Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Quantitative Sleazing

Commenting at The Saddest Chart in America, the eponymous Anonymous writes:

US debt held by the public is now at about the same level as it was when Obama was elected. The deficit spending is financed by bonds from treasury, but they are being bought by the fed.

Therefore, to be precise, we are printing new money to 'pay' for 42 cents of every dollar the federal government is spending.

Here, from the St. Louis Fed, is the chart of doom.

We won't be destroyed by the 16 trillion dollar debt. We will be destroyed by the hyperinflation resulting from the massive expansion to the money supply. Once it costs a billion or so for a loaf of bread, they'll pay off the debt.

Only a moron, an intellectually bankrupt progressive stooge, or Paul Krugman could support this madness. That which they would never do to their own families, they impose upon us with the force of law. I can not, in good conscience, stand silent while the most magnificent society ever seen on the face of the Earth is intentionally sabotaged from within.


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Top 10 Organizations Slashing Workers And Hours Thanks to Obamacare

Those greedy capitalists! The nerve of them trying to survive a brutal economy and a one-size-fits-all, government-mandated health insurance program!

As employers and businesses prepare for Obamacare’s sweeping changes and mandates to begin in 2014, many are already laying off some of their employees... Here are [just] 10 examples of job loss due in whole or part to Obamacare and its consequences:

Medical Device Tax

  1. 1,000 jobs lost:Stryker Corporation Confirms Obamacare Layoffs.”
  2. 275 jobs lost:Medical Device Tax Blamed for Welch Allyn Layoffs.”
  3. 100 jobs lost:Latest Obamacare Casualty: 100 Workers at Smith and Nephew.”

The 2.3 percent excise tax on the sale of medical devices, one of the 18 tax hikes in Obamacare, is estimated to cost the industry over $29 billion between 2013 and 2022. Many employers in the industry are compensating for the tax hike by reducing their labor costs.

Medicare Payment Cuts

  1. 950 jobs lost:Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Reengineers Cost Structure, Eliminate Positions.”
  2. Up to 400 jobs lost:Orlando Health to Cut Record Number of Jobs to Save Money.”
  3. 52 Jobs lost:Delaware Hospice Lays Off 52 Workers amid Federal Changes.”
  4. 58 jobs lost:Hospital Layoffs and the Affordable Hea[l]th Care Act.”

Obamacare reduces Medicare spending by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022, with a majority of the payment reductions hitting Medicare Part A providers, which includes hospitals, hospices, skilled nursing facilities, and nursing homes. As these providers are trying to do more with less federal reimbursement, they are laying off their employees to cut down costs.

If Obamacare’s rates remain law, the Medicare trustees predict, “the lower Medicare payment rates would result in negative total facility margins for an estimated 15 percent of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies by 2019, and this percentage would reach roughly 25 percent in 2030 and 40 percent by 2050.” The payment cuts are simply not sustainable.

Employer Mandate

  1. At least 7,386 full-time jobs turned part-time:State Grapples with Insurance Rules for Part-Time Workers.”
  2. 400 full-time jobs turned part-time:Health Care Law Brings Double Dose of Trouble for CCAC Part-Time Profs.”
  3. 300 full-time jobs turned part-time:Wendy’s Franchisee Slashes Employee Hours to Sidestep Obamacare.”

Obamacare’s employer mandate forces all employers with more than 50 full-time employees, defined as those who work at least 30 hours per week, to provide health insurance for employees or pay a $2,000 penalty for each employee after the first 30 workers. This creates an incentive for businesses to avoid both the penalty and cost of coverage by hiring part-time employees instead of full-time employees... This affects a wide range of American workers, from restaurant employees and college adjunct professors to state government workers


Remember: the real Obamacare regulations don't kick in until 2014.

We have not yet begun to suffer under this Soviet-style, authoritarian, and unconstitutional system of managing 16 percent of the entire U.S. economy.


EXCLUSIVE: Black Smoke smoke emerges from Senate chimney

Cub Reporter Biff Spackle emails us this photo, which he claims is a world exclusive.


