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Food Stamp Friday - Newt Shows America His True Colors
Food Stamp Friday - Newt Shows America His True Colors
I try to keep politics out of the weekly posts but screw that!
That disgusting, vile, son-of-a-bitch (just my opinion, we report - you decide!) Newt Gingrich is on a 12-city pre-election tour where he is advising Republican candidates to frame the choice for voters between Democrats as "the party of food stamps" while selling the GOP as "the party of paychecks."
With a truly shocking 42M Americans in such dire straits that they need food stamps to make ends meet (and our study of the shopping habits of the poor last week clearly illustrated that this aid is the only way they can eat as they shop the same day the checks come every month), Gingrich this week distributed a memo to Republican hopefuls saying they should use the final month to stress tax and spending cuts as a way to spur job growth while attacking Democratic policies as detrimental that effort.
"It’s perfectly fair to say they are earning the title of the party of food stamps," he said. "By contrast, we have historically since Ronald Reagan of 1980 been the party of job creation."
The party of job creation??? Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha - ha! Ha, ha, ha. Ha! OK, I think I’m done now. Ha! OK, now I can go on (but I’m still giggling). I will sum up the very cogent point I made to Members early this morning by simply saying: Is this out of touch elitist wealth-sucking windbag totally insane or just a big, fat liar? Let’s look at a chart:
What? Don’t like this one? Do you think it’s unfair to keep picking on poor W? I hear this all the time, Obama’s been in office 21 months, he needs to OWN this recession now and we need to stop looking at the idiot who caused it and pretend it was all Obama’s fault since he took office in the month that job losses maxed out at 850,000.
As logical as that line of reasoning may be, I do like to try to keep a historical perspective on things. We republished a full set of charts that illustrate my points from Member Chat over at Seeking Alpha, so you can view them here, but let me share just two that I find relevant. For the first chart, let’s take a look at ALL the post-Depression Presidents, including the great and powerful Ronald Reagan, and see how they stacked up in providing jobs for the American people:
Ouch! Not looking good for the red team is it? In fact, this was only through August of ‘09 and did not include 2.8M job losses in Bush’s last 4 months in office. A feat of failure that put his Administration squarely in the red for the first time since Hoover sucked up the economy in the 20s.
Well, sure, the Republicans may suck at creating jobs but they shine on controlling spending, right. Ha, ha and ha ha again! There is not even a close contest there as Reagan, Bush and Bush ran up OVER $6Tn in debt in 20 combined years ($300Bn per year) while the dreaded Carter and Clinton caused a GRAND TOTAL of $548Bn (0.55Tn) to be added to the deficit in 12 combined years ($45Bn/year).
How about government spending (all these figures are on the linked charts, by the way)? Also no contest, since 1940, Republicans have added far more then Democrats and, in fact, the only modern President to ever significantly reduce government spending was Harry Truman, despite all those liberal programs that paid for our parents homes and sent them to college, etc.
"Ooh, ooh" - you may say, as you raise your hand for attention "What about the pork projects - those filthy Democrats love pork projects." No, so sorry but this is one of the funniest charts. Mr. Gingrich’s party took over the House and the Senate in the 1994 elections and controlled both houses every session other than 2001-2 (when Jeffords got disgusted and switched parties) through Dec. 2005 and LOOK WHAT THEY DID!:
THESE are the people who want you to vote them back in, THESE are the people who are making all the same promises they broke last time about spending and fraud and waste and family. Who was in control of Congress from 1995 through 2005, when Total Federal Spending DOUBLED? You may think politics is not about the markets but it’s ALL about the markets right now. We are teetering on the edge of a precipice and going back to the disastrous policies that drove us to the edge of a cliff in the first place is NOT going to make things better. Our future investing decisions will very much hinge on who is in charge and so will our economic futures as a nation.
Just look at the tremendous burden we face if we extend the Bush tax cuts. It’s bad enough if we don’t but perhaps we can cut back spending and grow a little faster to offset the doubling of our debt to GDP load between now and 2050 but CLEARLY, extending them is nothing short of National Suicide!
You can’t give Trillions of dollars of tax breaks to the top 5% while 20% of the bottom 95% are unemployed or under-employed! A healthy economy needs a healthy labor force, which leads to healthy consumer spending which leads to more wealth for everyone - the proverbial "bigger pie." Cutting back on the social safety net and running an austerity budget when 42M of your citizens (13.5%) can’t live without food stamps is simply immoral. They do still teach morals somewhere, don’t they?
In fact, here is yet another chart of the income growth rate of post-war America broken down by party and, once again, the Democrats CLEARLY deliver better economic results for all. Well, not all, the top 1% do not do as well by a small margin under the Democrats but the entire top 5% STILL DO BETTER when the Dems are in charge by a full 10%!
We just got the Non-Farm Payroll numbers and they show that we LOST another 95,000 jobs in September. A loss of 5,000 jobs was expected. Government payrolls shrank by 159,000 jobs (damn those Democrats and their cutbacks!) while private enterprise added 64,000. While Unemployment held steady at 9.6%, U-6, the broader and also official measure of Unemployment jumped from 16.7% in August to 17.1% in September. Even worse (and you won’t hear this in the MSM), March has now been revised down — wait for it — by 366,000 jobs! That’s right, we dropped 366,000 jobs in March vs. an originally reported up 50,000(ish) so an 800% miss in the data. Wow - good thing we didn’t know that then or the market might not have run up 7.5% between March 1st and April 26th! I wonder what other "lucky" statistical mistakes are being made during the current rally?
So don’t get me wrong, Democrats suck too but just not as much as Republicans and, since we really only have two choices - I have to go with the guys who at least have some kind of track record fixing an economy, because this one is TOTALLY BROKEN! Of course, poor unemployment numbers boosted the futures because futures traders are generally idiots who are in the highest tax brackets and only think in terms of how things affect them and no jobs means (in theory) more Quantitative Easing and low interest rates and cheap labor - it’s everything a Capitalist dreams of all coming true at once!
From a trading perspective - frankly my dears, we don’t give a damn. We are cashy and flexible and we hit shorts on the Dow yesterday for a quick 50% in yesterday’s Member Alert and we’ll be looking to do it again this morning if they are going to keep pretending that TERRIBLE news is good news. A test of 10,800 is my goal for today and, if not, we’ll certainly take some flyers for Monday, which is a semi-holiday in America which celebrate Columbus "sort of" discovering the country 500 years after Leif Ericson - all of which came as quite a surprise to the people who had been living there for thousands of years, who had this crazy idea that they had discovered the place…
We’ll have to digest this nonsense over the weekend and play it by ear into Member Chat this morning because anything can happen and probably will on what is likely to be a low-volume day. Sorry for the rant but I work feeding the hungry and that really touches a nerve for me so sorry, Newt, maybe you aren’t a totally disgusting, vile, son-of-a-bitch.
Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha - ha! Ha, ha, ha. Ha!
Have a good weekend,
- Phil
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" no more realistic than handicapping "professional" wrestling matches"
+1000 LEVEL UP!
I stopped reading when i got to the first dem/repub juxtaposition. I don't feel that I have that kind of time to waste anymore.
+100000
The Remocrats are the party of WELFARE FOR EVERYONE (pimps and lobbyists first).
The Depublicans are the party of WELFARE FOR BANKING CRIMINALS ONLY.
All we have is jockeying for Captain of the Titanic.
I think its the other way around (mostly).
My father explained this to me when I was young: Democrats rob from the middle class and give to the poor. Republicans rob from the middle class and give to the rich.
wow, your Dad was an idiot, midtowng!!
Or the super-set: Politicians rob everyone else.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Politics: from
"poly" meaning "many" +
"ticks" meaning "blood sucking vermin"
Three points:
1. There is no Republican or Democrat party. They are merely two different wings of the big-spending Statist party. What we are seeing with the TEA Party people and the actual conservatives infiltrating the R half of that nonsense is the revival of the true Republican platform.
2. I would venture to guess at least half of the people on food stamps do not need them. A good many of the people I know collecting UE and SNAP don't need either. They're doing it because they can. I mean, why work if you don't have to?
3. You are part of the problem with your, "since we really only have two choices", bullshit. There are lots of parties out there to choose from. If you don't have the balls to step outside the lines and vote with your conscience, kill yourself.
good summation.
Ilene, please go back to watching MSNBC.
Thank you Conrad. You nailed it.
Conrad, your comment is spot on. I will add a few of my own observations, from observing both parties since the Nixon years. (Things they DO, which often contradicts what they SAY)
Liberal academic types (who would never live in da hood but think they understand minorities) think the Dems like black folks and Mexicans, while the GOP does not.
The fact is both parties cant love the minorities enough, and Govt givaways to the poor are ever increasing even when the GOP controls all 3 branches of govt. Newt would never ever build a fence on the border or make people do busy work for food stamps. Way too much money being made by all sorts of folks as a result of these programs. TPTB know all those programs are abused beyond recognition but they dont care.
GOP is believed to be anti-govt spending and all that crap but they spend like drunken sailors just like the Dems. The GOP is supposed to hate illegal immigrants, but of course they love them dearly, because they work cheap. No border fence or enforcement of the law will beforthcoming from the GOP,ever.
