Let’s Reflect On The History Of Social Security: On The Government Takeover And Of The FAR Better Privatized Option We Should Have Had

I begin by quoting from Burton Folsom, Jr.’s New Deal Or Raw Deal? to illustrate the history of the disaster that is otherwise known as ”Social Security”:

Roosevelt’s social security plan created an array of problems. First, it retarded recovery from the Great Depression by contributing to unemployment. From 1937 to 1940, employers and employees were docked for social security, and that money was out of private hands and lying fallow in the treasury. Lloyd Peck of the Laundryowners National Association concluded, “The burden of this proposal for employers to carry, through a payroll tax, will act as a definite curb on business expansion, and will likely eliminate many businesses now on the verge of bankruptcy.”

Second, social security was unsound financially.  Unlike life insurance policies, workers had to live to age sixty-two to collect anything.  Life expectancy in 1930, the year of the most recent census, was almost sixty years, which meant that most people of that time would lose money from their paycheck every month for thirty to forty years, and neither they nor their children would ever receive a return on it.  In the case of black Americans, who had only a forty-eight-year life expectancy in 1930, most contributed to pensions that would disproportionately go to whites.  What’s more, the payroll tax was regressive – Henry Ford and Andrew Mellon paid in the same amount as their employees who earned $3,000 a year.

While some Americans were soaked by social security, others, especially the first retirees, rolled in benefits after making only minimal payments.  Ida Fuller, for example, a legal secretary in Ludlow, Vermont, paid a total of $24.75 into social security from 1937 to 1940, when she retired at age sixty-five.  Her first monthly social security check of $22.54 almost matched her entire contribution.  At her death in 1975, she had received $22,888.92 from social security, a payout of roughly $1,000 for every dollar she paid in.

When an accountant quizzed Roosevelt about the economic problems with social security, especially its tendency to create unemployment, he responded, “I guess you’re right on the economics, but those taxes were never a problem of economics.  They are politics all the way through.”  Roosevelt explained that “with those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”  That’s why, as Roosevelt admitted, it’s “politics all the way through.”  Most politicians, following Roosevelt’s lead, have taken delight in raising social security payouts and using that gift to plead for votes from the elderly at election time.

In the original debate in the Senate on social security, Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri wondered if private pensions for retirement might outperform the government pensions proposed in the social security bill.  He introduced the Clark Amendment, which would have allowed private employers to opt out of social security.

The key provision in the Clark Amendment was that employers had to at least match the government’s social security program in benefits to the employee and in premiums extracted from the employee.  The employer also had to agree to place the premiums with an insurance company – to an approved alternative – and to give all employees the right to choose the government-run program instead of the private alternative.

When the Clark Amendment was debated before the Senate in 1935, the advocates of a government monopoly were on the defensive.  On of them, Senator Robert La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin complained: “If e shall adopt this amendment, the government having determined to set up a federal system of old-age [insurance], will provide in its own bill creating that system, for competition, which in the end may destroy the federal system.”  La Follette was perceptive.  If private insurance or mutual funds were allowed to compete with the government, no one might choose the government plan.  The Senate decided that workers ought to have a choice and voted 51-35 to make the Clark Amendment part of the social security law.

President Roosevelt was furious at the Senate, and threatened to veto the social security bill if it came to him with the Clark Amendment attached.  When the House passed a social security bill without the Clark Amendment, Roosevelt and his supporters used a parliamentary tactic to gain victory.  The House-Senate conference committee met to work out a compromise bill, and naturally the Clark Amendment was the main point of debate.  The committee decided to submit a final bill to Roosevelt with the government monopoly intact.  But they agreed to appoint a special joint legislative committee to study the Clark Amendment and report to Congress the next year on how best to provide for competition.  but after the government monopoly was instituted, the promised meeting in 1936 was never held.  Given that many private pension plans over the last sixty years have returned around 8 percent a year, and that social security benefits have averaged less than a 2 percent return, Senator Clark’s alternative showed much wisdom, but he couldn’t overcome Roosevelt’s political skill. — Burton Folsom, Jr., New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, 2008, pp. 116-118

Can we document the fact that FDR massively undermined workers and created devastating unemployment with his stupid and immoral policies?  To quote Obama, “Yes we can!”  For one thing, economists can now calculate that FDR prolonged the Great Depression and all the misery that accompanied it by seven years.

Don’t believe those economists?  Okay, then allow me to quote Henry Morganthau, FDR’s close personal friend and Secretary of the Treasury:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, for the record, unemployment was 20.7%

Don’t believe the economists or FDR’s own treasury secretary?  The how about Barack Obama’s former chief economic advisor?

Larry Summers blasphemy: Hitler saved FDR’s ass
by Lee on July 23, 2011 21:16 pm

Larry Summers is often quotable and Charlie Rose is occasionally watchable. Put ‘em together and you get the very definition of a blind sow finding an acorn.
 
The whole clip is interesting, but the money quote begins a hair after the 21:30 mark when Summers says something about left wing icon FDR that will undoubtedly result in fewer dinner invitations in the Hamptons this summer:

“Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.”
 
Why next thing you know Summers will be saying that Keynesian economics don’t work.

Clip here to watch the video: CharlieRose.com
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11777

You might also be interested in finding out what Obama’s former chief economic advisor had to say about the massive and massively failed $862 billion (and actually, according to the CBO, $3.27 TRILLION) stimulus.

It is a documented fact that FDR and the Democrat Party failed America.

Now consider one country that tried what that Democrat Senator (Bennett Champ Clark) proposed achieved:

Chile’s Privatized Social Security Program is 30 Years Old, and Prospering
Written by Bob Adelmann   
Tuesday, 03 May 2011 16:40

As a quiet example of how privatizing Social Security works in the real world, Chile’s 30-year experiment is succeeding beyond expectations. Instead of running huge deficits to fund the old “PayGo” system, private savings now exceed 50 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

Prior to May 1, 1981, the Chilean system required contributions from workers and was clearly in grave financial trouble. Instead of nibbling around the edges to shore up the program for another few years, José Piñera, Secretary of Labor and Pensions under Augusto Pinochet, decided to do a major overhaul of the system:

We knew that cosmetic changes — increasing the retirement age, increasing taxes — would not be enough. We understood that the pay-as-you-go system had a fundamental flaw, one rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave. That flaw was lack of a link between what people put into their pension program and what they take out….

So we decided to go in the other direction, to link benefits to contributions. The money that a worker pays into the system goes into an account that is owned by the worker.

The system still required contributions of 10 percent of salary, but the money was deposited in any one of an array of private investment companies. Upon retirement, the worker had a number of options, including purchasing an annuity for life. Along the way he could track the performance of his account, and increase his contribution (up to 20 percent) if he wanted to retire earlier, or increase his payout at retirement.

