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

Sunday, December 01, 2013

The Fed Must Inflate to Prevent the System From Imploding

Guest post by Chris Martenson

The Fed is busy doing everything in its considerable power to get credit (that is, debt) growing again so that we can get back to what it considers to be “normal.”

But the problem is that the recent past was not normal. You may have already seen this next chart. It shows total debt in the U.S. as a percent of GDP:

Somewhere right around 1980, things really changed, and debt began climbing far faster than GDP. And that, right there, is the long and the short of why any attempt to continue the behavior that got us to this point is certain to fail.

It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever. However, that’s been the practice since 1980, and current politicians and Federal Reserve officials developed their opinions about “how the world works” during the 33-year period between 1980 and 2013.

Put bluntly, they want to get us back on that same track, and as soon as possible. The reason? Because every major power center, be that in D.C. or on Wall Street, tuned their thinking, systems, and sense of entitlement, during that period. And, frankly, a huge number of financial firms and political careers will melt away if and when that credit expansion finally stops. And stop it will; that’s just a mathematical certainty.

Total Credit Market Debt (TCMD) is a measure of all the various forms of debt in the U.S. That includes corporate, state, federal, and household borrowing. So student loans are in there, as are auto loans, mortgages, and municipal and federal debt. It’s pretty much everything debt-related. What it does not include, though, are any unfunded obligations, entitlements, or other types of liabilities. So the Social Security shortfalls are not in there, nor are the underfunded pensions at the state or corporate levels. TCMD is just debt, plain and simple.

As you can see in this next chart, since 1970, TCMD has been growing almost exponentially.

That tiny little wiggle happened in 2008-2009, and it apparently nearly brought down the entire global financial system. That little deviation was practically too much all on its own for the markets to handle.

Now debts are climbing again at a quite nice pace. That’s mainly due to the Fed monetizing U.S. federal debt just to keep things patched together. As an aside, based on this chart, we’d expect the Fed to not end their QE efforts until and unless households and corporations once more engage in robust borrowing. The system apparently needs borrowing to keep growing exponentially, or it risks collapse.

One could ask why credit can’t just keep growing. But there are many reasons to believe that the future will not resemble the past. Let’s start in 1980, when credit growth really took off. This period also happens to be the happy time that the Fed is trying (desperately) to recreate. Between 1980 and 2013, total credit grew by an astonishing 8 percent per year, compounded. I say “astonishing” because anything growing by 8 percent per year will fully double every 9 years. So let’s run the math experiment and ask what will happen if the Fed is successful and total credit grows for the next 30 years at exactly the same rate it did over the prior 30. That’s all. This is nothing fancy, and it is simply the same rate of growth that everybody got accustomed to while they were figuring out “how the world works.”

What happens to the current $57 trillion in TCMD as it advances by 8 percent per year for 30 years? It mushrooms into a silly number: $573 trillion. That is, an 8 percent growth paradigm gives us a 10-fold increase in total credit in just 30 years:

For perspective, the GDP of the entire globe was just $85 trillion in 2012. Even if we advance global GDP by some hefty number, like 4 percent per year for the next 30 years, under an 8 percent growth regime, U.S. credit would be twice as large as global GDP in 2043.

If that comparison didn’t do it for you, then just ask yourself: Why, exactly, would U.S. corporations, households, and government borrow more than $500 trillion over the next 30 years?

The total mortgage market is currently $10 trillion, so might the plan include developing an additional 50 more U.S. residential real estate markets?

So perhaps the situation moderates a bit, and instead of growing at 8 percent, credit market debt grows at just half that rate. So what happens if credit just grows by 4 percent per year? That gets us to $185 trillion, or another $128 trillion higher than today — a more than 3x increase. Again: for what will we borrow (only) $128 trillion for, over the next 30 years?

When I run these numbers, I am entirely confident that the rate of growth in debt between 1980 and 2013 will not be recreated between 2013 and 2043. But, I’ve been assuming that dollars remain valuable. If dollars were to lose 90 percent or more of their value (say, perhaps due to our central bank creating too many of them), then it’s entirely possible to achieve any sorts of fantastical numbers one wishes to see.

For the Fed to achieve anything even close to the historical rate of credit growth, the dollar will have to lose a lot of value. This may in fact be the Fed’s grand plan, and it’s entirely about keeping the financial system primed with sufficient new credit to prevent it from imploding.


Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News

THE AWESOME EFFICIENCY OF GOVERNMENT: White House Considered Scrapping $500MM Healthcare.gov Site

Yesterday @Democracy2014 tweeted this "screenshot of the 'fixed' healthcare.gov website two pages into it."


Now I'm no computer expert, but that doesn't appear to be what you would call, eh, a working website.

Donald Douglas, writing at American Power, highlights one of the most shocking revelations from today's ludicrous talk shows.

Folks are talking about Obama advisor David Plouffe's psycho statement that the ObamaCare website will be working well in 2017. Jeez, right after Obama leaves office. Talk about leaving a steaming pile behind for your successor. Twitchy has that, "‘In denial at this point’: David Plouffe says Obamacare will work ‘really well’ by 2017..."


