Should Tim Cook Ask WWJD (What Would Jobs Do)? [View article]
What would Jobs Do?
I am guessin he would would have a long string of insults for all the handwringers and speculators. He would probably tell them he #$#%# knew what he was doing when he hired Cook and set up the company how he liked it before he died. He knew he was dying and wouldn't #$#%# do anything that would harm his legacy far out in the future. He would also tell them that no other company has changed the way we do things with insanely great products. No other company has the track record Apple has. No other company has the customer loyalty Apple has. No other company is positioned in the spaces that Apple is in. He would tell them that Apple has never been Wall Street's monkey, either people believe in the company or they do not. If they cannot wait for excellent products when they are ready, they do not know Apple nor do they understand technology, and they probably shouldn't be investing in technology.
What would Steve Jobs do? Make insanely great products people love and ignore people who think they know better than a company that has been enormously successful.
Apple's Growing Slice Of The Enterprise Market Should Offset Other Concerns [View article]
Somewhere on this board I have argued the same thing -- Apple is becoming the choice of businesses. When businesses big and small consider the Total Cost of Ownership of Mac's vs. any other platform, you are going to see more and more enterprise MACs. In my experience working in companies and universities with Macs is that we have far more problems with the PCs. Mac users always had problems with the printers, while PC users had to defrag, reboot, download drivers, clean viruses and trojan horses, deal with slowness, reinstall the OS, and etc.
The resistance you hear are from those who stake their livelihoods on being PC experts. IT departments go with what they know so they pick PCs because they are comfortable with them and are used to the downtime and fixing stuff. They simply do not understand that users need to get stuff done and want their computers to just work. I want a coffee break because I finished my tasks, not because I am waiting for IT to fix my computer or miss a coffee break because I have to fix it.
My Mac at home and at Work just work. Macs let you focus on your work. I am simply able to get more stuff done with Macs than PCs. So if any business is looking to get computers I would without question tell them to become a mac house if they want higher productivity and less downtime.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
People often credit Reagan for the fall of the Soviet Union. While overspending for the Nuclear Arms race was a drain on the Soviet Union, it really was the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan that wore them down. Small groups of "freedom fighters" were taking on a World Power and were losing. It was their Vietnam. Plus, I credit video tapes of American shows like Dallas. Laugh, but bootleg copies of these shows were very popular and showed the Capitalist paradise. People would see the lifestyles and ask why they couldn't have that.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
"USA set out in the 50s and 60s to save the world from Communism and help the poor and underclass in America - now we get blamed for every world problem, we have a huge military posted everywhere (why?)"
Our fight against Communism lasted till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. All the things our country did in the name of stopping the Dominoes from tipping countries Communist had within them Faustian bargains to them. We backed certain leaders, funded torture and deaths in stadiums, assassinations, coups, and proxy wars. When you do stuff like this, however well intentioned, they cause a chain of unintended consequences. You create, train, and arm a fighting force of muslim extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and call them "freedom fighters." Who knew they would end up training to crash planes into our buildings around 20 years later? Everytime we created a coup or proxy war in the name of capitalism we created a ton of collateral damage whose survivors do not forget even though Americans often do. We bet on dictators who did horrible things to his people and were corrupt, but they were our dictators and not with the reds. Sphere of influence trumped human rights and being naive we it never occured to us there would ever be blowback.
All the USAID in the world will not bring a mother's children back from the dead. Having free access to a McDonalds will not erase being tortured even though you were the wrong guy. Being free from communism is small comfort when your son and daughter-in-law were tortured and murder as a part of the Disappeared, and your grandchildren stolen and adopted by those who participated in that Dirty War.
We have so many miltary installations around the world because US has "interests" to protect, most of them corporate. We have them because we do not make anything here, so we have to protect our ability to get our stuff. We have built the most expensive, the most advanced military on the planet because the Military Industrial Complex is a business and it keeps finding ways to justify such a huge chunk of our coffers at the expense of all else. Since we have such a Military, we are not to interested in developing a robust diplomacy. We see peace as weakness or appeasement. We have to scream to the world how macho we are because we a fearful people, who believe that any sign of weakness means the "bad guys" (whoever it is on any particular era) will invade and force us to be their slaves.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Here is the explanation for this. The Bush Administration's boom was based on the housing and construction boom that favors those who are of the construction trades, who may or may not have a high school education or some college. If you look at the unemployment data, the disparity of who is employed and who not employed and how for long, is level of education. When the crash happened in 2008, you had lots and lots of construction workers laid off. That effected businesses who provided products and services to them had to lay off people with or without high school degrees or some college. Plus you had baby boomers being laid off who got into business before you had to have a college degree, who found themselves unemployed without degrees and perhaps updated skills.
