Sunday, December 22, 2013

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.

Friday, December 20, 2013

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


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."

Q3 2013 GDP Third Estimate At 4.1%, But Inventories Constitute 41% Of That





The BEA reports here:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in the third quarter of 2013 (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter), according to the "third" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the second quarter, real GDP increased 2.5 percent. The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the "second" estimate issued on December 5, 2103.  In the second estimate, the increase in real GDP was 3.6 percent (see "Revisions" on page 3).  With this third estimate for the third quarter, increases in personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and in nonresidential fixed investment were larger than previously estimated. ...  The change in real private inventories added 1.67 percentage points to the third-quarter change in real GDP, after adding 0.41 percentage point to the second-quarter change. Private businesses increased inventories $115.7 billion in the third quarter, following increases of $56.6 billion in the second quarter and $42.2 billion in the first.

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

That's a huge inventory number compared to the recent past.

Personal consumption expenditures, which in the second estimate came in at a paltry 1.4%, suddenly are revised up 0.6 to 2.0% in the third estimate, also contributing significantly to the up revision of GDP. In the second estimate it looked like the consumer was pulling back by over 20% from the second quarter. In the third estimate it now appears the consumer ramped it up by over 10% in Q3 compared to Q2, quite the reversal.

Someone wanted to go home early: Both reports in html and pdf say "December 5, 2103".

Hey. They're just numbers. Time for a beer. 

The Consumer Has Been Wiped Out By Food And Energy Inflation Since 2007

energy inflation up 7.75%
food inflation up 15%
average hourly earnings up 14.1%















Average hourly earnings for all employees are up 14.1% from November 2007 to November 2013, but energy inflation is up 7.75% and food inflation is up 15% over the same period.

You can't eat a cheaper iPhone.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Economic Stress Continues: Average US Car 11.4 Years Old In August, Another Record

1997 Olds LSS
The story was reported here:

The average age of vehicles on America's roads has reached an all-time high of 11.4 years, according to the market research firm Polk. And that average age is sure to keep climbing, the firm said. ...  In 2002, the average vehicle was 9.6 years old. In 1995, it was 8.4 years.

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

While cars are getting better and lasting longer, this may also be a picture of economic stagnation, and perhaps decline.

Deleveraging: Consumers Reduced Debt By Less Than 8% Between January 2008 and July 2012

And household debt is on the rise again since summer 2012, up now to just under $13.1 trillion.

Squawkers everywhere (here and here) are making a big deal of this, but I'm still not convinced. We're only talking $169 billion of borrowing in the last year, July on July.

16 million vehicle sales per year at $15,000 each is $240 billion. Presumably there are some good credit risks buying some of those new vehicles, as there always are. But with the average US car age at 11 years old in summer 2012 increasing to 11.4 years old in summer 2013, record highs, and projections expecting average age to increase still more years down the road, I'd say the very slight increase in indebtedness may have more to do with necessity playing out than with a fundamental return to healthy debt-fueled growth.

As I pointed out from a source in the earlier post on this subject, many more of the new car loans are subprime, higher loan to value to be able to afford the down payment, and longer term than they used to be. The quality of the increased indebtedness is nothing to be happy about, and tells a tale of continued economic stress, not of economic recovery.

Libertarians At Forbes Completely Misrepresent The Mortgage Interest Deduction


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.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Market Goes Irrational Whether The Fed Pumps, Stands Pat Or Tapers

Today the Fed announced a reduction of MBS and Treasury purchases of $10 billion, from $85 billion to $75 billion a month.

Usually when the Fed has announced things are still weak and that purchases will continue as planned, the market has rallied strongly. Same with announcements of new asset purchases.

Today the Fed announced the opposite, intending to scale back purchases, and the market rallied huge.

If you are looking for stupid pills at Walgreens, they're all out. Anyway that's what my broker said.

Vanguard Precious Metals And Mining Down Over 70% In Last 6 Years

click to enlarge
Ouch, and down 75% from the 2008 high.













John Hussman Is Right: High Valuations Since The Late 1990s Have Coincided With Smaller S&P500 Returns

Here's Hussman:

Yes, several reliable valuation measures have hovered at much higher levels since the late-1990’s than were generally seen historically. But that in itself is not evidence that these historically reliable valuation measures are “broken.” It matters that those high valuations have been associated with a period of more than 13 years now where the S&P 500 has scarcely achieved a 3% annual total return.

Here's Ironman's chart of S&P500 returns for the 15 years ended October 2013 showing a real, that is inflation-adjusted, total annual return with dividends fully reinvested of . . . 2.88%:

click to enlarge















Here's Morningstar's chart showing how much better you'd have done in intermediate term bonds like Vanguard's VBIIX, 5.88% nominal per year over the last 15 years (roughly 3.4% real), and that's including this year's bond slaughter:

click to enlarge














Here's the Shiller p/e as of this morning, clearly and excessively above the mean level of 16.50 for most of the time from the 1990s:

click to enlarge















Hussman says investors should expect poor returns from stocks going forward:

[S]tocks are currently at levels that we estimate will provide roughly zero nominal total returns over the next 7-10 years, with historically adequate long-term returns thereafter.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

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.

Is The S&P500 Still 13% Below Its Previous Peak?

Adjusted for inflation, the current level of the S&P500 has still not bested the 1999-2000 level, meaning there are bubbles, and then there are bubbles.

That said, the last "bubble" in 2007 has been surpassed already.

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.

Monday, December 16, 2013

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.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Get Over It: Santa's Been White Since 1881

Actually, he was white before 1881, but this image by Thomas Nast for Harper's Weekly in 1881 became dominant in America from that time.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Bank Failure Friday: The 24th Bank To Fail In 2013 Is In Texas

Texas Community Bank, National Association, The Woodlands, Texas, failed today, costing the FDIC $10.8 million.

6,891 banks remain in the insured system of FDIC banks and savings institutions.

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.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

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.

Military Retirees Under 62 Screwed Under House-Passed Ryan/Murray Budget Deal

As reported here:

The Washington Free Beacon reported that under the budget agreement crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D., Wash.), military retirees younger than 62 will receive 1 percentage point less in their annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). ...

A loss of one percentage point in their COLA translates into thousands of dollars in lost retirement income. ...

If an E-7 retires at 40, they would lose $83,000. Commissioned officers could lose much more. Lieutenant colonels and commanders (an O-5 rank) who retire at 40 would lose $124,000.

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

Senate Republicans who oppose the cuts to military retirements are saying so loudly but will most probably be defeated in the Senate next week when the budget deal comes up for a vote in the Democrat controlled chamber.


Roll Call Magazine's 218 Blog Embraces The Oligarchy

"218: Because it's the only number that really matters in the US House."

Yeah, and that's the problem.

Current population: 316.8 million.

Implied representation on the constitutional formula rejected by the anti-Federalists: 10,560 US Representatives in the US House.

Preferred level: 21,120 in the US House. Let 'em camp in tents on FedEx Field.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Rush Limbaugh's comments on the pope have been nothing if not lazy, so what's new?

Rush Limbaugh's comments on the pope have been nothing if not lazy, which most of his comments are in this late period of his career, and which is why one week after he made them on the pope we are still hearing about them in the media and on his own radio show. If Rush is being talked about, it's there on the show that you're sure to hear about it, because relevance was never so hard to keep up as it is in these days.

Here's Rush this very day in fact, claiming Reuters translated "unfettered capitalism" from the pope's remarks when Reuters hadn't done any such thing, one of the many little half-truths which are the stock in trade of The Rush Limbaugh Program; that phrase "unfettered capitalism" was never in quotation marks in the original Reuters story:

Now, what I had was a Reuters story that was reporting via the translation of the Holy Father's remarks, and in that translation were "unfettered capitalism," a huge, huge hit on what the pope was said to have called "trickle-down," and a plea for leaders of the world to do something about "income inequality" and about poverty and so forth, as though no one's been doing that.  I remember when I saw it, I was really shocked.  I could not believe...

Here's the original Reuters story speaking of unfettered capitalism but not in quotation marks:

Pope Francis called for renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and attacked unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny," urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.

The fact is Reuters skewed this story in the direction of "unfettered capitalism" while the pope never used the words "unfettered" or "capitalism", choosing instead "the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation" as the "new tyranny".

Here's as close as the pope comes to "unfettered capitalism" (this is easy to find online, but Rush cannot seem to), who only spoke of "unbridled consumerism" and never once mentioned unfettered capitalism, which comes as a surprise to Rush when callers protest as one did just today:

60. Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. It serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.

The pope's message, after all is said and done, is really quite simple, as all ideologies are, the difference being that his is a heavenly one, not a terrestrial. He's obviously uncomfortable with American Catholics of the conservative persuasion who have been allying themselves with what is commonly called libertarian ideology, the devotees of which Russell Kirk famously named the "chirping sectarians" of the conservative movement, Rep. Paul Ryan being a prominent contemporary example thereof. For Kirk, it was their ideological habit of mind which marked them out as outsiders of the movement because they could not abide the persistent lack of conformity to principle which is endemic to fallen, human nature in need of salvation, and substituted for it a bastardized, immanentized eschaton of infinite freedom:

208. If anyone feels offended by my words, I would respond that I speak them with affection and with the best of intentions, quite apart from any personal interest or political ideology. My words are not those of a foe or an opponent. I am interested only in helping those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centred mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking which is more humane, noble and fruitful, and which will bring dignity to their presence on this earth.

In the final analysis, conservatism represents an acquiescence to the sad predicament of human existence against which libertarianism never stops revolting, and Christianity represents a temporal and by definition incomplete response of God to life in that world. But for libertarianism, incomplete just isn't good enough.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Have Households Started To Borrow? Probably for cars.

PragCap thinks so here, but it's only been up $169 billion year over year. The monthly rate of vehicle sales annualized is up 1.6 million units over the same period. Could be that. Subprime, loan to value in excess of 100% and longer terms are all up in the space, according to Reuters here just in recent days.

The Passive Long-Term Investor's Dilemma: Both Equities and Treasurys Are Unattractively Priced

From John Hussman, here:

So passive buy-and-hold investors – who lock in a price and don’t alter their investment positions for a long period of time – should recognize that Treasury bonds are likely to outperform stocks over the coming decade, with substantially less risk. In my view, neither asset class is attractively priced, but in a world of zero returns on Treasury bills, our risk budget for passive investors would lean more toward bonds than equities here nonetheless.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Michigan Gov. Snyder Brags He's The Most Pro-Immigration Governor In The Country

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, someone who will never be president, here:

“I’m probably the most pro-immigration governor in the country and I’m proud of that,” said Snyder, who included farm workers in his call for opening the state’s borders to immigrants who can create jobs for the state’s economy.

Best comment on the story:

"I never see advertisements for farm labor." 

Government Logo On NSA Spy Satellite BRAGS "Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach"

Pics here and here. Story here.


Birds of a feather, er . . . cephalopods of a tentacle.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

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.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

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.

Friday, December 6, 2013

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)

Thursday, December 5, 2013

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.

Second Estimate Of Q3 2013 GDP Rises To 3.6% From 2.8% In The Initial

The report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis is here, showing Q3 2013 real GDP growing at a 3.6% clip. 

1.68 points of the 3.6, however, represents building of massive inventories, meaning the underlying rate is 1.9%, down from last month's 2.0% after stripping out inventories. The first estimate of inventories had been off by 100%.

Falling demand from consumers in the third quarter was indicated as personal consumption expenditures (PCE) grew at a rate 0.4 lower, at 1.4% vs. 1.8% in the second quarter, a drop of 22%. In the first estimate PCE had been estimated at 1.5% in the third quarter. The decline confirms the ongoing weakness of the consumer economy.


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


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.


Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Obama Affordable Veterinary Act
































h/t Chris, who always seems to come through on a slow news day

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Since 2000, Your Real Rate Of Return From Stocks Has Been Just 0.67% Annually

The inflation-adjusted rate of return from the S&P500 with dividends fully re-invested from September 2000 to September 2013 has been just 0.67% annually.

Check for yourself, here.

Monday, December 2, 2013

First New Bank Start-Up Since 2010 Caters To Pennsylvania Amish

The Wall Street Journal Reports here:

The number of federally insured institutions nationwide shrank to 6,891 in the third quarter after this summer falling below 7,000 for the first time since federal regulators began keeping track in 1934, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The decline in bank numbers, from a peak of more than 18,000, has come almost entirely in the form of exits by banks with less than $100 million in assets, with the bulk occurring between 1984 and 2011. More than 10,000 banks left the industry during that period as a result of mergers, consolidations or failures, FDIC data show. About 17% of the banks collapsed. ...

Unlike before the financial crisis, new startup banks aren't rushing to take the place of exiting institutions. Every year from 1934 to 2009, investors in the U.S. chartered at least a few and sometimes hundreds of new banks, according to the FDIC data. The Bank of Bird-in-Hand opened in Bird-in-Hand, Penn., on Monday—it was the first new bank startup in the U.S. since December 2010. ...

While the new bank will offer online deposits and target local customers who aren't Amish, it will also operate a courier service to accommodate customers who might not be able to drive up or log on—a nod to the fact many Amish don't use cars or computers. The drive-through window of the bank's one branch accommodates a horse and buggy, and there is a shelter in the parking lot to shield horses from rain.

NY Times Photographer Likens Obama Image Management To Communist Propaganda From Soviet State News Agency TASS

Yeah, well, here's why!
And you thought the extremists were in the Tea Party.

Reported here:

Barack Obama's White House has been accused of producing Soviet-style propaganda by press photographers who are furious at being denied access to the US president. Mr Obama's aides routinely block independent photographers from capturing him at work, before distributing flattering pictures shot by Pete Souza, his official photographer. During a tense meeting at the White House, the practice was described by Doug Mills, a veteran photographer for The New York Times, as “just like TASS,” the Soviet Union state news agency.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

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.

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

ObamaCare must be scrapped.