Obamacare And Progressive Disdain For The Peasants

In the disastrous Obamacare rollout, there has been much reporting on the falseness of the president's promises ("If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."), but much less on what that falseness reveals about the underlying game.  That game, of course, is to force some large percentage of the population to overpay for healthcare so that others can be subsidized. 

But with all the publicity about the false promises, and the accompanying cancellation of millions of policies now deemed non-compliant with Obamacare, it seems that more people are starting to catch on.  And now we are starting to learn what is the Official Progressive Answer upon exposure of the lie:  We had to do this to you because you are too stupid to do what is good for yourself. 

So one after another the spokesmen for the administration put forth the new line, that we are protecting you from your own folly.  The rhetoric attempts to direct anger at the evil insurance companies, but no one was forced to buy these prior policies.  So in fact what we have is a demonstration of oozing progressive contempt and disdain for the ignorant peasants.  As example number one, here is President Obama himself yesterday in Boston:   

One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured, but also the underinsured.  And there are a number of Americans –- fewer than 5 percent of Americans -– who've got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.

Or Jay Carney in his daily press briefing:

What the President said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act that create minimum standards of coverage.

Or Congressman Henry Waxman (D, Hollywood) at yesterday's House hearing, who characterized what is going on as no longer "allowing insurers to continue offering deficient plans next year." 

So the peasants have been buying "cut-rate" and "deficient" plans that don't meet "minimum standards."  Good try, but the peasants as usual aren't as dumb as their masters think.  Take a look at the list of "essential health benefits" that must be included in any Obamacare plan.  The majority of them are things that no rational person would insure against, any more than you would insure against the cost of buying lunch.  Insurance for "preventive and wellness services" is a license for neurotic hypochondriacs to force you to pay for their many useless doctor visits.  Prescription drugs are exactly the sort of ongoing and non-catastrophic expense that nobody would try to "insure" against outside the weird healthcare world; ditto for laboratory services.  Then there are the things that you can know with 100% certainty that you will not use during the coming year, for example, maternity services or birth control if you are a single man, or substance abuse services if you are a teetotaler. 

In fact the peasants know exactly what they are doing, and the elite progressives are the fools.  But the peasants are going to have the last laugh, because starting now from day one, people are going to do what they always do, which is to behave rationally to maximize their position in the world given the various constraints that they face.  The people will do lots of things, some of which are good for the country and some bad, but all of which are bad for the survival and success of the Obamacare coercive enterprise.  As a few examples: 

(1) As mentioned here many times, if you are young and healthy (with few assets), don't sign up.  Wait until you are sick and then sign up. 

(2) Will some enterprising people in Canada please set up a few black market insurers up there and sell policies over the internet?  The Canadians are doing this right now with ridiculously overpriced U.S. prescription drugs, making a bundle and completely getting away with it.  There are billions of dollars to be made here.   If Canada cooperates with the U.S. goons to shut this down, try Cyprus.  What are you guys waiting for?

(3) In one of its much underappreciated idiocies, Obamacare defines the entitlement to government subsidies based on "household income."  The concept of the "household" is subject to manipulation and redefinition by intelligent enterprising individuals seeking to maximize their government handouts.  Are a man, woman and two children with a $50,000 income one middle-class family or a middle-class man and a woman and two children in poverty?  If it enables you to qualify for a $10,000 per year subsidy, then get a divorce or build a temporary wall through the middle of the apartment.   The handout-receiving "poor" in this country have long since figured this out, and thus have a reported 72% "illegitimacy" rate; now the middle class can have that too! 

And those are just the ideas that occur to me off the top of my head.  We now have 300 million people at work in the best tradition of capitalism to get around this monstrosity.  Social structures that are based on demanding people to act against their own economic interest to benefit others do not work.  They won't work here either.  I'm betting on the peasants, and against their would-be masters. 

Should A Federal Prosecution, Or Even A Guilty Plea, Entail Reputational Damage To The Target?

When you read about the latest federal prosecution or investigation of some or another big alleged wrongdoing, do you find yourself instinctively thinking that the target undoubtedly must have done something wrong?  After all, our prosecutors and regulators are trained experts lacking even a hint of self-interest.  Why would they conceivably invest all this energy in a major prosecution if there wasn't something really bad going on? 

And beyond that abbreviated thought process, it's very difficult for even the well-informed citizen to invest enough time and energy in studying the facts of any of these prosecutions to form a real independent judgment on whether the defendant did anything wrong.  So our instinct is to trust the government, and thus for the reputations of entities under investigation or prosecution to suffer or die, along with their businesses.  Combine this dynamic with a few dozen rounds of piling on useless and destructive regulation (see, e.g.,  Dodd-Frank), so that now scores of federal and state regulators and prosecutors have been given life and death powers over most large businesses, and you have an environment ripe for extreme corruption.     

How bad is the corruption?  Fortunately, from time to time big cases come along that are so obviously preposterous on their face that no great amount of study of the facts is needed to know that something is going terribly wrong here.   

I have previously written about the government's "sick game" with the big commercial banks.  That is the game whereby the government passes the banks billions upon billions of dollars by artificially keeping their cost of funds at or near zero for years (aka QE I, II, III,. . .,n) and then every prosecutor in the country gets to go collect a few hundred million, or a few billion dollars from one or more of them every so often in order to keep the prosecutor's name in the papers.  And thus, to take the example of just one of the banks, I commented on July 1 on J.P. Morgan's participation in a $25 billion settlement with 49 state AGs, Justice and HUD over alleged wrongful practices in enforcing underwater mortgages; and then on July 25 on JPM's settlement with FERC for about $500 million for alleged manipulation of trading in the California electricity spot markets (the alleged manipulation having had the potential effect of raising electricity prices to any given consumer by perhaps a few dollars, all while the state of California and the Obama administration seek an artificial doubling of electricity prices by imposition of a "cap and trade" carbon restriction regime);  and then on September 24 on JPM's settlement for $920 million with the SEC, where the SEC decided that the right "remedy" to punish JPM for the "London Whale" trading losses of about $6 billion was to force JPM to fork over yet another $920 million to the SEC.   

Each of these three settlements had some rather obvious facial absurdities.  But now we're coming to the big one:  the criminal -- yes, criminal -- investigation of JPM by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York, for alleged failure to discover and report the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff.  The New York Times covered the story on October 23, and Professor Richard Epstein of NYU Law School has a long comment on the affair at the Hoover Institution site here.

The central irony of this one, of course, is that the government itself, in the person of the SEC, had both better information and better access to information about Madoff than JPM or anyone else.  The SEC had the right to inspect books and records.  The SEC had subpoena power.  The SEC actually sent people in to Madoff's offices no fewer than five times to conduct examinations or investigations.  The SEC had a well-informed guy named Harry Markopolos writing it one letter after another setting forth in layman's terms why Madoff's operation was and had to be a Ponzi scheme.  And compared to JPM or anyone else, it's actually the SEC's job, if they have any job, to figure out which operators are crooks and stop them. 

In 2009 the SEC's Inspector General put out a 457 page report on the agency's incredible failure to figure out Madoff over three decades (linked in Epstein's article).  Epstein summarizes the report as follows:  

 [T]he OIG found that the SEC had ample information in the form of “detailed and substantive complaints” from 1992 to 2008, all of which raised “significant red flags” about Madoff’s operations that the SEC then overlooked in “three examinations and two investigations” that turned up nothing. JPM is not mentioned once in that 457-page study.

But of course the SEC is the government so nobody can do any wrong.  Nobody even got fired!  Well, what good would that do, since they've never discovered any other single Ponzi scheme ever?  Could the next group of bureaucrats really do any better?

Epstein points out that Bharara is working on this one hand in glove with the Office of the Controller of the Currency, which has the ability to suspend JPM's charter and put it out of business without need for evidence, proof, or a trial.  So how much will JPM fork over on this one?  A good bet would be multi-billions.  If there's one sure bet, it's that JPM will not submit itself to a criminal trial and take any risk whatsoever of conviction, even .0001%.

The question is, when JPM (or some other big company) settles this one or the next five, to what extent should the informed public consider its reputation to be diminished by the assumption that it may have done something wrong?  There really isn't any reason to think that any one of these coerced settlements had any more solid basis than any other one, or than this latest absurdity.  Way too many ambitious prosecutors have figured out how easy this is.   Really, to the informed public, it's only the government's reputation that should be getting diminished.        

Understanding Political Priorities In Manhattan

Actually, there is no understanding political priorities in Manhattan.  I was kidding with that title. 

Our local newspaper The Villager this week has a long report on an interview with Gail Brewer, the recent winner of the Democratic primary for the nomination for the office of Borough President of Manhattan.   The office of Borough President has almost no responsibilities, but it is the only office whose geographical boundaries are (almost) co-terminous with Manhattan Island, so the thoughts of this candidate can give us some insights into the mindset of the Manhattan voter.  Ms. Brewer's prior job has been as member of the City Council from the Upper West Side, a neighborhood that was seedy when I moved to New York in the 70s, but today is quite wealthy.

In the article, Ms. Brewer lays out her three top priorities for Manhattan.  This against a backdrop of the highest state and local taxes in the country, sluggish economic growth, public school spending almost double the national average per student for inferior results, and a serious crisis of excessive and accelerating spending for pension and health benefits of retired workers who no longer provide any services to the taxpayers.  So what are Ms. Brewer's three top priorities?

First up is -- affordable housing!  And or course that housing must be located here in the most expensive place in the country, Manhattan. 

 In a city saturated with luxury housing development, Brewer’s top priority is to ensure affordable housing is obtainable in Manhattan.

Yes, it is the very thing that I nominated as "the worst possible public policy" just a month ago.  Can she really justify the implicit subsidy of $40,000 to $80,000 per family per year as a good use of public funds, when much less expensive places are available right across one of the rivers?  You can be 100% sure that she has never tried to make that calculation.  The whole idea is to hide the subsidies so deep off balance sheet that nobody can figure them out.      

Priority number two?  Brewer "wants to focus on preserving mom-and-pop stores."   

“The loss of mom-and-pop stores in Manhattan, I hear about it everywhere I go,” she said. A study found that there were 72 bank branches in her Council district, only confirming the obvious — that there were far too many.

It seems that banks have been on a tear opening branches around Manhattan.  But has Brewer forgotten that throughout the 70s and 80s, and as recently as about a decade ago, it was considered a crisis by trendy left-wing thinkers that there were not enough bank branches in New York, particularly in poor areas?   Consider this from Louis Jacobson in the Prospect in 2001:

Thanks in part to deregulation, bank branches have closed in low- income communities since the early 1980s, and check-cashing outlets have often taken their place. . . .  The flight of the banks not only means that the poor must now pay more for financial services; it also means their communities are losing the institutions that promote personal savings.

Well, fortunately for us Ms. Brewer appears to know the perfect number of bank branches for each neighborhood, although she has not yet chosen to reveal that information.  Perhaps after she wins the office. 

So on to priority number 3.  Drum roll!!!!!!!  Yes, it's "local food."  You can't make this stuff up.  Does she know that no food is produced in this county -- or for that matter in any of the six counties immediately across the water from us?  Or that our part of the world has a six month non-growing season when there is no produce available from hundreds of miles around unless you happen to have stored some squashes or potatoes in your root cellar?   Whenever I hear talk of "local food" on this paved-over island, I'm reminded of this conversation I had recently with a woman on the subject of her recent-college-graduate daughter:

ME:  Has she found a job yet? 

HER:  She is working at a food store that specializes in locally sourced food. 

ME:  Interesting.  What does she do there? 

HER:  She works at the coffee bar. 

ME:  Does she realize that no coffee is grown within a thousand miles of here? 

HER:  It's brewed locally. 

It seems that Brewer actually claims an accomplishment on the "local food" front, which is a bill passed by the City Council requiring that "food in city contracts must be purchased from within New York State, unless the item is too difficult to find here."  So I guess that Buffalo (400 miles away) is more "local" than New Jersey (2 miles away) or Connecticut (30 miles away). 

Meanwhile Brewer actually has a Republican rival, David Casavis  (The Villager says that Brewer is expected to "win easily.")  Casavis' entire campaign consists of calling for the abolition of the office of Borough President.  Clever, but you'd think he could at least have a good time making some fun of Ms. Brewer.

Can A Federal Bailout Of State And Local Public Employee Pensions Be Stopped?

I have nominated so-called "Affordable Housing" in Manhattan as the worst possible public policy, but suddenly there is a second nominee:  A federal bailout of state and local pensions. 

