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Would these suffice?

Sharpest drop in 27 years

Year over year drop of 32%

September 2008: housing starts lowest since 1991

Third quarter drop of 20.5% in housing starts.

It should be self-evident if new housing construction plummets as it did in 2007-2009, all the industries who rely on housing construction would also cut back their production of products. It's the only time trickle down works.

California is one of the states that gets raped on taxes by the federal government; our income taxes go to pay for stuff in other states that we can't afford

No, California ends up about even, getting slightly more dollars back than they pay out to the fed.

The state getting screwed the worst seems to be Minnesota, although Connecticut, Jersey, Colorado and Boston are way up there, too. Note that most western states are getting more back from the fed than they pay out.

http://ritholtz.com/2012/02/is...

I'm just focusing on the words "punitive and confiscatory", would you describe as such the taxation levels in 60% :

http://ritholtz.com/2011/04/us...

The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced.

Care to guess what happens at that point? New construction doesn't sell, developers go bankrupt, new construction is sold at auction for lower prices. Then the new units available at lower prices push down prices of other housing, which makes purchase more affordable, which results in renters buying, which curbs rent prices.

Unless of course, large financial companies and well-connected donors are threatened by that circumstance.

Then, the central bank will step in, through its many channels, to put a floor under rental prices ("So I think if we spent enough money, got enough of a hit right now, it would look like a floor on house prices, and we might have something every bit as good as a floor on house prices."). The multiple government housing agencies (Fannie, Freddie, FHA, VA, USDA, etc) can also step in to influence the rental market, as they did the housing market.

Blackstone is a company securitizing rental flows and selling them. They are the largest private equity company in the world ("By both profit measures, the first quarter set quarterly records for Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm").

The former head of the US central bank, Bernanke, is now employed by Citadel, a massive hedge fund.

My point is simply this: house prices did not revert to historical norms because of the big players - donors - that would have been deleteriously impacted by it. With big players moving into the rental market, if something went wrong with their business plan, don't expect them not to use their clout to get the government and central bank to do something about it.

Two minutes on google, GDP China India before industrial revoltion gets you: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2... India fell steadily all the way to 5% of the world by 1970. From > 25 in 1800. China fell fro 33% in 1820 all the way to 5% by 1970. Now please go ahead and nit pick India was above 5% at independence etc etc. Over the long arc of history, industrialization destroyed more jobs world wide than it created. Only if you limit yourself to industrialized countries you could argue it created as many as it destroyed.

Plus, as fuel efficiency has gotten better and Americans have started driving less, the tax has naturally raised less revenue anyway.

That's only true if you compare to gasoline consumption during the economic bubble from 2003-2008. If you look over a longer period, gas tax revenue is the highest it's been since before 2003 in nominal dollars, and is roughly the average it's been from 1990-2014 in inflation-adjusted dollars. The tax is due for an increase to counter inflation, not because of the reasons TFS cites.

Federal gas tax revenue (fig 6-2) has never been enough to cover highway construction and maintenance expenses (figure 6-3). The gap has always been made up by state fuel taxes and other revenue.

Here's one: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2...

You think they didn't have sugar, fatty foods and exercising decades ago?

They did, but now it is in every thing you eat. Because we love the taste of fat and sugar.

Instead of a special occasion of the day when you eat sugar, it is eaten routinely. That is what is new.

For instance, replacing a piece of bread with a thin layer of bread and jam in the morning with a muffin (so essentially eating cake for breakfast).
Drinks also have vast amounts of sugar in them. A typical Starbucks coffee contains tons of fat and sugar to make it tastier, whereas black coffee does not.

Animals are getting fatter too though. link, link paper

The country had its best time in the 50s/60s after the war - with the highest taxes.

Also, myself an entrepreneur (albeit on a small scale) I know not a single entrepreneur including myself who ever looked at tax rates before deciding to become entrepreneurial.

Last, a good infrastructure - not just roads, the legal system!!! - for the most part benefits entrepreneurs and those with money. The worker classes go to small claims court at the most (I want to say it's about small change 99% of the time when they use the system), those who benefits the most from government provided infrastructure are those with something to loose. So if you believe that those who need, use, benefit from something should pay for it you should be asking for higher corporate taxes and local taxes (meaning don't let companies benefit here and pay (no) taxes in Bermuda.

