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

[mercury14]

IT’S NOT JUST TAXES: 40% of every small-business dollar goes to pay for federal regs.

... says Markwayne Mullin, GOP House candidate in the GOP weekly radio address. Except he didn't cite any sources or studies that came up with that figure because none of them have. He just thought it sounded good n' scary. According to him he pays 40% of his profits in "regulations" and then another 30% or so in income taxes, so small businesses have a ~70% effective tax rate. And conservatives ate that lie up, didn't they?

If he's going to make up numbers like that why didn't he say regulations cost 60%?

 

[Busybody]

yes, we know

he is a LIAR


lets move on

and

pretend

HE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO SAYS IT


Happy?

 

[Busybody]

yes, we know

lets IGNORE all the other studies and business people who say the same

cause we KNOW what will happen

you will call em LIARS and ask for NAMES of people who are impacted



YES, WE KNOW

 

[mercury14]

Deficit Tops $1 Trillion For Fourth Year
by Mark Memmott
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/12/162811167/deficit-tops-1-trillion-for-fourth-year

You just said that Obama has decreased the deficit every year and it's declined by 25% total. 25% is not 50% but it also doesn't jive with the conservative belief here that Obama increased the deficit.

 

[Busybody]

$400 billion and 4% of GDP

to $1 trillion and MUCH MORE OF GDP

is INCREASE


unless one is Clinton and disputes what INCREASE MEANS

 

[mercury14]

$400 billion and 4% of GDP

to $1 trillion and MUCH MORE OF GDP

is INCREASE


unless one is Clinton and disputes what INCREASE MEANS

It's a ~$400 billion decrease.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

56% of Decline Since 2000 Was Unexpected

In 2000 the participation rate was 67.1. Using that favorable starting point, Toossi expected a total drop of 1.5 percentage points. The actual drop was 3.4 percentage points.

Even by the most favorable method, only 44% of the total decline in the participation rate was expected by the BLS.

Thus, no matter how one slices or dices the data, there is no realistic way to say the decline in the participation rate was expected. Not even half of it was, by the most liberal interpretation.

Regardless, now that we have BLS projections for labor force and participation rates, there are some interesting things we can do with those projections (such as figure out how many jobs it will take to reduce the unemployment rate to 5%, hold it steady, etc.)

I hope to have an interactive graph of that idea shortly.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#EauAl1yatrJ2HOYh.99

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You just said that Obama has decreased the deficit every year and it's declined by 25% total. 25% is not 50% but it also doesn't jive with the conservative belief here that Obama increased the deficit.

Obama declares he will cut deficit in half by end of his first term.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jJvkkNmR_8

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

To meet total spending requirements of $3.2 trillion, but not counting $117 trillion in unfunded liabilities, not only would we have to do everything in the five point list above, but we would have to take the combined salaries of all players in the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL, cut military spending by $254 billion, and tax everything people make above $250,000 at a 100% tax rate.

That's what it would take to meet the 2012 budget of $3.8 trillion. It would do nothing to pay down the existing national debt of close to $16 trillion. It would not come remotely close to meeting $117 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

Robbins gives credit in his video to the post Feed Your Family on $10 Billion a Day by IowaHawk.

In turn, I give credit to Michael Snyder for his writeup Anyone With Half A Brain Should See That A Gigantic Economic Collapse Is Coming

Snyder, referencing Ron Paul and Tony Robbins, writes ...

For the past four decades, the United States has been enjoying a 15 trillion dollar party. All of this borrowed money has enabled us to live far, far beyond our means.

If our politicians voted to severely cut spending or to raise taxes dramatically at this point, our economy would suddenly readjust to a more realistic standard of living. But that would be extremely painful and most Americans voters would be absolutely furious. They would demand that someone “fix” the economy immediately. But the truth is that what we have been enjoying all these years has not been real. It has been bought with trillions of dollars stolen from future generations. But most of our politicians just want to keep the party rolling as long as humanly possible so that they can keep getting voted back into office.

Some hard choices will have to be made, and there will be a lot of pain. The false prosperity that we are enjoying now is going to disappear.

