Why I’m Not A Doomsday Prepper Even Though I Believe We’re Close To Doomsday

There’s a fascinating show on National Geographic called “Doomsday Preppers.”  It is basically a documentary series detailing various people and groups of people who are variously earnestly preparing for any of a number of “doomsday scenarios.”  And while it is undoubtedly produced by Hollywood liberals who think the people they are focusing their cameras on are pretty much all nuts, it is likely that they find everything about the doomsday preppers nuts, such that they don’t feel they need to tip the scales in their favor with the kind of propaganda that they devote to so many other subjects.

A parallel would be the “ghost hunters” crap that started to dominate the Sci-Fi channel.  As an example, I believe that these people are so off that the more accurately you frame them, the crazier they will look.  And I think that’s how the “Doomsday Preppers” series is being filmed and produced.

I came across Doomsday Preppers because it was the channel up from the Military History Channel that I like to watch.  And I’ve watched two or three episodes.

You should understand that if you are a liberal who believes Obama is lowering the level of the oceans and healing the planet, these doomsday preppers are as mentally and emotionally warped as I think the ghost hunters are.

Anyway, I’m a guy who takes his Bible seriously (another subject liberals find crazy).  I believe the Bible is literally true, I believe the Book of Revelation describes our very close future and I therefore very much believe in “doomsday” stuff.

Maybe you don’t.  There are two kinds of people who don’t, though: 1) those who don’t think the human race will end in tragic mushroom clouds, but rather that the human race will create a Utopia and they will climb on board the Enterprise and seek new civilizations with Captain Kirk.  I’m not trying to mock anybody by putting it that way; there’s just two very different views of the future.  And man either solves his own problems and lives happily ever after or he doesn’t and things get really bad really quickly before they get even worse.  People of any intelligence believe in one or the other.  The second group 2) are those who are frankly as much too stupid to consider their world ending as a cow lying in a field chewing its cud could consider its world ending.  They’re just oblivious to anything beyond themselves.

Anyway, I’m in the group of thinking people who believe things are going to get really ugly as the human race systematically destroys itself.

So why am I not a “doomsday prepper,” then?  I mean, if I think things are going to go to hell on earth, shouldn’t I be trying to maybe do something to either escape the chaos or be able to fight it?

On my view of the world, no, I don’t need to do that.  God is in control.  And as our world gets more and more crazy all around us, it is actually proving that the God who predicted it would become crazy knew what He was talking about.

As it became obvious that Obama was going to target the 2nd Amendment and specifically target so-called “assault weapons,” I seriously considered getting myself an AR-15 or an M4.  Why?  Well, because Obama wants to take away my right to have one and be able to defend myself with one if needed.  But in my case, that wasn’t enough justification.

As a Christian, I do not have to go through life carrying a spirit of fear.

Again, if you’re going to even consider buying a weapon like an AR-15, you’d better think about it some first.  That by no means indicates the answer will be, “you shouldn’t buy one.”  But you ought to consider issues from “just where am I going to store this?” to “why am I buying this thing again?”

This is what gets to the essence of doomsday preppers versus Christians like myself.

Since I read my Bible and take my understanding of the world from that, I know that most of the scenarios that the “doomsday preppers” are fearing happen well into the Tribulation – after the Rapture – and I and my Christian brethren will be long-gone when the truly psycho stuff starts raining down upon a godless world ruled by the Antichrist.

Here’s the question: if a bunch of Obama’s jackbooted FBI killers came smashing through your door, would you want to be able to shoot them with your assault weapon?  Well, the doomsday prepper is going to say, “Hell yeah I would.  If it’s them or me and my family, I want to make it them.  No brainer.”

But, you see, my answer to that question is no, I wouldn’t.

I think we should all realize that localized scenarios when a hurricane, tornado or earthquake hits and you are completely on your own are more likely than ever.  People in high risk locations ought to consider buying an assault weapon to either discourage or deal with looters.

But I personally don’t spend my nights worrying about that.

The scenario I see developing is leftist fascists using the full weight of the power of government to “legally” drag me out of my home for my exercising of what had previously been my 1st Amendment right of free speech.  I see that happening as America and the world unfolds according to what the prophets said would happen in the Bible.

Would I want that assault rifle in that scenario?  No.  Let them drag me away and put me in prison and then kill me.  Frankly I’ll be glad if they take me in the very first wave.  That way I won’t have to keep being brave after I see what happens to the other people who were dragged away for exercising what had previously been their 1st Amendment right of free speech.

We find that after they take your guns away, you’ve got to be braver and braver and braver in the face of a government that knows it has all the guns and all the power and the people have nothing but interrogation cells waiting for them if they complain about it.

So why would I shoot armed vandals trying to break into my home but not shoot at government fascists trying to break into my home?  The answer is found in Revelation 13:10:

Anyone who is destined for prison will be taken to prison. Anyone destined to die by the sword will die by the sword. This means that God’s holy people must endure persecution patiently and remain faithful.

That passage tells me that in these last days, when the beast comes for you, God says to let him come and haul you away.  There is a time and a place for everything under heaven, Ecclesiastes chapter 3 famously tells us.  There WAS a time to fight – such as before the most wicked president in our nation’s history was getting elected through slander, fearmongering and demagoguery – but when the beast comes God calls us to stop fighting with our own strength and completely depend on Him.

I truly believe that we are heading for that day.  I truly believe that we have arrived at the point in history when God’s people will have to endure rather than fight back.  And I’m going to live that out in the here and now.

And when that day comes to my door, I won’t fight back.  Because the Word of God tells me to endure patiently by trusting in Him and to remain faithful to His Gospel.

P.S. For the record, while we talk about our “national debt” of $16.5 trillion, our real issue is the unfunded liabilities and the fiscal gap that the US government owes its own people due to Democrats imposing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on this nation.  Our unfunded liabilities are now well over $225 trillion and they are increasing at a rate of nearly one trillion dollars every single month.  And that isn’t counting the hundreds of billions of dollars in union pension debt that many of our states have accumulated – with California ALONE facing a $500 unfunded pension liability.  And with Illinois facing at least another hundred billion – which is increasing at the rate of $17 million every single DAY.  I say that our unfunded liabilities are our real issue because who do you think Democrats will renege on: China or millions of voters who have a benefit check coming at the end of the month and who will vote them out of office if they don’t keep pumping out those checks whether America can pay the bill or not???  The answer is obvious.  Our politicians will welch on our foreign creditors long before they welch on their voters.  And if we’re talking about having a hard time finding $16.5 trillion, how the hell are we ever going to come up with the hundreds of trillions of dollars that nobody will talk about???

The only thing keeping America financially afloat is the fact that we are the world’s reserve currency, such that most commodities such as oil are traded exclusively in U.S. dollars.  Because we are the world’s reserve currency, we can literally print money in a way that no other nation has ever been allowed to print money without immediate and painful consequences.  China and Russia are already demanding that status be changed.  And Obama and many Democrats are declaring that the United States is NOT the bastion of “exceptionalism” that resulted in America having that world reserve currency status in the first place.  In so doing, our own rulers are actually helping the nations that want to chop us down to size.  Because when we lose the world reserve currency status – that we only deserve if we are the unique, exceptional benevolent superpower that liberals deny we are – it will fiscally implode in very short order as we collapse under the sheer weight of our massive and unsustainable debt.

And then will come our doomsday.

But as a Christian who clings to Christ rather than to Obama or to the America he is “fundamentally transforming,” I need not fear.

That’s why I’m not a doomsday prepper even though I believe we are danger-close to doomsday.

Another Little ObamaCare Surprise: How About A SEVENTEEN TRILLION DOLLAR Funding Gap?

The craziest thing of all is that this seventeen trillion-dollar unfunded spending is actually itself just a small fraction of the money that the most irresponsible political party in the history of the entire human race has spent without being able to even begin to pay for it:

Another $17 trillion surprise found in Obamacare
Published: 9:21 AM 03/30/2012
By Neil Munro – The Daily Caller

Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap.

“The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate.

“The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said.

The hidden shortfall between new spending and new taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court justices grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance with the Constitution’s limits on government activity. If the court doesn’t strike down the law, it will force taxpayers find another $17 trillion to pay for the increased spending.

The $17 trillion in extra promises was revealed by an analysis of the law’s long-term requirements. The additional obligations, when combined with existing Medicare and Medicaid funding shortfalls, leaves taxpayers on the hook for an extra $82 trillion in health care obligations over the next 75 years.

The federal government has an additional $17 trillion unfunded gap in other obligations, including Social Security, bringing the total shortfall to $99 trillion.

The shortfall is different from existing debt. The federal government already owes $15 trillion in debt, including $5 trillion in funds borrowed during Obama’s term.

That $99 trillion in unfunded future expenses is more than five years of wealth generated by the United States, which now produces just over $15 trillion of value per year.

The $99 trillion funding gap is equal to almost 30 years of the current federal budget, which was $3.36 trillion for 2011.

The new $17 trillion funding gap is five times the current federal budget.

Currently, the Social Security system is $7 trillion in debt over the next 75 years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Also, Medicare will eat up $38 trillion in future taxes, and Medicaid will consume another $2o trillion of the taxpayer’s wealth, according to estimates prepared by the actuarial office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The short-term cost of the Obamacare law is $2.6 trillion, almost triple the $900 billion cost promised by Obama and his Democratic allies, said Sessions.

The extra $17 trillion gap was discovered by applying standard federal estimates and models to the law’s spending obligations, Sessions said.

For example, Session’s examination of the health care law’s “premium support” program shows a funding gap $12 billion wider than predicted.

The same review also showed the law added another $5 trillion in unfunded obligations for the Medicaid program.

“President Obama told the American people that his health law would cost $900 billion over ten years and that it would not add ‘one dime’ to the debt… this health law adds an entirely new obligation—one we cannot pay for—and puts the entire financing of the United States government in jeopardy,” Sessions said in a floor speech.

“We don’t have the money… We have to reduce the [obligations] that we have.”

ObamaCare was based entirely on lies from the very outset.  This bill seriously needs to burn in hell.

That $2.6 trillion ObamaCare figure – again, making it THREE TIMES what Obama promised the American people it would cost – is not some “right-wing talking point”; it comes right out of the CBO:

A Congressional Budget Office report shows that the cost of implementing President Obama’s health care overhaul will reach $2.6 trillion over a ten-year period, a dramatic increase from the White House’s original estimate.

In 2009, Obama stated that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over ten years.” The CBO’s original ten-year numbers weren’t that far off, but critics of the health care bill noted then that the cost would be much greater once projections accounted for its full implementation.

Democrats pushed the back-loaded bill into law in 2010, although it isn’t scheduled to be fully implemented until 2014.

“The fact that the outlook for the law continues to worsen so rapidly, even before it is implemented, is ominous,” Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

“And despite massive tax hikes and new penalties to pay for the bill, which CBO estimates have risen by another $99 billion compared to their estimates last March … the president’s health spending law will add at least $700 billion to the deficit over its first 10 years. Sadly, it may prove much worse than that.”

The CBO arrived at its $2.6 trillion figure after measuring the effects of expanding coverage over its first ten years in effect. At its full scope the health care law will result in “4 million fewer Americans [having] employer-based coverage,” the CBO noted.

As insane as that $99 trillion figure is, it is the lowball estimate of the sheer extent of the fatal debt cycle that the Democrat Party is entirely responsible for.  A peer-reviewed IMF publication cited the actual unfunded liabilities of the United States at over $200 trillion:

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.

I’ve written about how simply terrible and frankly wicked the Social Security boondoggle was from the very outset.  And what we could have had were the Democrat Party not the party of genuine evil in America. 

I’ve also written about the coming $600 trillion collapse that will implode America thanks to Barack Obama and his demonic crony capitalist friends.

Medicare will go bankrupt no later than 2017; and Democrats are demonizing every attempt by Republicans to save this failed system by making modifications that are critically needed to avert complete disaster.

The Democrat Party – the most reckless and irresponsible political body in the history of the world – has refused to produce a budget in 1,064 days.  And the ONLY budget Republicans can consider from the Democrat Party – Barack Obama’s budget – was so blatantly EVIL that it just went down in the House of Representatives on a vote of 414 to ZERO.

The Democrat Party ought to be called the “Demoncrat Party” – as in “the party of Demonic Bureaucrats.”

The United States of America is guaranteed to die if Democrats – and particuarly if Barack Obama – is allowed to have anything to do with its governance.

Give Me My Spenditol. Don’t Worry, Your Kids Will Pay For It

Great new ad:

I’ll just add a couple of facts.  1) Thanks to Democrats, the United States of Ameria has $200 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities thanks to their “entitlement” programs; and 2) California alone has an additional $500 BILLION in unfunded pension liabilities thanks to our state government union workers’ greed.  But you know what?  I only care about ME, because I’m a Democrat and that’s what Democrats do.  SCREW YOU AND SCREW YOUR KIDS, I GOT MINE.

If I had so much as a single functioning cell of decency inside of me, I’d demand a balanced budget amendment, but I’m a Democrat, and that would prevent me from SCREWING YOU AND SCREWING YOUR KIDS SO I CAN GET MINE.  So I fight that balanced budget amendment with every fiber of my being so I can continue being a parasitic leach until the country I suck from implodes and dies.

There are people who would argue that spending trillions of dollars that my generation doesn’t have and can never even theoretically repay is immoral.  But you know what, those people merely exist to work so that I can lay on my fat, lazy worthless ass.  And why should I care about the next generation?  I’m all for abortion, remember?  And I particularly am for eradicating black and female babies, dontchaknow.  As one of my heroes Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood said of black babies, “We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”  And as another of my heroes, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said about those undesirable black (and now apparently female) babies: “Frankly I had thought that at that time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

But keep that on the down low, because Margaret Sanger also said, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”  So shhh.

Vote Democrat.  Vote for the Antichrist.  Vote to either murder children or force them to live as debt slaves for your extravagance.  Vote to one day burn in hell for all eternity.

Want To Know How To Balance The Budget And Have Full Employment? Ask Republicans Who Are DOING It

Nebraska, a state governed by Republican conservative Dave Heineman.

First there’s the unemployment rate of 4.1%.  Second lowest in the entire nation (behind fellow Republican state North Dakota, for what that’s worth):

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Authorities say Nebraska’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.1 percent in May, a drop of a tenth of a point from April’s 4.2 percent.

Then there’s the fact that this Republican state has a balanced budget.  And how did it balance the budget and get low unemployment?

[M]aybe there is something Washington can learn from Nebraska. How did Nebraska, with an estimated budget shortfall of almost $1 billion November 2010, get to a unanimous decision May 2011 and approve a balanced biennial budget of $6.9 billion?  A balanced budget that does not raise taxes and leaves nearly $300 million in the state’s cash reserves.

Some might presume that life is difficult for Nebraskans, what with their state government required to balance the budget and not allowed to borrow.  Actually Nebraska  is ranked #10 by Lifestyle Statistics, it was 3rd in top jobs behind North Dakota and Texas, and to top it off, the unemployment rate for Nebraska is 4.1%.

How did it happen? Strong leadership. A state constitution that requires a balanced budget and doesn’t allow for borrowing. Tough decisions made during tough times, not delayed.  Priorities identified. Discussions. Debates. Negotiations…and the use of a red line.

An interesting quote from Gov. Dave Heineman occurs midway through this snippet from an article entitled, “Caterpillar Threatens To Leave Illinois Over Taxes“:

“If Illinois doesn’t want your business, Texas does,” wrote Rick Perry, the governor of that state.

The governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, wrote: “In Nebraska, we balance our budget by controlling spending, not by raising taxes.”

An official in the South Dakota governor’s office chimed in: “In South Dakota, you make a profit, and you keep your profit.”

The Illinois tax increase will cost Caterpillar’s 23,000 employees in the state about $40 million this year, said Jim Dugan, the company’s chief spokesman. Higher taxes make it harder for Caterpillar to attract and retain engineers, accountants and other employees, Dugan said. He added that Caterpillar’s corporate taxes in the state also will increase but provided no estimate on the added cost.

“The state unfortunately continues to put off the tough decisions” about potential reductions in government spending and pension costs, Dugan said. He said Caterpillar was offering to advise the governor on cost-cutting based on the company’s own experience chopping pay and laying off workers during the 2008-09 recession

First, liberal Democrat Illinois is a hellhole.  And that’s because Democrats own that state.  Some interesting figures: 4 out of the last 7 governors of Illinois are convicted felons.  It’s government union pension program is the biggest disaster in the nation.  It’s major city Chicago is so filled with gang violence that even Democrats have been pleading for the National Guard to come in.  And, if that isn’t bad enough, Democrats are so dishonest that they just altered their congressional map to undo the clear will of the people.  That’s what Democrats bring.

All over the nation we’ve got cities that have voted Democrat for a hundred years.  And they are all hell holes.  While a jackass is in many ways an accurate symbol of what it means to be a Democrat, it would really be far more fitting if the symbol of the Democrat Party was a black hole surrounded by the white-hot fires of hell.  Because “Democrat” is really a portmanteau for “Demonic Bureaucrat.”  And hell is what demonic bureaucrats invariably bring.  Along with socialism and totalitarian control.

And with that said, did someone say Texas?  Did someone say Rick Perry?  Oh, that’s right, I haven’t talked about Texas and Republican Rick Perry yet.

From a liberal writing in the Los Angeles Times:

For the last few weeks, I’ve been unable to get a startling statistic out of my head: Since the recession officially ended, Texas has created more than 4 of every 10 new jobs in America.

That’s right, Texas: the reddest of red states, home to gun lovers and school textbooks that openly question whether the Founding Fathers intended for the separation of church and state. I am no ideologue. Still, whenever I get political, I tend to tilt reflexively to the left, making the jobs figure a bit disconcerting at first.

But there’s no escaping it. The number is real. Which means that if you care about putting people back to work at a time when nearly 14 million in this country are unemployed, maybe Texas has something to teach us.

[…]

According to the Dallas Fed, Texas generated 43% of the net new jobs in the U.S. from June 2009 through May 2011 — an enormous share when you consider that the Lone Star State accounts for about 8% of the nation’s economy.

So let’s see.  Nebraksa is flyover country as far as liberals are concerned; they prefer their completely failed major metropolitan areas that their completely failed polices have turned into complete failures for a good solid century.  But Nebraska – with it’s 4.1% unemployment rate (second only to ANOTHER state governed by Republicans) and it’s balanced budget – has the last laugh.  It’s kind of like that “Annoy a Liberal – Work hard and be happy” bumper sticker – only with a whole entire STATE.  If you want to try to weasel your way out of contemplating Nebraska’s success by arguing that it’s a small state and it’s low tax, spend-on-a-budget ways wouldn’t translate to a large state, let’s consider Texas and the 43% of ALL U.S. JOBS it has created, instead.

Basically no matter how you slice it, conservatives rule and liberals drool.

We’re coming upon a major decision: do we want four more years of the hellhole of God damn America, or do we want to pursue the economic policies that actually have the advantage of WORKING???

[Update:] Oh, my goodness, I forgot to point out that – after all the unhinged rabid liberal HATE that came out in Wisconsin – Governor Scott Walker was able to sign a balanced budget with no business-hostile tax increases.

Obama Says ‘We Don’t Need A Balanced Budget Amendment.’ What We Don’t Need Is This Fool-In-Chief

Barack Obama is on the record saying, “We don’t need a balanced budget amendment,” he said. “We simply need to make these tough choices and be willing to take on our bases.”  Obama says, “I think it’s important for everybody to understand all of us believe we need to get to the point where we can balance the budget,” Mr. Obama said at a White House press conference. “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do that.”

