In recent years much has been made in the mainstream press about welfare spending and all of the lazy Poor Bastards who are allegedly sitting around The Kingdom collecting benefits, channel-surfing through cable-wonderland, while the rest of us slave away at the rock pile....Now that the dust has settled from the election and everyone has had a chance to take a breather, the Grand Poo Ba thought he would do a little research in order to set the record straight!
Let's start by putting one of the biggest myths to rest, which is that welfare spending is somehow going to bankrupt the country....
The reality is that total federal spending on welfare as of 10/15/2012, not including food stamps, amounts to $132 billion dollars a year!
In view of the fact that the current federal budget calls for $3.7 TRILLION in spending (that's 3.7 followed by TWELVE zeros, for all of you Poor Bastards
who can't count), this means that welfare spending, not including food stamps, amounts to around 3.5% of total federal spending!...And again, if you are a
mathematically challenged Poor Bastard, that would be the equivalent of spending four bucks on a Big Mac and being charged an additional fifteen cents to pay for some less fortunate Poor Bastard's double-chubby-chuck! Hell, most of you would leave the change in the jar for Jerry's Kids anyway, so what's the difference?
Food stamps account for another $71 billion in "welfare" spending, meaning that total federal spending on what is generally thought of as welfare totals right at $200 billion per year.
However, because food stamps are treated somewhat differently under the laws of The Kingdom, all spending on food stamps cannot technically be categorized as welfare spending. This is so because it is possible for an Unfortunate Poor Bastard to be gainfully employed and still qualify for food stamps due to the pathetic pittance they earn in wages!
So, the notion that every Poor Bastard who receives food stamps is lying around picking their nose, watching day-time reruns on TV, while they munch away on frozen pizza and turkey pot pies that were paid for with food stamps is simply not true! In fact, it could even be argued that the money used to provide food stamps to those Poor Bastards who are employed, is a form of corporate welfare, since it serves as a form of subsidy for the employer, who is then able to get away with paying his workers less money that it actually costs to survive, while the federal government picks up the tab for the his employee's groceries!
Not to belabor the obvious, but this rate of spending is hardly enough to break the bank! In reality it is little more than an annoyance, kind of like when White Collar Poor Bastards pilfer office supplies from their employer and take them home from the office.
Is is stealing? Yes.
Does it cost the employer money? Yes, but it is unlikely to result in the bankruptcy of the company.
The second myth that needs to be laid to rest is that welfare recipients are nothing but a bunch of free-loading Malingering Poor Bastards who are too lazy to work and would rather make a career out of lying around on the sofa waiting for the mailman to deliver "the welfare check."
The reality is that under current federal law, any one Poor Bastard welfare recipient can only draw benefits for 60 months, after which time they are out the door! In some states the benefit period is even less, depending on the laws of each state. Federal law does allow the state to occasionally extend benefits beyond 60 months, but only to 20% of the Poor Bastards who make up the caseload in each state!
This means that fully 80% of the Poor Bastards in the U.S. who receive welfare will have their benefits terminated after five years and will be dropped from the system!
Now the last time I checked, 5 years hardly constituted a "career", even among the Malingering Poor Bastard class!
The third myth is that the welfare rolls are clogged with unmotivated, single mother Poor Bastardettes who are hanging around with like-minded Degenerate Poor Bastards, breeding like flies, cranking out Future Poor Bastard babies, in order to increase the benefits they receive from welfare....When in fact the reality is that as of 10/15/2012 the average household receiving welfare had 1.9 children living in the home...a far cry from the romper room imagery the conservative media would lead you to believe is the case!
In total the ultimate reality is that federal spending on corporate welfare far outpaces any money that is spent on more traditional forms of welfare. By "corporate welfare" I am referring to everything from military spending to corporate bailouts to paying the interest on the national debt. And speaking of that national debt, all of you Retiring Poor Bastards should know that the annual interest payments now total more than 50% of the amount of money the U.S. spends on Social Security each year.
In order to get a realistic grip on exactly what all of this corporate welfare is really costing, let's look at some of those statistics....
Interest on the national debt is currently running $475 billion per year - more than 3.5 times the amount we spend on traditional welfare, not including food stamps. Much of this money is a wealth transfer from Working Class Poor Bastards to some of the world's richest individuals, companies and countries. A substantial amount of this debt is money that congress has "borrowed" from the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds. And it is this borrowing that has led to the destabilization of the Social Security program and therefore the retirement prospects for every last one of you Poor Bastards throughout the Kingdom of the Poor Bastard!
Military spending, including spending on veterans and retirees, now totals approximately $860 billion dollars per year, almost 6.5 times what we spend on welfare, not including food stamps. If we assume that 50% of this spending is unnecessary to actually "protect" the U.S. from its enemies around the world, that leaves $430 billion dollars, more than 3 times what we spend on welfare, that ends up mostly in the hands of private corporations as a result of lucrative contracts associated with defense spending.
As for corporate bailouts, there are very few reliable sources available from which to draw meaningful statistics, no doubt due to the fact that the federal government doesn't want all of you Disgruntled Poor Bastard voters to know just how much these bailouts are costing the U.S. taxpayers. But, we can draw some sort of comparisons just from the numbers which have been tossed about in the press over the last few years.
So, let's take the AIG bailout as an example. This gift from our government to the corporate cabal is said to have cost the U.S. $75 billion dollars, or almost 40% of the amount we spend each year on welfare and food stamps for the rest of us Poor Bastards, and that's just one damned company!
Other bailouts and federal spending to rescue Wall Street and the rest of the transnational corporate empire from their own malfeasance and incompetence, have easily totaled hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.
In total, it doesn't really matter what the exact numbers are. What matters when it comes to this discussion of welfare, is that the cost of supporting the Poor Bastards on welfare, whether they are people who have a legitimate need or are just lazy Malingering Poor Bastards, is a trifle drop in the bucket when compared with the amounts of money the federal government is shoveling into the coffers of some of the world's richest corporations and private citizens every day of the year!
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Friday, November 9, 2012
Here We Go Again!
Those of you Poor Bastards who may have been pleased (or
relieved) with the results of Tuesday's presidential election, but would
otherwise prefer to crawl back under a rock and ignore political
reality for another four years, may want to reconsider apathy as a strategy of change, after you see what the Bush clan is preparing to unleash:
http://news.yahoo.com/next-bush-makes-campaign-filing-texas-041025927.html
Young Jeb Jr. here should not be taken lightly, as he is no bumbling idiot like that Titanic Poor Bastard Mittens Romney or the Pathetic Poor Bastard John McCain...
No, the Jebster's boy is a highly polished Aristocratic Poor Bastard and well trained emperor-in-training, who has been schooled at the feet of America's last surviving political dynasty.
His Hispanic heritage has been carefully crafted and is clearly poised to exploit the shifting voter demographic that was on display last Tuesday when the Hispanic vote turned Florida from red to blue!
Boy George's strategists appear to be planning an assault on the state of Texas and its sizable (and growing) Hispanic population. He is spit-shined and ready to make his entrance onto the political stage. If he is successful, America could be faced with another presidential disaster just about the time we finally get the mess cleaned up that his Presidential Poor Bastard Uncle George left us with!
So it's time to get busy down there in Texas and nip this thing in the bud before another national embarrassment emerges from the Great State!
http://news.yahoo.com/next-bush-makes-campaign-filing-texas-041025927.html
Young Jeb Jr. here should not be taken lightly, as he is no bumbling idiot like that Titanic Poor Bastard Mittens Romney or the Pathetic Poor Bastard John McCain...
No, the Jebster's boy is a highly polished Aristocratic Poor Bastard and well trained emperor-in-training, who has been schooled at the feet of America's last surviving political dynasty.
His Hispanic heritage has been carefully crafted and is clearly poised to exploit the shifting voter demographic that was on display last Tuesday when the Hispanic vote turned Florida from red to blue!
Boy George's strategists appear to be planning an assault on the state of Texas and its sizable (and growing) Hispanic population. He is spit-shined and ready to make his entrance onto the political stage. If he is successful, America could be faced with another presidential disaster just about the time we finally get the mess cleaned up that his Presidential Poor Bastard Uncle George left us with!
So it's time to get busy down there in Texas and nip this thing in the bud before another national embarrassment emerges from the Great State!
