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The Fallen of World War II

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 02/10/2019 - 07:23

 

From Neil Halloran, via Chart Porn which seems to be on hiatus, if not defunct since the presidential election of 2016.

At 17 minutes, this might be a mite long for some of you.

You know who you are.

But I find it to be among the more powerful presentations that I have ever sat for.

Reposted at the suggestion of Donna.

The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.

I Have Some Good News and Some Bad News

Submitted by Roanman on Thu, 06/07/2018 - 16:54

 

First, the good news.

According to the Federal Reserve's Flow Of Funds report for the first quarter of 2018, the net worth of US households rose above $100 trillion for the first time ever, hitting a new all time high of $100.8 trillion.

Now, for the bad news.

As always, you can click on any of the charts below to link up with the reference article from which this piece was taken.

 

 

Your oligarchy at work.

On this Day In History, FDR Screws You Over Real Good

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 06/05/2018 - 07:01

Imho.

As always, click the image below for a trip to a decent but mildly opinianated little piece on the issue.

 

As an aside,

 

The last sentence of the above article reads,

"In 1974, President Gerald Ford signed legislation that permitted Americans again to own gold bullion."

It should have been followed by the following,

"And in so doing, realiized a tidy little profit for the federal government of the United States of America."

 

Not entirely sure what "recover real value" means in the above chart.

Thought about it for a minute.

Decided I just didn't care.

 

Sometimes A Map Along With An Occasional Chart Is All You Need

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 03/20/2016 - 10:18

 

I'm just wandering around some this morning, asking myself questions.

So, for lack of a better idea to be perfectly honest about it, let's start here.

As always, you can click on any of the maps below to go to the source material.

This map shows Federal government spending as a percentage of total state GDP for the years 2004-2013.

 

As you would expect, Virginia benefits mightily from Federal government spending as it surrounds the nation's capital.. Answers to questions regarding New Mexico and Mississippi show up below.

The following provides twenty year cumulative totals of taxes paid into the Federal government as compared to Federal spending received. Surplus, in this conversation means that green states are paying more into the federal government than they are receiving in returned government spending.

 

Nearly 2/3 of Federal spending went to benefit payments for individuals.

You can read just about the exact same thing below, I'm not really clicking yet this morning.

 

As for the growth in government spending from 2004-13 ....

 

I hit this one a couple weeks ago, but I do believe it to be one of the two most important issues facing America today, so ..... I hit it again.

 

 

As you would fully expect.

 

I'm about out of time for today, but going back one conversation .....

 

I'm thinking we need to step up our defense of the Canadian border.

Kidding!

I'd like to be offering a whizbang solution or failing that, some conclusion for all of the above this morning, but ..... evidently ..... no.

I'm just thinking.

As an aside, that's just a real good looking horse going around there, I don't care what anybody says.

 

To Quote Jim Rogers

Submitted by Roanman on Thu, 03/17/2016 - 17:18

 

 

 

The following are some charts taken from research done by the St. Louis Fed.

As always, click on any chart for a trip to the site from whence it came ..... probably.

 

 

     

 

The following charts were taken from research published by the New York Fed.

 

 

 

Interesting how it is that your "public four year colleges" have increased in cost so much more rapidly than both "private nonprofit" and "public two year colleges".

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. It's nearly impossible and for damn sure expensive to get student loans discharged via bankruptcy.

Just sayin'.

 

Unemployment

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 02/21/2016 - 16:24

 

A fraction is made up of 2 numbers. The top number is called the NUMERATOR and the bottom number is called the DENOMINATOR. Inthe fraction  the 3 is the numerator and the 4 is the denominator.

DENOMINATORThis number shows how many equal 'pieces' something has been divided into. In the fraction,  the denominator is 4 which means there are 4 equal pieces that make up the whole.

NUMERATOR: This shows how many of those pieces there are. In the fraction  there are 3 out of the total of 4 pieces.

In order to convert a fraction to a percentage, divide the top of the fraction by the bottom, multiply by 100 and add a "%" sign.

So, just for fun, in our example above 3 divided by 4 equals .75. .75 multiplied by 100 equals 75%.

I bring this up as a preface to a discussion of the headline unemployment rate otherwise known as U3 which is presently at 4.9% according to the bureau of labor statistics.

