Tag Archives: Money/Economy/Taxes

Trade deficit, Greece, jobs bill, Fed

@ 0:00 – Half Trillion $ per year trade deficit. Our government continues to do all it can to prevent Americans from saving.

@ 0:45 – Bailing out Greece creates moral hazard for nations and creditors & punishes responsible states.

@ 3:45 – Jobs bill & payroll tax holiday is a gimmick. It creates incentive to fire someone and hire a replacement at a discount. All the bill does is let politicians take credit for hires that will probably happen anyway.

@ 8:00 – This alludes to the Fed’s reluctance to raise interest rates. The Fed has painted itself into a corner. It needs to raise interest rates to stop bank from leveraging and lending out the massive quantities of money which have been printed, which would precipitate the collapse of the collar. But our phony economy and the big wall street firms with rule Washington are surviving on the easy money of artificially low interest rates. Peter Schiff discusses the Fed’s latest gimmick — paying banks to not lend money. It won’t work.

@ 9:20 – The Fed’s claim that they haven’t lost money on TARP is another obfuscation. They’ve bought crap from irresponsible banks. They won’t take a loss until they try to sell the crap.

See also: Greece is a poor country full of rich people [tax evaders]

Seems Greece can’t collect from its own citizens, so it’s going to collect from other Europeans.

Women Become Majority Workers

This has been on my mind ever since I heard Aaron Russo suggest the elites were behind Women’s Suffrage because they wanted to change America from a country in which half the people worked and paid taxes to a country where everyone worked and paid taxes. As it typical they hi-jacked a legitimate movement for their own purposes.

I was interested to see this report from thedailybell.com. They quote some news then offer analysis along the same lines as Aaron Russo:

At a time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France. Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times. Just a generation ago, women were largely confined to repetitive, menial jobs. They were routinely subjected to casual sexism and were expected to abandon their careers when they married and had children. Today they are running some of the organisations that once treated them as second-class citizens. Millions of women have been given more control over their own lives. And millions of brains have been put to more productive use. Societies that try to resist this trend-most notably the Arab countries, but also Japan and some southern European countries-will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens. – Economist

Dominant Social Theme: Hurray for women …

Free-Market Analysis: The liberation of women is in our opinion another dominant social theme, one of the longest running of the power elite’s promotions. The real push for women to become part of the work force happened in the 20th century. Not surprisingly, this was the century that saw the imposition of full-fledged central banking around the world. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was still culturally a problem for women to work, but the power elite promotion was launched to make women “modern” and it is still ongoing.

If you want to implement global governance, you need to break down the family unit as much as possible. Nothing can stand in the way of the state. From the power elite’s standpoint, getting women into the workplace in the name of “equality” solved a lot of problems at once. It left children parentless during much of the day, so that the state itself could take over childcare. And without the firm guidance of the full family, many children, especially girls, became much more promiscuous at an early age which also contributed to a fracturing of private culture.

. . . . But the real reason, in our opinion, that woman’s liberation is a power-elite promotion, and a very long-running one, has to do with central banking. The erosion of fiat money earning meant inevitably that to keep up there would have to be more than one wage earner in the household. Woman’s liberation was promoted, in our opinion, as a way of making it culturally acceptable for women to work – so as to conceal the degradation of the currency.

Obamanomics

Obama unveils $3.83T budget with massive deficits
President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.

The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year’s then unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap. The deficit would remain above $1 trillion in 2011 although the president proposed to institute a three-year budget freeze on a variety of programs outside of the military and homeland security. (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

Obama vows to fight for jobs in retooled message
President Barack Obama tried to revive his battered agenda and rally despondent Democrats on Friday with a renewed emphasis on jobs. (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

This lies somewhere between idiocy and shameless pandering. The pandering is evidenced in the obscene something-for-everyone budget which attempts to buy votes by sprinkling money on every special interest you’ve ever heard of. The idiocy comes from running a deficit on one hand and from presuming to create jobs on the other. In fact, government does not have the power to create jobs, because government has nothing which it doesn’t take from its people. Government only has the power to redirect jobs. Efficient, private-sector jobs must be destroyed so that in-efficient, politically motivated, public-sector jobs might be created.

Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein Will Take A $100 Million Bonus This Year

Update: Goldman Sachs says this rumor is “speculative nonsense.”

The rumor at the World Economic Forum at Davos is that Lloyd Blankfein will get $100 million this year.

“This is Lloyd thumbing his nose at Obama,” a banker at one of Goldman’s rivals told The Times.

Goldman doesn’t report the exact pay of their top executives until the end of this month, but there is good reason to believe the $100 million number is accurate.

In 2007, Blankfein got a $67.9 million bonus. In 2009, Goldman’s profits topped 2007’s by $1.8 billion. (Read more from businessinsider.com)

If Goldman were a private company operating in the free market, this wouldn’t be an issue, but Goldman Sachs takes bailouts — overt and covert — with monies taken from the American people by force.

Many people now say the government should crack down on their compensation. I say maybe, but the line between government and business should not have been perverted in the first place. The best and only regulation that works is forcing irresponsible companies to face the consequences of their behavior.

S&P fires warning shot at Japan

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services today revised to negative from stable its outlook on the ‘AA’ long-term rating on Japan. . . . .

The outlook change reflects our view that the Japanese government’s diminishing economic policy flexibility may lead to a downgrade unless measures can be taken to stem fiscal and deflationary pressures.

At a forecasted 100% of GDP at fiscal year-end March 31, 2010, Japan’s net general government debt burden is among the highest for rated sovereigns.

. . . .

Japan enjoyed a highly productive, export-oriented economy for decades. Then an economic downturn in the mid-1990s, followed by the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, shattered the bubble. The government responded by using massive stimulus spending and financial-system bailouts to maintain economic growth. Rather than jolting the economy into health, this lead to accumulating public budget deficits that were ultimately covered by government bonds, which resulted in surging government debt.

Sounds a lot like what we’re doing here.

I received this in an email from a friend, then found another occurrence of the storyhere.

‘Harmonization’ of Taxes

This is an emerging issue is the EU, and I’m sure some visionaries have the idea to ‘harmonize’ taxes all over the globe.

Basically, the exploiters (governments) don’t like exploited people (anyone who engages in voluntary trade) moving away from their taxes. This ‘harmonization’ bullshit is nothing but pressure applied to low-tax governments. They’re pressuring them to steal more from their exploited masses, so the bigger crooks don’t look as bad.

THE Irish economy will be devastated under EU plans to introduce a common tax base across Europe in the next two years, a top Brussels lawyer warned yesterday.

Sources in Brussels have indicated that the new European Commission is treating as a matter of high priority the ‘harmonisation’ of taxes across the 27-member bloc.

There are real fears the move would drive foreign businesses out of Ireland, exacerbating the country’s already fragile economy. (Read more from thefreelibrary.com)

The Move Your Money Campaign

Geithner addressed the campaign against too-big-to-fail banks during a recent interview with Politico. While Geithner said he understood the anger against bailed out banks and said that it was fair for bank customers to expect more, he did not explain why he thought that it was a bad idea.

Move Your Money is a project that seeks financial reform from the ground up. Account holders with money at bailed-out banks are encouraged to withdraw their money and deposit it into smaller, better-managed community banks and credit unions.

. . . .

Geithner’s comments about Move Your Money begin at 3:35.

This guy’s analysis is so wrong, and so insidious — blaming all the problems on liberty.

To learn more about the Move Your Money campaign, visit MoveYourMoney.info.

Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers

For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different. (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

Expect the lost decade to turn into the lost two decades as the government remains intent on taking money from responsible people and giving it to irresponsible people.