I'm not sure what that has to do with the unemployment rate, unless there is another mnemonic I"m unaware of. You might define acronyms so people know what you mean.
But the health insurance lobby putting a strange hold on Americans as well as business, the economy is no doubt and there is also no doubt retirement has been plundered, with the last meager amount, Social Security, clearly the next target.
But I would have to say the #1 financial security issue is a job in America that is under attack.
I've got a running tally on jobs offshore outsourced since 2008 and right now I've got 2.7 million. Companies don't release these numbers so it takes a lot of digging and my running tally maybe way off, but that's over 20% of the jobs lost, we need about 10.5 million to get to "normal" (cough, cough) unemployment rates.
I blame these businesses. They are sitting on massive amounts of cash at the moment too and we need some sort of corporate law reform which requires corporations to employ Americans. Things like tying their tax rate, their executive bonuses, even the overall profits of a corporation , to the health, well-being and welfare of the employees.
That too, a culture of business ethics and work, has been destroyed. It's so bad, something like 83% of people working as 1099-misc, or contract/freelance, have been denied payment. Literally these companies believe they do not have to pay people at all for their labor.
Globalization has really hurt this, we see in tech, companies believe they do not have to pay for even design. I've seen horrific things like online sites which cause workers to "bid" globally for "tasks" and literally they are paying maybe a quarter an hour, 10¢ an hour for skilled labor.
Not to say that offshoring is not a major factor, but the impact of FIRE remains the largest reason why unemployment is so pernicious.
The reality is that a person over the age of 35 just cannot survive on anywhere close to minimum wage - between health care costs, housing costs, and retirement saving the benefit of working for $10/hour or even $15/hour is simply a net negative.
This is also not taking into account the financial impact of having children.
FIRE affects all of these - the inability of the US to provide a minimum health care safety net is largely due to the health insurance industry.
Housing prices have unquestionably been driven unrealistically high by mortgage lending as well as real estate industry lobbying for subsidies - even excluding the quasi-governmental entities like Fannie and Freddie.
Retirement savings in turn have been plundered again and again via financial industry driven shenanigans - both outright fraud such as various securitized paper as well as indirect fraud via entire industries 'pumping and dumping' ranging from the Y2K internet bubble to ETFs to the modern high frequency trading.
Unfortunately it is quite apparent that the banksters are in charge - the average person doesn't even know how and why he is getting the shaft.
on estimating GDP, that's the 2nd column, not the GDP one in his table. The paper has more methods, plus you have another economists estimates there as well on overall GDP to compare, not as high as Hamilton, but clearly oil prices dramatically, negatively affect the economy.
I've written a host of posts on China capturing the oil market in the past here. You're right, it's only going to get worse and they need to do something yesterday.
Changes in spending on motor vehicles and parts are a horrible way to measure the effects of rising gas prices. The relationship between the two variables is extremely complex. For example, many people buy new cars with lower gas mileage in response to higher prices. This also completely ignores income effects both from higher gas prices and economic recessions in general. I'm sure with all the work that's been done on oil prices and their effects on the economy we can find something much more relevant and sophisticated.
On another note, get used to it. High subsidies throughout the third world are going to drive consumpion up indefninitely, and supply doesn't have much room to grow and will eventually begin to decline and become more expensive to extract. The aparent lack of serious planning for this is either evidence of the tremendous influence of the oil and automobile industries or the complete inability of our political leadership to plan for the long-term.
Over the past twenty years, I have spent way over two-thousand dollars of my own salary JUST ON BOXES OF TISSUES--our school doesn't provide this classroom staple.
You should consider registering and joining the site. I disagreed with large sections of the book, but his heart is in the right place, namely we must do something about the trade deficit, these bad trade deals hollowing out the country and manipulation of trade often through cheaper national economies. You have some excellent points!
I have read Fletcher's book cover to cover twice, and have scribbled numerous notes in the margins. I'm working on a precise review in my spare time (but since I have none, don't hold your breath). For my part, Fletcher comes up with the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. There is even a section where he hints at attributing the Exceptionalism of the 20th century U.S. to race! (a conclusion with which I vehemently disagree -- Tsk tsk).
Getting into the gist of the book, Fletcher lists a set of assumptions employed by the proponents of free (lunch) trade, and then proceeds to attack those assumptions. He does not directly attack the math of free (lunch) trade proponents (most likely because there is probably nothing wrong with it). He concludes that the Ricardians fail to include "Scale economies" in their analysis, and that tariffs most keenly protect such "scale economies," and for that reason, tariffs must be employed to protect them. As I stated, I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasons behind it.
