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The $800 per Person Uncertainty Tax
On April 29, the U.S. Treasury announced that it expects to pay down $35 billion of the total national debt this quarter—the first debt reduction since 2007. Great news, right?
Not so fast.
That fat sum is miniscule compared to the size of the national debt—a mere 0.2 percent of the nearly $16.8 trillion owed by Uncle Sam.
Moreover, the Treasury Department’s scheduled debt payment may result from many factors—including the sequester, the recent collection of income-tax revenues, the higher tax rates levied on those earning higher incomes, and the payroll tax hike that went into effect last January. But it most emphatically is not a result of some lasting and meaningful improvement in the government’s fiscal habits: In the same press release in which the Treasury announced its $35 billion payment this quarter, the agency also said it expects to borrow $223 billion in the following quarter.
It should come as no surprise that some luminaries in the investment community are extremely distressed by the government’s fiscal mismanagement.
“We’ve spent so much money at this point that we cannot pay it back…ever,” writes Keith Fitz-Gerald, chief investment strategist at Money Morning. “We’re either going to default or we’re going to pay our way out of it—and the former is much more likely than the latter.”
Fitz-Gerald isn’t predicting that a default is imminent. But he worries that if policymakers don’t adequately deal with the problem in the near term, the crisis will get much worse in the long term.
The fiscal overhang isn’t a problem only for the future, however. It’s a significant drag on the economy now. Perhaps the worst damage has come from investors’ uncertainties about how the debt problem will be resolved.
Bill McNabb, chairman and CEO of the Vanguard mutual fund family, says that investors’ skittishness about the uncertainty regarding the debt-ceiling debate has cost the U.S. economy $112 billion over the past two years. Add to that amount the cost of uncertainty over regulatory policy, monetary policy, and foreign policy, and the price tag, according to his company’s economists, comes to a staggering $261 billion—more than $800 per person in the country.
“Without this uncertainty tax, real U.S. GDP could have grown an average 3% per year since 2011, instead of the recorded 2% average in fiscal years 2011-12,” he writes in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. “In addition, the U.S. labor market would have added roughly 45,000 more jobs per month over the past two years. That adds up to more than one million jobs that we could have had by now, but don’t.”
McNabb warns that individual investors who focus heavily on the gyrations of the stock market may lose sight of economy’s underlying vulnerabilities. “Until the U.S. debt issue is resolved for the long term,” he continues, “market gains and losses will be built on an unstable foundation of promises that cannot be kept.”
View full post on MyGovCost | Government Cost Calculator
30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet
The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately 40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water, and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in “water-stressed” areas. But most Americans are not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about that, but the truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of our lives. Today, the most important underground water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the Colorado River, is rapidly running dry. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away. Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man, woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030…
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity’s “annual global water requirements” will exceed “current sustainable water supplies” by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won’t they?
But what if they don’t?
Most Americans tend to think of a “water crisis” as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the United States is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas. The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country. This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley…
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It’s critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily article discussed…
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most recent drought in California’s Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation’s largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas — a level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of the land area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will be unable to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be the breadbasket of the world. But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for good. That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The following are some facts about the Ogallala Aquifer and the growing water crisis that we are facing in the United States. A number of these facts were taken from one of my previous articles. I think that you will agree that many of these facts are quite alarming…
1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie” has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.
4. Scientists are warning that nothing can be done to stop the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The ominous words of David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service should alarm us all…
“Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do.”
5. According to a recent National Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed….
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.
6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the driest that it has been in 500 years.
7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.
8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an article in the Vancouver Sun…
But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
“What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse,” she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
“So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool.”
9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that time period.
10. Right now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
11. According to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water left.
14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water left.
15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The 1,450 mile long Colorado River is a good example of what we have done to our precious water supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the southwestern United States, and it is rapidly dying.
The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Jonathan Waterman about how the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly drying up…
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.
But of course North America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water than the rest of the world is.
In fact, in many areas of the world today water has already become the most important issue.
The following are some incredible facts about the global water crisis that is getting even worse with each passing day…
1. Total global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been before.
2. Today, there are 1.6 billion people that live in areas of the globe that are considered to be “water-stressed”, and it is being projected that two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will be experiencing “water-stressed” conditions by the year 2025.
