Taxes: tax his

This is from USA, but it applies in many places

Tax his land,
Tax his bed,
Tax the table,
At which he’s fed.

Tax his tractor,
Tax his mule,
Teach him taxes
Are the rule.

Tax his work,
Tax his pay,
He works for
peanuts anyway!

Tax his cow,
Tax his goat,
Tax his pants,
Tax his coat.

Tax his ties,
Tax his shirt,
Tax his work,
Tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco,
Tax his drink,
Tax him if he
Tries to think.

Tax his cigars,
Tax his beers,
If he cries
Tax his tears.

Tax his car,
Tax his gas,
Find other ways
To tax his ass.

Tax all he has
Then let him know
That you won’t be done
Till he has no dough.

When he screams and hollers;
Then tax him some more,
Tax him till
He’s good and sore.

Then tax his coffin,
Tax his grave,
Tax the sod in
Which he’s laid…

Put these words
Upon his tomb,
‘Taxes drove me
to my doom…’

When he’s gone,
Do not relax,
Its time to apply
The inheritance tax.
Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Excise Taxes
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)
Gross Receipts Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Personal Property Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service Charge Tax
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
Sales Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

Finland's Universal Basic Income Stopped

Finland’s Universal Basic Income experiment falls flat

Ross Clark

Ross Clark

25 April 2018

12:00 PM

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/04/finlands-universal-basic-income-experiment-falls-flat/

Should governments abolish their welfare states and replace them with a Universal Basic Income (UBI), paid to everyone, even billionaires, regardless of means? Such payments would be designed to cover essential living costs, leaving individuals free to make the choice of whether they wished to work in order to gain themselves a better lifestyle.

It is an idea which until yesterday seemed to be in the ascendant. Bernie Sanders has advocated it. John McDonnell has launched a study to determine whether it should become Labour policy. It hasn’t just attracted the Left – Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have declared themselves in favour, seeing a UBI as a means of softening the mass job losses they expect as a result of technological advance. It has attracted some British Conservatives, too – Alan Duncan wrote a book advocating it as long ago as the 1990s.

One country even put the idea into practice – Finland. In 2016, 2000 unemployed Finns were put onto a trial of UBI in which they were paid 560 Euros (£490) a month, with no strings attached. They didn’t have to prove they were looking for work, and if they did find work they were allowed to carry on receiving the money.

Yesterday, however, the experiment came to a shuddering halt. The Finnish government announced that it is not going to extend the scheme. In a blow which will be felt especially by the British Labour party, it announced that it was instead looking at a welfare system based on Britain’s Universal Credit – which to McDonnell and others has become a byword for social injustice.

So what went wrong with the dream? The Finns have abandoned the experiment simply out of cost. It is extraordinarily expensive to start paying a living wage to the entire populace, and would require a huge rise in taxes to fund it. Notionally, this does not matter too much, as for most people the extra taxes would be offset by the income itself – why should a worker on an average wage mind paying an extra couple of hundred pounds a week in tax if they are receiving the same sum back in UBI? But there is a very big snag. Jack up taxes and you hugely increase the incentive to avoid, or even to evade, it. There are inevitably going to be people who will gladly accept their free handout at the same time as dreaming up wheezes to reduce their tax bill. Any government experimenting with UBI is likely to find itself falling short of revenue to pay its massive extra outgoings.

The higher the UBI, the bigger the problems. Finland has run into difficulties trialling a UBI of less than £500 a week. That would not even nearly cover living costs in Britain. A UK government might instead want to set its UBI at £323 per week – the amount earned by an individual working 37 hours a week at £8.75 an hour, which is the ‘real living wage’ as defined by the Living Wage Foundation. But paying that sum to every adult in Britain would cost £853 billion. True, you could then cut out the £160 billion a year the government spends on pensions and much of the £114 billion it spends on welfare. But still the extra public spending required to support UBI at this level would come to £579 billion – raising current UK public spending (£772 billion) by three quarters. I wouldn’t envy a Chancellor the task of bringing in this extra revenue, even if he was promising everyone a ‘free’ income of £323 a week.

The above assumes there would be no effect on inflation, but of course putting £323 a week into the pockets of the low-paid would inevitably have an impact on prices. Suddenly, £323 a week would no longer seem enough. Moreover, there are people who already receive more than £323 a week in benefits. Would they see their income slashed in order to pay that weekly sum to billionaires? The rollout of Universal Credit may have had teething problems, but they are nothing compared with the lacerated gums which would come with a Universal Basic Income

Done like a Dinner: taxes cuts for rich

Of course if they taxed rich pricks properly

How Taxes Work . . .

This is a VERY simple way to understand the tax laws. Read on — it does make you think!!
Is it really this simple?

Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men — the poorest — would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1, the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18, and the tenth man — the richest — would pay $59.

That’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement — until one day, the owner threw them a curve (in tax language a tax cut).

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.” So now dinner for the ten only cost $80.00.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six — the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his “fair share?”

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being PAID to eat their meal. So the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of his earlier $59. Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man who pointed to the tenth. “But he got $7!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man, “I only saved a dollar, too … It’s unfair that he got seven times more than me!”.

“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man, “why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison, “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late what was very important. They were FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS short of paying the bill! Imagine that!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college instructors, is how the tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore

? dependant upon the whims and market?

the long-desired Left-wing dream of a 100% Government health care system across the USA. In doing so he re-stated a core belief of Left-wingers everywhere,.

In my view, the provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible

The horror. The horror. One commentator had some fun with this stupidity:

In my view, the provision of gasoline cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private energy companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

In my view, the provision of housing cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private realty companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

In my view, the provision of bread cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private food companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

 tom hunter (7,956 comments) says: 
August 18th, 2016 at 9:51 am

Griff (13,957 comments) says:
August 18th, 2016 at 9:18 am
…
You could instead point to the different costs and outcomes around the globe and think about what is best

Or you could try and answer the question that lies at the core: why is healthcare different that profit screws it up?

The USA has a system very much closer to free market profit based system than us.

Their healthcare public/private spend is about 50:50 – whereas NZ’s is about 80:20. This is a huge difference to you? Having half of a market place occupied by government is “close” to a free-market or worse, Dikensian laissez faire?

That means they have a more efficient cheaper system that result in better outcomes right ?

Nobody would describe the US system as “efficient” – but according to you the degree of government involvement in that market, from almost endlessly prescriptive regulations that try to tell doctors, hospitals and insurers exactly what they can and cannot do, to all that government spending that screws any price signals trying to get through the fog. BTW – all insurer’s premium prices have to approved by state boards – something not heard about when those premiums jump by double digits in one year.

And actually – on actual healthcare outcomes like cancer, surgeries and other stuff that makes people’s lives better – the US has better outcomes than the NZ system, let along the godforsaken NHS in Britain.

Don’t tell me – life expectancy and infant mortality?

wrong….
Most first world nations have mostly public systems and spend around 10 % of gdp in health care .
We spend 11% in NZ
The USA spends around 17% of its much higher gdp.
Their measurable outcomes are not significantly higher than ours.
In fact in a lot of them they are very much lower
life expectancy
infant mortality…

Ding, ding, ding, ding……. You’re not a Lefty but you repeat classic Lefty talking points rather than thoughtful analysis.

Life expectancy is vastly more impacted by such “public healthcare” as water treatment, sewerage systems and clean food than the healthcare of hospitals and clinics, which is why there was such a jump in life expectancy when the former were developed. Besides which we’re talking about tiny differences between the US and other parts of the West. Margin of error stuff.

As far as infant mortality is concerned there are huge fudge factors involved because of the definition of a “live birth”, which in the US is far more tightly measured than in say – Cuba! Moreover, infant mortality appears to be more affected by demographics, which is why Utah – operating under the same horrible “private” US healthcare system – has infant mortality rates every bit as good as the likes of Western Europe.

Yes the rich in the usa can afford lots of expensive testing and better cancer care in old age.

The non-rich can “afford” this too because they have private healthcare insurance.

The poor rely on charity for even basic service if it is available.

Crap – and has been crap at least since the start of Medicaid by good old LBJ in 1965: a government-funded healthcare system for the poor. If it does not cover them then it can be expanded – and has been. Charity is been a minor and shrinking component of healthcare for the poor ever since 1965.

I will point out that a huge study completed just a few years ago, that tracked a large sample of US poor over many years (almost a decade I think) who used Medicaid compared to those who did not and had no healthcare insurance,revealed the counter-intuitive truth that the latter had better health outcomes. The authors of the study did not expect this and have since been involved in trying to figure out how to tweak Medicaid to avoid this rather terrible result.

The number one cause of bankruptcy in the USA is medical bills.

Another Left-wing talking point based upon a study that failed to track healthcare insurance coverage timing and failed to consider the other factors that had led to bankruptcy. It “chose” healthcare expenses because it was less a study than a narrative.

 tom hunter (7,956 comments) says: 
August 18th, 2016 at 10:11 am

And if anybody wants to see what government healthcare in action in the US you have four to look at:

1. Medicare:
For the elderly who no longer have employer health insurance coverage and/or cannot afford private. The system works but is effectively out of control on budgets. The government cannot cut because the oldies will kill them: the system cannot keep going as it is without chewing up almost every dollar the government has within a decade. A third rail created by LBJ.

2. Medicaid:
For the poor who can’t jobs with healthcare insurance and cannot buy it themselves. See above. This one can have spending cut by the government. Unfortunately the doctors who provide services then drop out. Another growing healthcare crisis.

3. Veterans Health Administration:
Pimped by Jon Stewart and other lefties endlessly during the Obamacare debate: “Should we not provide the same level of superb healthcare to everybody that we provide to our veterans?” (cure huge, liquid eyes). This system is the closest the USA has to NZ or the UK: government-owned hospitals and clinics with government-employed doctors and nurses, funded by government tax.

It’s fucking awful. So awful that even the Democrats finally yielded on ideology and offered the poor bastards using the system, actual cash they can use to avoid and evade if they’re not getting the medical care they need. Like every such system it’s rationed by command and control rather than price – which is why hundreds of vets have died waiting for treatment and why there have been resignations at the highest levels over lies being told about the queues, as well as punishment of whistle blowers. But many doctors and aministrators who connived in this are still on the job, since the VHS cannot afford to fire them.

4. Obamacare:
A pathetic attempt to screw the private sector system into doing what the government thinks is right via almost endless, prescriptive regulation and rigging the price outcomes. The result has been a small increase in the number of poor covered by health insurance, but with tens of millions still not covered – and at the cost of vast increases in medical costs, premiums, excess (your average struggling family has to spend thousands before the insurance kicks in, even on the lowest “Bronze” plan).

Almost every criticism of Obamacare is turning out to be correct, and if the remaining boast is that more poor people have been covered than before – well that could have been done with vastly less pain, screaming and government idiocy by just expanding the program that already existed for the purpose: Medicaid.

The reason it was not, the reason Obamacare never even tried to attack the problem of employer insurance capture or reduced competition leading to screwed prices and service, is that it was never meant to – since the Left don’t think that “Profit”, or the private sector, should be a major part of the system.

That was an ideological choice, not one based on “real world data to drive policy”.

An old vision with warnings

 It seems like Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech although given (written?) in 1944 by an American Samuel Barret Pettengill U. S. Congressman 1886-1974 and appropriate here:
*****
In 1944, Democratic U.S. Congressman Samuel Pettengill warned America that socialists would endeavor to have the U.S. spend itself into bankruptcy, with a view to making citizens totally dependent on a centralized government.

Pettengill detailed TEN POINTS of the socialist manifesto that would destroy free government. Almost 50 years later it is disturbing to reflect on Pettengill’s 10 points.

1) People must be made to feel their utter helplessness and their inability to solve their own problems. While in this state of mind, there is held up before them a benign and all-wise leader to whom they MUST look to the cure for all their ills.

2) The principle of local self-government must be WIPED OUT, so that this leader or group in control can have all the political power readily at hand.

3) Constitutional guarantees must be swept aside. This accomplished in part by RIDICULING them as outmoded and an obstruction to progress.
.
4) Public faith in the legal profession and respect for the courts must be undermined. The law making body must be intimidated and from time to time rebuked, so as to prevent the development of public confidence in it.

5) Economically, the people must be ground down by high taxes, which under one pretext or another they are called upon to pay. Thus they are brought to a common level and all income above a meager living is taken from them. In this manner, economic independence is kept to a minimum.

6) A great public debt must be built so the citizens can never escape its burden, making government the virtual receiver for the entire nation.
.
7) A general distrust of private business and industry must be kept alive so the public may not begin to rely on its own resources.
.
8) Government bureaus are set up to control practically every phase of the citizen’s lives.

9) The education of the youth of the nation is taken under CONTROL so that all may be indoctrinated at an early age with a spirit of submission to the system.
.
10) To supplement and fortify all the foregoing, there is kept up a steady stream of GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA designed to extol all who bow the knee and to vilify those who dare raise a voice of dissent.

Samuel Barret Pettengill U. S. Congressman 1886-1974 Reprinted from an article in Ken Hamblin ‘Talks with America’ News letter Feb. 19. 1996
P.O.. Box 562 Castle Rock, CO 80104

Is this happening today?  Has it always been the same through history?

Obese, Smokers, Thin and Healthy; Lifetime Costs

Ed Snack (1,658 comments) says: 
June 9th, 2014 at 3:38 pm

James, I’ll have to find the reference again, but here’s a quote from the NYT about it:

“In a paper published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.

Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the “healthy-living” group (thin and nonsmoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on “cost of illness” data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.

Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.

The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.

The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of dollars.

“This throws a bucket of cold water onto the idea that obesity is going to cost trillions of dollars,” said Patrick Basham, a professor of health politics at Johns Hopkins University who was unconnected to the study. He said that government projections about obesity costs are frequently based on guesswork, political agendas and changing science.

“If we’re going to worry about the future of obesity, we should stop worrying about its financial impact,” he said.”

It’s back in 2008, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the conclusion has been overturned.

Twists and Turns, of costs of Obama care

Here are 169 reasons why hypocrite politicians and unions that support Obamacare want exemptions for themselves

Now 219 reasons  January 2014

Can it really be this bad??
Just what can one say when it seem it is all heaped up, illicit  on illicit,  cronyism on cronyism,  illegality on illegality all in the name of demos = mob rule and that "we are here to help you" and if you just look over there and how good it will all be while a swirl of  others  slide there hands over you, relieving you of  even your own decency 

http://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/obamacare-59/

By Dan from Squirrel Hill

Posted on September 24, 2013. Updated on November 12, 2013.

As the author of this blog post, I place it into the public domain. Anyone may freely copy it in any part or in its entirely, without asking my permission, and without paying any money. I do ask you please cite a link to http://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/obamacare-59/

I ask you to please show this list to as many people as possible. Sunshine really is the best disinfectant. I can’t stop Obama from doing any of these horrible things to our health care system, but I can tell people about what he is doing. So please share this list with others on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thank you. The short link for this is http://tinyurl.com/m8tfd7q

And now, on with the list:

1) After Obamcare was passed, unions that supported its passage requested and received special exemptions

Within months after Obamacare was passed, Obama gave some organizations anexemption from some of the requirements of Obamacare.  As time went on, more than 1,300 organizations received these exemptions.

More than half of the people who are covered by insurance plans that received these exemptions are in union insurance plans. These unions supported the passage of Obamacare. But immediately after Obamacare was passed, these unions wanted exemptions from the very same law that they wanted to force everyone else to obey. This reveals an extreme level of hypocrisy among many of the supporters of Obamacare.

In addition, these exemptions are illegal for two reasons – because Obama granted the exemptions without approval from Congress, and because the Constitution requires the law to treat everyone the same.

The Washington Times wrote of this:

“Selective enforcement of the law is the first sign of tyranny. A government empowered to determine arbitrarily who may operate outside the rule of law invariably embraces favoritism as friends, allies and those with the best-funded lobbyists are rewarded. Favoritism inevitably leads to corruption, and corruption invites extortion. Ultimately, the rule of law ceases to exist in any recognizable form, and what is left is tyranny.”

“The now-familiar monthly trickling down of new waivers is, at best, a tacit admission that Obamacare is a failure. So far, seven entire states and 1,372 businesses, unions and other institutions have received waivers from the law. The list includes the administration’s friends and allies and, of course, those who have the best lobbyists.”

“More than 50 percent of the Obamacare waiver beneficiaries are union members, which is striking because union members account for less than 12 percent of the American work force. The same unions that provided more than $120 million to Democrats in the last two elections and, in many cases, openly campaigned in favor of the government takeover of your health care, now celebrate that Obamacare is not their problem.”

2) After Obamacare was passed, politicians who voted for it asked for a special exemption for their own districts

Even the politicians who voted for Obamacare want exemptions for their own districts.

In response to the medical device tax that is part of Obamacare, some medical device manufacturers have announced plans to layoff employees, including Welch Allyn (275 planned layoffs), Stryker (1,170 planned layoffs), and Medtronic (1,000 planned layoffs).

In December 2012, Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, and 15 other Democrats who supported the passage of Obamacare wrote a letter to Harry Reid, asking him to delay the tax on medical devices, claiming that the tax would hurt job creation in their districts.

3 ) Politicians who voted for Obamacare wanted an additional exemption for themselves and their staff after it was passed

This is another example of how the politicians who voted for Obamacare want exemptions for themselves.

In 2010, Obamacare was passed by the House and Senate, and signed by President Obama.

Three years later, members of Congress and their staff complained that Obamacare was going to cost them a lot of money, and said that this would likely cause a brain drain among their staff. In response to this, Obama made changesto Obamacare so that these things would not happen. However, Obama’s actions were illegal, because he made these changes without Congress voting on them first.

The New York Times wrote of this:

… the language of the health care law requires Congressional employees to obtain health insurance through an exchange created by the law, but other parts of the federal legal code restrict the ability of the federal government to pay the usual employer share for group insurance programs approved by the Office of Personnel Management.

A straightforward reading of the law thus means that Congressional staff members, starting in January 2014, will have to obtain insurance through the Affordable Care Act but pay for it on their own without the normal contribution from their employer — Congress. This would be a multi-thousand-dollar income hit for those affected… many… would potentially feel the pain, giving rise to concerns over a potential brain drain of Congressional staff members finding other employment.

… the federal personnel office initially ruled that Congressional staff members would not be eligible for the subsidies, and then changed this decision under pressure from the White House…

4) An entire state that supported Obamacare asked for an exemption

The people of 

it is worth  while to continue on after jump break just to see how it twists and turns

Governmentally Speaking Commandments

Sorry this may seem like a mish-mash but it is in development and should be tidied up sometime later and more is being added to it.
Choice ,freedom to choose; governments do not like choice of school, of doctor, of medicine,

The 10 Commandments of Government by Director Blue
Posted on November 3, 2013 by Dymphna
Doug Ross   http://directorblue.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/the-10-commandments-of-government.html
has submitted for your review the following “commandments” of government. He could have said “operating system” or some other metaphor, but the word commandment does express both the quasi-religious nature of these rules, and the failure to heed them which indeed brings down the wrath of the State on your puny head.

For a much longer but equally on-target explanation (including a forecast) you would do well to get a copy of Gregory Copley’s book:


Copley doesn’t offer solutions, but his naming of the various problems we will face goes a long way toward aiding us in figuring out what to do while we wait. Let’s just say the more skills in your tool box, the better. And community will become increasingly important. Fragile, but necessary.

Our book budget is nil, but this one was too important not to buy. An atlas would help in your journey through Mr. Copley’s future. See the geo in front of the politics in the title? He really means it.

Meanwhile, here we are in Geenormous Government Land. Might as well read the rules to see if we can stay out of jail. That is becoming the unintended destination for lots of folks who weren’t planning to go there.

What follows is Director Blue’s Commandments and Dymphna’s amendments. Please feel free to add yours in the comments. In fact, if you can think of further commandments, let us know.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
I Generally speaking, government always grows — it never shrinks — whether times are good or bad.

The growth in good times is incremental. In bad times, it surges, tumors sprouting everywhere. Sometimes it fabricates “bad times” so it can go to war against these dangers — e.g., the Wars on poverty (or Poverty) and drugs and failing schools. Government loves wars.

II In each area it purports to “assist”, government attempts to replace individual decision-making with central planning.

Those ‘attempts’ at ‘assisting’ become evermore insistent and evermore umm…embracing. People are learning not to make frontal conflicts but instead to quietly build work-arounds. Homeschooling is one of those. However, it has been so successful it may well become illegal so people need to think ahead, especially where their children are concerned.

We have received distraught emails from shattered Norwegian parents who watch their children being brain-washed. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of parents in Norway who love their children’s school. But that’s not a universal love in Norway — we’ve also heard from grown-ups who survived the system and carry the scars. That’s what happens in totalitarian democracies.

Soon you will see lots more cases of “democracy” in scare quotes. People in many countries, including the U.S. republic, are beginning to grasp the farce of an electoral process in which the candidates on offer are the lowest common denominator results of crony, kleptocratic politics. They have nothing to add to the common weal but lots of ideas on what they plan to take from it during their “turn”.

III In order to implement its grand central plans and solidify its power, government must take from one citizen to give to another; this is, in effect, lawful theft.

And boy does it make the victims of these perennial robberies mad! Despite Obama’s transparent obsession with making things “fair” — a fixed game if ever there was one — his anger at rich white people — even just regular old white people like his granny — shines through each pronouncement. The man has done much damage to race relations in this country; it will take a wise saint to help us heal.

“Fairness” must always be founded on justice. When it is capricious or backward-looking, it becomes a dangerous weapon.

IV No matter how many times central planning fails, the self-appointed masterminds in government assert that “this time is different” and that with only a few tweaks and more money, their delusional plans will succeed.

Hahahahah. Can you say ObamaCare? No Child Left Behind? They’re tweaking like crazy and it will never ever be fixed. It’s a con and the American people are the unwilling suckers. As in ‘it sucks to be us’. If ObamaCare were real, all the Congress klepts would be in on it.

V Because it uses funds confiscated from taxpayers, self-restraint is no obstacle to government’s ambitions.


They have become increasingly gluttonous and greedy. They don’t even bother to hide it anymore — witness Nancy Pelosi and her deluxe private flights home to California, with the tab picked up by the taxpayer victims. Or the excesses of the IRS’ parties. Weren’t they the agency who went to Las Vegas?
 and continues on, then their are more suggestions in comments. 
Later I should summarize and tidy this up

The US Economy Grew Fastest With No Fed And No Income Tax

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/09/2013 21:00 -0400

• Barack Obama
 
• Barclays
 
• Ben Bernanke
 
• Ben Bernanke
 
• Bond
• Copper
 
• European Central Bank
 
• Federal Reserve
 
• Ford
 
• Global Economy
 
• Greece
 
• Gross Domestic Product
 
• Main Street
 
• National Debt
 
• Obama Administration
 
• Obamacare
 
• Switzerland
 
• UNCTAD
• Unemployment
 
• White House

inShare2

 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-09/us-economy-grew-fastest-no-fed-and-no-income-tax

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

How would America ever survive without the central planners in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve?  What in the world would we do if there was no income tax and no IRS?  Could the U.S. economy possibly keep from collapsing under such circumstances?  The mainstream media would have us believe that unless we have someone "to pull the levers" our economy would descend into utter chaos, but the truth is that the best period of economic growth in U.S. history occurred during a time when there was no income tax and no Federal Reserve. 

Between the Civil War and 1913, the U.S. economy experienced absolutely explosive growth.  The free market system thrived and the rest of the world looked at us with envy.  The federal government was very limited in size, there was no income tax for most of that time and there was no central bank.  To many Americans, it would be absolutely unthinkable to have such a society today, but it actually worked very, very well.  Without the inventions and innovations that came out of that period, the world would be a far different place today.

It is amazing what can happen when the government just gets out of the way.  Check out all of the wonderful things that Wikipedia says happened for the U.S. economy during those years...

The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy. By 1890, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.

An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the "Second Industrial Revolution." Railroads greatly expanded the mileage and built stronger tracks and bridges that handled heavier cars and locomotives, carrying far more goods and people at lower rates.

Refrigeration railroad cars came into use. The telephone, phonograph, typewriter and electric light were invented. By the dawn of the 20th century, cars had begun to replace horse-drawn carriages.

Parallel to these achievements was the development of the nation's industrial infrastructure. Coal was found in abundance in the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania south to Kentucky. Oil was discovered in western Pennsylvania; it was mainly used for lubricants and for kerosene for lamps. Large iron ore mines opened in the Lake Superior region of the upper Midwest. Steel mills thrived in places where these coal and iron ore could be brought together to produce steel. Large copper and silver mines opened, followed by lead mines and cement factories.

In 1913 Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, a step in the process that became known as mass-production.

When hard working, industrious people are given freedom to pursue their dreams, great things tend to happen.  The truth is that we were all designed to create, to invent, to build, and to trade with one another.  We all have something that we can contribute to society, and when families are strong and the invisible hand of the free market is allowed to work, societies tend to prosper.

It is not a coincidence that the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was between the Civil War and 1913.  The following information comes fromWikipedia...

The Gilded Age saw the greatest period of economic growth in American history. After the short-lived panic of 1873, the economy recovered with the advent of hard money policies and industrialization.

From 1869 to 1879, the US economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for real GDP and 4.5% for real GDP per capita, despite the panic of 1873.  The economy repeated this period of growth in the 1880s, in which the wealth of the nation grew at an annual rate of 3.8%, while the GDP was also doubled.

Wouldn't you like U.S. GDP to double over the course of a decade now?

So why don't we go back to a system like that?

In 1913, the Federal Reserve and a permanent national income tax were introduced.  Today, the unelected central planners at the Federal Reserve totally run our financial system and the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.  The value of our currency has declined by more than 96 percent since 1913, and the size of our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

Meanwhile, control freak bureaucrats seemingly run everything.  Almost every business decision is heavily influenced either by taxes or by the millions of laws, rules and regulations that are sucking the life out of our economic system.

My favorite example of how suffocating red tape in America has become is the magician out in Missouri that was forced by the Obama administration to submita 32 page "disaster plan" for the rabbit that he uses during his magic shows for kids.

It is no wonder why we don't have any economic growth.  The central planners in the federal government are killing our economy.

And the central planners over at the Federal Reserve are killing our financial system.  In school we are taught that the Fed was created to bring stability to our financial system, but the truth is that they have been responsible for financial bubble after financial bubble, and now Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the world.  When that thing bursts, and it will, we are going to see financial carnage on an unprecedented scale.

Unfortunately, the truth is that the Federal Reserve never has been looking out for the interests of the American people.  It was created by the big banks and it has always worked very hard to benefit the big banks.  During the Fed era, the big banks have become the most powerful economic entities on the entire planet.  Our entire economy is now based on debt, and the big banks are at the very center of this debt spiral.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Paul B. Farrell...

Today’s world includes four Wall Street banks each with assets over $1 trillion, each more than Goldman. Plus eight other big global banks each have over $2 trillion total assets, including, among the 100 largest, Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche, ICB-China and Japan’s Mitsubishi.

Yes, this new world is changing fast. Back in 2008 the world’s financial banks were in ruins. Wall Street sunk into virtually bankruptcy. Goldman and its Wall Street too-big-to-fail co-conspirators had trashed the global economy, triggered a virtual depression, and Wall Street’s casinos lost over $10 trillion of Main Street retirement funds.

And as we saw back in 2008, the Federal Reserve is going to do whatever is necessary to prop up Wall Street.  Most Americans never even heard about this, but during the last financial crisis the Fed secretly loaned 16 trillion dollars to the big banks.  Those loans were nearly interest-free and those banks knew that they could get basically as much nearly interest-free money as they wanted from the Fed.

So how much nearly interest-free money did the Fed loan to normal Americans?

Not a single penny.

That would be bad enough, but it is also important to remember that since 2008 the Fed has actually been paying banks NOT to lend money to the rest of us.

What is it going to take for the American people to start demanding that the Fed be abolished?  They are absolutely destroying our financial system.

Meanwhile, the central planners in the Obama administration have been doing their part as well.  During the second quarter of this year, the number of Americans working between 30 and 34 hours per week fell by 146,500.  During that same time period, the number of Americans working between 25 and 29 hours rose by 119,000.

Why is this happening?

Well, the Obamacare employer mandate will apply to workers that work at least 30 hours each week, so employers are starting to cut back on the hours their employees are getting in order to comply with the law.

But this is just one example out of thousands, and most Americans already know that the U.S. economyhas been crumbling for many years.

In fact, things have gotten so bad that even 53 percentof all Democrats believe that the American Dream isdead even though Barack Obama is residing in the White House.

But this is just the beginning.  Things are going to get much, much worse.  We are going down the same path that Greece has gone, and the unemployment rate in Greece has just hit a new all-time record high of 27.6 percent.

That is where the U.S. is headed eventually.  Decades of very foolish decisions are catching up with us.

The primary reason why all of this is happening is debt.  As a society, we simply have way, way, way too much debt.

The biggest offender, of course, is the federal government.  Since 1970, federal spending has grownnearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has, and since the year 2000 the size of the U.S. national debt has grown by more than 11 trillion dollars.

When government debt gets too large, it has a profoundly negative effect on an economy.  The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Lacy H. Hunt, a Ph.D. economist...

*****

Here are the studies, starting with the one with the broadest implications:

1. "Government Size and Growth: A Survey and Interpretation of the Evidence," from Journal of Economic Surveys. Published in April 2011, Swedish economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson (both of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics at Lund University) found a "significant negative correlation" between size of government and economic growth. Specifically, "an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0.5% to 1% lower annual growth rate."
2. "The Impact of High and Growing Government Debt on Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation for the Euro Area," in European Central Bank working paper, Number 1237, August 2010. Cristina Checherita and Philipp Rother found that a government-debt-to-GDP ratio above the threshold of 90-100% has a "deleterious" impact on long-term growth. Additionally, the impact of debt on growth is nonlinear – as the government debt rises to higher and higher levels, the adverse growth consequences accelerate.
3. The Real Effects of Debt, published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland in August 2011. Stephen G. Cecchetti, M. S.Mohanty, and Fabrizio Zampolli determined that "beyond a certain level, debt is bad for growth. For government debt, the number is about 85% of GDP."
4. "Public Debt Overhangs: Advanced-Economy Episodes Since 1800,"by Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 26, Number 3, Summer 2012, pages 69-86. The authors identified 26 cases of "debt overhangs," which they define as public-debt-to-GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least five years. In spite of the many idiosyncratic differences in these situations, economic growth fell in all but three of the 26 cases. All of the instances, which lasted an average of 23 years, are included in the paper. They found that average annual growth is 1.2% lower for countries with a debt overhang than for countries without. The long duration of such episodes means that cumulative shortfall from the debt excess—i.e., several years in a row of subpar economic growth—is potentially massive.

*****

But it isn't just federal government debt that is the problem.  The rest of us have way too much debt as well.

If you can believe it, the ratio of private debt to GDP was 273.3% for the twelve months ending in the first quarter of 2013.

That is an astounding figure.

And as Hunt explained, having too much private debt is also very bad for an economy...

In Too Much Finance, published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in March 2011, Jean Louis Arcand, Enrico Berkes, and Ugo Panizza found a negative effect on output growth when credit to the private sector reaches 104-110% of GDP. The strongest adverse effects are for credit over 160% of GDP.

The second is the 2011 BIS study authored by Cecchetti, Mohanty, and Zampolli. They found that private debt levels become "cancerous" (in BIS economic advisor Cecchetti's own words) at 175% (90% for corporations and 85% for households)—just slightly more than the UNCTAD study.

When you add our private debt to GDP ratio of 273 percent to our federal debt to GDP ratio of 101 percent, you get a grand total of 384 percent.

This is how we have funded the false prosperity of the past couple of decades.  Essentially, we have been putting our good times on a credit card.

And as anyone that has ever tried to live on credit knows, the good times eventually run out.

But this is what the Federal Reserve was designed to do.  It was designed to get the U.S. government trapped in a debt spiral from which there would never be any escape.

It is not an accident that our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Fed was originally created.  This is what the bankers wanted the system to do.

They wanted a system that would extract wealth from all of us through taxes, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it to them through interest payments.

We never needed a central bank, we never needed the IRS and we never needed an income tax.  America would be doing just fine without any of them.

But instead, America chose to go down the path of collectivization and central planning, and now we are heading toward the biggest economic disaster in the history of mankind.

Average: