Majority of Whites, Plurality of Minorities Don't Support the ObamaCare Individual Mandate

In this age of "choice", not having one is what upsets people, except Obama and his supporters.

John Harwood, here, in Wednesday's "Obama To Wall Street: This Time Be Worried", indicates the president is aware of the polling data but doesn't really care that we don't like his law, which he doesn't seem to like much either because he's unilaterally and unlawfully delayed many parts of it:

On Obamacare, the president's most significant legislative accomplishment, Obama said that despite certain polls showing it was unpopular with specific segments of the population--namely white people--the law would ultimately be accepted by the population at large. Tenets of the bill are popular among "all races" the president said. "The majority of the people who will be helped by the ACA will be white," he said.

Rasmussen reports 55% of whites and 46% of minorities don't support the individual mandate:

Fifty-two percent (52%) of black voters agree that the government should require every American to buy or obtain health insurance. Fifty-five percent (55%) of whites and a plurality (46%) of other minority voters oppose that mandate.

Unprecedented Jobless Claims Under Obama: 10 Weeks Straight Below 300,000

Not-seasonally-adjusted first time claims for unemployment have come in below 300,000 for ten straight weeks from July 27th, averaging just 269,000 first time claims per week. Annualized that's just under 14 million. The lowest level actually achieved annually under Bush was 16.2 million.

For the first 29 weeks of 2013 the average weekly report was 354,000 first time claims, an annualized rate of 18.4 million.

Considering that this has been the longest, deepest unemployment recession in the post-war period, it is not surprising that such low levels should occur eventually. If it's really a fact that we've bottomed out, the numbers will have to hew close to 310,000 for a full year to come in at 16.1 million.

The report is here.

The Government is shut down. Healthcare.gov doesn't work, and neither does America. Please check back in January 2017.

Non-Essential Employee Of The Month

Obama Shuts Down Government, Wins Non-Essential Employee Of The Month Award

Andrew Malcolm for Investors.com, here:

What if an intransigent Obama forced a partial government shutdown, the 18th in recent decades? And what people noticed was that things actually seemed to run pretty well with nearly 900,000 "non-essential" federal workers furloughed from Obama's bloated workforce of 2.2 million? Why should American taxpayers pay for any non-essential workers? If we can do without nearly 900,000 "non-essential" personnel today with all their costly benefits and accruing pensions, why not tomorrow? And next week? And next year? Which is the smaller government argument that so many conservatives will make in advance of Nov. 4, 2014. Now just 399 days away.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell Used To Be "The Law Of The Land" Too, But That Didn't Stop Democrats From Trying To Repeal It

Rich Lowry in The New York Post, here:

Having done the deed, Democrats now expect Republicans to salute smartly, accept “the law of the land” and suggest minor improvements that Democrats will, in their wisdom, decide whether or not to adopt. In other words, they recommend the acquiescence of surrender. If this were a consistent principle rather than opportunistic advice, Democrats would have been content to leave “don’t ask, don’t tell” in place and never would have agitated to repeal the Bush tax cuts, out of deference to duly constituted policy and law. ...

[T]he law suffers from basic design flaws beyond the question of whether the Obama administration can get its software to work. It depends on young, healthy people buying insurance even as it reduces their incentive to do so; it encourages employers to dump workers off their current insurance; it suppresses full-time work, through the employer mandate; in 10 years, the law still leaves 30 million people uninsured.

The government shut down because it's a PC, not a Mac

5 Years After Saying "Sell" Jim Cramer Says "Sell"!

Almost 5 years to the day after going on national television the Monday after TARP was signed and recommending that people sell their stocks if they needed the money in five years, Jim Cramer again tells people to sell.

Hm. Must mean there's more upside.

Here. 

ObamaCare Will Force Millions More Into Medicaid, And DENY Them The Right To Buy Private Insurance

It will deny them because ObamaCare-compliant plans will simply be too expensive for them to afford, and those will be the only ones available. 

John Goodman tried to warn us over two years ago, here:

"While defenders of the new law have chattered endlessly about people who are uninsured because of pre-existing conditions (turns out there are only 12,500 of them) almost no one seems to have noticed that 16 million people are not only going to be forced into Medicaid, they are effectively going to be denied the right to buy any private insurance — whether or not they have a pre-existing condition."

