Getting a little soft?

‘The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”

Tax US! An article by Oolong

As I write this, the US national debt clock is at $14.8 trillion. April 6, 2010, a group of wealthy liberals made headlines, requesting that they want their taxes raised. Is there anyone out there, other than me, that finds this the least bit suspicious? They can donate proceeds to the government, why do they want to increase government, enforced taxes?

Yesterday, Warren Buffet was on Fox News, insisting that the “ultra rich” should be taxed more. Interesting that he should say that when Berkshire Hathaway owes about $1 billion taxes since 2002. Even politicians don’t pay their taxes. Congressman Charlie Rangel, Senator John Kerry, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner have failed to pay their taxes. For the rich or the empowered, this does very little, but for us little people we may be blacklisted from taking out a loan.

Obama has spread his feathers in front of the camera and touts, “But as I said, we’ve actually cut taxes for small business 16 times since I’ve been in office. So taxes for small businesses are lower now than they were when I came into office.” I wouldn’t think so poorly of the president if that were true. However, the Washington Post reports that he’s lowered taxes in areas that least effect small businesses. To do even more of a disservice, if a business wants to lower taxes, the they will have to make a request for it or they have to meet a narrow criteria for the tax cut.

The Obama and Bush administrations have bailed out big business and not the small businesses. Obama promised, “No more… bailouts. Period.” One of Obama’s greatest campaign donor, Goldman Sachs, was given a bailout in the American Recover and Reinvestments Act through AIG. As senator, Obama voted in 2009 for the AIG bailout. Goldman Sachs has now fallen out of love with Obama and is now throwing itself into the arm of Romney (what a tragic romance). A ShoreBank bailout was nestled in a TARP bill for $75 million, in 2010. It didn’t happen, but their bad debt was swept away by the FDIC. ShoreBank no longer exists… in name, but it is now called the Urban Partnership Bank.

We cannot trust big government. We cannot trust in the nanny state. The politicians and the “philanthropists” may say that they are looking out for you, but in all reality they are eliminating competition and robbing us of our rights.

It’s The Quantitative Easing, Stupid

The current debt ceiling "crisis" has highlighted the fundamental difference between two philosophies of government.  The majority of Democrats would like to increase revenue, or as most taxpayers would say, increase taxes.  Republicans for the most part would like to cut government spending.  Controlling only one house of the legislature put Republicans at a distinct disadvantage.  In the recent budget battle they were able to pass a 38 billion dollar reduction, a pitiful amount considering the multi trillion dollar budget.  But even this “victory” may have been a chimera.  Columnist Jonah Goldberg asserts that after the gimmicks are stripped away the actual reduction amounted to 352 million. Progressives clearly have a different view of the value of money.  Former Congressman David Obey is quoted as saying, “It was a lousy $8 million,” in response to criticism of a pork project.   Senator Schumer is quoted as saying, “And let me say this to all of the chattering class that so much focuses on those little, tiny, yes, porky amendments, the American people really don’t care.” 

Most people, Republicans and Democrats, agree that the current deficit spending is unsustainable.  More and more people are becoming aware that we are heading for what columnist Mark Steyn calls a “demographic recession.”  Steyn may be somewhat optimistic. It is more likely to lead to a “demographic depression.”  Governments: federal, state and local, have committed themselves to generous pension plans and other expenditures that they have absolutely no chance of honoring.  These governments will have no choice but to default on their obligations.

The city of Pritchard, Alabama is in the vanguard of the default crisis.  150 retired workers no longer receive their pensions.  The city’s population has declined by 40 percent in the last few decades and along with that its tax base.  The government of Pritchard could not pay these pensions even if it wanted to.  Pritchard is a unique case but it is representative of what in is store for other pension plans.  Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney claims that, “Pritchard is the future.”   Aguirre has advised San Diego to declare bankruptcy in order to restructure its pension plan.  The California State Teacher’s Retirement System and the California Public Employee’s Retirement System are the nation’s two largest pension systems.  Their assets aren’t enough to cover their obligations. According to a Sacramento Bee article, “A recent Manhattan Institute study found that U.S. teacher pension plans need almost $1 trillion more in funding to pay promised benefits.”  The fact that these pensions are unsustainable has been obvious for some time.  Yet, according to the same article, “The number of educators receiving $100,000-plus annual pensions jumped 650 percent from 2005 to 2011, going from 700 to 5,400.”

