"I Fear For What’s Coming" – 68% Of Americans Believe The Country Is On The Wrong Track (Zerohedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/26/2013 22:30 -0500

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

Are you deeply concerned about the future of America?  Is something in your gut telling you that our system is fundamentally broken and that the mainstream media is not telling you the truth about what is happening?  If so, you are definitely not alone.  Right now, there are millions upon millions of Americans that are absolutely horrified as they watch this nation deteriorate.  In fact, according to an analysis of recent polling data conducted by Real Clear Politics, approximately 68 percent of all Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track and only 23.5 percent of all Americans believe that the country is on the right track.

And of course our problems did not appear just recently.  In fact, many of them are the result of decades of very foolish decisions and they are not going to be fixed easily.  Unfortunately, there is very little consensus among Americans about how to fix any of our problems.  There is more anger, frustration, hatred and division in the United States today than there has been in decades, and there is very little hope that the great storms that are looming on the horizon will be averted.  Those that are wise are preparing for what is coming.  Those that are not are going to be absolutely blindsided by what is rapidly approaching.

Once upon a time, America was the wealthiest nation on the entire globe by a huge margin and it had the largest and most thriving middle class the world had ever seen.  But now America is drowning in the biggest ocean of red ink in the history of the planet and the middle class is being systematically destroyed.

If you read my articles on a regular basis, you already know all of this.  But now there are certain factors that are going to cause the problems of the middle class to greatly accelerate.

For instance, just consider what Obamacare is going to do to millions of American families.

The Foundry recently posted a story that detailed the extreme hardship that Obamacare is going to impose on one middle class family in Sonora, California.  This particular family is very healthy and does not have a history of health problems.  Up until now, they have had a health insurance policy with Anthem Blue Cross Insurance that they have been very happy with.

Back in 2011, this family was paying $389 a month for health insurance.

In 2012, due to changes in California law that figure went up to $499 a month.

Now, this family has just received a letter informing them that their current plan is being canceled and that if they want a new plan it is going to cost them $1,252 a month.

Needless to say, that news did not go over very well with that family.

Just think about it.

Can you come up with an extra $753 a month for health insurance?

Most American families certainly cannot.

Well, Kate Joy and her husband sat down and started trying to figure out how they could squeeze the new health insurance policy into their budget.  It turned out that they would have to cut out a lot of things.  The following is a list of the proposed cuts that they have come up with so far...

• Stop paying the extra payment on my mortgage: $100/month
• Stop eating out: $150/month
• Don’t go to the movies: $36/month
• Switch to getting a haircut every other month: $15/month
• Stop getting manicures: $40/month
• Stop monthly charitable donations to Wounded Warrior and Habitat for Humanity: $70/month
• Stop saving for an annual anniversary getaway: $60/month
• No Christmas gifts to extended family: $40/month
• Quit buying beef at the grocery store: $100/month
• Teeth cleaning only once per year: $30/month
• Cancel all magazine/newspaper subscriptions: at least $30/month
• Cut DISH service to cheaper plan: $50/month
• Cancel land line phone service: $70/month

If they make all of those cuts, it will save the family $791 a month.

Understandably, that family is having a very hard time feeling optimistic about the future right now.  In fact, at the end of the article Kate Joy is quoted as saying the following...

"I fear for what’s coming."

And of course her family is not the only one that is being absolutely hammered by Obamacare.

In a previous article, I discussed the results of one study which showed that health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.

And a different study found that health insurance premiums for healthy 30-year-old men are going to go up by an average of 260 percent under Obamacare.

All of this is going to suck a tremendous amount of "discretionary income" out of the economy.

In addition, millions upon millions of Americans are going to make the choice to go without health insurance altogether.  And considering the level of care that we get in many of these hospitals that is understandable.  For example, the body of 57-year-old Lynne Spalding was recently discovered in a stairwell at San Francisco General Hospital 17 days after she had disappeared from her hospital room.

Those that provide our "health care" don't care about us as much as they did in the old days.  Instead, the health care industry just wants to get as much money out of us as rapidly as they can and then move on to the next victim.

And of course health care is not the only thing that middle class families have to be concerned about these days.  Our national employment crisis is getting even worse, incomes are shrinking, and Obama is pushing Congress to approve a secret treaty that will ship millions more of our jobs out of the country.

And there are certainly a lot of troubling economic signs as we head toward 2014.  Just consider the following examples...

-Pending home sales in the United States have fallen for five months in a row.

-Machinery giant Caterpillar is reporting negative retail sales growth in every region on the globe.  Historically, the sales growth of Caterpillar has been one of the most important indications of where the economy is headed next.

-Major banks are warning the Federal Reserve that they may have to start charging depositors a fee.  In other words, you may soon have to pay for the "privilege" of putting your money in the bank.

Of course this is just the beginning.  Things are going to get much, much worse in the years ahead as our economy continues to deteriorate.

And as things continue to fall apart, people are going to become a lot more desperate.  To get an idea of what is coming to America, just look at what is happening in Greece.  Some poor people in Greece have become so desperate that they are literally infecting themselves with HIV just so that they can get monthly government payments...

Suicides rose by 17% between 2007 and 2009 and to 25% in 2010, according to unofficial 2010 data (398). The Minister of Health reported a further 40% rise in the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Suicide attempts have also increased, particularly among people reporting economic distress (610). Homicide and theft rates have doubled. HIV rates and heroin use have risen significantly, with about half of new HIV infections being self-inflicted to enable people to receive benefits of €700 per month and faster admission on to drug-substitution programmes. Prostitution has also risen, probably as a response to economic hardship. Health care access has declined as hospital budgets have been cut by about 40% (398) and it is estimated that 26 000 public health workers (9100 doctors) will lose their jobs (611). Further cuts are expected as a result of recent negotiations with the IMF and European Central Bank.

If you doubt this, you can find the original report with these findings right here.

A lot of people accuse me of being a "doom and gloomer" for writing articles like this.

A lot of people accuse me of trying to spread worry and fear.

But I do not see it that way at all.

I was recently asked what the number one issue is that has me so worried that it keeps me up at night.

Do you know what my answer was?

"Nothing."

Nothing that I write about keeps me up at night.

I am not worried about what is coming and I do not believe in giving in to fear.

Rather, I believe that there is hope in understanding what is happening, and I believe that there is hope in getting prepared.

Do you want to know who is going to be totally giving in to worry, fear and despair in the years ahead?

The people that are not getting prepared right now.

Do you want to know who is going to be jumping off the top of tall buildings in the years ahead?

The people that are laughing at articles like this one.

For most adults in America, they primarily define their lives by their jobs, their material possessions and by all of the toys that they have accumulated.  When those things get taken away, we are going to see a national hissy fit that is absolutely unprecedented.

The Republicans are not going to save us from the storm that is coming and neither are the Democrats.

It is coming.

The Scheme behind the Obamacare Fraud

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT

November 23, 2013 4:00 AM

Lies smooth the transition to a fundamental transformation of our health-care system.

By  Andrew C. McCarthy

Fraud can be so brazen it takes people’s breath away. But for a prosecutor tasked with proving a swindle — or what federal law describes as a “scheme to defraud” — the crucial thing is not so much the fraud. It is the scheme.

To be sure, it is the fraud — the individual false statements, sneaky omissions, and deceptive practices — that grabs our attention. As I’ve recounted in this space, President Obama repeatedly and emphatically vowed, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan, period.” The incontrovertible record — disclosures by the Obama administration in the Federal Register, representations by the Obama Justice Department in federal court — proves that Obama’s promises were systematically deceitful. The president’s audacity is bracing, and not just because he lies so casually while looking us in the eye. Obama also insults our intelligence. It is one thing to tuck evidence of falsehood into a few paragraphs on page 34,552 of a dusty governmental journal no one may ever look at. It is quite something else to announce it in a legal brief publicly filed in a case of intense interest to millions of Americans aggrieved by Obamacare’s religious-liberty violations. To be so bold is to say, in effect, “The public is too ignorant and disengaged to catch me, and the press is too deep in my pocket to raise alarms.”

Still, to show that politicians lie is like pointing out that it gets dark at night. The lie, the fraud, does not tell us why they lied in this instance. The fraud does not tell us what the stakes are. To know that, we must understand the scheme — the design.

The point of showing that Obama is carrying out a massive scheme to defraud — one that certainly would be prosecuted if committed in the private sector — is not to agitate for a prosecution that is never going to happen. It is to demonstrate that there is logic to the lies. There is an objective that the fraud aims to achieve. The scheme is the framework within which the myriad deceptions are peddled. Once you understand the scheme, once you can put the lies in a rational context, you understand why fraud was the president’s only option — and why “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” barely scratches the surface of Obamacare’s deceit.

In 2003, when he was an ambitious Illinois state senator from a hyper-statist district, Obama declared:

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. . . . Everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.

That is the Obamacare scheme.

It is a Fabian plan to move an unwilling nation, rooted in free enterprise, into Washington-controlled, fully socialized medicine. As its tentacles spread over time, the scheme (a) pushes all Americans into government markets (a metastasizing blend of Medicare, Medicaid, and “exchanges” run by state and federal agencies); (b) dictates the content of the “private” insurance product; (c) sets the price; (d) micromanages the patient access, business practices, and fees of doctors; and (e) rations medical care. Concurrently, the scheme purposely sows a financing crisis into the system, designed to explode after Leviathan has so enveloped health care, and so decimated the private medical sector, that a British- or Canadian-style “free” system — formerly unthinkable for the United States — becomes the inexorable solution.

Once you grasp that this is the scheme, the imperative to lull the public with lies makes sense. Like all swindles, Obamacare cannot work if its targeted victims figure out the endgame before it is a fait accompli.

The president is a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky tradition. He is trained to adopt the language and co-opt the sensibilities of the masses in order to become politically viable; then, once raw power is acquired, the Alinskyite uses every component of it to thwart opposition in patient but remorseless pursuit of the given “social justice” goal. Consequently, in pursuit of health-care statism, Obama moderated his rhetoric over the years, but not his ideological goals. He stressed pragmatism: a gradual campaign that kept the ultimate prize in sight. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” he told his hard-Left base at a 2007 SEIU health-care forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years or 20 years out.”

There’s that word: transition. It’s the route “change” takes to reach its final destination: “fundamental transformation.” If you’re paying attention, you’ll hear the word transition a lot in Obama’s health-care speeches. You’ll also find it in that Justice Department brief the administration no doubt wishes Eric Holder’s minions had edited more furtively:

The [Affordable Care Act’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. [Officials of the Department of Health and Human Services] have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013 [emphasis added].

Understand what this studiously unthreatening, gradualist gobbledygook means. A “group health plan” is employer-provided insurance; the phrase thus blithely refers to the “transition” of 156 million Americans who get health insurance for themselves and their families through work. It does not mention the so-called individual market, consumers who buy health insurance on their own. That’s because the administration assumes the “transition” of those 25 million Americans from their preferred plans to Obamacare will already have progressed well toward completion. And indeed it has, as we have seen in the millions of cancellation notices reported in the last six weeks.

The Justice Department’s assertion, based on the administration’s internal analyses, conveys that by the third year of Obamacare’s implementation — “the end of 2013,” which has since been extended by a year due to Obama’s “waiver” of the employer mandate — more than half of those 156 million group policies will have lost their “grandfather status.” “Grandfathering” is the mirage Obama projected for his illusory “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” guarantee.

You couldn’t keep your plan because Obamacare mandates made it impossible for private insurers to offer it. The mandates essentially require that everything and everyone be covered — even though you do not need coverage for everything (e.g., 23-year-old men do not need birth-control pills, neo-natal care, and periodic colonoscopies), and even though mandatory coverage for preexisting conditions is not insurance but welfare. The mandates are simply cost-shifting from the young and healthy to the older and sicklier — just as you would find in any universal, single-payer system. But Obamacare is camouflaged to make it look like the insurers are deciding not to offer your plan anymore, rather than that the government is forcing their hand.

Of course, that’s not the half of the deceit — not in a program the president publicly insisted was not a tax even as his Justice Department insisted to the Supreme Court that it was one. Obama also said, “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.” As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey noted this week, that promise too is fraudulent. If your doctor is not part of the network offered on the plans in your exchange, you will lose your doctor. To keep costs down, exchanges will limit their provider networks. Top doctors and hospitals are already being cut out. Moreover, the onerous regulations, reporting requirements, and constant threat of fee-slashing are beginning to drive doctors out of the profession.

Then there is the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Stanley Kurtz described the IPAB in all its frightening detail in a 2011 National Review cover story: “An unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic entity with nearly limitless power over federal Medicare spending, [it] will have the power to effectively ration health care through price controls.”

Put aside that the IPAB, which Obamacare insulates from judicial review, is an unconstitutional delegation of Congress’s legislative power — a model that, if adopted in spheres of activity beyond health care, would effectively end popular self-governance. As the rising costs driven by our health-care system’s suffocating regulations compound our astronomical debt, pressure is mounting for the IPAB to oversee cost-cutting — i.e., rationing — not only in Medicare but across the whole Obamacare framework. In fact, as Stanley recounts, the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission appointed by Obama made just such a recommendation — giving the president political cover to push hard for IPAB expansion. “Once IPAB’s rules govern America’s health-care system as a whole,” Stanley concludes, “we will be most of the way down the road to a British-style single-payer system.”

So how does Obama get all the way down that road? That is where the scheme’s manufactured crisis comes in. Obamacare commands that all Americans purchase health insurance, whether they want it or not. This is essential: If young healthy people refused to buy overpriced, largely superfluous coverage to underwrite the cost of insuring older and sick people, premiums would further skyrocket. As Powerline’s John Hinderaker explains, insurance companies would either have to fold or shift the costs to whatever employer plans still remained. This, in turn, would spur employers to cancel plans, dumping ever more people into the government exchanges.

The individual mandate is what is supposed to prevent that death spiral. There’s just one thing: The individual mandate is legally unenforceable.

Yes, there is a penalty for failing to purchase insurance — starting at $95 or 1 percent of income the first year and rising sharply thereafter. But the designers of Obamacare went out of their way to prohibit the IRS from using its usual array of civil and criminal processes (fines, liens, etc.) to confiscate it. The government may only collect the penalty by deducting it from tax refunds — meaning people who prudently structure their tax withholding so that no refund accumulates can avoid paying with impunity.

Obviously, it would be far less expensive for young people — who are already disproportionately strained by Obama’s no-growth, high-unemployment economy — to opt for a penalty they are not actually required to pay than to purchase prohibitively costly coverage. After all, under Obamacare, they can wait until they are sick to buy “insurance.” That is, Obamacare’s architects consciously created the incentive to destroy the program’s own insurance exchanges.

By the time that problem erupts, private insurance will already be gutted. Coverage requirements will already be dictated by government, as will pricing, with a subsidy structure that builds in progressive wealth redistribution. And doctors will already be beholden to government for patient access, treatment options, record-keeping requirements, and payment. That is, much of the single-payer infrastructure will be in place.

The manufactured financial crisis will be portrayed as a demonstration that exchanges based on the assumption that individuals will take responsibility for their own “private” insurance arrangements do not work. It will be time to solve the crisis by a seamless transition — there’s that word again — to a fully socialized health-care system, now overtly controlled by the government. “Free” health care for everyone — with all the substandard treatment, absurd wait times, and rationing that entails — will be supported by a few “tweaks” to our progressive tax system . . . no more unwieldy, unpredictable premium payments.

That’s the scheme. Or maybe you still believe that if you like your private medical system, you can keep your private medical system, period.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

The 'fatal conceit' of President Obama and Kathleen Sebelius

Washington Examiner ^ | 11/23/2013 | Star Parker

Posted on ‎11‎/‎23‎/‎2013‎ ‎7‎:‎59‎:‎32‎ ‎AM by markomalley

I have lined up my Christmas presents this year for President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

I will send them both a copy of the last book written by one of greatest economists of the last century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, F.A. Hayek.

The book is called The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.

Although the language and discussion of the book is not all that simple, the basic point is, I think, pretty straightforward. Hayek summed it all up in his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize.

He noted the critical importance that we know what we don’t know. Thinking you know what you don’t and can’t know, the illusion that men can plan, organize, and control things far beyond their understanding is the “fatal conceit” of socialism.

And, Hayek concludes, that knowing what you don’t know, “ought to teach the student of society a lesson of humility, which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellow, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

Take a walk through the mall or the supermarket. Look at the almost infinite varieties of products in stores and on shelves designed and engineered to meet the unique tastes and desires of millions of different individuals.

You don’t need a Nobel Prize or a Ph.D. to appreciate that no supreme bureaucrat with all the power in the world could ever conceive that vast array of products and decide they should be produced.

This is the product and beauty of freedom. Free people deciding what they want and living how they want. And free people deciding to take risk, go into business, and become entrepreneurs and produce and deliver these many varied products.

This approach — freedom — has produced bounty as has never before been produced anywhere under any other arrangement.

But the “fatal conceit” is a powerful force. It is a powerful force because there will always be haughty, arrogant people for whom humility is a challenge and who are convinced that the world would be better off if they designed it rather than letting free private individuals run their own lives.

This is totally what the debacle we now confront with the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — is about.

Anyone who follows these things and knows just a little bit of history knew from the day Obama signed this law in 2010 that what is happening today was inevitable.

Neither Obama nor Sebelius have ever done anything in their lives except work in one way or another in politics.

Neither has ever run a small business, let alone a big one. Neither has a day of experience of being an entrepreneur, of taking personal risk and taking a loan to make a product to serve customers and to meet a payroll.

But both have been supremely confident that they could take over and redesign one-sixth of a $16 trillion economy.

Nothing is more unique to each individual than his or her personal health profile and needs. Yet a couple of supreme bureaucrats in Washington have used their power to decide what kind of health care hundreds of millions of unique American individual citizens need and how to deliver it.

Can it be any wonder that it is all collapsing?

The only wonders are that there are still those who maintain that this socialist monstrosity can still work and that so many Americans have been willing to give up their precious personal freedom and turn their lives over to arrogant, pretentious, and deeply confused bureaucrats and politicians in Washington.

The War Against Achievement

Thomas Sowell

 

A friend recently sent me a link to an inspiring video about an upbeat young black man who was born without arms. It showed him going to work — unlike the record number of people living on government payments for "disabilities" that are far less serious, if not fictitious.

How is this young man getting to work? He gets into his car and drives there — using controls set up so that he can operate the car with his feet.

What kind of work does he do, and how does he do it? He is involved in the design of racing cars. He sits at his computer, looking at the screen, with the keyboard on the floor, where he uses his toes as others use their fingers.

His story recalls the story of Helen Keller, who went to an elite college and on to a career, despite being both deaf and blind. Her story was celebrated in books, in television documentaries and in an inspiring movie, "The Miracle Worker."

But our culture has changed so much over the years that the young man with no arms is unlikely to get comparable publicity. Helen Keller's achievement was seen as an inspiration for others, but this young man's achievement is more like a threat to the prevailing ideology of our times.

The vision on which the all-encompassing and all-controlling welfare state was built is a vision of widespread helplessness, requiring ever more expanding big government. Our "compassionate" statists would probably have wanted to take this young man without arms, early on, and put him in some government institution.

But to celebrate him in the mainstream media today would undermine a whole ideological vision of the world — and of the vast government bureaucracies built on that vision. It might even cause people to think twice about giving money to able-bodied men who are standing on street corners, begging.

The last thing the political left needs, or can even afford, are self-reliant individuals. If such people became the norm, that would destroy not only the agenda and the careers of those on the left, but even their flattering image of themselves as saviors of the less fortunate.

Victimhood is where it's at. If there are not enough real victims, then fictitious victims must be created — as with the claim that there is "a war on women." Why anyone would have an incentive or a motivation to create a war on women in the first place is just one of the questions that should be asked of those who promote this political slogan, obviously designed for the gullible.

The real war — which is being waged in our schools, in the media and among the intelligentsia — is the war on achievement. When President Obama told business owners, "You didn't build that!" this was just one passing skirmish in the war on achievement.

The very word "achievement" has been replaced by the word "privilege" in many writings of our times. Individuals or groups that have achieved more than others are called "privileged" individuals or groups, who are to be resented rather than emulated.

The length to which this kind of thinking — or lack of thinking — can be carried was shown in a report on various ethnic groups in Toronto. It said that people of Japanese ancestry in that city were the most "privileged" group there, because they had the highest average income.

What made this claim of "privilege" grotesque was a history of anti-Japanese discrimination in Canada, climaxed by people of Japanese ancestry being interned during World War II longer than Japanese Americans.

If the concept of achievement threatens the prevailing ideology, the reality of achievement despite having obstacles to overcome is a deadly threat. That is why the achievements of Asians in general — and of people like the young black man with no arms — make those on the left uneasy. And why the achievements of people who created their own businesses have to be undermined by the President of the United States.

What would happen if Americans in general, or blacks in particular, started celebrating people like this armless young man, instead of trying to make heroes out of hoodlums? Many of us would find that promising and inspiring. But it would be a political disaster for the left — which is why it is not likely to happen.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

This Could Be One of the Best Cases Ever Made Against Common Core – No One Expected It to Come From a High School Student

 

Nov. 15, 2013 7:23am Jason Howerton

Speaking at a local school board meeting earlier this month, a Tennessee high school senior issued a brief and incredibly insightful address on the problems with Common Core standards.

Ethan Young, a student at Farragut High School in Knox County, Tenn., made his case as to why he believes the school district should drop the new national education standards, a set of guidelines that were never voted on by Congress, the Department of Education nor by local or state governments.

“The president essentially bribed states into implementation via ‘Race to the Top,’ offering $4.35 billion taxpayer dollars to participating states, $500 million of which went to Tennessee,” Young said. “And much like No Child Left Behind, the program promises national testing and a one-size-fits-all education, because hey, it worked so well the first time.”

“If nothing else, these standards are a glowing conflict of interest and they lack the research they allegedly received,” he added.

Young also argued that Common Core standards display a “mistrust of teachers,” a line that prompted applause from the audience.

(YouTube)

“I stand before you because I care about education, but also because I want to support my teachers,” he said. “And just as they fought for my academic achievement, so I want to fight for their ability to teach. This relationship is at the heart of instruction, yet there will never be a system by which it is accurately measured.”

The high school senior went on to argue that “standards-based education is ruining the way we teach and learn.” He also revealed that legislators and administrators have told him “that’s just the way things work.”

Now, he’s daring to ask: “Why?”

“I’m gonna answer that question: Bureaucratic convenience,” he added. “It works with nuclear reactors, it works with business models, why can’t it work with students? I mean how convenient, calculating exactly who knows what and who needs what. I mean, why don’t we just manufacture robots instead of students? They last longer and they always do what they’re told.”

“Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves.”

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The problem is, the extremely bright student continued, “education is unlike every other bureaucratic institute in our government” because the “task of teaching is never quantifiable.”

“If everything I learn in high school is a measurable objective, I have not learned anything,” Young proclaimed. “I’d like to repeat that. If everything I learn in high school is a measurable objective, I have not learned anything.”

Government bureaucrats will never be able to measure “creativity, appreciation, inquisitiveness” but they are the “purpose of education,” he lectured.

“Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves — pleading, screaming and trying to say to us that we teach to free minds. We teach to inspire. We teach to equip, the careers will come naturally.”

Watch Young’s entire inspiring, must-see speech below:

Safest Place in Canada

In light  of all that is taking place within our world and country,   do you sometimes  wonder where you can find peace and safety.      Where is  the Safest place in Canada ?  As you  view this picture, I believe you will agree, we now know.      This picture was taken at Tim's in Tillsonburg, Ontario

Israeli Company Ices Tumors, Now Aims for Lung Cancer

By Ari Yashar, INN

Israeli company IceCure, developer of a treatment for breast tumors by freezing them into ice, is currently attempting to expand its technique into the treatment of lung cancer.

The site NoCamels reported Wednesday that the biomedical company specializing in cryoablation, a process of destroying diseased cells by freezing, will soon conduct its first clinical trials in Japan using the same technology on lung tumors.
President and CEO Hezi Himelfarb noted that the study is fully funded by the Kameda Medical Center in Japan.

According to the company’s website, the “IceSense3 system” is currently a minimally invasive, in-office treatment for symptomatic breast tumors, known as fibroadenomas. The procedure uses ultrasound imaging to guide a small probe, namely a thin hollow needle, into the tumor.

The end of the needle is then cooled to -274 F (-170 C) using liquid nitrogen, turning the tumor into a ball of ice and allowing the body to reabsorb the dead cells over time.

Requiring only local anaesthetic, the procedure is safe and can be performed in just 10 to 15 minutes. Furthermore the process leaves behind no scarring.

In June Globes reported that IceCure’s share price rocketed nearly 300 percent in two days after announcing that the American medical insurance company HCSC would provide coverage from June 15 for its IceSense3 procedure.

If the Japanese trials to apply the technology to lung cancer yield success, Himelfarb says it will “open the possibility to enter a huge market with hundreds of thousands of new cases every year.”

According to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer is the leading killer among cancers in the US.

U.S. Labor Force Declines by 720K October (Unemployment Manipulation)

U.S. Labor Force Declines by 720K

October Unemployment Manipulation

http://larrymwalkerjr.blogspot.ca/2013/11/us-labor-force-declines-by-720k.html

- By: Larry Walker II -

The big story out of the October household survey was the decline by 720,000 in the headline labor force, which largely reflected the loss of longer-term unemployed into the broader U-6 unemployment measure.

In fact, since January 2009, the U.S. Labor Force has only grown by 607,000. Yet, over the same period, 11,034,000 persons have been removed from the labor force (see chart above). Once removed, such are neither counted as employed nor unemployed, each amounting to the equivalent of zero-fifths of a person in terms of modern governmental accounting.

In Manipulation 101: The Real Unemployment Rate, we learned that as the size of the labor force erodes, the unemployment rate artificially declines. So let’s recall how the unemployment rate is calculated. The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed persons by the size of the labor force:

[ (A) Total Unemployed / (B) Labor Force = (C) Unemployment Rate ]

Thus, the official unemployment rate of 7.3%, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on its November 8, 2013, Employment Situation Report, was calculated as follows:

However, when the 720,000 longer-term unemployed which were removed from the labor force in October are added back, the real unemployment rate actually rose to 7.7% (shown above). And, if we were to add back all long-term unemployed workers, removed from the labor force since February 2009, the real unemployment rate would be 13.4% (also shown above).

