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[diogenes227]

Why The Screwed Generation Is Turning To Paul Ryan

Boomers don’t want to give up their sweet deal, but the rest of us have reason to embrace Ryan’s “radical” plans

We’ve finally been vindicated: Members of Generation X have a representative who is anything but a slacker.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012...-paul-ryan.html

This post is pure politics of course.

But since you brought it up, the most notable American member of Generation X (as Strauss and Howe define the generations in "The Fourth Turning") currently lives in the White House. And, in case you've overlooked it, he too is no slacker, having gotten to the Presidency without family privilege or wealth to back him up.

His opponent, by the way, is a boomer. If you've read "The Fourth Turning," you know it's the authors' contention that it would be best for the country (for the world for for that matter) if the boomers would just get out of the way and let the next generation get on with fixing the boomer mess. No easy task as we all can see. If all the boomers out there throwing their tons of money into this election on behalf of their fellow boomer (the last stand of the boomer generation?) manage to succeed in winning this election then no doubt the big boomer mess will be compounded and likely a disaster beyond imagination. It'll be worse than Massachusetts where the current Gen X governor of that state is having to spend his entire terms cleaning up his predecessor's mismanagement of the infrastructure there. Strauss and Howe label the boomers a "Prophet" generation; the last businessman elected President from the last "Prophet" generation before the boomer generation was Herbert Hoover.

Enough said.

[stocks]

Washington Versus America

new census data revealed that 7 of the 10 richest American counties in 2011 were in the Washington, D.C., region. Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties, all in Northern Virginia, have higher median incomes than every other county in the United States.

Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington’s one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector’s work.

The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.

In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.

When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/...erica.html?_r=0

[salsabob]

Washington Versus America

new census data revealed that 7 of the 10 richest American counties in 2011 were in the Washington, D.C., region. Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties, all in Northern Virginia, have higher median incomes than every other county in the United States.

Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington’s one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector’s work.

The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.

In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.

When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/...erica.html?_r=0

From a money standpoint (is there any other standpoint??? ), the US federal govt is essentially a huge insurance program (SS and Medicare) with a very large army. Since the DC area has only about 1% of the nation's population, nearly all the insurance part leaves the DC Beltway and very lttle can get skimmed. However a big part of the large army expenditures can get skimmed and it stays in DC - it's call "defense spending."

Right now, there are a lot of pols doing a lot of hand wringing over the 1/2 trillion in defense spending cuts associated with the upcoming "fiscal cliff" - they not only talk about how that will bring us to having only 4 or 5 times the defense spending as the rest of the world combined, but they also get all Keynesian on you about how that reduced govt spending will kill the economy.

Then some more of those pols are running on the notion that the Pentagon needs about $2 trillion more than it asked for to develop and build weapon systems that the generals say they don't want but the defense contractors and their lobbyist say they must have. Most of those defense contractors and all of their lobbyists live around the beltway of DC - easy to spot in Great Falls and Potomac with their huge McMansions and Ferraris in the driveway.

What's really funny is that people, like you, that rail against how rich the DC area has become are the very same folks that vote for the pols that are in the pockets of the defense lobbyists and contractors! Imagine that.

Is that weird or what?

This post has been edited by salsabob: Sep 24 2012, 10:44 AM

[stocks]

Occupy Wall St. Vs. the Tea Party - Failure vs. Success

1. The Democratic party is bad soil for grassroots movements. The Dems are a patchwork coalition of victim groups with an uber rich and academic elite at the top. What do these wildly different groups have in common: single women, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Jews, the uber rich, unions, academia and Big Biz? They vote Democrat. Nothing else. This is why Obama won California in 2008 with 62% of the vote but prop 8 opponents only got 47% of the vote. Blacks and Hispanics dont care about gay rights. No ideology holds all groups together like GOP's 'lower taxes, lesser govt'. This is why the Tea Party had broad GOP and some independent support. Simple message of thought, which the Dems don't have as a glue. How could you get a message to stretch across the wildly different groups I listed above that vote them? You can't.

2. Campaign funding. Big Biz owns both the GOP and the Dems, but that's not the major source of campaign cash for the Dems. Jewish donors donate 60% of all them money and unions provide a lot of the rest. Big biz, Jewish money, union funds are resistant to changing the status quo, which is what OWS was all about. Because the GOP has that lower middle class to under $10 mil rich as a base for donations, TP had base of money outside of establishment that went to insurgent candidates. Overcoming a 30-1 spending ratio is nearly impossible, but overcoming 3-1 is doable when you have the fired up segment on your side. Because the GOP has that married middle class support, they can counter Big Biz money. Just look at the recent win by Cruz over Dewhurst in Texas for the open US Senate seat. A Hispanic Tea Party candidate beat the establishment white guy in Texas with Tea Party money and support. This would've been considered unheard of 5 years ago.

8. Protesting the Wall St bankers needed to be snuffed out before citizens connected the dots that Obama and Dems currently in power have not convicted a single Wall St banker or mortgage fraudster 5 years after the financial shock. This was a problem as people started to say publicly 'yeah why arent the bankers and fraudsters in jail? where's my change?'. If a single them with no Wall St ties and lib bona fides had taken the OWS message to power, you could have had a primary challenger to Obama. Looking at some of his primary results, it migth have worked. I spent a couple of months hoping Howard Dean would do this.


http://28sherman.blogspot.com/2012/08/occu...failure-vs.html