Now we have articles in the local paper here in Jackson Hole warning that the local economy will suffer and jobs will be eliminated if budget cuts are forced because National Parks, National Forests, and National Refuges (like the Elk Refuge here in NW Wyoming) will suffer some of the steepest cuts were the government to cut spending. Would this actually hurt our local economy here in Wyoming? I doubt it. I think it's just a scare tactic -- economic terrorism, if you will -- a method the (corrupt) Federal Government has perfected abroad over the last century.
There is even talk of shutting down the entire Federal Government, which I think would actually be a great move if they actually shut down everything including the Amerikan military industrial complex. Since the military accounts for 54% of US spending and has terrorized the entire world with threats of nuclear annihilation since 1945, shutting that down seems like the sanest of all possible actions.
Unfortunately, sanity is not the (corrupt) Federal Government's strong suit. In fact, all these threats are merely political tools. These are in fact "manufactured crises", and you don't have to take my word for it. Check out what Obama said in his latest SOTU while trying to drum up bipartisan support for insane policies...
"I realize that tax reform and entitlement reform won’t be easy. The politics will be hard for both sides. None of us will get 100 percent of what we want. But the alternative will cost us jobs, hurt our economy, and visit hardship on millions of hardworking Americans. So let’s set party interests aside, and work to pass a budget that replaces reckless cuts with smart savings and wise investments in our future. And let’s do it without the brinksmanship that stresses consumers and scares off investors. The greatest nation on Earth cannot keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next. Let’s agree, right here, right now, to keep the people’s government open, pay our bills on time, and always uphold the full faith and credit of the United States of America. The American people have worked too hard, for too long, rebuilding from one crisis to see their elected officials cause another."
The most absurd thing about all this political posturing is the government agencies continually proposed for the chopping block are those that actually benefit the American people, protect our environment, and/or can potentially turn a profit (legally).
The continued threats to shut down or severely limit the Postal Service, National Parks, Health and Human Services, etc. prove this institutionalized insanity. Equally insane is the fact that the government pretends that cutting 85 billion of beneficial services from a 3.7 trillion budget would make the slightest difference. Those cuts amount to 2.3% budget cut, a mere drop in the bucket of waste and corruption.
If the Feds really wanted to balance the budget, this is all they would have to do.
1) STOP PAYING TRIBUTE TO A PRIVATE BANKING CARTEL. Currently the US Government pays over $300 billion annually to the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank on an entirely manufactured and illegitimate debt. If we told the global banking cartel to suck eggs, the US' annual expenses would drop by 8.1% overnight.
2) CUT THE OVERINFLATED MILITARY BUDGET IN HALF. The US currently spends at least $729 billion on its military annually. This is over six times more than China spends on it's military and as much as the top ten military nations combined. Cutting that budget in half would decrease the US annual expenses by almost 10% overnight with no noticeable decrease in the average citizen's security. If that money was invested in America instead of blown up overseas, we would see unprecedented prosperity in this country.
Note: the figure $729 billion does not take into consideration backdoor or black op budgets. A good example of how deep the military rathole goes was revealed on September 10th, 2001 when Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon had misplaced $2.3 TRILLION. Convenient timing for such an announcement, eh?!
3) STOP BUILDING A POLICE/SURVEILLANCE/PRISON STATE. We all know Homeland Security has been a priority since the false flag attacks of 2001 and subsequent fabricated "War on/of Terror". Just how much has been spent on the police state over the last decade? At least $700 billion. How much is allocated in 2013? At least $100 billion more.
"The Department of Homeland Security, has a total 2012 budget of about $57 billion.... That budget only hints at what’s being doled out for homeland security at the federal level. Such moneys flow not just from Homeland Security, but from the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Commerce Department, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Defense. In 2010, the Office of Management and Budget reckoned that 31 separate federal agencies were involved in homeland security-related funding that year to the tune of more than $65 billion. The Census Bureau, which has itself been compromised by War on Terror activities — mapping Middle Eastern and Muslim communities for counter-terrorism officials — estimated that federal homeland security funding topped $70 billion in 2010. But government officials acknowledge that much funding is not included in that compilation. (Grants made through the $5.6 billion Project BioShield, to offer but one example, an exotic vaccination and medical program launched in 2004, are absent from the total.)
Even the estimate of more than $635 billion in such expenditures does not tell the full spending story. That figure does not include the national intelligence or military intelligence budgets for which the Obama Administration is seeking $52.6 billion and $19.6 billion respectively in 2013, or secret parts of the national security budget, the so-called black budget."
(SOURCE: http://www.salon.com/2012/03/05/the_cost_of_americas_police_state/ )
Cutting all of this creepy Orwellian crap out of the budget would save the US at least 4% annually. Combined with the two additional cuts mentioned above, the US budget would drop by at least 23% overnight.
Cutting all of this creepy Orwellian crap out of the budget would save the US at least 4% annually. Combined with the two additional cuts mentioned above, the US budget would drop by at least 23% overnight.
4) MAKE LARGE CORPORATIONS AND THE ULTRAWEALTHY PAY THEIR SHARE OF TAXES. Many of the largest and most profitable corporations in the US pay little or no taxes. Though the official corporate tax rate is around 30%, the biggest corporations actually pay between 2% and 10%. Meanwhile, taxes on the wealthiest Americans are still near all-time-lows and the same tax loopholes exploited by corporations are affordable for the wealthiest Americans as well...
This ThinkProgress article from 2011 shows the absurdity of the tax situation and the seemingly neverending stream of government manufactured crises we have been dealing with recently...
As congressional negotiators continue to debate the contents of a deficit reduction package, discussions are reportedly tiltingtoward a deal that will include spending cuts but no revenue increases.
Over at the Campaign for America’s Future, the Institute for Policy Studies’ (IPS) Sam Pizzigati notes that one way to very easily tackle U.S. debt going forward would be to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to levels more closely matching mid-20th century rates. Pizzigati cites an IPS paperfrom last spring to make the argument that if corporations and households making more than $1 million paid the same rates as they did in 1961, our debt would virtually disappear in a decade:
Some numbers — from an Institute for Policy Studies report released this past spring — can help us better visualize just how monumental this political failure has been. If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year. In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.
As ThinkProgress has previously reported, the richest Americans are paying their lowest taxesin a generation. Additionally, Center for American Progress experts Michael Linden, Seth Hanlon, and Jordan Eizenga have shown that the United States is actually very low-tax compared to other developed countries.
(SOURCE: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/07/25/277857/corporations-rich-taxes-debt-disappear/ )
So, long story short, the federal government is not just inept but blatantly corrupt. They could easily balance the budget and do away with the debt if they actually worked for the benefit of American citizens of humanity as a whole. We have to eliminate corrupt government before corrupt government eliminates us. Peace.
So, long story short, the federal government is not just inept but blatantly corrupt. They could easily balance the budget and do away with the debt if they actually worked for the benefit of American citizens of humanity as a whole. We have to eliminate corrupt government before corrupt government eliminates us. Peace.