This greaseball billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks missing a Social Security check, something that never happens, would be no big deal

Howard is otherwise busy firing people and disbanding volunteer industry groups who help the government create important statistics and guidance about things like gross domestic product, population, trade, etc. which people rely on every month to forecast the economy.

 

Meanwhile for the annals of dead American conservatism, meathead Mark Levin laughably eulogizes Ted Olson as the "late, great"

 

 Mostly because of Olson's role in Bush v Gore in 2000.

Levin never mentions that Olson himself, a thorough-going amoral libertarian who worshiped freedom above all other things, thought his greatest legacy was overturning California's same-sex marriage ban, glowingly covered by WaPo:

Mr. Olson said he considered his greatest legal legacy to be his role in invalidating California’s Proposition 8, a measure banning same-sex marriage that had passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote after the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

He had come to the case in a most unlikely way, through Rob Reiner, the film director and liberal activist who was among those intent on reversing the recently approved proposition.

Reiner had a decidedly low opinion of Mr. Olson, stemming from what he regarded as Bush’s ill-gotten 2000 election win. But Mr. Olson told Reiner that he found Prop 8 “wrong, morally and legally,” and Reiner was convinced that the lawyer could appeal to conservatives.

“It is a conservative value to respect the relationship that people seek to have with one another, a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community, for our economy,” Mr. Olson later told the Los Angeles Times. “I think conservatives should value that.”

Mr. Olson endured taunts from former supporters on the hard right, some of whom unleashed homophobic vitriol. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh denounced him on the radio. Others declined invitations to dine at his home near the Potomac River.

Mr. Olson also said he wasn’t trusted by gay rights advocates who feared that Americans were not ready for same-sex marriage and that challenging the ban in court might backfire and set back the cause for years. Some marriage-equality supporters said they feared that Mr. Olson took the case intending to throw it, a notion he dismissed. “I don’t take cases to lose,” he declared.

In part to allay those suspicions, Mr. Olson asked David Boies — an impeccably credentialed trial lawyer and a registered Democrat who had argued Gore’s case in 2000 — to take the marriage case with him. To the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Olson explained that the case was not a partisan matter but rather one about “human rights and human decency and constitutional law.”

Mr. Olson delivered the opening statement on Jan. 11, 2010, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“In California,” he said, “convicted murderers and child molesters enjoyed the freedom to marry,” he said. “What Prop 8 does is label gay and lesbian persons as different, inferior, unequal and disfavored. It says to gays and lesbians, ‘Your relationship is not the same.’ … It stigmatizes them. It classifies them as outcasts. It causes needless and unrelenting pain and isolation and humiliation.”

Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who heard the case without a jury, ultimately found Prop 8 violated the guarantee of equal protection under the law. Although the decision had an immediate effect only in California, it was a major rallying point nationally for gay rights proponents.

In 2013, the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the merits of same-sex marriage, although it affirmed Walker’s decision, finding that opponents of same-sex marriage lacked standing to defend Prop 8 in court.

Still, the win was credited with paving the way for the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended marriage equality nationally. 

      

In the 2020 United States census, same-sex married couples accounted for 0.5% of all U.S. households and unmarried same-sex couples accounted for 0.4% of all U.S. households.

In other unbelievable news, the population clock of the US Census Bureau shows an increase of just 4.6 million since Joe Biden was inaugurated

 https://www.census.gov/popclock/

Out of sight, out of mind I guess.

 

 

Fredo Fauci on US mortality rate for COVID-19 vs. influenza

Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He meant case mortality rate.

Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.

Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.

Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.

The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.

I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.

Mortality rate is function of population and time.

His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.

He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.

Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.

That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.

So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.

Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):

Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million

Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m

Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m

% cases hospitalized: 3.06

% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)

% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)

% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26

% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).

 

Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.

To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.

Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).

Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.

Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.

Bernie was right in 2015 and it's even worse now: Real wages of men are lower than they were 45 years ago, a fiasco

Wolf Richter:

The median earnings of men working full time year-round in 2018 ticked up to $55,291. Adjusted for inflation, this was below the amount they earned in 1973, according to the annual data trove released by the Census Bureau today. In other words, there has been a “real” income decline for men over the past four-plus decades! ... [M]en’s real earnings are a fiasco.

Story in The Atlantic cherry picks data about senior poverty

The Census Bureau's new (since 2011 but fiddled with again in 2013) Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) shows senior poverty in slight retreat since 2009, but you wouldn't know that from the story here (you'd have to look at the chart to the left here) which says it's up between 2015 and 2016, which it most certainly is, but hey, c'mon. The fact is, the "official" measure shows that senior poverty has dropped big time since the mid-1960s when the rate was knocking on the door of 30%, stabilizing in recent years in the 8, 9 and 10% range:

The problem is growing as more Baby Boomers reach retirement age—between 8,000 to 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, according to Kevin Prindiville, the executive director of Justice in Aging, a nonprofit that addresses senior poverty. Older Americans were the only demographic for whom poverty rates increased in a statistically significant way between 2015 and 2016, according to Census Bureau data. While poverty fell among people 18 and under and people 18 to 64 between 2015 and 2016, it rose to 14.5 percent for people over 65, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is considered a more accurate measure of poverty because it takes into account health-care costs and other big expenses. “In the early decades of our work, we were serving communities that had been poor when they were younger,” Prindiville told me. “Increasingly, we’re seeing folks who are becoming poor for the first time in old age.”

Rush Limbaugh is so stupid he thinks today's bad sales numbers were deliberately delayed until after the State of the Union address

The data release occurs on a regular schedule, which can be accessed here. There's no conspiracy to make Obama look better, as Limbaugh stated in the show opener today.

Sorry, But We Aren't Talking About A Lot Of People Not Counted In The Unemployment Numbers

I'd estimate the number not counted in the unemployment numbers to be between 1.5 million and 3.2 million, max.

9.784 million have left the labor force under Obama and are not counted as unemployed since he was elected 4.75 years ago. That's a lot of people, 75% more than left the labor force under George Bush. Not quite 9.5 million left under Bush, but that was over 8 full years.

Who are they who have left the labor force? And should any of them be counted as unemployed as many critics keep maintaining?

The people who should not be counted as unemployed from that total include the 1.1 million who retire every year, so subtract 5.2 million over the period, leaving 4.584 million. Those not in the labor force with a disability are up 1.4 million since 2008. Subtract them and that leaves 3.184 million.

As for the people who should be included in the unemployment number but aren't, they include the number leaving the labor force who wanted to work and searched for a job but were not counted as unemployed. But they were counted by the government. That number has increased by about 1 million since the beginning of the 2007 recession, as shown in the graph (h/t Mish). Then add in those not in the labor force who weren't discouraged workers but looked for work for other reasons and you add another 475,000. They weren't counted in the unemployment numbers either, but they were counted by the government.

So subtracting those 1.475 million from 3.184 million, you get 1.7 million unaccounted for who might or might not need to be included with those 1.475 million who perhaps should be. Many of those 1.7 million are probably like a lot of Americans who became sole proprietors in the aftermath of losing their regular jobs and involuntarily went into business for themselves, making lots less money than before in many instances, typically as contract employees and freelancers, supplementing their incomes from their savings and practicing frugality. The US Census Bureau might agree, having just reported here in May that between 2008 and 2011 alone the number of such "businesses" is up 1.2 million in the aggregate. That leaves you with a minimum expansion of the unemployed to 12.8 million from the current 11.3 million, and a maximum expansion to 14.5 million, but based on the Census data on sole proprietorships, I'll lean to the under.

The real unemployment rate would therefore be something a little higher than the current 7.3%,  between 8.3% and 9.4%, but probably closer to 8.3%. I'll go with 8.6% unemployment based on an additional 1.975 million not in the labor force who could very well be in it.

That's almost 18% worse than the government says unemployment is right now, but based on what I see regularly from government estimates of things, that's routinely good enough for them.

After all, hasn't it been called "good enough for government work" for decades for a reason?

Poverty Thresholds 2012

As shown here.

Poverty Thresholds 2011

As shown here.

Congressmen Get Richer, You Get Poorer

Just in time to echo my recent ranting about our rich, corrupt and unrepresentative Congress and why we therefore need a bigger one, Peter Whoriskey for The Washington Post here chimes in with this tidbit which shows just how unrepresentative our representatives have become:

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

The importance of an individual member of Congress works according to the law of supply and demand: When the supply of Congressmen declines, their individual value increases dramatically. The supply of Congressmen is fixed by law, but their value now increases year by year because the number of people they represent continues to grow.

The US House acted in the 1920s to increase their own value in this way by stopping the House from growing in size proportionally with population. We never should have let them get away with it. Is it any wonder that their wealth has increased so dramatically since then? We have the finest Congress money can buy, and getting finer by the day.

It's rigged. It's a racket. And it's not working for the people anymore. It's working for itself.

We could stop this almost overnight if we simply increased the supply of representatives, just like we do with money. To make debts worth less, we print extra dollars with which to pay them off. We should do the same thing with Congressmen. To make them worth less, increase their supply. The cost of corrupting a much bigger Congress would therefore skyrocket, and the ability of the people to reign it in would improve commensurately.

Consider that in our country less than half the population is registered to vote, 146 million people in 2008. Of that, 131 million actually voted. This means the individual member of Congress on average has a voting constituency of 301,000.

But if we had the 10,267 representatives demanded by Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, the size of a representative's average voting constituency would plummet to . . . 12,760.

Tick-off just one mega-church, a few VFW posts, a local manufacturer or the PTA, and out he goes. Just 6,400 people could make your Congressman a loser, or a winner, and on a regular basis.

Sounds pretty representative to me, and a lot cheaper.

Bruce Bartlett is so full of it: "More than 90 percent put themselves squarely in the middle"

No they don't. Bruce Bartlett has no scruples left (link):

Social class also involves self-identification. According to the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has been asking people what social class they belong to since 1972, more than 90 percent of Americans put themselves squarely in the middle – belonging either to the working class or the middle class.


This so broadly defines the middle it makes the definition meaningless.

The chief marker of membership in the middle class is homeownership, which the one third of Americans who are renters in 35 percent of the occupied dwellings in the US cannot claim, and they don't, despite what Bruce Bartlett says. They know they are working class, and they admit it.

About equal numbers have said historically that they are either working class or middle class, 45 percent each, by Bartlett's own admission.

Here's his table of the results of the latest self-identification of social class by Americans, which shows an increase in the percentage of Americans self-identifying in 2010 as working class and a more substantial decrease in the percentage of those self-identifying as middle class, just what you would expect during the collapse of the housing bubble and the decline in homeownership:

The Increase in the Wealth Gap is Due to the Housing Collapse

The latest figures from the Federal Reserve (link: compare lines 4 and 42) show that enormous wealth destruction in housing is the overwhelming cause of the dramatic decline in household net worth between 2006 and 2011.

Of the $7.8 trillion decline in net worth over that period, $6.6 trillion of that is all from the bursting of the housing bubble . . . nearly 85 percent.

Hurt most by this are the millions of middle class Americans whose primary asset is their home. Desperately trying to hold on to what they have, by scrimping, saving and working, they don't have the luxury of time to occupy much of anything to protest what is happening to them.

It is impolitic to say so, but their plight is the frequent one of the undiversified investor: too many eggs in one basket.

But that's not a bug, it's a feature of entering the middle class, whose goal is owning a home and raising a family in it, not sophisticated money management and investing. Such people who can scrape together the income of $40,000 to $50,000 necessary to support home ownership typically aren't going to have significant financial assets to manage. Of the 150 million wage earners in America, after all, fully 99 million make $40,000 a year or less.

Neither Obama nor the Republican candidates for president, nor Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party for that matter, seem to talk much about any of this, yet the collapse of housing better explains the growing gap between rich and poor in America than do the supposed crimes of the one percent. The rich may be getting richer, but it's inspite of the fact that their own homes have declined in value, too. The middle class is being squeezed downward because its primary asset continues to lose value.

The deep frustration of so many of the American people with their elected leaders is that the leaders really don't represent them in this matter, in the same sense that sympathizing with, understanding, or trying to fix this problem doesn't have the urgency for them anymore than it does for the rich. The reason is that virtually none of them has personal experience of it. From our president to our senators and all the way on down to our representatives, we have leaders whose own high net worth and the insulation from our vulnerabilities that that affords make them remote, unfeeling, and unmotivated.

In point of fact, since it was Democrats and Republicans who conspired in the very policies which have misled Americans to drain $10 trillion in home equity over three decades (for example, dramatic changes to tax and banking policy in 1997 and 1999 under Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm), it shouldn't be surprising that none of them really wants to talk about this gorilla in the living room. They helped make and sell the bed we're now sleeping in. And we bought it.

Of about 132 million total dwellings in 2010 of all types (table 3), just 61 million occupied dwellings are single family homes occupied by their owners, with an additional 11 million occupied by renters, according to the latest Census data here (link). That means something substantially less than 46 percent of total dwellings in the country could plausibly represent the American dream of the traditional middle class. The richest quintile, those households making over $100,000 per year, let it be remembered, lives in houses, too.

The Economic Policy Institute, whose president is a socialist, here (link) provides a useful summary of how wealthier individuals avoided the severity of the housing decline precisely because more of their assets were diversified and were not all riding on real estate (emphases added):

In 2007—prior to the Great Recession—median net worth was $106,000 (consisting primarily of home equity, as discussed later). ... Net worth for the top 1% was $19.2 million in 2007 . . ..

The updated figures for 2009 reflect the enormous destruction of wealth due to the bursting of the housing bubble. As a general rule, households with less wealth have a greater share of their wealth embedded in their homes. Thus, it is not surprising that the fallout from the deflating housing bubble disproportionally affected them. On average, the top 20% lost 16.0% and the bottom 80% lost 25.1% of their total wealth in 2008 and 2009. Average wealth of the bottom 80% was just $62,900 in 2009—a dropoff of $40,900 from 2007 and slightly less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it was more than a quarter-century ago in 1983. Those at the top also lost ground but not nearly as much, percentage-wise. Average wealth of the top 1% was close to $14 million in 2009, down $5.2 million from 2007. ...

[H]ousing equity is a far more important form of wealth for most households. ... In 2007, the middle 20% of households held $196,700 in non-stock assets, and only $10,200 in stocks. In other words, non-stock assets—which are over-whelmingly housing equity—made up about 95% of this group’s wealth.

In the United States homeownership has long been associated with solid footing on the economic ladder, and yet the housing crash has meant that for a broad swath of people homeownership is no longer a reality.

The stepping stone from the lower and working classes to the upper classes, obviously, is the middle class. Very few skip that step, on the way up or on the way down. Rags to riches and back to rags again is interesting, but not common. Rich liberals from both parties, however, have a vested interest in minimizing the middle class to polarize the country. Rich Republicans and Democrats alike don't want the competition entrepreneurial Americans threaten them with, and leftist Democrats need a servile, manipulable constituency they can feed table scraps to in order to keep themselves in power. Some so-called conservative Republicans also, it must be said, seek their own fiefdoms of influence and power at the expense of impulses to limited government. George W. Bush's play for senior votes with Medicare Part D comes to mind.

What middle Americans should demand is a bigger House of Representatives to co-opt these entrenched interests by de-concentrating the power which the 435 now enjoy. Tea Partiers in particular should be advocating a return to the constitutional principle of one representative for every thirty-thousand of population, if their protestations to originalism mean anything. Instead of the bloated, rich and corrupt 435 politicians we've been stuck with for a hundred years, we should have 10,000 lean citizen legislators.

When we get them, things will begin to change for the better because our representatives will have far less power and far more reason to listen to the people. Special interests will have much less influence over them, campaigns will be far less costly, and Congressional staffs could be reduced dramatically, saving us money and getting some actual work out of our politicians for a change. The move would also take away the enthusiasm for radical proposals such as the elimination of the electoral college by dramatically expanding the pool of electors in presidential elections.

We might even persuade such a House to overturn the 17th Amendment, another blow for originalism, which would help improve the US Senate almost overnight. By returning the corrupting influences of campaign cash to state houses where senators would be appointed, we might actually be able to do something about corruption more often because it would be closer to home and we'd be more aware of it.

Consumers Increase Spending in 2011 From Savings and Social Security Tax Holiday

Net real retail spending looks set to come in up 2.9 percent in 2011 over 2010.

Per the data here from the Census.

Average monthly retail and food expenditures in 2010 came to $363 billion per month, or $4.4 trillion overall.

Through October 2011 average monthly retail and food expenditures are running at $389 billion per month, or $4.7 trillion annualized.

That's a 6.8 percent increase so far, or about $26 billion more per month.

Less inflation running at 3.9 percent, the net real increase appears to be 2.9 percent.

$billions monthly

Unfortunately, about $14 billion of the $26 billion nominal monthly increase could be attributed to a reprieve on Social Security taxation of 2 percentage points on employee compensation running at an annualized rate of $8.3 trillion as of October. That extra money in paychecks is simply being spent.

Where did the remaining $12 billion per month come from?

From savings.

The savings rate has plummeted since January, from a rate of 4.9 percent to 3.5 percent. In January we were saving nearly $47 billion per month, but now only $33 billion, a difference of $14 billion per month.

Add the pernicious work of inflation on top of all that, and the rosy scenario of increased consumer spending doesn't look so good after all, especially since incomes are stagnant to falling. Hours worked year over year are flat, and real average hourly earnings overall are down 1.6 percent, according to the BLS here.

When the Social Security tax holiday expires on December 31, there will be less money available to spend, automatically. Robbing from Social Security for such temporary gains is a gimmick, but don't underestimate the politicians' and the voters' eagerness to repeat it under these grim circumstances. They'll take the money, even if it means saving less, because they need it.

Adam Davidson of NPR Wants to Increase Taxes on It, But What Really is The Middle Class?

In The New York Times, here, where he expansively defines the middle class as everyone making between $30K and $200K:

To solve our debt problems, we have to go to where the money is -- the middle class. People who earn between $30,000 and $200,000 a year make a total of around $5 trillion and pay less than 10 percent of that in taxes . . .. [M]ost economists acknowledge, and most politicians privately concede, that the middle class will have to give up some benefits . . . or it will have to pay more in taxes. Actually, it will probably have to do both.

It's a frequently repeated myth that the middle class includes many of the people in the top income quintile, that is, those making in excess of $100,000 per year, but it just isn't true no matter how often it gets repeated.

Richer men and women don't want to be called rich, of course, so they make believe they're just like the rest of us and call themselves middle class when they're anything but.

That this myth is getting repeated so often these days, however, and not just in liberal quarters like The New York Times but also in places like The Wall Street Journal, should make your antennae stand up.

I say this is all part of a softening-up operation to get the rubes ready for a big fat tax increase.

That uncomfortable feeling you get reading the article above might as well be because the author is using one of these to blow smoke up your rear end:

In all seriousness, though, the fact of the matter is that in 2010 there were 99.5 million wage earners making less than $40,000 a year, according to the latest information from Social Security, here. That's fully two thirds of all the wage earners in the country, and a long way from the earners in the top quintile.

The next tranche up from there, namely wage earners making between $40,000 and less than $80,000 a year, is really small by comparison, just under 35 million wage earners.

And fewer than 10 million wage earners inhabited the next level up in 2010, those who made between $80,000 and $120,000.

The $120,000 to $160,000 set is hardly a crowd by comparison, just over 3 million wage earners strong.

Between $160,000 and $200,000 there were 1.25 million people.

And beyond that: 1.75 million wage earners, making to infinity and beyond.

Asserting that middle class extends all the way up to $200,000 when nearly 90 percent make less than $80,000 a year is quite simply ridiculous. It's obvious that the middle is below $40,000 when the average wage of all 150 million workers in 2010 was $39,959. Worker number 75 million from the bottom made just $26,363.

A more meaningful metric for middle class is what kind of housing income can buy at that great dividing line of $40,000.

For example, when I bought my first real traditional home way back in the nineties, the seller's attorney congratulated us at closing by saying, "Welcome to the middle class." I might have said we'd never left it, seeing that we had been owners of other kinds of dwellings twice before, but the attitude represented the cultural consensus that single family home ownership with a lawn to cut defines the socio-economic middle. Being able to afford such a place has been synonymous with achieving the American dream since WWII, after a long period of economic upheaval which quite literally unsettled millions.

So who can afford what when it comes to housing today is an important measure for judging whether the American dream continues intact.

Consider that the median price of an existing single family home in the US stands at $165,400 in September 2011, according to the National Association of Realtors, here. The lowest median price is in the Midwest at $137,400, and the highest is in the Northeast at $229,400.

Assuming one can come up with the 20 percent down payment of $33,080, which is a tall order for someone making $40,000 a year in today's economy, $132,320 financed at 4 percent over 30 years means a principal and interest payment of $631 a month. Add $300 a month for taxes and insurance and the $931 monthly payment means, at a maximum percentage of income of 28 percent, income must be $3,325 a month, or $39,900 a year.

Another way to put this is that the maximum price of a home which can be afforded by a $40,000 income is the current median price of $165,400. Anything beyond that is out of reach.

So, for how many people is that out of reach?

Based on the numbers from Social Security above, for easily 66 percent of the workforce, or nearly 100 million workers who individually couldn't buy more home than the median priced home without more income. But of course many households have two earners who combine their incomes to do just that.

Nevertheless tax data from 2009 more than support the conclusion that a clear majority of Americans cannot afford housing at the median price level.

The latest information indicates that half of the country, nearly 69 million tax returns in 2009, had adjusted gross incomes of less than $32,396.

The next tranche up from there, consisting of 34.5 million more tax returns, takes us up to 75 percent of the whole country, and adjusted gross income of less than $66,193.

(And contrary to Mr. Davidson, the combined adjusted gross income of the first 75 percent of taxpayers is only $2.7 trillion. Of the first 50 percent, barely $1.1 trillion. The money is most definitely not in the middle. It's in the top 25 percent, with $5.2 trillion in AGI last year).

In other words, somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of the country would have to settle for housing which falls well below today's median price level if they had to buy today, despite the 16 percent decline in the median price from $198,100 reached in 2008.

Many who already own a home under these circumstances are desperately trying to keep theirs because they know their chances of being able to buy another one are not very good. Incomes are flat to declining and unemployment and underemployment are widespread. With home prices depressed, many who purchased during the bubble from 1998 to 2007 wouldn't walk away with enough from a sale for a down payment on another home. Some estimates put that number of underwater mortgage holders at 25 million, fully half of Americans with mortgages.

They dare not sell, because to do so is to leave the middle class.

Indeed, according to the Census Bureau here home ownership rates have fallen almost 4 percent from peak, back to 1998 levels.

And the liberals' solution to this middle class implosion is to raise their taxes.

It's not just crazy. It's mean, because increasing taxes on the real middle class will turn it into the working class, which, I gather, is the whole point of socialism.

Herman Cain's 999 Tax Idea is a Pipe Dream

Total retail and food services sales, according to the US Census Bureau here, in 2008 came to $4.4 trillion. (For 2010, the annualized estimate based on 8 months' of data is running at $4.6 trillion).

To replace the federal tax revenue of $2.5 trillion in 2008 solely on the back of consumption taxes, such as a national sales tax, would imply a national sales tax rate of . . . 57 percent. Unthinkable, unless you are Greece.

Herman Cain doesn't advocate that. But his idea of a 9 percent sales tax would have generated, at most, a paltry $400 billion in 2008. Coupled with about $765 billion from a 9 percent income tax on about $8.5 trillion in total adjusted gross income in 2008, the business community would have been on the hook for the missing $1.3 trillion in 2008 federal revenue, when it actually contributed only $300 billion in taxes that year.

A 333 percent increase in the tax liability of American business sounds like something only a commie like Obama would propose.

Herman Cain's numbers don't even come close to matching the problem which we are facing.

Tariffs on Imports at 100 Percent Wouldn't Be Enough to Cover Federal Spending

Here are the import numbers (rounded) for the last three years for all goods and services, according to the latest revision from the US Census Bureau, here:

2008 = $2.5 trillion

2009 = $2.0 trillion

2010 = $2.3 trillion.

Federal revenues in 2008 equaled $2.5 trillion, coming mostly from income and social insurance taxes, as well as a more modest contribution from corporate and excise taxes.

To completely replace that income from tariffs would imply a 100 percent tariff, which is unimaginable.

Presumably at least some of our trade with the world is reciprocally fair, excluding it from such a punishing rate.

At some point along the tariff scale as you rise toward that extreme level, otherwise off-setting import revenues will fall as retaliatory tariffs are imposed by the global marketplace.

A 25 percent tariff on Chinese imports, as The Donald recommends, in 2010 could have generated only in our dreams something around $91 billion in revenues.

At a minimum, a vigorous reliance on tariffs for federal revenues today implies a much reduced size of the federal state.

Poverty Lines 2010 US Census

(source)

Doh! We Tax the Rich Because That's Where The Money Is, Knucklehead.

Per Census.gov here, these are the income limits by each quintile of 23,507.6 households in 2009:

Lowest: up to $20,453

Second: up to $38,550

Third:    up to $61,801

Fourth:up to $100,000

Fifth:            $100,000+.

That means 80 percent of the country, about 94,030 households, makes $100,000 per year or less.

We know from IRS data that earners reporting adjusted gross incomes of approximately $67,000 or less in 2008, totaling $2.8 trillion in AGI, represented 105 million tax returns out of 140 million total. They are the bottom 75 percent of tax returns in the country, a rough proxy for the first 4 of the 5 income quintiles.

Using back of the envelope estimates, perhaps another 7 million more tax returns represent the rest of the territory up to $100,000, and AGI of another $0.6 trillion, meaning that the first 4/5 of the country contributes AGI of about $3.4 trillion.

Roughly 28 million tax returns would then round out the top quintile, with AGI of approximately $5 trillion. It is certain that 14.4 million of these returns account for $3.9 trillion of AGI, the top 10 percent of earners.

Thus one can estimate that tax returns from the top quintile have something like 6 times the AGI per return compared with the returns of all the quintiles below them taken together.

About 80 percent of the earners have 40 percent of the income, while the top 20 percent of the earners have 60 percent of the income.

That's where the money is.

The Pothead President

Just how big does the president think this country is, anyway?

Consider this from yesterday:

"I urge Congress to listen to AARP, listen to the AMA, and pass this reform for hundreds of millions of Americans who will benefit from it," Obama told reporters during an unannounced visit to the White House briefing room after the endorsements were announced.

Apparently to him, the country is really big.

But according to the U.S. Population Clock, the country currently has just over 300 million people in it. I guess President Obama could be referring to these "hundreds of millions," which is technically correct, but it sure sounds like he means a whole lot more people than that. You know, five, six, seven hundred million.

Would it be unfair to speculate that he's referring to all those extra Americans who live in the surplus states of the union he said in May of 2008 he had already visited up to that point in the primary campaign? What, fifty-seven, fifty-eight states?

It's big, man, really big.

Or is the president contemplating a future where the rest of the world continues to beat down our door to get our superior healthcare? Has it occurred to him that maybe after they've seen us all standing in line waiting forever for services they won't be so eager to come? Has it occurred to him that with the single payer system his plan intends for us that the number of abortions will skyrocket on the public tab and there won't be as many of us in the future as he thinks? Who's going to pay for all this spending, the Israelis? I don't think any of that has occurred to him at all.

Obama's troubles with geography and numbers go back a long way, and the instances have been the subject of some interest and amusement from the beginning. But the on-going failure to grasp the shape and size of things simply suggests that the president has an impaired sense of reality and its proper proportions.

Anyone who has known a dope smoker can pick out the telltale signs of the disconnect from reality, especially the frequently remarked detached quality of his personality. He seems passionless at the most inopportune times, strangely unmoved by events which deeply affect the normal among us. Off teleprompter, the president is haltingly vacant. He is apathetic to his core.

I say it's because he's a toker.