3. According to USAID, one-third of the people on earth will be facing “severe” or “chronic” water shortages by the year 2025.
4. Once upon a time, the Aral Sea was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire world. At this point, it less than 10 percent the size that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up completely by the year 2020.
5. If you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
6. It is being projected that the demand for water in China will exceed the supply by 25 percent by the year 2030.
7. According to the United Nations, the world is going to need at least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
8. Sadly, it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in Africa and India have had their growth stunted due to unclean water and malnutrition.
9. Of the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
10. It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
11. Sadly, according to one UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
12. Every 8 seconds, somewhere in the world a child dies from drinking dirty water.
13. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.
14. Each year in northern China, the water table drops by an average of about one meter due to severe drought and overpumping, and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the state of Rhode Island.
15. In China, 80 percent of the major rivers have become so horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at this point.
So is there any hope that the coming global water crisis can be averted?
If not, what can we do to prepare?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet
The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately 40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water, and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in “water-stressed” areas. But most Americans are not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about that, but the truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of our lives. Today, the most important underground water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the Colorado River, is rapidly running dry. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away. Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man, woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030…
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity’s “annual global water requirements” will exceed “current sustainable water supplies” by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won’t they?
But what if they don’t?
Most Americans tend to think of a “water crisis” as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the United States is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas. The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country. This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley…
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It’s critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily article discussed…
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most recent drought in California’s Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation’s largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas — a level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of the land area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will be unable to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be the breadbasket of the world. But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for good. That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The following are some facts about the Ogallala Aquifer and the growing water crisis that we are facing in the United States. A number of these facts were taken from one of my previous articles. I think that you will agree that many of these facts are quite alarming…
1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie” has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.
4. Scientists are warning that nothing can be done to stop the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The ominous words of David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service should alarm us all…
“Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do.”
5. According to a recent National Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed….
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.
6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the driest that it has been in 500 years.
7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.
8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an article in the Vancouver Sun…
But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
“What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse,” she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
“So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool.”
9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that time period.
10. Right now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
11. According to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water left.
14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water left.
15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The 1,450 mile long Colorado River is a good example of what we have done to our precious water supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the southwestern United States, and it is rapidly dying.
The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Jonathan Waterman about how the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly drying up…
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.
But of course North America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water than the rest of the world is.
In fact, in many areas of the world today water has already become the most important issue.
The following are some incredible facts about the global water crisis that is getting even worse with each passing day…
1. Total global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been before.
2. Today, there are 1.6 billion people that live in areas of the globe that are considered to be “water-stressed”, and it is being projected that two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will be experiencing “water-stressed” conditions by the year 2025.
3. According to USAID, one-third of the people on earth will be facing “severe” or “chronic” water shortages by the year 2025.
4. Once upon a time, the Aral Sea was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire world. At this point, it less than 10 percent the size that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up completely by the year 2020.
5. If you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
6. It is being projected that the demand for water in China will exceed the supply by 25 percent by the year 2030.
7. According to the United Nations, the world is going to need at least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
8. Sadly, it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in Africa and India have had their growth stunted due to unclean water and malnutrition.
9. Of the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
10. It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
11. Sadly, according to one UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
12. Every 8 seconds, somewhere in the world a child dies from drinking dirty water.
13. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.
14. Each year in northern China, the water table drops by an average of about one meter due to severe drought and overpumping, and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the state of Rhode Island.
15. In China, 80 percent of the major rivers have become so horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at this point.
So is there any hope that the coming global water crisis can be averted?
If not, what can we do to prepare?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Canadian • One person shot dead at PQ victory party
MONTREAL – One person is dead after shots were fired at the Montreal theatre where premier-elect Pauline Marois was giving a victory speech in a bizarre outburst of election night violence.
Montreal Police say a man in his 50s has been arrested after approaching the back of Metropolis and opening fire.
Witnesses said the suspect also threw what appeared to be a molotov cocktail in a nearby dumpster, igniting it briefly before the flames were doused. Some media reports said that the man yelled “the anglos are waking up" in French.
But an eyewitness, a stage technician waiting outside the theatre, told The Gazette the suspect said nothing before he was tackled by police.
Urgences Santé told The Gazette two people were taken to hospital.
“All I can confirm is that two people were transported to hospital. One is in critical condition, and the other is being treated for shock,” said a spokesperson for Urgences Santé shortly before 1 a.m. “Both of them are men.”
Minutes later, Montreal police confirmed via Twitter that a third person, who apparently was never transported to hospital, had been killed.
The Globe and Mail reported one of the victims was the driver of the PQ campaign bus, who happened to be outside the theatre when gunfire broke out.
A witness told The Gazette the second victim was a stage technician waiting outside to dismantle the set where Marois was speaking.
A section of Ste. Catherine St. in front of the Metropolis was been closed as a security perimeter was erected around the scene.
Television footage also showed police leading away a suspect dressed in a blue bathrobe and black balaclava being led away and put in a squad car.
There were also images of people lying on the ground and police examining what appeared to be a rifle.
Marois, Quebec’s premier-elect was rushed by her bodyguards from the stage Tuesday night after her Parti Québécois won the Quebec election with a minority government.
Marois returned to the microphone shortly after she was escorted away said an “unfortunate incident” had occurred. She asked supporters to leave the theatre and appealed for calm, saying: “That is what a woman head of government does.”
The incident put a damper on what was a noisy, happy celebration of Marois’s victory.
Sylvain Giguere, a PQ supporter, said after Marois was yanked offstage, “the room went deadly quiet.”
Marois herself is safe and sound after the eruption of violence.
The other party leaders, including outgoing premier Jean Charest and Coalition Avenir Québec leader Francois Legault denounced the tragic turn of events.
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/person+s … z25Zdv8mzX
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed Sep 05, 2012 12:24 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Paul Krugman, Won’t You Help Me Be a Better Person?
By Michael F. Cannon
I find myself on the wrong side of the facts. Again. So says Paul Krugman:
Still, wouldn’t private insurers reduce costs through the magic of the marketplace? No. All, and I mean all, the evidence says that public systems like Medicare and Medicaid, which have less bureaucracy than private insurers (if you can’t believe this, you’ve never had to deal with an insurance company) and greater bargaining power, are better than the private sector at controlling costs.
I know this flies in the face of free-market dogma, but it’s just a fact.
And Krugman should know. As the following clip shows, this is a guy who always has the facts on his side:
Yes, that was me at the beginning of the clip. Krugman was selflessly trying to instill in me his respect for evidence and his command of the facts. For some reason, I have yet to absorb either.
The proof is in this paper I wrote (and still stand by, for some reason):
Is Government More Efficient?
Supporters of a new government program note that private insurers spend resources on a wide range of administrative costs that government programs do not. These include marketing, underwriting, reviewing claims for legitimacy, and profits. The fact that government avoids these expenditures, however, does not necessarily make it more efficient. Many of the administrative activities that private insurers undertake serve to increase the insurers’ efficiency. Avoiding those activities would therefore make a health plan less efficient. Existing government health programs also incur administrative costs that are purely wasteful. In the final analysis, private insurance is more efficient than government insurance.
Administrative Costs
Time magazine’s Joe Klein argues that “the profits made by insurance companies are a good part of what makes health care so expensive in the U.S. and that a public option is needed to keep the insurers honest.” All else being equal, the fact that a government program would not need to turn a profit suggests that it might enjoy a price advantage over for-profit insurers. If so, that price advantage would be slight. According to the Congressional Budget Office, profits account for less than 3 percent of private health insurance premiums. Furthermore, government’s lack of a profit motive may not be an advantage at all. Profits are an important market signal that increase efficiency by encouraging producers to find lower-cost ways of meeting consumers’ needs. The lack of a profit motive could lead a government program to be less efficient than private insurance, not more.
Moreover, all else is not equal. Government programs typically keep administrative expenditures low by avoiding activities like utilization or claims review. Yet avoiding those activities increases overall costs. The CBO writes, “The traditional fee-for-service Medicare program does relatively little to manage benefits, which tends to reduce its administrative costs but may raise its overall spending relative to a more tightly managed approach.” Similarly, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission writes:
[The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] estimates that about $9.8 billion in erroneous payments were made in the fee-for-service program in 2007, a figure more than double what CMS spent for claims processing and review activities. In Medicare Advantage, CMS estimates that erroneous payments equaled $6.8 billion in 2006, or approximately 10.6 percent of payments. . . . The significant size of Medicare’s erroneous payments suggests that the program’s low administrative costs may come at a price.