The Dems are supposed to be peace loving war haters, but thats just in speeches. The much discredited "war on terror" including CIA torture has hardly missed a beat under our new Democratic, nobel peace prize winning, mostly black president.
The Gop is all about individual freedoms and small govt, but thats crap. Nowdays you have to piss test to get a menial job, and there always seems to be a pressing "war" (on drugs; on terror;on whatever) that leaves an individal with a lot less freedom after 8 years of those bastards.
Obama was all about transparency and curbing the abuse of corporate power, but of course its business as usual.
I could go on for pages but the point is that corporate America funds the two parties and their supposed idealogical differences are 99 percent hype and maybe1 percent action.
Liberal academic whites who worry themselves about the plight of Food stamp recipients and think racial harmony and world peace are only a few more Dems and govt programs away just dont get it.
People who think America will return to prosperity and industrial greatness if we only get the dems replaced with the gop must be in denial as well.
Both parties have had everything their way in recent history controlling every aspect of govt, while the jobs went overseas and money was printed to solve everything.
Obama and Newt are two peas in a pod, its long past time for the working class to get rid of the two party sham (think good cop/bad cop) before we are ALL on food stamps.
Very, very, VERY well put! I just pressed the thumbs up button!!
+ 14 Trillion.
vote for whoever listens to Ron Paul.
Conrad: Thank you for writing this and saving me the trouble.
"I would venture to guess at least half of the people on food stamps do not need them."
And this statement is based on...what? You know two people on food stamps and one of them could get by without it? Or do you simply hate poor people?
no we like 'the poor'. its bernanke that hates them, and the elderly by driving up their grocery bills.
we're also trying to save the poor from the Dems who exploit them for votes.
are you the 'defender of the poor', midtowng, with other peoples money, of course?
all this big government shite does is put a ceiling above the poor and ensure the 'upper class elite' keep their thrones. wake up and smell the dogshit.
So the food stamps program exploits poor people and puts a ceiling above them, while ensuring the upper class elite keep their thrones.
Have you bothered to think this one out at all?
yes, because ANY big government program keeps money out of private hands that create jobs so that those of us who have been poor can FEED OURSELVES.
have you bothered to think about that one, you one-dimensional fuckwit?
i dream of the day where liberal do-gooders like you get bullets in the head from those whose anti-social behavior you fund WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. the MONOPOLY government programs disconnect folks and CREATE class warfare.
folks used to have to asked each other for help, now they just have to asked their CONgressman for another flat screen TV.
THE WORLD OWES US NOTHING. CREATE YOUR OWN JOB. OFFER TO PICK UP YOUR NEIGHBOR'S TRASH FOR A FEW BUCKS. ASK YOUR NEIGHBOR FOR HELP.
you ever get out of your ivory tower, midtowng?!!!
FUCK YOU.
Agreed. I know several people on "food stamps" who definately need them, if they have any hope at all of keeping their properties. These, for the most part, are not 1% down mcmansioners, just hard-workers who have lost jobs and predictable ways of supporting themselves.
++
Amen to that...
Seriously. This crap is supposed to be on Huffington Post, not ZH.
I'm curious why ZH is supposed to be only for right-wingers?
Sorry if you got that impression. It's not only for right-wingers.
It's for people that can think.
Sorry if you feel like you just don't fit in.
One of the defining characteristics of the Zero Hedge community is an anti-big-government, pro-free-market stance, which in this day and age, translates to being against BOTH the Democratic and Republican parties.
Since left-wingers are typically for socialism, handouts, and big government, and don't trust free markets or individual initiative, they don't tend to fit in here, and prefer venues like DailyKos or the HuffPuff.
.
Instead of a line drawn between left(progressivism/liberalism), and right(conservatism); instead, make it a graph with four quadrants. The "x" axis is liberal-conservative. The "y" axis is libertarian-authoritarian.
Personally I find authoritarians left, right and center to be repugnant. But when it comes to those who lean more towards the libertarian end of the "y" axis, I can find common ground across the "left/right" or "x" axis spectrum(socially left, fiscally right).
Any individual or group or organization that attempts to impose their ideology will be soundly ignored by myself and others who are able to think for themselves!
Fair 'nuff.
But I should point out that right-wing Republicans are also for socialism and handouts (for corporations), big government (for military, prisons, policing your bedroom, and all types of law enforcement), and don't trust free markets (supports the Fed too).
I have no problem with libertarians, as you seem to describe, but that isn't the same as "right-wing". I think too many self-described right-wingers confuse the two. They tend to think that "Big Government" is the same thing as "government involved in things that I don't approve of."
True libertarians don't describe themselves as right-wing.
Uh, no, those would be left-wing republicans.
Right wing is about less tax and less government. True that modern republicans don't uphold this, but don't pretend they are right wing. That's just being stupid.
There are no left-wing Republicans anymore. The mistake too many Republicans make is that they think right-wing equals less government. It doesn't.
For instance, no matter how right-wingers try to rewrite history, fascism is right-wing and it is also Big Government. Saying otherwise ignores what everyone at the time believed/believes.
OTOH, I'm sure you would be surprised just how many people on the left believe in civil and human rights and want to restrict many government powers.
you're playing semantics, midtowng.
America is meant to be about liberty, which cannot exist with big government programs. they are mutually exclusive.
"socially liberal, fiscally conservative" = freedom.
Republicans deserve to be ridiculed for promoting a standing army to be exploited by industrial forces; it was never part of our Constitution, only a navy to protect our shores. today, we can probably include an air force. otherwise, armed citizens, state militias, and, at most, a national guard is plenty back-up to a navy and air force.
as for the Dems. they offer endless "big government solutions" that have choked the life out of the opportunity that once existed in this country (along with The Fed, fractional reserve lending, and fiat money).
read a history book; learn the mechanisms of cause and effect; wake up and smell the dogshit.
+1
...but i hate Dems much, much more.
+1
+1
Can I junk her whole post?
That's what I was wondering - how can we label guest posts as complete crap?
Yeah, all I could do was give a meaningless 1 star, when I'd rather flag it as partisan politics with a big fat X...
1-starring the truth..you must be a Republican.
You should try harder next time
I dont think this vapid sophomoric political hack piece would even make it onto the Huffington blog. Certainly has no place on Zerohedge...did Tyler leave early and they snuck one in here? I dont get it, most empty headed BS Ive ever seen on Zerohedge.
Hard to figure out what Ilene is trying to say since her lips are so firmly locked around Maobama's nutsack!
ha, ha. yeah, ilene, why don't you just get an internship in the oval office?!
...what a dumb bitch.
Sheep-dog, why don't you learn to read (e.g. "by") --not only did I not write the article, but I don't appreciate nasty comments that offer nothing except crap. If you have an intelligent point, why don't you make it.
"If you have an intelligent point, why don't you make it. " How about you start first?
Unemployment was 5+% when Bush left and now it's 9.6%, but actually higher because Obummers BLS is issuing nothing but BS.
ilene, you have shit for brains. you do not deserve an intelligent response. if you do not 'get it' by the time that you look as old and worn out as you do now, then you never will.
i feel sorry for whoever sleeps with you, because i'm sure you're as self-serving in the sack as you are in type. hey, as long as YOU feel good about yourself, eh?
go fuck yourself, and quit attempting to ruin the best site on the internet.
Dear ilene, this was the first contribution I've looked at from you. And it will be my last. The pretend fight between the two major partys no longer works on me. The real battle is between the tax payers and the tax eaters or if you like the producers vs. parasites. You must not be a Zero Hedge reader or you wouldn't be so stupid to continue pushing your pile of mammoth shit. bye.
Dear WM, as someone said below "ideology will always trump disinterested consideration of the facts." AND as a non-democrat, who reads ZH all the time - and arranged for a ZH section on PSW - it's very discouraging to see this discussion devolve into a race to the bottom in terms ignorance and insults. If Phil's charts are wrong, post more accurate ones or explain why he's wrong. I agree it's not really about democrats vs. republicans, that distracts from the real issues. ZH readers should get that.
The promotion of the power elite's divisions is my issue with your contribution. Such as global warming, peak oil, race relations, political divisiveness, wars, etc. Look at some of O's biggest contributors (banks and bankers) and look where the money from those contributors is going now. We are witnessing the collapse of the biggest con ever put upon the world and you want to promote partisan politics. Good grief.
Oh ya, I could care less about Phil's charts. They were created to destract the public while the looters continue the fleece.
Again, my issue is not the information, it is the promotion of the division.
amen.
nevermind that Bush spent like a Dem, Clinton signed welfare reform, Nixon ended the gold standard (instead of reducing the size of government), and Kennedy cut taxes.
how one-dimensionally foolish can one article be?
policies take years to affect economies. on one hand, Dems whine that Obama "inherited" a bad economy; on the other, credit good times during Dem presidencies all to themselves. ...which is it? think about it before you post this divisive shite next time, yeah?
Big government = slavery. Decentralization, and small state and local government = freedom. put that into a chart, idiot.
impeach President Flounder! Nobama!!
So - the charts were fabricated to tell a lie??