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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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The war on the middle class
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Wow! 243,000 New Jobs Created in January
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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What Makes a Jobs Bil Work? (A Job Insurance Supplement)
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 183869 reads
The war on the middle class
- 315165 reads
Wow! 243,000 New Jobs Created in January
- 50102 reads
New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
- 949830 reads
What Makes a Jobs Bil Work? (A Job Insurance Supplement)
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The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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Creative destruction is a real phenomenon.
The problem is this process is not being allowed to occur.
Much as Japan did, the US has placed its full faith and power behind the banksters.
The US however doesn't have nationalized health care nor does it have a trade surplus, nor even a large domestic pool of savings.
Mish and (if memory servers) Calculated Risk and many others feel that there is some moral if not legal transgression if people who borrow money don’t pay it back to “investors” and “lenders.”
This same concern about moral and legal transgression don’t seem to apply when it comes to contract and property law which govern lenders and investors. They can’t seem to get themselves to even consider that the lenders and investors violated the law and now are suffering the consequences.
Old saying: “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
The time has come for lenders and investors to “do the time.”
The news talk about it but no one explains how it works at all. Not sure if I get it , makes it clearer why I read China is buying our debt. Didn't get that either.
Ah, I remember that song and dance. It's absurd, and fails to note those "localized regionalized economies" that are "hurt" during the process will "recover", ignores a few things, number one being TIME, as in recover when? 50 years, when we have the next Roman empire after the global collapse and 1000 years of the dark ages, uh?
The other thing is how those "localized economies" which are destroyed, kind of add up after awhile to be relabeled now as middle town USA or small factory town Ohio, but they all start blending into each other to be called "The United States of America".
This is a surprise, New GOP wants action on China currency.
That said, instead of Democratic leadership refusing to do anything, now of course we have House GOP leadership....refusing to take the bill to the floor for a vote.
This bill has bi-partisan support across the board, so once again, it's just a few "leaders" blocking any reform.
So, "not" Democratic, it's bad enough you have just 535 people representing the law desires of 309 million people, but then, the way Congress is structured, it all really boils down to just a few in Congress.
How "representative" is that?
Firstly, one of the great lies on these taxes was they affected small business. No, no, no, they did not! The reason is even with a sole proprietorship, you're taxed on your net, not gross. So, an employee is a complete deduction, it's before your net profits which is where you would pay personal income taxes and self-employment taxes.
That said, many corporations these days pay zero taxes, moving funds around through countries and manipulating national corporate tax rates.
So, in my view, the only way they are going to get hires equal to a reduction of businesses taxes is to tie those reductions, mandatory, to hiring U.S. workers and additionally remove many of these loopholes which enable multinationals to move profits around the globe and not pay any taxes.
But we cannot even get a dialog on what even the corporate and business tax code is. It's ridden with lobbyist's wish lists, loopholes, all sorts of things and the little guy, that's your small business from a LLC/LLP to a sole proprietorship to even small corporations, don't stand a chance. They cannot run around the globe and manipulate national tax codes to their advantage.
But bottom line, the entire rhetoric on personal taxes is ridiculous because someone in business for themselves does a schedule C and that's where they deduct their operating expenses before any profits. Their gross is not taxed, their net is. Someone brings in say $500k in gross, but their operating expensive etc. are $300k, then their "income" is $200k. not $500k.
We probably need some better reforms for sole prop to be sure that only real profits transfer to income are just that, but that's the basic idea here.
So, multinational corporations sitting on billions in cash who already pay zero taxes, or say 2%...giving them yet another tax break with no strings attached, there is no reason for them to hire, more just pocket the profits again, dole them out to executives and possibly shareholders.
I wrote this after reading about this paper on Economix, a New York Times economics blog. I went through the paper multiple times and beyond realizing I need to get on the case of global financial flows and current accounts in terms of basic theory....I spent a long time chasing around this paper's assumptions and conclusions and couldn't any flaw. I mention that because the Peterson Institute often freaks outs people due to the never ending attacks on social security, workers, labor, any sort of social safety nets. So, consider the messenger versus the message house on this one.
This is true as a general rule, at least for me, when I see something concluding something new, even when it intuitively makes sense, I try to check out the math, EQs and assumptions....that's where you'll find a host of spin in the form of "bad math" or "bad assumptions" or my favorite, setting some major model variable to zero...and so on to make some agenda or philosophy sound like it's actually based in real models and theory.
Spinners love to hide agendas in math and theory because nobody, maybe a colleague who never will be heard....reads those parts.
Anyway, this one looks very good and at minimum got me digging around to understand better financial flows around the globe.
some say that when business taxes are cut, more jobs are created. does anyone think this philosophy really work ? why or why not ?
There were a flurry of economic reports and it's hard for me to get to them all to show the corresponding graphs and highlight report details I think is important to us, those peanut gallery folk all of this macro economic data is affecting.
Any diligent graduate student out there who is interested in writing up a few? You can contact me and I'll show you how to find all of the data and make the graphs, use the Saint Louis FRED system, format the overview.
Most of us? Most of the middle class won't have that problem. A lot of them have no 401k or its underfunded.
We are in the 15% tax bracket now and will be when we retire. Our spendable income should be 80% 0f what it is now. We won't be contributing to the 401k, social security, and city tax where we work any more. No more mortgage payments, won't need 2 cars, kids have moved out. If you are expecting to be so rich in retirement and pay extra taxes you surly will have more spendable income than me. So whats the problem? You would rather have minimal income in retirement just to get by? If your are over funded in you 401k. Check the tax brackets and calculate what deductions you will be using in retirement and only withdraw enough to live in comfort and stay out of the other upper tax brackets. Invest in a Roth, gold, help your kids buy a house, put ur extra money in a safe. I would like to have financial security in retirement. If your going to be in a maximum tax bracket you must be well off. So whats the problem? What other retirement vehicle are you going to use to avoid paying taxes?
which is probably a very good thing for they had their financial collapse around 2001.
Speaking of gifts, supposedly China is still getting them from the United States to help out impoverished nations.
This is getting ridiculous, China is about as 3rd world these days as Canada is.
yes, there are pockets of poverty in China, but they are so flush with cash, China is more than capable of taking care of their own and additionally, there are wide swaths of poverty, homelessness in the United States.
I'm sure Numerian has seen this or he will shortly.
The absurdity of gross negligence by those most familiar with the laws and regulations is bad enough. That stunner is trumped by the coming crisis pitting hundreds of years of contract law against this negligence and, it appears, criminal contempt for well established and universally known procedures.
Will the banks try scare tactics again? Will they say, either negate the laws we live under or the real estate market will crash? There has to be another alternative.
I maintain that you're right about the crisis but it's reasonable to expect that the 10 years of court cases, a logical deduction, will be foreshortened by a panic that threatens the market and some national action that replaces the current incumbents/system with something else.
As ugly as this may get, it may create a model to deal with the hyper inflated and also absurd CDS and other derivatives markets. Talk about useless paper.
The economic freedom of banks to invest US funds and guarantees in high growth developing countries. Once again the great citizens of this country are called on to sacrifice their hard earned money (as it were) for the greater cause of global capitalism.
Your map was instructive. What was that bright blue country in South America? Argentina! Can the citizens renege on the gifts that The Money Party, that perpetual bipartisan ruling class, hands out so generously?
Maybe we need a new definition of sovereign debt. If corporations can be a person then why can't people be a sovereign?
Very nice exposition.
He lost his election, which is really a bummer, for he may have made some misses, but he also was one of the few raising hell, trying to find out what happened during Financial Armageddon and trying very hard to get real reform enacted.
Germany is not perfect but the Germans have never been convinced that the Anglo Saxon model of capitalism creates genuine real wealth and consequently their system has been largely geared to supporting and creating productive investment which has enabled them to compete effectively with low cost manufacturing (China). In fact a number of Germans I have talked to think the UK and US are mad to neglect and stand idly by while the value of key industries is destroyed.
The 'GDP' measures we utilize treat all investment flows as a positive but in the case of the US, UK, etc, this has proven to be a house of cards as they are not all the same. The difference being that investments in physical assets and people (factories, capital and trained labour) generates tradable goods that earns foreign exchange while debt finance is an illusion as we are realizing to our considerable cost.
Many of the so called 'economic theories' based on economic rationalism and Monetarism have simply been a cover to enable finance capital to flourish. In reality no amount of money/debt/credit created will aid an economy if the fundamentals are not in place. There are not thousands of factories sitting idle in the US ready to burst back into life - they have been closed down, shipped overseas and the valuable labour skills have been lost. It takes time, resources and considerable effort to build capacity.
So while Germany has continued to embrace its industrial capacity and has invested in its stock of people, capital and technical capabilities we (the US, UK, etc) have deindustrialised rapidly as the economy has been increasing based on supporting consumption supported by debt rather than investing in production. So much so that we have reached a point where you cannot borrow anymore and as there is nothing to trade with the population will get poorer.
People in many articles I've read are calling for a US 'national plan' to change the focus to investment in manufacturing, etc. The will never work as long as the 'elites' that currently control and influence US policy to support the banks and financial institutions are in place. The financial institutions are parasitic, add no value and skim wealth of from the real economy. An alternative strategy to regeneration of the real US economy would break their hold and influence.
The point being is that without change the real economy will continue to shrink. All the Chinese have done is exploit the strategic and policy stance of the US to their benefit. The US is following the low cost economies to the bottom - a world based on the cheapest labour inputs rather than having a strategy in place to generate value through an investment in skills and capital within the US economy.
I find it dismal when anyone screams "Protectionist" policies. Good God, this country was built on protectionist policies and so was China.
Regardless, we have more political rumblings on China, although I'm extremely skeptical as noted by this piece.
They need to do something drastic and stop acting like they can get China to change. They cannot, it's America that needs to change and also rein in their labor arbitraging globe hopping multinationals along with their Benedict Arnold mindset.
I've yet to locate just the monthly statistics but the yearly China imports are here and exports are here.
Computers, toys, clothes are huge imports from China, with computers really being the one that *should not*, in terms of American jobs. I cannot believe the U.S. cannot use robotics and automation to be competitive in churning out a finished computer. Frankly they are "pretty Lego", so if someone can manufacture Silicon wafers here, why not computers by assembly? Cars here, why not computers? Semiconductors is still a large U.S. export to China, and that has to mean processors, which is so much more complex of a manufacturing process.
Of course soybeans is #1 for 2009 of U.S. exports to China and you can see a how of items where we used to dominate in manufacturing that clearly were offshore outsourced to China, now coming in as imports.
Here’s what is most important about the trade deficit news:
First, the U.S. trade deficit for 2010 is half a trillion dollars, a 34% increase over last year. That is bad news for American jobs.
Second, U.S. reliance on imported goods continues to rise. If we filled our demand for goods with American products, we would see more American jobs created. But instead we buy more and more imported items, so our unemployment situation never gets better.
If we want to see a real recovery, that includes actual jobs for Americans, we need to start buying American-made goods. We each need to make the effort to support the creation of American jobs with our everyday purchases. It really does make a difference.
Find out how you can buy American at http://buyamericanchallenge.wordpress.com/
but I don't believe either the World Bank or the IMF generally, I believe they are motivated by neocon agendas, but in terms of our government data/analysis groups, for the most part, I just think they really need better raw data collection methods most of all and probably some modifications too.
What I really don't believe is how trillions in worthless toxic assets will magically disappear, i.e. the MBSes and the stuff from Fannie/Freddie, GSEs.
Call me silly but I haven't been lulled to sleep and haven't believed much of what I've heard from the government in many, many years.
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