Tag: news

Authored by Michael Hudson and Paul Craig Roberts,

Mike Whitney has written an excellent expose of the “Russiagate” cover story for Obama’s political use of national security to help his party oppose Republicans. 

Covert surveillance of politicians on Obama’s Nixon-like “Enemies List” has been going on for many years, but is only now being unmasked as a result of the failure of Obama’s cover story–“We weren’t spying on political opponents; only on Russians to protect America.”

The presstitute media has passed on the cover story authored by former Obama-administration officials led by CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, the DNC, and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. The loose ends in this cover-up have now been so widely exposed as hearsay and political that only 13% of Republicans believe the fact-free story – but 67% of Democrats cling to it.

Whitney reports that Comey began the investigation in July 2016. As of last Friday (March 31, 2017) not a scrap of evidence has turned up. This did not deter Comey from telling Congress that Putin “hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.” So the Russians allegedly “engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy.”

Comey based this conclusion on what has become a hilarious bit of gullibililty.

The Russians, he said “were unusually loud in their intervention. It’s almost as if they didn’t care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing.”

Alternatively, someone wanted investigators to infer that the Russians were doing the hacking. As Wikeleaks Vault 7 releases prove, the CIA can hack computers and leave anyone else’s signature. Due to poor security, the CIA’s cybertechnology ended up in the Internet domain.

“They’ll be back. They’ll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018,” warned Mr. Comey. But who is the “they”? “They” seem to be “us,” or at least what numerous former national security officials have suggested: either the NSC, CIA or its “Five Eyes” partner, British MI6.

Wall Street Journal editorialist Kimberley A. Strassel poses the real question: Why hasn’t the Trump administration had the Secret Service to arrest Comey, Brennan, Schiff, the DNC and Hillary for trying to overthrow the President of the United States?

“Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administration—on subjects that had nothing to do with Russia—and that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This goes far beyond a mere scandal. It’s a potential crime.”

What we are watching is turning out to be traces of a plot against a government elected by the American people. Attempts to get at the truth by House national security committee Chairman Devin Nunes have been countered with demands by Democrats to recuse himself so as to stop his exposé of how “Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration.”

It seems that this has been going on for many years now. Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich has dropped a bombshell about what appears to be his own illegal surveillance under Obama’s NSC.

“When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen. It happened to me.”

Here’s what happened, which was revealed two years after he left office in 2013 when the Democrats were overjoyed to see Ohio Republicans redraw the election district lines to get rid of his candidacy. The Washington Times asked him to authenticate a secret recording of a cell phone call “from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and a son of the country’s ruler, Moammar Qaddafi.”

Before taking the call, Rep. Kucinich “checked with the House’s general counsel to ensure that such a discussion by a member of Congress with a foreign power was permitted by law.”

“I was assured that under the Constitution a lawmaker had a fundamental duty to ask questions and gather information—activity expressly protected by the Article I clauses covering separation of powers and congressional speech and debate.”

Given the quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call, Kucinich concluded that “the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers.”

His repeated Freedom of Information Act requests made in 2012 before leaving office have been stonewalled by the intelligence agencies for five years.

We are now in a position to see the real story behind “Russiagate.”

It’s not about Russia. The real news is the Obama regime’s abuse of the government’s surveillance powers to spy on Donald Trump and other Republicans in order to build a dossier for the DNC to leak to the press in an attempt to slander or compromise Trump and throw the election to Hillary.

They’ve been caught, but we can now see that they took steps to protect themselves against this. They prepared a cover story. They pretend they were not spying on Trump, but on Russians – which only by fortuitous happenchance turned up alleged incriminating smoke against Trump.

This cover story was buttressed by the fake news story prepared by former MI6 freelancer Christopher Steele. As Whitney reports, Steele “was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.” Unvetted and unverified information by so-called informants somehow found its way into U.S. intelligence agency reports. These reports were then leaked to Democrat-friendly media. This is where the crime lies. Obama regime and DNC were using these agencies for domestic political use, KGB style.

The Obama/Clinton cover story is now falling to pieces. That explains the desperation in the attack by Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, on Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to stop the exposure. Russiagate is not a Trump/Putin collusion but a domestic spy job carried out by Democrats.

Law requires Trump to arrest those responsible and to put them on trial for treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. If Trump fears to prosecute the Obama operatives within the Deep State, they will try all the harder to attack him to the point of forcing his removal or at least discrediting him and his fellow Republicans to pave the way for the 2018 elections.

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Venezuela security forces on Tuesday clashed with anti-government protesters seeking, in part, to remove justices from the Supreme Court accused of unconstitutionally favoring the ruling party, while supporting lawmakers locked in a bitter dispute with the administration of President Nicolas Maduro and the Supreme Court.

Previously, the opposition-controlled National Assembly had called for the march ahead of a vote by lawmakers to remove members of the country’s top court, less than a week after judges attempted to seize the power of Congress. The protest was the most violent since hundreds of thousands flooded the capital last year demanding the embattled president’s ouster.

Tuesday’s vote, however, was canceled after national guardsmen blocked the marchers as they attempted to cross Caracas’s main avenue, using teargas, pepper spray and water cannons to disperse the crowds. Ramon Muchacho, mayor of the Caracas Municipality of Chacao – an opposition stronghold – reported nine injuries including a gunshot victim, after the clashes with police and a rival protest by government sympathizers.

Security forces,  including the Bolivarian National Police, or PNB, and the Venezuelan National Guard, or GNB, fired tear gas, pepper spray and water cannons in attempts to disperse protesters in Caracas.

The gunshot was captured on the following video clip taken by a local activist.

URGENTE colectivos disparan nuestra manifestacion pacifica estamos en la autopista Auxilio! http://pic.twitter.com/TXweZe2IuI

— Lilian Tintori (@liliantintori) April 4, 2017

Other clips also captured the noise of gunfire in the background.

Con la ballena y perdigones #GNB intenta dispersar a manifestantes en la Av. Libertador #PuebloYANContraElGolpe http://pic.twitter.com/X8YPsTxZCK

— PJ Diputados (@pjdiputados) April 4, 2017

It was unclear if the shooting was an isolated incident, and whether the national guard have now been given instructions to shoot at protesters, an escalation that would likely result in a violent mass uprising.

“PNB officials throwing tear gas and pepper against the demonstrators, especially affecting older adults,” the opposition-controlled National Assembly legislature said in a statement.

According to UPI, there were two protests on Tuesday: one called for by the opposition and one in support of President Nicolas Maduro’s regime, most of whom were made up of dozens of people moving through Caracas on motorcycles. The opposition demonstration was planned as a march from Caracas’ Plaza Venezuela to the National Assembly’s building, which is about a 3-mile march. But as the opposition prepared to participate, authorities closed several of Caracas’ subway stations and set up security checkpoints and roadblocks. Officials closed off access to Plaza Venezuela, opposition members said.

Clashes ensued as security forces attempted to repel protesters, some of whom began to throw rocks and other objects at the security officials. The Venezuelan opposition accused Maduro’s regime of preventing a peaceful protest from occurring.  “Hundreds of police and guards move to block access to Caracas for a mobilization, but against insecurity not a single one moves!” Henrique Capriles Radonski, governor of Venezuela’s Miranda state and a key opposition leader, said in a statement Tuesday.

As discussed last week, the protests come after Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice, or TSJ, last week said it would assume the National Assembly’s duties – a ruling it later reversed, particularly after Venezuela’s chief prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, expressed “great concern” about the measure, which she said violated the constitution. The opposition said the TSJ’s move was akin to a coup d’etat in favor of Maduro’s regime.

The South American country is facing a political, security and economic crisis in which basic goods such as food and medicine are in short supply, unavailable or unaffordable. Venezuela has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The opposition’s efforts to remove Maduro from power have been dismantled by the TSJ, which is accused of ruling in favor of Maduro’s regime.

Today’s protests are expected to continue. Earlier on Tuesday, President Maduro, speaking on state television, pledged to continue governing regardless of opposition actions.

“Venezuela’s fascist ring wing got orders from the north to fill the streets with blood and violence. Today they failed to flood the streets of Caracas” said Maduro. “I won’t waste time on this oligarchy.”

Maduro also said in the case of eventual elections, he expects the ruling party to easily defeat the opposition; he didn’t specify what elections he was referring to.

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Via TheAntiMedia.org,

Kicking off what CNN called “the most crucial week of statesmanship so far” for the new U.S. president, NBC Washington reported Monday that police in Virginia are investigating a striking piece of vandalism at the Trump National Golf Club.

