TBGO~~Baaah-di-baaah-di-di: Balance; What's for Dinner;

 Spurious Sequestration:  Funny, but Prez. LowBar filled the can, spilled the fuel, and handed 'em the lighter...

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It is NOT "The GOPhux's" sequester.
It's Prez. LowBar's, the brain-child (cancer) of his resident econ guru, Gene Sperling.
BOTH parties want to use the chaos, consternation, uncertainty, and desperation it will engender to make people SO uneasy and nervous and fearful that they will put up with cuts to the Social Safety Net to make it go away.
Even though it is an entirely INVENTED crisis, they are ALL gonna use it to FUCK US!

Balanced Budget: A one-mil tax on Wall Street transactions of securities and other financial instruments would generate as much revenue for the Gummint as ALL the income taxes collected from people earning minimum wage combined.

Where does that number come from? Try to follow:
On an AVERAGE day, somewhere just short of 10 BILLION shares are traded on Wall Street.
There are approximately 275 trading days per year.
Stay close here, cuz we're gonna do some arithmetic:
10,000,000,000 (the # of shares/day) times 275 (the number opf trading days/year) = 27 TRILLION 500 BILLION shares traded per year.
I dunno the average price per share, but let's say, to make it easy, that that price is (arbitrarily) $20.
So that is Five Hundred Fifty TRILLION dollars in gross trades, annually: $550,000,000,000,000
One mil = 1 1/1000 of a dollar
Therefore, a one-mil tax on such trades would yield 550 BILLION dollars in revenues, annually.
Right?


 Apologies: Woody'z sorry, but:

Since 1) no new petroleum refineries will be built (none has been, since the '70s) and 2) all this shale-oil needs to be refined, then 3) there will be more pipelines built.
Nothing will prevent that.
It mightn't be the "XL" line--though it PROBABLY will.

But pipelines WILL be built to move that filthy sludge across the country were it can be turned into money.

Time Magazine just ran this ringing endorsement of the fight against Keystone XL by Michael Grunwald.

If you agree that it's time for President Obama to decide which side he's on, ours or big oil's -> SHARE this.

Read the full article: http://swampland.time.com/2013/02/28/im-with-the-tree-huggers/Apologi

Order Up!: Salt, sugar and fat are indeed 'tastes' which humans are GENETICALLY programmed to desire/seek/consume.
The fast/junk food "industry" depends ENTIRELY upon, and cynically and consciously appeals to those appetites.
The dominant "meme" in junk/snack/fast food adverts is that consuming them will make the consumer "happy."
And it does, to the extent that "happiness" is a condition which occurs when appetites are satisfied.
That doesn't mean that, as the NYTimes and NPR both featured today, that they aren't killing ya with cancer and diabetes.

Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.
A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.

In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does.

Just sayin...