The Long Cold Winter

[Trishntek]

Moynihan,,, and remember Tip Oneill? They look pretty centrist these days don't they?

There has to be a tipping point if current trends continue. All I can say is, hope for the best while preparing for the worst. The possibility of gubmint take over of retirement and pension funds is greater than ever. That, IMHO is sufficient reason to keep your treasure close.

[can't sit still]

If you take Argentina as an example, they took the retirement funds. In japan, everyone put their savings into the GOV postal bank. GOV has burned through all this money. North Korea recently took everything. Obummer made a campaign promise to not tax those who make less than $ 250 K. Budget director Orzag quit because he said that this promise was unworkable. In the end, GOV will grab anything that it can.
I believe that debt service will steamroller any efforts by GOV to keep solvent. GOV has a habit of reacting to problems. Interest rates demanded by bond investors could go up in a very short time. There is no short-term reaction by GOV that could save their credit rating.

California is a good example of GOV waiting until a problem is truly unmanageable,,, and then taking action.... or at least, talking about taking action. The spending by congress is a guarantee that fiscal responsibility is a thing of the past. When insolvency comes knocking on the door, I expect the U.S. congress to act much like the legislature in Ca.... dither and argue.
The end result is that creditors, contractors and vendors don't get paid. Illinois is setting the example;
http://dollarcollapse.com/articles/are- ... ankruptcy/

Russia also set the example. Workers went for months without a paycheck. About 50 % of Americans depend on a check from GOV of some form or another [directly or indirectly]. History says that it won't be pretty.

[geekster]

Your tax dollars at work.

Apparently some $50 million has been earmarked over the years for a "transportation center" in South Carolina. Someone went to have a look. The location is an empty lot. There are currently no "transportation studies" being conducted. They can now only account for half of the allocated money. But not to worry, they are going to use what is left of the money to try to figure out what happened to the first half of the money.

http://www.heraldonline.com/2010/06/30/ ... audit.html

To give a practical example. In California, if a town wants to replace a bridge within their town limits, they must pay for it ... no big deal. BUT if the road is a "state highway", they must get CalTrans approval to replace it. Now the town can budget the money, create a design for the bridge but then they need to submit the design to CalTrans. CalTrans can then deny the project as "no current need" but they will bill the cost of denying the project against the project's budget. There is a project in Santa Cruz County that to date has something like 12 million dollars billed against it but not a single shovel of dirt has turned. All of that money is for the design and "studies" by CalTrans that keep turning down the project. So CalTrans engineers can keep billing hours on various projects around the state by simply denying them.

I would like to know how many hours are billed annually to projects that are never approved for construction.

[can't sit still]

OK people. We're down to the wire. The financial reform bill will institutionalize the current screw-job. The FED is a group of European banking oligarchs. They have been given complete control of the financial system to root-out and stop abuse. Under FED direction, the dollar has lost 10 % in the last year. What do you expect to happen when these oligarchs are given full control? They made huge bad bets. They lost. They transferred these losses to US. They now demand that we make good these losses by cutting out all social programs.

"Unemployment insurance, Social Security benefits, healthcare, relief for the poor, and pensions are bad, and their unfortunate recipients lazy, stupid and an expendable drag on society. But the maintaining of ill gotten gains of the oligarchs, the enormous fortunes obtained through financial fraud, and paying little or no effective taxes on them through various loopholes, is a somehow a sacred requirement for economic recovery"
This is the script.


"The US cannot obtain a sustained recovery without serious and significant financial reform and restructuring of its economy, and the legal repatriation of the wealth stolen by the financiers through fraud."
"Slowly but surely, the truth will out. But the delay causes damage."
This delay will be a period of years. THIS is what you have to prepare for.

Essentially, the bankers are demanding austerity so that you can pay off all their gambling debts. You, on the other hand want to continue to eat. You want default. they want austerity.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.co ... chart.html

Now, where does GOV come into the picture? Obama is calling for austerity but, is his heart in it? He seems to be influenced by the Cloward-Piven strategy that calls for crashing GOV by overwhelming financial demands. The effects of this can be seen in Illinois right now. Congress has the spending pedal to the metal. Is congress pushing the Cloward-Piven strategy to crash the FED and make default unavoidable?

Austerity is a "light" continuous squeeze. Default is a huge crashing blowback. Is GOV purposely spending to default to avoid a 30? year squeeze from the oligarchs? Congress appears to be at war with the FED. Bernanke told them to cut out social programs. When Mac 'n Mae slowed down financing, congress fired up the FHA to continue. It's all very interesting. The GSEs are expected to fail at a cost of $ 1 trillion.

If the FED fails to monetize the debt, bond auctions will fail. Failed bond auctions will bring eventual default. Congress recently did NOT approve extensions of unemployment benefits. This will cause a negative effect in defaults that is FAR greater than the cost of the benefits would have been.

The FED does NOT want a default because the bankers will get a giant haircut. Obama continues to preach stimulus. That's guaranteed to bring default. Congress is spending to the point where debt-service will kill the budget. Obama says 50 % budget reduction in 2 years, He knows that bond sales will blow before that. Are congress and the Pres in collusion to crash the FED and chop them off at the knees?
Austerity,,, we pay. Default, banks lose.

The FED can only defend the dollar. They can't actually cut spending. GOV is currently trying half-assed measures to save the economy. Is that the whole idea? Is GOV trying to induce RE and credit card defaults to the point where nothing will save the system?
Dan

[geekster]

The FED is a group of European banking oligarchs.

What fucking planet are you from? Now you are sounding like a PaulTard.

Who is the ranking member of the New York Federal reserve? That would be one Denis M. Hughes. Now what is Mr. Hughes' other job? Oh, right, he is President of the New York AFL/CIO. He started in the AFL/CIO in the office of "Political Director". And we know this is ok because the AFL/CIO has always been absolutely squeeky clean and there has never been any political corruption when it comes to organized labor, right?

Now who might be getting the benefit of NY Fed policy these days?

[can't sit still]

Planet earth

[geekster]

Planet earth

Ok, so you have the TARP program that provides funds to the Federal Reserve. The head of the NY Federal Reserve is also in charge of the NY AFL/CIO. The UAW is a member of the AFL/CIO. Chrysler and GM get billions in TARP funds. UAW gets >50% ownership of both GM and Chrysler.

Hmm. Amazing transfer of funds to the unions who are part of the organization that the NY Fed President is a bigwig of.

[geekster]

So you have the NY Fed which regulates "Wall Street" is now headed by the AFL/CIO ... what could go wrong?

I can't think of a better recipe for disaster/corruption if I tried.

Oh, and now that the unions are owners of major corporations you would expect corporate restrictions on "speech" in the form of campaign activity to apply to them as they would any other corporate ownership, right? Think again. They are exempt. They can extort money from employees and do whatever they want with it.

The inmates are running the asylum.

[Trishntek]

All that is true geekster, but you've gotta realize the part IMF plays in all this. The officers of the FED are a small group among many. I think we all kinda underestimate just how well developed the global economy already is. And labor unions are going global as well. Or maybe it's just me,,,,, I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

[geekster]

The IMF plays practically no role whatsoever in the US economy. What we have now is a Chicago machine that has looted our treasury. In the meantime, people like George Soros are making money hand over fist selling the planet short while financing the political entity that destroys the economy. The idea seems to be to put someone in power who is going to wreck the economy, sell everything short, then make bundles of money as the market collapses. Wonder how long before he leaves for Belize.

And in the meantime, Europe has decided not to play along anymore. Europe has decided to balance their budgets despite Obama's urging that they continue the destruction.

This is the government Obama was part of before he came to Washington:

(NYTimes)

[quote]For the last few years, California stood more or less unchallenged as a symbol of the fiscal collapse of states during the recession. Now Illinois has shouldered to the fore, as its dysfunctional political class refuses to pay the state’s bills and refuses to take the painful steps — cuts and tax increases — to close a deficit of at least $12 billion, equal to nearly half the state’s budget.

Then there is the spectacularly mismanaged pension system, which is at least 50 percent underfunded and, analysts warn, could push Illinois into insolvency if the economy fails to pick up.

States cannot go bankrupt, technically, but signs of fiscal crackup are easy to see. Legislators left the capital this month without deciding how to pay 26 percent of the state budget. The governor proposes to borrow $3.5 billion to cover a year’s worth of pension payments, a step that would cost about $1 billion in interest. And every major rating agency has downgraded the state; Illinois now pays millions of dollars more to insure its debt than any other state in the nation.

