"traditional metrics" ;-/
Submitted by GreyWolf on Sun, 05/05/2019 - 12:56pm
I read "traditional metrics" in a comment here where folks were throwing around "data," and I got a perplexed frowny face. I was thinking that kinda means "it depends on your perspective," are you a shareholder or a worker ...? And of course I'm also thinking "lies, damned lies, and statistics," and a brazillion other things.
I like pictures.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Comments
What a nice collection GreyWolf
I found the concept of a great economy at present puzzling. I couldn't even comment. I wonder at my own good fortune having a pension...I also wonder if I'll have it for the rest of my life because it isn't beyond the pale that AL might take it back and use our money for something like more private prisons.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
"I couldn't even comment." ;)
me neither
Why bother.
like arguing with a Hillbot....
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
It was a truly dazzling array of bs as I’ve ever seen.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
I end up taking several Statistics classes
...at UGA it counted as my foreign language...true story.
Anyway I worked my way up into the 800 level classes where you learn how to make the numbers say anything you want. You really have to be careful believing statistical analysis.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
My grandmother used to say, “Figures can lie, and liars
can figure.”
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
sounds like a wise woman
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The Malcolm X quote is great
and we're there. Some one here has a sigline about how the CIA gets us to believe whatever they tell us is the truth.
That for posting this.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
The MalcolmX quote reminded me of Paulo Freire ...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
Lots and lots of tweets.
Woo hoo!! That'll show 'em!!
Just to take apart Ingraham's tweet, though, since I haven't time to debunk all of them, he's showing that dividends went up by 1.3% of total corporate assets while wages declined by 10.2%. What happened to the other 8.9% (10.2 - 1.3) of wages? There's more than just dividend payouts at play in the impoverishing of American workers.
And a final thought: Because employee pensions are largely a thing of the past, most workers now rely on their 401K stock market investments. This means that dividend payouts, which by law are reinvested into the 401K (simplified version, see How 401(k) Dividends Are Paid for details), employees also benefit from dividend payouts.
Many people used their 401ks to live on during the
Great Recession. One serious illness can wipe out everything a family owns even with health insurance. People’s lives are not affected by statistics. Reality is cruel.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
People are affected by statistics.
Dividends are reinvested into 401Ks, thus benefiting workers. Bankruptcies are down. Foreclosures are down. Employment is up. Wages are up. These are undeniable facts.
Wages haven't kept up with inflation in the past 40 years. The 2008 Great Recession damaged 10s of millions of Americans. College debt is at record highs. Those are also undeniable facts.
Both sets of facts are based on statistics. Do you disbelieve the 2nd set?
Statistics are merely an aggregation of data. They may be used
to sway opinions, but in and of themselves, they do not affect people’s lives. If someone makes an error in calculating their statistics, that error does not alter reality. What happens, happens. Statistics ideally tried to reflect what happens. Ideals are hard to achieve, though. And sometimes people even use statistics to mask reality rather than illuminating it.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
Foreclosures are going back up
I spoke with someone at my mortgage company Friday and asked him about this and he said his company is hiring more people to keep up with the work load. The number of people who homeless is also creeping up. Cities are overwhelmed with trying to find resources to deal with the number.
Life expectancy is going down for Americans in this nice economy because people are seeing that no matter how hard they work at how many jobs they still can't afford their rents and other expenses.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
It's early.
It's too early to tell. 2018 was a 13-year low.
"Those 624,753 properties with foreclosure filings in 2018 represented 0.47 percent of all U.S. housing units, down from 0.51 percent in 2017 and down from a peak of 2.23 percent in 2010 to the lowest level since 2005." See: U.S. Foreclosure Activity Drops to 13-Year Low in 2018
On the other hand, Jan-Mar 2019 foreclosures were higher than Nov-Dec 2018.
Auto loan defaults
More anecdotal evidence, this coming from a former co-worker: His son works in Dallas with auto loan defaults. I consider the company a collection agency of sorts, paid by the auto companies, and they have most of them as clients. A few weeks ago, my friend told me that his son's company was overwhelmed with business and was desperately looking for competent help. I noted that well. Seemed to be a rather recent development -- within the last fiscal quarter or so.
For what it's worth, a similar story.
Yep.. that too
Just read about how people have stopped buying new cars because they can't afford to. The article went into detail about what happened during the last economic crisis. Zero hedges has I think.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
I'd be interested in your take on this article
The truth about Trump's economy
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
The way you arranged the text and images
...played in my mind like a documentary. Very nicely done.
There's a lot of distorted data that has been turned loose recently. It's not just the Right Wing hicks with a home computer making fake charts anymore. The fake charts are now coming from the top. I see it trickling out of the health- insurance sector now, as they gear up to deny Americans basic human rights. Yet again.
The US hasn't had laws against misinforming American voters via the media for over 40 years. The current reality we see around us is exactly what that has wrought. Misinformation was allowed to fester and spread quietly to reach this putrid level, but in this most recent decade, they have pulled out al the stops when it comes to distorting data — like deliberately omitting "net savings from all sources" in a profit-loss calculation. (You'll frequently see this sort of distortion in the coming health care "debates."
