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2013 Press Release Archives

2013 Press Release Archives


OBAMA MAY BE THE GRINCH WHO STEALS CHRISTMAS, SAY EXPERTS

THANKSGIVING SALES: A BAD SIGN

OMINOUS OMEN FOR 2014 ECONOMY, INVESTMENT AND JOBS

IS THIS AMERICA'S “NEW NORMAL”?

black friday 12.2.13 - Thanksgiving holiday weekend sales were the weakest since 2009, despite major chain stores opening for the first time on Thanksgiving Day.

“President Barack Obama may be the Grinch who steals Christmas, judging by Thanksgiving's weak sales,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major economic journalists.

“We have the smallest percentage of Americans working since Jimmy Carter was President. Only 101 million Americans have full-time jobs, but 108 million are getting means-tested welfare, paid from heavier taxes on working families,” says Smith, whose latest book is “The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends.”

“The average American family's income is down by about $3,500 since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, yet in 2013 its Federal tax burden increased by more than $1,000,” says Smith.

“Consumer confidence was at a 7-month low this November,” said Smith, “and 65 percent of Americans told pollsters that they were living paycheck to paycheck.”

“An Associated Press survey last July found that 80 percent of U.S. adults are near poverty, rely on welfare, or 'struggle with joblessness' for at least a significant part of their lives. They live in economic insecurity,” says Smith.

“And Obamacare has left families, including millions already struggling to keep their heads above water financially, at risk of losing their health insurance and having to pay a lot more for a lot less coverage. The Manhattan Institute calculates that American families will soon be forced to pay an average of 41 percent more,” says Smith.

“No wonder the National Retail Federation foresaw 7 million fewer shoppers online and in stores than 2012's Thanksgiving weekend,” says Smith.

“On Black Friday, the number of customers visiting retail stores was down more than 11 percent over last year, and sales were down a stunning 13.2 percent.”

“Welcome to the 'New Normal,'” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist.

“This is one more sign of our economy weakening, despite the Federal Reserve propping it up with more than $1 Trillion every year of new money conjured out of thin air.”

“Even the Fed in late November grimly admitted that 'Slower growth in productivity might have become the norm' in our economy,” says Ponte.

“This means that the Federal Reserve dare not stop its stimulus spending, even though it no longer stimulates economic growth, because our 'record high' stock market and government are addicted to this cheap, easy money,” says Ponte, a former investigative reporter and longtime Roving Editor for Reader's Digest magazine.

“This means that taxes will keep going up, our anemic economy will keep going down, and, unless voters change things, we may be headed for our devaluing dollar to soon be destroyed in a firestorm of high inflation, or for a Great Depression of long-term stagnation,” says Ponte.

“We're in a slow-growth period of unknown duration,” says Columbia University Nobel-laureate economist Edmund Phelps. No wonder so many Americans are hunkering down, frightened, and spending carefully.

“This is a teachable moment for our children and grandchildren, an opportunity to instill lifelong survival skills,” says Ponte.

“Do as the three Wise Men did 2,000 years ago by giving something this Christmas that politicians cannot run off a printing press – something of secure, permanent value such as a small gold coin. This could inspire a lifetime of thrift and of wanting to learn how the economy works.”

“The old saying is that if you give a person a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach your children to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. Today the politicians give people a welfare check, to make them dependent on and addicted to government for a lifetime.”

“This Christmas teach your children and grandchildren how to be free, independent, self-reliant, prosperous and thankful for a lifetime by giving them real values and real money,” says Ponte.

“The Great Withdrawal” is the fourth book co-authored by Smith and Ponte as survival guides to help Americans avoid the tricks and traps of today's politicians and economy, and to help them secure the value of their life savings.

Factoid: 75% of Americans polled by CBS would have preferred that stores stayed closed on Thanksgiving. Millions nevertheless left family dinners, football and a day of rest to snap up bargains such as big screen TVs.

To interview Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Fed's secrets and who its incoming chair Janet Yellen is, contact: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatwithdrawal.com

Sources:

Lauren Coleman-Lochner and others, “U.S. Retail Sales Up 2.3%, Foot Traffic Declines,” Bloomberg News, December 1, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-01/u-s-retail-holiday-sales-up-2-3-foot-traffic-declines.html

Elizabeth A. Harris, “Thanksgiving Openings Take Sales From Black Friday,” New York Times, November 30, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/thanksgiving-openings-take-sales-from-black-friday.html

Hope Yen, “The Big Story: Exclusive: Signs of Declining Economic Security,” Associated Press, July 28, 2013. URL: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/exclusive-4-5-us-face-near-poverty-no-work-0

Rich Miller, “Fed Reveals New Concerns About Long-Term U.S. Slowdown,” Bloomberg News, November 27, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-27/fed-reveals-new-concerns-about-long-term-u-s-slowdown.htm


OBAMA ECONOMY MAY TURN “BLACK FRIDAY” RED, SAY EXPERTS

Reason: “Uncle Sam Is Playing Santa Claus”

WHAT YOU BUY ON FRIDAY COULD MAKE
YOUR FUTURE BLACK OR RED, WARN ECONOMISTS

“TURN THIS THANKSGIVING INTO A 'THINKSGIVING' BEFORE YOU SHOP”

black friday The day after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday,” because this is supposed to be the day that most merchants go from losing money – shown on their ledger books in red ink – to making a profit, which they record in black ink.

“Many businesses may stay in the red all of 2013 and deep into 2014 because consumer confidence is at its lowest level since 2009,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

“The reason is that Uncle Sam is Playing Santa Claus. Our politicians are spending more than $1 Trillion every year more than government takes in as taxes,” says Smith, whose latest book is “The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends.”

“Our government now operates in the red all the time, funded by the Federal Reserve printing more than $1 Trillion every year out of thin air, which debases the value of our savings, and frightens tax-fearing, inflation-fearing investors and companies out of hiring more workers,” says Smith.

“That is why our economy is stagnant, unemployment stays high, and our stock market is addicted to and high on the Fed's conjured hallucinatory money with its seeds of coming soaring inflation.”

“America now has only 101 million full-time workers – and the lowest job participation rate since Jimmy Carter – but we have 108 million people on means-tested welfare programs,” says Smith.

“We cannot go on much longer in an economy with more takers than makers, and with more in the cart than are pulling the cart. The invisible Continuing Recession soup line of those now on Food Stamps would stretch more than 17,500 miles – more than 70 percent of the way around our planet.”

“Today 49.2 percent of U.S. households have somebody living there who gets a government check, yet average household income has fallen by at least $3,382 since the Great Recession began – and household income has fallen twice as much since President Barack Obama took office,” says Smith.

“Americans should be grateful this Thanksgiving, and on this Red Friday you ought to be buying – not trinkets and toys, but buying things that will protect you and your family in the economic storm we shall face,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist.

“More than 5 million Americans have already lost their health insurance because of Obamacare, another of Uncle Sam's 'gifts,' and the Kaiser Family Foundation warns that as many as 93 million or more of us could see our own health insurance policies cancelled by the end of 2014,” says Ponte.

“For American families, Obamacare will increase health insurance costs by an average of 41 percent, according to analysts at the Manhattan Institute,” says Ponte. “And this huge government-imposed expense is happening in an Obama-chilled economy where millions were struggling to keep their heads above water financially.”

“Politicians love to play Santa Claus, but the rest of us pay the price for this....and a much bigger price tag will soon come when people around the world stop accepting Uncle Sam's credit card....and our economy collapses into another government-caused Great Depression,” says Ponte.

“This Friday, I plan to use some of my gift dollars not to buy toys or trinkets, but to diversify with tangible things they can't run off a printing press as they do our rapidly-devaluing paper dollars in Washington,” says Ponte.

“To protect my family, I plan to follow the example of three Wise Men who followed a star – and who brought tangible, reliable gifts: the spices frankincense and myrrh, and the once-and-future universally accepted global reserve currency, gold, which will gain value as fiat currencies such as today's U.S. Dollar collapse,” says Ponte.

“As we explained in our new book The Great Withdrawal, if you want to see the coming disaster that Big Government Santa Claus politics cause, look at bankrupt Detroit. This could be a crystal ball glimpse of America's fast-approaching future.”

“If you love getting bargains on what used to be Black Friday, then remember that when the next Great Depression hits, those who still have solid money such as gold will almost certainly be able to buy the world for five cents on the dollar,” says Ponte.

“What you choose to buy this holiday season with your dollars – trinkets or solid enduring value such as gold – could determine whether you and your family are bargain buyers, or are forced to sell your possessions for pennies on the dollar, the next time the economy collapses.”

“Make this Thanksgiving a Thinksgiving, and shop Friday as if your future depends on how wisely you buy and invest your money,” says Ponte, who was a longtime Roving Editor and investigative reporter at Reader's Digest magazine.

To interview Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Fed's secrets and who its incoming chair Janet Yellen is, contact: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatwithdrawal.com

SOURCES:

Cotten Timberlake, “Wal-Mart Touts $98 TV in Weakest Holiday Season Since '09,” Bloomberg, November 19, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/wal-mart-touts-98-tv-as-holiday-seen-weakest-since-2009-retail.html

Elizabeth A. Harris, “Retailers Less Than Cheerful Over Christmas Sales,” New York Times, November 14, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/business/retailers-less-than-cheerful-over-christmas-sales.html

“Poverty, Taxes Reach New Highs Under Obama,” Newsmax, September 28, 2013. URL: http://www.newsmax.com/InsiderReport/Poverty-Taxes-Reach-New-Highs/2013/09/29/id/528195

Jeffrey H. Anderson, “Incomes Have Dropped Twice as Much During the 'Recovery' as During the Recession,” Weekly Standard, August 23, 2013. URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/incomes-have-dropped-twice-much-during-recovery-during-recession_750068.html


“The Fed Has Become A Government Unto Itself”

Experts Explain Shocking Secrets of Today's Federal Reserve

“Our Economy Is Now Run More by the Fed than by Free Market Capitalism”

Next Chair Janet Yellen – Millionaire, Keynesian, Wife of Nobel Laureate

11.14.13 - Thursday gives a rare glimpse into what has been the most powerful – and one of the most secretive – entities controlling and re-shaping American society: the Federal Reserve.

yellen “Congress questioned Janet Yellen, likely soon to be confirmed as the most powerful person on Earth when she replaces outgoing Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve – America's Central Bank and controller of the whole world's reserve currency supply,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert and author frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

“When a Fed chair speaks, stock markets around the world can plummet and economies can crumble.”

“As Fed Chair, Ms. Yellen will not command armies, yet she will control the currency and interest rates needed to raise and maintain armies,” says Smith. “She will in many ways control much of the world's economy, and have more power over money than the President of the United States.”

“The Federal Reserve is scarcely more a part of our government than the private shipping company Federal Express,” says Smith, whose latest widely-praised book, published in October, is “The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends.”

“The Fed is actually a cartel of private, for-profit banks, that in 1913 was chartered by our government to 'furnish an elastic currency' the politicians could spend without limit, unlike the old gold-standard dollar that prevented politicians from overspending and limited the size of government,” says Smith.

“The Fed is a creature from the Twilight Zone between the private sector and government. Its chair and vice chair are appointed by the President, and it has the authority to conjure as much money as it wishes out of thin air – which the U.S. Mint then prints, or banks and governments simply accept as computer digits, as real U.S. Dollars,” says Smith. “Yet it also profits from such transactions.”

“The Fed in recent decades has acquired vast new powers and become a government unto itself,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist.

“Half a century ago, cowardly politicians found it easier to leave decisions about civil rights and other political hot potatoes to lifetime-appointed judges.”

“In the 21st Century, cowardly politicians find it easier to leave hot questions – such as squeezing more government revenue from taxpayers – to the Federal Reserve,” says Ponte, a retired Roving Editor and investigative reporter for Reader's Digest.

“The Fed, which originally was supposed to be free from politics and keep the U.S. Dollar's value steady, has become a major power in our politics and a deliberate debaser of our money,” says Ponte.

“Today the Fed pumps more than $1 Trillion a year in easy, magic paper money it creates from nowhere as stimulus into the economy, a policy that Janet Yellen, the current Fed vice chair, says she will continue for the foreseeable future,” says Ponte. “That's why I call her 'J.P.' Yellen, for Janet 'Print! (more money)' Yellen.”

The government's new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is considering plans to confiscate the money in citizen 401(K)s and IRAs and replace it with government annuity documents, is funded solely by the Federal Reserve, which is rapidly acquiring the powers of a Central Planner in our government and society.

This means that Congress cannot control this agency via budget pursestrings as it does other government agencies. This radical new Fed power, outside the Constitution's checks and balances, frightens many legal scholars because it sets a precedent for post-Constitutional potentially-dictatorial out-of-control government.

“The Fed is now expected officially to stabilize the U.S. Dollar's value. But it is also supposed to regulate the money supply to maximize employment, which usually means printing lots more paper money, which devalues through inflation the dollars people have saved and spend much of their lives earning,” says Ponte.

“Since 1913 the Fed has so debased our money that today's U.S. Dollar has only two pennies of the purchasing power of a 1913 dollar, and this debased has extracted $220 Trillion of value over the past 100 years from the earnings and savings of working Americans. This is expropriation on an immense scale, yet greedy politicians keep demanding more.”

“Unofficially, the Fed is expected to conjure perpetual prosperity, make the ups and downs of the business cycle disappear with Keynesian stimulus, levitate the stock market with easy low-interest money, and thereby help re-elect incumbent politicians,” says Ponte.

“When politicians are afraid to raise taxes, the government looks to Fed money-conjuring to create revenue – ultimately taken from the wallets of the American people through debt and the 'invisible tax' of inflation,” says Ponte.

“The Fed now supplements $2.77 Trillion in annual taxes with more than $1 Trillion of its own paper money conjured out of thin air. This is how government and welfare dependency keep growing, so that today 101 million Americans are employed full-time but 108 million Americans are receiving means-tested welfare. Two-thirds of every tax dollar goes for 'transfer payments,' moving the money in your pocket into the wallet of someone the politicians favor more,” says Ponte, who has co-authored three other books with Smith.

“In reality, by manipulating interest rates and the money supply, the Fed can help to defeat or elect Presidents, and to enrich or impoverish whole industries and sectors of the economy here and abroad,” says Ponte. “It has enormous power.”

“The Fed currently continues to create $85 Billion every month out of thin air to prop up the stock market and housing market, but this sort of artificial spending has addicted our economy and made it dependent on this magic money and its drug-induced illusion that we are still solvent,” says Ponte.

“If the Fed stops such stimulus, our economy could collapse overnight,” says Ponte, “but if the Fed keeps printing, at some point our economy will overdose, the Dollar's value will go up in a blaze of high inflation – and everyone's savings will be destroyed.”

