But then Friday came. Dow down 2.5%. Oops! Klientop's bubbles blow away. Here he is on Reuters, the next day, lamenting the lack of confidence of individual investors:Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks rallied, sending benchmark indexes to their biggest advance since July, after the economy returned to growth following the worst contraction in seven decades. Treasuries dropped and the dollar and yen weakened, while commodities surged.
...
"The stock rally is not over yet," said Jeffrey Kleintop, who helps oversee about $247 billion as chief market strategist at LPL Financial in Boston. "The stock market can celebrate. This news is an important confidence boost, in particular to individual investors."
]]>NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Friday, the day after logging their best gains in three months, as sectors that have led the rally pulled back.
Several reports pointed to a mixed economic picture on the heels of a government report that showed gross domestic product grew at its best rate in two years. Midwest area manufacturing was strong, but consumer sentiment slipped this month.
"Confidence still strikes me as shockingly low," said Jeff Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial in Boston. "Consumers are still very pessimistic, and that is evident in individual investors' hesitancy to embrace this rally."
Spending on health care in the US accounts for over 16% of GDP and continues to rise. Other advanced countries, like Japan and the UK, spend around 8%. Yet, they manage to insure their entire populations while providing measurably better results.
From birth (America ranked 24th out of 27 countries in infant mortality in 2005) to death (America ranked 24th out of 28 countries in life expectancy) Americans fare far worse than countries with government managed health systems. In between, medical costs for Americans are a factor in over 60% of personal bankruptcies. Medical errors kill upwards of 100,000 patients a year.
Is this "best health care system the world has ever known"? Maybe in the world of the Senator who said that - Alabama Republican Richard Shelby - and some of his colleagues, but not for the country as a whole.
If a study carried out by the McKinsey Institute is accurate, the system is monster of inefficiency that led them to conclude that "the United States spends $650 billion more on health care than might be expected given the country's wealth and the experience of comparable members of the (OECD)."
As put by health care economist Uwe Reinhardt, who referenced that same study in an op-ed in the Times:
One thing Americans do buy with this extra spending is an administrative overhead load that is huge by international standards...excess spending on administration would amount to about $120 billion in 2006 and about $150 billion in 2008. It would have been more than enough to finance universal health insurance this year.
When republican strategist Frank Luntz tells his benefactors to cry out in mock obstinance: "No Washington bureaucrat or healthcare lobbyist should stand between your family and your doctor" he ignores the fact that the political class itself, by failing to reorganize the healthcare system, IS that "bureaucrat". The only thing standing between 50 million uninsured Americans and a doctor is our weak-kneed government itself.
Since government managed healthcare has been hounded off the table as an entrée into socialism, the public option, if it's not compromised out of existence, is the only item still on the menu of market failure mitigation. President Obama says it could force the insurance companies to trim the fat of their own bureaucracies and discipline the system into greater efficiency. Maybe companies would then reconsider the value of the wild salaries paid to executives like Aetna's CEO Ron Williams who walked with $24 million dollars last year. I'm not sure what good Mr. Williams has done to deserve $92,000 a day for a year of five day work weeks, including vacations.
Unfortunately, real reform that brings the US cost structure in line with our OECD counterparts would inevitably bring the loss of jobs. You don't just squeeze out $650 billion in savings without eliminating jobs. That will cause real pain to those workers and should be a consideration if reform ever looks like it will evolve from talking point to effective policy. At least if reform is done right, those who do lose their jobs won't be sitting there without health insurance and hoping, fingers crossed, that they don't get sick. ]]>
While most of us don't worry about some government agent throwing a black bag over our heads and dragging us off to a secret prison where we'll be tortured, the thought that the president can, as he pleases, read our (e)mail and record our phone conversations is disturbing. Will Barack Obama hold onto or even seek to expand some of these hidden powers George Bush carved out for the presidency?
In 2001, the Bush
Administration instituted a broad domestic eavesdropping program. Though a legal process was in place
that would have likely allowed the president to implement such a program, he
ignored it completely, opting instead to run it secretly.
This is reminiscent of
Richard Nixon, whose use of government power to spy on political opponents led
to the creation in 1978 of the
law that President Bush violated beginning in 2001. The Foreign
Intelligence Service Act (FISA) required that all domestic eavesdropping
activity be reported to a special court, which would then decide whether the
surveillance was warranted.
Bush never notified the
court even as his spy agencies installed
powerful data collection equipment at massive Internet and mobile phone hubs
run by the nation's largest telecom providers.
After the program was
revealed in 2005, the flurry of lawsuits that followed were mostly thrown out
when the Democratic Congress passed
a law that let the phone companies off the hook.
However, one prominent
suit remains. In the case of
Al-Haramain vs. Bush, the plaintiff claims that the Bush administration
violated the FISA statute when, without the required warrants, it monitored
phone conversations between him and his lawyers. The Bush Department of Justice denied this and sought to
have the case dismissed. But in
the discovery phase, the government inadvertently sent to the plaintiff's the
full transcripts of the phone conversations they'd denied ever recording.
After reviewing the
transcripts, the judge ruled that they were grounds for continuing the
case. The government immediately
claimed they were "state
secrets" and sought to have the case dismissed. The judge denied the motion.
When Barack Obama took
the presidential wheel from George Bush, many Obama supporters believed he
would steer clear of such secrecy.
They hoped he would restrain from using"state secrets" to put the brakes
on court cases that could keep the president from off-roading into autocracy.
With this in mind, the
judge slowed down the trial to see if the new DOJ would approach the case any
differently. As a candidate, Obama
supported keeping the FISA statute and opposed granting immunity to the
telecoms. His stated positions led
the judge to reason that change might be on the way.
So what happened? The Obama DOJ filed an emergency motion
with a higher court, citing the "state secrets" privilege and seeking to
dismiss the Al-Haramain case. When
the court refused to hear the motion, the Obama DOJ said it will appeal.
In the Al-Haramain case,
Obama has taken from Bush the wheel of the presidential truck and continued
driving it straight through the "state secret" loophole. Lofty rhetoric about a new age of
accountability and transparency notwithstanding, Obama has acted not only to protect
his predecessor, but to retain some of the kingly powers Bush scratched out for
future presidents.
Earlier today, Josh posted a thirty second spot from a pro-McCain org. He asked for re-writes of the script that make explicit the ad's subtext. It's a strange ad and worth checking out. My re-write is below.