No Way To Run a Nation

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 Is Iran experiencing a leak?  (See 1 below.)
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Putting things in perspective and bringing them down to the dining room table level

* U S Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $ 3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $38,500,000,000

Let's now remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

* Annual family income: $ 21,700
* Money the family spent: $ 38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $ 16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $ 38.50

Got it?  Try moving the decimal points for different perspectives

What if you ran your business this way?

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Fred Barnes writes Obama also wants it all. (See 2 below.)
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IAF prepared for all contingencies and scenarios.  See this excellent video:YouTube video - 8:24 minutes
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Changing demographics and you have changing culture. 

Stop and think, if the prospects of children leaving the house diminish and their continued cost of care continues it is little wonder more and more are opting to remain single.  

Furthermore, the fact that it is acceptable to live together with no social stigma, this too makes child rearing a less attractive option. (See 3 below.)
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Dick 
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1)Iran to Citizens: Flee Isfahan

Iranian officials tell citizens to vacate city located near nuke site

BY: Adam Kredo

Iranian officials have instructed residents of Isfahan to leave the city, renewing concerns that a nearby nuclear sitecould be leaking radioactive material.

An edict issued Wednesday by Iranian authorities orders Isfahan’s one-and-a-half million people to leave the city “because pollution has now reached emergency levels,” the BBC reported.

However, outside observers suspect that the evacuation order may corroborate previous reports indicating that a uranium enrichment facility near Isfahan had been leaking radioactive material.

Tehran went to great lengths in December to deny these reports, telling state-run media outlets that “the rumors about leaking and contamination at Isfahan’s [Uranium Conversion Facility] are not true at all.”

November reports indicated that a radioactive leak might have poisoned several workers at the nuclear plant, which converts highly toxic yellowcake uranium into material that could be used in the core of a nuclear weapon.

The head of Iran’s emergency services agency said at the time that residents have no reason to worry about possible contamination resulting from a possible leak.

Stories about the potential leak soon disappeared from state-run news websites, Trend reported in late November.

Iranian officials denied that a leak has occurred and blamed Western media outlets for creating “tumult” in the region.

Wednesday’s evacuation order is now fueling concerns that Iranian officials are trying to hide something, including further fallout from a possible radioactive leak.

“Pollution in Isfahan is a problem but in the past, Iranian authorities respond by closing schools and the government to keep people at home and let the pollution dissipate, not by evacuating people,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq who has written about Isfahan’s battle against pollution.

“Mass evacuations suggest a far more serious problem,” Rubin explained. “There are two possibilities here: There is a radiation leak and the regime is lying or there is really bad pollution and no one believes the regime’s explanations.”

Rubin also pointed out that Iranian officials have a history of lying to both Western officials and their own citizens.

It remains unclear whether the technology has been properly inspected for safety because Iran has denied Western officials access to many of its nuclear sites.

The nuclear site at Isfahan has been targeted for attack in the past.

An unexplained explosion at the plant in 2011 is reported to have damaged the facility.

The nuclear plant also sits on an active fault line. The city of Isfahan has been destroyed at least six times from past earthquakes, a point of concern among regional experts.

“Given that Iran is on an earthquake zone and has lost tens of thousands of people with regularity suggests that a devastating nuclear accident is only a matter of time,” said Rubin.

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2)Fred Barnes: The President Who Wants It All

The essence of bipartisan deals is win-win: Both sides are satisfied. Obama's approach is he alone wins.

By FRED BARNES

President George W. Bush made bipartisan deals with Democrats on education, energy and, shortly before leaving office, the bank bailout known as TARP. President Reagan got together with Democrats on tax reform and Social Security. President Clinton reached agreement with Republicans on welfare reform, balancing the budget and Nafta's free trade. Mr. Clinton also negotiated reform of Social Security, a landmark compromise that died (before being announced) when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.

"Each president defined these deals as success, as principled compromises,"Keith Hennessey, Mr. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, noted recently, "and both parties shared the credit."

Not so the stopgap bill signed Tuesday by President Obama to avert the fiscal cliff and spare most taxpayers from paying income taxes at a higher rate. It left Republicans despondent, Democrats not quite thrilled, and represented Mr. Obama's latest failure to achieve a major bipartisan agreement. It fell short, he said, of "my preference" for "a larger agreement, a bigger deal, a grand bargain."

