Sunday, May 15, 2011

Social Security Trust Fund Bonds & Senator Hollings of Charleston

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If you really want it hammered home into your head just how ephemeral the Social Security Trust Fund really and truly is, take a look at what one of the most colorful and nearly-unintelligible US senators ever, Senator Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings of South Carolina, had to say about it on October 13, 1989, 22 years ago:

(We used to have to translate Senator Hollings' old school Charleston, South Carolinian dialect to some of our Northern friends in Congress even though we hardly could understand what he was saying most of the time either)
"The public fully supported enactment of hefty new Social Security taxes in 1983 to ensure the retirement program’s long-term solvency and credibility. The promise was that today’s huge surpluses would be set safely aside in a trust fund to provide for baby-boomer retirees in the next century.

Well, look again. The Treasury is siphoning off every dollar of the Social Security surplus to meet current operating expenses of the government…

(T)he most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund...

The hard fact is that in the next century…the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate banknotes.”

‘Confederate banknotes’. You know what they were worth at the end of the War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression or The Civil War, whatever you choose to call it?

Obama's "Stimulus" Plan Destroyed more than one-half million jobs

"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
-- Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to Joseph Milligan, 1816
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Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the purported stimulus bill) with great rigor. Earlier this week, they reported their findings in a paper titled "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled." The paper is dense and rather lengthy, and requires considerable study. Here, however, is the bottom line:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that "spending equals stimulus," he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.

This chart, from Conley and Dupor's report, shows how goods-producing industries have completely failed to benefit from ARRA and the Obama administration's other misguided policies;

Via Weasel Zippers

Geithner Admits: There Are NO Trust Funds

http://fascistsoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SocialSecurity_stupid.gif


Note this one well folks:

Medicare, the government health plan for seniors, will exhaust its principal trust fund five years sooner than previously thought, which could heighten pressure on the White House and Congress to change the program as part of deficit-reduction negotiations.


Wait a second.... didn't we just hear this from Timmy about the need to borrow more money?

"If the United States were forced to stop, limit or delay payment on obligations to which the Nation has already committed - such as military salaries, Social Security and Medicare, tax refunds, contractual payments to businesses for goods and services, and payments to our investors...."


Busted jackass.

Tim Geithner just admitted in writing that there is no trust fund - there is no money - the Government in fact blew every last penny of it.

You, America, have been serially lied to about these so-called "trust funds."

THEY DO NOT EXIST.

Coptic Christians slaughtered in Egypt as the world looks away

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TWELVE Christian were murdered in Egypt. Two hundred and thirty-two people wounded. The death toll will surely rise as victims succumb to their injuries. And that's just in the past few days. In the same time period, more Christians were killed in Egypt at the hands of Muslims than people killed in Syria or in Libya as a result of protests, riots and resistance.

Two churches in Cairo were burned in recent days. Over the past few months church property has being gutted, vandalised and violated with graffiti. Churches have been blown up.

An entire community - the Christian community in the new Egypt - is under attack. And the world remains relatively silent. There has been no significant religious outcry, political redress or diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks. There has been almost no media coverage as Egypt's Muslims systematically, over the past few months, set about massacring Egypt's Christians.

The world is not only standing idly by, it is enabling the massacre. The US naively expects that a new era, begun in new Egypt, will ripple to the rest of the Islamic world. So in the midst of these monstrous mass murders in Egypt, the US has decided to send an extra $US1 billion to help the Egyptians ease the economic crisis that emerged as a result of the ousting of Hosni Mubarak on February 11. Muslims in Egypt are on the warpath - on the religious warpath - and the US is feeding them money.

Via Weasel Zippers

The Inexpressibly, Unthinkably Obvious

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Fred On Everything

Somber Thoughts on Race and Ethnicitye

May 14, 2011

I have just read Jared Taylor’s new book, White Consciousness. The title might lead one to expect racial ranting, but there is none. It is a good read. Jared deals thoughtfully with America’s changing racial and ethnic make-up and the probable consequences. He is usually painted as a hate-monger who regards his bed sheets as evening wear, wants (as Lincoln did) to send blacks back to Africa, shoot Hispanics, and blame Jews for sun spots and loose fillings. Alas, he fails to perform. The book is no more extreme than Pat Buchanan, well documented, and utterly incorrect politically. His crime is asking questions one mustn’t because the answers come up wrong.

For example, he doubts the existence, and the desirability, of racial integration, as very distinct from desegregation. It hasn’t worked, he says.

Isn’t this obvious? I ask my readers, most of whom are white, how many close black friends do you have? When did you last have them over for dinner? We talk mixing. We don’t do it.