“Can Doctor Yellen reduce the dose of funny money America's been hooked on, control our Detox from easy money addiction, and get us through drug withdrawal safely?” asks Ponte. “That's one of the reasons we call our latest book 'The Great Withdrawal.'”

“America did not need a Federal Reserve in 1913, and we would be more prosperous if we returned to honest, unpoliticized money today,” says Smith. “We show people how to protect themselves and their families against the Fed's relentless erosion of our economy.”

To interview Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Fed's secrets and who its incoming chair Janet Yellen is, contact: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatwithdrawal.com

SOURCES:

Janet L. Yellen, “Confirmation Hearing,” Washington, D.C.: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, November 14, 2013. URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/yellen20131114a.htm

Binhamin Appelbaum, “Yellen to Back Stimulus Plan in Remarks to Senators,” New York Times, November 13, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/business/economy/yellen-to-testify-in-support-of-feds-stimulus-efforts.html

Victoria McGrane, “What to Watch for in the Yellen Hearing,” Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013. URL: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/11/13/what-to-watch-for-in-the-yellen-hearing/

John Detrixhe, “Dollar Falls as Yellen Says Economy Still Needs Fed's Stimulus,” Bloomberg, November 13, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/euro-snaps-2-day-gain-before-factory-growth-data-amid-ecb-bets.html

Alister Bull, “Yellen Says Fed Has 'More Work to Do' to Aid Recovery,” Reuters, November 13, 2013. URL: http://news.yahoo.com/yellen-says-fed-more-213340334--business.html

Joshua Zumbrun and Jeff Kearns, “Yellen Says Economy Performing 'Far Short” of Potential,” Bloomberg, November 13, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-13/yellen-says-economy-performing-far-short-of-potential.html

Joshua Zumbrun, Jeff Kearns and Craig Torres, “Yellen Rejoins QE Debate as Hearing Gives Critics Forum,” Bloomberg, November 13, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-13/yellen-rejoins-qe-debate-as-senate-hearing-gives-critics-forum.html


NEW SWISS AMERICA SPOKESMAN EXPOSES
'ROOT' OF AMERICA’S ECONOMIC DECLINE

WAR 11.12.13 - In these troubling times of spiraling taxes, runaway debt and deficits fueled by corrupt politicians, Swiss America has declared W.A.R. on the progressive "murder" of the middle class.

W.A.R stands for Wayne Allyn Root, who is a blue collar SOB (son of a butcher), President Obama's college classmate at Columbia, turned Vice Presidential nominee, national bestselling author, conservative political commentator, serial entrepreneur, small business champion, private equity guru and true blue American patriot.

Wayne Allyn Root joins the legendary Pat Boone as spokesman and media personality for Swiss America. Wayne's role is to reach a new generation of younger Americans, from recent college graduates to small business owners, entrepreneurs, and independent contractors- the groups most effected by Obamacare and Obama's destruction of jobs.

Wayne is one of the most dynamic, passionate, colorful and fiery political and economic commentators in the world today. He is a former anchorman and host (for the network now known as CNBC), superstar media personality, and a regular guest on Fox News Channel, as well as columnist for many of the top conservative web sites in the country, including FoxNews.com and Glenn Beck's TheBlaze.com. The national media has dubbed Wayne "The CAPITALIST EVANGELIST."

Swiss America CEO Dean Heskin says, "We decided to unleash W.A.R. to help the American public understand the 'ROOT' issue of America's rapid social and economic decline. The U.S. must abruptly change direction by 2014 - away from failed Progressive policies and toward the small government and free markets our Founding Fathers fought to preserve in the U.S. Constitution.”

For over thirty years Swiss America has been dedicated to educating the public about protecting their wealth during uncertain times. In addition to Pat Boone, Swiss America's spokesman for nearly 20 years, Wayne will be helping to spread the time-tested positive, fiscally responsible, and common sense message of asset diversification using tangible assets, such as gold and silver as wealth insurance.

Wayne's latest book entitled, "The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide" was a #1 national bestseller in bookstores and stayed on the "Top 5 Bestsellers List" for 10 consecutive weeks. It also hit #1 Finance bestseller at Amazon multiple times. His next book (out July 2014) is entitled, "The Murder of the Middle Class."

Mr. Root has made over 5000 media appearances in the past 5 years. His columns are read by millions of Americans. He has been profiled by CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, TIME magazine, Success, Millionaire, Equities, Worth, the Robb Report, and CNN/Money.

Wayne said in a recent media interview, "Obamacare is intended to wipe out the middle class by redistributing your income to Obama’s voters, Obama's biggest donors, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical lobby, leaving you dependent on government. I've studied 2700 pages of Obamacare's new rules and regulations and I've created a powerful guide with simple solutions to save you and your family.”

Mr. Root will begin a national media tour this week, starting with his appearance at the famous New Orleans Investment Conference. Mr. Root will be delivering a keynote address, alongside conservative legends such as Ron Paul, Charles Krauthammer and Ben Carson.

Wayne's media tour will discuss his new 15-page booklet, "The Obamacare Answer Guide," which is being offered free to the public. Wayne offers individuals key steps of protection to insure the government does not destroy your life savings in the same way they are presently destroying your healthcare. For media bookings with Wayne Allen Root, please contact Sandy Frazier at (516) 735-5468 or sandy@mystic-art.com.


Social Security: Like Walking Up a Down Escalator

Government Cost-of-Living (COLA) increase is an “Inflation Deception,” say Experts in New Book

President Obama is Shortchanging Americans on Social Security

escalator 10.30.13 - Social Security benefits for nearly 58 million people will increase by only 1.5 percent next year, says the Associated Press.

“The increase is among the smallest since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975. Social Security pays retired workers an average of $1,272 a month. A 1.5 percent raise comes to about $19.”

AP continues, “Some advocates for older Americans complain that the COLA sometimes falls short, especially for people with high medical costs.”

Authors Craig Smith and Lowell Ponte see COLA index as pure deception. “The U.S. government is expropriating Social Security recipients by claiming inflation now runs 1.5 percent when ShadowStats.com pegs it at between 7 and 11 percent," says Craig R. Smith in his widely-discussed new book THE GREAT WITHDRAWAL. Smith is a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

“This artificial (diet) COLA index also rips off taxpayers and investors – even those who pay a premium for TIPS bonds which are supposedly protected against inflation. It robs taxpayers, because the IRS supposedly adjusts its tax tables to offset inflation – yet uses these deceptively low inflation numbers to do so,” adds Lowell Ponte, co-author and a former think tank futurist. "It harms everyone who relies on Cost-of-Living increases to keep their head above water."

America is also experiencing "Asset Inflation" of the stock market hitting record highs because of government's huge inflationary money printing in an anemic economic that justifies no such increased values for most stocks. This is a carefully conjured bubble based on continued Federal Reserve stimulus trillions.

“God help the little people who trust their life savings to today's stock market!,” says Ponte.

Obama already denied SS recipients any cost of living adjustment in 2009, 2010 and 2011 - which means that this latest announcement merely continues his policy of sneakily reducing what Social Security recipients are paid.

Obama's Negative Power of Compound Interest

Much of the wealth of banks comes from the power of "compound interest."

“Mr. Obama is now doing the exact opposite - which we should call 'compound cuts,'" says Smith. "If you get little or no SS increase this year, then whatever percentage you get next year will be lower because of this year's dishonestly lower number....so you lose twice, three times...indeed, every time a new number is a percentage of a substandard old number.”

This is yet another form of "financial repression," giving Social Security recipients an inflation adjustment lower than the real rate of inflation.

"President Obama is financially ravaging and shortchanging retired Americans to enrich the government, which keeps for itself more of the money Social Security recipients should have received," says Ponte.

The greed of the Obama Administration is breathtaking – literally. And who is creating this 7-11 percent inflation that is drowning seniors?

“The Government and Federal Reserve by printing and spending more than $1 Trillion every year out of thin air," says Ponte. "And because the government creates and profits from inflation, it has a conflict of interest when it manipulates the official inflation numbers for Cost-of-Living Increases. We need some independent body to provide honest numbers this to make things more trustworthy."

In THE GREAT WITHDRAWAL Craig and Lowell explain “How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends” ...

Inflation robs those who work hard, are thrifty and live sober, responsible lives. It punishes those who defer their pleasures and invest in building a better future. Inflation rewards those who borrow and buy instead of saving, because it lets speculators repay their debts with debased, cheapened dollars.

“Inflation, and even the possibility of inflation, creates anxiety,” writes Forbes Magazine columnist Louis Woodhill. “People sense (correctly) that inflation threatens their survival. Hyperinflation can cause not only economic disaster, but also a collapse of law and order.”

THE GREAT WITHDRAWAL will help Americans learn which steps they can take to insure protection from a rising cost of living at least five times greater than the government admits in their 'official ' stats. Instead of attempting to walk faster up a down escalator, Smith and Ponte reveal ways people can make their finances and families more secure as the risk of inflation keeps increasing.

For media interviews with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatwithdrawal.com


2013-2014 Will Bring A Huge Turning Point in History, Possible End of Progressive Rule, Says New Book

"The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends" by Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte, Idea Factory Press, October 2013.

the great withdrawal (10.15.13 - Phoenix, AZ) - In 1913 America fell under the spell of an addictive European collectivist ideology called Progressivism that took our nation on a 100-year detour away from the sound money and values of America's Framers.

In 2013 millions of Americans are snapping out of this hypnotic spell. Today's political and social turmoil are caused by the withdrawal symptoms of kicking the Progressive addiction to government dependency, write renowned monetary expert Craig R. Smith and former think tank futurist Lowell Ponte in their fourth book.

Millions now see that we have been living in a dream world, an illusion of prosperity conjured with unreal paper money, a stock market addicted to the drug of a trillion stimulus dollars per year, zombie economics and mind-control politics.

A century ago President Woodrow Wilson imposed an unequal Progressive income tax to redistribute the nation's wealth, and a Federal Reserve system to begin replacing America's good-as-gold dollars that politicians could not freely print with a new paper "elastic currency" they could conjure out of thin air to buy votes.

After 100 years of Progressivism, 67 percent of tax dollars are now spent for "transfer payments" from your wallet to somebody else's. Today's dollar has only two pennies of the purchasing power of the 1913 dollar.

Progressivism promised to build a utopia through science, technology and government social engineering by an elite purportedly far smarter than the rest of us.

What Progressives created can be seen in their "workers' paradise" Detroit – a jungle of violence, strife, corruption and sky-high taxes from which more than a million former residents have voted with their feet to flee. Progressivism is an intellectually, morally and financially bankrupt ideology.

Yet Progressives like President Barack Obama keep trying to turn America into Detroit by increasing dependence on government. Today, nearly half of American households include someone who gets a government check.

Today's Progressives, fearful that their power is slipping away, are grabbing for total power by using the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon, massive surveillance, and regulatory power to silence critics.

Smith and Ponte explain prudent steps people can take to restore our nation's founding values and protect their families and savings through decentralized technologies and diversification.

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," said Ronald Reagan. "We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness."

The publisher, Idea Factory Press, is offering to send a FREE COPY of THE GREAT WITHDRAWAL to the first 500 Americans willing to read it and email a one paragraph book review.

For media interviews with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com


THE NEXT TAXPAYER BAILOUT: STUDENT LOANS

Does College Now Cost More Than It's Worth?

OBAMA PLAN HURTS THE ECONOMY, FUNDS THE LEFT, AND
COULD STICK TAXPAYERS WITH A $1 TRILLION BILL, SAY EXPERTS

6.4.13 - On July 1, if President Barack Obama and Congress do not reach agreement, the rate charged for college student loans could double, from 3.4% to 6.8%.

student debt “Americans now owe $986 Billion in student loans, more than the total debt Americans owe on all credit cards combined,” says Craig R. Smith.

“The average college loan debt has risen to $27,253 per student,” says Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major financial journalists.

“Going to college used to be the path to higher-income jobs, yet in today's economy many experts are questioning whether it's an investment worth going so deep into debt for,” says Smith.

“One third of recent graduates in a recent Wells Fargo study said they regret going to college,” says Smith, whose latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“The unemployment rate for working age Americans under 25 is officially around 16.2%, which the Wall Street Journal calculates is closer to 22.9%,” says Smith.

“Today unemployment among the young is almost as high as in several recession-crippled European nations,” says Smith.

“Roughly half of recent graduates have been unable to find full-time work commensurate with the college degree they worked hard and borrowed heavily to get,” says Smith, whose next book The Great Withdrawal will be published this summer.

“We have been pulled out of past recessions by sales of cars and homes, but the fat student loan debts and slim job prospects of recent graduates have limited their ability to buy cars and homes, and to start families,” says Smith.

“Politicians, by making it easy for students to borrow a total of almost $1 Trillion for college, has distorted our economy, just as government strong-arming banks into giving mortgages to almost everybody led to today's continuing recession,” says Smith.

“And now the politicians are playing politics to solve this situation,” says Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and co-author with Smith of four recent books, Crashing the Dollar (2010), The Inflation Deception (2011), The Great Debasement (2012) and, this summer, The Great Withdrawal.

“Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, have already passed a bill to keep student loan rates low. It would make the cost of such loans variable by tying it to the interest rate on U.S. Treasury notes, which might make loans more expensive if the Federal Reserve raised interest rates,” says Ponte.

“President Obama, by contrast, has at various times said he wants much lower, even fixed, loan rates,” says Ponte. “I suspect President Obama has several political motives for this:

“Students in college are not counted as unemployed, so it makes the official numbers for the economy look better;

“America's colleges and universities are major bastions of the ideological left, and government-insured or funded student loans have increased ten-fold to enrich these institutions since 2007; and

“Students in such colleges and universities are inculcated with progressive, leftist and anti-capitalist views akin to Mr. Obama's own in an environment that largely excludes and attacks conservative or pro-free market ideas,” says Ponte.

“President Obama has also proposed that student loan debt be forgiven if a college graduate goes to work for government or appropriate (read: politically correct) non-profit organizations,” says Ponte. “This effectively would turn the student loan program into a recruitment tool for ever-bigger government.”

“Such a bailout of student debt would also stick taxpayers with the bill for up to a trillion dollars in unpaid student loans, which today have a higher default rate – around 11.2% – than car loans, mortgages or credit card debt,” says Ponte.

“President Obama has already had the government take over 90% of student loans, and has encouraged borrowers to renege on the other 10%,” says Ponte.

“I believe that Mr. Obama sees control of student loans as a way to advance his ideology and to increase dependence on government by redistributing wealth from taxpayers to America's colleges and universities,” says Ponte.

“It should not surprise us that President Obama wants to tax working-class blue collar Americans in order to give a free ride to an educated, radicalized privileged white collar elite,” says Ponte.

