The Little Pop

It ain't quite the Big Bang, but...

While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup—quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.

The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot—4 trillion degrees Celsius—that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today.

We note that nothing melted, no black holes were created and the air conditioning in the lab worked fine afterwards.

Interesting, things did not go according to prediction, thus proving that the universe is nowhere near the orderly, precisely designed place that so many people lackign imagination believe it to be.

Indeed, even at its most elemental level, the universe is chaotic and random.

Even more interesting developments, like a possible answer to why the universe even exists in the form it does, have been uncovered from this experiment (short answer: matter and anti-matter should theoretically exist in equal portions, but they obviously don't, since we're here.)

This is Big Science, the kind of science we used to do regularly but have now ceded to the European and Asian scientific community.

Because, you know, tax cuts!

I Got An Uncle Lives In Taxes

It's not often that a 'fact check" gets it wrong, but here's an example of a partisan fact check:

McCain has proposed to end one of the largest tax breaks in the entire economy. Some 60 million Americans buy health insurance thru employers tax-free, and McCain would indeed begin to tax the value of the benefit.

However McCain also proposes to give the money back as a tax credit, $2,500 for individuals, $5,000 for families.

"Let's give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice," McCain said.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

Because a tax credit is money in your pocket?

Is it?

What is a tax refund? A tax refund is what's left over after your tax liability has been figured out. It is, in essence, an interest free loan to Uncle Sam.

(Side note: In an Actor212 NotPresidency, I would insist the rules be changed that you receive interest at the Applicable Federal Rate on any refund you obtain. But I digress...)

A tax credit merely lowers that tax liability: in effect, it is a dollar for dollar reduction in your taxes, which you've already paid into the pot.

Now, would your taxes go down? Yes, that's a given, particularly since the tax on the health insurance premium plus the insurance premium itself would be less than the $14,000 maximum premium you'd be credited for.

But...you're still paying for the premium, and you're still paying for the tax.

After all, the average annual premium for an individual in the US is about $4,500. But, the average annual premium for a family of four is, ready for this? $12,500 give or take!

So the benefit to a family of four of a tax credit of $5,000, assuming they pay the top tax rate of 35% ($5,000/0.35) would cover a $14,000 premium.

In other words, you're saving maybe $1500 a year or $525 in taxes!

And look what would happen once this new tax was insituted: insurance companies would now be forced to report to the government the premiums paid by employee (as a check to the payroll reports individual employers now provide to the IRS, such as your W2 form).

Who pays for that administrative cost? You do.

This is another example of the mindless, piecemeal, irrational economic approach of what was supposedly the more financially savvy of the two major parties: you know, they made the money to BE Republicans, so they must know how to pass that knowledge on to us, right?

Eight years of a Bush Presidency, which included six years of a Republican Congress, has proved the fallacy of that notion. Next to no job creation (as opposed to Clinton, who created more jobs than anyone else in history, unless you count the global war machine galvanized against Adolph Hitler), an S&P 500 & Dow Jones 35 that has actually lost ground, mortgage foreclosures at all-time record levels, an unemployment rate higher than any seen in a Democratic administration since the 1940s (save for Clinton's first year in office), personal income declines, and now the tanking of the banking and insurance sectors.

Is this any way to run the greatest nation ever to appear on the face of the planet?????

It's Like A Glass Of Champagne...

...all these bubbles bursting. Only it ain't champagne, more like sewage.

The housing market boom has turned to bust, and with it topple many cherished ideals of the Republican party platform: specifically, in this case, the tax cut.

When Bush proposed his tax cuts, coming on the heels of the first balanced budgets in decades and the first budget surplus in centuries, it was assumed that much of the tax burden would shift down the government scale: states and localities would be forced to raise revenue in order to finance unfunded mandates the Republican Congress was throwing their way, like, say No Child Left Behind.

States and localities, of course, were having their own tax battles. No one in their right mind, in the greed infested environment so polluted with the nonsensical notion that tax cuts were actually *good* for the economy, was about to impose new taxes.

Salvation came in the form of the housing bubble. A community could merely tweak the tax rate slightly, and generate brand new revenue based solely on the fact that house values were skyrocketing and all the community had to do was keep appraisals in line with that valuation.

Worked fine until the bubble burst:

The real estate frenzy that once filled public coffers with property taxes has over the last two years given way to a devastating bust. Rather than christening new facilities, the mayor [Eric Feichthaler, Cape Coral, Florida] finds himself picking through the wreckage of speculative excess and broken dreams.

