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Shout out to El Som who dutifully does what in the other 49 states would be the News Journal’s duty, just so we too can be an informed public… Many thanks from those of us who use this valuable resource….
You probably know by now from the “other” sources that Valerie Longhurst is gutting $70 million from fixing our roads and bridges despite the disaster on 495!
You probably right now are smacking your forehead with your hand, and saying “What the fuck is she thinking?” I have to sit in traffic an extra hour because of her!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You would be right. But, apparently she is not alone. The majority of the Legislature is still living in the 00’s and is too timid to increase revenues… any revenues… There is very tiny fringe of people cheering that… and that tiny fringe are the only ones who have their ear…
So the rest of us have to suffer more gridlock because of Valerie Longhurst… and more, and more, and more, more, more, more, more, …,
Collectively in 2 years we will all scream!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Why doesn’t someone do something!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”….
Instead of passing a gas tax which will hurt only those speculators investing in gasoline….and will be 60% financed by out of state travelers….. she is cutting, (this is not about growing any bigger) but she is “cutting” infrastructure improvements…..
Well, we gotta cut something……
NO! YOU DON’T…….
There are unlimited resources for raising revenue… The gas tax is one… And taxing our wealthy is a goldmine… Recently it was determined that our wealthy could adquetely fund up to $1.3 billion yearly each single year…. to bring them up to the level counting for inflation to where they were taxed back in the 50’s… They survived then; they’ll survive now…. No billionaire has ever died impoverished…..
So with an untapped $1.3 billion at our disposal…. Valerie Longhurst is cutting back on rebuilding bridges and roads!… Just think… if that inspector who luckily got in his car that Monday morning to look under that bridge, … had been laid off. Just think, if all of them had been laid off! Exactly! That is where Valerie is taking us….
We’d not have fixed the bridge in time… We still be pulling bodies out the river….
This is where Valerie Longhurst is leading us… This is just plain fucking stupid. Anyone can see it is plain fucking stupid….
The problem is not really in the number of brain cells these legislators have…. They, I trust, have pretty close to the same number as the rest of us… The real problem…. IS THAT THEY… DON’T…. HEAR… YOU !!! (They hear the tiny few from ALEC 40 times a day)… You must make them HEAR you… You must…
Call or more effectively…. email…. today….
Say: RAISE THE GAS TAX AND TAX THE TOP ONE PERCENT….. BUT, whatever you do…. don’t EVER cut the transportation fund and make me wait in my car ONE MORE SINGLE MINUTE because you were too cheap to fix a bridge before it goes out!!!
And if you don’t know who they are…….
The problem with government these days is that they just don’t hear anymore from people with plain Common Sense…. Change that! Today!
The principle statement supporting the implementation of Common Core, has always been that we need a better educated workforce to do tomorrow’s jobs….
Governor Markell said it in his state of the state address on the day the DOW fell 176 points….
This has been a reoccuring theme of his; “the education of today will not bring us the jobs of tomorrow..”
Although that sounds good in soundbyte form, it is not grounded too well in reality. In reality, the wages of jobs have declined as the demand for work rose to become greater than the supply. In other words, unemployment is too high… and that suppresses the cost of labor.
When one’s boss can hire one cheaper to do the same job, that is not the best time to ask your boss for a raise…..
Today, our minimum wage is being paid to college graduates and high school graduates. It used to be paid to those who were either still students, or never did graduate….
Image Courtesy of Economic Policy Institute
Today! Across the minimum workforce almost 5 out of every 10 have a college experience; and almost 8 out of 10 graduated high school or have a GED.
We are already educating our lowest level of workers far above what the job market requires… There are no jobs to be given to those who will soon emerge college or career ready (SAT score over 1550), unless they first fill in the minimum wage jobs these poor blokes working now, give up when they get bumped up into real jobs….
If you bump your newly trained graduates directly into those high paying jobs, then you will be freezing the current generation into these minimum wage level jobs at which they are currently stuck…
One cannot bootstrap a educational process into producing high quality job applicants, when there are no high quality jobs taking applications…
We already have a high quality educated work force; we call it our minimum wage crowd….
So Governor. What are you going to do?
As I see it here are your options….
You have to create an industry here in Delaware. Here is one: wind power infrastructure and solar power grid efficiency. You just make it up and go after it, hoping it doesn’t implode like Fisker and Bloom… The difference is that with Fisker and Bloom, you said “here is some money, do something”; you left it up to them. With this, you get Federal funding and we go government control all the way involving public-private partnerships. We have the land, we have the technical expertise, we have a scientifically educated work force; all we need are capital and someone to direct it.
Secondly, the government needs to create high labor-intensive industries. Areas where humans will not be replaced by robotics. Health care comes to mind. Personal care of senior citizen in their homes, is another. Food inspection is a third. Why can’t we have a public-private enterprise here in Delaware which performs the FDA food inspections for the entire East Coast? Environmental inspection industries is a fourth avenue of opportunity; testing and verification, done by the state to insure compliance of air, water, and soil standards…
As one can tell, these require more taxes. Those who have benefited from the bounce-back of the financial markets, should be the ones to carry the rest of us forward. That would be the 1%. There are two ways to fund our future growth… A) We can borrow and spread the cost over time by increasing our debt and pay it back later, or B) we can pay as we go by assessing more from those in real time, who can afford it without denting their lifestyle…. Being a fiscal conservative, I fall into taxing now, paying now, and keeping our debt levels low.(B).. It makes too much sense to do it any other way….since we currently have an abundance of cash in the hands of the 1% from which to draw.
The point being made through all these wishful plans, is that employment in the private sector is now full. It will not grow more jobs on its own. It is now required of government to prime the pump; we need it more than ever. Most of those currently unemployed will need government jobs to get back to work. There is much to be done to our infrastructure; we have cut government for so long, that many things are close to being broken….
We have an educated work force ready and able. It is our college and high school educated minimum wage earners.... We need to first give them the opportunity to move up into jobs for which they are qualified to do,.. in order to make them better citizens. Playing with education again and again to make more minimum wage workers who are overqualified, is not going to do anyone any good at all… it is just circling money around where it is not needed.
Dear Diary:
What if we raised income taxes on the top 1% several percent with a sunset clause not tied to a year, but based on achieving a certain state unemployment rate.? Perhaps 4.9%?
Work that through sometime soon, please?
Thanks,
me.
What do these three have in common?
They are the main themes of the News Journal, most progressive blogs and radio talk shows, and Pope Francis….
Since the News Journal came out with their report on jobs in the economy, there has been a shill of shrill callings for education to become the white knight to raise children up from poverty… Pick up a News Journal (paper version preferable)… Op-ed piece: James Butkiewicz; Robert Frost, Letter to The Editor, Phillip Socorso, Letter to The Editor, Bruce W. Lee, Letter to the Editor, Editorial Board writes “Get Ready for Lifetime of Learning.”
Hell, I was even guilty of it myself….”The path out of poverty is a good education and that’s the very thing we are not giving them: a good education.
But there is this idea boiling up pretty much only here in Delaware,with piece, after piece, after piece, that we need good education to grow jobs in Delaware….
Our direction is misplaced.
Good education can’t hurt, but with only a casual glance around the world, one can see the nonsense in connecting good jobs with good education…. Examples? Japan. Japan has the best education around, but has been in a slump for 20 years… Well educated populace does not equal booming economy and full employment. China, although Shanghai has private schools rated rather well, most of the jobs are in the outlaying regions. Places where people work for cheap. Education out there is not as high as we often hear about in Shanghai. Finland is rated as the best for education. It is the model. And yet the Finnish economy is facing industrial restructuring, rising domestic costs and an aging population. If one takes average wages, as a sign of prosperity… the US is on top, followed by Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Austrailia.… none of which are touted for their prowess in education.
Not globally astute? Let’s look at domestic, shall we… Top job growth in 2012…?
North Dakota (+ 29)
D.C. (+25)
South Dakota (+21)
Alaska (+19)
Arkansas (+17)
All home to America’s most brilliant minds…. “Can someone please pass the jelly?” All states educated and populated with rocket scientists, all… “Honey, you stay and wash the clothes; I’m going out and shoot me a deer.”
And the worst….
States with the Worst Job Growth
Nevada (-6)
New Jersey (-2)
California (0)
Oregon (+2)
Connecticut (+2)
New Jersey ranks at number 6 according to the NAEP, the nation’s report card. Connecticut was number 20. What about the two top educated states? Massachusetts? Employment peaked in 2001…. Minnesota? It’s lost 24,000 jobs across the past 6 months…
Time to pop that balloon once and for all… Other factors relate to full employment, not education. Luck is a big part of it. Who 5 years ago would know that the upper Midwest would produce more energy than the Middle East? Jobs depend solely on economics; there is no relation to how smart one’s educational system is, and more jobs… Period…. In fact, if one looks at the economic maps showing employment and unemployment, the most prosperous states right now, are all drilling… If you can’t drill, you are suffering….
Why are jobs not being created elsewhere? Actually there is a reason. A very good reason, and it is not, NOT, the quality of one’s education….
Our job’s situation is being hit on two sides with a double whammy…. The first is technology. Machines cost the same as people, and we have the technology to now replace people.. Face it! If you ran a business and the costs were the same, who would you prefer? A machine, of course… “Hello, I’m your machine, and I am so sick, I have to call out today… Yeah, I was up all night and had diarrhea and was throwing up and stuff… Must have been something I ate…. I should be fine tomorrow though… ” said no machine, ever.
And the other, is our intentional cutting away all public sector jobs… Mostly thanks to Republican philosophy…. “We gotta cut the government.”
NO…… We ……. DON’T……
In fact it defies rationality that as our economy was tubing, we were shedding jobs. And now that it is rebounding, we are shedding jobs… Does that makes sense to you? In fact… in an ideal world, where thoughts and ideas could be debated in the open, without being ignored or amplified by the main stream media to achieve their preferred result…. we would have figured this out long ago….
Machines replace people and cause profits of those who are doing the replacing to soar… However, because machines are not moral entities, they don’t know right from wrong. Therefore it will still take people who do have moral judgment to discern the moral qualities behind a certain business…. That was essentially a polite way of saying: we need more inspectors now… We always had people checking up on people. We need people to check up on machines….
As one example. If the London Whale had to be first cleared to make his huge transaction, would it have been made? That type of monitoring across all industries, is sort of what we are talking about…. We need public sector employees to do things like monitor rivers, air, crabs, venereal diseases, and hookers. If no one is monitoring them, what happens? Exactly.
These people need hired, trained, and jobs. But where should the money come from? Silly question… those who have it, of course…..
It is now time for the kavipsian family pizza analogy…. You have a family who is hungry. You put in a Red Baron Pizza, cook it at 425 for 15 minutes, and cut it for 4 people…. Everyone gets enough, but not too much…. That is normal… That describes the baby boomer’s parent’s economic lifestyle… But, it gradually evolved to where the baker person, got to cut his piece first, and the others split what was left… He now takes half, and the others split the other half, getting one sixth, whereas before it was one fourth…. The baker person, gets a whole half… so the pizza is consumed like this: by one half, one sixth, one sixth, and one more sixth… Three people are a little hungry, and the fourth, has too much so he wraps up roughly the left-over quarter he couldn’t eat and puts it into the freezer of the refrigerator, and scrawls his name across the plastic….
Over time, (he never eats them), that freezer fills up, because there is always a new pizza being ordered… always. Everyone else is hungry, and the baker keeps taking his half….
So… finally a change comes… And the other three decide, niceties aside, they have to eat MORE… They change the rules so that pizza being kept in the freezer, gets offered to them… The baker still gets his half off each new… but he gives a slice of frozen pizza to each of those others, and they can microwave it and add that to their one sixth….
All live happily every after… The baker is glad to still be alive, and he keeps his share of pizza… the others are glad they have one sixth and one fourth a pizza with each meal. And the refrigerator slowly empties its inventory…. but it takes a while because the baker is still putting in his quarter of pizza he can’t eat, back into the freezer….
Translated to the economy… It is not socialism. The baker had ownership of what was originally the other three’s shares. He is just essentially paying them back the loan.
If only some of that money that once was used to make jobs, was returned to making jobs again, all would be good… The rich would still get richer (though at a slower pace), and everyone else would get richer …too. Amazingly all levels of income brackets would simultaneously get richer… Wasn’t that once the American dream?
The answer to the capitalists when the backlash come, and it will come, is this: we gave you the opportunity to get wealthy by investing in us, and you turned us down cold… Since you didn’t do it, for our nation’s survival, we have to do it in spite of you… For actually, they very well could have trimmed profits and put much of that money back into their own companies in order to make sure, for instance, that they did not overlook a mistake costing them dearly in the future…. They chose not to and now, well, here we are.
So what we collectively need to say to the capitalists, is that since you have the advantage of the machines who replaced us, we will have to charge you for our public sector jobs now… That is fair. After all, what you made equals exactly what we gave up….
For if something happened, an EMP for instance and none, not one of those machines would work… Suddenly they’d be desperate for workers to make things again… Their loss of profits would be …”oh well, it has to be done this way.” and not…. “what? your taking my, my, my money, and giving it to, to, to, T-H-O-S-E … people???”
Since their loss of money would not affect them in that particular scenario ( they call it a cost of business), we should not worry about how loud they boast it will affect them now… Because you see, in our simplistic illustration, there are three who’ve been quiet this whole time, who desperately need this change to go forward now… They should have yelled, but for some reason, didn’t. Now one loudly complains; three are immensely grateful; two points ahead, it’s a win.
Bottom line. IT IS OUR INEQUALITY THAT IS COSTING US JOBS, MAKING US UNEMPLOYED. It is something we could readily fix… today! Well, maybe not exactly today… but when Congress returns in January.
Raise taxes, by however method you wish, just raise them solely on those who have stolen and fattened their refrigerators with our victuals. We can raise them a lot, if we want a 5 Hour energy economic boost, or, it can be done gradually with Mountain Dew if we wish not to shock the system too much….
With that new money, use roughly half to continue paying down the debt, and roughly the other half to start creating jobs. At which point we hit somewhere near 5% unemployment…. we lift our foot off the accelerator and coast down the highway to a more prosperous America…..
Back to education. Real good education is something we all want, but higher standards imposed on an unwilling young public won’t magically grow jobs. Attacking the inequality that even Pope Francis says is the most important problem mankind now faces, will.
Tax, save half, spend half, and let’s get this party rolling….
I for one, wouldn’t mind partying like its … 1999…..
Courtesy of The Atlantic
This is a good illustration of how compromise works… After the Tea Party’s humiliating defeat, it appears all those left, have thrown their mesh skeletons into the trash can, and to each of their entreaties for redemption…. have given them a collective……
“Forget about it…”
It should hit you hard right now, of just how far back we are from where we’d be if 2010 Tea Party Revolt had never happened………
America has always had it’s fringe. There has always been a backlash against populist presidents. There were those who hated William Jennings Bryan (almost President). Go figure. There were those who predicted the end of America with the election of Andrew Jackson… Yeah, we know the kind.
But in the past, what a hillbilly thought back in some holler, stayed in some holler. There was no manpower capable of driving down from New York, asking around the hamlet, finding him, driving back to New York with a hillbilly in the back seat, then putting his picture and words on the Hearst’s front page…
Yet today, with social media, we can do exactly that… Lack of manpower is no deterrent…. Therefore in today’s world where common sense would dictate that bashing the president was better for any opposing cause than not bashing the president,… we fully expect it to continue…
However, we must remember that if no one wanted to search out that back-in-the-holler hillbilly, we wouldn’t be hearing his words.
So who is the money, funding this apparatus and why are they so intent on bashing this president…..
It could be for policies like this…..
====
Current Law
Under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, non-U.S. persons generally are subject to a tax of 30 percent on dividends paid on U.S. equities.
No one pays that tax anymore. Because of this…
The Loophole
Currently, many non-U.S. investors, including foreign hedge funds, enter into swaps or other derivative contracts that pay dividend equivalents, instead of directly holding the dividend-paying equities on which they are based. These foreign investors are therefore able to avoid the U.S. tax on a dividend by receiving instead a dividend equivalent, which is not currently subject to U.S. tax.
Treasury’s Action to End Tax-Avoiding Financial Gimmicks
Treasury’s proposed regulations under section 871(m) would align the taxation of dividend equivalents with the taxation of dividends from sources within the United States when the underlying security that generates the dividend equivalent is a U.S. equity. Put simply, when finalized, the new rules will eliminate the incentive for non-U.S. persons to use financial products like swap transactions, forwards and futures to escape U.S. tax obligations.
Currently all the gains received by foreign investors in our national stock market that as boomed 20% since higher taxes kicked in last January,… are tax free…. but only if you are a foreign. If you are American you pay the full price….
None of this gets translated down to normal Americans holding mutual funds. But it is very relevant to those foreign interests with huge assets in American banks and markets. For as much as one day’s profits, they could spend the entire budget of every election in the United States….
Their money is why those, in any way connected to the financial world, are into bashing Obama….
Doesn’t it makes sense for you and me and all other domestic stock owners to pay the same tax as do foreign investors, and not an infinite amount more?
I’m a little late, but I wanted to mark down mostly for myself but sharing it as well, the accomplishments being made as a direct result of last year’s elections…. Some of the conclusions are superfluous, but are perceived to be a result of the election’s consequences, and since perception is nine tenths of reality, they too are a force with which to be reckoned..