In this downturn if you had a college degree or higher you fared far better than any other person looking for work with either some college, high school diploma, or no high school diploma. The unemployment rate was 5% for those with degrees (still high because usually the rate is close to 0% for this group). If you have a degree, skills, and experience you even do better.
The persistence of problems for the lower 20% are made more difficult by employers blacklisting those who lost their jobs at the beginning of the downturn and were still out of work. The longer you are out of work, the less likely you will be hired. Plus you have age discrimination in this country at a time where the demographics are swelling with potential workers over 50. Because it is an employers market, they have room only to hire those who are youthful, have more skills, and more education. Unfortunately, the longer you are out of work, the more likely than not you feel less confident and more desperate and that doesn't interview well.
This happening when a college education and adult education is getting more expensive, drawn out (because it is hard to get into crowded classes or cuts in classes), and difficult to get financing for if you got bad credit from the crash.
Every time you make government cuts, that means people with fresh skills and experience go out in the unemployment pool often getting hired before those who were cut in 2008. Being hired and working in a boom era is a different experience than working in the worst economic downturn. Being kept and relied on by employer in tough times tends to have more weight that being a boom worker laid off when everything hit.
The Bush era had to deal with the Internet bust and 9/11, which impacted more skilled and educated people who had savings and optimism to start their own businesses or had contacts to start projects with people.
In the Bush era we were also conducting two wars which employed people overseas as military personnel and as part of private contractors. As these wars have been drawn down by Obama, you are also adding more potential workers who have to convert the many skills they have learned into civilian use.
The Bush administration operated in an environment of unheard of rampant lending that allowed all kinds of projects to occur and no one was worried who was going to end up paying for it. The crash shut that all down and still financial institutions are still sitting on their cash. The Obama has had to operate with private lending essentially frozen, while corporations sit on historic levels of cash.
When you see claims like "So the bottom 20% is doing worse under Obama than it did under Bush, and the top 5% is doing better under Obama than it did under Bush?" You have to understand what the demographics are, what are the conditions on the ground, what are the skill sets and education needed?
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
I am currently an Office Manager because I like more time to spend with my kid, but I have been an Interactive Publications Manager, an award-winning web producer, PR Relations Coordinator and Client/Subscriber Services Manager for a Commercial Real Estate data company, IT Contractor, Telecommunications Coordinator, and worked in Technical Support and Training for computers. On the side, I have written blogs including one under my moniker.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
NAFTA and the Globalism that it unleashed had many negative unintended consequences (or intended consequences depending on your point of view) while having very little of the benefits that were promised to us. There is a reason why the Clinton administration and Congress rushed through adopting this treaty and others like it even though it would have a negative effect on manufacturing, workers, and the environment. We had a rare opportunity to negotiate those things in but they wrongly believed that we could negotiate these things AFTER signing. I remain upset at the Clintons, but also all of the former Presidents from both parties for pushing it through. I had friends and family members lose their jobs because of NAFTA. NAFTA also created economic dislocation of those South of the border. Where ever the American dollar went it meant that no one could afford goods or supplies for their farms. Walmart brought their stores to Mexico and Central America and even operates as a Bank down there.
If NAFTA wasn't enough to put down American manufacturing, WALMART put the last stake through its heart by going to remaining manufacturers and telling them if they do not move to China they will not work with them. Walmart is not the only force to squeeze out American manufacturing. There was a wide spread belief in the 1990s that workers will be freed from the drudgery of manufacturing jobs and become knowledge workers. This was part of the Internet boom as everyone and their uncle were becoming web designers/knowledge workers. The problem was that there was not enough jobs to absorb these new knowledge workers without creating a bubble of companies that were not making profit. In those days, there were companies whose sole goal was to get big enough so Microsoft could buy them out.
Meanwhile entire towns were decimated economically and physically as manufacturing closed and any business that supported manufacturing.
