Let's Go, Brandon!

[merh]

May 23, 2022 3:33:30 GMT abbey1227 said:

May 23, 2022 3:30:23 GMT merh said:

But we are connected & meant to help one another.

That is such cult-like thinking, imo

You're in denial of all of the people who behave in the exact opposite manner.......and then there's people like me just sitting in the middle on the fence.

I do not have a wish to join this large club that you want to be in.

Yeah.
Doesn't sound like you spent much time in church growing up.

[abbey1227]

May 23, 2022 3:43:33 GMT merh said:

May 23, 2022 3:33:30 GMT abbey1227 said:

That is such cult-like thinking, imo

You're in denial of all of the people who behave in the exact opposite manner.......and then there's people like me just sitting in the middle on the fence.

I do not have a wish to join this large club that you want to be in.

Yeah.
Doesn't sound like you spent much time in church growing up.

Like a lot of kids, I was forced to go.........heard the sermons repeatedly. Made it thru my first communion even.

But once I was about 10, I just wasn't interested in tagging along anymore.  

[merh]

[merh]

[abbey1227]

May 23, 2022 20:17:05 GMT merh said:

I am not shocked by the 50 year high.........as it's only on paper anyway.

See, when the $Dollar is no longer worth what it once was...........it takes more of them to equal the same amount of purchasing power.

THAT's why so many items that used to be one price..........are now sitting at a higher price.

I'm seeing tons of things that have gone up 20-30% in just the last few months. Egads!

[merh]

May 23, 2022 23:09:47 GMT abbey1227 said:

May 23, 2022 20:17:05 GMT merh said:

I am not shocked by the 50 year high.........as it's only on paper anyway.

See, when the $Dollar is no longer worth what it once was...........it takes more of them to equal the same amount of purchasing power.

THAT's why so many items that used to be one price..........are now sitting at a higher price.

I'm seeing tons of things that have gone up 20-30% in just the last few months. Egads!

Those bookcases that were $49 last July?
$69 now.

[abbey1227]

May 23, 2022 20:12:03 GMT merh said:

Biden: Record-high gas prices part of ‘incredible transition’

[abbey1227]

May 23, 2022 23:17:06 GMT merh said:

May 23, 2022 23:09:47 GMT abbey1227 said:

Those bookcases that were $49 last July?
$69 now.

Crazy, right?

And they're probably the same damn ones that have been sitting in that warehouse all this time.  

I can not believe what they want  for sawdust and glue

[merh]

May 23, 2022 23:22:57 GMT abbey1227 said:

May 23, 2022 23:17:06 GMT merh said:

Those bookcases that were $49 last July?
$69 now.

Crazy, right?

And they're probably the same damn ones that have been sitting in that warehouse all this time.  

I can not believe what they want  for sawdust and glue

Not sure.
IKea has been out of stock more often than not. 
I trashed all mine, figuring it would be just as easy to buy new. 
I started in August. Finally got 4 delivered in September.
Same dance around Halloween. 

And again last week to get 3.

Apparently if you order online you go to delivery hell where the store is always out of stock but tells you they aren't but then customers go to the store & buy all the bookcases so there are none to deliver so your delivery gets postponed.

[abbey1227]

May 23, 2022 23:29:49 GMT merh said:

Not sure.
IKea has been out of stock more often than not. 
I trashed all mine, figuring it would be just as easy to buy new. 
I started in August. Finally got 4 delivered in September.
Same dance around Halloween. 

And again last week to get 3.

Apparently if you order online you go to delivery hell where the store is always out of stock but tells you they aren't but then customers go to the store & buy all the bookcases so there are none to deliver so your delivery gets postponed.

I still do the occasional ordering for some old customers ...........so if it makes you feel any better, one of them has been waiting on an LP order ......the one year anniversary of that order being placed just came and went. 

[merh]

[abbey1227]

Jun 2, 2022 3:33:28 GMT merh said:

Was building new oil refineries and expanding drilling operations all over the US part of that bill?

[merh]

[abbey1227]

Jun 6, 2022 20:23:31 GMT merh said:

That acronym at the top of the photo is awfully appropriate these days

[merh]

Timothy Noah
June 2, 2022
SAY WHAT?
The Recession Hasn’t Happened Yet, but Somehow It’s Already Joe Biden’s Fault

Two Washington Post articles this week suggest we’re “returning” to a time of savage inequality. Returning?!

The news industry craves narrative, and when none is available it constructs one with the incomplete ingredients at hand, like a chef who makes a soufflé without eggs. It can be done, and done in such a way as to leave the facts unviolated. But don’t ask me to stomach it.

The narrative of the moment is economic recession, and the eggless soufflé is a pair of stories in The Washington Post about how it’s going, even though it hasn’t started yet (and may not for a long time). The expectation that a recession is coming puts pressure on the Post and other news organizations to cover it now. The two Post stories don’t actually say the recession has arrived, because that wouldn’t be factual. But they behave as though it has, and that does an injustice to President Biden’s economic record.

Exhibit A is a Page 1 feature by Kyle Swenson in Wednesday’s Post about the boom in plasma donations. This is in most ways an excellent story, but it strains for topicality by suggesting this is a trend story related to Biden’s stewardship of the economy. Which it isn’t, especially.

Swenson reports that Christina Seal, a 41-year-old schoolteacher in Slidell, Louisiana, is struggling to make ends meet because inflation has played havoc with her household budget. Seal can only just make it on $54,000 a year. (That’s about $13,000 less than the national median household income.) But inflation has kicked up Seal’s weekly grocery bills by one-third; her utility bills have doubled; and the cost of filling her gas tank has risen from $40 to $70. Now Seal is so strapped that she’s selling her blood plasma twice a week, at serious cost to her health.

“Seal [is] not alone,” Swenson writes, and that seems likely enough. Lots of lower-income people live very close to the edge financially, and it doesn’t take much to put them underwater. Given that inflation is outrunning wages by 2.6 percent, it’s not surprising that last fall and winter, Seal tells Swenson, more people showed up at her local plasma center—she states this less directly than I do here, but I accept Swenson’s implication that that’s what she means. That’s on Biden (to whatever extent presidents are responsible for how the economy performs on their watch).

The Post does not, however, address whether more people are showing up at plasma centers nationally—the question that landed this story on Page 1. Swenson documents a shocking boom in what is euphemistically called plasma “donation,” but that boom turns out to be not a two-year trend but a two-decade one. Plasma donation centers tripled in number between 2005, when there were about 300, and 2020, when there were more than 900. Donations (i.e., plasma sales) quadrupled during roughly the same period. “Two-thirds of the world’s plasma supply comes from the United States,” Swenson writes, “in part because the country allows companies to pay for plasma.” That such an industry can thrive in the United States probably has a lot to do with sluggish wage growth since the bursting of the dot-com bubble in early 2000. Swenson offers no evidence that it has anything to do with the inflation surge that began a year ago or anything else that’s happening in the economy right now.

Exhibit B is a Post column published the same day by Heather Long. The U.S., she writes, “appears to be returning to a have/have not economy.” What she means is that the bottom 20 percent in the income distribution has spent its stimulus checks, retail sales are down at Walmart, and lower-income people are, as Swenson’s story demonstrated, getting socked by inflation, even as more affluent people are spending briskly and piling up savings.

But it’s awfully strange for Long to suggest we’re “returning” to a have/have not economy. Returning? Income inequality has been growing for more than 40 years.

Yes, wealthier people are spending a lot right now and saving a lot, while lower-income people are spending less and saving nothing. But if Long is describing the short-term picture—and her lead paragraph, which reviews the various reasons we may be on the brink of recession, makes clear that she is—then that story is actually more complicated and contradictory. The “quits” rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday, is still a very high 2.9 percent. We’ll find out Friday what May’s unemployment rate was, but in April it was a very low 3.6 percent, and the (low-wage) leisure and hospitality sector was still creating the most new jobs and experiencing the steepest wage hikes—so steep that they exceed inflation.* Meanwhile, rich people have lately been losing a lot of money in the stock market. It’s very difficult to say whether economic inequality is growing or shrinking at this precise moment. It’s also not a very interesting question, because the bigger picture is that over the longer term, inequality has been growing quite a lot. If it isn’t growing at this nanosecond in history, rest assured that it will resume growing in the next nanosecond. Indeed, if we have a recession, income inequality, as I noted earlier this week, will likely increase at least twice as fast as it usually does. But that hasn’t happened yet.

This isn’t the first time Long demonstrated obtuseness about economic history. At Davos in 2019, she asked computer tycoon Michael Dell what he thought of a proposal by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 70 percent, noting the current rate was 37 percent. “Name a country where that’s worked, ever,” Dell replied. Economist Erik Brynjolfsson (then at MIT, now at Stanford) then chimed in, “the United States,” prompting Long to state, dismissively and incorrectly, “Briefly, in the ’80s.” Brynjolfsson then corrected both Long and Dell, explaining that the U.S. for a very long time—from the New Deal until the 1980s, which is to say, during the period of our greatest sustained growth in gross domestic product and lowest levels of income inequality—had a top marginal rate of 70 percent or higher.

Brynjolfsson got a few details wrong but mostly in ways that showed he was more right than he knew. President Franklin Roosevelt raised the top marginal tax rate to 79 percent in 1936, to 81 percent in 1940, to 88 percent in 1942, and to 94 percent in 1944. It dropped back into the 80s during the postwar years, then rose to 91 percent in 1951 and remained at 91 or 92 percent through the Eisenhower years. The top marginal rate dropped to 70 percent in 1965, as part of a tax cut initiated by President John F. Kennedy, and remained at least that high until President Ronald Reagan dropped it to 69.13 percent in 1981, to 50 percent in 1982, and finally to 28 percent in 1988. It crept up to approximately its current level (37 percent) under Presidents George H.W. Bush (violating his “no new taxes” pledge) and Bill Clinton. Biden proposes raising it slightly to 39.6 percent.

To summarize: Through the boom years of the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90 percent, and during the boom years of the 1960s it was at least 70 percent. When Reagan ran reelection ads in 1984 boasting that, economically, it was “morning again in America,” the top rate was still an unimaginably high (by today’s standards) 50 percent.

This history is highly relevant to current arguments about tax policy, and it’s surprising that Dell didn’t know it. It’s astonishing that Long, one of the top economics writers at one of the top American newspapers, didn’t. The exchange was bizarre enough to draw attention in The Atlantic, on NPR, and (by New Republic editor Michael Tomasky) in the journal Democracy. It was noted even in that chronicle of the rich and famous Vanity Fair. But it was difficult for readers to find the gist in The Washington Post.

Long reported some of Dell’s comments in her Post dispatch from Davos. But she left out Dell’s ignorant “name a country” challenge and Brynjolfsson’s answer to it, thereby omitting any suggestion that Dell’s opinion was so poorly informed as to be worthless. Here’s the passage:


Millionaires and billionaires in Davos panned the idea of higher taxes, arguing that the private sector does a better job than the government of spending money wisely.

“No, I am not supportive of that, and I don’t think it would help the growth of the U.S. economy,” Dell responded when asked about his views of Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for a 70 percent marginal income tax on earnings above $10 million.

Dell noted that he and his wife contribute most of their wealth to a foundation. “I feel much more comfortable with our ability as a private foundation to allocate those funds than I do giving them to the government.”

Others argued that their tax rate is already high and that raising tax rates could push people to move abroad or not invest.

For balance, Long quoted the inequality scholar Branko Milanovic of City University of New York saying, “Davos is always in favor of reducing inequality and poverty: locally, nationally and globally—but not if they have to pay for it.” But nowhere did Long report the salient fact that the top marginal rate used to be 70 or 90 percent.

All three of these examples—Swenson’s casting the plasma-selling boom as an inflation story, Long’s shoehorning a four-decade inequality expansion into a single economic cycle, and Long’s earlier failure to note that Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent top marginal income tax rate was less radical than Eisenhower’s tax policy—demonstrate a reluctance to place an economic moment in the context of what preceded it. Yes, we may soon have a recession. Or, possibly, not. “As long as the rich and upper-middle class continue to spend,” Long wrote Wednesday, “there probably won’t be a recession. But that doesn’t mean the economy will feel good to many, if not most, Americans.”

That’s correct. But it hasn’t felt good to them for four decades. To suggest otherwise is to bake a soufflé without eggs.

Who owns WaPo...?

So Biden is trying to raise taxes on the rich 2.6%, still well below the rate under Eisenhower (90%) or Reagan (50%), but the Apocalypse has come?

I made around $52,000 when I was working.
I sold my plasma back in the 80s when I was a newlywed. Made $7 per donation twice a week (or was it $8?) They allegedly paid more for negative, but they never paid me more & I have since discovered I'm A-... There isn't any detriment to one's health. They won't take your blood if you are unhealthy. They check one's iron, temp & blood pressure. 

And I know recession is something we don't know we are in until we are in it because there are specific measurements to calling it a recession. 

Foundation....like the Clintons?
I remember you take issue with theirs.

[abbey1227]

Jun 7, 2022 5:27:09 GMT merh said:

Who owns WaPo...?

So Biden is trying to raise taxes on the rich 2.6%, still well below the rate under Eisenhower (90%) or Reagan (50%), but the Apocalypse has come?

I made around $52,000 when I was working.
I sold my plasma back in the 80s when I was a newlywed. Made $7 per donation twice a week (or was it $8?) They allegedly paid more for negative, but they never paid me more & I have since discovered I'm A-... There isn't any detriment to one's health. They won't take your blood if you are unhealthy. They check one's iron, temp & blood pressure. 

And I know recession is something we don't know we are in until we are in it because there are specific measurements to calling it a recession. 

Foundation....like the Clintons?
I remember you take issue with theirs.

I think you guys are purposefully missing the boat. Even when YOUR taxes don't go up.........that Inflation and Cost of Living does. It's been decades since I've seen leaps like those recently. This isn't funny. It's a tax on the poor. Albeit indirectly.....but still directly. You were told before......you jack up minimum wages? Costs go up. You stop producing oil here, gas goes up. You allow the Govt to keep turning on the printing presses? Your dollar is now worth less......and by extension, your costs go up.

Stop living in that fantasyland of 90% taxation. It never really existed anyway.

I was getting $25-50 for plasma about 7 years ago.

I think most of these foundations, NGOs and Non-Profits are simply ways to launder money or avoid taxes.

You saw how her donations dried up right after losing that election........and yet you still believe it's existence is based on their want to just help little people?

[merh]

The only good Indian?

[merh]

Oops?



The decimal point is apparently 1 spot too far left...

[merh]

[abbey1227]

Jun 12, 2022 18:47:07 GMT merh said:

is it supposed to signify that others are being F'd harder..........so we really shouldn't complain?