| Coca-Cola said: "We were wrong. As a former FDIC chairman, Bill Isaac, points out here, the FDIC Insurance Fund is an accounting fiction. It takes in premiums from banks, then turns those premiums over to the Treasury, which adds the money to the government's general coffers for "spending . . . on missiles, school lunches, water projects, and the like." The insurance premiums aren't really premiums at all, therefore. They're a tax by another name." Betcha you didn't know that. That's right folks - there is no FDIC insurance fund. Just like there is no Social Security insurance fund, or Medicare insurance fund. They are all accounting FICTIONS that our Congress has created and allowed because we keep demanding that they spend more than they have. To keep us, and foreign bond investors (who must pony up $2 billion per day to keep this charade alive) from freaking out and saying "no mas!" they rob and steal every nickel from every nook and cranny they can so their "budget deficit" looks much smaller than it actually is. Clinton never ran a budget surplus if you simply add back in the FICA receipts he stole to "balance his budget." Bush of course never even claimed to run a surplus. Every administration since the 1970s has played this game to one degree or another, and we, Idiot Nation, sit back and let it happen. Quote from my guy from The Market Ticker Denninger. |
Tell me, which presidents were in office on this chart when you see the largest rises in the national debt? Reagan, Bush, and Bush.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
