Great Britain is burning.
Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and Ireland are economic basket cases. All are quasi-socialist nanny states whose fiscal policies are Ponzi schemes, the con job for which Bernard Madoff was sent to jail.
This is the economic model to which Obama and the Democrats aspire. Their thinking is simple and cynical: Get enough people working for and dependant on the government and inevitably they will vote for the party upon whom their livelihoods depend.
Entitlements are nothing less than a fiscal narcotic. Once started, the body yearns for a fix and will do most anything to keep the supply coming.
Make no mistake about it, the Democrats are building a plantation whose purpose is to harness a majority of Americans to a one-party government.
A goverment that replaces freedom with the equality of slaves.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
15 Comments
That is a very bad description of how it was suppose to work. He was investing in American busssiness. The problem is, is there is no demand for the products those bussinesses had to offer. Europe is broke, so nobody is buying and a lot of things we sell cannot be sold to China(for a good reason).
The reality is, is that the everyday products that people buy come from Asia and that is why the Asian Economies are doing very well. When Wal-Mart stocks only Asian made products, all that money shifts there. In order for the economy to be stable we have to be willing to buy things made here, but there is nothing made here for everyday typical consumers. In short Wal-Mart is an economy killer.
The reason I don’t like GOP’s economics is because they lower taxes for corporations. I am not talking about wealthy Americans when I say corporations. Lowering taxes for Corporations does nothing, because in bussiness we learn that efficiency is key. Corporations do not hire based off of how much money they have. They hire based off of consumer demand. It is always about making the most with the least amount. When have you ever worked in a work environment where they just have an extra guy there, because they had extra money? Bussiness use formula’s called Gross profit for Labor Dollar.
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Fat chance. You’ll pay and you won’t collect. Hasn’t everyone figured out by now that Social Security is just taxation by another name? The money is fungible and they use it for whatever they damn please.
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It used to be just for people who would have never made enough to retire, but since Reagan the money has been hijacked. I know everybody loves Reagan, but there were much better Republicans. In my opinion he wasn’t even a good actor.
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I think Keynesian economics has been thoroughly disproven by now – and yet the left still reveres it.
I have on my reading list The Forgotten Man – about the Great Depression – I had always heard that nothing FDR did – short of WW2 – pulled us out.
And yet we keep doing the same thing – giving the bill to Mayan’s generation – and her children.
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Bill:
You know the section in The Forgotten Man that absolutely had me climbing the walls? The story and transcript of the snooty govt. white shoe Jew-hating lawyers prosecuting and persecuting the kosher butchers.
That’s the New Deal in a nutshell. Clueless elites telling small businessmen how to conduct business and in the process destroying small business and the capital that is the engine for prosperity.
Disgusting.
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“Clueless elites telling small businessmen how to conduct business and in the process destroying small business and the capital that is the engine for prosperity.”
…and look at today Robert- nothing much has changed. Arrogance is the basis. And pride.
I don’t think there is one person in Obama’s circle that has any business experience.
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Bill:
Obama’s cabinet does not have one person who has practical experience in the real world of business. And all his Czars are, well, Soviet style bueracrats, arrogant and clueless elitists.
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I want to throw a brick at the tv when I hear a talking head about how Social Security is the most popular government program and how people love Medicare. Give me a break.
The government is not run like a business. The taxes paid for these programs do not go to the government where it sits in an account earning interest or dividends for 40 years where it can be withdrawn to pay for your benefits. The people collecting benefits today are paid with the taxes on people working today.
My parents retired in the mid-70s and I figured they got back all the taxes they paid in about 4.5 years. They got back their Medicare taxes back in less than two years. My dad died at the age of 75 collecting free money for 9 years. My mom lived to the age of 96 collecting free money for almost 25 years. Great deal for them but not for the country.
The demographics don’t work. My parents raised 9 children. They had ten grandchildren. So while 9 children paid taxes for two parents, ten children will pay the taxes for 18 parents. Even Obama knows (at least I hope he does) that you can’t raise FICA taxes to 100% to cover the demographic shortfall. Mr. Ponzi is rolling over in his grave wondering why he didn’t become a politician.
If the government were a business they’d have made Enron, Worldcom, GM, Chrysler, and Bear Stearns look like financial Gilbralters. Politicians and bureaucrats would be thrown in prison doing hard labor. Instead they keep making promises they can’t keep knowing they aren’t spending their own money. To them, spending other people’s money is known as compassion.
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If you think about it, the only people who should be getting Social Security should be those who don’t have enough savings to live off for their (actuarily projected) remaining life, and don’t have relatives who can take care of them. If one was in a particularly defiant mood one might also restrict people who chose to be childless (as in, married, no medical infertility, but used birth control or got sterilized to avoid children) to palliative medical care.
What annoys me is that Social Security is always spoken of as letting the elderly keep their “independence”, because they don’t have to live with their grown children. Uh, if they didn’t want to do that, they should’ve done a lot more saving, because last I checked the dole is not “independence”.
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Pax: FDR knew if he had proposed SS the way you want it would never have gotten 10 votes because all it would be seen as welfare. FDR made everyone pay in so that everyone (including teenagers just starting to work) would get benefits. Same with Medicare. If FDR or LBJ had said we’re going to put everyone on the public dole they’d have been impeached. But call the tax you’re paying is for insurance and everyone is jumping with joy.
But the programs will have to be means tested which will in effect make them welfare once people come to their senses. Won’t hold my breath though for those that vote for some of the dumbest Democrats every election.
The elderly have the most wealth (not income though) of any demographic. It makes you wonder where the Democrats get such pure heroin to mainline when they talk about protecting SS and Medicare from cuts. Do they realize they are making the less wealthiest pay more taxes so the wealthiest can maintain their standard of living?
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Johnny:
If the govt. were business they would face a firing squad.
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I assume then that those who shouldn’t get it shouldn’t have to pay into it?
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Johnny – I may be mistaken but there are no taxes collected for Medicare per se. And I think the WW2 generation is the biggest recipient of Social Security and Medicare by far – and I hate to say it – the greediest.
Let’s not even get into the fraud of these programs.
Over 60% of our Federal budget is devoted to “Entitlement” programs – how’s that for a mis-named segment of spending? As if one is “entitled”.
So during these last “budget negotiations” Obama said any talk of reducing this 60+% is “off the table”. But for any reform – and the health of the country – it has to be changed.
And in truth any talk of cutting any of this brings out an army of graying citizens ready to vote against anyone foolish enough to propose this.
One wag referred to this group as the “Greedy Geezers”. Certainly not everyone qualifies for the title but there is a huge segment.
This is what Roosevelt has brought – a huge segment of the population believing that they are entitled to money – with plenty of politicians willing to help them. And what amazes me the health of the country to these politicians seems irrelevant. I have no doubt that there would be many voting for bigger and bigger deficits until the financial collapse of this country.
I honestly don’t know how this is going to turn out. I would like to think that a sizable number of people are coming to the realization that this must change. Perhaps that is the optimism I have have for this country and her people.
I think this country has never faced so great an internal challenge since the beginnings of the Civil War.
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I’d say pyramid scheme, myself, actually—think about how they’re constantly digging up new “victims” to “advocate” for. ‘Course, a pyramid scheme is basically a conspiratorial Ponzi scheme, so…yeah.
I like to remind myself that they think this is sustainable for the same reason they think global warming is real, or free energy would be possible without the big bad corporations: they don’t understand thermodynamics (on some level, economics is really a special case of the laws of thermodynamics). Did you know there are people (“Transhumans”) who advocate “abolishing involuntary death”? Virtually every one of them is a socialist utopian (the remainder are anarcho-capitalist utopians, who are at least as naive as socialists).
I don’t know, I was raised by parents who would tell you “no, it’s too expensive”. Has our prosperity created its own nemesis, that so many people were raised so mind-bogglingly rich that they don’t understand that concept?
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Pax:
I thought that a Ponzi scheme is by definition a pyramid.
Transhumans? Hey, I work with them every day in Hollywood. It’s, um, transfun!
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