“The long-term effect of what President Obama wants, of course, would be to raise taxes, further damage America's economy, and shift much more of the nation's capital from the productive private sector to unproductive ever-more-obese government,” says Ponte.

“A better education would come from parents and grandparents teaching their children about real-world economics.”

For an amazing interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com


SOURCES:

“Obama's Student-Loan Props,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2013. URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323728204578515100635368008.html

Alex Altman, “A Student-Loan Fix?” Time, June 10, 2013.

Halah Touryalai, “Student Loan Problems: One Third of Millennials Regret Going to College,” Forbes, May 22, 2013. URL: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

Christina Medici Scolaro, “Student Debt Will Punish US for Years: Strategist,” Yahoo Finance, May 16, 2013. URL: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/big-data-download/student-debt-punish-us-years-strategist-170547657.html

Annie Lowrey, “Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less,” New York Times, May 10, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/business/economy/student-loan-debt-weighing-down-younger-us-workers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


AMERICA IS NOW FIGHTING TWO SIMILAR WARS – AND MIGHT LOSE BOTH

NEW JAPANESE ATTACK MAY CAUSE DISASTER, SAY EXPERTS

5.28.13 - Terrorists are waging war against the United States and the West, and are trying to obtain megaweapons from nuclear states such as Pakistan or North Korea.

“We are also simultaneously fighting another war – call it World Currency War One – that might harm America far worse than terrorism,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major financial journalists.

“Oddly, these two wars are similar in at least three ways,” says Smith.

(1) “Terrorists aim to bring down our economy and the U.S. Dollar. It's not a coincidence that they repeatedly attacked, and on the second try destroyed, the World Trade Center in New York City on 9-11. They killed thousands of America's top business experts and cost our economy more than a trillion dollars,” says Smith.

paper planes “In today's global currency wars, President Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are deliberately debasing the dollar's value to make our exports cheaper overseas and foreign imports more costly for U.S. consumers,” says Smith.

“For different reasons, both terrorists and our currency warriors aim to damage the dollar,” says Smith, whose latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

(2) “Civilians are victims in both wars,” says Smith. “Terrorists do this to terrorize and make people feel a loss of safety.”

“Our leaders waging global Currency War also hurt ordinary Americans, causing a loss of savings by devaluing the dollars we have earned and saved,” says Smith.

“This deliberate debasing of our currency is really a form of theft that politicians use as a hidden way to tax us,” says Smith.

(3) “The trillion-dollar War Against Terrorism has cost us a large measure of money, peace of mind, and liberty, and is turning us into a surveillance society of bigger, more intrusive government,” says Smith.

“In that sense, terrorists have already won by making us a less free nation than we were before 9-11,” says Smith. “This is the price we pay to make ourselves less vulnerable to their attacks.”

“The Currency War is also making us poorer, more insecure, and in many cases more dependent on government,” says Smith. “Yet it is making wise and prudent Americans turn for protection and shelter to defensive measures they should have used anyway, as we explain in our recent books.”

“Today's global Currency War is being fought with beggar-thy-neighbor tactics based on nations blowing up their own currencies in a 'race to debase,' a base to tear down the value of your own money,” says Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and co-author with Smith of three recent books, Crashing the Dollar (2010), The Inflation Deception (2011), and in 2012 The Great Debasement.

Their fourth book, The Great Withdrawal, will be published this summer.

“Japan recently began a high-risk gamble by entering the global Currency War,” says Ponte. “Last April the Bank of Japan announced that it would begin printing trillions out of thin air, doing its own Quantitative Easing (QE) like America's Federal Reserve Bank.”

“This drove the value of the Japanese Yen from less than 90 to the dollar to more than 103 to the dollar, a difference that should produce billions in added foreign sales for Toyota and Sony as their debased-Yen-based prices fall in other countries such as the United States,” said Ponte.

“This might be great for American car buyers, but not necessarily for the job security of auto workers in Detroit.”

“Japan's Nikkei 225 stocks soared in recent months in expectation that the new government would end more than a decade of deflation and stagnant economic growth by creating deliberate inflation as the U.S. does,” says Ponte.

“But on May 23 the Nikkei plummeted more than 7 percent, and it continued to slide as Americans fired up their barbecues on Memorial Day,” says Ponte.

“Expert Japan market analysts such as J. Kyle Bass of Hayman Advisors concluded that, as investors rushed to sell Japan government bonds, the country would be unable to print enough stimulus money to ignite sufficient growth to restore economic health from increased exports,” says Ponte.

“Japan's debts are already so high that any significant increase in interest rates could force the nation into default or into high inflation that would devour the savings of its citizens,” says Ponte.

“And if Japan goes down in flames from this monetary attack designed to undercut the U.S. and Europe in the Currency War, it might dangerously weaken the global economy,” says Ponte.

“Japan, the world's third biggest economy, might even drag China, Europe and the U.S. down with it by being the first major economic power brought down by the Currency War.”

For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

Sources:

Gordon G. Chang, “Asian Currencies Tumble. Yes, This Is A Global Currency War,” Forbes, February 10, 2013. URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2013/02/10/asian-currencies-tumble-yes-this-is-a-global-currency-war/

“Reality Bites in Japan,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2013. URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578500623673481886.html

Heather Stewart and Phillip Inman, “Was Jittery Thursday a Foretaste of Another Global Economic Crash?” The Guardian (U.K.), May 25, 2013. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/may/26/jittery-thursday-global-economic-crash

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Veteran Fears 'Beginning of the End' for Japan as Bond Market Buckles,” London Telegraph, May 23, 2013. URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10077273/Veteran-fears-beginning-of-the-end-for-Japan-as-bond-market-buckles.html

_____________________, “The Bank of Japan Must Crush All Resistence, and Will Do So,” London Telegraph, May 24, 2013. URL: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100024696/the-bank-of-japan-must-crush-all-resistance-and-will-do-so/

Tyler Durden, “Richard Koo Warns of 'Beginning Of The End' For Japanese Economy,” ZeroHedge, May 23, 2013. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/print/474337

___________, “Despite 'Promises,' Japanese Market Chaos Continues,” ZeroHedge, May 25, 2013. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/print/474357

Ayai Tomisawa, “Nikkei Slides As Exporters Hit, Investors on Edge After Last Week's Turbulence,” Reuters, May 26, 2013, URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/27/markets-japan-stocks-idUSL3N0E808J20130527

Paul Krugman, “Japan the Model,” New York Times, May 23, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/opinion/krugman-japan-the-model.html?_r=0

"Japan's Monetary Policy a 'Big Experiment,'” CNBC, May 23, 2013. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/100760769

“Mammoth Japan Stimulus Still Not Enough: Hayman's Bass,” CNBC, May 23, 2013. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/100762194

John Mauldin, “The Mother of All Painted-In Corners,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2013. URL: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/MAULDIN-Japan-Is-On-The-Brink-Of-Disaster-4549637.php

Chris Dieterich and others, “U.S. Stocks Temper Global Market Rout,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2013. URL: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/MAULDIN-Japan-Is-On-The-Brink-Of-Disaster-4549637.php

“Hard to See Smooth QE Exit in US, Japan: Dallara,” CNBC, May 26, 2013. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100767575/print


POLITICAL SCANDALS ARE DAMAGING OUR ECONOMY, SAY EXPERTS

“They Are Destroying Trust, The Glue That Holds
Both Our Government and Our Economy Together”

5.20.13 - “Today's scandals – especially allegations of partisan political use of the Internal Revenue Service – will have consequences far beyond politics.

“They are also undermining our economy and could push us back into severe recession,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

scandal “If, as recent news reports imply, President Barack Obama might have manipulated the IRS for partisan political gain, then many will wonder if he is a trustworthy steward of the economy and our currency,” says Smith.

“President Obama was already causing widespread uncertainty and fear about heavier taxes, heavier regulation and Obamacare among would-be investors,” says Smith, author of a major White Paper out later this week titled A Deficit of Trust: The Decline, Fall and Possible Restoration of Values and Prosperity in America.

“This uncertainty and fear slowed investment and hiring, giving us an anemic economy that, at best, is growing at stall speed and producing European-like high levels of unemployment plus underemployment,” says Smith.

“A healthy capitalist economy...requires both financial and moral capital,” writes Smith in A Deficit of Trust. “It also requires what British economist John Maynard Keynes called 'animal spirits' that give confidence, optimism and vitality to consumers and business people.”

According to Yale University Economics Professor Robert J. Shiller, “animal spirits” also refers to “the sense of trust we have in each other, our sense of fairness in economic dealings, and our sense of the extent of corruption and bad faith. When animal spirits are on ebb, consumers do not want to spend and businesses do not want to make capital expenditures or hire people.”

“Distrust is at the heart of today's Obama scandals,” says Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and co-author with Smith of this latest white paper and three recent books, Crashing the Dollar (2010), The Inflation Deception (2011), and in 2012 The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

Their fourth book, The Great Withdrawal, will be published this summer.

“Almost nobody trusts [President Obama]. Americans aren't sure he's even who he says he is. They don't trust him not to grab their guns, or run up bigger deficits or jack up middle-class taxes. Worst of all, they suspect he's playing politics with national security....He's simply not seen as an honest broker,” said a May 9th Editorial in Investor's Business Daily.

“Trust is the glue that holds both our government and our economy together,” says Ponte. “This is what President Obama is destroying.”

“President Obama's worsening deficit of trust has economic consequences that will be seen in less investment, fewer jobs, and more business people voting with their feet to take their skills and savings out of America's increasingly-politicized marketplace,” says Ponte.

“Who can trust the investment climate if, as allegations now suggest, the IRS was targeting eight business owners who were prominent Mitt Romney backers for abusive, widely-publicized audits to intimidate other potential donors?” asks Ponte.

“Who can trust the fairness of government if, as allegations suggest, the IRS denied to conservative groups the kind of tax-exempt status speedily given to left-wing groups – thereby using the heavy thumb of partisan government to tip the scales of democracy to the Left in an election year?”

“This corrupt tilting of our political system,” says Ponte, “may be the real reason Mr. Obama is still president.”

“And who can trust the integrity of a White House that has rewarded with more than $100,000 in bonuses the IRS executive in charge of the office that did this, and promoted her to a new job – head of the IRS office and its new 16,000 agents in control of Obamacare?” asks Ponte.

“Obamacare, it was said, would combine the efficiency of the Post Office with the compassion of the IRS,” says Ponte.

“And now your confidential medical records and health options under Obamacare will be controlled by the same person who ran the office that illegally turned over confidential tax data about conservative groups to Left-wing groups such as Pro Publica,” says Ponte.

“Just imagine how fairly and even-handedly businesses will be treated under Obamacare by a politically-directed IRS, which with more than 100,000 agents is the Federal Government's biggest 'police' force,” says Ponte.

“This Banana Republic kind of strong-arm government intimidation and partisanship could chill more than free speech and political freedom,” says Ponte.

“American confidence in our government is 'as low as it has ever been' because of these scandals, wrote veteran reporter Dan Balz in the May 18th Washington Post,” says Ponte.

“Obama's failed $6 Trillion economic stimulus policies have wrecked Americans' trust in their government and stymied his Big Government agenda,” says Ponte.

“Mr. Obama cannot go forward, except by strong-arm tactics, but as a radical ideologue who has bloated the size of government almost 25% relative to our anemic economy, he refuses to go back to the smaller government that polls show a majority of Americans now want.”

“If those behind the Obama Administration's high-handed abuse of government power are not fired and several sent to prison,” says Ponte, “then this chill climate of uncertainty and fear about corrupt government influence in our taxes and economy will grow – and could plunge American investment and hiring into a new economic ice age. This could freeze for decades...and maybe forever...our prospects for a return to prosperity.”

For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

Sources:

Dan Balz, “Obama's Trust-in-Government Deficit,” Washington Post, May 18, 2013. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-trust-in-government-deficit/2013/05/18/5c0bb23a-bf21-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

“President Obama's Biggest Deficit Is Trust” (Editorial), Investor's Business Daily, May 9, 2013. URL: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/050913-655521-president-obamas-biggest-deficit-is-trust.htm


DOW 15,000 – “A MAGIC TRICK OF LEVITATION...AN ILLUSION”

EXPERT EXPLAINS TRICK, AND WHY STOCK MARKET IS RISING

WHILE ECONOMY KEEPS SPIRALING DOWNWARDS

5.8.13 - On Tuesday the Dow closed above 15,000, a record high in today's inflated dollars. The mainstream media reported this as good news.

“A rising stock market used to mean we had a rising, robust economy, yet this is no longer true,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

levitation “This week's Dow 15,000 was a magic trick of levitation by the Federal Reserve. It is an illusion created to seduce millions of small investors.”

How is this trick done?

“The Fed hinted that it will keep on conjuring more than a trillion dollars a year out of thin air until at least 2015, with much of this enriching giant hedge funds and banks,” says Smith. “This assures big stock market speculators that their casino will stay open and awash in an ocean of easy, interest-free money.”

“The Fed has also joined other central banks in raising 'financial repression' to unprecedented levels,” says Smith, whose latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“Near-zero bank savings interest rates, and European seizure of private bank accounts weeks ago in Cyprus, are being used to pressure millions of small savers to withdraw their money and wager it in the stock market in hopes of surviving the Fed's conjured inflation,” says Smith, whose new book The Great Withdrawal hits bookstores this summer and is already sparking discussion.

“And days ago, some of the world's biggest investment entities suddenly dumped half a trillion dollars worth of paper gold – NOT physical gold....but paper options acquired with a 5% margin payment – to drive down the price of this value haven for prudent investors,” says Smith.

“The price of paper gold staggered from this massive surprise attack, but the price of physical gold rebounded by more than $100 within days as eager gold buyers crowded precious metal stores around the world,” says Smith.

“People are being stampeded into the stock market, where their savings are being harvested by speculators in the expanding Dow stock bubble,” says Smith.

How long will this magic illusion last?

“The huge disconnect between stock prices and the real economy keeps growing. In the real economy, double-digit unemployment plus part-time underemployment and long-term joblessness have become the new norm. Many companies have again become profitable, yet have done so by jettisoning many full-time employees; most of those jobs will not come back,” says Smith.

“One in five Americans now lives in poverty. Average household income fell by more than 5% last Quarter.”

“Real world inflation of 7% has kept our economy's real growth at around minus 5% – a Great Recession that has had our economy by the throat since 2008. Spendaholic Washington, D.C.'s budget deficit is on track to hit $20 Trillion by 2016,” says Smith.

“The bottom line: Dow 15,000 is a trick created with borrowed and conjured money. The real economy is slow and getting slower, sick and getting sicker,” says Smith.

“We're addicted to, and hallucinating from, all this funny money stimulus drug, yet our economy is heading for a collapse, a coronary, or a necessary cure that will cause terrible withdrawal symptoms,” says Smith.

“The higher we and the Dow get, the harder and farther we will fall. Heaven help the world if we fall and crater from Dow 19,000 or Dow 20,000, which might produce a new global Greater Great Depression that lasts for years or even decades.”

This hypnotic, easy-money-induced spell cannot last much longer.

Why did they do this?

“Beginning in 1913, America's once-golden age of prosperity and free enterprise has been replaced by Big Government ideology imposed on the rest of us by Progressives,” says Smith.

“By massive taxation, regulation and the invisible tax of inflation, the life blood of the Tree of Liberty has largely been devoured by parasitic mistletoe. Government has grown huge and hungry, now accounting for 39 percent of America's entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP), our whole economy.”

“And because government produces nothing, it lives as a parasite on achievers who do produce things of value,” says Smith.

“Craig Smith is a brilliant business leader who knows what is happening behind the scenes of our economy, and he is a master at explaining this in vivid, understandable terms,” says his co-author of three books, Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and former Reader's Digest Roving Editor.

“In today's Alice-in-Wonderland economy, the market goes down on good news and up on bad news,” says Ponte, “because its speculators want news that will make the Federal Reserve print trillions more stimulus dollars out of thin air. A good economy would mean that no more easy stimulus money is needed.”

“Those who understand how today's economy really works should be worried that the Dow has climbed to 15,000. This could mean that some very wealthy speculators with insider information see some very bad news coming and are eager to lure smaller investors into the market quickly, before a fast-approaching day of economic reckoning arrives to shatter today's stock market mirage.”

Craig R. Smith, a renowned entrepreneur, can explain all this to your audience. For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

SOURCES:

“Dow Hits All-Time High Above 15000, S&P Pushes to New Record,” CNBC, May 7, 2013. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100715566

Nouriel Roubini, “Will the Fed Have to Choose Between Economic and Financial Stability?” Slate Magazine, May 5, 2013. URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/project_syndicate/2013/05/the_fed_faces_a_tricky_exit_from_its_third_round_of_quantitative_easing.html

Jared Bernstein, “Where Have All the Jobs Gone?” New York Times, May 3, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/opinion/where-have-all-the-jobs-gone.html?ref=opinion

“Jobs Report Brings No Cheer to Main Street,” Investor's Business Daily, May 3, 2013. URL: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/050313-654828-job-report-brings-no-cheer-to-main-street.htm

Rick Moran, “Official Unemployment Rate Drops But Broader Jobless Measure Rises,” American Thinker, May 3, 2013. URL: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/official_unemployment_rate_drops_but_broader_jobless_measure_rises.html

Adam Davidson, “Boom, Bust or What?” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/larry-summers-and-glenn-hubbard-square-off-on-our-economic-future.html?ref=magazine


DON'T BE TRICKED, SAY EXPERTS

GOVERNMENT HAS NEW ACCOUNTING GIMMICKS UP ITS SLEEVE

4.29.13 - The Federal Trade Commission once tried to ban a TV commercial that depicted a boy growing into a young man in nine seconds from eating Wonder Bread. The FTC said it might deceive consumers into believing that Wonder Bread could make kids grow this fast.

"Last Friday this same Federal Government said that the U.S. economy grew at 2.5% rate during the first Quarter of 2013 -- a growth claim even more misleading than it accused Wonder Bread's ad of being," says Craig R. Smith, amonetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

"Most economists agree that our economy remains anemic and at risk of plunging back into Recession," says Smith. "This new 2.5% number is even weaker than the 3.1% growth many economists had predicted."

numbers

"And most of these economists agree that the Second Quarter we are now in will be lucky if growth is between one and two percent," says Smith. "Our economy is already near stall speed, and slowing."

"Economic growth was negative -- Minus 0.1%, in the previous Quarter until the data was massaged up to Plus 0.1% and then Plus 0.4%," says Smith, whose latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

"This is a dangerous time for people to pull money out of safe havens such as government money market funds and gold to gamble in an increasingly volatile, shaky stock market, even though that is what some powerful interests are stampeding small investors and savers to do," says Smith

Why is Smith, with 30 years of investment hedging expertise, skeptical about the government's claim that America's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at 2.5% in January, February and March 2013?

"First, I agree with Harvard economist Martin Feldstein that the claimed 2.5% GDP growth last Quarter is misleading because roughly half of it was companies building inventories that customers were not buying," says Smith. "If you subtract this added inventory, real growth was around 1.2%."

"Consumer confidence remains weak. Household income fell 5.3%, the biggest such income drop since the Third Quarter of 2009," says Smith.

"And with declining income, the saving rate fell to only 2.6%, barely half what it was in the previous disastrous Fourth Quarter of 2012. Savings, the seed corn of future growth and confidence, are falling sharply," says Smith.

"Americans were spending more out of their savings," says Smith, "but much of this was on utility bills during a long, cold winter and on higher gasoline prices."

"Spending on business equipment slowed to only about a quarter of the rate it was even in 2012's terrible Fourth Quarter, another sign that private investment and optimism are sinking," says Smith.

"At the same time, we have the lowest percentage of employed Americans in 31 years," says Smith, "and 41 percent of the unemployed are long-term unemployed with sinking prospects of ever finding good-paying jobs. One American in five is now officially in poverty."

"We DO have growth in America," says Smith. "Welfare dependency is growing. Government spending, borrowing and giant debts that our children must pay are growing. Taxes are growing rapidly -- now at their highest level in four decades."

"We also have growing fear and uncertainty among potential investors about all the new ways our spendaholic politicians are proposing to tax away even more of what we earn and invest," says Smith.

"A green economist should tell our leaders that they are destroying the natural environment needed to grow enterprises and hire people," Smith says.

"Ironically, the stock market has been going up because the economy is so fragile," says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist who for 15 years was a globe-traveling investigative reporter and Roving Editor for /Reader's Digest/Magazine.

"Our weak economy means that the Federal Reserve will have to keep printing more than a trillion dollars out of thin air every year to levitate stock prices, keep the stimulus-addicted Wall Street casino open, and prop up the housing market to prevent another collapse," says Ponte.

"It's all an upside-down Alice-in-Wonderland, Orwellian illusion," says Ponte, "where government spending is called 'investment,' tax cuts are called 'tax expenditures,' and debasing the value of our savings by printing trillions out of thin air is called 'positive inflation.'"

"As University of Maryland economist Peter Morici anticipated, the new 2.5% GDP report is deceptively strong, at best a mirage created largely by people spending the advances they took last December to avoid January's huge tax increases that are now slowing the economy."

"New taxes on achievers will choke the prospects for jobs. If President Obama achieves his goal to restrict the home mortgage interest deduction, then far fewer will be in the market to buy homes -- and home value, which for millions remains their diminished savings nest egg, will be shattered as buyers vanish.

"In the real world, durable goods orders in March plummeted 5.7%," says Ponte. "This almost certainly means an economic 'swoon' is coming later this spring or summer, and with similar economic weaknesses in Europe and China the global economy could also sink, taking us down together."

"But don't worry," says Ponte. "President Obama endlessly benefits from official numbers being 'adjusted' for his benefit. Thus the job numbers were engineered to look better just before the 2012 elections, as we explained in The Great Debasement, although few found actual jobs."

"President Obama's new budget alters the Consumer Price Index (CPI) with an accounting gimmick called 'Chained-CPI' that will manipulate cost-of-living and other factors so that benefits to those on Social Security will be less, but taxes on Americans will jump by an additional $100 Billion over the next few years," says Ponte.

"The government's Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Department of Commerce just quietly announced that starting in July it will alter how it calculates America's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by counting as assets things that used to be expenses and intangibles -- such as company research and development," says Ponte.

"The government economy will adopt a bit of what might be called deceptive 'Hollywood bookkeeping,'" Ponte says. "And why not, now that the entire economy is a Hollywood fiction in which the only thing real is how much of the fruits of your labor government takes to fund its expansion."

"By this accounting gimmick, America's GDP on paper will instantly appear to grow by an additional 3% every year, creating the illusion of prosperity and pulling Mr. Obama back from the cliff edge of Recession, even though almost nothing will have changed," says Ponte.

"We are carrying these major changes [that enlarge GDP numbers] all the way back in time -- which for us means to 1929," Bureau of Economic Analysis national accounts manager Brent Moulton told the /Financial Times/, "so we are essentially rewriting history."

"Rewriting history to make Big Brother seem infallible is what Winston Smith did in George Orwell's dystopian novel /1984/," says Ponte. "Big Brother, meet Big Barack and BEA."

"Today nearly 40% of America's Gross Domestic Product IS federal, state and local government spending, and 40% of Federal spending is money either borrowed or invented from nothing," says Ponte. "Today's U.S. economy is largely a magic trick, an illusion created by credit cards and government credit or cash-conjuring out of thin air."

"And now twice as many Americans are employed by government than in all of manufacturing combined," says Ponte. "Remember when America actually made things, back before today when 49.1% of American households have someone who gets a government check?"

"Now that government takes roughly 60 percent of everything you earn via direct plus hidden taxes or the invisible tax of inflation, can you please tell me what government makes?"

For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.


SOURCES:

"Gross Domestic Product, First Quarter 2013 (Advance Estimate)," U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, April 26, 2013. URL: _http://www/bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm_

"Oops! Economic Growth Wasn't So Great After All," CNBC, April 26, 2013. URL: _http://www.cnbc.com/id/100678290_

Gerald J. Thain, "Advertising Regulation: The Contemporary FTC Approach," /Fordham Urban Law Journal/, Vol 1, Issue 3 (1972). Pages 356-359 discuss the Federal Trade Commission action against Wonder Bread; a judge rejected the FTC action. To see 9 seconds of one such a Wonder Bread ad: _http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbAqqeZo97o_

For Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, see his April 25 interview: _http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2328213181001/is-fed-helping-or-hurting-economy/?playlist_id=937116503001_

Peter Morici, "Deceptively Strong GDP Report Expected," /United Press International / UPI/, April 25, 2013. URL: _http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Outside-View/2013/04/25/Outside-View-Deceptively-strong-GDP-report-expected/UPI-26051366862820/_

"Orders for U.S. Durable Goods Fall 5.7% in March," /Associated Press /Cleveland Plain Dealer/, April 24, 2013. URL: _http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/04/orders_for_us_durable_goods_fa.html_

Steven C. Johnson and Andy Bruce, "Manufacturing Data Stokes Fears of Global Spring Swoon," /Reuters/, April 23, 2013. URL: _http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/23/us-global-economy-idUSBRE93M0G820130423_

Robin Harding, "Data Shift to Lift US Economy 3%," /Financial Times/, April 21, 2013. URL: _http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/52d23fa6-aa98-11e2-bc0d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2RCnHCegl_

Robin Harding, "US Economy Gets a Hollywood Makeover," /Financial Times/, April 21, 2013. URL: _http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/63bbbd22-aa95-11e2-bc0d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2RDhxijf7_

Tyler Durden, "US GDP Will Be Revised Higher by $500 Billion Following Addition of 'Intangibles' To Economy," /ZeroHedge.com/, April 21, 2013. URL: _http://www.zerohedge.com/print/473110_

Shelly Smith and others, "Preview of the 2013 Comprehensive Revision of the National Income and Product Accounts: Changes in Definitions and Presentations," Bureau of Economic Analysis / U.S. Department of Commerce,March 2013. URL: _http://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2013/03%20March/0313_nipa_comprehensive_revision_preview.pdf_

"New Sources of Growth: Intangible Assets," OECD (Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris), September 2011. URL: _http://www.oecd.org/sti/inno/46349020.pdf_

"As GDP Falls, President Obama Runs Out of Excuses" (Editorial), /Investor's Business Daily/, January 30, 2013. URL: _http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/013013-642576-gdp-economy-decline-president-obama-policies.htm_

Karl Smith, "GDP And The iPhone Problem," /Forbes/, April 23, 2013. URL: _http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2013/04/23/gdp-and-the-iphone-problem/print/_


YOUR TAX BURDEN DIDN'T END ON APRIL 15, SAY EXPERTS

YOU'LL WORK TILL AT LEAST AUGUST 5 TO PAY FOR GOVERNMENT

GOVERNMENT HIDES 40% OF THE WAYS IT TAKES OUR MONEY

A HUGE “INFLATION TAX” INCREASE IS ALREADY UNDERWAY

4.17.13 - Think you're finished paying taxes because April 15 has passed?

No, the average taxpayer will have to work until “Tax Freedom Day” on April 18 just to pay his or her visible taxes.

Then the average American must go on working until “Cost of Government Day” on July 15 to pay the hidden added costs imposed on us by government regulations and mandates.

“Even this does not include the sneakiest tax of all – inflation – which all by itself might tax away the equivalent of between 20 and 32 days of earnings from the average American this year,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

“This means you will not reach the day you get back your life – when Americans figuratively can stop paying because of government and begin earning for themselves and their families – until sometime between August 5 and August 17,” says Smith.

“Combined, our direct and hidden taxes...that's what the government's regulations and deliberate inflation really are...will eat up at least 217 days – from January 1 until at least August 5 – of the average American's effort and income this year,” says Smith, whose widely-praised latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

consumer inflation

“Inflation is an invisible tax,” says Smith. “The government and Federal Reserve deliberately create it by printing and spending more than a trillion dollars a year out of thin air. This is devaluing the dollars Americans earn and save by between 5.5% and 7% this year, confiscating your purchasing power as a stealth tax that most people never notice.”

“Most people just see prices going up and hear politicians calling merchants greedy,” says Smith. “The reality is that when greedy politicians print mountains of money they can spend, they make every dollar worth less and stick hard-working Americans with the bill via higher prices.”

“In 2013, the Tax Foundation has calculated that Tax Freedom Day arrives April 18th,” says Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and investigative journalist. Smith and Ponte wrote The Great Debasement as well as two other books, Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse and The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us...and Seven Ways to Stop It!

“The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation calculated that the increasing economic costs of government regulation and mandates, added on top of taxes, in 2012 devoured the labor of the average American from January 1 until July 15,” says Ponte, a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and many other publications.

“If the invisible tax of 7% government-generated inflation – a median number between what two experts calculate – is added to this,” says Ponte, “then the average American will have to work 222 days – 60.8% of all the days in 2013 – to pay for these government-imposed costs on his or her life.”

“In the Bible, God asks only 10%. Why do our politicians think they are entitled to six times more from our lives and labor than God asks?” says Ponte.

“When government takes 60.8% or more of your life, isn't this slavery?”

“This means that people will not get back their lives until around August 10 and be free to work for themselves,” says Ponte.

“This is our median calculation based on current real-world inflation of 7% – not the government's incredible claim that we currently have almost no inflation. Apparently our rulers never have to pay at the gas pump or the supermarket.”

“Taxes and regulation vary widely among cities, states and people at different levels of income,” says Ponte. “In Connecticut, the state most burdened by taxes and regulation, taxpayers will not get their lives back until around September 3, approximately 247 days – nearly 68% of the way – into the year.”

“In Tennessee, taxpayers will not get their lives back until around July 23, approximately 205 days – 56% of the year in even this least-burdened state,” says Ponte.

And inflation threatens soon to become much worse, as the prestigious American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) – which oversees the “Everyday Price Index” – reported on April 8.

In February 2013, AIER noted, “The prices of frequently purchased goods and services jumped 2.3 percent...well over 25 percent on an annualized basis,” after prices had already surged in January. Inflation, AIER warned, is “poised to accelerate,” and inflationary pressure is building beneath prices.”

Because inflation is a hidden tax on earnings and savings accounts, this could be the start of a huge tax increase that will hit all Americans.

Even if we use late last year's AIER calculated lowest everyday price inflation rate of 5.5% – twice as high as the Federal Government claims for overall inflation – the hidden “inflation tax” from this would tax 20 days of work in lost earnings value away from Americans, however much or little they earn.

As Mark Twain once said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Inflation statistics can can be manipulated in thousands of ways, often for political purposes.

Widely-respected independent economist John Williams of ShadowStats reanalyzes current government data by removing the gimmicks that government has adopted since 1980 to manipulate its numbers.

By this more straightforward methodology, Williams reports that consumer inflation in March 2013 was running between 9% and 10% per year.

If we use a ShadowStats inflation number of 9%, then consumer inflation this year will tax Americans the equivalent purchasing power they would have earned by 32.8 days – more than an entire month – of work.

Federal Reserve money printing can intoxicate stock speculation, but the resulting inflation eats up productivity – which over the last two quarters has averaged less than 0.3% Gross Domestic Product growth in the real U.S. economy. Even a small inflation increase could drive America into recession.

“Inflation was unleashed in 1913, when Progressives created the Federal Reserve System and the income tax exactly 100 years ago and began undermining our then-inflation-proof gold standard dollar,” says Craig R. Smith.

“Breaking the dollar's gold anchor unchained our spendaholic politicians, which enabled them to print vast quantities of paper money that devalued the dollar, as we explain in The Great Debasement,” says Smith.

“Over the past 100 years, such money manipulation stealthily expropriated $222 Trillion from working Americans, and reduced today's dollar to less than two pennies of the purchasing power of the 1913 dollar. This is the greatest act of wealth expropriation in human history,” says Smith. “It not only continues today...it is now faster than ever before and is accelerating.”

“Restoring a gold standard, national or personal, could help us get back our lives and get back the sound money, genuine prosperity, and small government republic that America's Framers designed in the Constitution,” says Smith.

“Restoring a dollar based on gold would help get our lives and earnings back,” says Ponte. “And, in the words of the Beatles song, it would tell ever-more-obese government to get back to where it once belonged, to the small size and limited power America's Founders intended, before the taxing-and-spending-addicted politicians devour us all.”

“Most Americans have no idea how much in de facto disguised taxes the government is taking from their lives,” says Ponte. “If people – including those who now pay no income tax and think of government as giving them free goodies – understood how many hidden taxes we all pay, this would put pressure on our spendaholic politicians to reduce their wild taxing and spending.”

For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

William McBride and others, “Tax Freedom Day 2013 is April 18, Five Days Later Than Last Year” (press release), April 2, 2013. Washington, D.C.: The Tax Foundation. URL: http://taxfoundation.org/article/tax-freedom-day-2013-april-18-five-days-later-last-year See also taxfoundation.org.

Devin Bowen, Cost of Government Day 2012 Report (monograph). Washington, D.C.: Americans for Tax Reform Foundation / Cost of Government Center, 2012. This 44-page study explains and provides sources for how they determine Cost of Government Day. URL: http://costofgovernment.org/files/files/COGD2012_hi%20res.pdf See also atr.org.

Julie Ni Zhu and Steven R. Cunningham, “Inflation Poised to Accelerate,” American Institute for Economic Research, April 8, 2013. URL: https://www.aier.org/article/8008-inflation-poised-accelerate

Julie Ni Zhu, “Pressure Builds Beneath Prices,” American Institute for Economic Research, March 11, 2013. URL: https://www.aier.org/article/7971-pressure-builds-beneath-prices

John Williams, “Alternative Inflation Charts,” Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats), March 2013. URL: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts


NEW GOLD RUSH IN A DOZEN STATES, SAY EXPERTS

BEARISH ON U.S. DOLLARS, THEY CONSIDER BULLION MONEY

4.9.13 - The U.S. Constitution 224 years ago replaced unreliable state paper currencies with one unified national currency, the U.S. Dollar.

Trouble is, since the creation of the Federal Reserve 100 years ago to control America's money supply, the Fed's printing of trillions has made our dollar unreliable, too, and debased its purchasing power to less than two pennies of a 1913 dollar.

the new gold rush In a new gold rush, more than a dozen states are now considering whether to rein in the Fed by asserting their Constitutional right (Article I, Section 10) to mint their own money again as gold and silver coins.

“Through deliberate inflation, the Fed has stealthily expropriated at least $222 Trillion from the American people...equal to almost one trillion dollars every year since our Constitution was ratified,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

“Now states such as Utah, Kansas and South Carolina are considering how to break the Fed's money monopoly by minting their own gold and silver state money,” says Smith, who discusses such state efforts in depth in his recent book The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us...And Seven Ways to Stop It!

“The Fed has used its money monopoly as a hidden tax,” says Smith. “They print mountains of money with no productivity to back it, and when government spends that paper fiat money it dilutes the money supply and sucks the value out of every paper dollar that Americans have earned and saved.”

“Such inflation is theft, but Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke calls his deliberate debasing of the U.S. Dollar 'positive,'” says Smith.

“The Fed currently dumps $85 Billion every month – more than $1 Trillion every year – of its paper money conjured from nowhere into our economy, setting up a tidal wave of inflation that will destroy the value of American savings when it arrives,” warns Smith, who in his latest book The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back explores how the U.S. Dollar has been turned literally into “Monopoly Money.”

“The states are now considering what Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek called one of the best ways to get honest money back, which is competition – give consumers a choice of competing currencies in the free marketplace,” says Smith.

“If you could choose between a paper dollar with no intrinsic value that keeps losing value because of political manipulation, or a state gold coin with intrinsic value based on what the world has recognized as real money for the past 5,000 years, which would you trust to secure your savings?” asks Smith.

“The Framers of America's Constitution specified gold and silver as the standard, using paper dollars as mere promissory notes for these precious metals,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist.

“Politicians hated the Constitution's gold standard because it prevented them from being able to print all the easy paper money they wished, as a way to buy more power for themselves,” says Ponte.

“The Fed, as well as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 outlawing of gold as money, and President Richard Nixon's 1971 ending of the Eurodollar's convertibility to gold, have put our money on a downhill value slide to today's economic death spiral,” says Ponte.

“If even one state breaks the dollar's monopoly by offering Americans a choice of competing currencies, this could begin the end of reckless Federal spending, overgrown government and the welfare state,” says Ponte.

“An alternative gold currency, free from commodity taxes, would be money that no politician could debase. We would have honest, reliable money again, and the huge prosperity of America's Golden Age could return,” says Ponte.

“Liberals like to call themselves 'pro-choice,' and 'anti-monopoly,'” says Ponte.

“So surely liberals will want to end the government's dollar monopoly and give all Americans the right to choose a more trustworthy currency than what Washington, D.C., has been forcing down our throats as politically-manipulated, debased legal tender, won't they?”

In their forthcoming book The Great Withdrawal, out this spring, Smith and Ponte analyze a global withdrawal of people's trust in the state. This, they show, is evident in hundreds of ways, from savers withdrawing their deposits in politicized banks in Cyprus and Europe, to a dozen American states considering how to return to America's original, inflation-proof money before Washington, D.C., dissolves the value of the Fed's paper fiat dollars.

SOURCE:

Amanda J. Crawford, “Trust in Gold Not Bernanke As U.S. States Promote Bullion,” Bloomberg.com, April 8, 2013. URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-08/trust-in-gold-not-bernanke-as-u-s-states-promote-bullion.html


OBAMA TIGHTENS TAX NOOSE ON PRIVATE RETIREMENT PLANS

Punishing Rich Could Hurt Middle-Class Employees, Warn Experts

4.8.13 - President Barack Obama's budget, to be released this week, reportedly will restrict how much wealthy people can have in their IRAs and other retirement accounts.

“It's a penny-wise, pound-foolish idea that will hurt middle-class employees,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

empty pockets “President Obama expects to squeeze another $9 Billion in taxes out of our economy's achievers over the next 10 years by tightening the noose on their tax-deferred savings,” says Smith.

“Trouble is, as Brian Graff of the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries warns, when business owners reach this cap on their own retirement plans, their incentive to keep funding retirement plans for their employees will in many companies shrink or disappear,” says Smith.

“Company retirement plans often tie everyone at a company together, so a ceiling on the boss's account size could reduce what's paid into the retirement accounts of all who work there,” says Smith.

“This latest example of President Obama's class warfare against achievers could punish and harm a lot more middle-class working people than rich people,” says Smith, whose latest widely-discussed book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“Mr. Obama justifies limiting retirement accounts by arguing that the rich now save more than they need for an adequate retirement,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor and think tank futurist.

“This is unwise for at least three reasons:

  1. 1. Most rich people use their money for investment, innovation and hiring, and most will continue to do this long past conventional retirement age; a tax on their savings is a tax on the capital in capitalism, on the strength and health of the U.S. economy itself, which gives rich people one more reason to move their savings out of the United States;
  2. 2. The constructive lifestyle of the successful often requires a larger-than-average amount of money, which gets spent on things that employ many middle-class people, and spreads more money to them, too; and
  3. 3. The rich understand that Mr. Obama's policy of trying to tax, spend and borrow the economy he has ruined back to prosperity will soon generate a tidal wave of inflation. This inflation will turn what today seems like a lot of money in a retirement account into a much smaller amount of purchasing power 5 or 10 years from now.”

In their books The Inflation Deception and The Great Debasement, Smith and Ponte explain how you are now paying taxes that, when first enacted, were supposedly to hit only “the rich.”

“The good news is that in the fast-approaching Age of High Inflation that Mr. Obama is creating, we'll all earn a million dollars a year,” says Ponte.

“The bad news is that a million dollars will then buy what costs only $40,000 today, but you'll be paying a sky-high Obama millionaire tax on your income, even though you won't really be wealthy,” he says.

Smith and Ponte in their latest White Paper “Why Cyprus Matters” explore President Obama's various ideas for confiscating all private retirement plans such as 401(K)s and IRAs.

“In Argentina in 2008, the government seized private retirement accounts and in place of depositor money put government bonds worth only 29 percent of their face value. The government thus stole 71 percent of private retirement savings,” says Ponte.

“The Obama Administration is considering an even bigger expropriation of retirement accounts here,” says Ponte. “It has plans, when an exploitable crisis provides a pretext, to confiscate the money in our accounts – as happened in Cyprus weeks ago. It has plans to replace this money with government debt paper, in effect IOUs, as happened in Argentina.”

“And then it plans to pay people an 'annuity' each year out of these accounts. But retirees might never be allowed to cash out their government paper, and when they die the government IOUs will simply vanish, not go to their heirs,” says Ponte. “Unlike IRAs or 401(K)s, their retirement money could be absorbed by the government or redistributed to others who never saved a penny.”

“Your retirement savings might, in effect, be turned into Social Security Version 2.0,” says Ponte, “and employers may soon be forced to fund such accounts for all employees – based on required buying of government debt so government can keep growing bigger.”

“The bigger government gets, the hungrier it gets,” says Ponte. “It continues rapaciously to devour all the private wealth in America, and when that is gone it will eat our liberty to feed itself. Welcome to the Road to Serfdom 2013.”

For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte to explain how U.S. retirement accounts are at risk call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

Bernie Becker, “Obama Budget to Take Aim at Wealthy IRAs,” The Hill, April 5, 2013. URL: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/292071-obama-budget-to-target-wealthy-iras

J.D. Tuccille, “Obama Wants to Limit Retirement Accounts,” Reason Magazine, April 5,2013. URL: http://reason.com/24-7/2013/04/05/obama-wants-to-limit-retirement-accounts

Richard Rubin and Margaret Collins, “Obama's Budget Would Cap Romney-Sized Retirement Accounts,” Bloomberg News/BusinessWeek Magazine, April 5, 2013. URL: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-04-05/obama-budget-calls-for-cap-on-romney-sized-iras


CYPRUS BAILOUT THREATENS U.S. ECONOMY: EXPERTS

EUROPEAN DEAL PUTS BANK ACCOUNTS WORLDWIDE AT RISK

3.25.13 - On Monday morning the eastern Mediterranean island nation Cyprus avoided bankruptcy by making a bailout deal with the European Central Bank and others.

“This deal sets a dangerous legal precedent. It allows governments to loot private bank accounts if spendaholic politicians need the money,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

ATM “In Cyprus people woke up a week ago to find that their banks were closed, their savings accounts were inaccessible, and their government had plans to expropriate a hefty hunk of their life savings,” says Smith, the lead author of a major White Paper about the Cyprus bailout being published this week.

“People in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland are looking at the Cyprus bank accounts grab and deciding whether to withdraw their savings account from the bank before their money-hungry government does,” says Smith, who has done extensive business in Europe.

In his latest book, The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back, Smith documents the deceptive ways that government confiscates private savings in the United States.

“Europe could be destroyed economically by the contagious plague of fear caused by what just happened in Cyprus,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and investigative reporter who has covered stories in much of Europe and the Middle East.

“The European Central Bank, Eurocrats, and the International Monetary Fund all just gave their blessing to government helping itself to the life savings in private citizen bank accounts, including accounts the government insured against loss,” says Ponte.

“No wonder we could very soon see a run on European banks as people rush to get their money out...which could plunge Europe into a depression and the collapse of its currency the Euro,” says Ponte. “And because Europe is 25% of the world's economy, the U.S. economy could be dragged deep into recession by Europe's financial death spiral.”

“What just happened in Cyprus – where ancient Greeks believed their goddess of Love Aphrodite first came ashore – is an amazing tale of intrigue, Russian billionaires, undersea oil, German politics, the secret identity of the Euro, tax havens, global banking, the collapse of Europe, and much more,” says Ponte.

“One analyst says that the Cyprus bailout might become the economic equivalent of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, which started World War I,” says Ponte, “and I agree that it could, with devastating consequences for the global economy.”

