The War on Poverty

The irony of the Government declaring war on inanimate objects, or a group of people’s current fiscal state has always baffled me. It is almost like the government is writing its own epitaph without knowing it. You cannot win a war against nothing. The wars on Drugs, Poverty, wealthy, etc. are all losing battles.
You think prohibition would have taught us that if you want to make something popular, make it illegal. Even when the Government hinted at banning FourLoko it made sales go through the roof. I didn’t even know what FourLoko was until they tried getting rid of it.
But i digress, we as a people spend a lot of energy and time trying to control the choices and lives of other people. I could talk a lot about legalization of drugs but I will save it for later.
What I want to talk about is the recent report from the Senate Budget Committee; they compiled data from the Census, the office of Management and Budget, and the CRS (Congressional Research Service).
In my most humble opinion, this single report should be the main focus for the rest of the election. It is only evidence that we need to support the smaller government argument. It is major proof that the government cannot solve our issues for us and truly, TRULY does not work.
To my conservative friends this will not be anything new. To all the others, it might just change your vote!

In 2011, according to the census the number of households below the poverty line was 16,807,795. That is a family of four in one house with a total income of $22,350 per year or less. Now for the mind bottling part.
One thousand and twenty-five billion dollars was spent on programs meant to fight poverty. Sure that is a lot of money, but that is not the mind numbing paradox that is our government. It is the fact that when divided by the number of poverty stricken households, it turns out we spend $61,194 per impoverished household doing it!!!
Or put another way, we spend sixty thousand dollars per year per poor household fighting poverty!!!
The republicans on the Senate Budget committee released a note:

A congressional report from CRS recently revealed that the United States now spends more on means-tested welfare than any other item in the federal budget—including Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. Including state contributions to the roughly 80 federal poverty programs, the total amount spent in 2011 was approximately $1 trillion. Federal spending alone on these programs was up 32 percent since 2008.

If this doesn’t change your vote then congratulations you are the 47%, there is nothing anyone can do for you, and have a wonderful day. Read More

Obamas the Bullsh!&er

After CNN of all news networks challenged Obama's new shiny booklet claiming to be a plan. The Obama camp was not particularly happy with the holes they poked in it. So they responded with the presidents budget. Thus damming them even more because Obama is lying. HE IS LYING!! He will not reduce the deficit he will add to it and his own budget proves it. It must be very embarrasing to be a Obama supporter who uses the word math to attck us. Apparently they have failed to look at the presidents plan first.

Did Somebody Say…Inflation?

With every stimulus, Obama has been redistributing Federal Tax Dollars without goods or services being returned, thus lowering the value of each dollar spent by someone who didn’t “earn” it.
What does that mean in a stagnant economy? Well, if you don’t get a raise, or make more money, you actually made less. Inflation is the biggest hidden tax that no one understands. Wait. Strike that. A lot of conservatives understand it.

So how does the almighty government solve this problem? Raise the minimum wage, of course. Or tax all of the evil, greedy rich people since they have all of our money. (Right??)
This sounds okay in theory (to a liberal), except that when you sweep a floor for $8 an hour (or whatever fair market value for a good floor sweeper is) and all of the sudden the government deems that job to be worth $10 an hour, that further inflates the actual value of the job or task being performed.

It’s all in an effort to get votes. The left gets votes because they are better at making up hypothetical lies. You can’t prove them true or false.  Example: “Romney hates poor people.” (WHAT THE F***?!)
To put it in perspective, a gallon of gas is worth the exact same as it was 50 years ago. (I said “is worth,” not “costs.”) I could even speculate with modern technology that the price should have dropped. That is mind boggling to think of so I will use a more mind-friendly example. Computers. They are 100 times more powerful and 10,000 times less costly than they used to be. Think about it. In 1951, the UNIVAC I was sold by Remington Rand. They sold 46 machines at roughly $800,000 apiece. Here are the stats on that machine.

Speed: 1,905 operations per second
Input/output: magnetic tape, unityper, printer
Memory type: delay lines, magnetic tape
Technology: serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape
Size: 943 cubic feet
Shorter nerd translation: Slow, big, and expensive.

Now fast forward to today. You can buy an Android Netbook for about $100.
800×480 7-inch LCD, 128 MB DDR2 (up to 256 MB Optional)
1 GB SSD (up to 4 GB Optional)
ARM11 533 MHz 32bit CPU
Touchscreen
Shorter nerd translation: Fast, small, in-expensive

In 60 years, innovation has taken the cost of a computer from $800,000 to $100 while expanding the processing power, shrinking the size from a warehouse to your pocket, and enabling them to communicate (literally) through air to one another. So why do commodities cost more? The simple answer is Regulation, taxation, and inflation in an attempt to control the market to favor one or more people in a certain way.
$1.00 in 1913 would require $21.60 in 2007 in order to match value. That’s a 96% devaluation of our currency in 94 years.

Gas has not changed much, our engines have become better at burning it, our technology can get at it easier and cheaper than ever before. Other energy sources like Nat Gas are coming to light which will lower demand for oil. Yet the cost continues to rise.
Romney has hit the nail on the head when he preached, “Fair regulation in a free market with limited government intervention is best for Americas growth.”
Competition is a good thing! If I make a plunger and you open a company that makes a better one, I have to make an even better one at the same price (or cheaper) or risk going away into the ether. In the end, the guy buying the plunger wins. Our current tax code has been gifted an addition 13,000 pages of new regulations from Obamacare alone. How will taxing companies that compete to make cheaper more affordable healthcare, help patients get more affordable coverage? How about reasonable tort reform?
 

Romney’s plan is simple. (Which is probably why people don’t understand it.) Our economy, and the wealth in it, is not a finite number. Wealth can be created out of thin air. If I have something in abundance that you do not have and that you want, and you have something in abundance that I do not have and that I want, couldn’t we trade each other those things and BOTH be better off?
Take apart your iPhone (not literally). All of its components are not worth very much to you and me. Yet when Apple puts them together and writes software for it, I decide I’d rather have the phone than some money and Apple decides they’d rather have my money than another phone in stock. We are both richer in the transaction and therefore wealth is created.

This is how you can lower taxes and create more wealth, which in turn creates more tax revenue.
In short, you cannot entice growth and innovation by penalizing those who innovate and grow. Obama has effectively made becoming independently wealthy a bad thing.
I want to be rich. And I want to become rich the way Mitt Romney did. He should be on a freaking trading card. On the back it would say, “In America, hard work and determination can get you anything.”