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I saw what appears to be what was previously known for decades as "normal activity" prior to the cries of the global warming alarmists...
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Polar ice caps melting is NOT "normal activity". Being able to actually navigate a boat across the entire Arctic Ocean - which used to be more like the Arctic Ice Cube - is NOT normal. Drowning polar bears and homeless penguins are NOT normal. Superstorm fucking Sandy was NOT normal. Hurricane Katrina was NOT normal......
You see where I'm going with this?Eat Us And Smile
Cenk For America 2024!!
Justice Democrats
"If the American people had ever known the truth about what we (the BCE) have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - Poppy Bush, 1992Comment
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The Chart That Proves That The Mainstream Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment
Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
March 11, 2013
The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a “four-year low” of 7.7 percent. But is unemployment in the United States actually going down? After all, you would think that it should be.
The Obama administration has “borrowed” more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to “stimulate” the economy. So have those efforts been successful? Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily. Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that “236,000 jobs” were added to the economy in February, but what they didn’t tell you was that the number of Americans “not in the labor force” rose by 296,000. And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down – by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don’t want jobs.
Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago. And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis.
For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007. But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then. So where in the world is this “economic recovery” that they keep talking about?
At this point, the “unemployment rate” has become so meaningless that it really isn’t even worth paying much attention to. If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.
As Wikipedia tells us, many economists consider the employment-population ratio to be far superior to other measurements of employment…
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the employment rateas the employment-to-population ratio. The employment-population ratio is many American economist’s favorite gauge of the American jobs picture. According to Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, “The employment population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions.” This is a statistical ratiothat measures the proportion of the country’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.
A chart of the employment-population ratio in the United States over the past several years is posted below…
As you can see, the percentage of Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to below 59 percent during the last economic crisis. Since that time, it has not risen back above 59 percent. This is the first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment rate bounce back following a recession.
At this point, the employment-population ratio has been below 59 percent for 42 months in a row.
Yes, we should be thankful that things have stabilized, but as you can see there has been no recovery. The percentage of Americans with a job is essentially exactly where it was three years ago. Despite the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed, and despite the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing, the employment situation in the U.S. has not turned around.
Data for the employment-population ratio from the beginning of 2008is posted below…
2008-01-01 62.9
2008-02-01 62.8
2008-03-01 62.7
2008-04-01 62.7
2008-05-01 62.5
2008-06-01 62.4
2008-07-01 62.2
2008-08-01 62.0
2008-09-01 61.9
2008-10-01 61.7
2008-11-01 61.4
2008-12-01 61.0
2009-01-01 60.6
2009-02-01 60.3
2009-03-01 59.9
2009-04-01 59.8
2009-05-01 59.6
2009-06-01 59.4
2009-07-01 59.3
2009-08-01 59.1
2009-09-01 58.7
2009-10-01 58.5
2009-11-01 58.6
2009-12-01 58.3
2010-01-01 58.5
2010-02-01 58.5
2010-03-01 58.5
2010-04-01 58.7
2010-05-01 58.6
2010-06-01 58.5
2010-07-01 58.5
2010-08-01 58.5
2010-09-01 58.5
2010-10-01 58.3
2010-11-01 58.2
2010-12-01 58.3
2011-01-01 58.3
2011-02-01 58.4
2011-03-01 58.4
2011-04-01 58.4
2011-05-01 58.4
2011-06-01 58.2
2011-07-01 58.2
2011-08-01 58.3
2011-09-01 58.4
2011-10-01 58.4
2011-11-01 58.5
2011-12-01 58.6
2012-01-01 58.5
2012-02-01 58.6
2012-03-01 58.5
2012-04-01 58.5
2012-05-01 58.6
2012-06-01 58.6
2012-07-01 58.5
2012-08-01 58.4
2012-09-01 58.7
2012-10-01 58.7
2012-11-01 58.7
2012-12-01 58.6
2013-01-01 58.6
2013-02-01 58.6
So is there anyone out there that still wants to insist that the employment picture in the United States is getting significantly better?
Anyone that wants to claim that “unemployment is going down” should at least wait until the unemployment-population ratio gets back up to 59 percent. Otherwise they just look foolish.
Yes, the Dow is at an all-time high right now. But a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.
Most Americans understand that the Dow has been pumped up with all of the funny money that the Fed has been printing. Most Americans understand that the stock market really does not accurately reflect the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.
Just consider these numbers…
-The number of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City has increased by 19 percent over the past year.
-The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been in the White House.
-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.
-Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.
No, the truth is that everything is most definitely not fine.
If everything is fine, then why did the Federal Reserve inject another 100 billion dollars into foreign banks during the last full week of February?
The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are desperately trying to prop up the entire global economy. Unfortunately, the global financial system has been built on a foundation of sand and the tide is coming in.
Back in 2008, a derivatives crisis was one of the primary causes of the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.
So did we learn our lesson?
No, the boys on Wall Street are back at it again as a recent article by Jim Armitage described…
Historically, stock markets, being driven by humans, have tended to have a similar length memory of catastrophes, before making the same dumb mistakes again.
But it hasn’t even been five years since derivatives (on that occasion based on daft mortgages) blew up the world, and yet these exotic creatures have already returned. With a vengeance.
Research from Thomson Reuters declared that banks were creating more derivatives known as asset-backed securities than at any time since before the Lehman Brothers crash. Of those, 22 percent were made up of – and forgive me the alphabet soup here – CDOs and CLOs. The very type of derivatives that exploded last time. At this stage last year, only 6 percent fell into those categories.
In other words, banks are creating more of the riskiest types of the riskiest products.
At some point, we will have another derivatives crisis even worse than the last one.
