Happy Birthday to both John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness) and Alex Kingston (Melody Pond River Song).
In Closing: let’s just get all the TSA bashing out of the way; hope nobody is surprised that Federal law still says pot businesses aren’t legal; Sir Patrick Stewart; no plan is a plan; I already said this; perspective; and it’s getting worse; and even worse; oh, that’s why; actually, people’s opinions are center-left.
In Closing: My new favorite blog; disgraceful; AC saves lives; damned if he doesn’t sound reasonable; no deal may well be better than a bad deal, but it doesn’t matter because there will be no vote tonight; yeah, that does sound kinda dumb when you put it that way; Baby Boomer Nuns; they wouldn’t be there if they could farm it legally; we never had a chance; even a broken clock is right twice a day; and somebody must write a sci-fi epic based on this picture.
In Closing: That would be bad; Googlegator; Japan Crush; Rolling Jubilee gets more press; the last cooler than average month was during the Reagan Administration (maybe hell froze over when he compromised with Democrats or raised taxes?); Lost Decade, American Style; Forbes and USA Today disagree on the buyer, but agree that somebody will make your freaking Twinkies (and screw workers in the process); of course, you could just make your own freaking Twinkies; maybe if the so-called adults made it clear that we must treat others with respect, this wouldn’t be a problem; vintage pictures of Japan; Susie’s right; so is Robert.
LOL: Enjoy this meme while you can, I figure it’s dead in 3 weeks.
They just keep coming: Remember, the plot to kill Big Bird is still in play. There’s a Million Muppet March planned.
Twelve! Meeeeelion! Jobs!!!: Yeah, so?
Get it off me! Get it get it get it….: Is it just me, or does Mr. Romney look uncomfortable in this picture? You don’t suppose it could be that he’s being touched by a black man, do you?
Beating the dead dressage horse: What Romney’s tax “plan” could do to housing.
If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it: Scientists found a planet twice the size of Earth, largely made of diamond. Good thing it’s far enough away that DeBeers can’t get hold of it!
Like you needed an economist to tell you that: Your paycheck is being outstripped by inflation. So if low interest rates are supposedly the cure for inflation, what the heck is the Fed going to do now??
But apparently some people do need an economist to tell you this: Here’s why cutting taxes never has and never will create jobs.
Gee, maybe saying “no” wasn’t such a good strategy: Failing to pass a Big Agriculture Giveaway Farm Bill before leaving Washington gave some Democrats an upper hand.
Judges judge things: An Appeals Court has ruled part of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.
Unexpected Excitement: Passengers on a Canadian airliner helped save a boater’s life. That beats most in-flight movies.
Wheat Ain’t What It Was: On modern wheat.
Not sure how to get out of this mess: Two out of three new college grads has college loan debt, and the average amount is $26,600. The scary part is that many of them won’t be getting jobs anytime soon. Just a reminder, it would take 3668 hours at minimum wage to pay that off. That’s 152 days of nonstop 24/7 labor. And it won’t be wiped out by bankruptcy.
Newsweek: will stop printing a paper edition.
But what about the economy?: Here’s an outline of the risks.
“The other 1%”: 2/3 of the bottom 1% of Americans are in prison.
Turns out it won’t turn good girls into sluts: Girls who get the HPV vaccine are not more likely to have sex.
Carbs: “People 70 and older who eat food high in carbohydrates have nearly four times the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and the danger also rises with a diet heavy in sugar, Mayo Clinic researchers have found. Those who consume a lot of protein and fat relative to carbohydrates are less likely to become cognitively impaired, the study found.”
And it turns out that Doing Good might Make More Money: At least that’s Coca-Cola’s theory.
Once more it is book review time. Today’s selection from the BlogHer Book Club is Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay. As usual, this is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are my own. Join the discussion here!
When Ray Kilbride comes home after his father’s fatal accident, one of the things he must deal with is his schizophrenic brother Thomas: a recluse who thinks former President Bill Clinton has personally tasked him with memorizing every street in every major city on the behalf of the CIA. Thomas spends all day, every day, clicking down streets of the world using a tool that is absolutely not Google Maps at all against the possibility of a massive internet outage making all online maps inaccessible. Then one day, he spots what looks like a possible murder.
This has by far been my favorite of the books I’ve been asked to review. It is a thriller with more twists than a mountain highway. I absolutely promise there will be things you didn’t see coming. Chapters are generally short, so I found myself thinking “Oh, I have time for one more” often. It is unfortunate that any accurate description of the plot gives away what should have been the first twist in the Prologue.
A++, Would Read Again.
In Closing: be sure to read to the end; aw that’s sweet; I’m so glad somebody is asking what the heck information on 12,000,000 Apple devices was doing on a laptop for any reason; “Ok, you can play, but only approved games led by an adult”; dirty lies; wage stats; as expected; and I liked number 4.
Maybe you saw the report showing that the net worth of the average American family is down almost 40%. It’s down to the levels we had during the Original Bush Administration (oh, and Happy 88th Birthday to him).
Now, of course that’s partly because home prices are down to where they were a decade ago. But it’s also because unemployment is still over 8%. And even for those who are employed, last year inflation adjusted income is roughly what it was in 1968. And we’ve still got discouraged workers and the underemployed.
The nicest thing I can say is that at least household debt is going down. Of course, it’s going down for the bad reasons — like ditching the house that will never be worth what it sold for 5 years ago.
It is still the economy, “stupid.”
In Closing: how is this different than the Bush Administration, exactly?; has anything really changed about the Vatican since Alexander VI?; at least violent crime is down; the impossible dream; now I have really no reason to watch mainstream news unless it’s local; the disappearing phone booth; and illiteracy.
Please bear with me as some issues are simplified for clarity and length.
The American Economy has evolved a lot in the 234 years since the Declaration of Independence. We’ve been an agrarian economy. At times our economy has been driven by various commodities such as gold or steel; in fact, it is still widely thought that Nevada became a state because the Union needed a source of silver (and electoral votes) during the Civil War.
By the end of the 19th century, the ground was laid for the United States to become a real economic superpower. Instead of relying foodstuffs and commodities that were in some ways an accident of being a physically huge nation, worked by a growing workforce with plenty of ambitious immigrants buying into rhetoric of a “land of opportunity”, manufacturing came to the forefront. At the same time, the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Age; the standard of living rose for the working class not because the Tycoons were philanthropic, but because workers demanded things like living wages and the 40 hour work week that some of us still enjoy today.
Henry Ford, racist and antisemitic man that he was, did have a flash of genius when he decided to pay workers enough that they could buy his product, and enough time off to enjoy using it. Not only did it increase the number of potential buyers, he found that employee turnover plummeted. Other employers and competitors had to follow suit, and America now had quality finished goods to export.
At some point, “American” manufacturers realized that they could have their products made in countries with lower labor costs, put it on a boat to the United States, and still make more money selling it here, even if they had to discount the price a little bit! They could pull this off at least in part because even if they were paying a wage that was above the local average, it was still cheaper than American labor as they weren’t paying for retirement benefits or health insurance plans, they weren’t paying any payroll taxes or workers comp insurance on those employees, and things like environmental laws or worker protection laws were almost non-existent. To top it all off, desperate third world nations were sometimes willing to make financial incentives to build a factory and create what they saw as jobs of the future. International treaties such as NAFTA sped this process along. The best part of this was that the people at the top made more money, which in turn gave them more power.
But don’t worry about the factories closing, American students were told, you don’t really want to work in a dirty, smelly, dangerous factory all day, do you? No of course not! There is a future for you in information and service! See all these new computers? Somebody has to run them, and write programs in languages like COBOL or FORTRAN for them. Somebody has to figure out where all this information we are creating is, so there will be a need for people like research librarians and file clerks. And hey, worst case scenario, somebody still has to flip burgers and sack groceries.
Of course the problem with a lot of that “information economy” work is that it can even more easily be farmed out overseas. You don’t even have to get a finished product shipped back; just upload it to the server and it doesn’t matter whether it was compiled in San Francisco or Calcutta. Sure there are issues that come up with language and cultural gaps. Oops and I guess they don’t really have even similar data protection laws. But hey, it’s cheap.
And producing cheaper goods and services, we are told, is just the only way they can compete and give us the low low prices the American consumer demands. Of course there’s little talk about the reason the American consumer demands it: his wages just don’t go as far as they used to go.
So we don’t produce very much in the way of goods anymore, very little of the stuff you use every day is “Made in America, even if you wanted to buy American made products you can’t, the only thing we really export is money, at times we don’t even have a trade surplus in foodstuffs anymore, industrialized nations are busy plundering Africa for diamonds and rare minerals, construction is off sharply due to the real estate crash, and even those high-tech information jobs we were promised were the future are really some other country’s future. That leaves us with what is cheerily called a “service economy,” because “service” is the only thing you can’t do just as well from a thousand miles away.
And some unknown portion of this “service economy” is actually an underground economy of work performed at below minimum wage, with little thought to workplace safety, often by undocumented immigrants who fear deportation if they speak up. Frustratingly, in addition to some “conservatives,” even some “liberals” and “progressives” say we “need” these laborers. After all, they tell us, who do you expect to mow our lawns, pick our produce, and clean our floors, duh.
What does that leave for Americans who want a “living” wage at a legal job? A short list of “opportunities” such as the small number of professions that can’t be done from overseas (e.g., doctor, lawyer, nurse, teacher), selling goods imported from overseas, the grocery business, the hospitality industry, and food service. So I call the “service economy” more of a “latte economy”; at least Starbucks has employee benefits.
The thing is that we can’t really sustain a whole economy on that. We can’t run a country on selling one another lattes and Chinese made shoes forever. To have a vibrant and durable economy, we have to make something tangible that won’t all too soon be gone.
To get out of this economic mess, we must make things in this country that last, that people want, that people can afford, and that people in other nations might conceivably want. Somewhere out there are Americans with ideas about what those could be, but they are stymied by a lack of funding, and a system rigged against production and anyone who wants to play by the rules. But it’s going to take more than some tax breaks; that only helps when a business is profitable enough to owe taxes already. And it’s going to take more than lip service about government contracts; you have to be big enough to complete such a contract before you can get one. It’s going to take a leveling of the playing field so that start-ups can get working capital, develop products, and compete.
The Latte Economy must be replaced by something sustainable if the United States is to continue as a viable country. We can’t continue to export our money forever; at some point we will run out.
It’s the Jobs, Stupid.
You can’t swing your arms on the internet these days without hearing talk about jobs, and with good reason. We’ve got fewer job openings* and high unemployment, particularly high long term unemployment. It’s all about the jobs, and in many ways its about the fact that despite the law, people much over 40 are having a hard time getting them. And if you’re a new grad? You’ll be taking less pay* than you would have in recent years (and be delighted to have anything, alas). Meanwhile, the income gap is growing and our credit scores are getting worse — a polite way of saying we’re collectively having trouble paying our bills.
However, instead of talking about works programs that would put people to work now and create infrastructure that would create more jobs later, we have Hundreds of Hoovers looking to slash spending anywhere they can — but Heaven Forbid they should slash the Wars Without End, or turn thousands of criminal jobs into decent jobs, or slash actual waste, or make the people (and corporations!) who can most afford to pay taxes pay just a little more! Oh no, we can’t have any of those things.
Nope. They’re saying that tax cuts don’t result in the government getting less money, everything is Obama’s fault, that somehow cutting taxes creates jobs (I suspect the underpants gnomes are integral to that working), and — get this! — we little people are just going to have to get used to the idea that Social Security is going to be gutted.
We may also have to get used to the coming food riots.
I can’t think of the last time I linked Atrios, but he’s right. They don’t care about cutting the deficit, they care about making things better for the people at top and worse for the people at bottom.
Somewhere, Baby Boomers got the idea that there was never gonna be any Social Security money for them, so they set about destroying the system, insuring that prediction came to pass. Now those selfish young adults are getting on towards retirement age, and some of them have been forcibly retired. Talk about raising the retirement age to 70? Fine, but when was the last time you saw a 70 year old bricklayer, truck driver, computer programmer, barrista, or waitress?
So in the end, this is what we’ve got:
In Closing: nuclear explosions (a worthwhile way to spend 14 minutes); malaria; useless fliers; alert the media, the FDIC wants to do it’s job; factory farming means our produce isn’t as healthy as it was 30 years ago; why Johnnie doesn’t know his colors; super-extra polite phrases in Japanese.
*Somewhere along the line, USA Today turned into a proper news source! Kudos to them.