Obamacare – praag.org

Magic growth numbers from the US Government

Everyone wants good news, so the government makes it up. The latest fiction is that US real GDP grew 4.6% in the second quarter and 5% in the third.

Where did this growth come from?

Not from rising real consumer incomes.

Not from rising consumer credit.

Not from rising real retail sales.

Not from the housing sector.

Not from a trade surplus.

The growth came from a Bureau of Economic Analysis survey of consumer spending on services. The BEA found that spending on Obamacare drove the US real GDP growth to 5% in the third quarter.

In America, unlike in other countries, a huge chunk of medical spending goes to insurance company profits, not to health care. Another big chunk goes to paperwork, which has a variety of purposes such as collecting personal information on patients and combating fraud (probably the paperwork costs more than fraud).

Another chunk goes for tests and procedures in order to justify further procedures. For example, if a doctor thinks a patient’s diagnosis requires a MRI, he must often first order an x-ray to establish that a cheaper procedure does not suffice.

If a cancerous skin growth needs to come off, first a biopsy must be done to establish that it is a cancer so that a needless removal is not performed. And, of course, medical practicians must order unnecessary tests in order to protect themselves from the liability of relying on their medical judgment.

To regard any of these expenses as economic growth is farfetched.

There are sampling and other problems with the survey of personal consumption, and apparently Obamacare spending was all dumped into the third quarter. Why the third quarter?

The answer is that the illusion of economic recovery must be kept alive.

Real GDP growth of 5% in the third quarter is inconsistent with the sharp fall in key industrial commodity prices. It is not only oil (down 47%) but iron ore prices (down 49%), natural gas (down 30%), copper (down 15%). Pam and Russ Martens show that the fall in the producer price index for industrial commodities in 2014 is sharper than in 2008, the year of the crash.

With 30% of 30-year old Americans and almost 50% of 25-year olds living with parents, with debt-based derivative instruments impacted by falling oil and industrial commodity prices, with the likelihood that the US and EU economic attack on Russia will fail and perhaps produce retaliatory measures that could bring down the European banking system, look for 2015 to be the year that Washington will cease to get away with its economic lies.

The financial media and Wall Street economists by refusing to ask obvious questions have left the American people unprepared for another drop in their living standards and ability to cope.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

America: Your benefactor is NEVER the state

The marketplace brings plenty; the state does the opposite. Yet not a day goes by when consumers, ignorant of the forces that feed, clothe, cure, employ, entertain them and innovate for them, don’t demand that those who’ve done nothing of the kind – the McCains, Obamas, Bushes, Clintons, Keith Alexanders, Lois Lerners, Eric Holders of the world – proceed with force against those who do nothing but.

Expect the anti-Wal-Mart jousting to begin, because Wal-Mart has done it again. To fill the need created by the Obamacare wrecking ball, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is venturing into the business of providing primary health care. For $40, the price of a copay (in an Obama-mandated, sub-par health-care plan), “you can walk into a Wal-Mart clinic and see a doctor.” It’s “just $4 for Wal-Mart U.S. employees and family members.”

Rejoice, Sandra Fluke! You can have a pregnancy test at Wal-Mart for … $3.

Via Market Watch:

On Friday, a Wal-Mart Care Clinic opened in Dalton, Ga., six months after Wal-Mart U.S., the retailer’s biggest unit, entered the business of providing primary health care. It now operates a dozen clinics in rural Texas, South Carolina and Georgia and has increased its target for openings this year to 17. … A typical retail clinic offers acute care only. But a Wal-Mart Care Clinic also treats chronic conditions such as diabetes. (Wal-Mart U.S. also leases space in its stores to 94 clinics owned by others that set their own pricing.) “It was very important to us that we establish a retail price in the health-care industry because price leadership matters to us,” said Jennifer LaPerre, a Wal-Mart U.S. senior director responsible for health and wellness, in an interview.

Hear, hear!

The argument against Wal-Mart presses its case with an impressive array of economic fallacies. Typically, the critic – an example is “The High Cost of Low Prices,” in The American Conservative – does nothing to trace the mysterious mechanism by which Wal-Mart is said to impoverish. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What precisely is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?

“Protecting the home market,” which is what The American Conservative’s writer advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.

The writer also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” It sounds dreadful. However, the economic reality is this: Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it were paying less or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More materially, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do once Wal-Mart departs?

Even the Hollywood “Idiocracy” is hip to the spontaneously synchronized order that is the free market. Just for a change, the menstruation lobby is moaning about the movies and its members’ representation therein. By Variety Magazine’s telling, “[Female] characters are still significantly under-represented on the big screen. … The numbers for minority females are even lower. African-American female representation on screen [has] climbed to 14 percent, from 8 percent in 2011, but [is] down from 15 percent in 2012.”

The presence of minorities in movies often signals a two-hour long, oppressive racial lecture. Most movie-goers are no more inclined to turn to “12 Years A Slave” for fun, than they are to subject themselves to Oprah Winfrey and her M.O.P.E. (Most Oppressed Person Ever) “Butler.”

Anti-man moaning notwithstanding, the general public must be on to this, because it is quite clear that Hollywood is giving viewers what they want to see: men in lead roles. If film executives listened to the loathsome Lena Dunham, rather than to the demands of consumers – the industry would go under.

Alas, most liberals (and that includes “conservatives” aplenty) are foolish enough to lump business with government as an eternal source of disappointment to Americans. Noodles Ron Fournier of National Journal:

“Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every American institution: banks, schools, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big businesses, small businesses and, of course, politics and government.”

As I type, I consume a plate of seven different fruits topped with nuts. Many of the ingredients on my plate are organic. These used to be exorbitantly priced; out of reach. But as demand for organic produce has grown, production has increased and prices have dropped dramatically.

Each day I give thanks to the businessmen who, against all odds, bring such abundance to market and provide such plenty. There is nothing in my home that comes courtesy of the blessings of bureaucrats. I guarantee that it’s the same in your home.

If you, like Fournier, fail to distinguish the blessings of the private economy from the blight of government – you deserve none of the former and all of the latter.

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Praying to the military Moloch

For the past few weeks, the country’s distinct national navel-gazing has shifted to the military. It began with horror stories about the treatment of veterans at Veterans Affairs facilities across the country and has reached a crescendo in the curious case of Taliban hostage Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, exchanged for five fierce-looking Muhammadans from Afghanistan’s Jihad Central.

As to the first: Backlogs, limited services, fewer service providers, substandard treatment, filthy facilities and the ensuing fatalities – these have been features of the VA system for a long time. Pervasive, institutionalized indifference and incompetence are inherent to – and well-documented in – all centrally planned health-care systems. America’s neighbors north of the 48th parallel are forever in search of a panacea for the poxes that plague their single-payer gulag. Although the same problems are beginning to percolate across America’s health-care sector, due to Obamacare regulations and rationing, the misfortunes endured by the military have been elevated above the misery of the multitudes.

We fret and worry over the fate of the 9.3 million veterans who are enrolled in VA health care. Nary is a word said about the consequences of The Affordable Care Act (ACA) to ordinary, elderly Americans – 40 million of whom rely on Medicare. Why so? The military is one powerful interest group. It has formidable cheerleaders among the legislative and the chattering rabble. Even the weakest links in the military-industrial-complex, as the grunts who do the fighting surely are, wield almost as much political clout as the illegal-alien lobby, and are certainly mightier than advocates for the aged.

As the mantra goes, soldiers fighting phantoms in far-flung destinations are “fighting for us, suffering for us, sacrificing for us,” and deserve better than us.

Not that you’d know it, but death panels by any other name are the lot of non-VA patients aged 65 and older. In compliance with ACA-mandated rationing, government planners plan on penalizing hospitals that suffer from an administrative condition the technocrats have termed “excess readmissions.” Deconstructed, this Orwellian doublespeak means the following: Say a lady aged 84 is admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. Months later, she is seen at the same facility for a re-occurrence. Given her age, she will likely be readmitted in the future. To avoid Medicare penalties ordered by the ACA for admitting grandma too often, staff now place sickly repeat offenders on what is called (truly) a “frequent flyer list.”

The goal: Keep grandma out even if it kills her.

