By ROBERT J. SAMUELSON Posted 09/29/2009 06:11 PM ET
What’s driving the great health debate of 2009 is not a popular clamor for universal insurance.
“Many Americans are balking again at the prospect of health care reform,” writes pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center.
A new Wall Street Journal poll found 41% of respondents opposed to President Obama’s proposals and 39% in favor (the rest were undecided). The underlying driver is politicians’ psychological quest for glory.
| You’re the First to Know Dear Friend, Well, it looks like you have made a difference.
Based upon the unbelievable support that I have receieved from 10,000 supporters like you, I have decided to throw my hat into the ring to challenge Chris Dodd for the honor of representing the state of Connecticut in the United States Senate. I will announce my candidacy on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show on Thursday, September 17 at 8:15am eastern time. Sorry for the short notice, but its important to honor commitments and keep these things under raps until the day the news breaks.
At this time last year I could not have imagined that that I would be making such an announcement today. I had never intended to become a candidate for public office. But these are extraordinary times. Our economy is falling apart in front of our eyes and Washington seems intent on making the wheels come off even faster. At a time when we desperately need adult supervison, the economically illiterate are running the show. As I love my country, it now seems clear that I must try to do something to help. The emotional and material support I have received from across the country has made the decision much easier.
So today it begins. As I’m sure you are aware, the rules in politics bear only scant resemblance to those which govern polite society. As a result, I am wading into strange waters, and I’m sure strange things will happen. But I promise to maintain my composure and give it my best shot. Based on the support that I have received thus far, I fully expect to be facing down Chris Dodd in the general election just 14 months from now.
As my campaign takes flight, I appreciate the patience and trust that you have shown. To commit time and money to a long shot candidate for high office is a hard choice. I hope to repay that trust with a first class campaign.
I look forward to your feedback and your continued support.
Thanks again, Peter Schiff |
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Unsubscribe striker@morality101.net from this list Our mailing address is: Copyright (C) 2009 Schiff Exploratory Committee All rights reserved. |
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“NO QUESTIONS, SIR!” by Gary North, at http://garynorth.com Date 9/10/2009
I will now make an assertion:
Am I wrong? Then call my bluff. Send me a question. I’ll answer it. If you are asking a career decision question, I will need the following information:
Then ask your question. Send you question (25 words or fewer) to this address: Put the word “QUESTION” in the subject box. I will answer all of them in future issues of this newsletter. Back in 2005, I offered this service. For a year, I answered questions every other issue. This helped me find out what topics my readers were interested in. Well, a few of my readers, anyway. One-tenth of one percent of my mailing list sent a question. Yes, one out of 1,000. Nobody else had any questions. People do not ask questions. There are three main reasons for this.
A SHAKY TRESTLE Our problem is procrastination. Most of our lives are routine. We do not get too far away from a comfortable routine. Most of the time this routine works. Some people call this being in a rut. Others call it staying on track. Sometimes the trestle is wobbling. I have no objection to routines. My routine keeps me on track in my rut. But part of my routine is to look down the tracks to see if there is anything out of the ordinary. Today, the economy is out of the ordinary. The trestle almost collapsed a year ago. The question is: Will it collapse next time? Also, when might this next time be? There are signs that the trestle is missing pillars. Every Friday afternoon, after the stock market closes, the FDIC closes five more banks. Investors shrug it off. “No problem.” Then, the next Friday, five more banks get closed. How long can this go on? Not much longer. The number of closings will increase. A man whose firm buys busted banks says that he expects 1,000 banks to close. (http://www.cnbc.com/id/32581463) “No problem.” Then there is unemployment. Every month, the number of jobs declines by 200,000 or more. The rate of unemployment jumps. Investors immediately buy more shares. Why? Because they see unemployment as a cost-cutting tactic. Therefore, “corporate earnings will go up soon.” They don’t think that an S&P price-earnings ratio of 129 (August 31) is a danger signal. It has never been this high before. It has never reached 50 before. “No problem.” They think that profits will rise to bring the P/E back to something like 15, which would be a buy-and- hold signal. Then there is the Federal deficit. It will end up on September 30 in the range of $1.6 trillion. The administration has offered an estimate of $9 trillion between now and 2019, meaning $900 billion a year. Social Security is officially expected to go into the red in 2017. One Congressman thinks this could happen before the next Presidential election. He is on the House Committee for Financial Services. http://GaryNorth.com/snip/886.htm When this happens, the Social Security Trust Fund will have to cash in some of its Treasury bonds in order to get money to send to people on the rolls. The Treasury will have to sell enough debt to the public (including the Federal Reserve System) to cover these transactions. In 2008, Medicare’s Hospital Trust Fund went negative. It received less money from Medicare taxes than it spent. Thus, it had to sell its nonmarketable Treasury bonds back to the Treasury. Its press release admitted that the program was negative, but it spoke of the Trust Fund as solvent. It is solvent legally. It has government-issued IOU’s in it. But not for long.
That’s a nice, precise figure: $342 billion. The key words are these: “will need to be transferred from the Federal treasury.” From the empty Federal Treasury.
http://GaryNorth.com/snip/887.htm I love this phrase: “Congress should also act immediately.” Congress did nothing except run up the general deficit by another $750 billion (minimum) in October. Then it did it again this spring. The Medicare hospital insurance program is bankrupt, but nobody in government except Ron Paul uses this word to describe government programs. CALM IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE Most people know little or none of this. They go through their daily routines. They are oblivious. The government has deliberately disguised these matters. The average citizen thinks that someone at the top has a solution. He cannot conceive of the possibility that experts who run the system are making things up as they go along. Most of the time the system lumbers along. But then, once in a while — such as a year ago — the system grinds to a halt. Then the response is the same: create money and increase the Federal deficit. The average guy thinks this will solve the problem at no cost to him. It feels like no cost, but the debt level rises. This year, the Federal deficit has added another $17,000 per household. No one seemed to care. Few even noticed. http://GaryNorth.com/snip/888.htm As we watch these things going on around us, and when we perceive that those around us perceive none of this, we remain calm. The calm serenity of those around us calms us, as well. We see the trestle ahead. We see the engine disappear from sight. We suspect what is going to happen to us if we don’t get off the train. But no one around us is moving toward the exit. No one even seems to notice. The problem is, the trestle has wobbled before. It has looked as though the engine has disappeared, but it always reappears on the far side of the trestle. So, we assume that this time it will not go over the edge into the blackness below. But there are lots of trestles between here and our final destination. We are calmed by the calm of those around us. They seem to know what they are doing. Yet they didn’t know a year ago. Henry Paulson was frantic. He nationalized the mortgage market on his own authority exactly one year ago. The markets remained calm. Within weeks, the bailouts of the big banks began. Goldman Sach’s rival, Lehman Brothers Holdings, went bust over a weekend. Merrill Lynch was swallowed by Bank of America. The underlying causes of the problem, namely, toxic assets, have not gone away. There are lots more of them ahead of us: Alt-A mortgages (liars’ loans), option ARMs (folks too poor even to lie loans), and commercial real estate. The re-sets will hit families that will not be able to qualify for loans. There are no more liar loans available. Lending standards have tightened over the last year and a half. The loans that were easy to get in 2007 and earlier are now ancient history. The re-sets will mean busted loans. They will end. Some of them will not be replaced. No one knows how many. The lending agencies will not be able to hide these re-set loans. They die on schedule. They must be replaced. They will not be replaced. The lenders will have expired loans on their books. The lenders have been playing “let’s pretend” with bad loans. They have not reported these loans as being in default. They have pretended that there is hope to get the owners paying again. A re-set mortgage does not offer wiggle room. Unless the regulators change the rules, these loans will have to be written down as soon as the re-set date arrives. Example: my son-on-law bought a new home in a nice neighborhood. He bought a bank-foreclosed house in a bank- foreclosed development. It was $100,000 less expensive than a few months before. The houses sold fast because the bank priced the houses to sell. Recently, his next-door neighbor lost his job. He moved back to northern Illinois to get a seasonal job. His wife and family stayed behind. Now she has been laid off. This is not a poor neighborhood. It is middle class. Unemployment climbs relentlessly. This is having fall-out effects on housing. The summer season for selling houses ended in late August. The reports on home sales will turn negative as the percentage of foreclosure sales increases in relation to total sales. Yet people in the know are calm. The average Joe is calm until the guy across the street loses his job. THE IMPLICATIONS Have you sat down with a pencil and paper to outline your situation? If you were in the market for a new mortgage, what could you present to the lender to prove that you are a low-risk debtor? If you were in the market for a new job, how much wiggle room would your finances allow you? Where are you vulnerable? Your job? Where is your employer vulnerable? People assume that corporate management knows what it is doing. Then they are amazed when they are told that their services are no longer needed. Managers don’t warn people whose jobs are at risk. They hold out hope that a turnaround is imminent. They want to believe that it really is imminent. They don’t want to lose anyone because of a premature warning to him that his job is coming to an end. So, they don’t tell a targeted employee until there is just no wiggle room remaining. Are you seeing this at your firm? Is there a drip- drip-drip phenomenon going on, the way it is with insolvent banks? If there is, what have you done to see to it that your job is safe? Anything new? If not, you should assume that your job is not safe. What about your company’s market? Is it stabilizing? Talk to someone in sales. That’s where the first signs of recovery will occur. Here is a strategy you can quietly use to assess your firm’s line of credit. Which bank is its main lender? You need to know. Once you know, check what the bank is paying on time deposits. If it’s 2% or higher, the bank is probably in trouble. It is offering rates way above the federal funds rate of 0.15% that the Federal Reserve is paying on excess reserves. It is buying time at a loss. That bank is a candidate for an FDIC take-over. The problem then will be this: a new set of managers will be in charge of rolling over old loans. They will examine every business loan on the dead banks’ books. Your firm may be at risk along with the bank that supplies the credit. The looming decline of commercial real estate threatens local banks. A recent “Wall Street Journal” article shows why.
http://GaryNorth.com/snip/889.htm When these loans go bad, this will force more of these banks out of business. It will be crunch time for local lines of credit. CONCLUSIONS Does any of this raise some questions in your mind? Have you thought through your answers? If not, why not? Questions can be asked here of Morality101 via Comment, or to Author, garynorth@garynorth.com (subject: Questions) |
(entire article reposted here – please comment!)
Alan B. Krueger, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy
Even with this smoother-than-reality economic forecast, the administration is predicting that the federal government will run up an additional $905 billion in deficit spending over the next decade, almost doubling the national debt.
Krueger, speaking to reporters at a Friday briefing, said that while the administration’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth forecasts were largely in line with private estimates, numerous factors could affect and alter those estimates.
“It’s the nature of forecasting that forecasts typically are smoother than the realizations,” he said. “Your hope is that the ups and downs balance out and, on average, are on the forecasted path.”
What Krueger did not mention is that, while the administration’s projections are close to those of private economists, known as the Blue Chip Consensus, those private forecasts only extend through 2010, while the White House’s extend through 2019.
When asked by CNSNews.com if the fragility of the administration’s projections meant higher budget deficits in the future, Krueger said that deficits were inevitable during bad economic times.
“Deficits are inevitable when you’re trying to recover from such a steep recession,” he said.
Krueger also said that, because of that steep recession, it was impossible for the administration to produce a balanced budget in the short term, saying such an idea was not “advisable” for Obama.
“In fact, it wouldn’t be advisable to have a balanced budget at this point or anything close to a balanced budget at this point,” he said.
In the longer run, however, Krueger said that the administration planned to put the budget back on a path toward fiscal responsibility, saying that the country relies far too much on borrowing and not enough on public investment.
“One has to draw a distinction between the short run and the long run,” he said. “Certainly in the longer run the administration plans to put the budget on a path that’s fiscally responsible.”
“In the U.S., I think that we rely too much on borrowing and short-term consumption at the expense of longer-run investment, public infrastructure,” he said. “The president has said that it’s very important that when we emerge from this recession that we build a stronger foundation, one that’s less susceptible to these kinds of boom-and-bust cycles.”
However, the Obama administration’s projected budgets rely on what Krueger criticizes: borrowing to finance short-term consumption.
For example, the Obama administration projects that, as a result of its 2010 budget, the federal government will run a cumulative deficit of $9.05 trillion by the year 2019. In total, the government plans to spend $43 trillion during the next decade while taking in only $34 trillion in tax revenue.
In no year between now and 2019 does the administration plan to balance the budget. In fact, the smallest single-year deficit Obama plans to incur is $739 billion in 2015, after which time the deficit will begin climbing again until it hits nearly $1 trillion ($917 billion) in 2019.
However, Krueger claimed that it was a “very important” part of Obama’s budget to move the country toward “responsible budgeting” and a “more sustainable” path.
“That’s why it’s very important, in the administration’s budget, that we make the critical investments in human capital and physical infrastructure, responsible budgeting, health care reform, clean energy, to move the U.S. to a more sustainable economic path,” he said.
Liberty is Moral
Just a quick announcement here.
We will now be submitting everything from Morality101.net to Propeller.com and have formed a new Propeller Group called Liberty is Moral, in which our friends from Morality101, Digg, Facebook and Twitter can participate and submit their own favorites and articles as well.
Digg.com was our favorite social website for quite a long time, but slid way downhill as a result of eliminating shouts and sharing, shunting those off to Facebook and Twitter. In our view The workarounds were quite useless, just wasting too much of our time with duplications. So we’ve moved to Propeller as our “social” site for most future submissions.
This group uses admin approval for membership. We’ll plan to keep the spammers, personal attackers, and the adamant ObamaBots, No-Birthers and Collectivists out of the loop, but perhaps there will be a few who can engage in open-minded and productive discourse with our basically conservative / libertarian group.
We hope for a forum with real drive for both discussion of, and action toward, the virtues of liberty, capitalism, the free market, and progress toward true freedom.
If the shoe fits, wear it, come join us!
Thanks from Tasine and Striker101
t certainly needs to be said and to be repeated. Not philosophically perfect but a huge good step in the right direction. The speaker is very effective. Produced for examiner.com by Clyde Middleton.
also on:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Independence_Day_Rallying_Call_Must_View
This post is primarily meant for our Users here on morality101, and for Friends from Digg, Mixx, Twitter and RTR. There have been some problems with WordPress, both with new version 2.8 and with add-ons which don’t work as needed. 
Is Obama constitutionally eligible to serve?.
WND aka WorldNetDaily has been a prolific leader in the battle to induce Obama to produce his true birth certificate. Their webpage lists over 200 items and varied approachs to action.
My personal objection to Obama is much more about his immoral philosophy of collectivism and force, which is “REgressing” America into economic collapse of which the worst is yet to come.
However, if we can somehow get into the locked vault(s), America will be rid of him in a heartbeat.
Some of you folks may have seen this — it’s copied from an email I received today. It’s one of the best regarding the in-eligibility of Barack Obama to claim he is president of our USA.
From: HumanEventsOnline.com
Subject: Obama Birth Certificate – The Complete Story
Date: Sunday, June 7, 2009, 4:39 A
Dear Friend of the Constitution,
Update on The biggest political cover up in American history
Worse than Watergate, Whitewatergate, or any of the other cover ups of previous administrations, is the question of whether Barack Hussein Obama is eligible to serve as President of the United States of America… OR, is he a FRAUD, a USURPER, a man with no legal authority to sit in the position that he now claims to hold?
Barack Obama could simply put the issue to rest RIGHT NOW by releasing his ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE! But he WON’T! Instead, he has had teams of attorneys all over the country, fighting “tooth and nail” to thwart the efforts of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), and our allies in a number of states, to compel him to produce an ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE and to prove that he is Constitutionally eligible to serve as President of these United States!
Ohio, Mississippi, Hawaii, and California! These are the states where USJF has been involved in lawsuits seeking an answer to this critical constitutional question!
And now, in California, just like in every lawsuit filed over this issue, the Obama team of attorneys, working with liberal allies in the office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, has convinced a Sacramento County Superior Court judge to dismiss USJF’s suit to force the truth to come out about whether Barack Obama is a “natural born” citizen, and, therefore, eligible to serve as President of the United States.
BUT WE’RE NOT GIVING UP! Our clients in this case, including 2008 candidate for President of the United States, Alan Keyes, have given USJF the go ahead to file an appeal of this decision!
AND THAT’S WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO — BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP TO DO IT!
A number of apologists for Barack Obama have gone to great lengths to belittle USJF and our allies in the fight to preserve our Constitution. However, the questions that they cannot answer are: continue reading…
The federal government is forcing 3 million Americans to disclose sensitive, personal information about finances, health and lifestyle in a 14-page survey – including questions about availability of household flush toilets and difficulty with undressing and bathing.
The 2009 American Community Survey, an annual supplement to the decennial Census, asks about residents’ personal relationships and whether a home has hot and cold running water, a flush toilet, bathing facilities, appliances and phone services. It also asks how many rooms are in a home and what vehicles are used at each household.
The new questionnaire asks respondents what they pay for electricity, gas, water and sewer every month and whether residents receive food stamps.
Question 16 asks, “About how much do you think this house and lot, apartment, or mobile home would sell for if it were for sale?”
Respondents are required to disclose costs associated with rent or mortgage, annual real estate taxes on and fire, hazard and flood insurance expenses.
via Big Brother asks: ‘Do you have a flush toilet?’. from World Net Daily.
This from one of the much better websites out there, very active in opposing all the Force being imposed by Obama and his clones. Read it and pass it along!