Saturday, September 29, 2012
The Grand Poo Ba's View of Government Finance
All right, here it is folks....the Grand Poo Ba is going to lay down the nitty-gritty truth about the federal budget deficit.
http://news.yahoo.com/where-did-mammoth-us-budget-deficits-come-211927495.html
If we choose to believe the data contained in this article we can draw some very clear, crisp conclusions about how the U.S. wound up in the fiscal mess it is in at the moment. Let's review:
1) 1/4 of the deficit is due to the federal budget hawks' flawed projections about how much revenue would be collected over an unspecified period of time. In short, they thought they would collect more tax revenues than they did because the economy did not grow as much as they were anticipating. However, spending projections were based on the revenue projections and the government went ahead and spent money they never received...
This is the equivalent of a Poor Bastard who plans to take a vacation because he thinks he will earn enough money to afford it and when he doesn't earn enough money to take the kids to Disneyland, he goes ahead with his vacation plans and charges the entire trip on his Visa card!
2) 1/4 of the deficit is due directly to the reduction in federal revenues which have resulted from tax cuts beginning with the Bush tax cuts, which largely benefited the very wealthy, but the Middle Class tax cut engineered by Obama as a stimulus measure also contributed to this funding shortfall....
This is known as plain old-fashioned stupidity. It's kind of like a Poor Bastard who goes to his boss and says, "You know, bossman, I don't think I need all the money you are paying me and, in fact, I think I could manage with even less than you are paying me, so why don't you just reduce my pay by 15%?"
3) The remaining 50% of the federal deficit is due to overspending; or to look at it another way, UNDER-estimating the true cost of various programs that are paid for with federal dollars. In the context of the average Poor Bastard and their household finances, this is referred to simply as "bad budgeting skills."
In the context of government officials, who are entrusted by the public to do a job and do it correctly (kind of like all the Poor Bastards are expected to do every day they show up at the rock-pile) this is known as "professional incompetence."
http://news.yahoo.com/where-did-mammoth-us-budget-deficits-come-211927495.html
If we choose to believe the data contained in this article we can draw some very clear, crisp conclusions about how the U.S. wound up in the fiscal mess it is in at the moment. Let's review:
1) 1/4 of the deficit is due to the federal budget hawks' flawed projections about how much revenue would be collected over an unspecified period of time. In short, they thought they would collect more tax revenues than they did because the economy did not grow as much as they were anticipating. However, spending projections were based on the revenue projections and the government went ahead and spent money they never received...
This is the equivalent of a Poor Bastard who plans to take a vacation because he thinks he will earn enough money to afford it and when he doesn't earn enough money to take the kids to Disneyland, he goes ahead with his vacation plans and charges the entire trip on his Visa card!
2) 1/4 of the deficit is due directly to the reduction in federal revenues which have resulted from tax cuts beginning with the Bush tax cuts, which largely benefited the very wealthy, but the Middle Class tax cut engineered by Obama as a stimulus measure also contributed to this funding shortfall....
This is known as plain old-fashioned stupidity. It's kind of like a Poor Bastard who goes to his boss and says, "You know, bossman, I don't think I need all the money you are paying me and, in fact, I think I could manage with even less than you are paying me, so why don't you just reduce my pay by 15%?"
3) The remaining 50% of the federal deficit is due to overspending; or to look at it another way, UNDER-estimating the true cost of various programs that are paid for with federal dollars. In the context of the average Poor Bastard and their household finances, this is referred to simply as "bad budgeting skills."
In the context of government officials, who are entrusted by the public to do a job and do it correctly (kind of like all the Poor Bastards are expected to do every day they show up at the rock-pile) this is known as "professional incompetence."
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Here We Go Again.......
Friday, August 31, 2012
Grand Old Poor Bastard Party Anoints New King!
The genuine passion that all Political Poor Bastards have for telling a really big, juicy lie has no greater champion than the newly anointed (The Wall Street Journal's choice of words, not the Grand Poo Ba's) leader of the Republican Party, Mitt - I'm a religious man - Romney...endearingly known to family and close friends as "Mittens"...
...Otherwise known the great unwashed mass of Poor Bastard humanity as Mitt Robme!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829?print=true
...Otherwise known the great unwashed mass of Poor Bastard humanity as Mitt Robme!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829?print=true
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Porn Superstar Jenna Jameson Endorses Mittens' Presidential Bid!
Once again it is that time which occurs every 4th year when Poor Bastards and Poor Bastardettes from the world of Hollywood's Illiterati crawl out from under their rocks and start chiming in with their opinion of who they plan to vote for in the presidential election.
And while it may be possible that stranger things have happened somewhere in The Kingdom of the Poor Bastard while the Grand Poo Ba has been away, it's hard to imagine anything that could be more perfect than for superstar porn actress and Genuine Poor Bastardette Jenna Jameson to have slipped out from under the satin sheets of her porn palace bedroom to endorse 'Mittens' Romney and his presidential bid!
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-jenna-jameson-goes-republican-20120803,0,2605130.story
While it is certainly true that most red-blooded True Poor Bastards surely respect Ms. Jameson's theatrical talents and breast-augmentation surgery, it is clearly obvious that intellectual discourse has never been one of her strong points.
Meanwhile, Mittens was reported to be delighted with the news that his floundering and pathetic bid for the presidency had received Jameson's meaningless endorsement - even more so than the equally spurious nod from Camp Brain-Fart, where Grizzled Poor Bastard Clint Eastwood, that waxy, rawhide-skinned relic from the bygone era of bad TV acting and even worse movie scripts, has also thrown in the good word for Mittens & Company. Proving once and for all that Eastwood has outlived his own brain!
When asked her opinion of the somewhat dubious endorsement from Jameson, Mrs. Mittens reportedly replied,
"...Mittens and I have always enjoyed going to the movies and Mittens does have a fondness for pretty leading ladies, even if they do look like a figure from a wax museum and have breasts that look like they were molded out of plastic!"
Now that Romney and his supporters clearly have a celebrity brain-trust of such Titanic Poor Bastard proportions squarely in the corner, one can only imagine how Barack O-blah-blah-bama and his team must be quaking in their Presidential Poor Bastard loafers, while at the same time trying to keep from laughing their asses off at the absurdity of a self-proclaimed, holier-than-thou Bumbling Poor Bastard presidential candidate of the Mormon faith being endorsed by one the most legendary Copulation Queens of all-time, who, according to her own Wikipedia page, has 161 porn film "credits" to show for her acrobatic, silicone-enhanced career!
The Grand Poo Ba isn't so sure the word "credits" is really the appropriate term but that's an entirely different subject.
Pictured at left Poor Bastardette Jenna Jameson, who according to prosecutors, was arrested in May of 2012 for drunk driving in Orange County, CA after crashing her Range Rover SUV into a light pole and then failing the roadside booze-o-meter test by blowing a .08!...Upon arrest she was also found to be driving without a valid driver's license!
When asked about the incident Jameson reportedly responded, "I have always been told to suck, not blow, and now I guess I know why!"
Lending a truly new meaning to the phrase "dumb blonde" and proving yet again that Poor Bastard Comedian Ron White's observation that "you can't fix stupid" is as true as ever!
And while it may be possible that stranger things have happened somewhere in The Kingdom of the Poor Bastard while the Grand Poo Ba has been away, it's hard to imagine anything that could be more perfect than for superstar porn actress and Genuine Poor Bastardette Jenna Jameson to have slipped out from under the satin sheets of her porn palace bedroom to endorse 'Mittens' Romney and his presidential bid!
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-jenna-jameson-goes-republican-20120803,0,2605130.story
While it is certainly true that most red-blooded True Poor Bastards surely respect Ms. Jameson's theatrical talents and breast-augmentation surgery, it is clearly obvious that intellectual discourse has never been one of her strong points.
Meanwhile, Mittens was reported to be delighted with the news that his floundering and pathetic bid for the presidency had received Jameson's meaningless endorsement - even more so than the equally spurious nod from Camp Brain-Fart, where Grizzled Poor Bastard Clint Eastwood, that waxy, rawhide-skinned relic from the bygone era of bad TV acting and even worse movie scripts, has also thrown in the good word for Mittens & Company. Proving once and for all that Eastwood has outlived his own brain!
When asked her opinion of the somewhat dubious endorsement from Jameson, Mrs. Mittens reportedly replied,
"...Mittens and I have always enjoyed going to the movies and Mittens does have a fondness for pretty leading ladies, even if they do look like a figure from a wax museum and have breasts that look like they were molded out of plastic!"
Now that Romney and his supporters clearly have a celebrity brain-trust of such Titanic Poor Bastard proportions squarely in the corner, one can only imagine how Barack O-blah-blah-bama and his team must be quaking in their Presidential Poor Bastard loafers, while at the same time trying to keep from laughing their asses off at the absurdity of a self-proclaimed, holier-than-thou Bumbling Poor Bastard presidential candidate of the Mormon faith being endorsed by one the most legendary Copulation Queens of all-time, who, according to her own Wikipedia page, has 161 porn film "credits" to show for her acrobatic, silicone-enhanced career!
The Grand Poo Ba isn't so sure the word "credits" is really the appropriate term but that's an entirely different subject.
When asked about the incident Jameson reportedly responded, "I have always been told to suck, not blow, and now I guess I know why!"
Lending a truly new meaning to the phrase "dumb blonde" and proving yet again that Poor Bastard Comedian Ron White's observation that "you can't fix stupid" is as true as ever!
Monday, May 28, 2012
Donald Trump Named World's First "Bloviating Poor Bastard"
They say that if you make it a point to learn one new word every day you will be smarter than 95% of the population. In the case of the Garden-Variety Poor Bastard class it is probably more like 99%, but hey, why sweat the details?
At any rate, the Grand Poo Ba has to give credit where credit is due, and today's new word is one that he learned from that erstwhile conservative political pundit George Will, a Poor Bastard of Ivy League proportions, who has suddenly taken center stage in the political arena of the Kingdom of the Poor Bastard after publicly lambasting the Iconic Poor Bastard Donald-trump or monkey-Trump by referring to the Monkey-Man himself as a "bloviating ignoramus!"...
After which he observed blithely that "Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low, and you can still intrude into American politics....."
Now for all of you Generic Poor Bastards who, like the Grand Poo Ba, didn't even know that "bloviating" was a proper word, we have asked the fact-checkers here at the editorial desk of the Poor Bastard's Gazette to look it up and find out what it does mean. As it turns out, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as an intransitive verb which means;
"...To speak or write verbosely and windily."
Of course "windily' is certainly an appropriate description of the Monkey-Man and his hair, and we agree that "verbose" is a worthy adjective since virtually anything that spills out of the Trumpster's mouth is arguably more words that anyone needs to hear, but the Grand Poo Ba must confess he was unaware that there was a single word that could be used to describe the Big-Haired One any more accurately than "bloviating!"
The High Council of the Fraternal Order of the Poor Bastard was so impressed that an emergency meeting was called over the holiday weekend to confirm that a new class of Poor Bastard had been born as a result of George Will's word games.....that of Bloviating Poor Bastard, with Donald-trump or monkey-Trump being named the poster-boy for this newly anointed class of Genuine Poor Bastard!
At any rate, the Grand Poo Ba has to give credit where credit is due, and today's new word is one that he learned from that erstwhile conservative political pundit George Will, a Poor Bastard of Ivy League proportions, who has suddenly taken center stage in the political arena of the Kingdom of the Poor Bastard after publicly lambasting the Iconic Poor Bastard Donald-trump or monkey-Trump by referring to the Monkey-Man himself as a "bloviating ignoramus!"...
Now for all of you Generic Poor Bastards who, like the Grand Poo Ba, didn't even know that "bloviating" was a proper word, we have asked the fact-checkers here at the editorial desk of the Poor Bastard's Gazette to look it up and find out what it does mean. As it turns out, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as an intransitive verb which means;
"...To speak or write verbosely and windily."
Of course "windily' is certainly an appropriate description of the Monkey-Man and his hair, and we agree that "verbose" is a worthy adjective since virtually anything that spills out of the Trumpster's mouth is arguably more words that anyone needs to hear, but the Grand Poo Ba must confess he was unaware that there was a single word that could be used to describe the Big-Haired One any more accurately than "bloviating!"
The High Council of the Fraternal Order of the Poor Bastard was so impressed that an emergency meeting was called over the holiday weekend to confirm that a new class of Poor Bastard had been born as a result of George Will's word games.....that of Bloviating Poor Bastard, with Donald-trump or monkey-Trump being named the poster-boy for this newly anointed class of Genuine Poor Bastard!
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