“Politicians in the United States have looted our savings for many decades and continue to do so today by debasing the dollars in our accounts, which thanks to deliberate inflation and low interest rates are losing value every day,” says Ponte.

“Inflation is an invisible, slow-motion confiscation of our savings, but President Barack Obama's Administration has openly and repeated discussed how to confiscate overnight the $18.5 Trillion in Americans' 401(K)s, IRAs, and other retirement accounts,” says Ponte.

“Maybe it's not a coincidence that at the end of Cyprus are the two letters US,” says Ponte. “What happened this week in Cyprus could soon happen here.”

For an eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte to explain how what's happening in Cyprus and Europe could put American bank accounts, jobs and retirement accounts at risk call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

“Cyprus Secures Bailout, Avoids Bankruptcy,” Associated Press, March 25, 2013. URL: http://www.timesofisrael.com/cyprus-secures-bailout-avoids-bankruptcy/

Robert L. Samuelson, “Will Cyprus's Woes Infect the Rest of Europe?” Washington Post, March 19, 2013. URL: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-19/opinions/37833022_1_retail-depositors-euro-zone-rescue-package


OBAMA “CRAZY” MIDEAST POLICY COULD DESTABILIZE WORLD ECONOMY

OILING AN ALREADY-SLIPPERY SLOPE INTO CHAOS, SAY EXPERTS

3.18.13- On Wednesday President Barack Obama lands in Jerusalem to begin four days of symbolic meetings with Israeli, West Bank Palestinian, and Jordanian leaders.

“President Obama days ago warned that Iran is only 'a year or so' from acquiring nuclear weapons, which could trigger a stampede by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and perhaps Iraq to do likewise to deter Iran,” warns Craig R. Smith.

mideast crisis In his latest book, The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back, Smith explains the risks of American economic and military weakness, and of Islamist nuclear weapons, in the region in a chapter titled “America Engulfed.”

Smith lays out a chilling scenario for how America's Persian Gulf fleet might be destroyed. It is as frightening and vivid as a novel, yet its details are terrifyingly plausible.

“Because key banking connections, as well as essential oil supplies, tie Europe to the Persian Gulf, the outbreak of nuclear conflict here could collapse the Euro currency within minutes.”

“Such a collapse of the Euro would drag the global and U.S. economies into chaos,” says Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other top business journalists.

“President Obama has raised the stakes in the Persian Gulf by announcing that we will no longer station two aircraft carriers there, a strategic decision that veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward rightly called 'madness,'” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and former investigative reporter in oil-rich Muslim Indonesia and in the Middle East.

“This greatly reduces our power in the region, and makes it much less likely that the U.S. and Israel could preemptively destroy the hatching serpent eggs of Iran's emerging atomic arsenal,” says Ponte.

“If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, then future Islamist terrorists will soon be delivery systems for atom bombs – and mushroom clouds will soon appear above not only Tel Aviv but also above Paris and London, Tokyo and New Delhi, New York City and Washington, D.C., Houston and Chicago, and Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

“No major city of what Islamists call Dar al-Harb, the House with which Islam is at war, will be safe from nuclear terrorism,” says Ponte, who used to help develop such scenarios.

“President Obama reportedly is visiting the Middle East with no new plans to neutralize Iran's nuclear ambitions, and no new plans for peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” says Ponte.

“Mr. Obama is refusing to speak before Israel's Parliament or visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem. These could be seen in the Middle East as signs that his support for Israel is uncertain.”

“And even more disturbing,” says Ponte, “is that days ago, when the Obama Administration loudly announced that it would put 14 additional interceptors in Alaska by 2017 to shoot down North Korean nuclear missiles, it very quietly made another announcement that was scarcely reported.”

“The Obama Administration announced that we are scrapping the final phase of our defense system promised to Poland to shoot down medium and intermediate range missiles – and Iranian nuclear missiles that might threaten northern Europe and North America,” says Ponte.

“So President Obama is doing little to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons, is weakening our military capability in the Persian Gulf, and is scrapping the final phase of our interceptor system to protect northern Europe and America from Iranian missiles. Guess what message this sends to Tehran, to the terrorists it funds such as Hezbollah on Israel's northern border, and to neighboring nations such as Saudi Arabia about relying on the United States for their safety,” says Ponte.

“Meanwhile, President Obama continues to pursue an end to dependence on oil by giving thus far almost $100 Billion to crony oil companies, and to play Keystone cop by arresting a pipeline project to bring oil from Canada.”

“These Obama policies used to keep us dependent on Middle East oil and vulnerable to war and politics there,” says Craig R. Smith. “Yet today, despite the President, so much new oil and natural gas are coming from fracking on private land that America is fast becoming independent of Middle Eastern oil.”

“Ironically, America's oil independence may weaken President Obama's commitment to our traditional allies in the Middle East and prompt some to move faster to acquire nuclear weapons if Iran does,” says Ponte.

For a chilling and eye-opening interview with Craig R. Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

“Obama Iran Announcement Demands An Action Plan,” Investor's Business Daily, March 15, 2013. URL: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/031513-648253-year-left-before-iran-goes-nuclear.htm

Thomas L. Friedman, “Mr. Obama Goes to Israel,” New York Times, March 12, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/opinion/friedman-mr-obama-goes-to-israel.html?_r=0

Mark Landler, “Obama's Israel Itinerary Includes Some Standard Stops, But Not Others,” New York Times, March 13, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/world/middleeast/obamas-israel-itinerary-includes-some-standard-stops-but-not-others.html

Thom Shanker and others, “U.S. Is Bolstering Missile Defense to Deter North Korea,” New York Times, March 15, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/asia/us-to-bolster-missile-defense-against-north-korea.html

“US Scraps Final Phase of European Missile Shield,” BBC News, March 16, 2013. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21812161


JOBS NUMBO-JUMBO TRAPS OBAMA, SAY EXPERTS

TRICKY UNEMPLOYMENT NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP

3.11.13 - The official unemployment rate fell to 7.7% last Friday, the lowest rate since December 2008.

Numbers buried in the government's fine print, however, suggest that the economy might be sinking, not recovering.

“The government says we added 236,000 jobs in February, ” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

jobless report “However, in February the number of those unemployed who stopped looking for a job increased by 296,000....60,000 more than found work. This is what created the illusion of the jobless rate falling as real joblessness increased.”

“Yet in President Barack Obama's numbers manipulation, his Numbo-Jumbo, American's are tricked into believing that the real jobless rate declined – when in reality joblessness grew more desperate,” says Smith, whose latest widely-praised book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“Altogether, 89,304,000 adult Americans as of February were classed as 'not in the labor force,'” says Smith.

SLOW-MOTION TRAIN WRECK

“The Workforce Participation Rate in February plummeted to 63.5%, the lowest share of working-age Americans with jobs in 31 years,” says Smith.

“America's non-workers continue to increase almost twice as fast as those finding jobs, as they have during most of the Obama Administration,” says Smith.

“This isn't a recovery. It's a slow-motion train wreck,” says Smith. “The number of long-term unemployed increased by another 90,000 in February, surging from 38.1% to 40.2% of the total, and many long-time unemployed have lost job skills and might never again find good-paying jobs. A large fraction of the jobs reported in February were service-sector, hamburger-flipper kinds of jobs.”

“The February report showed only 14,000 new jobs in manufacturing, only 280 jobs in each of the 50 states,” says Smith.

U6, the official jobs number that includes those with part-time jobs who are unable to find needed full-time work, remains a staggering 14.3%, roughly one in seven working age Americans.

OBAMA IN A TRAP

“The Obama Administration is downplaying the February jobs report for several reasons,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and Reader's Digest investigative reporter.

“President Obama predicted doom and gloom, including the loss of 700,000 jobs, if the Sequester reduced government spending beginning on March 1. If he is right, then the February down-tick in the jobless rate was temporary, and March unemployment numbers will be much worse,” says Ponte.

“On the other hand, if the jobless rate for March does not officially get worse, Republicans then will say that President Obama was 'crying Wolf' about jobs, and that government spending should be cut a lot more,” says Ponte.

“President Obama has gotten himself in a trap here,” says Ponte. “He expected with help from his media comrades to blame Republicans for economic damage caused by the Sequester, but the media and public have begun to blame him. He must now hold off on his planned Sequester firings and layoffs until his media manipulators can shift public blame to the GOP.”

“President Obama has spent the last four years expanding government's share of America's Gross Domestic Product from 20% to 25% and has no desire to put our gluttonous, obese government on a diet,” says Ponte.

“Yet it is Mr. Obama's skyrocketing taxes and regulatory uncertainty, and Obamacare in particular, that since December 2007 have decreased full-time jobs by 5.8 million – and increased part-time jobs by 2.8 million,” says Ponte.

“THE FED SECRETLY NEEDS UNEMPLOYMENT...”

“President Obama is turning America into a transient, insecure society of companies afraid to hire, of part-time workers, and of renters instead of homeowners, apparently to make people more dependent on Big Government and on the Big Government political party,” says Ponte.

“The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has two mandates – to protect the value of the dollar, and to maximize employment,” says Ponte. “Yet Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has said that high unemployment, by holding down wages, is preventing inflation...so the Fed secretly needs unemployment to stay high.”

“And the Fed has indicated that for years to come it will keep printing at least $85 billion each month – equal to the entire Sequester cuts for 2013 – to prop up the economy, drive the housing market, and preserve jobs,” says Ponte.

“This addictive spending drug has created an hallucination of growth in the stock market, where speculators are hooked on the Fed's magic easy money,” says Ponte. “But all this cash conjured out of thin air will soon generate huge inflation and imperil the value of the dollar.”

“We're living in Oz, in an economic fantasyland of sky high spending, sinking employment and declining productivity,” says Ponte.

“President Obama and Chairman Bernanke are both practicing Numbo-Jumbo, but they both are damaging our unhealthy economy's ability to produce genuine growth and recovery,” says Ponte.

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

“More Are Quitting the Workforce Than Getting Jobs,” Investor's Business Daily, March 8, 2013. URL: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/030813-647381-job-growth-outpaced-by-growth-in-nonworkers.htm

“Off the Path to Recovery,” New York Times, March 8, 2013. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/opinion/off-the-path-to-economic-recovery.html?_r=0

Augustino Fontevecchia, “Why Is The White House Playing Down A Strong Jobs Report?” Forbes, March 8, 2013. URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/03/08/why-is-the-white-house-playing-down-a-strong-jobs-report/

John Ransom, “This Jobs Report Not Actual Size,” Townhall.com, March 10, 2013. URL: http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2013/03/09/this-jobs-report-not-actual-size-n1529516/page/full/

Elizabeth Harrington, “Record 89,304,000 Americans 'Not In Labor Force' – 296,000 Fewer Employed Since January,” CNSNews.com, March 8, 2013. URL: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/record-89304000-americans-not-labor-force-296000-fewer-employed-january

Jenny Marlar, “U.S. Payroll to Population Rate Falls Further in February,” Gallup.com, March 7, 2013. URL: http://www.gallup.com/poll/161063/payroll-population-rate-falls-further-february.aspx


SEQUESTER SECRETS AND SURPRISES

Two Financial Experts Explain and Expose the Sequester

We are being told that the coming Sequester on March 1 could shut down large parts of the Federal Government and plunge America into economic chaos.

Is this true? Two widely-quoted financial experts can explain what the Sequester really is, and is not, to your audience.

Gov by Freakout “The Sequester was designed to impose cuts so deep to national defense and social spending that, to avoid it, Republicans and Democrats would feel compelled to make wiser changes to government taxing and spending instead,” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

“This Sequester – from the Latin word Sequestrare (See-kwes-TRAR-a), meaning 'to set aside or surrender' – is a share of expected government budget money that was set aside and would be surrendered if no political budget deal was agreed to,” says Smith.

“In theory, these sequestered cuts over 10 years were supposed to add up to as much as $1.2 Trillion, yet nobody actually believes that this could happen,” says Smith, whose latest, just-published book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“If nothing is done to erase, modify or delay it, the Sequester supposedly cuts the Federal Government's budget by $85 Billion,” says Smith. “The real cut, however, will be closer to $44 Billion, which is a relatively tiny amount – less than 2.4 percent of the government's annual budget, and only one-quarter of one percent of America's Gross Domestic Product or GDP.”

“The government's nearly $3.7 Trillion annual budget is so huge, and the Sequester is so small,” says Smith, “that the Sequester cuts, as several economists have noted, are little more than a rounding error for Federal bookkeepers.”

“In fact, the Sequester does not shrink government at all,” says Smith, “because even if Sequester cuts kick in, Federal spending in 2013 will increase by at least $15 Billion.”

“The Federal Government uses a form of 'baseline budgeting' that assumes its budget will automatically grow each year, typically by as much as 7 percent,” says Smith.

“All that the Sequester does is reduce this automatic rate of government spending increase,” says Smith. “The government will still be spending more money in 2013 than it did in 2012, no matter what happens.”

“The politicians created such 'baseline budgeting' to make it easier to grow the government,” says Smith. “You and I have to tighten our belts in tough economic times like today, but this budget gimmick punches a new hole in Uncle Sam's belt so he can automatically grow fatter every year.”

“This deceptive budgeting is like a cost-of-living increase for government to offset the inflation caused by government spending and paper money printing,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a veteran investigative reporter and think tank futurist.

“So consider this: the Federal Government claims that there is no inflation in today's economy, that your fuel and food prices haven't been going up,” says Ponte. “This is how President Barack Obama's Administation denied cost-of-livng increases to Social Security recipients in 2009, 2010 and 2011...and only in election year 2012 gave those dependent on Social Security a meager increase.”

“If Social Security recipients have needed no increase to offset inflation, then why does the government need more money than it already has?” asks Ponte.

“The Sequester – which was originally proposed by Gene Sperling, the head of President Obama's National Economic Council, on July 12, 2011, and therefore came out of the White House, not Congress – does make unbalanced cuts in government spending,” says Ponte.

“The Sequester will not touch what the politicians now call 'Mandatory Spending' such as Social Security and Medicare. It would only cut 'Discretionary Spending' such as national defense, which America's Founders would not have deemed discretionary,” says Ponte.

“The Sequester would cut many government offices equally, and this is unwise,” says Ponte. “It would trim funds alike for offices that run a tight ship and do not waste taxpayer funds, and for offices that squander taxpayer money crazily. This will impose financial pain on the best government offices and persuade them never to practice frugality again.”

“Republicans have offered to give affected branches of government 'transfer authority,' so managers can shift money among their offices to minimize layoffs and other problems the Sequester might cause,” says Ponte, “but thusfar President Obama has refused to permit such 'transfer authority.'”

“President Obama's behavior leaves us wondering whether he actually wants this Sequester that his White House invented and he signed into law,” says Ponte.

