Category: #OccupyWallStreet

How costs have screwed working families

~ susie

Supermarket in Katowice

Whenever you leave Republicans in charge of anything, we’re sure to pay for it:

The picture painted by a report from the Center for American Progress released Wednesday is a gloomy one.

For a typical married couple with two children, the combined cost of health care, day care, housing and savings for college and retirement jumped 32 percent from 2000 to 2012 – after adjusting for inflation. Average income barely rose in that time once you factor in inflation.

The figures marked a sharp change from the preceding 12 years ending in 2000, when average income for a four-person family rose 20 percent, after inflation, and college and health care costs rose more slowly.

Here’s how costs have grown in some key categories:
Continue reading “How costs have screwed working families” →

So much cash, they don’t know what to do with it

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

unclescrooge
I just wonder when we get to that “heads on pikes” moment:

Billionaires are holding mountains of cash, offering the latest sign that the ultra-wealthy are nervous about putting more money into today’s markets. According to the new Billionaire Census from Wealth-X and UBS, the world’s billionaires are holding an average of $600 million in cash each—greater than the gross domestic product of Dominica. That marks a jump of $60 million from a year ago and translates into billionaires’ holding an average of 19 percent of their net worth in cash.

“This increased liquidity signals that many billionaires are keeping their money on the sidelines and waiting for the optimal moment to make further investments,” the study said.Indeed, billionaires’ cash holdings far exceed their investments in real estate. Their real-estate holdings average $160 million per billionaire, or about one-fifth of their cash holdings.

Hits the nail on the head

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Sen Bernie Sanders in Iowa talking Presidential run

Charlie Pierce on the media bobbleheads’ attack on Bernie Sanders:

Bernie Sanders won’t be president? No kidding, Bob. What was your first freaking clue? But, as I said, here’s the thing. Chris Christie won’t be president, either. Rand Paul won’t be president, either. Nobody’s out there in 2014 reminding their supporters that they’ll have to come to their senses some day. There is nobody telling Martin O’Malley’s supporters that they all should lay in some “READY FOR HILLARY” buttons against that inevitable day when the campaign craters. It is not a disqualifying flaw in a candidate two years before the election that the candidate is unlikely to win — or, even, that the candidate is very unlikely to win — because, if it were, nobody would be qualified to run. This is all understood, if rarely spoken, by the people who judge such things. But, so far, it’s a standard that has been openly applied only to Bernie Sanders. (Jesus, there are reporters out there who still are seriously talking about bringing back Willard Romney.) Why is it that Bernie Sanders is only in this to “push the dialogue to the left,” while Ted Cruz, who is a fking nut six ways to Sunday, is running because he has a “substantial constituency within the party”?

What is going on, I believe, is not an effort to marginalize Sanders but, rather, to marginalize what he’s talking about, because making a presidential election purely about class is something we don’t do any more. It really isn’t funny that Sanders talks incessantly about “the middle class,” because people who perceive themselves as middle class are finding themselves broken and sinking into poverty. Income inequality, and its pernicious effects on our people and our politics and our entire culture, is worth discussing, in detail, in a national election, and if Bernie Sanders wants to be monomaniacal on the subject, so what? Rudy Giuliani got months of great press as a potential president out of what Joe Biden famously called, “A noun, a verb, and 9/11.” Nobody accused Giuliani of running merely to push the conversation to the right, or into drag, or whatever. I’m old enough to remember 1979, when the smart money thought Ronald Reagan a superannuated joke. Right now, the 2016 election is nothing more than a vague national conversation about what’s important. If it’s all the same to everybody, for the moment, I’ll treat Bernie Sanders as a potential president the same way I’d treat Hillary Clinton or any of the others, thanks. It’s fking September of 2014. Nothing else makes sense.

Class war

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Hair Cuttery, North Haven, CT 7/2014 by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube #Hair #Cuttery

So here we have biblical values in practice:

Daphne Richards was a full-time manager at a Colorado Chick-fil-A when she received a breast cancer diagnosis in May. She took leave for a double mastectomy and when she had been cleared to return to work, she was shocked when management told her she was being demoted:

Richards’ documents show that not only was she being demoted, she was going from a 40-plus hour work week to a 10-to-15-hour week and her hourly wage was dropping from $14 to $10 per hour.

After the story began gaining attention, management eventually offered to increase her hours, but maintain she was demoted for poor performance and out of concern she wouldn’t be able to handle the work load….

So much for operating the company based on “biblical values.”

I was getting my hair cut the other day, and the woman sitting next to me started tsk-tsking over fast food workers asking for $15 an hour.

“Did you know they already pay McDonald’s workers that much in Europe?” I said. “They can afford it, they’d just rather pay it out in dividends to their stockholders.”

She looked shocked. “Go ahead, look it up,” I urged her. “I think it’s a real shame that people in this country have gotten so used to settling for crumbs that asking for a living wage seems ridiculous to them. If you work hard, you should make enough to pay your bills. Time to get out and vote, boot out these politicians who only want to help rich people.”

My hairdresser nodded. “I’m voting, everyone I know is voting.”

Good. Yes, the Dems aren’t that much better. But they’re still better, and when the economy is bleeding, you have to think in terms of triage.

Absolute horse manure

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

shitshow

Once again, the special interests are sharpening their knives to go after Social Security and Medicare. I mean, Council for Foreign Relations’ “Renewing America” project? The name alone makes me want to puke:

While other large wealthy countries have been cutting their entitlement programs, the United States has left Medicare and Social Security mostly untouched. Recent U.S. budget cuts have instead focused on discretionary spending, which goes toward areas such as education, infrastructure, and research and development—all of which constitute investments in future economic growth.

“By 2040, public debt is projected to top 110 percent, equal to the highest levels reached during the Second World War,” Renewing America Associate Director Rebecca Strauss writes. “And absent any policy changes it will likely keep climbing afterward into uncharted territory for the United States.”

Americans will have to make difficult choices to get the public debt load under control. Sequestration, which took effect in 2013, only affected government spending projected to decline as a share of GDP. Meanwhile, U.S. policymakers left cutting entitlements or increasing tax revenues largely off the table, despite the fact that entitlements will account for nearly all new federal spending in the future.

“Just to slow debt growth to the rate of GDP growth (or a steady debt-to-GDP ratio) from today through 2040, changes to current policy would have to be dramatic: cut entitlements by 10 percent, cut discretionary spending by 23 percent, increase tax revenue by 6 percent, or some combination of the three,” Strauss notes. “Adjustments to actually lower the debt-to-GDP ratio would be even more painful.”

You already know why this is crap, right? I don’t have to explain why all over again?

H/t Price Benowitz LLP.