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College Loans are Now the Last Leg in the Debt Pyramid

Source

Some parents are so averse to public schools that they’re taking out hefty “pre-college” loans to cover the costs of their child’s full tuition from kindergarten through 12th grade.

SmartMoney’s Annamaria Andriotis describes the risks of this trend:

“Parents could be on the hook to repay K-12 and college loans simultaneously. Already, about one in six parents of college graduates have loans, and they’re projected to owe nearly $34,000 on average this year, according to FinAid.org. Taking on loans before college leaves parents at risk of owing larger sums of debt, experts say.”

Let’s not forget that college students’ loan debt passed the trillion dollar mark months ago, creating some real-live horror stories for millennials. One student, Nick Keith, took on the college debt burden when his father refused to pay, and he has yet to pursue a career.

Also troubling is that the surge in pre-college loan’s popularity coincides with a rise in the cost of private school’s tuition, Andriotis says. The average cost is up nearly $20,000 per year. “

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Interesting Times: WSJ: Fed Buying 61 Percent of US Debt

“The Federal Reserve is propping up the entire U.S. economy by buying 61 percent of the government debt issued by the Treasury Department, a trend that cannot last, Lawrence Goodman, a former Treasury official and current president of the Center for Financial Stability, writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion article published Wednesday.

“Last year the Fed purchased a stunning 61 percent of the total net Treasury issuance, up from negligible amounts prior to the 2008 financial crisis,” Goodman writes.

Goodman also warns that U.S. economy and markets are “at risk for a sharp correction” if conditions aren’t “normalized.”

“This not only creates the false appearance of limitless demand for U.S. debt but also blunts any sense of urgency to reduce supersized budget deficits.”

The U.S. government is growing increasingly more dependent on borrowing to finance itself, with net issuance of Treasury securities hitting 8.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on average per annum, more than double levels before the crisis.

Fed intervention in the government debt market makes demand for Treasury bonds appear higher than it really is, as foreign creditors and other investors have fled U.S. government debt instruments and are looking elsewhere until the government makes serious attempts to curb spending and narrow its gaping deficits.

Goodman notes that foreign investors like Japan and China that once scooped up U.S. debt are shunning it. In 2009, such foreign purchases of U.S. debt amounted to 6 percent of GDP and has since falled by over eighty percent to a paltry 0.9 percent.

Without foreign buyers and a shrinking base of U.S. corporate and bank buyers, the Treasury has had to resort to the Federal Reserve itself to make the purchases. The Fed purchasing not only makes up the shortfall, but can keep long term interest rates artificially low.

“The Fed is in effect subsidizing U.S. government spending and borrowing via expansion of its balance sheet and massive purchases of Treasury bonds. This keeps Treasury interest rates abnormally low, camouflaging the true size of the budget deficit,” Goodman writes.

“Similarly, the Fed is providing preferential credit to the U.S. government and covering a rapidly widening gap between Treasury’s need to borrow and a more limited willingness among market participants to supply Treasury with credit.”

Political bickering on both sides of the aisle has prevented politicians from cutting spending and undertaking fiscal reform….”

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Tomorrow’s Final GDP Revision Could Be Better Than Expected

Source

“Tomorrow we get the last revision to Q4 GDP.

First the number came in at 2.8%.

Then upon first revision it was revised to 3.0%.

According to Bloomberg, the consensus is still it will stay at 3.0% upon tomorrow’s revision.

But maybe it will be way more.

Nomura has a new note out titled: US: Why Q4 GDP growth could be much higher than previously estimated

First they note that the December data from last year has been mostly revised higher, which augurs well for a good upward revision to this all-encompassing number.

Moreover, the incorporation of the Quarterly Services Survey (QSS), an important input for estimating household service consumption, might add a few more tenths to real GDP growth in Q4 2011. The annualized q-o-q growth rate of real personal service consumption was reported to be 0.74% in the second estimate of GDP, following 1.93% in Q3 and 1.86% in Q4. Considering other service-related data for Q4, such as the nonmanufacturing ISM survey and nonfarm payrolls in private service industries, the 0.74% increase seems to have underestimated service consumption. Although our expectation for the third estimate of Q4 GDP of 3.5% is already well above the market consensus of 3.0%, we think that there are some upside risks to our forecast.”

