Happy Days are Here Again - Part Deux!

Despite the economic happy talk I have been reading about the economy, what we have been seeing with clients since last October has now been verified by the U of O Index of Economic Indicators - we're going down. Yup, for the fourth consecutive month the indicators are down significantly for Oregon. In the past, this has usually meant the "R" word - recession. In November alone it was down 2.75%. UO economist Tim Duy said:

"For all the ups and downs, U.S. job growth has been increasing this year while Oregon’s has not,” Duy said. “So either we’re mismeasuring Oregon’s job growth and all this will go away, or there’s something a little bit different here.”

Well OK,  after all we do things differently here. 

www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/01/oregon_economic_index_falls_fo.html

Speaking of seeing things differently BTW, did you see that Gov. Kitzhaber's vaunted health plan savings will be less than half of what was projected to the Legislature when the budget was being formulated? I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that at the end of the 2-year budget there will not only be no savings, but a deficit to be covered! A donation is already being requested from the Feds, who themselves are awash in money. It's Chinese, but they are awash in it.

The problem with health care "reform" is that politicians want to run the system and "give" care to everybody to buy votes and the system is too big and too complex for them to do so and do it even halfway well. The single biggest cost is personnel and unless doctors and nurses agree to work for peanuts, the numbers will never balance. Ditto for the cost of medicine and medical equipment.  Politicians keep running into the truth that there is no free lunch. That doesn't bother most of them. They just keep screwing things up and "giving" us more of what we "want." I wish they would just go home and drink.

www.ktvz.com/news/30178498/detail.html