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The Best Type of Balanced Budget Amendment | BBA EXPLAINED
The United States is 30 trillion dollars in debt! We have more debt relative to our GDP than at any other point in our history! And so we need to fix this sinking ship or else America will go down under the weight of her debt obligations!
One tool that will help us reduce our debt addiction is a Balanced Budget Amendment…
“Research shows that balanced budget amendments lead to greater fiscal discipline.”
46 out of 50 states have some form of a Balanced Budget Requirement (BBR) and many countries have one too such as Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland.
Regardless of your political affiliation, I believe we should all support a Balanced Budget Amendment, but the more difficult question is… what’s the best type of balanced budget amendment? Not all balanced budget amendments are created equal!
Balanced Budget Amendments exist on a spectrum from lenient to strict so let’s explore the multitude of factors that go into making a Balanced Budget Amendment so we can design the best one for ‘Merica…
First, should our Balanced Budget Amendment be a constitutional amendment or should it just be a statutory provision? A statutory provision could easily be overridden by a simple majority vote therefore to increase the constraining power of our balanced budget requirement it should be a constitutional amendment. Virtually every state has their BBR as a BBA.
Second, should our Balanced Budget Amendment force the budget to be balanced on a yearly or a cyclical basis? A few nations in Europe have a cyclical BBR. The advantage of a cyclical BBR is it’s easier to predict government revenue over a business cycle rather than over the course of a year, but the problem is it’s also easier to game because of its increased complexity. For example, in 2005 the UK Treasury revised its national account data, which shifted their previous business cycle’s start from 1999 to 1997.
Every state in the US has there BBR on a yearly basis and so in the name of simplicity and Americana I believe our federal government’s should be yearly too.
Third, should our Balanced Budget Amendment include the whole budget or should certain programs be exempt? The 1995 Balanced Budget Amendment lost by just two votes in the Senate because it didn’t exempt Social Security. Ideally, though, no program should be exempt because politicians could move funds to get around the requirement like a mobster washing his money through the laundromat. If a program is worthy, which I believe Social Security is, then it should be worthy enough to be accounted for. With that said, we shouldn’t let purity stop progress. Let’s not die again on this hill! After all, on the state-level, “capital and pension funds are usually exempt from BBR limitations.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7plpOkOkSmc
One tool that will help us reduce our debt addiction is a Balanced Budget Amendment…
“Research shows that balanced budget amendments lead to greater fiscal discipline.”
46 out of 50 states have some form of a Balanced Budget Requirement (BBR) and many countries have one too such as Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland.
Regardless of your political affiliation, I believe we should all support a Balanced Budget Amendment, but the more difficult question is… what’s the best type of balanced budget amendment? Not all balanced budget amendments are created equal!
Balanced Budget Amendments exist on a spectrum from lenient to strict so let’s explore the multitude of factors that go into making a Balanced Budget Amendment so we can design the best one for ‘Merica…
First, should our Balanced Budget Amendment be a constitutional amendment or should it just be a statutory provision? A statutory provision could easily be overridden by a simple majority vote therefore to increase the constraining power of our balanced budget requirement it should be a constitutional amendment. Virtually every state has their BBR as a BBA.
Second, should our Balanced Budget Amendment force the budget to be balanced on a yearly or a cyclical basis? A few nations in Europe have a cyclical BBR. The advantage of a cyclical BBR is it’s easier to predict government revenue over a business cycle rather than over the course of a year, but the problem is it’s also easier to game because of its increased complexity. For example, in 2005 the UK Treasury revised its national account data, which shifted their previous business cycle’s start from 1999 to 1997.
Every state in the US has there BBR on a yearly basis and so in the name of simplicity and Americana I believe our federal government’s should be yearly too.
Third, should our Balanced Budget Amendment include the whole budget or should certain programs be exempt? The 1995 Balanced Budget Amendment lost by just two votes in the Senate because it didn’t exempt Social Security. Ideally, though, no program should be exempt because politicians could move funds to get around the requirement like a mobster washing his money through the laundromat. If a program is worthy, which I believe Social Security is, then it should be worthy enough to be accounted for. With that said, we shouldn’t let purity stop progress. Let’s not die again on this hill! After all, on the state-level, “capital and pension funds are usually exempt from BBR limitations.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7plpOkOkSmc
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JIM C
jim-carrey-spiritual-breakdown
When the curtain came down, Jim Carrey was a changed man.
After playing Andy Kaufman in the movie Man on the Moon, he wasn’t sure who Jim Carrey was anymore.
His existential crisis led to an epiphany.
“As an actor you play characters and then if you go deep enough into those characters you realize that your own character is pretty thin to begin with. And then you suddenly have this separation and go,
“Who’s Jim Carrey?” Oh, he doesn’t actually exist. There is just a relative mass of manifestation of consciousness appearing and then someone gave him a bunch of ideas. They gave him a name, religion, nationality, and then he clustered them into something that’s suppose to be a personality. It doesn’t actually exist. None of that stuff if you drill down is real.”
He concluded we are all playing avatars even though fundamentally we are everything. We are nothing. We are atoms.
“Ultimately, we’re not the avatars we create. We’re not the pictures on the film stock. We are the light that shines through it. All else is just smoke and mirrors. Distracting, but not truly compelling.”
But if we are not our avatars then how do we detach from them?
He wants us to first recognize we are playing an avatar and then focus on living in the present.
STOP being a character and START being in the now.
But he admits he can’t completely detach from his own avatar after 55 years of mental programming.
Jim Carrey, as he sees it, is a set of deeply ingrained behavioral, psychological, and physical traits, such as his desire to “free people from concern.”
But the distinction he draws between his current “self” and his younger self is that he no longer tries to uphold his avatar.
Walking into a room, he would be the funny man because that’s what people expected of Jim Carrey, but nowadays when he walks into a room he just does whatever feels natural in the moment, which could be a philosophical speech or a well-timed fart joke.
In his daily life, he tries to pull himself into the present by focusing on painting or acting or whatever it is he’s doing.
He wants to do things without the “idea” of him in it.
“Jim Carrey doesn’t exist.” — Jim Carrey
He believes people become depressed because they’re trying to live up to their fake avatar and the more we can detach from the ego ,and even thought itself, the happier we’ll be.
I think Jim Carrey speaks a lot of truth and people shouldn’t just write him off as nuts.
Let’s evaluate the message head-on in all its glory…
Are we just atoms?
I think part of the flaw in Jim Carrey’s thinking is he doesn’t see where the science ends and the spirituality begins. Yes we are made up of atoms, but that doesn’t mean we are atoms.
We get to choose the perspe
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HOW T
how-to-approach-failure-like-a-scientist
With any experiment, scientists have their hypothesis, conditions, and conclusion, but if their conclusion doesn’t match their hypothesis it doesn’t mean their experiment was a failure!
If you thought by writing a blog post everyday for 30 days you’d hit 1000 followers and then you don’t that doesn’t mean you failed. It just means your hypothesis was wrong and that’s okay! Keep experimenting!
The scientist only fails if he doesn’t strictly uphold the rules and conditions of the experiment.
What is it that you want?
What do you think it will take to achieve it?
Write a hypothesis.
Write detailed rules/conditions you’ll strictly follow.
And then at the end of your experiment write your conclusion.
EXPERIMENT: Do 100 pushups a day. HYPOTHESIS: In one month the subject will be able to do 50 pushups at one-time.
EXPERIMENT: Read 20 minutes immediately upon waking up. HYPOTHESIS: In one month the subject will be able to read at 300 words per minute.
EXPERIMENT: Take a cold shower. HYPOTHESIS: In one month the subject will be able to beat David Blaine’s record of standing in a massive block of ice for 63 hours, 42 minutes, and 16 seconds.
Again there’s no failure here (unless you don’t uphold your rules). You either prove your hypothesis or you disprove your hypothesis.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” — Thomas Edison
A single word can massively affect our psychology so whereas “failure” implies stagnation, “disproving” implies progress!
Let us move forward — even if it means moving toward a conclusion we didn’t fully expect.
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NIT V
nit-vs.-ubi-vs.-job-guarantee
The free market creates prosperity.
It makes things cheaper and better.
But some people can’t even afford “cheap” so in the richest country in human history should We the People just let struggling individuals go without basic necessities like food, healthcare, and housing?
If your answer's “yes” well then most voters have thus far disagreed with you whereby since the New Deal, no matter who’s been in office, the welfare state has only ever grown, therefore, for better or worse, Americans will not accept “yes” as an answer so then the question becomes, “What’s the best way to provide basic necessities?”
The answer has thus far been to make them free for those who can’t afford them.
But I think rather than a hodgepodge of anti-poverty programs, which just exacerbate poverty, we should eliminate poverty itself!
The poverty line is about $12K per year so let’s guarantee people can get that amount…
NIT
Milton Friedman supported a Negative Income Tax, which is where “earners above a certain level pay money to the state while earners below it receive money.”
If Person A has an income of $50K and Person B has an income of $10K then if the break-even income was $24K with a 50% NIT then Person A would pay taxes whereas Person B would receive $7K. If a person had no income they’d receive $12K.
"In my opinion, the negative income tax is more compatible with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of limited government and maximum individual freedom than with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of the welfare state and greater government control of the economy."
Proponents say it would effectively eliminate the welfare trap, poverty, and streamline benefits.
The US has a version of NIT in the Earned Income Tax Credit, but one has to work to qualify for it. A political compromise could be to abolish Medicaid, SNAP, Housing Assistance, TANF, and CHIP in order to repeal the work requirement and increase the credit, therefore, making EITC into a full NIT.
In 2000, Milton Friedman said that a universal basic income was "simply another way to introduce a negative income tax.”
UBI
A Universal Basic Income is where the government gives money to every citizen on a monthly or annual basis.
But I think there’s five key structural differences between NIT and UBI:
The first is a person receive’s less money the more one earns with NIT, which could disincentivize work more than UBI.
The second difference is that NIT would theoretically cost less than UBI because if the goal is to eliminate poverty then only people with no income would receive the full $12K whereas with UBI everyone would.
The third difference is that with NIT there’d be more political pressure to keep it low because fewer people would be receiv
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BUILD
build-back-better-would-give-billions-of
As of 2020, there are 1,260 newspapers in America. Over 80% of them are owned by large holding companies.
Since 1970, the number of daily newspapers in America has fallen by almost 30%.
I believe newspapers have been disappearing because of shorter attention spans, weaker communities, increasing corporatization, and more people consuming content for free online (wink, wink).
As part of the Build Back Better bill, Democrats want the government to give at least $12,500 to every “local” newspaper employee in the country.
Recently they changed the bill to where over the course of five years the federal government will give “local” newspapers an $85,000 payroll tax credit per employee.
The Joint Committee on Taxation pegs the cost at $1.7 billion over 10 years.
And let me ask you: why is the cost staggered over 10 years, therefore, forcing future Americans who had no say in the matter to pay for a subsidy that expired long ago?
San Fransisco Congressman Ro Khanna [D] defended the legislation by saying,
But Ro Khanna hasn’t read the Build Back Better bill. No legislator has! So it’s understandable he doesn’t know how the bill is actually written, but he shouldn’t speak with such certainty about something to which he had only read the bullets points to.
If he actually read the bill it’s clearly not just for “rural” newspapers. It’s for any newspaper with less than 750 employees, which means outside of the Top 10 that’s virtually every newspaper in the country with the vast majority of whom existing in cities and owned by massive media conglomerates.
In judging legislation, one also shouldn’t view it in a vacuum but consider it alongside everything else the government already does. Does adding an additional responsibility to the federal government (funding conglomerates’ “local journalists”) make sense when it can’t even competently carry out its basic constitutional duties?
And let’s be honest here, Democrats.
The media is overwhelmingly Democrat. According to FEC data, 88% of journalists and 91% of editors are Democrats.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 500 newspaper endorsements whereas the would-be-winner received 28, which of those 28 only two had circulations above 100,000 readers.
So by Democrats giving billions of taxpayer dollars to the newspaper industry, Democrats are overwhelmingly subsidizing their supporters. Imagine the Left’s outrage if a Republican president gave $1.7 billion to talk radio.
Build Back Better is of, by, and for Democrats.
Democrats want to keep their supporters typing away at your expense! Any real journalist would call the government out for subverting the meaning of a “free” and “independent” press.
Once virtually all of America’s newspape
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U.S. authorities recently discovered the longest smuggling tunnel under the southern border.
The tunnel stretches from Tijuana to San Diego, totaling 4,300 feet long. The previous record holder was discovered in San Diego in 2014, which was 3,000 feet long.
Homeland Security Special Agent Cardell Morant said in a press release,
"While subterranean tunnels are not a new occurrence along the California-Mexico border, the sophistication and length of this particular tunnel demonstrates the time-consuming efforts transnational criminal organizations will undertake to facilitate cross-border smuggling.”
According to U.S. Border Patrol, the tunnel features a rail and drainage system, air ventilation, electrical cables, and an elevator.
DEA Special Agent John Callery said,
"As efforts to strengthen security on our Southern border increase, Mexican drug cartels are forced underground to smuggle their deadly drugs into the United States. The sophistication of this tunnel demonstrates the determination and monetary resources of the cartels."
(longest-ever border smuggling tunnel found, trump wall stop tunnels, can trump wall stop tunnels, US-Mexico border wall trigger countless tunnels beneath it, us-mexico border wall tunnels, will trump’s border wall stop tunnels?, was trump's partial border wall effective)
With more walls comes more tunnels. The year George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, the number of tunnels found tripled to 18.
So does this mean that we should stop building border walls and fence if the cartel are just going to build tunnels underneath them?
The mainstream media always takes the discovery of a new smuggling tunnel as an opportunity to argue that border walls don’t work.
The New York Times commented,
“For all the talk about a wall between the United States and Mexico, the proliferation of such subterranean passageways demonstrates the problem with border security is as much below ground as above.”
ABC said one of the key takeaways of the recent discovery is that, “the tunnel exposes the limits of Donald Trump’s border wall.”
And last year when a similar tunnel was discovered, Now This mocked Trump with a video titled, “Trump learns Why a Wall Won’t Work From a Border Patrol Agent.”
The KPBS news station asked a professor at the University of Sand Diego what his thoughts were on the topic and he said,
“The reality is, drug tunnels are an illustration of why border walls don’t work. The wall simply ensures that there will be even more creative ways of getting around it.”
But Joshua Wilson, VP of the National Border Patrol Council, argued that walls do stop smuggling whereby pointing out the fact that tunnels are an issue primarily in border areas with good soil and nearby warehouses.
The
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a border security plan that includes enforcing the law, building more wall, and activating EMAC.
"We’re going to start making arrests—sending a message to anyone thinking about coming here—you’re not getting a free pass. You’re getting a straight pass to a jail cell."
EMAC is an interstate compact that seeks financial & human support from other states during an emergency situation such as hurricanes, storms, floods, wildfires, and most recently COVID-19.
Both Governor Abbott and Arizona Governor Ducey have activated EMAC to seek from other states additional law enforcement officers, drones, and helicopters to help with the surge in illegal crossings.
In a statement, Abbott acknowledged that the Biden administration’s policies have created a humanitarian crisis at the southern border with record levels of illegal immigrants, drugs, and weapons pouring into Texas.
"While securing the border is the federal government’s responsibility, Texas will not sit idly by as this crisis grows. The state is working collaboratively with communities impacted by the crisis to arrest and detain individuals coming into Texas illegally. Our efforts will only be effective if we work together to secure the border, make criminal arrests, protect landowners, rid our communities of dangerous drugs, and provide Texans with the support they need and deserve. This is an unprecedented crisis, and Texas is responding with the most robust and comprehensive border plan the nation has ever seen."
Unfortunately, the Biden administration has put identity politics over protecting the American people, but hey, at least Biden isn’t tweeting mean things right? Vice President Harris, who Biden tasked with overseeing the border, seems to think the humanitarian crisis is funny.
Some speculate she refuses to go to the southern border because it would make for a bad “photo-op.” The Biden Administration blocked reporters from taking photos of “kids in cages” by using COVID-19 as a pretext. Even liberal media outlets condemn them for this abuse of power because it corrodes trust in “trust the science” when they use a global pandemic to hide their own hypocrisy. The truth is that the Democratic Party has been the party of “kids in cages” because of their reluctance to stop or deport illegal immigrants, which is why the Obama administration built those cages in the first place.
If American schools had succeeded in teaching critical thinking then most Democrats would acknowledge that border walls work and that Trump’s threat to “make Mexico pay for it” was actually effective in reducing illegal crossings.
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"ARRO
arrogant-michael-bloomberg-buying-your
Upon Bloomberg entering the 2020 race, a lot of Democrats have said something along the lines of, “He’s so arrogant! What does he think he can buy the election?!” In this video I breakdown the critique.
Arrogant?
I’d contend it’s arrogant for ANYONE to think they should be the most powerful person in the world.
“What [Bloomberg] believes — and this is the arrogance of billionaires: ‘Hey, I can run for president because I’m worth $55 billion, and maybe I’ll take $1 billion out of that $55 billion’ — not a lot, when you’re worth that much — and … start running a massive amount of TV ads in California and, in fact, all over this country,” — Bernie Sanders
But with that said, Michael Bloomberg is a 77-year-old billionaire-philanthropist-mayor whose accomplishments by any fair measure outweigh all of the other Democratic candidates.
(bernie sanders vs. michael bloomberg)
Percent of income donated last year: Elizabeth Warren (5.5%), Amy Klobuchar (1.9%), Kamala Harris (1.4%), Bernie Sanders (1%), Beto O’Rourke (0.3%), Michael Bloomberg (100%, gave $767 million in 2018 making him 3rd most generous giver in USA and over $7.9 billion lifetime and he signed The Giving Pledge, whereby promising to give away the majority of his fortune before or after he dies).
And it’s far more arrogant in my opinion to think you are qualified to lead the free world when you’ve only been a mayor of a small city or a US Senator for just 6 years.
Buy election?
Tonight we say to Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires: Sorry, you’re not going to buy this election.
(bernie sanders vs. michael bloomberg)
Michael Bloomberg is not buying your vote.
If anything Bernie, Waren, and Yang are buying your vote.
They are literally saying to voters, “Vote for me and I’ll give you someone else’s money”, whether it be in the form of free healthcare, education, debt-forgiveness, or in the form of a literal thousand dollar check.
During a recent debate, Andrew Yang went so far as to tell viewers at home to go to his website and enter their email so they could then be put in a lottery to win a thousand dollars.
Ridiculous!
And please consider there are only two ways to get air time: you can buy it with your own money or you can buy it with other people’s money.
(bernie sanders vs. michael bloomberg)
Michael Bloomberg is using his own money whereas the other candidates are primarily relying on big media companies to fund the channels to get out their messages. Trump, for example, spent less money than Hillary, but more money via the mainstream media was spent on talking about Trump.
There are more substantive critiques of Bloomberg, such as on Stop & Frisk and his Big Gulp Ban, which I addressed in a previous answer, but ultima
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the-future-of-israel-(how-the-israel
Before we go forward let’s go back…
The Kingdom of Israel was established around 1000 BC predating Christianity and Islam. We could therefore think of Jews as the region’s indigenous population.
The region was eventually conquered by Muslims and then Christians and then Muslims and then finally Christians again.
“Make Israel Native Again!”
Now, I don’t personally find genetic land claims persuasive. I don’t love the idea of passing down massive wealth from father to son let alone to draw a broad line from a millennia ago to the present. I recognize, however, that I may be in the minority here because there are many of my fellow Americans who believe that the federal government should give special privileges, reparations, and land to people simply on the basis of their genetic makeup.
Anyway, after many Jews were expelled from their ancient homeland, they were forced to live under Christian and Muslim governments who fluctuated between tolerance and genocide. This is known as the Jewish Diaspora.
Naturally, Jews became frustrated by being raped, killed, robbed, and scapegoated for centuries so they requested the League of Nations give them back a piece of their ancient homeland, which since then had basically passed from one colonial power’s hands to the next.
The bottom line is Zionist Jews recognized that the best way to defend themselves from antisemitism and preserve themselves from cultural disintegration was to have a state of their own.
And then after the most horrific genocide in history where basically the world sat by as Jewish men, women, and children were gassed to death, the British/United Nations offered to split the colonized land into two states: one for Jews and one for Arabs.
This should have been hailed as a triumphant victory for the region! The first time it would rule itself since perhaps the Kingdom of Israel, but do you know how the Arab League responded to this gracious offer?
War.
Genocide against Kurds? Nothing.
Genocide against Christians? Nothing.
Jews want to establish their own democratic state in a small piece of their ancient homeland where they make up a majority of the population after the most horrific genocide in human history? Arab nations unite in moral indignation to declare war!
They didn’t declare war because all of a sudden these theocratic governments developed a deep love for democracy, self-rule, and human rights. It was about maintaining Arab Islamic power.
The goal of the Arab League wasn’t a two-state solution or one-state where everyone would be “equal,” i.e. name a Muslim-majority country where Jews are treated as equals or where a single Jew holds elected office? The motive was as many Arab Leaders actively proclaimed to, “drive the Jews into t
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