would not publicly put their academic reputation on the line for a an undereducated revisionist historian.