We're turning Californian, turning Californian!

$25 more million up in green:

http://www.wlox.com/story/20220865/solar-firm-that-got-26m-in-miss-loans-is-closing

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The median net worth of American households has dropped to a 43-year low as the lower and middle classes appear poorer and less stable than they have been since 1969.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/11/30/study-american-households-hit-43-year-low-in-net-worth/

It appears that we are going to need some more taxes to support the Middle Class, unless of course we are trying to end the days of the hated Bourgeoisie...
 
$25 more million up in green:

http://www.wlox.com/story/20220865/solar-firm-that-got-26m-in-miss-loans-is-closing



http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/11/30/study-american-households-hit-43-year-low-in-net-worth/

It appears that we are going to need some more taxes to support the Middle Class, unless of course we are trying to end the days of the hated Bourgeoisie...

400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

Did you ever play Monopoly? Eventually one person ends up with everything. That's a good deal if you are that one person.
 
400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

Did you ever play Monopoly? Eventually one person ends up with everything. That's a good deal if you are that one person.

I am comforted by the fact that those 400 people have a genetic money dispersal system called grandchildren.

Monopoly is nice, but it is not the game of Life...

;) ;)
 
I am comforted by the fact that those 400 people have a genetic money dispersal system called grandchildren.

Monopoly is nice, but it is not the game of Life...

;) ;)

We are 50 years away from the feudal system. I won't be alive then, but if I were I'd want to be a Lord. :cool:
 
Kindly Note the Impending Bankruptcy
Mark Steyn, NRO
November 30, 2012

Previously on The Perils of Pauline:

Last year, our plucky heroine, the wholesome apple-cheeked American republic, was trapped in an express elevator hurtling out of control toward the debt ceiling. Would she crash into it? Or would she make some miraculous escape?

Yes! At the very last minute of her white-knuckle thrill ride to her rendezvous with destiny, she was rescued by Congress’s decision to set up . . . a Super Committee! Those who can, do. Those who can’t, form a committee. Those who really can’t, form a Super Committee — and then put John Kerry on it for good measure. The bipartisan Super Committee of Super Friends was supposed to find $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction by last Thanksgiving, or plucky little America would wind up trussed like a turkey and carved up by “automatic sequestration.”

Sequestration sounds like castration, only more so: It would chop off everything in sight. It would be so savage in its dismemberment of poor helpless America that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the course of a decade the sequestration cuts would reduce the federal debt by $153 billion. Sorry, I meant to put on my Dr. Evil voice for that: ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE BILLION DOLLARS!!! Which is about what the United States government currently borrows every month. No sane person could willingly countenance brutally saving a month’s worth of debt over the course of a decade.

So now we have the latest cliffhanger: the Fiscal Cliff, below which lies a bottomless abyss of sequestration, tax-cut-extension expiries, Alternative Minimum Tax adjustments, new Obamacare taxes, the expiry of the deferment of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, as well as the expiry of the deferment of the implementation of the adjustment of the correction of the extension of the reduction to the proposed increase of the Alternative Minimum Growth Sustainability Reduction Rate. They don’t call it a yawning chasm for nothing.

As America hangs by its fingernails wiggling its toesies over the vertiginous plummet to oblivion, what can save her now? An Even More Super Committee? A bipartisan agreement in which Republicans agree to cave and Democrats agree not to laugh at them too much? That could be just the kind of farsighted reach-across-the-aisle compromise that rescues the nation until next week’s thrill-packed episode when America’s strapped into the driver’s seat of a runaway Chevy Volt careering round the hairpin bends on full charge, or trapped in an abandoned subdivision overrun by foreclosure zombies.

I suppose it’s possible to take this recurring melodrama seriously, but there’s no reason to. The problem facing the United States government is that it spends over a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have. If you want to make that number go away, you need either to reduce spending or to increase revenue. With the best will in the world, you can’t interpret the election result as a spectacular victory for less spending. Indeed, if nothing else, the unfortunate events of November 6 should have performed the useful task of disabusing us poor conservatives that America is any kind of “center-right nation.” A few months ago, I dined with a (pardon my English) French intellectual who, apropos Mitt Romney’s stump-speech warnings that we were on a one-way ticket to Continental-sized dependency, chortled to me, “Americans love Big Government as much as Europeans. The only difference is that Americans refuse to admit it.”

My Gallic charmer is on to something. According to the most recent (2009) OECD statistics: government expenditures per person in France, $18,866.00; in the United States, $19,266.00. That’s adjusted for purchasing-power parity, and yes, no comparison is perfect, but did you ever think the difference between America and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys would come down to quibbling over the fine print? In that sense, the federal debt might be better understood as an American Self-Delusion Index, measuring the ever widening gap between the national mythology (a republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens) and the reality (a 21st-century cradle-to-grave nanny state in which, as the Democrats’ convention boasted, “government is the only thing we do together”).

Generally speaking, functioning societies make good-faith efforts to raise what they spend, subject to fluctuations in economic fortune: Government spending in Australia is 33.1 percent of GDP, and tax revenues are 27.1 percent. Likewise, government spending in Norway is 46.4 percent and revenues are 41 percent — a shortfall but in the ballpark. Government spending in the United States is 42.2 percent, but revenues are 24 percent — the widest spending/taxing gulf in any major economy.

So all the agonizing over our annual trillion-plus deficits overlooks the obvious solution: Given that we’re spending like Norwegians, why don’t we just pay Norwegian tax rates?

No danger of that. If (in Milton Himmelfarb’s famous formulation) Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans, Americans are taxed like Puerto Ricans but vote like Scandinavians. We already have a more severely redistributive taxation system than Europe in which the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income tax while the poorest 20 percent shoulder just three-fifths of one percent. By comparison, the Norwegian tax burden is relatively equitably distributed. Yet Obama now wishes “the rich” to pay their “fair share” — presumably 80 or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in the New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year’s federal deficit. And after that you’re back to square one. It’s not that “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share,” it’s that America isn’t. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it’s not willing to pay for.

A couple of years back, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute calculated that, if Washington were to increase every single tax by 30 percent, it would be enough to balance the books — in 25 years. If you were to raise taxes by 50 percent, it would be enough to fund our entitlement liabilities — just our current ones, not our future liabilities, which would require further increases. This is the scale of course correction needed.

If you don’t want that, you need to cut spending — like Harry Reid’s been doing. “Now remember, we’ve already done more than a billion dollars’ worth of cuts,” he bragged the other day. “So we need to get some credit for that.”

Wow! A billion dollars’ worth of cuts! Washington borrows $188 million every hour. So, if Reid took over five hours to negotiate those “cuts,” it was a complete waste of time. So are most of the “plans.” Any “debt-reduction plan” that doesn’t address at least $1.3 trillion a year is, in fact, a debt-increase plan.

So given that the ruling party will not permit spending cuts, what should Republicans do? If I were John Boehner, I’d say: “Clearly there’s no mandate for small government in the election results. So, if you milquetoast pantywaist sad-sack excuses for the sorriest bunch of so-called Americans who ever lived want to vote for Swede-sized statism, it’s time to pony up.”

Okay, he might want to focus-group it first. But that fundamental dishonesty is the heart of the crisis. You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has to go.

Just do what California has done!

Raise taxes and invest in education; kids will vote for free stuff now and worry about paying the bill later.

:cool: They're bright, let's keep investing in them so that they can invent prosperity from the shared sacrifice that educated them in believing that you can get free stuff from the government!
 
Kindly Note the Impending Bankruptcy
Mark Steyn, NRO
November 30, 2012



Just do what California has done!

Raise taxes and invest in education; kids will vote for free stuff now and worry about paying the bill later.

