April 2015 – Page 8 – The Burning Platform

I’M 100% CONFIDENT MOST AMERICANS ARE MORONS

These polls crack me up. They prove how delusional and stupid the average American truly is. Americans are the most confident people on earth. Too bad they are also the most egotistical, clueless, and math challenged people on earth. The poll below shows that 58% of Americans are either very or somewhat confident about their retirement. A full 75% of them think they’ll have enough to take care of basic expenses and 56% think they’ll have enough for medical expenses. The average American is an imbecile if they think they are in good shape.

Here are the facts. The median retirement balance of all households is $3,000. The median retirement balance of 45 to 64 year old households is $11,000. But still, the delusional morons in this country are confident about their retirements.

Here is some basic math for these people. If we even use $100,000 as the starting retirement account of a newly retired 65 year old, the rule of thumb is that you can’t spend more than 4% of the balance per year in retirement. That’s $4,000. The average Social Security payment is $13,000 per year. Are these blithering idiots really CONFIDENT they will be able to pay basic and medical expenses on $17,000 per year? REALLY???

I’m 100% confident the majority of Americans are truly fucked and will beg for the government to save them. I’m also 100% confident this entire edifice of debt is going to collapse under the weight of delusion, stupidity and false confidence. Carlin was absolutely right.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

A survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute has found that the percentage of Americans confident of a financially comfortable retirement is increasing. 22 percent of respondents said they were very confident about the financial aspects of life after work while 36 percent were somewhat confident.

Looking closer at certain elements of retirement, 37 percent of Americans feel very confident that they will have enough money to take care of their basic expenses. However, when it comes to taking care of medical expenses and paying for long-term care, this number fell. Just 18 percent of people are very confident of being able to handle their medical expenses while even fewer, 14 percent, feel confident about paying long-term care bills, should they need to.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Muck’s Five Minutes – Equality – What is It?

Equality – what is it?? Or is it at all?

“Equality” is a beastly word. Why beastly? Because it means something different to every person who says it or hears it. It is slippery as the best of sexual lubricants and as hard to grasp as a nettle in full thorn. It is a word that is capable of angering even the most placid of every under-appreciated citizen around the globe and is the bane of the Elite and Powers That Be who perch high atop the economic pile and are trying (with ever greater success) to stay there or climb even higher.

I think “equality” is an accident that happens only in passing and only for a moment. It is recognized by the symbol “=” and when place in a basic “equation” so: X = Y , means X is the identical to Y; but for how long if both X and Y represent living creatures and are in constant independent motion (in three dimensions) under the control of free will and with all the foibles of a human being???

The Communist Manifesto that is thoroughly discredited and in operation only in such progressive places as Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia and is now left flopping around the gutters of wishful political thinking (“If only it had been me running the joint, I’d have made it work!”) that held the goal of communism was equality – top to bottom – of the citizens of a country so ruled.

Of course, modified somewhat by the necessity of a Marxist “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This turns “equality” on its’ head as far as producing bread and beans is concerned. It turned out that a country so ruled turns into a herd of equally poor citizens, many living by the efforts of others with yet another elite dressed in classy communist rags who lived high on the hog. The able bodied just shoveled food in the trough and cleaned the pens while the feeble nibbled at the trough run off.

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Inequality of Wealth

Guest post by Martin Armstrong

1904 View of Standard Oil

During the Progressive Era around 1910, the Marxist view of the world was all about the massive wealth of the very rich like Rockefeller. Standard Oil would always rule the world. How could that possibly change? They argued this was undermining economic opportunity for others. The government championed the progressive income tax and attacked inheritance taxes to solve what everyone assumed was not fair – the inequality of wealth. We are talking about total net worth, not income.

WHERE DO YOU RANK IN WEALTH

(If you have a household net worth of X … you rank in the Y percentile):

$50,000 … 60th percentile
$93,000 … 50th percentile
$100,000 … 48th percentile
$200,000 … 34th percentile
$500,000 … 18th percentile
$750,000 … 12th percentile
$827,000 … 10th percentile
$1 million … 8th percentile
$1.4 million … 5th percentile
$6 million … 1st percentile

Inequality in wealth is approaching record levels again as everyone now harps on not the 1%, by the top 10%. The top 10% of families own 75.3% of the nation’s wealth. So if you have $827,000 in total net worth (real estate, stocks, savings, everything), that’s you. The bottom half of families own 1.1% of it. The families squished in between those two groups own 24.6% of the national wealth.

The fascinating solution is always to tax the rich bastards more to drag them down to even the scale. This is like seeing someone with a nice watch and you go take it because it is not fair they have something you do not. Hillary, who is clearly in the top 1%, claims she stands for toppling the top 1%. I suppose her goal is to make everyone equally poor except her and her backers. When she was championing healthcare, her response to a question that it would put small mom and pop stores out of business was crude. IF they could not afford it, then they should not be in business.

Nobody ever looks at what is keeping the bottom 90% of families from reaching the top 10%. Two primary factors come into play. Government cares nothing about what they preach and neither do the hosts on MSNBC who champion hating the rich, yet they themselves all earn enough to be in that top 10%. On top of that, four of MSNBC hosts had serious tax liens against them and owe the government millions. Al Sharpton allegedly has owes $4.5 million so he is in the top 1%.

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18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year

Guest Post by Mark Perry

Carpe Diem

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

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