Kudlow to Moneynews: 'Government Has Been Obstacle to Economy'

Corporate profit growth may be slowing, but companies are still showing impressive skill in boosting their earnings and surmounting the government's negative effect on the economy, says Larry Kudlow, host of "The Kudlow Report" on CNBC and a Moneynews Insider.

"Profits are the mother's milk of stocks," Kudlow said in an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV. And the outlook for annual profit growth has slowed to 5-6 percent, he said. Combined with higher interest rates, "that's going to hurt stock valuations."

Sluggish revenue growth — stemming from global economic weakness — is behind the profit slowdown, the Newsmax columnist notes.
But the good news on the earnings front it that companies have been very clever in increasing productivity and cutting costs, Kudlow said.

"The question is how clever can these companies be? Will they be able to execute at lower costs and keep their earnings margins reasonably decent?" he said.

"I can't answer that question, but I'm pretty confident because going back four years, the reason we have any growth at all is the resilience and cleverness of American businesses."

It's certainly not thanks to the government, Kudlow said. "Government has basically been an obstacle to the economy."

Companies have large cash hoards, he points out. "They're making good money, their balance sheets look pretty good. They've de-leveraged," Kudlow said. "So that's why I don’t want to be overly bearish" on stocks.

Source: Newsmax.com Thursday, 27 Jun 2013 06:19 PM

By Dan Weil and David Nelson
http://www.moneynews.com/headline/larry-kudlow-companies-government-economy/2013/06/27/id/512365#ixzz2Xkvs6WBN

Obama’s Global Warming Claims Demolished

President 'cherry-picks' facts 'with the same relentless care as Al Gore'

Dubbed the “high priest of climate skepticism,” former Margaret Thatcher adviser Christopher Monckton has become a formidable foe of the movement claiming mankind is causing catastrophic “global warming,” noting that the average worldwide temperature has not risen in nearly two decades.

So when President Obama recently announced his plan to bypass Congress and use his executive power to “fight climate change,” targeting the coal-energy industry, Monckton responded.

Some of what Obama said was simply copied from Al Gore’s writings on global warming, he said, and virtually everything was incomplete, misleading – or wrong.

Obama’s declarations included:

• “Science … tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.”
• “The 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years. … these are facts.”
• The “sea level in New York, in New York Harbor, are (sic) now a foot higher than a century ago.”
• “The question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late.”It was too much for Monckton.

“The ‘image of Earth from space’ intro is lifted from Gore’s sci-fi movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ Gore may well have written much of the speech,” Monckton said. “The phrase ‘carbon pollution’ is also lifted from Gore. It occurs 30 times in the text of the speech.

“One imagines he means ‘carbon dioxide pollution.’ But CO2 is not a pollutant and is not listed as one on the U.S. national inventory of pollutants. It is a naturally occurring trace gas, harmlessly present in the air we breathe out, and in the bubbles in bread, Coca-Cola, and (more importantly) champagne.”

Then Monckton launched into a point-by-point demolition of Obama’s claims:

The “worry that rising levels [of CO2] might someday disrupt the fragile balance that makes our planet so hospitable” is scientifically unfounded. CO2 concentrations, at almost 400 μatm, are almost as low as they have ever been in geological time. In the Jurassic era, 175 million years ago, CO2 concentration was about 6000 μatm; in the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, it was 8000 μatm; and in the Neoproterozoic era, 750 million years ago, it was 30,000 μatm, or 75 times today’s concentration. Yet the planet survived and throve.

The statement that “the 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years” is no big deal. Recorded history, as far as global temperatures are concerned, only goes back to 1850. The weather was warmer than today in the medieval, Roman, Minoan, Old Kingdom, and Holocene Warm Periods, the last of which endured for 4000 years (8000-4000 BC) and was 3 Cº warmer than the present.

Obama says, “Last year, temperatures in some areas of the ocean reached record highs.” Welcome to our variable climate, which, like the baseball scores, is a chaotic object where new records will tend to be set all the time. Yet the 3500+ Argo bathythermograph buoys deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2006 show very little ocean warming overall, so that – according to the now-failed ENVISAT satellite, sea level in the 8 years 2004-2012 rose at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century.

His moan about ice in the Arctic shrinking to its smallest size on record is also little to worry about: for the Arctic ice record only goes back a third of a century. It is likely that there was a lot less ice in the Arctic in 1922 and again in the mid-1930s than there is today, but we cannot demonstrate that definitively.

The statement that sea level is a foot higher than a century ago should also be put in context. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age sea level has risen by 400 feet – a rate of getting on for 4 feet a century. So 1 foot a century is no big deal (and the 1.3 inches/century equivalent warming rate from 2004-2012 is still less of a big deal).

He whines on: “2012 was the warmest year in our history.” That may or may not have been true for the U.S. (there is good reason to suppose that 1934 was warmer): but it is certainly not true globally:

The graph, showing the Hadley/CRU data, makes clear that January 2007, an el Niño month, was the warmest on record; and 1998, an el Niño year, was the warmest year on record. El Niños are naturally-occurring events. Since the entire trend-line falls within the blue zone of measurement/bias/coverage uncertainty, we do not even know to 95% certainty that there has been any global warming at all for the past 17 years 4 months. Notwithstanding continuing increases in C)2 concentration, there has been no warming at all for 12 years 6 months:

The statement that “Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl [in the 1930s]” is equivalent to a statement that the drought of the dustbowl years was worse than today’s drought. Yet the world is warmer now than it was then:

Why was there more drought when there was less warming, if global warming is the chief cause of drought? Besides, as Obama admits, the Midwest was then “drenched by the wettest spring on record.” In short, climate has been changing for 4567 million years; it is changing now; and it will continue to change.

Obama cherry-picks his event with the same relentless care as Al Gore. He talks of Western wildfires scorching an area larger than the state of Maryland and a recent heat wave in Alaska. He does not mention the 10,000 cold-weather and high-snowfall records set just in the U.S. in the past winter; or the 100-year record cold in London and Moscow.

He talks of “the costs of these events” being “measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods, lost homes, lost businesses, hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services and disaster relief.” Yet the annual costs of extreme weather, normalized to allow for growth in population and infrastructure over the past half-century, show no trend. And the economic peer-reviewed literature is near-unanimous in finding that it would cost considerably more to try to mitigate global warming today than to adapt to its consequences the day after tomorrow. In fact, it is 10-100 times more costly to act now than to adapt later.

Obama says, “Farmers see crops wilted one year, washed away the next; and the higher food prices get passed on to you, the American consumer.” Well, farmers have always had fluctuating weather and consequent crop failures from time to time. Yet sometimes conditions are ideal, supply high and prices low. Those prices, too, get passed on to the American consumer, not that you will learn that from Obama.

He goes on: “Mountain communities worry about what smaller snowpacks will mean for tourism,” but he fails to mention that the United States has seen record snowfall in the past two or three years.

He says, “Families at the bottom of the mountains wonder what it will mean for their drinking water.” No, they don’t: the December snow cover extent in the northern-hemisphere winter of 2012/13 was the greatest in the entire 34-year satellite record, and the snow cover for the entire winter was the fifth-greatest on record.

Obama says, “Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction in insurance premiums, state and local taxes, and the costs of rebuilding and disaster relief.” No: they are paying just about as much as they always did for extreme weather damage, which is why the insurance companies have found it so very difficult to use climate change as a pretext to talk up premiums.

He trots out the Trots’ usual meme that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.”

The survey he mentions actually showed less than a third of a sample of almost 12,000 published papers even implicitly endorsing the notion that humans are contributing to global warming. Only 0.3 percent of the abstracts – just 41 out of 11,944 – said humans had caused more than half of “current” warming: no surprise there, given that there has not been any current warming. And none of the abstracts said warming would be catastrophic.

Obama got some applause for saying, “As a president, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act.” No: we need not to act. Since it is about 50 times more expensive to act now than to let the predicted global warming happen and pay the far later and lesser cost of adapting to it, it is necessary not to waste our legacy to future generations by spending it on pointless measures now.

He says: “This plan begins with cutting carbon pollution by changing the way we use energy – using less dirty energy, using more clean energy, wasting less energy throughout our economy.” Yet the four specific proposals for reducing “carbon pollution” would, if implemented at vast cost, forestall between them so little global warming that modern instruments and methods would not be able to detect it.

He trumpets: “Today, we use more clean energy – more renewables and natural gas –which is supporting hundreds of thousands of good jobs.” Yet each “green job” costs between $100,000 and $1 million, destroying many other jobs in the real economy.

He proclaims: “guess what – our economy is 60 percent bigger than it was 20 years ago, while our carbon emissions are roughly back to where they were 20 years ago. So, obviously, we can figure this out.” Except that, until he came along, no one was silly enough to do the economic damage he is doing. So the fall in US CO2 emissions is inadvertent: it owes nothing whatsoever to past concerns about global warming.

Obama goes on to say the State Department will decide on the Keystone XL pipeline by evaluating “the net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate.” The net effects will be nil: if the U.S. don’t buy the product, someone else will.

Source: World News Daily 6/30/13 by Bob Unrah http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/obamas-global-warming-claims-demolished/#Ii8H7fujRMCFea2x.99

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

Comments:

There is no man-made global warming problem and there has never been a global warming problem.  It is a hoax perpetrated by the UN to attempt to become our one-world communist government and to extort money from us.  There is a cabal of global Marxists associated with this scam that includes George Soros, global  ‘Banksters’ and all UN supporters in the US government. It was a political agenda using “political science”.  This junk science has been funded using your tax dollars printed out of thin air.  We need to replace all pro-UN Senators and quit the UN.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Palin Warns House GOP: Don’t Betray Working Class by Passing Amnesty

(Breitbart) – One day after the Senate passed its immigration reform bill, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned the House on Friday to not betray working class Americans by passing a bill that will lower wages and raise unemployment without securing the borders.

“Now we turn to watch the House. If they bless this new ‘bi-partisan’ hyper-partisan devastating plan for amnesty, we’ll know that both private political parties have finally turned their backs on us,” Palin wrote in a Facebook post that also urged Americans to read the Breitbart News piece that detailed the importance of the working class vote. “It will then be time to show our parties’ hierarchies what we think of being members of either one of these out-of-touch, arrogant, and dysfunctional political machines.”

Palin called the “amnesty bill the Senate passed yesterday” a “sad betrayal of working class Americans of every ethnicity who will see their wages lowered and their upward mobility” as well.

“And yet we still do not have a secured border,” she said. “This Senate-approved amnesty bill rewards lawbreakers and won’t solve any problems–as the CBO report notes that millions of more illegal immigrants will continue to flood the U.S. in coming years.”

Palin said independent-minded conservatives like her are “barely hanging on to our enlistment papers in any political party” because the “flip-flopping political actions like amnesty force us to ask how much more bull from both the elephants in the Republican Party and the jackasses in the Democrat Party we have to swallow before these political machines totally abandon the average commonsense hardworking American.”

Palin has signaled in recent weeks that she is not going to allow Washington politicians to betray America’s working class, especially if they specifically campaigned to put border security first and vote against amnesty.

She told Breitbart News last week that, for instance, she would not mind if Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) were primaried for reneging on their campaign promises to not vote for amnesty and secure the border first.

The Senate’s immigration bill passed 68-32, with 14 Republicans voting for the bill. The immigration battle now heads to the House.

Source: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/28/Palin-Warns-House-Don-t-Betray-Working-Class-by-Passing-Amnesty-Bill.

Obama to teach kids to promote Obamacare

(Heartland) – The Los Angeles Unified School District will use a state grant to train teens to promote ObamaCare to family members. Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, announced grants of $37 million on May 14 to promote the nationally unpopular law.

LAUSD will receive $990,000. The district listed as a primary outcome for its project, “Teens trained to be messengers to family members.”

Covered California spokeswoman Sarah Soto-Taylor said staff have not questioned this goal.

“We have confidence that the model LA Unified brought to the table will be successful in reaching our target population, which includes family members of students,” she said.

LAUSD will also use tax-paid staff to promote ObamaCare through phone calls to students’ homes, in-class presentations, and meetings with employees eligible for ObamaCare’s taxpayer-covered healthcare, the grant award says.

One in three Los Angeles students never graduates high school.

Unpaid Propagandizers

The district listed adult education students, part-time, and contract employees as its target population. Teens will be trained to be messengers not to those groups, but to their own families, to get more people enrolled in taxpayer-subsidized healthcare.

If the project is successful, Los Angeles families can expect more use of students to push government-preferred messaging.

“Teens are part of a ‘pilot’ program to test whether young people can be trained as messengers to deliver outreach and limited education to family and friends in and around their homes,” said Gayle Pollard-Terry, a LAUSD spokesman, in an email. “Teens will be educating adults that they already know (e.g., family or friends) and not other adults.”

‘Paid in the Rear’

Grant recipients like LAUSD will be held accountable by the state for fulfilling their promised activities for outreach, said Larry Hicks, another LAUSD spokesman.

“At a minimum, grantees will be required to submit to Covered California monthly, quarterly, and annual reports on their activities and progress towards agreed upon outcomes. If project benchmarks are not met, grantees may be required to submit additional ad hoc reports upon Covered California’s request. Grantees will also be required to report any proposed adjustments to their approved outreach and education plan using the information management system… Additionally, field monitors will be assigned to grantees to verify their progress,” Hicks said.

Pollard-Terry said the district is familiar with running grants like this one and federal ones of similar size: “This grant is ‘paid in the rear,’ so the funding will come based on performance. The district front-funds positions and we have the ability to start using existing staff for the most part.”

Source: http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/06/20/california-schools-train-kids-sell-obamacare

ObamaCare Must Be Destroyed With A Vote Of Congress!

A Property Rights Victory

Government can't use permitting to extort from landowners.

Property rights don't always get the respect they deserve at the Supreme Court, but this year has been different. On Tuesday the Justices delivered their third rebuke of the term against government abuse of the Constitution's Takings Clause in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management.

The case centered on whether a Florida wetlands district could set excessive conditions on the approval of a land-use permit. In 1994, landowner Coy Koontz applied for a permit to develop a 3.7-acre section of his wetlands property. As required by state law, Mr. Koontz offered to compensate for any wetland damage by deeding an 11-acre easement to the district for conservation.

That wasn't enough for local regulators, who gave Mr. Koontz an ultimatum: He could scale back his development to one acre and surrender the rest of his property to the district. Or he could proceed with his project with the 11-acre easement and pay thousands to improve district land miles away that was unaffected by his development.

Mr. Koontz declined the offer and sued under a Florida law that allows monetary damages when an "unreasonable exercise of the state's police power" constitutes "a taking without just compensation." Florida's Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Koontz didn't have a claim since his permit had been denied. Ergo, his property was not actually taken. By this logic, a landowner must first succumb to government property extortion in order to have a case.

Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Samuel Alito reversed the state court on grounds that "extortionate demands for property in the land-use permitting context run afoul of the Takings Clause not because they take property but because they impermissibly burden the right not to have property taken without just compensation."

The ruling extends the Court's Nollan (1987) \ and Dolan (1994) Takings Clause precedents to government denial of permits and government demands for offsite mitigation rather than a direct invasion of private property. This is a big deal because governments find multiple ways to extort property.

Property cases don't get the media attention that free speech issues do, but the Constitution's bar against unjust takings remains a bedrock protection against government abuse. Now if only Justice Anthony Kennedy would revisit his vote tolerating the abuse of eminent domain in Kelo v. City of New London. It's not too late, sir.

Source: A version of this article appeared June 28, 2013, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Property Rights Victory. * June 27, 2013, 7:24 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323683504578567670559475816.html

Federal Regulation Has Left America A Poorer Nation

Economy: Frustrated by the lack of jobs and middle-class progress? Dispirited by the fading American Dream? Don't blame capitalism. Blame regulation and politicians who push it.

Some people, it seems, live to rail against free markets and free enterprise, holding them responsible for flat wages, lack of opportunity, income gaps, middle-class stagnation, poverty and economic listlessness. They're convinced private greed holds back the government's ability to improve conditions.

But it's the government that's done the most damage to economic growth, new research shows.

America is now more of a regulatory state than a haven of free enterprise — a development that has not come without measurable cost.

A study published this month, for example, observes that if just federal regulation (state regulation wasn't considered) had remained at the level it was in 1949, the economy would be more than 3.5 times bigger than it is.

"Regulation's overall effect on output's growth rate is negative and substantial," economists John Dawson and John Seater write in "Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth" Published in the June issue of the "The Journal of Economic Growth."

"Federal regulations added over the past 50 years," they say, "have reduced real output growth by about two percentage points on average (annually) over the period 1949-2005. That reduction in the growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011.

"That is, GDP at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion, if regulation had remained at its 1949 level."

Numbers that big aren't easy to put into perspective. But at a more micro level, they mean losses of "$277,100 per household and $129,300 per person" per year, the the authors reckon.

To get a handle on the economy's regulatory burden, Dawson and Seater counted the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations and came up with a sixfold increase — from 19,335 in 1949 to 134,261 in 2005.

Their work does not consider four other government activities that affect economic activity — spending, taxation, deficits, monetary policy. So it's likely that if Washington had been more responsible in those activities since the middle of the last century, the $53.9 trillion the Dawson and Seater estimated would be even bigger.

Federal spending alone does tremendous damage. David Ranson, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, has just published a study showing that increases in federal spending since 1929 has been accompanied by even-larger decreases in private-sector spending.

Conversely, in the years when federal spending fell, private spending grew by a greater degree.

"Increased government spending induces the private sector to contract, a phenomenon that has been called 'crowding out,'" says Ranson. "Surprisingly simple evidence shows that government growth tends to cut the business sector back."

There are those who will say that government regulation has protected Americans and saved lives. That's arguable. But this isn't: A wealthier society is a safer and healthier society. More than six decades of regulation can't be erased in a moment. But the dismantling needs to start.

Source:   Investor's Business Daily Posted 06/28/2013,

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/062813-661866-dont-blame-capitalism-and-free-markets-for-poor-economic-performance.htm?fromcampaign=1#ixzz2XdztaFT1 

Comments;

We need to elect a Senate in 2014 who work with the House to begin to dismantle unnecessary, unwanted, job killing laws and regulations and to reduce government spending by $1 trillion a year.  They can cut it and we will never miss it.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

A Country Founded by Geniuses but Run by Idiots

by Jeff Foxworthy:

If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for entering and remaining in the country illegally — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If you have to get your parents’ permission to go on a field trip or to take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If you MUST show your identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor, or check out a library book and rent a video, but not to vote for who runs the government — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If the government wants to prevent stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines that hold more than ten rounds, but gives twenty F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If, in the nation’s largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not one 24-ounce soda, because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If an 80-year-old woman or a three-year-old girl who is confined to a wheelchair can be strip-searched by the TSA at the airport, but a woman in a burka or a hijab is only subject to having her neck and head searched — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If a seven-year-old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher is “cute,” but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

 
If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government regulation and intrusion, while not working is rewarded with Food Stamps, WIC checks, Medicaid benefits, subsidized housing, and free cell phones — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If the government’s plan for getting people back to work is to provide incentives for not working, by granting 99 weeks of unemployment checks, without any requirement to prove that gainful employment was diligently sought, but couldn’t be found — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If you pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest big-screen TV, while your neighbor buys iPhones, time shares, a wall-sized do-it-all plasma screen TV and new cars, and the government forgives his debt when he defaults on his mortgage — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If being stripped of your Constitutional right to defend yourself makes you more “safe” according to the government — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots

Source:  Not politically correct; just common sense TELLING IT LIKE IT IS JEFF!!!!  A Country Founded by Geniuses but Run by Idiots Attributed to Jeff Foxworthy:

 

The Federal Reserve Trap

The Biggest Ponzi Scheme In The History Of The World

Did you know that you are involved in the most massive Ponzi scheme that has ever existed?  To illustrate my point, allow me to tell you a little story.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Sam.  When he was younger, he had been a very principled young man that had worked incredibly hard and that had built a large number of tremendously successful businesses.  He became fabulously wealthy and he accumulated far more gold than anyone else on the planet. 

But when he started to get a little older he forgot the values of his youth.  He started making really bad decisions and some of his relatives started to take advantage of him.  One particularly devious relative was a nephew named Fred.  One day Fred approached his uncle Sam with a scheme that his friends the bankers had come up with.  What happened next would change the course of Sam's life forever.

Even though Sam was the wealthiest man in the world by far, Fred convinced Sam that he could have an even higher standard of living by going into a little bit of debt.  In exchange for IOUs issued by his uncle Sam, Fred would give him paper notes that he printed off on his printing press.  Since the paper notes would be backed by the gold that Sam was holding, everyone would consider them to be valuable.  Sam could take those paper notes and spend them on whatever his heart desired.  Uncle Sam started to do this, and he started to become addicted to all of the nice things that those paper notes would buy him.

Fred took the IOUs that he received from his uncle and he auctioned them off to the bankers.  But there was a problem.  The IOUs issued by Uncle Sam had to be paid back with interest.  When the time came to pay back the IOUs, Uncle Sam could not afford to pay back the debts, pay the interest on those debts, and buy all of the nice things that he wanted.  So Uncle Sam issued even more IOUs than before so that he could get enough notes to pay off his debts.  As time rolled on, this pattern just kept on repeating.  Uncle Sam repeatedly paid off his old debts by taking out even larger new debts.

Meanwhile, since the notes that Uncle Sam was using were backed by gold, everyone else in the world decided to start using them to trade with one another.  This was greatly beneficial to Uncle Sam, because the rest of the world was glad to send him oil, home electronics, plastic trinkets and anything else that Uncle Sam wanted in exchange for his gold-backed notes.

Eventually, however, the rest of the world started to suspect that the number of gold-backed notes that Uncle Sam was issuing far exceeded the amount of gold that Uncle Sam actually had.  So the rest of the world started to trade in their notes for gold.

And by that time Uncle Sam definitely did not have enough gold to back up his notes.  Realizing that the scheme was starting to collapse, one day Uncle Sam announced that his notes would no longer be backed by gold.  But he insisted that the rest of the world should continue using his notes because he was the wealthiest man on the planet and everyone should just trust him. And the rest of the world did continue to trust him, although it wasn't the same as before.

As Uncle Sam got greedier and greedier, he started to issue IOUs and spend notes at a rate that nobody ever dreamed possible.  The great businesses that Uncle Sam had built when he was younger were starting to decline, and Uncle Sam started buying far more stuff from the rest of the world than they bought from him.  The rest of the world was still glad to take Uncle Sam's notes because they used them to trade with one another, but they started accumulating far more notes than they actually needed.

Not sure exactly what to do with mountains of these notes, the rest of the world started to loan them back to Uncle Sam.  It eventually got to the point where Uncle Sam owed the rest of the world trillions of these notes.  Even though the notes were losing value at a rate of close to 10 percent a year, Uncle Sam somehow convinced the rest of the world to loan him notes at an average rate of interest of less than 3 percent a year.

One day Uncle Sam woke up and realized that the amount of debt that he owed was now more than 5000 times larger than it was when Fred had first approached him with this ill-fated scheme.  Uncle Sam now owed more than 16 trillion notes to his creditors, and Uncle Sam had already made future financial commitments of 202 trillion notes that

he would never be able to pay.  Meanwhile, the notes that Fred had been printing up for Uncle Sam were now worth less than 5 percent of their original value.  Uncle Sam was becoming concerned because some of his other relatives were warning that this whole scheme was about to collapse.

Sadly, Uncle Sam did not listen to them.  Uncle Sam knew that if he admitted how fraudulent the financial scheme was, the rest of the world would quit sending him all of the things that he needed in exchange for his notes and they would quit lending his notes back to him at super low interest rates.

And if the rest of the world lost confidence in his notes and quit using them, Uncle Sam knew that his standard of living would go way, way down.  That was something that Uncle Sam could not bear to have happen.

When a financial crisis almost caused the scheme to crash in 2008, a desperate Uncle Sam went to Fred and asked for help.  In response, Fred started printing up far more notes than ever before and started directly buying up large amounts of IOUs from Uncle Sam with the notes that he was creating out of thin air.  Fred hoped that the rest of the

world would not notice what he was doing.

It seemed to work for a little while, but then an even worse financial crisis came along.  Once again, Uncle Sam started issuing massive amounts of new IOUs and Fred started printing up giant mountains of new notes to try to fix things, but their desperate attempts to keep the system going were to no avail.  The rest of the world started to realize that they had been sucked into a massive Ponzi scheme, and they lost confidence in the notes that Uncle Sam was using.  Suddenly nobody wanted to lend notes to Uncle Sam at super low interest rates anymore, and people started asking for far more notes in exchange for the things that Uncle Sam wanted.

Uncle Sam's standard of living dropped dramatically.  Since he could no longer flood the world with his notes, Uncle Sam could not continue to consume far, far more wealth than he produced.  Uncle Sam sunk into a deep depression as he watched the scheme fall apart all around him.

Uncle Sam had once been the wealthiest man on the entire planet, but now he was a broke, tired old man that was absolutely drowning in debt.  Unfortunately, once he was down on his luck the rest of the world did not have any compassion for him.  In fact, much of the rest of the world celebrated the downfall of Uncle Sam.

All of this could have been avoided if Uncle Sam had never agreed to Fred's crazy scheme.  And once Uncle Sam made the decision to stop backing his notes with gold, it was only a matter of time before the scheme was going to collapse.

Does this little story sound crazy to you?  It shouldn't.  The truth is that you are involved in such a scheme right now.  In case you haven't figured it out, "Uncle Sam" is the United States, the "notes" are U.S. dollars, and "Fred" is the Federal Reserve.

Source: Zero Hedge.com, The Biggest Ponzi Scheme In The History Of The World | Zero Hedge

http://www.facebook.com/l/rAQHjhV0OAQES6OiVHm75ZwOW8e7ZuBPh4ZD1MyELzIGiPw/www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-24/biggest-ponzi-scheme-history-world

 

 

 

 

Atlanta Property Rights Violations

Atlanta BeltLine: City to condemn property to develop park, trail by David Pendered.  Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with new information from Atlanta. A total of 12 parcels are being proposed for condemnation.
http://saportareport.com/blog/2013/06/atlanta-beltline-city-to-condemn-property-for-first-time-to-develop-park-trail/#sthash.CKTgnYu5.dpuf

Atlanta is preparing to condemn private property to further the development of the Atlanta BeltLine. The 4.5 mile Southwest BeltLine Connector Trail is to link the existing Lionel Hampton Trail and Westwood Avenue, passing Beecher Elementary School. Credit: Atlanta BeltLine. Although just a few acres are involved, this marks the first time Atlanta has exercised its power of eminent domain to develop a park or trail related to the BeltLine.

Condemned land will be used to expand Enota Place Park, in southwest Atlanta, which was one of the original 13 jewels in the “emerald necklace” vision of the BeltLine that was used to promote the concept in its formative days. The Southwest BeltLine Connector Trail will be built atop some condemned properties.

In all, 12 parcels are to be condemned – five along the Southwest BeltLine Connector Trail, and seven next to Enota Park. In each case, the city named a public purpose to justify its proposed taking.

The city is resorting to condemnation in order to provide additional greenspace in an area of the city that various studies have shown to be in need of additional greenspace. Atlanta intends to pay fair market value for the land, with the price established through the legal process, according to papers associated with the proposals.

One issue that makes this process notable is the use of condemnation of private property to achieve the public purpose of developing the BeltLine.

Georgia voters were so concerned about the issue of eminent domain that in 2006 they voted overwhelmningly to restrict government’s use of eminent domain. The ballot measure came on the heels of a 2005 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that determined condemnation was acceptable to promote redevelopment. Twelve states voted on similar legislation that year.

The area marked “1″ is the portion of the Atlanta BeltLine that’s to benefit from the proposed condemnation of land by Atlanta. Credit: Atlanta BeltLine

Atlanta has defined the BeltLine as a redevelopment project intended to eradicate blight. This stated purpose, to reduce blight, is part of the reason a portion of property taxes collected along the BeltLine can be used to build its parks and trails and other amenities.

According to legislation submitted by Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration to the Atlanta City Council, the land to be condemned for the trail is being taken for what is described as: “A public transportation purpose.”

City procurement officials tried, but failed, to acquire the parcels through “good faith” efforts, according to the legislation. The problems boiled down to: “Numerous issues including liens and other clouds on title.” Georgia’s condemnation law includes title issues as an allowed use of eminent domain.

In the case of the land needed to expand Enota Park, the city and property owners evidently could not come to terms on the price. The legislation states:  “The city engaged in good faith negotiations with the owner of the property to acquire the property based upon a certified appraisal of the property … Condemnation … is necessary to complete the expansion of Enota Place Park.”

The public purpose of the condemnation is explained as: “Necessary for the expansion of Enota Place Park boundaries, which parcels will be possessed, occupied and used by the general public.” Condemnation laws have long held “public use” as an acceptable purpose.

The timeline provided by the Reed administration calls for the proposal to be discussed Tuesday at the Atlanta City Council’s Community Development Committee. The committee could vote as early as July 9, which would enable the full council to vote on July 15.

Source: Posted in Saporta Report by David Pendered June 24, 2013

http://saportareport.com/blog/2013/06/atlanta-beltline-city-to-condemn-property-for-first-time-to-develop-park-trail/#sthash.CKTgnYu5.dpuf

Comments:

This is not a “transportation” purpose.  Agenda 21 implementation has blurred the separation of transportation with parks and recreation, a much less compelling reason for property seizure than building an interstate highway. We need to revisit State Law in January 2014 to prevent the kind of property rights violations going on in San Francisco CA Bay area.  A law suit is in order.  Check to see if “trails” are planned for your city or county.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader