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3.29 minutes per day.

Some numbers. On TV watching alone americans are averaging 153 hours/month. About 5 hours/day. Say an hour a day of that is advertising though it's probably more. Average hourly wage is about $20/hour. Total US population is about 300 million. So 300 million hours, the equivalent of 6 billion dollars, is being wasted on TV advertising every day in the US alone (100 billion hours/year).

And that's not even including product placement, junk mail, web, billboard, shop and newspaper advertising. Advertising costs us as a society a staggering amount.

---

The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".

You know, the 10+% unemployment group is not evenly distributed. It's more like 15% for no degree, and 5% for a degree. So don't just assume you can't get a job - if you have valuable skills and some education, odds are good that jobs are still out there. "Give up in advance and take it without even bothering to look" is not the right perspective here.
Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Electricians (median $22.32/hour - http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes472111.htm) earn more than secretaries (median $14.41/hour http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes436014.htm).

Electricians (median $22.32/hour - http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes472111.htm) earn more than secretaries (median $14.41/hour http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes436014.htm).

[Citation needed]

Seriously, I just looked up these two pages. Data on various engineers. Scroll down to the "Earnings" section. The lowest 10% of EEs make about $49,120, which is still more than the average master electrician makes.

"How can it be optional if they are going to fine you when you say no???" She comes from the World War 2 generation, when freedom actually meant something.

How ironic you say this. The problem with health insurance got it's start in WWII. Government passed wage control laws, employers weren't allowed to pay employees more. Because this made it hard to hire people the government later allowed employers to offer insurance and other benefits to employees. For doing so they were given tax deductions. People who bought their own insurance didn't then and don't now get those deductions though. It tremendously distorted the market for health insurance.

Falcon

But in a free market people can easily produce enough value to be able to buy what they need and much of what they want through voluntary transactions instead of force. US workers produce about $50/hour worked. The US government collects about $15/hour. Most of that for social services. Is there anyone who has worked the majority of their adult life who has come out ahead on government services? Force is bad. Free will is good. http://www.bls.gov/

The vast majority of American capital is owned by the middle class.

No. First, the top 5 percent own more than half -- i.e., the majority -- of all wealth. Second, most of those stocks in middle-class retirement funds are not owned by those middle-class people, they're owned by the Wall Street financial services corporations, and so are controlled by the boards of those corporations. The account holders are customers, not owners.

Nobody controls "economic resources" except the forces of supply and demand.

Uh, no. The resources used for economic production -- land, natural resources, factories, money, ideas (copyrights and patents) -- all are privately owned and controlled.

Presumably, you are whining that only a small minority of people are responsible for very large investments. But nothing is stopping you from joining them.

I'm not "whining" about anything, I'm pointing out that a system of centralized power is good for those who have the power, and not for the rest of us.

But several things are stopping me from being ultra-rich. First, I cannot afford to waste my time collecting dollars: I have little desire to be rich. (Prosperous, yes, of course.) But more than that, as a person of strong ethical character I see few ways to accumulate large amounts of wealth that don't involve unethical behavior. Finally, to become rich in our society it's pretty much necessary to start that way -- the U.S. has very poor intergenerational class mobility.

All they ask is that they get a cut, for their trouble.

What trouble? They provide no labor. They take some risk of not getting their money back, but so do people at the blackjack table. We don't consider them virtuous.

And they take more than a cut: in our capitalist system, the majority of the value created by labor is skimmed off by the investment class.

The U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion. Our workforce is about 150 million people. The average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value a year. Do they receive a salary that reflects that? Nope. Most of that amount goes to interest, dividends, and rents paid to various investors, people who didn't do the work but reap the benefit -- and most of it goes to the aristocracy.

100,000 is a low estimate

As of 2006 there are 14 million health care workers in the US. http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs035.htm

You can't just divide 14 million by 50 to get an average for each state because the majority of those workers are in the high population states, of which NY is #2 population in the US. Even dividing equally by 50 you get 280,000, which is clearly higher than the 100,000 you gave as a generous number. Keep in mind the regulation is anyone who can come in contact with patients. That means a janitor who removed the trash from rooms or an IT guy who works on the nurses computers at a check in area both need vaccinations.

I won't go into the profit margins with you because I am not knowledgeable enough with the subject matter to add anything there.

The university attendance rate over there must be exceptionally low?

In 2007, 27% of Americans had a bachelor degree or higher, and 54% had "some college or more" which includes associate degrees and those who attempted college but failed. 10% of Americans have a degree beyond the bachelors.

84% of Americans have graduated from high school.

In an international comparison in 2000, 37% of Americans have reached a "tertiary" level of education, compared with 29% in Australia.

Currently 68.6% of recent high school graduates were attending college in October 2008.

So it appears that college cost may be less of a problem than it may appear...

Check the inflation rates. $30 in 1984 money is roughly $62 in today's money.

while you are reasonably correct on the causes of the great depression, you fail hard.

1. is over already

That doesn't invalidate his point though. It is a list of steps that are taken in order, not a list of conditions that must all be true at the same time.

2. paying off loans isn't what causes contraction of money supply.

If taking out a loan increases the money supply (as argued in a great many documentaries), then paying it off decreases it. Go see "money as debt" or something similar.

3. if you want to single out houses as the only asset, then yes.

4. yes, there's no getting away from the fact companies have taken a hammering

5. most places have had a fall in profits, there are some standouts though. gold producers are one of them.

If you are trying to deny what he's claiming, you are doing a lousy job. And gold producers as standouts... Could that be because investors are no longer willing to invest in coin?

6. here is your big fail. jobless rate in 1933 was 24.9% http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm

Indeed, and that may yet save us. Or it could be a difference in counting methods, or it could be that the hammer is yet to fall for many.

7. here is your biggest problem - doomers like yourself who are still claiming the sky is falling when their are CLEARLY signs of recovery worldwide.

You mean, "the people who caused the problem in the first place are telling us everything is fine now in the faint hope that we will believe them and start spending like crazy again. But given that they have no credibility left, no one actually believes them, thus perpetuating the downwards spiral."

Not that that is a bad thing. Restarting the spending spree will just start another bubble, making the problems worse in the long run.

1. is over already

2. paying off loans isn't what causes contraction of money supply.

3. if you want to single out houses as the only asset, then yes.

4. yes, there's no getting away from the fact companies have taken a hammering

5. most places have had a fall in profits, there are some standouts though. gold producers are one of them.

6. here is your big fail. jobless rate in 1933 was 24.9% http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm

7. here is your biggest problem - doomers like yourself who are still claiming the sky is falling when their are CLEARLY signs of recovery worldwide.

"He spent a week learning enough English to get a job in a machine shop for about $1 an hour.

In short, he was just about as low as you can go on the totem pole in America."

No, he wasn't. He got a decent paying job with little to no skills. He didn't create that job, the opportunity was there for him.

According to http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl -> $1 in 1932 has the buying power of nearly $15 today. So, with no skills, he got a job paying today's equivalent of nearly $15/hr while having little to no expenses. That's pretty lucky, if you ask me. My best friend is trying to pay her way through college. Since she needs to attend classes, she can't work full-time. Since she's not yet a college graduate, she can't get a high-paying job. She would jump for joy at the chance to earn $15/hr. Despite the fact that English is her native tongue, and she had a 4.0GPA through high school, she earns maybe... 2/3rds of that number. Maybe a little bit more. Of course, we're also currently living through the heart of a huge economic downturn instead of catching the nation on its greatest economic and social upswing in history.

I'm doing everything I can to get myself through college, and I've lucked out pretty nicely. My best friend's dad hired me and pays me pretty well, and helps me with tuition. I'm lucky because I know a generous man with extra resources. I'm not getting a handout, because when I'm not at school, I'm working for him at his shop. I am, however, getting an opportunity. You'll never catch me saying how I built everything I had by myself, because I recognize that the foundation for a grand opportunity was made by someone else and I benefited. That's how the world should work. Not through handouts and the like, but through laying the groundwork for opportunity.

Oh, and despite my great opportunity and (relative to my friends) decent paycheck, paying for a roof over my head cost 50% of what I make, before any and all other expenses come in. Gotta pay for gas and maintain my car, because to get between work, home, and school means I drive 120 miles every day. I don't get to live the university life in a dorm, doing nothing but studying, because my parents could never afford that. In fact, I make more money than my own mother (who, by today's standards, makes less than the "bottom of the totem pole" figure you named before). I've lucked out, and got a lot of help from others, and yet it's still very challenging to improve my life.

I have another good friend, she doesn't attend college. She's not stupid, and she had attended classes in the past. But she needs to work full-time. You see, she had a respiratory illness and had to go the ER once. Despite having insurance, she's stuck with the bill. She's still paying off that bill. It's all she can do. She works, and lives, to pay off a bill she should've never had. Because of this, she's not going to school, she's not improving her life, she's doing everything she can to stay where she's at.

I would venture to say that most of our "poor" are in a similar situation. They're doing everything they can just so that they can maintain what little they have. I'm a little more fortunate. I can manage a little bit of upward socioeconomic mobility, but it certainly takes a lot of work. I wake up around 6am to go to work, got 60 miles from work to school, and then get back home sometime after 10pm. I'm not complaining, I know I have it good. I recognize and acknowledge what got me where I'm at, and I recognize and acknowledge what others don't have that keeps them where they are.

Yes, there are overwhelming amounts of people that make bad choices that ruin their lives. Yes, we shouldn't give people a free ride. However, there is a far more large amount of people that are dying for an opportunity. That's what we need to work towards: Providing that "American Opportunity".

I highly doubt it.

"Since I'm lazy, I won't even go down the road of how the socialist Europeans can get more work done than us USians and still take a month off each year...."

You might want to re-examine your beliefs:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/03/business/main3228735.shtml
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod4.nr0.htm

Another commenter posted an excellent link, showing the various U measures. U-3 is the official unemployment rate, and does not include discouraged or marginally attached workers.

So In July 09 it seems that the "count everyone" unemployment rate was 16.5% with the "official" rate was 9.5% That includes discouraged workers, Those who took part time job and anyone else classified as a marginally attached worker.

That's actually incorrect...

Although I'm sure that their sample size is never big enough to trust their numbers (I've got to believe it's +/- 2% or so personally), but according to this FAQ the numbers you see in the news are based off of a 'monthly sample survey'.

"Is the count of unemployed persons limited to just those people receiving unemployment insurance benefits?

No; the estimate of unemployment is based on a monthly sample survey of households. All persons who are without jobs and are actively seeking and available to work are included among the unemployed. (People on temporary layoff are included even if they do not actively seek work.) There is no requirement or question relating to unemployment insurance benefits in the monthly survey."

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.faq.htm

Then again _actual_ unemployment is incalculable. In the US it's calculated based on unemployment claims. Once you've exhausted your unemployment insurance, you are no longer on the radar (see below). Meanwhile the people that are no longer counted in the unemployment numbers graduate from unemployed to homeless (or living in their mom's basement).

The BLS makes a "best effort", but they only sample 60000 households which is not such a great sample since in each market that's only a few hundred out of 100's of thousands. This is where the fudging happens.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

I'm not sure how that works in Europe.

Remember that unemployment statistics only tell part of the story. Also remember that wikipedia isn't the most reliable source of facts ;-)

-Viz

Sure, there have been some fairly steep fluctuations, but when you really grind the numbers, you find that them "tainted gubbmint numberz" really aren't so horribly ofar off...

Sure, if you ignore the fact that the "tainted gubbmint numberz" completely ignored the runup to the crash thanks to the "adjustments" that were made. There is no "gubbmint conspiracy" on this, the government openly stated that they're making these changes. Despite what the government thinks, people have to pay for their food and gas no matter how expensive it gets.

Just think, the same argument you just gave can be used to prove your "deflation" doesn't exist: "On a seasonally adjusted basis, the CPI-U rose 0.7 percent in June after rising 0.1 percent in May. The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.2 percent in June after increasing 0.1 percent in May." Since the items in the "basket" change whenever the government feels like, the numbers produced are (literally, since if apples go up and oranges go down, the CPI switches to whichever makes the numbers look better) apples-to-oranges meaningless.

Seriously, I went through terrible schooling, and I know how dangerous mining and in particular coal mining is.

The worst part about your "terrible schooling"? You ain't smart enough to know just how terrible it was.

2007 US Coal Mining Fatality Rate: .029 / 200,000 hours
2007 US Construction Fatality Rate: .356 / 200,000 hours

Hard to say. Page 16 of this gives the occupational fatality rate for American garbage collectors in 2007(22.8 per 100,000 for anybody who doesn't feel like opening the PDF). That doesn't tell us who was at fault in those incidents, or whether poor safety equipment was involved.

I suspect that most of the risk is being hit by vehicles trying to pass the garbage truck while it is stopped to collect refuse(googling around didn't bring up a definitive justification for this, just references to a "University of Miami study" that said so). Adding, and enforcing, those little no passing signs, as they do for school buses, would presumably cut this down, at the expense of significant travel delays.

I don't really think video games are that expensive if you put everything in the right context. I remember back in the day (1995) that most new video games cost $40 a piece. Using this handy inflation calculator, a new video game should cost $56.61 adjusted for inflation from 1995. Unlike computer hardware, which follows Moore's law and consistently decreases in price per goodness, the amount of programming required to make a game is roughly constant, so the price of games should roughly follow inflation.

Or to think about it in a different way, it's a really cheap form of enteratainment if you compute the hourly cost of it. A typical computer game is worth about 40 hours of entertainment, which means you're paying about $1.50 per hour for a $60 game. Compared with watcing a movie in theaters or on DVD ($4/hr), or dining out ($15/hr), or paintball/lasertag ($10/hr+) it's a remarkably inexpensive form of entertainment.

The median is widely used for reporting average wages in the U.S. For example:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.nr0.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

It is even discussed in contrast with the mean:

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html

(The graph on that last page is terrible, the median wage increases by more than 60%, while the ratio of median to mean decreases by about 10%, but at a glance, the latter appears to have changed by 3x more than the former)

It can be somewhat difficult to decide how the job market is doing. Sure, at the moment, unemployment in the United States is at or near an all time high, with about 14.5 million people unemployed, and about 140 million people employed (Table A, May):

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

In 1983 (the bottom of a recession, sorry no direct link, make a query here: http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab1.htm ), there were about 10-12.5 million unemployed people, out of a workforce of about 100 million people.

In 1958 (the year in that decade with the highest number of unemployed people, same link for the query), the numbers are about 4.5 million unemployed and about 63 million people working.

So the pessimist, depending on the time period, has to think that the 40 or 80 million jobs that were created do little to actually contribute to the economy. And they are probably wrong.

It can be somewhat difficult to decide how the job market is doing. Sure, at the moment, unemployment in the United States is at or near an all time high, with about 14.5 million people unemployed, and about 140 million people employed (Table A, May):

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

In 1983 (the bottom of a recession, sorry no direct link, make a query here: http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab1.htm ), there were about 10-12.5 million unemployed people, out of a workforce of about 100 million people.

In 1958 (the year in that decade with the highest number of unemployed people, same link for the query), the numbers are about 4.5 million unemployed and about 63 million people working.

So the pessimist, depending on the time period, has to think that the 40 or 80 million jobs that were created do little to actually contribute to the economy. And they are probably wrong.

California even prior to the current budget crisis had among the highest student to teacher ratios in the nation. Moreover their funding per student is among the lowest in the nation.

That statement leaves me with two options. Assume that you are an idiot, or assume that you are lying. Claiming that education is underfunded and there are too many students in a classroom because the state has the most students per room and the lowest funding of the 50 states is like claiming that Mensa is failing because Joe has the lowest IQ in the room. Taking a ranking where someone must be at the bottom and claiming there is a problem because someone is on the bottom is either ignorant or dishonest. By your logic, if California had 2 students per classroom and spent 100k a year per student, and every other state had one student per room and spent 110k per year per student, California education would be underfunded.

Teacher pay is typically higher in California, BUT not in proportion to the cost of living in the state.

According to your own link..

California's average of $54,348 was nearly $10,000 higher.

While $54k a year is not going to make you rich, it is certainly a reasonable salary in a state where the Mean Income is $48K a year. Of course you use 7 year old data to try to make your point. With today's data, the Mean yearly salary is $62k a year. That is well over 20% above the state's average. This is for a part time job no less. (No, don't try to tell the lie that teachers work 12 hours a day and don't get summers off.) That means they are making the same hourly pay as people who make in excess of $80k a year.

With all the complaining about pay I hear from teachers though, it would seem that very few of them have enough of a basic math education to figure out how much money they make. Of course, if you can't figure out that your hourly pay is over twice the state average, it is more likely that their financial troubles are more from personal financial mismanagement than underfunding.

Source: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm

Hardly a starvation wage.

We are over http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htmpaying http://www.aft.org/salary/our http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary teachers!?

I don't think so... Mods can clean up my html...

You were on the right track, but your point of reference is way off. Try something like this calculator which adjusts $$ for inflation:

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

What cost $2800 in 1955 would cost $21457.27 in 2007.

Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2007 and 1955,
they would cost you $2800 and $377.12 respectively.

Or look for a CPI (consumer price index) calculator, like:

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

which believes according to it's data that
$
in
has the same buying power as
$22,278.81
in 2009

So, corvettes have risen in price dramatically faster than the general "basket of goods" tracked by the CPI.

50 years ago, movie tickets cost $0.15. Applying the consumer price index we find that the price today would be $1.12 if movie ticket prices had gone up in the same average proportion as other prices.

Considering how much films today depend on special effects, and considering that so many effects are done by computers, one would believe that the cost of producing a movie should be lower than fifty years ago.

Some people say that "all capitalists are greedy pigs", but obviously some pigs are greedier than others.

Admittedly I'm comparing 1960s dollars with current dollars, but still...

Do you realize how big the difference is? Based on this calculator, 25 billion dollars in 1960 has the same buying power as 180 billion dollars in 2009...

You can get the official consumer price index, from 1913 up to now here. $6 in 1969 would translate to approximately $36 today.

For older historical data, plus many other interesting historical data about prices and economic indicators, this site is very interesting.

According to http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl .. $6/hr in 1969 is equivalent to $34.78 today. I read it on the internet, so it must be true! :P

So not too shabby. Not omgwow!, but not exactly minimum wage either.

Incredibly low? TFA quoted the median salary for a teacher in their mid 30s as $74,000 a year. I'm sure many people would be happy to trade their "incredibly low" salary for that incredibly low salary.

I don't know what article you're reading but the one linked in the summary says nothing about the median salary of a teacher. The number $74,000/yr, which I assume you pulled out of your ass, is about $30,000/yr inflated over the actual value. Sure, after 30 years of teaching I'd be making that much, but not in my mid-30s.

whoa. whoa boy. A lot of good points, but you are mistaken about the level of self-employment. Read this. They quote 25%. I know the amount of freelance work done is more -- even graphic designers who have a permanent position do it on the side. It's just the lifestyle we have. As to market saturation, i don't know where you live, but here in Minneapolis/St. Paul, all my contacts say we have more candidates than positions right now. And I know how many design companies are out there. I also know a lot of them are sole proprietorships with less than 25 employees -- it's freelancing "plus"... Everyone has a graphic design "business" on the side. Few of them are making much money.

I agree that Joe Average can churn out a simple newsletter and do simple layouts. Which is all a lot of people need. But running a marketing campaign, or designing an art catalog, submitting to a magazine -- they wouldn't know a bleed margin from a x-line, or Helvetica from Century Schoolbook. :) Absolutely there's a need, but for small projects that publish directly to the web or a small circulation they can print at Kinkos? Not so much.

There's this talk about how blogging is changing things. It is, but is it doing so in a good way? Nearly all blogs are little more than a news aggregate. All they provide in the way of content is commenting and maybe some editorializing.

I didn't say it would be an improvement. Frankly, the quality of news in general has gone down in recent years. Few people have time to do fact-checking and research and a lot of embarassments have happened in recent times. Blogging only lowers the professional responsibility to uphold journalistic integrity another notch. And as to bias, you're right again! But most people don't want unbiased news. Witness the Fox News Network, or the Rush Limbaugh Show, or Larry King... dear god, it's horrible out there. But people are buying it.

Another problem is that people want everything spoon-fed in bite-sized doses. How many people actually read full articles and don't just read sensationalist headlines and maybe skim over the summary.

There's more information on a soup label today than most people's knowledge of the world a hundred years ago was. We are swimming in information; When you're faced with so much data, you're going to skim, look for key phrases, and try to "surf" it rather than "absorb" it. That's just human nature. The media needs to adapt to this, because most people can't read 500 WPM at post-doctorate level like most of us can. The average reading comprehension is 5th grade, and you're lucky if they have ever read a book cover to cover in their life. That's why people still spend so much time watching TV instead of the internet -- they can't type as fast and they can't read as fast. The average person can listen to a conversation (about 200-300WPM) faster than they can read. So any news publication will need to adapt to that reality, not the other way around.

despite this I do think that the internet has real value and will probably bring about positive change. The problems I describe are probably symptoms of American media in general, but from what I've seeing the web isn't really helping.

The problem is not limited to "american media". We're just ahead of the curve.

I can't believe I'm reading this argument. In 1933 the unemployment rate was 25%. In 1940 it was 22%.

Or maybe 14.6%

And ... "Computer software engineers are one of the occupations projected to grow the fastest and add the most new jobs over the 2006-16 decade. Excellent job prospects are expected for applicants with at least bachelorâ(TM)s degree in computer engineering or computer science and with practical work experience." http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos267.htm

And that was in the 50s, so with the inflation, you can only guess how heavy the fine would be now.

$88,046.89

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=1950&year2=2009

Just sayin.

You can read the report at http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos110.htm from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Specifically look at the Training and Outlook sections before you make your decision. It sounds like you would have ALOT of work to do to even make the most basic entry level job.

You can read the report at http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos110.htm from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Specifically look at the Training and Outlook sections before you make your decision. It sounds like you would have ALOT of work to do to even make the most basic entry level job.

if it's going to include "benefits" it'd better include the enormously inflated cost of health care! Oh it doesn't?

Health care paid by employers does count under total compensation. If you prefer to gather the statistics yourself and plot them, see the "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" report, produced quarterly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As of September, 2008, benefits (including health insurance) were 30.3% of worker total compensation, meaning if you had to pay your own 401K, health care, etc. you would see your pre-tax wages rise by 30%.

The leading elements of total compensation are all around 7% to 8% each, include legally required ("employer side" of FICA), insurance, health care, and paid leave. Lesser elements include retirement & savings and supplemental pay.

By the way, you should know that in 1970, FICA taxes (totaling both the "employer" and "employee" side) were 9.6% in 1970, and 15.3% today, so we've lost 5.7% of total compensation (below the FICA max) to the government since then.

And why would tariffs put you out of a job? Tariffs affect imports not exports.

The history of global trade is that if one country raises its tariffs, other countries tend to "retaliate".

That said, my industry also depends on a lot of imported specialized technical equipment (from Canada, Mexico, France, and Japan off the top of my head), so US tariff rises would increase our costs at least in the short run if not the long run as well.

39 years later his son, a white collar computer programmer raising three children and supporting a wife can't afford to buy a house on 100% of his wage in ANY POPULATION CENTRE

The question you should ask is "why?" Why are houses so large now? We know that inflation adjusted price of housing per square foot has been dropping until about the peak of the housing bubble. Is the size of houses just demand-driven, does it reflect a generally richer population, is it due to rises in the minimum wage, or is it due to land use zoning regulations? I'm not sure, but I'd like to see an actual analysis.

On the other hand, housing prices are now down 10-30% post-bubble in most places, with house rent even cheaper.

You are correct that housing and health care costs as a percent of income are higher now then 40 years ago, of course both housing stock and health care is much improved since then. And both are very highly regulated - housing by zoning laws and building codes, with demand driven up till recently by the existance of the government-sponsored enterprises of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Health insurance has a different set of rapidly expanding regulations that are different in every state, demand driven by government provided Medicare and Medicaid, defensive medicine due to nearly unlimited malpractice liability, and IT expenses to comply with Federal medical privacy laws. There also is the fact that it is still difficult for foreign doctors to legally immigrate into the US and set up practice, and we now pay our doctors twice as much as the OECD average.

None of this is related to trade though, with the exception of cheaper wood products coming in from Canada due to NAFTA, which was probably part of the decrease in housing costs per square foot built.

Excellent graphs. I have been showing similar stuff to people who believe the media's assertion that the sky is falling down. It gets even better when one compensates for inflation, dividing the Dow Jones by the Consumer Price Index.

The reasonable conclusion is that we are at a fairly average economic recession, not the end of times.

Where did this $32,000 figure come from? According to the American Federation of Teachers, beginning teachers with a bachelor's degree earned an average of $31,753 in the 2004-05 school year.

So you spent an entire post trying to disagree with the previous post because his figure was $247 higher than yours? I think I missed the entire point of your post then.

Where did this $32,000 figure come from? According to the American Federation of Teachers, beginning teachers with a bachelor's degree earned an average of $31,753 in the 2004-05 school year. That's more than my starting salary was as an engineer in a decent sized metropolitan area. Had I been living back in the small town where I grew up, that would be a pretty decent chunk of money. Granted, the salary increase prospect for an engineer is much greater due to the more complex project structures that give engineers much greater advancement opportunity. Still not bad though for having all government holidays and 3 months of vacation.

If you're going to be a xenophobe, you might as well come out and say it, rather than blaming all of our economic woes on foreigners.

The number of H1B workers is a drop in the bucket in the context of the national economy.

The number of H1-B visas that can be issued in a given year is limited to 65,000 by law.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the total size of the American workforce was approximately 153.7 million last month (with unemployment at a troubling 11.6 million).

An H1B worker is typically limited to a 6-year stay, unless the worker is applying for permanent residency. Assuming that all 65,000 workers stay each year, we have 390,000 H1B workers in the country at the present (I'd guess the actual number is somewhat less than that).

At the very worst, H1-Bs might represent 0.25% of the national workforce.

Microsoft employs 3,517 H1-B workers (the 3rd most of any American firm), out of 89,809 total employees, or just about 4%. This number might be a little high, although 4 percent doesn't strike me as being particularly alarming.

Microsoft's recent round of layoffs (the first in the company's history) let go about 5,000 workers. Although I suppose these could have largely been avoided by eliminating all of the H1-B workers, that still leaves 1,500 workers, and assumes that every single H1-B worker was worthless to the company (which is somewhat doubtful).

To summarize: Stop complaining about the H1-B workers. Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession, the current crop of H1-B workers is simply too small to be having any substantial effect on the economy.

Its easy to say "stop complaining". If I was 1 of the 3517 qualified workers that have lost there job due to offshoring practices . I would tell you to take your stats and stick them just 4% up your ASS. If a hundred companies were to stop offshoring their labor it would be a very substantial effect. These dooshes were always lobbing to get more H1-B's so you see, the net effect of their practices are a significant negative impact to the US economy.

If you're going to be a xenophobe, you might as well come out and say it, rather than blaming all of our economic woes on foreigners.

The number of H1B workers is a drop in the bucket in the context of the national economy.

The number of H1-B visas that can be issued in a given year is limited to 65,000 by law.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the total size of the American workforce was approximately 153.7 million last month (with unemployment at a troubling 11.6 million).

An H1B worker is typically limited to a 6-year stay, unless the worker is applying for permanent residency. Assuming that all 65,000 workers stay each year, we have 390,000 H1B workers in the country at the present (I'd guess the actual number is somewhat less than that).

At the very worst, H1-Bs might represent 0.25% of the national workforce.

Microsoft employs 3,517 H1-B workers (the 3rd most of any American firm), out of 89,809 total employees, or just about 4%. This number might be a little high, although 4 percent doesn't strike me as being particularly alarming.

Microsoft's recent round of layoffs (the first in the company's history) let go about 5,000 workers. Although I suppose these could have largely been avoided by eliminating all of the H1-B workers, that still leaves 1,500 workers, and assumes that every single H1-B worker was worthless to the company (which is somewhat doubtful).

To summarize: Stop complaining about the H1-B workers. Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession, the current crop of H1-B workers is simply too small to be having any substantial effect on the economy.

Unemployment is just over 7%. During the great depression it was 25%. In the early 80's it was nearly 10%. The unemployment rate has been higher than it is here at least since 1996 in France, is the sky falling there?

Because unemployment is calculated differently now than it was during the 30's.

Workers that have been out of a job are not counted after a certain period of time. Nor are workers that have given up looking for a job or ones that have taken minimum wage part time jobs because they cannot find full time employment:

U3 is the "official unemployment rate" according to the BLS website. Due to this, it is the current measure of Unemployment that gets focused upon by most media, and therefore the public. It has, over the years, slowly excluded many of the factors that USED to go into how the US reported unemployment. Hence, there has been a gradual decrease in the Unemployment rate that has occurred regardless of what was happening in the Jobs market.

U3 is now comprised in a way that merely repeating it without a slew of caveats borders on fraud.

U6, on the other hand, is the broadest measure of Unemployment: It includes those people counted by U3, plus marginally attached workers (not looking, but want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past), as well as Persons employed part time for economic reasons (they want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule).

The U6 rate for January 2009 is 13.9% - far more worrisome than 7%, and far closer to how it was calculated in the 30's. And Roosevelt didn't have to deal with high unemployment AND a nation debt 2/3 the size of the nations GDP at the same time.

If you reduce taxation, more job creation and more spending happens. This is simple math. If you have $2,000 in your pocket at the end of 2 weeks versus having $1,500, what would your response be?

Save it, since such drastic tax reduction means that when I lose my job, social security has likely been cut, and I need every penny just to survive.

If you are younger, odds are you would buy useless junk like more video games, or a bigger t.v., or whatever. If you are older, you might be putting aside that extra 500 for a bigger or better house. Maybe getting some of the repairs done on your existing house. For the love of all things holy, its common......fucking.......sense.

No, it's unbelievably stupid. Spending your earnings instead of saving them was one of the things which got us into this mess. Not the main reason - that was Free Market Fundamentalism - but one of the reasons. If people had savings rather than debt right now, this recession would soon be over, rather than just getting started.

The math that has been done by alot of well known and respected economists shows that the current amount, before cuts in the stimulus bill amounts to $75,000.00 to each and every unemployed person in the country. And you think it's not big enough? Get off of Slashdot if you can't even understand basic math.

Integer division is indeed basic math. Your opinion that $75,000 is "a lot" has nothing to do with math. And 800 billion dollars divided by 11.6 million unemployed (from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm is about 69 000 dollars/unemployed. Oh, and nice form including decimal points to imply that the number is accurate to within a single cent.

BTW. Please learn to use paragraphs.

You can ALWAYS count on stimulating an economy of the US's size by reducing taxation.

Only if the economy relies on domestic manufacturing. When the majority of manufacturing has been outsourced to foreign countries, reducing taxation will simply result in people buying said foreign manufactured goods, which means that the economy will actually lose money, causing the country to go further into debt and making things worse.

Why are all these forclosures happening? Well, if the homeowners can't pay the mortgage, what's gonna happen? Reduced taxation=more money=less foreclosures and less debt.

Foreclosures are happening because people bought houses they can't really afford. Even with reduced taxation they probably couldn't afford them now that the housing bubble has burst. But here's a thought: How about using the incentive money to pay off those debts ? Sure, it would be rewarding incompetence; but hey, if Wall Street can get it...

Anyway, the way I'd do it would be to make unemployment benefits equal to the last job you held and have them continue indefinitely - dependent, of course, of you looking for a new job and taking one when offered. That way people would no longer need fear unemployment, which would allow the reallocation of resources - which is what getting kicked from a job because a firm folded or was downsized actually represents - to happen without destroying people's lives and causing the associated chaos. It might even eliminate the whole boom-bust cycle, since downturns would no longer cause a self-fulfilling prophecy of "I might be fired, thus I must stop all investment at once and start saving".

The engine of economy desperately needs lubricant, and generous unemployment benefits are that lubricant. Social security needs to be expanded a lot.