war on poverty – The Burning Platform

IN THE WAR ON TRUTH, IT’S TIME TO BECOME HEROES

“Truth is treason in an empire of lies.” – George Orwell

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10

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“Axis of Evil” seems to be interchangeable, based upon who the Deep State needs to be the enemy at any given time. Bush junior first coined the phrase in his January 29, 2002 State of the Union speech when describing Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Of course, we know his Deep State handlers then falsified claims of 9/11 involvement and WMDs, to take out Sadaam and steal his oil. The barely cogent doddering old fool senator McConnell this week declared Russia, China and Iran as the new “Axis of Evil”. You notice Iran is still in the club, but they now consider two nuclear armed superpowers to be evil and enemies. Kim Jong Un must be so disappointed at being kicked out of the club.

Continue reading “IN THE WAR ON TRUTH, IT’S TIME TO BECOME HEROES”

WHO IS SHAKING THE JAR? (PART 2)

In Part 1 of this article I documented the never ending false narratives used by those shaking the jar to keep us at each other’s throats. I will now show how 2020 was a turning point in history, with an accelerating decline of our empire in progress.

The numerous examples of how those holding the jar shake it to generate conflict and chaos to achieve their Machiavellian ambitions pales in comparison with what they accomplished during the fateful year of 2020. They began shaking the jar at hypersonic speed by weaponizing the annual flu, giving it a scary name and then faking data to scare the entire world into lockdowns and mandatory masking, even though “science” said neither of those “solutions” worked against viruses. And the science was right.

Continue reading “WHO IS SHAKING THE JAR? (PART 2)”

THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

I’m constantly amazed by the ability of those in power to create a narrative trusted by a gullible non-critical thinking populace. Appealing to emotions, when you have millions of functionally illiterate, normalcy bias ensnared, iGadget distracted, disciples of the status quo, has been the game plan of the Deep State for the last century. Americans don’t want to think, because thinking is hard. They would rather feel. For decades the government controlled public education system has performed a mass lobotomy on their hapless matriculates, removing their ability to think and replacing it with feelings, fabricated dogma, and social indoctrination. Their minds of mush have been molded to acquiesce to the narrative propagandized by their government keepers.

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” – Thomas Sowell

With a majority confused, distracted, malleable, willfully ignorant, and easily manipulated by false narratives, heart wrenching images, and fake news, the Deep State henchmen have been able to control the masses with relative ease. The unanticipated rise of Donald Trump to the most powerful role in the world gave many critical thinking, anti-big government, skeptical curmudgeons hope he could drain the swamp and begin to deconstruct the massive out of control Federal bureaucracy.

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THE REAL REASON THE AMERICAN DREAM IS UNRAVELING

Marketwatch posted an article this week titled Why the American Dream is Unraveling, in 4 charts. As usual, the MSM journalist and the liberal Harvard academic can create charts that reveal a huge problem, but they completely misdiagnose the causes and offer the typical wrong solution of taking more money from producers and handing it to the poor, with no strings attached. This has been the standard operating procedure since LBJ began his War on Poverty 50 years ago. Do these control freaks ever step back and assess how that war is going?

The poverty rate had plunged from 34% in 1950 to below 20% before LBJ ever declared war. It continued down to 15% just as the welfare programs began to be implemented. The percentage of people living in poverty hasn’t budged from the 15% range since the war began. This war has been just as successful as the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. Any time a politician declares war on something, expect a huge price tag and more of the “problem” they are declaring war upon.

The Federal government runs over 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Over 100 million Americans received benefits from at least one of these programs. Federal and state governments spent $943 billion in 2013 on these programs at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient (not including Social Security & Medicare). That is 27% of the total Federal budget. Welfare spending as a percentage of the Federal budget was less than 2% prior to the launch of the War on Poverty.

In the 50 years since this war started, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution. In terms of LBJ’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has utterly failed. In fact, a large proportion of the population is now completely dependent upon government handouts, incapable of self-sufficiency, and enslaved in a welfare mentality that has destroyed their communities.

Continue reading “THE REAL REASON THE AMERICAN DREAM IS UNRAVELING”

FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART FOUR

In Part One of this article I explained the model of generational theory as conveyed by Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning. In Part Two I provided an overwhelming avalanche of evidence this Crisis has only yet begun, with debt, civic decay and global disorder propelling the world towards the next more violent phase of this Crisis. In Part Three I addressed how the most likely clash on the horizon is between the government and the people. War on multiple fronts will thrust the world through the great gate of history towards an uncertain future.

War on Multiple Fronts

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The drumbeats of war are pounding. Sanctions are implemented against any country that dares question American imperialism (Russia, Iran). Overthrow and ignominious imprisonment or death awaits any foreign leader questioning the petrodollar or standing in the way of America spreading democracy (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Egypt). The mega-media complex of six corporations peddle the government issued pabulum about ISIS being an existential threat to our freedoms; Russia being led by the new Hitler and poised to take over Europe; Syria gassing innocent women and children; and Iran only six months away from a nuclear bomb (they’ve been six months away for the last fourteen years). Hollywood does their part with patriotic drivel like American Sniper, designed to compel low IQ unemployed American youths to swell with pride and march down to enlistment centers, located in our plentiful urban ghettos.