Now is the time to prepare for the massive economic shift that is coming. In the coming economic environment, those that are currently living month to month and those that are 100% dependent on the system are going to be in a huge amount of trouble.

Instead of wildly spending money as if the good times will never end like most Americans are, now is the time to get out of debt, to become more self-sufficient and to set aside the money, resources and supplies you will need to weather the storm that is rapidly approaching.

Hard Choices

I certainly agree with Snyder regarding hard choices. And over the course of the next decade, the projected budgets show the choices are going to get much harder.

2012 Budget vs. 2022 Budget

Please consider projected budgets for the next decade, straight from the White House Office of Management and Budget.

In particular, note Table S-5 on page 210.

The projected cumulative budget for the next 10 years is an unbelievable $46.956 trillion dollars. Government spending is projected to escalate to a whopping $5.8 trillion a year in 10 years.

Noting the difficulty Robbins had in coming up with $3.8 trillion, pray tell what kind of "fair tax" hikes would it take to meet expenses of $5.8 trillion?

So, do we have a spending problem, or a problem of not taxing enough?

The answer is pretty clear.

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogs...-could-obama-balance.html#Erx2wtUozVjUzZWI.99

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Even the LOONY Left "gets" it...

How Does the Current Deficit Compare to Past Deficits?
Name: Barbara Hughes
City & State: Harrison, Ark.

Question: How does the current deficit compare to past deficits as related to the economy as a whole? Is this really a historically large deficit when adjusted for inflation? How different is it really, especially when you consider huge executive salaries/bonuses, average home prices and prices in general?

Paul Solman: Well, if you used executive pay as your benchmark, I guess almost nothing is historically large at this point. I mean, Steven Schwartzman of the Blackstone Group was the highest paid executive of 2008 (not a great year for the rest of us, I might add), at $700+ million. The GDP of the United States was something like $14 trillion. That's 0.005 percent, if I'm doing the numbers right. In any case, a seemingly modest percentage, what with all those zeroes.

But compare Schwartzman's haul to the highest paid executive of 1978, to pick a yesteryear at random.

According to Business Week, the winner was Norton Simon at $2 million, in a year when the Dow Jones average was 805; average worker pay, $10,592; U.S. GDP, $2.3 trillion. Simon's pay, as a percentage of GDP? One fiftieth the size of Schwartzman's, adjusted for GDP.

(Another way to look at it: Adjust by GDP, and Simon's pay package would be roughly $13 million today. Adjust by the Dow, more like $25 million. Adjust by average pay, below $10 million.)

Now let's look at the budget deficit in 1978. It was $32 billion, a mere 1.4 percent of GDP. This year's deficit is a whopping 11 percent. But if it had kept pace with executive pay at the top, the deficit would be more like 80 percent of GDP -- somewhere in the neighborhood of ELEVEN trillion dollars.

As for the historical trend, see the nice chart here. You'll see that deficits, as a percentage of GDP, spiked to nearly 30 percent during World War II. But then, we quickly went into surplus when the war ended. By historical standards, deficits were high in the Reagan years and again under George W. Bush. They are higher today. And projected to remain so in the years ahead.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2010/02/how-does-the-current-deficit-c.html

 

[mercury14]

Obama declares he will cut deficit in half by end of his first term.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jJvkkNmR_8

That's why I said "it's not 50%". The recession ended up being a lot deeper than we thought back when Obama was running for pres, plus he cut taxes a number of times. The outcome was that the deficit only decreased 25% instead of 50%. The fucker!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Finally, Obama claims that “we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower.” We regret to say that the president is repeating a widely debunked column that appeared on MarketWatch earlier this year. We devoted three columns to the column’s faulty logic, and FactCheck.org and the Associated Press also said it was bunk. (PolitiFact said it was “half true.”)

Not to get too deep in the weeds again, but the claim is based on treating 2009 (as we said, an amalgam of Bush and Obama policies) as actually Bush’s year, and then ignoring Obama’s proposed spending increases in the future. Such calculations help to dramatically shrink the growth of spending under Obama relative to other presidents.

...

Four Pinocchios

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...9bfbcd0-077e-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_blog.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

He can only blame himself for the length and duration of the recession.

As we patiently pointed out his failed programs to delay the pain until after the next election; all he did was to put back the day of reckoning and force capital flight from the markets to the point where he had to complain about evil business sitting on the sidelines instead of being economic patriots.

But hey, we you ignore the rule of law and fuck over bondholders while claiming "it is not a death panel," who the fuck is ever going to believe in you?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

“I’m afraid of the president,” said Wynn. “I have no idea what goofy idea, what crazy, anti-business program this administration will come up. I have no idea. And I have to tell you, Jon, that every business guy I know in the country is frightened of Barack Obama and the way he thinks.”

The hotel tycoon claimed that President Obama had attempted to put himself between him and his employees by resorting to class warfare, and said he cannot stand being the target of demagoguery from someone who doesn’t understand the economy or “hasn’t created any jobs.”

“The president is trying to put himself between me and my employees,” said Wynn. “By class warfare, by deprecating and calling a group that makes money ‘billionaires and millionaires who don't pay their share.’ I gave 120 percent of my salary and bonus away last year to charities, as I do most years.”

He continued: “I can’t stand the idea of being demagogued, that is, put down by a president who has never created any jobs and who doesn't even understand how the economy works.”

Earlier on the show, Wynn boasted of creating 250,000 jobs in Nevada, which he said was 250,000 more than the president had created.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ceo-wynn-i-m-afraid-president

And we're afraid of his iPAB!
__________________
I invented i, the square root of neutral 1.

 

[mercury14]

He can only blame himself for the length and duration of the recession.

As we patiently pointed out his failed programs to delay the pain until after the next election; all he did was to put back the day of reckoning and force capital flight from the markets to the point where he had to complain about evil business sitting on the sidelines instead of being economic patriots.

You didn't point that out. It's your opinion. You're entitled to it regardless as to all the assumptions you back it with.

But hey, we you ignore the rule of law and fuck over bondholders while claiming "it is not a death panel," who the fuck is ever going to believe in you?

Yeah you believe death panels are in the law. And you said that referring to the law and quoting it is not admissible in the court of AJ. Tell me again how I'm "interpreting" the law by just showing it to you for you to read on your own.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Of course I pointed it out.

I pointed it out when he wanted stimulus.

I pointed it out with cash for clunkers and every effort to keep people in homes they could not afford.

It might be "opinion" to you, but to me is is a study of economics, a study to lead me to conclude that there would be no recovery, that what we would have would be akin to a Lost Decade.

I was correct.

THREE YEARS AGO!!!

Meanwhile, all the Obamanation has are excuses, one fucking excuse after another!

If you ask me, I think what we're experiencing isn't in fact closer to a "growthless" recovery than to a jobless one. Because GDP started to grow more than a year and a half ago, but with the exception of just a couple of quarters, growth has not been noticeably above its trend rate of about 2-1/2 percent a year. I don't rejoice at the news that we added 216,000 jobs in March. About a hundred thousand of that 216,000 is needed every month just to keep up with the growth in the labor force. At this rate of job growth, it would take most of the decade to replace the eight 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost in the recession.
Christina Romer
Chairwoman of Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors

 

[mercury14]

Of course I pointed it out.

I pointed it out when he wanted stimulus.

I pointed it out with cash for clunkers and every effort to keep people in homes they could not afford.

It might be "opinion" to you, but to me is is a study of economics, a study to lead me to conclude that there would be no recovery, that what we would have would be akin to a Lost Decade.

I was correct.

THREE YEARS AGO!!!

Meanwhile, all the Obamanation has are excuses, one fucking excuse after another!

If you ask me, I think what we're experiencing isn't in fact closer to a "growthless" recovery than to a jobless one. Because GDP started to grow more than a year and a half ago, but with the exception of just a couple of quarters, growth has not been noticeably above its trend rate of about 2-1/2 percent a year. I don't rejoice at the news that we added 216,000 jobs in March. About a hundred thousand of that 216,000 is needed every month just to keep up with the growth in the labor force. At this rate of job growth, it would take most of the decade to replace the eight 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost in the recession.
Christina Romer
Chairwoman of Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors

Last week you posted the opinion of a CEO who said that despite paying over $100 million for building a home called "Versailles" and paying $1 million for a single night of sex, he can't pay any more in taxes. He'll quit his job as CEO! Now this article where a guy who donates all of his salary to charity and has probably 0% tax burden is complaining that Obama is going to change nothing about his taxes....

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

There was a thread with over half-a-dozen examples of CEOs speaking up on how this administration was hurting the working man in almost as many different ways.


You found yourself a walnut tree in that thread about the offshoots of ACORNs, started pissing on the trunk and assuring us it was WARM RAIN! You didn't want to talk about the Oak Forest as if one Walnut Tree made it a Walnut forest!

AJ: I live in an oak forest...

fs: AJ, I'm standing in front of this tree and it's clearly a walnut, you don't live in an oak forest.

AJ: A forest will have more than one type of tree, but one usually predominates.

fs: All I see is this fucking Walnut tree! You're misusing the term Oak. It's just a forest.

AJ: 90% of the trees are oak.

fs: Now, you're just redefining the terms... We can't go any further with this conversation until you admit that this is a walnut tree...

AJ: Yes firespin, it's a walnut tree.

fs: Then you lied, you're stupid, you're inconsistent, and you make NO sense what-so-ever...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Troubling Auto-Rescue Plunder (TARP)
Randall Hoven
October 15, 2012

Remember that "trillion-dollar bank bailout" that President Bush pushed four years ago? The Congressional Budget Office now says that (1) it cost just $24 billion, nowhere near a trillion; (2) taxpayers made money from the banks; and (3) the vast majority of the money went to auto companies.

Don't call it a trillion-dollar bank bailout. Call it the $20-billion UAW payoff.

The CBO's numbers are summarized it in a table.

( http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/troubling_auto-rescue_plunder_tarp.html )

So we taxpayers made $11B from banks, not the other way around. You know something funny about that? When the TARP money first flowed out of government and into the banks, Democrats counted that as adding to Bush's deficit. But when that money flowed back into U.S. coffers, Democrats kind of forgot about it. As humongous as Obama's 2010-2012 deficits have been, they would have been about $200B bigger if not for TARP.

All the TARP money, and then some, will have gone to purposes that had nothing to do with the original TARP rationale: auto companies and mortgage programs. Here are some CBO words on the auto bailout.

General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, along with their associated financing intermediaries, received just over $79 billion in TARP funds. In addition, the federal government offered to guarantee $5 billion in loans to parts manufacturers for GM and Chrysler; only $413 million of such loans was actually disbursed, however, bringing the total assistance to the automotive industry to nearly $80 billion. About $37 billion of that amount remains outstanding.

The car companies brag that they "paid back" their loans. Sure, the "loans" were $413 million of the total $80 billion. They got $80B; they have never paid back $37B of that; and we never expect to see $20B of that. I will gladly pay the federal government $1M if it gives me $50M in the first place!

Here are some more CBO words.

Following the bankruptcy proceedings of GM and Chrysler, the Treasury agreed to exchange the debt positions it held in the original companies for a blend of debt, equity, and preferred shares in the newly configured companies-'New GM' and 'New Chrysler'- that emerged after bankruptcy.

Did you notice a certain word there? Hint: it was used twice in that one sentence. The word, boys and girls, is bankruptcy. GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. Obama's auto bailout did not prevent bankruptcy. Yet President Obama accused Mitt Romney of pushing bankruptcy.

When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, more than 1 million jobs were on the line, Gov. Romney said we should just let Detroit go bankrupt.

But GM and Chrysler did go bankrupt, even with Obama's $80B bailout. (And Detroit's own police tell outsiders to "enter Detroit at your own risk.") The difference is in how they went bankrupt. What Obama did was stiff bondholders and non-UAW workers, steal $20B from taxpayers, and give it all to the UAW. All told, those poor UAW guys, who used to make $70 an hour in pay and benefits, will get about $26B, or more than the entire cost of TARP.

Let me do some arithmetic for you. You can buy a decent car for about $20,000. That means the U.S. government bought one million cars from GM and Chrysler, but they didn't have to actually make them. I guess if we pay people not to work and farmers not to farm, it's OK to pay workers from car companies for not making cars. (At least with Cash for Clunkers, people ended up with real cars -- a sterling success by modern government standards.)

And what about those "mortgage programs" that will cost us $16B?

The federal government initially committed a total of $75 billion for the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which was established to provide direct payments to mortgage servicers to allow them to modify mortgages so as to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Of that total, $50 billion was made available through the TARP[.]

And how did that work out?

Through the end of July, more than 1 million homeowners had received permanent modifications to their mortgages through HAMP, though over 230,000 of those modifications were subsequently canceled, primarily because the homeowners later defaulted.

I'm not a banker, but a 23% default-on-top-of-default rate doesn't seem like good business to me.

We gave money to car companies, and they went bankrupt anyway. We gave money to homeowners in default, and they defaulted anyway.

TARP was simply Obamanomics in microcosm. Obama gave us a stimulus that didn't stimulate. An "affordable" health care program that bent the cost curve up instead of down. "Investments" in solar panel companies that never produced solar panels (except the ones that worked until they were put in the sun). Recovery Summers without recoveries. A laser-like focus on J-O-B-S that produced the slowest recovery in history.

President Obama has given whole new meaning to "money for nothing."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/troubling_auto-rescue_plunder_tarp.html


AND HE SHOULD HAVE ADDED CASH FOR CLUNKERS!!!

Obamanomics in a nut-shell! An ACORN!!!

 

[mercury14]

There was a thread with over half-a-dozen examples of CEOs speaking up on how this administration was hurting the working man in almost as many different ways.


You found yourself a walnut tree in that thread about the offshoots of ACORNs, started pissing on the trunk and assuring us it was WARM RAIN! You didn't want to talk about the Oak Forest as if one Walnut Tree made it a Walnut forest!

That's cool that you have anecdotes. And if I counter them with some of my own where does that leave you?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

"B-b-b-b-b-ut," Jen14's lip quivers..., "What about this WAL-Nut I found!


"Wal-Mart is some really bad people!



"Greedy Capitalists!



"That's why we failed! They were Economic Terroritsts! Not Patriots!!!"

 

[RobDownSouth]

That's cool that you have anecdotes. And if I counter them with some of my own where does that leave you?

Anecdotes are all the Chief has left.

He certainly doesn't have facts on his side any longer...

You can make a pretty good argument that he never did.

It's a good thing for him that his Glibertarian fiscal philosophy is not dependent on things like "facts".

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Obama's Ersatz Space Program
Bruce Johnson, The American Thinker
October 15, 2012

Our space program has been a source of national pride. Despite the fact it has dropped off the front pages of today's newspapers, it has always been an indicator of progress, innovation, and national advancement.

According to President Obama's 2013 budget proposal, NASA's budget would decrease from the $18.4 billion it was allotted in 2011 to $17.7 billion by 2017. These are cuts via attrition. There is no percentage increase per annum as other federal agencies enjoy. There is no base line accounting gimmickry. These are real cuts.

Of all the waste by the Federal government and with all the other Federal agencies that could be moved to privatization, Obama selects our space program. This detracts from the progress of our missile technology that is shared with our military, it inhibits our national defense, and it damages our national identity.

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he [Barack Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering...,"
Charles Bolden

AND!!!

We do not need to make tanks in Oiho anymore...

We got some rusting out in the desert, that'll last us for centuries!

Anyone remember what happened to the German Tanks that were mothballed through the siege of Stalingrad? When they needed them, the Russian mice had eaten all of the wiring. Wonder how much wiring will be left when the Urban Copper Mice are done?

But cut a program that has proven to have failed like Head Start! OH HELL NO!!!

That would hurt the feelings of the well-intentioned!

They need those jobs to justify their...



COLLEGE DEBT!!!

 

[RobDownSouth]

Big Government Glibertarianism!

Good ole "big government AJ".....the Space Shuttle program has ended, but the Chief still feels like NASA's budget should remain unchanged.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Deflation? WHAT Deflation?

If you believe inflation is under control, then answer this: Where can you get a dozen eggs for a buck?

For decades economists have warned about the dangers of deflation. The ongoing double-digit, multimarket decline in real estate prices should horrify us, we are told. Even our language has been edited to reflect this mentality; the phrase real estate recovery is a happy-sounding euphemism for a reinflation of housing prices. Yet everywhere you look, Americans are happy to do the deflation dance.

Deep-discount stores, usually with the word dollar in their names, are enjoying a boom that dates back to the turn of the 21st century but has been invigorated by the continuing credit unwind. Also expanding during the recession/recovery have been discount and second-run movie houses, which offer audiences big-screen thrills at the Reagan-era price of $3 a ticket. And although Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Senate in July that “we would certainly want to react against any increase in deflation risk,” chain restaurants all over the country have drawn a 14-inch line in the sand in the form of the $5 pizza.

This nationwide return to value has been missed by most media outlets. In a July cover story illustrated by a muscular Uncle Sam with pasties attached to his nipples, the British magazine The Economist posited a “Comeback Kid” American economy but used as its prime example Ethan Allen, an upscale furniture maker based in Connecticut. Now it’s true that in the first quarter of 2012 Ethan Allen saw 8 percent growth in net sales over 2011. And furniture is a perpetually overpriced industry that strongly encourages its customers to take on debt. (In many store windows you see prices listed in monthly installments.) Yet even here the real growth is, literally, in the cheap seats. Wisconsin’s Ashley Furniture Industries sells loveseats for about a third of what Ethan Allen charges and pulls in about six times as much money. If Ashley’s too rich for your blood, 15 percent of Americans shop in consignment stores and another in 18 percent favor thrift stores, according to America’s Research Group, a consumer behavior research firm.

This growth is largely due to Americans from higher income quintiles who are sinking to discount shopping. Dollar General Chairman Rick Dreiling reported in 2011 that half of his chain’s new customers come from “non-core, higher-income families,” with 22.4 percent of new Dollar General customers earning $70,000 or more.

“You see this flight to value that accelerated during the recession, which ended three years ago,” says Craig Johnson, president of the Connecticut-based consulting firm Customer Growth Partners. “But the growth in deep-discount stores has held up.” The North Carolina–based Family Dollar chain saw net sales increase 10 percent between 2011 and 2012. Tennessee’s Dollar General grew net sales 13 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

In a January 1991 memo advocating a modest “singles and doubles” marketing strategy, Jeffrey Katzenberg, then chairman of the Walt Disney Company, warned that “when times get tough…people will still want to escape to the movies, but they’ll want it for the historic cost of a loaf of bread.” The $3 movie tickets sold by Danny Heilbrunn, owner of the Ohio Danbarry Dollar Saver movie theater chain, don’t quite fulfill that promise. (Thrifty shoppers will recognize a $3 loaf of bread as highway robbery.) But Danbarry does a brisk business selling cheap movie tickets in tough times.

Heilbrunn brushes off my suggestion that stagnation has been good for discount theaters with the movie man’s mantra that pictures are not affected by the economy. But he opened another Danbarry house in 2009, at the supposed trough of the recession. Most major U.S. cities host thriving second-run houses. The 35-state Carmike chain greeted 2009 with a “Recession Special” of a 16-ounce beverage and 46-ounce popcorn for a dollar each. As of August, Carmike’s 2012 revenues (admissions plus concessions) were up 17.5 percent from the same period the year before.

But dollar stores and second-run houses merely slow the course of inflation. The $5 pizza—marketed by Little Caesars and countless smaller pizza chains—actually reverses it. Our do-nothing Department of Commerce does not maintain a historic database of pizza prices, but I can remember regularly spending $8 or $10 for a pie in the 1980s. The price of a pizza has fallen not just in inflation-adjusted terms (and by the way, why do you never hear the term deflation-adjusted?) but in nominal dollars.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/12/rise-of-the-5-pizza