We desperately need a balanced budget amendment.  What we DON’T need is Barack Hussein Obama and his endless rhetorical posturing.

The national debt that is acknowledged is currently more than $14.5 trillion.

Let’s take a brief trip down national debt memory lane.  Now, let’s see.  When Ronald Reagan left office, the national debt was $2.6 trillion.  By the time Bush I left office, the national debt was $ trillion.  By the time Bill Clinton left office, the national debt was $5.6 trillion (which is quite strange, given the constant claim that Clinton balanced the budget).  By the time Bush II left office, the national debt was $10.6 trillion.  It is currently at over $14.5 trillion, and Obama is not even through his first term yet.  He wants it increased to more than $16 trillion now.  Again, before the end of his first term.

And, of course that’s actually NOTHING.  $14.5 trillion, or even $16 trillion, is actually really chump change to how much the United States REALLY owes.  Read this figure published in a peer reviewed International Monetary Fund publication article that provides the grim reality:

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.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

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. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

And what’s Obama’s response to all of this?

 

We are so screwed it is absolutely unreal.

And that’s just what the UNITED STATES government owes.  Let’s consider the leftist People’s Republic of Californication and see what IT’S actual debt is:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

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.

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.

Most other states are facing catastrophic implosion due to government union workers massive unfunded pension liabilities.  Take Obama’s own state of Illinois, for instance.

Yeah, you’re right, Mr. Fool-in-Chief.  We don’t need a balanced budget amendment.  Let’s go with your plan instead.  Let’s dig our own graves, slit our own throats, and then fall into a hole never again to crawl out.  Let’s sacrifice our children’s children’s children’s children and put the weight of a debt they will never be able to possibly repay as we continue to selfishly and wickedly vote ourselves benefits at their expense.  Let’s guarantee that the United States becomes a banana republic in the next fifteen years.

We’re going to collapse soon.  When it happens, it will seem to come out of the blue, but we will have been working steadily toward our own doom for generations.

Obama’s Keynesian approach has utterly and completely failed.  And only fools refuse to see that by now.

The beast is coming.  And Barack Obama, the Democrat Party and every single fool who votes for these fools, will be his useful idiots.

Hey, ‘Republicans Drove Us Into A Ditch’ Liberals, Put THIS Into Your Pipe and Smoke It: Conservative Economic Principles RULE In Texas

This isn’t a piece by conservative Jonah Goldberg saying what all conservatives already know.  This is a piece by a self-identified liberal writing in the Los Angeles Times acknowledging a FACT that is frankly the death knell of liberal economic policy.

43% of ALL jobs created in the United States since June of 2009 have come from a conservative state that represents 8% of the national economy.  And Barack Obama has taken credit for every single one of them even as he demonizes the policies that actually produced all of those jobs.

Now, notice how this liberal tries to give credit to the most successful job-engine in America, and then steal that credit away from the conservatives and the conservative policies that brought that job-engine about.

Texas, the jobs engine
Conservatives hail it and liberals dispute the story, but one thing is certain about the Lone Star State’s employment success: The number is real.

By Rick Wartzman
July 3, 2011

For the last few weeks, I’ve been unable to get a startling statistic out of my head: Since the recession officially ended, Texas has created more than 4 of every 10 new jobs in America.

That’s right, Texas: the reddest of red states, home to gun lovers and school textbooks that openly question whether the Founding Fathers intended for the separation of church and state. I am no ideologue. Still, whenever I get political, I tend to tilt reflexively to the left, making the jobs figure a bit disconcerting at first.

But there’s no escaping it. The number is real. Which means that if you care about putting people back to work at a time when nearly 14 million in this country are unemployed, maybe Texas has something to teach us.

Unfortunately, that’s not the posture many commentators have taken. Instead, when the data from Texas emerged — touted first by Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — conservatives were quick to celebrate, embracing the jobs tally as powerful evidence of the superiority of Republican ideas as well as proof that Texas Gov. Rick Perry would make a good president. But that’s overly simplistic [me: yeah, that’s right.  Let’s keep re-analyzing this until we somehow we make it a victory for Obama liberalism in spite of the fact that Republicans have been running this state at every single political level].

Meanwhile, those on the liberal end of the spectrum immediately set out to shoot the numbers down. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for instance, held up a giant bologna and mocked the notion of a “Texas miracle.” That view, however, is too cavalier.  [Me: yeah, you’ve got a better way to steal credit from conservatives, don’t you, Wartzman?].

So what’s actually happening?

First, the basics. According to the Dallas Fed, Texas generated 43% of the net new jobs in the U.S. from June 2009 through May 2011 — an enormous share when you consider that the Lone Star State accounts for about 8% of the nation’s economy. (Critics, including Maddow, have been quick to note that the unemployment rate in Texas, at 8%, falls in the middle of the pack among the states. Yet total employment is a much more telling and reliable statistic than is the jobless rate.)

Aspects of the Texas economy are unusual, if not unique, and it will be difficult or impossible for other states to replicate them. For example, the energy industry is booming right now, as are agricultural commodities destined for export — a boon for a huge cotton and beef producer like Texas. [Me: Let’s simply ignore the fact that MANY states have abundant oil resources, but THOSE states are refusing to drill for them because they have a particularly nasty species of vermin called “liberals” running them.  Meanwhile, Democrats in California have gutted what had been the most productive agricultural region in the entire world by shutting off their water and protecting a stupid little fish.  It’s as if the other states are cutting their own throats and then pointing out that Texas is only doing so well because it hasn’t cut it’s own throat too].

What’s more, thorny tradeoffs surely exist. Texas is attracting businesses, in part, because it has low taxes. But that, in turn, makes for a smaller safety net, which is one reason Texas has a high incidence of poverty and, compared with every other state, the biggest proportion of its population without health insurance. There are also serious questions about the quality of jobs in Texas. A “right to work” state, it is tied with Mississippi for having the biggest percentage of workers paid at or below the minimum wage.  [Me: I’d rather have a job and make my own way than live off of a welfare state paid by other people’s money until the safety net collapsed.  But that’s just me.  This amounts to another way of saying, ‘Yes, Texas is creating all the jobs; but we want socialism in America, not jobs.  Aside from that, the data shows that Texas shares higher poverty rates with every single other state in the southern region (which shows that poverty is a problem with the entire region rather than a problem with Texas).  But hey, we have to bash Texas for being successful, right?  You need to understand something: Democrats don’t give a DAMN about creating jobs; they only care about leftwing UNION jobs, as what’s going on in South Carolina over a Boeing plant amply demonstrates].