The most disconcerting aspect of Fourth Turnings is they have always climaxed with total destructive all-out war. Not wars to enrich arms dealers like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, but incomprehensibly violent, brutal, wars of annihilation. There are clear winners and losers at the conclusion of Fourth Turning wars. Leaders mobilize all forces, refuse to compromise, define their enemies in moral terms, demand sacrifice on the battlefield and home front, build the most destructive weapons imaginable, and employ those weapons to obtain victory at any cost.

It may seem inconceivable that war on such a scale will happen within the next ten years, but it was equally inconceivable in 1936 that 65 million people would die in the next ten years during World War II. We valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices leading up to this Crisis and during the early stages of this Crisis. The accumulation of unmet obligations, unpaid bills, un-kept promises and unresolved issues will provide the fuel for an upheaval that will shake our society to its core and transforms the country’s direction for the next sixty years. The outcome of the conflict could be tragedy or triumph. Our choices will make a difference.

There will be war on many fronts, and they have already begun. The culmination will likely be World War III, with the outcome highly uncertain and potentially disastrous.

Continue reading “FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART FOUR”

Rand Paul: The Politicians Are To Blame in Ferguson

By Rand Paul

The failure of the War on Poverty has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation.

We are witnessing a tragedy in Ferguson. This city in Missouri has become a focal point for so much. The President and the late Michael Brown’s family have called for peace. I join their calls for peaceful protest, but also reiterate their call to action — “channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change.”

In the search for culpability for the tragedy in Ferguson, I mostly blame politicians. Michael Brown’s death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America. The War on Drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation.

In Ferguson, the precipitating crime was not drugs, but theft. But the War on Drugs has created a tension in some communities that too often results in tragedy. One need only witness the baby in Georgia, who had a concussive grenade explode in her face during a late-night, no-knock drug raid (in which no drugs were found) to understand the feelings of many minorities — the feeling that they are being unfairly targeted.

Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color. In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed?

African Americans perceive as true that their kids are more likely to be killed. ProPublica examined 33 years of FBI data on police shootings, accounted for the racial make-up of the country, and determined that: “Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater.”

Can some of the disparity be blamed on a higher rate of crime in the black community? Yes, but there is a gnawing feeling that simply being black in a high-crime area increases your risk for a deadly altercation with police.

Does bad behavior account for some of the interactions with law enforcement? Yes, but surely there must be ways that we can work to prevent the violence from escalating.

On the other side of the coin, defenders of the War on Drugs say, look at Mexico if you want to see drug violence unchecked by police power.

Isn’t there another alternative where we utilize police power to counter violence, but for the most part leave non-violent citizens alone?

As I’ve visited our nation’s urban centers and predominantly white, impoverished rural areas, I sense an undercurrent of unease. It’s not just lack of justice, but also a cycle of poverty, to crime, and back to poverty again. There is a sense of helplessness. To be sure, we all hold a certain degree of responsibility for our lives and it’s a mistake to simply blame others for our problems.

Reforming criminal justice to make it racially blind is imperative, but that won’t lift up these young men from poverty. In fact, I don’t believe any law will. For too long, we’ve attached some mythic notion to government solutions and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.

When you look at statistics for the white community alone, you see that we’ve become two separate worlds in which the successful are educated and wait to have children until they are married, and those in poverty are primarily those without higher education and with children outside of marriage.

This message is not a racial one. The link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups. Statistics uniformly show that waiting to have children in marriage and obtaining an education are an invaluable part of escaping poverty.

I have no intention to scold, but escaping the poverty and crime trap will require more than just criminal justice reform. Escaping the poverty trap will require all of us to relearn that not only are we our brother’s keeper, we are our own keeper. While a hand-up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.

I will continue to fight to end the racial disparities in drug sentencing. I will continue to fight lengthy, mandatory sentences that prevent judges from using discretion. I will continue to fight to restore voting rights for non-violent felons who’ve served their sentences. But my hope is that out of tragedy, a preacher or teacher will arise — one who motivates and inspires all of us to discover traits, ambitions, and moral codes that have slowly eroded and left us empty with despair.

I will continue the fight to reform our nation’s criminal justice system, but in the meantime, the call should go out for a charismatic leader, not a politician, to preach a gospel of hope and prosperity. I have said often America is in need of a revival. Part of that is spiritual. Part of that is in civics, in our leaders, in our institutions. We must look at policies, ideas, and attitudes that have failed us and we must demand better.

Real solutions will include a revival of spirit, purpose, and action. I, for one, pledge to be part of those solutions.

