Higher Health Insurance Premiums This Year? Blame ObamaCare.
Most Americans saw their insurance bills jump this year, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The average employer-based premium for a familyincreased a startling 9% in 2011. Over the next decade, rates are expected to double.
The Kaiser report is only the latest piece of research to indicate that ObamaCare isn’t driving down health care costs, as its proponents promised, but is instead accelerating their rise.
This year, the average premium for a family hit $15,073 — $1,303, or 9%,higher than the year before. And that’s on top of increases of 5% in 2009 and 3% in 2010.
Employees are picking up a substantial portion of that tab. They paid an average of $4,129 for their family insurance premiums this year — more than double what they shelled out 10 years ago. And that figure doesn’t include out-of-pocket health expenses.
These premium hikes have outpaced general inflation and salary increases — and thus are swallowing a greater share of American households’ budgets. A study published in the September 2011 issue of Health Affairs found that burgeoning health costs have decimated nearly an entire decade’s worth of income gains. In 2009, the average American family had just $95 more to spend at will than it did in 1999.
Worse, there’s no relief in sight. Next year, employers expect premiums to rise 7.2%, according to the National Business Group on Health.
Over the next ten years, American families can expect rising health costs to continue to offset pay raises. According to the Kaiser study, premiums are set to reach a whopping $32,175 by 2021. And more than 50% of employers have stated that they plan to shift a greater share of health-insurance costs onto their employees.
ObamaCare is to blame for much of these impending increases. Richard Foster, the Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), reports that America will spend an additional $311 billion on health care in the next decade because of the law.
CMS estimates the growth in health insurance costs will increase 10 extra percentage points in 2014 because of ObamaCare — a 14% increase, versus 3.5% without the law.
ObamaCare drives up the cost of insurance by piling mandates and required coverage benefits onto every single policy.
Here is another source for the list of 21 ObamaCare taxes coming your way courtesy of Investors Business Daily:
Taxation: The high bench has confirmed that ObamaCare’s individual mandate is a massive tax on the American middle class. But let’s not forget the 20 other new taxes that are embedded in the law.
Though President Obama never sold it as a tax hike, the Supreme Court ruled the mandate is exactly that. Unfortunately, the majority argued it’s legal under Congress’ taxing authority.
Forcing citizens to buy health insurance “is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama insisted in 2009. Earlier, he assured the public that raising taxes on the middle class to support his health care plan was “the last thing we need in an economy like this.” “Folks are already having a tough enough time,” Obama added.
Indeed they are. But his plan, which subsidizes some 30 million uninsured, amounts to a $1.8 trillion whammy on working families. And that’s just for starters.
The court was silent about the 20 other different taxes hidden in ObamaCare, more than half of which affect families earning less than $250,000 a year.
The new taxes, which cost some $675 billion over the next decade, include:
• A 2.3% excise tax on U.S. sales of medical devices that’s already devastating the medical supply industry and its workforce. The levy is a $20 billion blow to an industry that employs roughly 400,000.
Several major manufacturers have been roiled, including: Michigan-based Stryker Corp., which blames the tax for 1,000 layoffs; Indiana-based Zimmer Corp., which cites the tax in laying off 450 and taking a $50 million charge against earnings; Indiana-based Cook Medical Inc., which has scrubbed plans to open a U.S. factory; Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc., which expects an annual charge against earnings of $175 million, and Boston Scientific Corp., which has opted to open plants in tax-friendlier Ireland and China to help offset a $100 million charge against earnings.
• A 3.8% surtax on investment income from capital gains and dividends that applies to single filers earning more than $200,000 and married couples filing jointly earning more than $250,000.
• A $50,000 excise tax on charitable hospitals that fail to meet new “community health assessment needs,” “financial assistance” and other rules set by the Health and Human Services Dept.
• A $24 billion tax on the paper industry to control a pollutant known as black liquor.
• A $2.3 billion-a-year tax on drug companies.
• A 10% excise tax on indoor tanning salons.
• An $87 billion hike in Medicare payroll taxes for employees, as well as the self-employed.
• A hike in the threshold for writing off medical expenses to 10% of adjusted gross income from 7.5%.
• A new cap on flexible spending accounts of $2,500 a year.
• Elimination of the tax deduction for employer-provided prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients.
• An income surtax of 1% of adjusted gross income, rising to 2.5% by 2016, on individuals who refuse to go along with ObamaCare by buying a policy not OK’d by the government.
• A $2,000 tax charged to employers with 50 or more workers for every full-time worker not offered health coverage.
• A $60 billion tax on health insurers.
• A 40% excise tax on so-called Cadillac, or higher cost, health insurance plans.
All told, there are 21 new or higher taxes imposed by Obama’s health care law — and 21 more reasons to repeal it.
Take Your Medicine, America… Stephen Moore, Senior Economics Writer with the Wall Street Journal, told FOX and Friends this morning that nearly 75% of Obamacare costs will fall on the backs of those Americans making less than $120,000 a year.
It is true and the CBO confirmed it:
Jim Hoft comments on the following video where the White House Chief of Staff was trying to lie about the Supreme Court ruling, and then lied about it being some form of tax. So Fox News’ Chris Wallace played the audio from Obama’s Lawyer in the Supreme Court saying it is a tax. It is clear that the Obama Administration plan is to lie about ObamaCare and lie about the tax.
In the video below the White House calls those who pay the penalty tax “free riders”, because they will have to pay because of all of the new taxes ObamaCare puts on health insurance and care which will price health insurance out of the reach of the young and the working lower middle class. They are not the free riders, the young and working poor/middle class aren’t getting anything, they are the ones who are PAYING! The free riders are the few who will get their health insurance subsidized in part from that money paid. They are the free riders because they are getting at least a part of their insurance paid for by others who are forced to pay the penalty because they can’t afford health insurance any longer under ObamaCare mandates and taxes which are already causing rates to skyrocket.
Democrats told us Obamacare was not a tax.
Then they argued in front of the Supreme Court that it was a tax.
Now they want to tell us again that Obamacare is not a tax.
Jack Lew, the Obama White House Chief of Staff, was trying to persuade Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday that Obamacare was not a tax. But it didn’t work out so well for Lew when Wallace played audio of the Obama lawyer arguing that Obamacare was a tax in front of the Supreme Court.
While we were all debating the cost to our liberty due to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), we were ignoring the cost to our pockets. If there ever was a reason for bipartisan rage about this law, it should be on the twenty – yes, twenty – hidden new taxes of this law. Making matters even more relevant is that seven of these taxes are levied on all citizens regardless of income. Hence, Mr. Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 is just another falsehood associated with this legislation.
The first, and best known, of these seven taxes that will hit all Americans as a result of Obamacare is the Individual Mandate Tax (no longer concealed as a penalty). This provision will require a couple to pay the higher of a base tax of $1,360 per year, or 2.5% of adjusted growth income starting with lower base tax and rising to this level by 2016. Individuals will see a base tax of $695 and families a base tax of $2,085 per year by 2016.
[The following taxes affect those who have disabled family members disproportionately – Political Arena Editor]
Next up is the Medicine Cabinet Tax that took effect in 2011. This tax prohibits reimbursement of expenses for over-the-counter medicine, with the lone exception of insulin, from an employee’s pre-tax dollar funded Health Saving Account (HSA), Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Reimbursement Account (HRA). This provision hurts middle class earners particularly hard since they earn enough to actually pay federal taxes, but not enough to make this restriction negligible.
The Flexible Spending Account (FSA) Cap, which will begin in 2013, is perhaps the most hurtful provision to the middle class. This part of the law imposes a cap of $2,500 per year (which is now unlimited) on the amount of pre-tax dollars that could be deposited into these accounts. Why is this particularly hurtful to the middle class? It is because funds in these accounts may be used to pay for special needs education for special needs children in the United States. Tuition rates for this type of special education can easily exceed $14,000 per year and the use of pre-tax dollars has helped many middle income families.
Another direct hit to the middle class is the Medical Itemized Deduction Hurdle which is currently 7.5% of adjusted gross income. This is the hurdle that must be met before medical expenses over that hurdle can be taken as a deduction on federal income taxes. Obamacare raises this hurdle to 10% of adjusted gross income beginning in 2013. Consider the middle class family with $80,000 of adjusted gross income and $8,000 of medical expenses. Currently, that family can get some relief from being able to take a $2,000 deduction (7.5% X $80,000 = $6,000; $8,000 –$6,000 = $2,000). An increase to 10% would eliminate the deduction in this example and if that family was paying a 25% federal tax rate, the real cost of that lost deduction would be $500.
Continue reading about other new ObamaCare taxes HERE.
I have been a multi-state licensed health and life insurance Broker for more than 15 years now. I have also served as a Subject Matter Expert on Health Insurance for multiple business journals around our great country. One of the biggest challenges I’ve had to deal with throughout the years has been trying to secure coverage for people with pre-existing conditions who obtain their health insurance on the Individual market. They represent 10% of the American Insured.
I’ve never had to worry about pre-existing conditions with the other 90% of American Insured’s who get their health insurance through an Employer Sponsored Group Plan. Why? Because A Federal law called HIPAA has protected them against being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions for more than 14 years now.
Because Government legislators did NOT apply this law to Individual health insurance policies, you can be labeled as “uninsurable” when you apply for an individual health insurance policy if you have one or more pre-existing conditions. That being said, who should we TRULY blame for the fact that you can be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition? Is it the Insurance Company’s fault? Or are they simply following a law that was written by Government Law Makers who did not include HIPAA portability protection for the MILLIONS of American’s who purchase Health Insurance on their own in the Individual Market?
Read the details about what to do if you have pre-existing conditions, what is wrong with the current system, and how to fix it HERE.
Who are the Uninsured? Did you know almost half make over $50,000 a year? Did you know that a third of the uninsured qualify for low cost insurance programs and simply refuse to enroll?
It was government law that created the pre-existing condition problem for 10% of the population:
In the video above where the speaker talks about how Obama lied about a man who had a pre-existing condition Factcheck.org verified it HERE.
With the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare, everyone is wondering what’s next for big government? Here are some ideas for federal policymakers to consider:
Federal Broccoli Act of 2013: Eat your broccoli, else pay the IRS $1,000.
Federal Recycling Act of 2014: Fill your blue box and put on the curb, else pay the IRS $2,000.
Federal Green Car Act of 2015: Make your next car battery powered, else pay the IRS $3,000.
Federal Domestic Jobs Act of 2016: Don’t exceed 25 percent foreign content on family consumer purchases, else pay the IRS $4,000.
Federal Obesity Act of 2017: Achieve listed BMI on your mandated annual physical, else pay the IRS $5,000.
Federal National Service Act of 2018: Serve two years in the military or the local soup kitchen, else pay the IRS $6,000.
Federal Housing Efficiency Act of 2019: Don’t exceed 1,000 square feet of living space per person in your household, else pay the IRS $7,000.
Federal Population Growth Act of 2020: Don’t exceed two children per couple, else pay the IRS $8,000.
Today Justice Roberts engaged in one of the most politically motivated acts of judicial activism in the history of the court.
The Commerce Clause, whose “interpretation” expanded in 1942 as a result of a political threat from FDR to pass a judicial act to add a dozen or so members to the court and appoint them with political cronies if the court didn’t start ruling in his favor, finally had a line drawn in the sand with this ruling. Every lawyer knows that the expanding Commerce Clause interpretation lacked a certain legitimacy because of this history and even some more liberal inclined legal scholars have been coming to terms with this reality. Government expansionists have wiped their feet on that interpretation and as is so often the case, they were given an inch and took a mile.
Today, Justice Roberts along with four other Justices (Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) properly ruled that using the Commerce Clause to compel entrance into a market goes too far and that the Commerce Clause does not allow the government to compel market activity. This is good but is rendered almost hollow by what Roberts did as I will explain below.
Keep on mind that Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer and Sotomoyor would have a Commerce Clause unlimited in power meaning that government can compel you to do most anything from the womb to the tomb. Anyone who tells you that the left does not want a leviathan state ….
So Roberts, in a nakedly political move to save ObamaCare, decided to rewrite the law and convert the mandate penalty into a tax. [/SARCASM ON] You see, Congress is stupid and in spite of the fact that they write and modify tax law every year, obviously somehow with this law, Congress had somehow forgotten to write it as a tax, or even call it a tax, but lucky for us we have Justice Roberts to come along and rewrite the law to teach those silly dopes in Congress how to write tax law [/SARCASM OFF]. Of course it is a responsibility of the court to ascertain and apply the legislative intent of the law as best the court can, GREAT! Except that the problem is that the President and members of Congress said repeatedly that the mandate penalty is NOT a tax.
When the Court asked for briefs on the ObamaCare law (ACA) they asked for briefs on the mandate, the denial of all Medicaid funds if states didn’t comply, the Commerce Clause etc. The Court did NOT ask for brief’s on the tax law implications of ObamaCare. This shows that web sites that watch the Supreme Court such as Prof. Volohk are very likely correct in their assertion that Roberts’ interpretation came very late in the process and in fact he probably changed his vote at near the last moment.
