Welcome to Stockton, California: Prepare to Die

Like many other California cities, the cost of pensions, pay, and benefit packages is bankrupting Stockton, California. The city cannot afford to hire new police officers, because all the money is going to pay for the pensions and benefits of old police officers and other municipal employees -- current and retired.

Murder, rape, and robbery are becoming the new normal in Stockton, something of a preview of coming attraction to other Calfornia cities who find themselves in the same fiscal boat.

In Stockton, California, which declared bankruptcy earlier this year, your chances of becoming a victim of a violent crime such as murder, rape, robbery or assault are 1 in 70, which is nearly four times higher than the national average.

Your chances of being the victim of a property crime are even more likely, with 1 in every 17 residents of the city facing the prospect of having their house broken into or car stolen this year.

This is what happens when a city, county, state or federal government can no longer pay its bills and is forced to lay off workers. In the case of Stockton, the city has cut tens of millions of dollars from their budget, mostly targeting law enforcement and other essential services. _Stockton's Woe

In fact, in cities across the "blue zone" of the US, municipal workers' unions have enough power to bankrupt cities, and force the same type of hardship on their citizens.

Detroit, Michigan, is the true forerunner of municipal decay. And as you might guess, the municipal workers' unions of Detroit stand front and centre to blame for the downfall of motown, motor city.

What we are seeing is the doom of cities -- from Obama's Chicago to Detroit to inner city Philadelphia. Murders, flash mobs, out of control gang violence, and fat cat wealthy unions able to control elections and determine who gets elected to oversee their contracts.

Government officials on all levels are stuck. They are overloaded with debt and have no more money to spend. The only option is to start cutting services like law enforcement, emergency medical response, public food and homelessness support, and other social services like rental assistance. The effect of this collapse of government services is rising crime across the entire spectrum of criminal activity including murder, theft and organized attacks like flash mobs. This is more than likely coming to a town near you in short order, no matter where in the United States you live. _shtfplan

The comments following the article linked above are also interesting.

Private citizens are being forced to come together to form citizen's vigilance groups, militias, and armed neighborhood watch posses. This is what comes from the US electing a president who is viscerally antagonistic to the private economic sector and the non-governmental economy.

If Obama is re-elected, expect the situation to grow even worse. Much worse.

A newbies' guide to UAVs -- fly your own security drone to monitor the mean streets around your gated community.

Wake Up Little Stupid Head!

You are being played like a chump in many ways. Here are just 2:

foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.

As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. _PeterSchiff

And # 2, look at the taxes!

I keep reading about surveys that show that retail sales are up. But as noted above, no one pays extra sales taxes, or decides they need to pay more income taxes. The surest way to measure retail sales is sales taxes. Want to know how incomes are doing? Look at income tax receipts. Let's look at sales taxes first.

First off, I can find no single source of recent sales tax information. It is all one-off, but it is consistent. Sales taxes in my home state of Texas are down 12.8% year-over-year, and we're in the fifth straight month of decreases of 11% or more. Projections are for sales taxes to continue to decline into 2010.

There is a very revealing study by the Pew Center on state taxes, called "Beyond California". Everyone knows how badly off California is. The Pew Center looks at how the rest of the states are doing, and focuses on 10 states that also have severe problems. Sales tax receipts are down 14% in Arizona, and state income taxes are down 32%.

On average, revenues are down almost 12%. Oregon has seen their revenues collapse a stunning 19%. New York is down 17%, with a deficit of 32%. Illinois has a projected deficit of 47% of its budget, second only to California with 49%. You can see how your state fares here.

The Liscio Report notes that all states had negative year-over-year sales tax collections in October, and the weighted average decrease was 10.2%, down from a negative 7.2% in September. _SeekingAlpha

One more thing: do you really believe those unemployment numbers they try to feed you?

As I noted last week, the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey, not the 190,000 you read about in the mainstream media. Unemployment is sadly continuing to rise by significant amounts.

In August, I did an interview with CNBC from Leen's Fishing Lodge in Maine. The unemployment numbers had just come out. I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate that we would need about 15 million new jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we were when the recession started. _SA

President Obama thinks he can speak the country out of the recession with his teleprompter and 1960s era speechwriters.

He thinks that by paying off his supporters in the big unions, big Wall Street firms, big trial lawyer partnerships, and big overseas illegal campaign contributor scams, that somehow everything will magically get better.

How, Mr. Obama? By taxing small and medium business into oblivion? By destroying the coal industry, hamstringing the oil industry, and paralyzing the nuclear industry? By giving the auto industry to your union chums to destroy, and regulating the energy industry out of existence? By creating a monster of a government health care bureaucracy that drives the economy into the mud even more quickly than all previous entitlements put together?

Hey little stupid head! Wake up and decide if you are going to put up with this green rookie incompetent clown president you stumbled into electing. Because despite what you may have been told, the world really did need a prosperous, strong US -- for a lot of reasons.

First Send Them Back to the Stone Age, Then Make Their Home Into a Parking Lot

And you can do it all without messy invasions or nuclear weapons! First send that pesky enemy back to the stone age with EMP weapons -- you don't even need to use nukes! This will create havoc with military command and control, and largely break civilian morale within a few days.Then you can destroy transportation arteries and vital infrastructures such as powerplants, fuel refineries, pipelines and military installations from a distance -- using kinetic weapons fired by electromagnetic cannon!

This one-two punch can be assembled with off-the-shelf components taking very little time and expense.

A smart world conqueror might put off invasion plans until nano-weaponry becomes more advanced. Nothing clears a space so well as nano-invaders capable of stripping a land cleaner than locust. Stealthy in, quick working, then dissolving into the landscape. Entire nations could be turned over, ready for radical makeover practically overnight!

The social democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Oceania have allowed humans to take a vacation from history for the past half century or more. This pax cannot possibly last much longer, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Obama devastation of the world economy.

Soon, the world populations will be thrust back into the hands of the warlords, the conquerors, the absolute destroyers of lands and peoples. Again. History coming to life, just when you thought it was obsolete.

Modern weapons research is a bit uneven. Most projects, perhaps, will not survive due to poor conceptualisation and a lack of robustness on the field of battle. But enough of the tools of "the new warfare" will succeed, to change the face of the planet a million times more than the hyped up global warming scare of Gore and Obama.

Buckle up.

A Liberal Gets Uneasy About Obama's Leftism

Stuart Taylor is a respected liberal legal scholar and author who has supported Obama out of a belief that Obama was "one of us." By "one of us", Taylor meant that he thought that Obama was really a "good liberal", and not a wild-eyed leftist like those right wingers were claiming. But even a "baby leftist" can start to wake up. Being taken for a chump is not easy to admit, but Taylor may be beginning to comprehend how easily he has been led down the path.

I have taken certain liberties with the excerpted text below, from Taylor's timid "mea culpa." Text inside the square brackets is editorial comment from Al Fin. _Al Fin

Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be [crafting] what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

....But with the nation already plunging deep into [gratuitous] debt to [drown] the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama's proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.

All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn't "believe in bigger government" and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

The president's suggestions that all the necessary tax increases can be squeezed out of the richest 2 percent are [devious and ] deceptive and [designed] to stir class resentment. And his apparent cave-ins to [leftist revolutionary] interest groups [will] change the country for the worse.

Such concerns [will] help explain why the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 17 percent from the morning of Inauguration Day (8,280) to its close on March 4 (6,876). The markets have also been deeply shaken by Obama's alarming failure to come up with a clear plan for fixing the crippled financial system -- which has loomed since his election four months ago as by far his most urgent challenge -- or for working with foreign leaders to arrest the meltdown of the world economy.

Stuart Taylor