The Republicans and the Democrats Are Both Responsible for Obamacare as Worker's Hours are Cut.

 

Republicans keep clinging to the delusion that Obamacare is socialism and a 100% Democrat initiative. It's not. Obamacare was first proposed by Republicans.

Something for Conservatives to Think About: Obamacare Really Was a Republican Initiative

Obamacare really was hatched by the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980's, supported by Republicans during the 1990's, tested in Massachusetts by a Republican governor and finally passed as Obamacare. Newt Gingrich got rich promoting the healthcare mandate. Despite campaigning against Obamacare, Gingrich was one of the godfathers of the healthcare mandate.

What precisely did the Republicans and Democrats unleash?

ObamaCare’s Crony Capitalism and Crooked Concealment

It was inevitable that a behemoth law such as ObamaCare, the result of much political wrangling and lobbying, would lead to crony capitalism. What was not inevitable, however, was that the cronyism — and a subsequent coverup — would occur so quickly; but that is the accusation leveled against the Obama administration and a major healthcare corporation by Jeffrey H. Anderson in the December 10 issue of the Weekly Standard.

ObamaCare requires that each state set up an insurance exchange where individuals can choose from a variety of health plans by January 1, 2014. A state may opt out of creating its own exchange, at which point the federal government will step in and create one for it. As of now, 17 states plus the District of Columbia have indicated that they will establish their own exchanges, and about the same number have balked.

That has put the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a bind. It now has to set up exchanges for each of the recalcitrant states (plus any that subsequently refuse to play ball), which it was clearly not anticipating; and it must do so by October 1, 2013, when open enrollment begins. HHS is, not surprisingly, behind schedule — one reason for the coverup Anderson alleges in a report based on previously published accounts and information from an anonymous “insurance industry insider.”

The implementation of Obamacare is already taking its toll on the economy as worker hours are cut.

Cause and effect: Americans who voted for Obama now seeing weekly job hours slashed below 30 as Obamacare kicks in

It is the ultimate example of how you reap what you sow: Huge numbers of American workers who voted for Obama are now seeing their own jobs slashed below 30 hours a week as employers desperately try to avoid "Obamacare bankruptcy."

Obamacare mandates for businesses only apply to those working 30 hours a week or more, and while many businesses do not want to cut workers' hours, they are being forced to in order to stay afloat. This necessary action is causing businesses to lose money and become less competitive while at the same time destroying American jobs.

Some businesses are also slashing job positions in an effort to get below the 50-employee threshold above which Obamacare mandates kick in. So across the country, we're not only seeing workers lose hours thanks to Obamacare; we're also seeing workers losing their jobs.

But the Obama administration will announce these results to be a huge "job creation success!" because workers must now find two part-time jobs that usually pay less than the one full-time job they used to have. The raw job numbers, however, will be spun by the White House into a victory pronouncement of "twice as many jobs exist now!"

The ravages of central planning and statism never end. It's Shock and Awe economic destruction.

Student Loan Racketeering: Congress Critter Introduces a Bill to Make Student Loan Payments a Payroll Tax Deduction

Bloomberg had a very interesting article about a congressional bill that was introduced that would force employers to withhold 15% of an employees' paycheck to pay for student loan debt.

Student-Loan Collection Targeted for Overhaul in Congress

Congress will consider overhauling debt collection in the $100 billion-a-year U.S. student loan program, replacing it with automatic withdrawals from borrowers’ paychecks tied to their income -- a system used in the U.K.

Legislation that Wisconsin Republican Representative Tom Petri plans to introduce as soon as this week would require employers to withhold payments from wages in the same way they do taxes. Payments would be capped at 15 percent of borrowers’ income after basic living expenses.

The bill follows growing concern about the burden of $1 trillion in outstanding student loans, which now exceed credit- card debt.

The above proposal comes on the heels of Obama's 3/10 overhaul of the student loan program that took government guaranteed student lending away from lenders and replaced the Federal government as the direct lender. However, the banksters were still going to collect heavy fees for administering the program, even if they were no longer collecting the interest on student loans.

Obama's student loan overhaul was modeled after a European styled socialist program and the NYT was wild about Obama's new student loan program which is a variation of the Marxist doctrine of "from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs".

Obama Signs Overhaul of Student Loan Program

President Obama signed legislation on Tuesday to expand college access for millions of young Americans by revamping the federal student loan program in what he called “one of the most significant investments in higher education since the G.I. Bill.”....

The new law will eliminate fees paid to private banks to act as intermediaries in providing loans to college students and use much of the nearly $68 billion in savings over 11 years to expand Pell grants and make it easier for students to repay outstanding loans after graduating. The law also invests $2 billion in community colleges over the next four years to provide education and career training programs to workers eligible for trade adjustment aid after dislocation in their industries.

The law will increase Pell grants along with inflation in the next few years, which should raise the maximum grant to $5,975 from $5,550 by 2017, according to the White House, and it will also provide 820,000 more grants by 2020.

Students who borrow money starting in July 2014 will be allowed to cap repayments at 10 percent of income above a basic living allowance, instead of 15 percent. Moreover, if they keep up payments, their balances will be forgiven after 20 years instead of 25 years — or after 10 years if they are in public service, like teaching, nursing or serving in the military.

Student loan debt has spiraled to a staggering $1 trillion according to the WSJ, here. In fact, student loan debt has grown faster than any debt except government debt.

Chart of the Day: Student Loans Have Grown 511% Since 1999 The Atlantic

This chart looks like a mistake, but it's correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.

$550 billion in student loan debt as of the the 2nd quarter of 2011 is a ton of student loan debt but for it to increase to over a trillion as of the end of 2011 according to the WSJ is mindboggling and indicates that the figures used by The Atlantic were vastly under reported.

What is going on here?  There are two rackets that need to be understood.  1. the guaranteed student loan racket and 2. the education mafia.  Both of these factors have massively contributed to the rise in education costs as well as the debt burden of students, many of whom have useless degrees and are unemployable.

Why the Government is to Blame for High College Costs

It all goes back to two well-intentioned federal goals: first, that a college education should be within the reach of every American, and second, that if students borrow money from the federal government, they should repay it. Most of us would agree that both are noble goals. But the consequences of both have been stunning.

As a result of the first, the money began to flow; over the last 30 years, inflation-adjusted federal financial aid has quadrupled. Total student debt has now reached the $1 trillion mark, more than the credit card debt of every American combined. The federal deficit in the recently ended fiscal year totaled $1.3 trillion; the debt load carried by college grads now stands at more than two thirds of our nation's massive budget shortfall. According to the College Board, over half of all full-time undergrads at public colleges and universities are now full-time borrowers. At private nonprofit schools, a whopping two thirds have loans.

The more money the federal government pumps into financial aid, the more money the colleges charge for tuition. Inflation-adjusted tuition and fees have tripled over those same 30 years while aid quadrupled; the aid is going up faster than the tuition. Thanks to the federal government, massive sums of money are available to pay for massive tuitions.

This has nothing to do with costs. According to Neal McCluskey's research at the Cato Institute, it costs roughly $8,000 a year to educate an undergraduate at an average residential college. Yet the average college bill—including room and board—charged at a private four-year university is $37,000, and $16,000 at a public one. For a long time, college tuition has been rising faster than the inflation rate, which certainly has hurt middle-class families. Colleges can raise tuition with impunity because colleges know they'll get paid no matter what.

That brings us to that second well-intentioned federal goal, that all student loans must be repaid. In 1976 federal law was changed to state that student loans would no longer be "dischargeable," or covered by bankruptcy.

