Net Worth of Poorest Republican Candidate for President is 10 X More Than 75 Percent of America

Here's the minimum net worth of the Republican candidates for president:

Sen. Rick Santorum: $880,000

Gov. Rick Perry: $1.1 million

Rep. Michele Bachmann: $1.8 million (Congressional disclosure is average of minimum and maximum)

Rep. Ron Paul: $3.6 million (Congressional disclosure)

Newt: $6.7 million

Gov. Jon Huntsman: $16 million

Gov. Mitt Romney: $190 million

Discussed here (link).

75 percent of the American people have a net worth in 2007 of $80,000 or less.

Brookings Institution Must Be Nuts: Says Congressional Wealth Reflects Middle Class

Brookings Corporate Sponsors

I refer to this in USA Today (link) back in November:

Lawmakers disclose their assets and liabilities only in broad ranges. So the numbers are estimates — the average of a member's lowest and highest possible net worth. Their actual wealth is often higher because disclosures don't include home values.

Despite some superwealthy members, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution says Congress generally reflects the middle class.

"In many cases, the top 10% are self-made … and it reflects something that's in the American psyche," he says. "We're not against people being rich. We just wish we were. But we are particularly attracted to people who made their own riches."

In the USA Today list of 530 US Representatives and Senators, fully 250 or 47 percent declare their net worth, sans their homes, to be $1 million or more. Add in everybody down to a declared net worth of $600K or more (the average of $1.1 million and $100K) and the list balloons to 315 or almost 60 percent of the Congress.

By contrast, 75 percent of the American people have average net worth of less than $80,000 as of 2007. In view of what has happened to housing values since then, I would expect more people to be worth even less than that.

Unlike the members of Congress in the USA Today report, household net worth calculations as tracked by the Federal Reserve include home values.

And between 2006 and Q3 2011, household net worth has fallen by $7.8 trillion, $6.6 trillion of which has been lost in the real estate maelstrom.

For Brookings to say Congressional wealth generally reflects the middle class is preposterous. Kind of like The Wall Street Journal claiming the tax money the government needs so desperately will be found in the middle class, not among the wealthy. Lies, damned lies, designed to rough you up before they pick your pockets again.

WE ARE RULED BY THE RICH.

Anyone who contributes one red cent to their campaigns should be . . . er, institutionalized.

Brutus in 1787 Predicted Our Rich, Out of Touch, Taxing, Corrupt and Servile Congress

Because it is just too small to be otherwise:

[I]n reality there will be no part of the people represented, but the rich, even in that branch of the legislature, which is called the democratic. — The well born, and highest orders in life, as they term themselves, will be ignorant of the sentiments of the midling class of citizens, strangers to their ability, wants, and difficulties, and void of sympathy, and fellow feeling. This branch of the legislature will not only be an imperfect representation, but there will be no security in so small a body, against bribery, and corruption — It will consist at first, of sixty-five, and can never exceed one for every thirty thousand inhabitants; a majority of these, that is, thirty-three, are a quorum, and a majority of which, or seventeen, may pass any law — so that twenty-five men, will have the power to give away all the property of the citizens of these states — what security therefore can there be for the people, where their liberties and property are at the disposal of so few men?

It will literally be a government in the hands of the few to oppress and plunder the many. You may conclude with a great degree of certainty, that it, like all others of a similar nature, will be managed by influence and corruption, and that the period is not far distant, when this will be the case, if it should be adopted; for even now there are some among us, whose characters stand high in the public estimation, and who have had a principal agency in framing this constitution, who do not scruple to say, that this is the only practicable mode of governing a people, who think with that degree of freedom which the Americans do — this government will have in their gift a vast number of offices of great honor and emolument. The members of the legislature are not excluded from appointments; and twenty-five of them, as the case may be, being secured, any measure may be carried.

The rulers of this country must be composed of very different materials from those of any other, of which history gives us any account, if the majority of the legislature are not, before many years, entirely at the devotion of the executive — and these states will soon be under the absolute domination of one, or a few, with the fallacious appearance of being governed by men of their own election.

