Whether ideologically or politically motivated, economists and politicians on both sides of the aisle have been debating as to the reason for the falling labor participation rate.
The headlines blare Obamcare will cause over two million more jobs to be lost by 2017 and the losses will grow to 2.5 million jobs by 2024. That analysis is from the Congressional Budget Office in their 2014 Budget Outlook report. Unfortunately, the rationale behind the CBO claims are that the subsidies to buy health insurance for individuals are larger than the wages earned working full-time hours. From the report:
Obama only briefly mentioned fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in last Tuesday's State of the Union speech, depicting the trade agreement as part of his bipartisan outreach to the GOP, while claiming it would boost U.S. exports.
The economy has been debilitated by the offshoring of middle class jobs for the benefit of corporate profits and by the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing in order to support a few oversized banks that the government protects from market discipline. Not only does QE distort bond and stock markets, it threatens the value of the dollar and has resulted in manipulation of the gold price.
The amount of cash multinational corporations are stashing is at an all time high and economists are wondering why. A recent Federal Reserve research paper examined some of the reasons. A big one is multinationals pay no taxes on profits if they park them offshore. A stash of cash is building and the miser pile is now a mountain.
The wealth of the entire world is now divided in two, with almost half going to the richest one percent, and the other half to the remaining 99 percent.
In November 2013 the World Economic Forum released a 49-page report titled Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014. It says that, based on those surveyed, inequality is "impacting social stability within countries and threatening security on a global scale."
The Obama administration has offshore outsourced Obamacare. They made Accenture the lead contractor for the website healthcare.gov. The contract is estimated to be worth $90 million and the original contractor, CGI Federal, is out.
Fifty years ago Lyndon B. Johnson declared War on Poverty. Great strides were made. Between 1964 and 1965 Medicaid and Medicare were enacted, food stamps made permanent, a flurry of work and volunteer grants were passed, and educational opportunities were made more egalitarian. Unfortunately later administrations have been tearing apart Johnson's weapons against poverty one by one.
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