I was contacted by the next State Senator of the 27th SD David Storobin. He is calling on club members for help him in making sure that the vote recount goes smoothly without any fraud in the recount process. As it sits right now David is up by 27 votes, and that automatically triggered a recount from the Board of Elections, due to his victory being below 0.5 percent or below 110 votes. Let’s make sure that the Democrats don’t pull any Boss Tweed style tactics and steal this election win from David and the Republican Party. If you could help out please report to 345 Adams street 4th floor, were the votes get counted, from 10:00 AM – 4:30 PM starting Thursday May 17 and throughout every business day Monday through Friday until the count is finished. David’s team will be there guiding you on what to do to make sure that every vote is counted without any fraud. Be a part of a historic election and help our party to victory.

Thank you.

Glenn Nocera

President of the Brooklyn Young Republican Club

Going Strong Since 1880

On Sunday,May 6th, 2011 from 2:30 – 4:30 PM, the Brooklyn Young Republican Club will be holding its annual meeting at Ceol Irish Pub.

Ceol Irish Pub is located at:

191 Smith St. Brooklyn, NY 11201 (at Warren St.)   Phone: (347) 643-9911

The F and G Trains drop you off just a few blocks away.

Light refreshments will also be served.

We will be holding our annual elections and induction ceremony at this meeting, so it is essential for members to attend. Our nominees are:

President: Glenn P. Nocera (Kensington)
Vice President: Moshe Muratov (Flatbush)
Secretary: Osher S. Gordon (Crown Heights)
Treasurer: Louis A. Perrotta III (Park Slope)
Board of Directors: Jonathan J. Judge, Danniel Nizza, Samuel M. Rivera , Alan Bemben, Larry Schneier, Paul Hansen, John Thomas, and Avi Rosenberg.

Please RSVP by email (info@brooklynyr.com) or on our Facebook Event Page.

If you would like kosher food, please stipulate that in your RSVP email.

Hope to see you there!

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

This apothegm, like many nuggets of wisdom you might have stumbled across whilst skimming your conservative friend’s Facebook page or Twitter feed, is a quote from Dr. Thomas Sowell, historian, economist, professor, and one of the shrewdest observers of human nature of the late 20th and early 21st Century. It popped into my head a few weeks ago while listening to This American Life, an extremely popular radio program broadcast on NPR, which usually devotes an hour to examining a topic of either topical or broad philosophical importance.

In this case, the subject matter was a fusion of the two, as Ira Glass introduced three segments that purported to explore the question of what happens when the public’s demand for services from the state outstripped the state’s ability to bankroll such programs. In other words, What Happens When You Run Out Of Other People’s Money, to paraphrase Baroness Streep.

This episode was bookended by segments about the parlous economic straits of two very different American cities. In Trenton, New Jersey the overwhelming debt burden-somewhere on the order of thirty million dollars, the last time I checked-as well as our prolonged recession has compelled the municipality to make deep cuts to local law enforcement. Consequently, the number of home invasions, robberies, rapes, and homicides has skyrocketed. Leaving aside the question of whether some of these crimes might have been prevented through defensive firearms ownership-perhaps the only thing urban politicos hate more than fiscal restraint is the Second Amendment-the producers of This American Life decided to explore how raising taxes could have prevented this calamitous situation from developing. The hero of this segment was a working class Trentonian who courageously volunteered to pay higher taxes if that meant that some services, such as sanitation and police patrols, would have their funding maintained or increased.

Another story critically examined the free market philosophy of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who believes that the problem how much wealth is being redistributed, but how much spending-or, in the case of the Federal Reserve, how much printing-is occurring in order to finance public expenditures. Of course, this being NPR-which is partially financed by taxpayers, irrespective of consent-the program was largely skeptical of this point of view. But the reason why Ira Glass & Co. were critical of Norquist’s anti-tax, anti-regulatory ideology was what really grabbed my attention. To wit, Norquist is wrong because progressive taxation in this country is no longer truly progressive. Due to the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which reduced the top marginal tax rate-it should be noted that these cuts also eliminated millions of lower income Americans from paying taxes altogether-affluent citizens, or the 1% if you prefer, were handing less of their income over to the federal government than at any comparable point in American history.

