Earlier this month, Trump touted the idea that, under his tax plan, 1,000"s of Americans would be able to "file their taxes on a single, little beautiful sheet of paper." Of course, this so-called "postcard" that Trump and Paul Ryan have referenced repeatedly over the past several months is basically nothing more than a 1040EZ shrunken down to fit on a smaller piece of paper but who are we to rain on their parade?
That said, while many Americans will enjoy an easier tax filing in 2018, or at least as easy as the 1040EZ, others, especially high-income folks living in high-tax states like New York and California, are suddenly scrambling to retain accountants to figure out how they might best game the new tax code to avoid higher rates.
Of course, one of the key opportunities for "gaming" results from the new taxation rules for "pass-through" entities. Unlike high-income earners filing as individuals who lost a substantial portion of their deductions, pass through entities, with the exception of certain professionals like doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers, are still eligible for a 20% deduction from their earnings. To put that into perspective, a 20% deduction reduces Trump"s top marginal tax rate for pass-through entities to 29.6% from the 37% that will be paid by individual filers.
Not surprisingly, as CBS points out, the change has pretty much everyone suddenly plotting a post-holiday discussion with their boss to see if they can be fired and promptly re-hired as an independent contractor.
First, you convince your boss to let you quit and hire you back as a contractor after you"ve set yourself up as a sole proprietorship. Assuming you can do that and your tax treatment is better, you can offer your ex-employer the same services for less -- the company does not have to worry about giving you benefits or paying its share of your Social Security and Medicare taxes. That latter part is the iffy one for you, and the numbers would have to work out. "Do you really want to go without health care and a 401(k)?" asked online financial adviser group Betterment"s tax expert, Eric Bronnenkant.
Meanwhile, even lawyers, who are specifically excluded from the pass-through rules, could qualify by leaving their law firms and pursuing a position as an in-house counsel.
An end run works like this: A law partner, sick of the barricade to a kinder tax rate other pass-through people enjoy, moves over to be in-house counsel at an engineering firm, which is not on the ban list. "Now she"s no longer in a specified service," wrote Ari Glogower, a law professor at Ohio State University, on Vox.com. "Voila, she may qualify for the pass-through deduction."
As we pointed out earlier this week (see: Why Wall Street Is Furious At The Trump Tax Plan), for others who can"t game the pass-through system, like most of the traders earning big bucks on wall street, the best option might be to simply move from New York to a lower-taxed state like Florida or Texas.
Still others are considering a move to lower-taxed states like Florida and Texas which, as Todd Morgan, chairman of Bel Air Investment Advisors in Los Angeles notes, sounds like a great idea right to the point that you realize that actually entails uprooting your entire family and starting a whole new life in a different part of the country...something that generally doesn"t go over well with teenage kids..."If you’re already rich why would you move to another state and live a different life just to save some money on taxes? What are you going to do with the money? Buy more clothes? Eat more food?"
Finally, the tax bill could even influence decisions on if/when people decide to get a divorce. As Bloomberg points out, starting January 1, 2019 divorce suddenly becomes way more attractive for the recipients of alimony and punitive for payers as the payments will not longer be counted as income or allowed as a deduction.
Tax considerations are even changing for those getting a divorce.
Under the law, divorced taxpayers who pay alimony would no longer be able to deduct those payments from their income, and recipients of alimony would also no longer need to report the money as income. However, the provision doesn’t go into effect right away and instead applies to divorces finalized after Dec. 31, 2018. So, depending on whether you’re set to pay or receive alimony, you might want to speed up or slow down those divorce proceedings.
...which may or may not have been a clause specifically added by Melania...
The twin scourges of opioid addiction and worsening wealth inequality are literally draining the lifeblood from the American public. Case in point: The Centers for Disease Control confirmed earlier today that the average life expectancy at birth declined in 2016 for the second consecutive year - the first multiyear decline since 1963, when a flu epidemic led to a rash of deaths as hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans succumbed to the virus.
The increase has been fueled by a 21% rise in drug overdose deaths, according to the Washington Post.
Let that sink in for a second: In 1963, penicillin was a relatively recent innovation. We live in an age of unprecedented medicinal efficacy. Despite this, Americans are sicker than ever before.
And as if that weren’t enough, they’re also spending more on health-care than ever before. Data from the NHE shows the US spent a staggering $3.3 trillion on healthcare in 2016, equivalent to roughly 18% of GDP.
“I think we should take it very seriously,” said Bob Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, told the Washington Post. “If you look at the other developed countries in the world, they’re not seeing this kind of thing. Life expectancy is going up."
As we’ve highlighted time and time again, more than 42,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses alone in 2016 - a 28% increase over 2015. When deaths from drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines are included, the overall increase was 21%.
A multiyear decline in life expectancy is more commonly associated with AIDS epidemics in southern and eastern Africa or wars in Syria and Afghanistan, said Majid Ezzati, a professor of public health at Imperial College London who has studied life expectancy.
“The story does come down to young people,” he said. “It’s the overdose story, to a large extent."
Last year - when the CDC data showed the first annualized drop in life expectancy since the early 1990s - public health observers declared that this could be the beginning of a seriously troubling trend that could have far reaching repercussions for the US economy. Experts, including Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, examined the impact of so-called “diseases of despair” - drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism - as well as small increases in deaths from heart disease, strokes and diabetes as the Baby Boom generation ages into retirement.
Furthermore, the 2016 data shows that just three major causes of death are responsible: unintentional injuries, Alzheimer’s disease and suicides, with the bulk of the difference attributable to the 63,632 people who died of overdoses. That total was an increase of more than 11,000 over the 52,404 who died of the same cause in 2015. This trend was largely driven by deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which more than doubled from the previous year. Heroin and prescription opioid overdose deaths also rose, but more modestly.
At the same time, a long decline in deaths from heart disease continued a six-year trend of leveling out, Anderson said. The small decrease last year in the rate of the nation’s leading cause of death no longer canceled the drug epidemic’s impact on life expectancy, Anderson said.
“The key factor is the increase in drug overdose deaths,” he said.
