Thursday, October 28, 2010

Evidence: Democrat Civil War Is Larger Than Realized

Not sure how long this 'Open Letter' will remain up at Hillbuzz.org, so I'm posting it here in full. For all of you who hate to read anything of length, fair warning-- it's a long read.






Dear Rush,

It’s my great hope that some of your listeners find a way to get this letter to you, or that it makes it to “Snerdley” and finds its way into your hands. I don’t think even you understand just how much damage Obama has done to the Democrat Party — to the point where formerly lifelong Democrats like myself, and everyone here at HillBuzz.org, are actively working to expose the party and literally burn it to the ground for the good of the country.

None of this is being reported in the media, but a Civil War in the Democrat ranks has been raging since May 31st, 2008…a date every Hillary Clinton supporter knows well, because that was the date of the Democrat Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting where Howard Dean (then-DNC Chair), Donna Brazile, and scores of other Kool-Aid slurping Obama flunkies took off their masks and revealed the full extent of the Leftist coup that had taken over the party. This was the day when the DNC took delegates Hillary Clinton won in Michigan away from her and handed them to Obama (despite the fact he wasn’t even on the primary ballot in that state, because he removed his name when his campaign realized he’d come in third in that race).

May 31st, 2008 was a day when Hillary “babes” (as you call us sometimes) like us flew to Washington in large numbers to stand outside the Marriott near the National Zoo, where this Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting was held, to shout for the DNC to count all the votes and operate the nominating process fairly — but they refused. The anger over that day has never abated. In fact, it’s grown considerably since then.

This was the determining factor in millions of us leaving the Democrat Party for good. This was the day when the P.U.M.A. movement began — in response to Donna Brazile’s calls for “party unity” following the Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting, we “Hillary babes” said “Party Unity My A$$” (or People United Means Action, depending on how you want to phrase it). Exit polls showed 8 million PUMA voted Republican for the first time in our lives in the fall of 2008…casting ballots for McCain/Palin (and in truth, mainly for Palin, whom we support, and not to a small degree because she receives many of the same attacks lobbed at Hillary Clinton all these years).

You seem to know most of all this, so I’ll end the history lesson by noting the people alienated by the Democrat Party during the primaries in 2008 — where it was clear the party and the media colluded at great lengths to push Obama while hammering Hillary Clinton into the ground — never came back to the Democrat Party.

This is also when most of us stopped using the term “Democratic Party”, since there’s nothing “democratic” about these people. They are the “Democrat Party”, and even that is hard to acknowledge because they really and truly have proved themselves to be enemies of real democracy.

I’m still registered as a Democrat here in Chicago (because the Cocktail Party GOP establishment so disgusts me I can’t will myself to party-ID Republican, and there’s no Independent option here in Illinois) but I can’t imagine ever voting for another Democrat again, as long as I live. To Hell with Democrats. This was solidified for me on Christmas Eve of last year, when Democrats rushed Obamacare through the Senate in the dead of night, through various secret channels, and every single Democrat voted for its passage (even supposed moderates like Evan Bayh in Indiana, who quickly realized his vote would cost him re-election…so the coward retired rather then face angry voters over what he did). I just don’t believe Democrats should be given elected office by voters because they cannot be trusted to even read bills before they vote on them, not even when said bills seek to permanently alter the entire American economy. This is reckless and reprehensible to the point of treason.

I was a Democrat for 32 years before the heavy-handed push for Obama alienated me from the party…and I borrow what Hillary Clinton said about Republicans once, back when she was a Goldwater Girl, and will paraphrase by saying that I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me.

After it beat me to a pulp, called me a racist, berated and insulted me, and used Alinsky Rules to hit me with everything it had. Not just me, but all Hillary supporters.

This is the part I don’t think you understand because I don’t know if you and your listeners paid much attention to what the Obama campaign and DNC did to malign and assault Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 campaign. None of this has been forgotten by any of us.

If you have not seen it already, Rush, you need to watch Gigi Gaston’s documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008″. I’m featured in a segment on the voter fraud that was committed in the Iowa Caucus back in January of 2008. While I was always aware Democrats use unions and other means to cheat in elections, I never knew the Democrat Party was capable of the large-scale, aggressive, unapologetic fraud it committed on Obama’s behalf all through 2008. In Iowa, I watched Obama’s ACORN and SEIU goons push and shove old people, bully them, and intimidate them when they wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton. I saw scores of Illinois license plates fill the parking lots outside caucus locations, with Chicagoland Obama supporters illegally entering the Caucus sites to vote for Obama and game Iowa for him. Having planned ahead, Obama supporters actually RAN those caucus sites, and held the doors open for all these fraudulent voters to walk right in, without being asked for IDs, where they then took control of the caucuses and bullied the Iowa residents into supporting Obama — lest they be called RAAACISTS! out in the open in front of their friends and neighbors in those open-air caucuses.

