What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[Busybody]

The Secretary of the Treasury: from tax cheat to “tax scam” beneficiary


The Washington Post reports that Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, held money in an investment fund registered in the very Cayman Islands building that Obama called a notorious haven for tax abuse. The address of the fund is a building called the Ugland House. Obama singled out that building in a 2009 speech against tax haven abuse. With his characteristic subtely, the president declared, “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

Obama’s screeds against holding money in off-shore funds aren’t limited to this occasion, of course. During the 2012 campaign, he attacked Mitt Romney on similar grounds.

Personally, I have no problem with Lew holding money in any legal investment instrument, and the fund in question appears to be perfectly legal. Moreover, there is no indication that Lew cheated on his taxes, as his predecessor Tim Geithner did. Thus, his use of what Obama calls a tax scam doesn’t bear on his fitness to head the Treasury Department.

What we have, instead, is the umpteenth installment of Obama’s nauseating hypocrisy. If I live long enough, I’m confident of one day learning that Obama himself has benefited from this or that mechanism he has denounced as a tax scam.

 

[Busybody]

A large building in Washington DC houses " the largest tax scam in the world". It is called the Capitol Building.

 

[mercury14]

The Secretary of the Treasury: from tax cheat to “tax scam” beneficiary


The Washington Post reports that Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, held money in an investment fund registered in the very Cayman Islands building that Obama called a notorious haven for tax abuse. The address of the fund is a building called the Ugland House. Obama singled out that building in a 2009 speech against tax haven abuse. With his characteristic subtely, the president declared, “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

Obama’s screeds against holding money in off-shore funds aren’t limited to this occasion, of course. During the 2012 campaign, he attacked Mitt Romney on similar grounds.

Personally, I have no problem with Lew holding money in any legal investment instrument, and the fund in question appears to be perfectly legal. Moreover, there is no indication that Lew cheated on his taxes, as his predecessor Tim Geithner did. Thus, his use of what Obama calls a tax scam doesn’t bear on his fitness to head the Treasury Department.

What we have, instead, is the umpteenth installment of Obama’s nauseating hypocrisy. If I live long enough, I’m confident of one day learning that Obama himself has benefited from this or that mechanism he has denounced as a tax scam.

This has what do do with Doom and Gloom?

 

[Busybody]

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[IrezumiKiss]

“If I only had a brain.” - The White Lil Kim

 

[richard_daily]

“If I only had a brain.” - The White Lil Kim

jeninflorida?

 

[unregistered]

 

[eyer]

State lacks doctors to meet demand of national healthcare law
Lawmakers are working on proposals that would enable physician assistants, nurse practitioners, optometrists and pharmacists to diagnose, treat and manage some illnesses.

By Michael J. Mishak, Los Angeles Times
February 9, 2013, 6:03 p.m.

SACRAMENTO — ...

Like America to the statists...

...there's also nothing "special" about Doctoral exceptionalism.

Why consult with practical expertise...

...when there's plenty of ordinary lemmings w/ Google access all around, enabled by lawmakers of the United Socialist State of America to hasten death quickly to save the collective $$?

 

[unregistered]

 

[LadyVer]

Leftists will tell us that "doctors" are overrated, a social elite class of parasites that exploit the hard working citizens of society.

Is this what eyer was saying? He's usually clearest when he's slut naming.

 

[Busybody]

BEN SMITH: Obama Prepares To Screw His Base: Young people re-elected the president. Now they get to pay disproportionately for ObamaCare. “The near-total silence on this issue is a mark of a class that is either utterly selfless (hard to believe, honestly) or, as usual, singularly bad at seeing and defending its interests.” Hey, rubes!

 

[Busybody]

between THIS

and

the student loands they "kids" have to pay for taking CUNT STUDIES at school

They will be paying till they are 88 yrs old and have no life


GOOD, YOU DUMB CUNTZ, YOU VOTED NIGGA, YOU GOT NIGGA



Obama Prepares To Screw His Base

Young people re-elected the president. Now they get to pay disproportionately for ObamaCare. posted on February 10, 2013 at 10:45pm EST





President Obama talks with college students while waiting for an order of fries at OMG Burgers in Coral Gables, Florida last September. Image by C.W. Griffin/Miami Herald/MCT



President Obama's enemies often accuse him, in the starkest political terms, of crudely acting to shift resources toward his political base: Green energy donors; single women; Latinos; African-Americans.

But the next 12 months are likely to reveal the opposite. Imminent elements of Obama's grandest policy move, the health care overhaul known as ObamaCare, are calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

The passionate supporters are the youth, who voted for him by a margin of 60% to 36%, according to exit poll samples of people 29 and under. His enemies are the elderly: Mitt Romney won 56% of the votes from people 65 and over. And while one of ObamaCare's earliest provisions was a boon to the young, allowing them to stay on their parents' insurance through the age of 26, what follows may come as an unpleasant surprise to many of the president's supporters. The provisions required to make any sort of health insurance plan work — not just ObamaCare, but really any plan of its sort — require healthy young people to pay more in health insurance than they consume in services, while the elderly (saved by Sarah "Death Panels" Palin from any serious attempt to ration expensive and often futile end-of-life care) consume far more than they pay in. There is always a push and pull, however, and this year will be spent laying plans to shift the burden further toward the young.

State and federal officials and the health care industry are currently preparing to implement two specific ObamaCare provisions taking effect on January 1, 2014, acting on this politically perverse principle of shifting resources from your supporters to your opponents. The first is the individual mandate, which aims to force the young, childless, and healthy — "Young Invincibles," as they are said to think of themselves — to buy heath insurance, even if they think (and even perhaps make a rational, if risky, bet) that they don't need it.

The second is a lesser-known policy to limit the practices of charging different premiums to different ages, known as age-rating. Many states currently set a limit on this difference, often mandating that an old person shouldn't pay a premium more than five times a younger person's, even if she's expected to use more than five times as much health care. The ObamaCare provision kicking in next January 1 would reduce that ratio to three-to-one, essentially limiting what the elderly pay in part by forcing young people to carry a larger share of the total cost of national health care.

The raw politics aside, there is certainly a reasonable case for sparing the elderly exorbitant premiums, and for forcing young men to buy insurance before they wreck their motorcycles. The Health Care Blog's Maggie Mahar points out that a 60-year old unable to buy insurance is in a far worse position than a 27-year old forced to pay a bit more, though she and others worry that the costs will keep some young people from buying care for themselves and their children. (There are also provisions yet to come that benefit the young; subsidies for people buying insurance on the individual market are expected to be disproportionately used by younger people.)

Meanwhile the AARP, the implacable lobby for retired people, has been energetically making the case that the young should pay up.

In an interview, AARP legislative policy director David Certner didn't contest the suggestion that young people would be forced to pay more, but argued that it was a matter of the common good, not simply the interest of his constituents.

First of all, he told BuzzFeed, the young may not be paying their fair share: "Younger people pay less in taxes than they do when they're middle aged and have higher incomes."

And second, they'll be old some day too:

"It's about having a big insurance pool because everyone benefits from it," Certner said. "If a younger, healthier person is spending a little more now, it's OK because at some point they're going to be a less healthy, older person too."

This is a reasonable policy argument, though it's worth noting that every interest group argues its interests are identical to the common good. Cutting my taxes will stimulate the economy; spending on defense technologies will protect the homeland; maintaining my work rules will protect students; etc.

But politics is about power and resources, not about policy and morality. AARP has no real case to make there. The current young supported Obama; and the current old opposed him.

The near-total silence on this issue is a mark of a class that is either utterly selfless (hard to believe, honestly) or, as usual, singularly bad at seeing and defending its interests.

And so this vast transfer or resources from young to old — just the latest in a long line of these transfers — hasn't been discussed much because it is totally uncontroversial. Compare it to the footnote that has at times turned into a national obsession: Religious conservatives' objection to a provision favoring the young (and possibly saving money), the new requirement for private coverage of contraception.

The voices raised against age-rating and other policies tend not to be the most credible. They are, first, conservatives who simply see this as another wedge against Obama and his new policy. Outlandish rhetoric about the health care law's threat to American freedom can make it hard for members of either party to consider policy on the merits; and so the proposal from Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey (in the news of late for theorizing that " tense and uptight" women, like, say, rape victims, are less likely to conceive children) to leave age discount decisions with the states is generally considered as gimmicky as its name: The Liberty Act. (It's short for "Letting Insurance Benefit Everyone Regardless of Their Youth.").

The other main source of criticism of age rating has been the insurance industry, which worries that it will be blamed for rising premiums and that it will find it hard to sign young people up to expensive plans. Its main lobbing group, America's Health Insurance Plans, has been quietly briefing reporters on the threat, and circulating a catchy infographic suggesting that age rating will be a major threat to the success of ObamaCare — not just to the industry bottom lines. And insurers told the conservative American Action forum that small employers' premiums for healthy people 27 and under are likely to increase an average of 169%, while less healthy people 55 and older would see their costs decrease less than 25% (a smaller percentage, of course, of a much larger sum).

If you don't consider ultra-conservative Republicans and the insurance industry particularly credible sources in this argument, though, look to young person's lobby, such as it is. Young Invincibles, a liberal group best known for supporting the Affordable Care Act (and filing an amicus brief in support of the individual mandate), wrote to the Department of Health and Human Services last December 26 rather meekly suggesting that age-rating be watered down a bit.

"While young people have both a societal and individual interest in ensuring that older adults can afford to purchase coverage, no one benefits if young people who are not protected by this cushion do not buy on exchanges," the group wrote.

So attack Obama on whatever grounds you want, and accuse him if you like of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. But that charge, true to some degree of most politicians, may be less true of this one than any other in recent memory. The central question, as Mahar notes, is, "How do we choose between children and their grandparents?" In any normal political calculation, that answer would be clear: You choose the ones who voted for you.

 

[mercury14]

We warned this would happen but clown apologists like Merc and others told us we were full of shit. I'm sure he'll be here on the morrow to instruct us further about the Obama reality:

No, I told you the scope of Nurse Practitioners and Physician's Assistants are going to be expanded to cover the increased patient load... And you just posted an article showing that my prediction is coming true!

State lacks doctors to meet demand of national healthcare law
Lawmakers are working on proposals that would enable physician assistants, nurse practitioners, optometrists and pharmacists to diagnose, treat and manage some illnesses.

They are working on proposals that would allow physician assistants to treat more patients and nurse practitioners to set up independent practices. Pharmacists and optometrists could act as primary care providers, diagnosing and managing some chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high-blood pressure.

"I think a lot of people are trained to do work that our licenses don't allow them to."

Physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and optometrists agree that they have more training than they are allowed to use.

"We don't have enough providers," said Beth Haney, president of the California Assn. for Nurse Practitioners, "...so we should increase access to the ones that we have."

The California Medical Assn. says healthcare professionals should not exceed their training. Phinney, a pediatrician, said physician assistants and other mid-level professionals are best deployed in doctor-led teams. They can perform routine exams and prescribe medications in consultation with physicians on the premises or by teleconference.

His group proposes a different solution: It wants more funding to expand participation in a loan repayment program for recent medical school graduates. Doctors can now receive up to $105,000 in return for practicing in underserved communities for three years.

Administrators of community clinics and public hospitals say nurse practitioners and other non-physician providers already play key roles in caring for patients, a trend they predict will grow as more Californians become insured and enter the healthcare system.

"We're going to have to get a whole lot more creative about how care is provided," said Paul Hensler, Kern Medical Center's chief executive.

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-doctors-20130210,0,1509396.story

Good ol' Vette, declaring victory by proving my point for me.

 

[mercury14]

Like America to the statists...

...there's also nothing "special" about Doctoral exceptionalism.

Why consult with practical expertise...

...when there's plenty of ordinary lemmings w/ Google access all around, enabled by lawmakers of the United Socialist State of America to hasten death quickly to save the collective $$?

Nurse practitioners and PAs have "practical expertise" in a range of fields though. Heaps of Americans already get their care from them and there's not a problem with bad outcomes. Why do you suddenly think there will be?

 

[Busybody]

Stfu!

 

[Busybody]

This will spread, will get worse, will make the economy worse

Its a disaster

It is EVERYTHING WE ALL WARNED OF




States Cut Employee Hours Because Of Obamacare




Via Breitbart:


The costs of Obamacare are not just hitting businesses this year–they are also hitting the government, and public employees as well. Virginia, for example, is about to limit part time employees to 29 hours per week in order to avoid triggering Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more. The state cannot afford the $110 million annual cost of insurance.

Elsewhere, public institutions are taking similar steps to limit part-time work. In Ohio, Youngstown State University recently announced a 29-hour-per-week part-time limit, and placed employees on notice that they would be fired if they worked more than the maximum. Other public universities are doing the same across the nation, just as their private-sector counterparts are limiting part-time hours to avoid the Obamacare rule.

In addition to limiting part-time hours, many institutions–public and private–are moving employees from full-time to part-time status to avoid Obamacare requirements. Doing so means facing the ire of left-wing institutions such as John Podesta’s Think Progress, which recently castigated a Wendy’s franchise for cutting employees’ hours. Yet there is little most businesses can do–they are merely responding to incentives written into law.

 

[mercury14]

This will spread, will get worse, will make the economy worse

Its a disaster

It is EVERYTHING WE ALL WARNED OF




States Cut Employee Hours Because Of Obamacare




Via Breitbart:


The costs of Obamacare are not just hitting businesses this year–they are also hitting the government, and public employees as well. Virginia, for example, is about to limit part time employees to 29 hours per week in order to avoid triggering Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more. The state cannot afford the $110 million annual cost of insurance.

Elsewhere, public institutions are taking similar steps to limit part-time work. In Ohio, Youngstown State University recently announced a 29-hour-per-week part-time limit, and placed employees on notice that they would be fired if they worked more than the maximum. Other public universities are doing the same across the nation, just as their private-sector counterparts are limiting part-time hours to avoid the Obamacare rule.

In addition to limiting part-time hours, many institutions–public and private–are moving employees from full-time to part-time status to avoid Obamacare requirements. Doing so means facing the ire of left-wing institutions such as John Podesta’s Think Progress, which recently castigated a Wendy’s franchise for cutting employees’ hours. Yet there is little most businesses can do–they are merely responding to incentives written into law.

So basically part-time employees are going to be working the exact same part time hours. They'll continue not getting health benefits just like always and basically nothing is changing for them.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Merc will be along to deny all he said.

Part time employees getting their hours capped?

What part of "part time" do you not understand, you stupid son of a bitch?

 

[mercury14]

Part time employees getting their hours capped?

What part of "part time" do you not understand, you stupid son of a bitch?

You forgot "part time employees that don't receive benefits are still not going to get benefits". That's big news! They don't want things to change and they're not changing... and they're still complaining.

 

[Busybody]

T’S LIKE GROUNDHOG DAY: Byron York: After ignoring unemployment, Obama seeks to convince Americans it’s his top priority. He keeps saying he’ll pivot to jobs, but he never does.



he unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009. But the true toll of joblessness is far higher. The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent. And a new study, by Rutgers University scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job. That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn. . . .

Obama’s slighting of the economy is nothing new. Critics charged throughout his first term that at a time when economic conditions bordered on the desperate, the president devoted more than a year of his energies to passing a national health care scheme. At the time, the White House promised it would “pivot” to the issue of jobs and the economy at some future time. That time never came. Meanwhile, all the polls showed deep public concern over the economy.

Now, apparently, Obama has noticed public opinion.

Meh. He’d rather “fundamentally transform” America. You’re just collateral damage.

 

[Busybody]

America under WhoSane Obama

 

[IrezumiKiss]

 

[Busybody]

California has a balanced budget


Liberal columnist Froma Harrop, of the-tea-party-are-terrorists fame, is tired of conservatives beating up on Democratic Party controlled California. In her latest article she writes:


Last November, [Californians] approved a temporary tax hike on themselves, expected to add $6 billion annually in revenues for the next seven years. And they handed Democrats a two-thirds supermajority in the state legislature, enabling them to raise taxes without Republican support.
…
As projected surpluses smile on Sacramento, [California Gov. Jerry] Brown is strongly and wisely urging fellow Democrats to show spending restraint. He’s even setting aside $1 billion for a rainy day fund.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that $1 billion for the rainy day fund to materialize. Brown’s “projected surpluses” are a complete accounting fiction.

For starters, the California Legislative Office projected that the “temporary” income and sales tax hike Brown pushed this past November would cost California $6.8 billion over seven years, not $6 billion.

Second, Brown has significantly over estimated tax revenues every year he has been in office. A recent California Common Sense study showed that, since the recession began, the governor’s projections have overestimated revenues by an average of 5.5 percent. Apply that average to Brown’s 2013 projections and California’s budget would suddenly go from $1 billion in the black to $3.9 billion in the red.

And those are just the debts that Brown chooses to acknowledge.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s government unions won huge increases in retirement benefits including a lowered retirement age and higher benefit formulas. As a result, the state’s two biggest retirement funds, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) are both underfunded by $64 billion and $52 billion respectively.

According to a recent report, Brown would need to spend another $4.5 billion per year just to make CalSTRS solvent. Brown, and whatever union stooge the Democrats elect next, will never acknowledge these mounting retiree debts until they absolutely have to. And when that time comes, you won’t want to be a business owner in California.

 

[Busybody]

between THIS

and

the student loands they "kids" have to pay for taking CUNT STUDIES at school

They will be paying till they are 88 yrs old and have no life


GOOD, YOU DUMB CUNTZ, YOU VOTED NIGGA, YOU GOT NIGGA



Obama Prepares To Screw His Base

Young people re-elected the president. Now they get to pay disproportionately for ObamaCare. posted on February 10, 2013 at 10:45pm EST




.