Many are quick to applaud our representatives for coming up with a plan in regards to the debt ceiling. While I am glad to see some small steps toward solutions I am still a little skeptic of the actual progress towards a real solution.

What exactly does the Cut, Cap, Balance Act entail? What would a Balanced Budget Amendment consist of? Well this is what I gather from the cuts, caps, and balance.

The Cuts…

The Cuts will consist of $111 billion for FY 2012. The cuts will mainly come from non-defense discretionary spending and non-veterans, non-Medicare, non-Social Security mandatory spending. $111 billion dollars out of a $3.6 trillion dollar budget? I don’t know about you, those cuts seem extremely insignificant. It just boggles my mind how this is even called cuts considering we’re still borrowing and adding to the national debt of $14.3 trillion. And the cuts don’t touch the main budget items that continually increase year after year. Why are entitlements and defense still off the table when they account for nearly the entire budget? And we’re suppose to applaud this? All we’re seeing is a continuation of party politics and tiptoeing around the major issues of the government budget.

Here is what they mean by Cap…

They plan to scale back spending in relation to percentage of GDP for several years ultimately putting a cap on spending as 20% GDP. The scale back looks something like this:

• 2012, 22.5% of GDP.
• 2013, 21.7% of GDP.
• 2014, 20.8% of GDP.
• 2015, 20.2% of GDP.
• 2016, 20.2% of GDP.
• 2017, 20.0% of GDP.
• 2018, 19.7% of GDP.
• 2019, 19.9% of GDP.
• 2020, 19.9% of GDP.
• 2021, 19.9% of GDP.

Why arbitrarily 20%? They say because that was about average spending for the past 30 years. The past 30 years have continuously added to the National Debt. Shouldn’t that still be considered too much spending? Who determined that the past 30 years of government spending was a good thing or a good standard to live by? And who’s going to determine what our GDP is going to be? Oh yeah, the Office of Management and Budget under the President. Do we doubt that maybe this agency is capable of manipulating the GDP figure? Or what if the government simply inflates the economy through inflation so that they may get a bigger budget? By placing an arbitrary percentage of GDP for the budget only leaves it open to manipulation and will guarantee the spending will never decrease any further.

And finally the Balance…

The balance brings a passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. Which entails obviously a balanced budget, as well as a super majority to raise taxes and a limit on spending as a percentage of GDP (which we just went over). I do like the concept of the amendment, but again I think it leaves the budget vulnerable to still more manipulation by the federal government. The states can live with such an amendment but the federal government, being in its nature to expand and surpass its limitations, will find a way to go around such a thing. Maybe something that directly limits the spending and taxation more than just in relation to GDP would be more effective. Otherwise the only parameters they have to abide by is to keep it at 20% and balanced. Considering government’s resistance to cutting spending this might leave the door open to heavier taxation to bring a particular budget into balance. Great! They’ve satisfied the amendment but still cripples the economy.

I’m no economist but I am a continual skeptic of the intentions of government. So forgive me. But again, while I applaud the direction our representatives are trying to take us in, I just think it does not do enough to address the country’s budgetary concerns and leaves too many holes that need to be filled.

We need to see serious cuts NOW, not promises for it later while we increase our debt NOW. Our debt is the problem, yet the solution is to increase it? Stop the snowball from running down the hill. Although the steps are very small, in my humble opinion, I am glad that at least the necessary steps are being taken. Just crank it up a bit more.

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Supervisor Jeff Stone of Riverside County has proposed that 13 southern California counties secede from the state, creating the state of Southern California.

Now I’m not going to get into the details of it, anyone can just google it and read the news. What I want to talk about is the legitimacy of the idea. Everybody knows how screwed up California has been. They’re buried under a pile of debt facing a 26 billion dollar deficit, their welfare rolls are expanding, and crime is increasing, illegal immigration is a problem…the list goes on. But one must point out the cultural diversity of California. California is a very large state. Northern California is very different from Middle and Southern California, and vice versa. Compare it to the same land mass of the east coast and look how many separate states there are and how much they differ politically and culturally from one another.

California, it seems, is too big a state with too many diverse people to govern as a state. It’s like a country that’s trying to govern like a state without the concept of federalism. That’s why the federal government has so many problems. It abandoned the idea of federalism, a delegated instrument of the united sovereign states of america for specific purposes, and began trying to govern as one big state. One rule, one size fits all concept for everyone.

