Saturday, April 5, 2014

Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., April 5 & 6, 2014


Hmm... I can't seem to connect to the Drudge Report.

 Well... I guess we'll just do this the old fashioned way then...

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3 comments:

William R. Barker said...

TWO-PARTER... (at least!) (Part 1 of...)

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-04/shocking-truth-about-deindustrialization-america-everyone-should-know

How long can America continue to burn up wealth?

How long can this nation continue to consume far more wealth than it produces?

[A]s a result of running gigantic trade deficits year after year, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions upon millions of jobs, and America is being deindustrialized at a staggering pace.

The trade deficit is one of the biggest reasons for the steady decline of the U.S. economy... Basically, we are buying far more stuff from the rest of the world than they are buying from us. That means that far more money is constantly leaving the country than is coming into the country. In order to keep the game going, we have to go to the people that we bought all of that stuff from and ask them to lend our money back to us. (Or lately, we just have the Federal Reserve create new money out of thin air. This is called "quantitative easing.")

In order to live like we do, we must consume far more wealth than we produce. If someday we are forced to only live on the wealth that we create, it will require a massive [downward] adjustment in our standard of living.

Most Americans won't even notice, but the latest monthly trade deficit increased to 42.3 billion dollars, which was 7.7% above the January imbalance of $39.3 billion, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

When the trade deficit increases, it means that even more wealth, even more jobs and even more businesses have left the United States.

Have you ever wondered how China has gotten so wealthy? Just a few decades ago, they were basically a joke economically. So how in the world did they get so powerful?

Well, one of the primary ways that they did it was by selling us far more stuff than we sold to them. If we had refused to do business with communist China, they never would have become what they have become today. It was our decisions that allowed China to become an economic powerhouse.

Last year, we sold 122 billion dollars of stuff to China; China sold 440 billion dollars of stuff to us.

Below, I have posted our yearly trade deficits with China since 1990. Let's see if you can spot the trend...

1990: 10 billion dollars

1991: 12 billion dollars

1992: 18 billion dollars

1993: 22 billion dollars

1994: 29 billion dollars

1995: 33 billion dollars

1996: 39 billion dollars

1997: 49 billion dollars

1998: 56 billion dollars

1999: 68 billion dollars

2000: 83 billion dollars

2001: 83 billion dollars

2002: 103 billion dollars

2003: 124 billion dollars

2004: 162 billion dollars

2005: 202 billion dollars

2006: 234 billion dollars

2007: 258 billion dollars

2008: 268 billion dollars

2009: 226 billion dollars

2010: 273 billion dollars

2011: 295 billion dollars

2012: 315 billion dollars

2013: 318 billion dollars

Yikes!

* TO BE CONTINUED...

April 5, 2014 at 1:35 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas, and according to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year.

Considering the high level of unemployment that we now have in this country, can we really afford to be doing that?

Overall, the United States has accumulated a total trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than 8 trillion dollars since 1975. As a result, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and our economic infrastructure has been absolutely gutted.

Just look at what has happened to manufacturing jobs in America. Back in the 1980s, more than 20% of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 9% of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

* AND, NO, FOLKS, WE DIDN'T "OUTGROW" MANUFACTUING. THE UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES - AND ESPECIALLY THE WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION RATE (NON-PARTICIPATION RATE!) - WILL TELL YOU THAT!

And we have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then.

The United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

Millions of good paying jobs have been lost. As a result, the middle class is shriveling up, and at this point 9 out of the top 10 occupations in America pay less than $35,000 a year.

For a long time, U.S. consumers attempted to keep up their middle class lifestyles by going into constantly increasing amounts of debt, but now it is becoming increasingly apparent that middle class consumers are tapped out.

In response, major retailers are closing thousands of stores in poor and middle class neighborhoods all over the country. You can see some amazing photos of America's abandoned shopping malls right here.

If we could start reducing the size of our trade deficit, that would go a long way toward getting the United States back on the right economic path. Unfortunately, Barack Obama has been negotiating a treaty in secret which is going to send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the "NAFTA of the Pacific", and it is going to result in millions more good jobs being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

* AND NO DOUBT THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT (AND EVEN A LARGE SEGMENT OF SO-CALLED "TEA PARTY" AMERICANS) WILL APPLAUD OBAMA AS HE DOES SO!

According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

So what will this country look like when we lose tens of millions more jobs than we already have?

At one time, the city of Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city on the entire planet and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. But today, it is a rotting, decaying hellhole that the rest of the world laughs at.

In the end, the rest of the nation is going to suffer the same fate as Detroit unless Americans are willing to stand up and fight for their economy while they still can.

April 5, 2014 at 1:35 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://washingtonexaminer.com/eric-holder-defends-using-justice-department-airplane-for-27-personal-trips/article/2546816

Attorney General Eric Holder disputed a Government Accountability Office report on his use of Justice Department airplanes for personal trips, saying it overstated the number of trips he took and failed to recognize that some trips were job-related.

* YEAH... THE GAO IS LYING AND HOLDER IS TELLING THE TRUTH - WHAT ARE THE ODDS...???

"My staff keeps telling me to take it easy, you know, well, this is one that gets me," Holder told Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing. "There was this notion that we've taken - I think it was described as hundreds of personal trips. That was wrong. GAO counted flights, not round trips. And we looked at it and figured out from the time period that they were looking, we took not hundreds, but 27 personal, four combined - official and non-personal trips - and none of the trips that I took or that the [FBI] director took ever had an impact on the mission capability of those airplanes."

* AGAIN... WHAT DID THE GAO INVESTIGATION SHOW?

Holder made the comment when asked if he would report those trips to the General Services Administration in the future.

"We didn't have a reporting requirement that existed before," he said. "If they want to change those rules, we'd be more than glad to make sure that we share that information with the appropriate organization, but this is something that is really wide open."

(*GUFFAW*)

Holder noted that he has responded to multiple Freedom of Information Act requests and provided the information to GAO, as well as to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

"Just so that people understand that we're making appropriate use of DOJ aircraft," Holder told Wolf. "A lot of this stuff was described as mission and non-mission, and the way in which that was defined was not necessarily correct, because a non-mission trip - for instance, the trip that I took to Newtown to visit the school after the shooting - was described as a non-mission trip."

* AGAIN... LET'S SEE THE GAO REPORT...

April 5, 2014 at 5:24 PM

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