Now, we have corporate monopolies censoring American discussions between the people. This was done through the privatization (
net neutrality) of not only the means of communication (a public utility) — but by privatizing your content to the social media monopolies. By making the social media monopolies financially liable for for what you say online — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of fines spuriously levied by the states — your words were commodified and their ownership was transferred to the responsible party. Not a peep of protest coming from your government representatives.So, we live with the corruption of rights that we have allowed to become established, and we circle the drain. Americans are getting dumber across the board as the US IQ scores continue to slide against other nations. And when their pathetic indentured servitude begins to peek through the matrix of their denial — well, they just luv being a part of something big and bristling with nukes. It's the Godwin of the 21st century.
I'm a chart collector, a hoarder, even. But all that fancy visual data aside, I'm satisfied that this simple chart contains all the issues and dilemmas the US is facing (with the addition of simple overlays showing personal debt, national debt, financial sector income as a ratio of other wages, the GINI index, income inequality, the deregulation index, war profits, and etc). They are all strongly correlated. Now, it's easy to see the Gates of Hell on a chart like this. And the simple solution is also readily apparent, That sweet spot in the middle is where you go when you want to reverse the economic damage and grow a healthy middle class with a modern infrastructure. You go there when you want to eradicate income inequality, or provide full education to your citizens. You go there when times are good to establish Universal Basic Income people will need when times are bad — and you get rid of the expensive and degrading means-tested boondoggles that cost 10 times as much. You go there to buffer society so it can pass through adversity and change, like the transition to automation and robotics, without scarring people for life. It's where you go to sustain or regain the mental health of the nation.
_________________________
So, here's a first fo me:
When I finished writing this post, I searched for the chart I wanted to post. What came back instead was this page from Google:
.
"Why did this happen?" was a rhetorical question. I guess I'm supposed to give that some thought. I uploaded the chart from my picture archive, instead.
[edit=grammar]
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
This comment deserves an essay.
With more background on what is in the chart. I see highest and lowest personal income tax rates in the chart, but what does the circle encompass and how. You have a great point and great input. Please expand it into an essay. It deserves it.
I'd also consider the portion of income taxes paid by corporations. It's plummeted in the past few decades. Also, FICA taxes had an affect. As those taxes blossomed starting in the mid-80s, "borrowing" of the surpluses for current spending also exploded, thus financing (partially) tax cuts for the wealthy.
I drew that lavender oval on the chart
...to indicate a period of time when the people's lives were improving and virtually anything was possible. A child had every opportunity to do as well economically, if not better, than his or her parents. But that shimmering balance of happy progress was held into place by something equally important. Regulations on financial institutions. We're going to need more charts to make that essay. it was also a time of no wars. But then the rich got greedy and threw us into Vietnam to gain absolutely nothing whatsoever but wealth for them. And we ran out of the People's money and killed the gold standard and replaced it with the Saudi Arabian standard. And this is our cesspool from that.
Glad you like it,
Exactly. I had this one set aside. This chart also allows us to see what has happened and how the corporations came to own the Federal government and all of our natural resources. This is what votng in an unregulated democracy with an out of date constitution gets you.
.
The Orange area is the shrinking revenues from the ever-more-profitable corporations and the now unregulated monopolies (technically illegal in the US). The Yellow area is Social Security, which belongs on its own budget sheet. It's a solvent and self-funding pension fund and is not part of the Federal budget.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
I collect charts too, P.
Of course, half of 'em are charts I've snagged from you over the years.
I like to use them to demonstrate the effects of electoral politics and Neoliberalism.
A lot of people date the beginning of Neoliberalism in the US from the 70s under Jimmy Carter, with his appointment of Paul Volcker at the Fed, for example.
In my view, Neoliberalism really took off in The US with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
If you look at a lot of these charts, including the one you posted above, there's an inflection point in 1980. I did a thing at the other place once where I threw together a bunch of charts to demonstrate this and to make the point that elections have consequences.
I'm thinking of doing another one here. If I do, that marginal tax rate chart will be included.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
You should do that.
It was during Reagan's reign that the neo-conservatives jumped like starving fleas on a fresh dog.
They caught a lucky break when President Alzheimer was elected and did not hesitate to embed themselves into positions of authority in the Permanent federal government, where they remain to this day. They're protected by miles of classified documents that no one knows how to request. They had been waiting for this moment since the 1940s, pretty much all of them Nazi-Americans by that point. And all of them still gunning for the Russian Commies.
All the trends that track our miserable descent start in the same place, just as you describe, and it tick-tocks like a Darwin clock even as we speak. Our national debt is one of the most striking examples and correlations to the tax rate chart and shows what this really means. The words, "Debt doesn't matter" comes out of their mouths because their brains believe they will rule the earth with oil. And, then it won't matter a bit. But those same people all bet the house that Hillary would win. And now they are slashing and burning American brains trying to cover up their crimes in order to survive that risky bet.
There's no question that this ship is going down. The only question is whether of not we are taking the rest of the world with us. I remained behind to fight that fight.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato