Moonhowlings

Corey Stewart is apparently wants to save all defense spending while taking a chainsaw to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.  His latest email blast in his bid for Lt. Governor is shocking!  His own words:

There is no question our Federal Budget has ballooned to epic proportions, but arbitrarily slashing defense spending is the wrong way to try and reduce the federal deficit.

90,000 civilian Department of Defense employees will be furloughed; this alone will be a $648.8 million hit to the economy of Virginia.

If Washington wants to get serious about reigning in spending, they must go after entitlements. Entitlement programs currently occupy 62% of our federal budget, with 44% of that being comprised of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Those programs are increasing beyond the rate of inflation and, when combined with Obamacare, will eat up 18.5% of our national economic output.

Did he really use the words “go after?”  Does he realize that many senior citizens have only Social Security  to rely on?   Is he declaring a war on senior citizens and the poor?  It sure sounds like it.

Read more…

While many Republicans are trying to deny any part of the sequestration, many in the tea party see it as a great victory and celebrate whittling down government.  According to Washingtonpost.com:

Deep reductions in domestic and defense spending are set to begin Friday in a process known as sequestration, which will make progress toward the tea party’s goal of shrinking the government. What unfolds over the following months will be a high-stakes test of whether significant cuts in spending will help or hurt the economy — and the Republican Party’s brand.

The cuts, worth $1.2 trillion over 10 years, are slated to become reality after a period when the tea party — a movement, represented by a group of Republicans elected in 2010, whose goal is to radically cut the government — has struggled to have a lasting impact on Washington. The tea party saw President Obama win reelection and enact more than $600 billion in tax increases on the wealthy, while GOP leaders agreed to allow more federal borrowing without anything in return.

Read more…

I keep reading that sequestration is greatly exaggerated and that the cuts coming from sequestration are really nothing to worry about.  Who is doing all this prediction?  Why Republicans of course.  The White House is being accused of fear-mongering  and creating hype and a sky is falling environment.  Why would Republicans say that?  Probably because they know what caused this impasse.  It all goes back to the brinkmanship of the debt ceiling crisis in July 2011.  The sequester was a compromise reached so budge the house Republicans who would not vote to raise the debt ceiling.  The alternative was to  default on our debts.

The defense cuts are just one side of the sequester.  There are also looming cuts that will impact our daily lives.

A state by state report warns of the following if sequestration happens this Friday.  According to the Washington Post:

In the Washington region, hub of the federal government, the upcoming automatic spending cuts the Obama administration detailed Sunday would strike a tough blow, with nearly 150,000 civilian Defense Department employees facing furloughs and an estimated average loss of $7,500 in pay. Read more…

That’s right, in 7 Legislative days the Sequestration will take place. The Sequestration calls for $500 Billion dollar cuts to Pentagon spending and $700 Billion dollar cuts to non-pentagon spending.

How did we get to such a point with something so dangerous? The truth of the matter is, everyone expected that no one would let it happen.

The road to Sequestration started in July, 2011, when tea party Republicans attempted to block raising the debt ceiling, something which is done under every presidency. That catalyst set a series of unfortunate events into motion. First off, S & P down-graded our credit rating. Not by much, but a little. The stock market took an adverse reaction and many of us lost tens of thousands of dollars.

Read more…

Prince William County has been ranked #8 in the nation in  job growth.  It falls behind Loudoun County which is ranked #1 and mostly Texas communities.  It supposedly has a job growth of 48.6%.  My question is, where are the jobs and do  those jobs support a livable wage in this county?

From CNN.com

Prince William County takes the crown when it comes to offering enticing perks to businesses. Expedited permits for companies in “targeted” industries that promise high-paying jobs and capital investment is just one of the ways it rolls out the red carpet.

Also behind the job boom: proximity to the D.C. Beltway, a smart workforce and competitive tax rates. Some 770 new jobs were announced last year, a nearly 14% increase from the previous year.

The jewel of Prince William County is Innovation Technology Park, a 1,600-acre corporate district whose tenants include the FBI, Comcast and George Mason University’s Life Sciences Campus. One of the newest additions is Vector Security, which last year announced it was moving into the park and bringing 130 new jobs with it.

Read more…

Over the weekend, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke the following when he accepted the Jury du Prix Tocqueville Prize in France:

The foregoing observation is especially relevant to our understanding of the challenge facing contemporary America.  Though a democracy, it is becoming a country of socially ominous extremes between the few super rich and the increasingly many who are deprived.  In America today the top 1% of the richest families own around 35% of the entire nation’s wealth, while the bottom 90% own around 25%.   It should be a source of perhaps even greater concern that the majority of all currently serving Congressmen and Senators, and similarly most of the top officials in the executive branch, fall in the category of the very rich, the so-called top 1%.

At the same time, though still a unique super-power, America finds it difficult to cope with the consequences of the increasingly accelerating global changes that are spinning out of control, both on the socio-economic and on the geopolitical levels. Socio-economically, the world is becoming a single playing-field in which 3 dynamic realities increasingly prevail:  globalization, “internetization”, and deregulation. 