Watch it [here]. But pay attention to the opening segment, where Stepanopoulos reports that, "at one point the White House considered scrapping the site and starting all over again." This is the big story of the day, and it's being underreported amid the David Plouffe clown show and the state-media Orwellianism on the other Sunday shows (Emanuel Ezekiel and Ezra Klein provided the WTF analysis team on "Meet the Press"). That the White House seriously considered shutting down Healthcare.gov is the monumental concession of Democrat incompetence and Republican clairvoyance. It's the equivalent of folding your cards, of packing up and going home. A complete and utter defeat for the administration's marquee policy initiative, foreign or domestic. ObamaCare is the president's brand, and it's a loss leader.

The New York Times has it buried deep down in this report:

WASHINGTON — As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama’s chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia.

HealthCare.gov, the $630 million online insurance marketplace, was a disaster after it went live on Oct. 1, with a roster of engineering repairs that would eventually swell to more than 600 items. The private contractors who built it were pointing fingers at one another. And inside the White House, after initially saying too much traffic was to blame, Mr. Obama’s closest confidants had few good answers...

Publicly, Mr. Obama had said “interest way exceeded expectations, and that’s the good news.” But in a meeting in Mr. McDonough’s office that first weekend after the start, someone asked the question on everyone’s mind: Should we just take the website down altogether for a time so it can be fixed?
Panic is the key word here. Read the full report at the Times. And note how much fun Althouse has with the story, "'Inside the West Wing, where junior researchers monitor Twitter and other social media, officials knew the political controversy had moved beyond the broken website'."

While the website is the centerpiece of ObamaCare (because its "back end" operations form the lynchpin of this Democrat-socialist health rationing system), it's just the tip of the iceberg for political recriminations, both current and forthcoming. Millions have lost their coverage on the individual health insurance market --- prompting utter fear and desperation among Congressional Democrats facing reelection next year --- but as we get deeper into the rollout next year, when insurance companies start notifying business of policy cancellations, and when employers start dumping tens of millions of workers onto the crappy cookie-cutter ClusterCare programs, all hell is indeed going to break loose, and George Will so accurately predicts.

A half a billion dollars of our money was thrown away on this P.O.S. website?

And they were ready to scrap it?

Who was fired? Who was disciplined?

And this was just the website: the actual Obamacare disaster hasn't even truly begun. What happens to the 129 million Americans who have lost or will lose their insurance?

Here's a helpful hint for John Boehner: you took 40 phony votes on repealing Obamacare.

Now take a real vote. Force Democrats in the House to make a stand.

Repeal this monstrosity and put as much pressure on the Senate Democrats as they can withstand.


Friday, November 29, 2013

DON'T LET THEM CHANGE THE SUBJECT: Seven Lies and Seven Liars of Obamacare

Guest post by Herman Cain

Seven lies from seven Democrats about ObamaCare, just so you don't forget the matter at hand.

When you're as desperate as Barack Obama is right now - with your approval ratings plunging and people no longer even finding you to be an honest person - you're willing to try almost anything to make people focus their minds on something else. Well, I should qualify: That's what you do if your priority is your own political viability. If you're a real leader, you man up and solve the problem. But we don't have a real leader. We have Barack Obama.

So he is desperately trying to change the subject from ObamaCare to just about anything else. As Dan wrote this morning, he sent John Kerry off to get a deal with Iran at any cost so the two of them could wave the piece of paper and pretend they had accomplished something. At the same time, they are once again pushing an amnesty bill that they hope will lock in illegals as loyal Democrat voters fix the immigration system.

But none of these are serious policy initiatives. Their purpose is simply to change the subject from ObamaCare, which is quickly turning into a political crisis of historical proportions for the Democratic Party. And we're not going to let them do it. We're not going to let them make you forget that Democrats lied through their teeth about letting you keep your policy, about your premiums going down, about letting you keep your doctor and your hospital, about what the whole thing would cost . . . I could go on, but you get the idea. So in the spirit of refreshing your memory, I herewith present seven lies from seven Democrats, at least one of whom thinks she should be the next president.

I think you know what to do with these:

1. Max Baucus
"If you like what you have you can keep it."

2. Harry Reid
"Those fortunate enough to have health insurance will be able to keep theirs."

3. Mark Begich
"If you have an insurance program or a health care policy you want of (inaudible), you keep it"

4. Mary Landrieu
“While those individuals who like the coverage they already have will be able to keep their current plan.  This is a very accurate description of this bill before us - The Patient Protection and Affordability Act.  It's very accurate."

5. Hillary Clinton
"You keep the insurance you have if you like it."

6. Nancy Pelosi
"If you like what you have and you want to keep it, you have the choice to do that."

7. Barack Obama
“If you like your health care plan you will be able to keep your health care plan.  Period."

Liars. Every single one of them. The only conceivable defense against this charge would be for them to say that they trusted Obama, and if that's what the did, they're fools. But I don't buy it. They're all liars, and that should never be forgotten, especially not at a time when the president is so desprately trying to change the subject to anything else.


Follow Herman Cain at CainTV.com

The Hoover Myth

Excerpted from Jonah Goldberg's invaluable The Goldberg File

My friend and AEI colleague Nick Schulz has done something I don't have the intestinal fortitude to do: Read John Judis's New Republic cover story on the economy. Apparently Judis believes he's cornered Mitt Romney on the Achilles heel of Romney's -- and the GOP's -- economic agenda. Judis confronted Romney and asked
him:

I want to ask you something about history. You know, when Herbert Hoover had to face a financial crisis and then unemployment, his strategy was to balance the budget and cut spending, and that made things worse. When Roosevelt came in, unemployment was twenty-five and went to fourteen percent by 1937. With deficits. Aren't you repeating the Hoover mistake?

