Don't like the trade deficit, low GDP and the public outrage over the offshore outsourcing? Change the accounting method to make it go away! Such is the agenda of government statisticians it appears. How they are going to incorporate statistical lies into national accounts is shocking. Production location no longer matters, the thing that will count is ownership of the final product.
Did you know the United States has the worst income inequality of any industrialized nation? So says the OECD in this study. Globally, income inequality has increased more from 2007 to 2010 than during the twelve years previous and America is sure enough #1.
The opposition to Larry Summers as Federal Reserve Chair is growing. There is new petition demanding Obama not appoint Larry Summers and already has almost 100,000 signatures. Yet that doesn't seem to phase President Obama who some say seems bound and determined to nominate Summers to the post.
One of my most popular columns was about escaping from the Matrix existence in which Americans live. It is a world of disinformation and misinformation in which facts are fiction, and abstract theories are substituted for empirical reality.
Official government statistics are make-believe. The government makes inflation and unemployment disappear by how it defines inflation and unemployment, and it makes the economy grow by how it defines Gross Domestic Product. The definitional basis determines the statistical result.
Many of us are aware of the TIME magazine investigation about hospitals charging us $12 for those little paper pill cups. Those little cups add up to millions of dollars a year; but those little red and blue pills that Big Pharma pushes on us add up to billions. And many times the taxpayers are illegally billed for those little cups and pills. But because of budget cuts, the Inspector General may no longer investigate these abuses and fraud.
President Obama gave a speech on winding down Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the GSEs often blamed for the housing crisis and a darling of conservative ire. Government sponsored enterprises, or GSEs buy up mortgages from private lenders and the theory is to loosen up funds to stir additional lending.
The GOP has a new jobs bill. House Republican Representatives Ted Poe of Texas and Raul Labrador of Idaho have proposed nearly twice as many annual visas for low-skilled guest workers than the Senate bill had included in its version of an immigration bill. The House will propose nearly 400,000 new H-2B visas for temporary foreign guest workers in non-agricultural work (for unskilled and semi-skilled labor.)
It seems that fast-food wages can't pay the rent these days, so this week fast-food workers took to the streets in protest. Then panic ensued, and Fox News immediately launched a counter-offensive by putting on a high-priced restaurant lobbyist to argue that America's most titanic and profitable corporations, as well as the largest job creators, can't afford to pay their employees a living wage. If this is true, then capitalism, as we once knew it, has come to a shuttering halt.
The House Agriculture Committee's farm bill would have denied food stamp benefits to as many as 5.1 million Americans, or more than 10 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's enrollment, according to a new analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Welcome to this week in economic outrage. Every day there are thousands of economic horror stories where one just shakes their head in disbelief at the incessant injustice. To combat the information overload, we give you a financial follies reader's digest and how those in power could care less about any of it.
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