“Does Mr. Obama think that he and his party will gain politically from letting his Sequester do as much damage to our nation and defense readiness as possible – because he believes his media allies will blame this devastation on Republicans who, in fact, have offered compromises to prevent this?”

“Thus do we govern in today's Crisisocracy, government by the pressure of deliberately created crises and emergencies,” says Ponte. “This is a wasteful, reckless and foolish way to run a government, an economy and a culture. No wonder people are reluctant to invest in America anymore.”

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

Bob Woodward, “Obama's Sequester Deal-Changer,” Washington Post, February 22, 2012. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bob-woodward-obamas-sequester-deal-changer/2013/02/22/c0b65b5e-7ce1-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html

George Will, “The Manufactured Crisis of Sequester,” Washignton Post, February 22, 2013. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-the-manufactured-crisis-of-sequester/2013/02/22/d22d4466-7c81-11e2-82e8-61a46c2cde3d_story.html

Bill Frezza, “After the Sequester, Bring on The Blame Game,” Forbes.com, February 20, 2013. URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2013/02/20/after-the-sequester-bring-on-the-blame-game/

Fords O'Connell, “Shutting Down Government For Sequester May Backfire on Obama,” Investor's Business Daily, February 22, 2013. URL: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/022213-645439-obama-sequester-moves-might-not-be-liked-by-americans.htm

Grace Wyler, “Republicans May Have Found A Brilliant Way to Win the Sequester,” Business Insider, February 22, 2013. URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/republican-plan-sequester-2013-2

Chris Good, “57 Terrible Consequences of the Sequester,” ABC NEWS, February 21, 2013. URL: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/57-terrible-consequences-sequester/story?id=18551994


CHINA'S NEW “YEAR OF SNAKE” RISKY FOR U.S. ECONOMY, WARN EXPERTS

SNAKE YEARS HISTORICALLY HAVE BROUGHT TERRIBLE EVENTS:

9-11, PEARL HARBOR, 1929 STOCK MARKET CRASH, GREAT DEPRESSION

On February 10, the ancient Chinese Lunar calendar, based on a 12-year cycle of different animal years, exited the Year of the Dragon and entered the new Year of the Snake.

Snake years have been unlucky for humankind, and many Chinese astrologers predict that 2013 could be a year of disasters of many ominous kinds.

year of the snake “The 1929 stock market crash and plunge into the Great Depression happened in a Snake year,” says monetary expert Craig R. Smith.

“Many in Asia fear that this new Snake year is a bad omen that could lead to war or another economic disaster. Such thinking could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Smith in his latest book,The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back, includes many amazing facts about China – the birthplace of paper money where events such as Chinese New Year are celebrated with gifts of gold and offerings to the deceased of “ghost money.”

The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 happened during a Snake year, and so did the devastating terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center and its terrorist murder of more than 3,000 Americans on 9-11-2001.

The 1989 Chinese Communist slaughter of pro-democracy protestors who raised their own Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square happened in a Snake year.

In 2012, China's birthrate rose by around 5 percent as women tried to give birth during the good luck Year of the Dragon, but births will fall this year because a child born in a Year of the Snake could bring bad fortune.

CHINA'S NEW LEADER BORN IN SNAKE YEAR

The new Communist leader who took power in China in 2012, Xi Jinping, was born in 1953 – not only a Snake year, but also, like 2013, what Chinese astrologers call a Year of the Black Water Snake.

In this ancient tradition, Snake children like Xi are believed to be skilled, bright and motivated leaders, yet can also be proud, materialistic, vain, vicious, venomous, scheming and cunning. Like snakes, they can speak with a “forked tongue.”

“We should be aware of the Year of the Snake, not because we believe in Chinese astrology, but because more than a billion Asians do,” says Smith, who is interviewed frequently by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

“They fear that the Year of the Snake might bring bad luck and monsters, and this fear by itself could cause economic contraction and widespread social unrest in much of Asia,” says Smith.

“After the traditional gift-giving of this 15-day Spring Festival, China's biggest holiday, ends, don't be surprised if Asia's economy slithers downward for the rest of this year and drags us with it,” says Smith.

“Of all 12 animal years in the Chinese calendar, Snake years have brought the worst economic growth – and are one of only two animal years that on average bring negative growth, recessionary economies,” says Smith.

“ANIMAL SPIRITS”

“Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that prosperity depends on what he called 'Animal Spirits' of optimism and confidence,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and investigative reporter for Reader's Digest, who has tracked down stories in 33 countries, including China, Japan, Singapore and Indonesia.

“Bad luck Snake years symbolize the opposite of what Keynes meant by positive animal spirits,” says Ponte. “It's one more reason why wise investors will hedge against risk by diversifying in this very risky snake-bitten year for the interconnected world economy.”

“China has been hedging its bets by nearly doubling its already-rapid rate of gold purchases via Hong Kong,” says Ponte.

“We're already in global currency wars, trying to win a 'race to debase' the dollar to make our exports cheaper and more competitive in foreign markets,” says Ponte.

“We had been trying to undercut the Euro and Japanese Yen, but now it appears that China is quietly entering these wars, which could end by crashing the world's economy in a blaze of dollar-destroying inflation. If that happens, whichever country has the largest gold reserves could become economic ruler of the world.”

“Those nations and individuals with gold will ride out the economic devastation,” says Ponte. “The Chinese, who invented both paper and paper money, understand this. They are an ancient culture. And they see us as turning the U.S. Dollar into 'ghost money,' as we explain in our book.”

“Those who have built their economy on paper fiat currency like the dollar that has no intrinsic value will sink and see their money become worthless,” says Ponte. “People need to wake up and smell China's Year of the Snake.”

The Year of the Snake will continue until January 30, 2014.

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com.

SOURCES:

“Asian Astrologers Warn of Stormy Year of Snake,” Agence France-Presse (AFP), February 7, 2013. URL: http://www.france24.com/en/20130207-asian-astrologers-warn-stormy-year-snake

Ansuya Harjani, “China's Shaky Start of the Year of the Snake,” CNBC, February 1, 2013. URL: Http://www.cnbc.com/id/100425853/print

Annie Huang, “Chinese World Worries That Year of Snake May Bite,” Associated Press (AP)/San Francisco Chronicle, February 8, 2013. URL: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Chinese-world-worries-that-Year-of-Snake-may-bite-4262034.php

Dhara Ranasinghe, “Has China Quietly Joined the Currency War?” CNBC, February 7, 2013. URL: Http://www.cnbc.com/id/100444861/print


OBAMANOMICS MIGHT CAUSE NEW ICE AGE, SAY EXPERTS

Cite Liberal Study Claiming Less Work Could Cool Planet

Is Eurosocialism the Way to Reverse “Global Warming”?

2.8.13 - A new study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., predicts that if the world became “more European” – working fewer hours and taking more vacations – this could reduce future global warming by as much as 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit.

ice age “If this is true, then President Barack Obama's economy-chilling new taxes and choking regulations could push us into a new Ice Age,” laughs Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and author of one of the most widely praised books about global climate change.

“Because of President Obama's policies, 8.5 million fewer jobs exist in America today than when he took office four years ago, even though the U.S. population has increased by 9 million people,” says Ponte, author of the bestselling book The Cooling.

“America's economic growth has cooled to an almost-frozen halt, and plummeted to Minus 0.5 percent GDP growth, an icy dip to Recession level low grow, in the 4th Quarter of 2012.

“If fewer work hours will cool Earth's climate by expending less energy, then 23 million Americans now unemployed, or able to find only part-time work, are chilling our economy and society to the bone,” says Ponte, who for 15 years was the Roving Science Editor at Reader's Digest Magazine.

“No wonder so many Americans are shivering with fear that our economy may not survive the next four years, and that our children have no future in the economic Ice Age that President Obama's policies are bringing on,” he says.

Ponte and co-author Craig R. Smith, a famed monetary expert, explore forces that could bring down America's economy in their latest book, The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

In a chapter they titled “The Mandate of Heaven,” they examine how the continuing severe drought in America's heartland has raised the cost of food and fuel and lowered the level of the Mississippi River enough to impede barge traffic.

Experts this month warned that the continuing drought is lowering the level of the Great Lakes and threatens to reverse the flow of the Chicago River.

Such North American droughts, they note, have occurred repeatedly for thousands of years before humans could influence climate change.

“There's no doubt that weather and climate can affect the economy,” says Smith. “Since Biblical times people have understood that good weather brings rich harvests, feasts and prosperity, and that years of bad weather can cause famines and hardship.”

“What's interesting in this new liberal analysis,” says Smith, “is its idea that levels of unemployment and underemployment typical of European social welfare states could cool Earth's climate by slowing down productivity.”

“President Obama's blizzard of tax increases, frosty hostile-to-business regulations and icy class-warfare threats are moving America in the direction of becoming an economically frozen Eurosocialist welfare state where businesses are afraid to invest or hire workers,” says Ponte.

The liberal study contends that Americans might happily give up a quarter of their income gains in exchange for more leisure and vacation time.

“We are turning into a low-work welfare state faster than most people understand,” says Ponte. “Fully 49.1 percent of American households already include at least one person who pockets some kind of government benefit.”

“It's something we have to decide as a country,” says the study's author David Rosnick.

“We used to be able to decide things as individuals,” says Ponte, “but in President Obama's America all that matters, increasingly, is the collective, whose politicians get power by making us dependent wards of the state.”

“And today's liberal solution is to deindustrialize the world's most advanced economy and become collectivist cave dwellers again in a new economic Ice Age, like Europe's past and present eco- and econo-primitive Neanderthals.”

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

SOURCES:

Jason Koebler, “Study: Global Warming Can Be Slowed By Working Less,” U.S. News & World Report, February 4, 2013. URL: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/04/-study-global-warming-can-be-slowed-by-working-less

David Rosnick, Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change (13-page monograph). Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 2013. URL: Http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/climate-change-workshare-2013-02.pdf


THIS WEEK'S 100th ANNIVERSARY OF THE INCOME TAX
SHOULD BE MARKED BY “MOURNING IN AMERICA” SAY EXPERTS

“EVIL TAX” UNDERMINED FOUNDING FATHERS, ELEVATED MARX

“We Need a TRULY PROGRESSIVE Income Tax.”

Sunday, February 3, was the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 16th Amendment – which instantly opened the door for today's Income Tax.

“America's Framers wrote a Constitution that prohibited an income tax, but the Progressives who won the 1912 election were eager to impose unequal taxes – and they got their way,” says monetary expert and economic historian Craig R. Smith.

Smith's latest book, just published, is THE GREAT DEBASEMENT: THE 100-YEAR DYING OF THE DOLLAR AND HOW TO GET AMERICA'S MONEY BACK.

karl marx This book explores the 1912 Progressive takeover of America's government and their 1913 creation of both the Progressive Income Tax and the Federal Reserve System, chartered to begin replacing America's solid gold-backed dollar with an “elastic currency” – the very words used in the 1913 law.

“Just like today, the politicians in 1913 promised that their new tax would fall almost entirely on the rich,” says Smith, a financial expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists.

“They used class warfare and envy to trick people into accepting a tax that enriches government, a heavy and intrusive tax that more than half of all working Americans – not just the rich – now pay,” says Smith.

“And today, a century of the income tax and Fed's manipulation of our money has expropriated more than $222 Trillion from working Americans, fattened the government to monstrous size and power, and reduced the value of our dollar to only two pennies of its 1913 purchasing power.”

“In their 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed a 'heavy graduated income tax' as one of the most powerful ways government could bankrupt capitalists and destroy capitalism,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and investigative reporter for Reader's Digest.

“Abraham Lincoln imposed a temporary income tax to bankroll the War Between the States,” says Ponte. “Later politicians enacted income taxation, but the courts slapped these down as unconstitutional...which is why Progressives pushed for, and in 1913 won, a constitutional amendment to allow the kind of unequal taxation America's Founders had made illegal.”

“Politicians have many reasons to love the Progressive income tax,” says Ponte. “It allows them to selectively impose very heavy taxes on a minority of high achievers, then redistribute their loot to a majority of voters.”

“As playwright George Bernard Shaw said, 'He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul's support.'”

“Yet the effect of our heavy income tax has been to take investment capital from the most productive people in society and transfer it to those who are less productive, including many millions of welfare recipients,” says Ponte.

“In the long run, nations whose ruling politicians heavily tax the 'makers' to buy the votes of the 'takers' are committing economic suicide,” says Ponte.

“And the income tax destroys more than our economic freedom,” says Ponte. “It also empowers government to spy on and control every facet of citizens' lives that might involve any transfer of goods, labor or money.”

“America's Founders would mark this week's 100th Anniversary of the income tax with a day of 'mourning in America' for the death of our Constitution, economic liberty, and future,” says Ponte.

“As we suggest in THE GREAT DEBASEMENT, if we must have an income tax it ought to be a 'Truly Progressive' one – a tax that encourages genuine progress,” says Ponte.

“Under a 'Truly Progressive' income tax, your tax rate would FALL as your income rises, so that the person who earns a million dollars would pay a zero tax rate – and keep all the fruits of his or her labor,” says Ponte.

“Instead of today's income tax, where people work less to avoid being moved into ever-higher tax brackets, a 'Truly Progressive' income tax would give people from the bottom to near the top of the income scale an added incentive to work harder, do more overtime, be more productive and earn more,” says Ponte.

“This would make the whole society more prosperous, produce more goods and services, and reduce the need for government to support a large class of welfare dependents,” says Ponte.

“Today's Progressives, such as President Barack Obama, derive their power from keeping millions addicted to a giant government funded by heavily taxing a minority of the most productive citizens,” says Ponte.

“Truth be told, despite debates about whether the 16th Amendment was constitutionally enacted, I'm inclined to believe that it allows an income tax – but NOT a Progressive income tax, which violates the 'Equal Protection' clause of the Constitution by taxing some people more heavily than others,” says Ponte.

Progressives argue that equal taxes would be “regressive” because the poor and lower-middle-class people could no longer get a free ride in society's welfare wagon.

“The opposite is true,” says Ponte. “The most regressive tax is today's Progressive income tax, because it puts a huge drag on the economy, retards prosperity, and eats up the capital needed to move our technology and society forward.”

“Almost any other tax system – a fair tax on sales, a flat tax, or the Constitution's original indirect taxes via tariffs – would be better than today's corrupt and anti-freedom Progressive Income Tax,” says Ponte.

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

SOURCE:

U.S. Senator John Barrasso, “Tax Code's 100th Birthday Is Cause For Reform – Not Celebration,” Investor's Business Daily. January 31, 2013. URL: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/013113-642694-after-100-years-tax-code-in-bad-need-of-reform.htm

Jay Starkman, “Many Unhappy Returns – Millions of Them: It's the 100th Anniversary of the 16th Amendment....” Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2013. URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323701904578276210776108672.html


ECONOMY'S “DEATH SPIRAL” GETTING WORSE, WARN EXPERTS
LATEST DATA POINT TO RECESSION, NOT RECOVERY

“THOSE SEEKING SAFETY IN THE STOCK MARKET COULD BE RUINED”

1.30.13 - Prior to last year's election, the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the economy (3rd Quarter 2012) was recovering and growing by 3.1 percent.

Now, new data, released January 30, show that economic growth as measured by America's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the 4th Quarter of 2012 plummeted to an anemic 0.1 percent growth.

“Our economy's growth has again fallen to 'stall speed,'” says Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

the great debasement “This means not only that any recovery has stalled, but also that we might be trapped in an economic 'death spiral' pulling us into a Great Recession,” says Smith, whose latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“The politicians made this even worse in January by piling an additional $1,000 a year in payroll taxes on the average working family – which will slow economic growth to 1% during the 1st Quarter of 2013,” says Smith.

“Our spendaholic, taxaholic politicians are choking the life out of this economy,” says Smith. “They are frightening would-be investors with uncertainty about future taxes, regulations and penalties. And they are poisoning the environment needed to produce jobs, prosperity and optimism.”

STOCK MARKET MIRAGE

“Average Americans fear for their futures,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist and Reader's Digest investigative reporter.

“The Federal Reserve is practicing what economists call 'financial repression,' deliberately holding the rate of interest paid for bank accounts below the rate of inflation,” says Ponte. “This causes savers to lose the value of their money and feel forced to make riskier investments instead.”

“This, plus fear of 2013 tax increases, has led millions to withdraw their savings and to flee from bonds. Many are being stampeded into investing their cash in stocks, causing a temporary market rise,” says Ponte.

“The new GDP data show that what looks like an improving economy is instead a mirage, like the illusion of a lake full of water created by heat waves shimmering above bone-dry desert sand,” says Ponte.

“Federal, state and local government spending now accounts for 38.45 percent of America's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and government spending and Federal Reserve stimulus money have been increasing,” says Ponte.

“This means that soaring taxes, regulatory costs and fear are shrinking the private sector, the sector that actually produces the value that politicians are eager to grab and redistribute for their own benefit.”

“These politicians continue to expand the welfare state and massively increase taxes, but most are reluctant to shrink government spending or power,” says Ponte.

“The grim reality is that real-world inflation is close to 7 percent, and this is devouring our economy's 1-2 percent growth. Our real growth rate is closer to minus 5 percent,” says Ponte, “which means that we have never gotten out of the Great Recession that began more than four years ago.”

“The government might be concealing this massaged numbers,” says Ponte. “That's how this Administration,for example, can claim that unemployment is roughly the same as it was when President Obama took office – even though 8.33 million fewer people have jobs, and America's population has grown by 9 million.”

“We now have an Alice-in-Wonderland economy created with smoke and mirrors,” says Ponte. “It's an unside-down, spending-addicted economy in which the stock market goes up when bad news increases the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will magically conjure more hundreds of billions more in stimulus money out of thin air.”

“Investors who today bet their whole nest egg on a stock market levitated by stimulus money that the Fed has conjured out of nothing are taking a terrible risk,” says Ponte. “People need to remember that long-term real safety comes from solidity and diversification, not today's economic illusions.”

“Even in the supposedly 'up' 3rd Quarter of 2012, U.S. Exports shrank for the first time in four years, despite a three percent decline in the value of the dollar that Obama's economists believed should make U.S. products cheaper overseas. This is an ominous signal of economic trouble,” says Ponte.

“The grim reality is that the United States recently has suffered from slower GDP growth than 75 percent of the world's nations,” says Ponte. “In GDP growth, we rank 166th among countries. Our economic growth is now worse than Communist Cuba's – and keeps declining.”

GROWTH PROJECTIONS

What benchmarks can we use to determine whether the new government numbers are trustworthy?

Prior to the January 30 report of 2012 4th Quarter Gross Domestic Product, analysts at Goldman Sachs last December lowered their GDP growth projection to only 1 percent. J.P. Morgan's GDP economist then forecast Q4 at 1.5 percent growth, adding half-humorously that a third of this would come from record sales of Apple's iPhone 5. (When these sales later proved weaker than expected, Deutsche Bank's analyst predicted that this would make overall economic growth slower than predicted.)

The 50 economists who responded to the Wall Street Journal's survey included several who thought growth at the end of 2012 and through 2013 would be below 1 percent.

The Median WSJ experts' forecast for 2012 4th Quarter was 1.56 percent growth. Their Median forecast for 2013 1st Quarter was 1.6 percent. Their Median for 2013 2nd Quarter was 1.7 percent. These median numbers predict continued anemic growth. These forecasts would be even worse if a statistician removed 3-5 economists who predict much higher growth than the other 45, thereby skewing the Median higher.

“In today's economy – with housing still mired, debt rising, consumer confidence sinking, real unemployment stuck at European welfare-state levels, and government expanding – any report that claims the economy is growing faster than 1.6 percent should be taken with a very large grain of salt.” says Ponte.

“Today's clear economic trend is, at best, for a slow and slowing economy that could be mired for a decade or more as families and the government try to deleverage from stratospheric debt.”

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

SOURCES:

Doug Short, “WSJ Economists' GDP Forecasts: 1.6% for Q4 2012 and 1.7 in Q1 2013,” Advisor Perspectives, January 29, 2013. URL: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/WSJ-Economist-Survey-on-GDP-Jan-2012.php

Aaron Task, “Ignore GDP and the Fiscal Cliff, U.S. Is Already in Recession: ECRI's Achuthan,” Daily Ticker/Yahoo! Finance, November 29, 2012. URL: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/ignore-gdp-fiscal-cliff-u-already-recession-ecri-174612999.html

Joe Weisenthal, “Goldman Slashes Q4 GDP Forecast to Just 1%,” Business Insider, December 5, 2012. URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-slashes-q4-gdp-forecast-to-just-1-2012-12

Tyler Durden, “JPM Cuts Q4 GDP Forecast to 1.5%, Now Sees iPhone Sales Contribute 33% Of Growth Upside,” ZeroHedge, December 3, 2012. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/print/460508

___________, “So Which Is It: iPhone 5 Now Blamed for Q4 GDP Drop,” ZeroHedge, January 11, 2013. URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/print/468261

Daniel Greenberg, “Obama's America Has Worse GDP Growth than Cuba,” FrontPage Magazine, October 2, 2012. URL: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-america-has-worse-gdp-growth-than-cuba/


OBAMA-DRIVEN GUN SALES SHIFTING ECONOMY, SAY EXPERTS

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS AMERICA'S “GREATEST FIREARMS SALESMAN”

1.14.13 -- In December 2012 alone, the FBI performed 2.2 million background checks of would-be gun buyers, an increase of 58.6 percent over a year earlier according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

This nationwide rush by millions to buy firearms is reportedly driven by President Barack Obama's allies' statements that he may circumvent Congress and the Constitution's Second Amendment by using Executive Orders to restrict future gun purchases.

gun “President Obama's fiscal cliff deal is already costing the average working American family more than $1,000 in added taxes, and now his threats are driving millions of struggling families to spend another $1,000 or more of their savings or credit to buy rifles, shotguns and handguns whose ownership may be 'grandfathered in' if feared new restrictions are imposed,” says Craig R. Smith.

“This political uncertainty and panic is distorting our economy, eating up the disposable income of millions of struggling families, and potentially pushing us closer to Recession,” says Smith, a monetary expert whose new latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar.

“By his anti-gun statements, President Obama has become the greatest firearms salesman in American history,” says Smith, who is frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other prominent business journalists.

“President Obama has likewise caused uncertainty and fear by threatening heavier regulation and higher taxation and penalties for businesses,” says Smith, “and this has caused low investment, high unemployment, and an economy in which millions are struggling to keep their homes and heads above water.”

“Investment in responsible firearms ownership has historically been part of American self-reliance, as has family investment in emergency provisions and protection against government-caused debasement of our money,” says Smith.

“American pioneers had the mettle to understand that they needed both lead and gold to be secure and free,” says Smith.

“A month ago the students and heroic teachers murdered at Sandy Hook

School were not protected by their government,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor and think tank futurist.

“In the Northeast, those whose homes were devastated by Hurricane Sandy were promised immediate government help by President Obama, who came for a day and made big promises while the television cameras were there. Yet most of these storm victims are still waiting for help, left out in the cold with only broken homes and broken promises,” says Ponte.

“It's clear that President Obama wants to make Americans into helpless government dependents,” says Ponte, “yet the first lesson we should learn from recent tragedies is that you cannot depend on government and self-serving politicians for either your physical safety or economic security.”

“As our Founders understood, Americans need the freedom to have the means to depend, first and foremost, on themselves and their neighbors, not Washington, D.C.,” says Ponte.

“It's troubling to see how today's politicians are manipulating people – panicking and stampeding them into buying what could be the wrong kinds of guns for optimal self-defense, and the wrong investments to protect against how the politicians are devaluing our dollar and taxing us via deliberate inflation,” says Ponte.

“If President Obama wants to persuade Americans that we do not need guns, he could lead by example – by disarming his own Secret Service bodyguards,” says Ponte.

This week Vice President Joe Biden is expected to issue his special advisory on what new firearms restrictions should be imposed. As a Senator, Biden was a prime author of the 1994 ban on so-called “assault weapons” that lasted for ten years and, according to critics, failed to limit violence with such firearms.

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

--------------------

SOURCES:

“Gun Sales Soar In U.S. Ahead of Biden Report,” New York Times, January 11, 2013. URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100374251


BUDGET DEAL COULD TRIGGER RECESSION, EXPERTS WARN

HIGHER MIDDLE-CLASS TAXES WILL CAUSE LOWER GROWTH, FEWER JOBS

warning sign 1.2.13 -- To avoid economic disaster caused by going over the “Fiscal Cliff,” lawmakers framed a deal with higher taxes on the Middle Class that is likely to plunge America back into a Recession, according to economic experts.

“Politicians of both parties were happy to propose a deal to end the 2 percent payroll tax cut, and this will have devastating consequences,” says Craig R. Smith, a renowned monetary expert whose just-published latest book is The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back.

“Ending this one Middle-Class tax break could cost an average family between $1,000 and $1,300 every year,” says Smith. “It could force a household earning $100,000 a year to pay an extra $2,000, and a couple earning $113,700 or more to pay an extra $4,548 every year.”

“The Congress created this tax break in 2010 to stimulate the economy, and this additional spending money that was not taxed away from the Middle Class may have saved a million or more jobs, homes and small businesses because families could buy more,” says Smith, who is frequently interviewed by Fox's Neil Cavuto and other business journalists.

“President Barack Obama and lawmakers know that when they tax this money away, Middle Class families will be poorer and have less to spend. This stimulus will end, and many jobs will be lost,” says Smith.

“Analysts at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. now estimate that ending this payroll tax cut, along with imposing higher taxes on the wealthy, will drive down growth during the first Quarter of 2013 to 1 percent,” says Smith.

“With real inflation now running close to 7 percent and devouring our economic growth,” says Smith, “this could put America's economy underwater – shrinking at negative 5 percent growth or worse. This could quickly turn into another Recession.”

“The politicians are eager to end this tax break for the Middle Class, despite the risk of a new Recession, because it 'costs' the government between $125 Billion and $150 Billion in lost tax revenue every year,” says Smith.

Smith notes that California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein during a December 30 interview acknowledged what both Democratic and Republican lawmakers know – that cutting government spending by as little as $55 Billion could shrink America's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by as much as 1.5 percent.

“The proposed budget compromise would reduce private spending stimulus to the economy by as much as $150 Billion, nearly three times as much, so think how much ending this rare tax break for the Middle Class would devastate our economy,” says Smith.

“And there are lots of other devils in the details of this proposed deal to avoid the fiscal cliff,” says Smith's co-author Lowell Ponte, formerly a think tank futurist and Roving Editor at Reader's Digest.

“The deal proposes raising taxes by at least $620 Billion, imposing $41 in new taxes for every $1 in promised spending cuts. This will increase direct and passed-on hidden taxes on Middle Class Americans by thousands of dollars every year.”

“And President Obama says he will demand even more tax increases next year,” says Ponte.

“The deal promises to index Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and 'Death Tax'

levels to inflation, yet the current Administration now puts out cooked numbers that claim there is no inflation – and has used these questionable numbers to deny cost-of-living increases to those on Social Security. I expect the same tricks with the promised indexing in this deal,” says Ponte.

In their previous book The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us and Seven Ways to Stop It!, Smith and Ponte show how government uses inflation and the creation of trillions of paper dollars out of thin air as ways of secretly taxing and controlling Americans.

“Americans were fooled into accepting the income tax exactly 100 years ago, as we explore in The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back, by believing politician promises that this new tax would hit 'only the rich,'” says Ponte. “They used the same trick to sell the Alternative Minimum Tax. And President Barack 'Lucy' Obama is now holding that same football – taxing only the rich – and daring Charlie Brown to kick it again, to get Americans to accept his new taxes.”

“But after the tidal wave of inflation that inevitably is coming, we're all going to be 'millionaires' and get taxed like President Obama's targeted millionaires, even though a million dollars in paper money will soon have only the purchasing power of a few thousand dollars today,” says Ponte.

“Will Americans be fooled again by this political con game?” asks Ponte.

“Or will they open their eyes and see that these 'taxes on the rich' sooner or later come around to bite us Middle Class Americans in the wallet?”

“Remember,” says Ponte, “that both President Obama and Tea Party Republicans promised that they would never raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year. With this deal both sides are shafting hard-working Middle Class Americans and breaking their promise to you.”

For a provocative interview with Craig Smith or Lowell Ponte about the Great Debasement call: Bronwin Barilla at (800) 950-2428 or email bkbarilla@greatdebasement.com

SOURCES:

Todd Wallack, “With Any Fiscal Deal, Payroll Tax Apt to Rise,” Boston Globe, January 1, 2013.

URL: http://bostonglobe.com/business/2013/01/01/social-security-hike-goes-into-effect-cutting-most-pay-checks-percent/In52V2HS6TKuQf0TlGFDcI/story.html

Rich Miller and Shobhana Chandra, “Senate Budget Pact Would Crimp Not Crush U.S. Growth,” Bloomberg, January 1, 2013.

URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-01/senate-budget-pact-would-crimp-not-crush-u-s-growth.html

Senator Diane Feinstein on Fox News Sunday, December 30, 2013. Transcript URL:

http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday-chris-wallace/2012/12/30/sens-feinstein-graham-talk-chances-fiscal-cliff-deal#p//v/2064118248001

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