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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

coboardhead wrote:
I believe one needs to be 50% disabled to draw both retirement and disability concurrently. However, one can subtract the disability from retirement pay and reduce the taxes - if disability is less than 50%.

"One" doesn't just mathematically subtract or deduct VA disability pay from his military pension/retirement pay on paper, at tax time. The federal government does the subtracting for us, in advance. Every single cent the VA sends us for service-connected medical disabilities -- whether for a destroyed inner ear, partial deafness, frequent falls due to impaired balance, spinal stenosis, severe chronic insomnia, chronic irreparable bilateral shoulder injuries, permanent tinnitus, several surgeries, ulcerated esophagus, lifetime medication and surgical side effects, terminal cancer, or ALL of the above and much more (none of which would prohibit windsurfing, BTW, up to an obvious point) -- is deducted from our military pension check, unless our disability is rated at 50% or greater. i.e., the government takes my VA disability paycheck dollar for dollar from from my USAF pension before either check is issued The only benefit we gain from that, as I've explained many times here, is the fact that the VA disability is exempt from income taxes. If some schmuck had all of the above disabilities, his net disability benefit would approximate $120/month. Whom among the whiners would choose that list of disabilities just to get the extra $120? Or dedicate a man-year to the legal and medical fight necessary to get not only the $120 but the necessary medical care?

I submit that 99% of these whiners wouldn't last a month even in basic training, let alone a combat unit (to which every military member is subject on short notice).
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Who made this speech on the Senate floor?
From the Congressional Record, March 16, 2006:

"Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.

Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘‘trillion’’ with a ‘‘T.’’ That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers. And over the next 5 years, between now and 2011, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.

Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand. Some people may wonder why they matter. Here is why: This year, the Federal Government will spend $220 billion on interest. That is more money to pay interest on our national debt than we’ll spend on Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transportation, and veterans benefits combined. It is more money in one year than we are likely to spend to rebuild the devastated gulf coast in a way that honors the best of America.

And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the Federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.

Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar that is not going to investment in America’s priorities. Instead, interest payments are a significant tax on all Americans—a debt tax that Washington doesn’t want to talk about. If Washington were serious about honest tax relief in this country, we would see an effort to reduce our national debt by returning to responsible fiscal policies.

But we are not doing that. Despite repeated efforts by Senators CONRAD and FEINGOLD, the Senate continues to reject a return to the commonsense Pay-go rules that used to apply. Previously, Pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts. The Senate had to abide by the commonsense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues.

Unfortunately, the principle was abandoned, and now the demands of budget discipline apply only to spending. As a result, tax breaks have not been paid for by reductions in Federal spending, and thus the only way to pay for them has been to increase our deficit to historically high levels and borrow more and more money. Now we have to pay for those tax breaks plus the cost of borrowing for them. Instead of reducing the deficit, as some people claimed, the fiscal policies of this administration and its allies in Congress will add more than $600 million in debt for each of the next 5 years. That is why I will once again cosponsor the Pay-go amendment and continue to hope that my colleagues will return to a smart rule that has worked in the past and can work again.

Our debt also matters internationally. My friend, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, likes to remind us that it took 42 Presidents 224 years to run up only $1 trillion of foreign-held debt. [The Bush] administration did more than that in just 5 years. Now, there is nothing wrong with borrowing from foreign countries. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours.

Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit."

Hint: Now that same POS wants the right to not only eliminate the whole concept of the outdated "federal debt ceiling" but give him the sole unlimited right to spend without constraint or oversight.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

From the WSJ at http://tinyurl.com/byaqc6h comes this:
"Gold, Greenbacks and Inflation: A History and a Warning"
by Paul Moreno, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, is the author of "The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

It concludes with this:
"... the great engine of inflation was the enactment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, and a dangerous delegation of monetary power to an unelected bureaucracy. From 1800 to 1913, prices rose 176%; since then they have risen 448%.

The Fed got to work right away, helping to keep the government's borrowing costs low during World War I. It increased the money supply by 75%, and consumer prices doubled from 1914 to 1920. The central bank became the best illustration of the adage that "in politics, nothing succeeds like failure." As Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz showed in their "Monetary History of the United States," the Fed mismanaged the postwar reconversion, kept interest rates lower and prices higher than they should have been in the 1920s, and aggravated the Great Depression by keeping rates too low before the crash and raising them after it. Yet the Fed was rewarded with greater power, especially by the Banking Act of 1935. ...

Yet inflationary pressures built up again in the late 1960s thanks to the Fed's accommodation of deficit spending on Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and the Vietnam War. That, plus the abandonment of the gold standard and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, led to the infamous "stagflation" of the 1970s. The Fed eventually tamed inflation under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker in the early 1980s, though prices still have more than doubled since then.

Now the inflationary potential of deficit financing has grown enormously over the first Obama term. The lesson of American history is that it is difficult enough for the government to resist popular demands for inflation to relieve private debts. When the government itself is the country's chief debtor, resistance is all but impossible."

Now consider this, from CBS 20 months ago at
http://tinyurl.com/bgpykph , which concludes with this:
"If we calculate the inflation rate the exact same way the government did prior to 1990, the inflation rate is averaging around 6.5%, which is basically double the official rate. However, if we measure inflation the same way the government did back prior to 1980, the inflation rate clocks in at a mind-numbing 11%."
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keycocker



Joined: 10 Jul 2005
Posts: 3598

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 3:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

An entire page from Iso.
His disability is insomnia. He bragged about how difficult it was to prove to the level that he could live off the money for the rest of his life.
Everybody missed that I guess. At the time I was showing him respect and reading his posts carefully in the belief there would be something of value to be found there.
That was before he began streaming insults with every single post like a disturbed child. With a gun.
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 3:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
I submit that 99% of these whiners wouldn't last a month even in basic training, let alone a combat unit (to which every military member is subject on short notice).

isobars wrote:
Who made this speech on the Senate floor?

Blah, blah, blah....

Hint: Now that same POS wants the right to not only eliminate the whole concept of the outdated "federal debt ceiling" but give him the sole unlimited right to spend without constraint or oversight.

isobars wrote:
From the WSJ at http://tinyurl.com/byaqc6h comes this:
"Gold, Greenbacks and Inflation: A History and a Warning"


So much anger, angst, sniveling, whining, pissing, moaning, foaming, and roiling of the intestines from one guy in one day at one time on one forum.
___

A truly unhappy dude, despite his free government cash handout.

I think his disability is chronic anger.

It brings joy to the heart. Very Happy
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boggsman1



Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9118
Location: at a computer

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 4:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Im still hung up on the ulcerated esophagus.
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DanWeiss



Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Posts: 2296
Location: Connecticut, USA

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 4:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

coboardhead wrote:
Chandler...An in-law of mine received partial disability. I cannot remember how much he received, but it went something like this...His retirement was $2000 per month disability was $500 per month. He received two checks each month $1500 retirement and $500 disability. The disability payment reduced the retirement amount. But, only the $1500 is taxable. Before he retired he was receiving disability for a number of years.

I do not have any problem with disability insurance for anyone. In the military it comes with the lower pay. The rest of us have SS to rely on, I do know of folks who have received SS disability due to heart conditions. Of course, they were too sick to windsurf!


But Mike claimed he paid his own disability. That means only one thing: he received money from some source and paid for his care from his own checking account or the like.

If a person is promised two apples for retirement on the condition that if he wishes to use one apple to pay for doctors a portion of 2-apple retirement benefit will be reallocated to pay for disability. How exactly is that his own money? If he is not taxed on it that means it never accrued according to the IRS.

The VA pays disability benefits, not the former employee. That's why vets aren't aren't taxed on that amount. For Mike to claim that he pays his disability benefits is both a non-squitor and exactly the same as if I claim I pay for all my health care because insurance premiums are deducted from my paycheck and my salary is reduced almost exactly by the amount the employer pays the insurer for my coverage.

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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 4:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have to admit that I'm glad that isobars suffers from chronic insomnia. The way that I look at it, it's a payback of sorts for his public ugliness. Centering on hate in your life has its karmic consequences.
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keycocker



Joined: 10 Jul 2005
Posts: 3598

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 9:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I wake grumpy when I don't get enough sleep.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 9:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The last time we breached the debt ceiling the US lost one of its AAA ratings from a credit agency and the markets imploded, wiping out over a trillion dollars in household wealth in a matter of days. We will officially breach the debt ceiling again in roughly one month's time, yet the top U.S. story is gun control, which polls show gun control rates hardly a tenth of the public's concern compared to the economy. Why? Simple: political expediency.

More from a Peak Prosperity newsletter on that topic:
"This time around, things will be far worse if nothing is solved. If the US loses another AAA rating, then the financial markets could face systemic risk. The reason for this is that US Treasuries are one of the senior-most forms of collateral used by the banks to backstop the $600+ trillion derivatives market.

As any trader who trades on margin can tell you, when the value of your collateral is called into question, those on the other side of the trade come looking for you to put up more capital on your trades. This can result in assets being sold en masse (similar to what happened after Lehman failed) and things can get very ugly very fast.

Another consequence of the US losing another AAA rating would be a potential spike in interest rates as a result of us having a lower credit rating. A 100 basis point move higher in interest rates means the US paying another $100+ billion in interest payments on its debt. The US is slated to pay some $300+ billion in interest payments in 2013. This amount could explode higher if interest rates rose.

We already have a Debt to GDP ratio of over 100%. Our deficit to GDP is nearly 10%. These are Greece type levels. And while the US has several advantages Greece lacks (the US produces the reserve currency of the world and is also the largest economy), the bond markets can be very unforgiving of fiscal profligacy.

But US politicians don't care. They know that the US economy is a disaster and will be getting worse. The issue for them is not fixing this, but shifting the blame for what's coming onto the other party [and diverting our attention to meaningless gun control red herrings].

Bottomline: the US debt situation is not going to be brought under control. We'll either breach the debt ceiling or pass some hurried bill to raise it. Neither of these will help our credit rating or our fiscal issues.

Buckle up, 2013 is going to be an "interesting" year. "
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