View Full Version : "You Are Not Special" Commencement Speech
Carpe the heck out of the Diem! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lfxYhtf8o4&feature=player_embedded)
Pat
I bet that woke the little fockers up. :D
ZonieDiver
06-08-2012, 16:16
I bet that woke the little fockers up. :D
Most of them were probably timing him! One of the best things about retiring as a teacher is that I no longer have to go to those! Next to staff meetings and IEP meetings... graduations are the worst! Yawn!
Kyobanim
06-08-2012, 20:22
Found this on msnbc in the comments section to the article referenced for this thread
Dear graduates,
You are about to embark on your careers and eventually take over from the older generation. I want to take just a few moments and try to set the stage for the world you are inheriting.
The biggest danger I see right now is with China and the potential that one or more of the idiots in Congress will try to make political points by being “publicly” hard on China, in an effort to improve the image of Congress, a political party, or that of a particular member of Congress.
Negotiations belong in the back room, out of sight of the cameras so no one loses face, which is very important in China as in other Asian countries. If we push China too hard, China will simply resist. We need to pull China toward our goals, but not do so in public or in any manner of disrespect.
You may or may not have studied China of the early 1900’s but China as late as the 1940’s could not even feed herself. It was not
uncommon for hundreds of thousands to simply starve to death. Their population was growing out of control and they had no industry of significance
and their agriculture was very primitive.
As children, my generation was told to “eat everything on your plate because children are starving in China”. Well, that was then.
Now, less than two generations later, China has become the manufacturer for much of the world, manufacturing products like shoes, toys, trinkets and clothing, but they are also now climbing into the seat of being a world class manufacturer of computers and planes, of trucks and tractors, of rockets to space (we rely on them now to launch most of our civilian satellites) and high speed trains. China now exports food to the world, has their population growth problem under control and does not have an illegal immigration problem, meaning that China is also protecting her culture as she brings about economic reforms. China is now one of the largest buyers of debt in the world. The US is now the nation with the most debt.
It is now America where children are hungry and marginally educated, where homelessness is a big and rapidly growing problem, where the government resorts to funding itself with money stolen from future generations because they cannot vote to stop it. We in the United States continue to vote for more socialism, promise more expensive retirement plans to workers who can retire sooner, promise more expensive and
more abundant health-care to those that cannot pay for it, and allow our borders to become non-existent as to who comes here.
We also are enacting higher taxes and more complex tax codes in a failed attempt to appear like Congress is trying to pay for the promises made to buy votes to get elected, but even the appearance of trying is now about gone. We are also regulating our businesses out of business, pushing more and more businesses off shore in the process. As we import more and more goods and services manufactured elsewhere, we are also importing unemployment from elsewhere and destroying families, pride, and hope in the future in this idiotic process of globalization with rules tying our hands that fail to tie the hands of others. In a three words, we are losing. As we do all these things, our future prospects, your future prospects, are getting more and more dim.
We have failed to understand that big government, high taxes, over regulation, and socialist policies of robbing Peter to pay Paul destroy
opportunity, and similarly, that the destruction of opportunity results in the creation of yet more Paul’s needing a government teat, for which we continually need to rob a less and less wealthy Peter to provide.
We have now baked into our economy long term high rates of unemployment and the built in costs of dealing with this unemployment problem. Our tax base is eroding so we cut education and other services to free up the needed funds to provide the government teat for everyone needing a good suckle. We are destroying the middle class and job opportunity for many millions as we conduct ourselves in this manner.
All of these changes have occurred in my lifetime and it is simply an amazing transformation to have witnessed. Both the ascension of China and the decline of America have been rapid and stunning to say the least. Worse still, we are accelerating the rate at which we are borrowing from the future having arrived recently at the unimaginable rate of borrowing more than one and a half trillion dollars in just one a single year which is more combined debt than we built up from 1776 through 1983 even with all the wars starting with the Revolutionary War up through Viet Nam, and including building the Panama Canal, the Trans Alaska Highway, and our Interstate System. Yet Congress keeps on spending and making promises it cannot possibly keep, while also continuing to fail to fund those promises. Recently, about three years ago, we reached the sad point of not even trying to have a budget.