Most of the student loans used to be made by banks but these loans came with government guarantees. The banks couldn't loose. If students defaulted, the banks got paid principle and interest by the government and it was an extremely lucrative taxpayer guaranteed profit center for the banks. They had nothing to loose and they focused on marketing debt at colleges and universities. With all this easy money (federally guaranteed loan proceeds) pouring in, colleges and universities raised tuition fees and went on big spending binges.

Students are the big losers and many are saddled with mountains of debt that they will never be able to pay.  Moreover, many have nearly worthless college degrees.  A college degree doesn't guarantee a decent paying job and many very frustrated college grads are working in the food service industry or other low wage jobs.

College Degree = $10-Hour Job

There’s no question that this is a tough time for job seekers, but Millennial college graduates are also grappling with a huge disconnect between what they are taught in school — degrees correlate with salaried positions — and how those jobs just simply aren’t around anymore. Even with adjusted, or lowered, expectations, millions of Millennial college graduates find their only opportunities are for positions where $10 an hour is aiming high, benefits are non-existent, and a paid vacation is a laughable concept.....

And Millennials can’t even rely on the U.S. Government for cushy benefits and salary. I recently spoke with a Fish + Wildlife Ranger with a degree in biology who has been there for seven years and is only making $9/hour. Another 12-year F&W veteran just received a $.50-cent raise, to earn $11.50/hour. These two workers are not isolated examples. The majority of open postings on the Federal Government’s website lists hourly salaries ranging from $10 to $15/hour for entry-level positions, with college graduates primarily starting on the lower end. Plus, these government positions aren’t likely to be full-time; the majority of entry-level openings are for internships, are temporary, or operate as an on-contract basis.

Meanwhile, the government keeps telling folks to get a college education.  Perhaps a college education is vastly overrated and we will see a return of real skills.  But so long as the education mafia makes false and unrealistic promises about the value of the degrees they offer and so long as the government continues to subsidize and fund these education schemes, it's not likely that much will change.  Combining the education racket created by the government and colleges with a nasty, stagnant and declining economy translates to disaster.

Yes, the government is responsible for the mess because it subsidized it.  The Heartland Institute nailed it in a piece that documents just another government created disaster.

 The Real Source of Soaring College Debt? Government

The federal government has released a report blaming private lenders and risky borrowers for the nation’s college debt spike, which hit a record high of $1 trillion outstanding this year.....

Taxpayers are on the hook for the vast majority of this: $864 billion of loans outstanding are from federal aid, and $150 billion is from private lenders...

Infinitely available government funds fuel rising tuition and flagrantly unnecessary expenditures....

Out of Control Costs

College costs have increased more than 400 percent in the past 40 years—faster than healthcare. Government programs contribute to that increase by making more money available for colleges to capture by raising prices

The government created the disaster and now the government's solution to the government created problem is a 15% federal withholding tax for student debt? That ought to go over big with the college grads making $10 an hour. Just wait until the Obamacare tax kicks in. In the infinite wisdom of the government's quest for infinite public and private debt lies the seeds of shock and awe economic destruction.

Had the government not intervened in the education business, education costs would be a whole lot more affordable  and so would student debt.  At the end of the day, it's the taxpayers who will eat the student loan debt.

Republicans are Crazy but Democrats and Liberals are Crazier

I tend to read just about everything that I can from the left, the right and everything in between simply because I so enjoy learning how folks think or, more precisely, don't think. Obviously, America is suffering a profound economic calamity; therefore, just about every ideological group has its own stance on how to solve the problem. Invariably, the position on the left almost always congeals to the same faux fix and progressives are fairly consistent in identifying what they perceive as the root cause of the problem.

 Jonathan Turley has a blog worth following because of its primary focus on civil liberties but on occasion other folks show up as guest bloggers on a variety of issues.

Selling Out Middle Class America

Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger

I will mention two, among many, of the major factors in the decline of the American Middle Class laid out by the authors. The first is that until the 1970’s our Income Tax was really graduated to the point that government had ample revenue to do its job. The second is that one of the major revenue sources for the Federal Government was tariffs. It was the dismantling of the graduated Income Tax and the proliferation of trade agreements reducing tariffs (and tariff revenue) that have been major pieces in the shipping of jobs overseas, increasing our national debt and destroying what was the greatest industrial economy in the World.

That's it folks - the progressive solution to the economy: restore tax rates to pre-1970's levels and impose huge tariffs on foreign goods to drive up the protectionist price of everything. A history of federal tax rates is here.  There are a lot of years with tax rates in the 60%, 70%, 80% and even 90% plus percent tax rates.

According to progressives, government can only adequately do its job when those historically high tax rates are restored.  But in the 1940's, 50's and most of the 60's, American didn't have a welfare state where entitlement payments exceeded tax revenues. In fact, we barely had any personal entitlements at all.

It was LBJ's Great Society that spawned the gargantuan growth in socialism and entitlements that continue to this day, albeit on steroids.  LBJ also bankrupted the nation with the Vietnam War and a combination of progressive engineered entitlements and costly wars left the US in one pickle of a financial mess by the time Nixon arrived.  Creditors demanded payment for debt in gold.  Rather than wipe out whatever gold reserves we had backing the dollar, Nixon opted to just devalue the dollar by de-tethering it from gold which, of course, constituted a form of default.  Nixon also greatly expanded the size of government and entitlements.  Once the dollar was freed from the constraints of gold that forcibly instituted some measure of fiscal sanity, America rapidly descended into its 100% pure paper fiat monetary system.

Nixon also created the Environmental Protection agency (EPA) and other new government agency bureaucracies.  The EPA has become a noose around the neck of the US economy and many federal agencies wield so much authoritarian and dictatorial agency power that they have literally become power mad fiefdoms that aren't accountable to anybody, least of all the Congress that created these monsters.  The Nixon presidency did more damage to America and the American middle class than all presidents combined because his actions resulted in:

There are several factors that squeezed the middle class with devastating results.  1.  The loss of purchasing power of the dollar because working class wages never rose as fast as the decline in the purchasing of their wages and 2. The outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs that once paid the high wages that produced a strong middle class.  To further complicate the outsourcing problem, Congress did pass legislation that taxed US corporate profits earned on US soil at higher rates than profits earned on foreign soil.  The American middle class was betrayed by the very Congress Critters they elected.  What kind of elected officials literally pay companies to move offshore?  Traitors!

On the free trade issue, the liberals hardly have a legitimate grip because liberals don't understand the difference between true free trade agreements and corporatist protectionist agreements.  US trade agreements are nothing but corporatist written schemes and scams wherein spheres of influence and protectionism are divided up among rent seeking multi-national corporations.

The Kleptocracy of Cannibal Crony Capitalism. Bill Clinton and his Republican NAFTA Baby Co-Conspirators

Photo: America's favorite modern progressive Signing NAFTA: Clinton signed NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), an agreement with Canada and Mexico.

As liberals and progressives opine for higher taxes and more corporate protectionism, they sound like the regurgitated version of Francois Hollande, the French socialist prime minister who recently raised taxes on the wealthy to 70%.  Meanwhile, France is experiencing substantial capital flight as the French economy plunges into even more misery under the weight of statism, socialism and taxes.

The global economy is a whole lot more complicated than it was in the the 1950's, 60's and 70's when Americans were prosperous and hardworking producers in a relatively free economy.  A return to those days requires sound money, the substantial downsizing of government, a massively reduced tax burden, a huge reduction in draconian regulatory powers and PEACE instead of chronic war, something liberals and progressive would never allow.

I'm always beating up on the left when they claim they oppose wars.  Yeah, the GOP currently has the label of War Party but who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars - all progressive, liberal Democrats, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton.

Progressive wars vaporized over 100 million folks and that doesn't include another 100 million folks who died under communism, mostly by starvation.

At the end of the day, liberals and progressives oppose freedom and prosperity because to them the great vat of humanity is nothing more than a human zoo that must be managed and controlled like  other members of the animal kingdom or even exterminated like cockroaches if humans are perceived as a common nuisance.

How Romney and the GOP Could Have Defeated Obama and the Democrats

Once again the Republican Party finds itself severely deficient in voter confidence. Frankly, most voters are terrified of the Republican Party because they fear its rabid neoconism, military worship, intolerant social conservatives and its fraudulent fiscal conservatism. Even the pundits recognize that something is radically wrong with the GOP.

Romney Needs a Game Changer

Charles Krauthammer: "His unwillingness to go big, to go for the larger argument, is simply astonishing. For six months, he's been matching Obama small ball for small ball... When you're behind, however, safe is fatal."

Go BIG? Krauthammer is a big government statist who vociferously and consistently defends US foreign policy even though it has bankrupted the nation.  The cost of US foreign policy is mindboggling (over $1 trilliion a year), especially in an election environment where Republicans are the clear underdogs as the voter base of the Republican Party continues to shrink.

It's probably too late for a Republican game change because, well, the Republican Party isn't interested in changing a damn thing. At least the creepy Democrats had the good sense to structure a campaign based on perceived change even if it was one big lie.

My crystal ball tells me that folks would have been willing to vote for REAL change if the Republicans offered it.  What is the kind of change that American voters could have believed in?  The simple truth is that folks really do want peace, liberty and prosperity.  Core issues that drastically impede peace, liberty and prosperity are:

1. Defense spending is bankrupting us and we need to kill the militarized empire before it kills America.

$1 Trillion for Defense

With over 1,000 military installations spread around the planet, here, America desperately need to massively shrink the money spent on foreign military bases and foreign wars.

A solution that would have won hearts and minds of the American people: We need a bipartisan committee to slash military spending by at least half. Military spending does not constitute legitimate national defense needs and we need to take the issue out of the closet and put it on the table for a real debate.

For a bankrupt nation swimming in unsustainable debt and an economy in the tank, this is nothing to be proud of:

Yes, America really does spend over 50% of all tax receipts on wars

Yet, Mitt Romney is campaigning on increasing military spending by trillions, here.

2.  We need to permanently end all corporate welfare and subsidies to all corporations because it's protectionist, fascist and breeds nothing by oligarchy.

3.  Abolish all corporate income taxes because it's double taxation, counter-production, anti-economic growth and with the US having one of the highest corporate taxes rates in the industrialized world, the US is no longer considered a friendly place to park capital and build a business.  Besides, many corporations are so big and powerful that they buy themselves tax breaks.

GE Filed 57,000-Page Tax Return, Paid No Taxes on $14 Billion in Profits

4. The Federal income tax or the 16th amendment must be abolished/repealed because it's nothing but a government tool of terror and tyranny.

Taxation is Theft and Tyranny. The Power to Tax is the Power to Plunder and Enslave

While I don't support the Fair Tax or a national sales tax, it's still a whole lot less intimidating and draconian than the income tax.  A national sales tax in place of the income tax would be a decent step in the right direction so long as the 16th was repealed.

5.  Entitlement reform should be a priority because:

Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.

Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.

But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times.

America simply cannot afford the entitlement burden, benefits must be cut, programs should be mean tested to achieve bare bones participation for the neediest and fraud must be addressed.

6.  The issue of the Federal Reserve and bankster bailouts MUST be addressed because bankster bailouts have plundered the nation.

Have You Heard About The 16 Trillion Dollar Bailout The Federal Reserve Handed To The Too Big To Fail Banks?

The ideal solution is to restore the value of the dollar by returning to the gold standard, as prescribed by the Constitution. The Federal Reserve is the biggest crime syndicate in all of human history because it was specifically designed to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

7. The massive federal regulatory state is an economy killing issue that Republicans refuse to address.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute does an annual study titled Ten Thousand Commandments, An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.  Astoundingly, the cost of federal regulations alone is a recipe for economic disaster, as reported by CEI. .

• Regulatory compliance costs dwarf corporate income taxes of $198 billion
• Regulatory costs tower over the estimated 2011 individual income taxes of $956 billion by 83 percent. • Regulatory costs of $1.752 trillion amount to 11.7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), estimated at $14.954 trillion in 2011.

Most of these regulations were dreamed up by bureaucrats seeking power and corporations seeking monopolies and protection from competition.

8. Ron Paul's budget was a blueprint for fiscal solvency as well as balancing the budget.  The GOP could have praised it and embraced it as a starting point.  Instead, the Republican Party condemned both Ron Paul and his exceptionally sane fiscal proposal to reign in federal spending.  His son, Sen. Rand Paul, laid out a plan to cut $500 billion in spending and was laughed at by Republicans.  Sen. Paul reduced his plan to $200 billion in cuts and was still laughed at by Republicans.

Neither Mitt Romney nor the Republican Party are addressing the fiscal issues.  Even Freedom Works, a conservative think tank, praised Rand Paul's budget proposal and criticized Paul Ryan's idiotic plan that doesn't even balance the budget until 2040.

Senator Rand Paul’s Budget Plan is Still the Best

Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has released his new budget plan called The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal . His plan does contain some praiseworthy proposals such as cutting the corporate tax rate, repealing ObamaCare and ending forms of corporate welfare. However, it does not cut a single federal department and doesn’t balance the budget until 2040.

While the Ryan plan is certainly preferable to President Obama’s budget , it is not as bold as the budget plan introduced by Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Jim DeMint in the Senate. Rand Paul’s plan known as a Platform to Revitalize America would slash four federal departments and balance the budget within five years without raising taxes. Now, we’re talking.

Big problems required big ideas and big solutions. As always, the Republican Party continues to ignore the problems. For the Republicans, it's all about kicking the can down the road and spend, spend and spend.

When the GOP once again gets its ass kicked in a general election, they have nobody to blame but themselves.  If anything, the Republicans should have learned from the Democrats that Americans really do want change, REAL change.  

The Government Will Never End the Fed but the Fed is Destined to Die Anyway

Although the Republican controlled House of Representatives recently passed Audit the Fed, HR 459, Audit the Fed will never pass nor will the Fed ever be abolished legislatively. Republicans really do support the Federal Reserve because it funds their wars and empire. Furthermore, all the Republican YEA's to Audit the Fed were nothing more than an act of political expediency because Republicans in Congress absolutely do understand that Audit the Fed stands no chance of ever getting out of the Senate where it only has 30 co-sponsors and could never survive a presidential veto.

The Federal Reserve is the mother's milk of empire, tyranny and statism.  Big government and central banks exist for no purpose except to massive concentrate wealth and power.  Moreover, it's absolutely true that the phrase "99% vs the 1%" is indeed a valid premise even if it was hatched by socialists on the left.  What the progressive left fails to grasp is that it was liberal progressive Democrats who delivered unto us the Federal Reserve that was empowered to transfer wealth from the 99% to the 1%.