“Their pension is the most underfunded in the nation,â€

[can't sit still]

There is a lot of speculation about the ownership of the FED;
http://www.usagold.com/federalreserve.html
It's difficult to establish ownership vs control or influence; http://www.save-a-patriot.org/files/view/whofed.html
The FED claims that it is a non-profit corporation;
"Since nearly all the interest paid on debt sold to the Fed is transferred back to the U.S. Treasury, there isn't really any interest paid"
http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2004_ ... y-fed.html
The whole deal sounds incestuous
This paper claims that the FED is under control of GOV. Sounds doubtful when GOV has almost no idea what the FED does. They just did some huge currency swaps without a word to GOV. We'll never know.

[geekster]

Well, the notion is that the central bank of the US should not be under the direct control of Congress because every time that has happened, Congress screws it up. Right now the problem is not so much with Fed policy as it is with Treasury policy.

Treasury took a gamble that we were going to have a "quick V-shaped recession" and instead of using TARP to buy toxic assets, as it was originally sold to the American people, they decided to simply dump the cash into bank reserves under the assumption that the dip in housing values would be temporary. So they treated the immediate symptom (lack of liquidity) instead of addressing the problem (banks stuck with "under water" assets).

So now we have all that cash just sitting in the vaults and no sign that housing prices are going to recover any time soon. The Treasury should have bought the under-water loans or mandated some sort of plan where homeowners could get out from under them.

Where we sit to day is literally trillions of dollars that is owed by consumers where the underlying equity has evaporated. One reason existing home sales are down is that people can not sell. They are holding a $600,000 mortgage and can now only get $300,000 for the home. We are now into the third year of this and 50% of Americans stay in a job for only five years. People are in situations where they can't move, they can't sell houses, they can't unload that vacation house, the government is forcing them into a situation where the only action that makes any sense is to walk away from the loan.

8 trillion dollars of equity up in smoke and the government has not done a thing yet to address that.

[Trishntek]

Well, the notion is that the central bank of the US should not be under the direct control of Congress because every time that has happened, Congress screws it up.

I must respectfully disagree with you here. Since the FED was created in 1913, the accountability to the People of the United States has disappeared. At least with the Congress in charge of the money supply there is some avenue of accountability.

When did Congress screw it up worse than it is now? The U.S. Constitution designated the Congress with the responsibility. It does not grant them authority to delegate it to a "non profit" organization.

The ebb and flow of a free market economy is normal. That is how it self-regulates. It is the free market which is trying to adjust home prices to realistic values while the gubmint is trying to maintain a false value inflated by cheap and easy loans.

When gubmint manipulates the economy via redistributive programs, also unconstitutional, too big to fail bailouts that benefit individuals connected to the FED, and falsely blaming the free market system for all the woes in the world, that is what really screwed things up IMHO.

[can't sit still]

In the final analyses, the price of a house has to be relative to the wages in the same area. Wages have been stagnant since about 1970. Good-paying jobs have been leaving. The U.S. share of manufacturing has been declining. Greenspan tried to compensate for lowered purchasing power by lowering the prime rate. House prices bubbled way above 100 year old trend-lines and everybody knew it. The banks knew it too but, they passed out no-doc loans. What did they expect would eventually happen? The bond-rating agencies turned a blind eye to all of this. They knew what would happen.

Both the SEC and the FBI reported that RE was in a bubble and they expected a lot of fraud. Their RE fraud divisions were cut back to nothing.
The banks primary job is risk management. They fucked themselves. House prices were all fantasy if you considered that the earning power of Americans was falling as the house prices were exploding. The banks are fucking morons if they never considered the possibility that people would default.
RE is only secured by the property. Credit cards are unsecured. The banks offered un-deserved and un-secured credit to people in a falling-wage market. What did they think would happen? I haven't a shred of sympathy for the bankers. Their stupidity got them where they are at the moment.
Moron bankers blinded by greed seem to think that people are going to pay more than they earn to buy a house. These same morons believe that house prices will recover. If the banks got fucked because they could not see a connection between wages and house prices, they deserve defaults to the bitter end.
We have a collection of morons who believe that good paying jobs are going to come flowing back to the U.S.
We have another collection of morons who believe that house prices can recover even though wages will not recover.
We have bankers who believe that they'll get their money even though the working people don't have it to pay.
We also have a collection of morons in GOV / banks who are willing to cut loose the safety net so that GOV will have the bucks to pay the banks. ALL of these morons are ignoring the fact that there isn't enough wealth circulating in the economy for it to survive.
The economy will never recover if there isn't enough purchasing power.
Even the BIS came out and said as much.
Recovery babble is just a joke.

