Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : How Quickly Can Obama Totally Destroy the US? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Woody_Nickels who wrote (872)	1/7/2013 12:36:44 AM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 16547

You can’t ‘scrub’ up EBT mess with a dirty rag Jan 6, 2013 By Howie Carr / Boston Herald bostonherald.com Another day, another 19,000 anecdotes. Anecdote — that’s Gov. Deval Patrick’s favorite word to describe any scandal involving EBT cards and his constituents. It doesn’t matter how solid the information is, how many law-enforcement agencies are involved in the takedown, he always shrugs off the latest rip-off of the taxpayers. Anecdote. And now he’s looking at another 19,000 of them — that 4 percent of the welfare community that the Department of Transitional Assistance (a name that grows ever more preposterous) could not locate. Those 19,000 MIA’s collect — based on an average of $400 a month — $91 million a year. That’s the estimate of Rep. Shauna O’Connell (R-Taunton). But the governor Friday went into his best pooh-pooh mode. “That may not be indicative of a problem,” he said with a straight face. “We’ll know when we do the scrubbing.” Scrubbing? More like a sponge bath would be my guess. This is a program that needs a good cold shower. But the governor, himself a former welfare recipient, recommends … nothing, basically. Call it professional courtesy. Let’s not forget how the “scrubbing” began. Granny Warren’s daughter filed a lawsuit claiming the DTA hadn’t been proactive enough in by Text-Enhance">registering the state’s assorted loafers and layabouts to vote for her carpetbagging fake-Indian mom. Then — bingo, the hacks located $274,000 for mailings, complete with post-paid envelopes for the gimme girls and guys to send back their voter registrations. Have you ever gotten a post-paid envelope from the commonwealth? No, I didn’t think so. They’re not for taxpayers, just for the non-working classes to take part in a Democratic voter-registration drive. The Patrick administration has known about these appalling EBT numbers for months now. They were only released after this newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Which is the same way it was revealed that Lt. Gov. Tim Murray was doing 108 mph when he mysteriously crashed his state vehicle in November 2011. So much for transparency at the State House. It takes months for a law-abiding citizen to get a gun permit in this state. But if you sign up for welfare with a fake name or address, no problemo. Nobody ever checks up, apparently. When Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York in 1993, he insisted that all welfare recipients show up in person to renew their applications. A quarter of the “recipients” never appeared. It’s hard to respond to a letter if you don’t really exist. I know, that’s just an “anecdote.” So here’s one more. Years ago when the transit cops in New York and New Jersey started busting fare-jumpers, they made an astounding discovery. A quarter — there’s that number again — of those arrested were carrying welfare cards from both New York and New Jersey. In other words, they were collecting in two states. And now the Mass. welfare rolls will get a “scrubbing” — wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Here’s what really matters to Deval and his gang of plunderers. On Thursday, as soon as the successor to the outgoing watchdog of the Governor’s Council, Mary-Ellen Manning, was sworn in, the governor nominated Mary Beth Heffernan for a judgeship. Yes, that Mary Beth Heffernan, probably the worst public-safety secretary in state history. Too incompetent to properly broom Tim Murray’s auto accident or Annie Dookhan or the Sheila Burgess bad-driving fiasco, so they give her early by Text-Enhance">retirement on the bench for $130,000 a year. Taking care of dodgy old hacks, that’s what Deval et al. are about, not cleaning up the disaster that is the welfare state. By the way, I still haven’t heard back from Deval on my generous offer to provide him with one hour per month on my radio talk show to explain how wonderful he and his administration are. Governor, the offer stands.

To: Woody_Nickels who wrote (872)	1/8/2013 12:22:16 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 16547

Deficits: Apparently, President Obama never got around to reading the final report of his own deficit commission. How else to explain his belief that federal spending isn't the cause of the nation's debt crisis? That's apparently what Obama told House Speaker John Boehner during their recent "fiscal cliff" negotiations. "At one point several weeks ago," Boehner told the Wall Street Journal, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.'" That would be news to Obama's debt commission, which in its final report made clear that spending is the driving force behind the nation's debt crisis. Here's what the report said: "Even after the economy recovers, federal spending is projected to increase faster than revenues, so the government will have to continue borrowing money to spend." The panel added, "Over the long run, as the baby boomers retire and health care costs continue to grow, the situation will become far worse." And it recommended: "We should cut all excess spending — including defense, domestic programs, entitlement spending, and spending in the tax code." The commission was hardly breaking new ground here. Indeed, anyone who has looked at the federal budget can quickly see that out-of-control spending, not insufficient revenues, is the problem. As the chart shows, even with the $620 billion in tax hikes Obama won during the fiscal cliff fight, plus the $500 billion in new ObamaCare taxes, spending will continue to outstrip revenues as far as the eye can see. By 2022, federal revenues will top 19% of GDP, which is significantly higher than the post-World War II average. But spending will exceed 22%, and keep climbing. Meanwhile, a Government Accountability Office report concluded that spending is "on an unsustainable long-term fiscal path" and blamed entitlements. And countless Congressional Budget Office reports have documented how, left unchecked, federal entitlement programs will soon swamp the entire budget. Apparently Obama didn't read any of those, either. When it comes to federal spending, Obama is like the alcoholic who says that the only drinking problem he has is when he can't get a drink.