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August Trade Deficit Jumps by 15.6%, on Pace to Subtract 0.68 Percentage Points from 3rd quarter GDP
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 189487 reads
Libya, Gas Prices, and the Big Payday at Your Expense
- 62251 reads
S&P Downgrades the United States to AA+
- 59182 reads
This is What the Unemployed Look Like
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August Trade Deficit Jumps by 15.6%, on Pace to Subtract 0.68 Percentage Points from 3rd quarter GDP
- 18973 reads
US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 189487 reads
Libya, Gas Prices, and the Big Payday at Your Expense
- 62251 reads
S&P Downgrades the United States to AA+
- 59182 reads
This is What the Unemployed Look Like
- 29384 reads
The Golden Rule
- 1826437 reads
Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
- 1216705 reads
New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
- 362543 reads
VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
- 346229 reads
U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
- 321572 reads
The war on the middle class
- 316735 reads
House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
- 315253 reads
Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
- 279986 reads
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I'm a bit staggered that they are lowering the cap, it reminds me of when Greenspan was espousing ARMs before the mortgage crisis and I realized he wasn't this grandfatherly figure with my best interest at heart, its clear neither is the government, or either political party.
We already have a system in place to recapture social security payments to high income individuals.
It is called the tax code. Social security income is subject to income taxes so it would be very easy to change the details of the program so that very high income people would have all their social security income taxed away.
Actually, it already works that way to a lesser degree as there is a separate calculation of how much of your social security is subject to income taxes based on your other income. As your income increases the larger the part of social security income subject to taxes is greater. If you have little or no other income none of your SS is subject to taxes.
Washington Post on the new budget deal:
"Under the agreement, Medicare’s Part B premiums for a group of roughly 15 million people will increase from the current rate of $104.90 per month to $120 per month next year, plus a $3 surcharge."
Those include:
1) Those whose insurance premiums are not automatically subtracted from a Social Security check.
2) Those who do not yet collect Social Security, but are enrolled in Medicare.
3) Those who enroll in Medicare Part B next year for the very first time.
4) Those who have incomes great enough that they are charged higher premiums.
5) Those who are poor enough that they also qualify for Medicaid.
Those not included:
Because their was no COLA for next year, Social Security benefits will not increase at all in 2016. This means that roughly seven in 10 Medicare beneficiaries were “held harmless” because their Part B premiums are automatically withdrawn from their Social Security checks --- so therefore, their premiums will not go up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/10/27/budget-dea...
Thank you, Brennan! Wonderful commentary! Honest, practical, generous, and appropriate. We need to speak like this as a nation! (Running for anything?? - probably not...you are unfortunately too smart to do that!)
My Dad had a couple of sayings, probably quotes of someone else, which are appropriate in this sort of discussion.
The first was:
Whenever the congress is in session, fear. Because they meet with no purpose other than to pass laws which will restrict the liberty of citizens in some way, and whether their restriction affects you immediately or not depends principally only on your situation.
The second was:
Politics is the business of bribing people with their own money.
i normally review the revisions in this report, but they hit us with 6 major releases over a 50 hour period that week, and i have reserved my Saturdays for my oil market analysis, so i had to cover all those all those reports by Saturday morning to mail on Sunday...
last week there were just 3 reports, new housing starts, existing home sales, and state jobs reports, none of which i cover in depth, so with just two paragraphs on each i had nothing to post here...almost brought my oil coverage over here as an instapopulist, but it's the time of year where i'm rushing to get battened down for winter, and i got busy with that work...
i will have to come up a better way to express effects on GDP...maybe "basis points" instead of "percentage points"...i think it's important to include in the headline so readers know i'm not just regurgitating a press release..,another problem is at this time of year, all the months are three syllables...maybe i'll switch to abbreviations for the months...
A higher percentage of American children live in poverty today than did at the start of the Great Recession. The CBO's June 2015 report said that money transfers to the poor act as implicit taxes, reducing the labor force participation rate and depressing the economy further. The labor force participation rate in Greece is 52 percent and in Puerto Rico 43 percent. Entirely to many people are being allowed to go on government "disability" program rolls, not good for many of them in the long run and not financially sustainable to the remaining working population either. “Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected according to researchers at the University of Michigan who, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family.
We need to realize that Reagan increased Social Security taxes 33 years ago in anticipation of today. There is a 2.7 trillion dollar surplus owed Social Security by the Federal Government. The National Debt is a direct result of Republican tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and, under Bush II, the middle class as well. Social Security revenues are down because job killing trade treaties are reducing both employment and wages. Corporate America and the uber wealthy have benefited from both. Further the Boskin Commission under Clinton recalculated the way inflation and Social Security adjustments were measured resulting in lower rates that are bogus.
The truth is that both Social Security and Medicare are funded separately from the Federal Government. They were included in the overall Federal budget under Johnson to hide the true cost of the Vietnam War. Virtually the entire deficit is due to everything except Social Security and Medicare. The truth is Republicans are against Social Security because they are deadbeats. The Government shutdowns prove they simply don’t want to pay the bills they themselves have run up. The Social Security income cap must be eliminated and unearned income (rents, dividends, interest, royalties and capital gains going mostly to the wealthy) must be made subject to the Employee portion of both Social Security and Medicare. Social Security payments should be adjusted upward and the inflation calculation returned to reality. In short the truth is the exact opposite of what the Republicans say and the only way that today’s young people will not receive their Social Security is if they allow the Republicans to take it away from them.
It's not the disabled who are gaming the system, it's those who cash their checks after they die:
It's not the disabled who are gaming the system, it's illegal immigrants:
It's not the disabled who are gaming the system, it's doctors and hospitals:
It's not the disabled (in the U.S.) who are gaming the system, it's people in Puerto Rico:
SOURCES:
http://oig.ssa.gov/sites/default/files/audit/full/pdf/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/10/27/Here-s-New-Plan-Crack-Down-Social-Security-Fraud
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-92T
They have to be kidding, last I heard it was $711 to live on. What a joke. There is no way to live on that little and they want to cut it by 20%? That's just a crime.
Good sleuthing. The reduction in cap for Social Security contributions is really troubling. That's the opposite direction from where it needs to go. And I've had a salary of $250K and enjoyed having my SS deductions cap out halfway through the year, but there is no reason to give that kind of break to high earners on the backs of the elderly and disabled. I've also had a mother trying to live on $1000 a month from Social Security, when her assisted living facility was $4000 a month. This shifts costs back onto the middle class families of seniors who will have to support them. And it's just greedy, stupid and unfair.
(Finally, a new report)
One widely-reported proposal aimed at saving money in disability by taking it away from disabled people would have changed the formula for benefits from one based on the recipients pre-disability wages to a "flat benefit" tied to the federal poverty level.
This would have meant lower benefits for more than half of new disability recipients. (Existing recipients wouldn't be affected.) According to the Heritage Foundation, its chief promoter, the change would cut benefits for newly-filing disabled workers to $981 a month, the federal poverty level for a single person. That compares to the average benefit today of $1,165.
Heritage said that based on the existing demographics of the disabled population, 47% of new applicants would receive higher benefits than they would under the existing formula, and the rest would get less. It estimated the savings at $168 billion over 10 years.
The "flat benefit" didn't make it into the final bill. Curiously, however, the savings it was expected to provide was still being cited by some Republicans as a point in favor of the deal.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-social-security-medicar...
* One has to always sleep with one eye open whenever a member of Congress is burning the midnight oil, because when no one is looking, they will slip an amendment into a bill -- to do just this.
That claim that somehow labor arbitrage is a humanitarian mission is the biggest insult to working people of all time. Up there with let them eat cake level of lie.
These trade deals don't just ship jobs overseas, but put peoples in slave labor conditions and kill local economies. There are no labor and environmental standards in these deals but even that wouldn't stop it.
Key findings include child care costs account for a significant portion of family budgets, and is particularly unaffordable for minimum-wage workers.
http://www.epi.org/publication/child-care-affordability/
I see the statistics on the average deviation for revisions but still it makes these reports seem like made up numbers.
BTW: Titles need to be shorter for articles.
Thx for publishing these, I've had a death in the family, now very behind with writing.
A zero COLA also freezes the amount of Social Security’s “taxable maximum,” or the maximum wage on which workers and their employers pay Social Security payroll taxes (currently $118,500). When average wages rise, the taxable maximum rises — except in years when there’s no COLA.
The taxable maximum would be $122,700 next year if it were allowed to rise as it normally does. This quirk in the law will cost Social Security about $5 billion in revenue next year.
http://www.cbpp.org/blog/no-cola-for-2016-will-affect-medicare-premiums-...
* Members of Congress are paid $174,000 a year -- so ALREADY they aren't paying SS taxes on 100% of their wages.
our estimates converged...i have PCE adding 2.12 percentage points to GDP, up from my last estimate of 2.03 percentage points ...their estimate was cut from 2.6 percentage points to 2.2...
in addition, they added 10 basis points on retail inventories, and i couldnt see that as anything but a negative...in fact, i have a sense that we'll see the largest hit from inventories in this recovery (i dont put numbers on that because i can't get a handle on how to deflate them, considering the multiple indices used, and that inventories from remaining from previous months are valued at the time they entered the inventory)
what bothered me about their change to their GDP estimate is that they released it the same day of the retail sales report, ie, before they had the consumer price data...you can't estimate real PCE without knowing price changes unless you're using some kind of voodoo..
Multi-billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn (who supports multi-billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump) told CNBC that he is putting $150 million into a Super PAC aimed at targeting inversions, the practice of companies moving their headquarters overseas to pay less in taxes.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/21/us-usa-election-icahn-idUSKCN0...
I hate to tell ya but the Atlanta Fed never misses on their calculations, at least not anything I've seen to date. Regardless the impact to GDP is nil.
the 1015 day average is deceiving...i figure a lot of them have been living rent free for 5 or 6 years, possibly because of compromised titles that make legal foreclosure difficult...look at that "average days delinquent for FC" column on the chart, see how the average went up by more than 100 days each of several years...that suggests that some old mortgages weren't being touched over that period...based on that, i'd guess the foreclosure inventory to include a large number of 5 year deliquent mortgages and a near equilvant number of newly delinquent mortgages to result in that average...
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