P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Political Asylum
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Political Asylum Publicly Debate Politics, War, Media.

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 09-11-06, 10:43 AM   #21
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
Mazer's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
Default

Do you remember the recession that began in 1999? It ended in 2001 and the economy has progressed strongly since then. The Dow is now at its all-time high, above 12,100 points; four years ago it was in the 8,000 range. That's a 4-year, 50% increase for that part of the economy (hint: that's frickin huge). During the same period unemployment rates have stayed below 6%, now at 4.4%. Gas prices have been high, but at the moment they're lower than they have been in more than two years, and crude has dropped to about $60 a barrel. Are you skeptical of the data, Malk, or are your standards just too high?
Mazer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-11-06, 07:34 PM   #22
Malk-a-mite
 
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 7
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazer
The Dow is now at its all-time high, above 12,100 points;
Dow by itself means nothing in the econ world.
__________________
Malk-a-mite
===================
Insert clever .sig file here
===================
Malk-a-mite is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-11-06, 08:30 PM   #23
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Malk-a-mite
Dow by itself means nothing in the econ world.
doesn't mean that much in the real world either.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazer
Do you remember the recession that began in 1999? It ended in 2001 and the economy has progressed strongly since then. The Dow is now at its all-time high, above 12,100 points; four years ago it was in the 8,000 range. That's a 4-year, 50% increase for that part of the economy (hint: that's frickin huge). During the same period unemployment rates have stayed below 6%, now at 4.4%. Gas prices have been high, but at the moment they're lower than they have been in more than two years, and crude has dropped to about $60 a barrel. Are you skeptical of the data, Malk, or are your standards just too high?
it's not that the economy is all that bad - it's just the benficiaries of economic improvements have been primarily upper income people and large coporations.

case in point - me: i have a mid-range five-figure income, i've worked for a Fortune 500 company for a long time, i have two kids, a mortgage, a 401 K etc etc. in short, economically speaking, i'm pretty typical middle class. this is my experience:

on the plus side, i have recently seen the value of my stock portfolio increase (after a long slide). this is nice, but since my stocks are in a 401K, this rise is a blip in the big picture that will not benefit me for many years. i have also seen the value of my home rise dramatically in the last couple of years. this is also nice, but also does nothing for me for the foreseeable future - if i sell my house, any gains will be wiped out by the house i buy elsewhere.

on the negative side, my company has struggled, as have most over the last few years and we do more with less. i get annual salary increases, but my economic gains severely impacted by increases in health care costs. last year, it cost me about $4000 to insure me and my kids - this year, it has increased to $5400 (plus higher deductibles and copays). add it up and that will be a couple of thousand dollars that i could have spent elsewhere. oh, and gas is already on it's way back up (i paid $2.05 over the weekend - i paid $2.17 today).

so i'm holding my own, but i don't see a great economy. my situation is typical - my coworkers, customers, and most of the people i run into every day could tell pretty much the same story and i think the election results reflected that to some extent. at the end of the day, waving unemployment numbers and dow jones industrial averages just doesn't mean much in real terms.
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-11-06, 11:17 PM   #24
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
Mazer's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
Default

Malk, the Dow wasn't the only metric I cited.

Quote:
Originally Posted by theknife
it's not that the economy is all that bad - it's just the benficiaries of economic improvements have been primarily upper income people and large coporations.
You can't help but complain about a good thing.

Quote:
at the end of the day, waving unemployment numbers and dow jones industrial averages just doesn't mean much in real terms.
By real terms you mean personal anecdotes? I prefer facts, thank you.
Mazer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-11-06, 06:28 AM   #25
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazer
Malk, the Dow wasn't the only metric I cited.


You can't help but complain about a good thing.


By real terms you mean personal anecdotes? I prefer facts, thank you.
as you wish:

Quote:
The U.S. economy is indeed strong. Although growth is slowing, it's essentially been steady since mid-2001. September's unemployment rate was a low 4.6 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached record highs last week.

But through September, the growth in hourly wages was flat or negative for 27 of the previous 29 months, according to Labor Department data. Wages for blue-collar and nonmanagerial workers - 80 percent of the work force - are growing at a 3.9 percent annual rate, the Labor Department reported in September. Consumer-price inflation, however, is rising at the same rate. That means prices are rising as fast as wages.

Workers are barely keeping up. Health care, wages and energy prices are consumers' top three economic concerns, according to a Gallup poll in September.

Here's how the hypothetical median-income family - half of four-member families earn less, half earn more - is being squeezed.

The typical family paid, on average from 1999 to 2004, about $865 a year to heat a home with heating oil or $586 with natural gas, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association.

Last winter, however, it cost $1,496 to heat a home with heating oil and $946 with natural gas. Those are increases of 73 percent and 61 percent.

Then there's gasoline. The nationwide average for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline was $2.22 on Monday, according to AAA. That's 57 percent higher than $1.41, the average price for a gallon of gas during the second week of October from 2000 through 2003.

Health insurance costs have risen even faster. The premiums workers pay for employer-provided health insurance rose an average of 7.7 percent this year - and have increased 84 percent since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-issues research center.