 

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Fed Study Asserts Unemployment May Drop to 6% by Mid 2013

“The jobless rate in the U.S. could drop to as low as 6 percent by the first half of 2013, a bigger decrease than most economists currently project, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The relationship between the number of Americans newly unemployed and those recently finding work indicates joblessness will continue to decline, according to economist Aysegul Sahin. The jobless rate held at a three-year low of 8.3 percent last month after falling by 0.8 percentage point in the year ended January, according to figures from the Labor Department.

“Simulations based on historical patterns suggest that the fall in the unemployment rate could be quicker than many forecasters predict,” Sahin wrote in a note on the bank’s Liberty Street Economics blog co-written by research associate Christina Patterson.

The analysis looked at flows into and out of unemployment since the end of World War II, likening it to water in a bathtub. The unemployment rate, or level of water in the tub, would be determined by the difference in the volume of water pouring in and draining out.

The number of those exiting unemployment, which include people finding a new job as well as those leaving the labor force, takes precedence in determining changes in joblessness at this stage of a recovery, the economists found.

The flow into and out of unemployment over the three prior recoveries indicates the jobless rate will decrease to 6 percent by at least the end of 2014, the economists said. Should the pattern be similar to that following the rebound from the 1990- 91 recession, the rate could get close to there by early next year.

Median Forecast…”


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The Real Oil Shock: Rising Gas Prices Don’t Actually Affect Americans’ Behavior

Adam Davidson

Like a lot of carless New Yorkers, I am generally confused by bursts of populist outrage over high gas prices. But I have always assumed that the anger is genuine — that hard-working Americans, who already spend a lot on gas, are thrown into turmoil when they have to spend even more. After all, 63 percent of Americans insist that these price increases have caused them some financial hardship.

But amid the recent mania over prices hitting $4 a gallon, I decided to figure out whether this fury is economically rational. So I took a look at data from the Census Bureau, which conducts a quarterly survey of American spending habits. During these last few years of historically high oil prices, Americans spent about $40 a week, or $2,000 a year, on gas. That’s around 5 percent of our overall spending. It’s less than half of what we spend on restaurants and entertainment.

High gas prices must be forcing Americans to cut back in other ways, right? That’s what the economists Lutz Kilian at the University of Michigan and Paul Edelstein of the consulting firm IHS Global Insight wondered. They looked at personal spending habits during periods of high energy prices and discovered that “somewhat surprisingly, there is no significant decline in total expenditures on recreation,” which was one place they expected to find frugality. More specifically, rising gas prices had “no significant effect on the consumption of movies, bowling and billiard[s], casino gambling and only insignificant declines for recreational camps, sightseeing, spectator sports and spectator amusements.” Some people bought fewer lottery tickets, they told me.

In other words, Americans may protest loudly, but their economic behavior indicates a remarkable indifference to the price of oil.

Read the rest here.

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Is Political Correctness to Blame for Lack of Coverage Over Horrific Black-on-White Killings in America’s Deep South?

via dailymail.co.uk 

It was the kind of crime that strikes terror into the hearts of  parents everywhere.

A bright young couple were carjacked after a Saturday night date and murdered in the most brutal way imaginable.

Christopher Newsom, 23, was tied up and raped, shot in the back of the head and then dragged to a railway track and set on fire.

His girlfriend, 21-year-old University of Tennessee student Channon Christian’s fate was even more horrific.

Her death came only after hours of torture, during which time she was raped and savaged with a broken chair leg.

She was beaten in the head and a household bleach was poured down her throat and over her bleeding and battered genital area in an attempt by her attackers to cover any evidence of rape – all while she was still alive.

Channon Christian Christopher NewsomTorture: Channon Christian was forced to watch the attackers rape and kill her boyfriend Christopher Newsom before she was murdered

 

 

Then she was ‘hog-tied’ with curtains and a strip of bedding and a plastic bag was wrapped over her face.

Her body was stashed inside five bigger rubbish liners and dumped in a bin, where, according to the autopsy report, she slowly suffocated to death.

On Monday, the alleged ringleader of the gang accused of the killings goes on trial in Knoxville, Tennessee.

One of the gang has already been convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But, even though the killings happened in January, 2007, they have attracted very little national and international coverage.

That’s because they do not fit into the conventional contours of an attack in America’s Deep South, where a shameful history of racial intolerance has meant assaults by whites on blacks have historically been regarded in the context of race.

In this case, the races were reversed: the victims were white and the four men and one woman charged in connection with the murders are black.

Ironically, the case has now generated more publicity surrounding the furore over whether or not political correctness was behind the US media’s decision to largely ignore the story than it did for the murders themselves.

knoxvilleLemaricus Davidson, centre, goes on trial in Tennessee over the murders this week. Letalvis Cobbins, top right, has been jailed for life. Eric Boyd, Vanessa Coleman and George Thomas will be tried after Davidson

 

cobbinsLife: Letalvis ‘Rome’ Cobbins was found guilty of multiple counts of first degree murder. He was also convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery

Defence lawyers were quick to say that some of the accused dated white women and even prosecutors denied any racial overtones.

‘There is absolutely no proof of a hate crime,’ said John Gill, special counsel to Knox County District Attorney Randy Nichols.

‘It was a terrible crime, a horrendous crime, but race was not a motive. We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialised with white people, dated white people.

‘So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there’s evidence to the contrary,’ he added.

But that hasn’t stopped conservative critics from blaming liberal bias in the US mainstream media for failing to cover the attacks.

Columnist and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin weighed in, saying: ‘This case – an attractive white couple murdered by five black thugs –doesn’t fit any political agenda.

‘It’s not a useful crime. Reverse the races and just imagine how the national media would cover the story of a young black couple murdered by five white assailants.’

Country music singer Charlie Daniels pointed out the media frenzy that came after a black woman accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of raping her.

The players were later cleared after their accuser changed her story.

But Daniels said on his website: ‘If this had been white on black crime, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their ilk would have descended on Knoxville like a swarm of angry bees.’

Channon-Christian-ChristopheVictims: Channon christian, 21, and boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, were carjacked and murdered after a Saturday night date in Tennessee in 2007

Much of the criticism over the scant coverage of the murders has been on the internet through blogs and websites.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds said the American media has a ‘template’ for covering white-on-black crime but not the reverse.

‘I think it would have gotten a lot of national play faster if it had been a black couple kidnapped and killed by five white people,’ he told the local paper in Knoxville.

White supremacists have jumped onto the bandwagon, seeking to twist the facts for their own racist agenda.

They spread false details about the murders, claiming the victims were sexually dismembered and that Channon was sexually tortured for days, neither of which is true.

‘The DA’s office is outraged they have tried to abuse the victims by using the death of loved ones for racist purposes,’ John Gill said.

‘The things that have been seized on by these hate groups are things that never happened.’

‘There are people out there that just want to make something even worse than what it already is,’ Channon’s father, Gary Christian, said in a recent interview.

But Chris’s father, Hugh, told a local TV station: ‘Would they have done that to a black couple? I don’t think so.’

‘With all the things they did to them, what else could you call it but hate?’ his wife, Mary, said.

‘I think any kind of crime like that’s a hate crime. Was it racial? No, I don’t think so’, Mr Christian added.

Channon ChristianOutrage: Campaigners believe the murders haven’t received extensive media coverage because of race issues

Knox County Sheriff Jimmy Jones said: ‘I don’t believe if they’d been Mexican, Chinese or Japanese it would have mattered. I believe these  people were evil.

‘I believe it was a plan. These two kids just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

According to court testimony, Chris, a talented carpenter and former high school baseball player, and college senior Channon had gone to a friend’s home after a date at a local restaurant when they were held up at gunpoint and carjacked on January 6, 2007.

