Completely ignoring the kind of convoluted “Keynesian” logic would lead to that conclusion, I couldn’t help but think about the basic mathematics of the whole thing. With estimates indicating that average public employees earn between twenty and thirty percent more than their private sector counterparts, I was struck by an enormous numerical anomaly. Assuming that private employees are paying taxes at a twenty percent rate, IT TAKES THE TAX DOLLARS OF SEVEN PRIVATE SECTOR WORKERS TO PAY FOR ONE PUBLIC EMPLOYEE! This is not the kind of solution proposed by someone with any kind of economic sense. How are we to pay back borrowed money utilizing this kind of thinking? Is the strategy to breed our way out of it? It may be the only way.

Eventually, the United States is going to have to stop borrowing money. When that time comes, we will need to be able to work within the constraints of a reasonable budget. If we are borrowing money to hire more public workers (to whom we provide generous pensions), we are creating more long term economic liabilities. If we are borrowing money to support current liabilities and borrowing even more to create greater long term liabilities, we will never be able to get our fiscal house in order. When making reference to the tepid pace of our economic recovery, President Obama routinely uses the term “headwinds”. Although recent global events and a tough housing market will continue to contribute to a slow recovery, I think rather than blaming “headwinds” we should look at a Harvard educated anchor as the real culprit!

After the bank became the legal owner of the house, they went to the people who lived there and told them the bad news. Of course, the people were sad that the bank owned the house now and that they would have to move, but they were happy that the man whom the bank had sent to talk to them was offering them some money to help rent a new house. In fact, the man who came to the house told them that if they moved out in a month and left the house clean and tidy, they would be able to get enough money to hire movers and pay for a new place to live! So they agreed to move out and take the man’s offer…and that’s exactly what they did!

Even though the people had cleaned the house when they left, it had been a long time since anyone had done any kind of routine maintenance to the property. The people who owned it before didn’t have enough money to fix things that were wrong with the house, and hadn’t been able to do all of the things that they had been meaning to do to make it nicer. Also, even though it was really cute and the neighborhood pretty good, some people had broken in and vandalized the rooms. They had even broken the pretty fireplace. Since people don’t want to move into houses that are vandalized and need a lot of work, investors talked to the bank so they could buy it and fix it up…and that’s exactly what they did!

Having owned the property for about a month, the investors had finally completed all of the rehab and remodeling to the house. In addition to a new coat of paint and new landscaping, they had installed completely new bathrooms and opened up the kitchen. They put in new cabinets and countertops. The contractor that they hired refinished the floors, and even rebuilt the beautiful fireplace. After all of this incredible work had been done to make the house shine again, the investors felt that they could put the property on the market and sell it for a nice profit…and that’s exactly what they did.

Many interested buyers came in to look at the cute little house. All of their real estate agents had very complimentary things to say about the work that the investors had done to the property. In fact, within a few days, several agents had written offers on behalf of their clients to purchase the home from the investors. So after negotiating deal points, like pricing and the length of escrow, the buyer’s agent and the investors’ agent came to an agreement to sell the cute little house. The new buyers moved in, the investors moved on to their next deal, the contractor went to fix up another house, the real estate agents went to work with more clients, the original homeowners found a place that they could more easily afford and they all lived happily ever after.

Many, including the President of the United States, would hold this story up as an example “vulture capitalism” or “vampire capitalism” and focus on the human element of a family losing their home. They would talk about the greedy, millionaire investors making their money at the expense of others, and cite this as a reason why we need to pressure banks to modify loans. Unfortunately, this kind of lack thinking completely ignores the greater economic picture. Although the investors did share net profit in the amount of about $56,000, the contractor, loan representatives, real estate agents, escrow companies, insurance providers, property inspector, termite company, and even the former homeowner (They got three grand) got their share of $81,000. This transaction put $137,000 directly into the economy, and generated about $53,000 in state and federal tax revenue.

With an estimated 10,000,000 American homeowners currently in foreclosure, there is roughly half a trillion dollars of real capital that is not in the pockets of consumers. After factoring in the interest on the $1.5 trillion that homeowners would be paying on new loans, the amount of money sitting on the sidelines is very similar to the president’s stimulus package. When one considers the jobs that this kind of situation generates for a battered construction industry, the overall positive effect on the economy would be simply breathtaking! Housing represents nearly twenty percent of the nation’s GDP, and it’s being held back. By creating programs to help the struggling few, the government has inadvertently prolonged an economy of the struggling many. Although it may sound unsympathetic to the folks clinging to the desperate hope that they may be able to keep their homes, we must allow the free market and the foreclosure cycle to run its course.

The amount of waste is simply breathtaking! Right now, we are giving tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies, solar companies, natural gas companies and every energy producing industry in the country. We are even paying FULL PRICE for prescription drugs through the Medicare program. That’s right, the largest single purchaser of prescription drugs in the entire world is paying full price, when you can buy discount card from the internet or television and get a 50% discount right now! Social programs are even worse. Despite the fact that it is usually incorporated into neighborhoods with the highest vacancy and eviction rates, the Section 8 housing program is paying rents that exceed area norms by easily 15%. There are 49,000,000 people on food stamps, yet there has been no effort made to incorporate store “club cards” and manufacturer’s coupons into the program. I saved 20% on my groceries just yesterday! Using coupons and club cards to save a mere $10 per week saves the taxpayers over $20 Billion per year (5X The Buffett Rule!). Every single contract given to private contractors for government work is funneled to companies paying “prevailing wage”, and taxpayers foot the bill.

How can we Americans argue over whether or not we should increase taxes on anyone? It’s our money, and there has to be some accountability. Even when we were children, if we blasted through our allowance halfway through the week, our parents weren’t going to give us more money if we spent it frivolously. That’s exactly what the federal government is doing. Every once in a while, we will hear a story about a celebrity or athlete whose financial advisor absconded with millions of dollars by taking advantage of the trust that had been given them by their employer. Although we inevitably sympathize with the aggrieved party, there is always discussion about how they could have let that happen. We wonder why the person so capable of earning these large sums of money could be so cavalier as to not pay even a modicum of attention to its well-being. Yet here we are doing the exact same thing. We have put people in charge of the treasury, and they are using it to buy voting blocks with our cash. As American citizens and taxpayers, it is our responsibility to demand more. Let our elected officials get together and figure out how to make the system run a little better before asking for more money. Then, and only then, can we consider an increase in taxes, because right now, we are just throwing more wood into the fireplace without even making sure that we’ve closed the windows first!

Happy Memorial Day. Thank you to those who gave their lives that their countrymen may live in liberty!

Now, folks are seeking the protection of lawyers and the government to come in and save them from their own lack of research for their own investment portfolio. Are all of the people who purchased shares of Facebook too young to remember the massive debacle of companies like Pets.com? Can we as individuals expect that every poor decision we make to be corrected through litigation or legislation?

It appears as though the “victimization” of America is almost complete. The cradle to grave mentality has become so pervasive that it even touches the temple of capitalism known as Wall Street. Bad investments are as much a part of investing as bad decisions are a part of living. We cannot expect the government to correct each and every mistake that we make. Their solution to the problem is to create legislation to prevent the situation from repeating itself. “What’s so bad about that?” you may ask. Well, when the government no longer allows its citizens to make mistakes, its citizens are no longer free!

What the hell happened in Pakistan?! Dr. Shakil Afridi secretly created a fake vaccination program to obtain information that led to the raid which killed Osama bin Laden, and is now rotting in a Pakistani prison, having been sentenced to thirty-three years for treason.  His only crime was assisting the United States bringing justice to a man responsible for the murder of over 3,000 of its citizens.  How was he caught by a country that somehow managed to miss the most wanted man in the world living within yards of a military training facility? We ratted him out! In the frenzy and triumph following the death of bin Laden, Dr. Afridi’s identity was simply not protected. He was not whisked away by the CIA, he was not given a new identity. He was left to the wolves to be devoured at their leisure.

Imagine a jailhouse informant identified to his fellow inmates and left to serve out his term in the general population of the same prison. This is an abomination.  Regardless of his national origin, this man is an American hero and we threw him under the bus! Leading from behind does not mean allowing your friends and allies to suffer for their assistance. If we continue to treat our friends like this, how long before we haven’t any left?

First thing you want to do is get a bunch of dead people together. Statistics show they are far more easily manipulated than the living, and complain a great deal more quietly if you cast votes without their permission. So, I am a real estate broker, and have access to the listing data for all of the homes on the market and recently sold. As I have the capacity to search by map, it is a relatively simple task to go ahead and pull up the records of all of the trust and probate sales in any given voting district. This will give me the opportunity to determine how many easily accessible targets there are for whom I can cast a ballot.

After identifying the prospective addresses, I determine whether the owners actually lived in the homes at the time of their death. If they occupied the property at the time of their demise, they go on the list. If not, they go off the cliff with Paul Ryan’s grandma. Since I already have their name and address, all I have to do is make sure they were registered to vote at the location. At this point, I make a simple Excel spreadsheet with my names and addresses on them. Sure, I could pay the money to get the voter registration records to cross reference them against my own database, but it is not truly necessary. If I were to approach the poll worker and discover that “my name” wasn’t on the list, all I would have to say is that I was at the wrong polling place, and move on.

Armed with by list, I simply plug each address into the handy city/county clerk website to determine where I will be casting each individual vote. Utilizing Google Maps, I go ahead and make a driving map to my voting locations to maximize the number of times that I will be able to vote in a single day. I pack my lunch, hop in the car (No, it’s not a hybrid) and I start my day. I then simply drive from polling place to polling place, give them my name and they hand me a ballot. Without having to provide an ID, I can simply sign “my name”, walk into the voting booth, cast my vote, get my little sticker and trot back to the car to cast more votes for whatever lucky cause or candidate I choose.

The worst part about this kind of scheme is that it allows me to operate as a complete lone wolf. Without being affiliated with any kind of organization and making sure to cast only one ballot at each polling place, I would be virtually undetectable casting dozens of ballots. Unfortunately, this is just one single method for conducting voter fraud. It is one guy, thinking up one idea to eliminate the votes of one hundred other Americans. It is easy, fast and free and most importantly could be completely derailed by requiring photo identification as a prerequisite for casting a ballot. Critics of voter ID laws state that it is a method of voter suppression. You’re darned right it is…it means that folks will only be allowed to vote once!

Congratulations on your accomplishment. Your hard work and persistence has been rewarded with your diploma. You have done your parents, your community and yourselves proud. Now, you enter the workforce in very uncertain times. The job market for young college graduates has virtually never been worse. Economic conditions and government regulations are putting employers in a very difficult situation, and your prospects of being hired are somewhat bleak.

Now, statistics show that you have graduated college with an average of $23,000 in student loan debt, and 72% of you voted for President Obama. This puts you in a unique position. The same wide eyed optimism that accompanied you to college or university is very likely to have also led to your ballot having been cast for our current leader. It is also very likely that optimism has morphed into something very different.  Your eyes are still open, but are now looking at reality.

You enter into the job market at the same time as a very contentious presidential campaign with an opportunity that not everyone has. Between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, you will hear about gay marriage, the national debt, war on women and more catchphrases, slogans and hash tags than you can possibly handle. They will spend billions to try and earn your vote, and you don’t have to listen to a single word of it!

That’s right. All you have to do is follow your father’s advice. Go out and get a job! That’s it. Four years ago you were at the very beginning of your college career and had grand visions about this summer. This is when you had visualized making the first step on the path to taking the investment banking world by storm, becoming teacher of the year or even being elected president in 2048. This is where the rubber meets the road. All of the money, slogans and promises won’t make a bit of difference.

In 2008, Obama promised to create jobs. If you walk into an interview and walk out with a job offer, then go out and cast your ballot for Barack Obama. After all, he has made it perfectly clear that he has been creating jobs. With the proof being firmly implanted in the pudding, you can take your little spoon and enjoy the creamy deliciousness knowing that your decision has been well founded.

On the other hand, if you are forced to move back in with your parents or accept a job paying far less than you anticipated, then cast your ballot for Romney. His statements about the taxes, health care mandate and government regulation crushing the job market were clearly accurate. It turns out that “Hope and Change” were nothing more than words on shoddily made forty dollar t-shirts!

While the rest of us get to try and wade through propaganda and manipulated statistics to try and make a decision, you have the luxury of using the unique empirical data at your disposal to make the most informed decision possible. You can base your choice on your own experience, and it can’t get any easier than that. Now, go out and get a job…as for a haircut, that’s your call.

The amount of money that we pay annually on our debt represents more than double what we take in from corporate taxes. In fact, it comes out to about 35% of what the IRS takes in from personal income tax. That means that every tax-paying citizen works for the first four months of the year just to pay the interest on our debt! Please take note that this does absolutely nothing to improve the financial position of the country. As we are currently spending about 50% more than what we are bringing in, it can’t even be considered treading water. We are paying what amounts to an interest only home loan, and borrowing money on our equity line at the same time. This year, we are going to borrow approximately eight times our interest payments.

As a real estate broker, I deal with long term debt pretty regularly…every day, in fact. As such, I will put this into the perspective of a thirty year mortgage. As the budget stands right now, we have a projected deficit of $1,327,000,000,000. Simply put, we are bringing in about $2.5 trillion and are spending about $3.8 trillion. Estimates put our national debt at about $16,400,000,000,000 at the end of the 2012 fiscal year. Now, rather than abbreviating it, I chose to put all of the numbers up there. I know it looks dramatic, but I feel like it should. That is a great deal of money, and it really needs to be put into proper perspective, for it is the place that we begin.

Now, the great credit history of the United States warrants a tremendously low interest rate. The historic average that the country has paid on our national debt is 3.15%. So, I will use that figure when calculating our “national mortgage”. If we were to begin amortizing our brand new thirty year mortgage January 1st 2013, our monthly payments would be $70,476,848,775.58 or $845,722,185,306.96 per year. If we would like to pay off that debt within that thirty year timeline, those are the payments that we are going to have to make, and that is going to require some serious budgetary changes within the United States! For a little bit of perspective, you can check out the CBO breakdown of the budget here. Please note that that payment is larger than the entire budget for Defense, Social Security or Medicare!

From a monetary standpoint, that is going to mean that we need to increase revenue AND decrease spending by a combined total of about $2.2 trillion annually starting less than 250 days from today; but that is not the real change that we have to make. We have to change our national mindset. We have to begin electing representatives who are honest with the American people about spending and deficits. Liberals, including President Obama, have beaten up Paul Ryan over his budget proposal as being radical, despite the fact that it doesn’t even balance the budget until 2028 and doesn’t pay off the national debt until 2080! They have thrown labels like “draconian” and “radical” onto a budget that represents minor, gradual changes to our debt and budget problems over generations.

Personally, I don’t think it’s aggressive enough, but in order to incorporate my ideas into our national plan, we would have to double taxes across the board, AND cut about 40% of the spending from the existing budget. I think we can all agree that the current political climate doesn’t support the kind of cooperative action necessary to move that kind of agenda. We can’t even have a civil discussion about the subject. We have our elected federal officials actually arguing over such trivialities as corporate taxes, the Buffett Rule and Bush tax cuts. These are not real issues. The debt ceiling talks stalled over the cutting $2.2 trillion dollars over ten years on a budget that is currently ADDING OVER A TRILLION IN DEBT EVERY SINGLE YEAR! Politicians are having polls done to find out the appropriate wording to score maximum voter approval for plans that do absolutely nothing for our national debt situation. In order to pay off our debt within my lifetime, we are going to have to disburse annual funds in roughly the same amount as social security. In a political climate where a budget that doesn’t see America’s debt paid off until my grandchildren are old enough to be grandparents is roundly ridiculed as being radical, how are we to move any closer solutions?

Our founding fathers envisioned a country where men were recruited by their fellow citizens to serve their nation. Legislators were to serve out their term; and (Based upon their success or failure) either move to a higher office, or resume their former life. Interestingly enough, it allowed for these individuals to actually reap what they had sewn. Rather than living their entire lives in the political bubble of Washington, they would be forced to exist within the system they helped create. Much like military service, one left public office enriched for the experience accompanied by the gratitude of their nation.

I believe that the time to act is now. At no point in American history, have Congressional approval ratings been so low. Creating term limits for Congress is an idea whose time has come. I would propose that all individuals elected to Congress be limited to no more than two terms in office. Additionally, as they are forced to be constantly campaigning by their abbreviated two year terms, members of The House of Representatives would have the length of their term doubled to encompass four years. This would allow the American people the freedom to know that our daily lives were not being run by career politicians, but by citizens who must live within the same system as those for whom they legislate.