Category Archives: The Economy

July 25, 2010 · 8:46 pm

Stats Show Shrinking Middle Class

Another extremely interesting- and scary- article from John Aravosis at Americablog:

Click the link for the full source article from the Business Insider via Yahoo:

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-middle-class-is-being-wiped-out-heres-the-stats-to-prove-it-520657.html

Link to John’s AmericaBlog post at the bottom:

Here are the statistics to prove it:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

• 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

• 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.

• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

via AMERICAblog News: Stats show shrinking middle class.

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July 25, 2010 · 8:31 pm

National Journal Magazine – The Gray And The Brown: The Generational Mismatch

Another fascinating article…

I just hope the younger generations continue to vote!

In an age of diminished resources, the United States may be heading for an intensifying confrontation between the gray and the brown.

Two of the biggest demographic trends reshaping the nation in the 21st century increasingly appear to be on a collision course that could rattle American politics for decades. From one direction, racial diversity in the United States is growing, particularly among the young. Minorities now make up more than two-fifths of all children under 18, and they will represent a majority of all American children by as soon as 2023, demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution predicts.

At the same time, the country is also aging, as the massive Baby Boom Generation moves into retirement. But in contrast to the young, fully four-fifths of this rapidly expanding senior population is white. That proportion will decline only slowly over the coming decades, Frey says, with whites still representing nearly two-thirds of seniors by 2040.

These twin developments are creating what could be called a generational mismatch, or a “cultural generation gap” as Frey labels it. A contrast in needs, attitudes, and priorities is arising between a heavily (and soon majority) nonwhite population of young people and an overwhelmingly white cohort of older people. Like tectonic plates, these slow-moving but irreversible forces may generate enormous turbulence as they grind against each other in the years ahead.

Already, some observers see the tension between the older white and younger nonwhite populations in disputes as varied as Arizona’s controversial immigration law and a California lawsuit that successfully blocked teacher layoffs this year at predominantly minority schools. The 2008 election presented another angle on this dynamic, with young people (especially minorities) strongly preferring Democrat Barack Obama, and seniors (especially whites) breaking solidly for Republican John McCain.

via National Journal Magazine – The Gray And The Brown: The Generational Mismatch.

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July 25, 2010 · 3:30 pm

There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’ – Frank Rich

Another great article from Frank Rich in today’s New York Times.  I love the way he uses “Mad Men” and the 1960’s to introduce this…I encourage you to click the link at the bottom and read it in its brilliant entirety.

Here is an excerpt:

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

via Op-Ed Columnist – There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’ – NYTimes.com.

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July 23, 2010 · 6:32 pm

Fourteen Ways to Improve Air Travel

I’m just back from a trip, so I decided to revise and re-run one of my older posts.  It’s still accurate, but I needed to add a couple of points.  I’ve never seen an industry go downhill as fast as the airlines.  They have used 9/11 as an excuse to avoid any attempts at Customer service.  After our tax dollars bailed them out.

Think about that, those of you who don’t want to extend unemployment benefits.  We bail out entire incompetently run businesses, then people complain if we try to help the average person…

One of the reasons I don’t post as often as I might like is that I travel on business about 50% of the time. I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years now and I’ve really seen first hand the decline in quality of life for airline travelers. A lot of it– most of it– is the fault of the airlines, but my fellow travelers are also contributing heavily to the unpleasantness of travel through their own behavior. Here are 10 suggestions I think would improve the process for all of us.

1.Weld all airline seats to a stationary position. I’m tired of some drunken businessman laying in my lap and blocking my reading light all the way across the country.   I never recline my seat.   Not only does this lead to poor posture, I find the seat is even more uncomfortable reclined than upright. Exceptions would be made for overnight flights only.

2. Allow pets in the cabin and put ill-behaved children in the cargo hold in pet carriers. Not only would it deter terrorists if we had numerous dogs loose in the cabin, it would be much more pleasant than having some kid kicking your seat from coast to coast, screaming and crying at the top of their lungs or whining unattractively.

3. Either increase the width of the seat or enforce the policy for severely over weight people to have to buy two seats.   God knows I could lose a few pounds and I hate to say this, but it really makes for an uncomfortable flight if the person next to you taking half of your space.  If you have spent 5 hours hanging halfway into the aisle or unable to move your shoulders because the person next to you takes up so much space, you will know what I mean.

4. Limit carry on bags and enforce the limits. I’m sick and tired of people practically dragging steamer trunks onto 30 seater planes, then seeming amazed that they don’t fit in the overhead.

5. Deliver checked luggage in a timely manner. We now have to pay the airlines to handle checked baggage, so they should handle it quickly. I’m tired of waiting up to 45 minutes after landing for my bags to arrive.

6. Ban carry on food.  Either provide it or sell it, but don’t make me smell a meatball sub for hours in a confined, ill-ventilated space.

7. Define “weather” delays so the airlines don’t use it as a catch-all excuse not to staff or schedule appropriately or pay for hotel rooms for passengers they leave stranded.  I’ve seen the airlines use this excuse too many times when they strand people for several days due to canceled flights when there either is no weather issue or it was several days previous to the delay or cancellation.

8. Don’t let airlines claim an “on time” departure from pushback from the gate. Require it to be when the plane actually is airborne. This would greatly reduce the time spent sitting on planes on the tarmac.

9. Start calling “Flight Attendants” Stewards and Stewardesses again. This might bring their attitudes down a notch and make them a little less uppity and mean.

10.  Ban Flip Flops.  If, god forbid, there were an emergency these fools would cause half the people on the plane to die because they don’t have appropriate footwear.  Just think if there was a fire, crash landing, etc.  Would you want to be crawling over hot, tangled metal shoeless or with little pieces of plastic melted to your feet?  These people would delay the process and endanger everyone on the plane.  This isn’t just a style preference, this is a safety issue.

11.  Make people dress appropriately for travel in all other ways.  If you wear shorts and a tank top on a plane, you should expect to be cold.  Don’t make them turn down the air conditioning so those of us who are dressed appropriately for travel, burn up.

12. Nationalize the airlines and start over by reselling them to someone with a viable new business plan and customer focused strategy. We’ve gone so far downhill, this may be the only true fix….

13.  Remove the requirement that the Airlines be majority US owned.  I’m thinking Richard Branson.  Virgin Atlantic is a wonderful airline.  It seems only American’s no longer know how to run an airline.  Other countries do this much better…either learn from them or let them go ahead and run ours.

14.  Make them clean the damn planes.  I actually found a used diaper in my seat back pocket once.  When the stewards and stewardess come down the aisle to collect trash, I’m thinking we should all start keeping it and throwing it in the floor before we leave.  That may be the only way to force them to clean the planes.  Now, they expect us to do that ourselves, too.

More to come…I’ve got 3 more business trips over the next month or so…

And here’s a look at the way air travel once was:

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July 20, 2010 · 8:53 am

Steak or Veggie Burger: Which is Greener? | Mother Jones

I found this a very interesting article.

Here is an excerpt and a link to the full story at the bottom:

A 2009 study by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology found that while producing a plate of peas requires a fraction of the energy needed to produce the same number of calories of pork, the energy costs of a pea-burger and a pork chop are about equal.

That’s not the only issue with fake meat. Consider the process that keeps your veggie burgers low in fat: The cheapest way to remove fatty soybean oil is with hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and suspected neurotoxin. A 2009 study by the Cornucopia Institute, a sustainable-farming nonprofit, found that Boca, Morningstar Farms, and Gardenburger (among others) market products made with hexane. The finding was enough to turn Cornucopia researcher Charlotte Vallaeys off of fake meat. “I can’t think of a single meat-alternative product where I could explain how every ingredient is made,” she says. “With a grass-fed burger, well, there’s one ingredient. And with grass-fed burgers I actually might be doing something good for the environment.”

via Steak or Veggie Burger: Which is Greener? | Mother Jones.

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July 19, 2010 · 10:29 pm

Some Thoughts on Taxes

Let me start by saying, I’m lucky to have a job.  I’m even more lucky to have a pretty good job.  That means I pay a fair amount of taxes.  And guess what?  I don’t mind it.

I think of it as my civic duty.  I know that is a quaint concept in today’s world, but I think we all have an obligation to contribute to the common good.  That’s  how I view paying taxes.

I like that I am helping to finance education, social security, medicare, libraries, the Arts, mass transit and our public infrastructure.

I wish more of my tax dollars went to these and similar areas of focus and less to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I wish more of my contributions went to safer food and small, family organic farms and less to corporate food providers like Monsanto.  I wish more went to small businesses than to Halliburton and other “defense” contractors.

I wish more of my tax dollars built things and helped the poor and unfortunate and less went to provide tax breaks for the wealthy.

That’s why I get so mad at the Republicans who want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but don’t want to fund unemployment insurance.

It may be time for a little healthy class warfare.   Or at least a healthy discussion…

The rich have brought it on themselves.  And they control the resources to prevail in any battle.  As long as money drives our political system via campaign contributions, they still have the advantage.

But we can still vote and call our elected officials.  We can make it harder t0 vote against working people or people temporarily without work and for the non-working, idle rich.

For every Bill Gates or Warren Buffet who want to help people by sharing their wealth, we have a dozen Paris Hiltons.

It wasn’t always this way.  For example, Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall and countless libraries.  Today, the highest income groups seem to contribute so little.  Wealthy people no longer even have a concept of noblesse oblige.  It’s about “me” and “mine”.

Since the Republicans like to cite scripture for everything, how about Luke 12:48,

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

This sounds like a biblical justification to let the Bush Tax Cuts, that only applied to the very Rich, expire and let the wealthier classes help us retire the deficit they all seem so concerned with and greatly contributed to…via their tax cuts.

If  I’m willing to do my little part, why can’t they?

Instead of focusing on gaming the tax system and extending the Republican philosophy of  “I got mine, screw you”, they need to be contributing to the common good.

It’s their civic responsibility.  And it’s time the Democrats called the Republicans out on this instead of running in fear of the label “class warfare.”

Except for George Bush, most of us know you only declare war as a last resort to protect our way of life.

When people are losing their unemployment benefits, our bridges and roads are collapsing, our internet service is among the world’s worst, kids can’t afford to go to school without amassing a crushing debt load, our energy policy and systems are outdated, mass transit is a joke and all sorts of other issues face us as American’s.  They should be forced to do their part.

Let the Bush Tax Cuts expire.

Paris Hilton and her friends will survive.  They might even be forced to get and create real jobs that contribute to our economy and improve our world.

So much of today’s money was made without creating anything of substance.  What good did hedge funds do for anyone besides the people who bought them and made money betting on other people’s failures?

Let’s get back to building things.  If it takes forcing the rich to pay their share, so be it.

If they had been really contributing all along, we wouldn’t be in this position today…

Read some of the other posts I’ve run from people far wiser than I…

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July 19, 2010 · 10:09 am

The Pundit Delusion

Another great article from Paul Krugman in the NY Times.  Here is an excerpt with the link t0 the full column at the bottom:

The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.

But the only real puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting — who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback — actually matters.

This delusion is, of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama administration’s problem.

What political scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid. Today, Ronald Reagan is often credited with godlike political skills — but in the summer of 1982, when the U.S. economy was performing badly, his approval rating was only 42 percent.

My Princeton colleague Larry Bartels sums it up as follows: “Objective economic conditions — not clever television ads, debate performances, or the other ephemera of day-to-day campaigning — are the single most important influence upon an incumbent president’s prospects for re-election.” If the economy is improving strongly in the months before an election, incumbents do well; if it’s stagnating or retrogressing, they do badly.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Pundit Delusion – NYTimes.com.

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July 18, 2010 · 11:12 pm

Unjust Spoils | The Nation

Great article from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in  The Nation:

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America’s two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.

via Unjust Spoils | The Nation.

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July 18, 2010 · 9:11 pm

Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades, New Data Show — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

How much more proof do people need that the Republicans only support the Rich and the Corporations?

The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007 (the period for which these data are available), according to data the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued last week. Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928.

via Income Gaps Between Very Rich and Everyone Else More Than Tripled In Last Three Decades, New Data Show — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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July 17, 2010 · 3:56 pm

Obama: GOP Blocking Unemployed, Small Business Aid

I’m glad the President is finally starting to call out the Republicans for their stalling tactics.  They are cynically trying to delay the economic recovery in hopes a slow economy will help them in the fall elections.  I just hope people remember they are the ones who got us into this mess…

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says Senate Republicans are playing politics with bills that would extend benefits to the unemployed and increase lending to small businesses.

Striking a deeply partisan tone in his weekly radio and online address, Obama said the GOP leadership has chosen to “filibuster our recovery and obstruct our progress” by blocking votes on agenda items the president says would breath life into the economic recovery.

“These steps aren’t just the right thing to do for those hardest hit by the recession,” Obama said. “They’re the right thing to do for all of us.”

via Obama: GOP blocking unemployed, small business aid – Yahoo! News.

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