Monday, May 16, 2016

MILITARY SPENDING A NATIONAL CANCER AND DECEPTION IN DC



The US military budget is way over the top. We spend more for so called "defense" than any other nation on earth. And our "defense" expenditures are growing like a cancer enlarging and metastasizing so rapidly, just the cost of servicing the debt alone will consume its host. But the American people would never know. Republican and most Democrat members of Congress in Washington, the Pentagon, and the military prefer to deceive the public regarding our true spending in this category. Indeed, this year the Republican and Democrat candidates for President all continue to call for a laughable EXPANSION of military spending, while simultaneously decry the (paltry) spending on our nation's infrastructure, and the health and welfare of its citizenry. One good reason for this situation is the lack of understanding on the part of the citizenry directly related to a very misleading and commonly displayed pie graph, called the "US Federal Budget for 2015"!

In our 10th grade math class, our good and wise mathematics teacher, Mr. Wilson, cautioned us about misuse of statistical data. He often emphasized how very easy it was to manipulate numbers to make a graph twist the truth. I am sure our math teach would just cringe over the very widely published 2015 US Federal Spending Pie Graph. It appears so informative, is easy to read, colorful and attractive. However, it is grossly misleading. I would call it an outright lie...a criminal distortion of how this nation actually spends the tax dollar of its hard working citizenry.

This misleading graph presents the right side of a large colorful circle with two big "pie cut outs", labeled "Social Security" and "Health Care". Social Security is represaented as the largest, at 24%, while Healthcare accounts for 23% . Those two "pie pieces" represent almost half of the total (or 47%) on one side of the circle. They take up just about all of the right hand side of the graph. The left hand side has smaller categories of pie, like the cuts on a pizza you might make for the little kids of a group. On this side of the circle you will find "defense" spending. It is represented as a measly slice representing only 16% of the total. The overall impression the graph leaves its observer is that our leaders in Washington apparently have crafted a budget in which the the welfare of our citizens is paramount. It attempts to portray our nation, one which spends more than any other in the world on so called "defense", rather as a cuddly, socially responsive, Nordic European, peace-loving, home-grooming nation which cares so much about the health and welfare of its citizenry that it spends half of its tax income annually on healthcare and social benefits. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The real cost of military related spending is very different. Yes, the Defense Department has a 2015 budget of about $610 billion, (that is about 16% of our budget) but that is only about HALF of what is actually spent on military hardware, personnel and military related debt service. The actual total costs of our military is more than $1.2 trillion dollars annually. That is nearly a full ONE THIRD of our budget and the largest chunk out of our budget. That is something the Washington crowd would rather not have you know.

Those pie-graph artists in Washington know how to obscure the facts. Mr. Wilson would have loved to have been able to use them as an example of what NOT to do with a pie graph if you wanted to actually represent the truth. Those in Washington are more interested in deception. They would prefer the US citizen does not know how we really spend our hard won tax dollars.

The pie graph makers took a good half of the "defense related" costs AND SPREAD THEM OUT among other budget categories to obscure the facts.

The pie graph category "Defense" does NOT include:

1.Service on Debt Defense Related Interest on Loans (remember those Iraqi and Afghanistan Wars we fought and payed for "on the cuff".) Add in $400 billion dollars annually for this component to our "defense spending".

2. Veteran's Affairs. Add about $180 billion to the Defense budget to pay for the needs of veterans who served in our wars, of those receiving care related to their grievous wounds and the care and welfare of those that those who fell in battle left behind. The following all have defense related activities which are misleadingly spread over into other categories:

3. State Department. Defense Related Activities 4. Homeland Security Defense related /activities 5. Energy Department Defense Related Activities (those atomic bombs need to be cared for too)

A fair appraisal of the the costs of the military component indicates that were we to add up all of these costs, our total, real world, so called "defense" expenditures to taxpayers is closer to two times, or one hundred percent greater than what is indicated in the misleading US Spending Pie Graph, or about $1.2 trillion dollars!

It is noteworthy to underscore the fact that the interest on defense related loans which cost us now about $400 billion annually is more than we spend on the Energy Department, State Department. Homeland Security and Federal Defense Related Law Enforcement.

In fact just to service the debt on past military expenditures and adventures abroad, (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya) and the veterans affairs costs related to those past unwise adventures now amount to almost $580 billion or very close to the misleading DIRECT DEFENSE COSTS ($610 billion) the Defense Department spends annually.

That is the amount we spend each year out of the annual income of about $3.9 trillion dollars in tax and other revenues. We spend more than 30% of our income....Military spending is the biggest component of our budget.

The decision to spend so prolifically on military has its consequences. With a good third cut out of the budget for military expenses, the remaining two-thirds is just not enough for the excellent schools, health care, infrastructure, and broadband that other nations of our wealth level offer to their citizens.

When we ask why our nation's bridges, roads, tunnels, railroads, broadband, and all its infrastructure is crumbling into Third World levels of decay, and our citizens live shorter, more disease ridden lives than other nations of our wealth you can look toward the over the top, bloated defense budget and the purposeful misrepresentation of our actual spending preferences by the Washington crowd and their enablers in the pie graph publishing house.

Friday, May 13, 2016

PAUL RYAN, GENERAL WITH NO ARMY

Paul Ryan Conductor with no Orchestra, General with no Army!

Paul Ryan can't seem to get the message...insulated as he is within the Beltway--that his Ayn Randian pseudo-philosophy and its out-dated economic and government policies have been, post Donald Trump, soundly rejected by the "army" and "orchestra" . Ryan, were he not so blinded by hubris, arrogance and gross misperceptions of his own importance, needs only to look at the results of the recent nomination elections to understand why he is now seen by the rest of the nation as a lonely orchestra conductor, pathetically waving a limp baton at empty chairs and idled musical instruments.

Mr. Ryan has too long bowed before the monied elites in their the gilt-covered halls, faithfully making obeisance to the demands of the Washington mega-donor class while ignoring the needs of the masses of his hard-working fellow Americans. Ryan curried favor and accepted cash from the rich to support polices which cut taxes and spending, ignored our wide open borders, pursued costly foreign adventurism, spent blood and treasure on world-wide militarism, and encouraged job- destroying hyper free-trade agreements. These ideas and polices have all been wisely and soundly rejected by the average working men and women who ARE the "Republican Party". These average folks have in 2016 turned their backs on the present GOP leadership and its elite favoring policies. They have wisely voted "NO!" to Mr. Ryan's brand of Republicanism all across this nation, north and south, east and west and in the heartland too. Mr. Trump's successes have illustrated this fact over and over in a decisive way all through the nomination elections...and most damming and decisively in the last few weeks when he racked up massive wins over his Ryan-like conservative opponents in New York and Indiana. Mr. Ryan may be wearing general's stars and gold epaulette's but he has no army to command.

Kudos to "the Donald" for slaying the evil dragons of the elites, the neocons, and the moneybags in Washington. Now let us pray he never forgets who sent him there.

Monday, May 9, 2016

Alberta Wild Fires, Global Warming, and Gas Prices--Ironic

It's Ironic! Global warming caused by tar sand oil extraction, generates freak weather in Alberta, which results in forest fires that shut down tar sand oil extraction in region--a major source of global warming.

Not everyone appreciates the irony regarding the devastating Alberta forest fires which have shut down the Athabaskan oil companies which extract synthetic petroleum from the gooey black tar sands of the region. But it is worth understanding the situation, since it affects us all so intimately.

Forest fires in northern Alberta have been raging for days now through a region of taiga spruce and hemlock forests normally not affected by the scourge of wildfires, more common in more southern and broadleaf forests. But the massive amounts of carbon dioxide modern man has dumped into the atmosphere, as a result of burning fossil fuels, (like tar sand oil) have changed all that.

Winters have been unusually warm and dry in Alberta recently. And for weeks now a deep and uncharacteristic low pressure center in the northern territories of western Canada, most probably a meteorological result of global warming, has been drawing warm, dry air to the north. The source of air for this low Pressure center, comes in over the northern Rockies and then descends down into central and northern Alberta. This is a region where the main industry is extracting oil from tar sands. As these moountain winds sink over the Northen Rockies the air heats and dries up (a result of orographic pressure changes). These dry winds flow north through central Alberta as a strong and hot southerly breeze. Somewhere along the course of its flow, a smoldering campfire, a tossed cigarette butt, or lightning strike must have ignited dry brush which the steady winds fanned into a great conflagration. The outbreak of wild fire may be one of the most expensive "natural" disaster in Canadian history. The flames have consumed over 600 square miles of forest, thousands of homes, in and around the regional city of Fort McMurry. Nearly 100,000 resident of this region have fled the area. Many of them are workers at the several tar-sand extraction open-pit mines in the region. Most of these industries were closed or operations curtailed due the evacuation of personnel or the threat of being overrun by fire.

The wildfires are claimed to have cut back Canadian daily oil production by about 20%, or roughly about 800,000 barrels of oil a day. That amount, nearly a million barrels of oil, has had a significant affect on oil and gas prices at the local pumps here in the USA. The world consumes about 95 million bbl of oil a day. But up to just recently, just before the Alberta wild fire disaster, global producers have been generating about 96 million bbl per day. That slight glut of oil ( a million bbl per day) as kept the prices of oil and gasoline too down in this region at about two dollars a gallon. But the Canadian wild fires have put a dent in the supply. With consumption and production now about nearly equal, the sale of oil futures have spiked up from under $40 dollars a barrel to more than $44 dollars per barrel. In turn the price of gasoline at the American pumps has climbed too, reaching close to $2.50 in some localities.

So human induced climate change, or what I call "climatic intensification", is having its UNHAPPY effects in northern Canada, and on our pocketbooks too.