Tax law has to come in certain forms, either as a direct tax (called a capitation tax), an excise tax, or an income tax. The Constitution, in Article I Section 2, puts limits on the types of taxes that can be levied and there is plenty of case law defining these issues, all of which was ignored by Justice Roberts (by Amendment the income tax is an exception to Article I Section 2). In the opinion Roberts could not even tell us what kind of tax the ObamaCare mandate is. Is it a direct tax which must be apportioned equally, but look who is exempt; or is it an excise tax? In some ways the Roberts decision seems to act like it is parts of both.
[Editor’s Note: Some readers do not understand the tax law problem I was referring to so I will elaborate. Is the mandate an income tax? No. Is the mandate an excise tax? Well an excise tax is a fee for service so the answer is no. Is it a direct tax (capitation tax) no, because it is not equally apportioned among the states and the people (just look at who gets exempt for starters, states that get waivers ets etc). In short, as a tax it is not a constitutional one and goes against all previous tax precedent.]
There is also the issue of the Anti-injuction Act. The Anti-injuction Act says that the Court may not rule on a tax, no plaintiff has standing in court, until they are actually hit with paying the tax, thus preventing the Court from ruling on the matter further. Roberts, somehow in his ruling out of thin air, rules that it is not a tax for the purpose of the Anti-injuction Act, but is a tax when it comes to the health insurance mandate and penalty, even though Congress specifically said it was not a tax. So for part of the ruling it is a tax and for the other part is is not a tax. This is insanity. Again, the fact that Roberts and the Court did not ask for briefs on this subject indicates that this scheme to save ObamaCare was invented at the last minute out of thin air.
Roberts’ ruling uses twisted logic to get from Point A to Point B. This is a ruling with a goal in mind and an attempt to justify it after the decision was made. Charles Krauthammer wrote that what Roberts pulled out of his hat is a dodge.
The Chief Justice (Roberts) was hell-bent to find a way to make this law applicable, so he just decided, you know what, as a tax increase it works… – Rush Limbaugh.
According to Roberts, the government is not punishing you and mandating you to enter the market, thus penalizing inactivity, instead they are merely taxing inactivity and somehow that makes it OK. This amounts to a distinction without a difference. Why? Now the penalty is low, but when the penalty for those who do not buy the government mandated insurance goes up to thousands of dollars a year in (2018) and the costs of health insurance are already skyrocketing because of ObamaCare, what are low income people going to do? Go to jail for not paying their (as now defined by Roberts) ObamaCare taxes? In every way that matters in the application of the ObamaCare law per the Roberts ruling it is a mandate with a penalty and the IRS will not be forgiving. The IRS has no enforcement mechanism for ObamaCare now, but does anyone expect that to last? Roberts actually has the gall to make the case that since the penalty is low it is not a “real” mandate.
The Secretary of Health and Human services can essentially regulate health care to the point of virtually nationalizing it over time. In practice the government’s power to reach into our lives is greatly expanded in spite of the feckless words in the ruling that limit the Commerce Clause. It is Roberts’ job to uphold the basic tenant of limited government. The power grab in ObamaCare is off the charts which is why even the liberal minded Justice Kennedy made it clear that such a grab is unconstitutional in its entirety.
The Roberts’ ruling is lawless. If his goal was to galvanize traditional America for Romney, he did it.
See what I mean –
UPDATE: After the Supreme Court Ruling on Obamacare What is Next? – LINK
[Editor’s Note – I can see the objections now: Chuck, sure you have legal training, but you are not a lawyer and some of the people you have quoted are not lawyers (such as Limbaugh and Krauthammer). In coming weeks there will be law review and professorial articles critiquing this ruling in detail. Time will tell if I am correct in my analysis, but my record of accuracy in such articles leaves me confident.]
UPDATE II – Dissents Back Political Arena Editor’s Analysis
Editor’s Note – I deliberately did not read far into the dissent because I wanted to form my own view of the ruling and also because I was so steamed after reading Roberts’ incoherent pretzel logic that I had to walk away. The Weekly Standard has a nice summary of the ruling with some notes in plain English to make it easier to understand. Of course the entire ruling and dissents can be seen at the pdf link at the top of the page.
Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito Dissent: ‘We Cannot Rewrite the Statute to Be What It Is Not’
“Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling.”
Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito forcefully disagree with Roberts in their dissent. “[W]e cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not,” the four Justices write. “[W]e have never—never—treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’ Eighteen times in §5000A itself and elsewhere throughout the Act, Congress called the exaction in §5000A(b) a ‘penalty.'”
The dissenting Justices also argue that “judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling,” since the Constitution requires tax bills to originate in the House of Representatives, “the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off.”
The dissent goes to to destroy in details the pretzel logic and lack of legal reasoning and precedent of the Roberts ruling. Continue reading HERE.
“The Roberts ruling is so incoherent and full of internal contradictions that I would be embarrassed to put my name on it.”
UPDATE IV – First Paragraph of the dissent:
The first paragraph in the dissent hits it out of the park –
The case is easy and straightforward, however, in another respect. What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States.
[Street Translation via the Editor – There are generally accepted limits on government power that have been repeated in the Founding Documents and in 220 years of law that tell us countless times that government power is limited. The fact that ObamaCare goes in excess of those limits is a no brainer. – Amen]
UPDATE V– Curt Levey: Top 10 Lessons from the Roberts ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE VI – Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly on the Supreme Court: There is no silver lining (video) – LINK
UPDATE VII – Explanation of the ObamaCare Ruling for the Non-lawyer – LINK
UPDATE VIII – Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legal – LINK
UPDATE IX– Prof. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax – LINK
When I was in college finishing my latest degree I wrote a series of articles on the mortgage crisis (mid 2008). This is a good summary of this section of the scandal and what led to the collapse. This is by no means the whole story but as I said, a good summary of this layer of what gave us this mess.
The Obama Record: The Obama camp’s running a new ad reminding African-Americans of all he’s done for them as they weather an economic crisis he “inherited.” Left out is his own role in their predicament.
The press has never questioned the president about his involvement. But his fingerprints are there.
Before the crisis, Obama pushed thousands of credit-poor blacks into homes they couldn’t afford. As a civil-rights attorney, he sued banks to rubberstamp mortgages for urban residents.
Many are now in foreclosure. In fact, the lead client in one of his class-action suits has since lost her home and filed bankruptcy.
First some background: Obama focused on “housing rights” when he worked as a lawyer-activist and community organizer in South Side Chicago. His mentor — the man who placed him in his first job there — was the father of the anti-redlining movement: John McKnight. He coined the term “redlining” to describe the mapping off of minority neighborhoods from home loans.
McKnight wrote a letter for Obama that helped him get into Harvard. After he graduated, he worked for a Chicago civil-rights law firm that worked closely with McKnight’s radical Gamaliel Foundation and National People’s Action, as well as Acorn, to solicit lending-discrimination cases.
At the time, NPA and Acorn were lobbying the Clinton administration to tighten enforcement of anti-redlining laws.
They also dispatched bus loads of goons trained by Obama to the doorsteps of bankers to demand more home loans for minorities. Acorn even crashed the lobby of Citibank’s headquarters in New York and accused it of discriminating against blacks.
The pressure worked. In 1994, Clinton’s top bank regulators signed a landmark anti-redlining policy that declared traditional mortgage underwriting standards racist and mandated banks apply easier lending rules for minorities.
Also that year, Attorney General Janet Reno and her aide Eric Holder filed a mortgage discrimination case against a Washington-area bank that forced it to target minority neighborhoods for subprime loans.
Reno and Holder also encouraged civil-rights lawyers like Obama to file local lending-bias cases against banks.
The next year, Obama led a class-action suit against Citibank on behalf of several Chicago minorities who claimed they were rejected for home loans because of the color of their skin. It was one of 11 such suits filed against the financial giant in Chicago and New York in the 1990s.
As first reported in Paul Sperry’s “The Great American Bank Robbery,” the plaintiffs’ claim lacked merit. Factors other than race figured in the bank’s decision to turn them down for loans.
One of Obama’s clients had “inadequate collateral” and “an incomplete application,” while another had “delinquent credit obligations and other adverse credit history.”
Obama argued such facts miss the point: that Citibank’s neutral underwriting criteria may have adversely impacted his clients as a class of people. He demanded it turn over loan files from the entire Chicago metro area to prove it regularly engaged in a pattern of discrimination.
The court didn’t award him the files. But Citibank eventually settled, despite the weak case. Under the 1998 settlement, Citibank vowed to pay the alleged victims $1.4 million and launch a program to boost home lending to poor blacks in the metro area.
In the run-up to the crisis, Citibank underwrote thousands of shaky subprime mortgages to satisfy the court in Obama’s case. Defaults were common. When home prices collapsed, most of the loans went bust.
His lead African-American client, Selma Buycks-Roberson, who was denied a loan due to bad credit and low income, got her mortgage only to default on it years later.
She got a foreclosure notice in 2008, according to The Daily Caller website, along with many of her Chicago neighbors.
By putting them on the hook for loans they couldn’t pay, Obama did them no favors. Blacks have been hit hardest by foreclosures. But what does Obama care? The Caller reports he pocketed at least $23,000 from the Citibank case.
Today, he blames the devastating wealth drain in black communities on subprime mortgages. He says “greedy,” “predatory” lenders tricked poor minorities into paying higher fees and interest rates.
But Obama was for subprime loans before he was against them. “Subprime loans started off as a good idea,” he said as those loans began to sour in 2007.
His closest economic advisers also promoted subprime lending. Several months earlier, Chicago pal Austan Goolsbee, who later became his top economist, sang the praises of subprime loans in a New York Times column. He argued they allowed poor blacks “access to mortgages.”
One of Obama’s top bank regulators, Gary Gensler, once bragged that thanks to subprime mortgages, banks made home loans to minorities at “twice the rate” they made to other borrowers, according to “Bank Robbery.” “A subprime loan is a good option when the alternative is no access to credit,” he said years before the crisis.
Obama hasn’t learned from his mistakes.
Far from it, IBD has learned the mammoth credit watchdog agency he created (with input from NPA radicals) will dust off Clinton’s 1994 minority lending guidelines to crack down on stingy lenders. And he’s ordered Holder, now acting as his attorney general, to prosecute banks that don’t open branches in blighted urban areas.
Not only has Obama scapegoated banks for the crisis he helped cause, he’s exploited minority suffering to continue reckless policies that hurt those he claims to champion.
The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.
The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992.
The data represent one of the most detailed looks at how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Home-ownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.
The findings underscore the depth of the wounds of the financial crisis and how far many families remain from healing. If the recession set Americans back 20 years, economists say, the road forward is sure to be a long one. And so far, the country has seen only a halting recovery.
“It’s hard to overstate how serious the collapse in the economy was,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “We were in free fall.”
The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class. Only roughly half of middle-class Americans remained on the same economic rung during the downturn, the Fed found. Their median net worth — the value of assets such as homes, automobiles and stocks minus any debt — suffered the biggest drops.
Niall Ferguson is an award winning historian and economic historian who’s work is recognized around the world. This very web site contains several pieces of his work.
The economic historian, who is affiliated to Oxford and Harvard Universities, says wise young voters should insist politicians pay off debts as soon as possible for the benefit and security of their own financial interests.
Speaking at the Reith Lectures on Tuesday, Professor Ferguson will argue the “young should welcome austerity,” adding they “find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests.”
In his first lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Prof Ferguson will insist the current public debt “allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.”
“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” he says in an article ahead of the lecture.
He adds: “If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.”
Professor Ferguson argues the true size of government debt in Western democracies is many times larger than “deeply misleading” figures issued in the form of bonds because they do not record unfunded liabilities of social security and health care schemes.
“The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron,” he wrote.
“These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure,” he said.
He argues one of the ways out of the current economic “mess” would be for “a heroic effort of leadership” to persuade all generations to “vote for a more responsible fiscal policy.”
The White House tried to blunt Wednesday’s contempt of Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder with claims that Republicans were trying to focus on something other than the economy and jobs.
“At the beginning of this year, Republicans announced that one of their chief legislative and strategic priorities was to investigate the administration and damage the president politically,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “We are nine days away from the expiration of federal transportation funding which guarantees jobs for almost a million construction workers because Congress has not passed a transportation bill. We are 10 days away from student loan rates doubling, potentially impacting over 7.4 million borrowers.”
And that’s what President Obama focused on today as he notched yet another speech on student-loan rates into the schedule.
But the Carney spin came on the same day that the House passed the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, a package of seven bills focused on spurring job growth and lowering energy costs while embracing the country’s energy resources.
That legislation passed 284-163 despite a veto threat two days ago from Obama.
Go to the mall at 4pm on a weekday and subject yourself to the product of our public schools… we have all seen this. It is one of those things that everyone knows and few talk about.
I recently finished a new degree and I was shocked at how ignorant and miseducated the public schoolers were. So are many professors.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup’s 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.
In addition to public schools, this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey finds record lows, all by one percentage point, in Americans’ confidence in the church or organized religion (44%), banks (21%), and television news (21%).
Gallup has asked Americans to say how much confidence they have in a variety of U.S. institutions since 1973, including annually since 1993.
None of this comes at a surprise, even the low numbers on organized religion as the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has taken a very heavy toll the Vatican’s credibility.
The Obama Administration has given a former director at the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) nearly half a billion dollars to offer “struggling” Illinois homeowners mortgage assistance, a Judicial Watch investigation has found.
It means the ACORN official (Joe McGavin) will go from operating a corrupt leftist community group that’s banned by Congress from receiving federal funding to controlling over $445 million in U.S. taxpayer funds. The money is part of a $7.6 billion Treasury Department program to help the “unemployed or substantially underemployed” make their mortgage payments.
In this case, JW found that a subcomponent of the state-run Illinois Housing Development Authority, known as the Illinois Hardest Hit Program, has just received a generous $445,603,557Treasury infusion. The Obama Administration established Hardest Hit in 2010 to provide targeted aid to families in states hit hardest by the economic and housing market downturn, according to its website.
In early 2011 McGavin was appointed as director of Hardest Hit. Before that he was director of counseling for ACORN Housing in Chicago and operations manager for a Chicago ACORN offshoot called Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). His strong ties to ACORN make him a suspect candidate to handle such a huge amount of taxpayer dollars.
The Obama-tied community organization supposedly shut down after a series of exposés about its illegal activities, including fraudulent voter registration drives and involvement in the housing market meltdown. Read all about it in Judicial Watch’s special report, “The Rebranding of ACORN.” The legal scandals led Congress to pass a 2009 lawbanning federal funding for ACORN, which for years enjoyed a huge flow of taxpayer dollars to promote its various leftwing causes.
The Obama Administration has violated the congressional ACORN funding ban, however. Last summer Judicial Watch uncovered recordsthat show ACORN got tens of thousands of dollars in grants to “combat housing and lending discrimination.” The money came via Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which awarded a $79,819 grant to AHCOA.
In addition to violating the ACORN funding ban, the grant was astounding because federal investigators had previously exposed fraud by the same Florida-based ACORN/AHCOA affiliate. HUD’s inspector general found that the group “inappropriately” spent more than $3.2 million in grants that were supposed to be used to eliminate lead poisoning in its housing program.
President Barack Obama’s re-election turns on his ability to convince voters that
1) Obama inherited a “Great Recession,”
2) every “independent” economist supported the “stimulus,”
3) “bipartisan” economists agree that Obama’s stimulus worked,
4) as actor Morgan Freeman puts it, racist Republicans say, “Screw the country … we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here” — nothing to do with deeply held policy differences.
(1) Take this “Great Recession” business.
Remember the “misery index”? The term, popularized by former President Jimmy Carter, used to mean inflation plus unemployment. Unfortunately for John Kerry, by the time he ran for president in 2004, the misery index stood at 7.4 midway into the election year, the same as when George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000. What to do? Change the definition. Kerry invented a new misery index, one that included only high-rising costs like college tuition, health care and gas prices.
Similarly, “bad economic times” used to mean, above all, high unemployment. Within a year of Obama’s presidency, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent. Within three years of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment reached 10.8 percent. Under Obama, inflation has been — at least so far — rather modest. Early in Reagan’s presidency, inflation reached 13.5 percent. Rather than describe this era as the “Great-Recession-turned-around-by-Reagan’s-pro-growth-policies,” many pundits and scribes dismiss this period of extraordinary growth as the “me decade” or the “decade of greed.”
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: Excuse me Larry, but under Clinton the Consumer Price Index was changed so that government would never have to face the misery index and a proper measure of inflation again. They removed “Food & Fuel” from the index, you know, because nobody ever buys that stuff anyways, and they weighted the formula towards housing….. that’s right folks, housing.
When the economy turns south or hits a bump new housing starts talk and housing prices fall, thus showing negative inflation. So when the economy is in trouble and inflation is going up, the government reads it as zero inflation. If we still measured inflation like we used to it would be about 9.3% every year for three years. Of course, every shopper knows this as they see the prices for themselves.]
(2) “There is no disagreement,” said then-President-elect Barack Obama, “that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy.”
What?! More than 200 economists, including several Nobel laureates, signed on to a full-page ad placed in major newspapers by the libertarian Cato Institute. Eventually, over 130 more economists became signatories to the ad.
It read: “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true. Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.
“More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today.
“To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”
(3) Obama surrogate Steve Rattner recently said that Obama’s stimulus worked — as confirmed by “bipartisan” economists. As proof, Rattner offered the findings of “bipartisan economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder,” who “agree that … we would have had unemployment substantially higher than what we’ve had over the last two years.”
“Bipartisan”?
Blinder, a Democrat, served as a member of the Clinton administration and later advised presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. As for Zandi, he did serve as a presidential campaign advisor to John McCain. Like Blinder, Zandi is a self-described Democrat.
As to the alleged unanimous expert opinion on the effectiveness of Obama’s stimulus, Stanford economist John Taylor debated this on NPR with Zandi. Taylor’s analysis, shared by many other economists: “I just don’t think there’s any evidence. When you look at the numbers, when you see what happened, when people reacted to the stimulus, it did very little good.”
(4) Democrats never tire of trotting out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said his “single most important political goal” was to make Obama “a one-term president.” Horrors! Why, doesn’t this just make McConnell the very personification of sinister! Republican opposition for the sole purpose of bringing down Obama, the first black president, yada, blah, etc.
Apparently, it is outside the brain capacity of people like Morgan Freeman to understand something: One way to defeat bad, leftist Democrats’ policies is to defeat bad, leftist Democrats, who seek to implement those bad, leftist policies. It’s not complicated.
Nothing personal.
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: On September 11th, 2001 famed Democrat Strategist James Carville said that he hopes President Bush fails.]
School is letting out around the United States, but for George Soros, education never stops. Soros has given more than $400 million to colleges and universities, including money to most prominent institutions in the United States. He also helped establish Central European University (CEU) which, in turn, uses its resources to promote his personal goal of an “open society.”
Imagine that, a whole university funded by one of the most controversial figures in the world. Soros has used that $400 million worldwide to indoctrinate students and teach them to promote liberal, and in some cases extremist, causes. But don’t expect the American news media to make it a big issue, even though they have done so for the Koch brothers.
CEU, which is essentially Soros’s own university, has received $250 million from the liberal billionaire. The Founder and Chairman of the Board is none other than Soros. More than half of CEU’s 20 member board are closely tied to the liberal financier. President of the Soros-funded Bard College Leon Botstein is Chairman of the Board.
