What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[mercury14]

Actually the Japanese had more modernized plants and could produce much more cheaply. Unions here prevented modernization in order to save jobs, and at close to $20 bucks an hour for manual labor, business went overseas in the 60s. Own it.

And Nigeria pays its iron workers $1.00 per day. Our companies lose to that no matter what.

 

[koalabear]

And Nigeria pays its iron workers $1.00 per day. Our companies lose to that no matter what.

Well stop buying your iron from them.

 

[mercury14]

That's nonsense. It is not a zero sum game.

Here's why you're wrong. Take the emergency of Brazilian global mining giant, Vale. Not only do they do business all over the world, but their government gives financial rewards to other Brazilian companies who use Vale instead of foreign companies. So as Brazil emerges, Vale takes a chunk out of the market share our companies compete for - while Brazil itself doesn't add to the market share. Brazilian construction companies aren't buying iron from Germany or Pennsylvania.

And China is much, much worse.

So in reality it is very much a zero sum game.

 

[busybody..]

MICHAEL BARONE: Obama Tunes Out, And Business Goes On A Hiring Strike. “The signal was clear. Obama had already ignored his own deficit reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97-0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election. People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May it is 1 percent. . . . The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.”

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Again, my argument is that the number of government jobs has been declining. By that I've always meant overall government jobs. Stop trying to make my argument into something I never said. Okay so let me know if you disagree with these points:

1) Federal government jobs are pretty stable. Hiring obviously spiked around the time of the census.

2) Federal jobs have been growing in sectors such as homeland security and defense, which both Republicans and Democrats support.

3) Local government jobs have shrunk by almost hald a million since 2008.

4) There is a net loss of government jobs when you add the local, state, and federal figures.

5) Republicans voted for big boosts in the CIA, FBI, and Dept of Defense government staffing post-911. Then a Republican president entered us into two wars. Then a Republican president created an entire new executive branch department called the Department of Homeland Secutiry, and staffed it with tens/hundreds of thousands of employees.

6) According to that article, 79% of new goverment hiring is in these areas.

7) After voting to expand the government if not doing it themselves outright, they're now turning around and blaming democrats for the government being too big.

Again, you make a statement with no numbers to back it.

The only decline that you show puts government unemployment rates at under 1% assuming, as you do that Federal jobs are a stable number. I don't know how they teach math in Medical school (the physics course was a joke) but that's the the stuff proofs are made of.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Here's why you're wrong. Take the emergency of Brazilian global mining giant, Vale. Not only do they do business all over the world, but their government gives financial rewards to other Brazilian companies who use Vale instead of foreign companies. So as Brazil emerges, Vale takes a chunk out of the market share our companies compete for - while Brazil itself doesn't add to the market share. Brazilian construction companies aren't buying iron from Germany or Pennsylvania.

And China is much, much worse.

So in reality it is very much a zero sum game.

Let's get back to the classic economic model. Kansas can grow wheat corn and cotton. So can Iowa and Mississippi. But Kansas grows wheat better than Iowa of Mississippi, as Iowa does corn and Mississippi cotton, so each tends to grow what its best at. Are any of them hurt? No each is actually better off due to trade...

So we don't sell any iron ore. We still sell the equipment and they still buy cotton, corn and wheat...

But Obama is antithetical to that, he'll shut down our known oil reserves and ship those jobs to Brazil without a second thought, and the people who hire can see that he is not their friend, that he is already running for president, and if he wins, they'll be firmly in the crosshairs of Obamanomics, which is based in Marxist ideals.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

MICHAEL BARONE: Obama Tunes Out, And Business Goes On A Hiring Strike. “The signal was clear. Obama had already ignored his own deficit reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97-0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election. People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May it is 1 percent. . . . The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.”

From earlier in the piece:

Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities of 2009–10 raised federal spending from 21 percent to 25 percent of gross domestic product. Their stimulus package stopped layoffs of public employees for a while, even as private sector payrolls plummeted.

And the Obama Democrats piled further burdens on would-be employers in the private sector. Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill are scheduled to be followed by thousands of regulations that will impose impossible-to-estimate costs on the economy.

That seems to have led to a hiring freeze.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

More from the uninformed, ignorant lying racist rwingers I've been listening to since long before this thread began...