From that report:

“Vandals dug holes in the club’s 13th fairway of the club’s Championship Course, spray-painted parts of the course and poured a chemical, believed to be bleach, on the grass, said the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.”

Continuing, NBC explained what makes the vandalism so profound:

“The word ‘resist’ was spray-painted on the fairway and symbols associated with anarchists appeared to have been spray-painted and dug into the course.”

 

Anarchists vandalize Trump golf course in Virginia. #MaraLago #ResistTrump #Resist45 #resist #DumpTrump @yashar @barry_corindia @JordanUhl http://pic.twitter.com/7NBJMXRzC7

— Laylaa_S (@theaddamstweets) April 4, 2017

The incident was reported Saturday morning, a day ahead of a scheduled golf game at the course between President Trump and Senator Rand Paul.

When CNN said this would be a challenging week for the president in terms of diplomacy, it was referring to the fact that on Friday, Trump is set to sit down with the most powerful world leader he’s faced yet — China’s President Xi Jinping.

U.S. tensions are high with China, with territorial disputes in the South China Sea and concerns over global financial markets pitting the two superpowers in a standoff.

It can’t look good for the Donald, then, to have a rival world leader in town days after an anti-government group publicly exhibited such a bold statement in opposition to his rule — and on the man’s own soil, no less.

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As part of China’s efforts to spur tourism with a “toilet revolution,” Consumerist's Mary Beth Quirk reports that bathrooms at tourist sites will now use facial recognition to keep them from grabbing too much toilet paper. Yes, this means your face could be scanned in the john.

The toilet paper thieves of the Temple of Heaven Park were an elusive bunch, writes The New York Times Javier Hernandez; they looked like most park visitors, practicing tai chi, dancing in the courtyards and stopping to take in the scent of ancient cypress and juniper trees. But hidden in their oversize shopping bags and backpacks was a secret: sheet upon sheet of crumpled toilet paper, plucked surreptitiously from public restrooms.

Now the authorities in Beijing are fighting back, going so far as to install high-tech toilet paper dispensers equipped with facial recognition software in several restrooms.

Before entering restrooms in the park, visitors must now stare into a computer mounted on the wall for three seconds before a machine dispenses a sheet of toilet paper, precisely two feet in length.

If visitors require more, they are out of luck. The machine will not dispense a second roll to the same person for nine minutes.

“The people who steal toilet paper are greedy,” said He Zhiqiang, 19, a customer service worker from the northwestern region of Ningxia.

 

“Toilet paper is a public resource. We need to prevent waste.”

Qin Gang, 63, taking a stroll through the park with his wife, said China’s history of crippling poverty had left some people eager to exploit public goods.

“It’s a very bad habit,” Mr. Qin said.

 

“Maybe we can use technology to change how people think.”

One wonders which department of Chinese natural resource protection was responsible for deciding that 24 inches of single-ply TP was 'enough'.. or for that matter, why a 9 minute break between wipes? Still, these are the wonders of 'new' communism

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Submitted by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa

I once asked Janet Yellen a rather straightforward question that would echo for much longer than I expected.

It was March 2015, and the Federal Reserve was under pressure from Congress to reveal details about an internal investigation into how key details of its interest rate policy deliberations had made their way into a report by a private sector firm.

I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal*, and I asked the following at a press conference:

Let's make something clear: Like any journalist, I love a good leak. But this was not your typical leak of important information to a journalist who then reported it to the public.

This was the sharing of private, market-sensitive details with a private party — Medley Global Advisors — which then shared that information with its clients. The leak, it should be noted, happened all the way back in 2012 but it was still being discussed in 2015 because — despite the Fed's internal investigation — nobody seemed to have gotten to the bottom of what had happened.

And back in 2012, any read on what the Federal Reserve might do to suppress interest rates as the US economy continued to crawl out of the Great Recession, could lead to huge profits for the traders who bet on such things. These days, traders are thinking about the next rate hike. Back then, interest rates were already at zero and the real insight gleaned from Medley's report was how aggressively the Fed would work to keep them there by using its balance sheet.

