Monday, June 17, 2013

Detroit is officially Belly-Up

Detroit is suspending payments on $2 billion of unsecured debt, marketing parking garages and telling retirees to rely on President Barack Obama’s health-care law to avoid a record municipal bankruptcy. . June 14 (Bloomberg) -- Steve Miller, chairman of American International Group Inc., talks about Detroit’s $386 million deficit and outlook for the city. Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s emergency manager, is holding a closed-door creditor meeting today intended to cap the creation of a recovery plan for the city. Miller speaks with Erik Schatzker and Scarlet Fu on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Makers.” (Source: Bloomberg) Those are among proposed changes in a 128-page restructuring plan Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr offered yesterday at a meeting of creditors in Detroit. The moves, including spending $1.25 billion over 10 years to bolster safety and remove blight, will give an insolvent city a viable future, Orr said.
The result of bad governance.

Fraud or stupidity, what say you?

Not so long ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said it expected the U.S. government to register a budget deficit in the current fiscal year of $642 billion. But hold on a minute… The budget deficit so far (as of May 31, 2013) has already hit $626.3 billion, and we still have four more months to go in the government’s current fiscal year! Since the beginning of the U.S. government’s current fiscal year 2013, which began in October of last year, the government has posted a budget deficit in six out of the past eight months. The Department of the Treasury just reported the U.S. government registered a budget deficit of $139 billion for the month of May. The federal government took in $197 billion and paid out $336 billion for the month. (Source: Department of the Treasury Financial Management Service, June 12, 2013.) Comparing it to last year, May 2013’s budget deficit was 11% higher than that of May 2012. Zero Hedge
Everywhere I see the CBO and its followers committing massive fraud. They know we are in a debt spiral, they know the cause is government multipliers less than one. But the cowards would rather go down in denialism than be real scientists. Fraud.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Islamic Arsonists

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the New York-based American Center for Democracy's Economic Warfare Institute warns that last July "al-Qaeda's English-language online magazine, Inspire, published an article called 'It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,' which featured instructions on how to build an incendiary bomb to light forests on fire. Link
Nutcase religion

Monday, June 10, 2013

Photo Shop is the new normal

Zero Hedge having fun

Obamacare in action

Hundreds of federal employees were given advance word of a Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to private insurers in the weeks before the official announcement, a period when trading in the shares of those firms spiked.The surge of trading in Humana’s and other private health insurers’ stock before the April 1 announcement already has prompted the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Wall Street investors had advance access to inside information about the then-confidential Medicare funding plan. Link here.
A typical side effect off our undemocratic system.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Peter Lee is a liar and a crook you say?

California reported that the rates would range from 2% above to 29% below the current market. "This is a home run for consumers in every region of California," said Peter Lee, the director of the state exchange. "These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard."
But Mr. Lee and his fellow regulators were making a false comparison. They weren't looking at California's lightly regulated individual insurance market that functions surprisingly well. They were comparing ObamaCare insurance to the state's current small-business market where regulations similar to ObamaCare have already been imposed.
 
Associated Press
Peter Lee
In other words, California wasn't comparing apples to apples. It wasn't even comparing apples to oranges. It was comparing apples to ostriches. The conservative analyst Avik Roy consulted current rates on the eHealthInsurance website and discovered that the cheapest ObamaCare plan for a typical 25-year-old man is roughly 64% to 117% more expensive than the five cheapest policies sold today. For a 40 year old, it's 73% to 146%. Stanford economist Dan Kessler adds his observations nearby.
Yes, Peter Lee is an accomplished California political liar, working for the Brown administration.

I do not get it.  Why be a jackass in front of the world.  I mean the first thing a child learns is do not be a deliberate jackass, yet here is Peter Lee,  a deliberate jackass and liar.