Libtards

[04SCTLS]

True in that we do have it better than most of the world. However that doesn't mean we should just be complacent and say 'well it could be worse'. With just a bit of tweaking in our wealth distribution thinks could be so much better.

Let me ask this. Why do we have minimum wage laws? Shouldn't competition and the free market and all that stuff determine how much everybody makes? Couldn't it be that maybe we need some government oversight and regulations because the wealthy can't be trusted to reliably do the right thing?

Btw just today there's a new headline out that 1/6 of our country lives in poverty. Go trickle down economics! InB4 responses about how the poor have food, a car and a house with air conditioning so all is peachy

You have a monolithic view of the rich.
A big part of the problem is that the US has a 35% corporate tax rate the highest in the world to pay for our Great Society and a 14% Social Security tax up to 104k capped income and 3.5% Medicare tax with no cap on wages while Canada for instance has a 21% corporate rate.
The world wants business and offers what it has.
The high rate encourages companies to move production and profits out of country.
Profits that are made outside the country but not brought into the US are taxed only at the country of origin.
The rest of the world is competing for the wealth more now offering what is known in economics as comparative advantage in the form of cheaper labor and less regulation.
Those of us in the top 1% with S Corps taxed at personal rates once like contractors and domestic manufacturers,
doctors and other professionals who don't have the luxury of capital gains or foreign investment are the ones who carry the country and have to pay the top 35% rate along with their state taxes 9% in NY for instance.

That's a combined rate of 44%.
With a repeal of the Bush tax cuts it would be 49%.
Add in the SS and uncapped Medicare and it's over 50%

It's multinationals and those who use money to make money in capital gains on investments held for longer than 1 year that get the plumb 15% federal rate with their state tax on top of that.
I've finally started moving money that way.
However there have been some estimates that bringing everyone up to Warren Buffet's liking like to what the S Corps pay, his hypocritical tax appeals and unpayments notwithstanding,
would pay for 1 week of federal spending or 2%.
I suppose if we tried to repatriate the US Corps foreign profits with a low rate amnesty which has been tried before we might get another 2%.
4% more in the US social economy is big numbers but it disappointingly puts only a small 2 week dent into the underlying issue of people essentially outliving their usefulness by 15+ years instead of 5-7 when these programs were set up and accounted for.
Now that business has learned to do more with less workers that is not going to change.
Companies plan strategies to make money not jobs.
Machines are designed and created to minimize manual labor so production can be increased or even achieved while menial jobs are eliminated.
Some of the pie is shared with key workers who are paid hefty bonuses at Christmas.
This is how we have improved our efficiencies and strengthened our balance sheet.
Every worker is taxed and has to be insured whereas capital machines do need care and maintanence and a source of power but are not subject to human resources problems and issues and encumberances or taxed on a time or output basis and never will be.
Ohio eliminated it's property tax on heavy equipment a few years ago to compete better.
Even with the 1/6th poverty rate you point to hasn't put a dent into our ability to borrow money from the rest of the world seemingly indefinately.
The world is enabling our Moral Hazard of theft of the future which can only work in a constantly expanding and growing economy, unlikely with our aging costly underfunded retirees 8000 a day turning 65.
We'll spend it on Military Welfare make work projects and those "worthy" dependants but not the general lower and fallen middle class population.
Let him die was cheered by some members of the audience at the republican debate on monday.
Now there's constant talk of a Euro caused economic meldown if we and Germany don't bail out the socialist paradise of the rest of Europe that has leisurely dug itself into an even bigger hole than we are in.

It will be very hard to get higher tax rates out of the rich.

 

[Marcus]

I am supposing that the people who frequent this forum all have enough sense to work for a company that has smart enough management that they don't put themselves and their companies in the toilet and then end up as the equivalent of 'government motors'.

The peons at Enron certainly believed management was smart enough not to put them in the toilet. Management held company pep rallies where they encouraged the employees to put all their retirement money in Enron, while scum like Skilling were bailing out.