CMS further estimates that it made $10.4 billion in improper payments in the fee-for-service Medicare program in 2008.
Medicare keeps its measured administrative-cost ratio relatively low by avoiding important administrative activities (which shrinks the numerator) and tolerating vast amounts of wasteful and fraudulent claims (which inflates the denominator). That is a vice, yet advocates of a new government program praise it as a virtue.
Medicare also keeps its administrative expenditures down by conducting almost no quality-improvement activities. Journalist Shannon Brownlee and Obama adviser Ezekiel Emanuel write:
[S]ome administrative costs are not only necessary but beneficial. Following heart-attack or cancer patients to see which interventions work best is an administrative cost, but it’s also invaluable if you want to improve care. Tracking the rate of heart attacks from drugs such as Avandia is key to ensuring safe pharmaceuticals.
According to the CBO, private insurers spend nearly 1 percent of premiums on “medical management.” The fact that Medicare keeps administrative expenditures low by avoiding such quality-improvement activities may likewise result in higher overall costs—in this case by suppressing the quality of care.
Supporters who praise Medicare’s apparently low administrative costs often fail to note that some of those costs are hidden costs that are borne by other federal agencies, and thus fail to appear in the standard 3-percent estimate. These include “parts of salaries for legislators, staff and others working on Medicare, building costs, marketing costs, collection of premiums and taxes, accounting including auditing and fraud issues, etc.”
Also, Medicare’s administrative costs should be understood to include the deadweight loss from the taxes that fund the program. Economists estimate that it can easily cost society $1.30 to raise just $1 in tax revenue, and it may sometimes cost as much as $2.36 That “excess burden” of taxation is a very real cost of administering (i.e., collecting the taxes for) compulsory health insurance programs like Medicare, even though it appears in no government budgets.
Comparing administrative expenditures in the traditional “fee-for-service” Medicare program to private Medicare Advantage plans can somewhat control for these factors. Hacker cites a CBO estimate that administrative costs are 2 percent of expenditures in traditional Medicare versus 11 percent for Medicare Advantage plans. He writes further: “A recent General Accounting Office report found that in 2006, Medicare Advantage plans spent 83.3 percent of their revenue on medical expenses, with 10.1 percent going to nonmedical expenses and 6.6 percent to profits—a 16.7 percent administrative share.”
Yet such comparisons still do not establish that government programs are more efficient than private insurers. The CBO writes of its own estimate: “The higher administrative costs of private plans do not imply that those plans are less efficient than the traditional FFS program. Some of the plans’ administrative expenses are for functions such as utilization management and quality improvement that are designed to increase the efficiency of care delivery.” Moreover, a portion of the Medicare Advantage plans’ administrative costs could reflect factors inherent to government programs rather than private insurance. For example, Congress uses price controls to determine how much to pay Medicare Advantage plans. If Congress sets those prices at supracompetitive levels, as many experts believe is the case, then that may boost Medicare Advantage plans’ profitability beyond what they would earn in a competitive market. Those supracompetitive profits would be a product of the forces that would guide a new government program—that is, Congress, the political system, and price controls—rather than any inherent feature of private insurance.
Economists who have tallied the full administrative burden of government health insurance programs conclude that administrative costs are far higher in government programs than in private insurance. In 1992, University of Pennsylvania economist Patricia Danzon estimated that total administrative costs were more than 45 percent of claims in Canada’s Medicare system, compared to less than 8 percent of claims for private insurance in the United States. Pacific Research Institute economist Ben Zycher writes that a “realistic assumption” about the size of the deadweight burden puts “the true cost of delivering Medicare benefits [at] about 52 percent of Medicare outlays, or between four and five times the net cost of private health insurance.”
Administrative costs can appear quite low if you only count some of them. Medicare hides its higher administrative costs from enrollees and taxpayers, and public-plan supporters rely on the hidden nature of those costs when they argue in favor of a new government program.
Cost Containment vs. Spending Containment
Advocates of a new government health care program also claim that government contains overall costs better than private insurance. Jacob Hacker writes, “public insurance has a better track record than private insurance when it comes to reining in costs while preserving access. By way of illustration, between 1997 and 2006, health spending per enrollee (for comparable benefits) grew at 4.6 percent a year under Medicare, compared with 7.3 percent a year under private health insurance.” In fact, looking at a broader period, from 1970 to 2006, shows that per-enrollee spending by private insurance grew just 1 percentage point faster per year than Medicare spending, rather than 2.7 percentage points. That still omits the 1966–1969 period, which saw rapid growth in Medicare spending.
More importantly, Hacker’s comparison commits the fallacy of conflating spending and costs. Even if government contains health care spending better than private insurance (which is not at all clear), it could still impose greater overall costs on enrollees and society than private insurance. For example, if a government program refused to pay for lifesaving medical procedures, it would incur considerable nonmonetary costs (i.e., needless suffering and death). Yet it would look better in Hacker’s comparison than a private health plan that saved lives by spending money on those services. Medicare’s inflexibility also imposes costs on enrollees. Medicare took 30 years longer than private insurance to incorporate prescription drug coverage into its basic benefits package. The taxes that finance Medicare impose costs on society in the range of 30 percent of Medicare spending. In contrast, there is no deadweight loss associated with the voluntary purchase of private health insurance.
Hacker nods in the direction of non-spending costs when he writes, “Medicare has maintained high levels of . . . patient access to care.” Yet there are many dimensions of quality other than access to care. It is in those areas that government programs impose their greatest hidden costs, on both publicly and privately insured patients.
Mr. Krugman, won’t you please help me care about the facts as much as you do? It just seems like such bliss.
Paul Krugman, Won’t You Help Me Be a Better Person? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Other • AND THE ‘DUMBEST PERSON OF THE WEEK AWARD’ GOES TO…
AND THE ‘DUMBEST PERSON OF THE WEEK AWARD’ GOES TO…
by SIMON BLACK ·
May 11, 2012
Undisclosed location
Former US Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann receives the Sovereign Man dumbest person of the week award for obtaining… then almost immediately renouncing… Swiss citizenship. I’ll explain:
Bachmann’s husband is a Swiss national; they’ve been married since 1978, and as a result, Bachmann eventually became qualified for Swiss citizenship as well.
She recently received confirmation of her citizenship from the Swiss authorities, a fact that was reported in some mainstream media outlets. Bachmann was subsequently criticized by her political opponents for engaging in such ‘un-American’ activities.
[This is a bizarre assertion, by the way, as the country was built on dual nationals...]
And so, just two days after the story broke, Bachmann renounced her Swiss citizenship yesterday, announcing that she is a “proud American citizen.”
This is, by far, one of the dumbest things that somebody could do. It’s possible to both be a proud citizen AND have a backup plan. Patriotism doesn’t mean blindly going all in.
Having a second passport provides a great deal of opportunities, from new banking and financial relationships to a having a fallback option for another place to live.
It’s like an insurance policy… something that you many never ‘need’, but you’ll be incredibly thankful you have in case you ever do.
And as citizenship is often conferred generationally, your progeny will also be able to enjoy the benefits. In this way, it’s like having an insurance policy for all of your future descendants. Not a bad deal.
A Swiss passport is definitely one of the best. You can travel almost anywhere visa-free. It’s a great place to have the option to live some day. The economy is actually functional. Oh, and there are no men in caves plotting to kill the Swiss.
Obtaining Swiss nationality, though, requires a great deal of time and patience; it takes well over a decade to qualify, apply, and receive citizenship, and slightly less time if you’re married to a Swiss national.
Only a handful of people are lucky enough to become naturalized Swiss citizens, and giving it up is like throwing away a winning lottery ticket…
Ironically, after her political tenure is over and Congress has managed to finally finish off the US economy, Bachmann may, having renounced Swiss citizenship, find herself one day trapped in the environment of financial repression, capital controls, and steep inflation that was created by the government she once served.
The rest of us don’t have to end up this way.
For millennia, governments on the slide have resorted to plundering their citizens in order to maintain the status quo and keep the party going a little while longer.
History is full of examples, from the Roman Empire (which resorted to direct confiscation of people’s agricultural stock) to the Greek government of today (which is now simply nationalizing people’s bank accounts in its sole discretion).
The folks who stick around waving the flag and bombastically proclaiming their patriotism just end up getting abused. Thinking, creative people have a plan B.
Today this means taking steps to diversify internationally, including obtaining a second passport.
Now, I put boots on the ground all over the world. Just in the last two months, for example, I’ve been to 14+ countries from Venezuela to Thailand to Canada to Peru.
