The Damn Thing Just Won't Go Away!!!!  Considering That The Election For President  Of The United States Is Less Than One Week Away, And That Mitt Keeps Offering Tax Cuts As Our Way Out Of This Five Year Recession, It Is Worth Repeating This One More Time!!  And Don't Be Mislead By Some Other Name...It Is Arthur Laffer's Trickle Down Theory.  It Was Crap Then And It Is Crap Now!!!!!

 Trickle Down Theory...One Last Time...Hopefully!!!

They are at it again.  Cut the taxes on the richest of the rich and the corporations and they will spend their riches creating new jobs, and the resulting wealth will trickle down to the rest of us.

A quick review is in order here.  Jack Kemp, then a Congressman had lunch with Arther Laffer, then an economist.  The story is that Laffer drew a curve on a napkin to promote the theory that tax cuts for the rich produce economic growth and new jobs.  That curve will forever be know as the Laffer Curve.  Of course, the joke here is unintended.

So here is your assignment.  Take a look at corporate profits.  They are high as they have ever been.  Corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash and have been doing so for a number of years now. (Update: Business Week, Oct. 15, 2012, "Corporations are Sitting on $1.7 TRILLION in cash.")

The 1% now have more money than they have ever had and their share of the wealth of the country is staggering. (Update:  that is now 40% of ALL the wealth in the country.)

So where are all the new jobs that should have been trickling down to us since, oh say, the Bush tax cuts?????????????

Even Mitt says that 23 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed, and nothing much has changed for five years now.  Record numbers of people have been unemployed for over a year now.

And yet there are still fools in Washington trying to sell us the Laffer Curve!!  It is indeed a Laugh Curve, but the results ain't funny.  Tell them to stop trying to fool you.  It ain't pretty!!

The Most Important Thing You Have To Think About This Week, This Month, This Year!!

This week's Sunday New York Times Magazine has a story about the life long work of an apparently very nice lady.  But it raises the most fundamental question facing the USA today.  Namely, how much government is enough and how much is too much.  The article starts below.

Safety Lessons From the Morgue

By ROBERT W. STOCK

On a bright, chilly morning in February, Susan P. Baker sat in her fifth-floor office at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, staring at her computer screen. She had just completed a search for the word “sightseeing” in a federal database of U.S. aviation crashes between 2000 and 2010. Now she was scrolling through a seemingly endless list of grim case histories of people who were killed or injured when their sightseeing aircraft or balloon crashed. 

A month before, she read a news story about the crash of a tour helicopter in Nevada. Five people died, including a couple celebrating their 25th anniversary. “It made me sad and angry,” she recalled. “Such senseless deaths!” So Baker, an epidemiologist, did what she’s been doing for more than four decades. She decided to find out why people were dying and what could be done to stop it. 

Working with Sarah-Blythe Ballard, a doctoral candidate and Navy flight surgeon, Baker prepared an abstract and sent it to the Aerospace Medical Association. When it’s finished, the article will delineate the number of fatalities for each mode of sightseeing flight, including balloon, helicopter and fixed-wing; describe the circumstances that led to each crash, like encounters between hot-air balloons and power lines; and offer suggestions for reducing the risk of a crash — for example, increasing training for pilots on landing in unfavorable wind conditions and avoiding power lines. Then, if everything goes the way it usually does when Baker publishes her work, the article will be picked up by the media, putting pressure on the businesses that run sightseeing flights, as well as the legislative committees and agencies that oversee their operations, to improve the way these flights are conducted. Over time, the hope is, fewer people will die in these sorts of accidents.

Do we really need a federal agency to monitor balloon pilots?  (Confession:  I have ridden in a balloon and had a good time.)

But the much larger, and much more important question is, "How much government do we need to control individual behavior?"  It is clearly a spectrum.  At one end there is the government that protects you from getting killed by a lunatic, but at the other end there is the government that interferes in your bedroom.

Read the rest of the article and talk to someone, a friend, relative, about where the line should be drawn.  It has to been drawn somewhere.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/safety-lessons-from-the-morgue.html?ref=magazine

Now the next dimension.  You will notice that nowhere in the article is cost/benefit discussed.  Given the end of the article, this is truly ironic, i.e, air bags add about $1,000 to the cost of an automobile and the best estimate is that airbags save some 300-400 lives a year.  We sell 11 million to 15 million automobiles annually in the U.S.  You can do the math to calculate the amount of money we all spend to save those lives.

O.K., get ready, here comes the irony.  Airbags are useless if you are not wearing your seat belt!! 

One final assignment:  Take a look at what is on your plate for lunch (breakfast, whatever) and ask your self whether it is a good thing that everything on that plate was approved in one way or another by some government inspector.

Best of all, get some Tea Party member to think about what is at stake here.

You Have Heard All Of These Arguments Before, Right Here! Now Here Are The Same Arguments And Facts From Nobel Prize Winning Economist Joe Stiglitz In Today's New York Times.

Some Are More Unequal Than Others

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

This election has rightly been characterized as one that will deeply affect the future direction of the country: Americans are being given a choice with potentially large consequences. One arena in which there are profound differences that has not been adequately debated is the future course of inequality.

Mitt Romney has been explicit: inequality should be talked about only in quiet voices behind closed doors. But with the normally conservative magazine The Economist publishing a special series showing the extremes to which American inequality has grown — joining a growing chorus (of which my book “The Price of Inequality” is an example) arguing that the extremes of American inequality, its nature and origins, are adversely affecting our economy — it is an issue that not even the Republicans can ignore. It is no longer just a moral issue, a question of social justice.

