Big Gov's "A" Game

[Jccarlton]

There are times when your ass is on the line, when failure is NOT an option. During these times you have to make sure that you do not screw up that, you demonstrate your competence in the task ahead. For the Progressive movement the ACA was on of those times. Even if the bill was passed under shaky circumstances, politically failure was not an option. Especially with Conservatives and tea party types literally marching in the streets over tax and spend policies and continuous record deficits. This is the time to bring out your "A" game or well just about everything you Progressives worked for will probably go down the tubes for generations. Yet what did you do? You treated the ACA the same way you treat everything else, like some social club party game. You hired cronys to do the most important part, the exchanges:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare ... le/2537235
http://washingtonexaminer.com/feds-revi ... le/2537194
Rather than the best people out there. They made a website so bad that it is a perfect example of how NOT to set a website, an example that will probably be used in classes around the world for decades:
http://blog.isthereaproblemhere.com/sea ... thcare.gov
Then you set it up so that it wants to get people's personal information up front. So that you could spin a bad deal:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapotheca ... rue-costs/
Essentially you are treating your potential customers as idiots. Do you really think that most people in their 20's and 30's, your intended market don't know how a website is supposed to work? Or won't back out when asked for personal information over an unsecured website before making the commitment to buy. Nobody's that stupid. Which is why it's time to panic:
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/16/obama ... right-now/
Now you have to think the unthinkable
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/19/is ... map=%5B%5D
The problem was that the signals were shut out by the loud noises in the Progressives heads. They were so concerned about what not looking bad that they forgot to make sure that it would work.:
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/17/f ... oena-them/
Now they have made the subpoenas inevitable. This is the biggest gov't screwup since the prescription drug fiasco. maybe the biggest screwup ever. Then there is the damage the ACA has Already done to the economy, a number that easily runs into the trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Then there is the problem of people to be disincentivised to work and how the subsidy is going to be paid if taxes don't cover it:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/10 ... subsidies/
Have fun Progs.

[Schneibster]

There are times when your ass is on the line, when failure is NOT an option. During these times you have to make sure that you do not screw up that, you demonstrate your competence in the task ahead. For the Progressive movement the ACA was on of those times.

No it wasn't. The Republicans deliberately sabotaged it.

You're not supposed to do that.

At least not if you're a loyal US citizen, and especially not if you swore to uphold the Constitution.

They lied.

They always do.

Just like you're lying now.

Go home. You don't belong in my country.

[Schneibster]

Besides, how can government get bigger if the deficit is going down?

You're lying again.

[Jccarlton]

A "tech surge" probably won't solve the problem:
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/10/2 ... TopStories
Here's what the administration is going to do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZmHDEa0Y20
Our money, that we don't have.

[Schneibster]

Well, we'll have more of it if the deficit keeps going down.

Just sayin'.

[JLawson]

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/thousands ... 8C11417913

Some receiving cancellations say it looks like their costs will go up, despite studies projecting that about half of all enrollees will get income-based subsidies.

Kris Malean, 56, lives outside Seattle, and has a health policy that costs $390 a month with a $2,500 deductible and a $10,000 in potential out-of-pocket costs for such things as doctor visits, drug costs or hospital care.

As a replacement, Regence BlueShield is offering her a plan for $79 more a month with a deductible twice as large as what she pays now, but which limits her potential out-of-pocket costs to $6,250 a year, including the deductible.

“My impression was …there would be a lot more choice, driving some of the rates down,” said Malean, who does not believe she is eligible for a subsidy.

Regence spokeswoman Rachelle Cunningham said the new plans offer consumers broader benefits, which “in many cases translate into higher costs.”

“The arithmetic is inescapable,” said Patrick Johnston, chief executive officer of the California Association of Health Plans. Costs must be spread, so while some consumers will see their premiums drop, others will pay more -- “no matter what people in Washington say.”

And Earn Less - Get More.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth ... 891087.php

People whose 2014 income will be a little too high to get subsidized health insurance from Covered California next year should start thinking now about ways to lower it to increase their odds of getting the valuable tax subsidy.

"If they can adjust (their income), they should," says Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation. "It's not cheating, it's allowed."

Under the Affordable Care Act, if your 2014 income is between 138 and 400 percent of poverty level for your household size, you can purchase health insurance on a state-run exchange (such as Covered California) and receive a federal tax subsidy to offset all or part of your premium.

...


For older people, getting below the 400 percent poverty limit could save many thousands of dollars per year.

Take, for example, Jacqueline Proctor of San Francisco. She and her husband are in their early 60s. They have been paying $7,200 a year for a bare-bones Kaiser Permanente health plan with a $5,000 per person annual deductible. "Kaiser told us the plan does not comply with Obamacare and the substitute will cost more than twice as much," about $15,000 per year, she says.

This new plan, Kaiser's cheapest offering for 2014, would consume about 25 percent of their after-tax income. The new plan still has a $5,000 deductible but provides coverage for things her current policy does not, such as maternity care, healthy child visits and coverage for dependents up to age 26. Proctor has no use for such coverage, since her son is 30.

Premiums are also going up for many people next year because insurers can no longer deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or impose lifetime coverage caps.

Well, looks like a good idea to me. Give up being productive, go on welfare, get free food, housing, medical, and you'll have lots of free time to do what you want to do.

[JLawson]

Well, we'll have more of it if the deficit keeps going down.

Just sayin'.

Can't tell the difference between the deficit and the debt, can you?

And DOWN is so... relative. But the red ink should help show the difference.

We're going to need a LOT of green to cancel it out - and I don't see that happening any time soon.

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/joncga ... s-finances

[Jccarlton]

Well, we'll have more of it if the deficit keeps going down.

Just sayin'.

Can't tell the difference between the deficit and the debt, can you?

And DOWN is so... relative. But the red ink should help show the difference.

We're going to need a LOT of green to cancel it out - and I don't see that happening any time soon.

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/joncga ... s-finances

This what happens when you have compound interest and steadily increasing debt.

[JLawson]

Well, we'll have more of it if the deficit keeps going down.

Just sayin'.

Can't tell the difference between the deficit and the debt, can you?

And DOWN is so... relative. But the red ink should help show the difference.

We're going to need a LOT of green to cancel it out - and I don't see that happening any time soon.

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/joncga ... s-finances

This what happens when you have compound interest and steadily increasing debt.

Yep. But I'm sure when we get rid of that pesky deficit, all the red will magically turn green.

[choff]

Just stop borrowing money at interest to pay for it and print the money interest free as needed, it's the compound interest that kills. They use the Hegelian trap of saying your choices are either austerity or keynesianism, both make it worse.

Consider the situation of a country where the government prints the money as needed as opposed to one where the money is borrowed into creation with compound interest. The former will end up only creating a tenth as much currency to fund government, to maintain the currencies at equivalent value and prevent trade imbalances, that government can create additional currency to replace taxes or fund additional public works, until the trading partners wise up and do the same.

In England the government created the Bradbury pound out of concern for a bank run at the beginning of WW1 and funded the first year of the war debt free. It was only after the banks complained they weren't profiting from the conflict and put an end to the experiment that they had war debt. Another case is the Island of Guernsey.


http://michaeljournal.org/guernsey.htm

[Stubby]

Didn't Zimbabwe print money as needed? what is their inflation rate?

[JLawson]

Didn't Zimbabwe print money as needed? what is their inflation rate?

Off the cuff, I think it's somewhere between "OMFG!" and "YGBSM" - trending toward the high side.

[Schneibster]

Didn't Zimbabwe print money as needed? what is their inflation rate?

All the simple solutions end up coming apart like that. Some with massive inflation, some with massive deflation. But all with a bang. Or anyway a thud.

The key is the velocity of money. This touchstone concept indicates the relative extents to which money is spent, powering the economy, versus saved, to provide a buffer for disaster. The more social insurance the government provides, the less need be saved, thus increasing economic activity.

In a strongly capitalist economy like the US' today, two other problems arise:

First, about half of the ultra rich are sociopathic. This is a natural consequence of sixty thousand years of evolution hunting large animals. The problem is that their sociopathy is expressed in a mania for hoarding money. Instead of putting it back into the economy, like they're supposed to, they withhold it so they can brag they have the most.

This obsession has gone so far that a family of them, the Kochs, has funded fake economic theory promoted by ex-Nazis at Chicago University. People like Hayek, and von Mises. People whose economic theories were proved false by the Great Depression and never admitted it; people whose economic theories caused an "economic holocaust" when they were applied in Chile. Economic theories that have created and are sustaining the Great Recession. Austerity, at the worst imaginable time. Deliberate economic sabotage for personal gain.

This fake economics is identical in intent to two better-known projects of these same Kochs: campaigns to question whether cigarettes cause diseases, in order to shield lucrative tobacco companies from lawsuits, and global warming denial. In fact, many of the members of the deniers turn out to have "cut their teeth" in the tobacco wars, lying for big tobacco. And I mean a really disturbing number. And lo and behold, gee what a coinkydink, there they are promoting neoliberal economics and market fundamentalism and monetarism. Those same liars.

These people are going to require to be restrained at least by the law; it may even be necessary to arrest some of them before they stop trying to take over the world. They will need some serious convincing. They have hijacked the world economy and are holding it for ransom. And the Austerions, for so Paul Krugman calls them, are the ones holding the pistol to its head. This is the death of monetarism; it's still twitching, but it won't be long now. That's why Obama finally won the debt limit battle. You can smell it. Dodd-Frank is coming, they only managed to hold it off until 2014 and they haven't been able to weaken it much, and after it a deluge of financial regulation starting with reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.

The second half of the problem is the banksters, who have been fiddling the books by transferring money around unnecessarily to steal the fees, and who are hoarding their money out of the same impulse as the sociopathic ultra rich. Also, some if not all of them fear the others, as well as the sociopathic ultra rich, and are holding it for that reason as well. They will open up and start lending again when there's enough regulation to prevent the sociopathic ultra rich from stealing everything.

That legislation is, of course, is what the conservatives have been fighting tooth and nail, insisting on austerity and no new financial regulations. Based on those fake economics I was just talking about.

[choff]

Hyperinflation can be controlled by raising the fractional reserve rate, currently 4% or less. Some banks are leveraged 300 plus to 1. By raising the reserve requirement you can both payoff the debt and neutralize the threat of bank runs/bail ins while using debt free money, very different from raising interest rates.

[Schneibster]

Hyperinflation can be controlled by raising the fractional reserve rate, currently 4% or less. Some banks are leveraged 300 plus to 1. By raising the reserve requirement you can both payoff the debt and neutralize the threat of bank runs/bail ins while using debt free money, very different from raising interest rates.

Ummm, no, actually under conditions of a stall in the velocity of money, the interest rates are already as low as they can go, and raising interest rates in a bad economy is disastrous. Like 1000% inflation disastrous.

Unless you divest the ultra rich and the banks of their unneeded and wasteful unused wealth that's just sitting there clogging things up, your choices are quantitative easing, or printing more money.

By printing more money, you dilute the holdings of the rich, which is no biggie, to them or anyone else. Unfortunately you also dilute everyone's retirement savings at the same time, not to mention cause inflation that erodes the value of their savings from the other end. So basically their life savings are worth half as much, by fiat from the government. Gee, that sure sounds like a popular move. They did that in Chile. That's what caused the 1000% inflation.

Quantitative easing helps by increasing the money supply without creating a shock. But of course, it affects the rich the most, so they hate it. Right now they're lying to get the teatraitors to stop the Fed from doing more of it. Also, it's very slow. That's why it works. You can't do it quickly. You might as well just go start printing money and figure on the 1000% inflation.

The one thing we could have done, and for that matter could still do, would be to distribute more food stamps and more financial aid to poor people and hire more teachers and cops. And another good thing to do would be make lots more financial aid available for college. This would pump up the money supply without cutting into everyone's retirement savings, but still devaluing some of the ultra rich peoples' and the banksters' money. And that of course is why they are against it. However, combined with highway and train projects, and spending on technology like batteries and big industrial scale solar power plants and cheap solar cell production, not to mention the fuel technology projects I keep talking about, and of course Polywell, and a good hard look at the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Dense Plasma Focus, and at least a quick look at the Electron Power Systems toroids, not only should we find at least one "small fusion" system that works, but we'd fix global warming and make a profit doing it. Unfortunately, the ultra rich wouldn't make a profit on it so they're against it. And that means the Republican-Amurcn teatraitors in Congress are against it.

And BTW we could do all that and the deficit would still be going down.

Just sayin'.