A Seattle woman who is receiving welfare assistance from Washington state also happens to live in a waterfront house on Lake Washington worth more than a million dollars.

Federal agents raided the home this weekend but have not released the woman or her husband’s name because they have not officially been charged with a crime.

However, federal documents obtained by KING 5 News show the couple currently receives more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus state and government disability checks and food stamps. They have been receiving the benefits since 2003.

The 2,500 square-foot home, which includes gardens and a boat dock, is valued at $1.2 million. (Read more)

“Seems like the economy functions better when there are less gross inequities.” Really?

No society in human history has ever made itself richer by taking money from some people and giving it others. Many, on the contrary, have turned into gigantic meat grinders following Marx’s vision of equality.

Rich people already reinvest and redistribute their wealth. In the 90′s, for example, rich people gave a lot of their money to working class yacht builders. This, obviously, was despicable.

Why should some people have yachts and not others? Furthermore, what role was there for this country’s considerable political talent?

Happily, America’s yacht building industry was taxed to death. Hurray equality! Working class people still got money from rich people, but instead of building yachts (hard work) they just had to sign a statement of uselessness and failure — i.e. welfare application (much easier). The intelligence and talent of the politicians became indispensable in facilitating the transaction. And the politicians lived happily every after — some of them even purchased European-made yachts for themselves. (the end)

Years ago our fathers founded this nation on the premise of the rights of man. As they expressed it, “the inalienable right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In those days they knew what those words meant, not only the ones who expressed them, but the ones who heard and believed and accepted and subscribed to them. Because until that time, men did not always have those rights. At least, until that time, no nation had ever been founded on the idea that those rights were possible, let alone inalienable. So not only the ones who said the words, but the ones who merely heard them, knew what they meant. Which was this: “Life and liberty in which to pursue happiness. Life free and secure from oppression and tyranny, in which all men would have the liberty to pursue happiness.”

And both of them knew what they meant by “pursue.” They did not mean just to chase happiness, but to work for it. And they both knew what they meant by “happiness” too: not just pleasure, idleness, but peace, dignity, independence and self-respect; that man’s inalienable right was the peace and freedom in which, by his own efforts and sweat, he could gain dignity and independence, owing nothing to any man.

We knew what the words meant then, because we didn’t have these things. And, since we didn’t have them, we knew their worth. . . .

We founded a land, and founded in it not just our right to be free and independent and responsible, but the inalienable duty of man to be free and independent and responsible. What I am talking about is responsibility. Not just the right but the duty of man to be responsible, the necessity of man to be responsible if he wishes to remain free; not just responsible to and for his fellow man, but to himself; the duty of a man, the individual, each individual, every individual, to be responsible for the consequences of his own acts, to pay his own score, owing nothing to any man. . . .

the enemy of our freedom now has changed his shirt, his coat, his face.

He no longer threatens us from across an international boundary, let alone across an ocean. He faces us now from beneath the eagle-perched domes of our capitals and from behind the alphabetical splatters on the doors of welfare and other bureaus of economic or industrial regimentation, dressed not in martial brass but in the habiliments of what the enemy himself has taught us to call peace and progress, a civilization and plenty where we never before had it as good, let alone better. His artillery is a debased and respectless currency which has emasculated the initiative for independence by robbing initiative of the only mutual scale it knew to measure independence by.

The economists and sociologists say that the reason for this condition is too many people. . . . that man’s crime against his freedom is that there are too many of him, is to believe that man’s sufferance on the face of the earth is threatened, not by his environment, but by himself: that he cannot hope to cope with his environment and its evils, because he cannot even cope with his own mass. . . .

And to believe that, you have already written off the hope of man, as they who have reft him of his inalienable right to be responsible have done, and you might as well quit now and let man stew on in peace in his own recordless and oblivious juice, to his deserved and ungrieved doom.

I, for one, decline to believe this. . . .

I believe that the true heirs of the old tough, durable fathers are still capable of responsibility and self-respect, if only they can remember them again.

