Zero Hedge gets ObamaCare spending all wrong, again

The latest screed is here, claiming that healthcare spending is "the reason" behind the surge in Q3 GDP.

From the BEA here, healthcare spending contributed 0.52 points (line 17) to 5.0 GDP, about 10.4% of the total.

Zero Hedge wants to leave the impression there was no single bigger contributor to GDP, which isn't the case at all:

Equipment contributed 0.63 (line 30)

Durable goods 0.67 (line 4)

Pure consumption from defense spending 0.69 (line 55)

Export of goods 0.69 (line 47).

More importantly, it's not like we haven't spent 0.52 points of GDP on healthcare before.

We spent 0.51 in 4Q2011, 0.70 in 1Q2012, 0.48 in 4Q2013, and 0.45 in 2Q2014.

That last one is really important. It's the third estimate final figure of healthcare spending for the immediately preceding quarter, which can now be compared to the third estimate final figure for this one. The difference? Just 0.07 points, for an increase in healthcare spending of 15.5% on an annualized basis from 2Q to 3Q. As I've said, we've seen such increases before, quite apart from any new developments over ObamaCare.

The proper comparison, notably, is with 2Q, not with the previous estimate of healthcare's contribution to GDP for the current quarter, which, like everything else, was admittedly incomplete in the BEA's own words, as is always the case with the estimates before the third and final report.

And what that shows, last of all, is that GDP hasn't "surged" at all between 2Q and 3Q. The only thing which surged is the final revision based on the more complete data. The quarterly measure of GDP is up a very modest 0.40 points, from 4.6 to 5.0, or about 8.7% on the annualized basis. Healthcare's share of that increase to GDP is just 17.5%. 82.5% comes from other categories.

The worrisome thing is all kinds of people read and sometimes quote Zero Hedge: Rush Limbaugh, John Hussmann and Bill Gross come to mind. And Real Clear Markets often links to it, which is how I saw it.

Zero Hedge is embarrassing to read, kind of like pornography.

Pacifist Rama is the first caller to Steyn on Limbaugh today, and now to Savage!

Just now.

How did he do that? People claim they've been trying sometimes for decades to get through to these radio talkers, and Rama punks two of them in one day?

Look who's stupid now: Neither Rush Limbaugh nor his caller remember the chronology and politics of ObamaCare

It's been only four years and already the basic facts are forgotten.

The Supreme Court didn't even take the ObamaCare case until a year after the 2010 elections, in November of 2011, and ruled the mandate a constitutional tax on June 28, 2012. The Court had simply nothing to do with the 2010 landslide victory of the Republicans, but neither Rush's caller nor Rush remember that.

From today's transcript here:

CALLER:  Yes, Rush.  Thank you so much for taking my call.  I really appreciate it, and if you don't mind me taking the liberty, I'd like to give a shout out to James Marshall Timberlake, he's my first grandson born November 2nd.  But I thank you.  The reason I called is that I believe there's an American who has been vilified who really is a hero concerning Obamacare, and that is Chief Justice John Roberts.  Had he done what all of us expected him to do to find it unconstitutional, you would not have had the Republican landslide in 2010; you would not have had the Republican landslide in 2014; you would not be talking about Jonathan Gruber today. ...

RUSH:  I want to know where it started that the way we win is to have liberalism implemented so that everybody can learn how rotten it is.  When did that start?  "John Roberts did a great thing by letting this thing be proclaimed constitutional.  That way we've exposed these people for who they really are."  We didn't need this!  If Roberts had found this thing unconstitutional the 2010 elections would have been the same because Obama would have stayed the same.  He would have found a way to get this done some other way.  He wouldn't have just taken his chips and gone home and cried about it.

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Add two to Jonathan Gruber's pile of stupid American voters.

Rush Limbaugh keeps trying to expunge Heritage Foundation's guilt for ObamaCare mandate

In the first hour today, after which the first caller of the day almost hit the third rail when he pointed out that Jonathan Gruber may have his "stupid voters" but Rush Limbaugh has his "low information voters".

Nevermind the two leading Republican candidates for president in October 2011 agreed they got the idea from Heritage (transcript here).

ROMNEY: Actually, Newt, we got the idea of an individual mandate from you.

GINGRICH: That’s not true. You got it from the Heritage Foundation.

ROMNEY: Yes, we got it from you, and you got it from the Heritage Foundation and from you.

GINGRICH: Wait a second. What you just said is not true. You did not get that from me. You got it from the Heritage Foundation.

ROMNEY: And you never supported them?

GINGRICH: I agree with them, but I’m just saying, what you said to this audience just now plain wasn’t true.

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: OK. Let me ask, have you supported in the past an individual mandate?

GINGRICH: I absolutely did with the Heritage Foundation against Hillarycare.

ROMNEY: You did support an individual mandate?

ROMNEY: Oh, OK. That’s what I’m saying. We got the idea from you and the Heritage Foundation.

GINGRICH: OK. A little broader.

ROMNEY: OK.

Supremes let stand lower court rulings overturning state marriage laws, Rush Limbaugh misreports it

Rush Limbaugh opened the show today incorrectly saying the Supremes' ruling sent the matter back to the states when in fact allowing the lower court rulings to stand effectively validates the power of lower courts to strip the states of the power to define marriage for themselves. Someone in the office evidently told Rush he got it exactly backwards, and now he's been spending a few minutes correcting himself and beating a trail to put the focus on matters which are trivial by comparison, like the liberals' hypocrisy in ignoring Joe Biden's most recent offensive gaffes.

Combined with John Boehner's recent funding of openly gay GOP candidates, it is clear that real conservatives no longer have a home in the Republican Party, which is repudiating its former support for such laws in the states, and neither do they have a voice on the Rush Limbaugh radio program.

Conservatives who intend to vote for Republicans next month, or Democrats or libertarians for that matter, should have their heads examined, and their souls exorcised.

Rush Limbaugh says Rutgers survey which mentions Obama 5 times never mentions Obama while blaming Bush!

Ah . . .  no.

The survey never mentions Bush, mentions Obama 5 times, and two of those times are in questions from the actual survey. See for yourself here.

Rush Limbaugh transcript here . . . not just reliably getting it wrong, but lying about it. No wonder people are pessimistic about the future.

Dim bulb Rush Limbaugh doesn't know what an L.E.D. is

Transcript here.

Michael Savage is as lazy as Rush Limbaugh: keeps saying WWI started in 1917 with assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand

World War I started in 1914 with the assassination of the Duke, not 1917. 

Savage has started the show today saying 1917 after having said the same thing all day yesterday.

He's had plenty of time to check his facts and correct the record, but hasn't.

Rush Limbaugh whitewashes Republicans' central role in abolishing Glass-Steagall

Are we supposed to believe Rush Limbaugh doesn't know that three Republicans co-sponsored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 which overturned Glass-Steagall? How did their names get on there, by accident? And that both parties overwhelmingly voted for it in the end after 205 House Republicans and 53 Senate Republicans voted to get it to conference in the first place? Were it not for those Republicans the bill never would have seen the light of day, but here's Rush Limbaugh yesterday, boob extraordinaire, spreading the lies, misinformation and stupidity he's ranting against:

[I]f anybody eliminated regulations on the bank, it wasn't the Republicans. It was good old Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. Those are the two architects. You could even say that the repeal of Glass-Steagall is what led to the so-called financial crisis in 2008, and there's not a Republican fingerprint on it.  It's all Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. ... [T]his is just insane, the level of lying, the misinformation and the stupidity of people who accept it and buy it, because we have a corrupt media who is willing or unknowing, could well be they're ignorant, too, spreading all this drivel. ... [T]here's not one Republican fingerprint on that. They might have voted for it in the end, but the whole impetus for it was Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin.

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Amazing.

Drudge Is Just A Sensationalist Tabloid, Not In The Grocery Story Aisle But On The Internet

Everyone who reads the stories Drudge links to can perceive instantly that Drudge's headlines often are purely sensationalist and sometimes down right misleading, often in the extreme.

Today is a good example.

The story Drudge links to here via Reuters clearly states up front in the second paragraph that the US knew in advance of today's test. The test was not an exclamation point added at the end of the sentence about the Crimean invasion:

A U.S. official said the United States had received proper notification from Russia ahead of the test and that the initial notification pre-dated the crisis in Crimea. The Russian Defence Ministry could not be reached for comment.

Russia performs due diligence and informs us of these tests well in advance. Today's test was a good example. But Drudge plays it up differently nevertheless, as if Russia were sending us a message.

Wikileaks proved Russia has been warning the West about expanding NATO too closely to Russia's borders since at least 2008. Russia's action in Crimea should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has a sense of history or pays attention to the long record of Russian protests against European encroachments on its borders since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The sad part of this is that the radio talkers like Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and even Michael Savage take their lead from Drudge's headlines. At least Savage often brings a critical perspective to bear upon these stories, as does Ingraham to a lesser extent. But overall the tyranny of Drudge over the news cycle on the right is plain for anyone to see. Its memes become the fodder of the juggernaut of uninformed opinion to which we are all now hostage in the age of instant everything.

Rush Limbaugh, Confused About Conservatism, Talked Up Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED Just Last September

Here.

And also in May 2012 in "Atlas is Starting to Shrug" here, steering another caller to the book and drawing parallels to current members of the 1% abandoning the rest of us.

Committed conservatives understand the difference between conservatism and libertarianism and choose the former. Rush still thinks there's room for both under a big tent, which just shows he does not fully understand how libertarianism is inimical to conservatism.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, Maybe Mormons Stayed Home In 2012!

Alex Beam in "Did Mormons Want Romney To Win?" for The Boston Globe suggests Mormons weren't ready for a Mormon presidency, here:

“No one would ever come out and say it, but I suspect what you are thinking is probably true,” says Matthew Bowman, a Mormon professor of religion and author of “The Mormon People.” “The whole Romney campaign was a shock to the system for a church that generally wants to move very slowly and is used to hashing out things out [sic] internally over a long period of time.”

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Mormons in the US number about 6 million, but Kimberley Strassel has pointed out that Romney lost the election by fewer than 350,000 total votes in just four states: Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire. 

Rush Limbaugh Must Be High Again: Now Blames Tea Party For Staying Home In 2012

Up until now I haven't heard Rush Limbaugh blame the Tea Party specifically for staying home in 2012. It's always been the Republican "base" which he's been blaming for staying home, first 3 million of them, then 4 million. 

But now he's saying specifically that it's the Tea Party which stayed home in 2012, here on Friday:

CALLER: Hi, Rush, thanks for taking my call. Hey, I was just wondering if the Tea Party is so strong, what the hell happened to us in 2012?

RUSH: Stayed home.

CALLER: I would have walked over broken glass to vote against Obama.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Nothing could have kept me from it.

RUSH: Yeah, but four million of you didn't.

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Rush got this "stay home" meme in his head from some uncritical knee-jerk repetition of provisional reporting right after the election suggesting whites stayed home, based on admittedly incomplete exit polling data, which is kind of an irony since Rush used the same airtime on Friday to highlight how a false story about a country singer couldn't be erased no matter how hard she tried. Well this false story is well nigh impossible to erase from Rush's hard drive, and it's just getting worse now that he's singling out the Tea Party, which is probably more responsible for Romney's actual better performance than McCain's than people realize.

Within weeks of the election the whole idea that McCain got more Republican votes than Romney was decisively trashed by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal here and by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air here. Strassel points out the only losing state where McCain bested Romney was Ohio.

In point of fact, Strassel's numbers show Romney could have won the election but for 334,000 votes in just four states:

In the end, it was 334,000 votes—in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire—that separated Mr. Romney from the presidency.

In McCain's loss to Obama in 2008, the election similarly turned on just 1.4 million votes in the swing states. And for all the close states Romney lost to Obama in 2012, not just those four, the election turned on half that many in total.

So actually Romney did much better than McCain, it's just that Obama deployed his resources on the ground very effectively in a targeted manner, especially in Ohio, while Romney can't be said to have deployed much at all. Turning out your peeps in contested territories is key even if you lose those. Peeling off votes even in small numbers can increase the value of your turnout elsewhere in the same state, which is the point of campaigning on the ground in Hispanic and other minority strongholds, as Strassel points out. You don't have to win them, just weaken them.

Why Rush Limbaugh just keeps phoning it in on this issue is anyone's guess. But it is clear from much of what he says on the show that he increasingly relies on others to do his show prep for him.

Sympathetic critics of Rush Limbaugh are embarrassed for him, and Tea Partiers in particular can't be too happy. 

Estimating Retirements Added To Those "Not In Labor Force" 2009-2013

It is often forgotten that retired people are classified as not in the labor force. The measure of those "Not in labor force" has grown to a staggering all time high of 92.338 million, not-seasonally-adjusted, as of December 2013.

Between 2009 and 2013 alone, the figure has grown by 11.05 million, and people like Rush Limbaugh thump loudly about all these people "not working" because of the bad economy.

The question is, though, how many of these are retirements?

I say it's theoretically possible that all of them are.

Those turning 66 years of age each year from 2009-2013 were born between 1943 and 1947.

And here are births from 1943 to 1947:

3.1 million 1943

2.9 million 1944

2.9 million 1945

3.4 million 1946

3.8 million 1947.

How many of these survived to age 66?

The CDC publishes annually the life tables, the latest of which came out a few days ago for the year 2009. A person aged 63 in 2009 (born in 1946) was among the 86% who survived to 63, according to the tables. In the 2008 tables from a year ago, that same person at age 62 was among the 87% who survived to 62. In the 2007 tables at 61 he was among the 88% who survived to 61. Extrapolating forward to 2012, we will estimate that at 66 he was among the 83% who survived.

So for persons born earlier than 1946 we can estimate their survival rate as follows:

Born in 1943, retiring at 66 in 2009: 80% survive, or 2.48 million

Born in 1944, retiring at 66 in 2010: 81% survive, or 2.35 million

Born in 1945, retiring at 66 in 2011: 82% survive, or 2.38 million

Born in 1946, retiring at 66 in 2012: 83% survive, or 2.82 million

Born in 1947, retiring at 66 in 2013: 84% survive, or 3.19 million.

Total theoretically possible retirees: 13.22 million, 2.17 million more than actually left the labor force.

Obviously, not everyone retires at 66. Some keep working. And especially these days some keep working because they have to. The employment level of the 55 and over set has grown by 4.5 million over the period 2009-2013.

It appears to be the case, however, that an even larger number are deferring both Social Security benefits and work because they can afford to: Social Security reports that retired workers and their dependents receiving benefits grew only 5.6 million from the end of 2008 to the end of 2013.

Of the 11.05 million added to "not in labor force", I'd estimate at least 5.4 million are well off enough to forgo both work and Social Security until they reach age 70, and perhaps more than that if Social Security recipients who continue to work according to the rules are counted instead as part of the labor force.

Rush Limbaugh Today Totally Botches Income Quintiles On The Program

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The relevant passage is here:

Poverty is expressed as an income level. Most economists break down income in America to five brackets, called quintiles, and people move in and out of these. The top quintile, I think, is like a million plus, and that'd be the top 1% of 1%. I forgot what the breakdown is, but the poverty level, it's roughly, what, $14,000 for a family of four? It's around there. People move in and out of these all the time.

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

This is rich.

A quintile in this instance is one of any of the five groups of American households divided into those five groups based on how much money they make.

By definition, then, the top quintile is the richest 20% of households in America. So it's impossible for the top quintile to be "the top 1%", let alone "the top 1% of 1%".

As embarrassing as that is, Rush has absolutely no concept what it means to reach the top 20% of household income in this country.

The fact is it doesn't take all that much, and certainly nothing close to $1 million, hard as it may be to get there.

Currently the point in the middle of the top 20% of households by income is only about $181,905 per annum. That means about half the people in the top quintile make more than that, and about half make less. And interestingly enough, the middle of the richest 5% of households in this country isn't anywhere close to $1 million, either. The average household income of the top 5% is just $318,052. (For a good presentation of the data, see here.)

And Rush is equally out of touch about what it means to be poor. The federal definition for a family of four is about $23,500, not $14,000. The latter is about what it means for just one person to be poor, not four (see here).

Rush Limbaugh complains constantly about the sorry state of public education in this country. He even did so today in the same segment:

[L]ook at [President] Johnson's solutions. Education, job training, medical care, housing. That hasn't changed. The same weapons, the same language, the same way they tug at heartstrings. It's 1964, and they keep using the same lingo, obviously because it works. But look at how our education system's been since 1964 with them in charge.

Yep. Look at how it's been.

Rush is Exhibit A . . . the most popular radio host ever for a reason.