Category: Government

Uncle thinks it’s going to get raised. I agree. I have one more prediction for the next several years as well: we’re going to raise taxes. The fundamental problem is that the baby boomer generation didn’t have enough kids and didn’t save enough of their income for retirement, yet they expect the same cushy retirement their parents had (who did often save, and had plenty of kids). Given that the politics of this country has typically tracked the boomer generation, there’s no way we’re getting over this hump without more taxes to cover social security and medicare obligations. This problem is only going to get worse as more boomers retire and end up on the dole.

The only way this is not going to happen is if we have substantial entitlement reform now, which isn’t likely, and whichever party tries that will likely get eviscerated at the polls. Unless Gen Xers and Gen Yers can basically become a unified political movement, and essentially gang up on the boomers and say no to taxes and yes to entitlement reform, we will have more taxes to finance baby boomer retirements.

I don’t believe financial sense will come to the government until both sides come to an understanding that the current path is unsustainable, and the Democrats agree they’ve run out of other people’s money, and stop with the stimulus, bailouts, high speed rail, green jobs, and all the other bullshit they like to waste money on. Republicans need to focus on balanced budgets, and sometimes that’s going to mean you need to get voters to face the true costs of the programs they are demanding from government.

We not only need to reduce the deficit, I think we need to pay down debt. The current world financial system is precarious. Europe is on the verge of plunging off a cliff. I think China is a giant bubble waiting to burst. The Islamic world is brewing, and God knows what is going to come out of there, and God help us if it has nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver, on top of that. Historically, all this would mean there’s a large, bloody war coming. What money will we use to finance that if we’ve maxed out the credit card?

I’ve joked with my father that we’ll have to draft baby boomers to fight the next war, so we fix the social security and medicare liability problem at the same time. That generation has already fought a war, but this one we’ll let them win. They can drive the tanks, man the ships, and ferry supplies. We’ll let the kids who are good with video games control the UAVs, the high-powered space lasers, and giant killer robots.

John Richardson has a link to the smoking gun, and Katie Pavlich is reporting on this topic as well. On this, recall that our opponents called this “hyping ridiculous conspiracy theories to attack the Obama administration,” and suggesting it was something we created from whole cloth.

The emperor would appear to have no clothes.

Remember the story from a few days ago about a woman drowning in a pool in Fall River Massachusetts? But the body wasn’t found for two days. And the pool was open. It would seem this mystery has an explanation:

An initial investigation showed the water in the pool was murky from the time the pool opened for the season last Saturday. Visibility tests conducted Wednesday revealed a diver couldn’t be seen at a depth of 3 1/2 to 4 feet below the surface of the water.

Unfortunately I was eating when I read that.

“He did tell two lifeguards – one said she was on break, and had to leave and the other told him they were going to do a pool check,” the woman told the newspaper. “But he told me they never did.”

So it would seem the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can’t even run a public swimming pool, yet folks want us to believe they are competent enough to control all our health care?

From Tam, who thinks Rep. Cummings is proposing the opposite of a solution:

Given the revelations on Operation Fast & Furious, this is like finding a guy climbing through a broken window in your living room wearing a ski mask and an ADT uniform, and when you shine the flashlight in his face, having him pull his mask off and try to sell you a burglar alarm system because of the rash of break-ins in the neighborhood. Seriously, this is the Justice Department equivalent of the proverbial fireman that moonlights as an arsonist so he can heroically put out fires.

The only purpose of this operation is one of two things, to create a problem that will then require more funding and more bureaucrats to solve, or was a deliberate attempt to run the numbers up to justify further restrictions. This probably isn’t really an and/or situation though, and if I had to put money on it, the primary goal was the former, and if it made the case for the latter, that would have just been icing on the cake.

Someone call CSGV, because the North Carolina legislature and Governor have shown themselves to be dangerous insurrectionists militia whack jobs.

It looks like the retaliations against ATF “Fast and Furious” whistleblowers are continuing. NRA News has an interview with one of the whistleblowers who was recently fired, illegally, in retaliation:

EPIC has discovered through FOIA requests:

On June 24, 2011, EPIC released documents obtained from DHS as a result of EPIC’s lawsuit.

The disclosed documents include agency emails, radiation studies, memoranda of agreement concerning radiation testing programs, and results of some radiation tests.

The documents raise new questions concerning the radiation risks posed by the TSA full body scanner program. The records demonstrate:

• TSA employees have identified cancer clusters allegedly linked to radiation exposure while operating body scanners and other screening technology. However, the agency failed to issue employees dosimeters – safety devices that would warn of radiation exposure.
• The DHS has publicly mischaracterized the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, stating that NIST “affirmed the safety” of full body scanners. NIST stated that the Institute did not, in fact, test full body scanners for safety, and that the Institute does not do product testing.
• A Johns Hopkins University study revealed that radiation zones around body scanners could exceed the “General Public Dose Limit.”
• A NIST study warns airport screeners to avoid standing next to full body scanners.

I’m usually rather skeptical of public health fear mongering, but this is a case where no one asked people whether they wanted to take screening this far. TSA just did it, and screw you if you don’t agree. Now we know there’s really been no testing on back scatter devices, and that NIST warned workers no to stand next to them.

Now granted, they would be getting some dose throughout the day, whereas you’ll just get it once, but how much leaks? And what’s the dose for the person in it? How do we know the dose being delivered is within specifications?

I don’t think we do. I don’t think TSA does.