Little quote from Thomas Jefferson



"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have". ~Thomas Jefferson

Just A little information I know this is US information, but actually it will become a reality as Canada’s further integration into the US, (North American Union) under the scheme of the SPP agreement.

What will the SPP mean for Canada we will lower all our standards to comply with the great US of A poverty stricken social system?

Hang on it’s Going to be wide open roller coaster ride ahead, buckle up your seat belts for the ride that is coming, sorry they were removed the seat belts because off the cut backs.

Ok everyone just hang on, only the strong may survive, that right the weak, sick, malnutritioned, elderly, and our children will take the blunt of this orchestrated depression by the bankers, and their backers.

Do not worry the privileged will have their seat belts, and the ones who can’t afford them, hang on for dear life, because this roller coaster ride will never end.

This was done by are so call leaders. What a word leaders, feels like we are being led to the slaughter well will soon find out.

In fact, the price tag in the beginning was quite low, no more than a few billion dollars a year, and what is often overlooked today is that the enormous expansion in Government spending for social programs occurred not under Johnson but in the Administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Usury is a Sin?

Usury comes from the Medieval Latin usuria, "interest" or "excessive interest", charging of interest on loans.

This would have included charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change.

After countries legislated to limit the rate of interest on loans, usury came to mean the interest above the lawful rate. In common usage today, the word means the charging of unreasonable or relatively high rates of interest.

20 YEARS LATER, THE GREAT SOCIETY FLOURISHES

Let’s step back in time; Twenty years ago, these were facts of American life:

Half of all Americans over 65 had no medical insurance, and a third of the aged lived in poverty.

More than 90 percent of the black adults in many Southern counties were not registered to vote. Nationwide, at all levels of government, there were only a couple hundred black elected officials.

Only a third of the US children in the United States 3 to 5 year’s old attended nursery school or kindergarten.

Today most Americans would find those situations unacceptable, and indeed they have been reversed, in large part because of laws enacted in 1965, the high-water mark of Lyndon B. Johnson's drive for what he called the Great Society.

Now nearly every elderly person is covered by health insurance, and the aged are no poorer than Americans as a whole. Blacks vote at about the same rate as whites, and nearly 6,000 blacks hold elective office. A large majority of small children attend preschool programs.

Senate Votes Next Week

President Reagan has spoken often about what he views as the excesses of the Great Society. His Administration has cut the rate of growth of some of the Great Society measures, although spending has continued to rise. The Senate is scheduled to vote next week on proposals that would go somewhat further, actually reducing spending on some such programs and abolishing some others outright.

But liberals and conservatives agree that the cutbacks have been and will continue to be around the edges and that the activities that may be abolished are peripheral ones. Whatever the oratory about dismantling the Great Society, its bedrocks - Medicare and Medicaid, Federal aid to education, the right of blacks to vote and use commercial facilities - have become, in the almost unanimous view of politicians and scholars, permanent parts of the American system.

''Ronald Reagan - the most powerful President of my adult lifetime, a man who wouldn't have supported them when they were started if his life depended on it - Ronald Reagan is not taking a real shot at those programs,'' said Ben J. Wattenberg, a speechwriter for President Johnson, who now holds conservative views on many social issues.

Mr. Wattenberg is one of several dozen figures from the Great Society era who will gather Thursday and Friday at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library at the University of Texas at Austin for a conference on ''The Great Society: A 20-Year Critique.''

Edwin L. Dale Jr., the spokesman for David A. Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, agrees with Mr. Wattenberg. ''I wouldn't quarrel that Medicare's been a success,'' Mr. Dale said. ''In fact, much of the social safety net was accomplished during the Great Society, and whatever gets trimmed, the safety net will remain intact.''

The term ''Great Society'' was coined by Johnson in a speech at the University of Michigan in May 1964. ''We have the opportunity,'' he declared, ''to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.''

Although some Great Society measures were enacted in 1964 and a few in 1966 and afterward, the main elements of the Johnson program were approved in a frenetic nine-month period in 1965.

Johnson had just been elected in a landslide over Barry Goldwater. For the only time in this century except for four years in the late 1930's, a President's party had a 2-to-1 majority in both houses of Congress. The economy was strong and growing. And most people not only shared the President's dream for an end to poverty and racial injustice and a better life for all Americans but also believed with him that it was in the Government's power to fulfill that dream.

Milestones in Law

These are some of the milestones that became law that year:

- Medicare, providing health insurance for the elderly financed by payroll taxes.

- Medicaid, which pays for health care for the poor.

- The first general Federal aid to local public schools.

- The first broad-based Federal scholarships and loans for college students.

