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

[mercury14]

Good idea!

http://www.bullandbearwise.com/InitialJobless.asp

Now trying spinning THAT trend, you racist son of a bitch!

"but....but...U6!!"

He thinks Obama fabricated the numbers or something. Secretive operatives are turning the dials at the BLS....

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

I cashed out all of my Schlumberger today (which I have long posted I've owned). Sold at $74.12 after buying at $44. Over $71,000 in capital gains.

 

[mercury14]

Why don't they wait another three days until they have real numbers and report those? Which is about three days later.

Who cares if they do or not? How does that at all prove (or even suggest) that Obama is tampering with the numbers? Do you think this practice didn't go on before the Obama administration?

I suspect this phenomenon happens because the BLS is mandated to give its monthly report on a certain day while a certain data set always comes in a little later.

 

[islandman]

I cashed out all of my Schlumberger today (which I have long posted I've owned). Sold at $74.12 after buying at $44. Over $71,000 in capital gains.

Next quarter start a stock market challenge game. I, for one, would be interested in seeing how you do when your buys and sells are public.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Thanks for quoting the MMS who, being from Georgia, completely missed my point.

The numbers don't exactly square with what your Lord and Savior Rush Limbaugh told you, did they? You racist son of a bitch.

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

What you *want* to say but you have no proof, is that the labor force shrank a bit because of discouraged workers.

The BLS tracks discouraged workers though and their numbers are slowly decreasing.

What you REALLY don't want to factor in is the aging population and the baby boomer generation retiring, shifting the population towards non-working retirees.

 

[koalabear]

Nitre blue.

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

Next quarter start a stock market challenge game. I, for one, would be interested in seeing how you do when your buys and sells are public.

I've been posting these things lately for just that purpose. I posted Schlumberger a while ago actually.

And Red Hat. Which them exploded. My Vale stock is being lame as hell though. But it pays a fat divident so it's not just sitting there at least. You can search my post history for these things.

Most of our investments are in mutual funds... This is all play money for a little extra income. Turns out that investing heavily during the market's 6,700 point run up was a good move. We're about to buy a house and will be paying for almost all of it in cash just from capital gains from the past couple years.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

WOW!!!


Obama's been reelected! Did you see the reaction to the jobs and unemployment reports!



merc, is that 100K 200K yet?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What you *want* to say but you have no proof, is that the labor force shrank a bit because of discouraged workers.

The BLS tracks discouraged workers though and their numbers are slowly decreasing.

What you REALLY don't want to factor in is the aging population and the baby boomer generation retiring, shifting the population towards non-working retirees.

... and how we're going to pay all the benefits we promised to ourselves...




Happy days are here again!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Public-Employee Unions Gone Wild
By Patrick Brennan
April 27, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Terry List, a teacher in Saginaw Township, Mich., has a depressing lesson for her students: “I would not recommend to my pupils to become a teacher in Michigan.”

What’s discouraging her? A proposed pension-reform bill in Michigan would derail her plans to retire — at age 47.

After these rapacious reforms, List would have to work another 16 years, to age 63, in order to earn her retiree health-care benefits. “I understand we have to tighten our belts,” she laments, “but we don’t have to use a tourniquet and cut off the blood supply entirely.” Under the reforms, such a tourniquet means she could still retire now and have a guaranteed income for the rest of her life, but she’d have to pay for her own health care until age 65 — like, you know, most Americans.

Ninety percent of public employees in the United States enjoy defined-benefit pension plans, meaning they will receive a guaranteed income, and usually health insurance, until death. These benefits are prohibitively expensive, and more so when they are tied to retirement ages that are atypically low. Given rising life expectancies, we could see a raft of public pensioners spending more years collecting retirement benefits than they spent working their government jobs, and in fact this isn’t uncommon already.

Thanks to the strength of teachers’ unions, the average retirement age for a public-school teacher in America is 59. In California, the oldest age at which some categories of state and local employees can retire is 60, though for most the age is significantly lower. It’s hard to generalize, because some unions have pillaged far more than others. For a sense of how extreme the demands of some can be, one more example will have to suffice.

Until recently, employees of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority enjoyed “23 and out” pensions. No matter when they began their careers, they could collect nearly full pensions after 23 years on the job. (That has been raised to the a punishing figure of 25 years, and now with a minimum age of 55 before they can collect.) Perhaps the most famous member of the organization that negotiated these benefits, the Boston Carmen’s Union, is Patrick Bulger, son of longtime Massachusetts state-senate president Billy Bulger. The younger Bulger retired from the Carmen’s Union at 43 and began collecting an annual pension of $41,000. Plus cost-of-living adjustments. For the rest of his life.

It’s hard to justify such benefits when the rest of America relies on 401(k)s, Social Security, and Medicare, making their effective retirement age, on average, 63 — and soon to rise. Public employees retire still very much in their working years. Even though they’re guaranteed financial security for life, some of them in “retirement” go on to lucrative jobs in the private sector — or, more disturbingly, back in the public sector. Take retired MBTA manager Michael Mulhern, age 48, who now enjoys a $130,000-a-year pension — and earns $225,000 a year as executive director of the MBTA’s retirement fund.

And now Princess Nancy wants to tax our 401Ks...





... again...




I can see why merc wants to surrender his ill-gotten Capital gains, after all, he did NOTHING to earn that money, but hell, we already paid tax on our retirement...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Moreover, much of the cost that governments incur when they grant early retirement comes from health-care benefits, which are easy to promise but costly to deliver. Insuring the elderly can mean that a retiree already receiving a pension that amounts to 80 percent of his peak earnings in wages could easily be costing his public employer more than he ever did as a full-time worker.

In a nation where everyone must rely on Medicare, there’s no good reason for retirees to be provided health-insurance benefits, which shift the burden of an undersized risk pool and inflated tax-exempt benefits onto local governments and taxpayers. But these benefits are important for the unions, because otherwise employees couldn’t afford to retire before 65, when they become eligible for Medicare. And so public-safety employees whose retirement ages have always been much lower than 65 require extremely expensive health-care benefits in order to make their early-age pensions worthwhile. This practice spread as hazard schedules were applied to other professions until, eventually, it became a common retirement benefit.

As a 2007 GAO report explains, rising health-care costs make these promises extremely difficult, almost impossible, to account for — when state and local governments even bother. They usually don’t. Few still rely on pay-as-you-go budgeting for pensions, though it remains common for health care.

By almost every measure, public-sector unions have managed to extract excessive levels of retirement benefits from governments, whose obligations have been vastly increased by the early ages at which the benefits can be claimed. That the benefits enjoyed by public employees already are more generous than anything the average American knows, and that they can enjoy them at an age when the average American is still working, isn’t just adding insult to injury. It’s adding kerosene to tinder.

Patrick Brennan

 

[RobDownSouth]

Vetteman had to look long and hard for a chart that supported his personal narrative.

He couldn't address the New Unemployment Claims trend, of course, because that didn't fit the narrative.

So he ended up digging deep into the bowels of the Freeper site, to come up with some hoo-ha called "Civilian Non-Institutional Population Vs. Labor Force", declared this orange to be an apple, and smugly declared his position supported.

Textbook definition of cherry-picking.

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Democrats want to control your 401Ks and make you buy a certain percentage of govt. bonds, so they can corrupt your savings like they did SS.

I don't see why I should be punished for working so hard to be in the top 5% of retirement savings for our age group.

There is no limit to what Washington DC wishes to steal from us, including our dignity.

It is clear they want us to have to rely on them...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Why Occupiers will become Tea Partiers...




http://pjmedia.com/blog/8-reasons-why-todays-occupiers-are-tomorrows-tea-partiers/?singlepage=true

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

From his first days in office, the president has held up California as a model state. In 2009, he praised its green-tinged energy policies as a blueprint for the nation. He staffed his administration with Californians like Energy Secretary Steve Chu—an open advocate of high energy prices who’s lavished government funding on “green” dodos like solar-panel maker Solyndra, and luxury electric carmaker Fisker—and Commerce Secretary John Bryson, who thrived as CEO of a regulated utility which raised energy costs for millions of consumers, sometimes to finance “green” ideals.

Obama regularly asserts that green jobs will play a crucial role in the future of the American economy, but California, a trend-setter in the field, has yet to reap such benefits. Green jobs, broadly defined, make up only about 2 percent of jobs in the state—about the same proportion as in Texas. In Silicon Valley, the number of green jobs actually declined between 2003 and 2010. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is the nation’s third highest, behind only Nevada and Rhode Island.

...

Obama’s push to nationalize many of California’s economy-stifling green policies has been slowed down, first by the Republican resurgence in 2010 and then by his reelection considerations. But California’s politicians, living in what’s become essentially a one-party state, have doubled down on green orthodoxy. As the president at least tries to cover his flank by claiming to support an “all-in” energy policy, California has simply refused to exploit much of its massive oil and gas resources.

Does this matter? Well, Texas has created 200,000 oil and gas jobs over the past decade; California has barely added 20,000. The state’s remaining energy producers have been slowing down as the regulatory environment becomes ever more hostile even as producers elsewhere, including in rustbelt states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, ramp up. The oil and gas jobs the Golden State political class shuns pay around $100,000 a year on average.

Instead, California has forged ahead with ever-more extreme renewable energy mandates that have resulted in energy costs roughly 50 percent above the national average and expected to rise substantially from there. This tends to drive out manufacturing and other largely blue-collar energy users.

Over the past decade the Golden State has grown its middle-skilled jobs (those that require two years or more of post-secondary education) by a mere 2 percent compared to a 5.3 percent increase nationwide, and almost 15 percent in Texas. Even in the science-technology-engineering and mathematics field, where California has long been a national leader, the state has lost its edge, growing just 1.7 percent over the past 10 years compared to 5.4 percent nationally and 14 percent in Texas.

A recent Public Policy of California study shows that since the recession, the gap between rich and poor has widened more in California than in the rest of the nation. Lower-income workers have seen their wages drop more precipitously than those of the affluent. And the middle class is proportionately smaller and has shrunk more than elsewhere. Adjusted for cost of living, it stands at 47.9 percent in California compared to nearly 55 percent for the rest of the country.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/27/as-california-collapses-obama-follows-its-lead.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Freshman Class President

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304811304577366180123952456.html

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Freshman Class President

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304811304577366180123952456.html

We know.. Edjucashun is bad..

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We know.. Edjucashun is bad..

Another piece you "know" without reading...



Not bad for a High School education.

You might want to apply for the GSA mind-reader gig.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Another piece you "know" without reading...



Not bad for a High School education.

You might want to apply for the GSA mind-reader gig.

I read it Cap'n Ad hominem. High School education.. Demonstrating once again how little you know, but how much you think you know about me.

So your saying that the piece wasn't about bad-mouthing the President talking to college kids about lowering student loan rates so that more can afford to stay in school?

Your position seems to be that a high school education is bad (based on your attempted ill-fitting slight toward me), but that higher education should be unreachable to all but the affluent.

I think it's time to give up trying to understand your opposing views on the same subject.