Last month, the city eliminated 18 building inspector jobs and 20 other positions within its Department of Community Development. They were no longer needed because construction has all but ceased. The city recently hired a landscaping company to cut overgrown lawns surrounding hundreds of abandoned homes.

“People are underwater on their houses, and they have just left,” Mr. Feichthaler says. “That road widening may have to wait. It will be difficult to construct the high school. We know there are needs, but we are going to have to wait a little bit.”

Waiting, scrimping, taking stock: This is the vernacular of the moment for a nation reckoning with the leftovers of a real estate boom gone sour. From the dense suburbs of northern Virginia to communities arrayed across former farmland in California, these are the days of pullback: with real estate values falling, local governments are cutting services, eliminating staff and shelving projects.

So let me draw the picture for you: a lower tax base from the Federal government on down to your city or town; a crumbling infrastructure in terms of bridges (remember the I-35 bridge in Minnesota?), highways, streets, and public facilities like schools, hospitals, and services like police and fire departments; a shrinking tax base as baby-boomers begin to retire, forcing Social Security to call in its chits from the general tax revenue; an aging population demanding health care reform; a horribly tragic, wasteful war that's drained one trillion dollars plus from our collective nest eggs-- and the worst is yet to come.

Next year, another two million or so mortgages will have to be re-assessed as they are due for drastic rate hikes. That's going to create yet another contraction in the real estate market (barring a drastic intervention by the Fool On The Hill, George W Bush) that's going to fling off yet another wave of revenue cuts for states and communities.

And yet, Republicans nationwide applaud this kind of shit. I guess living in a gated community has some advantages but what happens when the gatekeepers can't get to work or can't get to an emergency room? Gates can trap inside as well as keep people out.

Not a pretty picture for the holiday season, huh?

A Convergence In The Force

One of the Democrats see-saw battles internally has been over free trade/fair trade. On the one hand, middle-to-middle-left Democrats see free trade as a good thing, an almost Republican position if you believe the smears.

On the other hand, more left-of-center Democrats believe free trade is a mask to cover predatory capitalism's exploitation of poorer nations and people, including poorer Americans, and that fair trade or barriers to trade are needed.

Both, sadly, are correct positions, which is what makes trade an issue that is not easily resolved at the grass-roots level, and has given the Republicans an economic and foreign policy plank in their platform, not to mention reinforced their arguments regarding tax cuts.

Until now.:

WASHINGTON -- By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president.

The sign of broadening resistance to globalization came in a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll that showed a fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy. While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.

Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations to limit foreign imports. That represents a challenge for Republican candidates who generally echo Mr. Bush's calls for continued trade expansion, and reflects a substantial shift in sentiment from eight years ago.

Note the slightly subtle undercurrent in general Republican opinion, apart from the trade issue: tax hikes on the wealthiest, and protections for poor working Americans.

All this comes on the heels of seven years of "unfettered economic improvement" (I'll get back to that in a moment), a rising if faltering stock market, and a President who goes out of his way to remind people of how his tax cuts put a lot of money in their pockets.

Um. Yea. Not so much...

If you take a look around the current economic landscape, you see the ghosts of our past fiscal party draped over the furniture: easy credit, rocketing house values, low interest rates, predatory lending.

None of which has anything to do with tax cuts. Where tax cuts could have and should have helped middle class Americans, putting more money in their pockets through reduced tax bites and, more important, higher wages, never happened. Wage growth was actually down for the first term of Bush's administration and it wasn't until 2006 that the average caught up and surpassed the average wage in 2000, adjusted for inflation.

In point of fact, the last seven years' spending is probably the result of one unintended impact of Bush's tax cut and one other factor that had nothing to do with taxes whatsoever.

When Bush cut taxes, three times, the logic should have flowed like this: tax cut equals increased spending by businesses and the public equals higher interest rates as credit tightens (companies leveraging their new-found money into capital purchases, people buying bigger homes).

What happened instead was something a little different: tax cut equals increased dividends and capital gains recognition equals lower economic activity equals a further lowering of interest rates to avoid recession.

That extra money, in other words, flowed to wealthier people who didn't need to spend it, instead investing it where they could get a great return. That would normally be a good thing for America, but here's the unintended consequence and why this happened: the rest of the world's economy was starting to ramp up and catch up to the American economy.

Those extra dollars weren't invested here, but in Europe and Asia, particularly China and India, which explains how, while our economy is basically stagnant at the consumer level, our corporations are still making money hand over fist on their overseas activity and the stock markets, never a good economic indicator except in retrospect, are breaking records.

The other factor? The psychology of September 11 and the fear that the administration has made certain to simmer since.

You get panicked and you need to be comforted. In America, that leaves one thing to do: shop. Bush's speech on this point was unnecessary. People weren't in economic hardship, so they weren't about to stash money in their mattresses, waiting for the rabid Islamist horde to come ravage their daughters and raid their banks.

Material acquisition, for reasons I'm not qualified to truly explore, seem to comfort us. Perhaps it's the whole "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality we've been inculcated with, or perhaps it's merely the feel that, in some bizarre way, we've "conquered" something and gained wealth.

It's the wealth angle that strikes me about the past seven years. The rising housing prices, the increased equity people gain in their homes with each mortgage payment, the ability to trade up, quickly turning a $250,000 investment into a $500,000 one by selling the $250K house for $300K, then buying the $500K house with the proceeds, minus the vig for yourself, and a bigger mortgage, feeds right into this acquisitive mentality.

And now we're seeing the bitter fruit of the leftover market. Sure, some people made a ton of money, early on, in the boom, but now you're seeing house prices slipping, and interest rates creeping up, which means house prices will slip further. Now, add to that the baby boomers downsizing their houses as the kids move on, and you've got a really chance of a shrinkage in wealth not seen since the Great Depression.

And people have less and less money to spend. And now, the job market is starting to catch up.

This is not going to be pretty, but the good news is the other half of the country is starting to wake up and realize how bad things really will be. It's a Pyrrhic victory we financial wonks on the left are celebrating, to be sure, but it bodes well for recovering from this horrible tragedy to come.

The Poster Girl For The Estate Tax

(hat tip to Hieronymous Bosch XIV for the image)

Mat 6:24-33 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

This is the Word of God. Amen.

The right wing Mammon-addicted economic royalists and their co-dependent Religious Right have long had a way of turning economic issues into "moral values." Take welfare, for example: it's immoral, because God talks about labor from the sweat of our brow as our birthright from Adam. Heaven forbid we should assist someone in dire need!

Or, a man lives and struggles (don't get me started!) all his life, and at the end of his days, as his body is lowered to its final rest, the taxman stands graveside, plundering his miserable earnings eked out across his life...assuming he stowed away more than $5 million dollars, minimum.

Most of that money having been untaxed during his lifetime, I should add.

The truly cynical aspect of all this is that, in an attempt to lure suckers for tax cuts like moths to a flame, or more appropriately, addicts to a crack mountain, the Republicans have foisted upon their bases, the numbnuts who don't read the newspapers and the others who read the Bible only, to believe that this makes sense: giving more money to the rich, because one day, "you too may be this wealthy."

I was listening to the radio this week and heard a commercial for a seminar on how, you too can avoid the estate tax! Just a few hundred dollars is all you need to learn the secrets the really rich use to avoid paying any estate tax at all! GRATs! Family LLCs! Generation skipping trusts!

And I wondered how many people who are worth over $5 million dollars don't already have an estate plan--...oh!

Right. This isn't about them. This is about the morons who will never, until their death beds, get that $5 million is a LOT of money, and they never even achieved 20% of it...and they're now being ripped off by the bottom feeders who see the scam the Republicans pulled off and want a piece.

But Paris Hilton gets a pass because of this cynical abuse of the American greed. When she garners her inheritance, the only people who will see any portion of it are a couple of drug lords in Colombia, her boy toys, and now, the LA Sheriff's Department.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The judge who sent Paris Hilton to jail called a hearing for Friday on why the hotel heiress was released early and placed under house arrest in a move swiftly challenged by prosecutors and local politicians.

Hilton, 26, a symbol of privilege and the excess of American celebrity culture, was released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for unspecified health reasons on Thursday after serving just three full days of her original 45-day sentence.

Hilton, whose term the sheriff already had reduced to 23 days citing state sentencing guidelines, was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet to track her movements and ordered confined to her lavish home in the Hollywood Hills house for the next 40 days.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said her "reassignment" from an 8-by-12-foot cell to house arrest was carried out after "extensive consultations" with doctors at the jail and others, including the sentencing judge.

But a court spokesman said the decision was made without the approval of Judge Michael Sauer, who later set a hearing on a request by prosecutors to send Hilton back to jail for the remainder of her sentence.

Forget about the fact that she's famous merely for being famous. Forget about the fact that she's fabulously wealthy in mammon. Forget about the fact that her soul is about as deep as the gene pool at a hillbilly family reunion, Uncle Dad.

Let's focus on what she truly represents: idle wealth creating nothing in this country but headlines and tabloids.

Jesus promised us that God would take care of us. Who cares if we have no clothes, no food, no shelter? If we believe, God will provide what we need. Let's face facts though: at some point, man was making enough mammon to be able to help his fellow man.

Maybe He said, "OK, I can slack off making rainment appear out of thin air. They seem to have things under control there."

At some point, He looked down at the bountiful harvests that man was growing and said, "You know what? They seem to have this feeding thing knocked out, as well. *Whew* Because it was getting hard making manna drip from the sky!"

At some point, He saw our builders and engineers making these massive houses and structures like churches, and God said, "OK, now, I guess I can stop strewing branches and reeds on the ground! Well, maybe not. Other animals use them. But these men got it going on!"

Don't you think He might, might, get a little miffed at the creation by our society of a Paris Hilton, who wastes our time, our money, and His resources with her antics, particularly since they are validated and by extension endorsed by our inane fascination with her lunacies, but moreover, our financial support by our tax code?

I'm thinking Jesus' job gets harder and harder the more and more Republicans get elected.God Will Provide, Paris!

The New Math Of A False Economy

(graphic courtesy tengrain at mockpaperscissors.com)
As my long-time readers know, I'm a wonk for economic stuff. Hazard of my avocation, I suppose, needing to stay on top of the economy and make decisions based on my observations. So I stumbled across this story, and started reading it, when I found a paragraph that I think can help explain and tie together some loose threads that have been floating on the periphery of your field of perception lately:

"The negative housing wealth effects on consumer spending could be more pronounced than anticipated," Zandi warned, estimating that a third of U.S. households tapped a substantial amount of home equity in recent years to support spending.

But with stagnant or falling home values, and rising mortgage delinquencies, consumer spending's sole support looks to be wage and income growth, and this at a time when households are being heavily taxed with higher energy prices.

Energy costs rose only 2.9 percent in 2006. But in the first three months of this year, they shot up at an annual rate of 22.9 percent, accounting for about 41 percent of the increase in U.S. consumer prices.

The Consumer and Producer Price indices that are so heavily reported by the mainstream media purposely ignore energy and food prices, due to their volatility. Personally, I think that's a mistake: first, we have much better tools to measure these and to factor out volatility now, and second, these are two core purchases that consumers must make, so to say "inflation was only 3% last year," while food and energy prices were up together anywhere around ten percent is a lie designed to make the administration look good.

But I digress.

Take a closer look at the excerpt I posted: you'll note that the past several years' economic growth has been generated not by wage and income increases (which have remained stagnant to down. It wasn't until 2004 that the final leg irons of recession, consumer income, surpassed the levels at the end of the Clinton administration and even that's not factoring in inflation), but by borrowing against the equity in our homes.

An increase in debt, in other words. Debt can be defined as an advance against income you hope to receive in the future, and interest payments a hedge against the lender losing all that money if your gamble fails.

The optimistic presumption the average American lives on is things are going to get better: my company will make more money. They'll pay me a higher wage. I'll be able to pay off my debts.

Not so much, anymore. Wages have stagnated for nearly thirty years while the banking industry has gone to great lengths to fool consumers into believing they are worth more money than they truly are.

I suppose to a large extent, bankers can be blamed for this situation. Anyone with half a brain who spends a little time studying the overall economic state of this nation would have tightened their lending rules, not expanded them, in order to keep their balance sheets honest and their mortgages current. And banks are chock-a-block with MBAs from Ivy League schools who are trying desperately to learn the lessons I learned on the streets of Noo Yawk: don' lend someone money what can't pay youse back, unless youse is prepared to break deir bot' legs.

See, another side of this comes out in the quarterly earnings report that banks have to prepare for their shareholders. Obviously, if I'm Chase Manhattan, I have to keep my earnings higher than Citibank in order to keep my investors from moving their money there. New loans generate gobs of short term income. Old loans do not. The shell game is to keep those fees and surcharges rolling in (which is why the penalties on credit cards have also become so exorbitant: that's pure profit).

That "immediacy culture" pervades right down to the administrative level, as those Ivy League MBAs are thrown into competition with each other to come up with "the next insanely profitable cash cow." To the winner goes the spoils: make the bank the most money, and you get the corner office, the bigger bonus, the trips to Hawaii.

No one thinks long term, so no one looks long term, so in truth, no one saw this coming, but it is.

We're already in the soup on this, and there's not much to do to bail Americans out. The government could try but thanks to Bush and his tax cuts for the wealthy and his invasion of Iraq, the government has no money either and the money it has borrowed is not going to be allowed to go to its people who need it most.

In effect, we'll all be wage slaves to China. And we've seen what their standard of living is like.

After that, the future gets murky. Obviously, taxes on the wealthy will skyrocket. They have to, particularly as baby boomers retire in greater numbers each year and the pool of productive tax paying Americans dwindles. Taxes on all of us will go up, as well.

Suppose for a second, though, that they don't. Some political pressure keeps honest politicians from talking about tax increases. It becomes a political third rail.

We can't cut spending sufficiently to offset the loss in revenue. Aside from Social Security (which is funded separately anyway) and defense, there's not a whole lot the government spends money on that could scale up to free hundreds of billions of dollars for domestic spending programs that would now go from discretionary to mandatory, unless the sight of people dying in the streets is somehow magically made palatable to Americans. Events of the past week indicate Americans wouldn't want that on their TVs.

About the only places we could cut are defense. And defense. And homeland security.

I think we all know what that means.

So by destabilizing the American economy for decades if not centuries to come, Bush has created the single most dangerous breeding element for the domestic security of Americans: a weakened economy with not enough money to spend on protecting us all.

Thanks, Dumbya.

Bush
economy
mortgages
taxes

A Rising Tide Drowns All Boats

....except for yachts.

A quote, from our President:

The federal government should take no more than a third of anybody's check. But I also dropped the bottom rate from 15% to 10%. Because by far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.

"By far the vast majority of the help goes to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder."

That rung is falling off, however:

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty.

A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.

(emphasis added)All the tax cuts in the world won't help people who aren't making enough to pay taxes, will they, Mr. Bush?

Is it any coincidence that this corresponds with the probationary period that was imposed during welfare reform under the Clinton administration?

No. But then Clinton assumed that the nation wouldn't lose 6 million jobs in the first three years after he left office. Clinton assumed that Preident Gore would be able to put into place a safety net that would cover the people that did lose jobs by keeping taxes in place on the people who never needed to work in the first place.

Let's look at those tax cuts for the bottom rung: in point of fact, when you count in the Social Security and Medicare taxes that people earning up to $90,000 MUST pay a portion of, you see that the bottom 60% of taxpayers got a tax cut of just over 14%.

Now, I don't know what kind of fuzzy math Mr. Bush was using, but I do know that 14% is roughly one-seventh, meaning that 60% of the tax cuts went to the top 40% earners. "By far, the vast majority..."

Now, I don't know about you, but when we've added some four million people to the rolls of desperately poor so that Paris Hilton can afford pedicures for her dog, I think there's something a little screwy going on.

When we've added four million people to the rolls of desperately poor so that Anna Nicole Smith's estate won't be taxed for essentially adding no value to the economy and indeed, sucking activity OUT of the economy, there's something very wrong going on.

When we've added four million people to the rolls of the desperately poor so that Exxon Mobil can make $39.8 BILLION dollars in profit in 2006 alone, our priorities are clearly fucked up.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind.

At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps to explain why the median household income for working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

Profits up, but wages and job growth have severly lagged behind. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in December 2000, there were 137,000,000 million people employed in the US. That level dropped in real numbers until October 2003, due to the Bush recession.

However, population climbed in that interval, so that in December 2000, that 137 million people represented 64.4% of the employable population, where we didn't reach that employment percentage again until, well, we're still waiting, Mr. Bush! (January 2007 was 63.3%)

This is something to be very concerned about. We're deeper in debt than ever before, owing some $7 trillion in mortgages alone. At least we have assets to cover some of that, but we owe another trillion dollars in auto loans, credit card debts and other unsecured credit facilities.

Which is roughly equivalent to the total debt of the United States. And when you've gone into debt, you're essentially getting an advance on your paycheck. Which assumes you will have a paycheck later on to pay off your debts. The US doesn't have that guarantee and neither do too many of us, anymore.

This is also why you see so many commercials on cable now for Countrywide home loans and other credit fixing scams.

43 million poor, sadly, may be a figure we one day look back on as "good times".

There are rocks in the road the size of Buicks. It's going to take a lot more than a war in East Asia for us to forget about them.

Bush
tax cuts
poverty