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2010
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September
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- This Newsbite Deserves a Stand-Alone Posting
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, September 30, 2010
- Car Rental Trivia
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, September 29, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, September 28, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, September 27, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., September 25 & 26
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, September, 24, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, September 23, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, September 21, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, September 20, 2010
- Abbreviated Weekend Newsbites: Sunday, September 1...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, September 17, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, September 16, 2010
- The Coming Republican Revolution
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, September 15, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, September 13, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., September 11 & 12,...
- September 11, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, September 10, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, September 9, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, September 8, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, September 7, 2010
- Labor Day Weekend Newsbites 2010
- U-6 Unemployment
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, September 3, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, September 2, 2010
- This Newsbite Deserves Its Own Stand-Alone Posting
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, September 1, 2010
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September
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About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
10 comments:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703556604575502160531647630.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
California, the novelist Wallace Stegner famously wrote, is like the rest of America, only more so - meaning that wherever the country is headed, the Golden State is probably there already. So the state's ObamaCare advance planning deserves closer scrutiny, given that it mirrors the regulatory and ideological model that the White House favors for everyone else.
In a matter of days, California will set a precedent for the future of the U.S. individual and small-business insurance markets via ObamaCare's "exchanges," where people will purchase coverage at heavily subsidized rates. The exchanges don't start up until 2014, but the states were given wide bureaucratic latitude in how they're run, and Sacramento is using this flexibility to convert them into a pretext for imposing de facto price controls on the insurance industry.
The most dangerous precedent in the California plan is known as "selective contracting." ... [I]n California, a five-member board of political appointees will pick winners and losers. If an insurer wants entrée to the pool of subsidized individuals and businesses with fewer than 50 employees - and of course all of them do - they'll have to genuflect to whatever dictates this board happens to decree.
Selective contracting will allow the state to "negotiate" more favorable terms, the preferred euphemism for industrial policy.
The result in practice will be submarket price controls. As a condition of admittance insurers will also have to justify their premium levels and rate changes over time. Plans will still be allowed to sell outside the exchange, but in practice almost all consumers will gravitate to the exchange because of the subsidies.
* AND, FOLKS... GUESS WHO IS GOING TO HAVE TO PONY UP FOR "THE SUBSIDIES?"
(*SIGH*)
* PRICE CONTROLS... GOVERNMENT DECREES... INDUSTRIAL POLICY...
(*SIGH*)
This is clearly the template the Obama Administration favors.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704654004575517822124077834.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Earlier this month, President Obama hosted a White House reception to celebrate the contributions of the nation's 105 black colleges and to reiterate his pledge to "invest" another $850 million in these institutions over the next decade.
(*HEADACHE*)
When segregation was legal, black colleges were responsible for almost all black collegians.
* THUS, SUBSIDIZING BLACK COLLEGES COULD BE ETHICALLY JUSTIFIED.
Today...
* TODAY THERE IS NO SEGREGATION. HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE NOW JUST ANOTHER SPECIAL INTEREST. SPECIAL INTERESTS SHOULD NOT BE SUBSIDIZED WITH FEDERAL DOLLARS!
* HERE'S THE KICKER THOUGH:
"Even the best black colleges and universities do not approach the standards of quality of respectable institutions," according to economist Thomas Sowell. "None has a department ranking among the leading graduate departments in any of the 29 fields surveyed by the American Council of Education. None ranks among the 'selective' institutions with regard to student admissions. None has a student body whose College Board scores are within 100 points of any school in the Ivy League."
Mr. Sowell wrote that in an academic journal in 1974, yet with few exceptions the description remains accurate. These days the better black schools - Howard, Spelman, Morehouse - are rated "selective" in the U.S. News rankings, but their average SAT scores still lag behind those at decent state schools like the University of Texas at Austin, never mind a Stanford or Yale.
In 2006, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the six-year graduation rate at HBCUs was 37%. That's 20 percentage points below the national average and eight percentage points below the average of black students at other colleges.
A recent Washington Monthly magazine survey of colleges with the worst graduation rates featured black schools in first and second place, and in eight of the top 24 spots.
The economists Roland Fryer of Harvard and Michael Greenstone of MIT have found that black colleges are inferior to traditional schools in preparing students for post-college life. "In the 1970s, HBCU matriculation was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduation, relative to attending a [traditional college]," they wrote in a 2007 paper. "By the 1990s, however, there is a substantial wage penalty. Overall, there is a 20% decline in the relative wages of HBCU graduates in just two decades."
