Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, April 13, 2010


Look on the bright side...

(*PAUSE*)

Nah... scratch that.

(*SHRUG*)
Posted by at

13 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

* HEY... MAYBE YOUR LOCAL DEMOCRAT POLITICIAN WILL CARE FOR YOU; THESE FOLKS ARE ALREADY EXPERT PROCTOLOGISTS.

The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter between 2002 and 2007.

* HEY... I'M SURE ENGLISH MAJORS AND SOCIOLOGY MAJORS CAN PICK UP THE SLACK... (*SNICKER*)

There is a shortage of medical resident positions. The residency is the minimum three-year period when medical-school graduates train in hospitals and clinics.

There are about 110,000 resident positions in the U.S., according to the AAMC. Teaching hospitals rely heavily on Medicare funding to pay for these slots. In 1997, Congress imposed a cap on funding for medical residencies, which hospitals say has increasingly hurt their ability to expand the number of positions.

* HEY... DON'T QUESTION OBAMA, PELOSI, AND REID... THEY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING - JUST ASK 'EM!

While doctors trained in other countries could theoretically help the primary-care shortage, they hit the same bottleneck with resident slots, because they must still complete a U.S. residency in order to get a license to practice medicine independently in the U.S. In the 2010 class of residents, some 13% of slots are filled by non-U.S. citizens who completed medical school outside the U.S.

* DON'T WORRY...! BE HAPPY MUN! (*MY BEST JAMAICAN ACCENT*)

April 13, 2010 at 10:28 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//100412/480/urn_publicid_ap_org52d493edeb0243ef84cbfc87f58f4b6a/

* WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS FRIGG'N IDIOT...??? SERIOUSLY!

April 13, 2010 at 10:30 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9F1PU2O0&show_article=1

Opponents of the fiscally conservative tea party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic and moronic.

Jason Levin, creator of http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15 - tax filing day, when tea party groups across the country are planning to gather and protest high taxes.

Levin says they want to exaggerate the group's least appealing qualities, further distance the tea party from mainstream America and damage the public's opinion of them.

April 13, 2010 at 10:51 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303828304575180243952375172.html

"The second way government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work. Each unemployed person has a 'reservation wage' - the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase [the] reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer."

Any guess who wrote that? Milton Friedman, perhaps. Simon Legree? Sorry. Full credit goes to Lawrence H. Summers, the current White House economic adviser, who wrote those sensible words in his chapter on "Unemployment" in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, first published in 1999.

(*SNORT*) (*CHUCKLE*)

Mr. Summers is merely reflecting what numerous economic studies have shown. The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee put it this way in its January minutes:

"The several extensions of emergency unemployment insurance benefits appeared to have raised the measured unemployment rate, relative to levels recorded in past downturns." It continued: "Some estimates suggested it could account for one [full] percentage point or more of the increase in the unemployment rate during the recession."

That's more than one million jobless workers.

(*SHRUG*)

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute has found that the average unemployment episode rose from 10 weeks before the recession to 19 weeks after Congress twice previously extended jobless benefits...

(*SIGH*)

Even as initial unemployment claims have fallen in recent months, the length of unemployment has risen. Mr. Reynolds estimates that the extensions of unemployment insurance and other federal policies have raised the official jobless rate by nearly two percentage points.

* AND GUESS WHO IS PAYING THE FREIGHT FOR ALL THIS LARGESS... (*SMIRK*)

Or consider the Brookings Institution, whose panel on economic activity reported this March that jobless insurance extensions "correspond to between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points of the 5.5% increase in the unemployment rate witnessed in the current recession."

* BROOKINGS...! NOT HERITAGE... NOT CATO... NOT AEI... BUT BROOKINGS. (*SHRUG*)

Or perhaps the Senate should listen to another Obama Administration economist, Alan Krueger of the Treasury Department, who concluded in a 2008 study that "job search increases sharply in the weeks prior to benefit exhaustion." (In other words, many unemployed workers don't start seriously looking for a job until they are about to lose their benefits.)

(And, sure enough, the share of unemployed workers who don't have a job for more than 26 weeks has steadily increased, reaching a record 44.1% in March.)

Democrats are slowly converting unemployment insurance into a welfare program.

April 13, 2010 at 11:04 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304222504575173801155100646.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

The Simmons Bedding Company, manufacturer of the famous Beautyrest mattresses, has finally been flipped one time too many. ... Sold seven times in 20 years from one private investment firm to another, last fall the 133-year-old company filed for bankruptcy and laid off 1,000 workers.

Simmons is a textbook example of a dangerous trend in which brand-name companies are turned into gambling chips by leveraged buyout ("private equity") dealmakers.

Private-equity funds are leveraged private pools of capital that benefit from extensive tax subsidies. They are unregulated and shrouded in secrecy...

* RELATIVELY... (*SHRUG*)

In the Simmons case, the leveraged buyout firm that brought the company to bankruptcy walked away with $77 million in profits on top of hundreds of millions of dollars in special dividends.

* NOT QUITE SURE WHAT "SPECIAL DIVIDENDS" ARE. ALSO, I'D LIKE TO SEE THE FULL FINANCIAL PICTURE - COSTS INCURRED VS. PROFITS REAPED AND HOW THE PROFITS WERE REAPED.

The Wall Street investment banks that arranged the deals pulled down big money, too.

* YEP. THE BANKS AND THE BANKERS.

Meanwhile, a thousand employees lost their livelihoods, the company's bondholders lost more than $500 million, and a value-creating American company was in effect pawned for cash.

* "PAWNED" TO WHOM...??? (HEY... I GET THE POINT AND IT ELICITS THE VISCERAL ANGER FROM ME IT'S SUPPOSED TO... BUT I'D STILL LIKE TO SEE THE DETAILS - THE NUMBERS.) (SERIOUSLY... WHAT'S MEANT BY "PAWNED...???")

[O]f the 163 non-financial companies that went bankrupt last year, nearly half were backed by leveraged buyout firms.

Approximately $1 trillion in leveraged buyout loans were issued in 2006 and 2007, the height of the leveraged buyout bubble. In December 2008, the Boston Consulting Group predicted that almost half of companies owned by leveraged buyout firms are likely to default, resulting in massive job losses and further pressure on our fragile economy.

In February, Connecticut-based private-equity firm Brynwood Partners shut down the 77-year-old Stella D'Oro bakery in Bronx, New York, after a labor ruling sided with workers protesting a massive pay cut.

* AGAIN... MY VISCERAL REACTION IS OUTRAGE... BUT I'D LIKE TO KNOW THE DETAILS.) (*SHRUG*)

* THIS OP-ED - WRITTEN BY RICHARD L. TRUMKA, PRESIDENT OF THE AFL-CIO - IS WORTH READING. (WHICH IS WHY IT'S INCLUDED HERE IN TODAY'S NEWSBITES.) BUT OBVIOUSLY TRUMKA IS ANYTHING BUT A DISINTERESTED ANALYST AND UNLESS YOU'RE AN IDIOT, YOU AS A READER MUST KNOW THAT GOVERNMENT "REGULATION" AIN'T ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE.

April 13, 2010 at 12:01 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575181663341749750.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

The U.S. deficit in international trade of goods and services rose 7.4% to $39.70 billion in February... The real, or inflation-adjusted deficit, which economists use to measure the impact of trade on GDP, rose to $42.45 billion in February...

[N]et exports adding 0.27% to gross domestic product in the fourth quarter... Crude [oil] import volumes fell [in February] to 243.31 million barrels...

U.S. import prices rose in March for the seventh time in the past eight months, led by higher oil prices... The Labor Department said import prices were up 11.4% for the year ended in March...

April 13, 2010 at 12:31 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575181303081072986.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

The International Energy Agency warned Tuesday that rising oil prices, up recently near 18-month highs, could squeeze economic recovery in the U.S. and other industrialized nations.

* COULD...??? COULD...?!?! (*SNORT*)

The Paris-based agency said there was plenty of oil around to sate increasing demand...

* AND YET THE ECONOMIC LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND SEEMS... er... INOPERATIVE.

[O]il inventories in the U.S. [have been] increasing in the past 10 straight weeks. Gasoline stocks in the U.S., the world's biggest energy consumer, also hover at a 17-year peak.

