“Don’t give in to fear,’’ Obama said yesterday, urging voters to turn back GOP efforts to gain control of the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections. “Let’s reach for hope.’’
Elect me, and I will bring Hope and Change. 18 months later, Reach for that same hope.
Do you suspect that the reach will be like Sisyphus and the rolling the boulder up hill. For his assignment was to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill. Only every time Sisyphus, by the greatest of exertion and toil, attained the summit, the darn thing rolled back down again.
Obama and the Democrats thrive on stress, fear, anxiety and lack of hope. So just in them and all will be wonderful…someday….maybe…but if it’s not it’s Bush’s Fault and you just have to re-double your faith in “hope”.
They don’t want to actually thrive because you won’t want them to run your life for you then. So it’s better to just “hope”.
WASHINGTON — Nearly half of the homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.
A new report issued today by the Treasury Department said that approximately 630,000 people who had tried to get their monthly mortgage payments lowered through the effort have been cut loose through July. That’s about 48 percent of the 1.3 million homeowners who had enrolled since March 2009. That is up from more than 40 percent through June.
The report suggests foreclosures could rise in the second half of the year and weaken the ailing housing market, analysts say.
Another 421,804, or 32.3 percent of those who started the program, have received permanent loan modifications and are making their payments on time.
Many borrowers have complained that program is a bureaucratic nightmare. They say banks often lose their documents and then claim borrowers did not send back the necessary paperwork.
The banking industry said borrowers weren’t sending back their paperwork. They also have accused the Obama administration of initially pressuring them to sign up borrowers without insisting first on proof of their income. When banks later moved to collect the information, many troubled homeowners were disqualified or dropped out.
(Should sound familiar–Community Reinvestment Act anyone?)
Obama officials dispute that they pressured banks. They have defended the program, saying lenders are making more significant cuts to borrowers’ monthly payments than before the program was launched. And some of the largest mortgage companies in the program have offered alternative programs to those who fell out.
The Obama plan was designed to help people in financial trouble by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Homeowners who qualify can receive an interest rate as low as 2 percent for five years and a longer repayment period.
And These are the bureaucrats who are going to save you on Health Care?
Well, at least that’s what they said during the 15 month fight. As was pointed out yesterday, it’s not what they want to tell you now.
And that Mandate that wasn’t a Tax, is a Tax. They admit it now.
But you’re going to love having government bureaucrats decide how you live and when you die.
Reach for Hope!
Essentially, we’ve now transitioned from the aforementioned terminology (Saved or created jobs)
, on to ‘jobs funded’, and eventually landed on something reminiscent of an after school special, ‘lives touched’.
So what exactly defines a touched life?
A spokesperson from the CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company explains:
“Lives Touched” is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds. This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.
In other words, the administration has stumbled upon another way to inflate their job numbers. They were already reporting on those saved or created, but will now include ‘people who at some point have supported a project.’
Lies, Damned Lies, and Stimulus Statistics!
NEW YORK: In signs of persisting financial woes in the US, the count of bankruptcy filings jumped as much as 20 per cent to 1.57 million in the year ended June 2010, the highest in four years.
The number of businesses going bankrupt climbed eight per cent to 59,608 during the same period, despite signs of economic recovery.
“A total of 1,572,597 bankruptcy cases were filed in federal courts in that period (year ended June 30, 2010), compared to 1,306,315 bankruptcy cases filed in the 12-month period ending June 30, 2009,” according to the latest data available with the Administrative Office of the US Courts.
Moreover, the bankruptcy filings are the highest since 2006 when the number stood at 1.48 million. (Economic Times)
“The President has shown he is willing to work with anyone who will join us to figure out new ways to create more jobs. The Vice-President spends each week making sure we’re squeezing job out of every Recovery Act dollar,”-White House Spokesman on The Summertime Blues list of 100 stimulus ‘projects’ that don’t create anything but debt.
The biggest circumvention of “we the people” was of course the so-called “health care reform” bill. This bill was passed with the proviso that it would not really take effect until after the 2012 presidential elections. Between now and then, the Obama administration can tell us in glowing words how wonderful this bill is, what good things it will do for us, and how it has rescued us from the evil insurance companies, among its many other glories.
But we won’t really know what the actual effects of this bill are until after the next presidential elections– which is to say, after it is too late. Quite simply, we are being played for fools.
Much has been made of the fact that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see their taxes raised. Of course they won’t see it, because what they see could affect how they vote.
But when huge tax increases are put on electric utility companies, the public will see their electricity bills go up. When huge taxes are put on other businesses as well, they will see the prices of the things those businesses sell go up.
If you are not in that “rich” category, you will not see your own taxes go up. But you will be paying someone else’s higher taxes, unless of course you can do without electricity and other products of heavily taxed businesses. If you don’t see this, so much the better for the Obama administration politically.
This country has been changed in a more profound way by corrupting its fundamental values. The Obama administration has begun bribing people with the promise of getting their medical care and other benefits paid for by other people, so long as those other people can be called “the rich.” Incidentally, most of those who are called “the rich” are nowhere close to being rich.
A couple making $125,000 a year each are not rich, even though together they reach that magic $250,000 income level. In most cases, they haven’t been making $125,000 a year all their working lives. Far more often, they have reached this level after decades of working their way up from lower incomes– and now the government steps in to grab the reward they have earned over the years.
There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a “fair share” of what others have produced.
The most dangerous corruption is a corruption of a nation’s soul. That is what this administration is doing. (Thomas Sowell)
Hope and Change!
Reach for the Hope!
IBD:
The consequences of government involvement in health care have become more and more apparent as people have become informed about what the health overhaul law would do. No longer does the government seem to be a fairy godmother but rather a tough enforcer of an avalanche of new mandates, taxes and regulatory requirements.
The assurance that government would make sure all Americans have health care coverage has turned into a mandate that we all must have insurance defined by the government and with the government determining what our “choice” of health policies will be.
The latest example of our loss of individual control over health care decisions is playing out deep in the weeds of definitions over what must be counted as medical care and what counts as administrative expense in health insurance — the so-called “medical loss ratio,” or MLR. According to the new law, at least 85% of premium dollars must be spent on medical care for large firms and 80% for smaller ones.
Or put it this way. You spend 75% of your premiums collected on claims. But now the government mandates 85% because that’s “fair”. So where do you get the extra 10%??
Since you aren’t the government and just raise taxes or print more money you have to either cut services or other expenses, or increase the premiums.
And if you increase the premiums the government and the liberals will scream that you’re ‘raping’ the people with greedy capitalism.
Sucks to be you.
It sounds like a simple and straightforward issue, but a world of challenges and complexity lies beneath the surface. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has been charged with making recommendations to the federal government about what should and should not be counted in the equation.
To show how consequential the decision is, President Obama briefly scheduled, then canceled, a trip to speak to the NAIC meeting in Seattle in mid-August where the MLR issue was being debated.
Many of the decisions being made by regulators could make it almost impossible for private insurance companies to comply, leading inevitably to a government-run health system.
Connecticut state insurance commissioner Thomas Sullivan warned, “What we’ve learned since March, is that if you like your health insurance you may not be able to keep it,” he told the Seattle meeting, “and state regulators will have a role in implementing health care as long as that role supports the goals of HHS (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), which may not necessarily be what’s in the best interest of consumers.”
He later told reporters: “I’m concerned there’s still a lot left to be done in interpretation … I fear that some have an agenda to interpret … with the express purpose of getting to a single-payer option.”
Many other health actuaries and experts at the Seattle meeting said they believed the MLR was meant to be so disruptive to private insurance that it would eventually push us into a single-payer system.
HHS is not obligated to take the recommendations of the NAIC. Ultimately, the bureaucracy will decide. And their decision will be hugely consequential.
Let the minutiae wrangling begin! And heaven help you if you’re on the wrong side of a bureaucrat!
An issue that is being most hotly debated right now is whether the federal, state and payroll taxes that insurance companies are required to pay must be counted today as administrative expenses or whether they can be subtracted from premium collections before the calculations are made.
Health insurers say the decision could determine whether they have the money to invest in fighting fraud, setting up networks of qualified physicians and updating information technologies. For other companies, the decision very well could determine whether they survive.
Six senior members of Congress also weighed in on the issue with a letter to the president of the NAIC, saying they meant for taxes to be counted as an administrative expense.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents insurance companies, countered that the legislation specifically says taxes shouldn’t be counted. Other independent analysts have validated the AHIP position.
So the politicization of health care begins, with even the president set to weigh in on a decision that would make most people’s eyes glaze over in the minutia. The president will meet with the NAIC at the White House in September or so to discuss the issue.
It now is clear that decisions about what kind of health insurance we have, how much we must pay, what it covers or doesn’t cover, will be made by politicians and bureaucrats.
This evokes a statement by health economist Paul Starr in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Social Transformation of American Medicine”: “Political leaders since Bismarck seeking to strengthen the state or to advance their own or their party’s interests have used insurance against the costs of sickness as a means of turning benevolence to power.”
The process has begun. Unless ObamaCare can be rolled back, the politicization of American medicine will reach into the smallest decisions affecting our medical care for decades to come.
And, just five months after the health overhaul law was enacted, we see how the regulatory bureaucracy may well push us into the single-payer, government-run health care system that even the very liberal 111th Congress couldn’t enact. (Even with all the bribes!)
But was predictable given that the Health Care Reform debate was about control, not Health Care.
Just like Immigration enforcement is about Amnesty, not security.
Global Warming is not about the planet.
Financial Reform wasn’t about reform, as much as it was about control.
Remember, Tort Reform was completely ignored during the Health Care debate because Trial Lawyers are too big to ignore Democrats. And Fannie and Freddie were ignored by Financial Reform because the government and the liberals doing the reform were at fault for it’s continued collapse!
It’s about what the politicians want, not what the people want or need.
You are being told you want this, when in fact they want you to want it.
The Drug Addicts want to addict you to their drugs so you’ll demand more of them from them and to do that they will take more of your soul in the process.
Trust in them to bring you the Hope all wrapped up in a pretty bow and all nice and shiny.
They would never take advantage of you.
No, they just want what’s “fair”.
