The Independent

This past Wednesday marked the three month anniversary of ObamaCare being rushed through Congress and signed into law. As Speaker Pelosi famously stated that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Americans are beginning to dislike the health care law more and more as its harrowing details are unveiled. Although the Majority claimed the health care law would reduce premiums by $2,500, in actuality it is expected to raise premiums by as much as $2,100, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In addition, during debate of the bill, Democrats claimed their government takeover of the health care sector would create millions of new jobs. However, according to a study by the National Federation of Independent Business, the health care law’s employer mandate could eliminate 1.6 million jobs through 2014, with 66 percent of those coming from small businesses. Because the health care law raises health care costs and kills jobs, among other atrocities, Con...

THE BLUEPRINT by WAYNE ALLYN ROOT , classmate Barach Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos -- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within. Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger gove...

Senate Republican Leader Dennis Hollingsworth (R-Murrieta) and Senator Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga) issued the following statements concerning state budget deliberations. Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth - Senate Republican Leader: "The budget proposals Democrats have put forward so far are financially irresponsible or illegal. Only Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed a legal budget proposal that closes the $19 billion deficit without raising taxes. We share the same goals: fix the budget by reducing spending and without raising taxes, reform some of the biggest looming problems, and get the economy moving again by bringing jobs back to California." Sen. Bob Dutton - Vice Chairman, Senate Budget Committee: "I've become increasingly frustrated during this budget process because it has become clear that the only solutions Democrats have offered to close the $19 billion deficit are a mix of accounting maneuvers and tax increases. In fact, the Assembly Democrats' pr...

By Adam B. Summers and Jon Coupal  California’s $19 billion budget deficit seems to worsen by the day, but an even larger financial crisis is brewing in the state’s pension system. Over the last two decades, state lawmakers have bestowed massive pension and benefit increases upon government workers. Unfortunately, taxpayers are now getting the bills for these handouts. Recent studies estimate California has $500 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, not to mention over $50 billion in unfunded retiree health care liabilities. It’s important for the state to recognize how it got into this fiscal disaster—and how to get out of it.   California’s public pension and retiree health and dental care expenditures have quintupled since fiscal year 1998-99, going from about $1 billion to $5 billion this year. And retirement spending is expected to triple again—to $15 billion—within the next decade.  Part of the problem is the growth of state governmen...

This Could be the US within Years Let’s see… Greece is having trouble with unfunded liabilities, runaway debt and constituents that demand they live off the public largess while much of the world recognizes that the current situation as unsustainable. I don’t see how the US is much different. While there are rosy projections that we’ll eventually be decreasing our deficit over the next few years if all goes well, what’s clear even in the most optimistic government models is that in 2030 and beyond we have a runaway situation. We’re seeing states and municipalities struggling to control debt and most of it stems from the overly generous pension and healthcare obligations they’ve made to generations of public-sector workers that is unsustainable. While the private sector has cut jobs, real wages and forced increased employee contributions to benefits for a decade, public workers have pretty much maintained the status quo as if they live in a vacuum. I can’t blame the worke...

By Jon Coupal For those who work in the private sector, the dream of enjoying  a comfortable retirement has become just that -- a dream. The impact of the recession continues to be brutal, especially on older workers. “More than seven-in-ten (72 percent) workers over the age of 60 who said they are putting off their retirement are doing so because they can’t afford to retire,” according to a recent survey by CareerBuilder.  In California, with unemployment and under employment totaling over 21 percent – only Michigan with its decaying auto industry is worse off – older people being forced to work longer may regard themselves as lucky just to have a job. This is not a concern for those who enjoy the job security of working for California government.  The highest paid public workers in all 50 states -- some of whom are able to retire as many 15 years earlier than the private sector average with pensions nearing full time-pay -- continue to be shie...

We learned Monday that the Central Planners have proposed a $3.8 trillion budget, with $2.0 trillion of tax increases, $1.0 trillion coming by increasing income taxes on families who earn more than $250,000. For those of you earning $250,000 in your families, which is about $125,000 after taxes using current tax rates, I ask you the question, are you rich? You are paying $1,200 a month in health insurance, paying $40,000 a year in college tuition with no scholarship help because you make too much money, and had 40 percent of your stock investments and 20 percent of your real estate investments wiped out the past three years. You pay three times as much in real estate taxes on the same home you lived in ten years ago. Are you rich? You work for a firm that could downsize or go bankrupt at any moment. Are you rich? Government tax revenues decline due to economic recession, and government spending increases because that is what Central Planners do under the guise of stimulating the econom...

* The Wall Street Journal * JANUARY 28, 2010, 1:53 P.M. ET Senate Approves Amendment to Raise Debt Ceiling by $1.9 Trillion By COREY BOLES WASHINGTON—The Senate approved legislation Thursday increasing the federal government's borrowing limit by $1.9 trillion, enough to enable the Treasury to pay its bills through 2010. The 60-39 vote was strictly along party lines with no Republicans joining the Democratic majority to approve the legislation. Once the increase is signed into law, the federal government will be able to borrow up to $14.3 trillion, by far the highest amount of debt it has ever held on its books. The current limit of around $12.4 trillion would have been breached by the end of February. House lawmakers must still take up the legislation and are expected to do so next week, according to a senior House Democratic aide. The increase comes just over a month after Congress upped the borrowing cap by $290 billion from its previous limit of $12.1 trillion. A vote to...

January 8, 2010 By Jon Coupal For a decade, California state government has spent more than it receives in revenue. The result? Our state has the lowest credit rating of all 50 states, we rank in the top four in unemployment, near the top in tax burden per capita, and we rank last or close to last in a number of surveys that measure business climate. Not coincidentally, California small business bankruptcies are up 81% over last year. For lawmakers, spending is a compulsion. During the historic recall campaign of 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who correctly labeled the spending problem as an addiction, promised he would be the antidote. His pledge to “blow up the boxes” and bring fiscal sanity to Sacramento led voters to support his candidacy by a huge margin. Sadly, and perhaps predictably, the spending terminator quickly succumbed to a more regional strain of the Beltway fog – some have even likened it to the Stockholm Syndrome where, after just a few months in office, elected o...

by Money Morning Americans could be in for a rude awakening in coming months when they discover the true scope of the massive national debt racked up by the U.S. government. In fact, the $1.6 trillion deficit expected for 2010, which is above 10% of gross domestic product (GDP), is only the beginning. Since the current economic crisis began in late 2007, the U.S. Federal Reserve has tripled the size of its balance sheet, creating enormous amounts of new money by lending to hundreds of ailing banks and buying up more than $1 trillion of questionable asset-backed securities. But that’s only a small part of the story. Since the beginning of the crisis, the Fed has lent, spent, or guaranteed $11.6 trillion, including underwriting the entire system of mortgage finance in the United States, a system that currently shows a nearly $1 trillion loss. And none of these figures include any of U.S. President Barack Obama’s stimulus packages, which means the actual deficit next y...

Here is what we (us, our kids, grandkids, great-grandkids) owe... Only taxes can pay for these or a default by the US congress. When you're in a hole, stop digging. Congress has to go - they are the diggers! Throw all the incumbent bums out!   U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

In 2006, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi stated that “Democrats are proposing a New Direction for America”. However, nearly three years into Speaker Pelosi’s “New Direction,” jobs are down and unemployment, poverty, and misery are up. Specifically, over the past three years the number of unemployed has increased from 7 million to nearly 16 million; the unemployment rate has skyrocketed from 4.6 percent to 10.2 percent; and the misery index, an economic indicator which adds the unemployment rate to the inflation rate, has increased by 27 percent. Further, the federal budget deficit has increased by a staggering 471 percent; federal spending has increased by 33 percent; and the national debt has ballooned to $12 trillion. In addition to these harrowing statistics, this week the media reported more instances of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Democrats’ $787 billion Economic Stimulus Package. According to the Recovery.gov website, nine California congressional districts that do not exist r...

House Passes $210 Billion Doc-Fix Without Paying for It On Thursday, the House passed a $210 billion stand-alone bill to protect doctors from scheduled cuts in Medicare payments over the next ten years, also known as a doc-fix. In 1997, Congress attempted to control Medicare’s skyrocketing growth through a payment formula known as the sustainable growth rate (SGR), and since its enactment it has been difficult for Congress to adhere to the resulting reductions in physicians’ payments. In fact, since 2002, Congress has stepped in to delay these cuts from taking place which has made the problem worse. Beginning January 2010, absent a change in law, Medicare physician payments will be reduced by more than 20 percent. In order to address this, the Majority cunningly detached the permanent doc-fix provision from the larger health care bill, the so-called Affordable Health Care for America Act, and introduced it separately—without it being paid for—so that the cost of the doc-fix would n...

On October 22nd 2009, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee , says that the U.S. economy faces a future as a “banana republic” if current federal fiscal policies continue. " Congress works for the next election, not for the next generation." In April 2009, Missouri Republican US Senator Kit Bond likened Barack Obama 's administration to a banana republic if they proceed to hold public trials on the issue of torture, giving the term banana republic a bimodal definition in the context of the ongoing US torture investigations. [23] In May 2009, Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times , referred to the state government of California as a banana republic. He was commenting on the state's tax system, in which taxes cannot be raised even in an emergency without a two-thirds majority. The state constitution requires that the budget be balanced, denying it the ability to borrow, while gerrymandering has turned many dist...

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that Housing Starts dropped a whopping 10.6 percent in the one month period October 2009 versus September 2009, and fell 30.7 percennt below an already awful number last October 2008. This is in spite of the $8,000 first time home buyers credit the Central Planners decided was a key stimulus tactic. New Building Permits fell 24.3 percent from last year's lousy October number. Mortgage Applications fell 2.5 percent last week. Clearly the Central Planners' stimulus plan is not working. The reason is simple, they have targeted a small minority to get the trillions of dollars of government spending, and have failed miserably in conducting a strategy that would get cash into the hands of all American Households. If you have a clunker and are willing to buy a tiny car with a certain gas mileage performance, if you are buying a new home for the first time, or if you are one of the largest financial companies on earth, you get the money, and...

As most working taxpayers will soon realize, beginning November 1st, the state increased withholding by 10%. Officials are saying that this is not a tax increase because at tax time you will owe no more that before the increase. Wrong! It is a tax increase because all withholding is borrowing money from taxpayers without paying interest, and an increase in withholding is borrowing more money without paying interest. The result is more money for government and less for taxpayers, which to reasonable people is a tax increase. Many taxpayers declare fewer dependents than the number to which they are legally entitled to assure that their tax liability is fully covered. If you are in that category, you have the ability to counter this grab for more of your money by changing the number of dependents you declare. However, it is always a good idea to consult with your tax preparer first, before making a change. To change the number of dependents you declare, you will need to fill out a DE-4 fo...

Porker of the Month:  Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has named Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) Porker of the Month for loading up her goodie bag just before Halloween as she prepares to leave the Senate to run for governor of Texas.  While claiming to be a fiscal conservative, the four-term senator requested 149 pork-barrel projects costing $1.6 billion in authorization and appropriations bills for fiscal year 2010.  On September 28, 2009, she told the Austin American-Statesman , “I’m proud of being able to garner Texans’ fair share of their tax dollars.”  “Sen. Hutchison is repeating the same old insidious quackery about the earmarking process:  that it can be made accountable and that it somehow levels the spending playing field,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz.  “The only fair way to distribute the taxpayers’ money is to eliminate the practice altogether and instead work to ensure that every dime of taxpayer money is spent using the budget...