Thoughts on a $1,118.00 Day

If it is always darkest before the dawn, daybreak must just be moments away. Because, on both the social and economic scales, it is a very dark time in America. Gold today hit a record high of over $1,118.00 an ounce as investors and governments around the world abandoned the US Dollar and other paper currencies in favor of the precious metal. Publicly and privately many say the see the collapse of the US Dollar and possible the collapse of the United States.

Misled and misguided by a President wholly unqualified and unready to lead this nation during an economic crisis, the United States is floundering. And the deaf, dumb and blind US Congress is leading the nation off the edge of the cliff as surely as the Pied Piper led the rats and then the children in the fairly tale to their potential doom. I'm not at all certain we can have a happy ending.

Clearly investors and foreign governments don't think a happy ending is in our future as they abandon on currency as if it were infected with Swine Flu (or, more likely, the Ebola virus). Death be to those holding US currency when the end times arrive.

President Obama's biggest mistake today is that he is ignoring the economy as he pursues a Health Care Restructuring Plan that is horrifically bad in its own right. He should be working on the economy and the deficit, but if, god forbid, he succeeds in forcing this Health Care Bill down the throats of a public that neither wants it nor needs it, it will bring on the collapse all by itself.

Poor President Obama has done virtually nothing right. Being naive in both the ways of Congress and in basic economics, he turned the Economic Stimulus Act over to Nancy Pelosi and give little or no guidance. Pelosi hadn't the slightest idea how to build a stimulus package, so she did what she does best, packaged up 780 billion dollars of pork and special favors for friends and supporters and called it stimulus.

Now some folks are surprised (or, at least, act surprised) to find the stimulus package isn't doing any good and the very slow economic recovery is exactly what would have been expected without a package.

The problem is the stimulus package is actually a time bomb and is ready to explode the deficit. Gold, therefore, is the safe haven for investors and other nations that are handling their economy correctly.

Three things need to happen. First, and perhaps most important, the Health Care Restructuring Bill must be stopped.

Second, the President needs a new economic team, a strike force if you will. He should ask Mitt Romney to head up this effort to, literally, save the United States.

Finally, Nancy Pelosi should step down as Speaker of the House and usher in a new spirit of true bipartisanship. Now is not this time to build walls and foster hatred. Pelosi isn't capable of anything else and she must go.

Let's Just Fall in Love Again

Relax.

Take a deep breath.

And Relax.

The Worst Bill Ever

The Worst Bill Ever.

That's how The Wall Street Journal characterized the House version of Health Care Restructuring introduced yesterday to a waiting world by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Last night on Bill O'Reilly's cable opinion show comedian Dennis Miller referred to Pelosi as "sub-reptilian." I couldn't agree with both characteristics more.

I've said before that Nancy Pelosi is the "worst Speaker of the House in United States history." I repeat that here again today. The woman, left unchecked, will destroy our country and never, ever realize what she has done.



I know I'm offending many folks and I usually don't get this emphatic, but the woman is a menace and this bill..... well, this bill is the worst bill ever.

Here are just a few of the key points from the journal article:

In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.

As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.

All told, the House favors $572 billion in new taxes, mostly by imposing a 5.4-percentage-point "surcharge" on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles. This tax will raise the top marginal rate to 45% in 2011 from 39.6% when the Bush tax cuts expire—not counting state income taxes and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. The burden will mostly fall on the small businesses that have organized as Subchapter S or limited liability corporations, since the truly wealthy won't have any difficulty sheltering their incomes.

This surtax could hit ever more earners because, like the alternative minimum tax, it isn't indexed for inflation. Yet it still won't be nearly enough. Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they'll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.

Read the entire article.