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Bankruptcy, Thy Name Is Democrat

What do these U.S. locations have in common: Central Falls, RI; Detroit, MI; San Bernardino, CA; Mammoth Lakes, CA; Stockton, CA; Jefferson County, AL; Harrisburg, PA; and Boise County, ID? Well, each has filed for Chapter 9 Bankruptcy since 2010.

However, there is something else, shared with the financially troubled cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Miami; also with Atlantic City and Camden, NJ, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

It is also common to the following states: California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

What these cities and states share, along with their financial challenges, is that the Democrat Party controls nearly every one of them; sometimes, it has for decades.

Consider Detroit, which on July 18, 2013, became the largest U.S. city ever to seek bankruptcy protection. No Republican has been mayor since January, 1962; the City Council has not had a Republican majority or plurality since the 1950’s. Democrats have run Detroit for more than a half century…into the ground.

As for the last Republican mayors in the other bankrupt locations:

    • Central Falls – 1930,
    • San Bernardino – 1993,
    • Stockton – only one since 1990,
    Birmingham, Alabama, Jefferson County’s seat – 1975,
    Harrisburg – 1982, and
    • Boise County, Idaho’s Commission appears majority Republican of late, bucking the trend.

Among the troubled, but not (yet?) bankrupt cities:

    Baltimore last elected a Republican mayor in 1963,
    Philadelphia – no GOP mayor in more than 60 years,
    Pittsburgh was last run by a Republican in 1934, and
    Miami has never had a Republican mayor.

Additionally:

    • Atlantic City’s last Republican mayor was black; James Usry ended his term in 1990,
    • A Republican last served as mayor of Camden, NJ from 1935 to 1936,
    Chicago’s last Republican mayor served in 1931, and for 43 of the last 82 years, the Democrat running the city was named Richard Daley, and
    Los Angeles boasts one Republican mayor since 1961.

There is more. In a report that identified 20 U.S cities that could go bankrupt after Detroit, at least 15 of them are Democrat-run. Of the 10 US cities with the highest percentages of residents living in poverty, Democrats have run them for decades. The point is hard to miss.

Turning attention to states with financial challenges:

    • California: 4 Democrat and 4 Republican governors since 1959. However, since 1992, Democrats have run the State Assembly for all but 4 years, and the State Senate for all but 2,

    • New York: Since 1958, 5 of 8 governors were Democrats. Since 1992, Republicans ran the Senate all but 4 years, but Democrats controlled the Assembly each year,

    • Illinois: Since 1991, 2 Democrat and 2 Republican governors; and Democrats controlled the State Senate for 12 of 22 years, and the House of Representatives for 20 of 22 years,

    • New Jersey: Since 1990 – 4 Democrat and 3 Republican, administrations. Since 1992, Republicans ran the Senate for 10 years, there were 2 years of shared control, and Democrats ran it for 10 years…the last 10 years; in the State House, Republican control for 10 years, followed by Democrat Control for the last 12, and

    • Massachusetts: Since Michael Dukakis’ 1991 retirement, there has been 1 Democrat governor, but Democrats kept majorities in both the Senate and the House.

To be “fair”, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are troubled states under Republican control. Ohio has 24 governments and 6 school districts plagued by pension funding issues and an unwillingness to cut spending despite declining revenues. Pennsylvania has $47 Billion in unfunded pension liabilities and no political will to address the problem. Michigan halts between dealing with rising healthcare costs, or kicking that can down the road.

However, the political scales may not balance as much as some might believe; the policies at the root of these financial ills have a decidedly liberal Democrat aroma.

The problem of unfunded pension liabilities traces back to President Kennedy’s desire to grab union votes for Democrats. Both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and former AFL-CIO president George Meaney considered collective bargaining for public employees bad for taxpayers. However, when Kennedy saw that New York City Mayor Robert Wagner built a reliable Democrat voting bloc by granting collective-bargaining rights to the city’s public employees, he put his party’s good ahead of taxpayer benefit and issued an Executive Order in 1962, granting those rights to unionized federal employees. The practice spread across the nation. Now, governments have collectively bargained themselves into more than $4.5 Trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Problems with healthcare costs trace back to the 1965 origination of Medicare and Medicaid under President Lyndon Johnson. Government socialization of medical costs is now a financial disaster, with Medicare facing $38.6 Trillion in unfunded liabilities, according to its Board of Trustees. Also, Medicare heads for bankruptcy in 2016 or 2024, depending upon what is true about Obamacare.

It took 17 years for all 50 states to “voluntarily” participate in Medicaid, and 11 more for President Clinton to announce Medicaid was bankrupting them. Add the fact Obamacare makes Medicaid more costly for states, and that uninsured patients often have better medical outcomes than those using Medicaid, and one wonders how Medicare, Medicaid, or Obamacare benefit the nation. However, despite poorer health care and worsened state balance sheets, liberal Democrats use the programs to show themselves as “caring”.