They were forced to drive to an old clapboard house in one of Knoxville’s toughest neighbourhoods, where their captors, some of them ex-convicts, subjected them to the nightmare ordeal.

Wearing glasses and dressed smartly in trousers, a collared shirt and jumper, Lemaricus Davidson, 28, looked more like a college student than an accused killer during pre-trial hearings.

The seven women and five man jury includes just one black juror. If convicted, Davidson could face the death penalty.

In a separate trial last month, Davidson’s brother, Letalvis Cobbins, 27, was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of multiple counts of first degree murder. He was also convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery.

George Thomas, 27, and Cobbins’ former girlfriend, Vannessa Coleman, 21, will be tried after Davidson.

A fifth defendant, Eric Boyd, 37, is serving an 18-year prison sentence after being convicted of being an accessory to a fatal carjacking.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220695/Is-political-correctness-blame-lack-coverage-horrific-black-white-killings-Americas-Deep-South-Tennessee-Channon-Christian-Christopher-Newsom-carjack.html#ixzz1qKYKvvzB

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Identity Theft Shifts to Kids Under 18

“Axton Betz had just rented her first off-campus apartment in West Lafayette, Ind. when the power company told her she needed to pay a $100 deposit to turn on the electricity. Betz, who was 19 at the time, assumed they required the large deposit because she had no credit history. But, for safe measure, she requested a copy of her credit report. “I thought it would be just one page on student loans,” Betz says. Instead, she found 10 pages of defaulted credit cards – showing someone had been using her identity since she was 11 years old.

iStockPhoto

Stealing social security numbers to buy cars, apply for credit and obtain driver’s licenses has now shifted to a new demographic: those under the age of 18. Credit companies and other firms are responding offering monthly services promising identity-theft protection for children. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there is a market for this:  19,000 child identity theft complaints were reported in 2009, the most recent data available, up 217 percent since 2003. What’s more, a study done by the Carnegie Mellon CyLab showed children are 51 times more likely to have their identity stolen than adults. And while most of these stolen IDs are used by undocumented immigrants or organized crime rings, there’s also the chance a child’s own parents could use their kid’s digits, says Bo Holland, CEO of AllClear ID, an identity protection company.

Prompted by those numbers, on Monday Equifax launched a family plan that keeps tabs on the identities of two adults and up to four children. The service, which costs $29.95 a month, alerts parents by e-mail or text message whenever someone tries to use any of the family’s IDs. It also scans the Internet for personal information found on websites and monitors the adults’ files from the three credit bureaus. Earlier this month, AllClear ID debuted a free ID theft mobile app for the iPhone and iPad that lets a parent make sure her child’s identity hasn’t been compromised. (There’s also an option for daily monitoring, which costs $14.95 a month.) And AllClear formed a partnership with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance to let consumers see the reports of stolen data that, before now, were only shared with companies….”

Full article

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The URLs “Socialists.com” and “Communists.com” Redirect to Obama Campaign Website

via hotair.com  Hat Tip @Woodshedder for the lead

A good catch by The Daily Caller’s Caroline May: As of this morning, two provocative web addresses — Socialists.com and Communists.com — redirect to the Barack Obama campaign website. Type “Socialists.com” into your browser and you’ll swiftly be greeted with an invitation to “like” Obamacare. (Yes, that is the current landing page for Obama’s campaign site — an invitation to express support for Obamacare!) May reports:

It is unknown who the responsible party is.

While it’s unclear if the campaign can come up with a solution for this, Twitter users have already begun to take notice.

“Someone is being cheeky: go to http://communists.com or http://socialists.com” tweeted @zaijian.

“So http://Socialists.com and http://Communists.com redirect to Obama’s website. Yeah, this is going to be a fun campaign,” added @DavidKenner.

The prankster behind this actually betrays uncommon insight into the conflict of visions that exists in this country. In one corner, free marketeers. In the other, collectivists and statists. Individuals range along the spectrum, but it doesn’t change the nature of the conflict, which was introduced in the twentieth century but, surprisingly, was still not settled by the outset of the twenty-first, despite the evidence of numerous failed centrally planned economies.

It serves no point to try to rename “socialism” or “communism” or to eliminate the words from our lexicon. The terms refer to theories of social and economic organization in the same way that “capitalism” does — and the theories continue to attract adherents to greater and lesser degrees. The president has openly stated his approval of wealth redistribution and has also displayed a marked tendency toward central planning, particularly in the area of energy policy. Why he should balk at being called either a “socialist” or a “communist” puzzles me. Why not attempt to defend his ideas instead of hiding behind conservative rhetoric as he pushes a progressive agenda? I’d never recoil from the label of “capitalist”even though “the 99 percent” thinks capitalism is evil. What does it matter to the president if half the country doesn’t like his ideas? Oh, right. That’s why it matters. He has an agenda to push, yes, but he has to win reelection to push it. That’s why this prank is so brilliant. I’d love to hear the president explain why he doesn’t want those links to redirect to his website. Or, better yet, I’d love to hear him explain why he does.

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{XXX PHOTO XXX} An Unfortunate T-Shirt Hits Florida Streets In Wake Of Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin Killing

Expanding the definition of “cracker,” a t-shirt featuring the photo of the man who shot Trayvon Martin is now available for purchase.

As seen (above), the shirt has a picture of George Zimmerman and the words “Pussy Ass Cracker.” Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic, killed Martin, 17, last month while acting as a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida.

The shirt’s “pussy ass cracker” line is apparently a reference to lyrics from the rapper Plies’s song “100 Years,” which bemoans stiff sentences handed out by racist judges.

VIA THESMOKINGGUN.COM

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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Feel the Pressure by Regulators To Shield Banks From Losses

Source

“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mortgage giants Fannie Mae andFreddie Mac are being pushed to reduce borrowers’ mortgagebalances in order to shield U.S. banks from taking losses on distressed housing debt, the companies’ regulator said in a Financial Times interview published on Sunday. “If you do principal forgiveness, who is it benefiting? … Doing principal forgiveness is what would protect the big banks,” said Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

DeMarco argued that writing down the principal on first mortgageswould amount to a transfer of taxpayer wealth to the biggest U.S. lenders, whose “second mortgages” are normally subordinate to the primary mortgages backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Some officials in the Obama administration, the Federal Reserve and Congress have called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to write down the value of mortgages they own or guarantee as part of an effort to help the U.S. housing market recover from a deep slump that saw one third of property values wiped out since 2006.

DeMarco has previously resisted those calls, citing concerns it would increase losses at the two companies and undermine his mission of keeping a lid on the costs of their taxpayer-funded bailout. “Certainly the environment of the last number of months have shown substantial attempt to influence or direct an independent regulator,” he told the business newspaper. Fannie and Freddie provide funding for the bulk of U.S. home loans by buying mortgages from banks and repackaging them as securities for investors, which they then guarantee. The Obama administration has proposed using TARP funds to lessen the cost to Fannie and Freddie of doing writedowns. DeMarco is now considering whether the new money the Obama administration is laying on the table changes the equation. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were taken over by the government in 2008 after massive mortgage losses at the housing giants threatened the global financial system. Since then, the U.S. government has funneled more than $150 billion in taxpayer funds into Freddie and Fannie, in part to ensure that credit remains available for homebuyers.”

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State of the Nation: New Economic Realities

Source

“Linda Hall of Spokane, Wash. has worked hard all her life but hasn’t earned any respect from the labor market. Laid off for the first time at age 62, Hall has no health insurance, not enough savings for retirement and almost no chance of getting hired again.

“A year ago I was absolutely certain that I had job security,” Hall said. “Change is a part of life. But, truthfully, until a few weeks before [getting laid off], I just didn’t see it coming and couldn’t imagine such a thing happening.”

Like many older workers, Hall is confronting America’s new economic reality.

“If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion,” President Barack Obama lamented in his 2011 State of the Union Address. “That world has changed.”

Baby Boomers like Hall are more likely than previous generations to keep working, or at least looking for work, as they get older. Since hitting a low of 29 percent in the 1990s, the labor force participation rate for older workers (those who are 55 and up) has risen to 40 percent today. The increase is partly due to employers offering stingier retirement plans than they once did….”

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Chart Porn on the U.S. Economy

Source

“And for a contrarian take on the US economy, check out this slide from Morgan Stanley, which basically argues that aside from autos, it’s actually hard to be impressed with any aspect of the US economy right now.

That’s a rather different spin than what you get from many other analysts and pundits, who blithely talk about the “improving” US economy, without then further backing that up.

See our comment below…

 

image

Morgan Stanley

 

While all of the above is fair, we think it’s a little narrow. Initial claims continue to improve. Retail sales (despite high gas prices) continue to be strong. Most housing metrics are clearly better than they were the year before. The bright spots aren’t entirely constrained to auto sales, as the chart above implies.”

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How the ‘Far Out’ Legal Arguments Against ObamaCare Went Mainstream

Josh Gerstein

When President Barack Obama signed the health care bill two years ago, the legal challenges to the law were widely belittled as long shots — at best.

But as the cases head to the Supreme Court this week, what looked to many like far-out legal arguments to undo “Obamacare” don’t seem so zany anymore.

“If you don’t like it, repeal it or amend it. But don’t ask the courts to do the job for you, because they won’t,” Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration, told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren in April 2010.

Pressed on whether he might be wrong, Fried replied: “Well, I suppose I could. But I’ll tell you what, I would be happy to come on this program and eat a hat which I bought in Australia last month made of kangaroo skin.”

Fried’s offer was extreme, but his skepticism wasn’t. Many legal scholars, including respected conservatives, pooh-poohed the idea that the courts might actually strike down the law or the individual mandate requiring most Americans to get health insurance or pay a fine.

Yet on Monday, three days of oral arguments about the law begin at the high court — the most time justices have devoted to a single law since 1966.

The challengers’ journey from the near-fringe of legal thought to coming within striking distance of knocking out Obama’s signature legislative achievement has coupled an intense legal assault with a communications drive to convince elites and the public that the law violates the Constitution.

“Once the Supreme Court grants review of the case and sets six hours of arguments over three days, it becomes a blockbuster case where, either way, there’s going to be a landmark ruling,” said Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal group.

“Most people think the government is likely to win more than five votes, but the arguments that seemed off the wall now seem on the wall, seem plausible and, for some people, even persuasive,” said Neil Siegel, a Duke law professor who has written extensively in support of the law.

For most of 2009, as Congress began to draft and debate the health care bill, the individual mandate drew little criticism — let alone a sustained argument that it would be unconstitutional.

“The debate about the individual mandate did not even come up until very late in the process of the bill itself,” said Neera Tanden, a key staffer on the administration’s health care team during the passage of the law. “It was a Republican idea. … I was looking for Republican opposition to the individual mandate, but the first letter they wrote on the bill was just about costs and the public option.”

Tanden, now president of the liberal Center for American Progress, attributes the initial wave of attacks on the law’s constitutionality to the rise of the tea party movement in the summer of 2009 and to libertarian legal scholars looking to rein in Congress’s power.

“There was a strategy of far-right thinkers to fundamentally relitigate the meaning of the Commerce Clause,” said Tanden, referring to the constitutional provision allowing Congress to regulate commerce “among the several states.”

The first big steps in the legal campaign against the law were a pair of op-eds in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in August and September 2009, authored by former Justice Department officials David Rivkin and Lee Casey.

“The federal government does not have the power to regulate Americans simply because they are there,” Rivkin and Casey declared in the Post.

“Such a mandate … would expand the federal government’s authority over individual Americans to an unprecedented degree. It is also profoundly unconstitutional,” the pair wrote in the Journal.

