Free Republic

Caught in the sluggish recovery from the last recession, Social Security and Medicare face an increasingly dismal fiscal future, the federal government reported Friday in its annual review of the two mammoth entitlement programs. Medicare, which now provides health insurance to some 47 million elderly and disabled Americans, could begin running a deficit in 2024, five years earlier than projected last year. And Social Security, which last year began paying out more in benefits than it collected in taxes, now faces insolvency in 2036, compared to 2037 in last year’s projections. Over the years, the Social Security and Medicare trustees...

Deepening Economic Crisis: Inflation, Rising Interest Rates, Surge In The Price Of Gold And Silver Economics / Inflation Apr 24, 2011 - 12:43 PM By: Bob Chapman Economic recovery does not seem to be taking effect in spite of more massive expenditures by Congress and the Fed. The IMF says financial stability has improved, but then again their vision is almost always clouded. US tax revenues are not increasing in a meaningful way, manufacturing struggles to expand and Wall Street flourishes in a cascade of mega salaries and bonuses. In another six months the US will be three years what...

One thing is for sure. The president of the U.S. will not perform his job, he will not gather the proper experts together to formulate a best guess on the radiation heading our way. And he will not hold a press conference. Instead, he's heading down to South America, well out of the way of the radiation plume heading our way. If his wife and kids go with him, then you know it's going to be far worse than they are letting on.

In fact, fewer than 50 deaths could be directly attributable to radiation from the disaster, almost all of them among rescue workers who had been exposed to massive amounts of radiation on the disaster site at the time of the fire and its immediate aftermath. In addition, nine children in the area died of thyroid cancer that is thought to have been caused by radioactive contamination, but even among the nearby population, there was neither evidence of decreased fertility nor of congenital malformations that could be attributed to radiation exposure.

Q.E. Money Printing Negative Feed Back Loop to Hyper-Inflation Oblivion Interest-Rates / Quantitative Easing Mar 09, 2011 - 09:16 AM By: Jim Willie CB USFed Chairman Bernanke and the Quantitative Easing programs are caught in a negative feedback loop, the instruments at risk being the USDollar and the USTreasury Bond. The former suffers from lost integrity and direct inflation effect. The latter suffers from direct intervention and market ruin. The next QE round is guaranteed by the failure of the previous program in an endless cycle to be recognized later this year. Leaders are confused why the recovery does not...

Debt, debt and more mounting debt is plaguing countries around the globe. In this U.S., states across the country face a collective $125 billion shortfall for fiscal 2012, while Congress is facing a budget gap nearly 10 times that size. PIMCO founder and co-CIO Bill Gross has previously said that if the United States were a corporation, no one in their right mind would lend us money. For the last decade, we’ve been “relying on the kindness of strangers” to help cover our debts, he tells Aaron in the accompanying clip. By “strangers” he is referring to our foreign counterparts,...

We all remember the media claiming the sky was falling during the Bush presidency, yet since Barack Obama got elected our journalist friends have bent over backward to paint a rosy picture of a country in crisis. Whether this is because of the leftist tilt of the media or an attempt to prevent the urban apocalypse a collapse of the dollar would cause is an argument that ultimately doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you see these ten economic facts and understand what they mean to you and your family. Then you can decide why this information is downplayed...

OK FReepers, I hope someone can debunk this whole thing I'm about to throw out there. I recently was on another web site doing some reading when someone posted a link to a YouTube video about the newly discovered comet Elenin. Well, it was kind of a conspiracy video with a woman talking about her visions of catostrophic earth changes associated with the arrival of this comet. The more I dig the less there seems to be available conserning this comet. There is some very interesting conspiracy videos on YouTube though suggesting a coverup. When I do a google news...

<p>Global inflation is far higher than official statistics reveal, Marc Faber, editor and publisher of the “Gloom, Boom and Doom” report told CNBC on Wednesday, with increases in the cost of living amounting to between five and eight percent in the United States and just below that in Europe.</p>

Birds now dying off in massive waves in four states. Fish also dying in mass with 100's of TONS of fish dead in Brazil, 10's of thousands now dead in Chesapeake Bay and the saga continues ... See Drudge for more ... This is today's topic, talk amoungst yourselfs, I'll be back later to tell you the real reason they're all dying once enough conspiracies have been bounced around.

GILBERTSVILLE, Ky. — Near her car, a dead bird. A quick walk to her mailbox, another. Scattered across her front yard, a local woman discovered dozens of dead birds. "I've never seen anything like it. Never," Sandy said of the discovery. Sandy, who asked we not share her last name, first noticed the birds several days ago but cleaned them up, not thinking twice. "I have outdoor pets and just assumed they were bringing them from around the neighborhood." But when she noticed more birds Monday morning, she panicked, "I had just seen the story on the news about the...

QUADRANTID METEOR ALERT: Earth is about to pass through a narrow stream of debris from shattered comet 2003 EH1, source of the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. "Peaking in the wee morning hours of Tuesday, Jan. 4, the Quads have a maximum rate of about 100 per hour (varies between 60 and 200)," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "What makes this year so special is that the Moon is New on the night of the peak, so there will be no interference from moonlight." PARTIAL SOLAR ECLIPSE: After the meteor shower, observers in Europe, northern Africa, the Middle...

Thousands of dead fish have turned up in an Arkansas river just days after 3,000 birds mysteriously dropped dead from the sky, but authorities say the deaths are not related. An estimated 100,000 dead drum fish are floating along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River and washing up on the river's banks near the town of Ozark in the northwestern part of the state. The dead fish were discovered just after 3,000 red-wing blackbirds fell from the sky in the town of Beebe, more than 100 miles from the site of the dead fish. Officials, who tripled the early...

The unreasonable standard is being applied to both private sector health insurers and companies that provide Internet service. But expect the White House to impose the standard on a lot more industries as the Obama blob continues to absorb every aspect of the economy. What it means is that we are abandoning the rule of law for the rule by bureaucrats. Unelected officials have been given the power to fundamentally remake industries based on their political and value judgments. Here, folks, we see the usual pattern of liberal, big-government demagogues. They proclaim that they - as the protectors of the...

Eighteen Hedge Fund Managers Are So Scared The World Is Doomed, They Wrote A Book About It Courtney Comstock Oct. 12, 2010, 1:35 PM A large number of high profile hedge fund managers recently told the world the government is screwing up and the economy is doomed. In case you've lost track of all of them, too, a startling low-ball estimate of the number of hedge fund managers scared pantless right now: 18. That's the number of financial professionals listed as co-authors on a new book dedicated to the administration that they collectively believe is running the world's economy into...

Is "Obamacare" the beginning of the end for America? No. Health care reform was long overdue, and Obama had the guts to put the nation on the right track. Glenn Beck and his toadies are wrong — Obamacare is great. Yes. We're talking big time socialized medicine here, and it's going to put us in debt up to our eyeballs. Listen to Fox News — they tell the truth about this. No. Every American should have insurance. This is great. Yes. But it doesn't matter, because a GOP-led Congress will overturn it, thankfully.

Bill Maher says most Americans are stupid for believing in religion and the Bible. Appearing on the O’Reilly Factor yesterday for the second night in a row (in what was some kind of Bill O’Reilly-provided showcase for Maher’s shockingly provocative views), Maher disdainfully branded the majority of the American people as unsophisticated morons because, essentially, the US is a predominantly Christian country where people read the Bible, go to church, and actually have the non-European tradition of believing in a higher power.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday announced the start of a new website intended to help Californians find jobs in green industries. The website, called Clean Energy Jobs, provides resources to promote jobs in areas such as recycling, clean transportation and renewable energy. The website lists 48 programs that provide training for green jobs, offered through organizations such as community colleges, local workforce investment boards and private industries. In a written statement, the governor said the website's purpose is to highlight "how the state's community colleges and workforce investment boards, labor unions, and employers are working to meet the demand...

Plunging Consumer Confidence and Treasury Yields, Economic Depression Is Here Economics / Great Depression II Jun 29, 2010 - 01:46 PM By: Mike Shedlock Is that a 3-handle I see on the long bond and a 2-handle of the 10-year treasury? Why yes it is. Treasury Yields - Weekly Close The week is not over yet but this looks rather ominous. Treasury yields are back where they were in April of 2009 at the start of the so-called "recovery". I am not quite sure why the 3-month treasury displays as a flatline at .5. The flatline is closer to 0....

It goes without saying that most people no longer believe what British Petroleum is saying publicly about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf and the condition of the well structure. The reality is much more frightening... In a few crevices in Cyberspace, experts in the industry are whispering what they think is really going on..."OK let's get real about the Gulf of Mexico oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD [The Oil Drum - an online site where oil industry people congregate] that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in...