It’s challenging to see the sunlight at the end of this complex tunnel, but it’s there. More visible today than a week ago.

White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short appears on Fox News Sunday to discuss the ongoing efforts to reform ObamaCare.  In a very positive shift amid the overall discussion, for the first time the point of the cost on the individual insurance market is brought to the forefront.

CTH readers will note our continuing frustration that 99% of the entire healthcare discussion has centered around medicaid spending, or the state funded subsidy of low-income healthcare coverage.

The vast majority of the most severely impacted people within the discussion, middle-class workers/taxpayers who do not qualify for medicaid, have been essentially locked out of the legislative consideration. It is refreshing to see middle America finally being part of the equation.  Within the Senate bill, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have finally advanced something of value.

The “Consumer Choice Amendment” would allow insurance companies to sell plans that do not follow regulations created under Obamacare, with the caveat that those insurers have to sell at least one plan that adheres to Obamacare’s mandates. The proposal would allow insurers to sell plans with tailored benefits.

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Utilizing some Bloomerberg and Zerohedge reporting – treeper SeekerofTruth provides a nice recap of Illinois financial self-flagellation.  Charging head-first into the abyss:

SeekerOfTruth – June 30 came and went and the Illinois legislature did nothing. So the courts have stepped in now.  Bloodbath coming. Fun to watch if any news outlets would report on the story. The bloodbath of decades of liberal policies and corruption.

“From Horrific To Catastrophic”: Court Ruling Sends Illinois Into Financial Abyss.

By the end of Friday – the last day of the fiscal year – Illinois legislators failed to enact a budget, and while negotiations continued amid some glimmers of hope and lawmakers planned to meet over the weekend, the failure marked a continuation of the historic impasse that’s left Illinois without a full-year budget since mid-2015, and which, recall, S&P warned one month ago will likely result in a humiliating and unprecedented downgrade of the 5th most populous US state to junk status.

Then came the begging. (more…)

For the past three days we’ve been assembling a great deal of research on visible back-channel communication amid numerous nations and their economic teams.  There are tectonic plates shifting just below the Geo-political surface, and we will be outlining many of them, along with the predictable economic outcomes (bigly), in the next few days.

In the interim, it’s useful to review the latest information from NatSec McMaster and NEC Cohen as it relates to the upcoming objectives from the next segment of foreign travel.

National Security Advisor General H.R. McMaster and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn pre-brief the media on President Trump’s upcoming trip to Poland and Germany for the G20 Summit.  An important read:

[Transcript] 1:21 P.M. EDT – AIDE: Hi. Just want to restate the ground rules. Today’s briefing is off camera, on the record, and the audio is not for broadcast. It is embargoed until the end of the briefing.

And with that, I will turn the podium over to —

Q Can you make this on — can you make the audio available? Because it puts radio at a disadvantage.

AIDE: It is off camera, not for broadcast. Those are the ground rules.

And now I’m going to turn it over to General H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn. Thank you.

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Our friends at the U.S. Dept of Commerce (DoC) took the weekend off prior to uploading the content from last week’s SelectUSA conference on economics and trade. Unfortunately that delayed our ability to discuss.

However, that said, CTH is often asked how we are able to predict economic and financial events with accuracy. The answer is quite simple, we listen to the raw information. We don’t listen to the media’s interpretation of events, we seek out the actual events and analyze the raw information. Assemble enough of those disparate (but connected) raw information data points and logical predictive conclusions follow.

During the U.S. DoC SelectUSA trade and economic conference last week both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross provided some great insight into the policies that will structurally impact everyone. Three videos are available below:

Secretary Wilbur Ross armchair discussion and Q&A:

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There was a widely read Chicago Tribune op-ed written a few days ago outlining an approach to dissolve the entire state and apportion the geography to Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa. –SEE HERE–  It was written tongue-in-cheek, but with an uncomfortable level of reality behind it.

Illinois has been struggling with its finances for a long, long time.

The Illinois long-term labor pension liabilities are ridiculous in the extreme.  However, things just went from bad to jaw-droppingly, gobsmackingly, unbelievably worse.

According to the latest financial media reports, Standard and Poors Global Ratings agency has positioned Illinois bonds to drop below “investment” grade; that would make Illinois the first state in the nation to achieve “junk bond” status.

(Via ABC) Illinois is on track to become the first U.S. state to have its credit rating downgraded to “junk” status, which would deepen its multibillion-dollar deficit and cost taxpayers more for years to come.

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Modernizing government might not sound sexy as a political agenda item, and definitely doesn’t carry the interest of MSM headlines, however it’s actually a key tenet to reducing the size, scope and expense of government.  The utilization of modern technology to downsize government is a policy initiative.

The Trump administration is quietly putting private sector operational efficiencies into place within the federal government, as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross outlines:

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Before explaining I must state this is written with a servant’s heart.  It is not my intention to debate the arguments or merit of legislation, only to point out the logical pathway if people hang tough, support President Trump and stay out of the traps laid by special interests (and their special-interest paid troll army).

There’s a parallel, comparative and representative example of what President Trump’s smart policy team is trying to do with healthcare; it lies within another set of economic policy objectives.  However, it takes elevation in thinking to understand the approach.

The comparative example is within the banking and finance industry.

For those who have read all the statements, watched the hearings, listened intently to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, you might have already noted their approach to working around the ridiculously burdensome Dodd Frank regulations within the banking and finance sector. – OUTLINED HERE –

Essentially, instead of trying to untangle all the complexities of decades long DC constructs enmeshing and enlarging the bureaucracy around banking, Trump’s team is constructing a parallel system.  Cliff Noted for Brevity: (more…)

Making America Great Again continues to run up against the reality of DC UniParty roadblocks.  Both Democrats and Republicans are procrastinating while hoping for any excuse not to participate in America-First policy advancement.

The election result in Georgia’s sixth district is yet another example of Trump supporters removing excuses the DC UniParty puts forth; yet the DC apparatus is so entrenched in their opposition to President Trump’s policy agenda, they sit idle spinning various congressional hearings-to-nowhere in an increasingly transparent effort to avoid action.

Anyone who believes Democrats own exclusive opposition to Donald Trump are completely ignoring the deliberate construct of the 2015/2016 republican primary. There are just as many -if not more- natural enemies within the Republican apparatus as there are within the Democrat group. “America-First” is antithetical to the UniParty.

Again, prior to Donald Trump there was one party in Washington DC, “The UniParty”. President Donald Trump represented a second party; an independent approach toward legislative and economic priority.  Trump was not a third party choice, Trump was the opportunity to finally get a second party in DC.

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Earlier this evening President Trump participated in a roundtable with technology executives as part of an administration effort to bring the operational and organizational objectives of the federal government into the 21st century.

The overall goal of the administration is to increase federal efficiency standards, reduce the size of government through elimination of bureaucratic waste, and use technology to deliver a more efficient federal administration.  Generation Z set to be the biggest benefactors.

[Transcript] 5:22 P.M. EDT – THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. It’s great to have you at the White House. And I just wanted to pass on word — Otto Warmbier has just passed away. He spent a year and a half in North Korea. A lot of bad things happened. But at least we got him home to be with his parents, where they were so happy to see him, even though he was in very tough condition. But he just passed away a little while ago. It’s a brutal regime, and we’ll be able to handle it.

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Commerce Secretary Wilbur “Wilburine” Ross discusses the ongoing Trump economic growth strategy and the economic policy initiatives surrounding trade, tax reform, and more recently, investment in U.S.

Wilburine delivers a timeline of mid-July China trade meeting and also a mid-July outline to congress, put together by Ross and U.S. Trade Rep Robert Lighthizer, explaining the NAFTA trade renegotiation objectives which will begin mid-August.

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Secretary Wilburine also politely explains how the current valuation of the Mexican Peso and Canadian dollar appears to be weakened vs. the U.S. dollar as an outcome of markets predicting the NAFTA agreement will be far more beneficial to the U.S.  [sly smile]

Love how Wilburine explains @12:30: no distractions, we’re MAGA regardless of anyone paying attention.

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