debt

Scattershooting 230128

January 28, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

Happy new year! Several topics have cropped up of late, not demanding a full-form entry, so I’ll resurrect an old category for a 2023 kickoff encore. As usual, topics are highlighted, so you can skip what doesn’t interest you.

Scattershooting while wondering why so many otherwise intelligent ignoranti fall for obvious, textbook conformist cult tactics employed by purveyors of the secular “social justice” ideology…

AMAZING DALLAS FIREWORKS SHOW on NEW YEAR’S NIGHT: Several times, when not setting them off myself, I’d go up Reunion Tower to watch Trinity River fireworks shows and assorted pyros doing their thing around town on July 4 & New Year’s. Now they’re launched from the tower, with lighted drones in formation as accompaniment. Spectacular! I ought to go see and shoot this sometime.

‘TWITTER FILES” REPERCUSSIONS and SO-CALLED PANDEMIC “MISINFORMATION”: Over the past couple months, several independent journalists, with the full cooperation of current Twitter owner Elon Musk, have exposed a hardline left-wing censorship agenda of Twitter users and linked content, by the corporation, in collusion with high-level government bureaucracy (mainly but not entirely FBI). This includes labeling pandemic content, by licensed medical doctors and scientists, as “misinformation”. This also includes information from peer-reviewed studies that was flagged or relegated to sight unseen. Yesterday’s ”conspiracy theories” sometimes do become today’s news. They affirm comments I made to some folks many months ago about non-expert bots and poorly educated basement dwellers—censoring posts from real-life scientists and physicians in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, virology, and general medical practice. Some low-wage tech contractor in the Philippines, nor high-level company executives without medical degrees, have no business censoring degreed, licensed physicians on medical topics! Yet these were the tactics social media employed to limit what you were being told about a crisis situation to Big Brother’s official Party line—even when the line clearly was flawed then or turned very wrong later. Thank God for watchdogs, gadflies and leakers — even if it’s the new owner dishing it out on prior management at great cost to himself.

MATURITY, SELF-RESTRAINT AND DISCIPLINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Speaking of Twitter, a libertarian I follow there, Curtis Scoon, posted these wise words: “I don’t want to be the person on social media who has something controversial to say about every headline just for attention. It’s definitely close to being an ambulance chasing personal injury attorney.” (My words now) …or virtue signaling to either spectral extreme. I have huge respect for such self-discipline & maturity. I aim the same. Not every topic needs instant opinion from every person. I’ve expressed my extended thoughts on this before, in this space, with, “Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement.” I’ll comment on the issues of my choosing, at the time and place of my choice (and nobody else’s). The context was “hot takes” on the Tyre Nichols incident in Memphis. There’s more to it, but next is what I’ll say for now, in this medium of my choice:

DISTILLING the TYRE NICHOLS KILLING to the SIMPLE PLAIN TRUTH: Often, videos like the Tyre Nichols police-brutality footage from Memphis (which I won’t post here) miss crucial “before” context. In this specific case, I don’t think such context matters. I’m having a hard time imagining what “context” would justify treating any handcuffed man with such relentless, 5-on-1 savagery — basically 5 strong dudes tossing the guy back and forth between each other like a medicine ball and taking turns slugging him full force. No excuse for that, whatsoever. Even if he had violently resisted before being restrained (and that info wasn’t available from the video I saw)…once handcuffed, that’s that. His wrists are locked together with steel, behind his back, and he can’t use his arms. That was basically a gang-beating of a helpless man, in this case the gang being cops. These now ex-cops have been charged with murder and official abuse. The justice system is working as it should here. Unfortunately, this incident is being spun every which way and twisted like taffy by people with bigger social agendas. What it is, plain and simple, is homicide, and any and all who commit homicide (including cops on duty, regardless of how they look) must be held responsible.

COMMON GOTCHA AGAINST ECONOMIC LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T a GOTCHA AFTER ALL: I had to laugh recently at a stupid meme some airheaded male celebrity sent out, thinking it was a “gotcha”. The meme implied libertarians are hypocrites because Ayn Rand accepted her Social Security checks. Clearly this wasn’t the product of a critical thinker, or much of a thinker at all. You see, those checks were her money anyway, extorted from her for years before in taxes. So she had no reason (and neither do you) to feel at all guilty about getting some of it back. Too bad she, and you, couldn’t have just kept it in the first place, instead of being forced to process it through a massive, inefficient, distant, detached bureaucracy that skims so much off. And I’m still waiting in futility for anyone, anywhere, to show me where personal entitlement spending of any sort is an enumerated Federal power in the literal, black-and-white words of our Constitution.

DO YOU HAVE STUDENT LOANS? PAY THEM. This entry is brought to you by tough love from a fellow (former) debt holder. And not just any ex-student, but one from poverty: first-generation college graduate here, raised inner-city poor in Dallas with no air conditioning, who remembers with razor-sharp clarity the sounds of wailing sirens and the feel of roaches crawling up sweaty legs many summer nights. There’s not a college student anywhere in this land who has a thing new to say to me about being “economically disadvantaged”. I arrived at university with assets valued in two digits, not counting a beater car that was worth maybe $200, no parental aid whatsoever, and scholarships for which I had busted my tail, but were still woefully insufficient. I left grad school with even less: $16 to my name, and five figures in student loans. Inflation-adjusted, they match magnitudes from many sob stories I hear today. I paid off every last one in under 10 years by working rotating shifts, in a real career, for which my major of choice was chosen specifically to prepare me, using something called foresight and something else called sacrifice. Hint: my major wasn’t “gender studies” or similar useless bullshit. Unless one was targeted by illegally predatory lending, which I do oppose, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anyone who demands that government (in other words, all of us but not him or her self) pay off debts he/she voluntarily chose to accrue. There’s a word for that, and it’s “freeloading”. My message, therefore, is clear: Yes, it is a loan. Pay it back. I’ve been there. I did, and I’m nothing special. So can you. Make better choices.

THE FED, BRETTON WOODS, GOLD STANDARD, and the RISE of CHINA: Finally, here’s a provocative, yet deeply historically informed, long-form essay by the aforementioned Curtis Scoon on how the Federal Reserve came to be, and its relationship with both American decline and the rise of Red Commie China as an economic and military power. I don’t necessarily buy into every detail he posits, but there’s a lot of basic truth here. This is well worth 15 minutes of time to read carefully and consider critically.

Trillion-Dollar Coin? Insanity!

October 5, 2021 by tornado Leave a Comment

This is insanity. It’s truly come to this?…serious talk about the feasibility of minting and depositing a coin stamped “ONE TRILLION DOLLARS” to avert a debt-ceiling default? Again, insanity. Perhaps the scheme would work, technically, but it should be prevented from being necessary to even consider!

The national-debt crisis grows ever deeper as the debt vs. GDP swells grotesquely (even before the pandemic!), and even more importantly, interest on the debt cancerously eats up an ever-larger share of the budget, invariably crowding out needful things by slow creep (hence, the growing, already massive, silent debt crisis), and yielding a vicious cycle in which the debt can make itself worse and worse without any assistance from us. Where does this lunacy end?

Read this little primer I posted in January to better relate to our debt. This is the fruits of decades of abject, shortsighted failure of the Republicrat duopoly to rein in their entirely undisciplined fiscal practices with our tax dollars, and instead pander to their ever-bloated lobbies and bases (mainly different entitlements favored by the Ds and Rs, and war spending by both parties).

Don’t dare blame just one party. Democrat presidents with Republican Congresses, Republican Presidents with Democrat Congresses, either with mixed Congresses, either with their own party effectively controlling both chambers (as now)…it hasn’t mattered. The national debt has grown, factually and demonstrably, for decades, under every permutation of those — every single one. Even with record- to near-record-low interest rates, so has the percentage of the budget devoted to debt interest.

What if interest rates double, or worse, approach levels of the early ’80s? That accelerates the vicious cycle much faster than any current projections, introducing upward nonlinear growth of our debt, even with small yearly deficits (which aren’t happening).

Plotted by PGPF from public-domain CBO data.

These Republicrats will drive us straight to economic ruin through their base-pandering shortsightedness and hapless ignorance of the greatest economic crisis our nation ever will face, staring us right in the face. And it’s not just the extremes of D and R either; the so-called “moderates” are ignoring it too. Only a very few outliers (e.g., Justin Amash, Ron then Rand Paul) ever bring serious attention to the debt, and they get swamped in a tsunami of everyone else’s drunken-like spree of profligacy.

Republicrats in Congress have shown they simply won’t behave themselves as they’re supposed to — adults managing a budget — refuse to control federal net spending to zero-deficit yearly levels, and certainly won’t bring about budget surpluses needed to draw down the debt. They’re not going to force themselves to balance the budget. Therefore, they need to be forced to do so externally, by The People.

The only way I see out of this is for an Article 5 Constitutional Convention of States to go around these spineless fiscal children in Congress and enact a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which would force Congress to balance the budget yearly. This at least would stop the debt-growth bleeding via ending yearly deficits. [While we’re at it, enact a Congressional term-limits amendment as well.]

Worried about wars or pandemics under a BBA?

From the PPGF:

Most amendment proposals go further than requiring a balanced budget or budget surpluses. Some of the most frequent additional elements are:
* A requirement that the President submit a balanced budget to the Congress;
* Provisions that allow some flexibility in times of war or economic recession provided that a supermajority (typically three-fifths) of the members of the Congress vote in favor of a waiver;
* A provision requiring a supermajority vote of both houses of Congress in order to raise the debt ceiling;
* A cap on total spending (as a percentage of gross domestic product or GDP) unless waived by a supermajority of both houses;
* A limit on the total level of revenues (as a percentage of GDP) unless waived by a supermajority of both houses; * A provision to prevent the courts from enforcing the amendment through tax increases;
* A provision assigning the Congress the responsibility to enforce the amendment through legislation.

Some of these (especially the last item) would water it down to something near uselessness. Others, such as a declared-war provision, might be beneficial in that it would, in effect, enforce what’s already in the Constitution: making sure all wars are formally declared, or they can’t count as BBA exceptions.

A balanced budget needs to be forced on Congress, because it will not come from Congress. Otherwise…disaster! Maybe not this year or next, but in the lifetimes of our children (and maybe us middle-aged people too).

“Poverty” in America, Part III: The Misleading “Solution” of More Taxation

November 15, 2011 by tornado Leave a Comment

In Part II, I posited that “luck is overrated” in escaping poverty. That doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent — to the contrary, we all experience lucky opportunity. What do we do with it? That’s the issue. One “opportunity” involves handouts from governments, as opposed to private charity (another opportunity). I’ve experienced both and do not deny that fact.

One oft-championed road out of “poverty” in America, advocated by the aforementioned Kos writer and others, is through tax increases to fund assorted social-welfare programs nominally directed toward aid for the poor. Advocates ignore this model’s greatest flaw: inefficiency.

For two decades, I’ve wondered how the enormous bureaucracy of government, with all its red tape and layers upon layers of salaries and overhead, is the solution to the problem of American “poverty”. The clear answer is that government is not the solution to poverty. The fact (not opinion) that government has tried to solve poverty for 200 years, and failed, proves me right here. Results are what matter. The results show little.

Who in their right mind, I’ve asked, thinks that big government can help the “poor” more swiftly, nimbly, and effectively, with more rapid return on the dollar, more situational familiarity and a lower rate of chronic dependency, than charitable aid at the local level? National, large-bureaucracy programs take a one-size-fits all approach, almost out of necessity, since they aren’t familiar with local problems and local solutions. Are we all one size? You tell me! More on that later…

As for the rich (or anyone else) who advocate more taxes, such as the Kos writer? Pay attention, for I am calling your bluff, right here, right now. Put your money where your mouth is. Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk. Stand up for your principles. Live by what you advocate. How? Take my longstanding “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is Tax Challenge”, which is this:

The government will take payments in any amount through pay.gov. Show how true you are to your ideals and pay, on your own, the extra amount you think you should.

Or, do you selfishly advocate that higher taxes apply only to others?

Which way is it?

If you advocate that your income bracket pays more, then…do it! Nobody is stopping you. It’s simple and easy to pay. Do you have the courage of conviction to take my challenge? If not, there goes your credibility in that argument too, because you refuse to back it up with your own behavior. “Do as I say, but not as I do.” Well, I once lived in Missouri, so…show me. Don’t be a hypocrite! Pay the extra amount you think should go to the government that you seem to believe is so streamlined and effective at eliminating poverty.

Yes, that means you, Elizabeth Warren, naturally gifted with verbal eloquence and expository skills, but misguided in your lack of non-bureaucratic solutions. That means you, Warren Buffett, who benefited from the system but won’t give back your own proposed rates in this way. That means you, George Soros, big rich guy who wants higher taxes. That means you, Michael Moore, big rich guy who wants more taxes. Pay them now! Why wait for government to force the issue? Take my challenge. Will you do what you say, or do your pseudo-populist proclamations melt away like burning flesh in the hellish heat of reality’s kitchen?

I’ve been challenging advocates of higher taxes for years this way, and nobody–I mean not one person–has had the guts to take my challenge. That sort of spinelessness and unwillingness to stand up for one’s ideals, to me, manifests the very selfishness and greed that advocates of higher taxes and more bureaucracy (like Warren B. and Mrs. Warren) belittle.

It’s not a matter of national-debt elimination–which raising taxes on “the rich” a thousand times over won’t accomplish anyway. [By the way, who are “the wealthy”? What is the unambiguous, consistent threshold for “rich”?] It’s simply a matter of principle. That’s all. Who will stand up for their principles on this? Anyone? I wait patiently, as crickets chirp outside the window and a lone clock ticks wistfully in a dark corner of the room. Tick, tock, tick, tock…snooze. Wake me up when somebody actually lives up to their professed ideal there.

Are there problems of greed and corruption in America? Absolutely! This applies to the ilk of Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff, but also and equally, to every single welfare parasite. Yes, there are rich folks who didn’t earn it. The unearned rich get far less respect from me as a result; for they share with shameless welfare moochers the common denominator of unjustified attitudes of entitlement.

No economic stratum has a monopoly on greed. It just manifests differently. A minority of the rich take bailouts and kickbacks, and fleece the public and corporate coffers through schemes of varying legality. A minority of the “poor” flip public aid into drugs, alcohol, flat-screen TVs, cell phones and/or Air Jordans via their own little schemes of varying legality. I’ve seen it at both ends and in between. Greed is human nature crossing all bounds of income and society. Don’t ever pigeonhole all rich as greedy and all poor as victims; that’s unadulterated BS. And I say that as someone offering intimate familiarity with roaches, rats, leaky ceilings, ceaseless collection-call harassment, and the sounds of gunshots and sirens in the night.

Despite the sound-bite mischaracterizations aimed at fiscal conservatives like me by the left, the truth is that I do not defend corporate or personal greed. I don’t defend predatory lending practices, medical overbilling, or an avalanche of fine print (though it is everyone’s responsibility to read and understand every word of a contract they sign). Who really does want predatory financial crime, except for a pathological 1% of 1%? To paint any anti-tax advocate with that label is irresponsible, misleading, over-simplistic, ignorant, disingenuous, diversionary and cowardly. Don’t try to apply the label to me because it won’t stick.

Greedy corporate thieves and rapacious big-bankers? Lock ’em up! The place for criminals is incarceration, and that includes white-collar thieves like Madoff, Lay and anyone else who breaks laws. If you don’t like what some financiers (in any field) have done that is technically legal, work and lobby to make their actions illegal through legislative processes, and hope the laws stand the test of constitutionality.

Of course faultless misfortune exists, and there is a (limited) place for welfare. Don’t you think I, of all people, know this? Go ahead, use heartbreaking, real-life examples of honest and terrible events to (mis)characterize the entirety of public-aid recipients as such. Only an delusional sadist will deny the existence of legitimate stories of need. I’ve seen many. I know and love someone (my elderly, senile, blind mom) for whom I cannot provide necessary direct care, and who is justifiably dependent on state and federal help. Who argues that situations like hers aren’t deserving targets of what should be the last-ditch options of public aid, in combination with private charity? But I’ve also known plenty who game and cheat the system out of more than they are entitled–including those who are both needy and greedy!

And don’t try to lay some sort of false guilt trip on us with “self-made” capital that we are somehow responsible for “helping” others solely via big-government spending of our tax money. No, no, a thousand times no. Far from it! We as responsible citizens (and especially those of us of faith) rightly are responsible for helping others however is the most efficient, beneficial and direct–and most often, that is NOT through big government.

For those on the so-called “Christian Left” (a term that, in reality, is a complete sentence) who claim that one must pay higher taxes to love thy neighbor, I demand to see the literal, black-and-white words of Jesus where he appended “by governmental gunpoint” to “Love they neighbor.” He did not. That’s because love, unlike taxation, cannot be authentic if it is coerced. You cannot, by definition, love when forced to do so. Love isn’t a bureaucratic exercise! Therefore, the “love” arguments revolving around higher taxes invalidate themselves ruthlessly. For these “Christians” I demand: Stop your idolatry of bureaucracy!

This is where the pompous, finger-wagging, schoolmarm style scolding by Elizabeth Warren about “social contracts”, and others of similar mindset, either speak from within the cage of a politically convenient delusion, or deliberately offer a disingenuous red herring for the sake of emotional appeal. Yes, the roads to our factories were built and are maintained with taxes. Yes, police protection is paid for that way. Irrelevant!

No conscientious fiscal conservative that I know advocates elimination of all financial aid to the poor, or of student loans. None of them (us) call for elimination of highway funds to transport goods and people, food inspectors, storm forecasters, national-disaster aid, or other economically essential, taxpayer-funded infrastructure and public-protection functions that cross state lines by necessity. The argument that any factory owner got where he is partly through such “help” is factually true but meaningless; as I don’t offer such things for utter elimination at any governmental level.

Instead, I offer the idea that a great deal of aid to the truly unfortunate is best done away from the tentacles of the governmental hydra. I understand the reality of it from the other side, from directly within the envelope of what we call “poverty” in the USA. As such, I’ve seen first-hand that the governmental method of throwing more money at the problem won’t solve it. I shall reiterate…

Government hasn’t solved American “poverty” in twenty decades of trying. What makes higher-tax advocates think that will change? It won’t, no matter how much money we feed to the red-tape-covered entitlement monster and mass-promoter of public-dependency addiction that is big government. We cannot tax our way out of “poverty”.. Ever. More of the same failed idea only means more failure.

Remember this: every dollar spent on taxes is a dollar not donated to charity or spent creating jobs on Main Street. That is factual, irrefutable arithmetic.

“Poverty” exists nationwide, but is not a national problem in the sense of what works well. Helping the downtrodden has limited governmental justification, but is far more a local problem with local solutions. In Part IV, I’ll cover examples of some, and suggest ways you and I can help the poor far more directly, fulfillingly and efficiently, both through charity and supporting job creation, than via the money you are forced through legal compulsion (not “love’) to fling at the bloated bureaucratic pig.

I’ll also suggest some ways the big pig can help. [Hint: get out of the damned way!]