Rand Paul Writes Giant Check to U.S. Treasury
Sen. Rand Paul cut a six-figure check
to the U.S. Treasury on Wednesday in an effort to do his part to put a
tiny chip in the federal debt.
The Kentucky Republican returned $600,000 in funds he saved from his Senate office budget in the last year, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.
“It’s the only budget I control,” Paul said at a news conference in Louisville. “It’s not enough, but it’s a start.”
The $600,000 — about 17 percent of his
3.5 million office budget — is on top of another $500,000 Paul returned
to the Treasury last year, according to CNN. Paul said the total unspent money he’s returned to the federal government amounts to $1.1 million.
“We watch every purchase,” Paul said.
“We watch what computers we buy, what paper we buy, the ink cartridges.
We treat the money like it’s our money, or your money, and we look at
every expenditure.”
The senator, a Tea Party favorite, noted, “We are frugal from top to bottom.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/21/rand-paul-writes-giant-check-to-u-s-treasury/
PK'S NOTE: And we've already seen new Secretary of Defense Kerry's first public speaking event was about climate change. Because this is the priority and NOT
Bengazi, and Fast&Furious, the $16.5 trillion in debt, no budget in 4 years, the devalued dollar so prices at the grocery store have doubled, the $1.4 billion spent on the upkeep of the Obamas last year, the high gas prices and high unemployment, stimulus spending to bankrupt green energy companies, the endless growth of Obama's power and growth of government, ignoring the Constitution and circumventing Congress, Obamacare forcing businesses to have to cut their employees' hours (and paychecks), the sequestration he proposed and is now against, the hundred plus golf games, the lack of any transparency and lack of press access to ask the hard questions...
Obama’s picks for EPA, Energy all about climate change
President Barack Obama plans this week to nominate Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz as his Energy Department chief, according to numerous press reports.Moniz’s current job as head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s energy initiative keeps him focused on reducing greenhouse gases. He was also a top Energy Department official during the Clinton administration.
If confirmed by the Senate, Moniz would replace retiring secretary Steven Chu.
By selecting McCarthy to head the contentious EPA, Obama reinforces his intention to make “climate change” a top priority in his second term.
McCarthy would replace retiring EPA Chief Lisa Jackson.
As head of the EPA’s clean air office, McCarthy was a central player in developing greenhouse-gas rules proposed last year that would effectively shutter proposed coal-fired electrical plants, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Massachusetts native also served in the Romney administration’s energy cabinet focusing on climate change issues.
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/20/obamas-picks-for-epa-energy-agencies-surfaces/
PK'S NOTE CONTINUED: And climate change is the gateway for UN's Agenda 21. These choices aren't an accident. “Governments have a responsibility this year to take the next essential step in the battle against climate change, said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres. How governments achieve the next essential step is up to them. But it’s politically possible. In Cancun, the job of governments is to turn the politically possible into the politically irreversible, she said.” Executive Order 13575 was signed in June creating a White House Rural Council. The intent of this Executive Order is also to enact policy directly related to Agenda 21 : Chapter 14.1 – Promoting Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development.
Disabled America: where work is for suckers
Nearly one in 10 working age Americans now claims they’re too disabled to take a job
I could not learn to anticipate who would plop this into conversation; none of these people were visibly “disabled.” Apparent race or class didn’t give any clues, nor did demeanour. The effervescent L.A. blonde in bespoke sweatpants seemed just as likely to bring it up as the glowering, hoodied teen from Fresno.
Just looking at fiscal and demographic stats from California will cause a cold, invisible hand to clutch at one’s throat, but talking to an endless series of seemingly able-bodied people who casually disclaim any capacity for honest work is even more chilling. When I got home I found out it’s not just California’s problem. In the OECD’s 2010 “Going for Growth” report, the percentage of the working-age labour force (20 to 65 years) receiving any kind of disability benefit or worker’s compensation is estimated at around 5.1 per cent for Canada. For OECD nations as a whole, the figure is 6.7 per cent.
Northern European welfare states, amiright? But for the super-competitive U.S.A., land of the proudly threadbare social safety net, the number was 9.2 per cent.
