"A good leader does not make excuses. A great leader does not need excuses."

Randomly came up with that in a discussion?

A brief post about credit unions.

In order to try to grow my follower base, I decided to create a blogger site. I will probably work on duplicate posts at least for a while.

You may agree with the oil pipeline. You may disagree with the oil pipeline. However I’m sure that many of the people following this blog and people whose blogs I follow will agree that tying two unrelated pieces of legislation together is a highly authoritarian move.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans have done just that. Not just in one instance but over and over again creating massive pieces of legislation like the health care act, tarp, and many others.

If we are to see an end to this, the first step would be to convince congress to pass rules that would prevent this, and then in order to force congress to uphold those rules, since it wouldn’t be the first time they ignored their own rules, we would need to have a constitutional amendment passed preventing it.

(Image Source)

"You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn."

Titanic director James Cameron, on the next iceberg we’re hurtling towards: climate change.  (via think-progress)

This has been a meme by climate scientists for decades. Of course the actual type of climate change, the reason behind it, etc always changes, the net result is the push to reduce economic output and increase government control.

(via think-progress)

baseballlibertarian:

Anyone who was serious about ending the wars and ending US intervention would want to not only ax the income but also the Federal Reserve.  If the government can no longer print money to pay for their empire building they would have to stop. 

Supporting big government supports the warfare state.  Regardless of your intentions or not that is a fact. 

As we approach April 15, the day when we render unto Caesar what is ours, it is well to bear a few stark and simple numbers in mind.

The personal income tax for 2011 will haul in a hefty $1.09 trillion to the federal coffers. The estimate for 2012* is $1.16 trillion.  

On the other side of the ledger, the best estimate of the known “national security” expenditures for 2012 is $1.22 trillion dollars.

That’s right; it takes the entire personal income tax, and then some, to cover the costs of war and Empire.  

The total federal revenue from every source will be $2.47 trillion in 2012, so the war machine and its various appurtenances take an enormous bite out of the total federal budget. 

There is a question of morality when the taxpayer forks over enormous tribute to bulk up a military Empire which visits death and destruction on untold numbers of people in the developing world – often with a public relations veneer of “humanitarian” endeavors.    Historically antiwar tax resistance of various types has grown out of such moral concerns.  The moral consideration bites harder when the wars are either sold on the basis of lies as W’s war on Iraq or are undeclared as with Obama’s on Libya, Pakistan, Syria and Iran.   In the case of undeclared wars for which we pay, it may fairly be said that we have taxation without representation.

With the end of the Cold War long behind us, a powerful new alliance to end taxes for war and Empire is within reach.   Consider the call of the conservatives, neocons excepted, when it comes to the income tax. “Starve the beast,” they cry.  And quite obviously they have a point when one considers the nature of the “beast,” aptly named in this case.  In fact when libertarians and “paleocons” call for an end to the personal income tax and also an end to wars and Empire, their demand is not the insanity that the some progressives would have us believe.  We would do well to consider axing a big chunk of the personal income tax.  Progressives would do well to embrace allies on the Right in fighting taxation to pay for death and destruction.

Hence a new coalition may emerge to cut the personal income tax.  Such a coalition has the potential to be more powerful than any seen yet on the imperial scene.  And it could deliver a crippling blow to the U.S. Empire.  Hillary Clinton clearly fears this, referring to such an incipient alliance as the “Come Home America” crowd in her article in Foreign Policy on the “pivot” to Asia.

For their part libertarians and genuine conservatives would do well to consider wooing a new segment of the population to their anti-tax crusade, at the very least to oppose the most despised of taxes, the federal personal income tax.

In the view of this writer, a view from the Left, not all taxes ought to be put on the chopping block.  The corporate tax, shrinking for many decades, deserves a lot more influx from the swollen accounts of America’s crony capitalism.   Most important, the payroll tax which finances Medicare and Social Security is money well spent and hence deserves preservation.    It is most appalling when Obama and the Obamabots call for cutting the payroll tax, not the income tax.  In this case they are not starving the beast; they are starving the people, sometimes quite literally.   And they are driving programs like Medicare into a weaker financial position whereupon the cry can go up that such programs are insolvent, unaffordable and must be slashed.    We do not hear the average Jane and Joe raise a hue and cry about the payroll tax – and that quite wisely.

