REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

I'm surprised there's not an inflation thread yet

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Saturday, October 26, 2024 12:47
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PAGE 15 of 17

Friday, March 15, 2024 11:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


CNBC: This week provided a reminder that inflation isn’t going away anytime soon

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/14/this-week-provided-a-reminder-that-inf
lation-isnt-going-away-anytime-soon.html



Also, Diversity Hire Idiot Janet Yellen is sorry that she called inflation transitory.

https://thehill.com/business/4529787-yellen-regrets-saying-inflation-t
ransitory
/

Nah bitch. Apology not accepted. We're all sorry that you have any power at all. You shouldn't even be in charge of a cash register at WalMart.



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Friday, March 15, 2024 12:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Home foreclosures are soaring nationwide

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/home-foreclosures-are-soaring-nati
onwide-rising-fastest-these-states


All of the news today is good news for responsible and intelligent people.

It's very bad news for irresponsible people and the gullible.


Foreclosures will not be good for people who are foreclosed on, but it will help bring the market back down to reality. By all rights, the prices of homes should have fallen steeply given all the recent rate hikes, but they're not because everybody and their mother is living on credit and money means nothing when there's all that credit floating around. Responsible people are being asked to pay $3.00 cash for a dozen eggs again (and refusing to pay that), because of all the irresponsible people who just keep buying them on credit no matter how high the prices go.

Having a few hundred thousand foreclosed on homes sitting unused all over the country with price tags nobody is willing to pay for them like we had in 2012 would cure all of this real quick.


The venture capital well drying up in the last two years destroyed woke and might save Hollywood. It's time that everybody else gets a dose of that pill.

Credit in all of its forms and how it's permeated every facet of life is the real cancer in this country.




Oh... and if our near-worthless government wants to get bi-partisan and actually do something to help fix our country, put an immediate end to property as an investment. Nothing gets fixed if BlackRock and Vanguard who have been sitting on the sidelines in the housing market for the last year of high rates and insane prices come swooping in to buy up another 10% or 20% of the residential homes with the intention of turning them into rental properties and Air B&Bs when prices come crashing down.


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Monday, March 18, 2024 9:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fed will have to keep rates high for longer than markets anticipate, say economists

FT-Chicago Booth poll suggests bank will make two or fewer cuts this year, with the first between July and September

https://www.ft.com/content/9d58ff6a-c6c4-4740-b3aa-5699a865c7f4?segmen
tId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9


This is terrible news for Biden* in Election Year.

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Monday, March 18, 2024 10:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Credit in all of its forms and how it's permeated every facet of life is the real cancer in this country.

Stupidity is the real cancer in this country. This is from a house purchase that a Trumptard signed but did NOT understand, or maybe didn't read beyond the first couple sentences. I don't think the Trumptard even understood there was 5.5% interest rate:

PROMISSORY NOTE $245,000.00 Harris County, Texas February 10, 2023
This Note shall be paid in sixty (60) equal monthly payments. The first payment will be due on March 1, 2023 in the amount of ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND 00/100 ($1,500.00) and will be due and payable on the 1st day of each month thereafter. Additionally, there shall be three (3) additional principal payments of TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS AND 00/100 ($20,000.00) each payable on February 28, 2024, February 28, 2025 and February 28, 2026. . . . .

THIS LOAN IS PAYABLE IN FULL AT MATURITY. YOU MUST REPAY THE ENTIRE BALANCE OF THE LOAN AND UNPAID INTEREST THEN DUE. THE LENDER IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO REFINANCE THE LOAN AT THAT TIME.

When February came around, the Trumptard was not even aware of the $20,000 owed. The seller gave the Trumptard a choice: pay $20,000 right now or else I am foreclosing on you, you stupid asshole. To repeat, Stupidity is the real cancer in this country.

P.S. I wrote a $20,000 check to stop the foreclosure. Next year I'm not saving this Trumptard from his stupidity. And I am not writing a check in Feb 2028 for the balloon payment of $148,216.80. https://www.calculator.net/payment-calculator.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 18, 2024 10:29 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
P.S. I wrote a $20,000 check to stop the foreclosure. Next year I'm not saving this Trumptard from his stupidity. And I am not writing a check in Feb 2028 for the balloon payment of $148,216.80. https://www.calculator.net/payment-calculator.html



You did no such thing.

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Monday, March 18, 2024 11:02 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
P.S. I wrote a $20,000 check to stop the foreclosure. Next year I'm not saving this Trumptard from his stupidity. And I am not writing a check in Feb 2028 for the balloon payment of $148,216.80. https://www.calculator.net/payment-calculator.html



You did no such thing.

This is typical for you, 6ix. Typical for that Trumptard, the $20,000 payment, once a year for three years, was a big surprise. I told him that besides paying the seller $1,500 per month, the Trumptard needs to also save $1,670 per month in his bank account so that there will be $20,000 for next year. The Trumptard got all upset: But I'm paying $1,500! Where am I gonna get another $1,700 each month?

My response was: Why did you sign the Promissory Note? When you showed it to me last year, there was nothing about an additional $20,000 per year. (I have a copy of the note from January of 2023)

The Trumptard responded that he wanted to pay off the note faster so he agreed to pay that additional $20,000 for three years. Somehow it did not register in the Trumptard's brain that $20,000 means you have to set aside the $20,000. Every year! Plus even more for the balloon payment of $148,000 in 2028! I guess the Trumptard is expecting a windfall or inheritance or something, but he doesn't have any living relatives who will write the Trumptard into their will.

The cancer eating up America is NOT debt. The cancer is the stupidity eating up the lamebrains of America.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 18, 2024 11:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
The cancer eating up America is NOT debt.



I didn't say that the cancer is debt. I said the cancer is credit.

Your entire anecdote is a lie. Nobody cares.

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Monday, March 18, 2024 6:16 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
The cancer eating up America is NOT debt.



I didn't say that the cancer is debt. I said the cancer is credit.

Your entire anecdote is a lie. Nobody cares.

6ix, you got fired from every job and dumped by your girlfriends because you are an asshole. It is pretty clear you misunderstand debt, loans, credit, mortgages, promissory notes, bonds, rent-to-own, and anything about owing money. (Owing is cancer, if you're stupid.) Trump is as dumb about money as you are. Thirty bond underwriters turned him down because they found him untrustworthy.

Trump’s lawyers say it is impossible for him to post bond (because he is an asshole)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-fraud-bond-appeal-million-75ef3efb5b7
0d6ea43bea85b65ff7810


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 18, 2024 7:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
The cancer eating up America is NOT debt.



I didn't say that the cancer is debt. I said the cancer is credit.

Your entire anecdote is a lie. Nobody cares.

6ix, you got fired from every job and dumped by your girlfriends because you are an asshole. It is pretty clear you misunderstand debt, loans, credit, mortgages, promissory notes, bonds, rent-to-own, and anything about owing money. (Owing is cancer, if you're stupid.) Trump is as dumb about money as you are. Thirty bond underwriters turned him down because they found him untrustworthy.

Trump’s lawyers say it is impossible for him to post bond (because he is an asshole)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-fraud-bond-appeal-million-75ef3efb5b7
0d6ea43bea85b65ff7810


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly



Have fun at work today, slaving away for the creditors that you're never going to live long enough to pay off sweetie baby?

As for my personal life, you need to ask yourself if you want to continue making up fake stories about it. I guaranty you that I have a much more impressive imagination than you do.



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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 11:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The American Dream Accelerates Away From Those in the Slow Lane

https://www.wsj.com/finance/the-american-dream-accelerates-away-from-t
hose-in-the-slow-lane-c2dc7abc?mod=hp_lead_pos5



If idiot Paul Krugman really is stupid enough not to understand why people don't agree with his lies that the economy is doing well, he should probably look at this thread as a collection of reality over the last 3 years of everyone's lives in this country.

When rent is unaffordable and buying a house is completely out of reach, none of the other problems easing up matters at all.



