Is Trickle-Up Poverty the New Prosperity?

           While being assaulted on all sides with Barack Obama’s “trickle-up poverty” and other progressive government boondoggles like Obamacare on top of trillion-dollar national deficits as far as the eye can see and well beyond . . . a strange new phenomenon has emerged to further muddy the waters already obscuring our future hopes. China is now selling off American debt and ridding itself of dollars so that now the largest holder of American debt is . . . drum roll, please, Maestro! . . . the United States Federal Reserve Banking System. Yes, you read that correctly. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is now in the voodoo economics business all the way up to his fuzzy skull.  

           Over the last three months, China has sold roughly $19 billion in treasury bonds and other U.S. debt instruments. China, in other words, has become concerned about the sheer size of the U.S. overall debt and the high probability that the Federal Reserve’s unceasing money printing for the last twenty-nine months has debased and devalued the world’s reserve currency for ‘lo these last 60+ years: the American Dollar. Looking back in history that’s exactly what happened to the British Pound Sterling which had been the World’s Reserve Currency for over two hundred years until the Brits ousted Winston Churchill with World War II still not entirely won and brought in their Labour (progressive-liberal) Party to run the show. Labour inflated their once proud currency so much that the citizens and nations of the world began dumping the Pound and fleeing for gold, silver, the gold-backed Swiss Franc and most commonly for the American Dollar.

            The American Federal Reserve now standing as the largest holder of U.S. Treasury debt means that financing Obama’s third trillion-dollar federal budget deficit in succession has become something the rest of the world has begun to shy away from. China is still the largest foreign-holder of American debt, but the Chinese seem determined to remove their names from the top of that dubious list (other top foreign holders of U.S. debt instruments include: Japan, Russia, Brazil, India, Korea, England, France, Germany and Saudi Arabia). It also suggests that faith and trust in the “Almighty Buck” may be reaching a low-ebb.

            Unlike hard money (gold and silver) and all hard-money backed currencies such as the Swiss Franc and the Kruggerand-backed South African money . . . paper money has zero intrinsic value . . . it only exists and continues to serve so long as people trust the government issuing the paper bills (and that goes double for a nation’s paper debt instruments).    Bernanke has run the printing pressings so long that on a sheer mathematical basis the dollar of today is technically worth only as much as 3.4 pennies compared to the dollar of late 2008 when the financial crisis reached its low spot and the U.S. government started stepping in. What’s going on here? Why is Bernanke printing so much money?

            Bernanke is a well-known student of the Great Depression and has written numerous articles suggesting that the reason the Great Depression turned from a “little-d depression” into a “capital-G/capital-D Great Depression” is because there was never sufficient money in circulation to head off relentless deflation. That is, he believes a vicious-circle of deflation was created and that the continuous dropping of prices fed off itself and destroyed jobs which destroyed buying power which destroyed businesses which destroyed more jobs, etc., etc. 

            There is some truth to what Mr. Bernanke suggests . . . but it’s a lot like yanking your starting pitcher off the mound with the score going from 2-1 in the 6^th to 8-1 against you in the 8^th . . . once so much damage has been done . . . almost nothing will work. Perhaps the twirler should have been sent to the showers when he looked tired after 120 pitches before the start of the 7^th?  Or after he’d allowed a home run and walked the next two batters with no outs in the 7^th? Poor decisions early in a process can make finding good decisions later . . . very, very difficult.

            Rajjpuut suggests a different reading of history is more accurate.    Almost precisely a full decade before the infamous 1929 stock market crash we had a depression start-up that 98% of Americans never heard about. Progressive Woodrow Wilson’s so-called “Invisible Depression” started in late 1919 and was full-blown by the time Warren G. Harding was elected in November, 1920; and much worse when Harding took office in March of 1921 (they had a four-month Lame-Duck session in those days). Production had already dropped nation-wide by 26%. Ignoring the suggestions of his Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover for immediate implementation of numerous government aid programs and other subsidies . . . Harding did only four things:

1.       Cut government spending by 48%

2.      Cut taxes by 49%

3.      Paid down the nation’s debt by 30%

4.       Slashed government regulatory interference across the board

            In fifteen months the economy had rebounded mightily (just a couple months later,  Harding died in office so he barely got to enjoy his success). The United States was now well into the “Roaring Twenties” the most single prosperous rebound of any economy in the recorded history of the planet. Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s vice-president continued the Harding policies faithfully, but chose “not to run” in 1928.   One of the most popular men in America and a famous philanthropist and author, Herbert Hoover ran for the presidency for the Republicans and won in a landslide over Democrat Al Smith.  Only three men in history have become president of the U.S. without extensive military or business executive or elected experience: Taft, Obama and Hoover.