The there's this:

Corporate tax rates US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Effective_Corporate_Tax_Rate_1947-2011_v2.jpg

Corporate, income and cap. gains tax rates US:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/dfadf.png

You are just plain wrong, historic corporate tax rates were higher, and NOW you have the crisis, the unemployment, the anger - the boom time seems to have been the 50s/60s.

Are you suggesting that while unemployment among tech workers hovers around 4%, there is actually a large population of "discouraged workers" in tech that have been unemployed for years and are consequently not counted among the unemployed?

Do you have any idea how unemployment is calculated? Once you get the burger flipper job, you're no longer considered a tech worker since you've "changed fields". Hence in U3 you won't be counted amongst unemployed, underemployed or discouraged tech workers. According to U3, you're now employed, and thus a happy productive member of the workforce. It's considered irrelevant that you've taken a 5x reduction in income, will never get another tech job since there's a big gap in your employment history unless you list burger flipper on your resume, that the cost and work of getting your university education is a total write off, or that you may be perfectly capable of doing some of the jobs for which H-1B happy employers claim there is a shortage of qualified people.

Another way of phrasing that claim would be "tech workers have a disproportionate ratio of discouraged to unemployed workers when compared against other sectors"

No it wouldn't - that doesn't follow at all. You could have a lower proportion of discouraged to unemployed workers (you forgot underemployed) when compared against other sectors, and still have a deceptive 4% figure. The fact that other fields may or may not be worse in that respect doesn't change the deceptive nature of the 4% figure for tech.

While we're at it, you apparently still don't understand the difference between U3 and U6. It's not credible to claim you have any real understanding of unemployment if you don't, so here's a clue.

How oh how do we counter these academic papers that show us individualism is the path to failure?

Hey, I know, with empirical evidence!

Stalin Mao Pol Pot

and last but not least, a couple of hundred million dead in the name of social justice, equality, and cooperation.

It is rather depressing here on slashdot lately. I week or so ago I used exactly those three names when a discussion came up about social equality. Someone claimed that social equality is the same as oppression. I made the point that conflating those dictators' policies with equality showed a profound lack of education, and left it at that. I expected to get yelled at for going too far by including pol pot, as no realistic thinking person with even the most basic knowledge of history could realistically argue that pol pot had anything to do with social equality. But no, I got yelled at because I made a point without backing it up with arguments. As though common sense and a basic primary school knowledge of history could be taught by a slashdot comment. Well this time I am going to try to explain it. Pol Pot is the easiest. Pol Pot's government was not communist, it was a despotism. Despotism is where a group or individual takes over all the resources and uses the control of those resources to gain power. It was a semi-feudal despotism. Feudalism means that there is a top class of people who are given power, and an underclass of peasants or serfs who work very hard and get nothing. Stalin and Mao created similar systems, but slightly less brutal. Despotism is a form of government that has been popular throughout history, and characterises Europe in the dark ages.

High social equality on the other hand, can be characterised by (to take a completely random example) the USA in the 1950's and 60's. Tax rates were higher and income equality was higher. It is harder to get nice graphs on government oppression during this period in the US, but I am sure we can all agree that less people were executed than under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Other countries that have had a high rate of social equality in the last century are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand. This is not an exhaustive list.

For more information on the statistical correlation between social equality and general wellbeing please see the following statistics lecture.

Actually, if they create a fighter with the performance of the F-35, it wouldn't be a problem at all... as the F-35 is massively expensive http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/f-35-the-most-expensive-fighter-jet-ever-built/, taking years longer to develop http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-27/lockheed-s-troubled-f-35-said-to-be-unscathed-in-budget.html, and still can barely get off the ground http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/feature/135080/f_35-reality-check-10-years-on-(part-1).html. It is a heaping pile of shith that we didn't need, and don't need, and may never get, and is sucking taxpayer money down like a drunk sailor in Subic bay.

On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, Chinese ingenuity will come up with a way to keep the Osprey from falling out of the sky and killing people (something we can't seem to be able to do). Once they fix that little glitch, maybe we can steal the plans back.

