Janis Lane is the Tea Party leader in Mississippi and she appears to long for the days when women were happy chattel. Lane had made headlines in complaining that women are inherently poorly suited to not just serve as bosses but to vote.
Lane explained that “Probably the biggest turn we ever made was when the women got the right to vote. Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting.” A former marketing director who now leads the party in Central Mississippi, Lane further observed that “There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how than can skewer a person . . . I do not see that in men. The whole time I worked, I’d much rather have a male boss than a female boss. Double-minded, you never can trust them.”
Once again, it is remarkable how some of our radicalized citizens share striking similarity with our enemies like the Taliban who would agree wholeheartedly with Lane on her view of women.
Source: Daily Mail
Elaine:
that is from your SS chart retiring at 62 with an annual income of $35k.
If you can retire at 58 why would you want to work until 70 to be able to get 100% of your social security which would be less anyway than your private plan.
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/18/tagg_romney_mr_white_privilege/singleton/
Tagg Romney: Mr. White Privilege
Tagg Romney admits he’d like to slug Obama, becoming the latest white man that thinks he can say whatever he wants
By David Sirota
Gyges:
have you heard of Hauser’s Law? Tax revenue holds steady at about 18-20% of GDP no matter what the rate is.
Bron,
I’m not sure why you keep using the $800 figure.
SwM,
“But other national polls published on Tuesday were not in agreement with the Gallup and Public Policy Polling numbers. Rather, three of the six national polls published on Tuesday had Mr. Obama leading the race. The same three polls also had Mr. Obama improving his numbers from the previous edition of the same survey …”
Interestingly enough at Intrade the prediction is slightly under 65% that Obama wins.
On the linked graph you can see the results of the first debate quite clearly
http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/538.png
(Keep in mind a neck and neck gets the voters off the couch and to the polls … and gives the News Media something to write about … 😉 )
Gyges:
That was very good.
Elaine:
if there are no guarantees in life then social security isnt guaranteed either.
I would rather have $3300 not guaranteed than $800 not guaranteed.
Bron,
At this point, I’m sorry that I asked in the first place.
Seriously, your response to finding out that the writer of the article was deliberately misrepresenting facts was to say”well what about the other stuff he said.” I mean, really. Did you even stop to think “huh, maybe I should double check that with other sources?” Hell, you didn’t even admit that he was wrong, you just changed the subject. Hell, I pretty much proved that there was very little chance that one third of the examples weren’t even accurate (aside from the misleading way the numbers were used), and your response was to wave it away with “what about X?”
You’re just playing economist of the gaps. At some point you start to sound like every other fanatic of a failed ideology “well, ______ would work if it was REALLY tried.” What’s worse is you don’t even see the contradiction between “X would have caused Y but for Z” followed in the next breath by “X always causes Y.”
Why should I bother? I don’t enjoy the feeling that every word I type that doesn’t agree with your preconceptions just gets ran through a Chinese Room of your ideology and both it and your own reply are promptly forgotten.
Elaine:
the 110 year average of the Dow Jones, based on the second link above, is 6.87%. From 1897 to 2007
40 year average = 7.62%
30 ” ” = 9.49%
20 = 10.55%
10 = 8.45%
with the last 5 years the numbers will change somewhat but not that much or to the good because of the growth in the past few years.
My 6% was conservative, I could have used 8%.
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/simple-savings-calculator.aspx
which would give you – 1,050,000 dollars or about $4400 per month for 30 years and that is at 3% during retirement just to be really conservative.
Bron,
If there are no guarantees in life, your numbers mean nothing. You can’t prove that a privatized pension plan would be better than Social Security. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut–“So it goes.”
Bron,
“Revenues increase when you reduce taxes.”
I’m not looking anything up but this sounds like an oxymoron.
Elaine:
“What did the financial meltdown of 2008 do to pension plans? BTW, that’s a rhetorical question.”
According to Eeyore above, everything is hunky dory and your investment has increased 100% since 2008.
Your 800 dollars from social security isnt guaranteed either and on top of that if you die the survivor benefits arent all that great.
There are no guarantees in life.
Historically the market has always moved up over the long term. If you remember in 1987 the market was around 2300. There has been a good deal of fluctuation in the ensuing 25 years but the trend is positive.
http://www.the-privateer.com/chart/dow-long.html
http://www.automationinformation.com/DJIA/dow_jones_average_yearly_change.htm
gYGES:
I was pretty sure you could figure it out on your own, I didnt think I was pulling the wool over your eyes. I wouldnt even try, you are way too smart.
There was the Viet Nam war back in the 60’s and also the space program. Both took money from the economy.