I lived a couple of decades in Washington, DC, a city mostly black, and had many white liberal friends. They believed they believed in multiculturalism, but they—we—lived in an overwhelmingly white world: white restaurants, friends, bars, clubs, dances. I can’t remember even once being in an establishment in which the majority, or anything close to it, were black. Whites associate with whites, blacks with blacks. That’s how it is.

Jared points out that most of what we think we are supposed to think about race and ethnicity isn’t true. He notes the mandatory refrain, “Diversity is our strength,” and asks, exactly how is it our strength? I have myself wondered. Name five ways diversity has made the country stronger (without mentioning ethnic restaurants or music).

Um…ah…well…ah…urg.

The book is a curious one in that most of it is obvious though one mustn’t say it. Does not diversity just cause trouble, almost everywhere? As much as one might want it to lead to comity, it doesn’t. Consider: Shiites and Sunnis, Irish Protestants and Catholics, Hutus and Tutsis; blacks, whites and Hispanics in the US; Turks and Kurds; Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Turks and Armenians; Indians and Ugandans; Turks and Germans; Moslems and the French; Moslems and Dutch; Jews in many places; Christians and Moslems in Sudan; Chinese and Indonesians, and so on for pages. None of these groups is evil, but none mix well. Usually they kill each other.

A staple of political correctness is that groups eventually merge into happy indistinguishable citizens. Occasionally, yes, if the groups are similar and want to assimilate: The Irish and Italians in the US did. Jared points out that, whatever one might wish, it usually doesn’t happen. Sunnis and Shiites have been around since the seventh century. They celebrate diversity by exchanging car bombs. In the US, neither blacks nor Amerindians have assimilated to the dominant European culture, nor have the cultures blended.

Jared notes that the US now has fifty million Hispanics, or sixteen percent of the population, expected to rise soon to twice that, as well as thirteen percent of blacks. Now, since I live in Mexico, have a Mexican wife, and speak Spanish at home, it will be difficult to nail me with racial hatred of Hispanics. Nor do I hate blacks. But…is this going to work? Or are we going to end up with three mutually hostile countries in one land? The possibility is real. Several states, including California, have Hispanic majorities, which means that shortly they will have Hispanic governments. If the majority vote as a bloc—bingo.

Aggravating the problem is that the people who most believe that we will eventually be one big happy family are those with the least experience. They have never been in the huge, hopeless, festering slums of Detroit, Chicago, Newark, Washington, on and on and on. These are awful, culturally isolated, and not getting better. If there is an answer, no one has found it.

Americans hardly notice the cost of diversity, as they have never known anything else. Jared was born in Japan to missionary parents, went to Japanese schools, and speaks Japanese. He makes the point that in Japan there is virtually no diversity, and therefore no civil-rights acts, no forced busing, no governmental agencies counting how many of whom one hires, no voting-rights laws, no affirmative action and resulting anger. An employer simply hires the best qualified candidate. And the Japanese do not burn their cities in racial rioting.

We are what we are, a mixed nation, but need we make things worse? Unrestricted immigration may let us feel good about ourselves, but does it really have a happy ending? One maywell wonder what will follow when half of the country is either black or Hispanic.

Further, when some groups are economically and academically way below the dominant culture, hostility and separatism become almost assured. As Jared points out, blacks and Hispanics are on average scholastic disasters. In the schools the gap in achievement is large between white and black, and has proven resistant to everything: Head Start, forced busing, integrated class rooms, segregated class rooms, affirmative action, schools run entirely by blacks, or entirely by whites, and so on. Hispanics in the US are not doing a whole lot better. If the shortfall doesn’t change, it won’t matter whether it is genetic or cultural in origin.

The implications, discussion of which is verboten, are not trivial. The US depends on and rewards deployable intelligence, particularly on IQs bordering on the scary, as in 180 and up. The clearest examples are in Silicon Valley, many of them from the physics department at Stanford or Harvard. These men—almost all are men—have given the US its dominance in technology. They are not just bright, like the valedictorian in your high school. They are off-scale, almost another species.

If you follow the computer/internet racket, you know that they are overwhelmingly white, Jewish (a subset of white, granted), Chinese, Asian Indian, Korean. The black and Hispanic proportion is close to zero if not actually zero. This isn’t because of racial discrimination. Santa Clara runs on raw brains, and doesn’t care what package they come in. Google would hire a giant clam if it could program well enough.

Sez me, this is not going to lead to cheery Kum Bah Yah harmony. As the country becomes a two-tier society—it already is, but as the second tier grows rapidly in size and political potency—how is this going to work?

Jared will disappoint many by not making exterminationist recommendations. But if you want a clear exposition of what is happening, he’s worth a read.

