when Walker and others talk about reduce liabilities they are not speaking against H.R. 676 or single payer health and so on? In the Friday Night Video segment on I.O.U.S.A. I link up to their Q&A and what they are talking about is overall costs. The Heritage foundation, with their privatization agenda will have you believe that, but that's not what they are advocating as the solution to reduce costs at all.
1. costs for the US are way, way beyond 2x. So you have no idea what those budgets would be if health care was no longer for profit
2. social security needs to be made progressive which will also reduce costs
3. competitiveness. Other nations are more competitive for jobs because they have single payer health care. This is about 20% of operating costs for companies in the US. Get jobs in the US and "Unfunded" is reduced considerably.
4. other costs. Healthy people reduce a lot of other costs from disability insurance to productivity to the need for long term care.
So, one simply doesn't know how "unfunded" they are unless all of these are reformed.
Absolutely not should social safety nets be reduced. Not until they get the corporations, insurance companies and big pharma out of the picture and reduce those costs.
Only then would you know if there was a problem in terms of unfunded liabilities.
The economic plans of both candidates are both corporate generated, so of course it won't work but that's not their intent to work. Neither one would consider true single payer health care or even the Swiss system. But if someone came along and did the right thing, in the national interest, this would be the way to go.
Come on, one can look at EU generally, they are all aging and no where near projected to have such problems nor is anyone claiming one must screw over seniors or deny health care or social benefits and the reason is they control their costs through the system itself.
You cannot tell me if Japan, Canada, England, France and so on can do it somehow the US can't and just has to screw over it's citizens.
That's pure kool-aid and also does not add up by the numbers.
It's also the same line of panic spewed out by various special interests who really, really want to get social security funds into Wall Street where they would make huge profits on privatization and the same with health care.
You can turn on CNBC and any day listen to how stable and profitable some health care sector company is. the "unfunded liabilities" line is sure funding wall street.
any other nation. I've seen the charts and the graphs and read the articles. I know we are getting ripped off. Hopefully Obama will take care of that, BUT that has little to do with the systemic degeneration of our entire
social net system.
The problems we face are large and getting larger, but I have never advocated the privatization of any of our social net systems.
But I do believe that benefits will have to be gradually decreased over the next 20-30 years because of the massive costs for medical care for the 77 million baby boomers that are just now beginning to retire. Under no circumstances can we pay for the future promises we've made to our seniors using the current economic plans of either candidate.
We are the largest debtor nation in the world with an economy that is going further down the tubes with every passing day. We can't sustain enough growth, eliminate enough waste, or increase enough taxes to get us out of the upcoming mess.
The current world financial / banking problems are but a symptom of the much broader financial problem that our nation faces. Foreign countries are beginning to see that our financial house of cards is sitting in a very large pit of quick sand.
As the fed attempts to shore up each card, as it falls, foreign investors are losing faith in the basic structure of our current and future economy.
I heard someone say the other night that the world has, for so long, depended upon the USA's economic engine that they continue to cling to it hoping that it will, once again, save the world, BUT more and more those people are beginning to see that they are actually running as fast as they can into a burning building.
They are therefore beginning to shift those assets away from the USA and into other markets. How long is it going to be before there is a wholesale saleoff of our Treasury Bonds.
Then what the heck are we going to do? That problem can not be solved by any one party or even by both parties, by cutting a few expenditrures here or saving a few bucks there.
I truely believe we have a minimum of a $53 Trillion dollar unfunded debt waiting for us in the near future. This amount is so large that funding SS, Medicare, Medicaid or anything else (in part or whole) is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Please excuse me if I don't care whether Barack or McCain can solve immediate problems with our social net systems, because whatever they do will be overwhelmed by the financial problems we face in the very near future.
Thomas Friedman is a globalist/corporatist/supply sider propagandist plain and simple. He offers up nothing but simplistic answers and ideas to complex issues. It seems his answer to nearly everything is outsourcing as summed up by this classic Tom Tomorrow carton
"If the hand of the Free Market is invisible, how come we can see it?" Tom Tomorrow
This past weekend, I actually managed to get a hold of a copy of the book, though instead of buying it, I read it at the coffee shop Borders has. Didn't finish the book, just read a few chapters while sipping tea (doctor has me off coffee for while), and I see what Mfmd is saying.
See markets are a construct of man, a method of managing resources in social arrangements. Nature is science, science is neither a social construct, it is a force. It is agnostic in regards of preference of economic systems. Nature only deals with actions and reactions, which while Kudlowites may say "see..just like a market", is in reality nothing of the sort. So what we have here is a clash of science and economics. The latter can manipulate the former, but only so far.
Sure, there are market solutions, but this only goes so far as to manipulate human decisions. For example, take the fisheries that once provided an economy for Atlantic Canada. Financial incentives may motivate companies in hiring biologists and what have you to try and repopulate those areas. But external environmental factors may negate any such activities. For all their work to attempt to restock in places like Prince Edward Island, the fish are not repopulating, or at least not coming back to the same degree as they were before.
Global warming is the same. Financial incentives may ultimately motivate folks and nations into alternative energy. Yet deserts will still continue to expand, dead ocean areas will become more commonplace and we still will face a warmer earth. There isn't a stock option in the universe that can convince climate to go the other way.
If it stops listening to corporate propaganda idiots like Thomas Friedman.
Honestly I don't think this guy means well, unless he is simply programmed like a cult by his corporate board and lobbyist friends who funnel that garbage which he turns into books.
Ben Franklin said there were basically 3 ways for a national economy to operate.
Still true.
1. War and Plunder, like the conquests of Rome.
(As US tries to militarily gain control of Mideast Oil)
2. Trade, or mercantilism, which is basically stealing.
US oligarchy of world wide corporations, plunder 3rd world resources for capitalist gains.
3. Agriculture, the only honest and real economic growth.
Corporate agriculture and private ownership of engineered food staples will insure the end of independent agriculture, and destroy the last pillar of honesty in the economy.
Lou Dobbs had Burton, an Obama campaign representative on what he was going to do on the financial crisis and he said nothing!
Dobbs tries desperately to get some specifics and we got jibber jabber. I could not parse out one thing, not even one thing in terms of policy that Obama would do specifically to this current crisis.
I'm not exaggerating and Dobbs even gave him plenty of talk time (which often he doesn't!)
Now onto the McCain campaign representative on Lou Dobbs:
He actually got it, he said default credit swaps are completely unregulated and the losses are hidden from public view.
He rattled off a series of things that need to happen, including denial of CEO compensation when running corporations into the ground.
Wow. The Democrat is the one who is supposed to nail these things, not this time.
Oh yes, Dobbs got in his diggs on McCain's desire to increase offshore outsourcing, bad trade deals and more guest worker Visas per his corporate pals demands.
and the answer is from other nations. Please follow the links in my previous comment. Look at the graph, watch Frontline, dig around in OECD data. It's very clear the US is paying at least 2x as much as any other nation and when you add in the private sector costs, it's Off the charts in comparison.
America is getting ripped off in so many words. Don't let the Milton Friedman create a crisis to privatize much needed social safety nets gain a foot hold.
Check out all of this data and I also wrote some posts on Big pharma too.
gets worse and worse over the next 30-40 years, I believe it will take BOTH a tax raise and benifit reduction to keep the system solvent. I do not believe tax increases, efficiencies, decrease in military spending..ect will be enough.
I, as much as any Dem, want universal health care, but for the life of me can not get the numbers to add up without reducing benefits also.
I'd like to see a surtax charged to everyone who voted in these supply side bozos, to pay the rest of us responsible citizens back for our debt burdens, decreased home, retirement and savings values
Washington Mutual Inc. and private- equity firm TPG Inc. agreed to waive a clause that would have forced the savings and loan to pay TPG for any dilution it suffered from a future capital infusion or buyout
That was an earlier save by TPG which blocked WaMu from bailing out in a fire sale.
I'll bet Chase (J.P. Morgan) takes over WaMu before the week is out. WaMu has some of the biggest exposure to subprime of the major banks.
Benchmark 10-year credit-default swaps on Treasuries increased 4 basis points to 30 today, according to BNP Paribas SA prices. The contracts have risen from below 2 basis points at the start of the credit crisis in July 2007 and are more than double those on government bonds sold by Austria, Finland or Sweden
Proceeds from the sale will immediately be transferred to the Federal Reserve to fund its operations to improve liquidity in money markets. The sale was needed to help the Fed expand its balance sheets, which has been shrinking as it lent out cash to banks and primary dealers to keep the financial system working
In How to prevent the next Wall Street crisis, he clearly puts the blame on Greenspan for this mess, as well as excessive CEO compensation and he literally calls the financial crisis a collapse of a pyramid scheme.
He has 6 points of reform to recommend and one of them is the the immediately maligned commission idea from McCain and a lot from the Democrats too.
This one is particularly dead on, he is just not mincing words (good for him!)
Secondly, we need to create a financial product safety commission, to make sure that products bought and sold by banks, pension funds, etc. are safe for "human consumption." Consenting adults should be given great freedom to do whatever they want, but that does not mean they should gamble with other people's money
Now look at the graph on costs. That's the problem, in addition to incredible inefficiencies. Wall Street loves Medicaid/Medicare and say so because they can make huge profits stiffing the government. The key is to stop these profit predators in our health care system.
It's clear almost every other nation has do just that and they have better health care than the United States.
Just because the facts of American going broke are there does not mean one has to privatize social security or deny people health care.
Corporate welfare denial might be a good place to start to reduce the deficit. How about a $3T Iraq war American cannot afford and we're not even getting any oil out of it.
Also, watch out because those privatization of social security, reduce benefits of social programs have their own agenda. One is wall street, they would make massive profits if part of social security went into Wall Street and also watch out for the private health care industry.
TKH
when Walker and others talk about reduce liabilities they are not speaking against H.R. 676 or single payer health and so on? In the Friday Night Video segment on I.O.U.S.A. I link up to their Q&A and what they are talking about is overall costs. The Heritage foundation, with their privatization agenda will have you believe that, but that's not what they are advocating as the solution to reduce costs at all.
and the reason I disagree is:
1. costs for the US are way, way beyond 2x. So you have no idea what those budgets would be if health care was no longer for profit
2. social security needs to be made progressive which will also reduce costs
3. competitiveness. Other nations are more competitive for jobs because they have single payer health care. This is about 20% of operating costs for companies in the US. Get jobs in the US and "Unfunded" is reduced considerably.
4. other costs. Healthy people reduce a lot of other costs from disability insurance to productivity to the need for long term care.
So, one simply doesn't know how "unfunded" they are unless all of these are reformed.
Absolutely not should social safety nets be reduced. Not until they get the corporations, insurance companies and big pharma out of the picture and reduce those costs.
Only then would you know if there was a problem in terms of unfunded liabilities.
The economic plans of both candidates are both corporate generated, so of course it won't work but that's not their intent to work. Neither one would consider true single payer health care or even the Swiss system. But if someone came along and did the right thing, in the national interest, this would be the way to go.
Come on, one can look at EU generally, they are all aging and no where near projected to have such problems nor is anyone claiming one must screw over seniors or deny health care or social benefits and the reason is they control their costs through the system itself.
You cannot tell me if Japan, Canada, England, France and so on can do it somehow the US can't and just has to screw over it's citizens.
That's pure kool-aid and also does not add up by the numbers.
It's also the same line of panic spewed out by various special interests who really, really want to get social security funds into Wall Street where they would make huge profits on privatization and the same with health care.
You can turn on CNBC and any day listen to how stable and profitable some health care sector company is. the "unfunded liabilities" line is sure funding wall street.
That's an understatement. But it is the Bush administration who also should be fired.
any other nation. I've seen the charts and the graphs and read the articles. I know we are getting ripped off. Hopefully Obama will take care of that, BUT that has little to do with the systemic degeneration of our entire
social net system.
The problems we face are large and getting larger, but I have never advocated the privatization of any of our social net systems.
But I do believe that benefits will have to be gradually decreased over the next 20-30 years because of the massive costs for medical care for the 77 million baby boomers that are just now beginning to retire. Under no circumstances can we pay for the future promises we've made to our seniors using the current economic plans of either candidate.
We are the largest debtor nation in the world with an economy that is going further down the tubes with every passing day. We can't sustain enough growth, eliminate enough waste, or increase enough taxes to get us out of the upcoming mess.
The current world financial / banking problems are but a symptom of the much broader financial problem that our nation faces. Foreign countries are beginning to see that our financial house of cards is sitting in a very large pit of quick sand.
As the fed attempts to shore up each card, as it falls, foreign investors are losing faith in the basic structure of our current and future economy.
I heard someone say the other night that the world has, for so long, depended upon the USA's economic engine that they continue to cling to it hoping that it will, once again, save the world, BUT more and more those people are beginning to see that they are actually running as fast as they can into a burning building.
They are therefore beginning to shift those assets away from the USA and into other markets. How long is it going to be before there is a wholesale saleoff of our Treasury Bonds.
Then what the heck are we going to do? That problem can not be solved by any one party or even by both parties, by cutting a few expenditrures here or saving a few bucks there.
I truely believe we have a minimum of a $53 Trillion dollar unfunded debt waiting for us in the near future. This amount is so large that funding SS, Medicare, Medicaid or anything else (in part or whole) is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Please excuse me if I don't care whether Barack or McCain can solve immediate problems with our social net systems, because whatever they do will be overwhelmed by the financial problems we face in the very near future.
Serious problem for bama, he has terrible surrogates. McCain clearly has the upper hand.
And where is Joe Biden? MIA best I can tell
He was billed as an attack dog, yet we see and hear virtually nothing from him
Has Palin neutered the dog?
I would revise #2 to fit the modern situation
Plunder our domestic resources
I would amend #3 to include domestic mfg as well - the most effective and broadest method of shared wealth generation
Thomas Friedman is a globalist/corporatist/supply sider propagandist plain and simple. He offers up nothing but simplistic answers and ideas to complex issues. It seems his answer to nearly everything is outsourcing as summed up by this classic Tom Tomorrow carton
"If the hand of the Free Market is invisible, how come we can see it?" Tom Tomorrow
This past weekend, I actually managed to get a hold of a copy of the book, though instead of buying it, I read it at the coffee shop Borders has. Didn't finish the book, just read a few chapters while sipping tea (doctor has me off coffee for while), and I see what Mfmd is saying.
See markets are a construct of man, a method of managing resources in social arrangements. Nature is science, science is neither a social construct, it is a force. It is agnostic in regards of preference of economic systems. Nature only deals with actions and reactions, which while Kudlowites may say "see..just like a market", is in reality nothing of the sort. So what we have here is a clash of science and economics. The latter can manipulate the former, but only so far.
Sure, there are market solutions, but this only goes so far as to manipulate human decisions. For example, take the fisheries that once provided an economy for Atlantic Canada. Financial incentives may motivate companies in hiring biologists and what have you to try and repopulate those areas. But external environmental factors may negate any such activities. For all their work to attempt to restock in places like Prince Edward Island, the fish are not repopulating, or at least not coming back to the same degree as they were before.
Global warming is the same. Financial incentives may ultimately motivate folks and nations into alternative energy. Yet deserts will still continue to expand, dead ocean areas will become more commonplace and we still will face a warmer earth. There isn't a stock option in the universe that can convince climate to go the other way.
If it stops listening to corporate propaganda idiots like Thomas Friedman.
Honestly I don't think this guy means well, unless he is simply programmed like a cult by his corporate board and lobbyist friends who funnel that garbage which he turns into books.
Ben Franklin said there were basically 3 ways for a national economy to operate.
Still true.
1. War and Plunder, like the conquests of Rome.
(As US tries to militarily gain control of Mideast Oil)
2. Trade, or mercantilism, which is basically stealing.
US oligarchy of world wide corporations, plunder 3rd world resources for capitalist gains.
3. Agriculture, the only honest and real economic growth.
Corporate agriculture and private ownership of engineered food staples will insure the end of independent agriculture, and destroy the last pillar of honesty in the economy.
Lou Dobbs had Burton, an Obama campaign representative on what he was going to do on the financial crisis and he said nothing!
Dobbs tries desperately to get some specifics and we got jibber jabber. I could not parse out one thing, not even one thing in terms of policy that Obama would do specifically to this current crisis.
I'm not exaggerating and Dobbs even gave him plenty of talk time (which often he doesn't!)
Now onto the McCain campaign representative on Lou Dobbs:
He actually got it, he said default credit swaps are completely unregulated and the losses are hidden from public view.
He rattled off a series of things that need to happen, including denial of CEO compensation when running corporations into the ground.
Wow. The Democrat is the one who is supposed to nail these things, not this time.
Oh yes, Dobbs got in his diggs on McCain's desire to increase offshore outsourcing, bad trade deals and more guest worker Visas per his corporate pals demands.
and the answer is from other nations. Please follow the links in my previous comment. Look at the graph, watch Frontline, dig around in OECD data. It's very clear the US is paying at least 2x as much as any other nation and when you add in the private sector costs, it's Off the charts in comparison.
America is getting ripped off in so many words. Don't let the Milton Friedman create a crisis to privatize much needed social safety nets gain a foot hold.
Check out all of this data and I also wrote some posts on Big pharma too.
gets worse and worse over the next 30-40 years, I believe it will take BOTH a tax raise and benifit reduction to keep the system solvent. I do not believe tax increases, efficiencies, decrease in military spending..ect will be enough.
I, as much as any Dem, want universal health care, but for the life of me can not get the numbers to add up without reducing benefits also.
Hope I'm wrong
TKH
I'd like to see a surtax charged to everyone who voted in these supply side bozos, to pay the rest of us responsible citizens back for our debt burdens, decreased home, retirement and savings values
Private Equity waives dilution clause:
That was an earlier save by TPG which blocked WaMu from bailing out in a fire sale.
I'll bet Chase (J.P. Morgan) takes over WaMu before the week is out. WaMu has some of the biggest exposure to subprime of the major banks.
From Bloomberg
Treasury sells $40 billion in bills for Fed at 0.30% and the article claims this is the first time in history such an action has been taken.
In How to prevent the next Wall Street crisis, he clearly puts the blame on Greenspan for this mess, as well as excessive CEO compensation and he literally calls the financial crisis a collapse of a pyramid scheme.
He has 6 points of reform to recommend and one of them is the the immediately maligned commission idea from McCain and a lot from the Democrats too.
This one is particularly dead on, he is just not mincing words (good for him!)
Secondly, we need to create a financial product safety commission, to make sure that products bought and sold by banks, pension funds, etc. are safe for "human consumption." Consenting adults should be given great freedom to do whatever they want, but that does not mean they should gamble with other people's money
on entitlements while Peterson group I think is showing alarming numbers, I do not think the answer is reduced benefits.
Look at this Instapopulist We don't need no Stinkin' Single Payer Health Care.
Now look at the graph on costs. That's the problem, in addition to incredible inefficiencies. Wall Street loves Medicaid/Medicare and say so because they can make huge profits stiffing the government. The key is to stop these profit predators in our health care system.
It's clear almost every other nation has do just that and they have better health care than the United States.
Just because the facts of American going broke are there does not mean one has to privatize social security or deny people health care.
Corporate welfare denial might be a good place to start to reduce the deficit. How about a $3T Iraq war American cannot afford and we're not even getting any oil out of it.
Also, watch out because those privatization of social security, reduce benefits of social programs have their own agenda. One is wall street, they would make massive profits if part of social security went into Wall Street and also watch out for the private health care industry.
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