Financial Outcomes of Lockdowns

Our fifty states are interconnected through trade and travel and states that did not enforce lockdowns are still affected by states that chose to shut down completely. Blue states, poorly managed to begin with and tightly locked down, are clamoring for a piece of the huge financial rescue coming from Washington.

This welfare is enabled by the Treasury’s money printing without any backing of goods and services faster than paper can be supplied thus contributing to the rising inflation, inflation partially hidden by the elimination of fuel and food from the proverbial basket of goods that determines each month the rise and fall of prices.

In addition, the disastrous executive orders passed in the first 100 days of the new presidency have affected our economy quite negatively, coupled with the out-of-control spending, much of it totally unrelated to the pandemic effects. Temporary and permanent effects of the lockdown have disrupted the economy and bankrupted many small businesses and larger ones that were already struggling before the “pandemic” hit.

If data is compiled and reported correctly, it is obvious how GDP has been affected by lockdowns in terms of loss of consumption, investment, government spending, and trade with other countries.

We had a relatively large working population “pre-pandemic,” now Americans are being paid more to stay home while employers are struggling to find people willing to work in service sectors.

We had, at one time, the most productive workers in the world. The U.S. economy used to make at least $40,000 worth of goods and services for every living American and over $80,000 for every working American. (William J. Baumol and Alan S. Blinder, Economics, 2007)

To find out what the total output of the economy is, you must look at the gross domestic product (GDP) which is comprised of consumption (the largest component), investment (I), government spending (G) and next exports (X-IM, exports minus imports). Government buys goods and services from private businesses amounting to about 18 percent of GDP, it does not produce goods, but it provides services. Two-thirds of GDP is consumption.

When you look at the GDP number for 2020, you can measure the size of the economy, what it produced in final goods and services that year. The real GDP shows adjustment to the economy in the purchasing power of money by correcting for inflation (increase in prices of goods and services every American buys). As you can plainly see in grocery stores and at the gas pumps, these two important elements for every household have skyrocketed in prices. Yet they are no longer included in the basket of goods used to measures inflation.

Economic data hides the human factors that cause immense suffering in a terrible economy marked by a terrible GDP.

Take the world-wide Great Depression of the 1930s. The U.S. GDP dropped 30 percent, business investment was almost non-existent, and the unemployment rate grew from 3 percent in 1929 to 25 percent in 1933. In the labor force, one person in four was jobless. And the government was not handing out unemployment and stimulus checks. Soup lines, closed factories, people begging, and homeless were at an all-time high.

NPR reported that GDP shrank at the annual rate of 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020, “the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history,” as reported by the Commerce Department. GDP Drops At 32.9% Rate, The Worst U.S. Contraction Ever : Coronavirus Updates : NPR

The estimated real GDP for the first quarter in 2021 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis is an increase of 6.4 percent. This figure reflects some economic recovery, reopening “establishments,” and government assistance payments, such as direct economic impact payments, expanded unemployment benefits, and Paycheck Protection Program loans, distributed to households and businesses through the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act and the American Rescue Plan Act.

“The full economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be quantified in the GDP estimate for the first quarter of 2021 because the impacts are generally embedded in source data and cannot be separately identified.”  Gross Domestic Product, First Quarter 2021 (Advance Estimate) | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

But how does one correctly estimate and quantify the loss of economic welfare on a societal level which impacts the economy?

-          Suspended or permanently lost freedoms for almost 15 months now

-          Permanent or temporary effects on mental health

-          Loss of economic opportunities due to the lockdowns

-          Loss of investment in human capital due to closed schools (students learned precious little in public schools or in college for over a year now)

-          Personal and professional loss resulting from inability to travel for business or leisure

-          Educational, friendship, and family losses due to lockdowns

-          Children being out of school and not in contact with outside humans

-          Adults being out of the labor force and not in contact with colleagues

-          Mental and physical uncertainty

-          Loss from proper medical care when care was virtual and inadequate

-          Loss from ability to go to hospitals due to fear of contagion

-          Loss from death because of other neglected serious medical problems

-          Severe loss from lack of socialization of people of all ages

-          Loss of our humanity and identity due to masking everywhere

-          Social distancing caused more than just reduced economic activity, it profoundly affected many individuals

-          Loss of entrepreneurship (some was replaced by a robust mushrooming of production of personalized masks and shields)

-          Loss of innovation

-          Small business formation collapsed except those supporting the lockdowns and mask wearing (door delivery, curb delivery, contactless credit card use, fashionable masking accessories and gloves)

-          The disappearance of buffets; new and permanent sanitation rules in retail and food processing and serving

-          Losses from wedding venues, birthday, and other parties

-          Banned activities such as going to church and everything related to it are not counted in GDP as a loss

-          Playing sports and attending professional and amateur games damaged economic activity in concessions and booster club activities/fund raising

-          The huge cost resulting from the lost value of living due to lockdowns, of seeing and associating with family

-          The loss of leisure time, i.e., traveling abroad, going on a cruise, on vacation, to a wedding, to a graduation, birthday, etc.

-          Loss of mental health, disability, suicides from lockdowns, drug overdoses, increased drug use and dependency, child abuse, elder abuse, and spousal abuse.

In his book, Economics in One Virus, Ryan A. Bourne wrote that “a third to a half of even the near-term decline in early phases of the pandemic was purely due to the lockdowns, as opposed to panicked changes in behavior from risk-averse consumers and workers.” (Cato Institute, 2021, p. 79)

Bourne wrote that there was a decline in vaccines for other child diseases, cancellation of elective surgeries by hospitals that potentially made a person’s health worse and increase in nursing home deaths that were not related to Covid.

The Covid-19 lockdowns in various states have had and are still having an economic impact that may or may not be correctly and fully quantifiable.  Bourne wrote, “Mercatus Center economists James Broughel and Michael Kotrous conclude that the initial lockdown measures probably cost somewhere between $255 and $464 billion in lost output (1.2 to 2.2 percent of 2019 GDP).”

Economic activity is much easier to calculate but how do you quantify the loss from schooling alone, what economists call “human capital accumulation?” And how does one quantify all the other intangible losses? What kind of subjective yard stick can one possibly use?

A lot of money has been created and a small part was distributed to the population in the form of various payments, stimulus checks, unemployment, and extended unemployment checks, etc. The money created did not go to economic growth or investment as people either were not allowed to work, their employers went bankrupt, the jobs went away, few new jobs and businesses were created, and many chose to stay home as the government’s weekly welfare checks was more than they were making while working. So, the increase in the money supply then caused inflation.

Investments were made heavily in the real estate market and construction market as people were fleeing mismanaged and locked down blue states. Housing prices and construction materials, especially lumber, have skyrocketed.

Consumption goods prices increased as well as retailers were unable to get enough merchandise stock in the brick-and-mortar stores and consumers turned to Amazon online and to other giant retailers that could remain open to the detriment of mom-and-pop stores that were not allowed to stay open.

The excessive money creation means that we have too much money chasing too few goods, inflation is high, and people want to invest in tangible goods such as real estate and precious metals, hence their prices are going up.

The lockdowns were exaggerated responses to a mismanaged health crisis and a rush to vaccines, but it was mostly a money supply-created crisis in order to generate the precise outcome we are facing today – high unemployment, high inflation, more government dependency, huge government spending (on political pet projects domestically and internationally), high gas prices and less mobility, high energy, less access to proper medical care, forcing solar and wind generated energy to fully replace fossil fuels, some of the many items on the agenda of the Great Reset/Build Back Better. The long-term global effects of the “new normal,” caused by the flu virus and by the subsequent opportunistic response to it, are not going to be pretty.

 

 

 

 

Progressivism Makes America Worse

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Americans are bored with their abundant lifestyle.  Western civilization is bored with its wealth, bucolic life, and success.  Academics and Hollywood elites have taken it upon themselves to bring all this success and wealth down a few notches if not to the first rung of the prosperity ladder. They’ve had their fun time in the sun, it is now time for the third world to take over and to teach them how to live, work, and worship the right way.

Having just one protected class in America was not enough; we brought in Islam with its clean living and fertility to replace the declining birth rate in the west. Western young women and men are not interested in marriage and reproduction, they want to have fun, and, if it means having it in the street or on reality TV, the more the better for the narcissistic society that we have become.

Right now the welfare spigot is open and it is flowing generously to the rest of the world. Although America is despised by all, they crowd the irrelevant border to cross illegally so they have an opportunity to our generous welfare system, our injudicious immigration laws, and to take over our wealth and our way of life.

Americans used to enjoy working long hours, overtime, bought every amenity imagined on credit and became slaves to banks, credit cards, the downtrodden, the aging population, and the ersatz disabled. Now they are still slaves to a bloated financial system  but have added their liberal children in the basement and the protected illegal immigrant underclass and pretty much any third world tin pot dictatorship that can force its way into the United Nations human rights council and muscle and squeeze more billions out of Satan’s country, the very generous U.S.A where money grows on trees just waiting to be plucked by intrepid illegals with no intention to ever assimilate or to contribute their share to the society they are plundering.

Gadgets that open the window to the world have cast a 24-hour glow on the faces of all generations, beholden to social media. They are stars, they are somebody, they are Internet and Instagram trolls, they can reach the stars with their hidden identities. They are finally somebody, no longer the ignored taxpayer or the bullied public school specimen brainwashed into liberalism and global citizenship utopia.

The vice of working endless hours every day is slowly dying down, replaced by apathy and a sense of entitlement to the government’s trough in the European socialist style. Nobody is asking the obvious question, the elephant in the room, which group of people is going to replenish the abundance trough if everybody adopts a lifestyle of government dependency from cradle to grave?

Materialism has triumphed for decades and opportunity has turned to success, and the rat race has ensued which turned the vast country into a fine-tuned watch; but its components are beginning to age and rust, and materialism has given way to indifference and apathy to anything that could remotely resemble what once used to be “borders, language, and culture.”

Americans have been brainwashed for many decades of academic excellence and liberal experimentation that they don’t have a culture and their history is bad, their men of fame, their inventors and entrepreneurs were bad people.  Inventions that made life easier and saved billions around the globe have suddenly become a danger to the planet and to Mother Nature itself.

The United Nations and the global elites have taken it upon themselves to socially engineer the masses into compliance with their wishes because, as rich as they are, they know for sure what is best for everyone, freedom be damned. They are gods of technology, of banking, of genetically modified agriculture, of pharma, of law, of politics, and are far superior to the dumbed down masses who must obey or be nudged through the power of the law, the courts, and of imprisonment.

“Thoughts are free” says an old WWII protest song, Die Gedanken sind frei, but corporate and political elites know that you have an “unconscious bias” and these thoughts you didn’t know existed in your brain must be rooted out with indoctrination classes in the workplace. If they could have, they would have physically extracted your evil and unapproved thoughts with pliers as if they were rotted teeth.  If you want to keep your job, you must think the way elites tell you to think and you must harbor thoughts only approved by progressive guidelines of the new world order.

Half of Americans who vote are ashamed of their country, of who they are, of their history, and of their culture. Teachers are more than happy to indoctrinate your children into their twisted political views.

Unconcerned Americans are at cross-roads of self-destruction, following in the footsteps of the intrepid Europeans who are busy committing demographic suicide and societal hara-kiri by bringing in non-assimilating masses of economic refugees from Africa and the Middle East at such alarming rates that many beautiful European cities have already been turned into cesspools of violence and destruction.

The triumph of materialism has finally hit a reinforced concrete wall built by progressive agendas and elite billionaires who can afford tall fences, expensive security systems, and armed body guards, in a gated and protected luxurious life that the rest of us cannot afford. We don’t want their wealth, we just want a safe country with well-defined and protected borders.

The West’s ladder of success is sporting dangerously loose rungs and the last few are even missing.  Can it be repaired and salvaged? How many Donald Trumps would be needed to fix it? Are we passed the civilization point of no return, headed for a down-sloping road into a furiously bubbling cauldron?

To put it bluntly, no matter how hard President Trump tries to make America economically better for everyone, those afflicted by a serious mental disorder, best described as liberal race-baiting and the progressive worship of the dictatorship of the oppressed, are making America worse.

Equality, Efficiency, and Dependency

Countries run more efficiently when there is less government intervention. Government certainly has its role in providing a strong military, adequate border defense, police and fire protection, and education.

Unfortunately government intervention in the free market has caused again and again more harm than good. And government has now become a Hydra that we fail to legally slay. Voting in a new government has been discouraging; it is now impossible to rid ourselves of the encroaching octopus with sharped-edged suckers.

Contrary to economic laissez faire, President Bush said in 2008, “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” In other words, because his administration attempted unsuccessfully to reign in the Democrats with their entitlement plans to lend money for homes to people who could not afford them and then disabled regulations that would have checked bank loans and mortgages, he had to prop up the too-big-to-fail bankers whose bankruptcy would have sent painful shockwaves around the world and would have upset the crony capitalists. The taxpayers were forced to the rescue.

The non-stop tirade of the “rich do not pay their fair share” and “you did not build that” began the vilification of small and large businessmen, followed by the marginalization and destruction of the middle class, the very geese that lay the golden eggs. The government nanny must be in total control of every facet of our lives.

Productivity, the industrial revolution, manufacturing are better left to other parts of the world. The new global order dictates that we must now be a service society, government-catering to the “hope and change” new citizens coming from far-flung corners of the illiterate third-world kingdom.

You can’t make a “living wage” at your minimum-wage job? It’s the fault of the rich! You vote for a living, stay on welfare, have out-of-wedlock babies, drop anchor-babies, and keep bringing in the flotsam of the world to replace the millions of babies aborted since Roe v. Wade. Make sure you vote into office the same corrupt politicians that keep you perennially poor under the guise of protection; you are dumb enough after graduating from a Common Core school to believe that it’s the fault of the rich who keep you “down.”

Do you accept any personal responsibility for your boorish behavior, drug use, lack of motivation, poor education, sloth, and lack of job skills? Nanny government tells you it is not your fault; you are entitled to the wealth of the rich. And when the rich run out of money, because socialists always run out of other people’s money, they can fleece the middle class, people who worked hard for a living, got an education, and paid taxes.

Today’s rich pay taxes to support the government and the welfare state.  The rich of long ago, after taxation, even though still wealthy, did not enjoy the comforts that you have in your alleged poverty of today. In the winter of 1695, when the climate change industry did not exist, the wine at the palace of Versailles froze in the fancy goblets at King Louis XIV’s table. Even in the nineteenth century America, the ink froze in the inkwells in winter time, that’s how cold and miserable life was.

The Pennsylvania legislature almost destroyed George Washington’s army quartered at Valley Forge. The government decided to try price controls on commodities that were needed by Washington’s army. No farmer with a large family to support was dumb enough to sell their produce at controlled prices when the British were paying in gold. The army almost starved to death in the winter of 1777-1778. The unwise government price controls brought the army to its knees.

Government does not believe in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand;” there is no such thing as people, by pursuing their own self-interest, are led by an invisible hand to promote the well-being of the community. The government must intervene because they know best.

If government does not dictate every last rule and regulation in great detail, how much and what we can eat, what we can drink, how much salt we can ingest, what doctors we can see, what homes we can live in, what cars we can drive, how much electricity we use, how much water we can have, what crops to plant, we are doomed to failure.

To avoid massive voter fraud, by the time the drive for a national “voter” I.D. becomes reality, we will all be chipped and the government will know where we are at all times, just like dogs and cats.

Government intervention to slay the war on poverty has perpetuated and deepened poverty after spending trillions of dollars. In spite of Affirmative Action programs and other wealth redistribution schemes aimed at destroying social injustice, people are still differently-abled by birth; some like to work more than others; some are risk takers and others are comfortable in their status-quo; some like to work the night shift while others no shift at all, they are happy with government handouts; some like to go to school and learn new things, while others enjoy partying and living it up; some don’t stay  on any job long enough to get work experience; why try if welfare is literally forced upon the sloth and unmotivated; some have inherited wealth that must be confiscated for the common good; others who built an enterprise did not really built that, it just happened by magic, it came via the public roads; and others were just plain lucky and thus does not deserve the fruits of their labor.

Keynesian economists have been telling us for decades that “America has more income inequality than other wealthy nations” and this miscalculated inequality “has been on the rise in the last 25 years.”  But none of these calculations include welfare, free medical care, WIC, and other similar programs. They are strictly looking at income disparities born by many factors connected to lacking personal responsibility, education, and the dissolution of the family.

You can tweak statistics to prove whatever you set out to prove so calculations of this “inequality” does not include the many financial dependency programs currently in place. According to the U.S. Census, there are over “100 million Americans who receive at least one welfare program run by the federal government and it does include Social Security and Medicare.”

Even Keynesian economists admit that policies that redistribute wealth or income reduce the rewards of high income earners, raising the rewards of low-income earners, thus reducing the incentive to earn high income.  We trade economic efficiency for equality and create a nation of dependents who would rather stay home and draw benefits from those who still work.

It is a fact that 70 percent of all government spending involves programs that create government dependence. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 60 percent of all U.S. households get more transfer payments than they pay in taxes.  “Terrence P. Jeffrey calculated that 86 million Americans work full-time in the private sector while 148 million Americans receive benefits from the government.” http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/18-stats-that-prove-that-government-dependence-has-reached-epidemic-levels

Education was for many generations a way out of poverty when the family was intact. But when the family unit was destroyed by a government that stepped in as the daddy for generations of fatherless children, college costs have escalated, and professional jobs were shipped overseas at an alarming rate, it was hard to sell education anymore.  Government and Democrats have advocated spending more money on pre-school programs and on inner-city children but the results were dismal. And the uneducated adults could not be lifted out of poverty; they remained on inter-generational government dole.

We have certainly tried for generations to alleviate poverty through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed forms of discrimination in rates of pay and hiring standards and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Equal pay for equal work was a daunting if not impossible parameter because we are different in our ability, education, experience, etc.  Affirmative action stepped in with hiring quotas for minorities and females.

The problem was that many who were given this preferential treatment over other hires were really less qualified or not qualified at all. They were expected to learn on the job. Critics argued that numerical quotas and compulsory hiring of unqualified workers was certainly a problem in many professions, including the field of education. Replacing qualified “white males” with “other, less qualified workers” was certainly counterproductive and inefficient. Proponents of quotas countered that it was necessary to redress past wrongs, especially slavery. “Putting more women and members of minority groups into high-paying jobs would certainly make the income distribution more equal,” affirmative action supporters argued.

Today the important economic balance of efficiency over equality is completely discounted by Democrats and their supporters who are arguing for a complete replacement of the free market system with socialism on the ideological belief that everything white men have accomplished has been tinged with racism, bigotry, and inequality and only adopting the Marxist ideology would redress that problem. Certainly these Democrats have not studied the recent case of Venezuela and its economic woes resulting from a full-blown socialist poverty state established by the late Hugo Chavez.

There is a lot to be said about government control from cradle to grave.  A population fully dependent on an omnipotent government is easier to control in a high-rise city dwelling setting than spread out over miles on the land. And when government runs out of other people’s money, it will have to scale back and possibly withdraw the largesse to the generationally dependent.

The free market mechanism is efficient but it does not promote the total equality desired by Marxist supporters. Such equality must be achieved by force, by government fiat, redistributing to the world the “unjust and unearned income and wealth” of billions of enterprising people.  When that is achieved, we will have reached Orwellian utopia.

Lucky for us, total government control works because they know what is best for us – nuclear armament of Iran, our sworn enemy, and a peaceful invasion with illegal immigrants brought from third world nations that will quietly complete the fundamental transformation of our expansionist evil empire into a malleable tin pot dictatorship.

We will be turned into an irrelevant impoverished nation as envisioned by the Washington political elites, a nation ruled by a one-party government that worships primitive cultures and obedient welfare-dependent subjects and favors global economic de-development.

The low information voters and welfare recipients will be satisfied with a minimum, grateful that the “man” sends them a check every month in exchange for nothing. The fact that governments do not produce anything of value seems to escape their understanding and, without the hard labor of many, their undeserved and unearned “entitlements” would not arrive promptly every month.

 

 

 

 

 

Political and Societal Conundrums, Normalizing the Abnormal

As I attempted to discuss politics in my former country, one young cousin commented wryly that individuals are not preoccupied with politics like Americans are; people are too worried about daily economic survival and loss of “entitlements.”

After decades of communism, the culture of dependency is strongly ingrained and is not likely to go away. Voters are too uninformed, he added. They say, ‘who cares who is elected, they are all corrupt,” but then eagerly accept the meager bribes of $15-$20 in exchange for their vote, whether it’s a vote for mayoral elections or for higher office, and then line up for the promised “social benefits.” Once they obtain said benefits, they complain that nothing ever changes in society because it is all rigged against the poor. Sounds familiar?

I’ve never seen so many young people idle, out of work, smoking and drinking in cafes, discussing philosophy and the virtues of socialism, unashamed to extend their hands to receive undeserved and unearned government support, as I have seen in Europe. A few countries are tightening their welfare belts but the citizens protest vehemently.

Our young Americans, the products of decades of public school indoctrination into socialism and Marxism, are equally perplexing in their outrageous and confusing demands.  

They want equality but fail to understand that “free people are not equal.” They refuse to understand because their revisionist history teachers have taught them that communist utopia makes everyone “equal.” They don’t know that communist elites were rich beyond anybody’s dreams and wanted to maintain the status quo while everyone else was equally poor and equally miserable.

Another conundrum is expressed in the chants rioters use during organized mayhem, like “America is capitalist and greedy.” Yet almost half of the population is on some type of welfare and citizens on the dole see themselves as the “victims” of white men, the “white devils,” who succeeded in life because they had bogus “white privilege.”

In a country where every child receives an award and a trophy for participation in a competition and an undeserved, often shocking praise for fiascos, it is no surprise that failures want to be recognized for sloth and lack of work ethic.

When blatant lies and deception are endlessly justified, while corruption and treasonous behavior are no longer punished, right is wrong, wrong is right, is it any wonder that our youth have a distorted view of reality?

These imagined “black victims” predominantly run the government in most bankrupt U.S. cities and enable their constituents to remain on generational dole, asking constantly for more. As they claim to be poorer and poorer, in spite of trillions of dollars spent on the War on Poverty, they have personal property that people in other countries wish they had and fantasized about.

These same “poor,” “enslaved” people, who never mention the real slave states in 21^st century Africa and Asia, are demanding reparations for their ancestors’ slavery, egged on by progressive academia; they drive the manufactured narrative of racism, of bigotry, of hate speech, in the most tolerant country on the planet, in an attempt to silence and shame all whites into blind submission to the bipartisan rulers of the country.

We are not supposed to judge an entire religion for the actions of one Muslim terrorist because he is a “lone wolf” but because one lunatic, drugged-up individual chose to murder in cold blood nine innocent people, we must immediately blame everything liberals ever wanted to change on various symbols this deranged young man displayed or used, and reorient our entire society to fit the one world government agenda. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” even a crisis as senseless and hateful as this one.

The country is described as “racist,” everyone cowers in shame, and immediately agree with the “transformational liberal agenda” that we must purge any symbol of our history, of our past, any word or phrase in our language that may be deemed offensive to someone of a “darker-pigmented skin.”

The American flag, the Confederate flag, and any statues, monuments, and graves must be removed because it offends those who don’t know nor care to know their history; if you are not removing them fast enough, let’s deface them with graffiti such as “black lives matter.” Farrakhan wants to remove all American flags!

If you cannot purchase a Confederate flag in the Gettysburg museum shop, where can you? And why are large retailers banning the sale of the Confederate flag but still selling the Nazi swastika flag and Che Guevara t-shirts, the butcher who “murdered thousands, forced thousands more into slavery, and drove more than a million to exile,” and an inveterate racist? http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/truth-about-che-guevara

Young Americans, who live in a distorted world manufactured by the progressive academia and the deceitful main stream media, have no idea what they are asking for or what they are admiring.

As Michael J. Totten said, “…anti-establishment young people all over the world have Che’s face on their walls and their T-shirts. Most of them don’t know anything real about the man they admire. They have no idea he was one of the most violently illiberal establishment figures in the Western Hemisphere’s history. They admire the image, which is and always has been a fraud.”

But we must destroy our own history and all the symbolism attached to it and remake our American past in the fake vision of liberalism that wants to shape the youth of the world into global citizens. The only country that stands in the way is the United States. But this former bastion is crumbling day by day into the dustbin of the former empires. It is falling from within through the work of its elected self-serving representatives and the ignorant and dishonest voters.

Illegal aliens and amnesty must be our number one priority, we are told ad nauseam, they represent a significant and very important voting block for all politicians; money is no object in pleasing them, while benefits to veterans and to the military are being cut.

America is so “unjust” that we must change it and make it like those perfect socialist and bankrupt European countries liberals envy and admire where everyone is “equal” on paper and “social justice” reigns supreme in theory, basking in the glory of failed multiculturalism.

America must change because it has had a good run as an “evil empire,” we are told by progressive admirers of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.

Any perversion that violates religious beliefs and family values must be taught to our children starting in kindergarten, without parental approval. “Free-range parenting,” another liberal category constructed to demean our worth and bring us down to animal level, is verboten. Parents who engage in such practices that allow kids to be kids, play outdoors, or home-school them away from the destructive Common Core, must be arrested and stripped of their rights.

Liberals invent new language, force strange labels on us, trans-gender, trans-racial, trans-normal, trans-sexual, trans-human, just add the prefix “trans.” Liberals are normalizing the abnormal, marginalizing the majority of us as irrelevant. Only then will we achieve the sought-after “equality” and “justice” under the sun.

Will we then be a perfect society built in the progressive image of utopian Marxism with citizen slaves to the Orwellian government where some animals are more “equal” than others?

Or is this just a distraction to do the bidding of large corporations and pass the basement-guarded Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a disguised giveaway of our sovereignty (under the excuse of globalist trade) to a foreign entity composed of a “committee” nobody knows, elects, can talk about, reign in, nullify, or supersede?

 

 

 

 

 

The Kindergarten Booties

Photo: noastracopilaria@yahoo.com

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose,
And nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free."
- Kris Kristofferson's song

The photograph of a pair of kids’ booties posted on a social website, “Copilaria anilor 80-90,” triggered a flood of memories – it was the exact pair that I used to wear as a child. They were the only ones available for purchase, and required uniform for all children who attended pre-school and kindergarten.

I re-posted the photo thinking that a few of my Romanian friends would comment, but I was wrong. Instead, my much younger cousin from Romania remarked that she had a pair in pre-school in the 1980s. Who knew that commies would stick to the same sorry, cheap, and ugly pair of booties for decades?

One American lady, Gemey, who had traveled to Romania as a missionary in the 1990s, long after communism was temporarily dismantled, wrote, “Having grown up here in the U.S., it’s difficult to imagine no electric, no water, no heat, little food, few clothes. I saw all that, well not the heat, no AC in July was bad enough! But it’s a beautiful country, reminds me of Virginia or Missouri where I live. Green and fertile and full of promise each day. And the people that I met were strong and resourceful and coped with all these situations with grace most of the time. But the moment things got a little better, people were clamoring for more, communist politicians promised more [just like the Bolsheviks] and they voted the commies back into office… sounds like the U.S. doesn’t it?”

She continued, “Superstitions die hard. Even medical doctors believed that evil spirits blew into open windows and people would get sick if they walked barefoot.” They also believed humans got sick if exposed to a slight breeze or draft. Consequently, kids had to wear these felt booties called “sosoni” or “botosei,” crudely made and itchy, in pre-school and kindergarten.

Mom always yelled at me to put on house shoes and she always kept an assortment of slippers in her closet in the U.S. Her granddaughters were amused and loved to irritate her by going barefoot on any kind of surface.

It’s hard to overcome any government dependency, even the communist variety. I have many older relatives who can barely make ends meet today because their pensions from the communist era are so small, yet they are nostalgic for communism. They want to live on the “take-care-of-me plantation,” and “I will do as you say farm.” Why try hard at all when everyone makes the same miserable salary?

The elderly today make an eager voting block that turns out every time to elect the communists back in power – the grey hair commie-voting brigade. They are like jail inmates who spend their entire lives in prison and, when freed, have no idea how to live on the outside, in the free world. They want back in prison where their needs were met poorly but were not expected to do much in return except be on their best behavior, be obedient to strict rules, and be willing to stay behind bars, the very bars that robbed inmates of their freedom in the first place.

I asked my cousin Maria why she voted for communists and she answered, they gave us a small pension, we did not have to work, the rent was low and subsidized, food was hard to find but was also subsidized, cheap alcohol was plentiful, we had rationing coupons, everyone was equally poor and miserable, we did not have to compete, we did not have to try very hard. We just understood that the commies in power were wealthy beyond belief but we accepted that as long as they threw us our daily crumbs and bones. We knew our place and they “protected” us.

What did they protect you from, I asked her. We had a miserable roof over our heads and medical care was free. But Maria, it was free but you could not see doctors nor buy medicines because they were not available, shortages were constant, and you had to fight in lines for the last loaf of bread, toilet paper roll, or bottle of cooking oil, and you had to pay bribes in cash and goods to be seen on time by a better doctor. True, she said, but we had free aspirin and generic Tylenol. She looked down at her feet and remained silent. My arguments did not seem to penetrate her skewed view of reality. No matter what I said, if she had a choice, she would choose communism again and again, graciously resigned and happy with government dependency in exchange for empty promises and scratchy felt booties for her grandchildren.

Having seen the insidious welfare dependency under crony capitalism and under socialism/communism, I seriously doubt that I could change an elderly person’s mentality of addiction to government handouts, even handouts not worth having.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014

Eating to Live Not Living to Eat

Photo credit: Ileana Johnson, 2014

I don’t look at food the same way most Americans do. I grew up on my grandparents’ small farm in the village. Everything we ate came from our garden and our livestock – fresh vegetables in season, canned vegetables in winter and spring, goat and cow’s milk, butter, goat cheese, eggs, smoked meat, lardy bacon, fatty sausages in natural casings, and eggs.

We ate to live; we did not live to eat. Food was for nourishment not for entertainment, gorging buffets, or for bourgeois socializing. From time to time, adults ate better meals with family and friends at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Kids were generally not included in such occasions. They stayed home.

When I went to first grade, I moved to the city with my parents, 6 miles away. Our food then came from the benevolent government planners who made us wait every day in endless lines at the grocery store, the butcher store, the dairy store, the bakery, the greengrocer, and the farmer’s market if we could find food, if the store did not run out, if there was enough for everybody, if we had rationing coupons, and if we could afford it.

Occasionally grandpa would ride his bike to the city with a fisherman’s netting bag filled with a dozen eggs, a piece of cheese, one smoked sausage left from the pig he butchered at Christmas, and a live chicken which my Dad killed in the most gruesome way in the yard, by cutting his head off. Mom plucked the chicken after dunking it in boiling water. The poor thing was jumping in agony around the yard. I would not have eaten the chicken except I was starving.

There were restaurants in the city, patronized by the ruling elites because they were the only ones who could afford the pricey meals. Their salaries were huge compared to ours. They received special treatment and gifts of food and services in exchange for loyalty to the communist party.

Allegiance and love for family and conscience went out the window when the specter of hunger hung in the air. It was easier to snitch on your family when you got extra food each month and were allowed to shop in underground communist party stores laden with abundant supplies from the west, fresh vegetables and fruits year around, expensive wines, liqueurs, beer, juices, chocolates, oranges, bananas, and other fine things that most Americans take for granted. No EBT, SNAP, or WIC credit cards.

Someone who entered such a store explained to me that it was as if you had died and gone to food heaven, that’s how much food there was everywhere. No money was necessary. All you had to do is sign your name in a book, leave your conscience at the door, and spy on your closest relatives – each monthly report sufficed and you were fed quite well.

My first encounter with a grocery store in America kept me in awe for hours. I could not tear myself away from the shelves, bright lights, the cleanliness, the colorful and hygienic packaging, the refrigeration, and the fresh fruits and vegetables in January! I kept filling the cart with everything, and then remembered that I had a budget, and I would start over. People were laughing, could not understand where I came from, and what we ate.

American buffets are an inexplicable form of gluttony that Europeans have a hard time understanding. Is it an indulgence because food is plentiful, always available without long lines or rationing, and cheap? Why stuff yourself to the brim if you’ve never felt intense hunger pains or experienced near starvation?

As the girth of Americans is expanding, the nanny government is stepping in to regulate portion size, control the type of foods they eat, the salt and sugar intake, and mandate three “healthy” meals in school, replacing the parents as the providers and decision-makers for their children. After all, the children belong to the community, we are told, and they are no longer a parental responsibility.

As small family farms that provide wholesome food are slowly disappearing, replaced by large corporate farms, we are importing more and more food from other countries, putting our food supply in jeopardy, at the whims of exporting countries. Fruits and vegetables are imported from Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, Columbia, and other South American markets. Even chicken, seafood, pork, and other meats come from China.

Having to go hungry is a concept that Americans are not willing to entertain. Abundance and endless supply will last forever! As long as the big and mighty government is in charge, we will never want for anything. Self-reliance is not necessary, not even for food. Few people know that grocery stores only supply their stores with food for three days.

We never had “fun” cafeteria food fights or filled the trash cans with free taxpayer-supplied food we disliked like American high school students do. That is because we did not have a cafeteria, the communist state did not feed us, food was so scarce, and we would not have turned down anything edible.

The American journalists in Sochi, accustomed to a life of plenty in our free market-based economy, experienced an unpleasant taste of a communist economy in their hotel rooms; they complained on Twitter – they wanted the comfort provided by our capitalist economy.

Perhaps this experience in Russia will change the rhetoric about the utopian communism, and the nonsensical race for “collectivism, equality, and social justice” will stop. Everything about communism was unjust - it was oppressive, unequal, and inadequate. And it was not just about the lack of food – it crushed the human spirit.

As long as there is plenty of food and no suffering from hunger, people are happy and satisfied, no matter how enslaved their existence may be. As long as there are generous Americans who go to work every day and pay taxes, there is money for welfare for those who either lost their jobs or choose to be on welfare permanently in order to find themselves, relishing in their new-found freedom from the drudgery of work. That is how government officials spin their inability to create jobs for the massively unemployed that would otherwise starve without food stamps and welfare.

 

Bad Economy, Bad Policy, More Poverty and Welfare Dependency

Poverty is a relative term. Some people understand poverty as cash poor, not having the latest electronic gadget, a huge house, or not taking an expensive vacation. Others think of themselves as poor because they fall behind a certain standard of living that they deem desirable. A third group of Americans may think they are poor because they fall behind the average income in the country. People confuse and interchange wealth, income, and cash constantly.
 

The figures listed below are the 2012 federal government’s poverty guidelines. However, they are not the figures that the Census Bureau uses to calculate the number of poor persons. The Census Bureau uses poverty threshold data based on gender, size of family, number of children, farm, and non-farm.  (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/index.html)

 

2012 Poverty Guidelines for the 48 Contiguous States and the District of Columbia
Persons in family/household	Poverty guideline
1	$11,170
2	15,130
3	19,090
4	23,050
5	27,010
6	30,970
7	34,930
8	38,890
For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $3,960 for each additional person.

                                        (http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12poverty.shtml/)

According to Michael Tanner, “The poverty rate has risen to 15.1 percent of Americans, the highest level in nearly a decade…Welfare spending increased significantly under President George W. Bush and has exploded under President Barack Obama.”  Since Obama took office, federal expenditures on welfare have increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year. (Cato Institute, The American Welfare State, April 11, 2012)

Forty-six million Americans live in poverty, even though the government spent more than $15 trillion on welfare since President Lyndon Johnson enacted the war on poverty in 1964. We lost all battles because the federal government was not serious about winning this war, it did not concentrate on fixing the problems by adding jobs to the economy that created prosperity. We outsourced jobs, we “saved or created’ shovel-ready jobs for bureaucrats, and we made poverty comfortable and dependable for an increasing sector of the population.

If we compare these 46 million poor Americans to other nations, their poverty is considered comfortable in most places around the world and well-off in many other countries.

That is not to say that there are no Americans who do not genuinely need help. The lengthy recession born by the bursting of the housing bubble, the subsequent TARP, the failed stimulus, auto bailouts, the mismanaged economy, the crony capitalism, created real victims who lost their homes, their jobs, their insurance, and their livelihood. They did not deliberately “purchase” a home that they knew they could not possibly afford to repay, nor engaged in complicated derivatives trading with other people’s retirement money and savings.

Yet some Americans who truly needed help were reluctant to accept welfare or, if they did, the benefits were inadequate or ran out. There are always Americans in temporary or permanent need who fall through the cracks of welfare. It is people who know how to milk the system who benefit the most from the welfare largesse.

Being on welfare is not just the result of lack of a good education, bad choices in life, unwillingness to work, of a culture of entitlement (it is free and the government owes it to us), it is also a function of bad luck, personal injury, illness, and hard times during cyclical economic downturns.

The federal government uses personal income tax receipts to provide two-thirds of welfare funds, while state and local governments provide one-third from state tax receipts. Economically speaking, welfare is categorized as transfer payments.

 
The largest transfer of payments (welfare) goes to Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), housing vouchers, State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

Medicaid spent the most on health care in 2011 - $228 billion for 49 million Americans. Food stamps or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was the second largest expenditure in 2011 with $72 billion for 41 million Americans. This year, 43 million Americans are on food stamps thanks to our tanking economy under the leadership and guidance of the current administration. According to Michael Tanner, Director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, federal spending on welfare rose 375 percent since 1965. Total federal welfare spending rose from 2.19 to 6 percent of GDP.

Since the inception of the War on Poverty, the federal government created 126 anti-poverty programs. There are some with overlapping missions:

-        33 housing programs administered by 4 different cabinet departments

-        21 food assistance programs administered by 3 different departments and one agency

-        8 health care programs run by 5 different agencies at HHS

-        27 cash/general assistance programs run by 6 cabinet departments and 5 agencies

“All together, seven different cabinet agencies and six independent agencies administer at least one anti-poverty program.” (Cato Institute, The American Welfare State, p. 3)

Keynesian economists suggested that a better way to tackle poverty was to give income to the poor without destroying their incentives to work via the earned income tax credit (EITC). As earnings of a family rose to a certain level, the federal government gave them a supplemental “grant,” proportional to earned wages. EITC began in 1975 but became increasingly more generous since 1993, giving income-support to over 22 million families. (Baumol and Blinder, Economics, 2007, p. 458)

We do know how well EITC works since illegal aliens, using an IRS issued number to encourage them to file income taxes, have taken advantage of this IRS loophole, raking in $6.3 billion a year in tax refunds, claiming children who are not even residents or citizens of this country.

Cato’s Michael Tanner suggests that making people more comfortable in poverty and government dependence is a bad idea - more food, better housing, more health care, free day care, etc. The solutions to get out and stay out of poverty:

1.     Finish school

2.     Do not get pregnant outside marriage

3.     Get a job, any job, and stick with it.

 The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a very successful program from the Clinton era, was recently changed by a directive from President Obama to the HHS, from a cash safety net for families in need via a welfare-to-work program that promoted employment, into a funding source for idleness and stay-at-home permanent welfare voters.

“The broad purposes of TANF specified in the law:

-        providing assistance to needy families so that children could be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;

-        ending needy families’ dependence on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;

-        preventing and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and

-        encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.”

(Kay E. Brown, Director of GAO, Testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, June 5, 2012)

 
Jonathan Alter, a left-wing writer, described in his book, The Promise, a short exchange that happened during President Obama’s first year in office:

“A congressman approached the first lady at a White House reception after the [stimulus] bill’s passage and told her the stimulus was the best anti-poverty bill in a generation. Her reaction was ‘Shhh!’ The White House did not want the public thinking that Obama had achieved long-sought public policy objectives under the guise of merely stimulating the economy, even though that’s exactly what happened.”  (As quoted by Paul Mirengoff in Powerline, July 30, 2012)

While we are $16 trillion in debt, with more Americans applying for disability than applying for jobs, the USDA’s “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics with Nutrition Assistance webpage states:

“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance. Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”

The USDA-Mexico partnership was signed in 2004, under President George W. Bush, by former USDA Secretary Ann M. Venemen and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Ernesto Derbez Bautista. This begs the obvious questions, why does Mexico need 50 consular offices in the U.S. when all other countries have only one consulate, and why are we responsible to feed Mexican nationals, including illegal aliens with their anchor babies?

Eradicating poverty should be more than just streamlining welfare – it should be about fighting the real causes of welfare dependency: the breakdown of families, rejection of faith, truancy, dropping out of school, having babies outside of marriage, drug use, crime, and lack of personal pride, responsibility, and accountability for one’s actions. Spreading the wealth, the socialist goal, is a dystopia that will further enslave people into perennial poverty.

Representatives Jim Jordan and Steve Southerland II suggested, “Congress should block-grant the [welfare] funds to states and let them innovate. Grass-roots organizations and state and local leaders know better than Congress what works in their communities.” Follow the model of Habitat for Humanity that requires families to put in “hundreds of hours of sweat equity before getting a new home.”

Taking care of the truly needy and disabled is the right thing to do in our civilized society. Taking advantage of a system that has gone beyond generosity and making welfare a life-style choice and career opportunity is honor-less.