|
Menu
Curmudgeon's
Comment Democracy Cycle Links Oldltime Radio Radical
Party
Viewpoint

Curmudgeon's
Archives
Butchers,
Bankers, Congress The
Battle for Honest Money
Coping with Deflation
From Riches to Rags
Fiddler's Broken Wrist
Jack-lantern Wealth
Chances of Gold Confiscation
Look Out Below!
Voting for Maggie
1932
Poobahs of Positivism
A Wistful Vista
1948
An Unknown Road
Vern's Precipitation
IOU-nothing
Blood In the Streets
How
To Buy Gold
Natalie's Predicament
America Descending
Just Plain Stealing?
A thing to fear
Unstuffing a Lifetime Heavenly
Sex
FDR & History
The Chicken Little
Convention
And Lead us not into
temptation
My Obituary
The Legislature and Embryos
Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive
What Fools, We Mortals
Unvarnished Truth
End-of-everything
Blues
My
Immigrant Relative
The Eloquent Pogo
Nesta's Complaint
Unionize School Children
Hucksterism Gone Wild
Religious Violence
|
|
"The lesson of the history of
the U.S. census is this: Any power ceded to a government will be
abused, given time. Today, the long-form of the census asks for
details of your life that you would never tell a neighbor or a private
business." ~Lew Rockwell
|
February
8, 2010
|
|
This almost makes
one pine for the Articles of Confederation.
"In
the Articles of the Confederation, drafted in the days of full
revolutionary liberty, each state had one vote, no matter how many
representatives it sent to Congress. There was no demand for a census
because the central government, such as it was, had no power to do much at
all." This
was written ten years ago by Lew Rockwell. With the census taker
about to knock on our respective doors again you might find it interesting to
learn how the U.S. Census began and how it grew. And grew. And
grew!! The Census
Why
did the Census Bureau blow $2.5 million of
taxpayer money on a 30-second promo in the Super Bowl telecast? Why
does a national nose-count need such expensive advertising?
"The U.S. Census Bureau squandered $2.5
million on a half-minute Super Bowl ad starring D-list celebrity Ed Begley,
Jr., plus two pre-game blurbs and 12-second “vignettes” featuring
Super Bowl anchor James Brown. It’s a drop in the Census boondoggle
bucket (otherwise known as the tax-subsidized National Democrat Future
Voter Outreach Drive). The Obama White House has allocated a total
of $340 million on an 'unprecedented' promotional blitz for the 2010
Census. That’s on top of $1 billion in stimulus money siphoned off for
increased Census 'public outreach' and staffing. In all, the Census will
triple its total budget from 2000 to $15 billion." Census
Boondoggle
Said Sarah Palin to Tea Party conventioneers in Nashville, "The Republican Party would be very smart to try and absorb
as much of the tea-party movement as possible, because the tea-party
movement is the future of politics."
This is good advice for the Republican
Party but not good for the Tea Party movement.
All is lost if it is absorbed into either the Republican or Democrat
parties. Speaking of advice....Sarah, you're flaunting too much
hair. Your visage doesn't require such an abundance of untamed
locks. Change hairdressers.
|
America's
Drunkest Cities
1.) Fresno, CA F
2.) Reno, NV F
3.) Billings, MT F
4.) Riverside, CA F
5.) Austin, TX F
6.) St. Louis, MO F
7.) San Antonio, TX F
8.) Lubbock, TX F
9.) Tucson, AZ
F
10.) Bakersfield, CA F
11.) Las Vegas, NV F
12.) Modesto, CA F
13.) Columbia, SC F
14.) Nashville, TN D-
15.) Madison, WI D-
16.) Colorado Springs, CO D-
17.) Denver, CO
D-
18.) Phoenix, AZ D-
19.) Cheyenne, WY D-
20.) Sacramento, CA D- |
Our town, Columbia,
SC, distinguishes itself again!
<
This time we show up on Health Magazine's "Top 100 Drunkest
Cities" list. There we are...#13!
The editors drew upon such data as death rates from alcoholic liver
disease, booze-fueled car crashes, frequency of binge-drinking in
the past month, number of DUI arrests, and severity of DUI
penalties.
Come on, fellow
Columbians. We can do better than that. Just hang out at
the bar a little longer, pick up an extra six-pack from the
grocery store, host more wine tasting parties....we can make it to
NUMBER ONE! |
A report from the Congressional Budget Office shows that for the first
time in 25 years, Social Security is taking in less in taxes than it is
spending on benefits.
Instead of helping to finance the rest of the government, as it has
done for decades, our nation's biggest social program needs help from the
Treasury to keep benefit checks from bouncing -- in other words, a
taxpayer bailout. Social Security hasn't been cash-negative since the
early 1980s, when it came so close to running out of money that it was
making plans to stop sending out benefit checks. (What
calumny is this? How dare anyone suggest there's one teeny thing
wrong with long-range Social Security funding? just for the heck of
it, though, we'd better keep an eye on whether or not FICA taxes can keep up with
the outgo.) Social Security Bailout?
RETIREMENT ARMAGEDDON
We recommend this highly to seniors AND their offspring.
"The
U.S. government has a nasty surprise for tens of millions of retirees: a
now-empty piggy bank," writes economist Gary North. "Two
of them, actually: Social Security and Medicare." North
is quite right about this. The government has recently announced it
is paying out more Social Security money than it is taking in from FICA
taxes.
"Congress will soon have a nasty surprise for voters: a larger
deficit than announced to fill these now-empty piggy banks." There
is no way around this embarrassment because voters will destroy any
politician who cuts back on costly entitlement programs.
"The Federal Reserve System will also have a nasty surprise for
investors: newly created digital money to fill up the empty piggy banks
when the Treasury cannot sell any more debt at low interest
rates." Also
true. When potential lenders demand much higher interest rates on
those securities Treasury peddles the Fed'l Reserve must step in to save
the day with money it can create from nothing. .
"The free market will have a nasty surprise for everyone: rising
prices in response to the Federal Reserve's digital money." Probably.
The jury is still debating the effect of cascading defaults on the
inflating money supply. ie; If the Fed injects $100.00 of fresh
money into the system, and bad debt erases $200.00 from the ledgers, it's
difficult for the price inflation effect to take place.
"Medicare will have a nasty surprise for physicians who treat
Medicare-funded patients: limits on payments per service that are set
below urban costs (price controls).
All too true.
"Physicians will have a nasty surprise to patients: longer waiting
periods (rationing by sitting in an office). The days of wine and roses
are over. The era of nasty surprises has begun." Alas,
North seems to have this right, too. Read on: Retirement
Armageddon
| ITEM: HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- A
federal U.S. judge ordered jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney to
halt its plans to move 1,000 jobs out of Connecticut and to
Japan
, Singapore and the state of Georgia.
U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall in
Bridgeport issued a permanent injunction, stopping the company's
plans to shift the jobs. Who "owns" the
jobs? |
< In
effect the labor union told Pratt & Whitney that despite the
fact the company can't economically keep the Connecticut
operation staffed at former levels, it can't shift 1,000 jobs
elsewhere in order to bring costs under control.
The union is
saying the unionized worker "owns" the job, not
Pratt & Whitney. This flies in the face of the adage
"He who owns the tools owns the job." Pratt has one
ace up its sleeve. It can close. And it will if the
union forces it to lose money.
|
It's true President Obama
mispronounced "corpsman" in a recent speech at The National
Prayer Breakfast. There are lots of words like that which trip up
people in all walks of life, but columnist Mark Steyn wonders why Obama's
staff didn't anticipate it.
"It’s revealing that nobody around
him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to
spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and
loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t
know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it
either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they
don’t know." Unsustainable
| In his State of the Union speech
President Obama stated that “We find unity in our incredible
diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the
notion that we are all created equal….”
The Constitution says nothing about equality. That
"notion" is in the Declaration of
Independence.
Yesterday we caught sight of a politician on TV
flashing a booklet containing the text of the Constitution. He
assured viewers that it begins with "We the
people....." It doesn't, of course. That
phrase is also from the Declaration of Independence. |
< If
prominent politicians are confused about the Declaration of
Independence and the United States Constitution what must be going
on in the minds of Joe and Josephine Twelvepack concerning the
founding documents of the U.S.?
Perhaps there should
be one day each year, say in all American 5th grades, when the
principal subject for the day is instruction on the purposes of the Declaration
and the Constitution. No need to comb through the entire documents
word for word, but Americans...from the president on down...need to
have the confusion cleared up. |
|