The GOP’s new godfather

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With the 2012 elections on the horizon, many conservatives are uneasy about the lack of an obvious front-runner for the job of denying President Obama a second term. While the GOP field lacks clarity, it does provide a platform for new talent to stand out and wow the party faithful. According to a Zogby poll released Tuesday, Herman Cain is getting that attention. Though a relative unknown, Mr. Cain jumped to second place among surveyed primary voters.

Like Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, Mr. Cain brings a background of private-sector success that contrasts sharply with the weak resume of our current commander in chief. Prior to his election, Mr. Obama’s signature achievement off the public dole was to serve as a “community organizer” - whatever that means. On the other hand, one of Mr. Cain’s early assignments in business was to manage 450 of the lowest performing-Burger King locations in the Philadelphia region. Within three years, those stores were among the chain’s top performers. He then turned his attention to rescuing a near-bankrupt Godfather’s Pizza. After restoring its profitability, Mr. Cain bought the company.

Such stories resonate with a country desperate to find a leader capable of restoring national prosperity. Perhaps that’s why Mr. Cain received such high marks in the May 5 GOP presidential debate. Most of the crowd knew nothing beforehand about Mr. Cain, but a Fox News focus group overwhelmingly approved of what it heard, especially on the topic that matters most: the economy. “One of the biggest problems we have with this country right now is too much government intervention trying to tell businesses how to do what they do best - which is create jobs,” Mr. Cain said in the debate. “Government doesn’t create jobs, business creates jobs. We need to get government out of the way.”
Via Weasel Zippers

150 years has done nothing to dent the pride of white Southerners, which is understandable.









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"........the Stars and Bars now represents something much more than racial hierarchy. To most people who hoist it in their front yards, it stands for honour and tradition and the Old World chivalry of Gone With the Wind. They revel in its outrageous defence of vanishing values, its uncompromising statement against the decadence of modern life and the voluminous size of federal government. The Civil War is as potent to many white Southerners as the Blitz is to a Brit. Regardless of the historical reality, it is their finest hour. To take that away from them seems rather cruel."

Obamacare Spurs Doctor Shortage Crisis

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Verbatim post from NEWSMAX

The healthcare reform bill enacted last year will significantly increase the number of Americans with health insurance and exacerbate an already looming doctor shortage.

The Association of American Medical Colleges reported in 2010 that the United States will need an additional 130,000 doctors — general-practice physicians and specialists — in 15 years, 20 percent more doctors than are currently practicing. But medical school enrollment has been essentially flat, and about a third of American physicians are over the age of 55 and likely to retire by 2020.

Making matters worse, Congress in 1996 capped the number of new doctors Medicare would pay to train. And President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposed cutting Medicare funding for training even further, by $60 billion through 2020. “If this cut is enacted, the doctor shortage would get far worse,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

At the same time, the number of patients is certain to increase. Baby boomers will be retiring at the rate of 10,000 per day, and they will require more medical care as they age. Plus, Obamacare will boost the number of Americans with health insurance or participating in Medicaid, which will mean greater demand for doctors’ services.

At present, physicians are reimbursed at roughly 78 percent of costs under Medicare, and just 70 percent under Medicaid, according to Michael Tanner, a Cato Institute senior fellow.

As a result, more and more physicians are choosing to opt out of the government programs altogether. Already, as many as a third of doctors will not participate in Medicaid, and 13 percent won’t accept Medicare patients.

With cuts in reimbursements on the horizon with Obamacare, “retirement in Florida may begin to look like a very good option” for many older doctors, observes Tanner, whose article appeared in the New York Post. “Are they really going to want to stick it out for a few more years if all they have to look forward to is more red tape for less money?”

A 2010 poll by IBD/TPP found that 45 percent of physicians would at least consider leaving their practice or taking early retirement as a result of Obamacare.

These various factors will combine to produce a shortfall of more than 150,000 doctors over the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

As a start in dealing with the problem, the Obama commission’s recommended cuts in training funds should be set aside, Dr. Herbert Pardes, president and CEO of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, writes in the Journal. “Secondly, the cap enacted in 1996 on training new doctors should finally be lifted. These two steps would go a long way to addressing our country’s medical needs.”

Tanner concludes, “Promising universal health coverage is easy. But what does universal coverage mean if you can’t actually see a doctor?”

Arizona Attorney General: Declare Drug Cartels Terrorist Groups

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Verbatim post from NEWSMAX

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne told Congress on Wednesday that the United States should designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

Such a designation by the State Department would place Mexican drug trafficking organizations on the same list as al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

And it would subject the cartels to the freezing of monetary assets and tough criminal prosecution of those who provide them with material or monetary support.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, has introduced a bill calling on the secretary of state to officially list Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

Testifying before a House Homeland Security Oversight, Investigations, and Management Subcommittee hearing, chaired by McCaul, Horne said, “I certainly do agree with the chairman’s bill to designate cartels as terrorist organizations. Among other things, it makes it an enhanced crime to supply aid to those organizations and that obviously would be a very powerful tool in fighting them.”