Ah, the "Hoover Mistake," capitalized for your eternal reifying pleasure.

If you ever doubt that liberal historians have imbibed the partisan talking points of the New Deal, you need look no further than the maligned figure of Herbert Hoover. Judis's characterization is simply what "everyone knows" to be true about Hoover's response to the Depression of 1929. I say "the Depression" and not "the Great Depression" because it took FDR, the Tony the Tiger of liberalism, to make it Grrrrrrrrrrreaaat!

The problem is that almost everything "everybody knows" about Hoover is wrong. This creates a real challenge for conservatives and libertarians because while Hoover the man was very impressive, Hoover the Progressive Republican was, well, a Progressive Republican. As anyone who's read Liberal Fascism should remember, Hoover was all-in on Wilson's war socialism, serving as national food administrator; he considered "supper . . . one of the worst pieces of extravagance that we have in this country." He promulgated the Little American's Promise, a pledge card every child was expected to sign:

At table I'll not leave a scrap 
Of food upon my plate. 
And I'll not eat between meals but
For supper time I'll wait.
I make that promise that I'll do
My honest, earnest part
In helping my America
With all my loyal heart.
For kids who couldn't read yet, he offered them a nursery rhyme:
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!
The cook's using wheat where she ought to use corn
And terrible famine our country will sweep,
If the cooks and the housewives remain fast asleep!
Go wake them! Go wake them! It's now up to you!
Be a loyal American, Little Boy Blue!

Hoover was such a card-carrying Progressive, guess who considered running on his ticket as vice president in 1920? Wilson's toady at the Navy Department, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But none of that matters. Hoover was a crazy, heartless libertarian, don't you know anything?! I mean, just look at what a spendthrift he was during the Great Depression! Hoover mistake, Hoover mistake, Hoover mistake! I'm not listening to you!

Well, if you tell a certain breed of libertarian that Hoover was a budget-balancing fiscal tightwad, you'll get punched in the face, at least figuratively. Here's Tim Taylor:

Hoover's budget strategy over his term of office was not to balance the budget. The budget ran a small deficit of -.6% of GDP in 1931, followed by a much larger deficits of 4.0% of GDP in 1932 and 4.5% of GDP in fiscal year 1933 (which, as Judis points out at a different point in his discussion, started in June 1932 and was thus mostly completed before Roosevelt took office in 1933).

Let me say it clearly: Hoover didn't cut spending. In nominal terms, federal government spending went from $3.3 billion in 1930 to $4.6 billion in 1933. As Taylor notes, given the price deflation that came with the crash, the real federal outlays nearly tripled from 3.4 percent of GDP in 1930 to 8.0 percent of GDP in FY 1933.

In the spring of 1930, the New York Times said of Hoover's efforts, "No one in his place could have done more" and "very few of his predecessors could have done as much."

But, hey, maybe Hoover's reputation as a spendthrift of Jack Fowlerian proportions (Jack, as you should know, is the head suit here at NR; he'd object but he's busy searching for a 10 percent off at Arby's coupon I told him was in the corner of a round room) is derived from his effort to cast himself as a responsible steward of the public fisc. Er, no. Here's Hoover defending his record in his acceptance speech at the 1932 convention as he prepared to run for another
term:

Two courses were open to us. We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put that program in action. Our measures have repelled these attacks of fear and panic . . . We have used the credit of the Government to aid and protect our institutions, both public and private. We have provided methods and assurances that none suffer from hunger or cold amongst our people. We have instituted measures to assist our farmers and our homeowners. We have created vast agencies for employment.

Perhaps because I am so cynical, I'm no longer shocked that liberal historians and Democratic politicians still cling to the Hoover myth, but what is amazing to me is how liberal economists who swear they are empiricists and fact-finders propagate it as well. Paul Krugman is constantly invoking the Hoover myth. So is Brad DeLong, who has driven many decent students of economic history to the point of sputtering rage with his insistence that Hoover was a "liquidationist."

The Hoover myth endures for a simple reason -- it has to. Because otherwise the FDR myth will tip over.


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Thursday, November 28, 2013

After Undermining Efforts to De-fund Obamacare, GOP Establishment Ready to Jam Amnesty Down Our Throats

Courtesy of Mark Levin, we find that the Republican establishment is urgently trying to find ways to pass an amnesty bill.

Is immigration reform dead?

"No, immigration reform is going to happen," Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House Republican whip, told CBS's Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation."


"But it's going to happen in a step-by-step method. And I will tell you, the president came out and supported that the other day." ...

...The current immigration system is "broken" and "needs to be fixed," McCarthy said on Sunday. "Forty-two percent of everyone that's here illegally came here legally," he said, a reference to people who overstayed their visas. "We need to fix this system."

President Obama has said "there's no reason why we can't get this done before the end of the year."

What's driving Amnesty? Here's a hint: it starts with the letter M and ends with the letter Y. And has cash in the middle.