Quantitative Easing ends in June, according to Ben Bernanke's initial commitment. As June begins, the ending seems in doubt despite Fed statements regarding its imminent demise. These comments are perfunctory propaganda and will ultimately prove to be as premature as those of Mark Twain's misreported death. Twain eventually died; so too will QE. It just will not do so now, at least on a permanent basis.

There will likely be a face-saving pause, after which a new "crisis" will be discovered or imagined. The recent plunge in the stock market is a likely excuse if it continues, although nowhere in the Fed's charter does it suggest that "pumping" financial assets is a proper role.

There is no economic case for quantitative easing, nor has there ever been one. Quantitative easing is simply a political gimmick. Knowledgeable economists understood that QE2 would not produce economic improvement. "Rented" government economists (political mercenaries) argued for it on behalf of their bosses.
The results are now in and there are no surprises. Brett Arends of MarketWatch summarized it thusly:

QE2 has created a massive new bubble in dollar-based financial assets, from stocks to gold. Meanwhile, it has had zero visible effect on the real economy.

QE made matters worse in the sense that it prevented adjustments in relative prices and the liquidation of misallocated resources. These adjustments are necessary for any recovery to occur. As expressed by Pater Tenebrarum:

... the Fed managed to quickly arrest and reverse the liquidation of malinvestments. While this has averted more short term pain in 2009 -2010, the economy is now once again faced with having to deal with a distorted and discoordinated production structure that needs to be realigned with reality.

The political case for inflation or loose money is simple. It covers over (temporarily) the seriousness of underlying economic problems. It has been used in this country since the 1930s, when Keynesian economics provided "legitimacy" for interventions. Similar interventions have been documented for more than a thousand years in other countries. Nowhere have they worked other than to defer problems for an eventually bigger day of reckoning.

Look at some of the outcomes resulting from QE2:

The working labor force dropped as a percentage of the total labor force.
The unemployment rate was virtually unchanged.
Housing prices continued their downslide.
Growth in the economy slowed from 2.6% to 1.8% in the most recent quarter.
The rise in the stock market of 26%, according to Mr. Arends, was primarily a result of the deterioration in the value of the dollar.

Those who owned stocks had gains, but gave part of the gains back due to the rise in prices, especially of imported goods.

[That's your 401K U_D]

Wage gains trailed reported CPI inflation meaning the poor became worse off.
Non-investors in the stock market were made worse off as a result of higher prices.
The US government further added to the debt burden of the public with virtually nothing to show for it other than speculative financial markets.
The US dollar continued to lose value relative to other fiat currencies.
Precious metals and other hard assets continue to increase in dollar value.

The latest job report (May) showed only 54,000 private jobs created, of which reportedly half were jobs at McDonald's.

Supporters claim QE2 created 700,000 new jobs. Mr. Arends points out that, if true, each new job cost $850,000 to create. To put this dubious (desperate) employment claim in perspective, the US economy normally creates about 1.5 million jobs during a six-month period. That is double what is claimed for the stimulus and generally occurs without any help from the government or the Fed. That amount of growth is necessary merely to keep pace with normal growth in the labor force.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis questioned the validity of monetary policy as a policy tool for the economy. It determined that economic growth was higher in slow monetary growth periods:

Ironically, economic growth was higher in the years of slow money growth (3.7 percent) than it was in the years of rapid growth (3.2 percent). The same was true for industrial production. Meanwhile, the consumer price index rose 5.1 percent in years of above-average monetary growth and just 2.6 per- cent in below-average years.

...

Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, was an early supporter of government interventions. The principals, Bill Gross, Paul McCully, and Mohamed El-Erian are Keynesian-activist government types. Bill Gross is now one of the biggest critics of US economic policy. According to Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy failed to meet the "ultimate objective" of boosting employment and economic growth, said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer at Pacific Investment Management Co.

The Washington Post, long-time cheerleader for big government, now allows statements indicative of the despair and confusion amongst liberal ranks:
The economic recovery is faltering, and Washington is running out of ways to get it back on track.

All these comments/findings are consistent with sound economic theory. The St. Louis Fed data are consistent with centuries of data from around the world. Easy money does not work. If continued too long it always ends with destruction of the currency and social fabric of a nation.