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

But today it is coming true.

For example, in one county in Michigan an older, married, full-time worker with one child still in the home must make at least $19,530/year to get a tax credit to make the bargain basement Bronze plan monthly health insurance "affordable" for his family, but go below that threshold and he loses the subsidy entirely and ends up in Medicaid whether he likes it or not. That means he must make almost $9.39/hour, almost $2/hour above the Michigan minimum wage of $7.40/hour, or he's out of luck.

A single parent in the same situation must make no less than $15,510 to stay out of Medicaid and get the subsidy.

There were almost 61 million Americans making less than $20,000/year in 2011, and nearly 50 million making less than $15,000, meaning many of them will be forced into Medicaid under ObamaCare if they are not among the 70.4 million already in Medicaid in 2011, already 46.5% of all wage earners in the country that year.

Two kinds of insurance, ObamaCare and its crappier forerunner Medicaid, and one unhappy nation.

Michigan Healthcare Marketplace Opens, Tells Me To Wait, Then Tells Me It's Down

Good enough for government work.

Hey, I've got appendicitis here!

Total Public Debt Outstanding Kept At $16.738 Trillion By Treasury Dept. For Four Months!

I can't show you all of the data because the format is too long for me to capture it all in a single screen shot.

All of June, all of July, all of August, and now all of September at $16.738 trillion, despite the fact that federal revenues are estimated to be running at $226 billion per month in fiscal 2013.

See for yourself here.

Angela Merkel Is More Attractive Than You Think

Maybe A Guy Who Can't Count Shouldn't Be Messing With Your Health Insurance

You're once, twice, three times a . . . red diaper doper baby.

Most Of The Free-Rider Problem Is An EMTALA Problem, Not A General Healthcare Problem

Maybe a guy who can't count shouldn't mess with your health insurance.

One good estimate of the cost of uncompensated hospital and doctor care in 2008 was just $43 billion, or 5.7% of a hospital care economy of $750 billion that year. But total spending on health care is much higher than that. For example, for 2011 the total size of the healthcare economy has been estimated at $2.7 trillion.

Consistent with that, Megan McArdle recently cites an Urban Institute estimate here for the following year, 2009, showing costs of all uncompensated care, not just for hospitals and doctors, at $62 billion, saying "this is a relatively small amount of overall health spending ... in the trillions."

She's right. $62 billion is just 2.3% of a $2.7 trillion healthcare economy.

The spread between those two numbers for 2008 and 2009 is $19 billion. Assuming a 4% increase in the costs of the hospital/doctor portion only from 2008 to 2009, the spread declines to $17 billion. That's the non-hospital side of the free-rider problem in 2009, less than 1% of all healthcare spending in 2011. Passing ObamaCare to fix that is like firing a bazooka to kill a gnat.

Clearly the bulk of the free-rider problem has been in the hospitals, which will continue to experience problems with uncompensated care despite Obama's Affordable Care Act.

That problem exists because of Ronald Reagan's 1986 signature on EMTALA, requiring hospitals to provide care regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. It drove up visits to emergency rooms over 26% in the first 15 years, and uncompensated cost totals over 600% since 1983, when they were just $6 billion compared with over $45 billion today. Those costs have been paid by all of us over time in a variety of ways, not the least of which have been increased healthcare insurance premiums, higher taxes, and longer waits in fewer available ERs.

While we're at it trying to overturn ObamaCare, EMTALA should be scrapped with it.

Tapering Delay Makes People Think It's Safe To Go Back In The Bond Water

Just because someone got killed at the beach last week by a great white shark is no reason not to go swimming here, right?

Bond mutual funds are witnessing net asset value increases in the wake of the Fed's decision announced on Wednesday, September 18th to delay tapering.

For example, VBISX a week ago closed at 10.51. Yesterday it closed at 10.53. VBIIX a week ago was 11.24. Yesterday it closed at 11.31. VBLTX a week ago closed at 12.51. Yesterday it closed at 12.64.

