Dollar, Yellen, Geithner, retail sales, unemployment
March 13th, 2010
Peter David Schiff ( born March 23, 1963) is an American stock broker, economist, author, financial news commentator, video blogger, the president of Euro Pacific Capital and a 2010 candidate for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democratic Senator Chris Dodd.
Peter Schiff Wikipedia
Tags: Economic News, economy, State of the Economy, unemployment
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I Am so Looking forward To The Government Taking Over The 40% Of Our Health Care That They Don’t Already control
March 13th, 2010
[Through Medicare and Medicaid the government now controls about 60% of our health care.]
UK: Patients Put in Hospital ‘Cupboards’ (mop closets) Due to NHS Budget Squeeze
by Pat_S on March 13, 2010 · 0 comments
A post by Pat
Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.
Poor doggie. If Mother Hubbard went to the cupboards of some hospitals in the U.K. today, she’d find plenty of bones though still in living bodies. We hope. The NHS is having some money problems. Oh, and by hospital “cupboards” they mean mop closets.
No, we sure wouldn’t want to maintain the status quo with our health care system in the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid are going to bankrupt us. Private insurers keep raising their premiums and denying coverage to people. The solution from Obama and the Democrats is government intervention to turn the screws on private insurers and “keep them honest”. Ultimately, a single payer system will solve everything. Just a matter of time.
You’d think we’re the only country experiencing a health care crisis since we’re the ones so backward about universal health care. Actually, most major economies are having a health care crisis right along with us.
It just goes to show that however perfectly a health system is designed, funded and organised, it is always going to have its problems. Right now, the health services of all advanced economies – good, bad, and ugly together – face a common challenge. The demographic time-bomb of baby-boomers about to hit the age of maximum health care cost has pretty much made all of them fiscally unsustainable. Either we are going to have to pay a whole lot more for our health care, or it will have to be rationed.
So how does a system that is already government run handle a health care crisis? The NHS instituted drastic cutbacks including reducing the number of hospital beds and curtailing medical procedures. Something will have to be done about the elderly too. A recommendation will be made to the NHS to provide “a minimum level of service” to the elderly.
Here are a few other things going on.
Patients treated in cupboards
More patients will be treated in hospital cupboards if further planned bed cuts are given the green light, a health pressure group warned on Tuesday.
Health Emergency chairman Geoff Martin made the comments following a Nursing Times survey that revealed over 60 per cent of nurses were aware of patients being routinely treated in mop cupboards, TV rooms and corridors.
The poll of more than 900 nurses showed almost 80 per cent believed this resulted in patient safety being put at risk and 29 per cent admitted it happened every day.
Nurses highlighted specific issues around safety with senior staff, including patients having no access to call bells or water, as well as a lack of emergency equipment and fire exits being blocked.
Hospitals being “full” and a fear that the government’s four-hour A&E target for patients to be seen will not be met, leading to unnecessary hospital admissions, were some of the reasons given for why non-clinical areas had to be used.
But Mr Martin warned of much worse to come if planned bed cuts, including over 30 per cent of the current capacity in London, were bulldozed through.
He said: “If NHS London get its way, a third of the current hospital beds in the capital will be ripped out of the system at a time when nurses are already making it clear that the crisis is so severe that patients are being treated in cupboards and that hospitals are dangerously short of capacity.” The Patients Association charity director Katherine Murphy said: “Not only is this potentially unsafe, but it is completely undignified.
If you need a tooth pulled or a hysterectomy, you probably won’t be put in the mop closet. You may not wind up in the dental chair or an operating room either.
Patients denied surgery because of black hole in health budgets
More than a third of Primary Care Trusts, which fund hospitals in England, are running deficits which have led to a cutbacks in operations and calls to close casualty departments, the report said. [...] Patients are already suffering from the deficit, the report said. GPs in one area have been told they must seek “approval” for a list of procedures including hysterectomies, removal of “skin lumps and bumps” and tooth extraction.
Bosses have advised that “it is usually better to wait to see if symptoms resolve themselves”, according to the report.
That sounds reasonable. Don’t be such a sissy running out for a tooth extraction or a hysterectomy before you know you really need it. Waiting for the pain to go away is much better than giving up premium cable to pay for higher health insurance premiums.
Being in a mop closet doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get any care.
Patients ‘routinely neglected’ at hospital of horrors
PATIENTS were “routinely neglected” at a hospital where managers became obsessed with cost-cutting and Government targets, an inquiry has damningly concluded.
Maybe they aren’t being neglected. Maybe everyone is waiting around to see if the problems go away, like when you’re dead.
NHS trust shamed for cost cutting
Stafford Hospital was ranked among the best in Britain – having been awarded a coveted foundation status in 2008. But on closer inspection things are not so rosy.
For the previous six years, it had had one of the highest mortality rates in the country. The Royal College of Nursing believes this could only happen because the criterion used to decide which hospitals are awarded foundation status does not focus closely enough on patient safety.
“It’s definitely more than a local problem, it comes from the government it really does. It comes from the targets they put in place,” [says a family member of a patient]. “The hospitals will do absolutely anything to meet the targets and even more to get foundation status.”
Anyone who looks to government to solve the problem of health care costs should remember Old Mother Hubbard.
She went to the baker’s
To buy him some bread;
When she came back
The dog was dead!
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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On Obamacare – just say no
March 13th, 2010
WorldNetDaily.com
Posted: March 13, 2010
When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he chose the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used on which to take the oath of office.
A little over a year later, as President Obama strong-arms House and Senate Democrats to pass a health-care bill that will nationalize 17 percent of our economic lives – a bill that Americans don’t want – we ought to recall Lincoln’s famous words at Gettysburg.
Dedicating the final resting place for those who fought there, Lincoln appealed that we not let up in the struggle for “government
of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Democrats may soon show, if we let them, that the American ideal of representative government – government of a nation, in Lincoln’s words, “conceived in Liberty” – is lost.
Bending rules into a procedural pretzel, Democrats will attempt to pass one of the largest government takeovers of private American lives in history without a single Republican vote and, against the will of the people. Obama will sign it into law.
Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen write in the Washington Post, “… a solid majority of Americans oppose the massive health-care reform plan.”
Pollster.com, which reports an average of all polls, shows that now for the first time disapproval for President Obama exceeds approval – 48.8 to 47.5 percent.
According to Gallup, just 21 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, down 10 points from spring of last year when the health-care reform push began.
And, per the latest from the Pew Research Center, only 13 percent of Americans view health care as “our most important problem.”
But this isn’t about logic. Mr. Obama and his colleagues on Capitol Hill perceive a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grasp the holy grail of the left and realize the dream of transforming America into a European-style welfare state. Democracy – what the American people actually want – is just not going to stand in the way.
It isn’t just about Republican opposition. Nancy Pelosi must persuade, bribe and threaten to get 216 House Democrats to support this despite having 253 sitting House Democrats.
Speaking the other day in Missouri, Obama mocked Republicans who want to stop this train and begin the process over.
But Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the nation’s wealthiest men – himself a Democrat – said the same thing in an interview on CNBC.
Buffett said we should “start over.” And he said, correctly, that the main health-care problem is runaway costs and that the bill the president is pushing “unfortunately … doesn’t attack the cost situation that much.”
Yet, in his remarks in Missouri, the president said, “Let me tell you, we’ve incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain rising health-care costs. There’s not an idea out there that we have not worked on, that we have not included in this proposal.”
At the recent White House health-care summit, Rep. Paul Ryan challenged with clarity the massive accounting gimmicks and hallucinatory economic assumptions Democrats have used to present this massive budget-busting disaster of a bill as a prudent deficit-cutting measure.
Ryan, speaking for Republicans, showed that the 10-year costs are in reality $2.3 trillion, rather than under a trillion as claimed. It’s all been ignored.
In the one laboratory experiment we have – Massachusetts – which enacted a state plan similar to what Democrats want for the nation, premiums are now the highest in the nation, and per-capita health expenditures are 27 percent higher than the national average.
Every freedom-loving American patriot who cares about our future should be on the phone today to their senators and congressmen saying “stop.”
Star Parker is is an author and president of CURE, Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education. Her books include “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialism, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Yellen is Spellin’ Future Inflation
March 13th, 2010
Townhall.com
The new Obama Fed is going to be very dovish when it comes to fighting future inflation and defending the value of the dollar.
The president has nominated Janet Yellen to be vice chair of the Federal Reserve. Ms. Yellen is a distinguished economist who unfortunately subscribes to the Phillips-curve model that trades off unemployment and inflation. In other words, rather than excess money creation as the cause of rising prices, she focuses on the unemployment rate, the volume of new jobs being created, and the growth of the overall economy. For Ms. Yellen, inflation is caused by too many people working and too much economic prosperity.
And since we have the opposite problem today — high unemployment and too few people working — she will be the last Fed governor to turn out the lights on the central bank’s zero interest rate.
There is no evidence in Ms. Yellen’s public opinions or speeches that she might use a market-price rule — targeting commodities, gold, bond rates, or the dollar — as a forward-looking inflation (or deflation) signal. So the absence of a commodity- or dollar-price rule will continue at the Fed. Ben Bernanke doesn’t use a market-price rule, and Obama’s additional Fed appointees — whoever they are — will undoubtedly come from the same Phillips-curve camp.
Supply-siders like myself who believe that only market prices can provide accurate signals of the supply and demand for money are going to be very disappointed. If the Fed supplies more cash than markets want, the inflation rate can go up whether unemployment is high or low. We learned this painfully in the 1970s, when high unemployment was accompanied by high inflation.
Even more troubling, fiscal policies coming out of Washington will reduce the investment demand for money. This is because tax rates on those individuals, families, and entrepreneurs who are most likely to save and invest are going up. Rather than extending the Bush marginal-tax-rate cuts on capital gains and other forms of investment, Washington will let that tax relief expire at the end of this year.
On top of this, Obamacare proposes to apply the 2.9 percent Medicare payroll tax on ordinary labor income to capital gains, dividends, interest, and profits from passive investments in partnerships and S-corporation small businesses.
Saving and investment are already double-taxed several times over. This includes the inheritance tax, which is slated to rise substantially next year. But taxing successful investors and earners is the exact wrong policy. Continued…
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Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, inflation, unemployment
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How Real are the Defects in Toyota’s Cars?
March 13th, 2010
Megan McArdle – Megan McArdle is the business and economics editor for The Atlantic. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and the Economist.
Mar 12 2010, 2:56 PM ET
One of the great mysteries of the Toyota debacle is why Toyota ignored the complaints for so long. Or at least it’s a mystery to reporters on cable news, abetted by consumer advocates who were all too happy to imply that Toyota didn’t care how many people it killed as long as they made a profit.
The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, though the Times did not mention it, the ages of the drivers involved were striking.
In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89–and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.
These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did before them. (If computers are going to discriminate against anyone, they should be picking on the young, who are more likely to take up arms against the rise of the machines and future Terminators).
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Toyota
Posted in The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Bob Shallit: IRS visits Sacramento carwash in pursuit of 4 cents
March 13th, 2010
The Sacramento Bee
Saturday, Mar. 13, 2010 – 12:00 am
It was every businessperson’s nightmare.
Tags: IRS
Posted in The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Texas Social Studies Curriculum Vote Bring Out Worst in AP Bias, Labeling
March 13th, 2010
Texas Social Studies
April Castro and the headline writers at the supposedly “objective” Associated Press are obviously not pleased with changes the Texas State Board of Education made to the Lone Star State’s social studies curriculum.
Castro’s report (HT to an NB e-mailer) makes almost no attempt to hide her clear disdain. She includes references to a “far-right faction” (a “faction” that happened to constitute a two-thirds majority!) and “ultraconservatives,” while uniformly describing leftists as mere Democrats, and generally comes across as a sore loser in solidarity with the poor, outvoted libs.
You’ll also see in the excerpt that follows that the story’s headline is disgracefully over the top:
Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences
AUSTIN, Texas — A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.
Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.
“We have been about conservatism versus liberalism,” said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. “We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it’s appropriate.”
…. Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board’s most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of “whitewashing” curriculum standards.
By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding “American exceptionalism” and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.
Castro should have been asking why the items described in the excerpt, plus the following cited by the AP writer in unexcerpted paragraphs, haven’t been in the social studies curriculum all along:
- “… the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics.”
- former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
- “a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.”
Apparently the ultimate insult occurred when “Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.”
Oh the humanity.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters
Texas Social Studies
Tags: Election 2010, Houston Voters, Public Education, Texas Textbooks
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Leftists Defend The Right to Race-Based Abortions
March 13th, 2010
David Horowitz’s Newsreal
1921 diagram from the Eugenics Record Office
The virtue of hate crime legislation is a given on the Left. Criminals deserve stiffer punishments if they select victims based on race or sex, end of story.
But what if one of those criminals chose to abort a pregnancy based on the race or sex of the fetus? Oh, that would be a sacred right.
This is not hyperbole. Consider the depravity of this recent headline on Salon’s Broadsheet blog: Banning Race-Based Abortions is Wrong.
My body, my choice to abort based on race?
The Broadsheet piece by Tracy Clark-Flory is a reaction to the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, a proposed law that would outlaw abortion based on race, color, or sex in the state of Georgia.
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act would apply to abortion “the same standards of nondiscrimination” that govern employment, education, government and housing, said Georgia state Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Republican who introduced the bill last month with bipartisan support.
If enacted, the bill would make it illegal to knowingly solicit, perform or accept funding for race- or sex-selected abortions.
So how does this translate into an assault on reproductive freedom? Clark-Flory explains:
Roger Evans, Planned Parenthood’s senior director for litigation and law, told me over the phone that his main objection is to “the notion that the government has a role in deciding what are fair reasons and unfair reasons for a woman to have an abortion.” First it’s race and sex — but what next?
Ah, yes, the slippery slope argument. First they come for our right to selectively abort female fetuses, and the next thing you know, it’ll be redheaded fetuses. Pretty soon we’ll have no right to abort eight-month-old fetuses that kick too much in the middle of the night.
She continues:
On a more practical level, though, the bill “makes it exceedingly difficult for physicians or counselors to talk with women who have concerns or ambivalence about what to do,” he explains. “If [the patient] mentions the prohibited subject, it puts doctors in the position of saying, ‘I can’t talk to you about what you’re thinking’” — not to mention the position of refusing to perform an abortion on that patient for fear of being thrown in prison.
When a patient is desperate to get one of those racially undesirable fetuses out of her womb, the doctor will apparently have to say, “Sorry, ma’am, the wingnut antis have forced Planned Parenthood to stop knowingly abetting eugenics. You’ll have to go elsewhere for your race-based abortion. Hey, you’re not filming this for Lila Rose, are you?”
Clark-Flory insists the proposed legislation would require doctors to “cross-examine their patients so as to be sure a woman’s decision to abort isn’t motivated by sex or race.” Rubbish. In all likelihood, the law would simply add another form to the pile of clinic paperwork completed by each patient: sign here if your abortion was not coerced and is not motivated by race, sex, or color.
Tracy Clark-Flory isn’t the only one distressed about potentially losing the right to fetal discrimination. Staff writers at Double X are concerned about this bill “further stripping away women’s reproductive rights.” And leftist cheerleader Alan Colmes is promoting the lie that the bill would “require doctors to ask women why they want abortions and to record their answers.” What, suddenly Alan’s forgotten about the constitutionally protected right to privacy?
In the 1920s, the Eugenics Movement was in full swing in the United States. Terms like “compulsory sterilization” and “racial betterment” were acceptable in polite conversation, and eugenicists promoted anti-miscegenation laws to preserve the purity of human stock.
Less than 100 years later, the Left hopes to defeat a ban on race- and sex-based abortions and Democratic leaders argue that federal abortion funding will cut health care costs. (Babies from poor families can be awfully expensive – best to weed them out before birth.)
With such extreme rhetoric surfacing, is it any wonder that young Americans are trending anti-abortion? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Abortion, government control, Houston Voters
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Good News, D.C. Unemployment’s Up
March 13th, 2010
- BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
- MARCH 12, 2010
Oh, wait. Actually, they say it’s good news, and that’s why it’s bad news.
By JAMES TARANTO
This headline in the Washington Post seemed like a pleasant surprise: “Rise in Washington Area Unemployment Seen as Good Sign for Economy’s Recovery.”
The logic seems unassailable: The District of Columbia is the hub of the political class. Higher unemployment in Washington and vicinity thus means fewer parasites feeding off the productive economy, which augurs well for recover[y]. But we wouldn’t have expected to read it in the Washington Post.
Turns out we would have been right, for it turns out the story actually says that higher unemployment in Washington is a sign of prosperity in Washington:
Unemployment rates rose in the District, Maryland and Virginia in January, a shift that economists said could be a positive sign for the economy because it suggests that discouraged job-seekers are feeling more optimistic about their prospects and have resumed looking for work.
So what looks to the Post like good news that looks like bad news is actually bad news that looks like good news.
Tags: economy, Election 2010, Houston Voters, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »