A Few Points On The Economy And Our Failing Economic Model.

Share Button

A commenter at IGF posted this:

One of my great frustrations in the debate regarding economics is the complete avoidance of some basic understanding of what it is. Economic activity is simply money changing hands. When money doesn’t change hands, the economy falters. When it does, it flourishes. It is hard to avoid value judgments about how it changes hands. (taxes, government spending) There is nothing wrong with money pooling into fewer hands at the top provided those hands invest it, create jobs, and increase economic activity. But that isn’t happening. And if those further down the scale have fewer discretionary dollars, the economy slows.

This is a basic reality. Now, is it preferable for individuals to keep more of what they earn to spend how they choose? Absolutely. But then we have a problem if they choose not to spend it. And I see no reason why they would choose to invest to make products no one can buy.

So cutting taxes sounds wonderful, but only on the proviso that the money continues to circulate. And it usually does that in high confidence times. This is why tort reform, slashing taxes, and cutting public payrolls sound great but have dire consequences unless the other half the equation holds.

Henry Ford famously doubled his workers salaries voluntarily “so they could afford the product they made” and it changed the economy locally. Things boomed without a government lifting a finger. Starving workers is great initially to the bottom line, but when people have fewer dollars to spend, just like the 2008 crisis, economic activity slows to a trickle and may even shut down entirely.

So all the talk about a business-friendly environment is great. But if there is no worker-friendly environment as well, no one will be able to buy the fabulous stuff they are making. Business people aren’t stupid, they don’t make stuff that people can’t or won’t buy.

And so here we are. Again.

Don… Yep.

In the current government / business paradigm we’re living under, the sacred tenant of policy is to make the investment community the top dog. As Larry Kudlow likes to say “Profits are King”.

Problem is, profit are going toward building more paper profits because it’s a much cheaper way to make profit than to actually spend the money on business and infrastructure.

Prime examples – The industrial spill in West Virginia and the recent rail car derailment in North Dakota. Now, had the companies invested in upgrading to safer technologies in each cases, they would have not only created more jobs, but also probably averted the disasters, or at least lessened the scope of them.

Why are both using older than dirt technologies? Because, even though both companies are very profitable, improving each would eat into profits, making the stocks a little less attractive and cut into profits.

Also, do you know why the Target credit card heist was so huge? Because the banks here in the US, who are certainly not hurting for profits, won’t spend the capital to move to newer, much more secure, credit card technologies that every other first world country now uses. Why… Because doing that, even though it would also create new jobs, would eat into their profits.

And the general public? Well, the boom years of the 80’s, 90’s and naughts were not a product of higher and better pay… Those booms were purchased on credit… Credit cards and home equity loans that is. The Great Recession took that away. The economy is recovering slowly because banks are not issuing credit quite as crazily as they did ten years ago. Of course, that also means that if something else happens that tanks this current anemic economic recovery, because the majority of the employed are barely scraping by, and there is much less credit leeway being offered, there is much less wiggle room for anyone to survive financially. Basically, we are running on an economic model that is poised to collapse rivaling the Great Depression.

Something has to change. And though many Dems don’t really have much to offer as far as economic structural vision goes, the path the Republicans want to not just continue on, but follow right off the proverbial cliff, is a road to disaster.

Oh… You Clever Spammer!

Share Button

As some of you know, I’m not the best, most accurate speller in the world. So today, I noticed that I got a comment on a two year old post saying this:

“certainly like your website but you have to check the
spelling on quite a few of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I to find it very troublesome to inform the truth nevertheless
I’ll certainly come again again.

Feel free to surf to my webpage Angry Birds GO Hack [URL Deleted]”

The post was from June, 2011, and there were no errors that I could find. And if there were, I’m sure my dedicated self appointed spell-checker Jeff Alberts would have surely let me know! I double checked though just to make sure.

I might just approve this spam cause it made me smile….

Na. Deleted!