If you ask progressives why they feel that cutting the payroll tax is a dandy type of stimulus, they will tell you that the payroll tax is regressive and so it is fine to take an ax to it.  But the personal income tax, with its panoply of loopholes, is profoundly regressive.  Ask Warren Buffet.  So by progressive logic, the personal income tax should be put to the knife. In fact such cuts are a stimulus that will bring smiles to economists of many different persuasions from the Keynesian to the Monetarist. That smile would certainly spread to the faces of cash-strapped Americans.  Ax that tax.

Banks and government, the worst combination I have ever seen.

We’ve all heard the horrors of dealing with the banks over mortgages. This is my parents’ story. It’s kind of lengthy and I’m sure not all that uncommon, but if you need a reason why bank bailouts should not occur and whey the government should not get involved in the banking industry, this is a pretty good reason.

To be fair, my parent have not done a great job with managing their finances. There’s really no reason why they should be in financial distress, but they are, and I’ve been working on getting them out of their situation. 

They like many others in America have found themselves under water with their home and because of other financial obligations (such as actually repairing the house) fell behind on payments and so the bank (Indymac) started the foreclosure process.

Around the beginning of March I made a phone call to get a reinstatement quote. The quote of course included penalties, attorney fees, etc and I was told it was good until March 28. We were told of a payment plan that could be set up 80% down 20% over six months. We were also told that if we were to pay it at once, we would need a certified check sent off for the entire back amount.

So of course not wanting to send a huge check off that could be lost, I opted for the payment plan and I called around March 22 since that was the first time we had enough money “available” to catch up. At that point we were told that the agreement had to be signed by the 26th and that the numbers had to be checked by the attorneys and that we would receive the agreement to sign in the mail priority overnight.

We waited, and waited, and then called back since we were not going to have time before the 26th. At that point we found out that since there was not enough time to sign the agreement, the process was cancelled and we needed to start the process over. We were told that this would be done by the 4th of April.

Of course by this time more fees had accrued. But we figured it was a small amount and we could wait a few more days. So we called back on the fourth. No plan was in the process according to the person we spoke with this time. So again we asked for a plan to be written up.

Next phone call, the plan was submitted and the numbers confirmed, but now they had to be agreed to by the investor. Who was the investor? Why Fannie Mae of course. The government sponsored entity that bailed out Indymac with our tax payer money.

Finally as of today we called back to check to see how things were going. We also asked if the fees were on hold since we were in the process of the agreement. After much pushing, the “customer service representative” on the other end said no. So while we were waited for Fannie Mae to agree to let us pay the mortgage up to date, we were still getting penalized.

Note, that not a single person who we spoke to had the same story. Most of them spoke to me as if I had no clue how banks worked or what an investor was. They also refused to send the internal notes on the account to me and I am working on getting them to post on this blog.

So there’s my rant on how a bank bailed out by the taxpayers treats it’s customers. It does leave me wondering one question. Why is it that a massive bank that messes up gets a major break but we the taxpayers do not?

icanseeatlantis:

“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.” —Ayn Rand

(via dontprayonme)

theatlantic:

Here Is President Obama’s Tax Return

The president and vice-president released their 2011 tax returns this morning. The Obama’s reported total income of $844,000 and adjusted gross income of $789,674, placing the president’s family well inside the top 1% — even the top 0.5% — of households, which is no surprise considering the president’s salary alone puts somebody near the top percentile. About half of Obama’s income came from the president’s salary. The other half came from book sales.

The Obama’s paid $162,074 in total taxes, for an effective tax rate of about 20%, which is typical for an upper-middle class family but a tad lower than the average tax rate for the richest tenth of earners, since half of their money came from non-earned income and they reported a $3,000 investment loss. The couple donated a nearly identical amount, $172,130, or 22% of their adjusted gross income, to charities.

See the rest of Obama’s tax return.

(via publicradiointernational)