Tag: Big Government

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‘Open Space’ Travesty Says It All

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‘Open Space’ Travesty Says It All
Aug. 11
By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

Everything that drives me crazy about Trenton played out in last week’s passage of a new “Open Space” measure, Save Jerseyans, setting up a ballot question for the November election and another expenditure which we can ill-afford.

Bad logic. Reckless spending. And a little good old fashioned horse trading?

In case you’re not aware of the background information, SCR-84 results in a proposed constitutional amendment on New Jersey’s next general election ballot which, if approved by the voters, dedicates $150 million per year for open space conservation over 30 years.  That’s a roughly $4 billion investment at a time when our government just declined to make an additional, pre-planned $2.4 billion payment towards our chronically underfunded pension system.

And it doesn’t make much sense, does it? At least not right now regardless of how you feel about open space land preservation. But it’s part of a disturbing trend where our legislators shirk their responsibility to make tough decisions by passing reckless constitutional amendment proposals that are designed, at least in part, to boost Election Day turnout. Last year’s minimum wage question and 2012′s higher education Big Labor stimulus package were apparently just the beginning.

Set aside for a moment your conceptions of what government should do or what you know it can afford. Personally, I think open space is great idea as a general concept. Government should use smart zoning and general funds to create parks and prevent our entire state from resembling that planet-sized capital city from the Star Wars movies.

What you may not know is that New Jersey taxpayers have already preserved an area of land, inside our state’ boundaries, that’s approximately the same size as Delaware – almost 2,000 square miles.

– See more at: https://savejersey.com/2014/08/open-space-bail-reform-new-jersey/#sthash.zCmy7klW.dpuf

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The economy’s big mystery: Why workers are disappearing from the job market

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The economy’s big mystery: Why workers are disappearing from the job market

JULY 20, 2014    LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2014, 1:21 AM
BY ZACHARY A. GOLDFARB
THE WASHINGTON POST
THE RECORD

* Unforeseen factors could keep many Americans out of the labor force — permanently

WASHINGTON — Ever since the job market began to recover in 2010, the decline in the unemployment rate has come with a big fat asterisk. The unemployment rate has been going down, the argument goes, but largely because people have stopped looking for work. That’s why the labor force participation rate — the percentage of the population looking for a job or employed — stands at 62.8 percent, down from 66 percent before the recession. The joblessness rate, as a reminder, stands at 6.1 percent.

Now comes a new White House report, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers, that offers fascinating insights into what might be happening in the job market. The biggest headline in the report is the least surprising. It finds that about half of the decline in participation is the result of the baby boomer generation’s beginning to retire. For years, economists have known and predicted that this would happen. It should be no reason to worry. The report also finds that a sliver of the decline in participation is simply due to the elevated unemployment rate, which is still half a point or so above normal. In all recoveries, some people opt out of looking for work while the unemployment rate is higher than normal. This, thus, is “cyclical,” and also offers little reason for concern.

But the most interesting and alarming part of the report examines what White House economists call the “residual” — the factors beyond aging and cyclicality that explain why people are disappearing from the labor force. This is what we should worry most about. It’s these people who may never return to jobs. The report finds that about a third of the decline in participation is attributable to these disappearing workers. If their exit from the labor force proves permanent, the nation’s economy could suffer for years, never achieving the growth and prosperity it once could.

What’s behind this residual is one of the big mysteries in economics today. As in why, according to the report, it emerged only in 2012. That’s right: For the first two years of the recovery, the decline in labor force participation appears to have been normal, driven by aging and temporary effects from the recession. Only later on — as the unemployment came down and the economic recovery continued — did an unusually large number of workers start to abandon the labor force.

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/biggest-threat-to-economy-comes-from-disappearing-workers-1.1054355#sthash.527eptbX.dpuf

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Readers Worries about kids future

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Readers Worries about kids future 

This country has undergone a seismic shift in its values in recent years. Our two main parties pretty much followed the same principals of self-reliance and hard work. One was just a little more to the left of the other, but nevertheless, the entrenched sense of American entrepreneurship shone through. Because of the fairly narrow gap in philosophies, common ground was fairly do-able in a divided Government. These last few years have seen a very dangerous move to increase support on the left by enhancing and pushing programs that encourage people to work less and even not at all, through hand-outs and a tax system where almost half the population pays no income tax. Now call me crazy, but even I would vote for the party that absolved me from paying income tax. Add to that, years of sending cryptic signals to people south of the border that we aren’t all that serious in preventing your border crossing, and it’s no wonder we are seeing droves flooding in. We no longer have a diligent media in this country. We have a media business model that caters to segments of society. The majortiy of these segments are to the left, and we therefore have a media that mostly acts as a cheerleader for this President.

I’m not sure if it’s even possible to get the psyche of this country back to where it used to be. I am truly worried about the future of my kids, and if this woman gets elected, I think 4-8 more years of this current way of thinking will be catastrophic.

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Obamanomics: 86M Full-Time Private-Sector Workers Sustain 148M Benefit Takers

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Obamanomics :86M Full-Time Private-Sector Workers Sustain 148M Benefit Takers

April 16, 2014 – 5:04 AM

Buried deep on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau is a number every American citizen, and especially those entrusted with public office, should know. It is 86,429,000.

That is the number of Americans who in 2012 got up every morning and went to work — in the private sector — and did it week after week after week.

These are the people who built America, and these are the people who can sustain it as a free country. The liberal media have not made them famous like the polar bear, but they are truly a threatened species.

It is not a rancher with a few hundred head of cattle that is attacking their habitat, nor an energy company developing a fossil fuel. It is big government and its primary weapon — an ever-expanding welfare state.

First, let’s look at the basic taxonomy of the full-time, year-round American worker.

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/86m-full-time-private-sector-workers-sustain-148m-benefit-takers

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Tax Revenues Hit Record for First Half of FY 2014

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Tax Revenues Hit Record for First Half of FY 2014
April 15, 2014 – 2:49 PM
By Ali Meyer

(CNSNews.com) — Inflation-adjusted federal tax revenues hit a record $1,320,793,000,000 in the first half of fiscal 2014, but the federal government still ran a $413,264,000,000 deficit during that time, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement for March.

Each month, the Treasury publishes the government’s “total receipts,” including all revenue from individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement taxes (including Social Security and Medicare taxes), unemployment insurance taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and “miscellaneous receipts.”

https://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/tax-revenues-hit-record-first-half-fy-2014

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New study shows NSA phone metadata can reveal EVERYTHING about your life

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New study shows NSA phone metadata can reveal EVERYTHING about your life

New research published by Stanford Univeristy Wednesday reveal phone and Internet metadata collected by the NSA can expose far more information about an individual than the agency admits, including, “medical conditions, financial and legal connections, and even whether they own a gun.”

Two of the school’s computer science graduate students were able to uncover the sensitive personal details of individuals from phone data details, like the numbers of callers and recipients, the location of callers, phone serial numbers and the length of conversations — all of which are data the signals intelligence agency collects in bulk both domestically and internationally.

Of the 33,688 unique numbers called by the study’s 546 study volunteers, students were able to positively identify a specific individual in 18 percent of those calls. They were also able to discern 57 percent made at least one medical call and 40 percent made a financial services call.

Computer scientists Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, the doctoral students that authored the study, say metadata are “extremely sensitive and revealing,” and “can yield a wealth of detail about family, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.”

“It would be no technical challenge to scale these identifications to a larger population,” Mayer told Stanford News, referencing similar metadata analysis the NSA is almost certainly already engaged in.

Read more: https://dailycaller.com/2014/03/13/new-study-shows-nsa-phone-metadata-can-reveal-everything-about-your-life/#ixzz2vvLeMtUQ

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The Golden Toilet : Government has become a self perpetuating beast

>Come on, is this a surprise to anyone? This is just one more example of how inefficient and costly Government is. Take a look at the cost of the bandshell bathrooms. Is there anyone who doesn’t believe that a private contractor couldn’t have built those for a fraction of the cost the Village spent?

Government has become a self perpetuating beast; enacting regulations (to protect the people!) which require people to enforce, require extra hours and costs to adhere to them and thus driving up costs for everyone else. The private sector has profit as motivation, government has service as its mandate. Government should not be running businesses that private enterprises can provide cheaper.

Did you see what happened with the school system up in Providence the other day? They fired every single teacher in the system. One of the alternatives they are looking at is hiring a private contracter to provide teachers and manage the school system. Think they can do it cheaper?

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