Commentary is blaming unions.. Well, isn’t that what you’d expect from a Bain Capital liquidation?
By December 2011 it was reported that Hostess Brands was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy a second time after it suspended payments for union pensions and was struggling to remain current on its $700 million loan.
On January 10, 2012, Hostess Brands filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy for the second time. In a statement in its filing, the company said it “is not competitive, primarily due to legacy pension and medical benefit obligations and restrictive work rules.” The company said it employs 19,000 people and carries more than $860 million in debt. The company said it would continue to operate with $75 million debtor-in-possession financing from Monarch Alternative Capital, Silver Point Capital and other investors…
Television talk show hostess Wendy Williams started a “Save The Twinkie” publicity campaign shortly after the bankruptcy filing. The campaign included promotions on The Wendy Williams Show…
In March 2012, Brian Driscoll resigned from his position as CEO. Gregory Rayburn, who had been hired and named Chief Restructuring Officer only nine days earlier, assumed the leadership position. Fortune reported that unions within the organization had been unhappy with Driscoll’s proposed compensation package of $1.5 million, plus cash incentives and a $1.95 million “long term compensation” package. Additionally, the court had discovered that Hostess executives had received raises of up to 80% the year prior. In an effort to restore relations, Rayburn cut the salaries of the four top Hostess executives to $1, to be restored on January 1 the following year…
In July 2012, the New York Post reported that negotiations (lead by Silver Point Capital) with the Teamsters Union were close to a possible agreement that could allow Hostess Brands to cut employee pay and benefits, if the company maintained funding of existing pension plans…
In May, all 19,000 workers had been warned (as required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) that they could face a mass layoff. In an email to the Appeal-Democrat Hostess spokesman Erik Halvorson said that the May notices were to alert employees to possible sale or wind down of the company, but that “our goal is still to emerge from bankruptcy as a growing company with a strong future.” These layoff notices listed the dates as July 7–21, but on July 5 another company spokesman told the Financial News & Daily Record that there were no immediate plans to start laying off Hostess employees…
These layoff notices listed the dates as July 7–21, but on July 5 another company spokesman told the Financial News & Daily Record that there were no immediate plans to start laying off Hostess employees…
In November 2012, Hostess employees nationwide went on strike. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union, which represents 6,600 Hostess employees, took the strike action after the latest contract proposal from Hostess Brands was rejected by 92 percent of its members. In response, Hostess Brands issued the following statement: “A widespread strike will cause Hostess brands to liquidate if we are unable to produce or deliver products. If that’s the case, the company will move promptly to lay off most of its 18,300-member workforce and focus on selling its assets to the highest bidders. We urge our employees to remain on the job to rebuild the company…
Today, on November 16, 2012, Hostess announced that it was ceasing plant operations and laying off most of its 18,500 employees. It stated that it intended to sell off all of its assets, including the well known brand names, and liquidate…
The CEO, Gregory F. Rayburn stated, “Hostess Brands will move promptly to lay off most of its 18,500-member workforce and focus on selling its assets to the highest bidders….
There you go. As was typically done by Bain Capital, preditory companies practiced vulture capitlism upon one of America’s icons. Move in, pay yourself highly, saddle the company with debt, declare bankruptcy, and use the employees pension to reward yourself and your investors…..
For this greed, we no longer get Twinkies, (until they come from China)….
There is a solution. Legally make pension plans the first item that gets reimbursed when a company goes bankrupt and gets sold for assets. It is simply arbitrary that our legal system puts investors before employees. The order can easily be changed.
The significance of that change in wording, means that taking over a profitable company, saddling it down with debt, then selling it’s pieces, will cause you a loss. The employees will get the assets. Better to invest your money in building a new company from the ground up…. and hire more people… not fire 18,500….
Perhaps our government can step in and cut out GE Capital and give employees a chance, like we did with GM and Chrysler? After all, the Twinkie is just as great of an American Icon….
10 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 19, 2012 at 10:17 am
M. Moore
Thanks for the info. Some always blame the unions (not saying they are perfect, just an easy target), nice to get some confirmation of what I suspected.