U3 is calculated as follows, unemployment rate = number unemployed / civilian labor force x 100

So, here's an example of a calculation employing the above formula that yields a five percent unemployment rate.

unemployment rate = 5,000,000 / 100,000,000 x 100 = 5 percent

Got it? Of course you do, it's simple. But there is mischief afoot and that mischief is found in the catagory "Civilian Labor Force."

Civilian Labor Force" is defined by the Bureau of labot Statistics for purposes of this calculation as follows: All persons in the civilian noninstitutional population classified as either employed or unemployed.

Employed persons are defined for purposes of this calculation as follows: All persons who, during the reference week (week including the twelfth day of the month), (a) did any work as paid employees, worked in their own business or profession or on their own farm, or worked 15 hours or more as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of their family, or (b) were not working but who had jobs from which they were temporarily absent. Each employed person is counted only once, even if he or she holds more than one job. 

 

Unemployed persons are defined for purposes of this calculation as follows : All persons who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment some time during the 4 week-period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed. 

 

Lets go back up to our example above: unemployment rate = 5,000,000 / 100,000,000 x 100 = 5 percent unemployed.

 

Only let's suppose that we have only 75,000,000 in "Civilian Labor Force rather than the 100 million in the above example.

The calculation now looks like this, unemployment rate = 5,000,000 / 75,000,000 x 100 = 6.7 percent unemployed.

 

Let's say we have unly 60 million people in the labor force. The calculation now looks like this, unemployment rate = 5,000,000 / 60,000,000 x 100 = 8.3 percent unemployed.

 

It's easy to see here how increasing the numerator, in this case the number of people within the "Civilian Labor Force" reduces the unemployment rate without adding a single job.

 

How do you increase the numerator? It's pretty simple really. Let's say an employer decides, for any reason whatsover, that rather than employing one, fulltime, 40 hour a week employee, he would prefer to have two, 20 hour a week, part time employees. Presto, for purposes of this calculation you now have two employed people where before you only had one despite the fact that the total hours worked and subsequently compensated for hasn't change at all.

 

Lets take a look at the denominator or the number of people unemployed. The definition for "Unemployed Worker" requires that person to have actively looked for a job in the preceeding four weeks. If you stop looking, you no longer count within the calculation.

 

So again using our example above, unemployment rate = 5,000,000 / 100,000,000 x 100 = 5 percent, lets say 1 million unemployed people, for any reason, stopped looking for work last month. they no longer count as unemployed, so the calculation becomes as follows, unemployment rate = 4,000,000 / 99,000,000 x 100 = 4.04 percent.

 

You have to take that million people who stopped looking for a job from both the numerator and the denominator in order to make the defined calculation, but by virtue of the nature of division, the result is profound. You knock nearly 1% of the unemployment rate.

 

Here's some charts to think about the next time someone, most likely the President of The United States starts yammering about what a fine job he's done in reducing the rate of unemployment.

 

 

 

 

 

The chart below was taken from an NPR piece titled "Unfit For WorK the startling rise of disability in America". Click anywhere on the chart to pull up their presentation.

 

 

Maybe we'll look into U6 next week. I dunno. You could go look into it yourself if you want. Then tell me about it.

 

Race, Family, Crime and Poverty ..... Redux

Submitted by Roanman on Tue, 01/13/2015 - 15:10

People keep saying that they want that "National Conversation About Race".  We are of the opinion that for the most part they're lying through their teeth. But just in case someone is telling the truth on that one, here's a good start.

As always, clicking on the chart will take you to it's source.

Black Americans at the median, earn less money than Asian Americans, White Americans, and American Hispanics, in that order.

Black Americans at every level of educational attainment suffer higher rates of unemployment than do White, Asian and Hispanic Americans.

Apologists for Black America frequently site the statistical fact that there are more White Americans than Black Americans on the welfare rolls. The following is a chart reflecting that fact with regards to SNAP recipients.

Unknown?????

Apologists for Black America invariably fail to mention another statistical fact. Black Americans make up only about 13% of the total American population. As opposed to between 64% and 72% for White Americans, depending on your criteria regarding just exactly who is White.

Black Americans are imprisoned at a significantly higher rate than are White Americans.

Again, apologists for Black America complain loudly that this disparity has to do with racist sentencing policies for possessing and selling illegal drugs, and in particular differences in sentencing across the board for use, possession, sale and distribution between crack and the powdered form of cocaine, Black Americans cocaine users being significantly more likely to indulge in Crack than are White American cocaine enthusiasts who prefer the powdered form.

