Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Matters Improve for America: Will COGs Notice?

Armstrongism teaches that the world situation will soon take a severe turn for the worst which shall lead to cataclysmic nuclear war and the military conquest of America by Europeans. They say the only way to escape such monstrous events is to join a COG group to be protected.They have constantly said this since the 1930s. Many predictions of theirs have failed miserably but still they insist that catastrophe will soon occur.

But reality stubbornly refuses to accommodate their dogma. Recently political events have been taking a turn for the better for the United States as one writer notes.
Obama Didn't "Make the Economy Worse." Throughout the 2012 campaign, Romney and his GOP amen corner also insisted President Obama "made the economy worse." Speaker John Boehner has kept up the chant since, denouncing Obama's "job-killing tax increases" and "job-crushing" health care reform law.

But in 2014, I was shocked--SHOCKED!--to learn that the GOP claims weren't true. CBO director Douglas Elmendorf explained that the overwhelming consensus of economists agreed that Obama's $800 billion stimulus program was a success, at its peak adding as many as 3.3 million jobs and boosting GDP by as much as 4.1 percent. (No wonder Republicans want to fire him.) Former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi concluded that the federal government had prevented "Great Depression 2.0." As we learned in October, when it comes to cutting unemployment, spurring investment and driving economic growth, Barack Obama is out-Reaganing Reagan at the same point in his presidency.
The same writer also notes that health care reform is going along quite splendidly.
The market has voted and Obamacare won. From the beginning, Republican opponents of Obamacare warned that the Affordable Care Act was a "government takeover of health care." They charged that "Obamacare will destroy the private-insurance market" in order to "make a single-payer, i.e. socialized medicine, system inevitable."

But as Stephen Colbert might have put it, instead the market has voted and Obamacare won. Virtually every constituency in the health care eco-system has come out ahead. In 2014, as many as 25 million Americans acquired insurance through the ACA's expanded Medicaid program, subsidies to buy private plans through exchanges, extension of coverage to young adults and other incentives. And it's not just consumers who are happy. The private insurance carriers are enjoying rising profits, stock prices and new customers, and are entering new markets even as Uncle Sam caps their "medical loss ratio." Hospitals--at least in those states which wisely chose to accept the federal expansion of Medicaid--have seen their bottom lines improve as their costs of caring for the uninsured plummet. Meanwhile, rejectionist red state governors in states like Tennessee and Texas are reconsidering their decisions after the success of Kentucky and Arkansas in dramatically reducing the ranks of the uninsured. And back in the nation's capital, the debt-reducing Obamacare is coming in under budget even as health cost growth has slowed to its lowest level this century.
What a difference this is to what PCG's writers and others want people to believe, namely that America is about to collapse.

5 comments:

  1. Mathematically speaking, the PCG will be right at some point. It is in the math that I make this assumption.

    Regardless of the PCG and their tainted reviews of the news, the painful truth is that Barack Obama and his minions are adding onto the public debt an untenable amount of future obligations that the American people will not be able to absorb. Add to this the elimination of American culture, borders, and language, we see that America we live in is indeed doomed if it is to continue as America. It won't.

    The collapse: Your wrong on this. At some point a economic collapse will occur when the petro dollar is ditched. This week Russia has ok'ed the sale and conversion of 88 billion dollars of U.S. currency to Russian Rubles. What does this mean? Dollars and the exportation of American inflation will be halted. America will have to adsorb their inflation. Prices rise and the public, the middle class gets fucked.

    America can print dollars but when the nations of the world refuse to trade in their fiat currency the curtain closes and America becomes a third world banana republic.

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  2. Actually the US Federal debt was higher per capita back in the 1940s because of World War II.

    The Federal debt is not a source of danger in the current situation of the world.

    Also unlike Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and other Eurozone countries the US has its own currency and because it is not possible for a state to be forced to default on debt denominated (as is the case with US federal debt) in its own currency it is not possible for anyone to make America bankrupt.

    Also a large share of the Federal debt is owed to itself.

    The 2007-8 financial crisis was about private debt, not public debt. If the US Federal debt was going to be a problem it would have crashed in 2008.

    Also I encourage you to take a look at this post regarding this issue. At present there is no need to worry about the US Federal debt. It is public debt, not private debt.

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  3. One thing you can say for the old Plain Truth magazine is that it was --- at least on the surface --- apolitical. Of course, conservatism has always run strong in the COG community, but at least in print Armstrong didn't run down folks like Kennedy and Johnson or gush over Nixon and Ford. By and large, the magazine avoided overt political comments. In contrast, Flurry's constant criticism of Obama with its racist overtones is tiresome and disgusting. But it's another way to keep people afraid, and that is the main goal.

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  4. If conditions improve, the Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia will ignore it because

    It's Bad for Business!

    An unethical business model?

    What a concept.

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  5. k-barandanikto,

    I will state here that LCG's Tomorrow's World was far less political then PCG's recruitment magazine.

    Black Ops Mikey,

    You are so right.

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