Category Archives: Media

European By Any Other Name

America, Europe, Journalism, Media, Socialism, The State, Welfare

The stock characters we see on TV have certain stock phrases. Triteness goes with the Talker’s territory. A variation on a theme is as follows: “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states.” Obama is “converting America into a European style social-welfare state.” This, in the teeth of a 160 percent debt to GDP, a figure easily arrived at by adding to US liabilities, not only the paltry “$14.5 trillion in federal debt,” but the $2.7 trillion in state and local debt, “plus the $6.5 trillion federal mortgage guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

These figures, cited here, don’t, I believe, fully account for the promises made on the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security fiscal fronts.

How European is America? Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com has grappled admirably with a reality ordinarily avoided in our mummified media. “America’s welfare state is not a principality,” he writes. “It is a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world.”

Hey, just like our military, which, as I’ve contended, “works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government.”

Back to the “welfare/entitlement empire“:

Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018. Counting state Medicaid expenditures, this one program cost taxpayers $425 billion in 2010, soaring to $800 billion by 2018. Under Obamacare, 85 million Americans will soon be on Medicaid, growing to nearly 100 million by 2021, according to the CBO.

But there are 184 additional federal, means-tested welfare programs, most jointly financed and administered with the states. In addition to Medicaid is the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Also included is Food Stamps, now officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly 42 million Americans were receiving food stamps in 2010, up by a third since November, 2008. That is why President Obama’s budget projects spending $75 billion on Food Stamps in 2011, double the $36 billion spent in 2008.

But that is not the only federal nutrition program for the needy. There is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which targets assistance to pregnant women and mothers with small children. There is the means tested School Breakfast Program and School Lunch Program. There is the Summer Food Service Program for Children. There are the lower income components of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). Then there is the Nutrition Program for the Elderly. All in all, literally cradle to grave service. By 2010, Federal spending for Food and Nutrition Assistance overall had climbed to roughly $100 billion a year.

Then there is federal housing assistance, totaling $77 billion in 2010. This includes expenditures for over 1 million public housing units owned by the government. It includes Section 8 rental assistance for nearly another 4 million private housing units. Then there is Rural Rental Assistance, Rural Housing Loans, and Rural Rental Housing Loans. Also included is Home Investment Partnerships (HOME), Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Housing for Special Populations (Elderly and Disabled), Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA), Emergency Shelter Grants, the Supportive Housing program, the Single Room Occupancy program, the Shelter Plus Care program, and the Home Ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program, among others.

READ ON. And don’t listen to anything that comes out of the mouths of America’s Sino– and Europhobic bobbleheads, whose grasp of reality is tenuous at best.

Steve Forbes: Johnny-Come-Lately To Gold

Debt, Economy, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Media, Ron Paul

The mummified media, the financial press included, called Rep. Ron Paul a lunatic when he explained again and again that “a return to the gold standard by the United States would help the nation solve a variety of economic, fiscal, and monetary ills,” created when President Richard Nixon abolished the Gold Standard.

“Such a move would help to stabilize the value of the dollar, restore confidence among foreign investors in U.S. government bonds, and discourage reckless federal spending. … With a stable currency, it is ‘much harder’ for governments to borrow excessively. … Without lax Federal Reserve System monetary policies that led to the printing of too much money, the housing bubble would not have been nearly as severe.”

You don’t say?!”

Actually, these are Steve Forbes’ words, not Paul’s. Forbes is currently singing from the Paul hymn-sheet, and it is music to the ear.

Of course, this is not to say one should embrace Paul’s political opponents, just because they’ve arrived at the correct economic conclusion, now that it’s probably too late.

Goldbugs know that gold is a necessary financial hedge in the survival on the road to serfdom.

Watch out! Gold is bad for government health. Remember Executive Order 6102? FDR, idolized by BHO and many a Republican alike—by almost all offshoots of the duopoly, in fact—forbade “the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates” at pains of punishment: a fine of “not more than $10,000, or “imprisoned for not more than ten years or both.”

On The Mike Church Show

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Media, South-Africa

On Monday morning, May 9, at 8:05 ET, I will be talking to the King Dude, the one and only Mike Church. Much marginalized by the “DeceptiCONS,” as he calls the custodians of allowable opinion in contemporary America, Mike is “a man, a myth and a machine of clear Constitutional thought.”

Topics: We’ll touch on my new book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. You can pre-order the book from the publisher. In about 10 days, it will be available from Amazon too. If you pre-order from the publisher, shipping is free, where ever you live (South Africa included).

Praise for Into the Cannibal’s Pot is here.

We will be discussing the bin laden orgy too.

I hope I am compos mentis at 5:05AM PT.

UPDATE II: Beck Bucks The System (If “Incoherent & Meandering”)

Glenn Beck, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Media, Uncategorized

Yes, I’ve been critical of the irrational, illogical twists and turns in the thinking of Glenn Beck in recent months. (Here). “Skeptic” (the magazine) could use Beck’s conspiracy building tactics to fill an issue on irrational thinking. However, besides exuding goodness, Beck also radiates rebellion. Whatever one thinks of Beck, he is a rebel. And like all real rebels, he too must secede from the system. Glenn’s departure from FoxNews is an act of secession. FoxNews is the system. Beck is no longer able to abide by the ideological and disciplinary constraints imposed by the Republican establishment’s megaphone.

Beck has promised his jubilant adversaries that they were “going to pray for the days of 5:00PM,” intimating that a force of nature has been unleashed on the world. Or as the Judge put it, “Bigger, better and more Beck.”

Go Glenn! Of course, as I had hoped (see “Beck has Left the Building”), The Judge may stand to inherit the slot.

UPDATE (April 7) I: I hear here, and on Facebook, lots of cheerleading for one program, The Judge’s. Or Stossell’s—who is marvelous, but still very much within the remits of conventional, by-the-book libertarianism. I love them both to bits. But none of you so-called “independent thinkers” has noticed that these shows tolerate, 1) the must-have, establishment Tea Partiers, and 2) the Reason and other narrow-faction libertarianism. The shows are still within the, admittedly, wonderful box. Those who say Beck is part of the system are as insane as Beck (who is a good type of insane; a lovable goof, as Huggs put it). Beck is a natural secessionist.

I’m surprised that you’ve all fallen to your knees before (our) ideological correctness, dismissing Beck’s brave act of secession, b/c of his errors of thought. I have news for you: In the liberty-oriented community, people tend to huddle in atrophying intellectual attics, and quibble about detecting and expelling contrarians. Dare to dissent on this or the other point of purity, and keepers of the flame will take it upon themselves to read you out of the movement. This, naturally, makes for tribalism, not individualism. The bad, moreover, have a nasty habit of crowding out the good. Or as one wag once said to me (was it Randy Barnett? I can’t recall), “Quality is never the result of intellectual purges: the most creative and independent thinkers are the first to go.” That makes perfect psychological sense: those who remain feel more secure, group cohesion having trounced intellectual vitality.

UPDATE II (April 9): Larry Auster:

Glenn Beck’s announcement that he is going to “transition off” his daily TV program later this year, whatever that means, is about as coherent as Sarah Palin’s July 2009 announcement of her reasons for resigning from the governorship. Has anyone noticed that Beck, like Palin, is inveterately incapable of forming a cogent sentence, and that one of the reasons for this, as with Palin, is that almost everything he says revolves around himself?

Indubitably true.