I occasionally look at the Millard Fillmore (comic strip) as I page through the newspaper in the morning... the purpose being simply to see the right wing point of view of things. In today's strip (July 4) Millard quotes Thomas Jefferson (actually a mis-quote which is normal for this particular Jefferson quote):
&...
In July 4th's Mercury News (page 3) an AP article Scientists warn of warming sea water surfaces a glaring omission of recent past scientific analysis as it relates to global warming. The article cites a new study published in Sunday's journal Nature Geoscience by Jianjun Yin of U of Arizona and colleagues which shows ...
... that a political ideology about gov'ts role in society that was being espoused 200 years and more ago is still being considered as relevant in today's world? I mean, c'mon... 200 years is a long, long time ago.... both in terms of elapsed time and conditions. The U.S. isn't an untapped wilderness west ...
One little factoid about effects of global warming... property damage insurance rates will rise along with it. In the exteme it might even mean unaffordable insurance rates since the global effects aren't probabilistically isolated to specific regions at a given point in time, therefore simultaneously affected (more or less in ...
Krugman complains that Obama is using / following Very Serious People rhetoric, concluding that he's influenced more by that ilk than the facts which belie their point of view. His last sentance says it all ...
There's got to be a future's market for this event, right?... From what I can find on purchase of 5 year gov't bonds at present investors (purchases) have not made any substantive changes in pricing or yields yet. This can be interpreted two ways .... 1) investors cumulatively don't believe congress won't raise the debt ...
According to the gov't report for 2008 family income distribution, only 2.8% of families report income >$249.99k... which is another way of saying that 97.2% of the income earning population earn ...
You may or may not have noticed that since early this calender year there has been almost no national media (TV or print) stories or updates on either New Unemployment Claims or CPI. This is in contrast to the prior year where these items were broadcast widely every week (Unemployment Claims) and month (CPI).
I'm trying to figure out what the real issue is with national federal deficit spending and the accumulated national federal debt (sum of past deficits).
The reason for my lack of understanding of the real issue is that every U.S. home owner goes into a 20 or 30 year debt when they buy a house. They buy a ...
Don't know if you've seen this already, but new studies say greenhouse gas emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are increasing at a faster rate than previously believed, accelerating the rate of warming over rates previously calculated. It also says that warmer oceans are reducing the ability of oceans to absorb atmospheric ...
With reference to http://news.yahoo.com/google-margins-social-product-spotlight-044151893.html , Google's quarterly net income increased (year over year) by only 74% of it's increase ...
The headline: Forests soak up third of fossil fuel emissions: study
http://news.yahoo.com/forests-soak-third-fossil-fuel-emissions-study-193606194.html
... http://news.yahoo.com/forests-
A partial response I wrote to one of my "fans" who opposes increasing gov't debt was essentially that debt isn't "bad" even in large amounts. I previously provided an analogy related to U.S. homeowner indebtedness having a ratio of total debt to annual income that's normally much larger than the U.S. ratio of national debt to ...
Following are the charts (and tables) of Gross Public Federal Debt levels under Bush II and under Obama.
The Federal Fiscal Year runs from Oct 1 in the year indicated to Sept 30 of the next year. Since Bush II's term in office began Jan 2001, most of the fiscal year 2000 debt occurred in his first year in office. ...
I've sent a few global warming "new news" items lately, but have seen many more than I've forwarded. From these occasional observations of new news items as they relate to cause of feedback mechanism discovery's or other new news effects on rates of change and magnitudes in a negative direction (i.e. global warming rate increasing ...
National sovereign gross debt is as natural and normal a condition as Newton's apple falling from a tree.
The current levels of the EU nations public debt levels are for the most part in the range of 75% - 80% of GDP (Greece, Italy, Begium, Ireland, & maybe Portugal exceptions) --- public debt excludes debt owed to other countries, ...
I've been thinking about the political divide we're more and more entrenched in and whether it's really the manifestation of a peaceful revolution in process.
This divide didn't just start recently... under Bush II or Obama, although it is during these administrations that it's become more ...
Part of the issue related to federal debt is how what the interest rate the fed pays for borrowed money.
Following is the coupon rate paid by treasury for 10 year notes
since 1953. The 10 year notes pay the interest semi-annually. The
interest is constant for the term of the note (10 years in this case).
...
The current debt ceiling issue is being hog-tied by the far right ... tea-party and equivalent caucus of the GOP. If the moderate GOP were to forge a compromise with the democrats by ditching their far right caucus's intransigence a reasonably well adjusted compromise could be passed by both houses ... majority consisting of ...
I'd heard something about executive authority under the constitution to unilaterally ignore the debt ceiling limit imposed by congress. I was vacationing at the time and listening to the news broadcasts wasn't high on the agenda nor was the inebriated state conducive to same.
Anyway, it appears that ...
Congress already has all the power of the federal purse it can possibly use... exclusive power of spending authority and taxing authority. Why on earth would it therefore want to limit its own power?
Well, the fact of the matter is it wouldn't want to limit that power. No body of gov't, in any kind of gov't, ...
The house of reps was created with proportional representation of state population with each representative being popularly elected. As such it was considered to be a body incorporating "the fury of democracy" (Edmund Randolf). The Senate was created to restrain that fury so to speak: "The use of the ...
I came across a TPM Cafe article that attempts to outline the true nature and cause of the so called "debt crises". In that article the author describes four types of people that are behind the conservative stratagy to not support a balanced approach to the issue. One of those types he refers to as "fountainheads"... a-la Ayn Rand'...
I've written previously on the real GDP growth from post WWII to mid-'80's and the decline in growth rate since then (& continuing). One of GDP growth rate's outcomes is how it affects real income growth. Real GDP growth rate increases imply improving profitabililty and hence growth in private enterprise ...
In Perry v U.S. the Supreme Court decided in favor of the plaintiff (Perry) and against the U.S. Congression Law that had reduced the value of ...