The Angry Bear

Via The Intercept Leaked ICE Guide Offers Unprecedented View of Agency’s Asset Forfeiture Tactics ICE confirmed to The Intercept that the handbook reflects the agency’s most up-to-date guidance on asset forfeiture. Agents under its instruction are asked to weigh the competing priorities of law enforcement versus financial profit and to “not waste instigative time and resources” on assets it calls “liabilities” — which include properties that are not...

The Incidence of the Obamacare Subsidies Justin Fishel and Mary Bruce covers Trump’s dismantling of Obamacare: The White House announced Thursday night that the administration will slash Obamacare subsidy payments to insurers. The “cost-sharing reduction payments,” worth an estimated $7 billion this year, are intended to reduce out-of-pocket costs for low-income Americans on Obamacare … House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader...

 Ken Houghton retweeted this letter…from the Financial Times; Unused Capacity: “My brothers and I run a relatively small family business with a turnover of below £20m. We could easily cope with a 20 per cent increase in business with no extra staff, and even a 50 per cent increase might require only a 10 per cent increase in staff. This would mean a huge growth in productivity, and I strongly the suspect the same is true for most smaller and even many...

Trump Fails To Certify JCPOA Iran Nuclear Deal I wish to be very precise here on this extremely important matter. President Trump has not “decertified” the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal.  Now Congress must ultimately be responsible. He has, after a lot of discussion and intervention by his national security team, failed to certify the deal.  This is not something that was part of the deal, but an epiphenomenon put in place by the US Congrees as part of a deal...

Enslaved to an Individualist View of Social Change I note with some interest the debate over whether it is ethically necessary to refer to slaveholders as “enslavers” in order to convey our disapproval over their actions.  The obsessive use of the enslaving terminology in The Half Has Never Been Told (Baptist) bothered me at the time, and now I see he was part of a trend. I understand the motivation—up to a point.  Anyone who participated in the slave...

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddad blog) There Is No Commodity Based Inflation Consider the following charts (the top three area daily; the bottom is weekly):  All prices are either declining or stable. The only major ETF that is showing strength is the industrial metals ETF (this is a weekly chart): This explains why non-food and energy prices are subtracting from prices: This is one reason why overall inflation is so...

Many have noted that Trump has the strange idea that he can destroy the US health care financing system & people will blame Obama. I actually think he is wrong about this — many polls show that a solid majority of US adults say they will Republicans responsible (yes I know it’s unfair to think they have the responsibility just because they have all the power). But before that comes the question of whether Republicans can destroy the ACA without...

They are monsters The President and his GOP majorities in Congress are monsters. As one commentator on NPR put it yesterday afternoon, the President’s default mode is to toss an armed hand grenade into a room in order to create chaos.  He can then pick out the most vulnerable, and use that leverage to enter into a win-lose deal. Meanwhile, having been emboldened by the 2011 Debt Ceiling Debacle, the Congressional GOP majorities, who haven’t been able to...

Trump’s Healthcare Executive Order Trump Signs Executive Order relaxing ACA health insurance rules. About a week or so ago, I had read this elsewhere, mentioned it, and was told there was no way this would happen. Similar to the three attempts to defund the ACA, Trump is doing what he says the Senate could not do and that is to take healthcare insurance away from the citizenry. More of Trump’s Executive Order down the page. Children’s Health Insurance...