The compliant voter keeps electing local officials who’ll use their police powers to pick from the pockets of wealth creators so as to give to a more powerful constituency: members of the public sector unions. WSJ:
“Cities across the nation are raising property taxes, largely citing rising pension and health-care costs for their employees and retirees.
In Pennsylvania, the township of Upper Moreland is bumping up property taxes for residents by 13.6% in 2011. Next door the city of Philadelphia this year increased the tax 9.9%. In New York, Saratoga Springs will collect 4.4% more in property taxes in 2011; Troy will increase taxes by 1.9%.
… Some cities have also pushed unions to reopen contracts in an attempt to pare benefits or raise workers’ contributions for pensions and health care. They have faced stiff resistance from some unions that argue it’s unfair to penalize workers for a financial crisis that isn’t their fault. Others have agreed to some cutbacks.”
Socialism is secondary to state squandering—and a consequence of it. America is a debtor nation. The defining characteristic of the Unites States is debt—public and private; macro and micro, federal and state.
I sincerely hope you are not invested in municipal bonds. The “$3 trillion municipal bond market, where state and local governments go to finance their schools, highways, and other projects,” is about to come crashing down.
“60 Minutes” (CBS): “By now, just about everyone in the country is aware of the federal deficit problem, but you should know that there is another financial crisis looming involving state and local governments.”
It has gotten much less attention because each state has a slightly different story. But in the two years, since the ‘great recession’ wrecked their economies and shriveled their income, the states have collectively spent nearly a half a trillion dollars more than they collected in taxes. There is also a trillion dollar hole in their public pension funds.
The states have been getting by on billions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, but the day of reckoning is at hand. The debt crisis is already making Wall Street nervous, and some believe that it could derail the recovery, cost a million public employees their jobs and require another big bailout package that no one in Washington wants to talk about.
‘The most alarming thing about the state issue is the level of complacency,’ Meredith Whitney, one of the most respected financial analysts on Wall Street and one of the most influential women in American business, told correspondent Steve Kroft.
Whitney made her reputation by warning that the big banks were in big trouble long before the 2008 collapse. Now, she’s warning about a financial meltdown in state and local governments.
‘It has tentacles as wide as anything I’ve seen. I think next to housing this is the single most important issue in the United States, and certainly the largest threat to the U.S. economy'” …
“…The problem with that, according to Wall Street analyst Meredith Whitney, is that no one really knows how deep the holes are. She and her staff spent two years and thousands of man hours trying to analyze the financial condition of the 15 largest states. She wanted to find out if they would be able to pay back the money they’ve borrowed and what kind of risk they pose to the $3 trillion municipal bond market, where state and local governments go to finance their schools, highways, and other projects.
‘How accurate is the financial information that’s public on the states? And municipalities,’ Kroft asked.
‘The lack of transparency with the state disclosure is the worst I have ever seen …’ Whitney said”
UPDATE (Dec. 21): The Guardian (UK) has taken note: “US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds. … American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn.”
The problem with the Commonwealth of Virgina’s pleasing legal victory in challenging the constitutionality of Obama’s “healthscare” is this: The individual mandate and much of the health care bill may be manifestly violative, but most of the limits the Constitution placed on the federales (and the courts themselves) are no longer upheld by the courts (or by Congress, that other co-equal branch of government), starting with the Tenth Amendment.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So, as PBS’s News Hour reported, once again so well (appending as it always does a PDF document of the Decision), “Federal judge Henry Hudson ruled Monday afternoon that a major provision of the health care reform law is unconstitutional. In his decision, the judge sided with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who argued that the Congress does not have the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance. ‘The Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution,’ Judge Hudson wrote.”
But along could come the Supreme Court Justices and nullify the health-care preferences of the people of Virginia. That’s because the framers’ constitutional dispensation is now nothing but a sad joke. The Appellate Court could beat the SCOTUS to it.
A manifestly malevolent stranger gropes, feels, and frightens this reporter’s small little girl. And the attack bitch does not let up; she persists in the futile exercise. The little girl has the healthier attitude. She screams bloody murder and doesn’t stop, even as her mother tries to subdue her. I would not subdue her.
Why doesn’t an infantile American people listen to the sounds coming out of the mouths of babes?
I will not be flying anytime soon. I urge you all to do the same.
Good-to-be-groped: This is the Tribune reporter’s impetus; help parents turn their kids into malleable little sheep.
I see that the newspaper has blocked the shocking YouTube in which Mandy, its reporter’s daughter, is frisked, groped, pawed by a TSA agent who only gets more aroused and adamant with each yelp from the tiny terrorist.
All Big Daddy aims at is to help make groping a game. Perhaps Myron, who was kind enough to send the clip, can locate the transcript of the actual newspaper report.
UPDATE I: Some state politicians are tabling objections. This via New Jersey’s Back Room:
State Sen. Diane Allen (R-Edgewater Park), state Sen. Michael Doherty (R-Washington Twp.) and other legislators will join Deborah Jacobs, executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, at the Statehouse on Monday to discuss their opposition to the new Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) screening procedures at United States’ airports and the nationwide reports of passenger abuse.
Doherty, Allen, and Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle, Assemblywoman Alison McHose, Assemblyman John DiMaio and Assemblyman Erik Peterson will announce the introduction of a resolution urging Congress to immediately review the new TSA screening procedures and the reports of passenger abuse occurring at airports.
The problem I foresee is with backroom deals, whereby the bastards develop a certain system of what I call sectional privileges and rights, based on professional need and proximity to power. That’s the problem. The new Tea Party pols have been silent so far. Or, as far as I know.
UPDATE II (Nov. 16) JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS. After a day of radiating and rogering innocent men and women, One TSA agent urged WND, “to remind people that the policies come from Washington, including … President Obama. The individual agents, including Christians, the agent said, are as helpless and upset as the passengers.”
“‘Over the years TSA has certainly become more invasive in its SOP procedures. First the changes regarding liquid carry-ons, and now the implementation of Standard Pat-Downs along with the roll out of Advanced Imaging Technology. As each and every change has been handed-down and implemented I would cringe anticipating an understandable negative reaction from the general public (not to mention myself),’ the agent said.”
“‘Attack the system,’ the agent asked. ‘Out the misguided bureaucrats … but spare our Christian brothers.'”
[SNIP]
Where have we heard the “I was just following orders” excuse? Damn this brother to hell. If he were a true Christian he’d quit his cushy job rather than abuse other human beings.
UPDATE III: PENILE PAT-DOWN. That was the lot of radio host Owen JJ Stone of “The Alex Jones Show.” “Stone [noted] how the TSA thug directly patted down his testicles, penis and backside while his hand was inside Stone’s pants. Stone was initially embarrassed to reveal the full scope of the groping but related the details of what amounted to nothing less than outright sexual molestation.”
As the lede in “Congress: Call Off Your TSA Attack Dogs!” details, I was touched inappropriately. The “touching” caught me by surprise because my molester did not utter a murmur, just did her thing. What’s more, I did not know that these proceedings had been put in place. As a news person, I would have known had they been widely reported at the time. I didn’t because they were not.
I don’t intend to fly. That piece of dreck Janet Napolitano says that the traveler who doesn’t submit should seek alternative means of traveling. Does the deranged dodo not know that people fly for business and work-related purposes? How are you supposed to get to DC from, for instance, where I live? Embark on a two week train odyssey? She’s messing with livelihoods.
Predictably, some statists on Fox News such as Bill O’Reilly and his blond Squad don’t seem particularly perturbed.
Did you know that the nation’s airports are not required to have Transportation Security Administration screeners checking passengers at security checkpoints? The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period. Now, with the TSA engulfed in controversy and hated by millions of weary and sometimes humiliated travelers, Rep. John Mica, the Republican who will soon be chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is reminding airports that they have a choice.
There is no substitute for intelligence (as in IQ). The Examiner again:
many security experts have urged TSA to adopt techniques, used with great success by the Israeli airline El Al, in which passengers are observed, profiled, and most importantly, questioned before boarding planes. So TSA created a program known as SPOT — Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques. It began hiring what it called behavior detection officers, who would be trained to notice passengers who acted suspiciously. TSA now employs about 3,000 behavior detection officers, stationed at about 160 airports across the country.
The problem is, they’re doing it all wrong. A recent Government Accountability Office study found that TSA “deployed SPOT nationwide without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment.” They haven’t settled on the standards needed to stop bad actors.
“It’s not an Israeli model, it’s a TSA, screwed-up model,” says Mica. …
