I bet you were wondering what Admin does in his spare time for fun.
After spending my weekend writing a depressing article about the decline and fall of the American Empire, I got up at 5:15 am, got in my itsy bitsy Hybrid and dodged 18 wheelers on my hour drive into the killing fields of West Philly. I put in a full day at work and then for fun I walked over to the Annenberg Center at 5:00 pm to watch a documentary about the impending collapse of our country because of our debt and a panel discussion with four Wharton professors. The conclusion – we’re fucked.
The documentary was extremely well done. It was similar to David Walker’s I.O.U.S.A. which came out in August 2008, just before the financial collapse. Here’s the problem. David Walker’s documentary showed the perils of our national debt and the impending disaster if we didn’t address our unfunded liabilities related to Medicare, Social Security and future deficits. The National debt in August 2008 was $9.6 trillion. Today it is $16.2 trillion. I don’t think Walker’s recommendation was to increase the Debt by 69% over the next four years. Obamacare was passed, adding millions of people into Medicare and digging us deeper into debt. When you’re in a hole, you’re supposed to stop digging. We dug faster.
They can make documentaries until they are blue in the face, but Americans will yawn and flip the channel to Dancing With the Stars to see Bristol Palin self destruct. If this documentary comes on your local PBS station (until Romney pulls the plug) I recommend you watch it. They are going to 20 different colleges to promote this film. It is the Millenials who get fucked the worst, so they should get angry. We’ve left them a shit sandwich with a side of shit.
We have no leaders willing to level with the American people. We have an American people who want to be lied to. Nothing will be fixed until the entire system implodes. Sad but true. The panelists seemed to hold out hope that after the election the Simpson/Bowles plan would be resurrected and enacted. I doubt it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqW628w_z4w&feature=share&list=PL681B1D0A84320023
PBS documentary ‘Overdraft’ explores U.S. debt situation
After the screening, Wharton professor Michael Useem moderated a discussion
By Fiona Glisson · October 9, 2012, 12:32 am
In last week’s presidential debates, Governor Mitt Romney said that he would cut funding for PBS as part of his plan to balance the budget and decrease the national debt.
Last night in the Zellerbach Theatre, The Wharton School and the Penn Institute for Urban Research hosted a screening of Overdraft — a PBS documentary — which discusses the causes and dire consequences of the United States’ soaring national debt.
After the screening, management professor Michael Useem — who is also the director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management — moderated a panel discussion.
The documentary, which can also be found on YouTube, was commissioned and funded by the Travelers Institute, a think tank founded by Travelers Insurance Company. It applies the company’s management, experts and knowledge to issues of public policy.
“We wanted to raise awareness about the importance of public policy decision-making and things that our experts can help with,” said Joan Woodward, the president of the Travelers Institute and executive vice president of public policy for Travelers.
Though the Traveler’s Institute funded and contributed information to the documentary, they had little say in its editorial content. WTVI-TV — Charlotte, North Carolina’s PBS affiliate — produced the film in partnership with Susie Films.
The documentary outlined how the housing crisis, the resulting economic downturn and unbridled government spending contributed to the burgeoning national debt.
It then showed various perspectives concerning how portions of the government’s budget such as health care, defense and social security were not solvent.
Heather Huang, a junior exchange student in Wharton, found pharmacy owner Tom Miller’s story particularly effective. His pharmacy in Marion, Illinois, went under because the state government could not afford to reimburse him for patients’ Medicare and Medicaid prescriptions. She liked that the film interviewed “common people and related [national debt] to their lives.”
While it did not provide specific solutions, the film stressed that something must be done.
Introducing the film, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Travelers Companies Inc., 1974 Wharton bachelor’s and MBA graduate Jay Fishman stressed that we are on an “unsustainable path to $2 trillion [yearly] deficits if we don’t do something about it.”
Echoing a quotation from Revolutionary-era financier Robert Morris, University President Amy Gutmann commented while introducing the film, “Our own interest and the public good still go hand and hand.”
Wharton is the first stop on a nationwide tour of a growing list of business schools that include the Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Producer and Susie Films founder Scott Galloway hopes the film will serve to educate students and encourage them to be involved in public policy. “My hope is that they get a better understanding of the issues,” he said. “I do hope that they recognize that a lot of these issues are solvable.”
Students who attended the event echoed Galloway’s thoughts, discussing the film’s education value. Dan Clay, a Wharton MBA student said the film was “really helpful in explaining why the debt matters.”
Second-year Wharton MBA student William Wang said the film stressed that “fiscal responsibility goes a long way.”
Katie Willis, a graduate student in the School of Social Policy and Practice studying non-profit leadership, appreciated that the film motivates viewers to take action. “The urgency of the speakers within the film felt like a call to arms, which I enjoyed because this is such a pressing problem.”
“I do hope that they recognize that a lot of these issues are solvable.”
sez who?
It’s funny that Amy Guttman quoted Founding Father Robert Morris before a documentary about debt. He was thrown into debtors prison near the end of his life:
Morris was later deeply involved in unsuccessful land speculations, investing in the District of Columbia, and purchasing over 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km²) in the rural south. An expected loan from Holland never materialized because England and the Dutch declared war on Revolutionary France. The subsequent Napoleonic Wars ruined the market for American lands, and Morris’s highly leveraged company collapsed. The financial markets of England, the United States, and the Caribbean suffered from the deflation associated with the Panic of 1797. Thus Morris was “land rich and cash poor” (he owned more land than any other American at the time, but didn’t have enough hard money to pay his creditors).
Although he attempted to avoid creditors by staying outside the city at “The Hills”, his country estate on the Schuylkill River, his creditors literally pursued him to his gate. After he was sued by a former partner, a fraud who at that time was serving time in debtor’s prison, Morris was arrested. He was imprisoned for debt in Prune Street prison in Philadelphia from February 1798 to August 1801.
Took a little while to find this but ………… NO NEED TO WAIT !!!!
YOU CAN WATCH THE WHOLE DOCUMENTARY HERE …;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqW628w_z4w&list=PL681B1D0A84320023&feature=player_embedded#!
Stuck
I searched and couldn’t find it. I’ll post it.
Thanks
At your service, Massa.
And don’t forget my fuckin’ hat tip!!
Thanks for the videos. I know that pharmacist, he got a job at Wal Mart pharmacy (no joke). The democratic socialist state of Illinois gives out free shit like it’s going out of style, and doesn’t pay their bills, sometimes for 9-12 months, if at all. Multiply this guy going out of business by about 10,500, and you have some kind of idea the businesses that have closed or gone bankrupt in healthcare in Illinois because of the criminal politicians in Illinois. Doctors, hospitals, pharmacists don’t get paid for 9 months, if at all, but the FSA gets their direct-deposit cash like clockwork, their SNAP and EBT cash “after midnight” when it’s due, their free housing and phones ad libitum. And the FSA keeps using (often grossly over-using) doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists. It’s insane.
I had to sell my practice to the hospital, and now earn about 1/2 what I did, because the state doesn’t pay their bills. I no longer worry about meeting payroll every two weeks, tax deposits, and borrowing the money every month to do so. I can’t leave Illinois, because my children are here.
That fucking Clinton, he’s campaigning on T.V. for Obama, who has deficit spent $6 trillion, and will spend/borrow another $6 trillion if re-elected. What a fucking hypocrite.
As you say, they can make videos all day long. It’s like sticking your foot out the door trying to slow your car, going 60 mph toward the cliff with no brakes. It’s pointless. Everyone knows a collapse is coming, even almost 70% of boobus Americanus, but nothing can be done about it; 47% of the population is getting cash from the government. The sooner it collapses, the better. Once the government starts getting into trouble, boobus Americanus will be clamoring for Republicans to run things, once all the democrat lies and socialism starts to fail, but it’ll be too late. It already is too late. Everyone with two neurons knows it. Now, it just waiting for Godot.
I’m not crying or complaining here. I swear to that. Just another data point, that’s all.
A few weeks ago Ms Freud received payment on a client she saw eight months ago. She doesn’t take Medicare. It was Blue Cross. That was atypical. The average wait is 2 – 3 months.
She remarks that she too would love to wait 3 months before paying her grocery bill, or whatever. She also said that had she known how bad this would be, she would have never spent $50k to get her doctorate degree. It’s just not worth it. The clinic where she works is down to three psychologists … from eight just last year. They just didn’t want to put up with the shit.
And Obamacare hasn’t even kicked in yet. America is in for one helluva surprise when it does.
Memo to self:
Don’t get sick
In Texas Medicaid was single payer until this year. It wasn’t big money, but getting paid was mostly a matter of waiting a month or two (and resubmitting the lost and f**ked up claims relentlessly)
Now I’m dealing with three nasty corporations that don’t want to pay for anything. they keep changing the rules daily …taking away money retroactively….I’m getting screwed while their CEO collects a bonus for saving money through “managed care”
The best of the three, and the only one we could negotiate with reasonably at all, apparently decided the State was asking them to play too much dirty pool, and they are dropping out, so we will only have the two worst ones after the first of the year.
“I had to sell my practice to the hospital, and now earn about 1/2 what I did, because the state doesn’t pay their bills. I no longer worry about meeting payroll every two weeks, tax deposits, and borrowing the money every month to do so. I can’t leave Illinois, because my children are here.”-AWD
Thats a pretty common occurrence here. Since Obamacare was upheld most of the local doctors have either sold out to the hospital, or just flat moved to another location.
I think we only have a bare handful of true private practice docs in town, which is a shame because they typically provide the best care in my experience.
Every time I go to my doctor, in spite of Medicare and my supplemental, I donate to his practice because I’m not stupid.
From Investors Business Daily 9-7-12 covering Obama’s DNC speech.
President Obama’s convention speech got rough reviews, and rightly so. He offered little but tired bromides and recycled promises. But critics overlooked one promise that will guarantee an even bleaker future.
There was plenty to dislike in Obama’s speech. The language was flat, his delivery languid. The speech was stuffed with standard Obama chestnuts about the smallness of politics, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and how cynicism is our worst enemy.