 

[04SCTLS]

Half A Billion People Escaped Poverty Between 2005 and 2010

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/half-a-billion-people-escaped-poverty-2005-2010/

The Millennium Development Goal to halve the rate of global poverty by 2015 was met sometime in 2007, says the Brooking Institution in a new report, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015.
By 2015, we will not only have halved the global poverty rate, but will have halved it again to under 10 percent, or less than 600 million people, with India and China responsible for three-quarters of the reduction in the world’s poor expected between 2005 and 2015.
“While these findings likely come as a surprise to many, they shouldn’t,” says the report. “Growth lies at the heart of poverty reduction. As developing country growth took off in the new millennium, epitomized in the rise of emerging markets, a massive drop in poverty was surely to be expected.
“With few exceptions, however, the international community has been slow to catch on. We hear far more about the 64 million people held back in poverty due to the Great Recession than we do about the hundreds of millions who escaped impoverishment over the last six years. While there is good reason to focus public attention on the critical and ongoing need to support those still stuck below the poverty line, there is also reason to celebrate successes and to ensure policy debates are grounded in reality.”
​

The two are not unrelated. The rise in South and East Asia, particularly, has come partly at the cost of the West. They’ve lifted themselves out of poverty by out-competing the developed world on the basis of cheap talent.
From the report’s Executive Summary [PDF]:

The Millennium Development Goal to halve the rate of global poverty by 2015 was met sometime in 2007.

• By 2015, we will not only have halved the global poverty rate, but will have halved it again to under 10 percent, or less than 600 million people.
• India and China are responsible for three-quarters of the reduction in the world’s poor expected between 2005 and 2015.
• Between 2005 and 2015, Asia’s share of global poverty is expected to fall from two-thirds to one-third, while Africa’s share more than doubles from 28 to 60 percent.
• Nevertheless, Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate has fallen below 50 percent for the first time. By 2015, its poverty rate is expected to fall below 40 percent—a feat China did not achieve until the mid-90s.
• Whereas only 20 percent of the world’s poor lived in fragile states in 2005, this share is rising sharply and will exceed 50 percent by 2014.

________________________________________________________

The good news for those in the real world poverty of 1.25 a day but probably not good news for our fallen masses.
Based on this development the appeal of US Securities will expire as the world finds better use of it's money.
​

 

[shagdrum]

Also the "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" argument is entirely valid. Just look at the stats.

Actually, it is the stats that show it to be invalid. Only when the (intentionally?) misleading statistic of "household income" is used, it that lie given any validity. When you look at the much more accurate statistic of individual income, it is a different story.

The bottom 40% of the country has less than 1% of the total wealth. The top 1% control around 20%. By simple logic we can see that if even 5% of that 20% was evenly spread among the poor the result would be a MASSIVE increase in their standard of living while the wealthy would hardly feel it.

That is not "simple logic" but a gross misrepresentation of economics by reducing it to accounting. It is a zero sum fallacy, nothing more.

All the talk about how much wealth the top 1% have is utterly meaningless unless you can show that wealth in a free market is a fixed entity. History has proven that it is not.

If, as history has show, a free (or even mixed) economy actually creates wealth, then it is irrelevant to argue how much of the pie "the rich" have because the pie is constantly growing.

Efforts to "redistribute" that wealth inhibit that wealth creating function of the market. Those redistributive efforts cannot and have not remained at a level of simply tinkering around the edges. The assumptions behind them, they way the are set up, inherently causes those efforts to become more and more intrusive and crowd our the wealth creating function of the market.

Which is crueler, raising the standard of living for all by growing wealth, or lowering the standard of living for all and, in the extreme, bringing about poverty for the majority in the name of "social justice".

With just a bit of tweaking in our wealth distribution thinks could be so much better.

Do you realize how dangerous an idea this is?

EVERY ideological tyranny in the 20th century has had as it's aim a more "equal" distribution of wealth. History has shown that this goal is not only self-perpetuating, but destructive to productivity, culture and society.

Social Justice is the most destructive delusion ever created by man.

Let me ask this. Why do we have minimum wage laws?

Because of short sighted politicians looking to pander to economically ignorant votes with no regard for the economic consequences of their actions. Namely, increased unemployment, exporting of jobs, reduction of wages overall, distortion of wages as an incentive structure for increased performance, etc.

Btw just today there's a new headline out that 1/6 of our country lives in poverty. Go trickle down economics!

How is that, IN ANY WAY, an indictment that capitalism is a failure?

There are a lot of lazy assumptions behind that claim.

Do all those countries have a free economy? Even America doesn't have that (and, arguable, hasn't for over a century).

It is VERY dangerous to start placing blame with little to no understanding of the problem. You end up chasing the symptom and blaming whatever scapegoat is convenient instead of actually understanding and treating the root cause.

 

[04SCTLS]

How Rich Are Poor People?

By Brian Palmer

Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2011

The Census Bureau says there are more Americans in poverty than ever. Are the poor better off today than they used to be?


http://www.slate.com/id/2303828/

More than 46 million Americans are now living below the poverty threshold, according to numbers released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday. That's the highest number since the Bureau started keeping track of the statistic in 1959. Are poor people better off now than they were 52 years ago?

Much better, in absolute material terms. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation recently published an analysis of the lifestyle of people below the poverty line in 21st-century America. He found that many poor people have amenities that were available only to the wealthy (if they existed at all) in 1959. The typical household at the poverty line includes air conditioning, two color televisions with a cable or satellite feed, a DVD player, and a microwave. Poor children usually have a video game system. More than 38 percent of poor people have a personal computer.

In the late 1950s, annual per capita caloric consumption reached a low point (PDF) for the 20th century. While food choices and the availability of fresh food in certain areas are major concerns, undernourishment is rare in the United States today. More than 92 percent of poor households always have enough food to eat, and poor children get about the same quantity of nutrients as middle-class children. Rector points out that poor children now "grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II."
Much of the improvement in the quality of life among the poor comes down to increased government assistance. The Census Bureau's poverty threshold—based on the cost of a bare minimum diet multiplied by three—is adjusted for yearly inflation, but it doesn't account for the expansion of noncash income sources like Medicaid or Medicare, which didn't exist until 1965. It also ignores tax credits that can increase a poor family's income. Nor are food stamps, which have expanded significantly since 1959, taken into account. Public housing is more widely available today than 50 years ago. There are also a range of less obvious government programs that bolster the lives of people living at or below the poverty line like Head Start, subsidized school lunches, energy assistance, and Pell Grants for college tuition. All of these free up money for other uses. A general decline in the relative price of food has also helped the poor, although costs have drifted upward over the last four years.
Despite the many luxuries now enjoyed by many below the poverty line, Rector's argument that the Census Bureau overstates the number of poor in America is controversial. Many economists believe that poverty should be measured relative to the wealth of a society (PDF), not in terms of absolute deprivation, as Rector suggests. This isn't some bleeding-heart liberal view. Adam Smith made the same point in The Wealth of Nations: "A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."
Some economists argue that the Internet, mobile phones, and air conditioning are the linen shirts of the 21st century. Even manual labor jobs now sometimes require a candidate to access the Internet to either find a listing or apply. Less than 30 percent of families living in poverty have Internet service in the home.

_______________________________________________________________

What is poverty in America is measured against the wealth of our society and not what poverty is defined in the undeveloped world where 1/2 the world's people have not even ever made a telephone call.

 

[fossten]

Btw just today there's a new headline out that 1/6 of our country lives in poverty. Go trickle down economics!

Yeah, eighteen percent unemployment during the Obama regime has nothing to do with that.

But yeah, we should totally increase food stamp production or something - THAT'LL make everybody rich! Woohoo!

 

[ford nut]

You have a monolithic view of the rich.
A big part of the problem is that the US has a 35% corporate tax rate the highest in the world to pay for our Great Society and a 14% Social Security tax up to 104k capped income and 3.5% Medicare tax with no cap on wages while Canada for instance has a 21% corporate rate.
The world wants business and offers what it has.
The high rate encourages companies to move production and profits out of country.
Profits that are made outside the country but not brought into the US are taxed only at the country of origin.
The rest of the world is competing for the wealth more now offering what is known in economics as comparative advantage in the form of cheaper labor and less regulation.
Those of us in the top 1% with S Corps taxed at personal rates once like contractors and domestic manufacturers,
doctors and other professionals who don't have the luxury of capital gains or foreign investment are the ones who carry the country and have to pay the top 35% rate along with their state taxes 9% in NY for instance.

That's a combined rate of 44%.
With a repeal of the Bush tax cuts it would be 49%.
Add in the SS and uncapped Medicare and it's over 50%

It's multinationals and those who use money to make money in capital gains on investments held for longer than 1 year that get the plumb 15% federal rate with their state tax on top of that.
I've finally started moving money that way.
However there have been some estimates that bringing everyone up to Warren Buffet's liking like to what the S Corps pay, his hypocritical tax appeals and unpayments notwithstanding,
would pay for 1 week of federal spending or 2%.
I suppose if we tried to repatriate the US Corps foreign profits with a low rate amnesty which has been tried before we might get another 2%.
4% more in the US social economy is big numbers but it disappointingly puts only a small 2 week dent into the underlying issue of people essentially outliving their usefulness by 15+ years instead of 5-7 when these programs were set up and accounted for.
Now that business has learned to do more with less workers that is not going to change.
Companies plan strategies to make money not jobs.
Machines are designed and created to minimize manual labor so production can be increased or even achieved while menial jobs are eliminated.
Some of the pie is shared with key workers who are paid hefty bonuses at Christmas.
This is how we have improved our efficiencies and strengthened our balance sheet.
Every worker is taxed and has to be insured whereas capital machines do need care and maintanence and a source of power but are not subject to human resources problems and issues and encumberances or taxed on a time or output basis and never will be.
Ohio eliminated it's property tax on heavy equipment a few years ago to compete better.
Even with the 1/6th poverty rate you point to hasn't put a dent into our ability to borrow money from the rest of the world seemingly indefinately.
The world is enabling our Moral Hazard of theft of the future which can only work in a constantly expanding and growing economy, unlikely with our aging costly underfunded retirees 8000 a day turning 65.
We'll spend it on Military Welfare make work projects and those "worthy" dependants but not the general lower and fallen middle class population.
Let him die was cheered by some members of the audience at the republican debate on monday.
Now there's constant talk of a Euro caused economic meldown if we and Germany don't bail out the socialist paradise of the rest of Europe that has leisurely dug itself into an even bigger hole than we are in.

It will be very hard to get higher tax rates out of the rich.

One of the best posts I have read in this forum.

Companies plan strategies to make money not jobs.
Machines are designed and created to minimize manual labor so production can be increased or even achieved while menial jobs are eliminated.
Some of the pie is shared with key workers who are paid hefty bonuses at Christmas.
This is how we have improved our efficiencies and strengthened our balance sheet.

Bingo...lights out manufacturing, minimize manual labor, it is the only way to compete with low wages.

We have the same road map.

 

[shagdrum]

A few things to keep in mind here...

There is a HUGE difference between relative poverty and real poverty. Relative poverty is mostly a statistical fact of those on the lowest income brackets and is far remove from reality. Real poverty is when people do not have the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.). You would be hard pressed to find large examples of the latter in America, but the former is more vague and can be defined as loosely as possible to serve political ends.

Demagogues and propagandists regularly mislead by equivocating between these two very distinct understandings of poverty. When someone points out that poverty in America is largely of the "relative" kind, these demagogues misrepresent it as a heartless assault on poverty of the real kind. Unfortunately, too many useful idiots buy into these lies.

Also, the natural order of society has historically been were the vast majority of that society suffered under real poverty while a very small few (maybe 1-5%) lived in sheltered, permanent luxury. It is only in exceptional societies like America where this historical pattern is broke. The "rich" are not guaranteed a gilded lifestyle and the poor have an tremendous opportunity to move out of poverty. The rise of the middle class as well as the standard of living of all and of class mobility is due to Capitalism.

Attempts to "redistribute" wealth more equitably take that reality for granted and inevitably destroy it. Communist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot's regime and North Korea are all prime examples of this. Even removing the vicious personalities behind those regimes, we are left with the riots in Greece and London that are the logical fallout from cultures destroyed by the redistribution fallacy.

 

[cammerfe]

Very well said!

KS

 

[04SCTLS]

Still sucks to be poor though.
It only sucks less in America

 

[04SCTLS]

Speaking of Military Welfare

Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary, Warns That Military Cuts Could Add 1 Percent To Jobless Rate

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/leon-panetta-defense-cuts_n_965359.html

ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Congress on Thursday that if lawmakers fail to agree on debt-ceiling talks and trigger $1 trillion in Pentagon budget cuts, they could add 1 percentage point to the nation's jobless rate.
Pentagon press secretary George Little said Thursday that Panetta has relayed those numbers to lawmakers in person and in calls this week, urging Congress to avoid the deadlock that would require the sweeping cuts.
Under the current deficit-reduction plan, the Pentagon must slash more than $400 billion in defense spending over the next decade. In addition, a newly created deficit-cutting supercommittee has until Nov. 23 to reach a consensus on budget cuts. If the committee members can't agree, or if Congress rejects its plan, automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion would hit the government accounts, with half coming from defense spending.
The trillion dollar total, Little said, would be devastating for the military, forcing spending reductions that likely would necessitate shrinking the size of the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps to the smallest numbers in decades and also lead to the smallest Navy in nearly 100 years.
"We would break faith with those in uniform who are serving. At a time of war, that's unacceptable," Little told reporters traveling with Panetta back to Washington after security meetings with Australian leaders in San Francisco.
Citing a new Pentagon analysis, Little said the defense industrial base provides 3.8 million private sector jobs. He said the 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate would include government, military and private sector jobs. He did not know how many jobs that entails or how many could be lost in the individual government and private sectors.
The current national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent.
The new comments reflect the Pentagon's growing worries that partisan divisions on Capitol Hill could foil any attempt to reach an accord on spending cuts and revenue changes to meet the debt reduction plan. Defense officials have argued repeatedly that triggering the automatic spending reductions would mean slashing military programs based on arithmetic rather than on sound national security strategy.
Panetta and his predecessor, Robert Gates, have insisted that government leaders and lawmakers must decide what they want their military to be able to do, and then cut the budget accordingly, rather than take a percentage off all the accounts.
Defense spending has nearly doubled since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to more than $500 billion. That spending is separate from the $1 trillion-plus for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade.
Pentagon officials have said the initial cut of $400 billion or more will be tough but manageable, but Little said adding another $600 billion "is a red line that this government should not cross."
Past efforts to reach compromise on major debt-reducing proposals have run aground over mutually exclusive demands: Republicans oppose raising taxes and Democrats are against cutting benefit programs.

______________________________________________________________

Has the time come to figuratively slaughter this expensive military welfare cow we have fathered?

 

[Coherent]

Republican solution to the economy. Get rid of minimum wage, unions and regulations so we can compete with China and not surprisingly share their problems such as awful pollution, slave wages, horrible work conditions and the like. Without minimum wage what's to stop competition from all the Immigrants who'll do all the entry level jobs for like $2 per hour? How will we Americans compete with that unless we're willing to also work for slave wages?

Also I'm not advocating full blown socialism or communism or w/e. Just taxing the rich a whole lot more and using that money to provide some jobs for the 9% of the population without one. More unions might also help bring wages up as they actually give the employees some form of power.

 

[shagdrum]

Republican solution to the economy. Get rid of minimum wage, unions and regulations so we can compete with China and not surprisingly share their problems such as awful pollution, slave wages, horrible work conditions and the like. Without minimum wage what's to stop competition from all the Immigrants who'll do all the entry level jobs for like $2 per hour? How will we Americans compete with that unless we're willing to also work for slave wages?

You really have no interest in truth, do you.

Also I'm not advocating full blown socialism or communism

Actually, you are. You are simply too ignorant to know it and too prideful to admit it to yourself.

Just taxing the rich a whole lot more and using that money to provide some jobs for the 9% of the population without one.

I am real tired of dealing with useful idiots. Some people cannot see reason.

Ninety years ago -- in 1921 -- federal income tax policies reached an absurdity that many people today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on "the rich" got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn't actually pay those taxes.

The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year and up -- equivalent to far more than a million dollars in today's money -- declined from more than a thousand people in 1916 to less than three hundred in 1921. Were the rich all going broke?

It might look that way. More than four-fifths of the total taxable income earned by people making $300,000 a year and up vanished into thin air. So did the tax revenues that the government hoped to collect with high tax rates on the top incomes.

What happened was no mystery to Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He pointed out that vast amounts of money that might have been invested in the economy were instead being invested in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds.

Secretary Mellon estimated that the amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities had nearly tripled in a decade. The amount of this money that the tax collector couldn't touch was larger than the federal government's annual budget and nearly half as large as the national debt. Big bucks went into hiding.
* * *
If anything, "the rich" have far more options for putting their money beyond the reach of the tax collectors today than they had back in 1921. In addition to being able to put their money into tax-exempt securities, the rich today can easily send millions -- or billions -- of dollars to foreign countries, with the ease of electronic transfers in a globalized economy.

In other words, the genuinely rich are likely to be the least harmed by high tax rates in the top brackets. People who are looking for jobs are likely to be the most harmed, because they cannot equally easily transfer themselves overseas to take the jobs that are being created there by American investments that are fleeing from high tax rates at home.

Small businesses -- hardware stores, gas stations or restaurants for example -- are likewise unable to transfer themselves overseas. So they are far more likely to be unable to escape the higher tax rates that are supposedly being imposed on "millionaires and billionaires," as President Obama puts it. Moreover, small businesses are what create most of the new jobs.​

More unions might also help bring wages up as they actually give the employees some form of power.

Yes, and cause their members to LOSE THEIR JOBS. I know you won't do it, but actually researching the history of unions shows they are not near as noble or beneficial as you think. Inflating wages beyond market value only creates negative trade offs and nasty market corrections.

You have been indoctrinated rather well and it is doubtful you will overcome it.

The laws of supply and demand are as unavoidable as the law of gravity. Anyone ignoring basic economics only shows themselves to be a useful idiot.

 

[cammerfe]

Determinedly Blind

And broken noses and teeth and cut lips when the willfully blind trip over that which they are unwilling to see.

KS

 

[fossten]

Republican solution to the economy. Get rid of minimum wage, unions and regulations so we can compete with China and not surprisingly share their problems such as awful pollution, slave wages, horrible work conditions and the like. Without minimum wage what's to stop competition from all the Immigrants who'll do all the entry level jobs for like $2 per hour? How will we Americans compete with that unless we're willing to also work for slave wages?

Also I'm not advocating full blown socialism or communism or w/e. Just taxing the rich a whole lot more and using that money to provide some jobs for the 9% of the population without one. More unions might also help bring wages up as they actually give the employees some form of power.

It's amazing how people still think the government can do ANYTHING more efficiently than the private sector, after you look at the failures like Amtrak, the US Postal Service (which will run out of money this month), Fannie and Freddie, Solyndra, FEMA, Social Security, Medicare, Fast and Furious, The War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the Massachusetts Big Dig, overspending and underprogressing at the Ground Zero site, NASA, The Census Bureau, and of course, these gems:

#1 A total of $3 million has been granted to researchers at the University of California at Irvine so that they can play video games such as World of Warcraft. The goal of this "video game research" is reportedly to study how "emerging forms of communication, including multiplayer computer games and online virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life can help organizations collaborate and compete more effectively in the global marketplace."

#2 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the University of New Hampshire $700,000 this year to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#3 $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#4 A professor at Stanford University received $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love. So far one of the key findings of this "research" is that the Internet is a safer and more discreet way to find same-sex partners.

#5 The National Science Foundation spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians "gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions."

#6 The National Institutes of Health spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#7 Approximately $1 million of U.S. taxpayer money was used to create poetry for the Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Chicago zoos. The goal of the "poetry" is to help raise awareness on environmental issues.

#8 The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spent $175 million during 2010 to maintain hundreds of buildings that it does not even use. This includes a pink, octagonal monkey house in the city of Dayton, Ohio.

#9 $1.8 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars went for a "museum of neon signs" in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#10 $35 million was reportedly paid out by Medicare to 118 "phantom" medical clinics that never even existed. Apparently these "phantom" medical clinics were established by a network of criminal gangs as a way to defraud the U.S. government.

#11 The Conservation Commission of Monkton, Vermont got $150,000 from the federal government to construct a "critter crossing". Thanks to U.S. government money, the lives of "thousands" of migrating salamanders are now being saved.

#12 In California, one park received $440,000 in federal funds to perform "green energy upgrades" on a building that has not been used for a decade.

#13 $440,955 was spent this past year on an office for former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert that he rarely even visits.

#14 One Tennessee library was given $5,000 in federal funds to host a series of video game parties.

#15 The U.S. Census Bureau spent $2.5 million on a television commercial during the Super Bowl that was so poorly produced that virtually nobody understood what is was trying to say.

#16 A professor at Dartmouth University received $137,530 to create a "recession-themed" video game entitled "Layoff".

#17 The National Science Foundation gave the Minnesota Zoo over $600,000 so that they could develop an online video game called "Wolfquest".

#18 A pizzeria in Iowa was given $60,000 to renovate the pizzeria's facade and give it a more "inviting feel".

#19 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave one enterprising group of farmers $30,000 to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight "haycations". This one sounds like something that Dwight Schrute would have dreamed up.

#20 Almost unbelievably, the National Institutes of Health was given $800,000 in "stimulus funds" to study the impact of a "genital-washing program" on men in South Africa.

But yeah, instead of cutting spending, we need to tax the rich more, or something.