Middle Class In Flames: All The Fed Has Done Is Help The Banks

Naked Capitalism supports Occupy Wall Street. Heh, heh. Does Jeep know?

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, here:

Oh, puhleeze. Robust recovery for who? The Fed not only threw staggering amounts of firepower at salvaging bank balance sheets, while showing no interest in rescuing ordinary Americans. It was also all-in on the Administration’s program to paper over the banks’ chain of title problems and their widespread servicing abuses, and didn’t bother to obtain any meaningful concessions or reforms, the most important of which would have been principal modifications, a remedy favored by investors as well as homeowners. The Fed has been all too happy to accept mission creep rather than speak up forcefully for the need for more fiscal stimulus.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The analysis is right, but the prescriptions are left: raising the minimum wage, breaking mortgage contracts, and spending money we do not have. Oh, puhleeze. It's Naked Liberalism.

But she's great on Obama's Mussolini-style corporatism, most recently here in response to The New Republic:

I’m actually a bit miffed that Konczal treats the “corporatism” appellation as the sole property of the right wing (in the style sheet of the Vichy Left, calling them “hysterics” is redundant but necessary for the rubes), since I have a prior claim. And what is particularly rich is that Konczal apparently regards the allusion to Mussolini to be unfair . . ..

Obamacare IS corporatist. Here we have the industries that are significant contributors to why the American medical system is so overpriced – the health insurers and Big Pharma – actually playing a major role in writing the legislation. And how is it not a sop to large companies to have the government require that citizens buy your product or else pay large tax penalties? Mr. Market certainly thought so, for the price of health insurer and drug company stocks jumped the day the ACA passed. And remember, the beneficiaries of Obamacare extend beyond the insurers and pharmaceutical makers. Hospitals, who increasingly engage in oligopoly pricing (most surgeries need to be done in hospitals), also come out even stronger because new requirements imposed on doctors’ practices will make it difficult for a retiring MD who practices medicine, as opposed to servicing the rich (e.g., cosmetic surgeons) to sell their business to anyone other than a hospital.

And the label fits in the banking arena like a glove. I’ve ... called both the Bush, but far more often the Obama bank-friendly policies “Mussolini-style corporatism” since 2008, and well before what [Mike] Konczal [of The New Republic] claims is the origin of this description, Tim Carney’s book Obamanomics, published November 30, 2009.

Flashback March 2010: Sen. Max Baucus Forgot To Mention Income Redistribution Was FROM The Middle Class, Not To It, Or Did He Just Lie Like Obama Did?

Reward for his service to the State: ambassadorship to China

Actually, ObamaCare, which is the handiwork of Sen. Max Baucus, will transfer income from the middle class to the lower class and wipe out the middle.

Here, March 25, 2010:

Sen. Max Baucus (D): "Too often, much of late, the last couple three years the mal-distribution of income in America is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America."

Meanwhile, income inequality has never been worse, reaching its all time high under just four years of Obama.

Flashback to HuffPo, here in 2012:

In the 2009-2010 period, a time of modest economic growth, the top 1 percent of U.S. earners captured 93 percent of all the income growth in the country.

Got that? Now compare it to how the mega-rich made out during the Bush upswing years of 2002 to 2007. During that time, the top 1 percent of earners captured just 65 percent of all the income growth.

The numbers don't lie. Income inequality has grown at a rate 4.75 TIMES faster under Obama compared to Bush (perfect equality is 0 on the scale, perfect inequality is 1). Inequality has never been higher than under Obama. The nomenklatura gets richer.

income inequality under 8 years of Bush up 0.4%

income inequality under 4 years of Obama up 1.9%

ObamaCare's Draconian Tax Increase On The Middle Class: Wisconsinite To Pay $7573 Tax On $5000 Of Extra Income

The middle class is the greatest enemy of the proletarian revolution.

Great example of ObamaCare's war on the middle class from The New York Times, here:

A 60-year-old living in Polk County, in northwestern Wisconsin, and earning $50,000 a year, for example, would have to spend more than 19 percent of his income, or $9,801 annually, to buy one of the cheapest plans available there. A person earning $45,000 would qualify for subsidies and would pay about 5 percent of his income, or $2,228, for an inexpensive plan.

----------------------------------------

Obama's message to America: Don't EARN too much, people, or it'll happen to you, too.

Gunney Highway's Assessment Of ObamaCare

What's your assessment of this ObamaCare, Gunney?

It's a clusterfuck, sir. Americans shouldn't be sitting on their asses filling out forms on a website that doesn't work.

Obama Alters His Own Law Of The Land Yet Again, John Fund Says For At Least The 14th Time

Here:

Yesterday the Obama administration suddenly moved to allow hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lost their insurance due to Obamacare to sign up for bare-bone “catastrophic” plans. It’s at least the 14th unilateral change to Obamacare that’s been made without consulting Congress.

Whether It's ObamaCare Or The Gay Mafia, Camille Paglia Detects Stalinism And Fascism

Lesbian Camille Paglia, quoted here:

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. ... This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have [sic] been lost by my own party. ... I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility. ... This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points. There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement. ... And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

Here's Paglia in October on ObamaCare:

"But the ObamaCare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion--okay?--into American culture."

Libertarians At Forbes Completely Misrepresent The Mortgage Interest Deduction

Here:

The mortgage interest deduction (MID) is the largest personal tax deduction on the books and is widely considered one of the most sacrosanct tax benefits in the country because it is seen as making homeownership more affordable for middle-class Americans. Our new Reason Foundation research suggests, though, that the average benefits from the MID are not enough to be the difference between renting and home owning for a household.

----------------------------------------------------------------

If there's a sacrosanct tax benefit in this country, which by the way benefits mostly upper income people who also pay most of the taxes, it's reduced rates of taxation on dividends and long term capital gains, which the Joint Committee on Taxation says costs the federal government $596 billion in lost revenue between 2012 and 2016. The mortgage interest deduction, by contrast, will cost the feds $364 billion. Leave it to Forbes not to mention that.

The mortgage interest deduction may or may not be "the largest personal" deduction, but in the big picture of revenue forfeited by the feds due to tax preferences, which is categorized as "tax loss expenditure", the mortgage interest deduction represents just 6.9% of the revenue lost out of the largest 21 line items in the JCT's report representing $5.25 trillion in tax loss expenditures for the period mentioned (here).

Preferential treatment of income from stocks isn't the biggest preference either (11.4%), but it is much bigger than the preference given to mortgage interest. But businesses do get the biggest preference. When employers provide healthcare contributions, health insurance and long term care insurance, they get to deduct all of that. Cost to the feds? A whopping $706.6 billion (13.5%). And that figure will only grow under ObamaCare.

And how about retirement plan contributions? Cost of excluding both defined benefit and defined contribution plans comes to $505.3 billion over the period (9.6%).

Compared to these, the mortgage interest deduction comes in a distant fourth (in fifth is the earned income tax credit at $319.7 billion).

The much-maligned charitable deduction, meanwhile, which was the original basis for the standard deduction in the tax code, at $172.4 billion represents just 3.3% of the lost $5.25 trillion in revenue from 2012 to 2016. It comes in fourteenth.

There's lots of things wrong with the world, but changing the home mortgage interest deduction isn't going to fix them. For libertarians to focus on it as they do should tell you there's more going on here than meets the eye: an ideological bias against home ownership because it limits "freedom". Millions beg to differ.

Largest Sums Of Federal Revenue Forfeited Because Of The Tax Code, Joint Committee On Taxation, 2012-2016

$706.6 billion: exclusion of employer contributions for healthcare, health insurance premiums and long term care insurance premiums.

$596.0 billion: reduced rates of taxation on dividends and long term capital gains.

$505.3 billion: net exclusion of pension contributions and earnings to defined benefit/contribution plans.

$364.0 billion: mortgage interest deduction.

$319.7 billion: earned income tax credit.

$305.0 billion: exclusion of Medicare Parts A&B benefits.

$289.4 billion: credit for children under 17.

$259.2 billion: deduction of nonbusiness state and local government income taxes, sales taxes and personal property taxes.

$239.7 billion: deferral of active income of controlled foreign corporations.

$236.1 billion: exclusion of capital gains at death.

$184.3 billion: subsidies for participation in healthcare exchanges.

$182.8 billion: exclusion of interest on public purpose state and local government bonds.

$175.8 billion: exclusion of benefits provided under cafeteria plans.

$172.4 billion: deduction for charitable contributions.

$172.1 billion: exclusion of untaxed Social Security and railroad retirement benefits.

$153.8 billion: exclusion of investment income on life insurance and annuity contracts.

$143.0 billion: property tax deduction.

$124.1 billion: exclusion of capital gains on the sale of a home.

$119.1 billion: credits for tuition for post-secondary education.

Greedy Democrats Have Used Medicaid Since 1993 To Take Your Assets, Now It Ramps Up Under ObamaCare

Signing up for Medicaid may be signing away everything you own.

From the story here:

The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1993 [under Bill and Hillary Clinton and a Democrat Congress] requires states to pursue Medicaid asset recovery from persons who receive benefits at age 55 or older. At first, this applied mainly to nursing home benefits, but at state option, it could now include any items or services provided under Medicaid. ... A potential for greatly expanded use of estate recovery was created in Obamacare, as pointed out in an anonymously authored, well-documented article distributed by economist Paul Craig Roberts. Obamacare increases the number of people eligible for Medicaid by dropping the asset test for enrollment (Page 162 of Obamacare). ... Medicaid, supposed to be a program to help the poor, has become a cash cow for multibillion-dollar, managed-care companies, who milk federal and state taxpayers. Expanding Medicaid to persons with modest assets will enable estate recovery to become a cash cow for states to milk the poor and the middle class.

American Killer Obama Shakes Hands With Cuban Killer Castro

The outrage is that Obama's still our president, not that he shook hands with a fellow murderer.

Story here.

Former MT Governor Democrat Brian Schweitzer Calls Obama A Corporatist

The story, here, is attracting quite a discussion in the comments section about how a lefty like Obama could possibly also be a fascist, since Schweitzer characterizes Obama's entire presidency as a move to the right.

The true believers are furious with Obama.

Over Two Times As Many Getting Stuck With Medicaid Vs. Insurance Under ObamaCare

"Coverage" does not equal care.

The Detroit News reports here:

Nationwide, 1.9 million people completed online applications in October and November, but just 365,000 selected an insurance plan. Those planning to buy on the health insurance marketplace — healthcare.gov — must enroll by Dec. 23 to have a policy in effect by Jan. 1. ... An additional 803,077 Americans were found eligible for Medicaid or the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program. That number includes 7,363 residents of Michigan, one of 25 states and the District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Wow, Jobless Claims Surge +146,241 To A Level Worse Than This Week Last Year: Sudden ObamaCare Effect?

The report is here.

This number is stunning. We haven't seen a level like this in 2013 except for once in July (410k) and three times way back in January to start the year.

Are companies letting people go in advance of ObamaCare kicking-in full-force about a year from now, to comply with the one-year look-back period?

Major market indices declined for a third straight day on the news, the DOW by 2/3rds of a percent.

Obama Lies About Everything, Even The Small Stuff Like His Illegal Alien Uncle Omar

From The Boston Herald, here:

[I]n 2011 ... media outlets asked the White House if the two men had ever met. The answer was no. ... However ... Uncle Omar testified in court that his nephew had stayed with him for three weeks when he was at Harvard Law School . . .. And what do you know, the president confirmed his uncle’s story.

Full Time Jobs Are Still 6.344 Million Below The July 2007 Peak

There are just 116.875 million usually full time employees in the US nearly 6.5 years since peaking above 123 million in July 2007.

Obama's laser-like focus vaporized full-time jobs, which plunged from 120 million a month before his election in 2008 to below 109 million one year later.

Unemployment falls to 7.0% in November, the 60th straight month at that level or higher

That's five years for those of you in Rio Linda.

Today's report from the BLS  shows unemployment falling to 7.0% from 7.3%, quite a drop, with an average level of job creation monthly in the last year rising to 195,000 in November or 2.34 million in the last year.

Part-time for economic reasons is down to 7.7 million, while for non-economic reasons is up not even 300,000 in the last year (seasonally adjusted). Obviously the purported ObamaCare effect is not showing up. An important reason why the government can't measure the asserted phenomenon is because people who are working fewer than 35 hours are already classified as part-time by the BLS. If they get reduced to 29 hours because of ObamaCare, SO WHAT? They are still part-time, just as they were working 30, 32 or 34 hours.

The real test for the part-timing of the nation is in average hours worked, which continue flat to rising modestly in the last year. There simply haven't been enough workers reduced in hours to impact this measure. Isolated industries may be heavily impacted, but overall workers are not  . . . at least not yet.

Still, unemployment under Obama sucks big time, now worse than under Reagan and therefore the worst record for a sixty month run in the post-war.

Reagan's average report, December 1980 to December 1985 (61 months): 8.3% unemployment.

Obama's average report, December 2008 to November 2013 (60 months): 8.7% unemployment.

Barack Obama's Unemployment Record Is Now Worse Than Reagan's

Having grown up in the 1960s and lived through the terrible employment situation which prevailed in this country off and on from 1975 arguably through 1996, Barack Obama now owns the dubious distinction of a worse unemployment record than even Ronald Reagan's, and that's saying something.

From the time of Reagan's election in November 1980 right on through December 1985, unemployment stayed at or above 7% for 61 straight months, with an average report of unemployment coming to 8.31%. The severity of it was highlighted in 1981 and 1982 by a string of ten months with unemployment in excess of 10%. It was a brutal time, especially for older workers with homes and families whose dreams for the future were arrested, and for young people who had to start their careers at the very bottom, just as many of their depression-era parents had had to do.

Hard as it may be to believe, unemployment under Barack Obama is now even worse than it was under Reagan. Obama's average report of unemployment over the last sixty months, none of which has been lower than 7%, the same as the case with Reagan but short of one month (we'll see if the 7% threshold is broken in the December figures come January), now stands at an incredible 8.67% even though there's been only one month, October 2009, at 10%. Combined with the housing, stock market and banking collapses, a bona fide if small depression with negative GDP in 2008 and 2009, and a much older, less adaptive population, the impact of unemployment on the psyche and fortunes of the nation this time around is understandably more acute.

From the long term perspective, unemployment took a systemic turn for the worse in America since the mid-1970s, shortly after we adopted the free trade mania which has done nothing except create a middle class abroad at the expense of the middle class at home. Our chief export has been the prosperity of the nation's vast middle, chiefly through housing which Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich helped Americans tap like an ATM to buy goods, mostly made abroad. Owner's equity in housing is half what it used to be in this country, squandered away by the squanderers, the Baby Boom.

If you want America to continue to exist, fix that by forcing people to save again, since no one seems to know how to do so for themselves, for the obvious reason. It doesn't really matter how we do it, but do it we must, or it's curtains.

(view the chart here at The Wall Street Journal)

Wow The ObamaCare Sham Guy

h/t Zero Hedge

White Hat Hacker Says Healthcare.gov Remains Insecure, Should Be Scrapped

Wow The ObamaCare Sham Guy

White hat hacker David Kennedy says despite Obama's claim that healthcare.gov has now been fixed, it's still not a secure website and your personal information is at risk.

"If you look at the report that was released, they had fixed 400 bugs. None of those were addressed on security. There haven't been any [security] fixes yet. You're trying to rush to keep the website—the front-end that we see everyday—up-and-running. Unfortunately when you do that and you don't do any testing around that, you introduce new exposures."

The complete story is here.

Turley Says Obama Is Becoming The Very Danger The Constitution Was Designed To Avoid

Here:

The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. ... [W]e have had the radical expansion of presidential powers under both President Bush and President Obama. We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority.