Ever since a certain marsupial who pops in here occasionally told me about JASC2, I’ve kept my eye out for stuff to turn into odd .gif animations. This is one of them. The original 25 images came from a google search for “butthead,” which is my honest opinion of the OccuPoopage.
So let’s all celebrate the return of the public parks to the public and chant:
THIS||IS||THE OVERNIGHT OPEN THREAD!
Property taxation forms a huge part of the reason why we cannot recover from the collapse of the housing bubble. We are in this predicament because we have allowed local and State governments to cave in to the confiscatory demands of public sector unions.
Government employees should never have been permitted to unionize in the first place.
A hard look at the data explains the polarization of American politics: state and local governments are increasing property taxes even while the housing market crashes, and this is killing the middle class. In many parts of the country prospective homebuyers will pay almost as much in property taxes as in mortgage interest! No wonder the residential real estate market can’t come up for air, and why the American middle class feels that it is fighting for its existence. The only solution will be the kind pioneered by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, one of the real heroes of our time: renegotiate the whole relationship between the government and the government unions. But that would mean the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. That’s why the upcoming presidential election will be the nastiest in living memory.
Crunching the numbers, I was gobsmacked by the way in which the tax burden has trickled down to the state and local level and crushed the middle class. [emphasis added] The charts and graphs are available in my “Spengler” essay at Asia Times Online this morning…
America is engaged in class war, but not of the sort one reads about in the mainstream press. The truly indigent — young African-American men, for example, most of whom are now unemployed — have little to do in this war. Large corporations for the most part are bystanders as well; they will make their peace with the victor. This is a war of survival between the productive middle class on one hand, and the dependents of the state on the other. [emphasis added]
[…]
State and local governments, though, have exhausted their tax base, and the continuous rise in property taxes through the crash in property prices has kept the real estate market more depressed than economic conditions otherwise might indicate. A further increase in tax rates would yield less revenue. In effect, the government would have to proceed from taxing private capital to expropriating it, de facto or de jure — for example, nationalizing banks and directing them to make loans to politically-favored projects, after the fashion of Latin American banana republics.The alternative is to renegotiate pension and health benefits already promised to public sector unions…
Or, preferably, ban public sector unions entirely, at all levels of government.
…The crisis has called into being a political movement of the exasperated middle class, namely the Tea Party. It has erased the image of the government unions as champions of progressive causes, and exposed them as an “aristocracy of labor” (in Marx’s phrase) parasitizing the public revenue.
The outcome inherently favors the Republicans. Debt — the catchall name for the crushing tax burden — has become a hot button issue even for many Democrats. But this election will be fought more desperately, and nastily, than any other that comes to mind during the past century. This is an existential struggle, a political war of survival for the American middle class. If the government unions go down in the fight, the Democratic Party of Barack Obama will cease to exist in its present form – and that would be a beneficial outcome for the United States.
That explains why the debt issue raises emotions. Republican consultants report that in focus groups, TV commercials about out-of-control debt prompt strongly positive responses even from Democrats. Even Democrats have to live somewhere and a lot of them own homes. And there are a lot more Democratic taxpayers and homeowners than there are government workers. This is a wedge issue for Republicans that won’t quit.
Here’s one result that I found remarkable: It shows the aggregate property taxes paid to state and local governments, against aggregate mortgage payments (the outstanding volume of mortgage debt multiplied by the current mortgage rate). The result is somewhat exaggerated, because about a third of property tax collections are commercial rather than residential, but it’s still compelling: the property tax burden on homeowners is now roughly equivalent to the interest burden on their mortgages!
Property taxes vs home mortgage interest (mortgage debt outstanding multiplied by current mortgage rate), in $US billions
Source: Census Bureau, Federal Reserve
Property taxes add to the expense of owning a home. Prospective home buyers can’t and won’t buy houses in areas where the property tax pushes the homes out of their range of affordability. So if you need to move to find work, but you’re stuck in a good house in a good neighborhood that you cannot sell, you can put a major part of the blame on your local public sector unions.
Property taxes support the public school system, along with other government agencies with unionized employees on their payrolls. Via the automatic union dues deduction from the salaries of teachers and other unionized public employees, the money feeds directly into public employee union coffers and the Democrat party.
This is why Tea Party groups are putting as much focus on local property taxes and other state and local taxes as they do on federal taxation, and well they should! So join your local Tea Party group and do everything you can to help them to starve this governmental beast that threatens to leave us all destitute.
Some of the #Occupy movement signs and slogans seem to resonate with many onlookers. Maybe it’s because they’ve stolen a few talking points (but very little else) from the Tea Party. Maybe it’s because the sympathetic mainstream media carefully edits out what they don’t want you to see.
Let’s take a closer look.
Are you frustrated and angry about unemployment, inflation, the decreasing economic opportunities, the burden of debt, and the declining standard of living in North America, much of Europe, and elsewhere? Are you worried about the sovereign debt problems that bedevil the international financial system?
So am I.
Do you empathize with those struggling to make ends meet in low-paid, part-time jobs? Do you consider bailouts to be unconstitutional, politically and economically unwise, and morally wrong? Do you believe that the Federal Reserve system puts too much power into the hands of too few people who are not accountable to the voters and taxpayers?
So do I.
The Occupy movement blames our predicament on “billionaires”, “rich corporations”, and “Wall Street bankers”. They offer no basis for their accusations, but merely pander to the temptations of envy, sloth, and greed to which all of us are prone.
I agree with Herman Cain in placing most of the blame on Barack Obama and his failed policies. I also blame other public officials in the US and elsewhere whose policies brought about our financial downfall.
Let’s see…the Occubaggers have got the commies, the socialists, the anarchists, the American Nazi Party, the George Soros front groups including the Open Society Institute, the Tides Foundation, and MoveOn.org, along with Code Pink and Michael Moore, the Muslim Brotherhood and its front group CAIR (more about CAIR and its connections here and here), the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, the leftist establishment media including the New York Times and the Washington Post, Frances Fox Piven, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khamenei, Hugo Chavez, David Duke, and, of course, that architect of failure and scapegoater-in-chief, Barack Hussein Obama himself.
Along for the ride are the aging drugged-out hippies reliving Woodstock, the young drugged-out prep school and college kids looking for a place to fornicate al fresco, the paid shills, the student loan debtors with useless degrees, the trust-fund babies, the anti-Semites, the LGBT nudists, the race-card players, the outdoor urinators and defecators, the pro-abort feminazis, the tree-huggers, the vegans, and the mentally ill. (Many of these categories overlap.) Rounding out the rogue’s gallery are various drug dealers, crackheads, junkies, thieves, rapists, street bums and other lumpenproletariat, and felons hiding out from the law.
None of them speak for me.
Nor do they speak for Lech Walesa.
Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, champion in the fight against communism, and winner of the Liberty Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989, has decided to not make a trip to New York in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Last week the AP reported that Walesa was backing the Occupy “movement” and considered traveling to New York in support of the growing nationwide mob activity that currently plagues the United States. However, when former Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski, (For the Good of Illinois) found out about this, he quickly reached out to his contacts in Poland to alert the former president to the truth behind this radical movement.
“We made the point that the political themes of Occupy Wall Street may have started out with some of the principles that we share, but OWS themes were rapidly being morphed into anti-freedom and anti-liberty messages. At the core is the want for a big, powerful central government to dominate the lives of individual citizens.” -Andrzejewski
In his write-up last night at BigGovernment.com, Andrzejewski stated that with the help of BigGoverment and other sources, he was able to convey an accurate picture of the Occupy movement, particularly that it is “…organized by anarchists, Code Pink, the American Communist movement, jihadists, anti-Israel, socialist, and anti- free enterprise interests.” After reviewing this information about the true nature of the demonstrations, Walesa and his team withdrew their support and will not be attending any Occupy protests.
We were overjoyed to learn that recent Rebel Pundit investigative reports and footage were able to play an an important role in Walesa’s decision. According to Andrzejewski:
“They appreciated the inside info- they weren’t getting that in Poland from the European media.”
So…does the #Occupy movement speak for you? Unless you truly are a leftist, with all that this implies, the answer is no.
The Republican Party has set up a Hotline for election day, 1-888-775-8117, which will be staffed by attorneys, to handle polling issues and possible voter fraud or intimidation. If folks even guess that it might be taking place, they should call for free advice.
Thanks to Burn The Koran For Freedom.
The Diary of Daedalus
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