Personally, I do fall under his category of people who think the economy is bad for other people but it's not really that bad for themselves. But I don't have rent or a mortgage, so I'm in a group of people that almost doesn't even exist outside of seniors and the 1%-ers. The cost of everything I need to live has gone up significantly in the last 3 years, but I'm among the few who truly aren't feeling that because of my unique housing situation.

A vast majority of people who live in houses that are paid for free and clear in this country are seniors. And seniors vote heavily for Republicans regardless of the economy, so most of the people who are hit hard by the housing crisis were either already going to vote Republican before it happened or are going to vote against the status quo that put us in this position.

So go on and keep writing all of those articles about how great the economy is and insulting everyone you've already injured by telling them that they just don't get it.

Those polls aren't going to get any better for Biden* as the election draws near. They're only going to get worse for him. There is nothing that he or Democrats can do to fix any of this before November. Maybe if liars like Paul Krugman hadn't spent an entire year denying that inflation was happening before wasting another half year calling it transitory and action had been taken much earlier things would be different now.

Y'all done fucked up.



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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 3:02 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


How credit card debt has become a burden for Americans — and Joe Biden

https://www.ft.com/content/34c57911-dcda-4c29-b75d-bef830608a5a?segmen
tId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9


Are you reading this, Krugman?

You fucking idiot.

Quote:

US consumers paid almost 50 per cent more in credit card expenses last year than in 2020, the year before President Joe Biden took office, putting pressure on family budgets and firing up an election issue about what Republicans say is a cost of living crisis.

Credit card interest and fees increased by $51bn in that time to $157bn, according to data provided by US banks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Delinquencies on credit card loans are also running at their highest level in almost 13 years, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, even as banks have reported record profits from credit card lending.

The rise in credit card costs has come as the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to a 23-year high but lenders have pushed consumer borrowing rates higher still. The central bank, which meets on Wednesday, is not expected to begin cutting rates until this summer.



The Central Bank already met. They did not lower the rates today.

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Thursday, March 21, 2024 11:20 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


New York Times: One Quarter of Renters Now Pay 50% of Their Income On Rent

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/biden-housing-costs.htm
l


Quote:

A quarter of tenants — about 12 million households — now spend more than half their income on rent. Prices are so high that if a minimum-wage employee worked 45 hours a week for a month, a median rent would consume every dollar he or she made.



Here's a breakdown of minimum wage by state:

https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wages

There's a lot of states with a $7.25 minimum wage that matches the Federal minimum wage that hasn't seen an increase since 2009 when Obama just started his first term... 15 years ago this July.



According to Redfin, average apartment rent in Indiana in January of 2023 was $850 per month. It's currently $1,147 per month.

https://www.redfin.com/state/Indiana/rental-market

If you worked 45 hours per week at $7.25, your gross take home pay is $1,305. Your gross pay for the year will be $16,965.


That's not the full story though. If you grossed $16,965 for the year, your half of the Social Security / Medicare contributions are $1,298 per year.

Social Security: $2,104 + Medicare: $492 = $2,956 / (2) Employer Contribution: $1,298.

The Standard Deduction for Federal taxes in 2023 was $13,850. You subtract the SS/Medicare tax before the Standard Deduction is applied ($16,965 - $1,298 = $15,667), so you had a taxable gross of ($15,667 - $13,850 =) $1,817. A 10% Federal tax is applied to this, so that's another $182 deducted from your take home pay.

$16,965 - $1,298 - $182 = $15,485

The average State/Local income tax rate in Indiana is 5% on everything over $1,000. This is taken before you pay the Federal taxes, so $15,667 - $1,000 = $14,667. 5% of $14,667 = $733.

$16,965 - $1,298 - $182 - $773 = $14,712.

You also get an earned income credit there too, which can vary based off of your circumstances and filing status. Let's just call it a single person with no other sources of income like rental properties or bank interest. The number you'd look up on the table is $15,667, which in 2023 equates to an EIC credit of $150.

Actual take home pay: $14,712 + $150 = $14,862

Your monthly take home pay for working 45 hours per week at the national minimum wage is $1,238.50 per month.


In January of 2023 with the average Indiana rent costing $850 per month, you were spending 68.6% of your income on rent.

In March of 2024 with the average Indiana rent costing $1,147 per month, you are spending 92.6% of your income on rent.

Good thing you qualify for the maximum $239 per month in food stamp benefits, because that 7.4% you were left with after paying rent is just barely enough to pay sales taxes on anything you buy, including electricity and heat.

You'll also qualify for LIHEAP for help with heat/electricity costs every winter, but I doubt very much that apartment renters qualify for the maximum $475 benefit. It's probably more in the $250-$300 range, even though there isn't a state law requiring landlords to pay for your heat like they have in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Hope you have a lot of credit cards on hand that aren't maxed out.

They will be.



Good luck!

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 8:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


America’s Magical Thinking About Housing

The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing.

By Derek Thompson | March 21, 2024

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/austin-texas-rents-f
alling-housing/677819
/

If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling.

In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S. metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to build enough apartments and single-family homes to meet the influx of demand, and housing costs bloomed across the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even as rent inflation has gone berserk nationwide, no city has experienced anything like Austin’s growth in housing costs. In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled.

This might sound like the beginning of a familiar and depressing story—one that Americans have gotten used to over the past few decades, especially if they live in a coastal blue state. California and New York, anchored by “superstar” clusters in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street, have pulled in some of the nation’s most creative workers, who have pushed price levels up. But a combination of stifling construction regulations, eternal permitting processes, legal tools to block new development, and NIMBY neighbors restricted the addition of more housing units. Rent and ownership costs rose in America’s richest cities, until families started giving up and moving out. As the economics writer Noah Smith has argued, California and New York are practically driving people out of the state “by refusing to build enough housing."

But Austin—and Texas more generally—has defied the narrative that skyrocketing housing costs are a problem from hell that people just have to accept. In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)

The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.

One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.

“Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse,” announced the headline of the top story on the WSJ website on Monday. The article illustrated “Austin’s recent downswing” and its “glut of luxury apartment buildings” with photographs of abandoned downtown plazas, as if the fastest-growing city of the 2010s had been suddenly hollowed out by a plague and left to zombies and tumbleweeds.

Running in reverse. Downswing. Glut. This is the same Wall Street Journal that, in 2021, noted that rent inflation was demolishing American budgets and, in 2022, gawked at all-time-high rents in places like New York City. Sure, falling housing costs are an annoyance if you’re trying to sell your place in the next quarter, or if you’re a developer operating on the razor’s edge of profitability. But this outlook seems to set up a no-win situation. If rising rent prices are bad, but falling rent prices are also bad, what exactly are we supposed to root for in the U.S. housing market?

This is a surprisingly complex question for Americans today. In the U.S., our houses are meant to perform contrary roles in society: shelter for today and investment vehicle for tomorrow. This approach creates a kind of temporal disjunction around the housing market, where what appears sensible for one generation (Please, no more construction near me, it’s annoying and could hurt my property values!) is calamitous for the next (Wait, there’s nowhere near me for my children to live!).

If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset.

This magical thinking isn’t just a phenomenon of real-estate reporting. It is deeply rooted even in the highest echelons of policy making. Just look at the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform. The document reads (emphasis mine):

Homeownership has long been central to building generational wealth, and expanding access to homeownership to those who have been unfairly excluded and discriminated against is critical to closing the racial wealth gap.

But then the same platform goes on to say (emphasis mine):

Housing in America should be stable, accessible, safe, healthy, energy efficient, and, above all, affordable. No one should have to spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, so families have ample resources left to meet their other needs and save for retirement.

See the issue? On the one hand, the Democratic Party says we are all relying on homeownership to close the racial wealth gap, which implies that we should root for today’s home values to significantly rise, so that today’s minority owners can build wealth. On the other hand, the party says we need houses to be “above all, affordable.” In that case, we should despair when home values rise too fast, because it implies that the next generation of owners will be priced out of the market.

I don’t think the authors of the Democratic Party platform are careless or clueless. I think they’re doing their best to articulate a folk wisdom: Housing should, somehow, deliver permanent affordability and constant appreciation, at the same time. And perhaps they’re trying to reconcile the awkwardness of a market where ordinary middle-class people are both sellers and buyers of an essential yet expensive good; where high inflation would help some people, while deflation would help others.

Americans’ inconsistent approach to housing doesn’t end with these contradictory desires. In 2022, three economists asked several thousand Americans a few simple questions about how supply and demand works in various markets. For example, if automakers suddenly stopped making new cars and trucks, what happens to the price of used vehicles? Or, if a farm started using an amazing new fertilizer and got a huge boost in grain yield, what will happen to the price of the grain? Contrary to the assumption that Americans don’t understand basic economics, the survey respondents did pretty well on the test. They correctly guessed that a shortage of cars would shift car prices up and that a surge in grain production would shift grain prices down. So far, so good.

Then the economists asked the participants about housing. They said: If a new law makes it easier to build dwellings near train stops, what happens to housing prices? Well, all of a sudden, the laws of supply and demand no longer applied. More than a third of participants said that “a large, exogenous increase in their region’s housing stock” would cause rents and home prices to rise. “The public understands the implications of supply and demand in markets for agricultural commodities, for labor, and even for cars, a durable consumer good that, like housing, trades in new and second-hand markets,” the authors wrote. Only when the subject is housing do many Americans despair that you can never build your way out of a shortage.

Housing is a pit of oxymoronic thinking. The Wall Street Journal tells its readers that it’s bad when rents go up but also bad when rents go down. The Democratic Party platform says homes have to be affordable and also that they ought to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. Americans in research surveys say that if grain yields surge, grain prices go down, but that if housing construction surges, housing costs go up.

I’m listing these examples not to be despondent about the prospects for housing abundance, but rather to be realistic. Housing is, in fact, both a present need and a future investment. In a dual-side marketplace, I suppose you could argue that any change in price is bad for some party. But the externalities of housing abundance outweigh the loss to any particular party rooting to profit from scarcity. More and denser housing has been found to reduce inequality and raise personal income; to increase individual exercise rates and reduce obesity; to limit carbon emissions and preserve thousands of acres of natural splendor; and even to increase productivity and innovation.

The miracle of Austin is helpful to recognize, because it restores clarity to a simple truth: Houses are essential, but they are not magical. The normal rules of supply and demand apply. Perhaps more blue cities and states should make a point of applying those rules—and build more damn homes.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 9:51 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
America’s Magical Thinking About Housing



It's a good article.

Quote:

Housing is a pit of oxymoronic thinking. The Wall Street Journal tells its readers that it’s bad when rents go up but also bad when rents go down. The Democratic Party platform says homes have to be affordable and also that they ought to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. Americans in research surveys say that if grain yields surge, grain prices go down, but that if housing construction surges, housing costs go up.

I’m listing these examples not to be despondent about the prospects for housing abundance, but rather to be realistic. Housing is, in fact, both a present need and a future investment. In a dual-side marketplace, I suppose you could argue that any change in price is bad for some party. But the externalities of housing abundance outweigh the loss to any particular party rooting to profit from scarcity. More and denser housing has been found to reduce inequality and raise personal income; to increase individual exercise rates and reduce obesity; to limit carbon emissions and preserve thousands of acres of natural splendor; and even to increase productivity and innovation.

The miracle of Austin is helpful to recognize, because it restores clarity to a simple truth: Houses are essential, but they are not magical. The normal rules of supply and demand apply. Perhaps more blue cities and states should make a point of applying those rules—and build more damn homes.



Nearly everybody's view on housing is warped in current year.

Back before the housing crash of 2008 or 2009 or 2012 or whatever year the article you look at says that it happened now, I started working a great job in 2005. I was told by a few people who worked there before I did that renting an apartment at the time was throwing money away and I should be buying a house as an investment.

Not only did this discount any previous experiences of layoffs and the very real possibility that there would be another one in the future (spoiler alert: There was in late 2009) and the fact that if I didn't have that job I didn't want to be stuck living in a Milwaukee suburb that was an hour and a half away from my friends and family, but up until the recent housing boom phenomena driven in large part by No Money Down infomercials and speculation the value of people's homes across the country with rare exceptions kept pace with inflation.


THAT is what we should be striving for in the housing market. 100% absolute parity with inflation.



But... But... But... REAL ESTATE IS AN INVESTMENT!!!! I hear you scream.


Yeah. It is.

But not in the "my house is going to be worth 3 times the price and I can use it as an ATM" way that you're thinking.

Obviously, it's an investment with immediate returns if you bought it and you're renting it out to somebody else. And you can rent it in that area enough to pay the much higher property taxes on rental properties and you're putting all of that extra money back in the mortgage and building your equity in the hopes of owning it outright one day.

It's also an investment if you spend your life buying a run-down home every 2 to 5 years, fixing it up and flipping it for a much higher price after you've made tons of improvements. As long as you did it in an area where it made sense to put that much time and money into it and you'd get the asking price you need to make a profit... also waiting long enough in between sales to be able to sell without getting raped by a 20% Capital Gains tax.


There is also an "investment" when you buy your own home. It's not about the money you make on the property when you sell it. As I said before, that should more or less be a wash because of the inflation that happened while you were living there except for any seriously notable improvements you've made to the home and the land before you sell it.

But now, when you sell it, you don't pay any taxes on that sale unless the profits (keeping up with inflation) is over $250k. Okay... so yeah... You COULD have put that money into an interest bearing account all of those years instead of buying a home and you would have done better than breaking even. This is very true, but where would you have been living all those years? Throwing your money away on rent? Living with your parents? Living in your car?

And that's the final part of the investment when it comes to buying your own home. If and when you do finally pay the mortgage off, you're living there virtually for free for the rest of the life of that house (and/or yourself). Now all you're paying for your monthly housing expenses is property tax and homeowners insurance. You're paying for water and trash pickup that renters don't pay for. If you live in a state where landlords are forced to pay for heat, you're also paying a gas bill you wouldn't have paid in an apartment.

These costs are a fraction of what you'd be paying for to rent an apartment and an even smaller fraction of what you'd be paying to rent an entire house. You also have much more freedom to do with your own property as well, within obvious legal limits.

This is implied income. This is money that you no longer need to make to live and/or money that you can save or spend on anything other than housing costs.



That's how my house has been an investment. I was fortunate enough to buy it with cash 12 years ago at a steeply discounted price during the worst of the last housing market crash. And because of the flood plain issues that were present and the bank refused to keep the electricity on (something which should be illegal, IMO), there were enough problems in the house I had no competition to buy it.

The math that I figured over the years, this home purchase paid for itself after only 8 years, meaning that had I instead paid apartment rent instead of buying this house I would have spent the same amount of money for 8 years of renting and had absolutely nothing to show for it in the present. And now I've lived here another 4 years without paying rent to anyone. (Well... we all still pay rent to our local government via property taxes as homeowners).

The way I figure it now, once you subtract homeowners insurance, property taxes, water/trash and gas bills from the equation, I'm saving nearly $10,000 per year on rent, or right around $820 per month. Also, that $820 per month is AFTER INCOME TAX money I'm saving as well, so I didn't have to pay SS/Medicare, Federal/State/Local income taxes on it either. So in reality that's about equal to another $1,150 per month (or around $14,000 per year) I don't need to be making at a job to live. And that's compared to just the average apartment rent in the area. If I were renting a house of a similar size you could add at least $300-$400 per month on top of that. In this way, with prices today, my house is now paying for itself over again every 5 or so years, so in about another year it will have paid for itself twice.

I would never have gotten those kinds of returns on any other investment that didn't come with a lot of potential risk. Plus I get to have a roof over my head as a bonus. Stock certificates and tax forms aren't going to keep the rain off of your head.



