HOPEYCHANGE MUST BE DECLARED AS INCOME

In the face of psychotically skyrocketing federal deficits and a Fed induced collapse of the dollar, Obama-rama-ding-dong has unveiled his latest scheme to squeeze yet more wealth from the economy: retroactive taxation of gratuities received by minimum wage food service employees for the last five years. Yep, you heard me right. The big O wants wants our change back.

What this means for an unlucky collection of cooks and waitresses is a last minute "corrected" W-2 with a roughly 30% larger taxable income than previously reported. Restaurant owners will be given the choice by IRS henchmen either to pay back taxes on estimated tips for up to five years previous, or to negotiate down the number of years of back taxes owed in return for "voluntarily" enrolling in the relatively new ATIP (Attributed Tip Income Program), which allows the IRS to estimate and automatically tax gratuities received by service employees. For most restaurant owners, this is an offer they can’t afford to refuse.

I imagine a scenario wherein a nefarious Obama, lit by a noxious green smoke, lurks in a darkened oval office and consults with a magic mirror about what to tax next.

"There seems to be a plethora of confusion surrounding the corporate income taxes of companies such as General Electric. Perhaps you take advantage of this by adding yet another tax to the burden of the public shareholders?" suggests the mirror.

"No, I need them to keep funding my elections," replies evil Obama, whilst stroking his goatee. "Besides, I play golf with the CEO."

After a thoughtful pause, the mirror offers another suggestion: "Well, then, how about the gratuities of all the poor sobs who voted for you? I’ve heard it’s common practice to not report waitressing tips to the IRS."

The green glow lights the growing grin of the evil one.

"Yes . . . YES . . . WE’LL TAKE THEIR TIPS! MWAAAH-HAAAAA-HAAAAAA"

HOPEYCHANGEY!

Medical Progress, R.I.P.

I just finished up assisting in a surgical excision of cancerous bone growth, in a child, no less, a child who will likely go on to live a full and wonderful life. The range of possibilities available to us for the treatment of cancer is a testament to the miracle of the free market. Seriously, you should see our radiation therapy facilities - fricking Star Wars. Last I checked, virtually none of our methods were developed by the British National Health Service. Pretty much entirely products of the American free market in medicine (R.I.P.).

I am proud to work at OHSU, one of the premier medical centers in the world. Amongst our many remarkable facilities is the "OHSU Knight Cancer Research Center". That's Knight, as in Phil Knight, of Nike. It's called that because in 2008 Mr. Knight donated $100 MILLION dollars to the OHSU Cancer Research Center to massively expand it's facilities. This monumental act of charity, coupled with the incredible folks I am honored to work with every day, will be nothing short of a miracle to countless more kids, for years to come. The world will literally be a better place because of them. Mr. Knight's philanthropy is in the tradition of other great capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie, and is a testament to the sorts of mature, community oriented individuals which a free society can produce. Michael Moore, by comparison, is a worthless piece of garbage, whose existence will have been to the benefit of no one but his financial investors, and it's high time he high-tailed it to Cuba, Venezuela, or Russia - but I digress...

Individuals like Phil Knight, combined with the innovations and motivations inherent to the free market, have born more fruits than all of the worlds "national health care systems" combined; that the credit seems to unerringly fail to fall where it is due is sickening.

The free market saves lives. If medical care had been turned over to the government 100 years ago, we'd still be using leeches and tinctures.

This Message Approved By Ke$ha, bitche$!

See, kids? Economics can be fun!

http://econstories.tv/home.html

Federal Stimulus Spending Is A Crock

Currently, America is in a period of economic depression stemming from a collapsed housing bubble resulting from an attempt by the Federal Reserve to boost economic growth in the wake of 9/11 (and the “.com bubble”) by drastically reducing its lending rate to flood the market with cheap investment finance. The resultant real estate boom and accompanying economic surge were based more on the oversupply of capital than the presence of any real demand necessary to sustain such growth, and as a result, the economy crashed.

In the aftermath of the crash, the government again stepped in to limit the negative market correction. This time the administration utilized a series of unprecedented “stimulus spending packages” wherein an attempt was made to jump start the economy with a massive infusion of government spending. Let’s just skip past the fact that now, on the cusp of 2010, we can see in hindsight that these spending measures have utterly failed, and that the U.S. economy is still struggling to get back up despite the rude whipping being administered by the administrations, past and present. A simple, albeit boring, economics lesson could have warned us that it would go this badly.

Our miserable politicians have now decided to repeat their own mistakes. Echoing the stupidity of George W. Bush’s idiotic defense of 2008’s massive spending debacle (“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system”), Temporary President Barack Obama recently presaged another round of wasteful “stimulus” spending in 2010, in a speech given at the Brookings Institute on December 8th:

“One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility. Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we have begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run, . . . At this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe . . .”

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, and for the rest of us, these statements do not reflect an accurate understanding of economics, and the president knows is. He very candidly said as much in a little publicized recent interview with socialist economist Robert Kuttner, during which he appealed to sympathetic economists to help spin his policies and make them sound somewhat credible:

“. . . we're going to need help from all of you who oftentimes are more credible than politicians in delivering that message. Because we want to leverage whatever public dollars are spent, and we are under no illusion that somehow the federal government can spend its way out of this recession.”

These obviously self-contradictory remarks should really come as no surprise. Self-contradiction is a near universal side effect of any attempt to twist reality into a more serviceable selfish falsehood. Self-contradiction is one of the most telling symptoms of a liar. Consistency, sweet consistency, can only reliably come from a solid foundation based on truth and logic, a foundation which is all too often missing in politicians, which is why the progress of human social evolution and the advancement of liberty and equality has always been to further protect the individual from the fickle selfish throes of government. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, leaps in this aspect of human development was the framing of the American Constitution. The founders believed in the natural inalienable rights of the individual and rooted this country in a firm foundation of individual liberty and limited government. Our Constitution plainly states this philosophy to be constant and unchanging. James Madison explained the eternal need for this philosophy in the 51st Federalist Paper:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Barack Obama does not believe in this philosophy. From his book, The Audacity of Hope:

“Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course . . .”

This convenient disregard for absolute, universal truths is what allows him to plunge ahead, foundationless, without respect for our fundamental principles of limited government, guided only by his own selfish and relative morality. This is why he contradicts himself.

More to the topic, however, the president is wrong to attempt economic stimulus through government expenditure. The trouble with this process is that in order to obtain its money, the government must first either take it directly from the citizenry in the form of taxes, or issue bonds to investors in order to borrow the amount it intends to spend. The first option has the effect of reducing the amount of liquid capitol within the economy, which depresses the GDP and leads to increased unemployment. The second option increases the national debt, which can only be paid off through increased tax receipts, spending cuts, or the arbitrary printing of “fiat” money. Increased tax receipts stem from either economic growth or an increase in tax rates. Unfortunately for us, a historical analysis of 20th century American economics reveals that increased government spending usually results in a net loss to the GDP. History does not bode well for this approach, yet it is one of the shoestrings to which the current administration is asking us to cling. So, since we are considering massive increases in government spending, increased taxation and fiat money are the most likely outcomes. Fiat money is the money arbitrarily printed and issued by the federal treasury which increases the quantity of money units within an economy without increasing the intrinsic worth of that economy. The net result is a decrease in the actual value of an individual unit of money, in this case the dollar, and a resultant increase in the cost of consumer goods, a market quality tracked by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. An increase in the CPI is also referred to as inflation, a process which decreases the productivity of a market by effectively shifting economic wealth from the owners of the money (private business and individuals) to the borrower of the money (Federal Reserve, during deficit spending).

This is not to say that absolutely no one benefits from government spending. The entire economy of Washington, D.C. is made up of its beneficiaries - politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and anyone else who cheered for the winning team last election and now awaits their tax-funded reward. They suckle, like pigs, at the tired teats of the taxpayers. I know. I’ve seen it. It’s gross.

So what does all of this mean for you and me, average U.S. citizens? Basically, any increase in government spending contributes to a decrease in the overall economic aspect of our quality of life. Federal stimulus spending is a total crock of shit. It’s that freaking simple.

Hail Obama, ruler of wage-slaves!

