Krugman proves he's a partisan hack

Or he could be delusional.

Read his take on Social Security........

About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.

Let's put his in a simple context.

You give me 12.4% of your paycheck every pay period (6.2% of your pay and your employer match).

I take that money and put it into a special account; call it a trust fund.

Now you don't have any right to that money until you retire but I have every ability to borrow that money and replace it with IOU's.

Of course, I'll use the money for something productive like strippers and Jack Daniels but it's all good because I'm going to pay you the IOU's back.......... with interest!

If social security were to keep accounting records as the SEC requires private companies to do, there would be 35 TRILLION dollars worth of IOU's from a federal government who doesn't have the money to fund it.

But it's all good because the feds have borrowed that money and invested it on strippers and Jack Daniels. Actually, that would be a much more productive investment than tunnels for turtles.

Yesterday, I was bored so I decided to actually do some actuarial work on the money I've put into social security and what they told me my future benefit would be.

Between me and my employers, we've kicked in about $55,000 into "my" social security "account". Based on what my future benefit will be, the net present value of that money would be about $155,000 giving me a whopping 3.35% return on my investment. (here's a place where you can see your ROI based on your age and contribution rate).

By the way, I calculated my return with a simple annual compounding as opposed to when the Treasury got that money. As any investment professional will tell you that's a big deal over a lifetime.

Now I'm no Wall Street investment banker but I could get that kind of return by just investing in CD's over my lifetime. And these guys are worried we may not invest it as wisely as they do?

But here is what's truly pathetic. If I die tomorrow, that money doesn't go to my kids or my wife (since she's worked her whole life, she'll collect on her own contributions) the feds get to keep it.

Isn't that a great deal for everyone!

This rape brought to you by the pro illegal immigrant crowd

Hearing the details made the rape victim’s son ill – and almost sickened the 15-year-old boy who admitted he raped, beat and robbed a Liberty Township woman 50 years his senior.

Alexis Ramirez pleaded no contest to nine adult charges, including rape, on Friday. Butler County Common Pleas Judge Keith Spaeth convicted him, making Ramirez the county’s youngest convicted armed rapist.

snip.....

She answered a knock at her door around 3 a.m. Jan. 11.

Ramirez confronted her with a white T-shirt hiding his face. Armed with a black pellet gun, he demanded money.

He whacked her in the head with the gun, causing a gash that had to be stapled shut. Ramirez raped her repeatedly, at one point ordering her to shower because she was covered in blood. He also threatened to shoot her.

Finally, Ramirez ordered the woman to drive him to a money machine. On the way there, he grabbed her purse and bailed out. He later ditched the purse under a bush.

Feltner doesn’t think the teen is genuinely remorseful.

But Brewer pointed out that Ramirez handed him a note of apology that he wrote to the victim. That note likely will be disclosed during Ramirez’s sentencing hearing.

The teen was “truly merciless” against an innocent victim apparently chosen at random, Butler County Prosecutor Robin Piper said, and a long prison term is needed to protect society from him and exact some justice for the rape victim.

What's interesting is how The Enquirer refused to report that this pile of crap was an illegal immigrant?

So for all of you who want to protect the likes of Mr. Ramirez here, congratulations. He won't be deported anytime soon.

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What's 75 billion amongst friends?

Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration's flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.

The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday's report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say.

More than 2.3 million homes have fallen into foreclosure since the recession began in December 2007, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. Economists expect the number of foreclosures to grow well into next year.

"The government program as currently structured is petering out. It is taking in fewer homeowners, more are dropping out and fewer people are ending up in permanent modifications," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

Besides forcing people from their homes, foreclosures and distressed home sales have pushed down on home values and crippled the broader housing industry. They have made it difficult for homebuilders to compete with the depressed prices and discouraged potential sellers from putting their homes on the market.

Approximately 630,000 people who had tried to get their monthly mortgage payments lowered through the government program have been cut loose through July, according to the Treasury report. That's about 48 percent of the those who had enrolled since March 2009. And it is up from more than 40 percent through June.

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Liberal policies - hurting the ones you say you care about

Here's a liberal's take on the working poor............

Bringing that message home is the new documentary Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County. The HBO film by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, offers an arresting portrait of America's paycheck-to-paycheck life as seen through the eyes of the kids who live it.

Orange County is one of the wealthiest areas of the country. It's where Bravo's The Real Housewives of Orange County show off their indulgent lifestyles in their big-dollar homes. Meanwhile, 6-year-old Rudee sleeps between her parents in a run-down motel room because her father's mechanic pay isn't enough for an apartment. And Celine, age 10, and brothers Dilan and Ben, 9 and 7, are crowded into a single motel room with their parents and another sibling. Dad lost his job and mom works night shifts at a hospital making a little over $11 per hour. She can't give up working nights because the extra dollar and change per hour is essential income for the family.

The documentary features working parents whose jobs pay so poorly — though more than the federal minimum wage — that they can't provide a basic standard of living for their children. One widowed mom of four kids figured out she would have to earn double her hourly pay in the parking department of Disneyland to afford a stable home.