While the Left shrivels at the thought of the Koch brother’s donations to universities, Soros gave more than 50 times as much. Bard College was the American institution that received the most from Soros (more than $75 million). Grants to Bard for “community service and social action” included a Palestinian youth group and an initiative to educate prisoners across the country.
All of the Ivy League universities, along with a variety of state schools, private institutions, and even religiously-affiliated institutions, were also funded by Soros.
The Koch brothers were vilified by the American political left for donating almost $7 million to universities while their beloved Soros gave more than 50 times that amount to the same type of groups.
Soros’s Center for American Progress, which received $7.3 million from his foundations, posted a report on their Think Progress blog titled “Koch Fueling Far Right Academic Centers at Universities across the Country.” In the article, the Koch-hating leftist Lee Fang lists universities that received money from the Kochs to include George Mason University, Utah State, and Brown. Totaling nearly $7 million, grants as small as $100,000 were criticized. A donation of $1.5 million to Florida State University supposedly gave the Kochs “a free hand in selecting professors and approving publications.”
Alternet, funded by Soros complained about a “shady deal” that helped the Kochs fund Florida State University. Colorlines, also funded by Soros, said of the same donation: “FSU Trades Academic Freedom for Billionaire Charles Koch’s Money.”
This information is all part of an extensive new Special Report on Soros by the Business and Media Institute (a sister organization of CNSNews.com). The report, “George Soros: Godfather of the Left,”also detailed Soros’s many controversial dealings around the world.
President Obama has shelled out more in federal spending than the five presidents that came before him.
A new chart by the Comeback America Initiative (CAI), a non-partisan group dedicated to promoting fiscal responsibility by policymakers, shows federal spending by president as a percentage of GDP, and it doesn’t reflect well on Obama.
“There has been a dramatic increase in spending under the Obama administration,” David Walker, Founder and CEO of CAI, told Whispers. “Most of it is attributable to year one of his presidency and the stimulus… but President Obama has continued to take spending to a new level.”
Federal spending was close to 20 percent under the Carter administration, dropped to 18 percent under Clinton, and is currently at an incredible 24 percent of GDP. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal spending may hover around 22 percent for the next decade.
Federal spending is also higher this year than any year since 1949. The last time spending was higher—in 1946, it was 24.8—the country was just coming down from the exorbitant rates of spending during World War II.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he would cut federal spending down to just 17 percent of GDP.
President Obama is facing some heat over the economy Friday after a depressing job report showed the jobless rate climbed to 8.2 percent in May.
(CNSNews.com) – The number of American women who are unemployed was 766,000 individuals greater in May 2012 than in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In January 2009, there were approximately 5,005,000 unemployed women in the United States, according to BLS. In May 2012, there were 5,771,000.
The BLS derives its employment statistics from an overall number it calls the civilian non-institutional population. This includes all Americans 16 or over who are not on active duty in the military and who are not in an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home. From this civilian non-institutional population, BLS determines a subset it calls the civilian labor force, which includes all members of the civilian non-institutional population who are either employed or have made specific efforts to find work in the past four weeks. People who are not employed and who have not sought work in the past four weeks are considered by the BLS to have dropped out of the labor force.
Unemployed people are those who are in the labor force but do not have a job—despite having looked for one in the past four weeks. The unemployment rate is the percentage of the overall civilian labor force that does not have a job—that is, who have sought a job in the past four weeks and not found one.
In January 2009, according to BLS, the unemployment rate for American women was 7.0 percent. In May 2012, it was 7.9 percent.
When Obama took office in January 2009, the female civilian non-institutional population was 121,166,000. In May 2012, it hit 125,788,000—an increase of 4,622,000 since January 2012.
However, at the same time the female civilian non-institutional population was increasing, the percentage participating in the labor force was declining—following a long-term trend. In January 2009, 59.4 percent of women participated in the labor force, while in May 2012 it was 57.8.
May’s 57.8 percent female participation rate in the labor force was up from April’s rate of 57.6 percent—but that level (57.6 percent) was the lowest it had been since March 1993.Female participation in the labor force peaked at 60.3 percent in April 2000. The last time it was above 60 percent was March 2001, when it hit 60.2 percent.
Despite the increase in the female non-institutional population over the past three years, the actual number of women employed in the United States in May 2012 was about 83,000 lower than it was in January 2009. In January 2009, there were 66,969,000 women employed in the United States and in May 2012 there were 66,886,000.
The number of women employed in the United States peaked at 68,102,000 in April 2008, according to BLS. The number of women employed in the United States today is 1,216,000 less than that.
Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from two Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back.
“No one aside from Mitt Romney is running for President highlighting their tenure as a corporate buyout specialist as one of job creation, when in fact, his goal was profit maximization,” said Mr. LaBolt. ”The President has support from business leaders across industries who have seen him pull the economy back from the brink of another depression, manufacturing and the auto industry revived, and support his agenda to build an economy that lasts where America outinnovates and outeducates the rest of the world and economic security for the middle class is restored.”
On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden defended the attacks on Mr. Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Though he insisted he wasn’t “criticizing private equity firms,” Mr. Biden said there were many examples of Mr. Romney and his Bain colleagues causing tremendous harm.
“You hear all these stories about his partners buying companies … where they load up with a tremendous amount of debt. The companies go under, everybody loses their job, the community is devastated, but they make money,” said Mr. Biden. “They make money even when a company goes bankrupt, when workers lose their jobs.”
As summer break approaches and school seasons conclude, teens in California will have a more difficult time finding a job than their demographic counterparts in every other state, according to Census Bureau data released by the Employment Policies Institute.
With 36.2 percent of its teens unable to find employment, California leads all other states in teen unemployment — only the District of Columbia, with its 51.7 percent teen unemployment rate, surpasses the Golden State.
Overall, teen unemployment rose in 17 states and Washington, D.C., between April 2011 and April 2012, and fell in 32 states.
Nationally, the teen unemployment rate stands at 24.9 percent, and has averaged above 20 percent for over 40 months. The number of employed teens fell by 14,000 from March to April 2012.
1) California 36.2%
2) South Carolina 31.2%
3) Rhode Island 29.8%
4) Washington 29.0%
5) Arizona 29.0%
6) Nevada 28.8%
7) Idaho 28.4%
8) North Carolina 28.2%
9) Missouri 27.7%
10) Louisiana 27.6%
** District of Columbia 51.7%
The American job market is no place for students as the number of employed high schoolers has hit its lowest level in more than 20 years, according to new figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.
In 1990, 32 percent of high school students held jobs, versus just 16 percent now. Blame their elders.
Sectors that traditionally have offered teens their first paying gig — fast-food chains, movie theaters, malls and big-box retailers — have now become the last resorts for out-of-work college graduates or older Americans forced back into the labor force out of sheer financial necessity. The resulting squeeze has left students on the outside looking in.
“By definition, teenage workers get the jobs that are left over,” said Charles Hirschman, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who has studied and written about student employment. “When you can’t find someone else to bag your groceries or work construction, often teenagers are the labor force you can count on to pick up that slack for a low wage. But now, with the recession, everybody has moved down. Those jobs aren’t going to teenagers.”
Economics: The president (Obama) has been accused of seeking to turn the U.S. into an Americanized Western European welfare state. If he insists on imitating one particular model, we suggest he follow the Swedish paradigm.
Sweden has a reputation as the prototypical cradle-to-grave socialist European nation, and the political left has long yearned for America to be more like the Scandinavian nation.
But it’s looking through a smudged window. With little notice, Sweden has changed.
The turnaround has been driven in no small part by the election of Fredrik Reinfeldt as prime minister in 2006. He took office in October of that year and by January of 2007, tax-cutting had begun. The Reinfeldt government also cut welfare spending — a form of austerity — and began to deregulate the economy.
That doesn’t sound like the Sweden that American Democrats hold up as the standard.
But as Finance Minister Anders Borg told the Spectator, the Reinfeldt government was simply continuing the last 20 years of reform.
Far from hurting Sweden’s economy, the changes have improved it. And they’ll likely help to protect it from the 0.3% economic decline now forecast for the euro zone in 2012.
Sweden fell into recession in 2008 and 2009, as did many developed nations. But it’s pulled strongly out of the decline, posting GDP gains of 6.1% in 2010 and 3.9% last year, when it ranked at the top in Europe’s list of fastest-growing economies.
U.S. growth over those same two years under Barack Obama’s Keynesian stewardship? It was less than half of Sweden’s — 3% in 2010 and an anemic 1.7% in 2011.
While the U.S. continues to struggle with its jobs problem — unemployment is at 8.1% here — Sweden’s jobless rate has fallen to 7.5%.
Not perfect, but 7.5% is far below the euro zone average of 10.2% and significantly lower than the rates in Spain (21.7%), Portugal (12.9%) and the United Kingdom (8%), countries that Borg noted were “were arguing for large temporary stimulus.”
Under Borg, Sweden handled the downturn in the most un-European way. “While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut,” Fraser Nelson wrote last month in the Spectator.
Borg strongly opposed the Keynesian solution, which the left continues to advance while it inveighs against an austerity that has yet to be implemented.
He also refused to resort to the trickery of a stimulus, instead cutting the taxes that he knew were hindering entrepreneurs from giving the economy the kick it needed.
The country needed innovators and capitalists — “the source of job creation,” says Borg — and he did what he had to, to attract new ones and to keep those already there from leaving.
During Sweden’s decline into a welfare state, it became, as Borg told the Spectator, “a textbook case of European economic sclerosis” punished by “very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.”
That lasted until the 1990s, when the nation realized it had to return to the market policies that had made it rich prior to the onset of its cradle-to-grave coddling.
How much further can Borg and Reinfeldt take their reforms? Will voters ask them to come back and complete the job?
After all, it’s not over. Though it continues to fall, Sweden’s government debt as a share of GDP is still too high at 38.4%. And while it’s dipped below 45% for the first time in decades, the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio is still far too steep.
Despite this unfinished business, Sweden is still moving in the right direction.
GE who owned MSNBC, has lucrative government contracts and whose CEO was appointed to a position in the White House utilized our 60,000 page tax code again, which is filled with cronyism and special favors.
The taxes Democrats propose to “soak the rich” always seem to miss those who they demagogue for not paying their fair share. They have been “soaking the rich” for decades and keep missing the target. Why? – LINK
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. “GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions–it’s legal,” Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE’s profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn’t taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
“I asked the GE tax officer, ‘How long was your tax form?'” Ryan said. “He said, ‘Well, we file electronically, we don’t measure in pages.'” Ryan asked for an estimate, which came back at a stunning 57,000 pages. When Ryan relayed the story at the townhall meeting in Janesville, there were audible gasps from the crowd.
Ken Kies, a tax lawyer who represents GE, confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD the tax return would have been 57,000 pages had it been filed on paper. The size of GE’s tax return has more than doubled in the last five years.
Related:
CNN: Obama Attacking Private Equity At 6am, Fundraising With Private Equity At 6pm (video) – LINK
Under Obama: Family Income Down. Jobless Claims High. Government Spending Up. Super Rich Getting Richer. – LINK
Wall St. Made More Money In 2.5 Years Of Obama Than 8 Years Of Bush – LINK
Corruption You Can Believe In: Failed Sub Primes and Mortgage Fraud Lenders Funneled Money to Dodd & Obama the Most. Fannie & Freddie Gave $200 Million to Partisans-Most Went to Democrats! Dodd, Obama Among Top Recipients. Republicans Attempted to Pass Reforms-Blocked by Democrat Leadership! – LINK
Three years ago, President Obama cut a secret deal with pharmaceutical company lobbyists to secure the industry’s support for his national health care law. Despite Obama’s promises during his campaign to run a transparent administration, the deal has been shrouded in mystery ever since. But internal emails obtained by House Republicans now provide evidence that a deal was struck and GOP investigators are promising to release more details in the coming weeks.
“What the hell?” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, who is now Obama’s campaign manager, complained to a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in January 15, 2010 email. “This wasn’t part of our deal.”
This reference to “our deal” came two months before the final passage of Obamacare in an email with the subject line, “FW: TAUZIN EMAIL.” At the time, Billy Tauzin was president and CEO of PhRMA.
The email was uncovered as part of investigation into Obama’s closed-door health care negotiations launched by the House Energy and Commerce committee’s oversight panel.
“In the coming weeks the Committee intends to show what the White House agreed to do as part of its deal with the pharmaceutical industry and how the full details of this agreement were kept from both the public and the House of Representatives,” the committee’s Republican members wrote in a memo today.
On June 20, 2009, Obama released a terse 296-word statement announcing a deal between pharmaceutical companies and the Senate that didn’t mention any involvement by the White House.
“The investigation has determined that the White House, primarily through Office of Health Reform Director Nancy Ann DeParle and Messina, with involvement from Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, was actively engaged in these negotiations while the role of Congress was limited,” the committee members wrote. “For example, three days before the June 20 statement, the head of PhRMA promised Messina, ‘we will deliver a final yes to you by morning.’ Meanwhile, Ms. DeParle all but confirmed that half of the Legislative Branch was shut out in an email to a PhRMA representative: ‘I think we should have included the House in the discussions, but maybe we never would have gotten anywhere if we had.’”
McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, McMillan Firearms Manufacturing and McMillan Group International have been collectively banking with Bank of America for 12 years. But no more: In a recent meeting, the mega-bank told the firearms company that its business is no longer welcome.
Operations director Kelly McMillan told the Daily Caller that his company has never been late on a payment and has never bounced a check. The debt outstanding on its line of credit is at 61 percent.
But at the bank’s request, he said, the McMillan group of companies would soon be paying off its credit line and closing its accounts.
On Thursday, the Director of Operations Kelly McMillan explained on McMillan’s Facebook page:
Today Mr. Ray Fox, Senior Vice President, Market Manager, Business Banking, Global Commercial Banking [of Bank of America] came to my office. He scheduled the meeting as an ‘account analysis’ meeting in order to evaluate the two lines of credit we have with them. He spent 5 minutes talking about how McMillan has changed in the last 5 years and have become more of a firearms manufacturer than a supplier of accessories.
At this point I interrupted him and asked, ‘Can I [possibly] save you some time so that you don’t waste your breath? What you are going to tell me is that because we are in the firearms manufacturing business you no longer what my business.’
‘That is correct’ he [said].
I replied ‘That is okay, we will move our accounts as soon as possible. We can find a 2nd Amendment friendly bank that will be glad to have our business. You won’t mind if I tell the NRA, SCI and everyone one I know that BofA is not firearms industry friendly?’
‘You have to do what you must’ he said.
‘So you are telling me this is a politically motivated decision, is that right?’
Mr Fox confirmed that it was. At which point I told him that the meeting was over and there was nothing let for him to say.
The Blaze is reporting that Bank of America is denying all of this on their Facebook page. Who do you believe?
Some recovery. Initial claims for unemployment have been between 380,000 and 415,000 (that is 400k lost jobs per week) every time we have checked for three years now. Democrats called the George W. Bush recovery a “jobless recovery” even when unemployment dropped well below unemployment under President Clinton.
Bloomberg News – More Americans Than Projected Filed Jobless Claims Last Week
For those who continue to complain that “We the People”, mainly conservatives, are cutting government too much, this should put everything into perspective. I know liberal progressives dislike me because we promulgate the truth which for them is like sunlight on a vampire. America, we are becoming a socialist egalitarian welfare nanny state and hardworking American taxpayers are on the road to Serfdom.
Yet another example to our leftist friends that “regulations are not made by Angels for the people’s benefit, they are made at the direction of corrupt politicians to pick winners and losers”.
So imagine that you are a small tax preparer and are a minority owned small business. Like so many of these small businesses they train tempts to do some of the work when tax season comes so as to be able to handle the work load.
H&R Block doesn’t like the competition so H&R Block creates a Political Actin Committee (PAC) that spreads around campaign cash to Members of Congress and the parties, spends a few million on lobbying.
What did they buy? New regulations that make even the temporary employees get fully licensed, have to attend a government certified course, AND attend continuing education classes every year. What small business can afford that? BUT WAIT…. you really didn’t think it ended there do you? The large tax preparers are exempt from some of the most burdensome requirements on their seasonal employees…..
So Sabrina Loving of Chicago is suing the IRS with help from the Institute for Justice.
Marking the similarities between President Barack Obama’s time in office and former president Jimmy Carter’s is nothing new. But as of Monday, Obama has hit one more Carter benchmark – both saw gas prices double in their first term of office. [See Where Gas Prices are Spiking the Most]
Under the Carter administration, gas prices increased by 103.77 percent. Gas prices since Obama took office have risen by 103.79 percent. No other presidents in recent years have struggled as much with soaring oil prices. Under the Reagan administration, gas prices actually dropped 66 percent. When Bill Clinton was president, gas prices grew by roughly 30 percent, and under both Bush presidencies, gas prices rose by 20 percent.
Across America, spending on local and state governments made up 19.8 percent of the average state’s economy in 2008. California spent 22.5 percent, compared with Texas’s 15.4 percent. Simply put, Californians spend 46 percent more of their income on their government than do Texans.
Comparing major categories of spending really brings home the difference.
The average state spends 5.7 percent of its economy on education. Neither California (at 5.6 percent) nor Texas (5.4 percent) deviates far from the average. But Texas stretches its spending much further, employing 17 percent more educators per capita than does California, with its strong teachers’ unions and highly paid teachers.
Welfare spending shows a shocking contrast, with California spending 5 percent of its economy on wealth-transfer programs, compared with the national average of 4.6 percent and Texas’s 3.1 percent.
California also spends more than Texas on law enforcement and prisons, 1.5 percent to 0.9 percent, as well as parks, recreation, and natural resources, 0.7 percent to 0.3 percent.
Mass transit and other state and locally run utilities constitute 1.4 percent of the average state’s economy. California spends 1.9 percent here, Texas, 1.2 percent. California’s proposed high-speed-rail system will significantly grow this outlay. By comparison, heavily urbanized New York, with its mass-transit systems and extensive network of government-run toll roads, outlays 2.2 percent of its economy towards government-run utilities.
Texas manages to spend more in one category than does California: roads. Though Texas has diverted as much as $1.2 billion from its highway fund lately, it still manages to spend 1.2 percent of its economy on highways, compared with California’s outlay of 0.9 percent. The national average is 1.1 percent. California used to spend far more on its roads, but cut back in the 1970s, the last time Jerry Brown was governor — he suggested then that if you build road and water infrastructure, they will come. California stopped building but they came anyway.
The spending category showing the largest divergence between California and Texas should come as no surprise to anyone following the impending bankruptcy of Stockton, California’s 13th-largest city: spending for government-employee benefits. Nationwide, states spend an average of 1.6 percent of their economy in this area. California spends 2.2 percent of its economy — $1,105 for every person in the state — to keep government employees comfortable in their golden years. Texas spends 0.9 percent of its economy for this purpose — $467 for each man, woman, and child in the state. While most Texas civil servants don’t have collective-bargaining rights, they experience about one-third the job-turnover rate of private employees, showing that the State of Texas is seen as a good employer.
Last month, Texas added 27,900 jobs. The official unemployment rate is 7.1 percent in Texas, compared with 8.3 percent nationally. California added 4,000 jobs and has an official unemployment rate of 10.9 percent.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 