Remember this is general and is being painted with a broad brush….
The economy is number one. Some taxes were raised which boosted the economy almost immediately. This has been the most consistent trend over the past year. The economy has benefited the same people it benefited before. It has not seemed to help those who were not helped before. If you are an investor, this has been a great year. Stock Market has never been higher.
The number of private sector jobs has consistently grown across 2013…..
One of the marvelous trends is the fact that once the solid line is crossed in the year 2010, it never drops below… That means we have consistently been growing private sector jobs… Since 2010 we have never had a negative month… one where we actually lost jobs. However Unemployment has not fared so well. Even though we are growing jobs, we still have a ways to go. In one of the most amazing graphs… so amazing I’m rather surprise it has not been featured until now, one sees all employment across this century….
.
What is fascinating is first, the constant rate of growth. the pitch of the line never changes. But what is freaky, is exactly how that pitch mirrors the employment growth of the Bush years… Not even Republicans can fault George W. Bush’s employment growth up until 2007. Obama’s rate mirrors his rate exactly.
It needs more quantified research, but initial speculation would be that since the tax rates were similar (The Bush Cuts were carried over) that factor pretty well determines the maximum rate at which our nation’s economy is able to grow. Furthermore it shows us that if consistency prevails, and since it has for the past 10 years there is little likelihood it wouldn’t, then we will have grown into employment levels which we had just before the crash in fall of 2014……
So investors have done well; the middle class hasn’t.
Consumer spending is exactly the same level as of the first of the year. It’s low was reached during the sequester fight (Jan 28) and its high, was on August 18th. As for now, we are were we were Christmas Day 2012.
Consumer Confidence is right where it was in January. We had some peaks over summer, but he shutdown lowered us back to where the threat of a shutdown held us hostage as the year began…..
Only since 2013 have we made progress on hammering down the deficit. The national debt is still huge. it will take multiple budget surpluses to whittle it down, and to achieve that, we need to again tax more than we spend. But we are not spending a trillion dollars in deficits anymore. we are only over spending by 600 billion which may become less by years end than 2003’s deficit….
Enough economics.
On the world front:
- We have a possible solution to Iran’s giving up on being a nuclear power.
- We have Syria dismantling their chemical weapons.
- We are on course to leave Afghanistan.
- We have Iraq begging us to please, please come back.
All of these would have gone completely the opposite way if you remember what Romney was promising during the debates.
- Attack Iran with shock and awe.
- Attack Syria with shock and awe,
- Attack Iraq with shock and awe… oh wait, that was Rumsfeld. Instead, Iraq was that we should never leave, and we should also stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. But we should have never gone into Libya. My goodness, can you image the shambles the world would be in if he had ever been elected?
Not to mention, his pushing of tightening up the money supply. Just the anticipation of such, sends our stock market into a panic.
Domestically we have weathered Benghazi, more a Republican talking point than anything important. We worked through the IRS scandal which it was revealed to be a forward thinking sound policy and not a scandal after all.. Political groups friendly to the president were swept up in the nets as well.
The Common Core package fortunately seems to have stalled. It was always a low priority, and with the drying up of TARP and Stimulus funding, it seems like most state’s enthusiasm is drying up as well. The program does not seem to be able to get past the roadblock that the tests themselves create. There is enough opposition by enough parents so that this program maybe salvageable in part, but dead in the water as a whole.
It would be nice to have a viable program in its place. One that aims to put an 11:1 student/teacher ratio in troubled public schools.
But, the most notable event and the one with the biggest blowout, was the revelations by one Edward Snowden which were made last July. America is collecting huge amounts of data. Since then the leaks have only become worse. Americans have compromised the entire Internet. They have broken into banks, they have spied on foreign competitors, they have become a service offering “information for hire…. ” And although too early to tell, implications are that is may have been done secretly even keeping the president and his officers completely in the dark….
Which is really scary. Cheney’s shadow government is alive and well……
If true, this is our greatest threat. Simply because unlike the economy, unlike unemployment, unlike Syria, Iran, or Israel, unlike the Republican yellow journalistic scandals…. this one is against us. It violates our Constitution. It is against all we purport to be…..
One interesting parallel…. Long, long, long ago, the city state of Rome was also a viable democracy, and like us, it too expanded its empire across the known world… Until Julius Caesar marched his armies into Rome, took over the reins as dictator, done in order to bypass the quagmire in which it’s Congress had become bogged down… It was originally supposed to be a temporary solution…. For the next 400 odd years, Rome never went back… Instead one bad Caesar followed another, often at the point of a sword (there was no NRA back then)…
Looking the other way at a scandal of this proportion, especially if it was done as a rogue element of which the White House now even barely has a clue as to how deep it goes… and what is has been doing, then we already have a Caesar, and whoever it is, they are not elected by us, We, The People….
This can be fixed quietly, internally, and we may never hear of its resolution. Or it could get worse. Much worse…
The final solution is to cut off the NSA from its unlimited sources of money…. Even shut it down, or better, let a more porous government agency, even that of the CIA take it over….
Spying on American citizens is simply put…. un American. It has never been who we are. We’ve always chose the other way. It does not represent what we want ourselves to be…. Any person could spy on their neighbor if they wished. Any person could hide in his neighbor’s bushes and watch them get undressed… Most of us would be so creeped out at just the idea, we would never, ever consider doing such a thing.
The fact that most of us would never consider something that creepy, has always been what has made Americans so special, so likable, and so loved the world around…. We were different from those Communists…. Well, not any more.
As each new NSA revelation comes out, one just can’t shake the creepy feeling that somewhere Voldermort, somehow is pulling all the strings……
I sometimes forget that people really don’t understand the financial markets as well as they should. That’s very understandable. I don’t understand everything it takes to build a road, as much as I should.
There are so many things to know; we can’t know everything. When I posted a message about getting out of the markets, I received a comment that reminded me that not everyone was up to par on what is about to happen and how that will affect them.
Here is why getting out now is a good thing, and why staying in “for the long haul” is a bad thing.
Assume you have $10,000 in stocks. If the stock market drops 40% as it is prone to do, it will be years before it gets back up to its level. On the Dow Jones a 40% drop would be like going down to 9000 to give you an idea. That can happen in a day, and with most IRA’s, you have to put your bid in one day and it comes out the next. You could do it now, and if it crashes tomorrow still lose it all.
Which is why you should act today, Friday, and take a chance on Monday.
If you don’t. here is what will happen. That $10,000 could become $6,000 by next Monday afternoon. But you are in it for the long haul, right?. Again after 2 years of awesome 30% growth,, that money-total of yours has again climbed up to $10,000. No big deal you shrug. You were in it for the long haul. You lost nothing.
Now, the other side of the story.
You switch the $10,000 right now over to a Treasury bond fund. There is not much growth, so it stays at $10000 for a while. Of course, everyone else has lost 40% but you are steady.
So when the market stops losing and starts bouncing back, you go in at the bottom. with your full $10,000. After 2 years of 30% growth, you have $16,000. Had you stayed, you only had $10,000.
That is why, both those who are smart and unsmart should get out of the stock market now.
In layman’s terms its the equivalent of protecting your property upon notice that Superstorm Sandy is headed for Delaware’s shores. You can take your chances that it will blow over and do nothing….. you could be right if you are very lucky. or you could hedge your bets and with little or no expense, and just a tiny bit if effort, protect your assets from any damage that could occur….
Just saying that an economic superstorm of gigantic proportions is headed your way.
Here is what happened the last debt crises… published from the Treasury’s blog…
“The financial market stress that developed in
August of 2011 persisted into 2012 even
though Congress raised the debt ceiling prior
to the exhaustion of extraordinary measures.”
“From June to August 2011, consumer
confidence fell 22 percent and business
confidence fell 3 percent.”
“Financial market conditions have a direct
effect on economic activity. A good deal of
household wealth is held in financial assets,
and much of household and business
spending is funded by borrowing. Thus,
lower asset prices and higher borrowing costs
tend to weigh on private spending ”
Now the clicker….
“So far this year, Treasury yields have
been rising on balance, which means that any
adverse effects from financial market
disruptions caused by a debt ceiling debate
may not be offset as it was in 2011.”
That is why it is unlikely that Boehner will send us over the edge. In fact, the sooner he sells out the Tea Party, the better…
The last 5 days of stocks…
-70 -128 +68 -58 -120
Do you feel poorer already? Better cut back on that spending…..
If one is driving southbound down the Pacific Coast Highway and comes to the cliff where Jimmy Dean’s character went over, and your passenger grabs the wheel, turns hard to the right, stomps on the gas….. whose fault will it be if the car goes over the proverbial financial cliff?
Exactly, all you Republicans out there. Exactly.
If the US economy tanks because our ratings get lowered one more time… It won’t be the fault of ANY democrat.
kavips 