Economists Give Obama Low Marks

[RAYMOND]

Economists Give Obama Low MarksReuters
posted: 1 HOUR 53 MINUTES AGOcomments: 2762filed under: Political News, The Obama PresidencyPrintShareText SizeAAA(March 12) ? President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received failing grades for their efforts to revive the world's largest economy, according to participants in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.
A majority of the 49 economists polled said they were dissatisfied with the administration's economic policies, according to the paper, a stark contrast to Obama's popularity ratings with the general public.
On average, the economists gave the president a grade of 59 out of 100, and although there was a broad range of marks, 42 percent of respondents rated Obama below 60, the paper said.

 

[THE KOD]

 

[Chadman]

Couple things jump to mind - not that I would necessarily doubt that outlook.

1. 49 economists? Seems like a relatively small sampling. Poll could definitely be skewed with a small number of selected "respondees."

2. Poll by the Wall Street Journal - believe owned now by Rupert Murdoch, who now has his people in place to give an "objective" look at economics.

3. 58% of the respondents rated Obama above 60. A broad range of marks must mean that some rated him pretty highly.

Not sayin, just sayin...

 

[THE KOD]

Comparing U.S. & Israeli health care systems
By Jeffrey Barg

Published June 1988

PND: Can you describe Israel?s current health care system?

SG: Israel basically has had almost universal coverage all along largely because the labor union had an HMO for many years. Up to the time of the passage of national health insurance, 95 percent of the population was covered by voluntary employer-employee health insurance through sick funds. Originally the big one was the labor union sick fund. Over the years, the other sick funds began to bite into the sick fund of the labor union in large part because they skimmed. They selected younger people, and so they could offer better services for people who had means. The sick fund of the labor union was really limping along, getting the sick people, the old people. The government finally passed a tremendously politically controversial national health insurance bill. The bill basically provides for employer-deducted health insurance, collected by one collection agency and the money distributed to the four sick funds according to the number of members they have, weighted by the age distribution of the members. Also, the law provides that no sick fund can turn down any member. You can?t legally skim. There are ways, still, of skimming but it makes it more difficult. It also makes it less of a reason to skim because you?re getting paid more for an older patient. There?s free movement between sick funds now and everybody is covered. Meantime, over the last number of years, the major sick fund has been reduced in size by competition and now only has about 60 to 70 percent of the population. The idea was that competition would also improve services, which it did to some extent. Since 1996, you have four sick funds competing, getting paid by the government and taking the big sick fund?s basket of services. They were supposed to update the basket of services annually. There were inadequate provisions for three areas of inflation: an aging population, an increase in technology and a total increase in population. The Minister of Finance basically kept the lid on and did not provide adequate funding to do this, so every year there?s a crisis. Two of the sick funds are almost bankrupt because of this.

PND: Was the primary motivation for coming up with this form of health system to hold down costs?

SG: Every player has different motivations. The major sick fund was rescued financially by the national health insurance bill. But I think there?s a general feeling that health care should be provided for everybody without necessarily tying it to membership in the union or some organization. Everybody agreed in principle that there should be national health insurance. Most western countries now have national health insurance, except the United States.

PND: What was the position adopted by the physician organizations?

SG: I think they also wanted it. Most physicians are employees anyway, they always were, so that really didn?t worsen their position. Actually, one of the reasons that the system is bankrupt or having trouble is that, just before the bill went into effect, the physicians and nurses union negotiated a tremendous pay increase. This wasn?t taken into account in the cost increase. This is one of the reasons that the bill started off already with a deficit.

PND: Who was the primary payer?

SG: The physician negotiates with all the employers as a package. The employers are the Government, which has the Government hospitals, and the sick funds. The salaries are uniform. It?s one group of negotiations for everybody. Ultimately, the money comes from tax money. But the people who set the budget don?t necessarily take into account the negotiations.

PND: How many physicians are there in Israel?

SG: Israel probably has the most physicians of any other country in the world per unit population. They have over 20,000 physicians. The number of physicians in Israel doubled in a five year period by immigration from the Soviet Union. Think what would happen in the United States if 500,000 physicians came into the country over a five year period. That?s what happened in Israel. Over 12,000 physicians arrived between 1988 and 1993 on the shores of Israel. And before that, Israel already had a very high ratio of physician to patient, so they had a tremendous surplus of physicians. A significant number of them are still not employed as physicians and they never will be because there?s no way anybody can employ that number of physicians, absorb them into the economy.

