Category Archives: John Stossel

June 5, 2013

John Stossel: IRS Spends $60,000 on Star Trek Tax Spoof (Video)

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This video may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law.


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Posted in John Stossel, Tax

May 18, 2013

America Needs More Free-Range Kids by John Stossel

Posted on May 18, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Grit made America great.

Are you a real man (or woman)? Do you have “grit”?

Compare yourself to the man on the $20 bill: Andrew Jackson, our seventh president.

During the Revolutionary War, Jackson volunteered to fight. He was just 13 years old at the time. The British captured him and made him a servant for British officers. When one ordered Jackson to clean his boots, Jackson refused, and the officer slashed Jackson’s hand with a sword. When Jackson became president, he showed off the scar.

Jackson had grit.

Do your kids have that much grit today? I doubt it. Parents now try to protect kids from all danger. In New York City, some won’t let teenagers go to school by themselves.

Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” thinks that’s absurd.

“Free-range kids are kids we believe in,” she told me. “They can do things on their own.”

Once she allowed her own 9-year-old to ride the subway alone. After she wrote about that, she was labeled “World’s Worst Mom.” Really. Google “world’s worst mom.” Skenazy’s name comes up.

“Free-Range Kids” promotes events like “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day.” Skenazy says leaving kids in the park without adult supervision teaches them grit. Kids get used to bugs, rocks and a lack of constant supervision. They become leaders by discovering how to organize their own lives without parents bossing them around.

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Complete text linked here.


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Posted in Culture, John Stossel

May 2, 2013

Train Wreck Ahead by John Stossel

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Maybe we will soon be like Canada, where some people wait years for treatment. A producer from my TV show went to a Canadian town where the town clerk pulls names out of a box and then phones people to say: “Congratulations! You get to see a doctor this month!”

Most Americans — even those who are legislators — know very little about the details of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare. Next year, when it goes into effect, we will learn the hard way.

Many people lazily assume that the law will do roughly what it promises: give insurance to the uninsured and lower the cost of health care by limiting spending on dubious procedures.

Don’t count on it.

Consider just the complexity: The act itself is more than 906 pages long, and again and again in those 906 pages are the words, “the Secretary shall promulgate regulations …”

“Secretary” refers to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Her minions have been busy. They’ve already added 20,000 pages of rules. They form a stack 7 feet high, and more are to come.

Our old health care system was already a bureaucratic and regulatory nightmare. It had 16,000 different codes for different ailments. Under our new, “improved” system, there will be more than a 100,000.

Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost — depending on how often you’ve walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation.

On Government-Planned World, this makes sense. But it will be no more successful than Soviet central planning.

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Complete text linked here.


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Posted in Canada, Democrats/Progressives, Health Care, John Stossel, Obama, Radicals

April 12, 2013

Government Plays Favorites by John Stossel

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When the housing bubble burst, politicians got panicked calls from their friends on Wall Street — in many cases former colleagues. Instead of letting their old friends take big losses and trusting smaller banks to expand and take their customers, the political class propped up risk-takers who made bad bets.

People say government must “help the little guy, promote equality, level the playing field.”

People often go into government to do that. But even when people mean well, it’s natural for them to help out their cronies.

David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, was criticized for saying the government’s budget numbers didn’t add up. But he was right.

Now, in his book “The Great Deformation,” he says both major political parties failed ordinary Americans when the housing bubble burst, and they rushed to bail out cronies at big banks. Government continues to threaten our future by printing gobs of money and guaranteeing trillions in loans to banks, homeowners, students and other politically connected groups.

The political class claims the economy would have been destroyed in 2008 without a bailout of the big banks. Stockman says that’s a myth: “The Main Street banks were not going to go into a huge retail bank run … and (Fed chairman Ben) Bernanke is totally wrong when he says we were on the verge of Depression 2.0. We weren’t close. We would have worked our way through it. We’ve done it many times in history.”

Worked our way through it? Without the bailouts, there might have been a bigger stock market drop, and more businesses would have closed! But Stockman says, so what? It would have been worth it. And I agree with him.

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Complete text linked here.


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Posted in Bailouts, Bubbles, Government, John Stossel

November 23, 2012

John Stossel – Obama Supporters Asked What His Win Means For “FREEDOM”? (Video)

Posted on November 23, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“… people viewing politicians as the magic politician, who’ll just solve every problem. Obama was the magic president. I got the sense last night these people waited for three hours before he showed up, and they were waiting forever. He’s magic to them.” John Stossel


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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Entitlements, John Stossel, Obama, Radicals

October 17, 2012

Website of the Week: Stossel in the Classroom

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John began his career as a consumer reporter, criticizing business. He changed his focus after concluding that government regulation hurts consumers more than business.

John Stossel hosts a weekly show, Stossel, on the Fox Business Channel and anchors several specials a year for Fox News. Before joining Fox in October 2009, he was co-anchor of ABC News’s 20/20. He has been praised for his reporting on issues such as education, healthcare, consumer protection, government regulation, taxes, legal reform, and more.

John’s weekly one-hour program, Stossel, airs Thursdays at 9pm Eastern time on the Fox Business Network and is rebroadcast Saturdays at 1am, 9pm, and 12 midnight, as well as Sundays at 9pm (all times Eastern). It is also rebroadcast on the Fox News Channel Saturdays at 3pm and Sundays at 3pm and 12 midnight (all times Eastern).

John is the author of two national bestsellers—Give Me a Break and Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Why Everything You Know Is Wrong. His newest book is No They Can’t: Why Government Fails—But Individuals Succeed. John’s TV specials have consistently rated among the top news programs and have earned him uncommon praise: “The most consistently thought-provoking TV reporter of our time,” said the Dallas Morning News, while the Orlando Sentinel said he “has the gift for entertaining while saying something profound.”

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Stossel in the Classroom.


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Posted in John Stossel, Website of the Week

October 16, 2012

John Stossel – Atlas Shrugged

Posted on October 16, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Atlas Shrugged Special. John Allison of BB&T Bank, analysts from various think tanks and Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine are among the numerous guests who discuss their take on the book and why they believe so many are reading it and drawing parallels to the overtaxing, over-regulating, suffocating government policies being passed today which Rand prophetically wrote about in Atlas Shrugged, her Magnum Opus novel that came out in 1957.


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Posted in Economy and Debt, Entertainment, Government, John Stossel

September 27, 2012

Strangulation by union by John Stossel

Posted on September 27, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Of course workers have a right to unionize — it’s part of freedom of association. But to be effective, that right needs a free-market environment. That means no compulsory membership — free association, not forced association. Second, enterprise must be truly free and competitive, which means no privilege or favoritism from government — no bailouts and crony capitalism.

The Chicago teachers strike is over, but the public didn’t win. Schools will still transfer bad teachers to other schools because it’s nearly impossible to fire them. When bad teachers go from school to school, principals call it “the dance of the lemons.” It would be funny if those teachers didn’t slowly wreck children’s lives.

The basic issue is: Who decides how to manage a workplace? Unions say it’s good that they protect American workers from arbitrary dismissal and make sure everyone is treated equally.

But it’s not good.

Rules that “protect” government workers from arbitrary dismissal and require everyone be treated equally are bad for taxpayers and “customers” — and even union workers themselves.

But this is not intuitive. Union workers certainly have no clue about it.

At a union rally, I asked union workers if it bothered them that slackers are paid as much as good workers. The activists actually said, “There is no slacker,” and that union rules mean less productive colleagues are helped, “brought up to speed.”

C’mon, I asked, aren’t there some workers who are just lazy, who drag the enterprise down?

“No!” they told me.

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Complete text linked here.


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Posted in Business, Employment, John Stossel, Unions

September 1, 2012

Stossel: Kennedy’s View of the RNC (Video)

Posted on September 1, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“There is discord within the Republican Party. They make it seem like this is a completely united party, and it’s just simply not. And we have seen the fissures exposed this week, and it Mitt Romney loses, the party will dissolve a little bit and will have to reinvent itself.” Stossel Special Correspondent Kennedy

Original source.


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Posted in Conservatism, John Stossel, Republicans/Neo-Cons, Ron Paul

August 22, 2012

Wars To End War by John Stossel

Posted on August 22, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Advocates of America-as-world-policeman rarely grasp that their conception of “defense” endangers us by creating new enemies. Fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan, once said, “For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.”

On his recent trip abroad, Mitt Romney observed an American taboo by not criticizing President Obama’s military policy. But before his trip, he made his position clear. Obama has “exposed the military to cuts that no one can justify,” Romney said.

He meant that unless Congress intervenes, Pentagon spending will be cut by more than $500 billion over 10 years under the (bipartisan) budget sequestration scheduled for January. This terrifies those who fear that limiting the growth of the military-industrial complex will leave us less safe.

But is that true? Even if $500 billion is actually cut, America still will spend more on defense — adjusted for inflation — than we did at the height of the Cold War and the Vietnam War.

We station soldiers all over the globe. Thousands of U.S. troops are in Germany, Japan, the UK and Italy. Why? I thought we won World War II.

We built an air force base in Greenland to monitor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why are we there now?

We station 28,500 soldiers in South Korea. South Korea’s economy is 38 times bigger than North Korea’s. Why does America need to pay to protect it?

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Complete text linked here.


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Posted in Government, John Stossel, Military