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The Miracle Product That Cures Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome!
The Miracle Product That Cures Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome!
“You might have noticed that there is an increasingly massive industry in our country that sells something called “financial products”. This industry now comprises close to 40% of our economy. What is a financial product, you ask? It is the most amazing, miracle invention known to humankind! You can buy one of these financial products and then just wait – go on a vacation, do your nails, play golf – while doing absolutely nothing productive. And when you come back you find that your financial product has disgorged free money! You don’t even have to water it!”
During last year’s presidential election, Dr. Willard M. Romney diagnosed a previously unrecognized epidemic illness that is eating away at the moral foundations of our country. Romney was the first medical scientist to grasp that 47% of our citizens have been transformed into an army of zombie parasites now known to the experts as “moochers.” The moochers have been infected with DES, Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome, a 21st century plague whose victims live lives solely devoted to sucking funds from the bank accounts of decent people. Not one to sit idly by while an invasive undead horde saps and impurifies our precious bodily fluids, Dr. Romney attempted to sound the national alarm about the moocher scourge. But alas, he was ahead of his time. The country was not yet ready to hear his bracing but prescient DES warning.
Moochers might appear normal, but don’t be fooled by appearances! While these bloodsuckers are seemingly busy changing bedpans, waxing the floor at your office, serving up stacks of pancakes at Denny’s and standing in long lines to beg abjectly for “jobs’, they are all the while draining our hard-won and well-merited wealth. A tell-tale symptom of DES is that while moochers pay all kinds of sales taxes, payroll taxes and government fees just like the rest of us, they don’t pay any income taxes. Imagine! No income taxes! The DES sufferer will tell you that the absence of income tax obligations is somehow related to the moocher’s extreme deficiency in actual income. A likely story!
Moochery is the new leprosy. Its victims cannot be cured, but only isolated from the rest of us by being cut off from access to lobbyists, fund-raising dinners, Justice Department cronies, voting booths, think tank idea moguls, astroturfing consultants, and all the other instruments by means of which normal, healthy people influence the direction of government and society. They must even be cut off from access to regular, remunerative employment. Economists are now helping the cause by gradually redefining the natural rate of unemployment upward to take the profusion of unemployable moochers into account. It is expected that by 2021, the country will have become quite comfortable with workforce participation rates of 50% or less.
But what hope is there for the rest of us? If Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome can’t be cured, can it at least be prevented? Scientists now know the answer is – yes! And the urgently needed prophylaxis has lain within our grasp all along. A common, widely-sold product that is available to almost all worthy and non-mooching people with a respectable amount of money in the bank can keep DES at bay indefinitely.
What is this marvelous treatment? You might have noticed that there is an increasingly massive industry in our country that sells something called “financial products”. This industry now comprises close to 40% of our economy. What is a financial product, you ask? It is the most amazing, miracle invention known to humankind! You can buy one of these financial products and then just wait – go on a vacation, do your nails, play golf – while doing absolutely nothing productive. And when you come back you find that your financial product has disgorged free money! You don’t even have to water it!
Where does the money come from? Hardly anyone really knows! The person who sold the financial product probably doesn’t know; and certainly the person who bought the financial product doesn’t know. (A hysterical rumor has been spread that some of these financial products derive their cash flows from the work of some of the moochers themselves; but economists have now proven this manifestly ridiculous theory to be unambiguously false.) What we do know is that the money is 100% deserved. And that makes financial products the perfect barrier to fend off the DES virus and the onset of acute moochitis.
But what are financial products made of, you ask? What hidden quintessence produces these glorious emanations of lucre? So far as scientists have been able to discern, financial products are mostly derivative products that come from other financial products! And the best thing about these money-engendering financial products is that to buy most of them you are required to have a lot of money already. So the more money you have the more money you are able to get. Just buy a financial product, sit back and enjoy the spontaneous money ejaculations!
Financial products have been shown to have all sorts of salubrious psychological effects. Doctors have shown that the mere ownership of financial products causes their owners to develop extremely high levels of self-esteem and unshakable convictions of personal merit. Even though the owners of financial products might do nothing productive, they become resolutely convinced that the effort they put into deciding which financial products to buy is in itself a form of meritorious personal industry. The ability to buy and sell lucrative financial products with a rapidity exceeding the perceptual thresholds of naked eye vision is viewed by their owners as the most exalted of all human occupations. Also, staring into one’s financial products sometimes induces the same kinds of transcendent experiences and levels of higher consciousness others have attained from close concentration on mandalas and lava lamps.
The owners of financial products also develop contempt for the meaner and more productive occupations in life, which is no doubt good for their health as it makes them avoid all kinds of physical hazards, toxic industrial environments, and muscular stresses and strains (unrelated to golfing). Indeed, the shrewd owner of financial products acquires the belief that the very fact that their discernment is more keen than others, to the degree that they are able to bathe in fountains of money without expending the kinds of labor others must undertake to enjoy much smaller trickles, is proof positive of their ordained desert. The fact that others demonstrably lack those rare combinations of personal qualities that make a person a discerning purchaser of financial products, and so must work for a living instead, only convinces the owner of financial products that work is a barbarous vestigial habit of the undeserving undermasses.
But isn’t the psychological conviction that one deserves flows of money that are not derived in any measurable way from one’s own productive contribution to society, and that seem to come from magically reproducing money alone, a sense of entitlement? The effects of financial product ownership seem disturbingly similar to the moochachondriacal symptoms of DES, do they not? If I own some financial products and feel entitled to their monetary discharges, how do I know that I am not suffering from DES myself?
The effects may look similar on the surface, but don’t be fooled by these false positives in self-administered DES tests! Just as in the case of cholesterol, scientists have learned to distinguish “good” entitlement from “bad” entitlement. The technical names are “1-alpha entitlement” and “86-zeta entitlement”, but let us not be sidetracked by jargon. Bad entitlement is the kind of entitlement one feels when one thinks one is entitled to a decent life in exchange for a willingness to work to the best of one’s abilities, given the natural gifts one possesses, however meager, and given the opportunities for work that one’s society has offered. Bad entitlement is the entitlement of the DES-afflicted moocher. Good entitlement is that kind of entitlement one experiences from the assurance of one’s own cleverness in the buying and idle owning of financial products. (1-alpha entitlement is closely related to the other members of the alpha family of entitlement experiences, such as 800-alpha entitlement: the entitlement feelings that flow from having high SAT scores; and 10-alpha entitlement: the sense of entitlement that derives from being totally hot.)
As Martin Luther King said, “The course of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice!” If King was right, then there is no doubt that Willard Romney will eventually receive his just due from the world: a Noble Prize in medicine for his studies in the identification and treatment of Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome. He has already been nominated for other prizes, including the Eric Holder memorial Too Big to Bother lifetime prosecution exemption award from the US Justice Department. And yet, what if King was wrong? Well, Romney is already an accomplished virtuoso in the buying and ownership of financial products, so his real reward will remain the quiet, inward assurance of his own awesomeness, and the enjoyment of his 100% merited 1-alpha entitlement. Dr. King, on the other hand, is not known to have possessed any noteworthy skills in the acquisition and holding of financial products. So really, who cares what he thought?
via The Miracle Product That Cures Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome! – New Economic Perspectives.
via The Miracle Product That Cures Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome! – New Economic Perspectives.
Voting By Sex, Age, Race, Money, And Education
Amazing Facts About US Presidential Voting By Sex, Age, Race, Money, And Education
The New York Times has an awesome graphical breakdown of voting data from the 2012 Presidential election.
In case you had any doubt about how the country breaks down along gender, age, race, financial status, religion, education, and community lines, just have a glance at these stats.
Obama won “Women” by 11 points (55% to 44%). This was very important, because women made up 53% of voters.
Romney won “Men” by 7 points (52% to 45%). Men were only 47% of voters.
Obama won “Young voters” (18-29) by an astounding 24 points (60% to 36%). These folks were 19% of total voters.
Obama won “Young middle aged voters” (30-44) by an impressive 7 points (52% to 45%). These folks were 26% of total voters.
Romney won “Middle-aged voters” (45-59) by 5 points (52% to 47%). These were 29% of voters.
Romney won “Older voters” (60+) by 9 points (54% to 45%). These were 25% of voters.
Obama won “Black voters” by a staggering 87 points (93% to 6%). Blacks were 13% of voters.
Obama won “Asian voters” by a remarkable 47 points (73% to 26%). Asians were 3% of voters.
Obama won “Hispanic voters” by a remarkable 44 points (71% to 27%). Hispanics were 10% of voters.
Romney won “White voters” by 20 points (59% to 39%). Whites were 72% of voters.
Obama won gay, unmarried, and working-mother, and parents-with-young-kids voters by massive margins.
Romney won “married” voters.
Obama won uneducated (no high school), modestly educated (high school), and super-educated (graduate degree) voters.
Romney won college grads by a small margin.
Obama won by a staggering margin voters who said their financial situation is the same or better than 4 years ago.
Romney won by a big margin voters who said their financial situation is worse.
Obama won households making less than $49,999 by ~20 points
Romney won households making more than $50,000 by 6-10 points
Obama easily won voters who classify themselves as Democrats and Liberals and narrowly won those classifying themselves as Moderates
Romney easily won voters who classify themselves as Republicans and Conservatives, and very narrowly won Independents
Obama won by a landslide in big cities and easily in small cities.
Romney won easily in rural areas and more narrowly in the suburbs and towns.
Obama won Jewish voters handily (2% of voters) and Catholic voters (25% of voters) narrowly
Romney won protestants (53% of voters) and white evangelical Christians (26% of voters).
via Voting By Sex, Age, Race, Money, And Education – Business Insider.
via Voting By Sex, Age, Race, Money, And Education – Business Insider.
Where it went wrong for Romney –
Analysis: Following an ugly and seemingly interminable presidential campaign, Mitt Romney‘s hopes of becoming the 45th president of the United States unravelled in just a few hours.
The political prize that eluded him in 2008, and his father four decades before, had seemed tantalisingly close. It was all the more remarkable give that his roller-coaster campaign threatened to come off the rails early on, before roaring back to life following his first energetic television debate.
But within hours of arriving in Boston to watch the results pour in with his family and advisors, the television networks had called the election for his rival.
What may rankle most with Romney is that the obstacles which prevented him from beating an incumbent saddled with high unemployment and a disappointing first election term were largely of his own making.
There were devastating wall-to-wall attacks from Democrats, to be sure, which sought to portray him as an elitist plutocrat who was all-too comfortable with bankrupting the US car industry.
But there was no one else to blame for the verbal gaffes, his comments about the 47 per cent of people on welfare, his failure to produce tax returns or his constant shape-shifting on fundamental policy issues.
Ultimately, voters never warmed or trusted him in sufficient numbers – and Romney never effectively made the case for himself.
47 per cent
The voice on the secretly recorded video was steady, and the message was severe. “There are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what,” he said at a private fundraiser.
“All right, there are 47 per cent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,” Romney said. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
It took Romney days to express regret at his comments.
Coming after a slew of ads that accused his investment company, Bain Capital, of vulture capitalism and outsourcing jobs, the damage was devastating, particularly among the blue-collar vote he so badly needed to secure.
Tax returns
Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his tax returns gave Democrats even more ammunition. What he did release showed that he had paid a meagre 14 per cent, significantly less than average workers.
“What else is he hiding?” a narrator in an Obama ad asked viewers over the summer.
It was Romney’s decision not to release any earlier tax returns, on the basis that it would play into the hands of the Democrats’ campaign.
But it all hinted at a bigger problem.
Romney, the affluent son of a former car industry chief and state governor, was deeply uncomfortable discussing his wealth.
He did a good job of completing the caricature of a one per center by boasted that his wife had “a couple of Cadillacs” and making a $10,000 bet with his Republican primary rival, governor Rick Perry, over health care policy.
Bain Capital
Democrats spent millions of dollars during the summer portraying him as a vulture capitalist, happy to ship jobs overseas in order to maxmise his financial returns.
Yet, these were the same ads – and in some cases, the same individuals – that had been used eight years earlier in his unsuccessful Senate campaign bid against Ted Kennedy.
Neither Romney, nor his campaign, insisted they were vastly exaggerated, but they never did enough to rebut them. The mud stuck. It hardly matters when he went on to tell voters at a rally in New Hampshire that he “liked to fire people”.
Shifting positions
It was no surprise that Romney would seek to make a play for the middle ground after securing a nomination.
But the sheer number of about-turns gave the impression of a candidate with no real conviction.
He largely disowned the health insurance policy introduced in Massachusetts as governor (which became the model for Obamacare) and embraced the coal industry he had denounced a few years earlier.
In order to appeal to the his Republican base, he renounced more liberal position he held in the past on abortion. It all allowed the Obama campaign to characterise these many changes as “Romnesia.” But voters – both Democrats and Republicans – didn’t forget these about-turns.
Lack of personality
Ironically, it was only during the final weeks of the campaign that some of Romney’s personality began to come through.
For most of the campaign, he had avoided revealing anything to do with Mormon faith besides clipped overall generalisations. Yet, there was aspects of it which reflected well on him. His personal engagement with charities were considerable. He have millions to voluntary groups and spent significant period of time with ordinary church members, often allowing poorer visitors from abroad visiting Boston for medical attention to stay in his home.
All in all, Romney never gave the public a good enough reason to vote for him as a person. He never effectively made the case for Romney himself, instead allowing others to define him.
via Where it went wrong for Romney – The Irish Times – Wed, Nov 07, 2012.
via Where it went wrong for Romney – The Irish Times – Wed, Nov 07, 2012.