Overall, life expectancy dropped by a tenth of a year, from 78.7 to 78.6. It fell two-tenths of a year for men, who have much higher overdose death rates, from 76.3 to 76.1 years. Women’s life expectancy held steady at 81.1 years.
While drug mortality has been increasing among all age groups since 1999, it’s highest among those ages 25 to 54. Their fatal overdose rate for all drugs was roughly 35 cases per 100,000 individuals in 2016, compared with 12 deaths per 100,000 for people under 24 and six deaths per 100,000 among seniors 65 and older.
Examining this data through the lens of gender reveals another startling detail: The bulk of this increase is driven by a spike in overdose deaths among men.
As WaPo points out, men of all ages (26 deaths per 100,000) are twice as likely to die of a drug overdose as women (13 per 100,000). At the state level, West Virginia stands alone as the epicenter of overdose mortality, with 52 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2016. The next two states, New Hampshire and Ohio, each saw 39 deaths per 100,000 last year.
“This is no longer an opioid crisis,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former Rhode Island congressman who was a member of President Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. “This is a moral crisis . . . we know how to answer this problem, but we can’t get around our own prejudices."
During the campaign, President Trump promised to do everything in his power to combat the opioid epidemic. But so far, his actions have fallen far short of the recommendations from a committee that he created in March to study options to suppress the crisis. Most notably, Trump ignored a recommendation from the committee to declare the opioid crisis a national emergency - a designation that would’ve allowed the hardest-hit states to access federal disaster-relief funds. Instead Trump declared it a national health crisis, leaving states empty-handed.
Another factor that shows just how damaging opioids have been to the American public: last year, rates of heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, strokes, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease fell, as did the nation’s overall death rate. But this wasn’t enough to offset the impact of opioids.
Increasing incidences of Alzheimer’s disease have also contributed to this trend.
“As people avoid [cancer and heart disease], they’re going to survive long enough to die of Alzheimer’s,” he said.
And while only limited provisional data is available for 2017, things don’t look any better.
“My guess is that when all of the data are in that the [2017] trend line will be at least as steep as for 2016, if not steeper,” Anderson said.
And in case you wondered what all this has to do with me... apart from it"s "your" life expectancy, well this is what happened to the only thing that really matters to everyone... The Dow... the last time that US life expectancy dropped for two straight years...
BBC’s ‘America First?’ series sent Aleem Maqbool, a North America correspondent, to the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, where he uncovered a rather shocking statistic in which 46% of the inner city residents suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a rate that is much higher than U.S. soldiers (10-20%).
Maqbool describes Atlanta’s inner city environment as a “war zone”, where death and destruction are contributing to high levels of PTSD in adults and children. He further quoted researchers and said levels of PTSD in America’s inner cities are comparable to refugee populations around the world.
To make matters worse, the video makes the claim: gun murder rates (per 100,000) in the US are at astronomical levels when compared to other countries. A startling find, when considering the US, the richest country in the world, does not perform well in the international rankings.
As the crisis spreads, PTSD in children and young adults are sparking a public health crisis, where traumatic events are negatively influencing brain development.
This is already having a significant effect on inner-city youth, who already suffer from broken families, drug abuse, education inequality, and wealth inequality.
Back in 2016, President Trump told the American people the true state of the inner cities. He correctly labeled the areas across the country, a “war zone” (see below).
"The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities,” Trump said. “For those hurting the most, who have been failed and failed by their politicians, year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers, poverty, rejection, horrible education, no houses, no homes, no ownership, crime at levels that nobody has seen. You could go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.”
“It is a disaster the way African-Americans are living in many cases and in many cases the way Hispanics are living,” Trump continued. “And I say it with such a deep felt feeling, what do you have to lose? I’ll straighten it out. I’ll bring jobs back, We’ll bring spirit back. I’ll get rid of the crime, so you’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
America’s once hustling and bustling inner cities are contracting in terms of economic productivity and in some cases population. Atlanta’s inner city war zone is not the only city dealing with death and destruction, which raises our eyebrow because children who are suffering from war zone PTSD is much more widespread than thought, making it an unrecognized national public health crisis. As per MSN, America’s most dangerous inner cities:
DETROIT, MICHIGAN: Violent crime rate: 2,047 per 100,000
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: Violent crime rate: 1,913 per 100,000
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE: Violent crime rate: 1,820 per 100,000
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND: Violent crime rate: 1,780 per 100,000
ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS: Violent crime rate: 1,659 per 100,000
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: Violent crime rate: 1,655 per 100,000
CLEVELAND, OHIO: Violent crime rate: 1,631 per 100,000
Like Alcoholics Anonymous, President Trump submitted the inner cities into America Anonymous, a 12 step program to get the country back on the right path. The first step is admitting there is a problem, which was completed in 2016, with eleven more steps to go, who said this was going to be an easy rebuild?
It’s time the American people awaken from their decades’ long sleep and learn the truth about the disastrous mistakes government has made in governing this country.
In the medium range, Americans will have to start stomaching the consequences of bad policies in the form of an entire generation of children who are suffering from PTSD and the ramifications surrounding brain development.
Following reports of more sexual misconduct allegations, Senator Al Franken is facing a revolt among his female Senate "collegaues" as seven female senators are demanding his resignation... "let someone else serve!"
Despite his apology and genuflection, further allegation shave appeared and that appears to have been the tipping point for Franken"s peers.
As Bloomberg reports, within minutes of each other, seven female senators - Senators Patty Murray of Washington, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Kamala Harris of California, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconisn - and two males (Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio) posted messages on Facebook and Twitter saying Franken of Minnesota must resign.
We suspect in the interst of virtue-signaling that every female Democratic Senator will quickly pile on.
"I consider Senator Franken to be a friend and have enjoyed working with him in the Senate in our shared fight to help American families," Gillibrand wrote on Facebook.
"I have been shocked and disappointed to learn over the last few weeks that a colleague I am fond of personally has engaged in behavior towards women that is unacceptable,"
"While Senator Franken is entitled to have the Ethics Committee conclude its review, I believe it would be better for our country if he sent a clear message that any kind of mistreatment of women in our society isn’t acceptable by stepping aside to let someone else serve."
"Sexual harassment and misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not occur anywhere. I believe the best thing for Senator Franken to do is step down," Harris said in her statement.
