Ryan Is No Conservative: He Voted For The Biggest Entitlement Program Since The 1960s

Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, Gov. Romney's VP nominee, is a huge friend of the welfare state and is no conservative.

Not only did he vote to bail out the banks and everyone else in 2008, in 2003 he voted for the largest expansion of government entitlement since the 1960s when he said "Yes" to Drugs For Seniors.

If he has any principles, they don't animate his votes when it's time to roll back liberalism. Instead, he rolls with liberalism when push comes to shove. Which is why Romney picked him. A man after his own heart he is.

Conservatives don't say "Yes" to Mitt Romney. Conservatives say what they said in South Carolina:

WE DESPISE MITT ROMNEY TO THE VERY CORE OF OUR BEING.

Scott Rasmussen Says Most Americans Think Both Parties Are Fascists

They just don't say it that way. Instead they call the two parties crony capitalists.

Here is Rasmussen for the Boston Herald:

[S]even out of 10 Americans believe government and big business work together against the rest of us.

In other words, Americans believe crony capitalism is a reality regardless of which party is in the White House. This is the root cause of much of the frustration sweeping the nation today. ...

[T]hey want the government to stop picking winners and losers in the business world.

Looking The Part

Don't Vote For The Fascists. It Only Encourages Them.

Three Tax Collectors For The Welfare State (And One Nincompoop)

US Public Debt Under Obama Has Soared Exactly 50 Percent In 43 Months

(Source: little Timmy Geithner's Treasury Department)

Romney Doesn't Oppose Obama's Financier Fascism, He's Part Of It

"[D]espite taking office in the midst of a massive financial meltdown, Obama’s administration has not prosecuted a single heavy-hitter among those responsible for the financial crisis. To the contrary, he’s staffed his team with big bankers and their allies. Under the Bush-Obama bailouts the big financial institutions have feasted like pigs at the trough, with the six largest banks borrowing almost a half trillion dollars from uncle Ben Bernanke’s printing press. In 2013 the top four banks controlled more than 40 percent of the credit markets in the top 10 states—up by 10 percentage points from 2009 and roughly twice their share in 2000. Meantime, small banks, usually the ones serving Main Street businesses, have taken the hit along with the rest of us with more than 300 folding since the passage of Dodd-Frank, the industry-approved bill to “reform” the industry. ...

"In a sane world, one would expect Republicans to run against this consolidation of power, that has taxpayers propping up banks that invest vast amounts in backing the campaigns of the lawmakers who levy those taxes. The party would appeal to grassroots capitalists, investors, small banks and their customers who feel excluded from the Washington-sanctioned insiders' game. The popular appeal is there. The Tea Party, of course, began as a response against TARP. ...

"Romney himself is so clueless as to be touting his strong fund-raising with big finance. His top contributors list reads something like a rogue’s gallery from the 2008 crash: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Citicorp, and Barclays."

Read the whole thing from Joel Kotkin, here.

Obama's Gangster Auto Tsar Admires China, The Largest Expression of Crony Capitalism In History

As pointed out by Joel Kotkin for The Daily Beast, here, who refrains from using the still radioactive term "fascist" in lieu of which the euphemism "crony capitalism" will still have to do:

Obama’s financial tsar on the GM bailout, Steven Rattner, took to The New York Times to stress that Obamians see nothing systemically wrong with the banking system we have now, blaming the 2008 market meltdown on “old-fashioned poor management.” ... 

Rattner ... paid $6.2 million and accepted a two-year ban on associating with any investment adviser or broker-dealer to settle with the SEC over the agency’s claims that he had played a role in a pay-to-play scheme involving a $50,000 contribution to the now-jailed politician who controlled New York State’s $125 billion pension fund. He’s also expressed unlimited admiration for the Chinese economic system, the largest expression of crony capitalism in history. Expect Rattner to be on hand in September, when Democrats gather in Charlotte, the nation’s second-largest banking city, inside the Bank of America Stadium to formally nominate Obama for a second term.

Relative to Gold, Oil is Still ON SALE

The gold to oil ratio stands at 17.44, meaning oil is "on sale" relative to the price of gold.

Low Tech Auto Security System

The Upper Limits Of Middle And Upper-Middle Individual Incomes 1990-2010

SocialSecurity.gov here provides comprehensive net compensation statistics going back to 1990, from which one can chart the nominal growth of individual incomes over the period.

Below I have charted both the nominal and CPI-adjusted growth in the upper income limits for middle incomes (60th percentile) and for upper middle incomes (80th percentile) between 1990 and 2010, choosing years where the income tranches ($5000 each) hit within less than 1 point of 60, or 80, percent of total earners. For the 80th percentile chart this meant stopping with the year 2007 because years after 2007 do not yet provide a clear demarcation of the 80th percentile for an income tranche within 1 point of 80 percent. For proper comparison purposes real growth in green for both is expressed in 2010 dollars.

What the charts show is that the income ceiling defining the upper limit of the middle rose over nineteen years in real terms 9.4 percent, and the ceiling for the upper middle rose over seventeen years in real terms 15.6 percent, a difference in the real rate of change of nearly 66 percent.

This is cause for much hand-wringing in some circles, where, it seems, it is rarely considered how the costs associated with acquiring the skills and credentials necessary to earn upper middle incomes have skyrocketed. Those costs have increased nearly 72 percent over the period, in real terms, consuming 70 percent of the upper-middle upper-limit salary of $50,000 in 1990 for the typical 4-year public university degree, and 104 percent of the comparable salary in 2007.

