Rain on Occupy Wall Street

It's raining on Occupy Chapel Hill. But the occupiers have a plan. You might be able to enlarge this photo and read it. 

They also have a plan for the what to do about the  bathroom. The occupiers are welcome over at The Chapel of the Cross and at University United Methodist Church, which are keeping their doors open from 8:00AM to 9:30PM. These churches and their congregations apparently are very happy to support the group which thinks it's a good idea to offer a table full of extreme literature, including quite a large stack of  free copies of Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto.




Did I mention the group feels it imperative to have a Legal Help Phone Line? They keep a lawyer's phone number posted on the daily agenda.

The post office doesn't seem to mind having the walls of their edifice defaced with all kinds of signs affixed with all manner of sticky substances. If you enlarge this pic, you might see that one of the signs decries that CEO salaries have gone up a great deal in the same time period that middle class salaries have gone up to a lesser degree. This protest is targeting "the one percent". Do the protesters think there are over three million CEOs in the country? Or do they understand that the top one percent subsumes a much broader group than that? Maybe not. 

According to..research...A category called “executives, managers and supervisors (non-finance)" make up the greatest concentration (of the one percenters)_ at 6.35 percent. Financial professionals are next at 2.77 percent, while doctors make up 1.85 percent and lawyers 1.22 percent.The rest of the table shows a wide variety of skills, from real estate professionals to celebrities, from government workers to farmers and pilots, each comprising about 0.5 percent of the 1 Percenters. 

You can read more about the composition of the one percent at http://www.cnbc.com/id/44960983. The much maligned rich one percenters even include pilots. And farmers! Apparently, the occupiers ought to be occupying Hollywood, and hip hop studios,  and sports arenas, and all kinds of places--doctors' and lawyers' offices too--but  no, they have chosen to focus their wrath just on the financial sector. But not the government. Think of the irony there. The government played a massive role in bringing about the housing crisis. 

...the politicians clearly had as their political goal homeownership as “a good thing” and persisted—and for that matter persist to this moment in pushing it. The Federal Housing Administration last I checked was promoting supporting mortgages that have less than 4 percent down payment. We all make mistakes, but politicians have persisted in their mistakes, and in the pointing of fingers in other directions.----Thomas Sowell 

People in Chapel Hill are pretty well educated and perhaps have a sophisticated and accurate grasp of the pernicious interplay between the government and Wall Street and banks and major corporations. Area citizens surely wonder why the occupiers are willing to storm the banks and vilify the people who work there, but have no interest in investigating the government connections behind all this crony capitalism which arose to solve a problem which some say did not even exist. 


Maybe that is why there were very few tents and even fewer people on hand yesterday when I went over to check on the growth of the Occupy thing in Chapel Hill. It had not grown since the first day. In fact it was quite a bit smaller.

Health Care to Be Capped at One Trillion

I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

---Barack Obama
September 12, 2008

YAY! Congress is now vowing to come up with a health care reform bill which will only cost us a trillion dollars. That is good, because I really did not want to pay any more than a trillion. Let's not forget, however that Obama got elected by promising the people that only the rich will pay for all the change he hopes to stick us with. Everyone else will see no increase in any tax whatsoever. Especially not the middle class. Obama is all about protecting the middle class and doing for the middle class and strengthening the middle class and never making them pay for any of the lollipops. He said it and he meant it and he said it more than once. And a lot of voters believed it.

The rich will pay and we shall all party! And they won't mind because the "rich" people in this country are loaded! How much does the bill for the health care bill come to, per rich person? If "the rich" comprise two percent of our society which currently stands at about 304 million people, that amounts to 6.08 million people paying the entire bill for the new health care plan.

A trillion dollars spread over 6.08 million rich people is $163,447 per elitist, good-for-nothing rich taxpayer. Piece of cake! That is hardly a drop in the bucket for the rich, right? Well not exactly. Remember, that is more than half the pay of many of the rich. And those people have other taxes to pay (state income tax, for example). Will they have anything left over? Or will they become poor through taxation? (Wow, the irony.)

Rich is anyone making over 250K. Obama said so. And 163K is more than half of that! But wait, I may have overstated that cost. Congress for some reason is giving us a ten year cost and not an annual cost.

Why a ten year estimate? I don't know why they don't want to figure it on an annual basis instead of on a ten-year basis. They are saying they will keep costs to one trillion over a ten year period. What happens then? We all are cured, no more health care needed? Plan canceled, no more payment necessary? No...... No. I am afraid there are going to be continuing costs to this dreamy health care plan, from now until we are all dead and gone. So that is 100 billion needed every year. And that brings us down to having each nasty old rich person pay only $16,447 per year to foot the bill for the entire country. That sounds a lot more affordable. Oprah Winfrey and Sean Penn etc, won't even notice. Quite a few not-very-rich, rich people might have to pull their kids out of private school or not buy a new car or not move to a new house, but who cares? (Well, actually, the people who are making the fancy houses and cars that the rich people buy will care when some of them get laid off. And the kids attending the private schools on needs-based scholarship will care when some of those schools close or severely cut back on programs due to loss of revenue. But I digress.)

