Have you been wondering how the Imperial Federal government has been spending your hard-earned tax dollars?  Wonder no more.  Excerpt:

If America does not change course, the future will be dramatically worse. Now more than ever, it is crucial that Americans understand what our nation’s spending, taxes, and debt mean for them and their families. The Heritage Foundation’s Federal Budget in Pictures offers a unique tool to learn about the federal budget in a clear and compelling way.

A few of the more interesting charts from the article follow, with comments.

We have our fourth grandchild on the way; she will be born in September.  Her share of Imperial debt?  $41,000.  She will be born owing an amount that would have been a healthy down payment on a house, or two to three years of her college education.  By the time she is 24 she will owe half the value of a pretty nice house, $142,000.

Now, 2031:  The year yr. obdt. turns 70 is the year that Imperial entitlements plus interest on Imperial debt exceeds all tax revenues.  That 18% figure estimated in the chart here, by the way, is probably pretty accurate; there appears to be a hard cap of tax revenues at about 19-20% of GDP, no matter what tax rates are.  (Someone send a note about that to Queen Hillary I, who is still maundering about “revenue enhancements,” by which she means tax hikes.)

This chart speaks for itself:  Social Security is screwed.

Oh, and remember that comment about tax rates?   Take a look.

This is a flaming disaster.  The Imperial Federal government’s response:

I think we’re well past the point of no return.

For today’s Hump Day fare, have a look at the latest from the always-worth-reading Dr. Thomas Sowell.  Here is Just Asking.  Excerpt:

In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of rhetoric — and disregard of reality.

One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to “ask from society’s lottery winners” that they make a “modest investment” in government programs to help the poor.

Despite pious rhetoric on the left about “asking” the more fortunate for more money, the government does not “ask” anything. It seizes what it wants by force. If you don’t pay up, it can take not only your paycheck, it can seize your bank account, put a lien on your home and/or put you in federal prison.

So please don’t insult our intelligence by talking piously about “asking.”

As Dr. Sowell points out later in the column, another canard constantly parroted by the Left is referring to the successful as “society’s lottery winners.”

Speaking personally, if I may, for a moment; I’m not in the top one percent that Her Highness Queen Hillary has promised to “bring down,” but I sure as hell am in the top ten percent.  But I didn’t win any damn lottery.  I’ve worked my ass off.  I’ve worked since I was fourteen, and I figure on working as long as my health allows me to.  But it wasn’t “good fortune,” or “luck.”  It was work.  It was taking risks.  It was long hours, long days and missed weekends.

That’s pretty typical for the self-employed.  I know more than a few serial entrepreneurs that might just take a swing at you if you suggest their success was just due to luck.

But this is just another sign of the economic cluelessness on display in the Imperial City today.  We have in the Imperial Mansion an executive who has never run a business, never met a payroll, never looked at a balance sheet – he has never produced anything, ever, and now he’s bloviating on economic success.

What a revoltin’ development.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Burger Flipping Overlords.  Excerpt:

The Momentum Machines website is low-key right now, but that may have something to do with high-profile arguments in the press and protests in the streets demanding that fast-food chains pay workers $15 an hour to do the job the company’s robots are designed to fill. Even before those placard-wielders decided to raise their costs in terms of dollars and grief, the San Francisco-based start-up announced that they were obsolete.

Momentum Machines’ old, boastier website claimed:
Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.

Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant.

It does everything employees can do except better:

• it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
• our next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.
• Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices.
• it’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.

This, True Believers, is the future of the minimum-wage debate.

There is and always will be a real minimum wage, and that is $0.00/hour.  There is and always will be a law of economics , and that is that a job is only worth the value that the employee returns to the employer.  If the wage is artificially raised above that value, then the job will go away – and above you see that happening.  Minimum wage raised above the value a fast-food employee returns?  Replace them with automated order-taking kiosks and robotified burger lines.

When I myself was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck (with a pink carnation and a pickup truck) most fast-food and other minimum-wage jobs were held by high-school kids making a few extra bucks to spend on cars, girls and other entertainments.  Now you hear a lot about how “you can’t support a family on minimum wage,” to which I can only reply that if you are trying to support a family on one minimum-wage job, you really need to take a good, hard look at your life – and, by the way, teenagers today are mostly unable to gain that valuable entry-level work experience because they are priced out of the market.

And there’s one more little thing:  Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is the Imperial Federal government allowed to meddle in voluntary contracts between employee and employer.

But then, it’s not like the denizens of the Imperial City pay all that much attention to the Constitution any more.

