-- Posted Wednesday, 3 September 2008 | Digg This Article
| Source: GoldSeek.com
The biggest laugh I got all week was from a Wall Street Journal article that said, "On election day, Massachusetts will vote on whether to eliminate its state income tax of 5.3%", which they will do by slicing it in half next year and eliminating it completely the year after! Hahaha!
Check this out: The income tax currently provides $12.5 billion of the state's budget of $28 billion - almost half! And so it makes me laugh to hear Carla Howell, of the Committee for Small Government that is "battling to repeal the tax", when she says that eliminating the tax "will mean less money in the hands of politicians and will give back an average of $3,700 to each of 3.4 million workers and taxpayers in Massachusetts." Hahaha!
I laugh with a distinct undertone of disrespect because I am rude and insensitive, and because poor Carla has obviously not heard that Chaos Theory has proved that everything is connected to everything else, and usually by six degrees of separation or less (as it turns out), which is beside the fact that it is all a zero-sum game and it must all balance out, and so it is impossible that everybody will still make their same salaries, working at their same jobs, and life will go blissfully along, just like now, even though a delicious $12.5 billion in spending cash is jingling in their taxpayer pockets and even though that same $12.5 billion has been ripped from the incomes of a huge parasite class that got $12.5 billion from the government last year, but which won't be getting any income two years from now or ever again! Hahahaha! Like that's going to happen!
Obviously, I agree with the "best guess" of Douglas Schoen - who is prominently cited as a "political consultant" while I am completely overlooked and ignored - who says that the voters will defeat the measure, as I figure the same thing, as I am sure that everyone will look at their wallets and say, "Hey! My income from state spending is going to be cut! So I'm voting against lowering income taxes, or any taxes! And besides, we're in Massachusetts, where collectivist idiocy is the norm, and we constantly re-elect Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry as our Senators to show the whole world what kind of touchy-feely, feel-your-pain, socialist morons we are, and how we bankrupted ourselves and the country, for which The Mogambo will never forgive us because adults don't deserve to be forgiven for acting So, So, So Stupid (SSSS)!"
In fact, Gene Epstein, in his Economic Beat column in Barron's, has a nice little graph humorously titled "Bipartisan effort" that shows that "Total Federal, State and Local Spending/GDP" is at about 34%. Yow! A third of identified GDP is comprised of government spending! He doesn't mention that with the multiplier of even 3, government spending IS the U.S. economy! Hahaha! We're so freaking doomed!
And as chilling as this is, this is only the part that is budgeted! The total must be higher than that because, as Milton Friedman so famously said and Mr. Epstein has so graciously included in his column as reminder of it, "The real cost of government is measured by what government spends, not by receipts labeled taxes."
This quote came at just about the same time that some medications must have started kicking in, and so I uncharacteristically decide to do some work around here, surprising the hell out me.
Suddenly, I find myself getting up and finding out that the National Debt is now a terrifying $9.608 trillion, and which is up a whopping $637 billion from this time last year, while the government only admits that they borrowed half that! Yikes! Mr. Friedman was right!
Since Mr. Friedman is dead, you can't ask him, but I'll bet that if you could speak to him From Beyond The Pale, he would say in his ghostly voice that The Mogambo was riiiiiight, and that you should be buying gold, silver and oil, because then you are going to make So Freaking Much Money (SFMM) when they zoom in price - thanks to the ruination of the buying power of the dollar - that you won't care about the federal budget deficit, or the real deficit, or the looming bankruptcy of the Whole Freaking Country (WFC), or have any cares whatsoever! Whee!
So, to recap, the Federal Government alone is already deficit-spending almost $700 billion a year, about twice the deficit that Congress originally budgeted and slipped in piecemeal in a series of slick "supplemental appropriations" throughout the year, long after the budget was passed, demonstrating corruption on a massive scale, and yet you are NOT buying gold, silver and oil? Hahaha! I am enchanted by your optimism!
As for me, I would rather be cynical and rich than optimistic and poor, but to each his own! Hahaha!
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Editor's Note: Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.
The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and other fine publications. Click here to visit the Mogambo archive page.
-- Posted Wednesday, 3 September 2008 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com