            Hoover was a famous geologist and mining engineer who married the daughter of a rich banker.  He believed mightily in the “Efficiency Movement” (if you’ve read Cheaper by the Dozen, the father, Frank Gilbreth, was founder of the Efficiency Movement) and believed that the economy was riddled with waste and inefficiency which could be dramatically improved by “experts” like him once they identified the problems and solved them. Hoover became, according to the New York Times “one of the Ten Most Important Living Americans” for his charitable and humanitarian work during World War I.  

            Hoover administered distribution of over two and one-half million tons of food to nine million war victims and was later named head of the brand new U.S. Food administration by Woodrow Wilson when the country entered the War. A member of the Supreme Economic Council after the war, as well as head of the American Relief Administration he continued organizing shipments to millions of starving people in Central Europe.  A well-known philanthropist, Hoover like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was like them a self-described “Progressive and Reformer.”

             He came to be known as “Wonder-Boy” during the Harding-Coolidge administrations for his notorious and comical lust for expanding portions of everybody else’s bailiwicks into new roles for the Commerce Department. The reporters of his day called Hoover, "the Secretary of Commerce... and Under-Secretary of Everything Else!" Long before he had entered politics he had abandoned laissez-faire economic thinking. Outside of engineering and charitable work he was a terrible micro-manager always on the look out to fix what wasn’t broken.  History shows that Hoover did one very important thing as Commerce Secretary:  he codified and standardized traffic lights across the nation. 

              As soon as he was elected president Hoover set about planning the undoing of much of the good work created by Coolidge and Harding.   He raised government spending and taxes and debt.  He initiated numerous “eleemosynary” style federal activities (reminiscent of his charitable work in World War I) to protect workers and farmers and businesses from the natural vicissitudes of the free market economy. His biggest mistake was instituting a huge tariff designed to protect American farm workers from foreign competition but remove such protections from business; the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was to cause great consternation in the business world. The agricultural tariff increase was the second highest in U.S. history and put a lot of people out of work. Overall, once the stock market crashed in 1929, Hoover instituted the biggest big-government policies the nation had ever seen.

             Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had once praised Hoover in 1919 and tried to get him to run as the Democratic presidential candidate) and his v-p running mate Garner accused Hoover of being a socialist and promised that when elected they would:

1.      Cut government spending severely

2.      Cut taxes dramatically

3.      Pay down the nation’s debt

4.       Slashed government regulatory interference across the board and eliminate many of the socialistic programs of Hoover

          Since these amounted to little more than promises to do what Harding had succeeded with in 1921, people embraced FDR and he won in a landslide taking office in March 1933. History shows that the bottom of the Great Depression was reached in July, 1933, and the bottom of our own “Great Recession” was reached in March, 2009, in each case shortly after the new president took office. Ordinarily the expectation is that after the bottom is reached, prosperity begins to return within six months. In both FDR’s and Barack Obama’s cases, however, government interference made things much, much worse.

          FDR, of course, did exactly the opposite of what he promised. He dramatically raised taxes and government spending and debt and deficits. He expanded all of Hoover’s social and economic programs and added 40 of his own (just one law in 2010, Obamacare, created 384 new government agencies, so FDR was a piker compared to Barack) and made big government a way of life. He also confiscated gold coinage and then instituted an overnight inflation of 69% by pegging the dollar to gold at $35 per ounce (he’d given the citizens just $20.76) impoverishing the taxpayers while enriching the government. Of course doing what Harding did and avoiding what Hoover and FDR did is just common sense . . . something seemingly beyond Obama and Bernanke . . . .

          In June, 2009, when the full-folly of the Obama policies began to outline themselves in sharp contrast to common sense . . . the Chinese held $896 billion in American debt; today they hold $764 billion a 15% reduction in greenback holdings. Since an outright flooding of the market with U.S. debt notes would destroy China as well as the U.S., it seems the Chinese are now buying up gold and silver in large quantities and making an orderly retreat from the dollar – leaving our suspect currency in the hands of less astute nations and of Ben Bernanke. Since the American trade deficit with China alone reached a record $273.1 Billion in 2010, the Chinese are going to have to work awfully hard to keep lowering their dollar holdings . . . so one suspects that gold and silver will continue to rise quickly.

          Bernanke’s monetary policy, known as “Quantitative Easing” a.k.a. “irresponsibly printing money,” has seen the Federal Reserve recently buy up $600 billion worth of Treasury debt. Big Ben’s plan is to hold down interest rates and thus help lower the cost of federal government borrowing (to cover the Obama deficits) and incidentally increase inflation which he believes will stimulate economic growth and create jobs. This is a very Keynesian economic philosophy. In the months prior to his death in 1946, John Maynard Keynes (as the ending of the British Pound Sterling’s  200- year reign as the world’s reserve currency approached) who had long preached against the classical economic wisdom of Adam Smith and Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace,” like an atheist seeking God at the last hour repented . . . .

          As Britain’s economic hole under the progressive Labor Party deepened, and his own death drew near, Keynes told Henry Clay of the Bank of England of his hopes that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” would somehow save the English economy and yank Britain out of the economic swamp it found itself in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the ‘invisible hand’ which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." The inflation destroyed the Pound Sterling as the Labor Party continued with government largesse and Keynes’ deathbed conversion went to naught.

          Here in America recent spikes in food prices and energy costs are a direct consequence of Bernanke’s unofficial devaluation of the dollar. The government continues under-reporting of inflation assisted by the Labor Statistics Bureau’s refusal to include fluctuations in prices of food and energy. Bernanke, however, believes that deflation is still the rule and continues to inflate the currency to avoid a second Great Depression. Since job creation by the private sector is the key, perhaps the government ought to try: cutting spending; cutting taxes; eliminating debt; and getting the government out of the way of the free market . . . oops, that’s been mentioned before . . . .

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

Americans Now Learning Real History,

A recent Rasmussen Reports Survey seems to show that Americans are starting to understand that the country was NOT rescued from the Great Depression by government spending and government policies (a.k.a. interference in the free markets), but rather that the government actually cost the nation millions of  jobs, intensified a normal recession with its increased spending, creating and lengthening the depression and eventually turning it into the “Great Depression.” The lesson, however, is not necessarily transferring into a greater understanding of today’s economics . . . .

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_business/february_2011/43_say_government_policy_mistakes_created_great_depression_of_1930s_26_disagree

According to the Rasmussen survey, 43% now say that government policy mistakes created the Great Depression of the ‘30s; while only 26% disagree and 31% say they are unsure. Americans, today however, are still greatly confused about the cause of the financial meltdown which, they think, began about October, 2007. More on that later . . . .

Despite the Rasmussen poll results, thanks to two and a half generations of revisionist history ,today far too many Americans still believe that Herbert Hoover was  a) a conservative rather than a progressive  b) that greedy Wall Street created the Great Depression c) that Hoover’s administration spent almost nothing fighting the economic problems d) that government spending can create jobs in the private sector e) that in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for president against Hoover’s “conservativism” f) that FDR did virtually everything entirely different than Hoover and g) that FDR saved the country from the Great Depression. Let’s quickly put those lies to rest before dealing with today’s situation, eh?

Since progressivism (we must ‘progress’ beyond the out-dated and seriously flawed U.S. Constitution if we are ever to make ‘progress’ toward an earthly socialist or even Marxist Utopia) first became a serious undercurrent in American Politics in the 1890’s only once in the following 120 years has a serious economic downturn been handled by pure conservative restraint . . . and no, Ronald Reagan was NOT president when that happened (Reagan actually increased government spending while cutting taxes extra-severely and created some whopping deficits in the process of also creating twenty million jobs). 