The story’s narrator contrasted this unfavorably with the 1950s, when the wealthiest Americans were forced to give in excess of three-quarters of their annual income to the IRS. Putting aside the fact that the wealthiest ten percent of the population pays over seventy percent of federal income taxes-according to the Congressional Budget Office-I take issue with the underlying conceit, shared unfortunately by a great many Americans, of the people who wrote this story. When asserting that the top twenty percent of the population owns over half of the nation’s wealth, there is the implicit assumption that this wealth is parceled out-and is therefore a creation of-the state. Yes, they “own” that wealth, but merely in a technical sense. In reality it is the nation’s, i.e. the government’s, wealth, and therefore its ultimate disposition should not be left in the hands of the people who generated it.

Unlike the redistributionists-which I don’t think is an unfair characterization of the people who work within public radio, especially this program-I don’t believe that the wealth you earned or created-or is voluntarily bequeathed to you by the person who has-is an extension of the state. There is no “fair” share that the wealthy-or the middle class, or even the poor-should pay if they came by it legitimately, i.e. by not forcibly extracting it from other citizens, because it is their wealth. Yet, even if you don’t share my perspective, and believe that the government must confiscate at least a portion of an individual’s earnings in order to bankroll “essential” services, is our current system truly “fair?”

Per Adam Carolla-whose insights might not be shared by the organic coffee and arugula set, but which are often more perspicacious than anything heard on NPR or or seen on PBS-wouldn’t a fair system of taxation require each American to pay the same rate? After all, the rich-such as Adam Carolla, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama-would still forfeit an exorbitant portion of their income to the government-much more than someone in the bottom 10 percent. Unfortunately, this would not fulfill the main function of our current tax system, which is punitive in nature. See, the problem isn’t that taxes aren’t distributed equitably, but that a certain group retains too much of its own income, purportedly at the expense of other, less fortunate groups. I find it hard to believe that This American Life would devote a program to attacking the amount that was paid by the wealthiest Americans if they shared ninety percent of the tax burden, even though this would be manifestly unfair. The goal of state-sponsored egalitarianism is to punish those people whose wealth is ostensibly earned at the expense of the poor, while creating an artificial sense of equality, even if this means leveling rather than allowing those seeking to advance their fortunes to achieve wealth through their own initiative.

Much like Obamacare-which provides less health care at a higher cost and more inefficiently than any free market alternatives, all the while carving out exceptions for influential and wealthy rent seekers-the goal of our tax system is not to be fair, or to allocate resources more productively. Rather, the goal is to redistribute misery, particularly that experienced by the wealthiest Americans-although, as the Alternative Minimum Tax demonstrates, this is easier said than done. The next time a liberal pundit such as E.J. Dionne laments our “revenue problem,” remind him that the United States does not have a revenue problem. It has a government not respecting property rights problem. A subject that I doubt Ira Glass will be exploring for This American Life during next year’s tax season.

-Gerard J. Perry, Editor-in-Chief of American Rattlesnake.

                                                              Thank You.

                          Glenn P. Nocera,  President of the Brooklyn Young Republican Club.

                                                  Going Strong Since 1880.

If you are available at all between now and election day please take some time and head on down to David’s Election Campaign  Headquarters in Sheepshead Bay, located at 2658 Coney Island Ave, corner of Avenue X. The office is open from 10:00 A.M. until 9:00 P.M. The campaign will be in full swing until the polls close at 9:00 P.M.  on Election Day, March 20th. Volunteers are needed to do phone banking, canvassing, going door to door, as well as handing out fliers outside stores and by train stations across the district. For any questions do not hesitate to call (347) 587-7884 or email  storobinforsenate@gmail.com.

If you are able to volunteer on David’s campaign please click here. To donate to the campaign please click here.

Ceol Irish Pub is located at:

191 Smith St. Brooklyn, NY 11201 (at Warren St.)   Phone: (347) 643-9911

Take F or G trains to the Bergen street Station stop.

Come and join us for the Brooklyn Young Republican Club quarterly meeting to discuss the Republican presidential primaries, and how we can work on building the party to win even here in Brooklyn with a principled, reform Republican message!

As we  are gearing up to the 2012 elections we want to hear from you: who is your candidate to take on President Obama in 2012? Who are you supporting, and why?

Please RSVP by email (info@brooklynyr.com) or on our Facebook Event Page.

