Republicans stopped growth of representation in the 1920s: Why isn't fixing that the Tea Party's job one?

From the Wikipedia article, here:

In 1921, Congress failed to reapportion the House membership as required by the United States Constitution. This failure to reapportion may have been politically motivated, as the newly elected Republican majority may have feared the effect such a reapportionment would have on their future electoral prospects. Then in 1929 Congress (Republican control of both houses of congress and the presidency) passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929 which capped the size of the House at 435 (the then current number). This cap has remained unchanged for more than eight decades. Three states – Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota – have populations smaller than the average for a single district.

The "ideal" number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding. George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention (one representative for every 40,000) was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000. This was the only time that Washington pronounced an opinion on any of the actual issues debated during the entire convention.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison argued that the size of the House of Representatives has to balance the ability of the body to legislate with the need for legislators to have a relationship close enough to the people to understand their local circumstances, that such representatives' social class be low enough to sympathize with the feelings of the mass of the people, and that their power be diluted enough to limit their abuse of the public trust and interests.

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All the ancient American debates about this issue argue over ratios of 1 representative for every 15,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 of population. But today because of what the Republicans did in the 1920s, arresting growth of representation and fixing the number at 435, the ratio has soared to 1 for every 728,000!

If you wonder why your representative doesn't represent you today, that is why. He or she doesn't know who you are, or care.

If you want to fix America, fix that. We could start by doubling the size of the House, which means halving all the districts.

That sound you're hearing right now is Congressmen everywhere shitting their pants.

Obama is maintaining a constant pressure upon the opposition (that would be you) at the border

Bob Brinker cites high valuations in 1Q2000 as determinative for his sell call then

Bob Brinker cited high forward operating price to earnings ratios at "almost 30" in 1Q2000 as an important reason behind his call to sell at the time, during the first hour of his radio program yesterday. He continues to like stocks right now because forward p/e ratios are in line with a long term average around 16. You can listen for yourself this week in the seven day archive at ksfo.com by picking Sunday between 1 and 2 pm.

The trouble is, the measure never got much above 25 in the first place, and then flirted with the vicinity of that already in early 1999, a year before Bob sold the market. That suggests that as a timing tool there is considerable elasticity to it in practice, or in Bob's memory. Unfortunately, however, the forward p/e has predicted nothing untoward since, from 2005 to this day, missing the 2008-2009 debacle entirely.

Factset framed things this way, here, in March, where you'll also find a nice chart of forward p/e ratios over time:

"On the other hand, the current forward 12-month P/E ratio is still below the 15-year average (16.0). During the first two years of this time frame (1999 – 2001), the forward 12-month P/E ratio was consistently above 20.0, peaking at around 25.0 at various points in time. With the forward P/E ratio still below the 15-year average and not close to the higher P/E ratios recorded in the early years of this period, one could argue that the index may still be undervalued."

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The p/e based on reported earnings, however, actually did average 32.4 for the ten months between November 1998 and August 1999 inclusive and then fell somewhat by the first quarter of 2000 to an average of 28.4. Perhaps Bob Brinker is thinking of that instead of forward p/e ratios. The p/e ratio from reported earnings is presently above its mean and median levels at 19.6. This measure climbed into the 20s from the October 2007 high into the crash in September/October 2008.

That said, the forward ratio of 25 by itself admittedly looks extreme in its historical context, and current forward estimates close to 16 are arguably at a minimum indicating that stocks are not yet frothy.

Buy and hold investors from the Aug.'00 high have made all of 1.32%/yr through May 2014

The August 2000 level of 2045 was the inflation-adjusted all-time high for the S&P500. Average annual returns adjusted for inflation have been a paltry 1.32% since then, indicating how steeply valued stocks were at the time: The Shiller p/e was 42.87. h/t politicalcalculations.blogspot.com

Average real rate of return from stocks since 2000 highs didn't turn positive until May 2013

Through April 2013 your real return annually was negative on average. August 2000 is the benchmark for the inflation-adjusted high for the S&P500 at 2045. Through May 2013 your real return annually turned positive on average. h/t politicalcalculations.blogspot.com

If no man is an island, how come Christian morality is being defeated everywhere?

Alan Noble, here:

"[M]orality has this nasty habit of not staying put; it sneaks out of our personal conscience and affects those around us. Some morals affect communities more than others, but no moral is entirely contained. My choice to live my life the way I want to will impact my community, no matter how careful I am to defer and tolerate and be sensitive to others. And this is a basic tenet of evangelical Christianity, too: Faith must be lived out in the public square; a privatized faith is no faith worth the name. Because of this, the real debate isn’t about whether morality should be public or private; it’s about figuring out what kind of moral impositions are tolerable and fair in a pluralistic society."

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It's no longer self-evident that Christian morality holds the field in US public life. It's not sneaking out everywhere and overturning everything. In fact Christian morality has been almost entirely defeated in the US. Otherwise we would not be at this pass. Which must mean the morality embraced by Christ's followers today is a fiction for far many more of the 75% of Americans who claim to be Christian than we otherwise think. The fact is, we've been running on the vapors of past Christians' morality, not our own, and the car is sputtering to a halt. It'll be a long walk home. 

Food stamp recipients decline 2.7% in April 2014 from a year ago

Total recipients in April 2014 ticked up from the month earlier to 46,247,450 but remain down from 47,548,577 a year prior.

Bob Brinker was right in March 2003, but not until May 2009 at the earliest

Bob Brinker's gain since March 2003 when he called for his followers to fully invest in the stock market has been an impressive 7.14% per annum inflation-adjusted, on average, in the S&P500 index through March 2014.

Things didn't look anywhere near that good in April 2009, however, when his  return was still -0.45% per annum, inflation-adjusted, on average, for the 6 years plus one month. His returns had plunged at their worst to -2.32% per annum just the month before, through March 2009, because of the market crash, which of course he never saw coming and he never predicted. Bob remained fully invested into the teeth of the 2008-2009 banking apocalypse cum financial panic, and never told his followers to sell, as did Jim Cramer, infamously, the Monday after TARP was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008, a Friday, on national television no less. Who needs Monday morning coffee with that kind of news on NBC? I say Bob Brinker gets a lot of credit for that courage, and Cramer gets nothing but ridicule.

Bob Brinker's advice began to turn positive again in May 2009, as the stock market began to recover with the suspension of mark to market rules by the SEC in late March. Brinker never told anyone to get out of the markets, but soldiered on to where we are today. Was it prescience? Bull-headedness? Luck? Faith?

Here's what I think it was: Bob believes in secular markets, and he knew the secular high in 2000 was not matched in 2007 on an inflation-adjusted basis (1753), so there was no need for caution even though there might be a big correction. The financial collapse made him look like a fool for the size of it, but he knows that today even at 1967 the S&P500 remains well off the real 2000 high of 2045. We could just as easily get a big correction here before we march on to retest that real high.

Either way the market should retest the former high before the secular bear comes to an end, which means we have a bit more to go in point terms, but not very much.

I'm expecting a stock market sell order from Bob Brinker in the not very distant future as we get closer to 2045.

Anyone wanna bet we get as high as 2249?

h/t politicalcalculations.blogspot.com

Important inflation-adjusted milestones in the S&P500 index: 75 years of no progress have happened before

1967.57 Sunday, July 13, 2014

1752.10 October 1, 2013
  846.80 March 1, 2009
1753.10 October 1, 2007
1087.54 February 1, 2003
1767.00 February 1, 2001
2045.09 August 1, 2000
1727.35 December 1, 1998
1054.18 October 1, 1996
  841.39 June 1, 1995
  716.77 January 1, 1992
  266.94 July 1, 1982
  713.70 December 1, 1968
  430.68 November 1, 1958
  266.47 July 1, 1954
    83.44 June 1, 1932
  430.42 September 1, 1929
    83.51 December 1, 1920
  278.75 September 1, 1906
    83.77 January 1, 1878
    64.37 June 1, 1877
    83.38 February 1, 1871

With every child you don't have . . .

. . . the country dies a little bit more because of you.

America is already well on the way to being completely dead because of all the children we stopped having since the 1960s, and the irony of it is that the parents of the Baby Boomers told their children not to have so many children. Trust me, I know from personal experience. So why would the children of the Boomers do anything but the same? And they have.

The greatest generation were liberals, and their death wish is coming true in spades, visiting their iniquity on the third and fourth generations of them that hate me, saith the Lord. They've not only spent your inheritance, they've also made sure there's no one to inherit it.

I hate them all.

Japan poised to rise from the dead: nuclear plants finally to begin restart after 2011 Fukushima disaster

The Japan Times reports here:

The Nuclear Regulation Authority is moving toward the first reactor restart under its new safety requirements since the Fukushima disaster started, giving impetus to bond sales by utilities as borrowing costs plunge. ...

“The fact that the government is in favor of restarting reactors is positive because it shows a firm commitment toward the electric power companies,” said Yasuhiro Matsumoto, the senior manager for the financial services industry at ABeam Consulting Ltd. “Once one restart is approved, others will come one after another, and the pace may quicken. You can’t approve one but turn down others.” ...

All 48 of Japan’s functioning commercial reactors are idled for safety checks after a tsunami wrecked Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 plant on March 11, 2011, and caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

Minus 2.9% GDP has never occurred outside of a recession: They're ignoring it like 2008

Jeffrey Snider, here:

The most recent example of this, in a larger scale setting, was the first quarter's GDP estimate. Rather than embrace the information that might be relevant to what is actually taking place, the entire orthodox economics profession is busy trying to convince everyone that there was nothing useful in that result. It was, as has been repeated over and over, an aberration of no significant value; an error term to be denied a full place in the analysis of where the economy might actually be headed.

A GDP figure of nearly minus three percent is decidedly rare, however, so unusual that it has never taken place outside of a recession. But that is precisely what we are supposed to ignore when being counselled to take no notice of it. Actually, counsel is too slight and too soft of a word, as what is really occurring is nothing short of a demand. The surety at which the orthodox profession, especially those of monetary disposition, exercises such confidence about forecasting is very much descriptive of ideology rather than science.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard oddly unaware high CO2 coincides with 17yr+ pause in global warming

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

[Shale] has whittled down the US current account deficit, now just 2pc of GDP [approximately $340 billion?]. Cheap gas costs - a third of EU prices and a quarter of Asian prices - has brought US industry back from near death, perhaps for long enough to give America another two decades of superpower ascendancy. But making money out of shale is another matter.

Even if the fossil companies navigate the next global downturn more or less intact, they are in the untenable position of booking vast assets that can never be burned without violating global accords on climate change.

The IEA says that two-thirds of their reserves become fictional if there is a binding deal limit to CO2 levels to 450 particles per million (ppm), the maximum deemed necessary to stop the planet rising more than two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. It crossed 400 ppm threshold this spring, the highest in more than 800,000 years.

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Ambrose's problem is that he has insufficient skepticism: There is no binding deal, and we couldn't stop developing nations from spewing even if we wanted to. Ambrose has become a co-dependent in the climate scare and is trafficking in last year's news:

If CO2 was at the same level as of 800,000 years ago, why are we cooler by 5-10 degrees and sea levels lower by 75-120 feet? This would indicate there’s no CO2/temp/sea level relationship.

Indeed, as the picture has unfolded in the last year, we are well past the 17 year milestone for no temperature anomaly. All that extra CO2 is doing nothing, except maybe producing too much vegetation.

So I bought a lawn tractor to mow it all down.

About market timing on the way down, Mish can be very wise

Here:

History suggests bear markets will destroy many bears, some by turning bullish at the top, others by turning bullish way too soon after a correction.

Watch those valuation measures on the way down, folks, be patient, and keep your powder dry. 

What unites some Christians and libertarians is radically unconservative: belief in human change for the better

Here's Christian libertarian economist David Brat, Cantor-killer:

"Preach the gospel and change hearts and souls. If we make all of the people good, markets will be good. Markets are made up of people. Supply and Demand are curves, but they are also people. Nothing else. If markets are bad, which they are, that means people are bad, which they are. Want good markets? Change the people. If there are not nervous twitches in the pews when we preach, then we are not doing our jobs."

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Conservatives generally haven't believed human nature changes for the better, but it is central to the Catholic doctrine of grace that grace infuses the baptized and changes them, and the belief is central also to the doctrine of some protestants.

These were called Schwaermer by Luther, "enthusiasts".

In politics we called them ideologues.

Josh Brown must be nuts: valuations are high, markets are exuberant and growth is as pathetic as 2007

Is Ritholtz paying him to say this stuff?

Here:

"Valuation is not going to tell you when the run ends. We were reasonably valued in 2007. The economy fell off the cliff," he said. Brown also said he agreed with Yardeni that there was "no sign of a recession."

"Those are usually what coincide with the end of a bull market," he said. "I'm not telling you P/E expansion takes us significantly higher, but earnings growth could, revenue growth could, and in the second half of this year, we should be seeing a meaningful uptick based on what analysts are expecting at the moment. So, I think it's smarter to be constructive than to be worried about the next 5 percent in either direction."

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In late September 2007 the Shiller p/e was high, in the range of 26/27, the S&P500 was making new all time highs, and 1Q2007 GDP had just been finalized at 0.6% after a 2.1% and a 1.1% print for the two previous quarters of 2006. That's growth of more or less just 1.2% over three quarters.

The 3.8% 3rd estimate for Q2 at the time arguably contributed to the blow off market top at 1565 within days of the announcement, but growth in the economy had been pathetic up to that point. People thought things were looking up again, but within a year we were almost scraping people off the sidewalks of Wall Street.

Today valuations are similarly high at 26, the market has made new all time highs, and we've just booked a horrible NEGATIVE GDP for the first quarter. The average of the last three quarters is now the same as it was in late September 2007: 1.2%.

Valuations are reasonable? There's no sign of a recession? Both may very well be coinciding right now to signal the end of a bull market, just like in 2007.

Sorry Mark Judge, the original punk rockers of Christendom were Lutherans

Why can't Mark Judge write a decent opener? He starts off, here, with this:

"With the takeover of liberalism and secularism in the West, Catholicism is now a subculture."

What he means is:

"With the takeover of the West by liberalism and secularism, Catholicism is now reduced to a subculture."

And it's too bad, too, because the rest of what he writes is worth reading . . . if only he could imagine a subculture. You know, like Lutherans. The original punk rockers of Christendom, who shouted like Joey Ramone 

I don't like sacraments

I don't like celibates

I don't like priests and nuns

I don't like what the pope has done

Well I'm against it

The truth is Catholics could never be punkers and never have been. Being a punker requires being an individual, and saying no to something, like disco and rap, and instead Catholics have been busy for centuries saying yes to everyone and everything, absorbing every culture and every cult under the aegis of their big tent. It's been the secret to their success.

To take only the latest example, they see illegals coming across the border and immediately want to welcome the stranger, give them a shower, a meal and a place to sleep. The protestants see this and want to kick their asses all the way back to Guatemala.

Catholics aren't really against anything, and never have been.

That's why if they get their way, America is finished.

I'm against it. 

Something about riskier bonds for Bob Brinker listeners to think about

Seen here:

"The sensitivity of a bond to interest rate increases is determined by the time to maturity, not its credit rating."

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Some of Bob Brinker's followers/critics think his recent move away from all bonds with durations beyond one year was a big mistake.

If there's a bond run, which becomes more likely when bonds are overvalued, which they arguably are, selling becomes more difficult than people realize. Steep losses would be almost certain, but it is also likely that the ultra short duration bonds would recover much more quickly, and perhaps not just because they are ultra short. People might actually plow into them as they did with bonds in general in the wake of the financial panic of 2008, boosting prices.

I'll go out on a limb and predict the S&P500 maximum market high for this cycle since 2009

I'll predict 2249.60 for an S&P500 market high before the market begins to revert to mean. From 1977 that's not quite 14% more to go, or 272 more points!

But my money is in cash!

John Hope Bryant is an ignoramus about Jesus and poverty

Seen here:

'The Greek word for poor, as used by Jesus, is poucos, which means non-productivity. To be poor doesn’t mean you don’t have anything; it means you aren’t doing anything. Poverty is cured by hard work. “Lazy hands make a man poor” (Proverbs 10/4). The Bible says, “How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest – and poverty will come on you like a bandit, and scarcity like an armed man.” Proverbs 6/10-11.'

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Actually the Greek word is properly transliterated "ptochos", not "poucos". And Bryant couldn't be more wrong about how the poor behave. The truly poor don't lay about and do nothing. The root of the word signifies that the poor do plenty . . . of crouching and begging.

But the worst thing is trying to baptize Jesus in this enterprise of viewing poverty as an evil, a problem to be solved. Unfortunately in the case of Jesus it's exactly the opposite of what Bryant thinks.

Frankly, Jesus prized poverty and required it as a condition of discipleship: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:33).

John Hope Bryant is all over the place in a media onslaught spreading his silly message about the poor saving capitalism, nevermind they can't save for the next month let alone the system most notably conceptualized by Adam Smith, a man feeble in neither mind nor money.

Expect more of this pap from Bryant and your federal government, through his connection with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a propaganda project of the Dodd-Frank bill.

The Bureau's current director, by the way, was an unconstitutional recess appointment by the president according to a Supreme Court ruling just in recent days.