FedUpUSA

What happens when you sit back silently and allow criminal behavior to go unpunished?

You get more of it.

Tea Party leaders refused to accept an apology from the IRS Friday in which the agency acknowledged that it inappropriately flagged conservative groups for additional review during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.

Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, said she wants to see resignations over what she called the “disturbing, illegal and outrageous abuse of government power.”

Resignations?

How about some fucking indictments?

“The House will investigate”, says Cantor.  Sure it will.  Like it has investigated Benghazi?  Even after acknowledging that the narrative given the people was an utter fiction we’re still pussyfooting around that issue and the dead Americans it produced.

Further, the IRS originally lied in that it claimed there was no such targeting. Just like the FBI lied when they said they had no contact with the Boston Bombers, and it was only when their families disclosed to the media irrefutable evidence that the FBI was bullshitting did they come clean.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said “the fact that Americans were targeted by the IRS because of their political beliefs is unconscionable.”

No Darrell, it’s unconstitutional and thus unlawful.

Just like bilking people with hinky deals on mortgage bonds is illegal — that’s criminal fraud.

It is also unlawful to back-date deposits so as to make a bank look more sound than it is.  People lost real money because of that scam and the agency involved, the OTS, had people who did it previously during the S&L crisis.  Not only were they not prosecuted that time they weren’t prosecuted this time either.

Unlawful bill collection tactics are, as the name implies, illegal.

So is filing knowingly perjured documents in courtrooms to take people’s houses, which happened over 100,000 admitted times.

So is money laundering in the hundreds of millions of dollars for drug gangs by American banks.

So is knowingly allowing the delivery of thousands of guns to drug runners who intend to, and do, deliver them across the border into Mexico for the purpose of murdering people.

Instead of prosecuting any of this you Darrell, along with Boehner and the rest of you clowns allow The Fed and Treasury to reward the banksters who did this, screwing the American public blind, letting them get shot with guns provided by the government and paid for with laundered money run by the very same banksters — and exactly none of the people responsible for any of this crap have gone to jail.

WHERE ARE THE DAMNED INDICTMENTS ALONG WITH BILLS OF CONTEMPT AND IMPEACHMENT?

The following is making the rounds on Facebook:

My reply, which incidentally is all easily-verified, was thus:

No you didn’t. 

You were conned. 

You paid a tax, nothing more. 

This has been ruled on by the US Supreme Court.

That is the same Supreme Court that liberals believe has the right to ban guns (any or all), starting with the NFA and onward through Miller and more. 

It is the same US Supreme Court that the liberals say was correct in endorsing Obamacare. 

The problem is that the US Supreme Court ITSELF is a con; in Marbury .v. Madison they ARROGATED the right to change the Constitution to themselves, but no such power was ever delegated to them IN the Constitution or by Amendment thereof. 

All of those acts by the US Supreme Court are thus unlawful, and those that impugn fundamental liberty interests are openly seditious. 

But…. you believe in that court, so go take the issue up with them, SINCE THEY HAVE RULED YOUR SO-CALLED “PAYMENTS” NOTHING MORE THAN A TAX.

You can’t have this one both ways folks…..

It never ceases to amaze me how people get “column inches” in a paper like the NYT peddling nonsense like this gent is doing.  Oh wait; it’s not that hard to figure out – the media is not about reporting or even opinion, it’s about shaping opinion — and the truth, even arithmetic, be damned.

WE have two political parties in America, runs a saying that conservatives like to quote. One is stupid, the other is evil. And when they join forces to do something that’s both stupid and evil — well, that’s what we call “bipartisanship.”

The payroll tax holiday that passed Congress in the winter of 2010 was a rare exception to this pessimistic rule. Cutting the payroll tax was good short-term politics for both Democrats and Republicans: it was a tax cut that liberals hoped would double as stimulus, and a boost to the middle class that conservatives could support without embracing new federal spending. But more important, it opened the door to what would be good long-term policy as well — because more than almost any feature of the American tax code, the payroll tax deserves to be pared away into extinction.

Ross goes on to do what so many other so-called “populist” commentators do — he conflates the two components of the payroll tax and then talks about getting rid of one of them.

That’s intentionally dishonest and Ross knows it.

The Payroll Tax has two components, both of which are intentionally designed so that you, the employee, only “see” half of them.  Both halves, however, come directly out of your wages even though employers are forbidden by federal law to itemize the second half (the “employer contribution”) and show it to you on a pay stub as a deduction off what you would otherwise be paid.

Social Security has a number of very serious and I would argue intentional design features that are both racist and sexist.  For example, a black man is expected to live to be 70.8 years, while a white woman is expected to live to 81.2 years.  If we presume an equal retirement age of 65 (which the Social Security system does for equal benefits, assuming equal earnings history) the black man will collect benefits for 5.8 years, while the white woman will collect them for 16.2 years, or 279% of the black man’s Social Security payments.  Note that a large percentage of the difference is found in things that kill black men before they reach 65; those people get exactly nothing.

All paid in, however, the exact same amount of money.

That’s racist and sexist — and intentional.  Those who pay in and get nothing wind up being the net “suckers”; they have no choice but to pay, but they get zero since their payments do not have their name on them – they’re just a tax.

In addition Social Security is “progressive” in that the amount of benefit you get from further contributions once you reach the minimum requirement is less, on a ratable basis, than what you paid in.  That is, the lower-income person gets a larger benefit in proportion to their paid-in capital than the higher-income does.  Further, the FICA cap and payout cap means that beyond a certain level of contribution, which is reasonably modest and occurs in the middle class income band, you get nothing further at all.  Of course you pay nothing more either, so that, I suppose, is “fair.”

Nonetheless Social Security is fixable without a lot of drama, although we certainly should talk about whether the program should exist at all, or whether it should exist in its present form.  The reality is that the payroll tax has become a convenient slush fund from which the government steals, and which causes the reported deficit to be smaller than it really is.  It was responsible for Clinton’s so-called “Surplus”, which in fact never happened — he simply stole the amounts paid in from the payroll tax that were not immediately disbursed as benefits!  Every President since Ronald Reagan has done the same.

To fix Social Security removing the payroll tax abatement is required, as is indexing the full benefit retirement age to longevity.  If we want to fix the sexist and racist elements as well, we could index the retirement age by race and gender; this would work because the persons with the lower life expectancy would also pay in for fewer years and likely would have lower benefits, but they would last for the same average amount of time as does someone who is of a longer-lived race and/or gender.  This could be adjusted on a five-year sliding scale to account for changes in demographics.

The real problem with the payroll tax is found in Medicare.  The Federal Government went from spending $53 billion on all medical services in 1980 to about $850 billion last year.  The average retiree gets between three and five dollars out from every dollar they “contributed” during their working years.  To put this in perspective the payroll tax is 3.8% for Medicare (both halves) and if we look at the average working wage of about $50,054 (all workers, all races, US Census Bureau) then the payroll tax for Medicare is $1,902 annually (both halves.)  Over a 45 year working life this amounts to $85,592.34.

How long does this amount of money last? 

The fact is that the average expense that Medicare puts forward for a given retiree is close to $300,000!

There is simply no way to make the books balance given these facts; to make the books balance either benefits must be cut by more than two thirds or the 3.8% Medicare tax must more than triple.

This has been hidden intentionally from the public debate on entitlements because both Democrats and Republicans know what the figures say, and they also know there are only three choices when it comes to solving this problem:

• Triple the Medicare tax to approximately 12%, 6% each for employer and employee with no earnings cap.  Incidentally, this is only the forwardcomponent for retirement; you still have medical costs during your working years, insured or not!
• Dramatically curtail Medicare benefits — by a literal 2/3rds or more.  That’s not going to be popular, but it’s what is inevitably coming if we don’t solve this, because the law does not permit Medicare to go into negative balances, and by the end of the decade it will.

• Break the medical industry’s monopoly-style pricing and controls.  Up and down the line, from drugs to devices to “CON” laws and more.  In short, make the entire industry from insurance to providers to hospitals to doctors accountable under Sherman, Clayton, Robinson-Patman and first-sale doctrines, along with removing all shields that prevent them from being attacked under Racketeering and similar statutes for any element of price-fixing or other anti-competitive behavior.  This would cause prices to collapse by 75% or more, and suddenly the problem goes away.

#3 is the only way that can work in the long term.  But #3 causes an instant deep recession or worse, as the short-term impact of removing that spending from GDP will be immense.  It also destroys the political power of these companies and groups, such as the AMA and the insurance industry.

What you’re seeing in editorials like the one cited above, along with the so-called “debate” in Washington (and what drove Obamacare) is the inherent scam and fraud in the system as it has been designed and implemented. Whether FDR intended Social Security to be racist and sexist at its inception is not material to the debate, but the factual outcome as it exists today most-certainly is!

Yet nobody — not Democrat, Republican or even the so-called “Libertarian” party, all of which espouse equality under the law for all persons, will take these issues on and bring them to the forefront of public and political discussion.

Instead what we get is the Three-Card Monte game run by columnists in the NYT, along with the political class, seeking to divert us from the facts and figures that are right under our noses.

Some ugly facts for your Saturday….

From 1990 to 2000 GDP expanded at an average rate of 4.80%.  Debt expanded at an average rate of 7.51%

From 2000 to 2010 GDP expanded at an average rate of 4.13%.  Debt expanded at an average rate of 6.55%.

From 2010 to 2Q 2012 GDP expanded at a rate of 3.93%.  But debt expanded at only 0.94%, which is a massive paradigm shift from the previous 20 years.

This is good instead of bad, right?

In a word, no.  It is signaling the end of the self-delusional game we’ve been running for the last three decades.  That endpoint is here, now and today.

Real economic growth has to subtract out government deficit spending. When you do that it looks like this:

There has been no growth of materiality since 2000.  We cheated.  And we cheated before too, but in the private sector with all the Internet scam companies that blew up in the tech wreck.

And by the way, at current run rates (although the numbers are not in yet) this year in terms of actual deficit and actual adjusted GDP will be almost identical to 2011, unless something dramatic changes in the next two months.

We have a grown a few things though.  First, let’s look at the growth in Federal (only) health spending.  This is what we’ve done thus far (smoothed, using the endpoints — $53 billion in 1980 and $850 billion last year.)

And then there’s what that rate projects out to for the next 35 years, which is what the government has promised all those who are 50 and older – your Medicare will not change if you’re 50 or older — remember?

Best of luck with that, Kemosabe; roughly $16 trillion on federal health spending alone in 2043?  

By the way, for the math-challenged by 2029 we will spend more on health care than the entire federal budget is today.  If you believe that can happen, say much less that 2043 will happen, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.  The foundation might have had a bit of trouble of late though.  I think it was called “Sandy”.  Heh, that works, doesn’t it?

Of course we’ve all heard that the economy is recovering since early 2009.  That recovery must be real because this statistic is just skyrocketing — the number of people (and households) on food stamps.  Uh, if the economy is recovering, why does this number keep going up and why has it gone up by more than 50% in the last four years — and has never gone back down?

That must be because the fine government people and “eCONomists” are all lying to you.  Let’s see if we can find the lies.

We’ll being with employment.  We keep hearing that we’re gaining jobs.  This is half-true.  We have in fact added 7.2 million jobs from January 2010 to today.

Unfortunately we also added 7.15 million working-age people during the same time period.  So in point of fact, we added jobs – all 50,000 of them, when you account for working-age population growth.

Eh, that’s not so good, and nobody wants to talk about that.

Of course during the same time gasoline prices have roughly doubled, and most food items are up dramatically in price — 50% or more.  Milk, eggs, cheese, meats.  I wonder if that would force people onto food stamps — stagnant employment and outrageously-rising costs.

It just might!

Why is that happening?  Well that might be due to the Federal Budget.  Ok, ok, it’s not really a budget because they didn’t pass one.  But this is where we’re spending our money, and where we’re taking in money in taxes — and what we’re putting on the credit card.  I ordered a few things to point out that we must pay the interest, we must pay “General Government” (that’s the light bill for the Capitol, among other important things) and we probably want to pay for things like the Fibbies (various federal law enforcement entities and their infrastructure.)  It’s also important to keep in mind the size of those shards of the budget, so when someone says “but the FBI and government is so wasteful on such programs” you can point to exactly how much we would “save” if we stopped doing all of it.

That is, not enough to matter.

So if we were to stop deficit spending today we could pay the interest on the debt, we could pay for the lights in the White House, we could pay for the FBI and similar, we could pay for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But then we run out of money half-way through Defense and have nothing for Welfare, Other spending, Education or Transportation. 

Zip, zero, nada.

There’s this little problem with that chart too which explains all of the above with employment and food stamps, along with the other markers of actual economic health.  That nasty red bar with the label “Debt”, and which both sides of the aisle claim we can continue to add onto every year, is actually dilution of the nation’s wealth.  This is exactly identical to imposing a tax, and it’s over a trillion dollars annually.  In point of fact from 2008 to 2012 (calendar) it has been $1.40 trillion, $1.647 trillion, $1.852 trillion, $1.225 trillion and at the current (10 month) run-rate for 2012 it will be $1.246 trillion this year.

Remember, President Obama, when he took office, told us all that he would cut the deficit in half from the fiscal 2008 level, which was about $600 billion, by the time he came up for re-election.

He instead more than doubled the annual deficit and added about $5 trillion in debt across his first term.

And let’s not forget that this is not just a Democrat thing.  Oh no — all spending bills must originate in The House.  Without the House there is no spending and there is no deficit.  And who controls The House?  Why that would be Mr. Speaker Boehner, and I do think he has an “R” after his name.  Despite all the screaming about “fiscal responsibility” he (and Paul Ryan) are abject liars; when push comes to shove they are all more than happy to shove all right – they shove you, your children and every senior citizen right into the hole right along with help from Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

But that’s not the bad news.  The bad news is that at the rate of escalation going on today we will try to do this by the end of the decade:

Now that is just not going to work at all; we’ll pay that light bill, the Fibbies and Health Care but then will run out of money about halfway through Social Security, at which point the FBI will have plenty to do as Granny’s shotgun comes out.

So as you go about your weekend, contemplate these facts:

• You can’t fix medical entitlement spending.  You instead have to fix the medical system, and the only way to do that is to pull all of the monopoly-style protections so that the cost of care in terms of dollars spent crumbles by 75% or more.  This will result in a lot of short-term unemployment and contraction in GDP, but if it’s not done our government and society will blow up.  This is a mathematical certainty.

• You can’t keep escalating defense spending either.  But to fix that you must solve our energy dependence problem, because a huge part of why we spend over $750 billion a year is found there.  Oh, it might help if we didn’t hand man-portable anti-aircraft missiles to our “friends” that happen to be affiliated with Al-Qaida too, as we reportedly did in Libya.

If we contracted Medical Spending by 75% and Defense by half, expiring the payroll tax credit and indexing Social Security retirement to longevity we would balance the budget and stop destroying our nation’s competitiveness and middle class.

Doubt me?  Here’s the graph, and those three things are all I changed; Social Security does not move in expense but tax receipts go up due to the payroll tax cut expiration by about $200 billion a year.

There isn’t any other way to do it.  Welfare, even if cut dramatically, can’t be cut enough.  Other spending, education and transportation don’t have enough margin in them either — even cutting them in half won’t get there.  Social Security can be slowed in escalation but in point of fact most of it is paid for by the Payroll Tax, or at least it was before Congress raided it with the allegedly “temporary” payroll tax deduction that costs about $210 billion a year in revenue.  Indexing retirement to longevity gets us the rest of the way there by halting the advance of spending on that program.

It comes down to medical spending and defense, and with medical spending the only solution is to remove the monopoly protections and allow competition to force the industry to eat well over a trillion dollars a year in decreased gross revenues, accepting the impact that has on the economy and employment in the short term.  On defense we must resolve our energy dilemma and stop pandering to the Middle East, then literally go home, cutting defense spending in half.  There is no other answer; raising taxes to close the debt gap is exactly identical to what we’re doing now in terms of economic damage; the downward spiral will continue if that is attempted exactly as if we do not and keep trying to deficit spend our way out of the hole.

This is reality folks, and yet nobody wants to face it.

Arithmetic cannot be bargained with.

It just is.