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Other • The knockout blow people won’t see coming
The knockout blow people won’t see coming
by SIMON BLACK on APRIL 5, 2013
Have you ever done something really stupid, just because you were in love? Something you look back on and cringe, thinking “why on earth did I do that?”
Of course. Who hasn’t?
Fear. Love. Panic. Exuberance. Jealousy. Desire. These emotions have tremendous influence over human behavior. And when they kick in, they skew our judgment and cause us to do things that can only be characterized as highly irrational.
In the world of economics and finance, they call this ‘sentiment’. Consumer confidence, business confidence, investor confidence… these are basically emotional readings. Screw the numbers. To hell with the truth. It’s all about how people feel.
It seems crazy, but it’s true. Right now, for example, ‘sentiment’ is telling us that the euro crisis is over. It’s telling us that the debt ceiling is pretty much resolved. And, after taking five years to reach pre-crash levels, it’s telling us that the stock market is once again safe for the average investor.
Yet the numbers tell a completely different story.
In the US, politicians are celebrating their accomplishments that the US unemployment rate has declined to 7.6%.
Of course, the real figures show that the labor force participation rate (effectively the percentage of society that they consider to be in the work force) has just hit a 30-year low. And the economy is failing to create new jobs.
Perhaps most of all, the US debt level this year will hit the danger zone that Greece was in just a few years ago when the European debt crisis kicked off in earnest.
In Europe, the situation is so bad that even the government figures are dismal. Italy is officially in a deep recession. Spain is posting a public deficit over 10% of GDP. The Greek economy shrank (officially) nearly 6% last year. Etc.
Bottom line, the numbers don’t match up with sentiment at all. And this makes for precarious investment conditions.
Over the first quarter of this year, US stock mutual funds reported $52 billion in retail investment inflows, according to market data firm TrimTabs. This is the highest inflow in a decade.
In January of this year, retail investors poured a record $77.4 billion into the stock market. To put this in perspective, the prior record, set in February 2000, was $23.7 billion.
You can probably guess how that turned out. This whoosh of money into stocks happened mere months before the crash.
It certainly seems strange when you stack it all together: on one hand, record high deficits, record high debts, record low labor force participation. On the other hand, record high stock market, record high mutual fund inflows.
Something just doesn’t add up.
Investors are throwing caution to the wind right now… ignoring the basic fundamentals and focusing exclusively on euphoric sentiment. (Or central bank policy).
Some of you may know that I was a competitive fighter for a number of years. I can personally attest, and any boxer will tell you, that it’s the punch that you don’t see coming which knocks you out.
http://www.sovereignman.com/finance/the … ing-11593/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Apr 05, 2013 9:33 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
WaPo Blogger Still Won’t Let Facts Get In Her Way
Jason Bedrick
There she goes again.
Just a few weeks ago, Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post falsely accused scholarship tax credit programs of being “welfare for the rich,” an absurd claim that was easily debunked. Now Strauss is making similarly absurd claims about voucher programs in response to the Indiana Supreme Court’s unanimous decision upholding their constitutionality:
The notion is that families deserve to have a “choice” of schools for their children. The reality is that the amount of money provided in each voucher isn’t enough to cover tuition at a great many private schools, especially the elite ones that get most of the media’s attention, such as Sidwell Friends, which the Obama daughters attend.
The implication is that since school choice programs do not provide enough funding to make all choices affordable for low-income families, they don’t really provide “choice” at all. Moreover, Strauss seems to be arguing that if we can’t afford to send every child to the same school as the children of the president of the United States, then we shouldn’t do anything to expand educational options for low-income families. One wonders if Strauss also opposes food stamps because recipients can’t afford filet mignon every night.
While hiding behind weasel words that are technically correct—a “great many private schools” are too expensive for most low-income families even with vouchers—Strauss ignores the “great many private schools” that school choice programs do make affordable for low-income families. Take, for example, this story from yesterday’s New York Times:
Some parents of modest means are surprised to discover that the education savings accounts put private school within reach. When Nydia Salazar first dreamed of attending St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Phoenix, for example, her mother, Maria Salazar, a medical receptionist, figured there was no way she could afford it. The family had always struggled financially, and Nydia, 14, had always attended public school.
But then Ms. Salazar, 37, a single mother who holds two side jobs to make ends meet, heard of a scholarship fund that would allow her to use public dollars to pay the tuition.
She is now trying to coax other parents into signing up for similar scholarships. “When I tell them about private school, they say I’m crazy,” she said. “They think that’s only for rich people.”
Excluding the nine voucher programs for students with special needs and the two for students in failing public school districts, five of the nation’s eight general voucher programs have income caps or give priority to low-income families. The more than 41,000 students participating in these means-tested voucher programs manage to afford private schools that they prefer over their local government schools. These numbers are small compared to the total number of students in those states, but I suspect that Strauss would not support lifting the caps on the number of vouchers available or increasing the voucher sizes, which range from 29 percent to 56 percent of the government schools’ operating per-pupil spending (excluding capital expenditures).
Strauss also misleadingly asserts that students participating in voucher programs do not benefit academically:
There are arguments made that students in voucher schools do better than their peers who wanted vouchers but didn’t get them and are in public schools. Research shows that that is largely not true.
Again, Strauss hides behind weasel words. Her assertion that it is “largely not true” that vouchers improve performance obscures the fact that all the randomized-controlled research shows that voucher students perform as well or better than their peers that sought vouchers but didn’t get them. Professor Patrick Wolf explains:
Nine different research teams have conducted 12 rigorous evaluations of these types of programs over the past 17 years. Eleven of those studies have reported at least some positive findings and no negative results from private school choice. People who claim there is no evidence that opportunity scholarship or “voucher” programs work clearly are not paying attention.
Wolf also cites the increased graduation rates and college enrollment that school choice programs produce at a fraction of the cost of traditional government schools. Moreover, the voucher recipients are “on average, more disadvantaged than the typical public school student and thus dramatically more disadvantaged than the average private school student.”
There are legitimate concerns about voucher programs, as with every public policy. But it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that they don’t expand educational opportunities for low-income families or to ignore the copious research showing academic benefits. Strauss should correct the record.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
American • Secret Obama Group Won’t Disclose Secret Meeting Location
Secret Obama Group Won’t Disclose Secret Meeting Location
Wealthy donors to Organizing for Action meet in undisclosed hotel
Jim Messina / AP
BY: Lachlan Markay
March 7, 2013 11:03 am
A controversial dark money group recently created to promote Democratic policies and officials has refused to disclose the location of a secretive donor meeting it will hold in Washington, D.C., next week.
Organizing for Action (OFA), a 501(c)(4) advocacy group created by President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, will hold an event called the “founders summit” in a Washington hotel on Wednesday, March 13, according to an NPR report.
According to the New York Times, donors will pay $50,000 to attend the event, where they can brush shoulders with OFA chair Jim Messina and Jon Carson, the group’s executive director and the former director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
For $500,000, donors will enjoy a spot on OFA’s national advisory board, which gives them direct access to the president and other top administration officials. Government watchdog groups have blasted the scheme as a transparent pay-to-play arrangement.
Organizing for Action staff have ignored or rebuffed numerous requests for additional information about the founders summit.
Staff at the organization’s downtown Washington, D.C., office would not answer questions about the event. Multiple attempts to reach OFA spokesperson Katie Hogan at a phone number provided by office staff were unsuccessful. Hogan also did not reply to multiple emails.
Their refusal to disclose information on the event coincided with attempts by OFA to reassure critics that the organization will be transparent and ethical. Messina has rejected claims it will allow wealthy individuals to influence administration policy.
The group’s advisory board meetings, Messina wrote in a CNN article, “are not opportunities to lobby—they are briefings on the positions the president has taken and the status of seeing them through.”
Messina also claimed the group would not accept donations from corporations or lobbyists, though the president has made similar promises about lobbyists in the past.
OFA appears to be part of a renewed advocacy push by left-wing groups, many of which are backed by corporate dollars.
Business Forward, a left-wing group whose major corporate donors enjoy access to administration officials, invited business representatives to an unveiling event for OFA in January.
“For the next few years, there will be much more alignment between the business community and the administration,” Business Forward president Jim Doyle told Time’s Swampland blog.
Messina’s insistence that OFA will refuse corporate contributions also leaves the group with ample opportunities for financing through the nation’s largest labor unions, which he excluded from the list of groups that will be barred from donating to OFA.
Democrats have attempted to restrict or more heavily regulate political activity by corporations and nonprofit groups, but have largely excluded unions, which donate almost uniformly to Democrats, from demands for greater disclosure or spending restrictions.
That loophole is underscored by OFA’s apparently close relationship with the nation’s largest teachers’ union. The group’s office is located on the fourth floor the National Education Association’s Washington D.C. headquarters, in an office labeled “National Membership Strategy.”
The NEA did not respond to multiple requests for information on the nature of its arrangement or cooperation with OFA.
http://freebeacon.com/secret-obama-grou … -location/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu Mar 07, 2013 12:24 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Abolish The Income Tax: You Won’t Believe Who Is Getting Away With Paying Zero Taxes While The Middle Class Gets Hammered
The federal income tax is a bad joke and it needs to be abolished. All over the nation, hard working American families are being absolutely crushed by oppressive levels of taxation, and our politicians are constantly coming up with new ways to extract money from all of us every single year. Meanwhile, many ultra-wealthy Americans and many of the most profitable corporations in the country pay little to nothing in taxes. In fact, as you will see below, there are dozens of very prominent corporations that make billions of dollars in profits and yet don’t pay a dime in taxes. Tax avoidance has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. Those that have the resources to “play the game” use shell companies, offshore tax havens and the thousands of loopholes in our tax code to minimize their tax burdens as much as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of us get absolutely hammered. This is fundamentally unfair. The federal income tax system is irreversibly broken at this point, and it is time to abolish it. If you think that the federal income tax system can be “fixed”, then you probably have never studied it. Our tax code is nearly 4 million words long and it is absolutely riddled with thousands of loopholes that favor big corporations and the ultra-wealthy. We should come up with a better, fairer way to fund the government. The United States once prospered greatly without a federal income tax, and it could do so again.
Many people simply do not believe that it is possible for corporations inside the United States to make billions of dollars in profits each year and not pay a dime in income taxes.
Well, according to a report put out by Public Campaign, that is exactly what is happening. Posted below are numbers that come directly from their report. 30 large corporations are listed, and 29 of them had a tax burden for 2008 through 2010 that was less than zero even though they all made enormous profits. And all 30 of them spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.
The numbers that you are about to see are for 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined. For “taxes paid”, please note that for 29 of the corporations a negative number is given. That means that the net tax liability for 2008 through 2010 was actually less than zero.
After seeing these numbers, is there anyone out there that is still willing to claim that our tax system is “fair”?…
General Electric
U.S. Profits: $10,460,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$4,737,000,000
PG&E Corp.
U.S. Profits: $4,855,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$1,027,000,000
Verizon Communications
U.S. Profits: $32,518,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$951,000,000
Wells Fargo
U.S. Profits: $49,370,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$681,000,000
American Electric Power
U.S. Profits: $5,899,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$545,000,000
Pepco Holdings
U.S. Profits: $882,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$508,000,000
Computer Sciences
U.S. Profits: $1,666,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$305,000,000
CenterPoint Energy
U.S. Profits: $1,931,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$284,000,000
NiSource
U.S. Profits: $1,385,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$227,000,000
Duke Energy
U.S. Profits: $5,475,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$216,000,000
Boeing
U.S. Profits: $9,735,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$178,000,000
NextEra Energy
U.S. Profits: $6,403,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$139,000,000
Consolidated Edison
U.S. Profits: $4,263,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$127,000,000
Paccar
U.S. Profits: $365,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$112,000,000
Integrys Energy Group
U.S. Profits: $818,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$92,000,000
Wisconsin Energy
U.S. Profits: $1,725,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$85,000,000
DuPont
U.S. Profits: $2,124,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$72,000,000
Baxter International
U.S. Profits: $926,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$66,000,000
Tenet Healthcare
U.S. Profits: $415,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$48,000,000
Ryder System
U.S. Profits: $627,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$46,000,000
El Paso
U.S. Profits: $4,105,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$41,000,000
Honeywell International
U.S. Profits: $4,903,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$34,000,000
CMS Energy
U.S. Profits: $1,292,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$29,000,000
Con-way
U.S. Profits: $286,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$26,000,000
Navistar International
U.S. Profits: $896,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$18,000,000
DTE Energy
U.S. Profits: $2,551,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$17,000,000
Interpublic Group
U.S. Profits: $571,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$15,000,000
Mattel
U.S. Profits: $1,020,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$9,000,000
Corning
U.S. Profits: $1,977,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$4,000,000
FedEx
U.S. Profits: $4,247,000,000
Taxes Paid: $37,000,000 (a rate of less than 1%)
Total
U.S. Profits: $163,691,000,000
Taxes Paid: ?$10,602,000,000
Just look at that combined total again.
Those 30 companies had combined profits of more than 163 billion dollars during those three years, and yet the combined net tax liability of those companies was negative 10.6 billion dollars.
I wish I could make my taxes look like that.
Another company that is making headlines because of their taxes these days is Facebook.
It turns out that Facebook made more than a billion dollars in 2012 but did not pay a single dime in federal or state income taxes. The following is from a report that was just released by Citizens for Tax Justice…
Earlier this month, the Facebook Inc. released its first “10-K” annual financial report since going public last year. Hidden in the report’s footnotes is an amazing admission: despite $1.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, Facebook did not pay even a dime in federal and state income taxes.
Instead, Facebook says it will receive net tax refunds totaling $429 million.
According to Businessweek, Facebook has an additional 2 billion dollars in tax credits that it will be able to use in future years…
Facebook says that it anticipates reducing its tax liability in the future by an additional $2.17 billion by using further net operating loss carry-forwards that it has banked.
And of course when it comes to abusing the tax system, the big Wall Street banks are some of the worst offenders. The following is an excerpt from a report put out by the office of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders…
—–
Here are just a few examples of how the corporations and Wall Street banks these CEOs work for have significantly harmed our economy and the federal budget:
1. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan
Number of Offshore Tax Havens in 2010? 371.
In 2010, Bank of America operated 371 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens. 204 of these subsidiaries are incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which has a corporate tax rate of 0%.
Amount of federal income taxes Bank of America would have owed if offshore tax havens were eliminated? $2.5 billion.
Bank of America has stashed $18.5 billion in offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. income taxes. Bank of America would owe an estimated $2.5 billion in federal income taxes if its use of offshore tax avoidance was eliminated.
Amount of federal income taxes paid in 2010? Zero. $1.9 billion tax refund.
Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS in 2010, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits.
Taxpayer Bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department? Over $1.3 trillion.
During the financial crisis, Bank of America received a total of more than $1.3 trillion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve and a $45 billion bailout from the Treasury Department.
2. JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon
Number of Offshore Tax Havens in 2010? 83.
In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens.
Amount of federal income taxes JP Morgan Chase would have owed if offshore tax havens were eliminated? $4.9 billion
JP Morgan Chase has stashed $21.8 billion in offshore tax haven countries to avoid payng income taxes. If this practice was outlawed, it would have paid $4.9 billion in federal income taxes.
Taxpayer Bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department? $416 billion
During the financial crisis, JP Morgan Chase received a total of more than $391 billion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve and a $25 billion bailout from the Treasury Department, while Jamie DImon served as a director of the New York Federal Reserve.
3. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein
Amount of federal income taxes paid in 2008? Zero. $278 million tax refund.
In 2008, Goldman Sachs received a $278 million refund from the IRS, even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion that year.
Number of offshore tax havens in 2010? 39.
In 2010, Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax haven countries.
Amount of federal income taxes Goldman Sachs would have owed if offshore tax havens were eliminated? $3.32 billion.
Goldman Sachs has stashed $20.63 billion in offshore tax haven countries to avoid paying income taxes. If this practice was outlawed, it would have paid $3.32 billion in federal income taxes.
Taxpayer Bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department? $824 billion.
During the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs received a total of $814 billion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve and a $10 billion bailout from the Treasury Department.
—–
Are you starting to get the picture?
The big banks and the big corporations make billions, but they pay nothing or next to nothing.
The rest of us bust our rear ends to try to get ahead, and we get gouged by dozens of different taxes.
Over time, the percentage of the overall tax burden shouldered by corporations has gotten smaller and smaller.
Back in 1950, corporate taxes accounted for about 30 percent of all federal revenue. In 2012, corporate taxes accounted for less than 7 percent of all federal revenue.
These days, large corporations have become absolute masters at avoiding taxes. In fact, there are many international tax havens that are doing a booming business in setting up sham headquarters for U.S. corporations. For example, the city of Zug, Switzerland only has a population of 26,000 people but it is the headquarters for 30,000 companies.
But corporations are not the only ones doing this kind of thing.
The ultra-wealthy have also mastered the art of legally not paying taxes.
As I mentioned in a previous article, it has been reported that the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.
With that amount of money, you could pay off the entire U.S. national debt and still have enough money left over to buy every product and service produced in the United States during an entire year.
It is time to admit that our tax system is broken.
Congress has had decades to fix it, and yet the abuses just keep getting worse.
What we are doing is not working.
We need to abolish the income tax.
If you are still not convinced that the federal income tax is an abomination and that we need to abolish it, here are some more shocking facts about our tax system from one of my previous articles about taxes…
1 – The U.S. tax code is now 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.
