Welfare-Warfare State

Carlo Ponzi, Alias Uncle Sam

"We are not placing a burden on our children. We are placing a burden on ourselves. The government is borrowing money to pay for the systems. We are therefore raising our level of indebtedness. Our children are not going to be burdened with this; we are going to be burdened with it when the kids get smart enough to pull the plug. They are going to stiff the creditors who have bought Treasury bonds and Treasury bills, and that means the banks that have bought them, the money market funds which have bought them, the retirement funds which have bought them, and anyone else who has bought them, including the central banks of the world." Continue reading →

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GDP Was Strong in Q3; Why Did That Happen?

"Weaponized Keynesianism happened. Government defense expenditures surged by 13 percent between July and August. The Pentagon spent significantly more on weapons, training, operations, and maintenance. (Ammunition purchases, for instance, doubled.) Had these expenditures not occurred last quarter, the U.S. economy would have grown at a mere 1.36 percent, instead of 2.0 percent." Continue reading →

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Amid Austerity, Greek Doctors Offer Help to Poor

"Until recently, Greece had a typical European health system, with employers and individuals contributing to a fund that with government assistance financed universal care. Things changed in July 2011, when Greece signed a supplemental loan agreement with international lenders to ward off financial collapse. Now Greeks must pay all costs out of pocket after their benefits expire. The changes are forcing increasing numbers of people to seek help outside the traditional health care system. Elena, for example, was referred to Dr. Syrigos by doctors in an underground movement that has sprung up here to care for the uninsured." Continue reading →

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Fraud: Medicare vs. Walmart

"In 2010, Medicare disbursed $524 billion. The number of people receiving funds in 2012 was 49.4 million. For comparison, take a very large business that has high revenues. Number three is Walmart with $447 billion. Walmart has 100 million customers a week. How large is fraud against Medicare? It runs about $60 billion a year. How large is fraud committed against the Walmart company? A large fraud against Walmart reported recently was a $13 million credit card and gift card fraud. A recent large fraud case against Medicare was $430 million. Earlier this year, there was another large case of $452 million against Medicare." Continue reading →

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Yes, Virginia, Social Security Really Is Going Bankrupt.

"At the heart of every defensive of Social Security's actuarial solvency is a series of lies. It is difficult to know who started the lie, but if you follow the lies, you always get back to the truth, and the truth is admitted by the Trustees of the Social Security trust fund. This is the best-case scenario. There is a worse-case scenario: the inevitable one." Continue reading →

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The Nine States with the Most Underfunded Pensions

"According to data released this week by Milliman, Inc. and by the Pew Center on the States, there was a $859 billion gap between the obligations of the country’s 100 largest public pension plans and the funding of these pensions. In 2010, only Wisconsin’s pension funds were fully funded. Nine states, meanwhile, were 60% funded or less — this would mean that at least 40% of the amount the state owes current and future retirees is not in the state’s coffers." Continue reading →

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1971: The Year That Nixon Chose Gold Over Paper

"The U.S. was now free from the shackles of that barbarous relic. It was high time for gold to get dumped into the dustbin of history. No longer were people supposed to think of it as money. And being that gold's industrial uses are minimal, its price was supposed to languish until the end of time. Also of note in 1971, Merrill Lynch went public. It was only the second brokerage firm to do so. That same year, it released its 'Merrill Lynch is bullish on America' ad during The World Series. Oh...and The Nasdaq was also launched in 1971. So as you can see, Paper Money America was about to be unleashed!" Continue reading →

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The ‘Red Pill’ Of Economics

"More and more people are starting to wonder if central banks like the Bank of England and The Fed can just 'rip up' the debt that they've bought via Quantitative Easing, and reduce the national debt of these countries with the stroke of a key. Asking this question, and thinking about the implications of it, is the equivalent of taking the 'Red Pill' of economics. If you start thinking about the possibility that the central bank could just rip up a government's debt, with few negative ramifications, then you might start thinking about government finances in a totally new way that makes you uncomfortable." Continue reading →

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British ‘End of Life’ Panels Are Bad News for Everyone

"General practitioners are being encouraged by the Government Department of Health to make lists of people who they believe are not going to live long. But that's not all. There are other unmistakable statements in the report that make it clear the mandate to provide end-of-life care is going to be aggressively implemented throughout the British state-run health care system. Death programs are like any other government service, actually. They will be continually expanded and made more complex to ensure the expansion of the departments in question. Eventually, people could die simply to ensure that a department meets certain quotas." Continue reading →

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Lew Rockwell explains how the Federal Reserve Enables War, Empire, and Destroys the Middle Class

"The accused Federal Reserve bomb plotter's home country wants details on his case. While this may make headlines, we ask Lew Rockwell of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute about one aspect of the Federal Reserve that has not made front page news: how the Fed, with its printing press, may be making war easier. After all, if the people of the United States were asked to write a check every year to the IRS in order to fund the exploding deficits and rising interest payments on the national debt, would they continue to support all these wars? Randolph Bourne may have famously quipped that 'war is the health of the state,' but it isn't the health of the economy, this is for certain." Continue reading →

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