ARMAGEDDON - Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn gave a particularly insightful speech (links at bottom) about the decline of America as a world power in various concepts in his book, "After America, Get Ready for Armageddon", which drills down towards the roots of what we see going on today.  In it, he touches on subjects that fit neatly into the categories he has crafted into an acronym for Armageddon:

• A - Addiction
• R - Redistribution
• M - Monopoly
• A - Arteriosclerosis
• G - Global Retreat
• E - Educational Social Engineering
• D - Decay
• D - Disintegration
• O - Open Season
• N - Nuke's Away

In this speech, he talks about many things that I have been highlighting some examples here, but I still fail to capture the intrinsic interrelations as well as Mark has in this speech. 

Take a look, for it's well worth your time.  I'm not going to add anything here in this post, but if you see anything in his speech that warrants additional discussion based on what you know, feel free to leave a comment or two.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Fiscal Cliff? ...or Three Card Monte?

Fiscal Cliff, my butt. 

Yea, we're all fools.  Government has perfected the three card monte scam.  It's called 'matching funds' and this whole fiasco of a debt crisis is just a show.  Taxes always go up, because they all keep creating new programs that need funds.  It's all just a show of them deciding from which vehicle do they get their loot, but it still comes from your pockets.  Just take a look at how states abuse the matching funds of the Medicaid program.  That's only the tip of the iceberg as there are literally hundreds of matching funds projects going on.

It's not rocket science.  We hear about it all the time with things like this article, "The Effect of Federal Budget Cuts on States and Localities", yet no one seems to grasp the concept.  It's a pretty good illustration of the dilemma, but there is one minor thing in the article disturbs me.  He wrote:
 

Finally, there are indirect cost-cutting or tax-increasing measures. Under federal tax laws, homeowners now write off their mortgage interest costs. Over the years, this favoritism has driven up housing prices. Real estate values, now in very bad shape, serve as the foundation for local property taxes. But the feds lose $100 billion or so from the interest deduction. That makes it an attractive target for reducing the federal deficit. But such a step might permanently bend down future growth in housing prices and accordingly, the property tax base.

They don't give a rat's patootey about how much your home is 'worth' on the market.  Market value has absolutely nothing to do with tax assessments and their property tax base.  All they care about is how much of your money they need to extract to enact their delusions of grandeur.  The tax 'base' is simply the total number of taxable properties located within their jurisdiction from which they can plunder the loot.  For example, I used to live in a town with a considerable number of government facilities, courthouses, and religious exempted properties for it was the county seat.  Anyone who owned a similar property in a town without all those exempted properties paid much, much less in taxes.  Two similar properties on the same road could have vastly different tax levies simply depending on a township property line being between them.  Nothing drives away homeowners of average means more than unbalanced giveaways in tax-exempt properties.  They have their operating budget full of promises to people to vote for them, and they will extract it from you one way or another.  The rich tend to settle in those locations, for it's another giveaway they use to simply write off the taxes.

Who's Checking the Fact Checkers?

I'm kind of tired of saying this.  We've had to live with Clinton claiming a success in the budget battles going from an annual budget deficit to a surplus, then we lived with Newt Gingrich doing the same saying he was the reason for it. 

Here's the federal deficit chart from from the CBO that Factcheck.org uses to tell us Clinton was a hero in  The Budget and Deficit Under Clinton:

Interesting indeed.  Factcheck.org added an update saying readers noted a USAToday article which stated, "The Clinton administration reported a surplus of $559 billion in its final four budget years. The audited numbers showed a deficit of $484 billion."  That's over a trillion dollar difference!!!  Oh my!!!

Even after looking into that USAToday article, Factcheck still claimed a surplus in the three of the last four years of Clinton budgets, "But even under accrual accounting, the annual reports showed surpluses of $69.2 billion in fiscal 1998, $76.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and $46 billion for fiscal year 2000." 

I don't know how they figured that out, for those three reports they were so kind to link to show increases in total federal debt for each of those years to be $155.9 billion, $126.9 billion, and $20.9 billion respectively even with Factcheck continuing to claim there were budget surpluses.  Yes, federal debt held by the public went down in each of those years so they were paying off some of their debts, but federal debt held in government accounts increased much more than the public held debt decreased.

Then we have this picture from Dueling Debt Deceptions from the very same fact checking organization claiming Clinton ran surpluses:

Ok, so then where did the $1.54 trillion increase in total federal debt come from during those very same Clinton years?   Perhaps these fact checkers should start better checking their own facts.

(Update 11 Sep 12) - Craig Steiner explains it much better than I did over at the Myth of the Clinton Surplus.