November 19, 2012 at 12:58 pm
B. Batten
Um, so now you want to nationalize Twinkies? And have you noted that our government is 16 Trillion in debt? We can’t afford to bail out anyone. It is beyond too bad that an agreement could not be reached. As opposed to an 8% wage reduction, it has turned into an 100% wage loss for all workers. A very bad bet.
November 20, 2012 at 3:27 am
kavips
Unions do get blamed for inefficiencies. But then, those doing the blame are always the business owners, who benefit from when unions go away. But what has been missing from the arguments, is the effect on the economy when you no longer have advocates out there for people who are working…. They have to do with less, and you haven’t heard them whining as do some of these corporate jerks recently over Obamacare……
They have suffered long enough. it is time the pain all came from investors…..
We’ve always heard from the business owners and the wealthy: you can’t do that, we’ll lose money.
But when was the last time workers and their families said, you can’t do that, we’ll lose money?
Workers need their advocates. We’ve learned our lesson..
November 20, 2012 at 3:37 am
kavips
Keep in mind, the GM bailout didn’t cost America. We loaned money and got our money back… in a very well crafted agreement that enabled workers to be part of the success and failure of the automotive industry, We could do the same with Hostess Bakeries, although I hear a private concern is now interested…… making such and argument moot if the deal goes through…..”
As for the deficit, I believe it was Dick Cheney himself who said… deficits don’t matter… ”
They obviously don’t…. We’d have raised taxes a long time ago, if “deficits really mattered….”
If we made a law, that no profits could be recorded until our deficit was zero, meaning every penny earned by the wealthy would pay down the deficit and when it was zero, they could keep some of their profits themselves.., … That 16 trillion would be completely gone in 2 and 1/2 years…..
The reason we have such a deficit, is because our wealthy is not taxed enough. Pure and simple….
November 21, 2012 at 11:04 pm
Donger
Dear Kavips, Did you really make the statement that the reason we have a deficit, is because our wealthy is not taxed enough? It amazes me to no end when people like to blame the wealthy. I for one am not wealthy at all and totally disagree with you. Don’t you think maybe our federal gov’t should stop spending so much? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in gov’t had to play by the same rules as everyone else? It’s not the wealthy people’s fault. It is our out of control (who care’s, we’ll just raise taxes and screw the public) politician’s fault Kavips.
November 22, 2012 at 2:50 am
kavips
Actually, Donger, I do. And I’m probably the wrong person to bring this up with, because I have worked this issue from scratch since 2009… You can see it here when you have time….
Your idea unfortunately does not work.. Here is why. If what you said was true, then cutting taxes in 2003 would have given us prosperity instead of a Gigantic Recession. Likewise, we would have had prosperity with the 1986 tax cuts, but instead got the recession of 1991. And particularly, we would have had prosperity during the thirties, because the tax cuts in the twenties were the best ever done. Instead, we got the Great Depression.
If your idea worked, we would have had depressions during Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon’s terms.. The top marginal tax rates during that time were 94%, 77%, 70% respectively. Instead we had unbridled growth. We had a strong middle class. We had GDP growing every quarter… We had a good economy…
So if you were choosing a policy, would you choose one that always created a great depression or severe recession with three years of its implementation? Or would you choose the one that creates the three longest periods of continuous growth and economic expansion?
Anyone can make up any words and say them. It doesn’t mean they work. But the actual history of when it was done, and the results that occurred thereafter, are pretty hard to dismiss.
So yes! It is clear that when you let the top earners keep more of their money, the economy crashes…..
From your writing, it appears that you are not familiar with our federal budget. If you look at the actual budget, you will see that non military discretionary spending has not increased since the days of George HW Bush.
Yes, despite all the hot air in Congress, we are spending on non military discretionary spending, the exact same as we were 20 years ago.
Our budget deficits occur in areas we have no discretion over. The military, it has to get smaller if you are serious about deficits. It has to. Why? Because with two wars now down to one, it is spending most of our money. Second, the rest of the bleeding is in Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and the Prescription Drug Plan.
So what is needed is to increase taxes. If you ran a business where expenses are more than money coming in, you would raise prices. Raising taxes is exactly the same thing. It puts ones finances in line.
I would certainly agree with you if there was anything left to cut. Cutting fat is better than raising taxes. But we are at minimum now. We can’t go lower; the fat is long gone and we are cutting actual muscle.
Therefore raising taxes is the first defensive option…..