In many way, the progressive left considers itself intellectually superior to liberty because, control freaks that they are, they believe that there isn't anything they can't control or shouldn't control, given their totalitarian mindsets. . Hence, they have an enormous propensity to align themselves with big corporatist and big bankster money, the very same folks they claim to abhor as the blood suckers of humanity.  It's a situation of where progressive police state ideology butts heads with the real power - the power of big statist money.  In the end, it's always about power and never liberty or even the the prosperity of the people.   The first victims of most Marxists revolutions are typically the bourgeois, the middle class, and the backbone of any flourishing and prosperous society.  Marxist revolutions are never about revolts against capitalism but always about joining with the powerful to share totalitarian power.

Communist party officials always had the finest homes and the finest foods. They always exempted themselves from breadlines as the hoards of lowly humanity, the proletariat they claim to love, waited in line for hours to buy a loaf of moldy and stale bread.  The commie officials always had the best of everything from caviar to imported French wines.  From Stalinists and Marxists to the limousine liberals of the west, these folks thoroughly enjoy their rockstar status, power and money.

But alas, the progressives are in deep trouble as their beloved banksters and 1 percenters are now teetering on the brink of collapse as the human carnage piles up.  The debt fueled power of banksters and progressives is now imploding.  From Greece to Spain to Portugal to Italy, we are witnessing the final days of the marriage of banksters and progressives.  In fact, they've plunged into a black hole from which there is no escape.

With minor exceptions, nearly all western nations are indebted on a scale that is unsustainable.  Individual citizens are also massively indebted and will default on their debts.  The fiat banksters will suffer loan losses that will wipe out their capital.  It started in 2008 and while the Federal Reserve intervened and pumped some $16 trillion into the financial system, here, it was the equivalent of putting a band aid on a massive and oozing cancerous tumor for the sole purpose of hiding the tumor but not its deadly effects.

How will this mess shakeout?  It will shakeout the same way it's shaking our in Greece and Spain, namely, folks will devise new paradigms of survival that will include barter and underground economies. More importantly, they will just opt out of the system to the extent that they can to escape the government tax collectors.  Folks will seek financial safety in hard currency and they will withdraw their money from the banks.

As The Euro Tumbles, Spaniards Look To Gold

The euro exodus from Greece and Spain

Wary depositors are hauling billions of euros our of Greek and Spanish banks, reflecting the nervous mood of the people.

Wary depositors have been hauling billions of Euros out of Greek and Spanish banks over the past few weeks. Since 2009, Greek depositors have withdrawn $4 million a month from that nation’s banks, while Spanish bank customers pulled 31 billion euros from Spanish banks in April alone.

More than any election result, bank runs reflect the mood of the people.

Folks fear 2 things. They fear a currency collapse (devaluation and  hyper-inflation), something that is always triggered by the massive printing of currency. But they also fear the government seizure of what money they do have.

One of the benefits of modern technology and the computer age, at least from the perspective of the government, is that governments now have the ability to track your entire life - from auto-deposit payroll checks to what goes in your savings account and to what you buy with debit/cards. Government know where your money is all times because they have an electronic trail and road map. But the government's power to track, tax and plunder becomes a whole lot more limited in an underground economy that may utilize various methods to transact business, including cash, plain old bartering, local currency or even a cyber currency like Bitcoin.

Moreover, hard currency like gold and silver will also come into play as a newly emerging default currency. The modern system of government taxation and banking requires trust in the system but when trust and confidence evaporates on a significant scale, folks will always flee to safe havens that protect wealth from devaluation and confiscation. At this point, government revenue collection machines and fiat banks are in deep trouble. Government revenues shrink and folks withdraw their money from the banks, something that denies the government the ability to track their life and every financial transaction.

It's wise to use cash to purchase what you need and bills can be paid with money orders. Even folks with auto-deposit paychecks are withdrawing their money from their bank accounts. It's very important to conduct one's financial life, to the extent that one can, beyond the snooping electronic eyes of the government and its agent-in-chief, the banks. Even more importantly, it's imperative to keep a low profile and live below the governments radar - never attract attention or discuss your business with anybody.

In many ways, the government and its fiat banks have sown the seeds of their own destruction by spending way too much money, taxing folks to the point of outright expropriation and doing it all with fiat money.  In the process, government and banksters have literally destroyed the one thing that sustained them - the wealth producing capabilities of a thriving economy.

Most folks never wanted to opt out of the system. They were forced out by government policies that destroyed their jobs, livelihoods and their prosperity. In fact, most folks were quite content and very willing to tolerate the corrupt system so long as as the system was working for them. But whether one is in Greece (where an estimated 30-50% of all economic activity is now underground), Spain or the US, the system is no longer working for the growing millions who got shafted and are now suffering.

To be sure, these folks will seek vengeance on the government that caused them so much misery and their willingness to ever trust the government and its banksters again will be about zilch. A paradigm shift from 'government is great and government is god' to 'screw the corrupt government' will unfold slowly but it will ultimately be massive. Furthermore, the beast known as the government monster will be starved in the process as revenues dry up.

Starving the beast is a two-step dance that includes opting out of the banking system and figuring out how to make and trade your stuff and skills through voluntary associations. Granted, it's a challenge but many folks are embracing the challenge as they dive headfirst into survivalist mode. Going forward, there will be a proliferation of small rural voluntary communities with good soil and a reliable water source. Skills will become critical (carpenter, plumber, mechanic and other trades) but the services of doctors and geeks will also be in demand. Hot commodities will be basic food, fuel and medicine.

Many Americans have already embarked on a journey that they never anticipated but was forced upon them without their consent.

Benefits of the 1099 Economy, the Underground Economy and the Future of Freedom

According to Forbes, the 1099 economy is booming.

One of the biggest obstacles facing government is its ability to collect taxes. So long as folks are employed as employees, the government easily got its share of plunder right off the top via the federal withholding tax and the Social Security tax, along with other taxes including state taxes. Enforcement of tax collections was never really much a problem for government so long as most folks were employees. The government didn't need an army of tax collectors; employers functioned as the primary tax collectors for the government.

But with the economy tanking and necessity being the mother of invention, folks are now forced to discover new paradigms of survival. Many companies are resorting to contract labor to avoid the legacy costs of health insurance and retirement plans. They hire independent contractors and issue a 1099 instead of a W-2. Folks who earn 1099 income are required to file tax returns, they are required to pay quarterly taxes and they are considered self-employed. They are effectively small business owners who also avail themselves of legal tax deductions.

1099 income is a whole lot harder for governments to trace and enforcement becomes a huge problem for the government. Precisely because 1099 tax revenues don't consistently and reliably flow to the government in a timely manner, the government is at a disadvantage because it no longer has employers functioning as efficient and immediate tax collectors.

The economic calamity has also spawned a massive distrust of the government. Folks are simply fed with with paying taxes. When government is perceived a corrupt to the core and no longer offers value to taxpayers, taxpayers will seek ways to just opt out of the system. And thus, the underground economy is born.

There can be no question that America is in uncharted territory but whatever happens will also translate into an opportunity to shed the shackles of slavery, fiat money and corrupt government. The one thing that America needs most - peace, liberty and prosperity - will never flow from the government or government power, which is precisely why the beast must be starved.

Prosperity: A View from the Left, the Right and the Austrian Liberty Movement

With the economy in shambles and the middle class rapidly vanishing, there are 3 views on how to solved the America's increasingly critical economic problems: 1. the progressive left or Democrat view 2. the right wing or the Republican view and 3. the Austrian free market view.

While every sane American and even the political class will acknowledge that traditional American prosperity is in dire jeopardy, the views on precisely what constitutes prosperity and where prosperity comes from vary radically in the ideological camps.

The View From the Democrat/Progressive/Liberal Camp

The leftist Democrat/progressive views have been well summarized in a category captioned Austerity Hawks Want a Return to 1920's Capitalism on a progressive website that includes a series of articles on the issue.

Austerity Road to 19th Century

Deficit Hawks Continue Post-WWII Attack on Labor

Who Benefits From Austerity

High Deficits were the Objective of Right Economics

Austerity Hawks Want a Return to 1920's Capitalism

Is Obama Still on the Austerity Train?

Austerity and the GOP in Power

According to the Democrat/liberal/progressive view, there can be no prosperity for the masses without a government mandate.  Moreover, they demand absolute totalitarian powers to 1. unionize labor and give them enough power to force businesses to meet their every demand and 2. the power to tax for redistribution purposes just in case somebody has incurred their wrath and scorn by working hard and being successful in entrepreneurship.

The left automatically rejects the premise that free markets can deliver prosperity by giving the people the power to decide want they want in the way of goods and services.  Hence, the left strongly favors a top down command and control economy wherein government bureaucrats alone have the exclusive power to decide what people will get and at what price they will get it.

The progressive model is certainly nothing new and has been around since the days of Marx, Stalin and Mao.  Furthermore, the left totally ignores the fact that communism and socialism killed over 100 million folks during the 20th century alone and mostly by starvation.

Despite the incessant whining of American progressives that folks are poor because government and bureaucrats don't have enough power, there exist many nations on the planet where the progressive had all the power - Greece, Spain and Portugal to name a few - and all are suffering from profound economic decline, mountains of debt and bankruptcy.

Progressives have an intense aversion to the word austerity, although austerity is nothing more than living within your financial means and not spending yourself into personal and national bankruptcy. While progressives absolutely believe that promising and delivering the cornucopia of plenty  to humanity is their defining goal, they fall way short.  Europe's most debt ridden nations and America's most debt ridden cities are run by progressives who do nothing but lie and borrow to keep the great progressive lie alive.

Nobody summed up progressive thinking better than Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang.  What Lewis says about Greece easily applies to any progressive nation or entity dedicated to achieving the paranoid delusion of utopia through tyranny (the Marxist socialist recipe for miraculous abundance that murdered 100,000,000 folks).

As it turns out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms – and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a years. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance….pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension…..and there isn't a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.”

Progressives are facing the stone cold reality that reality really does bite so they are in an absolute panic.  Their solution?  Raise taxes and plunder everybody.  The recently elected French president Francois Hollande campaigned on a 75% tax rate on the rich.  He won an election and delivered on his promise.  What France will learn is that capital always seeks and finds the friendliest of abodes.  Accordingly, there will be a mass exodus of money and folks with money from France.  Nobody with resources is going to hang around and wait for the ax of the financial guillotine to fall.  As capital flees, as it always does when facing the threat of outright expropriation, the French economy that is already reeling from economic misery will only get a whole lot worse.

The View From the Conservative Republican Camp

Unlike progressives that are ideologically secure and comfortable in their statist economic and command and control government views, Republicans tend to be absolute frauds who wallow in the delusion that America already has a free market economy.  At Republican gathering, one will frequently see folks holding signs defending for capitalism.  Weirdly, Republicans and conservatives truly believe that the Republican Party is the party of free markets and capitalism.  Yet the truth tells a completely different story.  The so-called capitalism and free markets that Republicans claim to worship are really nothing but statist engineered oligarchy, plutocracy, corporatism and fascism.  It's the tyranny of the marriage of Big Government and Big Business.

Republicans are notorious for voting for corporate welfare and subsidies.  The Democrats also support corporate welfare and subsidies but generally only for their pet issues like green energy scams that are personified in scandals like Solyndra.  The Democrats love corporate welfare because state run and funded business enterprises is their goal; the Democrats don't want capitalism or free markets and would gladly outlaw all forms of private business initiatives.  The Republicans love corporate welfare because they are whores and crooks who seek to fill their campaign coffers with any special interest money.  Republicans love taking care of their rich oligarch friends and showering them with taxpayer dough, protectionism and monopoly.

Ironically, Republicans frequently accuse the Democrats of being socialists and Marxists but what the Republicans do isn't a whole lot different than what the Democrats do.  They just do it for different reasons.  Republicans consistently invoke capitalism and free markets as justification for their anti-liberty and anti-free market actions while the Democrats merely invoke "we're doing it for the people" as they sing their collectivist lyrics.

In reality, getting caught up in a game of semantics is an exercise in futility.  Is it even appropriate and relevant to debate the finer semantical points when both the Republican and Democrat solutions translate to the precise same end game, namely, the control of all resources and production by a handful of elites who have absolute power and dominion over everything?

Who benefits from such a system?  Nobody, except political party elites drunk on power and filthy rich oligarchs who buy political power to guarantee their monopolies while avoiding honest competition.

Even on the fiscal and spending side of the equation, Republicans are  notorious big spenders who are addicted to spending other peoples money just as much as the Democrats are.  Under Bush 43, the national debt increased a whopping $5 trillion but there was no backlash by Republicans.  Yet, the same Republicans who had no moral qualms whatsoever with Republican spending went into full attack mode over Democrat spending.  Even the Tea Party movement is a total fraud.

The Tea Party Republicans Spent More Than the Dems They Replaced.

If there are any differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, it's the contentious social issues that weigh heavily on each election. On the BIG issues like fiscal, monetary, economic and foreign policies, the tyrannical Republicans and Democrats are pretty much in complete agreement.

The View from the Austrians and Liberty Activists

While it can be conclusively proven that Republicans and Democrats are really two statist peas from the same tyrannical pod, the only political movements in America today that truly represents a change toward liberty is the Ron Paul liberty movement and the Libertarian Party. These folks advocate for -  gasp - peace, liberty and prosperity, three things that make Republicans and Democrats absolutely cringe. In fact, it makes them downright apoplectic. The establishment is stroking out because Americans are rising up to think the unthinkable and speak the unthinkable in a nation where thinking is verboten.

These liberty activists imagine a world without wars (murdering for defense contractor profits), a world without thieving central banksters that steal from the poor and middle class by devaluing currency (the Federal Reserve) and they also have the blazing audacity to imagine a world of free peoples voluntarily making and trading their widgets/services in peace. GASP again!

As odd as this may sound for the 132 million Americans who voted for Obama or McCain in 2008 and who will probably vote again for Obama or Romney in 2012, the views of the liberty activists are pretty much the exact same views of America's founders who envisioned a weak federal government, the wide dispersion of power, the freedom to produce and keep what you produce, and a federation of sovereign free states.

Liberty activists are ideologically anchored in the belief that government is a pox upon humanity because it murders, wages endless genocidal wars, steals from those who produce and uses the police powers of the state (the point of a gun) to impose its tyranny.  Liberty activists may be divided between the 100% Rothbardian purist anarcho-capitalists (no government) and the minarchist movement (bare minimal government to secure rights) but at this juncture the debate is hardly worth waging because America is so far removed from her founding principles that our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are nothing more than artifacts permanently consigned to the dust heap of history.  George Bush supposedly called the Constitution nothing but a "G-d damn piece of paper" that had no authority to limit his absolute power in any way.

Unlike Republicans and Democrats, the Austrians and liberty activists understand that government cannot create wealth and prosperity.  In fact, the only thing a government can really do economically is outlaw the ability of its citizens to become prosperous while stealing what they have already produced.  In government think, a free and prosperous citizen is not only a sovereign citizen endowed with protected natural rights, but is considered a threat to government power.  Free and sovereign citizens tend not to empower governments with anything except bare minimal powers because they know full well that such a government will come after them and their wealth.

The Keynesian economic model is based on 2 defining characteristics 1. government can remain powerful by plundering its citizens and redistributing income,  and 2. when a people and nation are fully plundered, there's always the back-up game of printing money out of thin air to create the illusion of prosperity derived from government largess and its counterfeit money printing machine.

America has been in the "print fiat money out of thin air" phase ever since Republican Nixon de-tethered the dollar from gold in 1971 (via an executive order and without congressional approval) and rendered the dollar a paper fiat currency.

Paper currency always reverts to its intrinsic value of zero.

A real and enduring wealth is produced by producing something of value.  Governments cannot create wealth with gobs of paper fiat money. If they could, there would be no human misery or poverty on the planet and everybody would be oozing prosperity from every earthly crevice.

What is Wealth?

What is wealth and prosperity? We all want it because nobody wants to be poor, suffering and impoverished.

It sounds like a simple question. It is and the answer is astonishingly simple. However, it’s our deviation from the principles that accrue wealth and prosperity to the greatest majority of people that got us into deep dodo. Wealth is simply excess production. A corn farmer sows his seeds, lovingly tends to his crops and harvests the product of his labor. What he doesn’t need to feed and sustain his own life is wealth or savings. What does the corn farmer do with his wealth? He could trade his corn for meat or eggs or shoes or clothes and other things he might want. But - no matter what the corn farmer does, he absolutely must produce and must save enough seed to plant again or he will starve and suffer. That’s a law of economics that cannot be altered, modified or otherwise tampered with without negating the entire wealth building mechanism of human survival.

Human survival has always been based on the principle of working in some capacity to produce something of value to sustain life and create excess production for the purpose of exchanging it for other goods and/or to save for the future....

When property rights were secure before the age of government confiscation, crony capitalism, cartel capitalism, protectionism and fascism, capitalism was the most prosperity inducing of all human activities simply because the motivation to work and produce was extraordinarily high. Capitalism motivated sane values like self-sufficiency, thrift, savings, a strong work ethic and building communities that respected the property of others.

But what happens to the farmer when the government invades a “man’s castle” and violates his ability to produce and save by seizing his production, his property and/or limiting his capacity to produce and save?

This has been the trajectory of America for nearly 50 years. As government power grew, it stole the production of producers, it stole their wealth, it stole their seeds for future growth and it stole their savings that are plowed back into a productive economy.

And so we remain at political loggerheads as power made control freaks lock horns with the liberty loving activists who absolutely comprehend that government can not only destroy real and endurable wealth but also outlaw the wealth building mechanism itself.  It's a recipe for perpetual poverty.  The real tragedy, however, is that the American people still have a high level of trust in the ability of the government to deliver on its promises, promises of plunder at the point of a gun.

How Statism and the NWO Will Crash and Burn

If anything, government is an optimistic entity that automatically assumes that the economy will always do well, and perpetually and generously fill government coffers with an abundance of tax revenues. However, the decline and fall of the global economy has badly dinged tax collections. If folks aren't prosperous and making money, the plundering government's cut shrinks and shrinks substantially.

Government survives by either brute force or with the voluntary consent of the people because they perceive a value. But what happens when folks no longer perceive a value in government? Well, folks just opt out of the system, go underground and/or overtly or covertly indulge in non-compliance. When this happens, we see headlines and stories like this:

Island authorities denounce attack on tax police

ATHENS, Greece -- Local authorities on the Greek island of Hydra have denounced an attack by a local crowd on tax police after they detained a restaurant owner who did not provide receipts to clients.

The Friday incident happened after the inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour's ride away by fast boat. They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat's crew.

The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island's police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived Saturday morning. Locals cut off the station's electricity and water supplies.

The Greeks have a long history of refusing to pay taxes to its corrupt and thieving government. However, the Greeks are far from the only folks indulging in a tax revolt. In Germany, statist socialists are alleging that Germans who put their money in Swiss banks are tax cheats who should be imprisoned.

German opposition leader attacks Swiss banks

Gabriel, whose Social Democrats (SPD) have blocked a deal between the German and Swiss governments to levy taxes on German assets in Swiss bank accounts, told Deutschlandfunk that Swiss banking practices in Germany were comparable with organised crime.

"It's a serious crime," said Gabriel, the chairman of the SPD who may run against Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2013 election. "We're talking about organised crime in Swiss banks (operating) in Germany."

Gabriel, who plans to make criticism of banks a centrepiece of the SPD's 2013 campaign, added the sentence for large-scale tax evasion in Germany could be as long as 10 years in prison.

In Italy, another nation quite notorious for tax avoidance, the desperately broke Italian government is beefing up tax collection efforts.

Italy's tax hunters target super-rich and their yachts off the Sardinian coast

There used to be a time when Italy's super-rich gravitated to the smartest enclaves of Sardinia for a summer of relaxation and luxury. Not any more. In an increasingly austerity-conscious country, the yacht-owning classes are coming under increasing and unwelcome scrutiny, some of which would not look out of place in a scene from the film Apocalypse Now.

"We first spotted the targets with the helicopter's radar and closed in to identify about 50 boats off the two islands," said Italian coastguard captain Pietro Mele, describing a recent raid on yachts suspected of straying too close to the coast.

Although these are only a few examples of governments' insatiable appetite for other peoples money and how people fight back, the stone cold reality is that western governments have been indulging in unsustainable spending sprees for decades. Now that the massive pile of unsustainable debt is evidenced everywhere, another stone cold reality that directly impacts the people is the austerity of cutting public services because bigger and bigger percentages of national income are diverted to debt service. Tax receipts are going to the banksters and not the people.

In a bad and worsening economy, such a situation is the sum of all fears for the government. Not only do governments lack the resources to fund entitlements and public services, they've lost the trust of the people who are waking up to another reality, namely, that a big spending corrupt government wasn't such a good idea after all.

As the world unwinds according to the laws of financial physics and the fictitious fiat monetary paradise implodes, folks will be forced to plunge into raw survival mode as they seek and invent new paradigms of survival that most assuredly won't include trust in government and its army of bureaucratic goons. .

Meanwhile, folks accustomed to feeding off of everybody else will indeed clamor for a more violent and draconian government that will militarily plunder everybody and everything. But there comes a point when there is nothing left to plunder.

The only difference between the murderous and ruthless tactics of Mao/Stalin and Gang who killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and the so-called soft socialism of the west is that the former didn't have the luxury of a wealthy economy to plunder. Well, the plundering class is rapidly running out of options because there isn't much left to plunder which is why the hysteria is now focused on 'tax the rich'. In France, the socialists have passed a law imposing a 75% tax on the rich. What will happen is that what productive capital that remains in socialist France will simply pack up and move to friendlier abodes. The French economy will be deprived of scare financial resources to reboot its ailing economy, the economy will worsen and French misery will intensify. Socialists never think about the future and merely dwell on the immediate and politically expedient that invariably includes class warfare.

At this juncture, it's safe to assume that the west (Europe and America) are going down and it won't be a soft landing. Things are about to get a whole lot worse, it's won't be a pretty sight, there will be massive human suffering and probably violence and massive civil unrest.

However, if folks can just resist the temptation to implement more bad government and thieving central banks, they will finally acquire a bright and prosperous future out of the pile of statist rubble.

Simply put, the glutenous beast that is devouring us must be starved if folks are to survive in peace, liberty and prosperity.  

The Vanishing American Middle Class

It's no secret that the Occupy movement was largely spawned by the left. Hence, it was viewed with disdain by most Republicans who perceived the Occupy activists as socialists clamoring for more socialism but that's only part of the story. The American middle class is indeed nosediving toward permanent extinction and any society that consists of the ruling rich and the eternally poor is doomed. But heck, it's America where we obsess over chicken sandwiches and pay scant attention to what is really happening in America.

The left isn't always wrong and in fact it gets a lot of things right. Actually, the left is quite good a diagnosing a problem but where it falls way short is in their proposed solutions to a problem which invariably calls for more government intervention and control.

Forgetting for the moment that liberals have radically different solutions than conservatives when it comes to solving big problems, we need to focus on a stone cold reality.  Contained in the jargon of the 99% vs. the 1%, there is ample documented evidence that the middle class is rapidly losing ground.

Real Wages Much Lower Than They Were Four Decades Ago

These charts do not paint a pretty picture. In fact they disclose that male wages are declining while the purchasing power of the dollar is simultaneously decreasing. That translates into direct hit on the middle class.

While the gap between the rich and the poor in America has been widening for decades, CEO compensation also continues to soar.

Average CEO Pay 2011 Nearly $10 Million At Public Companies: AP Study

The issue isn't so much about how much CEO's earn but what they earn in relation to worker wages.  The disparity between CEO compensation and worker compensation is incredibly wide and growing.

In 1982, the ratio of CEO pay to the wages of an average worker stood at 42 to 1. Today, it is beyond 300 to 1. If the minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay since 1990, it would be $15.71 an hour today, here.

So when the left talks about economic injustice, it's not as if they don't make a very valid point.  So long as America continues to be a society where the rich get richer, the banksters get bailouts and the poor and middle class get poorer, that's a recipe for disaster and an eventual Marxist revolution.

Thus far, neither the Republicans or Democrats are motivated to confront America's dire economic situation.  Instead, they think the solution to everything is to just put everybody on welfare.

Over 100 Million Now Receiving Federal Welfare

Food stamps and Medicaid make up a large--and growing--chunk of the more than 100 million recipients. "Among the major means tested welfare programs, since 2000 Medicaid has increased from 34 million people to 54 million in 2011 and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) from 17 million to 45 million in 2011," says the Senate Budget Committee. "Spending on food stamps alone is projected to reach $800 billion over the next decade."

To further complicate matters, it's recently been reported that long term immigrants  in America are heavily entitlement dependent.

Slow path to progress for U.S. immigrants - 43% on welfare after 20 years

The study, based on 2010 and 2011 census data, found that 43 percent of immigrants who have been in the U.S. at least 20 years were using welfare benefits, a rate that is nearly twice as high as native-born Americans and nearly 50 percent higher than recent immigrants.

America is deliberately and massively importing entitlement dependent 3rd world labor and we've been doing it for a very long time.  Meanwhile, jobless and entitlement dependent Americans are stuck in an untenable economic situation from which there is no escape and no hope for the future..

For a nation that once proudly exhibited the strongest and most prosperous middle class in all of human history, it's clearly evident that political and policy decisions have been made at the legislative, fiscal, monetary and economic level that combined into a middle class conflagration.

While Americans are definitely not happy with Obama and the Democrats, they are even less trustful of the war obsessed Republicans who can't seem to campaign on anything except spending trillions more the murderous wars and foreign follies.   

The Free Shit Army Rules

The website Government Gone Wild (governmentgonewild.org) has some incredibly enlightening videos including this short but highly instructive 3 minute video:

 Land of The Freebies, Home of the Enslaved

Americans need to acknowledge the bitter truth: America is no longer the land of the free and the economically prosperous. America is very much a fascist/socialist/entitlement hell that is so typical of every bankrupt western nation that is imploding under the weight of unsustainable entitlements.  Even more disturbing is that both Republican and Democrat voters literally voted for this nightmare that is wiping out the once strong and prosperous middle class.

No one describes the situation better than James Quinn, a brilliantly astute economic pundit whose website, theburningplatform.com, is loaded with extraordinary, insightful and well documented data on the true state of the union.  It's not a pretty sight.

Quinn frequently talks about what he dubs "The Free Shit Army", here.

I've come to the conclusion that the middle class of this country has been caught in a pincer movement by two armies. My definition of the Middle Class is households making between $50,000 and $150,000 per year. The Free Shit Army is attacking us on the left. The middle class has been the backbone of the country, doing the heavy lifting in this country. They get up every morning and trudge off to work to support their families. The Free Shit Army sleeps in. They have chosen to not educate themselves in order to advance in our society.

Politicians have enabled them to stay in poverty by providing welfare, disability, food stamps, and tax incentives that make their lives just comfortable enough to not work. If you provide money to people who are classified as disabled, you get more disabled. The Free Shit Army has 50% more disabled than the general population. If you pay people for not working, why should they work? The middle class works and pays their taxes. These taxes are then redistributed to the Free Shit Army.

The second pincer movement on the middle class has been conducted by a stealthier army. This army has experts in propaganda, misinformation, and obfuscation. I call them the Ruling Elite Army. The generals are the ultra-wealthy CEOs of Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. Their armor divisions are manned by the corporate mainstream media. They are excellent at laying down a great smoke screen before blasting away. The infantry is manned by 535 Congressional officers with thousands of corporate lobbyist foot soldiers. This army has been given the mission to capture the supplies of the middle class.

The middle class were not prepared for the assaults they have been fending off. They became soft and satisfied. They stopped training. They became distracted by their gadgets, delusions of home wealth, and fear of phantom terrorist enemies behind every bush. The propaganda machine of their true enemies has convinced the middle class that foreign enemies are massing. The enemy is within. The middle class will need to sacrifice and go to war against two enemies. Are they up to the task? I'm not sure.

Quinn then offers up real solutions for real problems that are outlined under the following categories: Political System, Economic Policy, Education Policy, Energy Policy, National Defense/Foreign Policy, Immigration and Social Issues.

The cures detailed by James Quinn are pretty much identical to the cures that have been advocated by the good doctor Ron Paul for decades.  Both Quinn and Ron Paul have correctly diagnosed the disease and the medicine required to cure the disease.

It's not likely that the America people will listen to what needs to be done or take the life saving medicine to restore their liberty and prosperity because, well, the people are just too far gone and too corrupted. Once the American people made the ballot box decision to hire the police powers of the government to steal from others at the point of a gun to give them what they demand and and think they deserve, the American people signed their own death warrant and voted themselves into totalitarian slavery. The American people now get to chew on a few crumbs and tossed bones that were picked clean by those who promised them the statist cornucopia of plenty.

For a while, The Free Shit Army and their powerful ally, The Ruling Elite Army, were euphoric.  Everything appeared to be working splendidly, until one day it just was no more.  Just ask the Greeks.  

Benefits of the 1099 Economy, the Underground Economy and the Future of Freedom

According to Forbes, the 1099 economy is booming.

The Rise of The 1099 Economy: More Americans Are Becoming Their Own Bosses

One of the biggest obstacles facing government is its ability to collect taxes.  So long as folks are employed as employees, the government easily got its share of plunder right off the top via the federal withholding tax and the Social Security tax, along with other taxes including state taxes.  Enforcement of tax collections was never really much a problem for government so long as most folks were employees.  The government didn't need an army of tax collectors; employers functioned as the primary tax collectors for the government.

But with the economy tanking and necessity being the mother of invention, folks are now forced to discover new paradigms of survival.  Many companies are resorting to contract labor to avoid the legacy costs of health insurance and retirement plans.  They hire independent contractors and issue a 1099 instead of a W-2.  Folks who earn 1099 income are required to file tax returns, they are required to pay quarterly taxes and they are considered self-employed.  They are effectively small business owners who also avail themselves of legal tax deductions.

1099 income is a whole lot harder for governments to trace and enforcement becomes a huge problem for the government.  Precisely because 1099 tax revenues don't consistently and reliably flow to the government in a timely manner, the government is at a disadvantage because it no longer has employers functioning as efficient and immediate tax collectors.

The economic calamity has also spawned a massive distrust of the government.  Folks are simply fed with with paying taxes.  When government is perceived a corrupt to the core and no longer offers value to taxpayers, taxpayers will seek ways to just opt out of the system.  And thus, the underground economy is born.

The underground economy is even more difficult than the 1099 economy for the government to track.  In fact, underground economies are largely based on untraceable cash transactions and outright bartering among private individuals - anything to avoid the tax collectors reach.

In Greece, the government is perceived as so worthless and hopelessly corrupt that it's estimated that as much as 50% of Greek economic output is underground and beyond the tax collectors thieving hands.  The Greeks substantially opted out of paying taxes long ago and they have a very long history of just not paying taxes to support an insanely thieving government.  The Italians are also notorious for tax avoidance.

As the global economy continues to implode, governments will continue to panic as tax revenues plummet and folks simply disappear and are no longer under the government's surveillance and monetary radar.  Realistically, many more folks will strive to be minimally attached to the system.  Folks are figuring out that W-2 income and debit/credit card transactions are all traceable electronic transactions.  Even those who collect W-2 paychecks that are automatically deposited into bank accounts as required by their employers are resorting to immediately cleaning out the bank accounts and withdrawing their cash.  Such folks then proceed to pay their bills and living expenses with cash and/or money orders.

While electronic banking and the age of plastic has been very convenient, it's also how the government tracks you and your every purchase and financial transaction.  To deprive the government of its ability to snoop will really drive the government nuts and render it even more powerless.

Of course, powerless government is most assuredly the End Game of all liberty lovers.  You kill government by depriving it of tax revenues.  A thriving and growing underground economy is definitely something that every government goon fears most.  Making it happen is asserting our liberty and natural rights.

The Bankster Meltdown Really Happened in 2004 and Was Covered Up by Bush and Gang

The generally accepted theory of the 2008 financial meltdown is that it just happened suddenly, although financial troubles were indeed expected to be significant from the fallout of the the mortgage debacle and the real estate crash. Moreover, it is also generally accepted that the Bush Administration reacted as if the sudden financial calamity was indeed something that just happened out of the blue. 

There is overwhelming evidence that the Banksters were crashing in 2004, an election year, and that the Bush Administration merely covered it up. In the way of background information that built the foundation for the financial collapse, it all goes back to a 1999 piece of legislation signed by Bill Clinton and supported by Republicans and Democrats called the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA). The gory details of the FSMA were astutely laid out in a Global Research 11/12/08 piece by Michel Chossudovsky titled “Who are the Architects of the Economic Collapse” who names the big names and summarizes the bill:

Under the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, effective control over the entire US financial services industry (including insurance companies, pension funds, securities companies, etc.) had been transferred to a handful of financial conglomerates and their associated hedge funds….

Summers, Geithner, Corzine, Volker, Fischer, Phil Gramm, Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Rubin, not to mention Alan Greenspan, al al. are buddies; they play golf together; they have links to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg; they act concurrently in accordance with the interests of Wall Street; they meet behind closed doors; they are on the same wave length; they are Democrats and Republicans.

While they may disagree on some issues, they are firmly committed to the Washington-Wall Street Consensus. They are utterly ruthless in their management of economic and financial processes.

There is no question that the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act definitely set the stage for 'Banksters Gone Wild'.  By 2004 there was ample evidence that something was radically wrong although nobody noticed at the time.  Post 2008 financial collapse, every financial journalist was scrambling to figure precisely what happened, why it happened and how it happened.  After all, America is a nation that is supposedly swimming in mountains of legislation fictitiously dubbed 'consumer protection bills' and/or just updating laws to comport with modern financial trends and technology.

In a stunning October, 2008 disclosure, New York Times reporter Stephen Labaton laid out a startling account of a secretive meeting in 2004 that explains all we need to know in a piece titled:

Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt

The piece starts with:

“We have a good deal of comfort about the capital cushions at these firms at the moment.” — Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, March 11, 2008.

Drained of most of its cash three days later, Bear Stearns was forced into a hastily arranged marriage with JPMorgan Chase — backed by a $29 billion taxpayer dowry.

Within six months, other lions of Wall Street would also either disappear or transform themselves to survive the financial maelstrom — Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted to commercial banks.

How could Mr. Cox have been so wrong?

Although Latham burns a lot of ink attempting to spin the disaster into some type of a regulatory failure while focusing on the SEC's refusal to adequately police the Banksters, his story unwinds with remarkable facts and clarity, as if Latham himself didn't even want to believe his own story or the horror that were unfolding before his eyes.

...decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.

At this juncture, it's important to understand precisely what the Banksters were demanding at the secret meeting in the basement of the SEC.  Furthermore, it's impossible that Bush and his Administration were not aware of the meeting, who attended the meeting and what the meeting was all about.  Bush and Gang undoubtedly didn't want anybody to know about the meeting.  Congress was not informed.

The Banksters were demanding that they be given a green light to borrow more money and increase leverage so they could gamble on more wild ass investment schemes.

In the post 2008 disaster analysis, Alan Blinder,a former Federal Reserve Vice-Chairman, blamed the SEC for allowing the Banksters to increase their leverage and further stated “Before then, leverage of 12 to 1 was typical; afterward, it shot up to more like 33 to 1. What were the SEC and the heads of the firms thinking?”, here.

That's precisely what happened at the secret 2004 meeting - capital requirements were lowered and Wall Street Banksters were allowed to increase leverage from 12:1 to 33:1 (and even higher).

This is the equivalent of a gambler being up to his eyeballs in casino debt and asking the casino to increase his credit so he can continue gambling in the hope that he might win and wipe out his bankrupting losses.

After the dirty deal was struck to appease the gambling Banksters, SEC Commissioner Roel C. Campos, a former federal prosecutor, said “And I keep my fingers crossed for the future.”

Everybody at that meeting precisely understood the situation. They kept their fingers crossed and the Banksters imploded anyway, along with the global economy.

Latham continues:

With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed....

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt....

The commission’s decision effectively to outsource its oversight to the firms themselves fit squarely in the broader Washington culture of the last eight years under President Bush.

That's what happens in the District of Crime (DC).  Agencies and Congress Critters routinely outsource power to the very folks an agency is responsible for regulating, which, of course, is why the concept of regulation is a joke.  It's more like a license to steal, concentrate power and legalize monopolies.  Had Wall Street turmoil, fraud, deceit and gambling addiction been allowed to blow up in 2004 when it rightfully should have, we'd still be in a mess but a mess not nearly as big and economically devastating as the mess we are currently enduring.

One thing is clear.  Bush and Gang are clearly responsible for allowing this to happen.  Unquestionably, Bush put the entire nation at grave risk on a gamble he lost.  I'm sure that Bush did the exact same thing the SEC commissioners did - crossed his fingers.

On a more disturbing note, why should any federal agency have the kind of raw and absolute power that allows the SEC to allow the Banksters to bring down an entire nation and the global financial system?

In the District of Crime, Congress Critters and the President are nothing but wholly owned subsidiaries of the Banksters.  Now the suffering taxpayers who are themselves struggling in a Bankster created economic horror are still bailing out the thieving Banksters and their gambling losses.

It's the American way - a nation where crime really does pay.