They certainly have a point when it comes to the category "Street Level Dealer".

However, that Black Americans commit a significantly higher percentage of violent crime relative to their percentage of the total population than any other racial group in America is not even debatable. (FBI crime statistics combine Whites and Hispanics into the same group, called White)

Clicking on the image below will take you to the 2013 FBI Uniform Crime Report. It is important to understand that these statistics are for arrests and not for convictions. Having said that, the figures are truly ugly as Black Americans make up 52% of the arrests for Murder, 56% for Robbery, 33% for Aggravated Assault and with the exception of Driving Under the influence, Liquor Law violations and Public Drunkenness, Black Americans never approach their relative percentage of 13% of America's total population. Interestingly, 36% of the total arrests for "Suspicion" and 44% of all arrests for Curfew Violations and Loitering are made on Black Americans which I think can be easily construed as evidence of the pervasive "Arrested for Driving While Black" charge, registered by Black Americans against Police Departments across America for generations now.

BUT! ......................... 

What if maybe, all of this has nothing to do with race or racism or anything of the kind? What if there is something else at work here altogether?

The Right just loves to reference a 1990 report that has seemingly disappeared from the internet from The Progressive Policy Institute research arm of the Democratic Leadership Council that states as follows, “... the relationship between crime and one-parent families” is “so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low-income and crime."

As early as 1965 New York Democrat, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan came to the identical conclusion in his report titled "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor March 1965" aka "The Moynihan Report".

That report was for the most part vilified as both sexist and racist.

Results of a 1994 Wisconsin study on juvenile incarceration, based on data collected in 1993, when combined with census data for the state of Wisconsin from it's Current Population Survey for 1993, are as follows;

Additionally, children from biological two parent families on average miss fewer school days, have higher grade point averages, and are more likely to attend college. Of those who attend college, children from biological two parent families are more likely to graduate than children from both single parent families and children from biological/stepparent families.

Here is some of the research.

Test Scores: Elementary school children from intact biological families earn higher reading and math test scores than children in cohabiting and divorced single and always-single parent families. David J. Armor, Maximizing Intelligence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003): 80.

Test Scores: Adolescents from non-intact families have lower scores than their counterparts in intact married families on math, science, history, and reading tests. Youngmin Sun and Yuanzhang Li, "Parents' Marital Disruption and Its Uneven Effect on Children's Academic Performance- A Simulation Model," Social Science Research 37 (2008): 456.

Test Scores: Adolescents living in intact married families or married stepfamilies (with stepfathers) performed similarly on the Peabody Vocabulary Test, but adolescents living in single-mother families or in cohabiting stepfamilies (with their biological mother) did worse than those in intact families.Wendy Manning and Kathleen Lamb, "Adolescent Well-Being in Cohabitating, Married, and Single-Parent Families," Journal of Marriage and Family 65 (November 2003): 876-893.

Grades: High school students who live in intact married families have a higher average combined GPA in English and math (2.9) than those in married stepfamilies, divorced families, or intact cohabiting families (2.6) and those in always-single parent families or cohabiting stepfamilies (2.5). National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. As cited by Patrick F. Fagan, "Family Structure and School Performance of U.S. High School Students." Available at http://www.frc.org/content/mapping-america-family-structure-and-school-p.... Accessed 12 September 2011 .

Attending College: Over 57 percent of children who live in intact biological families enter college, compared to 32.5 percent of children in stepfamilies, 47.5 percent of children in single-parent families, and 31.8 percent of children who live in families without either parent present.Gary D. Sandefur, Sara McLanahan, and Roger A. Wojtkiewicz, "The Effects of Parental Marital Status during Adolescence on High School Graduation," Social Forces 71, no. 1 (1992): 112.

College Graduation: Students from disrupted families are less likely to complete four-year college than their peers from intact biological families. Michele Ver Ploeg, "Children from Disrupted Families as Adults: Family Structure, College Attendance and College Completion," Economics of Education Review 21, no. 2 (2002): 174.

Overall: Adolescents from single-parent families and cohabiting families are more likely to have low achievement scores, lower expectations for college, lower grades, and higher dropout rates than children from intact biological families (after controlling for other family socioeconomic factors).Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994): 79.

Behavior: First grade students born to married mothers are less likely to behave disruptively (i.e. disobey a teacher, be aggressive with other children) than those born to single or cohabiting mothers. Shannon E. Cavanagh and Aletha C. Houston, "Family Instability and Children's Early Problem Behavior," Social Forces 85, no. 1 (September 2006): 551-581.

Suspension: Adolescents in single-parent families, married stepfamilies, or cohabiting stepfamilies are more likely than adolescents in intact married families to have ever been suspended or expelled from school, to have participated in delinquent activities, and to have problems getting along with teachers, doing homework, and paying attention in school.Wendy Manning and Kathleen Lamb, "Adolescent Well-Being in Cohabiting, Married, and Single-Parent Families," Journal of Marriage and Family 65 (November 2003): 876-893

Attendance: Compared to adolescents from intact married families, those from divorced families and cohabiting families have many more unexcused absences and skip more classes.Barry D. Ham, "The Effects of Divorce on the Academic Achievement of High School Seniors," Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 38, no. 3 (2003): 180.Dropping Out: Students from stepfamilies and single-parent families are three times as likely to drop out of school as students from intact biological families, even when controlling for socioeconomic status.[13]

Dropping Out: Students from stepfamilies and single-parent families are three times as likely to drop out of school as students from intact biological families, even when controlling for socioeconomic status.Herbert Zimiles and Valerie E. Lee, "Adolescent Family Structure and Educational Progress," Developmental Psychology 27, no. 2 (1991): 314-320.

High School Graduation: Eighty-five percent of adolescents in intact biological families graduate from high school, compared to 67.2 percent in single-parent families, 65.4 percent in stepfamilies, and 51.9 percent who live with no parents. Gary D. Sandefur, Sara McLanahan, and Roger A. Wojtkiewicz, "The Effects of Parental Marital Status during Adolescence on High School Graduation," Social Forces 71, no. 1 (1992): 112.

Applying to College: Sixty-nine percent of children from intact biological families applied to college, according to one study, compared to only 60 percent of students who were not from intact families. Gary D. Sandefur, Sara McLanahan, and Roger A. Wojtkiewicz, "The Effects of Parental Marital Status during Adolescence on High School Graduation," Social Forces 71, no. 1 (1992): 112.

Educational Expectations: The adolescent children of single-parent families or stepfamilies reported that their parents had lower educational expectations for them, were less likely to monitor schoolwork, and supervised social activities less than the parents of children in intact biological families. Nan M. Astone and Sara S. McLanahan, "Family Structure, Parental Practices, and High School Completion," American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 309-320.

College Expectations: Whereas 31.3 percent of sons and 26.7 percent of daughters from intact biological families plan to get a college degree, 42.4 percent of sons and 35.9 percent of daughters in single-parent families do not plan to get a college degree. Rashmi Garg, Stella Melanson, and Elizabeth Levin, "Educational Aspirations of Male and Female Adolescents from Single-Parent and Two Biological Parent Families: A Comparison of Influential Factors," Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36 (2007): 1010-1023.

Parental Expectations: Sixty percent of mothers in intact married families expected their child to graduate college, compared to 40 percent of mothers in cohabiting stepfamilies and 36 percent of always-single mothers. Kelly R. Raley, Michelle L. Frisco, and Elizabeth Wildsmith, "Maternal Cohabitation and Educational Success," Sociology of Education 78, no. 2 (2005): 151.

Graduate Studies Expectations: About 40 percent of sons and 44.7 percent of daughters from intact biological families aim to get more education after obtaining their undergraduate degree, compared to 30.7 percent of sons and 35.3 percent of daughters from single-parent families. Rashmi Garg, Stella Melanson, and Elizabeth Levin, "Educational Aspirations of Male and Female Adolescents from Single-Parent and Two Biological Parent Families: A Comparison of Influential Factors," Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36, no. 8 (2007): 1017.

That there was some of the research.

Can anyone here possibly think that any of the above does not reflect in the potential for the lifetime earnings of an individual child? This matters a great deal because as you will discover below, this problem amplifies itself with every subsequent generation.

From Fair Test, College Board and the Wall Street Journal. Evidently, on average, children from every single economic bracket outscored every single lower bracket in every category on the 2014 SAT exam.

You really should read that again !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now here's where it gets really interesting ..... at least to me.

It literally pays to be married as .....

And ...

Conversly.

Don't just get caught up with the 48% "Never married", take note of the only 13% "Married with husband present" as well.

