Posts from — January 2013

Zero has thrown away his best legal and constitutional method of dealing with a Republican refusal to pay its bills.

Come on, you knew he wanted cover to gut Social Security and Medicare. With more people, and serious people, looking at the platinum coin option, you had to know that Zero was going to deep six it so he could act like he didn’t have a choice when he began the process of dismantling the most popular government programs ever enacted, programs that have absolutely nothing to do with the national debt.

There is talk of the Treasury Department prioritizing payments when it runs low on money. I would like to know where anyone finds a legal or constitutional basis for that?

Any Democrat who votes to cut Social Security and Medicare is toast, extra crispy. You can get elected without a majority of white males, but there is no way around the seniors. They are the most consistent voting bloc in the US and there are a lot of them.

Austerity will throw the country back into recession. That isn’t a guess, it’s a fact, just ask the British. The current government has already taken the country into a double-dip with austerity, and is about to force it into a triple-dip by not changing course.

Smart Cat

Find your own spot…

[Editor: Weasel has selected one the best places available for a nap – atop my Mother’s air conditioner which is under an awning and protected from rain. That window is just single glass, so he has found a heated cat bed.]

Friday Ark

At some unknown time between 8AM and 7PM someone was suppose to attend to the problem of my communication isolation, but I’m still not operating normally. I used the connectivity I had for a while to upload a picture of the first camellias of the season. I expect they will be out for Christmas in a couple of years.

It started raining and everything is back to where it was yesterday, i.e. static bursts on both lines.

If you are wondering why I don’t switch to cable, my Mother’s cable has been acting up for several days, so I wouldn’t have gained anything.

I may or may not be around as my DSL line keeps dropping out. It is probably related to the splice after the utility guys broke the telco cable a few weeks ago. The problems get worse after it rains.

They’ll get on the problem ‘real soon now’, I have been assured.

The President has the legal right to mint platinum coins with a face value of his choice. People have been talking about this for years. The current conversation is for a $1 trillion coin which could be deposited with the Federal Reserve and used to avoid the ‘debt ceiling crisis’ that replaced the ‘fiscal bluff’ as the apocalypse du jour in Washington and the Village.

Why limit him to a single coin? Make several in different denominations to cover other possibilities. We could have a $1 trillion with Reagan on it, then a $5 trillion with George H.W. Bush, a $10 trillion featuring George W. Bush, and finally a two-headed $20 trillion coin with Ayn Rand on one side and Alan Greenspan on the other to celebrate their contributions to the national debt.

In normal times such coins would be inflationary if deposited with the Fed, but thanks to the financial blow-out and all of the assets lost as a result, the economy has a lot of room to spare at the moment.

Actually, the Treasury could just mint the coins and put them on display without actually depositing them as a reminder to Congress that they have a work-around for stupid Congresscritter tricks.

Update: The CBC has a piece featuring Krugman up today. I would note that the Congresscritter from Oregon who thinks he’s going to stop this with a new law had better be able to round up two-thirds of the House and Senate to back his bill, because there is no way a President is going to voluntarily give up any power, so a veto is a given. It is also important to note that the President has no legal or Constitutional way of spending money that isn’t appropriated by Congress. We aren’t talking about the Executive branch choices when it comes to the budget – Congress controls spending. The deficit spending is the fault of Congress. If Congress wants to trim the budget, they need to stop handing out money to their friends and supporters. The President can prevent spending by vetoing appropriations bills, but has no power to spend more than what Congress appropriates.

The Land Down Under is baking and burning. Juan Cole noted that Climate Change is turning Australia Purple with Blazing Heat, referring to the new color they had to add to their temperature graphics to deal with areas over 50°C [122°F].

The ABC noted that Austrailia had its hottest day, on average, since records have been kept, but wrote that the record was not expected to last for long.

While Tasmania is still looking for 100 people who have been missing since wildfires stormed across the island, New South Wales is under a catastrophic fire alert. The map shows fires popping up all over the state in the Southeast corner of the continent.

Meanwhile, as Fallenmonk implies, too many people with too much influence continue to deny the existence of Global Climate Change.

Some people really should know better.

Robert Reich has a good piece today that more people should read: The Hoax of Entitlement Reform.

He does a good job of laying things out and explaining why Social Security and Medicare have nothing to do with the deficit, and shouldn’t be part of the discussion, and then he blows it suggesting a change to Social Security that will guarantee its destruction: means testing.

If you include means testing in determining Social Security benefits you change it from an insurance program into a welfare program, and it is easy to destroy welfare programs. If you pay into the system, you should get the benefits, no matter what you are worth when you apply. The amount you receive is based on the amount you put in, just like any other insurance program.

Another point that the people who advocate changing the age at which you receive benefits don’t seem to grasp is that the more money you put in, the more you get back, so the savings won’t be as large as they believe. I know people who have delayed taking benefits to increase the pay out.

С Рождеством Христовым to my Orthodox friends who are still waiting to see how the calendar reform works out.

So, while politicians have been playing games with the budget and pretending that they are appeasing the ‘confidence fairy’, consumer confidence has dropped into a subbasement. The numbers from this Christmas season suck – down from 2011. Congress and its owners seem to forget that more than two-thirds of the GDP are based on consumer spending, and making consumers nervous about the future with the ‘fiscal bluff’ and the ‘debt ceiling’ make people stop spending.

Digby reads Forbes so I don’t have to waste my time. Apparently the IMF is finally admitting that austerity in a recession is a bad idea. It turns out that a $1 cut in government spending causes the loss of $3 in growth when a country is in an economic downturn. This admission won’t change anything because austerity is a ‘religion’ not an economic policy – people must have pain so they can repent of their ‘evil ways’.

Ken Houghton at skippy’s and Mike Konczal at New Deal 2.0 show how Social Security recipients are actually being shorted by the current Consumer Price Index that is now used. The Bureau of Labor Statistic has a CPI-E [Consumer Price Index for the Elderly] but everyone talks about the CPI-W [CPI for Workers in metropolitan areas], and that is what is being used currently.

Today marks the Feast of the Epiphany, end of the twelve days of Christmas, and Día de los Reyes in Spanish-speaking countries.

This is the customary day for gift exchanges in many Christian cultures because it is the day that the Magi finally arrived in Bethlehem with their totally inappropriate gifts after putzing around for over a week because they didn’t want to ask for directions.

CBS announced a new study on partial privatization of the Post Office that put the most important fact in the last paragraph:

The study is being underwritten by Connecticut-based firm Pitney Bowes, which already contracts with the Postal Service for portions of its operations and could stand to benefit from the agency’s further privatization.

The study exempts the ‘final mile’ service of the Post Office, the delivery of the mail to people, for a bogus reason, not wanting to admit that that is the most expensive and most resistant to change of the entire system, that no one wants to do it. UPS and FedEx both use the Post Office for small packages in mailers. I have seen their postal permits on several things I have ordered. They bulk transport, and then drop the small parcels off at the regional bulk mail centers for final delivery.

It isn’t hard to make money on bulk transport, the expensive part is the final delivery, so this study is about stealing the profitable activities of the Post Office and leaving it with the most expensive service it provides. That is not a plan to save the Post Office.

I knew things were bad but this Digby post shows how bad:

The December jobs figures out today indicate that there were 725,000 more jobs in the private sector than at the end of 2008 — and 697,000 fewer government jobs. That works into a private-sector gain of 0.6 percent, and a government sector decline of 3.1 percent.

In total, the number of people with jobs is up by 28,000, or 0.02 percent.

There are around 150,000 people per month added to the work force, and we have been adding an average of less that 600 jobs per month.

I knew governments were laying people off, but I didn’t really appreciate the size of the lay offs. The standard economic reporting on jobs is always limited to the numbers for non-farm jobs, and never addresses the changes in the public sector.

After decades of doing it for some reason it occurred to me today that the standard American response to “Thank you” is actually fairly odd.

What does “You’re welcome” have to do with it?

In its coverage of the vote to expand the borrowing authority of the Flood Insurance program, they recorded the comments of House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas:

He said his committee would take up a bill this year “to transition to a private innovative, competitive, sustainable flood insurance market.”

I hate to break it to you, Mr. Chaircritter, but the reason there is a Federal Flood Insurance Program is because the private sector refused to sell flood insurance to people who might use it, while banks wouldn’t give mortgages to people who didn’t have it. There is no “private innovative, competitive, sustainable flood insurance market” and there isn’t going to be. This is the same reason we have Medicare, the private insurance market isn’t interested in issuing policies to people who are probably going to want to collect benefits because that reduces profits.

The official report showing the 67 Republicans who don’t want any Federal disaster funding for their districts.