In an interview, Rivkin said the crusade was a lonely one at the outset.

“Lee and I were the only people talking about it. … Nobody else was interested in this. [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi was asked about it and answered, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Rivkin noted. “There were no hearings in the House or Senate Judiciary Committees on whether this was constitutional. … Nothing like that happened.”

Indeed, around the time that the op-eds appeared, several Republican senators, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, were part of a so-called “gang of six” trying to craft bipartisan health care reform legislation. News stories from the time quote them complaining about the cost of Democratic proposals and the implications of a government-run insurance program, but there is little indication they objected to the basic premise of the individual mandate.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who supported the individual mandate in the 1990s, did list it among concerns he had when he quit bipartisan talks on the health bill in August 2009.

Then, in December 2009, The Heritage Foundation released an influential legal memo, calling the mandate “unprecedented and unconstitutional” — even though the conservative think tank was a key promoter of the idea in the late 1980s and 1990s.

A co-author of the Heritage legal memo, Randy Barnett of Georgetown University law school, said he was not surprised that the constitutional question was slow to gain traction in Congress.

“I don’t think I’d view Republicans in Congress as the touchstone of the constitutionality of any particular issue. The fact that Republicans in Congress may have missed a constitutional problem doesn’t keep me up at night thinking I must be wrong,” Barnett said.

However, Barnett noted that in December 2009, Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) offered an unsuccessful point of order on the Senate floor objecting to the mandate as unconstitutional.

After the health care bill was signed into law by Obama in March 2010, a flurry of lawsuits were filed. One of the challenges, led by Florida, quickly signed up 25 state attorneys general as plaintiffs.

But the suits got little respect in the legal community.

“In my view, there is a less than 1 percent chance that the courts will invalidate the individual mandate,” law professor and prominent libertarian blogger Orin Kerr of George Washington University told the Los Angeles Times days after Obama signed the legislation.

That sentiment began to change in December 2010, when Richmond-based U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson became the first judge to rule the mandate unconstitutional.

“A huge inflection point was Judge Henry Hudson’s ruling in Virginia,” Barnett said. He added that the day of the decision he got an email from a key legal thinker on the left saying, “As of this morning, your theory is officially not frivolous anymore.”

Read the rest here.

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‘I Don’t Feel America is Quite a First World Country Anymore’

I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. “I don’t feel America is quite a First World country anymore,” a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.

Well, what does some rinky-dink ’roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the last decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later.

I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still — from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen and a half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the treasury secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

Nor do some of Ryan’s fellow conservatives. Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, for whom I have a high regard, was among those representatives who appeared at the Heritage Foundation to express misgivings regarding the Ryan plan’s timidity. They’re not wrong on that: The alleged terrorizer of widows and orphans does not propose to balance the budget of the government of the United States until the year 2040. That would be 27 years after Congressman Ryan’s current term of office expires. Who knows what could throw a wrench in those numbers? Suppose Beijing decides to seize Taiwan. The U.S. is obligated to defend it militarily. But U.S. taxpayers would be funding both sides of the war — the home team, via the Pentagon budget, and the Chinese military, through the interest payments on the debt. (We’ll be bankrolling the entire People’s Liberation Army by some point this decade.) A Beijing–Taipei conflict would be, in budget terms, a U.S. civil war relocated to the Straits of Taiwan. Which is why plans for mid-century are of limited value. When the most notorious extreme callous budget-slasher of the age cannot foresee the government living within its means within the next three decades, you begin to appreciate why foreign observers doubt whether there’ll be a 2040, not for anything recognizable as “the United States.”

Yet it’s widely agreed that Ryan’s plan is about as far as you can push it while retaining minimal political viability. A second-term Obama would roar full throttle to the cliff edge, while a President Romney would be unlikely to do much more than ease off to third gear. At this point, it’s traditional for pundits to warn that if we don’t change course we’re going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although it’s worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland, and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America’s current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece’s, although it’s worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.

But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent — or getting on for twice as much as the second-most-insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.

Read the rest here.

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