Category Archives: Government
Backdoor Wall Street Bailout
Our magic president has appointed a new Fed chief to make more magic money.
Janet Yellen’s Senate hearing for approval to succeed Ben Bernanke began yesterday.
Backdoor Wall Street Bailout
Andrew Huszar, a former bond buyer for the Fed, wrote an interesting apology in the WSJ this week for his role in “quantitative easing”.
He says that the Fed never bought a mortgage bond in its 100 year history until he was hired in 2009 to buy $1.25 trillion of the things! In a single year. According to Huszar Bernanke spun the scheme as a plan to help Main Street but it was really “the biggest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time”.
Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed’s central motivation was to “affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn.
QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.
Bill Clinton on Keeping Your Healthcare. Period.
Bill Clinton knows the meaning of “period“.
He took this opportunity to drive the Hillary Machine off the tracks of the ObamaCare train wreck when he said the president should honor his commitments to people who lost their health care.
Easier said than done, considering nearly 5 million insurance contracts have been vaporized.
Clinton on Keeping your Health Care
Anyway here’s the Clinton quotation on CNN:
“So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Clinton said during an interview with the website OZY.com.
Wonder if he’ll insist the president come clean with the people on the meaning of “what difference does it make“?
Update:
Looks like the king is trying to put it back together again. He wants to use prosecutorial discretion to let people keep their old plans. Howard Dean thinks that’s illegal.
Iran Sucker’s Deal
The U.S. negotiated a deal with Iran that would have eased sanctions without requiring them to stop moving toward an atomic bomb. Netanyahu freaked out and hit Kerry on the nose with a rolled up newspaper calling it a “very very bad deal“. The French went a step further calling it a sucker’s deal and killed it.
Young Voter Base
The president is punishing his base. Young voters delivered for him in both elections. Their reward is to be asked to subsidize older and sicker voters through ObamaCare. It’s a scheme to spread the wealth from the relatively poor to the relatively affluent.
Can’t say he didn’t give the “young healthies” an important job. If they don’t sign up, ObamaCare could go into a death spiral. Or not.
Carl Schramm in the WSJ cites this Manhattan Institute study:
A Manhattan Institute analysis of Health and Human Services numbers notes that a 27-year-old male will pay 99% higher premiums under ObamaCare than he would under previously prevailing market rates. One reason is that the law now limits insurers to charging the sickest seniors no more than three times the amount they charge their youngest customers. Given that 64-year-olds use on average six times as much health care as 19-year-olds, the Affordable Care Act forces young people to pay considerably more than the cost of their own care.
Young men and women who pay a fine instead of buying coverage are not making an irrational choice. They know how little care they need and use. They also may be beginning to understand that the high cost of their plans reflects the redistribution of their wealth to older people and a bunch of mandated services that don’t make sense for them.
What’s in the Bill
We really shouldn’t be surprised to find out what’s in the bill.
Edie Littlefield Sundby wrote a WSJ op-ed about the ordeal of losing her health coverage. Her insurer wasn’t a “bad apple”. UnitedHealthcare spent 1.2 million for her cancer treatment. The op-ed went viral.
The journal has an editorial today suggesting that the purpose of ObamaCare is that everyone gets equal care, not 1.2 million in cancer treatment. Sounds like Edie should just take the painkiller.