As I reported earlier this year, in Black Unemployment Rate Closer to 37.9%, there is an alternative to the federal government’s phony reporting. Shadow Government Statistics publishes a more accurate measure of unemployment based on pre-1994 BLS methodology. The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994.

In other words, the SGS Alternate Rate adds millions of long-term discouraged workers back to the BLS estimate, which only includes short-term discouraged workers. In case you didn’t catch that, this means the BLS has eliminated long-term discouraged workers (i.e. those who have been without a job for so long that they haven't bothered to look for work in more than 12 months) from official unemployment statistics since 1994, thus distorting the true employment situation.

Accordingly, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics boasts of an official U-3 unemployment rate of 7.3%, and an official U-6 rate of 13.8%, the real unemployment rate, based on pre-1994 BLS methodology, has actually increased from 18.3% in January 2009 to 23.5% as of October 2013 (shown above).

Of course the Chief of the White House will simply continue to repeat something like, ‘Now that we’ve fixed (i.e. effed up) the nation’s health care system, it’s time to finish fixing (i.e. effing up) the economy.’

Ten Reasons ObamaCare Will Fail

FrontPage Magazine ^ | November 8, 2013 | Steven Plaut

Posted on Friday, November 08, 2013 8:27:35 AM by SJackson

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -

Ten Reasons ObamaCare Will Fail

Posted By Steven Plaut On November 8, 2013 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment

There is a fundamental difference between economists and lawyers (or legal scholars) when it comes to resolving complex social and economic problems.  Economists believe that human behavior and the functioning of institutions are based upon incentives.  Lawyers and legal types believe that one can resolve complex problems by passing laws and imposing regulations.  The latter think one can legislate away the problem.

I like to describe the approach by lawyer-types to such problems as “rain laws.” They are like trying to resolve the problem of flooding from heavy rainfall by means of a law making it illegal for it to rain.  Or solving droughts by passing a mandate that it must rain.  Making global warming illegal is a pretty close runner-up idea.  An example of a rain law in the area of health care would be to solve shortages, health care inflation, and inadequate coverage by passing a law making it illegal for people to get sick.  A second example would be Obamacare.

The entire matter of Obamacare is so complex that most people have lost sight of the fundamental problems within it and especially its rain law aspects.   Instead, the media and much of the public are concentrating on tangential matters, like whether or not the software on the Obamacare web sites is functioning properly.

I will not attempt here to spell out all the issues and problems with Obamacare.  I would just like to point out a few of its flaws in simple words, and these should be sufficient to understand why the entire apparatus will fail.

1.   Provision and production of health care services involves resources.   Those resources cost money.  The real costs of those resources will not be reduced under Obamacare.  Doctor, nurse, and technician salaries will not be reduced.  The prices of medical equipment will not be reduced.  The costs of hospital buildings and infrastructure will not be reduced.  The costs of resources used for developing and producing medicines will not be reduced.  Costs of other factors, such as the notoriously high expense of malpractice insurance thanks to the rather loony American tort system, will not be reduced.

2.  If anything, the costs of all the items cited above will rise under Obamacare.  That is because the most important openly-stated goal of Obamacare is to expand access to medical services and coverage for the uninsured.  In simple words, Obamacare seeks to expand consumption of or demand for medical services, without changing in any significant way the supply of medical services.  The number of man-hours, the amounts of medication, and the set of equipment required to perform any medical procedure or service will not change because of Obamacare.  Raising demand without any shift in the supply function produces inflation in the prices of medical services.

3.  When demand expands but the supply function does not, the only way to prevent this from manifesting itself in inflation is using price controls.  But price controls produce shortages, long queues, denial of access to services, and diminishing quality of services.  The main mechanism for controlling costs in other state-run medical systems, ranging from the British Health System to Medicare, is indeed price controls and shortages and queues.   Since Obamacare does nothing to change the cost of the inputs used in producing medical services, the only manner in which it can seek to prevent the inevitable inflation from expanded “coverage” is price controls.

4.   Price controls with regard to insurance itself have the same consequence as price controls regarding particular medical treatments and services.  They produce shortages.  The price controls regarding health insurance packages contained in Obamacare mean that the market for Obamacare-defined health insurance will unavoidably fail to clear.

5.  In every place they have been used, in every country and in every period of history, price controls create shortages and cause reductions in quality.  Ask tenants in NY rent-controlled apartments about this.

6.  To an extent, some of the shortages produced by price controls can be disguised with government subsidies.   But “suppressing” inflation of health care services with price controls does not really eliminate the inflation.  It just means that people will pay the higher prices through taxes instead of directly out of pocket as consumers.  Consumers will quickly figure out the scam.

7.  You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.  The Democrats can define a minimally acceptable health insurance package, but they cannot ensure that sufficient Obamacare insurance packages will be offered to consumers by the insurance industry to clear the market.   The more that Congress tries to twist the arms of the insurers to provide more policies to clear the market, in other words, the more it tries to escalate the level of regulation of insurers, the worse the problem will become.  The shortage in Obamacare insurance policies means that those who fail to find such coverage are left with the option of buying non-Obamacare health insurance, and this augmented demand will significantly raise the prices of such “private” non-Obamacare health insurance.

8.  From the start, the “problem” of the uninsured in the United States was very different from the way it was presented in the media.  Before Obamacare the number of Americans who did not have health insurance because they were too poor to buy it was basically zero.  That is because the truly poor could get their health insurance from Medicaid.   On the other hand, millions of healthy young Americans were choosing NOT to buy insurance because they preferred spending their money on other things, like education, child rearing, and housing.  This was no more of a social problem than the fact that few 30-year-olds save for their old age, while few 50-year-olds do not.  At 30, people have other concerns on their minds.   At most, a case might have been made for requiring that people get a high-deductible catastrophic health insurance policy, a bit like some states require car owners to have insurance that covers injuries their car may cause to other people.  Instead, Americans got Obamacare, a law whose pages must be measured by the kilogram.

9.  Denying the ability of medical insurance providers to differentiate insurance premiums based upon risk is idiotic and self-defeating.  It is like requiring that life insurance companies charge the same exact rates to 25-year-olds and 80-year-olds.  It simply ensures that the 25-year-olds will not want to buy life insurance and will probably refuse to buy it EVEN if they are charged a penalty for remaining uncovered by life insurance.  Indeed, such suppression of differential risk pricing is what lies behind much of the “uninsured” population “problem” and explains why these people have refused to buy insurance.  This suppression of differential pricing is a thinly disguised form of income and wealth redistribution.  It is as silly as requiring that non-smokers agree to pay higher insurance premiums in order to offset the high premiums that smokers would ordinarily be charged for coverage by the market.  Come to think of it, Obamacare contains THIS subsidy of smokers as well.