You may be too young to remember the 1990′s. But back then, before the Bush W tax cuts, we had budget surpluses lined up as far as the eye can see. In fact, the entire national debt was going to be zero in 2008. Zero in 2008! What happened! The Republicans rammed through the Bush Tax Cuts and even though our spending was streamlined and cut to the bone, we stopped receiving the revenues we needed to maintain that balance budget…..
Sort of like if you boss suddenly cut your salary by $15,000… No problem, you’ll get a loan… Well, that is what we did, and the Republicans were so gung-ho on getting loans, that we went to war, paying for it with another loan, then went to war again, paying that with another loan, then decided to pay for old people’s drugs, and paid that with another loan…. As one might guess, under all this weight, the economy crashed. Then the new president had to inject money into that crashing economy to stop its fall, and since we were broke, it had to be done with another loan…..
None of this would have ever happened, if Democrats had won in 2000. The Democrats were committed to paying as we went, and keeping the budget surplus intact so that national debt would come down to zero…..
So as you can see, the reason things are messed up, is exactly and only because the wealthy are not being taxed enough…. I hope this short history causes you to look with more depth into this on your own…
But, now I’m curious about you… How could anyone, NOT think that taxing the wealthy would bring our finances and economy back on line?
November 27, 2012 at 2:10 am
Converned
Tax EVERYONE – we are all in this mess…… 50% don’t pay any tax – is that fair?
November 27, 2012 at 9:08 am
kavips
Taxing someone who earns just one penny a year, so one can say all people now fairly pay a tax, is pretty foolish. So is taxing someone making two pennies a year, or three…. That I think, is enough to prove your statement has nothing to stand on.
Obviously the problem is where to start taxing. Somewhere between 1 penny and $1 Trillion, taxes have to begin…. But where? Wiser people than us have struggled to make that determination…..
Almost all of them agreed. If you have no income, you shouldn’t be taxed on the income you do not have…..
The 50% to which you refer, have no income after expenses. Therefore, making them pay tax is unfair.
Your premise is again, false….. It is not fair. In fact, what you suggest, is completely unfair.
The wise answer is to divide the cost of a year of Federal Government, which is roughly $2 trillion, and divide it among those making over $250,000 a year… If that comes down to .40 cents on every dollar, then those at the top marginal rate, can all equally pay .40 cents on the dollar. That means the person making $250,000 and the person making $250,000,000, pay the exact same rate… That I believe, is called the “Fair Tax.”……… How much fairer can one get than that?
November 29, 2012 at 11:43 pm
Donger
Kavips,
Thanks for your response. From that response, I take away that you are passionate about this country, history and what our future holds. I skimmed through some of your “book” and got a decent understanding of what your views are and where you stand. Unfortunately, I do not agree. Your length of response was not expected, but truly welcomed.
My first post to you was vague in retrospect, as I did not fully expand on my view that it’s not the wealthy’s fault we are in this mess. So please allow me to go into further detail.
The true history of the corruption of this gov’t has always been intriguing to me and I hope you find this interesting as well.
I am not basing my beliefs on this video, but it definitely is an eye opener. Here is a video by Bill Whittle on how taxing the wealthy corporations and all the rich people in the US who make $250,000 and above pays down the deficit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbRKfXyQEw
First, you have to un-believe that there are Dems vs Reps, Libs, vs Cons. and all the other fodder they want you to believe. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANY OF THESE PARTIES!!! They are all the same people who run this dog and pony show. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s all crap!
Presidents, VP’s and the like are all puppets. I wish we had actual leader in this country to lead the people, but “They” don’t want that. They do what they are told to do and what policies and orders to write. I am not a conspiracy nut or a whack job, I am just pissed that so many people fall for the all this Democrat or Republican stuff.
Depending on the subject, I could be one or the other.
Ron Paul was the only person in congress that ran to be a leader that made sense. But the media said he was un electable and didn’t give him the coverage that he deserved. Two of the biggest projects RP wanted to end was the Fed and the IRS. I don’t know about you, but that would’ve made me happy! One thing that I was worried about if Paul got in was, who is he gonna have on his “team?” Not a lot of honest politicians to pick from in DC.
I take it that you are a Democrat. The Dem’s play their part by helping the people become dependant on the gov’t for food, shelter and money to name a few. Why learn to fish when it’s just handed to you all the time. Dem’s remind me of Socialist. Obama quotes like ” We all have to do our share.” or “We have maxed out our credit cards and now it’s time for the people with pensions to go with less.” That scares the !@#$ out of me. It just seems that no matter who is in there, they can do what ever they want to you and affect how you live and whats to stop them.
People need to get away from this “2 party system” and realize that our gov’t is outta control.
Your quote ——-”If your idea worked, we would have had depressions during Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon’s terms.. The top marginal tax rates during that time were 94%, 77%, 70% respectively. Instead we had unbridled growth. We had a strong middle class. We had GDP growing every quarter… We had a good economy”
I am a fan of Ludwig Van Mises and there is a better explanation on this qoute here at
http://mises.org/daily/1597#_ftnref23.
It seems, that you are a man that stands by the Constitution, and agrees with no man shall be taxed on their personal property right? Well, I don’t believe in personal income taxes at all. My labor is my personal property and if I give you 10 hours of my life, I expect to be paid for 10 hours. Not work for 10 and get paid for 7. I pay all the other taxes with no complaints, but when I have to work hard for 4 months out of the year just to give it to the gov’t that is corrupt and has shown to me and the rest of this country that it does not know how to properly spend money, then I have a huge problem with that. And so should you.
There is so much more to this than most people dare to study. Let’s start with the Federal Reserve. First, there is nothing Federal about it. It was the brain child of Paul Warburg. He brought it to the states in 1910 and met with JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Harriman, Aldrich and the list goes on of the who’s who of that era. It was passed by congress on Dec, 23rd 1913. It was at this time that, we as a nation, gave our country’s right to print and issue our currency by the US Treasury to a private corporation.
Now, the Fed loans the US money at face value and gets to charge interest. The Fed needed henchmen for the task of getting its loans paid back so, they came up with the IRS to be its collection service also in 1913. The IRS only collects taxes on Income taxes, that means your income tax is only being used to pay off the interest on the money borrowed by the gov’t.
The gov’t has a bad borrowing habit and coincidentally, the Fed loves to loan money to the US gov’t. With there no end in sight of us ever being able to pay back the Fed, we all are going to be paying income taxes indefinitely, which makes us serfs and not free Americans. Special thanks to the Democrat president Woodrow Wilson who pushed that through.
He would later state a few years after passing the Fedral Reserve Act-
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” -Woodrow Wilson
My point on your comment about the Great Depression is that it was controlled by the Federal Reserve, or the men behind it. Our current economic mess we are in is by design only.
Here is a short excerpt on this by Milton Friedman and Bernanke.
“Despite the varied theories espoused by many establishment economists, it was none other than the Federal Reserve that caused the Great Depression and the horrific suffering, deprivation and dislocation America and the world experienced in its wake. At least, that’s the clearly stated view of current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
The worldwide economic downturn called the Great Depression, which persisted from 1929 until about 1939, was the longest and worst depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. While originating in the U.S., it ended up causing drastic declines in output, severe unemployment, and acute deflation in virtually every country on earth. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the Great Depression ranks second only to the Civil War as the gravest crisis in American history.”
What exactly caused this economic tsunami that devastated the U.S. and much of the world?
In “A Monetary History of the United States,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman along with coauthor Anna J. Schwartz lay the mega-catastrophe of the Great Depression squarely at the feet of the Federal Reserve.
Here’s how Friedman summed up his views on the Fed and the Depression in an Oct. 1, 2000, interview with PBS:
PBS: You’ve written that what really caused the Depression was mistakes by the government. Looking back now, what in your view was the actual cause?
Friedman: Well, we have to distinguish between the recession of 1929, the early stages, and the conversion of that recession into a major catastrophe.
The recession was an ordinary business cycle. We had repeated recessions over hundreds of years, but what converted [this one] into a major depression was bad monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve System, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States. There’s no other example I can think of, of a government measure which produced so clearly the opposite of the results that were intended.
And what happened is that [the Federal Reserve] followed policies which led to a decline in the quantity of money by a third. For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing from beginning to end, with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.
At all times, the Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were all the time urging them to do that. So it was, in my opinion, clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.
Although economists have pontificated over the decades about this or that cause of the Great Depression, even the current Fed chairman Ben S. Bernanke, agrees with Friedman’s assessment that the Fed caused the Great Depression.
At a Nov. 8, 2002, conference to honor Friedman’s 90th birthday, Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, gave a speech at Friedman’s old home base, the University of Chicago. Here’s a bit of what Bernanke, the man who now runs the Fed – and thus, one of the most powerful people in the world – had to say that day:
I can think of no greater honor than being invited to speak on the occasion of Milton Friedman’s ninetieth birthday. Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. …
Today I’d like to honor Milton Friedman by talking about one of his greatest contributions to economics, made in close collaboration with his distinguished coauthor, Anna J. Schwartz. This achievement is nothing less than to provide what has become the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history, the onset of the Great Depression – or, as Friedman and Schwartz dubbed it, the Great Contraction of 1929-33.
… As everyone here knows, in their “Monetary History” Friedman and Schwartz made the case that the economic collapse of 1929-33 was the product of the nation’s monetary mechanism gone wrong. Contradicting the received wisdom at the time that they wrote, which held that money was a passive player in the events of the 1930s, Friedman and Schwartz argued that “the contraction is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces.”
After citing how Friedman and Schwartz documented the Fed’s continual contraction of the money supply during the Depression and its aftermath – and the subsequent abandonment of the gold standard by many nations in order to stop the devastating monetary contraction – Bernanke adds:
Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, Friedman and Schwartz noted, bank panics were typically handled by banks themselves – for example, through urban consortiums of private banks called clearinghouses. If a run on one or more banks in a city began, the clearinghouse might declare a suspension of payments, meaning that, temporarily, deposits would not be convertible into cash. Larger, stronger banks would then take the lead, first, in determining that the banks under attack were in fact fundamentally solvent, and second, in lending cash to those banks that needed to meet withdrawals. Though not an entirely satisfactory solution – the suspension of payments for several weeks was a significant hardship for the public – the system of suspension of payments usually prevented local banking panics from spreading or persisting. Large, solvent banks had an incentive to participate in curing panics because they knew that an unchecked panic might ultimately threaten their own deposits.
It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s infamous ‘liquidationist’ thesis, that weeding out “weak” banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks – which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed – felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.
In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. …
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.
Best wishes for your next ninety years.”
Alright, I’m back.
That might have been a long read, but there are some amazing truths in there.
Put 2 and 2 together and you get the current mess we are in. It’s not because people aren’t paying their taxes. The Fed controls the swings in the economy. I think the Great Depression was a test run at it, and why it took longer to recover. It was a work in progress.
Part 2.
In regards to your non discretionary gov’t spending that hasn’t changed in 25 years, which I hope is not true, here are just a few examples of that spending you and I are paying for. Can somebody say “Pork Bellies”
$107,000 to study the sex life of the Japanese quail.
$1.2 million to study the breeding habits of the woodchuck.
$150,000 to study the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
$84,000 to find out why people fall in love.
$1 million to study why people don’t ride bikes to work.
$19 million to examine gas emissions from cow flatulence.
$144,000 to see if pigeons follow human economic laws.
Funds to study the cause of rudeness on tennis courts and examine smiling patterns in bowling alleys.
$219,000 to teach college students how to watch television.
$2 million to construct an ancient Hawaiian canoe.
$20 million for a demonstration project to build wooden bridges.
$160,000 to study if you can hex an opponent by drawing an X on his chest.
$800,000 for a restroom on Mt. McKinley.
$100,000 to study how to avoid falling spacecraft.
$16,000 to study the operation of the komungo, a Korean stringed instrument.
$1 million to preserve a sewer in Trenton, NJ, as a historic monument.
$6,000 for a document on Worcestershire sauce.
$10,000 to study the effect of naval communications on a bull’s potency.
$100,000 to research soybean-based ink.
$1 million for a Seafood Consumer Center.
$57,000 spent by the Executive Branch for gold-embossed playing cards on Air Force Two.
Total: $ 45,980,000
Great site for this at- http://www.akdart.com/pork3.html
Lot of Dem’s with an appetite for pork, not saying Rep’s weren’t hungry either.
Part 3.
Your example of if I ran a business and the expenses were more than the revenue scenario makes for a bad case. I would go out of business, plain and simple. I shouldn’t expect someone else to pay more if the business model doesn’t work. That’s part of the freedom of capitalism. And a bad business. Just like with any businesses, if you can’t compete or make a profit, your done. Sad as it may be, not everyone makes it in business. Sidebar—Maybe if my taxes weren’t so high and put on everything we touch, my prices wouldn’t have to be raised.
In comparison to our gov’t, they have been out of business for quite awhile. But, the can just increase taxes on us and stay in business indefinately. I loved when it was said that the gov’t made the roads and such and it wouldn’t have been possible for a business owner to be in business without the gov’t help. Or what ever he said.
When they confiscated your gold in the 1930′s, the Bretton Woods agreements, and Nixon taking us off the gold standard in the 70′s is when people should’ve realized there is something fishy going on. Our dollar is worthless and has been for 70 years. Thank God for the OPEC arrangement to back our dollar with oil. A lot of conflict in the Middle East because of countries not wanted to buy oil with petro dollars any more. Iraq wanted to take euro’s and Libya wanted to to paid with gold. That would’ve messed up the illusion of a strong dollar. These are all things that can be researched by you when you have time. Too much to go into there.
So why should I keep paying for a gov’t that has such a complete lack of respect and thankfulness to our citizens? Because you’ll go to jail if you don’t. Even though there is no law that says I have to pay taxes and the tax codes cannot specify a law, I pay. Do I want to pay more? No.
So come up with a better plan than taxing the life out of the people of this country and get the corruption out of DC.
Spend your time and energy into something that makes more sense and makes the people get behind yo on it. That is change, that should be the American way.
The comment on Social security and medicaid bleeding our country I agree with. It started out with good intentions, but all gov’t programs start out with good intentions. And we all know the quote that goes along with that. Something else we pay into and I probably will never see. I think Madoff got his idea from the SS scheme. I think LBJ made mention of transferring SS money into the general fund and being able to use it for other purposes as necessary. SHAM! Thanks Roosevelt!
I have wealthy friends and acquaintances and they say tax me, I don’t care. Nothing is in my name. Not my car, my homes, not even my income. So tax away. I think the wealthy you are talking about are just simply smarter and are politicians.
We can’t even keep American corporations here (which should be a huge source of taxes)because we tax the hell out of them and import the hell out of everything else without imposing tariffs. No one talks about imposing tariffs, why not?
Your alleged proof that when the wealthy are taxed the most, we prosper, isn’t enough.
There is more to this than a simple analogy. The wealthy make the rules the rest of us have to live by. You think all those people in congress are poor, working class citizens? They aren’t. We have a gov’t of 545 persons that we pay to make laws that screw us and exempt themselves. That doesn’t seem right. We don’t need more money in taxes or the US citizens paying their fair share and burdening the debt of a few. We need a few who will stand up for the many and show us there is hope for our children who shouldn’t bear the weight of debt that we are going to leave them with and the politicians kid driving sports cars and spending still more than need be. We may disagree on some things, but I hope we can find common on the future of this great childhood memory I once had called America.
November 30, 2012 at 10:48 am
kavips
I certainly agree that Ron Paul was the most refreshing Republican Candidate and was very excited to see if he would change the Republican Party. They sort of pushed him out…
What caused me to turn away was his insistence on doing away with the Federal Reserve and the IRS, and that we return to the Gold Standard.
Although many people share his beliefs, out of the entire range of society, they are but a few percentage points.
Here is where he fails. If you do away with those institutions, what replaces it? Nothing?
For that argument to move forward, and I’m not saying there is reason it can’t, it will need a solution that stands up to rigorous testing before implementation…..
How does Ron Paul plan on running today’s Global economy without those two institutions?
In a way, it is sort of like saying, to cut our dependence on carbon fuels, we should do away with cars… Well, among friends and bycycle riders, that might elicit cheers. But the rest of us hear it and think, “now how am I going to get to work?” Sure there may be viable alternatives, like bus, but those ideas need to be handed to us while hearing the argument, otherwise we shall dismiss it out of hand….
As for the answer to the libertarian question always asked: why should I pay for a government? The answer is: that not having government is a lot more expensive than the small percentage of income that it asks…