Approval Rating Of Congress At 9%

Rassmussen Reports - As members of Congress and the president haggle over ways to reduce the federal budget deficit, ratings for the bicameral legislature have fallen to the lowest level since late 2008.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that nine percent (9%) now say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Fifty-six percent (56%) rate the Congressional performance as poor. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Positive grades for the legislators are down from 13% last month and are the lowest measured since December 2008. The number of voters who give Congress a poor grade is up seven points from last month and is the highest negative review since Republicans took control of the House in January.
From January 2007 through December 2010, with Democrats in control of both the House and Senate, the legislature earned good or excellent marks ranging from 9% to 26%.  The high water mark was reached in May 2007. Poor marks for the Democratic tenure ranged from a low of 35% to a high of 71%. That 71% negative rating was reached just before the health care bill became law.
In the four months since Republicans took control of the House, positive ratings for Congress have ranged from nine percent (9%) to 15%, while poor marks have run from 42% to 56%. Democrats continue to control the Senate.
Only 11% of Republican voters believe Congress is doing a good or excellent job, as do 11% of Democrats. Just six percent (6%) of voters not affiliated with either major party give Congress positive marks.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls).  Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on April 19-20, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
Just 17% believe Congress has passed legislation in the past year that will significantly improve life in America, down from 21% last month and the lowest finding since February 2010. Sixty-one percent (61%) say Congress has not passed such legislation, while 21% more are not sure.
But voters are a bit more divided on the goals of Congress. While 47% say the more important role for Congress is passing good legislation, 43% say top priority should be preventing bad legislation from becoming law. That’s the smallest gap since Rasmussen Reports first posed the question in August of last year.
Republicans continue hold a modest lead over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot.
In the ongoing budget-cutting debate in Washington, some congressional Democrats have accused their Republican opponents of being held captive by the Tea Party movement, but voters like the Tea Party more than Congress.
Voters continue to view the Republican agenda in Congress as more mainstream than the agenda of the Democrats. But only one-in-four voters think the average member of either party shares the same ideology they do. 
Most voters feel the president and Republicans in Congress are unlikely to agree on major spending cuts before next year’s elections. They also aren't confident either side will come up with a serious plan to begin with. 

Republicans Deal Feuls Revival Of School Vochers In D.C.

Trip Gabriel - In the 11th-hour compromise to avoid a government shutdown last week, one concession that President Obama made to Republicans drew scant attention: he agreed to finance vouchers for Washington students to attend private schools.

The voucher program, whose main beneficiaries are church-affiliated schools, is close to the heart of the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a product of parochial schools, who had repeatedly choked up defending it on the House floor last month.

The White House at first opposed the Opportunity Scholarship Program, saying it did not raise student achievement. But in the end it was an easy place to compromise, administration aides said, in order to save bigger, more prominent education initiatives favored by Democrats from the $38 billion in cuts.

Mr. Boehner’s beloved program is the latest example of how conservative Republicans across the country are advancing school vouchers — including offering them for the first time to middle-class families — and reviving a cause that until recently seemed moribund.

“Life has been breathed into the voucher movement,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, director of education policy at the Brookings Institution. “I think they are part of what will be a more powerful and focused drive toward choice.”

Voucher advocates have long argued that if a student can use public money to attend any school, even a private one, schools will compete and improve. Some black leaders see vouchers as a way for poor students to escape failing urban schools.

“When I walk into a Safeway and talk to a mother who had a child who was already part of the voucher program and had another one she wanted to sign up, how could I deny her the opportunity?” said Kwame R. Brown, the Democratic chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, who supports the city’s voucher program.

But vouchers were never widely adopted. Voters in four states defeated voucher referendums through 2007, and state courts narrowed or ended some programs.

Much of the enthusiasm for school choice has been absorbed by charter schools, which are secular and accountable under state standards like other public schools. Today, when 1.6 million students attend charter schools, the pro-voucher Foundation for Educational Choice says that only about 185,000 are in voucher or voucherlike programs.

The same gale-force winds battering teacher tenure and collective-bargaining rights, however, have led to a voucher revival.

“Where Republicans have taken over both the governor’s office and state legislatures, they’re pushing very hard on ideas that are grounded much more in ideology than on evidence they’ll have positive outcomes,” said Greg Anrig, vice president for policy at the liberal Century Foundation.

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio wants to quadruple a state voucher program capped at 14,000 students in failing schools. In Indiana, a bill that is likely to pass the legislature soon would offer vouchers to families with incomes up to $61,000. “I think it’s going to strengthen public schools through competition,” said Dennis Kruse, the Republican chairman of the State Senate education panel. “The schools will have to shape up if they want to keep the kids they have.”

Vi Simpson, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate in Indiana, said the vouchers would divert $92 million from public schools when they are already facing steep declines in state and federal aid. “Either this hasn’t been very well thought out,” she said, “or it’s been very well thought out and it is intended to help public schools fail.”

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who overcame a siege of the State Capitol to enact a law narrowing collective bargaining for public employees, mainly teachers, wants to expand Milwaukee’s voucher program, the nation’s oldest with 20,000 students. His plan would let any student, not just the poor, receive a voucher. Supporters say universal vouchers will make the city more attractive to the middle class.

But critics say that even after 21 years of vouchers, students receiving them perform no better than those in public schools on state tests of math and reading. Mr. Walker’s proposal “takes a program that’s supposed to be for low-income and working-class people and turns it into a subsidy for rich people,” said Howard L. Fuller, who was superintendent in the program’s early years.

“I will become an opponent of a program that I’ve fought 20 years of my life for,” he added. “I’ve been called every name under the sun for being a black person who would support, quote, the right-wing agenda.”

Dr. Fuller recalled debating an Illinois state senator opposed to vouchers in 1998, Barack Obama.

Democrats in Congress in 2009 closed Washington’s voucher program to new students, and as recently as last month the White House opposed reopening it on the ground that it did not lift student achievement. That was the finding of the United States Department of Education last year. But the report showed that Washington voucher students had a 12 percent higher graduation rate.

Mr. Boehner introduced legislation last month to reopen the program, providing $8,000 to $12,000 per year for low-income students, a total of $20 million annually for five years. After impassioned debate, the House bill passed March 29 on nearly a party-line vote. Its prospects in the Senate were considered poor.

Then came the budget negotiations between the White House and Congressional Republicans. For the administration, accepting Mr. Boehner’s voucher program was a small compromise compared with education priorities like maintaining financing for Head Start and Race to the Top.

One person excited by that decision was Lydell Mann, a single father with two children in the voucher program. He chose the Nannie Helen Burroughs School, owned by a Baptist denomination, for his children because the classes are smaller and the students more respectful, compared with what he observed when his daughter attended public school.

“Taking Ariona to school every day, noticing the language being used by the youth, noticing the trouble that would be started before and after school, I felt that environment wasn’t the greatest,” Mr. Mann said.

He was “ecstatic” that more families would have a chance to receive vouchers.

House-Senate Mid-Term Elections Porjections " Republican Win House 49 - Senate 7"

After months of partisan wrangling, it is finally time for the voters to deliver their decision on the 2010 mid-term elections in the Congress, as Republicans seem to have the edge today.

Republicans need to gain a net of 39 seats to charge of the House and 10 seats to take over the Senate. Political experts think the first is almost a given, while the latter is still a longshot.

It isn't difficult to get to 39 seats for a GOP takeover, as most political experts are expecting the Republicans to be back in charge of the House.

The big question is how many seats will the GOP win.

One Republican lawmaker told me yesterday that his guess is 55 seats - that's one more than what Republicans won in 1994.

Others though see the chance for a much larger haul - 60, 70, even 80 seats or more. If the "wave" is that high, then a number of unsuspecting Democrats will likely get swept out tonight, as happened in 2006 to then-Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA), even though Democrats didn't even target him.

"You're going to see somebody like that fall this time," says Henry Olsen, an elections expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

"On my list, I have what I call 'Super Upset Specials'," as Olsen and many others around here try to figure out who might be at risk on a night like this.

I should resist making any predictions like that, but I will say that I wonder if the GOP advantage in the state of Michigan could mean that a longtime Democratic lawmaker will go down to defeat.

Where are Democrats at risk of losing seats? I don't mean to be flip - but 'just about anywhere' is the answer, from New England to Blue Dogs in the South, to the Midwest and West.

As of today, Republicans have no seats in New England in the U.S. House. They have a chance to change that in Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Republicans have only two of the 29 seats in the New York delegation. They have a chance to increase that dramatically.

In key states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, the losses could approach a half dozen seats in each state if the wave is big enough for the GOP.

Virginia could see at least three Democrats go down. Meanwhile, Blue Dog Democrats are at risk in Virginia, North & South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi.

In Florida, Republicans think they can win four seats from the Democrats.

Texas could deliver as many as two to four seats for the GOP.

Indiana has three seats at risk, three or four more in Illinois, several in Michigan and Wisconsin could go to the GOP. Iowa has some GOP longshots.

Missouri has two seats that might shift, Arkansas has two or three, depending on the size of the Republican gains. Another one could go in Louisiana.

All three freshman Democrats in New Mexico are at risk, as are maybe four or five Democrats in Arizona. It probably didn't help to have arguments yesterday on the Arizona immigration law, a reminder for voters one day before the elections.

Democrats could lose the only House seat in both of the Dakotas, one in Kansas, three or four in Colorado, maybe one in Utah, another in Nevada and one in Idaho.

The Pacific Coast isn't immune either, as maybe three Democrats are at risk in California, another one or two in Oregon and a couple of seats in Washington State.

What about the GOP? Don't they have some seats at risk? Oh yeah, four or five tops - in Delaware, Louisiana, Hawaii, Illinois and south Florida. You can see how one-sided this election looks at this point.

So will the GOP win big? We'll see what the voters decide.

As for my election coverage tonight, I will be on with live reports starting through the evening, and then at 11pm EDT, I will be hosting several hours of election coverage, focusing on the race for Congress. Please check back on my blog all night, as I will be posting comments as the results unfold.

Harry Reid: "Obama is Like A Trapped Chilean Miner"

This might surprise you, but I agree with Harry Ried that Obama is like a trapped miner — both are in dangerously over their heads and begging for cigarettes:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has compared President Barack Obama to a trapped Chilean miner.

In a speech to supporters in Las Vegas on Sunday night, Reid said that when Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House he found himself in a “hole so deep that he couldn’t see the outside world.

“It was like the Chilean miners, but he, being the man he is, rolled up his sleeves and said ‘I am going to get us out of this hole,’” Reid said at an “Early Vote GOTV” event.

It’s worth noting for Harry that the leader in saving the Chilean miners was a conservative.

From Spuddser in comments: “I guess that would be an apt comparison if the Chilean miners had all grabbed their shovels and started digging downward to get out of the hole.”

United States Path To Collapse

NIA - The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today held hearings with former Lehman Brothers Chairman Dick Fuld. They are trying to figure out why Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse, with the belief that the failure of Lehman Brothers caused the financial crisis of 2008. The truth is, the failure of Lehman Brothers was a result of the crisis and allowing them to fail was the only correct decision the government made during the crisis.

The pain that was felt after the collapse of Lehman Brothers is nothing compared to the pain that will come when we begin to feel the effects of bailing out the rest of Wall Street. U.S. second quarter GDP growth was revised down on Friday from 2.4% to 1.6%. In order to get this 1.6% GDP growth, the U.S. government had to spend $3.7 trillion on bailouts, stimulus bills, the buying of mortgage backed securities, and other commitments.

General Motors reported today that their August deliveries fell 25% from one year ago to 185,176 vehicles. The U.S. government used "cash for clunkers" to buy GDP growth in 2009, but that growth stole from future automobile sales. NIA believes that GM's sales decline is a sign that the U.S. will likely see a sharp contraction in GDP beginning in the third-quarter, which will lead to the Federal Reserve implementing the mother of all quantitative easing and cause a massive sell off in the U.S. dollar.

Christina Romer, outgoing Chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, today called for more government spending and less taxes as a way to bring down unemployment. The combination of more government spending and less taxes equals massive inflation, but this represents the state of mind in Washington today. Inflation is still the last thing on their minds because they don't see it yet.

Even though we might not see massive across the board price inflation at this time, gold and silver prices have been surging ever since NIA released its article "Gold and Silver Capitulation is Near" on July 28th. Gold is very close to breaking its all time nominal high of $1,264.90 per ounce set during June and silver is getting ready to test the critical $20-$21 per ounce resistance level.

Rising gold and silver prices indicate that the U.S. is headed for an explosion in budget deficits that will rise far beyond what it can pay for through borrowing. Leading Chinese economists are now calling Japanese debt less risky than U.S. debt and with the Japanese savings rate in decline, the U.S. will soon have nobody left to borrow from. The only option will be monetization and already the Federal Reserve is getting ready to buy $10 billion to $30 billion per month in U.S. treasuries to keep its balance sheet at inflated levels.

There are now 50 million Americans on Medicaid, with annual Medicaid costs rising 36% over the past two years to $273 billion. The recently enacted health care bill will add 16 million more Americans to Medicaid beginning in 2014, but the U.S. government will likely go bust by then. It is impossible to have an economic recovery when jobless benefits are encouraging Americans to stay unemployed. U.S. unemployment insurance spending has nearly quadrupled since 2007 to $160 billion annually. Even food stamp costs have surged 80% over the past two years to $70 billion annually.

Once Americans get used to receiving and relying on government entitlement programs, it is hard to wean them off of them. NIA has been hearing reports from members with friends who say they will only "come out of retirement" if they can find a job that pays $25 per hour or more, because with anything less it wouldn't be worth losing their jobless and food stamp benefits. Americans expect to receive their jobless benefits forever and we are sure Obama will continue to extend them leading up to the 2012 election.

There are now countless warning signs all around us on a daily basis that the U.S. is headed for a complete societal collapse. NIA received an overwhelming response from its members when we asked you to submit any signs you see that a societal collapse is near. The response we received was so strong that we are now beginning to produce a documentary about America's upcoming collapse of society. The documentary will be over an hour long and we are hoping to release it by the end of October. It will go beyond the economic facts and statistics that were discussed in 'Meltup' and help expose the upcoming collapse from a real life perspective. NIA believes this documentary will appeal to a very mainstream audience and help open up the world's eyes to the truth about the path this country is on.

America's Debt:: The Big Wave Is Coming Soon

Damien Hoffman - This morning credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s (MHP) said in order for the US to keep its AAA-rating, it is “very important” for Congress to deal with the cascading US Debt. China’s largest credit rating agency Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. was less diplomatic: they simply downgraded the US credit rating to AA.

