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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 19, 2011 1:23:04 GMT -6
Shucks. I read through the entire article carefully - and from front to back start to finish top to bottom (sideways and upside down) that lil bitty bit of information scoots just like a gremlin around the corner....does it exist payable or not? Tell me 1000 things that kiss gramma goodbye, but fer gosh sakes don't ever tell me the only thing really needed to be known......................... all too typical reporting. When is a statute not a statute.... Is statute, debt?
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 17, 2011 18:03:27 GMT -6
Education that is too expensive / training, re-training...payroll and benefit combined "unaffordable".......and somehow we just can't come up with appropriate skill-sets? When this lame argument just doesn't wash anymore, then do we finally get an honest assessmnent of what "competition" really means? (and the fact that the playing field is so un-leveled as to be unplayable at all.) I've never seen so much damned education, training and skill sets be deemed so bloody useless. It's an embarrassment (I suppose - used and abused to make skilled workers feel ashamed enough of their "incompetent" selves to go quietly away, while swallowing this bs.) We know the game plan is to siphon more of the goodies upward - but gov't-sanctioned rules don't allow for defaulting on the outcome. Fairy tales and Disneyfication...Too true.
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 14, 2011 14:17:11 GMT -6
Well - I suppose a few empty cities might be their version of an Afghan/Iraqui war........but seems to me the reason they're empty is that they're designed to hold an extended middle class that hasn't arrived yet. And perhaps this is wishful thinking on their part. Remember - these cities are entirely modern, and will suck enormous energy requirements - based on energy consumption models that will fairly soon pass their shelf-life. However many brand-new Omahas, Memphises and Houstons they add to their pile - they'll still wind up with an unsustainable mess. The amazing thing is....they're nowhere close to shifting their rural/urban ratio into what happened in the west after the Industrial Revolution was finished with. They need a lot of land to grow food - unless they're planning on importing everything. So urban sprawl that kills good soil isn't so smart. I've looked at these city designs....they don't represent smart sustainable planning - just the wish to imitate and emulate a lot of bad ideas elsewhere...strange choices for otherwise astute economic planning. In the future, in the long run, Chinese government will have to deal with the reality of a decidedly majority population that will be on the outside looking in, and will feel marginalized, betrayed - like nothing the western workforce has gone through. If China ever staggers its way toward a middle class of 500 million (more than North America and Europe, combined - they'll still have a billion have-nots. What to do with that number will require an awful lot of aspirin to deal with the headaches.
Whatever....this still doesn't solve the problem of migratory American investment dollars...into anything and everything that doesn't create jobs at home...not just plum white collar - but for collars of every color.
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 14, 2011 11:40:44 GMT -6
That race to the bottom is eternally defined by new bottoms. What I can't understand is why anybody (other then corporate beneficiaries) ever thought this model would produce strong domestic consumption at home in traditional developed countries.
I'm beginning to think that the biggest lie of the century (the last one, and this one) is that new exotic jobs would result from shipping away manufacturing. I think the biggest result has been just that the quarter to third of an entire workforce that traditionally gravitated toward manufacturing, and would probably never excel at anything else, has been reduced to scrambling for crumbs.
How many burger flippers, baristas, bed-makers, cashiers out there could assemble things? I'd say a pretty good proportion. And every single one of them would create domestic wealth, if they were working in domestic factories.
This reminds me of the poor countries we used to go to for cheap vacations - the ones with entire economies that utilized a workforce that did nothing but provide service to tourists. They didn't make anything either - except beds and drinks. They couldn't afford any alternative. They didn't even have an investing class that gloriously avoided investment in anything remotely designed to promote job creation - just quick returns.
The whole game of global poker-bluff spins the planet just like a roulette wheel. Wish I could train bright chimps to work for peanuts...literally. When the value of a thing gets defined by how cheap someone can put it together - then value eventually becomes as ill-defined as a constitutional guarantee.
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 10, 2011 21:46:56 GMT -6
[/quote]
Great review and analysis.
I continue to label this as a 'regular depression' for average Americans as the upper 20% of income earners/wealth concentrate more riches. Most of what appears to be an Economic Stall is nothing more than sustaining stability from debt/deficits at a horrible, low level for most Americans while financial elites and corporations enjoy skyhigh profits, cash hoards and immunity form prosecution while laying off American workers.[/quote]
I agree -
As the "middle" class slowly morphs into the working class (I guess the way things were back there in that guilded age Mark Twain wrote about) do they then discover how little they mean anymore...as workers? A debt economy never works for anyone except the ones who earn the interest income profit.....(or are bailed out when that doesn't work!)
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 10, 2011 20:42:54 GMT -6
What jumps out at me is that dual-income reality: I only know about three people who earn enough by themselves to be homeowners... The other few dozen are all couples...this is critical to middle-class homeownership. Two decent sustained incomes (sustain - the operable word) will become rare in the future. Except for desperately irresponsible people (barring more lender hallucinations) I figure the working class of the future won't bite (regardless of tanking home values.) Does this mean the working class becomes the renting class? Probably. I don't even think in terms of middle class anymore. The new middle class is what I used to think of as decidedly upper....not those at the top - just those who earn well over 100Gs. The "working class" is everybody else. Including job insecurity, and shrinking asset value. This "class" can't drive an economy any more than a baby can drive a car.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 23, 2011 7:44:52 GMT -6
Dependency - I think there is the key word. Sort of freaky, how much what's discussed here resembles the boomerang "kids" returning in ever-growing numbers to childhood's haven - after sopping up expensive education and perhaps, socking it out in the real working world...(what's left of it.) So much of this money paying the shot, one way or another, represents absolutely no productivity, and anything remotely resembling positive fiscal margins (living on borrowed time?) I think that borrowed time clock started many years ago......................
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 18, 2011 21:32:28 GMT -6
starvation in the 'midst of plenty... status attached to how freely we can toss what would save another human being...
And to think that systematic waste...by design, earns fabulous profits (all up and down the supply chain.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 18, 2011 20:25:23 GMT -6
Yep, its sticker price is compounded up... and then the payback price is compounded all over again (and especially so if there should happen to be the slightest whiff of default.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 18, 2011 20:22:54 GMT -6
hmmm. No matter how you hedge it, it's a bad bet all over the place. Monopoly Board funny money chased by the most desperate...(kind of reminds me of those little kids' wooden blocks, piled as high as they would go until they fall over...)
They always fall over.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 18, 2011 20:16:10 GMT -6
so the upper 20% become some sort of critical necessity for economic stability, and their spending habits bolster what the bottom 80% can't support? That's rich.......in an oxymoronic kinda way -
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 3, 2011 12:34:00 GMT -6
On a somewhat more somber note.... This is sad, hard evidence that the "crumbs" of freetrade-generated wealth - begrudgingly dispersed among the middle-class wannabe's of emerging industrial societies...hardly adds up to the leftover bits on a bread and butter plate after the real banquet has been consumed. (enough to sustain an amoeba)
That a DOWNTURN benefits the HNWI's - says it all.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 3, 2011 12:29:00 GMT -6
Does anyone remember the Beatles' Yellow Submarine feature cartoon? Remember that weird beastie with the vacuum-cleaner nose that started sucking everything up?...........until eventually it sucked up itself and left a blank, dark, screen....
Rather metaphoric, what?
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 3, 2011 12:22:42 GMT -6
Economic Stall.... They're not espousing what they actually believe. They're espousing what's in the best interests of their multinational free-traitor advertisers and sponsors. Free traitors..............I like that. When one examines who is helped and who is hurt by these policies, can it be any more obvious what the story is? (this is what mystifies me, somewhat) But then - espousing actual beliefs can hide the elephant in the room quicker than a Las Vegas floor show magician! (trick is to get 'em lookin' somewhere else...)
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Post by spudbuddy on Jul 2, 2011 14:27:43 GMT -6
Sickening. The rich have always looked for ways to justify their affluence--and how to justify why it's "good" that they have so much more than the rest of us. Though those justifications are still widely accepted, there appears to be growing number of those who do not accept those justifications. I agree, and I think that's exactly it - needing to justify the affluence (as if, in itself, this affluence is a done deal and justifiable no matter how it came about.) The economic playing board has been set up to create affluence opportunities, (unsustainable) as opposed to creating greater measures of sustenance toward the common good. (funny - pathetically so.......how that word "common" raises the patrician sneer in so many rich and privileged people.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Apr 16, 2011 10:14:28 GMT -6
So let's get this straight: A spanking new Chindia middle class equaling, or maybe surpassing the entire middle class of North America & Europe is about to motorize itself into autopian ecstasies - just as incredibly expensive fuel relentlessly and remorselessly becomes more and more expensive? (resource depletion) Is this the terminal wet-dream of the oil/carmaker cartel, or what? Mad Max futures where nobody owns anything anymore, because they can't afford it - all gone to drink from the gas pump.
I don't know about India.......but it appears that China just doesn't understand the concept of peak oil. That's truly disappointing....they're pretty shrewd in other ways. But it's an incredibly dumb thing to re-build and re-design a whole nation in such an energy-intensive way. They tear down everything that was energy-poor (because the folks that lived there couldn't afford anything else) and replace it with endless sprawl, towering highrises, and every single occidental design that was a mistake.
I dunno - was it some kinda glitch in the rice? - that caused otherwise reasonably smart greybeards to suddenly lose their minds over childhood whingings that made 'em want to be American? (read: drive like a Yank..........lotsa distance, mucho gas.) I figure that they figure they'll just make hay while the sun shines - even though they came so late to the party. The party's almost over. I wish someone would tell them. I wish they'd listen. Someday soon conventional energy will be many times more expensive than it is today. When that happens, much of what they've built will become unusable. Or who knows? They just become an incredibly poor country again, because it takes everything they have just to pay the energy bill - nothing left over for anything else.
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Post by spudbuddy on Apr 5, 2011 16:36:13 GMT -6
think.zionsdirect.com/2011/03/03/investors-snap-up-cheap-homes-new-buyers-miss-out/Somehow, this all fits in so well. A sort of sordid shadow economy. While the peons evict, eject and move on, the vultures swoop in and gorge on the dead carcasses of the American Dream. The fare is fabulous, the pickings swell, the deals delicious, and fattened, swollen buzzards burp their engorged ecstasies back into the faces of the dispossessed. Of course, they're providing a public service - tidying up the mess, while creating rental cash cows or just simply flipping (or, saving for a hopeful rainy day years from now when prices stagger back up.) Interesting: how no "bottom feeders" (read: middle-incomed first time buyers) ever seem able to butt through the thronging carrion gluttons and get a piece of the action. Nope - they had to pay through the nose years ago (and now the lenders won't touch them.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 29, 2011 23:09:06 GMT -6
Doesn't bode well considering that, added to the growing decrease in 2-partner "nesters" , who in their right mind would want to buy something that is likely to decrease in value? I still think much of what's out there is going to stubbornly resist leveling off to prices reflecting what people actually earn (and that's the ones that still have reasonable-paying jobs.)
That permanent underclass sort of reflects the global model, does it not? All over the planet, "free" trade manufacturing zones are pickled with millions of young women workers - who get that work because they are easier to control - often used up and spit out again before they turn 30 (or even 25.) This model seems to regard men as expendable.........they only produce kids when they get together with the women, and that's not wanted - because as economic "units" the women are only valuable as manufacturing workerbees, not as consumers. (they don't earn enough.) It's the west of course, with all the discount boxes - providing the market for this shit.
Strange......that a society deems a whole gender expendable in that way. Though in many societies it's still the opposite: boys....little emporers/dictators who are worshipped (for future successes.)
Gee, I wonder who "unexpected" house sales to fall to lowest on record........ (Could it be Rip Van Winkle, who's been asleep since the last time the Cubs won the World Series? - and finally woke up with a severe case of irrational exuberance?) I seriously feel for whoever it was who choked out that word...."confidence." That's gotta be right up there with ultra last taboos....like feeding starving Hindus Big Macs.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 29, 2011 22:45:47 GMT -6
Seems to me there's more broke here than just the ass part - sad thing too - delaying having kids until you "have it all" well, you may indeed have it all, when that first kid arrives at the age of 40+.....after a couple of decades of forging the career and the funds.........except one thing you'll never have again in this life: Youth. ..........which seems to have disappeared from the model - but bouncing around small kids in your twenties ain't the same half a lifetime later. I can see a whole lotta folks out there toddling their toddlers around and bystanders musing about "Ain't that cute! They're out with Grandma." Sad stuff. But this is what a broke-ass economy provides. I mean....out there in real wilderness, wolves quit having cubs when their "economy" (read: food source) goes sour. I guess we're doing the same thing.
And kids didn't used to be expensive. Where I grew up, the local garage mechanic (Catholic) was bound to have a family of maybe 9 or 10 kids. They didn't all go off to college, but they all ate well enough up until they left home (which tended to be right after high school.) Nowadays, people seem to think they have to be millionaires to raise a kid (except for Catholics and Insurance salesmen.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 28, 2011 22:25:15 GMT -6
Interesting charts! I still say it's not even so much a matter of that misappropriated wealth, as much as it's a matter of wealth that doesn't invest in anything that remotely creates jobs (here.) Which leads me to ponder: A society that allows this to go on, is doomed ultimately, is it not?
On the charts themselves: I agree - middle class "wealth" in the past decade has been all about extracted equity from property holdings. Which makes it a real problem, when people can't do that anymore, can't ramp up the credit card limits (or add to the pile) and can't pay for education...(which is being harvested in record amounts.) I'd say we're in deep doo-doo.
The food stamp numbers look like a quick trip to Mexico to me...welcome to King Henry's feast, where the starving curs grovel in far-flung corners and snap and growl for pre-gnawed bones flung from fattened fingers. All because the numbers just don't add up anymore, and for too many, the food budget is the only place left to find "surplus" resources in the family fortunes. Could those stamp stats be a canary in the coal mine?
Flattened wages (for those lucky enough to have had any that have proven moderately reliable over time)...haven't reflected true profit margins for....more than three decades? I always loved Prof. Rick Wolff's take on that little item: the profits unearned by workers are lent out to them - at interest. It's a good scam.
Still and all, it's a telling thing that America has once again become the beloved home of the millionaire. The millionaire's club must just love that - because it re-awakens that old Pinocchio dream...nobody really wants to rock the boat too much when it looks even remotely possible that they might be able to climb on board themselves.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 27, 2011 21:53:48 GMT -6
That curious trend of "malinvestment" that has been dogging the economy for some time (de-industrialization) but always seems to have flown a little under the radar...as if we all swallowed the idea that we were supposed to turn into a white-sleeved working society that just never gets its hands dirty. The reality of course, is that hands can indeed stay quite clean...unemployed.
It also strikes me as a curious thing, contemplating the housing meltdown, that (as with the cost of an education) the cost of a house skyrocketed the way it did - no doubt rampant speculation had something to do with it - but something many never seem to think about...one of the big reasons house costs skyrocketed...is because they got so damned big! "Bargain" houses are looked upon askance - as if there's something inherently wrong with them...their puny, punky little 1300 square foot size. Yet so many conveniently forgot that in previous generations, rather large families (far larger than the average now) were raised in such houses. Is it possible that as a society, we morphed into people who couldn't relate to anything that didn't give us collectively the kind of elbow room that provides 2 or 3 rooms per family member? (and as such, priced ourselves out of something that could have been affordable - into something that obviously wasn't.)
This gigantism...a very strange and curious "ism" which seems to have affected us on so many levels, perhaps has that exact by-product attached to it...that so many things ultimately wind up being unaffordable because they incur too high a debt-to-income ratio.
All that being said, I'm absolutely convinced that our two-tier "recovery" has as much to do with profiteering investments that were never intended to have so much as the tiniest "by-product" of job creation. Jobs appear to have become entirely toxic to investors, who want quick and convenient returns. The sad thing is...they get their returns, because they've invented so many exotic ways to do so.
In historic times, investments created real industry, and management had to at least duke it out with labor, and fight the good fight over how to divide up the spoils. Now - shadow wealth skips nicely along outside any real economic activity, and eludes the social contract with impunity.
Sometimes I find myself almost overwhelmed at how much real (or imagined) wealth exists completely detached from anything that puts people to work - but I guess that was the game plan.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 25, 2011 15:26:26 GMT -6
Here's a great article by Paul Krugman about why we cannot educate or retrain our way to more and better jobs. In fact, many of the so-called "new jobs" of the 21st century are even more outsourceable than the old jobs.
What Krugman doesn't cover, is that most of the "old" jobs in manufacturing are STILL being performed--just not in this country.
But Krugman does debunk the myth that education is the key to more employment, better employment, and higher wages. It is not.
In fact, the ONLY solution left for increasing employment and wages is to reduce imports, since they reduce the demand for domestic production. Without demand for domestic production, and the labor needed to provide that production, no amount of education will create jobs--or even save jobs.
And we can't replace the jobs that produce goods that we currently use, with the new "green" jobs that produce goods we don't currently use--goods for which there is no significant current demand.
from the New York TimesDegrees and DollarsMarch 6, 2011 By PAUL KRUGMAN " It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”
But what everyone knows is wrong.
The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.
And legal research isn’t an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.
The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.
Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.
*******************************************
Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.
And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.
And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.
So what does all this say about policy?
Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.
But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages. *********************************************** This conventional "wisdom" currently drives a trillion-dollar debt/profit machine that obviously benefits investors, while milking the populace and especially an entire generation of young people of their future. There are so many things wrong with this picture. THere are legions of young people out there now who are lucky enough to be working - at something that never required their higher level of education...but apprently does anyway...why? Because the employer says it does, and for no other reason. Collusion? Another thing that we conveniently forget, is that the last time we had a truly healthy and balanced economy, legions of people did not retrain, retrieve or aquire higher educations at all. They couldn't. For obvious reasons. (Have a good look sometime at the failure rates in post-secondary institutions.) Yet these people weren't deadbeats at all. They were the backbone of the economy - solid working class people, who raised families and preserved a common philosophy of work ethic, which without, our nation would have fallen into quick decay. Now, of course - educational institutions are sopping up the profits from endless mobs of these people, trying to get a certificate in this, a diploma in that...much of it worthless. Yet they are capable of working - just not in the rarified Land of Oz ...that peculiar NeverNeverLand of future jobs that has twinkled out into globalized re-structuring and mystified markets that contitutes the giant Monopoly paying board of corporatized Cosplay. The more ferociously educated we become as a society, the less that same education is able to smoothly pave the way for educated people into a job market which is incapable of absorbing them. The conventional thinking is that the right degree earned in the right post-secondary institution will win the day...odds rather remarkably similar to wagering this month's pay in Vegas. And this is supposed to represent the starch conservitive wise approach to beginning a young working life. (as one whistles past the graveyard, contemplating the debt owing for that education, and how an $800 chunk removed from a month's earnings of $1600 at a "starter" job leaves enough left over to be able to move out of the childhood bedroom in daddy's house.) An education is a wonderful thing. Constructive critical thinking, true literacy, and congnitive development...all good stuff. I figure 85% at least of all those schooling or retraining for anything wouldn't be caught dead doing what they're doing, if the end result wasn't gainful employment. A long time ago, unless professionally educated, jobs were a more generalized byproduct of a good education. One just worked, to begin with....beyond which they tended to narrow down choices that made sense. But I agree entirely......without a healthy and sustainable job market, no amount of education is going to make any difference at all - except for the 10 or 15% at the top who are set up to compete for all the best stuff that made the gamble worthwhile in the first place. One of our healthiest "industries" right now is the collection of debt. Go figure. (and how well-educated do you suppose most of those hyenas in that racket actually are?) Kind of brings to mind Khmer Rouge thugs shooting spectacle-wearers between the eyes for looking intellectual............
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 25, 2011 11:39:44 GMT -6
But when all this really kicked off somewhere in the 70's...don't we have some pretty obvious results as to what's replaced living wages? (an ordinary little resource that any banker would have deemed necessary to do business 40 years ago.)
We had the S&L, various oil bumps, Enron and Worldcom, Dotcom, and now the housing mess. Even so, and still writ large enough, we have a pathetic anemic economy staggering along on the proceeds and resources of unpaid mortgage payments.
Whatever they thought was going to enhance the de-industrialization model, didn't happen. Whatever they thought was going to replace job growth and living wages, also didn't happen. (other than a decades' worth of home equity ATM liquefaction.)
If the bottom line was, we couldn't afford to do what we did (but went ahead and did it anyway).........wow, that's some leadership, isn't it?
And I agree..........that kewpie dolls and trinkets are now cheaper by the gross in big-box shop-topias hardly matters when housing, health care, education, energy and most everything else that runs a household or an economy now costs a fortune.
Ha! We bought Manhattan, New England, and paid for the Louisiana purchase with "trinkets" and loose pocket change. I suppose the sellers back then thought they were getting good value, too.
By the way....tracking that inflationary line, it's fascinating noting the flatline from the end of the Civil War to the end of WW1. In fact, if you throw in the War of 1812 and the War of Independence, those account for all the "bumps" until the gradual rise in the late 1940's.
It sure leaves off being cute though, by the '70's.
I've noticed a recent trend around my university: more and more non-Asian graduates contemplating shifting their job hunt to include something in southeast Asia, but now particularly in China. How's that for a reverse-diaspora?
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 23, 2011 22:53:33 GMT -6
Seems to me that the problem with the "broke ass guys" is nicely interwoven into the whole substructure of dysfunctional futurism...to wit: If yonder young broke ass guys have just recently, or relatively recently graduated with expensive fresh degrees and mucho educational debt, and having discovered that their job prospects are lousy, therefor their ability to pay off said debt is severely hamstrung - this does not bode well for these guys to get their butts the hell out of the parental mansions they've boomeranged back into, and set about wooing wives, starting real careers, planning families, buying real estate, and sucking up oodles of commodity items like good little consumers. Could be that the broke ass guys are contemplating instead, a return to the Kerouac adventures of their forefathers - and I can't say as I'd blame them much. I figure they'd get fed up soon enough for being treated like social lepers because they actually stuck to the plan of trying to better themselves with an education.... (which could actually mean they've become literate enough to read Kerouac) - but doesn't necessarily mean they're any more employable in today's economy than the average pretty slick smart grade 10 dropout. I mean............they can't all deal drugs now, don'tcha know. If they're smart enough to avoid that nonsense, they're also probably smart enough to know better than to try taking on responsibilities that require actual consistently reliable income. Internships, and temp shortfalls don't make it in that league. (I should think there'll be an awful lot of old maids skittering about the escutchion about a decade or so, from now.................................)
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 30, 2011 23:28:03 GMT -6
Retraining is the proverbial shell game...supposedly to distract people from the fact that there ain't enough to go around. Too many foxes chasing too few rabbits... and it takes a lot of field mice to make up the difference. And if that isn't bad enough - schools of um, "higher learning" are spewing out whole generations of spring lambies that are going to do - exactly what? (meanwhile their school debts swirl like quicksand around them.) Maybe we'll wind up with some weird shadow economy, like in India, Bangladesh or Brazil. Recycling plastic, delivering hot lunches to financiers, house-sitting the empty recreational second and third homes of the rich and absent...
Whatever the hell our work force was supposed to evolve into - in some futurist's terminal wet dream, we've fallen far short. We still live in the real world... gawd knows where they live.
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 23, 2010 11:21:12 GMT -6
Karl Denninger has made a graph of Census Bureau information showing median income over the last 2 decades. Over the last decade there has been 0 net growth. It's very hard for there to have been any per capita GDP growth if median incomes have not grown. In fact, since 1998, there has been a net decline in median incomes. So all that "growth" (what James Howard Kunstler calls Hallucinated wealth) - was based entirely on debt.......... - nobody stopping to take a quick look and conclude that the income to pay all that debt just wasn't there. That's mighty astute. just like bunnies out of hats, hankies out of cuffs - the populace was mesmerized by the magic... I can well imagine there must be right now, about a half-trillion dollars worth of educational debt that will never pay for itself. (a different kind of magic - more like fun-house mirrors, I suspect) When "growth" stopped being umbilically attached to anything of real value...I kinda think that's when the shit really hit the fan.
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 23, 2010 11:07:10 GMT -6
It didn't just screw the poor. It hurt those of us who are thrifty enough and resourceful enough not to waste money on new car depreciation. Last year I bought a tarted up minivan that came off the lot five years before at $37K, and I paid $7K. At 90K miles, it's been trouble-free. Yeah but the terminal wet dream was to sell new cars - for multiple reasons, pathetically important, I suppose - but for so many the new reality is that a brand new car is a ridiculous extravagance.... Wasting the clunkers fits in with all the other things we waste. (creates jobs, don'tcha know! and other various myths & follies)
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 29, 2010 17:03:41 GMT -6
I dunno.... If a lot of foolish people took themselves to the cleaners, and then got cleaned out because they actually believed the "conventional" spin, I'd say that's fair play. On the other hand, all the rest of those who were careful, yet believed the "investment" value of their purchase was relatively safe (how many decades worth of appreciation?) then I'd say that's also fair game - the other side of the coin. The little guy hasn't had a whole lot to fight back with in quite some time - the rules were all in favor of the Big Boyz. But even they can't get blood out of a stone...or fool the masses anymore (like believing in a turnaround soon enough to make a difference.)
Not only that - I'd say the conventional greed that big-boxed the housing supply (much like selling half-gallon popcorns to movie goers who only really wanted a pint...) then we're probably going to see a nice turnaround...a whole lot of people buying the 300k house, while convincing themselves that this is plenty enough square footage for family business. I think it's kinda cute that the high end properties are suddenly being treated like toxic plague. New shopping conditions make them seem like the ridiculous extravagances they actually are.
But ultimately...faulting lenders versus borrowers? - or vice versa...I think it's all mixed up in the same stew. The "rules" don't make sense anymore. If they were to penalize every single indebted American tomorrow - to the mazimum of what they owed, with God so help them on their side (*haff caff*) Well, we could nicely close down every box store, mall outlet, franchised cookie cutter, and all return to home cookin' and grandpa's workshop now, couldn't we? There aren't otherwise, enough decently leveraged citizens left.
Of course, the financial industry knows this all too well, which is why it's been busy playing peekaboo tiddly-winks with big daddy warbucks. (while little orphan Annie takes the train outa town...........)
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 29, 2010 14:28:21 GMT -6
My washring machine has a better spin cycle than this media twirl - articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/17/business/la-fi-consumer-debt-20100817Household debt is contracting (apparently for seven quarter's worth - that's 3 months shy of two solid years...) which is good, far as it goes... Yet the combination of concern plus dread over Economy fallout (lousy consumer spending) doesn't seem to want to connect the dots. Less available credit (and all its attendant threats - bankruptcy, etc) still short-circuits the obvious, tippy-toeing by .) shhhhh... It appears a lot of folks out there just might be only spending what they earn, for a change. Which means they're spending a helluva lot less than they used to...because they actually earn a helluva lot less than their spending habits used to reflect. Imagine that. Sometimes, in a blue mood, I rather enjoy plugging into some financial spin show, and watch in fascination, the jokesters yap about this stuff as if it never occurred to them that there is a relationship between earnings and spending. Wow. I wish I made what they're paid, to be that dumb. I guess I could stand it for a time, until the embarrassment caught up with me. ;D
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Post by spudbuddy on Aug 25, 2010 10:50:01 GMT -6
I think the moral rules changed forever when real estate did the unforgiveable - refused to go up anymore, as it always had, and instead went the other way. I'd wonder if this didn't produce a sense of moral outrage and entitlement...(ironically) that if these conventional rules have somehow changed (appreciation) well then, the rules of payback change, too.
This sure breeds bad blood with the neighbors, though. All the ones who have paid every penny of debt they've ever owed (sacrificed and gone without many things to stay on the right side of the ledger) - and watch folks get to steal 90% of what they borrowed? Wow.
On the other hand - the greedy little shell game for fun and profit blew up in the faces of those who should have known better, so isn't it kinda like Jesse James stealing from Al Capone? Which side of beef does one choose? The moral flavors are hard to tell apart - sort of like blind taste-tests between Coke & Pepsi.
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