 |
| English: Thomas Nast's most famous drawing, "Merry Old Santa Claus", from the January 1, 1881 edition of Harper's Weekly. Thomas Nast immortalized Santa Claus' current look with an initial illustration in an 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly, as part of a large illustration titled "A Christmas Furlough" in which Nast set aside his regular news and political coverage to do a Santa Claus drawing. The popularity of that image prompted him to create another illustration in 1881. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
BRH is helping to spread the word...but...YOU can help! To the right, you'll see Dr. Anderson's picture! Click on that picture and "start following" Dr. Anderson's blog and comment on one or more of his articles...Please leave contact info because 20 randomly selected individuals will receive a copy of one of his books! If you have a preference, ask for it! Don't forget he'll need an address where the book should be sent!
In the history of mankind, no nation with a fiat currency (a currency not backed by something of value, like gold) has been able to resist the temptation to inflate its currency to benefit certain parties. There is really no difference between the government stealing from future taxpayers to benefit corporations, or industries, or farmers, or green energy and stealing from taxpayers present and future to pay for entitlements. It is still stealing.
The leaders in a democracy must derive their power continuously from the consent of the people. That is one of the purposes of having a budget, and for having our elected legislators vote on it in real time. Our founding fathers envisioned patriotic Americans rotating through Congress, keeping it honest. Instead we prefer that every Congressman and Senator stay in Washington for the longest possible time. Why? The longer you stay, the more Santa Claus money you can send back home. Santa Claus money allows governments to tax future taxpayers without their consent. Wasn’t taxation without representation the principle issue that our founding fathers found so intolerable that they organized a revolution?
This Santa Claus money has robbed our nation of its self-reliance and industriousness. It now encourages class warfare. When Obama says that taxes need to be dramatically raised on the rich to benefit the poor, he is ignoring the fact that even if he took every dime from the rich, he could not balance our budget and service our debt at the same time without drastically cutting existing entitlements. He does not say that the absorption of all that capital by the government hurts real businesses, which create real jobs, and pay real wages and taxes. We already have the highest corporate tax rates in the world, driving businesses to other countries and actually lowering total tax revenue collected. We are watching European countries even now come to grips with their addiction to borrowed money. We not only borrow money, we create it with a stroke of a computer and print some more when we need it. That’s one big reason we have been able to avoid disaster as long as we have. No other country in the world has the capacity or the gall of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to ignore all honest accounting practices and all checks and balances to manipulate markets, interest rates, and money supply.
The current president appeals to class warfare and envy in order to take everyone’s eye off of the basic systemic dishonesty in our government. I believe that inequality of income in America is shameful. The greediness of CEOs in America is egregious. All of this was made possible by a dishonest government giving handouts and tax breaks to its friends with Santa Claus money. But this is a side issue that, even if reversed tomorrow by paying every CEO $1 per year, we could not balance our budget or pay off our debt. I’m afraid I would be tossed out of a Republican rally or a Democratic rally.
Most Americans will gladly look away from Europe and believe that it can’t happen to us. They have forgotten that the mighty Soviet Union went down the same path that America is on until its currency was worthless. Did it matter that they spent printed money trying to keep up with Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, or their war with Afghanistan, or for socialist programs? Of course not. The Soviet empire crashed. Americans, rich and poor, want to continue to game the system at the expense of taxpayers in the future and other countries using Santa Claus money. This is nothing new. It has ruined countries and civilizations for more than 2000 years. For example, I don’t care if you are a fireman or a teacher or a policeman or a garbage collector or a paramedic. You did not earn a pension that equals or exceeds your yearly salary when you retire early. If you have such a deal, you got it because governments and unions agreed to rip off those people who are not employed by some level of government. I put in 38 years of incredibly stressful work in trauma centers and emergency departments and the government never provided me with such benefits. I didn’t expect them to.
Whatever the government chooses to subsidize in the name of “help” creates a dependency class. Many middle class Americans would rather have two years of unemployment benefits than a job. So many Americans want to be paid for contributing nothing to society. Do you believe that the number of truly disabled Americans increased five-fold since 2008, or that many people will use any excuse to game the system if Santa Claus money is freely available? Since the war on poverty began in the 1960s, we have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing single mothers. What incentive does she have to get married or finish her education or get a job when she would lose eight different types of government aid by doing so?
Some say that having 47 per cent of Americans now on some type of government assistance is not doing enough. Others think that allowing families to earn up to $47,000 without paying any federal taxes is not enough help. Our president has already stated publicly that he did not care if taxing the rich produced any increase in government revenue. He knew that the rich would avoid the taxes with loopholes paid for by Santa Claus money. He wanted to do this out of “fairness.” He wanted to punish rich people because they are successful. It doesn’t matter to him how they earned their money, or that without these rich people, there would be no non-government employers.
In Obama’s view, the government should decide who is successful. This level of class warfare and abandonment of the family values of our past, as well as our Constitution, is unprecedented from a president of the United States. Of course big business and big banks and Wall Street are corrupt. Our government caused much of this corruption with Santa Claus money. Real capitalism, not adulterated by phony, stolen, borrowed, or created money from the government is the best system for prosperity that man has ever created. We are now more socialist than capitalist. Just look at where big government has brought us.
The fact is that the fifty-three per cent of Americans who do pay taxes are way overtaxed and over-regulated. The problem in America has never been the lack of taxation. It has always been a lack of control over spending. Of course Mr. Romney wants to keep his tax returns private. He has used every tax break and loophole financed by Santa Claus money to pay the least amount of taxes possible. Although Obama has a socialist agenda and Romney has a capitalist agenda, it no longer matters. They are both liars, neither one willing to tell America that recovery from addiction is going to be painful. Our creditors are not going to let us continue to turn out Santa Claus money much longer. If you follow this blog, I will tell you why.
I am a physician. In an ideal world without Santa Claus money I would like the concept of nationalized single-payer health insurance on one condition. We should pay for it as we go. Is it too much to ask that the government make the necessary decisions to balance our budget? When we pay as we go, we have to make those difficult decisions that Santa Claus money allows government and individuals and families to avoid indefinitely. We have avoided making any rules limiting the amount of money that can be spent on an elderly person who is dying. We spend more money on lost causes than any nation on this earth.
The government doesn’t want to be attacked by every person who wants to live to be 100. Families often want everything done for elderly parents and grandparents, no matter how futile it is. These kinds of decisions can be avoided by everybody if the government prints more money and pays for doctors, medications, nurses, mechanical ventilators, and dialysis for everyone to live the last three months of their life in an intensive care unit. Santa Claus money doesn’t require honest discussion about end of life issues. I’m not advocating euthanasia. I’m calling for a return to sanity in healthcare, spending the money we can afford where it will do the most good. I want an honest president to face the cameras and tell America that we cannot have all of the medical care we want at government expense using Santa Claus money.
All social programs would have to be drastically reduced to afford Obamacare as a pay as you go program. Adding another gigantic Santa Claus program now, without making the drastic cuts necessary in our bloated budget, simply increases the size and control of government over us all, and hastens our financial Armageddon.
How many addicts are going to vote for someone who pledges to cut off their Santa Claus money? What possible incentive due the 47% who pay no federal taxes have to vote for someone who pledges to cut taxes? There is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on the most critical issue of all, Santa Claus money. Neither wants the pain of withdrawal. Neither wants to tell Americans that we face gigantic cuts in all government programs once the election is over regardless of who is elected. Why?
It is impossible to borrow your way out of debt. We know that instinctively, but we keep doing it because we are addicts. Our government keeps throwing stolen money after stolen money. All of the bailouts in this country and all of the bailouts in Europe will ultimately fail, each bailout making the final collapse more painful. Nobody wants to hear this. I don’t know who will win this election, but the winner will be the man who organizes the most addicts of Santa Claus money. Obama has a real advantage here, since he can create dependency groups by decree.
Not only can he create new dependency classes, the Federal Reserve has long ago crossed every line of honesty to keep the country from crashing before the election. We have been in the twilight zone of corruption since 2008. There is no level of dishonesty and fraud that our government will not stoop to in order to keep the music going. Even the dying European countries are laughing at America’s creative financing. Countries in Europe would not sink to our level of deceit even to keep their country viable. We have been committed to continuous rounds of “stimulus” with Santa Claus money. Think of a dying patient who needs a larger shot of epinephrine every five minutes to stay alive. Not one American in a hundred could explain how our government could possibly buy its own bonds with money it printed in its own mint. Our Federal Reserve has been doing this since 2008, trillions of dollars of bonds, to manipulate the global bond market and lower long term interest rates. This is called quantitative easing. Since the FED cannot lower interest rates to less than zero, they can only try to hold them down by manipulating the bond market. Don’t you love Fed-speak?
In the Fed’s first round of QE (quantitative easing) in 2008 through early 2010, it bought $1.25 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities and $300 billion of Treasury securities and debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Does it bother you that our Federal government “owns” the majority of all mortgages in America now? In the second round of QE in 2010 and 2011, the Fed bought $800 billion of U.S. treasury bonds. A third round of QE is planned for later this year, sooner if necessary. Wait, there’s more. If the stock market begins to falter, the FED has a plan to buy stocks and stimulate a “recovery.” As one person in a FED meeting commented, “Buying stocks during an election year would favor the incumbent President.”
Somebody recently pointed out to the FED that it was not authorized to buy stocks. No problemo. They buy them through “intermediaries,” says Bernanke. Imagine how much money the intermediary can make knowing in advance that he is going to buy billions of dollars of stocks with Santa Claus money. To minimize the profit to any one brokerage, they would buy indexed funds and raise the entire market. Of course, many index funds are weighted by capitalization. A novice would know which stock in any index would profit the most.
The most important thing to know about the stock market is when to buy and when to sell. If you are a Wall Street insider, you know exactly how to play this game with the Fed. Before TARP funds were handed out, the government reportedly told Goldman Sachs exactly what they planned to do in advance. Goldman Sachs executives reportedly pocketed millions of dollars from this advance information. Any bull market between now and the election would not be the first time the FED has created a bubble in the stock market, or the first time it has bought stocks through intermediaries. It is clear that our government does illegal things, and then quietly passes a law to make what they have already done legal. Wall Street banks don’t represent real capitalism. They represent crony capitalism and the rape of the American individual investor.
Every time the FED creates money and injects it into the world, it further devalues the dollar. Countries holding the dollar or dollar assets are screwed. Commodity prices worldwide are being driven up while the FED creates yet another bubble in the bond market by buying its own bonds. I’d be getting a little “fed-up” if I lived outside the United States. Why is it that almost all nations on earth continue to buy U.S. treasuries even though they yield one per cent or less? This is something you really need to understand because it is the source of much of our Santa Claus money. Do other nations really feel their money is safer in America than anywhere else? Do you know which country on this planet really holds the fate of the United States in its hands? This country could send America into a financial death spiral in one day if it wanted to. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not China. Let me explain. Next week.
Charles C. Anderson
This Santa Claus money has robbed our nation of its self-reliance and industriousness. It now encourages class warfare. When Obama says that taxes need to be dramatically raised on the rich to benefit the poor, he is ignoring the fact that even if he took every dime from the rich, he could not balance our budget and service our debt at the same time without drastically cutting existing entitlements. He does not say that the absorption of all that capital by the government hurts real businesses, which create real jobs, and pay real wages and taxes. We already have the highest corporate tax rates in the world, driving businesses to other countries and actually lowering total tax revenue collected. We are watching European countries even now come to grips with their addiction to borrowed money. We not only borrow money, we create it with a stroke of a computer and print some more when we need it. That’s one big reason we have been able to avoid disaster as long as we have. No other country in the world has the capacity or the gall of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to ignore all honest accounting practices and all checks and balances to manipulate markets, interest rates, and money supply.
The current president appeals to class warfare and envy in order to take everyone’s eye off of the basic systemic dishonesty in our government. I believe that inequality of income in America is shameful. The greediness of CEOs in America is egregious. All of this was made possible by a dishonest government giving handouts and tax breaks to its friends with Santa Claus money. But this is a side issue that, even if reversed tomorrow by paying every CEO $1 per year, we could not balance our budget or pay off our debt. I’m afraid I would be tossed out of a Republican rally or a Democratic rally.
Most Americans will gladly look away from Europe and believe that it can’t happen to us. They have forgotten that the mighty Soviet Union went down the same path that America is on until its currency was worthless. Did it matter that they spent printed money trying to keep up with Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, or their war with Afghanistan, or for socialist programs? Of course not. The Soviet empire crashed. Americans, rich and poor, want to continue to game the system at the expense of taxpayers in the future and other countries using Santa Claus money. This is nothing new. It has ruined countries and civilizations for more than 2000 years. For example, I don’t care if you are a fireman or a teacher or a policeman or a garbage collector or a paramedic. You did not earn a pension that equals or exceeds your yearly salary when you retire early. If you have such a deal, you got it because governments and unions agreed to rip off those people who are not employed by some level of government. I put in 38 years of incredibly stressful work in trauma centers and emergency departments and the government never provided me with such benefits. I didn’t expect them to.
Whatever the government chooses to subsidize in the name of “help” creates a dependency class. Many middle class Americans would rather have two years of unemployment benefits than a job. So many Americans want to be paid for contributing nothing to society. Do you believe that the number of truly disabled Americans increased five-fold since 2008, or that many people will use any excuse to game the system if Santa Claus money is freely available? Since the war on poverty began in the 1960s, we have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing single mothers. What incentive does she have to get married or finish her education or get a job when she would lose eight different types of government aid by doing so?
Some say that having 47 per cent of Americans now on some type of government assistance is not doing enough. Others think that allowing families to earn up to $47,000 without paying any federal taxes is not enough help. Our president has already stated publicly that he did not care if taxing the rich produced any increase in government revenue. He knew that the rich would avoid the taxes with loopholes paid for by Santa Claus money. He wanted to do this out of “fairness.” He wanted to punish rich people because they are successful. It doesn’t matter to him how they earned their money, or that without these rich people, there would be no non-government employers.
In Obama’s view, the government should decide who is successful. This level of class warfare and abandonment of the family values of our past, as well as our Constitution, is unprecedented from a president of the United States. Of course big business and big banks and Wall Street are corrupt. Our government caused much of this corruption with Santa Claus money. Real capitalism, not adulterated by phony, stolen, borrowed, or created money from the government is the best system for prosperity that man has ever created. We are now more socialist than capitalist. Just look at where big government has brought us.
The fact is that the fifty-three per cent of Americans who do pay taxes are way overtaxed and over-regulated. The problem in America has never been the lack of taxation. It has always been a lack of control over spending. Of course Mr. Romney wants to keep his tax returns private. He has used every tax break and loophole financed by Santa Claus money to pay the least amount of taxes possible. Although Obama has a socialist agenda and Romney has a capitalist agenda, it no longer matters. They are both liars, neither one willing to tell America that recovery from addiction is going to be painful. Our creditors are not going to let us continue to turn out Santa Claus money much longer. If you follow this blog, I will tell you why.
I am a physician. In an ideal world without Santa Claus money I would like the concept of nationalized single-payer health insurance on one condition. We should pay for it as we go. Is it too much to ask that the government make the necessary decisions to balance our budget? When we pay as we go, we have to make those difficult decisions that Santa Claus money allows government and individuals and families to avoid indefinitely. We have avoided making any rules limiting the amount of money that can be spent on an elderly person who is dying. We spend more money on lost causes than any nation on this earth.
The government doesn’t want to be attacked by every person who wants to live to be 100. Families often want everything done for elderly parents and grandparents, no matter how futile it is. These kinds of decisions can be avoided by everybody if the government prints more money and pays for doctors, medications, nurses, mechanical ventilators, and dialysis for everyone to live the last three months of their life in an intensive care unit. Santa Claus money doesn’t require honest discussion about end of life issues. I’m not advocating euthanasia. I’m calling for a return to sanity in healthcare, spending the money we can afford where it will do the most good. I want an honest president to face the cameras and tell America that we cannot have all of the medical care we want at government expense using Santa Claus money.
All social programs would have to be drastically reduced to afford Obamacare as a pay as you go program. Adding another gigantic Santa Claus program now, without making the drastic cuts necessary in our bloated budget, simply increases the size and control of government over us all, and hastens our financial Armageddon.
How many addicts are going to vote for someone who pledges to cut off their Santa Claus money? What possible incentive due the 47% who pay no federal taxes have to vote for someone who pledges to cut taxes? There is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on the most critical issue of all, Santa Claus money. Neither wants the pain of withdrawal. Neither wants to tell Americans that we face gigantic cuts in all government programs once the election is over regardless of who is elected. Why?
It is impossible to borrow your way out of debt. We know that instinctively, but we keep doing it because we are addicts. Our government keeps throwing stolen money after stolen money. All of the bailouts in this country and all of the bailouts in Europe will ultimately fail, each bailout making the final collapse more painful. Nobody wants to hear this. I don’t know who will win this election, but the winner will be the man who organizes the most addicts of Santa Claus money. Obama has a real advantage here, since he can create dependency groups by decree.
Not only can he create new dependency classes, the Federal Reserve has long ago crossed every line of honesty to keep the country from crashing before the election. We have been in the twilight zone of corruption since 2008. There is no level of dishonesty and fraud that our government will not stoop to in order to keep the music going. Even the dying European countries are laughing at America’s creative financing. Countries in Europe would not sink to our level of deceit even to keep their country viable. We have been committed to continuous rounds of “stimulus” with Santa Claus money. Think of a dying patient who needs a larger shot of epinephrine every five minutes to stay alive. Not one American in a hundred could explain how our government could possibly buy its own bonds with money it printed in its own mint. Our Federal Reserve has been doing this since 2008, trillions of dollars of bonds, to manipulate the global bond market and lower long term interest rates. This is called quantitative easing. Since the FED cannot lower interest rates to less than zero, they can only try to hold them down by manipulating the bond market. Don’t you love Fed-speak?
In the Fed’s first round of QE (quantitative easing) in 2008 through early 2010, it bought $1.25 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities and $300 billion of Treasury securities and debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Does it bother you that our Federal government “owns” the majority of all mortgages in America now? In the second round of QE in 2010 and 2011, the Fed bought $800 billion of U.S. treasury bonds. A third round of QE is planned for later this year, sooner if necessary. Wait, there’s more. If the stock market begins to falter, the FED has a plan to buy stocks and stimulate a “recovery.” As one person in a FED meeting commented, “Buying stocks during an election year would favor the incumbent President.”
Somebody recently pointed out to the FED that it was not authorized to buy stocks. No problemo. They buy them through “intermediaries,” says Bernanke. Imagine how much money the intermediary can make knowing in advance that he is going to buy billions of dollars of stocks with Santa Claus money. To minimize the profit to any one brokerage, they would buy indexed funds and raise the entire market. Of course, many index funds are weighted by capitalization. A novice would know which stock in any index would profit the most.
The most important thing to know about the stock market is when to buy and when to sell. If you are a Wall Street insider, you know exactly how to play this game with the Fed. Before TARP funds were handed out, the government reportedly told Goldman Sachs exactly what they planned to do in advance. Goldman Sachs executives reportedly pocketed millions of dollars from this advance information. Any bull market between now and the election would not be the first time the FED has created a bubble in the stock market, or the first time it has bought stocks through intermediaries. It is clear that our government does illegal things, and then quietly passes a law to make what they have already done legal. Wall Street banks don’t represent real capitalism. They represent crony capitalism and the rape of the American individual investor.
Every time the FED creates money and injects it into the world, it further devalues the dollar. Countries holding the dollar or dollar assets are screwed. Commodity prices worldwide are being driven up while the FED creates yet another bubble in the bond market by buying its own bonds. I’d be getting a little “fed-up” if I lived outside the United States. Why is it that almost all nations on earth continue to buy U.S. treasuries even though they yield one per cent or less? This is something you really need to understand because it is the source of much of our Santa Claus money. Do other nations really feel their money is safer in America than anywhere else? Do you know which country on this planet really holds the fate of the United States in its hands? This country could send America into a financial death spiral in one day if it wanted to. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not China. Let me explain. Next week.
Charles C. Anderson
No comments:
Post a Comment