Have a look at this, True Believers:  Senator Rubio’s pro-growth tax reform plan.  Excerpt:

Perhaps no function of our government is more antiquated and dysfunctional than our federal tax system, which:

• Requires Americans to spend 6.1 billion hours per year preparing their tax returns;
• Is so complex that only about 30% of individual filers itemize, meaning itemized deductions in their current form are useless to 70% of individual filers;
• Penalizes parents by requiring them to contribute twice to the old – age entitlement system;
• Gives foreign companies an advantage over their American competitors in business done outside of our borders;
• Encourages debt issuance and accumulation, needlessly creating a riskier economy;
• Fails to sufficiently distinguish between businesses investing money into growth and new jobs and businesses accumulating cash and withdrawing profits;
• Taxes the same flow of money at several different points, hindering growth and hiding the true burden of the system;
• Creates an environment of confusion and uncertainty for individuals and firms – and unfair opportunity for the special interest lobbyists – by designating a multitude of tax code provisions as temporary; and,
• Conspires with our outmoded welfare system to discourage work and investment in human capital by imposing very high effective marginal tax rates on families and individuals living near the poverty line.

To end these problems, Senator Rubio and co-sponsor Senator Mike Lee propose to:

• Treat all families equitably and eliminate the tax code’s biases against parents and married couples;
• Encourage economic growth that will yield more private sector jobs and higher wages;
• Remove crony biases in the code;
• Enhance the ability of firms located in the United States to compete in the global market; and
• Curtail the Internal Revenue Service’s discretion and capacity for abuse.

There’s an even better way to conduct this, of course; the FairTax.  But for quite a while now, the FairTax has looked to be a non-starter in Congress, and it is certainly a dead letter as long as Barack Obama is in the Imperial Mansion.

But then, the Rubio-Lee plan certainly faces a veto as well.  To be honest, nothing much is going to happen until at least January of 2017, because “tax reform” to President Obama means “raising tax rates.”

Have a read through the entire plan.  While yr. obdt. would prefer scrapping our entire system and replacing it, as in the FairTax, this plan is nevertheless a reasonable, rational pro-growth plan along the lines of the Reagan reforms of the early 1980s, which led to two decades of robust economic growth – quite different from the economic doldrums we’ve been in since 2007.

Why the President and Congressional Democrats seem so opposed to economic growth, however, is a stumper.

Thanks to The Daley Gator for the Rule Five link!

Any True Believers out there under 40?  You’re fucked.  Excerpt:

Remember Occupy Wall Street, when thousands across the country took to the streets, sleeping in tents to protest the ultra-rich 1 percent? The occupiers’ frustration was real, but their ire was misdirected. They should have launched an Occupy the AARP movement instead.

Government policies that transfer cash from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy are the real scandal. In 1970, Social and Medicare accounted for 20 percent of federal spending. They have since grown to 40 percent; by 2030, they will be more than half. And these numbers understate the level of federal spending for the elderly. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some 28 percent of spending on Medicaid, a program designed to offer health care to families in poverty, goes to older Americans.

Yr. obdt. is forced to disagree in one respect; the Occupy Wall Street crowd weren’t misdirected, they were idiotic.   But beyond that, what our Imperial Federal government has done is a cosmic leap in idiocy beyond anything the Occupy crowd ever dreamed of.

Instead of explaining this again, I’ll just present a relevant quote from the Animal Manifesto:

The entire picture of tax and fiscal policy, such as it is, by our Imperial Federal Government is an unmitigated multi-generational disaster; it is a cluster-fuck of cosmic proportions, the overarching, transcendent issue of our time.  Runaway government spending and debt is the single greatest threat to the Republic today; greater than Islamic terrorism, greater than competition from Chinese manufacturing, greater than any environmental crisis.  And this crisis can only be addressed in one of two ways; we can inflate our way out of it, or we can grow our way out of it.  We should be doing the latter, but seem to be doing the former; the purchasing power of the American dollar is almost perfectly paralleling the decline of the Roman denarius during the decline of the Empire.

Things may well be past the point of no return.  Neither party seems to have the political will to address the problem; one party seems to show some slight concern about low economic growth and the ridiculous tax system, while the other party intends to continue doubling down on bad policies.  That’s not a comforting thought.

We have demagogued away our grandchildren’s future, and history will (rightly) damn us for it.

The Reason article linked above concludes:  Unfortunately, there is almost no appetite in Congress for even mild reforms of Social Security and Medicare. Most lawmakers won’t touch entitlement programs, because older Americans vote. Driven by a desire to get re-elected, politicians refuse to reform the program at the core of our country’s future fiscal woes.

That behavior makes sense even if it’s deplorable. Harder to understand is why younger Americans don’t object when wealthy seniors take funds from those who can least afford it.

It’s another data point in the documentation of a fiscal calamity.  As the Manifesto says, future generations will rightly damn us for it.