[ygmir]

don't I remember, some sort of gov. edict or the sort, almost forcing lending to unqualified people, so, it could be more "fair"?

IIRC, there was some tag line like "everyone deserves the American dream", or something like that.

[can't sit still]

Yup, they actually penal;zed the banks if they didn't make enough loans to unqualified people. I hear that GOV also has plans to repeal the law of gravity also.

[Trishntek]

don't I remember, some sort of gov. edict or the sort, almost forcing lending to unqualified people, so, it could be more "fair"?

IIRC, there was some tag line like "everyone deserves the American dream", or something like that.

I think it was all started with the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Then there was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1998 that completely opened the flood gates.

[can't sit still]

Seems other people are using the "winter" theme. The US: A Long Economic Winter Ahead
http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/07/th ... ter-ahead/
"I wrote a piece announcing that my analysis was pointing out to ten years of economic hardship entitled “We are in the Midst of the Great Baby-Boomers Economic Stagnation of 2007-2017â€

[can't sit still]

Time and time again, it has been proved that a central bank screws the people badly when they get control of money printing. Canada is a perfect example of a country that was very prosperous until they got a central bank. Central banking is a great siphoning off of wealth by the elites and royalty. This was the experience of Lincoln;

"1861: President Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the United States from 1860 till his assassination in 1865) approaches the big banks in New York to try to obtain loans to support the ongoing American civil war. As these large banks were heavily under the influence of the Rothschilds, they offer him a deal they know he cannot accept, 24% 36% interest on all monies loaned.

Angered by this high level of interest, Lincoln prints his own debt free money and informs the public that this is now legal tender for both public and private debts.

1862: By April $449,338,902 worth of Lincoln's debt free money has been printed and distributed.

He states of this

"We gave the people of this republic the greatest blessing they ever had, their own paper money to pay their own debts."

That same year "The Times of London" publishes a story containing the following statement:

"If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce.

"It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed
or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."

That states it pretty clearly. The parasites of banking were very worried. The Russian Tsar came to the aid of Lincoln and the north. The bankers financed the revolution to get rid of the Tsar. Somebody also got rid of Lincoln. JFK had the same experience. A few months after he started printing U.S. notes backed by GOV silver, he was killed. LBJ stopped the printing after 11 days, I believe. Then GOV sold off the silver to make sure that nobody else got the same idea.

The GOV sponsored banking bubble was a fraud and the banks knew it. As long as they could collect the fees and schlep the loans over to Mac n Mae, they didn't care. They securitized everything to make sure that they couldn't lose. They knew that it would crash and the public would get stuck with the bill. Greenspan promoted this fraud. Bernanke is continuing to buy MBSs even though he knows they're worthless. Our central bank oversaw all these actions by the member banks.
Hang em all.

[geekster]

Holy crap! Babs? Is that you?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/8874 ... tionselite

[quote]“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,â€

[can't sit still]

This is a list of counties most likely to default.
http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are ... nt-miss-24
The bankers of the world and the investor class would like to see austerity so that they get the money. The debtors would prefer default so that there debts are written off. In a VERY general sense, the rich want the poor to pay up for the benefits that they received from the Nanny-state. By the subtraction of interest money from the productive economy, the bankers have diminished the purchasing power of the majority of the people. They just can't pay up.
Who should pay and who should lose?
IMO, the bankers who engaged in risky gambling / speculating just to increase their private money pile should lose it ALL. The investors who invested honestly in the productive economy should see a reward for their investment. The banks who worked hard to screw everyone that they came in contact with should be liquidated to legitimate receivers. The war industries should be shut down completely except for legitimate defense projects.

We can just buy oil from Central Asia cheaper than taking it by force. We can't take over the Sino-Soviet bloc. We need to drop the pretensions and expense of Pax Americana.
We need a whole new economic model if we hope to compete. The cost of capital is far higher than the cost of labor. If we don't get the banks off our backs, the purchasing power won't come back,,, the competitiveness won't come back. Without those, the jobs won't appear.
The world has a huge over-capacity of manufacturing. It will be utilized in the countries with the lowest labor AND capital costs. If banks work for the good of the general economy, it works well. If banks work only for the good of the banks, the rest of the economy suffers.

This isn't just an academic subject. Since most countries have bought the debt of many other countries, any default will act like the proverbial domino. The sovereign states just don't have the reserves to absorb huge losses. Some countries will see default as an attractive solution. There are a few who are contemplating an exit from the EMU;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010 ... -recession

The whole West is collapsing. It isn't going to come to "fruition" without some defaults. Chances are that this will cause lots more defaults. I imagine a few countries will tell the banks to "PISS OFF"

[geekster]

This is a list of counties most likely to default.

Many years ago during the Carter years, the state of Delaware was in a bad situation. Pete DuPont was elected Governor. He instituted a program where the state could only budget 90% of the previous years actual revenues until a reserve fund had built up. Once that was done, the legislature could then budget up to 100% of the previous year's revenue. In no case could the legislature budget on a projected revenue increase. The state had tried to do that in the past and would raise taxes, expect a revenue increase, only to find that revenue declined each time they increased taxes. This resulted in increasing deficits which resulted in increasing borrowing and that resulted in increased debt load. That was particularly true in a time when municipal borrowing rates were over 10%.

The state completely turned their finances around.

DuPont was a harbinger of Reagan. He was reelected in 1980 with 71% of the vote in a state that is traditionally Democratic. He was a wildly popular Republican and the first Governor in 20 years to be reelected to a second term.

All it takes is financial discipline. Don't spend more than you take in. "Progressive" spending policies are fine as long as you have a huge surplus to draw from. As long as there are enough people with deep enough pockets to rob, you are fine. But once you run out of other people's money, spending MORE isn't going to fix the problem.

So far in my life experience what I have seen since the 1970's is that Republicans generally improve the economy, and Democrats generally spend it all. Then Republicans are elected again and the cycle repeats. The economic stagnation of the Nixon/Ford years was a result of the burdens of Johnson's Great Society programs in addition to VietNam and Apollo. That culminated during Carter when even after VietNam and Apollo, the burden of the Great Society welfare programs was more than we could handle.

[geekster]

Greenspan promoted this fraud.

Popular conventional wisdom but not true.

He didn't promote the fraud but what he did was enable it. There is a subtle but important difference. Interest rates too low for two long. When it came time to raise rates, people in adjustable rate mortgages who had no business being in that type of loan defaulted and that is when all hell broke loose.

Also:

Recently released transcripts of Fed meetings do record him warning in November 2002: "It's hard to escape the conclusion that at some point our extraordinary housing boom...cannot continue indefinitely into the future."

...

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has expressed concern that government subsidies provided to the GSEs make investors underestimate the risk of investing in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Ron Paul's remarks in the House in July, 2002)

...

WSJ - Greenspan Sternly Warns Of GSE risks
Thursday, September 15, 2005

"as Fannie and Freddie increase in size relative to the counterparties for their hedging transactions, the ability of these (companies) to quickly correct the inevitable misjudgments inherent in their complex hedging strategies becomes more difficult"


So the notion that Greenspan "promoted" the GSE's behavior with regard to home mortgages is pretty much urban legend. It isn't true.

Greenspan was warning that exactly what did happen could happen for several years before it happened.

[geekster]

*sigh*

The damned Democrats just can not stop their social engineering meddling and let markets work.

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/article ... 98562.html

The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

....

Lest there be any narrow interpretation of Congress's intent, either by agencies or eventually by the courts, the bill specifies that the "fair" employment test shall apply to "financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services." That last would appear to rope in law firms working for financial entities.

Contracts are defined expansively as "all contracts for business and activities of an agency, at all levels, including contracts for the issuance or guarantee of any debt, equity, or security, the sale of assets, the management of the assets of the agency, the making of equity investments by the agency, and the implementation by the agency of programs to address economic recovery."

This latest attempt by Congress to dictate what "fair" employment means is likely to encourage administrators and managers, in government and in the private sector, to hire women and minorities for the sake of appearances, even if some new hires are less qualified than other applicants. The result is likely to be redundant hiring and a wasteful expansion of payroll overhead.

...

The new Offices of Women and Minorities represent a major change in employment law by imposing gender and racial quotas on the financial industry. The issue deserves careful debate - rather than a few pages slipped into the financial regulation bill.

Layers and layers of more bureaucracy, quotas that have nothing whatsoever to do with competence, more racist policies from Democrats. "Sorry, you can't hire that black guy for that job in the finance department, the numbers say you have to hire a Hispanic guy, you already have enough black people working for you. " We don't care that he is amazing and very qualified and graduated at the top of his class, he isn't the right color."

What are these people THINKING?

The supreme idiocy of this is an attempt to legislate "fairness". Life isn't fair. People work their entire lives to get an "unfair" advantage by getting more education or becoming better at something that others. So you tell someone after they have busted their ass becoming the best they can possibly be that they can't get the job because the quota of people of their race is full? How is that "fair"? It is institutionalized racism.

Stop expecting life to be "Fair". It wasn't designed to be. If life were "fair" one person would never have to work harder than another to attain a goal or to be exceptionally good at something. If life were "fair" we would all have equal talents and abilities. We don't. A business should be able to hire the best person for the job REGARDLESS of race, creed, or national origin.

The Democratic Party has become a pack of idiots.

[Trishntek]

It seems being created equal has turned into living, working and learning equal. Unique abilities, talents and creativity are no longer encouraged. As the BORG in Star Trek NG would say, "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!"

[geekster]

And "to promote the general welfare" has turned into "to provide the general welfare".

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

[geekster]

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... n-may.html

Consumer credit decreased at an annual rate of 4-1/2 percent in May 2010. Revolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 10-1/2 percent, and nonrevolving credit decreased at an annual rate of 1-1/2 percent.

...

Still working down the debt ... also the previously reported slight increase in April was revised to a $14.9 billion decrease in credit.

[geekster]

http://coburn.senate.gov/public//index. ... 98826c1592

What I find amazing in this document is:

Starting in 2014, Americans will be subject to the individual mandate penalty of $695 annually if they do not purchase federally-dictated health insurance. However, under the new federal law, illegal immigrants will not be forced to purchase health insurance, though they will still be able to receive health care—regardless of their ability to pay—in a hospital‘s emergency department.

According to CRS, ―Unauthorized (illegal) immigrants are expressly exempted from the mandate to have health insurance and, as a result, cannot be penalized for noncompliance. So illegal immigrants get health care without paying for it, but citizens face the choice of either buying expensive health insurance or paying a tax.

The cost of illegal immigrants‘ health care in the emergency department of hospitals will be shifted to Americans with insurance. As CRS underscored, ―the cost of providing uncompensated care to the uninsured was $43 billion in 2008, and, ―to pay for this cost, health care providers pass on the cost to private insurers, which pass on the cost to families. This cost-shifting increases family premiums on average by over $1,000 a year.

President Obama said in September 2009, there are ―more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get [health] coverage.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S – constituting between a quarter or third of the uninsured population that President Obama identified.

While the CRS memo said there is ―very limited research on the differences in the amount of uncompensated care provided to U.S. citizens and noncitizens, if illegal immigrants use the emergency department for getting health care on a proportional basis, it is possible that they could be the cause of a quarter to a third of the cost of uncompensated care. While the uncompensated care costs may be reduced under the law, according to the Congressional Budget Office, there will still be about 24 million people without health insurance at the end of the decade.

Now why would this be unless illegals are voting?

[can't sit still]

Hospitals can't deny treatment in the ER. FED GOV does not currently reimburse states for prison and hospital costs. For school costs, it depends. I believe 72 hospitals have gone bankrupt in Ca and Az in the last few years. I expect more hospitals to go under as higher numbers of people use the ER for their doctor of choice.
I've been to the IMSS [social security] hospitals in Mexico. They aren't free.

[geekster]

But this is the part that got my ass chapped:

Unauthorized (illegal) immigrants are expressly exempted from the mandate to have health insurance and, as a result, cannot be penalized for noncompliance.

EXPRESSLY exempted. That means that it explicitly and clearly says they are exempt. Why? Why can not their home country be billed for their care?