The authors concluded that "by some measures, HBCU attendance appears to retard black progress."
* AND WE'D WANT TO SUBSIDIZE THIS... er... WHY...???
Howard and Spelman have endowments valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars...
* BUT I'M SURE OBAMA WANTS TO GIVE THEM TAXPAYER MONEY ANYWAY...
...but a large majority of black colleges have very small endowments and more than 80% get most of their revenue from the government.
(*SIGH*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/building_the_next_subprime_crisis_V3m4nolf77wLI3sZPkePZI
Democrats in Congress haven't moved to stop subprime lending - they've just taken it over.
* YOU REMEMBER THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS... BARNEY FRANK... CHRIS DODD... OTHER "FRIENDS OF ANGELO" SUCH AS KENT CONRAD...
* HERE - REFRESH YOUR MEMORIES: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Mozilo
They've created a federal subprime-lending monopoly by seizing control of the financial apparatus - Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration - and lending 100% of the home price to borrowers who can't afford it. (Private lenders can't make these loans -- they need to get paid back.)
On Sept. 9, I reported that Fannie had forged a subprime partnership with state housing-finance agencies called "Affordable Advantage": Fannie agreed to buy loans from housing-finance agencies for which the buyer puts down $1,000 or less - in at least one case, just 67 cents.
On Sept. 15, the House Government-Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee held a hearing on Fannie and Freddie. Since these two GSEs have cost the taxpayers $148 billion (so far), Reps. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) took their regulator to task over Affordable Advantage. Edward J. DeMarco, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, sheepishly replied, "This one got away from us" and then promised "you won't be hearing about additional programs such as this." But DeMarco also testified that Fannie's contracts to buy these zero-down loans from HFAs don't expire until next March - and he can't tell Fannie to stop.
* "CAN'T...???" OR WON'T?
* To be continued...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)
Obama controls the GSEs - they were seized by Bush and placed in federal conservatorship; Obama OK'd $42 million in bonuses for their top brass last Christmas. They're making subprime loans because the boss wants them to.
DeMarco apparently changed his tune as soon as he left the committee room. He spoke later that day with Barbara Thompson, director of the National Council of State Housing Agencies - and she then wrote on the group's Web site that he'd agreed that "HFAs have demonstrated their ability to administer low-down-payment programs successfully." Democrats don't want Fannie and Freddie to clean up their acts - that could mean less subprime lending.
(*NOD*)
(The Obama team isn't even willing to look into what went wrong. On July 27, I reported that Rep. Darrell Issa, top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform, had written to Alfred Pollard, DeMarco's general counsel, demanding a probe into 173 VIP loans made to Fannie and Freddie execs by Countrywide Financial's then-chairman, Angelo Mozilo -- who's going to trial on SEC fraud charges next month. But Pollard hasn't issued a single subpoena to any of the 173 VIP loan-taking execs.)
Obama and the Dems haven't limited their subprime takeover to the GSEs. The Federal Housing Administration insured 29.4% of all home purchases in 2009, up from just 4.5% in 2006.
* NUDGE... NUDGE... NUDGE... (*SHRUG*) ANYONE WHO DOESN'T SEE OBAMA PUSHING THIS NATION FURTHER TOWARDS SOCIALISM BIT BY BIT IS EITHER BLIND OR JUST DOESN'T WANT TO ADMIT THE TRUTH.
To insure a loan, the FHA requires a downpayment of 3.5% - but also it allows "seller concessions" of 6%. In other words, if the seller's willing to mark up the official price by 6% and then put that amount to the downpayment, the buyer doesn't have to come up with any cash. There's talk about reducing allowable seller concessions to 3% - but that would still permit FHA-insured loans of 99.4%.
* SCAM AFTER SCAM AFTER SCAM... (*SIGH*)
Because the FHA is insuring so many more mortgages than it used to, its capital reserve - the cash it's supposed to have on-hand in case of a wave of defaults - is at a quarter of the congressionally mandated minimum. But Democrats want the FHA to keep insuring subprime loans, so it's not enforcing the minimum.
(*SNORT*) SO MUCH FOR THE RULE OF LAW.
[W]hat the government's doing here is "helping" people buy homes they can't truly afford. Many of these borrowers will find soon enough that they can't keep up with the payments (or perhaps just need to to relocate) - and, with prices still falling, they won't be able to flip the house to get out from under, either.
The taxpayers will be out for the balance of the mortgage - but the borrower will lose the downpayment plus everything he or she's paid on the loan.
