Red Herrings
All of this manufactured media outrage about debt and fiscal cliffs is bullshit. It's actually a red herring meant to distract from the real truths that the complicit don't want revealed. For example, CEO's and the "investor class" don't want to be taxed. Yet on Black Friday nearly every WalMart and mall in America was staffed with dozens of police officers used to control the stampeding hordes of morons that are their customer base. They use the roads - trucks causing greatly accelerated road wear rates versus cars - to stock their big-box retail stores, and the ports and rail lines to bring in the disposable Chinese crap they hawk. Yet they are emphatic in their refusal to willingly contribute to this supporting infrastructure that enabled their accumulation of grotesque wealth in the first place.
They have done their damnedest to eradicating manufacturing in this country by outsourcing; thereby removing the huge tax base of reasonably compensated workers who paid 22-33% of their income in taxes, and transferred those revenues to the top 2% who pay ~12% at best, and generally shelter most of their earning in offshore accounts to avoid taxation while leaving what little remains in circulation as salaries to retail store workers who are the economic lowest common denominator and pay little to no taxes at all because they are below the poverty line. And then the thieving bastards refuse to contribute to the very infrastructure that enabled their accumulation of vast wealth; haughtily branding everyone who objects as "losers" and "takers." It's called gaming the system, and the bulk of those "taking" are those using these red herring arguments. This exact same rhetoric has been used in politics for over 100 years; always resulting in massive declines in government revenues. I'll be the first to admit that there are some aspects of the government, both federal and state, that are bloated, ineffectual, and even criminally complicit, but many of these issues are attributable, not to government, but to BAD government. Government stuffed to capacity with industry tools and rampant nepotism; people who do not meet even the most basic requirements of the job as intended. In other words, a complete waste of taxpayer monies.
Every time you hear someone utter the words Fiscal Cliff, Job Creators, Growing the Economy, and Entitlement Reform, ignore anything that comes from their lying mouth henceforth.
Canards, all.
Fiscal Cliff: There is no such thing. It's a scary sounding load of hogwash used to frighten moronic Tea Partiers and red state southerners into a frenzy - to their own detriment. The primary result will be an automatic increase in taxes to Clinton era rates. Whoopee. Nothing is going to stop functioning, least of all the economy. People will still buy groceries, toilet paper, and fucking Chinese iPads. What it does do is eliminate the ability to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the top 5% without affecting the rest of the US. Once the middle class and the top 5% of earners are separated, the GOP doesn't want to look stupid (i.e. their real motivations to be revealed) when they are forced to decide on cuts for ONLY the lowest payers on the rung while leaving their friends, relatives, and best contributors out in the cold. We live in a world of fiat currency and debt has absolutely nothing to do with job creation, investment or income potential. It's a problem, to be sure, but not for the reasons the avaricious bullshitters maintain.
And just for historical reference, remember that the top tax rates in this country have been as high as 91% in 1963, and were 70% in 1965; not exactly periods of great public austerity. The rich still got richer, and the middle class grew steadily; in fact, my parents had it far easier than those of my generation. And this was before the myriad of tax loopholes, which were engineered into the grotesquely complicated tax code by hordes of bought and paid for congress critters and "tax consultant", "wealth preserving foundations", which are now present in the tax code, existed.
Job Creators: One of the biggest lies out there. According to the numbers I've collected, the top 1% doesn't create jobs. Less than 2% of people in those top brackets want anything to do with sullying their pink hands by manufacturing anything other than unsecured debt and Ponzi Schemes. The bulk of that group makes their money by "hypertrading" and gaming the stock market, to the chagrin of every _real_ corporation that tries to exist and contribute to the hostile environment that is what is left of America. The fact is, most "Job Creators" are those that make less than $500k a year. One can only look towards Wall Street and the hundreds of failed Ponzi Schemes unleashed during the deregulated Bush years to see the drain they place on the actual economy. People like Lee Farkas of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker / Colonial BancGroup almost single-handedly brought down not only the Florida housing market, but were major participants in the bundling of trash mortgage securities to the Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac FHA investors as well as dumping tons of worthless paper into Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas via Bank of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor,_Bean_%26_Whitaker
Or how about the organized, criminal fleecing of Jefferson County, Alabama, which has effectively destroyed the county and the lives of those who live in and around Birmingham. In a perfect storm of criminal activity, Wall Street banks and bribe taking politicians turn the construction of a sewage treatment plant in to one the nation's most publicly observable examples of what Wall Street Banksters and unsophisticated red state political grifters can accomplish in three-part harmony. A 250 million dollar waste treatment plant ballooned into a 5 billion dollar financial albatross thanks to a morass of corrupt local officials and morally deficient financiers who got together to build a giant machine that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for the soulless vampire capitalists of Wall Street.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-main-street-20100331?print=true
And guess who gets to bail out all of this crap, and why the European economy is now in tatters? Blame also the ratings firms who gave this fiscal garbage AAA ratings resulting in the fleecing of otherwise stable economies worldwide. (excluding Greece which had problems for years.)
Growing the Economy: An irritatingly stupid phrase to begin with: you grow corn and flowers. But to put this into perspective, "growing" the economy implies increasing revenue streams, both retail and taxation. People are already drowning in consumer debt for shit they don't need, and what exactly are you going to sell that you aren't already selling? The only way to "grow" the economy is to either reduce the already pathetic lifespan of imported consumer goods so that they require replacement more often, or increase the population to unmanageable levels. When considering environmental damage, energy, water, and arable land issues, marked increases in population is utter folly. And when factoring into this equation China and India, both of which are increasing exponentially their consumption of world resources, triply so.
Want another way to "grow the economy?" Clawback all of those outsourced jobs that heretofore provided livable wages to the residents of this country and provided tax revenues sufficient to run the damned country and provide for the health and welfare of those who live in it. Don't want to pay employees? Well how about huge import tariffs based upon comparative standards of living. Nothing revolutionary here, either; the early 1900's were filled with such examples.
But the former solution sure beats sending trillions of US dollars to China and watching them filter into massive military buildups that we then have to counter with massive increases in taxes to fund a corrupt military industrial complex. Think about it; they already have. With those "evil commie Soviets" now rendered impotent due to internal economic collapse, what better way to keep money flowing into their malignant coffers than to perpetuate endless "wars on terror" and eventually counter threats from "evil commie China", who is already rattling her sabers towards Taiwan and Japan over a handful of uninhabited islands in the South China Sea. A self-created foe; proving once again that Eisenhower got it right.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19709355
And to lay bare another misconception, the current obsession with the stock market as some kind of barometer of economic health for the majority of Americans is just more bullshit. The stock market was originally intended to enable companies to gain access to the funding needed to facilitate the purchase of machinery and infrastructure in order to meet expanding product markets. In this age of millisecond trades, however, it exists primarily to enable legions of avaricious pink-handed money-changers to divert and deplete as much money as possible from the actual production of goods into their own pockets at light-speed rates. There are huge sectors of the economy that exist solely to contrive various computer algorithms meant to tap into this revenue stream and bleed off as much as possible into the pockets of those who have no interest in providing jobs or manufacturing anything other than short term profits. Anyone foolish enough to invest in Wall Street, who is not rich and well connected, might as well go to Vegas and piss his money away at the blackjack tables - the odds are far better. You will simply be providing the revenue stream which these grifters feed upon. Wall Street has devolved into a seething morass of insider trading, confidence games, corrupt SEC officials, and outright fraud.
http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/tag/sec/
Entitlement Reform: Yet another canard which has nothing to do with the "Fiscal Cliff" or US debt. But again, if more, actual well paid workers were contributing into the pool which backs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid it could be in better shape. Yet it's a separately funded pool that is actually solvent and was reworked in the 80's. More importantly, however, is that for all the whining about "entitlements", there is so much fraud and waste involved enriching the various criminals that feed from this pool you will see no realistic changes, it's all just more noise meant to distract. These investor backed monopolies that have taken over what is laughably called "healthcare" in this country are nothing but the same ilk that have perpetrated massive, organized fraud upon the banking, mortgage, and financial markets worldwide. Wherever there is a massive revenue stream you will find them, gorging themselves, to the detriment of those who contribute to and depend on these services.
Finally, the primary reason there is tremendous pushback against increased Federal regulation of these various rogue entities is because it is far easier to demonize Federal oversight to a bunch of racist secessionists yearning for a replay of the Civil War and then buy off the state legislators who are utterly corruptible due to poor public oversight and lack of accountability. Especially in the poorly educated southern red states, NASCAR and the NFL get far more coverage than anything to do with governance, and they like it that way. Just fine!
One only has to look towards, again, the southern red states to see how easily corporate entities can buy off these alleged state lawmakers as they force consumers to fund the construction of their corporate equity. Rate payers in GA are being extorted to the tune of 2+ billion dollars for the construction of two new nuclear power plants that may, in fact, never even obtain approval from the NRC for operation, yet they have built-in, guaranteed profit margins for their construction. Citizen ratepayers do not receive stock, equity in kind, and likely won't even be the recipients of the electrical power that might eventually be generated; most of the power will probably end up sold to other states while GA ends up footing the bill for construction and cleanup of the messes left behind, a la TVA. And at the Federal level, over 8.3 billion dollars have been provided as taxpayer backed loans for these plants.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/03/power-politics-big-nuclears-money-grab.html
http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/05/institute-index-fighting-nuclear-powers-money-grab.html
TVA coal ash spill (not nuclear, but coal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
In Florida, over 550 million dollars has already been collected for the construction of two nuclear plants in Levy County that have been effectively cancelled. The original construction cost estimate in 2006, when the CWIP law was passed, was 6 billion; in 2007, 10 billion; in 2008, 17 billion; currently estimated to cost 22 billion. Original completion date: 2012; last estimated completion date: 2027. Total current cost per Progress Energy customer is over 340 dollars. Amount to be refunded to defrauded ratepayers? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
Florida Power & Light was planning to build two new reactors at its Turkey Point plant near Miami for an estimated 20 billion dollars. Amount to be refunded to ratepayers due to CWIP advance construction funding laws should these plants not be completed? Again, ZERO.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/02/institute-index-nuclear-rebirth-dead-in-florida.html
And here you were, thinking that the Federal government is your only problem? Ha!
BAD government combined with complacent, low-information voters who repeatedly elect complicit, predominately GOP criminals in office are the problem. Note the votes on this bill and their party affiliation:
http://votesmart.org/bill/votes/23708
So much for the GOP's stand on fiscal conservancy, "fair markets", public service, or anything other than graft and corruption.
They have done their damnedest to eradicating manufacturing in this country by outsourcing; thereby removing the huge tax base of reasonably compensated workers who paid 22-33% of their income in taxes, and transferred those revenues to the top 2% who pay ~12% at best, and generally shelter most of their earning in offshore accounts to avoid taxation while leaving what little remains in circulation as salaries to retail store workers who are the economic lowest common denominator and pay little to no taxes at all because they are below the poverty line. And then the thieving bastards refuse to contribute to the very infrastructure that enabled their accumulation of vast wealth; haughtily branding everyone who objects as "losers" and "takers." It's called gaming the system, and the bulk of those "taking" are those using these red herring arguments. This exact same rhetoric has been used in politics for over 100 years; always resulting in massive declines in government revenues. I'll be the first to admit that there are some aspects of the government, both federal and state, that are bloated, ineffectual, and even criminally complicit, but many of these issues are attributable, not to government, but to BAD government. Government stuffed to capacity with industry tools and rampant nepotism; people who do not meet even the most basic requirements of the job as intended. In other words, a complete waste of taxpayer monies.
Every time you hear someone utter the words Fiscal Cliff, Job Creators, Growing the Economy, and Entitlement Reform, ignore anything that comes from their lying mouth henceforth.
Canards, all.
Fiscal Cliff: There is no such thing. It's a scary sounding load of hogwash used to frighten moronic Tea Partiers and red state southerners into a frenzy - to their own detriment. The primary result will be an automatic increase in taxes to Clinton era rates. Whoopee. Nothing is going to stop functioning, least of all the economy. People will still buy groceries, toilet paper, and fucking Chinese iPads. What it does do is eliminate the ability to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the top 5% without affecting the rest of the US. Once the middle class and the top 5% of earners are separated, the GOP doesn't want to look stupid (i.e. their real motivations to be revealed) when they are forced to decide on cuts for ONLY the lowest payers on the rung while leaving their friends, relatives, and best contributors out in the cold. We live in a world of fiat currency and debt has absolutely nothing to do with job creation, investment or income potential. It's a problem, to be sure, but not for the reasons the avaricious bullshitters maintain.
And just for historical reference, remember that the top tax rates in this country have been as high as 91% in 1963, and were 70% in 1965; not exactly periods of great public austerity. The rich still got richer, and the middle class grew steadily; in fact, my parents had it far easier than those of my generation. And this was before the myriad of tax loopholes, which were engineered into the grotesquely complicated tax code by hordes of bought and paid for congress critters and "tax consultant", "wealth preserving foundations", which are now present in the tax code, existed.
Job Creators: One of the biggest lies out there. According to the numbers I've collected, the top 1% doesn't create jobs. Less than 2% of people in those top brackets want anything to do with sullying their pink hands by manufacturing anything other than unsecured debt and Ponzi Schemes. The bulk of that group makes their money by "hypertrading" and gaming the stock market, to the chagrin of every _real_ corporation that tries to exist and contribute to the hostile environment that is what is left of America. The fact is, most "Job Creators" are those that make less than $500k a year. One can only look towards Wall Street and the hundreds of failed Ponzi Schemes unleashed during the deregulated Bush years to see the drain they place on the actual economy. People like Lee Farkas of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker / Colonial BancGroup almost single-handedly brought down not only the Florida housing market, but were major participants in the bundling of trash mortgage securities to the Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac FHA investors as well as dumping tons of worthless paper into Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas via Bank of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor,_Bean_%26_Whitaker
Or how about the organized, criminal fleecing of Jefferson County, Alabama, which has effectively destroyed the county and the lives of those who live in and around Birmingham. In a perfect storm of criminal activity, Wall Street banks and bribe taking politicians turn the construction of a sewage treatment plant in to one the nation's most publicly observable examples of what Wall Street Banksters and unsophisticated red state political grifters can accomplish in three-part harmony. A 250 million dollar waste treatment plant ballooned into a 5 billion dollar financial albatross thanks to a morass of corrupt local officials and morally deficient financiers who got together to build a giant machine that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for the soulless vampire capitalists of Wall Street.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-main-street-20100331?print=true
And guess who gets to bail out all of this crap, and why the European economy is now in tatters? Blame also the ratings firms who gave this fiscal garbage AAA ratings resulting in the fleecing of otherwise stable economies worldwide. (excluding Greece which had problems for years.)
Growing the Economy: An irritatingly stupid phrase to begin with: you grow corn and flowers. But to put this into perspective, "growing" the economy implies increasing revenue streams, both retail and taxation. People are already drowning in consumer debt for shit they don't need, and what exactly are you going to sell that you aren't already selling? The only way to "grow" the economy is to either reduce the already pathetic lifespan of imported consumer goods so that they require replacement more often, or increase the population to unmanageable levels. When considering environmental damage, energy, water, and arable land issues, marked increases in population is utter folly. And when factoring into this equation China and India, both of which are increasing exponentially their consumption of world resources, triply so.
Want another way to "grow the economy?" Clawback all of those outsourced jobs that heretofore provided livable wages to the residents of this country and provided tax revenues sufficient to run the damned country and provide for the health and welfare of those who live in it. Don't want to pay employees? Well how about huge import tariffs based upon comparative standards of living. Nothing revolutionary here, either; the early 1900's were filled with such examples.
But the former solution sure beats sending trillions of US dollars to China and watching them filter into massive military buildups that we then have to counter with massive increases in taxes to fund a corrupt military industrial complex. Think about it; they already have. With those "evil commie Soviets" now rendered impotent due to internal economic collapse, what better way to keep money flowing into their malignant coffers than to perpetuate endless "wars on terror" and eventually counter threats from "evil commie China", who is already rattling her sabers towards Taiwan and Japan over a handful of uninhabited islands in the South China Sea. A self-created foe; proving once again that Eisenhower got it right.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19709355
And to lay bare another misconception, the current obsession with the stock market as some kind of barometer of economic health for the majority of Americans is just more bullshit. The stock market was originally intended to enable companies to gain access to the funding needed to facilitate the purchase of machinery and infrastructure in order to meet expanding product markets. In this age of millisecond trades, however, it exists primarily to enable legions of avaricious pink-handed money-changers to divert and deplete as much money as possible from the actual production of goods into their own pockets at light-speed rates. There are huge sectors of the economy that exist solely to contrive various computer algorithms meant to tap into this revenue stream and bleed off as much as possible into the pockets of those who have no interest in providing jobs or manufacturing anything other than short term profits. Anyone foolish enough to invest in Wall Street, who is not rich and well connected, might as well go to Vegas and piss his money away at the blackjack tables - the odds are far better. You will simply be providing the revenue stream which these grifters feed upon. Wall Street has devolved into a seething morass of insider trading, confidence games, corrupt SEC officials, and outright fraud.
http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/tag/sec/
Entitlement Reform: Yet another canard which has nothing to do with the "Fiscal Cliff" or US debt. But again, if more, actual well paid workers were contributing into the pool which backs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid it could be in better shape. Yet it's a separately funded pool that is actually solvent and was reworked in the 80's. More importantly, however, is that for all the whining about "entitlements", there is so much fraud and waste involved enriching the various criminals that feed from this pool you will see no realistic changes, it's all just more noise meant to distract. These investor backed monopolies that have taken over what is laughably called "healthcare" in this country are nothing but the same ilk that have perpetrated massive, organized fraud upon the banking, mortgage, and financial markets worldwide. Wherever there is a massive revenue stream you will find them, gorging themselves, to the detriment of those who contribute to and depend on these services.
Finally, the primary reason there is tremendous pushback against increased Federal regulation of these various rogue entities is because it is far easier to demonize Federal oversight to a bunch of racist secessionists yearning for a replay of the Civil War and then buy off the state legislators who are utterly corruptible due to poor public oversight and lack of accountability. Especially in the poorly educated southern red states, NASCAR and the NFL get far more coverage than anything to do with governance, and they like it that way. Just fine!
One only has to look towards, again, the southern red states to see how easily corporate entities can buy off these alleged state lawmakers as they force consumers to fund the construction of their corporate equity. Rate payers in GA are being extorted to the tune of 2+ billion dollars for the construction of two new nuclear power plants that may, in fact, never even obtain approval from the NRC for operation, yet they have built-in, guaranteed profit margins for their construction. Citizen ratepayers do not receive stock, equity in kind, and likely won't even be the recipients of the electrical power that might eventually be generated; most of the power will probably end up sold to other states while GA ends up footing the bill for construction and cleanup of the messes left behind, a la TVA. And at the Federal level, over 8.3 billion dollars have been provided as taxpayer backed loans for these plants.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/03/power-politics-big-nuclears-money-grab.html
http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/05/institute-index-fighting-nuclear-powers-money-grab.html
TVA coal ash spill (not nuclear, but coal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
In Florida, over 550 million dollars has already been collected for the construction of two nuclear plants in Levy County that have been effectively cancelled. The original construction cost estimate in 2006, when the CWIP law was passed, was 6 billion; in 2007, 10 billion; in 2008, 17 billion; currently estimated to cost 22 billion. Original completion date: 2012; last estimated completion date: 2027. Total current cost per Progress Energy customer is over 340 dollars. Amount to be refunded to defrauded ratepayers? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
Florida Power & Light was planning to build two new reactors at its Turkey Point plant near Miami for an estimated 20 billion dollars. Amount to be refunded to ratepayers due to CWIP advance construction funding laws should these plants not be completed? Again, ZERO.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/02/institute-index-nuclear-rebirth-dead-in-florida.html
And here you were, thinking that the Federal government is your only problem? Ha!
BAD government combined with complacent, low-information voters who repeatedly elect complicit, predominately GOP criminals in office are the problem. Note the votes on this bill and their party affiliation:
http://votesmart.org/bill/votes/23708
So much for the GOP's stand on fiscal conservancy, "fair markets", public service, or anything other than graft and corruption.
posted by Dr. Know at 3:29 PM
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