Franken has been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct.
When was the last time you stopped to think about how much the government spends on welfare?
Most people probably don’t think about it too much, but we bet even for those who do, they don’t know how much their government spends, much less what the money actually pays for.
That’s why we created a new map showing you how much each state spends on the public dole.
Our viz takes U.S. Census Bureau data from GoBankingRates to create a map for the entire country. Each bubble represents a state, and the size of the bubble corresponds to the size of the public expenditure on public welfare. We then color-coded each circle according to the size of the expense. Shades of blue mean that the state spends relatively little money, but pink and red indicate a higher-than-average amount. There’s a lot that you can quickly learn by breaking mapping public welfare expenses in this war.
First off, what is public welfare? This can be a controversial topic with a lot of stereotypes, so let’s get our definitions straight. If you rely on public welfare, then you turn to the government for help with paying your basic necessities, like food, housing and healthcare. The federal government runs programs that provide these types of things, and to varying degrees, so do some states. As you can clearly see, some places are more generous than others.
California is the obvious standout on the West Coast, dropping north of $100 billion on public assistance. Texas is the only other Western state with over $30 billion of expenditures, followed by Washington at under $12 billion.
There’s a significant cluster of high-spending states across the Northeast, including New York ($61.4B) and Pennsylvania ($26.8B). Florida stands out in the South at over $27B, thanks in large part to its retirement communities. There’s also a cluster of states in the Upper Midwest in light pink, where there a lot of old manufacturing cities.
We should also point out the states with much smaller expenditures, stretching across the Midwest and into the deep South. The simplest explanation for the lack of huge welfare budgets in these states has to do with geography: there just aren’t a lot of big cities in places like Iowa and Alabama compared to other states. This helps explain why California and New York spend so much on welfare. They rank first and fourth as the most populous states.
Here’s a straightforward list of the top ten states with the highest expenditures on public welfare. Note the enormous difference between California and New York and the rest of the country.
1. California - $103 Billion
2. New York - $61.4 Billion
3. Texas - $35.4 Billion
4. Florida - $27.2 Billion
5. Pennsylvania - $26.7 Billion
6. Illinois - $21 Billion
7. Ohio - $20 Billion
8. Massachusetts - $18.6 Billion
9. New Jersey - $17.3 Billion
10. Michigan - $16.3 Billion
Here’s an interesting fact for you. The top ten states listed above spend more on public welfare ($346.9B) than all of the bottom forty states (plus the District of Columbia) combined ($262.7B).
Regardless of how populated any particular state is, you want to pay attention to these numbers because they foreshadow future budget problems.
When you consider the fact that many states run operating deficits and have enormous debt problems, you begin to wonder if some of these numbers are sustainable for the long term.
Following comments by the White House last week that the administration would soon bring more pressure on North Korea, President Donald Trump has confirmed as much to a crowd of reporters, adding that, as of today, that North Korea would once again be designated a terror sponsor.
Trump cited the killing of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un"s estranged half brother in a Malaysian airport earlier this year, as well as the North’s horrific treatment of Ohio college student Otto Warmbier, as justifications for the sanctions.
“North Korea has supported acts of international terrorism, including assassinations on foreign soil,” Trump said.
“As we take this action today we think of Otto Warmbier and the many others affected by north korean opporession."
During remarks at the start of a cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said the Treasury Department will announce on Tuesday additional sanctions against North Korea, describing the moves as “a very large one.” The sanctions will be imposed over the next two weeks, Trump said.
Trump demanded that the North cease its nuclear program and stop aiding terror groups across the world.
Trump called the move a long overdue step and part of the U.S. "maximum pressure campaign" against the North...
United States designates North Korea as a state sponsor of terror.
Pres. Trump: "Should have happened a long time ago, should have happened years ago." pic.twitter.com/3GC5Umcd4S
North Korea was last on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror in 2008, when the country was removed in a bid to salvage a deal to halt its nuclear development. Iran, Sudan and Syria are also designated by the U.S. as state sponsors of terror, the Associated Press pointed out.
The designation had been debated for months inside the administration, with some officials at the State Department arguing that the North did not meet the legal standard to be relisted as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Officials said there was no debate over whether the slaying of half brother Kim Jong Nam was a terrorist act. However, lawyers said there had to be more than one incident and there was disagreement over whether the treatment of Warmbier, who died of injuries suffered in North Korean custody, constituted terrorism.
While North Korea is being added to the list, last week, Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said the United States was willing to consider removing Sudan, which has been on the list since 1993.
The mainstream media is a fickle beast beholden to the direction of the prevailing political winds. Unfortunately for Facebook, Google and Twitter, those winds have turned about face in recent weeks as the political establishment thrashes about in its misguided efforts to prove that – aided by social media - Russia changed the course of the 2016 presidential election. While Facebook’s share price has suffered very little so far, the mainstream media is going to work on the reputations of Facebook and its billionaire founder. For example, according to Vanity Fair last month.
"…the tech giant is broadly focused on repairing its reputation following revelations that its platform was weaponized by Russia in the 2016 election."
“Weaponized” seemed a very strong word to use.
With the social media platform deemed “fair game” in the mainstream media, the Financial Times has lined up Mark Zuckerberg in its crosshairs. The FT journalist who penned the piece on Zuckerberg, Edward Luce, is cut from establishment cloth…and then some. Luce is the son of Richard Luce, now Baron Luce, the former MP, former Lord Chamberlain to the Queen and Knight of the Garter. Edward Luce read PPE at Oxford, took a sabbatical as a speech writer for Larry Summers and is the FT’s chief US commentator.
We are no fans of Zuckerberg and sympathise with some of it, but we recognise a hatchet job when we see it. In the article, Luce accuses Zuckerberg of...
Self-evident observation, or “stating the bleeding obvious”, to use the English vernacular:
Here is what Mark Zuckerberg learned from his 30-state tour of the US: polarisation is rife and the country is suffering from an opioid crisis. Forgive me if I have to lie down for a moment. Yet it would be facile to tease Mr Zuckerberg for his self-evident observations. Some people are geniuses at one thing and bad at others. Mr Zuckerberg is a digital superstar with poor human skills.
Political inadequacy and insincerity:
Facebook’s co-founder is not the first Silicon Valley figure to show signs of political inadequacy - nor will he be the last. But he may be the most influential. He personifies the myopia of America’s coastal elites: they wish to do well by doing good. When it comes to a choice, the “doing good” bit tends to be forgotten. There is nothing wrong with doing well, especially if you are changing the world. Innovators are rightly celebrated. But there is a problem with presenting your prime motive as philanthropic when it is not. Mr Zuckerberg is one of the most successful monetisers of our age. Yet he talks as though he were an Episcopalian pastor. “Protecting our community is more important than maximising our profits,” Mr Zuckerberg said this month after Facebook posted its first ever $10bn quarterly earnings result — an almost 50 per cent year-on-year jump.
Self-promotion, acting like a Soviet dictator and losing touch with ordinary people:
When a leader goes on a “listening tour” it means they are marketing something. In the case of Hillary Clinton, it was herself. In the case of Mr Zuckerberg, it is also himself. Making a surprise announcement that Mr Zuckerberg would be having dinner with an ordinary family is the kind of thing a Soviet dictator would do — down to the phalanx of personal aides he brought with him. This is not how scholars find out what ordinary families are thinking. Nor is it a good way to launch a political campaign. Ten months after Mr Zuckerberg began his tour, speculation of a presidential bid has been shelved. Say what you like about Donald Trump but he knows how to give the appearance of understanding ordinary people.
Helping Russia in its attempts to secure Trump’s election victory:
More to the point, Facebook has turned into a toxic commodity since Mr Trump was elected. Big Tech is the new big tobacco in Washington. It is not a question of whether the regulatory backlash will come, but when and how. Mr Zuckerberg bears responsibility for this. Having denied Facebook’s “filter bubble” played any role in Mr Trump’s victory — or Russia’s part in helping clinch it — Mr Zuckerberg is the primary target of the Democratic backlash. He is now asking America to believe that he can turn Facebook’s news feed from an echo chamber into a public square. Revenue growth is no longer the priority. “None of that matters if our services are used in a way that doesn’t bring people closer together,” he says.
Avoiding Tax (indirectly via Facebook) and masking self-interest:
How will Mr Zuckerberg arrange this Kumbaya conversion? By boosting the community ties that only Facebook can offer. Readers will forgive me if I take another lie down. Mr Zuckerberg suffers from two delusions common to America’s new economy elites. They think they are nice people — indeed, most of them are. Mr Zuckerberg seems to be, too. But they tend to cloak their self-interest in righteous language. Talking about values has the collateral benefit of avoiding talking about wealth. If the rich are giving their money away to good causes, such as inner city schools and research into diseases, we should not dwell on taxes. Mr Zuckerberg is not funding any private wars in Africa. He is a good person. The fact that his company pays barely any tax is therefore irrelevant.
Destroying communities and the noble profession of journalism:
The second liberal delusion is to believe they have a truer grasp of people’s interests than voters themselves. In some cases that might be true. It is hard to see how abolishing health subsidies will help people who live in “flyover” America. But here is the crux. It does not matter how many times Mr Zuckerberg invokes the magic of online communities. They cannot substitute for the real ones that have gone missing. Bowling online together is no cure for bowling offline alone. The next time Mr Zuckerberg wants to showcase Facebook, he should invest some of his money in an actual place. It should be far away from any of America’s booming cities — say Youngstown, Ohio. For the price of a couple of days’ Facebook revenues, he could train thousands of people. He might even fund a newspaper to make up for social media’s destruction of local journalism. The effect could be electrifying. Such an example would bring a couple more benefits. First, it would demonstrate that Mr Zuckerberg can listen, rather than pretending to. Second, people will want to drop round to his place for dinner.
Having dinner with Mark Zuckerberg was way down the list at ZH, with top choices including Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Margaret Thatcher (if she was still alive), David Bowie (if he was still alive), John Lennon (ditto) and John F. Kennedy (ditto).
While we are finding the FT’s attempts at ridiculing Zuckerberg and his company entertaining, we are questioning whether it merely reflects the shifting political winds. Maybe there is more to it. When Pearson sold the Financial Times in 2015 after being the “proud proprietor” for almost 60 years, it cited the “inflection point in media, driven by the explosive growth of mobile and social”.
In a recent interview with host Wilmer Leon at the Inside the Issues show, former presidential candidate and United States House of Representatives Member Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) discussed how what Kucinich terms the “permanent government” has worked to ensure the United States continues pursuing destructive foreign interventions and to keep America “at the precipice of a much wider war” irrespective of who is president.
“There’s an unbroken line going back over the last 30 years where American presidents have continued to proceed with an interventionism that has been counterproductive,” states Kucinich.
This “continued commitment to a failed foreign policy of interventionism, of unilateralism, of first strike,” Kucinich continues, “imperils America,” “does not make us safer,” “separates us from the world community,” “has people looking to extract vengeance on Americans,” and “has made the world a more dangerous place.”
Saying we need to look beyond the personalities of the succession of US presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, Kucinich recommends we “look at the foreign policy establishment of the United States of America” that, he explains, includes people in the State Department who have a neoconservative ideology, in the Pentagon who are dedicated to the military-industrial complex, and in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who can “conjure conflicts” and “try to justify the further involvement of the military and the State Department.”
This, Kucinich says, “is the permanent government, which we see reflected through Democrat and Republican administrations, no matter whether they are so-called conservative or liberal or populist; it’s all the same.”
While this “permanent government” push for US intervention overseas has produced many harmful consequences, some of which Kucinich discusses in the interview, it also, he argues, produces the additional danger that it “keeps us at the precipice of a much wider war.”
It"s been less than two hours since police identified the suspect in today"s Halloween terror attack in NYC as 29-year-old Uzbek national Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, and already the New York Post has published an interview with a friend of the suspected terrorist who reportedly expressed complete shock when told his friend had killed 8 people and injured more than a dozen others in what some sources described as the deadliest terror attack in NYC since 9/11.
Kobiljon Matkarov, 37, and a fellow Uzbek native, described Saipov as a "very friendly" man who worked for Uber. Matkarov met Saipov in Florida about five years ago shortly after he came over from Uzbekistan. The two connected over their mutual heritage, with Matkarov adding that Saipov had no terrorist connections.
“He is very good guy, he is very friendly… he is like little brother… he look at me like big brother,” Matkarov said by phone Tuesday from his home in Miamisburg, Ohio.
Saipov was identified as a resident of Tampa, Florida, by police but according to Matkarov had been living in New Jersey where he drove for Uber as recently as this summer. Matkarov said he last saw Saipov in June when he asked him to a ride to JFK, where the family was catching a flight to Uzbekistan.
“He dropped me to the airport with my family… I called him and said I needed a ride."
Matkarov said Saipov got along well with Matkarov"s five kids, who enjoyed playing with Saipov.
“My kids like him too, he is always playing with them. He is playing all the time,” Matkarov remembered.
But when Matkarov’s son asked for a picture with Saipov, he refused.
“He no like that. He said no,” Matkarov said.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saipov acted alone when he carried out today"s attack and that there were no signs of a wider plot. However, the New York Times has reported that allegiance notes to ISIS written in Arabic were found at the scene.
Having sworn themselves to secrecy, Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee are scrambling to put together a tax bill by next week. But not knowing anything about the details of the plan, as it stands right now, hasn’t stopped an army of lobbyists from mobbing Capitol Hill with one overweening mission: To threaten, cajole or otherwise coax lawmakers into preserving loopholes that benefit their clients.
The stage was set with the House’s adoption Thursday of a budget resolution designed to speed the course of tax legislation and kick off a three-week sprint toward a House bill. Now, lobbyists representing every corner of the economy are poised to first devour, then attack what may be hundreds of pages of legislation that Brady says he’ll release Nov. 1.
Special interests from realtors to dairy farmers will be trying to save their industry-specific tax breaks, said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. His group, which is backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, supports ending such breaks.
“It’s pretty fierce,” Phillips said. “We met with Brady on Tuesday and he was saying their offices are swamped with all the special interest groups swarming in asking to be protected.”
The immense pressure to find a source of revenue to compensate for the sweeping cuts to corporate and individual rates has already nearly derailed the tax reform process. Yesterday, House Republicans narrowly approved the Senate version of a $4 trillion federal budget over the objections of 20 blue-state Republicans who oppose the elimination of the state and local tax deduction, which they say would disproportionately raise taxes on middle-class taxpayers in blue states, which tend to have higher taxes. Yet, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady has said the elimination of the SALT deduction will stay in the bill - for now, at least.
Kevin Brady
On a static basis, the nine-page outline introduced by the White House and GOP Congressional leaders last month will cost $2.4 trillion over the first decade and $3.2 trillion over the second decade, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The TPC also found that 80% of the benefits from tax reform would accrue to the top 1% of earners. Republicans who are writing the bill must somehow reduce the impact on the deficit to $1.5 trillion, while adhering to President Donald Trump’s promise that middle-class Americans would be the biggest beneficiaries of the tax overhaul.
Still, it remains to be seen which groups will lose their benefits. According to Bloomberg, even Republican members of Ways and Means don’t know what will be preserved and what will be eliminated.
That could make releasing the bill by the Wednesday deadline difficult.
“The problem is that Ways and Means has somewhat been kept out of the loop with details,” Representative Jim Renacci of Ohio, a member of the House tax-writing panel, said in an interview. “There are still a lot of hurdles to get it done.”
As Bloomberg points out, the elimination of the SALT deduction has become one of the most divisive issues surrounding tax reform. Trump and congressional leaders have proposed abolishing that break, which benefits high-tax states that tend to vote Democratic. But several Republican House members from such states want to preserve the break in some form.
“Can you get people to put their party loyalty above home-grown constituents’ concerns?” said Hollier, a former chief of staff and legislative director for Senator Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican. “How they deal with that will show that people can be broken.”
And unsurprisingly, corporate lobbyists, who are used to their clients’ interests being given priority in Congress, are upset with the Republicans’ decision to keep other details of the bill under wraps.
Will Hollier, whose clients include Microsoft Corp. and Visa Inc., told Bloomberg that secrecy is a double-edged sword: The secrecy has allowed for some efficiency, but it’s also prevented GOP leaders from winning broad support.
Which could create problems for the bill as it moves forward because, as Sen. Bob Corker told Bloomberg: “I don’t think that people realize that 80 percent plus of this effort is eliminating things in the code,” referring to special interest loopholes. Meaning that, once the bill’s details are made public, Republicans will need to guide it to the president’s desk over lobbyists’ objections.
“I mean, over the next two weeks, especially when the Senate tax-writing committee puts their stuff out, they’re going to realize that this the biggest tax code rewrite since 1986 and it’s going to affect everyone,” Corker said.
Lobbyists have already started pushing back against details in the nine-page outline that would raise taxes on corporate America. Those measures include the elimination of corporate deductions for interest payments – which could raise as much as $1 trillion over a decade – as well as a new foreign minimum tax that would affect corporations who shift profits to offshore tax havens
One of the ways to make up the revenue gap is by limiting the deductions corporations take on the interest they pay on their loans -- a major consideration for industries such as private equity and real estate. A prior House Republican proposal called for completely eliminating the corporate break, which could have raised more than $1 trillion over a decade.
“They’re totally undecided,” about how to restrict corporate interest deductions, said Marc Gerson, the chair of law firm Miller & Chevalier. Gerson said proposals include setting limits based on a company’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, a key measure of profitability. Existing debt might be grandfathered in, he said.
Another piece of the framework is aimed at preventing U.S. companies from shifting their earnings to offshore tax havens -- by imposing a minimum foreign tax. The idea -- described briefly and obliquely in the framework language -- was called “appalling” several weeks ago by Ken Kies, a lobbyist whose clients include Microsoft and General Electric Co. The rate and formula for such a tax haven’t been specified, but the proposal carries multibillion-dollar implications for multinationals.
On the individual side, the treatment of state and local deductions remains in question. At least 12 Republicans from high-tax states, whose constituents stand to lose if the tax break is repealed, voted no on the House budget Thursday. The most vocal among them have demanded a compromise on the issue.
Given the number of parties involved, there are many obstacles to passing tax reform by the Republicans’ hoped-for deadline of year’s end, including the other issues on the Congressional agenda. Congress must fund the government to avoid a shutdown by Dec. 8. That could turn ugly as the White House has signaled it’ll demand funding for a border wall, and Democrats say they want a solution to protect young undocumented immigrants.
To be sure, there is one powerful political imperative that might force Republicans to swallow their objections: The fear that another legislative failure - especially one with the potential to tank financial markets - could cost Republicans one, or both, of their Congressional majorities.
House and Senate leaders hope to pass bills through their chambers by Thanksgiving, said Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn. The different bills would then have to be reconciled with another round of votes in December. Only then can Congress send the final bill to the president’s desk.
Last week, Twitter Safety released ‘a calendar of our safety work’ in approach to make the social media platform a much safer place. Twitter’s blog indicates “far too often in the past we’ve said we’d do better and promised transparency but have fallen short in our efforts”. The timeline will include regular and real-time updates about safety changes and overall progress of the social media channel to provide transparency. The blog also indicates “this is the first time we’ve shared this level of visibility into our work”.
According to Ars Technica, Twitter’s transformation will begin this Thursday–
On October 27, Twitter will expand what types of “non-consensual nudity” (aka “revenge porn”) that it takes action against. The company will already act when a victim complains, but Twitter will soon act even in cases where the victims may not be aware images were taken, instances like upskirt photos and hidden webcams. “Anyone we identify as the original poster of non-consensual nudity will be suspended immediately,”
What is Revenge Porn?
The term ‘revenge porn,’ though frequently used, is somewhat misleading. Many perpetrators are not motivated by revenge or by any personal feelings toward the victim. A more accurate term is nonconsensual pornography (NCP), defined as the distribution of sexually graphic images of individuals without their consent.
As of June 08, 2017, C.A. GOLDBERG, PLLC, who focuses in the areas of revenge porn, domestic violence, sexual assault, & public figure crises says about 38 US states have adopted ‘revenge porn laws’. Interesting enough, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, and South Caroline do not have ‘revenge porn laws’.
Here are various states and the penalties for revenge porn…
Revenge porn search term in the United States has been an explosive trend over the past 5-6 years. States such as Maine, West Virginia, and Kentucky have the highest interest by region.
Unfortunately, millions of Americans idolize Hollywood, who have been actively promoting revenge porn for the world to see. The latest story is Rob Kardashian posting nude pictures of Blac Chyna…
Back to the Twitter’s blog post, where the social media platform has outlined 4-months of proposed transparency in attempt to make the platform a much safer place. After Thursday, on November 03, Twitter will suspend organizations and groups who have a history for advocating violence . This will include banning hate imagery in profile headers and avatars, along with banning “hateful display names”.
Most social media channels are in damage control ahead of the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify in a public hearing November 01 about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Twitter has felt the need to become more ‘transparent’ and tackle revenge porn ahead of the meeting.
Here are questions we ask:
Why does Twitter suddenly care about revenge porn?
Is it because of the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting?
*****
Are insiders attempting to transform Twitter <TWTR> post -81% stock crash?
A 40-year-old essay predicted the end of an empire and current events sure make it look like we’re watching it happen in real time.
I spend a fair bit of time scanning the news every day for my site, Preppers Daily News. And some days, I just have to shake my head as I realize that people are so desperate for…something…that they just keep going to further and further extremes to try and find that elusive thing their lives are missing.
The more I read, the more likeness I see to Sir John Glubb’s essay, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. (It’s only 24 pages and you should definitely read it – it’s brilliant.) Sir Glubb wrote this outstanding work when he was 79 years old, after a lifetime of being a soldier, traveling the world, and analyzing history. It’s well worth a read as he goes into detail about the fall of empires past.
The final stage of the end of an empire is the Age of Decadence.
Some signs of this age are political dissensions (Antifa, anyone?), an influx of foreigners (Europe, anyone?), the welfare state (America, anyone?), despair (350 million people diagnosed), depravity (see below), and the rise of frivolity as people try to fill lives that have less and less meaning.
Sound familiar?
This video is a brief synopsis of the signs of an empire that is near its end.
A synopsis I read makes Glubb’s theory entirely applicable to modern society:
In the age of decadence many people choose to behave in ways that are unsustainable, apparently unaware of the consequences. They indulge in excessive, often conspicuous, consumption. An absurdly wealthy elite emerges, but instead of repelling the masses it is admired and celebrated. Those outside the elite aspire to similar levels of consumption, and are encouraged by the availability of cheap credit. People become convinced that increased consumption is the key to happiness, but in its pursuit they become measurably less happy. As David Morgan says, “you can never get enough of what you don’t need.”
At this point in the life cycle of an empire frivolity, as Glubb calls it, comes to the fore. In order to distract people from what’s really going on, the economy creates diversions. Voyeurism becomes central to culture: the gladiatorial spectacles in decadent Rome are mirrored in today’s ‘reality’ television. People become fixated on celebrity as the genuinely noteworthty become understandably camera shy. These invented celebrities are ‘famous’ just for being famous…
…Debauchery is another recurring theme at the end of empire. Society develops a strangely immature obsession with sex. People drink themselves to the point of unconsciousness and shamelessly collapse in the street. In Roman times, binge drinkers were left to their fate. Today’s debauchery is supervised by the police; its ‘victims’ are taken care of by hard-pressed health care professionals, placing further pressure on the public purse. And, all the while, supermarkets and corporations make a killing selling discounted booze to people barely old enough to buy it. This is our modern-day bread and circuses, with obese citizens literally becoming a burden on the state.
But the small can never satisfy the large. Cheap pleasures fail to compensate for the absence of meaning in so many people’s lives. A hankering for something greater remains…growing numbers are denied access to work; they can find no meaningful involvement in their community, so their potential goes unfulfilled. When people are prevented from fulfilling their potential, they often self-destruct. (source)
By “Empire,” I’m not referring specifically just to the United States in particular, but Western Civilization in general. We’re watching our friends in Europe go down the same path. How can anyone look at the following stories and think that we are all okay and that this is sustainable?
NOTE: The story below isn’t pretty and there is adult content. If you are offended by adult content, take my word for it and do not read on. If you do read on, don’t get mad that you read adult content and complain in the comments. Thanks. DL
Dissent
Never have America and Europe seen their citizens more at odds. Here in the United States, the last election caused more division than any other in history. Friendships and family relationships ended over who people’s voting choices. Once Trump was inaugurated, things didn’t settle down. There are still groups who want to overthrow the “Trump-Pence regime.” Some students can’t even tolerate the existence of those with opposite beliefs.
In Europe, the UK voted to leave the European Union and Catalonia voted to leave Spain. People are firmly divided between welcoming immigrants and banishing immigrants.
Chaos is everywhere and there is little middle ground.
A Hollywood fixture has been accused of assaulting and harassing dozens of women, which led thousands of other women to share their horror stories with a #MeToo hashtag on Twitter. I have seen report after report recently of teachers having sex with their high school students.
Premature Sexuality
Sexuality is being introduced to our children far too early, For example, libraries around the country are having “Drag Queen Story Hour.” A picture is worth a thousand words.
Drag Queen Story Hour aims to give young children “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models,” according to the programme’s website…
…The Drag Queen Story Hour site explains that the event “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood”.
“In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.
The programme “happens regularly in LA, New York, and San Francisco, and events are popping up all over the world!”
I actually don’t have an issue with adults who are drag queens – heck, I sang along at a show in Vegas, and as a libertarian, I believe that consenting adults can do what they want. I have not raised my kids to mistreat others because of their sexuality. They’d be in massive trouble if they did. I did, however, manage to teach them to be kind individuals without taking them to Drag Queen Story Hour when they were 3.
Let me be absolutely clear that while I don’t think Drag Queen Story Hour is an attempt to sexually abuse children, it does lead me to the over-sexualization of kids. I don’t even know the names of all the genders and sexualities that are being claimed and LBGT keeps adding so many initials, I can’t keep up. No wonder kids are confused. I’m confused and I’m a grown-up.
Decades ago, anything on TV before 9 o’clock was pretty innocent. We didn’t have laptops and cell phones that allowed us to learn way too much, way too soon. We didn’t take quizzes on Buzzfeed to see if we were ready to have anal sex that night and we didn’t turn to Teen Vogue to learn about oral sex. These days, Teen Vogue is racier than Cosmo was in the early 80s. How do we protect our children’s innocence in this environment? How do we let them just be kids and find their own ways? Heck, even in Disney movies, everyone’s gotta have a love interest. Why?
Normalization of pedophilia
Children are exposed to far too much, far too young. This makes them ripe targets for pedophiles. Let me be clear on this too. Pedophilia is always, always wrong and extraordinarily harmful to children.
Our website is intended to reduce the stigma attached to pedophilia by letting people know that a substantial number of pedophiles DO NOT molest children, and to provide peer support and information about available resources to help virtuous pedophiles remain law-abiding, and lead happy, productive lives. These are our stories. There are brief bios of the two founders of the site and collections of other personal stories. (source)
I keep wondering, are the people in charge of media trying to normalize this so that when they inevitably get outed for molesting children, no one will care? Watch this video about the rampant pedophilia in the entertainment industry – and then remember, these are the people who influence the views of the folks who idolize celebrities.
Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, was spotlighted for his incredibly disturbing art collection that showed the torture and murder of children. (Here is a shocking post with images found using “Tony and Heather Podesta’s art collection” as a search term.) And who can forget that sick “spirit cooking” scandal during the election? There are some things we simply cannot unsee.
Speaking of “art,” a Slovenian woman just won a prestigious art award for being “in seclusion” with her dogs for 3 months. Of course, for some of us, just hanging with pets sounds awesome, but we don’t hang out with pets like Maja Smrekar does. She breastfed a puppy and fertilized one of her eggs with what she says was a “fat cell” from another of her dogs. Mmm hmm. This video that documents her “art” is another thing to add to the can’t-ever-unsee-it list. The jury that awarded her the prize said, “What is making this artwork so special is the total commitment of the artist.” Apparently, I just don’t understand art. Or commitment. Or what cool people do with their pets.
Bestiality is actually legal in these US states: Hawaii, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. Apparently, parties are organized where people can engage in sex acts with animals. Publicly.
Not to be outdone, this gal is done with humanity altogether and says she now is…a cat. I wasn’t sure if this went in the bestiality section or where.
The emptiness of society
Perhaps people should first examine the depravity and frivolity that passes for art and entertainment these days. A walk in the woods to look at fall leaves will not suffice for much of the population.
People are so desperate for that rush of endorphins that they’re constantly seeking something more and more outrageous to give it to them. Normal things no longer give them that fleeting feeling of joy. Their own lives are so empty that they focus on the lives of people famous for being famous to fill them up.
When society is more interested in reality television than actual reality, how can we expect that same society will be invested in our future?
Russia didn’t win Trump the White House any more than China re-elected Bill Clinton in 1996.
The fake news about fake news is practically endless. Americans worried about Russia’s influence in the 2016 election have seized on a handful of Facebook ads—as though there weren’t also three 90-minute debates, two televised party conventions, and $2.4 billion spent on last year’s campaign. The danger is that bending facts to fit the Russia story line may nudge Washington into needlessly and recklessly regulating the internet and curtailing basic freedoms.
After an extensive review, Facebook has identified $100,000 of ads that came from accounts associated with Russia. Assume for the sake of argument that Vladimir Putin personally authorized this expenditure. Given its divisive nature, the campaign could be dubbed “From Russia, With Hate”—except it would make for a disappointing James Bond movie.
Analyzing the pattern of expenditures, and doing some back-of-the-envelope math, it’s clear this was no devilishly effective plot. Facebook says 56% of the ads ran after the election, reducing the tally that could have influenced the result to about $44,000. It also turns out the ads were not confined to swing states but also shown in places like New York, California and Texas. Supposing half the ads went to swing states brings the total down to $22,000.
Facebook also counted ads as early as June 2015. Assuming they were evenly spread and we want only those that ran the year of the election, that knocks it down to $13,000. Most of the ads did not solicit support for a candidate and carried messages on issues like racism, immigration and guns. The actual electioneering then amounts to about $6,500.