But I don't want my net worth to grow beyond inflation because of my home. Only negative things come from that. Higher rent to the government for property taxes is the first thing, but also any profit from a future sale getting highly taxed at 20% Capital Gains above $250k is the second one. My house IS worth a lot more than inflation simply because of how many improvements have been made, so if inflation is doubling that on top of it, I don't want an insane housing market that's on fire doubling or even tripling that once again and leaving me with a lifetime of high property taxes and HUGE tax bill when I sell the place.

We need to build more fucking houses.

And we also need to stop building McMansions too.

There needs to be a real push to going back to building "starter" homes. We need some sort of social media psy-op campaign to make starter homes appealing to people again too. Maybe pay a bunch of tik tok influencers to extol the virtues of minimalism and the benefits of a small home instead of making 12 year old girls beat each other up if they come to school with a YETI instead of a Stanley mug. We managed that with vehicles... Look at the sizes of so-called SUVs today compared to the needlessly gas-guzzling behemoths people were driving around in the 90's and up through the 2010s. Bigger isn't always better.

In retrospect, I wish I had bought the much smaller house in a very similar area that cost a couple thousand more than mine did. I would have finished remodeling it in 2 years. It would have taken me only 15 minutes to mow my lawn instead of 2 hours. The property taxes would have been lower. The heat bills during the winter and the A/C bills during summer would be half of what they are today.





--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, April 5, 2024 5:56 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Yes, food is more expensive. And wages are higher too.

April 4, 2024 – 10:47 am

https://jabberwocking.com/yes-food-is-more-expensive-and-wages-are-hig
her-too
/

I have perfect timing. Yesterday I noted that even though overall food inflation is low, there are still some items that have increased a lot. Today, the Wall Street Journal splashes this exact thing across their front page:



"Calm down, Kevin," some of you are already saying. "Read past the headline and I'm sure they compare average food prices to wages. The Journal is a serious paper."

Astonishingly enough, no. There is not so much as a mention of wages in the piece. In fact, they exaggerate food inflation by cherry picking a basket of items that have gone up more than average. Here's the real story:



Since 2019, the overall cost of groceries has increased 1.5% more than average wages.

That's not a typo. 1.5%.

That's all but unnoticeable. And, I suppose, nowhere near scary enough for the front page of the Journal. They should be ashamed of themselves.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, April 5, 2024 10:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


More lies by Kevin Drum.

--------------------------------------------------

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Friday, April 5, 2024 2:08 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted:


Quote:

Since 2019, the overall cost of groceries has increased 1.5% more than average wages.

Interesting chart.
Tied (pinned) at beginning of 2019.
By beginning of 2021 (end of Trumponomics), wages had gain more than 5% over inflation. In only 2 years, tail end of Trump.
By beginning of 2023, not only had Bidenflation reversed this trajectory, but had also made Bidenflation gain 10% more than wages. In only his first 2 years of destroying the economy.

Every once in a while, Libtards accidentally stumble across the truth - and then forget to hide it.

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Friday, April 5, 2024 2:10 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


I used to buy 1 liter bottles of Mountain Dew at Dollar Tree - for $1.
Then Bidenflation, so it was a Biden Buck, or $1.25 for the same bottle.
Now the same bottle, at Dollar Tree, is $1.75.




also:
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/99-cents-only-stores-closing-151055629.html

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Friday, April 5, 2024 3:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yeah. Bidenomics killed the last Dollar store.

--------------------------------------------------

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Friday, April 5, 2024 3:52 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Percent change from year ago
Blue Line: Average Weekly Earnings of All Employees, Total Private
Red Line: Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items Less Food and Energy in U.S. City Average
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jDnO


To win in November 2020, Trump injected $trillions into the economy for more than a year, causing incomes to rise and bank accounts to fill, which caused sellers to raise their prices and move all that extra money from the buyers into sellers' bank accounts. (It is a fact little understood, but sellers raise their prices to learn how much money buyers have in their bank accounts. Once sellers have gotten all the buyers' money, as indicated by buyers decreasing their purchases, prices stop rising faster than incomes.)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 9, 2024 8:53 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices: All Items for the United States

And while there was a wave of inflation, it seems to have broken. This is especially clear if you measure inflation the way other countries do. The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices differs from the regular Consumer Price Index in that it doesn’t include Owners’ Equivalent Rent, an imputed cost of housing that nobody actually pays and is very much a lagging indicator; and by this measure, inflation has already been cut to roughly 2 percent, the Fed’s inflation target:


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jPXJ

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jPYk

For comparison
Consumer Price Index: Harmonised Prices: All Items: Total for the Euro Area (19 Countries)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jPYI

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 12:06 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I don't believe the Feds inflation figures. Real life tell me things have gotten a lot more expensive than when Trump was in office.

But, let's say they're correct.

Those graphs don't prices. It's price CHANGE.
And what they say is that, except for 2008 and some brief later periods where the prices dropped (line falls below zero) prices have relentlessly gone UP. Sometimes prices ripped higher at a 10% clip, and sometimes they muddled along at 2.5%, but up they went, month after month.

2.5% inflation may not seem like much, but compounded over 15 years means prices will be approximately 40% higher.

*****

In any case, if oil prices stay high or we start a trade war with China, we can expect to be paying a lot more just around election time.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 1:14 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I don't believe the Feds inflation figures. Real life tell me things have gotten a lot more expensive than when Trump was in office.

But, let's say they're correct.

Those graphs don't prices. It's price CHANGE.
And what they say is that, except for 2008 and some brief later periods where the prices dropped (line falls below zero) prices have relentlessly gone UP. Sometimes prices ripped higher at a 10% clip, and sometimes they muddled along at 2.5%, but up they went, month after month.

2.5% inflation may not seem like much, but compounded over 15 years means prices will be approximately 40% higher.

*****

In any case, if oil prices stay high or we start a trade war with China, we can expect to be paying a lot more just around election time.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.




And the much higher rate than 2% over the last 3 years compounded has raised the prices of everything substantially. Though wages have not kept up at all with the rise in price of goods in that time, they have gone up... in some places like California they've gone up quite a bit, particularly among the low wage earners.

What nobody talks about is that the Government doesn't take less taxes here. They take more. Not only do they get more taxes because of the higher wages per hour themselves, but caps on programs and tax savings haven't gone up to match the new wages.

The Federal Standard Deduction (the amount of money you don't pay taxes on if you don't itemize) only went up $750 this year from last. If somebody is only making $750 more than they made last year, they're not keeping up with any rise in prices on anything, let alone their monthly apartment rent.

This should have gone up THOUSANDS every year for the last few years.

Single people making less than $14,600 and married people making less than $29,200, assuming they've got even the most basic level of responsibility, are the people who are using what they make only to live.

At this point, I believe that no single person making less than $30,000 or a married couple making less than $60,000 should have to pay any Federal Taxes. They're already paying 7.65% on Social Security and Medicare on dollar one, and the company they work for is paying them 7.65% less than they would have otherwise because they're "paying" the other half for you.

If they own a house they're paying property taxes. If they rent, the owner is paying premium rental property taxes and you're paying for a portion of that with your rent check. If you drive a car you're paying yearly registration taxes. Anything you buy, with some rare exceptions like food in a number of states, you're paying sales taxes on it.

If the government cares at all about people, especially people in the lower quintile, They'd really ought to double that standard deduction in 2025.

Somebody who made $30,000 per year would have an additional $1,500 to help pay the higher costs of everything. Somebody making only $20,000 per year would still get another $500.

EIC limits should be reevaluated as well. If you were to double the gross dollar amount somebody needed to earn for the peak EIC credit today, it would be between $15,600 and $19,600 (Up from $7,800-$9,800). If you doubled the gross dollar amount they needed to earn to price themselves out of EIC, you'd be at $35,200 (up from $17,600). Now double the amount of EIC credit for each $50 amount of income on the tables...

Under the above circumstances Somebody who earns between $15,900 and $19,600 gross would receive a $1,200 credit. On the low end, somebody who earned only $1 would get a $4 EIC Credit, and on the high end somebody who earned between $35,150 and $35,200 would get a $10 EIC credit.