How well has the system performed? John Tierney, a writer for the New York Times, went to visit Pablo Serra, a former classmate and friend in Santiago a few years ago, and they compared notes on how well their respective retirement programs were doing. Tierney brought along his latest statement from Social Security, while his friend brought up his retirement plan on his computer. It turned out that they both had been contributing about the same amount of money, so the comparison was apt, and startling, said Tierney:

Pablo could retire in 10 years, at age 62, with an annual pension of $55,000. That would be more than triple the $18,000 I can expect from Social Security at that age. OR

Pablo could retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $70,000. That would almost triple the $25,000 pension promised [to me] by Social Security starting a year later, at age 66. OR

Pablo could retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $53,000 and [in addition receive] a one-time cash payment of $223,000.

Tierney wrote that Pablo said “I’m very happy with my account.” Tierney suggested that, upon retirement, Pablo could not only retire nicely, but be able to buy himself a vacation home at the shore or in the country. Pablo laughed it off, and Tierney wrote: “I’m trying to look on the bright side. Maybe my Social Security check will cover the airfare to visit him.”

According to Investors Business Daily, the average annual rate of return for Chilean workers over the last 30 years has exceeded 9% annually, after inflation, whereas “U. S. Social Security pays a 1% to 2% (theoretical) rate of return, and even less for new workers.”

As expected, the capital accumulated in these privatized accounts have generated substantial growth in Chile’s economy. As noted by Wikipedia, “Chile is one of South America’s most stable and prosperous nations, leading Latin American nations in human development, competitiveness, income per capita, globalization, economic freedom, and low perception of corruption.” [Emphases added.]

High domestic savings and investment rates helped propel Chile’s economy to average growth rates of 8% during the 1990s. The privatized national pension plan (AFP) has encouraged domestic investment and contributed to an estimated total domestic savings rate of approximately 21% of GDP.

This was anticipated by Piñera when the plan was originally designed and implemented in 1981. In reviewing the success of the plan after just 15 years, Piñera said, “The Chilean worker is an owner, a capitalist. There is no more powerful way to stabilize a free-market economy and to get the support of the workers than to link them directly to the benefits of the market system. When Chile grows at 7 percent or when the stock market doubles … Chilean workers benefit directly, not only through high wages, not only through more employment, but through additional capital in their individual pension accounts.”

All of which should resonate with American workers who have been forced to contribute to a failing Social Security system for years. And yet when given the opportunity to support any sort of privatization, as during the Clinton and Bush administrations, the idea gained little traction. And now that Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Road Map” offers the chance for those same workers to contribute just one-third of their Social Security taxes to similar private accounts, the idea continues to fall on deaf ears.

However, according to Rasmussen Reports, that may be changing. Nearly half of those polled now correctly understand ‘that making major long-term cuts in government spending will require big changes” in Social Security, Medicare, and defense. That figure, adds Rasmussen, “suggests a growing awareness of budgetary realities among the American people.”

To privatize Social Security makes nothing but sense, as in dollars and cents. The ownership of private property has always propelled economic prosperity, higher wages and improved standards of living. Only those whose goals are to impoverish the American worker and reduce his ability to manage his own affairs and control his own future would resist such an attractive alternative. As noted by Piñera,

This is a brief story of a dream that has come true. The ultimate lesson is that the only revolutions that are successful are those that trust the individual, and the wonders that individuals can do when they are free.

I think of the misery that FDR inflicted upon every single American worker for the sake of a Democrat-controlled boondoggle that would “progressively” rob one generation of Americans after another compared to what they could have had if a privatized system (such as Chile’s or such as Clark’s) had been implemented instead.

But it is not enough to say America could have had much more than what Franklin Delano Roosevelt afflicted us with as a result of his partisan political takeover to give government a sole monopoly of something it never should have involved itself with in the first place.  The simple fact of the matter is that ENTIRELY because of FDR and the increasingly despicable Democrat Party that would follow, America is now in a situation in which it is guaranteed to economically implode.

Social Security was ALWAYS a Ponzi scheme and it was ALWAYS guaranteed to ultimately fail and result in the collapse of the American dream and the very nation itself.

Consider what Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, discovered:

A National Debt Of $14 Trillion? Try $211 Trillion
by NPR Staff
August 6, 2011

When Standard & Poor’s reduced the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA-plus, the United States suffered the first downgrade to its credit rating ever. S&P took this action despite the plan Congress passed this past week to raise the debt limit.

The downgrade, S&P said, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.”

It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”

Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.

“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.”

We don’t hear more about this enormous number, Kotlikoff says, because politicians have chosen their language carefully to keep most of the problem off the books.

“Why are these guys thinking about balancing the budget?” he says. “They should try and think about our long-term fiscal problems.”

According to Kotlikoff, one of the biggest fiscal problems Congress should focus on is America’s obligation to make Social Security payments to future generations of the elderly.

“We’ve got 78 million baby boomers who are poised to collect, in about 15 to 20 years, about $40,000 per person. Multiply 78 million by $40,000 — you’re talking about more than $3 trillion a year just to give to a portion of the population,” he says. “That’s an enormous bill that’s overhanging our heads, and Congress isn’t focused on it.”

“We’ve consistently done too little too late, looked too short-term, said the future would take care of itself, we’ll deal with that tomorrow,” he says. “Well, guess what? You can’t keep putting off these problems.”

To eliminate the fiscal gap, Kotlikoff says, the U.S. would have to have tax increases and spending reductions far beyond what’s being negotiated right now in Washington.

“What you have to do is either immediately and permanently raise taxes by about two-thirds, or immediately and permanently cut every dollar of spending by 40 percent forever. The [Congressional Budget Office's] numbers say we have an absolutely enormous problem facing us.”

Democrats want to self-righteously lecture us about the giant spending of Reagan or Bush.  But don’t just consider that Barack Obama demonized George Bush for increasing the debt by $4 trillion in eight years before he increased the debt by $6 trillion in only three years.  Go beyond that and divide Bush’s debt by the $211 trillion that Democrats have saddled us with after giving us toxic boondoggles loaded with lies and pork.  I come up with 1.9 percent; what do you get?

Virtually every single penny of toxic, staggering, insurmountable, unpayable debt that we have been saddled on us by Democrats.  And they have done so while giving us massively inferior boondoggles such as Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats And Crack Cocaine Addicts: Two Kinds Of The Same Vile Species

It’s Obama’s Economy. Hold Him Responsible For It.

June 8, 2011 12:00 A.M.
It’s Obama’s Economy, Stupid
Jonah Goldberg
No president “runs” the U.S. economy, but this president talks like he does.

Now, my administration has a job to do as well, and that job is to get this economy back on its feet,” President Obama declared on July 14, 2009, in Warren, Mich. “That’s my job, and it’s a job I gladly accept. I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, well, this is Obama’s economy. That’s fine. Give it to me.”

OK. It’s yours.

The unemployment rate then was 9.5 percent. It’s now 9.1 percent, well above the 8 percent cap that the administration’s advisers projected under the stimulus bill. But that’s not the amazing part. According to a White House report written by economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer in January 2009 in support of the bill, if we had passed no stimulus package at all, the unemployment rate would have topped out at around 8.8 percent in the last quarter of 2010.

If only.

Instead, we got Obama’s vital “investments.” Since his speech in Warren, we’ve spent another $2.8 trillion in borrowed money. Presumably, we could have cut the unemployment rate by four-tenths of a percentage point more cheaply than that?

Meanwhile, we’ve accrued a total of $3.7 trillion in debt on Obama’s watch, while losing 2.8 million jobs. That doesn’t sound ideal either.

But what do I know?

The more salient point is that Obama acts like he knows everything. From Day One, this White House has been cocksure about how to get us out of the economic ditch. In every major relevant speech, Obama has stuck with a consistent message: We know what to do and the Republicans don’t. “I will not sacrifice the core investments we need to grow and create jobs,” Obama insisted yet again in his April budget speech.

So what does this guy have to do to get the blame for the bad economy? Mark Halperin, an analyst for MSNBC and Time magazine, was asked on the Today show over the weekend about the political impact of the bad economy. He assured viewers that the president was totally engaged in the need for job creation. “The Republicans, though, have the onus on them to come forward with some ideas. The president’s ideas are still a little bit up in the air.”

A little bit up in the air? They’re in concrete. From his April 14, 2009, “New Foundation” speech at Georgetown University to his latest campaign stop, Obama has insisted he knows exactly what he’s doing. He stands by “Obamacare” as a boon for the economy. He still sees the “green revolution” — and all the crony capitalism that comes with it — as the solution to our woes. (That’s why he nominated John Bryson, a former utility CEO, subsidy-seeking entrepreneur, and environmental activist, to be his next commerce secretary.)

But is there any evidence it’s helped create jobs? Consider that when President Reagan oversaw a huge jobs boom, the media recycled the untrue claim that these were all low-paying “hamburger flipper” jobs.

Well, McDonald’s alone may be responsible for a quarter to a half of the new jobs created in the last month. And that hiring probably wouldn’t have happened if Mickey D’s hadn’t been given a waiver from Obamacare.

And then there’s the stimulus, which the White House still touts as an unqualified success. Well, during Obama’s first year in office, more than half (119,000) of all the new jobs in the United States were created in business-friendly Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If Obama created those jobs, why’d he put so many of them in, of all places, George W. Bush’s home state?

No president “runs” the U.S. economy, but this president talks like he does more than any I can remember. And yet, none of his economic promises or predictions has panned out. (Remember the long, hot “recovery summer” when 250,000 to 500,000 new jobs a month that the vice president promised turned out to be mirages?)

How does the media react? Not by taking him at his word when he says he wants it to be “Obama’s economy.” Instead, they’re ferociously truth-squadding Sarah Palin’s comments on Paul Revere and following her bus around like they’re in a remake of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

And maybe it is.

Remember, Raising The Debt Ceiling Is A Failure Of Leadership. Vote No.

Democrats say that if Republicans don’t go along with their reckless spending increases, the world will end.

But let’s not forget what the messiah-in-chief lectured us a few years ago:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. 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. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

And, of course, Americans DO deserve better.  They deserve better than a hypocrite, a demagogue and a disastrous failure.

As I previously pointed out about this:

“America has a debt problem,” Obama said in 2006.  That year, Republicans passed their last budget before losing power to Democrats until this year.  It had a deficit of $161 billion.  The next year the Democrats virtually tripled that deficit to $459 billion.  And in two years of Obama it has soared to $3 TRILLION.

The AP correctly pointed out that “It was a blast by the freshman lawmaker against a Bush request to raise the debt limit to $8.96 trillion.”

It was a personal attack by an evil fool against a president which history now proves knew what he was doing versus the current moral idiot who clearly does not.

That’s right, boys and girls.  The last time a Republican Congress passed a budget, it had a deficit of $161 billion.  And Republicans have been doing mea culpas ever since about their fiscal recklessness.  Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress have heaped up $5.34 TRILLION MORE in debt – and they do nothing but continue to point the finger at Republicans who actually spent less by a rather silly percentage.

This is a game that has to end.  And now is frankly long past time.

I propose that we treat Obama as though he is/was a sane and honest human being and do what he said:  Vote AGAINST the debt ceiling.  Vote like Obama said we should vote.  Otherwise we should frankly treat Obama as a dishonest fool who needs to resign in disgrace.

And any vote to increase the debt ceiling should be a) temporary (i.e., valid for no more than six months) and b) accompanied by spending cuts that exceed the amount of any increase.

If I Budget Like Liberals, I Can ‘Save’ A Billion Dollars And Go Bankrupt At The Same Time

I decided to buy a $1,700,000 Bugatti Veyron.  But instead I borrowed a ton of money to purchase a Lamborghini Reventon which costs only $1,600,000.

Ka-ching.  In Obama math, I just saved my family $100,000.  I think I’ll go buy myself some Versace suits to reward myself for my fiscal discipline.

How did I justify this car purchase?  Well, every day, I write myself a budget and allocate funds.  I don’t actually have the money, but that’s no big deal these days.  I allocate huge sums to myriad accounts.  And then I tally up the unspent portion and see how much I “saved.”  And if I re-allocate that money to another pet project, I count it as a “cut.”  And that way I’m justified to do basically whatever the hell I want.

You might say, “That’s crazy.  They don’t do that.”  But you’d be wrong:

Budget tricks helped Obama save programs from cuts
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press – 4/12/2011

WASHINGTON – The historic $38 billion in budget cuts resulting from at-times hostile bargaining between Congress and the Obama White House were accomplished in large part by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.

Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs — Pell grants for college students, health research and “Race to the Top” aid for public schools, among others — from Republican knives, according to new details of the legislation released Tuesday morning.

And big holes in foreign aid and Environmental Protection Agency accounts were patched in large part. Republicans also gave up politically treacherous cuts to the Agriculture Department’s food inspection program.

The details of the agreement reached late Friday night just ahead of a deadline for a partial government shutdown reveal a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially “score” as cuts to pay for spending elsewhere, but often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.

As a result of that sleight of hand, Obama was able to reverse many of the cuts passed by House Republicans in February when the chamber approved a bill slashing this year’s budget by more than $60 billion. In doing so, the White House protected favorites like the Head Start early learning program, while maintaining the maximum Pell grant of $5,550 and funding for Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative that provides grants to better-performing schools. Food aid to the poor was preserved, as were housing subsidies.

Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused bonus money for states that enroll more uninsured children in a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.

More money was actually borrowed and spent in the time it took Congress to negotiate this package ($4 billion a day) than was actually “saved.”

And only in Washington can a budget which spends far more and borrows far more than the year before be seen as “cutting.”

In the movie “City Heat,” Mike Murphy’s (Burt Reynold’s) partner was killed over an extortion deal by gangsters who threw him out of a window.  Asked how he died, Murphy said, “Suddenly.”

That’s how the United States of America is going to die, too.  Suddenly.  Very suddenly.

The U.S. debt exceeds the gross domestic planet of the entire human race.  Eventually a few big lenders in that class known as “the rest of the world” are going to want their money.  And then it’s Great Depression Part Duex – only this time bigger and scarier than ever – coming to your town soon.

And most Americans are like ants, busy at work (well, the half of the country that actually works and pays taxes, anyway) scurrying around, only dimly aware that there’s a gigantic can of toxic pesticide labeled “U.S. Debt” poised over our thriving little colony.

Democrats WILL NOT actually cut money or spend less.  The best we can hope for – and that only after a knock-down drag-out fight in which we played chicken with our political system – is a charade of baits and switches.

A more precise anaology (than ants) for Democrats would be termites.  They have been busily eating away at the fabric of American society for decades.  The wood of our economic system is almost entirely gone now, leaving only a hollow shell that could completely collapse with a particularly large gust of wind.  But they are merely redoubling their efforts to just eat faster.

The word “trillion” has become a household word just in the last three years.  Yes, occasionally when talking about the national debt (and few people ever really bothered to do that prior to 2008), the word “trillion” came up.  But we all routinely hear that number thrown around now: a trillion.  A thousand billion.

Liberals love to argue that we had balanced budgets under Democrat Bill Clinton.  But a little history (contained in this article) would demonstrate Congress, and NOT the president, writes the national budget; that Bill Clinton and the Democrats were thoroughly defeated for their terrible policies in 1994, and that it was the REPUBLICAN CONGRESS which controlled the House and the Senate from that point on which actually balanced the budget; and that the Republicans actually massively cut spending largely over Bill Clinton’s objections.  You’d know that the very first platform on that incoming 1994 House Republican Congress was A BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT.  Bill Clinton didn’t “balance” anything; Republicans did.

Liberals also love to say it’s the Republicans whose policies have led us into now-almost-certain bankruptcy and national implosion (even as they keep recklessly spending while Republicans plead with them to stop being insane).  But here’s the reality from the same article cited above:

For the record, the last budget from a Republican President AND a Republican Congress – FY-2007 (passed in 2006) – resulted in a$161 billion deficit at a time when unemployment was 4.6%.  That’s what happened the last time the GOP was in control.

What happened when the Democrats took control in January 2007?  Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi passed a FY-2008 budget that had a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times the deficit in the immediately previous Republican-passed budget.  Three times.  And this before the financial crisis that somehow “necessitated” all this massive spending.

Now, that’s a pretty crazy increase under Democrat control.  But you aint seen nothin’ yet.

The Democrats passed a FY-2009 budget with a staggering, mind-boggling, totally reckless $1.42 TRILLION deficit.

The FY-2010 budget approved by Reid and Pelosi and signed by Obama had an estimated $1.6 TRILLION deficit.

The deficit has increased from $161 billion in the last budget before Democrats took control of the Congress (FY 2007) to $1.42 trillion in the most recent fiscal year (FY 2009)—an increase of $1.26 trillion or 782%.

With three months remaining in the fiscal 2009 budget, the federal deficit just officially passed the $1 trillion mark.  Worse yet, Obama borrowed more than forty cents for every single dollar he spent.

We also suffered a budget shortfall of $94 billion in the month of June, which marks the first June in more than ten years (read, “encompassing the entire Bush presidency”).  Bush’s success in raising revenues is bookended by two Democrat presidents who failed.

And now the Democrats aren’t even bothering to pass a budget for the next fiscal year, so they can simply spend without any accountability whatsoever.

The old annual deficits under Republicans have now   become the monthly deficits under Democrats:

In the 12 years that Republicans controlled the   House, the average deficit was $104 billion (average of final   deficit/surplus FY1996-FY2007 data taken from Table F-1 below).  In   just 3 years under Democrats, the average deficit is now almost $1.1   trillion (average of final deficit/surplus FY2008 and 2009 data   taken from Table F-1; FY2010 data taken from Table 1-3).  Source: CBO January 2010 Budget and Economic Outlook

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Minority Whip) rightly pointed out on ABC’s “This Week”:

“If you look at the kind of deficit that we’ve incurred over the last  three years that the Democrats have been in control of Congress, 60% of  the overall deficit from the last ten years has occurred in that period.  And frankly with the incurrence of the debt, we’ve seen very little  result. That’s why we think we ought to choose another way.”

And yet the media falsely blame BUSH and Republicans for that spending, rather than Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, even though factually speaking the Democrats were ENTIRELY to blame for every single penny that was spent from January 2007 on.  Because our Constitution forbids a president from spending; it is CONGRESS that spends.

Right now, liberal newspapers such as the New York Times are decrying the Republicans for “holding America hostage.” How DARE Republicans demand spending cuts?  Don’t they care about all the children they’re murdering? ask the liberals who are responsible for 53 million dead babies since 1973.

Liberals also incessantly say, “If we don’t spend more, America will collapse.”

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

And you just try that at home and see how it works out, kids.

Democrats are morally and fiscally insane.  And all they have done – along with an ideological propagandist mainstream media’s assistance at every turn – is to redefine insanity as “sane” and sanity as “insane.”

If we do not initiate massive cuts now, America itself is 100% guaranteed to collapse within just a few more years.  And when it collapses – and mark my words it will fall like a house of cards in a way that will stun Americans because they’ve believed liberal lies – it will be the poorest who will suffer the most.

All the budget gimmicks and phoney tricks aside, when America implodes, it will be because Democrats spent too much, not because Republicans cut too much.

GOP Or Democrats: Who’s To Blame For the Budget, Spending And Shutdown Mess We’re Now In?

As we face an impending government shutdown, it becomes an interesting question to ask, “How did we get here?”  And why are the Democrats literally scheming to shut down the government over the Republicans’ demand to cut just 2% of our massive deficit?  Why do Democrats want to hurt our troops and their families by denying the pay of soldiers who barely make it month to month?  Especially when Republicans have passed a stopgap measure that would fund the troops for the year and keep them out of any budget squabbles?

First, let’s get one fact on the table: this entire “shutdown” mess is the result of Democrats’ pathetic failure to pass a budget when they controlled the White House, the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives last year.

What is being fought over is the FY-2011 budget.  We are now SIX MONTHS into that fiscal year thanks to Democrat incompetence.  And the reason Democrats didn’t bother to pass a budget when they were in total control of the government was because it was an election year, and Democrats didn’t want the American people to see how morally and fiscally insane they truly were.  Bottom line: if Democrats had passed the kind of reckless budget that Democrats invariably pass, the election would have gone even worse for them than it did.

You need to understand the magnitude of the Democrats’ failure last year.  It marked the FIRST TIME in the history of our republic that the party in power failed to pass a budget.  And Democrats were in TOTAL control of all three branches of government at the time.

Furthermore, as soon as the new Republican House took over, they immediately went to work on the budget for this year that Democrats had refused to bother with last year when they were supposed to do so as the most basic part of their duties.  They sent that budget to the Democrat-controlled Senate.  And Harry Reid sat on it and did nothing.

And, for the record, Senate Democrats STILL don’t have any kind of a budget whatsoever.  The only thing they’ve got is a big can of deceitful demagoguery.

Those are the documented facts.

The mainstream media – as they sharpen their knives to carve up Republicans and make them the culprits – are simply lying to you.

That’s one.

Two, let’s consider the budgets passed by the last several Congresses, and then see who passed those budgets.  Let’s see which party is responsible for the shocking deficits that now plague us:

For the record, the last budget from a Republican President AND a Republican Congress – FY-2007 (passed in 2006) – resulted in a$161 billion deficit at a time when unemployment was 4.6%.  That’s what happened the last time the GOP was in control.

What happened when the Democrats took control in January 2007?  Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi passed a FY-2008 budget that had a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times the deficit in the immediately previous Republican-passed budget.  Three times.  And this before the financial crisis that somehow “necessitated” all this massive spending.

Now, that’s a pretty crazy increase under Democrat control.  But you aint seen nothin’ yet.

The Democrats passed a FY-2009 budget with a staggering, mind-boggling, totally reckless $1.42 TRILLION deficit.

The FY-2010 budget approved by Reid and Pelosi and signed by Obama had an estimated $1.6 TRILLION deficit.

The deficit has increased from $161 billion in the last budget before Democrats took control of the Congress (FY 2007) to $1.42 trillion in the most recent fiscal year (FY 2009)—an increase of $1.26 trillion or 782%.

With three months remaining in the fiscal 2009 budget, the federal deficit just officially passed the $1 trillion mark.  Worse yet, Obama borrowed more than forty cents for every single dollar he spent.

We also suffered a budget shortfall of $94 billion in the month of June, which marks the first June in more than ten years (read, “encompassing the entire Bush presidency”).  Bush’s success in raising revenues is bookended by two Democrat presidents who failed.

And now the Democrats aren’t even bothering to pass a budget for the next fiscal year, so they can simply spend without any accountability whatsoever.

That’s your history lesson.  Anyone who wants to blame the reckless spending on Bush or Republicans is either lying, or ignorant, or an ignorant liar.

Three, we need to chop TRILLIONS of dollars in spending if we don’t want our entire nation to collapse and our children to starve in front of our eyes in a depression that will make the 1930s look like a nice day at the beach.

Consider that according to the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the United States faces an unfunded liability of $200 TRILLION dollars.

Democrats are literally fighting to the death over a few billion dollars in this FY-2011 budget that they did nothing about when they had the chance.  At the same time, they are loudly demonizing Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget (notice how, unlike the Democrats, the Republicans are actually being responsible and passing a budget?) that will save $6.2 trillion compared to Obama’s budget over the next ten years – even as it spends more than $40 trillion (as compared to Obama’s $46 trillion).  Ryan’s budget is called “The Path to Prosperity.”  Obama’s out-of-control budget is now the status quo.  Which looks better to you?

There is absolutely NO WAY the nation will do anything but collapse if Democrats are allowed to play any role whatsoever in its governance at this point.

If you vote Democrat, this is your basic posture: “I don’t care about the next generation.  I do not give one DAMN about America.  I want everything that I and my union special interests can get, and screw everybody else.”

And my response is that Democrats are a greater threat to America than al Qaeda or China.  They are a fifth column destroying America from within so our worst enemies don’t have to bother.  We must crush Democrats before they can crush America.

Four, it is an absolute LIE that Republicans are shutting down the government.  The fact is, Republicans just passed another stopgap that would fund the government for a week and fund military operations (as in Obama’s military operations that he’s now placed into three wars) for the remainder of the year.

Consider reality for a change.  From the Associated Press:

US House defy veto threat, pass stopgap spending

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Defying a White House veto threat, the Republican-led US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown as a deadline looms.

US President Barack Obama’s budget office had vowed to reject the measure, dubbing it “a distraction” from difficult, ongoing negotiations on funding the US government for the rest of the fiscal year that ends September 30.

And Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had vowed to block the measure, calling it a “fantasy” and “a non-starter.”

The bill, which cleared the House by a mostly party-line 247-181 vote, would also have funded US military operations for the rest of the year.

Republicans, relying on the measure to gain leverage in the spending cut battle, used that to argue that Democrats and the White House opposed funding for US troops in harm’s way.

And, with all due respect, that is precisely what the rat bastard Democrats are doing; opposing funding for US troops in harm’s way. 

Democrats don’t want to allow the troops to be funded.  Like the terrorists whose side they routinely take, they want to hold America’s ability to defend itself hostage; they want “leverage” over Republicans.  Cave in to our demands or else we’re destroy the military.  Allah Akbar!

Obama and Democrats do not WANT to prevent a government shutdown.  Obama and Democrats are enraged that Republicans give a damn about our troops and their ability to sustain operations.

What Obama and the Democrats want is to force a government shutdown over Republican attempts to prevent one and then use the power of the most propagandist media since Goebbels ran Hitler’s “mainstream media” to blame the GOP.

Because that is the kind of vermin the Democrats have become.

Harry Reid is refusing to allow the Republicans’ stopgap to even come up for debate in the Senate – even though there is no sane alternative.  In fact, the ONLY alternative Reid proposes is a Senate measure that would require a unanimous vote of all 100 Senators.  Which is to say that Harry Reid is forcing a government shutdown.  Period.

Go back and look at the past.  Consider that, under Democrats’ leadership, the federal budget has gone from $161 billion to $1.6 trillion a year with no end in sight until we get these bloated Democrat leeches off our backs.  Understand that a “trillion” is a thousand billion.  That makes the Democrats’ $1.6 trillion deficit a hundred times worse than what the Republicans left us with the last time they controlled Congress.

Consider our present situation.  Deficits skytocketing out of control.  Two hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities that we can never possibly repay.  Interest payments alone soon exceeding $700 billion a year.

And Harry Reid can’t find enough money to pay for his sacred cowboy poetry festival in a $1.6 trillion a year deficit.  And that is not a joke.  It is a dangerous mental disease called “the Democrat Party.”

And consider that Democrats are doing everything they can to shut down the government and cause as much suffering for ordinary Americans as they can with the cynical belief that their liberal mainstream media allies will report the lie every single day that the Republicans are to blame until an ingorant population believes their Big Lie.

