"There are not enough Warren Buffett's"

Republican Senator Jim DeMint had a good line in response to Obunglers State of the Union address.campaign speech and class warfare rhetoric. He says that there “are not enough Warren Buffetts in the world that we could take all their money” in order to solve our debt crisis.

     Something to think about,  According to an article by Walter Williams

If Congress imposed a 100 percent tax, taking all earnings above $250,000 per year, it would yield the princely sum of $1.4 trillion. That would keep the government running for 141 days, but there's a problem because there are 224 more days left in the year.

How about corporate profits to fill the gap? Fortune 500 companies earn nearly $400 billion in profits. Since leftists think profits are little less than theft and greed, Congress might confiscate these ill-gotten gains so that they can be returned to their rightful owners. Taking corporate profits would keep the government running for another 40 days, but that along with confiscating all income above $250,000 would only get us to the end of June. Congress must search elsewhere.

According to Forbes 400, America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. Congress could confiscate their stocks and bonds, and force them to sell their businesses, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry. The problem is that after fleecing the rich of their income and net worth, and the Fortune 500 corporations of their profits, it would only get us to mid-August. The fact of the matter is there are not enough rich people to come anywhere close to satisfying Congress' voracious spending appetite.

       Rich people didn't get rich by being stupid.  They will move or hide their money.  If the government seizes all their property, it will cause 2 problems, one: if you seize everything in the name of "fairness"  to redistribute to the "less fortunate" you will still have people that will not have anything, the poor with few exceptions are poor for a reason.  Also there will be no rich people, this would be a one time thing, once their money is gone, who pays the taxes?   The poor?  yeah right.  The top 50% pay about 97% of all the taxes.  There will be 2 classes of people, the "hoi patoi" and the political elite.  Kinda like the old Soviet Union.  Maybe that is what Obungler has in mind.   The second problem,  is we still have a spending problem, when taxes go up, there is less revenue collected and there will still be a deficit, now it will be acerbated by the seizures of the rich people assets.   We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem and unless COngress ans the president get a grip on it, it will get worse.

     

System failure on a global scale.

By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Non government logic

I LIKE THIS LOGIC!

If you can answer this correctly, you can answer the question on what action to take on raising the Federal debt ceiling.

You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup and you have sewage up to your ceilings.

What do you do……raise the ceilings, or pump out the shit?

Who to blame for the deficit.

I got this from the daily telegraph in the U.K  I also read papers and watch programs from across the pond.   I got this article from here and piggybacked it.  I read news from the English and German papers.  I like to get perspectives from other area's.  I tend to use Europe because we have a shared culture and a lot of traditions.    To read the rest of the article...read it here...it is long and worth the read..

Which of these is the most important question to ask in the present economic crisis: how can we promote growth? Should we pay off government debt more or less quickly? Is the US in worse trouble than Europe? Answer: none of the above.

The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society? On this side of the Atlantic, the model of a national welfare system with comprehensive entitlements, which is paid for by the wealth created through capitalist endeavour, has been accepted (even by parties of the centre-Right) as the essence of post-war political enlightenment.

This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.

But the US has a very different historical experience from European countries, with their accretions of national remorse and class guilt: it has a far stronger and more resilient belief in the moral value of liberty and the dangers of state power. This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The Tea Party faction within the Republican party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future toward which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programmes which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with tax rises could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.

And, again contrary to prevailing wisdom, their view is not naive and parochial: it is corroborated by the European experience. By rights, it should be Europe that is immersed in this debate, but its leaders are so steeped in the sacred texts of social democracy that they cannot admit the force of the contradictions which they are now hopelessly trying to evade.


       More here

Marco Rubio...nails flipper..A.K.A John Kerry

I got this from PJ media, Marco Rubio talks about the debt, the fact that the democraps havn't passed a budget in 822 days.  The same people that made talking points about the debt ceiling in 2007 to nail Bush, now pretend it don't happen.    And he handles flipper A.K.A. John Kerry to boot.

Thanksgiving 2012.....

I shamelessly lifted this here, a great site and worth a book mark,,,Thanks OldNFO

Thanksgiving 2022

Winston, come into the dining room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband. "In a minute, honey, it's a tie score," he answered. Actually Winston wasn't very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington. Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and the "bad example it sets for the rest of the world",Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as exciting.

Yet it wasn't the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey. Even though it was the best type of Veggie Meat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mincemeat pie), it wasn't anything like real turkey.

And that was the year they took all the guns, since "hunting" was officially outlawed under the same act, so there was no need to have any guns.  The NRA was disbanded as a terrorist organization, and their entire membership list was added to the terrorist watch list, put on GPS monitoring and most lost their jobs, as they were restricted to no more than 2 miles of travel from home.  Winston absently rubbed his ankle, remembering those two years until he 'proved' he was safe.

And ever since the government officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving Day" to "A National Day of Atonement" in 2020, to  officially acknowledge the Pilgrims' historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster. Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold.

Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats - which were monitored and controlled by the electric company - be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

         

Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family. Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of life-saving medical treatment. He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program. And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort. "The RHC's resources are limited", explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone. "Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled. I'm sorry for your loss."

         

Ed couldn't make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 outlawed the use of the combustion engines - for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn't want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there.

         

Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were flying in. Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists."

         

Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022. That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine. Almost.

         

The Supreme Court is reviewing the statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact. "A living Constitution is extremely flexible", said the Court's eldest member, Elena Kagan. " Europe has had laws like this one for years. We should learn from their example", she added.

Winston's thoughts turned to his own children.  He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.

         

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism, or any of a number of other calamities were "just around the corner", but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility. It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being. Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually

worthless as a result of QE13.

         

The latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated was, once again, to "spur economic growth." This time, they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

         

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful, Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement. At least, he had his memories. He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before government promises to make life "fair for everyone" realized their full potential.

Hearing the roar of a big Detroit V8, riding in a convertible, going to the range for friendly competition, actually LISTENING to one's parents, cooking a real steak on a grill; oh man, now all they get is what the government 'lets' them do.

         

Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them. He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2011, when all the real nonsense began. "Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is enough' when we had the chance," he thought. Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.

Obummers balanced approach

THE DEMOGRAPHY OF DEBTORS

I read this from here      It is a bit long but a real good read.

Steyn on the World

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

HAPPY WARRIOR from National Review The other day, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, fled the country. The only wonder is that there aren’t more fleeing. Not Afghans; central bankers. I mean, you gotta figure that throughout the G-20 there are more than a few with the vague but growing feeling that the jig’s up big time. Round about the time the Afghan central banker was heading for the hills, the Greek central banker ventured some rare criticisms of his government. “Piling more taxes on taxpayers has reached its limit,” said Giorgos Provopoulos. The alleged austerity measures do not “place enough emphasis on the containment of spending.” All very sensible. Prudent and measured. Outside, in the streets of Athens, strikers struck, rioters rioted, and an already shrunken tourism industry dwindled down to an international press corps anxious to get on with societal collapse. “We don’t want your money, Europe,” declared a protesting “youth,” Iamando, 36. “Leave us alone — please, please, please.” I would bet that, somewhere not too deep down, Giorgos Provopoulos understands that the problem is not the Greek economy or the Greek government but the Greek people. Many years ago in this space, I quoted the line Gerald Ford liked to use when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And I suggested there was an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the stage Greece is at and so, to one degree or another, is the rest of the Western world. In the United States, our democracy is trending as Athenian as the rest: We’re the Brokest Nation in History, but, as those Medicare polls suggest, getting enough people to give enough of it back isn’t going to be any easier than it is in Greece. From Athens to Madison, Wis., too many people have gotten used to a level of comfort and ease they haven’t earned. It’s not a green-eyeshade issue. The inability to balance the books is a symptom of more profound structural imbalances. Over on the Mediterranean, the only question that matters is: Are the Greek people ready to get real? Most of us, including Mr. Provopoulos, have figured out the answer to that. Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But we’re way beyond that. That’s a droll quip when you’re on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve advanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period. Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable speed a range of transformative innovations — welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion — whose cumulative effect a few decades on is that the developed world has developed to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. In the course of so doing, they have fewer children later. And the few they do have leave childhood ever later — Obamacare’s much heralded “right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further. A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do. On the Continent, the shifting rationale for mass immigration may not illuminate much about the immigrants but it certainly tells you something about the natives: Originally, European leaders said, we needed immigrants to work in the mills and factories. But the mills and factories closed. So the new rationale was that we needed young immigrants to keep the welfare state solvent. But in Germany the Turks retire even younger than the Krauts do, and in France 65 percent of imams are on the dole. So the surviving rationale is that a dependence on mass immigration is not a structural flaw but a sign of moral virtue. The evolving justification for post-war immigration policy — from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism — is itself a perfect shorthand for Western decay. Most of the above doesn’t sound terribly “fiscal,” because it’s not. The ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the cause. As Angela Merkel well understands every time she switches on the TV and sees a news report from Greece, culture trumps economics. I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago: One moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first came out west over 40 years ago. And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected. Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland, Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are “more than two genders.” The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe self-confidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast. We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why everything’s changed.