Instead of stirring rhetoric filled with hope and promise, Obama pledged that under his leadership, “our path is harder” and “our road is longer.”
Seriously? After four years of the worst economic recovery since the Depression, falling incomes, lower-paying jobs, increased hopelessness and exploding debt, all Obama has to offer is that he’ll make this nightmare last even longer?
He also told the public that they “elected me to tell you the truth” not to “tell you what you wanted to hear,” but then proceeded to hide inconvenient truths while filling the public’s ears with sweet nothings.
For example, he pledged government help for everyone who could possibly want or need it, but managed to avoid any mention of the hard truth that the national debt just topped $16 trillion and entitlements are unsustainable.
He said he’d spend money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on roads, bridges and schools. Even the liberal press wasn’t buying this one. As the AP pointed out, Obama “laid claim to a peace dividend that doesn’t exist.”
Obama promised to “take responsible steps” that would “keep the promise of Social Security.” But he failed to mention that the only options he’s left on the table are raising taxes or cutting benefits. That may not be what people want to hear, but it’s the absolute truth.
He trotted out his supposed plan to cut deficits by $4 trillion over the next decade. But his actual plan — the budget he presented in February — would add $3.5 trillion in deficits, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Then Obama said he’d create a million new manufacturing jobs, recruit another 100,000 math and science teachers, cut tuition growth in half, and reform the tax code. All by magic, apparently, since he’s provided no detailed plans on any of this.
But while everyone was picking apart these and other flaws in Obama’s speech, they overlooked the most frightening line of all. That was when Obama promised that he’d pursue “the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.”
That promise might have made liberal hearts swoon. But as Amity Shlaes explained in her outstanding history of the era — “The Forgotten Man” — it was precisely FDR’s “bold, persistent experimentation” that was largely to blame for the length, depth and severity of the Great Depression.
Convinced that the government had to do something, FDR tinkered and experimented, she said, figuring that if he didn’t “get it right the first time … maybe he’d get it right the second time.” But the very arbitrariness of FDR’s actions, she found, made it impossible for businesses to make plans. And so, as FDR’s bold experiments increased, business activity decreased and markets froze.
“From the point of view of a business,” Shlaes said in a 2009 interview, “it is annihilating to hear Washington uncertain, and that itself retards recovery because you really don’t know what to expect.”
If Obama wants to conduct experiments, he should get a job as a high school science teacher, and not use the entire nation as guinea pigs, particularly when we already know how his tests will turn out.
Sensetti
Our hospital has 30 beds. We don’t need a hospitalist. We do it all, including covering the ER. Our hospital is what I like to call “functionally bankrupt”. The democratic socialist/communist state of Illinois owes our hospital more than $1 million dollars. Our yearly profit/budget is only about $700k. So, the hospital borrows from the local bank at 6% interest. I don’t know how much we owe the bank, but, for all practical purposes, we are bankrupt (negative cash/equity position). We borrow based on our accounts receivable, as I did when I tried to stay in business. If the bank doesn’t loan us the money, we close the doors.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the state decides to freeze payments for state employees health bills for one year. So, instead of getting paid for people with regular insurance, the hospital has to borrow yet more money. And, around here, it’s all state employees, FSA, farmers or coal miners.
So, the bank that loaned us the money is functionally bankrupt as well. They’re owed money by us, who are owed money by the state of Illinois, which everyone knows is bankrupt. Yet, we must, by law, continue seeing Medicaid patients, Medicare patients, and state employees, even though we don’t get paid.
Meanwhile, mongoloid state employees are still making $125,000 per year to warm a desk and push papers, still retiring at 50 with massive multi-million pensions, still driving Mercedes and living the high life, and still get raises every year (and protesting to RAISE taxes, as I’ve demonstrated before). The unions are still running the show. Meanwhile, the entire healthcare system in the state hangs by a thread. And, the FSA get their goodies right on time. There is a huge line outside Wal Mart on the 31st of every month; starts about 11pm, then they start filling their carts and loitering around the store until the magical hour midnight. When the clock strikes 12, the new SNAP and EBT cash electronically hits their cards, and they race to the check-out counters with all their loot. It’s been video’d. It’s hilarious.
Your comment about case managers is old news. We’ve been putting up with that for years now.
Obamacare is going to add at least 30 million more people to Medicaid, which doesn’t pay their bills, which less than 30% of primary doctors will see, and which zero specialists will see. Hey, give fucking everyone in the country Medicaid. Your Medicaid Gold Card, or you’re combo Obamacard/Medicaid card might work for breaking into houses, but will soon render no healthcare. Obamacare is the final straw, the poison pill, the end of healthcare as you and I know it. I suppose now you can see why. It’s the last dagger in the heart.
I bookmarked the video and watched the first 15 minutes so far. A total of 2601 hits. This explains why America is fucked. Nobody cares.
You guys need to get with the program.Black market is the answer,organ transplants.Drug dealing out of an empty room.Just kidding.Work out a way to charge the government late fees for late repayments.