The political class and their Nomenklatura live a very comfortable lifestyle regardless of any economic downturn.  The government of Bell, California provides an extreme example of how politicians feather their nests.  This southern California city of 38,000 was paying its mayor an annual salary of almost $800,000.  Other city officials were receiving similar inflated salaries.  Their only problem was that they were excessively greedy.  Perhaps if the mayor had settled for $400,000, his salary would have gone unnoticed.  There are many examples of excessive government salaries.  Beverly Hall, the former Atlanta Schools Superintendent received a salary of $415,293 in 2010 and $581,860 in bonuses between 1999 and 2010.  In additions she has won numerous awards.   She is now under investigation for fraud.  The education establishment is riddled with charlatans with bogus credentials from elite universities making six figure salaries. Although not a graduate of an Ivy League university, Otis Mathis, the former president of the Detroit Public Schools board, was supposed to be a role model for students.  He had a “learning disability” that prevented him from composing a coherent sentence.  The school board was satisfied with his performance until it accepted his resignation after it was reported that he routinely performed inappropriate sex acts during meetings with a colleague.

Wasteful government spending is under attack on a broad front.  Politicians and their allies in the media are prepared for the counterattack. Their first approach is to make opponents of tax increases appear heartless.  A recent AP article on the recent Minnesota budget battle begins, “The blind are losing reading services. A help line for the elderly has gone silent.”  It is good practice to put a human face on the suffering.  In this case it is Sonya Mills. Ms. Mills is a 39-year-old mother of eight who will have to do without $3,600 a month in state child-care subsidies.   Ms. Mills’ plight might elicit sympathy from a tenured college professor or an AP reporter.  However, a man working two jobs to support his family might wonder what other benefit Ms Mills is receiving from the government aside from $42,000 a year in tax free subsidies.  If taxpayers cannot be convinced to open their wallets for the government out of compassion, they can be threatened with real cuts.  The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan laid off members of its fire department due to budget shortfalls.  At the same time it was funding an $850,000 piece of art.  When politicians claim that the elderly will not receive their Social Security checks they are attempting to frighten people into supporting tax increases.  Only a fool would threaten the defunding of a study to train Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly or the defunding of the Cowboy Poetry Festival.

Progressives believe that there is an almost unlimited supply of money.  Van Jones claims, “We are not broke.  We were robbed and somebody has our money.”  In one respect progressives are correct.  The Federal Government has an unlimited supply of money with its ability to perform “quantitative easing.”  The problem with quantitative easing is that it is a tax: a tax that hits the poor particularly hard.  This is explained by John Maynard Keynes who stated, “by a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

Follies of the Compassionate

We are living in a fantasy world, an “I Love Lucy” world. It is a world where the poor wear $200 tennis shoes, they sport designer “welfare” fingernails, have cell phones, cosmetic surgery and perhaps a gold “toof.” This world was created by the incredible productivity and innovations of Western civilization. It will be succeeded by a world were life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Our elite has no idea of how wealth is created. They make Beevis and Butthead look like sophisticates. Michelle Obama advised the people in Zanesville, Ohio, “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that.” Wealth is created by people who produce. They are supported by people who serve; the military, firefighters, necessary government officials, etc. The producers could afford to be complacent and inattentive as long as they lived fairly comfortable lives. Shortly this will no long be the case.

Friedrich Neitzsche asks, “What has done more harm than the follies of the compassionate?” Our elite broadcast their compassion, but is this compassion when it will lead to the destruction of a civilization? In fact it is not compassion. Several years ago Democratic consultant Bob Beckell was on Crossfire. He stated that because Ronald Regan would not sign a budget, programs like Meals on Wheels would be halted until the budget was passed. He then stated that his own mother would be going hungry. Apparently this poobah of the Democratic Party would allow his own mother to starve. How is President Obama’s brother doing, or his aunt? The English philosopher William Godwin argued in his book Political Justice that he would leave his mother and sister in a burning building in order to save the writer Francois Fenelon because he was of more value to mankind. It is instructive that when Henrietta Hughes begged for help from the president she was apparently offered a business card with the address of a social service agency.

The government should provide for the deserving poor. But where does the government get the money to give to the unproductive? It gets it from the productive. The elite has miscalculated. The productive are being overburdened. Many of them will see the writing on the wall and cease producing.

Franklin Raines, Timothy Geithner, Bernard Modoff, George Soros, Henry Paulson, all members of the compassionate party are living in gated communities. They feel secure and protected. They believe that this debt will be passed on to our children and grandchildren. Wrong ke-no sah-bee. This is not a threat to the narcissistic. They could care less about our posterity. They live for the moment. The plan is to raid the productive’s retirement plans. The prototype for this plan will be modeled on the policies of Gidion Gono Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. No matter how successful this present Svengali is in hoodwinking the majority of the population, it will be for naught when people are literally starving.