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Quote of the Day – Bitter(10/7/2012)

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Why is PBS lobbying so hard for taxpayer funds? I know they raise money effectively. I gave during a fundraiser to get @alfieboe tickets.

Bitter – Tweet
October 5, 2012

[The answer to this is actually really simple.  PBS while they could fund themselves through private means still wants “free” money from the government.  It makes things that much more cushy.

Government throwing funds at the economy to “stimulate” it, actually has the opposite effect and I will explain what I watched first hand.

Back when they did they started talking about the massive bailout almost immediately utilities put a halt to current projects.  Utilities plan projects years in advance and have the funds to do them.  They froze the projects because they could smell money on the table and ultimately they could use it to improve their bottom line.  When the stimulus was finally passed they then needed to file for the grants.  The way this worked most simply was a dollar for dollar matching scheme to help with equipment retrofits.

So all of that moved at a snails pace through the cogs of government bureaucratic paper. Meanwhile here in reality, planned projects have now been on hold for over 6 months, all because they could smell money on the table.  When funding finally did start rolling in, almost a year after it started to slow down, projects rates looked just like it did prior to the funding push.  What happened was a projects that it merely subsiding what was already planned.  This didn’t have the effect of creating jobs since it’s still the same crews doing the work.  The most entertaining thing though is overall the decrease in output will never be really made up.  Everything the utilities are doing was already planned, this didn’t magically create extra work.  All it did in the end was delay the inevitable.

How’s that for the government “stimulating” the economy?  Still think only the government is capable of solving problems?

This is why PBS is going off the deep end.  They see free money and they want some of it.  -B]

Ear Worm Wednesday – 10/3/2012

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Trapt-Stand Up

When a bunch of us finally stand up, it’s going to be ugly, nasty, and at a minimum it will look like Atlas shrugging.  I’m tired of supporting people like this (just watch the video below, it’s got a response tied to it I fully agree with).

So if the government will buy me a phone, why am I working to pay for my own phone and service? Seriously where do we draw the line?  I am staring at the fact that my tax burden is about to increase by enough that I’ll be making the same I did last year after Uncle Sam is done with me.

You read that right, I get promoted and a raise and my Uncle Sam comes along and say’s, “You don’t need that, this woman over here needs an ‘Obama Phone’.”  All I have to say is vote out the incumbents; every last one of the corrupt little turds, even if you don’t think they’re a problem.

Pardon me while I go off and do something else before this becomes a full-fledged rant.

What is wrong with this picture…

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First up is the following headline:

US Embassy issues terror warning for Americans in Egypt

It appears that there is credible information suggesting another terrorist attack is going to occur in the middle east. You know much like the first one that killed a US Ambassador and 3 other US citizens.  Our fearless leaders response can be summed up with the following statement:

The Obama administration notified Congress on Friday that it would provide Egypt’s new government an emergency cash infusion of $450 million, but the aid immediately encountered resistance from a prominent lawmaker wary of foreign aid and Egypt’s new course under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Umm, why are we still sending money to that crap hole?  Seriously, why is anyone in our government still contemplating sending our money to those who will just use it to kill our own civilians.

Yeah, Reason magazines response I think fits this incident quite well.

Lets not ignore the fact that this administration still tries to blame a video for something that is actually a terrorist action.  I watched the video and it doesn’t even qualify as something that would even fit into Grindhouse cinema.  Some of us have woke the fuck up, there’s plenty more than continue to want to rack up debt and fund our enemies, who’s really asleep at the wheel here?

Good for this small business owner!

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A Virginia business owner refused a Vice President Joe Biden campaign visit at his three month old bakery on Wednesday because of President Barack Obama’s recent “you didn’t build that” comments.

If I lived within a day’s driving distance round trip I would be patronizing your establishment as soon as possible.  Instead I hope that some of my friends who live in Virginia can pay you a visit in my stead. I applaud you for standing up for yourself and not taking the cowards way out for cheap press and letting your convictions slide.

Though I will say you’re probably getting considerably more press and coverage by telling them no, than you would have by accepting their patronage.

Now some have claimed that Obama was merely talking about infrastructure, except lets look at exactly what he said (emphasis mine):

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” Obama said last month. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.”

If I have a business, I didn’t build that.  Someone else made that happen.  In the words of Samuel L. Jackson:

He said, plain as day, “if I have a business I didn’t build that, someone else did”.  But lets humor them for a second and say it just applied to “infrastructure”.