I was disappointed to see that one assumption he left out is the most fundamental assumption embodied by free traders (perhaps because he may agree with that assumption): that economics transcends politics - that they operate independently and that one may be considered without the other. In my writings I argue that this is impossible, however, it cannot be denied that this "economic transparency" is an implicit assumption of free (lunch) trade.
With respect to the "T word," I have this to say:
My mathematical toolkit is limited to that which suits an average physical and software engineer, so I am a little light on the statistical modeling concepts needed for economics. However, as a former software engineer, I am keenly aware of the concept of "garbage in, garbage out." All of the devotees of David Ricardo, Henry George, etc., dismiss tariffs by mathematically modeling the scenario of tariff versus no tariff, and conclude absolutely that no tariff is better. To that I say... DUH!
The analysis of tariff versus no tariff is indistinguishable from the analysis of higher general tax versus lower general tax! It doesn't matter how elegent the equations, since there is nothing wrong with the math. It's the underlying assumptions that are out to lunch! It's important to take extreme care when translating reality into an equation. Therein lies the greatest danger of grievous error. I can see that even here on this site, there is a knee-jerk tendency to jump right into the math, but in the end that resolves to a mere shell game.
The question of tariff versus no tariff is a non-starter -- it's meaningless. A tariff is nothing more than a tax. Even I can see that any serious analysis of the economics of tariffs on imports MUST begin from the standpoint of being REVENUE NEUTRAL! Show me a model that shows that a revenue neutral tariff reduces welth for the imposing nation, and I will listen. Without that, you have an experiment without a control group, and any conclusion drawn holds no water. At best, Fletcher hinted at that concept, but did not expand on it.
Tariffs have been successfully employed too many times to dismiss that success as merely "post hoc ergo propter hoc" (as does Henry George, and by extension, David Ricardo). Just because a model (with all it's unexamined assumptions) says otherwise doesn't make it so. When theory is pitted against history, history wins. Science uses repetition to distinguish between causality and coincidence. The amount of repetition in history suggests that the proponents of coincidence are on thin ice.
The United States has nothing like socialism, which if anyone paid attention, isn't such a bad thing, Russia was, as well as China are not socialist, they are totalitarian communist.
But now we have Corporatism. It amazes me shows like Glenn Beck and so on rail on "Socialism" because they are in reality pimping for corporatism.
NAFTA and WTO are central economic planning organizations that meet in secret to decide what sectors of a country’s economy are going to be benefitted at the expense of other sectors and what industries are going to be outsourced to other countries. If we had real free trade; trade agreements would be less than a paragraph where all tariffs and non-tariff barriers would be elminated in which the US would not have to beg like it currently is for other countries to accept more US exports. Didn’t the special interests that lobbied for NAFTA and WTO get the message that central economic planning never works. I guess they have never read Mises and Hayek’s works on economics.
It seems the former Soviet Union’s planning boards, NAFTA, WTO, the FED and other central banks all have something in common which is that they meet mostly in secret to devise economic plans to benefit their favored special interests. The printing press stands behind the special interests. They get newly created money out of thin air for R&D expenses, to pay for the outsourcing of jobs overseas and to bail them out when things go south.
Paul Krugman wrote a classic, Bah Humbug and notes a Christmas Carol is a strongly leftist poem. Others have noticed the same for It's a Wonderful Life.
that the Democrats have blood on their hands so to speak .. more so President Clinton and the Senate(out of 100 .. only 8 voted against the repeal of Glass-Steagall) .. the problem is no one(those who get on TV all the time) wants to stand up to Wall Street .. where we find more people like Bernie Sanders? I don't know.
"people age 75 and over are working, a good 7.4% of them. On top of it, many cannot find a job, the unemployment rate for those looking at age 75 and over is 5.7%."
It's simple, the government and big biz want you to work until you die. Several stragegies they use for making this happen:
- Increase the Social Security retirement age.
- Inflation. Destroy older workers savings with policies that promote inflation.
- Encourage debt. Those in debt must keep working until they pay it off.
- Keep the cost of health care and insurance high. Can't retire if you can't pay your medical bills.
- Increase the cost of housing. It's difficult to retire if your house isn't paid off.
- Increase property taxes. Even if your house is paid off, rising property tax rates will force you to work until you die.
Why would big biz want you to work until you die? Because to them, there's nothing better than a desperate worker. Desperate workers labor for whatever wage you give them. Desperate workers won't stand up for their rights, like working unpaid overtime. Desperate workers are afraid to organize.
Why would the U.S. government want you to work until you die? Because their campaign contributors, big biz, want it.
The money printing out of thin air stimulus packages gave the multinationals record profits. These multinationals are really something. They expect to receive newly created money out of thin air and tax credits to subsidize their R&D expenses and moving of jobs overseas plus new money to be created out of thin air to bail them out when things go south. Now with corporations and other groups being allowed to contribute unlimited campagin contributions foreign central banks can create an unlimited amount of new money out of thin air to pay lobbyists in the US to lobby for more outsourcing and transfer of technology overseas.
Hayek spoke of the need to denationalize money where competing currencies domestically would be allowed to compete with each other. With money denationalized no one group would have the monopoly power to issue money and have the power to decide which specific sectors should receive credit for investment and development and have the only currency to influence elections.
Remember that starve the beast mantra, in order to justify cutting SS and what's left of any social safety net? Simon Johnson originally worked at the IMF, which has had it's sights also on SS (notice the IMF was involved in "austerity" programs).
After cutting 2 percent off the individual and corporate side of the payroll tax, the next shoe to drop is cutting SS, UI, Disability and Survivor Benefits. The entire SS system is now on borrowed funds and the Republicans will next say how this is unsustainable and must be cut, unless the payroll cuts can be put back miraculously by a Republican Congress.
The only way out of here, aays the joker to the thief, may be to create a Service Based Retirement System based on the core services the retirees need like food, all utilities, transportation and housing for the disposessed. That system could be funded by the same corporate side of the payroll tax plus vouchers given back to those robbed by the cuts: the individual plus corporate 2 percents.
Utility deregulation has brought about pricing of 60 percent of conventional(WhiteFence.com) utilities. Same can happen with food and public transportation. If nothing is done, there will be hunger in the land. Again, the social contract for current retirees, is breached.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the unemployment rate, unless there is another mnemonic I"m unaware of. You might define acronyms so people know what you mean.
But the health insurance lobby putting a strange hold on Americans as well as business, the economy is no doubt and there is also no doubt retirement has been plundered, with the last meager amount, Social Security, clearly the next target.
But I would have to say the #1 financial security issue is a job in America that is under attack.
I've got a running tally on jobs offshore outsourced since 2008 and right now I've got 2.7 million. Companies don't release these numbers so it takes a lot of digging and my running tally maybe way off, but that's over 20% of the jobs lost, we need about 10.5 million to get to "normal" (cough, cough) unemployment rates.
I blame these businesses. They are sitting on massive amounts of cash at the moment too and we need some sort of corporate law reform which requires corporations to employ Americans. Things like tying their tax rate, their executive bonuses, even the overall profits of a corporation , to the health, well-being and welfare of the employees.
That too, a culture of business ethics and work, has been destroyed. It's so bad, something like 83% of people working as 1099-misc, or contract/freelance, have been denied payment. Literally these companies believe they do not have to pay people at all for their labor.
Globalization has really hurt this, we see in tech, companies believe they do not have to pay for even design. I've seen horrific things like online sites which cause workers to "bid" globally for "tasks" and literally they are paying maybe a quarter an hour, 10¢ an hour for skilled labor.
Not to say that offshoring is not a major factor, but the impact of FIRE remains the largest reason why unemployment is so pernicious.
The reality is that a person over the age of 35 just cannot survive on anywhere close to minimum wage - between health care costs, housing costs, and retirement saving the benefit of working for $10/hour or even $15/hour is simply a net negative.
This is also not taking into account the financial impact of having children.
FIRE affects all of these - the inability of the US to provide a minimum health care safety net is largely due to the health insurance industry.
Housing prices have unquestionably been driven unrealistically high by mortgage lending as well as real estate industry lobbying for subsidies - even excluding the quasi-governmental entities like Fannie and Freddie.
Retirement savings in turn have been plundered again and again via financial industry driven shenanigans - both outright fraud such as various securitized paper as well as indirect fraud via entire industries 'pumping and dumping' ranging from the Y2K internet bubble to ETFs to the modern high frequency trading.
Unfortunately it is quite apparent that the banksters are in charge - the average person doesn't even know how and why he is getting the shaft.
on estimating GDP, that's the 2nd column, not the GDP one in his table. The paper has more methods, plus you have another economists estimates there as well on overall GDP to compare, not as high as Hamilton, but clearly oil prices dramatically, negatively affect the economy.
I've written a host of posts on China capturing the oil market in the past here. You're right, it's only going to get worse and they need to do something yesterday.
I find it outrageous that teachers are forced to pay for supplies out of their own pocket and I know what you're saying is true, so thank you!
FYI, $2k for tissues? You need to order wholesale or at least Costco.
Changes in spending on motor vehicles and parts are a horrible way to measure the effects of rising gas prices. The relationship between the two variables is extremely complex. For example, many people buy new cars with lower gas mileage in response to higher prices. This also completely ignores income effects both from higher gas prices and economic recessions in general. I'm sure with all the work that's been done on oil prices and their effects on the economy we can find something much more relevant and sophisticated.
On another note, get used to it. High subsidies throughout the third world are going to drive consumpion up indefninitely, and supply doesn't have much room to grow and will eventually begin to decline and become more expensive to extract. The aparent lack of serious planning for this is either evidence of the tremendous influence of the oil and automobile industries or the complete inability of our political leadership to plan for the long-term.
Over the past twenty years, I have spent way over two-thousand dollars of my own salary JUST ON BOXES OF TISSUES--our school doesn't provide this classroom staple.
I find it interesting that all of a sudden the press today realized $5 gas could cripple the economy. Americans have short memories.
Zerohedge has a great post on how Allstate obtained the evidence for their case.
They are clearly manipulating rare-Earth exports, critical for manufacturing. Wall Street Journal.
You should consider registering and joining the site. I disagreed with large sections of the book, but his heart is in the right place, namely we must do something about the trade deficit, these bad trade deals hollowing out the country and manipulation of trade often through cheaper national economies. You have some excellent points!
I have read Fletcher's book cover to cover twice, and have scribbled numerous notes in the margins. I'm working on a precise review in my spare time (but since I have none, don't hold your breath). For my part, Fletcher comes up with the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. There is even a section where he hints at attributing the Exceptionalism of the 20th century U.S. to race! (a conclusion with which I vehemently disagree -- Tsk tsk).
Getting into the gist of the book, Fletcher lists a set of assumptions employed by the proponents of free (lunch) trade, and then proceeds to attack those assumptions. He does not directly attack the math of free (lunch) trade proponents (most likely because there is probably nothing wrong with it). He concludes that the Ricardians fail to include "Scale economies" in their analysis, and that tariffs most keenly protect such "scale economies," and for that reason, tariffs must be employed to protect them. As I stated, I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasons behind it.
I was disappointed to see that one assumption he left out is the most fundamental assumption embodied by free traders (perhaps because he may agree with that assumption): that economics transcends politics - that they operate independently and that one may be considered without the other. In my writings I argue that this is impossible, however, it cannot be denied that this "economic transparency" is an implicit assumption of free (lunch) trade.
With respect to the "T word," I have this to say:
My mathematical toolkit is limited to that which suits an average physical and software engineer, so I am a little light on the statistical modeling concepts needed for economics. However, as a former software engineer, I am keenly aware of the concept of "garbage in, garbage out." All of the devotees of David Ricardo, Henry George, etc., dismiss tariffs by mathematically modeling the scenario of tariff versus no tariff, and conclude absolutely that no tariff is better. To that I say... DUH!
The analysis of tariff versus no tariff is indistinguishable from the analysis of higher general tax versus lower general tax! It doesn't matter how elegent the equations, since there is nothing wrong with the math. It's the underlying assumptions that are out to lunch! It's important to take extreme care when translating reality into an equation. Therein lies the greatest danger of grievous error. I can see that even here on this site, there is a knee-jerk tendency to jump right into the math, but in the end that resolves to a mere shell game.
The question of tariff versus no tariff is a non-starter -- it's meaningless. A tariff is nothing more than a tax. Even I can see that any serious analysis of the economics of tariffs on imports MUST begin from the standpoint of being REVENUE NEUTRAL! Show me a model that shows that a revenue neutral tariff reduces welth for the imposing nation, and I will listen. Without that, you have an experiment without a control group, and any conclusion drawn holds no water. At best, Fletcher hinted at that concept, but did not expand on it.
Tariffs have been successfully employed too many times to dismiss that success as merely "post hoc ergo propter hoc" (as does Henry George, and by extension, David Ricardo). Just because a model (with all it's unexamined assumptions) says otherwise doesn't make it so. When theory is pitted against history, history wins. Science uses repetition to distinguish between causality and coincidence. The amount of repetition in history suggests that the proponents of coincidence are on thin ice.
TD
The United States has nothing like socialism, which if anyone paid attention, isn't such a bad thing, Russia was, as well as China are not socialist, they are totalitarian communist.
But now we have Corporatism. It amazes me shows like Glenn Beck and so on rail on "Socialism" because they are in reality pimping for corporatism.
NAFTA and WTO are central economic planning organizations that meet in secret to decide what sectors of a country’s economy are going to be benefitted at the expense of other sectors and what industries are going to be outsourced to other countries. If we had real free trade; trade agreements would be less than a paragraph where all tariffs and non-tariff barriers would be elminated in which the US would not have to beg like it currently is for other countries to accept more US exports. Didn’t the special interests that lobbied for NAFTA and WTO get the message that central economic planning never works. I guess they have never read Mises and Hayek’s works on economics.
It seems the former Soviet Union’s planning boards, NAFTA, WTO, the FED and other central banks all have something in common which is that they meet mostly in secret to devise economic plans to benefit their favored special interests. The printing press stands behind the special interests. They get newly created money out of thin air for R&D expenses, to pay for the outsourcing of jobs overseas and to bail them out when things go south.
Paul Krugman wrote a classic, Bah Humbug and notes a Christmas Carol is a strongly leftist poem. Others have noticed the same for It's a Wonderful Life.
that the Democrats have blood on their hands so to speak .. more so President Clinton and the Senate(out of 100 .. only 8 voted against the repeal of Glass-Steagall) .. the problem is no one(those who get on TV all the time) wants to stand up to Wall Street .. where we find more people like Bernie Sanders? I don't know.
"people age 75 and over are working, a good 7.4% of them. On top of it, many cannot find a job, the unemployment rate for those looking at age 75 and over is 5.7%."
It's simple, the government and big biz want you to work until you die. Several stragegies they use for making this happen:
- Increase the Social Security retirement age.
- Inflation. Destroy older workers savings with policies that promote inflation.
- Encourage debt. Those in debt must keep working until they pay it off.
- Keep the cost of health care and insurance high. Can't retire if you can't pay your medical bills.
- Increase the cost of housing. It's difficult to retire if your house isn't paid off.
- Increase property taxes. Even if your house is paid off, rising property tax rates will force you to work until you die.
Why would big biz want you to work until you die? Because to them, there's nothing better than a desperate worker. Desperate workers labor for whatever wage you give them. Desperate workers won't stand up for their rights, like working unpaid overtime. Desperate workers are afraid to organize.
Why would the U.S. government want you to work until you die? Because their campaign contributors, big biz, want it.
The money printing out of thin air stimulus packages gave the multinationals record profits. These multinationals are really something. They expect to receive newly created money out of thin air and tax credits to subsidize their R&D expenses and moving of jobs overseas plus new money to be created out of thin air to bail them out when things go south. Now with corporations and other groups being allowed to contribute unlimited campagin contributions foreign central banks can create an unlimited amount of new money out of thin air to pay lobbyists in the US to lobby for more outsourcing and transfer of technology overseas.
Hayek spoke of the need to denationalize money where competing currencies domestically would be allowed to compete with each other. With money denationalized no one group would have the monopoly power to issue money and have the power to decide which specific sectors should receive credit for investment and development and have the only currency to influence elections.
Xmas cheer I've had! I'm ready to relax and enjoy the holidays;)
The VERY BEST to the best of the blogs!
And here's 29 seconds that explains what peopole mean when they say that we're lead by fools.
Remember that starve the beast mantra, in order to justify cutting SS and what's left of any social safety net? Simon Johnson originally worked at the IMF, which has had it's sights also on SS (notice the IMF was involved in "austerity" programs).
After cutting 2 percent off the individual and corporate side of the payroll tax, the next shoe to drop is cutting SS, UI, Disability and Survivor Benefits. The entire SS system is now on borrowed funds and the Republicans will next say how this is unsustainable and must be cut, unless the payroll cuts can be put back miraculously by a Republican Congress.
The only way out of here, aays the joker to the thief, may be to create a Service Based Retirement System based on the core services the retirees need like food, all utilities, transportation and housing for the disposessed. That system could be funded by the same corporate side of the payroll tax plus vouchers given back to those robbed by the cuts: the individual plus corporate 2 percents.
Utility deregulation has brought about pricing of 60 percent of conventional(WhiteFence.com) utilities. Same can happen with food and public transportation. If nothing is done, there will be hunger in the land. Again, the social contract for current retirees, is breached.
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