THE WAR ON POVERTY: 50 Consecutive Years of Failure

Guest Post by Doug Ross

Robert Rector, writing in The Washington Times, writes the epitaph of the catastrophic disaster — for all involved — known as “The War on Poverty.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty. In January 1964, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Since then, the taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s war. Adjusted for inflation, that’s three times the cost of all military wars since the American Revolution.

Last year, government spent $943 billion providing cash, food, housing and medical care to poor and low-income Americans. (That figure doesn’t include Social Security or Medicare.) More than 100 million people, or one third of Americans, received some type of welfare aid, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. If converted into cash, this spending was five times what was needed to eliminate all poverty in the United States.

By the government’s own measures, the drop in the percentage of individuals qualifying as poor ended once the “War” truly got underway.

In fact, begin “poor” ain’t what it used to be during, say, the Great Depression.

The actual living conditions of households labeled as poor by Census are surprising to most people. According to the government’s own surveys, 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television; half have a personal computer; 40 percent have a wide-screen HDTV. Three-quarters own a car or truck; nearly a third has two or more vehicles.

Ninety-six percent of poor parents state that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food. Some 82 percent of poor adults reported that they were never hungry at any time in the prior year…

…The average poor American lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the average poor American has more living space than the typical nonpoor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.

In order to justify the massive transfers of wealth engendered by the “War”, President Lyndon Johnson predicted that the programs would reduce the number of Americans on welfare and transform many “tax-eaters” into “taxpayers”. In fact, the opposite happened, as it does so often when the federal government exceeds its Constitutional authority.

For a decade-and-a-half before the War on Poverty began, self-sufficiency in America improved dramatically. For the past 45 years, though, there has been no improvement at all. Many groups are less capable of self-support today than when Johnson’s war started.

The culprit is, in part, the welfare system itself, which discourages work and penalizes marriage. When the War on Poverty began, 7 percent of American children were born outside marriage. Today, the number is 41 percent. The collapse of marriage is the main cause of child poverty today.

The folly of Obama and the Democrats’ incessant push for more wealth redistribution — after five decades of unbroken failures — is obvious to any thinking American.

The welfare state is self-perpetuating. By undermining the social norms necessary for self-reliance, welfare creates a need for even greater assistance in the future. President Obama plans to spend $13 trillion over the next decade on welfare programs that will discourage work, penalize marriage and undermine self-sufficiency.

Which, some might say, was the plan all along.

The effects of subsidizing poverty are remarkably clear: these programs destroy two-parent families, sentence children to lives of poverty, and frequently lead to violence and imprisonment.

Any rational human being would look at the facts and reconsider the entire “War on Poverty”.

It remains to be seen whether any Democrat qualifies.

$21 TRILLION AND ALL I GOT WAS ……

Via Doug Ross

THE WAR ON POVERTY: $21 Trillion Later, Government Has Only Made Things Worse

Guest post by Matthew Vadum
The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in actual poverty, states the 205-page report unveiled last month by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).

The paper, created in the hope of starting a discussion in Congress about reforming America’s bungled poor-relief programs, came out before Ryan released the GOP’s new budgetary blueprint yesterday that lays out how to balance the budget in 10 years. That document calls for reducing federal government spending by $5.1 trillion over a decade largely by getting a grip on out-of-control social programs. The House Budget Committee could vote on the fiscal plan as soon as Friday. Leadership in the Democrat-dominated Senate, which hasn’t even tried to adopt a budget in recent years, isn’t planning to craft a fiscal blueprint this year, either.The heart of the War on Poverty report is its observation that most federal poverty-alleviation programs are essentially useless or incapable of having their impact measured in the real world.

The study observes that in 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent. This means taxpayers blew a staggering $20.7 trillion over the last half century in order to achieve a paltry 2.3 percentage point decrease in poverty.

The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in actual poverty

Broken down into less mind-blowing, easier-to-grasp figures, between 1965 and 2012 the average family of four spent roughly $146,000 per percentage-point drop in poverty, or $335,000 per family for the whole 2.3 percentage-point reduction.

Only the most blinkered or jaded among us in the body politic believe that sucking $9 trillion out of the private, productive economy for each single percentage-point reduction in the poverty rate constitutes an acceptable return on investment.

Which brings us to the modern “progressive” Left.

Those on the Left consider the gentle statistical dip in poverty over five decades to be social progress achieved by way of holy coercive redistribution. Mere results have always been less important to the Left than intentions.

Although a sane person would consider the extremely modest reduction in poverty a humiliating defeat, left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, hurling epithets, smearing opponents, and intimidating adversaries, all in an effort to move the discussion away from their 50 years of human misery-generating policy failures.

The Obama White House self-servingly slices and dices the statistics to portray the War on Poverty as a smashing, if flawed, success.

While the Obama administration admits that some of the government’s poverty-fighting approaches are less than optimal, President’s Obama Council of Economic Advisers issued a ringing endorsement of the War on Poverty.