After decades of political quietism during which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expressed libertarian sentiments but mostly voted Democratic and funded Democratic candidates who shared their elite-class social and political views, Silicon Valley has finally mobilized—for immigration expansion. In April Mark Zuckerberg, with help from Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist John Doerr, launched FWD.us, a $25 million-and-counting lobbying group aimed at lawmakers in both political parties. FWD.us, unlike other pro-immigration groups, isn’t much interested in amnesty for illegal immigrants or easier border-crossing for lettuce-pickers. Its chief interest is in expanding the H-1B work visa program for “highly skilled” workers that’s mostly used by tech employers to hire temporary guest-workers from foreign countries, usually from East and South Asia….

...The anti-H-1B faction has a response to that: statistics. One of them, from an April 24 briefing paper produced by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, is that only one out of every two U.S. college graduates with a degree in engineering or computer and information science is hired into those fields, despite a doubling of the number of homegrown computer-science graduates between 1998 and 2004. Others argue that employers mostly don’t use H-1B workers to fill “best and brightest” jobs, but, rather, relatively low-paying routine programming positions, and that the most avid users of the visas are India-based outsourcing companies that use the visas to provide a few months of U.S. training for their employees, who then return to India.

Most damning of all is that, despite persistent claims of tech-worker shortages, programmer salaries overall have inched only slightly higher from what they were 20 years ago: from $60,000 a year to about $75,000 a year in 2012 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Engineers fare somewhat better: The average annual starting salary at top valley employers such as Google is about $100,000, with the median for experienced engineers at about $150,000...

Put simply, the oligarchs in Silicon Valley are spending millions lobbying Congress to import cheaper technology talent. They don't want to pay American wages, they want to pay Indian (or Chinese, or wherever) wages here in the states.

As for McCarthy, Cantor, Boehner, Karl Rove and the rest of the GOP Old Guard? They want some o' that Silicon Valley Cash!

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is, as usual, on top of the imminent debacle:

Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions wants wealthy CEOs to butt out of immigration policy.

“America is not an oligarchy… A Republic must answer to the people,” Sessions said today, in a direct response to President Barack Obama’s latest effort to get wealthy California CEOs to increase their support for his unpopular push for increased immigration... “Congressional leaders must forcefully reject the notion, evidently accepted by the president, that a small cadre of CEOs can tailor the nation’s entire immigration policy to suit their narrow interests..."

...Obama has been working with top CEOs since summer to push the Senate’s immigration expansion that would welcome 30 million immigrants, plus millions of temporary guest workers, over the next decade...

The push is being supported by numerous billionaires, including New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg... Since 2007, progressive and business groups have spent more than $1.5 billion on advocacy and lobbying to pass an immigration bill, despite massive unemployment, stalled salaries and negative polls. Other business groups have been pressured by the federal government and progressives to provide rhetorical support for the push.

So once again I ask Karl Rove:


I give thanks for many things in this great country, but the Republican crony capitalists ain't among them.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

100 MILLION "ANECDOTES": Cancer-Stricken Patients Lose Their Insurance Plans and Doctors Thanks to Obamacare

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

CancelCare: Dismissed as anecdotal exceptions, as many as 80 million people with employer health plans, like a Virginia cancer patient, now find their coverage being canceled because it doesn't comply with ObamaCare.

Debra Fishericks, who has been working for the past 10 years at Atkinson Realty in Virginia Beach, has been frantically scouring Healthcare.gov for a plan that fits her.

But she's finding, like so many others, that premiums and plans like the one she had are out of her price range.

Fishericks is battling kidney cancer, and while one of the benefits of ObamaCare was supposed to be that people with pre-existing conditions could not be denied insurance, those who already had it are losing it.

As with Fishericks, the policies they liked and helped to keep them alive have been decreed "substandard" and must be replaced with compliant and more expensive policies the Obama administration considers "better."

White House Uses Taxpayer Funds to Promote Goldman Sachs While Massively Expanding the Welfare State

FOOD STAMP EXPLOSION: The White House is now using taxpayer funds to promote economic illiteracy like this, which it shares with Common Core. The term SNAP refers to food stamps:


Now let's think this through.

1. The government takes $10 from you, which prevents you from spending it on something you want...

2. The government launders that $10 through the federal bureaucracy, which leaves roughly $5 for benefits...

3. The government takes the remaining $5 it hasn't wasted and sends it to those who may or may not need it...

Hold up. My first point is wrong. The government doesn't take $10 from you... it takes $6 from you and borrows the rest by issuing debt.


And that borrowing program is executed by a certain number of "Primary Dealers" -- enormous, powerful banks like Goldman Sachs -- that make billions managing the sale of U.S. debt.

Furthermore, the fraud endemic in the food stamp program is legendary. Billions upon billions of your money is stolen each year, much of it in plain view on sites like Craig's List.

Therefore, in order to believe the collectivist propagandists in the Obama White House, you'd have to ignore all of the fraud, ignore Goldman Sachs, ignore the borrowing, ignore all of the money laundered through the federal bureaucracy, ignore the money confiscated from you... and pretend all of that is more efficient than you spending your money freely on things that you need or want.

You'd have to be completely mad or completely ignorant to believe that -- and it would seem the White House thinks you're either one or the other.


Hat tip: G-Man.

