Here’s a real friggin’ genius that was once of the NJ’s finest. What a dope.
John Marion, ex-NJ Cop, thief and now inmate. Really not the brightest bulb on the tree either.
John Marion, a former police officer in Waldwick Borough, N.J., was sentenced today for stealing more than $321,000 by fraudulently collecting a disability pension from the State of New Jersey while working full-time as an officer in Georgia.
John Robert Marion, 44, of Valdosta, Georgia, was sentenced to 364 days in the county jail as a condition of four years of probation by Superior Court Judge Peter E. Warshaw in Mercer County. He was immediately taken into custody to begin serving his jail term. Marion pleaded guilty on Nov. 12 to a charge of third-degree theft by deception. He must pay full restitution of $321,008 and is permanently barred from public employment in New Jersey. He turned over a check for $100,000 in court today toward that restitution… The investigation began with a referral from the Pension Fraud & Abuse Unit in the New Jersey Division of Pensions.
..One of the big reasons why I had to move into the “Van Down by the River” was because I simply COULD NOT FUNCTION using cash. When I was foreclosed upon because I could not provide the bank with a tax return (because I have declared a tax strike), I began investigating possible rental scenarios in preparing to move. Kids, you CANNOT rent an apartment “above the table”, pay the utilities on said apartment, insure a vehicle and scores of other necessary expenses in the former U.S. using cash today. Between IRS liens and mortgage foreclosures, my credit score is destroyed, which also disqualifies above-board rental. If you think that cash controls and the move to outlaw the use of cash is crazy talk, just stop and think about all of the myriad ways that IT IS ALREADY IMPOSSIBLE to pay with cash. We’re already 75% of the way there...
I discovered The Shrugging Out Podcast a few months ago. I did not quite know what to make of it, I admit, until I went through and download several of the earlier episodes and listened to them in chronological order.
The site’s author / Podcaster Peter Farron (sp?) is extremely intelligent, sane, analytical and well thought out: The podcasts are obviously well-prepared in advance and – notwithstanding the intro music – an aesthetic pleasure to listen to.
The content of the shows centers on issues relating to self-sufficiency with a philosophical unpinning in libertarianism, and often draws premises from Ayn Rand’s writings. In his shows, however, Farron does not shy away from the less ethereal: He usually address current news issues, his own process of awakening and what he is doing about it in his dynamic transformation from ‘typical’ patriotic conservative to neo-patriotic libertarian survivalist (my half-assed and inadequate label, not his).
All in all, well worth the time and well worth spreading around to those with interests in libertarianism, survivalism and prepping, Ayn rand, current events, politics and the like.
I am through about 60 of his podcasts now, and will post a permalink to the blogroll. GE.
Why do we all need to acquire a piece of true wealth in the form of owned land? There are several reasons we’ll discuss. For today we’ll leave the whole, “you never really own the land because of taxes” argument off the table and focus on the land attributes that we can control.
The first reason I want each of us preppers to own land… It’s our fundamental right as a United States citizen. Our ancestors didn’t have this right as most nations of the world restricted the land ownership to royalty and the elite of society.
Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it is with a tracking service like a financial institution. Sometimes you can make a clean break and other times you have to remain “just friends”.
The US government actually has a name for people who have no bank accounts – they call these folks “the unbanked”. The FDIC defines the unbanked as “those without an account at a bank or other financial institution and are considered to be outside the mainstream for one reason or another.” Another term is “the underbanked” – “people or businesses that have poor access to mainstream financial services normally offered by retail banks. The underbanked can be characterized by a strong reliance on non-traditional forms of finance and micro-finance often associated with disadvantaged and the poor, such as check cashers, loan sharks and pawnbrokers.” Continue reading →
… In summary, as a taxpayer, you did not borrow the funds, you did not spend the funds, and you have no moral obligation to repay the funds.
click here for Mises
Rothbard’s recommendation: “I propose, then, a seemingly drastic but actually far less destructive way of paying off the public debt at a single blow: outright debt repudiation.” Repudiation is not only a sound economic solution to our fiscal crisis, but it is also the morally correct solution. Rothbard’s more detailed proposal, which was a “combination of repudiation and privatization,” should be considered a blueprint for an effective debt-reduction plan. As Rothbard argued, such a plan “would go a long way to reducing the tax burden, establishing fiscal soundness, and desocializing the United States.” As an added bonus, default would be as effective, if not more effective, than a balanced budget amendment, in reducing the likelihood of a future re-occurrence of the problem.
But “[i]n order to go this route, however, we first have to rid ourselves of the fallacious mindset that conflates public and private, and that treats government debt as if it were a productive contract between two legitimate property owners.” The commentary by Hummel and Henderson are evidence that some are seriously addressing this issue, alas, after over a 20 year lag….