The more I reflect on this subject, the more firmly am I persuaded, that the representation is merely nominal — a mere burlesque; and that no security is provided against corruption and undue influence. No free people on earth, who have elected persons to legislate for them, ever reposed that confidence in so small a number. The British house of commons consists of five hundred and fifty-eight members; the number of inhabitants in Great-Britain, is computed at eight millions — this gives one member for a little more than fourteen thousand, which exceeds double the proportion this country can ever have: and yet we require a larger representation in proportion to our numbers, than Great-Britain, because this country is much more extensive, and differs more in its productions, interests, manners, and habits. The democratic branch of the legislatures of the several states in the union consists, I believe at present, of near two thousand; and this number was not thought too large for the security of liberty by the framers of our state constitutions: some of the states may have erred in this respect, but the difference between two thousand, and sixty-five, is so very great, that it will bear no comparison.

Brutus to the New Yorkers, 15 November 1787

ND Sheriff Calls in US Border Control Predator B Drone to Execute Search for $6K in Rustled Beef

Reminds me of Lincoln starting a civil war over a dead horse at Ft. Sumter.

Note the prominent emphasis on "law enforcement" at this government website (link). The use of military weaponry for law enforcement is the modus operandi of the US government at least since the Clinton regime used tanks to crush the Branch Davidians in Waco. 911 gave the strategy new impetus under the Bush regime, and the starry eyed leftist dupes who voted for Obama have witnessed nothing but a continuation of Bush policies under Obama building on the Patriot Act.

The crime here was a lousy misdemeanor offense, and escalated into a felony in part because of the sheriff's actions. More ominously, Federal level quasi-military resources were mobilized against citizens. The militarization of units of the FBI, DHS and BATFE, among others, is all part of the same pattern of Federals crossing the line into military tyranny (Is there any other kind?).

The LA Times has the story (link):

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

Some Gave All, Some Gave Nothing

How Do You Say "I Have a Pair" in Anglo Saxon?

This is how.

Toad Suck, Arkansas

Who would believe it?!

(link)

"Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison"

The greedy Marxists who outnumber conservatives on college faculties by three to one figured out long ago how to avoid the draft, subvert the values of America's children and future teachers of the young, and get rich doing it all at the same time.

It's been a veritable trinity of scams milked by the coward and follower classes: military conscription deferments for MA and PhD students, the tenure system which has permanently installed radicals nationwide, and now the most important, federally-backed student loans.

The Economist in September 2010 (link) noted the incredible disparity in the rates of college cost and income increases:

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

More recently Virginia Postrel thinks the reason costs have escalated is the federal student loan program itself, a veritable gravy train which guarantees rising costs for everything academic (link):


Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions. ...

If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. ...

[T]he number of slots at traditional colleges and universities is relatively fixed. A boost in student aid that increases demand is therefore likely to be reflected in prices rather than expanded enrollments. Over time, enrollments should rise, as they have in fact done. But many private schools in particular keep the size of their student bodies fairly stable to maintain their prestige or institutional character.

The IRS: Another Reason Not To Use A Credit Card

They're snooping on your transactions.

From an article in Barron's in September (link):

In a new program launched this year, the IRS is cross-checking taxpayers' reported incomes with their credit-card records.

So if you took a luxury world tour in a year you drew a modest income and left a trail on plastic, be prepared to defend your tax return. Through these credit-card checks, the IRS hopes to snag, among others, unscrupulous filers of Schedule C, used by taxpayers reporting profits and losses from businesses.

All in all, Schedule C filers are estimated to report just 57% of their income, leaving some $68 billion in unpaid taxes each year.

Good for David Cameron

"What was on offer is not in Britain's interest so I didn't agree to it."

"We're not in the euro and I'm glad we're not in the euro."

"We're never going to join the euro and we're never going to give up this kind of sovereignty that these countries are having to give up."


These lines have been scrubbed from revised UK sources such as the tabloid Daily Mail, but CBS News still has them (link).

When America gets a new president, the Anglo Saxons can repair their alliance with leadership such as this.

Congressional Approval Remains in the Tank!

Gallup has congressional job approval stuck at 13 and under 20 since May.

Representation without representation.

How About 10,000 US Representatives Instead of 435?

Many people, rightly in my opinion, point to the decline of religious faith, traditional morality and constitutional respect for both as a leading cause of our current discontents. In making this argument, however, some fall prey to an ahistorical understanding of the priority of the 1st Amendment, and miss an important remedy which animated the founding generation just as much did the principle of religious freedom.

