You Are One Million Dollars in Debt

If you are an American taxpayer, you are more than one million dollars in debt. This may come as an unwelcome shock, as the median income for an American is only $28,567/year. What bank would loan a million dollars to a person who earns less than $30k/yr?

This debt is not, by and large, a result of the official national debt. The national debt currently stands at $13.9 trillion dollars, which is only $126k per taxpayer. At $30k/yr, you could contribute 20% of your earnings to paying off the national debt every year and be done in only 21 years — not including interest charges.

The real debt of the American government is not included in the official national debt. The real debt is in the form of what are called “unfunded liabilities.” These are things that the U.S. government has agreed to pay for, but that it does not have the money to pay for. To meet these “unfunded liabilities”, Uncle Sam has to reach his hands into your pockets. The unfunded liabilities for Social Security are $14.7 trillion dollars — a number larger than the national debt. The Prescription Drug Program is even larger though, at $19.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Both of these are dwarfed however, by the truly immense $477.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities of the Medicare program. In total, the U.S. government has committed you to funding $111.9 trillion dollars in promised benefits. The liability for each individual taxpayer amounts to $1,012,463. This doesn’t include the $126k you owe due to the national debt.

These liabilities are guaranteed by the total assets of the American people. Unfortunately, the total household assets of all Americans are worth only $54.7 trillion dollars. If every American could find a buyer who would pay fair market prices for every single asset they owned, we would not be able to pay for even half of our unfunded liabilities.

If this doesn’t strike you as a smart way to run a nation, please forward this post to every eligible voter you know.  We can try to blame the fools in Washington for the mess we’re in, but we should remember who sent those fools to Washington in the first place.

Muslim Mouse

MEMRI has an eerie video clip of a Mickey Mouse like character on Al-Aqsa TV. The character, named Farfour, looks like Mickey Mouse, but he sounds very differently from the friendly mouse with which you are familiar.

This is what the character has to say to the children:

Host Saraa, a young girl: Sanabel, what will you do for the sake of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? How will you sacrifice your soul for the sake of Al-Aqsa? What will you do?

Sanabel, young girl on phone: I will shoot.

Farfour, a Mickey Mouse character in a tuxedo: Sanabel, what should we do if we want to liberate…

Sanable: We want to fight.

Farfour: We got that. What else?

Saraa: We want to…

Sanabel: We will annihilate the Jews.

Saraa: We are defending Al-Aqsa with our souls and our blood, aren’t we, Sanabel?

Sanabel: I will commit martyrdom.

[...]

Farfour: We’ve said more than once that becoming masters of the world requires the following: First, to be happy with our Arabic language, which once upon a time ruled this world.

Saraa: Of course.

Farfour: Second… or maybe that’s it?

Adult host: Farfour, I heard you talking in English.

Farfour: Yes. How are you, Saraa? I hope to be good time.

Saraa: What’s with you, Farfour? Why are talking this way? Didn’t we agree to talk in literary Arabic?

Farfour: But Saraa, this is the language of the advanced world, the language of the world that understands and invents things, isn’t it?

Saraa: No, Farfour, you are wrong, because you don’t know that the Muslims are the basis of civilization. If not for the Muslims, the world wouldn’t have got to where it is today.

[...]

Farfour: My dear youngsters, we’re back. We always miss seeing you on your weekly program “The Pioneers of Tomorrow,” in which we are placing together the cornerstone for the ruling of the world by an Islamic leadership.

Watch the video yourself and continue to be shocked:

Journalists Are People Too

A few years back, MSNBC published an excellent bit of investigative journalism, The list: Journalists who wrote political checks, on the topic of professional journalists who give money to politicians. In the article, Bill Dedman identified 143 journalists who had given money to political causes. He found 125 journalists who had given to Democrats and liberal causes, 16 journalists who had given to Republican or conservative causes, and two journalists who had contributed money to both sides.

Why is this a big deal? Most news organizations have ethics rules which bar their reporters from participating in partisan politics. Many of these people could be fired for their actions.

Many “professional” journalists consider themselves “above” politics. They somehow believe that they are immune from bias and that everything they report is “objective.”

What a pile of horse manure! None of us are objective. The only path to objectivity starts with accepting and understanding our personal biases. These people are deluding themselves, and then they are attempting to delude their audiences.

From a purely political perspective, we can plainly see that almost eight times as many journalists contributed to left-wing causes than right-wing causes.  Media bias is real and it is strongly bent to the left.