And truly, it IS a graduated tax scale. So those at the bottom of "the rich" won't pay the average. But those who are at the top of "the rich" will see their taxes increased by more than the cost of my house each and every year. If they decide to stay in the country, that is. And they all will, because Biden has said it is very patriotic to pay taxes. And what is more pleasant than to write a nice fat check in the amount of several hundred thousand dollars to the IRS when you know you are helping out a whole nation?

Oh darn, there is more to add in to the final bill, however. Now I see that I have actually UNDERstated the cost. Health care is only one small part of what we are all going to get, and what the rich are going to pay for. They are also going to pay for everything else! EVERYTHING ELSE!

If you make less than a quarter-million dollars a year, which includes 98 percent of small-business owners, you won’t see your taxes increase one single dime. Not your payroll taxes, not your income taxes, not your capital gains taxes, nothing.

Barack Obama
October 16, 2008

So who is left? The poor are not going to pay. In fact we are already paying the poor, so they really don't pay taxes at all. So there is only the filthy rich. They will get the whole soaking. Obama promised.

Just go ahead and add in Cap and Trade and the 787 billion dollar stimulus bill we already had, and stimulus bill number TWO, which we are told is coming whether we like it or not. And pretty soon you are talking about some real money you can add to the 16K per year each rich person is going to pay for health care. So it adds up, but we are talking about those disgusting greedy rich people here and everyone knows the rich have money to throw away. The rich will handle it. None of those rich people are going to retire early, or move to a more tax-advantaged Caribbean Island or anything. They and Obama know that we need them, and they have got our backs. So they will be staying here and working harder than ever. And working very long hours and even neglecting their families to keep making lots of money. Just for us. 'Cause we're special. We're the middle class and we deserve it.

So what are you worried about? You can go back about your business. Nothing to see here.

What Lincoln Removed, Let Obama not Bring Back

Obama is trying to model himself after the great Abraham Lincoln, who, by the way said and believed this:

"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

But Obama does not seem to share Lincoln's view. Obama wants to hand out a long list of goodies for the populace, a list of goodies which will be given continuously, now, and forever more. Obama does not particularly want to encourage people to amass wealth on their own and become rich as Lincoln admired. But there is an issue with all of that so-called "giving". The problem with a president who hands out lollipops, is that someone has to pay for all that expensive candy. And who might that payer be, you may ask? OOH, I know! The rich! The rich are just swimming in money, so let's take the money from them, how about that? We are an incredibly wealthy nation, and if we can't manage to share all the trappings of the rich, with all the unfortunate people, then what good are we? How can we look at ourselves in the mirror every morning? No, this will never do. We must take from the rich and give to the poor so that we will have "equity".

This is the thinking of the Obamas. They think the rich are loaded with ill-gotten gains, and that they ought to be made to share all that wealth that somehow just landed on them because they were so lucky. But here is the little secret. The rich, as it turns out, are rich, because the rich work. And they work very hard, most of them. A lot of the wealth in this country is held by very hard-working small business owners, many of whom have taken on a considerable amount of risk to get to where they are today. And here is another truth about the rich. They tend to have a few brain cells.

The rich can see that, under an Obama administration, they are speeding towards higher taxation. They know, too, that they already pay a huge percentage of the entire tax bill for the country. Do you think they want to pay more? Maybe. But maybe not. Particularly when they see the money wasted, going to bail out losing businesses, and to keep Nancy Pelosi happy and smiling, as she flies herself and her family around the world in her special DOD airplanes; and as they subsidize those who don't pay their fair share....our Secretary of the Treasury among them.

No, the rich may decide to go on a bit of a strike. They might decide to cut back on those long hours they work. They might decide to hire less people, giving themselves less to worry about. Why work hard and spin so many plates in the air? Maybe they are close to retirement age? A lot of them might just throw in the towel and retire early. Doctors, for example. The most experienced doctors in your community might soon be closing up shop and heading for no-tax states, such as Florida. All of that will result in less work done by the rich, less spending by the rich. And less tax paid by the rich.

We have already seen the destruction of many of the rich, courtesy of Madoff and the many Madoff copycats. Guess what? The rich ponzi scheme victims won't be paying so much tax any more, now that their holdings are wiped out. Ditto for people who lost half their stock market holdings since it became clear that Obama was going to be elected. And we have seen tens of thousands of jobs lost on Wall Street. Oh darn....some of those people were making big salaries and paying a shedload of tax. That is over now, for many of those people, as they head off to other careers at lower salaries. And the tax they once paid? Well that is over for US now. Gone. Those receipts will never be so high again.

It will be interesting to see what happens as we go forward. Will the rich continue to work extremely hard and take great risk so that they can have the great privilege to buy all the lollipops for the rest of us to enjoy? I hope so! Because if the rich go on strike and stop paying just a portion of the massive share of the tax which they now pay, there is only one group of people left to pay the the remaining, still massive, tax burden.....now let's see.....which group of people would that be?

Oh wow.....looks like you and I are going to have to work ourselves to the bone to pay for the unaffordable lollipops Obama has foisted upon us. We will be paying for years, for decades, for centuries (if this country which Lincoln fought so hard to keep together, lasts that long). We will soon be working to keep the government going, even though the government is supposed to be working for us. Great. So maybe Obama's delusions of grandeur involving himself and one of our greatest presidents are not so crazy after all.