Thursday, December 19, 2013

The Government Is Quietly Giving Way More Housing Aid To Rich People Than Poor People -


Business InsiderBy Danny Vinik | Business Insider – 23 hours ago


The Center for Budget Policy Priorities released a number of charts today that shows how much the federal government favors high-income households over low-income ones in housing benefits.

This largely results from the fact that homeowners receive significantly more aid than renters and high-income Americans are much more likely to be homeowners.

In 2012, the federal government gave out $240 billion in housing aid. Income data is not available for all of it, but of what is available, more than half went to those with incomes greater than $100,000 ($81.6 billion). Only $40 billion went to those with incomes less than $50,000.

Overall, high income households receive four times as much in housing aid as low-income ones.

The main reason for this is the majority of federal housing aid flows to homeowners, not renters. The mortgage interest deduction is the most well-known program that subsidizes homeownership. That deduction alone is larger than all federal rental aid combined.

The federal government gave out about $60 billion in housing benefits to renters in 2012. It gave out more than three times that much to homeowners. Low-income households receive the vast majority of that rental aid, but the opposite is true of aid to homeowners. That flows primarily to high-income households. 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/government-quietly-giving-way-more-212800893.html

This comes at a time when renters are struggling to keep pace with rising housing costs . Fifty percent of renters now spend more than 30% of their income on housing. This has forced renters to cut back on other household necessities or live in inadequate units.

CBPP rental housing2


Renters are more likely to face a severe cost burden (defined as spending at least 50% of income on housing) than homeowners are. This is a result of rising median gross rent and falling media income over the past 15 years.

For both renters and homeowners, the percentage of households that have a severe affordability problem with their housing has increased since 2001.

These problems are only going to get worse as millions of seniors find themselves in need of rental housing in the coming decades. 

Yet, while this silent crisis continues, the majority of the money that the federal government spends on housing flows to homeowners, not renters.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Obama's public admiration dropping


Poll: Public admiration of Obama drops
Image
President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks about immigration reform,
Monday, Nov. 25, 2013, at the Betty Ann Ong Chinese Recreation Center in San Francisco.

By Charles Babington and Jennifer Agiesta, Associated Press
Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2013 | 10:09 a.m.

WASHINGTON — Americans' perceptions of President Barack Obama are falling not only on his handling of the economy and other big issues, but also on more personal qualities such as honesty, a poll finds.
A clear majority of adults, 56 percent, say "honest" does not describe Obama well, according to The Associated Press-GfK poll. That's worse than his 52 percent rating in an October poll.
The latest poll finds 41 percent think the president is decisive, 44 percent see him as strong and 45 percent call him inspiring. Click here to read full article

Poor working class blacks to be left out of Obama's Health program


More and more black people are outraged at Obama’s healthcare plan?  Who's next?
 
Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law

“A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.” Click here to read full article

Jim Brown NFL Hall of Famer Rips Obama

Didn't Jim Brown at one point work on or with the Obama campaign?

Jim Brown rips Kobe Bryant, gives Obama a 'C' and talks civil rights on Arsenio Hall
Show
2013-10-03-brown2 (1).JPG
"On the job President Obama has done in office: "When you ask me that, that's a difficult one. I like his family. I like him as a human being, but somehow it seems like he's over his head or maybe he underestimated the system of government we had." Click to read full article

What's your opinion?

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Healthcare.gov sign ups. More problems?

Exclusive: Thousands of HealthCare.gov sign-ups didn’t make it to insurers
Posted by Sarah Kliff on December 14, 2013 at 10:00 am

Enrollment records for close to 15,000 HealthCare.gov shoppers were not initially transmitted to the insurance plans they selected, according to a preliminary federal estimate to be released Saturday.

While these cases pose a challenge for the Obama administration, officials say they believe the situation is improving. Since early December, fewer than 1 percent of HealthCare.gov enrollments did not make their way to health insurance plans...... Read full article

Who is Alejandro Mayorkas?


Alejandro Mayorkas???  Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Who is this man?  Why was he nominated and easily approved for the position. Is he another one of Obama’s cronies. Why is there growing controversy about his ability
to sell green cards to wealthy foreign investors and their family members?


To read more about this man named Alejandro Mayorkas see the article written by Michelle Malkin

Friday, December 13, 2013

Can Obamacare Be Fixed?

Found this article about the problems with Obamacare. Read it and interested in your opinion

Don't Be Fooled: Obamacare Is Not Getting Better; It's Not Fixable
David Limbaugh | Dec 13, 2013

If you have just returned from a space mission on a spaceship without Internet access and some Kool-Aid-drinking liberal has assured you the disastrous Obamacare problems are behind us, let me do my part to help deprogram you.

The website problems were too numerous to count, and they are just the tip of the Obamacare iceberg. The substantive problems with Obamacare are enormous. Oh, and the website problems continue, as well.

Obama is not about to abandon this law, because he cares more about fundamentally transforming the nation than he even does about his approval ratings, which have reached an all-time low. Besides, if he's lost the public's trust, it's not his fault but ours, because, to paraphrase Valerie Jarrett, we are just not quite capable of fathoming his surpassing greatness, and we'll eventually recover our senses.
As a returning cloistered astronaut who has just emerged from his propaganda session with the Obamabot, you should hear some highlights about Obamacare from just the past few days' news.
The Obamacare website has reportedly violated the Federal Information Security Management Act by failing to perform a series of security control assessment tests.

The Department of Health and Human Services reports that just 365,000 people have signed up for private health insurance under the new law, which is abysmally far from its already meager goal of signing 1.2 million by the end of November. Most of these came from the 14 state exchanges, and only 137,000 came from the federal website, HealthCare.gov. As some 5 million have already lost coverage because of Obamacare, it's hard to imagine how the law won't result in millions more people losing their coverage than new people acquiring it, even counting the 800,000 new Medicaid enrollees. All the while, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius falsely assures Congress that everything's fine, saying, "We are seeing very, very positive trends" now that HealthCare.gov is supposedly working better.

Some who have signed up for coverage on the website are receiving email notices informing them they shouldn't assume they are covered unless they "have seen the Confirmation Letter from the Disbursing Office!"

Indeed, according to insurance industry consultants, those who have signed up for coverage may find that their coverage has lapsed because to secure coverage, a customer's premiums first must be paid. Reportedly, only 5 percent of Obamacare enrollees have paid at this point.

The Washington Post reports that patients with high medical bills are having difficulties determining which plans on the exchange fit their particular needs. In the website chaos, this information is far from readily obtainable.

Reuters cites a Cornell University study showing that just half of the country's psychiatrists are likely to accept Obamacare.

Only 7,000 people in Illinois have signed up for Obamacare. In Missouri, the scorched-earth law may cause major cuts in hours for substitute teachers and a potential fine of $150,000 for public schools.
A little-known regulation from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services may cause as many as 3.5 million poor and elderly people to lose home health care coverage beginning Jan. 1.

It's now common knowledge that Obamacare exchanges are excluding many physicians, hospitals and drugs, and a panel of doctors will testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that they are being dropped from patient provider networks because of Obamacare.

Sebelius refuses to provide straight answers to questions about whether and how often she met with President Obama about Obamacare and the website prior to the rollout.

Adding insult to injury, HHS is obstructing a congressional investigation by instructing contractors working on the website not to release documents to the investigators.
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While we are treating Obama's fraudulent promises on Obamacare as past-tense deceit, we may be overlooking his ongoing duplicity. As The Wall Street Journal's editors also observe, "the reason for all this obstruction and statistical juking is so the White House can get the press corps and Democrats to believe that the worst is over and that ObamaCare is now rolling toward success. ... But it's impossible for an outsider to know what the truth really is because HHS and the White House continue to manipulate and bury the real statistics."

There's one other thing I want you space travelers to understand before we end this session. Our indignation over Obama's lies about our ability to keep our plans and doctors is wholly justified, but let's not overlook another consequence of this betrayal beyond the government's outrageous
severance of our freedoms and personal relationships with our health care providers. Obamacare's exclusion of doctors and hospitals from the exchanges necessarily means a reduction in the quality of health care overall, thus negating one of the main ostensible purposes of this abominable law in the first place.

Next time you decide to go on a space mission, demand Web access and give me your email address.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Our Founding Fathers Proclamation

 

Who Can We Trust When The Leader of Our Country Lies To Us?

The Solution To The Human Dilemma

Kalle Lasn, 19 October 2013  


As our planetary crisis deepens, radical new visions of the future are bubbling up like never before. All the norms, rules, traditions and taboos that we've taken for granted for centuries are suddenly up for grabs. As Einstein famously pointed out, we cannot solve a problem by using the same type of thinking that created the problem in the first place.

So what are some of the scenarios that could change the direction of our civilization?

Could a new messiah, a modern day Buddha, Muhammad or Jesus, suddenly appear on YouTube with a message that goes viral and sparks a spiritual movement that takes humanity by storm? Could he—or maybe this time a she—demolish all the sacred cows and false gods we currently worship—growth, consumerism, individuality, freedom, progress—and give us a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence here on this Earth?

Could an astronomer sitting in an observatory high in the Andes suddenly stumble upon intelligent life on another planet? What an existential jolt that would be! And then, could the humbling realization that we are not alone, that a spirit really does pervade the whole universe . . . that in the vastness of the cosmos other civilizations on other planets have sprung up, peaked and waned just like ours is doing right now—could this be the answer that finally solves the great civilizational quest for meaning we've been on since our beginnings?

Or, on a more mundane plane, could ten thousand university campuses explode like they did back in 1968 and creatively destroy our current global system? Could the Greek anarchists, Spanish indignados, the Occupy forces, the yabastaers, Gezi greenies and Rio revelers rise simultaneously on a clear Autumn day and pull off a coordinated occupation of the whole world?


Or imagine this: a bunch of fired up back end programmers develop an open source, real world KILLCAP game that gets a billion activists jamming the system every day until the cost of doing business as usual becomes too hard to bear. Yeah, these are beautiful pipe dreams . . . nicely served over a midnight bottle of tequila.

But maybe our best hope of derailing the planetary train wreck is something much more ordinary, anticlimactic even . . . like a slow, imperceptible cultural heave, one that gives way to a renaissance of conviviality. We grow tired of the consumerist orgy, the rat race, the moral one-upmanship . . . the wars, the secrets, the punitive strikes, the holocausts and genocides, the stultifying bureaucracy of techno-capitalism. We move, as Ed Vulliamy wrote in a recent Guardian Weekly article, from “some combination of cocaine, Red Bull and Viagra towards aromatic coffee, a cool aperitif and an afternoon snooze.” We jump from pyramid to rhizome thinking, from a hard helvetica, top-down corpo-driven culture towards a soft, organic DIY one. We learn to play jazz and start living lives of never-ending spontaneous creativity and uninhibited play . . . We wake up one morning feeling happy!

The capitalist algorithm we're currently caught in has turned our planet into a death star. The internet, virtual reality, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, green markets, wind turbines . . . none of these innovations will save us. Our only chance of transitioning into a sane sustainable future is to stumble onto something that we feel in our bones, something not yet here, but the spirit of which—its essence, its taste, its tone, its resonance—we can feel all around us in the touch of a lover, a chat with a bright-eyed stranger, a quiet moment in the wild.





George Washington’s Inaugural Speech April 30, 1789
Our Nation’s first Presidents Inaugural Speech
America’s Covenant with God?
 

…….”I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my country can inspire, since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity; since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained; and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
After his inaugural speech George Washington, members of Congress and the house of representatives proceeded to walk to St. Paul’s Church to pray for America.

Quotes From Jonathan Cahn
Author of The Harbinger


“America was founded on prayer. Therefore, the removal of prayer from its public life was a central part of its fall from God. A nation that turns away from prayer will ultimately find itself in desperate need of it.”
Jonathan Cahn, The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America's Future



“Some would call it tolerance, I said. Yes he replied, the same tolerance that overtook ancient Israel - a tolerance for everything opposed to God, a growing tolerance for immorality and a growing intolerance for the pure-a tolerance that mocked, marginalized and condemned those who remained faithful to the values now being discarded. Innocence was ridiculed and virtue was vilified. Children were taught of sexual immorality in public schools while the Word of God was banned. It was a tolerance that put the profane on public display and removed nativity scenes from public sight..contraband, as if somehow they had become a threat-a strangely intolerant tolerance. "But still, I countered, how does all that compare to what happened in ancient Israel? America doesn't offer its children on altars of sacrifice? "Does it not? he said. Ten years after removing prayer and Scripture from its public schools, the nation legalized the killing of its unborn.”
Jonathan Cahn, The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America's Future