The absurdity that printing money can improve the well-being of a people was demolished concisely by Ludwig von Mises:

If it were really possible to substitute credit expansion (cheap money) for the accumulation of capital goods by saving, there would not be any poverty in the world.

...

There are three problems with the Keynesian approach:

1. The economy never properly "heals" from the excesses of the prior boom. As a result, distortions and misallocations of resources and employment do not correct and are carried forward as potential seeds for the next downturn.
2. Each monetary and fiscal intervention must be larger than its predecessor since the problems to be covered up grow bigger and bigger over time.
3. At some point even the ability to produce "newspaper" economic numbers (as opposed to sound growth) ends because
a. distortions in the economy become so great as to preclude proper functioning, or
b. the need for ever-increasing doses of resources outgrows the economy's capacity to provide them.

The US has reached point 3. Pater Tenebrarum believes point 3a has been reached:

If the economy can not even maintain a 'statistical recovery' in the face of massive monetary pumping and deficit spending, then this shows that the preceding credit expansions have fatally weakened the economy's ability to generate true wealth. The problem is no longer just cyclical, it has become structural.

Marty Pelerin
The American Thinker

(He even takes on Bush U_D.)

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

My new hero, Mr. Greenspan, stated the banks haven’t even used up QE1 reserves yet, and are sitting on QE2, parked at the Fed and drawing interest.

That’s over $1.5 trillion dollars not being lent either for lack of demand or stringent terms and conditions, or both.

I take exception with Mr. Greenspan declaring the banks haven’t used the money for lending. They’ve certainly lent it to the banks for use in the stock and commodity markets.

However, we both concur that when the Fed takes that money back, it could prove interesting and tumultuous.

Finally, the former Fed Chairman said there would be no, that’s NO, recovery without construction being revived, while Case-Shiller reports the continued decline in housing prices.

Greenspan believes that no real recovery is in sight without the 2 million lost construction jobs coming back, and house prices finding somewhat of a floor, sooner rather than later.

That would be the real sign that we’ve turned the corner. Until then, Keynesian models, cheerleading, and spinmeistering are all just smoke and mirrors coupled with wishful thinking.

http://finance.townhall.com/columni...enspan_they_missed_meltdown,_could_miss_again

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

‘The auto industry has added 113,000 jobs over the past two years.” So proclaimed President Obama in his speech Friday at the Chrysler-Fiat plant in Toledo, Ohio, his tone triumphal despite the horrific unemployment numbers that had been released that very morning.

Automotive jobs numbers are cited to end the argument against anyone who objects to the bailout/takeover of General Motors and Chrysler. The White House has largely abandoned the projection that bailout funds will be recovered fully after critics — including my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleagues Hans Bader and Sam Kazman — pointed out the shuffling of government loans to allow GM to claim deceptively that it had repaid taxpayers “in full.” Now the White House is projecting a $14 billion taxpayer loss, and so is putting the focus on the jobs added to the sector supposedly as a result of the bailouts

But we need to look under the hood of those employment claims. And in this case, the first place to look is a June 1 Cleveland Plain Dealer story by Robert Schoenberger that seemingly contradicts the president’s figures for auto job growth. Schoenberger reported the sobering fact that even after the Bush and Obama administrations spent $62 billion to bail out Chrysler and General Motors, “the two automakers employ 16,500 fewer people than they did in 2009.”

How can these two statistics — 113,000 new jobs and 16,500 fewer auto workers — simultaneously be true? After all, Obama didn’t say “saved or created” — although there was plenty of that elsewhere in the administration’s talking points of the bailouts’ supposed success — he said “added.” And other administration officials and documents also specifically used the term “added” or “created” with the similar statistic of 115,000 jobs when touting the bailouts.

But the fine print, in Obama’s speech quoted above and the quotes listed below, is the artful use of the term “industry” or “auto industry.”

On June 1, for example, the White House issued a report claiming, “Since GM and Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy, the auto industry has created 115,000 jobs.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner chirped the same statistic in an op-ed in the Washington Post, bragging that since GM filed for bankruptcy, “the industry has added new shifts and 115,000 jobs.”

So how could the “auto industry” have added thousands of U.S. jobs when GM and Chrysler cut jobs? It so happens that both statistics are correct if the reader or listener understands what’s being referred to. But the Obama administration is obscuring what many would consider important information about the nature of the jobs to give undue credit to the bailouts. And that is that many of the jobs added by the “auto industry” have been created by foreign-owned automakers in nonunion states far away from the plants of the bailed out companies — not by GM or Chrysler.

A White House infographic and earlier White House “brag sheets” and reports attribute the job-growth figures to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. And indeed BLS’s industry category of “motor vehicle and parts manufacturing” does show substantial growth since the summer of 2009 — near the bottom of the recession.

Jobs in this category had been steadily falling since well before the recession, from 1.1 million in 2005 to around 950,000 by the end of 2007. BLS figures show that number of jobs reached a low point of 623,000, when the government took GM into bankruptcy, and rose to 695,000 this March, a gain of 72,000. That’s somewhat less than the administration’s figure of 113,000, and it’s not entirely clear from its charts where the start and end data points are. But I’ll cut the administration some slack on this, since even 72,000 is an impressive gain.

The problem for bailout defenders, though, in touting these gains is that the BLS is very clear this number includes U.S. jobs created by all manufacturers — foreign and domestic — and that foreign automakers with plants in the South have been picking up the slack in hiring. “Automotive employment is shifting away from its traditional base in the Midwest to the southeastern States,” says the BLS in its 2010–11 Career Guide to Industries. “A large number of these assembly plants are owned by foreign automobile makers, known as ‘domestic internationals.’”

It is of course very good news, as well as a tribute to the quality of America’s labor force, that foreign auto and auto-parts makers want to hire here. But it is very difficult to attribute this new hiring by foreign automakers to the U.S. government’s bailout and takeover of our domestic dinosaurs.

John Berlau
NRO

Not lies, just parsing...

 

[Ham Murabi]

More competition means more business going elsewhere. For example, the US still produces a lot of iron. But now Brazil and a bunch of other South American countries produce heaps of iron too, not only competing with our companies but driving up supply and driving the price down, globally. See how that works?

That's how it works if all national economies are stagnant in terms of demand for product. In other words, that's not how it works.

 

[onemadvagabond]

Again, my argument is that the number of government jobs has been declining. By that I've always meant overall government jobs. Stop trying to make my argument into something I never said. Okay so let me know if you disagree with these points:

1) Federal government jobs are pretty stable. Hiring obviously spiked around the time of the census.

2) Federal jobs have been growing in sectors such as homeland security and defense, which both Republicans and Democrats support.

3) Local government jobs have shrunk by almost hald a million since 2008.

4) There is a net loss of government jobs when you add the local, state, and federal figures.

No I do not disagree with the above. I fully agree. In your original post it read (by the response to it I was not the only one that understood it that way) in a way that it looked like you were confusing the two and trying to make it look as if the federal employment went down by half a million. Now that you have clarified your position we do indeed agree on that. I was also just trying to point out the leading causes for the local government jobs. Local governments get a large portion of their income from property taxes. With property values dropping in the last couple of years they have lost a lot of tax revenue, and have since made cuts in employment levels. I feel they could have also saved a lot of those jobs by cutting alot of waste. There will always be wasted spending in government, but I feel that they should take more responsibility in times like these especially. We've just proved here that people with different views on the country can agree to the same thing.

5) Republicans voted for big boosts in the CIA, FBI, and Dept of Defense government staffing post-911. Then a Republican president entered us into two wars. Then a Republican president created an entire new executive branch department called the Department of Homeland Secutiry, and staffed it with tens/hundreds of thousands of employees.

H.R. 3162 USA Patriot Act of 2001 October 25 2001 Senate Vote: YEAs 49REPUBs 48 DEMs 1 IND NAYs 1 DEM NO Vote 1 DEM

S.J.RES. 23 Authorization for Use of Military Force September 14 2001 Senate Vote: YEAs 98 NO Votes 2 REPUBs

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_107_1.htm

Seeing the above votes, can you agree that it wasn't just the republicans voting for this stuff? I pose that question to the rest of you as well. It's pretty hard to just scream the republicans were the only ones now isn't it.
I didn't put the Iraq crap on there, because I beleive we are both in agreement on that one. It was both sides as well though.

