Thursday, April 26, 2012

How Do You Like Paying Twice For Social Security This Year?

You know, we can't wait for the date when we can 'make your day!' as Clint Eastwood used to say and write these words in bold letters:

'Everything is getting better on the budget and entitlement fronts of the US federal budget!'

This is not that time yet.  Sadly.

In fact, it is getting dreadfully worse on a daily basis as the most recent Social Security Trustees report lays out with excruciating and incriminating detail from our friend, Chuck Blahous with whom we worked on the 1994 Entitlement Commission.

Chuck is a good guy to follow on anything relating to Social Security or Medicare trust funds for that matter.  You should sign up for his blog and follow him closely.

Like the old saying says:  'If Chuck doesn't know the answer to your questions about Social Security and Medicare trust funds, you don't need to know it in the first place!'

It used to be that all you had to do was quietly lip-sync the words: 'Social Security is going broke' and the Claude Peppers and the Tip O'Neills of the world would go running stark-raving mad down the middle of Constitution Avenue to the White House screaming for an emergency solution to be passed in Congress...immediately to SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY!'

Today? We are running multi-billion annual deficits in Social Security and the Obama Administration doesn't even offer a budget to fix it that can get one single vote in the House or Senate from Democrats or Republicans. The Senate Democrats who control the US Senate under the absentee leadership of Nevada Senator Harry Reid have now set a world record for not passing a budget to deal with Social Security or anything else for that matter...1,092 days now and counting.

The American Civil War was fought and prosecuted and brought to an end in only 1,458 days...and the US Senate can't pass a budget in Washington DC in less time than that terrible period in our nation's history?

At least the Republicans have passed the Ryan budget in the House of Representatives, we give them that much.

While we like much of what Congressman Ryan is trying to do to rein in the growth of federal spending, we would love to see more aggressive action on reforming both Social Security and Medicare which we think would actually produce stronger and more stable programs for all of us going forward on both the practical application and the budgetary implications of said reforms.

We urge you to read Mr. Blahous' pithy comments in detail because you will know far more about the stresses now facing Social Security and Medicare than you do right now today. 10,000% more probably.

While you read it though, we do want to plant this seed in your brain to mull over as you do so:

'How do you feel about paying for Social Security twice in this calendar year?'

Assuming, of course, you are one of the fortunate people to have a solid-paying job now and are also fortunate enough to have it pay you enough that you are in the 53% of the working population  paying income taxes on top of the payroll taxes everyone pays up and down the wage-scale in the only 'true' flat-rate tax we have in America today.

That is a mouthful but hear us out here:

In most years, you are paying 7.65% of your salary in payroll taxes, FICA for short, that cover Social Security and Medicare Part A benefits for the most part if you are an employee or 15.3% of your earned income if you are self-employed. There is a wage maximum limit for payroll taxation of $106,800 in 2010 for Social Security and no limit on earned income for Medicare taxes.

For the years 2011 and 2012, the employee's contribution has been temporarily reduced to 4.2%, while the employer's portion remained at 6.2% due to one of the few bipartisan bills passed in the last 2 Congresses under President Obama.

But this accursed recession has thrown so many people out of work and destroyed so many businesses that the current payroll tax collection is falling way, way below current obligations being paid out on a daily basis to current retirees.  Chuck says that the operating deficit for Social Security alone will be $165 billion in 2012 alone.  (Medicare is worse but we are focusing on SS right now and can't process any more bad news, can we?)

What happens when payroll taxes fall short of meeting current SS benefit obligations?  Does Congress raise payroll taxes immediately or cut benefits to bring them back into balance?

No, silly!  What are you smoking today?  Do you think they would be that reasonable or fiscally responsible and mature about it all?

Here's what is basically happening:

1) Every single penny of payroll taxes being sent to Washington today is spent on SS benefit checks being sent out every month.  Just like it has always been since inception in 1935.

2) The shortage of $165 billion in SS this year is essentially being paid by general revenues typically allocated to pay for defense, welfare, education, roads, environmental protection.  All the programs that defense hawks, rural development advocates and progressive liberals like.

