By: Diane Benjamin
Keep in mind: the country is $18,000,000,000,000 in debt. (Trillion – hard to get that many zeros right!)
Big banks aren’t lending money to small businesses. Some banks will lend if the loans are backed by the Small Business Administration, or sometimes the SBA just loans the money themselves. Everybody knows economic activity doesn’t happen without the government! (Sure)
This article has a good take on he issue: http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcprosser/2014/08/14/is-the-boom-in-small-business-finance-real/
I was browsing openthebooks.com and found some SBA loans to local businesses in 2014:
B-N Development Inc $912,000 – I believe they make money available to loan to small local businesses
Hamilton & Sikora CPA’s PC $560,000
Alstate Insurance $200,000 (That’s not a misspelling)
Anytime Fitness of Normal $80,000
Oh Baby Hair and Day Spa $53,300
Take A Bite Food Coaching Service, LLC $10,000
Questions:
Would these loans be needed if the Federal Government wasn’t confiscating so much of our money?
Where is the Federal government given permission in the Constitution to loan confiscated money?
The last company doesn’t seem to exist. (The Feds don’t even show info other than the payment) Out of business?
Will these loans be paid back?
Is the future government control of business?
What “strings” were attached to these loans?
We are stealing money from future generations by burying them in debt, but we have money to loan. Just Brilliant!
Much more information is available on the OpenTheBooks App. I suggest downloading it and doing some browsing of your own.
Diane, the collection of Income Tax The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on the United States Census. This amendment exempted income taxes from the constitutional requirements regarding direct taxes, after income taxes on rents, dividends, and interest were ruled to be direct taxes in the court case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895). The amendment was adopted on February 3, 1913. Article I, Section 2, Clause 3:
Other Constitutional causes in the Constitution
Diane, are we still paying for World War II? Are we still paying for the Civil War? No. The US was born in debt. In the 1790’s the US owed about $11.7 million to foreigners, mostly to Dutch bankers and the French government, and about $42 million to domestic creditors. The states also had a ton of debt (about $25 million, Hamilton reckoned), which the Federal Government assumed–take a hint, euro zone!–in 1790.
As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was laser-focused on the debt, not so much to pay it off, but rather just to ensure that the fledgling government could make all its payments to creditors. How? Well, tariffs and taxes.
Civil War Debt: The next major surge in debt coincided with the US Civil War. The federal government was nearly debt-free before the war. The public debt surged from about $65 million in 1860 to $2.76 billion in 1866. (The Lincoln administration also signed into law the first income tax in the country’s history in 1862, which was repealed 10 years later.) The debt would never get below $900 million again. But a surge of late-19th-century economic growth, with a bit of inflation, helped the US gradually reduce the the Civil War debt as a percentage of economic output.
WW II debt : The debt-to-GDP ratio hit its all-time record of 113% by war’s end. Debt was at $241.86 billion in 1946, about $2.87 trillion in current dollars. Unlike after World War I, the US never really tried to pay down much of the debt it incurred during World War II. Still the debt shrank in significance as the US economy grew. It would take the debt-to-GDP ratio until 1962 just to get back to where the US was before the war. And with some fits and starts the debt load declined until hitting its recent low in 1974 at 24%, when the debt outstanding held by the public was $343.7 billion ($1.61 trillion, in current dollars.)
http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/debt-and-gdp-main6.png?w=1024&h=603
Does your answer have anything to do with the story? (Other than taxes were okay’d by progressives?)
Take a look at the documentary by Aaron Russo, “Freedom to Facism.” The 16th Amendment was not legally ratified.
Will share public.
I will say that I have patronized the fifth business on your list. I get my haircut there, they are the ideal small business owners. They recently expanded and probably used the loan for a new location and equipment. Knowing them personally that loan will be paid back with interest!
Sorry, the 16th Amendment was ratified by 42 States with only 6 States not ratifying the Amendment. Ratification (by the requisite 36 states) was completed on February 3, 1913. On February 25, 1913, in the closing days of the Taft administration, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and attorney general under McKinley and Roosevelt, certified that the amendment had been properly ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures. ”
The William J. Benson contention is essentially that the legislatures of various states passed ratifying resolutions in which the quoted text of the Amendment differed from the text proposed by Congress in terms of capitalization, spelling of words, or punctuation marks (e.g. semi-colons instead of commas), and that these differences made the ratification invalid. Benson makes other assertions including claims that one or more states rejected the Amendment and that the state or states were falsely reported as having ratified the Amendment. As explained below, the Benson arguments have been rejected in every court case where they have been raised, and were explicitly ruled to be fraudulent in 2007.
“Benson has failed to point to evidence that would create a genuinely disputed fact regarding whether the Sixteenth Amendment was properly ratified or whether United States Citizens are legally obligated to pay federal taxes.” United States v. Benson.William J. Benson was convicted of tax evasion and willful failure to file tax returns in connection with over $100,000 of unreported income, and his conviction was upheld on appeal.The court ruled that “Benson’s position has no merit and he has used his fraudulent tax advice to deceive other citizens and profit from it”
So you are wrong and Mr. Russo is wrong, the 16th Amendment has been ratified and has stood up to legal challenges up to the Supreme Court.
Is that the Supreme Court that thinks it’s okay to kill babies?