According to that body, poverty has declined by more than one-third since 1967. “The percent of the population in poverty when measured to include tax credits and other benefits has declined from 25.8 percent in 1967 to 16.0 percent in 2012.” Predictably, the council opines that “[d]espite real progress in the War on Poverty, there is more work to do.”

The council also obsequiously slaps President Obama on the back, praising him for taking steps to “further increase opportunity and economic security by improving key programs while ensuring greater efficiency and integrity.”

It then moves from servile flattery to outright revisionism, claiming that Obama’s actions have “prevented millions of hardworking Americans from slipping into poverty during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

OBAMA: Big government, a lawless administration, and radical attacks on civil society aren’t worth worrying about

Ever the class warrior, in a December address on income inequality, Obama showed just how much a prisoner he is of his own self-imposed ideological bubble. Without mentioning the devastating impact that the high tax rates and runaway social spending he ardently supports have had on American society, the president argued that it’s all deterministic, all the fault of capitalism. He said:

“But we know that people’s frustrations run deeper than these most recent political battles. Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles—to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were.”

Big government, a lawless administration, and radical attacks on civil society aren’t worth worrying about, according to Obama.

It is “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain—that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.”

This is “the defining challenge of our time,” he said, even though Americans don’t give a farthing’s cuss about economic inequality.

That challenge consists of “making sure our economy works for every working American,” Obama declared, slyly anthropomorphizing the economy, an intangible abstraction, in order to push the illusion that markets, like animals or streams, can somehow be controlled and centrally managed.

All of this rhetorical blatherskite had its heyday in the awful 1960s, an era historian Paul Johnson correctly described as “America’s suicide attempt.” Instead of being satisfied with New Deal-era programs like Social Security, left-wingers resolved to move America even farther away from its founding ideals, fundamentally changing the country by erecting a supremely sclerotic behemoth welfare state answerable to no one.

The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society

The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society. This war really should have been called the war on American values. As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, social evils have not only been encouraged but subsidized with taxpayer dollars. For example, out-of-whack financial incentives have caused out-of-wedlock birthrates to mushroom, as David Horowitz and John Perazzo reported in “Government vs. the People.”Despite an orgy of federal spending, blacks and other minorities have suffered the most from big government poverty alleviation efforts. The anti-marriage, anti-family tilt of welfare policies has devastated black communities and society at large.

In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay. He exhorted Congress to launch a new belligerency against a perpetually ineradicable foe.

“Let this session of Congress be known,” Johnson exclaimed, “as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.”

The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 became the centerpiece of the new war. It expanded the nation’s social safety hammock, turning government resources into war materiel to be used against the American system of constitutionally limited government.

The War on Poverty gave taxpayers’ money to so-called community groups like ACORN and Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation

The War on Poverty gave taxpayers’ money to so-called community groups like ACORN and Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation in order to encourage them to agitate against the status quo. This, in turn, stimulated demand for more government spending as taxpayer dollars became a kind of ever-increasing subsidy for pro-big government activism. The federal government still hands out significant grants to left-wing groups to subsidize their efforts to take away our economic freedoms. Many of the EOA-created programs still exist today, including VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America), now known as AmeriCorps VISTA, Job Corps, and Head Start.

Many more excuses for handouts were created after the mid-1960s—so many, in fact, that it is difficult nowadays for poor people to tiptoe through the ever expanding minefield of government assistance unscathed.

Loud calls for yet more welfare spending continue unabated from the echo chambers of the Left every single day whether the national economy is good or bad.

These calls come even after the country has saturation-bombed poor people with welfare over the past 50 years, to the tune of $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every actual, non-figurative war it has fought. Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is now 16 times greater than when this phony war was declared, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation.

While millions of Americans remain stuck in poverty, the House Budget Committee’s white paper from March inventories a dizzying array of expensive failed programs on which mountains of money have been lavished.

The federal government now administers at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. There are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs. The federal government spent $799 billion on these programs in fiscal 2012 alone, according to the report.

Among more than 15 programs, more than $100 billion was spent on food aid. More than $200 billion was spent on cash aid. Spread over more than 20 programs, more than $90 billion was spent on education and job training. Almost $300 billion was spent on health care and close to $50 billion was spent on housing.

Let’s look at some of the eye-popping numbers involved in the major aid category of cash aid.

There were three federal agencies involved in spending $220 billion on cash aid in fiscal 2012. They are the Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of the Treasury.

Created in 1974, the Supplemental Security Income program provides cash benefits to elderly, blind, or disabled persons with limited income and assets. It weighs in at $50 billion.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1935, provides assistance to needy families. In 2012 it weighed in at $16.7 billion.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, established in 1975, provides cash assistance to low-income working families. The EITC, which some analysts consider to be a rare federal anti-poverty success, is the largest measure in the tax code that is aimed at reducing poverty. In 2012, its budget was $59 billion.

The Child Tax Credit, enacted in 1997, provides assistance to families with children. The IRS spent a little over $57 billion on total child credits in 2013.

The Title IV-E Foster Care/Adoption Assistance program, created in 1997, helps states pay for arranging temporary homes for disadvantaged children or for facilitating their adoption. The federal government spent $6.8 billion on the program in 2012.

But most of the 92 federal poverty-alleviation programs have a mediocre to downright dreadful track record of helping people in need.

To make matters worse, over the past three years, “deep poverty” has reached its highest level on record and about 21.8 percent of children live below the poverty line, the report states. Although changing demographics and slow economic growth contribute to continued poverty, federal policies are also discouraging work. For example, a rapid increase in disability caseloads has shrunk the labor force.

“But a large problem is the ‘poverty trap,’” the report states. “There are so many anti-poverty programs—and there is so little coordination between them—that they often work at cross purposes and penalize families for getting ahead.”

Because these programs are means-tested—meaning that benefits fall as recipients earn more money—poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government, in effect, is discouraging them from making more money.

“Congress has taken a haphazard approach to this problem; it has expanded programs and created new ones with little regard to how these changes fit into the larger effort. Rather than provide a roadmap out of poverty, Washington has created a complex web of programs that are often difficult to navigate.”

Some programs work, some don’t, and with many of them, “[t]here’s little evidence either way.”

Federal programs are not only failing to address problems in society; in some ways they are making the problems worse

Federal programs are not only failing to address problems in society; in some ways they are making the problems worse. “Changes are clearly necessary, and the first step is to evaluate what the federal government is doing right now,” the report said.

But President Obama, neo-Marxist ideologue that he is, isn’t interested in making changes to anti-poverty programs. Obama is seeking $56 billion in new spending for a variety of programs expanding educational offerings for preschoolers and job training for laid-off workers. No doubt he’ll find a way to lard still more billions of dollars in so-called emergency spending onto the budget as the year progresses.

“The two sides have converged in terms of the problems they’re diagnosing,” said Alan D. Viard of the American Enterprise Institute. “But the solutions are very far apart.”

That is an understatement.
Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com/, is an investigative reporter at a watchdog group in Washington, D.C. His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada), and as an e-book at Kobo (Canada).

IT TAKES A TWO PARENT FAMILY TO RAISE A CHILD

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. Hillary Clinton is a liberal power hungry control freak. Liberals like to spew gibberish like this because their welfare state policies have destroyed the family unit and they want the all powerful government to assume even more control over our lives to fix the problem they created. The disintegration of America began with LBJ’s War on Poverty entitlement state solutions to a problems we didn’t have. West Philly is a ghetto because black men have abdicated their role of being a father to the government. The spiral continues and the liberal solution is more food stamps, more welfare, more dependency, and less self responsibility. The state will fix all of our societies ills. Just give them some more money.

Family disintegration has hurt America

Monday, January 28,2013

COMMUNITY LEADERS across the U.S. find themselves struggling with rampant tardiness, high truancy rates, high dropout rates, low educational attainment, widespread drug addiction, crime, a degraded work force and more.

It’s as if society is disintegrating.

That’s because many poor American families have.

Some social scientists contend that War on Poverty programs intended to help the poor actually led to what they call “family disintegration” instead.

“The core feature of the U.S. welfare system, and its central problem, is that it subsidizes and thus promotes self-destructive behavior,” the Heritage Foundation said in a 1995 briefing paper. “Specifically, the welfare system promotes: non-work, illegitimacy and divorce.”

The current system “transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it,” the foundation said.

In 2011, almost 41 percent of children born in the United States were born to unmarried women.

This has consequences.
“Welfare insidiously creates its own clientele; by undermining work ethic and family structure, the welfare state generates a growing population in ‘need of aid.’”

The Heritage Foundation again: There is “material poverty,” which measures income, and “behavioral poverty,” which “refers to a breakdown in the values and conduct which lead to the formation of healthy families, stable personalities, and self-sufficiency.”

BEHAVIORAL POVERTY “incorporates a cluster of severe social pathologies including: eroded work ethic and dependency, lack of educational aspiration and achievement, inability or unwillingness to control one’s children, increased single parenthood and illegitimacy, criminal activity, and drug and alcohol abuse,” the foundation said.

That’s what U.S. law enforcement, criminal justice, public school and court systems wrestle with every day.

ALL THESE problems would be lessened if society were to address the cause of family disintegration – welfare that is more rewarding than work – rather than the consequences of family breakdown.

Society, it turns out, makes a very poor substitute for strong families.

— The Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail

Money in America — Part Eight

In our last dramatic episode, we saw America ready for war … with British help, looked at a war economy from the vantage point of Main Street, and touched on post-war conditions.

World War Two loose ends

The behind-the-scenes activities of the British Security Coordination (officially know as the British Passport Control Office in NYC) not only derailed the ‘isolationist’ element of the American public, it also succeeded in deposing Vice President Henry Wallace as FDR’s running mate in 1944.

One factor was Wallace’s vision of a post-war world which conflicted with Churchill and others, hoping to retain their stature as a world power. Recall that Great Britain insisted on returning to a gold standard at the pre-WW1 value of the pound. During WW2 years, they feared the growth and ambition of their American cousins. Perhaps the most significant area of disagreement was the role of civil aviation and who would claim the lion’s share of world domination.

Juan Trippe’s Pan American had received a $260 million war contract to build some 16 airfields in South America for military use. One provision of this contract granted the reversion of “$38 millions worth of work” to Pan Am and exclusive use of these facilities after the war. The final cost was estimated upwards of one billion dollars …

Pan Am also had their Boeing 314s (the Clipper flying boat) taken over by the government as they were the only existing aircraft that could carry large payloads across an ocean. The airline had other contracts, ferrying bombers and other aircraft, and flew all up more than 90 million miles for the U.S. Government.

Perhaps one of the factors that drew Churchill’s approval of Harry Truman was that the latter disliked Pan Am’s monopoly in South America.

Most of this aviation war work fell under the auspices of the Army Air Transport Command. What started in wartime as a very small scale operation ended up larger than the entire United States commercial airline establishment. The British were right to worry about their future.

(A slight digression)

The Tokyo Skytower, world’s largest freestanding tower, opened on 21 May 2012. This is a significant rhyme … and Skytower’s “curves and arches reflect[ing] a traditional Samurai sword” katana imagery offers interesting symbolism.

Although the first skyscraper was built in Chicago in 1884-5, the great push for really big building occurred even as the Great Depression unfolded.

NYC – Chrysler Building, 1930, Empire State building, 1931.
Chicago – Palmolive building, Carbide and Carbon building, and Medinah Club building, 1929.
Cincinnati – AT&T building, 1929, Carew Tower, 1930, and Times-Star building, 1933.
Kansas City, Missouri – Power and Light building, 1931, and Jackson Country Courthouse, 1934.
Hartford, Conn. – Southern New England Telephone building, 1931.
Providence, RI – County Courthouse, 1930.
Philadelphia, PA – Lewis Tower, 1929, and Ritz-Carlton , 1931.
Pittsburgh, PA – Gulf Building, 1932.

Just a few examples then and here we are now in another similar era with tall, taller, tallest buildings springing up around the globe. Do you feel lucky, punk?

The Post-War Economy

In a fine example of linear thinking, the pundits looked forward by looking backward. Some remembered the Bonus Army. Others anticipated a new depression … “the greatest and swiftest disappearance of markets in all history” … “insecurity, instability, and maladjustment” … “the infections of a postwar disillusionment” … “a declining birthrate” …

Fearing a thinning population and collapsing economy, the U.S. Government began planning a massive campaign, involving two hundred organizations, to provide work relief on the scale of the original New Deal.

It wasn’t necessary.

The Fourth Turning, pg. 146

With vast examples of wartime spending, many economists feared the subsequent drop in military spending would see the economy revert to depression hard times. Not so – a dozen years of thwarted consumer demand assisted strong economic growth. The 1940 GNP of $200 billion in 1940 went to $300 billion by 1950. And a decade later, GNP surpassed $500 billion.

Rebuilding Europe via the Marshall Plan aid and U.S. exports certainly was a factor. And an ‘Iron Curtain’ descending over eastern Europe supplanted the Nazi menace with a Soviet one and the Cold War was underway. Cue the MIC.

Also, the union movement threw off the government shackles imposed by the war effort. 1945 ended with automobile, electrical and steel strikes.

A gathering of elites from allied nations had met at Bretton Woods in 1944 and established a regulated method of exchange rates, referenced to the U.S. gold backed dollar – and thus the US$ became the world reserve currency.

Whether or not it’s true that the U.S. held 80% of world gold reserves then, “he who owns the gold makes the rules.” As of 2010, the total of gold reserves was 30,807 tonnes and the U.S. is said to have 8,133.tonnes, even if it’s now “only tradition” …

“After World War II, the United States held over 20,000 tons of gold in its reserves much of it having come from Europe to pay for war supplies and arms.”

Alex Stanczyk – Beijing China Jan. 7th, 2012 speech

Businessmen, industrialists, entrepreneurs, all demonized in the 30s and co-opted in the 40s saw a ‘sea change’ in attitudes. Having assisted in victory, albeit via government spending, the post-war years saw new attitudes welcoming progress. And innovation. An industrial conference certainly embraced innovation – and even depression-era experiments like television quickly became a reality that grew. Radar and microwaves turned from war to civilian use. The potential of computers was discussed; the only one willing to take a chance was Thomas J. Watson, who said he would probably lose money but it was worth exploring.

As quickly as Detroit factories had converted to war work, they changed back even faster. The first 1946 civilian cars rolled off the lines before year’s end.

In the farm sector, increased productivity led to agricultural overproduction. Small farms were losing competitive ability and the 1947 farm workforce of 7.9 million people declined over the next forty years to less than half that. Farming grew to become Big Agra.

Nothing goes up forever – business eased off from expansionary investment. President Truman responded to an eleven month slump beginning in November 1948, shortly after his “Fair Deal” economic reforms. Coincidentally the Federal Reserve had initiated a period of monetary tightening. Also, there was the new, improved threat of the Cold War – and Truman reinstituted the draft. Economists had forecast a much worse period, deflation, gloom and doom. The GNP declined 1.5%, consumerism had lessened and unemployment went up to 7.9%. A little deficit spending wouldn’t hurt …

The face of the urban workplace environment changed, too. By the 1950s more service works would be counted than those who produced goods. By 1956, more white-collars were employed than blue-collars. Unions won their first long-term employment contracts, with generous benefits …

Business activity has expanded greatly since the spring of 1946 in response to the stimulation of a large postwar civilian demand for goods and services. As a result of this increased activity, as well as of advancing prices and a sharp reduction in corporate taxes, business profits after taxes reached new high levels by the end of 1946. In this period expenditures by business for plant, equip- ment, and inventories have been in unprecedented volume. In order to finance the great increase in assets, business in general has invested the largest annual volume of retained earnings in history, has drawn upon its large wartime accumulation of cash and Government securities, has borrowed from banks, and has floated new issues of securities.

Federal Reserve Bulletin, May 1947

The Fed also noted that the dollar volume of sales in 1946 was 75 percent greater that the previous peacetime peak year of 1929. Wartime profits for business contributed to unusually high levels of plants and equipment spending – aided by a large volume of investment funds. Banks with large holdings of short-term Treasuries could sell or pledge against advances from the Federal Reserve and thus increase their loan portfolios. Special tax credits adjustment wartime taxes for business reduced the 1946 tax liabilities.

Wartime financing by the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, after statutory dividends to the member banks in 1947 yielded a net earning of 60 million dollars. About 90 percent was paid into the Treasury.

The Rise of Suburbia

William Levitt addressed the problem of affordable home ownership first in New York and four other locations. A generation accustomed to ‘government issue’ found the identical ‘cookie-cutter’ houses acceptable, especially since they were cheaper than renting. Assembly-line production techniques in building houses for the first time proved effective.

Levitt & Sons and other builders were guaranteed by the V.A. and FHA which benefitted veterans significantly. The first homes were offered in March, 1949, even as the administration fought deflation.

The typical blue collar family had an option for better living also.

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/Life%20magazine%20images%201949-/Bernard%20Levey%20family%20in%20front%20of%20original%20Cape%20Cod.jpg

Levittown, New York was the model of an ideal American suburb. It would take decades for these modest homes to morph into McMansions all across the nation – but once a paradigm shift has begun, it must stay the course.

The symbiosis of automobiles for Everyman as well as tidy little suburban homes was irresistible. Those hordes who once escaped the family farm for city life now expanded inexorably into something that was neither. The average new car cost $1,510 in 1950 and a gallon of gas to put in it set you back 18 cents. That Cape Cod house style averaged $8,450 and it came with modern kitchen appliances!

A middle-class wage averaged $3,210 and one of the biggest discretionary expenses was a B&W TV at $249.95, and it was made in America.

The sprawl continued over the years: inner suburbs, outer suburbs, exurbs, and by the 1990s, suburbs mingled with commercial centres, industrial parks, and corporate headquarters.

The Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord

The Federal Reserve System formally committed to maintaining a low interest rate peg on government bonds in 1942 after the United States entered World War II. It did so at the request of the Treasury to allow the federal government to engage in cheaper debt financing of the war. To maintain the pegged rate, the Fed was forced to give up control of the size of its portfolio as well as the money stock. Conflict between the Treasury and the Fed came to the fore when the Treasury directed the central bank to maintain the peg after the start of the Korean War in 1950.

http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/special_reports/treasury_fed_accord/background/

Actually, Truman wanted that peg maintained for his U.N. police action. The Fed argued the low peg produced an excessive monetary expansion causing inflation. The Accord, eliminated the obligation of the Fed to monetize the debt of the Treasury at a fixed rate. This agreement became essential to the independence of central banking …

Thus, 1951 ushered in “the modern Federal Reserve System”.

Sociologically, all you need to know about the decade of the 50s was written in William H. Whyte’s “The Organization Man.” Americans inspired to win World War 2 returned to an empty suburban life, conformity, and the pursuit of the dollar. Kurt Vonnegut would have agreed. His first novel, “Player Piano”, reflected the corporate culture of uniformity, team work, collectivism and stability that he experienced at General Electric.

And there was McCarthy and reds under the bed. The Rosenberg trial. HUAC. The ever-present threat of the Cold War and mushroom clouds. Captain America and Mickey Spillane taking out Commies. A new chapter in ‘War is the health of the state’ …

The business magazine Steel had applauded Truman’s policies: “the firm assurance that maintaining and building our preparations for war will be big business in the United States for at least a considerable period ahead.”

In 1950, the U.S. Budget was $40 billion with $12 billion for the military. By 1955, that year’s budget was $62 billion with $40 billion for the military. When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, it was 49% of about $91 billion total. Very soon after his inauguration, JFK asserted the country was spending too much for war and intended to cut back the size of the active military. Then he reversed course, adding $9 billion to the ‘defense’ kitty. A curious observation has been made about the Nixon-Kennedy debates: those who felt JFK won were primarily television viewers; the radio audience leaned toward Nixon. The 1960 election was incredibly close.

Of course, news of Soviet buildups, the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” turned out to be exaggerated. Nonetheless, the 1970 military budget had grown to $80 billion – half of that to about 15 industrial corporations.

The fear factor card never gets old, continually played and believed. From an Iranian threat, the panic of “Reds” only 90 miles away to Bay of Pigs to the Cuban missile crisis and then an assassination to wonder about. On and on.

But by 1964, the American High had worn out and the greatest antiwar movement ever experienced in America had its effect – enter the Second Turning, the Consciousness Revolution. Perhaps the prelude to this season shift was the founding of the AARP in 1958 – another type of looking ahead from the previous generation.

After the ‘death of Camelot’ (smothered by glitz, hype and myth) America embraced the Great Society with good intentions and no ability to do simple arithmetic. The 1964 election saw the biggest Democratic landslide since 1938. Liberals would eliminate poverty – and any slight failures were blamed on the excessive spending on the Vietnam War.

And along came Nixon

Aside from health problems, LBJ also faced dissension within the ranks, from an antiwar movement, complete with Hollywood celebrities – and depressing polling results indicated the pragmatic decision to “not seek … not accept the nomination of my party for another term.” Following his earlier remarks in that speech, suspending bombing in North Vietnam and being in favor of peace talks, this decision was unexpected.

With LBJ’s withdrawal from a race that was looking promising for antiwar Eugene McCarthy likely to win large numbers of convention delegates, Hubert Humphrey announced his candidacy. So did Robert Kennedy. The latter’s ambition ended with another lone nut with a gun … McCarthy was overshadowed by Humphrey. The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, complete with antiwar riots and police brutality seen by “the whole world” had some influence in the outcome of the election. The failed Paris peace talks … for whatever reason … added to the shift to the Republican brand.

Nonetheless, the end result was squeaky close with but 0.7% in favor of Nixon.

Nixon assumed office after about eight years of expansion. By the end of 1969, attempts to handle the budget deficits of the Vietnam War and Federal Reserve monetary tightening via raised interest rates spawned an eleven month recession. Confidence grew with the Christmas present of the end of a mild (0.6%) recession and 1971 started looking bright.

Meanwhile, what had begun at Bretton Woods was slowly unraveling. With a little bit of coercion, the U.S. Dollar had been accepted as the world reserve currency and a fixed-exchange system would reign.

Everything worked well in the post-war era. The Marshall Plan and other aid was designed to assist growth of nations, such as Japan, as targets for export of U.S. goods – and thus able to absorb U.S. Dollars. The U.S. was producing half of the world’s manufactured goods. Initially holding half of the world’s reserves, and a creditor nation. But by 1970, U.S. Reserves were down to 16%, the Deutsche Mark and yen were undervalued with neither country willing to revalue – this being the justification for weaker currency being good for exports. Trade imbalances were worsening.

And then there was de Gaulle. With the U.S. insisting on the FDR gold price fix of $35/oz., an open market for gold made the pegged convertability between central banks a problem.: the U.S. had to keep running deficits to keep the system liquid and other countries were tempted to buy gold at the Bretton Wood price and sell on the open market for the artifically maintained strength of the U.S. Dollar.

In about 1967, de Gaulle realized the reserve currency was unsustainable and intended returning France to a gold standard. Having been a party to the establishment of the London Gold Pool in 1961, he responded to his prime minister’s later analysis:

“The international monetary system is functioning poorly because it gives advantages to the country issuing the reserve currency. Such a country can have inflation by making others pay for it.”

George Pompidou

France pulled out and the London Gold Pool collapsed in 1968. By 1971, U.S. Reserves were only around $10 billion and foreign banks held $80 billion in dollars.

In early 1971, de Gaulle sent a French battleship with a hoard of dollars to convert to gold at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The British ambassador to Washington conveyed the August 11 instruction of his government, conversion of $3 billion dollars into gold, to be stored in the underground vault of said bank. Other foreign governments had gold stored there also.

On August 16, 1971, Nixon abandoned the gold standard, asserting that the United States would no longer redeem dollars.

Fiat on!

And it’s been downhill ever since.

Epilogue to come …