Monday, November 25, 2013

DEMOCRAT DEADBEATS: Illinois Now a Paltry $9 Billion Behind on Payments to Suppliers

Hey, I've got an idea! Let's give the keys to the nation's economy to a bunch of mental midgets from Chicago!

...The backlog of bills waiting to be paid in the [Illinois] comptroller’s office has grown by $3 billion since the spring, when the state was flush with tax revenue... “As the numbers grow, so too do payment delays to vendors throughout the state,” said Brad Hahn, spokesman for Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka.

...At the start of April, the bill backlog in Topinka’s office stood at $8.5 billion. That number included bills on hand and the office’s best estimate of bills held in state agencies.

...In early April, Hahn said, vendors were waiting at least four months for payments from the state, although some bills took longer than that to be paid... A strong tax season this year allowed the office to “aggressively pay down bills” in April and May. By the end of May, the backlog was down to $5.8 billion and vendors were waiting a minimum of two months to be paid, half what they were waiting at the start of April.

That was, however, the high-water mark in the state’s efforts to pay bills on time. By the end of June, also the end of the state’s fiscal year, the backlog was sitting at $6.1 billion.

By Oct. 1, the backlog was up to $7.5 billion, including bills that hadn’t been turned in for payment. And as of late last week, the total was at $8.8 billion.

Hahn said the office believes the total will hit $9 billion by the end of December, exactly where Topinka predicted it would be last summer. It is the second year the backlog will sit at $9 billion at the end of the calendar year...

Hahn claims the state is "treading water", which would mean they're staying afloat.

Gee, didn't I just read that Illinois state pensions are also underfunded by roughly $100 billion?

Uh, yeah, I did.


Hat tip: BadBlue Money.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Secret Goal of the Obamacare Ruse

In drawing attention to Andrew C. McCarthy's seminal deconstruction of Obamacare, Robert Stacy McCain describes the program as "a river of lies, with headwaters in hell."

McCarthy and other Constitutionalists grasp what few in the Republican establishment seem to: Obamacare is a ruse.

Fraud can be so brazen it takes people’s breath away. But for a prosecutor tasked with proving a swindle — or what federal law describes as a “scheme to defraud” — the crucial thing is not so much the fraud. It is the scheme.

To be sure, it is the fraud — the individual false statements, sneaky omissions, and deceptive practices — that grabs our attention. As I’ve recounted in this space, President Obama repeatedly and emphatically vowed, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan, period.” The incontrovertible record — disclosures by the Obama administration in the Federal Register, representations by the Obama Justice Department in federal court — proves that Obama’s promises were systematically deceitful...

Still, to show that politicians lie is like pointing out that it gets dark at night. The lie, the fraud, does not tell us why they lied in this instance. The fraud does not tell us what the stakes are. To know that, we must understand the scheme — the design.

The point of showing that Obama is carrying out a massive scheme to defraud — one that certainly would be prosecuted if committed in the private sector — is not to agitate for a prosecution that is never going to happen. It is to demonstrate that there is logic to the lies. There is an objective that the fraud aims to achieve. The scheme is the framework within which the myriad deceptions are peddled. Once you understand the scheme, once you can put the lies in a rational context, you understand why fraud was the president’s only option — and why “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” barely scratches the surface of Obamacare’s deceit.


McCarthy notes that in 2003 Illinois state Senator and perennial back-bencher Barack Obama was plain-spoken about health care for all. He was a noted fan of single-payer, a completely centralized, Soviet-style form of health care, and there is no reason to doubt that was always his endgame.

That is the Obamacare scheme.

It is a Fabian plan to move an unwilling nation, rooted in free enterprise, into Washington-controlled, fully socialized medicine. As its tentacles spread over time, the scheme (a) pushes all Americans into government markets (a metastasizing blend of Medicare, Medicaid, and “exchanges” run by state and federal agencies); (b) dictates the content of the “private” insurance product; (c) sets the price; (d) micromanages the patient access, business practices, and fees of doctors; and (e) rations medical care. Concurrently, the scheme purposely sows a financing crisis into the system, designed to explode after Leviathan has so enveloped health care, and so decimated the private medical sector, that a British- or Canadian-style “free” system — formerly unthinkable for the United States — becomes the inexorable solution.


Single-payer was always Obama's goal and that is why he had to lie. As McCarthy notes, his are the tactics of Alinsky.

...He stressed pragmatism: a gradual campaign that kept the ultimate prize in sight. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” he told his hard-Left base at a 2007 SEIU health-care forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years or 20 years out.”

There’s that word: transition. It’s the route “change” takes to reach its final destination: “fundamental transformation.” If you’re paying attention, you’ll hear the word transition a lot in Obama’s health-care speeches. You’ll also find it in that Justice Department brief the administration no doubt wishes Eric Holder’s minions had edited more furtively:

The [Affordable Care Act’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. [Officials of the Department of Health and Human Services] have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013 [emphasis added].

Understand what this studiously unthreatening, gradualist gobbledygook means. A “group health plan” is employer-provided insurance; the phrase thus blithely refers to the “transition” of 156 million Americans who get health insurance for themselves and their families through work...


It is clear that well over 100 million Americans will lose their health insurance in pursuit of a Utopian fantasy that centralizes the entire health care industry into a labyrinth of government agencies. Legions of bureaucrats -- unelected, unaccountable and uncontrollable -- will mestastasize into the medical analogue of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Socialized medicine has been the Holy Grail for the progressive, Fabian socialists for 100 years. Now that it has been cemented into place -- with establishment Republicans unwilling or unable to fight it -- the death of the Republic is all but certain.

OH, MY: Even California Tells Obama to Pound Sand Over His Costly and Illegal Obamacare "Fix"

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

ObamaCare: California's health insurance exchange has decided not to allow insurance plans that do not meet the law's standards, rejecting the president's attempt to rewrite the law through executive action.

Recognizing the impracticality and illegality of President Obama's proposed "fix" for insurance policies canceled due to the Affordable Care Act's coverage mandates, the board of Covered California, the state's health insurance exchange, voted 5-0 against extending the 1 million California health care plans that were dropped under the law.

The Golden State follows several other blue states — including New York, Washington, Rhode Island and Minnesota — that announced they won't go along with the administration's proposed solution. State insurance commissioners make it clear that just in practical terms the fix is unworkable in the time available.

Reality bites, as they say, and the reality is insurance companies that altered insurance plans and computer software in a long, Herculean effort to comply with the law can't restore the status quo in weeks just because the president pulls an Emily Litella and says "never mind," without a constitutional or legal leg to stand on.

Obama's fix allegedly lets insurance companies continue selling the same individual health insurance plans they sold before the law, but only to those who currently own such policies, and only for another year.

"There's no way to make the federal law work without this transition to ACA-compliant plans," Covered California board member Susan Kennedy said. "Delaying the transition isn't going to help anyone; it just delays the problems. I actually think that it's going to make a bad situation worse if we complicate it further."

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Fraudulent Unemployment Numbers and 5 Other Huge Lies the Obama White House Is Telling You

Guest post by Michael Snyder


According to a whistleblower that has recently come forward, Census employees have been faking and manipulating U.S. employment numbers for years. In fact, it is being alleged that this manipulation was a significant reason for why the official unemployment rate dipped sharply just before the last presidential election.

What you are about to read is incredibly disturbing. The numbers that the American people depend upon to make important decisions are being faked. But should we be surprised by this? After all, Barack Obama has been caught telling dozens of major lies over the past five years. At this point it is incredible that there are any Americans that still trust anything that comes out of his mouth. And of course it is not just Obama that has been lying to us. Corruption and deception are rampant throughout the entire federal government, and this has been the case for years. Now that some light is being shed on this, hopefully the American people will respond with overwhelming outrage and disgust.

The whistleblower that I mentioned above has been speaking to John Crudele of the New York Post. In his new article entitled "Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report", he says that the huge decline in the unemployment rate in September 2012 was "manipulated"...

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
Two years earlier, the Census had actually caught an employee "fabricating data", but according to this whistleblower the corruption at the Census Bureau goes much deeper than that...

Friday, November 22, 2013

Conservatives Flee Marxist-Controlled Radicals at AARP

Guest post by Ryan Ekvall

MADISON — David Stella taking over AARP in Wisconsin might be very good for conservative seniors groups.

The appointment of Stella, former head of the state pension fund, who once signed a petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker, is a further lurch to the left for an organization that played an instrumental role in getting Obamacare passed.

“We made an offer to anyone who cut their AARP card in half that we’d give them a year’s free membership,” said Randy Lewis, spokesman for the American Seniors Association. “We had to stop it early. I had too many 55-gallon trash bags full of AARP cards cut in half.”


Older conservatives are fleeing AARP due to the organization’s support of Obamacare.

Phillip Owens, of Beloit, dumped his AARP membership after 20 years with the organization, objecting to his dues supporting liberal policies like Obamacare he didn’t agree with.

Owens joined and is now the state delegate for the Association of Mature American Citizens. AMAC now boasts more than 1 million members, including 18,500 members in Wisconsin alone, Owens said. He claims the organization has been adding about 60,000 new members a month.

“People are looking for an alternative,” he said. “AMAC listens to membership, they respond to membership. AARP’s membership had written them on a repeated basis and they continued to support Obamacare.”

And all that AARP junk mail?

“Their mail still comes and it goes right into the trash barrel,” said Owens, a retired veteran of the U.S. Army and Navy.

CHARTS: Public Views Obamacare Less Favorably Than Body Lice, Fish-Flavored Gum and Rosie O'Donnell

The public's view of Obamacare: dark and growing darker (click to explodify).

Hey, could someone drag John Boehner out of whatever bar he's in and have him organize a real vote to repeal Obamacare?

Oh -- and by all means, Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- please run on Obamacare.


Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News Engine.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

WE'RE IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Enrollment Data Entered Into Healthcare.gov Available in Google Search Results

Some rascal online called it IdentityTheft.gov and that assessment appears to have been validated by a top security research team. The Ohio firm TrustedSec has released a security assessment of Healthcare.gov and the results, even though they were cursory by modern standards, were very grim indeed.

David Kennedy, CEO of the firm, revealed that he withheld many of the vulnerabilities because they were so severe that publishing them could have meant the complete destruction of the site. His executive summary read simply, "based on what I can see … I would say the website is either hacked already or will be soon."

I perused the entire report (PDF) this evening. In short, the site is not only a complete catastrophe from an operational perspective, it's also a hacker's dream.

...The website cost an estimated $624 million and consists of over 500 million lines of code. With the number of lines of code, this is one of the most complex applications ever written in the history of applications. To put this in comparison, the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system, which is the latest, has an estimated 50 to 80 million lines of code and has over 25 years of development and maturity. It should be noted that with 80 million lines of code, the Windows operating system has had a significant amount of “exploits” that have hit their product line since it’s early existence...

Microsoft has one of the largest and most sophisticated security development, protection, and remediation processes today. This process has taken years to mature and places security at the forefront. With a website that is over 6 times more complex than the Microsoft operating system and developed in an extremely short period of time, there is and was no foreseeable way to build security into the website...

...there are clear indicators that even basic security was not built into the healthcare.gov website. TrustedSec is confident based on the exposures identified that the website has critical risks associated with it and security concerns should be remediated immediately...

...TrustedSec identified multiple severely critical exposures that it is not publishing publicly until they have been addressed.

...One of the more alarming trends is that the actual security testing of the website was deferred due to project delays. The website was launched without formal testing and with known risks around the security of the applications. Even further, there was little to no security built into the website or through the development. With the complexity of the website, this would indicate
that the website will suffer from significant security concerns for a long period of time unless significant action is taken to address the issues and flaws within it.

...It appears that individual user accounts and names are indexed via Google and can expose profile information of individuals that sign up on data.healthcare.gov.

Based on what I've seen, Healthcare.gov may be the single biggest magnet for identity thieves in world history.

And, come to think of it, that's another historic Obama first!


Wednesday, November 20, 2013

BIG F***IN' DEAL, INDEED: Only 100 million more Americans to lose their health insurance next year

I wasn't a math major in college, but canceling the insurance plans of 140 million Americans to make sure 9 million other Americans are covered seems rather, eh, counter-intuitive.

A new and independent analysis of ObamaCare warns of a ticking time bomb, predicting a second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall -- right before the mid-term elections.

The next round of cancellations and premium hikes is expected to hit employees, particularly of small businesses. While the administration has tried to downplay the cancellation notices hitting policyholders on the individual market by noting they represent a relatively small fraction of the population, the swath of people who will be affected by the shakeup in employer-sponsored coverage will be much broader.

...half to two-thirds of small businesses would have policies canceled or be compelled to send workers onto the ObamaCare exchanges. They predict up to 100 million small and large business policies could be canceled next year.

...Under the health care law, businesses with fewer than 50 workers do not have to provide health coverage. But if they do, the policies will still have to meet the benefit standards set by ObamaCare.

...For workers, their experience could mirror that of the 5 million or so on the individual market who already received cancellation notices because their plans did not meet new standards under the Affordable Care Act.

President Obama announced last week that insurance companies could offer out-of-compliance plans for another year. But that only means the cancellation notices will resume late next year.

...The business community has already been hit with another side effect from ObamaCare. Because the law will require businesses with more than 50 full-time workers to offer health coverage, there are reports that companies are shifting employees to part-time status to avoid hitting the threshold... A survey showed 31 percent of franchise businesses, and 12 percent of non-franchise businesses, have already reduced worker hours. It also showed 27 percent of franchise businesses, and 12 percent of non-franchise businesses, have replaced full-time workers with part-time employees.

I wonder what the Leni Riefenstahl of the Obama administration -- Taegan Goddard -- has to say about this?


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

The Biggest Money-Printing Exercise in World History

Guest post by Martin D. Weiss

The U.S. economy is now so addicted to the Fed’s monthly $85 billion injection of monetary stimulus … that just the thought of withdrawal is enough to cause violent market convulsions.

Consider, for example, the absurdity of this recent chain of events:

* The U.S. Labor Department announces a far better-than-expected report on new jobs …

* Investors fear that the good economic news may nudge the Fed a tad closer to cutting back its stimulus …

* They dump their investments by the truckload, and …

* Bond prices plunge the most in four months, driving interest rates skyward.

All in response to supposedly good news about the economy!

All because investors would rather see the economy sink than see the Fed cut back on its monthly megadose of money shot up their veins.

Or consider the long sequence of excuses Fed Chairman Bernanke has offered for smashing the 100-year Fed prohibition against running the money printing presses 24/7 …

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

EZRA KLEIN, CNN AND TECHCRUNCH PUNK'D: White House Falsified Unemployment Rate Before 2012 Election

A month before the 2012 presidential election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new unemployment numbers. They turned out to be a stunning surprise: the official U-3 unemployment rate dropped from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September.

At the time, former GE Chairman Jack Welch smelled a rat and said so publicly.

Welch’s tweet unleashed a firestorm of criticism with numerous accusations of him being a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ CNN attacked Welch’s hiring history claiming that Obama’s record on jobs trounced that of Welch. The site Tech Crunch deemed Welch a crazy, accusing him of inspiring a ‘web-wide Obama conspiracy’. In response to Welch’s statement, then Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said, “This is a methodology that’s been used for decades. And it is insulting when you hear people just cavalierly say that somehow we’re manipulating numbers.”


Barry Popik reminds us that the pencil-necked journoleftist named Ezra Klein was among the first to mock "jobbers" (i.e., "jobs birthers"):

The Daily Kos and Washington (DC) Post writer Ezra Klein came up with the term “jobber” on October 5, 2012—after an important BLS pre-election jobs report favored the current Democratic administration and Republicans questioned the numbers. “Jobber” follows similar names of “truther” (a 9-11-2001 conspiracy theorist), “birther” (a Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorist) and “deather” (an Osama bin Laden death conspiracy theorist).

