Barack Obama and His Urban Parasites Declare War on the Constitution (Sound like Toronto??)

 

By William A. Levinson

Who needs the birthers when we have Barack Obama himself?  His recent statement about the role of the U.S. Senate proves that he is a self-declared enemy of the United States Constitution and of its checks and balances on federal power.

At a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago Thursday night, Mr. Obama told a small group of wealthy supporters that there are several hurdles to keeping Democrats in control of the Senate and recapturing the House. One of those problems, he said, is the apportionment of two Senate seats to each state regardless of population.

“Obviously, the nature of the Senate means that California has the same number of Senate seats as Wyoming. That puts us at a disadvantage,” Mr. Obama said.

Of course, Wyoming has the same Senate representation as California specifically to prevent individuals like Barack Obama, and his constituency of urban parasites, from imposing their will on the less populous states.  This "Great Compromise" of 1787 was a condition of these states' willingness to join the United States in the first place.

This is also why each state gets no fewer than three electoral votes, regardless of population.  Hillary Clinton dislikes this arrangement, because it gives her constituency less leverage in presidential elections.

Urban Parasites: the Core of the Democratic Party

Barack Obama added explicitly that his kind of Democrats congregate primarily in big cities.  These cities are the sources of most of the country's problems, including attacks on the Second Amendment, attacks on the First Amendment via speech codes and zero tolerance policies in public schools, cap and trade mandates to enrich Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, and pressure for ever-increasing taxation of the nation's productive elements.  They are also centers for violent crime, drug distribution, and gang activity.  Most of Wilkes-Barre's drug and gang trouble, for example, originates in Philadelphia, New York, and Newark.

The modern big city is, regardless of the work ethic of its productive residents, an economic parasite.  Cities evolved for exactly two purposes, neither of which they serve today.  These were defensibility and commerce.  A city's walls could once stop swordsmen and spearmen almost indefinitely.  But no walls on Earth can keep out high-angle artillery, aircraft, or missiles.  The British proved this at Copenhagen in 1807, more than 100 years before the Paris Gun began to lob shells into Paris.  Now, of course, cities are convenient high-value targets for nuclear-armed maniacs like Kim Jong-un.

Cities also once served as centers of commerce.  If you wanted to buy or sell something you could not buy or sell in your village, you had to go to the city – and "a trip to the big city" was once a major and exciting event in people's lives.  Now it involves fighting traffic, looking for a place to park, and paying grossly inflated prices to cover the city's inherently parasitic nature.  The city is, therefore, a costly and outdated entity that Henry Ford identified as obsolete more than 90 years ago.

And finally, the overhead expense of living or doing business in the great cities is becoming so large as to be unbearable. It places so great a tax upon life that there is no surplus over to live on. The politicians have found it easy to borrow money and they have borrowed to the limit. Within the last decade [1910s] the expense of running every city in the country has tremendously increased.

This is not to say that many, if not most, people in cities do not work.  The people who commute to jobs in Manhattan certainly work, but their salaries have to cover inflated rents of well over $2,000 a month, New York State and City taxes, and other costs of the dubious privilege of living in Mayor de Blasio's worker's paradise.  Their employers have to pay rents 400 or more percent higher than those they would pay in, for example, northeast or central Pennsylvania.

A key element of supply chain value analysis is, in fact, the identification of waste in your supply chain.  If your supplier is in Manhattan, you are paying Bill de Blasio's inflated taxes, and the city's inherently exorbitant rents and costs of living, as well as for the goods or, more likely, services you are actually receiving.  When enough productive people and employers figure this out, the last worker to leave New York City will hopefully remember to turn out the lights, the way he did when he left Detroit.

