M’Kay, finances.
10/30/2010
And debt, and unemployment, and so forth. This shit still doesn’t seem clear to many. I’ve written several articles, with easily verifiable charts and so on. Why is this so apparently hard to understand?
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You know, I clicked the link and then went to the link there that showed the unemployment rates.
Funny but there are always mini-spikes around March and July. I may be displaying gross ignorance here but any insights on that?
I’m not real sure. What would come to mind would be graduations and such, summer hires, that sort of thing.
Because the most prevalent numbers released by the government are generally not worth the paper they are printed on. The U-3 unemployment figure(employer payroll) is constantly being redefined to not reach 10% and because it is employer payroll it misses a lot of people who are self employed so when those people are not working their idleness is not counted. Also keep in mind once unemployment benefits run out you are removed from the unemployment roles as they are no longer monitoring you to see if you have a job.
Meanwhile the U-6 which is more a comprehensive examination of household unemployment has been hovering around 17% since September 2009 or just about the time the regime assured us we had turned the corner and the worst was over because of the porkulus bill which essentially just transferred deficit state spending to the Federal balance sheet. The U-6 measure is patently ignored as it breaches the psychological barrier of double digit unemployment.
http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp?fromYear=2007&toYear=2010
The consumer price index(CPI) the primary indicator of inflation in the economy and generally as reported omits much of what normal consumers
would normally spend their wages on food, shelter and energy.
I have provided a link to the latest CPI. I won’t pretend that I understand exactly what this report actually says I do numbers all week and refuse to dive into this mass of statistical sleight of hand but in the table starting on page 6 of the link I have come to this general conclusion: except for shelter if it is a necessity it has increased year on year. The decrease in shelter costs and related durable purchases can be explained by the continued shaking out of the mortgage bubble. Since this is the largest item in the “basket of goods and services” it may have artificially held down the actual effect on inflation as it masks increases in property taxes for those who have mortgages and their actual shelter costs(mortgage) are fixed and their shelter costs go up at the rate of property tax and home energy costs.
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpid1009.pdf
Read it if you need to catch some ZZZ’s and are philosophically opposed to taking artificial sleep inducers.
Then there are federal income taxes of which fully 40% of the citizenry does not pay. I don’t mean they get refunds I mean their line 55 liability is
-0- and quite often they actually get refunds against their social security with-holdings or receive what are euphemistically called “refundable tax credits”, euphemistically because ‘refundable tax credit only happen when the taxpayer liability falls to -0-.
Now don’t get me wrong, these people do pay embedded taxes just like the rest of us but because their liability is not visible and people in this group are what would be termed as net tax users i.e. they use more in government services and subsidies than they pay in taxes as opposed to net tax payers, they do not oppose tax increases because their taxes will not be raised in a manner that they would notice. They may feel a general erosion of purchasing power because as taxes and the costs of regulation go up on producers they are either passed on to consumers in higher prices or to employees as jobs are shipped to lower cost venues where the cost savings outstrip the decline in efficiency and productivity or to owners in the form of lower dividends. I have provided the latest data on the composition of who actually pays taxes in the US in this link:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
As you see the “rich” i.e current high income earners, pay a share of the taxes that far outstrips their percentage of the total income earned. Meanwhile the “poor” pay next to nothing and to put it in the terms of the Class Warrior in Chief do not have a “skin in the game”.
Of course a lot of the confusion swirls around definitions of rich and poor and who remains in these categories over the course of time(Sowell). This is a prime way to confuse economic issues as the general populace has been misinformed and miseducated as to economics and the the dynamics of tax and monetary policy on behavior and how that impacts the economy.
This of course has been a willful dumbing down of students by tendentious ideologues who wish to foster enmity between classes in order to impose their dystopic and morally vain vision of how humans should order their affairs a primitive and constricted view of society as to the evolution of the current extended order of economic and societal interaction.
So to get back to answering the initial question why is this so hard to understand is because it is hard to understand on the part of the current generation because they were consciously not taught how to evaluate the information that is out there. They are taught the construct that free enterprise is evil and that government is altruistic in it’s intentions. All the while as government intrudes more people on both sides of the transaction are harmed not to mention those harmed by the “unintended consequences”.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman what makes anyone think that some governmental bureaucrat is any more virtuous than
a business man. The business of government(as it is currently practiced) is the arrogation and dispensation of power this is why the idea that the government is benevolence personified is self evidently false.
Students are taught to be patently innumerate and to be good little automatons and not question, as long as the actions involve the unconstitutional theft and fencing(taxation and spending) of assets to the class warriors favored constituencies, the government’s action.
The inversion that has happened that items that are approved in the constitution are optional but things not approved(income re-distribution and special laws for certain grievance groups) are necessary could only happen in a context where the original meaning of the organic law was undermined by those who wished to change the course of this country without having to do the heavy legislative lifting.
Like has been said if a foreign country had done to us in the field of education that Obama and his fellow traveler’s and antecedents have done it would causus belli to cut off their breathing privileges.
A maleducated populace is an easily controlled populace why do you think they need to try and control content on the internet and other media as they know knowledge is power and must control the message.
As per usual, you have filled in so many blanks it is incredible! BRAVO!