That’s the problem with California. Those in the leadership are incompetent in governing such a big state. Should the citizens who are frustrated with the rule of law in California be forced to go along with failed policy after failed policy? California keeps digging itself into a bigger hole and is crippling its businesses and its citizens with back breaking taxes and regulation. Their citizens are leaving the state in droves. The frustrating part is they just keep exacerbating the problem. It’s like watching someone trying to put out a fire with turpentine and you keep trying to convince him its not going to work.

Now can a state be that big and govern efficiently? Sure! Let’s take a look at Texas. Texas doesn’t try to micromanage its citizens. It has no income tax, attracts businesses by its business friendly environment. The state legislature gets together once every other year! They let the people govern themselves. In Texas, they account for half the jobs that’s been created in the entire country for the last couple years. Did the government create those jobs? No. They merely sat back and encouraged an environment in which a free society can exist with limited government hindrance. This environment in itself is conducive to economic success. Don’t you think they might be doing something right? Maybe they’re on the right track? Maybe?

Now, can you blame the citizens of these 13 counties who argue for this type of governance that they see working in other states?  Can you fault them for wanting to finally split away from a state government who refuses to listen and instead keeps taking their money? It sounds like common sense to me.

Especially when a state government is doing this to your constituents:

Stone’s proposal came on Thursday just hours after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s new budget legislation, passed by the Democratic majority, which will divert millions of dollars away from county and city agencies.

“With this budget, you will see cities and counties on the brink of bankruptcy,” Stone told the Press-Enterprise of Riverside.

“Local jurisdiction, particularly those in Southern California, have been at the mercy of the state legislature for well over a decade,” Stone’s chief of staff, Verne Lauritzen, told ABCNews.com. “The state has been unable and incompetent in producing a budget that is not only balanced but appropriate to local governments.”

One of the elements of the budget that has particularly angered Stone is a trailer, SV89, which says that any city in the state incorporated after 2004 must forfeit funding from the vehicle licensing fee.

“This bill unfairly targets only four cities, all of which are in Riverside County,” Lauritzen said. “All of them have been incorporated since 2004. One of them was just incorporated yesterday, Jurupa Valley. This bill creates a $6.2 million takeaway from that city, which has an approximate budget of $22 million. They’ll have to forfeit nearly 30 percent of that. That is catastrophic.”

How is that lawful? It’s like forcing a state that’s been fiscally responsible to give up their surpluses or non-vital funds to another state that hasn’t been fiscally responsible because they need it. The result is that the fiscally irresponsible state will continue with the status quo, burn through its gift of stolen funds and then two states will end up broke.

If the citizens of those 13 counties truly want to secede from California and create a state of their own in which they truly feel represented and heard then maybe it is their right to do so. Why not?

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In recent news, there’s heated debate in Congress on whether or not we should raise the debt ceiling. Actually, the debate is starting to be steered towards more of if it should be raised accompanied with a balanced budget amendment or a balanced budget amendment and tax hikes.

If every time we reach the debt ceiling, we just raise it higher, what is the purpose of having a debt ceiling in the first place? In that case, let’s just have an unlimited credit limit. The Democrats are using the “end of the world” rhetoric on this to try and scare the American public into accepting a debt limit increase and a continuation of the unsustainable status quo. They are saying that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling then we’ll default on our debt and the earth will explode. But me being me, I question everything. Would we default on our debt if we don’t raise the debt ceiling?

The way I look at most things happening in government is I try to break it down to our level. Same rules should apply, one would think. If my family was in deep debt, and I had reached my credit limit on my credit card. Would I seek to raise my credit limit to keep spending as usual? Would I even be able to raise my credit limit! Not likely. In fact, common sense would tell me to stop spending money at this rate IMMEDIATELY. Then maybe create a budget in which I make sure to pay at least the interest payments on my debt before moving on to other expenses (if I can afford it).

Shouldn’t this same common sense thinking also apply to the federal government?

The federal debt is about 14.3 trillion dollars. Our monthly interest payment every month is about 30 billion dollars. Our monthly federal revenue is about 150 billion dollars (give or take 10 or so billion, I’m estimating). It would seem that we can afford to pay the debt’s interest payments every month and still leave us with over a 100 billion dollars a month for the rest of the budget.

So it doesn’t automatically mean we default and the world ends if we don’t raise the debt ceiling. We can obviously keep up with the interest payments. We just can’t borrow any more money if we want to be able to pay our debt. Its common sense and every american family who has experienced rough financial situations knows this.

If the federal government raises the debt ceiling, they’re only going to borrow more money and keep going down the same doomed path. It doesn’t make any sense. Instead of taking the essential steps now to solve the crisis, they would rather delay it and deal with an even worse situation in the future.

There is no sweet way to fix the problem. There’s only the logical way. Stop spending money you don’t have, stop borrowing money, stop printing money. The country’s going to feel some pain. But the longer you delay it, the worse the pain is going to get. Exponentially worse.

How hard is it to create a balanced budget? Pay the interest payments, make payments to the principal, then prioritize and portion off the rest of the revenue to everything else.

Don’t raise the debt limit. Fix the problem, don’t delay it by maintaining current spending levels.

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At what percentage is a tax rate too much for an individual? What is the limit on the amount you can plunder from the fruits of a man’s labor? There’s gotta be a number or specific amount, right? There has got to be a point when it’s just too much, right? Or is there?

Is it even moral to forcefully take a man’s income much less 35% of it?

Geithner: “…just to put it in perspective, it’s important to recognize why are we doing this. You know, our deficits are 10 percent of GDP, higher than they’ve been since any time in the postwar period really. We have a big hole to dig out of, and we have to figure out how to do that in a way that’s balanced, good for growth, fair to people as a whole.”

Fair? The current tax rate for people making $250,000 and above is about 33% and 35%. That means that nearly 4 months out of the year that individual gives his earning straight to the Federal Government (or actually the private banking cartel we call the Federal Reserve System). That’s fair?

Many people who make $250,000 a year are small businesses that use that money to actually run the business. These hard working folks aren’t exactly swimming in a money bin full of cash like scrooge Mcduck. These people need that money to not only run their business but to also reinvest into their business to grow it and employ more people! aka CREATE JOBS…isn’t that our whole goal here in recovering from the Great Recession?

These small businesses are responsible for over 60% of the jobs in this country. Don’t you think we should allow them to do what they do best rather then cut their legs out from under them?

Of course not. We need to promote growth in the economy (create jobs) by taking 4 months worth of earnings from these job creators’. “its for the greater good”, ya know.

“We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because if we don’t do it, then, again, I have to go out and borrow a trillion dollars over the next 10 years to finance those tax benefits for the top 2 percent, and I don’t think I can justify doing that,” said Geithner.

“finance tax benefits”? How is it he calls the absense of plundering money from people financing their tax benefits? And it’s interesting that he HAS to “go out and borrow a trillion dollars” to finance the big out of control federal government. “No alternative”. Why isn’t cutting the out of control spending an alternative to crippling the job creators of this country through excessive taxation?

I got an idea. How about the people stop financing the Federal Government’s out of control, wasteful spending? The way they spend it and get nothing out of it they’ll always want more. It’s the nature of big government.

“If you don’t touch revenues and you leave in place the tax cuts for the top 2 percent that were put in place by President Bush, if you leave those in place and you’re trying to bring our deficits down over time, then you have to do exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans and you have to shrink the overall size of government programs, things like education, to levels that we could not accept as a country,” said Geithner.

Increased funding in education has obviously not increased student performance. How much damage could possibly come from decreasing it that hasn’t already been done from increasing it. Federal spending in education has consistently increased dramatically since the federal takeover of education. Do you think student’s performances have increased in any sort of relation to the increase in spending? I don’t think so.

There should be one mantra being chanted in Congress and the White House, right now, and that is “cut government”. Period. That’s the only thing that’s going to get us out of this mess. We have to get those involved in making the mess (federal government) out of the way so that the people and the private sector can finally clean it up.

To watch Sec. Geithner’s testimony, click here (Geithner’s Testimony)

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What I want to know is why can’t people who have legitimate and lawful concealed carry licenses carry onto college campus’? What is the reasoning behind allowing it in other places but not campus’? The purpose someone has a CCL is self protection. Does one not need the ability to self protect on a college campus? Are people really that much safer on college campus’? I’ll try to put myself in the perspective of the liberal gun control freak…

You can’t allow guns on campuses, crazy! Haven’t you heard of Columbine and Virginia Tech?!

Well, first of all, I’m just going out on a limb here, but I don’t think either of those shootings involved a shooter with a CCL. Whether or not a person has the legality to carry a firearm on to campus has no relevance to a criminal who deliberately plans to go on a shooting rampage. That doesn’t make any sense to me why law abiding responsible citizens wouldn’t be allowed to carry.

What would of happened if concealed carry was allowed on campuses? How differently would the outcome have been during those tragic school shootings? Maybe a citizen who was practicing his 2nd amendment right would of had the means to defend himself/herself and the fellow citizens around him/her? Maybe a teacher would of had the capabilities to defend his/her students?

I may be wrong but I think those are very logical possibilities. I just don’t understand the reasoning behind not allowing it. To prevent shootings or crime? But criminals in their nature have no propensity to pay any sort of attention to any law. So that can’t possibly be the reason. In fact, I would assume that the disarmement of citizens in these no gun zones would encourage crime in the area since these criminals know full well that the innocent are defenseless in these very zones.

Security personnel are not supermen. Their reach of protection is logically very limited. But every citizen’s reach of self protection is quite adequate in protecting the necessary area required. And the citizen having the capability of self protection alone deters any would be criminal substantially.

It seems very logical to me.

Every law abiding citizen has the right to armed self-defense. Preventing law abiding students from carrying only makes students vulnerable. Not only is the specific student who seeks to carry vulnerable but the number of students potentially around said student is made vulnerable when some crazy maniac (who doesn’t adhere to rules and regulation) goes on a shooting spree.

Allow those who are licensed to carry onto campus. This will only make campus a much safer place for everyone.

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Moral Hazard – lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences, e.g., by insurance.

This is one of the major problems with our economic system these days. People keep blaming the free market and lack of regulation on the run away powers of big corporations. Their view is that  the result of these “free markets” and “lack of regulation”, is that these big greedy corporations, without restraint, gain too much power and end up in trouble which only good ol’ daddy Washington can bail them out of.

First of all, that isn’t the fault of free markets. Actually, it’s the fault of the lack of free markets. The system we currently have is what Ron Paul calls, “corporatism” – a partnership of government and big corporations. The Federal Reserve being the key player and foundation of the entire system (one of its purpose at its founding was a partnership of government and big banking).

Corporatism breeds moral hazard. These big corporations make these unrealistically risky investments that lead to default only because their money comes with a guarantee by the Federal Government. Which the Federal Government only has that power with its possession of the unlimited credit card, the Federal Reserve. Imagine if the Federal Government could only acquire its funds through direct taxation? Hah, zero bailouts, my friend.

These big corporations make malinvestments because its a no-brainer. They get to reap the profits of these risky investments while not having to worry about the potential for loss. If they are not successful, instead of crashing and burning (which they would in a free market) they merely get to distribute those losses on to the millions of taxpayers. That’s what occurs when the Federal Reserve bails out these big corporations because they’re “too big to fail”.

When you provide guaranteed protection against the potential of loss you directly encourage the risky actions that would lead to the very loss you’re protecting against.

In a free market, these banks would not be making such investments because they would be fully aware of the risk potential. They would be completely susceptible to the risk of bankruptcy and would therefore take the necessary steps to mitigate those risks (ie, not making loans that have a huge potential of default). If a bank doesn’t mitigate those risks and made those malinvestments anyways, then they fail and go under as they deserve. In which case, by going under they free up the assets and capital for more efficient areas of the industry.

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Well, Obama’s 86th Executive Order was recently signed on the 9th of June.

Take a look at it here – Executive Order 13575.

Now clearly this is another example of the Federal Government expanding its power and control over the people. Do we really need a “White House Rural Council”? Oh I think we do! All those rural communities have been running wild out there in the country side without the infinite wisdom and guidance of the Obama White House.

Section I …Though rural communities face numerous challenges, they also present enormous economic potential. The Federal Government has an important role to play in order to expand access to the capital necessary for economic growth, promote innovation, improve access to health care and education, and expand outdoor recreational activities on public lands.

Really? Of course. As always, “the Federal Government has an important role to play”. Actually, no it doesn’t. No where in the Constitution does it say that the federal government has a role to play in the business of rural communities. Expand, promote, improve, expand…what makes him think these rural communities can’t and aren’t doing these things without the direct involvement and intervention of a group of bureaucrats in Washington?

Section I … To enhance the Federal Government’s efforts to address the needs of rural America, this order establishes a council to better coordinate Federal programs and maximize the impact of Federal investment to promote economic prosperity and quality of life in our rural communities.

The only way the Federal Government will be able to  ”address the needs” of rural America (and the rest of America for that matter) is to get out of the way! This sounds like another excuse to spend more money with the well known efficiency of federal government.

The whole order is vague and all-encompassing when it comes to getting involved with the rural communities. Again, another instance of turning the dial on increasing the power of Federal Government.

What’s even more disturbing (which I’ll dive into in depth in a future post), is that this “White House Rural Council” is just another way of enforcing the UN resolution Agenda 21. Since when did we follow UN law? Where was the memo that said UN resolution superseded the US Constitution as the supreme law of the land?

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