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.