Person A earning $30,000 per year or a married couple earning $60,000 per year would benefit quite greatly under both of the above circumstances.

Not only would they be saving $1,500 on Federal Income Taxes, but they'd also get a $400 earned income credit. That is $1,900 more for that person to pay for essentials with.

Person B only making $20,000 in a year would only save that $500 on their Federal Income Taxes, but their EIC credit would be $1,166 (Doubled from the current $583 one would get at $10,000). So their income tax benefit would be $1,666.

So even though Person A made 33% more than Person B did this year, their additional tax savings from these changes would only be 14.04% more than Person B, illustrating the natural phase out of benefits remains intact... just at higher levels.


How does this affect the people at the top of this low income and everyone above it?

Well, anyone making more than $30,000 per year would have saved an additional $1,500 in Federal Income Taxes. Even if you made $400,000, you saved that $1,500 because you didn't start hitting the 10% tax bracket until twice what it was the year prior.

And the EIC payment would cap out with only a $10 EIC credit for a person earning between $35,150 and $35,200, and anybody making more than this doesn't get an EIC Credit.

I realize at the top earner levels a lot of people don't need that $1,500 and it shouldn't be a change that benefits everyone. But I say instead of make any changes here let everyone making over $30,000 get that $1,500 benefit but just raise some taxes that only the top earners feel by $1,500 to offset it.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 1:38 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Speaking of phony inflation numbers...

Quote:

Scandal Rocks Biden's Labor Dept For Lying About Sharing Non-Public Inflation Data With Secret Group Of Wall Street "Super Users"

... In retrospect, it appears the BLS really did have something to hide, because in a follow up from both the NYT and Bloomberg, we now learn that an economist from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was corresponding on data related the monthly CPI print with major firms like JPMorgan and BlackRock, in what Bloomberg said "raised questions about equitable access to economic information." ...



https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/scandal-rocks-bidens-labor-dept-lyin
g-about-sharing-non-public-inflation-data-secret-group


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 6:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I don't believe the Feds inflation figures. Real life tell me things have gotten a lot more expensive than when Trump was in office.

But, let's say they're correct.

Those graphs don't prices. It's price CHANGE.
And what they say is that, except for 2008 and some brief later periods where the prices dropped (line falls below zero) prices have relentlessly gone UP. Sometimes prices ripped higher at a 10% clip, and sometimes they muddled along at 2.5%, but up they went, month after month.

2.5% inflation may not seem like much, but compounded over 15 years means prices will be approximately 40% higher.

It is easy to plot both percent change per year and absolute price change:

(left, blue) Percent Change from a Year Ago
Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average

(right, red) Index 1982-1984 = 100
Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jQSn <- go to this URL to see month by month change

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 12:49 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


"Obviously, This Is Very Bad News For Biden": Wall Street Reacts To Today's Red Hot Inflation Print

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/obviously-very-bad-news-biden-wall-s
treet-reacts-todays-red-hot-inflation-print


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 1:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I don't believe the Feds inflation figures. Real life tell me things have gotten a lot more expensive than when Trump was in office.

But, let's say they're correct.

Those graphs don't prices. It's price CHANGE.
And what they say is that, except for 2008 and some brief later periods where the prices dropped (line falls below zero) prices have relentlessly gone UP. Sometimes prices ripped higher at a 10% clip, and sometimes they muddled along at 2.5%, but up they went, month after month.

2.5% inflation may not seem like much, but compounded over 15 years means prices will be approximately 40% higher.

*****

In any case, if oil prices stay high or we start a trade war with China, we can expect to be paying a lot more just around election time.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.




And the much higher rate than 2% over the last 3 years compounded has raised the prices of everything substantially. Though wages have not kept up at all with the rise in price of goods in that time, they have gone up... in some places like California they've gone up quite a bit, particularly among the low wage earners.

What nobody talks about is that the Government doesn't take less taxes here. They take more. Not only do they get more taxes because of the higher wages per hour themselves, but caps on programs and tax savings haven't gone up to match the new wages.

The Federal Standard Deduction (the amount of money you don't pay taxes on if you don't itemize) only went up $750 this year from last. If somebody is only making $750 more than they made last year, they're not keeping up with any rise in prices on anything, let alone their monthly apartment rent.

This should have gone up THOUSANDS every year for the last few years.

Single people making less than $14,600 and married people making less than $29,200, assuming they've got even the most basic level of responsibility, are the people who are using what they make only to live.

At this point, I believe that no single person making less than $30,000 or a married couple making less than $60,000 should have to pay any Federal Taxes. They're already paying 7.65% on Social Security and Medicare on dollar one, and the company they work for is paying them 7.65% less than they would have otherwise because they're "paying" the other half for you.

If they own a house they're paying property taxes. If they rent, the owner is paying premium rental property taxes and you're paying for a portion of that with your rent check. If you drive a car you're paying yearly registration taxes. Anything you buy, with some rare exceptions like food in a number of states, you're paying sales taxes on it.

If the government cares at all about people, especially people in the lower quintile, They'd really ought to double that standard deduction in 2025.

Somebody who made $30,000 per year would have an additional $1,500 to help pay the higher costs of everything. Somebody making only $20,000 per year would still get another $500.

EIC limits should be reevaluated as well. If you were to double the gross dollar amount somebody needed to earn for the peak EIC credit today, it would be between $15,600 and $19,600 (Up from $7,800-$9,800). If you doubled the gross dollar amount they needed to earn to price themselves out of EIC, you'd be at $35,200 (up from $17,600). Now double the amount of EIC credit for each $50 amount of income on the tables...

Under the above circumstances Somebody who earns between $15,900 and $19,600 gross would receive a $1,200 credit. On the low end, somebody who earned only $1 would get a $4 EIC Credit, and on the high end somebody who earned between $35,150 and $35,200 would get a $10 EIC credit.



Person A earning $30,000 per year or a married couple earning $60,000 per year would benefit quite greatly under both of the above circumstances.

Not only would they be saving $1,500 on Federal Income Taxes, but they'd also get a $400 earned income credit. That is $1,900 more for that person to pay for essentials with.

Person B only making $20,000 in a year would only save that $500 on their Federal Income Taxes, but their EIC credit would be $1,166 (Doubled from the current $583 one would get at $10,000). So their income tax benefit would be $1,666.

So even though Person A made 33% more than Person B did this year, their additional tax savings from these changes would only be 14.04% more than Person B, illustrating the natural phase out of benefits remains intact... just at higher levels.


How does this affect the people at the top of this low income and everyone above it?

Well, anyone making more than $30,000 per year would have saved an additional $1,500 in Federal Income Taxes. Even if you made $400,000, you saved that $1,500 because you didn't start hitting the 10% tax bracket until twice what it was the year prior.

And the EIC payment would cap out with only a $10 EIC credit for a person earning between $35,150 and $35,200, and anybody making more than this doesn't get an EIC Credit.

I realize at the top earner levels a lot of people don't need that $1,500 and it shouldn't be a change that benefits everyone. But I say instead of make any changes here let everyone making over $30,000 get that $1,500 benefit but just raise some taxes that only the top earners feel by $1,500 to offset it.





JO would have liked this idea. I wonder how he's doing.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 2:07 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Obviously, This Is Very Bad News For Biden": Wall Street Reacts To Today's Red Hot Inflation Print
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/obviously-very-bad-news-biden-wall-s
treet-reacts-todays-red-hot-inflation-print


Over the weekend, I fed a load of economic data into ChatGPT’s Data Analyst feature and asked it to predict inflation for the next 12 months.

If the computer is to be believed, inflation will fall to 2.2% by the end of the year.

This only took a few minutes, and I’m still learning to use the tool. As fancy as an “AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average” sounds, if predicting inflation was that “easy,” well, the Ph.D.s at the Fed would’ve cracked the code already.

https://www.independentvanguardadviser.com/high-times/?ref=the-indepen
dent-vanguard-adviser-newsletter




The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 10, 2024 2:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The damage of the Biden* Administration is already done.

Unless prices drop 20 to 30% this year and inflation takes a hard negative plunge that will fuck up a lot of other things, everybody is stuck paying far higher prices than 3 years ago and it only gets higher than that every year with 2% inflation.

Nobody should be getting any pats on the back for making inflation normal when they spent all that time purposefully fucking everything up for 3 years and destroying poor people.

But don't take it from me. Watch how many minority Democrat voters vote for one of the other guys or just stay at home this election.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, April 11, 2024 4:46 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


ChatGPT is worthless. Because it follows the "large language" model, all it can do is tell you what people are talking about "out there".

Ask it whether angels are real, or whether Russia will invade Europe, or whether climate changeis real, and you'll probably get a "balanced" argument on both sides of the question, without any real evidence or predictive model to back it up. If not, you'll get a "consensus" answer, again, without any real evidence or predictive, real world model to back it up.

AI is no substitute for understanding.
It follows the old GIGO computer rule: garbage in, garbge out.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 11, 2024 8:13 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
ChatGPT is worthless. Because it follows the "large language" model, all it can do is tell you what people are talking about "out there".

Ask it whether angels are real, or whether Russia will invade Europe, or whether climate changeis real, and you'll probably get a "balanced" argument on both sides of the question, without any real evidence or predictive model to back it up. If not, you'll get a "consensus" answer, again, without any real evidence or predictive, real world model to back it up.

AI is no substitute for understanding.
It follows the old GIGO computer rule: garbage in, garbge out.

Your next rhetorical move is to claim the CPI is false. 6ixStringJack has already done that, which leaves him with his very private and individualized CPI exclusively for 6ix.

Here is CPI inflation since the late '70s. There's a huge amount of noise in the monthly CPI numbers. What's more, we got used to ultra-low inflation in the decade following the financial crisis. Average CPI from the end of the '70s inflation to the start of the financial crisis was 3.1%. We're only barely above that right now. It's hardly a crisis.



https://jabberwocking.com/theres-no-need-to-panic-over-inflation/


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, April 11, 2024 8:41 PM

THG


Quote:

Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Biden spending to build back stagflation

https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/biden-spending-to-build-back-stagfla
tion-202111161956
]



Pay attention now.

T




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Friday, April 12, 2024 11:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Resurgent inflation looms over Joe Biden’s White House bid
Consumer prices are rising quickly at just the wrong time for the US president

https://www.ft.com/content/d8520a33-f202-4679-b6f7-99fe9e4fb3ae?segmen
tId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9



The FED cannot lower rates. Inflation will just pick up if they do. It already is without a rate cut. They should actually be talking about raising rates again, not lowering them. We haven't even felt the impact of that Baltimore bridge collapse on the system yet either.

This isn't over. And with the election coming up all Joe Biden* can hope for is that the FED manages just to not make anything worse until election day. Trump will be left with a lot of bullshit to juggle after 4 years of this idiocy.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, April 13, 2024 9:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Resurgent inflation looms over Joe Biden’s White House bid
Consumer prices are rising quickly at just the wrong time for the US president

https://www.ft.com/content/d8520a33-f202-4679-b6f7-99fe9e4fb3ae?segmen
tId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9



The FED cannot lower rates. Inflation will just pick up if they do. It already is without a rate cut. They should actually be talking about raising rates again, not lowering them. We haven't even felt the impact of that Baltimore bridge collapse on the system yet either.

This isn't over. And with the election coming up all Joe Biden* can hope for is that the FED manages just to not make anything worse until election day. Trump will be left with a lot of bullshit to juggle after 4 years of this idiocy.

When this is all over, you and Trump will still be in trouble until the day you die because both of you have always acted like retards and assholes. This is a fact from the public records on Trump and 6ix's history on fff.net. Meanwhile, what been going on in the real world of US Inflation, not the haunted house of Trump and his Trumptards' demented minds?

Social Security Cost-Of-Living Adjustments
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/colaseries.html

Year COLA
1975 8.0
1976 6.4
1977 5.9
1978 6.5
1979 9.9
1980 14.3
1981 11.2
1982 7.4
1983 3.5
1984 3.5
1985 3.1
1986 1.3
1987 4.2
1988 4.0
1989 4.7
1990 5.4
1991 3.7
1992 3.0
1993 2.6
1994 2.8
Year COLA
1995 2.6
1996 2.9
1997 2.1
1998 1.3
1999 2.5
2000 3.5
2001 2.6
2002 1.4
2003 2.1
2004 2.7
2005 4.1
2006 3.3
2007 2.3
2008 5.8
2009 0.0
2010 0.0
2011 3.6
2012 1.7
2013 1.5
2014 1.7
Year COLA
2015 0.0
2016 0.3
2017 2.0
2018 2.8
2019 1.6
2020 1.3
2021 5.9
2022 8.7
2023 3.2

What is the 2024 prediction, which goes into effect in 2025?
3%. If 3% is the end of the world for Trumptards, too bad for those fat fools, drunks and retards.

New 2025 Social Security COLA Estimate Released
Updated Apr 11, 2024 at 6:15 PM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/new-cola-social-security-payment-estimate-188
9525


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 14, 2024 9:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Select to view spoiler:


(Incomes are NOT rising for certain people. What kind of people? Because it was a secret ballot, if you voted for Trump, nobody necessarily knows who you voted for. But your boss already knows you are stupid at work and that means your boss will not be raising your income as fast as inflation. You might even find yourself unemployed because of your stupidity. Voting for Trump again is not the clever decision convincing your boss that you are now smarter and now deserve a raise. American life is hard for retards and Trumptards.)

The Inflation That Democrats Can’t See

By Michael Powell | April 14, 2024, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/inflation-democrats-
biden-interest-rates/678047
/

Democratic Party analysts and left-leaning economists have had quite enough of their fellow Americans’ complaints. As a striking number of poll respondents express alarm, despair even, about the rising cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency, experts shake their heads. Don’t people realize that jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, and inflation is in retreat?

Few have struck this chord more insistently than Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and liberal New York Times columnist. In a February column titled “Vibes, Vegetables and Vitriol,” he suggested that inflation is no longer worrisome and backed up his view with field research.

“Now, I go grocery shopping myself, and am occasionally startled by the total at the cash register—although that’s usually because I wasn’t factoring in the price of that bottle of scotch I picked up along with the meat and vegetables,” Krugman wrote.

The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous. Poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people experience a different reality. They carry the searing memories of the Great Recession and its foreclosure crisis, when millions of American households lost their home. A large number of these Americans worked in person during the dolorous early days of the pandemic, and saw its toll up close. And since 2019, they’ve weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power. Tell these Americans that the economy is humming, that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate, and that everything’s grand, and you’re likely to see a roll of the eyes.

Krugman in his column confessed that he had “no idea” what he paid for roughly the same groceries three years earlier, although he allowed that olive oil seemed costly. He and other economists talked of a “vibecession”—an admixture of gloom and worry and misinformation that prevents Americans from seeing the rosy nature of the economy. This is a common take among prominent Democrats and left-leaning economists, all of whom speak with an eye on the upcoming presidential election. In late February, California Governor Gavin Newsom appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and declared that Biden had conducted a “master class” in economic helmsmanship. “The economy is booming; inflation is cooling,” Newsom said, adding, “All because of Biden’s wisdom, because of his temperance.”

Around the same time, the Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served as chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on social media: “If a year ago you had told someone [that inflation] would come down to 2.5% they would be surprised & delighted.” Just before Biden’s State of the Union address last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted that “Americans will hear a clear theme: America’s economy is accelerating, inflation is decelerating.”

These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?

Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.

But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.

Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.

“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”

The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.

Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.

According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.

Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.

The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.

The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.

All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment. Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper noting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.

Many commentators’ eagerness to ignore inflation’s toll appears inescapably tied to Biden’s precarious reelection prospects. The president is more clear-eyed than his cheerleaders. Several months ago, he largely stopped touting the joys of “Bidenomics” and talked instead about challenging the corporations that raised prices and padded profits. During the State of the Union, Biden pledged to take on corporations that quietly shrink their products and hike prices out of greed. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said that night. “That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price-gouging.”

Mainstream economists cringe at this kind of populist rhetoric; their assumption is that the austerity that follows raising interest rates is an unfortunate but necessary medicine. Similarly, the suggestion that wealthy corporations should bear more of the pain, and the working class less of it, has come to sound radical to some economists. In late 2021, amid the rising prices and supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, Weber, the UMass economist, proposed a once-popular and now unusual form of economic therapy: limiting what companies can charge for food and energy. “Large corporations with market power,” she wrote in The Guardian, “have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits … What we need instead is a serious conversation about strategic price controls.”

Krugman and others harshly dismissed her idea—the Times columnist panned it on Twitter as “truly stupid.” He later deleted the post and apologized. The German and British governments enacted something similar to Weber’s ideas in limited form on energy prices. Weber, whose argument that corporate greed helps accelerate inflation has since been echoed by figures such as European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, has gained acclaim as an iconoclastic thinker about inflation.

“I have been ridiculed in obnoxious ways, but people sense the injustice,” Weber told me. “Many Americans worked throughout COVID; they saw friends die; they think, I did all the things I’m supposed to do, and I still can’t afford this life.”

Perhaps the economic turmoil of Biden’s term will ease in the seven months before the election, and consumer agitation will cool in tandem with inflation. Krugman offers tart counsel to Americans: “Maybe my message here sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi in reverse: Look, don’t trust your feelings.”

The temptation for liberal economists and politicians to deny the pain experienced by many Americans, and to condescend when they might instead try to empathize, is perhaps understandable in a fraught election year. But working- and middle-class Americans might conclude that they are wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 14, 2024 4:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Chances are a lot more of the people being hurt by Democrats are the low-income Democrat voters than anyone else.

I've told you this before.

You don't have enough rich, white, college "educated" voters to carry the party.

And any of you fools still listening to Paul Krugman after he's been proven wrong about every article he's written in the last 3 years will get what you deserve.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, April 15, 2024 6:15 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Chances are a lot more of the people being hurt by Democrats are the low-income Democrat voters than anyone else.

I've told you this before.

You don't have enough rich, white, college "educated" voters to carry the party.

And any of you fools still listening to Paul Krugman after he's been proven wrong about every article he's written in the last 3 years will get what you deserve.

Chocolate-lovers are being hurt by Biden. It is an outrage!

Vote for Trump. He’ll fix the price of chocolate! Believe In Him!

Chocolate Might Never Be the Same

By Yasmin Tayag | April 12, 2024

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/04/cocoa-shortage-choc
olate-expensive/678053
/

The cocoa shortage is making chocolate more expensive—maybe forever.

An illustration of chocolate candies disappearing
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Good chocolate, I’ve come to learn, should taste richly of cocoa—a balanced blend of bitter and sweet, with notes of fruit, nuts, and spice. My favorite chocolate treat is nothing like that. It’s the Cadbury Creme Egg, an ovoid milk-chocolate shell enveloping a syrupy fondant center. To this day, I look forward to its yearly return in the weeks leading up to Easter.

Most popular chocolate is like this: milky, sugary, and light on actual cocoa. Lots of sugary sweets contain so little of the stuff that they are minimally chocolate. M&M’s, Snickers bars, and Hershey’s Kisses aren’t staples of American diets because they are the best—rather, they satisfy our desire for chocolate while costing a fraction of a jet-black bar made from single-origin cocoa.

But chocolate isn’t as economical as it once was. By one estimate, retail prices for chocolate rose by 10 percent just last year. And now this is the third year in a row of poor cocoa harvests in West Africa, where most of the world’s cocoa is grown. Late last month, amid fears of a worsening shortage, cocoa prices soared past $10,000 per metric ton, up from about $4,000 in January. To shoulder the costs, chocolate companies are gearing up to further hike the price of their treats in the coming months. Prices might not fall back down from there. Chocolate as we know it may never be the same.

Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion” in the crop’s struggles, Carodenuto said.

The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season, Reuters reported.

In the past, when supply fell and prices rose, farmers were motivated to plant more cocoa, which led to a boost in supply five years later, when the new trees began to bear fruit, says Nicko Debenham, the former head of sustainability at the chocolate giant Barry Callebaut. Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.

Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland. More important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.

No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat. Barry Callebaut has predicted that the companies it supplies with cocoa will raise chocolate prices by up to 8 percent in the next few months. Because companies buy beans in advance, it will take some time before retail prices reflect the current shortage, so further increases are likely.

When cocoa prices go up, companies start reducing bar sizes and adding in substitutes such as fruit and nuts to reduce the amount of cocoa content. “They’ll try and use every trick in the book to keep the consumption levels up,” Debenham said. My beloved Cadbury Creme Egg, for example, is markedly smaller than it used to be. Now, as Bloomberg has noted, companies are promoting candies that contain less chocolate, such as the new Reese’s caramel Big Cup from Hershey’s, or treats that have no chocolate at all, such as gummies.

Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown. Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature, Johnny Drain, a food-science expert and co-founder of the cocoa-free chocolate brand Win-Win, told me. Doing so can eliminate unwanted qualities, but it may also remove desirable ones, resulting in a less interesting flavor overall. Even if an M&M contains a minimal amount of actual chocolate, a longtime consumer could notice a change in flavor.

Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA. Some already use chocolatelike ingredients such as cocoa-butter equivalents, cocoa extenders, and artificial cocoa flavors. In some cases, the swaps are noticeable: Cadbury’s use of an emulsifying filler to reduce the amount of cocoa butter in its Caramello bars diminished “the rich creaminess of the original,” Bon Appétit noted in 2016.

Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.

Read: Silicon Valley is coming for your chocolate

Cocoa-free chocolate is currently far more expensive than chocolate, but Drain hopes it will eventually become “cheaper than the cheapest chocolate.” At that point, he said, it’ll likely find its niche at the lowest end of the market, where chocolate plays a supporting role rather than a starring one—think chocolate-coated ice creams and granola bars with chocolate chips. Already, some of these products are labeled as having “chocolate flavor” or being “chocolatey” instead of “chocolate,” which has a strict FDA definition.

Yet change is always tough to swallow. So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 15, 2024 6:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Chances are a lot more of the people being hurt by Democrats are the low-income Democrat voters than anyone else.

I've told you this before.

You don't have enough rich, white, college "educated" voters to carry the party.

And any of you fools still listening to Paul Krugman after he's been proven wrong about every article he's written in the last 3 years will get what you deserve.

Chocolate-lovers are being hurt by Biden. It is an outrage!



Finally. Something caused by Biden* that doesn't negatively effect me.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, April 16, 2024 8:39 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Special note for Trumptards: Biden does NOT control prices at all, even indirectly. But purchasers have powerful direct control by NOT PURCHASING the overpriced products and burning the salesmen to death. This has been a public service message just so you know how prices are set.

Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets sold for $11,000 while Biden did not order lower prices!

Biden might actually do something about ludicrously expensive concert tickets

The government is slated to sue Ticketmaster’s parent company.

By Nicole Narea | Apr 16, 2024, 7:20pm EDT

https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/4/16/24132509/ticketmaster-live-natio
n-lawsuit-swift-bad-bunny-beyonce-rodrigo


The Department of Justice opened an investigation of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, shortly after the Eras tour fiasco. That investigation appears close to its conclusion, and now, the government seems prepared to take the company to court over alleged anticompetitive behavior. The Wall Street Journal reported that the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit could be filed as early as next month.

“The Justice Department should have never cleared the [Live Nation-Ticketmaster] merger, because as a vertically integrated monopoly, they have every interest in encouraging prices and fees to go up, and there is no [one] in a position to discipline the industry, either by using an alternative promoter or ticketing agent,” said Tim Wu, a key architect of the Biden administration’s antitrust policies and a professor at Columbia Law.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 16, 2024 9:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


What a false and stupid argument the stupid writers at Vox present to their stupid audience.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 10:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Two weeks ago, when I filled the gas tank, gas was about $4.60. Now it's $5.30!

Let THAT soak in!

Thanks, Israel!


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 11:20 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Futures Tumble, Oil And Gold Soar On Reports Of "Huge Explosions" In Central Iran, Israeli Airstrikes In Iraq And Syria



https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/futures-tumble-oil-and-gold-soar-rep
orts-huge-explosions-central-iran-israeli-airstrikes


If this goes to closing of Straits of Hormuz, watch the EU spiral down the drain and the USA run around like a headless chicken.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Friday, April 19, 2024 1:10 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Looks like this Israel/ Iran kerfuffle... which Israel started ... was reduced to a form of "kinetic peformance theater" where Iran made its point and Israel made its point.

Iran has no motivation to go to war. They just joined the BRICS, their economy is booming, things are going well for them. And probably just in case, China may have reminded them that if the flow of oil is shut off thru the Straits of Hormuz, all of that lovely infrastructure Chinese investment would go away.

On the flip side, since the EU and Japan desperately depend on Mideast oil, having formally cut themselves off from Russian oil (altho in reality they still import, just via expensive middlemen) and the USA does still import oil from Saudi Arabia, NOBODY in the G7 wants to see a mideast oil crisis. It looks like that G7 meeting that the USA called put enough pressure on Israel (how?) to get them to talk tough but back off.

Let's hope it stays that way.

Yanno, we're fortunate but really stupid with our good fortune. We still have the option of importing oil from the largest known reserves of oil in the world: Venezuela. And a lot of our refineries are tuned to processing heavy (Venezuelan) crude. Too bad we sanctioned them too!

We DO go around pissing everyone off and cutting off our options, don't we??



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, April 27, 2024 7:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fed’s Preferred Core Inflation Gauge Rose at Brisk Pace in March

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fed-preferred-core-inflation-gauge-1307
43176.html


Those interest rates aren't coming back down before the election. Just like I said they weren't.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, April 27, 2024 9:28 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


I heard report that the GDP missed the Brandon projection by 65%.

I haven't looked into it yet.

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Monday, April 29, 2024 9:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


CNBC: All the data so far is showing inflation isn’t going away, and is making things tough on the Fed

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/26/all-the-data-shows-inflation-isnt-goin
g-away-making-things-tough-on-fed.html


No shit, huh CNBC? You mean the same inflation you and your goons spent over a year pretending didn't exist, right?


Quote:

Commerce Department indexes that the Fed relies on heavily for inflation signals showed prices continuing to climb at a rate still considerably higher than the 2% annual goal.
The stubborn inflation data raised several ominous specters, namely that the Fed may have to keep rates elevated for longer or even have to hike at some point.



No shit. There isn't going to be any rate cuts this year, just like I said by the end of last year.

Don't forget the bridge collapse and how that's going to impact the economy for years to come as well. I noticed you failed to make mention of it in this article.



I'll give you this though, CNBC... You finally do tell the truth every once in a while...

Quote:

The inflation problem in the U.S. today first emerged in 2022, and had multiple sources.

At the beginning of the flare-up, the issues came largely from supply chain disruptions that Fed officials thought would go away once shippers and manufacturers had the chance to catch up as pandemic restrictions eased.

But even with the Covid economic crisis well in the rearview mirror, Congress and the Biden administration continue to spend lavishly, with the budget deficit at 6.2% of GDP at the end of 2023. That’s the highest outside of the Covid years since 2012 and a level generally associated with economic downturns, not expansions.



Holy shit... How many articles do you think CNBC wrote that said Joe Biden*'s irresponsible spending had nothing to do with inflation before this one?

Joe Biden* is fucked. It's very clear that the economy isn't going to improve under his "leadership", and the crime and border problems only continue to get worse as time goes on.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, May 1, 2024 7:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Affluent Americans are driving US economy and likely delaying need for Fed rate cuts

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER | April 29, 2024

https://apnews.com/article/inflation-economy-wealth-rates-federal-rese
rve-cuts-9290216e89cbd7a3a0d2be66041aeaf8


Older Americans are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy and inflation. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth and inflation — than ever before.

And much of their spending is going toward higher-priced services like travel, health care and entertainment, putting further upward pressure on those prices — and on inflation. Such spending is relatively immune to the Federal Reserve’s push to slow growth and tame inflation through higher borrowing rates, because it rarely requires borrowing.

Affluent older Americans, if they own government bonds, may even be benefiting from the Fed’s rate hikes. Those hikes have led to higher bond yields, generating more income for those who own such bonds.

The so-called “wealth effect,” whereby rising home and stock values give people confidence to increase their spending, is a big reason why the economy has defied expectations of a sharp slowdown. Its unexpected strength, which is contributing to stickier inflation, has forced a shift in the Fed’s plans.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 3, 2024 12:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Affluent Americans are driving US economy and likely delaying need for Fed rate cuts

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER | April 29, 2024

https://apnews.com/article/inflation-economy-wealth-rates-federal-rese
rve-cuts-9290216e89cbd7a3a0d2be66041aeaf8


Older Americans are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy and inflation. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth and inflation — than ever before.

And much of their spending is going toward higher-priced services like travel, health care and entertainment, putting further upward pressure on those prices — and on inflation. Such spending is relatively immune to the Federal Reserve’s push to slow growth and tame inflation through higher borrowing rates, because it rarely requires borrowing.

Affluent older Americans, if they own government bonds, may even be benefiting from the Fed’s rate hikes. Those hikes have led to higher bond yields, generating more income for those who own such bonds.

The so-called “wealth effect,” whereby rising home and stock values give people confidence to increase their spending, is a big reason why the economy has defied expectations of a sharp slowdown. Its unexpected strength, which is contributing to stickier inflation, has forced a shift in the Fed’s plans.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two




Haha! Bullshit.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, May 3, 2024 12:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Viral TikTok: What Does JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon Mean When He Says "The Consumer Is Doing Well" In 2024?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/05/02/viral_tiktok_what_d
oes_jp_morgan_ceo_jamie_dimon_mean_when_he_says_the_consumer_is_doing_well_in_2024.html


Quote:

This woman heard Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, the largest bank in America on the Wall Street Journal’s podcast

What she heard was so “f*cking out of touch” with America she had to stop what she was doing & make this video

He said this about America:

Question asked to him, “As the chief exec of America's biggest bank, you have an unrivaled insight into the financial health of the US consumer. What are people doing with their money right now?”

Jamie Dimon’s response “Yeah, you have to look a little bit in context. The consumer's in pretty good shape right now. The consumer has, you know, unemployment under 4% has been there for two years. They still have excess money from COVID. — They're still spending it down. Housing prices are up, stock prices are up, jobs are plentiful.”

Creator: “I'm sorry, what? The stimulus checks, the ones that went out in 2020 and 2021, three and four years ago, we're still spending it down? Who is he talking about? People are not doing well. This country is literally unaffordable. Child care, groceries, you've got Kellogs out here telling us to eat fucking cereal for dinner.

Everything is up in price. Even for those who are making ends meet and are able to still save, we have to be conscious as fuck to where you're putting your money because nothing is at a good price.

What does he mean the consumer is doing well? Like these are the biggest decision makers in our financial systems. These are the people who work with Congress and who are talking about how do we create like a soft landing of inflation and He thinks we're doing okay. Like, guys, this is scary. I mean, it's been f*cking scary. Let's be real. No one's surprised”

The CEO of the largest bank in America still thinks you have money from your Covid checks…. It’s almost unfathomable how out of touch with reality these people are.



They're simply lying for the Biden* administration, darlin'.

Vote Joe* if you want 4 more years of this.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, May 3, 2024 2:02 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Chicago Tribune: Wait, how much for a latte? Even high-flying Starbucks is suffering.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/01/editorial-starbucks-mcdonald
s-consumers-inflation
/

Take your overpriced shit and shove it up your asshole.

Ya'all are going to go out of business.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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