The growth trend, which began in 1984 with a congressional backlash against Reaganite benefit cuts that opened the door to softer eligibility criteria, hasn’t slackened. In 2010 alone, 2.9 million eligible U.S. workers—a full 2 per cent of the pool of insured—applied for disability benefits from social security. The number of people receiving federal disability cheques, as of January 2013’s monthly report, was 8,830,026—all working-age individuals under 65—and that figure doesn’t include veterans injured on duty, persons on state disability programs, or beneficiaries of workers’ comp. The number of payees has tripled since 1990. It’s almost half of Canada’s total number of employed. The cost of federal disability insurance in the U.S. has been growing at an estimated 5.6 per cent a year, in real dollars, for two decades. (Population growth is under 1 per cent a year.)
There is a handful of economists working on the problem without ever gaining much traction in the popular press; the atmosphere of general crisis hasn’t made it any easier for them to be heard. Reading their papers and seeing them plead for the same reforms every few years is almost as depressing as contemplating Disabled America itself. Just as social security for the aged was devised at a time when workers could expect only a few years of life after clearing 65, social security for the disabled was conceived at a time when manual labour was the norm and “disability” denoted identifiable, incapacitating physical injury. No one envisioned a world in which clerical and “knowledge” work had taken over, but the number of people judged totally unable to work had skyrocketed, owing to vague musculoskeletal disorders, unverifiable chronic pain and an astronomical expansion in the definitions of mental illnesses.
In Canada and Europe, at least some attention has been given to updating income supports for the disabled so that the programs don’t claw back earnings from work too viciously. But in the United States, the system essentially drops everyone into either a “can work” or a “can’t work” bin. This discourages any return to self-sufficiency: once an American starts drawing disability they will move mountains to evade any job in the above-ground economy. Clinton-era welfare reforms made relative incentives worse, cutting off alternatives and creating a clear correlation between poor economic conditions and “disability.” Graphs of unemployment and new disability applications leap up and down in tandem like trained dolphins.
Disabled America helps explain, I think, how the 2012 presidential election got so ideological. It is easy for Canadians to sneer at Tea Party types who gripe about “makers” and “takers” without considering the alarming degree to which the U.S. actually has become a dole society, much like ’70s Britain—a place where work is, to some extent, for suckers. And the more American politicians avoid discussing the reality, the more the narrative of creeping socialism flourishes. The “Protestant work ethic” can’t survive long in the face of bad incentives. Nothing can.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/02/19/where-work-is-for-suckers-2/
PK'S NOTE: The only addition to this article I would say is most don't make the connection that government money is taking our money. Many believe that money from the government is free money just sitting there.
Another Trip Into the Recesses of the Liberal Mind
By Neal BoortzSit down. I’m truly sorry about this, but we really need to take another trip into the dark recesses of the liberal mind. A dangerous journey to a world where it is greedy to want to keep your own money, but not to covet the money or property of others; a world where earning 17% of the income, but paying 38% of the income taxes means you’re not paying your fair share; a world where any expression of disagreement with any utterance, no matter how ignorant, from the mouth of someone-not-white makes you a racist.
We have to do this because you really do need to understand the extent of mindless irrationality that liberals present to us as a “thinking process”.
Our liberal du jour here is one Jennifer Brooks. She’s a member of some crowd called the Corporation for Enterprise Development. Look them up. It seems that their goal in life is to enrich the poor and the middle class at the expense of those who have been more responsible with their lives. An opinion piece by Brooks was published in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution. Here’s your link, if you need to catch up on your self-abuse regimen.
Brooks’ piece was titled: “A path to prosperity: allow more to save.” In her column Brooks says that more than half of Georgia’s residents don’t have enough money saved up to get them through a rough time. She thinks that the government needs to do something to help these people save money. And --- wouldn’t you know it? --- she thinks that the best way to help these people is to take money away from those who’ve earned it and give it to them.
Hold on … tunneling a little deeper into the liberal mind here.
First, the lovely Jennifer suggests that people who actually go to college, buy a home and save for retirement are able to do so because they either inherited money or their family supported them. Nowhere – not one word in her piece – does Brooks acknowledge that perhaps these people managed to go to college, buy a home and become successful through hard work and good decision-making. The liberal mind cannot acknowledge that possibility! These rich people either inherited their money, or some family member paid the tab! Here Brooks sets the class warfare table. How DARE these people not want to share their money with the less-fortunate! After all, it’s not like they worked for it! They inherited all that money! Someone gave it to them!
But then Ms. Brooks gets down to proposing solutions! Wow! This is starting to get exciting here, isn’t it? Jennifer Brooks to the rescue!
First idea! Georgia needs a “refundable” state Earned Income Tax Credit! She says these tax credit help families boost their income – even those without any tax liability!
Well duhhhhhhh. Of course it helps families boost their income! When you create a state EITC that simply takes money away from people who are paying their own way – and their own taxes – and gives it to people who haven’t worked as hard or as smart, it tends to boost their income! That word – “refundable” – simply means that you get a fat check from the government whether you actually pay any taxes or not. Welfare ... money for nothing ... money forcibly taken from someone else. Simple as that. The federal EITC is the number-one area for tax fraud! So let’s get the state on the same road!
Ms. Brooks’ second idea is for the state to stop what she clearly believes is the abusive and asinine policy of denying cash welfare benefits to people who have more than $1000 in liquid assets. She says that if these people can’t get their welfare checks they won’t be able to save any money.
Say what? I thought welfare was supposed to be (1) temporary, and (2) to help people cover the cost of life’s basic necessities. Now we learn that welfare is for people who simply need to open a savings account but don’t have the money! This amazing liberal thinks the state should seize money, by force, from the person who earned it, and then give it to someone who did not earn it so that they will have some money to save and maybe buy a house some day. You’ll just have to excuse me for a moment here … I mean I’m good at filtering through the rhetorical yak squeeze of the left to see what our proggies friends are up to, but this is really confounding me. Let’s see … you’re going to take money that I was going to put into my savings and give it to someone else so that they can put it into their savings. Really?
Ms. Brooks isn’t through with her fantasy raid on your wealth yet. She wants what she calls “individual Development Account programs. What’s that? Pretty simple. She wants the state to take even more money from you to give to other people to match, dollar-for-dollar, whatever they put aside on their own for a house, to start a business, or to go to college. “Hey! Government! I’ve saved $4000 for a house here, but I need an $8000 down payment! Could you please go take that money from someone else and give it to me so I can get this closing scheduled?” I wonder what Ms. Brooks would think about giving the person who was forced to make the matching contribution a share of the eventual equity in that home, of the profits of that business, or the earnings that come from the college education?
I trust that during the course of this day you will be able to cleanse your rational mind of the liberal effluent I’ve thrown your way. Just know this. In the world of the liberal you are not yours. You do not own yourself, nor do you own the fruits of your labors. The government owns you. The government will decide how the money you earned is distributed. You will be allowed to keep enough to keep you happy – to keep you working. The amount you are allowed to keep will be referred to in Washington as a “tax expenditure.” The rest of the money you have earned, which will be referred to as “your fair share,” will be spent to create more and more government dependency … more and more voters who will be automatically vote for their liberal benefactor.
OK, the reading’s over. When you get that taste out of your mouth you can resume normal behavior.
http://townhall.com/columnists/nealboortz/2013/02/21/another-trip-into-the-recesses-of-the-liberal-mind-n1517169/page/full/
Brave New World
The world changes while we snore.
Lazy Money
No wonder, then, most of us are still not quite aware of how vastly different the world of 2013 is from even 2008. Take interest: not long ago most Americans assumed that when they retired, their 5-7% interest rate on passbook savings would provide some sort of income. Not now. There is scarcely a 1% return. In fact, most accounts lose money. The interest is not even matching the rate of inflation. Will we soon be charged by the banks for “protecting” our deposits?
At some unspoken moment, we shrugged and silently accepted Ben Bernanke’s world, along with the thousands of ways that his Federal Reserve Board has radically changed our lives. Those at retirement age are not stepping down, not when they have a bad/worse choice of receiving no interest income or putting their life savings in the stock or bond market. Our fathers may have retired at 58; we will be lucky to quit at 70. Is there even such a thing as retirement anymore?
No wonder that unemployed young people are endlessly circling the airport with nowhere to land, given all of us old planes perpetually taxing around on the crowded runways below. To understand the effect of no, or very low, interest, think of the billions of dollars in cash that are silently transferred from those who have saved to those who have no cash. The former receive little or no interest from the banks. The latter take out mortgages or car loans at historically low interest rates.
Did the president ever mention this revolution, among his boilerplate of “millionaires and billionaires,” “pay your fair share,” and “fat cats”?
Does it really make all that much difference whether you are a doctor at 70 who religiously put away $1,000 a month for thirty years, compounded at the old interest, and planned to retire on the interest income, or a cashless state employee with a defined benefit pension plan? The one might have over $1 million in his savings account, but the other a bigger and less risky monthly payout. Suddenly the old adult advice to our children — “Save and put your money in the bank to receive interest” — is what? “Spend it now or borrow as much as you can at cheap interest”?
Them and Us
I think it was around 2009 when an entire new vocabulary entered the American popular lexicon. Where did the 1% versus the 99% come from? From where did the new financial Mason-Dixon line arise — good below $250,000 in annual family income, very bad above it? When did the 47% — or is it the 50%? — pay no federal income taxes?
At some magical point, the rich became not the successful, the skilled, the well-inherited, the lucky, or the hardworking, but “them”: the suspect, the damned even, even as the lifestyles of the rich and famous became ever more sought after.
There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people.
The president in his State of the Union damns the “billionaires with high-powered accountants,” as a friendly Facebook pays no state or federal taxes, as a George Soros walks away with $1.2 billion in speculation profits (in three months, no less!) by betting against the Japanese yen, and as a Jesse Jackson, Jr. gets caught stealing from a campaign fund to buy a $43,000 Rolex (was not a $1,000 one enough?). I thought Soros at his age knew when he had made enough money?
We shrug at all this. A president who thunders to the nation that we must be on guard against the “well-off and well-connected” heads south to Palm Beach to meet his $1,000-an-hour golf pro, while Michelle and the family go west to hit the slopes at “downright mean” Aspen, where no one accepts that they’ve reached a point where they’ve made enough money, or that there was any time when it was not good to profit.
Something strange has insidiously happened to the old notion of hypocrisy. Does it even exist any longer?
Or do we shrug and just accept it as rebranded medieval penance? Obama gets to golf with zillionaires because in soaring cadences he attacks them — and all for us?
Jack Lew takes his $1 million bonus from a federally bailed-out Citigroup and invests his stash in his offshore tax haven in the Caymans because he will be a progressive, raise-your-taxes secretary of Treasury — and because Barack Obama has castigated those who took bonuses from a federally bailed-out money-losing company and derided offshore tax havens in the Caymans?
Chris Hughes is a cutting-edge, gay progressive who buys the New Republic because his Facebook portfolio does pretty well without owing taxes? Is that how it works now?
Have we come to the point where we expect John Kerry’s populist rhetoric to explain why he can feel no pain over dodging taxes on his yacht or marrying into the big money that he used to warn against? John Edwards can lounge around in his ugly mansion precisely because of his “two Americas” choruses?
When did we expect the elite to enjoy their wealth and to rail against its acquisition, to lumber around on four legs in the barn with the animals and strut on two in the kitchen with the overseers? Do Levis and t-shirts mean it’s okay for Google to offshore its profits? Does “Earth in the Balance” mean you can walk away as a guilt-free liberal with $100 million in petro-profits from a sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic sheikdom?
The End of the Law
When did the idea of citizenship largely disappear? There is now little argument over the nomenclature of “illegal alien,” “undocumented worker,” or “unregistered resident.” About three or four years ago, all those rubrics simply became irrelevant.
Most police forces won’t turn over any foreign national stopped for DUI to immigration authorities (e.g., do you really think Obama’s illegal-alien uncle will be deported for drunk driving?). The student body president of the local university not only bragged that he was an illegal alien, but dared anyone to do anything about it — to the loud applause of the university president. If an illegal alien can walk into Congress without fear of deportation, then there is no longer any sense of legal/illegal, or even amnesty/deportation.
“Comprehensive immigration reform” is likewise a silly construct. It does not exist any more. The truth is that we will allow “a pathway to citizenship” for those who broke the immigration law but who have been here a few years, who are working, and who have not been arrested. And, likewise, for those who broke immigration law but are not working, have just arrived, are on public assistance, and have been arrested, we will mandate neither citizenship nor deportation — but just allow a perpetual limbo of residence. When proponents of amnesty declare pathways of citizenship predicated on a fine, or on learning English, or on returning to the back of the line, we know both that they will never audit such requirements and that it would not matter much whether they did. There is now just a sort of nothingness.
So what does it matter whether one is legal, illegal, holds a green card, holds no green card, is in line for citizenship, or is in line for deportation? There is no deportation; there is no real border anymore; there is no federal immigration law. All these are but states of mind, talking points of politicians without meaning.
In or around 2010, these rubrics finally disappeared, buried under the rhetoric of “nativist,” “racist,” “the borders crossed us,” and the reality of the new demography and emerging Democratic constituencies. Try to deport an illegal alien with a felony conviction and instead six hours later on television we will see helpless dependent children cast adrift by the nativists. Eleven to fifteen million foreign nationals, and ten or fifteen million of their American citizen offspring, represent voters that have made the immigration-debate rhetoric and policy superfluous, a revolutionary fact that most have napped through.
The New American Army
Suddenly one moment, women were eligible for combat duty at the front line: no congressional vote, no national bipartisan panel with white papers of pros and cons, no in-depth Pentagon study, no national dialogue. There was an executive order — and that was that. Get over it.
Why then are women not eligible to play in the NFL or the NBA? Or are they, in theory? Yet something tells me that we will see a 140-lb. female SEAL in hand-to-hand combat with a 220 lb. Pashtun tribesman before we will see a female quarterback dodging defensive ends.
Are enemy linemen more dangerous than the Taliban?
Or is the assumption that women can in theory both play quarterback and go mano-a-mano against Mullah Omar’s thugs, but whether they do depends on whether they can meet male standards? One moment we had assumed that most men had about 30-50% more body strength than do women, and perhaps in most cases a more venomous aggressive streak. In the next blink, all that mattered not at all — or was it the sort of sexist fact that we kept silent about?
What is in store for those Neanderthal frontline infantry who object to the new rules? Apparently male reactionary combat soldiers of small units who for various reasons are not willing to entrust their lives to women at the front line are dead wrong. And they are so dead wrong that they can leave the military if they don’t like the new statutes.
And if they leave the military, their presence either won’t affect combat efficacy, or will in fact improve it.
Really?
Because we have effective and aggressive female Blackhawk pilots who risk getting shot down and killed or captured, de facto we must have no problem finding female SEALS who can rip the throats out of jihadists with no more difficulty than pushing the fire button in the chopper above. Yet we suspect that some of the female soldiers who can’t quite meet the existing male standards of physical prowess for combat units will argue that the bar is set artificially too high and is an irrelevant construct, given that 21st century knives, kicks, and choke holds are so passé and just the sort of artificial talking points that the sexists erect.
We all expect that in the near future there will be gender equity lawsuits, and sexual harassment writs — and we fear lurid stories of captured and killed women at the front that will shock us in the years to come. And we will continue to sleep, in the manner that we will soon whisper: “Wow, Iran finally got their bomb, after all”; or “Hmmm, that Korean missile got sorta, kinda close to Maui”; or “Wouldn’t you know it — they’re back to hanging female doctors from light poles in Kabul”; or “Whoa — 550 shot in Chicago this year?”
The New Normal
When did 7.8% unemployment become the new normal? After 49 months above it? What happened to a “jobless recovery”?
Are we always to borrow $1 trillion a year? Will the national debt always rise, never decline? Did $4 a gallon gas become the new normal — a small price to pay for more windmills and solar panels?
Suddenly, college is not the pathway to the upper-middle class, but a risky 50/50 proposition that just as likely can lead to a $100,000 plus, 8% student loan debt, no job, and five years in the parents’ spare bedroom. Who ever objected to tuition climbing at twice the rate of inflation? One day there were sparse dorms, and the next rock-climbing walls; one day deans and provosts who at least taught one class, the next diversity czars with scores of assistants. The more kids can’t pay for college, the more college looks like Disney World.
The new America is a society where 50% pay federal income tax, and for 50% April 15 is an occasion for a tax refund or credit. I grew up with my parents dreading the date; now I see signs offering all sorts of “tax refund” sales. When did disability insurance merely become an extension of unemployment insurance?
There Is No Media
About four years ago, the media just dissipated. Gone, buried. Did we notice our newsreaders are virtual government employees? The media is a Ministry of Truth where spokespeople vie for superlatives — a living “god,” a man who creates tingles in our legs and is pictured as a “messiah” on our magazines. Each sermon is a new “Gettysburg Address,” each gesture is Lincoln’s, each new Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton part of the new Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals.”
Journalists are now Photoshoppers of news: Guantanamo once bad, now good; we all grew to stop worrying and to love Predators; renditions, the Patriot Act, and preventative detentions must have gone with George W. Goldstein.
Those noisy free-for-all press conferences are now like Xerxes’s court at Persepolis, where toadies compete with kowtows. “Investigative reporting” is how some reactionary, enemy-of-the-people hacks dig up dirt on a progressive like Sen. Menendez or Susan Rice. The video maker sitting in jail and the 16-year-old American who was vaporized were reactionary troublemakers — and that is all ye need to know.
Brave, New World
Panta rhei — “everything is in flux” — Heraclitus says. The world we knew is not the one we wake up to after a short nap. January 2009 now seems like a far-off dream, in a way that 2016 may be a nightmare.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/brave-new-world/?singlepage=true
More secret email accounts for Obama’s EPA chief?
Lisa Jackson stepped down from her
position at the Environmental Protection Agency at the start of
President Obama’s second term, but her actions while in office are still
raising questions today.
As you might recall, Jackson was suspected of trying to skirt federal records laws & information requests when she used the alias “Richard Windsor”
in emails. But now, a Washington attorney says Jackson may have been
using an additional email account which raises more ethics questions.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow with the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, says recently released documents show
that, in at least one case, Jackson used an old New Jersey government
email account from her time working in the administration of Gov. John
Corzine. Further, there’s a direct link between the two questionable
email accounts. According to Horner, Jackson used her New Jersey
government email account to forward her “Richard Windsor” emails to the
New York Times in July 2009.
An EPA spokeswoman told
Fox News Thursday that Jackson’s government accounts would’ve been
closed when she left her position in state government, but Horner points
out that the email in question appeared to have been sent months after
Jackson left her post at the New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection. In response, Horner told Fox News that “we’re dealing with someone who has earned no benefits of any doubts.”
Additionally, Jackson’s replacement — acting EPA administrator Bob Perciasepe — is now also coming under fire
for using a separate, private email account to conduct official
business. Oh, and newly released documents reveal that Perciasepe was
communicating directly with “Richard Windsor.” In other words, no one
at Obama’s EPA has learned a single darn lesson.
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/02/21/more-secret-email-accounts-for-obamas-epa-chief/
PK'S NOTE: And the scariest and most serious one for last:
Why Are We Not Talking About America’s $123 Trillion In Unfunded Liabilities?
Most Americans know that our nation is spending more than it is taking in (the deficit). Though many on the Left do not seem to understand (or care about) the consequences of out of control spending, most Americans do know that the nation has America has over $16.5 trillion in debt–or, nearly $53,000 of debt for every man, woman and child.While $16.5 trillion of debt is clearly unsustainable, what is even more alarming is what we are not talking about: The fact that, in addition to the $16.5 trillion of debt we currently have, every man, woman, and child in America also is on the hook for nearly $400,000 in unfunded liabilities–or, over $1 million for every household.
Though their numbers appear to vary slightly (not including the unfunded liabilities of ObamaCare, for example), in their November Wall Street Journal article, writers Chris Cox and Bill Archer explain the lack of knowledge about the unfunded liabilities as:
The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees’ future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure.To be sure, the nation’s fiscal problems are a bi-partisan issue, caused by years of buying votes among specific constituencies. As a result, those constituencies are now entitled to the benefits which have yet to be paid for.
Why haven’t Americans heard about the titanic $86.8 trillion liability from these programs? One reason: The actual figures do not appear in black and white on any balance sheet.
Today, while those politicians wrestle with Obama’s self-induced sequestration deal, (which slashes defense spending while barely nibbling at the fat that has become the national budget), no one wants to deal with the real issue at hand: Politicians in Washington have enslaved future generations with the costs of various entitlement programs.
Perhaps it’s time we raise it to their attention–seriously.
___________________________
“Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth.”
Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)
http://www.redstate.com/2013/02/20/why-are-we-not-talking-about-americas-123-trillion-in-unfunded-liabilities/
Also reads:
However, subprime auto loans are exempted from CFPB oversight thanks to opposition from industry interests.
“They didn’t want to be subject to the same regulations as banks,” one industry source said. “The administration and Democrats in Congress were more than willing to hand over the keys. They knew what a stalled auto sales market would mean for how people viewed the bailouts.”
Obama made GM’s sales growth a centerpiece of his campaign during stops in Ohio and Michigan. The car company used flexible financing, pricing incentives, and other discounts to drive up volume, selling more than 9 million vehicles last year.
“Car sales have been the one economic indicator that the Obama administration has repeatedly pointed to as sign of recovery; we’re creating a bubble in order to make a government pet project look viable,” Niedermeyer said. “GM is using subprime to move cars out doors but it won’t last forever, and eventually the music is going to stop and we’re going to be back where we found them before the bailout.”
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