Thomas Sowell-on Occupying Wall Street

By Dr. Sowell

The current Occupy Wall Street movement is the best illustration to date
of what President Barack Obama’s America looks like. It is an America
where the lawless, unaccomplished, ignorant and incompetent rule. It is
an America where those who have sacrificed nothing pillage and destroy
the lives of those who have sacrificed greatly.

It is an America where history is rewritten to honor dictators, murderers
and thieves. It is an America where violence, racism, hatred, class warfare
and murder are all promoted as acceptable means of overturning the American
civil society.

It is an America where humans have been degraded to the level of animals:
defecating in public, having sex in public, devoid of basic hygiene. It is an
America where the basic tenets of a civil society, including faith, family, a
free press and individual rights, have been rejected. It is an America where
our founding documents have been shredded and, with them, every person’s
guaranteed liberties.

It is an America where, ultimately, great suffering will come to the American
people, but the rulers like Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi,
Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, liberal
college professors, union bosses and other loyal liberal/Communist Party members
will live in opulent splendor.

It is the America that Obama and the Democratic Party have created with the
willing assistance of the American media, Hollywood, unions, universities, the
Communist Party of America, the Black Panthers and numerous anti-American
foreign entities.

Barack Obama has brought more destruction upon this country in four years than
any other event in the history of our nation, but it is just the beginning of what he
and his comrades are capable of.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is just another step in their plan for the
annihilation of America ..

“Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual
could ignore or evade it.”

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a libertarian perspective. He is currently a Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He had received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1958 and a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968, he earned his doctorate degree in economics from the University of Chicago.
Dr. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell and University of California, Los Angeles, and worked for “think tanks” such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980 he has worked at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of more than 30 books.

Remember, not only did you contribute to Social Security but your employer did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you averaged only $30K over your working life, that’s close to $220,500.

If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer’s contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working you’d have $892,919.98.

If you took out only 3% per year, you’d receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years (until you’re 95 if you retire at age 65) and that’s with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you’d have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month.

The folks in Washington have pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madoff ever had.
Entitlement my butt, I paid cash for my social security insurance!!!! Just because they borrowed the money, doesn’t make my benefits some kind of charity or handout!!

Congressional benefits —- free healthcare, outrageous retirement packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited paid sick days, now that’s welfare, and they have the nerve to call my social security retirement entitlements?

We’re “broke” and can’t help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless
In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, and Turkey. And now Pakistan ……home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!!

Our retired seniors living on a ‘fixed income’ receive no aid nor do they get any breaks while our government and religious organizations pour Hundreds of Billions of dollars and Tons of Food to Foreign Countries!

They call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives and now when it’s time for us to collect, the government is running out of money. Why did the government borrow from it in the first place? Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT* gave ‘US’ the same support they give to other countries.

Sad isn’t it?

… And what about the people who died before they collected anything? Where is THAT money?!

The Occupy Wall Street crowd seems indignant that people expect a rational set of demands from them. Most of the participants I’ve seen interviewed have probably not put a coherent sentence together in years. Although, I’ll admit, taking a dump on a police car does make a statement. I’m just not sure what it is? Is it “I reject your authority” or “This is the cleanest place in the park to poop”?

They seem to just have a general sense that they are being screwed and should get some free stuff out of it. It’s like a rained-out Grateful Dead concert where the totally basted crowd demands a refund and free t-shirts. Well, they have been screwed.

We should all be mad as hell about the bail-out of Wall Street, GM, Chrysler, AIG, Fannie, Freddie, and so on ad ad nauseam and the resulting explosion of the national debt. But this was not a failure of free enterprise.

A truly capitalist economy would have required they all go down, with shareholders and bondholders wiped out. It happens to small businesses every day. This was a failure of government; from the Fed that caused the easy money that blew the bubble, to Congress who failed to reel in Fannie and Freddie and required that loans be made to people that can’t afford them, to the SEC that allowed rampant fraud while they were downloading midget porn, to treasury officials Hank Paulsen and Turbo Tax Timmy Geightner, to George W Bush, Mitch McConnell, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi who all took tons of money from Wall Street and put through the bailouts and then squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on dog crap like Solyndra.

Here’s some demands for them: We should break up the large banks, reinstate Glass-Steagull Act, blacklist the officers and directors of the bailed out entities from ever working in the financial industry, claw back any bonuses paid to employees of bailed-out entities in the last five years, and put some of these crooked bastards in jail.

We need to get the government out of the mortgage business. We need to prosecute as many of the mortgage brokers as possible who underwrote LIAR loans. We need to stop trying to keep people in houses they couldn’t afford to begin with and if they lied on their loan applications they should be punished too.

We need to end the Federal Reserve System. You can’t have free markets when the Fed intervenes in those markets to set the interest rates. Right now they are killing savers with low interest rates only to help the banks.

We need to simplify the tax code where EVERYBODY pays something. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan is better than what we have now and would definitely stimulate the economy. Free markets, property rights, and rule of law are what made our country the envy of the world. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have seriously attacked these basic tenets. But instead of protests that look like a Burning Man Festival, we need to vote the bastards responsible out of office.

Dennis Dan

In 1972, Joe Miller was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Tulsa Junior College.

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Joe approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee, inspected the elephant’s foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Joe worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to Joe, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Joe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled.

Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Joe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Thirty years later, Joe was walking through the Tulsa Zoo with his family. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Joe and his family were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Joe, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1972, Joe could not help wondering if this was the same elephant. Joe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing, and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Joe’s legs and slammed him against the railing killing him instantly.
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Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer be allowed vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.
The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

Example: John’s Car Repair Shop
John is an “S” corp. or LLC and all profits from that corporation pass through for tax purposes pro rata the percentage of stock own. John owns 100% of the stock and is doing well, last year the shop did two million in sales and after salaries and expenses the business made $200,000.00. John pays himself $100,000.00 a year in salary but he has to pay taxes on $300,000.00. Here is where the problem starts; John doesn’t get to keep all the money he is paying taxes on because the business needed $75,000.00 in capital improvements like a new lift and new computers and tools to fix the cars.

John also needs to keep a prudent reserve of cash in the company of $75,000.00 to cover operating expense and weather a rainy day if the sales are not there in a given month. To make things simple let’s say that John is being taxed at 30% ($300,000 x 30%) or $90,000 on the $150,000 in profit John actually got to take home leaving him with take home pay of $60,000. This scenario creates an actual tax burden on rich evil John of 60%. Let’s tax John 50% because he is so rich and we need the money ($300,000 x 50%) or $150,000 – Johns take home pay of $150,000 = ZERO.

Make the increase at $750,000 and you save hundreds of thousands of small business that are employing millions of workers that are spending money repairing the economy. You may ask “Mark, it is so simple, why don’t they just do that?” The answer is that the meat is in the middle, even if you taxed all income on those earning over $750,000 at 100% there wouldn’t be enough and they know that.

Given all the hassle and risk of running a business the small business owner would be crazy to continue this model. Say whatever you want but if you destroy the small businesses in America the well will truly be dry.

You can shear a sheep many times, but skin it only once.

When he got to the first one, he asked the Madam, “Is this a union house?”
“No,” she replied, “I’m sorry it isn’t.”

“Well, if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?”
“The house gets $80 and the girls get $20,” she answered.

Offended at such unfair dealings, the union man stomped off down the street in search of a more equitable, hopefully unionized shop. His search continued until finally he reached a brothel where the Madam responded, “Why yes sir, this is a union house. We observe all union rules.”

The man asked, “And, if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?”

“The girls get $80 and the house gets $20.”

“That’s more like it!” the union man said.

He handed the Madam $100, looked around the room, and pointed to a stunningly attractive green-eyed blonde.

“I’d like her,” he said.

“I’m sure you would, sir,” said the Madam. Then she gestured to a 92-year old woman in the corner, “but Ethel here has 67 years seniority and according to union rules, she’s next.’”

NOW YOU Know what’s wrong with the AUTO industry, the teachers “union” and why most of our jobs have gone overseas.

The intruder, Kyle Blackburn, was taken to a South Carolina hospital, but the injuries were not reported to be life-threatening, according to Rex Gore, district attorney for Columbus, Bladen and Brunswick Counties.

The State Bureau of Investigation and Columbus County Sheriff’s Department are investigating the shooting, Gore said. Soles, who were not arrested, declined to discuss the incident Sunday evening.

“I am not in a position to talk to you,” Soles said by telephone.

“I’m right in the middle of an investigation.”

The Senator, who has made a career of being against gun ownership for the general public, didn’t hesitate to defend himself with his own gun when he believed he was in immediate danger and he was the victim.

In typical hypocritical liberal fashion, the “Do as i say and not as i do” Anti-Gun Activist Lawmaker picked up his gun and took action in what apparently was a self-defense shooting. Why hypocritical you may ask?

It is because his long legislative record shows that the actions that he took to protect his family, his own response to a dangerous life threatening situation, are actions that he feels ordinary citizens should not have if they were faced with an identical situation.

It has prompted some to ask if the Senator believes his life and personal safety is more valuable than yours or mine.

But, this is to be expected from those who believe they can run our lives, raise our kids, and protect our families better than we can.

House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, pictured standing, far right, speaks while colleagues Rep. Barbara Lambert, D-Milford and Rep. Jack F. Hennessy, D-Bridgeport, play solitaire Monday night as the House convened to vote on a new budget. (AP)
The guy sitting in the row in front of these two….he’s on Facebook, and the guy behind Hennessy is checking out the baseball scores.
These are the folks that couldn’t get the budget out by Oct. 1, and are about to control your health care, cap and trade, and the list goes on and on….
Should we buy them larger screen computers – or – a ticket home, permanently?

This is one of their 3-DAY WORK WEEKS that we all pay for (salary is about $179,000 per year).