Wednesday 21 January 2015

What you won’t hear in Obama’s State of the Union address tonight [updated]

Cunningly timed to be delivered at a similar time to Nick Smith’s savage slashing of cautious tinkering with the RMA, U.S. President Obama’s State of the Union speech (or perhaps it’s the other way around) will tell tall tales and many myths.

Here are 11 facts you won’t hear:

  1. Today’s young Americans … are the first generation to be poorer than their parents.
  2. They will also pay all their lives into a retirement system than won't be there for them when they get there.
  3. Young Americans indebt themselves more than anyone else on the planet to attend university, requiring them to spend a large part of their careers paying off debt.
  4. Americans of all ages are earning less than they did two decades ago when adjusted for inflation. Yet they’re paying more in taxes.
  5. And US taxation is an increasing burden not only in quantity but complexity…
  6. But despite record levels of tax collection, the national debt keeps increasing. It now stands at more than $18 trillion, well over 100% of GDP.
  7. In fact over 14% of all federal tax revenue collected goes to pay interest on the debt. Another 20% goes towards destruction, war, bombs, drones, and spying.
  8. They also create roughly 200 pages of new rules and regulations every single day. These rules govern something as sacred as what you can/cannot put in your own body, or often make it more difficult to do business.
  9. Many of these regulations carry severe civil and criminal penalties; this is … why America leads the world in the number of people incarcerated.
  10. More people rot away in US prisons than did in the Soviet gulag at the height of communism…
  11. In total, there were 79,066 pages of new regulation passed last year, with a total regulatory cost of $181.5 billion (based on the government’s own estimate).

It’s the trend that needs to be turned around, and it cause, but won’t be.

The trend is pretty obvious for anyone paying attention.
    We know deep down that there are consequences to waging endless [misdirected] wars.
    There are consequences to racking up $18 trillion in debt.
    There are consequences to treating people like milk cows and regulating every aspect of their existence.
    There are consequences to awarding total control of the money supply to an unelected central banking elite.
    [There are consequences to] government debt growing every year [at a rate] far outpacing GDP growth.
    And the primary consequence is this: despite the enviable number of Starbucks and iPads per capita, Americans are working harder to make ends meet, and are far less free, than they used to be.
    That’s not progress. It’s precisely the opposite

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