5 lies of the debt debate

The article below is from Human Events.
Enough said.

Incontinent spending put America $14 trillion in debt. 
The politicians who borrowed and spent us into debt 
want permission to borrow more so that they can 
spend more. And if they don’t get permission to 
borrow more money, they assure us that our debt 
woes will worsen.

Does this seem like a solution or a rationalization?

Washington is hooked on spending. Like other 
addicts, politicians tell lies to get their fix. 
Jonesing for more money, they insist that 
raising the debt limit is the best way to limit 
America’s debt.

Bad habits are tough to break. Surely, dishonesty
 about the problem doesn’t bring us any closer 
to a solution.

In the spirit of providing clarity through the 
haze of deceit, here are the five big lies the 
spending addicts tell to satiate their cravings 
for more of your money:  

Lie #5 Americans Want a Tax Increase
“Eighty percent of the American people support 
an approach that includes revenues and cuts,”
 the president claimed Friday. “So the notion 
that somehow the American people aren’t sold 
is not the problem. The problem is members of 
Congress are dug in ideologically into various 
positions because they boxed themselves in 
with previous statements.” A poll released the 
previous day by Rasmussen showed that while 
a majority of Democrats want a tax increase 
as part of the deal, just 34 percent of Americans 
favor one in conjunction with raising the debt ceiling.

Lie #4 The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share
Obama contended in his Saturday radio address 
that he merely planned on “asking the wealthiest 
Americans to pay their fair share” and that 
“we have to ask corporations and the wealthiest 
Americans to share in that sacrifice.” 
Leaving aside whether Obama intends to merely 
“ask” wealthy Americans for more of their money, 
there is the subjective question of what constitutes
 a “fair share.” A study by the Tax Foundation 
found that America’s richest tenth pays a higher 
percentage of income taxes than their counterparts 
in Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and every other 
similar industrialized nation. According to the 
Internal Revenue Service, the wealthiest five 
percent of Americans pays 59 percent of income 
taxes and the bottom fifty percent pays three percent 
of income taxes. 
Who, precisely, isn’t paying their “fair” share?

Lie #3 The U.S. Will Default If Congress Doesn’t
 Raise the Debt Ceiling 
The president has repeatedly referred to a failure 
to raise the debt limit as “Armageddon.” But if the 
debt ceiling is not raised before it expires the first 
week of August, it’s not the end of Washington’s 
money—let alone the end of the world. The U.S. Treasury 
will claim revenues of about $172 billion for the 
remainder of the month. Even practitioners of 
fuzzy math understand that revenues of $172 
billion are enough to cover an interest payment
 of $29 billion. Not only are the revenues sufficient
 to pay the interest on the debt, but military salaries, 
Social Security, and Medicare, too. 
Dramatic spending cuts would necessarily follow 
a decision not to raise the debt ceiling. 
But it’s a lie to equate an act of fiscal responsibility 
(refusing to allow more borrowing) with one of 
recklessness (default).

Lie #2 The Bush Tax Cuts Caused the Debt
“It turns out that our problem is we cut taxes 
without paying for them over the last decade,” 
Obama claimed during Friday’s press conference. 
But revenues, which had been in decline 
immediately prior to the enactment of the 
Bush tax cuts, increased by more than a third 
soon after the top rates fell from 40 percent 
to 35 percent. While receipts declined dramatically 
in the aftermath of the financial/housing crisis, 
they had increased even more dramatically—
$1.8 trillion in 2003 to $2.6 trillion in 2007—in 
the wake of the Bush tax cuts. As with the Harding/Coolidge, Kennedy/Johnson, and Reagan rate reductions, revenue counterintuitively increased following the Bush tax cuts.

Lie #1 Conservatives Who Oppose Raising t
he Debt Ceiling Are (Insert Insult Here)
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee sees 
racism fueling opposition to raising the debt ceiling.
Newsweek’s Tina Brown calls Republicans “suicide bombers.” Economist Paul Krugman calls the GOP “crazy.”
 But there are sensible reasons why an elected 
official might believe that taking on new debt 
would make a debt crisis worse, not better. 
“The fact that we are here today to debate 
raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership 
failure,” Senator Obama explained in 2006 
regarding his vote against raising the debt ceiling. 
“It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay 
its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on 
ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries 
to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.” 
Amen.