There once was a Jew named Pincus
who thought all along he'd hoodwinked us
He made the girls swoon as Manilow
but lived with a guy on the down-low
He's out now the queer, in his wrinkles.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Tuesday, April 4, 2017
Monday, April 3, 2017
Opioid epidemic is far more likely an effect of this depression economy than one of its causes
Jeffrey Snider, here:
What the cash flow and profit series tell us is that Economists once again have it backward. The opioid epidemic is far more likely an effect of this depression economy than one of its causes. If businesses are forced to utilize so much less labor, it is because there is no cash nor expectation for growth in profit by which to put more of it to productive use. ...
The problem is the erosion of the national basis for income, the jobs that the Trump administration has correctly focused upon in at least its economic rhetoric. The means to correct the deficiency so far proposed, however, will, in all likelihood, do little or nothing toward alleviating it. For as much as the Federal Reserve in 2017 will claim that this is now a purely fiscal problem, it is instead still a monetary one just as it has been all along.
AP Obama details Obama policies already reversed by Trump
1. Climate change
2. Internet privacy
3. Abortion/Family Planning
4. Keystone XL Pipeline
5. Dakota Access Pipeline
6. Fuel efficiency standards
7. TPP
8. Abortion/Mexico City Policy
9. Fiduciary Rule
Story here.
And right now the boob Rush Limbaugh is ranting against homeownership and its tax deduction
Rush says the mortgage industry lobbied to get the mortgage interest deduction, not realizing it's been there since the Income Tax became law in 1913.
It's like a conspiracy, this coordinated attack on homeownership today.
Real Clear Markets doesn't hide its libertarian bias, runs three anti-homeownership articles today
The American Dream That's Not Backed Up by History APRIL 1, 2017 10:00 AM EDT By Stephen Mihm
Is the American Dream Killing the American People? By Robert Samuelson April 03, 2017
Ilargi: Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles Posted on April 1, 2017 by Yves Smith By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor of Automatic Earth
That last one is a doozy, from Occupy Wall Street friendly Naked Capitalism, showing to what depths libertarianism will stoop to advance its ideology.
University of Georgia historian minimizes the magnitude of foreclosures during the Great Depression, missing their significance for the value of homeownership today
Stephen Mihm, at Bloomberg here:
While home ownership became increasingly popular in the early twentieth century, the U.S. was still a majority-renter nation in 1930, though by this time homeowners numbered 48 percent of the total population. But the Great Depression knocked that figure back down to 43 percent, roughly on par with late nineteenth century levels.
Things changed dramatically in the 1940s, when home ownership levels began moving toward unprecedented highs, hitting 66 percent by 1980. Economists are still arguing over why that happened, but the most compelling explanations are pretty banal and do little to support the sentimental blather associated with home ownership.
Does this guy even know that the nonfarm foreclosure rate nearly quadrupled between 1926 and 1933?
Through 1933 there were over 1 million completed foreclosures, about 1% of US population of the time. Compare that to the current crisis. We've had 8.5 million completed foreclosures since 2004, about 2.5% of population.
Homeownership as a cultural value in the post-war was so high because so many people lost their homes before it.
And it still is today and will continue to be, despite what some people say with an axe to grind from the safety of their sinecures.
Robert Kuttner gets out there pretending there isn't already a shadow government
If this were a parliamentary democracy, there would be a leader of the opposition, and a whole “front bench” of opposition spokespeople, issue by issue ― a kind of Shadow Cabinet. ... Even better would be if a leading Democrat put herself forward now, as the presidential candidate for 2020. That way, there would be head-to-head comparisons and challenges, as well as almost equal coverage.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Hey Trump, we're still waiting for you to repeal Obamacare "immediately"
Trump tweeted this about one month after Obama vetoed HR 3762.
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Grand Rapids, Michigan, climate update for March 2017
Mean average temperature was 35.0 degrees F in March 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The mean for March is 34.1.
The lowest minimum temperature was 12.0. The mean for March is 7.
The highest maximum temperature was 71. The mean for March is 66.
Precipitation was 3.27 inches. The mean for March is 2.46.
March snowfall was 4.7 inches. The mean for March is 9.1.
Heating degree days came to 921. The mean for March is 953. The total through March from July 2016 comes to 4975 vs. mean to date of 5849.
The heating season to date has been about 15% warmer than normal.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Wikileaks publishes CIA's Marble software used to disguise hacks as Russian, Chinese etc. to mislead forensic investigators
From the story here:
Experts who've started to sift through the material said it appeared legitimate - and that the release was almost certain to shake the CIA.
Krauthammer thinks Trump might go for single payer in the end, in which case Americans should get it, good and hard
Think of it as socialism with Republican characteristics.
Krauthammer, here:
Obamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage.
Acceptance of its major premise — that no one be denied health care — is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that “our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care,” making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any Obamacare repeal. ...
As Obamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all.
Simplicity? Draco's laws were simple. The penalty for every crime was death.
I wonder if Krauthammer has a clue what he's talking about.
Total Medicare outlays in 2015 came to $632 billion.
Total Medicaid outlays in 2015 came to $552 billion country wide (read the Notes).
Total Social Security and Disability outlays in 2015 came to $897.1 billion.
That is a total of $2.0811 trillion from 2015 total net compensation of $7.4158 trillion, or 28%, without even talking about "universal coverage" yet.
Yet all your typical American pays now for this is 10.63%:
6.2% in Social Security tax and 1.45% for Medicare, plus whatever taxes are paid at the state and local level toward Medicaid, which federal law mandates must account for at least 40% of program revenues. So $221 billion from 160.8 million wage earners across the country in 2015 represents another 2.98% paid by them at the state level.
6.2% in Social Security tax and 1.45% for Medicare, plus whatever taxes are paid at the state and local level toward Medicaid, which federal law mandates must account for at least 40% of program revenues. So $221 billion from 160.8 million wage earners across the country in 2015 represents another 2.98% paid by them at the state level.
The status quo therefore is funded only 38% by its beneficiaries, at best. I say "at best" because many beneficiaries pay NOTHING because they don't work and never have. But I digress.
So bring about Krauthammer's revolution, for that is what he's talking about, and reset the table as follows.
Total healthcare outlays in the United States in 2015 came to $3.2 trillion. Add in $897.1 billion for Social Security and Disability, and you now have a "universal" obligation bloated to $4.097 trillion, which represents 55% of net compensation that year.
That's your tax.
You've become France, Germany, Denmark or some other Western European paradise which depends on the United States for its defense.
And that's before even talking about funding the $1.2 trillion part of the federal budget which is discretionary, like defending ourselves against that little fat kid playing with hydrogen bombs in North Korea.
Of course there's another chunk of money out there being made in the United States apart from net compensation, about $8 trillion in 2015. The recipients of this income typically pay the lower capital gains tax rates, not the payroll and income tax rates which are for the chumps.
It's a nice little system which isn't paying its fair share for socialism in the United States, even though it is rich guys who typically shout the loudest on behalf of it. They do this because they know it will keep the little guy down, from whom they don't want the competition some day. But tax that system equally to net compensation and you cut that 55% tax in half, to say 27.5%. That, however, means a big fat tax increase on the rich, and on everybody else. I doubt they'll stand for that any more than they open their checkbooks now to make patriotic voluntary donations to the US Treasury.
We live in a fantasy land where no one wants to pay what it costs for anything.
We think we can have our cake and eat it too.
We want infrastructure spending, and a tax cut dammit.
We want infrastructure spending, and a tax cut dammit.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
57-year old female spacewalker drops and loses 18-pounds of thermal shielding outside International Space Station
Can't they find anybody younger and stronger to do this job and do it right?
She's on her 8th spacewalk for crying out loud.
Story here.
Property and sales tax revenues in fiscal 2016: $915.49 billion
$374.79 billion in sales and gross receipts taxes and $540.7 billion in property taxes.
Beancounter says so here.
The combined total is about 28% of total state and local revenues in fiscal 2016, which came to $3.26 trillion, according to usgovernmentrevenue.com .
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