Random Thoughts

An article in the newspaper covered the current health insurance "improvement" legislation being hotly debated in Washington. As is common with this type of reporting a number of statistics were employed and several caught my attention. Cited by the author was a US Census report that in 2008 only 15% of Americans did not have health insurance. In that same year only 10% of children were uninsured and less than 2% of seniors were without health insurance. If these figures are accurate, then the current efforts by the Obama Administration are not out of a need to medically assist our nation's citizens but rather as an extension of Obama's socialistic goals into yet another phase of our lives.

A local car dealer was interviewed on the subject of the huge drop in sales following the termination of the Cash-For-Clunkers Program. He had just held a special sales event which drew 450 potential customers. Of these attendees, just over 300 provided financial information for new car purchases but only 10 cars were actually sold. This disparity in the numbers was identified as not representing poor credit but rather an intense lack of interest by financial institutions to loan money for new car purchases. The dealership was not selling exotic autos but rather VWs. I wonder how bad it is at the Mercedes lot?

Out of Washington, the Social Security Administration projects that in 2010 it will pay out $1o Billion more in benefits than it will receive in tax income. This deficit payment figure is expected to drop to a mere $9 Billion in 2011. Officials from the Social Security office explained that the extreme decrease in the number of employed Americans has "negatively impacted" the current levels of the Social Security tax and thus the "premature" negative funding figures. At the same time statistics were cited that showed an increase of 23% over last year in the number of Americans initially applying for retirement funds and a 20% increase in the initial claims for disability income. The most interesting comment was that in "normal" economic times most of these new individual claimants would have only taken advantage of unemployment benefits. It would be interesting to see the raw number of claimants chased involuntarily into retirement or into a "disability" by the economy and therefore not shown as an addition to the unemployment calculations.

Finally, yet another recognized economic pundit [IHS Global Insight] has declared that technically the American economy is no longer in recession. However, unemployment shall, it admits, continue to increase well into 2010. So, to follow their logic even though more Americans will be losing their jobs during the next 9 months as compared to Americans being hired, the recession is over. Like most economic experts, these guys may know statistics but real life is lost on them.