10.  A bureaucrat in Washington cannot effectively define the managerial principles and rules that would lead to the efficient functioning of an ice cream soda fountain outside of Washington.  Washington bureaucrats cannot deliver the mail with any semblance of efficiency or competence.  Why would anyone think they can create a system of regulations that will lead to the efficient functioning of thousands of medical providers?

The Declaration of Independence promises Americans they are free to pursue happiness.  It does not guarantee that they will be happy.  A governmental regulatory bureaucracy that set up regional exchanges to supervise consumer happiness and formulate definitions and regulations establishing the adequate amount of happiness would be an absurdity.  A set of rules that insisted that Americans have an entitlement to happiness, defined in the exact same way for all people as a “one size fits all” notion, without anyone bothering to contemplate how happiness is produced or what its costs of provision are, would be even more absurd.

So just why is Obamacare any less absurd than this?

The Myth of Poverty

http://takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_poverty_gavin_mcinnes/print

by Gavin McInnes

November 08, 2013

Multiple Pages

photo credit: Shutterstock

Some rich brats at Salon were recently bitching about the “GOP-shredded safety net” they claim has forced moms into the workplace. In a typical example of bourgeois naiveté, they assume it’s the libertarian lack of government that’s keeping us poor and tearing apart families.

This is false for at least three reasons. One, the government can’t create wealth. It can only make people poorer. Two, the poorest we have are single moms, and it’s the left that glorifies that lifestyle, not the right. And three, the poor aren’t even that poor.

Despite a hundred years of evidence that big government equals big losses, people still think that welfare works. Even many Republicans say tax dollars were well spent in FDR’s New Deal, despite the fact that Reason exposed how it made conditions worse for blacks. Work and government are diametrically opposed. The less work they do, the more jobs we have.

One of the only sane responses to my insistence that women would rather stay home was, “Yes we would, but we can’t afford it.” We’re told families need two incomes to stay above the poverty line. Why? You’re already paying rent for your place. Add another person in there and all you need are more groceries. And if you don’t eat shitty food, groceries are still pretty cheap. Judging from the size of your average American poor person, they’re not exactly starving to death. As John Stossel asked in a recent episode, “So our biggest problem is that our poor eat too much?”

“Asking for something is not the same thing as needing it.”

When we think of true poverty, the famous picture of the migrant mother in the Dust Bowl comes to mind, but today’s poor look more like Honey Boo Boo’s mom. They live in big houses or subsidized apartments. They play video games. They watch TV on a massive screen and they stuff their faces.

I grew up middle class in the suburban 1970s and our lifestyle then would be considered dirt-poor today. We had one black-and-white TV, one phone, and no air conditioning. If you check the welfare lineup today, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone living under those conditions. We had one car while growing up and my mom used it once a week to go get groceries. When my jeans got a hole in the knee, she’d iron on a patch. We only got presents on our birthday or Christmas and if it was something big like a bike, you’d be delirious with gratitude.

Being a single mom whose man walked out on her is about the worst financial situation a family can be in, but Democrats and the liberal media consistently turn a blind eye to the 70% single-parent rate among blacks and choose to sing “Sisters are doing it for themselves” instead.

I contacted a single mom in the Puerto Rican neighborhood next to mine in Brooklyn and asked her how much welfare money she gets. She told me she gets $400 a month, but the state handles 90% of her rent and food stamps handle about the same percentage of her grocery bills. She claimed she had to clean the occasional apartment for extra cash and I took her word for it that there was no extra boyfriend income feathering her nest. She told me it’s a myth that women get lots of money for having kids, as the state only adds $125/month per kid. She said scamming among other single moms was rare but admits she’s seen a few who get up to $800 a month in food stamps. This sounds like a dumb way to scam the state until you realize many will exchange the food for cash. Many Dominican moms use their stamps to send barrels of food back to their homeland.

They do it so often that grocery stores will supply the barrels themselves. The Dominicans they send it to don’t eat it. They sell it. So $400 a month after expenses is about as bad as it gets. The woman I spoke to has kids who have several times the creature comforts I had as a kid. They get just enough to get by, which means it’s just enough to continue the single-mother welfare pattern forever. Many Hispanic kids in the projects will be third-generation welfare. Can you imagine not knowing any relatives who ever had a job, including your grandparents? Many assume denying benefits like free lunches will lead to more hungry kids, but studies show there is little incentive to improve your standards when you’re being paid to squeeze by. According to TIME magazine, a recent Harvard study discovered “people are most likely to find a job just as their unemployment benefits run out.”

The single-mother predicament is about as bad as poverty gets in America, but having your rent and food paid for ain’t nothing to scoff at. Drive around slums in Philly or Brooklyn or LA, and you’ll see poor single moms living in five-bedroom houses with a front and back yard. Here in New York, we are inundated with towering projects where families pay only a few hundred dollars a month depending on their income.

I recently shot a movie on one of the poorest streets in Brooklyn and the single mom’s house we shot in was gigantic. She had four kids and each had their own room. One room appeared to be some kind of shrine to the matriarch and the walls were festooned with pictures of her from throughout her life. The fridge was packed, the porch went on forever, and the TV was one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. We shot all night at that location and I was startled to see her teenage son playing Batman on his Xbox at five in the morning. I hadn’t noticed him because he didn’t get up until five PM. When I was his age I worked at a gas station and if I wanted to play a video game, I’d bring a dollar to the arcade. Only spoiled brats had an Atari at home.

Simply stating the vast numbers of people on government assistance is not proof that we have a poverty problem. Kiyras Joel is the poorest village in all of America and it’s all Hasidim taking advantage of free welfare money and food stamps. They’re already doing fine with donations from “the community,” but if God’s non-chosen people are offering free stuff, why not?

Even if we did have the kind of poverty problem we’re told we have, the government would be the last place to look for a solution. The Washington Examiner recently pointed to the knuckle-whitening incompetence that has come to light recently via Obamacare. Our government is wasting billions on scammers and appears to have no intention of fixing it. This should be the story of the century, but the media refuse to go near it because it’s not an empowering Aretha Franklin song about sisterhood.

The government spends over a trillion dollars a year on welfare, but liberals say that’s not enough. Their proof is, “Look how many people sign up for it.” Yes, well, it might be time to consider the possibility that asking for something is not the same thing as needing it.

Republican @ 20 .vs. Democrat @ 40

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker

There's an old saying that goes something like this:

If you vote Republican at 20 you have no heart.  If you vote Democrat at 40, you have no brain.

