This is exhausting…an entire nation fighting their own elected officials…specifically the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Trifecta.
First time we’ve ever had three presidents.
Never have so few people, spent so much money, for so long, working so hard, to try to pass something so many people don’t want.
My country feels like a plane that’s been hijacked and I don’t like where the three terrorists are taking us.
Click on image to enlarge
Animal Farm: A Modern Parody
The swine that politicians are, has led to a resurgence of an infectious disease they carry and unleash on the public from time to time.
Known as the”Washington Monument Syndrome,” it has cycles, like many pandemics, rising and falling with the economic tides.
As the economy slips, and tax revenues decline, the pigs in government start nervously pawing the barn floor. They know they are beholden to their Farmers, the Union Bosses. They know it is their job to protect the Farmer’s income. Any oinking the Farmer overhears that includes cuts to firefighters, police, teachers or any other unionized government worker enrages the Farmer and he forces the pigs to watch him sharpen his axe in preparation for the slaughter.
This sends the pigs into a squealing panic, their fear of falling under the axe is too great and they all agree to work together to protect the Farmer’s income. The Farmer takes so much of their income though that the only way to continue paying him is to raise taxes on the Humans. They know the Humans will be angered by this and might rise against the pigs, bringing their own axes to the Farm.
The pigs meet at the trough, and agree that they must incite fear in the population. They release their plague.
Closing parks? Selling off popular public lands? Why are politicians so spiteful of their constituents? Why do they work so hard to please the Unions? What’s next? The only thing worse they could do is close the prisons and let the prisoners run free…at least they would never do that…right?
The politicians use this tactic to bring the public to its knees and agree to increased taxes. New taxes to keep our parks open, new taxes to prevent the sale of cherished public properties, new taxes to keep criminals from being released to walk among us.
The reality is, the new taxes are to keep the unions intact, to ensure that their bloated salaries, healthcare and guaranteed retirement benefits remain unaffected. As I have said in prior posts, the Unions will spend millions of dollars and fight like a cornered racoon to prevent even the threat of any cuts in their quality of life.
If that means closing your parks, selling your public properties and letting violent prisoners free to commit new crimes on your family…to the unions, that’s okay.
If a firefighter from the OC Fire Authority retires at age 50 at the current average firefighter total compensation of $175,000 annually, then that firefighter will earn roughly $4.2 million in total compensation in his remaining 24 years (based on average life expectancy) without one more day of work.
How many of you have a $4.2 million retirement plan?
“…the OC Fire Authority budget lists firefighter compensation at $175,000 a year including overtime and benefits…thanks to the overtime system, rigged to boost employee pay rather than protect the public till, many California firefighters earn more than $200,000 a year in pay alone. One firefighter amassed so much overtime his annual pay was nearly $300,000 a year.” ~Steven Greenhut, author of PLUNDER!
“Overtime costs at the Orange County Fire Authority hit $27.9 million last year, a 55 percent increase since 2003, an Orange County Register analysis of payroll records has found…Interviews and records show that a key factor behind the growth of overtime is the enhancement of pension benefits granted to firefighters in 2001. The pension benefits have boosted the cost of each firefighter dramatically, simultaneously discouraging the agency from new hires and encouraging more early retirements.” ~OC Register
That last sentence is important to understand. When new hires are “discouraged” and “early retirements” are encouraged, that means less firefighters actually showing up for work. In other words, you and I must live our lives with fewer firemen on the job which increases the risks to our safety, and all because the city or state has only enough money to continue paying the generous retirement benefits to its retired firefighters.
Since the municipalities can’t afford to hire new firefighters, all they can do is give existing firefighters more overtime to cover the vacancies. A firefighter would be crazy to work one day more than his 50th year because it’s like working for free. So on the first day of his 50th year, a new vacancy opens up and it’s filled with more overtime from the remaining firefighters.
Guess what happens next…
Firefighter’s Labor Unions will then point out that there is a decline in public safety due to a lack of firemen. This will raise the public’s concern and they will support the city and state in hiring more firefighters. The money to pay those new firefighters can only come from two sources; either your local government cuts other government services or they raise your taxes.
The fact that the Labor Unions and the Firefighters are the cause of the very shortage they are complaining about will never be mentioned.
See how this scam works? The city will have to stop repairing roads or maintaining public parks so the Labor Unions can get more firefighters on the payroll, who will of course retire early and join the other retired firefighters who are draining your local government’s funds for the next 30 years of their natural life. And since they were making so much money in overtime due to all those who retired before them, they will receive those inflated amounts during retirement, thus repeating the cycle forever. It’s a beautiful scam.
Alternatively, your city, county or state will have to raise your taxes if they don’t want to cut other services which is more likely because the Labor Unions that repair the roads and the Labor Unions that maintain the parks will not want to take any cuts either, just like the Labor Union that fights the fires.
Labor Unions are raping the taxpayer and spinning this perpetual pillaging cycle off into future generations with no end in sight.
Don't Pay The Union Demands And They Will STRIKE Against You and Me
Let me start with some shocking statistics from the Wall Street Journal…
“Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.” There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.”
“Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year’s pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state’s pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven’t been).”
“A 2008 state commission pegged California’s unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades. That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock-market and real-estate values, certainly will soar.”
Let’s be honest and very clear about this fact…Labor Unions will spend billions of dollars to thwart any effort to force any of their members to take wage or benefit cuts.
They do not exist, nor care, to make the police, the firefighters, the teachers or government workers any better, any more efficient or any more effective.
Like a cockroach, the purpose of a Labor Union is to serve itself and survive at all costs.
No wage or benefit cut is acceptable, billions are spent to fight a fraction of a fraction in cuts. While the rest of us are laid off, lose bonuses, take pay cuts…the Unions will obliterate anyone even suggesting they take a reduction in anything, including politicians who vote against what the Unions want.
How long do you think it took before all the ethical politicians (as common as unicorns to begin with) were replaced by ones that agreed from the beginning to do what the Unions asked as long as the Unions help them get elected by spending their billions of dollars in union dues in political campaigns.
The California legislature is crawling with union-backed political bureaucrats. They are motivated by nothing else but keeping their Union backers happy because it’s the Unions that spend billions to help them stay in office.
California is struggling with a $20 billion deficit, and who is to blame?
The Unions.
And who will pay the $20 billion deficit?
Not the Unions.
You and I will pay for it through higher taxes.
Another example today of moral hazard as the FDIC announces plans to test principal reductions.
A principal reduction is when the bank allows a foreclosed homeowner to have their total home loan value reduced, also known as a “cram-down” or “principal forgiveness.”
For example, your neighbor buys a house for $750,000 but they could only afford a house half that price. They are now in foreclosure. With a cram-down, the government will authorize the home loan to be reduced from $750,000 to say, $375,000.
In today’s article, the FDIC wants to offer cram-downs for people who are actually making their mortgage payments but are underwater (owe more on the house than it’s worth). This is an effort to encourage people to continue to pay rather than performing a strategy that is growing in popularity known as strategic default (when a homeowner decides he is so much underwater that he will never recoup his money and just walks away from the house and lets it default).
The $375,000 that he doesn’t have to pay will be paid by you and me as taxpayer bailout money to the bank that suffers this loss or the FDIC that covers the loss.
So let me be clear. The government is subsidizing homeowners in foreclosure through bank bailouts and mortgage modifications as well as subsidizing homeowners not in foreclosure through cram-down incentives.
What is the government doing for the rest of us who either rent and will not pay the price for these overpriced homes or live in homes that we can afford?
For us, comes the bill.
The good news is only 1% of current outstanding mortgages would be eligible for this, so if they focus on just underwater homeowners (11 million) then for every 1 million of them, 10,000 of your neighbors get to keep their overpriced homes thanks to your generosity.
And by generosity I mean the one where the government will send you to jail if you don’t pay your taxes so they can give your money to your neighbor.
The bad news is, if this gets popular and the government expands this program we can immediately expect to be on the hook for millions more of our neighbors homes.
From the Associated Press:
“A Rhode Island school district has voted to fire all the teachers at an underperforming school.
The Central Falls School Committee voted Tuesday evening to fire every educator at Central Falls High School at the end of the school year.
It’s the only school in the tiny, impoverished city north of Providence. Only about half its students graduate, and only 7 percent of 11th-graders were proficient in math in 2009.”
With a 50% dropout rate and a 7% math proficiency, it is crystal clear that the teachers at this school are grossly negligent in performing their duties.
Gross negligence doesn’t bother the teachers union though…
“The Central Falls Teachers Union says it is reviewing legal options and hasn’t decided what action to take.”
What’s worse is that you and I are paying these teachers to be this bad.
And how many of you in the private sector can only be 50% good at your overall job and only 7% effective on one of your primary job responsibilities and still sue your employer if they fire you?
You can if you’re a government union employee.
Learn more by clicking on the image above, or visit www.teachersunionexposed.com.
Nothing makes a recession last longer than market uncertainty.
Contrary to what the government would have you believe, the “market” is fairly predictable. There are thousands of leading and lagging indicators that move in certain directions of varying amounts and can predict to some degree of certainty which way the economy is going. It’s not an exact science, but it’s not completely random either.
We often talk about how unpredictable the weather is, but like a falling barometer can indicate rain is on the way, but not how much or exactly when…market indicators can indicate when a recession, or a recovery, is approaching. With this information, we can act accordingly to get in out of the rain…or at least know it might be wise to bring an umbrella.
Enter uncertainty.
Almost all uncertainty in the market is brought on by the government. Government can change direction on a dime, increasing or decreasing taxes, regulating or deregulating, taxing or not taxing, bailing out or not bailing out, increasing or decreasing interest rates, going to war or not going to war, printing money or not printing money, etc. It doesn’t even require the action itself to move the markets, merely suggesting the possibility will ensure sufficient damage.
All of these actions can change the market drastically in one direction or another, and this uncertainty involving which way the government will zig causes businesses to not know which way to zag.
Investors can capitalize on these short term market swings and some general market trends can still be extrapolated but for a business person, an owner, a CEO, not knowing how government’s actions will affect their own business, their own industry, their own state or their own customers…the result is paralysis and a drawn out recession.
When uncertainty is everywhere, businesses will do nothing, and wait. They don’t invest or expand, they don’t hire or take on debt. Capital projects are shelved while cost cutting continues. Just as a barometer starts falling and people shutter the house, get out the candles, and settle in for the storm…market uncertainty will break our economic barometer and cause business to rein in spending, R&D and expansion plans…and all the jobs that could have been created along with them.
Government has broken our economic barometer.
We can see this in how government words or actions translate into market movements…
Scott Brown won the Senate race in Massachusetts not long ago. This upset was driven by the desire of the people to stop the tax and spend juggernaut in Washington by electing him as the 41st vote needed in the Senate to kill the government’s monstrous healthcare reform bill.
The result? Dramatic increases in healthcare stock values that took the market up with it now that the healthcare bill was dead in the water.
Meanwhile, not long afterwards, Obama declares, “Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by banks that are too big to fail,” as he proceeds with his plans to curb banks and limit risky investments.
The result? No sooner had the words left his lips, bank stocks took a dive..and with it, the market.
That much power, to simply speak and move markets, is unfortunate, reckless and will only prolong this recession.
These roller coasters in different industries caused by the government’s repeated attempts to enforce their ideological views of how the world should be will continue to interfere with business’s ability to predict and react effectively to market changes.
As a result, businesses will remain uncertain and act accordingly, which for me and you will translate to continuing unemployment, stagnant or declining incomes, a decline in public services and increased taxes.
Just a little public service announcement…
In hopes that I can dispell an urban legend from time to time and improve the standard of living for everyone, I offer the following…
Snopes.com reports that there have been no reports of a fire being started while fueling a car at a gas station due to the use of a cell phone.
Considering how many cell phones there are in the world, and how often fuel-ups occur…the odds are comfortably in your favor against spontaneous combustion.
This urban legend has led gas stations to post signs asking not to use cell phones and reporters to report fires as being caused by cell phones when the individual was coincidentally using one at the time despite the fact that the often unreported investigative conclusion after-the-fact finds that the ignition source was not related to a cellphone but rather to static electricity.
Even Myth Busters could not ignite gas with cell phones.
So please feel free to text and talk away right next to your fueling vehicle.
Snopes article here.
You can read the article here.
This man had a lien put on his house because of his failing business and the IRS and his bank were fighting over what was left of his assets, namely his home and a commercial property.
In the article it’s clear that he had never missed a payment on his home, had almost 50% of his mortgage paid off and had an offer from a potential buyer that would have covered his remaining mortgage debt and that the bank refused to accept it.
What is not clear in the article is if his home was legitimately used as collateral by the homeowner to secure his other business loans which would give the bank every right to take his house and to refuse the potential buyer’s offer. If the homeowners business debt exceeds the $160,000 left that he owed, which the potential buyer offered to pay, then the bank will want the whole house value, not just the remaining debt, so they can sell it and get back what’s owed to them from his other defaulted business loans.
The banks are responsible for much of the current economic pain we are all experiencing and I could spend hours railing against them for many things. In this instance however, due to a startling lack of information in this article, I am inclined to believe the author of this piece was writing to elicit an emotional response from the reader and ride the, “we hate the banks” tidal wave that everyone is feeling right now.
“Truth Through Omission” is most likely in effect in this article.
I appreciate his “message” to rally the public to his cause, but it may well be that the bank’s actions were correct. From this article, there is no way to be sure.
My faith in the American people has somewhat recovered recently in the light of their reaction to the out-of-control spending in Washington and the Healthcare Reform Bill which culminated in the peaceful revolution that occurred in Massachusetts.
Still, it was the American people who allowed everything to get as bad as it is. Myself included. We have to accept the fact that ultimately, we elect our representatives and we allow them to run roughshod with our money pandering to every imperialistic whim, government union and social re-engineering pet project their ideology ever wanted.
In the end…we let it happen.
There has been some speculation that the Tea Party should become a third-party and run against the Republicans and the Democrats. I’ve considered the pros and cons of that for some time now and I’ve decided that doing so is not in America’s best interest.
It’s not that a Tea Party President would not be the hope and dream that I think they would be, it’s that a Tea Party candidate would never win. As many people claim, splitting the ticket just creates two losers. I disagree with this in theory because I have never liked the Republican or the Democrat candidate. To me, they are two sides of the same kumbaya, socialistic, tax-and-spend, big government, social re-engineering coin with two different game plans that lead to the same result.
So what happens?
The Democrats aren’t really happy with the Democrat candidate and the Republicans aren’t really happy with the Republican candidate but everyone begrudgingly stomps into their polling location and yanks all the blue handles or yanks all the red handles, ” ’cause we’ll be damned if those Republican war-mongers will win or we’ll be damned if those bleeding heart Democrats get one more dime of my money.”
In the end, everyone loses except the Politicians.
I am not chained to one political ideology and don’t feel compelled to walk into a voting booth and just pull all the blue handles, or all the red handles.
Come November, a significant amount of Blue Politicians are going to join the ranks of the unemployed and be replaced by equally unworthy Red Politicians. The difference is, the Red ones coming in realize they are only there because the Blue ones didn’t do what we asked of them. The Red ones know this and they know that they can be just as easily replaced by some new Blue ones should they get out of line.
Politicians have short memories. A couple of days, at most, if we’re lucky. Because of this, they will immediately return to their Republicrat mentality and shove forward with their ideology in the face of our opposition if we are not diligent about reminding them why they are there.
So my personal opinion at this point is that we can mold our elected officials to the will of the people by voting them in and out of office when they do not perform as desired. Whether they be blue or red is of less consequence as to what their actions are while in office. However, this requires significant diligence on our part…and that is what makes me nervous.
Are we up to the task?
