patrick.net

ja says

During the last 10 years, medical costs increased as crazy. It looks they are getting stable now.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DHLCRC1A027NBEA

ja says

So I'm sceptically about this view.

The baby boom has yet to turn 70. Median boomer was born in 1955 so in 2020 the pig will be halfway through the snake as far as Medicare enrollment goes.

Medicare beneficiaries get more expensive each year they age of course (age 75+ are 40% of the beneficiaries but 50% of the expenses)

http://www.medpac.gov/documents/Jun12DataBookEntireReport.pdf

The baby boom was made to pay 2.9% in Medicare insurance premiums from 1984 on and are only now are beginning to draw down on this (notional) savings.

Here's the population of age 55+:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mC0

looks like just what it is -- a tsunami of old people coming our way . . .

and what's odd is that Japan *doesn't* have this tsunami coming -- their baby boom was just 1947-49, then in the 1950s their live births fell to below prewar levels even.

This means they're about 80% into their induction of old people.

We're just getting started, about 1/3 in now:

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/chart-graph/projected-number-medicare-beneficiaries-2001-2030

The only difference between sub-Sahara Africa and America today is our top 1% income producers. Unfortunately, those top 1% producers are also leaving America today in droves. When they are all gone, reality will be upon all of us.

carrieon says

The only difference between sub-Sahara Africa and America today is our top 1% income producers. Unfortunately, those top 1% producers are also leaving America today in droves. When they are all gone, reality will be upon all of us.

Droves? Name 5.

Good job on slamming the door shut on one of the only appealing and correct tennents of your ideology!

This "debt ceiling" bullshit is not an area that I have managed to pay any attention to.
Could someone explain to me what the point of a debt ceiling is if not to LIMIT DEFICIT SPENDING.
Let's just do away with the fucking thing so that we can get busy spending all the fucking money that we can conjure up.

If Obama was smart, he'd let them shut down the government, but make sure they own everything that happens as a result.

Iwag says

SubOink says

LOL. Did I strike a nerve there?

no, besides being an annoying dull asshole, youre a good guy

ok, angry bird

egads101 says

In your prior post, the tenants paying rent are giving a gift...

one post later, it is Q.E. and bailouts that are my gifts...

Bob, it's a gift, you got a gift, enjoy it.

Dead thread.

1% income threshold was $1.5M/yr in 2010.

Don't let the door . . .

thunderlips11 says

but make sure they own everything that happens as a result.

hard to do when the right owns 80%+ of the media.

Don't believe me, listen to KGO sometime. The token lefty is on after midnight, LOL.

Robert Sproul says

is it not more accurate to say that it is EXACTLY like hitting your credit card limit and then asking for more credit to be extended, not coincidentally enabling your spree to continue?

Yes, if your name is American Express or Discover.

Robert Sproul says

Let's just do away with the fucking thing so that we can get busy spending all the fucking money that we can conjure up.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Without all the bullshit since 2008, we'd be in 1933 conditions.

Cut taxes a lot, then launch two expensive wars ($1.5T and counting), of course the nation's finances are going to be fucked ten years on.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mCE

is real per-capita total government spending.

Reagan takes it from $9000 to $12,000 and then W takes it from $13,000 to $16,000 and they're conservatives in error. Obama takes it from $16,000 to $17,000 and he's the next Karl Marx.

Whatevs.

The real lesson of 1994-96 was never raise taxes on the middle class.

They don't like that.

hmm, $1T / 313M is . . . $3200.

Yup, I'd buy an iPhone 5S, iPad Mini, and Macbook Pro . . .

I'm afraid that if they can't kill Obamacare then the US might one day lose its enviable position as the the envy of the world when it comes to high end medical care.

I was hoping that one day the super rich could buy life extending procedures that regular people can't afford, and that these wonderful miracles of modern medicine would only be available in America.

A billionaire can dream right ?

To any billionaire worth his salt, the idea that regular people and rich people should receive essentially the same quality of medical care is repugnant. Because obviously that might mean a lower quality of care for the rich than what they can conveniently get now.

Or the money would end up in China.

Oracle are u Roberto ?

cloud15 says

Oracle are u Roberto ?

Yeah he is and for a while he was pretty mellow. It was like Bobby had finally discovered peyote out in the desert where he lives and thought he could communicate with the real estate gods through patnet. Unfortunately, this persona is gone and he is back to his normal doache level.

egads101 says

an article about dipshits like you, that waste everyone's time giving crap advice:

Roberto, you're so dumb that you don't even read your own articles which you post. This article clearly explains the difference between crap advice and bad advice. So, by the definition presented in the article, David wasn't even giving any advice, but, by no means crap advice. If David had said: blah, blah, blah, and BTW, did you know that you can write off all gifts as a tax deduction; that would have been crap advice. Roberto, the fact that a thinker and an analyst of your caliber can actually be a professor at an institution of higher learning, is a perfect epitome of the sorry state our university system is, today.

sbh says

I want them by this time next year to make this batch of idiots look like limp
wristed pussies. It's the best way to purge them from government. People keep
re-electing them, so only if it backfires on the electorate will it finally go
away.

LOL. more-crazy won't work any better than their early stages of dumbass/crazy.

It's way overdue for them to be flushed out of office, and the insane morons that vote for them time and again, to retake their status of irrelevant kooks that nobody ever took serious.

Tim Aurora says

I think you just redefined business

You don't see the problem?

Great, why would I care.

The doubling of the price of housing is just another thing that the consumer has to contend with.

The consumer has a budget that will need to be met.

If you can't see that housing is a very simple thing for everyone to promote as a way to economic stability then you aren't paying attention.

The Fed is attempting to create inflation without job creation. The idea under Bush was that construction provided good paying jobs. This time around the workers are taking what they can get, and there are wage increases begrudgingly.

So what do you think will give first? Do you see hyper inflation, because I don't, do you see job creation? What is it that will support the price of housing?

$1000 a month is a big portion of the consumer budget no matter what. How about $1200, or $2000?

I own property, and want to sell now, rather than wait. Will I buy more? Maybe, but my focus will be on commercial rather than residential.

If you want to discuss the benefits, and draw backs of Real Estate, fine, but you are like Bob here in this thread without a point.

Tim Aurora says

Every transaction in this world is somebody selling and somebody buying

and that is always true about Real Estate, there is a deal every day, you just have to find it.

Anyone up for an "ignore this thread" option on PatNet?

egads101 says

Obama walked in as we lost 700,000 jobs a month into the great recession

yup:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mE9

finehoe says

The new CBO long-term budget projections are out, and while they’re not good, they don’t show crisis levels of debt even looking out a quarter-century.

btw, those CBO projections are UTTER CRAP.

If you dig behind the numbers, you'll see they are predicting 5.4% wage growth next year, and 5.8% growth the following two years.

When you juice the denominator like that the deb-to-GDP ratio looks a lot better than it will actually be.

Plus there's another $4.8T of intragovermental debt they're not counting, but is going to be needing to be liquidated over the next 30-years (these are trust accounts to pay off the various boomer retirement funds).

Good point. But those little "unread comment" icons suck me in.

I'm afflicted by SIWOTI syndrome.

mell says

It's just hard for me to believe somebody promising to half the deficit (if I recall correctly)

"Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office"

Debt to the Penny:

09/19/2013 11,961,016,186,546.38
09/19/2012 11,253,971,990,768.93

FY13 deficit: 707,044,195,777.40

09/18/2009 7,504,720,341,482.68
09/19/2008 5,552,620,101,517.17

FY09 deficit: 1,952,100,239,965.51

hey, whaddya know, thanks to the sequester, Obama's more than beat his 2009 promise to cut the deficit in half. . .

The deal with the deficit and sequester is that back in 2009, Obama idiotically thought he could pull another Clinton, preside over a bouncing back economy and be all fiscally tight like Clinton's first term was.

AFAICT he was getting horrible advice from the center-right brain trust around him, nobody understands even now how the $6T consumer credit bubble floated all boats 2002-2007, so of course nobody back then did either.

The sequester is "a golly-gee isn't it so bad we've been forced to do that" artifice when the truth is the Feds are spending a helluva lot of money now and nobody wants to be removed from the trough.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mEK

real (2009 dollars) per-capita (age 16+) federal spending.

throwing in state & local:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mEL

we get $36,000 per capita gov't spending now. Yes it's been flat since we've had divided gov't. But it's still a helluva lot of money and I don't actually understand how it's even possible, really.

Bellingham Bill says

"Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office"

http://i/new-jersey/statements/2012/oct/21/leonard-lance/barack-obama-broke-promise-cut-annual-deficit-half/

He's late, but better late than never. Of course this doesn't help much the problem of total debt and the debt to GDP which will stay stubbornly high, just one crisis/recession away from blowing it out again. Btw. I am in favor of the sequester, regardless of whose idea it was ;)

mell says

Of course this doesn't help much the problem of total debt and the debt to GDP which will stay stubbornly high, just one crisis/recession away from blowing it out again

The debt is literally just numbers on the screen. Actual interest costs now are 40% lower than the 1990s:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=mEN

Yes, this is the Japan trap. No, there is no getting out of it.

Tim Aurora says

So now we are jumping to an argument where we are not supposed to make profits as it is bad for consumer. I think you just redefined business , another coming of communism, except that it is just a rant

I would respond with: profiting from a good or service you have not created is not capitalism per se.

People profiting from rental properties is not very far from the extortions of the protection racket. The cancer of any economy, capitalist or command, is rent-seeking.

There's damn little wealth creation going on here. Yes you rehab the houses, but your profits have very little basis in this cosmetic crap, and these efforts are not unreproducible works of art that others would find difficulty in doing for themselves.

The main profits derives from the naked site value, what the community offers in terms of employment and amenities. Landlords reap where they have not sown.

To object to all of this is not "communism".

"[Henry George] built up the most complete and most impregnable defense of the rights of capital that was ever constructed, and if the capitalists of his day had had sense enough to dig in behind it, their successors would not now be squirming under the merciless exactions which collectivism is laying on them, and which George would have no scruples whatever about describing as sheer highwaymanry." -- Alfred Nock, "Thoughts on Utopia"

Bellingham Bill says

What do I care about making the world a better / less shitty place.

Why? Jesus is coming back soon.*

*a significant part of the voting public actually has that attitude.

anyone who bought homes after 1997 is getting so fucked

The solution is simple: put a new federal property tax in place on 2nd to 3002nd homes, say set at 2x mil rate. This will make rent seeking unprofitable, causing rent seekers to sell, the market to even out somewhere reasonable, giving everyone more money to spend (not on housing) but on growing the economy by purchases of goods and services.
Rent seekers would be free to put their money up for rent in mutual funds or use it to start businesses that contribute to employment.
Incompetent rent seekers would soon become renters.
Bliss!

Um, lots of people living in California and thus lots of competition for the "best" houses, which look like crap elsewhere in the country but have 90%+ of their value tied up in the land.

Housing is affordable to those living in those houses because they're the one with the incomes that are supporting those houses. If someone is unwilling to pay the huge prices, then move further away and spend that time commuting. It might take you 2+ hours a day extra to get what some would say is affordable housing.

Land is a huge premium in california, and people are always complaining they can't get 2+ acres in downtown LA for what they could get a ranch for in Texas. It's a massive, sprawling city where land values are high for hundreds of square miles due to population density.

And in other news, the earth is now believed to be approximately round.

Call it Crazy says

In the meantime, California officials have become too lax in figuring out how they can solve home affordability and work-access issues.

I thought that the way they were fixing the long commute for "affordable" housing in CA was to get as many people as possible on welfare and Social Security "disability".

A combination of a shit-load of money and low-standards means this isn't your father's California.

You could throw your empty TV box on a plot of land and it would sell for $200K minimum.