I would be OK with this bias if these holier-than-thou liberals would just come out into the open and admit their biases.  Instead, they lie to us and claim an objectivity which does not — and can not — exist.

The Internet is slowly releasing the stranglehold mass-media has held on news reporting for the last several hundred years.  This change is being accelerated by the realization that the “professional” journalists employed in mass media have been lying to us for decades.  If mass media wants to continue to exist in the future, it is going to have to come clean with it’s audience.  The “professional” journalists are going to have to admit their personal biases and engage their audiences in an honest dialog about the issues.  If they can’t honestly and intelligently support their personal beliefs, they  should be replaced by a new generation of journalists who can.

Government Greed is Forcing America’s Best and Brightest to Seek New Homes

Because of the amount of money the government insists on taking from its citizens—both domestically and internationally—some have decided that it is better to drop American citizenship and look elsewhere for a new home.

A little over 500 people renounced their citizenship to America in the 4^th quarter of 2009. While this is a tiny fraction of people in comparison to the total population, it is still a staggering number and must beg the question:

Why Are They Leaving?

The answer is so simple. In the past, money that was held in foreign accounts was not really taxed all that much. But, because of the need for more revenue, $10,000 and over in foreign accounts must be filed or the individual can suffer a 50% fine on the money in the account.

On top of that, people are getting frustrated with the fact that taxes are going up. The United States is one of the only countries that taxes their citizens—whether they are home or not. In other countries, if they work in a different country, they aren’t taxes for that revenue. What this is resulting in is a double tax for people. Why stay in a country if they are going to double tax you?

Tim Burns made a note in the Dow Jones article that really touches home. “Fifteen or 20 years ago there was a big rush to make sure your kids became U.S. citizens, for access to U.S. schools for example. Now we’re seeing just the opposite.” People don’t want to become a U.S. Citizen because it is becoming more and more expensive.

Because of blatant examples of government greed, people are looking to get rid of their U.S. citizenship and instead become a citizen elsewhere. That’s the last thing America needs right now. Since these are some of the brightest people America has—those making more money—we don’t want to lose them.

The United States government needs to stop being a government of greed. If they don’t, more people are going to become expats.

As John Locke wrote in Two Treatises of Government, “if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see, whither they are going; ‘tis not to be wonder’d, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at first erected”.

In other words… should the government continue being greedy and taking our property away, the people will revolt. That much is for certain.

Home Prices Are Not Done Falling

Most Americans are wondering if home prices have bottomed out or if they will continue to fall.  The obvious answer is that they will continue to fall, and that answer comes from two important (and simple) pieces of data.

The first is a comparison of median home price to median income.  Everyone’s numbers differ slightly, but most analysts agree that the median home currently costs 3.4 years income.  In the relatively prosperous years between 1980 and 2000, that number fluctuated between 2.9 and 3.1 years.  Housing prices will have to fall another 10% just to hit the top of that range.  Unfortunately, these are not relatively prosperous years and we can only expect them to get worse.  As a result, we should expect home prices to drop below 2.9 years income.

The second important number is the median home price, adjusted for inflation.  Take a look at this chart from Housing Bubble Graphs:

Looking at this chart, it seems clear that home prices have to fall more than 10% to meet historical norms.  Of course, if the government loses control of inflation nominal home prices will skyrocket — even as real home values continue to fall.

Venezuelan Police Kill 2,685 Citizens

Provea, the Venezuelan Program of Education Action in Human Rights, recently released statistics on violence in Venezuela during the year 2009.

The Venezuelan police killed 2,685 Venezuela’s last year. That is almost as many people as were murdered in the attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City. That is about seven times as many people who are killed by police in the United States — and the U.S. has a population ten times as large as Venezuela. This means that your odds of being killed by the police in Venezuela are approximately seventy times greater than in the United States.

The human rights group also reported 13,985 murders in 2009 which were not committed by the Venezuelan police. In addition, 4,200 deaths from 2009 are still listed as uncategorized by the Venezuelan government. Violent crime rates have been rising steadily since Hugo Chavez took power; Venezuela is now more than twice as dangerous as Iraq as a place to live.

Foreign Policy now lists Caracas as the world most dangerous city. In response, the Chavez regime has stopped releasing comprehensive crime figures. Chavez has also accused non-governmental organizations and the media of exaggerating the scope of the problem.

Most Venezuelans appear to disagree. In a poll of 6.42 million Venezuelans, 61% called violent crime a “very serious” problem, while 33% ranked it as only “serious.”