So what happened in the 20’s and the 80’s? The 70% rate in the 20’s was because of the first World War.
Why is there such a difference of opinion on this subject?
Revenues increase when you reduce taxes.
It occurs to me that maybe somebody should come up with a field of mathematics dedicated to measuring rates of change in things. Somebody, or two somebodies working separately but contemporaneously, should get right on that…
Maybe invent a few laws of motion while they’re at it.
Why Bosses Always Win if the Game Is Always Rigged
By Charles P. Pierce
10/18/12
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-boss-13852713
The gang on Morning Joe this morning was gassing on about how neither of the presidential candidates — but especially not the incumbent, as was repeatedly pointed out by Mark Halperin, successful pundit and talk-show sycophant — have been “specific enough” about their plans to pull the country out of the ditch in which 32 years of crackpot conservative economics and a decade of deregulated thievery have left it. (Okay, that last part was me.) There was, as you might expect, very little talk about income inequality, or about stagnating wages, or about how so many largely unaccountable centers of power have decided that the country doesn’t need a middle class and, to that end, have worked on their own to make the one purportedly accountable center of power — the government, and the electoral politics that power and staff it — as unaccountable as they are, folding them into that impregnable iron bubble in which the other centers of power carve things up for their own benefit.
No, there was not any talking about that.
Joe Scarborough talked about how the people will willingly follow a politician who proudly “slays sacred cows.” Willie Geist said something about a Grand Bargain, and that the biggest problem with the election is that the politicians can’t tell the people what “we” really need. Steve Rattner lumped in Social Security with The Deficit. Halperin mentioned that some people picked on him for not giving the president’s performance the other night a better grade. Mika Brzezinski meeped something that sounded recognizably humane and Scarborough accused her of hijacking the show.
It is easy to mock the sheer entitled audacity of these people’s talking about the “sacrifices” that “we” all have to make. It is easy to mock the notion of a Grand Bargain which, even in its most benign form, will involve changing the very natures of Social Security and Medicare while closing “loopholes” that will sock the middle class and cost the richest people in the country a little of their pin money, at least until their lawyers and lobbyists close in on Washington and devise new loopholes to replace those old ones. (We’ve had an endless discussion of the mortgage-interest deduction, which is pretty plainly on life support, but almost none on the preposterous carried-interest deduction. Coincidence? I think not, and neither does my banker in the Caymans.) But the discussion failed to include what I think is the most important factor driving the current drift of support in the general direction of Willard Romney.
Resignation.
There was a moment right there at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 when the nation could have radically reassessed the power of corporations and the power of their money in our politics. The way that American corporations did business was laid bare in all its magnificent avarice and mendacity for all the world to see. The damage that an unaccountable and deregulated corporate elite could do to the rest of the country was just standing there in the open with a huge spotlight on it. It became possible for the country to see how the game had been rigged and for whose benefit, and for the country to see the complicity of the political elites in building the crooked casino that was our national economy.
And then the moment passed.
We need not cast blame again as to why the moment passed. Suffice it to say, it passed because those same forces that brought on the crisis — and, therefore, that brief, glimmering opportunity — were able to make it pass. We need not go into all the reasons they were able to do that. Suffice it to say that there has settled upon our politics, as we perceive them among ourselves, a notion that the rigged game is the only game in town.
We have allowed ourselves to become mired in the habits of oligarchy, as though no other politics are possible, even in a putatively self-governing republic, and resignation is one of the most obvious of those habits. We acclimate ourselves to the habit of having our politics acted upon us, rather than insisting that they are ours to command. TV stars tell us that political stars are going to cut their Grand Bargain and that “we” will then applaud them for making the “tough choices” on our behalf. That is how you inculcate the habits of oligarchy in a political commonwealth. First, you disabuse people of the notion that government is the ultimate expression of that commonwealth, and then you eliminate or emasculate any centers of power that might exist independent of your smothering influence — like, say, organized labor — and then you make it quite clear who’s in charge. I’m the boss. Get used to it.
And, hell, we’re already entertaining ourselves by watching bosses act like jackasses all over television. Donald Trump is sui generis in this regard, of course, but the cable lineup is full of shows about angry misanthropes who come in and treat the employees of hair salons, restaurants, and saloons like dirt, all in the name of “improving” the businesses in question. The Economist last week published an astonishing sentence in one of its allegedly “centrist” editorials calling for the Grand Bargain: “No Wall Street financier has done as much damage to American social mobility as the teachers’ unions have.” Do not look up at your betters with anger. Look around at your neighbors who teach in the public schools. Inculcate the habits of oligarchy in people — especially the habit of resignation — and you can turn them on each other and go on your merry way. Look at the now weekly stories of corporate chieftains “encouraging” their employees to vote a certain way, lest the chieftain — regretfully, I am sure — be forced to destroy any economic independence the employees have.
So, as we groan on towards the election, it’s becoming clear that a lot of people have decided to vote for Willard Romney because he is The Boss, and because we all know that everything in our lives, including the exercise of our freedom, is at the whim of the boss. Those are the habits of oligarchy. The Morning Joe crew speaks their language.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-boss-13852713#ixzz29gBSzRMM
The Romney House Is a House Full of Punks
By Charles P. Pierce
10/18/12
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/tagg-romney-take-swing-obama-quote-13852750#ixzz29g8JFC80
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/tagg-romney-take-swing-obama-quote-13852750
Here’s what Josh Romney said last week about the president of the United States:
“So as a father, he learned how to debate an obstinate child. We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of fun watching the debate.”
Here’s what Willard Romney said the other night to the president of the United States:
“You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.”
Here’s what Tagg Romney said on Wednesday about the president of the United States.
“Jump out of your seat and just want to go down and take a swing at him.”
Any questions?
The talk of revising taxes on capital gains and other investment misses the point that the way investment is done is completely unregulated and works to provide unfair advantages to a handful of traders belonging to a particular investment consortium (2nd article) and the speed with which investment can be done with no market brakes can completely distort a market. The drunken binge trading illustrated below is just an egregious example of the speculative commodities trading practices (energy is now playing by those rules- or more to the point- has been freed to play by the virtually no rules imposed on that kind of trading) that has artificially inflated oil and food prices.
It is crucial to regulate these investment methods, a tax per trade is a great place to start, and a tax high enough to cause real repercussions to the people engaging in them would be even better. Also, it would seem to me that simple access alone could be an enormous advantage to some. Did not Carlin say “It’s a club, and we ain’t in it.” That seems to apply generally throughout society but it gets to be dangerous and nation destroying when that’s how a nations wealth is handled/manipulated. I thought that was what caused the crash of ’08. We haven’t really done anything about that either.
I also think it’s interesting that any old anonymous one that has access to the proper input codes through the preferred system can engage in a practice, for test purposes, that can distort the market and it’s assumed to be benign or up-to-tricks as usual. There doesn’t seem to be any concern that this kind of thing could be a test run for a malicious hack. I’d like to know how much money (if any) is being made by bad actors with a good head for code- a series of blitz attacks of a size that didn’t raise suspicion maybe could make someone a lot of money. Maybe I just watch too many movies though.
***
“Blackout’ trading binge: Drunken broker pushed oil price to 8 month high overnight”
“A drunken broker apparently shook the global oil market much like a major international incident. A report claimed a senior broker at PVM Oil Futures pushed oil prices $1.50 higher in a night of blacked-out trading.
Steve Perkins spent $520 million of his client’s cash on oil futures contracts throughout the night during a “drunken blackout”.”
***
What is also very troubling is this story which deserves a read as it explains the impact of ‘bandwith stuffing and the non-existent control over it:
***
“Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week”
“A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.
The program placed orders in 25-millisecond bursts involving about 500 stocks, according to Nanex, a market data firm. The algorithm never executed a single trade, and it abruptly ended at about 10:30 a.m. ET Friday.
“Just goes to show you how just one person can have such an outsized impact on the market,” ….
“My guess is that the algo was testing the market, as high-frequency frequently does,” says Jon Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster.com. “As soon as they add bandwidth, the HFT crowd sees how quickly they can top out to create latency.” (Read More: Unclear What Caused Kraft Spike: Nanex Founder.)
Translation: The ultimate goal of many of these programs is to gum up the system so it slows down the quote feed to others and allows the computer traders (with their co-located servers at the exchanges) to gain a money-making arbitrage opportunity.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49333454/Mysterious_Algorithm_Was_4_of_Trading_Activity_Last_Week
Bron,
“Since it is your money and you have been investing and reading about investing and buying stocks and bonds and maybe paying someone for help, it is probably a safe bet to say that yes it is.”
Yes it is what?
*****
“Based on your chart social security is not a good deal when people could invest and have a retirement income of $3300 per year after 40 years of work and retire whenever they wanted after age 58.”
I’ll ask again: Where is your proof that a retired person is guaranteed $3,300 a month in retirement if he/she invests his/her money?
*****
What did the financial meltdown of 2008 do to pension plans? BTW, that’s a rhetorical question.
The link to the unemployment numbers
http://www.davemanuel.com/historical-unemployment-rates-in-the-united-states.php