The latest example of the myth of the priority of our 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is repeated by none other than John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America, for The Baltimore Sun (link), whose other observations I otherwise find wholly unobjectionable:

[T]he right to religious freedom — the first freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights — was of great importance to the framers of our Constitution.

Mr. Garvey operates under the common misapprehension that the 1st Amendment is somehow first because of James Madison's statements in various places about the priority of religious liberty as an unalienable right whose basis is in the creator. Accordingly Garvey quotes Madison, "This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society," as if this proves why The Bill of Rights starts the way it does and that we should therefore insist more urgently that 1st Amendment considerations somehow take the lead in our civil deliberations over contentious issues, especially as affecting institutions of The Church. It is to some extent an appeal to the authority of what has primacy, which one might expect of a Roman Catholic.

If Madison could hear this, however, he would no doubt laugh, because he himself authored what was the original first amendment, and it had nothing to do with freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, etc.

Mr. Garvey's ignorance of the historical situation is not unusual, inasmuch as most of us, if we are familiar at all with even the basic facts of history, are children of the federalists who prevailed at the founding and wrote the constitution. We do not remember the arguments of their opponents, the anti-federalists, nor the issues which animated them, probably because we were never taught them.

The short version of a part of this very complicated history is that there was a list of at least twelve amendments proposed in 1789, and what we call our 1st Amendment was actually third in that list, which, with numbers four through twelve, was ultimately ratified while the two preceding were not. These go largely unremarked today, which is a pity because they reveal that if anything animated the minds of the founders as a matter of first importance, it was the idea of adequate representation. And it was this which was a chief pre-occupation of the anti-federalists, who viewed the constitution as a federalist conception of a defective republicanism which co-opted and undermined local constituencies and state governments. To the men of the anti-federalist camp, the more the representation, the less the chance of despotism.

As an historical phenomenon, representation's importance in the founding era formed a unity with taxation, as in "no taxation without representation."

This is why the first article of the constitution concerns itself with establishing the legislative authority, which the founders considered the predominating power in the new government, and its power to tax, both of which were to be apportioned to the states by population. Hence the census. But the constitution failed to delimit the maximum size of legislative representation, only that the number of representatives should not exceed one for every 30,000, and thus amendments were proposed.

The original amendments 1 and 2 read as follows:

Article I:

After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Article II:

No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Because Article I was not ratified, the deficiency of the original constitution's provisions for representation, though hotly debated at the time, was never successfully remedied. The deficiency is that the constitution does not specify the "maximum district size", in the words of thirty-thousand.org (link), which happens to be a veritable cornucopia of scholarship on this problem. Its author points out that our US House of Representatives, if it followed the constitution's original intent, would now consist of 10,000 representatives instead of just 435, a number fixed by the Congress in 1929:

Because this part of the Constitution is still “defective”, Congress can choose to grant its constituents virtually any number of Representatives it deems appropriate. In fact, Congress can choose both the number of Representatives and the algorithm by which they are allocated among the states. In contrast, the role of the Census Bureau is limited to conducting the decennial census and applying, to that result, the apportionment algorithm specified by Congress in order to calculate the allocation of House memberships. 

No one alive today who takes politics seriously can say with a straight face that he feels adequately represented by any politician of any party. Gallup would not report polls indicating the extreme low esteem for Congress that it does were it otherwise. Congressmen are remote and aloof, unresponsive even to their erstwhile supporters. Senators are even worse, to say nothing of the president. This was precisely the future predicted by the anti-federalists.

It might come as something of a surprise, perhaps, to thirty-thousand.org, that the anti-federalists were none too happy even with the constitution's idea that "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand." Some of them could not imagine that one man could adequately represent so many people even as that.

Madison's attempt to set the representation progressively, stopping at one per fifty thousand, indicates something of his federalist sympathies, as well the limits of his imagination as to the potential growth of the American population.

In either eventuality, it must be said, Americans today would be better represented with more representatives than the few we currently have, whose nearly impenetrable incumbency makes them a veritable hereditary aristocracy of power and indeed tyranny over the lives of the Americans the founders intended them to represent.

What we have today is representation without representation, which is why Mr. Garvey rightly feels The Church to be under attack. Too much power is concentrated in too few hands, which is just the way the opponents of all that is good, true and beautiful like it.

The last thing they want is a US House of Representatives populated with 2300 Catholics.

The Market is Not a Leading Indicator

It is a market that has followed . . . the ratings agencies, the Congress, the Fed, the EU appendage du jour. Anyone with any sense knows this and doesn't need an analyst to explain it to him. The smart money remains out of the market.

Herds keep following, and mostly in fear.

Today we're basically back to August 2 and the debt ceiling fiasco, falling then from the 1260 level and rising to it now.

This is a market longing for the days of QE II in late 2010 and early 2011, but it isn't happening, probably because Ben Bernanke doesn't want to be accused of getting Barack Obama reelected.

But all that QE really could do was reproduce a high level around 1360, last seen in June 2008 before all hell broke loose. 1560 might as well be Mt. Everest.

One false move and it's . . . say . . . 575.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Splat.

Irrational Exuberance in Stocks and in Home Ownership Coincided Beginning After 1994

Home Prices Are Still At The Top Of Their Historical Range Before The Bubble

Note the inflation-adjusted similarity of the current index value to the late 1980s and the late 1970s. 

This means prices could continue to fall at least another 7-8 percent from April 2011 levels, and easily overshoot to the downside as the imbalances continue to correct.

And it could take a very long time.

(source)

The Day The Jobs Stood Still: Obaamu Baracka Nikto

About 2 million fewer total non-farm workers are employed today than in January 2009, despite growth in the population.

Homeownership Under Obama Hits a New All-Time Low of 59.2 Percent

Even a broken clock is right twice a day:

"This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement."

-- President Obama, quoted here, Dec. 6, 2011

The fact is the moment has already broken against the middle class.

Nobody is fighting to get into the middle class. The middle class is fighting to stay middle class, and is losing.

The president, who only now protests that he would rescue the middle class as the election season heats up, has actually presided over its demise, turning the middle class into the working class renters of yesteryear, and worse, according to this story from August 5, 2011 at CNN Money (link):

Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters.

Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter -- its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.

Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.

In fact, once they factored in delinquent mortgage borrowers (the ones who are likely to lose their homes at some point), Morgan Stanley calculated that the home ownership rate is more like 59.2%.

That's the lowest level since the Census Bureau started keeping quarterly records back in 1965 (before that, it recorded home ownership rates once a decade). The Census Bureau's statistics, however, do not factor in mortgage delinquencies.


When it comes to savings, the president speaks of modest savings and secure retirement as his goals for us, when the actual picture is a grim present and a worse future.

A survey using 2009 data and making the rounds in May 2011 said nearly half of Americans couldn't come up with $2,000 for an emergency within 30 days (link).

And just two days ago a story (link) reported on a different survey which suggests that over half of the 151 million American workers have less than $25,000 saved while over half of the already retired are in the same boat:

More than half of all workers, 56%, say they have less than $25,000 in savings, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. ...

More than half of retirees, 54%, report they have less than $25,000 saved. That's up dramatically from 2006, when 42% said they had less than that.


The most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (link) confirms that there has been a steady decline in the personal savings rate under Obama from 5.3 percent in 2010 to an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, a nearly 30 percent decline from what was already an inadequate level.

Some unemployed and now homeless families in hardest hit states like Florida are reduced to living in their cars, trucks and vans because shelters are already full. Their plight was the subject of a recent story (link) on 60 Minutes.

The American middle class is under siege on every front, from jobs, to homeownership, to family formation, to savings, to retirement. All this has unfolded under Obama's watch, who vacations, golfs, parties, fund-raises and speechifies, railing against business and the rich at every opportunity. But it is the middle class which is disappearing as he speaks, and he's done nothing to stop it.

The true meaning of class warfare.

Lawyer for Joshua Clough of the Hutaree Militia Turned His Client for The State

If you were 29 and your lawyer offered you 5 instead of life after 20 months in the slammer, what the hell do you think you would do?

On Monday, nearly two years later, Clough cut a deal with the government in admitting to his role in the plot -- a confession that will land him in prison for five years. The deal spared him a potential life sentence.

"This was a difficult choice. I guided him to this decision, and he's comfortable with it," said Clough's lawyer, Randall Roberts, who wouldn't say whether Clough is cooperating against the remaining defendants.

This is why they don't release you on bond, so they can grind you down, working on you day after day, week after week, month after month, until you crack.

None dare call it tyranny: "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial."

Read the whole story in The Detroit Free Press (link).

John Tamny Believes The Mad Dream of Libertarian Ideology

Briggs forgets his limitations

"[A]s humans we’re free to do anything we want so long as our actions don’t infringe on the freedoms of others. ... [W]e as Americans have infinite natural rights."

-- John Tamny (link)

Just taken at face value the statements are a self-contradiction because the first logically excludes the second.

To qualify the range of permissible action is to limit the range, which therefore cannot be infinite, by definition. In fact, the very resort to so qualifying the range in the first place is a sort of back-handed compliment to the limitations which the underlying order places on all the constituent elements of the world.

Conservatives recognize in the underlying order the divine, which is the basis of the rights. Accordingly the rights themselves have limitations, just as also do we. As surely as our common end is the grave, no one is at liberty to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre and to hope to escape arrest. The right to free speech is not absolute.

And to qualify infinite natural rights as somehow American reminds one of nothing so much as the unreflective boosterism of the by-gone era of manifest destiny.

Conservatives recognize their own limitations. Libertarians do not. Therefore the latter are dangerous, especially at the movies.

The Next Bailout: Think Fed Leverage at 53:1 is Bad? Try the FHA at 417:1.

So says Fortune (link), or else it's curtains for Ginnie Mae:

The second catalyst [for government support of housing to decline] is the FHA, which looks increasingly like it will need a bailout. In its annual report to Congress, released a few weeks ago, the FHA reported estimated economic net worth of $2.6 billion backing $1.078 trillion insurance in force, for a capital ratio of just 0.24% (or 417x leverage). One year ago, the capital ratio was 0.50%, and in 2007 it was 6.4%.  The FHA's annual report claims it's adequately capitalized, but this conclusion relies on home prices not falling at all from here. ...

The government will have to pony up to recapitalize the FHA. FHA mortgages are fed into Ginnie Mae MBS, and Ginnie Mae MBS are explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. So if the FHA runs out of funds, the government will have little choice but to step up. To do otherwise would be a default – not out of the question these days, but not very likely either.

FHA and VA loans fill void left by private lending

Dr. Housing Bubble weighs in with the big picture (link):

The trend for lower home prices has been baked in for nearly a year now. Last summer we had a mini burst of buyers thanks to artificial tax credits and low interest rates. I still view the current market as being designed for the nothing down leverage happy mentality that is present in our society. You have a large number of buyers purchasing homes with 3.5 percent down FHA mortgages and the default rates are soaring in this category. ...



Over half a decade ago I knew the bigger issue would be the cognitive dissonance that would linger from a post-bubble world. Many now realize that what occurred in the housing market was a once in a lifetime spending binge induced by debt. Yet some still think those days are only around the corner. The global debt crisis will not allow that. This is why most of the mortgage market is now dominated by the government. How many foreign governments or investors are going to trust Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley when they drop by their door steps with new mortgage backed securities? I think some have learned their lessons well and the data reflects this.


The housing market was bound to have a day of reckoning and it looks like it is slowly unraveling. It was simply impossible to have a shadow inventory growing with banks just ignoring the reality. We are now going into year five of the housing bubble bursting. You have millions of those in foreclosure who have not made a payment in one to even two years.


Ultimately the burden falls largely on the middle class. The Federal Reserve has a primary mission to protect banks. That is their bottom line. They are not looking out for the best interest of homeowners or working Americans. For the cost of the bailouts and shadow loans, they could have paid off close to every mortgage in the country. Yet even principal reductions were never on the radar because to do that, it would be to admit a financially broken system. Instead they opted to give out $7.7 trillion in backdoor loans to banks and forced the public to deal with “free market” solutions. An interesting situation no doubt but the problems we are now facing are based on this two-tiered system.



Confounded Interest points out (link) just how high the FHA default rates are:

As of October 2011 17.02% of FHA loans were at some stage of delinquency. The serious delinquency rate is 9.05%.


Clearly another government sponsored enterprise is repeating the mistakes of the past as we speak, having destroyed its capital base with non-performing loans swelling its balance sheet. FHA obviously should require down payments which are much higher than 3.5 percent in order to strengthen its bottom line, but it's probably too late to avoid bailing it out for the mistakes it has already made.