This morning an interesting three-way OpEd showed up in the Journal from Shaheen, Boxer and Murray, all Democratic Senators.
It managed, in a few column inches, to show exactly what's wrong with America when it comes to Health Care, and how the Catholic Church's decision to sleep with Satan led it to where it is now.
It was a historic victory for women's health when the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free. This new policy will help millions of women get the affordable care they need.
Right there, in the first sentence, our three esteemed Senators show exactly how stupid they are, and where the root of the problem lies.
Nothing is ever free and when everyone is forced to buy a thing then everyone is forced to pay for it, which means that all this "mandate" has done is "spread the cost" to those who don't use such services. As a consequence not even the intended users gets their contraceptives, breast exams and HIV screenings "for free" -- they simply get to force others to pay for them.
Now, sadly, there is an aggressive and misleading campaign to deny this benefit to women.
Why shouldn't women pay for the services they wish to consume on their own? There is no "denial" of this "benefit"; since Obamacare contains an individual mandate there is no benefit at all since all are forced to pay, whether they will use it or not (or whether they even have the approprirate biological components to have a use for such things.)
It is being waged in the name of religious liberty. But the real forces behind it are the same ones that sought to shut down the federal government last year over funding for women's health care. They are the same forces that just tried to pressure the Susan G. Komen Foundation into cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screenings. Once again, they are trying to force their politics on women's personal health-care decisions.
The Komen Foundation is a private charity. It should thus be free to allocate its money as it sees fit. Only in the world of government force does such an argument arise; free speech cuts all ways, and those who fund that private charity have a right to demand that if the charity wishes to continue to receive their funding that it change its policies. The charity has a right to say no, and the donors have a right to stop donating.
Of course in the world of government none of these rights exist. This is, in fact, the trap the Catholic Church fell into originally, but it wasn't an accident. It was in fact their intentional throwing off of obligations that the Church has maintained for hundreds of years onto the State that led to this problem.
The Church loved this when it all worked their way. Rather than being the source of beneficience and charity, it has shoved off that onto state programs, thereby taking what was a voluntary act of donation and turning into a compulsion enforced by government with literal guns-up-the-nose through the power of taxation.
Turning tithing into taxation was the literal Holy Grail for the Church -- it was able to codify as a matter of law what was religious dogma. This, when it worked their way, was praised from the pulpit on Sunday and not one word was breathed about Establishment and its problems.
Of course that sort of tricksterism is the hallmark of Satan.
When you sleep with the Devil it rarely works out well.
The Church has never given a damn about the First Amendment's establishment clause when willfully ignoring it was to their benefit! By tossing off literal billions of dollars of annual expense in the United States alone that used to be allocated to charity works, from feeding the poor to running charity hospitals that provided care to people who had no money, The Church was the historic source of these good works for the poor, funded entirely from voluntary donations.
Supporting the welfare state that has become built up in the western world has allowed The Church to slough off that obligation and maintain its wealth by substituting the power of government force for the power of persuasion from the pulpit.
There is also the hypocrisy of the Church's position, specifically:
Nationwide, 1.5 million women use contraceptives only as treatment for serious medical conditions.
True. Birth control pills are in fact prescribed for various menstrual disorders; in that use they are not intended as a "birth control" at all, but are instead a therapeutic drug. The Church's position of course is that women should suffer dysmenorrhea and related disorders in silence, as they believe that all drugs or devices that might interfere with conception are "intrinsically evil." Of course it is all men who make these decisions; I recognize that as a man I seem to lack the ability to comprehend in full the decisions involved here, as God did not grant me a uterus or ovaries. The Bishops, of course, have no problem arrogating medical decisions for others to themselves.
And now the punchline:
Consistent with other federal policies, churches and other groups dedicated to teaching religious doctrine are exempted from providing this coverage under a "conscience clause." But the law does include institutions that have historic religious ties but also have a broader mission, such as hospitals and universities. That's also consistent with federal policy—and with laws that already exist in many states.
Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true. Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church's doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form. But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.
Catholic hospitals and charities are woven into the fabric of our broader society. They serve the public, receive government funds, and get special tax benefits. We have a long history of asking these institutions to play by the same rules as all our other public institutions.
Yep.
The Church in fact took what was a uniquely private institution -- provision of charity through hospitals (run by the Church), food banks (ditto), soup kitchens and provision of shelter for homeless people and others in dire straights and preached for literal decades that the forced taking of money from the congregation, along with non-believers, was not only justified but a moral imperative, thereby relieving what was a consensual act of charity and turning it into a legal obligation.
This burst of authoritarian jackboot application in fact met with the Church's explicit approval, not just silent assent. That same approval was voiced when EMTALA was passed in the 1980s when forced provision of care to the indigent came into law in the United States, taking what was a voluntary act and turning into a legal imperative. The very same position -- that of forced provision of cost-shifted care, has been considered a laudable goal for literal decades by The Church when it comes to Medicaid and Medicare, both of which effectively force private payers and working people to subsidize medical care for those who are either indigent or retired and have saved nothing of their own.
Then, having championed this organized theft from the citizens at literal gunpoint The Church stepped up to the trough and lapped up its share of hard-wrought blood from the people, attaching itself to the federal tit and drawing mightily upon tax benefits and transfer payments for its institutions (such as hospitals) that were once funded instead by the generosity of those who decided to tithe on Sunday.
In short the Church has, for decades, supported the entirety of the legal framework and the Democratic Left's position that the provision of charity, which was once provided for through voluntary tithe, was "best" provided instead in large part through mandatory taxation.
The very same Church that now bleats about the chains imposed by government, in short, was more than happy to help that very same government apply the chains of both fiscal and moral bondage to your neck.
The Bishops all need to drink a great big chalice of Shut-The-****-Up until and unless they reverse, in public, their explicit endorsement of Medicaid, Medicare, EMTALA and the rest of the blatantly unconstitutional and outrageous cost-shifting and forced charity that they have all supported for the last 50 years.
The author is a Libertarian Catholic.
The numbers are proving Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s critics wrong.
More than a year after Republicans from House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio to presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas warned that the Fed’s second round of asset purchases risked a sharp acceleration in prices, the surge has failed to materialize. The personal-consumption-expenditures price index rose 2.4 percent for the 12 months ending in December, near the central bank’s 2 percent target.
Near? And second, what part of this target is difficult to understand?
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy's long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
Notice the repeated use of the words "long run"?
Why is this important? Because you live in the "long run." Your life is, typically, about 85 years. So what is the difference in lifetime price inflation between 2 and 2.4%?
438% .vs. 651%, or close to 50% more lifetime inflation.
Incidentally, did those numbers make your eyes pop out of your head? They should; those are the actual numbers over a lifetime with "2% inflation", and put the lie to the claim of long run "stable prices."
The latter also means that you have about 13 cents of purchasing power for a dollar left over that same 85 years, and indeed that's about what you do have. "Stable prices" my ass.
Second, what's "moderate" about long-run interest rates where they are now (10 year Treasuries @ 2%)? That's not "moderate", it's eye-popping, floor-shattering ridiculously low.
“The statements were politically motivated,” said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Group in New York. With unemployment stalled above 8 percent for three years,“I don’t see how anybody in their right mind could form a strong argument for persistent, rapid inflation in the United States without the participation of the labor market.”
A wage-price spiral does indeed require the labor market to "participate." Destruction of the purchasing power of the common man, especially those with under-median incomes, however, does not.
Bloomberg, like the rest of the media and Bernanke himself, love to cite "core" inflation as well. But you don't live in a "core" world; you consume both food and energy. The CPI index says that for a "median" family about 15% of your budget will go to "food and beverages", with 7.8% of it being "food at home." For a median income of $50,000 this is $3,900 a year, or $325 a month. I can buy that number.
But what's it look like if you're making $12/hour and have $24,000 a year in income -- over the poverty line, but rather typical of "modern" blue collar wages? Is it still 7.8% of your budget or is it much higher? Of course it's much higher.
This is very important because all food at home went up 6% last year. Over ten years this is an inflation rate of 79% and over a working man's 45 years in the workforce it's a total inflation of nearly 1,300%!
This is "stable prices"?
Motor fuel (for your car) was up 10.3% over the last year. Don't run that number out 45 years. Just don't.
Here's the thing -- the rich, and I'm sure our intrepid writer for Bloomberg (along with the fat cats on Wall Street and in DC) falls into this category when compared against the median income level, feel much less of this than the working man that comprises the majority of the country does. That's simply because as a percentage of their income (and mine) food and energy comprise far less in the way of expenditures. Once I buy my steak, eggs and bacon I've bought them -- I don't wind up with a bill that 3x as large for food as I did when I was a broke guy just out of school even though my income is much more than 3x what it used to be.
Core inflation works just fine for the 1%ers, and for that matter it works well as a measurement for the guy who's making $150,000 a year (not into the 1% territory, but getting there.)
But for the working stiff -- the fully half of the nation that earns the median income and below, core inflation is a bad joke, as their expenditures on food and energy, as a percentage of their income, is much higher than the CPI weighting table suggests.
This, incidentally, is one of the key points I make in Leverage (and another reason you ought to read it if you haven't already -- look to the right to get your copy); CPI statistics are not only flawed due to things like hedonic substitution, they're also flawed for anyone who isn't right at the median income, as the use of "core" inflation numbers, in particular, severely understates the impact that price changes have on lower-income families.
Further, as I have repeatedly pointed out, "2% inflation" is not "price stability" at all. It is in fact an outrageous level of inflation over a person's lifetime, and even over simply your working-age life (45 years) it amounts to a 144% total inflation rate -- that is, a double and then half more, roughly, in the average price level from where it starts from your 20th birthday until you turn 65.
Libertarians (and others) love to talk about the "free market", especially so-called "capitalists" and "republicans." But there is no "free market" when one adopts a policy of intentional destruction of purchasing power and then uses measurement of "price stability" that (1) reflects that intentional destruction but calls it "price stability" and (2) intentionally directs the bad effects of that price inflation at those who can least afford it.
“There’s been an extraordinary amount of misinformation about inflation circulating,” Gertler said. “We have not had any sign of sustained inflation.”
We have had ridiculously-sustained inflation for 100 years. The laws of mathematics make that "tiny" 2 or 3% inflation in fact ridiculously large over the long run. The explicit statement of The Fed's policy goals as ensconced in law, is the impact of their policy decisions over the long run, and in this regard The Fed has serially and intentionally violated the law every single year since it was founded, and Congress has serially and intentionally refused to enforce that law.
Bernanke deflected a question from a reporter at his Jan. 25 press conference about whether he’d resign if a Republican were elected president in November and asked him to do so.
“I’m not going to get involved in political rhetoric,”Bernanke said. “As long as I’m here, I will do everything I can to help the Federal Reserve achieve its dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment.”
That a lie. The Fed has never in its history met its mandate and still isn't, as defined by the mandate for long run price stability. Any percentage of inflation over zero fails this essential test due to the laws of mathematics.
Just don't expect the MSM, including Bloomberg, to tell you the truth.
They won't.
Oh this was looked at favorably... but should it be?
Consumer credit increased at an annual rate of 7-1/2 percent in the fourth quarter. Revolving credit increased at an annual rate of 4-1/2 percent, and nonrevolving credit increased 9 percent. In December, consumer credit increased at an annual rate of 9-1/4 percent.
That sounds good, right? Well....
That doesn't look all that hot. I suppose the non-revolving figures are good, but ex-FedGov while the rate is improving it's still negative. Revolving, on the other hand, is flat.
How about amounts outstanding?
On a level basis revolving upticked a bit, but non-revolving was up significantly, with about half being student loans. (Is the rest newly-revived subprime auto?)
Hmmm......
I think we can assume this means the answer is "no" on the robosigning settlement...
Jefferson City, Mo. –Attorney General Chris Koster today announced that a Boone County grand jury has handed down 136-count indictments against DOCX, LLC and its founder and former president, Lorraine Brown, for forgery and making a false declaration related to mortgage documents processed by DOCX.
“The grand jury indictment alleges that mass-produced fraudulent signatures on notarized real estate documents constitutes forgery,” Koster said. “Today’s indictment reflects our firm conviction that when you sign your name to a legal document, it matters,” Koster said.
The forgery and false declaration counts each allege that the person whose name appears on 68 notarized deeds of release on behalf of the lender is not the person who actually signed the paperwork. The documents were then submitted to the Boone County Recorder of Deeds as though they were genuine.
Koster’s office requested the indictment, and the Attorney General’s Office will prosecute the case.
Well now, that's not a "fine" or a "handslap", it's an alleged felony.....
Forgery is a Class C felony and False Declaration is a Class B misdemeanor. If convicted on the most serious count, Brown could face up to seven years in prison for each count. DOCX could be fined up to $10,000 for each forgery conviction and $2,000 for each false declaration conviction.
The charges against DOCX and Lorraine Brown are merely accusations and, as in all criminal cases, the defendant is innocent until or unless proved guilty in a court of law.
Yes indeed, everyone is entitled the presumption of innocense and the evidence will be presented in a court of law before a jury of their peers.
I'm wondering if the "peers" would be wrongfully-foreclosed homeowners or banksters? 
PS: It's about damn time, and this makes two with the previous one being Nevada, which returned a ~600-odd count indictment late last year.