I hate replying twice, but i have to point out that:
"neither has the inflation adjusted price."
is simply not true. House prices have consistently outpaced inflation for decades, until the 2008 financial crisis. But prices still haven't returned to historical norms. And if it did, it wouldn't matter because the only people experiencing a "recovery" are the super rich.

So inflation adjusted wages haven't changed. Inflation adjusted prices are higher than they were in the past. And inflation adjusted executive compensation has increased over 100x in the same period. How is this defensible?

I bet that the turbines can be built better to last much longer.

Perhaps, but better turbines also cost more. What does that do to the bottom line?

Solar energy is still much more expensive than nuclear or wind, although it's getting there.

Solar panels already pay for themselves. The question is, how long does it take. People will install solar roof panels even without subsidies if the payback period is short enough.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/02/how-much-does-solar-cost/

The gas thing, $10 billion sounds like a lot, but it's over 7 years or more, it's not as bad as it sounds

First, the U.K. spent a lot of money to build out wind. Now, the U.K. must spend a whole lot more money because the wind is not reliable. So, this money, whether it is as bad as it sounds or not, is in addition to the already a lot of money the citizens in the U.K. have spent.

See also: "The U.K. government's effort to expand renewable energy generation will boost household electricity bills by 54 percent by 2020."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-14/u-k-green-energy-plans-boost-power-bills-54-by-2020.html

wind is otherwise cheaper than nuclear anyway.

Nuclear is mostly expensive because of the lawsuits and delays. If wind power was plagued with similar levels of lawsuits and delays, cost of wind power would similarly skyrocket.

And wind power is not suitable for base load, whilst nuclear power is.

Also, although you probably can get that high pressure front effect sometimes, wind speeds are generally higher in winter.

The U.K. has already decided that wind power alone is not reliable enough to provide power, and natural gas backup is required.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/6957501/Wind-farms-produced-practically-no-electricity-during-Britains-cold-snap.html

Please provide a reference to support your claim that wind power generation will increase during winter... I'm keen to read it.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you: the capacity factor numbers for winter are higher than for summer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#Variability_and_related_issues

Listen, you have got to get your economic information from someone other than Krugman or at the very least someone in addition to Krugman. The man is a political hack. Based on your posts, here's are some sites that are probably aligned with you politically but are actually written by people who know something about finance and economics:

The Big Picture
Interfluidity

Oy, this canard again?

Sorry, no: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/cra-thought-experiment/

As recently as 2010, they were failing. Source. I mean, yes, you can massage the data to put California in a better light, and yes, they have been making changes, but historically they've sucked. You can't just look 5 years, or 10 years, but all the years: Because that's where our federal deficit comes from. And when you look at that data... California's still bringing up the rear.

The problem with your thesis is that it doesn't work. The banks got hit by tens of billions in fines as the result of robosign abuses.

The thing about the mortgages is that it varies depending on the state. NY for example enforces chain of custody of the note. No note no title no foreclosure.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/02/mers-decision-in-re-ferrel-l-agard-case-no-810-77338-reg/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/23/948986/--Show-Me-The-Note-Foreclosure-Defense-Works

I'd like to see it compared to an updated map of states' net federal taxes.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/02/is-your-state-a-net-giver-or-taker-of-federal-taxes/

Your mid-late 90s as the start of all this is late. The real start is ~7/31/1982 or late 1987, depending on how you look at it - that's the start and end of the last "normal" boom/bust cycle, where the end would classically have been the start of a small recession, but was instead propped up by increasing the money supply. Money supply manipulation has been done every time the US approached a down since then.

You can see this fairly clearly in the Market cap/GDP ratio - up, up, up until 2000, and then wide swings but *way* over the traditional levels.

Wow, I'm having a hard time either a) explaining the issue or b) getting people to take my reports seriously.

The issue (for me) is that orders are getting placed with no expectation of them getting filled. Is this so hard to understand?

From a comment at http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/08/nanex-knightmare/:

"The point is to submit a large number of false trades that you have no intention of making until other traders start to notice them, then take advantage of their reaction. It works, because too many other actors in the market do not have enough time or information to recognize the pattern of bids and counterattack. More simply, it works by making markets less efficient to introduce an arbitrage opportunity.

Right now only a handful of specialized firms are seriously trying to exploit this, but as more money is made, I expect a lot more players to buy in. Eventually, there will be enough high speed action to make it a less effective strategy, but in the interim I’m expecting a lot more meltdowns."

If you quibble, please read http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2977.html and refute their argument.

Both, Joe and Jack are willing participants in the trade, both got their preferred prices, the 0.02 cents was cut out of their trade, but it didn't do anything to hurt them that a little bit more bargaining wouldn't have.

Please explain where or how HFT added the slightest amount of value for Joe or Jack.

Re your Schiff video:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/01/peter-schiff-was-wrong/

Japanese are printing Yen like crazy, it should be much stronger than it is today and prices in Japan must be much lower than they are today and there should be restructuring.

Looking at relative values between currencies ALL of which are being debased is useless.

Here is an example of their printing plan: 4 year printing plan that started in 2001

Here is part of their plan description from 2010

Here is the result of the third time BoJ 'eased' in August 2011

Here is some more in October 2011

2012, April, the headline is: "BoJ will print as much as it takes."

May, 2012

They are constantly running 'Quantitative Easing' programs, you can even refer to wiki - fourth paragraph in that chapter.

I bet that Texas funds your state.

California could probably fund that stuff if they did not give more money in federal income tax than they receive.

California receives more tax money than it pays.

I don't follow. Californians pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal spending.

You need to look at more up to date numbers.

It's funny. The District of Columbia receives $0.30 for every dollar paid. That's why their licenses plates say taxation without representation.

[quote]
But they have the oil that WE need in order to not suffer mass starvation.
[/quote]
NO.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/02/u-s-dependent-on-middle-east-oil-think-again/

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find one. In fact we're spending much LESS as a PERCENTAGE of GDP/GNP then during WW2 and we're taking in even less taxes. I could cite a bunch of sources for this as it's a well-known fact, but here's a nice graph.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/government-spending-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-2/

Are you sure you're not confusing this with total revenue?

Here is but a few worrying examples from this past couple of weeks alone! US wants to censor anything it doesnt like online, across the world: http://stopcensorship.org/ US wants to lock up US citizens without trial or charge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8mPZlysCAm0 http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/congress-to-vote-next-week-on-explicitly-creating-a-police-state/ Wikileaks exposes secret spying industry: http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html Ron Paul tells it like it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XeCpLcjxOq4 Shameful actions of US military: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-CpCUOygqU&list=PLB9FE42FDCEFA73B8&feature=plpp_play_all Commercialisation of TROLLING?? http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/11/13/facebook-opens-doors-to-a-new-way-of-suppressing-information-activists-constantly-banned/

Citation

What's more, "work" is only "worth" as much as someone is willing to compensate you for it.

No, my work is worth what my employer sells it for. If my work was worth exactly what I was paid for it, my employer could not make a profit by selling the products of my labor.

Some good points, but the CRA did not cause the housing bubble. The bubble was global, and the CRA only affected US housing, so there was something else going on. See Matt Taibbi at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/one-last-note-on-michael-bloomberg-20111105 or Barry Ritholtz at http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/most-subprime-lenders-werent-covered-by-cra/ Both authors have done excellent work on chronicling the housing boom and bust and what went wrong.

My personal favorites are
Barry Ritholz
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/
David Merkel
http://alephblog.com/
Though one might argue that they are more so stock traders than pure economists.

we have a working democracy (republic) because we respect the system

We don't have a working democracy, that's the point. If we did, we'd have a government that's run in the interests of the 99.9% of us, and not the top 0.1%.

Really, go read their site, the other day the first five or so WE WANT (I mean these guys come off as "WE ARE, THEREFOR YOU OWE US) were to use the oppressive power of government even more.

Yes, we're asking the government to do its job and actually protect us. That means more laws, and more enforcement of laws. Wall Street had a chance to behave itself, and it wrecked the country. If you liked your deregulated finance industry, you should have used it responsibly. It's not oppression when the government kicks your boot off of my neck.

Do you acknowledge that there has been a serious problem with our country for the past 30 years? If so, what measures would you suggest to reverse these trends? Judging from your rhetoric, your answers would be "more deregulation" and "trickle down economics". That's what we've been doing for 30 years, and it's just gotten worse. Do you have anything new to offer?

If you don't agree that there's been a serious problem with our country for the past 30 years, then you're just insane. Even the strictest conservative can agree that productivity should be corelated with compensation (work hard and you'll succeed, right?). Even the strictest conservative can agree that people who commit crimes should be punished (robosigning is a felony).

It isn't offering a solution to the problem, all it is saying yea we are angry. So what.

Standing up and making noise is the first step towards getting a problem fixed. Obama, Boehner, Cantor and the rest would be happy to ignore the problem that's been growing for 30 years.

Do you really expect solutions from a bunch of unemployed college grads? They're not economists. The fact that they have trouble articulating a solution doesn't mean they haven't identified a real problem. The solution should come from the people whose job it is to run the country.

Unfortunately, we have no way of making them do their jobs. The only thing we can do is make noise.

There's a disconnect here. If people are buying big heavy cars which aren't fuel efficient, why did the US auto makers need a bailout?

There is no disconnect here. In 2006 almost 17 million cars were sold in the US. In 2009 10.4 million cars were sold. They needed a bailout because they have huge fixed costs which were draining their cash reserves and nearly half their revenue was wiped out. The only way for any large manufacturer to deal with that sort of business environment is to have large cash reserves, cut costs as much as you can and then wait for a recovery. Everyone lost money, foreign AND domestic alike. The only difference is that the recession happened before the US manufacturers could get their high labor costs back to competitive levels. Their balance sheet wasn't in good enough shape going into the recession and it was more than they were able to absorb. Frankly the bankruptcy is probably the best thing that could have happened to GM and Chrysler because it sped up their recovery and made them competitive more quickly than they might have otherwise been.

Because consumers were still buying cars, they just weren't buying the cars the big three were making.

The actual data shows that consumers weren't buying cars from ANYONE. Even Toyota had their first full year loss in decades to the tune of several billion dollars. Toyota, Nissan and Honda sales in 2008 fell more than Ford or GM that year. It was a bloodbath across the board, foreign and domestic alike.

I'm sorry to say this, but the radicals are now in control

Yup. America's Political Spectrum

What countries are these where religion doesn't have a foot in the door? In the United States religion has a giant foot in the door. That is half the worlds wealth. Look at the following study: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/religions-correlation-with-poverty/ There is correlation with poverty and religion as a whole. But can you see correlation if you remove india(buddism) and islam?

Causing the market to crash (most economic gurus Ive heard plant the blame squarely on housing loan requirements instituted under Clinton)

By "most economic gurus" I think you mean "complete morons". Subprime lending by Fannie/Freddie (the organizations whose policies Clinton could modify) was not even close to what was being done by the private sector. If you want to go further back, you could also say that Bush is the reason we even have the TSA, and one of those wars (Iraq) was based on complete fiction. There's also good evidence that Obama is really just a moderate Republican, which helps to really explain why he's continuing so many terrible policies.

The top 2% of Americans own 80% of the wealth

Nope, it's closer to 20% own 80% of the wealth:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/10/estimates-of-wealth-distribution-are-widely-wrong

http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#half-of-america-has-25-of-the-wealth-2

Is it fun pulling numbers out of the air to try to make your point?

And just because you aren't in the top 2% or top 20% doesn't make you poor.

The ratios aren't precisely 100:1...

If by 'aren't precisely' you mean 'aren't anywhere close too', then your statement is correct.

Just imagine how much cash we'd have for research if we would have forced the banks to do the same thing that GM was forced to do.

Declare bankruptcy, wipe out shareholders, and trim bond holders. Those are the people that invested in risky behavior and they should have paid the price.

The swedes did it and they recovered from their banking crisis.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/06/go-swedish-part-47/

Reagan won out the cold war without firing a shot.

And he also ensured that our future would forever be saddled with debt. Which makes me laugh when I read the end of your original post:

Stop Iraq, Libya and Afghan wars. There is your savings and cost reductions. Keep our military strong here at home to DEFEND us.

Spend more on your military industrial complex than you take in on taxes. THERE is your ensured debt and eventual country-wide bankruptcy. Raise the debt ceiling? Sure why not? We've done it, how many times since Reagan?

You're in fantasy land where communists are nice people, just misunderstood. Never mind the hundred + million they've killed since the 1920's.

You're in a fantasy land where a large part of today's world population are mass murderers just because they live in a communist society! Put that blame on communist leaders and we'll talk. I rip China apart more than anybody on Slashdot, I don't need to hear you assume that I think they're misunderstood angels. Their leaders are human rights violators but I don't hold the citizens responsible for death. When you nuke a country do you think the leaders are the only ones that get hurt?

The only fear monger is you "Oh God we're all gonna die!"

What in the hell are you talking about? We're trying to have a discussion about possible ways to decrease our spending so we can catch up with the insane amount of debt we've been accumulating. And you totally skirted any indication that you even understand that whether we build a thousand more nukes or stick with our current numbers, the outcome is the same. We could hold the entire world hostage right now if we wanted to just by threatening to detonate all of our nuclear weapons on ourselves and I think it's time to consider that enough force if to increase that means $700 billion.

Here's the thing, it wasn't tax cuts that were the problem. Rather it was government organizations like Freddie and Fannie who were lending to poor prospects, and the feds forcing the banks to do the same. The initial implosion of the housing market created the ripple. And until the US has it's financial straights in order(such as not lending to people who can't afford it), you'll continue to repeat this massive fuck-up.

Oh God, this crap again. Fannie and Freddie did not cause the crisis, and the feds did not force bank to do anything. See http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/fannie-freddie-acquitted/

We all know they are going to raise the debt limit. Every time this comes up, whichever party is in power votes to raise the limit. Whichever party is not in power delays the vote to the last minute, using the occasion for political grandstanding.

It would frankly be wonderful if enough Congresscritters had the chuzpa to not raise the limit. Force some fiscal responsibility, even if it is probably too late. But, no, this is the Congress that still hasn't passed a budget for 2011 - they just gave up, and there is every sign that there will be no official budget for 2012 either.

This one stands out as exceptionally silly to me, because I live in Wisconsin and nothing remotely like that has happened.

Really?

It seems like... ..you haven't been... ..paying attention.

Do you still want to stand by your claim that "nothing remotely like that has happened"?

Let me know if you're still not convinced. I can provide more evidence. As someone who owns a house near Palmyra, Wisconsin, I can tell you that a lot of people around here are pretty well informed about this thing that you claim is not happening.

This link:

Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing

Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.

Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.

Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.

Actually, it was astroturfing. Or at least the extremely rapid promotion of an article written by a non-nuclear scientist who happened to be working on a liason project with MIT in no nuclear engineering capacity, was coordinated by a siemens astroturf group.

Described here: bad-oehmen-confirmation-bias-sources-astroturfing/

'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost.

Once Congress and the commercial interests that fund Congress get involved (e.g., U.S. Chamber of Commerce), any hope of any manner of neutrality is lost to the money of lobbyists and special interests.

With the corporate takeover of the US Government how can anyone expect for net neutrality to survive once the lobbyists get involved?

It is no longer Republicans and Democrats, it is now individual citizens vs. corporate interests. And it looks like corporate interests have won. We no longer have a Republic. We no longer have a Democracy. We now have a kakistocracy run by corporate interests.

Despite being killed over and over again, somehow this myth that Fannie and Freddie and the CRA were responsible persists. Here's just one instance of it being killed.

If they're responsible, why, then, did the same housing bubble happen in other countries?

Great chart.
Reposting it as non AC so folks can see it.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/GR2010081106717.gif

The chart shows that the benefit to taxpayers is
10% for people making 1 million
3% for people making 200,000
2% for people making 75,000
~1.9% for people making 50,000.

So let's keep 1.9% of the tax cuts and let the rest roll back. That benefits the wealthy as well as the poor.
Or even better,

Let's keep $1,119 of the tax cuts and let the rest roll back.

It would be a 2% tax increase for me in my tax bracket, but I'm willing to take that hit-- we do need to balance the deficit. There is no reason to raise taxes on people making $40k to $50k. They have it hard enough.

This reminds me of this chart showing who benefits from tax cuts (basically the current debate of extend the tax cuts or not from the democrates and republicans).

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/GR2010081106717.gif