WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED
ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR THREE
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Name
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Published
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OVERVIEW
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 14
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Dec
18, 2012
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 15
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Jan. 02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 16
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Jan. 08, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART
16 EXTRA
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Jan. 11, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 17
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Jan. 15, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 18
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Jan. 22, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 19
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Jan. 29, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 20
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Feb. 05, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 21
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Feb. 14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 22
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Feb. 20, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 23
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Feb. 27, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 23 SPECIAL
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Mar. 06, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM
PART 24
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Mar. 07, 2013
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IN THIS
ISSUE
1. Violence Against Women Act &
Democracy, what is happening to it?
2. Don't get taken by a scam.
3. A balanced plan to avoid Sequester.
4. Sequester - the President's plan.
5. Bull market for stocks
Bear market for workers.
VIOLENCE
AGAINST WOMEN ACT
&
WHAT IS
HAPPENING TO OUR
DEMOCRACY?
By Floyd Bowman.
Publisher "Opinions Based On
Facts."
March 7, 2013
On Feb. 28, the House
finally passed the Violence Against Women Act. What is particularly interesting to me is the
number of Republicans that voted against it.
In 2000, only 1
Republican voted against the same bill.
In 2005, 2 Republicans voted against the same bill. In 2013, 138 Republicans voted against the
bill.
For quite sometime, I
have been saying that the Republican Party is on a crusade to overthrow our
Democracy. More and more items occur
that just keep adding to my assumption.
Recently, as you know
if you have been reading the past two or three postings, the Ayn Rand
Philosophy is firmly at work. The above
vote shows what a change has taken place since 2000. It is subversive and it just keeps coming. Speaker Boehner's action, along with Paul
Ryan and Eric Cantor, are openly subversive.
They are bordering on traitorous performance.
Even the Supreme Court
is starting to act out of bounds. On
Feb. 27, 2013 Supreme Court Justice Scalia, has compared voting rights to "Entitlements." There is a strong movement to take away the
right for minority voting. If the
Supreme Court determines that voting is an "Entitlement" then they
can set up rules as to who is entitled to the voting entitlement.
Folks, we
are going backwards in our country. The only way Republicans can win an election
is to fix the election by illegal means and they are trying to get the
Conservative Supreme Court to help them by making some voting right decisions
that will let them fix elections legally.
~~~
DON'T GET
TAKEN
BY
A SCAM
By Floyd Bowman.
Publisher "Opinions Based On
Facts.
March 7, 2013
Yesterday, March 6,
2013, I received a letter from a group I have never heard of by the name of
"TROOPS NEED YOU," signed by a Lieutenant Colonel Eric Egland (not
mis-spelled). Thinking that it is quite
possible that you will receive the same letter, I am giving you the information
that I have learned about this letter.
Enclosed was a small
sewing kit and a very well written letter setting forth a plea from a Captain
Matthew G. of the 10 Mountain Division, Faryab Province, Afghanistan,
requesting sewing kits for his 400 men to repair their tattered uniforms.
The letter is four
full pages long and, as I said, it was very well written, and makes you feel
like you want to send your last dollar to them right away. I am fortunate to have a retired Sergeant
Major with two tours in Afghanistan
I asked him to read
the letter and tell me what he thought about it. Long talk cut short, he said that first of
all, every uniform comes with a complete repair kit. Second, the small kit that they plan to send
to the troops would not do much good as the material in the uniforms is of a
strength that the needle and thread wouldn't work. Third, and most telling, there is no such
unit as the 10 Mountain Division. Obviously, it is a SCAM.
Don't get taken in by it if you get one.
~~~
A
Balanced Plan to Avert the Sequester and Reduce the Deficit
FROM FLOYD:
Obviously, this article was written quite some time ago, but I feel its
content is very important and sets us straight on some points. It is as apropos now as it was when it was
written.
In eight days, harmful automatic cuts are slated to take
effect, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cutting vital services
for children, seniors, people with mental illness and our men and women in
uniform.
Only Congress can
avoid this self-inflicted wound to our economy and middle class families, and
the only thing standing in the way of a solution today is Congressional
Republicans’ refusal to even consider closing tax loopholes that benefit
wealthy Americans and well-connected corporations. The President and
Congressional Democrats have put forward solutions to avoid these cuts and
allow time for both sides to work on a long-term, balanced solution to our
deficit challenges.
The President is
serious about cutting spending, reforming entitlements and the tax code to
reduce the deficit in a balanced way. The
question is, will Congressional Republicans come to the table to get something
done?
Let’s
take a moment to look what we’ve done so far: The President has
already reduced the deficit by over $2.5 trillion, cutting spending by
over $1.4 trillion, bringing domestic discretionary spending to its lowest
level as a share of the economy since the Eisenhower era [see below]. As a
result of these savings, together with a strengthening economy, the deficit is
coming down at the fastest pace of anytime in American history other than the
demobilization from World War II.
And he's laid out a specific plan to
do more. His proposal
resolves the sequester and reduces our deficit by over $4 trillion dollars in a
balanced way- by cutting spending, finding savings in entitlement programs and
asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share. As a
result the deficit would be cut below its historic average and the debt would
fall as a share of the economy over the next decade.
Just two
months ago Speaker Boehner said there was $800 billion in deficit reduction
that could be achieved by only closing loopholes and reducing tax expenditures.
So we know we can get this done. Let’s be clear: the
President’s proposal to Speaker Boehner is still on the table. Here it is again.
We can't just cut
our way to prosperity. Even as we look for ways to reduce deficits over the
long term, we must grow the economy in a way that strengthens the middle class
and everyone willing to work hard to get into it.
So the choice in
front of Congressional Republicans today is simple: will they let these
devastating cuts happen that will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs simply
because they refuse to close one tax loophole for the wealthy? Or will they compromise and work with us on a
balanced solution to get this done? We
hope they come to the table for the sake of middle class families, our national
security and our future, today.
~~~
The Sequester - The Presidents Plan
A Balanced Plan to Avert
the Sequester
and Reduce the Deficit
By Floyd Bowman.
Publisher "Opinions Based On Facts."
March 7, 2013
President Obama believes that our guiding focus must be growing the economy
and strengthening the middle class . That’s his North Star, and it's why he
won't accept cuts that force the middle class to bear the burden of deficit
reduction.
The President has put forward a specific plan that will avoid
sequestration's harmful budget cuts and reduce the deficit in a balanced way --
by cutting spending, finding savings in entitlement programs and closing tax
loopholes.
Both parties have already come together to cut the deficit by more than
$2.5 trillion and today the deficit is coming down at the fastest pace since
the end of World War II.
President Obama's plan
builds on this progress and would cut the deficit by another $1.5 trillion,
bringing it below its historic average.
Speaker Boehner
continually says that the President hasn't offered a plan. It just simply is not true, as the following
will show. He also keeps pointing out
that the House of Representatives has passed two bills in the past 10 months
that would avoid Sequester, but the Senate has not brought either one to a
vote. The bills contained items that had
nothing to do with the Sequester and made it impossible to accept. Boehner then says why doesn't the Senate pass
a bill and send it to us. The answer to
that is simple. All money bills have to
start in the House. At any rate, the President does have a plan and here it is.
The President's
Plan: $4 Trillion of deficit reduction,
including the last offer to Speaker Boehner.
The President has
signed into law more than $2.5 trillion of deficit reduction
Discretionary spending cuts
over the past 2 years. $1.4T
(Not counting War savings)
New revenue from
wealthiest in fiscal cliff deal More
than $600B
Interest savings More
than $500B
Subtotal deficit reduction
to date More
than $2.5T
The
President's last offer to the Speaker,
which is
still on the table.
More than
$1.5T in additional deficit reduction.
Even split between defense
and
non-defense discretionary savings: $200B
Health savings could be
achieved by: $400B
Reduced payment to drug companies $140B
Reduced hospital payments such as
reimbursement for patients who
don't pay. $
30B
Encourage efficient care after a hospital stay $ 50B
Encourage beneficiaries to seek high value
health care and ask the most fortunate
to pay more. $ 35B
Medicaid, Pay-for-Delay, IPAB program integrity $
25B
Other health savings $120B
Non-health mandatory savings
- could be
achieved by: $200B
Eliminate certain subsidies for
agriculture $ 30B
Reform Federal retirement program $
35B
Reform postal service and TSA passenger
security fees $ 40B
Strengthen solvency of UI trust fund $ 50B
Other savings including Spectrum Fees,
Sales of Excess Property, & Program
Integrity $ 45B
Spending savings from superlative
CPI with
protections for vulnerable $130B
Subtotal, Total New
Spending Reductions $930B
+$200B interest
REVENUE
Limit tax deductions to
28% for the wealthiest
and close other
loopholes $580B+$100BCPI
change
TEMPORARY
GROWTH MEASURES
Immediate investments in
infrastrudture -$50B
TOTAL
DEFICIT REDUCTION
DEFICIT REDUCTION TO DATE MORE
THAN $2.5T
NEW DEFICIT REDUCTION $1.8T
TOTAL
DEFICIT REDUCTION
MORE THAN
$4.3T
~~~
Why
There’s a Bull Market for Stocks and Bear Market for Workers
Robert Reich
NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Wednesday 6 March 2013
Today the Dow Jones
Industrial Average rose above 14,270—completely erasing its 54 percent loss
between 2007 and 2009.
The stock market is
basically back to where it was in 2000, while corporate earnings have doubled
since then.
Yet the real median wage
is now 8 percent below what it was in 2000, and unemployment remains sky-high.
Why is the stock market
doing so well, while most Americans are doing so poorly? Four reasons:
First, productivity gains.
Corporations have been investing in
technology rather than their workers. They
get tax credits and deductions for such investments; they get no such tax
benefits for improving the skills of their employees. As a result corporations can now do more with
fewer people on their payrolls. That means higher profits.
Second, high unemployment
itself. Joblessness all but eliminates the bargaining power of most
workers—allowing corporations to keep wages low. Public policies that might otherwise reduce
unemployment—a new WPA or CCC to hire the long-term unemployed, major
investments in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure—have been rejected in
favor of austerity economics. This also
means higher profits, at least in the short run.
Third, globalization. Big American-based corporations have been
expanding and hiring around the globe where markets are growing fastest—even
while the U.S.
Finally, the Fed’s
easy-money policies. They’ve pushed investors into the stock market because
bond yields are so low. On Tuesday, the yield on the 10-year U.S.
All of this spells
widening inequality in America
Corporate profits are
claiming a larger share of national income than at any time in 60 years, while
the portion of total income going to employees is near its lowest since 1966. As my colleague Immanuel Saez recently found,
all the economic gains between 2009 and 2011 (the last year for which data were
available) went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. The bottom 99 percent has continued to lose
ground.
And yet the tax code
continues to give preference to capital gains over ordinary income—a huge boon
to investors. The sequestration is
likely to make all this worse, since it will slow the U.S.
More than 3.8 million
Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits will have their monthly
payments reduced by as much as 9.4 percent, and lose an average of $400 in
benefits over their period of joblessness.
The Department of
Education’s Title I program, which helps schools serving more than a million
disadvantaged students, will be cut $715 million, and $400 million will be cut
from Head Start, the preschool program for poor children. And major cuts will be made in the Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which provides
nutrition assistance and education.
The health of an economy
is not measured by the profits of corporations headquartered within it or the
value of its stock market. It depends, rather, on how many of people have jobs
and whether those jobs pay decent wages.
By this measure, we are a
long way from economic health. Rarely before in American history have public
policies so blatantly helped the most fortunate among us, so cruelly harmed the
least fortunate, and exposed so many, average working Americans, to such
widespread insecurity.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and the
creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again on Tuesday March 12, 2013.
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United States of America
Floyd
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