Voter ID, Lets Put a Face on the Disenfranchised Voter

So.......in WI, the will of the people is being held up by a couple of liberal Dane County Judges who like to use their power inappropriately. The reason they cite, is that the voter ID law is unconstitutional because it disenfranchises the voter. David Flannigans actual words are,

"the state’s new voter ID law required people who lacked government photo ID to spend money to acquire the necessary documents — such as birth certificates". He called that “a real cost that is imposed on constitutionally eligible voters,” adding that was especially “burdensome” for the elderly and disabled.
He said the ID requirement fell disproportionately on elderly people, people of color and poor people, and said claims that the voting process needed to be policed to prevent voter impersonation — or fraudulent voting — were overblown and “extremely unlikely.”Link

So lets look at one group, the ones who are so burdened that they need an ID to vote.
Elderly in WI (aged 65 and older) = 779,383
Percent below poverty = 7.1%
Number of Elderly 65 and Older in Poverty = 55,336

Now Since you need ID for healthcare lets eliminate the ones who have any coverage at all.
According to the same census document less than 1% of 65+ did not have some type of coverage.
or 779 people.
So of those 779 people, in order for them to not have a photo ID to vote would mean that. They do not receive disability, social security, welfare, food stamps, or other benefits from anywhere. They do not drive, have a bank account, they have never been married, never held a job, they don't live in a house or rent an apartment, they can not even cash a check, or more importantly have anybody to help them in anyway shape or form.

Unfortunately the census does not provide a narrowed down number from 779 after my list of other things that require ID. Lets be conservative though, lets say 10% still fall under that scrutiny and are still living.

We are left with 77 people who cannot vote.


Now lets look at those below poverty level.

WI has a total of 5,711,767 people in the state and 11.6% are below the poverty level.
That gives us 662,565 people who are below our countries set poverty standard.
Minus the number of people receiving food stamps since you need ID for them (469,853)

You are left with 192,712.
So of those 192,712 people, in order for them to not have a photo ID to vote would mean that. They do not receive disability, social security, welfare, food stamps, or other benefits from anywhere. They do not drive, have a bank account, they have never been married, never held a job, they don't live in a house or rent an apartment, they can not even cash a check, or more importantly have anybody to help them in anyway shape or form.

Just like before lets say 10% fall into this category and that they are actual people.
We are left with 1,927 people

In total I have come up with 2004 possibly disenfranchised voters.

With 72 Counties in WI, that is an average of 28 people per county(or roughly 10 people per city)  that are having a difficult time voting.

In order for the dems argument to be locked would mean that these people have no way of getting to a DMV to obtain their FREE ID. However one thing I realized is that if you truly fall into this category, you do not have ANY commitments at all. You have all the time in the world to focus on two things, getting an ID and voting.

I pose this question. WHY AGAIN, IS IT SO HARD TO GET A FREE ID????????

Answer: It is not, the people who are against photo ID may use one or more of the following reasons.
-They themselves commit voter fraud
-They are aware of people who vote fraudulently and they agree with it.
-They know that in order for their politician to get elected they need the extra help.
-They just dont like that their party didn't come up with the idea.
or lastly....
-They truly believe in this magical population of people who have somehow skirted all known modern society since they turned 18, and for some reason have this unwavering passion to emerge from the cave they live in to vote and then vanish again until next election. Then they also assume each one of these people are dems.

As a last resort we could just draft some law requiring all citizens to get a government ID, since that sounds unconstitutional we can just call it a tax so it passes.

But no vote fraud doesnt ever happen.......

Epic Afterburner!

America Run As A business

Today marks a great move by the Romney camp. He has officially selected Paul Ryan (Congressman of my Great State of WI) as his veep running mate.

Although I liked all the choices, Ryan was in my mind the best of them all. He is a fiscal powerhouse. The path to prosperity with his entitlement reforms will get this country back on track.

The other reason we all should know this is the best choice, is the utter freakout from the left. This is a guy who can debate, and he knows what he is talking about. In other words he is right for this country. Plus, anytime the VP running mate is 10 times better than the sitting president, the other side should be worried.

What are the biggest fundamentals of making and maintaining a business? In my mind, it is having the leadership with a CEO who can make the tough decisions that benefit the most people. Using facts and figures to make those decisions. Secondly, it is having a good fiscal support system, a good CFO that can assist the CEO in making the tough choices and giving options that financially will work.
We are the board of directors at America Inc. Half of the board wants to screw the workers and take big bonuses for themselves while there is still something to take (The Left). While the other half (The Right) wants to cut spending to prop up the security of America Inc., for future generations to enjoy. The right have already passed votes of no confidence for the managers and replaced them (Congress). Now it is time to pass the vote of incompetence on our current CEO. Obama is doing what any corrupt money laundering CEO would do. Proclaiming success to save his job. As the board, we have two very clear paths. Path one, America Inc. continues to pay more money to those who were fired or retired than the current employees who work here. Or the path to prosperity, we reform the way monies or distributed amongst those who rely on America Inc. Ensuring that the monies paid to those people is never so much that they become dependent, and therefore enslaved by it.

"Our current president attacks success, and therefore under his administration we have less of it."

Political Break, 'A Pirate Looks At 40'

A Cover of, 'A Pirate Looks At 40' Music from my office (The Lunch Sessions)

I think we need more conservative musicians! :-) Enjoy!

Fed study says Bush and the banks didn’t cause the Great Recession. The Fed did

Great article by James Pethokoukis. I will try and sum it up in my own view. We are in a drought right now, and we are losing crops. So right now corn will be our economy. We are losing corn like crazy as a result of the drought. However, what if the government thought the corn was dying because of how the farmers were growing the corn. They decide to slap new restrictions and additional requirements to be a corn producer. So in addition to having the corn supply continue to deplete they make it harder for existing farmers and new ones to produce more corn.......to fix the problem. WTF!?!?!

 It’s probably President Obama’s most politically effective line of attack against Mitt Romney.

The president argues that it was the unchecked, reckless, casino capitalism of the George W. Bush years — bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich — that lead to the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And if Mitt Romney is elected in November, the Republican will bring those policies right back, risking another financial collapse.
Here’s what Obama said during that same speech where he told America’s entrepreneurs that “you didn’t build that”:

But I just want to point out that we tried their theory for almost 10 years … and it culminated in a crisis because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street and they could make reckless bets with other people’s money that resulted in this financial crisis, and you had to foot the bill. So that’s where their theory turned out.

But a book by Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, says it wasn’t Bushonomics or greedy bankers or broken markets that caused the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Hetzel pins the blame squarely on the Federal Reserve and Team Bernanke.
Oh, the downturn first started with “correction of an excess in the housing stock and a sharp increase in energy prices” — the housing bust and the oil shock. Indeed, those two things were enough, in Hetzel’s view, to cause a “moderate recession” beginning in December 2007.
But only a moderate one. It was the Fed’s monetary policy miscues after the downturn began that turned a run-of-the-mill downturn into a once-in-a century disaster. Hetzel:

A moderate recession became a major recession in summer 2008 when the [Federal Open Market Committee] ceased lowering the federal funds rate while the economy deteriorated. The central empirical fact of the 2008-2009 recession is that the severe declines in output that in appeared in the [second quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009] … had already been locked in by summer 2008.

Not only did the Fed leave rates alone between April 2008 and October 2008 as the economy deteriorated, but the FOMC “effectively tightened monetary policy in June by pushing up the expected path of the federal funds rate through the hawkish statements of its members. In May 2008, federal funds futures had been predicting the rate to remain at 2% through November. By mid-June, that forecast had risen to 2.5%.
And it wasn’t just the U.S. central bank. Hetzel thinks all the major central banks — the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, sat on their hands as the global economy weakened. “The fact that the severe contraction in output began in all these countries in 2008:Q2 is more readily explained by a common restrictive monetary policy than by contagion from the then still-mild U.S. recession, Hetzel writes in a Fed paper that inspired the book. “Restrictive monetary policy rather than the deleveraging in financial markets that had begun in August 2007 offers a more direct explanation of the intensification of the recession that began in the summer of 2008. Irony abounds.”
Here’s another reason Hetzel lets Wall Street off the hook. If a banking collapse was the true villain rather than the Fed, bank lending should a) have been a leading indicator and b) should have declined more significantly than in past recessions. But this chart of bank lending, adjusted for inflation with recessionary periods shaded, shows “bank lending behaved similarly in this recession to other post-war recessions.”

The irony here, of course, is that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a much-noted student of the Great Depression and of the work of the late Milton Friedman whose landmark book, A Monetary History of the United States, pinned the blame for the Great Depression on a too tight Fed. As Bernanke told Friedman and his co-author, Anna Schwartz, on the economist’s 90th birthday a decade ago, ”You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
But if Hetzel is right, the Fed blew it again.
The analysis will be much debated and probably won’t have much impact on the election or public perception of the Bush years anytime soon. And bankers are unlikely to see their approval ratings rise. But Hetzel’s work suggests policymakers should take notice and perhaps think twice about placing more faith and power in regulators or abandoning pro-market polices because they somehow caused the financial crisis and Great Recession.

Article by
James Pethokoukis
Link