Of course, as we recently found out, the White House falsified the unemployment numbers in one of their various criminal enterprises designed to steal the 2012 election.

Now that Welch (and everyone of us with an ounce of common sense) have been vindicated, how long will it take the unemployment denialists like Gregory Ferenstein, Felix Salmon, the freakish Austan Goolsbee, and the loathsome Ezra Klein to apologize?


That's a rhetorical question, of course. Religious extremists like these leftists aren't bound by facts, logic, reason and history. That's why they're fanatics, irrational kooks who have an insatiable desire to control others.

In a word, they're Democrats.


EXPLOSIVE CHART: There Have Been 40 Insurance Cancellations for Every Obamacare Sign-up

I describe this chart as explosive because I recommend wearing ear, eye and head protection if you show it to a liberal drone. Be wary of flying brain shrapnel. Send them the link, then tuck and roll.


And here are two more shots.


And a chaser.



Hat tip: Twitchy.

Monday, November 18, 2013

WHY, OF COURSE IT DOES: Obamacare Intended to Obliterate the Family Unit Once and For All

Writing at the invaluable Tatler, Bryan Preston describes the devastating effect that Obamacare will have on the family unit, but ascribes it more to ignorance than malice.

Is this an accident or was it by design? Jonathan V. Last reports on yet another hidden gem in Obamacare.

A married couple can get Obamacare subsidies if their income is less than 400 percent above the poverty line. But because the federal poverty level for married couples is less than double the level for individuals, a couple that lives together without getting married can make more money than a married couple, yet still get Obamacare subsidies.

The Atlantic reports that in practice, this means that a married couple in New York making more than a combined $62,040 gets no subsidies from Obamacare. But two people who live together without getting married? They can make up to a combined $91,920 and still get subsidies from the government.

On one hand, this may be accidental because, let’s face it, no one read Obamacare before passing it, so who know’s what’s in there?


Oh, Bryan, you naive, misguided youth.

Destroying the nuclear family is, like socialized medicine, one of the central tenets of Marxism.

In fact, chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto describes the destruction of the family in no uncertain terms:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie... The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty ...

...The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour...

The preamble to the above paragraphs begins with the phrase "Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!"

Dr. Preston, these people are hard-core, radical sixties retreads. They mean business.

And at the risk of being labeled a "Visigoth" by Rick Moran again, the sooner we recognize their true intentions the better.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

CRUZ: Watch Out America, 5 Million Canceled Policies Are Just the Beginning of Obamacare's Damage

The Obamacare rollout debacle has left many political losers in its wake but just a handful of winners. The losers are obvious: every Democrat politician and the entire establishment media complex look like, for lack of a better phrase, lying wankers.

Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) look like heroes, having warned repeatedly of the impending disaster and doing everything in their power to stop the onslaught of canceled policies. Had the RINO old guard, led by the feckless John McCain and Mitch McConnell, actually backed up their conservative betters, the American people might be having a very different kind of conversation today.

Earlier this week Cruz explained that Obamacare's worst damage is yet to come:

The thing about Obamacare, the five million who lost their health care right now, is just the beginning of this that. The next shoes that are going to be dropping, one of the next shoes that's going to be dropping is you're going to see more and more people realizing they can't keep their doctor. Texas Oncology, one the very best cancer centers in Texas has just announced it's not going to participate in Obamacare.

I've gotta tell you, I've got people who are close friends who are cancer survivors who are discovering now they can't go to their cancer doctor because Obamacare has denied them their doctor. That's the next shoe that's going to fall. After that, you're going to see premiums.

You know, the 100,000 people who have signed up, it's a sign of how this system isn't working. But the consequence of that is this spring, when the next set of premiums come out -- we've seen sticker shock already as premiums have gone up -- but the next waves of premiums is likely to go up dramatically.

And then the shoe to drop that I think is most damaging, potentially, is the 90-plus million people who have employer-provided health care. I cannot tell you how many HR directors at big companies have said they're just getting ready to dump their employees off of their health care and onto these exchanges.

The tradeoff that Obamacare was all about -- that the president was not honest with the American people about -- it was a trade off that was focused on providing insurance to part of the group of Americans that didn't have insurance. And that is a noble goal. But that trade off to provide insurance for tens of millions of people -- and CBO estimates that even if fully implemented, there will be 20 to 30 million Americans without insurance. But to provide insurance to those tens of millions of Americans -- the tradeoff Obamacare made -- is that we're going to screw up the insurance of the remaining couple 100 million people. I think that's a terrible trade off.

House Republicans have previously held more than 46 phony votes to repeal Obamacare.

Now is the time to pass a real repeal bill. Repeatedly, if necessary.

As the damage grows and the midterm elections near, the pressure will increase on endangered Democrats to eradicate Obamacare. In fact, when it came to Rep. Fred Upton's bogus "Keep Your Plan" bill, 39 Democrats defected and voted with the GOP.

Keep the pressure on.

The House must keep voting to repeal this outrageous, unconstitutional law. Keep the pressure on the Democrats. Squeeze them in the nutcracker. Squeeze them until they crack.


Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News.