There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again
Tide detergent: Works on tough stains. Can now also be traded for crack. A case study in American ingenuity, legal and otherwise.
ncluding the sheer size ($2.5 trillion in 2009) – and at least one financial opinion that we don’t have a debt problem in this country – we have a healthcare problem. In this graph, Mary Meeker’s focus was more on the hyper-growth of Medicare/Medicaid – which basically went from 0% in 1960 to 35% in 2009.
If government spending in America had just held pace with population growth and inflation since 1954, government spending today would total $1.3 trillion. Instead, spending this year will top $5.4 trillion.
But it did not work that way (there is not room enough for all of us to champion the delta smelt, find insidious racism in the Detroit schools, shut down an oil pipeline, or sue Arizona). Instead, we are left with an energy-poor country sitting on energy riches, a moribund economy with millions in the private sector piling up cash rather than investing or hiring, and cohorts of young, flat-broke, indebted, and politically prepped but poorly schooled students wondering where is the good life and why a Wall Street fixer, or computer nerd, or company man civil engineer makes so much more than they, the anointed, do.
The US already meets 72pc of its own oil needs, up from around 50pc a decade ago.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.
On the Wall Street meltdown: It all started with an asinine bubble. The cause was a combination of megalomania, stupidity, insanity, and I would say evil on the part of bankers and mortgage brokers.
And it was widespread. Alan Greenspan was a smart guy, but he totally overdosed on Ayn Rand when he was young. You can't give bankers the freedom to create gambling games. That's what it was. Wall Street was a gambling house, and the house's odds were better than a Vegas casino. And real casino operators have to build parking lots, fly in entertainers, pay for bars and restaurants. It's expensive. Wall Street was like a casino with no overhead. It was hog heaven for them. But it created vast damage with terrible consequences to civilization.
The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.
With this deal, Obama is conceding that the Pelosi-Reid stimulus approach did not work, that tax cuts must be tried to get the economy moving, that, for the next two years, he must make his deals with Republicans.
The Obama-McConnell pact is a recognition of reality and a sign of maturity.
In these negotiations, Obama acted like a president. He went in with a weak hand and came out with half the pot. He got something, where the Democrats now berating him got nothing.
David Norris wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world.
Imagine that! The Chinese are ignoring WTO rules and putting China first. Don't they understand how the Global Economy works? You're not supposed to tilt the field in favor of the home team.
One knows not whether to laugh or cry.
The policy the Chinese are pursuing, economic nationalism, was virtually invented by the Republican Party. Protectionism was the declared policy of the GOP from the day its first president took office in 1861 to the day Calvin Coolidge left in 1929.
Government Spending Details
"The flaw in their logic is that when it comes to higher unemployment benefits or any other stimulus spending, the resources given to the unemployed have to be taken from someone else. There isn't a "tooth fairy," or as my former colleague Milton Friedman repeated time and again, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." The government doesn't create resources. It redistributes them. For everyone who is given something there is someone who has that something taken away."
"A record-low 41.9% of the nation's personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began in December 2007. "
"Pew’s figure actually is conservative"
"There is a common theme across the internet: US manufacturing is dead and it's never coming back. Well, there's a big problem with that analysis: it's not true. In fact, as the chart above indicates, it's actually false. "
"As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65 percent in the mid-1990s, is roughly 100 percent today."