If you would like kosher food, please stipulate that in your RSVP email.

Hope to see you there!

Recently, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly announced that Terahertz Imaging Detection scanners will be used to detect illegal guns carried by pedestrians. The idea that law-abiding citizens will be subjected to these intrusive virtual searches even where no probable cause exists is an affront to the personal liberty of all New Yorkers. The pretext that it’s being done to make us safer is flimsy at best and offers no excuse for police-state measures.

The Terahertz scans would give the police a ready-made excuse to stop just about anyone on suspicion of carrying an object resembling a gun. This is true even if the real reason for the stop is unrelated to guns. Kelly’s promise that they would only be used in “reasonably suspicious” areas indicates that the scanners are more likely to be used against the poor and minorities, who would ironically benefit from being allowed to exercise their second amendment rights where crime is prevalent.

Here, Kelly’s own involvement in showing anti-muslim training videos to NYPD officers should give us pause. The people of New York should not hastily grant the police new powers that might be used for racial or other types of profiling. Politically targeted groups will bear the brunt of the oppression if broad powers are exercised, and the freedom to object without oneself becoming a target will be put at risk.

The legality of the new program is uncertain.  In Kyllo v. United States, it was clearly stated that “obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information…that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical ‘intrusion into a constitutionally protected area,’ Silverman v. United States…constitutes a search-at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use.” While the area in question in Kyllo was a private home, it was ruled in U.S. v. Jones that police are required to obtain warrants when tracking criminal suspects via GPS because such tracking constitutes a “search.” It could be argued that the use of a Terahertz scanner, not in general public use as far as I can see, to look for objects resembling guns potentially carried by random pedestrians in a given area also constitutes a “search” requiring a warrant.

New Yorkers should actively oppose Terahertz scanning of general areas in public as dangerous to our privacy and way of life. Whether the goal is to have the program overturned by a court ruling or banned by the state legislature, freedom-oriented groups from all sides must work together to stop the growth of the surveillance state. Giving up liberty and privacy in the name of security will cause us to lose both.

We will be joined by a special guest, David Storobin, candidate for New York State Senate from the 27th district and Vice Chair on the Brooklyn Republican County Committee.

Ceol Irish Pub is located at:

191 Smith Street Brooklyn, NY 11201 (at Warren St.)   Phone: (347) 643-9911

Take the F or G trains to the Bergen Street Station stop. Or take the 2 or 3 train to Hoyt Street Station and walk for a few minutes.

The special election to replace disgraced senator Carl Kruger is well underway, and we are going to hear from the Republican candidate for that seat as he campaigns to give Brooklyn another Republican voice in the State Senate.

As we  are gearing up to the 2012 elections we also want to hear from you: who is your candidate to take on President Obama in 2012? Who are you supporting, and why?

Please RSVP by email (info@brooklynyr.com) or on our Facebook Event Page.

If you would like kosher food, please stipulate that in your RSVP email.

Hope to see you there!

Ceol Irish Pub is located at:

191 Smith St. Brooklyn, NY 11201 (at Warren St.)   Phone: (347) 643-9911

Take F or G trains to the Bergen street Station stop.

Come and join us for the Brooklyn Young Republican Club quarterly meeting to discuss the Republican presidential primaries, and how we can work on building the party to win even here in Brooklyn with a principled, reform Republican message!

As we  are gearing up to the 2012 elections we want to hear from you: who is your candidate to take on President Obama in 2012? Who are you supporting, and why?

Please RSVP by email (info@brooklynyr.com) or on our Facebook Event Page.

If you would like kosher food, please stipulate that in your RSVP email.

Hope to see you there!

Please call Councilman Fidler’s office at (718) 376-6033 or email info@lewfidler.com and demand that Mr. Fidler stop stirring up hate for votes and that he instead discuss the issues that are important to everyday New Yorkers.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

Let us pray that we continue as a nation to learn from the lessons that DR. Martin Luther King JR taught us, and that we continue to grow in ensuring that all races are protected from all forms of discrimination. From the Brooklyn Young Republican Club. Going Strong Since 1880.                                        Glenn P. Nocera  President.

From all of us at the Brooklyn Young Republican Club,We wish you and your Family a very Happy New Year. May 2012 be the year the Republicans take back the White House.

Glenn P. Nocera  President