Saturday, December 13, 2014

Crazy WaPo article portrays middle class as complete creature of government spending

Here, focusing on the anecdotal history of the middle class in Downey, California, where the removal of spending on the space program has hit particularly hard.

Just the sort of deliberate Keynesian propaganda you would expect from The Washington Post, where you will also find narry a word mentioned about how America's turnabout to free-trade fanaticism during the 1960s started the wholesale export abroad of good-paying middle class jobs, the dearth of which now is our present predicament.

The sickness of Republicanism in the present liberal era has been how ready it has been to participate in profiting from the export of these jobs, and by masking how the middle class was being gutted by providing transfer payments to them, for example, in the form of tax credits.

If there's every been a time for a middle class rebellion in America, this is it. Unfortunately, so many of the middle class are now in the lower class that, if a revolt comes, it will be studiously lied about by the profiteering elites of both parties as a dangerous, left-wing proletarian revolution.

There is a way to take the country back which is not violent, however, but it requires Americans to demand the representation which they do not enjoy. It requires a transformation of their vision in conformity with a constitution which never imagined there was anything sacrosanct about the number "435". 


Obama's war on growth: Per capita measure shows GDP didn't recover to 2007 level until 3Q2013

So says Ironman, here:

"Going by this measure we see that it wasn't until the third quarter of 2013 that the U.S. economy really recovered to its pre-recession level. And then, it has only been since the second quarter of 2014 that it has grown beyond that level.

"The interesting thing is that tracking the GDP per capita measure this way would more closely match the perceptions of the American people regarding the overall health of the U.S. economy. Say as measured by the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index, which returned to its prerecession levels just a few months ahead of real GDP per capita.

"Contrary to what at least one particular economist [Jonathan Gruber] and his fellow travelers [Bill Maher/Kathleen Sebelius] might think about their cognitive abilities and financial literacy, regular Americans would seem to be pretty capable of collectively assessing the real condition of the U.S. economy."

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Yes, self-perceptions matter.

Coincident with the extraordinarily long 6 year wait for the real economy to recover, the self-identification of the American people by lower class in January 2014 has swelled by 50 million since 2008, according to the results of a regular Pew survey, showing just how many people have died on the vine of a militant, leftist Obama administration and Democrat Party bent on destroying the middle class.

When the New York Times suddenly tells you after the election that 30 million prime-working-age Americans 25-54 aren't working, you know that where there's smoke, there's fire. With fewer than 5 million job openings in the country for those 30 million, legalizing 11 million illegal aliens isn't just an act of charity toward some, but a declaration of war against all.

Barack Obama has been burning down the house, one family at a time.


Friday, December 12, 2014

Gold is the last man standing: Gold/oil ratio soars to 21.21 as oil tanks to 57.56

Two men enter, one man leaves
Of all the commodities, it is gold which continues to hang on, averaging in the low 1200-range in recent months and closing tonight at 1222 and change.

It's looking like the last man standing.

S&P GSCI commodities indexes for precious metals, petroleum, agriculture and agriculture/livestock are all down year to date, and down significantly for the 1 year and 3 years. (Petroleum is down a whopping 37.99 year to date). But while the ags are virtually flat per annum over 10 years and petroleum is down 3.87 per annum over 10 years, precious metals alone remains up big over the last decade, 9.82 per annum, buttressed by gold. Pretty impressive.

This is somewhat surprizing given the six month surge in the dollar closing at 88.32 tonight, not far off the 89.55 high of a few days ago. In early May it was as low as 78.90. And 10 years ago, the dollar actually traded below 82 before embarking on an erratic history of ups and downs before stabilizing in the 80s after 2011, the year that gold peaked. But for the 1 year now the dollar is up over 10% while the average gold price to date hasn't retreated as much as 3%.

If a rising dollar is supposed to be killing off gold, we don't see it yet.