Economy / Nanny Government / Politics / Socialism / Socialized Health Care

The Occupy Wall Street Brain Surgeons

The vibe I get from OWS is that they want to take the tax windfall from those darned “banksters” and either distribute it among “the 99 percent” or let the government apply it towards new spending programs. Case in point: Remember the cheery woman in OWS’s official online commercial who called for taxing the rich to fund education? That’s super, but it does little to help us cope with the explosion in mandatory spending that will eventually cannibalize the budget: Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt, and whatever’s left over for defense. In essence, these people seem to want to build Great Society II just as the government’s begun to crumble in earnest from the weight of Great Society I.

That’s why, as much as I goof on them, I can’t get as worked up about OWS as some of my friends on the right. Despite their alarming radical overtones, they’re basically committed to preserving (and expanding upon) the same unsustainable status quo we have now.

Politics

Say What? October 17, 2011 edition [Reader Post]

Wall Street protester chant: “You can become immortal…you can have sex with animals or whatever.”

Occupy Wall Street in Los Angeles protester Patricia McAllister (employee of Los Angeles Unified School District) “I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government. . . . they need to be run out of this country.”

Politics / The UN

U.N. – For What Are We Paying? [Reader Post]

Did you know that American taxpayers, through “assessed” dues, account for 22% of the United Nation‘s (U.N.) regular operating budget, and 27% of a separate peacekeeping budget? For comparison, China pays just 3%. The U.N. “proposes” an operating budget in 2012-2013 of $5.5 billion, and that currently employs 10,307 people. In 2010, U.S. payments totaled $3.35 billion, of which $2.67 billion was dedicated to the 16 peacekeeping operations worldwide. Additionally, the U.S. provides voluntarily billions of dollars in contributions for various U.N. agencies. Here is just one example.