To be perfectly frank, the photo might not depict the U.S. Senate, as Spackle has been known to drink around NCAA tourney time.


Shocker: Illinois settles pension fraud charge with SEC

I know, it's hard to believe that a state with the squeaky clean reputation of Illinois -- and its fabulous Democrat-slash-union monopoly on government -- would get caught up in something like this.

Illinois settled a fraud charge Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it misled investors with shoddy disclosure between 2005 and 2009 about the significant financial risks posed by its pension funding system.

The SEC's two-and-a-half-year probe into the state's pension disclosure concluded Monday with the announcement of a civil charge of fraud against Illinois for violating federal securities laws in its public pension disclosures in offering statements on $2.2 billion of general obligation bonds.

The state settled the charge by agreeing to a cease-and-desist order in which it neither admitted nor denied the order's findings. Illinois does not face any fines or penalties.

The order offers a stinging assessment of the state's past disclosure practices for failing to provide investors with material information about its pension funding system and the stress it posed to the state's fiscal condition.

The action Monday is the second taken by the SEC against a state. New Jersey entered a settlement order in 2010. "Municipal investors are no less entitled to truthful risk disclosures than other investors," said George S. Canellos, acting director of the agency's Division of Enforcement. "Time after time, Illinois failed to inform its bond investors about the risk to its financial condition posed by the structural underfunding of its pension system."

The state established a 50-year funding schedule in 1994 with payments based on a statutory formula, not an actuarially required contribution. The SEC found that the methodology structurally underfunded Illinois' pension obligations and backloaded the majority of pension contributions far into the future...

...Illinois faces a staggering $95 billion of unfunded liabilities for a funded ratio of just 40.4%, the worst among U.S. states...

Say, I've got an idea! Let's have the same jamokes who drove Illinois into bankruptcy run the federal government!


Hat tip: BadBlue Money News.

The Saddest Chart in America

I forget: is this going to be the third or fourth annual "Summer of Recovery"?

Record Dow Jones, record US debt ($16,701,846,937,879.74), and now, once more, record number of Americans on foodstamps. According to the USDA, an all time high of 47,791,966 Americans closed 2012 in possession of the highly desired Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, managed by who else but JPMorgan. And with a civilian non-institutional population of 244.4 million in December, this means that a record 19.56% of eligible Americans are on Foodstamps.

In December an additional 109,924 Americans became reliant on foodstamps for their poverty-level needs, bringing the total to 47.8 million.

Interesting, as well, that the Chase website has been inaccessible for much of the day, but its EBT (electronic benefits transfer, aka welfare) card portal is working jest fine, thanks.


To recap: the country is borrowing 42 cents of every dollar it spends, it has expanded food-stamp benefits to nearly 1 out of 5 residents (including millions of illegal aliens), and the only things the Obama administration can find to cut are White House tours and national defense.


Monday, March 11, 2013

The illustration that accompanies the dictionary definition of "Insanity"

It may be just a bit taller than Shaquille O'Neal but, unlike Shaq, this stack of Obamacare regulations is still growing.

The office of Senator Mitch McConnell, the GOP minority leader in the Senate, has sent out a shocking photo.


This is over 20,000 pages and measures 7′ 2.5″. These are all the Obamacare regulations published in the Federal Register up through last week. Then last Friday they added another 828 pages.

...And hidden in this giant stack of intrusive new regulations that seem to grow every month is a major job loss problem. Douglas Elmendort, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, said in February of 2011 that Obamacare could cost 800,000 jobs and the Federal Reserve has stated that Obamacare is the reason for “planned layoffs.”

On March 6, The Hill reported, “The Federal Reserve on Wednesday released an edition of its so-called ‘beige book,’ that said the 2010 healthcare law is being cited as a reason for layoffs and a slowdown in hiring.”

In fact, scores of employers are downsizing or moving full-time workers to part-time in order to avoid the one-size-fits-all, Rube Goldberg-style requirements of Obamacare.

The hubris of the far left Democrat Party is stunning: they believe that the billions of individual health care decisions made by Americans each year can be replaced with a centralized, Politburo-style bureaucracy headed up by a 15-person panel called "IPAB". Here's a cheat-sheet: they can't.

There's one major reason that the Soviet Union's economy imploded. Central planners thought they could effectively manage all of the billions of economic interactions necessary to grow, instead of having individuals exercise their own free will.

And like the old Soviet Union, Obamacare is destined to implode as surely as night follows day.


Hat tip: BadBlue 24-hour News.

Judge tells scale-model, would-be dictator Napoleon Bloomberg to take his soda ban and stuff it

Major kudos are due Judge Milton Tingling, who metaphorically pimp-slapped the height-challenged mayor of New York.

A state judge on Monday stopped Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration from banning the sale of large sugary drinks at New York City restaurants and other venues, a major defeat for a mayor who has made public-health initiatives a cornerstone of his tenure.

The city is "enjoined and permanently restrained from implementing or enforcing the new regulations," wrote New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling, blocking the rules one day before they would have taken effect. The city's chief counsel, Michael Cardozo, pledged to quickly appeal the ruling.

In halting the drink rules, Judge Tingling noted that the incoming sugary drink regulations were "fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences" that would be difficult to enforce with consistency "even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole."

...In his ruling, Judge Tingling found the Board of Health's mission is to protect New Yorkers by providing regulations that protect against diseases. Those powers, he argued, don't include the authority to "limit or ban a legal item under the guise of 'controlling chronic disease.' "

...Across New York City, restaurants, bars and movie theaters had already started bracing for the change... Brother Jimmy's BBQ, a chain with five locations in the city, had already ordered 1,000 new glasses for soft drinks at their five New York City locations. The restaurants serve soda in 24-oz. glasses, CEO Josh Lebowitz said earlier this month—8 oz. more than city's new rules.

Bloomturd must have had an inkling this decision was going to come down. On Sunday, visiting the little-known and lesser-watched CBS Sunday show -- which I believe is called Sunday Morning With Some Really Old Dude, if memory serves -- Bloomberg denied his ban was a ban.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg assured Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer that his soft-drink size restriction that goes into effect this week is just “portion control,” and not a ban...

He said that ... government “is reminding you what’s in your interest” as opposed to companies motivated by profits. He also told New Yorkers that “it’s totally your choice” how much soda you want to have, as long as they are willing to make multiple purchases of 16-ounce sodas.

Unfortunately for many businesses, the expensive changes to their business mandated by Mayor Mussolini had already taken their toll:

Monday is the last day New Yorkers will be able to buy super-sized sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters, sports venues and street carts in New York City.

The cola crackdown goes into effect on Tuesday. The new regulation puts a 16-ounce limit on sugary drinks and applies to both bottled and fountain drinks... establishments like Dunkin’ Donuts have posted colorful fliers explaining the complex rules surrounding coffee... For example, Lattes are exempt because they’re more than half milk and it’s OK for customers to fill their own cups of large coffee with all the sugar they want.

Starbucks announced it plans to continue offering 20 ounce venti-sized drinks because of the milk content. Like Dunkin’ Donuts, customers will also be able to add their own sugar to their coffee...

Worse still, Mini-Mayor had "plans to ambush stores with inspectors toting 17-ounce measuring cups":

Come Tuesday city inspectors will be armed with 17-ounce cups to police New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial new law banning large sodas and other sugary drinks.

The Health Department will begin implementing routine inspections to make sure eateries, including sit down restaurants and fast food chains, are not selling sugary beverages in servings larger than 16 ounces.

Those inspectors will have specially ordered measuring cups to help them enforce the new rule, Deputy Health Commissioner Daniel Kass said in an affidavit recently filed as part of the legal challenge to Bloomberg’s anti-big-soda policy.

Soft-drink size is the mayor's top priority at the same time that the public school system for which he is responsible has an unbelievable 80 percent illiteracy rate.

This man exhibits all the traits of a very sick individual and I sincerely hope he seeks professional help.


Saturday, March 09, 2013

For all the Democrat-Media whining about the Sequester, federal spending actually... higher this year than last

To illustrate just how sick the Democrat-Media complex has become, consider the following: ABC, CBS, NBC ("Cuts would hit vaccination, elderly meals, childcare"), and The New York Times ("Poor May Be Hit Particularly Hard") -- to name but a few -- all hyped the "devastating" Sequester cuts in the most hysterical terms imaginable.

Only, as it turns out, "year-to-date spending through five months of the government’s fiscal year is up by 2.7 percent":

With all the talk of sequstration and its supposed “austerity on autopilot” (as characterized at Voice of America — your tax dollars at work against you), it’s useful to look at what has really been happening with federal spending over the past six years, something the establishment press is very reluctant to do.

On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office released its February Monthly Budget Review ahead of the Treasury Department’s official report which will arrive early next week. It estimates that the federal government ran a one-month deficit of $205 billion. It also shows that year-to-date spending through five months of the government’s fiscal year is up by 2.7 percent, and is up even after adjustment for timing quirks...

The federal government has historically run deficits in February, but it’s useful to see how dramatically reported (and for 2013, estimated) February spending and deficits have risen in just the past six years, because it’s clear that the increase is almost entirely due to higher spending (all numbers are billions):

February 2007 — Spending, $240; Deficit, $120
February 2008 — Spending, $281; Deficit, $176
February 2009 — Spending, $281; Deficit, $193
February 2010 — Spending, $328; Deficit, $221
February 2011 — Spending, $333; Deficit, $223
February 2012 — Spending, $335; Deficit, $232
February 2013 (estimated) — Spending, $332; Deficit, $205

These days, the apparent definition of “austerity” is “trying to level off spending now that it’s almost 40% higher than it was just six years ago.” The press never, ever reports on how long-term spending has exploded, but instead assumes, as does the administration, that the current level of spending is the new normal, and that any attempt to reduce its growth trajectory will cause unspeakable hardship.

Any attempt at a real reduction in spending automatically considered “draconican,” even by Republicans like Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama.

As the great Investors Business Daily astutely points out, it is Barack Obama's policies that are hurting minorities and the poor, not any phony "Sequester" austerity.


Wednesday, March 06, 2013

It's different this time

They tell us that the Dow is at a record high even though the economy is a disaster. They tell us not to worry about rampant unemployment, the layoffs caused by Obamacare, and all of the new EPA regulations that are killing thousands of jobs each day. They tell us not to worry about all of the Fed's money-printing.

They tell us not to worry that the Dow is truly down by 50 percent if you price it in gold.


After all, it's different this time.



Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Emails confirm Obama is the first president in history who is out to hurt the American people as badly as possible

There is no other way to put it.

The Obama administration denied an appeal for flexibility in lessening the sequester’s effects, with an email this week appearing to show officials in Washington that because they already had promised the cuts would be devastating, they now have to follow through on that...

...In the email sent Monday by Charles Brown, an official with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Brown asked “if there was any latitude” in how to spread the sequester cuts across the region to lessen the impacts on fish inspections.

He said he was discouraged by officials in Washington, who gave him this reply: “We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be...”

While APHIS may be cutting back on food inspectors, it's still hiring bureaucrats.

As for the Department of Homeland Security, it is intentionally releasing dangerous predators onto the streets at the same time it is buying billions of rounds of ammunition and spending tens of millions for new uniforms.

Europe, Unemployment and Instability [Friedman]

Guest post by George Friedman, Founder and Chairman, Stratfor Research

The global financial crisis of 2008 has slowly yielded to a global unemployment crisis. This unemployment crisis will, fairly quickly, give way to a political crisis. The crisis involves all three of the major pillars of the global system -- Europe, China and the United States. The level of intensity differs, the political response differs and the relationship to the financial crisis differs. But there is a common element, which is that unemployment is increasingly replacing finance as the central problem of the financial system.

Europe is the focal point of this crisis. Last week Italy held elections, and the party that won the most votes -- with about a quarter of the total -- was a brand-new group called the Five Star Movement that is led by a professional comedian. Two things are of interest about this movement. First, one of its central pillars is the call for defaulting on a part of Italy's debt as the lesser of evils. The second is that Italy, with 11.2 percent unemployment, is far from the worst case of unemployment in the European Union. Nevertheless, Italy is breeding radical parties deeply opposed to the austerity policies currently in place.

The core debate in Europe has been how to solve the sovereign debt crisis and the resulting threat to Europe's banks. The issue was who would bear the burden of stabilizing the system. The argument that won the day, particularly among Europe's elites, was that what Europe needed was austerity, that government spending had to be dramatically restrained so that sovereign debt -- however restructured it might be -- would not default.

One of the consequences of austerity is recession. The economies of many European countries, especially those in the eurozone, are now contracting, since austerity obviously means that less money will be available to purchase goods and services. If the primary goal is to stabilize the financial system, it makes sense. But whether financial stability can remain the primary goal depends on a consensus involving broad sectors of society. When unemployment emerges, that consensus shifts and the focus shifts with it. When unemployment becomes intense, then the entire political system can shift. From my point of view, the Italian election was the first, but expected, tremor.

Monday, March 04, 2013

AETNA CEO: Prepare for Obamacare Premium "Rate Shock" With 100 Percent Increases Possible Next Year

I'm guessing the administration's infamous "Enemies List" just got bigger by one.

Aetna CEO Warns of Approaching Health Insurance ‘Premium Rate Shock’ in 2014 for Consumers and Others Under Accountable Care Act


Steep increases in insurance costs may leave patients with less money to cover deductibles and copayments for clinical laboratory tests

Next year, consumers and small businesses can expect what one health insurance CEO says will be, “Premium rate shock for 2014.” As this happens, clinical laboratories and pathology groups are likely to find it even more difficult to collect co-pays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket fees from patients who had medical laboratory tests performed.

The premium rate shock remark was made by no less than Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, Inc. (NYSE: AET). In his speech at an investor conference, he predicted premiums would rise by 20% to 50% next year before the government subsidies are applied. In some markets, rates could double, he added.

Aetna is not alone in seeking steep hikes in health insurance premiums. Blue Shield of California is seeking a rate increase of 12% to 20% for more than 300,000 individuals, The Los Angeles Times reported. These new rates would go into effect in March, the company said.

...For pathologists and clinical laboratory managers, such increases mean patients may have less money to cover deductibles and co-payments for medical laboratory tests. Labs would then need to invest more time and money in collecting these payments. Also, health premiums are likely to rise sharply for those clinical laboratories that offer health insurance in the small group market...

...No less an authority than Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, Inc., is predicting that consumers and employers alike will experience significant “premium rate shock for 2014” in the cost of health insurance and healthcare benefits. Financial analysts are pointing out that, along with the regular, expected annual increase in healthcare costs, mandates of the Accountable Care Act, which will take effect at the start of 2014, will further add to the costs of health insurance for many employers and consumers...

One reason insurance costs are rising is the requirement under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that older consumers can be charged no more than three times as much as the youngest consumers, said Robert Laszewski in his blog at Health Policy and Market... Laszewski predicts that individuals can expect a 30% to 40% increase in what they pay for health insurance. That cost includes premiums, deductibles, and copayments. He based this estimate on an informal survey of health insurers he conducted late last year.

...“But consumers who make less than 400% of poverty will have their premiums capped at a percentage of their income,” Laszewski observed. “So, anyone getting a subsidy will be insulated from the very highest premiums. Who will pick up the rest of the premium? Federal taxpayers... The formula spelled out in the ACA will increase the risk the federal government bears...

It is significant that two nationally recognized experts like Laszewski and Paul Mango are predicting significant—even dramatic—increases in what employers and consumers must pay for health insurance. To that must be added the higher deductibles, out-of-pocket and co-pay requirements that employers are instituting...

The clinical laboratory journal Dark Daily summarizes the effect on Obama's beloved "middle class", to wit: they're about to get boinked, hard.

It seems clear that “sticker shock” is about to hit many middle-class Americans. As a consequence, clinical laboratories should anticipate higher rates of bad debt from patients who are financially overwhelmed by all the increases in the cost of their healthcare.

As conservatives predicted, Obama, Pelosi and Reid all lied about Obamacare as they rammed it through Congress, sight unseen. Rates are going to skyrocket. Employers will drop coverage. Physicians will stop accepting Medicare patients. Insurance carriers will go bankrupt. Care, when you can find it, will be rationed. And the system is going to melt down, with the poor and seniors suffering most.

Obama lied -- and people will die. Obamacare is an Angel of Death hovering over the very fabric of this society.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Sunday, March 03, 2013

OBAMANOMICS 101: Four out of Five Americans aged 18 to 34 say economy makes it hard to afford a... car

Not a home. A car. Ain't Democrat policies grand?


It's indeed ironic that the millennials who overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama are going to be those devastated most by his policies in the years to come.


Hat tip: Jalopnik.

ONE CHART: Illustrating the Horrifying Depth of the Sequester Cuts

Oh, the humanity:


I'm no math wizard, but it sure looks like government spending continues increasing at a pretty good clip even with the dreaded Sequester.


Saturday, March 02, 2013

FREE CHEAT-SHEET: Do I qualify for the Obamacare mandate-tax-penalty surcharge fee?

The average American may be intimately familiar with Erin Andrews' awkward smooch with 50 Cent, but he or she has no freaking idea how painful the health care system will become under Obamacare.


Thanks, John Roberts!


Hat tip: Adapted from a chart found at Noisy Room.

AUDIT THE FED, INDEED: Revealed - JPMorgan Gold Vault Linked by Underground Tunnel to the Vault of the New York Fed

One of the most unconventional -- and effective -- financial reporters operating today is Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge. Among the first to call attention to Wall Street's HFT ("High Frequency Trading") crooks that give certain institutional investors guaranteed advantage over retail traders, Durden today has another blockbuster scoop.

When two weeks ago we exposed the heretofore secret location of JPM's London gold vault (located under the firm's massive L-shaped office complex at 60 Victoria Embankment) we thought: what about New York? After all, while London is the legacy financial capital of the "old world", it is New York that the biggest private wealth of the past century is concentrated, and it is also New York where the bulk of the hard assets backing the public money of the world's sovereigns are located, some 80 feet below ground level in the fifth sub-basement of the New York Fed, resting on the bedrock of Manhattan.

That the topic of the gold "held" by the New York Fed - historically considered the gold vault with the largest concentration of gold bars in the world - has become rather sensitive, in the aftermath of the Bundesbank's request to repatriate it... is an understatement. Yet in the aftermath of some of the revelations presented here, we believe quite a few other countries will follow in Germany's footsteps for one very simple reason: suddenly the question of whether their gold is located at 33 Liberty, or just adjacent to it, in what we have learned is the de facto largest gold vault in the world, located across the street 90 feet below 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, doesn't appear to have a clear answer...


[Although JPMorgan asked the CFTC to guard the vault's location from Freed of Information Act (FOIA) requests,] the FOIA request letter itself, while also being filed with a request for Confidential Treatment, never got it. As a result it was posted at this address. Ooops.

But a far bigger oops, is that on the first page of said declassified confidential FOIA app, in black ink, we get the missing piece:

In addition, the Exchanges are providing the Commission with the application summary of requirements for the JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A. facility located at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York, NY.

And so, despite the extended attempts at secrecy, we finally hit the proverbial goldmine vault...


...That's right, ladies and gentlemen, as a result of our cursory examination, we have learned that the world's largest private, and commercial, gold vault, that belonging once upon a time to Chase Manhattan, and now to JPMorgan Chase, is located, right across the street, and at the same level underground, resting just on top of the Manhattan bedrock, as the vault belonging to the New York Federal Reserve, which according to folklore is the official location of the biggest collection of sovereign, public gold in the world.

At this point we would hate to be self-referential, and point out what one of our own commentators noted on the topic of the Fed's vault a year ago, namely that:

Chase Plaza (now the Property of JPM) is linked to the facility via tunnel... I have seen it. The elevators on the Chase side are incredible. They could lift a tank.

... but we won't, and instead we will let readers make up their own mind why the the thousands of tons of sovereign gold in the possession of the New York Fed, have to be literally inches across, if not directly connected, to the largest private gold vault in the world.

We think readers can do a good enough job on their own.

Gentlemen, start your repatriations!


Hat tip: The invaluable BadBlue News Service.

Friday, March 01, 2013

SEQUESTER-GEDDON: Twitter Documents the End of Civilization

Heh:



OH, THE HUMANITY: One Chart Illustrates the Brutal, Savage, Monstrous Sequester Cuts

How can anyone survive these cuts to the very bone of the federal budget?

Sequestration, the set of automatic spending reductions set to hit on March 1, barely makes a dent in federal spending over the next decade. Much larger spending cuts are needed to rein in growing spending and debt and avoid a debt crisis. [Ed.: Gee, ya think?]


Federal spending is projected to grow from $3.6 trillion in 2013 to more than $6 trillion by 2023, a 69 percent increase without sequestration. Even with sequestration, federal spending would still grow by 67 percent. Sequestration barely even slows the growth in spending, let alone cuts any spending out of the overall budget.

Not to worry, though: according to Paul Ryan, the entire economy will have collapsed before 2023. No society can continue to borrow trillions per year, just as no family can borrow millions per year without having to present a plan to pay that money back. We call it a "budget" -- a term unfamiliar to the traitorous Democrat "leadership", which has failed to produce or pass a budget that is required by law since they took power in 2009.

In colloquial Spanish, sequester (secuestro) means to kidnap, to hostage, to ransom.

Which is fitting, as that is precisely what the President is doing. He is holding the American people hostage -- releasing dangerous prisoners, compromising national security -- in order to increase taxes and spending. He is, of course, addicted to taxes and spending; and only a serious intervention can stop him. In this case, shutting the government down for a few weeks could be the intervention we need.


Obamacare hits Maine like a Nor'easter: policyholders to see rate increases up to 47 percent today

Let me guess: it's Bush's fault:

Some policyholders could see 47 percent hike when health insurance rate increase kicks in March 1


About 7,000 Maine customers of Mega Life and Health Insurance Co. will be affected by a rate change set to take effect March 1... While some policyholders will see their health premium costs drop... others will be hit with rate hikes of up to 47 percent...

...Richard Barclay, 67, of Holden said he received a letter from the company last week stating that his wife’s individual policy would jump from $323 to $449 a month, a nearly 40 percent increase. He looked into a similar plan offered by Anthem, but it carried hefty costs for visiting medical providers outside the insurer’s network, he said.

Faced with paying the higher Mega rate for another 19 months, after which his wife will qualify for Medicare at age 65, Barclay said the couple may drop her coverage... “If there are no [health] issues come January, we’re probably going to go with no insurance,” he said.

The letter from Mega about his wife’s policy, a $7,500 deductible plan, cites rising “health care-related costs” as the reason for the rate increase, Barclay said.

...Mega ultimately will net an estimated profit margin of 3 percent, according to the insurance bureau.

Three percent profit margins. Those greedy SOBs.

Gee, what happened to:

"The average family will see their premiums go down by as much as $2,500 a year."

"If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."

"If you like your doctor, my plan won't prevent you from seeing your doctor."

All promises straight from the mouth of Obama. And all obvious lies. Every single one.

And now the progressives, the drones, and the other Leftist miscreants are mad at the health insurers, because they're trying to keep up with all of the mandated services from the federal government?

Friends, these are the tactics of a despot: set rules for industry that are impossible to meet, then demonize that industry when it inevitably fails to deliver affordable products and services. And then nationalize that industry.

We are headed for the dustbin of history, like Venezuela, like the Soviet Union, like Cuba, and half the people in this country still aren't seeing what's going on right before their eyes. Tyranny is coming.


Thursday, February 28, 2013

Take a Bite of the Pie

Michael Ramirez is the finest political cartoonist of this, and perhaps any, generation:


He is one of the few who can be said to regularly speak truth to power.