Author's posts

Denial

One factor common to our elite’s failures is their utter and complete unwillingness to accept factual reality.

Eurozone on brink of double-dip recession as growth falls 0.2%

Graeme Wearden, The Guardian

Tuesday 14 August 2012

The eurozone is on the brink of following Britain into a double-dip recession after its economy shrank between April and June.

GDP across the 17-nation bloc fell by 0.2% in the second quarter of this year and economists believe the downturn is continuing. Better-than-expected figures from Germany and France were offset by sharp contractions elsewhere, with the Spanish, Italian, Finnish and Portuguese economies all shrinking. The wider European Union also suffered a 0.2% contraction.



The UK … shrank by 0.7%, according to last month’s preliminary estimate from the Office for National Statistics.



In Germany, there was some relief that the economy grew by 0.3%. Analysts, though, fear that Europe’s powerhouse could slide into recession soon.



With no growth in the last quarter, France has now been flatlining for the last nine months.



Portugal continued to be buffeted by the austerity programme now being implemented. Its GDP tumbled by 1.2% in the latest quarter and is 3.3% smaller than a year ago, while the unemployment rate crept up to a new record of 15%.

Greek Economy Shrank 6.2% in Second Quarter

By DAVID JOLLY, The New York Times

Published: August 13, 2012

(M)any economists were skeptical that the heavily indebted Greek state can cut its way out of crippling recession.

A shrinking economy creates pressure for further budget cuts, since the deficit and debt grow as a percentage of the overall economy.



Standard & Poor’s estimated last week that the Greek economy would shrink 10 percent to 11 percent cumulatively this year and next, compared with the 4 percent to 5 percent decline the European Union and International Monetary Fund assume.



“(W)e’ve long argued that that is a fantasy,” Mr. May (economist at Capital Economics) said. “Greece will have to go through a long recession if it’s going to remain in the euro zone.”

He said Greece needed a 30 percent to 40 percent decline in real wages to restore its competitiveness, a punishing prospect if accomplished as a member of the euro. He said the better alternative might be for Greece to leave the euro and accomplish the same goal with a devalued currency.

US economic recovery is weakest since World War II

By Paul Wiseman, Associated Press

1 hour 50 minutes ago

Economic growth has never been weaker in a postwar recovery. Consumer spending has never been so slack. Only once has job growth been slower.



Europe’s troubles have undermined consumer and business confidence on both sides of the Atlantic. And the deeply divided U.S. political system has delivered growth-chilling uncertainty.



America’s gross domestic product – the broadest measure of economic output – grew 6.8 percent from the April-June quarter of 2009 through the same quarter this year, the slowest in the first three years of a postwar recovery. GDP grew an average of 15.5 percent in the first three years of the eight other comebacks analyzed.



Government spending and investment at the federal, state and local levels was 4.5 percent lower in the second quarter than three years earlier.

Three years into previous postwar recoveries, government spending had risen an average 12.5 percent. In the first three years after the 1981-82 recession, during President Ronald Reagan’s first term, the economy got a jolt from a 15 percent increase in government spending and investment.

This time, state and local governments have been slashing spending – and jobs.



Since June 2009, governments at all levels have slashed 642,000 jobs, the only time government employment has fallen in the three years after a recession.



Consumer spending has grown just 6.5 percent since the recession ended, feeblest in a postwar recovery. In the first three years of previous recoveries, spending rose an average of nearly 14 percent.



The economy shed a staggering 8.8 million jobs during and shortly after the recession. Since employment hit bottom, the economy has created just over 4 million jobs. So the new hiring has replaced 46 percent of the lost jobs, by far the worst performance since World War II. In the previous eight recoveries, the economy had regained more than 350 percent of the jobs lost, on average.



Never before have so many Americans been unemployed for so long three years into a recovery. Nearly 5.2 million have been out of work for six months or more. The long-term unemployed account for 41 percent of the jobless; the highest mark in the other recoveries was 22 percent.



(P)ay raises haven’t kept up with even modest levels of inflation. Earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers – a category that covers about 80 percent of the private, nonfarm workforce – have risen just over 6.2 percent since June 2009. Consumer prices have risen nearly 7.2 percent. Adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen 0.8 percent. In the previous five recoveries -the records go back only to 1964 - real wages had gone up an average 1.5 percent at this point.



Washington isn’t doing much to help the economy. An impasse between Obama and congressional Republicans brought the U.S. to the brink of default on the federal debt last year -a confrontation that rattled financial markets and sapped consumer and business confidence.

Given the political divide, businesses and consumers don’t know what’s going to happen to taxes, government spending or regulation. Sharp tax increases and spending cuts are scheduled to kick in at year’s end unless Congress and the White House reach a budget deal.

In the meantime, it’s difficult for consumers to summon the confidence to spend and businesses the confidence to hire and expand. Never in the postwar period has there been so much uncertainty about what policymakers will do, says Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business: “No one is sure what will actually happen.”

Voodoo Supply Side Economics does not work.  Period.  It is faith based Mammon worship by the greedy and evil.

Cartnoon

The second time Bugs meets Cecil.  This was originally posted April 25, 2011.

Tortoise wins by a Hare

Cartnoon

Bugs and Sam in Al Buquerque.  Daffy makes a cameo at the end.  Originally posted April 22, 2011.

Sahara Hare

Believe Nothing

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The ad’s cynicism contributes to a phenomenon that increases each year, and that is that we are becoming a nation that believes nothing. Not in nothing, but nothing we’re told by anyone in supposed authority.

Peggy Noonan

A closer look at Paul Ryan’s federal budget plan

By David Lauter and Lisa Mascaro, Washington Bureau, Los Angeles Times

August 14, 2012

Under Ryan’s plan, which has passed the Republican-controlled House twice in slightly different versions, the Internal Revenue Service would tax the wealthiest Americans less, but many of the poorest ones more; Medicare would be transformed; Medicaid would be cut by about a third; and all functions of government other than those health programs, Social Security and the military would shrink to levels not seen since the 1930s.



The Ryan plan would not balance the federal budget for another 28 years at least, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. … It’s also partly because Ryan’s proposed tax cuts considerably outweigh even his ambitious spending reductions.

Ryan himself concedes that his plan would not balance the budget this decade, predicting it could be balanced by the “mid-to-early 2020s” because his plan would ignite rapid economic growth. Like his onetime mentor, Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee, Ryan argues that the key to economic growth is not balancing the budget but lowering tax rates.



In the more than two years since his budget was unveiled, Ryan has not specified any tax breaks he would eliminate. Independent analyses have shown that offsetting the tax cuts would require changing things such as the mortgage interest deduction, the tax exclusion for employer-financed health insurance or other popular tax preferences widely used by middle-income households.



Ryan would shift Medicare from a system in which everyone gets the same set of benefits, paid for by tax funds, to one in which the government would give each senior citizen a fixed amount of money.



Ryan would also gradually lift the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 by 2034.



Ryan’s plan would keep the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush and add an additional $4.5 trillion in cuts over the next decade. It would do that by replacing the current six tax rates with two – 10% and 25%. It would also eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax and cut corporate taxes.



The net result would be a tax increase for the bottom fifth of households and a big tax cut at the top, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

In many cases, low-income households would see a tax increase of $100 or less, but some would be hit harder. Among households earning between $10,000 and $20,000 a year, about 1 in 5 would get a tax increase averaging over $1,000, the Tax Policy Center analysis showed. Households earning more than $1 million a year would get nearly 40% of the benefits of the plan, with a cut averaging about $265,000. Ryan has not challenged those figures.



Ryan would increase the military budget by $300 billion over the decade.

Ryan would keep in place the across-the-board cuts on the domestic side and deepen them by $700 billion more over the decade.

Some of the domestic spending cuts are spelled out in Ryan’s blueprint – a cut in food stamps, for example, that would impose new limits on the length of time recipients can receive aid. Like Medicaid, the food stamp program would become a grant to the states, giving local jurisdictions more say in how the money is spent. Pell Grants for college students would similarly be capped, with new requirements that make only lower-income students eligible. Worker training programs would also be reduced.

Overall, the CBO said in its analysis that under Ryan’s budget, spending on defense and all domestic programs other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would fall to 6% of the total economy by 2030, about half the current level. That would mean a smaller share of the economy going to federal domestic spending other than entitlements than at any time since the New Deal.

Herr Doktor Professor

Culture Of Fraud

August 10, 2012, 5:10 pm

The big story of the week among the dismal science set is the Romney campaign’s white paper on economic policy, which represents a concerted effort by three economists – Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor – to destroy their own reputations.



Romney’s tax plan is now a demonstrated fraud – big tax cuts for the rich that he claims would be offset by closing loopholes, but the Tax Policy Center has demonstrated that the arithmetic can’t possibly work. He turns out to have been dishonest about when he really left Bain. And on and on.



Is it really surprising, then, that the economists who have decided to lend their names to the campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud? Maybe some of them were initially reluctant, or thought they could support the campaign with selective renderings of the truth. But the pressure was on to be team players, to give the campaign material it could use – and so, one day, they all ended up putting their names to a report that is just plain dishonest, in ways that can be and have been easily documented.

Galt / Gekko 2012

August 11, 2012, 3:45 pm

What I do know is that anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.

The Ryan Role

August 13, 2012, 5:24 am

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.



What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

Romney/Ryan: The Real Target

August 13, 2012, 1:54 pm

Like Bush in 2000, Ryan has a completely undeserved reputation in the media as a bluff, honest guy, in Ryan’s case supplemented by a reputation as a serious policy wonk. None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air – huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned. See Matt Miller for more.

So whence comes the Ryan reputation? As I said in my last post, it’s because many commentators want to tell a story about US politics that makes them feel and look good – a story in which both parties are equally at fault in our national stalemate, and in which said commentators stand above the fray. This story requires that there be good, honest, technically savvy conservative politicians, so that you can point to these politicians and say how much you admire them, even if you disagree with some of their ideas; after all, unless you lavish praise on some conservatives, you don’t come across as nobly even-handed.



So that’s the constituency Romney is targeting: not a large segment of the electorate, but a few hundred at most editors, reporters, programmers, and pundits. His hope is that Ryan’s unjustified reputation for honest wonkery will transfer to the ticket as a whole.

Paul Ryan’s Budget Priorities: Transforming Government

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday August 13, 2012 8:15 am

In fact, the Romney campaign has said that they would never reduce defense spending below 4% of GDP, which means the entire discretionary budget would have to have a negative rate of spending. That includes everything the government does outside of mandatory spending and things like Social Security with a dedicated funding stream. Ryan would also slash spending on mandatory programs for the poor. In fact, in his initial budget, 2/3 of all the spending cuts would hit the poor directly.

Tim Murphy has all of this in chart form. The bottom line is this: Ryan’s priorities have nothing to do with balancing the federal budget. His budget doesn’t do so for over 20 years. He voted for every single budget-busting program of the Bush Administration and he believes in federal spending to support his home district. Balancing the budget is a convenient crutch for his real goal – changing the way government works entirely. He thinks the poor don’t have a safety net, but a hammock. He wants to sever that hammock from the tree, and sever the relationship between government and its neediest citizens. He wants to either privatize government services or end them. Period, end of sentence.

But it’s not just Ryan and Romney, these are Democratic goals too and they’d much rather talk about who cuts less than about massive income inequality, stratification of social class, permanent unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and the humanitarian needs of the 99.9% of us who keep you in your phoney baloney jobs you ungrateful bootlickers.

The Great and Narrow Fiscal Debate of 2012

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday August 13, 2012 9:35 am

(T)his is not only a debate we shouldn’t be having at a time of mass unemployment, but a debate the public doesn’t want in a time of mass unemployment. The media have done yeoman work in trying to conflate “the economy” with “the deficit” – and considering that we could actually use a higher deficit right now for stimulative reasons, this is partially true – but that’s not the debate we’re going to be having. We’re going to talk about what the role of government should play 20 years in the future, rather than what it should play right now when we have an unemployment crisis.



It’s a choice between one distinct ideology, and a technocratic center which doesn’t reflect the core belief of the party as it has been defined over the years. The part of the debate that believes Social Security needs to be adequate to provide for retirement and not cut from its already puny benefit – that will not get a hearing. The part of the debate that says that Medicare and Medicaid do a better job of controlling health costs than private insurance, and that they should be expanded and joined for a single-payer program, starting with allowing people to buy in to Medicare – that will not get a hearing. The part of the debate that says that in a time of mass unemployment, government must be the spender of last resort to increase aggregate demand and create jobs – that will not get a hearing. This great deception, that the pole of the debate represented by the Administration represents the [left]ward pole, will only facilitate a post-election move to cut safety net spending, as the “wise responsible middle course.”

I don’t think that the electoral outcome will give running room for policies to deal with mass unemployment – that seems like a rabbit out of the hat. It seems much more likely it will give running room for the policies that would naturally arise out of a two-month debate where one side wants to end a substantial portion of the safety net, and the other side merely wants to cut it in the spirit of compromise as part of a grand bargain.

Erskine Bowles Heaps Praise on Paul Ryan in 2011 Video

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday August 14, 2012 7:35 am

Just avail yourself of Erskine Bowles, floated as a potential replacement at Treasury in an Obama second term, the “liberal” half of the Bowles-Simpson catfood commission, singing the praises of Paul Ryan, a year after Ryan rounded up his fellow House Republicans on the commission and denied the votes necessary to pass the deficit plan because they would have been considered a violation of the Norquist pledge, as a tax increase.

Cartnoon

How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not “the thing with feathers”. The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

This was originally posted April 21, 2011.

Life with Feathers

Democrats

Cartnoon

Another Silent Classic.  A  little dark, but the best print I could find.

Sergei EisensteinBattleship Potemkin 1925 (1:13)

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these featured articles-

Special sporting event on The Stars Hollow GazetteXXX Olympiad.

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Meanwhile in Afghanistan

Afghan policeman kills 10 fellow policemen

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press

3 hrs ago

An Afghan police officer killed at least 10 of his fellow officers on Saturday, a day after six U.S. service members were gunned down by their Afghan partners in summer violence that has both international and Afghan forces questioning who is friend or foe.



A day earlier, two Afghans shot and killed six American service members Friday in neighboring Helmand province in the south where insurgents have wielded their greatest influence.

In the first attack, an Afghan police officer shot and killed three Marines after sharing a pre-dawn meal with them in the volatile Sangin district, according to Afghan officials.



Then at around 9 p.m. Friday in the Garmser district farther south, an Afghan working on an installation shared by coalition and Afghan forces shot and killed three other international troops, said Maj. Lori Hodge, a spokesman for the coalition in Kabul. A U.S. defense official confirmed the three victims also were Americans.



Attacks where Afghan security forces or insurgents disguised in their uniforms kill foreign troops have spiked with four such attacks in the past week. There have been 26 such attacks so far this year, resulting in 34 deaths, according to the U.S.-led coalition.

Perseids 2012

The Perseids are the remnants of Comet Swift-Tuttle and stretch all the way around its 130 year orbit because it’s falling apart.  First historically recorded about 2,000 years ago the main current debris source is a chunk that fell off more or less 1,000 years later and a stream from 1862.  This year’s display is expected to be exceptionally active because of the numeric density of the material the Earth will pass through.

Perseid meteor shower: NASA explains why it’ll be the year’s best

By Rene Lynch, Los Angeles Times

August 10, 2012

But the Perseid meteor shower is only part of the treat in store for stargazers, NASA says.

“The brightest planets in the solar system are lining up right in the middle of the [Perseid] display,” NASA says. Specifically, “Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon are gathering together just as the Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak.”

The red giant star Aldebaran will also be visible, “adding a splash of color to the gathering,” NASA says.

The three celestial orbs will make for a brilliant, three-point line in the sky, all surrounded by shooting stars. The display is expected to be best seen in the eastern skies and in the early morning hours before sunrise.

The show will get better as the weekend winds down. Early Monday, the increasingly narrowing moon will pass even closer to Venus, as Jupiter “hovers” overhead, according to NASA.



“Star-watchers say there’s nothing prettier than a close encounter between the slender crescent moon and Venus. Nothing that is, except for the crescent moon, Venus and a flurry of Perseids.”

Viewing conditions might not be the best, especially in the Northeast, but should get better by sunrise.

Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight, best places to view it

David Epstein, Boston.com

August 11, 2012

Much of Texas, the Ohio Valley, Tennessee, the northern parts of Alabama, Mississippi and the Rockies look to have favorable sky conditions. parts of Florida and a good deal of the West Coast will also be mainly clear.



If you live where it is expected to be cloudy, like here in the northeast, it is still worth looking up later tonight. Last evening we had big thunderstorms in the area but early this morning it cleared enough to see some of the meteors in the Massachusetts area. The same thing could very easily happen across the northeast later tonight.



On Saturday the 11th, leading into the 12th, expect about 25-60 meteors per hour. You won’t see the meteors evenly spread out over time. You may see nothing for five minutes and then four or more in a row a minute later. Lie on a blanket and look up rather than stand. If you stand with your neck tilted up, you will have neck issues in the morning. On Sunday night, heading into the morning of the 13th there will be fewer meteors per hour, but still a nice show. The best time to see this will be around 2AM-3AM, but if you don’t want to wait till then it’s still worthwhile once it gets dark.

USA! USA!

Now, where’s my Bud.  Thank goodness all those froo-froo sports are done sucking up the TV Box and we can get back to NASCAR and the NFL.

Cartnoon

Odd what you can find.  Complete.  One of those films you should put on your bucket list.

Fritz LangMetropolis 1927 (2:30)

Part 1 (50:43)

Part 2 (50:42)

Part 3 (50:41)

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