This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, October 23, 2017:
Mick Mulvaney
University of Virginia professor Herbert Stein, the father of Ben Stein of Ferris Bueller fame, was known as a pragmatic conservative. But he is best known for his cryptic expression, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Mick Mulvaney’s hopeful outlook hasn’t yet been tarnished by his experience in Washington. Serving as a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina prior to accepting the position of President Trump’s Director of Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney really thinks, based on his public statements, that things really can go on forever. All that is needed is a little tweaking: “We need to grow our economy again and get our fiscal house in order. We can do that through smart spending restraint, tax reform, and cutting red tape.”
A closer look at the size of that fiscal deficit, however, reveals Mr. Mulvaney’s naiveté: on Thursday the Treasury Department announced that the deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 was
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, August 1, 2017:
Deciding to move on following the failure of the Senate to pass the “skinny” ObamaCare repeal bill, the Trump administration announced on Monday its accelerated plans for passing its budget bill. According to Marc Short, President Trump’s director of legislative affairs, background work on the budget will take place in August in preparation for committee action in the House in September. Assuming little resistance there, Short hopes for a floor vote in October, a Senate vote in November, and the president’s signature on it immediately thereafter.
It’s good to dream big.
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, July 12, 2017:
During his presidential campaign, Republican Party candidate Donald Trump made it abundantly clear that he would not do anything to restore the financial integrity of Social Security:
I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do.
Now that he is president, he no doubt has discovered just “where the money is”: It’s been spent by the government. And likely due to the commitment by the Democrats to oppose anything and everything he’d like to do, he’s just going to leave the failing and shrinking program alone.
This has caused angst among realists who see the federal program failing to meet its promises in less than 17 years and offering various ideas and suggestions on how to “fix” it.
This article was published by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, June 30, 2017:
Seal of Illinois.
The Journal declared that although the state of Illinois “is in deep trouble”, that shouldn’t be troubling to those investors holding billions of the state’s debt that is about to be downgraded to junk. On Saturday morning, barring a miracle, S&P Global will keep its promise and announce that Illinois’s debt rating is being reduced by at least one more notch, to junk status.
The Journal said that downgrade reflects the fact that the state faces “large uncertainties” and has “major exposure to adverse conditions.” But none of those need bother investors, said the Journal. Even though several bond mutual funds have bailed since the first of the year, offloading an estimated $2 billion of the state’s $25 billion in investor-owned debt, the Vanguard Group is standing firm. It has the largest exposure to Illinois in its seven mutual funds, holding $1.2 billion of its debt and claiming that it is “comfortable with (its) risk/reward”.
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 29, 2017:
Susana Mendoza
Despite the clock’s ticking on the downgrade of Illinois’ $25 billion of indebtedness to junk status on midnight Friday, investors remain complacent. True, some mutual funds have offloaded $2 billion of Illinois debt in the last few months, but the Wall Street Journal provided salve to investors’ concerns that those remaining invested will be badly hurt. Unnamed analysts, wrote the Journal, “predict prices would drop only a few cents in the event of a junk downgrade.” They noted that Vanguard Group has $1.2 billion of Illinois bonds spread across seven of its bond mutual funds, with a company spokesman saying that it is “comfortable with the risk/reward” of investing in the state’s bonds.
Besides,
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 12, 2017:
Despite 97 percent of Puerto Ricans voting for statehood in Sunday’s plebescite, the chances of adding the island as the country’s 51st state are between slim and none.
The island’s voters had three choices on Sunday’s ballot: Stay as a U.S. territory, move ahead with statehood, or seek full independence as a sovereign nation. This is the fifth vote on the issue since 1967, with the first three failing to gain a majority vote for statehood. That majority is required for the U.S. Congress to consider it. The fourth vote was marred by some 500,000 voters boycotting it to protest the ballot allegedly being rigged in favor of statehood.
The chances this time aren’t any better.
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 12, 2017:
Ever since he announced his campaign for governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, who was installed as the island’s new governor in January, has been pushing for statehood. Offloading his country’s financial problems onto American taxpayers is the American way. By gaining statehood, Puerto Rico would be poorer than Mississippi, the poorest of the American states, and therefore would be the likely recipient of federal largesse by the truckload. As Rossello said so clearly,
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, May 23, 2017:
Now that the long-awaited Trump budget for Fiscal Year 2018 has been released, it hasn’t failed to deliver what skeptics initially expected: Growth coupled with lower taxes will drive the economy to levels that will balance the budget — by 2027 — much of it based on magic, hope, pixie dust, and gimmicks.
First, the “magic.”
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, March 16, 2017:
Mick Mulvaney. Trump’s OMB Director
President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unveiled “America First — A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again” on Thursday, noting that the president’s actual budget will be released in May. President Trump and his OMB Director Mick Mulvaney joined in outlining the “blueprint” without disclosing hard numbers, revenue projections, or even an economic outlook to back it up. It was, in other words, a policy statement, with details to follow.
Said Trump:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, February 17, 2017:
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson said many things on which classical liberals and libertarians agree. The one most apropos to Obamacare is this: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
Anything that requires government force (or threat of) to gain compliance is, on its face, immoral. But Obamacare did something else: it was a deliberate forced attempt to shift personal responsibility for one’s health care from a citizen to his government. Jefferson had this to say about that:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, December 28, 2016:
The name of the group LOL Illinois can taken two ways: Land of Lincoln, or Laughing Out Loud. As Scott Santi, chairman of Illinois Tool Works, which employs 48,000 workers around the world, noted:
There’s a crisis of confidence in terms of a plan to address some pretty significant structural problems in the state. It’s challenging for Illinois to be competitive given the uncertainty around the fiscal crisis.
“Crisis of confidence”? “Challenging”? “Uncertainty”? Illinois was headed into oblivion until Bruce Rauner, the first Republican governor in 12 years, faced reality.
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 29, 2016:
On or before September 1, President Obama will complete the eight appointments to the oversight board created when he signed PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act) into law on June 30. Those already on the board include Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Marco Rubio, Democrat Senator Bill Nelson and Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez.
In theory the board will have the power to override the island’s government, delay litigation, fire government workers, and “suggest” other ways the island can begin to recover from its present economic implosion. It has been described as a “de facto” Chapter 9 bankruptcy. In practice it is likely that,
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, August 29, 2016:
Map of Peuto Rico, with inset showing it’s position in relation to American continents.
George W. Plunkitt was not the world’s first dishonest politician, but he might have been one of the first ones to be honest about his dishonesty. Plunkitt was a Tammany Hall pol who served in the New York State Assembly and then in the New York State Senate around the turn of the 20th century. He called what he did – and what made him wealthy – “honest graft.” He defined “dishonest graft” as efforts to work solely for his own interests. “Honest graft,” on the other hand, was graft that worked for the interests of his own party.
He made his money by
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 8, 2016:
When Elizabeth Holmes (above), the 32-year-old CEO of medical technology startup Theranos, was named as one of President Obama’s presidential ambassadors for global entrepreneurship (PAGE) last year, she sounded like the winner of a beauty contest, telling her audience how she was going to save the world:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, August 8, 2016:
Every investor has, or at least should have, rules. A few good ones are: If your barber starts giving you investment advice, find another barber. Tips are for waiters. Never get into something that you can’t get out of. Always set a stop loss. If you miss one opportunity, don’t worry: there’s another one right behind it. Wherever possible, hedge. And so on.
Above all these is Rule Number One, a rule so hackneyed it’s almost embarrassing to put it down on paper:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 25, 2016:
Last Friday the Justice Department charged a Miami-area healthcare operator, a hospital administrator, and a physician’s assistant with conspiracy involving submitting fraudulent bills to Medicare and Medicaid exceeding, for the first time, $1 billion.
The three included Philip Esformes, the owner of more than 30 Miami-area nursing and assisted-living facilities, hospital administrator Odette Barcha, and physician assistant Arnald Carmouze. They were charged with money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, and receiving kickbacks, along with other charges.
The conspiracy had been going on for 14 years, and came to a end with the help of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force (MFSF), which began investigating healthcare fraud in March 2007. Since that time, nearly 3,000 defendants,
Latest Comments