More often than not in the U.S., when governments have financial trouble, Democrats are at the helm of government and, even when not in charge, policies originated and associated with Democrats cause the problems. For example, Democrats portray Social Security as an effective and successful program.

However, it is hard to imagine how a program, short nearly $10 Trillion over the next 75 years, and facing massive growth in the number of beneficiaries, meets any reasonable success criteria…until you consider how it delivers the senior vote to Democrats.

To their credit, Democrats convinced the nation that they care about the people, even as they devastate them financially. By the time Democrats finish showing their concern for people, no government anywhere is likely to have a dime to spend on them.

Perhaps it is time for a real change?

The Fiscal Cliff: What the Obama is Going On Here?

For those who wondered, I am not depressed by last month’s election results. Since October, I have worked on changing careers. Staring deeply into technical documents and prepping for certification exams has left little time for blogging. My apologies but…I’m ba-ack…..

Both sides in the so-called “fiscal cliff” (the combination of looming tax increases and spending cuts) debate have voiced their public positions. Here is a summary of Obama’s:

    The Obama administration is “absolutely” willing to go off the so-called fiscal cliff if Republicans refuse to increase taxes on the nation’s top earners.

    • Obama’s current spending cuts proposal looks eerily similar to his budget plan, which failed to garner a single vote in either the GOP-controlled House or the Democrat-controlled Senate. Obama’s plan is so flawed that Senate Democrats kept it from coming to a vote on December 5.

    Obama wants authority to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, effectively transferring to the Executive Branch of the federal government a power constitutionally given to the Legislative Branch, or Congress, even though in 2006, then Senator Obama called increasing the nation’s debt “a leadership failure”.

Here is a summary of the GOP position:

    • Individual income tax rates stay unchanged; , additional revenues would come from subjecting more of an individual’s income to taxation, by removing provisions that shield income from taxation (closing loopholes) and limiting current deductions.

    • Reduce government spending, including raising the age for Medicare eligibility, and reducing annual Social Security increases.

    • It does not seem that the White House proposal for unilateral presidential authority to increase the debt limit will receive serious consideration.

Critics of the GOP plan note that the Bush era tax cuts gave money to upper income earners and, in part, led to the 2008 recession. However, those rates, implemented in 2003, after the 2000 – 2001 Clinton recession and the September 2001 terror attacks were, by 2005, generating more income tax revenue than in any year of the Clinton administration. Since lower rates generated higher revenues, the argument that low tax rates either hurt the economy or deprive the Treasury is a difficult one to make.

The press, for their part, appears more focused on identifying Republicans with a willingness to “break ranks” and raise taxes than reporting the objective consequences of either position. They could look to Europe, where the higher taxes, lower spending approach is en vogue. The results are not encouraging:

    • Greece raised taxes to bring in more revenue, only to see its deficit increase. Worse yet, tax receipts actually declined after taxes were raised. Additionally, the street demonstrations, protesting budget cuts, continue.

    • Great Britain was harder hit by the Great Recession than the US. After 6 T, after 6 quarters of decline, he British economy began to grow again in late 2009 at an annual rate of more than 2.5%. Then the government enacted an Emergency Budget in June, 2010, which contained a ratio of more than $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increase. GDP growth retreated to less than 1% annually. And, as with Greece, there are the protests.

    Spain is taking the same approach with, predictably, the same results.

Bottom line, the “fiscal cliff” approach of raising taxes and cutting spending, to get government finances in order and to boost the economy has failed in Europe. According to CBS News, “Across Europe, six countries are in recession and economists predict the entire region could be heading for recession by the end of the year.”

Then why would the president be absolutely committed to going off the cliff if Congress refuses to raise tax rates? Well, he did say he wanted to “fundamentally change this nation.” Perhaps he is now revealing into what.

History teaches that economies are more likely to grow when taxation decreases and not increases, and now is a time when America could use more economic growth. The trustees of both Medicare and Social Security continue to sound the alarm that those programs are in deep financial trouble and need reformation to stay viable. And the Founders made it clear that one man should not control the nation’s purse strings. Yet, on each of these points, Obama seeks a path that demonstrably runs counter to American success or future prosperity. Further, he is not given to cogent explanations of how his approach would change the country’s current financial or economic plight.

Nevertheless, the president who claims to care for the middle class, would rather plunge them, and everyone else, into economic adversity that would bring more pain, debt, and poverty, rather than allow 2% of the nation’s income earners keep their current tax rates – just like everyone else. The revenue projected from what Obama desires, over a decade, is less than one year’s annual deficit. More than 4 times what the president seeks from the top 2% would be raised if all tax rates were allowed to rise (if the economy was so good under the Clinton rates, then why only bring them back for some of the nation?). If the nearly half of income tax filers who pay nothing contributed only $1,000/year, that would raise more revenue than the president seeks. So why the insistence?

The Defense cuts could cause more problems for an already troubled job market. No action on Social Security or Medicare could leave one or both of those programs unable to help seniors, Yet, Obama presses on, insisting he is right, but without saying what would happen should he get his way.

The president is an “all or nothing” negotiator, when anyone can get him to the table. His approach: “I won re-election, so now you must do whatever I want.” This ignores that every Republican in the GOP-controlled House also won an election on November 6, that there are more elected Republicans than Democrats in D.C., and that it is unlikely that voters sent Republicans there to bow to Obama. If only this were simply political drama, and not potential economic madness.

What the Obama is going on here?

Can We Get Any More Ridiculous Than The Obama and Romney Tapes?

Categories: ... 'bout Politics
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Published on: September 20, 2012

In a campaign that lingers far too long, while discussing far too little about major issues, we have hit a new low, though I doubt this will be the lowest point. We have Barack Obama voicing his support for the socialist standard of wealth redistribution back in 1998:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge3aGJfDSg4[/youtube]

Hard to understand why this is news. There was “Joe the Plumber” during the 2008 campaign:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoqI5PSRcXM[/youtube]

Redistribution, spread the wealth around, tax the top 2% – no matter what shade of lipstick one puts on this pig, it oinks socialism. For his part, Mitt Romney is on video saying this at a fundraiser earlier this year:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvqHERTcytI[/youtube]

So, one candidate, the incumbent, tacitly admits to being a socialist while the other candidate believes 47% of the electorate will not vote for him because they prefer the “free” benefits provided by an increasingly socialistic government. Each man’s view and vision of America is starkly different from his opponent. The Obama and Romney tapes do nothing more than express those differences in sound bite and video bite form. However, the reaction to the tapes – more emotional than political, and more political than substantive – is much ado about nothing new.

Interestingly, the reaction to the Romney 47% statement is more pronounced than the reaction to Obama’s socialism. One reason, of course, is that very few people are ignorant of the president’s ideology. Another reason is the remarkably poor wording of Gov. Romney’s statements, provided he was not seeking to offend. However, the more important reason for the unequal reaction likely has more to do with how Obama and his supporters want to frame the campaign than it has to do with what is on these tapes.

There is a significant ongoing effort by the Obama campaign, with help from pollsters and some in the press, to keep the focus of the campaign on ANYTHING other than the Obama record on the economy and jobs. Regarding the polls, it is now known that pollsters skew their results in Obama’s favor. They query greater numbers of people who are more likely to support the president than they do of people more likely to support Romney. NBC has admitted as much on air:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzCB_tXSf0A[/youtube]

Some members of the press actually believed Romney’s quick reaction to the attack on the US Embassy in Libya was bigger news than the attack itself:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uUvi0hYBaM[/youtube]

Others are quick to seize on any economic headline that trumpets potential recovery, even when the larger picture remains bleak. As major news organizations seized on a small decrease in initial jobless claims prior to the presidents DNC nomination acceptance speech, they did not report that the US economy needs to create 150,000 jobs monthly just to keep pace with the growing labor pool. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy has not done that since February of this year.

So, while the ranks of the un- and underemployed have grown in each of the last 6 months, the press reports instead that things are improving. The number one issue in this presidential campaign, as it was in the last one, is jobs and the economy – and the press will not report accurately on the subject. Instead, the current focus is on what Obama said 14 years ago, and what Romney said in a closed gathering of donors.

There is even less attention paid to the budget deficit, which has topped $1 Trillion again this year, according to the CBO. Medicare could go broke four years from now, but the media presses neither candidate for a plan. Social Security is staring at unfunded liabilities of more than $20 Trillion (as is Medicare), but the press is asking no question about what either campaign believes is the answer for helping these programs continue. Neither are they asking how the administration’s current cuts in the payroll tax, which funds both Social Security and Medicare, are impacting the short and long term outlook for either program.

It’s hard to find either candidate answering questions about these topics, or immigration, or energy policy, or any other topic that affects the future of the country. Instead, the current focus is on what Obama said 14 years ago, and what Romney said in a closed gathering of donors.

And the election is less than 50 days away.

For me, this is simple. The Obama campaign, with help from pollsters and the press, do not want to talk about the issues. They realize that as long as the campaign is a pure popularity contest, Obama should run away with it. However, if Obama has to defend his record: on the economy, on entitlements, on budgets and the deficit, and now – with the torture and death of the US Ambassador to Libya – foreign policy, it is difficult to see how Obama avoids tar and feathers.

Nevertheless, America has pressing problems that demand a serious debate among those who seek to lead her. Unfortunately, it does not seem that the incumbent wants to debate those issues. It does not seem that the press wants to orchestrate such a debate. And we are running out of time.

Funny, but no one can find time to talk about the country’s future. But somehow, we have enough time to talk about what each candidate has said in the past.

Ending Spock “As We Knew Him”

Categories: ... 'bout Politics
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Published on: August 29, 2012

I’m not a “Trekkie”, but I am a fan, old enough to have seen each Star Trek movie’s original release. I consider Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan the best of those using the original TV cast. It was memorable because, in it, Mr. Spock died…sort of. You can see the details of his “demise” here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPBGZRRrEKM&feature=related[/youtube]

I write “sort of” because the backlash against killing the Star Trek franchise’s most popular character prompted another movie, ostensibly to resurrect Spock. But I digress. I use the clip to draw some parallels between Spock’s “death” and the current Medicare situation.

Upon hearing Admiral Kirk (yep, Jimmy got an upgrade) tell Scottie, “I need warp drive in 3 minutes or we’re all dead!”, Spock leaves the bridge, goes to the Engine Room, and brings the ship’s warp drive back on line, in time for the Enterprise and those aboard to escape harm. In the process, Spock sacrifices himself. In his final dialog with a distraught Admiral Kirk, it is said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one.” That is where I begin.

Spock “as we knew him”, or before he absorbed enough radiation to light the Eastern Seaboard, is comparable to Medicare “as we know it”. The similarities? Well:

    A Firm Deadline: Spock understood time was of the essence; he had 3 minutes. With Medicare, we have until 2024 if we do nothing, only until 2016 with the effects of Obamacare, or perhaps even sooner. So say Medicare’s trustees.

    A Need for Quick Action: The Enterprise’s warp drive had to be fixed NOW. In 3 minutes more, no action would matter; there would be neither ship nor crew to save. Similarly, Medicare needs fixing, correction, reform (pick you favorite noun) NOW. In not more than 12 years, and possibly less than 4, if nothing changes, then there will be nothing that can be done.

    A Need for Bold Action: Had Spock remained “as we knew him”, all aboard the Enterprise would have died. In a nod to Caiaphas, Spock reasoned that it was more expedient that one man die for the ship than that the ship perish. Similarly, should Medicare remain “as we know it”, both Medicare and those who depend upon it will be lost.

All who follow, and who are willing to speak candidly about, Medicare’s financial situation know the status quo cannot continue; both Medicare and Social Security, with its $8.6 Trillion in unfunded liabilities through 2086, will bankrupt the federal government if no action is taken. So far, only one of the major US political parties is speaking openly about this. While both would cut Medicare spending by more than $700 Billion over the next decade, the GOP plan is not law and would be part of reforming the program; the Democrat approach is already law and does nothing to make Medicare more solvent. But back to Spock.

In order to save the Enterprise and those aboard her, Spock effectively reformed himself. Not surprisingly, those who were fond of Spock “as we knew him” resisted this reform, though they had no other plan that would save Spock or the ship. Before he made his sacrifice, however, Spock performed a mind meld with Dr. McCoy, uttering the word, “Remember”.

Remember

That marked the end of Spock “as we knew him”. As it turned out, Spock’s reform allowed everyone to survive, and paved the way for a new Spock to appear.

The point is simple, if somewhat contrived. Had Spock continued “as we knew him”, those aboard the Enterprise would have died; if Medicare continues “as we know it”, America’s seniors, who depend upon government-run or subsidized health care, may not survive.

One major US political party proposes to end Medicare “as we know it”, in favor of a reformed version that could actually last beyond 2016, and even beyond 2024. The other party seems content to simply let Medicare end, not just “as we know it,” but end period, not heeding the financial warnings from Medicare’s trustees. The other party even encourages the lie that money seniors “paid into” Medicare when they were younger will provide their benefits when they turn 65. The open secret is that no one “pays into” Medicare for their future benefits. Instead, everyone now “pays for” the services those now on Medicare receive.

With 10,000 Americans turning 65 daily and qualifying for Medicare, and with fewer than 200,000 jobs created per month, the math no longer works. Something needs to be done differently, NOW, or soon there will be nothing that can be done at all.

Medicare is indeed a case of the need of the many to find a way to fund benefits bumping against the need of the few to receive benefits. Medicare “as we know it” is broken to the point that, at most, 12 years remain before it dies. If Medicare were Mr. Spock, then it would already be on its way to the nation’s Engine Room, looking to get things back online. It would abandon its current make up in search of a new one that would first make those who now depend upon it safe; next, be affordable for those who must pay for it; and remain available for those too young to be in either of the former two groups. It would do that, even if it meant death, because “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one.”

Spock sacrificed himself only to return for further service. Similarly, the sacrifice of the current Medicare would result in a new program with a longer life. However, for that to occur, the American people must decide they can let go of Medicare “as we know it.”

Copyright 2012. blackmanthinkin.com

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