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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once Again, ObamaCare Is Simply The HMO-ization Of Healthcare All Over Again

And given the choice, people overwhelmingly pick Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) over Health Maintenance Organizations.

But under ObamaCare, you have no choice.

Flashback to Scott Gottlieb, here, in September:

Obamacare's exchange based plans will be a throwback to the 1990s style of restrictive HMOs. They will give you fewer choices of doctors and hospitals than the kinds of health plans currently sold in the private, commercial marketplace. The doctor networks that Obamacare plans use will resemble Medicaid plans.

Now comes this from The Wall Street Journal, here:

Nearly half of the ObamaCare plans are tightly managed HMOs, according to a McKinsey & Co. analysis. In states like California, Missouri and New Hampshire, many networks are 40% or 45% the size of those offered for normal commercial coverage. Patients face the prospect of waiting months and driving miles to clinics and county hospitals.

Narrow networks can be a useful cost-control tool, to the extent people choose to give up medical options in return for lower premiums. But that's rarely what people want when they're choosing with their own money. Some 82.5% of eHealth customers in 2012 purchased preferred provider organization plans (PPOs) that are structured so patients can visit virtually any physician.

The awful irony of this new ObamaCare health system is that all adults now enjoy mandated pediatric vision benefits, even if they don't have kids, but parents can't take their daughter to an expensive children's hospital if she gets really sick. Everybody gets "free" preventive checkups with no copays, but not treatment for a complex illness from specialists at an academic medical center.

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ObamaCare must be scrapped.

You're At Risk On Healthcare.gov, ObamaCare Website Should Be Scrapped, Say Hacker Experts

"When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time. It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it. We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself ... everything from hacking someone's computer so when you visit the website it actually tries to hack your computer back, all the way to being able to extract email addresses, users names--first name, last name--locations. When you look at the site itself, it could be really good. It could do really well. They're just not building the security into the site itself. Putting your information on there is definitely a risk."

-- David Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec

"There's not a plan to fix this that meets the sniff test of being reasonable."

-- Morgan Wright, CEO of Crowd Sourced Investigations

For the full story, go here.

Obama Approval Tanks With ObamaCare

Poll here.

5 Million Get Insurance Canceled, Obama Claims Over 100 Million Sign-Ups In First Month!

The red diaper doper baby in chief strikes again, in a conference call to supporters, quoted here:

Boasting of his administration's skill in encouraging taxpayers to buy health insurance policies through public marketplaces, he claimed that 'in the first month alone, we've seen more than 100 million Americans already successfully enroll in the new insurance plans.' ...

It's likely Obama meant to initially take credit for 100,000 success stories, rather than 100 million. But his mangling of the statistics put him off-track by a factor of 1,000.

And even the smaller number relies on a flexible definition of what counts, and what doesn't, as an Obamacare subscriber.

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Off by a factor of 1,000, which pretty much sums up everything about the last 5 years.

This is what you get when you put the son of Cheech and Chong in charge of the country. You know, intercontinental railroads, military corpse-men and three proud words ("made in the USA"). 

"The only way ObamaCare pain stops for Democrats is if they repeal it."

So says John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics, just now on the Larry Kudlow Radio Show.

CHRONICLES' Roman Catholic Tom Fleming Goes All-In For Obedience To The Tyranny

When you hitch your wagon to the grandmothers of Bolshevism, you always end up in the ditch:

Not content with telling wives to obey husbands, slave to obey masters, subjects to obey the rulers, Paul makes obedience a general rule: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no power but of God: the powers that are ordained of God.  Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive unto themselves damnation."  So much for the right of revolution, civil disobedience, and, I might add, the myth of the Underground Railroad. ... In everyday political terms, then, we have to perform our duties as subjects or citizens.  "Render therefore to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due; [TAX RESISTERS NEED NOT APPLY], custom to whom custom [SORRY, PAUL IS NO FREE-TRADER], fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.  By the way, the word for honor is good old Greek word time, that implies that different men have a worth or price that must be paid in terms of respect.

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None of that good ole' Protestant "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God" stuff for Tom Fleming, no siree.

It's nice to see that after all these years our disagreements about politics always end up being theological at their root.

Conservatives take note. The Roman Catholics now in control of most of the conservative movement are the reason America grows less and less free than it used to be. They will do nothing but continue to bow, but patriots will stand with the father of their country and refuse to kneel. 

Insurance Canceled By ObamaCare? Send A Copy Of The Letter To MyCancellation.com.

Hundreds already have.