The media has never talked about this. I don’t remember ever hearing you talk about it. But one of the biggest reasons the Democrats are in the trouble they’re in right now is because of how frequently the Left and the media (one and the same, really) called anyone who opposed Obama a RAAACIST. If you supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries instead of Obama, you were called a RAAACIST. If you were someone like me who fundraised for Hillary, who hosted events for her, who put yourself out there and wrote columns advocating her or did media spots talking up her candidacy, you were aggressively targeted by the Obama campaign and his supporters…relentlessly attacked as a RAAACIST! and assaulted with the Alinksy Rules for Radicals in hopes of breaking your spirit, terrorizing you, and making you abandon Clinton for fear of having these people destroy your life, ruin your business, and make you an absolute pariah in your community.

This is what the Obama campaign, the media, and the DNC did to DEMOCRATS.

For almost a year, the Obama zealots and the Left waged all-out-war not just on Hillary Clinton, but on lifelong, loyal, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat voters like me. This came straight from the top, from Obama himself. Both he and his wife Michelle called the Clintons racists. Obama’s surrogates like James Clyburne, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and others called Geraldine Ferraro, Madeline Albright, and others racists. The Obamas toxified the South Carolina primary, in particular, with foul race-baiting and turned North Carolina and Indiana into racial powder kegs by ramping up accusations that anyone not supporting Obama was a vile racist that needed to be pounded into the ground.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones, my former Congresswoman back home in Cleveland, was a black Hillary Clinton supporter to the very end — and she was called a “race-traitor”, an “Aunt Jane”, and all manner of worse names as she was bullied, berated, and verbally assaulted by the Obama team…because she was black and dared to stand with her friend Hillary Clinton, the person Tubbs Jones knew would make a better president than “The One”. To her dying day in August of 2008, Tubbs Jones was threatened by the Obama campaign and told she’d be primaried in 2010 and kicked to the curb for being a “race-traitor”. She died of a brain aneurysm while driving her car, and Obama supporters filled Daily Kos, DemocratUnderground, and other George Soros-supported sites with lies about her drunk driving, doing drugs, and other slurs because even after she died these people wouldn’t stop hating her for daring to be an outspoken black woman who would never abandon Hillary for Obama.

This is similar to the grief that I’ve received here in Chicago for being a gay Hillary former Democrat in Boystown who never drank any Kool-Aid, never stopped speaking out against Obama, and who recently fully came out as a conservative — in the face of the same kind of Alinsky-grade, identity-based, “traitor” hectoring that Tubbs Jones got for being a black woman who didn’t kneel before the Obama altar.

Well, Rush, let me just tell you, from personal experience, that the tens of millions of people relentlessly abused and hounded by Obama supporters (remember that back in 2008 he urged his followers to “get in their faces” and “confront their neighbors” if they weren’t drinking his unicorn-pumped sparkly Kool-Aid ) will NEVER EVER FORGET what the Obama campaign directed at them, in terms of all this Alinsky bullying.

To quote Jeremiah Wright, the man Obama spent twenty years eagerly listening to at Trinity United Church of Christ: somebody’s chickens have now come back to roost.

During the campaign, Donna Brazile famously said that the Democrat Party no longer needed the people Obama once described as “bitter, religion-and-guns-clinging, Midwesterners”. Brazile took this further and said, outright, that the Democrat party did not need blue-collar white voters, the Jacksonian voters, the Hillary voters, because the party was “Obamafied” and would win elections for generations with the Obama coalition of blacks, Leftist elites, Hispanics, low information gay voters, and self-hating Jews.

This is all the Democrats have left, Rush.

Speaking from personal experience, as someone who has worked in fundraising for over 10 years and who has been a part of every presidential campaign since 1992, the Democrats have permanently alienated tens of millions of people who normally turned out reliably every year not just to vote Democrat, but also to write checks and otherwise participate in campaigns.

No more. Never again.

Here in Chicago, just about everyone who was part of Team Hillary efforts with me on the ground has completely divorced themselves from the Democrat Party. Being called a racist repeatedly and hearing from Donna Brazile that we are not needed will do that to a person.

But in a bigger sense, Democrats, by being so shameless and aggressive with the voter fraud in 2008 have opened too many eyes for us to ever go back to pretending that fraud and corrupt practices aren’t the hallmark of the Democrat Party.

There was a show on ABC a few years ago called Alias starring Jennifer Garner in which she played a woman working for a company called Credit Dauphine…which she was told was a front for a CIA organization called SD6. Garner’s character, Sidney Bristow, carried out her missions for SD6, overlooking different things the organization did that she might not have liked, because she thought she was doing what was best for the country. And then, one day, Sidney learned SD6 was actually an enemy of America…that it’s real mission was to destroy the country…that everything Sidney was told about SD6 was a lie. The mask came off SD6, and Sidney Bristow realized she had to work aggressively to take the whole enterprise down.

Rush (and his listeners), please hear me on this because you will not read this in the media — but just about every one of us from the Hillary 2008 campaign is a Sidney Bristow today.

Those of us who worked Democrat campaigns in the past put up with union associations and the other unsavory aspects of being a Democrat because we were told this was the only way Democrats could win…with union muscle. But, in 2008 the Democrats revealed themselves to be an SD6 conglomeration of every force in this country that wants to bring America down, tank our economy, usurp our Constitution, and lay waste to the American way of life.

Democrats took off the mask. The DNC reveled in being fully Leftist-controlled. Crazy people unapologetic in their Communist admiration took over positions of great influence not just in the DNC, but in our state and federal governments as well.

I’m horrified by that.

Hillary supporters are horrified by that.

And we have not sat back quietly to allow this to happen without a fight.

I know for a fact that people I worked with on the Hillary 2008 campaign have been actively working against every single Democrat who supported Obama’s nomination. Everyone who backstabbed Hillary Clinton is being undermined and sabotaged by people who might still be registered as Democrats but have no more loyalty to the party. Sometimes, conservative sites try to make this into a “sour grapes” sort of “Hillary’s revenge” meme — and there might be a taste of this in what’s going on — but the real driving force is that we former Democrats saw just how insane these people really are and we are now doing everything we can, behind the scenes, to use everything we know about the Democrat Party to collapse it from within.

If you think about it logically, there is not enough energy to sustain a years-long drive to remove Obama supporters from office just because people are still upset Hillary Clinton was not the 2008 nominee and is not president today. Sometimes, I think even you believe this is what this is all about. Your “Reverse Operation Chaos” initiative seems predicated on this, but that belief is apocryphal in that it misses a few big marks.

This is and it isn’t about Hillary.

What it’s really about is what the Democrat Party did to Hillary that alienated tens of millions of Jacksonian/Clintonian/middleclass Americans from the party permanently — and this includes what the party and Obama campaign did to Hillary’s supporters themselves (ie, calling them racists, telling them they weren’t wanted, calling them bitter clingers, etc.).

For the first time in our lives, so many of us former Democrats were given an Alinsky taste of what the Democrat Party really stand for…what it really believes…and how it really feels about America, our Constitution, our economy, and our way of life.

Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama took the mask off the Democrat Party…and the Leftist gorgon that lurked beneath is something America-loving, middleclass, Jacksonian/Clintonian Democrats want nothing to do with.

As part of your “Reverse Operation Chaos”, you really need to emphasize something the media just won’t talk about — and that’s the simple fact that even if you called yourself a Democrat for 32 years, the way I did, because everyone you grew up with and everyone in your family was a Democrat, that in 2010 it’s time to ask yourselves what that really means.

Do you want to be in a party that calls people racists for stepping out of line and voicing opposition to the socialist lurch of the current administration?

Do you condone voter fraud and the shameless, undemocratic tactics employed by Democrats?

Do you wish to associate with the likes of ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and all the other thugs, goons, and degenerates the Obama campaign and White House employ as the DNC’s muscle on the ground?

It is crystal clear that being a patriotic American who loves this country is intellectually incompatible with being a Democrat. If you love America and want it to prosper, the Democrat Party is at absolute odds with everything we need for a thriving, successful economy.

Hillary supporters realize this.

We received a heaping helping of Alinsky assaults to wake us up to this reality.

The reason so many of us support Governor Palin is not just because we see the same Alinksy assaults being waged upon her…but the woman is pitch-perfect in outlining exactly why Obama and the Left are wrong, and why Democrats under Obama are dangerous to have in elected office.