When that happens, financial markets all over the globe will crash, economic activity will grind to a standstill and unemployment will go skyrocketing once again.
But as you saw above, we have never even come close to recovering from the last crisis.
So you can believe the mind-numbing propaganda that the mainstream media is trying to feed you if you want. Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we have not recovered from the last major economic crisis, and another one is rapidly approaching.
I hope that you are getting ready.
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The Congressional Budget Debate Is Just A Sideshow
Ron Paul
March 18, 2013
Federal spending once again dominated the debate in Washington last week, as House Republicans and Senate Democrats began work on their ten-year budget plans. Contrary to claims, neither party’s budget reduces spending. While the Republican plan increases spending a little less than the Democrat plan, it would still spend $5 trillion in 2023, an almost two trillion dollar increase over this year’s budget.
Of course, these projections of future budgets are meaningless, as a current Congress cannot bind a future one. Therefore, the projected spending for next year is the only part of the budget with any significance. So is there a great gulf between the two parties’ budgets for next year? No. For fiscal year 2014, the Democrat budget proposes spending $3.7 trillion, while the “radical” Republican budget spends $3.5 trillion!
While the two parties bicker over minor differences in spending, the stock market, which many in Washington predicted would crash unless the parties reached a “grand bargain” on taxes and spending, seems unaffected by the various manufactured budget crises. Unfortunately, the market’s indifference to Washington spending games is based on the fallacy that the deficit does not matter as long as the Federal Reserve is willing to monetize the federal debt.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is certainly doing all he can to facilitate deficit spending. The Federal Reserve’s desire to monetize the federal debt is a main reason for the aggressive program of buying federal debt via the continuous quantitative easing. Under Chairman Bernanke, the Federal Reserve is pumping as much as $85 billion a month into the American economy. This out-of-control monetary policy is largely conducted behind closed doors, yet it has much more effect on the do day-to-day lives of Americans than Congress’s phony budget debates. The Federal Reserve’s polices erode the value of the dollar, causing prices to rise, which in turn diminishes people’s standard of living. This inflation tax may be the most hideous tax of all because it is both hidden and regressive.
Of course, the Federal Reserve can only keep this up for so long before doing serious damage to the economy. The Austrian school of economics teaches that the Federal Reserve is responsible for the boom-and-bust cycles that plague modern economies. The Federal Reserve’s aggressive money pumping runs the risk of creating hyperinflation — especially once banks stop hoarding their reserves and began flooding the economy with Fed-created fiat currency.
Even though the economic crisis of 2008 proved the Austrians correct, there are still too many in D.C. and on Wall Street who believe the Keynesian fallacy that government and the Federal Reserve can spend-and-inflate our way to prosperity. But, as is the case with the narcotics addict, the longer the Federal Reserve enables Congress’s habit of deficit spending, the more painful will be the withdrawal when Congress is finally forced to kick the habit.
The role of the Federal Reserve in facilitating deficit spending by the US—and even foreign governments—means it is a mistake to segregate monetary and fiscal policy. Our nation will never get its fiscal house in order until we reform monetary policy. The first step is letting the American people know the real facts about the Federal Reserve’s actions.
The debate over the federal budget and even the battle over the Federal Reserve are ultimately arguments over symptoms rather than the cause. The root of the fiscal crisis is the belief that the federal government is qualified to manage the economy, provide for the people’s needs, and spread democracy throughout the world through either by foreign aid or by force of arms. Neither party in Washington questions the welfare-warfare state.
Until Congress begins debating questions such as whether or not we really need thousands of military facilities around the world, whether or not we should shut down the Education Department and return control to local communities and parents, and whether we should allow young people to completely op-out of the entitlement programs, the so-called debates in Washington, D.C. will continue to amount to nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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This sums up where Ron Paul and those who agree with him totally FAIL.Ron Paul
Neither party in Washington questions the welfare-warfare state.
Until Congress begins debating questions such as whether or not we really need thousands of military facilities around the world, whether or not we should shut down the Education Department and return control to local communities and parents, and whether we should allow young people to completely op-out of the entitlement programs, the so-called debates in Washington, D.C. will continue to amount to nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing.
They fail to see the difference between wasteful spending and investment.
Trillions of dollars wasted on wars for the benefit of oil companies and paranoid Likudist wackjobs. No question that needs to end.
But education is an investment. The things he calls "entitlement programs" are not only a safety net, but also direct economic stimulus. Every dollar that goes out in the form of food stamps, unemployment compensation, or even welfare, goes back into the economy. Nobody is saving that money up and buying mansions and Cadillacs with it, they're buying food and other necessities of life. Yeah, probably some of them are buying booze and smokes too, but even that is going into the economy.
Education is an investment. Infrastructure is an investment. A real honest to Christ health care system would be an investment. All of that money would come back eventually, just like the bailout of GM did. The money wasted on the Chimp/PNAC wars is NEVER coming back.
I don't know if Ron Paul has ever had a substance abuse problem, but I'm sure he's heard of the "Serenity Prayer". He might try reciting that one.... specifically the last line "....the wisdom to know the difference". In his case, the difference between spending and investment.Eat Us And Smile
Cenk For America 2024!!
Justice Democrats
"If the American people had ever known the truth about what we (the BCE) have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - Poppy Bush, 1992Comment
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Way to go, Cockforbreath...Comment
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Obama is one big fail.Comment
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Sup War...Comment
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Update to Obomba's Economy...
Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose to 385,000 for the week ending March 30th...
In case anyone was wondering, that's bad...
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The unemployment rate went down a tenth of a percent because more people gave up looking for work and were taken off the rolls. Something like 90 million Americans off the labor force now.
If Obama plays this right, he could have the unemployment rate down to 5% by the time his second term is over.Comment
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