This is one you probably have not heard of yet.  Time to wake up. 

Previous Manhattan Contrarian articles on the looming state/local pension crisis are collected here.  How big a problem is it?  A 2011 CBO report available here puts the nationwide underfunding figure at "only" $0.7 trillion, using the numbers reported by the states and localities themselves, which include discounting liabilities at an average of at or close to 8%.  I would call that methodology completely fraudulent.  To its credit, CBO also gives numbers at discount rates of 7, 6, 5, and 4%, and by the time you get to 4% the underfunding figure has gotten to $2.9 trillion.  By the way, at this point are you, like me, asking what possible legitimate interest CBO has in this subject to begin with? 

Meanwhile, an NBER/Cato Institute study available here puts the underfunding number at +/- $3 trillion.  Basically, they take the view that liabilities that must be paid come hell or high water must be discounted at a (kind of) risk free rate, which sounds right to me.  Separately, Moody's announced in 2012 a plan to recalculate government pension liabilities at a 5.5% discount rate as part of its bond rating processes.  That rate gives an underfunding number of around $2 trillion. 

Importantly, the problem is not spread uniformly among the states, but rather is heavily concentrated in (surprise!) a handful of big deep-blue states.  Illinois has the worst problem, California second, while New York, New Jersey and Connecticut vie for third, fourth and fifth place.  Pennsylvania is probably sixth.  Many red states have no pension problem at all, although Texas is not without its issues.

Yesterday the Manhattan Institute and Real Clear Politics co-sponsored a conference on this subject here in sunny New York City.  A panel on "How Bad Is It?" did not cover much that would be new to Manhattan Contrarian readers.  But then came a panel on "How To Fix It" -- and suddenly the number one topic of discussion became the seemingly inevitable "federal role."   

Former Mayor (1993-2001) Dick Riordan of Los Angeles spoke by video feed from California.  Apparently he is making a big personal push for California pension reform.  After describing a failed effort last year to gather signatures to get a pension reform measure on the California ballot, he moved on to his current ideas, prominent among which was a plan to get the federal government involved in some kind of insurance scheme for state and local pensions.  Although the proposal was vaguely described, and he never used the acronym, it sounded to me very much like the PBGC.  When other speakers' turns came, I was fully expecting them to dump well-deserved scorn and ridicule all over this idea, but no!  The opposite -- one after the other they said something like, "well, it may be necessary," but "of course, if they do this they will have to impose stringent conditions."  (Other panelists who spoke to this issue included generally sensible types like Dan DiSalvo of City College and Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute.)  One participant, Joshua Rauh of Stanford Business School, described meetings with Congressional leaders, including, he said, Republicans, where the discussion was more what form the bailout should take as opposed to whether there should be such a thing at all.  One speaker said that Governor Quinn of Illinois had included a line item in his most recent budget for an assumed federal contribution to alleviate the state's pension woes.  Asked (by me of course) how anybody could possibly think federal intervention in state and local pensions would be a good idea, the answers mentioned "preventing another financial crisis" or "avoiding a meltdown."    

Yikes!   Like many other gigantic federal power grabs, this proceeds to seeming inevitability before anybody even finds out about it.  Any sort of a federal bailout for state and local pensions is a world class bad idea.  Let me count the ways:

(1) Politicians in general have no ability to run (or guarantee) any pension system because they cannot resist the temptation to buy votes today with current payouts and hide and delay the funding until after they have left office.  But at least the states have the semi-discipline imposed by not being able to borrow in a currency that you can print, which is why the state/local pension problem is "only" around $3 trillion.  The feds, as we all must know, having the ability to print the currency in which their obligations are denominated, therefore have the illusion of the infinite credit card, and have used it to turn their pension and health care programs into Ponzi schemes with unfunded liabilities of $80 trillion or more.  So the right answer to the state/local pension problem is to turn it over to the feds?  And why exactly won't the feds then promptly turn it from a $3 trillion problem into, say, a $50 trillion problem? 

(2) I loved the business about the feds supposedly imposing "stringent conditions."  Because, I guess, federal congressmembers and bureaucrats are responsible people who just want to do the right thing with taxpayer money?  It was like it hadn't occurred to anybody that the public employees who are the beneficiaries of these pensions, and their unions, are the core constituency and prime operatives of one but not the other of the political parties.  Money going to public employee union members is not just buying individual votes, it is buying political contributions, phone banks, driving people to the polls, and everything else needed to swing elections and entrench incumbents and enhance their power.  Politicians simply cannot behave responsibly when faced with these kinds of temptations. 

(3) Any federal pension bailout will be a massive wealth transfer from the responsible to the irresponsible and from the red states to the blue.  The Republicans cannot possibly be stupid enough to go along with this.  (I know, don't underestimate them.)  Can they not perceive the political advantage of pointing to the upcoming struggles of the big blue states and saying, that's what happens to you when you vote for the Progressives?

I could think of a bunch more reasons, but that's enough for now.  Of course, the prime argument of the forces of bailout will be to stampede their opposition with fear of a "crisis" or a "meltdown."  All I can say is, back in the days before the federal government bailed everybody out, we had very sharp contractions, followed by equally rapid rebounds and booms.  Now that downside risk is gradually being eliminated from life we have endless sluggishness.  Maybe if we can socialize all risk we can achieve the high-tax collectivist nirvana of the Eurozone, which according to the August 14  Wall Street Journal, still has not recovered to pre-recession 2008 gdp.  

The Government Shutdown Brings Out A Flood Of Economic Nonsense

Does a brief shutdown of the government, and an accompanying minor reduction in government spending, help or hurt the economy?  I start from the proposition that all wealth is created by the private sector while much government spending is wasted; and from the observation that the countries with the lowest government spending as a percent of gdp (Singapore, Switzerland) have the most successful economies, while those with the highest government spending as a percent of gdp (Cuba, North Korea) have the least successful economies. To improve an economy's performance, cut government spending!

But the government shutdown has brought out a flood of ludicrous economic nonsense somehow attributing the economy's ongoing poor performance to the shutdown and accompanying slight reduction in government spending.  Most of the nonsense falls into the categories of either fake Keynesianism or the uncritical acceptance of the fraudulent government gdp methodology that counts all government spending as a 100 cents on the dollar increase in gdp. 

Just a few examples to prove I'm not making this up.  The New York Times graces us with a long analysis piece on October 18 titled "Shutdown to Cost U.S. Billions, Analysts Say, While Eroding Confidence."   What analysts exactly?  How about IHS Global Insights:

“The three weeks of government shutdown will cost the economy $3.1 billion in gross domestic product from lost government services,” estimated Paul Edelstein and Doug Handler of IHS Global Insight, an economic research firm. “There will also be some impact from lost private-sector jobs tied to the shutdown, as well as a loss of consumer and business confidence resulting from the debt-ceiling showdown.”

The $3.1 billion is just total acceptance of the idea that reducing government spending reduces gdp dollar-for-dollar -- not really a fallacy so much as a fraud.   I guess government spending can never be reduced then!  But the $3 bil is so paltry.  S&P promptly upped the ante to $24 billion, according to this from Business Insider on October 16, quoting an S&P press release:

We believe that to date, the shutdown has shaved at least 0.6% off of annualized fourth-quarter 2013 GDP growth, or taken $24 billion out of the economy. However, the closer we get to breaching the debt ceiling, the higher we expect the economic impact to be.

Funny that they don't have any comparable number for how much damage Obamacare is doing to the economy.  Perhaps trying to curry favor with the administration to get out from under that $5 billion lawsuit?

Bloomberg Business Week gives us two articles in October attributing the continuing economic stall to the shutdown and spending cuts.  On October 7 we have "Republicans Are No Longer the Party of Business," containing this gem: 

Over the past several years the series of budget crises engineered by Republicans to extract concessions from Democrats has damaged economic growth by reducing spending and increasing uncertainty. 

Or try this, from BBW on October 21's "The Tea Party's Pyrrhic Victory":

Fiscal policy is probably subtracting 1.5 percentage points from the economy’s growth rate in 2013, taking into account this year’s spending cuts and higher taxes, estimates Zandi of Moody’s Analytics.

It's the old "austerity" fallacy, mixing a benefit to the economy - spending cuts - with a detriment - tax increases.  And this is before we even get to the screamers like Media Matters or Think Progress.  Or Krugman -- I can't even read him any more.

I just hope no one here is reading this stuff and thinking that because these people have credentials they must know what they are talking about.

UPDATE, October 25:  Don't know how I missed it before, but the classic of this genre is the op-ed by Steven Ratner in the New York Times on October 23, "The Biggest Economy Killer: Our Government." 

[T]he sharp decline in the budget deficit, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to $642 billion in the 2013 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, has braked the economy at a time when it was already improving only slowly, as Tuesday’s jobs report demonstrated.  According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the pullback in spending by Washington — it declined in 2013 for an extraordinary second year in a row — together with higher taxes will cause the economy to grow by 1.5 percentage points less this year than it would have if the deficit had remained constant.

For those who don't know him, Ratner is known variously as the New York Times' favorite investment banker and as Obama's one-time "car czar."  Those kind of credentials do not make one immune from falling for preposterous fallacies.  Can somebody please tell this guy, and the other guys, that counting government spending at 100 percent in the gdp is a scam?

When Will The Young Figure Out They Are Getting Taken?

The government shutdown is over for the moment, and lots of pundits are chortling about how badly the Republicans, and particularly those who fought to defund Obamacare, got "beaten."  For example, check out Timothy Noah at MSNBC here:   

[W]hat the GOP’s right flank is experiencing right now, in government and the court of political opinion, is failure.

Well, you can look at this politics thing as a series of skirmishes where what counts is who "won" and who "lost" the latest skirmish; or you can look at it as trying to come up with the right system to enhance the wealth and happiness of the people.   Looked at from the second perspective, what exactly has been "lost" or "won"?  Every last government program has been defended until some time early next year, entitlements continue merrily on their unsustainable growth path, the cash basis deficit is almost $1 trillion and the accrual-basis deficit is more like $5+ trillion, and Obamacare is now launched.   All of this amounts to a Ponzi scheme where the benefits owed to the old are accelerating and the new entrants -- the young -- have to pay more and more the longer it continues, with little prospect that the scheme can survive long enough for today's young ever to get their due.

And yet.  What age cohort gave Barack Obama and the Democrats the largest share of the vote in the 2012 election?  That would be the 18 - 29 cohort, which according to the Huffington Post here went 60 - 36 for Obama.  These would be the people who already have to pay for Social Security and Medicare for the baby boom generation, who are bearing the lion's share of the now over $1 trillion in student loan debt, non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and who are about to get hit with Obamacare.  Why are these people voting overwhelmingly for the defenders of the Ponzi scheme status quo?  Hello?  

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal has an interview with Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the most successful hedge fund entrepreneurs of the last several decades, who is currently on a tour of college campuses giving talks on the subject of the generational theft.   Druckenmiller's theme to his young audiences is that they can't possibly come out ahead in this game.  Among other things, he points out to them that proposals to fund increasing benefits by raising income tax rates on "the rich" will fail to catch people like himself and others in the baby boom generation who have already made their money; instead, such higher tax rates will catch those now young as they move up the income ladder, making it harder and harder for them to keep up with their debts, let alone get ahead. 

And into this mix, throw Obamacare.  Here again, almost all of the reporting is about who gains or loses from the problem of the day.  But a longer view says that today's website problems are far less important that the attempt at yet another huge chunk of generational theft from the young to the old.  Have the twentysomethings really been fooled into believing that you can add tens of millions of people to the ranks of those with access to healthcare, not add any doctors, hospitals, or other health providers to the system, and everyone's healthcare costs will go down?  People, the whole idea here is that twentysomethings are to be forced to pay double or triple or quadruple the fair cost of health insurance so that the money can be transferred to others who are older and less healthy. 

I have previously reported on the huge efforts ($684 million in spending) of the federal and state governments to promote Obamacare, particularly to the young for whom it is a terrible deal.  See The U.S. Government Embarks On The Most Massive Fraud In World History, September 2, 2013.    Kyle Smith in today's New York Post takes it a step further, revealing a grant to the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center  to get Hollywood to work Obamacare propaganda into television shows and movies. 

There are two ways for the Ponzi scheme to end -- by crashing, or by the young people figuring out that this can't work for them and voting for politicians who support fundamental reform to the entitlement state.  I actually have some optimism that the sticker shock of Obamacare is going to be the thing that will finally start waking these twentysomethings up.