Recession? We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!

In 2004, the estimated future liability for all financial guarantees to U.S. citizens by all levels of government was - get ready for this - 53 TRILLION DOLLARS. That's not a typo, and it's not a joke. The liability is also totally unfunded - the money necessary to pay for it does not yet exist.

When all benefits for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and the Prescription Drug Benefit, and all government funded pensions, are added together and projected for all citizens who are currently alive, the staggering amount of liability equals almost 4 times the entire US GDP.

In fact, the current liability is more than the total value of all goods and services created for the entire world!! So if every living person devoted an entire year's work to nothing but paying toward the United States' financial promises to its own people, we would still be short on the bill.

That's astonishing. But that's not all. The $53 (now $57) Trillion represents the value in today's dollars, not future dollars, which is how it will be paid out. The true cost of this liability is closer to $100 TRILLION when adjusted for the future value of the dollar over the term of payout.

Ok, the good news is that the Senate has just discovered $65 million in waste and fraud in the Medicare system, so let's see, that only leaves about $100 TRILLION!!!

You'll remember that George Bush tried to tackle part of the problem in 2005 when he proposed to overhaul Social Security, but no, we couldn't have that! Even though there was no risk to current beneficiaries, the Democrats waged a national campaign, complete with misinformation and fear-mongering among the elderly to defeat it. Sound familiar?

Here's the insidious part: All these programs, with the exception of Social Security, were created by the very people who stand to benefit from them, namely the so-called "Greatest Generation", a self-administered title, and their corrupt, entitlement-brained baby-boomer kids. These two generations absolutely lined their nest own eggs in gold at the expense of every other American who will ever live. Think about that - the people who paid in the least have the most to gain, and the looming insolvency of the whole shitpiece assures that future generations will either get nothing or see their own tax burdens doubled or tripled to pay for it. Either way we lose out, to the tune of more than a million dollars of lost income during our lifetimes.

What could you do with million dollars? Probably a lot, unless you're the government, in which case you sneeze it away. Think of it like this - how often do you count or keep track of pennies anymore? Never. Well, a million dollars is a like a penny to a US Senator or the president. It's meaningless, and that's how they treat it. 65 cents will buy me a can of Coke, and the Medicare fraud is like a can of Coke to the government - it takes about 5 minutes and it's gone.

Time to predict the future:
1. This will start to come to a head during 2012, Bara Bama's reelection year. If he manages to con the nation into believeing he has the best solution, all taxes on every working American will be doubled during his second term.
2. If a competent conservative is elected to the White House, along with a conservative congress, we still only have a puncher's chance at turning things around since all the clout will reside within the age groups that stand to get the benefits. The best we can hope for is a hard age cap on all government benefits that will limit the inevitable tax hikes. For example, if the cap is placed at anyone currently 50 years or older. That means the rest of us get stuck with the bill and get nothing, but at least the country as a whole still has a future.
3. Due to the current Democrat regime, out of control spending and debt issuance causes foreign lenders to balk kat future American debt risk. The US government can no longer print money without inflationary affects and the dollar crashes. Either the government immediately raises all taxes to cover the continued deficit spending and benefit payouts, which will almost certainly cause the economy to collapse, or all benefits are immediately cancelled. The government can do this simply by enacting new law.

I think the last option, as catastrophic as that may seem to the "Greatest" degeneration and the Boomer Babies, is actually the best possible outcome. It will take an economic crisis unprecedented in US history and not seen since Germany after Versailles to make it happen, and then only if we have courageous enough leadership to make it happen.

There's one more possibility, of course. That's when policitans do nothing, the economy collapses, and a liberal government federalizes all the nation's assets. It's not so far-fetched. FDR tried it in 1933 and to some extent succeeded, but the Great Depression will seem like a misplaced credit card bill compared to the inevitable chaos when the big bill comes due. Then it's Welcome to Communism!

Paying Debt With More Debt

Money is so cheap right now that many states are borrowing to pay off old debt. From a fiscal perspective this makes total sense; you exchange debt at a high interest rate for debt at a low interest rate.

The problem is rates cannot go any lower, so at this point the states are naturally going to load up on cheap money knowing it will be more expensive later. So states are taking on even more debt simply because of the rate - any sense of fiscal discipline is out the window. The low rate encourages states to spend to the limits of liberal imaginations, and that is not a good thing.

We're going to see states so heavily leveraged, with dubious likelihood of paying the borrowed money back. This is the perfect opportunity to cut costs, but that will never happen with fiscal liberals (Democrats or Republicans) in power.

I don't see how these states can remain solvent 5, 10, or 15 years from now given current projections for revenues vs expenditures.

Unless of course the states' budgets are federalized...

All This Phony "Debate"

The health care reform movement is trying out a new tactic this week. They are framing the "debate" as being between liberal, err, progressive Democrats who want a public option, and so-called "conservative" Democrats who, while they aren't opposed to the idea, know the public support is not with their more liberal colleagues, so they oppose the public option. (Anyone wanna guess where the polling is tracking in those "conservative" senator's states?)

I'm not shocked that the media is touting this as some great battle for pragmatism, but I am surprised at how many in the conservative camp have bought into it.

Hey out there, wake up! This is a phony scam to make the American people think that Democrats are everything to everyone! Have you even heard the term "Republicans" mentioned in the context of this new ploy? Of course not, because the press is in on it.

And it makes total sense. By apparently positioning one group of Democrats to the right, they confuse people into believing that group is conservative, when the opposite is in fact true. The second big win is that the now "Conservative" element of the Democrat party opposes only the contentious public option, but not the greater albatross of ObamaCare as a whole. The hoped-for effect is to make the American people think that even conservatives are now on board with the plan to overhaul the health care system, including public funding for self-assisted suicide, abortion, and illegals. And finally, it allows the ever-expanding progressive wing of the Democrat party to move even farther to the extreme left, where they wanted to go for so long but only now is it politically tenable.

This is a clever ruse, and it may work, based on the sleepy response from actual conservatives and the zero media coverage for Republican opposition. But hey, we don't need Republicans anymore - the left has everyone covered!

You Have a "Right" to Health Care, But You Do Not Have the "Right" to Not Have It

This is the new wisdom. During the 2008 campaign, the Campaigner-in-Chief Bara Bama promoted his ideal of health care as a "right". Now, however, the current Democrap proposals indicate that if someone chooses not to be covered, they will be fined, no exceptions, as much as $3500. (Edit: as of 9/29/09 the proposed fine is $1900, but carries with it a federal misdemeanor charge and the potential for jail time. That's right, if you don't buy health insurance, you can GO TO JAIL.)

That's absurd. If it is indeed a "right" then someone has a right to not have it.

So clearly, in Bama's mind, health care is not a right but a government mandate, like buckling your seat belt. Do you need any more proof that democrats are trying to control every aspect of our lives?

Quick Hit: Bama's "White House" and Bush's "Administration"

Have you noticed how the media refers to Bama's "White House", while they always referred to Bush's "Administration"?

This is a deliberate attempt in both cases to make Bush and Republicans seem like the bad bosses who control our lives and give us nothing, while making Bama seem like the guy next door, your friendly neighbor who just also happens to lead the free world.

Don't be manipulated by the press!!!

Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy: 40 Years of Prejudice by the Press

After stealing 7,000 secret documents from the Pentagon and giving them to the New York Times, Daniel Ellsberg was popularized into a national hero and let off the hook on legal technicalities. Whistle-blowers have been attacking Republicans ever since, often manufacturing evidence to create stories that are completely untrue ala Dan Rather with the Bush documents in 2004.

Because the media makes celebrities of these people, and then major universities give them a lasting voice as professors of journalism and other nonsense, an artificial campaign has been waged against the security of this country.

Ellsberg's contention is that LBJ and McNamara concocted the incident in Tonkin as justification for the war in Vietnam, but strangely, Ellsberg was not compelled to come forward with information he knew from day 1 until he had an opportunity to take down Nixon. He claims it just didn't occur to him to come forward until years later when he was working for Kissinger.

I think it is very likely that if he had come forward while LBJ was pushing his Great Society, the Old Gray Lady would have turned him away, or at the very least they would have sat on it until they had a a more desirable target.

Ellsberg has been screaming to anyone who is forced to listen - his students - for the past eight years about the Bush White House's case for the war in Iraq. His only evidence, like almost all liberals, is that a) almost none of the WMDs have been found (they're in Syria), and b) Valerie Plame was outed as an act of political vengeance against Joe Wilson.

No one has ever seriously questioned Joe Wilson about anything - the press had everything to gain in their agenda to destroy Bush's credibility by just broadcasting all his outrageous statements without a single serious examination of his story. Wilson clearly went to Africa with the express purpose of not finding evidence to support the White House's claims. Surprise - he didn't find any. All accounts were that Joe hardly left the hotel when he was there. He did not prove that Powell lied, only that Joe Wilson had no particular interest in the truth. That's the real story, and the one we were never told.

Here's the thing - outing Plame, a desk jockey who did not have anything even remotely secret to do that would have justified her clearance, does not hurt Wilson, and it doesn't even hurt Plame. From start to finish, this was a manufactured story with the sole purpose of embarrassing Bush. It has zero credibility, and yet the media made a hero out of this guy. Meanwhile, national security is damaged not by some lie told by Bush (that didn't happen), but by the purposeful destruction of the credibility of our intelligence agency and of our president.

Nixon was right about Ellsberg, the guy was nothing more than another opportunist making a name for himself at the cost of the security of Americans abroad and at home.