3) And if it is not being paid for by the general tax revenue dollars in whole, the SS shortage is either whole or in part being paid for by the same funding process that everything else is being paid for nowadays:  with funds borrowed from the Chinese, other foreign sovereign nations and investors as well as domestic financial institutions.  (Would you buy a bond now yielding about 2% when you just have to believe inflation is going to out-race that by a factor of 2 or 3 times in the next couple of years?  Us neither)

So you are either paying out of general tax revenues for this shortage in SS this year or you are paying for the interest on the new debt being taken out to cover the shortfall.  And your children and grandchildren....well, they'll be paying for this debt for the rest of their natural-born days, won't they either in annual interest payments on the national debt or in paying down the principle...somehow, someway, someday, right?

This stark fact should put to rest the absolutely silly and absurd notion that we have set aside any of your payroll taxes paid over your working career in a safe trust fund somewhere ('lockbox' as Al Gore said during his 2000 presidential campaign) that is 'earning' cash interest somehow out of the ethereal world.

That big mountain of 'cash' in a trust fund simply does not exist.

Because if it were, don't you think we would see President Obama, Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Boehner digging that cash out to pay for this SS shortage with pickaxes and dynamite like it is some silver or gold mine instead of borrowing it like a beggar on the street from the Chinese?

They ain't digging anywhere, are they?

We need to reform SS and Medicare today to modernize both and bring them up to the 21st century in terms of portability, stability and equity for every American citizen.

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Saturday, April 21, 2012

'Curses! Foiled Again!'

Snidely Whiplash
Do you ever get the feeling that 'something just ain't right' and that maybe, just maybe, the Wall Street guys have everything rigged so they always win and you, the taxpayer, always lose?

Well, get ready to wonder again.

Yadkin Valley Bank, headquartered in Elkin, North Carolina just made a filing to announce that it will auction the preferred shares they have as a result of their acceptance of TARP funds in 2008 to outside investors as part of the Obama Administration's Treasury plan to get the government out of the TARP business altogether.

Most likely to some of the same Wall Street banks and investors, who were probably at the core of the problem to begin with in 2008 with some of the worst financial decision-making this nation and world has ever known.

This story here is about the people who are going to benefit handsomely from the Federal Government’s desire to exit TARP.  Yep. The same accursed TARP program everyone was screaming about in October 2008 that pumped billions of 'real' cash and digital manufactured credit on the spot from the Fed that put liquidity into the financial system and apparently saved the day, didn't it?

These are (for the most part) the same people who: 1) made all the bad and imprudent financial decisions 2) to lend money to unqualified buyers 3) and then bundled up the bad 1st, 2nd and 3rd mortgages into complex financial packages such as derivatives and then 4) sold them as 'great investments' to people around the globe.

They now say: 'It was the fault of Congress!' 'These people should have known they couldn't afford the loans to build homes they couldn't afford!' 'We were just following orders!' and/or 'doing our jobs!'

When you leverage your company's assets at the tune of 35-to-1 or 50-to-1, even a dumb bunny who has never been to one basic business class or much less attended Harvard MBA School or went through a rigorous training program at one of the most prestigious Wall Street investment firms would know that 'that just ain't right!'

This current iteration of the Wall Street Saga of 2008-2012 might make you yearn for some shots of the white whiskey from Troy & Sons we just wrote about.

Let's not gloss over one very important point. In 2008, when all of the major banks and investment houses were over-extended through no fault of anyone but their own due to their avarice and greed, the decision was made by then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and former Goldman Sachs Chairman (coincidence?) that every bank in the nation was going to be forced to take on TARP debt 'just so the American business community and public would not know which banks were in REAL trouble'.

Thus avoiding 'disintermediation' (withdrawal of funds from banks) and all that banking nomenclature.

Once these TARP preferred shares are sold to new investors, they will then own the debt and the federal government will finally be out of TARP. The community bank is then responsible for repayment of 100% of the original amount to the new holder of the debt, not the government as originally planned and contracted.

Government has done its job. Check.  Getting out of the banking business. Check. Taxpayer has been paid back for 100% of all the TARP money that was spewed out of the Fed firehose in 2008. Check.

All well and good up to this point.

Right? Wrong. The new private sector holders of the debt will have been given a huge gift and, in many instances, these beneficiaries are the 'bad guys' from the worst financial debacle of the last 80 years. They made their bed...and ruined the lives of millions of people they falsely led into believing they could buy homes well beyond their means. They sold billions of dollars of worthless derivative investments around the world to unsuspecting investors who had the rug pulled out from under them when the US housing market collapsed.

How can that be 'right' under any acceptable standards of human ethics and rectitude?

Specifically, let's say The Bubba Gump Bank of Greenbow, Alabama owes $60,000,000 to the government for their TARP obligation and has to pay 5% interest for the first 5 years of TARP and 9% thereafter. Now with 2 years remaining, the government wants out and they are willing to “sell” its interest for $40,000,000 or a discount of close to 30%.

If the government stayed in the TARP collection business, the American taxpayer would benefit from the repayment of their remaining $20 million owed plus receive the previously agreed-upon payments of interest to the federal treasury.

Surplus funds from repayments by the banks that could conceivably go to pay down existing debt or prevent equal amounts of new debt from being issued at the federal government level. God knows we need to find clever ways to pay down our national debt, don't we?

However, now that Snidely Whiplash, the Chairman of Dewey, Cheatam and Howe Brothers investment bank, owns the discounted debt from the federal government, THEY, the private investment bank and partners, will collect the original face amount of the loan of $60,000,000 for a tidy profit of $20,000,000 plus the interest for the time it takes to pay off the loan.

That is at least a 50% return on investment plus interest earned, all protected under the auspices of the US Federal Taxpayer-Supported Government (because do you think the Government is going to let any bank fail now after ALL this work and money and effort has been undertaken to save them?)

In other words, what could have been going to help reduce the debt of the United States of America is now going to line the pockets of the very same culprits still running our major banks who caused the debacle in the first place.

We think part of the problem is that our business schools no longer teach the classical education curricula that might bring up a full discussion of ethics and what it means to be a well-rounded honest businessperson in the modern world.

It is very easy to make cold-blooded decisions based on the 'numbers'. Numbers 'don't lie' and the 'bottom-line is the only thing that matters!' in a truly capitalistic system.

But is it 'right' and 'the right thing to do' in many instances?

That is what was missing in the investment banking world pre-Crash of 2008.

Maybe we have learned our lessons.

(but then again, based on this situation....maybe not)

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Tuesday, April 17, 2012

'White House Burning' and 'White Whiskey'

The authors of this otherwise very educational and helpful primer on federal budgeting, 'White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why It Matters to You' conclude their 'recommendations' with this honest disclaimer:
'Because there is no such thing as a free lunch, our proposals largely fill the long-term budget gap by increasing tax revenues. People who evaluate the federal government solely by the dollar value of taxes and spending will object that our proposals amount to 'big government'. 
That is an understatement if there ever was one.

We will go even a step further:  'If you want to see what an unfettered President Obama would do in his second and last term if he also had congressional majorities in the House and the Senate, this book would be the 'roadmap to the future' for them'.

Apparently, these guys only read the ‘Revenue’ part of the CBO book, ‘Revenue AND Spending Options’ they refer to over 100 times in their footnotes.

We still strongly suggest you read the book, primarily for its educational value and extensive and complete footnotes and references just referenced.

We also 'strongly' recommend that you also buy a fifth of the truly great new North Carolina product from Asheville, Troy & Sons ‘White Whiskey’ Moonshine, and take a jiggerful shot each and every time you read the words 'higher taxes'.

Cause you are gonna need it.

Within about 3 pages of Chapter 6, you may be rendered speechless by the depth and scope and breadth of their tax-hiking prowess...and then by the Troy & Sons ‘White Whiskey’ itself. (Please use responsibly!)

When we started reading the book, we thought:  'Finally!  An honest and open look at all the underlying intricacies of the federal budget, on the revenue, tax expenditure (loophole) and spending sides, all being fairly discussed out in the open by economists one typically would expect to be supporters of the Obama Administration!

We were actually thrilled to see any liberal economist or politician actually quote the 'invisible hand' theory of none other than Adam Smith who wrote 'The Wealth of Nations' the same year, 1776, that Thomas Jefferson penned The American Declaration of Independence.

And our heartbeat skipped a beat as we were reading about the 'necessity' to curb health care costs in the economy generally which we all know is the prime determinative driving upwards force on our federal budget through more than 3 times the average rate of inflation in Medicare, Medicaid and the various health benefit programs in the VA, the Pentagon and every other governmental agency.

Alas, we were wrong and left hanging at the altar like some jilted groom. Honestly, it appears as if these authors have never seen a federal program in need of reduction, reform or elimination.

They obviously have never sat in any House Budget Committee hearings then.

However, the basic premise of this book does allow us to set up a contrapuntal argument to most everything these authors recommend.

(It still is a very useful reservoir of information though and worthy of your reading, trust us.  You will learn tons just from reading this one book)

Here are some fundamental retorts to most of these guys' general observations which, had they included these in their book, would have made it far more 'balanced' and believable as a 'serious' budget recommendation that Congress could and should consider:

1. 'Government is Our National Insurance Program!'- This is their view of how the US federal government is supposed to function. Virtually everything from what is 'explicit' in the Constitution (defense) to what has been interpreted as being 'implied' in the Constitution (Social Security/Medicare through the general welfare clause)

Retort #1- We are supposed to be living in a free enterprise/capitalistic system, aren't we?  Isn't that why we have 'private' insurance companies that will insure your home, your car, your life, virtually everything you own?

Let 'insurance' be true 'insurance'. Let the government defend us and take care of the things that the private sector does not do well such as build roads, maintain laws that protect our property rights and commerce and ensure peace in our nation.

Is it the proper role of the federal government to provide 'insurance' for everything from health coverage to bailing out Wall Street to providing crop insurance for farmers and flood insurance for wealthy people who build expensive homes on the coast where hurricanes can rip them to shreds...which means the federal taxpayer will help them rebuild it?

We are not sure that the Founders thought the federal government was set up to be the ultimate 'backstop' insurance company for every negative contingency that happens in life. Ben Franklin started one of the first life insurance companies in America...and got pretty darned wealthy doing so as well.

2. ‘Social Security is Perfect! Don’t change a thing!’ 

Retort #2- SS is broke, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Payroll taxes are not even paying the current obligations of retirees, much less setting aside enough money in a true financial instrument to pay for anyone in the future.

How about a serious and honest debate on the merits of shifting to something along the lines of the Chilean Social Security system which started in 1980, long about the time many of us started working, and which allowed each Chilean citizen to put aside a fixed amount of their monthly salary into an individualized Social Security account?

Result? An average Chilean could retire today with a $223,000 cash payment in hand PLUS an average annual pension of $53,000 to be used to pay for expenses in retirement.

Today’s average SS payment is about $13,000 PER YEAR to the average American.

The argument could be made that supporters of the status quo in Social Security are actually working against the better interests of the average American citizen, couldn't it?

So who is coming out ahead in that deal, the average American citizen or the average Chilean citizen?

The Chileans win!  Hands-down.  Let's have an honest open debate about it in public like during a political campaign. That is how American politics dealt with slavery, women's suffrage and civil rights, you know.

3. 'Health Care is a Right for All! 

  • 'The federal takeover of the American health care system was the right thing to do!'
  • The current system 'just needs to be tweaked' in order to ‘work better!’ 

Retort #3- When was the last time these authors went to the Post Office? Or the DMV?

Does anyone really believe the federal government can do a more efficient job of running our health care system 'at a lower cost over time'?

There was one brief mention in the book about some of the intrinsic upwards cost-drivers in health care but there was no mention of asking the Obama Administration to lead an effort to combat all of these for the general good of our nation.

We have named them before, so we'll name them again: tort reform; malpractice insurance reform; eliminating the conditions that lead to excessive 'defensive medical practices' by doctors and hospitals alike; duplicative medicine; false filing for Medicare/Medicaid claims...the list goes on seemingly forever.

Focus on these first...and the rate of inflation in medical costs will start to moderate and then perhaps plummet as private insurers start to see their claims go down.

4).  There is no substitute for higher taxes and eliminating all tax loopholes to balance our federal budget.


Retort #4-  Yes, there is. Read the 'Spending Options' of all of the books and reference materials you cited in your very own book. Just holding the federal government growth rate to around 2% per year will balance the budget before 2020, depending on whenever this economy turns around.

Still, all-in-all, you should read 'White House Burning' and read it soon. You'll know more about the federal budget than you do today. We just wish the authors had practiced what they initially were preaching: Use history as a guide to get fair and balanced results from our government.

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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

'White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why It Matters to You'

Here's a simply amazing astounding fact you need to know and contemplate as we go through this thought-bomb for today:

'The United States of America became the world's largest economy along about 1870.'

Let's think about that for a moment.

We had just endured the costliest war, and most deadly in terms of human loss of life, our nation has EVER experienced.  More American people died in the Civil War than in all of the other wars we have fought, including World War II, combined.

In 1790, the population of America was just under 4 million people across mostly the 13 original colonies.  By contrast, France had over 19 million people in population close to 100 years earlier in 1700!  Britain had 9 million people way back then as well.

What in the world were our Founders thinking when they decided to take on the world's largest economic and military superpower in 1776 and actually thought they could defeat the King and his Empire?

Anyway, just after the end of the Civil War, within about 5 years or so, the United States of America became the world's largest economic power after only 81 years of existence.  France and England and Holland and Spain had been around for centuries, if not millennia in the case of China.

Why was this so?  How could this had been even remotely possible?

For one thing, America was blessed with an abundance of riches in terms of natural resources.  Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania soon thereafter and literally fueled an explosion of economic activity from the internal combustion engine in our cars to our planes and heated our homes and other innovations improved the manufacture of steel and other products that made America the envy of every other civilization on Earth.

For another, most Americans in 1790 and 1870 had a ton of freedom and liberty to do pretty much what they wanted to, didn't they?  (We understand the gravity of slavery and the ensuing civil right struggle that makes this statement hard to make for everyone in 19th and 20th century America which we would get to if we had room here)

If a person wanted to invent a product or process, there was very little they needed to do other than start working on it, aside from finding the money through friends and family to pay for all of that exploration or research and development.

The numbers of 'inventions' that have come out of America in the past 125 years simply boggles the imagination:  Lightning rod; cotton gin; light bulbs; automobiles; airplanes; computers...the list goes on for days.

There was no income tax until 1913. No 2000-pages of promulgated regulations published in the Federal Register on a daily basis telling them what they could do and how they could do it.

What else was different in 1870?

Well, for one thing, the scope of the federal government was near about minuscule back then when compared to GDP.  The Federal government has typically spent about 1% of our nation's GDP up until around 1930, mostly on defense-related items such as equipping our armies and navies over time.  In case you have forgotten, 1930 was when something else 'really bad' happened and FDR grew the government to around 10% of GDP, which we would take in heartbeat today in 2012 America.

However, there was one very striking similarity to today's world in the federal budget:

'In the decades following the Civil War, income security—in the form of veterans’ pensions—also became a major responsibility of the federal government, accounting for one-third (1/3) of all spending in 1890.'

Even way back then, the US federal government was struggling with the first wave of 'entitlements' which is precisely what this expenditure was, wasn't it?  Congress felt compelled to 'rightly' honor the Union soldiers and their spouses for their heroic service and sacrifice to keep the Union together in 1865 by providing a decent pension for them in their dotage or due to war-related injuries to the tune of 1/3 of their annual budgets by the turn of the 19th century.

Today, close to 56% of the US federal budget is consumed by entitlements.  56%+.

The difference between then and now? The Civil War veterans eventually died off, didn't they? (the last Civil War widow, Maudie Hopkins, died in 2006, believe it or not, and received a part of her husband's civil war pension until his death in 1937)

The entitlements of modern-day America are never going to go away. They are simply going to add on more recipients every single day as more and more Boomers retire and then their children after them.

And guess what? The cost of supporting such a huge aging population is going to keep going ever higher unless and until we elect people to our US Congress and to sit in our White House who can understand the gravity of this problem and do something about it.

You need to get and read a great book on the history of debt in America, 'White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why It Matters To You' and try to understand just how sticky of a wicket we face when it comes to ever balancing our budget again in the face of such humongous entitlement program claims on our national budget.

One of the authors, Simon Johnson is a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The other, James Kwak, is a professor at the Connecticut Law School.

This book is chock full of facts and details that would take you 30 years to find and get comfortable with (as it took us including a grueling 4-year stint on the House Budget Committee and Entitlement Commission in 1994).  But please take it upon yourself to read it through and through so you will be able to talk and debate intelligently with the 99.999999% of the public who will not read this book or any other book on federal budgeting (just sounds boring, doesn't it?).

You might just change some people's minds on this critically important subject to us and our future.

The one thing we don't get?  We just don't get how people who are as smart as Messrs. Johnson and Kwak and any other person who is enamored with an ever-expanding federal government bureaucracy and edifice will never say this out-loud and in public:
'We are liberals and we love more government to protect and preserve the health and safety and education of our fellow citizens.  But we have combed through the budget and found hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted money each and every year and we think we should cut the hell out of such wasteful spending!  
And not just in defense spending which we all know is used to oppress other people around the globe. As in Social Security and Medicare....why Americans have been duped to believe that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates 'deserve' to draw $2500/month from Social Security and be subsidized in their Medicare bennies for over 90% of their actual cost as seniors is beyond our cotton-pickin' MIT/Connecticut Law School brains!'
If liberals would all of sudden come to their senses and be fiscally responsible and conservative in this regard, they might close out the marketplace for there ever being a conservative Republican opposition party in the first place.

But they won't. At least they haven't for the past 40 years or so in Washington, DC.

Maybe the next generation will be more responsible once they read this book and get energized to throw all the old people out of government from both sides of the aisle.  And start over again.






Thursday, April 5, 2012

250 Things That Are Not True! (continued): 'The Supreme Court Can Not Strike Down Laws as Unconstitutional!'

So said President Obama this past Monday when asked about whether he thought the Supreme Court will overturn the Obama Health Care individual mandate.
“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."
First of all, the Obama Health Care Bill passed only by the slimmest of margins in the House, 219-212 with 34 Democrats joining the opposition in 2010.

Hardly a 'strong majority of a democratically elected Congress', is it?

Here's our question for the constitutional professor who is now our US President and Commander-in-Chief:

'What the heck is the Supreme Court supposed to do if it is not supposed to determine the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and signed into law by an American President?'

Is the Supreme Court supposed to just be a 'potted plant' sitting in the corner watching the United States government operate right in front of them every day and never weigh in on weighty matters such as slavery, civil rights, abortion, commerce and just about everything else including health care coverage for every US citizen?

We got to being more than a little curious once we heard these comments by President Obama and looked up in the GPO database about how many laws have been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court over these past 2 centuries or so.

Answer is: 1,315.  One thousand, three hundred and fifteen laws, statutes and ordinances.  All passed by democratically-elected legislatures and city councils.

Unconstitutional and Preempted Laws 1789-2002
According to the GPO (Government Printing Office Database): 


1789-2002 Acts of Congress Held as Unconstitutional..............................158
1789-2002 State Statutes held unconstitutional......................................935
1789-2002 City Ordinances held unconstitutional....................................222
1789-2002 State and City laws preempted by Federal laws.......................224
Total State, Local and Federal Laws Declared Unconstitutional................1,315
Total State and Local Law Preempted by Federal Laws..............................224
Total Laws Overturned, all governments..............................................1,539

Now. look, everyone has a bad day at the office every now and then.  Maybe Monday was one of those bad days for President Obama.

But seriously.  He is a constitutional professor for goodness sakes!  People tell us this was taught in Class Numero Uno at every law school in the nation:  The Supreme Court has the authority through the concept of 'judicial review' (which is not explicitly stated in the Constitution by the way) to take a look at any law brought to the bench through the proper judicial channels to determine if it fits in the framework put forth by the geniuses who wrote the US Constitution in 1787.

So, this just proves that the general election campaign has already started with President Obama staking out his position 'just in case' the Court rules against him in this case and announces their decision in late June this summer.

He will run against the 'mean old conservative justices' on the Supreme Court who were nominated by Reagan, Bush 41 and 43 and seek to make the case to the American people they need to return him to a second term to appoint more 'competent and understanding' justices between 2013-2017.

'This is 'judicial activism' in its most egregious form!' President Obama and his handlers will scream if the Court rules against the individual mandate which may undo the entire health care law itself.

Blasting the Supreme Court is as old as the Republic itself.  Both sides have done it going back to the days of the Federalists of John Adams days and the Democratic Republicans under Thomas Jefferson who disliked the courts so much that he one time zeroed out the entire budget for the judiciary in his annual budget submission!

We just thought President Obama would know better.  He is a constitutional professor after all...and we are not.

Thankfully.

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