* AND YET... (*SMIRK*)

[F]inancial investors like hedge funds have remained active participants in the world oil trade this year.

(*SMIRK*)

OPEC sits on the highest level of spare pumping capacity in a decade at over six million barrels a day, with most of that held by Saudi Arabia.

U.S. stocks of unused oil stand well above five-year average levels and analysts expect these to rise again when U.S. government data are released later this week.

* HMM... ALL THIS DATA SEEMS TO POINT TO A PHANTOM REALITY WHERE CRUDE IS AT $35/BRL. INSTEAD OF $85/BRL.

(*SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)

U.S. drivers face gasoline prices that may average close to $3 a gallon this summer, or 20% more compared with 2009...

April 13, 2010 at 12:31 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=530039

Justice Stevens was on the High Court for 35 years - more's the pity, or the disgrace.

Justice Stevens voted to sustain racial quotas, created "rights" out of thin air for terrorists and took away American citizens' rights to their own homes in the infamous "Kelo" decision of 2005.

The Constitution of the United States says that the government must pay "just compensation" for seizing a citizen's private property for "public use." In other words, if the government has to build a reservoir or bridge, and your property is in the way, they can take that property, provided that they pay you its value.

What has happened over the years, however, is that judges have eroded this protection and expanded the government's power - as they have in other issues. This trend reached its logical extreme in the Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London. This case involved local government officials seizing homes and businesses - not for "public use" as the Constitution specified, but to turn this private property over to other private parties, to build more upscale facilities that would bring in more tax revenues.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the Supreme Court opinion that expanded the Constitution's authorization of seizing private property for "public use" to seizing private property for a "public purpose."

And who would define what a "public purpose" is?

Basically, those who were doing the seizing.

As Justice Stevens put it, the government authorities' assessment of a proper "public purpose" was entitled to "great respect" by the courts.

Let's go back to square one. Just who was this provision of the Constitution supposed to restrict? Answer: government officials.

And to whom would Justice Stevens defer: government officials.

Why would those who wrote the Constitution waste good ink putting that protection in there, if not to protect citizens from the very government officials to whom Justice Stevens "deferred?"

April 13, 2010 at 1:56 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/12/radical-muslim-cleric-lied-qualify-funded-college-scholarship/

The American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, considered by some to be one of the most wanted terrorists behind Usama bin Laden, was educated in the United States with taxpayers money... A former diplomatic security agent who was tasked with investigating Awlaki immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks told Fox News that the Yemeni-American national apparently lied on his visa application to attend Colorado State University, where he studied engineering. Rather than tell U.S. immigration officials that he was born in Las Cruces, N.M., in 1971, Awlaki stated that the was foreign born, the security agent, Ray Fournier, said.

Awlaki received $20,000 in scholarship money from a U.S. government program for his schooling in Fort Collins, Colo. When asked if Awlaki was eligible, Fournier said, “No, he is absolutely forbidden to have it.”

"That's the taxpayers' money," Fournier added, saying Awlaki knew that lying about his birthplace would help him get the scholarship money. (A spokesperson at Colorado State University confirmed that Awlaki listed himself as an international student during his years there. The school would not comment on his financial records citing privacy issues.) Fournier came across the scholarship information as part of a larger investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, based in San Diego, in the months following 9/11.

April 13, 2010 at 9:42 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/08/haiti-ruins-relief-workers-live-large-love-boat/

For the United Nations World Food Program, it was a moment of satisfaction: the U.N.'s flagship relief agency announced on its Web site on March 19 that two gleaming passenger ships had docked in ravaged Port au Prince harbor.

What the Web site announcement did not disclose was that the vessels were intended to house not homeless Haitian refugees, but employees of the U.N. itself.

Nor did it publicize the cost of leasing the ships: $112,500 a day.

Nor did it mention that one of the vessels is owned by a company closely linked to the government of Venezuelan strongman President Hugo Chavez.

Another thing not mentioned: Even U.N. staffers regularly refer to one of the ships as "the Love Boat."