The militarily and economically obsolete big city's parasitic nature, therefore, fosters an attitude of dependency, as opposed to self-reliance, among the inhabitants.  This is also why there is a huge gap between Obama Democrats and centrist and conservative Democrats from places like Northeast Pennsylvania.  The latter originated with industrious people like coal miners and factory workers, who were simply not getting a square deal from greedy and abusive employers (e.g., as depicted in The Molly Maguires).  Urban Democrats are against the private ownership of firearms, while coal miners once needed guns for protection against the mine bosses' private armies.

The sons and daughters of coal miners and factory workers know that you have to work for a living, while Obama's urban parasites think they can simply vote themselves health care benefits, welfare payments, and anything else they think they need.  Robert A. Heinlein warned of these others:

But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader – the barbarians enter Rome.

One of the roles of the Senate's "one state, two votes" arrangement is to stop the parasites from voting themselves bread and circuses.  Barack Obama's own statements about the nature of the U.S. Senate, along with his confirmation that his kind of Democrat congregates in the nation's big cities, tell us everything we need to know about the upcoming House and Senate elections.

William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.

The ‘You Didn’t Do That’ Society

Frontpage ^ | 5/28/2014 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on ‎5‎/‎28‎/‎2014‎ ‎5‎:‎30‎:‎51‎ ‎AM by markomalley

First Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates with a knife, hammer and machete. Then he shot eight people, three of them fatally, and tried to run over several others in his car.

After the bodies were taken away, everyone on television agreed that it was the fault of the guns.

Rodger had been in therapy since he was eight and was seeing therapists every day in high school. He had a history of violent threats and psychical assaults and the police had already gotten involved. He was on multiple prescription medications and had therapists whom he alerted to his plans by sending them his manifesto.

A therapist reacted by notifying his mother who drove out personally. By then even more people were dead.

In a country where a little boy with a pop tart chewed in the shape of a gun triggers immediate action, the professionals who cashed in on the killer’s wealthy family were in no hurry to call the police. One even reassured his mother while the shootings were going on that it wasn’t him.

So it was obviously the fault of the guns… which he bought with $5,000 from his family. The BMW he used to commit some of the attacks was given to him by his mother.

Jenni Rodger, his British aunt, blamed America and guns for her nephew’s massacre. “What kind of a society allows this? How can this be allowed to happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do something about this horrific problem.”

Somehow the parenting failure of her brother is now the fault of an entire foreign country.

Rodger’s father issued a statement through his lawyer in support of gun control and “staunchly against guns.” It might have been more useful if instead of opposing a category of manual instruments; Peter Rodger had spent more time dealing with his son’s problems.

Guns did not kill six people. His son did.

When a teenager stabbed twenty people at a Pittsburgh-area high school there were no easy answers about gun control to take refuge in. If Rodger had stuck to his knife, hammer and machete, relatives who coddled him all these years wouldn’t be able to shift the blame. They wouldn’t be able to politicize the crime and snip their own involvement out of the picture.

Elliot Rodger’s parents, communicating through a lawyer and a talent agent, find it convenient to put up another layer of abstraction between themselves and the actions of their son. And the easiest way to do that is to transform it into a widespread social problem. The more that the smiling people on television talk about gun control, the less likely they are to talk about them.

Expanding an individual act into a social problem manufactures a collective responsibility. The killer’s family has successfully shifted their responsibility to people who live a thousand miles away. Now the villains are the 5 million members of the NRA who are unwilling to give up their constitutional rights because Elliot Rodger’s family failed at their single most important job.

Why is a gun owner in North Carolina more responsible for the Isla Vista killings than Peter Rodger? Does Peter Rodger’s staunch opposition to guns free him from responsibility while dumping it on the majority of Americans who believe in the Bill of Rights?

Elliot Rodger was not a social problem. He was not a gun culture. He was not a national anything. He was an individual and individuals bear responsibility for their own actions.

The left is expert at removing responsibility from individuals and assigning it to the culture at large. Every murder is a failure of society. And society fails every murderer, they insist. We are all murderers because we didn’t vote for the right politicians who would have outlawed guns.