I know you talk about a “Hillary 2012″ but Rush, as much as I love Hillary Clinton, and as much as I worked my heart out for her in 2008, there’s no way that even she can repair the damage Obama has done to the party. Certainly not by 2012. MAYBE the Clintons and their supporters can purge the Obama lunatics from the party by 2016…but I doubt even that will happen. Just like with the Leftists Carter infected the Democrat Party with, Obama legacy hires will be in the DNC for a generation to come…and it might not be until the 2030s before the Democrats can remove the taint Obama and his Leftist agenda have put on the party.

Democrats have made themselves synonymous with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-democracy. Obama and his acolytes decidedly upped the ante when it came to their aggressive push towards socialism…and this Center-Right nation is resisting it in what I am certain will be an epic refudiation (to borrow the Governor’s term) next week.

On November 3rd, no one I know will be resting on any laurels. November 3rd starts the 2012 campaign…and not just the presidential race (where we’ll back Governor Palin) but the drive to knock people like Claire McCaskill out of office, continuing our work to take down every last one of the Obama supporters who backstabbed Hillary Clinton and helped install this socialist into the White House back in 2008. When you hear talk of a Hillary “enemies’ list”, or just “The List” as we call it in HRC supporter circles, this is very much real…and we are truly committed to making sure the Claire McCaskills out there get everything that is coming to them for all their service to Obama and his agenda.

Hear that, Ben Nelson…voters will be coming for you.

You and everyone like you.

Every last one of you.

If you voted for Obamacare, you are politically dead but may not know it…and it is your own fault. Being intensely stupid is no defense. If you were a YES vote on anything related to Obamacare you are going to be defeated…if not in 2010, then in the primaries in 2012. If you survive those, you will be taken down in the 2012 general election. Your political career is over…dummy.

Hope your time on the Obama Kool-Aid bandwagon was worth ruining your life over.

We will not forget those Obamacare votes. We will not forgive being called a racist because we don’t support this terrible man and his awful agenda. We will not be silenced.

We will not give up.

It’s going to be years, if ever, before the lamestream media ever catches up to any of this, and realizes that a large swath of people who used to be Democrat loyalists are now doing everything they can to destroy the party. Some of them are out and open, like me and my friends here at HillBuzz, but many are doing their part quietly. They just stop writing checks. Or maybe now they write checks to Democrat opponents. They might continue to attend events and fundraisers, but now they call up Republican sites and give them all the dirt on what they heard in those meetings. The Democrat Party alienated so many people who are now working to bring it down that I could go on for pages and pages more on this topic.

It’s very Sidney Bristow, Rush. And if you watched that show Alias, you’d know she not only won in the end, but looked damn good kicking ass while doing it.

THAT, El Rushbo, is what your “Hillary babes” are up to.

Here in Boystown, and in every town, because the Civil War Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama started on May 31st, 2008 is raging without end until the Democrat Party is no more.

Tell your listeners to count on that.

---------------

Kevin DuJan

Editor-in-Chief, HillBuzz.org

Hillary "Babe" in Buzzquarters, Boystown

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Step Up & Vote!



Here's a 16 second political commercial I put together...

Thursday, October 14, 2010

What we mean by 'Social Security is 'Bankrupt'"

U.S. Social Security Will Go Bankrupt in 2010
Gary_North, MarketOracle.co.uk, Dec 08, 2009


For the third time in my life, the Social Security System will go belly-up.

The first time was in 1977 – well, almost. To head off the bust, Jimmy Carter got Congress to pass a major FICA tax increase – sorry, "contribution" increase – in order to save Social Security. The rate would be hiked in phases from 2% to 6.15% (times two: employee and employer). He promised: "Now this legislation will guarantee that from 1980 to the year 2030, the Social Security funds will be sound." (http://tinyurl.com/ybksxs4)

Carter's projection was off by a Georgia country mile. In 1983, the SSA program technically went bankrupt. Reagan signed a law that speeded up Carter's rate increases, added Congressional employees to Social Security, and delayed the age of eligibility. (http://tinyurl.com/ybksxs4)

Unless there is another Social Security tax increase in 2010, the system will go into red ink mode and stay there.

The public has not been informed of this, which comes as no surprise. There have been a few scattered stories on the Web, but nothing sustained. The media do not want to admit that the jointly operated Social Security program and Medicare program are going to bankrupt the Federal government if they are not cut back drastically.