But even with these significant caveats, Texas has long been the most robust jobs engine in the country, and its policies and practices deserve deeper reflection. Some say, for example, that an increase in education funding 25 years ago lifted the quality of the workforce. “That set the table for job expansion,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Mitchell Schnurman has asserted. (Budget pressures in Texas are now forcing education spending to go in the other direction.).  [Me: you heard right; let’s give all the credit to what Democrats did 25 years ago so we don’t have to give any credit at all to what Republicans have done ever since.  Because liberals must always get the credit no matter how far back you have to go to do it; and conversely, conservatives must always get the blame no matter how far back you have to go to do it].

Also deserving of further exploration are the strict lending guidelines that Texas banks instituted after the S&L crisis of the 1980s. Those standards spurred institutions to keep larger capital reserves and take on fewer problem mortgages than were seen elsewhere in the country. As a result, the state emerged relatively unscathed from the most recent real estate meltdown.  [Me: this is an quick reference to the Democrat-imposed Fannue and Freddie subprime lending policies that were supposed to make home ownership a right for minorities who couldn’t repay their loans.  George Bush tried to reform these policies 17 times, but Democrats – who ran both the House and the Senate when our economy crashed – would have none of these common-sense Republican reforms.  Fortunately conservative Texas passed their own laws to protect them from the Community Reinvestment Act and all the other Democrat horrors].

At the same time — and this, of course, is the tough part for those on the left to swallow — it is clear that the state’s limits on taxes, regulations and lawsuits are contributing to the job machine. “The most important thing I think that’s happened to us is tort reform,” Fisher, the Dallas Fed president, has said. He added that when John Deere and other companies have decided to hire in Texas, they’ve been largely driven by steps the state has taken to cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice suits and to make it harder to bring product liability and class-action cases.

For those whose knee-jerk instinct is to dump on such logic, they would do well here to consider the source. Fisher served in President Carter’s Treasury Department and as a high-ranking trade official for President Clinton, and was a two-time Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Although the former investment banker is certainly not an ardent leftie, he is no right-wing zealot either.

To be sure, Texas is not without lots of problems. And its remarkable employment growth is not without attendant concerns. But for those on the left to dismiss the state’s jobs story out of hand, just because Republicans have embraced it as a showpiece, is counterproductive and foolish.

Counterproductiveness and foolishness are two of the three hallmarks that define the left.  Hypocrisy is the third.

A lot of Californians are whining about the fact that many “Texas jobs” came at California’s expense.  And the whiny liberals are right; many of those employers DID escape from the liberal hellhole known as the People’s Soviet State of California.  But here’s the question: do you want America to be more like California – which among other things features a $500 billion black hole of economic death known as unfunded liabilities from state union pensions – or do you want a job?  Do you want a demagogic excuse for why all the jobs are going elsewhere, or do you want a job?  Do you want to sit on your fat pimply sweaty ass living on welfare until the system crashes and you starve to death, or do you want a system that actually produces something?

If you want the former vote for Obama, vote for Democrats, and then go to hell when you die.  If you want the latter, for God’s sakes, please vote for the Republicans who  are actually creating jobs in America.

Democrats look back at 2008 and blame “failed Republican policies.”  Basically, all they have to point at is the fact that George Bush was president when it happened.  They ignore the fact that Democrats had total control of the House and near total control of the Senate for nearly two years prior to the disaster happening.  They claim that Republicans refusing to regulate was what created the mess.  They ignore the fact that Democrats REPEATEDLY refused ANY regulation whatsover of Fannie and Freddie which had overwhelming control of the housing market that actually caused the meltdown.  Look at the actual facts:

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/aei-article-how-fannie-and-freddie-blew-up-the-economy/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/barney-frank-and-democrat-party-most-responsible-for-2008-economic-collapse/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/barney-frank-video-proves-democrats-at-core-of-2008-economic-collapse/

http://hennessysview.com/business/franklin-raines-criminal-enterprise-and-barack-obama-his-accomplice/

http://politicsorpoppycock.com/2008/09/28/franks-fingerprints-are-all-over-the-financial-fiasco/

The last link above refers to a Boston Herald story which has since been scrubbed.  It’s amazing how articles that taint Democrats have a way of “vanishing.”  It’s one of the reasons I blog.  I want to preserve the record of what actually happened to this country.

All this to say that Democrats had a false demagogic narrative based on lies.

But the American people bought those lies in 2008.  And Democrats had dictatorial control of the White House, the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof Senate for nearly two full years.  And they took their same failed policies which led to the economic collapse of 2008 and expanded them.  And they promised Americans that their godawful stimulus would work.  It not only failed; it completely failed even by the Obama White House’s own constantly-shifting standards.  And it cost us $3.27 TRILLION we didn’t have.

Now, amazingly, the fact that the president happens to be a Democrat – and the fact that that Democrat took bad news and made it far worse – no longer matters.  Now Democrats want to say that it’s the Republicans – who only control the House of Representatives – are blocking economic progress.  Even though it DIDN’T matter that Nancy Pelosi was running the House of Representatives into the ground in 2007 and 2008.  To go along with Harry Reid doing the same thing during the same time period in the US Senate.

Democrats don’t run on facts; they run on demagoguery.  Remember that the man who led Texas into the job-creating machine that it is not only has nothing to do with George Bush, he actually didn’t like Bush as a big spending and compromising “compassionate conservative.”  Because Democrats and their mainstream media propagandists are already starting to tell the demagogic lie that Rick Perry is somehow identical to George Bush simply because the two men were governors of the same state.

Coming To America Soon: ‘Anti-Austerity’ (I.E., Pro-Reckless-Government-Spending Liberals) Protests Turning Violent In Greece

I just want to make sure you understand that the violence in Greece is coming from LEFTWING SOCIALISTS.  Which is the same that will happen HERE soon.

Don’t ever forget that liberals are dangerous, bad, violent people.

These people spend societies into bankruptcy, and then they riot because there’s no more “other people’s money” to spend.

Anti-Austerity Protests In Greece Turn Violent
by The Associated Press

Louisa
Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty ImagesProtesters fight with riot police during massive clashes at the
 central Athens Syntagma square on Wednesday. Thousands of protesters ringed the
Greek Parliament building as the government tried to push through its emergency
package inside and a general strike paralyzed the country.

June 15, 2011

Hundreds of protesters clashed with riot police in central Athens Wednesday as a major anti-austerity rally degenerated into violence outside Parliament, where the struggling government was to seek support for new cutbacks to avoid a disastrous default.

Tear gas blanketed the capital’s main Syntagma Square, where more than 25,000 people had gathered to protest a new package of tax hikes and spending cuts through 2015.

A few hundred youths smashed the windows of a luxury hotel on the square, ripped up paving stones to throw at police and hurled firebombs at cordons of riot police. Demonstrators said at least 10 people were injured, and they appealed to fellow protesters to stay calm and allow ambulances through.

The protests are the epicenter of a crisis that could end in a disastrous default that would threaten the future of the eurozone and shake financial markets just as the global economy struggles to recover.

Wednesday’s violence adds public pressure on the government at a time when Prime Minister George Papandreou also faces a party rebellion from within his governing Socialists over the new austerity. One of his deputies defected Tuesday, reducing Papandreou’s parliamentary majority to five. Another Socialist lawmaker said he will vote against the bill, which is set for final approval by early next month.

But the new bill, worth euro28 billion ($40.5 billion) must be passed this month if Greece is to continue tapping its rescue loans.

The stakes are high and the results uncertain — if Greece is cut off from its rescue funding, it will default on its debts, likely setting off a financial chain reaction that experts have described as catastrophic.

In Athens, sporadic clashes on the fringes of the rally gradually spread, scattering those in the previously peaceful rally. Cafe tables and chairs lay overturned as trash bins burned. Heavy clouds of tear gas hung over Syntagma Square and side streets. The choking chemicals wafted as far as the presidential mansion behind Parliament, where Papandreou met with the country’s president, Karolos Papoulias, to brief him on the severity of the situation.

Papandreou later spoke by telephone with the heads of opposition parties to seek support for the austerity package. The EU has been pressing for cross-party support, but main opposition Conservative party leader Antonis Samaras has insisted the bailout agreement must be re-negotiated instead.

Police had set up a massive security operation to ensure protesters could not carry out a pledge to prevent lawmakers from accessing Parliament. Some 5,000 officers, including hundreds of riot and motorcycle police, used parked buses and crowd barriers to prevent protesters from encircling the building, while a large part of central Athens was closed to all traffic.

The protests in Athens and in the northern city of Thessaloniki, where another 20,000 people rallied peacefully, were part of a 24-hour general strike, the result of months of growing frustration over the country’s slide.

“A national effort is required. Because we are at a historically crucial moment and a time of crucial decisions,” Papandreou told Papoulias, according to a transcript of their conversation released by the prime minister’s office.

“But on the other hand, everyone has to assume their responsibilities,” he said. “In any case, we will move forward with this sense of responsibility and the necessary decisions” to pull Greece out of the crisis.

In Syntagma Square, however, the mood was defiant.

“Resign, resign,” the crowd chanted outside Parliament before the clashes. The protesters included both young and old, and many brought their children, hoisting them onto their shoulders to shield them from the crush.

The latest austerity drive has brought many people onto the streets for the first time.

“What can we do? We have to fight, for our children and for us,” said Dimitra Nteli, a nurse at a state hospital who was at the protest with her daughter.  “After 25 years of work I earn 1,100 euros a month. Now that will drop to 900.  How can we live on that?”

Her 26-year-old daughter, Christina, said the situation in Greece had led her to leave for Britain to study conflict resolution.

“I have no job here. There are no prospects,” she said.

Police spokesman Athanassios Kokalakis said about 20 protesters were briefly detained.

The general strike crippled public services across the country, leaving state hospitals running on emergency staff, disrupting port traffic and public transport.

The Socialists’ popularity plummeted in recent weeks over the new austerity plan. A weekend opinion poll gave the main opposition conservatives a four-point lead over their Socialist rivals, the first time the party has been ahead in surveys since 2009. The next general election is scheduled for October 2013.

With its credit rating deep in junk status, Greece is being kept afloat by the EU and IMF bailout, but will need additional support to cover financing gaps next year as high interest rates keep it out of the bond market, contrary to what the original bailout agreement had predicted.

On Monday, Standard & Poor’s slashed Greece’s rating from B to CCC, dropping it to the very bottom of the 131 states that have a sovereign debt rating. That suggests Greece’s creditors are less likely to get their money back than those of Pakistan, Ecuador or Jamaica. On Tuesday, the agency also cut its rating for four Greek banks to CCC from B.

We’ve already started seeing the violence that the American left is more than capable of.  We saw it build and unleash in Wisconsin and other states whose governors and state senates and assemblies were forced to deal with massive public pension boondoggles.

California alone has a $500 billion unfunded liability in public pension debt.  But of course California elected Jerry Brown and that black hole of debt will be papered over until it utterly explodes the way we’re seeing it explode in Greece.  Elsewhere, even Democrats are beginning to stare into the black holes the unionized left have created and gotten scared enough to start trying to do way too little, way too late.

Barack Obama often talks the language of a “fiscally responsible” president.  Of course, his brand of fertilizer doesn’t walk.  When Obama submitted his budget, it contained SO MUCH RIDICULOUS OUT-OF-CONTROL SPENDING THAT THE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED SENATE VOTED IT DOWN 97-0.

This is beyond insane, and Democrats are making it even MORE insane.  First, Democrats didn’t even BOTHER to pass a budget last year when they had the White House, The Senate AND the House of Representatives.  That was a shocking dereliction of their most fundamental duty as officeholders.  And they haven’t improved since; even as Democrats CONTINUE to demonize Republicans for trying to lead, they STILL have not bothered to pass any kind of a budget for this year (unlike House Republicans, who HAVE).

Barack Obama sold the stimulus – which will ultimately cost American taxpayers $3.27 TRILLION – with what we now know to have been a massive lie.  He claimed over and over again that it would fund “shovel-ready jobs” that would get Americans back to work and get the economy rolling again:

Now Obama is “joking” that “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”  Oops.  Sorry for that three and a quarter trillion dollars I pissed away and the three years of misery I caused.

Even Obama’s own chief-of-staff acknowledges that Obama’s policies are “indefensible.”

But Democrat crazy is the most corrosive kind of KoolAid of all.  Even as we now know for a DOCUMENTED FACT OF HISTORY that the stimulus utterly failed, we’ve got Harry Reid and the Democrats demanding MORE massive stimulus spending even as the CBO warns us of an economic meltdown if we don’t stop spending ourselves into collapse.

Allow me to explain a couple of rather important facts to you.  Number one, Democrats are responsible for virtually ALL of the unsustainable and reckless spending and policies that have led to our teetering on the edge of ruin and suffering unlike anything this nation has ever even had nightmares about, let alone experienced.  We are facing – and this according to a peer-reviewed IMF publication – $200 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities.  That should scare you into the fetal position if you have any intelligence whatsoever.  But it gets even worse than that; because liberal policies have contaminated the states, too.  Take California, which alone has $500 BILLION in unfunded public pension liabilities.

And yet here we are.  Republicans are trying desperately to cut spending before we collapse, and Democrats demonizing and fearmongering Republicans for pursuing sanity and demanding spending that will cause us to collapse all the faster.