This, my friends, is only the tip of the iceberg of what will unfold should we choose to kick the proverbial can farther down the road. As you can see in the infographic below, according to the US Treasury we are watching a debt Tsunami come ashore. If we have any pride or patriotism, we’ve got to start dealing with the crisis now before it wipes out generations of wealth.

Speaker Pelosi Wants Ground Zero Opponents To Be Investigated

John Joseph Watson - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for opponents of the proposed Ground Zero mosque to be investigated in order to establish who is funding their activities, in a throwback to how Pelosi also claimed that the Tea Party was a phony “astroturf” movement being orchestrated by the Republican hierarchy.

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” Pelosi told San Francisco’s KCBS radio.

“How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we’ve been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we go forward to an election about the future of our country and two of the first three questions are about a zoning issue in New York City,” she added.

No matter where you stand on the proposed mosque, which is set to be built within a community center a couple of blocks from where the twin towers once stood, Pelosi’s implication that opposition to its construction is being bankrolled by the Republican party is simply not true.

A Rasmussen poll conducted nearly a month ago, before the mosque story had received widespread media coverage, found that a mere 20 per cent of Americans supported the construction of the mosque. People were not swayed to oppose the mosque because of an engineered PR campaign to ‘gin up’ the controversy as Pelosi claims, they were opposed to it from the very start.

Pelosi’s comments bear resemblance to similar rhetoric that we heard earlier this year, when she claimed the Tea Party movement was not grass roots because it was being orchestrated by the Republican establishment.

“The Republican Party directs a lot of what the Tea Party does, but not everybody in the Tea Party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots,” she stated at the time.

Pelosi is so arrogant and out of touch with the American people that she truly believes that any significant opposition to Barack Obama, who on Friday committed political suicide by publicly backing the mosque, and his policies is not the genuine backlash of millions of Americans sick to the back teeth with big government and must be artificially engineered.

When she is heckled and booed, as routinely happens when she makes any kind of public appearance, Pelosi resorts to blaming “insurance companies” and other mythical creatures of her imagination.

In reality, Obama’s poll numbers continue to plunge to record lows as more Americans reject his policies and Pelosi’s own approval rating according to a CBS poll stands at a pathetic 11 per cent, making her even more unpopular than George W. Bush ever was.

This is a woman who, along with Harry Reid who has even worse approval ratings, has come to represent the Obama administration’s big government policies. She is despised by the vast majority of Americans and yet has the temerity to pretend that this resentment and opposition is an artificial construct of the Republican party.

Pelosi, who is fond of public displays of smiling and cackling as she sinks a dagger into the heart of America with the passage of Obamacare, is living in a self-perpetuated fantasy world where the vast majority of Americans vehemently support her activities, when in reality she is reviled and detested by around 90 per cent of the entire country.

1-15 Children In U.S. Has Illegal Immigrant Parents

Howard Fischer - About one out of every 15 children in the United States was born to a family where at least one parent is in this country illegally, according to a new report today.

And four out of five of them are “anchor babies,” the Pew Hispanic Center concluded.

The figures, which the organization calculated based on 2009 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, are the best estimates to date of the scope of the issue which has resulted in calls to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny automatic citizenship to children solely by virtue of their birth within this country.

That percentage of children of illegal immigrant parents might be increasing.

The overall figure is about 6.8 percent of all children 17 and younger have at least one illegal immigrant parent.

But the center calculated that about 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were offspring of “unauthorized” immigrants. That computes out to 7.9 percent.

Researchers peg the number of illegal immigrants in the United States at something slightly in excess of 4 percent of the total population.

“But because they are relatively young and have high birth rates, their children make up a much larger share of the newborn population and the child population in this country,” the report says.
The 14th Amendment says that anyone born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of both this country and the state where they reside. Courts have interpreted that to entitle citizenship to those born in the United States regardless of whether one or both parents had no legal right to be here.

Some foes, including Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, argue those rulings are flawed.

He noted that the amendment makes its provisions conditional on the children being “subject to the jurisdiction” of this country. Pearce said courts, citing that language, concluded for years that did not entitle Native Americans to citizenship even though they were clearly born within the country’s borders.

It was only after Congress specifically altered the law regarding Indians that situation changed.

15 Economic Statistics That Just Keep Getting Worse

Economic Collapse - A little over a week ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner penned an article for the New York Times entitled “Welcome To The Recovery” in which he touted the great strides that the U.S. economy was making. But with unemployment still dangerously high and with foreclosures and personal bankruptcies continuing to set all-time records, should we really be talking about a “recovery”? The truth is that the numbers don’t lie, and statistic after statistic shows that the economic fundamentals continue to get progressively worse. The U.S. government can continue to try to pump up with economy with more debt, but the reality is that there is not going to be a legitimate “recovery” until consumer spending rebounds. Consumer spending makes up the vast majority of U.S. GDP. But without good jobs, consumers are not going to be able to spend money. Unfortunately, our jobs base continues to be erode as millions upon millions of middle class jobs are shipped over to China, India and dozens of third world nations by the global predator corporations that now dominate the world economy.

The U.S. government cannot create real wealth out of thin air. It can borrow even more money and flood the economy with even more paper currency, but the short-term “buzz” that creates does absolutely nothing to solve our long-term economic problems.

It is the private sector that actually creates wealth. But unfortunately, over the last several decades we have allowed that wealth to become highly concentrated. Now the giant global predator corporations have decided that American workers aren’t really that desirable after all. They are slowly taking away their factories and their offices and they are moving them to where people are willing to work for one-tenth the pay.

So where does that leave middle class American “consumers”?

Well, it leaves us in a world of hurt.

The following are 15 key economic statistics that just keep getting worse and which reveal the horrific economic plight in which we now find ourselves….

1 – The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has set a new all-time record for 18 months in a row. But there is every indication that things are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the number of Americans on food stamps will increase to 43 million in 2011.

2 – The U.S. economy lost 131,000 more jobs during the month of July. But the truth is that the U.S. economy has been bleeding jobs for a long time. According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Meanwhile, immigrants (both legal and illegal) continue to pour into this nation in unprecedented numbers.

3 – Americans who are out of work are finding it incredibly difficult to get back into the workforce. In the United States today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to an all-time record of 35.2 weeks.

4 – The U.S. government keeps trying to pump up the economy with debt, and in the process things are getting wildly out of control. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.

5 – The interest on all of this debt is becoming increasingly oppressive. As of July 1st, the U.S. government had spent $355 billion so far in 2010 on interest payments to the holders of the national debt. The total for 2010 should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion. According to Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama’s national debt commission, the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion just on interest on the national debt by 2020. Keep in mind that the entire U.S. government budget is less than $4 trillion for the entire year of 2010.

6 – If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.

7 – Social Security will pay out more in benefits in 2010 than it receives in payroll taxes. This was not supposed to happen until at least 2015. In the years ahead, these new “Social Security deficits” are projected to be absolutely catastrophic.

8 – There are simply far too many retirees and not nearly enough workers to support them. Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.

9 – Wealth continues to become highly concentrated at the top. Since 1973, the average CEO’s salary has increased from 26 times the median income to over 300 times the median income.

10 – According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Advertisement)

11 – The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one mortgage payment during the January to March time period. That was a new all-time record and represented an increase from 9.1 percent a year ago.

12 – A recent survey of last year’s college graduates found that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up substantially from 63 percent in 2006.

13 – During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.

14 – The total number of U.S. bank failures passed the 100 mark in July of this year. In 2009, the total number of U.S. bank failures did not pass the century barrier until October.

15 – The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today. An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today.

Any rational observer (and clearly U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not qualify) can see that the foundations of the U.S. economy are coming apart. The rapidly accumulating mountain of debt that has fueled our “prosperity” is impossible to repay and is going to progressively choke the life out of our economic system. The good jobs that we have allowed to be shipped out of our country are never coming back. Every single day, more wealth flows out of this country than flows into it.

Anyone who claims that things are getting “better” is either ignorant, completely deluded or is purposely lying.

The U.S. economy is not getting “better”.

The U.S. economy is dying.

You should adjust your plans accordingly.

Real Jobs, Fake Jobs

Lew Rockwell - In many ways, the unemployment numbers are much worse than they appear. One factor has been the timing of the US census. The bureau hired some 700,000 workers to collect data, people who otherwise were having a very difficult time navigating the choppy labor markets. They went for the jobs because they were a sure thing, paid decently, and didn’t require unusual skills (anyone can knock on a door and pester people about their private lives).

That inflated the jobs number for a while. But now these jobs are at an end — a highly unusual event in government employment, which usually lasts a lifetime. Now all of these people are facing the bracing reality of looking for employment in an economy wrecked by the government.

The press has been posting tributes to these people and their jobs and wailing about their fate now that their jobs are vanishing. And that raises questions. If these jobs were so great, why should they be eliminated at all? Surely, there is a way that these people could be transitioned to some other kind of government-funded service? That way, one might reason, people would have jobs, work would get done, and everyone would be better off.

Right? Wrong. Census jobs perform no market function, and the wages of these workers are paid by the taxpayer, meaning that these jobs are actually destructive of wealth. They siphon wealth and work out of the private sector into the wasteful sector. In fact, we can go further to say that eliminating these jobs is actually a step toward economic recovery.

Given the way economic fallacy has gone viral these days, it seems necessary to explain the issue further. The point of employment is not just jobs; it is productive and economically viable jobs.

It would be possible, for example, to reduce unemployment to its bare minimum simply by a mandatory regression in technology. We could abolish the trucking industry and force all freight to be carried by car, thereby creating millions of new jobs. Or we could abolish the car and create even more jobs for people to haul freight around by hand.

In each case, the number of jobs created would vastly outnumber the number of jobs lost. But would we be richer as a result? Not in any way. It would amount to a mandatory drop in living standards for everyone. These kinds of policies violate the Hazlitt dictum that part of good economic thinking consists in looking at what is good not just for one group (the unemployed), but all groups in society, and not just for the short term but for the long term.

The point of jobs is for people to work towards providing goods and services that are valued by the marketplace. If there is no consumer-driven demand for the things people are doing, their jobs are nothing more than waste. It does nothing for society if everyone is employed building pyramids, contrary to what Keynes once claimed. It would be senseless to have a business that employs thousands to do nothing but break new cellphones and repair them again, or to dig holes and fill them. And why is that? Because there is no economically rational basis for these tasks to exist.

To be sure, a wealthy entrepreneur can create a business doing anything, even something that loses money and is even socially ridiculous. But in order to sustain that, he will have to continue to throw good money after bad for an indefinite period of time, even unto the end of time. The day that he decides to stop doing it, the jobs will go away.

Of course, no businessman in his right mind wants to do such a thing. If you are going to create and retain uneconomic jobs, there is really only one way to do it: government. The government takes money from the private sector to throw around in inefficient ways, regardless of whether the job is worth doing in the first place.

The taxing and debt creation that is necessary to fund the government jobs is extracted from the real engine of wealth creation. This is not only true of census jobs but of all public sector jobs, whether in the federal bureaucracy, the military, or the educational sector. For this reason, the public sector’s payrolls really ought to be excluded from the employment rolls.

One objection might be that some of what public jobs produce is actually necessary for long-term economic health. We need an educated society, people might say, and even the results of the census are necessary for private-sector planning. But if that is true, there is no reason why the private sector would not have the incentive to provide these services themselves.

And they do in fact. The private sector has ever more sophisticated means for educating its employees, and making up for the inferior products of public schooling. It is the same with the census results, which are used by the state to keep track of us and control us; the private sector has its own methods of assessing demographic concerns over business location and product development. Even if there were government jobs that are in fact productive in their results, they could be performed at a profit instead of by extortion.

While everyone obsesses about the plight of census workers, there is a genuine calamity taking place in the private sector, which is being attacked by government every day. This is why the latest jobs numbers show nothing like robust job growth where it matters most. We see only slight overall increases from a decade ago, with boom-time jobs almost entirely wiped out in the bust.

This is what needs attention, but not from government programs. We need an absence of government programs, plus dramatic cuts in taxes and regulations of all sorts, and across the board. We need wage reductions in some sectors so that employment can grow in other sectors. Government cannot plan real job growth. It can only get out of the way and let it happen.

Jobless Americans: The Real Unemployment Rate 16.5% To 22%

Pallavi Gogoi - Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical

Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market's problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

"The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren't going to be thinking as big as they should be," says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. "It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn't going to be there."

Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don't appear or orders don't flow in.

College Grads Serving Fries

Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.

Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can't find a full-time job that they're qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.

The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves "unemployed" and "looking for a job," and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica's respondents.

Jobless Workers Who Disappear

Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who've given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.

"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted," says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. "It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."

According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That's almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.

Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled "U-6," says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.

Misreading Americans' Anxiety

However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.

Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers' not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn't extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration's decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.

By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he's doing, while 52% disapprove -- the first time Obama's disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.

It's obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it's already bigger than Washington thinks.

Rep. Rangel Calls For National Military Draft Again

Jennifer Fermino - Rep. Charles Rangel yesterday again called for bringing back the national draft -- right at the Times Square recruiting station.

For the third time since the Iraq War began, the Harlem Democrat announced his plans to introduce a bill requiring all Americans to serve in the armed forces.

"If you love your country, be prepared to serve," said Rangel, a Korean War veteran.

Congress should stop funding the war and, instead, use tax dollars to bring troops home, he said.

Rangel, who this year was stripped of his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the bill calls for men and women 18-42 to sign up for the draft during wartime. It will likely be introduced next week.

Welcome To Maywood, Mexico

Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico. Maywood is a warning to every city and town in America.
The Maywood City Council announced this week that after years of radical policies, corruption and scandal, the city was broke and all city employees would be laid off and essential city services contracted out to neighboring cities or to L.A. County government.
How did this happen? Until recently, Maywood was the model for “brown power” politics.
Maywood was the first California city with an elected Hispanic City Council, one of the first “sanctuary” cities for illegal aliens, the first city to pass a resolution calling for a boycott of Arizona after that state passed a law to enforce federal immigration laws, the first California city to order its police department not to enforce state laws requiring drivers to have licenses to drive, the first American city to call on Congress to grant amnesty to all illegals.
Council meetings were conducted in Spanish. Maywood was the leader in the peaceful, democratic achievement of the La Raza goal to take power in the U.S.
The City of Maywood started out quite differently. Back after World War II, Maywood was a booming blue-collar town with good jobs, a multi-ethnic suburb of Los Angeles.
On the 25th anniversary in 1949 of Maywood’s incorporation as a city, the town celebrated with a beard-growing contest, a rodeo, and wrestling matches in City Park. Chrysler operated an assembly plant there until 1971.
But the early 1970s saw these industrial jobs in aerospace, auto and furniture manufacturing, and food processing evaporate under the pressure of higher taxes, increased local and state regulation, and the attraction of cheaper land and cheaper labor elsewhere.
The multi-ethnic Maywood of the post-war years was transformed in the ’80s and ’90s by wave after wave of Hispanic immigrants, many of them illegal.
In August 2006, a “Save Our State” anti-illegal immigration rally in Maywood drew hundreds of protesters—but a larger number of defenders of illegal immigration. The pro-illegal protesters carried signs which read “We are Indigenous ! The ONLY owners of this Continent!” and “Racist Pilgrims Go Home” and “All Europeans are Illegal Here.”
According to newspaper reports at the time, objectors to illegal aliens were subject to physical attacks. A 70-year-old man was “slashed,” a woman attacked, and cars vandalized. Pro-illegal demonstrators raised the Mexican flag at the U.S. Post Office.
The illegal population and their sympathizers became increasingly radicalized. Elections to the City Council saw “assimilationist” incumbent Hispanic council members ousted by La Raza supporting radical challengers.
For years, the Maywood City Council authorized police checkpoints to stop drunk driving. Drivers without licenses had their cars impounded. Illegals in California cannot get drivers licenses. By 2005, the number of such impounds were in the hundreds. A community campaign was launched forcing the City Council to suspend the checkpoints.
Cars were still being impounded whenever a police traffic-violation stop resulted in a driver without a license. Felipe Aguirre, a community activist with Comite Pro-Uno, an “immigration service center,” coordinated a new campaign against any impounds. He was elected in 2005 to the City Council. He is the mayor of Maywood today.
Aguirre and a new majority of the council dismantled the Traffic Department. Illegals were given overnight-parking permits and impounds stopped. You didn’t need a license to drive in Maywood. The Los Angeles Times wrote glowingly of this “progress” in a story entitled “Welcome to Maywood, Where Roads Open Up For Immigrants”.
The Maywood Police Department was restructured by the new council. A new chief and new officers were hired. Later it turned out that many of the new officers had previously been fired from other law enforcement agencies for a variety of infractions. The Maywood P.D. was known as the “Department of Second Chances.”
Among those hired was a former L.A. Sheriff’s deputy terminated for abusing jail inmates; a former LAPD officer fired for intimidating a witness; and an ex-Huntington Park officer charged with negligently discharging a handgun and driving drunk.
Even the L.A. Times called the Maywood Police Department a “haven for misfit cops.” Their story alleged that a veteran officer was extorting sex from relatives of a criminal fugitive; that another officer tried to run over the president of the Maywood Police Commission; and that another officer has impregnated a teenage police-explorer scout.
Charges of corruption and favoritism led to one recall of city council members and threats of more recalls are heard to this day.
Maywood is represented in the state Senate by Democrat “One Bill” Gil Cedillo. He earned the nickname by introducing every year in the state legislature a bill to grant drivers licenses to illegals. Maywood is represented in Congress by Democrat Lucille Roybal-Allard, a staunch advocate of amnesty for illegals.

Today, Maywood is broke. Its police department dismantled along with all other city departments and personnel. Only the city council remains and a city manager to manage the contracts with other agencies for city services in Maywood.
Maywood is the warning of what happens when illegal immigrants, resisting assimilation as Americans, bring with their growing numbers the corruption and the radical politics of their home countries. Add the radical home-grown anti-Americanism of Hispanic “leaders” and groups like La Raza and you get schools where learning is replaced with indoctrination, business and jobs replaced by welfare and gangs, and a poisonous stew of entitlement politics.
In too many American communities, this sad tale is all too familiar.

Rep. Pete Stark Mocks Constituents At Town Hall Meeting

Looking like a burnt-out teacher with three years left to retirement presiding over an after school detention session, Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) took great pleasure recently in alienating his constituents at a town hall meeting by marginalizing the Mexican border issue and issuing sarcastic, belittling answers to reasonable questions that were asked of him.
When a Minuteman– part of a group that voluntarily patrols the Mexican border and reports crossings by illegal immigrants–stood to ask a question, Stark first asked him, “Who are you going to kill today?”  Then in response to the question itself, which was why the federal government wasn’t doing more to seal the borders, Stark mockingly responded, “We’d like to get all the Minutemen armed so they can stop shooting people here.”
Stark then went on to make other amazingly detached and dismissive retorts which sparked outrage from various members of the audience, including a round of applause when the Minuteman asked his question again.  Stark then insisted that the border was secure, which invited more jeers.
Politicians have always been accused of pandering to their constituents and offering transparently phony promises to address their concerns, feeling that a false front of sincerity was enough to placate their critics.  In recent history however, politicians have reacted to voters with arrogant ridicule and outright hostility as a mass awakening has caused Americans to increasingly exercise their duties as citizens to become more politically active, challenging the dominance of the establishment that keeps career politicians in office.
Pete Stark’s performance at the town hall is the most brazen display of disdain from a politician towards ordinary Americans since Bob Etheridge assaulted a student who asked him a question on the street a few weeks ago.  Such displays show that the masks are  falling off the controlled authorities of the nation as the metaphorical lizards underneath them are revealed.  Now, instead of rushing to put the masks back on, some political reptiles are deciding to show their true faces, baring their teeth and lashing their tongues out at their stunned constituents, whom they once at least pretended to represent.

Obama May Soon Unilaterally Legalize Millions of Illegal Aliens By Executive Diktat

Kurt Nimmo - NumbersUSA and Fox News report today that Obama may issue an executive order that will grant amnesty to between 10 and 30 million illegal aliens.

	Republicans say Obama will legalize millions of illegal aliens with a stroke of a pen.

“Eight Republican senators and an independent group that supports tighter limits on immigration are warning that the Obama administration is drafting a plan to ‘unilaterally’ issue blanket amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants as it struggles to win support in Congress for an overhaul of immigration laws,” reports Fox News.
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), David Vitter (R-La.), Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and Thad Cochran (R-Miss), have sent a letter to the White House asking for clarification on the issue:

Dear President Obama:
We understand that there’s a push for your Administration to develop a plan to unilaterally extend either deferred action or parole to millions of illegal aliens in the United States. We understand that the Administration may include aliens who have willfully overstayed their visas or filed for benefits knowing that they will not be eligible for a status for years to come. We understand that deferred action and parole are discretionary actions reserved for individual cases that present unusual, emergent or humanitarian circumstances. Deferred action and parole were not intended to be used to confer a status or offer protection to large groups of illegal aliens, even if the agency claims that they look at each case on a “case-by-case” basis.
While we agree our immigration laws need to be fixed, we are deeply concerned about the potential expansion of deferred action or parole for a large illegal alien population. While deferred action and parole are Executive Branch authorities, they should not be used to circumvent Congress’ constitutional authority to legislate immigration policy, particularly as it relates to the illegal population in the United States.
The Administration would be wise to abandon any plans for deferred action or parole for the illegal population. Such a move would further erode the American public’s confidence in the federal government and its commitment to securing the borders and enforcing the laws already on the books.
We would appreciate receiving a commitment that the Administration has no plans to use either authority to change the current position of a large group of illegal aliens already in the United States, and ask that you respond to us about this matter as soon as possible.

In February, Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, indicated his boss would rule by executive dictate and bypass Congress.
“We are reviewing a list of presidential executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues,” said Emanuel. “The challenges we had to address in 2009 ensured that the center of action would be in Congress. In 2010, executive actions will also play a key role in advancing the agenda,” added Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director.
The New York Times reported in February that White House officials believe the increased focus on executive authority reflects a natural evolution from the first year to the second year of any presidency.
In fact, it represents an increasing tendency by the Obama administration to rule by authoritarian diktat and a willingness to engage in treason against the Constitution.
The founders devised a carefully balanced separation of powers explicitly to prevent any of the three branches of government from acting unilaterally. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution grants to the president “executive power,” but this is kept in check by Section 3 of Article II that instructs the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Laws originate and are passed by the House and Senate.
In other words, the U.S. Constitution declares that the legislative branch writes the laws of the land and the law of the land supersedes any executive action. No executive order or regulatory policy can override a statutory man
Obama is now a dictator and Democrats fully support his assumed dictatorial power. Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats have stated they believe Obama is acting within the Constitution.
Obama, of course, is not merely acting on his own. He is following orders issued by his globalist handlers.
The Council on Foreign Relations has long favored and used its considerable influence to push for granting legal status to illegal aliens. Last July the globalist organization said local police should not take lead roles in immigration enforcement and workplace raids (the CFR issued its opinion after Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas conducted immigration raids and prosecutions against businesses hiring illegal immigrants and also drop-houses used by smugglers trafficking illegal immigrants into Arizona from Mexico).
Our rulers are cynically exploiting illegal immigrants to drive down wages of American workers. This ongoing process compliments more than two decades of globalist “trade” agreements like NAFTA designed to offshore American jobs — the “giant sucking sound” presidential candidate Ross Perot warned about in 1992.
According to the master plan, Mexicans that momentarily benefited from the sucking sound experienced one of their own when jobs traveled to the slave gulag in China. Now many of them — destitute and desperate — are flocking illegally over an open border and are in competition with American workers and bankrupting the states as they fill generous welfare rolls.
Last week we learned about Obama’s plan to ignore growing violence and criminal activity on the border when Arizona senator Jon Kyl told an audience at a North Tempe Tea Party town hall meeting that during a private, one-on-one meeting with Obama in the Oval Office, the president told him, regarding securing the border, “The problem is … if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’”

It now appears Obama will not need the support of Kyl and the Republicans. He will simply sign an unconstitutional executive order and legalize millions of felons who have crossed the border illegally.

U.S. Will Be Like Greece In Seven To Ten Years Says Congress And Experts

(CNSNEws.com) - Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), along with other members of Congress and leading financial experts, is warning that the United States is in danger of being in the same dire situation as Greece – national bankruptcy -- in seven to 10 years unless the federal government radically curtails spending.

Last month, Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said the United States will “essentially be where Greece is in about seven years.”

“If we continue to spend much more than we take in," he says. "We'll double our debt in five years and triple it in 10 years and essentially be where Greece is in about seven years,” Gregg told the Fox Business Network in May.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee, has also said that the United States has been making decisions similar to that which caused Greece’s debt crisis.

“We’re on this trajectory where we will have more takers than makers in society. We’re going to have more people taking from government than living on their own, paying taxes and contributing into it. That is a dangerous position to be in, that’s the position Greece is in,” Ryan said in a radio interview on News/Talk 1130 WISN in May.

Brian Riedl, lead budget analyst at The Heritage Foundation, agrees that unless the federal government radically curtails spending, a debt crisis as severe as or worse than that now happening in Greece will erupt in the United States in as soon as seven to 10 years.

“We can say that we will be at about the Greek level of debt probably in the next seven to 10 years,” Riedl told CNSNews.com. “There is no reason that with the same economic policies at the same level of debt, that the United States won’t face the same economic and financial crisis as Greece.”

But for Reidl, who recently issued his own report on federal spending, seven to 10 years may be too optimistic.

“It’s very tough to predict when a financial crisis will hit, because much of it depends on bond market psychology,” Reidl said. “As soon as the bond market decides the U.S. may not be able to fully service its debts, they will respond with a flight from our currency. When the bond market makes that decision is really anybody’s guess. It could be two to three years from now, it could be 10 years from now.”

Given the relative economic strength of the United States compared to many other nations, and President Obama’s promises of job creation thanks to the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it may strike some as unfathomable that the United States could sink to the level of Greece’s economy.

Still, the current numbers are frightening. The U.S. national debt now stands at more than $13 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. In addition, the estimated U.S. federal deficit in 2009 was $1.5 trillion.

In order to compare the economic situations between countries, economists often look at the figures as a percentage of each country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP represents the value of all of the goods and services produced by a country within a given year.

When Greece started to admit its debt problems last November, the government estimated its deficit last year was 12.7 percent of its GDP – a figure that Eurostat, the European Commission’s official statistics agency, said was too low and which it revised to upward 13.6 percent.

Meanwhile, the U.S. deficit is on track to become 10.3 percent of GDP in 2010 under President Obama’s budget.

In his report, “Federal Spending by the Numbers,” Reidl pointed out that the projected 2010 U.S. deficit would represent the biggest percentage of GDP the United States has seen since World War II.

That same report shows that average deficits over the next 10 years will be almost $1 trillion instead of returning to pre-recession levels of $100 billion to $400 billion. The projected deficits, Riedl pointed out, would double the current national debt.

However, spending -- not shrinking revenue -- is the principal cause, according to the report, which said “90 percent of the rising long-term budget deficits are driven by rising spending,” and just 10 percent of the rising deficits are caused by falling revenues.

“This is 100 percent a spending problem in the long term,” Reidl said.

Greece’s debt hovered above 110 percent of the GDP in November. Meanwhile, the estimated U.S. national debt was 52.9 percent of GDP in 2009 -- a significant jump from the 39.7 percent in the previous year, according to data from the CIA World Factbook.

The economic crisis in Greece came to a peak in the past few months as the global recession started to expose the consequences of overspending, which up to that point had been shrouded in fudged budget numbers.

Both Riedl and Rep. Ryan warn that the potential financial disaster would be more devastating for the United States than it has been for Greece.

“(T)here will be nobody to bail us out,” Ryan said in the radio interview. “You’ve got the IMF, Germany and France that are basically bailing out Greece, but we are the world’s reserve currency. If we go down the same path it will not only give us a problem of our own reckoning, but it would turn upside down the global financial system.”

The Greek economy is a fraction of the size of the U.S. economy, Riedl noted.

“Greece’s economy is small,” says Reidl, “and therefore when it borrows 100 percent of its economy, it’s still not a huge amount of money in the context of the broad global economy.”

“But when the U.S. has to borrow 100 percent of its economy, that’s a real lot of money for the global economy to absorb – that’s something like $20 trillion by the end of the decade. Other countries may not be able to absorb $20 trillion in debt once we hit that level,” Reidl warned.

The bond market and U.S. Treasury ratings will be the tell-tale signs that disaster has arrived, according to both Sen. Gregg and Riedl.

“When people stop buying our bonds,” people will know that the United States is in trouble, Gregg said. He continued explaining that this would mean investors are saying “‘we do not believe you can repay the debt or can repay it in a way to make us buy your debt at a reasonable price.’”

“Moody’s has repeatedly threatened to downgrade the U.S. triple-A bond,” which would debase the value of bonds in the eyes of world investors, Riedl said.

Although the United States has been able to skate by as a good investment up until now, Riedl says this is only because we are better off right now than most other economies:

“People are still willing to invest in United States, because, quite frankly, what other country are they going to invest in? There’s nobody in very good shape,” Riedl said.

But this will change, he said, if emerging economies, like China and Brazil, continue to improve and "provide safe and predictable returns for investors.”

If U.S. bonds falter, their interest rates will have to rise to compete with these other investments.

“And that’s when the real problems begin,” said Ried.

Conn. Senate Hopeful Richard Blumenthal Lied About Vietnam Service

Chris Cillizza - The New York Times reported Monday night that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has claimed on numerous occasions that he served in Vietnam, even though he obtained at least five military deferments and avoided ever going to war.

Blumenthal (D) is a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Christopher J. Dodd (D), and he has held a commanding lead in the race since he entered it. But the Times report has the potential to fundamentally reshape the contest in the Nutmeg State.

Eric Schultz, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, blamed Republicans for the report. In particular, he said, former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon, one of several Republicans running for the seat.

"It's no surprise Republicans would want to smear Dick Blumenthal, considering all of the debauchery at [WWE] under Linda McMahon's watch," Schultz said.

Ed Patru, a spokesman for McMahon, responded, "It's become increasingly clear to us over the past weeks and months, as we've researched Mr. Blumenthal, that there are some very troubling discrepancies between what he's been saying and the truth."

Blumenthal has served as the state's top cop since 1988, and national Democrats spent months ensuring that he was ready to run if and when Dodd decided not to seek reelection.

When Blumenthal entered the race, his poll numbers were stratospheric: He held massive leads over McMahon and Rob Simmons, a former congressman. Even as Democrats celebrated, however, some warned that Blumenthal had not been tested in a serious campaign in more than two decades and that once punched -- as he inevitably would be in a high-profile race like this one -- he would collapse.

"He's popular, but for no particular reason," said one senior Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. "No one really knows him, and this fills in the blanks in a pretty devastating way."
ad_icon

The strategist added that Connecticut remains strongly Democratic, which works in Blumenthal's favor, but, he acknowledged, "It's a race now."

Blumenthal faces only nominal primary opposition at the moment, although the state's filing deadline isn't for another week. That week is going to be the toughest of Blumenthal's career.

The Times reported that Blumenthal obtained deferments from 1965 to 1970, then joined the Marine Reserve in 1970 and was based in Washington through the end of the war. The newspaper added that the deferments allowed Blumenthal to complete his studies at Harvard and serve as a special assistant to The Washington Post's publisher, Katharine Graham.

He told the Times on Monday that he misspoke about his service in one 2008 event and might have misspoken on other occasions. "My intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who served in Vietnam," he said.

Racist Illegal Immigration Film 'Machete" Produced with Taxpayers Funds

Infowars - ‘Machete‘ has fallen into controversy, and it’s still months away from its September release. 20th Century Fox, which won a ‘bidding war’ to distribute the film, pulled Rodriguez’ fiery “Illegal” trailer from the web shortly after its special “Cinco de Mayo” message created a storm of controversy and fueled attacks, including one from its sister subsidiary Fox News. Fox News, in turn, pulled the critical article from circulation, entitled “Violent Movie Declares War on Arizona for Immigration Law.”

Worst of all, Robert Rodriguez’ incendiary race film ‘Machete‘ was made, in part, with help from tax incentives and location access provided by the Texas Film Commission, a division of Governor Rick Perry’s Office. A spokesperson from the organization confirmed that Rodriguez has indeed applied for funding.

The film, originally based on a largely satirical mock-trailer inserted into Rodriguez & Taratino’s Grindhouse, has expanded into full production, and developed a message that many have criticized as glorifying a race war. Among those critics are two anonymous crew members from the production– who happen to be Hispanic– that came forward to warn Alex confidentially about the upsetting script. Further, two individuals who were privy to early screenings of ‘Machete’ have warned that the film is far more racially inflammatory than either the trailer or leaked script have indicated.

By contrast, films like Waco were denied taxpayer-funded resources for fears that it cast Texas in a ‘bad light.’ Attempting to shed the light of truth on one of Texas’ most infamous and controversial episodes is bad, but stoking the fires of racial conflict somehow does Texas “good”?

Yet, no issue has been made of using Texas Film Commission resources to fund Rodriguez’ racist treatise. Why does such a production warrant the support of the people of the State of Texas? Will people standby as as tax breaks and other valuable resources– such as shooting access at the State Capitol, which likely required closing it off from the public– are poured into the creation of divisive, reductive and ultimately offensive portrayal of Mexicans and Americans alike, whether white, black, brown or otherwise.

In addition to state funds, Robert Rodriguez has long had use of the state & city funded studios based at the former Austin airport. His Troublemaker Studios utilizes the Austin Studios facilities, which is managed by the Austin Film Society. Are racial-revenge fantasies the intended use of such publicly and community supported institutions?

Let the Texas Film Commission and other related entities know whether or not you support taxpayer funds going towards the production of ‘Machete’ and other films like it:
http://www.governor.state.tx.us/film/

United States Posts 19 Straight Monthly Budget Deficit

(Reuters) - The United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.

Greece

It was more than twice the $40-billion deficit that Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast and was striking since April marks the filing deadline for individual income taxes that are the main source of government revenue.

Department officials said that in prior years, there was a surplus during April in 43 out of the past 56 years.

The government has now posted 19 consecutive monthly budget deficits, the longest string of shortfalls on record.

For the first seven months of fiscal 2010, which ends September 30, the cumulative budget deficit totals $799.68 billion, down slightly from $802.3 billion in the comparable period of fiscal 2009.

Outlays during April rose to $327.96 billion from $218.75 billion in March and were up from $287.11 billion in April 2009. It was a record level of outlays for an April.

Department officials noted there were five Fridays in April this year, which helped account for higher outlays since most tax refunds are issued on that day.

But for the first seven months of the fiscal year, outlays fell to $1.99 trillion from $2.06 trillion in the comparable period of fiscal 2009, partly because of repayments by banks of bailout funds they received during the financial crisis.

Receipts in April -- mostly from income taxes -- were $245.27 billion, up from $153.36 billion in March but lower than the $266.21 billion taken in during April 2009.

Receipts from individuals, who faced an April 15 filing deadline for paying 2009 taxes, fell to $107.31 billion from $137.67 billion in April 2009.

The U.S. full-year deficit this year is projected at $1.5 trillion on top of a $1.4 trillion shortfall last year.

White House budget director Peter Orszag told Reuters Insider in an interview on Wednesday that the United States must tackle its deficits quickly to avoid the kind of debt crisis that hit Greece.

Plan For Audits Of The Federal Reserve Dies In Senate

Last-minute maneuvering in the Senate allowed the Federal Reserve to sidestep legislation that would have exposed its interest-rate decision-making to congressional auditors.

Pressure from the Obama administration led Senate lawmakers to alter a provision pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that was gaining momentum despite opposition from the Treasury and the Fed. It would have largely repealed a 32-year-old law that shields Fed monetary policy from congressional auditors.

The compromise, endorsed by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) and the Treasury, would require the Fed to disclose more details about its lending during the financial crisis. It would also require a one-time audit of those loans and a one-time review of Fed governance. A formal vote was pushed back until next week.

Thursday's Senate showdown came after senators on the left and right joined forces to support Mr. Sanders' provision.

"At a time when our entire financial system almost collapsed, we cannot let the Fed operate in secrecy any longer," Mr. Sanders said. "The American people have a right to know."

But Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, while insisting on a commitment to "openness" at the Fed, said in a letter to Congress the Sanders measure would "seriously threaten monetary policy independence, increase inflation fears and market interest rates, and damage economic stability and job creation."

Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, in a statement, endorsed the revisions to the Sanders provision, saying they would provide a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve Board's operations in response to the financial crisis, "while preserving the existing protections of the Federal Reserve's independence with respect to monetary policy."

A House bill sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) that passed in December contains a proposal similar to the original Sanders measure. If the Senate bill passes, it will need to be reconciled in a conference committee. That keeps the pressure on the Fed alive for the coming months.

The original Sanders measure stated that it shouldn't be "construed as interference in or dictation of monetary policy." But the Fed and administration warned that would allow auditors to interview Fed policy makers and staffers about monetary policy, thereby allowing congressional critics to pressure the Fed and undermine its independence.

Like most other capitalist democracies, U.S. politicians have given the central bank considerable latitude to control interest rates on the theory that elected politicians are prone to keep rates too low to get more growth during their terms at the cost of more inflation later. Although sponsors of legislation insisted that wasn't their intent, the Fed and its allies said otherwise.

"It's a chilling kind of circumstance," former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, an Obama adviser, said in an interview. "The more you have no clear boundaries about what's appropriate and what's inappropriate, you castrate the decision-making process. That's true for any organization, but it's particularly true when you get into the sensitivities of monetary policy that can generate speculative waves in financial markets and speculation in people's minds," said Mr. Volcker, who also urged lawmakers to eliminate the audit provision.

Anil Kashyap, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, stressed that independent central banks need to be insulated from politics and make decisions several months ahead of expected trends.

"There are times when you have to start raising interest rates before the economy's recovering. If you're going to get audited while you do that, you know you're going to be slower—meaning we're going to tolerate higher inflation."

Before the last-minute compromise, the Fed's foes appeared to be winning, and got a major boost when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said he would side with Mr. Sanders.

Mr. Bernanke, meanwhile, returned to Washington Thursday afternoon after a morning speech in Chicago to continue pressing for changes to the Sanders bill. In the past few days, Mr. Bernanke has spoken to at least a half-dozen senators to argue the Fed's case that the bill would deeply damage the Fed's credibility and ability to make tough decisions about interest rates.

At least half a dozen Obama administration officials joined the blitz, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—a former Fed official—and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. Administration aides credited Mr. Dodd with pushing back against the original amendment and developing an acceptable alternative.

New York Fed President William Dudley also advocated to scale back the scope of the auditing. He was among those arguing that ongoing reviews of the Fed's regular lending to financial institutions would stigmatize the program and cripple the Fed's role as the nation's lender of last resort.

The Senate beat back another amendment with populist tinges, defeating 61-33 a provision that would have put strict caps on the size of the nation's banks. Offered by a bloc of liberal Democrats, it would have capped at 10% the limit on the nation's total insured deposits any single bank holding company could carry. It would have also set a 6% leverage limit for banks and capped their non-deposit liabilities at 2% of U.S. gross domestic product.Last-minute maneuvering in the Senate allowed the Federal Reserve to sidestep legislation that would have exposed its interest-rate decision-making to congressional auditors.

Pressure from the Obama administration led Senate lawmakers to alter a provision pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that was gaining momentum despite opposition from the Treasury and the Fed. It would have largely repealed a 32-year-old law that shields Fed monetary policy from congressional auditors.

The compromise, endorsed by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) and the Treasury, would require the Fed to disclose more details about its lending during the financial crisis. It would also require a one-time audit of those loans and a one-time review of Fed governance. A formal vote was pushed back until next week.

Thursday's Senate showdown came after senators on the left and right joined forces to support Mr. Sanders' provision.

"At a time when our entire financial system almost collapsed, we cannot let the Fed operate in secrecy any longer," Mr. Sanders said. "The American people have a right to know."

But Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, while insisting on a commitment to "openness" at the Fed, said in a letter to Congress the Sanders measure would "seriously threaten monetary policy independence, increase inflation fears and market interest rates, and damage economic stability and job creation."

Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, in a statement, endorsed the revisions to the Sanders provision, saying they would provide a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve Board's operations in response to the financial crisis, "while preserving the existing protections of the Federal Reserve's independence with respect to monetary policy."

A House bill sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) that passed in December contains a proposal similar to the original Sanders measure. If the Senate bill passes, it will need to be reconciled in a conference committee. That keeps the pressure on the Fed alive for the coming months.

The original Sanders measure stated that it shouldn't be "construed as interference in or dictation of monetary policy." But the Fed and administration warned that would allow auditors to interview Fed policy makers and staffers about monetary policy, thereby allowing congressional critics to pressure the Fed and undermine its independence.

Like most other capitalist democracies, U.S. politicians have given the central bank considerable latitude to control interest rates on the theory that elected politicians are prone to keep rates too low to get more growth during their terms at the cost of more inflation later. Although sponsors of legislation insisted that wasn't their intent, the Fed and its allies said otherwise.

"It's a chilling kind of circumstance," former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, an Obama adviser, said in an interview. "The more you have no clear boundaries about what's appropriate and what's inappropriate, you castrate the decision-making process. That's true for any organization, but it's particularly true when you get into the sensitivities of monetary policy that can generate speculative waves in financial markets and speculation in people's minds," said Mr. Volcker, who also urged lawmakers to eliminate the audit provision.
Who's Who in the Senate Financial Overhaul

Anil Kashyap, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, stressed that independent central banks need to be insulated from politics and make decisions several months ahead of expected trends.

"There are times when you have to start raising interest rates before the economy's recovering. If you're going to get audited while you do that, you know you're going to be slower—meaning we're going to tolerate higher inflation."

Before the last-minute compromise, the Fed's foes appeared to be winning, and got a major boost when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said he would side with Mr. Sanders.

Mr. Bernanke, meanwhile, returned to Washington Thursday afternoon after a morning speech in Chicago to continue pressing for changes to the Sanders bill. In the past few days, Mr. Bernanke has spoken to at least a half-dozen senators to argue the Fed's case that the bill would deeply damage the Fed's credibility and ability to make tough decisions about interest rates.

At least half a dozen Obama administration officials joined the blitz, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—a former Fed official—and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. Administration aides credited Mr. Dodd with pushing back against the original amendment and developing an acceptable alternative.

New York Fed President William Dudley also advocated to scale back the scope of the auditing. He was among those arguing that ongoing reviews of the Fed's regular lending to financial institutions would stigmatize the program and cripple the Fed's role as the nation's lender of last resort.

The Senate beat back another amendment with populist tinges, defeating 61-33 a provision that would have put strict caps on the size of the nation's banks. Offered by a bloc of liberal Democrats, it would have capped at 10% the limit on the nation's total insured deposits any single bank holding company could carry. It would have also set a 6% leverage limit for banks and capped their non-deposit liabilities at 2% of U.S. gross domestic product.