2 – According to the National Taxpayers Union, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 7.6 billion hours complying with federal tax requirements. Imagine what our society would look like if all that time was spent on more economically profitable activities.
3 – 75 years ago, the instructions for Form 1040 were two pages long. Today, they are 189 pages long.
4 – There have been 4,428 changes to the tax code over the last decade. It is incredibly costly to change tax software, tax manuals and tax instruction booklets for all of those changes.
5 – According to the National Taxpayers Union, the IRS currently has 1,999 different publications, forms, and instruction sheets that you can download from the IRS website.
6 – Our tax system has become so complicated that it is almost impossible to file your taxes correctly. For example, back in 1998 Money Magazine had 46 different tax professionals complete a tax return for a hypothetical household. All 46 of them came up with a different result.
7 – In 2009, PC World had five of the most popular tax preparation software websites prepare a tax return for a hypothetical household. All five of them came up with a different result.
8 – The IRS spends $2.45 for every $100 that it collects in taxes.
9 – According to The Tax Foundation, the average American has to work until April 17th just to pay federal, state, and local taxes. Back in 1900, “Tax Freedom Day” came on January 22nd.
10 – When the U.S. government first implemented a personal income tax back in 1913, the vast majority of the population paid a rate of just 1 percent, and the highest marginal tax rate was just 7 percent.
11 – Residents of New Jersey pay $1.64 in taxes for every $1.00 of federal spending that they get back.
12 – The United States is the only nation on the planet that tries to tax citizens on what they earn in foreign countries.
13 – According to Forbes, the 400 highest earning Americans pay an average federal income tax rate of just 18 percent.
14 – Warren Buffett had an effective tax rate of just 17.4 percent for 2010.
15 – The top 20 percent of all income earners in the United States pay approximately 86 percent of all federal income taxes.
16 – Sadly, as Bill Whittle has shown, you could take every single penny that every American earns above $250,000 and it would only fund about 38 percent of the federal budget.
Please share this article with as many people as you can. We have now entered a time of the year when tens of millions of Americans will be filling out their tax returns, and the pain of going through that process will make people even more receptive than normal to the truth about how broken our system is.
So what do you think?
Do you think that it is fair for the ultra-wealthy and hugely profitable corporations to get away with paying zero taxes while you get hammered?
Do you believe that it is time to abolish the income tax?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
“If Poor People Get Richer, They Won’t Have Anything to Eat”
K. William Watson
The nonsensical sentiment expressed in this post’s title seems to be the guiding belief among people in the United States and United Kingdom currently concerned that eating imported quinoa is harmful to the Bolivian farmers who grow it.
For the uninitiated, quinoa is a grain-like plant that grows only in the Andes Mountains and is possibly the most nutritious food on the planet. In recent years, health food enthusiasts in the United States and Europe have developed an affinity for the exotic import. The result has been a sharp rise in the food’s global price and a concurrent increase in production in Bolivia and Peru.
If you’re like me, you probably think this is a terrific outcome for the Bolivians, who can now sell their crop for three times what they could just five years ago. Major media outlets disagree. The New York Times ran a piece titled “Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary at Home” that warns, “The surge has helped raise farmers’ incomes here in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. But there has been a notable trade-off: Fewer Bolivians can now afford it, hastening their embrace of cheaper, processed foods and raising fears of malnutrition in a country that has long struggled with it.”
The UK Guardian ran an article last week airing similar concerns and also published a commentary titled, “Can Vegans Stomach the Unpalatable Truth about Quinoa?” The commentary’s author laments that “the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there.”
This is all par for the course in the interminable fair-trade, ethical-consumption conundrum in which the desire among affluent American consumers for things is pitted against their concern that production, commerce, and consumption breed injustice. While part of me finds this hand-wringing amusing, I can’t help but worry about the bigotry implied in the notion that poor foreigners will starve if they are allowed to sell food for money.
I came across a blog post recently by Stefan Jeremiah and Michael Wilcox, two photographers currently in Bolivia making a documentary. They do a really great job of putting the quinoa controversy in its place. After National Public Radio ran a story in November worrying about overpriced food for poor Bolivians and considering the possibility of growing quinoa in the United States, Jeremiah and Wilcox wrote this in response:
The overwhelming evidence suggests that as demand for quinoa increases, Bolivians growing quinoa is providing a viable way of working themselves out of poverty. Perpetuating these myths and half truths only serves to damage a growing economy and undermine hard working farmers’ efforts to lift themselves out of poverty in an honest and sincere endeavor.
What are your motives behind this article (and the others you reference)? It appears that you’d rather Americans didn’t buy from Bolivians and are making a concerted effort to turn Americans away from eating Bolivian quinoa. Convincing Americans that somehow boycotting Bolivian quinoa and taking away the bulk of international demand will do the farmers more good is unacceptable.
Is the American Dream restricted only for Americans of the United States? Is it that ambition, hard work, enterprise, blood, sweat and toil is only reserved for the people of your choosing? Is it because seeing farmers in the Developing World actually succeeding doesn’t fit with your own expectation of misery and starvation? Would you prefer the humble Bolivian quinoa farmer to stay poor and remain in his place?
[We] charge you that all these things are the rights of all the peoples of the Americas across both continents, North and South…if not the World.
HT: Courtney Patridge
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Society Is Crumbling Right In Front Of Our Eyes And Banning Guns Won’t Help
What in the world is happening to America? I have written many articles about how society is crumbling right in front of our eyes, but now it is getting to the point where people are going to be afraid to go to school or go shopping at the mall. Just consider what has happened over the past week. Adam Lanza savagely murdered 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. 42-year-old Marcus Gurrola threatened to shoot innocent shoppers and fired off more than 50 rounds in the parking lot of Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach, California. After police apprehended him, he told them that he “was unhappy with life”. Earlier in the week, a crazy man wearing a hockey mask and armed with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire on the second floor of a mall in Happy Valley, Oregon. He killed two people and injured a third. On Saturday morning, a lone gunman walked into a hospital in Alabama and opened fire. He killed one police officer and two hospital employees before being gunned down by another police officer. So have we now reached the point where every school, every mall and every hospital is going to need armed security? How will society function efficiently if everyone is constantly worried about mass murderers?
In response to the horrible tragedy in Connecticut, many in the mainstream media are suggesting that much stricter gun laws are the obvious solution.
After all, if we get rid of all the guns these crazy people won’t be able to commit these kinds of crimes, right?
Unfortunately, that is not how it works. The criminals don’t obey gun control laws. Banning guns will just take them out of the hands of law-abiding American citizens that just want to protect their own families.
Adam Lanza didn’t let the strict gun control laws up in Connecticut stop him from what he wanted to do. Connecticut already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and Adam Lanza broke at least three of them.
However, if there had been some armed security officers or some armed teachers at that school, they may have had a chance to protect those dear little children from being brutally gunned down.
If gun control was really the solution to our problems, then cities that have implemented strict gun control laws should be some of the safest in the entire country.
But sadly, just the opposite is true.
For example, Chicago has very strict gun laws. But 10 people were shot in the city of Chicago on Friday alone. Chicago is now considered to be “the deadliest global city“, and the murder rate in Chicago is about 25 percent higher than it was last year.
So has gun control turned Chicago into a utopia?
Of course not.
And it won’t solve our problems on a national level either.
You can find more statistics about the futility of gun control right here.
Well, how would things be if we did just the opposite and everyone had a gun?
Would gun crime go through the roof?
That is what liberals were warning of when the city of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring every home to have a gun. But instead of disaster, the results turned out to be very impressive…
In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of “Wild West” showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.
The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.
Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.
When criminals know that everyone has guns, they are much less likely to try something. And often armed citizens are able to prevent potential mass murderers from doing more damage. You can find several examples of this right here.
But of course most of our politicians are not interested in common sense. Instead, they are obsessed with the idea that gun control will make our country “safe” again.
Senator Diane Feinstein says that she is ready to introduce a strict gun control bill in January that will “ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession” of many types of firearms.
Will such a law keep the criminals from getting guns?
No way. Just look at what is happening with the cartels down in Mexico. The criminals are always able to get guns.
If our “leaders” were really interested in stopping these mass murders, they would take a look at the role that mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs play in these incidents. If you look at the mass murders that have occurred over the past several decades, in the vast majority of them the murderer had been using mind-altering pharmaceutical drugs…
The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) has raised concerns about severe acts of violence as side effects of anti-psychotic and antidepressant drugs not only on individuals but on society as well.
Just a month ago PRWeb described drug induced violence as ”medicine’s best kept secret.”
And the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHRI) is calling for a federal investigation on its web page which links no less than 14 mass killings to the use of psychiatric drugs such as Prozac and Paxil.
And guess what?
According to the Washington Post, one neighbor says that Adam Lanza was “on medication”.
But will our politicians ever consider a law against such drugs?
Of course not. The big corporations that produce those drugs give mountains of money to the campaign funds of our politicians.
So the focus of the debate will remain on guns.
And a lot of liberals would have us believe that our society could be transformed into some type of “utopia” if we could just get rid of all the guns.
Unfortunately, that is simply not true. Our society is in an advanced state of moral decay, and this moral decay is manifesting in our society in thousands of different ways. The corruption runs from the highest levels of society all the way down to the lowest.
For those that believe that gun control would somehow “fix America”, I have some questions for you…
Down in Texas, one set of parents kept their 10-year-old son locked in a bedroom and only fed him bread and water for months. Eventually he died of starvation and they dumped his body in a creek.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
A pastor in north Texas was recently assaulted by an enraged man who beat him to death with an electric guitar.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
Police up in New Jersey say that a man kept his girlfriend padlocked in a bedroom for most of the last 10 years.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
A 31-year-old man up in Canada was found guilty of raping an 8-year-old girl, breaking 16 of her bones and smashing her in the face with a hammer.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
According to the FBI, a New York City police officer is being accused of “planning the kidnap, rape, torture and cannibilization of a number of women”.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
A Secret Service officer that had been assigned to protect Joe Biden’s residence has been charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
Over in Texas, a very sick 29-year-old man stabbed his girlfriend to death and then burned his one-year-old baby alive because she had gone to court and filed for child support.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
Over in Utah, a 21-year-old man is accused of stabbing his grandmother 111 times and then removing her organs with a knife.
Would banning guns have kept that from happening?
There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.
Would banning guns keep that from happening?
An average of five children die as a result of child abuse in the United States every single day.
Would banning guns keep that from happening?
The United States has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.
Would banning guns keep that from happening?
It is estimated that 500,000 Americans that will be born this year will be sexually abused before they turn 18.
Would banning guns keep that from happening?
In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.
Would banning guns keep that from happening?
If there was a way to take all of the guns away from all of the criminals, I would be all in favor of it. Unfortunately, no government on the planet has been able to do that.
Instead, we have seen that criminals thrive whenever gun bans are instituted and the guns are taken away from law-abiding citizens.
But the bottom line is that our social decay will not be solved either by more guns or less guns.
Our social decay is the result of decades of bad decisions. We have pushed morality out of our schools, out of government and out of almost every aspect of public life. Now we are experiencing the bitter fruit of those decisions.
And this is not a problem that our government is going to be able to fix. Violent crime increased by 18 percent in 2011, and this is just the beginning.
As our economy gets even worse, the rot and decay that have been eating away the foundations of America are going to become even more evident. The number of Americans living in poverty grows with each passing day, and millions upon millions of people are becoming very desperate.
Desperate people do desperate things, and crime, rioting and looting are going to become commonplace in the United States in the years ahead.
So you can pretend that the government is going to be able to keep our society from crumbling all you want, but that is not going to help you when a gang of desperate criminals has invaded your home and is attacking your family.
We definitely should mourn for the victims in Connecticut. It was a horrible national tragedy.
But this is just the beginning. The fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams. The feeling of safety and security that we all used to take for granted has been shattered, and the streets of America are going to steadily become much more dangerous.
I hope that you are ready.
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International News • You won’t believe the opportunities here
You won’t believe the opportunities here
by SIMON BLACK on NOVEMBER 21, 2012
November 21, 2012
Santiago, Chile
The Chilean economy is booming right now. Full stop. From agriculture to retail to construction to mining. Everywhere you look, it’s happening.
This isn’t pretend economic growth, conjured out of thin air by central bankers who drop freshly printed currency from helicopters. It’s the real kind, brought about by increased production, greater exports, technological development, and fiscal discipline.
So far this year, for example, the Chilean government has posted a budget surplus of 1.7% of GDP, up from 1.4% last year. Unsurprising, Chile’s gross debt level is a paltry 11.3% of GDP, putting it in the same category as countries like Saudi Arabia and Estonia.
Yet despite such a strong fiscal position, taxes in Chile are the lowest in the OECD at just 17% of GDP. This means that a whopping 83% of all economic activity remains in the hands of private businesses and individuals, not incompetent, thieving bureaucrats.
All of this is self-reinforcing. Low taxes mean that the economy can grow, unrestrained. And high economic growth means that the government can keep tax rates low. It’s a virtuous circle.
Here’s the best part, though. Amid all of this economic growth, there’s tremendous opportunity on the ground here. Jobs are plentiful, disposable income is growing, and confidence is high.
If you’re an employee type, chances are you’ll be able to find a job here. The labor market is tight, and companies really need talented workers. Plus, new ventures are being created daily, and foreign companies are investing heavily in the country.
Not to mention, Chilean immigration law is perhaps the most straightforward in the western hemisphere. There are very few obstacles to obtaining a work permit. And of course, you can eventually obtain citizenship as well.
(I should mention that a passport from Chile is one of the more valuable in the world… more on that soon.)
If you’re an entrepreneur or investor type, the opportunities are even more sensational. Wealth in Chile is rising, so overall demand is very strong. But the supply of very high quality products and services is incredibly tight.
To give you an example, Chileans who are coming into wealth for the first time want to send their children to the best private schools possible. But the supply and demand are so out of balance that tuition rates have gone through the roof… yet the schools still have waiting lists a mile long!
The same fundamentals hold for just about every high quality product or service across the economy… from beauty and anti-aging treatments to heavy machinery to high performance sports cars to top brand electronics to fine dining.
This is especially true for the luxury market in Chile, which is growing at a rate of 20% p.a. according to the Association of Luxury Brands. Ferrari sales last year quadrupled over the previous years. Premium restaurants are often booked out days in advance.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more growth to come for Chile, and this means there is a lot of room for foreigners to set up shop, ply their skills, and make a fortune in this booming economy.
http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/you-w … here-9982/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Nov 21, 2012 11:35 am
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What the Candidates Won’t Explain about Outsourcing
By Daniel Ikenson
Like almost everything about the 2012 presidential campaigns, the bickering between the major party candidates over who is most responsible for shipping jobs overseas has been banal and utterly uninformative. While politicians have scared many Americans with hyperbolized sales pitches about the costs of foreign outsourcing, most people remain in the dark about the causes and benefits of outsourcing. What is foreign outsourcing anyway? Why do some businesses invest in sales operations, research and development, production and assembly operations, or the provision of services abroad? Are low wages and lax environmental and safety standards in poor countries really the magnets attracting U.S. investment? If so, why is 75% of U.S. direct investment abroad in rich countries? What explains the fact that the United States (high-standard, rich country that it is) is the number one destination in the world for foreign direct investment? Doesn’t the fact that businesses have options in our globalized economy serve to discipline some of the worst government policies?
As I suggested in this recent post:
In a globalized economy, outsourcing is a natural consequence of competition.?And policy competition is the natural consequence of outsourcing. Let’s encourage this process.
Answers to the questions raised in this post and some other thoughts about outsourcing are expressed in this cool 4+ minute video produced by Cato’s Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg:
What the Candidates Won’t Explain about Outsourcing is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Why Sebelius Campaigns So Hard for Her Boss — and Why He Won’t Fire Her
By Michael F. Cannon
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has been campaigning so enthusiastically for President Obama that she — whoops! — broke a federal law that restricts political activities by executive-branch officials. Federal employees are usually fired for such transgressions, but no one expects that to happen to Sebelius. Heck, she got right back in the saddle.
Every cabinet official (probably) wants to see the president reelected, and no president relishes dismissing a cabinet official. But in this case, there’s an additional incentive for Sebelius to campaign for her boss and for Obama not to fire her.
ObamaCare creates a new Independent Payment Advisory Board that — “fact checkers” notwithstanding — is actually a super-legislature with the power to ration care to everyone, increase taxes, impose conditions on federal grants to states, and wield other legislative powers. According to legend, IPAB will consist of 15 unelected “experts” who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Yeah, good one.
In fact, if the president makes no appointments, or the Senate rejects the president’s appointees, then all of IPAB’s considerable powers fall to one person: the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The HHS secretary would effectively become an economic dictator, with more power over the health care sector than any chamber of Congress.
If Obama wins in November, he would have zero incentive to appoint any IPAB members. The confirmation hearings would be a bloodbath, not unlike Don Berwick’s confirmation battle multiplied by 15. Sebelius, on the other hand, would not need to be re-confirmed. She could assume all of IPAB’s powers without the Senate examining her fitness to wield those powers. If Obama fired her, or the voters fire Obama, then the next HHS secretary would have to secure Senate confirmation. Again, bloodbath. That makes Kathleen Sebelius the only person in the universe who could assume those powers without that scrutiny.
No wonder she’s campaigning so hard. No wonder Obama won’t fire her.
Why Sebelius Campaigns So Hard for Her Boss — and Why He Won’t Fire Her is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty