OBOF TYMHM & MORE Vol 14 No 27

WELCOME TO OPINIONS  BASED  ON FACTS (OBOF)

&

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)

YEAR ONE

YEAR TWO

YEAR THREE

YEAR FOUR

 

OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-01	Jan. 02, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-02	Jan. 09, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-03	Jan. 15, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-04	Jan. 24, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-05	JAN 30, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06	Feb. 06, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06 EXTRA	Feb. 09, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-07	Feb. 13, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-08	Feb. 21, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-09	Feb. 27, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-10	Mar. 08, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11	Mar. 13, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11    EXTRA	Mar. 15, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-12	Mar.  21, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-13	Mar.  29, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-14	Apr.  03, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-15	Apr.  12, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-16	Apr.  19, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-17	Apr.  26, 2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-18	May  03,  2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-19	May  10,  2014
OBOF TYMHM PART 14-20	May  20,  2014
OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 21	May 28,  2014
OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - Ho 22	June 10, 2014
OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 23	June 20, 2014
noteOBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 24	July  04, 2014
OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 25	Aug. 04, 2014
OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 26	Aug. 25, 2014
OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 27	Sept. 03, 2014

 

 

Agenda

 

1.  Note from Floyd.

2.  Labor Day Thoughts

3.  Burger King leaving the US.

4.  The Race Baiters fail.

5.  SS report does not reveal

           the true status of the SS Trust Fund

6.  US soon to become the World' largest

          producer of oil.

NOTE FROM FLOYD

Hi folks, I just wanted to mention that I am now doing better and I believe I will be able to start on regular weekly posting.  I won't say for sure what day, but, hopefully by Friday.

It's good to see many of you are still looking.  Thanks a lot.  I'll keep trying to send you "TYMHM & MORE".

~~~

LABOR DAY THOUGHTS

from

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

“In these tough economic times, government must respond to the needs of working people in this country and not just to millionaires and billionaires,” Bernie said as Americans prepared to mark Labor Day this weekend.   While the economy is better than when George W. Bush left office and we were losing 700,000 jobs a month, the middle class is continuing to shrink and real unemployment, at more than 12 percent, is much too high.  Americans overwhelmingly want the federal government to play a strong role in creating decent-paying jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, railroads, water systems and other projects.  The need for jobs to boost the economy is one of the many areas where Americans (except for Republicans in Congress) are overwhelmingly united.

~~~

senator

OHIO

Dear Floyd:

Burger King just announced that it’s in talks to buy a Canadian company, move its headquarters from the United States, and reap the benefits of exploiting a loophole in American tax law.

Wall St. calls it a “tax inversion.” I call it abandoning your country.

Burger King is not alone. They’re part of a growing trend in which companies get rich in the United States, then move to a foreign tax haven with the stroke of a pen. It needs to stop, and I’ve got a plan to stop it.

If a company gets rich in America, it should pay taxes in America. Support my plan to close down tax havens that cost our country revenue and cost American jobs.

Right now, American corporations are stashing cash in foreign tax havens to pad their bottom line. So while they’re reaping the benefits of doing business in the United States -- everything from using publicly funded roads to employing workers who are educated in American schools to utilizing our food safety system to ensure quality -- they’re not willing to pay their fair share when it’s tax time.

To fix this in the long term, we need to close tax loopholes and end incentives once and for all by instituting a global minimum tax. In the short term, we need to invest in public infrastructure, workforce training, and incentives to encourage R&D and capital investment.

And we need to make it clear to corporate America that if they want to get rich here, we expect them to pay taxes here, too.

We have a plan to end corporate “tax inversions” and protect American jobs. Please sign our petition calling on Congress to act.



Sherrod:

Shut down foreign tax havens

Wall St. calls it a “tax inversion.”  You and I call it abandoning your country.

American corporations shouldn’t be able to pretend that they’re headquartered in another country just so they can avoid paying taxes.

I support Sherrod Brown’s plan to close corporate tax loopholes and to protect American jobs.

                                                                                      Sincerely,

                                                                                  Floyd Bowman   

I have tried to transfer the petition, but it just won't work.  You can go to Google and search for Senator Sherrod Brown.  You can find it that way and I urge you sign this partition.  I have never asked you to sign a petition before, but I think this one is important for our economy and jobs, which is really saying the same thing.

~~~

The Race Baiters Fail In Ferguson

August 26, 2014 by Chip Wood 
PERSONAL LIBERTY DIGEST

 

 

 

Funny how facts make thing turn around 180 degrees.

 

Floyd.

 

 

Al Sharpton spoke during a rally for justice for Michael Brown at Greater Grace Church in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 17.

The charges seemed ideal to stir up an angry mob.  A white policeman shoots and kills an unarmed black teenager.  The teen’s companion says his friend, Michael Brown, was shot in the back. Another alleged eyewitness claims the boy had his hands up and said “Don’t shoot” when he was gunned down.

Suddenly, the tiny town of Ferguson, Missouri, was the site of demonstrations that turned into riots.  Stores were looted and burned. Police were stoned.  Molotov cocktails were hurled.  State police were called in to try to prevent things from getting completely out of hand.

Notorious racist agitator Al Sharpton flew into town to add his own incendiary remarks to the volatile mix.  For a while, it looked as though an escalation of violence was inevitable.

But then an amazing thing happened: As more facts began to emerge, the picture started to change.  Police released a video from a nearby convenience store, taken moments before the shooting on the street.  The video allegedly showed Brown threatening and pummeling a store clerk and stealing a box of cigars. This happened minutes before Brown and his companion, Dorian Johnson, were stopped by a local policeman for blocking traffic by walking down the middle of a street.

An autopsy confirmed that Brown had not been shot in the back, as his companion claimed.  That was simply a flat-out lie. While officer Darren Wilson’s statement hasn’t been released yet (and it certainly should be!), a woman who said she was a friend called a local radio station and said that Brown punched and pushed Wilson and tried to take his gun.  There were reports that Wilson had been severely beaten around the face and suffered a fractured eye socket.

Brown was 6-feet-4 and weighed close to 300 pounds.  If he did strike Wilson several times, as has been alleged, I don’t think anyone would blame the policeman for fearing for his life. Wouldn’t you?

The fact is we don’t know exactly what happened that day in Ferguson.  But that hasn’t stopped agitators like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson from demanding “justice” for Brown.  Even Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon joined the clamor, demanding the “vigorous prosecution” of Wilson. Shame on him for jumping to judgment!

Attorney General Eric Holder flew to Ferguson to head up the federal investigation of the shooting.  Shortly after he landed, he proved that he wasn’t exactly unbiased, when he revealed several confrontations he said he had with white law enforcement officers when he was younger. All of them seemed to demonstrate an anti-black bias.

Way to help calm things down, Attorney General!

As I said, the first reports out of Ferguson seemed ideal to stir up the mob.  And for a while, it worked.  But thanks to the alternative media in this country — things like talk radio, Fox News and websites such as Personal Liberty — it’s almost impossible to suppress the “other side” of a story for long.  And the more facts that came out, the harder it became for the racist agitators to succeed with their bigoted, one-sided portrayals.

Because of this, things are calmer now in Ferguson.  Thank goodness!  If it hadn’t happened, I have no doubt that there would be more riots, more looting and more bloodshed — probably in many other cities, in addition to that small St. Louis suburb.

Thanks for doing your part to make sure that “the other side” continues to be heard.

Until next time, keep some powder dry.

–Chip Wood

~~~

 

The Des Moines Register

Social Security report fails to reveal that surplus is gone

By Allen W. Smith

CDT August 20, 2014

 

 

The release of the annual Social Security trustees report brought out the same old stale arguments from both the optimists and the pessimists that have been around for decades.  The pessimists insist that Social Security is going broke, and the optimists continue to argue that Social Security has enough money to pay full benefits for 20 more years.

 

How could the optimists and pessimists reach such radically different conclusions from the same data?  They couldn’t, if they were being honest with the public.  As an economist, I am appalled at the distorted misinformation the American people are fed.

 

If the government had not taken, and spent, the $2.7 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue that was generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, Social Security would be able to pay full benefits for another 20 years.

 

But the government did take, and spend, for non-Social Security purposes, every penny of that $2.7 trillion.  If the government were to make provisions for repaying that $2.7 trillion debt to Social Security, the financial problems of Social Security would suddenly be dwarfed.

 

Every member of Congress knows that the real Social Security problem is the direct result of the misappropriation of Social Security money.  But few American citizens have even a clue that all of the surplus Social Security revenue was used for general government spending.  The citizens of America have been misled, over a 30-year period, about what was happening to their Social Security contributions. Over that period, presidents and Congresses, both Republicans and Democrats, spent every dime of that $2.7 trillion for other purposes.

 

As the money was spent, the government issued IOUs to Social Security, which served as an accounting record of how much Social Security money was spent on other programs.  But these IOUs do not provide any means for repaying the spent money. They cannot be used to pay benefits, and they cannot be converted into cash.  They are, for all practical purposes, worthless pieces of paper, which are stored in a fireproof filing cabinet in an office building in Parkersburg, W.Va.

 

The government may, or may not, choose to repay the misappropriated money.  But, because of a 1960 Supreme Court ruling (Flemming v. Nestor), the government is not legally required to repay the money.

 

The surplus revenue was neither saved nor invested in anything. It was supposed to be saved and used to purchase marketable U.S. Treasury bonds.  This would have decreased the public debt and given Social Security “good-as-gold” marketable bonds to hold in the trust fund.

 

The reason the money was not saved and invested is that the government chose to use the surplus Social Security revenue as a giant slush fund, which could be used for anything the government chose to spend it on.  Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner refers to the slush fund in his book, “Stress Test.”

 

Geithner wrote, “In treating Social Security like a slush fund, the federal government has borrowed, spent and vowed to pay back the $2.5 trillion or so ‘surplus’ in payroll tax revenue it has siphoned out of Social Security. The money has been spent but the federal government has promised to pay it back.”

 

As treasury secretary, Geithner was also managing trustee of the Social Security fund. If he says Social Security served as a slush fund, and all the surplus Social Security revenue was “siphoned out of Social Security,” it must be true.

 

Maybe I have a distorted view of what things should be like in the United States.  But, to use Allan Sloan’s words in his recent “Fortune” article about tax inversions, I believe that for the government to increase payroll taxes, under the guise that the revenue would be saved for the baby boomers, and then spend all the money for things like financing income tax cuts for the rich and funding wars is “positively un-American.”

 

ALLEN W. SMITH, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of economics at Eastern Illinois University.  He is the author of the textbook “Understanding Economics.”  Contact: ironwoodas@aol.com.

~~~

 

UNITED STATES SOON TO BECOME WORLD' LARGEST OIL PRODUCER.

Oil production in the Permian Basin to drive down prices.  "One of the state's oldest oil fields, the Permian Basin in West Texas, is booming again, thanks to advanced technologies such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.  And Permian oil output shows no signs of stopping at its current 1.7 million barrels a day....The hot, new Bakken oil field in North Dakota pumps about 1 million barrels a day now.  The Eagle Ford in South Texas: 1.5 million.  The oil flowing from the Permian is so plentiful that it is threatening prices."  Russell Gold in The Wall Street Journal.

An oil bonanza in Texas.  "The new bonanza has doubled the state’s crude production over the last two years, suddenly making Texas a bigger producer than either Kuwait or Venezuela....Most of the price of gasoline is determined by the world price of crude, now hovering around $100 a barrel. Turmoil in major producer countries like Iraq and Libya does matter.  But the new source of American energy means more supply has been added to global markets — almost the exact amount that has been taken off the market at times because of unrest in the Middle East and Africa over the last five years."  Clifford Krauss in The New York Times.

World pressure mounts on U.S. to ease ban on most oil exports.  "Washington is facing growing international pressure to ease its long standing ban on crude oil exports, with South Korea and Mexico joining the European Union in pressing the case....South Korean President Park Geun-hye told a visiting U.S. delegation of lawmakers on the House of Representatives energy committee on Aug. 11 that tapping into the gusher of ultra-light, sweet crude emerging from places like Texas and North Dakota was a priority, the lawmakers said....In the midst of a shale revolution, the United States is soon expected to surpass both Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer." Valerie Volcovici, Timothy Gardner and Meeyoung Cho in Reuters.

~~~

If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again next week, at least by Friday.

 

God Bless You All

&

God Bless the United States of America

Floyd