bostonbubble.com

[CC]

They are just playing tricks actually. It really made me mad.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2008/11/10/apnewsbreak_patrick_to_dissolve_mass_turnpike/

[john p]

This is going to be a long one, sorry....

Imagine a Budget like a pie. The pie usually grows outward tracking inflation. It is supposed to stay within Prop. 2 1/2 or within 2.5% increases. Well, if workers wages go up at 3% tracking inflation, the wages slice of the pie start to eat away other segments of the pie.

If you look at the baby boom aging, we have way too many "senior" people working in government. Mike Dukakis had this WPA mentality and he hired a ton of people in State Government. Those people have put in twenty plus years and are making senior level salaries so if you get senior levels getting 3% pay increases the top heavy nature is just making the wages explode upward. Beyond that, many are retiring. When they made the pension and retirement benefit laws there was a fundamental economic context meaning public employees like say an accountant made 50% of the amount a private sector accountant (some significantly lower percentage). What has happened is that the private sector has operated much leaner than the public sector and by laying off people and not keeping many levels from raising much; the balance of the cost of government has significantly outweighed the private sector's ability to pay the tax burden. The people that have abused the situation the most are our political sacred cows and because people are loyal to a fault, we never vote the bums out and therefore deserve what we get. The truth is that we have many retired school teachers that never made vey much to begin with so their pensions are aligned with reality, but it is the thousands and thousands of graft, political hack jobs where you had people making 6-figures for leaning on a broom if they even showed up to work.

Don't blame me, I voted for Muffy. Muffy wanted pension reform because it was unbalanced and unsustainable. Muffy would have closed the tollbooths, and she got killed in the election by Deval Patrick, a man who wrote a letter to a Parole Board to ask for the release of a grandmother rapist, a man who sat on the Board of Ameriquest, one of the worst predatory mortgage lending companies, and has tried to let casinos in our State.

Getting back to the pie, if certain slices of the pie are outpacing the outward 2.5% radius growth, concentrically outward, what happens is that they take a slice out of the pie. For instance, Mitt Romney just cut back infrastructure and made that slice of the pie narrower so it left room for other slices to grow into the void.

The other play the government makes is creating new "Revenue Streams", meaning if the pie isn't growing fast enough, you take a slice out and create a new means to fund it. The Mass Turnpike Tolls were put in place to pay for the turnpike, to pay for the surcharge to pay for the road construction, not act as a revenue stream for the general fund.

Now, they want to increase parking at commuter rail parking lots by 100%. What is annoying is that the general public is flowing and following the course of the impressions made by our leaders. We were encouraged to use public transportation. The poor planning of our road systems have created hardships that make public transportation a requirement of some families. So basically, Government's poor planning, incompetence, and bloated and overpaid labor force are creating hardships, and hardships that they are using as the basis to hurt those that actually carry the BURDEN of working hard to actually turn a profit. The hardships of the government's negligence make it harder to compete for those that do carry the burden of creating the abundance that pays for government. The government feeds the general public the delusion that the actual providers of our society are bad, even though they pay the freight for the overwhelming majority. They brainwash the masses to thinking that they are looking out for them when in fact they are not burdened with having to be competitive, turn profits and they get the job security, the fat pensions, the holidays, etc. Beyond that, when we have boneheads running public projects they waste significant amounts in poor leadership or graft and plain stupidity. I wish we could just take the political appointees and put them in a room and give them crayons and coloring books instead of allowing them to think that they actually have the ability to manage anything.

Again, this is the first election where I have seen a dissolving of the American integrity. JFK asked Americans "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Obama's platform was based on what country can do for you. He is the pied piper of the "Give Me Generation” It was better when the deadbeats just stayed home on Election Day and ate Doritos and watched Jerry Springer. Obama promised those that don't pay a nickel in income taxes a free welfare check. It was free money that got those couch potatoes to the polls. We have illegal immigrants collecting Social Security, hell Obama's sister was in publically subsidized housing and she was an illegal. A child of a family that has paid taxes to help build the public colleges in our State gets less preferential treatment than a foreign student or someone that has never paid to help build our education system. We have delusional unions that pump their member's heads with notions that they are worth $100k a year for stamping out bumpers on an assembly line. They don't tell their members that someone in China is willing to do it for 50 cents an hour. They tell their members that it is the "fat cats corporations" that are keeping them from having a flat screen TV. (made in China) and their golf memberships. These same unions supported Obama because he told them that it was ok to have that delusion and look now, he's going to bail them out. Think about that, their business model doesn't work anymore, it is fatally flawed and we're going to just keep paying and paying and paying until we get that point. We're going to just pay tolls and see more toll booths or casinos until we finally get the point that the government is out of control. I am afraid of how dumb people are. There are cities in California that are bankrupt because they were delusional and they continue to vote in left wing liberals who spend and spend and spend.

The reason why there is still money in the US is because people trust that the Government won't appropriate their 401k like they have in socialistic countries. It happened in Brazil I'm told. The big deal, I'm told is that the stock market is just a small amount of our economy and that if the bond market collapses we will see a vacuum of foreign investment and that could really, really hurt us.

Think about that. Think about how bad it is when our politicians can't talk about illegal immigration because they want the votes of the fastest growing segments in our society. So basically we've got this herd behavior, a herd that is breaking our laws but because they are so many and tied to others that are loyal to them, they get away with breaking the law because they have become a political sacred cow. This delusion does not have a good end game and until we run this experiment of a government of the people as adults and not selfish children, it sadly may fail.

[john p]

Oh, one important point I forgot, the automobile industry was asked by the Government to develop fuel efficient cars. They did. The American People didn't buy them. So, the automotive industry did what government asked and it hurt them economically. Get that, we did not buy these cars. And the "We" in we did not buy these cars are complaining about the surge in oil prices when in fact we weren't efficient and we sent our wealth to China building their industry which now drinks alot of oil. So here I am, a guy that lived in a rathole apartment and saved, bought a fuel efficient car and bought a house near public transportation and paid a premium in college tuition and for a house because of failed socialistic programs tha hurt instead of helping and now I'm asked to pay more income taxes, property taxes, almost 40% more for public transportation and have to work extra hard to turn profits in a declining market. I'm volunteering about 2 nights a week of my time and many other nights I need to work longer hours to stay competitive. I need to spend my free time researching ridiculous laws to fight 40B laws or the Indian Gaming Act and finding out that the Indian Tribe's leader was a convicted rapist, lied about being in the Miltary and may in fact not be that much Native American as one old Wampanoag woman said, Glen Marshall was a bully and used to pick on smaller kids because they were Wampanoags. This bully grew up to be the leader of the Wampanoags.... The nonsense goes on and on and on, it is totally fucking surreal.