PND: How would you evaluate the success of the system thus far?

SG: It depends what you compare it to. We were spending about a thousand dollars per capita on health care, which is about a third of what the United States is spending. There?s nobody in Israel who?s bankrupt like in the United States because of health care. Health care is available readily. It may not be as luxurious. It may not be as pleasant or offer as much choice, but I think most people are reasonably satisfied with the health care system. Each year we go into a problem. I don?t remember a year in Israel when there wasn?t a problem. Right now, because of the deficit, the Minister of Finance has come up with a plan which, at the present moment, cannot pass even with his own party because it aroused so much opposition. They said they weren?t going to raise taxes. So what did they do? Instead of raising the amount deducted from everybody or on a scale according to salary, they allowed each sick fund to put a head tax, a supplementary tax, and they?re allowing sick funds to charge a small amount per visit. It?s a whole package of what most health economists would regard as regressive taxation. In other words, the sick are going to be paying more at the time of illness. So now there is a big public uproar, every month that passes the deficit gets bigger and they?re going to have to come some head. I think this is the first time that there?s been a public outcry in Israel about health care. Consumer groups, the cancer society, diabetes, they?ve all gotten together and formed a very vocal constituency. The doctors and nurses have joined them too, each for their own reasons. The government doesn?t have the votes to pass it, so they have to go back to the drawing board and do something. What?s going to happen I don?t know.

PND: What do you think would be the best way to address the problem?

SG: What the Minister of Finance is proposing, to my mind, is insane. It?s going to require a whole new collection apparatus and then there are exemptions. It?s so complicated. The simplest thing and the least bureaucratic is to raise the ceiling so you have to pay a certain percentage of your income up to a certain amount and beyond that you don?t add anymore, or increase a tenth percent to affect everybody.

PND: How would you compare the Israel?s health care system to that in the U.S., and what could you see each learning from the other?

SG: Israel has always been committed to health care for everybody. That?s been axiomatic. There?s a very high proportion of dialysis compared to the overall income of the country. The highest number of IVF units in the world per population. Probably the highest number of transplantation units per population. If somebody needs a transplantation in Israel, they?ll raise money in the community, not to let somebody die. Although we?re getting away from socialism more and more, going to a free economy and America?s the model, that ethos still exists in Israel much stronger than it exists in the United States.

And yet, the quality of health care: there is no place in the world you can get better than in America. Competition has improved the quality of how the sick funds treat their patients because they don?t want to lose them to the other sick funds. On the other hand, it has also created competition which isn?t always healthy: competing not necessarily on what?s good for the patient, but what the patient would like. For example, the major sick fund used to require you to go to your family doctor before you go to a specialist. The other sick funds would let you go to your specialist directly. Whether that? s good or bad, you can argue both ways. But because the other sick fund lets you go to your specialist, this sick fund has to do the same thing. Also, a tremendous amount of money was spent on advertising. You walk into a bus station and some girl would grab you and say, "You belong to so and so? If you join this sick fund we give you a suitcase or an umbrella. And you get three months free." It?s American stuff. How do you sell anything else? And there have been some tragic situations. I had a patient die because of that. She?s not too smart and her husband walked into one of these bus stations, some girl grabbed him and he switched out of the sick fund. The doctor in the other place didn?t really know the case, it?s a complicated case. So now they?re putting a clamp on that. But part of free market is free market. You give the public what it wants. Or what it thinks it wants

 

[StevieD]

These are the guys who gave Bush the advise that got us into this mess in the first place. They should be hung not polled!

 

[THE KOD]

RON PAUL

Republican representative from Texas; candidate for president in 2008

To fight earmarks is to fight for an even more powerful executive branch. It is popular these days to condemn earmarks in the name of fiscal conservatism. The truth is that they account for less than 2 percent of the spending bill just passed. And even if all earmarks were removed from the budget overall, no money would be saved. That money would instead go to the executive branch to spend as it sees fit. Congress has the power of the purse. It is the constitutional responsibility of members to earmark, or designate, where funds should go, rather than to simply deliver a lump sum to the president.

Earmarks actually provide a level of transparency and accountability to federal spending. Consider the $350 billion that was recently given to the Treasury Department for the Troubled Assets Relief Program. The Treasury has not been forthcoming about where much of that ended up. If every bit of it had been earmarked, at least we would know something about how it was spent.

Instead of fighting earmarks, we should empower Congress to audit the Federal Reserve, which creates and spends trillions of dollars without any real transparency or accountability.

CHARLES S. KONIGSBERG
..............................................................

 

[THE KOD]

Among the very rich, it's known as "the nut." That's the amount of money they need to salt away for a "rainy day"?for when the bubble bursts or the subpoenas arrive. It's enough money to keep paying for, say, the grandkids' private-school tuitions or the landscape gardener on Martha's Vineyard. ("Every Master of the Universe knows the number," wrote "The Bonfire of the Vanities" author Tom Wolfe.) Usually, the money is invested in something safe, such as T-bills. But sometimes it's sent, as they say, "offshore," stashed away in what one Swiss bank described as a "posterity fund."

Just how many rich people, and how much money? According to a recent U.S. Senate investigation, a single Swiss bank?the biggest, UBS?holds the secret bank accounts of 46,000 Americans, worth an estimated $18 billion. Lately, the Feds have tried to crack down on these rich Americans as tax evaders (generally, the depositors do not pay any taxes on the income from these accounts). The Swiss, not surprisingly, have been resisting. For more than three centuries, Swiss bank secrecy has offered safe haven to the wealthy, some of them unsavory types?Nazis, dictators such as Saddam Hussein and, allegedly, Islamic terrorists. At a time when the rich are coming under close and unsympathetic scrutiny, the details starting to come out about the way the Swiss banking game is played are eye-popping, if not infuriating. Judging from documents and testimony examined by NEWSWEEK, Swiss bankers, like spies, practice what is known in the espionage business as tradecraft?elaborate and often clever steps to evade detection. Last month UBS issued a statement saying, "UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its U.S. cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the U.S., as well as our own internal review." Translation: the Swiss bank was running a shadowy operation to help rich Americans get their money out of the country, and sometimes back in, without the Feds finding out.

The story is best told through the misadventures of an extremely rich American businessman named Igor Olenicoff and his dealings with an American-born Swiss banker named Bradley Birkenfeld, whose name seems to come from a Hollywood story treatment, along with some of the tales he has been telling, like smuggling diamonds in a tube of toothpaste.

Olenicoff is the 522nd-richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine. A white-haired, courtly-looking 66-year-old, Olenicoff had a close relative who was a courtier to the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II. His family fled the communists with some help from the daughter of Leo Tolstoy, who used

her fortune to aid the tsarist diaspora. Educated at the University of Southern California, Olenicoff worked in the pop-music industry as an executive for Motown Records, then made a bundle?more than a billion dollars?in commercial real estate in Orange County, Calif. and in Florida. In the late 1990s, worried about the stability of American banks, he says, he began moving some of his money offshore, first to Barclays Bank in the Bahamas, then to UBS in Switzerland.

In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Olenicoff told how he was lured to UBS by Birkenfeld, whom he describes as smooth and well-spoken. He says Birkenfeld arranged for him to get the secret tour: the elevator ride into the vault five floors below street level in the elegant UBS bank building in Geneva (impregnable to bombs!), the thumbprint, the facial-image-recognition software. Olenicoff says he was a little skeptical of the high-tech mumbo jumbo, but he was impressed by the UBS officials. Over time, he put into UBS accounts $200 million worth of assets, some of which were held in opaque corporate entities in Liechtenstein. He got the royal treatment there: a stay in the guesthouse of Prince Hans-Adam, at the time the ruler of the tiny principality in the Alps, where he was shown portraits of some of the royal family's most famous friends, including photos autographed by Cary Grant and Doris Day.

Olenicoff says that he was assured the setup was all perfectly legal under U.S. tax law. (This may be, though one wonders if someone as sophisticated as a billionaire with access to the best lawyers and accountants wouldn't have raised a few questions about the tax consequences.) In any case, his suspicions were more than raised when the IRS subjected him to an aggressive audit in 2004?and indicated it had seen copies of his UBS bank statements. Olenicoff immediately questioned how the Feds knew so much about his supposedly secret holdings. He says he suspected that he had been ratted out by the man who had brought him to UBS in the first place.

Bradley Birkenfeld, in his mid-40s, is a mysterious figure. Recent photos are hard to come by. Based on a court appearance last year, Portfolio magazine colorfully described him as "a bloated, tan version of Jim Cramer, if the 'Mad Money' host had lost his manic energy." The son of a successful neurosurgeon in Boston, Birkenfeld was a bit of a bad boy in high school, where he was busted for drugs, Portfolio reported. His parents packed him off to Norwich University, a military school in Vermont, presumably to learn some discipline. He appears to have migrated to a posh and not-too-demanding business school in Switzerland, then into the world of Swiss banks, where he thrived. Before long he had a BMW and a chalet in Zermatt

Birkenfeld's job, it seems, was to fish for rich American clients. According to testimony he gave to Sen. Carl Levin's permanent subcommittee on investigations, which has been looking into UBS, Birkenfeld was a member of a big team ("around 25 people in Geneva, 50 people in Zurich and five to 10 in Lugano ? a formidable force") of wealth prospectors. These "private bankers" would travel to the United States four to six times a year. "You might go to sporting events. You might go to car shows, wine tastings," Birkenfeld told the subcommittee. "You might deal with real-estate agents. You might deal with attorneys ? It's really where do rich people hang out, go and talk to them ? It wasn't difficult to walk into a party with a ? business card, and then someone ask you, 'What do you do?' and you say, 'Well, I work for a bank in Switzerland, and we manage money and open accounts.' And people immediately would recognize, 'Oh, this is someone who could open new business by opening accounts'." UBS did its part to foster such potentially profitable interchanges by sponsoring fancy events such as Art Basel, an annual major art show in Miami; performances in big American cities by the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra, an ensemble of young Swiss virtuosos; and yachting regattas at which an elite Swiss boating team called Alinghi competed.

But UBS wanted prospectors such as Birkenfeld to be careful?to act, it seems, more like spies than bankers. A September 2006 UBS document cautions its bankers to "always maintain 'clear desk policy' in hotel rooms; use secure infrastructure (travel notebook, PDA); be aware that cell phones are prone to eavesdropping; cross borders without client-related documents." Other documents warn UBS bankers what to do if approached by the FBI: protect bank secrecy.

Birkenfeld told investigators UBS bankers would encourage their clients to misrepresent money transfers they received from UBS as loans, rather than taxable income; to destroy offshore banking records in U.S. files; and to use Swiss bank credit cards that supposedly could not be discovered by U.S. investigators. Birkenfeld took his client service into the realm of James Bond: he says he once transported diamonds, bought with client money abroad, into the United States in a tube of toothpaste.

Somewhere along the way?it's not clear when or how?Birkenfeld turned state's evidence. Documents indicate that he left UBS in 2005; the reason he reportedly gave was that he suspected his employer of illegality. On the bank's internal computer network, he discovered an incriminating document?a set of instructions that U.S. investigators now believe was part of UBS's tradecraft manual for bank representatives serving American clients. Birkenfeld may have already been talking to the authorities by then. In any case, he was caught in a difficult spot. Entering the United States last spring to attend his 25th high-school reunion, he was arrested by the Feds. Later he pleaded guilty to conspiring with Olenicoff to hide millions from the IRS in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. He has been cooperating with investigators in an effort to stay out of jail; he is due to be sentenced next month. Having been outed as a whistle-blower, he is in trouble in Switzerland, too: if he ever sets foot in his adopted country, he would likely face arrest and a lengthy prison term for violating the strict Swiss bank-secrecy laws. (Birkenfeld's lawyers declined to comment.)

The Feds have subpoenaed all of UBS's records on Americans with secret bank accounts. Threatened with criminal charges, UBS has admitted violating U.S. law, paying $780 million in a settlement and offering banking data on about 250 clients. But the bank has said that Swiss law forbids it to turn over information about the thousands of other secret accounts. Nonetheless, UBS told its American clients to close their accounts and take their money elsewhere. Conservative politicians in Switzerland have railed against what they say is a fishing expedition that violates Swiss banking laws and Swiss sovereignty. Bank secrecy is a point of cultural pride for the Swiss, and so the controversy seems unlikely to abate any time soon.

The Swiss government and Switzerland's tiny neighbor Liechtenstein are facing heavy scrutiny. Since 2001 both countries have tried to cooperate with intelligence services tracking terroristfinance networks. As the global economy melts down and public anger rises, the old ways of bank secrecy will become increasingly hard to defend (even as the wealthy look for safe places to hide their money). Last week, the governments of both Switzerland and Liechtenstein announced that they would share more tax-related information with foreign governments, but the Swiss still declared that "Swiss bank secrecy is maintained."

And as for Olenicoff? He had to pay $52 million in back taxes and penalties, but, according to Forbes, he is still worth $1.4 billion?a big enough nut for any Master of the Universe.

? 2009
..............................................................

DTB

the rich pay the majority of taxes:mj07: