Dressing Up This Halloween?

The Economy in Pictures, Mostly

Excellent link showing that QE is essentially responsible for everything occurring in financial markets. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-22/spot-odd-one-out

Here's one from Doug Ross, saw it posted over at Asylum Watch too- I believe.

I nabbed this from Zerohedge since we are coming up on the 100th year anniversary of the greatest fraud ever foisted upon the American people- the Federal Reserve Bank.

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

As we’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Federal Reserve, one thing has become abundantly clear– these guys are horrible at their jobs.

According to the popular lie, the Federal Reserve was supposed to have been established to smooth out the economic cycle, thus preventing booms, busts, recessions, and depressions.

It hasn’t really worked out that way.

In the 100 years prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve, there were 18 distinct recessions or depressions:

1815, 1822, 1825, 1828, 1833, 1836, 1839, 1845, 1847, 1853, 1860, 1865, 1869, 1873, 1887, 1890, 1899, and 1902.

Since the establishment of the Federal Reserve, there have been 18 recessions or depressions:

1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

So in other words, the economy experienced just as many recessions with the ‘expert’ management of the Federal Reserve as without it.

And this doesn’t even begin to capture all the absurd panics (the S&L scare), bailouts (Long-Term Capital Management), and ridiculous asset bubbles that they’ve created.

Hardly an impressive enough track record to justify conjuring trillions of dollars out of thin air, and awarding nearly totalitarian control of the money supply and economy to a tiny banking elite… wouldn’t you say? 

This Is What Is Wrong With America*Update With More Funny Stuff

I've been on the annual hunting trip to North Dakota. There have been some casualties in the pheasant world.

Today, I clipped this comment from a Huffington Post article. I clipped it because I think the writer was trying to be honest and genuine about Obamacare but it reveals far more about the thought process of Americans.

“My daughter signed up and starting 1/1/14 she will have a $2000 deductible 80% plan for under $200 a month. She had problems initially, i think she said it took 3 times. She is a new mom who wanted to finish college, had a baby during the start of her 3rd year. She lives with an aunt and the house hold amount made her ineligible for Medicaid. This is perfect. It may take some time to get signed up, but in the end at least in her case, very well worth it.”

I read this comment a couple of times. We have a young woman, not enrolled currently in college, who apparently decided to have a baby first. There is no mention of a father. Her income thresholds are so low that she can afford a gold plan for two people and pay less than 200 bucks for it.

Who plans their life this way? Or more precisely, who fails to plan their life this way?

The liberals love to tell the rest of us that our medical needs should not be borne by society- yet they have no problem at all burdening the rest of us with their poor planning and decision making.

Is there something wrong with going to college first and then after securing a decent income stream- having a baby?

We have a nation filled with people like this.

What makes this comment so prescient is that the writer seems completely oblivious to the possibility that all of these poor decisions are solely their responsibility. Not only that- but they seem to think they are entitled to healthcare at a vastly reduced cost- as long as you pay.

Entitled.

You'll like this video. It is a Mark Dice vid asking people to endorse Karl Marx for President. Very funny.

For People Who Can't Be Bothered With Politics

MSNBC, Statist Obama Network, Caught Lying

This vid speaks for itself. I have not tuned in  to watch MSNBC for two weeks now. Missing, nothing.

The ACA is DOA

For months, maybe even years, I have been on this blog telling readers what an expensive nightmare the ACA is.

ACA's sole purpose was to force healthy people back into health insurance pools- to pick up the tab for everyone else. This law is a complete sham and it is horribly expensive. The Affordable Care Act is not affordable nor is it caring. With it's outrageous deductibles and premiums, it hardly qualifies as insurance. It is a sham- foisted upon the American middle class and given a palatable name- to provide windfall profits to healthcare companies while stealing every last dollar and tidbit of personal information it can glean.

I am not going to participate. At any level. My first act of civil disobedience will be to refuse to enroll.

You will enjoy this article. Forbes discovers that the healthcare exchange is crashing because the Obama administration desperately wanted to hide the true cost of the ACA by forcing people into giving up all of their personal data before disclosing plan prices. Deceit is no way to enroll people and then steal their money.

People cannot afford this. The middle class is tapped out. The ACA is DOA.

Very interesting. http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/?partner=yahootix

Many states with ZERO signups. http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2013/10/obamacare-meltdown-continues-171.html

Here in a nutshell and stolen from Ace's site is the reason Obamacare will implode.

If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare -- and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system. The worry was that if insurance is hard to buy -- if you have to do your own comparison shopping and then call the insurance company, and fax in some paperwork and two years of tax returns -- that the young and the healthy simply won’t do it. Sick people and old people who were getting huge subsidies -- and maybe the ability to buy insurance on the private market for the first time in a long while -- would overcome any obstacles, because if you’re spending $15,000 a year on health care, it’s worth a lot of your time to make sure that you have insurance. But if your biggest annual health-care expense is contact lens solution, you may just decide to skip it and pay the fine.

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 million total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed -- if it’s mostly old and sick people on the exchanges -- then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies. It’s called the “death spiral,” and the exchanges, like the mandate, were designed to keep it from happening.

Without the exchanges, the death spiral seems almost assured.

Washington Post Puts Up Misleading Video- Debunking Follows

In just a minute, I am going to show you a video which apparently targets the American masses and was produced with some sort of 8th grade audience in mind. It was posted on Huffington Post today (10/14/13) where all of the really smart people hang out.

This is the shit that Huffpo readers watch and this is what we are up against. So what's wrong with this deficit spending video produced by the Washington Post?

Please pay attention to the graphing that occurs right around the :46 mark. This is the visual aid that they employ to pacify the sheep who watch shit like this and think it is accurate. Note also how they say the United States has "always borrowed money" as though that makes borrowing seem normal and acceptable. (Please ignore the references made by the video about our poor, victim, President Obama. I mean after all, I clipped this from Huffpo)



First of all, saying that the US has always had to borrow is not entirely accurate. The US has not always had to borrow to pay it's debts. In fact we went through an actual 30 year period where we didn't fight any wars and voila!!! We didn't have to borrow anything because we had no debt. 1830-1860.

Virtually all historical US borrowing has occurred because of wars. This piece, from The Atlantic, details our war  spending very nicely, up until our current day. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-long-story-of-us-debt-from-1790-to-2011-in-1-little-chart/265185/ 

If you simply read the Atlantic article, you are going to find that near the end of it- it makes this statement. You'll love this- this is the part where your government stole all of the money in the SS trust fund years ago- they note it but for some reason- still don't want to count it.

Because on top of the roughly $11.4 trillion in US government debt, which can be bought and sold and is floating around in financial markets, there's also nearly $5 trillion in debt that the US government owes to itself. Those are largely obligations to the trust funds that are used to pay for programs such as Social Security. These aren't counted in debt-to-GDP charts published here, and are often excluded from such calculations. But if you did include this debt--and there's an argument to be made that we should, since the government is on the hook to pay these claims--the US debt-to-GDP ratio was just under 100% at the end of 2011.


So why can't anybody draw an accurate chart showing today's real debt (16.7 trillion divided by 2012 14.99 trillion GDP= 111%) at the exact same level that we had just after WW2??

Why do they say- well we excluded the 5 trillion the government stole from Social Security so we don't include that in our graphs. Huh? How can you steal 5 trillion that is owed to American taxpayers and pretend that it doesn't exist?

This is the kind of bullshit that passes as journalism.

Either way, the people of this country don't get the truth. The real truth is that current government debt exceeds every historical measure that we have ever employed to measure it. It has never been this high. Period.

And unlike 1946, we don't have the capacity to pay the debt down. The real American economy, primarily corporations and 30 million manufacturing jobs, have all left the US. You can't squeeze trillions out of workers at McDonald's.

We are at a historical point in time where the debt will go supernova. Why? Because we are adding 340 billion dollars a year in interest expense ( at 2%) while watching principal amounts build. We have a giant demographic (boomers) all hitting the debit side of the ledger. Even if the government can somehow manage to hold interest rates steady- a much smaller taxpaying demographic will have to pick up the slack for a much larger retiring demographic. It only pencils out one way- and it's all bad.

If they don't slash and burn federal spending now, it's game over and the truth is- it's probably game over anyway.

It kind of makes you wonder how they are going to graph our debt, 10 years from now- doesn't it?

They'll think of something. They always do.