Read more…

Huffingtonpost.com:

 [T]he former speaker suggested that benefits were being abused by people who were more interested in living off the government dime than in finding actual work.

“It is fundamentally wrong to give people money for 99 weeks for doing nothing,” he said.

Most studies of unemployment insurance have showed that lethargy is not a side effect of providing help to the unemployed. The money that is being distributed simply doesn’t cover the salary lost from not having a job.

The Newster sticks his foot in his mouth again.  Since when do the jobless get accused of being lazy.  On the one hand there is much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over joblessness and unemployment.  Then there is the Newster who suggests that people are abusing being unemployed.  Help me understand this. 

From the Washington Post:

Republicans scuttle negotiations with Obama

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Cantor might want to jump ‘ship’ and go back to being a normal Republican. 

The VRS had a great year.  It had an 18.5% return as of June 30 for last year.  It has nearly returned to its all-time high water mark in 2007, before the crash of 2008.  The trust fund now has approximately $55 Billion dollars.  However, the VRS  board of directors warn that its still not big enough to keep promises made to teachers and local and state workers. 

After the crash, the fund dipped to $38.9 billion dollars in March 2009.  According to Roanoke.com:

But with more government workers and teachers retiring, the investment gains don’t erase the need for lawmakers to increase contribution rates, pension administrators told the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. Pension obligations represent just one of the pressures facing Gov. Bob McDonnell and lawmakers who must shape a new two-year budget next year.

“The fund is aging and will increasingly face the prospect of negative cash flows in years ahead as benefit payments exceed payments from payroll contributions,” said Diana Cantor, the chairwoman of Virginia’s retirement board.

The retirement system has nearly 340,000 active members, including state and local workers, teachers, judges and law enforcement officers. It pays out benefits to more than 156,000 retirees, a number that is increasing. Cantor noted that 5,368 teachers retired in July 2010, a 48 percent increase over the number reported the previous year.

“Recent investment gains notwithstanding, we continue to believe that contribution rates will have to rise to meet our pension obligations over the long term,” she said.

The retirement board will recommend new contribution rates after meeting with an actuary this fall. The state has underfunded the plan, routinely paying rates less than those recommended by the Virginia Retirement System’s governing board over the past two decades.

Read more…

USAToday.com

WASHINGTON — Social Security made $6.5 billion in overpayments to people not entitled to receive them in 2009, including $4 billion under a supplemental income program for the very poor, a government investigator said Tuesday.

In all, about 10 % of the payments made under the agency’s Supplemental Security Incomeprogram were improper, said Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr., the Social Security inspector general.

Error rates were much smaller for retirement, survivor and disability benefits, which make up the overwhelming majority of Social Security payments, O’Carroll told a congressional panel.

Read more…

From msnbc.com:

The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.

“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.

Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class.

“I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt,” she said. “I’m 30 years old, and I can’t save up enough for a down payment” for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

This woman really isn’t making a great deal of money.  She has college debts that must be paid off.  The NO Child Left Behind Act sets unrealistic expectations for every teacher in this nation.  Specifically, the act says that by 2014 each school will have 100% pass rate.  In other words, every child in America will have passed all of his/her state objectives.  Sure, sure, by the time 2014 rolls around, someone in the Department of Education or Congress will have come up with some lamely concocted caveat to ease the pains of not being able to do the impossible, but that is still the albatross that hangs around each teacher’s neck as they enter the building each morning to go to work.  That is the axe  that hangs over their head during the work day. 

Read more…

Sam Stone aka "B. Virdot"

This month’s Smithsonian Magazine features the story of B. Virdot’s mysterious letter in the Canton, Ohio newspaper during the Great Depression. 

The next steps are unclear for the deficit commission’s drastic debt reduction plan. Many people have simply said what has been proposed in the draft is unacceptable on many levels.

Perhaps a plan this draconian is a place to start discussion. Right now it seems that senior citizens and federal works are heavily targeted and that the wealthy will be impacted the least.

Ten Flash Points in the Fiscal Commission Chairmen’s Proposal

I don’t doubt for one second that there are people out there gold bricking, but to make sweeping generalizations? I know of several people who just haven’t been able to get a job. Perhaps there are better people to attack than the jobless.

Much of the unemployment situation depends on location. Those of us living in Northern Virginia are fortunate. We haven’t been hit as hard as other localities.

Was Beck lacking sensitivity? Is it fair to attack people for being unemployed after 99 weeks?

Interesting way to look at the debt, especially since debt rose under Saint Ronnie and decline under Bad-boy Bill. It seems to me if we cut the war business, the debt might not be such an issue.

It is difficult to balance 2 wars and pull out of an almost depression. Too bad Obama is getting all the blame. People that are placing all the blame on him really aren’t intellectually honest with themselves or with others.