Winston Churchill had a quote that I think bears repeating here.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
We are becoming miserable here in America. So what does your future hold? Well, while China is not yet a real super power as is America, China will become a real super power by simply continuing to do the things she has already been doing. However, if America stays her course, America, currently a real super power, will not remain so. So which country is facing the real need to change? China or the United States of America? The answer is obvious.
If America is allowed by the voters to continue the race to insolvency, China will be in a position to buy up America’s resources including
raw materials, factories, and intellectual property rights and patents to the point that America may very well be forced into a second fiddle role under the boot of China. This is not to say that anything China is doing is necessarily bad, but rather that America is doing some incredibly stupid things. We are throwing away our heritage, our culture, and our future while chasing the known to not work strategy of becoming more and more a socialist government. Many have tried this before and all have failed. We will be no different.
The changes we need:
We need to start in our schools by teaching about great men like general MacArthur and his code of Duty, Honor, Country, and of self-discipline. We need to emphasize a strong work ethic, accountability and responsibility. We need to teach our youth at an early age how to deal with failure. Little things like having to try out for a ball team and that not everyone will make the team are very good lessons to learn. In doing this, our kids will learn at an early age how to deal with failure, how to regroup and move on and try again. Failure is not necessarily a bad thing for one has to try first in order to fail. My fear is we will stop trying. That will usher in ultimate failure.
We need to improve education itself so we are not graduating illiterates that need remedial education just to be able to read and write at a
minimum level before being employed at even a low paying job. This means education is THE sacred cow above all others.
We need to allow businesses to run their respective business without fear the government will change the rules next week, or next month, or that government will change the tax code making what otherwise would be a good economic decision, a bad decision tax wise.
We need to abolish a tax code that penalizes effort and promotes the opposite. We need to stop the insanity of managing for the short term
at the expense of long term success and growth. We need to stop rewarding illegal aliens with free education, subsidized housing, free medical care, and other unearned entitlements including being placed at the head of the line to gain legal citizenship and then complaining that there are too many illegal aliens here.
We need to drop the employment penalty called payroll tax that is levied against employers for hiring and keeping workers as it makes our
labor 7.6% less competitive and as a result, sends more of our jobs to elsewhere resulting in having to deal with more and more un-employment costs here, defeating the purpose for and effectiveness of the tax itself.
We need to realize that there are two types of war, a shooting war, and an economic war. We are a super power and can win in a shooting war. But we have been losing the economic war that has been waged upon us for decades due to bad trade policies and idiotic taxes and regulations. Yes, government needs taxes, but there are some things that when taxed, like employment, have severe unintended consequences. We should tax consumption, not employment and tax income, if at all, in a much simplier manner that is clear to understand and void of loopholes for some that do not apply to others. A tax is a penalty no matter how you look at it. And when you penalize the bedrock of an economy (employment and effort) you necessarily will cause great and long term harm to that economy. Just look at what we have done. We are killing ourselves.
We still, as a nation, and especially so in Congress, fail to realize that China’s main export to us in all those sea going containers is not
the stuff in the containers, but un-employment itself. We have yet to begin to come to grips with the substantial threat to our economy that arises
from tax free trade, containerized freight, container based seaports, inter modal transport and big box retailers that distribute imported product
efficiently. This is one of the game changers that is knocking our economy down.
(cont)
Kyobanim
06-08-2012, 20:22
(cont)
Folks say, well that is free trade and you can’t have import taxes. To that I still say, “Are you nuts?”. We have higher wage scale, more regulatory costs, and you think we can compete with countries that have lower wage scale and less regulation? How?
This question of “How?” is where the free trade disciples get stuck. Here is what I know. If you follow the “free trade” mandate, you have to race to the bottom with both wages and regulation, or you will export you jobs to elsewhere. So you take your pick, import taxes or unemployment here. so far, we as a nation have chosen unemployment and i do not understand why. We need to Fire the idiots that are doing this.
When I was national sales manager for a plastics company a long time ago, I was able to bring a container of product from China and land it in
NY with less freight cost than would have been incurred had that same shipment been by truck from Louisiana to New York. That situation has only gotten worse with higher trucking costs including fuel, labor, insurance and taxes when compared to the more modern, faster, larger, and more efficient container ships. America is losing the economic war because of these faster and larger ships, and because our ship of state has no rudder because we keep re-electing idiots.
We need to curtail the size, cost, footprint, and influence of the government nanny state that now pays the average federal worker double the
average wage in the private sector and is currently sucking the private sector dry with taxes and regulation that combined, are but feed and fodder for the ever growing footprint of bureaucracy. The end result is removing discretionary income and opportunity from the private sector. This paradigm indicates high levels of unemployment for years into the future, maybe decades, maybe forever if unchecked.
We the people, need to get use to the idea that we cannot afford a government teat for every problem that may arise in life and begin to act
accordingly. The big question is, are we the people capable of doing that? Or said another way, are you as the embodiment of the future
capable of doing that. We the older generation have failed miserably on this score and have burdened you and your children with a terrible debt burden that your grandchildren will still be dealing with. So the big question is this.
Can we in America grow up and take care of ourselves as adults and individuals, or do we succumb to the call of the nanny state with a warm teat for everyone? That is the big question for your generation and generations to come, because I doubt you will be able to repair the damage we the old idiots have done to this great land in your lifetimes. I am very sorry, but my generation has failed, and failed miserably.
China faced her demons in the mid 1900’s and changed the rules of the game. She said you can only have one child. If you have more
than one, you will lose all government support. It was unpopular but such is the mark of true leadership, and China changed. China embraced the
idea that if you make money, you get to keep it. Businesses grew and grew. To this day, China does not have real estate taxes, which in the
very basic sense is simply the government saying that you have to rent your own property, bought with income that the government first took their cut, or forfeit that property to the government if you fail to pay the rent. The result is you can never have real estate that is fully paid for, and still worse, the government can now seize your property and give it to a for profit private enterprise for economic development as has now been
authorized by a supremely stupid supreme court ruling. So much for private property rights in America which was one of the building blocks of our
free society.
You graduates have to understand that these are the fundamental building blocks of our society and our economy that we are changing in the name of giving everyone a teat. I for one am sick of it.
The bottom line is this. China can stay her course and become the most powerful country on earth. America can’t. America, more than China, has to change. Not the change of bigger government, higher taxes, more regulation, and bigger deficits either. America needs to get back to her roots. If she doesn’t, America will become just another nanny state on the rock pile of failed democracies that litter history, and by my estimation, we are only a couple of generations from that point, and we are accelerating the speed at which we are trying to get there.
I wish you luck and success in getting America to change. You have to, or you will be broke. With 35 trillion dollars of unfunded social security, 40 trillion dollars of unfunded Medicare, and a little more than a trillion dollars of underfunded federal government retirement, added to 16 trillion dollars of debt, several trillion dollars of debt hidden on the books of the federal reserve, and several more trillion dollars in guarantees and GSE and agency exposure, you really have to come out of the gate and hit this nanny state issue hard and fast.
You need to understand that there is a big difference with bond debt and underfunded entitlement obligations. Bond debt has liquidity risks that can be overcome by solving the liquidity issue by simply borrowing more, or by printing more money and kicking the can down the road. However, entitlement obligations are not a liquidity issue. They are a solvency issue. They cannot be kicked down the road. They have to be paid when they come due. And if you try to pay these unfunded entitlement obligations with debt, you will break the banking system.
We are now looking into the abyss of nearly 80 trillion dollars of underfunded entitlement obligation that one way or another, has to be resolved within the next 30 years. That equals about 2-1/2 trillion dollars per year, which is almost exactly the amount of all taxes currently collected at the federal level.
Obviously, this is a bad situation that is not going to be resolved by raising taxes alone. You would have to effectively double all taxes currently collected by the federal government to raise that extra 2.5 trillion dollars per year, but realistically, if you did, then no one would be working. Therefore, the underfunded entitlement issue is a solvency issue and will be resolved by default. That default will be in the form of either a currency crisis or a default in the promises made to pay the benefits.
This is what the last 30 years of elected idiocy in Congress has laid at your feet.
You are inheriting a very sick America with an aging population that has not made arrangements for retirement, nor for caring for the aged, nor
for dealing with the accrued obligations of entitlements. In fact, your government recently added another entitlement by basically nationalizing healthcare and you my dear graduates will bear the brunt of paying for this brand new nanny teat in the form of higher taxes and higher costs for medical care itself, notwithstanding that the bill’s name that brought this about was the “Affordable HealthCare Act”. Yes, this is how low congress has sunk. They create legislation that bars the importation of lower cost drugs that will end with higher costs drugs here , and call the bill the “Affordable HealthCare Act”. You should gird your loins as they said long ago and Fire them All.
Congress has become an enemy of the people. I urge you to deal with it accordingly. My generation refused to believe soon enough and look at what we have done to you and to the country you will inherit.
No matter how you wrap it up, the end result of constantly robbing from Peter to pay Paul will eventually make Peter far less wealthy, will
remove nearly all opportunity for Paul, and will end up trapping both Peter and Paul in a lifetime of servitude to the nanny state.
Good luck to the Class of 2012.
China keeping the value of its currency down is interesting. If it were to go up, would ours go down? And then the value of what is paid back isn't the value of what was borrowed?
Consequently, if we are in a "crisis" by design, which also keeps our nations wealth from rising, and the value of our dollar from getting stronger, isn't the same end achieved in what is paid back does not have the same value or buying power as what was borrowed?
Kind of like exchanging currencies when the rate is favorable to profit.
Anyone with a strong economics or finance background shed some light on these theories?
Anyone with a strong economics or finance background shed some light on these theories?
Starting with how much of our Country is already owned by China...:munchin
I always find it interesting to read a number of the high school and college commencement addresses every year, looking for a pointedly fresh delivery of a meaningful message versus the many that merely offer a rehash of somebody else's previously delivered sage advice or somebody's opinion of a topic which would be better placed in their blog or on an OpEd page in a newspaper.
I've sat through many HS commencement addresses (including two last month) and IMO the Wellesley HS English teacher chosen by the graduating class to deliver the faculty address to their class did a great job. YLOO.
Congratulations to the Classes of 2012; I wish you all the best in your future endeavors and your lives.
Richard :munchin
Well the government puts limits on what China can own. They aren't letting them own or even acquire large stakes in certain companies. In terms of our debt, China is the largest foreign holder of our debt, at $900+ billion, but the largest holder of our debt is the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Where did you get this information?
Where did you get this information?
As of 4th Quarter 2011...
Social Security Trust Funds
US Federal Reserve
China
Savings Bonds and Other Investors
Japan
Pension Funds
Mutual Funds
State and Local Governments
Medicare Trust Funds
Depository Institutions
Oil Exporters
Insurance Companies
Brazil
Caribbean Banking Centers
Taiwan
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29880401/The_Biggest_Holders_of_US_Government_Debt?slide=1
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/06/09/the-fed-is-the-biggest-holder-of-us-debt/
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fed-now-largest-owner-us-gov-t-debt-surpassing-china
As of 4th Quarter 2011...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29880401/The_Biggest_Holders_of_US_Government_Debt?slide=1
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/06/09/the-fed-is-the-biggest-holder-of-us-debt/
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fed-now-largest-owner-us-gov-t-debt-surpassing-china
lol Thanks for the chart. China is a hair behind the Fed in holdings.
If that was a diagnosis, it would be like, "Good news! Your liver cancer will probably kill you before the brain cancer does."