They are never cut back. They always expand.

Medicare's Hospital Insurance program has been in red ink mode for two years. The public does not know this, either. To cover the program's insolvency, the government is quietly funding the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund with bailouts from the general fund.

Politically, this creates a problem. When the Treasury taps the general fund, the expenditure appears on the budget – the on-budget budget – as an expenditure. This immediately adds to the deficit, meaning the visible deficit, the one that gets recorded on those wonderful U.S. debt clocks.

When revenues flow into the four Social Security and Medicare trust funds, the money is instantly handed over to the Treasury, which issues non-marketable long-term IOU's to the trust funds. These IOU's are listed as assets by the funds. But, through the wonders of government accounting, they are not listed as liabilities on the government's on-budget budget. They are liabilities only on the off-budget budget, which most Americans are unaware of. This chicanery has been going on ever since the Johnson Administration (Lyndon's, not Andrew's).

The problem facing the politicians is this: when a trust fund is no longer showing a surplus of revenues over expenditures, it has to sell its assets back to the Treasury. The Treasury's non-listed liabilities must be converted into money to send to the legal recipients. This is a red alert of hidden red ink. The public finds out. The debt clocks speed up.

The Treasury has no money in reserve. Every dollar that it takes in immediately flows out. So, it must get Congress to provide the money for the deficit-running trust funds, either by taxing or by borrowing (increasing the legal debt ceiling).

What's a Congress to do?

HIDING THE BUST

The Congressional Budget Office released a report in July on the condition of the Social Security trust finds. There are two funds: Old Age Insurance and Disability Insurance. Think of them as "geezers and gimps." Combined, they are called OASDI. The report offered a table of numbers showing inflow and outflow. It is here.

The table is tricky to interpret. This is deliberate. The political strategy has always been concealment. But if we think through what is being reported in this table, we can spot the ringer.

The ringer is interest payments to the trust funds. The Treasury issued the IOU's, so it must pay the trust funds interest.

Think: "Where does the Treasury get the money?"

Answer: "The general fund." Up go the debt clocks.

Look at the figures projected for 2009. Income from revenues (FICA) is $653 billion. Total income is $808 billion. Where did the extra income come from? Three sources.

     Taxes on benefits: $21 billion
     Federal employer share: $14 billion
     Interest: $120 billion

This means that the U.S. government has to pony up an extra $134 billion to pay to itself: $14 billion in taxes paid on behalf of Federal workers plus $120 billion in interest. This is counted as revenue for the OASDI Trust Fund, but it is red ink for the government.

Neat!

Now let's do a reality check. Subtract $134 billion from the $808 billion reported as total income to the OASDI Trust Fund. Why subtract it? Because this is not income coming from outside the government. We get $674 billion.

What is the expected outgo? $670 billion. The official budget surplus for the OASDI Trust Fund: $138 billion ($808b minus $670b). This is reported by the CBO under "Surplus." This looks pretty good. For the Trust Fund, it is pretty good.

For the government, the real figure is barely in the black. The official on-budget, count-the-subsidy-as-a-subsidy OASDI surplus for the U.S. government: $4 billion ($674b minus $670b).

This is never mentioned by the CBO. We are expected to figure this out. No one does. It took me several minutes to spot the ringer.

Now let us look at the projections for 2010. Income for the trust funds: $811 billion.

     Taxes on benefits: $20 billion
     Federal employer share: $15 billion
     Interest: $118 billion

Let us remove the U.S. government's payments into the fund: $133 billion ($15b + $118b). This must be covered by the general fund. Subtract this from total income to the OASDI fund: $811b minus $133b = $678b.

The expected outgo is $703 billion.

The deficit for the OASDI program in 2010 will be $25 billion ($703b minus $678b).

Some people will regard the "Federal employer share" as non-subsidy: $15 billion. I'll concede this in practice, although I still think this is money extracted by taxes paid into the general fund. Even with this money removed, Social Security will run a $10 billion deficit in 2010.

Social Security will go bust in 2010, if CBO projections are correct.

What do I mean by "bust"? I mean technically insolvent – you know, like the nation's biggest banks in September 2008, before the government's bailout and the Federal Reserve's swap at face value of T-bills for toxic debt held by the banks.

I mean by "bust" the inability of the Social Security System to pay its bills by means of money extracted from the public by way of FICA "contributions."

Think of the Social Security System as Oliver Twist in the workhouse, gruel bowl in hand. "Please, sir, may I have some more?" Unlike Bumble, the Treasury dips its ladle into the gruel and then fills up the bowl. For how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

THE ACCOUNTING DECEPTION WORKS

The accounting scam of the Social Security Trust Fund has worked politically for a generation. It is not just the voters who are fooled. The best and the brightest in the media have been taken in. Here is an exchange that took place on the PBS show, Nightly Business Report, on March 25, 2009.

     GERSH: A negative cash flow does not mean Social Security is in crisis. The program has built up an enormous trust fund over two decades. Barbara Kennelly is president of the Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. She says the trust fund is more than enough to cover any short-term financial hit.

     BARBARA KENNELLY, PRES., NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE: The trustees look at it every single year, the report is going to come out at the end of this month. And you're going to still see that we can pay those benefits way out. Say it's not 2041, it's 2040 or 2039. But we have that money. There is $2.5 trillion in the trust fund for Social Security.

No problem! There is a $2.5 trillion asset base. The OASDI Trust Fund need only sell a few of these assets each year.

The interviewer with PBS never batted an eye. He did not say, "Don't try to pull the wool over my eyes, sister. I wasn't born yesterday." Yes, he was, and the scam worked just as well yesterday as it does today.

She said: "We can pay those benefits way out." How? By selling trust fund assets.

You know the old line from the financial world. "Sell!" "To whom?"

To sell an asset, there must be a market. Here is the punch line, taken directly from the 2009 Report of the Trustees: "Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs." (In a printout, this appears on page 4.)

The Department of the Treasury invests program revenues in special non-marketable securities of the U.S. Government on which a market rate of interest is credited. The trust funds represent the accumulated value, including interest, of all prior program annual surpluses and deficits, and provide automatic authority to pay benefits.

What, exactly, are "non-marketable securities"? They are IOU's issued by the Treasury on behalf of the U.S. government. As I mentioned, these IOU's are not recorded in the government's on-budget account. The revenues that purchase these IOU's are.

But wait! There's more! Pay attention to these words: "on which a market rate of interest is credited." The Treasury applies a market rate of interest to a non-marketable security. There is no such rate. The Treasury can make it up as it goes along.

So, the trust funds are filled with assets: non-marketable IOU's from the government, issued to a government agency. The trust funds are treated as marketable assets. They are indeed marketable: to the Treasury. The bill is passed along to Congress whenever the trust fund sells any of these assets.

There are lots and lots of these IOU's in the Social Security OASDI Trust Fund. No problem!

This is a scam. It is an accounting trick to deceive the public. Does it work? Better than Congress could have dreamed back in late 1968, when the change in accounting took place. (http://tinyurl.com/yeh5sm5)

According to the lady representing the special interest group promoting Social Security and Medicare, Judgment Day is a depleted trust fund. That will take place is 2040, give or take a couple of years. Politically, a date this far out is irrelevant. Congress has been playing kick the can on this issue for a generation. There is no sense of urgency by the public, so there is no sense of urgency in Congress.

Judgment Day is 2010, when the general fund must start paying for those cashed-in non-marketable assets.

Let's see if Congress will kick the can some more. Let's see if Congress passes hikes in the FICA tax rates in 2010, or extends the wage base that pays the tax beyond today's $106,800 limit. My guess: Congress will kick the can. The deficit will grow.

"HOW BAD IS IT?"

Those were Ed McMahon's four words to Johnny Carson, decade after decade, setting up Carson's punch line.

Here is the punch line – lines, actually – as delivered by the notoriously humorless trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds.

The 2009 report begins: "The financial condition of the Social Security and Medicare programs remains challenging." I worked on Capitol Hill as Ron Paul's first research assistant back in 1976. The code word "challenging" means "politically unsolvable at the present time, so Congress will kick the can."

To this assessment, add the first sentence in the Conclusion: "The financial difficulties facing Social Security and Medicare pose serious challenges." What does "serious challenge" mean? Think of December 7, 1941, on board the U.S.S. Arizona. Imagine this sound: "Aye-oo-ga! Aye-oo-ga! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!"

We are assured that Social Security's problem is merely difficult. ("Yellow alert! Yellow alert!")

For Social Security, the reform options are relatively well understood but the choices are difficult.

The Social Security options are very well understood by Congress, but not the public. These options have been understood by Congress ever since 1983, when Reagan hiked FICA taxes.

The political choice was difficult in 1983, back when Reagan still thought he could balance the budget without vetoing spending bills sent up by Congress, which he usually signed into law. That was the year that the on-budget deficit hit $200 billion, a year before my 1977 prediction that it would hit $200 billion in 1984.

Reagan knew that red ink from the sale of Social Security Trust Fund assets back to the Treasury would push his on-budget budget even deeper into the red. He hiked FICA taxes to keep this from happening. Ever since then, Congress has played kick the can.

We ain't seen nothin' yet! The Conclusion concludes:

Medicare is a bigger challenge. Its cost growth can be contained without sacrificing quality of care only if health care cost growth more generally is contained. But despite the difficulties – indeed, because of the difficulties – it is essential that action be taken soon, particularly to control health care costs.

CONCLUSION

We are on board a replica of a 19th-century Mississippi paddle wheel steamboat. Nostalgia is always popular. The illusion of the good old days still sells. The engine is chugging faster and faster. The captain and crew decided long ago never to put the engine into reverse.

We are floating down the fiscal river of no return. We are moving faster and faster. Some of us can hear the falls ahead. The sound gets louder and louder. But our companions on board say, "Let's party!" They head for the dining room. After that, they will head for the slot machines.

Americans respond favorably to these words: "Free" and "all you can eat." That is what politicians promise.

Either the falls will get us (deflationary depression) or else an explosion of the overheated engine will (hyperinflation).

Our companions are still in the dining room or heading toward the slot machines. You and I should begin to move toward the lifeboats.



-------

I've never had any doubt that our government would continue to pay out benefits. I don't believe I have ever suggested that pensioners would cease to receive checks in the mail. What I have suggested is that the system, as it is currently managed, is crumbling around us, and if we don't do something soon-- besides kicking the can down the road --the pain this nation will feel at the moment of collapse will be beyond our comprehension (we can imagine how bad it will be; or won't, but we cannot "know").

Social Security begins paying out more than it takes in... this year. If that's not a problem for you then I suggest you take a deeper stock in whatever drives your moral compass, because something is obviously off-kilter.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Bullicide: The New "Crisis Du Jour"

"What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in the maturer life." ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This is a disturbing story on many levels, but I can't help wondering that there must be something more to it that the author isn't revealing:

"It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand - three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink."

Read the story. Why so many incidents of "bullicide" at one school? So many possible reasons leap out, one cannot arrive at any one all-encompassing conclusion.

On the surface, it would appear that bullying got out of hand.

But, bullying has been in existence since man was created. Cain bullied Able.

I was bullied in school. I never even considered taking my life. Just about everyone can attest to being bullied at some time with no lasting ill effects. Why, all of a sudden, is bullying so severe that students are driven to take their own lives?

Perhaps the problem isn't as new as we are led to believe.

What is happening here? Have some students become too sensitive while others have become less sensitive? Is this a result of too little control or too much? Is it a result of legislating God out of schools?

At least two of the students probably could have prevented most of the bullying they received:

1. "Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn't get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.

He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class...

Mohat's family and friends say he wasn't gay, but people thought he was."

Well, he wore pink. He carried a stuffed animal around with him wherever he went. He wanted to sing soprano. If he wasn't gay, it certainly seems he wanted people to think he was.

I don't want to say he asked for it, but I think the evidence speaks for itself.

2. "[Meredith]Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay."

Why in the world does a high school even have a "Gay-Straight Alliance" in the first place? Students that age have no business having straight sex, let alone gay sex.

Shouldn't the homosexual activist's agenda to "naturalize" aberrant behavior share at least part of the blame?

She was also a good friend of Eric Mohat, the student who wore pink but "wasn't gay".

Perhaps her suicide wasn't the result of bullying at all. Perhaps it was, as the article suggests, because her family had "issues".

Perhaps America's current obsession with fostering and placating a victim-hood mentality creates a sort of longing in some students to make themselves the ultimate victim.

Also, as the article casually points out: There is "a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it."

Macabre as it may seem, perhaps "bullicide" is becoming fashionable.

Perhaps the opening quote is the only explanation.

Who knows? I certainly don't.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Walking Dead?

Or an allegory depicting the "dead, but refusing to die" democratic party, and the public struggling to take back America? Or just good clean zombie fun on AMC Halloween night, 9:00pm Central?



Premiering 2 days before the midterms.


"Things are different now. There's us.... and the dead!"