In each of these places, I’m constantly looking for the best opportunities– lifestyle, investment, business, employment, banking, medical, personal, etc.
Residency and citizenship is high on my list… and what I can say is that it’s definitely getting harder by the day. Governments are starting to realize that a passport is one of the scarcest resources in the world, and as things continue to get a bit crazy, demand is growing.
Scarce supply, rising demand; we all know what this means. Bottom line, it’s getting harder:
- St. Kitts, generally considered a foolproof economic citizenship program, recently raised their already high price for obtaining nationality.
- In Uruguay, the standards are now very strict, and the government wants you to really prove your value to Uruguayan society. They’ve even hired a special team to go around the country to check on your physical residency.
- In Singapore, the flood of EmployeePass applications has made the government reconsider this residency program after having already discontinued the high net worth Financial Investor Scheme.
- For residency and citizenship in Paraguay, the government keeps modifying the procedures for application, and it’s taking much, much longer than it used to.
There are a lot more examples, but its true: obtaining foreign residency and getting naturalized is really getting harder.
Nobody else is going to tell you this. In fact, the plethora of idiots running around ‘selling’ passport services who have no earthly idea what they’re talking about is only spreading misinformation and making matters worse.
In reality, there are still some high quality options available, several of which I will review at the end of this month on our SMC members-only teleconference.
To give you an example, Brazil and Chile are both excellent, off the radar choices. But you really need to have the right support, someone who actually knows what s/he is doing.
The biggest lesson is– do not procrastinate. The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll be grandfathered in under the old rules. The longer you wait, the higher the likelihood that an option won’t be available any longer.
Something to think about.
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri May 11, 2012 1:16 pm
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American • More than 1.4 million families live on $2 a day per person
The number of families living on $2 or less per person per day for at least a month in the USA has more than doubled in 15 years to 1.46 million.
By Steven Exum, for USA TODAY
Jessica Stevens, 21, has two children, Kmarie, 2 and Nekota, 16-months-old. She receives subsidies such as Work First, DSS childcare subsidy and Food Stamps. She attends school with the help of a Pell grant. She is on the dean’s list.
That’s up from 636,000 households in 1996, says a new study released by researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard University.
Government benefits blunt the impact of such extreme poverty, but not completely, says one of the researchers, Luke Shaefer, a professor of social work at Michigan.
When food stamps are included as income, the number of households in extreme poverty, defined as living on $2 a day, drops to 800,000, Shaefer says. That’s up from 475,000 in 1996.
"This seems to be a group that has fallen through the cracks," says Kathryn Edin, a Harvard researcher and professor of public policy.
Living on $2 a day
The number of American households with cash income of no more than $2 a day per person doubled in 15 years:
Source: National Poverty Center
The study found that among households in extreme poverty, one in five received rent vouchers or lived in public housing. Sixty-six percent had at least one child with public health insurance. The study did not factor in how those benefits affect household income.
Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says most aid to the poor today is in non-cash assistance. Last year, he says, the federal and state government spent $900 billion on 70 programs that assist the poor, from health care and food stamps to energy assistance and college grants.
"When you look at that type of family, you don’t see the type of deprivation this study suggests," he says.
Because the study shows households in extreme poverty for a month, it is more reflective of people losing jobs, getting divorced or having short-term crises, he says.
Shaefer says, "We are trying to document the growth in deep poverty. … Even one month living at this level is concerning."
Magdalyn March, 30, of Birmingham, Ala., can relate to those living in extreme poverty. In 2006, she lost a seasonal job at a packing warehouse, split with an abusive boyfriend and was caring for her two children. She received about $200 a month in government cash assistance and $282 in food stamps.
March and her children lived in a motel when she was with her boyfriend. When he left, she couldn’t afford the room, and she and her children were kicked out. March stayed with friends and relatives for a few nights at a time but ended up in a homeless shelter.
She credits the shelter, First Light, with helping her find a job as a waitress at a chain restaurant and affordable day care. She says she still struggles. She needs glasses and has to go to the dentist but can’t afford it. March and her children are living with her mother now.
"You’ve got to come up with a system," she says, "because you can’t live off of that. You really can’t."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/sto … 53227386/1
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Feb 24, 2012 9:39 am
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