Map of the World's Major Fascist Regimes (In Yellow)!

Rosie Agrees: The Market Cheers Bad News, Because That Means More Stimulus Is Coming

Here's Rosie:

It's gotten to the point, he said, where the market actually cheers bad news . . ..

"We're back to the situation where for the stock market bad news is good news, because the good news is that we're going to get more gobs of stimulus to push asset prices higher at least over the near term," he said. "That's a driving factor behind this recovery that we've seen in the stock markets globally in the past month or so."

Top Ten Tax Loss Expenditures 2011 From The Joint Committee On Taxation

10. Exclusion of benefits under cafeteria plans ................................................................$31 billion

10. Exclusion of untaxed Social Security and Railroad Retirement benefits ....................$31 billion

  9. Exclusion of capital gains at death .............................................................................$38 billion

  8. Deduction of state and local government income taxes, sales and property taxes ......$42.4 billion

  7. Pension plan contributions .........................................................................................$42.7 billion

  6. 401 K plan contributions ............................................................................................$48.4 billion

  5. Tax credit for children under 17 .................................................................................$56.4 billion

  4. Earned income tax credit ............................................................................................$59.5 billion

  3. Mortgage interest deduction ........................................................................................$77.6 billion

  2. Reduced rates of tax on dividends and long term capital gains ...................................$90.5 billion

  1. Exclusion of employer contributions for health care, health/long term care insurance.$109.3 billion

Welfare Practised Through The Tax Code Is Liberalism, Not Conservatism

This is why those who call Ronald Reagan a conservative are wrong, because the intent of his tax policies has been all along to practise welfare through the tax code and thereby create a whole class of people at the bottom half in the country who are dependent on the federal government on April 15th, have no stake in policy and thus in politics because they do not pay for it, and are as a result ungrateful, unmotivated to climb higher, and are increasingly a nation apart from the Americans who do pay for it:

"Reagan and succeeding Republicans abolished federal income taxes on the working poor and on what the Left calls the working class, and they almost abolished them on the middle class.

"It began with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which grew out of then-Governor Ronald Reagan's famous testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1972. Reagan proposed exempting the working poor from all Social Security and income taxes as an alternative to welfare, with the credit serving as a way to offset payroll taxes for low-income workers. ...

"[B]y 2007, after 25 years of Reaganomics and before President Obama was even elected, the bottom 40 percent of earners, on net and as a group, paid less than 0 percent of federal income taxes, according to official IRS data, as reported recently by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of paying at least some income taxes to help support the federal government, the federal government paid them cash through the income tax code. That same year, the middle 20 percent, the true middle class, paid less than 5 percent of all federal income taxes."

So Peter Ferrara now, here, defending Romney's tax plan as more of the same.

These policies, now accepted by both Democrats and Republicans alike, have turned Social Security into pure welfare because a large majority of the people eventually receiving it will have effectively received refunds of everything they've put into it long before they start drawing it. Temporary reductions of contributions to Social Security during the recent financial crisis, advocated by Democrats in complete control of the government, have only underscored the point.

If nothing else it is another flip for Romney, who famously characterized himself as an independent and not in the mold of Reagan-Bush during his race for Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts in 1994.

"Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

Who knows, maybe the flipper will flop after he's elected. Stranger things have happened. After all, many of us on the right feared Obama in 2008 because we thought he was a commie. Little did we know he was a fascist.

Stephen Prothero Of Boston University Is Biased Against Whites And Christians

The overwhelming majority of bias crimes in the US are racially motivated, and only 20 percent are specifically religious. And of those, fully 65 percent are anti-Semitic in motivation. Just over 13 percent are anti-Islamic, and just under 8 percent specifically anti-Christian.

So says Kate Shellnutt here for The Houston Chronicle.

When it comes to crimes of religious bigotry in America, most of us have to take a number behind the Jews.

CNN blogger Stephen Prothero of Boston University, unfortunately, unhelpfully conflates the racial and religious motivations for bias crimes, and just decides out of thin air and without evidence that Christians and whites are to blame for all of it, here:

When murderers target and kill religious minorities simply because they are nonwhite or non-Christian, something of each of these traditions dies. So we need to redouble our efforts to keep both vibrant.

... [H]ateful invective is a weapon too, and it can be heard not only among white supremacist extremists but also on our mainstream radio and television talk shows.

Last time I checked, Jews are classified as whites. Do they endure the overwhelming number of cases of violence "because they are nonwhite"? Do Muslims attack Jews because Jews are non-Christian? And why do so many acts of violence against Christians come from disaffected Christians? And prejudice from denizens of the American academy?

Stephen Prothero hasn't committed an act of violence, but his bias against Christians and whites is a crime nonetheless, against intelligence.

What Does Elizabeth Talking Bull Warren Have To Hide In Her Taxes?

Plenty, apparently.

Story here.

You Have Been Warned

"[T]oday’s low interest-rate dynamic is not an entirely stable one. It could unwind remarkably quickly."

-- Kenneth Rogoff, here

North American Death Squad

The Burning Question On The Day After The Michigan Primary Election

Were any of the corporations which voted yesterday in the Michigan primary election actually registered to vote in Michigan?