Did you know that you are related to President Obama? We found him in your family tree on Geni.

Specifically, he’s your 18th cousin five times removed.

You can find this in the tree by navigating to your father’s mother’s father’s mother’s mother’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s sister’s daughter’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s son’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s son’s daughter’s son.

To see the exact path from you to President Obama or any other blood relative on Geni:

1. Upgrade to Geni Pro
2. View the public profile for Barack Obama

Geni needs your help! We’re proud of the hard work our users have put into building our site and we want to share the story. Please reply to this email if you would be willing to let us list your name among the tens of thousands of President Obama’s blood relatives who are on Geni.

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I’m not going to upgrade to Geni Pro to actually traverse this path, but it’s interesting nonetheless. He can go on the list with Eisenhower, Daniel Boone, and King Edward III.

Old Version (11/6/2008)

“When you choose to serve – whether it’s your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood – you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream.”

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

New Version (11/7/2008)

“When you choose to serve – whether it’s your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood – you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream.”

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

Interesting…

So, it seems that this form of conscription is acceptable to the American people. I wonder how this will be enforced if it is adopted. The very interesting thing is that we are expecting forced labor from our children before our prison population. If this happens, I will expect to see chain gangs on the side of the road as well, though this will of course not happen since it’s “demeaning” when prisoners pick up garbage and dig ditches. By changing the language from require to setting a goal, he will win more people over as it doesn’t sound like forced labor, but that’s still basically what it sounds like to me. At least he got rid of the 100 hour per year community service in college in the newer version, which removes the possibility of making income to pay for school for that time.

He also cites that the average college graduate has $19,000 in debt, which apparently he thinks is a bad thing. That is a very manageable amount of debt, especially for someone who will almost definitely make $30,000+ their first year of work after college. The payments on that debt will likely be fairly small, and if the person has good spending habits, they should be able to pay it off in just a few years. The interest, which for figuring I’ll guess is 8%, is only about $1600 a year, so assuming they can put in an extra $4000 per year towards the principal, which most people with a degree can, you’re looking at paying it off in less than 5 years. Having the equivalent of debt that comes from buying a new car is nothing to be worried about. In fact, if these college graduates did the exact opposite of what most of them do and actually buy a used car after college, they will be able to focus their earnings on the debt they already have. If anything, Obama should be pumping money into initiatives that persuade people to avoid unnecessary debt.

Screenshots

This is awesome – I’m pretty sure it’s accurate as well. While Obama’s side might look “fair” to many people, I think it will encourage the affluent to leave the country or move their businesses offshore, as well as their investments. It is a plan that will force our exports to decrease and our imports to necessarily increase since there will be less domestic industry. It is Rand’s nightmare realized. This will lead to a dramatic cost of living increase, and eventually another depression. It’s a question of whether we want a nation of workers who get a little more money per year but are massively unemployed, therefore increasing the tax burden on other workers over a period of time, or whether we want to continue borrowing tons of money from foreign nations, not paying down the debt, fighting increasingly expensive wars (which, of course, Obama wants to do as well), and decreasing our taxation, which is also unrealistic in the long term.

Obama’s plan to saturate the professional market with highly educated people, yet force the owners of businesses away from the country through very large increases in personal income tax, capital gains, and corporate taxes will either lead to massive unemployment or a population of outsourced labor a bit similar to what we’re seeing in India at the moment. While I do not support cutting taxes and increasing spending, I actually concede that John McCain’s plan is slightly more reasonable than Obama’s fiscally, mostly because of the opposition to push a ridiculous amount of funds into things like Americorps, his “Civilian National Security Force that is … just as well funded” as the military, and, last but not least, healthcare. I have a feeling that when Obama’s taxation plan fails to live up to the cost of the social programs he proposes to create, we will see even more increases of taxation of corporations and the rich, giving them even more reason to leave. I believe McCain’s plan will fail in an entirely different way, relying upon even more borrowing and foreign investment, eventually leading us into the same fate many other countries have faced – not being able to pay even the interest on their loans from afar. If McCain were to have to raise taxes to responsibly pay down the debt, I believe he would do it in a much more sane way than we see on the right side of the above figure.

Now, the Obama campaign has addressed this very concern, but it mostly addresses earmarks. McCain also primarily denounces earmarks when he talks about “cutting spending.” Earmarks have been demonized into being the worst wasteful spending possible, but the real problem is the number of social programs Obama will create, build upon, or perpetuate. For instance, he is a proponent of building low-income housing, which has created crime-ridden neighborhoods for years. He and McCain support the mortgage bailout that is happening right before our eyes, which will save the irresponsible house-flippers who made bad investments in their homes or obtained mortgages with terrible terms, as well as save the organizations that made this possible, Fannie and Freddie. The lenders themselves, while marketing bad loan products, are simply the middlemen, and the guarantee that Fannie and Freddie would buy any mortgage-backed-security-bundle they created is what has caused this mess. But, instead of those people having to stimulate the rental property industry and “lose” their homes (which just means the banks lose, housing prices go down, and people who don’t own homes currently have access to cheap property), we’ve decided to punish all the people of America for the mistakes of the few.

I still believe that my taxes will increase when the people most able to leave the country decide they don’t want to lose an extra $700.000 per year, and when the top 1% leave, we will be left with 28% more tax burden. All that needs to happen is for 3,000,000 people to leave.

Update

Obama laid out some of the things I said in a speech yesterday by the looks of it.