Seemingly, as John Wooden once famously said,

As an aside, I think that one might logically conclude that this would apply to women and fathers equally well.

But the children of Black Americans by a very strong percentage do not live in two parent families.

Or, the other way to look at it.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions here, but mine are as follows.

While it may not solve the entirety our issues with race in America, Black Americans in general and black American children in particular would be a helluva lot better off if black men and women were to get ..... not necessarily to each other ..... and then stay ..... MARRIED.

This pretty much goes for just about everyone else as well.

Just sayin'.

Sometimes a chart or two, maybe some maps are all you need

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 08/23/2014 - 09:48

 

Our last post of charts was probably our all-timer for calls.

Probably/mostly because the posting around here has been less than haphazard for a good long while.

Some of you were worried that I had gone out and got me a job.

Like somebody's gonna hire me.

Anyway ..... we continue. 

As always clicking the image will mostly take you to the source article from which it was taken.

 

On that military gear coming to a county near you thing .....

 

I'll post it again despite it being just a post or two below mostly because I think it matters.

One outcome is predictable.

 

 

The above was taken from an economist piece that concludes, "This is not because they are trigger-happy but because they are nervous. The citizens they encounter have perhaps 300m guns between them, so a cop never knows whether the hand in a suspect’s pocket is gripping a Glock.

I don't disagree.

The ignored issue here is the fact that the citizenry is equally nervous, as the following is the image that Cops are aggressively projecting to the American people on a daily basis.

 

 

Why the facemasks?

Here are two other reasonable questions.

 

   and    

 

The Economist also doesn't care much to consider this next issue.

 

I'm not relying much on the Economist's numbers on "Death by Police Shootings" for perfect accuracy as I wish there was better sourcing.

As an aside, I frequently come away from The Economist with that same thought ... but I digress.

I mostly believe it though because of this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you go through all the numbers in the linked pieces above, they don't always add up real well as these charts come from different years and sources, but the message holds regardless of the details.

Compared to any other country in the world, we put an extraordinary number of people in prison relative to our population.

Your intuition is correct however as high incarceration rates have led to a reduction in crime ..... at least on the outside.

I linked all of the charts below to the same University of Chicago research paper which offers it's own batch of charts as I thought it was the best thing out there.

    

 

 

Lying Al Sharpton among others will tell you that America's criminal justice system is racist because Black and Hispanic People are significantly more likely to run afoul of the law than are White People.

He is absolutely right about that second part.

 

Maybe not so much there on that first part.

The following statistics are taken from the 2005 edition of The Color of Crime by Jared Taylor.

Apologies for making you read, but I found the following summary to be significantly better than any five charts I could assemble.

Click anywhere below to link up to the entire work.

 

The Color of Crime

Race, Crime, and Justice in America — Second, Expanded Edition, 2005

Major Findings: 

Police and the justice system are not biased against minorities.

Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.

When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.

Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.

The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.

Interracial Crime

Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Gangs

Only 10 percent of youth gang members are white.

Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs. Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.

Incarceration

Between 1980 and 2003 the US incarceration rate more than tripled, from 139 to 482 per 100,000, and the number of prisoners increased from 320,000 to 1.39 million.

Blacks are seven times more likely to be in prison than whites. Hispanics are three times more likely.

 

If you want our opinion ..... even if you don't ..... issues having to do with incarceration rates, exploding prison population, prison safety and busted budgets at every level of government can all be traced to one pervasive public policy mistake.

 

THE WAR ON DRUGS

 

  

  

 

 

Although ...

 

That was 1997,  I would guess it's not much different now, but I dunno.

I'd love to do more, but I was just informed that I gotta clean the basement for a party.

As an aside ...

 

That's all for today.

 

Figures Don't Lie. But Then Again, Liars Will Figure.

Submitted by Roanman on Sun, 08/17/2014 - 12:04

 

So, I’m sitting here in front of my screen fooling around on Linkedin instead of paying the bills, when I see that Pulse has recommended a piece penned by some guy in the investment business, titled American’s Sour Mood on the Economy Doesn’t Square with the Fact. 

 

Sigh!

 

I know this has been the chronic theme proffered by the professional shills appearing on your TV set morning, noon and night for some time now. I had been getting pretty good at ignoring them.

 

At first I was doing a pretty good job of ignoring this guy as well.

 

But finally ….. I succombed ….. 

 

So in order to rebut this guy, I start to pull together some updated versions of charts I have collected in the past, and in so doing, I stumble across a Quartz piece titled Seven Charts That Leave You No Choice But To Feel Optimistic About The US Economy, and just that quick …..

 

We begin.

 

As almost always, clicking on the charts will link you up to the piece from which they were taken.

 

The Headline Unemployment Rate is hovering just above 6%. 

 

Pasted Graphic 1.tiff

 

The formula for calculating the rate of unemployment is as follows; 

 

Unemployment Rate = Number of Unemployed / Total Labor Force.

Total Labor Force = Number of Employed People +  Number of Unemployed People.

An unemployed person for purposes of the above calculation is defined by the Bureau of Labor Statisics as follows: person who had no employment during the reference week, was available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment some time during the 4 week-period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed. 

So, people are counted as unemployed for purposes of calculating the rate of unemployment only if they are in the labor force.  And as such, unemployed workers who have quit seeking work are no longer counted for purposes of calculating the unemployment rate.

Got that?

As you can see below, labor force participation is in decline, if not freefall. 

Pasted Graphic 3.tiff

 

"What do it mean?"

 

 

 

If you have quit looking for work in favor of going on disability, you no longer count in the calculation.

 

And the total number of them that have gone on disability is going nowhere but up.

 

People who have gone on disability are for the most part not looking for work and thus counted as part of the labor force.

 

Fewer people in the labor force means ..... lower unemployment for purposes of calculating the headline number.

 

Pasted Graphic 6.tiff  

 

 

  Pasted Graphic 16.tif

 

 

Pasted Graphic 18.tiff

 

 

 

A significant percentage of the improvement in the rate of unemployment is directly attributable to the increase in "disabled" Americans.

 

Maybe there are more people on disability because we now provide help to people with honest disabilities that we have overlooked or ignored before.

 

But it strikes me that there might be more to it than just that.

 

Pasted Graphic 36.tiff

 

 

In case you were wondering how the unemployed are able to afford eating?

 

Pasted Graphic 9.tiff

 

 

Nope, that's old news.  

 

Food lines are passe' as they are very bad for the fiction that all is well with the economy.

 

Our modern food lines are much improved as they are far less obvious to the naked eye.

 

Pasted Graphic 7.tiff

 

 

 

But wait a minute. What about all those jobs the Obama Administration has created?

 

 

Pasted Graphic 10.tiff

 

 

I'm not impressed yet.

 

Mostly because ...

 

Pasted Graphic 11.tiff

 

 

But why so few full time jobs and so many part time jobs?

 

Pasted Graphic 14.tiff

 

 

To be crude about it, it's mostly because part time workers are cheaper, and sales suck.

 

But, there is some good news, car sales are back.

 

Pasted Graphic 19.tiff

 

 

Except .....

 

Car sales as reported in the press tend to be wholesale numbers.

 

Dealer inventories are also up dramatically.

 

GM channel stuffing.jpg

 

 

GM isn’t alone when it comes to this issue, as unsold inventory abounds all over the world regardless of manufacturer.

Definitely click on the photo below for a pretty quick, little piece on automobile manufacturers channel stuffing their supply system.

 

Pasted Graphic 23.tiff

 

 

Pasted Graphic 24.tif   Pasted Graphic 25.tiff

 

Oh well, that’s good news for me as I have to buy a car for a boy soon.

 

I’m thinking there should be some good deals on cars this fall.

 

 

Anyway, stocks are on fire, business must be good.

 

   Pasted Graphic 28.tiff

 

 

Except, the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve Bank has expanded nearly dollar for dollar with the increased value of the S&P 500.

 

Pasted Graphic 29.tiff

 

 

As has margin debt for NYSE member firms.

 

Pasted Graphic 30.tiff

 

 

And …

 

Pasted Graphic 31.tif

 

 

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure this one out.

 

Corporate management is adding debt in order to buyback shares and in so doing are driving the surge in the stock market.

 

“But why would they do that?” You might well ask.

 

Management is compensated for increasing market cap rather than for running a profitable entity. 

 

All you need to know about “Corporate America” in one chart.

 

Pasted Graphic 34.tiff

 

 

Oh, and by the way, CEOs now earn on average, from 273 to 331 times the average worker’s pay depending on how you calculate stuff.

 

Pasted Graphic 35.tiff

 

Form your own opinion.

 

I got mine.

 

Gotta scoot.

 

 

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