Welfare States Cry the Loudest!
Some Notorious “Welfare” States now asking U.S. Taxpayers to foot the huge state deficits generated by their many long standing extravagant welfare Programs!
October 11, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The state of California has long been recognized as one of the leaders in state welfare programs, which has created a large part of its well known financial problems. The northeastern U.S. states have also not been far behind California in their well meaning, but fiscally unbalanced desire to make the middle working class and the non-working class equality to fit the so-called American dream of equality. Unfortunately, if all the wealth in the United States was equally distributed to each adult, one would find that twenty years later the nation would have retuned once again to inequity – the same ones would have struggled back into the working middle class, and the same ones would have descended into the non-working class. Those who have risen out of the non-working class into the middle class have done so through diversity and struggle. They are the type of men and women who rise above their poverty by honest endeavor to have a better life. I am very much afraid that the plan we will see Obama institute, if is he is elected President, will distribute the wealth from the working taxpayers to the nonworking non-taxpaying segment of the American society. Obama has deliberately targeted the young (non-taxpayers) and welfare recipients (non-taxpayers) in order to win the election. The huge percentage of votes which will be received by Obama from non-taxpayers in November is going to put him in office unless all the taxpayers show up at the polls and vote. A Robin Hood plan of robbing the rich and giving to the poor has great emotional appeal, but it will only bring anarchy, chaos, and eventually it will finish this country’s greatness.
I could care less about sex, race, color, or creed of the candidates in this election, and while I enjoyed the reading of the exploits of the mythical Robin Hood in my youth, it is not a good program to rob the rich to give to the poor. I simply am convinced Obama’s statement he will only take from the richest is ridiculous. It will come from both the middle class and the so called “richest.”
This Saturday morning, as I type this article, my vanity is hoping I am right about the prediction I made, when all this started, that the Dow Industrial Average would not fall below 7000 and, that after wild swings up and down, it would likely eventually rise back to 11000 by year’s end, but I must admit that is pure speculation on my part. It is possible this thing could go either way. But of this I am certain, if Obama is our next President, during his term in office the implementation of his plans will help the next slide of the Dow Industrial Average to begin earlier than if McCain is elected. However, we are living on borrowed time. I am convinced the final war of this age will begin at some point in time between 2010 and 2015, and close the Age of the Gentiles with its final battle of Armageddon some three and one-half years later.
The two excerpts which follow give a good overall view of the present world financial crisis.
Begin Excerpt from Associated Press via Jerusalem Post
US states cut spending, delay projects
October 9, 2008
Associated Press , THE JERUSALEM POST
With the economy in a slide and the credit markets seized up, US states are slashing budgets, eliminating jobs, putting major construction projects on hold and nervously waiting to see whether their shriveled pension funds recover.
They are also weighing lawsuits against Wall Street firms. And at least one state – California – may ask Washington to come to the rescue.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger warned he may have to beg the federal government for a short-term loan to cover operating costs for schools, nursing homes and police if the nation’s most populous state is unable to borrow a short-term $7 billion on the credit market.
Dozens of states are expecting big drop-offs in revenue and dispiriting pension-fund losses, and are making another round of emergency spending cuts on top of deep cutbacks earlier in the year, when the economy began softening and the mortgage crisis started to unfold.
New York, the capital of the US financial industry, is grappling with the highest unemployment rate since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and a $1.2 billion deficit that could balloon to $2 billion by the end of the fiscal year March 31.
“We’re going to have to take drastic action,” Gov. David Paterson said.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick may ask state lawmakers for the power to make midyear cuts to close a $223 million budget gap. Massachusetts also saw its pension fund shrink by nearly $4 billion in September alone to about $46 billion.
States such as Massachusetts, Indiana, Washington, Pennsylvania and Colorado are either putting a freeze on hiring or hoping to reduce their payroll through attrition.
With tax revenue expected to fall at least $2.5 billion short of previous estimates, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine ordered 570 layoffs, cut college funding by at least 5 percent and postponed state employee raises from next month until next summer.
Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire suspended the early stages of a program that would give employees paid family leave.
Massachusetts successfully sold $750 million in bonds to pay state bills this week, but only after twice delaying the sale because of the paralyzed credit market.
In some states, the fiscal woes have bubbled over into anger and threats of lawsuits.
West Virginia’s governor has asked his staff to res
earch possible legal action after the state suffered deep losses in pension funds with holdings in Wall Street players like AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual.
“I want somebody to pay,” Gov. Joe Manchin said. “It’s outrageous. We should be looking at the people who walked away with the money.”
New Jersey investment chief William Clark said the state pension board is considering legal action against Lehman Brothers after the state bought about $180 million of Lehman stock in June and sold it for a loss of about $100 million.
The attorneys general and Connecticut and other states are investigating investment banks for alleged misleading and deceptive statements regarding sales of mortgage-backed securities. Connecticut also sued three of the nation’s leading credit rating firms, accusing them of giving artificially low ratings to cities and towns.
Begin Excerpt from DEBKAfile Special Analysis
Rescue the Old World Financial Order or Build a New One
DEBKAfile Special Analysis
October 11, 2008, 2:08 PM (GMT+02:00)
This weekend sees make-or-break efforts by Western finance ministers and international financial institutions to produce a plan that will drag their economies back into equilibrium before the world’ s market
s open Monday, Oct. 13. They are working to the dread drumbeats of turmoil, panicky investors and looming recession, which some economists predict will be more disastrous than the 1930s slump which led to World War II.
Two major rescue plans for the banking and financial systems by the US and UK have fallen short of luring fleeing investors back to the markets.
In seven black days, crashing global indexes led by Wall Street – which tumbled 18 percent and London by 21 percent – followed by Asia, wiped $4.5 trillion off share values world wide. In the UK, it was calculated that one person goes bankrupt every five minutes. Iceland’s entire economy is bankrupt.
The plan on the G7’s table is essentially to partially nationalize almost half of the Western banking system by buying up stakes in troubled banks or shoring up the banking system as a whole.
In their statement Saturday, the G7 said that they were working on a rescue package tailored for each country within a common framework that would include recapitalizing banks, ensuring strong deposit insurance to protect savers and restarting frozen credit and mortgage markets.
Many leading Western economists strongly doubt that these measures will do the trick.
DEBKAfile’s sources note that what the Americans and British have been aiming for until now is to restore investor confidence in the existing financial system by increasing credit, the lifeblood of economies based on the free market.
But matters have gone too far for what is essentially a patching up job. The upheavals of the last two weeks have demonstrated that the entire system is discredited. Trust has been suspended not only in the financial system but in the ability of political leaders to come up with solutions to protect the individual investor and taxpayer.
The partial nationalization of banks in the US and Europe breaks with the rules
of the free market, of which the United States is the global epitome – a major factor in its superpower status. While Asia has prospered by embracing free-market practices, resentment is deepening over its shortcomings for which the US is blamed.
The Columbia University Nobel-prize winning economist, Prof.
Joseph Stiglitz told the Washington Post : “People around the world once admired us for our economy and we told them if you want to be like us, here’s what you have to do – hand over power to the market. The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis.”
And of course it raises questions about our credibility. Everyone feels they are suffering because of us.”
The only Western leader to address this problem head-on was Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. At a government session in Rome, Oct. 10, he revealed: “The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite new rules is being discussed.” Berlusconi added: “They can’t just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.”
This remark was quickly retracted after a phone call from the White House in Washington, according to our sources, because it opens up the even more problematic question of who is competent to lead the rewriting of the rules. However, the IMF, high priest of the gospel that the market knows best, has already turned around and is calling for more international regulation and oversight on global finance, a further retreat from its basic tenets.
The looming leadership vacuum is fueling financial fears. The US president George W. Bush’s presidency ends in January, Canada faces an election next week, Japan is on its third prime minister in a year; Britain’s Gordon Brown is fighting sliding opinion polls.
Who will therefore lead the transition to a different, or even amended, world financial order? And how credible would a G7 or EU consensus be, given that so many major economic powers including China, Russia, India and Brazil, were excluded from their counsels?
Israel is suffering its own leadership crisis.
Friday night, Ronnie Bar-On, finance minister in the caretaker government headed by Ehud Olmert, went on record again as declaring that Israel’s banks and financial institutions are solid. No Israeli bank is threatened with collapse, he insisted.
The corporate leaders (Lev Leviev, Eliezer Fishman and Nohi Dankner), whose bonds have plummeted on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, are equally sound and will recover, the finance minister stressed.
As for the savers, who have lost 15-20 percent of their assets, they should not complain, said the minister, because in past years their value doubled. All he was willing to admit was that a new period was at hand.
By continuing to pour oil, the minister was gambling. The Tel Aviv Stock exchange opens for business Sunday, Oct. 12, after a six-day suspension due to Yom Kippur running into Saturday. It is unlikely that this market will sail unscathed through the global turbulence.
Bar-On may have reason to regret that he did not announce an emergency plan in good time to protect savers and holders of pension funds, if not the banks.
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