No one should work 40 hours and still be unable to afford decent shelter, food, transportation and health care, but this country allows it. And it's no accident. It's deliberate public policy.

First, if Alexandra is so sympathetic to these people's plights, why doesn't she employ them and pay them a good wage?

Second, if someone works making $11/hr. they can receive food stamps, subsidized housing, free school lunches, and earned income credit. With all these types of government benefits, you can easily increase your real hourly wages $5-7 an hour.

Third, this is the question I ask anyone proposing a hike in the minimum wage for the working poor. What's the amount and how do you justify it?

Let's face it, shouldn't everyone make, say $20/hr. how about $30 or $40? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Fourth, if you really want to make life horrible for these people, try increasing the minimum wage again and you'll make life nice and cushy for a Vietnamese or and Indonesian family.

Not one media member has had the smarts to question the White House as to how making it more expensive to hire American workers will increase job opportunities for them. They just assume the American entrepreneurial engine will just rev up and make all kinds of jobs for the least of us.

They say liberals are so smart but I still challenge the notion that any of them understand the law of Supply and Demand.

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Come and Take It

How's that hope and change working for you now

THE BORDERS ARE QUITE SECURE. Congressman Pete Stark's Town hall meeting...

The affirmative action president

Jennifer Rubin...........

Attempting to explain the Ground Zero mosque blunder, Margaret Carlson argues that Obama is too smart for us: “He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers.” Well, supremely confident but not so smart. Does he truly not get the distinction between constitutional rights and moral persuasion? Does he not understand that an imam who can’t denounce Hamas, insists America is complicit in 9/11, and won’t disclose whether state sponsors of terror are funding his project isn’t seeking reconciliation?

To be blunt, Obama suffers from a lifetime of others excessively praising his intellect. It insulates him from ideas and facts that conflict with his pre-existing liberal rubric (so “every economist” believed his stimulus would work). It leaves him unprepared to engage in real debate with informed opponents (e.g. the health-care summit). It skews his understanding of how geopolitics works, as he imagines that his own wonderfulness can sway adversaries and override nations’ fundamental interests (the Middle East). Is he as well read as George W. Bush? As intellectually creative as Bill Clinton? As grounded in history as Harry Truman? Let’s get some perspective here.

But Carlson does get it partially right:

His coldly rational comments on the mosque were reminiscent of his remark during the campaign about people in struggling small towns who “cling to guns or religion,” or of when he said police had “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own house during a burglary investigation. The Obama mindset is dismissive of those who have never sipped espresso in the faculty lounge. Anyone who lets emotion creep in where Obama has let reason reign is wrong.

It’s a deadly combination — intellectual arrogance and lack of sympatico with the public — that leads him again and again to stumble. And when his shortcomings lead to embarrassment or failure, he strikes out in frustration — at Israel, at the media, and at the American people. The image of himself clashes with the results he achieves and the reaction he inspires. No wonder he’s so prickly. You’d be, too, if everyone your entire life had told you that you were swell but now, when the chips are down and the spotlight is on, you are failing so badly in your job.

A few weeks ago, I posted on how the Voting Rights Act has bred corrupt black representatives in congress.

Rubin hits the nail on the head when you have a president who moved up the charts entirely as a beneficiary of affirmative action.

By his own admission, his time at Occidental was spent as a pot smoking slacker who somehow gets into Columbia?

Then he takes his under achievement into Harvard Law School. How? We'll never know because he's never released any of his college transcripts.

Then he became Harvard Law Review's editor where he impressed everyone with his ability to publish not one paper during his tenure.

Then he moved on to his community activist work where he wasn't accountable for anything but being present; which also mirrors his work as an Illinois legislator.

The conventional wisdom was that Obama ran a spectacular campaign. Really? Seriously, how hard can your campaign be when no one in the media will vet anything you've ever done; or not done.

The very media who vetted the crap out of Sarah Palin's book never asked one question about an author who wrote a memoir at the age of 34? Who does that?

We don't even need to cover all the non coverage of his associations with known communists, terrorists, race baiters, et al.

When the Clinton's won't even go after you, you know you have a candidate getting a free pass.

Add to that a Nobel Prize.......... for what?

This guy is like Chance the Gardner from the movie Being There. All these upper east side liberals love to hear his wise words of wit, never once questioning that this guy is an idiot because they don't want to believe that their assessment might be a result of racism. So they give him a pass.

As I've said before, liberals do their candidates no favors by not aggressive vetting their members. As a result, we now have a president who's only real accomplishment will be to push Jimmy Carter to number 43 on the all time ranking of American presidents.

Congratulations.

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Furious Parent Blasts Senator Over Health Care

Mary Jo Kilroy - Sentimental Journey

Video Re-Exposes Sen. Reid's Hypocrisy On Illegal Immigration

Why in the world would people think he was a Muslim

Maybe because he listened to this clown at his "church".



By the way, have you ever seen the guy eat shrimp or a big 'ole sausage biscuit?

Animal Farm

Earlier this year, the United Auto Workers decided to sell its money-losing 1,000-acre resort and golf course. Now, while GM files for its IPO, new UAW leadership is pulling the resort off the market. Here's a look inside.

Built in 1970, the $33 million retreat located at the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula includes the Walther and May Reuther Family Education Center, lodging for 261 people and an eternal flame in memory of Reuther, who died in a plane crash en route to the resort. Used mostly by the UAW for training conferences and family events, several well-appointed cabins dot the well-groomed grounds, including those given to former UAW presidents, and the centrally-located bar only serves beer made in union-represented breweries.

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Mission Accomplished

Why does the media continue to be "surprised" by this news...........

New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed to a nine-month high last week, yet another setback to the frail economic recovery.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 500,000 in the week ended August 14, the highest since mid-November, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast claims slipping to 476,000 from the previously reported 484,000 the prior week, which was revised up to 488,000 in Thursday's report.

A Labor Department official said there was nothing unusual in the state level data. The data covered the survey week for the government's closely watched employment report for August, scheduled for release early next month.

"There are some technical factors out there and the seasonal factors seem to be pushing it up a little bit. But given the trend of claims it looks like the economy ran into a wall in August," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-MitsubishI UFJ in New York.

The wall is Obamanomics.

Let me explain this in a way that even the dumbest of liberal, media types can understand.

When things get more expensive, you buy less of it. Let's make up a name and call it "The Law of Supply and Demand".

For you liberals let's use this as an example. Assume Starbucks doubles the price of the Grande Double Crapocino. Will you buy more or less of the product?

The same hold true for employees. So when we make the cost of labor more expensive by passing laws like health care, minimum wage hikes, and Lilly Ledbetter Act ,companies have this tendency to hold back from hiring. Especially when they're pretty sure the regulatory landscape is only going to get worse.

So when American companies start laying off American workers because the costs get too high, it should be no surprise to anyone but, in fact, highly expected.

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Congratulations Ohio

It seems that just about the only thing going for Ohio right now is that we're not Michigan.

Now we cannot even claim that.........

Ohio is being called the nation's bedbug capital in a new article in Time Magazine.

The piece mentions the Bedbug Remediation Commission Cincinnati created in 2007.

The EPA is meeting with state and municipal leaders today to try to come up with an abatement strategy. According to the article, the Ohio Department of Agriculture petitioned the EPA in June for an exemption to allow in-home use of propoxur, a pesticide and neurotoxin which can kill adult bedbugs within 24 hours and keeps killing newborns as they hatch. The EPA banned it for in-home use in the 1990's on the basis of animal tests and ill effects on adult workers who were exposed to it.

Here's a simple idea in three letters D D T.

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Life in "Progress" City - Cincinnati edition

One of my guilty pleasures in life is to head down to the Ohio River on Wednesdays and drink a few liquid breads down at Yeatman's Cove and watch the bands.

Before I get to this story I need to preface it with a Cincinnati geography lesson. Near downtown, the city has a few parks that line the Ohio River. Nearly every weekend there is some type of festival down there. Name some sort of food, drink or entertainment idea and they'll have it sometime during the summer down there.

Last night, I headed down to Party in the Park when the parking guy told me that I had to walk around 100 yards of chain link fence to get into the park. No big deal but i was wondering why the fencing all around the park.

Anyway a buddy of mine told me that it was for the Black Family Reunion going on this weekend.

Me. The Black Family Reunion? That's a free festival right?

Him Yeah

Me What the hell is the fencing for?

Him To force people to go through metal detectors.

Seriously, what does it say about a community that can't even have an (alleged) family friendly festival without frisking everyone for guns?

Bringing guns to the family reunion?

Now that's "Progressive"!

Krauthammer Says Pelosi's Mosque Comments Are Pure Lunacy

Extreme

You've got to be kidding me

Barney Frank on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac......

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be abolished rather than reformed as part of the Obama administration's planned overhaul of the government's role in housing finance, Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee, said on Tuesday.

"They should be abolished," Frank said in an interview on Fox Business, when asked whether the mortgage giants should be elements in housing market reform. "They only question is what do you put in their place," Frank said.

The Federal Housing Administration should be fully self-financing and Freddie and Fannie should be replaced with a new mechanism to help subsidize housing, Frank said in the interview.

Contrast this information with Barney's take on Fannie and Freddie before the meltdown.

The total hypocrisy is amazing.

The Democratic Party creating a mess then fixing them with more messes since 1932............

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Who did she vote for? #7

Meet Rachel Stieringer. Why is Rachel in the news?

The mother of a baby who appeared to be smoking a bong told a detective she thought it was funny that her 11-month-old son put the bong into his mouth and looked like he was smoking pot, according to court documents released Thursday.

Rachel Stieringer, 19, of Keystone Heights, was arrested on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia following the infamous photograph that attracted so much attention on the Internet.

Detectives said Stieringer admitted to having the bong in her bedroom. She told investigators she was cleaning her room one day and her young son crawled in and put the pipe up to his mouth, according to the documents.

Nice to see there's no mention of a daddy anywhere in the article. How much do think the public is paying this derelict to get high and post stupid crap on her facebook page?

None the less, did mother of the year vote for The One or The Maverick in the 2008 election?

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