:cool: They're bright, let's keep investing in them so that they can invent prosperity from the shared sacrifice that educated them in believing that you can get free stuff from the government!

Your "Makers 'n Takers! Makers 'n Takers, DAMMIT!" narrative was summarily rejected by voters a few weeks back.

Time to man up and accept reality, Chief.

p.s. Education BAD! :mad:
 
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If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.
Noam Chomsky
 
Congressional Democrats say they aren't willing to consider changes in Social Security in order to avoid the "fiscal cliff." On Sunday, November 25, 2012, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), on ABC's This Week, said, "Social Security does not add one penny to the deficit. Not a penny. It's a separate funded operation, and we can do things that I believe we should now, smaller things, played out over the long term that gives it solvency." Durbin also said that Social Security needs only a few minor tweaks, but no major reforms to ensure its long-term solvency. And, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), at a recent hearing by the House Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee, said, "Over 77 years and now through 13 recessions, Social Security has not added one penny to our deficit or our debt."

What Durbin and Becerra said about Social Security not adding to the deficit may be, for now, technically true, but "Social Security shortfalls are [indirectly] adding to the federal budget deficit[.]" For almost thirty years, Social Security collected more in taxes than it paid in benefits, thus producing surpluses. The surpluses were "invested" in special interest (2.417 percent in 2011)-bearing bonds issued by the Treasury Department to Social Security. The special bonds formed what has become known as the "Social Security Trust Fund," amounting to $2.7 trillion. That's all well and good, but (and there's always a "but")...

The government (both parties) "borrowed" from the trust fund in order to pay for other programs that, if paid for in the yearly budget, would have raised the deficit. Thus, borrowing from the trust fund became a way to hide deficit spending increases. Social Security itself does not directly increase the deficit, but the money collected in the name of Social Security certainly has an effect on the deficit. And what of the Trust Fund now? It is a myth, even though Durbin and Becerra continue to insist otherwise.

Social Security is presently paying more in benefits than it collects in taxes. As baby-boomers leave the work force, the problem will only increase. Benefit expenses will exceed tax receipts and then, after several more years, will exceed all system income, including interest. The Social Security Trust Fund (you remember, that $2.7-trillion myth) is expected, depending on whom you believe, to go broke in 2041 (Social Security Administration, see Figure II.D7. - Long-Range OASDI Trust Fund Ratios From Stochastic Modeling) or 2033 (Congressional Budget Office). Durbin and Becerra will both be long gone when either date rolls around, leaving our children and grandchildren to "hold the bag." Their "Social Security doesn't raise the deficit" speeches may, for now, be technically correct, but what about in a few years?

So what can be, or could have been, done? Simpson-Bowles? Officially, this is "The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform," named after co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. The commission recommended (among other things) that the retirement age for Social Security be raised, that the Social Security payroll tax be raised, and that entitlements be reduced. Not surprisingly, the commission failed to achieve the necessary 14-vote supermajority required to officially endorse the plan.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012...rity_doesnt_add_to_deficit.html#ixzz2DngLQnNp
 
$.60 of every federal tax dollar goes to overhead...

Just how fat have Washington and the Beltway counties gotten? According to the latest U.S. Census data, between 2000 and 2010 the richest of the Washington, D.C., area have accrued about twice as much new wealth as those not living in or around the area.

Also, some Washington counties have gotten about twice as much new wealth as some of the other richest counties in the United States.

An April 2012 Forbes article lists the 10 richest counties in the United States — the list contains five D.C.-area counties, including the top three richest on the list.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/since-2000-d-c-area-wealth-grew-at-twice-national-average/?singlepage=true
 
California private health insurers are looking to substantially raise their rates in the coming year.

The largest for-profit insurer in California, Anthem Blue Cross, wants to raise its rates an average of 18% for roughly 630,000 individual policyholders. Aetna, the nation's third-largest health insurer, wants a 19% increase. And Blue Shield of California is expected to try raising rates next week. Health Net raised rates last month by 14%.

If Anthem goes through with their plans, some customers may have their fees raised by as much as 25% by February.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/29/Anthem-Blue-Cross-Going-To-Raise-Rates-Again

We tried our plan - and it worked!
Barack Obama, May 2012
 
The Canary is Singing!

In Japan things have gone from Grim to Grimmer. The Markit/JMMA Japan Manufacturing PMI™ shows Japanese manufacturing sector contracts at sharpest rate in 19 months.

Key points:

Output and new orders both continue to decline
Capital goods producers register sharpest falls in production and sales
Inventories and employment cut amid subdued economic outlook

Summary:

Operating conditions in the Japanese manufacturing sector continued to worsen in November. The deterioration was driven by falls in output, new orders and employment as the economic climate remained difficult. Amid an uncertain outlook, manufacturers also cut inventory levels and lowered purchasing activity.

Investment goods producers also recorded the steepest fall in staffing levels during November. With the consumer and intermediate market groups also registering reductions in employment, a net fall in total manufacturing payroll numbers was recorded for the second month in succession.

Reduced sales and a subdued economic outlook were reported to have led to the reduction in staffing levels in the latest survey period. Similar factors led to declines in inventories and purchasing activity over the month. The fall in stocks of raw materials and semi-manufactured goods was the steepest in over a year-and-a-half, while input buying was pared to the steepest degree since April 2011.

...

As my friend John Mauldin suggests, Japan is a bug in search of a windshield. I highly doubt Japan can make it to 2022 or even 2017 before it runs into serious issues.

Actually, Japan has extremely serious issues already, it's just that the market is ignoring them for now. If interest rates rise by a mere 2% or so, interest on the national debt will consume 100% of Japanese tax revenue.

Global imbalances are mounting. I suspect within the next couple of years (if not 2013) Japan will resort to the printing press to finance interest on its national debt and the Japanese central bank will start a major currency war with all its trading partners to force down the value of the yen.
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#Qg7MgSprcI03bp4X.99
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#Qg7MgSprcI03bp4X.99
 
Unemployment here in MoCo is 4.7%.

It's just too bad the government can't create jobs!

:cool:
 
Oh it can "create" jobs after it has confiscated them...


;) ;)

$.60 of every tax dollar. That's some serious overhead.
 
Disabled System
Michael Barone, NRO
December 1, 2012

Americans are very generous to people with disabilities. Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, millions of public and private dollars have been spent on curb cuts, bus lifts, and special elevators.

The idea has been to enable people with disabilities to live and work with the same ease as others as they make their way forward in life. I feel sure the large majority of Americans are pleased that we are doing this.

But there is another federal program for people with disabilities that has had an unhappier effect. This is the disability-insurance (DI) program, which is part of Social Security.

The idea is to provide income for those whose health makes them unable to work. For many years, it was a small and inexpensive program that few people or politicians paid much attention to.

In his recent book, A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Nicholas Eberstadt has shown how DI has grown in recent years.

In 1960, some 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments. In 2011, the number was 8,600,000. In 1960, the percentage of the economically active population aged 18 to 64 years old receiving disability benefits was 0.65 percent. In 2010, it was 5.6 percent.

Some four decades ago, when I was a law clerk to a federal judge, I had occasion to read briefs in cases appealing the denial of disability benefits. The Social Security Administration then seemed pretty strict in denying benefits in dubious cases. The courts were not much more openhanded.

Things have changed. Americans have grown healthier, and significantly lower numbers die before 65 than was the case a half-century ago. Nevertheless, the disability rolls have ballooned.

One reason is that the government seems to have gotten more openhanded with those claiming vague ailments. Eberstadt points out that in 1960, only one-fifth of disability benefits went to those with “mood disorders”= and =“musculoskeletal” problems. In 2011, nearly half of those on disability voiced such complaints.

“It is exceptionally difficult — for all practical purposes, impossible,” writes Eberstadt, “for a medical professional to disprove a patient’s claim that he or she is suffering from sad feelings or back pain.”

In other words, many people are gaming or defrauding the system. This includes not only disability recipients but health-care professionals, lawyers, and others who run ads promising to get you disability benefits.

Between 1996 and 2011, the private sector generated 8.8 million new jobs, and 4.1 million people entered the disability rolls.

The ratio of disability cases to new jobs has been even worse during the sluggish recovery from the 2007–09 recession. Between January 2010 and December 2011, there were 1,730,000 new jobs and 790,000 new people collecting disability.

This is not just a matter of laid-off workers in their 50s or early 60s qualifying for disability in the years before they become eligible for Social Security old-age benefits.

In 2011, 15 percent of disability recipients were in their 30s or early 40s. Concludes Eberstadt, “Collecting disability is an increasingly important profession in America these days.”

Disability insurance is no longer a small program. The government transfers some $130 billion obtained from taxpayers or borrowed from purchasers of Treasury bonds to disability beneficiaries every year.

But there is also a human cost. Consider the plight of someone who at some level knows he can work but decides to collect disability payments instead.

That person is not likely to ever seek work again, especially if the sluggish recovery turns out to be the new normal.

He may be gleeful that he was able to game the system or just grimly determined to get what he can in a tough situation. But he will not be able to get the satisfaction of earned success from honest work that contributes something to society and the economy.

I use the masculine pronoun intentionally, because an increasing number of American men have dropped out of the workforce altogether. In 1948, 89 percent of men age 20 and over were in the workforce.

In 2011, 73 percent were. Only a small amount of that change results from an aging population. Jobs have become physically less grueling and economically more rewarding than they were in 1948.

The Americans with Disabilities Act helped many people move forward and contribute to society. The explosive growth of disability insurance has had an opposite effect.
 
Deval-ued Wind Power
Kevin D. Williamson, NRO
December 3, 2012

Masschusetts governor Deval Patrick is as green-power mad as any up-and-coming Democrat, and he has set an ambitious goal for the commonwealth’s utilities: begin producing 2,000 megawatts of power from environmentally preferred sources by 2020. Patrick’s green dreams are way up in the air; on the ground, things look starkly different.

Last September in the tiny town of Princeton, Mass., the general manager of the local utility authority sent out an extraordinary little memo that is one part standard bureaucratic posterior-covering and one part cry for help, noting that a modest wind-energy project already has lost nearly $2 million — a whopping number for a community of only 3,413. For perspective, consider that those losses occurred despite all of the subsidies the utility received for its wind-energy work; when the cost of those credits is accounted for, the real losses are even higher, but of course subsidy expenses are not borne in full directly by Princeton residents. Nevertheless, customers of the Princeton Municipal Light Department now pay more than a third more for their electricity than does the average Massachusetts residential customer, adding some $774,000 to their power bills in 2011. The financial position of the PMLD has been weakened, and there is little hope for significant improvements under current conditions.

“As best I can look into the future,” general manager Brian Allen wrote, “I would expect the wind turbine losses to continue at the rate of around $600,000 a year. This assumes current wholesale electricity rates, no need for extraordinary repairs, and that both turbines continue operating. If any major repairs are required, this will be an additional expense for the PMLD. The original warranties on the turbines have expired, and extended warranty options are not available.”

Those warranties are an acute concern: After becoming operational in 2010, one of Princeton’s two wind turbines broke down in August 2011 and was not back online until nearly a year later. Princeton had a warranty from the turbine’s manufacturer, the German firm Fuhrländer, but the usual political cluster of agents and subcontractors meant that the whole mess still is in litigation. If Princeton does not prevail in its lawsuit, it will suffer hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional expenses. The cost of replacing a gearbox on one of the Fuhrländer turbines is estimated at $600,000.

Those breakdowns are real concerns. According to the trade publication, Wind Energy Update, the typical wind turbine is out of commission more than 20 percent of the time — and regularly scheduled maintenance accounts for only 0.5 percent of that downtime. The group also estimates that some $40 billion worth of wind turbines will go out of warranty by the end of 2012, leaving the Princetons of the world looking at a heap of expensive repair bills. In Europe, the largest wind-energy market, operations-and-maintenance expenses already are running into billions of dollars a year.
 
Save the Country! Tax the Rich!
They all live in the bluest of states.
William Tucker, The American Spectator
12.3.12

There's one tax benefit for the rich that I can't see why anyone would possibly want to defend. That's the deduction of state and local taxes on your federal income tax.

This is a racket perpetrated by the bluest of blue states -- the whole Northeast and California -- in order to foist their profligacy on the rest of the nation. Nearly all the beneficiaries of this deduction are high-income people living in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland (i.e., the suburbs of Washington) and California. And you can bet the vast majority vote Democratic and spend their days congratulating themselves on how progressive they are. Meanwhile, the people who end up foisting the bill onto the financially responsible Republican states that have nothing to deduct because they have no income tax at all! Try Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Alaska for starters.

The theory is that the deduction of state taxes prevents citizens from being taxed twice for the same government services. Whoever thought that one up? There is no overlap of services in high tax states that doesn't exist in every state. All the exemption does is allow politicians in profligate blue states to tell their constituents, "Don't worry about our high taxes. You can always deduct it from your federal income tax." (I know, I live in one.) In other words, you can stick it to the rest of the country. If you don't believe it, just listen to Chuck Schumer howl the next time anyone mentions eliminating the deduction.

Charles Lane of the Washington Post has calculated that the exemption cost the federal government $67 billion in 2011. Is that anything to sneeze at? Moreover, an incredible 30 percent of all deductions came from residents in two states -- New York and California. And wouldn't you know, they just happen to be the most highly taxes states in the nation. New York ranks #1 overall and California #2. Others ranking near the top -- Connecticut (3), Massachusetts (5), New Jersey (7) and Maryland (10). Moreover it is the richest people in these states -- and only they -- who benefit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 73 percent of the deductions went to taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 and 20 percent to people making over $1 million. What more surgically targeted tax strike on tax breaks for the rich could you possibly ask?

More than that, it's important these people feel the full weight of their spending habits because they are on the verge of heading off a fiscal cliff and taking the rest of the country with them. Predictably, the states with the highest tax rates are also those that are in the deepest debt. Massachusetts leads the pack with $11,000 per capita. Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont all in the top 10. And the New York State figure is misleading because it doesn't include New York City, whose $8,700-per-head debt is greater than every state except Massachusetts and Alaska ($9,500).

...

There is yet another way that high-spending states use the tax code to shift the burden onto the more financially responsible states. That is through the exemption on municipal bonds. Walk into any financial advisor's office in New York City and they will immediately try to steer you into "triple-tax-exempts." That means New York State or New York City bonds, whose interest income is exempt from federal, state, and New York City income taxes, which can add up to more than 40 percent. Holders of municipal bonds in every state are exempt from federal taxes but the exemption only works really well in states with high income taxes. The whole system is designed to steer money away from the private sector and into the government. Given this advantage, states and cities are encouraged to borrow even more money. It also shows how governments at all levels work in concert, favoring each other. After all, they are all in the same business -- extracting more money from taxpayers.

All this is soon going to come to a head. Keep in mind, Europe didn't hit its financial woes because the whole European Union overspent. It was undermined because one country -- Greece -- dug itself too deep a hole. Things then cascaded and soon Germany was being asked to bail everyone out.

That's the way it will happen here as well. It won't be the entire U.S. government that runs into trouble, just one or two states that finally go over the edge. Illinois is the prime candidate. The state ranks only 12 in general obligation debt ($4,424 per head) but has been raiding its pension funds since the feckless administration of Governor Rudy Blagojevich and now has unfunded liabilities of $83 billion. Only 45 percent of its pension obligations are covered, the performance worst of any state. Only California has a lower credit rating and Illinois is now borrowing $8 billion to cover unpaid bills, many of them to small businesses. Observers predict the state could be asking for a federal bailout before Obama finishes his second term.

So what happens then? Will Obama turn his back on his home state? Or will Republicans be demonized for not allowing him to rescue Illinois taxpayers? And if the federal government assumes Illinois' pension burdens, how many other states will quickly be in line?

So there are rough times ahead. And it's the liberal blue states that are dragging us down the chute. There's only one way to go. Wealthy liberals in the Northeast, California, and the Chicago suburbs who congratulate themselves on their "progressive" voting patterns have to be shown there's a price to be paid for all this profligacy. Tax the rich! It's the only way to head off the crisis.
 
Raising Everyone's Taxes!


Fiscal Cliff Notes
Thomas Sowell, NRO
December 4, 2012

Amid all the political and media hoopla about the “fiscal cliff” crisis, there are a few facts that are worth noting.

First of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on “the rich,” even if that is done, it will scarcely make a dent in the government’s financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top 2 percent will not generate enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days.

And what will the government do to pay for the other 355 days in the year?

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting “the rich” to pay “their fair share” is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics. Taxing “the rich” will produce a drop in the bucket when compared with the staggering and unprecedented deficits of the Obama administration.

No previous administration in the entire history of the nation ever finished the year with a trillion-dollar deficit. The Obama administration has done so every single year. Yet political and media discussions of the financial crisis have been focused overwhelmingly on how to get more tax revenue to pay for past and future spending.

The very catchwords and phrases used by the Obama administration betray how phony this all is. For example, “We are just asking the rich to pay a little more.”

This is an insult to our intelligence. The government doesn’t “ask” anybody to pay anything. It orders you to pay the taxes it imposes, and you can go to prison if you don’t.

Then there are all the fancy substitute words for plain old spending — words like “stimulus” or “investing in the industries of the future.”

The theory about “stimulus” is that government spending will stimulate private businesses and financial institutions to put more of their money into the economy, speeding up the recovery. But the fact that you call something a “stimulus” does not make it a stimulus.

Stimulus spending began during the Bush administration and has continued full blast during the Obama administration. But the end result is that both businesses and financial institutions have had record amounts of their own money sitting idle. The rate of circulation of money slowed down. All this is the opposite of stimulus.

What about “investing in the industries of the future”? Does the White House come equipped with a crystal ball? Calling government spending “investment” does not make it investment any more than calling spending “stimulus” makes it stimulate anything.

What in the world would lead anyone to think that politicians have some magic way of knowing what the industries of the future are? Thus far the Obama administration has repeatedly “invested” in the bankruptcies of the present, such as Solyndra.

Using lofty words to obscure tawdry realities extends beyond the White House. Referring to the Federal Reserve’s creation of hundreds of billions of new dollars out of thin air as “quantitative easing” makes it seem as if this is some soothing and esoteric process, rather than amounting essentially to nothing more than printing more money.

Debasing the value of money by creating more of it is nothing new or esoteric. Irresponsible governments have done this, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

All the pretty talk about how tax rates will be raised only on “the rich” hides the ugly fact that the poorest people in the country will see the value of their money decline, just like everybody else, and at the same rate as everybody else, when the government creates more money and spends it.

If you have $100 and, after the inflation that follows from “quantitative easing,” that $100 dollars will buy only what $80 bought before, then that is the same economically as if the government had taxed away one-fifth of your money and spent it.

But it is not the same politically, so long as gullible people don’t look beyond words to the reality that inflation taxes everybody, the poorest as well as the richest.
 
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