Tag: Economy

What Are You Searching For? It Depends on How Much Money You Have

Trish
Single-Jogging-Stroller
And then we’ll have the very best cupcake!

If you’re not dirt poor, with few prospects for changing your situation, it’s hard to consider how much of your thought would be devoted to grim subjects. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir illustrated the concept and the myth of the so-called cycle of poverty in their recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Being stuck in perpetual crisis mode is less about wasting your food stamps buying lobster, the authors say, and more about what they call lack of bandwidth.

It works like this. When you’re laying in bed all night wondering how you’re going to pay your child’s daycare provider if you put tires on the car, but if you don’t get tires it’s just a matter of time before you have a flat and can’t get to work and then you’ll lose hours of pay and possibly your whole job…let’s just say you don’t have a lot of energy left for healthy meal planning, shopping, and preparation. The authors call this a “bandwidth tax” on the poor that America’s better off just don’t have to pay.

Leonhardt: The dark side of religion is of special interest: “Antichrist,” “hell” and “rapture” make the top 10 search terms

Now Google, courtesy of The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, is giving a stark glimpse into the mindsets of those on the losing end of income inequality. The search terms of poor people show that they and the well-off live in different countries, and possibly on different planets.

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Half of Americans Say Midterm Results Won’t Help Economy

Buck Banks

50%

Of Americans say that Democrats or Republicans in control of Congress won’t make much of a difference in improving the economy. That’s compared with 25 percent who believe the economy will improve if Republicans control Congress, and another 23 percent who believe it will improve if Democrats are in charge, according to an NBC/WSJ/Annenberg survey.

It’s Amazon’s World and We Just Live in It

Trish

I wanted to buy a book a few months ago for a relative who was hospitalized in a city about 40 miles north and who wasn’t a TV watcher. I figured I’d stop off at the mall or a shopping center as I drove up and pick up some books and magazines.

Except there were no bookstores. While I had been floating along, ordering books from Amazon because they were cheap or putting them on my Amazon wish list and waiting for the prices to come down, book shops all around me were going out of business. Instead of finding some cool books and artsy, interesting magazines, I had to stop at a grocery store to buy a lame edition of O Magazine by Oprah. I believe it went unread.

Your reading choices will someday be either 50 Shades of Gray or The Hunger Games…or a copy of O Magazine

If you watch the Colbert Report, you know that the responsible thing to do right now is to boycott Amazon. The massive “Don’t Be Evil” online seller is engaged in a very evil battle with traditional publishers to control pricing and set off a dumbing down process that will likely promote self-publishing as an Amazon work-around.

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What It Means for America to Have the Largest Prison Population in the World

Trish

This video from the Hank portion of the VlogBrothers doesn’t follow where the $75 billion a year goes, nor does it discuss prison privatization, which drives the spending, but maybe it’s better to start, as the video does, by describing the problem’s scope.

Punitive measures that continue punishment even after the convicted have paid their debt to society turn every prison term into a life sentence

What is covered is something a criminal justice system employee once told me: the vast majority of people in prison today will at some point get out, and we are not only doing almost nothing with that day in mind, such as preparing them to do something different, but we are helping ensure their failure with punitive measures that are designed to continue punishment even after the convicted have paid their debt to society. This turns every prison term into a life sentence. And that’s good for neither them nor society, i.e., us.

I hope someone will do a similar video on the facts behind the DUI privatization rip-off, but that’s a subject for another day.

Obama’s Weekly Address Isn’t So Ho-Hum

Trish

Week in and week out, the president posts his “Weekly Address,” a reiteration of the best answer to the most pressing problem of the time, which will never see daylight because of Republican opposition to anything Obama-related. It’s easy to tune out Obama’s message, just to save a little heartbreak.

This week, in the wake of the proposed budget from Republicans (which will also go nowhere, since Democrats still rule the Senate*) the president again frames the sensible solution but kind of kicks butt with a little extra womp around the 1:17 mark:

The Republican budget begins by passing out massive tax cuts to the households making more than a million dollars a year. Then, to keep from blowing a hole in the deficit, they’d have to raise taxes on middle class families with kids. Next, their budget forces deep cuts to investments that help our economy create jobs, like education and scientific research.

What’s the bottom line, my president?

Policies that benefit the fortunate few while making it harder for working Americans to succeed — that’s not what we need right now. Our economy doesn’t grow best from the top-down, it grows best from the middle-out.

Wham.

* Be sure to vote in November! It really, really matters this time.

Americans Expressing a Current of Individual Optimism

Buck Banks

2/3

Of Americans think the country is in a recession or going in the wrong direction, but the vast majority believe their personal prospects will improve or stay the course, according to a new NBC/Marist poll. “A current of individual optimism — the highest level detected since 2009 — runs through the results of the survey, despite evidence that millions of Americans, especially those in lower income brackets, are struggling to balance their budgets. And yet that individual optimism is trumped by political pessimism of the country’s situation as a whole.”

Unemployment, Economy Numbers Better Than Expected

Buck Banks

204,000

Number of jobs added to the U.S. economy in October, while the unemployment rate rose to 7.3%, the Wall Street Journal reports. Combined with yesterday’s report that third-quarter GDP grew 2.8%, October economic data “have been surprisingly strong, especially considering many economists thought the 16-day partial government shutdown would skew the numbers.”