My question to Yellen had to do with basic public trust in the Fed. Why should the American people believe the central bank is working in its best interests if policymakers chat privately with movers and shakers on Wall Street? This was an alarming trend I had been reporting on since 2010, when I co-authored a report for Reuters entitled "Cozying up to big investors at Club Fed."

In it, my colleagues and I detailed other instances of market-moving information inappropriately being shared with investors, a trend we first observed when Fed officials speaking to bankers and hedge fund managers at conferences would suddenly go silent when a reporter walked by.

After the Yellen press conference, I took two weeks of paid leave for the birth of my daughter. When I returned, my editor at the paper told me I would no longer be attending Fed press conferences. No reason was given, and I left the job a few months later.

Market bloggers speculated the Fed had "banned" me from the press conference. I have no reason to think that was the case because the central bank let me back in as soon as I changed news organizations.

Fast-forward to April 4, 2017: Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker resigns abruptly after admitting he was a source of the leak.

As soon as I saw the news, the whole press conference incident flashed before my eyes.

But Lacker's admission that the Medley leak originated with him doesn't entirely settle the matter.

We know Yellen also met with Medley herself. Why? What did she say to them? Former Fed economist and Treasury official Seth Carpenter was also under scrutiny on the issue. What were the results of the Fed's own investigation? And of Congress'?

Also: Why did it take Lacker so long to come forward?

I'll have to keep asking.

*I'm identified in that transcript as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires, even though I was working for The Wall Street Journal, because both publications are part of the same company and, by tagging me as a Newswires reporter, Dow Jones could get more than one person in the room.

 

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Silicon Valley’s newest celebrity chef goes by just one name, Sally, and as Bloomberg reports, this chef has just one specialty: salad.

Still, Sally will make you the most perfectly proportioned salad you’ve ever eaten: through science.

Bloomberg goes on to note that Sally occupies about the same amount of space as a dorm room refrigerator, and uses 21 different ingredients – including romaine, kale, seared chicken breast, Parmesan, California walnuts, cherry tomatoes, and Kalamata olives – to craft more than a thousand types of salad in about 60 seconds, while the customer watches the process. The machine weighs in at 350 pounds, making it more appropriate for industrial settings than for home kitchens at the moment. “Sally will be going on a diet,” said its creator, Deepak Sekar, 35, founder of Chowbotics Inc., looking into his and Sally’s future.

The benefits of Sally are manifold, according to Sekar. “Sally is the next generation of salad restaurant,” he claims, comparing it to chains such as Chopt and Fresh & Co. For one thing, a robot can make salad faster than a human can. Also, you will know precisely how many calories your salad is delivering; there won’t be the problem of consuming one piled high with garnishes that turn out to be more fattening than a burger. And it’s more hygienic to have a machine prepare your salad than to have multiple people working on a line—or worse still, a serve-yourself salad bar.

Sally does require a human set of hands to prep the ingredients that go into its canisters, which are then installed in the robot. (Sekar called the process of chopping ingredients in the machine "too complicated right now," although it's something he promises for the future; he offered an analogy: "It's like paper getting stuck in a printer; it shuts down the process.")

This spring, Sally will debut in Silicon Valley, at Mama Mia’s, a fast-casual restaurant in Santa Clara, Calif., and at the corporate cafeteria at H-E-B Grocery Co. in Texas. The public launch will come on April 13 at co-working space Galvanize in San Francisco, whrre the public will be able to order Sally's salads. Sally’s current list price is $30,000; there will be an option to lease one for about $500 per month. Chowbotics will start delivering pre-orders of Sally in the third quarter.

Sekar also brought in Google’s original chef, Charlie Ayers to be Chowbotics's executive chef.

“A few of the things that I love about robots is that they don’t come in late, they don’t talk back, and they’re always accurate,” said Ayers over the phone. “And the labor savings.”

At Google, Ayers said, he first entertained the idea of a food robot. Ayers doesn’t lose sleep over the inevitable loss of kitchen jobs in Silicon Valley

“I don’t feel like I’m betraying my brothers and sisters by replacing them,” he said, resolutely.

 

“It’s happening in every industry now. You can either fight it, or be on the team that makes it happen.” He added: “People will find other things to do. Like fixing salad-making robots.”

Easy for the 56th Google employee to say now…

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Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Over the last couple of week’s (see here and here), I have been discussing the value of Shiller’s CAPE ratio. The Cyclically Adjusted P/E ratio, or CAPE, is often maligned by the media as “useless” and “outdated” because despite the fact the ratio is currently registering the second highest level of valuation is history, the markets haven’t crashed yet.  Of course, the key word is…YET.

In the second article, I shortened the length of the CAPE ratio to make it more sensitive to price movements which sparked a good discussion on Twitter about forward return analysis using a shortened smoothing period. Leave it to my friend John Hussman to do the heavy lifting:

.@ndunivant @LanceRoberts @MebFaber On question about CAPE5 vs CAPE10: CAPE isn't our own preferred metric by a longshot, but here you go. http://pic.twitter.com/M8rNB3gdUC

— John P. Hussman (@hussmanjp) March 27, 2017

Of course, the obvious question is what are his favorite metrics? Here you go.

@drenerbas @ndunivant @LanceRoberts @MebFaber Metrics w/ higher and more stable correlation w/ subsequent returns have clearer implications. http://pic.twitter.com/riXyQKMd68

— John P. Hussman (@hussmanjp) March 28, 2017

 

Within all of this is a simple point. No matter how you cut it, slice it, dice it, twist it, abuse it, or torture it – valuations matter in the long run.

But therein lies the problem, valuations are NOT, and never have been, a market timing tool. It is about the value you pay for something today and the return you will receive in the future, and a point that Research Affiliates recently took a very interesting approach to in a recent report:

“Academics have suggested various reasons for sustained higher equity valuations, from the microstructure benefits of improved participation and lower transaction costs to the macroeconomic benefits of larger profit shares. We examine the explanation put forward by Lettau, Ludvigson, and Wachter (2008) that rising valuations are propelled by the large reduction of macroeconomic risk in the US economy. Their intuition is simple—investors require lower returns from equity markets when the aggregate volatility of the economy is lower. It should come as no surprise that investors are glad to pay a higher price and accept a lower return for investing in a stock market that delivers less uncertainty.

 

Today’s economy is drastically different from just a few decades ago, and radically different from a century ago. Judging from the volatility of two major macroeconomic variables—real output growth and inflation—it has changed for the better. From the days before the US Federal Reserve Bank until today, the annual volatility of the economy has tumbled about 80%.

 

When we plot the measure of macro volatility with the inverse of a very popular valuation metric, Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio (CAPE), we find an intriguing and significant positive correlation between expected real equity returns and the aggregate volatility of the economy. Under the restrictive assumption that prices are fair and an appropriate return on retained profits, we assert that earnings yields are an appropriate proxy for an equity market’s future real return. For clarity, we name the inverse of the CAPE, an earnings yield, the cyclically adjusted earnings yield (CAEY). 

Research Affiliates makes some very interesting points and the entire paper is worth reading. However, I was most interested in the concept of the Cyclically Adjusted Earnings Yield (CAEY) ratio and its relationship to forward real returns in the market.

While the statement that lower valuations, inflation, and lower volatility are supportive of higher valuations is true, there have also been other issues as well as I addressed last week:

• Beginning in 2009, FASB Rule 157 was “temporarily” repealed in order to allow banks to “value” illiquid assets, such as real estate or mortgage-backed securities, at levels they felt were more appropriate rather than on the last actual “sale price” of a similar asset. This was done to keep banks solvent at the time as they were being forced to write down billions of dollars of assets on their books. This boosted banks profitability and made earnings appear higher than they may have been otherwise. The ‘repeal” of Rule 157 is still in effect today, and the subsequent “mark-to-myth” accounting rule is still inflating earnings.
• The heavy use of off-balance sheet vehicles to suppress corporate debt and leverage levels and boost earnings is also a relatively new distortion.
• Extensive cost-cutting, productivity enhancements, off-shoring of labor, etc. are all being heavily employed to boost earnings in a relatively weak revenue growth environment. I addressed this issue specifically in this past weekend’s newsletter.
• And, of course, the massive global Central Bank interventions which have provided the financial “put” for markets over the last eight years. 

Furthermore, the point suggesting investors are willing to accept lower returns in exchange for lower volatility is intriguing. 

While academically speaking I certainly understand the point, I am not so sure the average market participant does who is still being told to bank on 6-8% annualized rates of return for retirement planning purposes. 

However, this brings us to the inverse of the P/E ratio or Earnings Yield. The earnings yield has often been used by Wall Street analysts to justify higher valuations in low interest rate environment since the “yield on stocks” is higher than the “yield on risk free-assets,” namely U.S. Treasury bonds.

This is a very faulty analysis for the following reason. When you own a U.S. Treasury you receive two things – the interest payment stream and the return of the principal investment at maturity. Conversely, with a stock you DO NOT receive an “earnings yield” and there is no promise of repayment in the future. Stocks are all risk and U.S. Treasuries are considered a “risk-free” investment.

The chart below, which uses Shiller’s data set, shows the 10-year Cyclically Adjusted Earnings Yield. I have INVERTED the earnings yield to more clearly show periods of over and under-valuations.

With the CAEY currently at the 3rd lowest level in the history of the financial markets, it should not be surprising to expect lower returns in the future. Of course, lower returns is exactly what Research Affiliates suggests you will accept in exchange for lower volatility.

Right?

The chart below shows the CAEY as compared to 10-year forward real returns (capital appreciation only).

Not surprisingly, when the CAEY ratio has reached such low levels previously, forward returns were not only low, but negative. Currently, with the earnings yield nearing 3%, forward 10-year returns are going to start approaching zero and potentially go negative in the years ahead.

Of course, such declines in returns will, as they always have, coincided with a recession and fairly nasty mean-reverting event which has historically consisted of declines in asset prices of 30% on average.

But hey, you are okay with that, right?

I mean, after all, you did agree to lower returns when you bought into overvalued equity markets in exchange for lower volatility.

For investors, planning for future wealth and security relies on reasonable assumptions about future expected returns. No matter how you do the math, returns over the next decade, which can be forecasted with a fairly high level of predictability, will be low.

“Long-term trend of mean reversion implies lower-than-average earnings per share in the future due to a decline in productivity. So, we estimate that EPS growth over the next decade is likely to be at about 1%. In reality, the return for the S&P 500 over the next 10 years could be somewhere between zero to low single digits.” – Chris Brightman, Research Affiliates

Remember, while valuations are not a market timing tool in the short-run. Using fundamental measures to predict returns 12-months out is a fruitless endeavor. However, over the long-term, the math is always the same:

The price you pay today is extremely indicative of the return you will receive in the future. 

Just something to consider.

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Despite Obama’s promise of a socialist utopia whereby all of his snowflake, millennial supporters would jump at the opportunity to ‘spread their wealth around’ for the greater good, his one crowning achievement that attempted to implement that vision, Obamacare, has proven to be a complete failure.  As it turns out, while millennials may be naive, they’re not stupid. 

While it may not have been readily apparent to the young Obama voters in 2008, most of whom would have blindly approved of almost any policy he put forward good or bad, Obamacare was always just a gigantic tax, via both off-market premiums and actual taxes (or ‘penalties’ according to the Supreme Court), levied on young people to cover the expenses of older people. 

And perhaps nothing illustrates the cause of Obamacare’s epic failure than the following chart from the Washington Post which highlights the fact that the top 1% of health-care spenders use more resources, collectively, than the bottom 75% combined.  Slice the data a different way, and the bottom half of spenders all together rack up only about 3% of overall health care spending — a pattern that hasn’t budged for decades. 

In other words, the youngest people of this country are paying $1,000s of dollars each year for health insurance that they almost never use…and haven’t for decades.

 

As Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute points out, Obamacare solves precisely the wrong problem by taxing young people to provide subsidies to older folks who will then just consume even more healthcare and drive already astronomical healthcare prices even higher.

But Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, disagreed. He said that the study is based on quick and incomplete snapshots of health and argued that it is yet another way to divert from the health-care discussion we should be having: about how to rein in spending. Using this data to argue about where to get premium dollars from — from the pockets of the well or the sick — simply allows the system to grow ever bigger and prop up an even-more-expensive medical system.

 

“We all get diverted by hoping we can hide the bill under someone else’s pillow,” Miller said. “I think that’s the political argument you hear — these low spenders, we’re scared to death they might catch on to the fact they’re getting taken to the cleaners” by being forced to buy expensive health insurance they don’t need.

But, seemingly no amount of logic will ever convince idealists, like Marc Berk of Health Affairs, that young people somehow have an inherent obligation to “take care of people who are very sick.”

“The key takeaway message really is most people are in good health; they don’t spend a lot of money, and yet it’s important to have them be part of our insurance system. If they’re left out of the system, we’re not going to have the funds to take care of people who are very sick,” said Marc Berk, a health policy researcher and contributing editor of Health Affairs who led the analysis.

And while millennials may shout their verbal support at liberal rallies, they’re apparently much less willing to demonstrate their actual support with their wallets.

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Picking the worst possible time (or perhaps having it picked for it) to demonstratively launch a rocket, just as Trump and Xi are set to discuss the North Korea nuclear threat, with the US president reportedly prepared to announce that ““If China Is Not Going To Solve North Korea, We Will” and take unilateral action to eliminate any potential threats coming out of North Korea’s regime, moments ago South Korea’s Yonhap reported that North Korea on morning Wednesday fired a projectile suspected to be a ballistic missile toward the East Sea, military officials said.

The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff announced, “North Korea fired an unidentified projectile in Sinpo, South Hamgyong Province, into the East Sea.”

And while we await more details, as well as news of a potential response by South Korea, Japan, or even the US – recall “US Delta Force, SEAL Team 6 Prepare To Take Out Kim Jong-Un, Practice Tactical North Korea “Infiltration” – it is worth noting that earlier on Tuesday, a White House official said that the clock for resolving the North Korean nuclear issue “has now run out,” and the United States is looking at “all options on the table” to deal with the problem, according to Reuters.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the upcoming summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, also said that how to deal with North Korea is a “test of the relationship” between the U.S. and China.

“We would like to work on North Korea together. There is an opportunity,” the official said during a conference call briefing. “We’ve been … trying pretty much everything to bring about a safe and denuclearized peninsula. So this is some ways a test of the relationship.” The official stressed the urgency of the problem, saying, “The clock is very, very quickly running out.

“We would have loved to see North Korea join the community of nations. They’ve been given that opportunity over the course of different dialogues and offers over the course of four administrations with some of our best diplomats and statesmen doing the best they could to bring about a resolution,” the official said.

Needless to say, random gratuitous ballistic missile launches will not help, and if anything, may prompt the US to retaliate now that both Trump and Tillerson have said any provocation by North Korea will be met with a response.

On Sunday, Trump said in an interview with the Financial Times that China should help with the North Korea problem by using the “great influence” it has over Pyongyang, warning that if it doesn’t, the U.S. will solve the problem on its own, and that won’t be good for anyone. Trump also said he will use trade as an incentive for China to take action on the North.

On Tuesday, Trump said the North is a “humanity problem,” and he will talk about the issue with China’s Xi.

“North Korea clearly is a matter of urgent interest for the president and the administration as a whole. I think the president has been pretty clear in messaging how important it is for China to coordinate with the U.S. and for China to begin exerting its considerable economic leverage to bring about a peaceful resolution to that problem,” the White House official said.

“Certainly, it is going to come up in their discussions. Somewhere in the order of just shy of 90 percent of North Korea’s external trade is with China. Even though we hear sometimes that China’s political influence may have diminished, with North Korea, clearly its economic leverage has not. It is considerable and so that will be one of the points of discussion,” he said.

The Trump-Xi meetings will also be watched closely as to whether the U.S. stands up to China for bullying South Korea for hosting the U.S. THAAD missile defense system designed to defend better against ever-growing missile threats from North Korea.

The White House official said that the deployment will go ahead as planned.

“We are familiar with China’s objections to THAAD. The United States will always act to defend our allies and to defend our homeland against any threat, particularly one of the nature of the North Korean regime with the kinds of terrible weapons that they’re developing. There will be no move away from protecting our South Korean allies and the United States,” he said. The official also said that China’s retaliation against the South is “disturbing.”

“South Korea is a responsible, friendly, economically dynamic democracy that is seeking together with its ally, the United States, to put in place defensive systems. It doesn’t make much sense and at some levels even is disturbing to be punishing South Korea for wanting to do that,” the official said.

“If THAAD is a problem to other countries in the region, they need to look to North Korea,” he said.

It is unclear if today’s launch provoked Seoul to respond with a THAAD response, one that will be frowned upon be Beijing and other countries in the region.

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Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

 

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