Author: AWD

The opposite of freedom is slavery. The U.S. has dropped out of the top ten countries in terms of “economic freedom”. The Federal Reserve, the banksters, and the criminals in Washington are enslaving our population in debt and government dependence.

Unelected bureaucrats are writing laws and regulations at an astonishing rate. Taxes keep going higher, and unless you own stocks, inflation is probably eating your alive. And 11 million fewer people have jobs now than when Obama took office. More than 100 million people have “left the work force”. We’re circling the drain, not having an “economic recovery” like our insane delusional leaders tell us.

Socialism, communism, and central planning have failed throughout history, but that hasn’t stopped Obama and the liberal progressives. Yea, it’ll work this time….

The Level Of Economic Freedom In The United States Is At An All-Time Low
By Michael Snyder, on January 14th, 2014

Americans have never had less economic freedom than they do right now. The 2014 Index of Economic Freedom has just been released, and it turns out that the level of economic freedom in the United States has now fallen for seven consecutive years. But of course none of us need a report or a survey to tell us that. All we have to do is open our eyes and look around. At this point our entire society is completely dominated by control freaks and bureaucrats.

Our economy is literally being suffocated to death by millions of laws, rules and regulations and each year brings a fresh tsunami of red tape. As you will see below, the U.S. government issued more than 80,000 pages of brand new rules and regulations last year on top of what we already had. Even if we didn’t have all of the other monumental economic problems that we are currently facing, all of this bureaucracy alone would be enough to kill our economy.

Yes, every society needs a few basic rules. We would have total chaos if we did not have any laws at all. But in general, when there is more economic freedom there tends to be more economic prosperity. In fact, the greatest pe

The following is what he had to say about this photo…

“Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register. It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law by the president.”

I didn’t even see the small stack of paper at the top of the cabinet until I read his explanation. Most of the time everyone is so focused on what Congress is doing, but the truth is that the real oppression is happening behind the scenes as unelected federal bureaucrats pump out millions upon millions of useless regulations that are systematically killing our economic freedom.

On Tuesday, an article about the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom was published by the Wall Street Journal. As I mentioned above, the United States has fallen for seven years in a row…

World economic freedom has reached record levels, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. But after seven straight years of decline, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 most economically free countries.

That same article mentioned some of the reasons why the United States is falling…

It’s not hard to see why the U.S. is losing ground. Even marginal tax rates exceeding 43% cannot finance runaway government spending, which has caused the national debt to skyrocket. The Obama administration continues to shackle entire sectors of the economy with regulation, including health care, finance and energy. The intervention impedes both personal freedom and national prosperity.

And of course the results are predictable. Our economy has been steadily declining for many years, and that decline appears to be ready to start picking up speed once again. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Dave in Denver…

In the latest retail sales report for December, auto sales were nailed – down 1.8%. The only reason overall retail sales from November to December showed a slight “gain” that November’s number was revised lower. Electronics fell off of a cliff. The housing market is about to get crushed. Feedback I’m getting from my Seeking Alpha articles and blog posts on housing from housing market professionals all around the country tells me that the housing market hit a wall at the end of 2013, as I have been forecasting.

What he said about the housing market is definitely true. In recent months, mortgage originations have been falling like a rock. Just check out this chart.

And as I wrote about the other day, there has been absolutely no employment recovery since the end of the last recession. In fact, 1,687,000 fewer Americans have jobs today compared to exactly six years ago even though the population has grown significantly since then.

Unfortunately, these are not just “cyclical problems”. Long ago we abandoned the fundamental principles that once made our economy great, and now we are paying a tremendous price for that.

Posted below is a story that has been circulating all over the Internet for quite some time. It is a fake story. Once again, let me repeat that. This is a fake story. But I think that it does a great job of illustrating what is happening to America as we march toward full-fledged socialism…

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”.. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that.

But of course it would be disingenuous to pin all of the blame for this just on Obama, although his socialist agenda and spending are unlike anything this country have ever seen before The truth is that our nation has continued to march toward socialism no matter who has been in the White House and no matter who has been in control of Congress. So if you want to place some of the blame on a “Boehner”, “Reid” or a “Pelosi” please feel free.

And the American people are getting sick and tired of this one party system that has two heads. According to a recent Gallup survey, only 29 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be Democrats right now. And the news was even worse for Republicans. According to that survey, only 24 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be Republicans at this point.

A staggering 45 percent of all Americans now consider themselves to be Independents. Deep down, most Americans know that something is seriously wrong with our nation and that they are being lied to be our politicians and the mainstream media.

Unfortunately, there is very little agreement about how to fix things because Americans do not have a set of shared values that we all agree on anymore.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-level-of-economic-freedom-in-the-united-states-is-at-an-all-time-low

An email I got from Ron Paul I’m sharing with you….

Concerned American,

You may not know this . . .

But for the past year, I was censored.

Believe it or not, federal rules governing former members of Congress for their first year after retirement limited my ability to mobilize Americans to advance liberty.

Every communication had to be carefully crafted, and often even double-checked by C4L’s lawyers, to make sure I didn’t violate federal law.

But as of January 4th, the muzzle has been removed!

I’m now free to speak my mind.

And I’ve got BOLD plans for 2014 – starting with sending a loud-and-clear message to Congress.

I want to kick off 2014 by letting Congress know you and I are going to ramp up our efforts.

This is especially important to me as I watch pro-liberty members of Congress, such as my friends, Representatives Justin Amash and Thomas Massie, and my son, Senator Rand Paul, work to Audit the Fed, end NSA snooping and TSA groping, repeal ObamaCare, and cut government spending in all areas.

Just as I did when fighting these battles in Congress, Rand, Thomas, Justin, and their allies face tremendous opposition from statists in both parties.

And, just as it happened when I was in Congress, I know pressure from pro-liberty Americans can overcome the bipartisan, pro-Big Government D.C. establishment.

That’s why Campaign for Liberty is launching a “Freedom Bomb” from January 13 to January 23 to celebrate the restrictions being lifted.

Our goal is to flood Congress with 200,000 “Defend Liberty Directives” letting EVERY legislator know the R3VOLUTION is alive and well.

As you’ll see, whether it’s supporting Audit the Fed, repealing ObamaCare’s Individual Mandate, defeating the Internet Tax Mandate, or stopping the statists’ National ID scheme, your Directive demands your elected officials stand up and fight for our God-given liberties.

I’ll give you the link to sign your Directive in just a moment, but first let me tell you why our “Freedom Bomb” is so important.

You see, when I retired from Congress, the statists cheered in relief.

They thought the largest “thorn in their side” was now gone.

Well, Concerned American, they figured wrong.

I’m determined to fight harder for liberty than ever before.

I want to let Congress know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, far from backing off, you and I are going to turn up the pressure in the fight for individual liberty.

Of course, Campaign for Liberty will be fighting the statists on every front.

Our top legislative priority for 2014 will be forcing a Senate vote on Audit the Fed (S. 209).

Nearly 75% of the American people support auditing the Federal Reserve.

Given the Fed’s track record, it’s no wonder.

And as it becomes increasingly clear that, in the words of former Fed official Andrew Huszar, the Fed’s Quantitative Easing program is “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time,” I only expect that percentage to grow.

So you and I have a tremendous opportunity to take this fight to the next level.

Last year, Campaign for Liberty made great progress in its efforts to pass Audit the Fed legislation (S. 209/H.R. 24).

With my son, Senator Rand Paul, placing a hold on Janet Yellen — President Obama’s nominee to be the next Fed Chair — Audit the Fed received unprecedented attention in the U.S. Senate.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid still refused to allow a vote on Audit the Fed, despite the American people’s overwhelming support.

However, Janet Yellen’s vote total marked the lowest show of support for a Fed Chair nominee in history!

That’s because, even with 100 years of Fed propaganda and the Fed’s cheerleaders doing their best to stop us, you and I are gaining more ground against our nation’s out-of-control central bank every day.

If C4L can raise the resources to educate and mobilize millions of Americans on this issue, you and I will be able to force an up or down, roll call vote on Audit the Fed in the Senate.

And just getting a public, roll call vote in the Senate on Audit the Fed would be a huge victory.

It’s a win/win situation.

With so many Americans in our corner, if Rand’s colleagues in the Senate want to vote to defeat Audit the Fed, they’ll pay the political price at the ballot box when faced with reelection.

And you and I will move one step closer to passing Audit the Fed in the next Congress.

But aside from pushing for a roll call vote on Audit the Fed, C4L will also be leading the fight to REPEAL ObamaCare’s Individual Mandate.

Now that the American people are finally getting a taste of ObamaCare, the political dynamic over this legislation is completely changing.

In fact, roughly one-dozen Democrat United States Senators, worried stiff about their political careers, are beginning to push for “reform” of the bill.

It’s not hard to see why. Issues with the website appear to be the least of President Obama’s problems.

Millions of Americans – those that haven’t seen outright cancellations – are watching their health insurance premiums skyrocket.

Businesses are cutting hours and freezing hiring. States that have spent millions setting up exchanges have enrolled only a handful of people.

This all means the fight over ObamaCare is NOT over. But this could be the most dangerous time in the entire law’s history.

The establishment of BOTH parties is going to want to pass quick fixes to paper over the law’s failings, kicking the can down the road until this law becomes even more entrenched.

Our movement can’t let that happen.

It’s up to liberty-minded Americans to keep pushing for nothing less than FULL repeal of the individual mandate.

If the mandate is repealed, the entire ObamaCare law will completely unravel.

Of course, the statists are scheming to pass new laws to take away even more of our God-given liberties.

So C4L will be facing a number of defensive battles this year, including:

*** Defeating National ID.

For months now, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) have been working behind the scenes to pave the way for the bill’s passage.

If passed, this dangerous scheme would require a new National ID card based on Social Security cards.

These cards would be tied to a national database containing biometric identification information, potentially even including fingerprints, retinal scans, or scans of veins on the back of your hands, which could easily be used for government tracking.

*** Defending our Fourth Amendment Freedoms.

It’s no secret statists in BOTH parties have declared an all-out WAR on our Fourth Amendment rights in recent years.

If Campaign for Liberty does not mobilize in support of reining in the NSA, we may lose this opportunity to begin rolling back the surveillance state, as Congress will pass legislation either endorsing NSA spying or taking half-measures that don’t protect your right to be free of unconstitutional surveillance.

*** Stopping the Internet Tax Mandate.

As you recall, the Internet Tax Mandate has been rammed through the U.S. Senate and could be voted on any day in the U.S. House.

So far, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte has promised to follow the normal Committee process.

But he is under tremendous pressure from high-powered DC lobbyists, establishment insiders, and governors hungry for tax dollars to RAM the National Internet Tax Mandate through Committee and on to the House floor, where it will surely be gaveled through to Barack Obama’s desk.

That’s why you and I must create a grassroots firestorm of opposition to stop the National Internet Tax Mandate in the House.

Concerned American, I’m convinced our shared ideas of liberty have what it takes to restore our country.

But to win, you and I must be louder than ever in 2014.

As a former Congressman, I can assure you that will get their attention.

Not only that, but it’ll also be another step in generating the massive grassroots pressure needed to force a Senate vote on Audit the Fed, repeal ObamaCare, and fight back against the statists’ other assaults on our liberties.

I’ve been amazed at the incredible progress our R3VOLUTION has seen in recent years.

I can’t tell you what it means to me to have wonderful activists like you fighting continually for restored liberty.

Because of good folks like you, Campaign for Liberty is now one of the most feared political forces in the entire country.

But you and I have our most important work to do in the months ahead.

For Liberty,

It’s amazing our limp-wristed Chicago bath house fairy president hasn’t gotten us all killed (yet).

Given that presidential hopefuls are already gearing up for 2016 election, we’d like to remind you to vote for Vladimir Putin in the Democratic primaries. Any way you look at it, Putin is still cooler than Obama and more experienced than Hillary.

Do you get any benefit from our government? They’re getting ready to spend another $1.1 trillion, you know, to keep things going for awhile longer. There’s a lot of free shit that needs to be given out, and a lot of military hardware and union government drone pensions that need to be paid (for people that retired at 50). But not for Obamacare, since they opted out of Obamacare. But you will be paying for their major medical insurance.

Remember all the turmoil when the government “shut down”? No? Because there wasn’t any turmoil, other than tyranny and punishment ordered by Obama, who hates America and Americans. People will blindly stare at their phones, their T.V., and their computers while the government pisses away all their money, and borrows another trillion to fill in the gaps. Our government is so far out of control and divorced from reality that it cannot be saved, in it’s present form.

Senate Negotiatiors prepare $1.1 trillion spending; Could top 1,000 pages…

Dozens of Trade-Offs in $1.1 Trillion Budget Bill
WASHINGTON January 13, 2014
By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press

A massive $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the government through October and finally put to rest the bitter budget battles of last year is getting generally positive reviews from House Republicans eager to avoid another shutdown crisis with elections looming in 10 months.

Veteran Republicans said the favorable response to the all-encompassing spending bill reflected the desire of the rank and file to avoid a repeat of the politically damaging budget standoffs with the White House that led to last year’s 16-day partial government shutdown. The government closure sent congressional approval numbers plummeting and roughed up Republicans in particular. They’ve regained support amid the troubled rollout of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

“The shutdown educated — particularly our younger members who weren’t here during our earlier shutdown — about how futile that practice is,” said House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky. “There is a real hard determination now that we will reacquire and use the power of the purse that the Congress constitutionally has been given.”

Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., said the bill would get “our country off this notion of shutting the government down” and would allow Republicans to “keep the spotlight on some other issues that affect the other side that we think are very important,” a reference to the health care law that’s weighing politically on Democrats.

The massive measure contains a dozens of trade-offs between Democrats and Republicans as it fleshes out the details of the budget deal that Congress passed last month. That pact gave relatively modest but much-sought relief to the Pentagon and domestic agencies after deep budget cuts last year.

Western Republicans from timber country were anxious about a cutoff of funding of federal payments in lieu of taxes to towns surrounded by federal lands but were reassured that the payments would be extended though separate legislation. Gulf Coast lawmakers praised a provision aimed at delaying federal flood insurance premium increases from new flood maps that have proven faulty, but the provision left in place other reforms enacted in 2012.

The GOP-led House is slated to pass the 1,582-page bill Wednesday, though some tea party conservatives are sure to oppose it.

Democrats pleased with new money to educate preschoolers and build high-priority highway projects are likely to make up the difference even as Republican social conservatives fret about losing familiar battles over abortion policy.

The bill would avert spending cuts that threatened construction of new aircraft carriers and next-generation Joint Strike Fighters. It maintains rent subsidies for the poor, awards federal civilian and military workers a 1 percent raise and beefs up security at U.S. embassies across the globe. The Obama administration would be denied money to meet its full commitments to the International Monetary Fund but get much of the money it wanted to pay for implementation of the new health care law and the 2010 overhaul of financial regulations.

“This agreement shows the American people that we can compromise, and that we can govern,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. “It puts an end to shutdown, slowdown, slamdown politics.”

The House vote is expected less than 48 hours after the measure became public, even though Republicans promised a 72-hour review period for legislation during their campaign to take over the House in 2010.

On Tuesday, the House is slated to approve a short-term funding bill to extend the Senate’s deadline to finish the overall spending bill until midnight Saturday. The current short-term spending bill expires at midnight Wednesday evening.

The measure doesn’t contain in-your-face victories for either side. The primary achievement was that there was an agreement in the first place after the collapse of the budget process last year, followed by a 16-day government shutdown and another brush with a disastrous default on U.S. obligations. After the shutdown and debt crisis last fall, House Budget committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., struck an agreement to avoid a repeat of the 5 percent cut applied to domestic agencies last year and to prevent the Pentagon from absorbing about $20 billion in new cuts on top of the ones that hit it last year.

At the White House, President Barack Obama expressed support for the bill and urged Congress to “pass that funding measure as quickly as possible so that all these agencies have some certainty around their budgets.”

To be sure, there is plenty for both parties to oppose in the legislation. Conservatives face a vote to finance implementation of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul and Wall Street regulations, both enacted in 2010 over solid Republican opposition. A conservative-backed initiative to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions was dumped overboard and social conservatives failed to win new restrictions on abortion.

Democrats must accept new money for abstinence education programs they often ridicule, and conservatives can take heart that overall spending for daily agency operations has been cut by $79 billion, or 7 percent, from the high-water mark established by Democrats in 2010. That cut increases to $165 billion, or 13 percent, when cuts in war funding and disaster spending are accounted for. Money for Obama’s high-speed rail program would be cut off — a defeat for California Democrats — and rules restricting the sale of less efficient incandescent light bulbs would be blocked.

Democrats are more likely to climb aboard than tea party Republicans, but only after voting to give Obama about $6 billion more in Pentagon war funding than the $79 billion he requested. The additional war money is helping the Pentagon deal with a cash crunch in troop readiness accounts. Including foreign aid related to overseas security operations, total war funding reaches $92 billion, a slight cut from last year.

At the same time, the bill is laced with sweeteners. One is a provision exempting disabled veterans and war widows from a pension cut enacted last month. The bill contains increases for veterans’ medical care backed by both sides and fully funds the $6.7 billion budget for food aid for low-income pregnant women and their children.

Yet the National Institutes of Health’s proposed budget of $29.9 billion falls short of the $31 billion budget it won when Democrats controlled Congress. Democrats won a $100 million increase, to $600 million, for so-called TIGER grants for high-priority transportation infrastructure projects, a program that started with the 2009 stimulus bill.

The spending bill would spare the Pentagon from a brutal second-wave cut of $20 billion in additional reductions on top of last year’s $34 billion sequestration cut, which forced furloughs of civilian employees and harmed training and readiness accounts.

It also contains a longstanding provision blocking the Postal Service from ending Saturday mail delivery and closing rural post offices, a rule that’s taking on greater importance as Congress contemplates cost-cutting steps for the post office.

I’ve been wondering about videos like this. Somebody at the sea shore on the West coast or Hawaii with a Geiger counter. One seems to have emerged, and if it’s to be believed, it’s rather scary.

Nuclear meltdown and radioactivity, the gift that keeps on giving. I’m glad I don’t live in California. It may not be safe to swim there for at least 40 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=LcQLxT49ZP0

Has Fukushima’s Radioactive Wave Already Hit California?

Health officials confirm spike in radiation on San Francisco beach but have no answers

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
January 6, 2014

Predictions that Fukushima’s radioactive ocean plume would hit the west coast of the U.S. sometime in 2014 may have already come to pass, with a new video showing Geiger counter readings of background radiation at a beach in San Francisco over five times the safe level.

Days after a YouTube video emerged showing background radiation at a Coastside beach reaching over 150 micro-REM per hour, Health officials in San Mateo County confirmed the spike but said they were “befuddled” as to its cause.

However, officials dismissed the possibility that the readings could be linked to Fukushima radiation reaching the west coast despite forecasts by experts last summer that radioactive particles from Fukushima would reach U.S. coastal waters in 2014.

The video shows a man measuring radiation readings at different spots on a beach south of Pillar Point Harbor. Background radiation in the areas immediately surrounding the beach are normal, but once the man approaches the water itself, the radiation spikes to at least 500 per cent safe levels and the Geiger counter’s alarm goes off.

The man behind the video claims that on his previous visit to the same beach, radiation readings were 13 times the safe level.

“In the following days, other amateurs with Geiger counters began posting similar videos online,” reports the Half Moon Bay Review. “The videos follow other alarming news last month that starfish were mysteriously disintegrating along the West Coast, a trend that has not been linked yet to any cause.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state Department of Public Health are now investigating the cause of the radiation and more information is expected to be released this week.

While officials will almost certainly downplay the situation in order to prevent panic, it’s important to remember that genuine public health crises are virtually always preceded by government duplicity.

TEPCO and the Japanese government have repeatedly been caught lying in their efforts to downplay the scale of the Fukushima disaster. In September it was confirmed that radiation readings around the power plant were 18 times higher than previously reported by TEPCO. After a tank leaked 300 tonnes of toxic water in August, groundwater radiation readings at the plant soared to 400,000 becquerels per litre, the highest reading since the nuclear accident occurred in March 2011.

EPA officials in America also lied in the weeks after 9/11 when they told rescue workers and the general public that the air at ground zero was safe to breathe. According to insiders, EPA officials knew that the dust in the air was laden with asbestos but chose to cover up the truth, leading to at least 20,000 ground zero workers suffering debilitating illnesses and numerous deaths.

Mainstream media outlets have also largely toed the line on Fukushima despite overwhelming evidence of a cover-up of the true scale of the crisis by Japanese authorities. Former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur was told not to warn the public about the danger posed by the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant during his time as a host on the cable network.

Concerns that the federal government is preparing for some form of nuclear emergency have heightened after it was revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services has ordered 14 million doses of potassium iodide, the compound that protects the body from radioactive poisoning in the aftermath of severe nuclear accidents, to be delivered before the beginning of February.

Image: Extent of Fukushima radiation by 2014. (Rossi et al./Deep-Sea Research).

QUESTION OF THE DAY: WOULD YOU COMPLY?

Good foot soldiers do as told! – What are we becoming?

You must obey! – Be very honest, what would you do if you were in the same situation if you resided in Connecticut? Would you have been in the same line too…or not? If so, why? If not…why not?

Here’s one report about what’s already taken place, see what you think:

A now-viral photo showing a long line of Connecticut residents waiting to register their guns and ammo is circulating across the Internet — and it’s sending chills down the backs of some gun owners.

Connecticut gun owners are rushing to register certain firearms and ammunition that will be considered illegal contraband in the new year.

Under a wide-ranging gun control law passed after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, they have until Tuesday to submit the paperwork with the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection.

“Holy crap. Looks like Weimar Germany,” Twitter user @votermom said of the photo.

“Another disgusting picture from Connecticut . . .men waiting in line to register guns with the government,” user @chipwoods commented.

“First, they came for the guns,” @PaulRReyes added.

“Life is too short to live in a state that does this to its residents,” Twitter user @lancemfisher declared.

And there are plenty more comments where that came from.

State police say they’ve had people lining up early in the morning to turn in applications to keep high-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and guns considered assault weapons under the new law.

While the Connecticut Citizens Defense League believes the law is unconstitutional, it has been reminding gun owners of the deadline to make sure they don’t become felons on Jan. 1.

Everyone is racing out to buy lottery tickets to win $630 million (at last count), which is kind of hilarious, because the criminals in Washington pissed away $30 billion without blinking an eye. Dr. Coburn completed his annual “wastebook” and all the crap your tax dollars are wasted on. Enjoy!

Government Blatantly Wastes $30 Billion This Year

Brianna Ehley, The Fiscal Times, December 17, 2013

When the sequester cuts slashed $85 billion from the federal budget, crippling federal programs like Head Start and halting crucial research at the National Institutes of Health, the government continued spending tax dollars on things like 3-D pizza printers for NASA, a beachfront property loan program for millionaires, and a $300 million Army surveillance blimp that doesn’t work.

Those are just three of the 100 examples of egregious government waste that cost taxpayers $30 billion this year–all detailed in Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) annual “Wastebook,” released Tuesday.

The report, obtained Monday night by The Fiscal Times, documents a host of federally-subsidized programs and projects that have incurred significant costs while offering little or no benefit to taxpayers.

The report isn’t just big ticket items, it also includes a spate of rather obscure, little-known projects as well, including a federally funded grant of nearly $400,000 awarded to Yale University to study the “oddity of the duck penis.” Another includes a $200,000 grant from the International Trade Administration was awarded to a group of indie rock execs to travel the world and discover new music.

“Collectively these cost more than $30 billion in a year when Washington would have you believe everything that could be done has been done to control unnecessary spending,” Coburn said in a statement. “Had just these 100 been eliminated, the sequester amount would have been reduced nearly a third without any noticeable disruption.”

In his report, Coburn wastes no time in taking aim at his colleagues in the do-nothing 113th Congress, which, he says, achieved very little this year, aside from passing 56 laws, forcing a 16-day government shutdown and maintaining an approval rating that hovers around 10 percent.

“The first session of the 113th Congress will likely go down in history as the least productive in history, more notable for what it do not do than what it did,” Coburn said. He added that the government shutdown cost taxpayers $400 million reinstating paychecks for furloughed federal employees earning more than $100,000 a year. This includes members of Congress.

“Congress should not be paid when it fails to pass an annual budget required by law,” Coburn said.

The latest “Wastebook” was released just ahead of a Senate vote on a bipartisan budget deal brokered by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray, which passed the House last week.

Coburn, a Republican and known deficit-hawk, voiced his disappointment in the deal during an interview on MSNBC last week, saying it doesn’t go far enough to address the long-term debt and doesn’t achieve any savings by eliminating any of the wasteful spending highlighted in his report.

“None of that’s addressed in this. None of the waste, the duplication, the fraud. None of it,” he said.

Here are some of the highlights in the report:

Beachfront Property for Millionaires — $500 million: A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) home loan program, created to help people with low and moderate incomes afford a home in “rural areas” has been used by many millionaires in “resort communities” in tropical paradises like Hawaii. According to the report, more than 100 individuals or families received loan guarantees for $500,000 or more from the USDA to purchase a home in Hawaii. And here’s the kicker, “if these new homeowners later cannot afford their new homes it’s no problem, the federal government will protect the banks from losses by repaying 90 percent of the loans,” the report says. Last year, it paid nearly $500 million in lost claims.

Botched Blimp — $300 million: The Army spent three and a half years and nearly $300 million building a football field-sized blimp called the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, to provide continuous surveillance over Afghanistan battlefields, but the project was riddled with errors and cost-overruns so the Army eventually just sold it back to the contractor.

NASA’s “Pillownauts” — $360,000: During the shutdown, 97 percent of NASA’s staff was laid off, still the agency was paying 20 people $18,000 each to literally lie around and do nothing for 70 days with their body “slightly tilted forward” for a study to help scientists learn how astronauts bodies will change in space flight. However, NASA isn’t planning any missions anytime in the foreseeable future, since it no longer has a manned space program…So they people getting paid to lie in bed all day might as well keep dreaming.

Fort Hood Shooter Still on Federal Payroll — $53,000 (in 2013): Alleged Fort Hood Shooter Major Nadal Hasson, continues to get paid federal salary since the Military Code of Justice doesn’t allow a soldier to be suspended until they are found guilty. He made $52,952 in 2013 and $278,000 total since he allegedly killed 13 and injured 32 in 2009.

NASA Looks for Intelligent Life in Congress — $3 million: Since NASA’s space program has been grounded, it’s left to search for intelligent life on Earth. Curiously enough, it has chosen to explore Capitol Hill and the inner workings of Congress. Teaming up with Georgetown University, NASA will embark on its next mission of hosting a one-week seminar exploring how Congress works—almost as complicated and mysterious as the solar system?

Television Ads for Hurricane Sandy — $65 million: Of the $60.4 billion Congress appropriated for areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, at least $65 million were put toward local television ads. Instead of rushing aid to the people who need it most, state-level officials in New York and New Jersey spent the money on tourism-related TV advertisements. Making this particularly vexing for some local residents, the flow of disaster aid has been both paltry and slow,” the report said.

Duplicate IT Systems — $321 million: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent over $30 million on two IT programs that serve the same purpose. Both support “immigration enforcement booking management, which includes the processing of apprehended illegal aliens suspected of committing criminal violations of immigration law. However, DHS said it has no plans to address the duplicative expenditures. Similar problems have accorded at DOD, where the Air Force has two duplicative IT systems. In fact, according to a recent GAO report, three agencies have spent $321 million for overlapping IT purposes over the past several years.

Bureau of Print and Engraving Ruined New $100 Bills — $4 million: The new $100 dollar bills that came out in October, after several setbacks pushed back their release date. One of the latest incidents happened in the fall when too much ink was applied to the paper (known as “mashing”). As a result, the Federal Reserve returned the bills to the Bureau and demanded a refund. The incident cost the taxpayer about $4 million.

Half a Million to Spruce Up Block in Kansas Town — $500,000: The Department of Transportation awarded Rossville, Kansas—a tiny town with a population of 1,150—a grant of $532,000 to make one-block in the downtown area “more decorative and colorful.” According to the report, the “decorative and colorful improvements to one street block in Rossville, Kansas cost U.S. taxpayers $462 per resident of Rossville or $38,000 for each of the 14 businesses located on this block of Main Street.” Hopefully now taxpayers across the country will swarm to Rossville to enjoy the block they helped pay for.

NASA’s 3D Pizza Printer — $125,000: NASA awarded a $124,955 grant to Arjun Contractor to build a 3-D pizza printer. The space agency spends about $1 million on “Martian food development.” According to the report, a NASA scientist involved in the 3D printer pizza said it could be years until the creation becomes feasible. Too bad, it sounds out of this world.

Uncle Sam Looking for Romance on the Web – (NEH) $914,000. The Popular Romance Project has received nearly $1 million from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) since 2010 to “explore the fascinating, often contradictory origins and influences of popular romance as told in novels, films, comics, advice books, songs, and internet fan fiction, taking a global perspective—while looking back across time as far as the ancient Greeks.”

Mass Destruction of Weapons – (Department of Defense) $7 billion. As the U.S. war effort in the Middle East winds to a close, the military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of useable vehicles and other military equipment. The military has decided that it will simply destroy more than $7 billion worth of equipment rather than sell it or ship it back home.

Millions Spent Building, Promoting an Insurance Plan Few Want and a Website that Doesn’t Work – (Department of Health and Human Services) At least $379 million. With nearly half-a-billion dollars in government funding put behind promoting a product that relatively few people seem interested in purchasing off a website that doesn’t work, Obamacare is perhaps the biggest marketing flop since Coca-Cola introduced the world to “New Coke” in 1985.

Government Study Finds Out Wives Should Calm Down (NIH) $325,525. If your wife is angry at you and you don’t want her to stay that way, you might avoid passing along the findings of this government study. Wives would find marriage more satisfying if they could calm down faster during arguments with their husbands, according to government-funded research.

Federally Funded Solar Panels Covered at Manchester-Boston Airport Because the Glare Blinds Pilots and Controllers (FAA) – $3.5 million. When officials at the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire installed new solar panels, they did not anticipate one quarter of them would not be used 18 months later. In Spring 2012, the panels were placed on top of the airport’s parking garage, and 25 percent have remained there, covered with a tarp, rendering them useless. Problems with the new panels were noticed almost immediately by air traffic controllers who claimed that for 45 minutes each day, glare made it difficult to oversee the airport’s runways.

Need Brains! Fighting Zombies with Pluses and Minuses — (NC) $150,000, A grant from NSF went to a company in North Carolina to develop a math learning game based on the zombie apocalypse.

NASA’s Little Green Man (NASA) — $390,000. Since NASA is no longer conducting space flights, they have plenty of time and money to fund a YouTube TV show and cartoon series called “Green Ninja” in which a man dressed in a Green Ninja costume teaches children about global warming.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/12/17/10-Most-Absurd-Stories-Government-Waste-Year#sthash.OP9ttFnF.dpuf
http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ContentRecord_id=e7359436-1572-414e-8acc-0222cad1c7d5&ContentType_id=d741b7a7-7863-4223-9904-8cb9378aa03a&Group_id=7a55cb96-4639-4dac-8c0c-99a4a227bd3a

9-Year-Old Suspended For Saying ‘Merry Christmas’ To Teacher

San Francisco, CA — The ‘war on Christmas’ continues as a simple well-wishing of ‘Merry Christmas’ has led to big trouble for one fourth-grade San Francisco boy this week.

Timothy Dawson, a 9-year-old student at Argon Elementary School in San Francisco, CA., was in the school cafeteria Monday eating with friends when he was taken to the principal’s office and given a week-long suspension. His punishment was consequence for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to his homeroom teacher earlier that morning.

Dawson’s teacher, 35-year-old Paul Horner who is an outspoken Atheist, was offended at the students display of Christmas spirit and had staff suspend the young boy for the rest of the week.

“I say ‘Merry Christmas’ to everyone,” the boy told CNN. “I didn’t think it would cause so much trouble just for saying a couple little words.”

The boy’s mother, Laura Dawson, 41, was fuming over the issue.

“You don’t traumatize a child who loves to go to school, who wanted to be early every day to school, you don’t make him cry, just for wishing someone Merry Christmas,” she told reporters, holding back tears. “You just don’t do it.”

Reporters spoke with Mr. Horner as he was leaving from school on Tuesday. “I warned the children not to bring religion into my classroom,” Horner said. “Maybe he’ll [Tim] listen to adults next time.”

Argon Elementary School officials declined to comment.

We have located the email address for the Atheist teacher in the story, Paul Horner. I think he deserves a nice well-wishing of Merry Christmas!

Email: [email protected]

http://nationalreport.net/9-year-old-suspended-saying-merry-christmas-teacher/#sthash.PshgDLXX.dpuf

Outside Argon Elementary school where the war on Christmas was declared

War on Christmas

Once again this holiday season, the right to celebrate Christmas is under attack. it’s happening in your community.
http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/12/12/war-christmas

ESPN dives headfirst into the War on Christmas

ESPN dives headfirst into the War on Christmas

Yes, actual words from Nancy “Botox” Pelosi. Almost as good as “we have to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it”.

Democrats are pissed because there won’t be unlimited paid vacations (unemployment benefits) and other free shit.
Republicans are pissed because it wipes out all the sequester spending cuts.

Our government is a joke, plain and simple. It’s beyond belief, and just gets worse every day.

“Embrace the suck” indeed.

Pelosi on budget deal: ‘Embrace the suck’

By Geoff Earle December 12, 2013

WASHINGTON – It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the budget deal.

“Embrace the suck,” House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi told fellow Democrats Thursday morning, a source told Politico.

“We need to get this off the table so we can go forward,” she added. It’s a way of telling her colleagues the budget deal negotiated with Republicans is the best they can get.

Democrats are fuming that the bipartisan budget deal doesn’t extend unemployment benefits for more than a million Americans.

One of Pelosi’s top lieutenants, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said Thursday it was “too early to say” whether most Democrats would back the deal, in an appearance on the Bill Press show.

To pass the House, it will need to get a bipartisan majority of votes.

The deal, negotiated by conservative House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Budget chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) puts off most of the looming “sequester” budget cuts.

It shaves about $23 billion from the deficit, but provides for $85 billion in new spending over a decade, funded through cost savings and fees slapped on air travel and Medicare providers.

A group of conservative groups is blasting the deal for blowing through spending limits, and numerous Senate conservatives have come out against it.

House Speaker John Boehner laced into conservative groups for a second day in a row Thursday.

“I think they’re pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be, and frankly I just think that they’ve lost all credibility,” Boehner fumed.

The House is set to vote on the budget Thursday.

http://nypost.com/2013/12/12/pelosi-on-budget-deal-embrace-the-suck/

Americans consume 5-10x more than they produce. They pay for this inflated standard of living by borrowing and creating debt. We exchanged a production economy for a financialization economy, which means debt creation above all else.

Keynesians like Paul Krugman believe debt doesn’t matter. But it does matter. We’re reaching the end of the line, where more debt creation finally takes it’s toll on GDP people’s living standards. Our entire standard of living has been a debt-fueled illusion. Debt creation can only drive economic growth for so long, then it’s game over.

Debt Is Failing as a Driver of Economic Growth

Submitted by Phoenix Capital Research on 11/25/2013

The US is heading towards a debt crisis.

Today, the US’s Debt to GDP ratio stands at over 105% (debt of $16.7 trillion on a GDP of $15.68 trillion). The only other time we’ve had more debt relative to our GDP was during WWII when the Debt to GDP ratio hit 112%:

Debt is not inherently evil. Debt that doesn’t create growth is.

In the 1960s every new $1 in debt bought nearly $1 in GDP growth. In the 70s it began to fall as the debt climbed. By the time we hit the ‘80s and ‘90s, each new $1 in debt bought only $0.30-$0.50 in GDP growth.

And today, each new $1 in debt buys only $0.10 in GDP growth at best.

Put another way, the growth of the last three decades, but especially of the last 5-10 years, has been driven by a greater and greater amount of debt. As you can see, after the Crisis began in 2007, the US moved into the point of debt saturation at which each new $1 in debt generates no additional growth.

This is why the Fed has been so concerned about interest rates. With a debt load of this size, every 1% rise in the US’s debt payments means another $100 billion in debt payments.

Unfortunately for the Fed, rates will eventually rise. It is guaranteed. As you can see in the below chart, rates have fallen almost nonstop since the early ‘80s. This is not sustainable. At some point rates will rise again. I cannot state expressly when, but that point is coming sooner rather than later.

As rates rise, the government will not be able to make interest on more than $17 trillion in debt.

And it now takes more than $35 dollars of government intervention to create $1 of economic growth:

The debt bubble, public and private debt is now more than $56 trillion. This amount can never be paid back. Therefore, A debt default is only a matter of time. The Federal Reserve money printing and bond-buying are only buying time. Sooner or later, treasury bond holders will realize they aren’t going to get repaid. Treasuries are much more risky than interest rates being falsely manipulated would indicate. The catastrophic debt problem will end our economic system as we know it, and the Fed and the government makes it worse every single day with more and more reckless spending.

I tend to post quite a bit of negative material around here. I simply can’t believe, nor can I stomach what is happening in this country. It’s easy to forget people that are my personal heroes. Jonas Salk is one of those people.

When I was a kid, I met people that had polio. It rendered their arms or legs completely non-functional. Some people were in an “iron lung”; it was a truly frightening disease.

Lucky for me, and everyone else in this world, Jonas Salk was alive, and found a vaccine.

Our healthcare system used to be “not for profit”, people could afford healthcare, and thanks to religious-based hospitals, nobody was turned away, and nobody went bankrupt trying to stay alive. Then the third-party payer system was invented, and government got involved in healthcare. Greed took over, and everybody and anybody tried to get in on the action.

Health insurance companies, instead of assisting in healthcare, have siphoned tens of billions out in profits every year while denying life-saving care. Pharmaceutical companies make billions, as do hospital chains with their massive administrative staffs. 600,000 people declare bankruptcy every year because of healthcare bills, all of which had health insurance. And now we have Obamacare, written by bureaucrats and health insurance companies that will siphon off billions more to inept government agencies and HMO’s.

Greed has absolutely ruined healthcare. Yet, one of the greatest medical pioneers, Jonas Salk, gave away his discovery virtually “free of charge”. There’s many good videos on Jonas Salk, like the one below. He wasn’t interested in profit or patenting his vaccine, it was a gift from his brilliant mind to all of humanity.

Some day, we’ll look back and see there were people that made a difference in this world. People like Ron Paul, and people like Jonas Salk, that had everyone’s best interests at heart, and not how much money they could make or how the could chisel the common man. There might still be some hope left when men like this are one-day revered again.

About Jonas Salk

When Dr. Jonas Salk envisioned the idea of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it was with the idea of creating a vibrant, intellectual community, dedicated to pursuing the kinds of scientific achievements that had made him an international figure only five years before.
Jonas Salk

Salk came to La Jolla following a career in clinical medicine and virology research. After obtaining his M.D. degree at the New York University School of Medicine in 1939, he was a staff physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

He then joined his mentor, Dr. Thomas Francis, as a research fellow at the University of Michigan. There, he worked to develop an influenza vaccine at the behest of the U.S. Army. In 1947, he was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

It was in Pittsburgh that Salk began to put together the techniques that would lead to his polio vaccine. He was already struck by the principle of vaccination: that if the body is artificially exposed to a harmless form of a disease virus, the body will produce antibodies that resist or kill the dangerous form of the virus if later exposed. In contrast to the Pasteurian dogma of the times, Salk believed that protective immunity could be induced without infection by a living virus such as those used in the vaccines against smallpox and rabies. In developing the influenza vaccine, he had observed that protection could be established using noninfectious, inactivated (killed) viruses.

Salk’s research caught the attention of Basil O’Connor, president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation). The organization decided to fund Salk’s efforts to develop a killed virus vaccine against the most frightening scourge of the time: paralytic poliomyelitis.

Using formaldehyde, Salk killed the poliovirus, but kept it intact enough to trigger the necessary immune response. His work was enabled by a key achievement made by Harvard researcher John Enders. Enders and his team had figured out how to grow poliovirus in test tubes. This step was necessary to obtain the quantities of pure virus needed to develop and manufacture a vaccine.

The resulting injectable vaccine was tested first in monkeys and then in patients at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now The Watson Institute), who already had polio.

Next, vaccine was given to volunteers who had not had polio, including Salk, his laboratory staff, his wife and their children. The volunteers developed anti-polio antibodies and none had bad reactions to the vaccine. Finally, in 1954, national testing began on one million children, ages six to nine, who became known as the Polio Pioneers: half received the vaccine, and half received a placebo. One-third of the children, who lived in areas where vaccine was not available, were observed to evaluate the background level of polio in this age group. On April 12, 1955, the results were announced: the vaccine was safe and effective. In the two years before vaccine was widely available, the average number of polio cases in the U.S. was more than 45,000. By 1962, that number had dropped to 910. Salk never patented the vaccine, nor did he earn any money from his discovery, preferring to see it distributed as widely as possible.

Given the fear and anxiety that polio caused during the first half of the century, the vaccine’s success in 1955 made Salk an international hero, and he spent the late 1950s refining the vaccine and establishing the scientific principles behind it. By 1960, however, Salk was ready to move on. Salk’s dream was to create an independent research center where a community of scholars interested in different aspects of biology – the study of life – could come together to follow their curiosity.

For more than a year, Salk toured the country in search of the right location for his research center. For San Diego mayor Charles Dail, a polio survivor, bringing the Salk Institute to San Diego was a personal quest. Dail showed Salk 27 acres on a mesa in La Jolla, just west of the proposed site for the new University of California campus then planned for San Diego. In June 1960, in a special referendum, the citizens of San Diego voted overwhelmingly to give the land for Salk’s dream. With initial financial support from the National Foundation/March of Dimes, Salk and Kahn were able to proceed. To bring his concept of free-flowing labs and quiet studies to life, Salk recruited architect Louis Kahn. The resulting collaboration is a series of elegant concrete structures that overlook the Pacific Ocean.

Under Salk’s direction, the Institute began research activities in 1963 and gradually expanded its faculty and the areas of their research interests. Salk’s personal research activities included multiple sclerosis and autoimmune diseases, cancer immunology, improved manufacture and standardization of killed poliovirus vaccine, and the development of an AIDS vaccine. He published several philosophical books and advocated cooperative rather than confrontational approaches to addressing human needs.

Completed in 1967, the original Institute buildings were declared an historic landmark in 1991. During Salk’s tenure as Founding Director, a major building addition consistent with his and Louis Kahn’s original architectural vision was designed and constructed. The Institute now has 61 faculty members and a scientific of staff of more than 850, with labs that house research on everything from cancer, diabetes and birth defects to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, AIDS and plant biology.

The Salk Institute truly reflects the broad, humanistic interests of its namesake.

A great, comprehensive article about the biblical disaster known as Obamacare.

The tsunami of Obamacare is still several years away, when millions of people that used to have health insurance no longer have any, and start dying or going bankrupt.

It’s impossible to predict the results of this disaster, but one thing’s for sure: The people left in this country that still work for a living are screwed.

Obamacare: The Final Nail In The Coffin For The Middle Class
By Michael Snyder, on November 17th, 2013

If there were any shreds of hope left that the stunning decline of the middle class could be turned around, Obamacare has absolutely destroyed them. Over the past decade or so, the middle class in the United States has been absolutely eviscerated. The number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, median household income in the U.S. has fallen for five years in a row, and the poverty numbers in this country are spiraling out of control.

And now here comes Obamacare. As you will see below, Obamacare is causing millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance policies, it is causing health insurance premiums to explode to absolutely ridiculous levels, and it is systematically killing jobs even though the employer mandate has been delayed for a while. All of this is creating a tremendous amount of stress for millions of middle class families that are already stretched extremely thin financially.

According to CNN, a survey that was conducted earlier this year found that 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most of those families simply cannot afford to pay much higher health insurance premiums for new policies that also come with much larger deductibles and significantly increased out-of-pocket costs. Millions of those families will ultimately end up choosing to do without health insurance altogether, and that will create a whole host of new problems. This is a disaster that is so enormous that it is really hard to put into words. If the U.S. health care system was a separate country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire globe all by itself. And now Obamacare is going to bring the entire U.S. health care system to its knees.

Obamacare: Since October 1st, The Number Of Americans With Health Insurance Has Fallen By Nearly 4 Million

Last week, Barack Obama decided to allow Americans to keep their current health insurance plans for one more year.

Isn’t that generous of him? Especially considering the fact that he promised us over and over that if we liked our current health insurance policies that we would be able to keep them permanently.

The funny thing is that Obama is not actually changing the law. So if your health insurance company allows you to stay on your current health insurance plan that does not meet the requirements of Obamacare, it is technically breaking the law.

And if you continue to stay on that current health insurance plan that does not meet the requirements of Obamacare, you are technically breaking the law.

It is just that Obama has promised not to enforce what the law says for one year.

For a president to just blatantly disregard the rule of law is a very dangerous precedent. Do we really want the president to have the power to decide what laws are going to be enforced and what laws are not going to be enforced?

That sounds dangerously close to a dictatorship to me.

And in any event, there are many Americans that are not going to be able to keep their current policies no matter what Obama says. For example, just two hours after Obama announced his plan last week, the state of Washington announced that they would not be allowing insurance companies to extend their old health insurance plans if they don’t comply with Obamacare under any circumstances…

State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler has rejected President Obama’s proposal to allow insurance companies to extend health insurance policies for people who have received notices that their policies will be cancelled at the end of the year.

Within two hours of President Obama’s news conference announcing the proposed administrative fix for Americans upset by their policy cancellations, Kreidler issued a statement rejecting the proposal.

“I understand that many people are upset by the notices they have recently received from their health plans and they may not need the new benefits [in the Affordable Care Act] today,” he said. “But I have serious concerns about how President Obama’s proposal would be implemented and more significantly, its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market.”

“I do not believe his proposal is a good deal for the state of Washington,” Kreidler’s statement continued. “We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies.”

How do you think the people of the state of Washington will respond to that?

Things are getting crazy out there, and the number of people that are losing their health insurance policies is absolutely stunning.

According to the Wall Street Journal, so far 106,185 Americans have enrolled in Obamacare since October 1st. Most of those that have successfully enrolled have done so through the state insurance exchanges. So far, only 26,794 Americans have signed up for health insurance using the federally run exchanges on HealthCare.gov.

Meanwhile, during that same time frame, 4.02 million Americans have had their health insurance policies cancelled.

So that means that the number of Americans with health insurance has actually decreased by 3,918,205 since October 1st.

Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to result in more Americans being covered?

And according to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, Obama not only knew that this would happen, he actually wrote the regulation that caused this to happen…

“I’m still learning about it. It’s 20,000 pages of regulations. The Bill was 2,000 pages and I didn’t realize this until this week, the whole idea of you losing or getting your insurance cancelled wasn’t in the original Obamacare. It was a regulation WRITTEN BY PRESIDENT OBAMA, three months later. So we had a vote, this is before I got up there. The Republicans had a vote to try to cancel that regulation so you COULDN’T BE CANCELLED, to grandfather everybody in. You know what the vote was? Straight party line. EVERY DEMOCRAT VOTED TO KEEP THE RULE THAT CANCELS YOUR INSURANCE.”

So now millions of Americans, including women battling cancer, are losing health insurance plans that they were depending upon.

Thanks Obama?

Obamacare: Skyrocketing Health Insurance Premiums

How much more are you willing to pay for health insurance than you are paying right now?

10 percent?

20 percent?

30 percent?

Well, according to one study health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.

And of course some groups are going to see increases that are much larger than that. For example, it is being projected that health insurance premiums for healthy 30-year-old men will rise by an average of 260 percent.

Ouch.

And there are some families out there that have already been hit with health insurance premium increases that are absolutely jaw-dropping. In a previous article, I included the example of one family down in Texas that has been hit with a 539% rate increase…

Obamacare is named the “Affordable Care Act,” after all, and the President promised the rates would be “as low as a phone bill.” But I just received a confirmed letter from a friend in Texas showing a 539% rate increase on an existing policy that’s been in good standing for years.

As the letter reveals (see below), the cost for this couple’s policy under Humana is increasing from $212.10 per month to $1,356.60 per month. This is for a couple in good health whose combined income is less than $70K — a middle-class family, in other words.

Obamacare: Enormous Deductibles And Huge Out-Of-Pocket Expenses For All

It isn’t just health insurance premiums that are going up either. Deductibles are going up too. In fact, just check out what one survey of Americans living in seven different states recently discovered…

Expenses for some policies can reach $6,350 for a single person and $12,700 per family, the most allowed by the health-care law, according to a survey by HealthPocket Inc. of seven states, including California and Ohio. That’s 26 percent higher than the average deductible in the seven states, and a scenario likely repeated across the country, said Kev Coleman, head of research and data at Sunnyvale, California-based HealthPocket.

That same article has a great quote from an elderly New Jersey resident. 82-year-old Larry Saphire thinks that if you have to pay a $5,000 deductible up front, “you might as well not have any insurance at all”…

“If you have to pay $5,000 upfront” when illness hits, “you might as well not have any insurance at all,” said Larry Saphire, 82, of West Orange, New Jersey, who shopped for coverage for his wife and two children, ages 16 and 21. “That’s not insurance.”

On California’s state-run exchange site, the standard low-premium “bronze” plan carries a $5,000 deductible per person, a $60 co-pay to see a doctor and a 30 percent fee, known as coinsurance, on hospital care. In Rhode Island, Blue Cross Blue Shield’s bronze plan has a $5,800 deductible while Missouri’s U.S.-run exchange offers plans by Anthem Blue Cross with the maximum-allowable $6,350 in out-of-pocket costs.

Obamacare: The Quality Of Care Is Going To Go Into The Toilet

A lot of Americans that are signing up for Obamacare are going to be in for a huge shock. Many of the best hospitals and many of the best doctors are not covered by their plans…

Meanwhile, sometime between March and June, the other shoe drops: People who bought exchange policies realize that the restricted networks insurers created to keep the premium costs low cut out the best hospitals and doctors. A newly insured child with cancer cannot get into a top pediatric hospital because her insurance has zero coverage for out-of-network emergency care. Tearful Mom goes on the evening news and says that she thought when they went on Obamacare, that meant they were safe, and why can’t I take my baby to Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, Mr. President?

Can you imagine being a parent in that situation?

In response, some hospitals are already filing suit over this. For instance, check out what is happening over in Seattle…

Seattle Children’s Hospital filed suit against Washington State’s Office of the Insurance Commissioner this week, after Obamacare implementation caused the hospital to be cut from four of the six insurance plans offered by the new Washington Health Benefit Exchange.

And even if you are on Medicare that does not mean that the quality of your care is going to stay the same either. As Reuters just reported, UnitedHealth is dumping “thousands of doctors” from their Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly because of Obamacare…

UnitedHealth Group dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks, leaving many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to continue seeing their doctors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The insurer said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly could not be fully offset by the company’s other healthcare business. The company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare Advantage services.

In the United States, we already pay much more for health care than everyone else in the world, and we typically have to wait longer to see a doctor than most of the rest of the industrialized world does.

Now Obamacare is going to make all of this even worse, and the quality of the care that we receive is going to go downhill fast.

Obamacare: The Jobs Killer

A while back, Obama unilaterally made the decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate until 2015.

That was probably a good political decision, because it would have been a huge political issue in the 2014 elections.

But the truth is that we won’t have to wait until 2015 for Obamacare to start killing jobs. In fact, according to CNBC it is already happening…

Approximately one-third of business decision-makers at companies with between 40 and 500 employees, say the health-care law has already increased their costs due to hikes in both the cost of insurance and compliance, according to a recent report from political-research firm Public Opinion Strategies. As a result, many business leaders say they are already making personnel decisions based on the Affordable Care Act.

Among franchised businesses, 27 percent report their company has replaced full-time workers with part-time workers and 31 percent have reduced worker hours. Among non-franchised businesses, 12 percent are replacing full-time workers with part-time workers or reducing hours. This is happening now, with more than a year before the mandate goes into effect; and undoubtedly, these numbers will rise as we approach next July’s “look back” period for tabulating workers’ hours.

It is kind of startling that we are already seeing employers make such big changes even though the employer mandate does not come into effect until 2015. You can find a very long list of some of the employers that have already either eliminated jobs or cut hours because of Obamacare right here.

Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once we get closer to the deadline things are going to get much, much worse.

At a time when the middle class desperately needs jobs, Obamacare is going to slaughter them.

And even if you are able to keep your current job, that does not mean that your health plan will remain the same. In fact, Forbes is projecting that a staggering 51 percent of all employment-based health insurance plans will be canceled and replaced with new ones.

Overall, Forbes is projecting that an astounding 93 million Americans will eventually lose their current health insurance policies due to Obamacare.

Obamacare: Providing Huge Incentives For Many Americans To Work Less And Make Less Money

Did you know that Obamacare is going to cause millions of Americans to want to keep their incomes under certain levels?

If you make too much money under Obamacare, you will miss out on some absolutely massive health care subsidies. The following is an excerpt from one of my previous articles…

—–

The figures that you are about to see were calculated using the Kaiser Family Foundation subsidy calculator. These numbers apply to a husband and a wife that are both 62 years old.

A non-smoking, married couple living in San Francisco, California earning $63,000 a year will have to pay $20,318 a year for a silver plan under Obamacare and $12,647 a year for a bronze plan.

At $63,000, that couple would be making too much money to be eligible for a subsidy, so that couple will have to pay the total cost of whatever plan they choose by themselves.

But if that couple only made $62,000 a year, things would dramatically change.

The plans would still cost the same, but the couple would now be eligible for an Obamacare subsidy of $14,428.

So a silver plan would end up costing them only $5,890, and they would ultimately pay nothing for a bronze plan.

In other words, by reducing their income by $1,000, that couple would save $14,428 if they got a silver plan or they would save $12,647 if they got a bronze plan.

Isn’t that bizarre?

—–

In the end, millions upon millions of middle class families will decide to go without health insurance entirely for one reason or another.

This will work great until they get into an accident or become seriously ill.

As I have discussed previously, approximately 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are related to medical bills. And most of those bankruptcies actually happen to people that are supposedly “covered” by health insurance.

Obamacare is going to make all of this so much worse. Millions of middle class families will end up with no health insurance at all, and because so many of them are living paycheck to paycheck a single health emergency will be enough to send them hurtling down the path to financial oblivion.

If you get into an accident, a visit to the emergency room and a single night in the hospital can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars in many areas of the country.

If you get a serious illness such as cancer, the medical bills can be absolutely astronomical. For instance, there are many cancer patients that rack up medical bills well in excess of a million dollars by the time that they die.

Something desperately needs to be done about our horrible health care system. Unfortunately, Obamacare is going to make just about everything that is bad about our current system much, much worse.

And the American people are becoming increasingly disgusted and frustrated with Obamacare. According to Real Clear Politics, an average of recent opinion polls shows that the American people are opposed to Obamacare by an average margin of 14.2 percentage points.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/obamacare-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-for-the-middle-class

Bernanke has lost $544 billion on gold. Ouch.

Gold Befuddles Bernanke as Central Banks’ Losses at $545 Billion
By Nicholas Larkin & Debarati Roy – Oct 7, 2013

Ben S. Bernanke, the world’s most-powerful central banker, says he doesn’t understand gold prices. If his peers had paid attention, they might have stopped expanding reserves that lost $545 billion in value since bullion peaked in 2011.

Bernanke, who holds economics degrees from Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led the Federal Reserve through the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression, told the Senate Banking Committee in July that “nobody really understands gold prices and I don’t pretend to really understand them either.”

Central banks, which own 18 percent of all the gold ever mined, will add as much as 350 tons valued at about $15 billion this year, the London-based World Gold Council estimates. They purchased 535 tons in 2012, the most since 1964. Russia is the biggest buyer, expanding reserves by 20 percent since prices reached a record $1,921.15 an ounce in September 2011. Gold slumped 31 percent since then.

As policy makers were buying, investors were losing faith in the metal as a store of value. The value of exchange-traded products dropped by $60.4 billion, or 43 percent, this year, saddling hedge fund manager John Paulson with losses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Billionaire investor George Soros sold his holdings in the biggest gold-backed ETP this year and mining companies wrote down the values of their assets by at least $26 billion.

Worst Drop

Gold, which entered a bear market in April, slid 21 percent to $1,316.28 in London this year on Oct. 4, set for the biggest drop since 1981. It rose sixfold as it rallied for 12 successive years through 2012, beating a 17 percent gain in the MSCI All-Country World Index of equities as the Standard & Poor’s GSCI gauge of commodities more than doubled. It’s this year’s third-worst performing raw material, after corn and silver. Gold today rose to $1,321.69 an ounce.

Policy makers, who are responsible for shielding their economies from inflation, often mistime gold investment decisions, buying high and selling low. They were reducing holdings when bullion reached a 20-year low in 1999 and as prices as much as quadrupled in the next nine years. Central bankers became net buyers just before the peak in 2011.

“Central bankers have typically bought when you probably should be selling and selling when you probably should be buying,” said Michael Strauss, who helps oversee about $25 billion of assets as chief investment strategist and chief economist at Commonfund Group in Wilton, Connecticut. “It’s going to be a difficult market and sometimes the price of gold is driven by emotions rather than fundamental factors. Central banks have been bad traders of gold.”

Policy Makers

Holdings were little changed from the start of 2008 through early 2009. Then, policy makers increased gold reserves as prices doubled and they have purchased a net 884 tons since the 2011 peak, International Monetary Fund data show. Russia was the biggest buyer, adding about 171 tons. Kazakhstan bought 67.2 tons and South Korea purchased 65 tons. Turkey’s reserves swelled about 371 tons in the past two years as it accepted bullion in reserve requirements from commercial banks.

In addition to buying when prices rose, central banks sold into slumping markets, disposing of about 5,899 tons in the two decades from 1988, equal to about two years of current mine supply.

The U.K. auctioned about 395 tons from July 1999, a month before prices reached a two-decade low, through March 2002. Gold averaged about $277 as the country was selling. The Bank of England’s hoard of ingots and coins, including a bar smelted in New York in 1916, now totals 310.3 tons, or 13 percent of the nation’s total reserves.

Gold Standard

Warren Buffett, the fourth-richest person in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the world’s most successful investor, has said the metal has no utility because it moves to vaults once mined. While countries from the U.S. to the U.K. adopted a gold standard by the 19th century to limit inflation, no central bank or government institution links currencies directly to the metal anymore. The Fed, created a century ago, cut the dollar’s ties to gold four decades ago.

Bernanke, when asked to explain gold’s volatility and the long-term impact of reducing economic stimulus, told the Senate Banking Committee July 18 that investors see a reduced need for “disaster insurance.” In a Congressional hearing two years ago, he described the commodity as an asset rather than money and said central banks own bullion as a “long-term tradition.”

Following that tradition has proved a poor investment decision. Kazakhstan almost doubled reserves the past two years and South Korea expanded them sevenfold since mid-2011.

“Bernanke was suggesting in his own way that too much importance is given to gold, it’s too hyped,” said Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business at New York University. “Gold is not a currency.”

Inflation Hedge

Bullion rose 70 percent from December 2008 to June 2011 as the Fed debased the dollar by pumping more than $2 trillion into the financial system, spurring demand for a hedge against inflation. That protection hasn’t been needed, because U.S. consumer prices have risen at an average annual pace of 1.7 percent in the past five years, compared with a four-decade average of 4.3 percent, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show.

After taking inflation into account, gold is worth almost half of what it was in 1980. It reached a then-record $850 that year after U.S. political and financial turmoil in the late 1970s caused a surge in consumer prices. The metal is valued at $464 in 1980 dollars, according to a calculator on the website of the Fed Bank of Minneapolis.

Price Forecasts

The most accurate analysts say the bear market will deepen. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA correctly forecast this year’s rout. New York-based Goldman says prices will drop to $1,110 in 12 months and Societe Generale, in Paris, sees an average of $1,125 in 2014. Prices will average $1,300 in the fourth quarter, the lowest in three years, according to the median of 12 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Central banks bought metal as the Fed’s balance sheet swelled fourfold since 2008 and policy makers around the world lowered interest rates to record low levels. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus needed bailouts since the European debt crisis erupted four years ago, sparking concern that nations would be forced out of the euro.

“There was a widely-circulated belief that the euro as a currency will cease existing,” said Michael Aronstein, the president of Marketfield Asset Management LLC in New York, whose MainStay Marketfield Fund beat 97 percent of its peers in the past five years. “A lot of foreign central banks thought they cannot keep the euro and did not want to increase dollars. It was desperation and fear that drove the surge in demand.”

Purchasing Power

While gold is trading below the 1980 high on an inflation-adjusted basis, it has still been better than the dollar in preserving its purchasing power. A dollar bought about three quarters of a gallon of milk in 1970, a year before the peg to gold ended, and an ounce of gold 28 gallons. By the end of 2011, a dollar got you about a quarter of a gallon and an ounce of bullion 420 gallons.

Holding gold is a reasonable, prudent strategy and central bankers probably build reserves with a one- to two-decade view rather than one to two years, Nathan Sheets, the former head of the Fed’s international-finance division and now the global head of international economics at Citigroup Inc., said in an interview in August. The U.S., Germany and Italy, which together own 44 percent of all central-bank holdings, changed gold reserves by less than 3 percent since the start of 1999.

Fort Knox

U.S. holdings of 8,133.5 tons, valued at $344.2 billion and accounting for 72 percent of total reserves, are the world’s largest. Most is stored at the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox in Kentucky and has been held at a book value of $42.22 an ounce since 1973, the U.S. Mint’s and Fed’s websites show. The hoard contracted by about 450 tons, or 5 percent, since then.

Former Texas Representative Ron Paul, the Republican who pushed for an independent count of U.S. gold holdings to prove they exist, also urged that a commission consider “a metallic basis for U.S. currency.” Utah recognizes precious metals as currency and lawmakers in at least six other states have or are considering bills to accept bullion coins as legal tender.

“The gold standard era, at least from an academic view and I think from people that were contemporaries in the 19th century, were that it didn’t work very well,” St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said Aug. 23 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It seems like it would be very problematic to tie the dollar to gold in an environment where gold is fluctuating like crazy.”
Fixed Amounts

Returning to a gold standard, a monetary system in which currencies are converted into fixed amounts of metal, wouldn’t be feasible because there’s not enough available and it would prevent governments loosening monetary policy, Bernanke said at George Washington University in March 2012.

Central banks’ gold holdings are valued at $1.35 trillion now and totaled $1.9 trillion in September 2011 at prices then. Nations will buy more than another 500 tons by 2018, Morgan Stanley says. Their appetite contrasts with investors who cut the value of holdings in ETPs by 43 percent this year to $81.4 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The most recent central-bank buying began less than a year before Soros called bullion the “ultimate asset bubble” in January 2010. The 83-year-old sold his entire stake in the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), the biggest gold-backed ETP, in the second quarter. Paulson cut his company’s stake by 53 percent in the period.

Emerging Markets

Venezuela holds 67 percent of its reserves in gold, the most among emerging-market countries, compared with less than 9 percent for Russia. While Russia’s central bank will continue buying, the pace may vary, former First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said in January. Bullion’s fluctuations failed to change the bank’s view on the role of gold in reserves, former Bank Rossii Chairman Sergey Ignatiev said in June.

“There’s been a perception that they are a contrary indicator when they buy and sell, but they’re not traders,” said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist for Newark, New Jersey-based Prudential Financial Inc., which oversees more than $1 trillion of assets. “Some central bankers have come to see gold as an alternative currency, certainly as a defense against potential inflationary pressures from the historical deployment of quantitative easing and low rates by global central banks.”

The agribusiness lobby is one of the strongest in Washington, draining tens of billions from taxpayers in free handouts to farmers, millionaire land owners, and insurance companies.

An ex relative was getting $70,000 a year from the government for a scant 2000 acres, on top of his farming income of $200,000 a year. Farmers are making more money than ever farming, and getting more money than ever from taxpayers.

Taxpayers Turn U.S. Farmers Into Fat Cats With Subsidies
By David J. Lynch & Alan Bjerga – Sep 8, 2013

A Depression-era program intended to save the nation’s farmers from ruin has grown into a 21st-century crutch enabling affluent growers and financial institutions to thrive at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Federal crop insurance encourages farmers to gamble on risky plantings in a program that has been marred by fraud and that illustrates why government spending is so difficult to control.

And the cost is increasing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture last year spent about $14 billion insuring farmers against the loss of crop or income, almost seven times more than in fiscal 2000, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The arrangement is a good deal for everyone but taxpayers. The government pays 18 approved insurance companies to run the program, pays farmers to buy coverage and pays the bills if losses exceed predetermined limits.

With a showdown over the nation’s finances — and a possible government shutdown — looming this fall, the growing insurance tab is a bipartisan target. President Barack Obama sought this year to cut almost $12 billion from the program over the next decade while his ideological opposite, Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, has called subsidized insurance “crony capitalism.”

Lobbyists Win

Yet the president of the United States and Republicans’ chief budget expert are no match for the farm and insurance lobbies, which spent at least $52 million influencing lawmakers in the 2012 election cycle. Rather than thin the most expensive strand in the nation’s farm safety net, Congress is poised to funnel billions of dollars more to individuals who already are more prosperous than the typical American.

“We have been subsidizing some of the farmers who least need it in a way that is really costing taxpayers a lot of money,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat of New Hampshire. “We’re never going to solve our budget challenges if that’s what we’re doing.”

Crop insurers and the USDA say that the subsidized insurance helps stabilize food prices for consumers while protecting farmers from weather-related losses. The program insured $117 billion worth of crops last year, including almost all the corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat grown in the U.S.
Capping Subsidies

Unlike direct farm aid payments, which are capped at $40,000 per farm, there is no limit on crop insurance subsidies. The names of those receiving payouts from the program are kept secret. There’s little chance the program will be restructured, since a permanent insurance mechanism spares politicians from approving ad-hoc farm bailouts that CRS says have cost taxpayers more than $50 billion since 2000.

The heavily-discounted insurance incentivizes farmers to cultivate marginal acres that may or may not be fertile. And the program’s been vulnerable to fraud, notably in North Carolina where a network of insurance agents, claims adjusters and farmers bilked the government of close to $100 million over more than a decade.

“The crop insurance program is terrible budget policy,” says William Frenzel, a 10-term Republican representative from Minnesota who served on the House Budget Committee and now analyzes fiscal issues at the Brookings Institution. “It’s the kind of congressional back-scratching that got us into our debt and deficit situation.”
Risk Factor

This is the first in a series of articles examining the U.S. crop insurance program, which advocates say is essential to the nation’s food supply and critics assail as wasteful corporate welfare. Other installments will examine how private insurance companies benefit from public assistance, the record North Carolina fraud and the program’s impact on the environment.

Crop insurance, intended to safeguard farmers from natural disasters, has mutated into an income support mechanism that almost eliminates risk from agriculture, say critics such as Vincent Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University.

When last year’s drought drove corn prices to record highs, farmers with “harvest price option” policies were paid those inflated prices for what they didn’t grow — contributing to a record bill for taxpayers and record income for farmers. “There is no social justification for these subsidies,” says Smith. “This is a program that’s fundamentally designed to give money to farmers.”
Dustbowl Legacy

Federal crop insurance began in the shadow of the 1930s Dust Bowl, which scorched the soil and left farmers impoverished. Until 1980, when the government began paying about one-third of farmers’ premiums, few farmers participated.

In 2000, Congress made the subsidies more generous, so that farmers now pay only about 38 percent of their insurance bills or more than $4 billion in 2012. By last year, almost 1.2 million policies covering 282 million acres of farmland were in force.

Each year, farmers choose from a menu of insurance options — and by law, insurers are obligated to cover all who apply. More than seven in 10 policies guarantee income rather than yield.

The Washington-based Environmental Working Group, which supports more federal aid for conservation, says subsidies give farmers an incentive to buy “Cadillac” policies that over-insure their holdings and drive up costs. Some policies protect as much as 85 percent of a farm’s average yield.
Record Income

Taxpayers are helping farmers pay their bills even as farm income this year is expected to top $120 billion, its highest inflation-adjusted mark since 1973, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Farm income has doubled over the past four years thanks to rising land values and surging exports.

In 2011, the median income of commercial farm households — those deriving more than half their income from farming — was $84,649, almost 70 percent higher than that of the typical American household.

Even as manufacturers and retailers struggle to rebound from the recession that ended four years ago, farm equity ended 2012 at $2.5 trillion, up 37 percent since the start of the recession in December 2007 — compared with a less than 1 percent gain in net worth for all U.S. households over the same period.

Citing “the record-breaking prosperity of American farmers,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, said in March that “taxpayers should not finance payments for a business sector that is more than capable of thriving on its own.”
Policy Shift

The planned expansion of crop insurance reflects a decisive move in the nation’s farm policy away from direct payments to farmers.

The Congressional Budget Office says crop insurance will cost taxpayers about $90 billion over the next decade. If droughts like last year’s become more frequent, that could prove a conservative estimate: A February USDA report warned that even if greenhouse gases tied to climate change stabilize, “land surface temperatures will continue to rise for decades,” permanently altering planting zones.

Advocates say that with direct payments ending, crop insurance is all that stands between farmers and the unpredictable forces of nature. In the event of ruinous drought or disease, the program automatically disburses aid, often within 30 days, much faster than ad hoc bailouts, which can take more than a year.

Without government-subsidized insurance, financially-hobbled farmers might take land in and out of production, causing food prices to gyrate, according to Tom Zacharias, president of the National Crop Insurance Services, an industry group, who says the insurance costs about two cents per meal.
Farmers’ Tool

In an interview, Brandon Willis, administrator of the USDA’s Risk Management Agency, cited a University of Nebraska study that said crop insurance payments last year supported 20,900 jobs in four farm states. “More and more, crop insurance is the tool farmers rely on,” he said.

With new farm legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, largely over Republican demands for deeper cuts in food stamp spending, the cost of crop insurance is drawing fire from both ends of the political spectrum.

The Environmental Working Group says the insurance encourages farmers to make riskier plantings, secure in the knowledge they will be paid even if the crops fail. The free-market Club for Growth, meanwhile, derides the program as a government handout for millionaire farmers.

Even some beneficiaries are uneasy. “I like to think of myself as an independent who’s willing to take risk,” says farmer Jim Handsaker, 65, of Story City, Iowa. “With insurance, it takes the risk out of it.”

The USDA’s Risk Management Agency determines the policies’ costs and terms, while leaving marketing and claims payment to private companies. That means there’s no real price competition among the 18 approved insurers. The government doled out $1.4 billion last year to cover the administrative costs incurred by the companies, including a unit of Wells Fargo & Co (WFC), the nation’s fourth largest bank, Ace Ltd. (ACE) of Switzerland, which reported a $2.7 billion profit last year, and privately-held Great American Insurance of Ohio.

Handsaker, a genial fan of the broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, farms about 3,400 acres of corn and soybeans with his brothers and sons. He says he paid about $70,000 to $80,000 in crop insurance premiums last year. The taxpayers paid even more — since an average of almost two-thirds of premium costs are paid by the government.

No Competition

“I have a lot of problems with the federal crop program,” Handsaker said as he sat in the kitchen of his one-story home, a Cadillac sedan parked outside. “It doesn’t matter who you purchase it from, it’s the same.”

Subsidized insurance also gives farmers an incentive to plant on land where crops may or may not flourish, he said, adding that he knew individuals in South Dakota who are “farming the program” with the intent of making an insurance claim rather than harvesting a crop.

The program’s formula for determining insurance premiums also “has created brittle farming operations that lack resilience and a spiral of ever-increasing taxpayer-subsidized” losses, according to an August report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group.

Democratic Representative Ron Kind of Wisconsin expects that trend to worsen.

“You’re going to see a lot of unproductive land brought into production because the taxpayer will cover the losses from all these riskless decisions,” said Kind, whose proposal to limit program subsidies fell 10 votes short of passage in June. “My concern is that this is eliminating all risk.”
Big Subsidies

In 2011, the latest year for which data is available, 26 farmers each got annual subsidies of more than $1 million; more than 10,000 received $100,000 or more. One grower of tomatoes and peppers in Florida enjoyed a subsidy of $1.9 million, according to the Environmental Working Group. Congress has barred the USDA from revealing the identities of payout recipients.

In April, Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget recommended slicing $11.7 billion from the program over the next decade by raising out-of-pocket costs for farmers and cutting administrative subsidies for insurers. Ryan, too, has called for trimming program spending.

Instead, the House-approved farm measure would expand crop insurance to guarantee as much as 90 percent of a farm’s income and extend coverage to peanut farms while the Senate bill covers farmers against even the modest losses they currently pay out of pocket.

Shaheen, the Democratic senator from New Hampshire, failed to persuade her colleagues to cap premium subsidies at $50,000, which she says could save $3.4 billion over 10 years.
Bullet-Proof

A glimpse at lobbying filings explains why the program is bullet-proof in Congress.

The 43 groups that wrote a joint letter to members of the Senate in March defending crop insurance collectively spent more than $52 million on lobbying during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Sunlight Foundation.

One signatory, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, reported spending $1.6 million on lobbying last year and identified five registered lobbyists working on the program.

Individual companies including Ace, with $2.2 million, and Deere & Co. (DE), with $1.4 million, cited crop insurance in their lobbying reports.

Funding Lawmakers

Agribusiness employees also have been generous in funding political campaigns, contributing $91 million to candidates in the 2012 elections, up from $70 million four years earlier, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

In Nevada, Iowa, Mark Kenney, 33, raises corn, soybeans and oats on about 3,000 acres as yellow Union Pacific locomotives rumble west through the nearby fields. He defends crop insurance as the best response to the vicissitudes of farming.

“Would you rather pay a dime now or a dollar later?” Kenney asks. “Of all the industries to be involved in, the security of our food, fuel and fiber is of the greatest importance.”

Kenney, whose $150,000 premium represents roughly 10 percent of his total costs, says he doesn’t have much faith in alternative tools for managing risk, including financial contracts such as futures and options.

Premiums last year accounted for no more than 10 percent of corn growers’ average production costs of $349 per acre, said Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. Farmers spent far more on seed, fertilizer, fuel and electricity.

Dropping Coverage?

If premium subsidies were reduced, many farmers would consider canceling their policies.

“If we had to pay what they say they subsidize, most of us wouldn’t have crop insurance because we couldn’t afford it,” says Mike Brown, 63, who along with his son Tanner farms 7,300 acres in Colby, Kansas. “Crop insurance is costing you $15 to $20 an acre. If they took all the subsidies out, it would be $50 to $60 an acre.”

Crop insurance funding will be determined when lawmakers reconcile competing House and Senate versions of the farm law. Congress faces a deadline of Sept. 30 to make a deal or extend a current stopgap funding measure.

Off the table: whether federally backed crop insurance should exist at all.

“We shouldn’t look at crop insurance as the least evil policy,” says Josh Sewell, senior policy analyst with Washington-based research group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s not like our choice is to send checks one way or send checks another way. We could just not send checks.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-09/farmers-boost-revenue-sowing-subsidies-for-crop-insurance.html

Thank God for the internet. The truth is getting out, despite the bought and paid for MSM bullshit lies.

The truth about Syria is ugly. Saudi Arabia gave the Al Qaeda rebels poisonous gas which they used on civilians. Meanwhile, the Al Qaeda rebels we are arming and giving training to are beheading Christians. These are the people war criminal Obama is backing.

Well, the military doesn’t want anything to do with it. Maybe we’ll see Obama removed from power, and anyone else in Washington that goes along with this criminal fraud and treason. Don’t believe the lies you hear on T.V. We need to stay the hell out of Syria.

The U.S. Military Does Not Want To Fight For Al-Qaeda Christian Killers In Syria
By Michael Snyder, on September 1st, 2013

Why is the Obama administration so determined to have the U.S. military help al-Qaeda win the civil war in Syria? Why are we being told that the U.S. has “no choice” but to help rabid jihadist terrorists that are slaughtering entire Christian villages, brutally raping Christian women and joyfully beheading Christian prisoners? If you are a Christian, you should not want anything to do with these genocidal lunatics. J

abhat al-Nusra is a radical Sunni terror organization affiliated with al-Qaeda that is leading the fight against the Assad regime. If they win, life will be absolute hell for the approximately two million Christians in Syria and other religious minorities. According to Wikipedia, Jabhat al-Nusra intends “to create a Pan-Islamic state under sharia law and aims to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate.” As you will see below, many members of the U.S. military understand this, and they absolutely do not want to fight on the side of al-Qaeda.

Not that we should be supporting Assad either. Assad is horrible. He should be rotting in prison somewhere. But just because a country has a bad leader does not mean that we have justification to attack them.

The U.S. military should only be put into action when there is a compelling national interest at stake. And getting involved in a bloody civil war between Assad and al-Qaeda does not qualify.

For the moment, we have a little bit of time to educate the American people about this because the Obama administration has decided to try to get the approval of Congress before striking Syria. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

Unfortunately, some members of the U.S. Congress are actually trying to push Obama into even stronger action. In fact, some Senators are now saying that they will not support military intervention in Syria unless it is a part of an “overall strategy” to remove Assad from power.

If the U.S. does try to remove Assad, it will unleash hell in the Middle East. Syria has already threatened to attack Israel if the U.S. tries to remove Assad and so has Hezbollah.

As I mentioned the other day, right now there are 70,000 Hezbollah rockets aimed at Israel.

When Hezbollah and Syria start sending rockets into the heart of Tel Aviv, Israel will respond with even greater force.

And if a single one of those rockets that land in Tel Aviv have an unconventional warhead, Israel will respond by absolutely flattening Damascus.

When I say that, what I mean is that a city of 1.7 million people will be gone permanently.

Do our politicians have any idea of the hell that they are about to unleash?

Do our leaders actually want Israel to be attacked?

Do our leaders actually want major cities in the Middle East to be completely wiped out?

Do our leaders actually want millions of precious people to die?

As I mentioned above, those serving in the U.S. military understand these things better than most people, and right now many of them are expressing a very strong desire to stay out of this conflict.

According to a tweet from U.S. Representative Justin Amash, he has heard from numerous members of the U.S. military that are urging him to vote against an attack on Syria…

“I’ve been hearing a lot from members of our Armed Forces. The message I consistently hear: Please vote no on military action against #Syria.”

Journalist Paul Szoldra says that he has also heard from a lot of service members that want nothing to do with this conflict…

I’ve reached out to my own sources who are either veterans or currently on active duty in the military, and asked them to share their thoughts on whether we should, or should not, intervene in the two-year-old Syrian civil war. Most have responded with a resounding no.

The following is what a Marine Corps infantry veteran with three deployments to Iraq named Jack Mandaville wrote to Szoldra…

The worst part about this Syria debacle, among many things, is how closely it resembles Iraq. Those Vietnam veterans who warned us about disastrous results in Iraq were doing so based off their experience in a war that, contrary to popular belief, was vastly different from our war and was separated by at least two decades. Many veterans of Iraq are still in their twenties and have a firsthand understanding of Arab political issues. The complicated things we faced with Syria’s next door neighbors is freshly ingrained in our memories. How quickly the American people and our political leaders forget.

Our involvement in Syria is so dangerous on so many levels, and the 21st century American vet is more keen to this than anybody. It boggles my mind that we are being ignored. My anger over this issue has actually made me seriously comment on our foreign policy for the first time since 2006 when I was honorably discharged after three stints in Iraq and subsequently watched it continue for nearly another six years. I’m sickened that we’re putting ourselves in a position for another prolonged war where the American people will quickly forget about the people fighting it.

And even an establishment mouthpiece like the Washington Post is admitting that top U.S. military officials are expressing “serious reservations” about a war with Syria…

The Obama administration’s plan to launch a military strike against Syria is being received with serious reservations by many in the U.S. military, which is coping with the scars of two lengthy wars and a rapidly contracting budget, according to current and former officers.

Having assumed for months that the United States was unlikely to intervene militarily in Syria, the Defense Department has been thrust onto a war footing that has made many in the armed services uneasy, according to interviews with more than a dozen military officers ranging from captains to a four-star general.

One officer even told the Post that he “can’t believe” that Obama is even considering a conflict with Syria…

“I can’t believe the president is even considering it,” said [one] officer, who like most officers interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because military personnel are reluctant to criticize policymakers while military campaigns are being planned.

What Obama wants to do is utter insanity.

Why would we want to enter a war on the side of Christian killers?

In areas of Syria that are controlled by the rebels, Christians are being treated brutally. The following is from eyewitness testimony from a Christian missionary who recently visited the region…

“The Christian residents were offered four choices: 1. renounce the ‘idolatry’ of Christianity and convert to Islam; 2. pay a heavy tribute to the Muslims for the privilege of keeping their heads and their Christian faith (this tribute is known as jizya); 3. be killed; 4. flee for their lives, leaving all their belongings behind.”

How would you like to be faced with those choices?

In other instances, Christians are not even given any choices. Instead, they are being summarily executed for their faith.

For example, the following is one incident that made news back in December…

Syrian rebels beheaded a Christian man and fed his body to dogs, according to a nun who says the West is ignoring atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.

The nun said taxi driver Andrei Arbashe, 38, was kidnapped after his brother was heard complaining that fighters against the ruling regime behaved like bandits.

She said his headless corpse was found by the side of the road, surrounded by hungry dogs. He had recently married and was soon to be a father.

How would you feel if a member of your family was beheaded and fed to the dogs?

And the rebels have continued to slaughter Christians even though they know the world is watching. The following is from an NBC News report on August 18th…

Syrian rebels killed at least 11 people, including civilians, in an attack on a checkpoint west of the city of Homs on Saturday that official state media described as a massacre.

Most of those killed were Christians, activists and residents said.

Sometimes these psychotic Syrian rebels actually round up Christian women and children and gun them down. The following is from a report about what the rebels did to the Christian village of al-Duvair when they took control…

Images obtained exclusively by Infowars show the aftermath of an alleged massacre of a Christian village in Syria during which men, women and children were slaughtered and churches desecrated by Obama-backed FSA rebels.

The photos, which were provided by a source inside the village of al-Duvair in Syria’s Western province of Homs, show ruined homes, ransacked churches as well as the burned remains of what looks like an infant.

According to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) on May 29, “The armed rebels affiliated to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) raided the Christian-populated al-Duvair village in Reef (outskirts of) Homs near the border with Lebanon….and massacred all its civilian residents, including women and children.”

But sometimes women are not killed by the rebels. If they are young and lovely, they are often systematically raped. What happened to one 15-year-old Christian girl from Qusair named Mariam is a total abomination…

The commander of the battalion “Jabhat al-Nusra” in Qusair took Mariam, married and raped her. Then he repudiated her. The next day the young woman was forced to marry another Islamic militant. He also raped her and then repudiated her. The same trend was repeated for 15 days, and Mariam was raped by 15 different men. This psychologically destabilized her and made her insane. Mariam, became mentally unstable and was eventually killed.

This is who Obama wants to help?

We are going to shed American blood to help those monsters take over Syria?

Are we insane?

Of course one of the most prominent examples of rebel brutality was even reported on by CNN…

The ghastly video shows how barbaric the Syrian civil war can be.

A man, said to be a well-known rebel fighter, carves into the body of a government soldier and cuts out his heart and liver.

“I swear to God we will eat your hearts out, you soldiers of Bashar. You dogs. God is greater!” the man says. “Heroes of Baba Amr … we will take out their hearts to eat them.”

He then puts the heart in his mouth and takes a bite.

After reading that, can anyone out there possibly justify helping the Syrian rebels?

But the Obama administration insists that we “must” attack Syria because Assad supposedly used chemical weapons against his own people.

Secretary of State John Kerry says that samples taken by UN inspectors have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, and therefore what we must do is clear.

But is it really?

According to Reuters, the UN has had evidence that Syrian rebels have been using sarin gas against Assad forces since May…

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

And as I discussed the other day, Syrian rebels have admitted to an Associated Press reporter that they were the ones that used sarin gas during the incident that the Obama administration is so concerned about.

The chemical weapons were supplied to the rebels by Saudi Arabia, but the Obama administration will never, ever admit this. If the U.S. called the Saudis out on this, it would potentially endanger the status of the petrodollar.

Instead, the U.S. government is going to end up doing exactly what the Saudis want, which is to attack Syria.

But people all around the world are seeing through this charade. For example, the following is a statement that Pat Buchanan made during a recent interview with Newsmax…

“I would not understand or comprehend that Bashar al-Assad, no matter how bad a man he may be, would be so stupid as to order a chemical weapons attack on civilians in his own country when the immediate consequence of which might be that he would be at war with the United States. So this reeks of a false flag operation.”

Sadly, it doesn’t really seem to matter what any of us think. According to James Rosen of Fox News, the Obama administration has apparently made the decision to go ahead with an attack on Syria no matter what Congress decides…

A senior State Department official tells Fox News the president’s decision to take military action in Syria still stands, and will indeed be carried out, regardless of whether Congress votes next week to approve the use of such force.

The official said that every major player on the National Security Council – including the commander-in-chief – was in accord last night on the need for military action, and that the president’s decision to seek a congressional debate and vote was a surprise to most if not all of them. However, the aide insisted the request for Congress to vote did not supplant the president’s earlier decision to use force in Syria, only delayed its implementation.

“That’s going to happen, anyway,” the source told me, adding that that was why the president, in his rose Garden remarks, was careful to establish that he believes he has the authority to launch such strikes even without congressional authorization.

Very soon, the U.S. military will be embroiled in a vicious civil war between a brutal dictator and absolutely psychotic Christian-killing jihadists.

Should American blood be spilled in such a conflict?

Of course not.

Is it worth potentially starting World War III just to teach Assad a “lesson”?

Of course not.

Hopefully this war will not happen, because if it does I fear that it is going to be very, very bloody.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-u-s-military-does-not-want-to-fight-for-al-qaeda-christian-killers-in-syria

Ah, the unintended consequences of unions and democratic wars on poverty and drugs. Chicago can afford to pay driver’s ed teachers $160,000 a year, but can’t afford enough cops. As tax revenues dry up in democrat controlled shitholes (as the productive flee for their lives and being taxed to death), the eventual death-spiral results in gangland crime and murder.

Liberals and the MSM divert attention away from gangs and murder rates, and provide a side-show to support their agenda of taking away our right to protect ourselves and our families from what is really going on in this country. The collapse is already happening, and will get worse. Just ask the people that live in some of these places, if you know any. The collapse of local and city governments will usher in wave after wave of new crime and victims. It won’t end well. Unintended consequences are a bitch.

Large Cities All Over America Are Degenerating Into Gang-Infested War Zones
By Michael, on January 6th, 2013

Large U.S. cities that the rest of the world used to look at in envy are now being transformed into gang-infested hellholes with skyrocketing crime rates. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Camden, East St. Louis, New Orleans and Oakland were once bustling with economic activity, but as industry has fled those communities poverty has exploded and so has criminal activity. Meanwhile, financial problems have caused all of those cities to significantly reduce their police forces. Sadly, this same pattern is being repeated in hundreds of communities all over the nation.

The mainstream media loves to focus on mass shooters such as Adam Lanza, but the reality is that gang violence is a far greater problem in the United States than mass shooters ever will be. There are approximately 1.4 million gang members living in America today according to the FBI. That number has shot up by a whopping 40 percent just since 2009. There are several factors fueling this trend.

Unemployment among our young people is at an epidemic level, about one out of every three U.S. children lives in a home without a father, and there are millions of young men who have come into this country illegally and have no way to legally support themselves once they arrive in our cities. Gangs provide a support system, a feeling of “community”, and a sense of purpose for many young people. Unfortunately, most of these gangs use violence and crime to achieve their goals, and they are taking over communities all over America. If your community is not a gang-infested war zone yet, you should consider yourself to be very fortunate. If nothing is done about this, the violence and the crime that is fueled by these gangs will continue to spread, and eventually nearly every single community in the United States will be affected by it.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the large cities all over America that are degenerating into gang-infested war zones…

East St. Louis

East St. Louis has a national reputation for being a city that you want to avoid. The following is from a recent Bloomberg article about the growing crime in that community…

Dodging open manholes where thieves had swiped cast-iron covers, Stephen Wigginton drives the crumbling streets of his hometown, East St. Louis, Illinois, pointing out new landmarks in America’s most violent city.

There’s the shopping mall where a police officer was shot in the face, a youth center that saw a triple homicide in September, and scattered about the city of 27,000 are brightly lit gas stations that serve as magnets for carjackers, hit-and-run robbers and killers.

“It’s the Wild West,” said Wigginton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Illinois.

Today, the murder rate in East St. Louis is 17 times higher than the national average, but financial problems have forced huge cuts to the police budget. The number of police patrolling the streets of East St. Louis was reduced by 33 percent between 2008 and 2011. Police in the city admit that they are outgunned and outmanned, but there is not much that can be done about it.

Camden

Camden, New Jersey is another city that has experienced huge cuts to the police budget. Their police force shrank by about a third between 2008 and 2011. Today, Camden is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities in America and it has a murder rate that is about ten times higher than New York City.

The gangs have a very strong hold over Camden, and kids kill kids on a regular basis in the city. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article about the horrible violence that is plaguing Camden…

At the vigil last week, residents prayed that Camden would simply find peace and that the masked gunman who killed Jewel Manire and Khalil Gibson would be caught.

As it grew darker, Michael Benjamin stood toward the back of the crowd, his son huddled even closer now, and shook his head.

“I’ve known at least 45 kids who’ve been killed in my lifetime,” he said, the boy holding his finger. “I stopped counting in 2004, though.”

Chicago

In recent years there have been massive cuts to the police budget in Chicago due to financial difficulties. At the same time, gang activity has dramatically increased in the city.

As a result, Chicago has become known for murders and violence. The murder rate in Chicago was about 17 percent higher in 2012 than it was in 2011, and Chicago is now considered to be “the deadliest global city”.

If you can believe it, the number of murders in Chicago during 2012 was roughly equivalent to the number of murders in the entire country of Japan during 2012.

And the primary reason for all of this violence in Chicago is the gangs. As I have written about previously, there are only about 200 police officers assigned to Chicago’s Gang Enforcement Unit. It is their job to handle the estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city.

Approximately 80 percent of all murders and shootings in the city of Chicago are gang-related, and as the gangs continue to grow in size the violence in the city is going to get even worse. If Barack Obama wants to do something about violence in America, perhaps he should start with his home city.

Detroit

I write a lot about Detroit, but that is because they are a perfect example of where the rest of America is headed if something dramatic is not done.

Detroit used to be one of the greatest manufacturing cities the world has ever seen, but over the past several decades the economic infrastructure of Detroit has been gutted and now there is very little industry left in the city.

Over half the children in the city live in poverty and a sense of hopelessness hangs in the air. At the same time, financial problems have forced the city to lay off huge numbers of cops. Back in 2005, there were about 4,000 police officers in Detroit. Today there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.

Meanwhile, crime in Detroit just continues to get even worse. There were 377 homicides in Detroit in 2011. In 2012, that number rose to 411.

Things have gotten so bad that even even the Detroit police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk”.

New Orleans

New Orleans was a crime-infested city even before Hurricane Katrina hit it in 2005, but life has never quite been the same since that time.

The gangs have a very strong presence in the city, and there simply are not enough financial resources to keep crime in check.

If New Orleans was considered to be a separate nation, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate on the entire planet. There are some areas of New Orleans that you simply do not ever want to venture into at night.

Meanwhile, the police force has been such a mess in recent years that the federal government finally decided to step in. It is hoped that the “reforms” will mean less crime in New Orleans in future years, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Oakland

Today, there are 626 police officers in Oakland, California. That is about a 25 percent decline from the 837 police officers that were patrolling the streets of Oakland back in December 2008.

Predictably, criminals have stepped in and have taken advantage of the situation. At one point in 2012, burglaries in the city of Oakland were up 43 percent over the previous year.

If you can believe it, more than 11,000 homes, cars and businesses were burglarized in Oakland during 2012. That breaks down to approximately 33 burglaries a day.

Stockton

Police cuts in the city of Stockton, California have been so severe that the Stockton Police Officers’ Association ran a billboard advertisement with the following message at one point: “Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California: Stop laying off cops!”

At the same time, crime in Stockton continues to get even worse. there have been more than 250 gold chain robberies in Stockton since the month of April, and there is no indication that crime in the city is going to slow down any time soon.

So what is the solution?

Should we have everyone turn in their guns?

No, that would just make the problem even worse. The gangs aren’t going to turn in their guns. The only people who would turn in their guns would be law-abiding citizens. That would just make them even more vulnerable to the violence and crime that are starting to spread like wildfire all over the nation.

We don’t have a gun problem in America. What we have is a gang problem.

In 2006, the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center reported that Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities. By 2010, that number had risen to 1,286.

Many of these gang members run up long criminal records, but our overcrowded prison systems just keep releasing them back into the streets. The results of this philosophy have been predictable. The following is from a recent article by Daniel Greenfield…

A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.

This is not a time to take away the ability of law-abiding American families to defend themselves. Instead, people need to put even more emphasis on self-defense as police forces all over the country are cut back.

Just recently, the city attorney of San Bernardino, California told citizens living there to “lock their doors and load their guns” because the police force in that city is being cut back again.

And that is good advice. As the economy continues to decline and as millions more Americans fall into poverty, the violence is going to get even worse.

What would you do if a desperate criminal broke into your house and started searching through your home room by room? That is the horrifying situation that one young mother down in Georgia was recently faced with…

She quickly retreated to an attic crawlspace with the children, but not before she also picked up her handgun.

The burglar, whom police identified as Paul Ali Slater, did a room-by-room search of the home, and when he reached the attic, she was ready.

Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman told WSBTV: ‘The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he’s staring at her, her two children and a .38 revolver.’

She reportedly fired all six rounds, missing only once. The other shots hit Slater about the face and neck.

Sheriff Chapman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: ‘The guy’s face down, crying. The woman told him to stay down or she’d shoot again.’

What would have happened if she had not had any way to defend herself and her children?

That is something that we all need to think about.

For the last couple of decades, we have been fortunate to live in an era of falling crime rates. Unfortunately, that era is now over. Large cities all over the country are degenerating into gang-infested war zones, and what we are seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg.

After the economy collapses, millions of people are going to become incredibly desperate and things are going to get much, much worse than this.