The International squeeze against all our freedoms

Already we look evidence in this administration of media tampering, intimidating as well as even threatening if certain subjects are covered such as the President’s eligibility which millions of Americans want to cognize about.

Is it not a fair question to ask….why has this President spent over 1.5 million dollars to hide every one of his records, passport, birth certificate, completely college and school records Gee, inquiring American minds want to know. Wouldn’t you be proud of your school records Why hide them

We know through the investigative and excellent work of Doug Hagmann, httpwww.homelandsecurityus.com and Judi McLeod, editor of httpwww.canadafreepress.com that at least one major national host had contacted Doug saying he had been ordered not to do any segment regarding Obama’s eligibility issues, but told there would be serious consequences if he did. Doug and Judi started digging and it was discovered and verified that numerous in various networks had been ordered away from certain Obama birth certificate stories, intimidated and threatened if they dared mention it.

It's quite evident that this President is a narcissist and media hound. Obama loves getting in front of cameras and giving teleprompter speeches but WITHOUT any real questions, challenge or disagreement by the press. Obama is known for controlling questions he ever gets to minimize dissent and confrontation on a myriad of issues. Even veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas couldn’t believe his controls She stated to CNSNews.com “Nixon didn’t try to do that….They couldn’t control the media. They didn’t try.” “What the hell do they think we are, puppets “They are supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

As most know by now most the TV media has worshiped at the feet of Obama from way before he was elected, even campaigning to move into the White house for Health- car-a-Thon coverage and public manipulation. First we saw NBC move right into the White house for worshipping coverage regarding the Obama health concern horror show then ABC couldn’t take it and they dove in. They planned to devote a whole news day, Good Morning American clear through to Nightline on Obama and health care. Naturally ABC planned to cover prime time, Obama’s town hall, moderated by Dian Sawyer and Charles Gibson………..then of course the grand posh dessert conclusion, World News Tonight anchored from the White House. Even with this amount of worship from mainstream TV media this administration wants more.


Freedom of the press and speech is a threat to this administration

Even White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said recently in a videotaped conference “Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t completely control,” She went on…..”One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters.” Dunn continued on….”Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was….Making the press cover what we were saying.”

It can’t get much clearer than that. This administration is all about cramming, manipulating and force-feeding their message. Difference of opinion and free speech is simply in the way and not acceptable.

Remember the influences and training behind Obama

Obama was a huge fan of Saul Alinsky author of Rules for Radicals, dedicated by the way to Satan in the front of his book. The ‘hope and change’ montra we have heard crammed down our throats before and after Obama was elected were the exact words of Alinsky and part of the strategy of ClowardPiven. Obama not only studied these nut case radicals but taught their strategies and techniques as a community organizer for ACORN! You know, that inspiring group that has dozens of indictments for voter fraud and wanted to bring in young people to form a prostitution ring Isn’t that inspiring and special Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated she is a fan of Saul Alinsky. You could certainly see it in their own words, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff and Hillary herself have said “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”

Remember with this administration words and contexts are twisted to back up their agenda.

Our second amendment rights and freedom of speech is being threatened and surrounded by the UN. You know….the largely pro Muslim radical, anti Israel, anti Christian, anti American and anti Capitalist UN Yes, that one. There is a proposal at the UN hiding behind the lovely montra of “freedom of opinion and expression” but this freedom of expression is to be completely subservient and submissive to international human rights obligations. Cutting way to the bottom line it'll force a halt to the criticism of Islam.

Remember the UN is pushing already for us to submit to an international court, the ICC, distorted obsession and plans regarding the environment and global warming (the non science) wanting to enact ‘rights of the child’ - international rules that trump all parental rights, prevent Muslim extremist language and planning while trying to slander and arrest Soldiers and leaders in Israel for simply defending their country…..on and on.

Also remember, this UN that Obama kisses up to is mostly influenced, led and funded by Islamic countries. Naturally they are planning to shut up any individuals or countries daring to put the light on radical Muslims who are planning to take over the world by force. We aren’t to notice that many well funded and radical Muslim groups are planning our demise and take over. I guess what we used to call our ‘freedom of speech’ is just their ‘freedom to murder’.

Keep your eye on the International ball regarding the manipulated suckage of our freedoms starting with speech, guns and use of our environment. WE MUST PROTECT OUR SOVERIGNTY AND SUPPORT LEADERS WHO SUBMIT ONLY TO U.S. LAW NOT UN LAW OR TREATIES.

Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven would be proud. Still look like the Messiah but take total control of speech, guns and money through the supported UN rules you submit to through the back door. If you really want to know who Obama is, read who he studied and taught….then pray a lot.

Read more...

The Cloward-Piven Strategy

Although I was vaguely familiar with the Cloward-Piven strategy, I had not taken a good look at it until Neal Boortz tweeted a link to an article about it so I send out a well-deserved HatTip to the TalkMaster (@TalkMaster) for enlightening me. Neal’s link was to an article at a great site called DiscoverTheNetworks.Org, which has detailed information about the tangled web of left wing activist groups. From there I found another article written in October of last year by a retired Air Force colonel named Robert Chandler in which he analyzes the use of the Cloward-Piven strategy by individuals seeking to damage our financial system. These two articles are worth reading and forwarding to your thinking friends.

Named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, the general idea behind the strategy is to intentionally overload the government system so much that it causes a crisis and collapses with a subsequent loss of confidence that Cloward and Piven hoped would “hasten the fall of capitalism.” I am reminded that my late father, a conservative, had a good but incredibly liberal friend who would bluntly argue that the cost of avoiding violent class warfare in America is the network of welfare programs that keep the poor complacent. As much as the idea disgusts me I have always thought that he was at least partly right. The article at DiscoverTheNetworks points out that the basic idea behind the Cloward-Piven strategy is to break the system in order to make the poor miserable enough to rebel. Not surprisingly to those of us watching the tactics being employed by the current ruling party, the author also mentions their connections to the radical Saul Alinsky, whose ideas apparently so inspired President Obama:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people able to advance exclusively when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to substitute the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky

The author points out that the approach called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” In fact, after Cloward and Piven recruited an organizer named George Wiley to do just that his group, the National Welfare Rights Organization, enjoyed such successes in New York that they did cause the desired collapse:

Regarding Wiley’s tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, “There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.”These methods proved effective. “The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams,” writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. ”From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy.”As a direct happen of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

These are precisely the same tactics employed by groups like ACORN to intimidate elected officials into acquiescing to their demands, such as forcing lending institutions to make loans to people with bad credit. The author argues that this approach requires surprise and that “when the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.” In fact, he points out that followers of the Cloward-Piven strategy successfully shifted their focus to our electoral system, with sinister results:

The new “voting rights” coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of “racism” and “disenfranchisement,” and “direct action” (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America’s welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation’s understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute and his “Shadow Party,” through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for many of the Left’s most ambitious campaigns.



In an article at the Washington Times subtitled Using the poor to tear down capitalism, Col. Robert Chandler points this out and shows that it not only was proven viable when the approach successfully bankrupted New York City in the 70s but that our sub-prime financial crisis was engineered with these tactics:

The socialist test case for using society’s poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial “shock troops,” in accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, bankrupting the government. As a consequence, New York state also teetered on the edge of financial collapse when the federal government stepped in with a bailout rescue.

The 2008 financial crisis has all of the earmarks of a Cloward-Piven strategy assault against the capitalist system. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently explained that “community organizers” (1) “intimidate banks into making high risk loans to customers with poor credit,” (2) “occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes,” and, through these thuggish tactics, (3) compel “financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.” “In other words,” Mr. Kurtz explained during a presentation at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, “community organizers help to undermine America’s economy by pushing the banking system into a sink-hole of bad loans.”

We have seen the results of the Cloward-Piven strategy, from the sub-prime crisis to [always left-wing] voter fraud in any swing state, these people are playing for keeps. Working in the trenches with these very people, attempting to destroy the system from within so that he could remake it, was our community organizer president. Saul Alinksy would be so proud.

We need to interrupt underestimating our opponents and the depths to which they will sink to force their statist ideology on Americans.

Read more...

The ClowardPiven Strategy of Economic Recovery

Using borrowed money for a band-aid bailout of the economy should seem backwards to most people. However, it likely is a planned strategy to promote radical change. Those naively believing that President Obama is just rewarding his far-left base, and will then move to the political center, must wise up.

The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.

Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a dangerous crisis to go to waste."

The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.

According to Discover the Networks.org:

Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation... [Emphasis added.]


Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health concern through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.

If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their kids themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.

The Cato Institute reports that the plan will harm a faltering economy, intentionally causing increased job losses leading to increased demands for the aforementioned programs. Even the jobs to be created are set apart to render social justice, not economic revival. Robert Reich believes new infrastructure jobs should not go to white construction workers. Meanwhile, workers at Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the retail market find themselves experiencing the life of the welfare poor.

If highly educated and trained workers continue to lose jobs and business falters as a whole, where will these jobless workers go? Could this be construed as revolutionary social reorganization that puts the underachiever above the achiever? Where is the future economic strength when jobless professionals collect welfare and unemployment while dreaming of a minimum wage job? For whites, there's not even the hope of a great paying construction job.

Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a complete storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat.

As the flow of money from the top of the economy dries up, job losses and mortgage busts will mount exponentially. The Democrat stimulus plan provides for welfare expansion but not for a robust economy that creates high paying jobs. Is this what Obama means when he warns, "It's going to get worse before it gets better?" If we are not bailing out corporate America so they can regain profitability, we must conclude Obama is working toward another end goal. Recognizing these attack methods reveals the only logical response -- an unwavering wall of "No!"

Nancy Coppock publishes The Jackalope's Voice.

Read more...

Promise vs. Performance

A Senate committee Tuesday voted 14-9 to pass the Baucus bill. That's my favorite bill. Now, it has to be combined with the Dodd bill, as well as I come from a state where they say "Dumb Dodd." Not when he's got great bills that he is pushing!

Whatever the mutations the House puts together before this is said and done, you able to bet that this bill, as bad as it is, is about to get much, much worse.

Neil Cavuto pointed out Tuesday on his program that President Obama has maintained we must have health care reform right now, even though it's not going to take effect until 2013 — which is weird, why the hurry?

He told us that any tax increases needed would come later, but now, it looks like they're going to kick in later this year. I thought he meant a little later when he said "later."

He promised lower premiums and it looks like instead of lower, they'll be higher. He promised nobody is going to wait for a doctor, but as it turns out, it looks like a little of will wait longer.

This reform plan is definitely turning out to be something that wasn't what I saw advertised on TV. He said consumers need protection from the insurers. Mr. President, I'm beginning to think that the consumers — the Americans need protection from you guys and Congress.

The president keeps telling us that his health care reform public option obsession is –- well, I do not even know what they're talking about. I'm for choice and competition.

But I think we've already made a choice. America doesn't want a public option. No more government. I think it's kind of big as it is. Most polls have shown this. The town hall meetings have shown that.

The vast most of us believe this so-called public option would lead to a single-payer universal health care plan. There's a lot of us that who think that kind of socialism is best left to Canada and other places.

Oh, but don't worry, because Barack Obama doesn't want that kind of option either.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter, because, frankly, we historically have had an employer-based system in this country with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that, I believe, would be too disruptive. So, I'm not promoting a single-payer plan:

Read more...

Obama’s Orchestrated Crisis

The financial crisis continuing to brew in America is part of a deliberate strategy to expand the size as well as scope of government, Glenn Beck argued on his TV show.

It’s called the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis. It’s an approach to radical social and political modify articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” They called for “a massive control to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

The strategy helped to push New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975. Years later, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name.

In the Nation article, Cloward and Piven made it clear that they were irritated that many Americans legally eligible to receive forcibly redistributed wealth hadn’t bothered to ask for handouts. They wrote:

“The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis.”

One of the leftist activist groups that contributed to the current economic climate is ACORN. Its founder, Wade Rathke, is a big believer in the Cloward-Piven Strategy but he’s given it a early name for a new millennium. He calls it the Maximum Eligible Participation Strategy and has said he wants to use the Internet to swamp America’s social welfare system.

Although the Cloward-Piven Strategy pertains specifically to welfare benefits, the basic idea is that any massively unsustainable financial demands on the government'll cause chaos and civil unrest.

Policy makers in Washington either want to cause crisis in order to overthrow the existing system or they simply don’t care. What else could explain the jaw-dropping fiscal irresponsibility in Washington?

Couple this with the fact that in the closing weeks of the Bush administration, incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel practically admitted the Obama administration was planning to sabotage America in order to force socialism upon the American people:

Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.

A massive increase in the money supply takes roughly two years to cause inflation or hyperinflation in the economy. In the 1970s the government printed money like crazy and added 13% more to the money supply over two years. This caused an inflation rate of 12%.

The Federal Reserve chairman at the time, Paul Volcker, had to raise interest rates in order to stem inflation. He raised interest rates to 20%.

But, Beck noted, the money supply in the U.S. has been increased by 120% in the last year or so in order to visit the unachievable demands of a reckless president and Congress.

How high will our interest rates have to rise to in order to tame the inflation that is about to be unleashed? Will those brutal interest rates snuff out economic growth?

We’re going to find out.

Read more...

Obama’s Orchestrated Crisis

The financial crisis continuing to brew in America's part of a deliberate strategy to expand the size and scope of government, Glenn Beck argued on his TV show.

It's called the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis. It's an approach to radical social and political modify articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." They called for "a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls" in an effort to overwhelm the system.



The strategy helped to push New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975. Years later, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name.

In the Nation article, Cloward and Piven made it clear that they were irritated that plenty of Americans legally eligible to receive forcibly redistributed wealth hadn't bothered to ask for handouts. They wrote:

"The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis."

One of the leftist activist groups that contributed to the current economic climate is ACORN. Its founder, Wade Rathke, is a big believer in the Cloward-Piven Strategy but he's given it a early name for a new millennium. He calls it the Maximum Eligible Participation Strategy and has said he wants to use the Internet to swamp America's social welfare system.

Although the Cloward-Piven Strategy pertains specifically to welfare benefits, the basic idea is that any massively unsustainable financial demands on the government will lead to chaos and civil unrest.

Policy makers in Washington either want to cause crisis in order to overthrow the existing system or they just do not care. What else could explain the jaw-dropping fiscal irresponsibility in Washington?

Couple this with the fact that in the closing weeks of the Bush administration, incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel practically admitted the Obama administration was planning to sabotage America in order to force socialism upon the American people:

Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.

A massive increase in the money supply takes roughly two years to cause inflation or hyperinflation in the economy. In the 1970s the government printed money like crazy and added 13% more to the money supply over two years. This caused an inflation rate of 12%.

The Federal Reserve chairman at the time, Paul Volcker, had to raise interest rates in order to stem inflation. He raised interest rates to 20%.

But, Beck noted, the money supply in the United States has been increased by 120% in the last year or so in order to meet the impossible demands of a reckless president and Congress.

How high will your interest rates have to rise to in order to tame the inflation that is about to be unleashed? Will those brutal interest rates snuff out economic growth?

We're going to find out.

Read more...

NEVADAS ECONOMY Consumers spend less revenue plummets

NEVADA'S ECONOMY Consumers spend less, revenue plummets


LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Nevada's businesses saw their sales fall 24.1 percent from August 2008.
REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO





Nevada posted its 10th straight month of double-digit declines in taxable sales in August, as a major federal incentive to boost car sales failed to drive consumer purchases into growth territory.

Wednesday's numbers from the state Department of Taxation showed that Nevada's businesses rang up $3.1 billion in sales in August, down 24.1 percent from $4.1 billion in August 2008.



Most Popular Stories
# Man shot by police identified as local attorney
# RADIO CLAIMS: Reid jabs generate backlash
# TRAFFIC STOP: Shooting accounts conflict
# Las Vegas officer wounds suspect
# No foul play suspected in death of man found near Nellis
# ENGINE FAILURE: Plane makes forced landing
# NORM: At time, drug use wasn't suspected
# Police shoot man at traffic stop
# Police shoot man at traffic stop
# Three kids fall from vehicle; mothers arrested
# Boy struck, killed by car pulling out of driveway




The numbers include the results of an earlier tax-amnesty program that augmented collections a year ago. Businesses that owed back taxes paid $263 million in August 2008. Take out that amnesty revenue, as well as the year-over-year sales decline would have been 18.9 percent.

In Clark County, taxable sales dropped from $3 billion to $2.2 billion year over year in August.

Several sales categories showed declines in the month. Sales in the construction sector plummeted 47.5 percent, while furniture retailers saw a 38.6 percent decline. Clothing stores, bars and restaurants and department stores posted significant sales dips.

And despite the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, dealers of cars and car parts experienced a 16.4 percent drop.

Local analysts said the results reveal a state that remains mired in a recession that is almost 2 years old.

"The question remains: Where's the bottom? The economy is clearly not stabilizing," said Brian Gordon, a principal in local research firm Applied Analysis. "Retailers continue to be affected by consumer spending by both residents and leisure travelers, and these numbers are a clear sign that we're not out of the woods yet."

Added Keith Schwer, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas: "It's very clear the national economy is showing signs of recovery, and we're not."

Schwer said spending in Nevada remains low because of high unemployment and flagging consumer confidence.

More than 190,000 Nevadans are out of work, and as joblessness surged through the summer, residents with jobs feared they soon would receive pink slips themselves. So a sizable chunk of the state lacks the discretionary income to spend; the rest are too nervous to take on purchases such as cars and appliances.

Cash for Clunkers, which offered consumers rebates of up to $4,500 to trade in older cars for more fuel-efficient versions, did seem to curb sales declines among car dealers, who had been seeing year-over-year sales declines of 30 percent or more in the months before August. But the federal program couldn't completely avert losses.

A recent study from the Retail Association of Nevada backs up the idea that Cash for Clunkers wasn't too fashionable among the state's residents.

The trade group's report found that Nevada ranked No. 48 in Cash for Clunkers rebates per capita, which indicates that a smaller-than-average percentage of residents took the money. Assuming one rebate per Nevadan, 1.3 Nevadans out of 1,000 traded in old cars, compared with a national average of 2.3 out of 1,000.

The association estimated that Cash for Clunkers added $3.6 million in state sales taxes that would not have materialized without the rebate program.

Some sectors of the economy did expand their sales in August. Heavy and civil engineering construction, which consists of big public-works projects, rose 46.6 percent, and telecommunications jumped 30.4 percent. Rail transportation, management of companies, performing arts and spectator sports showed increases in sales.

The state collected $242.4 million in revenue from sales and use taxes. That is an 18.4 percent drop compared with August 2008. Adjusted for the amnesty program, revenue collections were off 17.6 percent year over year.

Taxable sales help finance public services such as schools and prisons, and budget projections show the sales are bringing in less revenue than expected so far in fiscal 2010, which began July 1. In the first two months of the fiscal year, the general fund portion of sales and use taxes is 1.16 percent, $9.3 million, below forecasts of the Economic Forum, a nonpartisan group of appointees who craft revenue estimates for budgeting purposes.

Fifteen of the Silver State's 17 counties posted declines in taxable sales, with exclusively Mineral and Lincoln counties spared any drops.

Gordon said consumer spending in Nevada has fallen to 2002 levels, and he expects spending to continue shrinking well into 2010.

Gov. Jim Gibbons released a statement saying that the sales data show a sustained slump in Nevada's economy.

"August's sales and use tax figures demonstrate that the people and businesses of Nevada continue to feel the effects of the recession," Gibbons said. "The administration continues to monitor and plan for the effects of the impaired housing market, sluggish consumer spending and the overall condition of the economy."

Read more...