Thanks for the memories. Boulder’s Eads News & Smoke Shop closes after 100 years in business
I used to frequent Eads quite often to buy a variety of magazines, newspapers and the weekly addition of Barrons. Unfortunately as competition arose I didn’t remain a loyal customer.
Robert Samuelson asks: If We Can’t Kill Farm Subsidies, What Can We Kill?
Farm subsidies are a metaphor for our larger predicament. We no longer have the luxury — as we did for decades — of carrying marginal, ineffectual or wasteful programs. We can no longer afford subsidies for those who don’t need them or, at least, don’t need so many of them (including affluent Social Security and Medicare recipients). If we can’t eliminate the least valuable spending, then we will be condemned to perpetually large deficits, huge tax increases or indiscriminate cuts in many federal programs, the good as well as the bad.
Neil Cavuto: “It doesn’t make sense that a party that defined itself providing opportunity for all, now gets bested by another party pushing government for all. How the heck did that happen?”
Ray Muccio: The Life and Times of an Overtaxed Nation: From the Eyes of a Twentysomething
When we see special tax rates put in place for Hollywood producers—$430 million tax benefits and the ability to expense up to $15 million of costs for work—it’s hard not to wonder, “What about the normal American who wakes up for work at 6AM every day and works the jobs that keep this country afloat?” They have been forgotten once again.
Barack Obama has yet to pass a budget, regardless of who has been in charge in the House or Senate. We have seen the national debt increase from $10.6 Trillion on January 20, 2009 to $16.3 Trillion on December 28, 2012. That’s a 54% increase in the National Debt, all during my 20s. It shouldn’t take long to realize that a 54% increase in the National Debt in 4 years, under one President, who has been responsible for a trillion dollar a year deficit, may have not been the best choice for America after all.
How refreshing. I’d like to have a beer with Mr. Muccio.
Global warming, the tool of the West
For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations. Knowing full well that their produce in China and sell in the West model and its consequent spiral downward in wages and thus standards of living, was unsustainable, the elites moved to use this new “science” to guilt trip and scare monger their populations into smaller and more conservatives forms of living. In other words, they coasted them into the poverty that the greed and treason of those said same elites was already creating in their native lands.
In regards to the “knowing full well” 2nd sentence, I’m not willing to believe our politicians are capable of thinking ahead, much less forseeing the future.
All that said, the article makes interesting reading.
via Reason Magazine (and mulitple other sources for that matter), Barack Obama: ‘We don’t have a spending problem’
At the same time, Obama’s alleged quote is unsurprising, because a vast swath of Democrats well and truly believe that spending is not a problem.
Where’s the Great God of Porcelain?
Of course, we’re talking Obamacare.
Forbes: Obamacare Guarantees Higher Health Insurance Premiums — $3,000+ Higher
Remember in 2008 when then candidate Obama said that htealth reform would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for a typical family”?
Well, that first term is just about up. And health insurance isn’t any cheaper. In fact, it’s more expensive. Premiums have increased by an average of $3,065. And they’re about to go up even more, as Obamacare takes effect during the president’s second term.
I suppose they would have gone up $5,565 without Obama’s health care reform?
Who will the premium hikes hit hardest??? Inquiring minds want to know.
These premium hikes will hit young people hardest. As The New York Times reported in October, insurers and health policy wonks are warning that the young will “face higher premiums because of a provision that limits how much rates can vary based on a person’s age.”
I want to know when the younger generation is going to figure out they are being taken for fools. They are subsidizing this generation’s insurance coverage, will be bailing out social security and who knows how many trillions of debt they will be saddled with by the time this current generation is done with it.
Welfare recipients take out cash at strip clubs, liquor stores and X-rated shops
Welfare recipients took out cash at bars, liquor stores, X-rated video shops, hookah parlors and even strip clubs — where they presumably spent their taxpayer money on lap dances rather than diapers, a Post investigation found.
As you can see, if you are one of my few returning visitors, Boulder is a Stoopid Place now has it’s own domain name and the blogging platform is now WordPress instead of Blogger.
There’s quite a bit of work to dress up the blog so hopefully the look and feel will improve as the weeks go by. Thanks for visiting.
ChrisA
Well a combination of journalists and politicians is bound to come up with numerous displays of stoopidity. That said, a national debt graphic that’s off by $3 trillion?
Obamacare Layoffs, Hiring Freezes Begin
The Obamacare employer mandate doesn’t go into effect until January 1, 2014, but the government requires businesses to track worker schedules for three to 12 months in advance. That means many employers plan to get a jump start on avoiding Obamacare’s $2,000 per-worker fine by firing workers now, reducing employee hours, or replacing full-time employees with part-time workers. A survey by the International Franchise Association finds that 31% of franchisees say they plan to cut staff to duck under Obamacare’s 50-employer mandate. And another study by Mercer consulting firm found that half of businesses who don’t presently offer health insurance plan to reduce employee hours to avert triggering Obamacare’s penalties.
Of course, this isn’t a surprise to those paying attention. Of course, for Progressives who are orgasmic that Obamacare is the path to single payer, digging into the details is beneath their pay grade.
The picture caption states:
Obama can no longer focus on his predecessor’s role in digging the hole.
Wanna bet?
Regardless of who you want to blame it on, and HOW LONG you want to blame it on SOMEONE. WE HAVE A DEBT PROBLEM.
Tell me it isn’t true. Recipe for a long life: overweight people have LOWER death risk
This Is What Teachers Learning to Shoot Guns Look Like
If you read the article, reading the comments is a required assignment.
While we’re talkng taxes, moving on to the fiscal cliff: Higher Taxes for All: The Dems’ Terrible Fallback Plan for the Fiscal Cliff
The Senate tax bill is just that — a tax bill. It would extend the Bush tax cuts for a year for all but the top 2 percent of households, and limit the deductions they can take. It would bring the estate tax back to its 2001 level with a $1 million exemption and 55 percent rate. It would raise taxes on capital gains and dividends from 15 to 20 percent — which is really 23.8 percent when you include the Obamacare surtax. And that’s it. It wouldn’t extend the payroll tax cut. It wouldn’t extend unemployment insurance. It wouldn’t undo the sequester. It wouldn’t do the doc fix. It wouldn’t start any new infrastructure projects. If you add up all of the things it doesn’t do, it comes out to about 1.8 million fewer jobs in 2013 than in a world without the fiscal cliff.
Why worry about jobs when you have “entitlement nation”
From the comments:
dio777: For ten years we have been told that the Bush tax cuts applied mostly to the rich. Now it is imperative that we extend them further or the middle class is going to take a big hit.
Guess the Bush middle class tax cuts didn’t mean anything until they did.
Obamacare contains twenty new or higher taxes. Five of the taxes hit for the first time on January 1. In total, for the years 2013-2022, Americans face a net $1 trillion tax hike for the years 2013-2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The taxes are:
No cost is too high to get on the road of government controlled healthcare.
Right now the Republicans and Democrats are hotly debating which of their two wholly inadequate plans we should use to avoid the fiscal cliff, but looking at the size of the deficit, they’re proposing different-sized Band-Aids where a tourniquet is needed. If you point this out, you’re called a Tea Party extremist who wants to throw old people off a cliff and deny underprivileged Ivy League law students free birth control. “You silly person. Budgets don’t have to balance. That’s just a superstition.”
To the Denver Post editorial board, I present exhibit number one: Romney makes a radical choice in Paul Ryan
Frank J Fleming: Math is Coming
To the Denver Post Editorial Board: Get the Eff Out of the Way.
John Hinderaker: They can’t argue with arithmetic
American voters accepted Obama’s claim that no change is necessary, that $16 trillion of debt is nothing to worry about. In France, voters put socialists into office, vowing not to give an inch on government benefits, ever. In Spain, Greece, and elsewhere around the world, politicians promise their constituents that nothing has to change, more money can be found somewhere. They are all lying.
And of course in the United States, we currently have present and former postal employees on a hunger strike.
John goes on to quote the majority of an article by Janet Daley at the UK Telegraph titled “The truth is that politicians are telling lies: Government is simply unaffordable.”I highly recommend reading both Janet’s article and John’s blog posting. I’ll excerpt a paragraph from each as a teaser. From Janet’s article
Is this the lesson of a year of false economic hopes and cynical political deceptions? That governments will have to accomplish by stealth and betrayed promises what they did not dare to propose when running for office? Here in Britain, the Conservatives make much of their determination to cut welfare, as if out-of-work benefits were the heart of the government spending problem. But in fact, in the medium and long term, it is the state benefits that working people think of as a right that present a far more serious dilemma. The reality is that our ever-rising state pension and entirely free health care system are as unsustainable as social security and Medicare in the US. It is not going to be possible for the NHS, paid for by general taxation, to offer world-class modern medical provision – with its never-ending advances and innovations – into the indefinite future.
And the conclusion from John…
Wishful thinking is a remarkably powerful force. It is beginning to appear that voters will not face reality until they have exhausted all other alternatives, which is to say, until it is too late. Which, if true, implies that a terrible crash is coming, not just in the United States but across the developed world. Demagogues like Barack Obama, Hugo Chavez and Francois Hollande may be able to fool voters, but they can’t fool arithmetic.
Ahh, if it were only so simple. I’ve had conversations with a Boulder liberal who insists that Social Security is solvent and in no financial danger in our lifetimes. This is because Social Security holds US Treasury bonds as collateral for the funds the government has pilfered from this program.
The problem is there IS too much debt, the deficit is too high and the future obligations of Social Security, Medicare, not to mention Obamacare are simply too burdensome. THERE IS NO EASY WAY OUT. Simply cutting the rate of growth of Social Security, Medicare and numerous other government programs elicits howls of unfairness and targeted persecution, not to mention threats of retribution. What happens when we actually CUT absolute spending or, heaven forbid, we eliminate program altogether?
Don’t dare to think “outside the box” as Congressman Paul Ryan tried to do with Medicare. Then you have the pseudo intellectuals at the Denver Post Editorial Board calling you a radical. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these idiots that it is going to take radical thinking and courageous leadership to get us out of this mess. Since they only recently figured out that Colorado may face substantial Medicaid exposure thanks to Obamacare, I feel comfortable in calling them psuedo intellectuals. There are many portions of Obamacare that one had to dig to find the information and connect the dots. The potential exposure the States have to the expansion of the Medicaid program is not one of them. Here’s an example from a 2010 Heritage Foundation blog posting, although I’m sure this was pointed out by many blog and publications, probably including the Congressional Budget Office. It could only be ignored either by willful ignorance or plan old stoopidity. How anyone could advise their readers on Obamacare and have ignorance of how the expansion of Medicaid would effect state budgets boggles my mind.
Personally, by the end of President Obama’s term I believe it will be too late for radical thinking and courageous leadership. I hope I’m wrong. Social unrest is not far away
Oh, remind me one more time what Glenn Reynolds says about our fiscal situation in general….
Things that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be.
Oh, it sure would be nice if the Senate, under the leadership of Harry Reid, would propose a budget.