Teddy Roosevelt was our first progressive president. You’ll remember that his “Bull Moose Party” was actually a third party officially known as, wait for it:  the “Progressive Party.” Teddy certainly had done a lot of questionable and presumably out-and-out unconstitutional things earlier when he was a Republican president, luckily most of them worked out pretty well for the nation.  Perhaps a Progressive president once every century or so wouldn’t be a bad thing, but certainly no more often?

Our first ultra-progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, however, was another story. Besides giving us the Federal Reserve Banking system and the income tax (still called today: “progressive” income tax), Wilson was a great propagandist who ran for a second term under the slogan “He kept us out of War” but within a month after his March, 1916 inauguration he deliberately and unnecessarily thrust us into World War I. He was the first truly big-spending president the country had ever known . . . way, way beyond the costs of the war. When his term was winding down, we were in a serious recession much worse than the recession sparked by the 1929 collapse. When he left office in March, 1921 the country was in a full-fledged depression.Curiously, those events are generally overlooked by history. People in the know, however, speak of “The Invisible Depression” or of the “Not-so-Great Depression.” Why was the Invisible Depression so invisible we don’t even know about it today?

            Two things: 1) revisionist progressive historians have done everything possible to hide this quite remarkable set of events and keep us from comparing it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s approach while creating an enormous myth of FDR as a savior and 2) these policies worked out as the launching pad for the World’s most expansive decade in free market history and gets lost in the shuffle while everyone writes books and novels and treatises about the “Roaring ‘20’s” instead. What actually happened was this:

            Warren G. Harding and his vice president, Calvin Coolidge took office in March, 1921 with a full-fledged economic contraction underway. The full story is available from the Cato Institute here:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9880

but let’s sum it up briefly.  Unemployment stood 150% higher than it was a year earlier; and GDP was only 76% of 1920 levels. Harding immediately cut government spending 49%; taxes 48%; and reduced government debt 30%.   Unlike the business-bashing that Wilson, FDR, LBJ (Lyndon Johnson) and Obama are infamous for, the Harding administration did everything it could to get government out of business’ way.   In fifteen months the country was humming again and the Invisible Depression was over. When Harding died, VP, Calvin Coolidge continued the same policies saying “the business of America is business.” 

Where did Herbert Hoover come from? Hoover was a highly respected humanitarian with an engineering background that Harding installed as his Secretary of Commerce to appease certain Eastern Republican interests.  Under both Harding and Coolidge was very ineffective. Hoover promoted government intervention under the rubric "economic modernization" and tried to get Harding to dole out unemployment benefits to ease the pain of the high 1921 joblessness. Through the next eight years both presidents Harding and Coolidge largely ignored Hoover. 

Hoover was, in short a progressive . . .   Some people are aware of that but here’s what most don’t know. At the end of World War II, Hoover’s humanitarianism including involvement in a program akin to the Marshall Program after World War II which benefitted defeated Germany and the Bolsheviks in Russia. Hoover was so influential and well respected that the New York Times named him “One of the ten most important living Americans. Woodrow Wilson considered Hoover “my ideal successor,” Democratic leaders looked upon Hoover as a strong presidential candidate and FDR said, “There could be none finer.”    Hoover, who up to then was a-political, said that because of his childhood memories, he had no interest in being a Democrat (supposedly the only Democrat in his home city was “the town drunk) and ignored Democratic overtures.   Hoover decided he’d become a Republican and announced his candidacy for president but couldn’t get much Republican support although he did finish 2^nd in the 1920 California Primary.   Despite the gridlock at the RNC Convention that year, Hoover’s name was never seriously discussed and Harding became a popular compromise candidate and he won the nomination on the 10^th ballot.

After the 1920 Republican -- to appease influential Republicans on both coasts -- Harding installed Hoover as his Secretary of Commerce. Hoover’s only real contributions during his stint as Commerce Secretary were some important traffic safety (embracing motor vehicle standards, rules of the road, and urban traffic control) innovations. Nevertheless, he sought to expand the Commerce Secretary domain in every possible way. He became known for trying to take over parts of other cabinets so much so that the joke was that Hoover was "the Secretary of Commerce... and Under-Secretary of Everything Else” and Coolidge called him “Wonder-boy.” 

            After the combined Harding-Coolidge administration ended in 1928, Hoover again ran for president. As soon as he was elected in 1928, he set about making the government much bigger. His biggest moves began right after his inauguration and including implementing a wide series of farm programs and a much-criticized huge tariff increase.   A self-described “Progressive” and “Reformer,” Hoover saw the presidency as a vehicle for improving the conditions of all Americans by regulation and by getting government involved encouraging of volunteerism. Long before entering politics, he had denounced laissez-faire thinking.  As Commerce Secretary, he had taken an active pro-regulation stance. As President, he helped push expensive and interventionist tariff and farm subsidy bills through Congress. Hoover also increased taxes and increased the federal budget 50% (for comparison Barack Obama so far has only increased the budget 41%). It’s obvious that the real Hoover was nothing like the do-nothing Hoover that Progressive historians have insisted he was.  

Just as they did back then, the left (the progressives of today’s  Democratic Party) is now seeking to blame the current economic crisis on a conspiracy that is an inversion of the actual facts. By the way, back in 1932 FDR and his first VP-to-be called Hoover a “socialist” and promised to use Harding’s methods to regain prosperity . . . that is FDR promised to pay down debt; slash taxes; and slash government spending. Instead he actually raised the budget 100% above Hoover’s last budget; confiscated the nation’s gold and in other ways undermined the recovery so badly that only the nation’s entry into World War II nine years later got us out of the depression.

Most Americans have no idea about the facts you’ve just read and their opinions about government’s ability to create jobs in the private sector by increased spending are largely based upon the “Savior myth” of FDR as the man who heroically saved us from the Great Depression. 

When it comes to today’s problems and today’s myths the infamous Obama-car-in-the-ditch myth (blaming all our woes on conservatives and the free markets) tops them all.   The truth, however, is:

The fact that Frances Fox Piven is today still openly calling for bloody revolution and urging the poor and unemployed to “use their anger” and begin the Marxist “revolution” while the lame-stream, mainstream media is accusing the TEA Party of hate-mongering and ignoring Piven is the greatest possible journalistic malfeasance.

The fact that George W. Bush’s administration recognized the problem as early as January, 2005 and sought to repeal the horrific CRA ’77 laws but the vote was defeated. And that Bush made at least 19 separate speeches on the matter and continued to strive for elimination of CRA ’77 right up until finally in July, 2007 (30 months later) when a much weaker law was passed has not been allowed as part of the history of the meltdown even though Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in August, 2010 credited Bush with preventing an absolute collapse of our financial system and with preventing total disintegration of the housing market again reflects poorly on the so-called journalistic “profession.” The “watchdogs of the Republic” have turned on us . . . this is the biggest story of the last half of the 20^th and of the first decade of the 21^st Century and naturally, it’ll never be reported by the present generation of mainstream journalists . . . .

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/the_clowardpiven_strategy_of_e.html

Were Democrats Victimized

by their Own Shenanigans?

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats find themselves fully flummoxed and feeling flimflammed by the voters they’ve been working so feverishly and frantically for. It seems that in the 21^st Century, government throwing large amounts of money at problems A) is not that popular with the voters and B) doesn’t work. Hey, what’s that all about?

Rajjpuut used to work as a health educator for Blue Cross and Blue Shield. One of the “studies” that BC and BS did involved a series of actors going around to physicians reportedly suffering severely with fictitious but reasonable symptoms). It was discovered that surgeons wanted to surge into the body with a scalpel; radiologists thought the patients needed to be zapped; internists considered only the wisdom of potions, powders and pills; and chiropractors thought that body alignment was clearly necessary.

In a different study, psychologists found that chess masters routinely either missed or took much longer to discover unique two-move checkmate patterns when their thinking process got tangled up in five- eight- or ten-move combinations leading to far more familiar patterns . . . what’s up? In a phrase: it’s a scientific principle called the “Einstellung Effect” which is a fancy way to say that when all you have is a hammer, after a while the whole world starts to look an awful lot like a nail. Specifically, the Democrats are “one-trick ponies” who solve problems (or invent problems to solve; or cause problems and then set out to cure them) with only one specialized technique: upping taxes and throwing money at the symptoms of the problem (never the underlying cause which is all too often an initial excess of government involvement).

So our current exacerbation of our fiscal problems under Barack Obama may well be a lesson in the futility of money-throwing and an example of redistributive wealth (as a solution) coming out second-best to the Einstellung Effect, at least that’s one possibility, but other than in revisionist history (where the progressives change things to be more to their liking calling, for example, the Italian Fascists an example of the evils of right-wing ideology when anyone doing a modicum of research finds out that the Italian labor unions rose up against the corporate bosses and seized power and then after seizing power across all of Italy, they elected Benito Mussolini to lead the entire nation. Last time anyone checked, labor unions are NOT a right-wing, but rather a left-wing manifestation. The progressives who used to call themselves Liberals are guilty of revisionism at least 100 times a day in major comments found in print, on the air or online.

Hmmmmm, the Einstellung Effect or progressives’ own historical revisionism coming back to bite them in the butt, ooh what a “Behar” (as in calling someone “a son of a Behar”). Of course, if you believe as Rajjpuut does that the 100% accurate and real ditch story is this one:

George W. Bush saw Obama, Clinton, ACORN and progressive politicians deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot cliff (utter financial disaster) and jumped into the front seat, grabbed the wheel and slammed on the brakes, thus initiating a controlled skid that deposited the vehicle into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.

For more on the details of this version of the now famous car and ditch showing that progressives created a bad law under Jimmy Carter (CRA ’77 which forced mortgage lenders to make knowingly bad loans) which was first expanded by regulatory fiat under Clinton and then expanded legislatively by Slick Willy three times (twice in 1995; and the steroid-version expansion in 1998); and all the while abused by ACORN to at day’s end cause us our worst financial comeuppance since 1929 . . . . Go here for those details and be shocked to find that supposedly 'stupid' G.W. was acutely aware economically and proved himself a hero according to Treasury Sec. Timoth Geithner:

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2010/11/05/avoiding_1994%e2%80%99s_mistakes_crucial_for_conservatives.thtml

So the truth is that former ACORN lawyer and bank brow-beater and shake-down solicitor for the propagation of CRA ’77, Barack Obama, actually did 10,000 as much harm to the U.S. economy prior to October 2009 as George Bush ever did . . . and that since taking office in January, 2009, he’s done more harm to the U.S. economy than any man since the days of Herbert Hoover and FDR (two infamous progressives) . . . . it all sounds like the Democrats have been hoisted upon their own petard just as they were back in 1933 when FDR came into office and started breaking his campaign vows to, you guessed it, lower taxes and lower spending which is what Warren G. Harding had done in 1920 when he inherited a much fiercer depression from Woodrow Wilson than anything we’ve seen since: Harding cut taxes 48%; government spending 49%; and paid down the national debt by 30%.

http://www.theproletariatsnews.com/2008/11/special-report-do-we-need-a-new-fdr-to-save-us-from-depression/

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/09/22/1920_the_great_depression_that_wasnt_98679.html

So, is Rajjpuut saying that Democrats deliberately did the country in? As a matter of fact, he’s saying that the Progressive ultra-left-wing of the Democratic Party which has co-opted the Democratic Party did just that . . . but let’s pretend you consider such utterances to be “conspiracy theory” nonsense . . . well, given the facts as they stand you can instead call them extraordinarily INEPT instead and we’ll both be happy.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/the_clowardpiven_strategy_of_e.html

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

”. . . and then there’s welfare . . . . Obamacare created 388 brand new government agencies or offices and a whole new welfare culture so that now the whole mess (national debt; unfunded liabilities (in Medicare, Social Security and the federal side of Medicaid), Obamacare, Medicaid funding by the states; and welfare + interest will amount to roughly a $225 TRillion obligation. The Gross Domestic Product of the whole world is only about $56 Trillion, roughly one fourth of the mountain of debt and obligations we’re now facing. How can this be handled without impoverishing our children and grandchildren? Without reducing the nation to 4th world status?” Rajjpuut

Crocodile Tears of the Left

Flood America with Corruption

as the “BIG LIE” Dominates

Part V: Victim #5, The American Dream

Loyal readers are advised to skip ahead as we give a brief review. In this blog series, we’ve been exposing the self-described “victimhood” of progressives at the hands of their evil, racist, etc. conservative oppressors and showing you where the real victimhood is . . . .

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2010/09/04/first_crocodile_tears,_then_dismemberment_part_i.thtml

The highlight of part I of this blog series (the link immediately above), and it was difficult to pick a single highlight with “TRUTH” the victim, was this well-documented statement:

Using the same Cloward-Piven** strategy that DELIBERATELY created the bankruptcy of New York City earlier between 1967 and 1975 by deliberately overloading the welfare rolls . . . beginning especially after 1992, ACORN, OBAMA, First ACORN PRESIDENT Bill Clinton, and oodles of progressives (98% of them Democrats) DELIBERATELY were pushing the car toward a 500-foot cliff. George W. Bush jumped in and grabbed the steering wheel and hit the brakes. Bush was able to create a controlled-skid and guide the car to rest in a friendly-looking ditch!

The fact that such a statement is made NOW, 44 years after the chain of events began producing that statement is something that every American ought to be aware of, just as every American ought to be aware of the identities of Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward and Frances Piven and be able to articulate what Cloward-Piven strategy is . . . the fact that most Americans are totally ignorant of these things means someone hasn’t been doing their job. In Part II the victim was journalistic integrity . . . .

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2010/09/05/first_crocodile_tears,_then_dismemberment___part_ii.thtml

In Part III of the series we examined how the false victimhood of the progressives (we must “progress” beyond the outdated and deeply flawed U.S. Constitution) has created another real victim: “Responsibility” in the guise of the rising numbers of single-mother-families (a problem obviously created by everybody else’s sexism, according to feminists). As the irresponsible notion of deliberately choosing a single-parent family drags down all of society (see this link) destroys the American family and creates a new impoverished class in the country . . . .

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2010/09/06/first_crocodile_tears,_then_dismemberment___part_iii.thtml

Economics is a very simple area that the left has sought to hijack with the creation of their own branch of economic science called Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics only sort of explains what happens in Socialist and Totalitarian regimes, that’s why there’s about 80 different schools of Keynesian economics out there. Rajjpuut gives the basics of real (Classical) economics which NOT surprisingly explains everything that happens in any type of political system pretty much perfectly. Classical economics is not the same as Obamanomics, not at all. Taxing and spending and government interference boondoggles (GIBs) and government spending boondoggles and the deficits and debt they create are the antithesis of common-sense classical economics as we saw in our 4^th installment . . . .

http://teapartypatriots.org/BlogPostView.aspx?id=15869898-cbf1-4968-8dbc-3d0550f77bbd

And while the left and their media sycophants are crying, “racists, sexists, bigots, etc. all day long proving themselves always the long-suffering victims and conservative Americans always the eternal oppressors, the fifth REAL victim of all these progressive-victim tales is:

Victim #5: The American Dream

The American Dream is a simple, beautiful thing . . . from the start people came here to find freedom from the heavy hand of big government they’d known in other lands. They continued to come here during the last 233 years because freedom was incarnated in the rule of law, the Constitution of the United States (itself based upon the Declaration of Independence) knowing that the Republic created upon America’s shores was a Meritocracy, that every man or woman who came here would find no real obstacles to their American Dream, to build a good life and open to all of them was the opportunity to leave their children a lot better off then they themselves started out. Thanks to a Century of Progressivism, the American Dream is on the endangered list . . . .

The American Dream is endangered because the very core principles of this nation have been set aside for far too long now. Thrift; industry; equality before the law; capitalism; freedom itself; integrity; and small, non-interfering government that lived by these principles

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

http://fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0.1_L2

http://fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0.1_L3

http://fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/

has all but disappeared from the American scene. The meritocracy has virtually vanished. Thrift has been replaced by personal, corporate and particularly government excesses and debt creation. Industry? Why? 48% of the people pay no taxes, the industrious and the job creators are taxed relentlessly as their 52% supports all the rest of society, most shamelessly, a bloated bureaucracy of unionized government workers who almost can’t be fired no matter how poorly they perform.

Repeatedly hard-working, hard-studying men and women who seek to advance themselves by entering important civil-service fields like the fire-department, police-department and first-responder medical crews find that it does no good to ace the test . . . because affirmative-action critics will steal the positions the hard-working/hard-studying folks actually earned; “capitalism” has become a dirty word and PROFIT has become the dirtiest of vile words as freedom itself has been perverted in a thousand ways . . . most often by abusing the once honored word “reform.”

Citizens are becoming aware that the word “reform” attached to a bill doesn’t mean anything is ever improved, it only means that government is expanding, spending is going up and taxes too . . . and the last time Obama, Pelosi and Reid showed integrity . . . . well, it hasn’t happened in Rajjpuut’s lifetime. Our ever expanding, ever spending, ever interfering government is the problem and the political class (the politicians and bureaucrats within the government) is the only group who benefits while the rest of us suffer. The biggest losers, the biggest victims? Our children and grandchildren.

Our $14 TRillion national debt is multiplying geometrically as this is being written. But that’s small potatoes. Since 1935 for Social Security and 1965 for Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid, the progressives have established these three entitlement programs as “pay as you go, set-aside” entities . . . but of course, the progressives in congress have seen to it that we never pay as we go, we never set aside the money collected for these purposes . . . the result? We now own $115 Trillion in unfunded liabilities (promises made to our people – often our aged) that we have not one single dollar set aside to pay off these promises.

On top of that as all three of these unfunded liabilities grow . . . the new Obamacare program will between 2019 and 2024 bankrupt every state in the union as they force states to fund the greater role for Medicaid required by that law. And then there’s welfare . . . . Obamacare created 388 brand new government agencies or offices and a whole new welfare culture so that now the whole mess (national debt; unfunded liabilities (in Medicare, Social Security and the federal side of Medicaid), Obamacare, Medicaid funding by the states; and welfare + interest will amount to roughly a $225 TRillion obligation. The Gross Domestic Product of the whole world is only about $56 Trillion, roughly one fourth of the mountain of debt and obligations we’re now facing. How can this be handled without impoverishing our children and grandchildren? Without reducing the nation to 4th world status? Can it be done?

Yes, it can and it can be done simply (but definitely NOT EASILY and definitely NOT QUICKLY). Barack Obama is committing the country to the path that Republican Progressive Herbert Hoover and Democratic Progressive Franklin Roosevelt took which turned a simple panic into first a depression (under Hoover) and then a Great Depression (under Roosevelt) that lasted over twelve years. The strange thing is that Roosevelt ran against the big government, big spending philosophies of Hoover and promised to revert to the strategies of Harding and Coolidge (cutting taxes by 47% and taxes by 49% and paying down 30% of the national debt) and then, of course, FDR pulled a Barack Obama on the country doing such things as confiscating the people’s gold (forced) at $20.76 per ounce and then devaluing the paper dollars he’d given them to $35 per ounce – stealing almost 70% of the value of the gold he’d confiscated.

The reason he won the election in 1932? Hoover was totally unpopular and FDR was promising common sense solutions that the people knew worked because they’d seen them work in making the “Invisible Depression” of 1920-21, well “invisible” . . . .

http://www.theproletariatsnews.com/2008/11/special-report-do-we-need-a-new-fdr-to-save-us-from-depression/

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-depression-youve-never-heard-of-1920-1921/

One proviso, our current situation and our current direction is much worse than what Harding faced taking over from progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson . . . so how tough could things be? Imagine elimination of Obamacare; government spending reduced 60%; taxes reduced the same 60%; and a commitment to reduce the national debt by 12% per year . . . does that sound austere to you?

Then consider this, let’s say, the problem with the economy and the national debt is wiped out in five years . . . NICE! Not so fast! Remember the $225 TRillion total we mentioned? Well that’s taken care of perhaps $16 TRillion and all the states are meanwhile going bankrupt and the federal government as well because of state and federal government pensions going through the roof to our unionized state and federal employees . . .

So we’re talking about letting states fail (go bankrupt) and state and federal workers getting their contracts renegotiated markedly downward and we’re talking about our wonderful union employees “pulling a Greece” and holding the country hostage with street violence . . . simple is one thing, easy solutions are yet another . . . .

Next Time: First Crocodile Tears, then Dismemberment Part VI

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut