Eat The Rich 1%! (... And The Next 19% Too)

Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich - NYTimes.com:

As someone that grew up in the lower 50% income strata and now fits in the upper 20% most of the time, this article is great reading. Socialism is never really satisfied until the 99% are "minimally fed, minimally housed, minimally educated (indoctrinated), minimally entertained, and maximally indentured to the perpetual service of the state. Hope is the eternal enemy of socialism, and the left is already WELL down the road to killing it.

The chattering classes and elite assume that they will be in that top 1% with ALL the power, privilege and perks, while the rest of the vermin will be suitably "classless" in all meanings of the word. Turns out that most of them are wrong about making the 1%, but typically they will find that out with a bullet to back of the head, so at least they will never have to admit they were wrong.

This article makes it VERY clear that the top 1% of the current "corrupt system" are not the only ones that have to give, and give mightily -- the other 19% that make up the top 20% have got to surrender as well! Viva La Sameness!

Progressive policies, whether on zoning or school admissions or tax reform, all too often run into the wall of upper-middle-class opposition. Self-interest is natural enough. But the people who make up the American upper middle class don’t just want to keep their advantages; armed with their faith in a classless, meritocratic society, they think they deserve them. The strong whiff of entitlement coming from the top 20 percent has not been lost on everyone else.

This article of course targets the "top 20%", but lets face it, the maw of socialism is not satisfied until there is an absolutely flat hopeless 99% totally unarmed and totally under "public" (1%) control. "Progressive" (regressive) policies have not run their course until 99% of the population is living in concrete mauseleums reeking of urine and standing slack jawed in line waiting the days vodka or weed ration and whatever meager scraps the state feels are a decent diet.

When I was growing up, my father told me that us little people never had a chance -- it was not possible to move up the economic ladder, it was rigged. Many people I knew in my youth believed that, and they likely still do -- such prophecies tend to have a way of being VERY self fullfilling. The elite would like to convince you that the only "just" society is one where only the elite gets to "have their cake and eat it to". And, naturally castigate even their fellow "20%ers" for not being pure enough comrades ... obviously those fools thinking that they can send their kids to expensive private schools and still retain full comrade status are not true to the cause and will be purged.

The only "merit" socialists recognize is being smart and ruthless enough to become one of the overlords like a BO or the Clinton Crime Family. You make any money outside of politics, and you ought not be able to lead because of the "emouluments clause" of the Constitution (man they LOVE obscure pieces of that document when they feel they suit them!) Why "emouluments" is almost as popular with the puppetmasters this year as "misogyny" was last year!

If you are above the bottom 20%, they will be coming for you -- just give them time. Ah, the smell urine, untreated sewage and miscellaneous smoke -- the smell of SOCIALISM!

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Sin, BO, Money

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2017/04/barack_obama_is_taking_400_000_for_a_wall_street_speech_and_that_s_fine.html

I got to hear Mayo's top guy, Dr John Noseworthy, talk at a luncheon this past week -- looks like a CEO from Hollywood casting. Tall, thin, full head of just perfectly grey flecked hair, angular leading man good looks, and oh so smooth as a speaker!

He led off with a little story of silent Cal Coolidge. Cal goes to church, reporter asks him coming out what the sermon was about. Cal says "sin", reporter inquires further on what the minister had to say on that topic. Cal responds "he was against it".

Noseworthy's topic was a  "Strong Diverse Connected Community" ... he was for it. Very effective speaking device. I hope John is a great CEO ... I have a house I want to sell here in the next year or two!

The link is to a Slate article strongly defending BO taking $400K for a speaking fee -- well deserved, W only gets $100K (tsk, tsk). BO's first book post presidency deal is $65 million, that is also a good thing according to Slate. No surprise here ... if it were not for double standards, we know that humans sans religion would have no standards at all. Most everyone loves their own team.

Here is BO on the income topic ... His supporters would no doubt point out that he was indicating limits on what OTHERS should be satisfied with in earnings. As "The One", he is naturally exempt from limits .... being on "the right side of history" has it's privileges.

I got in a little chat with a guy on FB today about some cartoonist in IA supposedly being fired because he complained about CEO pay. I went out and took a look, and the CEO of John Deere makes $16 million a year ... Joe Mauer of Twins fame, $23 million a year, Clayton Kershaw (Dodgers pitcher) is the high in MLB, average salary is $4.5 million.  Noseworthy makes $3.8 million ... less than the average MLB player. Turns out it was last years news ... too old to even  be fake.

I can understand plain old envy -- people just not liking what others make, how good looking they are, their talents, their blessings, their oxen, manservants, maidservants, etc. Covetousness is an old problem ... the answer is to repent, focus on your own blessings and move on.

Who is being "hurt" by CEO or MLB salaries? For the MLB, it is fans buying tickets and possibly consumers buying products that are advertised when games are televised. For CEOs, it is the SHAREHOLDERS, not the employees -- they are not going to receive more salary because the business KNOWS pretty much what they contribute to the bottom line. Here is an article on this if you don't already understand it. 

Even if we assume that CEOs are all overpaid, the pay is not money taken unfairly from other workers. Rather, the undeserved pay is being taken from shareholders. When corporate boards overpay a CEO, it is shareholders who lose because profits that could have become either shareholder dividends or capital gains are instead going into the pocket of the CEO.

Do the fans and the shareholders feel hurt? Not as long as their highly paid star is performing.

Most of the CEOs are actually "progressives" as well ... so we have the odd case where "progressives" hate their own because in general they are unaware they are on their side -- like Oprah, BO, or "The Clinton Fund' (funds ... for Clintons). As the Slate article thinly disguises, what is important is for young "progressives" to understand that as long as they follow "progressive" dogma, both wealth and women are on the list of perks!

Christ died for the whole sorry bunch of us. He even dined with tax collectors -- the lowest of the low  in those times. Making the money, casting the stones, puffing up our chests in pride because what **WE** make is EARNED ... oh, and JUDGEMENT! We love to judge others!

Filthy rags -- that is what we are best at.

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Gigapixel Trump Inauguration

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/

One of the rather amazing things of our time is the ability to shoot a picture with a BILLION pixels! You can click the link and go look around at the various people ... kinda funny to see some of the expressions and how much you can zoom in. I don't really care about the numbers. As the picture shows there were LOTS of people there, and LOTS of red "Make America Great Again" hats.

When I think of the effort required to attend such an event, it makes me realize that a LOT of people are a whole lot more dedicated to poltics than I am -- which I see as GOOD in both senses. It's great they care enough to be there, and it is especially great that I and millions of others feel we don't have to care that much. That is what freedom looks like.

America was a land of LIMITED GOVERNMENT, which meant that the level of intrusion of government on anyone's life was intened to be LIMITED. Both in the ability of the government to give you what you want and to force others to give it to you was to be strictly limited. Since the government does not produce anything, certainly not wealth, that is really the only question that needs to be considered. Who makes and who takes.

If the government has enough power to "give" you more than it takes from you for "some charge" to you, the only way that can happen is when it TAKES what is "given" to you from somebody else.

When you go to the grocery store, you understand the transaction fairly well -- you walk around the store, pick up what you want, and then pay for it as you leave. The money you pay keeps the store operating and returns some level of profit to the company running the store after the store has paid for it being built, keeping the lights on, employees to stock and do check out, and of course a large part of what you paid goes to the whole system that moves the products from farmers, fishermen, bakers, processors, etc  through processing plants, trucking, packaging, advertising, etc, etc.

Everyone in that system makes some level of profit from what they do -- usually very low single digit percentages ... for groceries, it can be LESS than 1%, since 1% is the average. So if one guy owns the grocery store / chain, he needs to do 100 million dollars of business a year if he wants to have million dollar income.

Yes, some of what you pay in taxes goes for the government to make sure everyone "plays fair" and "plays safe" ... the folks that built the store, provided the power, grew the food, processed the food, etc, etc all live under some level of "regulation". Regulation is pure overhead, if everyone was honest, dedicated, competent, etc, there would be no need for regulation. Some of the money for regulation comes out of everyone's taxes, some of it you paid at the checkout because it was a "cost of doing business"  for the myriad of "farmers, processors, truckers, etc" that it took to get those products on the shelf.

When Obama was elected, the vast majority of the people in the crowd were hoping that he would tip the scales so that they were going to GET more from the government than they had gotten in the past. I'm quite certain that the vast majority of people standing in red hats assumed that Trump was going to shift the balance so that the govenment TOOK less from them and the rest of the country on the assumption that lowering the overhead of govenment would allow them to keep more in their pockets, and hopefully GROW the overall economy at a higher rate than it has in the last 8 years so that the entire pool of wealth to be spent, re-distributed, wasted, invested, etc was greater.

That isn't a very high bar. Obama was the first US president in history to never have a year of 3% growth or better, and even that pitiful level was highly suspect given the amount of changes he made in how the calculations are done. My guess is that there was very close to ZERO actual growth if the lowered value of money (inflation from "stimulus", "quantitative easing", deficit spending, etc) was accurately figured in.

So did less people show up to support the opportunity to MAKE more than showed up in '08 to TAKE more? All the people that told us that Trump would certainly lose tell us that is that case. In many ways, I hope they are right -- if there is more opportunity now, it is better to be out creating wealth than standing and watching the new guy be installed to try to make that happen!

Davos, Eight Billionaires vs Half the World

Eight billionaires 'as rich as world's poorest half' - BBC News:

So 8 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet. They are:

1. Bill Gates (US): co-founder of Microsoft (net worth $75bn)
2. Amancio Ortega (Spain): founder of Zara owner Inditex (net worth $67bn)
3. Warren Buffett (US): largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (net worth $60.8bn)
4. Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico): owner of Grupo Carso (net worth $50bn)
5. Jeff Bezos (US): founder and chief executive of Amazon (net worth $45.2bn)
6. Mark Zuckerberg (US): co-founder and chief executive of Facebook (net worth $44.6bn)
7. Larry Ellison (US): co-founder and chief executive of Oracle (net worth $43.6bn
8. Michael Bloomberg (US): owner of Bloomberg LP (net worth $40bn)

They are likely all at Davos this week, and in general, while the media might report the 8  having the same wealth as about 3.75 billion people, they are all pretty well liked. Ellison maybe not so much, but Gates, Buffett, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Bloomberg are seen as "decent progressives" that support "the right causes".

Bloomberg is kind of an interesting case. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about his wealth:

In March 2009, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $16 billion, a gain of $4.5 billion over the previous year, enjoying the world's biggest increase in wealth in 2009.[25] At that time, there were only four fortunes in the U.S. that were larger (although the Wal-Mart family fortune is split among four people). He had moved from 142nd to 17th in the Forbes list of the world's billionaires in only two years (March 2007 – March 2009).[26][27] In September 2013, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth as $33 billion and ranked him as the 13th richest person in the world. In March 2012, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $22 billion, ranking him 20th in the world and 11th in the United States.[14] In September 2015, his net worth was $43.3 billion, ranking him the 6th richest person in the United States

Bloomberg happened to be Mayor of NYC in 2009, which was NOT a very good year in the Stock Market, and he ALSO enjoyed the worlds largest increase in wealth in 2009.

I'm wondering if Trump enjoys the world's largest increase in wealth in any of the years of his presidency if it might hit the press at all? Probably not ... we know they are "fair and balanced". Strangely, I could find nothing on the business genius that Bloomberg had run all his businesses when he fully divested to be Mayor? They must have been a real financial wizard to have him enjoy the WORLDS biggest increase in wealth in '09!

This sort of thing is what knuckle dragging Trump supporters and stupid Brexit types get angry about. As I've mentioned before, Davos man wants to see the masses of Americans drastically "lower their expectations for life" as I've written of before.

See, our betters in TP ("The Party"(D)" and the MSM know what would be better for us, and they LOVE the Davos sorts. Those folks are "the right kind of rich" -- no need to put any taxes or controls on THEM!

Get right with TP and your heart is right! When your heart is right, you can be fabulously wealthy, have all sorts of women (or even children as evidenced by Jeffrey Epstein and Slick Willie) ... you "rule the world", and all you have to do is agree with TP!

Well, that, and realize the set of you that actually rules the world is EXCEEDINGLY small!

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Political Psychology

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-is-he-thinking/201612/the-decline-empathy-and-the-appeal-right-wing-politics

Readers of this blog will generally lose interest well before the end of the linked Psychology Today article and throw up their hands. They aren't wrong, the article is a great example of the depth of the difference in world view that we face in BOistan, but I soldiered on.

One of our giant problems is the loss of philosophy and the attempt to replace it with psuedoscience. Science about creating hypotheiss and MEASUREING results. If it can't be measured, it isn't science. Science can't recognize human consciousness, love, empathy or beauty because they can't be measured.

The "soft sciences" like Psychology, Political Science, Anthropology, etc use statistics which is a branch of mathametics, a TOOL of science (which is also a tool) to give itself the patina of "scientific authority". Scienfic authority itself is a complicated subject -- "works as designed so far with no promises for the future" is the authority. Much like the turkey two days before Thanksgiving giving a 99.999% statistical confidence interval to the assertion that "humans are benevolent creatures that care for turkeys", sometimes there can be surprises in the future.

The purpose of the article is really accomplished in the headline "right bad/childish/foolish/etc", left good/adult/smart/.etc" ... "proven by science"! So lots of ink is wasted on "empathy", "still faces" (uncaring people), family stress, inequality, etc until we get to this fine paragraph.

The right-wing media machine, one that has reached its zenith in the Trump campaign, has stoked the fires of the scapegoating reflex that always seems to lie just beneath the surface of the psyches of victimized whites. Thus, it’s important to pause and recognize that the propagandistic xenophobia of the Right has helped propagate the deep story that Hochschild so empathetically tells.

The "deep story" is that the middle class feels like the US economy isn't moving and that minorities and even "environmental concerns" are "cutting in line" ahead of them. As the above paragraph indicates, they have been "manipulated". The following paragraph lets us know that Robin Hood, Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders have the answer, one must "take from the greedah and give to the needah".

Wilkinson and Pickett’s research on the harmful effects of economic inequality should force us to make redistribution the centerpiece of our political program, just as it was for Bernie Sanders. Their research clearly shows us that greater equality itself can ameliorate a wide range of suffering. And the fact that our society disconnects us from each other means that we have to seek common ground with the people on the other side of what Hochschild calls the “empathy wall” and communicate to them that we not only feel their pain, but share it, and that, in the end, we are all in this together.

This sort of writing is not all that interested in much in the way of "facts" (to the extent that such things exist anymore outside the domain of the hard sciences). Income inequality has been going up since the early '80s no matter which political party was in power. The following chart from here.

Our eyes are of course drawn to the red top line, and the headlines admonish us to look there. Let's just not be manipulated for a moment and consider if how Stephan Curry or Lebron James play basketball has much to do with the rest of us. Look at the blue, tan, and yellow lines. First, they are NOT correlated with the red! The fortunes of the 1% rose and fell with primarily the stock market. Were we to look at the blue, we would likely find that stocks were also a component of their fortunes.

THE BIG NEWS looking at this chart ought to be that Trump and his primary supporters are RIGHT!  Whatever policies have been initiated and maintained since '80 have resulted in middle 60% and the bottom 20% having nearly identical economic results for the past 35 years! Is that what we want to see?

Why do we NOT want to see the bottom 20% stay at inflation adjusted flat income? Would we not rather see the 60% grow a little more showing some incentive for work?

My purpose here is not to go into economic policy, but to point out what I see on a regular basis by exposing myself to the MSM.

• "science" is regularly trotted out to support left wing ideas without so much as a tiny shred of factual data being shown.
  
• the left constantly tells themselves that "the 1%" and the "right wing" are the problem, which factual data shows to be completely wrong.
  
  The 1% is pretty much disconnected from the rest of the population -- they are CEOs, financiers, movie stars, sports heros, the Clintons,  etc ... their lives are not the lives of the other 99%, nor will they ever be. Here, in North Korea, China, Cuba, or anywhere.
  
  Most of the trends of the last 35+ years continue through all types of poltical administration. Technology may be driving them. Poltical decisions made prior to 1980 might be driving them (mass immigration, FICA, Medicare, welfare, etc), or something we are not seeing -- but the answer really doesn't appear to be either the 1% or the right wing.
  
• Previous bullet notwithstanding, the left wing position of "the 1% and the right wing" is loud and CONSTANT. The MSM and "The Party" (TP-D) certainly at least seems to believe it fervently. For many on the left, this belief is as strong as any religious belief held in any world religion, because it IS a religious belief in Secular Humanism. 

Celebrating a Fine Sowell

National Review:

Thomas Sowell has decideed that 86 is old enough to stop writing his weekly column. Though I respect and understand  his decision, but I mourn it. In my mind he is finest current conservative mind on the planet. He would be the first to tell you that there are no irreplaceable men -- I yeild to his wisdom, but he feels irreplaceable to me just the same.

Over at National Review, they are having a retrospective that is well deserved. If only Sowell had been our first Black President rather than BO, the world would be much brighter today! The following is from the excellent column linked above and I think makes a giant point that is easy to miss. Even a brilliant mind like Sowells, studying under one of the leading lights of economic freedom, Milton Friedman, was still a Marxist after studying under Friedman! It was EXPERIENCE that showed Sowell the way the world really was. Had he remained an academic, he would likely be a Marxist still.

"The young man from Harlem earned degrees at three elite institutions: Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. It was at the third of these that he got his Ph.D. in economics. “I was a Marxist when I went to the University of Chicago, and I was still a Marxist after I took Milton Friedman’s course.” Incidentally, he holds the Rose and Milton Friedman chair at the Hoover Institution. “But just one summer as an economics intern in Washington got rid of all of that.” Sowell worked in the Labor Department, in the Wage and Hour Division. He was interested in whether minimum wages helped the poor by raising their pay or hurt them by denying them jobs. He found that the personnel around him were interested in other things: namely, the preservation of their own jobs, and the perpetuation of government programs. “Government has its own incentives,” he says. He was on his way as a conservative and free-marketeer."

Collectivism often sounds good in theory, but to date it has always failed miserably in practice. Some watered down versions like FICA and Medicare in the US have seemed to last a good long while, but they come with the "feature" of an ever increasing unpaid liability hanging over our heads -- currently something on the order of $130 TRILLION dollars and rising. Europe and Japan have similar programs and all three have been saddled with poor grouth for  16 (Europe and the US), and 26 years (Japan). While academics and government bureaucrats would be loath to admit it, it is just barely possible that a $130 trillion (US alone) ecomonim sword haning over your head just might slow growth a bit!

Sowell understood that good advice was good advice -- even if it came from a white guy. I loved this paragraph.

And Sowell thinks back on a “crucial point” in his own student career. He was in his very first semester at Harvard. And his roommate said, “Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?” Sowell thought, Goofing off? But I’m going full-bore! When the midterm grades came out, he had two D’s and two F’s. Then he knuckled down. Today, he says the following about his roommate (who became a math professor): “His lighting a fire under me is probably the only reason I graduated” — which he did magna cum laude. He adds a comment about our present America: “How many white students are going to tell a black student, ‘Why don’t you stop goofing off and get some work done?’ Oh, heavens.” These students would be hauled up before deans, “at the very least.”

Can anyone deny that in a unniversity today, Sowell is correct? Why the ONLY reason that a white student could be doing better than a black today is "white privilege".  A short time reading Sowell will convince any white person that "white privilege" doesn't allow many white people's names to be uttered in the same sentence as Sowell's relative to intellectual capacity and wisdom!

I definitely realize it HAS been my distinct privilege to read the words of Thomas Sowell. I thank our creator and the tireless efforts of Dr Sowell for allowing me that opportunity!

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Solving The BOcare, Medical Care Crisis

http://www.hoover.org/research/how-cure-health-care-0

By the time you get to the end of this post, you will know how to fix the healthcare system.

This post is important -- we need a little background Friedman that PJ O'Rourke has enhanced to stick in our brains first relative to how money is spent. This is taken from his book "Don't Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards!"

I think we all intrinsically understand the preceding -- it makes a REAL difference whose money any person is spending and it makes a real difference who it is being spent on!

Now on to Milton Friedman on healthcare (I recommend you read the whole linked column, but I'm doing cliff notes here in case you are not going to). Milton has astutely observed that as technology has advanced in medicine, people in the developed world have paid more and more for health care, yet are generally less satisfied. Advances in technology in other areas (cars, tv, cell phones, the internet) have produced LOWER costs and GREATER satisfaction!

Rapid technological advances have occurred repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution—in agriculture, steam engines, railroads, telephones, electricity, automobiles, radio, television, and, most recently, computers and telecommunication. The other two features seem unique to medicine. It is true that spending initially increased after non-medical technical advances, but the fraction of national income spent did not increase dramatically after the initial phase of widespread acceptance. On the contrary, technological development lowered cost, so that the fraction of national income spent on food, transportation, communication, and much more has gone down, releasing resources to produce new products or services. Similarly, there seems no counterpart in these other areas to the rising dissatisfaction with the delivery of medical care.

So apparently, having 3rd parties -- employers, insurance companies and government buy our healthcare has provided us with a very expensive off color Yugo healthcare -- and we are surprised? But it's worse than that -- because government is involved.

Some years ago, the British physician Max Gammon, after an extensive study of the British system of socialized medicine, formulated what he called "the theory of bureaucratic displacement." He observed that in "a bureaucratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like ‘black holes,’ in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of ‘emitted production.’" Gammon’s observations for the British system have their exact parallel in the partly socialized U.S. medical system. Here, too, input has been going up sharply relative to output.

Why is government different? It combines typical human hubris and incompetence with monopoly power -- in fact,  potentially total coercive power.  How to escape from this morass, now made much worse by BOcare? Well, the "perfect solution" would be:

The ideal way to do that would be to reverse past actions: repeal the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care; terminate Medicare and Medicaid; deregulate most insurance; and restrict the role of the government, preferably state and local rather than federal, to financing care for the hard cases. However, the vested interests that have grown up around the existing system, and the tyranny of the status quo, clearly make that solution not feasible politically. Yet it is worth stating the ideal as a guide to judging whether proposed incremental changes are in the right direction.

 So what does this all mean in simple easy to understand terms?

1. Like all goods, medical care WILL (and always has been) be "rationed" -- supply and demand are a form of rationing, as are long waits. The government decides on the waits, like having less MRI machines for the country than Mayo has with waits of 12 - 18 months. My wife would likely be a quad in Canada, but their healthy people LOVE their system! (the number of healthy people exceeds the number of sick people -- so socialized medicine is politically astute ...  note "insane evil pig" above )
   
2. 80/20 rule, 80%+ of medical care can be "WalMart, Target, Bloomies" levels of care -- basic physicals, high blood pressure, thyroid issues, diabetes, throat cultures, standard pregnancy/delivery -- People need to pay for 80% of their health care out of pocket, just like their groceries and gasoline.
   
   You buy the level you can afford when you are hurting -- and it is cheap because there is competition, and very limited liability. It is like buying normal groceries -- not steak, certainly not caviar. Just like when your car breaks or house needs a new roof, you either have savings to handle those "unexpected expenses", or you are forced to use credit. If you are really poor, you go seek state assistance, or to to the "medical shelf" (like the food shelf).
   
3. When really bad things happen -- cancer, trauma, heart attack, stroke, etc, "Cirrus Vision Medicine" kicks in -- note, I didn't say "Gulf Stream, Trump's plane, or Air Force One" level of medicine. The Cirrus Vision is a very advanced JET plane ... but it isn't "snotty". You can't afford the Cirrus level either, but just like fire insurance, you pay a premium for a policy so you are not RUINED ... it costs more than your fire insurance because the odds of you eventually getting bad sick are higher, and the care is going to cost more than replacing your house.
   
   You DO "notice it" -- Some number, say "20% of your net income" is yours to pay. Serious illness ought to be financially like having your home burn down -- a really bad thing (which it WILL be anyway, because serious health issues are MUCH more than just financial). 

A lot of this unfortunately assumes that we re-educate people on some of the basic facts of life that our political and educational system have hidden from us so they can shear us. 

1. "Single Payer" means that if you are a person that uses only public housing, public transportation, public health, etc today, you will likely LOVE it! If not -- like if you have your own home, car, etc, then you will also find that you need to have your own healthcare. You will pay dearly for the "public option", and THEN  unless you are REALLY wealthy, you will pay hyper-dearly for the "private option" that you actually use -- if you can afford it at all. Increasingly, many of us that bought into the old "American Dream" will finally fall into a frayed, stinking, 10-20 people to a ward slum of healthcare like the VA (the "public option" poster child), and find that we are dying in BOistan. 
2. Single Payer" isn't ... it is "paid by all taxpayers present and future". It is one stop lobbyist stop for those getting the money. They know who to pay off, take on junkets, provide good stuff for, etc. No need to deal with slimy "customers" (patients) anymore ... they are not paying anyway! If DC is happy, it's all good. If your business ever had a "large users group", imagine a "ONE users group"! How well did your business treat the customers that were not "large" compared to the big spenders? Imagine only a single real customer that determined your entire financial picture as a healthcare provider and you will start to get the idea. 
3. There is NO free lunch! Somebody is paying -- maybe not you, but somebody. Your neighbor, your kids, your grandkids, SOMEBODY (and likely not the "really rich guy" -- he has lawyers and tax accountants that he pays instead). When you don't understand that, most likely you AND everyone else is paying WAY more than you realize for your "free lunch", which is exactly the case for healthcare. "Free goods" are insanely expensive!
4. NEVER insure against losses that you can self-insure for! Yes, this means NEVER purchase the "extended warranty"! Assuming that the warranty is actually going to cover things that actually might happen (a BIG assumption!), someone is betting that they will make money by you purchasing the warranty, and they have LOTS more information than you have about the transaction and odds! Just like Vegas, they are "the house", and rule #1 is that the house wins! They have to, otherwise they would not be in business!
5. 
   Note, this applies DOUBLE to "don't have the (federal) government pay for people's food, car repairs, or basic medicine". The government is REALLY "the house", and they will take A LOT of pounds of your taxpaying flesh as they seek to pad their pockets and buy votes to stay in power! If government MUST be involved in chairity (it ought to be neighbors and churches), then it starts LOCALLY and as failure happens, the funding needs to take longer and longer expensive trips to the state and federal capitols so that 20-30-40 cents can return to do good deeds.
   
6. "The Government" is not "magic", and certainly not "god". Yes, it can promise to rob from your neighbor to give you things like healthcare, but it will also certainly charge a hefty fee for it's larceny "service". Since it is robbing though,  it WILL also rob from you, your children and your grandchildren as well. You asked it to be a robber, do you REALLY think it is going to be an "honest robber"?
7. Robbing for a "really good reason" is still robbery. If the reason is THAT good, reasonable people will want to invest in it, or even gift the money. The corruption engendered by deciding that it is morally OK to take money from others by force fits well with the "morality" that it is OK to take the life of another person for your own convenience. When you are willing to kill for convenience, or even allow such killing,  morality is over. (killing for convenience is another name for abortion -- as in the abortion of all moral standing, meaning that if you trust any person or organization (eg US Government) that supports abortion, you are insane and deserve whatever happens to you)
8. Once institutions are robbing people, there is no such thing as "reasonable", or "limited" because "institutions" ARE people  -- real imperfect standard issue people. Not "public servants", or some other sainted term. When your day to day job is robbing a set of people to hand the money to another set of people so they will keep you in power, you are going to want to keep some loot for yourself, and you will find a "legitimate" way ... or your union will.
   
   Since you have already convinced yourself that charging people vastly different rates based on income for redistribution is "moral", "progressive" even, it is much easier to see how you absolutely "deserve" a higher salary, cushy benefits like super health care yourself, full salary retirement at a young age "indexed for inflation", shorter work hours, more vacation, total job security, etc, etc) ... all of these are either "in" or "in sight" for unionized government workers see (AFSCME) 

The whole Friedman article is WELL worth reading. We COULD solve our healthcare issues in the next year or two -- I only hope that Trump and his advisors are looking at this sort of information! 

American Amnesia, 1/3 Through

https://www.amazon.com/American-Amnesia-Government-America-Prosper/dp/1451667825

I'm only 1/3 of the way through this pompous and ridiculously wordy leftist tome, but the thought has occurred to me that I may have been snookered. Supposedly, a lefty acquaintance read it, was really impressed, and was willing to read Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" in a sort of a "ideological exchange". I'm hoping he didn't this book ... at least not too closely, and perhaps was feeling bad because some of his friends had so figured he would snooker me into reading it and writing a review to save him a lot of time wading through turgid prose.

The big picture summary so far seems to be (unsurprisingly) that "Government is God" ... little events like industrial revolutions, world wars, mass communication, computers, the internet, etc have minimal effects. The key to everything is a properly balanced "mixed economy" -- with government being the senior, virtuous, intelligent partner in the decidedly unequal "partnership" with greedy capitalists, biased research not properly funded via tax dollars, etc.

Ergo, the success of the US from 1946 - 1970 is PROOF that a properly balanced "Golidlocks"  mixed economy is what made this country rich! Simple.

The other leading world economies being bombed to ashes while we were unscathed save Pearl Harbor, and thus supplying damned near everything for their remaining populations to recover isn't mentioned -- so clearly not a factor. That time period being the rollout of all sorts of technologies, plus a burst of growing children (us, the vaunted "boomers") was also not a factor. Keep repeating GOVERNMENT!

Unsurprisingly, the book seems to lack a single chart (I have the Kindle version, so maybe that is the issue). You see the mixed economy was "balanced" until sometime around Reagan, and it has been grossly too small since then, thus accounting for all our problems -- well except for PeterPeterson and Ayn Rand, but I haven't gotten to the conclusion of their nefarious deeds yet. That is why you see in the following chart the huge and continuing drop in government spending as a percentage of GDP starting around 1980:

You don't see it? Well then obviously you are not a liberal, and likely under the influence of Ayn Rand or Pete Peterson -- perhaps you should seek psychiatric care. I must confess, I seem to have a similar issue. I'm guessing that means I'm a clear victim of "amnesia" -- perhaps the use of data and charts is a symptom?

Well, in my obviously incorrect world, government as a percentage of GDP has actually GROWN steadily! From just over 20% to just short of 40% today. To the extent it was "balanced" from 1945 to 1980 and we became amnesic about it, the proper level of spending would be "20-25% of GDP". Strange. 

Oh, they seem to think that MORE REGULATION will help ... so that must be much lower. Hmm ... 2015 was a record year for federal regulation, surpassing the old record set in 2010. Admittedly, that was a "scant" 81,611 pages -- expertly rolled out by an administration brilliantly led by Obama. I'm sure each of those highly effective contributions to the proper functioning of our mixed economy was a gem of great value! 

Now it could well be that pages of regulation as a percentage of population, GDP, or unicorn farts IS actually out of it's "proper mix". However,  other than "more, more, more", being nefariously blocked by Randian Republicans cruel and foul, actual assertions about "what is the goldilocks amount" (mysteriously achieved from 1946 - 1975) remains a mystery not deemed worthy of revelation in this lengthy tome. 

What IS very obvious to me at this point is that the authors of the book are very much in the "unconstrained" vision where the latest is the greatest (unless a Republican gets elected) and more government is ALWAYS better -- data and charts are a distraction. They are so smart that anyone not feeling grateful for their efforts in explaining all this is clearly a Neanderthal and likely voted for Trump. I did --- mea culpa, mea culpa! 

On to the rest of this brilliant treatise ... I'm sort of imagining a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" plot where Pete Peterson conjures the spirit of Ayn Rand and they hypnotize most of the population of the US to use numbers and data and such to attempt to understand reality -- thus becoming "amnesic" about the TRUE reality being described in the book. 

Well, back to the excitement! 

**** I am sort of joking -- I think the "slight" point they missed (or more likely just left out) is that the Democrat purchase of votes via FICA, medicare, BOcare, etc is sucking up way too much of the total government cash now and they need VASTLY more money to support the house of cards "entitlements", PLUS reign in those nasty capitalists. The actual "properly balanced mix" for "liberals" always ends up being 100% government control and guys like me either at room temperature or sitting in a gulag on the N slope of Alaska munching rat in a tent. 

BOnomics In 9 Charts

These Are The 9 Zero Hedge Charts Showing "Obama's Recovery" That Angered The Washington Post | Zero Hedge:

If Trump keeps speaking "Truth to Power" like this, Jeff Bezos and the WaPo may have a hemorrhage!

You can read the article -- bottom line, economic life sucks in BOistan, WaPo doesn't like that reported, so they would like to change the facts.

Don't worry, the facts always win eventually!









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The 5,000 Year Government Debt Bubble

The 5,000-Year Government Debt Bubble - WSJ:

When the international financial house of cards finally comes tumbling down it should be a surprise to no one. Governments have worked very hard to dig this hole, and anyone that cared to look realizes that "voting themselves benefits they can't pay for" is the normal end of "democracy". Even NPR sees this hole.

Mr. Sylla sums it up: “There were no negative bond yields in 5,000 years of recorded history.” 

Put another way, government bonds have never been so expensive.Paul Singer, founder of hedge fund Elliott Management, isn’t expecting a happy ending. He believes that because of massive entitlement promises plus huge debt, “the entire developed world is insolvent.” He says that a negative rate on a government bond is “crazier than zero, and zero was crazy enough.”

Thus we live at a time with slowing or slowed economies, but people largely still living a lifestyle that could only be afforded by rapidly growing economies.

It’s not as if the bond bubble is fun while it lasts. It’s painful for savers and corrosive for society to have governments systematically punishing thrift. It also encourages reckless governments to spend further beyond their means when they are rewarded for borrowing in this way. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the government-engineered bond bubble hasn’t delivered the promised economic growth. Who can confidently invest when the official price of credit appears to be so dishonest?

Corrosive, corrupt, clandestine, coercive,  catatonic,  criminal ... CLINTON!
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PBS On Quantitative Insanity

Column: The monetary bubble to end all bubbles is coming | PBS NewsHour:

We've been over the fantasy of "Quantitative Easing" a few times, but this Yogi Berra quote might help put the issue in common terms.

Yogi Berra famously said he wanted his pizza cut in four slices instead of eight. His “logic” was that he didn’t want to gain weight by eating a lot of slices. However, what matters is not the number of slices, but the total amount consumed.

I use this same "logic" with Fosters 24oz "oil cans". I enjoy Fosters beer and for some reason (conspiracy against me is the reason I believe), it is only available in 24 oz cans. So I like to say that "I've cut the number of cans of beer I drink in HALF!". I can also use the same excuse that "big economies" use -- I'm pretty much twice as big as everyone else, so my beers ought to be as well!

The article is from PBS, so they use "missiles in Afghanistan" as their "government good", but readers of this blog know that it would be FAR better to use "money transferred to voting blocks to buy votes" as the "good" -- over 3/4 of our budget, and those of the Europeans and Japanese as well is the transfer of money from young to old and successful to unsuccessful. The article also doesn't point out that ON TOP of the trillions in printing, all those governments are piling on trillions in debt!

... printing more money does not alter the size the economy; it simply reduces the value of each dollar. The seductive aspect of having the Fed pay for government expenditures is that, unlike taxes, the cost of printing money is invisible. Almost no one is even aware that they have paid for part of a drone strike.

"Fiat currency" -- what we call "money" has no intrinsic value, it is PURELY a "medium of exchange". It's "value" is constantly changing, relative to the price of EVERYTHING. We commonly see gas prices and say "the price of gas went up/down", but in fact it is equally true that the "value of our money relative to gas went up/down".

I've been talking about the "government bubble" for years now, and after a career in IBM I realize to a SMALL DEGREE how long disaster can be staved off in something large. IBM was around a 100 billion dollar a year in revenue company. It takes a long time for something that large to completely die even with horrible mismanagement. The US federal government is around $4T a year, PLUS it has a whole bunch of people here and around the world that would really really like for it not to fail. BUT, even though it is large, it isn't infinite, nor is it "magic".

Governments have two ways to pay for their expenditures. They can take the money from their citizens through fees and taxes. Or they can have the central bank create new money. (Borrowing the money can be thought of as a third way, or it can be viewed as simply deferring the choice between taxing and printing).

Rather boring isn't it? In fact, government is not magic AT ALL! It actually only has ONE way to pay for expenditures -- IT TAKES MONEY FROM IT''S CITIZENS!!!! Taxes are right up front -- the government takes your money. Borrowing takes either your money or your children's money in the future (with interest), printing money lowers the value of every dollar in existence. No magic -- everything the government promises to you is paid for by citizens.

Naturally, the government attempts to hide this any way they can, and they ALWAYS try to tell you that SOMEONE ELSE WILL PAY! ... "the rich, the banks, the corporations, ...". But of course they won't -- the rich, the banks, the corporations HAVE THE POWER. They ARE "The Party" (TP-D) The Clinton foundation alone takes in over $200 million every year! They are the ones primarily benefitting from the giant Ponzi scheme!

"So the ECB program transfers money from European savers to the largest, richest companies in the world. What was the response to the ECB’s bond buying plan? Was there outrage at this transfer of wealth? Did Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders lead “Occupy ECB” marches? No, exactly the opposite happened: Stock markets around the world rallied after the announcement of more European printing."

With Christ, the population was "like sheep who have gone astray", without Christ (religion, culture, values, tradition, family, community, truth, etc), we ARE SHEEP!

It's a bubble, it WILL burst -- the question is not "if, but when". So HEDGE ... have some metals in your portfolio, and maybe a lake place where you can catch catfish off the dock! ;-)
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$12 trillion of QE, Lowest Interest In 5,000 Years

$12 trillion of QE and the lowest rates in 5,000 years ... for this?:

It's not a very long article. I've written on the subject before -- these times are historically NUTS! Massive inflationary monetary policy, but other than the stock market, where is the BOOM!?  There ought to be a boom!

 I really don't think anyone has a clue as to WHEN the "crash" is going to happen. Everyone that pays minimal attention realizes that these sorts of financial unnatural acts are not "sustainable". "The event" might be deflation, who knows? To some degree, we have had more inflation than we realized, and growth is probably WORSE than even the numbers we see.

Most likely we would have been far better off had we allowed a lot of the speculative and uninsured financial system to fail in early 2009. We find ourselves somehow staggering on when we ought have allowed the "creative destruction" of the market do some destruction so we would be CREATING something other than tepid 2%ish growth.

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Some Frankness From Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank on How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the Party of Rich Elites - In These Times:

I loved this quote ... isn't it wonderful to see how the DC wing of TP ("The Party"-D) thinks?

I live in Washington, D.C., and I spend time around Hillary-style Democrats. They really think that they’ve got this thing in the bag. And I don’t just mean her versus Bernie. I mean the Democratic Party winning the presidency for the rest of our lives. From here to eternity. They can choose whoever they want. They could nominate anybody and they would win. They think they’re in charge.

I tend to agree with them -- they have brought in enough illegals, made voting with no ID nearly the national standard, and through organizations like ACORN and just the fact of 90% of the people tabulating the votes being union government employees, that all counts are suspect. As Stalin said "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do". TP counts the votes -- or contracts for the machines to count the votes.

The main thesis of the article is:

According to Frank, popular explanations which blame corporate lobby groups and the growing power of money in politics are insufficient. Frank instead points to a decision by Democratic Party elites in the 1970s to marginalize labor unions and transform from the party of the working class to the party of the professional class. In so doing, the Democratic Party radically changed the way it understood social problems and how to solve them, trading in the principle of solidarity for the principle of competitive individualism and meritocracy.

There is that left wing word again "meritocracy" -- oh how they hate the idea that people are blessed with different abilities and can use them wisely or foolishly to obtain different economic result! TP moved away from PRIVATE sector unions in the '70s and focused on the massive growth of PUBLIC  sector unions. Automation, global trade and non-competitive labor had pretty much destroyed vast swaths of American industry by that point already, Steel being a great example. TP cares about POWER not people -- they go where the power is, and it was certainly with the professional class.

But Frank seems surprised that TP operates as it does and clearly took action when BO took office to benefit it's major constituency, the upper 10-30% (Frank wants it to seem more elite than it is, it's more than 10%)  -- government workers, teachers, university professors, lawyers, financial people, fortune 500 professionals.

This is not only because of those evil Republicans, but because Obama played it the way he wanted to. Even when he had a majority in both houses of Congress and could choose whoever he wanted to be in his administration, he consistently made policies that favored the top 10 percent over everybody else. He helped out Wall Street in an enormous way when they were entirely at his mercy. 

He could have done anything he wanted with them, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did in the ‘30s. But he chose not to.

He didn't do what FDR did because what FDR did failed miserably. It prolonged and deepened what would have been a bad recession, much like 1982 into the Depression. BO's "FDR lite" of STILL massive government intervention, regulation and cronyism have made a "recession" into the "Great Recession". BO got away with what he could get away with to not make the disaster as obvious as it ought to be. It is STILL easy to look at the 1930's, late 1970s and 2008-2016 as times of TP taking control (they took Congress in 2006) and the economy being bad.

The big overarching problem of our time is inequality. If you look at historical charts of productivity and wage growth, these two things went hand in hand for decades after World War II, which we think of as a prosperous, middle-class time when even people with a high school degree, blue-collar workers, could lead a middle class life. And then everything went wrong in the 1970s. Productivity continued to go up and wage growth stopped. Wage growth has basically been flat ever since then. But productivity goes up by leaps and bounds all the time. We have all of these wonderful technological advances. Workers are more productive than ever but they haven’t benefited from it. That’s the core problem of inequality.

First of all, productivity is NOT improving. The OBJECTIVE of the left is the story of inequality! A more and more privileged government crony elite class and an ever more dependent and controlled mass "proletariat". The left is about CENTRALIZATION OF POWER in the hands of the VERY few, ultimately THE ONE! Left is control, right is chaos, the US was supposed to be "center right".

If policies of merit and competition are allowed to work, one gets the US 1982 - 2008. If the policies of the left are allowed to work, the result is East vs West Germany prior to '91, North Korea vs South Korea today.

The biggest question I have is whether Frank is a "Useful Idiot" and doesn't know that BO (and FDR and Carter before him) are doing exactly what is intended, or if he is simply a propaganda shill for the TP. I guess it really doesn't matter ...


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Medicine, Coded for Disaster

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/how-government-killed-medical-profession

Pretty much all institutions, crafts, professions and pursuits go through a number of cyclical forces. At a high level we have things like centralized control vs decentralized, process vs art/craft, public / private, big factory "assembly line" sorts of approaches vs skilled craftsmen --- we could go on.

Writing computer code went from a highly individualized "art" prior to say "the 1970's" and then became an increasingly heavyweight "Design - review - Code - review - Test - review, with tracked "defects" at each phase with plenty of "metrics" to make the "Waterfall" a one shot through a supposedly constantly improving process. The process got way too heavy.

Then came the Internet and Open Source and it all blew up to free-lance "super coders" throwing source across the net with abandon  and rapid cycling new versions constantly. "Design" largely died and even "specifications". The coders took back control of software -- and it went pretty much back to being an "art" rather than a "profession".

Medicine has been both an art and very much a profession for at least hundreds if not thousands of years. It is the most personal and intimate of "personal services", with the level of trust required in your dealings with your doctor exceeding all other relationships in your life when the combination of trusting in both their care / concern / focus / wisdom / confidentiality / character AND highly skilled technical expertise as a package in a single person.

Much like religion, a government that seeks to entirely control your life cannot allow this sort of relationship to NOT be mediated by government and kept under strict control of government. The linked article gives a lot of detail of how we have slid into the hole we are now in, and how it is nearly certain to get MUCH worse.

Before long, these codes were attached to a fee schedule based upon the amount of time a medical professional had to devote to each patient, a concept perilously close to another Marxist relic: the labor theory of value. Named the Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS), each procedure code was assigned a specific value, by a panel of experts, based supposedly upon the amount of time and labor it required. It didn’t matter if an operation was being performed by a renowned surgical expert—perhaps the inventor of the procedure—or by a doctor just out of residency doing the operation for the first time. They both got paid the same.

"Process" attempts to convert humans into plug compatible "parts". That was bad enough with programmers -- in which the best are able to produce 10-100x the "output" of the "average".  Measuring that output is exceedingly difficult -- "lines of code" are often used, but most assuredly "more is NOT better". As in writing, the tightest, best performing, most free of problems, easiest to understand, extendable, maintainable ... etc, etc makes programmers FAR from "plug compatible".

Doctors, having MUCH larger requirements relative to knowledge, skill, judgement, decision making, diagnostic acumen,  very personal communication / interaction, etc, etc are far far less "compatible" than programmers. I did a blog post discussing the difference between the pilots that crashed a plane in Buffalo a few years back and "Sully" Sullenberger who dead sticked an Airbus into the Hudson with no loss of life. Paying doctors "all the same" is insane  -- as is thinking that converting medicine into an "assembly line" with a bunch of "codes and process" is somehow going to "improve" it. What it does is shift power and renumeration to bureaucrats and devalues the unique skills of doctors.

So what we end up with is this:

In other words, we’re about to experience the two-tiered system that already exists in most parts of the world that provide “universal coverage.” Those who have the financial means will still be able to get prompt, courteous, personalized, state-of-the-art health care from providers who consider themselves professionals. But the majority can expect long lines, mediocre and impersonal care from shift-working providers, subtle but definite rationing, and slowly deteriorating outcomes.

The best doctors will end up in the private system, and a lot of solid doctors the next echelon down will just leave medicine because it is no longer a profession and they are professionals. What 90% of the population is increasingly left with is best described in this from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".

“Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Why Is Productivity So Weak?

Why Is Productivity So Weak? Three Theories - The New York Times:

It's really weak ... like it was on the late 1970's. The NY Times helpfully gives us three theories:

1. All "the good ideas" have been fully exploited -- computerization, outsourcing, management strategies, etc. It's not going to get better. 
2. It's just a measurement error -- we don't really know how to count the value of all the current "good stuff". 
3. We are "investing heavily" in new stuff like "driverless cars" that will come to fruition and "everything will be better". 

I'll give you another theory. You can either focus on government solving everything, making everything "more sustainable" and dealing with increased regulation, bureaucracy and the potential for endless new government programs -- BOcare, "green" this and that, open borders, higher minimum wages, etc ... **OR** you create new productive innovations, create new industries that MAKE STUFF, invest in the private sector with reasonable confidence that there will be REAL GROWTH, and assume that government will increasingly GET OUT OF THE WAY. 

Productivity stunk in the late 1970's and it stinks now since 2008 -- the first Carter administration sucked and the second one stunk worse -- we even labeled Carter II "BO". 

When you have a country that allows cheap labor to stream in by the millions, why would you focus on "increased productivity"? Why did people innovate and come of with fracking and lateral drilling when oil prices were HIGH? Duh ... because it PAID OFF! 

So when labor cost is a race to the bottom, the NY Times is "surprised" that investment in productivity is low? Perhaps they need to read Zero to One! 

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Values, Corvettes, Todays Dollars, How It's Going

In 1978 I started at IBM and $15,500 a year salary. I could have purchased a new Corvette for a little less than $10K. So I went to work for "1.5 Corvettes". It looks like a 2016 that anyone would want to have is $60K, the top of the line pushes at least $90K.

I was dating someone whose dad worked at GM in Janesville and made close to $50K, REALLY good cash in those days, her brother started on the line at $20K with a full month and 1/2 of vacation about the same time I did. I got two weeks -- the benefits were better at GM than at IBM in those days.

A teacher at Barron made about $12K in the early '70s when I was considering teaching as one of the options for a career. A number of them were married to other teachers and had a small home in Barron and a small lake place on Silver Lake about 40 min north. Times were pretty decent, and with the election of Regan in '80, they got a lot better.

Things were just starting to really go berserk in '78 -- prices would shoot up and taxes would shoot up even worse. I remember one great raise I got of something like $50 a week that moved me a bracket or so and I got all of $5 in actual take home pay. Inflation would push 20% and eventually, interest would exceed 20%.

Today a programmer starts at IBM around $60K, so barely one Corvette. According to this, a new GM hire (of which I'm sure there are not very many) hires on at a bit less than $16 per hr, or $33,280 annually. Experienced old hands push $60 an hour for $124K ... hey, so two Corvettes for the old guys (but 5 in '78)! A median teacher salary in Eau Claire is $45K, so less than a Corvette.

According to this calculator, $1 in 1978  worth $3.81 today, so I REALLY started at $15,500 x 3.81, or $59,036 in todays dollars. Todays programmers are basically identical given inflation. The GM worker starting at $20K was making the equivalent of $76K today, so starting manufacturing workers are doing WAY WORSE. The $12K teacher would be doing $46K in todays dollars -- so teachers are doing about the same as well as programmers.

If the $10K corvette had just inflated, it would cost $38K today rather than $60K. The starting auto worker gets less than 1/2, and even the experienced worker would be getting $190K today if they had kept pace with inflation! Yet, the price of the car -- with materials costs down, automation supposedly saving money and WAY less labor input in both cost and actual hours has risen in relative value far beyond inflation!

But let's face it, none of the above really feel that they are doing better today than we did in 1978!!

We sure as hell felt we were doing better in 1988, and even 1998 in many cases, but certainly not today!

So what happened? I'm really not all that sure, but I'll throw out some thinking:

1. The inflation calculations are lying -- for many things it is much worse than the calculator indicates. The vettte shows us one example.  Sadly, they are lying WORSE than that because taxes are much higher (income, property, state, sales, etc) plus medical is MUCH higher. (think for a second, is government more or less involved in medical aspects today than it was in '78? Which way do YOU think government causes costs to go?) 
2. The media and "The Party" (D) likes to focus on "inequality", but unless you foolishly believe that the economic pie is a fixed size (which means you don't know enough to even think of economics at all and need to study), what matters is "what you can do with what you make". What someone else makes is meaningless. Teachers kept pace, programmers kept pace, auto workers did terrible -- but EVERYONE in that comparison got screwed in the last 40 years to some extent relative to the vette. 
3. The chart doesn't show DEBT and UNFUNDED liabilities (FICA, Medicare, BOcare, etc ...  now $19T and $125T respectively. The costs of these problems are starting to siphon off any government funding going into "productive investment" -- roads, research, education, space programs, etc, and requiring ever more pure transfer payments. Primarily from old to young, but also from productive to unproductive as more and more votes are purchased to keep the rising percentage of government ever growing even as GDP is stagnant or shrinking. We started "eating our seed corn" with the stench of BO arriving in earnest. 
4. I suspect if we looked at medical or government jobs we would see some people who have improved their relative position a bunch since '78 -- "administration" is the REAL "growth area" almost everywhere. More government = more bureaucracy = more administration and less productivity. Even worse, government tends to keep the numbers -- "the house wins"! I've covered the GDP and Inflation shenanigans.  We are being lied to -- A LOT, which is why EVERYONE inside the beltway is DESPERATE that neither Cruz or Trump get elected!

A lot of government taxation and spending has been increasingly hidden at the state and local levels due to "Federal Grant In Aid". 

Add this together with increased Federal spending and you get the following.

Remember, this chart is RELATIVE TO GDP ... so when we are doing well economically, our spending can be high without increasing the % of GDP much if at all. WWII and BO are the big events. From the '90s to BO we can see the relative prosperity, and then the disaster of BO struck!

Certainly, for manufacturing things went bad starting in the '80s, but neither teachers or programmers as examples are ACTUALLY keeping pace with inflation because the numbers are cooked. We can see it is bad, yet it is WORSE than that and all we are being told is "the rich make too much".

BULLSHIT! The government TAKES TOO MUCH!!! Sure, some of that sticks to some palms more than others (try Hillary going from "penniless" in 2000 to worth $100M in 2016! You can still buy A LOT of vettes with $100 Mil!)

This is not one of those blogs that I feel satisfied with -- "work in progress". I feel like there is a lot more truth hiding in plain sight here, but I'm not seeing it yet. Later.

Geezer Votes Matter

http://www.wsj.com/articles/when-older-people-do-better-than-those-of-working-age-1458498054?mod=e2fb

Watching the economic crackup of the grand Ponzi Scheme of FICA and all the other "buy people's votes with promises of better benefits when they are dead" debacle is as unexpected as hearing about a drunk getting another DUI, the government running a deficit, or the sun rising in the morning.

“It’s a perfect storm of sudden increases in longevity, combined with the global financial crisis, combined with the greater voting power of older generations,” said Liz Emerson, co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation, a London-based think tank that argues the political clout of seniors—an age group with high voting turnout—has damaged the interests of the young.

We have seen this coming for at least 40 years -- really since it was created in the 1930's. 2/3 of people were supposed to die before they got benefits, the population was supposed to always grow (more people paying in) and the economy was always supposed to grow. All three of the assumptions are wrong now -- the first HUGELY, the send significantly, and the third sometimes a little true, but WAY slower than would have been imagined.

But the old vote -- so like blacks, their VOTES matter!

“We are redistributing income within the family,” said Frank Field,who heads a British parliamentary panel that in January announced an inquiry into the issue of intergenerational fairness. “It isn’t fair and it isn’t sustainable.”

Except popular government is NEVER about "fairness" -- it is either about voting for things that cause the economy to expand which some people want because they think they will succeed and do better than others, OR, it is about dominant political parties buying votes to gain more and more power with no concern for anything other than the vote buyers winning.

The fact that BOTH the right establishment and the left establishment hate Cruz the worst and Trump the 2nd worst shows what the vote buyers on  BOTH sides are thinking!

Call 911! Red Star Sniffs $$$ Reality!

Boomers, millennials need wake-up call on deficit - StarTribune.com:

Ok, apparently hitting the floor restarted my heart!

Whose face do you picture when you think of history’s greatest thieves? If you are an old movie buff, perhaps Butch and Sundance or Bonnie and Clyde come to mind. Maybe Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme? 

Well, even that staggering amount is paltry compared to history’s truly greatest theft. And the face of the greatest thief might surprise you. If you are over 50 take a look in the mirror. History’s greatest thief is you!

The United States is $18 trillion in debt, an amount that continues to rise at an alarming rate with no end in sight by anyone’s calculation. But that is dwarfed by the $128 trillion in “unfunded liabilities.” Unfunded liabilities are the amount by which future obligations exceed the present value of funds available to pay for them. 

To put that in perspective our nation’s unfunded liabilities come out to $1.1 million per taxpayer.

Folks, this is the RED STAR TRIB! Massive endorser and supporter of Wellstone, Dayton, Franken, Klobuchar, BO!  This column sounds like **ME** ... only I've been understating the unfunded liabilities as "$40-$60T"! I've lost touch with how bad this really is.

The CBO calculated that for debt in 2040 to equal the historical 50-year average of 38 percent of gross domestic product, Congress would need to cut spending by 13 percent or raise revenue by 14 percent beginning in 2016. Needless to say, neither of those is going to happen.

Right ... and if we had done something EARLIER, it would not be this bad, **BUT** the left and papers like the Strib have been demagoguing this for DECADES. Talk of imaginary "lock boxes", complete derision of plans like W's to privatize a portion of FICA, or against Paul Ryan's plan which was basically the idea that they now assert that Boomers need to adhere to.

Is there any way to save the millennials and subsequent generations from this continuing theft? The final irony is that the heroes must be the thieves themselves. It is up to the baby boomers to vote for politicians who will make the fundamental budgetary changes to alter the current path. But this is asking such voters to reject the political pandering that tells them government can keep expanding benefits without paying their full costs. 

I wouldn’t hold my breath. The older generations are addicted to receiving benefits without paying for them. The younger generations are being robbed blind and don’t even know it.

I covered the Madoff - FICA similarity back in 2008 in this blog -- now seeing the Red Star agreeing with me a mere 8 years later is enough to make me think I ought have just stayed on the floor!

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The Top 1% In Each State

http://mentalfloss.com/article/61362/what-youd-have-make-be-top-1-each-state

A little perspective on the evil 1% in each state. In Arkansas, you can get there with $228K. Sure, that may sound like "a whole lot" to a bunch of you, but consider that for the vast number of people that hit that lofty "top 1%", it is for a year or a few years at most. Perhaps they had a stock that did really well, got some significant award or bonus from work -- or got "bought out" so they are not likely to be working for the same amount of money for awhile, if ever.

While the "malefactors of great wealth" get LOTS of abuse these days, you don't fly around in a private jet on $228-$500K or so even if you make it for a FEW years!

American has always allowed you to hate these horrible folks all you want. What is new in this non-Constitutional mobocracy is that now it is perfectly legitimate to loot any amount wished up to ALL OF IT from these nasty high earning beasts!

In olden times, we used to have "Nursery Rhymes" like the "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" in which even small children learned that when the envious or greedy decided that they would cut open the "Goose" to get it all right now, they discovered that they destroyed the natural order of things and they ceased to receive the bounty they were already receiving.

But I'm certain there is no lesson there for the rush to socialism we see today!

The Spotted Cow Felony

Maple Tavern owner, manager charged with felonies for selling 'Spotted Cow' beer - Story | KMSP:

You may be thinking "Onion", but no, this is government reality.

A former Minnesota bar owner and manager are each being charged with a felony for running “Spotted Cow” beer out of Wisconsin and selling it at their restaurant, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.

"Why" you might legitimately ask ... here you go:

While there is humor to this story of beer-smuggling and a sense of state pride with New Glarus Brewery’s “Only in Wisconsin” sales stance, this is also a story of just how screwed up the alcohol wholesale market is. Since the repeal of prohibition most states have operated what is called a “Three-Tier Alcohol Distribution System.” Wisconsin is no different.

The REAL bottom line is "taxes and fees". The government makes A LOT of money from alcohol ... MN is #13 highest, WI is #40 ... bit of differential there!

I am a BIG believer in "States Rights" -- that one of the BIGGEST things our founders wanted to enable is the chance to have "50" (their number was less) separate laboratories of "what works and what doesn't" inside a very limited federal system.

SO ... I believe that states SHOULD be able to do different things. "Felony" sounds like wacko enforcement to me for CERTAIN ... make the punishment fit the crime. FINE them enough so it is cheaper for them to obey the law than not.

I believe states ought to have the right to regulate things like alcohol, drugs, commerce, etc in very different manners within their borders, and obviously, that means that there will be these kinds of issues. I consider that a reasonable price to pay to allow people to have choices beyond "leaving the country".

Oh, and BTW, you MIGHT look at that chart and assume liquor prices are cheaper in WI. You would not be wrong ... a case of Leinies runs like $13 a lot of places.

If you are not offended by the F word, and things that are "inappropriate" you might also check this out ... I'm embarrassed to find it funny, but it DOES have a good deal to say about WI. (you may want to enjoy it with a Brandy Old-Fashioned).

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