alajac

A Radical Solution for Healthcare: Kill the Hybrid

You can't pretend to even begin to have a free market in healthcare as long as the AMA, et.al. are constraining the supply of healthcare professionals. So, until you DO have things in place to have an actual free market, the only intelligent thing to do is to treat the entire US population as one big group so we can at least get a decent group rate; in other words, de facto single payer. Just because something CAN be quasi-privatized does not mean that it SHOULD be quasi-privatized. They only care about things getting "socialist" when it is their ox that is getting gored: when the Feds are handing out trillions to the rich people that own banks, they call it "unavoidable". I call it "socialist welfare b.s.". See my recent SA comments for a plan that will fix everything.

Is It Time to Recognize Reality?

While I agree that massive unemployment will be the iceberg that takes this ship down, I believe that instead of a bunch of new rights that government can pretend to maintain while it actually continues to serve the banking industry, what is required is an institution of equal-dollar compensation payments (of at least $1000/month paid in new U.S. non-debt money that must replace the Federal Reserve dollars) to every legal resident; thereafter, housing, healthcare, etc. can be taken care of out-of-pocket.


On Sep 29 12:36 PM John Ryskamp wrote:

> It's the same old analysis, over and over again. What new is there
> to be said? One thing:
>
> He rants about the political system failing to change and continuing
> to turn a blind eye. Why is this happening? Simple. The underemployment
> rate among the politically relevant population--those with a Bachelor's
> degree or higher--is only 10%. These are the people who matter politically,
> and frankly, it isn't that bad for them yet. Just ask them.
>
> Yeah, they're not happy with their stock portfolios or the decline
> in the value of their houses--or a lot of other things. But as long
> as the job is there, the house is there, and the TV is there, you
> will not see THEM get politically active and move for any kind of
> change.
>
> Maybe it's too bad, but then, maybe it won't happen either. Unemployment
> in this class never reached a level high enough during the Depression
> to produce any important policy change--and the country was STILL
> in the depression when the war began.
>
> So if this guy wants to see change, all he has to do is sit around
> and wait until underemployment among the educated class reachs 40%.
> NOTHING will happen at 39.99999999999%.
>
> 40%.
>
> By the way, we are moving from the West Coast Hotel v. Parrish "scrutiny"
> regime--which allowed this catastrophe by denying individually enforceable
> rights and gave the political system nearly all power over the facts
> (blame people themselves for this)--and toward the "maintenance"
> regime I discuss in my book The Eminent Domain Revolt.
>
> You will never see economic activity increase again--NEVER--until
> the scrutiny regime is booted out of power, the maintenance regime
> is put in power, and the New Bill of Rights is enforced.
>
> Enforce it or starve. It's up to you clowns.

Monoline Mania: MBIA and Ambac Included in the Dash to Trash

Hope you sold the open, Tom (though by option exp I think we'll be higher). I think we are (next) going to work down for a retest of some moving averages and then get one last big rally starting September option expirations week, pretty much just like in 1938. That should pretty much be "it" for the major upside for the next few years.

Minyanville: Subprime Lending Is Back with a Vengeance

the first "Colonial scrip" link should be to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Minyanville: Subprime Lending Is Back with a Vengeance

Autolander - You said:
"We are telling them it's okay to leach off the system. It's okay to walk away from your agreements. It's okay for you to dishonor your word - the most valuable thing you have."

We need some historical context here.

This country was BUILT (and the land you live upon was obtained) by YOUR government walking away from its agreements.

Governments are the DE FACTO owners of ALL the property within their dominion (i.e., the extent of the claims on natural resources/property that they are able and willing to defend); they set up "DE JURE" ownership (however they like) to try to ensure and enhance their own survival and maximize profits for whoever has control of that government.

In our particular case that would be "rich people": that is, at least since 1787-1789 when they hired a private army to put down Shays Rebellion (a group of Massachusetts farmers and Revolutionary War vets who had gotten fed up with being "cash cows" for the rich) and decided that, the next time they had to do something like that (put down a revolution or steal some more land), they wanted "the cash cows" to foot the bill for hiring the thugs, and so they got George Washington riled up enough to come out of retirement (he was so easy to "work") and they got Ben Franklin (and perhaps likewise Tom Paine) onto their side by loaning him enough money to buy a shipload of Bank of North America shares. (They also made Franklin's son-in-law a BNA director.)

Franklin, part of Pennsylvania's banking-dominated delegation to the "Constitutional Convention" - doesn't that term sound a lot better than "Counter-Revolution"? - argued during the "Convention" AGAINST the "Colonial Scrip" -see eh.net/XIIICongress/cd... - that he had helped set up and had previously lauded so much that England had passed the Currency Act of 1764 in order to outlaw the colony-issued paper money that was cutting into English banking profits; that law was said by Franklin and others to have been the principal cause of The Revolution.

The US Constitution was created to give the rich the weapons they required to keep the cash cows in line, while at the same time (and this is the best part) convincing the cows that they have some voice in how things on the farm are run. Everything else is just "smoke and mirrors". It was harder back when everybody knew everybody else in a community, but now the oligarchs just run some attack ads and make sure that only their own people are able to get on ballots and the rest is history. Pretty ironic that the weapon that put the gun to your head is looked to as "our last, best hope".

And so here we are today.

Basically it comes down to this: if they need to screw or kill or maim some (or even all) of the cash cows (foreign or domestic, since the herd owned by "USA, Inc." now pretty much includes everybody in the whole world, the other governments in the world having the same "de jure" status as US homeowners and may continue so only as long as the real owners allow) in order to maximize profits, that's just what has to (and will) happen. Got it?

Whether or not some poor people get a good deal or get to sponge a little or whatever is totally irrelevant to our cash cow farm owners: as long as a good bit of the labor of the cows goes into their pockets, everything else is a nitpick. They are not doing this BS to help anyone but themselves.

If you thought there was anything you could do about it, would you be doing it? See my plan on the "alajac" page of u4prez.com for what I believe will fix it (with no shooting required).


See also "Creating the U.S. Dollar Currency Union, 1748-1811: A Quest for Monetary Stability
or a Usurpation of State Sovereignty for Personal Gain? (start on page 15 with "RHETORIC VERSUS REALITY AT THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION") at
eh.net/XIIICongress/cd...

Forget the Moral Outrage: Just Restore the Mortgage Markets

the reality is that the government owns everything and just allocates apparent ownership to get the most productivity out of its resouces. so if the government decides the market isn`t the best way to handle a certain resource, then that`s the way it is and you can go pee up a rope if you don`t like it. In the end, the government will hang (or prosper) by its own decisions. personally, I think they are putting the cart before the horse due to the need of persons high up in our government to put the personal interests of themselves and their comrades ahead of the long-term viabiltiy of the state. But what do they care since they probably won`t be around long enough to see all the damage they are doing.

The `cart` is mortgage affordability. the horse is the ability of the majority of us to afford inflated rent payments at all, much less buy a home.

Making the mortgages more affordable will result in a bounce after which will come the REAL `recession` (similar to the ones Alan described as following the 1987 and 1998 blow-ups), in 2010, right on schedule.

Bill Gross: 'Pick Me! Pick Me!'

Gross is a obviously a whiny loser (except when he`s got a bull market to help make him look good) and anybody that believes anything that a corporation or the government ``assures`` them is an idiot. The really smart criminals go to Wall Street and DC.

Price and volume charts are the only truth and they clearly say `more down` at least for now (as they have since mid-2007 and esp since the end of May).

The Facts Behind the Coming Congressional Mortgage Bailout Bill

Anybody who thinks that the Federal Reserve or government regulators are ``on their side``, also probably believed that `dot com` and housing prices were going to keep `going up` forever.


I won`t say anything about the government regulators except that `by their fruit you will know them`, but the Federal Reserve is owned by the banks, so get a clue. The banks have a virtual `call option` on a hefty chunk of our labor and wealth provided to them by the Federal Reserve. In other words, even if they lose money, their downside is limited, just like it was for the income-challenged people who took out low-up-front-cost loans for housing that they couldn`t otherwise afford, people who could live in a nice house for at least awhile and maybe even make a bunch of money on the deal `down the road`. It would be the fiduciary duty of anyone offered a deal like that to grab it and run, especially if they had children who had never had a chance `to live in a nice house in nice neighborhood`.


And who can blame the banks for taking us up on a similar deal? If the deal goes well, then they get `filthy rich`, if not, they get time to spend all the money OUR SYSTEM has tossed into their laps. Tough choice.


As we learned in `Quality Improvement Process 101`, the problem is never `the people`. The problem is always THE SYSTEM. Unless (and until) we fix THE SYSTEM, the same bad things will keep happening, over and over. The fault lies not with the borrowers and the banks wo profit from THE SYSTEM, but with our ancestors for letting this SYSTEM get set up, and with ourselves for letting a SYSTEM continue which incentivizes activities that lead to our own destruction.


First thing we need for our NEW SYSTEM is our own, debt-free U.S. Government currency, backed by all the real estate within the nation`s borders (of which property the U.S. government is the actual owner...`legal` owners are granted `legal exclusive right of use` by an `actual` owner, valid until such time as the actual owner changes its mind or becomes unable to defend its ownership claim). Since banks will no longer be able to print the our new currency to cover their losses, and since we will no longer be dependent upon banks to maintain a flow of credit, banks should become more conservative in their lending and speculation. We should also get rid of FDIC insurance to further encourage such a change.


While we are at it, we should replace all income-related taxes with a 1/2% electronic transfer (aka debit) tax which will be avoidable by the use of cash. This will not only rid us of the IRS (saving us the billions of dollars currently spent on `tax reporting`), it will also end the current system`s penalization of work and entrepreneurism, and release for investment purposes untold billions currently spent on `tax avoidance`. This debit tax will not only be more of a tax on wealth than labor and be (arguably) voluntarily-paid, it will also act to discourage excessive short-term market speculation and will raise enough revenue to begin paying off the National Debt, a debt which will no longer be growing once we have switched over to our own debt-free currency. We will also apply any Federal Reserve dollars that are swapped for our new currency toward paying off the National Debt.


Since the U.S. government has, by granting `exclusive rights of use`, denied everyone free access to all of its property, and since the U.S. government has not compensated everyone for that `taking`, we should elect a Congress that will pay every legal U.S. resident `Adequate and Equal Just Compensation for Denial of Free Access to U.S. Property`, compensation which WILL FUNCTIONALLY REPLACE ALL FORMS OF PERSONAL AND CORPORATE WELFARE, SUBSIDIES AND BOONDOGGLES, including the rescindance of Federal Minimum Wage laws and a phase-out of the Social Security system. (Once everyone is getting `Denial of Free Access` compensation their whole lives, it would seem arguable that the vast majority of people will be able to save enough to be able to comfortably cease working at some point in their lives.)


As a starting point, $1000 per month (of the new, non-Federal-Reserve, non-Debt-Money, as described above) should be paid to every legal adult resident (compensation of minors should, of course, be held `in trust` to avoid incentivizing baby factories). Since everyone gets the same amount, this compensation plan is not wealth redistributive, but will give the least wealthy the biggest advantage (in terms of monthly percentage increase of wealth) and a better chance to `catch up` than the current system that keeps the rich getting relatively richer through good times and bad.


Once this NEW SYSTEM gets going, we should expect people in other countries to insist that their governments either emulate our NEW SYSTEM, or else apply for U.S. statehood as The Republic of Texas did in 1845.


Benefits of the new system should include better childcare, less poverty, less crime, cheaper government and a safer world. All in favor, help spread the word.

Is the U.S. Banking System Safe?

Bank stocks bounced because there are many clueless people with lots of money, as evidenced by many of the above comments, I've been warning people about this crash since 2006 (due to an article I read about the lagging correspondence of the S&P500 with the Housing Index); anybody who didn't see this coming shouldn't be trusted with a checkbook, much less funds and banks and the Federal Reserve System.

If the bank owners were personally responsible for loan losses do you think they would have made all those bad loans? They can socialize the losses and take all the profits, so they do. As noted in this great piece, fractional reserve loaning is totally corrupt, a government-approved Ponzi scheme.

Loans from fractional reserve banks are inherently “liar’s loans”, the lie being, the bank is loaning money that it really doesn’t have. The Fed and the thousands of banks creating these liar loans create inflationary conditions that actively discourage thrift: people throw their money at something that hopefully will go up in a lot in price in order to hold onto the buying power of their money, trading the certainty of being screwed in the long run for the chance to possibly avoid being screwed at that future time. Debt-money leaks out value like a bucket with a hole in the bottom leaks out water. This is just going to keep happening until the basic cause gets fixed.

First of all, WE NEED OUR OWN DEBT-FREE CURRENCY, backed by all of the real estate owned by the United States (which is, in fact, all of the real estate within the national boundaries, and really more than that including other nations whose continued claim to existence depends on U.S. defense of that claim; case-in-point, Kuwait, 1991), we should distribute that new currency in monthly equi-dollar amounts to all legal residents (amounts due minors to be held in trust accounts). Also, we need bankers to be held financially responsible for any loss of depositors’ money (if they want to gamble with fractional reserves, it’s the bank owners who should pay, not taxpayers, and if you lose your own money by depositing it in a fractional reserve bank, again, it’s YOU who should pay, not taxpayers. How can we ever expect things to get right with a system based on socializing losses?

Next, we should REPLACE ALL FEDERAL NON-CONSUMPTION TAXES with a one-half percent(+/-) Tobin-type tax on ALL outgoing electronic transactions (avoidable by using cash for all transactions, and, since avoidable, the tax will be arguably being paid voluntarily) in order to:

1. Pay off the national debt,

2. Repair the damage that the U.S. government has done to persons and the free market by favoritism (reparations for having “Constitutionalized” slavery might be considered) and excessive regulation (e.g., we need about 4 times as many doctors and healthcare professionals as we currently have in order to have enough competition extant to get medical costs back to the realm of affordability, and we would have had them had there been a free market in medical education), and

3. Extract and destroy excess currency as required to avoid inflation.

No other form of Federal non-consumption tax would be allowed (this tax could go to zero when it has done its job if there is no inflation in the system).

The monthly equi-dollar distribution amounts should be of sufficient quantity (assuming $1000, that’s $24,000 Federal tax-free per couple, plus whatever wages and other income they bring in) to be considered sufficient replacement for all forms of corporate, farm and personal welfare, including subsidies, welfare, tax incentives, Social Security (to be phased out), Medicare, the Federal Minimum Wage law, and ALL OTHER forms of Federal financial redistribution schemes; there won’t be any need for separate Federal retirement accounts since there won’t be any income or investment taxes.
For those who like their political solutions morally justified, the monthly equi-dollar distribution amounts can be considered “justified compensation” for the denial of free access to all the property that the government has privatized.

With everybody getting the same monthly amount, and everybody paying the same percentage increase of fiat money, there is no redistribution nor inherent injustice in the plan.