Obamacare

ISM Services headline index collapsed to 51.6 (missing expectations of 53.5) to its lowest since February of 2010. We are sure many will proclaim this as "weather-related" but remember the strong performance of the Manufacturing print. Respondents worried about weather, Obamacare, and oil prices... as the employment sub-index crashed from 56.4 (highest since Nov 2010) to 47.5 (lowest since Mar 2010) - the biggest drop since Lehman!

With the world still on edge over developments in the Ukraine, overnight newsflow was far less dramatic than yesterday, with no "bombshell" uttered at today's Putin press conferences in which he said nothing new and simply reiterated the party line and yet the market saw it as a full abdication, he did have some soundbites saying Russia should keep economic issues separate from politics, and that Russia should cooperate with all partners on Ukraine. Elsewhere Gazprom kept the heat on, or rather off, saying Ukraine recently paid $10 million of its nat gas debt, but that for February alone Ukraine owes $440 million for gas, which Ukraine has informed Gazprom it can't pay in full. Adding the overdue amounts for prior months, means Ukraine's current payable on gas is nearly $2 billion. Which is why almost concurrently Barosso announced that Europe would offer €1.6 billion in loans as part of EU package, which however is condition on striking a deal with the IMF (thank you US taxpayers), and that total aid could be as large as $15 billion, once again offloading the bulk of the obligations to the IMF. And so one more country joins the Troika bailout routine, and this one isn't even in the Eurozone, or the EU.

Mainstream media discussion of the macro economic picture goes something like this: “When there is a recession, the Fed should stimulate. We know from history the recovery comes about 12-18 months after stimulus. We stimulated, we printed a lot of money, we waited 18 months. So the economy ipso facto has recovered. Or it’s just about to recover, any time now.” But to quote the comedian Richard Pryor, “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?” However, as Hayek said, the more the state centrally plans, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to plan. Economic growth is not something that just happens. It requires saving. It requires investment and capital accumulation. And it requires the real market process. It is not a delicate flower but it requires some degree of legal stability and property rights. And when you get in the way of these things, the capital accumulation stops and the economy stagnates.

With the world distracted by Putin and ICBM launches, The White House, according to the WSJ, is about to extend Obamacare deadlines by another year:

*U.S. MAY GRANT 1-YR EXTENSION ON HEALTH LAW REQUIREMENTS: WSJ
*WSJ CITES INDUSTRY OFFICIAL ON INSURANCE COS., HEALTH CARE LAW

Allowing insurers to keep selling policies that do not meet standards for another year. It seems, if you like your healthcare policy, you can keep it for one more year... (most importantly past the Midterms)

After once again clearly delineating that Russian "costs" are set to surge, and hopefully he means more than just the drop in the Micex and its artificial, paper wealth effect which Putin couldn't care less about as long as crude is soaring...

• OBAMA SAYS INCIDENT WITH UKRAINE WILL BE ‘COSTLY’ FOR RUSSIA

... the US president has laid out his latest tactic:

• OBAMA SAYS HE'S CONSIDERING ECONOMIC STEPS TO ISOLATE RUSSIA

And the punchline:

• OBAMA URGES CONGRESS TO PROVIDE PACKAGE OF ASSISTANCE QUICKLY TO UKRAINIAN PEOPLE; SAYS SHOULD NOT BE PARTISAN ISSUE ON CAPITOL HILL

Maybe time to send Obamacare to Kiev: so many young, strapping participants just waiting to sign up? Or maybe it just time to raise minimum wages in the Ukraine while giving the local population the safety of mind that comes with investing in the "no risk, guaranteed return" MyRA.

"January nominal personal spending rose 0.4% (vs. consensus +0.1%). Both durable (-0.4%) and nondurable (-0.7%) goods spending fell on the month. Services spending rose a sharp 0.9%, the strongest gain since the bounce-back from the September 11 attacks in October 2001. Out-sized gains occurred in two categories of services spending: household utilities (+9.7%), boosted by colder weather, and health care (+1.6%) in light of enrollments in the Affordable Care Act exchanges."

First it was frat bros, then it was sluts, then it was Richard Simmons. Now, that the doge meme has arrived, Obamacare marketing desperation has just sunk to unfathomable lows.

That the bulk of Americans (especially those 4+ million whose insurance policies have recently been cancelled as a result of the ACA) have to pay more for healthcare as a result of Obamacare, is now largely accepted and well-known. But did you know that the cost of Obamacare is slowly metastasizing to other places? Such as your restaurant bill.

Presenting Exhibit A.

Extortion and skimming create their own antidotes. As the costs of skimming, extortion and corruption reach new heights, the savings to be gained by bypassing the Status Quo systems also increase. The problem is its own solution. Whether we try to stop the Status Quo, or let it stop, it WILL stop. Debt and other state-cartel schemes enclose and imprison the bottom 90% while leaving the illusions of liberty, democracy and "prosperity" intact so the debt-serf inhabitants of the home-country neocolonial plantations love their servitude. The incentives to escape the home-country plantation are rising in parallel with the skimming of the state-cartel Elites.

Have you noticed that people are becoming angrier?  You can see it everywhere – in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our television shows, in our movies, and certainly in Washington.  In fact, many have said that there is an “epidemic” of anger in America today.  And it is undeniably true.  As you will see below, a whole host of surveys and opinion polls show that America has become a seething cauldron of anger and frustration unlike anything that we have ever seen before. The very fabric of our society is coming apart at the seams and the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is beginning to disappear.  What is America going to look like if we continue to go even farther down this road?

Not quite what you thought it would be? Have no fear. The following will make it all clear...

Today’s economic model was best summed up by dictator Benito Mussolini in one short sentence: “Fascism … is the perfect merger of power between the corporations and the state”.   But tyranny also has its life-cycle within the balance between the past and the future.  Once the past becomes far too much of a millstone for the future generations to carry any longer, governments fall and debt and servitude recede.   Empires can fall largely without violence and allow a new, freer system to emerge, as most of the satellite states of the Soviet Union achieved.   Or the legacy of fallen empire becomes violent chaos followed by renewed oppression, like the French Revolution. This bottom-up style revolution is happening to nations across our 21st Century.  The future lies in the balance.  The bell tolls for all Western nations, too. So, in the United States, it seems, liberty will have its chance again before too long.

Few laws cause as much high blood pressure as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Supporters of the law consider it the signature legislation of the Obama administration. Yet, in 2011 the House of Representatives passed the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law,” one of more than 40 attempts to scuttle the legislation. Public opinion polls are ambiguous: most Americans are against the law as a whole and yet most support many of its provisions. BofAML tries to slice through the partisan debate and show what serious research says about how the ACA will impact the labor market.

Sickcare/ObamaCare is fundamentally broken at every level. The incremental nature of change makes it difficult for us to notice how systems that once worked well with modest costs have transmogrified into broken systems that cost a fortune. Only those with no exposure to the real costs of ObamaCare approve of the current sickcare system. Government employees who have no idea how much their coverage costs, well-paid shills and toadies like Paul Krugman, academics with tenure and lifetime healthcare coverage--all these people swallow the fraud whole and declare it delicious. Only those of us who are paying the real, unsubsidized cost know how unsustainable the system is, and only those inside the machine know how broken it is at every level. Greed + cartels = Sickcare/ObamaCare. Love your servitude, baby--it's affordable, really, really, really it is.