I believe we are in the last days before the Tribulation that God forewarned us about nearly 2,000 years ago.  I believe the beast is coming – and that beast will be a big government totalitarian fascist who will be the fulfillment of everything the Democrats have been trying to push America toward for most of the last century.

God didn’t decree the coming Antichrist and the terrible hell on earth that would result from his “government as God” rule; God merely knew that in the last days of the human race we would make the kind of terrible mistakes that would cause the coming of the beast and his seven coming years of hell.  And that is precisely what we have been doing.

We COULD do the right thing and avoid the hell that awaits us.  But we won’t.  And, amazingly, America will be the nation that starts the “beast” ball rolling; when America catches a cold, they say, the rest of the world catches the flu.  And because of the morally and fiscally insane policies of Democrats, America now has flesh eating disease.  You can already see the clear “last days” signs that have resulted from Obama’s wicked and foolish policies.

The beast is coming.

Obama Causes Official End Of The Nation Of Makers

This is something that conservatives saw coming from the very fist days of the Obama administration.  From Cato, February 26, 2009:

Cato begins that article with a quote from Obama from a couple of days previous: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day… Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.”

But like virtually everything else, it was a lie.  Obama’s own proposed massive increase in federal spending proved that.  And since Obama took office, he has spent as no government has ever spent in the history of the human race.

And thus is it utterly no surprise at all to anyone but ignorant fools that we are now here:

APRIL 1, 2011
We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers
More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.

By STEPHEN MOORE
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees.

Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to “win the future.” The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

California?  Unions?  Consider this from the Los Angeles Times:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The People’s Republic of Kalifornia was cursed with a R.I.N.O. governor who championed abortion, a $6 porker giveway for stem cell research, gay marriage, and a whole bunch of other liberal crap.  And the legislature is one of the most overwhelmingly Democrat in the country.  And the only things that have changed is that the People’s Republic is now officially under a Democrat Governor (Jerry Brown) and they actually added a Democrat seat in the legislature.

Illinois was described by NBC as having the worst unfunded pension crisis in the country.  Maybe they didn’t know how bad California’s really was when they reported that.  But more likely, they probably had no idea how bad Illinois’ problem truly was and is, either.

The United States is so screwed it is absolutely unreal.  And that is largely due to unions and the Democrats who support those unions in exchange for votes.  It’s an unAmerican scheme that works like this: labor unions give Democrats big campaign donations and provide the muscle and infrastructure for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.  And in exchange, Democrats give unions other peoples’ money to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.  They don’t give a damn about the 88% of Americans who AREN’T in unions.

Unions are parasites that have sucked the blood out of every industry they have ever seized their vile little talons onto.  Autos, airlines, manufacturing, education government at every possible level - you name it; they’ve ruined it.  And the rest of America is the host that the parasites feed off of.  And Democrats care about the parasites, and not one damn about the rapidly dying host.

And Barack Obama is far and away the most pro-union president ever.  And that was true BEFORE he signed three new hard-core union-agenda executive orders into law.

Obama has just gotten caught red-handed using his ObamaCare to give huge payouts to unions and corporations that advanced his agenda (fascism alert).  Remember that G.E. – one of the corporate beneficiaries of ObamaCare, not only paid zero taxes but actually got money from the taxpayers.

Do you remember Obama’s preacher for over twenty years said, “No, no, no, not God bless America.  God DAMN America.”  And then said that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”???

You need to understand our actual situation and look at our real debt to understand that AMERICA is the chicken – and Obama has cut its head off and thrown it into a pot of boiling water:

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling. [...]

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie.

Every single one of these massive entitlements that is poisoning America they way Japan’s tsunami has poisoned her nuclear reactors with toxic meltdowns came from the vile minds of DEMOCRATS.  And it is DEMOCRATS who will cause the once mighty America to shortly go the way of the Dodo bird.

Social Security was a ponzi scheme from the outset.  And the only thing that has kept it going was that it is a really, really BIG ponzi scheme.  We find out that FDR – who wanted a massive takeover of the private sector by the federal government – worked hard to kill an amendment offered by a Democrat (Senator Bennett Champ Clark): “ It would have allowed workers to go with the new government system or, if they wished, to have their money put into a private-insurance plan. Either way, the contributions would be mandatory.”  Had that amendment been allowed to pass, it would have forced the government’s filfthy paws off the “trust fund” that they subsequently ripped off for the next seventy years and beyond:

We wouldn’t be saddled with today’s fiscal disaster. Hundreds of billions of dollars that politicians have “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund for all sorts of pork spending would not have disappeared. Instead, all that capital would have been invested in the economy, leaving us a lot more prosperous. Moreover, the Clark Amendment would have been a model for state pension plans, which are now bankrupting local governments, as well as for other nations.

There was a much better idea from the private sector – but in the end Democrats wouldn’t have it.  They wanted their government fascist control instead.  They didn’t care about the American people; they wanted to be able to raid those retirement funds for their own partisan ideological ends.

Then there was the much more colossal failure known as Medicare.  Ronald Reagan famously warned America about that fraud in 1961:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Medicare now represents the largest share of our unfunded liabilities today.  The private market could have done a much better job at a much lower cost, but again, Democrats wanted socialism, and they were hell bent upon getting their socialism.

Now we face collectivist bankruptcy.  We were previously told that if current trends held, Medicare would go broke by 2017.  But current trends didn’t hold, because Obama robbed Medicare of $500 billion to fund the ObamaCare boondobble that bears his name.

As the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  And voilà, here we are.

When it comes to how John F. Kennedy viewed the socialist redistribution of wealth via “progressive taxation policies,” you will find that Kennedy was solidly on the side of fiscal conservatives today.  As it stands, today’s vile Democrats are fundamentally at odds with the man widely recognized to be the greatest Democrat president.

As we speak, Republicans are trying to cut a tiny fraction of the bloated, totally-out-of-control federal budget.  And Democrats are demonizing them at every turn for it.  Because Democrats have been using government spending to massively pad the coffers of the government-sector unions who make their elections possible.  And to be a Democrat means you don’t give a damn about America’s future; you only selfishly want – to put it in John F. Kennedy’s famous words – “what your country can do for you.”

God HAS damned America in the person of Jeremiah Wright’s parishoner for 23 years.  And the most ignorant generation in America’s history voted for it.

Schumer, Democrats Goose-Stepping To Their Fuhrers’ Marching Orders

When Charles Schumer’s caucus gives marching orders, Charles Schumer knows exactly how to proceed: “Jawohl, mein Fuhrer!”

Even the New York Times of all sources affirms this was  an incredibly stupid display.  But it is an incredibly stupid act that reveals that the Democrats are strickly a Big Brother-style operation.  And that Republicans are their Immanuel Goldstein.

March 29, 2011, 12:30 pm
On a Senate Call, a Glimpse of Marching Orders
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
4:58 p.m. | Updated Um, senators, ever heard of the mute button?

Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process.

After thanking his colleagues — Barbara Boxer of California, Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — for doing the budget bidding for the Senate Democrats, who are facing off against the House Republicans over how to cut spending for the rest of the fiscal year, Mr. Schumer told them to portray John A. Boehner of Ohio, the speaker of the House, as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.
Then the conference call began in earnest, with the Democrats right on message.

“We are urging Mr. Boehner to abandon the extreme right wing,” said Ms. Boxer, urging the House to compromise on the scale of spending cuts and to drop proposed amendments that would deny federal financing for Planned Parenthood and for government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

Mr. Carper continued with the theme, referring to some House Republicans’ “right-wing extremist friends.” Mr. Cardin decried Mr. Boehner’s giving into “extremes of his party.” Mr. Blumenthal closed by speaking of the “relatively small extreme group of ideologues” who are “an anchor” dragging down the budget negotiation process.

How news is made . . .

Update: Later in the day, Mr. Schumer’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, issued this statement about the senator’s remarks: “There’s nothing wrong with reporters overhearing him calling the House Republicans’ [position] extreme, because that’s what it is. He had just given a speech on the Senate floor saying the same thing. The sooner Speaker Boehner abandons the Tea Party’s extreme demands, the sooner there can be a bipartisan deal on the budget.”

So’kay, Republicans are “extreme right wing.”  But you guys are nothing more than a bunch of Nazis, goose stepping to your fuhrers’ marching orders.

The “relatively small extreme group of ideologues” just won the largest landslide election in 70 years, while Democrats – the “mainstream” in their warped view – just LOST the largest landslide election in 70 years.  What is wrong with this picture?

The Republican House is trying to fulfill the campaign pledge that won them victory in that landslide.  The are trying to cut a MERE $61 billion out of a $1.65 TRILLION deficit.  Democrats falsely and deceitfully claim they want to reduce the deficit when literally everything the Republicans propose to do so is “extremist.”

Let’s talk “extremist”:  When Democrats took over, Republicans had left them with a deficit of $161 billion (the deficit in the Republican-passed FY-2007 Budget).  The very next budget, and the first budget passed by Democrats (FY-2008), contained a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times larger than the previous year’s GOP budget.  If that seems crazy, consider their next budget, the FY-2009 budget that had a $1.4 TRILLION deficit – which again virtually tripled their previous tripling of the deficit.  Then there was the Democrats’ FY-2010 budget with a deficit of $1.6 trillion.  And even with total control over the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, Democrats – caught like cockroaches with the kitchen lights turned on – couldn’t pass a budget at all prior to the election that threw them out of that total control.

Thanks to the Democrats, the United States is adding $4 billion to the deficit every single day this year. 

Now, you need to decide that either THAT is “extreme,” or Republicans trying to cut just a tiny fraction – just 1.5% – of that deficit, is “extremist.”

Republicans are the extremists?  Again, what is wrong with this picture???

Let us see who has used this tactic of unrelenting blame in the past:

Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf.  He blamed the Jews for pretty much everything that was wrong with Germany.

Hitler seized power after blaming the Reichstag fire on a communist conspiracy.

Hitler launched his Anschluss in Austria claiming that he was ”protecting” the Austrian people from a Communist uprising (i.e., he blamed the communists).  For the record, both Nazi fascism and Soviet communism were both socialist and both left wing (“Nazi” stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party”).  The Nazis were “rightwing” only in that they were the far right of the extreme left.

Hitler demanded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia after blaming the Czechs for oppressing the Volkdeutsch (ethnic Germans) there.

Hitler invaded Poland after fabricating the Gleiwitz incident which provided him with the pretext to blame the Poles.

The tactic of demagogic blame has worked for fascist socialists many times before.  Only an evil people falls for this tactic.

It remains to be seen whether it will work this time.

More Proof Democrats Destroyed The Economy In 2008: The Ongoing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Disaster

Who destroyed the economy in 2008?  Democrats say it was Bush.  Why?  Well, because he was president, that’s why.

Why – when applying the same logic – Barack Obama STILL isn’t responsible for any of his economic mess fully two years after George W. Bush left office is anybody’s guess.

But stop and think.  The primary cause for the 2008 economic meltdown was a downturn in the housing market and the underlying mortgage market.

At the core of that meltdown was GSEs (that’s “Government Sponsored Enterprises” to you) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has always been that it was – and remains - a social welfare institution masquerading as a financial institution.  And they have made beyond-godawful “financial” decisions because their true loyalty has always been with socialist policies rather than financial ones.

Let’s look at Fannie and Freddie’s current picture:

Fannie, Freddie’s $685B fix
Bloomberg
Last Updated: 11:54 PM, November 4, 2010
Posted: 11:54 PM, November 4, 2010

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage firms operating under federal conservatorship, may cost taxpayers as much as $685 billion as the US covers losses and overhauls the housing-finance system, Standard & Poor’s said.

Costs for resolving the two government-sponsored entities could reach $280 billion, including $148 billion already delivered under a US Treasury Department promise of unlimited support, New York-based S&P said yesterday in a research report. The government may spend an additional $405 billion to capitalize a replacement for the two companies, which own or insure more than half the US mortgage market.

“It appears unlikely in our view that housing and mortgage markets will be able to operate normally without continuing and substantial government involvement,” S&P said, citing the GSEs’ growing portfolio of unsold homes, a sluggish economy, high unemployment, the prospect of rising foreclosures and billions in legacy losses.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has said there is a strong case to be made for continued US involvement, has promised to deliver the Obama administration’s plan to overhaul the housing-finance system by the end of January. Republican lawmakers, who will take control of the House of Representatives in January, have called for the government to end its support for Washington-based Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of McLean, Va.

“Although federal authorities have taken no concrete public steps toward sponsoring a GSE alternative, Standard & Poor’s believes that it’s a useful exercise to consider how much such a recapitalization might cost taxpayers,” the report said.

$685 BILLION.  That’s quite a mess.

Did it just happen?  Hardly.  This was going on for years.  This was what caused the subprime crisis that destroyed our economy in 2008.

Let’s survey the record.  According to record provided by The New York Times, Fannie and Freddie were in huge trouble PRIOR TO the economic collapse.  And their holdings were so massive that there is simply no reasonable way that one can maintain that their crisis didn’t directly contribute to the greater crisis to be revealed.  Read the article dated July 11, 2008:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

A timeline of the subprime loan crisis of 2008 clearly reveals that it was Fannie Mae’s collapse that started the entire mess rolling downhill.  From Wikipedia:

September 2008

Main article: Global financial crisis in September 2008

• • September 7: Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which at that point owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.’s $12 trillion mortgage market, effectively nationalizing them. This causes panic because almost every home mortgage lender and Wall Street bank relied on them to facilitate the mortgage market and investors worldwide owned $5.2 trillion of debt securities backed by them.^[151][152]
  • September 14: Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America amidst fears of a liquidity crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse^[153]
  • September 15: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection^[154]
  • September 16: Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s downgrade ratings on AIG‘s credit on concerns over continuing losses to mortgage-backed securities, sending the company into fears of insolvency.^[155][156] In addition, the Reserve Primary Fund “breaks the buck” leading to a run on the money market funds. Over $140 billion is withdrawn vs. $7 billion the week prior. This leads to problems for the commercial paper market, a key source of funding for corporations, which suddenly could not get funds or had to pay much higher interest rates.^[157]
  • September 17: The US Federal Reserve lends $85 billion to American International Group (AIG) to avoid bankruptcy.
  • September 18: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke meet with key legislators to propose a $700 billion emergency bailout through the purchase of toxic assets. Bernanke tells them: “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.”^[158]
  • September 19: Paulson financial rescue plan is unveiled after a volatile week in stock and debt markets.

Democrats who bother to offer any reason at all why “Republicans got us into this mess” claim that the Republicans refused to regulate and reform the economic sector.

Well, let’s dig a little further.  Was it George Bush who refused to regulate or reform?

Hardly.

From US News & World Report:

Seventeen. That’s how many times, according to this White House statement (hat tip Gateway Pundit), that the Bush administration has called for tighter regulation of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That’s right.  George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to reform and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agencies at the epicenter of the economic crisis.

When did this thing start?  Under Bush?  Not according to The New York Times, as I have pointed out before in a previous article.

From the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

More.  Again from the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

What do we have, even in the pages of the New York Times?  A prediction that as soon as the economy cooled off, the mortgage market would explode like a depth charge and the government would have to step in to prevent a catastrophe.  And from a Clinton program, at that.

The same man – Peter Wallison – who had predicted the disaster from 1999 wrote a September 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”

So this disaster began under Bill Clinton.  Specifically, it began in the very final years of the Clinton administration.  Interestingly, at the same time that the Dot-com bubble was getting ready to explode on Clinton’s watch.  Clinton got all the credit for a great economy, and Bush got to watch 78% of the value of Nasdaq destroyed just as he was taking office.  $7.1 TRILLION in wealth was vaporized (43% of the the Market Capitalization of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Full Cap between 2000 Q1 and Q1 2003).  Bill Clinton handed George Bush a massive economic disaster (made even worse by the shocking 9/11 attacks), and Bush turned economic calamity into the longest consecutive period of job growth (52 straight months) in history.  In diametrical contradiction to all the lies that you have  heard from Democrats and from a mainstream media propaganda machine that often puts Joseph Goebbels to shame

What did George W. Bush do to deal with the necessary regulation and reform of these government-subsidized behemoths Fannie and Freddie?

Read what the New York Times said back in September 11, 2003:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

So Bush WANTED to regulate and reform the industry that would destroy the economy five years later, again, in contradiction to a blatantly dishonest and ideologically liberal and biased media.  Bush didn’t “refuse to regulate.”  Bush TRIED to provide the necessary regulatory steps that could have averted disaster.

And who blocked those regulations and reforms that Bush tried to provide?  None other than Barney Frank and his Democrat buddies:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

Democrats blocked reform and regulation of Fannie and Freddie.  They threatened to filibuster any attempt at regulation and reform.  Meanwhile John McCain wrote a letter in 2006 urging reform and regulation of the GSEs.  He said:

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

And it came to pass exactly as John McCain warned.

Because of Democrats.  Who were virtually entirely to blame for the disaster that ensued as a result of their blocking of reform and regulation.

What did Democrats do with the mainstream media’s culpability?  They falsely dropped the crisis at the feet of “greedy” Wall Street.  But while examples of Wall Street greed abound, the liberal intelligentsia deliberately overlooked the central and preceding role of Democrat-dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here’s how the mess actually happened:

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, in their role as Government Sponsored Enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, again, are Government Sponsored Enterprises.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, an intelligent observer would note a primary conflict: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet at the same time they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what allowed the toxic instruments that have been sold across the world to proliferate.  And then to explode.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

And it was Democrats, not Bush, and not Republicans, who were all over this disaster that destroyed our economy in 2008.

We were led by a pathologically dishonest media to believe that Republicans had created this mess, when it fact it had been Democrats.  And so we gave the very fools who destroyed our economy total power.

And what have they done in the two years since?

They made bad far, far worse.

ObamaCare Forcing Boeing, 3M, And Other Corporations To Increase Cost For Employees

“We can insure 30 million more people.  And it won’t cost a dime.”

To put it in a single word: dumbasses.

Boeing To Raise Employee Costs Thanks To Obamacare
By Carole on Oct 18, 2010

Aircraft manufacturer Boeing Comany is the latest mega employer claiming the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) is part of why its employees will have to pay more for their medical benefits next year. In a letter mailed to employees late last week, Boeing said deductibles and copayments are going up significantly for some 90,000 non-union workers due in part to the effects of the new law. (source)Continued…

President Obama and his fellow Democrats who pushed the unpopular legislation through Congress have stated repeatedly that the law would bring down individuals’ costs for health insurance. Meanwhile the debate over the obscenely expensive bill raged on with Republican lawmakers and the majority of the American people speaking out against the far-reaching government power grab disguised as reform. Announcements like Boeing’s are proving the opposition right.

Boeing joins other companies like 3M which earlier this month announced it will stop offering its health insurance plan to their 23,000 retirees in response to Obamacare’s passage. (source)

While Boeing cited two additional reasons for the cost shift including untamed health care inflation and lifestyle issues such as being overweight, company spokeswoman Karen Forte said the company is concerned that its relatively generous plan will get hit with a new tax under the law in 2018.

Democrats are moral idiots who think, “Someone else will be paying for it, so it must be the right thing to do.”

Well, the boomerang strikes back.

The additional cost of ObamaCare above and beyond what Democrats said it would cost, and which somehow just never got factored in, will be about $6.25 TRILLION.

For the record, $6.25 trillion amounts to a very large poison pill to have to swallow.

Businesses, and even the basically communist labor unions that worked so hard to get ObamaCare passed, are pleading to be exempted from the law by the hundreds.

Health insurers are dropping coverage for children ahead of the new rules.

Health insurers are dropping coverage for senior citizens ahead of the new rules.

There are lies.  There are damn lies.  And there is the ObamaCare sales pitch.

ObamaCare will be providing funding for 12,500 new IRS agents to serve as attack dogs for those who don’t purchase insurance under the government-imposed individual mandates.

Businesses are raising the costs employees will have to pay, or else they are simply dropping coverage altogether.  And those businesses and most every single other business are holding back on hiring because of ObamaCare, massive and unnecessary regulations, taxes, and basically Barack Obama and the Democrat Party in general.

This whole ObamaCare thing is just working out great.

Democrats are refusing to talk about the massive boondoggle they cursed America with.  Don’t you forget that curse when you vote in two weeks.