In other words, every part of the bond spectrum is up from 0.2% to 1.0% in just one week, even though none of the net asset value prices had yet fallen below their respective high end of normal prices.

Fools dare where angels fear to tread.

10-Year Treasury Rate Ends The Week At 2.64%

The 10-year US Treasury Rate ended the week at 2.64%, 43% below the mean level going back to 1871.

Despite the best efforts of the US Federal Reserve to suppress interest rates on behalf of other "investments" like housing and stocks, the current rate of the 10-year Treasury still bests the dividend yield of the S&P500 by 34%, which ended the week at 1.97%. From another perspective, it's even worse than that.

John Hussman noted this week here that based on the ratio of equity market value to national output, you might expect less than zero from the S&P500 going ten years out: 

Likewise, Buffett observed in 2001 that the ratio of equity market value to national output is “probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment.” On that front, the chart below [follow the link above] shows the value of nonfinancial corporate equities to GDP (imputed from March to the present based on changes in the S&P 500). On this measure, the likely prospective 10-year nominal total return of the S&P 500 lines up at somewhere less than zero. Suffice it to say that our estimates using both earnings and non-earnings based measures suggest a likely total return for the S&P 500 over the coming decade of less than 2.9% annually, essentially driven by dividend income, and implying an S&P 500 that is roughly unchanged a decade from now – though undoubtedly comprising a volatile set of market cycles on that course to nowhere.

In other words, it's possible stocks could return absolutely nothing over the next decade, or just barely beat bonds by less than 10% based on the current 10-year Treasury rate. For sleeping soundly at night, the choice is easy.

The 10-year Treasury rate has backed off about 10% since Ben Bernanke reversed himself on tapering bond purchases this month, seeing how it was knocking on the door of three.

Normalization of the 10-year yield would cost the US government dearly, jacking up interest expense costs over time which are paid from current tax revenues, by nearly double. In the last four years under Obama, interest payments on the debt have averaged $403 billion annually. Increasing those payments 43% would add another $173 billion to budgetary requirements, again, not all at once but over time.

Seymour Hersh, For The Ages: "Our Job Is To Find Out Ourselves"

Here, in the UK Guardian:

"Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

Talmudic Asset Allocation Strategy

A third in land, a third in business, a third in reserve. (h/t Mebane Faber)

"And Rebbe Yitzchak said, A person should always divide his money into three: one third in land, one third in commerce, and one third at hand."

-- Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 42a (quoted here)

Defeated Bush 41, Still Compromising With The Victors: Signs As Witness To Lesbian Marriage

Seen here.

The guy's never had a conservative bone in his body.

The Face The Dog Makes When Caught In A Sex Scandal . . .

and the face the cat makes:

h/t Chris

Total Credit Market Debt Has Grown Less Than 9% In The Last Three Years

The debt deflationary depression continues.

Total credit market debt owed (TCMDO), now unhelpfully renamed by the Federal Reserve "All Sectors; Credit Market Instruments; Liability" and perfectly Orwellian in doing away with both information-rich terms "debt" and "owed", has grown 8.76% from the recent April 2010 low to April 2013, about $4.64 trillion.

To put that in context, there have been episodes going back to 1949 when this measure has exploded 50% in three years' time so that doubling times for TCMDO have been as short as 6 years. The longest periods between doubling have been around 11 years long, and since 1949 have averaged about 8 years. The last time the metric doubled was in July 2007, at just under $50 trillion. At almost six years out from that date, we could well have been close to witnessing the number double again to $100 trillion by now based on past experience, or certainly something like half the way there, say to $70-$75 trillion. But here we are instead, at less than $57.6 trillion. It's like we hit a brick wall, the brick wall of a repossessed house most likely.

Say what you will against such a debt-based economy, its fundamental immorality, unsustainability and limits, but that's the economy we have, where the real money in the post-war has been in growth in borrowing, not in the money supply. From this perspective we have entered a long debt-deflationary depression, to get out of which borrowing will have to pick up to at least the point where TCMDO doubles at the extreme of the post-war experience, say by 2018, 11 years on from 2007.

Unfortunately for us, if the last three years are indicative of the new normal pattern of very slow debt expansion, it will take until about the year 2042 for TCMDO to double again to $100 trillion, another 29 years, an unprecedented slowdown in the American way of life.

This is what Chris Whalen meant when he warned in 2010 of decades of economic shrinkage ahead.

Q2 2013 GDP 2.5% Annualized In 3rd Estimate, Nearly 11% Lower Than In 2012

The full GDP report from the BEA is here.

Subdued growth in the last three quarterly reports, 0.1% for the last quarter of 2012, 1.1% in Q1 and now 2.5%, in part reflects on-going effects from Hurricane Sandy last November, little remarked in the press since then probably because of all the heat Obama got in 2011 for blaming exogenous events for poor GDP performance, but correctly forecast by Rosie in the instance.

Since about 25% of GDP is government spending at any given time, the real economy is piddling along at about 1.88%.

Face It, The Heritage Foundation Has Been And Remains Confused (By Liberalism)

As the photo at left demonstrates but conservatives want to ignore, including Erick Erickson here at Red State, a Heritage Foundation representative was present for the signing of RomneyCare in 2006 because Heritage invented the damn idea way back before HillaryCare raised its ugly head and Heritage was happy to see it made into law (so was Senator Ted Kennedy). That was just seven years ago, but now Heritage would just rather have you ignore all that.

Forcing people to sign up for health insurance at the point of a gun has its analog, of course, in forcing people in distant lands to adopt Western-style democracy, something we heard the heir of Republican conservatism, George Bush, incessantly preach: "The long-term solution is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal." (Whether they want it or not). To this day, as Molly Ball's article in The Atlantic points out here, "universal coverage" is still Heritage's position:

In my interviews with them, Heritage officials could recite chapter and verse on why Heritage turned against the individual mandate -- a turn, they claim, that occurred before Romney or Obama adopted the idea. “We still believe universal coverage is a good idea,” [Phillip] Truluck [VP and COO] said. But none of the four Heritage officials I interviewed could tell me offhand how the foundation proposes to reform health care and cover the uninsured if Obamacare is scrapped. (Later, an assistant followed up by emailing me links to Heritage papers on “putting patients first,” regulating the health-insurance market, and Medicare reform.)

The place is universally incoherent, and always has been. It has been against Drugs for Seniors as an expansion of big government, but supported the line-item veto, thus expanding the authority of the executive part of government, even as it once used to warn about the imperial presidency. Today it is famously against the current immigration amnesty plan but was pro-immigration for the longest time. It had a founder who has moved notably left liberal, but now it has a libertarian-friendly leader in Jim DeMint. It was for ObamaCare before it was against it. Something about the Heritage Foundation is really off for it to be the home of so many contradictory currents. If conservatism is the negation of ideology, as Russell Kirk taught us, Heritage knows nothing about it.

Maybe they should just rename the place The John F. Kerry Foundation and be done with it.

Time To Ram ObamaCare Up The Donkey's Ass . . . Again

Real Clear Markets Has JP Morgan Predicting Either 4% Up Or 31% Down By Year's End

So, it's either going to be a modest 4% rise in the S&P500 by the end of the year to 1775, or a 31% collapse to 1175. My dartboard could predict as much. If I were JP Morgan, I wouldn't be too happy.

Attention to detail . . . what separates the wheat from the chaff.

Healthcare Groundhog Day: Can You Say HMO-bamacare?

So says Scott Gottlieb, MD, for Real Clear Markets, here:

The new health plans offered in the Obamacare exchanges are going to be narrow network, no frills affairs. 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. But it doesn't end there. Pretty soon, these same bare bones health plans will also become standard fare in the commercial marketplace. You'll get them at work.

Sole Proprietorships 2009-2011

2009 22.7 million

2010 23.0 million

2011 23.4 million

The number of sole proprietorships is up 3.1% over the period. Total revenues have gone from $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion over the period, an increase of 8.3%. That's about $55k per sole proprietor in 2011.

If Only It Were So . . .

33% Increase In Dutch Euthanasia Misreported As 13%

The figure for 2011 was 3,136, meaning the 2012 increase to 4,188 is 33%, not 13% as reported here by The UK Telegraph.

Fire The Druncken Interns At Real Clear Markets!

Oops! JP Morgan Chief Strategist Predicts S&P500 To 1775, Real Clear Markets Says 1175!

Video here.

And you have to listen incredulously to nearly the whole thing with all its happy talk to confirm the headline's typo.

Update: Added the headline from the front page just so you understand my surprise.

Should Chief Justice John Roberts Have Recused Himself On ACA Because Of Epilepsy?

Should Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts have recused himself from the ObamaCare case because he has epilepsy? He had a seizure as early as 1993, and another in 2007.

You know, a guy with a pre-existing condition like that may have felt compelled to help other people with pre-existing conditions by upholding ObamaCare. His own condition may have interfered with his judgment on the merits of the Affordable Care Act.

Striking it down would have meant that that provision of the Act guaranteeing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions such as his would have gone down with it.

The Rise Of Patents From The 1980s Is Basically A New Protectionism, Reducing Innovation

So says Jeffrey Snider, here:

Contrary to popular belief, again assuming I am correct in interpreting it, patents are not about innovation at all. The rise in patent applications was not a proxy for a new wave of innovation, but an era of protectionism. A patent is a legal form of destroying competition. Ostensibly, that is assumed to be a cost to the system worth bearing because we largely believe that patents encourage innovation by giving the innovator some protection to reap the benefits of trying to innovate. But is that really the case? Would innovation suffer from competition at the earliest stages?

Markets develop because market demand exists, and I happen to believe that innovation would be better served with competition right from the start. But to the question at hand, the sharp rise in patent applications starting in the 1980's was likely far more related to reducing competition than signaling the continued advancement of technology revolution.

"In blow to immigration reform, House ‘gang of seven’ bill looks dead"

Story here.

Bond Mutual Fund Prices Remain Expensive, Returns Negative: Cash Has Been King

Bond mutual fund prices remain expensive by historical standards despite the recent carnage, while returns have been negative. For a safe haven, cash has been the place to be over the last year, such as it is.

For example, the short duration bond index fund from Vanguard, VBISX, finished the week at 10.51, 1.05% above the high end of normal (10.40). Vanguard reports returns down -0.27% for this fund in the last year.

The intermediate duration total bond index fund from Vanguard, VBMFX, a mixture of short, intermediate and long bonds, finished the week at 10.61, 1.04% above the high end of normal (10.50). Vanguard reports returns down -2.77% for this fund in the last year.

The pure intermediate duration bond index fund from Vanguard, VBIIX, finished the week at 11.24, 2.18% above the high end of normal (11.00). Vanguard reports returns down -3.66% for this fund in the last year.

Meanwhile the long duration bond index fund from Vanguard, VBLTX, finished the week at 12.51, 4.25% above the high end of normal (12.00). Vanguard reports returns down -10.01% for this fund in the last year.

Add in the insult of all items inflation of 1.5% to these miserable returns over the last year and cash was the place to be for safety even though it is also down because of inflation (gold, by the way, has fallen, per the London Fix, from 1758.50 on September 20th, 2012 to 1349.25 on September 20th, 2013, a decline of 23.3%).

Clearly such bond funds have farther to fall before they become attractive safe havens once again.

WaPo Finally Demotes The Leader Of The Banana Republic To Lecturer

When you lose The Washington Post, you've really lost it.

The comment at the left was seen here in the comments section to an article in The Washington Post which, among other things, omits Obama's use of the term "Banana Republic" in his address in Kansas today, but does finally demote him to the mere lecturer that he was at the University of Chicago:

Obama at times sought to belittle GOP lawmakers. “The most basic constitutional duty Congress has is to pass a budget,” said the president, a former constitutional law lecturer. “That’s Congress 101.”

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The demotion from "professor" is interesting in the light of the omission of "Banana Republic" since America pretty much qualifies as one by the definition in Wikipedia if you remember that the bank and automobile maker bailouts enriched private enterprise by socializing the losses on the backs of the taxpayers:

In economics, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by a collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, in which the profit derived from the private exploitation of public lands is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are a public responsibility. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country, and tends to cause the national currency to become devalued paper-money, rendering the country ineligible for international development-credit. Such government by thieves is a kleptocracy; such a kleptocratic government is manipulated by foreign (corporate) interests, and functions mostly as ceremonial government that is unaccountable to its nation. The national legislature is, in effect, for sale, influential government employees illegitimately exploit their posts for personal gain (by embezzlement, fraud, bribery, etc.), and the resulting government budget deficit is repaid by the country's working people who earn wages rather than making profits.

Better, apparently, to deflate his credentials than face his fascism.

Economic Stress: Middle Class Can't Eat Out On Friday Night . . .

. . . neither at Red Lobster nor at Olive Garden:

"Outside Darden's niche in casual dining, limited-service eateries that don't require tipping are gaining ground."

Read more, here.

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

Tonight's menu at your blogger's home? Baked Steelhead lemon pepper trout filet, Jasmine rice, and steamed broccoli with butter. Serves three tonight for $10.

Nancy Pelosi Doin' The Mussolini

The World Has Learned Nothing Since The Crisis: Global Public Debt Is Up 63% 2008-2013

2008 global public debt $32 trillion

Global public debt, the amount owed by the world's governments, has risen by almost $20 trillion in the five years since the panic of 2008, an increase of nearly 63%.

Note the main offenders, none of whom has been practicing austerity in any sense of the term: America, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, The UK, Europe, India, China, Japan and Australia. Spendthrifts all.

See the data and charts, here.

2013 global public debt $52 trillion

None of this is ever going to be paid back. Chaos awaits.

Jobless Claims Plunge Again To A New Record Low Under Obama: 8 Weeks Under 300,000

Not-seasonally-adjusted first time claims for unemployment now average another new all-time low in the last four weeks under Obama, also marking the eighth week in a row below 300,000.

Over the last four weeks, jobless claims have averaged just 262,000 weekly, handily beating last week's old record 4-week average low of 273,000.

Over the last eight weeks, jobless claims have now averaged an astonishing 273,000 weekly.

Annualized these average levels would fall into the range of 13.6 million to 14.2 million per year. The best actual performance under Bush was 16.2 million per year, also not-seasonally-adjusted. So these are excellent numbers indeed, if they can keep them up. The difference, however, is that under Bush the low levels of claims occurred simultaneously with high levels of employment.

By the way, the advance estimate of 228,399 in last week's report for September 7th merely bumps up this week to a revised 229,485. Supposedly reporting problems were blamed for the low level. It appears any missing numbers from last week appear in this week's advance estimate, which is up +42,262 week over week, which means this week's advance estimate is significantly higher than it really is.

Read this week's report here.

If It's A Number And It's On Rush Limbaugh, You Can't Trust It

Here is today's Rush Limbaugh basic K-8 math error, which keeps him and his audience from appreciating the fact that high gasoline prices have been pummeling the American people for one year longer than he says they have:

"The number of people losing their jobs is up. The number of jobs lost, all of this, is up. The one thing that none of these stories cover is another thing that's going on, and that is the price of gasoline has been over $3 a gallon for 20 months now.  Now, Obamacare is gonna raise everybody's health care costs.  Premiums are gonna skyrocket. The cost of food is way up.  Gasoline is over $3."

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

Actually the number of people losing their jobs is DOWN and down big in the last 2 months to a rate low enough to compete with George W. Bush, if it can be sustained. Usually part-time is not up significantly, and usually full-time is almost back to where it was on Election Day 2008. The real story there is the failure of full-time to recover to the 2006-2007 level.

But gas has been above $3 for 1000 consecutive days, according to The Wall Street Journal, not 600 days:

1000

------  = 33 months (not 20).

30

He read it, he flubbed it, boo hoo. And you people pay for that?

New Stock Market High Based On Nothing But ZI(R)P

The total stock market makes another new high today on mere words from the Federal Reserve.

So what does that have to do with fundamental analysis?

ZI(R)P.

By Not Tapering, Fed Devalues Your $ In One Day By Almost What It Takes A Year To Do

The dollar fell 1.2% today because the Fed decided not to taper bond purchases, while year over year the dollar is down 1.5% to 1.8% because of inflation, as reported yesterday by the Bureau of Lies and Statistics, here:

The all items [Consumer Price] index increased 1.5 percent over the last 12 months. The [core] index [Personal Consumption Expenditures] for all items less food and energy has risen 1.8 percent over the last year; the 12-month change has remained in the range of 1.6 percent to 2.3 percent since June of 2011.

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

By all means the Fed should have tapered, and increased interest rates to boot.

The war on the citizenry continues.

End the Fed.

(As far as broken clocks go, Ron Paul is correct twice every 24 hours).

Best American Rifleman Cover Ever

Leave Them There

Rush Limbaugh Can't Even Divide 1000 by 30

33: That's how many consecutive months gasoline has been above $3/gallon, but Rush just said 20 months.

Nipplehead.

The Wall Street Journal, yesterday, here:

"A millstone has reached a milestone. On Tuesday, the national U.S. average gasoline price chalked up its 1,000th consecutive day above $3 a gallon, according to the AAA. That’s a landmark most Americans couldn’t have dreamed of a decade ago: Pump prices didn’t break above the $2 level sustainably until 2005."

American Businesses Have Saved $2.8 Trillion In Last Four Years Due To ZIRP

In the form of lower borrowing costs, according to this story from Bloomberg:

America’s companies, from Apple Inc. (AAPL) to Verizon Communications Inc., are saving about $700 billion in interest payments with the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented stimulus. ...

Savings of about $700 billion represents the difference between what companies that have sold bonds since Sept. 17, 2009, are paying annually based on an average maturity of nine years for securities in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Corporate & High Yield Index, versus what they might have paid before the crisis.

After rising as high as 11.1 percent on Oct. 28, 2008, it wasn’t until Sept. 17, 2009 that yields fell below the pre-Lehman average of 6.14 percent, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows.

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Just another reason corporate profits after taxes have skyrocketed to another record seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $1.83 trillion for Q2 2013.

First Black President Brings Record High Poverty And Inequality As The New Normal

You talkin' to me?

Hm. Imagine that.

From the Associated Press story, here:

The nation's poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent last year despite America's slowly reviving economy, a discouraging lack of improvement for the record 46.5 million poor and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama's recovery plans.

More than 1 in 7 Americans were living in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million of 2011 and the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median income for the nation's households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve but only a bit, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent.

"We're in the doldrums, with high poverty and inequality as the new normal for the foreseeable future," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. "The fact we've seen no real recovery in employment and wages means we've just flatlined." ... 

"This lack of improvement in poverty is disappointing and discouraging," said John Iceland, a former Census Bureau chief of the poverty and health statistics branch who is now a Penn State sociology professor. "This lack of progress in poverty indicates that these small improvements in the economy are not yet being equally shared by all."

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in poverty, agreed.

"Everything's on hold, but at a bad level; poverty and income did not change much in 2012," he said. "So child poverty is still too high and family income is still too low. The recession may be over, but try to tell that to these struggling families. Don't expect things to change until the American economy begins to generate more jobs."

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

Way to go, Brownie!

Kook Fringe Republican Comes Out For Gun Control

David Frum, here.

Guns don't kill people, Canadians do.

Charlie Gasparino Gets It Right: America Lost Its AAA Because Of Debt, Not Debt Ceiling

Charles Gasparino for The New York Post, here:

In fact, economic growth is barely existent on [Obama's] watch; millions of Americans have stopped looking for work and the country lost its Triple-A bond rating because debt isn’t the settled matter Obama pretends it is.

5 Years Post-Lehman Bros. Bankruptcy, VTSMX Makes New All Time High

Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index Fund is up 163% since the March 2009 low of 16.43.

On the day Lehman Bros. failed in September 2008, VTSMX closed at 29.24 but proceeded to fall from there another 44% into 2009 despite the passage of TARP in early October 2008, and despite massive short-term discounted loans to just about the whole world by the US Federal Reserve Bank denominated in the trillions of dollars throughout the period.

From the 2007 high to September 15, 2008 this fund had already fallen from 37.80 or nearly 23%. The total decline of the fund from the 2007 high to the March 2009 low was nearly 57%.

A decline of that magnitude from today's new high would land the fund back at 18.81.

The Founders Didn't Believe In American Exceptionalism: They Sought To Be Equals In The World

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."