I completely agree that we need to make things here again and the pendulum is starting to swing back to making things in the US again as fuel costs make manufacturing overseas more costly. We need to be makers, but we need to do so with producing good paying jobs that would support a thriving middle class. We need to be the leader in renewable technology, water purification and storage, and waste recycling -- things the world needs and will need in the future. We need to make investments in these things and in education.
We can solve the problem twofold: cutting off tax benefits and trade preferences to companies that send jobs and capital overseas, and give preferences and tax benefits to companies that manufacture here. Companies can still put jobs and capital overseas, but they do not get help from the public coffers or protections. If you want to be a global company you have to find benefits elsewhere, but if you want the stability of being an American company you have to contribute to the system that makes it so via court system, government R&D, transportation system, the education system, and infrastructure improvements that make commerce possible.
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
I own that 2012 Honda civic and we are pleased with it. I have no idea why people were so negative about it. It just doesnt make sense.
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
Consumer reports does not have the reputation it once had, unfortunately.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Despite my commentary I am a very optimistic person who has worked since I was 16 (actually earlier if you count babysitting). I have worked hard all my life and with passion. I am more likely to be hard on myself more than any external source. I never blame anyone for my shortcomings. My success is that I have treated my work as a vehicle to add more and more skill sets to my toolbox which allows me the ability to be productive at everything I do.
I realize that I am fortunate. I am a middle-classed white person who has had access to an excellent education. My family spends money prudently and appreciates the virtue of doing so. We reinforce in our son the importance of education and gaining skills for the future.
No matter what happens my family will be just fine. Except for a small Pell Grant in the 1980s, I have never had to rely on direct government aid. We do not spend what we do not have.
But I am also an unapologetic liberal who rejects the notion that we are supposed to be some Horatio Algeresque lone-wolves in a libertarian state-of-nature paradise. We live in an interdependent and interconnected universe. No one succeeds alone in a vacuum. Everybody had someone take interest in them making all the difference. Everybody is presented with a set of circumstances that make it easier or more difficult to succeed because of their environment and genetics. Some people are more resilient than others depending on a wide variety of factors. How we are measured as a society is how well we treat those who are struggling, not how we enrich those who have every advantage.
The fact I am interested in investing is proof that I have confidence in the future and do not listen to the doomsayers. When I commentate on the socio-political-economic shortcomings of our country it is meant to illuminate and create change for the better.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
I think it is adorable when people replace history with their own narrative that conveniently fits with their own political philosophy but never happened.
There was a time up to the 1970s that most workers worked in family owned factories when unions had power to negotiate great benefits. Workers had pensions. Workers stayed with companies for 25-40 years when they could retire comfortably. Not only were workers taken care of to their deaths, but they were certain that their offspring could get out of high school and work where they did with the same benefits. So essentially, there did exist a cradle to grave benefits for manufacturing workers.
I remember having a debate about union workers getting such salaries of $25 an hour back in the eighties. The 1980s represented the beginning of a full frontal assault on unions and workers rights. The narrative emerged that unions were bad, and that we all should be entrepreneurs. They even revived the old victorian mythology of Horatio Alger, Jr. In these debates I would have I would point out the societal and economic value of the working class earning $25 an hour. This would allow purchase power to save, buy a house, and pay property taxes. This would allow for disposable income to buy toasters, appliances, cars, and other consumer goods which creates other jobs. When you have good wages, they can pay taxes that contribute to infrastructure improvements and programs that again create jobs.
Starting in the 1970s but accelerating in the 1980s, you see a decline in family owned businesses and farms as they get taken over by larger corporate entities that have no stake in the communities where the businesses they take over reside. When corporate owners make decisions from across the country they do so without any consideration of how it will effect the community unlike the family owned business.
By the mid to late 1980s, you see the shattering of the socio-economic contract between employer and employee. An employee became an entrepreneurial free-agent and the word was that if you stayed at one company more than 2-3 years something was wrong with you because it meant you were not confident to take your skills into the marketplace. Since the socio-economic contract had been severed, workers had to take on more and more expenses like health care, take less vacations, and struggle to find a way to save for the future.
Gone are the decent paying jobs right out of high school and this is responsible for the most pain in this economic downturn of 2008. This downturn badly hit people who did not finish high school and all other non-college graduates. The decent paying jobs for non-college graduates was construction or the trades, which were hard hit when commercial and residential were hard hit. It is hard for a construction worker or a person in the trades to go back to school and get a college education because it is no longer affordable for the working class to do without taking out debt that cannot afford to pay back.
