Obama is a total failure

Obama is a total failure... as a crypto-Marxist.  We all know, despite his lies to the contrary, that he hates business deep down in his heart of hearts, that he really does everything he can to kill America's private enterprise, and yet, and yet... this.  Epic fail.

He gives us far-left ultra-liberals a bad name.  He desperately needs to brush up on his Engels and Saul Alinsky 101.

Obama Is The Fifth President To See The S&P 500 Double While In Office

May 25, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1ajQSbS

Coulter: On second thought, hooray for Romneycare!

Wow, proudly skanky Ann Coulter must be really flexible because she has bent over backwards and twisted herself into a pretzel to defend "Romneycare."

She's a good, loyal comfort woman for the GOP, sensing that her party's inevitable nominee needs all the support he can get with an embarrassing personal issue, even if it does cause her massive cognitive dissonance.

See my comments embedded below...

Three Cheers for RomneyCare!

By Ann Coulter

February 1, 2012 | NewsBusters

If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles -- as it was at the time.

It's not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country.

Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats' piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry.

In November 2004, for example, libertarian Ronald Bailey praised mandated private health insurance in Reason magazine, saying that it "could preserve and extend the advantages of a free market with a minimal amount of coercion."

A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare, and its health care analyst, Bob Moffit, flew to Boston for the bill signing.

Romneycare was also supported by Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School professor and health policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. Herzlinger praised Romneycare for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care.

The bill passed by 154-2 in the Massachusetts House and unanimously, 37-0, in the Massachusetts Senate -- including the vote of Sen. Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy's seat in the U.S. Senate in January 2010 by pledging to be the "41st vote against Obamacare."

But because both Obamacare and Romneycare concern the same general topic area -- health care -- and can be nicknamed (politician's name plus "care"), Romney's health care bill is suddenly perceived as virtually the same thing as the widely detested Obamacare. (How about "Romneycare-gate"?)

[ Yeah, that's the only similarity, it's just a name thing! Never mind that it was Republicans who coined the idiotic name "Hillarycare," and then thought it was so successfully damning that they went on to coin "Obamacare" to associate the two, and then "Romneycare" to tie to Obamacare. Republicans' "Name + -care" thing was always meant to be pejorative and evocative of Clinton's healthcare reform "debacle" in the 90s. - J ]

As The New York Times put it, "Mr. Romney's bellicose opposition to 'Obamacare' is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there." This is like saying state school-choice plans are "the same idea" as the Department of Education.

One difference between the health care bills is that Romneycare is constitutional and Obamacare is not. True, Obamacare's unconstitutional provisions are the least of its horrors, but the Constitution still matters to some Americans. (Oh, to be there when someone at the Times discovers this document called "the Constitution"!)

As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws -- including laws banning contraception -- without violating the Constitution.

That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally.

[ Why in the world would a plan that allows for universal healthcare coverage in Massachusetts be a bad idea nationally? What makes Massachusetts so damn special? Romney can't just be allowed to sidestep it; the media have to put him on the spot or they're not doing their job. Obama's campaign surely will. This excuse is a lame cop-out by Romney... and now by Coulter. - J ]

The only reason the "individual mandate" has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is that Congress has no constitutional authority to force citizens to buy a particular product.

The legal briefs opposing Obamacare argue that someone sitting at home, minding his own business, is not engaged in "commerce ... among the several states," and, therefore, Congress has no authority under the Commerce Clause to force people to buy insurance.

No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.

States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive.

There's no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age male s to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today's world to equip themselves with health insurance.

The hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses a legal argument with a policy objection.

[ Whoa there, Nelly! Coulter might have just discovered that she has no "policy objections" to government forcing us to buy private health insurance, but millions of her fellow Republicans -- and quite a few Democrats, by the way, including Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton -- think that the individual mandate, no matter what level of government it's coming from, is an assault on their personal liberty and "free markets," or just a totally unnecessary giveaway to private insurance companies since we could have a cheaper single-payer system like every other advanced country with better outcomes. Coulter can try to sweep this issue under the rug, and maybe most GOP zombies will let her get away with it, but I won't. And certainly the hard-core libertards and Ron Paul-ites won't let her get away with that argument. - J ]

If Obamacare were a one-page bill that did nothing but mandate that every American buy health insurance, it would still be unconstitutional, but it wouldn't be the godawful train wreck that it is. It wouldn't even be the godawful train wreck that high-speed rail is.

It would not be a 2,000-page, trillion-dollar federal program micromanaging every aspect of health care in America with enormous, unresponsive federal bureaucracies manned by no-show public-sector union members enforcing a mountain of regulations that will bankrupt the country and destroy medical care, as liberals scratch their heads and wonder why Obamacare is costing 20 times more than they expected and doctors are leaving the profession in droves for more lucrative c areers, such as video store clerk.

Nothing good has ever come of a 2,000-page bill.

There's not much governors can do about the collectivist mess Congress has made of health care in this country. They are mere functionaries in the federal government's health care Leviathan.

A governor can't repeal or expand the federal tax break given to companies that pay their employees' health insurance premiums -- a tax break denied the self-employed and self-insured.

A governor can't order the IRS to start recognizing tax deductions for individual health savings accounts.

A governor can't repeal the 1946 federal law essentially requiring hospitals to provide free medical services to all comers, thus dumping a free-rider problem on the states.

It was precisely this free-rider problem that Romneycare was designed to address in the only way a governor can. In addition to mandating that everyone purchase health insurance, Romneycare used the $1.2 billion that the state was already spending on medical care for the uninsured to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance for those who couldn't afford it.

What went wrong with Romneycare wasn't a problem in the bill, but a problem in Massachusetts: Democrats.

First, the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature set the threshold for receiving a subsidy so that it included people making just below the median income in the United States, a policy known as "redistribution of income." For more on this policy, see "Marx, Karl."

[ Today, the median U.S. household income is about $50,000; let's assume zero income tax, but after 3.1% employee payroll tax that's $48,450. The average U.S. household is about 2.5 people. The average cost for family coverage through an employer is about $4,100, plus out-of-pocket costs. To buy family health insurance directly (not including dental or maternity) for a family of three costs $200-300 per month with a $5,000 deductible and up to 30% coinsurance plus co-pays, (although some plan deductibles reach $11,000 for monthly rates as low as $150), so let's say the average family must pay at least $7,500 per year for independent health insurance. Indeed, the average American pays $7,900 per year, but the very old and sick skew that figure, so let's stick with $7,500 per household. Next, let's say the average rent/housing/utilities/public services/property tax expense is $15,000 per year, a low-modest figure. Average-median U.S. household spending on food & dining is about $6,400 per year; but to be modest let's use the average SNAP/food stamp figure of $133 per household member per month, or about $335 per month for food = $4,020 per year. Let's say the average household spends at least $2,500 per year on gasoline and car maintenance -- again, a modest estimate. Let's say $1,500 per year for clothing. And $2,000 a year for car payments + mandatory insurance, a very low estimate.

So far, we've covered only the basics -- food, shelter, clothing and transportation (necessary to work and earn money for the basics) -- and we've already spent $32,520 on a household budget that's modest compared to other estimates. That leaves only $17,480 for emergency expenses, including emergency health expenses not covered by health insurance, maybe buying a new or second car, not to mention things like education, gifts for family, furniture + appliances, Internet + phone service, the occasional night out or alcoholic beverage, some kind of family vacation, and of course saving for college and retirement. Now, this budget is certainly doable, and lots of families make do on even less, but the point is that subsidizing the average family's health care costs is not goddamn "Marxism." If it is, then so are the child tax credit, education tax credits, and home mortgage interest deduction. - J ]

Then, liberals destroyed the group-rate, "no frills" private insurance plans allowed under Romneycare (i.e. the only kind of health insurance a normal person would want to buy, but which is banned in most states) by adding dozens of state mandates, including requiring insurers to cover chiropractors and in vitro fertilization -- a policy known as "pandering to lobbyists."

[ See above what "no frills" private medical insurance costs. It ain't cheap. - J ]

For more on "pandering" and "lobbyists," see "Gingrich, Newt." (Yes, that's an actual person's name.)

Romney's critics, such as Rick Santorum, charge that the governor should have known that Democrats would wreck whatever reforms he attempted.

They have, but no more than they would have wrecked health care in Massachusetts without Romneycare. Democrats could use a sunny day as an excuse to destroy the free market, redistribute income and pander to lobbyists. Does that mean Republicans should never try to reform anything and start denouncing sunny days?

Santorum has boasted of his role in passing welfare reform in the 1990s. You know what the Democrats' 2009 stimulus bill dismantled? That's right: the welfare reform that passed in the 1990s.

The problem isn't health insurance mandates. The problem isn't Romneycare. The problem isn't welfare reform. The problem is Democrats.

[ This actually represents progress, ladies and gentlemen. The Right and Left establishments are now in agreement that universal health coverage and an individual mandate are not necessarily bad things. - J ]

Channel Marx to save capitalism?

Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy

By George Magnus

August 28, 2011 | Bloomberg

Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx. The sooner they recognize we're facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of capitalism, the better equipped they will be to manage a way out of it.

The spirit of Marx, who is buried in a cemetery close to where I live in north London, has risen from the grave amid the financial crisis and subsequent economic slump. The wily philosopher's analysis of capitalism had a lot of flaws, but today's global economy bears some uncanny resemblances to the conditions he foresaw.

Consider, for example, Marx's prediction of how the inherent conflict between capital and labor would manifest itself. As he wrote in "Das Kapital," companies' pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an "industrial reserve army" of the poor and unemployed: "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery."

The process he describes is visible throughout the developed world, particularly in the U.S. Companies' efforts to cut costs and avoid hiring have boosted U.S. corporate profits as a share of total economic output to the highest level in more than six decades, while the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and real wages are stagnant.

U.S. income inequality, meanwhile, is by some measures close to its highest level since the 1920s. Before 2008, the income disparity was obscured by factors such as easy credit, which allowed poor households to enjoy a more affluent lifestyle. Now the problem is coming home to roost.

Over-Production Paradox

Marx also pointed out the paradox of over-production and under-consumption: The more people are relegated to poverty, the less they will be able to consume all the goods and services companies produce. When one company cuts costs to boost earnings, it's smart, but when they all do, they undermine the income formation and effective demand on which they rely for revenues and profits.

This problem, too, is evident in today's developed world. We have a substantial capacity to produce, but in the middle- and lower-income cohorts, we find widespread financial insecurity and low consumption rates. The result is visible in the U.S., where new housing construction and automobile sales remain about 75% and 30% below their 2006 peaks, respectively.

As Marx put it in Kapital: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses."

Addressing the Crisis

So how do we address this crisis? To put Marx's spirit back in the box, policy makers have to place jobs at the top of the economic agenda, and consider other unorthodox measures. The crisis isn't temporary, and it certainly won't be cured by the ideological passion for government austerity.

Here are five major planks of a strategy whose time, sadly, has not yet come.

First, we have to sustain aggregate demand and income growth, or else we could fall into a debt trap along with serious social consequences. Governments that don't face an imminent debt crisis -- including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. -- must make employment creation the litmus test of policy. In the U.S., the employment-to-population ratio is now as low as in the 1980s. Measures of underemployment almost everywhere are at record highs. Cutting employer payroll taxes and creating fiscal incentives to encourage companies to hire people and invest would do for a start.

Lighten the Burden

Second, to lighten the household debt burden, new steps should allow eligible households to restructure mortgage debt, or swap some debt forgiveness for future payments to lenders out of any home price appreciation.

Third, to improve the functionality of the credit system, well-capitalized and well-structured banks should be allowed some temporary capital adequacy relief to try to get new credit flowing to small companies, especially. Governments and central banks could engage in direct spending on or indirect financing of national investment or infrastructure programs.

Fourth, to ease the sovereign debt burden in the euro zone, European creditors have to extend the lower interest rates and longer payment terms recently proposed for Greece. If jointly guaranteed euro bonds are a bridge too far, Germany has to champion an urgent recapitalization of banks to help absorb inevitable losses through a vastly enlarged European Financial Stability Facility -- a sine qua non to solve the bond market crisis at least.

Build Defenses

Fifth, to build defenses against the risk of falling into deflation and stagnation, central banks should look beyond bond- buying programs, and instead target a growth rate of nominal economic output. This would allow a temporary period of moderately higher inflation that could push inflation-adjusted interest rates well below zero and facilitate a lowering of debt burdens.

We can't know how these proposals might work out, or what their unintended consequences might be. But the policy status quo isn't acceptable, either. It could turn the U.S. into a more unstable version of Japan, and fracture the euro zone with unknowable political consequences. By 2013, the crisis of Western capitalism could easily spill over to China, but that's another subject.

(George Magnus is senior economic adviser at UBS and author of "Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy?")

The Real Thanksgiving Story -- GOBBLE THIS!

Originally written Nov. 23, 2006

A lot of you won't accept, or won't want to accept, this "version" of the Thanksgiving story. Just remember one indisputable fact: the Pilgrims' descendants are alive and well; but most native Indian tribes have been slaughtered to the point of extinction. In modern parlance, they were "ethnically cleansed."

Even if you accept the traditional version of Thanksgiving, you must admit that the amity between Plymouth settlers and native Indians was short-lived. To me, it seems a real mockery of the dead to focus on that one mythic moment and ignore what came after.

People with a political ax to grind say the "real" story of Thanksgiving was the triumph in Plymouth of 'capitalism' (farming on individual plots of land) over 'communism' (collective farming). But this is a petty distinction, considering that those plots of land belonged to the Indians first, and were farmed by Indian slaves. Warfare, pillage, and slavery, unfortunately, are totally compatible with capitalism.

(I debate this pro-capitalism theme after the article!)

But hey, not that I'm a killjoy. I like my turkey and stuffing too. My celebration just has nothing to do with honoring those violent religious exiles from England, the Pilgrims.

THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING by Susan Bates Most of us associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a big feast. And that did happen - once. The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language. He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags. But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest. But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought. In 1637 near present day Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside. Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered. Cheered by their "victory", the brave colonists and their Indian allies attacked village after village. Women and children over 14 were sold into slavery while the rest were murdered. Boats loaded with a many as 500 slaves regularly left the ports of New England. Bounties were paid for Indian scalps to encourage as many deaths as possible. Following an especially successful raid against the Pequot in what is now Stamford, Connecticut, the churches announced a second day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the heathen savages. During the feasting, the hacked off heads of Natives were kicked through the streets like soccer balls. Even the friendly Wampanoag did not escape the madness. Their chief was beheaded, and his head impaled on a pole in Plymouth, Massachusetts -- where it remained on display for 24 years. The killings became more and more frenzied, with days of thanksgiving feasts being held after each successful massacre. George Washington finally suggested that only one day of Thanksgiving per year be set aside instead of celebrating each and every massacre. Later Abraham Lincoln decreed Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War -- on the same day he ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota. This story doesn't have quite the same fuzzy feelings associated with it as the one where the Indians and Pilgrims are all sitting down together at the big feast. But we need to learn our true history so it won't ever be repeated. Next Thanksgiving, when you gather with your loved ones to Thank God for all your blessings, think about those people who only wanted to live their lives and raise their families. They, also took time out to say "thank you" to Creator for all their blessings. It is sad to think that this happened, but it is important to understand all of the story and not just the happy part. Today the town of Plymouth Rock has a Thanksgiving ceremony each year in remembrance of the first Thanksgiving. There are still Wampanoag people living in Massachusetts. In 1970, they asked one of them to speak at the ceremony to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim's arrival. Here is part of what was said: "Today is a time of celebrating for you -- a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people. Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the Wampanoags, still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed. But today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important." http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=530&mode=nocomments&order=0&thold=0 _______________________________________________ "That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn't work!" -- from chapter six of: "Dead White Guys or What Your History Books Never Told You," I don't want to debate which is better, communism (often equated falsely with 'socialism') or capitalism. (For the record, a communist nation has never existed; I hope you all realize that.) I just want to point out the silliness of the line of reasoning above. Long before Marx, and long, long before the Pilgrims -- even after the Pilgrims -- tribal societies, including the native American Indians, practiced communal or collective farming. And it worked. It may not have gotten them skyscrapers and Gatling guns, but it kept them fed and clothed. It kept humanity going for tens of thousands of years. The main reason collective farming didn't work for the Pilgrims is because it was completely new to them. The Puritans certainly hadn't lived that way back home in England; they were mostly middle class professionals -- less than 1/3 were farmers, to the Puritans' detriment in America! So, what they tried in the American wilderness was something idealistic but ultimately naive, and, contrary to their own poltical culture and habits in England. Despite their Christian zeal, their heart just wasn't in it to live all for one, one for all. Nor did they know how.