[American Greatness] In a romantic relationship, one cannot generally influence his partner’s emotions with rational argument. Feelings are unmediated, unruly, and mostly instinctual things. The same may be said for our feelings about the economy. They are not always rational, but that is not to say they are false or meaningless.
Joe Biden and his surrogates keep trying to convince and shame the American people into believing that the economy is doing great and that "Bidenomics" is the reason. Nice try. The people are unhappy and not buying it. While this is an emotional reaction, it also has a basis in real facts about the state of the economy, which are refracted through individuals’ personal circumstances.
The first and most glaring issue is that everything is more expensive than it was a few years ago. On top of this, wages have not kept up, real wealth and income have declined, and middle class people find themselves harried by competing and rising costs in healthcare, electricity, food, housing, tuition, and cars. People who thought of themselves as middle class sometimes find themselves descending into proletariat status. In the more extreme cases, people become homeless late in life, having lost all their resources to deal with job loss or other emergencies.
Biden and his surrogates are correct that unemployment remains low, and that the economy is still moving along. The 2007-2009 period of the Great Recession was far worse and far more frightening in this regard, at least for those of us working in the private sector. Lots of hard-working and productive people found themselves out of work because of massive disruptions to capital markets and the banking sector.
We have a different problem today, which is inflation. But inflation is also different because it affects nearly everyone. During the Great Recession large numbers of people never experienced significant pain, as unemployment only affected a minority of workers. While 10% unemployment is a huge number of people looking for work, it also means 90% of the other people who wanted jobs were finding and keeping them.
Keeping an eye on that one for sure, but nothing we can do at this point but wait and see.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
12/04/2023 9:41 Comments ||
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#5
Ref #2: "At issue in Moore v. United States is the question of whether the federal government can tax certain types of “unrealized” gains, which are property like stocks or bonds that people own but from which they haven’t directly recouped the value, so they don’t have direct access to the money that the property is worth."
#7
You can gaslight most of the nation during COVID, but you can’t gaslight all of us in the McDonalds drive through. My meal cost $10 bucks and the fries and drink are smaller. I am like the prole in 1984 that was ticked off that his pint of beer was now metric measured. They messed up when they jerked around our McNuggets.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/04/2023 11:34 Comments ||
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#8
Nothing is more fundamental to individual AMericans than our expectations of world-class food supply and quality. It is the most intimate connection we have with out sense of first-world living. It is a place where there are obvious tells of decline.
I find the shrink-flation and price increases in mainstream, trusted brands like Stouffer's and Pepperidge Farm's is bad enough, but what I find increasingly across the entire spectrum is quality deterioration. They not only cheat on packaging and per unit pricing, but they have reduced quality and taste. For example Pepperidge Farm's Pretzel Goldfish are now tasteless and virtually salt-free as they have adulterated the proportions. Stouffer's has ruined Creamed Chipped Beef, rendering it inedible, and the Spaghetti with Meat Sauce is essentially devoid of significant trace amounts of marinara. Produce is routinely too early or kept past peak freshness. Canned goods are frequently presented with mere months of shelf-life remaining. Baked goods can have less than a week remaining on the sell-by dates.
These are not the hallmarks of a prosperous, healthy national economy. This is the decay of fundamental American prosperity on display!
#9
An to think when the 1913 Federal Income Tax form was 4 pages, which is now 106, the count of both including instructions. It was created for the WWI debt.
It was ORIGINALLY sold on, only taxing the Rich, not taxing the typical wage/income earners and not lasting more than 7 years.
Somehow, Congress quickly forgot about the original promises.
[Kim Iverson YouTube] The curse of the 8th decade is a mysterious and almost biblical prophecy but with a material reality, countries sometimes don't last past the 8th decade of their existence, but why?
Concept of "Third Generation Curse" poorly explained.
#1
What so f*cking mysterious? Israel made a mistake not ethnically cleansing the Arabs in 1948 (like they did with Germans in Europe) and repeating that mistake in 1967. Then we let the mistake fester for two generations.
Now, finally, we starting to deal with it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[FoxNews] 