It wasn’t the government that built the roads, no, it was small independent contractors, aka small businesses that built that.  They were paid from money collected by the federal government.  That money was collected from businesses and their employees.  They made that money by selling goods and services to other people.  So really small businesses through inter-cooperation built roads and infrastructure with the government getting involved to take a cut of the costs.

So maybe what Obama was actually talking about was money.  You see government prints the money and since it’s no longer standardized on anything they can print as much as they want.  So it was the government that built a fiat currency to use to buy all this stuff and in the end screw businesses by devaluing the currency used for transactions.  That is the only way that “If you have a business, you didn’t build that” can possibly make any sense.  That statement can only hold true if you say that government is the creator and founder of using money in exchange for goods and services.  Except you need not only use cash, you can barter or use precious metals in transactions as well.

The bottom line is the President let us look under the veil on that one.  Under that veil we saw what many of us already knew, a hard-core socialist that wants to drive private independent businesses into the ground and have a central government-run it all.  Because in that case no one would build that, it would all be “owned” by the government.  No thanks Mr. President, keep the change.

Quote of the Day – Munchkin Wrangler (07/19/2012)

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Nobody builds a business alone, that’s true. But Bob didn’t make all those people work for free, and he didn’t make use of public resources without writing hefty tax checks for the privilege. Bob paid everyone, including his local, state, and federal government, before he even got to make his first dollar of profits. And Bob carries all the risk here. If his business tanks, his contractors aren’t going to return the money he gave them for their work, his employees aren’t going to give back their wages, and the government isn’t going to return the taxes and fees he paid. So why is it OK that when he’s successful enough to make a profit, some populist asshole politicians can stand up and say that “he hasn’t paid his fair share to society yet”?

Munchkin Wrangler – you didn’t build that
July 16th, 2012

[I do love the comments about what it took to build a business coming from a man who’s never built or run a business in his life. Businesses take work, period. There is risk and there is one person who takes that risk and the reward for the risk is the potential for profit. But profit is the result of greed and corruption right?  That person who has poured blood sweat and tears working their ass off so they don’t fail shouldn’t get any reward.

Why should they get no reward, you see someone else actually built their business. The business owner didn’t spend late nights with no bonus pay keeping the ship afloat.  They haven’t spent hours working on a website with zero income coming from it at the beginning.  Who cares that the business operator has paid anyone who works for them a fair wage in exchange for their goods and services?

That’s the crux, people who are paid by the business owner didn’t build the business.  People who build a business invest considerable time and effort without the guarantee of a reward.  That in and of itself is the very nature of business and is known as your Return on Investment.

Building a business means you invest a lot of time and your own money that in the future you may end up with more than you had.  Evidently our fearless leader has some other shining example of what building a business looks like.

*Most annoyingly is some places charge you a fee merely for permission to conduct business.  You see you need a business license to sell things to people who would like your goods and services.  You pay for the privilege but if for one reason or another you take a year off, you get to pay the tax man for the privilege again.  See how that works?  The government has to get theirs or you can’t get yours. -B]

Since when is it our job to take care of everyone else?

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What happened to self reliance and why in Zeus’s butthole does the current administration want to take care of everyone else and ignore the issues in our own country?

The U.S. must shape a world order relying as much on the persuasiveness of its diplomacy as the might of its military, he said. All hands are required to solve the world’s newest threats: terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons, climate change and feeding and caring for a growing world population, he added.

As I continue reading Atlas Shrugged I frequently see similarities between the book and present day America.

From each according to his ability to each according to his need. – Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Apparently other countries, who could IMO take care of themselves, are higher on the list of priorities than people right here at home.

The government also seems to think that throwing money at problems will be the solution. For example, programs such as Social Security, food stamps, unemployment, etc. are having money taken from tax payers for funding. This creates a decline for private wages.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.

The Obama administration is pushing the country towards communism:

Economist David Henderson of the conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. “People are paid for being rather than for producing,” he says.

(Emphasis mine). In this case, the way to make more money would be to have more kids, because then your need is greater.

We don’t have any kids and we are working our butts off to make ends meet, yet we are punished for our hard work just because someone else doesn’t work but needs more because they couldn’t keep it in their pants or their legs closed. Oh yeah, they also need a new big screen TV and an expensive ‘green’ vehicle to cart the kids around in.

Why should my husband and I not shrug?

TMW