Ephemeral dreams of an ideal society

Can Americans trust the claims of temporary politicians who promise that their grand dreams and intricate plans will solve humanity's most vexing issues?

Consider their track record...

Social Security

THEN: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 14 August 1935, Washington, D.C.:

Today, a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, had tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what will be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last...

...This social security measure gives at least some protection to 50 millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health...

...It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness...

NOW: Social Security Is Failing Even Faster Than We Thought:

In last year's Trustees Report, the Social Security Administration warned that the program's trust fund was likely to run out of money in 2036, leading to deep cuts in benefits. If that weren't bad enough for anyone expecting to be alive then, a more recent projection from the Congressional Budget Office paints a much worse picture.

This year's CBO report forecasts that by the end of this decade, the combined Social Security Old Age and Disability Trust Funds will be about $800 billion smaller than last year's SSA projections. That's a very substantial drop -- and a sign that this year's Trustees Report will likely bring another downward revision to the year it expects those Trust Funds to dry up and benefits to be cut.

Medicare

THEN: President Lyndon Baines Johnson, 30 July 1965, Washington, D.C.

...No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years... And no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country...

...During your working years, the people of America--you--will contribute ... a small amount each payday for hospital insurance protection. For example, the average worker in 1966 will contribute about $1.50 per month. The employer will contribute a similar amount. And this will provide the funds to pay up to 90 days of hospital care for each illness, plus diagnostic care, and up to 100 home health visits after you are 65. And beginning in 1967, you will also be covered for up to 100 days of care in a skilled nursing home after a period of hospital care.

NOW: Medicare’s Worsening Finances: The Other Shoe Drops:

A week ago, the Medicare Trustees issued their annual report, which showed that the program is on the fact track to insolvency. The 2011 analysis projected that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund (which funds Medicare Part A) will be insolvent in 2024, and the program’s long-term unfunded obligations—promised benefits that are not paid for—amount to $24.6 trillion...

...[new] across-the-board cuts would cause 15 percent of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies to become unprofitable by 2019. This number would climb to 25 percent in 2030 and 40 percent by 2050.

Obamacare

THEN: President Barack Hussein Obama, 23 March 2010, Washington, D.C.:

...And we have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care...

...I said this once or twice, but it bears repeating: If you like your current insurance, you will keep your current insurance. No government takeover; nobody is changing what you’ve got if you’re happy with it. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. In fact, more people will keep their doctors because your coverage will be more secure and more stable than it was before I signed this legislation.

NOW: Obamacare's Broken Promises:

Hard times continue for the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). The administration has scrapped the law's long-term care insurance program, covering nursing homes and home health care. The program was deemed unrealistic. This is a harbinger...

...Writing in The New York Review of Books, [Arnold Relman, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine] says that "the law does very little or nothing to address some of the most important causes of the high cost of care and its rapid inflation.” Note: Relman isn't a conservative crank. He's a critic of insurance companies and advocates a single-payer, government-run health-care system.

The ACA, Relman writes, doesn't alter fee-for-service reimbursement... [he is also] unimpressed with the ACA provisions intended to control costs: for example, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It's a group of 15 experts who would recommend changes if government health spending rose too rapidly... Relman also dismisses "accountable care organizations” (ACOs) that supposedly save money through coordinated care by doctors and hospitals. The regulations governing ACOs will be so complicated that there won't be many of them, he writes.

...Many of [the ACA's] promises rest, like CLASS, on unrealistic assumptions. Disappointments loom, and the needed debate is deferred.

We are living in Ameritopia

Mark Levin explains:

The reason I say that liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid is because we can look at what's going around in the country today. If, in your own lives, you were pursuing policies that were destroying your own home ownership, that were destroying your own job, that were creating a massive, impossible debt for your family and your children in particular, you'd stop it. You wouldn't keep doing it!

And yet for the liberal, if it's imposed on you -- and they feel that they can be immune from it -- they're for it. They wouldn't do to themselves and their own family what they're doing to you, and your family, and the whole nation! Take Barack Obama. Does Barack Obama conduct himself in his own, personal affairs, in his family's affairs, as recklessly as he conducts the affairs of the nation? No. Would he run up the kind of relative personal debt that he's running up for the nation? No way.

...So they do to us -- and they do to our society -- what they would never do to their own families. They do not live in their own lives as they seek to have the rest of us live. Or as they seek to have our society conduct itself.

The only question that remains is whether the country can be saved. 2012 may be our last, best chance to save this Republic from the Utopian Statists, whose pursuit of impossible, narcissistic dreams have set the country on a course for national fiscal suicide.

Dreams From My Single-Parent Family

In September of 2009, a cell-phone video that depicted Chicago public school students beating a fellow teen to death circulated throughout the Internet and the mainstream media.

Curiously, none of the media outlets that covered the story bothered to recollect that President Barack Obama had once served as a community organizer and then a state senator in these very same South Side neighborhoods.

Throughout his years working for "change", Obama paid scant heed to the primary cause of violence and dependency in the area: the eradication of the black two-parent family by decades of Democrat policies.

Community organizing had gotten its start in Chicago under the direction of an activist named Saul Alinsky. Alinsky believed that poverty was the result of political inequities. He envisioned a power-grab by the "have-nots" of society, who would form massive, grassroots coalitions that would defeat the rich and redistribute their possessions.

But the Alinsky movement suffered two calamitous setbacks in the years leading up to the Obama era. First, the "War on Poverty" had established a governmental community organizing bureaucracy called the Community Action Agency. Rife with corruption, the agency's money was misappropriated and used to fund gang warfare, rape and murder.

In addition, the Alinsky playbook was doubly irrelevant because blacks occupied most of the positions of power in Chicago. The city had elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington; it had power-brokers like Emil Jones, Jr. in the State Senate; and Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign in the south side.

Despite the sea-change in political influence, Chicago had exploded in a maelstrom of black-on-black violence. In 1984, the year Obama came to Chicago, one of the top high school basketball players in the country -- an immensely talented and likable center named Ben Wilson -- was murdered by gang members.

The outcry was as predictable as it was ineffectual. None of the power-brokers pointed out that all of Wilson's killers came from single-parent families. None concerned themselves with the mind-blowing statistic: 75% of all black Chicago kids were born out of wedlock. In fact, it became a cultural norm for young black men to father children and flee responsibility. The result was rampant crime. In fact, statistical studies show that, whether you are white, black or brown, you have the exact same chance of going to prison if you come from a single-parent family.

In Obama's book Dreams from My Father, his narrative "is almost devoid of men. With the exception of the local ministers and the occasional semi-crazed black nationalist, Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: 'Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs?' The most appropriate candidate—'their fathers'—never occurs to him."

Rather than confront the central issue, Obama as community organizer initially struggled to find his role. He was relieved to find that a Mayor's Education and Training (MET) office had no branch in Roseland, and he promptly filed an application to open one. The office had as much of an effect on the area as his asbestos removal efforts, which is to say: none. In fact, youth violence continued to increase and by his third year, 57 children had been killed in the city.

In 1994, a series of brutal child murders galvanized public attention: an 11-year old gang member was executed to keep him from implicating others in an accidental shooting death. A month later, a five-year old boy who had refused to steal candy for two under-12 gang members was dropped from a 14-story building. Not one of the participants came from a two-parent family.

A year after these notorious murders, the would-be candidate for state senator granted an interview to The Chicago Reader. Rather than point out the lack of family structure endemic to the rampant violence, Obama instead attacked "the Christian Right and the Republican Congress for 'hijack[ing] the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.' Yeah, sure, family values are fine, he says, but what about 'collective action . . . collective institutions and organizations'? Let’s take 'these same values that are encouraged within our families,' he urges, 'and apply them to a larger society.'"

The ignorance or naivete inherent in these statements expose a bizarre worldview. Never in the history of western civilization has some collectivist framework served as a realistic substitute for the traditional family structure. In Obama's Chicago, fathers are AWOL; and some nebulous obligation for "collective action" has no chance of succeeding without a sense of personal responsibility. In fact, Obama downplays the notion of a familial duty and points to an overall societal failure, saying "...we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant... [but] not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more."

The ideology of Alinsky then -- as now -- appears to have polluted Obama's sense of right and wrong. Where history, facts, logic and reason point to the need to encourage, nurture and reward the traditional family unit, Obama instead vilifies family values and those who promote them.

For decades, Obama and the Democrats have embraced an utterly defective and destructive strategy: Crushing school choice. Incentivizing single-parent families. Encouraging a lifelong culture of dependency.

The children of Obama's South Side deserve better. They deserve more than a dream of a father.


Based upon: Heather Mac Donald, Chicago’s Real Crime Story, City Journal.

The White House: laser-focused on making condoms easier to get than jobs

Two figures spotted at The Right Scoop illustrate how close we are to the precipice:

This is stunning. Zero Hedge has an article today showcasing research from Wyatt Emerich of The Cleveland Current. He shows how a single parent making minimum wage, with a family of 3 children, has more disposable income that someone making $60k/year...

And this is in Mississippi, not California. Who knows how much more they are getting there...

For another reality check, we look at a chart that PowerLine picked up from the Republican Study Committee on the decline in jobs. Here is how they describe it...:

It depicts the percentage of Americans in the labor force from January 2005 (commonly known as the “good old days” through January 2012. The decline in the number of working Americans is staggering. And note that Barack Obama became president in January 2009, about 3/4 of the way through the gray “recession,” and just before the “stimulus” that is marked with a red dot. What has happened since Obama took office is that the jobs situation has steadily deteriorated:

This is why we are headed for a debt crisis. No jobs and we’re subsidizing everything under the sun.

If only Obama would expend as much energy on private sector job creation as he does on mandating abortion pills.


Hat tips: BadBlue. Headline idea: Mark Levin.

Good news: 1 in 5 Americans now dependent on government assistance (not including public sector employees)

Hey, check it out, kids: it's another Obama record!

The number of Americans dependent on the federal government has exploded over the past five years, reaching a record 67.3 million people, according to Heritage’s annual Index of Dependence on Government. That means 1 in 5 Americans (21.8 percent) today receive some level of assistance from the federal government.

This week’s chart — one of 15 featured in this year’s report — depicts the percentage of the U.S. population who receive government assistance and the total number of individuals who are dependent on the federal government.

Fifty years ago, before President Lyndon Johnson created the Great Society programs, some 21.7 million people (or 11.7 percent of the population) received assistance through government programs that existed at the time. The number increased sharply in the 1960s and 1970s before falling in the 1990s. Recently, however, it has skyrocketed.

I think this chart must be racist or something.

Or it could just be that this country is headed for fiscal collapse unless we reverse course ASAP.

Which is the proper name: Barack Hussein Foodstamp or Barack Foodstamp Obama?

Because only one man in history can properly be called "The Foodstamp President" and this chart illustrates why.

And you would think Obama would be proud of that title: after all, he reveled in the media's coverage of his "Stimulus" package in 2009. Remember when CBS Evening News ran featured segments like "Stimulus Boost For Food Stamp Recipients?"

And now he wants to run away from his great achievements?


Update: "State Gets $5 Million Bonus For Food Stamp Sign Up"


Hat tip: Mark Levin.

Obama Labor Politburo Now Publishing Patently Bogus Unemployment Propaganda

Sure, "the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5%". And a unicorn-riding leprechaun is sprinkling gold nuggets like BaconBits™ on my front lawn at this very moment.

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people "drop out" of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population...

...In order to back out this fudge we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate. To get that we used the average rate since 1980, or ever since the great moderation began. As it happens, this long-term average is 65.8%...


It won't surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4%... basically where it has been ever since 2009 - and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s.

...And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.

In other words, if the Obama Labor Propaganda Bureau (which is the name they prefer, I hear) used a reasonable labor force participation rate, the real unemployment rate would be:

11.4%
To pull this off, they've been forced to use the lowest labor force participation rate that America has seen since... 1984. Which seems, eh, appropos.

As my wife asked the other day: "I wonder whose mortgage I'm paying when I clock in for work?"

The most terrifying economic chart of 2011

Of 'the 11 most disturbing economic charts of 2011' presented by Tyler Durden, this particular graph struck me hardest:

Why is this single graph so horrifying?

Please note what occurred to the labor force participation rate when Barack Obama took office.

Not when "the Great Recession" hit. When Obama took office. After he took office, the labor force participation rate went into freefall.

And please note the coincidental rise in food stamps and government assistance at the exact same time; free money to stay unemployed, dispensed with leaf-blower-like efficiency throughout the country:


This, my friends, is the inevitable result of President Subprime McDowngrade's expansion of the welfare state: a new class of individuals so enriched by government largess that they have lost all motivation to work.

But it's not all bad news: at least the USDA is aware of how food stamps are being used and is highly efficient at stamping out waste, fraud and abuse.

Oh, wait. They're not - they don't even know what kind of things are getting purchased with your tax dollars.

Talk amongst yourselves.

The Coming Tidal Wave... of Crime

Caution: this is not a snarky post. Zero-percent snark. I want to connect a few dots for you. Additional caution: you may want to sit down.

* * * * * * * * *
 1  USA Today headline: Record number in government anti-poverty programs

Government anti-poverty programs... now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand... More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor...

...More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through May. The program has grown steadily for three years...

...Close to 10 million receive unemployment insurance, nearly four times the number from 2007. Benefits have been extended by Congress eight times beyond the basic 26-week program, enabling the long-term unemployed to get up to 99 weeks of benefits. Caseloads peaked at nearly 12 million in January — "the highest numbers on record," says Christine Riordan of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers.

More than 4.4 million people are on welfare, an 18% increase during the recession...

In February 2009 Robert Rector, quoted in the London Sunday Times, predicted that the Obama Democrats' expansion of welfare, food stamps and unemployment would be disastrous.

One of the few undisputed triumphs of American government of the past 20 years – the sweeping welfare reform programme that sent millions of dole claimants back to work – has been plunged into jeopardy by billions of dollars in state handouts included in the president’s controversial economic stimulus package...

...Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama’s stimulus plan was a “welfare spendathon” that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history... Despite dire warnings that reduced benefits for single mothers and deadlines on entitlement would create a social calamity – one liberal senator warned at the time that children would be “sleeping on grates” – the 1996 reforms cut welfare rolls from more than 5m families in 1995 to below 2m a decade later without a discernible increase in hardship.

In other words, the Obama 'Stimulus' program was intended to massively expand the welfare state. But wait! There's more!

* * * * * * * * *
 2  Increasing welfare and food stamps leads to more kids born to unwed mothers

The statistical link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is conclusive. There have been dozens of studies that link the availability of welfare benefits to out-of-wedlock births.

One study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.

A 1996 paper describes the correlation in ominous terms.

...Out-of-wedlock births are strongly related to welfare dependency. A 1 percent increase in the welfare dependent population in a state increases the number of births to single mothers by about 0.5 percent...

...Welfare dependency reduces employment. A 1 percent increase in the dependent population increases the number who are not employed by about 0.1 percent... An increase in welfare benefits reduces employment by increasing the number of welfare dependents. An increase in AFDC benefits by 1 percent of average income increases the number who are not employed by about 0.5.

In other words, if you ratchet up welfare benefits, you get reduced employment and more single-parent families.

Now, why am I telling you this?

* * * * * * * * *
 3  Single-parent families correlate to higher crime rates

In 1995, Dr. Patrick Fagan wrote a seminal summary of the situation: "Over the past thirty years, the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers... High-crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers... The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers...

"Neighborhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighborhoods... Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime... Criminals capable of sustaining marriage gradually move away from a life of crime after they get married."

Of 23 peer-reviewed U.S. studies since 2000, 20 found that family structure directly affects crime and/or delinquency.

"[R]esearch strongly suggests both that young adults and teens raised in single-parent homes are more likely to commit crimes, and that communities with high rates of family fragmentation (especially unwed childbearing) suffer higher crime rates as a result."

For example, a 23-year study found that nearly 90% of the change in violent crime rates can be attributed to the change in percentages of out-of-wedlock births (divorce rates, on the other hand, had no relationship with crime).

In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted that the "relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime."

Let me repeat the most important statement -- "controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime."

Single-parent families generally lead to increased levels of crime; and there are no significant differences between blacks, whites, or any other race when it comes to this simple fact.

* * * * * * * * *
 4  Recap:

• Fact: There are a record number of Americans dependent upon government anti-poverty programs thanks to the Obama Democrats
• Fact: Expanded access to welfare and food stamps greatly increases the number of children born to unwed mothers
• Fact: Single-parent families correlate to higher crime rates
• Conclusion: with the unprecedented increase in welfare, food stamps and unemployment, we will also see an unparalleled increase in violent crime within the next dozen or so years.

Obama and his Democrat sycophants in Congress will have created hundreds of thousands of single-parent families. These kids, born out-of-wedlock, will find themselves trapped in lives of criminality at far higher rates than kids from two-parent families.

Fast forward a dozen years, give or take a couple, and we will see a true Obama Crime Wave. I predict that we will see an unprecedented increase in crime. In fact, you could call it historic.

And the question is not whether it will happen. The question is just how bad it will be.

Jesse Jackson's advice for black fathers: teach your children the value of reading. Just kidding, he wants them to teach kids how to fight.

Mush-mouthed race hustlers hardest hit:

There’s no guarantee the being a black father will stop this because they’re killing black fathers too. One of the tragedies of this [garbled] is that you don’t have to be guilty to be crucified – killing the innocent. Therefore we must overwhelm them with numbers. That becomes our strength to fight back.

When I was younger I would say I wanted my children to get educated so that they wouldn’t have to go through what I’ve gone through. I’ve changed that position now. I want them to get a good education so they can have more tools with which to fight. The fight will not stop. I want them to have more tools. I want black fathers to have more tools with which to fight.

So when it’s time for Operation Black Vote to have massive registration, responsible black fathers vote to make a difference. They demonstrate. They march. They fight back.

So I say ‘fathers, teach your children how to fight for jobs and justice and healthcare using the weapons of your mind, your vote, and your marching feet.’

It will be a good day when professional race-baiters like Jackson and Sharpton are finally given all the respect they deserve. Which is to say, none.


Related: The Democrats' "War on Poverty"