Indeed, it fell way, way short.

For that, Mr. Obama has mainly himself to blame. He faults congressional Republicans for his inability to achieve the impressive compromises that other presidents attained. But the biggest hindrance to a bipartisan breakthrough has been the president's own style in dealing with the GOP opposition.

Unlike prior presidents, Mr. Obama doesn't believe he is obligated personally to bring about a compromise. Over the past 18 months, he hosted meetings with Republican leaders and had numerous one-on-one conversations with House SpeakerJohn Boehner—all for naught. Much of the serious negotiating is left to subordinates. He skipped the final talks on the fiscal-cliff deal, only to appear on television to inform "members of both parties" in Congress that he and the American people were anxiously awaiting a last-minute accord—as if he were as uninvolved in the budget wrangling as the public.

After the 2010 election, Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell worked out a deal on taxes and spending. In 2011, Mr. Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid picked up the pieces after a debt-limit compromise sought by Mr. Obama failed to materialize. This week, it was Messrs. Biden and McConnell again who were called on to produce an agreement.

The president devoted weeks to unproductive talks with Mr. Boehner and Republican leaders in 2011 over a $4 trillion grand bargain on taxes and spending. "He views it that if he has extensive debate then he'd fulfilled his only obligation," a Republican engaged in the talks said. "Every day we got further away from a deal." Nonetheless, Mr. Obama boasted of having devoted more time than any previous president to such discussions.

An even bigger impediment is the president's predilection for stepping up his demands just as a compromise appears possible. After Mr. Boehner agreed to $800 billion in new tax revenues in 2011, Mr. Obama suddenly called for $400 billion more. This instantly killed a potential grand bargain and deepened Republican distrust of the president.

Republicans, ever hopeful, were optimistic about a deal with the White House after Mr. Obama's re-election two months ago. Mr. Boehner had announced his willingness to raise taxes, and progress was being made in negotiations. But after Thanksgiving, the president sent Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to Capitol Hill with sharply heightened demands. When Mr. McConnell heard them, he laughed out loud.

On Capitol Hill, the normal practice in seeking a compromise is to woo the other party and recruit prominent allies. Mr. Bush lined up the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy as his chief Democratic ally to pass the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. Mr. Clinton and Trent Lott, then Senate majority leader, agreed on a balanced-budget bill in 1997. Reagan, facing a lopsided Democratic House majority in 1981, drummed up enough conservative and moderate Democrats to enact his tax and spending bills.

Mr. Obama has turned this practice on its head. He is strikingly un-conciliatory. While his aides negotiated in recent weeks, he attacked Republicans in stump speeches—well after the end of his election campaign. He dismissed their pleas for spending cuts and claimed that their chief interest was in helping the rich avoid higher taxes. With the talks at a critical stage last weekend, he staged a White House event at which he mocked Republicans for thinking he might forgo additional tax increases for millionaires and "companies with a lot of lobbyists" in 2013.

Having failed to cultivate Republican allies in Congress, Mr. Obama finds himself without any, even among GOP senators with whom he had friendly relations as a senator from 2004 to 2008. Now Republicans regard him as partisan in the extreme.

His abrupt reversals have made compromise almost impossible. The initial budget negotiations in 2011 were headed by Mr. Biden, an experienced deal maker from his decades in the Senate. Faced with disagreements on spending items, he was inclined to split the difference. Mr. Obama isn't so inclined. When he took over the talks, Republicans discovered that billions in Biden-approved cuts had vanished.

It was support by the Senate "gang of six" for $1.2 trillion in taxes—a third more than Mr. Obama had agreed to—that prompted him to up the ante with Mr. Boehner. The president feared the political embarrassment of being outbid on taxes by a rump Senate group that included three Republicans. His sudden demand for more tax revenues snuffed out any chance of a deal with Republicans.

Mr. Obama's post-Thanksgiving insistence on new concessions by Republicans had the same effect. He wanted a new stimulus of $50 billion the first year and $25 billion in the subsequent years, another housing-finance program and still-higher taxes. Negotiations soon petered out, leading to the scaled-backed legislation that cleared Congress on Tuesday.

It was not a happy ending for Mr. Obama or Republicans. The president barred significant spending cuts in the stopgap bill, further alienating Republicans and worsening the poisonous political climate in Washington as he begins his second term.

This is a bigger problem than Mr. Obama may imagine. The most important issues—the debt ceiling, entitlement reform, tax reform, government spending, the $110 billion sequester—now must be dealt with in an atmosphere that is hardly conducive to bipartisanship and compromise.

The essence of bipartisan deals is win-win: Both sides are satisfied, even if not elated. Mr. Obama's approach is that he alone gets to win. The approach worked, more or less, on the fiscal-cliff deal, but it won't produce the larger bipartisan agreements that Mr. Obama now needs. And he'll miss the opportunities that other presidents seized, to their own benefit and the country's.

Mr. Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, is a Fox News commentator.
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3)Subj: Fw: A nation of singles

A Nation of Singles – Implications For the Future

What follows is a summary of a post-election demographic study that was sponsored by the Weekly Standard.

Americans have been wedded to marriage for a very long time. Between 1910 and 1970, the “ever-married rate” – that is, the percentage of people who marry at some point in their lives – went as high as 98.3% and never dipped below 92.8%. But beginning in 1970, the ever-married number began a gradual decline so that by 2000 it stood at only 88.6%.

Today, the numbers are even more striking according to the 2010 Census. Almost 24% of men, and 19% of women, between the ages of 35 and 44, have never been married. If we look at the people between 20 and 34 – the prime-childbearing years – the numbers are even more startling: 67% of men and 57% of women in this group have never been married. When you total it all up, over half of the voting-age population in America, and 40% of the people who actually showed up to vote this time around, are single.

You don’t hear nearly as much about the rise of single voters, despite the fact that they represent a much more significant trend. Only a few political analysts have emphasized how important “singletons” were to President Obama’s reelection. Properly understood, there is far less of a “gender gap” in American politics than people think. Yes, President Obama won “women” by 11 points (55 to 44 percent). But Mitt Romney won married women by the exact same margin.

To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among non-married voters – people who are single and have never married, are living with a partner, or are divorced – Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42.

Far more significant than the gender gap is the “marriage gap.” And what was made clear in the recent election was that the ranks of unmarried women and men are now at historic highs, and are still increasing. This marriage gap and its implications for our political, economic, and cultural future âis not well understood.

What does this group look like? Geographically, they tend to live in cities. As urban density increases, marriage rates (and childbearing rates) fall in nearly a straight line. Politicos James Carville and Stanley Greenberg put together some very interesting data on singles. Of the 111 million single eligible voters, 53 million are women and 58 million are men. Only 5.7 million of these women are Hispanic and 9.7 million are African American. Nearly three-quarters of all single women are white.

Singles broke decisively for Obama, no surprise there. Though his margins with them were lower than they were in 2008, he still won them handily: Obama was +16 among single men and +36 with single women. But the real news wasn’t how singles broke – it was that their share of the total vote increased by a whopping 6 percentage points.

That 6 percentage point increase meant 7.6 million more single voters than in 2008. They provided Obama with a margin of 2.9 million votes, about two-thirds of his margin of victory. To put this in some perspective, the wave of Hispanic voters we’ve heard so much about increased its share of the total vote from 2008 to 2012 by only a single point to roughly 12.5 million voters. It makes you wonder how the Romney handlers missed that!

How Did We Become a Nation of Singles?

How did we get to an America where half of the adult population isn’t married and somewhere between 10% and 15% of the population don’t get married for the first time until they’re approaching retirement? Jonathan Last, who did the research and wrote the article for the Weekly Standard, explains this phenomenon as follows:

It’s a complicated story involving, among other factors, the rise of almost-universal higher education, the delay of marriage, urbanization, the invention of no-fault divorce, the legitimization of cohabitation, the increasing cost of raising children, and the creation of a government entitlement system to do for the elderly childless what grown children did for their parents through the millennia.

But all of these causes are particular. Looming beneath them are two deep shifts. The first is the waning of religion in American life. As Joel Kotkin notes in a recent report titled “The Rise of Post-Familialism,” one of the commonalities between all of the major world religions is that they elevate family and kinship to a central place in human existence. Secularism tends toward agnosticism about the family. This distinction has real-world consequences. Take any cohort of Americans—by race, income, education — and then sort them by religious belief. The more devout they are, the higher their rates of marriage and the more children they have.

The second shift is the dismantling of the iron triangle of sex, marriage, and childbearing. Beginning in roughly 1970, the mastery of contraception decoupled sex from babymaking. And with that link broken, the connections between sex and marriage — and finally between marriage and childrearing — were severed, too.

Where is this trend line headed? In a word, higher. There are no indicators to suggest when and where it will level off. Divorce rates have stabilized, but rates of cohabitation have continued to rise, leading many demographers to suspect that living together may be crowding out matrimony as a mode of family formation. And increasing levels of education continue to push the average age at first marriage higher.

The question, then, is whether America will continue following its glidepath to the destination the rest of the First World is already nearing. Most experts believe that it will. As the Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz put it, once a society begins veering away from marriage and childbearing, it becomes a “self-reinforcing mechanism” in which the cult of the individual holds greater and greater allure. Jonathan Last continues:

What then? Culturally speaking, it’s anybody’s guess. The more singletons we have, the more densely urban our living patterns are likely to be. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg believes that the masses of city-dwelling singles will sort themselves into “urban tribes,” based not on kinship, but rather on shared interests. The hipsters, the foodies, the dog people, and so on. Klinenberg teaches at NYU, so he would know. As a result, cities will gradually transform from centers of economic and cultural foment into what urban theorist Terry Nichols Clark calls “the city as entertainment machine.”

The urban tribes may be insipid, but they’re reasonably benign. Kotkin sees larger cultural problems down the road. “[A] society that is increasingly single and childless is likely to be more concerned with serving current needs than addressing the future,” he writes. We could tilt more into a “now” society, geared towards consuming or recreating today, as opposed to nurturing and sacrificing for tomorrow.

So what does this mean for the economy? The economic effects are similarly unclear. On the one hand, judging from the booming economic progress in highly single countries such as Singapore and Taiwan, singletons can work longer hours and move more easily for jobs. On that level a more single society could be good for the economy. But only for a period of time, as fewer babies are being born to replace them.

And there’s another downside to this scenario of falling marriage rates and more singles in the workforce. Demographers have found that without the responsibility of families to provide for, unmarried American males have historically tended to drop out of the labor force prior to their normal retirement age, thus exacerbating recessionary tendencies in the economy. Not good.

That’s because marriage, as an institution, is helpful to all involved. Survey after survey has shown that married people are happier, wealthier, and healthier than their single counterparts. All of the research suggests that having married parents dramatically improves the well-being of children, both in their youth and later as adults.

As demographer Robert George put it after the election, limited government “cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these things happen, the health, education, and welfare functions of the family will have to be undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or later be the government.”

Marriage is what made the West, and America in particular, so successful. George continues, “The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the [free] market economy and the institution of marriage. These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall together.”

Conclusions – How Do We Turn the Trend Around?

Over the last few decades, our culture has migrated toward tolerance. Tolerance of the decay of marriage, acceptance of divorce and cohabitation and even gay marriage in a growing number of states. This along with the trend toward having fewer children, for a variety of reasons, has put our nation at risk of a multi-decade decline in the population.

The US birth rate has always declined during periods of recession. But the birth rate has always climbed to new highs after recessions – except this time. The US birth rate has continued to decline to a record low since the recession of 2007-2009. This is alarming.

At the same time, the number of single Americans continues to climb to record highs. The rise in singles who do not reproduce is an equally troubling demographic. This suggests that the institution of marriage is in jeopardy for all the reasons discussed above.

Somehow, we need to re-instill the importance of marriage in our culture. And sooner rather than later. That may not be a panacea for a rising birth rate, but it is a place to start. Marriage is an institution which ought to be celebrated, nurtured, and defended because its health is integral to the success of our culture.

All of these issues noted today – the falling birth rate, fewer marriages, record number of singles, etc. – are very important developments for our society and cannot be adequately addressed in such a short space as this. There are also far-reaching implications for saving and investing as well. Thus, I will be writing more on these topics in the weeks and months to come