"Obama warns Republicans against blocking economic progress" July 26, 2013
What progress?
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Casting them as stubborn deadbeats, President Obama sought Thursday to discredit House Republicans in upcoming fiscal fights by painting them as roadblocks to a thriving middle class.
Both parties are responsible for the decimation -- at the behest of their campaign contributors and corporate $pon4ors.
With Obama and Congress approaching all-too-familiar showdowns over spending levels and the nation’s borrowing limit, Obama used a visit to a seaside port in Florida to argue that the nation’s economic agenda should be immune to the partisan backbiting he faulted Republicans for instigating.
In the last of three stops on a two-day tour to reframe his broad economic vision for the nation, Obama pitched the need for enhanced American infrastructure at this port and others across the country — and for better roads, bridges, and power grids. But the president offered no new proposals for accelerating the economy.
Obama warned that if Republicans continue with their ‘‘my way or the highway attitude,’’ dire consequences could await Americans....
Something else to be fearful and afraid about. Man, I'm exhausted.
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You know, every time he opens his mouth these days I just don't want to hear it. I'm tired of the POLITICAL THEATER of IMAGERY and ILLUSION!
Oh, btw, that tax hike they supposedly leveled on the wealthy was actually a tax cut -- all under the rubric of a fiscal crisis! Thanks for the help, Obomber.
"Middle-class pay falls, widening income gap" by Sabrina Tavernise | New York Times, September 13, 2012
WASHINGTON — The income gap between the wealthiest 20 percent of US households and the rest of the country grew sharply in 2011, the Census Bureau reported, as the overwhelming majority of Americans saw no gains from a weak economic recovery in its second full year.
Actually, they FELL FURTHER BEHIND -- meaning there NEVER WAS the MUCH BALLYHOOED RECOVERY proclaimed by the crap corporate media!
Income for the top fifth of US households rose by 1.6 percent in 2011, driven by even larger increases for the top 5 percent of households, said David Johnson, the Census Bureau official who presented the findings. All households in the middle of the scale saw declines, while those at the very bottom stagnated.
“You’re really struck by the unevenness of the recovery,’’ said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. ‘‘The top end took a whack in the recession, but they’ve gotten back on their feet. Everyone else is still down for the count.’’
The numbers helped drive an overall decline in income for the typical US family. Median household income after inflation fell to $50,054, a level that was 8 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the recession took hold.
That's a massive hit in your purchasing power, combined with higher food and gas prices.
That drop poses a political challenge for President Obama as he presents himself as a champion of the middle class and defends his economic stewardship in a tightly fought presidential race.
If he's your champion.... (sigh).
The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, is likely to seize on the decline as evidence of the president’s failure to fix an ailing economy. Obama, for his part, has emphasized the potentially damaging effects of Republican policies on the middle class.
Who?
Obama administration officials said Wednesday that more recent data on job growth, unemployment, and wages indicate that median income, adjusted for inflation, is growing this year. They pointed to the rise in income inequality as proof that their policy priorities are even more urgent. Rebecca M. Blank, the acting US commerce secretary, said in a statement that the rise ‘‘underscores the fact we must enact policies that help rebuild our economy not from the top down, but from the middle out.’’
It is an argument that conservatives, who contend that income inequality is not inherently harmful, largely reject.
‘‘Over the long run, the disappearing middle class has moved up, not down,’’ said Douglas J. Besharov, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. ‘‘Too much redistribution will kill the goose that laid the golden egg.’’
Where can I find one of those?
The Census Bureau reported that a standard measure of income inequality, the Gini index, registered the first year-on-year increase since 1993, a surprise for economists who say the measure, which has been rising for some time, usually changes so slowly that a statistically significant rise over the course of one calendar year is rare.
They never get anything right, so why should we listen to them anymore?
Two other of the report’s findings were promoted by the administration as achievements:
■ The share of Americans without health insurance declined, driven by a 2.2 percent drop in the portion of uninsured 19-25 year olds, strong evidence that a provision in Obama’s health care measure that allowed children to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until age 26 is having an impact. The uninsured rate for the nation fell to 15.7 percent from 16.3 percent.
And now that thing is killing full-time work as the premiums and penalties rise. But at least Obama got through the election without it being an issue.
■ The percentage of Americans in poverty remained unchanged for the first time in four years, though economists had expected the rate to rise for a fifth straight year.
What did they do, lower the metric? If we don't call it poverty, problem solved!
‘‘If you have to guess what’s going on, 2011 was the year that we started making real gains in employment,’’ said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan.
And here we are two years later..... (arrrrgggggh!!!!!!!!!!)
Johnson, the census official, said the movement of people from part-time work to full-time work was most likely a major reason the poverty rate did not worsen. The number of people in poverty declined in the South and the suburbs, and among people who were not US citizens.
Related: This Post is Only Temporary
The ma$$ media lies are constant!
“There’s a big shift from part time to full time, and the largest percent increase in full-time work was in the lowest quintile,’’ he said, referring to the bottom fifth of the income spectrum.
A big something, all right!
There were 46.2 million people in poverty in the United States last year, little changed from 2010. That figure represents 15 percent of the population, compared with 15.1 percent in 2010, census officials said, a change that was not statistically significant.
But the data still reflect the bleak state of the US labor market.
But, still, however.... bad words for a report!
Inflation-adjusted median household income fell by 1.5 percent in 2011. During the recovery, about 3 in 5 of the new jobs created have been low-skill and low-wage — taking people off the unemployment rolls and pulling some families out of poverty, but not providing a clear route to the middle class.
That's all you are going to get, Americans. And with the new work visas coming through for the illegals.....
That trend helps explain how the poverty rate could stay flat while the median income went down.
Whatever you liars figure because your figures lie.
Middle-income earners have fared worse in this economy than both lower-income workers and higher-income workers, a phenomenon economists refer to as the polarization of the labor market, Katz said. As a result, income at the middle point of the spectrum went down, while remaining flat at the bottom, something that happened from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, he said.
Meanwhile, the TOP got a BIG BOO$T!
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And as if they weren't taking enough out of your ever-shrinking paycheck:
"Workers bearing more costs of benefits; Employers blame medical pinch" by Todd Wallack | Globe Staff, September 10, 2012
Employers are increasingly asking workers and retirees to pay for some or all of the cost of many benefits — including life, disability, and accidental death insurance — they once took for granted as part of their compensation, according to industry studies.
“This is part of a bigger trend of companies cutting key parts of the total compensation package,” said Shaun O’Brien, assistant policy director for the AFL-CIO labor federation in Washington, D.C. “In many ways we are at a make-it-or- break-it period for the middle class, with all of this cost shifting.”
Already broken.
But insurance executives and consultants say many employers have had to scale back funding for an array of small benefits to offset the rising expense of major medical insurance.
You are going to need that medical for the ass-pounding you are taking.
Nearly 1 in 10 US employers said they might replace one or more benefits that were partly or fully subsidized by companies with so-called voluntary benefits that are completely paid for by employees, according to a 2011 survey by Limra, a life insurance trade group in Windsor, Conn....
Mike Thompson, who leads Mercer’s US voluntary benefits consulting practice, said companies are pulling back primarily because of the soaring cost of medical care....
In some cases, employees may not yet be aware they are paying 100 percent for some benefits, such as vision and dental insurance....
Oh, they will be come aware!
In addition to charging employees more for some benefits, companies have been increasing workers’ share of health insurance costs with higher premiums and copayments. Others have switched to cheaper medical plans that are less comprehensive and have higher deductibles.
But we are all in this together, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Compared with health insurance, however, some employee-paid benefits are relatively inexpensive, particularly for modest levels of coverage. And companies typically offer group plans with steep discounts over what some workers might pay as individuals.
Yeah, somehow it all works out for you workers.
For instance....
It’s also easier to obtain such benefits through an employer. For example....
“It can be a better deal for workers than having to look for it on their own,” said O’Brien....
The move toward employee-paid benefits is also creating opportunities for insurers.
Oooooooooh! Now we $ee what is at the bottom of it!
Sun Life Financial of Canada set up a division in Wellesley this year to step up its sales of “voluntary benefits” to workers. The company added 17 people to the unit’s sales team last quarter alone and plans to hire more.
“We do have fairly aggressive growth goals,” said Bob Klein, Sun Life’s vice president for voluntary benefits. “We saw the trend.”
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"Income inequality seen blocking economic growth; Divide in US is largest since Great Depression" by Annie Lowrey | New York Times, October 17, 2012
WASHINGTON — Income inequality has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression, and the recession has done little to reverse the trend, with the top 1 percent of earners taking 93 percent of the income gains in the first full year of the recovery.
It's even worse than I was told.
The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots — and the political questions that gap has raised about the plight of the middle class — has given rise to anti-Wall Street sentiment and animated the presidential campaign. Now, a growing body of economic research suggests that it might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation in the years ahead, as well.
Not according to Obama!
“Growth becomes more fragile’’ in countries with high levels of inequality like the United States, said Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund, whose research suggests that the widening disparity since the 1980s might shorten the nation’s economic expansions by as much as a third.
Reducing inequality and bolstering growth, in the long run, might be ‘‘two sides of the same coin,’’ research published last year by the IMF concluded.
How ironic that one of the very institutions responsible for wealth inequality is criticizing it.
In the United States, since the 1980s, rich households have earned a larger and larger share of overall income. The top 1 percent earns about one-sixth of all income and the top 10 percent about half, according to statistics compiled by the respected economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.
The concentration of income in the hands of the rich might not just mean a more unequal society, economists believe. It might translate into less stable economic expansions and more sluggish growth.
That is the conclusion drawn by two economists at the fund, Ostry and Andrew G. Berg. They found that in rich countries and poor, inequality strongly correlated with shorter spells of economic expansion and thus less growth over time.
And inequality seems to have a stronger effect on growth than several other factors, including foreign investment, trade openness, exchange rate, and the strength of political institutions.
For developing economies, the channels through which inequality might drag down growth seem clear. Inequality might foster political instability and lead to violence and economic destruction, for instance.
We are almost at the end of that road.
For the United States, such channels are now the subject of intense research, with economists examining whether and how the gap between the rich and the poor fueled the recession and what it might mean.
I don't like agenda-pushing narratives, sorry.
Starting in the 1970s, low- and middle-income households saw their earnings squeezed. They borrowed to improve their standards of living — buying bigger houses than they could afford, and using those houses as piggy banks. Families bet that housing prices would keep rising, making a three-bedroom outside Phoenix a safe store of wealth. But the housing bubble collapsed and took the rest of the economy with it.
Yeah, it's all the fault of the families that bought into the American Dream at the encouragement of Greenspan and the Fed. Nothing about the fraudulent foreclosures or mortgage-backed securities swindle.
Research by Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago has also underscored the importance of deregulation.
‘‘Starting in the early 1970s, advanced economies found it increasingly difficult to grow,’’ he wrote this year. ‘‘The shortsighted political response to the anxieties of those falling behind was to ease their access to credit. Faced with little regulatory restraint, banks overdosed on risky loans.’’
Thus, inequality might help explain the recession and the sluggish recovery after it. But now, economists and policy analysts are facing the thorny and politically freighted question of what US inequality might mean over the next several years.
The recession seems to have cemented the country’s income and wealth inequality, not reversed it. The top 10 percent earn a larger share of overall income than they have since the 1930s.
It hasn't cemented it, it is GETTING WORSE!!! WTF is with the shit journalism?!?!
The earnings of the top 1 percent took a knock during the recession but have bounced back. In contrast, the average working family’s income has continued to decline through the anemic recovery. The distribution of wealth has become more concentrated as well.
There WAS NO RECOVERY! If INCOME FELL there was NO RECOVERY!
‘‘What worries me is the idea that we’re in a vicious cycle,’’ said Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics who has studied inequality extensively. ‘‘Increasing inequality means a weaker economy, which means increasing inequality, which means a weaker economy.”
And you know who is being $avaged!
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Now to my grouping:
"Little mentioned on trail, poverty widening in US" by Bobby Caina Calvan | Globe Staff, September 10, 2012
WASHINGTON — For all the talk by the presidential candidates about producing jobs, fixing the economy, and bolstering the country’s middle class, a dispiriting prospect looms ahead of November’s election: The nation’s poverty rate is poised to rise to its highest level since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his war against it.
New Census Bureau estimates are expected to be released this week, and even a small two-tenths tick upward would push the 2011 rate to the highest level since 1965.
With nearly one in every six Americans now living in poverty, advocates for the poor say little attention is being paid to the issue and express concern over how this fall’s elections could influence government programs meant to aid the poor.
“The political visibility and influence of the poor is now about where it was in the early 1960s, before the war on poverty,” said Christopher Jencks, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Much of the rhetoric and promises of both Mitt Romney and President Obama have centered on rescuing the middle class. The word poverty is seldom heard. Yet the election’s outcome could have a profound effect on the nation’s neediest, particularly regarding plans to trim entitlements and slash such programs as food stamps to ease the strain on the federal budget....
You are getting that anyone, and they didn't pass food stamps this year.
Shortly after his election, Obama pledged to raise the $7.25 an hour minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, so “full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing — things so many people take for granted.”
But he didn’t deliver, and the prospect of renewing that pledge could be political folly....
The list is so long we have run out of room on the paper.
The government’s formula for income includes a person’s earnings, Social Security benefits, pension, and other before-tax income, but excludes food stamps, housing subsidies, and other noncash benefits. In 2011, the government’s threshold for poverty was $10,890 for an individual and $22,350 for a family of four in the continental United States.
And that's low. Try living on that sometime.
The median income for a family of four in Massachusetts is $99,067, according to the US Census Bureau.
In Massachusetts in 2009, the most recent year for state breakdowns, about 655,000 people lived in poverty, or about 10.3 percent of the population....
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Related: Fed is Working For Workers
So WTF happened?
"Leaving a poor place offers well-being, not money, study says" by Carolyn Y. Johnson | Globe Staff, September 20, 2012
In the mid-1990s, thousands of families living in public housing, including nearly 700 adults from some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, took part in a federal housing voucher program designed to determine whether moving families to a less impoverished place would improve their lives.
Oh, that's the answer.
The bold social experiment, called Moving to Opportunity, was intended to put a theory about poverty to the test, using the same kind of rigorous study that is the gold standard in medicine.
Now, a new analysis by a team of social scientists suggests that while the $80 million program did not lift people out of poverty, it made a profound improvement in their happiness.
For every 13-percentage-point decrease in the neighborhood poverty rate, people reported an increase in their well-being equivalent to how they would feel if they had a $13,000 increase in annual income, the authors calculated.
People given vouchers to move to neighborhoods with less poverty also experienced improvements in mental health and a strong suggestion of benefits to physical health.
Their household incomes did not improve, however.
Surprisingly, the level of racial integration in a neighborhood did not matter nearly as much as the rate of poverty when it came to residents’ happiness.
Your kidding? No race hate?
“The bigger the change in poverty that you got through a move, the bigger the improvement in well-being and health,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University who leads the long-term evaluation of Moving to Opportunity.
“If you stay in a poor neighborhood, but it’s more racially integrated, it doesn’t seem to have big effects. . . . Being in a really poor neighborhood has adverse effects, regardless of the racial composition.”
The 15-year study, sponsored by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, began in the early 1990s at a time when urban issues and neighborhoods were a national focus, driven in part by the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
Government was hoping for those after Zimmerman to take your eye off the inequality.
It also presented an opportunity to answer scientific and policy questions that had been mounting since the Victorian era:
Does living in a distressed neighborhood cause residents to have lower education, a greater likelihood of being involved in crime, worse health, and lower economic achievement?
Or do the greater rates of those outcomes reflect something about the people who are drawn to those neighborhoods?
It's your own fault, whatever it is.
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"Want to be generous? Act quickly, Harvard study suggests" by Carolyn Y. Johnson | Globe Staff, September 19, 2012
Want to be a more generous, cooperative person?
Don’t dwell on it. Just be impulsive.
Most people’s gut reaction is to give, according to a study published Wednesday by Harvard scientists. Only upon reflection do they become greedy.
Now we know what went wrong in the money junkies' heads.
To reach that conclusion, researchers teased apart the workings of people’s minds when they’re asked to contribute to the greater good at their own expense.
Even if it is based on lies?
Their findings lay bare a sort of tug-of-war that takes place in our minds between two cognitive systems: one that is quick and intuitive and spurs us to cooperate, and another that is slower, rational, and leads us to look out for ourselves.
“From a philosophical perspective, people have been asking for a long time: Is cooperation our initial impulse? Or are we initially selfish and we have to control our selfish impulses?” said David Rand, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University who led the work....
So which bankers did they study?
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