Accommodation aboard the two ships could best be described as comfortable if not luxurious - and far better than conditions a few hundred yards from their moorings, where hundreds of relief workers, some 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers and police, and huge numbers of Haiti's 9.5 million people are sleeping in tents or on bare floors - or worse - after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

* ANYWAY... (*CHUCKLE*)... NOT EXACTLY THE STORY OF THE CENTURY, BUT WORTH THE AFOREMENTIONED CHUCKLE. (*WINK*)

April 13, 2010 at 9:43 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://article.nationalreview.com/430961/tax-complexity-adds-pain-to-cash-drain/deroy-murdock

Completing tax forms required 7.75 billion hours of human labor in fiscal year 2008, according to the latest RegInfo.gov data. That roughly equals 3.7 million people - or everyone in Los Angeles - filling out IRS forms for 40 hours every week, all year, without vacations.

[T]he National Taxpayers Union’s David Keating...also found that individual taxpayers will devote some 2.43 billion hours to grappling with the income tax in 2010 at an equivalent labor cost of $71.4 billion.

Add to this the $31.5 billion that individual taxpayers will cough up for tax software, accounting services, photocopying, and other compliance-related expenses. All told, individual taxpayers will spend $103 billion to determine how much more money they must pump into the Beltway.

Meanwhile, the IRS website now offers 1,909 different documents, up from 1,770 last year.

* HMM... I WONDER IF THEY ASSIGN SOMEONE TO HELP TREASURY SECRETARY GEITHNER WITH THESE FORMS... WHICH HAVE PROVED SO CONFUSING TO HIM IN THE PAST. (*SMIRK*)

Last year, NTU calculated that U.S. corporations spent $159.4 billion on tax compliance, equal to 54% of corporate-income-tax revenue. (In 2008, General Electric’s tax return droned on for some 24,000 pages. If only all that energy had brought good things to life.)

"In 2009, 45 countries eased corporate taxpaying by cutting rates or streamlining procedures. America was not among them," says NTU spokesman Pete Sepp.

April 13, 2010 at 9:43 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-dow-high-ahead-happy-talk-feeds-sheep-2010-04-13

* YOU NEED TO READ THIS, FOLKS. THOSE OF YOU WHO REGULARLY READ "BARKER'S NEWSBITES" WON'T BE SHOCKED - AFTER ALL, I'VE BEEN HIGHLIGHTING INFO LIKE THIS ALL ALONG - BUT THIS IS AN EXCEPTIONALLY WELL-WRITTEN PIECE.

* ALLOW ME TO PROVIDE THE TEASER:

Yes, we hit 11,000. Propaganda. Yes, we'll quietly sneak past 11,722 (Dow's 2000 peak). Yes, we'll happily climb to 14,164 (Dow's 2007 peak). Maybe. But you're being conned: Even a new record of 14,165 barely equals CPI inflation the past 10 years.

Get it? Wall Street's lost more than 20% of your money the past decade. Now they're blowing a new bubble, filled with more toxic costly hot air.

Yes, the bull's back. But not the bull market kinda "bull." The "happy talk" kinda "bull" propaganda.

* BASICALLY THE ARTICLE REHASHES ALL THE PAST LIES TOLD US BY "THE ECONOMIC ESTABLISHMENT" AND COMPARES AND CONTRASTS THEM TO THE LIES WE'RE BEING FED NOW VIA THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.

* THIS AIN'T "PARTISAN" FOLKS... WHEN I WRITE "MAINSTREAM MEDIA" I'M NOT TALKING "LIBERAL" IN THE SENSE OF BEING "PRO-DEMOCRAT." NO... I'M TALKING "MAINSTREAM MEDIA" AT THE CORPORATE LEVEL - THE BOYS AND GIRLS "IN THE CLUB" WHO GO ALONG TO GET ALONG.

* SERIOUSLY... FOLLOW THE LINK AND READ THE PIECE.

April 13, 2010 at 9:43 PM
Rodak said...

As usual, either the WSJ itself, or your selective cropping of the article, doesn't tell the story accurately. Even Fox News tells it somewhat better.
The problem of physician shortage is recognized, and is being addressed. While even more needs to be done by way of building more new medical colleges (as opposed to law schools, for instance), the issue is not simply being ignored, as your post would suggest.

April 14, 2010 at 12:40 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)