Having undercut private lenders with 100% loans at cheap rates in a falling market, federal subprime lending is booming. The result: Another subprime crisis is coming, this time the taxpayers holding the bag for all subprime loans.
Still believe that Wall Street, not the Dems, caused the subprime crisis?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/adaa0890-ca5e-11df-a860-00144feab49a.html
The US administration has concluded multibillion-dollar arms deals with Gulf states without establishing whether they were in the national interest, according to a congressional investigators’ report seen by the Financial Times.
The report by the Government Accountability Office expresses concern that “US priorities are not consistently considered before such sales are authorised”.
* ANYONE SURPRISED...???
In its audit of authorisations of weapons exports to six Gulf countries, the non-partisan report suggests the administration has failed to ensure the deals are in the national interest. “As arms transfer authorisations increase to this part of the world, the US government needs to ensure that it reviews requests for arms transfers, especially for significant military equipment, for their foreign policy and national security implications,” it says.
In its account of 15 commercial sales and 13 foreign military sales, the report finds the state department “did not document how it applied criteria to review arms transfers”.
* HMM... THE STATE DEPARTMENT, HUH...??? NOW HASN'T HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON BEEN RUNNING THE STATE DEPARTMENT SINCE... oh... JANUARY 2009...???
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2009/08/get_it_straight.html
Get It Straight: Consumer Spending is NOT 70% of GDP
[Many otherwise] fine economics writers have fallen into a subtle but very important trap. They look at the category of GDP which the BEA - Bureau of Economic Analysis - calls "personal consumption expenditures" and assume that it means what it sounds like: The money that persons, like you and me, spend on consumption.
* WRONG...!!!
But in fact, "personal consumption expenditures" in the U.S. is a grab-bag category which includes all sorts of money - like Medicare spending by the government which never passes through the hands of households.
"Personal consumption expenditures" also includes all the consumer goods imported into the U.S. - cars, computers, clothing, and the like - which create very little economic activity in this country.
* EXACTLY...!!! THUS THE DISASTER KNOWN AS AMERICAN DEINDUSTRIALIZATION!
[H]ousehold spending on goods and services which are primarily domestically-produced - things like food, recreation, haircuts, utilities, legal fees, airplanes, auto repair, and so forth - [actually accounts for 30% of GDP - roughly $4.3 trillion out of our $14.1 trillion economy.
In fact, by [the author's - Michael Mandel's - admittedly] very rough calculations, the money that people actually pull out of their paychecks and bank accounts to pay for domestically-produced goods and services drives about 40% of economic activity in this country. That’s still large - but the U.S. is nowhere near as dependent on consumer spending as people [have been falsely led to believe].
* BTW... THE WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE DISPARITY BETWEEN "30% OF GDP" vs. "40% OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY" MENTIONED IS DUE TO "IMPUTED SERVICES." (What this means is that the BEA assigns a number to certain economic activities, even though no money actually changes hands. The two most important imputed services are “imputed rental of owner-occupied nonfarm housing” and “financial services furnished without payment” - the money you supposedly pay yourself to live in your own home, and the money you supposedly pay the bank for such services as free checking [via] accepting lower or no interest on your demand deposits.)
* ANYWAY, FOLKS... VERY INTERESTING ARTICLE. I SUGGEST YOU READ IT IN FULL.
http://www.slate.com/id/2268833/
[A] Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world's largest copper deposits...
* IN AFGHANISTAN.
...where U.S. troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent...
(*SIGH*)
Though American troops don't protect the miners directly, Afghan troops, trained and armed by Americans, do. And although the mine is still in its early phases, the Chinese businessmen and engineers - wearing civilian clothes, offering jobs - are already more popular with the locals than the U.S. military, which carries guns and talks security.
The Chinese paid a high price for their copper-mining rights and took a huge risk. But if it pays off, our war against the Taliban might someday be remembered as the war that paved the way for Chinese domination of Afghanistan.
* THANK YOU GEORGE W. BUSH AND BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA...
In Iraq, where U.S. troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts.
In Pakistan, where billions in U.S. military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.
Americans, along with Western Europeans, are pouring vast amounts of public and private money into solar energy and windpower, hoping to wean themselves off fossil fuels and prevent climate change. China, by contrast, builds a new coal-fired plant every 10 days or so. While thus producing ever more greenhouse gases in the East, China makes clever use of those government subsidies in the West: Three Chinese companies now rank among the top 10 producers of wind turbines in the world.