I can’t say it any more plainly than this: if you vote Democrat, you are a truly EVIL human being.  Aside from your direct responsibility for the murder of 53 MILLION innocent human beings in America alone (and hundreds of millions more around the world), you are also going to be responsible for the unparalleled suffering of more than 300 million Americans when the crisis you first created and then refused to stop perpetuating comes crashing down all around us.

I know you are probably reacting like Cain and refusing to accept any responsibility for the horror you have done and continue to do, but one day you will find yourselves writhing in hell for the hell you helped bring about.  You can take that as a warning and get your priorities right before it’s too late or you can just take it as a prediction of where you’ll be spending the rest of eternity.

Liberal Rallies Pimp Hard-Core Totalitarian Socialism

John Edwards ran a campaign of “two Americas” in 2004 and again in 2008.  This particularly disgusting species of vermin could have been our president; he certainly could have been our vice president.

Now decent Americans know they would NEVER want to belong to “John Edwards’ America” if there was any possible other one to belong to.  The man is pure slime, as are the “values” he ran on.

John Edwards was right, though: there REALLY ARE “two Americas” being fought over right now.  They are the United States of America that our founding fathers fought for and created based on a profound Judeo-Christian view of the world, versus the Union of Soviet Socialist States of America dreamed of by the left.  The former has an economic basis of free market capitalism; the latter has an economic basis of a hybrid mixture of crony capitalism (i.e. fascism) and communism.  The former is based on individual liberties balanced by duties based on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition; the latter is based on a Marxist/fascist notion of statism balanced by nothing but their own lust for power.

On June 17 a union leader denounced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie compared Christie to Adolf Hitler and threatened to start World War III to destroy him:

At a rally in New Jersey protesting Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s deal to reform New Jersey’s state pension system, a union leader charged Christie with acting like a Nazi. And not any ordinary Nazi, but Adolf Hitler himself.

“Good afternoon brothers and sisters. Welcome to Nazi Germany,” Communications Workers of America District 1 Vice President Christopher Shelton is seen raving at a Thursday rally in a video posted on YouTube.

“We have Adolf Christie and his two generals trying to make New Jersey Nazi Germany.”

After ranting more about “Adolf Christie,” the YouTube video shows Shelton comparing the pension battle in New Jersey to World War II.

“Brothers and sisters, this is not going to be an easy fight,” he shrieked. “It took World War II to get rid of the last Adolf Hitler. It is going to take World War III to get rid of Adolf Christie. Are you ready for World War III?”

Rally attendees are seen wildly cheering Shelton’s speech in the video.

There’s a couple of major problems with Christopher Shelton’s thesis: one is that Adolf Hitler was a socialist: “NAZI” stood for “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party“; and the second is that it was Adolf Hitler and those who thought like him who started that terrible war.  Just like the REAL Nazis in Shelton and the leftists who think like him are angling to start the NEXT world war.

Who is starting the wars going on now?  Look at Greece, where leftists are violently rioting because there isn’t any more money to pay for their socialism.

When you look at the Nazi Party platform, you see hardened socialism all over it:

• The abolition of unearned income;
• Nationalization of trusts;
• Inclusion into profit-sharing;
• Increase in old-age pensions;
• Creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class;
• Aguarian reform, which included the siezing of land without compensation;
• State control of education;
• Creation of a “folk” army to supplant or replace the regular army;
• State control of the press

Leftwing socialist is in the Nazis’ own words:

– The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand:

– Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.

– In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

– We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).

– We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.

– We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.

– We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.

– We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.

– We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

– We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.

– The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.

– The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.

– We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.

– We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.

You look at this platform and you explain to me how “the National Socialist American Workers Party” wouldn’t be the DEMOCRATS.

Unions HELPED Hitler rise to power.  Homosexuals DOMINATED Hitler’s SA which he rode in his rise to power.  Both were purged when they had outlived their usefulness.  Hitler didn’t want “unions”; Hitler wanted THE union of all Germans in a greater German Reich.  Hitler didn’t abolish unions; he created one big giant union by unifying them.  Hitler had said of the trade unions:

“I am convinced that we cannot possibly dispense with the trades unions. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions in the economic life of the nation.”

Read up on the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF): “DAF membership was theoretically voluntary, but any workers in any area of German commerce or industry would have found it hard to get a job without being a member.”  That is NOT the “right-to-work” policies of conservatives; IT IS THE UNION AGENDA OF LIBERALS.  Read up on the Obama NLRB lawsuit against Boeing for daring to open a plant in a non-union right to work state and explain how we’re not seeing the same story all over again.  Obama is dictating (like the dictator he is) to a private company while unions say “if you aint union, then you don’t get no job.”

Nietzsche – a hero of Nazis AND leftists ever since – put it best.  He pointed out that the artist was not only the creator of beautiful objects but of values.  He pointed out that cultural change requires artistic change: “Change of values – that is a change of creators.”  And this change to new values had to involve the breaking of old values.  As Nietzsche put it, “Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.”  Destroying the old order and giving birth to the new attracted ALL the cutting-edge leftists of the day.

Homosexuals, artists, and all the other leftists and leftist movements of the day joyfully joined Hitler.  But once Hitler gained power and forged his own social order, many of these began to encounter brutal censorship.  Why?  Simply because when these people and movements were attacking the old order, they were useful, but once Hitler began to impose his own order, they who attacked order became a threat to be repressed.  To put it in other words, they were hung on their own petard.

To whatever extent that Hitler crushed the trade unions that had eagerly helped him gain power, he crushed many other useful idiots the same way.  That participation in their own destruction is part of the ultimate death-wish that is liberalism.  We’re seeing it now as liberals routinely support Islamic radicals who would gleefully murder every single one of these tools the moment they gain real power.

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations.  But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  Whad did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has repeatedly done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

Here are some pictures from the latest May Day rally, along with a brief description of what is going on.  For the record, this is from an email that was forwarded to me.  I did not write it or generate the pictures, but could not provide a “link”:

Pictures taken on May Day, May 11, 2011

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!

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When I tell people that public political rallies are more and more being led by communists and socialists, most folks simply don’t believe me. Aw, come on, you’re just giving decent protesters an extreme label, they say. No, actually, I’m not: The communists freely and proudly declare their affiliation. And the SEIU has no problem marching arm-in-arm with them. “Smash Capitalism” is a slogan the SEIU apparently endorses — or at least doesn’t mind marching behind. In case you think the SEIU is some peripheral out-of-the-mainstream organization: The SEIU devoted $28 million to Obama’s campaign, making the SEIU “the organization that spent the most to help Barack Obama get elected president.” Furthermore, who is Obama’s favorite White House guest and one of his closest confidants? The individual who has visited the Obama White House the most: SEIU President Andy Stern, who has visited 53 times. Obama is closely linked with the SEIU. The SEIU is closely linked with communists. You do the math. Did I say communists? Sorry, I meant Communists (with a capital “C”). Note how the Communists that day (like the women on the right in this photo) carried solid red flags symbolizing their ideology. Keep that in mind as you view the next photo… One of the SEIU leaders picked up a Communist flag and led a contingent of rank-and-file SEIU members. Everyone was OK with that. The way you can identify the SEIU members in all these pictures: They’re the ones in purple t-shirts carrying blue-and-yellow signs. So, as you can see, the communists and the union members intermingled as the march progressed. In case you were wondering what the SEIU was saying during all of this, here’s a video of the SEIU chanting “Legalization or REVOLUTION!” Clear enough? And it wasn’t just the SEIU at the march — other “normal” unions like the AFL-CIO were on hand as well. There were plenty of teachers’ unions attending too, and they brought along many of their public school students for some good old-fashioned communist indoctrination,. Most of the idiots in the US who walk around with Che buttons or Che shirts do so simply because they foolishly think he’s “cool.” These hardcore communists carry his image not because he’s “cool,” but because he was one of the most radical revolutionaries who ever lived. Right up there with Lenin, apparently. In order to have a more “civil dialogue” with their political opponents, the marchers made a puppet of a demonic Statue of Liberty aligned with the “Tea Bag Party.” OK, I guess Hitler comparisons are off the table for now — too many people have called it taboo. So what’s second best? The Devil! Tell me the honest truth: If the Tea Party had marched in a rally behind a banner held up by fascists or neo-Nazis, don’t you think it would have been national news? But the nation’s biggest Obama-supporting political organization marched behind banners like these, and not a peep about it in the media. Hmmmm…. Until recently, the average American has regarded fascists and communists as equally noxious and equally malignant. As well they should have. But the drive these days by the left side of the spectrum is to make communism and socialism somewhat less remarkable and more palatable. For two years they angrily denied the Tea Party accusation that Obama’s policies and supporters had a socialist bent. But in recent months, as the accusation had started to gain traction, the new leftist tactic has become: “What’s so bad about socialism after all? You’re demonizing a very popular and respectable ideology!”

The very first picture above brings the riots of the left in Wisconsin to use fascist tactics to block the elected democratic process in that state.

The war has already started, and the people who say today – “Because workers of the world unite it’s not just a slogan anymore“ and “We’re trying to use the power of persuasion. And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to use the persuasion of power “ – are the ones who started it.  They are saying to one another:  “There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement“; and “you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.“

These are people with no morals beyond the morality of fascism.  They want to impose their will on you.  They want to take what is yours and give it to themselves.  They want to make the state god while THEY run that state; and then force you to come to them and devote yourself to “the state” in order to have a job, health care, food, life itself.

The beast is coming.  And when he comes, Democrats will be the Party that cheers him and votes for him.

The Democrat Party has become the party of genuine evil in America.  A vote for Democrats has become a vote for hell itself.

Stop and think about why the union leader in New Jersey demonized Gov. Chris Christie: Christie wants to save his state from certain financial implosion.  He wants to restructure government union benefits that are giving many “public employees” a hundred thousand dollars in benefits a year while they are retiring in their mid-fifties.  These unions want to leach off the system until it collapses.  And it WILL collapse: in California ALONE the public employees’ accumulation of unfunded liabilities is $500 BILLION.  The unfunded liabilities of all the states easily exceeds $1 trillion.

Which of these “two Americas” is fascist?  The one that wants to kill America and impose a totalitarian system in its place, or the one that is trying to embrace the vision of our founding fathers just short of way too late?

Update, June 20: The overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled New Jersey Senate just agreed with Governor Chris Christie on the reforms that he was called a “Nazi” for proposing.  If you want to see the Nazis in the story, look at Christopher Shelton, look at his union and look at the Democrat Party that is controlled by these unions.  THAT’S where you’ll find all the Nazis.

Actual U.S. Debt Exceeds GDP Of Entire Planet

Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on.  Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:

True U.S. debt exceeds world GDP by $14 trillion
Obama 2010 budget deficit now 5 times larger than nation’s output
Posted: March 21, 2011
By Jerome R. Corsi

As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget  deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.

That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. GDP for 2010 was $14.861 trillion. World GDP in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, was $61.936 trillion.

“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.

Statistics generated in Williams’ most recent newsletter demonstrate the real 2010 federal budget deficit was $5.3 trillion, not the $1.3 trillion previously reported by the Congressional Budget Office, according to the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government as released by the U.S. Department of Treasury Feb. 26, 2010.

The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget  deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in  the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official  budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including  Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they  occur.

The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis  (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes  in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs  such as Social Security and Medicare.

Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social  Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.

“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and  Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range  in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion,  remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.

“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising  taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits  to do so,” he warned.

In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams  listed both an official accounting and an alternative.

“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he  noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting  was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare  liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently  enacted health care legislation.”

U.S. Government GAAP Accounting  Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States,  2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)

Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and  Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S.  government in bankruptcy, even before we take  into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may  be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health  care.

“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into  balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100  percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a  federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”

Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a  hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt  obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely  slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.

“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a  solution to not having enough money to cover  obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have  committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a  bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross  mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”

He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy  of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by  mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”

“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange  rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain  timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper  assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset  of hyperinflation in the near-term.”

Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by  an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to  unfold in response to QE2.

“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to  assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving  wealth and assets,” he advises.

Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced  near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the  purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the  Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.

$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot.  And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness.  But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:

I Can Give You 200 Trillion Reasons Why We Need To Cut Government Spending NOW
By Michael Eden     March 7, 2011

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way.  Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

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.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

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. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Enron-style accounting?  From our government?  Say it aint so!!!

It’s isn’t a matter of IF America will financially collapse; it is only a matter of WHEN.  And “WHEN” is SOON.

And it will necessarily happen because Democrats are genuinely depraved.

Recklessly spending money on fools’ projects that your grandchildren will become debt slaves just trying to pay the interest on is immoral.

I can only keep begging Republicans to turn the Democrats’ demonization game back at them.  Democrats are running around on their talking points denouncing Republicans as “extremists” who want to kill poor people.

Bullcrap.

It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.

It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold.  It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.

Don’t you dare forget that it has been LIBERALS who have been dreaming of undermining and imploding America financially since Cloward and Piven back in the 1960s.  And now we’ve got a JUST-ex SEIU official on tape plotting to send America into a financial crisis that will dwarf anything ever seen.

If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek.  That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”

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.