The Last Time There was an Increase in Jobs by State

Mega dittos Mr. Green, but as politicalpen says, don't use the cuss words in class, laugh out loud.

"Sure, people want healthcare reform right now (especially if it were to miraculously also have the virtue of being authentic healthcare reform), but what they really want, overwhelmingly, is jobs"

The US now has massive problems even in areas that it was supposed to have a guarantee against. For several decades, US politicians in both parties claimed that although workers at the low end received lower pay, far fewer benefits, and had much less job security than in Europe, at least they would almost always have a job available to get, whereas in Europe, due to "excessive government interference", you would often have a situation where you could not get a job even if you desperately wanted or needed one.

Well now the US has that same problem that was supposed to be limited to certain European countries: sheer unavailability of jobs. So the US workers now have pretty much every possible problem going against them.

Face it, US workers have no real representation from either of the right wing parties. The information I have provided below is the kind of information that would be common knowledge were it not for the fact that most US politicians have number of jobs and workers in general as very low priorities. Workers need to wake up and demand a new party, and help to create it.

Number of jobs is an extremely important real world economic indicator, as important as GDP in my view. But as an example of how this matters very little to the ones in charge, number of jobs is not even a major factor with respect to whether the economy is considered to be in recession or not in the US, thus the bizarre, bogus, and ultra right concept of "jobless recovery".

The following dates are, as of October 2009, the last month in which each state had the same number of jobs as that state had in September 2009. In other words, this tells you how long it has been since one or more jobs have been created, net of job losses, in each state. States where the month shown is September 1999 or earlier have failed to create a net job for more than 10 years. There are several states showing October 1999; as of September 2009, there have been zero new net jobs in those states for one month shy of ten years.

And if I counted correctly, there are 32 states which have not created a single net job since the 21st century began (which is January 1, 2001 technically).

The greater the amount of time since jobs increased, the worse the depression or recession is in that state. Data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Alabama: September 1998
Alaska: June 2006
Arizona: October 2004
Arkansas: September 2005
California: November 1999
Colorado: November 2000
Connecticut: October 1997
Delaware: May 1999
District of Columbia: June 2008
Florida: November 2003
Georgia: May 1999
Hawaii: October 2004
Idaho: September 2005
Illinois: December 1995
Indiana: September 1995
Iowa: May 1999
Kansas: November 1998
Kentucky: September 1998
Louisiana: October 1999
Maine: October 1999
Maryland: June 2004
Massachusetts: June 1998
Michigan: September 1988
Minnesota: October 1999
Mississippi: May 1997
Missouri: December 1998
Montana: June 2006
Nebraska: May 2006
Nevada: October 2004
New Hampshire: December 2000
New Jersey: June 1999
New Mexico: December 2005
New York: October 1999
North Carolina: June 2000
North Dakota: October 2008
Ohio: September 1994
Oklahoma: November 2006
Oregon: June 2000
Pennsylvania: October 1999
Puerto Rico: December 1995
Rhode Island: June 1998
South Carolina: November 1999
South Dakota: June 2006
Tennessee: September 1998
Texas: April 2007
Utah: June 2006
Vermont: October 1999
Virginia: December 2004
Washington: May 2006
West Virginia: May 2000
Wisconsin: June 1998
Wyoming: June 2007

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The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

Mitch McConnell and Bart Stupak Among the Last Hopes

GUEST COMMENT

RichM December 19th, 2009 3:09 pm
It's a measure of just how far we've sunk, that the best outcome one can now hope for in the health care debacle is that Mitch McConnell -- long one of the most thoroughly loathesome figures in the Senate -- should prevail.

Rather than wishing for a White Christmas, I'm just wishing that the Republicans will be able to destroy this monstrosity, even if they do it for all the wrong reasons. Then Obama will be widely perceived as the pathetic failure that he is, the insurance companies won't get their millions of "mandated" new customers, & the Democrats will go onto the slag heap of history, where they so richly belong.

Go, Mitch!!

UNITY-PROGRESS RESPONSE
Mega Dittos, Rush, and go Mitch!

Now excuse me while I heave up my lunch, laugh out loud.

No seriously, did you know that if this bill fails, Lord Obama would have no alternative but to settle for passing the obviously good things like no pre-existing conditions and no lifetime caps? (Well, he could resign instead.) But most likely, if the bill fails, you would get much of the good without most of the bad, because the Democrats would still have to pass something.

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The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

Romney / Pawlenty Ticket to win in 34 Months?

Well, Lord Obama could be counting on the fact that there are still 34 months before the election to make up for his abandonment of those who elected him. Then again, he has done so many right wing things already that in my view no amount of public relations in the last few months before the election will save him from losing to the Romney/Pawlenty ticket or some other non-redneck ticket designed by the Republicans to kick Obama's posterior.

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The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

A Nice Poem for the Holidays

GUEST COMMENT (POEM)

micki December 20th, 2009 12:15 pm
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the Senate,
Not a critter was honest, not even a Dem-mit,
The pork was all hung for the lobbyists with care,
In hopes that the citizens soon would not care.

The politicians were nestled all smug in their beds,
While visions of dollars danced in their heads.
The homeless in tents were fending a cold snap,
As Congress settled down to give us more crap.

When over the land there arose such a chatter,
That DC didn’t know what the hell was the matter,
Away to big biz they raced for more cash,
Tore apart peoples’ dreams, let’s hurry slapdash!

The goons on the right caused much of the woe,
But they had their enablers, one was named Joe.
Then, some were still hoping the prez would appear,
And take a strong stand that would cause a great cheer!

With a flick of his tongue, so lively and quick,
We knew in a moment his words were still slick.
So rapid was Rahm, there was more of the same,
Everything we got grew more and more lame.

"Now Baucus! now, Lincoln! now, Nelson and Snow!
On, Landrieu! On, Reid! on and on we can crow!”
At the top of their lungs! to the top of the hall!
“To hell with the voters, we make the call.”

As premiums rise like a wild hurricane fly,
Not an obstacle for them, for they are so sly,
So up to the hilt they continue to screw,
The American people into deeper doo-doo.

And though there’s an inkling, we’ve had quite enough,
They’ll continue to act like it’s all a great bluff,
For they’re moving ahead, not turning around,
They’re passing this bill though it’s very unsound.

They’re dressed in their finest, from head to their foot,
Their souls a bit tarnished, but they’ll stay put,
Because a bundle of pork they want to give back,
To corporate patrons who they need like more smack!

Their eyes, how they twinkle! Their laughter how merry!
They don’t give a damn if the people are wary!
Their slick little game all tied up with a bow,
They’ll continue to win because they get the dough.

When they’re out on the stump they lie through their teeth,
And hope we won’t know, they think we’re beneath,
Even as they act like the cunning Machiavelli,
We shake, and they laugh like a bowlful of jelly!

They’re clubby and smug, all full of them self,
They laugh, but we know it’s each man for himself!
They wink but don’t blink as they turn words on their head,
And continue to think they have nothing to dread.

They speak not a true word to voters, but work
For their corporate funders with whom they do smirk.
And lifting their finger aside of their nose,
They hope they will always smell like a rose!

They spring to their districts, to their states give a whistle,
And continue to fund wars like an unguided missile.
But, the day will soon come when the voters do fight,
And tell them “Get lost! Get out of our sight!”

UNITY-PROGRESS COMMENT
Yes, brilliant and perfectly timed five days before the holiday.

All they had to do to not screw things up was to pass the obvious regulations that should have been in effect already for decades. But no, they had to badly screw things up by restricting liberties, by rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and by in general pretending that you can resurrect and preserve the failed US health care system by applying carrots (subsidies) and sticks (restrictions on freedom) to try to force people to prop it up.

Governments should never expect people to be able to prop up a largely failed system. People are not responsible for whether a system is failed or not; a system is either a failure or it is not, and trying to force people to do things they don't want to do is not a substitute for redesigning a failed system.

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The above was in response to this article

Democrats' new Health Insurance Laws: Big Trouble and big Expense for Small Gain

The “30 million are going to get health insurance” claim that is being bandied about by the Democrats is very, very misleading. It sounds kind of impressive when looking at the current total number of uninsured, which is roughly 50 million. But it is very unimpressive when you look about six years into the future, which is when the 30 million increase is supposed to take place. The big problem for the Democrats is that they are chasing a swiftly moving target when they try to reduce the total number of uninsured in the inefficient and expensive way they are trying to do it.

With no legislation at all and given the nightmarish economic conditions, we can, based on a few known facts and trends, make a rough but useful baseline estimate of how many uninsured there would be if nothing changed:

2009 50 million / 35 million not counting illegal aliens
2010 54 million / 39 million not counting illegal aliens
2011 57 million / 41 million not counting illegal aliens
2012 60 million / 44 million not counting illegal aliens
2013 63 million / 47 million not counting illegal aliens
2014 66 million / 50 million not counting illegal aliens
2015 69 million / 52 million not counting illegal aliens

NUMBER OF UNINSURED BY YEAR PROJECTIONS AND ANALYSIS
As of 2015, there would probably be about 70 million residents with no health insurance if nothing changed. Of this number, first subtract 15 million for newly Medicaid eligible, yielding about 55 million. Second, subtract another 17 million as a rough but reasonably good estimate of the number of illegal aliens there will be as of 2015. Illegal aliens are left out of the new requirement to buy grossly overpriced and dysfunctional health insurance, which may ironically give them an advantage in economic life over US citizens. So at the moment we are down to about 38 million uninsured legal residents as of 2015.