Average employer-paid family-health coverage now is estimated to cost $11,480 annually, and workers pay about $2,973 of those costs in premiums, Kaiser said. That's $1,354 more per year than workers paid six years ago.

"Health-care costs outpace the cost of just about everything in our economy," said James Klein, the president of the American Benefits Council in Washington. "Most of that cost burden is increasingly shared with workers."

Some 66 percent of the nation's employers have higher employee co-pays this year, 56 percent raised premiums and 56 percent increased deductibles for participants, according to a recent survey by The Society of Human Resource Management.

In 2001, the family paid $397 a month for health insurance. Today they pay $717 a month. They're hoping to cut that to less than $500 a month by taking a plan with higher deductibles for medical services.
the economy may look good on paper but the middle class is not benefitting from the current economic growth.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15781393.htm
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-11-06, 09:40 AM   #26
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
Mazer's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
Default

Well alright, you go ahead and blame the rich if you want. If the Dems have a solid plan for reducing insurance premiums and copays then let's see what it is. They didn't really talk about it much during the campaigns; Iraq was their sticking point this year so you can understand my reservations about what their domestic policies might be. The seem determined to change things, and I don't like the sound of that where it concerns the economy.
Mazer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-11-06, 10:39 AM   #27
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazer
Well alright, you go ahead and blame the rich if you want. If the Dems have a solid plan for reducing insurance premiums and copays then let's see what it is. They didn't really talk about it much during the campaigns; Iraq was their sticking point this year so you can understand my reservations about what their domestic policies might be. The seem determined to change things, and I don't like the sound of that where it concerns the economy.
who's blaming the rich? i wouldn't know who to blame, if anyone. but a couple of points come to mind:

-Iraq is and will continue to require massive transfers of tax dollars to the DoD and the companies who are contracted to help maintain the occpation. winding down the occupation of iraq will help staunch the bleeding.

- i am willing, at this point, to consider any alternative to the status quo -even a single payer health care system (read government-controlled health care - cue the wingnut screams of "socialism!") because my paycheck simply cannot continue to sustain the kind of health care cost increases i have seen over the past 3 years. the GOP health care policy has been "don't just do something - stand there", but the Dems know they just got elected to be more proactive than that. let's see if they can come up with something.
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-11-06, 04:04 PM   #28
Drakonix
Just Draggin' Along
 
Drakonix's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2000
Posts: 1,210
Default

Good News! Amazon.com has a sale on copies of the Qur'an, we will all be needing them before to long, unless you want Muhammad's sword in the gut option.

http://www.amazon.com/Quran-Oxford-W...e=UTF8&s=books
__________________
Copyright means the copy of the CD/DVD burned with no errors.

I will never spend a another dime on content that I can’t use the way I please. If I can’t copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won’t be buying it. Period. They can all take their DRM, broadcast flags, rootkits, and Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
Drakonix is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-11-06, 05:30 PM   #29
albed
flippin 'em off
 
albed's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: the real world
Posts: 3,231
Exclamation

If you can't afford to pay your medical bills it's a strong indication that you are not fit for survival. Getting the government to steal from fitter humans to sustain you is detrimental to the human race as a whole.


For the good of the species you should let nature take its course and replace you with a healthier or harder working specimen.
albed is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-11-06, 07:12 PM   #30
Malk-a-mite
 
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 7
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by albed
For the good of the species you should let nature take its course and replace you with a healthier or harder working specimen.
The invisible hand at work? Oddly enough sometimes people fall on hard times and it has nothing to do with how good they are, also without some level of government interferance there is very little reason for business to not treat their employees like cattle.

Or do you think the 40 hour work week is a natural condition?
__________________
Malk-a-mite
===================
Insert clever .sig file here
===================
Malk-a-mite is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-11-06, 12:00 AM   #31
Drakonix
Just Draggin' Along
 
Drakonix's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2000
Posts: 1,210
Default

It's interesting......

All that talk and griping about problems with the vote and election fraud, up to and including election day.

But.......

After the Dems win, not a single word about concerns regarding the vote.

All the concern about the e-voting machines, "disenfranchised voters", etc. seems to have evaporated instantly. Where is all this "concern" now?

I guess all is fair and good, as long as the Dems win.
__________________
Copyright means the copy of the CD/DVD burned with no errors.

I will never spend a another dime on content that I can’t use the way I please. If I can’t copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won’t be buying it. Period. They can all take their DRM, broadcast flags, rootkits, and Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
Drakonix is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-11-06, 09:18 AM   #32
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

it's there if you look. the fraud websites were hyper on election day. there may be instances where the dems would've picked up more seats or had wider margins on the seats they did get, possible even the reps lost some from fraud although i haven't seen that scenario so far, and really their anger is directed at bush atm, convinced that had he fired rummy a few months before the election their prospects would have been far less severe.

right now however the democratic leadership is involved in other matters, preparing to lead, deciding chair appointmnets etc but it'll all be gone over in post mortems for months to come.

i included a good interview on evoting in this week's wir. this isn't some invention of one party or another, it's a real, verifiable problem. here's the link.

i can tell you this drak: here in ct we've taken a 90 degree turn where electronic machines are concerned. nobody wants touch-screen voting, they all want to keep the old lever machines - but they're no longer manufactured and getting parts is problematic. we're reviewing everything, and that's with a republican govenor.

we will probably migrate to SAT test style paper voting that is scanned and counted electronically with the actual paper ballots kept for two years.