Why The Conservative Movement Is Becoming Irrelevant – Part 2

Share Button

Andrew Sullivan has a blog post titled “The GOP’s Talking Points On Poverty“. In it, he notes:

Philip Rucker and Robert Costa report that ”there is deep disagreement among Republican leaders and strategists over whether to embrace an economic-mobility agenda in the 2014 midterm campaigns.” But some prominent Republicans are beginning to address the issue:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will give a speech Wednesday that aides said will lay out changes to federal programs to help people climb out of poverty permanently. In the weeks to come, Rubio also plans to introduce ideas to make it easier for mid-career adults to go back to college or learn new job skills at vocational schools. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the 2012 vice-presidential nominee, has been traveling to impoverished areas and meeting with community organizers. He plans to address poverty in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams on Thursday.

A third potential GOP presidential candidate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is also putting a renewed emphasis on the poor, traveling to Detroit to pitch a plan to revitalize urban centers through “economic freedom zones.” Paul has given his message on income inequality an ideological edge — mixing lofty, empathetic language with anti-government broadsides. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has been visiting urban schools, will give a speech Wednesday promoting school choice as a way to address poverty. And Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has proposed increasing the child tax credit as a means of blending social conservatism with anti-poverty policies. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will give a speech Wednesday that aides said will lay out changes to federal programs to help people climb out of poverty permanently. In the weeks to come, Rubio also plans to introduce ideas to make it easier for mid-career adults to go back to college or learn new job skills at vocational schools. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the 2012 vice-presidential nominee, has been traveling to impoverished areas and meeting with community organizers. He plans to address poverty in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams on Thursday.

A third potential GOP presidential candidate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is also putting a renewed emphasis on the poor, traveling to Detroit to pitch a plan to revitalize urban centers through “economic freedom zones.” Paul has given his message on income inequality an ideological edge — mixing lofty, empathetic language with anti-government broadsides. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has been visiting urban schools, will give a speech Wednesday promoting school choice as a way to address poverty. And Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has proposed increasing the child tax credit as a means of blending social conservatism with anti-poverty policies.

I’m not as hopeful as Mr. Sullivan that things are starting to come around. As I noted in my blog post a couple of days ago, here is what the most powerful in the party are pushing. From TownHall.com:

“The truth is that income inequality is of minimal importance in a nation like America, where so many people already move between classes, where the poor are doing so much better than they used to, and where our poor already do so well compared to the rest of the world.”

As you know, TownHall is in lock-step with the talking-heads wing of the party. The article I quoted says this next:

“Among children from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, 84 percent of those who go on to get a college degree will escape the bottom fifth, and 19 percent will make it all the way to the top fifth.”

The problem is, that if you don’t dig into the numbers, this sounds pretty good. If you do dig into the numbers, and realize that being in the second fifth isn’t that great either, then you can’t really take this seriously. Further, if you do not endorse this point of view, you find yourself in really dangerous territory for Conservatives, admitting that Reaganomics and Trickle-Down Supply-side economics has failed over the 30 year period it’s been the economic backbone of the US economy.

Sure, they will try and pin the blame on Obama. But then they will have to explain why that upward mobile trend doesn’t show itself under Presidents who were more favorable to Conservative economic ideals.

So, while there are a few in the GOP who are starting to talk about, say, finding ways to get more people to go to college or get vocational training, neither of those things actually creates jobs. Too often, the type of programs Rubio and others may talk about only create more people in debt. It ignores the bigger problem – the so-called “Jobs Creators”, despite the ever increasing wealth being generated in accord with sipply-side economic policies, simply are not creating jobs. To acknowledge that the “trickle-down” side of the equasion doesn’t work is simply too dangerous for any Republican to admit.

Note To Conservatives – You Can’t Debunk A Story Debunking Your Talking Points By Using Those Same Talking Point To Debunk The Story Debunking You!

Share Button

This is a post i meant to write when the Breitbart article first came to my attention last week, but with the holidays and all…

OK. Here’s the Breitbart story and headline: Obama Administration in Pre-Edited Talking Points: Al Qaeda Behind Benghazi Attack!

Um… I read this twice to make sure I’m not missing something. The story does not match the headline.

This is what the story says is the pre-edited analysis and conclusion of the Congressional testimony:

Kirkpatrick’s writings also contradict the Obama administration and intelligence community themselves – including a now-former White House official involved in the talking points issue who has touted Kirkpatrick’s story as some kind of saving grace for himself.

Months and months of congressional investigation have uncovered internal Obama administration and intelligence community communications that show the administration did believe al Qaeda-affiliated organizations were involved in the attack.

“The crowd almost certainly was a mix of individuals from across many sectors of Libyan society,” the second talking point on page four reads. “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”

The document is a communication marked “confidential” between a number of different intelligence community officials, including some from the CIA. In it, the author, whose name is redacted, indicates that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) “has asked for unclassified points immediately that they can use in talking to the media.”

Got it?

“the administration did believe al Qaeda-affiliated organizations were involved in the attack.” and “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” is NOT the same as al Qaeda being BEHIND the attacks.

As is usual with Breitbart and FOX, they mislead with the headline and that itself becomes a new talking point.

Breitbart is relying on old incomplete evidence, some of which are initials CIA estimates which were very incomplete at the time. If Breitbart wants to break the back of the New York Times story, they need to show that the following:

The only intelligence connecting Al Qaeda to the attack was an intercepted phone call that night from a participant in the first wave of the attack to a friend in another African country who had ties to members of Al Qaeda, according to several officials briefed on the call. But when the friend heard the attacker’s boasts, he sounded astonished, the officials said, suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault.

Al Qaeda was having its own problems penetrating the Libyan chaos. Three weeks after the attack, on Oct. 3, 2012, leaders of the group’s regional affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, sent a letter to a lieutenant about efforts to crack the new territory. The leaders said they had sent four teams to try to establish footholds in Libya. But of the four, only two in the southern Sahara “were able to enter Libyan territory and lay the first practical bricks there,” the letter said.

A note the Breitbart, FOX, and the other Conservative “truth-tellers” – THAT PARAGRAPH ABOVE is the heart of the New York Times story. Break that with better evidence by actually, you know, investigating this on the ground, instead of re-re-re-hashing dated talking points from the right, and you have something. Otherwise, you just continueto look like the partisan outlets that you are.

InfoWars Is CRAP – Again… Worse For Your Brain Than Fukushima Radiation!

Share Button

A Berkeley nuclear engineering professor has dismissed a viral video which appears to show unusually high radiation readings on a beach in San Francisco, asserting it has no link to the ongoing Fukushima crisis in Japan.

The highly trustworthy folks at InfoWar are upset at Berkley Professor Edward Morse because he dismissed the one YouTube video that made the rounds a few weeks ago of a guy with a Geiger-counter getting higher than normal radiation readings off the northern California coast and claiming that it’s Fukushima radiation that has hit the west coast.

The video itself seems pretty compelling, and of course InfoWars was all over it.

I was indeed interested when the video in question first popped up on the tubes. I wondered if there would be a lot more videos popping up that would show similar results? But I lost track… Holidays and all that. Read more »

Science Is Cool – Do – A Deer, A Female Deer. Fa – A Long Long Way To Run….

Share Button

Remember the book / movie “Flowers For Algernon” where a mentally retarded man (that’s the way they referred to it in the story, so I’m using it) was given an experimental treatment of something that made him suddenly not only become normal, but to possess superior mental and cognitive abilities?

It was one of my favorite books and stories when I was a kid. I SOOOOOO wanted that shortcut in life, so I could be smart and not have to work as hard at it!

Yeah!  I was pretty damned lazy!

Well, they haven’t found a way to do THAT yet. But, they did discover an interesting side effect to an existing epilepsy drug that can reopen specific learning pathways that close off when you become an adult.

Here’s the abstract:

Absolute pitch, the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a sound without a reference point, has a critical period, i.e., it can only be acquired early in life. However, research has shown that histone-deacetylase inhibitors (HDAC inhibitors) enable adult mice to establish perceptual preferences that are otherwise impossible to acquire after youth. In humans, we found that adult men who took valproate (VPA) (a HDAC inhibitor) learned to identify pitch significantly better than those taking placebo—evidence that VPA facilitated critical-period learning in the adult human brain. Importantly, this result was not due to a general change in cognitive function, but rather a specific effect on a sensory task associated with a critical-period.

A friend on facebook pointed my to an article on the Raw Story website describing some of the findings. But the article skips some of the details in the study, which I find to be some of the more interesting aspects of the study and absolute pitch.

“Absolute pitch (AP), the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a musical sound without any reference point, has long fascinated musicians, music scholars, psychologists, and neuroscientists (Stumpf, 1883; Mull, 1925; Takeuchi and Hulse, 1993; Zatorre, 2003; Levitin and Rogers, 2005). Individuals who possess AP, constituting about 0.01% of the general population, are able to identify the pitch class, i.e., one of the 12 notes of the Western musical system, e.g., C, D, G#, of a sound with great accuracy “

Only 0.01% have absolute pitch! I would have thought it to be much higher.



And this:

“Training that begins after the age of 9 very rarely leads to AP, and there are no known cases of an adult successfully acquiring it (Brady, 1970; Ward and Burns, 1999; Levitin and Rogers, 2005).””

How many ads are there in the back of musician magazines advertising this or that sure-fire program that will teach you perfect pitch?

Anyway, read the whole study. It’s fascinating.

PS. Since I’m a musician… OK. That’s stretching things a bit… A lot!… I wonder where I fit into the rating scale of those with absolute pitch. On the one hand, If you asked be to sing a note in “C” right now, I’m not sure if I could do it. However, when I’m playing guitar or singing, if a note anyone, myself included, is even an N’th degree sharp or flat, I hear it, a lot of time more so than even my fellow musicians. Drives me nuts! And I always assume it’s me, which drives me even MORE nuts!!!! 🙂

Why The Conservative Movement Is Becoming Irrelevant. (Meme watch – us poor folk should be grateful Mitt Romney has eleven houses or whatever)

Share Button

Do you want to know why the Conservative Republican Party is marching toward irrelevance? This statement from a January 4th article captures a snap-shot of their state of mind:

“The truth is that income inequality is of minimal importance in a nation like America, where so many people already move between classes, where the poor are doing so much better than they used to, and where our poor already do so well compared to the rest of the world.”

To prove this is true, they say:

“Among children from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, 84 percent of those who go on to get a college degree will escape the bottom fifth, and 19 percent will make it all the way to the top fifth.”

That’s a quote from Rich Lowry in The National Review. That article provides no links to statistics to try and prove those numbers are true. Further, if a whopping 19% do escape and enter the top fifth, that means that a real whopping 81 % FAIL to scrape into the top fifth percent!

My God! That’s a horrible failure ratio! This is what you’re touting as a wonderful societal structure????

But it gets worse. Going to college means getting yourself into tons of debt. And that means the very real possibility of being in that 81% and not having a great job but still being responsible for paying back the massive amounts of student loans for an education you can’t use. The original article appeared on Townhall.com. Glenn Reynolds, a lawyer and a long-time member of the Townhall team who blogs as Instapundit, maybe an original member, has been documenting a subsegment of the economic system that has experienced just such a problem, the overflow of lawyers and the what he calls the “higher education bubble“. Here is but one example of an Instapundit headline:

“December 15, 2013

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: “I consider law school a waste of my life and an extraordinary waste of money.”

This is a very real phenomenon. I know. I’m a member of the higher education bubble generation. Instapundit / Glenn Reynolds usually concentrates on the law profession and law schools, but this phenomenon goes across the board. There are many more college graduates than there are jobs for them. Town Hall author John Hawkins, National reviews Rich Lowry are clearly living in the past:

“In the 1980s and 1990s, the demand for college graduates started booming, especially in the lead-up to the tech boom, said Paul Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia who has studied this trend. Wages grew and a college education paid off.

But when the tech bubble burst, the economy was left with an oversupply of college graduates. Some went into industries related to housing or finance, and then the recession wiped out those jobs. No industry has emerged to employ all the people who got college degrees in that time, he said.

As more college graduates have flooded the market, employers are able to offer lower wages. The earnings of college grads have fallen about 13% in the last decade, according to Drexel University economist Paul Harrington.

The Conservative writers, who routinely espouse this philosophy as matter of fact and some sort of natural law, seem to have no idea what is happening in the real world. Further, they never tell you what the

Further, what is the difference between the top and bottom fifth, and the middle?

Here is what that looked like before Republican President George W Bush left office in 2007.

Here is another chart, which displays the dollar amount that each of the fifth made in 2007 (source).

Here is what the chart of fifths looked like as of April of 2013.

Note that the flat line trend started long before Obama “destroyed” the US economy with his socialism and and Marxist policies.

As of 2011, the median income level, which is the income of half of the US population, is at $50,000 dollars (source).

Here is the chart of cost of going to college up to 2008.

The trend hasn’t reversed itself in the five years since that chart was printed.

So, not only has the pay rate of those in the lowest fifth remained stagnant, but that holds true in the second and third fifth as well. Yet the cost of college, the thing that is supposed to save everyone, along with medical and other cost, have greatly increased. And now, after the great recession, many professions, like that of the lawyer, just doesn’t have enough jobs to provide for all the people who are part of the 81 %, who finish college with a degree but don’t have a good paying job to pay the debt load of that education,  I have no clue how this statement:

“The truth is that income inequality is of minimal importance in a nation like America, where so many people already move between classes, where the poor are doing so much better than they used to, and where our poor already do so well compared to the rest of the world.“Among children from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, 84 percent of those who go on to get a college degree will escape the bottom fifth, and 19 percent will make it all the way to the top fifth.”

Makes any sense or is very comforting at all. This party has morphed into a caricature of Herbert Hoover, a man who’s ideology left him completely unable to deal with the massive problems he faced.

PS. And what is happening even as we speak? This very model of prosperity is the exact model we are following. You have more and more young adults trying to go to college, pressured by a society that has insisted and insured that you won’t get a descent job if you don’t. Since college is expensive and many families can’t pay for their education, the student have to take out loans. Many of those students don’t even finish which means that they can’t pay them back. As we have seen via the very statistics that are supposed to bolster the Conservative model on how to succeed at life, those that do finish don’t get great paying jobs like society and the supposed “jobs creators” promise”, and the struggle to pay back their loans. The Great Depression was fueled by way too much credit in the markets and within the general population. The Great Recession was fueled by the same thing; too many people and investors living on over-extended credit. The credit bubble in the education system created by massive student loan debt is HUGE. Yet these republican “scholars” keep pushing this model as the solution to all our problems.  What is going to happen when the inevitable happens and this bubble bursts?

I’m hoping it doesn’t happen. But I see no way around it, especially with the lack of vision displayed by both sides of the isle.

Sonicfrog.Net – 9 Years And Counting!

Share Button

Happy Blogaversary to me… Us!

I started this blog as a means to improve my spelling and writing skills as I was beginning my journey to become a credentialed teacher. I wanted to improve my vocabulary. My typing skills honestly absolutely sucked nine years ago. I got my credential 5 years ago, but so far, have not worked full time as a teacher.

All is not lost.

Though I may not be teaching, and my blog never got popular like some others did, and there is certainly no money in this, I don’t regret blogging for one minute. No. It hasn’t been a waste of time. There have been other unanticipated benefits to this blogging exercise.

I have been writing songs since I was 13. Many of them were born of the angst I has as a teen and the struggles of being a lonely twenty-something. When I came to find peace within myself and stopped fighting against the one thing in my life that I resisted, that I am, was, and always will be gay… Well… I kind of lost the muse that inspired so many of my songs, the struggles of life.

As life got easier to deal with, my lyric writing slowed to a halt.

Last year, I started to write a few songs again. Much to my amazement, the words would flow out of me easier than they ever had even at the height of my miseries. That is a direct result of committing myself to sit down and write a blog post, even when I wasn’t always in the mood. Practice may not make perfect, but it does make better! And that trained me to be able to write on a whim. Now it come almost too easy! This has revealed another weakness that must be worked on… I need to relearn music theory and learn many more chords.

The second HUGE way that my blog has changed my life…. I have started writing a book!

Everyone is doing it! If not for the nine years of blogging, I couldn’t type as decently as I can now. I’m not “fast” by any means, but I’m certainly much much better at it than I was at the beginning of 2005.

I’ll provide more details on the book soon.

I just want to thank the internets for letting me do my thing and make a mess here on Sonicfrog. I promise – One day, I will repay you by becoming a great success and gobs of money and wealth when I am a world renowned writer / songwriter / teacher / person / thing….

🙂

InfoWar And WND Are Crap… Worse Than Radiation! It’s Mind Poison!!! Stop Reading Them!!!!

Share Button

OH NO! THE GOV’MENT JUST ORDERED 14 MILLION DOSES OF POTASSIUM IODINE!!!! THAT MEANS THEY KNOW WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF FUKUSHIMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The headlines featured by the two “news” outlets don’t say that explicitly in their headlines, but that’s the story.

Here is the skinny. The order listed on the link that InfoWars is using to scare the bejezuz out of people says specifically this:

“””(iv) The contract line item number, item, quantity and unit of measure is :

Line No. 001; potassium iodide tablet, 65mg, unit dose package of 20s; 700,000 packages (of 20s)”””

14 million sounds like a heck of a big number, but lets examine this. For adults, the proper dosage of KI is 130 mg to treat against, specifically, thyroid damage due to radiation. These tablets are 65 mg each. For adults, you would have to take two tables each day you are exposed.

Lets say that half of the patients you are going to treat are adults, and half are children. That brings the useable dosage of the entire proposed order down to about 9 1/2 million US citizens per day.

Since the “big fear” for most right now centers on the West Coast…. That entire order, if only shipped to Los Angeles’s 3.8 million people, would only last for less than three days.

But, if the government is worried about the entire West Coast, which would be the most vulnerable, now you’re talking about other large cities needing the drug as well. San Francisco has just under one million. San Diego has just over a million. So there’s another two million right there.

However. Now you have introduced more silliness from InfoWars. Here’s what they offer:

“””Now that radioactive debris is hitting the West Coast of North America, numerous different animals and sea life are suffering from mysterious diseases, including 20 bald eagles that have died in Utah over the last few weeks alone.”””

Here is what they link to for this scary information. If the radiation is causing the mysterious bird deaths in Utah, that means the drugs would have to go there as well.

Population of Utah – 2.8 million.

And if you follow the link that InfoWars did, that brings you to The WashingtonBlog, which adds Alaska to the list, another almost 1 million.

InfoWars / WND don’t mention that KI tablets have a life expectancy of 6 to 7 years, depending on the formula, thus the supply constantly needs to be replaced throughout THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES.

14 MILLION IS A VERY SMALL NUMBER OF DOSES when you are talking about the entire United States.

And, lastly, getting back to InfoWars and their constant use of deceit to scare people, here is what they wrote in May of 2011, just after the Fukushima disaster:

“””U.S. health authorities could be blocking Americans from obtaining the radiation-fighting drug potassium iodide, even as the threat of a radioactive cloud from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant affecting the United States prompts panic buying, which has led to stocks of the drug running out across the country.

High strength potassium iodide is a once-a-day-pill than protects the thyroid gland from radiation and cancer caused by radioactive iodine. There are also weaker liquid forms of the drug that provide less protection, but supplies of these are also running low.””””

So, two years ago, they bitched and moaned that the government was not getting this stuff out to the public, even thought they didn’t really need it at the time, yet now that the government is trying to be more prepared and provide for the public what it wants, InfoWars is using that to gin up fears?

That doesn’t fly in my book.

Can you tell I really don’t like theses guys! 🙂