Now let's break down the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) estimate of the 30 million increase in the number owning insurance policies by 2015 or 2016, which is composed of the 15 million new Medicaid enrollees and 15 million with higher than poverty incomes who buy insurance instead of paying the penalty.

Incidentally, Medicaid is considered an insurance policy by the CBO and the Democrats when they discuss their new laws, but it is clearly not really an insurance policy but rather a Government health care program for destitute people.

And as another “incidentally”, as a very rough estimate, about 30% of the 15 million buying insurance will get partial subsidies and the other 70% with the higher incomes not eligible for Medicaid will buy policies with no subsidy assistance from the Government.

Judging from polling and other evidence, I expect CBO’s 15 million estimate is a little high. I would predict that the number who will buy policies will be more like 13 million than 15 million. But give CBO a lot of credit, because their estimate is in fact conservative (just not as conservative as my estimate). CBO's estimate is close to what will actually happen.

However, for the record, the unexpected confluence between the CBO estimate and the Unity-Progress estimate is probably due to differing assumptions about the economy and the resulting different baseline number of insured (the number of uninsured there would be with no change in the law) instead of differing compliance estimates. CBO very likely has substantially lower baseline uninsured numbers and substantially higher compliance rate estimations than I do.

Using my baseline uninsured number, the estimate from CBO of the percentage of those who are supposed to buy health insurance who will actually buy it is about 40%. But CBO is probably underestimating the baseline number who would lose insurance between 2009 and 2015 because they are probably overestimating the strength of recovery in the real economy and especially in the job market. CBO's true compliance estimate (percentage that buy insurance out of the total who are supposed to) is probably at least 45% and may be close to 50%. My compliance estimate is 13.5/38 = 35.5%.

In any event, the CBO and the Unity-Progress estimates of the actual number of newly purchased insurance policies are very close, and I will use theirs in a sign of respect for the quality work they are known for.

Recall that after we subtracted out the Medicaid enrollees and the illegal aliens we were left with an estimated 38 million uninsured in 2015. From this we subtract the 15 million who will buy insurance due to the mandate. So we finally have a pretty good estimate of how many uninsured legal residents there will still be in 2015: 23 million. So obviously, there will still be a huge number of peoplw with no health insurance.

Now if you add back the illegal aliens, the estimate of the total number of uninsured in the country for 2015 is 40 million, which indeed is 30 million less than the baseline.

So the proponents of the law may not be materially lying when they say that 30 million more will be insured as of 2015; but they are not telling you that the underlying problem will grow substantially between 2009 and 2015, so that the actual number who are still not insured in 2015 after the new laws are imposed will be only about 12 million fewer than it is in 2009! Yes, this monstrous legislation, the Constitutional challenges, all the new bureaucracy, people becoming homeless after they buy health insurance and then lose their jobs, etc. etc. all of the trouble, dislocation and misery produces just a 12 million reduction in the number of uninsured in a country of about 315 million people when you compare 2009 and 2015!.

But wait, it gets even worse. The number of uninsured will still be going up even after this law is in effect, because the population will be increasing and also because, as everyone knows, there is very little real health cost control in this law, so when deductibles, co-pays, uncovered items, and the cost of medications go up by more than overall inflation as they inevitably will, and when most likely inflation adjusted subsidies go down, and when the economy keeps throwing skilled employees into unemployment, and when small businesses keep having to discontinue offering health insurance as a benefit, the number and the percentage for who can not or will not buy the health insurance will be going up.

So that 12 million advantage will shrink and, by roughly 2025 at the latest, there will be just as many uninsured as there were in 2009.

So the bottom line is that the new monstrous law “buys” at the most 16 years of no increase in the total number of uninsured. Then after roughly 2025, the number of uninsured residents will be greater than the number in 2009.

NUMBER OF UNINSURED LEGAL CITIZENS BY YEAR
We can do the same estimates but this time let’s treat the illegal aliens as if they don’t exist:

2009 Number of legal citizens uninsured: 35 million
2015 Number of legal citizens uninsured: 22 million (52 baseline minus 15 million Medicaid minus 15 million who buy private insurance)

Assuming the 22 million in 2015 increases at 5% a year, which would be roughly half the rate of increase of 2007-2009, we have:

2020: Number of legal citizens uninsured: 28.3 million
2025: Number of legal citizens uninsured: 36.2 million

With these assumptions, the number of legal citizens uninsured will reach the 2009 number by 2025, so in effect the new law will have “bought” 16 years of no increase in the number.

I hope you can not see that overall, this new law not only does not solve the problem, but does not really come close to doing so. This new law is not even remotely a true national health program, or even merely a national health insurance policy. A good analogy is that this is like a football team that can not make a first down has decided to punt the ball downfield.

A FEW OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THOSE WHO WILL NOT COMPLY
You know the old saying: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink? With 2/3 of the population overall against the mandate, this means that it is likely that at least 85% of the non-insured are against the mandate. The Republicans in particular are very fiercely against this and there will be resistance in bulk from them. Many of these people will find a way to not comply.

Moreover, consider also that there will be a reverse effect. There will apparently be at least close to two million people in total who indefinitely drop, or whose employers indefinitely drop, health insurance after this passes, some because their premiums will go up when they are forced to buy a plan in compliance, some for ideological reasons, and some due to the one-two punch of the new taxes and the depressed economy. These people and businesses will either gladly pay the penalty or in some cases will try to dodge even the penalty.

The above was in response to this articleat Common Dreams.

New Health Insurance Laws Have Both Fascist and Feudal Characteristics

People who do not want and/or can not afford health insurance but who comply will be legally slaves to health insurance executives or to the penalty division of the IRS, their choice. (At least you get a choice as to who you are a slave to, laugh out loud.)

This is a very fascist oriented bill in many respects. It is also distinctly feudal, with the health insurance executives similar to powerful feudal lords and the people forced to pay them the serfs and the weaker feudal lords who “need protection”.

The above was in response to this article.

Bernie Sanders Abandons Public Option and True Affordability for Small Scale Side Programs

Sanders is either not a progressive, on the take big time, or a complete wuss. I doubt he would "make the cut" to make it into a genuine non-right wing party.

Sanders might be thinking that improvements will be made. But this bill is far more likely to be repealed than improved in the future. How are you going to improve something with new provisions that are even more objectionable to the Republicans than the ones they already unanimously refused to support, keeping in mind that the number of Republicans in both the Senate and the House is going up about a year from now? The Republicans will be out to repeal much of it, not improve it, and I actually can't blame them.

This is dead on arrival and guaranteed to fail or, to be more precise, to do more harm than good. All of "the good stuff" directly regulating the insurance companies should have been law already, for years and years and years. Obviously, these things could have been passed by themselves and then there would be no big problem going forward as there is now.

The above was based on this article at Common Dreams.

Thom Hartmann and other True Progressives Catch up to Common Dreams

The following was in response to this article.

Well we are ahead of you here at Common Dreams, Mr. Hartmann, because a lot of us here have for weeks and in some cases for months saying Obama will probably (or most likely) lose in 2012. And we have been virtually unanimous in saying this law is an abomination for months. Nice to see everyone catching up to Common Dreams, it’s better late than never.

With the advent of this unprecedentedly bad law, the progressives can't play games and hide behind Obama’s slick pimping anymore. Either they create a new party that is marketable (can't use "Socialist" or "Green" or “progressive” trashed by right wing propaganda words like that in the name of it) or they just remain corporate serfs. It’s either new party or fascism with medieval tendencies, one or the other.

And yes, even though I don't know the details, I am well aware that anti-democratic and unconstitutional state laws are designed to prevent third parties from getting on the ballot. But if you have a new organization that almost overnight has ten million or more followers, which you could achieve, those petty state laws would become irrelevant to a large degree, either because the new party could jump over all the hurdles in those anti-democratic laws, or because the new party would have enough legal clout to get those laws declared unconstitutional and tossed out.

So as far as I am concerned, there are no excuses for anyone in this fiasco including progressives. Progressives can never ever vote Democratic again (assuming they are not living under a bridge and unable to vote thanks to Obama) and they need to start a new party, such as for example New Democrat Party (US). Hint: start it before you are living under the bridge.

Could Sarah Palin Defeat Barack Obama in 2012? Yes She Could!

If the Republicans are lucky (can't use the word smart there) they will go with Romney or Pawlenty. However, even if Sarah Palin is nominated, Obama might lose to her due to the health deform and Afghanistan and no jobs and bankster welfare and (I don't have time to type all 565 things Obama has screwed up).

Laugh out loud at the plausible idea of Obama losing to Palin. You have to be a real loser and/or a far right wacko yourself to have even a chance of losing to Palin.

White House Spokesman Gibbs Headlines for C-Span (Comedy-Span)

The following was from this article at Common Dreams.

"White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday. 'On balance, does this legislation make a big difference in the lives of everyday working men and women? It's not even a close call on that."

Is Gibbs being humorously ironic, is he just shooting the bull, or does he actually believe working men and women will gain from this? Whichever of the three it is, laugh out loud. It seems that Gibbs is a budding stand-up comedian.

Howard Dean: Health Reform has Failed

Keith Olbermann: Health Reform has Failed

Thom Hartmann: Health Reform has Failed