- The Voting Rights Act, which has enabled large numbers of blacks to register and vote, and therefore hold more elective offices.

- Establishment of the National Foundations for the Arts and Humanities, which have brought cultural activities to communities across the country.

- Rent supplements for poor people.

- Highway beautification.

- Grants, loans and training programs for doctors and other health professionals.

- Special development assistance to Appalachia.

Johnson called it ''the greatest outpouring of creative legislation in the history of the nation,'' an assessment that at the time was not viewed as hyperbolic.

Little Discussion of Cost

The fears expressed by the Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress who voted against those measures were not borne out. Hardly anyone would assert today, for instance, that Medicare and Medicaid led to socialized medicine or that Federal aid to education resulted in Government domination of local schools.

On the other hand, a review of the Congressional debates shows little discussion of the cost of the Great Society. At the end of the Congressional session, Mr. Dale, then an economics correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in an analysis of the legislation that had been enacted, ''Cost estimates running into the scores of billions are clearly far out of line with reality.''

In fact, the price tag in the beginning was quite low, no more than a few billion dollars a year, and what is often overlooked today is that the enormous expansion in Government spending for social programs occurred not under Johnson but in the Administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Charles Murray, a critic of most social programs, whose book ''Losing Ground'' has become something of a policy bible for the Reagan Administration, notes that even not counting the effects of inflation, spending for social programs grew two and a half times as much in the five years after the Johnson Presidency as it did in Mr. Johnson's five years in office

Costly Social Security Change

Welfare eligibility rules were relaxed in the Nixon years. Food stamps and Supplemental Security Income for the aged and disabled became costly national programs. Revenue sharing with the states and cities was enacted. Loans and grants were made available to middle-income college students for the first time. Disability compensation rolls mushroomed as eligibility requirements were eased. Millions of additional people became entitled to Medicaid. Perhaps most important, and certainly most expensive, Social Security retirement benefits were set to rise automatically with the rate of inflation.

''Congress and the President got into the process of seeing who could be more effective in the social area,'' said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, who was a key Presidential adviser on social policy in the early Nixon years.

''But it was one of the best-kept secrets of American politics,'' Mr. Moynihan continued. ''Liberals didn't want Nixon to get the credit and conservatives didn't want people to know what was happening.''

To be sure, many of the Great Society initiatives did not stand the test of time. The Office of Economic Opportunity, the central agency of what Johnson called the ''unconditional war on poverty,'' was gradually eliminated in the 1970's. The Model Cities program, designed to provide special assistance to poor neighborhoods in selected cities, hardly got off the ground before it was scrapped.

Now, a Surplus of Doctors

Furthermore, some of the peripheral Great Society programs President Reagan wants to abolish this year have worked so well, in his Administration's view, that they are no longer needed. For example, there is now a surplus rather than a shortage of doctors and dentists in the country, and the Administration argues the Government no longer needs to subsidize the training of health professionals.

But with a few exceptions, most notably Medicare policies to control costs, the major budget savings put forward by President Reagan have involved the programs of the Nixon and Ford Administrations.

If the core programs of the Great Society are so widely accepted, why is Mr. Reagan so successful with his argument that the extravagance of the Great Society failed the nation's poor and bred economic disaster?

The answer, in the view of politicians and scholars, is that it is the excessive promises of the Johnson years and the attitudes that prevailed then that people now find so objectionable, not the programs that were written into law.

''The problem,'' said John Brademas, a Democratic Congressman from Indiana for 22 years who is now president of New York University, ''was the rhetorical excess of L.B.J. He promised to abolish poverty in our time, but poverty is still with us. He promised to end racial discrimination, but it couldn't be done.''

No 'Soft on Crime Act'

Mr. Wattenberg, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said: ''What happened was that distortions crept into Government policymaking. There was no Great Society mandate for busing or quotas or regulatory nuttiness or educational permissiveness. There was no 'Soft on Crime Act of 1965.' But those perceptions were attached to the Great Society and the nature of Government, and people thought they were screwball.''

Kevin Phillips, a conservative political analyst who is president of the American Political Research Corporation, said many Americans rapidly lost confidence in ''social engineering.''

''People have never objected to giving money to poor people or to middle- class entitlements or environmental programs,'' Mr. Phillips said. ''People liked those things then and they like them now. But when they started talking about 'the noble underclass' and saying, 'We're going to uplift them,' and when they called welfare recipients 'clients,' that's what people reacted against.''

Just Posing Questions

Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was Johnson's chief adviser on domestic policy matters, is scheduled to present a paper entitled ''How Great Was the Great Society'' at the conference in Austin this week.

''All I can really do is pose the questions,'' Mr. Califano said just before he sat down to write the paper last weekend. ''Where would this country be if it hadn't been for the Great Society? How many kids would not have been able to go to college? How many more people would have died or been incapacitated for lack of proper health care? Where would our elderly go if the Government didn't pay for nursing homes? What would our air be like? Our water? I don't know all the answers, but I do know we as a country would be much worse off.''

But, in retrospect, Mr. Califano said he recognized a serious problem he did not fore see at the time. ''The Government,'' he said, ''simply got into too many nooks and crannies of American life.''

COST OF SOCIAL WELFARE PROGRAMS

Costs per capita of each program, in constant 1982 dollars, adjusted for inflation. Figures for 1981 and 1982 are preliminary.

'60 '65 '70 '75 '78 '79 '80 '81 '82 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1,000 1,100 1,200

Social insurance Education All health and medical Public aid Health and medical Veterans' benefits MAJOR EXAMPLES from programs include: Social insurance - Social Security retirement benefits, Medicare, workmen's compensation and disability insurance.

Health and medical - Combined cost from all social welfare programs, medical research and health care for current military personnel and their families.

Public aid - Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps and Medicaid.

Veterans' benefits - Pensions and medical care. Source: Social Security Administration

And Here is a REPLY ABOUT THIS ALSO FROM THE C-KING

The problem with Social Security is that no one has there own private Social Security Account. We need to change it so every American has there own account and the money put in to it is yours. In short you put nothing in you get nothing out..

(The Truth about Social Security and what happened to the money the people put into the fund.)

Franklin Delano. Roosevelt 32 nd . President , Democrat Terms of Office March 4, 1933 , to April 12, 1945 GO TO HERE ! Our Social Security Franklin Delano. Roosevelt (Terms of Office March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945), a Democrat , introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program.

He Promised: -

1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary,

2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program,

3.) That the money the participants elected to put Into the Program would be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year,

4.) That the money the participants put into the Independent 'Trust Fund' rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would Only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program, and

5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income.

Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to 'Put Away' -- you may be interested in the following:

----------THEN--------------------------------

Dwight David Eisenhower 34 th . President , Republican , Term Of Office: January 20, 1953 to January 20, 1961 Insert by Vincent Peter Render , 1958 is the first year that Congress, not President Eisenhower, voted to remove funds from Social Security and put it into the General Fund for Congress to spend.

If I recall correctly, it was a democratically controlled Congress.

Congress logic at that time was that there was so much money in Social Security Fund that it would never run out / be used up for the purpose it was intended/set aside for.

------------- WORSE STILL ----------------------------------------------

Lyndon Baines Johnson 36 th .. President , Democrat Term Of Office: November 22, 1963 to January 20, 1969

Question: Which Political Party took Social Security from the Independent 'Trust Fund' and put it into the General Fund so that Congress could spend it ?

Answer: It was Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat, Term of Office: November 22,1963 to January 20, 1969) and the democrat controlled House and Senate.

Question: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax Deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding ?

Answer: The Democratic Party

William Jefferson Clinton (Bill Clinton) 42 nd . President Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001 Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. ( Al Gore ) 45 th . Vice President Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001

Question: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?

Answer: The Democratic Party , with Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. ( Al Gore ) [Vice President Term of Office: January 10, 1993 to January 20, 2001 ] casting the 'tie-breaking' deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the US .



------------------THE STRAW THAT BROKE THE CAMEL'S BACK !!-------------------------------

James Earl Carter, Jr (Jimmy Carter) 39 the President, Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1981

Question: Which Political Party decided to start giving Annuity payments to immigrants? - AND MY FAVORITE:

ANSWER: That's right! JAMES EARL CARTER, JR. (Jimmy CARTER ) (DEMOCRAT, TERM OF OFFICE: JANUARY 20, 1977 TO JANUARY 20, 1981 AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. IMMIGRANTS MOVED INTO THIS COUNTRY, AND AT AGE 65, BEGAN TO RECEIVE SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY GAVE THESE PAYMENTS TO THEM, EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER PAI D A DIME INTO IT!

"Damn", have you ever seen a Jack-ass eating briers!

Then, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away! The worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it!

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of Awareness will be planted and maybe changes WILL evolve! Maybe not, some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn't so. But it's worth a try.

How many people can YOU send this to?

Actions speak louder than bumper stickers.

AND CONGRESS GIVES THEMSELVES 100% RETIREMENT FOR ONLY SERVING ONE TERM!!!

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Thomas Jefferson 3rd President, Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1777 to January 20, 1781



"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have". ~Thomas Jefferson