- js.
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-11-06, 10:11 AM   #33
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

shamelessly clipped from TPM:

Quote:
Was anyone besides me delighted to note that the last two Republican senators to concede were Burns and Allen?

Say goodnight, Gracie.
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-06, 07:18 PM   #34
Nicobie
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2000
Posts: 5,522
Default

Almost too good to be true.

:big grin:
__________________
May your tote always stay tight and your edge eversharp :wink:
Nicobie is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-06, 07:36 PM   #35
multi
Thanks for being with arse
 
multi's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The other side of the world
Posts: 10,343
What The?

WOW, He served George Burns a martini.

Give the man a CEEGAR !
__________________

i beat the internet
- the end boss is hard
multi is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-11-06, 10:08 PM   #36
Drakonix
Just Draggin' Along
 
Drakonix's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2000
Posts: 1,210
Default

Quote:
i can tell you this drak: here in ct we've taken a 90 degree turn where electronic machines are concerned.
I hear ya. Same thing here in California. E-voting machines were not certified by the Secretary of State. As posted elsewhere, I think e-voting machines are not ready for prime time. I posted what the California ballot looked like. You indicated your vote by using a black or blue ballpoint pen to complete the middle of a broken arrow. When your ballot was marked then you fed your two ballot sheets into a big scanner box that retained the ballots.

Seems to be a fairly reliable, tamper proof, and safe system. Paper ballots and electronic tabulation with the scanner.

The scanner apparently does some error checking on the ballots, as a friend told me he accidentally voted yes and no on the same item and the machine rejected the ballot. He was given a new ballot to mark.

I'm somewhat disappointed there was no ID checking like they told us there would be. However, for many years the polling place had a list showing all voters with that polling location, and you have to sign the list where your name is listed and print your residence address.
__________________
Copyright means the copy of the CD/DVD burned with no errors.

I will never spend a another dime on content that I can’t use the way I please. If I can’t copy it to my hard drive and play it using the devices I want, when and where I want, I won’t be buying it. Period. They can all take their DRM, broadcast flags, rootkits, and Compact Discs that aren’t really compact discs and shove them up their bottom-lines.
Drakonix is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 14-11-06, 12:16 PM   #37
Repo
Registered User
 
Repo's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Posts: 123
Default

Many Republicans still don't get why they lost the election. Take Florida U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, as the joke goes, please! He blames everyone but himself. Rep. Shaw believes that had Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resignation been before the election, that he and many other Republicans would have won reelection. "My first impression was that the extra votes that I needed would have been there," said Shaw. Really, in Shaw's mind it is Bush and Rumsfeld's fault that Shaw lost reelection to Democrat Ron Klein. Shaw is in denial. He himself said in the same interview, "I stayed loyal to the president. I believe in this president, as a Republican, I have the responsibility not to run away from the president unless I clearly think he is wrong." Well maybe Mr. Shaw you lost because the people don't want a rubberstamp congressman, or because the people didn't believe in this president and because you believed in a president the people didn't believe in they didn't believe in you, or maybe it is because as a Republican you didn't give any dissent because your loyalty was to your party and not your constituents. Rep. Clay Shaw didn't lose because of Bush and Rumsfeld, Rep. Clay Shaw lost because he stood by them when the people wanted action from their representative not more of the same lip movement. Rep. Clay Shaw and the Republican Party cried wolf one too many times. They try to demonize the Democrats every election but this time the people saw the Republican Party as the party in power, the party that mismanaged the Iraq war, mismanaged Hurricane Katrina, mismanaged the budget, mismanaged the Mark Foley scandal, mismanaged themselves as their own were convicted of bribes and other misdeeds. Where was Rep. Clay Shaw on all these matters? He was silent and nowhere to be heard from...

Rep. Clay Shaw didn't lose reelection because Rumsfeld resigned after the election instead of before it. Rep. Clay Shaw lost because he was part of the corrupt Republican Congress that has mismanaged the country for the last several years. People are tired of the old political party hacks; they want their representative to standup to corruption and mismanagement even if it goes against their own party. If Shaw had any gonads he would have stood up to his own party but he didn't because he was nothing more than a rubberstamp for the Bush Administration and the big spending Republican Congress...

Rep. Clay Shaw said, "I wouldn't have run this time," if he thought the Republicans would be the minority party because, "I've been in the minority and it's frustrating." Well fortunately for Clay Shaw and for us, he lost and won't have to be part of the minority party in Congress...
Repo is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 14-11-06, 04:38 PM   #38
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
Mazer's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
Default

Heh. The Dems aren't as ungracoius about their win as you are, Repo.
Mazer is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 11:46 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)