Grandma may pay with her life for the benefit of sectional interests: 30 million uninsured Americans, including millions of illegal aliens, for whose benefit Obama’s $2 trillion ACA was intended. But who cares? In the mass of competing interests that is America, grandma is never as glamorous as the illegal alien or the grunt – who will often confess, as did Army Sgt. Bergdahl, to having joined the military so as to travel the world, experience different cultures and help peoples more exotic than his own.

At the center of the Bowe Bergdahl contretemps – a story that grows in the telling – was a passion to “learn about other cultures.” This motivated him to join the army. Poor Pashtuns are certainly more interesting than the generic granny from the Midwest. Our soldiers, after all, are groomed as “citizens of the world.” “We pay their wages,” this column ventured in “The International Highway to Hell,” “but their hearts belong in faraway exotic places with which Main Street USA can hardly hope to compete” for their affections.

There’s a problem with the American military’s sentimental flirtation with internationalism: The Constitution these men and women swear to obey brooks none of this stuff!

Who, then, grooms this army of avowed internationalists? Aided by the military’s upper echelons, Uncle Sam does. Commanded constitutionally by the commander in chief, the military does the government’s bidding. Although limited-government advocates refuse to consider the military as a division of Leviathan, it is just that. As was further argued in “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program,” “The military works like government, is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small. Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while exempting the military mammoth.”

Better still, if the military is government – and it is – fanatical militarism is a facet of statism. And if the military is government – and it is – then the missions on which the government sends the military must be questioned. An equally distinctive characteristic of the current military statism is to extend the worship of The Man in Uniform to His Mission. We worship the men and women in uniform and their mission without question.

Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state’s warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.

The blanket chant – “thank you for your service; thank you for fighting for our freedoms” – is the hallmark of a propagandized people in the grip of fanatical militarism. Even the most irrational person has to recognize how tentative are the ties between “helping” toothless Pashtuns to be more like Americans and protecting Americans like granny.

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Hollywood says US is embarrassing

Despite the botched launch of Obamacare, the United States as a whole, because of its opposition to the health-care law and support of gun rights, is still more of an embarrassment than the president, said Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein. He also asserted that then-senator Obama wouldn’t have been “beating” on George W. Bush if Bush had rolled out a dysfunctional program as president.

Weinstein, a big donor to the president, downplayed the problems with Obamacare’s implementation and the misleading promise that Americans could keep their insurance plans, saying that Obama “made a mistake — he’s human.”

“This is the only country in the world where we don’t have a health-care,” he told CNN’s Piers Morgan over the weekend “Countries embarrass us around the world — this is the only country in the world where we don’t have a gun law.”

“Obama’s not embarrassing — the country’s embarrassing,” he said. – nationalreview.com

Obama: ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’

by Ilana Mercer

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So where do we stand in the health care chain reaction, cooked-up in the Barack Obama command-and-control centers? Let’s see. Having destroyed the market for health insurance, the president turned to another parlor game, hailed by the daytrippers at CNN and the New York Times as a “health fix” and a “fix for canceled plans.”

Yes, the fix is in. Parsed, the president’s advice to the millions who’ve lost coverage is, essentially, “I’ll let you keep your already canceled policies through 2014. Feel free to take it up with your insurance company.”

In the preceding weeks, and against the backdrop of polls in which 50 percent of voters said, “President Obama knowingly lied when he repeatedly told Americans they could keep their plans under his signature health care law,” the paper of record took a “different” view. Obama, the apple of their eye, “wrongly assured Americans that they could retain their health care plans.”

An “incorrect promise” was another euphemism used by NYT story tellers.

Quite the opposite, opined Patrick J. Buchanan:

WHO’S THE BIGGEST LIAR OF THEM ALL? In the grand scheme of history, Obama’s rank lie “now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s ‘Read my lips! No new taxes,’ Bill Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.”

As wrecking balls go, Obama and “W” are tied in ignominy. Christopher Conover of Duke University estimates that “129 million, or 68 percent of Americans, may not be able to keep their current health-care plans once Obamacare is fully implemented. [Conover’s] study also suggests that 18 to 50 million people will lose their plans altogether.”

The butcher’s bill of human suffering—Bush’s—has been tallied. Obama’s is still to come.

LAWYERING OR LYING? Obama stool pigeon Jake Tapper of CNN went in search of character witnesses for the disgraced 44th U.S. president. Who better to galvanize than the mountain of opportunistic flesh, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie? Fresh from his triumph in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, the popular Republican governor was eager to offer advice to the president whose political epitaph will be: “If you like your health care plan, you will keep it, period.”

Actually, the line Obama had repeated at every turn, from 2009 to 2012, morphed in November of 2013 to, “What I really meant was that Americans could keep their healthcare plan if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

“Don’t lawyer it,” cringed Christie. “People don’t like lawyers. I’m a lawyer. They don’t like ‘em. You know? Don’t lawyer it. When I saw that [namely, the Lie’s new iteration]… this morning for the first time, I thought, he’s lawyering it. That’s Barack Obama the lawyer.”

Correction, Gov. Christie: That’s Barack Obama the liar talking.

Still, some strides were made.

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD. A term reserved to denote Mao Zedong’s catastrophic transformation of China into a communist, collectivized society—a great leap forward of sorts was made by dummy Dana Bash. Four years on, this CNN reporter belatedly admitted that the Republicans had forewarned of the fiasco that is Obamacare:

… When the President made that statement [“If you like your health care plan, you will keep it”] during the heat of the health care legislative battle, Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, dismissed the commander in chief’s promise in a weekly Republican address.
“If you read the bill, that just isn’t so,” Price said. “For starters, within five years, every health care plan will have to meet a new federal definition for coverage, one that your current plan might not match, even if you like it.”
Fast forward three years, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

Indeed, 2:43 minuets into his August 22, 2009 address, Rep. Price explained the simple stuff with which the great hulking mass of America is only just grappling, thanks in no small part to a press whose members all sang from the same press releases.

LOVE MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY. Remember that line from the tender 1970 film, “Love Story”? Given the unconditional love Barack Obama has received from America, the president believed he would never have to say he was sorry.

Still, like jilted lovers, The People began to demand an apology from their beloved.

What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell.

For what it’s worth, here’s Hussein’s “apology” for the pox he has unleashed on the land:

“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me. Obviously we didn’t do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law … And, you know, that’s something I regret. That’s something we’re gonna do everything we can to get fixed … We’re looking at a range of options.”

And what, pray tell, is the matter with Christians that they hunger to forgive evil, without any evidence of expiation? Some sins are simply unforgivable.

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Oprah: Americans hate Obama because he’s black

Oprah Winfrey is going around the world telling everyone that Americans are racist while she promotes her new race-baiting film.

Oprah Winfrey has been a prominent supporter of Barack Obama. She thinks that both he and the Office of President have been treated with contempt because of the colour of his skin.

“There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”

Meanwhile Senators have dug up new report of an Obamacare failure so dismal it is hard to believe.

Among four major insurance companies, a total of only five people have enrolled in the president’s health plan in Washington, D.C.

Delaware reported only four people had enrolled in Obamacare as of Tuesday, even though the state used a $4 million grant to hire four community organizations to provide marketplace guides. That worked out to $1 million spent on each enrollee.

The worst numbers from any state to report is actually just a single number, as in the number one. Just one person has reportedly enrolled in Obamacare in North Carolina. And even that person is technically still not enrolled, having yet to pay. So, zero people enrolled in Obamacare as of Oct. 15.

Coulter: Nigerians manning Obamacare

By Ann Coulter.

In a weird confluence of the nation’s two most pressing issues — Obamacare and our insane immigration laws — this week we found out that the tens of thousands of “navigators” hired by the government to enroll people in Obamacare will include convicted felons.

Despite some “navigators” having already been exposed as having arrest warrants against them, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has no plans to screen out the criminals. (But rest assured: If your identity is stolen as a result of trying to sign up for Obamacare, no one will be more upset about it than President Obama.)

In addition to convicted felons, navigators are drawn from labor unions, community organizers, former ACORN staffers and front-groups for the Democratic National Committee.

Call right up and give all your private financial and medical information to those guys! What could go wrong? (Before Obamacare was even online, Minnesota’s health exchange emailed the Social Security numbers and other identifying information for about 2,400 Americans to a man applying to be a “navigator.”)

If you call today, you can sign up for Obamacare plus learn about a Nigerian prince in exile who’s willing to share his vast inheritance with you in exchange for your bank account numbers.

To much fanfare, in 2006 Medicare announced that only 7 percent of its payments were a result of fraud. Two years later, The New York Times reported that it was actually 31.5 percent — and that Medicare had aggressively hidden the fraud from outside auditors.

Do you think a privately run insurance company would take three years to notice that one-third of its payouts had been obtained by fraud? But with federal programs, there’s a powerful incentive not to look for fraud. That would merely vindicate critics of big government!

In 2012, Medicare’s crack investigators noticed that more than a billion dollars in home health care payments for 2008 had gone to one single county in Florida — more than all such payments made to the rest of the entire country.

Do you think it would take five years for a private insurer to figure out it had been scammed out of $1 billion by a few health care professionals in one county? Anyone else would notice being stolen from, but not the government. It’s not their money.

Wherever there’s a government program, there’s a gigantic opportunity for criminals. A staggering percentage of the health care workers scamming Medicare and Medicaid are foreign-born — much higher than their numbers in the medical profession generally.

Do you notice anything that stands out about the list of convicts? Would any of their names have sounded strange to Ben Franklin? Of 22 people convicted of defrauding American taxpayers by fraudulently billing Medicare or Medicaid, at least 17 have almost comically foreign names.

None of the scammers should be foreigners! We can’t do anything about our native-born crooks, but why are we importing them?

Enormous, unwieldy corrupt government programs run by arrogant bureaucrats would be bad enough in 1950. But after decades of our Third World-only immigration policies, one can’t help noticing that Medicare and Medicaid are beckoning Disneylands for foreign-born thieves.

The problem isn’t their complexion, it’s their culture. In America, we think only dumb people become criminals. That’s not true in the Third World!

Nigeria, for example, leads the world in criminal enterprises. Every level of Nigerian society is criminal, with the smart ones running Internet scams, the mid-range ones running car theft rings, and the stupid ones engaging in piracy and kidnapping. At the University of Lagos, you can major in credit card fraud.

There were almost no Nigerians in the United States until the 1970s. Today, there are nearly 250,000 Nigerians in the U.S. (committing the cyber-crime Americans just won’t do!). In 2011, we took in more immigrants from Nigeria than from the United Kingdom (9,246 from the U.K. and 9,344 from Nigeria).

Of course, Obamacare never would have passed without decades of massive immigration from the Third World. Liberals didn’t change any minds — they changed the voters. In order to pass Obamacare, Democrats had to bring in the Third World to vote Democratic.

The downside is that the country is now chock-full of people who come from cultures where criminality and government corruption is a way of life — at the very moment that the country is expanding a government-run health insurance program already shot through with fraud and abuse.

Only confiscatory tax rates can support such a system.

Gosh, I sure hope our new Somali and Nigerian immigrants have German-style rectitude and are very honest about reporting all their income to the government.

The glories of Hussein’s proctology

by Ilana Mercer

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The message that greeted future Obamacare patients who logged on to Healthcare.gov was as follows: “Please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.”

Healthcare.gov is the deluxe version of Obamacare.

The interminable waits on Healthcare.gov are a harbinger of things to come under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This so-called “Health Insurance Marketplace” is using the good name of the marketplace in vain. A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy. As such, they will result in long lines precipitated by the inevitable inability of central planners to bring demand and supply into balance.

Like Canadian, Cuban and British nationalized healthcare, Obamacare’s motto will become, “We have boatloads of patients, too few doctors, supplies and equipment and not nearly enough of your money. Don’t like it? Go jump in the lake.”

Like me, you must know Obama-heads (doctors included) who shrugged off the idea that a further centralization of healthcare by Obama’s politburo of proctologists—a modest expansion totaling $2 trillion—would cost them anything at all. (Doctors for Obamacare ought to revel in the 140,000 added codes into which they’ll have to categorize care rendered. These include nine new codes for injuries sustained from the common macaw! You’re more likely to be felled by an Obama-guided drone than by that gentle hook bill.)

I’m already feeling the care. How about you?

Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. Before Obamacare, this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Obamacare became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how to continue caring for us under current conditions (and keep operating).

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It has already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

Perhaps like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself. In this case, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has more bad news. On the individual-market, “Obamacare will increase average … insurance premiums by 99% for men, 62% for Women.” Middle-class Americans Obamacare subsidies will not protect. They “face the double-whammy of higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes to pay for other people’s subsidies.”

Well before Roy, a healthcare expert had warned John Stossel’s viewers that the employer mandate forces every employer of more than 50 workers (insurers are employers) to provide them with a one-size fits all government-designed plan.

The costs of the employer mandate are such that it’s economically more viable for a proprietor to deny coverage and pay a penalty, considering that compliance will add about $1.75 per hour to the cost of a worker and may see a business go under.

Who does this onerous mandate hurt? Entry level hires. An additional $1.75 an hour doesn’t much matter when one is hiring a neurosurgeon. However, 2000 additional dollars a year for a relatively unskilled worker whose productivity—output per unit of labor—is not that high; this is a proposition only government can entertain, given that it derives its revenue fromtaxing, borrowing and minting money.

Not even CNN’s resident physician, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, can doctor the reports any longer. Sad to say, but across the country people have been reporting what Gupta admitted only yesterday. Those who had full-time employment and healthcare insurance may now find themselves downgraded to part-time employees with no insurance, or to the ranks of the unemployed bereft of a job and insurance.

Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent.

This same belief plagues the simple-minded pinkos at Politico.com, where two female reporters gushed that “[d]espite the unceasing GOP campaign to sink the law, Obamacare has exceeded expectations in some significant ways.” The gush and tosh was over the fact that the central planner had instructed insurers on how to “better” allocate resources, forcing them “to issue more than $500 million in rebate checks to consumers because they failed to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care.”

Another tenet of this prevailing worldview is that an act of force—a law—is all it takes to make medical manna fall from the heavens.

In April came news that Big Brother will be appointing “navigators” to show the beneficiaries of the bankrupting Affordable Care Act the way: 21,000 navigators in California alone translates into 140,000 of them nationwide, a bureaucratic army that will swell the already swollen federal oink sector. By Pat Buchanan’s telling, navigator pay will run from $20 to $48 an hour, almost $100,000 a year for one federal oinker, for a total of between $5 and 10 billion.

In California alone navigators will cost between $871 million and $2 billion a year.

These navigators will likely be members if the entrenched minorities who speak the languages of the welfariat for which Obamacare has been sculpted. Since the chosen workers will be Obama’s pepes—community organizers, union folks and PlannedParenthood advisers—recruiting new Democrats will be part of their job description.

Despotism is upon us when, as one wag put it, “government officials write laws that apply only to us and not to them.” Lawmakers and staff were supposed to have lost their generous Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, to be replaced by health insurance purchased at the comically calamitous Healthcare.gov.

The proctologist-in-chief caved to the squealing quislings. The 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives and thousands of their Capitol Hill staff will still retain the subsidies provided by taxpayer largess. Obamacare for thee, but not for me.

That’s what you call the law of rule, not the rule of law.

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The real crisis is not the US shutdown or ‘debt ceiling crisis’

By Paul Craig Roberts

The inability of the media and politicians to focus on the real issues never ceases to amaze.

The real crisis is not the “debt ceiling crisis.” The government shutdown is merely a result of the Republicans using the debt limit ceiling to attempt to block the implementation of Obamacare. If the shutdown persists and becomes a problem, Obama has enough power under the various “war on terror” rulings to declare a national emergency and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. An executive branch that has the power to inter citizens indefinitely and to murder them without due process of law, can certainly set aside a ceiling on debt that jeopardizes the government.

The real crisis is that jobs offshoring by US corporations has permanently lowered US tax revenues by shifting what would have been consumer income, US GDP, and tax base to China, India, and other countries where wages and the cost of living are relatively low. On the spending side, twelve years of wars have inflated annual expenditures. The consequence is a wide deficit gap between revenues and expenditures.

Under the present circumstances, the deficit is too large to be closed. The Federal Reserve covers the deficit by printing $1,000 billion annually with which to purchase Treasury debt and mortgage-backed financial instruments. The use of the printing press on such a large scale undermines the US dollar’s role as reserve currency, the basis for US power. Raising the debt limit simply allows the real crisis to continue. More money will be printed with which to purchase more new debt issues needed to close the gap between revenues and expenditures.

The supply of dollars or dollar denominated assets in foreign hands is vast. (The Social Security system’s large surplus accumulated over a quarter century was borrowed by the Treasury and spent. In its place are non-marketable Treasury IOUs. Consequently, Social Security is one of the largest creditors to the US government.)

If foreigners lose confidence in the dollar, the drop in the dollar’s exchange value would mean high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s loss of control over interest rates. It is possible that a drop in the dollar’s exchange value could initiate hyperinflation in the US.

The real crisis is the absence of intelligence among economists and policymakers who told us for 20 years not to worry about the offshoring of US jobs, because we were going to have a “New Economy” with better jobs.

As I report each month, not a single one of these “New Economy” jobs has appeared in the payroll jobs statistics or in the Labor Department’s projections of future jobs. Economists and policymakers simply gave away a good chunk of the US economy in order to enhance corporate profits. One result has been to create in the US the worst distribution of income of all developed countries and of many undeveloped ones.

In the scheme of things, the enhanced profits are a short-run thing, because by halting the growth in consumer income, jobs offshoring has destroyed the US consumer market. As I noted in a recent column, on September 19 the New York Times reported what I have reported for years: that US median family income has not increased for a quarter of a century. The lack of consumer income growth is why 5 years of massive monetary and fiscal stimulus have not brought economic recovery.

The real crisis cannot be addressed unless the jobs are brought back home and the wars are stopped. As powerful organized interests oppose any such measures, Congress will pass a new debt ceiling and the real crisis will continue.

Do you hear any mention of the real crisis in the media? Today I was on an international TV program for 25 minutes with the chief financial editor of one of England’s major newspapers. Little doubt but that he was a good-hearted and intelligent fellow, but he had no capability of thinking outside the box. He was unable to comprehend my explanations, and resorted to regurgitations of the media’s ignorance or subservience to Washington’s propaganda.

Among his regurgitations was the “solution” of cutting Social Security. The chief financial editor of a major UK newspaper did not know that for the past quarter of a century Social Security revenues exceeded Social Security payments, and that the Treasury spent the surplus to fund the annual operating expenses of the government, issuing non-marketable IOUs to the Social Security Trust Funds.

The chief financial editor also did not comprehend that cutting Social Security payments also cuts consumer spending or aggregate demand, and sends the economy down further, thus magnifying the deficit/debt problem.

Because of the serious decline in the US economy caused by jobs offshoring and financial deregulation, Social Security no longer adds to its surplus. Social Security payments need the supplement to the annual payroll revenues of repayments by the Treasury of the borrowed funds.

The only reasons that Social Security is in trouble is that jobs offshoring and wars have constrained the US Treasury’s ability to make good on its debts except by having the Federal Reserve print money. Every job that is sent abroad does not contribute payroll taxes to Social Security and Medicare.

Insouciant American economists say that manufacturing is an outmoded source of employment, but Chinese manufacturing employment is almost equal to the total US labor force in all occupations, including waitresses and bartenders and hospital orderlies. China’s economy is growing at a rate of 7.5% in real terms, while Western economies cannot move forward and some are regressing.

In order to appease Wall Street, the most corrupt institution in human history, and to prevent Wall Street-financed takeovers of their corporations, executives destroyed the American consumer market by offshoring American incomes in order to enhance profits by substituting cheap foreign labor for US labor.

In my opinion, the US economy is not salvageable in its present form. The economy is running out of water resources. The supply that remains is being decimated by fracking. The soil is depleted by glysophate, a requirement of GMO agriculture. The external costs of production are rising (the costs that the corporations impose on the environment and third parties) and possibly exceed the value of the increase in corporate output. Economists are incapable of independent thought, and elected representatives are dependent on the private interests that finance their campaigns.

It is difficult to imagine a more discouraging situation.

At this time, collapse seems the most likely forecast.

Perhaps out of the ruins, a new, intelligent beginning might occur.

If there are any leaders.