In a recent conversation with a rather well-read friend of mine, I heard him use a term which completely baffled my senses of logic and reason. Apparently a number of progressive thinkers have invented a term for an imagined evil supposedly inherent in our free-market society, and that term is “wage-slavery.” Supposedly, in a system such as we have in the U.S., greedy and all-powerful “wage-slavers” keep the working class down by forcing them to do menial work such as making shitty overpriced coffee, selling crappy overpriced clothes in the God-forsaken malls, and any of a number of the other jobs we all did before we grew up and realized that we needed to do something useful with ourselves. And supposedly these evil overlords are able to keep the peasants in their place by only paying them just enough to scrape by, but not enough to overcome their situation.
At this point I laughed so hard I almost shit myself. America today is not the America of the 19th century, so why are some people still spouting the same old rhetoric? The anarchists and pinkos of the era of unionization were fighting for humane working conditions and a fair day’s wages. The progressive liberals of today are fighting for other people’s money, despite having the benefit of history’s hindsight to look back to all of the times when socialist-communist experiments around the world plunged entire nations into black holes of ruin and starvation. History and current events show us quite clearly what happens to a people forced to redistribute assets and wealth in order to eliminate the lower class. The entire nation becomes the lower class, with the only exception being the ruling class. The society becomes a cruel mockery of itself.
As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. How old does a person have to be to realize that a good life requires a little bit of hard work? How long can these assholes sit around like big helpless babies, shitting their diapers and screaming for someone else to change them and give them a bah-bah?
But I digress. We were talking about the myth of wage-slavery. Let us forgo discussions of the disgusting ignorance this usage of the term “slave” reveals in the progressive thinker. One need only read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass to see the glaring contrast between the lives of the unmotivated bottom-feeders of today and those truly tortured and enslaved men and women of a past that has been thankfully laid to rest. The comparison would be laughable if it weren’t so disgustingly blind. Slavery is dead. It was the death of slavery and the passing of the days of sharecroppers and segregation that matured America into a truly free and equal state. Still, as with any other economic system, there remains greedy individuals hoping to attain wealth through the exploitation of the cheap labor of others. But how is this attained in a nation of truly free and innately equal individuals? In a free nation, the labor can only be cheap if it chooses to be. No slave was ever given that choice.
As the American dream becomes a reality for larger and larger segments of the population, and the natural development of individual liberty and freedom from oppression progresses, we realize the founder’s vision of a nation of free and equal individuals. Certain steps must be taken by the so-called “slave lords” to ensure that the pool of cheap labor never goes dry. Due to the nature of our free nation, any who would proclaim themselves “wage-slaves” have freely chosen to become so. Indeed, this is so well understood by the supposed exploitative ruling class that they have adapted to this new age by introducing enticements specifically designed to weaken the need to work for a better, more rewarding, life. Where once there were whips and chains, now there are financial enticements. Government subsidies are created as incentives for lower class citizens to remain at the bottom, allowing them to tread water for the benefit of the business owner and, in the style of true socialism, at the expense of the rest of the tax-paying citizenship. Earned income tax credits, welfare, kicker checks, and food stamps are all shining examples of this sinister new form of social engineering.
Wealth redistribution plans as put forth by liberal Democrats only serve to increase incentives for individuals at the bottom of the income ladder to remain in place, never bettering themselves or their situation, thus creating a class of easily exploited voluntary "wage-slaves".
This, I suppose, makes President Obama our new slave king.

These Boots Were Made For Kicking Fascist Ass

One of the only aspects of this ridiculous economic stimulus package that actually makes sense is about to be dropped by President Obama due to pressure from the European Union Trade Commission, a group of morally corrupt fascists who have apparently decided to drag us onto their sinking ship. The excellent "Buy American" clause would dictate that American iron and steel must be used in the construction projects that form part of the recovery plan, in order to further boost job growth and liquid revenue passed amongst the citizenship. The E.U., however, is trying to get it's grubby little hands on some of our taxpayer supplied stimulus money by pressuring the president to nix this clause. I just called Representative David Wu and Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkely to tell them to politely inform the European Union to go fuck itself, and now you can, too! Keep the "Buy American" clause in the stimulus plan!

contact your senator:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

contact your state representative:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

Help America out. Find out what she makes good, and buy it. I'm wearing Danner Boots, made right here in Portland. These shits have lasted me 6 years, two of those in a Navy industrial shipyard, and I can still stand in a puddle of water up to my shins without getting wet, hell fucking yeah! Bring it on, Fascism!

Editor's Note: In retrospect, it would appear that this particular rant was advocating protectionist trade policies, but this was not my intention. Protectionism decreases overall output, efficiancy, and ultimately leads to a decline in quality of life. This process was beautifully explained by the English economist David Ricardo with his Theory of Comparative Advantage. My goal was merely to point out that if the government is going to steal our money and blow it on stupid crap, it could at least have the decency to spend our money within our own economy, thus mitigating our losses on this crummy deal.