Now look at the bigger picture.
Every day, Americans see hundreds of ads on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards and smartphones. North Americans post to Facebook something like a billion times a day, and during the election many of those messages were about politics. Facebook typically runs about $40 million worth of advertising a day in North America.
Then consider the scale of American presidential elections.
Hillary Clinton’s total campaign budget, including associated committees, was $1.4 billion. Mr. Trump and his allies had about $1 billion. Even a full $100,000 of Russian ads would have erased just 0.025% of Hillary’s financial advantage. In the last week of the campaign alone, Mrs. Clinton’s super PAC dumped $6 million in ads into Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy, mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate. Converting someone who voted for the other party last time is an enormously difficult task. Swing voters in states like Ohio or Florida are typically barraged with 50% or more of a campaign’s budget. Try watching TV in those states the week before an election and you will see how jammed the airwaves are.
No one wants foreign governments meddling in American elections.
In 1996, the Chinese government had the “China plan” and pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign. There were congressional investigations, and several fundraisers were prosecuted, but Attorney General Janet Reno rejected calls for an independent counsel. Campaigns tightened up their donor-validation procedures, and life moved on. The same is called for here. Internet companies should improve their screening of electioneering ads, impose clearer standards on all ads, and do a better job weeding out phony accounts.
Millions of taxpayer dollars have probably been spent already poring over that $100,000 of Facebook ads.
Better to keep it all in perspective, as everyone did in 1996.
The only way Russia will get its money’s worth is if Washington overreacts and narrows the very freedoms that make America different in the first place.
On April 30, 1934, under pressure from Italian-American lobby groups, the United States Congress passed a law enshrining Columbus Day as a national holiday.
President Franklin Roosevelt quickly signed the bill into law, and the very first Columbus Day was celebrated in October of that year.
Undoubtedly people had a different view of the world back then… and a different set of values.
Few cared about the plight of the indigenous who were wiped out as a result of European conquest.
Even just a few decades ago when I was a kid in elementary school, I remember learning that ‘Columbus discovered America’. There was no discussion of genocide.
It wasn’t until I was a sophomore at West Point that I picked up Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (and then Columbus’s own diaries) and started reading about the mass-extermination of entire tribes.
Columbus himself wrote about his first encounter with the extremely peaceful and welcoming Arawak Indians of the Bahama Islands:
“They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
And so he did.
“I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.”
Columbus had already written back to his investors in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, that the Caribbean islands possessed “great mines of gold.”
It was all lies. Columbus was desperately attempting to justify their investment.
In Haiti, Columbus ordered the natives to bring him all of their gold. But there was hardly an ounce of gold anywhere on the island. So Columbus had them slaughtered. Within two years, 250,000 were dead.
Now, this letter isn’t intended to rail against Columbus. Point is, I never learned any of this information in school. Decades ago, no one really did.
But today, people are starting to be aware of what Columbus did. And our values are vastly different today than they were in 1937. Or in 1492.
Decades ago… and certainly hundreds of years ago… the idea of a ‘superior race’ still prevailed, endowed by their creator with the right to subjugate all inferior races.
This readily-accepted belief was the pretext of slavery and genocide.
Even as recently as the early 1900s, there were entire fields of ‘science’ devoted to studying the technical differences among various races and drawing data-driven conclusions about superiority.
Phrenologists, for example, would take precise measurements of people’s skulls– the circumference of the head, the ratio of forehead to eyebrow measurements, etc.– and deduce the intellectual capacity and character traits of entire races.
Jews could not be trusted. Blacks and Asians were inferior. These assertions were based on ‘scientific evidence’, even in nations like Sweden, the United Kingdom, and United States.
Today we’re obviously more advanced than our ancestors were. We know that their science was complete bullshit, and our values are totally different.
There are entire movements now (particularly among university students) to remove statues, rename buildings, and re-designate holidays.
Frankly this is a pretty slippery slope. If we judge everyone throughout history based on our values today, we’ll never stop tearing down monuments.
Even someone as forward-thinking as Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And that’s a LOT of elementary schools to rename.
More importantly, there will come a time in the future when our own descendants judge us harshly for our short-sighted values.
Fortunately we no longer have faux-scientists today writing dissertations about racial superiority.
But we do have entire fields of ‘science’ that will truly bewilder future historians. Economics is one of them.
Our society awards some of its most distinguished prizes for intellectual achievement to economists who tell us that the path to prosperity is to print money, raise taxes, and go into debt.
Economists tell us that we can spend our way out of recession, borrow our way out of debt, and that there will never be any consequences from conjuring trillions of units of paper currency out of thin air.
They created a central banking system whereby an unelected committee of economists possesses nearly totalitarian control of the money supply… and hence the power to influence the price of EVERYTHING– food, fuel, housing, utilities, financial markets, etc.
Economists have managed to convince the world that inflation, i.e. rising prices, is actually a GOOD thing… and that prices quadrupling and quintupling during the average person’s lifespan is ‘normal’.
They’ve also succeeded in making policy-makers terrified of deflation (falling prices) even though just about any rational individual would naturally prefer falling (or at least stable) prices to rising prices.
Economists make the most ridiculous assertions, like “The debt doesn’t matter because we owe it to ourselves…” as if it’s perfectly acceptable for the US government to default on its citizens.
Or that the US economy is so strong because the American consumer spends so much money, i.e. consumption (and not production) drives prosperity.
The public believes all this nonsense because the ‘scientists’ say it’s true.
The scientists also come up with fuzzy mathematics to support their assertions. Last Friday, for example, the Labor Department reported that the US economy lost 33,000 jobs in September.
Yet miraculously the unemployment rate actually declined, i.e. fewer people are unemployed despite there being fewer jobs in the economy.
None of this makes any sense. Fewer jobs means lower unemployment. Spend more money. Print more money. Borrow more money. Debt is wealth. Consumption is prosperity.
All of this is based on ‘science’.
We may rightfully take umbrage with the values and ideas of our ancestors.
But it’s worth turning that mirror on ourselves and examining our own beliefs… for there will undoubtedly come a time when our own descendants wonder how we could have been so foolish.