What we need is not fewer people, but more room between them, where those who would stand on their own feet, could, and those who won’t, might have to. Then the welfare, the relief, the compensation, instead of being nationally sponsored cash prizes for idleness and ineptitude, could go where the old independent uncompromising fathers themselves would have intended it and blessed it. [emphases added] (Read more)

A key senator has asked the Social Security Administration to investigate how people who live their lives role-playing as “adult babies” are able to get taxpayer-funded disability payments — after one of them was featured on a recent reality TV episode wearing diapers, feeding from a bottle and using an adult-sized crib he built.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican and the Senate’s top waste-watcher, asked the agency’s inspector general to look into 30-year-old Stanley Thornton Jr. and his roommate, Sandra Dias, who acts as his “mother,” saying it’s not clear why they are collecting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits instead of working.

“Given that Mr. Thornton is able to determine what is appropriate attire and actions in public, drive himself to complete errands, design and custom-make baby furniture to support a 350-pound adult and run an Internet support group, it is possible that he has been improperly collecting disability benefits for a period of time,” Mr. Coburn wrote in a letter Monday to Inspector General Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr.

The request comes at a time when members of Congress are struggling to cut budgets and weed out waste to try to bring down the staggering deficit, and comes just days after Social Security’s trustees released a grim assessment of the program’s long-term financial health.

. . . .

“You wanna test how damn serious I am about leaving this world, screw with my check that pays for this apartment and food. Try it. See how serious I am. I don’t care,” the California man said. “I have no problem killing myself. Take away the last thing keeping me here, and see what happens. Next time you see me on the news, it will be me in a body bag.”

Mr. Thornton was featured in early May on National Geographic Channel’s “Taboo” program along with Miss Dias, a former nurse who feeds him a bottle and otherwise attends to his needs when he is dressed in diapers. (Read more from washingtontimes.com)

President Barack Obama Friday sought to rally support around the government intervention to keep General Motors and Chrysler afloat.

Obama, speaking during visits to GM and Chrysler plants in Michigan, sought to highlight the benefits to workers at the now-revived companies to blunt criticism of the federal bailout, one of the most frequently criticized actions of his presidency so far. (Read more from rttnews.com)

Reaction #1:

B-R-O-K-E-N W-I-N-D-O-W F-A-L-L-A-C-Y !!!!!!!!11

Reaction #2:

“It injects demand into the economy,” Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”

Pelosi said the aid has the “double benefit” of helping those who lost their jobs and acting as a “job creator” on the side.

“It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country that would say we’re not going to have unemployment benefits,” Pelosi said. (Read more from foxnews.com)

My reaction:

Newsbusters has a nice story on this that links to a Forbes story on this house of lies. GM received $50B in bailout funds while only $6.7B of that amount was deemed a loan (at 7% interest). As most folks know, most of the bailout money was given to GM, by the US and Canadian governments, in return for a large stake in the company. As to how the loan is being paid back, as Shikha Dalmia of Forbes explains:

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

Additionally, as Dalmia goes on to say,

Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, points out that the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5%) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government’s tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new–and bigger–DOE loan much more feasible.

The gist of this is – if you didn’t catch it – that General Motors will get a DOE loan at 5% to pay off its 7% loans, so essentially it is a refinance of debt, at a lower rate, with the Government playing banker with your money. Even the awful, pro-bailout Charles Grassley referred to this as the TARP Shuffle. In a letter from Grassley to Timmy Geithner, he stated:

On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. During his testimony Mr. Barofsky addressed GM’s recent debt repayment activity, and stated that the funds GM is using to repay its TARP debt are not coming from GM earnings. Instead, GM seems to be using TARP funds from an escrow account at Treasury to make the debt repayments. The most recent quarterly report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP says “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” See, Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, Quarterly Report to Congress dated April 20, 2010, page 115.

Furthermore, Exhibit 99.1 of the Form 8K filed by GM with the SEC on November 16, 2009, seems to confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multi-billion dollar escrow account at Treasury—not from earnings.

Yet so many people, including those in the media, are swept off their feet by the lies. A really, really, really bad article on cars.com has the nerve to make this Mickey Mouse statement:

Essentially, GM no longer needs emergency government aid to stay afloat. While the taxpayer still has a sizable investment wrapped up in the automaker, GM has returned to decent health for the time being.

(Read more from lewrockwell.com)

From the Forbes article: But when Mr. Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion–the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the $6.7 billion loan amount.

But wait! Even that’s not the full story given that GM, which has not yet broken even, much less turned a profit, can’t pay even this puny amount from its own earnings.

So how is it paying it?

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

AN overseas holiday used to be thought of as a reward for a year’s hard work. Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer. (Read more from timesonline.co.uk)