The problem is that young voters have, for the last eight years, been voting for their own destruction, and now they're getting it -- in spades.

The worse news is that the Republicans are simply asking whether you'd like to go in the wood chipper feet first or head first rather than offering actual policy fixes.

Let's just focus on two, both of which come from the same problem: Monopolies.

First, education.

What happens when you throw what amounts to unlimited amounts of money at something by allowing people to borrow virtually any amount?  The price shoots the moon.  Then you change the law so that the borrowed money can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and voila -- instant slaves. 

You demanded crazy resort-style colleges, instead of plain cinder-block dorms and a place to learn something.  The colleges engaged in an arms race of stadium and gilded "student center" building, all financed (that is, with debt that will have to be paid) and in some cases they were (and are) crazy enough to issue century bonds for it (that is, 100 year maturities.)  What are the odds that said building will be standing in 100 years?  I'll take the other side of that one, but when you (and your parents) march into the financial "aid" office and file that FAFSA and then sign on the line you are directly and intentionally blowing your own financial brains out.

I remind you: You voted for this with both ballots and your wallet over the last couple of decades and you're still doing it today.

What you didn't demand and vote for was no student loans -- at all, period -- and level pricing so that you cannot be forced to pay for the "poor kid" sitting next to you in class, refusing to consent to anything else.  Without students there is no school which means you had the power as students and parents to stop this crap but you refused to do so and instead advocated what has happened.  While it sounds really good to "help" said poor kid what happens is that he pays the same and you pay his bill in full.  He used to be able to flip pizzas to afford college but now he doesn't have to -- you get to pay both his bill and yours.

Still feeling good about your alma mater and the policies you demanded with your applicaton and attendance, never mind voting for them -- just so you didn't have to flip those pizzas and live in a basic cinder-block dorm but instead could drink beer all Friday night in a gilded "suite"?

Talk to me about how good you feel since avoiding that pizza-flipping means you will never be able to buy a house or start a family because of the crushing debt you are carrying as the policies you voted for and demanded have inflated the cost of college by a factor of at least 5 times!  The result is over a trillion in student loan debt and a default rate of roughly 1 in five.

Oh, and we'll get to another part of this issue shortly, which bears on this too.

Second, health care.

Take the price of a routine birth from 1963 and inflate it by the CPI from then to now.  You find that you should be able to have a routine birth in a hospital for just under $1,000 in cash.

How much does it really cost?  Eight, ten, 20 times that much.

Why?

Because you again voted for and demanded an infinite money supply to feed the medical system through "benefits" at your job and the price rose as a consequence from monopoly practices and protections, exactly as it did in "higher education."

Now you can't possibly afford even routine medical emergencies without "insurance" and nearly 1/5th of the economy is now medical care -- which comes directly out of your hide.  This is a major part of the reason that wages have collapsed and your standard of living and the job market are both in the toilet.

Even very poor people could come up with $1,000 for a birth if we hadn't done that, especially when you have 9 months to do it.  How do you expect a poor, or even middle-class person, to come up with 20x that much?  You don't, but this is what you voted for and demanded both in the ballot box and at your place of employment.

Then you went even further and demanded (and voted for) Brosurance, otherwise known as "Obamacare."  And you got that too -- I warned at the time that this would roughly double the cost for health "insurance" for healthy, young people. You called me names and said it would make your prices go down. 

I pointed out that this claim and your belief in it was irrational; after all, what's the price of fire insurance on your house if you call the company to buy it after lighting the house on fire? 

This is what Obamacare forces and the result was utterly predictable, even as to magnitude.  I wasn't off by much with my back-of-the-envelope guess, as it turns out.

Now where's my apology and admission that I was right -- you again voted to put the shotgun of government in your own mouth and blow your brains out.

Crickets I tell you, crickets....

What's worse about both of these fields is that they're technologically strong fields -- both are heavy users and exploiters of technology -- that is, productivity improvement. 

As a result you should see dramatically lower costs for both over time because the cost of technology over time makes things cheaper virtually everywhere -- except in these two places.

How much is a computer today .vs. one five years ago of the same capability?  Much less.  How about of 10, 15, 20 years ago?  The capability that I have on my desktop today was not available at any price -- save perhaps in mainframes that consumed an entire floor of building and cost millions.

So why are education and medical care different? 

They're not -- but the reduction in cost due to technology has been siphoned off and turned into an escalation of cost instead, while you are being literally extorted to pay those funds after you in fact both demanded and voted for exactly these policies, irrespective of whether you voted Republican or Democrat!

So enjoy the pain folks.  All you've gotten thus far is the tip and that has hurt badly enough but I assure you the rest is going where that went, and you're going to get it good and hard to the limit of your ability to take it -- if not beyond.

I, and a few others, warned you but you either called me names or turned what was a populist movement (e.g. The Tea Party) into a "Guns, Gays and God" distraction rather than sticking to the demand that those who lied, cheated and stole deserve to go bankrupt and then be indicted, prosecuted, tried and imprisoned for their offenses, thus deflating the excess leverage and returning sanity to prices througout the economy.

And by the way, before you whine that this politician or that lied about the outcome, may I ask you exactly when you've ever had a politician not lie to you, especially when it comes to outcomes?  Ever read PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of *****s?  Written in 2003 there's damned little excuse more than a decade later for continuing what you've been doing, whether you're Democrat or Republican.

You can't call something you consent to******and as such you may as well smile because you are getting exactly what you asked for, indeed, what you demanded.

Greenfield: The Cloud Dwellers

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog ^ | Sunday, November 03, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on Monday, November 04, 2013 7:19:26 AM by Louis Foxwell

The Cloud Dwellers

Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month's bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you're already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.
The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things. Comparing the naked numbers is as misleading as comparing the average salaries in Tokyo and Bombay. What matters is not how much money you have, but how you live.
The $110,729 and $4,955 don't reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living. Much of that $110,729 is home equity. But why do you need to shoulder the burden of a mortgage, when the government will just give you housing for free?
It's misleading to think of the $110,729 families as privileged and of the $4,955 families as oppressed.
The $110,729 and  $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual baseline consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn't bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.
In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.
To understand this, think of the "Cloud". You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a "Cloud" of someone else's servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the "Cloud" confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.
America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud.
The $110,729 families are independent while the $4,955 families are living in the cloud. Their cloud is "Social Capital". Social Capital is their support system within their extended families and the government. Instead of using real capital, they use the collective Social Capital of family resources and government aid.
The $110,729 family pays for everything. The $4,955 family pays for very little. The $110,729 family earns and saves money because that is its medium of exchange which it uses to obtain food, shelter and clothing. The $4,955 family uses money for luxury goods like televisions or sneakers. It doesn't need to save money because cash is just bonus points. Its necessities like food, medicine and shelter are covered by the social capital of the government.
The $4,955 family is single parent, but is built around a large extended family, mostly female, and mostly on various government benefits. That family is capable of providing valuable aid, not just in government money, but also by babysitting and helping out at home.
That extended family is one reason why Clan $4,955 has 5 to 8 kids, while the mother of the two-parent $110,729 household is tearing her hair out trying to figure out how to manage two kids and a full-time job. The $110,729 household doesn't have much of an extended family. Their grandparents live somewhere else and are enjoying their retirement. They pitch in sometimes, but not nearly as much as their own parents did, and they have their own financial problems.
The $110,729 family is isolated while the $4,955 family is part of a social network that extends through a dozen female relatives to the entire government. Is it any wonder that the $4,955 family also has much less worries and is living an existence more associated with 19th century fantasies about an indolent Polynesian paradise than the grim modern day struggles of the $110,729 family living in the house they don't own and worrying what will happen to their standard of living if they lose their jobs tomorrow?
The $4,955 family has a lot of kids. Its kids, in traditional Third World style, are disposable. If a few go down, there will be public tears and wailing, but there will be a bunch of others left. Clan $4,955 doesn't do helicopter parenting or hover over Shane Apple Buckbaum-Cleavens and worry about how he's going to get into Harvard when the waiting list for a private kindergarten is so long. The $4,955 family's kids are disposable. They bring in money to the family in the form of benefits, then they drop out of school, hang around causing trouble until they marry, drift to another city or go to jail.
Their parents cry over them, a lot, but they don't invest too much in them because no single child represents their future.
The offspring of the $4,955 family are more likely to be shot, stabbed, locked up or die of a drug overdose, but the $110,729 family is more likely to be left childless. It's almost completely certain that the $4,955 family will extend into the third generation and will be several times larger. Meanwhile the $110,729 family may not even have a third generation or its third generation may see the four grandparents shrink down to two or three grandchildren.
Since the $110,729 family is actually funding the lifestyle of the $4,955 family, that's a problem, but it's a problem that no one talks about. And when social capital gets tight, Medicare for the $110,729 family's grandpa is more likely to be cut than the endless community grants that help keep the $4,955 family and all their many kids comfortable and voting Democrat early and often.
The $110,729 family is responsible. It understands that money is finite and that the government can only do so much. The $4,955 family doesn't understand that and won't accept it and has a lot more free time and energy to do something about it. The $110,729 family looks at a variety of factors before voting. The $4,955 family is practical, it looks only at its own bottom line.
No money, no vote.
On paper, the $4,955 family is poor. But so were the Polynesian beach combers. Poverty is relative. From the perspective of a white male capitalist, the $4,955 family is ridiculously poor, but its life is actually comfortable and worry-free compared to the $110,729 family.
On paper, the $4,955 family is poor. But in a society where hundreds of billions of dollars go into funding social capital, the old dollar-and-cent household values no longer apply.
A 1913 family that had less than 5% of the net worth of the average household would have been living a grim existence complete with patched clothing, hungry children and a ramshackle hut that they were paying an outrageous weekly rent for. But a 2013 family with 5% of the net worth has just dropped out and is letting the average household carry it.
There are still plenty of working poor in America, but the broken families that pad out the bottom of that $4,955 statistic rarely work for a living. They work for extras. Social capital has freed them of the need to work for anything except luxuries. And when they work, they don't pay taxes, usually they get someone else's taxes back as Earned Income Credits.
On paper, the $110,729 family has an impressive household worth, but much of that worth comes from a mortgaged home that it is struggling to keep up the payments on. The $4,955 family lives in a housing project that they can’t lose no matter how many payments they miss on their high interest credit cards. If the payments get too hard, they'll drop $199 on a hole-in-the-wall lawyer to declare bankruptcy.
The middle class has become the new poor. The old economic uncertainties of the households at the bottom of the ladder have fallen squarely on it-- with none of the sympathy, which is still reserved for their welfare wards.
The middle class is trapped by its own aspirations. Those aspirations are weighed down by a political system that exists for the benefit of the upper and lower classes. Though the middle class still has the majority of the vote, it has the least political influence because it has the least disposable time and wealth, and lacks a dedicated political class to represent its interests
The United States is no longer a middle class country. It is a country whose political establishment answers to the operatives of the very rich and the very poor, the donor class and the welfare class. Politicians have a vested interest in catering to very rich donors or welfare voters because they have the time, money and organizations to get their way. And what they want is wealth redistribution upward and downward from the middle class.
The middle class is being looted by crony capitalists and welfare clans. The liberal Robin Hoods who direct billions in stolen money to Green Energy companies and ghetto voters do their best to convince the middle class that it should vote for them because it's actually poor. 
The middle class is poor, but it has all the disadvantages of poverty and none of the advantages.
Its workaholic efforts leave it at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with the idle rich and poor who launch Green Energy companies that are meant to fail and stand in line waiting to cash their latest government check every other week. The middle class just doesn't have the time or energy to do anything about the trap that's in. Unlike the rich and poor, it can't even get politically organized.
The Obama vision is a "Cloud" America where all the money is in the government cloud and each family is given support according to its needs and is taken for whatever its abilities earn. That vision is already true on the $4,955 scale and is coming true on the $110,729 level as well.
The government money "Cloud" works about as well as Healthcare.gov. Its brand of central planning has failed everywhere it's been tried. But the experiment won't completely crash until the middle class does. Margaret Thatcher famously said that Socialism works until it runs out of other people's money. The "other people" are the middle class who have the most money and the least ability to protect it from the cloud dwellers.
There are two Americas; the America of the working class and the Obamerica of the government class. Measuring poverty in net worth is relevant in only one of these Americas. To measure poverty across both nations, we must speak of the poverty of freedom, the poverty of family and marriage, the poverty of economic security and the poverty of leisure time.
These are the true measures of modern poverty in an America where some people are living in a postmodern government cloud that uses social capital instead of personal income and others are scratching out an uncertain living to support the "Cloud Dwellers" who manage the government bureaucracy, work at non-profits and squat in the $4,955 space.
Our postmodern economy punishes personal aspiration and rewards the surrender of economic independence to the government. More Americans are vanishing into the government cloud, going on disability, dropping out of the system and entering the cloud until the cloud is too heavy to keep on floating in the sky and sinks down to earth or until the New Poor get tired of living fearful lives to subsidize the utopian fantasies of the 1% and the Polynesian lifestyles of the $4,955.
An American workers' revolution will not be a Socialist revolution, it will be an Anti-Socialist revolution of the new poor of the middle class.