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AMERICA’S DEBT BOMB: WORSE THAN EUROPE’S
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/americas-debt-bomb-worse-than-europes.php ^

Posted on 04/11/2012 5:24:58 AM PDT by chessplayer

It has been said many times in recent months that we aren’t Greece. Now it will start to be said that we aren’t Spain. Both propositions are certainly true. (For one thing, Spain elected its socialist government in 2004, thus getting a head start on us.) But if we compare America’s debt crisis to Europe’s as a whole, how do we stack up?

The Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee did the math and produced this graphic, which shows that the U.S. is now deeper in debt than the entire Eurozone, plus the United Kingdom.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn thinks I am understating the problem and being too nice to the Obama administration.

(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: clowardpiven; economiccollapse; manchuriancandidate; manufacturedcrisis; sourcetitlenoturl
We're number one! We're number one! American exceptionalism, the obama way.
1 posted on 04/11/2012 5:25:03 AM PDT by chessplayer
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To: chessplayer

and O hasn’t even bailed out student loans for the kiddies yet...


2 posted on 04/11/2012 5:37:30 AM PDT by TurboZamboni (Looting the future to bribe the present)
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To: chessplayer

Feel sorry for those college kids yesterday. They really believe that Obama can raise tax revenues. Man o man, just wait until interest on the debt starts going up when inflation picks up steam.


3 posted on 04/11/2012 6:16:31 AM PDT by griswold3 (Big Government does not tolerate rivals.)
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To: chessplayer
This can't be! CNBC and The New York Times have declared that the recent financial downturn is over! Happy days are here again! Pour your life savings into the stock market! Love Dear Leader Obama! /sarcasm

The Obamessiah! (look who's seated to the right of the stairs)

Bernanke is Our Hero! (from the cover of this month's The Atlantic)

4 posted on 04/11/2012 6:38:20 AM PDT by Dr. Thorne
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To: chessplayer
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
[Obama's strategy for destroying the economy]

frontpage.americandaughter.com
| August 31, 2008 | Jim Simpson

Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.

Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:

  1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
  2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
  3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
  4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.

In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?

Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.

Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.

To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.

Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.

How does any of this improve our lot?

Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?

You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.

Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.

I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!

There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]


The Complete Cloward-Piven Series

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship
_______________________________________________________________

Also see (from David Horowitz's DiscoverTheNetworks.org) ...

THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (CPS):

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7522
_______________________________________________________________

Cloward, Piven and the Fundamental Transformation of America

Tuesday, January 05, 2010
By Glenn Beck


Meet Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven,
authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy

"I'm going to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It's the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system."-Glenn Beck

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582097,00.html

5 posted on 04/11/2012 6:39:01 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: chessplayer
"Spain elected its socialist government in 2004, thus getting a head start on us."

And the Obamunists won't just stop with European-like socialism. Their ultimate goal is Communism, in particular, "new world order" global Communism.

6 posted on 04/11/2012 6:53:33 AM PDT by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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To: chessplayer
The US debt is $15 trillion and growing with no sign of stopping. Just so you know.
7 posted on 04/11/2012 7:21:14 AM PDT by Phlap (REDNECK@LIBARTS.EDU)
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To: ETL
The most galling aspect of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is that it would never work with moral people. It is finding great success in America because those who accept immoral government hand-outs are willing participants in their own destruction.

"Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams, second President of the Uniteed States of America

8 posted on 04/11/2012 7:24:12 AM PDT by Dr. Thorne
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To: ETL

A dictator, such as Obama, only has the power that the people give him.

Currently at least 40 % of American voters are gladly willing to give Obama the necessary power to continue his dictatorship.

Dictator Obama has designed Obama”care” to become active only AFTER he is re-elected, thus enabling THE NINE SUPREMES to delay ruling on the Constitutionality of the dictate of the individual mandate until Obama is once again the Illegal Foreign White House Occupier, (IFWHO).

The purpose of Dictator Baby-Doc Barack is simple: 1.) Regulate; 2.) Control; and 3.) Destroy. By his own count he as achieved 60 % of his goals, according to the note he says he carries in his pocket.

Obama’s obvious deep hatred of America could have only come from his childhood.

Since there are no known networks of childhood friends from Obama’s past, Obama was probably a member of a Marxist sleeper cell funded by wealthy men with a Marxist view of the World.

The lack of credible evidence that has NOT been forged requires a long-term, highly skilled and well-funded support group.

Who the key members of Obama’s probable support group and probable sleeper cell were and are is well known to the CIA and the FBI.

Will the “Citizen Journalists” such as Breitbart Editor Joel Pollack be able to out-spy these two tax-funded spy entities?

BTW, forget about the LAM, (Liberal Agenda Media), as they are saving their notes to write their tell-all Obama books after Obama has SAFELY retired back home in Kenya.

BTW, BTW, to all the doubters of the above speculation: what does your gut tell you?


9 posted on 04/11/2012 7:30:32 AM PDT by Graewoulf ((Dictator Baby-Doc Barack's obama"care" violates Sherman Anti-Trust Law, AND U.S. Constitution.))
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To: griswold3

Yep, even a 5% prime rate will be crippling.

We are so screwed.


10 posted on 04/11/2012 11:56:35 AM PDT by Freedom_Is_Not_Free (REPEAL OBAMACARE. Nothing else matters.)
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