It is amazing how much credit has contracted. Both the banks' ability to lend, as well as the demand for loans has slowed way down. Few companies are buying additional capacity, since there is so much overcapacity. There is a bleak market for any luxuries, and the new normal will be high unemployment, low incomes, high taxes, and low growth. While we have deflation, our dollar will be worth so much less in terms of other currencies and commodities that all imports, including energy, will be very dear. Oh well...

The new Healthcare emphasis scares me a bit. It makes sense to spend money on prevention, except that it won't save a dime. To take a smoker who will die at an early age, of a disease that is uncurable and quick, and transform them into a healthy person, who lives for years, has numerous and expensive treatments over a long life, is a good thing, but it doesn't save money. Also, our best new diagnosis tools are the high tech scanners, and our best strategy is to permit lots of these to drive the price of a scan down. That won't happen.

The key to lowering health care cost is to persuade someone headed to the emergency room for a toothache or an upset stomach to go to a CVS clinic instead. The other key is for all Medicare and Medicaid service to be HMO programs, where unnecessary treatments are not reimbursed.
The final part of the cost is to have a very inexpensive catastrophic very high deductible insurance policy available for everyone.

Ht truthdig

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully.

“This means the end of the dollar,” “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

The battle between deflation and inflation continues. As some commodities experts claim that one or the other will be the larger problem, the debate on the internet is fierce.

lazy american students

hat tip ft

American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics.

virgins

Men and women who attended church at least once a week were respectively 5 and 3.9 times more likely to be virgins than those who attended church less often. Virgins of both sexes were slightly less likely to have swigged a beer in the last year, compared to non-virgins. And women with college degrees were 5.4 times more likely to be virgins than women who never got their Bachelor's. ht futurepundit

Iran elections are over, and still no comment from Washington about the level of corruption in the election process. What gives?