The average amount of college debt in 2012 for each student is 27k. The more debt a student or graduate takes on means they put off marriage which is the best predictor of economic success, put off having kids, put off major purchases, etc. This is caused by the privatization of college loans from government loans which would be forgiven after time. Private loans are more expensive and live on until they are paid off with enormous interest that eats into the purchase power and makes people question if it is worth getting a college education even though only college graduates are being considered in this an employers' market.
This is a few of many facets that are happening to the working and middle class.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
(interest rates drop more favor corporate borrowers than for individual consumers, and the lower rates hurt incomes of individual savers).
This is one of my pet peeves. This lack of saving power forces people into the stock market to get the returns that they got in the 1970s with your old school passbook. I remember opening a savings account with my parents in the Nixon era. I was able to get very good interest for a kid. This is why most people in the 1970s and 1980s didn't get into the stock market. Why would one risk their money, if you can get a decent return on your savings account? I think the Internet boom and investment boom of the mid to late 1990s was due to more people entering the market as interest rates on savings accounts fell and 401ks and other consumer investing reached out to average folk. The more people entering the stock market raised the price of stock which encouraged people to invest more.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
The thing is the migrants who come here have skills. It is a skill to be able to go into the fields when it is 90-100 degrees and pick produce for Americans. It takes skill to butcher meat, be a nanny, do landscaping, and efficiently clean houses. When Georgia cracked down on migrants, produce rotted on the field because there were few Americans who wanted those jobs and those who tried didn't last but a day. Not only do these migrants do these jobs, they work multiple jobs. They work hard, and value education for their children. Many of the dreamers want to be doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers and their bi-lingual skills are needed. This has been the immigrant story since the very beginning. Most of the first generation of immigrants have only backbreaking work ethic to offer which has value. It is the second generation that knows what hard work is that are motivated by that and their parents to achieve more.
The only time migrants are a burden is on the local or state level, when employers offer no health care or benefits and force that cost on local governments. Migrants worried about their status put off getting medical help until it is an emergency, while taking the most dangerous jobs that expose them to harmful chemicals. On a National level they pay into our Social Security system without being able to claim any of it. They keep the country from feeling the ill effects of an aging demographic like all other industrialized countries like Japan.
The best thing is to allow that second generation to thrive and get a great education and help them contribute to our society along with all their fellow students. We need to have more science, art, music (music has been proven to increase math skills), and give kids a vigorous well-rounded education. This is the only way to help the economy.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
For those who are still of an opinion that supply-side anti-regulation is a force for good should read AND watch Alan Greenspan's October 2008 testimony where he admits that the economic philosophy that he and the republicans have been preaching was a failure. It was not the low income sub-prime loan folk who are at fault according to Greenspan but the consequences of no regulatory oversight and markets spinning out of control. It is interesting that when business articles talk about that 1984-2007 economic expansion that was supposedly was put in motion by Reaganomics, they leave out the major dips that caused misery and economic disruption. They do not mention the unsustainable bubbles of Reagan's Military spending bubble that crashed in 1991. They give credit to Reagan for the Clinton economic boom that was also unsustainable because people were betting on a whole new paradigm that companies need not to turn a profit. They even give Reaganomics credit for the unsustainable real estate boom created by criminal level leveraging and irresponsible and predatory business practices. They ignore that since the Reagan era the gap between rich and poor has been increasing. The USA is only number one in GNP, but lags far behind in health care and education which is essential for innovation and economic health.
As someone who was born when LBJ was President and was politically engaged at an early age, I remember a lot from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, the aughts all the way to the present. There are a lot of holes that the defenders of supply side conveniently leave out.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Fact: 50% of welfare and food stamps recipients are children, and much of the rest are their parents are barely able to keep from being homeless. Are you suggesting we let the children starve or be so malnourished that they become a burden to our health care system? Grow up and stop blaming the poor for your problems.
Stop scapegoating hard working migrants who were forced across the borders by the bad side-effects of globalism. These migrants have earned the ability to stay here because they do the hard work that Americans have shown not to be able or wanting to do. These migrants risk their lives to cross for basic survival.
Americans are in the a fix because they have clung to an economic philosophy that lead to the worst economic downturn since the great depression. We got screwed by credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, and insane leveraging by people who used our money to fund that lunacy. We got screwed by the Supply-siders and anti-regulation zealots. Americans are screwed because they do not value education, critical thinking, and science which are the building blocks of innovation. Americans are not healthy because the health care system we want over single payer or Obama care, has NO INCENTIVES to make Americans healthy, because they make money keeping Americans alive by more and more expensive interventions. I can go all night listing all the causes of our nation's problems and never have to bring up poor people or migrants.
You save your outrage over someone getting cigarettes, while the very people who engineered our economic collapse are living in $25 million dollar homes with OUR money. You need to get some perspective.
Should Tim Cook Ask WWJD (What Would Jobs Do)? [View article]
I am guessin he would would have a long string of insults for all the handwringers and speculators. He would probably tell them he #$#%# knew what he was doing when he hired Cook and set up the company how he liked it before he died. He knew he was dying and wouldn't #$#%# do anything that would harm his legacy far out in the future. He would also tell them that no other company has changed the way we do things with insanely great products. No other company has the track record Apple has. No other company has the customer loyalty Apple has. No other company is positioned in the spaces that Apple is in. He would tell them that Apple has never been Wall Street's monkey, either people believe in the company or they do not. If they cannot wait for excellent products when they are ready, they do not know Apple nor do they understand technology, and they probably shouldn't be investing in technology.
What would Steve Jobs do? Make insanely great products people love and ignore people who think they know better than a company that has been enormously successful.
Am I wrong?
Apple's Growing Slice Of The Enterprise Market Should Offset Other Concerns [View article]
The resistance you hear are from those who stake their livelihoods on being PC experts. IT departments go with what they know so they pick PCs because they are comfortable with them and are used to the downtime and fixing stuff. They simply do not understand that users need to get stuff done and want their computers to just work. I want a coffee break because I finished my tasks, not because I am waiting for IT to fix my computer or miss a coffee break because I have to fix it.
My Mac at home and at Work just work. Macs let you focus on your work. I am simply able to get more stuff done with Macs than PCs. So if any business is looking to get computers I would without question tell them to become a mac house if they want higher productivity and less downtime.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Our fight against Communism lasted till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. All the things our country did in the name of stopping the Dominoes from tipping countries Communist had within them Faustian bargains to them. We backed certain leaders, funded torture and deaths in stadiums, assassinations, coups, and proxy wars. When you do stuff like this, however well intentioned, they cause a chain of unintended consequences. You create, train, and arm a fighting force of muslim extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and call them "freedom fighters." Who knew they would end up training to crash planes into our buildings around 20 years later? Everytime we created a coup or proxy war in the name of capitalism we created a ton of collateral damage whose survivors do not forget even though Americans often do. We bet on dictators who did horrible things to his people and were corrupt, but they were our dictators and not with the reds. Sphere of influence trumped human rights and being naive we it never occured to us there would ever be blowback.
All the USAID in the world will not bring a mother's children back from the dead. Having free access to a McDonalds will not erase being tortured even though you were the wrong guy. Being free from communism is small comfort when your son and daughter-in-law were tortured and murder as a part of the Disappeared, and your grandchildren stolen and adopted by those who participated in that Dirty War.
We have so many miltary installations around the world because US has "interests" to protect, most of them corporate. We have them because we do not make anything here, so we have to protect our ability to get our stuff. We have built the most expensive, the most advanced military on the planet because the Military Industrial Complex is a business and it keeps finding ways to justify such a huge chunk of our coffers at the expense of all else. Since we have such a Military, we are not to interested in developing a robust diplomacy. We see peace as weakness or appeasement. We have to scream to the world how macho we are because we a fearful people, who believe that any sign of weakness means the "bad guys" (whoever it is on any particular era) will invade and force us to be their slaves.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
In this downturn if you had a college degree or higher you fared far better than any other person looking for work with either some college, high school diploma, or no high school diploma. The unemployment rate was 5% for those with degrees (still high because usually the rate is close to 0% for this group). If you have a degree, skills, and experience you even do better.
The persistence of problems for the lower 20% are made more difficult by employers blacklisting those who lost their jobs at the beginning of the downturn and were still out of work. The longer you are out of work, the less likely you will be hired. Plus you have age discrimination in this country at a time where the demographics are swelling with potential workers over 50. Because it is an employers market, they have room only to hire those who are youthful, have more skills, and more education. Unfortunately, the longer you are out of work, the more likely than not you feel less confident and more desperate and that doesn't interview well.
This happening when a college education and adult education is getting more expensive, drawn out (because it is hard to get into crowded classes or cuts in classes), and difficult to get financing for if you got bad credit from the crash.
Every time you make government cuts, that means people with fresh skills and experience go out in the unemployment pool often getting hired before those who were cut in 2008. Being hired and working in a boom era is a different experience than working in the worst economic downturn. Being kept and relied on by employer in tough times tends to have more weight that being a boom worker laid off when everything hit.
The Bush era had to deal with the Internet bust and 9/11, which impacted more skilled and educated people who had savings and optimism to start their own businesses or had contacts to start projects with people.
In the Bush era we were also conducting two wars which employed people overseas as military personnel and as part of private contractors. As these wars have been drawn down by Obama, you are also adding more potential workers who have to convert the many skills they have learned into civilian use.
The Bush administration operated in an environment of unheard of rampant lending that allowed all kinds of projects to occur and no one was worried who was going to end up paying for it. The crash shut that all down and still financial institutions are still sitting on their cash. The Obama has had to operate with private lending essentially frozen, while corporations sit on historic levels of cash.
When you see claims like "So the bottom 20% is doing worse under Obama than it did under Bush, and the top 5% is doing better under Obama than it did under Bush?" You have to understand what the demographics are, what are the conditions on the ground, what are the skill sets and education needed?
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
If NAFTA wasn't enough to put down American manufacturing, WALMART put the last stake through its heart by going to remaining manufacturers and telling them if they do not move to China they will not work with them. Walmart is not the only force to squeeze out American manufacturing. There was a wide spread belief in the 1990s that workers will be freed from the drudgery of manufacturing jobs and become knowledge workers. This was part of the Internet boom as everyone and their uncle were becoming web designers/knowledge workers. The problem was that there was not enough jobs to absorb these new knowledge workers without creating a bubble of companies that were not making profit. In those days, there were companies whose sole goal was to get big enough so Microsoft could buy them out.
Meanwhile entire towns were decimated economically and physically as manufacturing closed and any business that supported manufacturing.
I completely agree that we need to make things here again and the pendulum is starting to swing back to making things in the US again as fuel costs make manufacturing overseas more costly. We need to be makers, but we need to do so with producing good paying jobs that would support a thriving middle class. We need to be the leader in renewable technology, water purification and storage, and waste recycling -- things the world needs and will need in the future. We need to make investments in these things and in education.
We can solve the problem twofold: cutting off tax benefits and trade preferences to companies that send jobs and capital overseas, and give preferences and tax benefits to companies that manufacture here. Companies can still put jobs and capital overseas, but they do not get help from the public coffers or protections. If you want to be a global company you have to find benefits elsewhere, but if you want the stability of being an American company you have to contribute to the system that makes it so via court system, government R&D, transportation system, the education system, and infrastructure improvements that make commerce possible.
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
I realize that I am fortunate. I am a middle-classed white person who has had access to an excellent education. My family spends money prudently and appreciates the virtue of doing so. We reinforce in our son the importance of education and gaining skills for the future.
No matter what happens my family will be just fine. Except for a small Pell Grant in the 1980s, I have never had to rely on direct government aid. We do not spend what we do not have.
But I am also an unapologetic liberal who rejects the notion that we are supposed to be some Horatio Algeresque lone-wolves in a libertarian state-of-nature paradise. We live in an interdependent and interconnected universe. No one succeeds alone in a vacuum. Everybody had someone take interest in them making all the difference. Everybody is presented with a set of circumstances that make it easier or more difficult to succeed because of their environment and genetics. Some people are more resilient than others depending on a wide variety of factors. How we are measured as a society is how well we treat those who are struggling, not how we enrich those who have every advantage.
The fact I am interested in investing is proof that I have confidence in the future and do not listen to the doomsayers. When I commentate on the socio-political-economic shortcomings of our country it is meant to illuminate and create change for the better.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
There was a time up to the 1970s that most workers worked in family owned factories when unions had power to negotiate great benefits. Workers had pensions. Workers stayed with companies for 25-40 years when they could retire comfortably. Not only were workers taken care of to their deaths, but they were certain that their offspring could get out of high school and work where they did with the same benefits. So essentially, there did exist a cradle to grave benefits for manufacturing workers.
I remember having a debate about union workers getting such salaries of $25 an hour back in the eighties. The 1980s represented the beginning of a full frontal assault on unions and workers rights. The narrative emerged that unions were bad, and that we all should be entrepreneurs. They even revived the old victorian mythology of Horatio Alger, Jr. In these debates I would have I would point out the societal and economic value of the working class earning $25 an hour. This would allow purchase power to save, buy a house, and pay property taxes. This would allow for disposable income to buy toasters, appliances, cars, and other consumer goods which creates other jobs. When you have good wages, they can pay taxes that contribute to infrastructure improvements and programs that again create jobs.
Starting in the 1970s but accelerating in the 1980s, you see a decline in family owned businesses and farms as they get taken over by larger corporate entities that have no stake in the communities where the businesses they take over reside. When corporate owners make decisions from across the country they do so without any consideration of how it will effect the community unlike the family owned business.
By the mid to late 1980s, you see the shattering of the socio-economic contract between employer and employee. An employee became an entrepreneurial free-agent and the word was that if you stayed at one company more than 2-3 years something was wrong with you because it meant you were not confident to take your skills into the marketplace.
Since the socio-economic contract had been severed, workers had to take on more and more expenses like health care, take less vacations, and struggle to find a way to save for the future.
Gone are the decent paying jobs right out of high school and this is responsible for the most pain in this economic downturn of 2008. This downturn badly hit people who did not finish high school and all other non-college graduates. The decent paying jobs for non-college graduates was construction or the trades, which were hard hit when commercial and residential were hard hit. It is hard for a construction worker or a person in the trades to go back to school and get a college education because it is no longer affordable for the working class to do without taking out debt that cannot afford to pay back.
The average amount of college debt in 2012 for each student is 27k. The more debt a student or graduate takes on means they put off marriage which is the best predictor of economic success, put off having kids, put off major purchases, etc. This is caused by the privatization of college loans from government loans which would be forgiven after time. Private loans are more expensive and live on until they are paid off with enormous interest that eats into the purchase power and makes people question if it is worth getting a college education even though only college graduates are being considered in this an employers' market.
This is a few of many facets that are happening to the working and middle class.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
This is one of my pet peeves. This lack of saving power forces people into the stock market to get the returns that they got in the 1970s with your old school passbook. I remember opening a savings account with my parents in the Nixon era. I was able to get very good interest for a kid. This is why most people in the 1970s and 1980s didn't get into the stock market. Why would one risk their money, if you can get a decent return on your savings account?
I think the Internet boom and investment boom of the mid to late 1990s was due to more people entering the market as interest rates on savings accounts fell and 401ks and other consumer investing reached out to average folk. The more people entering the stock market raised the price of stock which encouraged people to invest more.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
The only time migrants are a burden is on the local or state level, when employers offer no health care or benefits and force that cost on local governments. Migrants worried about their status put off getting medical help until it is an emergency, while taking the most dangerous jobs that expose them to harmful chemicals. On a National level they pay into our Social Security system without being able to claim any of it. They keep the country from feeling the ill effects of an aging demographic like all other industrialized countries like Japan.
The best thing is to allow that second generation to thrive and get a great education and help them contribute to our society along with all their fellow students. We need to have more science, art, music (music has been proven to increase math skills), and give kids a vigorous well-rounded education. This is the only way to help the economy.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
As someone who was born when LBJ was President and was politically engaged at an early age, I remember a lot from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, the aughts all the way to the present. There are a lot of holes that the defenders of supply side conveniently leave out.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Grow up and stop blaming the poor for your problems.
Stop scapegoating hard working migrants who were forced across the borders by the bad side-effects of globalism. These migrants have earned the ability to stay here because they do the hard work that Americans have shown not to be able or wanting to do. These migrants risk their lives to cross for basic survival.
Americans are in the a fix because they have clung to an economic philosophy that lead to the worst economic downturn since the great depression. We got screwed by credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, and insane leveraging by people who used our money to fund that lunacy. We got screwed by the Supply-siders and anti-regulation zealots. Americans are screwed because they do not value education, critical thinking, and science which are the building blocks of innovation. Americans are not healthy because the health care system we want over single payer or Obama care, has NO INCENTIVES to make Americans healthy, because they make money keeping Americans alive by more and more expensive interventions. I can go all night listing all the causes of our nation's problems and never have to bring up poor people or migrants.
You save your outrage over someone getting cigarettes, while the very people who engineered our economic collapse are living in $25 million dollar homes with OUR money. You need to get some perspective.