patrick.net

thunderlips11 says

not more Public-Private Cooperation Taxpayer Funded Bullshit that fixes nothing except bonuses for Insurance Company Executives.

We needed dramatic reform of a broken system.
We got Obama care.
By some estimates, at least a third — and perhaps as much as half — of all the money spent on health care in the United States is wasted, and all we are doing is arguing about who should pay for this waste.
And fund the average CEO salary of 11 million bucks.

Taxes are due on April 15 every year. If only 1% of people who owe, have paid their taxes by Feb. 2, does that mean that the IRS is a failure and that taxes will never be paid?

smaulgld says

That is not true- the site just doesn't work. and they paid $650 million for it.

Whether you like Obama care or not this type of "glitch" is not acceptable.

A story was on the morning news today about how that in the case of Massachusetts's own healthcare plan, which Obamacare was heavily modeled after, it too had a lot of technical glitches when it started. Besides- that has nothing to do with trust and people's hesitancy to sign up.

Hard to lose faith in something that I never did have faith in. In many ways it's even a bigger disaster than expected and anticipated. A bad program shoved down our throats by an idiot president.

"...not in actuality vote for anything that would legalize human slavery."

I can't believe he would insult The Confederate States of America.

Why do we need to repeal the 13th and 14th amendment when we have mortgages? After all Debt is Slavery!

And graduate school. Postdocs too.

Just more liberal hogwash, taking things out of context...

Jim Wheeler, a Republican from Gardnerville, was talking to a crowd of Storey County Republicans in August he when said “yeah I would” vote for white slavery if that’s what his black constituents wanted.

what goes around comes around...

APOCALYPSEFUCK is Comptroller says

Here's a case of Conservative who had it right, a Nevada assemblyman righteously committing himself to the restoration of the great American institution of slavery.

Debt is the "New Slavery" whereby the production of the slave may be siphoned off by "collections" and "fees" and actually increases over time! It's wonderful because 1) your slaves work harder than ever to try to afford their payments and also provide for their own basic needs.
2)they hardly ever run away
3)rather than trying to abolish this practice, new englanders are actually passing laws to make this new slavery even harder to escape!
4)if the slaves complain, you can always tell them that "it's their own fault" and feel totally righteous!

Quigley says

they hardly ever run away

Two words - Strategic Default!

Benghazicare is like slavery. Everyone in the Old Confederacy of Dixie Robert E. Lee Antebellum Noble Cause should have the right to inflict Benghazicare on all blacks they own.

APOCALYPSEFUCK is Comptroller says

The Constitution guarantees us all the Freedom to enslave. Without that, Freedom would have no meaning!

Essentially, this is what Right to Work legislation is all about: weakening labor's bargaining position by making cooperation among laborers impossible and thereby lowering labor's wages to below living wages.

The politicians who propose "Right to Work" do so, not because they care about the worker, but because they want to screw over the worker.

zzyzzx says

Clinton seems to be the worst offender here

Clinton only signed NAFTA. Most of the other Free Trade Agreements were enacted under Bush II and Obama:

The United States-Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) entered into force on January 1, 2005.
The United States-Bahrain FTA, which entered into force on January 11, 2006.
On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico (NAFTA) entered into force.
The United States-Chile Free Trade Agreement (FTA) entered into force on January 1, 2004.
On August 5, 2004, the United States signed the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with five Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) and the Dominican Republic.
United States-Israel Free Trade Agreement, which was the first FTA entered into by the United States, in 1985
United States-Jordan Free Trade Agreement, which was fully implemented on January 1, 2010.
U.S.-Korea trade agreement on March 15, 2012
The United States and Morocco signed an FTA on June 15, 2004. The Agreement entered into force on January 1, 2006.
The United States-Oman FTA, which entered into force on January 1, 2009.
On December 14, 2007, the United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement Implementation Act became law, and the PTPA entered into force on February 1, 2009.
The United States-Singapore Free Trade Agreement has been in force since January 1, 2004.

"Obamacare, should be called Terriblecare. "

"I mean who creates such a fucked up healthcare system and then names it after them self?"

"Wasn't healthcare supposed to be affordable? I mean this is terrible, it should be called Terriblecare..."

This was what former Obama Okeydoke, (who voted for the lying bastard twice, because the news told him that Romney was going to destroy the jobs) told me last night. .

I then asked him, "you mean worse than how it is now?"

But Terriblecare, I liked it, I hope it sticks.

DIE!

"These plans should be called the “ Bankruptcy Plans”, since you risk bankruptcy due to the high level of co-insurance."
Now I've got to find how many have bankrupt on free market healthcare & insurance.

Benghazicare is such a vicious, Satanic, Hitlerian, Stalinist, Maoist, Kafkaesque nightmare of fear and loathing, that private alternatives will have no problem competing with it and offering cheaper plans.

DEATH PANELS!!!!!!!!!!!1111

egads101 says

clinton signed NAFTA, and we went on to suffer through multiple years of near full employment, exceptional growth and a balanced budget....

Because of a y2K scare and housing bubble.

finehoe says

Clinton only signed NAFTA. Most of the other Free Trade Agreements were enacted under Bush II and Obama:

And I was blaming all 3. But the original NAFTA one probably had a bigger impact. Only the one with Korea has the potential to come close.

Vicente says

who cares?

The only real relevancy today is to understand that the narrative provided to you by govt and media in this case is utter bullshit. You don't have to solve the half century old mystery.
Once you understand that they are always covering up something, if not always nefarious, spooky, conspiracy (Kennedys, MLK, Hastings) maybe just prior institutional knowledge (OK City, Boston) or ineptitude (Bengazi), you can at least not be a deluded partisan puppet like thomaswrong.
That is my goal anyway, to remind myself to be eternally and universally incredulous.

White people need to be slaves for the next 3000 years at least, as reparations to the whatever races they have enslaved in the past!

Since everything is white people's fault, it is the least they can do for the principles of justice.

If it weren't for slaves, our founding fathers could never have gotten boners in old age.

debyne says

You have no idea what you're talking about. Having the gov't pay for our care vs the private sector has nothing to do with fee for service. The private sector is already starting to make strides away from fee for service, so your argument makes no sense. The private sector will always ultimately find better, faster, cheaper solutions than the gov't will ever dream of doing.

Yes like our better, faster, cheaper health care? BTW Medicare is one of the primary sources of the push away from fee for service. Get your story straight.

Fee for service is THE problem no matter who pays for it. The whole point of single payer is to get rid of the huge cost of fee for service and the associated billing (not to mention all the costs of running insurance companies, collections, marketing, profits, executive salaries, lobbying, etc., etc.). That's how everyone else in the world manages much cheaper health care.

bob2356 says

Fee for service is THE problem no matter who pays for it. The whole point of single payer is to get rid of the huge cost of fee for service and the associated billing (not to mention all the costs of running insurance companies, collections, marketing, profits, executive salaries, lobbying, etc., etc.). That's how everyone else in the world manages much cheaper health care.

I agree that fee for service is a huge problem, but I don't agree in letting the government become the payer because of all the cost and inefficiencies associated with gov't and monopolies; medicare is a classic example of that. Now that Obamacare is creating a bigger marketplace for insurance companies to compete, you're going to see more and more innovative healthcare payer models that will drive costs down; it was lack of competition that stifled the creativity of the free market to solve it. I forget the name of the company, but they're in Seattle and they already have a model where you pay a monthly fee and get the care you need when needed with a focus on outcomes because the business model is motivated to get you better as efficiently and effectively as they can. We just haven't had a chance for it to take root, and I'm hoping Obamacare will foster that.

How did a Panamanian get to run for President?

HEY YOU says

How did a Panamanian get to run for President?

1000 times this!

I hate foreigners more than life itself.

The NSA will send him a flash drive full of his whiny, sweaty, pleading phone calls to the midget tranny dominatrix hot line, and he will sew his hole shut on this TSA matter.

bgamall4 says

There were plenty of verticl lines, multiple storeys of squibs shooting out of the buildings. BTW, the so called fire demolition in the building in the Netherlands actually proves WTC7 conspiracy because no fire brings a building down symmetrically:

Post up the time on the video of one demolition where just a single line of vertical squibs goes off half way up one side of the building. That is what you are claiming brought down WTC7 silently. A single line of unheard vertical squibs off set half way up the building. And you are claiming that that managed to bring the building down symmetrically. That is what you are claiming, isn't it? And perhaps you can tell me why the first clearly visible sign of collapse was on the other end of the building where the penthouse was.

Try this video. It is quite a bit clearer than yours:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/OUkvnfV606w

Are you still seriously going to tell me that you think those are squibs and that they brought down the building? Ha, ha, ha.

This is damning evidence.

debyne says

Now that Obamacare is creating a bigger marketplace for insurance companies to compete, you're going to see more and more innovative healthcare payer models that will drive costs down; it was lack of competition that stifled the creativity of the free market to solve it.

For the last 75 years there have been 100's of health insurance companies that have been writing polices. What lack of competition was that?

Call it Crazy says

So, Do You REALLY Think We Are At The Bottom???

Only fools think that the bottom has even been come close. Unfortunately, every newspaper and every "economic expert" is actively trying to convince people to become fools. You can tell by the way the Case-Shiller Index is presented.

The Case-Shiller Index is the gold standard for evaluating how much the real estate market is overpriced or underprice. Bankers, realtors, and other scammers despise the existence of the Case-Shiller Index because it is objective, clear, accurate, and indisputable. So the strategy these scammers try is to distort the Case-Shiller Index literally and physically by zooming in on the bubble and stretching the graph so that it seems like bubble prices are normal prices. This is done with the obvious intent to mislead the buyer.

Remember the graph that started it all? This sacred graph showed us the truth.

Notice that the sacred graph starts at 1890. It shows the entire historical perspective, not some arbitrary and misleading period. If you go to see an updated graph at any financial website, you'll most likely see a graph based only on the past 10 years, the very abnormal time of the bubble. If you really lucky, you might see a graph with data going back to 1987, but that's hardly the entire picture.

Here's the 20 city composite graph from SP Indices. I've replace their incorrect y-axis labels with the correct Case-Shiller Index values.

There are three things you should notice. First, the data range is just from 2001 to 2013. You can't select a larger range. This data range choice shows you only bubble prices, not normal prices.

Second, the horizontal dimension in graph 2 is much larger than in graph 1. Third, the vertical dimension in graph 2 is much smaller than in graph 2. Each of these changes greatly diminishes the magnitude of the bubble. It's like taking this picture...

and distorting the aspect ratio to produce this picture...

The woman may not be pretty, but she doesn't look nearly as fat. Well, the distortion of the aspect ratio of graph 2 is far, far greater than what I did to the above picture. So let's take a look at what graph 2 really looks like when restored to the same dimensions as the sacred graph.

Holy shit those are steep changes!

But that's still not the whole picture. To see the truth, we now have to transpose that new data onto the sacred graph to see what an updated graph of the Case-Shiller Index looks like.

I've also copied the index to the new right-most side for clarity, and I've marked off how far back prices have reset. Notice that today's prices are the same as in 2004, when 63% of the overpricing of real estate had already occurred.

Here are the facts.

1. The normal, fair market prices for real estate in modern times is 110 on the Case-Shiller Index. These are "real", not "nominal" prices.

2. During the bubble, prices escalated to 205 on the CSI. That's nearly a doubling of the real cost of a house.

3. Since the bubble burst, prices only declined to being only 35% too high. That's hardly a complete correction. A complete correction, without any overcompensation, would be prices 0% higher than 110 on the CSI.

4. Over the past year, prices have reinflated from 148 CSI to 172 CSI. This is a classic bull trap. Whenever a bubble is corrected, some time during the correction speculators will gamble that the correction is done before it actually is. This causes a momentary spike in prices which then continue their crumbling.

To illustrate the bull trap, recall this holy chart.

Notice it looks a lot like what we're seeing in the updated CSI chart.

5. For prices to simply return to normal, they must decline by 36% from their current levels. That's right. Houses must lose one third of their imaginary equity just to return to the normal, fair market prices during economically prosperous times. And that's just for the country as a whole. Specific bubble markets like south Florida have way more to fall while non-bubble areas have way less.

Image how much they would have to fall if we were to even consider the mass unemployment, declining wages, and financial uncertainty of the past 10 years.

These facts are indisputable. When presented clearly, these facts show beyond any reasonable doubt that the majority of the bubble's deflation has yet to come. We do not even need to consider that the bull trap is caused by foreign speculators to know these things. The Case-Shiller Index, when viewed in its entirety, clearly shows that the bubble is still correcting and it will show us when the bubble has fully corrected. You just have to put the truth before what you desire the truth to be.

you want things turn to shit, put a black person in charge.

bgamall4 says

I am not saying that those squibs and the explosions causing them brought all the building down. I am just saying they are evidence of explosions and demolition.

No, they aren't. The shattering of glass and expulsion of air and debris are clearly as a consequence of the collapse NOT the cause.

bgamall4 says

Truth is, all the supports of the building were disabled at the same time, since the building was in free fall.

Oh, that must be why the video I posted up clearly shows that NOT to be the case.

Call it Crazy says

Until the Department of Health fixed the security hole last week, anyone could easily reset your Healthcare.gov password without your knowledge and potentially hijack your account.

Doesn't matter. The NSA has full access to all your health information as well. The security hole is built right into the infrastructure of the Internet by design.

APOCALYPSEFUCK is Comptroller says

Obama should fist himself on TV and demand that he be indicted for refusing to surrender to Romney.

Shouldn't the people be given the right to fist Obama themselves? You're letting him off easy.

"Though the stream of information generated by the Snowden leaks seems endless,"
.
.
At this point it might as well be written by the KGB, since all the leaks are coming from within Russia of all places. And the naive US press is drinking it all up...

Dont worry once you log in and enter your information, you can keep it! Along with every other hacker.

This and spygate has the potential to ruin this presidency. You can dismiss bengazi and blame bush for the economy, but obamacare is his signature legislation. The administration owns spygate too. There is no one to blame on this. As an executive he should be shaking things up, Sibellius should be gone.
The perception of incompetence can creep in and impact the mindset of how all the other complaints about the administration and the "phony" scandals are viewed.

Many voters picked the president for healthcare reform and to protect civil rights
The grades on these objectively is an F

The only thing keeping the die hards supporting is a lack of an alternative.
Nixon went through this and finally the republicans could defend him no more and dropped him
If Ocare doesnt roll out properly soon and there is another budget debacle soon support for the president and congress will be gone
The question is who will fill the void? Biden? Clinton? Harry Reid? Pelosi? Bonhner? McConnell? With the exception of Clinton virtually noone is fond of any of them
Maybe 2014 will see a new round of dem and rep and perhaps independent (doubtful) faces in congress

The small landlord has an advantage over the new american homes 4 rent wall street type landlord as they will have higher vacancy rates, ability to make cheaper repairs
Will be interested to see number of vacancies that american homes for rent has as of sept 30
As of june 30 it was almost half

Easy money/leverage, that is what made the bubble possible. Add to that irresponsible investors/consumers/speculators and irresponsible lenders/speculators and declining interest rates so that savings accounts can no longer deliver a real return on investment and that is plenty of fuel for inflating the bubble.

Is that as far back as the data goes? Looks interesting but a longer duration to establish the "normal" trend would be nice. As it is now (and we all know that the bubble and crash was an anomalous period) half the graph shows a pretty stable direct relationship between the two, but the other half make them look pretty well decoupled..

Ignoring the bubble-crash for the moment, the question for me is what happens next..the blue appears to be increasing more rapidly than the red in the recent few years, but will it rejoin it or establish some "new normal"?

If blue catches back up with red, and Denver follows the national trend, I'm going to do pretty well on my purchase...and only wish I had "stretched" more.

Unless the money created by the fed trickles down to consumers (not likely as outsourcing/automation/increasing rate of retiring workers is the future of american labor) or the wealthy continue to buy up all the real estate (more likely scenario), how can prices continue to rise?

Vaticanus says

Easy money/leverage, that is what made the bubble possible. Add to that irresponsible investors/consumers/speculators and irresponsible lenders/speculators and declining interest rates so that savings accounts can no longer deliver a real return on investment and that is plenty of fuel for inflating the bubble.

we started the bubble before Easy Money or Lower Interest Rates.. if you look back in 1998, we were already well beyond past highs on CS index... and should have corrected downwards. And frankly we didnt have either. Back in late 80s/early 90s as we saw price peak and fall along with interest rates, there isnt a link between the two in a historical context.

fact is.. ALOT of this Bubble was Consumer driven without any regards to rational thinking....

I agree Thomas but even before the days of "easy money" by your own estimation consumers exhibited irrational exuberance and since very few houses are purchased outright, leverage is what enabled this irrational exuberance.