Florida State Seminoles

[eCat]

That will be a real test for Dooksucks as his joint marriage income rises along with his age. I predict a new era of conservatism for him once he hits about 150K a year.

Eh. Doubtful. I am already in the 28% bracket. Politics are still left of center, but I am more the centrist democratic mindset. Sanders is just as scary as extreme republicans.

I don't see how you can be a liberal and not support in theory at least what Sanders wants. His platform should have been Obama's.

[Jungle Rat]

You also said years from now. Let the boy make his own mistakes

[Bklyn]

Politics aren't all economics, obviously.

[eCat]

WASHINGTON — Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.

Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, said: “Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.”

President Obama, on a trip to Tennessee this week, said that consumers should put pressure on state insurance regulators to scrutinize the proposed rate increases. If commissioners do their job and actively review rates, he said, “my expectation is that they’ll come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

[eCat]

New Yorker longs for the Guliani days back due to menacing homeless people

http://nypost.com/2015/07/08/homelessne ... al-in-nyc/

[Dave23]

WASHINGTON — Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.

Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, said: “Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.”

President Obama, on a trip to Tennessee this week, said that consumers should put pressure on state insurance regulators to scrutinize the proposed rate increases. If commissioners do their job and actively review rates, he said, “my expectation is that they’ll come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

"I'm totally stunned!", said no one...

[Bklyn]

New Yorker longs for the Guliani days back due to menacing homeless people

http://nypost.com/2015/07/08/homelessne ... al-in-nyc/

Slow news day.

I did write on here last year, though, that I saw some 20 something, white chick pan handling with a sign held up asking for money... all the while texting on a cell phone.

If she was homeless, that's some first world homelessness, for your ass.

[eCat]

I watched an interview with Donald Trump where a young reporter tried to Katie Courie him like she did Sara Palin

He held his own and didn't back off.

I think I would have taken it one step further. Start turning this shit around on those who sit in judgement of him.

What would have happened had Trump looked into the camera and said "all you who agree with me that immigration is out of control in this country, I want you to stop shopping at Macy's - don't spend another dime of your middle class incomes with them"

I have no idea how influential it would be but I'd love to see him take them on.

Now granted, I'm still inclined to say that Donald is going to self implode and ultimately will do more harm but for now , I like that he is killing it on immigration in this country and I hope he keeps getting a platform to sell it.

[AlabamAlum]

[img2]http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/ ... pChina.jpg[/img2]

[eCat]

The wool jackets are made in Mexico

[10ac]

I assume they are made where the textile mills are located.

[AlabamAlum]

The wool jackets are made in Mexico

Hahaha.

[AlabamAlum]

I assume they are made where the textile mills are located.

No doubt true, but when you support not doing business with companies that farm manufacturing to China and Mexico, and you send your own label to be made in China and Mexico, it calls your position into question.

On the flip side, if he had found/made a U.S. Textile mill, he coulda scored points with it.

[Jungle Rat]

Trump is a moron. God help us all if he evens sniffs the white house. He needs to go away.

[Bklyn]

Trump is a capitalist. If he wants his brand mass produced, he will be in cheap labor markets. I'm no fan of his, but I don't see hypocrisy in that one.

The Germans, though, they are hypocrites (pivoting topics).

[DooKSucks]

The Germans, though, they are hypocrites (pivoting topics).

Bullshit. Completely different situation.

[DooKSucks]

bloombergview.com
Germany Deserved Debt Relief, Greece Doesn't
By Leonid Bershidsky

Syriza, Greece's new ruling party, makes an attractive argument for writing off Greek debt: Wasn't Germany, now the biggest opponent of debt relief, itself the recipient of unprecedented largesse in 1953, when its foreign debt was halved? Attractive, however, doesn't mean convincing. Parallels between today's Greece and 1953 Germany are demagoguery, pure and simple.

The Federal Republic of Germany's creditors -- 20 countries including Greece -- indeed agreed at a London conference to write off 55 percent of the country's 32.3 billion Deutsche marks of foreign debt. "More than 50 percent of Greek debt needs to be written off," says top Syriza economist John Milios. "The solution that was given to Germany at the London conference in 1953 is what we must do for Greece.”

Milios went to college in Germany; he has a Ph. D. from the university of Osnabrueck in Lower Saxony. He knows well that reminding Germans of their 20th century history and then appealing to their conscience can be effective. The devil is in the details, however.

About half the total amount of German debt discussed at the London conference -- 16.1 billion Deutsche marks -- came from before World War II. Some of it had arisen from the unpaid reparations to the winners of World War I. Those unbearably high demands on the German economy had helped the Nazis, who promised to do away with the reparations, win power. Yet Konrad Adenauer, Germany's first post-war chancellor, had recognized the debts in 1951 as part of an effort to turn Germany from a ruined, deadbeat state to a responsible member of the Western world's economic system.

This was a goodwill move. Much of the debt had been issued in currencies that later lost most of their value and interest from the years between the wars was hard to calculate. So when Adenauer took on the obligations at conversion rates acceptable to creditors, "it was recognized at the outset that Germany would not be expected to pay the full bill that would emerge from a purely technical reckoning of the outstanding debt," Yale's Timothy Guinnane wrote in 2004 in the most authoritative paper to date on the 1953 debt write-off.

As for the post-war debt, here's what Frankfurt, Germany's current financial center and seat of the European Central Bank, looked like in 1953:
frankfurt

www.altfrankfurt.com

There are ruins at the center of Athens, too, but they are rather more ancient.

Germany needed a lot of money to restore the infrastructure and housing wiped out by the war. In some German cities, there are no pre-war buildings left apart from those painstakingly restored in the last 70 years. Besides, after Germany was split in two by the World War II allies, 10 million refugees from the Soviet-controlled eastern part of the country -- about as many people as there are in Greece now -- flooded the west, creating a humanitarian catastrophe of major proportions.

Germany had brought it on itself, of course, but it was no longer ruled by the Nazis: It was doing its best to expiate its past, work that still continues and that defines the consensual, value-based nature of German leadership in today's Europe. The creditors felt they needed to help that effort.

The circumstances under which Greece accumulated its debt are strikingly different. After restoring democracy in 1974 after seven years of military rule, the Greek government splurged on a full range of socialist benefits, including higher pensions and universally accessible health care, as well as on a big government. It financed a railroad that had more employees than passengers; even before the military coup, it started paying salaries to Orthodox priests, and it still does so, though there has been a pay cut after international creditors demanded it. For three decades, Greece ran unsustainable fiscal deficits, borrowed to cover them -- and then lied about them to Eurostat so it could join the euro in 2001.

There is a not-so-subtle difference between voluntarily taking on debts made by previous, rogue governments at a currency rate favorable to the creditors -- and heedlessly accumulating debts of one's own while concealing the true size of budget deficits. In the first case, the implication is harsh self-imposed discipline and penitence. In the second case, profligacy.

It might still be argued that if Germany deserved a second chance after all it did to Europe, then surely Greece should also be granted one.

There's a technical answer to that. As Guinnane wrote, "The people of some countries today are working to repay international debts incurred by earlier governments that they did not elect or want. Often the debt was used either to provide luxurious lifestyles for a corrupt few, or to pay for the repression of the mass of the population. Yet under the rules of the international financial system, the people of the country are still responsible for the debt or risk loss of access to international credit markets."

There is, however, a stronger reason why it would be wrong to write off Greek debt while the country is run by Syriza.

In 1953, countries of the eastern bloc were conspicuously absent from the London talks. The Soviet puppet state, the German Democratic Republic, did not shoulder any of the old German debt: In 1953, workers were rioting in the east, and Soviet tanks were called in to put down the disturbances, so the GDR did not need any extra economic burdens. After Germany reunited in 1990, it had to pay some of the east's share of debt under the London agreement.

Part of the reason West Germany was granted debt relief lay in the Federal Republic's importance as a Western bulwark in the fight against Communism. As Jurgen Kaiser wrote in a paper for Friedrich Ebert Stiftung last year,

In Germany’s case, these were the times of the Cold War and the system competition between the West on the one side, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. There was a great deal of interest on the part of the major creditors, the US and to a lesser extent the UK, in stabilising the country both politically and economically as quickly as possible.

The West German governments that benefited from the debt relief were resolutely anti-Communist and anti-Marxist. CDU, now the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, ran West Germany for the first two decades of its existence. It was less economically liberal than it is now, and it built a sizable welfare state over the years, but it was still a center-right, capitalist force that believed that only private initiative could lead to more or less universal prosperity.

The far-left political forces were outside the London process in 1953; they were in the GDR. Now, far-left Syriza wants to be on the inside, with its plans to nationalize banks and utilities and its costly promises to voters. It will use the debt relief to provide free electricity to households, subsidize rents, restore Christmas bonuses to pensioners, raise minimum salaries -- that is, to return to the practices that led to the accumulation of Greece's debt. It is an extreme case of moral hazard, which the post-war German governments conscientiously avoided.

Of course there are political arguments for Greek debt relief, as there were in the German case 62 years ago. European leaders are worried that Greece might leave the euro zone and trigger its disintegration. It might be less costly to write off some of the debt than to deal with such dire consequences of a tougher stand. Then, however, the problem should be framed in these stark terms: Greece's creditors would be paying ransom to its far-left government so it doesn't mess up the common currency, which Greece had no business adopting in the first place.

If that is the case, we should be spared parallels with the 1953 London conference. It had far nobler goals, and Germany was much better positioned to put creditors' generosity to good use than is Syriza's Greece.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg View's editorial board or Bloomberg LP, its owners and investors.

To contact the author on this story:
Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
Cameron Abadi at cabadi2@bloomberg.net

[AlabamAlum]

Trump is a capitalist. If he wants his brand mass produced, he will be in cheap labor markets. I'm no fan of his, but I don't see hypocrisy in that one.

The Germans, though, they are hypocrites (pivoting topics).

Well, the hypocrisy, to me, is him lambasting other capitalists for going overseas. And if he's suggesting he is going to close those markets, to have more homegrown industry, that goes counter to hardline capitalism.

[eCat]

I don't mind some hypocrisy - hell, he's the only one taking a hard stand against immigration.

We have more spanish speaking people in America than Spain.

That's not a melting pot - that's a takeover.

[hedge]

Don't be alarmist, eCat. The beauty and strength of America is its culture not its political structure (although I will admit that the former would be difficult if not impossible to imagine without the latter). I imagine the first couple of generations of immigrants from any country stuck to their mother tongue for the most part. But eventually, in order to participate in the broader culture, future generations picked up english and became, linguistically, "americans". America will absorb the spanish speaking folk, too, and will benefit from the cultural practices that they bring with them. It just takes time. Many people's feelings about latinos today is similar to how people felt about the first few generations of Irish and Italian (etc) immigrants. But nobody feels that way about Americans of Irish or Italian (etc) descent these days. The same will be true of latinos by the time your grandchildren are your age. Hell, they might even marry one...