Friday, April 6, 2012

Beaver Friday and other useless news


Ever notice how they can take any piece of news and spin it one way or the other? If it's good news they can make it sound like the end of the world with the right phrasing. Take unemployment for example. The numbers came in this week that were better. 120K people are now back to work but by some accounts you'd think the sky was falling. You know the type person who thinks like that. After any service no matter how generous they look sad face and say "Is that all there is?" and you feel like saying "keep dancing then Peggy Lee."

It seems our well to do in this country are of that mind set. After Bush gave them no less than four tax breaks adding yet more money to their already overstuffed coffers they are not satisfied. At what point do we say enough is enough? The trickle down only runs down the legs of the likes of Bill Gates and Donald Trump. In fact I'd bet that their spending habits benefit only a very few. Computer software has come to the point of requiring very few. Once written the product can be easily downloaded with no production costs and very little in the way of distribution. For Trump it's about building "world class" hotels and golf courses always "huge!" at least in his eyes. I'm sure he has picked up on using out of country slave labor in the process of lining his pockets. Eventually something gives in terms of the labor market when workers can't cover a bare subsistence life. Look no farther than that cheap can of tuna in your cupboard to see human suffering. So while the well to do whine about what I don't have, the lesser of the world only wish to have enough to just survive another day.

So what? This post wasn't enough for you?

Bank fails later--- UPDATE: No fails this week

5 comments:

Roger Owen Green said...

It's all about expectations. THEY said that it wasn't 200,000+ so it's disappointing. One should take the long view; monthly changes are nearly meaningless.

BBC said...

Hey, it's not so bad, moose milk cheese is only five hundred bucks a pound, and up. It ain't easy milking a pissed off cow moose ya know.

The end of the world as we know it isn't until about another fifty years but I recon that things will be getting ugly enough in twenty years.

Demeur said...

As long as it's going in the right direction Roger.

So you'll be dining on some of those $2000 a lb. river eels with a side of moose cheese Billy? Don't forget to wash it down with a nice bottle of Dom.

S.W. Anderson said...

The reason the 120,000 figure is disappointing is because more than twice that number of new jobs is required to get ahead of the number of people entering the work force. Plus, there's the fact that the official number of unemployed grossly understates the real number. That's because it doesn't count people who aren't receiving unemployment benefits.

You're right, though, about the folly of more and more trickle down, and something having to give. The extremely well off can accept some modest tax increases now or expect to see a huge, ugly backlash in the future, one that will undoubtedly end up costing them a lot more.

To their credit, some of them, like Gates and Warren Buffett, realize that and have said they're OK with a tax increase. They didn't make their vast fortunes by being stupid. Then there's Romney, Trump and their ilk.

Randal Graves said...

Golf kills.