Continued References to Economic Recovery Are Weird

Fewer Americans were employed in December 2013 than were employed in either December 2006 or December 2007.  The percentage of non-institutionalized adults employed both in December 2012 and December 2013 was far lower than in December 2006 and December 2007.

 Over and over we hear that the economy is recovering, albeit slowly.  We have heard this throughout 2012 and 2013.  But note that the percentage of working age Americans employed in December 2011, 2012, and 2013 has been stuck at 58.6%.  This is 4.8% below the employment percentage of December 2006, which was just before the sudden cost of oil increase in early 2007 and before the subsequent financial crisis in 2008.

This is an incredible degree of employment stagnation.  Yes, 58.6% is above the low 58.2% of December 2009, but the 0.4% increase relative to that low point is only a fraction of the total December 2009 loss relative to December 2006 of 0.4% / 5.2% = 0.077.  In other words, for all intents and purposes, from 2009 through 2013 the employment situation has been essentially unchanged and awful.

We need to have 11.843 million more jobs to have the same percentage employment we had in December 2006.  Because of the big government policies of George W. Bush prior to Obama, that December 2006 employment percentage was already lower than it had been in December 1999.  Our jobs stagnation problem actually began at the start of this century.

Apparently a government jobs program, consisting of

• bailouts, 
• stimulus programs, 
• Food Stamp increases,
• Social Security Disability increases,
• Extended Unemployment Benefits, 
• ObamaCare, 
• Dodd-Frank and other financial regulations,
• Tax increases,
• Increased fossil fuel sourced energy costs (recently moderated by shale oil and gas increased production on private lands, while extensive federal land and off-shore oil and gas were denied development), and
• Subsidized so-called green energy,

has not been very effective in increasing employment.

But then a program to take people out of the private sector workforce, to transfer money from the private sector to the government sector, and to limit the options of the private sector's entrepreneurs and consumers could have no other outcome.  It is not as though this sort of program has not been tried before and been found to fail disastrously.  But those who believe in the efficacy of big government will not learn from history.

As a result, we have had at least 5 years of a jobs depression.  Given Obama's wrongheadedness and pigheadedness, we are likely to see this continue for at least another 4 years.  Four years being 3 more years of Obama and one year for a more rational and less abusive President to return control of the economy to the private sector.

ObamaCare Self-Immolates, but Heavily Taxes Middle Income People

The signature achievement of Obama and the Democrat Socialist Party, the fraudulently named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is undergoing an immediate self-destruction brought on by the unbelievable hubris of party hacks in believing that they could better direct the massive medical and health insurance efforts than the private sector can.  The problems run much deeper than health insurance exchanges whose website portals do not work.  That is an unsurprising problem given the nature of those in charge of setting them up, but it is only the start of the tsunami of problems being unleashed upon the American People by these preternaturally bloated Progressive Elitist's egos.

Obama told us on Tuesday, 22 October, that thousands of people are signing up for ObamaCare and saving money.  Actually, it turns out that most of those who have signed up are really signing up for expanded Medicaid benefits.  It also turns out that many who have struggled with the website problems long enough to sign up are those with pre-existing conditions who will often save money under ObamaCare.  In addition, a few states are already so heavily regulated by the state with consequent health insurance costs being forced skyhigh, that even the ObamaCare costs are lower.  Yet, the costs for all but five states are generally up and often are up by factors of two or more.  A Heritage Foundation study by Drew Gonshorowski produced these results:

Only in Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island can you find cost savings under ObamaCare.  The rest of the nation is screwed.

For 27 year olds, their rates are going up by 100% or more in the following 10 states:

Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas, and Vermont.  Nobody actually knows the rates for Virginia because it appears that the ObamaCare website is giving out a number that must be wrong.

Again for 27 year olds, insurance premium rates are going up by more than 50%, but less than 100%, in the following 15 states:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Of course, ObamaCare is design to milk the healthy young to pay for the sick and older population.  Nonetheless, for adults aged 50 the rates are also generally going up.  In the following 13 states and DC, they are going up more than 50%:

Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

An adult aged 50 will see rates go up by more than 25%, but less than 50%, in the following 15 states:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.

So, a 27 year old will see his premium rates going up by more than 50% in 25 states.  A 50 year old will see rates going up by more than 25% in 28 states and the District of Columbia.  Somehow, I suspect the claims of the Democrat Socialist Party and Obama that ObamaCare was just going to be Hunky-Dorry are ringing, or will soon ring, very hollow.  No, they will even be regarded as the lies that I have always said they were.

When ObamaCare was being pushed through Congress, the claim was that there were 47 million uninsured in the USA and desperately in need of affordable health insurance.  They said it was everyone's responsibility to see that the uninsured had their medical needs assured by ObamaCare.  Now mind you, they did not point out as I did (discussing this here, here, here, and here) that about 10 million Americans do not need insurance since they or a family member are so wealthy that they can readily be self-insured.  Maybe 12 million of that number were then illegal aliens.  Most of the remainder were healthy young people who even at the lower rates available before ObamaCare did not see a reason to insure themselves.  Clearly, ObamaCare does not address any of the needs of the wealthy, the illegal alien, and the healthy young person.  It is only addressing the needs of those who are already sick and do not have health insurance and it is doing so at incredible cost to everyone else.

Let us examine how ObamaCare is doing if thousands had actually signed up as Obama says in the first 22 days of the program.  Since it has been sold recently as covering 50 million people without insurance and since it is now estimated that about 16 million people who had insurance are losing it due to cancellations saying their policies do not meet ObamaCare mandates, there would be 66 million people who have to sign up for ObamaCare by 31 March 2014.  In that 182 day period, 362,637 people a day must sign up, despite Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, and Valentine's Day!  More refined recent claims were that ObamaCare hoped to sign up 30 million of the uninsured.  So, that makes the total number of sign-ups a mere 46 million by 31 March 2014, or a mere 252,747 a day.  In the 22 days to Obama's speech last week, the total number of sign-ups for insurance was not anywhere near even the one-day necessary average of 252,747.  In fact, so few have signed up to date that one can just as well say that 46 million sign-ups have to occur in the remaining 156 days from today, at an average rate of 294,872 a day.

Now stop and think about this.  Is it at all likely that 294,872 people a day will sign-up for ObamaCare before 31 March 2014 given the website problems, the high costs, and the high deductibles?  There is no way this will happen.  No Way!  In fact, it was never a likely development from the beginning.

I have been sure that ObamaCare was designed to fail so that a single-payer system would soon replace it.  But the facts discussed above now make it clear that the Democrat Socialist Party that is always pushing for new taxes was also trying to create a system almost no one would want a part of so they could charge tens of millions of people the penalty tax for not obtaining the prohibitively expensive ObamaCare with its low quality health care service.  This was always primarily a new and massive tax!  By clever, insidious design.

One can even understand that Obama paid no attention to the problems of launching ObamaCare because its immediate failure was the equivalent of a huge additional tax increase.  It was designed to fail either immediately or in a few years.  But the faster it failed, the bigger the tax increase!  Obama was either setting up a future single-payer completely nationalized medical care system or he was getting out of the corner he had painted himself into with his pledge not to increase taxes on the Middle Class.  It was a win-win situation for him.

ObamaCare was a pretense for an incredible and massive tax increase, which was mostly aimed at the middle class even as the Democrat Socialist Party was pledging no tax increase for the middle class and pretending to care about all the millions suffering without health insurance.  ObamaCare was directly a massive power grab over 16 to 18% of the economy and it was also a heavy tax increase to pay for the program.  People understood that some people would be hit by the penalty tax, but few understood that it was designed to be a massive tax increase to soak tens of millions of people with middle incomes.

Obama is counting on his abilities as a great con man to keep Americans from understanding this.  Eventually, the pain will be so great for so many Americans that I think enough will come to understand the perfidy that fell upon them.  They will finally see Obama and the Democrat Socialists as the malevolent liars that they are.  They will soon no longer control the Senate and in 2016 they will lose the Presidential election.  At last!

I am now reading that the ObamaCare mandated insurance has to be purchased by 31 March 2014, not by 15 March as I had earlier seen reported.  I have recalculated the necessary daily average rates of sign-up for everyone to meet the ObamaCare requirement for its approved insurance plans on 30 October.  Of course, the actual daily sign-ups since I originally posted this remain vastly lower than the necessary daily average.

Obama's Tax Cut Illusions

Obama is posing as a tax-cutter in this presidential election, despite his past history as an enthusiastic taxer. He is doing this in a particularly insidious way.

Obama is clearly buying votes and pitting large numbers of Americans against carefully crafted smaller numbers of Americans and businesses owned by Americans. This is the usual socialist technique of playing upon envy and avarice and directing them against an electoral segment which is relatively defenseless.

HE claims that HE is going to cut the taxes of 95% of working American families, though who knows what HIS definition of working families is. In reality, HE is going to give many so-called "tax credits" to Americans on their income tax returns who are not paying any income tax. This is clearly disguised welfare. Who gets this welfare? We do not know exactly, but it looks to be most of the 44% of all tax filers who will pay no income taxes under the Obama plan. The total cost of the "tax credits" is estimated to be $1.054 trillion over the next 10 years, an increase of $647 billion over the present tax credits. These tax credits, while welfare, will not be counted in the welfare part of the federal budget. They will be hidden costs.

There is another major problem with these tax credits: they are sold as an incentive to work, but in some cases they will be a disincentive. This is because as a low income family earns more, they will lose a large part of their increased earnings to a very high marginal tax rate. Some families with an income of $40,000 will lose up to $0.40 for every additional dollar they earn!

You can read more about Obama's tax plans on individuals in a good Wall Street Journal article here.

Obama also says that HE will give tax breaks to 95% of businesses. HE wants to increase taxes on large businesses, on capital gains, and on estate taxes applied to small businesses. The capital gains and estate tax increases will hurt many small businesses, as will the tax increases on large businesses. For instance, I own and operate a small business, but most of my customers are large enough businesses that they are going to be hit by massive tax increases by Obama. Somehow, all that extra money being sent out in welfare checks under the guise of tax credits and his other massive new federal programs have to be paid for. There is no such thing as a free lunch, even if the Pied Piper says there is! So, what will happen to my business when my customers are hurting under the burden of higher taxes? Will their expanded operations in India, China, Ireland, and Poland send my laboratory as many material samples for analysis as their plant in Ohio or in North Carolina does? When they close the Ohio and North Carolina plants, won't that hurt my business? What, am I supposed to be stupid enough not to know what the effect on my business will be?

So, what new start-ups and small businesses will get Obama's tax cuts? Who actually knows? HE has not told us how long a company is considered a start-up and HE has not defined what he means by a small business. But, the reality is this: Giving a small business a minor tax break while sending the economy into a depression is a badly losing proposition for almost any small business. It is better to teach a man to fish, or at least to allow him to fish, than it is to give him a fish. With businesses, it is best to allow people to run them with minimal interference. Then natural incentives and rewards for hard work and creative and useful ideas will do the rest.

Instead, HE wants to pick the winners and kick the losers in the teeth. Developers of his favored technologies will possibly prosper. So, it will be good to be developing solar energy and wind generators, but it will be bad to be a materials analysis laboratory, a computer manufacturer, a surgical tool maker, a weapons maker (Barney Franks says they will cut the defense budget by 25%), an oven maker, a specialty cloth maker, or huge numbers of other industries. You will be hurt unless you devote a massive effort to curry favor from Washington Democrat politicians, as Fanny Mae, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and PNB have done in the financial arena. Small businesses cannot do this.

So, for a single fish, we are expected to elect HIM and then find many of our customers hurt, a weakened economy, energy-use restrictions, more severe and senseless environmental restrictions, more expensive and less reliable energy, more expensive health care mandates, increased liability to claims of gender pay discrimination, and more restrictions on imports and exports. What a trade! I would rather just be allowed to do my own fishing.

Both individual tax payers and business owners should be very wary of this charlatan who will do anything to be the Wealth-Redistributor-in-Chief. How ironic that this will make HIM our Master!