This perhaps provides part of the explanation for why inequality and poverty should suddenly appear as part of the Romney-Ryan makeover, as they attempt to portray themselves (to use a phrase of some 12 years ago) as compassionate conservatives. In Cleveland on Wednesday, Paul Ryan gave a speech that might lead one to conclude that the two Republican candidates were really concerned about poverty. But more revealing than oratory are budget numbers — like those actually contained in the Ryan budget. His budget proposal guts programs that serve those at the bottom, and little could have done more to enrich those at the top than his original tax proposals (like the elimination of capital gains taxes, a position from which he understandably has tried to distance himself). Every other advanced country has recognized the right of everyone to access to health care, and extending access was central to President Obama’s health care reform. Romney and Ryan have criticized that reform, but have said nothing about how or whether they would ensure universal access. Most important, the macroeconomic consequences of the Romney-Ryan economic program would be devastating: growth would slow, unemployment would increase, and just as Americans would need the social protection of government more, the safety net would be weakened.

We’d all do well to pay a bit closer attention. That American inequality is at historic highs is undisputed. It’s not just that the top 1 percent takes in about a fifth of the income, and controls more than a third of the wealth. America also has become the country (among the advanced industrial countries) with the least equality of opportunity. Meanwhile, those in the middle are faring badly, in every dimension, in security, in income, and in wealth — the wealth of the typical household is back to where it was in the 1990s. While the recession has made all of this worse, even before the recession they weren’t faring well: in 2007, the income of the typical family was lower than it was at the end of the last century. While Obama may not have done as much as he should to counteract the steep downturn he inherited from George W. Bush upon taking office — and he underestimated the depth of the problems that had been passed along to him — he did far more than his predecessor. And he could have done far more, as the dimensions of the problem became clearer to everyone, had he not faced such strong opposition in Congress.

There are many forces giving rise to this high and rising inequality. But the fact that America’s inequality is greater than other advanced countries’ says that it’s not just market forces. After all, other advanced countries are subjected to market forces much like those confronting us. Markets don’t exist in a vacuum. Government policies — or their lack — have played a critical role in creating and maintaining these inequities.

Inequality in “market incomes” — what individuals receive apart from any transfers from the government — has increased as a result of ineffective enforcement of competition laws, inadequate financial regulation, deficiency in corporate governance laws, and “corporate welfare” — huge open and hidden subsidies to our corporations that reached new heights in the Bush administration. When, for instance, competition laws are not enforced, monopolies grow, and with them the income of monopolists. Competition, by contrast, drives profits down. What is disturbing about Romney and Ryan is that they have done so little to distance themselves from the economic policies of the Bush administration, which not only led to poor economic performance, but also to so much inequality. Understandably, perhaps, Romney has not explained why those, like him, in the hedge fund and equity fund business should be able to use a loophole in the tax law to pay 15 percent taxes on their earnings, when ordinary workers pay a far higher rate.

Our government does less to correct these inequalities than we did in the past, or than other countries do, and as disparities in “market” incomes have increased, its efforts have diminished. It’s not just a matter of redistribution, as some suggest. It’s in part a matter of ensuring that those at the top pay a fair share of their taxes. And it’s in part a matter of ensuring that those at the bottom and in the middle get a fair start in life, through access to education, adequate nutrition and health, and not being exposed to the environmental hazards that have come to plague many of our poor neighborhoods.

But Romney’s campaign likes to play tricks with numbers. When he unleashed a tirade against the bottom 47 percent of supposedly freeloading Americans (for which he has since apologized), he failed to note what should have been obvious and has been pointed out repeatedly since he made that remark:  those Americans do pay large amounts in taxes. These include (and I’m hardly the first to point this out) payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, and even part of the corporate income taxes that our major corporations manage to pass on to their customers. He failed to note, too, the many older Americans barely above poverty who receive social security payments, for which they contributed through a lifetime of work. Yes, the rich may pay a high and increasing share of the country’s total tax revenue, but that’s only because they have a high and increasing share of our national income— not because their rates have gone up.

Many of the very rich, like Romney, are avoiding taxes because of numerous loopholes that favor the rich, and capital gains taxes that are taxed at less than half the rate of other income. The 14 percent rate Romney reportedly paid on his income last year is well below that of Americans of comparable income who worked for their money doing things like creating a real business. Tax havens like the Cayman Islands (condemned by the Group20 and all economic experts) facilitate another level of tax avoidance. That the practice is legal is not an economic justification — the loopholes that allow it were put in place by the rich and the bankers, lawyers and lobbyists who serve them so well. We can be sure that the money is not in the Cayman Islands just because it grows faster in the bright sunshine there.

Putting all this together isn’t the politics of envy, as Romney’s camp likes to complain, or even about shaking a finger at the country’s real freeloaders. It’s about cold, hard economics. Tax avoidance and low rates on capital gains — and the inequality they amplify — are weakening our economy. Were the rich paying their fair share, our deficit would be smaller, and we would be able to invest more in infrastructure, technology and education — investments that would create jobs now and enhance growth in the future. While education is central to restoring America as a land of opportunity, all three of these are crucial for future growth and increases in living standards. Tax havens discourage investment in the United States. Taxing speculators at a lower rate encourages speculation and instability — and draws our most talented young people out of more productive endeavors. The result is a distorted, inefficient economy that grows more slowly than it should.

We can be sure that the money is not in the Cayman Islands just because it grows faster in the bright sunshine there.

The Romney campaign, however, has defended inequality or brushed it aside. To do so, it has employed a handful of economic myths. Here are a few of the most important:

(1) America is a land of opportunity. While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility — and less downward mobility from the top — even than in Europe, and we’re not just talking about Scandinavia.

(2) Trickle-down economics works (a k a “a rising tide lifts all boats”). This idea suggests that further enriching the wealthy will make us all better off. America’s recent economic history shows the patent falsehood of this notion. The top has done very well. But median American incomes are lower than they were a decade and a half ago. Various groups — men and those without a college education — have fared even worse. Median income of a full-time male worker, for instance, is lower than it was four decades ago.

See the short version of Trickle Down Economic BS in two earlier rants here. 

(3) The rich are the “job creators,” so giving them more money leads to more and better jobs. This is really a subset of Myth 2. But Romney’s own private sector history gives it the lie. As we all know from the discussion of Bain Capital and other equity firms, many made their money not by creating jobs in America but by “restructuring,” “downsizing” and moving jobs abroad, often using debt to bleed the companies of money needed for investment, and using the money to enrich themselves. But more generally, the rich are not the source of transformative innovations. Many, if not most of the crucial innovations in recent decades, from medicine to the Internet, have been based in large measure on government-financed research and development. The rich take their money where the returns are highest, and right now many see those high returns in emerging markets. It’s not a surprise that Romney’s trust fund invested in China, but it’s hard to see how giving the rich more money — through more latitude to escape taxation, either through low taxes in the United States or Cayman Islands hide-aways — leads to a stronger American economy.

(4) The cost of reducing inequality is so great that, as much as idealists would like to do so, we would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. In fact, the engine of our economic growth is the middle class. Inequality weakens aggregate demand, because those at the middle and bottom have to spend all or almost all of what that they get, while those at the top don’t. The concentration of wealth in recent decades led to bubbles and instability, as the Fed tried to offset the effects of weak demand arising from our inequality by low interest rates and lax regulation. The irony is that the tax cuts for capital gains and dividends that were supposed to spur investment by the wealthy alleged job creators didn’t do so, even with record low interest rates: private sector job creation under Bush was dismal. Mainstream economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund now recognize the connection between inequality and a weak economy. To argue the contrary is a self-serving idea being promoted by the very wealthy.

(5) Markets are self-regulating and efficient, and any governmental interference with markets is a mistake. The 2008 crisis should have cured everyone of this fallacy, but anyone with a sense of history would realize that capitalism has been plagued with booms and busts since its origin. The only period in our history in which financial markets did not suffer from excesses was the period after the Great Depression, in which we put in place strong regulations that worked. It’s worth noting that we grew much faster, and more stably, in the decades after World War II than in the period after 1980, when we started stripping away the regulations. And in the former period we grew together, in contrast to the latter, when we grew apart.

As I have explained in detail elsewhere, the cost of these myths goes far beyond the damage to our economy, now and in the future. The fabric of our society and democracy is suffering. The worry is that those at the top are investing their money not in real investments, in real innovations, but in political investments. Their big contributions to the presidential and Congressional campaigns are, too often, not charitable contributions. They expect, and have received, high returns from these political investments. These political investments, exemplified by those the financial institutions made, yielded far higher returns than anything else they did. The investments bought deregulation and a huge bailout — though they also brought the economy to the brink of ruin and are a source of much of our inequality.

Such political investments undermine and corrupt our democracy. But there are other manifestations: America is fast becoming a country marked not by justice for all, but by justice for those who can afford it. (Just one of many examples is that no banker has been prosecuted, let alone convicted, for banks’ systematic lying to the court regarding the fraudulent practices that played so large a role in the 2008 crisis.) And with the increasing influence of money, especially notable in this election, the outcomes of our political process are becoming more like one dollar, one vote than one person, one vote. It’s even worse, because political inequality leads to economic inequality, which leads in turn to more political inequality, in a vicious spiral undermining our economy and our democracy.

Recognizing all this is not class warfare. It is simply acknowledging the realities of life in the United States, which Romney has not done. That should be cause for concern: if you don’t recognize that there is a problem, and if you don’t understand the sources and consequences, you will never work to solve it.
Obama has at least touched on key elements: his education policies, from “the race to the top” to the reforms of student loan programs, will enhance opportunity. His tax proposals will do a little bit about the extremes at the top. His jobs and investment programs will expand growth now, and in the future, and these will be of enormous benefit to those in the middle. Romney and Ryan have tried a hard tack to the center in their rhetoric in recent weeks. But let no one be deceived: their tax policies will lead to even more inequality at the top, the continued hollowing out of the middle, and more poverty at the bottom. Worst of all, they will lead to a more divided society that endangers our future — our economy, our democracy and our sense of identity as a nation.
Joseph E. Stiglitz , a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and a former chief economist of the World Bank, is University Professor at Columbia University. His most recent book is “The Price of Inequality.”

Can You Explain How Mitt's Five Point Plan (the one without points), Or Obama's Twenty-seven Point Plan (the one filled with trivia) Will Deal With These Facts??

 
Some of the biggest names in the business world have announced job cuts in recent weeks.  The following are 15 signs that layoffs and job losses are skyrocketing...
1. Dow Chemical has announced that it will be closing about 20 plants and will be letting about 2,400 workers go.
2. Colgate-Palmolive has announced that they will be eliminating about 2,300 jobs.
3. DuPont has announced plans to eliminate about 1,500 jobs.
4. Ford has announced that it will be eliminating 6,200 jobs and will be reducing production capacity in Europe by 18 percent.
5. Hewlett-Packard announced last month that they plan to eliminate 29,000 jobs.
6. Chip maker AMD has announced that they will be getting rid of about 15 percent of their workers.
7. Sony has announced plans to reduce their workforce by about 2,000 workers.
8. Electronics manufacturer Sharp reportedly plans to eliminate 11,000 jobs.
9. Engine maker Cummins Inc. has announced that they plan to get rid of about 1,500 jobs by the end of 2012.
10. Earlier this month Applied Materials announced a plan that will eliminate up to 1,300 jobs.
11. Zynga (known for making video games for Facebook such as FarmVille) has announced that they are reducing their workforce by about 5 percent.
12. Lattice Semiconductor has announced plans to eliminate about 13 percent of their jobs.
13. Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a plan to eliminate more than 5000 jobs all over the globe.
14. Siemens AG has announced that the number of positions being eliminated may reach 10,000 by the end of the year.
15. Banking giant UBS plans to eliminate up to 5,000 jobs.

Something To Think About.  How Many Carrier Battle Groups (we have eleven) Do We Need To Stop Cyber Attacks?  Maybe Mitt Knows.  I Don't.

 From today's New York Times.

---

October 23, 2012

In Cyberattack on Saudi Firm, U.S. Sees Iran Firing Back

By NICOLE PERLROTH

The hackers picked the one day of the year they knew they could inflict the most damage on the world’s most valuable company, Saudi Aramco. 

On Aug. 15, more than 55,000 Saudi Aramco employees stayed home from work to prepare for one of Islam’s holiest nights of the year — Lailat al Qadr, or the Night of Power — celebrating the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad. 

That morning, at 11:08, a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with an image of a burning American flag.

United States intelligence officials say the attack’s real perpetrator was Iran, although they offered no specific evidence to support that claim. But the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, in a recent speech warning of the dangers of computer attacks, cited the Aramco sabotage as “a significant escalation of the cyber threat.” 

In the Aramco case, hackers who called themselves the “Cutting Sword of Justice” and claimed to be activists upset about Saudi policies in the Middle East took responsibility.

But their online message and the burning flag were probably red herrings, say independent computer researchers who have looked at the virus’s code. 

Immediately after the attack, Aramco was forced to shut down the company’s internal corporate network, disabling employees’ e-mail and Internet access, to stop the virus from spreading.

It could have been much worse. An examination of the sabotage revealed why government officials and computer experts found the attack disturbing. Aramco’s oil production operations are segregated from the company’s internal communications network. Once executives were assured that only the internal communications network had been hit and that not a drop of oil had been spilled, they set to work replacing the hard drives of tens of thousands of its PCs and tracking down the parties responsible, according to two people close to the investigation but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. 

Aramco flew in roughly a dozen American computer security experts. By the time those specialists arrived, they already had a good handle on the virus. Within hours of the attack, researchers at Symantec, a Silicon Valley security company, began analyzing a sample of the virus. 

That virus — called Shamoon after a word embedded in its code — was designed to do two things: replace the data on hard drives with an image of a burning American flag and report the addresses of infected computers — a bragging list of sorts — back to a computer inside the company’s network.

Shamoon’s code included a so-called kill switch, a timer set to attack at 11:08 a.m., the exact time that Aramco’s computers were wiped of memory. Shamoon’s creators even gave the erasing mechanism a name: Wiper. 

Computer security researchers noted that the same name, Wiper, had been given to an erasing component of Flame, a computer virus that attacked Iranian oil companies and came to light in May. Iranian oil ministry officials have claimed that the Wiper software code forced them to cut Internet connections to their oil ministry, oil rigs and the Kharg Island oil terminal, a conduit for 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports. 

It raised suspicions that the Aramco hacking was retaliation. The United States fired one of the first shots in the computer war and has long maintained the upper hand. The New York Times reported in June that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the computer virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010. 

Last May, researchers discovered that Flame had been siphoning data from computers, mainly in Iran, for several years. Security researchers believe Flame and Stuxnet were written by different programmers, but commissioned by the same two nations. 

If American officials are correct that Shamoon was designed by Iran, then clues in its code may have been intended to misdirect blame. Shamoon’s programmers inserted the word “Arabian Gulf” into its code. But Iranians refer to that body of water as the Persian Gulf and are very protective of the name. (This year, Iran threatened to sue Google for removing the name Persian Gulf from its online maps.) 

After analyzing the software code from the Aramco attack, security experts say that the event involved a company insider, or insiders, with privileged access to Aramco’s network. The virus could have been carried on a USB memory stick that was inserted into a PC.

Aramco’s attackers posted blocks of I.P. addresses of thousands of Aramco PCs online as proof of the attack. Researchers say that only an Aramco employee or contractor with access to the company’s internal network would have been able to grab that list from a disconnected computer inside Aramco’s network and put it online. 

Neither researchers nor officials have disclosed the names of the attackers involved. Saudi Aramco said in a statement that it was inappropriate to comment amid an investigation. The company further stated that it does not comment on rumor or speculation. 

American intelligence officials blame Iran for a similar, subsequent attack on RasGas, the Qatari natural gas giant, two weeks after the Aramco attack. They also believe Iran engineered computer attacks that intermittently took America’s largest banks offline in September, and last week disrupted the online banking Web sites of Capital One and BB&T. 

Multiple requests for comment from Iran’s interests office in Washington and to Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York brought no response. 

The finger-pointing demonstrates the growing concern in the United States among government officials and private industry that other countries have the technology and skill to initiate attacks. “The Iranians were faster in developing an attack capability and bolder in using it than we had expected,” said James A. Lewis, a former diplomat and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Both sides are going through a dance to figure out how much they want to turn this into a fight.” 

More than two months after the Aramco attack, the company continues to deal with the aftermath. Still, this month employees were not able to gain access to their corporate e-mail and internal network for several days. Until the company’s executives decide its systems are secure, employees can no longer access Aramco’s internal network remotely. 

The attack, intelligence officials say, was a wake-up call. “It proved you don’t have to be sophisticated to do a lot of damage,” said Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official at the National Security Council. “There are lots of targets in the U.S. where they could do the same thing. The attacks were intended to say: ‘If you mess with us, you can expect retaliation.’ ”

This Editorial From Today's New York Times Is Something To Think Seriously About As The Election Draws Near.

 

October 23, 2012

The Austerity Trap

In Monday night’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney echoed other Republican politicians, saying that under President Obama’s economic policies, the United States is “heading toward Greece.” Mr. Romney was invoking Greece apparently to make the point that deep and swift budget cuts are needed in the United States to avoid a debt crisis.

That bizarre comment, sadly, is no surprise in a campaign that has parted ways with the facts. The president’s budget, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, would stabilize the ratio of federal debt to the economy over 10 years. 

What is more disturbing is that the comment displays willful ignorance about the lessons of Greece, and such ignorance can only lead to bad policy decisions at home. The lesson that should be learned from Greece is that its fiscal mess has been made far worse by severe budget cuts.

New data from the European Union, released on Monday and analyzed in The Times by Landon Thomas Jr. and David Jolly, show that countries that have most ruthlessly cut their budgets — Greece, especially — have seen their overall debt loads increase as a share of the economy. 

The data provide objective support for what has been clear to just about everyone except pro-austerity German officials and deficit-crazed Republican politicians. Namely, deep government budget cuts at a time of economic weakness are counterproductive, complicating, if not ruining, the chances for economic growth. 

The new European statistics also dovetail with a recent analysis by economists from the International Monetary Fund. They found that budget cutbacks are much more damaging to economies recovering from recession than has been previously believed. The reason is that with interest rates stuck near zero, there is no room to lower them when fiscal policy is tightened, and thus no way to offset the pain of budget cutbacks.

If governments push ahead anyway with deep spending cuts, the result is only more economic weakness without the hoped for budget improvement. That has been the case in Greece and other nations of Europe, like Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Britain. If Republican policies to slash government programs while excessively cutting taxes were carried out here, the United States would experience a similar effect. 

Taken together, the Greek experience and the recent European research, show that for the United States, a “grand bargain” on the deficit should include two main parts: spending in the near term to boost the recovery, coupled with tax increases, and spending cuts to reduce the deficit as the economy regains its health.

Mr. Obama is better positioned than Mr. Romney to deliver that agenda. Mr. Obama could make his jobs plan, introduced last September but blocked by Congressional Republicans, part of the budget package to be negotiated after the election, when politicians must agree on tax increases and spending cuts to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. 

Mr. Romney’s agenda is missing a direct focus on jobs, foolishly relying instead on high-end tax cuts and deregulation to help the recovery. And he and his party continue to insist on premature deficit reduction that, in a fragile economy, is the real road to Greece.

Remember Mitt's 47%?  Michael Lists 32 Examples Of How Many (But Not All) Of the 47% Are Actually Living.          

 Remember That 70% Of All New Jobs Are Created By Small Businesses, Pay Special Attention To #29.

Read 'em and weep!!


The following are 37 facts that show how cruel this economy has been to millions of desperate American families...
1. One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.

2. A different recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.

3. In the United States today, there are close to 10 million households that do not have a single bank account.  That number has increased by about a million since 2009.

4. Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.

5. The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.

6. Median household income has fallen for four years in a row.  Overall, it has declined by more than $4000 over the past four years.

7. 62 percent of middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

8. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of middle class Americans say that it is more difficult to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.

9. In the United States today, 77 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.

10. In the United States today, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans are not working.

11. Since January 2009, the "labor force" in the United States has increased by 827,000, but "those not in the labor force" has increased by 8,208,000.  This is how they have gotten the unemployment numbers to "come down".

12. Sadly, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

13. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.

14. Right now, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

15. At this point, less than 25 percent of all jobs in the United States are "good jobs", and that number continues to shrink.

16. There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.  That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

17. According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.

18. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

19. In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance.  Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

20. Health insurance premiums rose faster than the overall rate of inflation in 2011 and that is happening once again in 2012.  In fact, it has been happening for a very long time.

21. According to one recent survey, approximately 10 percent of all employers in the United States plan to drop health coverage when key provisions of the new health care law kick in less than two years from now.

22. Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned.  By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.

23. Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.

24. Total consumer debt in the United States has risen by 1700 percent since 1971.

25. Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

26. According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.

27. Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living at home with their parents.

28. The percentage of Americans that find that they are able to retire when they reach retirement age continues to decline.  According to one new survey, 70 percent of middle class Americans plan to work during retirement and 30 percent plan to work until they are at least 80 years old.

29. The U.S. economy lost more than 220,000 small businesses during the recent recession.

30. In 2010, the number of jobs created at new businesses in the United States was less than half of what it was back in the year 2000.

31. Back in 2007, 19.2 percent of all American families had a net worth of zero or less than zero.  By 2010, that figure had soared to 32.5 percent.

32. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either "low income" or impoverished.

33. In the United States today, somewhere around 100 million Americans are considered to be either "poor" or "near poor".

34. In October 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, 46.7 million Americans are on food stamps.

35. Approximately one-fourth of all children in the United States are enrolled in the food stamp program.

36. Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.  And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare.

37. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government.  Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.

What makes all of this even more frightening is that many homeless shelters and food banks around the nation are so overloaded at this point that they are already over capacity.  Just consider this example...

When Janice Coe, a homeless advocate in Loudoun County, learned through her prayer group that a young woman was sleeping in the New Carrollton Metro station with a toddler and a 2-month-old, she sprang into action.
Coe contacted the young woman and arranged for her to take the train to Virginia, where she put the little family up in a Comfort Suites hotel. Then Coe began calling shelters to see who could take them.
Despite several phone calls, she came up empty. Coe was shocked to learn that many of the local shelters that cater to families were full, including Good Shepherd Alliance, where Coe was once director of social services.
“I don’t know why nobody will take this girl in,” Coe said. “The baby still had a hospital bracelet on her wrist.”

Keep in mind that Loudoun Country is smack dab in the middle of one of the wealthiest areas of Virginia.
So if things are that bad in the wealthy areas, exactly how bad are things getting in many of the poorer areas?

Unfortunately, things continue to get worse for this economy.  DuPont has just announced plans to eliminate 1,500 jobs.  There are more major layoff announcements almost every single day.  So how bad will things get when our crumbling economic system finally collapses?  When kind of chaos will be unleashed all over the nation when millions upon millions of Americans finally lose all hope?

In the introduction to this article, I mentioned that one of my regular readers has had his lights turned off.  The following is how he described his situation...

No gas, no water, no electricity at my house. Couldn’t pay the bills. I’m broke. Desperately searching for any means of income, or at least enough cash to get the juice (electricity) restored.
Typing this missive in a dark house using the battery on my laptop. Feels like I’m camping out at home. Hope to get this situation fixed tomorrow… somehow. Needless to say, I *…. hate this.
I was ready for this, but it is still a major league inconvenience. For those of you who DO have power, etc. – and are not ready… oh brother. You need to get ready. Seriously, you do. Because what I’m going through is just an inconvenience. It may someday be a normal occurence. Ugh. (expletives deleted)

Hopefully a way can be found to get his situation turned around, but the truth is that there are tens of millions of other similar stories out there in America today.

What about you?  What are things like in your neck of the woods?  Please feel free to share your thoughts below...

One More Thing I Am Annoyed About!!

When W was president, the generals went to him with a plan to bump up the number of troops in Iraq.  They called it a "surge" and it was claimed to be wildly successful in winding down the war in Iraq.

 What actually happened is that we started paying young Sunni males $100 a month to stop killing Shias.  And, surprise, it worked like gang busters.  They took the money and stopped killing Shias.  (Note that they are now killing each other again, but we are gone and the payments have stopped.)

But when it came to Afghanistan, the surge didn't work, Period!!

I don't know whether we offered the Taliban males (of course, there are only males) money to stop killing us, but I doubt it.

In Iraq, we got in the middle of a religious war to see who would hold political power.

In Afghanistan, we got into the middle of a cultural war that have been going on for a thousand years.  The Russians lost it.  The British before them lost it.  All the way back to Genghis Khan, outsiders have been losing the war in Afghanistan.

As the German philosopher said, "All we ever learn from history is that we never learn anything from history!"

And by the way, do you know how much it costs us to wage this losing war in Afghanistan?

Two Billion Dollars A DAY!!!

 

This Is Really Annoying!!!

Both Obama and Romney keep arguing about who saved the auto industry and who would not have saved it.  That is all a bunch of crap like babbling about income tax rates!!

What Obama did was save General Motors and Chrysler!  Together, they have about a 20% share of the U.S. auto market.  So 80% of the U.S. auto market is alive and well (see Section Two of The Great Recession Conspiracy to see who and where they are), and did not require saving because they are all alive, well and profitable

Notice that Ford is never mentioned in all the blab blab, yet Ford is right there in Detroit with the same union.

The absolute facts are that the U.S. government did not save the automobile industry in the U.S.  What the government did was to save a few jobs for incompetent managers at two companies for a short time.

When will a politician ever tell the truth about anything?  Romney should have been saying exactly what you just read.  So why didn't he?? 

Two Interesting Numbers!

The October 15 issue of Business Week has two really interesting numbers.  Here they are:

"The 1.2 million households that make up the top 1% of wealth saw their earnings increase 5.5% last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  In the 96 million households that made less than $101,583, roughly 80% of Americans, earnings dropped 1.7%" 

End The Recession--Redux!!

Monday, September 10, 2012

This Is So Easy And So Obvious, You Would Think That Even The Fools In Congress Would Know It!!  And So Where Are Obama And Romney?

How To End The Great Recession In Six Months, Or Less!!

Facts:

1)     At least 75% of the 45,000 miles of our crown jewel, the Interstate Highway System is desperately in need of repair.

2)     The Society of Engineers says we have 10,000 bridges in need of major repair or replacement.

3)     We have hundreds of thousands of miles of oil (and petroleum products) pipelines in need of replacement or repair.

4)     We have hundreds of thousands miles of water pipelines that are up to 150 years old that need replacement or repair.

5) The deterioration of our infrastructure is costing hundreds of millions of dollars in delayed shipping, excess inventories, wear and tear of equipment, etc., and people are dying (California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, etc.)

6) We will HAVE to make these repairs sooner or later.  No Escape!!

Solution:

Issue Infrastructure Repair Bonds.  Interest costs are 1% or less.  The costs will NEVER be lower.

Make the money available to individual cities and state highway departments directly on a first come, first serve basis.  No Federal Government filters, allocations, etc.

The only conditions are that the money must be spent on the above projects and must begin in six months or less.  In addition, each proposal must include an estimate of how many jobs are directly produced, and a progress report at six, twelve and twenty-four months to qualify for progress payments.  Absolutely no new projects are allowed, i.e., No Mob Museums,

Bridges To Nowhere, High Speed Trains To Nowhere, etc.

Reasons Why?

1)     Reduce unemployment payments

2)     Increase tax revenues

3)     Increase revenues for small businesses that create 70% + new jobs

4)     Each dollar spent has a 1.5% multiplier

5)     Restore infrastructure and improve safety of citizens

6)     Reduce distribution costs and improve GDP

7)  Restore international competitiveness

Reasons Why Not?

     1) Elephant clowns

Now go back to Sept. 8, 2012 and take a good look at that graph!!

The Title Of The Book Is "This Time Is Different-800 Years Of Financial Folly", And Sometimes Krugman Actually Gets It Right!!

This is from today's New York Times.

 

---

October 21, 2012

The Secret of Our Non-Success

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The U.S. economy finally seems to be recovering in earnest, with housing on the rebound and job creation outpacing growth in the working-age population. But the news is good, not great — it will still take years to restore full employment — and it has been a very long time coming. Why has the slump been so protracted?

The answer — backed by overwhelming evidence — is that this is what normally happens after a severe financial crisis. But Mitt Romney’s economic team rejects that evidence. And this denialism bodes ill for policy if Mr. Romney wins next month. 

About the evidence: The most famous study is by Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who looked at past financial crises and found that such crises are typically followed by years of high unemployment and weak growth. Later work by economists at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere confirmed this analysis: crises that followed a sharp run-up in private-sector debt, from the U.S. Panic of 1893 to the Swedish banking crisis of the early 1990s, cast long shadows over the economy’s future. There was no reason to believe that this time would be different. 

This isn’t an after-the-fact rationalization. The Reinhart-Rogoff “aftermath” paper was released almost four years ago. And a number of other economists, including, well, me, issued similar warnings. In early 2008 I was already pointing out the distinction between recessions like 1973-5 or 1981-2, brought on by high interest rates, and “postmodern” recessions brought on by private-sector overreach. And I suggested that the recession we were then entering would be followed by a prolonged “jobless recovery” that would feel like a continuing recession. 

Why is recovery from a financial crisis slow? Financial crises are preceded by credit bubbles; when those bubbles burst, many families and/or companies are left with high levels of debt, which force them to slash their spending. This slashed spending, in turn, depresses the economy as a whole. 

And the usual response to recession, cutting interest rates to encourage spending, isn’t adequate. Many families simply can’t spend more, and interest rates can be cut only so far — namely, to zero but not below.

Does this mean that nothing can be done to avoid a protracted slump after a financial crisis? No, it just means that you have to do more than just cut interest rates. In particular, what the economy really needs after a financial crisis is a temporary increase in government spending, to sustain employment while the private sector repairs its balance sheet. And the Obama administration did some of that, blunting the severity of the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the stimulus was both too small and too short-lived, partly because of administration errors but mainly because of scorched-earth Republican obstruction.

Which brings us to the politics. 

Over the past few months advisers to the Romney campaign have mounted a furious assault on the notion that financial-crisis recessions are different. For example, in July former Senator Phil Gramm and Columbia’s R. Glenn Hubbard published an op-ed article claiming that we should be having a recovery comparable to the bounceback from the 1981-2 recession, while a white paper from Romney advisers argues that the only thing preventing a rip-roaring boom is the uncertainty created by President Obama. 

Obviously, Republicans like claiming that it’s all Mr. Obama’s fault, and that electing Mr. Romney would magically make everything better. But nobody should believe them. 

For one thing, these people have a track record: back in 2008, when serious students of history were already predicting a prolonged slump, Mr. Gramm was dismissing America as a “nation of whiners” experiencing a mere “mental recession.” For another, if Mr. Obama is the problem, why is the United States actually doing better than most other advanced countries? 

The main point, however, is that the Romney team is willfully, nakedly, distorting the record, leading Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff — who aren’t affiliated with either campaign — to protest against “gross misinterpretations of the facts.” And this should worry you. 

Look, economics isn’t as much of a science as we’d like. But when there’s overwhelming evidence for an economic proposition — as there is for the proposition that financial-crisis recessions are different — we have the right to expect politicians and their advisers to respect that evidence. Otherwise, they’ll end up making policy based on fantasies rather than grappling with reality. 

And once politicians start refusing to acknowledge inconvenient facts, where does it stop? Why, the next thing you know Republicans will start rejecting the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change. Oh, wait.

I Have Been Warning About Healthcare Costs Bankrupting The U.S.  Here Are Graphs From The Business Insider That Explain The Same Thing.  Look At Them VERY Carefully!!!

America's Health Care Costs Are Only Going To Get Worse [INFOGRAPHIC]

Michael Kelley | Jul. 27, 2012, 5:00 PM | 589 | 12

A recent Congressional Budget Office report concluded that the number of people who do not have access to health care will fall from 53 million to 30 million by 2022 as a result of Affordable Care Act.
One problem is that health care is not only too expensive for the uninsured but it's becoming increasingly hard on those who are insured as well.
This infographic from the Center For American Progress lays out how it's only going to bet harder unless we tackle ballooning costs:

Center for American Progress

Donna's Diner

The New York Times has just concluded a five part piece entitled Donna's Diner.  You can watch, listen and read it online.

Start here:  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/14/us/this-land-elyria-ohio.html#/#never-ending-conversation

It is an extremely well written series and it traces the good and bad times of a little town in Ohio, through the eyes of a fiftyish single woman who always wanted to own her own diner.

You will come away with a very clear understanding of small town America and the troubles its citizens face trying to get on with their lives as the world changes around them.

And you will be touched by how hard the people you will meet have worked, and are working.

Some of the people you will meet are in Mitt's 47%.  You can make up your own mind whether they are shiftless, lazy, no-good bums.

Down load it and read at your leisure.  Better yet, read it and watch it with someone important to you.

According To Last Night's Debate, The "Trickle Down" Theory Is Alive And Well, So Here It Is One More Time................

 
Trickle Down Theory...One Last Time...Hopefully!!!

They are at it again.  Cut the taxes on the richest of the rich and the corporations and they will spend their riches creating new jobs, and the resulting wealth will trickle down to the rest of us.

A quick review is in order here.  Jack Kemp, then a Congressman had lunch with Arther Laffer, then an economist.  The story is that Laffer drew a curve on a napkin to promote the theory that tax cuts for the rich produce economic growth and new jobs.  That curve will forever be know as the Laffer Curve.  Of course, the joke here is unintended.

So here is your assignment.  Take a look at corporate profits.  They are high as they have ever been.  Corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash and have been doing so for a number of years now. (Update: Business Week, Oct. 15, 2012, "Corporations are Sitting on $1.7 TRILLION in cash.")

The 1% now have more money than they have ever had and their share of the wealth of the country is staggering. (Update:  that is now 40% of ALL the wealth in the country.)

So where are all the new jobs that should have been trickling down to us since, oh say, the Bush tax cuts?????????????

Even Mitt says that 23 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed, and nothing much has changed for five years now.  Record numbers of people have been unemployed for over a year now.

And yet there are still fools in Washington trying to sell us the Laffer Curve!!  It is indeed a Laugh Curve, but the results ain't funny.  Tell them to stop trying to fool you.  It ain't pretty!!

After Last Night's Debate, It Seems Clear That Neither Candidate Has Been Able To Figure Out This Simple Policy.
 ******************************************

This Is So Easy And So Obvious, You Would Think That Even The Fools In Congress Would Know It!!  And So Where Are Obama And Romney?

How To End The Great Recession In Six Months, Or Less!!

Facts:

1)     At least 75% of the 45,000 miles of our crown jewel, the Interstate Highway System is desperately in need of repair.

2)     The Society of Engineers says we have 10,000 bridges in need of major repair or replacement.

3)     We have hundreds of thousands of miles of oil (and petroleum products) pipelines in need of replacement or repair.

4)     We have hundreds of thousands miles of water pipelines that are up to 150 years old that need replacement or repair.

5) The deterioration of our infrastructure is costing hundreds of millions of dollars in delayed shipping, excess inventories, wear and tear of equipment, etc., and people are dying (California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, etc.)

6) We will HAVE to make these repairs sooner or later.  No Escape!!

Solution:

Issue Infrastructure Repair Bonds.  Interest costs are 1% or less.  The costs will NEVER be lower.

Make the money available to individual cities and state highway departments directly on a first come, first serve basis.  No Federal Government filters, allocations, etc.

The only conditions are that the money must be spent on the above projects and must begin in six months or less.  In addition, each proposal must include an estimate of how many jobs are directly produced, and a progress report at six, twelve and twenty-four months to qualify for progress payments.  Absolutely no new projects are allowed, i.e., No Mob Museums,

Bridges To Nowhere, High Speed Trains To Nowhere, etc.

Reasons Why?

1)     Reduce unemployment payments

2)     Increase tax revenues

3)     Increase revenues for small businesses that create 70% + new jobs

4)     Each dollar spent has a 1.5% multiplier

5)     Restore infrastructure and improve safety of citizens

6)     Reduce distribution costs and improve GDP

7)  Restore international competitiveness

Reasons Why Not?

     1) Elephant clowns

Now go back to Sept. 8, 2012 and take a good look at that graph!!

Posted by JW Taylor at 4:54 PM