6) According to that article, 79% of new goverment hiring is in these areas.

7) After voting to expand the government if not doing it themselves outright, they're now turning around and blaming democrats for the government being too big.

Both sides do the same thing. I don't side with either side on this because of that. They are all to blame in this area.

 

[mercury14]

Again, you make a statement with no numbers to back it.

The only decline that you show puts government unemployment rates at under 1% assuming, as you do that Federal jobs are a stable number. I don't know how they teach math in Medical school (the physics course was a joke) but that's the the stuff proofs are made of.

Yes I did show numbers. Scroll back.

 

[mercury14]

So we don't sell any iron ore. We still sell the equipment and they still buy cotton, corn and wheat...

That's the thing though, we do sell iron ore. We had a massive iron industry. There was no painless trade off for one industry to another, we just lost a monumental amount of market share and became economically weaker.

 

[mercury14]

No I do not disagree with the above. I fully agree. In your original post it read (by the response to it I was not the only one that understood it that way) in a way that it looked like you were confusing the two and trying to make it look as if the federal employment went down by half a million. Now that you have clarified your position we do indeed agree on that.

Sorry I wasn't more clear.

Seeing the above votes, can you agree that it wasn't just the republicans voting for this stuff? I pose that question to the rest of you as well. It's pretty hard to just scream the republicans were the only ones now isn't it.
I didn't put the Iraq crap on there, because I beleive we are both in agreement on that one. It was both sides as well though.

Of course it wasn't. But it's primarily Republicans who are crying about the size of government. Even though Bush + Republicans expanded government greatly during their time and then handed the keys to Obama, immediately attacking him for the government being too big. Even though the areas of government that have grown (CIA, FBI, Dept of Justice, war effort Dept of Defense personnel, Dept of Homeland Security) are all things that Republicans support and created themselves, they attack Obama for it.[/QUOTE]


They know Americans are uninformed about actual numbers so they go off on tirades about "government is too big" and "government has gotten bigger". It's utter hypocrisy.

 

[onemadvagabond]

Sorry I wasn't more clear.

No worries on that front.

Of course it wasn't. But it's primarily Republicans who are crying about the size of government. Even though Bush + Republicans expanded government greatly during their time and then handed the keys to Obama, immediately attacking him for the government being too big. Even though the areas of government that have grown (CIA, FBI, Dept of Justice, war effort Dept of Defense personnel, Dept of Homeland Security) are all things that Republicans support and created themselves, they attack Obama for it.

My point with showing the votes was not to defend republicans. It was to show that the dems were right there with them through all of that. It was to prove the point that both sides are as equally responsible, especially if you look at the vote totals. The organizations you refer to here are a direct result of that voting the patriot act into law.

On a whole they don't attack Obama on those fronts. They attack him on the government taking control of 1/6 of the economy through things like health care reform. I don't disagree with the idea of it myself. I disagree with the far lefts way of doing it. Namely Pelosi and Reid. They ran the show on that. If it was so good then why did so many of their own party not really want it. Of course they weren't really Pelosi's party. She's a liberal and they were democrats. Two different things. It's full of so much lawyer double speak that all bills are full of and it needs to be reworked, cleaned up and fixed, just like the original system that is still in effect for the time being. I mean do you really think republicans are going to gripe about increasing the defense department. Come on.

 

[mercury14]

No worries on that front.







My point with showing the votes was not to defend republicans. It was to show that the dems were right there with them through all of that. It was to prove the point that both sides are as equally responsible, especially if you look at the vote totals. The organizations you refer to here are a direct result of that voting the patriot act into law.

On a whole they don't attack Obama on those fronts. They attack him on the government taking control of 1/6 of the economy through things like health care reform. I don't disagree with the idea of it myself. I disagree with the far lefts way of doing it. Namely Pelosi and Reid. They ran the show on that. If it was so good then why did so many of their own party not really want it. Of course they weren't really Pelosi's party. She's a liberal and they were democrats. Two different things. It's full of so much lawyer double speak that all bills are full of and it needs to be reworked, cleaned up and fixed, just like the original system that is still in effect for the time being. I mean do you really think republicans are going to gripe about increasing the defense department. Come on.

Well for one, the Affordable Health Care Act isn't giving us "government-controlled health care" like the right keeps saying. And that old line about "government taking control of 1/6 of the economy" is a monumental whopper on par with death panels and government agents putting you in jail if you're uninsured.

Really... I expected more from you man.

And why was is such a painful vote? Because America was deeply split on it and politicians worry about their reelection prospects, especially in the House. This is all obvious stuff.

 

[JenAltArmy]

And Nigeria pays its iron workers $1.00 per day. Our companies lose to that no matter what.

but here is what you nut baggers miss. for that person in Nigeria, what does $1.00 a day mean? does that provide a high standard of living in their country? if so there is NOTHING wrong with that.

 

[JenAltArmy]

Well for one, the Affordable Health Care Act isn't giving us "government-controlled health care" like the right keeps saying. And that old line about "government taking control of 1/6 of the economy" is a monumental whopper on par with death panels and government agents putting you in jail if you're uninsured.

Really... I expected more from you man.

And why was is such a painful vote? Because America was deeply split on it and politicians worry about their reelection prospects, especially in the House. This is all obvious stuff.

clearly we can't trust our political leaders, just look at penis man!?!?!

government workers are evil, self serving, and wrong. see, another political leader bites the dust.

then what about obama's buddy, the ex-gov of Ill, isn't he going off to a "government" vacation of 2-10 years?

just another example of a dirty government worker/political leader.

so, do you really want government to run health care? just look at the fantastic job they are doing with the US post office

when will you socialist nut jobbers ever learn, government isn't the solution; government is the problem?!?!?!

there has never been, nor will there ever be an effective and efficient government enterprise. it just doesn't exist

 

[badbabysitter]

but here is what you nut baggers miss. for that person in Nigeria, what does $1.00 a day mean? does that provide a high standard of living in their country? if so there is NOTHING wrong with that.

but here's the thing... it doesnt

it currently ranks at 126th spot on the quality of life index... North Korea is at 113


yes, in comparison, living in North Korea would be a blessing for a Nigerian

 

[JenAltArmy]

but here's the thing... it doesnt

it currently ranks at 126th spot on the quality of life index... North Korea is at 113


yes, in comparison, living in North Korea would be a blessing for a Nigerian

so what?

what does that $1 mean for that country?

that is the point.

 

[Sean Renaud]

so what?

what does that $1 mean for that country?

that is the point.

It means about the same as 1$ means here. A shitty life where you can't afford food, shelter or clothing. Sure instead of it buying one cheese burger it buys 2 apples but still it's shit.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

It means about the same as 1$ means here. A shitty life where you can't afford food, shelter or clothing. Sure instead of it buying one cheese burger it buys 2 apples but still it's shit.

And entitled, fat-off-the-good-life whiny fucks like Welfare-Alt-Jen will myopically try to justify the worth of that dollar by re-engineering it like it's worth $10,000 in their country. Thereby giving himself the excuse for making things stay the same since he'll never have to care as long as he's got access to his gas-guzzling SUV to drive down the two residential blocks to the local McDonald's to get his Big Macs, fries and super-size milkshake. Then he'll drive back down his two blocks, waddle back inside his air conditioned home and plomp his cottage cheese ass down in front of his computer to bitch and moan again how terrible life is and how he's suffering under Obama.

Summertime and the livin' is easy...

 

[cebalrai]

government workers are evil, self serving, and wrong.

My sister is a child protective social worker for the county. She makes like 32K with a master's degree. She's constantly working unpaid overtime and evenings because it's not possible for her to maintain contact with her 45 kid caseload during a 40 hour work week.

So please explain how my sister is:

1) "Evil"

2) Self-serving (she could have gotten her master's in business and made triple her tiny salary)

3) Wrong (she works with girls who were neglected, physically, and sexually abused by their parents. They've been often pimped by their mothers for drugs or raped by their fathers)

 

[JenAltArmy]

It means about the same as 1$ means here. A shitty life where you can't afford food, shelter or clothing. Sure instead of it buying one cheese burger it buys 2 apples but still it's shit.

no it does not, god you are stupid

if the avg salary is say $.50 than that person making $1 will have a higher than avg means