DC has always been distant from the people. Apart from the IRS and the draft, they were “the other” we read about in the papers, running gangsters and spies to ground, getting the interstate built, fighting wars and generally looking out for the Little Guy. We believed they were the Big Picture People doing things on the largest scale on behalf of all who worked hard, lived responsibly and stayed right with the law. DC was the captain and crew of our mighty ship, alert and sure, cutting cleanly through heavy seas and turgid morass alike, while their grateful passengers shuddered at the hardship and horrors beyond the delights of the endless buffet on the promenade deck. Continue reading →
… I’ve spent days analyzing the bill… and frankly, it’s a joke. You can read the 200+ pages yourself if you like, but here are the important points–
As we’ve discussed before, US government spending falls into three categories.
1. Discretionary spending is what we normally think of as ‘government.’ It funds everything from the military to Homeland Security to the national parks.
2. Mandatory spending covers all the major entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Then there’s (3.) interest on the debt, which is so large they had to make it a special category.
The latter two categories are spent automatically, just like your mortgage payment that gets sucked out of the bank account before you have a chance to spend it. The only thing Congress has a say over is Discretionary Spending. Hence the name.
But here’s the problem– the US fiscal situation is so untenable that the government fails to collect enough tax revenue to cover mandatory spending and debt interest. In Fiscal Year 2011, for example, the US government spent $176 billion MORE on debt interest and mandatory spending than they generated in tax revenue.
In Fiscal Year 2012, which just ended 6 weeks ago, that shortfall increased to $251 billion. This means that they could cut the ENTIRE discretionary budget and still be in the hole by $251 billion.
This is why the Fiscal Cliff is irrelevant. The automatic cuts that are going to take place don’t even begin to address the actual problem; they’re cutting $110 billion from the discretionary budget… yet only $16.9 billion from the mandatory budget.
Given that the entire problem is with mandatory spending, slashing the discretionary budget is pointless. It’s as if the US economy is a speeding train heading towards a ravine at 200 mph, and the conductors are arguing about whether they should slow down to 150 or 175.
Overview. The United States government has five interrelated motivations for destroying the value of the dollar:
Creating money out of thin air on a massive basis is all that stands between the current state of hidden depression, and overt depression with unemployment levels in excess of those seen in the US Great Depression of the 1930s.
It is the most effective way to meet not just current crushing debt levels, but to deal with the rapidly approaching massive generational crisis of paying for Boomer retirement promises.
It creates a lucratively profitable $500 billion a year hidden tax for the benefit of the US government which is not understood by voters or debated in elections.
It is the weapon of choice being used to wage currency war and reboot US economic growth; and
It is an essential component of political survival and enhanced power for incumbent politicians.In this article we will take a holistic approach to how individual short term, medium and long term pressures all come together to leave the government with effectively no choice but to create a substantial rate of inflation that will steadily destroy the value of the dollar…via FINANCIAL SENSE….
“For the early generations, it was an incredibly good deal,” said Andrew Biggs, a former deputy Social Security commissioner who is now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The government gave you free money and getting free money is popular.”
If you retired in 1960, you could expect to get back seven times more in benefits than you paid in Social Security taxes, and more if you were a low-income worker, as long you made it to age 78 for men and 81 for women.
As recently as 1985, workers at every income level could retire and expect to get more in benefits than they paid in Social Security taxes, though they didn’t do quite as well as their parents and grandparents.
With Senate Majority Leader Reid’s (D-NV) decision on Tuesday to not pass a budget for the third straight fiscal year, the Washington game of fiscal chicken–this time over $19 billion–is in full swing once again. To provide perspective, this is less than one-half of one-percent of the 2012 budget and less than 1.5% of this year’s expected deficit. It’s also about one-eighth of one percent of our national debt.
While politicians bicker, Rome burns and the budget grows. While some pundits blame Obama, and others blame Bush, and still others blame everyone in the Beltway, the fact is neither president or party has instituted the wisest fiscal policy. Still, the increase in spending under both has not been driven principally by new spending initiatives. It has instead been driven by the increasing number of retirees and resulting growth of social spending and especially Social Security and Medicare. Continue reading →
IRS officials on background tell FOX Business the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on health reform gives the IRS even more powers than previously understood. The IRS now gets to know about a small business’s entire payroll, the level of their insurance coverage — and it gets to know the income of not just the primary breadwinner in your house, but your entire family’s income, in order to assess/collect the mandated tax.
Plus, it gets to share your personal info with all sorts of government agencies, insurance companies and employers.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “We expect even more lien and levy powers,” an IRS official says. Even the Taxpayer Advocate is deeply concerned. Continue reading →
Potential employers have to respond to the incentives and disincentives that exist in today’s world, and those do not favor conventional permanent employees. I know you’re hard-working, motivated, tech-savvy and willing to learn. The reason I can’t hire you has nothing to do with your work ethic or skills; it’s the high-cost Status Quo, and the many perverse consequences of maintaining a failing Status Quo.
The sad truth is that it’s costly and risky to hire anyone to do anything, and “bankable projects” that might generate profit/require more labor are few and far between. The overhead costs for employees have skyrocketed. So even though the wages employees see on their paychecks have stagnated, the total compensation costs the employer pays have risen substantially.
Thirty years ago the overhead costs were considerably less, adjusted for inflation, and there weren’t billboards advertising a free trip to Cabo if you sued your employer. (I just saw an advert placed by a legal firm while riding a BART train that solicited employees to sue their employers, with the incentive being “freemoney” for a vacation to Cabo.) Continue reading →
The Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling on Thursday cuts right to the very fabric of the relationship between a once-limited government and a once-free citizen, but the eternal struggle between liberty and tyranny endures. It is a beginning, not an end.
As enormously important as the high court’s Obamacare ruling is – and it’s huge – it’s not the final word. The legal and political dust has not yet settled, and it will take some time for the unpredictable ripples to form the powerful waves of history. Yet, history waits for no man, so we begin by asking: What now? Continue reading →
Imagine if your taxes tripled — literally overnight.
The so-called Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year. That means that all of the current income tax rates will rise to pre-2001 levels overnight. The lowest rate will jump from 10% to 15% and the highest from 35% to 39.6%. Although Congress extended all of the cuts at the end of last year, some Democrats have pledged to let the tax cuts expire for the “rich” — individuals making $200,000, and $250,000 for families. Continue reading →
The Pew Center has released its annual summary of US pension and retirement health care (under)funding.
As of 2010, the total underfunding gap rose by $120 billion from the prior year’s $1.26 trillion deficit to a record $1.38 trillion underfunding. This number consists of $757 billion in pension promises, not backed by any hard cash, representing pension liabilities of $3.07 trillion and assets of $2.31 trillion. In 2000, more than half of the states had their pensions 100 percent funded, but by 2010 only Wisconsin was fully funded, and 34 were below the 80 percent threshold—up from 31 in 2009 and just 22 in 2008.
But that pales in comparison to the ridiculous spread between retiree health care liabilities of $660 billion and assets of, drum roll, $33 billion, or a funding shortage that is $627 billion, roughly 19 times the actual assets in the system! Just seven states funded 25 percent or more of their retiree health care obligations: Alaska, Arizona, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, and Wisconsin. What this means is soon US pensioners will have no choice but to experience not only austerity unlike any seen in Europe, but broken promises of retirement benefits which will never materialize. The response will likewise be proportional. Sadly, it is only going to get worse: …. go here ZeroHedge.
There is no doubt that the elite have always sought to carefully manufacture news and to control the beliefs of the masses through their interests in funding education and in owning media distribution channels for centuries. There is a wealth of history that chronicles the elite’s desires to control and sway public opinion by manufacturing news versusthe honorable journalism pursuit of reporting news in a fair and accurate manner. For example, in 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway stated, as documented in the Congressional Record: Continue reading →
A Swiss tribunal blocked the release of the name of U.S. taxpayer holding a secret Credit Suisse account to the Internal Revenue Service. The April 5 decision was announced in a Tuesday press release, which noted the ruling cannot be appealed.,,,,WSJ.
The wireless industry has long been the victim of discriminatory taxation. In fact, state and local taxes have skyrocketed in recent years to an average of over 16%—much higher than the average state sales tax of 7.4% on other goods and services. In some cities, wireless taxes reach over 25%. All told, wireless taxes cost consumers $21 billion annually…..
Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it is with a tracking service like a financial institution. Sometimes you can make a clean break and other times you have to remain “just friends”.
DC has always been distant from the people. Apart from the IRS and the draft, they were “the other” we read about in the papers, running gangsters and spies to ground, getting the interstate built, fighting wars and generally looking out for the Little Guy. We believed they were the Big Picture People doing things on the largest scale on behalf of all who worked hard, lived responsibly and stayed right with the law. DC was the captain and crew of our mighty ship, alert and sure, cutting cleanly through heavy seas and turgid morass alike, while their grateful passengers shuddered at the hardship and horrors beyond the delights of the endless buffet on the promenade deck. 
The Grey Enigma 