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The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

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Bit of a Slump

I just haven't been in the mood lately to post. It seems to me that my government has gone insane, spending away our (great?) grandchildren's tax money. There's all this talk about stimulating the economy, but it is just politics as usual.

Nothing in the "stimulus" bill is really meant to get things moving. The President is relying on fear to bully his agenda through Congress. He learned very well from the previous administration how to do that. There is just a token amount in the bill to create jobs, most of it is long-term. Congress sailed it through because there are enough hands in the till these days, no one notices what is really happening. This is all about government control. Federal control. Bringing more power to the federal government, because who isn't getting money from this?

Never mind that most of our representatives couldn't even read the final text of the 1000-page bill because it hasn't been posted long enough. So much for transparency.

Let's do some math for fun. I heard this on Dave Ramsey, but I wanted to see it in print:

	$787,000,000,000.00
divided by	3,500,000.00	jobs
equals	$224,857.14	per job

How's that for government efficiency on creating or saving jobs? And every time I hear that number from our representatives it gets smaller or just downplayed as an estimate.

According to the IRS, there are about 138 million taxpayers in the U.S. If we take that same number above, that would come out to about $5700/taxpayer. Add in last years $800 billion bank welfare program, and we're talking about $11,500 per taxpayer in the United States.

$11,500 per taxpayer. That represents the tax on a single person in the US making about $60,600 per year in taxed income. I want you to think of this not as money being paid to you, but money being taken from you. Just let that soak in.

Who do you think is going to pay for this, if the government is already spending more than it takes in? Yep: our children, grandchildren, and their children. You would think that people would learn from Madoff that this is just a Ponzi scheme played out at a whole new level.

The real catch is, this little scheme isn't going to do anything for the economy. We are the economy. The economy will recover when we all stop feeling scared about losing our jobs and start buying things again. How do you really do that? Well, how about offering companies a $20,000 tax credit for every employee that they hire this year (net gain in employment)? Let's see how that math looks:

	$20,000	per job
multiplied by	3,500,000	jobs
equals	$70,000,000,000	total

Hmmm... Dave's plan cost's 10x less than then one that just sailed through Congress. It's almost a rounding error -- heck, they've knocked that much out of the plan that just went through over the course of the last couple of weeks.

This plan stops the hemorrhaging in jobs, brings confidence back to the American consumer, and starts immediately.

It's just too bad no one in Washington will listen to this plan, since it doesn't offer any more power for them.

He Who Has the Gold, Rules

Ah, it's nice to see that some people are paying attention out there.

Do you wonder why Obama is letting the Republicans and Democrats do whatever they want with the stimulus package? The answer to me is quite obvious - he doesn’t care about it and what it does. Look through it - it is chump change for everyone. $1,000 tax break per couple, some money for states and cities, money for the road builders, some for solar energy, some for university students, but all of it chump change. The simple reason is that he doesn’t care about the stimulus because it doesn’t matter.

The big prize is what his funders in the financial sector want and that is the bad bank where they can pour the multi-trillions of dollars of bad loans onto the taxpayer without losing their jobs, their stockholders being wiped out, and some of them having to do the perp walk. It is the next banking bailout where the massive transfer from the taxpayers to the wealthy is going to occur. Watch the ball. Don’t listen to the words, believe the “shocked” indignation, or accept that Obama and the Congressional Democrats do not know what is going on.

http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2009/01/31/understanding-the-obama-stimulus/