The “You didn’t build that” society is also the “You didn’t do that” society. The flip side of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama’s collectivist rhetoric is that just as no one invents the airplane, creates a company or writes the Great American Novel on their own, no one kills six people on their own. If you killed six people, it’s because of the Second Amendment. If you wanted to kill sorority girls, it’s because of Seth Rogen movies. If you’re a half-Asian who beat and stabbed your Asian roommates to death, it’s because of white (or half-white) supremacism.

Everyone but the killer is responsible for his shooting spree. The problem is tackled with public awareness hashtags and zero tolerance legislation that hurts millions of random people.

America’s gun owners, like its machete and hammer owners, did not kill anyone. Every day the vast majority of gun owners somehow manage to get through the day without a killing spree. Their tools don’t have minds of their own. The gun culture that liberals talk about does not sneak in through their windows at night and urge them to shoot up the neighborhood.

And it was the good guys with guns the left sneers at who stopped Elliot Rodger’s killing spree.

We aren’t rethinking the First Amendment because of Rodger’s YouTube videos and manifesto. Why are we supposed to rethink the Second Amendment every time some psycho includes guns in his killing spree? The problem was not with Rodger’s computer, his smartphone, his hammer, his machete or his handguns. They were only the tools that he used. The problem was with him.

Elliot Rodger’s family doesn’t want to deal with their own choices. Elliot Rodger certainly did not want to deal with his. However we won’t achieve a moral society through collective guilt, but through individual responsibility.

A better country doesn’t begin with banning guns, but with holding accountable those who kill.

Even while liberals were puffing out their chests over gun control, the Supreme Court’s liberal justices stepped in to save Freddie Hall who kidnapped, raped and murdered a pregnant woman.

That was in 1978. A decade earlier he had gone to jail for raping another woman and gouging out her eyes so that she wouldn’t be able to identify him.

Like some of the other monsters on death row, Hall decided to plead retarded. His IQ scores dropped. After a long series of appeals, the Supreme Court finally decided that executing him would be unconstitutional.

“Florida’s law contravenes our Nation’s commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world,” Justice Kennedy wrote, speaking for the majority.

America was at its best in decency when it held men accountable for their actions. Liberals like Kennedy instead seek every possible pretext for protecting killers from their choices. We can restore decency by rejecting social problems and instead embracing individual responsibility.

Our choice is between a society of individual responsibility where everyone can be trusted to own a gun and a society of collectivist irresponsibles where no one can be trusted to own a gun.

Food for thought!

RETAIL DEATH RATTLE GROWS LOUDER (theburningplatform.com)

 

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2014/05/25/retail-death-rattle-grows-louder/

The definition of death rattle is a sound often produced by someone who is near death when fluids such as saliva and bronchial secretions accumulate in the throat and upper chest. The person can’t swallow and emits a deepening wheezing sound as they gasp for breath. This can go on for two or three days before death relieves them of their misery. The American retail industry is emitting an unmistakable wheezing sound as a long slow painful death approaches.

It was exactly four months ago when I wrote THE RETAIL DEATH RATTLE. Here are a few terse anecdotes from that article:

The absolute collapse in retail visitor counts is the warning siren that this country is about to collide with the reality Americans have run out of time, money, jobs, and illusions. The exponential growth model, built upon a never ending flow of consumer credit and an endless supply of cheap fuel, has reached its limit of growth. The titans of Wall Street and their puppets in Washington D.C. have wrung every drop of faux wealth from the dying middle class. There are nothing left but withering carcasses and bleached bones.

Once the Wall Street created fraud collapsed and the waves of delusion subsided, retailers have been revealed to be swimming naked. Their relentless expansion, based on exponential growth, cannibalized itself, new store construction ground to a halt, sales and profits have declined, and the inevitable closing of thousands of stores has begun.

The implications of this long and winding road to ruin are far reaching. Store closings so far have only been a ripple compared to the tsunami coming to right size the industry for a future of declining spending. Over the next five to ten years, tens of thousands of stores will be shuttered. Companies like JC Penney, Sears and Radio Shack will go bankrupt and become historical footnotes. Considering retail employment is lower today than it was in 2002 before the massive retail expansion, the future will see in excess of 1 million retail workers lose their jobs. Bernanke and the Feds have allowed real estate mall owners to roll over non-performing loans and pretend they are generating enough rental income to cover their loan obligations. As more stores go dark, this little game of extend and pretend will come to an end.

Retail store results for the 1st quarter of 2014 have been rolling in over the last week. It seems the hideous government reported retail sales results over the last six months are being confirmed by the dying bricks and mortar mega-chains. In case you missed the corporate mainstream media not reporting the facts and doing their usual positive spin, here are the absolutely dreadful headlines:

Wal-Mart Profit Plunges By $220 Million as US Store Traffic Declines by 1.4%

Target Profit Plunges by $80 Million, 16% Lower Than 2013, as Store Traffic Declines by 2.3%

Sears Loses $358 Million in First Quarter as Comparable Store Sales at Sears Plunge by 7.8% and Sales at Kmart Plunge by 5.1%

JC Penney Thrilled With Loss of Only $358 Million For the Quarter

Kohl’s Operating Income Plunges by 17% as Comparable Sales Decline by 3.4%

Costco Profit Declines by $84 Million as Comp Store Sales Only Increase by 2%

Staples Profit Plunges by 44% as Sales Collapse and Closing Hundreds of Stores

Gap Income Drops 22% as Same Store Sales Fall

American Eagle Profits Tumble 86%, Will Close 150 Stores

Aeropostale Losses $77 Million as Sales Collapse by 12%

Best Buy Sales Decline by $300 Million as Margins Decline and Comparable Store Sales Decline by 1.3%

Macy’s Profit Flat as Comparable Store Sales decline by 1.4%

Dollar General Profit Plummets by 40% as Comp Store Sales Decline by 3.8%

Urban Outfitters Earnings Collapse by 20% as Sales Stagnate

McDonalds Earnings Fall by $66 Million as US Comp Sales Fall by 1.7%

Darden Profit Collapses by 30% as Same Restaurant Sales Plunge by 5.6% and Company Selling Red Lobster

TJX Misses Earnings Expectations as Sales & Earnings Flat

Dick’s Misses Earnings Expectations as Golf Store Sales Plummet

Home Depot Misses Earnings Expectations as Customer Traffic Only Rises by 2.2%

Lowes Misses Earnings Expectations as Customer Traffic was Flat

Of course, those headlines were never reported. I went to each earnings report and gathered the info that should have been reported by the CNBC bimbos and hacks. Anything you heard surely had a Wall Street spin attached, like the standard BETTER THAN EXPECTED. I love that one. At the start of the quarter the Wall Street shysters post earnings expectations. As the quarter progresses, the company whispers the bad news to Wall Street and the earnings expectations are lowered. Then the company beats the lowered earnings expectation by a penny and the Wall Street scum hail it as a great achievement.  The muppets must be sacrificed to sustain the Wall Street bonus pool. Wall Street investment bank geniuses rated JC Penney a buy from $85 per share in 2007 all the way down to $5 a share in 2013. No more needs to be said about Wall Street “analysis”.

It seems even the lowered expectation scam hasn’t worked this time. U.S. retailer profits have missed lowered expectations by the most in 13 years. They generally “beat” expectations by 3% when the game is being played properly. They’ve missed expectations in the 1st quarter by 3.2%, the worst miss since the fourth quarter of 2000. If my memory serves me right, I believe the economy entered recession shortly thereafter. The brilliant Ivy League trained Wall Street MBAs, earning high six digit salaries on Wall Street, predicted a 13% increase in retailer profits for the first quarter. A monkey with a magic 8 ball could do a better job than these Wall Street big swinging dicks.

The highly compensated flunkies who sit in the corner CEO office of the mega-retail chains trotted out the usual drivel about cold and snowy winter weather and looking forward to tremendous success over the remainder of the year. How do these excuse machine CEO’s explain the success of many high end retailers during the first quarter? Doesn’t weather impact stores that cater to the .01%? The continued unrelenting decline in profits of retailers, dependent upon the working class, couldn’t have anything to do with this chart? It seems only the oligarchs have made much progress over the last four decades.

Retail CEO gurus all think they have a master plan to revive sales. I’ll let you in on a secret. They don’t really have a plan. They have no idea why they experienced tremendous success from 2000 through 2007, and why their businesses have not revived since the 2008 financial collapse. Retail CEOs are not the sharpest tools in the shed. They were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. Now they are stranded there, with no hope of getting home. They should be figuring out how to position themselves for the multi-year contraction in sales, but their egos and hubris will keep them from taking the actions necessary to keep their companies afloat in the next decade. Bankruptcy awaits. The front line workers will be shit canned and the CEO will get a golden parachute. It’s the American way.

The secret to retail success before 2007 was: create or copy a successful concept; get Wall Street financing and go public ASAP; source all your inventory from Far East slave labor factories; hire thousands of minimum wage level workers to process transactions; build hundreds of new stores every year to cover up the fact the existing stores had deteriorating performance; convince millions of gullible dupes to buy cheap Chinese shit they didn’t need with money they didn’t have; and pretend this didn’t solely rely upon cheap easy debt pumped into the veins of American consumers by the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street bank owners. The financial crisis in 2008 revealed everyone was swimming naked, when the tide of easy credit subsided.

The pundits, politicians and delusional retail CEOs continue to await the revival of retail sales as if reality doesn’t exist. The 1 million retail stores, 109,000 shopping centers, and nearly 15 billion square feet of retail space for an aging, increasingly impoverished, and savings poor populace might be a tad too much and will require a slight downsizing – say 3 or 4 billion square feet. Considering the debt fueled frenzy from 2000 through 2008 added 2.7 billion square feet to our suburban sprawl concrete landscape, a divestiture of that foolish investment will be the floor. If you think there are a lot of SPACE AVAILABLE signs dotting the countryside, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The mega-chains have already halted all expansion. That was the first step. The weaker players like Radio Shack, Sears, Family Dollar, Coldwater Creek, Staples, Barnes & Noble, Blockbuster and dozens of others are already closing stores by the hundreds. Thousands more will follow.

This isn’t some doom and gloom prediction based on nothing but my opinion. This is the inevitable result of demographic certainties, unequivocal data, and the consequences of a retailer herd mentality and lemming like behavior of consumers. The open and shut case for further shuttering of 3 to 4 billion square feet of retail is as follows:

• There is 47 square feet of retail space per person in America. This is 8 times as much as any other country on earth. This is up from 38 square feet in 2005; 30 square feet in 2000; 19 square feet in 1990; and 4 square feet in 1960. If we just revert to 2005 levels, 3 billion square feet would need to go dark. Does that sound outrageous?

• Annual consumer expenditures by those over 65 years old drop by 40% from their highest spending years from 45 to 54 years old. The number of Americans turning 65 will increase by 10,000 per day for the next 16 years. There were 35 million Americans over 65 in 2000, accounting for 12% of the total population. By 2030 there will be 70 million Americans over 65, accounting for 20% of the total population. Do you think that bodes well for retailers?

• Half of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 have no retirement savings. The other half has accumulated $52,000 or less. It seems the debt financed consumer product orgy of the last two decades has left most people nearly penniless. More than 50% of workers aged 25 to 44 report they have less than $10,000 of total savings.

• The lack of retirement and general savings is reflected in the historically low personal savings rate of a miniscule 3.8%. Before the materialistic frenzy of the last couple decades, rational Americans used to save 10% or more of their personal income. With virtually no savings as they approach their retirement years and an already extremely low savings rate, do retail CEOs really see a spending revival on the horizon?

• If you thought the savings rate was so low because consumers are flush with cash and so optimistic about their job prospects they are unconcerned about the need to save for a rainy day, you would be wrong. It has been raining for the last 14 years. Real median household income is 7.5% lower today than it was in 2001. Retailers added 2.7 billion square feet of retail space as real household income fell. Sounds rational.

• This decline in household income may have something to do with the labor participation rate plummeting to the lowest level since 1978. There are 247.4 million working age Americans and only 145.7 million of them employed (19 million part-time; 9 million self-employed; 20 million employed by the government). There are 92 million Americans, who according to the government have willingly left the workforce, up by 13.3 million since 2007 when over 146 million Americans were employed. You’d have to be a brainless twit to believe the unemployment rate is really 6.3% today. Retail sales would be booming if the unemployment rate was really that low.

• With a 16.5% increase in working age Americans since 2000 and only a 6.5% increase in employed Americans, along with declining real household income, an inquisitive person might wonder how retail sales were able to grow from $3.3 trillion in 2000 to $5.1 trillion in 2013 – a 55% increase. You need to look no further than your friendly Too Big To Trust Wall Street banks for the answer. In the olden days of the 1970s and early 1980s Americans put 10% to 20% down to buy a house and then systematically built up equity by making their monthly payments. The Ivy League financial engineers created “exotic” (toxic) mortgage products requiring no money down, no principal payments, and no proof you could make a payment, in their control fraud scheme to fleece the American sheeple. Their propaganda machine convinced millions more to use their homes as an ATM, because home prices never drop. Just ask Ben Bernanke. Even after the Bernanke/Blackrock fake housing recovery (actual mortgage originations now at 1978 levels) household real estate percent equity is barely above 50%, well below the 70% levels before the Wall Street induced debt debacle. With the housing market about to head south again, the home equity ATM will have an Out of Order sign on it.

• We hear the endless drivel from disingenuous Keynesian nitwits about government and consumer austerity being the cause of our stagnating economy. My definition of austerity would be an actual reduction in spending and debt accumulation. It seems during this time of austerity total credit market debt has RISEN from $53.5 trillion in 2009 to $59 trillion today. Not exactly austere, as the Federal government adds $2.2 billion PER DAY to the national debt, saddling future generations with the bill for our inability to confront reality. The American consumer has not retrenched, as the CNBC bimbos and bozos would have you believe. Consumer credit reached an all-time high of $3.14 trillion in March, up from $2.52 trillion in 2010. That doesn’t sound too austere to me. Of course, this increase is solely due to Obamanomics and Bernanke’s $3 trillion gift to his Wall Street owners. The doling out of $645 billion to subprime college “students” and subprime auto “buyers” since 2010 accounts for more than 100% of the increase. The losses on these asinine loans will be epic. Credit card debt has actually fallen as people realize it is their last lifeline. They are using credit cards to pay income taxes, real estate taxes, higher energy costs, higher food costs, and the other necessities of life.

The entire engineered “recovery” since 2009 has been nothing but a Federal Reserve/U.S. Treasury conceived, debt manufactured scam. These highly educated lackeys for the establishment have been tasked with keeping the U.S. Titanic afloat until the oligarchs can safely depart on the lifeboats with all the ship’s jewels safely stowed in their pockets. There has been no housing recovery. There has been no jobs recovery. There has been no auto sales recovery. Giving a vehicle to someone with a 580 credit score with a 0% seven year loan is not a sale. It’s a repossession in waiting. The government supplied student loans are going to functional illiterates who are majoring in texting, facebooking and twittering. Do you think these indebted University of Phoenix dropouts living in their parents’ basements are going to spur a housing and retail sales recovery? This Keynesian “solution” was designed to produce the appearance of recovery, convince the masses to resume their debt based consumption, and add more treasure into the vaults of the Wall Street banks.

The master plan has failed miserably in reviving the economy. Savings, capital investment, and debt reduction are the necessary ingredients for a sustained healthy economic system. Debt based personal consumption of cheap foreign produced baubles & gadgets, $1 trillion government deficits to sustain the warfare/welfare state, along with a corrupt political and rigged financial system are the explosive concoction which will blow our economic system sky high. Facts can be ignored. Media propaganda can convince the willfully ignorant to remain so. The Federal Reserve can buy every Treasury bond issued to fund an out of control government. But eventually reality will shatter the delusions of millions as the debt based Ponzi scheme will run out of dupes and collapse in a flaming heap.

The inevitable shuttering of at least 3 billion square feet of retail space is a certainty. The aging demographics of the U.S. population, dire economic situation of both young and old, and sheer lunacy of the retail expansion since 2000, guarantee a future of ghost malls, decaying weed infested empty parking lots, retailer bankruptcies, real estate developer bankruptcies, massive loan losses for the banking industry, and the loss of millions of retail jobs. Since I always look for a silver lining in a black cloud, I predict a bright future for the SPACE AVAILABLE and GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign making companies.

Maybe it DOES take a Brain Surgeon!

Conservative firebrand Dr. Ben Carson said Saturday that the scandal plaguing the Department of Veterans Affairs is actually a blessing in disguise.

“I think what’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God, to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider,” Carson said during an appearance on Fox News.

“And if we can’t get it right, with the relatively small number of veterans, how in the world are you going to do it with the entire population?” he asked. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.”

What Tim Hudak’s Plan might look like!

Ontario Deficits as a function of Political Philosophy.

Note that Harris did almost exactly the same as being proposed.

He cut tax rates by 30%.  Revenues GREW by 62%.  So much for the union hacks and their credibility!

He turned a 11 billion deficit into a surplus in 5 years.

All the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth by the left Were proven to be ABSOLUTELY WRONG!

How The Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable (Zerohedge.com)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/07/2014 22:14 -0400

• ETC
• Federal Reserve
• Gross Domestic Product
• Tax Revenue

inShare18

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

There are four structural drivers behind the soaring costs of the middle class lifestyle.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated? Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

1. Baumol's Cost Disease
2. Systemic headwinds to the current version of capitalism
3. Dominance of global corporate capital
4. Financialization

The key take-away here is that the first two causes are structural and cannot be changed by passing a law or funding another state bureaucracy. Though many believe they can tax global corporate capital to eliminate wealth inequality, capital is mobile and will move to where it can expand. The dominance of money in politics also means that the political machinery is for sale to the highest bidder, which just so happens to be global capital.

Since financialization rewards both capital and the central state that depends on tax revenue, reversing financialization politically is a non-starter.

No wonder the middle class is evaporating. These trends are far more powerful than the proposed solutions.

Let's start with Baumol's cost disease, named after economist William J. Baumol, whose work with William G. Bowen I described in Productivity, Baumol's Disease and the Cliff Just Ahead (December 8, 2010).

Baumol examined the relationship between productivity and cost, and found that productivity in labor-intensive services (for example, nursing and teaching) had intrinsically lower rates of productivity increases than goods-producing industries.
The performing arts offers a striking example: it takes the same time to learn and play a Mozart concerto now as it did in 1790, so productivity gains will be modest.
This can be clearly seen in this chart of the consumer price index, 1977-2005:

Note how manufactured goods such as TVs, clothing and autos fell in price while education and healthcare soared. Baumol foresaw the crunch that his theory predicted: as healthcare and education took a larger share of the national income/GDP, taxes would have to rise substantially to pay for those services.
He described the social choices we faced in a seminal 1993 paper: Health care, education and the cost disease: A looming crisis for public choice.

Baumol under-estimated the power of the low-productivity sectors such as healthcare and higher education to exploit political capture to increase their share of the national income. In other words, the extraordinary rise in healthcare and higher education costs arise not just from the low productivity of these sectors, but from their cartel power to obscure the true costs of their bloat and push prices higher.

Baumol also failed to appreciate how the state (government) is the willing partner in this exploitation of low productivity. The state enforces the monopoly pricing power of these cartels. As a result, potential gains in productivity from technology are suppressed to protect the cartels from any real competition. (The same can be said of the military-industrial complex and other state-protected cartels.)

That's how we end up with college degrees and medical procedures that cost more than a house.

The second set of systemic cost drivers were identified by Immanuel Wallerstein, who views these forces as threats to capitalism's prime directive, which is to accumulate more capital:

1. Urbanization, which increases the cost of labor
2. Externalized costs (dumping private waste into the Commons, environmental damage and depletion, etc.) are finally having to be paid
3. Rising taxes as the Central State responds to unlimited demands by citizens for more services (education, healthcare, etc.) and economic security (pensions, welfare)

I covered these headwinds to capitalism in Is This the Terminal Phase of Global Capitalism 1.0? (February 8, 2013).

In brief, urbanization drives wages higher, regardless of the era or economic system, and external costs such as pollution and depletion must eventually be paid out of labor and capital alike. The demand for more state services is unquenchable, and the state responds by buying off key constituencies with more benefits.

Wallerstein is one of the few who clearly understands the State's role as enabler and enforcer of monopolies and cartels. High profit margins are most easily maintained by persuading politicians to create/regulate quasi-monopolies and cartels.

The State has two core mandates: enforce quasi-monopolies and cartels for private capital, and satisfy enough of the citizenry's demands for more benefits to maintain social stability.

If the State fails to maintain monopolistic cartels, profit margins plummet and capital is unable to maintain its spending on investment and labor. Simply put, the economy tanks as profits, investment and growth all stagnate.

If the State fails to satisfy enough of the citizenry's demands, it risks social instability.

That is the nation-state's quandary everywhere. With growth slowing and parasitic cartels increasingly difficult to maintain and justify, the State has less tax income to fund its ever-expanding social spending.

In response, the State raises taxes and borrows the difference between its spending and its revenues. This further squeezes spending as the cost of servicing debt rises along with the debt. The rising cost of debt service is an ever-tightening noose that cannot be escaped.

Here are two charts: the first is productivity, the second is corporate profits. Note that while wages have stagnated, the cost of benefits (healthcare and pensions) has absorbed much of the increase in productivity. The rest has gone to corporate profits:

And this leads us straight to financialization, the parasitic extraction of profits from the real economy by finance and the state. Remember Wallerstein's key insight: the state depends on cartel pricing to sustain high labor costs, investment and the taxes that flow from high wages and profits. As the real economy stagnated, the state (which includes the Federal Reserve) incentivized financialization and speculative credit bubbles to keep the money flowing to feed its own spending.

In other words, the state isn't just a passive patsy in financialization--it is a willing partner, because financialization funds the state. Just look at the enormous expansion of property taxes and income taxes that flowed from the housing and stock market bubbles.

Asking the state to limit financialization is like asking the fox guarding the henhouse to stop eating plump hens. If the fox stops consuming the plump hens, it dies. If the state stops financialization, the state's enormously expensive programs and its debt machine all die, too.

In essence, the state has no choice: to save itself, the middle class must be sacrificed. From the point of view of global capital, the ideal partner is a powerful central state that imposes cartel pricing on the economy: $200 million a piece F-35 fighter jets, $100,000 college diplomas, $200,000 medical procedures, $1,000 a pill medications, etc.

From the point of view of the state, it's more important to protect corporate profits and preserve the ability to borrow another trillion dollars at near-zero interest rates than it is to restore a vibrant middle class.

Debt-serfdom works just fine for the financial sector and the central state that enforces the serfdom. Food stamps (bread) and distracting entertainment (circuses) are cheap. What's not to like about debt-serfdom to those in power? Not only is it an ideal arrangement, it's the only one left to the state and its partner, global capital.