The Chinese have also quietly cornered the market in rare-earth elements, unusual minerals with lovely names (promethium, ytterbium) that are utterly vital for the production of cellphones, lasers, and computers - not to mention hybrid cars, solar panels, and wind turbines. Although China doesn't control the world's reserves of these elements, some of which aren't all that rare, mining them is dirty, labor-intensive, and ideally suited for cheap production in a country with low wages and lower environmental standards. Nobody else can compete, which is why China now controls 99% of the world's supply of some of these elements.
* SOUND LIKE A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT - AS WELL AS AN ECONOMIC THREAT - TO YOU? SOUNDS LIKE ONE TO ME!
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/247724/opinion-just-deroy-murdock
What is the quietest spot in Washington, D.C.? The Rose Garden? The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?
Actually, it’s the Justice Department’s "Voting Section."
The unit that allegedly fights disenfranchisement lately has been caught dozing while at least nine states deliver absentee ballots too slowly to overseas GIs. Military votes thus may go uncounted in November.
In yet another outrage, the Voting Section is static while the rolls of at least 16 states evidently list ineligible voters, including non-residents, disqualified felons, and, yes, dead people.
Justice’s response?
“ZZZZZZzzzzzz……”
[T]he Big Sleep at Justice seems totally deliberate.
As former Voting Section prosecutor J. Christian Adams testified under oath July 6 before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, he attended a November 2009 meeting at which deputy assistant attorney general Julie Fernandes discussed the federal law that requires local officials to purge illegitimate names from their voter rolls. Adams swore that Fernandes told Voting Section prosecutors, “We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”
* AGAIN, FOLKS... THIS IS TESTIMONY UNDER OATH BY A RESPECTED FORMER JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PROSECUTOR.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Tennessee expunged precisely zero dead voters from their rolls between 2006 and 2008. The same applies to numerous counties in Alabama, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Either these places are experiencing an explosion in immortality, or they are violating federal law.
Several Iowa and North Carolina counties have more registered voters than live, voting-age adults. This condition plagues at least a dozen counties each in Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Texas. Registered voters equal 104% of Baltimore County, Maryland’s voting-adult population; and, according to documents that Adams filed, the figure is 113% in Lincoln County, West Virginia. Alaska’s and Michigan’s statewide figures are 102%.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/barney_new_excuse_xr9UKP7eqW0PmiFRWJrtlK
Barney Frank & Co. are getting set for yet another hearing this week on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage lenders.
Once again, they're not after the truth - they're looking to conceal it.
The House Financial Services Committee chairman and his brethren on the Left want you to believe they're making a good-faith effort to figure out what went wrong with Fannie and Freddie...what they'll deliver is more hot air from so-called "housing advocates" obscuring just how much Fannie and Freddie contributed to the housing bubble, the 2008 financial collapse and the Great Recession.
The notion of [owning your own home] as a God-given right had been promoted by people like Barney Frank for nearly two decades. Their vehicles to expand homeownership for all were "government-sponsored enterprises" Fannie and Freddie - which, starting in the mid-90's, began buying up and placing "guarantees" on mortgages taken out by people with lower incomes and lousy credit histories.
When the bubble burst, the government "sponsored" agencies were in hock for billions - and so was their "sponsor," the US taxpayer.
[Unsurprisingly,] once Fannie and Freddie stopped making loans to anyone with a hearbeat (and many people without jobs), housing prices began to deflate, taking the banking system and the rest of the economy with it.
Now it looks like Fannie and Freddie are back to their old tricks - with the evident support of both Barney Frank and President Obama.
Spencer Bachus, the top Republican on Frank's Financial Services Committee, tells me that both agencies have started new programs that once again make loans and guarantees to "subprime" borrowers, or people with the lowest credit ratings - the same sort of lending practices that contributed to their collapse back in 2008.
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/09/28/harvard-pilgrim-customers-to-l
Add 22,000 New Englanders to the list of Americans who will lose their current health care coverage as a result of ObamaCare.
The Boston Globe reports that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care has announced plans to discontinue its Medicare Advantage policies due to new requirements and lower reimbursement rates imposed by the new health care law.
The news is consistent with what Obnacare's critics were saying during the health care debate, and further undermines a key promise from supporters of the legislation - that those who like their current coveraage could keep it.
Customers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine who wish to remain with Harvard Pilgrim will now have the option of enrolling in a more expensive Medicare supplemental plan.
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