econarchy

By now we have all heard of the fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. After a successful career he started his own firm, which we now know was just a front for a massive Ponzai scheme. You see, Bernie raised money from people to payback former investors. So he had to keep raising more and more money from one group of people to hand it to another group. Eventually this scheme collapsed, as they always do.

Now we hear of another Billionaire, Allen Stanford, perpetrating another huge ponzai scheme. Just like Madoff, Stanford raised money from new investors to pay previous investors.

Does this sound familiar to you? It should, and for one key reason - this financial fraud that will undoubtedly result in prison for these two men is fundamentally identical to the US Tax System. Think about it. They took money from one group of people to give money to another group. And when the money ran out, they were exposed and their systems failed. Robbing with the right hand to give a handout with the left hand is exactly what Obama and the Liberals envision for the US.

We have had a “progressive tax” system in the US for a long time. The top 1% of wage earners pay 34% of all taxes. The top 10% pay  66% of all taxes, and the top 50% basically pay for it all - a whopping 97% of all taxes. This means that a solid HALF of the people who WORK (this doesn’t count the unemployed and unemployable) pay nothing in federal income tax.

So the way the system works is simple, take money from one group of people to give money to another group. The US tax system is especially insipid and unjust because they take the money from a powerless minority. When you rob from 1% of the population to get 34% of your income, what is that 1% going to do about it? Vote against you? That doesn’t sound very threatening when you can use the money from that 1% to buy the votes of 50% of the population. Oh, but Obama wants to cut the deficit. Yea, right. He has no plan to do that and the numbers speak for themselves.

Obama and Pelosi will never admit it, but they are no better than Madoff, Stanford, or any other scam artist. They stand up on their pedestals and decry the fraud and scheming of these people, but they create laws so they can get away with it. Liberal politicians are common crooks. Thieves. No different from someone who robs at gunpoint to line their own pockets. But since they are the Aristocracy put into power via Manifest Destiny, they feel like they have moral authority over us. They rob, and steal and deny freedom, liberty, and justice from a powerless minority to purchase support from the majority. It is the opposite of justice. It is the antithesis of liberty.

It is thievery; perpetrated by the worst kind of criminal - the kind that feels like they have a moral authority to commit their crime against liberty, freedom, and justice. Tyrannical rules such as these should be criticized and called out for what they are. They are even worse than Madoff and Stanford because they take your money by force. Nobody was forced to give their life savings to Madoff, but if you don’t pay your taxes you are going to prison. Period.

So spare us your moral superiority complex, Pelosi, Obama, and all the rest of you liberals. You are no better than the con artists and schemers that you decry from your pulpit.  In fact, you are worse.

Today’s cartoon by Sean Delonas in the NY Post:

Here is an excerpt from the best Op-Ed piece I have read in, well, maybe ever!

John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin’s sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that “this stewardess” would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly’s Clive Crook to write that “the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment.”

The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” From Richard Nixon’s invoking the “silent majority” to Mrs. Palin’s campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.

Read more at the WSJ

Wow! Thank goodness that the messiah and his cadre of liberal politicians swooped and rescued us from certain financial disaster! The “stimulus” bill has been signed into law.

There is only one problem - you may fool the majority of Americans because, well, let’s face it - there are a lot of stupid Americans. But you cannot fool the Markets, and the Markets know that this stimulus is nothing but BS Government Spending and European-style Socialism wrapped up in a pretty wrapper called “Economic Stimulus.” It isn’t a stimulus for anything other than the liberal agenda to replace the free markets with more government.

It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Lisa becomes President and wants to pass a tax increase, but her advisers  caution her that they need to call it something else so that the Americans support it. So they decide to call it a “temporary income adjustment” and everyone loves the idea. Even 10 years ago the writers of the Simpsons understood that if you take a piece of crap and call it something nice, Americans will support it. That is what we have with the “economic stimulus” bill. This bill was probably written 30 years ago when Carter  was President and this is the first chance the Liberals have had to actually pass the thing. It is garbage. It is Socialism. It won’t help the economy (by the liberals own admission) and we will be paying for it for years.

Face it - Liberals need a bad economy. It supports their agenda of forcing more people to be dependent on the government. And the higher the unemployment and the worse the economy, the more people become dependent on liberal programs. So bad economy = good news for Obama and the liberals. You probably wouldn’t like to work for a company that pays the CEO based on how poorly the company performs, but that is exactly what we have with the liberals that are running our country. The worse it gets, the better for them.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

If you have Sirius and/or XM, you will know what I am talking about. Sirius is struggling, and I know why. Here are the problems they need to fix:

- You have talkative DJs. Why on earth do you pay people to talk on satellite radio?! Trust me when I say that NOBODY pays $12 a month to listen to your DJ’s talk.

- The DJs you have are idiots. Here is how you save money - just play music!!! If we wanted to listen to stupid DJs talk about BS we would listen to free FM radio. Just play music and fire your talent. You can have one dude making $12 an hour sit and watch the computers playing music on 100 channels.

- Integrate XM and Sirius already. Why aren’t the channels aligned? The stations I listen to on XM in my car are on different channels than Sirius at my house. You could have aligned the channels in 10 minutes. What is the problem?

- Pay your “talent” based on ratings. Poll listeners to see how many are actually listening to Stern, Opie and Anthony, etc and pay them accordingly. Stern isn’t bringing in enough money to cover his costs, and that is a fact.

- Did I mention your annoying DJs? Why the @#$% did Sirius and XM think that we want to listen to the same annoying DJ prattle that we get inundated with on FM radio!? Fire the #$*@ing DJs on your music channels already. How Sirius figures that people want to listen to annoying DJs on their music channels is beyond me.

- Quit changing the programming every 4 days. Get Sirius and XM receivers on the same channels, with the same programming, and then leave it that way. Change it once a year or so if necessary, but stop the constant changing. Having to reprogram all of my radios 5 times a month is getting very old.

- Fire the DJs on the music channels. They suck. Big time.

Sirius CEO, Mel Karmazin

If you don’t get your act together, you are going to be out of business. In 5 years every single car on the road will have an iPod adapter and (gasp) maybe even mobile broadband which connects to FREE internet radio. You better fix your stupid problems and fast. Oh, and tell your CEO to start putting on some sun block and scale down the visits to the tanning salon to once a day, maximum.

Cars that nobody wants, unsustainable labor costs…. Detroit is doomed and it is downright foolish for the taxpayers to keep it alive. Today we heard that the Unions are talking with GM again after closing down discussions over the weekend. The Unions are a joke. The very fact that we let any group collude to fix wages is absolute insanity, but we do. The US auto companies have had no choice but to cave to the extortion tactics of the Unions for the past 50 years, and they have been suffering ever since. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that the US auto makers are on par with the Imports, and the Unions are largely the reason why. Bailing them out now is just a band aid on a severed artery. Without finding workers that are willing to work for the actual value of unskilled labor, say $10 an hour, the US auto makers have no chance. They also need to invest heavily in automation - something the Unions have prevented for decades.

Unions are the kryptonite to productivity and efficiency, and that is a FACT. Nothing would make me happier than to see Detroit and all it’s Unions flushed down the crapper. Illiterate, uneducated auto workers earning $100k+ per year….. sickening.

So why let Detroit fail, but bail out the banks? The reason is simple - we don’t need American cars, but we need the American banking system. Banks keep EVERY buisiness afloat. They keep the entire economy afloat. Banks need bailed out and, as much as I hate to admit it, banks should probably be Nationalized. Or at the very least, much more seriously regulated.

Even fastidious Conservatives like me understand that certain things need to be managed by the Government. Things like the Military, police, fire departments and yes, Banks, are probably best managed as a public good.

However, unlike all those other public goods I mentioned, we need competition in the banking industry. Therefore the answer is probably much more highly-controlled Government oversight. We all agree that banks cannot act without any rules, because when they do we see people acting only for their own best interests and that is what got us here to begin with. Since we all rely on the banks for the very fundamental stability of the government we need to be able to have confidence in them. And they cannot act with such a high level of risk as they did over the last decade.

So let Detroit fall straight into the pot, but save the banks. But save them with a whole lot of strings attached. No more 25 yr old MBAs with 3 months of work experience sitting on Wall Street earning $2 Million a year to take stupid bets. Regulate the banks and flip off Detroit.

Hope? Try Hopelessness. Transparency? Try total secrecy and threats. Leadership? How about caving in to politics as usual. Obama is a failed President. Already. Yes, I said it. I mean, I know we are still giving the guy on-the-job training since he has less work experience than the lady helping you find the pooper scoopers at your local Wal-Mart, but Obama is nothing but a mouthpiece for rhetoric. Now he is touring the nation giving his stump speeches, probably because that is all he knows how to do. Hey Obama, the campaign is over! How about rather than travel around giving speaches you get to the Hill and tell Pelosi it may be wise to postpone her little junked to Rome to, you know, DO YOUR JOB!!!!

But that takes leadership, and Obama is an empty bag of hot air. This piece from the WSJ Editorial sums it up quite nicely.

“President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

AP

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

This fearmongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics. It is bad history because our current economic woes don’t come close to those of the 1930s. At worst, a comparison to the 1981-82 recession might be appropriate. Consider the job losses that Mr. Obama always cites. In the last year, the U.S. economy shed 3.4 million jobs. That’s a grim statistic for sure, but represents just 2.2% of the labor force. From November 1981 to October 1982, 2.4 million jobs were lost — fewer in number than today, but the labor force was smaller. So 1981-82 job losses totaled 2.2% of the labor force, the same as now.”

Hmmm…. I always thought that the Democrat’s campaigned against using Fear to pursuade people and win support. So much for that idea. “Do as I say, or else!” seems to be Obama’s new slogan.