A Letter From “The Forgotten Man”

(Excerpt from The Glenn Beck Show)

Glenn,

The Republicans caved as I expected, but that’s not news where I live. As the discussions were going on in Washington this week, I called my senator and I called my congressmen too. I left them a message with my phone number and my e-mail address. I asked them to stand tall, to get the spending in order, to make Obamacare equal for all Americans, not just special interests. The recording that I received said they would send me a response. I’ve called them before, got the same recording. I won’t hear from them. After all, I’m The Forgotten Man.

The media today is blaming the TEA Party for all the ills in Washington. I laugh when I hear that, Glenn. Just give me 10 minutes with each of those so-called journalists, just 10 minutes. I’d ask them, “What is the TEA Party? How did the TEA Party get started? What do people who support the TEA Party principles actually believe in?” I can guarantee you, Glenn, they don’t know the answers. But I would share it with them anyway. We believe in liberty. We believe in freedom. We believe in a much smaller representative government. We believe in the God-given right that has been given to each individual. And then I’d ask those journalists, “When you give your daughter her allowance on Saturday and she comes back to you the next Wednesday saying she spent it all, and more, what do you tell her?” If they reply, “Well, you’re going to have to wait until next Saturday and you’re going to have to work it out,” I’d tell those journalists, “Welcome to the TEA Party.” If I met somebody in Hollywood and I asked them, “Why do you use Toronto to depict New York City in their recent movie,” and they told me, “Well, it’s cheaper to do it there,” I’d say, “My gosh, you sound like not only a capitalist but a new member of the TEA Party.” I’d ask them if they believe that every man, woman, and child should be treated equally, regardless of their gender, race, or religion. They would all say, in their journalistic ivory towers, “Of course.” And I would say, “Welcome to the TEA Party.”

You see, where I live, Glenn, using common sense, sharing common values, and exhibiting common courtesy is not the exception. It’s the norm. But I’m The Forgotten Man. And speaking of parties, maybe it is time for a third one. But not for the so-called journalists I see on TV because they already have enough parties. That’s why I don’t think they ask any that you had probing questions. In April I was watching the White House Correspondents Dinner on C-Span. Before it got started, they showed the journalists arriving. I thought I was watching the Academy Awards. Designer dresses, tuxedos, limousines. As each one entered, the flash bulbs would go off. Then they would stop, smile, turn slightly to the right. More flash bulbs, slightly shifting to the left, more pictures. I thought to myself, they’re not journalists; they’re the Kardashians. And it’s the same thing when the Washington Post or the New York Times or Vanity Fair throws a party. They will sell their souls to be there. But they don’t really have any souls to sell because they’ve already sold them before. If you work in the media in Washington or in New York or in Hollywood, I guess you have a decision to make: You can ask the tough questions that Americans actually would support you on, actually expect you to ask, or you can ask the “I want an invitation to the next party” question.

Glenn, I’m through with all of them, but I want you to know I’m also through with complaining. Misery loves company, but I’m kicking misery to the curb. The next time I write to ya, I’m going to focus on what’s good, on what’s possible, what’s remarkable about America. I may be The Forgotten Man, but I haven’t forgotten about America. You say this all the time, “We’ll get through this.” We will. Just wait and see. Much the sun is always brightest right after the storm.

– The Forgotten Man

Education Is The Destroyer Of Slavery

This decade is going to prove to be very volatile. The world is teetering on the edge of a cliff. There are things you can do and there is hope!

You MUST get educated! That is the most important thing you can do. No one can tell you exactly what do. Each situation is different and you must educate yourself and devise your own plan.

The world’s demise could be your biggest opportunity!

Why Gold and Silver Are SO Important

This site is run by one of my favorite mentors, Mike Maloney. He is phenomenal at education and informing people about the upcoming storms.

You can find pretty much anything you need to know on his site. Plus he regularly talks about other people he looks up to and learns from!

Enjoy!

And The Next Crisis Is…

Its hard to say what the next financial crisis will be in this country. Will it be housing again? Commercial real estate? Or will it be Social Security or Medicare going bankrupt? Maybe the U.S. dollar collapsing or most likely the Japanese yen going bust?

I think there is a good argument to be made that it will be the pyramid scheme we’ll refer to as student loans.

The Next Crisis?

Our politicians wont let this happen because, you know, “it wouldnt be fair if someone couldnt go to school only because they couldnt afford it.” I mean we just heard the President say this again in another campaign speech earlier this week: “its not that we need equal results, everyone should have equal opportunity.”

I hate to break it to people but thats not life. You make your own breaks. If you are older than the age of about 10 you should have realized this. You level your own playing field or you dont. Its that simple. I would have loved to have Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr coach me my whole hockey career but its not that simple. You cant make life FAIR no matter how hard you try or how many government programs you scheme up.

They are going to try and make college free someday, MARK MY WORDS!

The President may mention it before he leaves office. I would put money on it actually.

Americans have to realize that they cannot have their cake and eat it, too.

You cannot be the most prosperous and free country on Earth and think you can still pay for everyone to sit home and produce nothing.

The printing of money will only get you so far, just ask the Romans! Our joy ride WILL come to an end if we keep traveling down this delusional “shared wealth” vision.

If it worked then America would have been modeled after every other country that existed prior, but it wasn’t. There is an excellent reason for that.

No Better Time Than The Present

The title of this post says it all..

There is NEVER a better time than right now, this very instant, to make a move, take action, change the direction of your life.

Stop following the crowd. Stop doing what they do. Stop listening to what they listen to. Stop watching what they watch. Stop talking like they talk. Stop working like they work. Unless you want what they have.

The great news is you can ALWAYS change. The door is always there for you to open.

It’s like going down a highway and passing exits, those are all opportunities to get off and change. They keep on coming but it’s up to you to decide to get off the cruise control and make a change.

Now more than ever this country needs business owners and entrepreneurs and creative thinkers.

Those who take the Information Age by the horns will win and those who are stuck in their old ways, old jobs, old “pensions”, looking for government to take care of them will get chewed up and spit out.

Multiple streams of income is the wave of the future – the Information Age.

Network marketing, real estate, coding, startups, inventors. They will make the rules of the future. It’s not too late to start doing any or all of these.

You just need to decide to get off the highway.

A Theory About Cyprus

This may be a month or so after the bank deposit raid that took place in Cyprus but it is STILL relevant because it hasn’t happened here yet, but will in due time.

I believe one of the big reasons it got such little media coverage in the western world is because that is the plan going forward here. The media dictates what they think the public can handle – just like the government gives you just enough money left over for what it thinks you need to live on.

I think the biggest reason for this silencing of the raid was due in large part because the heavy-hitters are not ready to show their cards yet. We are on the “turn” and the powers-that-be are not ready for the “river” quite yet. They are still gathering all the gold and silver they can find and stashing it away while the public blindly believes that the economy is on the road back to recovery. I mean hey look, the Dow is well over 15,000 and continually setting new highs, right?

We have seen ebbs and flows, recessions and depressions before, but we have never seen anything like what is coming in the future; an economic collapse on a global scale.

All the past hiccups were between only a handful of countries. Now, nearly every country in the world minus some African countries are involved in this debacle. Add to that, this is one of the first times the gold and silver market has had such a massive audience.

When things start hitting the fan people will ultimately turn to the world’s only real money: gold and silver. When they do its going to be the same gold and silver we have been trading around for thousands of years. Yes, we have obviously mined more in that time but the quantity still remains fairly low – a little over 5 billion ounces.

To put that in to perspective, we are about $17 trillion in debt as a country alone. Then you look at the world and we are on the hook for quadrillions of dollars in derivatives. See, governments can print money, they can’t print gold and silver.

When it all comes crashing down you are looking at nearly the same quantity of gold and silver being ravaged by a consumer base hundreds of millions of people larger than the last bubble in 1980.

Talk about a bidding war.

We are going to see prices in the stratosphere for people who want to preserve their wealth and not be totally wiped out by the reset that WILL take place.

And it WILL happen.

We are printing $85 billion a month, have been for years and will continue to do so for another 2 years. This makes the money you have worth less and less each day, don’t believe me just watch:

What has the price of gas been since 2008?

What has the price of milk been since 2008?

What has the price of sugar, wheat, rice, etc. been since 2008?

This isn’t something that happened because of which President came to power in the last few years. I mean some helped more than others. But George W. Bush and Barack Obama were focused on bailing the “too-big-to-fail” guys out while you were footing the bill.

This really started once we created the Federal Reserve in 1913 (Woodrow Wilson) and compounded it with Social Security (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Medicare/Medicaid (Lyndon Baines Johnson) and then ultimately coming unhinged when the U.S. (Richard Nixon) took the world off the gold standard.

This is when savers became losers and debtors began to win.

Financial education will help you through this mess and give you a fighting chance to survive the decade or two of turmoil we have ahead of ourselves.

 

Some recommended books to start off your education:

“Why ‘A’ Students Work For ‘C’ Students and ‘B’ Students Work For The Government” by Robert Kiyosaki

“The Creature From Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin

“Nanny State” – Coming To A Government Near You…Unless You Have The Answers!

It is astonishing to see liberal talking heads back Obama’s jobs bill, and more specifically the tax hikes on “rich people”. Has anyone looked up the definition of Socialism lately?

so·cial·ism

[soh-shuh-liz-uh-m] -noun

1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the

means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.

3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by

the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

WOW! This is right out of the playbook.

Controlling the production of capital: This is exactly what happened with the Solyndra scandal. Government is not a venture capitalist and when it becomes one, it always fails. Pushing through loans and trying to make a company work is not something governments can do because they have no vested interest. They use taxpayers’ money and have no accountability for the share holders. On the other hand, an investor wants his company to succeed so he/she doesn’t go bankrupt. So he/she will take the necessary steps to make the most product at the least cost. This is how Capitalism works, and why it has worked so well for over 230 years.

It is so beyond scary to see so many news anchors, commentators, union leaders, political leaders, and Presidents back this idea of taking from the rich and redistributing the wealth to the poor. It has been tried in countless countries and failed each time. No, I take that back. It has succeeded overwhelmingly at its intended purpose; overthrowing governments and giving the power to emerging dictators – see #3 on definition of socialism.

Also beware of people like Stephen Lerner who advocate unrest and overthrow of our systems.

You have heard Obama claim that all Americans need to pay their fair share of taxes. Well what exactly is the fair share? Does one man have the power to decide whats fair? A quick look at the data from 2008 – not much has changed in two years – and you will notice that the top 1% of taxpayers earn about 20% of all the adjusted gross income but pay nearly 40% of the taxes. While the bottom 50% of taxpayers earn about 12.75% and pay just under 3% of the total income taxes. While the bottom 47% or 48% DONT PAY ANY FEDERAL INCOME TAXES. Doesn’t that seem reversed? In the business world you want incentives to make more, not make less, so you can pay less taxes. This is where our country is distorted. There isn’t as much incentive to do well because so much of your money is taken and given to people who don’t work as hard and educate themselves. Many know they can just float through life, be a bad student, bad worker, etc., and have the government (high income earners) pay their way through life; in the form of welfare, unemployment, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Most importantly, the means to become rich are so strapped by government rules and regulations, the American Dream is just that; a dream.

—–

I think that Churchill said it best.

“We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” – Sir Winston Churchill

On that note, once you have identified the problem you need to lay out a solution. This is again where you will hear many media personalities claim that Republicans have no plan – even though they have submitted multiple this year alone only to be shot down or tabled in the Senate, or threatened by the President to receive a veto. Most famous were the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan and the Paul Ryan budget plans; reforming many plagued government programs.

This is a rough list of the ideas I have to spur economic super-growth in the private sector. The area where real prosperity is created.

1.) Cut taxes for everyone. Institute a flat tax, if you were to have an income tax, of say 15%. You then broaden the tax base to include the 50% of the country paying no federal income tax. Everyone pays 15% federal income tax. This would drastically increase “revenue”, which the Democrats talk about all the time now, as a cover for tax hikes. That would probably get rid of all the “unfair” talk we have going on between the President and the country, don’t you think?

2.) Better yet, just get rid of the income tax. This is a Keynesian approach, to bring down the skilled worker and redistribute the wealth to the poor; originally implemented as the 16th amendment by super-progressive, Woodrow Wilson, as a tactic to pay for war.

3.) Get rid of capital gains, property, and estate. These are worthless taxes that take from the wealthy and have proven to grow government. Capital gains are the taxes put on earnings from things like stocks and are already taxed through income initially, so that’s a double tax. Property taxes are taxes you pay on your land. The government forgot that the Founding Fathers meant for the people to own their land, not the government. By taxing you on your land, the government is telling you that you don’t own it, you just are leasing it from them. Estate tax, or the death tax, is land/house taxed that is inherited or given to someone through a will when someone dies. Just another way for government to corral your money.

4.) In getting rid of the federal income tax we would implement a small national sales tax that would tax all items being sold, except vital goods like food/commodities. This would incorporate everyone in the entire country; every single person taking something from the pot, is also contributing to it. Every person getting paid under the table, illegal immigrant, or tax cheat; is now taxed when he/she buys items at the store. Fair share, right?

5.) Stop some tax loopholes for corporations that give companies, like GE, the ability to pay ZERO taxes and stash their money in overseas accounts.

6.) Stop printing money (audit the Federal Reserve) – This stops inflation and gets rid of the secret tax. The secret tax is hidden everywhere, all around you. Every good and commodity goes up in price but your wages don’t. You pay more for each product, effectively lowering the purchasing power of the green you have; forcing you to hand away more bills for the same product.

7.) Get rid of much of the regulations and red tape hamstringing small business. Which leads in to the biggie…

8.) Repeal Obamacare. The national healthcare law the Democrats shoved down our throats while in full control will destroy job growth. Not to mention when it takes effect in 2013 it will bring more tax hikes. The ills of Obamacare are long and many. This is something I will cover in the near future. This post is long enough and may be easily doubled if I begin to explain the negatives that will come along with it.

9.) Stop bailing companies out – This is counterintuitive. no one is too big to fail and sets a horrible example for companies and citizens. Bail outs are counter to free markets and free enterprise.

10.) Institute tort reform – Ridding the judicial system of many frivolous lawsuits. The component added would be a loser-pays system. If you file a frivolous lawsuit and lose then you pay the costs. See Texas for the success of this policy.

11.) Reform entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security need serious overhauls. They are colossal burdens on our taxpayers. The big three take up nearly 50% of our federal budget without enough taxpayers paying in to the system to keep it upright, which we are beginning to see the repercussions of now.

12.) Reform unemployment – You have to work for charities or a company and get job training. There should also be an allotted time period that you are eligible for payments.

13.) Reform welfare – You should be drug tested while receiving welfare checks. If you test positive you are immediately off and you have to pay for the test. If you test negative, then you are refunded your test money. You should also have an allotted time period before your checks stop; say 18 months.

14.) Re-work base-line budgeting. Every time there is 1% increase in spending, there should be a 1% increase in the budget. Right now we have a budget that increases automatically each year. For example, say the budget increases 9 percent each year. If you only spend an extra 5% that year the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores that as a 4% budget cut. With this system, real budget cuts will never be attainable. The budget will continue growing uncontrollably. To put it in relative terms: its like being dragged to a store by your friend when you have no money, buying something on sale, and telling yourself you just saved money.

Just a few things that can be done to immediately relieve the burden on the American economy. This should get the ball rolling – as there are still, many things we could do that are not mentioned above.