McCaul said the bill would provide “more authority to go after [Mexican drug cartels] and those who provide them with assistance,” adding that they should be called what they really are — terrorists, CNS News reported.

Federal officials maintain there is no need to make that designation because there are already enough laws on the books to punish the cartels. “The designation I don’t think would help us,” said Grayling Williams, director of the Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security. “I think we have laws on the books that we need to apply and have worked with us for several years.”

Rep. William Keating of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said the United States “has successfully used the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to sanction Mexican drug trafficking organizations.” But McCaul said that the act goes after only the cartel leaders, not the people under them.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, told Newsmax.TV on Wednesday: “The administration’s own inspector general has said the border is 44 percent secure. If it’s only 44 percent secure, that means somebody else controls the other 56 percent. If it’s not the United States and it’s not Mexico, then it’s the drug cartels and anyone else who wishes to come in."

#135 of 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy

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HumanEvents


Find a feminist and see if she has a sense of humor:

Q: How many men does it take to open a beer?

A: None. It should be open when she brings it to you.

No Huck and weak Mitt – the GOP’s 2012 presumed frontrunners

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Excellent analysis. Verbatim post from Conservative Heritage Times

Mike Huckabee said himself that the world isn’t revolving around whether he runs for President or not. Certainly a billion Chinese don’t care and I think it is a refreshing attitude there’s no will to destiny unlike the Republican’s resident Nietzschean Newt Gingrich. Knowing in all likelihood he would run another grassroots rich but cash-poor campaign which wasn’t a pleasant experience the last time for him and his family and leave him vulnerable to another pounding from his enemies he couldn’t respond to, Mike Huckabee probably did the wise thing and said no, he’s more happy doing what he’s doing right now maybe in four years, with presumably Obama re-elected and the White House open for a non-incumbent, he’d have a better shot of winning.

This announcement certainly leaves a lot of voids in the GOP nomination campaign. Without Huckabee there’s no “first tier” Southern candidate, which is strange when you think how important the region is for the party. And no I don’t consider the former Army brat who used a cosmo congressional district in Atlanta to launch his political career a “Southerner” (nor does he and wife No. 3 is from Whitehall, Wisconsin which is not too far from where I live). Does someone like Herman Cain move into this role? If this sampling of delegates at this year’s Georgia State Republican Convention in Macon is any indicator the answer is yes, which means now Cain has to be taken more seriously.

There’s also no first tier “Christian Conservative” in the race either with Huckabee’s absence. That means on cue in Michele Bachmann, who will eagerly swoop into next door Iowa to fill that role, much to the consternation of fellow Minnesota Tim Pawlenty, who has to feel increasingly boxed in by the establishment on one side, as he’ll never raise the money to challenge Romney, and Bachmann on the other side, who will keep him from attracting a more conservative crowd. He too may want to serious think about ditching the campaign like Huckbee and preserve himself for another day given his youthful age.

Basically the field is structures like this: Romney, Huntsman and Pawlenty make up the establishment – Bachmann, Paul and Cain are the niche candidates looking for their opportunity to expand and Gingrich, Roemer, Moore, Kargas, Santorum, Johnson, Trump and anyone getting in at this late date without credentials are the jokers. And no I don’t expand Mitch Daniels to jump in either for largely the same reason Huckabee isn’t running: his family doesn’t want it and the money he needs to raise to beat Romney he won’t be able to get. He’s simply and press and politician favorite, no more, no less.

So is Romney the inevitable nominee as Larison asked in a recent Eunomia column? On paper perhaps, but his situation reminds me of one Nelson Rockefeller before he basically traded up his wife in 1963: Nobody liked him but everyone sort of expected him to be the GOP nominee, because that’s who the powers that be wanted. Romney is obvious front runner because he has unlimited funds, he has his campaign organization in tact, he has a base of loyal voters (Mormons of the West) he can count on but he excites no one and thus is vulnerable, especially if he loses in early states like New Hampshire and or Nevada to Ron Paul (he’s not even bothering with Iowa this time). Given this attitude, can he expect the South (outside of Florida) to bail him out if he stars losing early on? I doubt it. The inevitable happens only when it happens, in this case winning. If it doesn’t, then it’s commonly known as “feet of clay.”

Oh, I almost forget. I was going include Sara Palin on this list but then I Googled her name under news articles and saw stories which had nothing to do with politics but had everything to do with tabloid antics of her family. I’ve always thought she was going to run, that she had to run. But now I’m come to the conclusion her moment has come and gone. It’s too late to repair what’s been damaged.