Federally Faked Thursday – The Unhappy Median
by phil - May 22nd, 2014 7:58 am
Look at this chart:
LOOK AT IT!!!! This is America, damn it! We peaked out in earnings in 2000 and it's been downhill ever since. Even worse, this is America AFTER the Federal Reserve spent $4 TRILLION to boost the economy. This is America AFTER our Government plunged another $6 TRILLION into debt – supposedly to save jobs and support the economy.
This is a DISASTER! If this were the chart of a company you owned – you'd be selling. If there were a board of directors, we'd be looking to make changes, right? Actually, there is a sort of board of directors and, as is often the case with Corporate Management – they're the only ones making any money!
Only in Washington DC and Dick Cheney's Wyoming are people in this country still making as much money as they were in the good old days (Clinton years). The rest of the country is in various states of decline – some of it fairly drastic – and in big states like Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, where people are earning about 20% less now than they did 14 years ago.
Our standard of living is in decline, especially when you consider that inflation is chewing into those lower wages from the other end as well. How much more evidence can we possibly need that the Bush Tax cuts were a complete and utter policy failure? Yet you will hear none of that in the MSM. What TV station owner or newspaper & magazine publisher is going to tell you that they should be paying 20% more taxes than they are paying now?
There's a reason that, despite the BS Employment Numbers put up by the Administration, that the #1 concern of US voters is JOBS! People may HAVE jobs (actually 20% of the families in our country have NO ONE employed at the moment) but, clearly, from an economic perspective – the jobs suck! Even people lucky enough to keep their jobs through the crisis haven't had raises in a decade but, of course, they are too afraid to leave because we all know people who lost their jobs and didn't find…
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Jobless Thursday – America’s Infrastructure Crisis
by phil - September 9th, 2010 8:13 am
What a disaster!
Not only are our students failing to keep up with the rest of the World but America is close to getting a failing grade in Infrastructure. That’s right, what was once the World’s mightiest and proudest economy, this once great nation of builders has been given an overall grade of D in the American Society of Civil Engineers report on our Infrastructure.
The 2009 Grades include: Aviation (D), Bridges (C), Dams (D), Drinking Water (D-), Energy (D+), Hazardous Waste (D), Inland Waterways (D-), Levees (D-), Public Parks and Recreation (C-), Rail (C-), Roads (D-), Schools (D), Solid Waste (C+), Transit (D), and Wastewater (D-). Awful? Shameful? How about DANGEROUS? Deadly even…
For one thing, The number of high hazard dams—dams that, should they fail, pose a significant risk to human life—has increased by more than 3,000 just since 2007, when there were "just" 1,000 dams at risk and 3,000 to pro actively maintain but the administration refused to fund the project, now the costs have tripled as the situation deteriorates but that’s nothing compared to what happens if just a few of them break completely. 1,819 dams are now in the "high hazard" category and, with the current budget, for every one damn that is reparied, two more become an emergency.
In urban areas, roadway congestion tops 40 percent. According to the report, decades of underfunding and inattention have jeopardized the ability of our nation’s infrastructure to support our economy and facilitate our way of life. At risk of catastrophic failure besides the dams (including levees) are things like our drinking water, sewage systems, bridges, waterways, rail lines, airports, roadways (especially elevated ones) and, of course, our entire electrical grid. Additionally, 7 Billion gallons of clean drinking water is lost every day through leaking pipes – that’s 23 gallons per citizen per day WASTED for want of $11Bn in repairs – don’t bother worrying about it, the last Administration wouldn’t fund it in 2001 or 2006 so why bother now – 10 Trillion gallons later?
The ASCE calculates a 5-year $2.2Tn investment is needed to address the situation, that’s $500Bn (25%) more than it was 5-years ago, when they released their last report and nothing was done by the previous administration. So, rather than having invested in America, putting people to work and improving EVERYONE’s way of life, we spent over $1Tn fighting a war, another $600Bn a year on our regular military operations and gave over $1Tn worth of taxe breaks…
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Suburbs: the Dispersal Defense Against Nuclear Attack
by ilene - July 11th, 2010 1:52 pm
Suburbs: the Dispersal Defense Against Nuclear Attack
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
The roots of suburbia extend deeper into Cold War policy than most of us know.
The built environment (roads, railways, structures and towns/cities) is integral to any understanding of energy, resiliency, fragility, society and the economy. Any discussion of energy consumption must include the fact that roughly half the energy consumed in the U.S. is used to heat and cool buildings. No discussion of transport or economic strength is integrated without an understanding of rail and seaports, and their vast efficiencies.
To mention one example out of hundreds: the construction and marketing of distant suburbs (exurbs) as the ultimate extension of the suburban lifestyle has strained the American family to the breaking point via crushingly long commutes; wage-earners have no time to spend with their children because their waking, productive hours are spent getting to work, working and then crawling home exhausted.
Thus the built environment has a direct causal effect on divorce rates, teenage alienation and the "bowling alone" isolation and ennui that characterizes so much of American life.
A long-forgotten, underappreciated aspect of encouraging widely dispersed suburbs was rooted in Cold War defense against nuclear attack.Planner/correspondent Tom Christoffel alerted me to this fascinating connection between military/defense policy and the effective abandonment of cities in favor of suburbs in the poast-World War II era. Here are Tom’s comments:
RE: The Future of Cities (June 17, 2010):
I think you’d find interesting: The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence by Kathleen A Tobin, Purdue University, Cold War History, Vol.2, No.2, January,2002.
This is an unrecognized if not forgotten history of the roots of sprawl in the U.S. as a defensive measure. The outcome of the defense was similar to that of the attack it was meant to survive – a cratering of the cities.
Although incorporation of the automobile into city design began early in the century, it has been since the 1950’s that American housing, retail and employment sites – the business campus, have been designed for the automobile. Distances are unwalkable and very often there are no sidewalks to connect buildings.
There are very few cities where owning an automobile is optional. Jurisdictions are cities in name and legal structure only. New urbanism is simply an attempt to accommodate the car.
There are
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.