Employers Encourage Welfare

Musings

If employers could, they would pay their employees nothing.

Employers say the employee is not worth paying a livable wage or the job is not worth paying a livable wage,... yet the job still needs to be done.

Since the employee isn't paid a livable wage, they depend on welfare to make up the difference.

Food stamps.

Subsidized housing.

Subsidized utilities.

Subsidized-everything that a living wage would have otherwise paid for.

So by not paying employees a livable wage, employers are encouraging welfare.

Welfare improves the businesses' profits because the cost of wages is spread-out among tax payers.

Since welfare boosts business profits, business taxes should go up to support the many millions of underpaid employees on welfare.




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Economic Slow-Motion Train Wreck - Amtrak

This morning I saw an Amtrak train pass by with only three or four cars between 2 engines.

I don't know how Amtrak has been faring these past few years but I get the feeling, by only seeing so few cars sandwiched between two engines, that the cross-country passenger train business isn't doing very well. Considering Amtrak is pretty much the only cross-country passenger train business things must be really bad.



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Please, keep your comments clean, civil and relevant. Cussing with foul language just for the sake of using foul language only proves the person to be an obnoxious, dull-witted fool.

Just Write is Just Right

Ye Olde Quill and Ink

It's always a good idea to listen to experienced, professional advice but sometimes you are better off doing things your own way.

Before starting this blog I read several other blogs and web articles on the subject of creating good blogs.

"Stick to one subject for the blog.", they advised.

Ok, I seem to have a particular interest in reading and talking about politics and the economy. Done.

"Backup what you say with links to supporting articles." - more advice from the experts.

Ok, so I bookmarked every article I read. The list of bookmarks grew monstrous. I had a hard time remembering which bookmarked article related to whichever paragraph of what I was writing about. I tried organizing the bookmarks by date and topic, even tried to organize them in a database, but there was just too much overlap of information.

The result of following the expert advise was only a few blog entries were written, each one taking a lot of time and research to write, and the whole process becoming such a chore that I eventually stopped blogging.

At the time of this writing, my previous blog post is just 3 weeks shy of being a whole year ago.

During the past 12 months there were other things I wanted to blog about but they didn't fit into the "politics and economy" niche. Also the memories of the tedious hours, sometimes days, it took to write and refine a single blog post discouraged me.

My blog, like so many others that I've come across in my Internet travels, had been abandoned without any sort of closure. I remember in the beginning telling myself that I wouldn't let that happen, but that is exactly what happened anyway.

A couple days ago a fleeting thought became rooted in my mind... "To hell with'em, just write."

Then I began to ask myself, "Why not?"

Nobody is reading my blog anyway.

Well... other than the NSA computers downloading every character I've typed and complex algorithms processing the data to determine if I'm either the ultimate, mastermind, terrorist of the universe or just another nobody-crackpot, but even then no living person is reading my drivel.

So who cares whether or not I stay on track with a specific niche?

Who cares if I don't fact check and backup my opinions with links and data? They are my opinions and these opinions of this piss-pot-poor, cranky-old-fart aren't going to alter the course of anything.

I like chocolate ice-cream and, in my opinion, vanilla ice-cream tastes yucky!

Wait for it... wait for it...

Hmm...

The world seems to be continuing about it's business despite my opinion of vanilla ice-cream and despite my not having any hard facts or scientific data to back my opinion. (And I still like chocolate ice-cream and I'm still of the opinion that vanilla ice-cream tastes yucky.)

All the expert advice, suggestions, guidelines, techniques, etc. that I've read about blogging may come in handy someday but for now just writing something,... anything,.... is better than the 12 months of "nothing" I've written so far.

For now, "just write" is just right.



Comments
Please, keep your comments clean, civil and relevant. Cussing with foul language just for the sake of using foul language only proves the person to be an obnoxious, dull-witted fool.

LIBOR, LieBOR, Lie More, Whatever

Yet another banking scandal rocks the world!... meh.

Just like all the other too-big-too-fail bank shenanigans, nothing will be done about this LIBOR scandal either.

LIBOR is an acronym for the London Intra-Bank Offered Rate. Sixteen of the world’s largest banks (some of them are American Banks) call in the morning to report the interest rate they are charging each other to loan money to each other.

Around the world, other interest rates are based on the LIBOR for loans, credit and other financial scams... er, I mean “financial products”.

The scandal is that the 16 big banks have been fudging the numbers (surprise, surprise) to the LIBOR.

Low LIBOR numbers means the banks are lending a lot to one another and they are in good financial health.

High LIBOR numbers means the banks aren’t lending to one another as much and they aren’t too healthy financially. Remember back in 2008 the LIBOR was high?

The scandal is that the big banks have been under-reporting the numbers to make themselves look better off than they really were. In turn, since interest rates around the world are based on LIBOR, globally, investors and savers were getting less return on their money than the should have.

About $800 Trillion (yup, that’s trillion with a very big “T”) is the current estimated loss to investors and savers.

Barclay’s of London got caught, plea bargained for a lesser penalty in exchange for ratting-out the other banks involved. As it turns out, all of the 16 big banks were involved... and the regulators and central banks have known about it for years.

LIBOR has “London” in it’s name but American banks, the US Secretary of Treasury and the Federal Reserve are all involved. The banks played hanky-panky while the US Treasury and Fed knowingly looked the other way.

Mind you, the almighty US dollar is only backed by the “good faith and credit of the US Government”. That “good faith and credit” is rapidly dwindling in recent years because of things like the LIBOR scandal.

The outcome of all of this will be... nothing.

You, me and everyone else on the low end of the financial ladder will continue to get screwed-over while the fat cats get richer and get away with economic murder.

Politicians will bluster (this is an election year after all) but since they are so deep in the banksters’ pockets hot air is about all that will ever come of it.

In fact, the banksters merely have to remind their puppet politicians of what will happen if interest rates were allowed to rise. Political suicide for anyone who is in it to get rich off of politics, which is just about every slimy creature with two legs in Washington DC.

Greg Hunter, of USAWatchdog.com, recently interviewed former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts and on the subject of LIBOR.

Here’s the video link: http://usawatchdog.com/one-on-one-with-paul-craig-roberts-2/

Mr. Roberts lays it out plainly - the damage caused by letting interest rates go up would be so much worse than allowing this fraud to continue.

At this point in the video, Mr. Hunter, like a good news hound, sinks his teeth into the fraud issue. Mr. Roberts, seasoned with age and inside the belt-way experience, remains calm and states that this is his assessment, he doesn’t like it either but that’s just the way things work in Washington DC.

The only solution Mr. Roberts could foresee of possibly working would be to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. But since the banks own the lawmakers, that will never happen.

So this is where we are at folks. Massive, global fraud is allowed to continue, unabated because the whole system is so corrupted and unwieldy that if anyone put a stop to the fraud, the whole shebang would come crashing down.



Comments
Please, keep your comments clean, civil and relevant. Cussing with foul language just for the sake of using foul language only proves the person to be an obnoxious, dull-witted fool.


Related Links:
USAWatchdog - One-on-One with Paul Craig Roberts #2
http://usawatchdog.com/one-on-one-with-paul-craig-roberts-2/

Vote Anyway

Election time is coming soon and many frustrated people are saying that they are just not going to vote.

Bad idea.

There is more on the ballot than just who is running for president. There are other people running for other offices. There are things like taxes, new proposals, changes to existing laws, new laws, the removal of old laws, etc. Federal, state and local election issues may get thrown all into one ballot.

If you don't vote, just because of who is running for president, then you are giving up your right to have a voice when it comes to a lot of other important matters up for a vote.

On the ballot you don't have to vote on everything nor for everyone. You can even "write-in" the name of the person who you want to have your vote for. You don't like any of the candidates? Then write in the name of the person you would like to be elected or just leave the vote blank.

Purportedly, "None of the above" gets quite a few votes as well as "Mickey and Minney Mouse", "Big Bird and Snuffelupogus" and "Picard and Ryker" (or "Kirk and Spock" for the older Trekkers).

If you see an issue up for vote that you know nothing about... no worries.

Read the summary, if there is one, and make a decision based on that.

In some case, a sample ballot or a booklet may be mailed out weeks ahead of time to let voters know what will be on the ballot so they can research the issues themselves and make a more informed vote.

If you still can't decide, flip a coin... or just leave it blank.

What will really scare our politicians is if a lot of people start showing up to vote. The political rats are so used to us just ignoring everything they do to us. As Thomas Jefferson said, "When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.".

Here's another really good one from ol' Thomas Jefferson that applies directly to whether or not you should vote, "We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.".




Comments
Please, keep your comments clean, civil and relevant. Cussing with foul language just for the sake of using foul language only proves the person to be an obnoxious, dull-witted fool.