But still some get fat while others starve to death.
This is 100% a political problem. In other words, people are only starving to death in countries whose governments do not allow the free market to work.
For example, most people in China were poor until free market reforms in the 1980s, and since then hundreds of millions of Chinese have left absolute poverty. If you go back to the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950's, China starved 20-30 million people to death through socialism.
Most people will never make it to higher education.
70.1% of 2009 high school graduates now enroll in college.
30% of people in the US have a bachelor's degree now (55% have "some college"), and at current growth rates, we are on target for over 50% of Americans having a bachelor's degree by 2050.
Except unfiltered audio power levels do not agree well with perceived loudness.
The ITU BS.1770 standard uses a spectral filter that a lot of research went into so that it agrees well with actual human perceived loudness.
Ad creators have known for a long time how to game simple compressors by putting more energy into higher frequencies where humans are more sensitive in terms of loudness.
So - does this new reg. limit total dB for N-channel systems?
Yes, BS.1770 does measure (spectrally filtered) power found in all channels (except LFE), with slightly higher weighting for left and right surround channels.
Even though American manufacturing is in decline, America is still the world's largest manufacturer
How is American manufacturing "in decline"? We are producing about 7% more than in 2000, and are just 2.8% down from the all-time industrial production high in 2007 (coming up from a 15% drop from 2007 during the recession). (data)
What's interesting is that the table shows far worse performance for both which makes me question how accurate speed test is.
Indeed, who cares how fast you can push packets from a SpeedTest server to your home computer. That is really mainly a measure of your local loop speed, not your typical Internet speeds with real world applications.
What really matters is how fast you can get video from Netflix (or other sources) in a reliable, isochronous flow over a matter of hours to watch your movie.
Only wild-eyed lefties would imagine that the bulk of taxation actually advances civilization and fairness.
Moreover, most entitlement spending in the US does not mainly go to the poor. The bottom 20% of the income scale receive only 32% of benefit spending. The middle 60% of income receives 58% of entitlement benefits, and the top 20% of income receive 10% of entitlement benefits.
Getting rid of corporation and capital gains taxes would suit the rich very well indeed, as would moving towards higher VAT and lower income taxes. All of these things would push more of the tax burden onto the poor.
But most European countries have a less progressive tax structure than the US due to their large VATs, yet everyone seems to say these are workers' paradises...
This is how our GDP keeps rising, but our real wages are falling.
The reason why real wages are flat in the US is because of more employee compensation going to rising payroll taxes and tax-sheltered benefits.
Real average hourly total compensation is up 40% from 1972 until today.
US private industry employers spent an average of $28.80 per hour worked for employee compensation in June 2012. Wages and salaries averaged $20.27 per hour worked and accounted for 70.4% of these costs, while benefits averaged $8.52 and accounted for the remaining 29.6%.
My wife is a software product manager for a start-up that in part uses developers based in India (from a major Indian consulting company).
Employees in the US gather requirements and plan the development (product manager and dev leads). Very simple development tasks (often web-based UI elements) go directly to india. Slightly more complex dev tasks are "de-risked" by dev managers in the US (i.e. "use this interface", "use this data structure", etc.) and then communicated to India for development. The most complex development tasks tend to be done by US developers (one who is just out of college, but still more knowledgable than most of the Indian developers). Many QA tasks are also done in India.
Like any good manager, you have to know your employees' strengths and weaknesses, and maximize everyone's potential productivity by assigning the proper tasks to the proper people.
Then how do you explain people buying US T-Bonds at such low yields?
The US is not expanding the total money supply much (at the "M3" level). Although the Fed is buying securities and pumping out money in that way, the Fed is also paying interest on excess reserves of banks held at the Fed, and banks are keeping most of their money at the Fed or on bonds.
Thus little of the new Fed produced money is making it into bank loans (which is the most "high powered" money through multiplications of money loaned out, then loaned out again, etc.) Loans are tough to get right now and not many are being made.
Thus US inflation is under control (for now).
The long-term fiscal situation of the US government is not sustainable under current law, but I believe that most US government security buyers believe that the 14th Amendment will be held up with regards to payment of government debt.
There is also plenty of wealth in the US to still tax if push came to shove (compared to Greece for example). US future entitlement problems are easy to fix in theory, and the political forces in the US are far more likely to solve them than say the political forces in continental European countries.
But the truth is that as of March, the Fed was buying 61% of new US debt, so perhaps that is part of the reason for low rates as well...
This organization, the Tax Policy Center, is making the assumption that those people who will be taxed will actually have that money available to be put into the treasury instead of working to find other ways to avoid paying those taxes... including simply not working at all or cutting back on their pay in lieu of other forms of payment
What would happen with deduction limitation is that there would be a reduction in loophole-preferred private spending, such as financing very large houses with debt (mortgage interest deduction), and charitable spending.
The economic effects of deduction limitations would be very different than an increase in the marginal tax rate on labor or investment income (the latter would specifically make labor or investment less attractive).
Don't get me wrong - deduction limitation is only part of the solution. Gradually but significantly raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare would need to occur as well. And maybe we should have fewer useless wars.
Greece, Italy, and Spain would not be in trouble if they stayed out of the zone
So imagine Greece inflated its currency to pay off its debts...
1) It would still become more expensive for Greece to borrow because bond buyers aren't dumb, they will want the extra return to make up for the inflation, and in fact they will be spooked by significant inflation because they may think it could lead to hyper-inflation.
2) If domestic spending remained at current levels, it means real domestic spending decreasing, the same thing as decreasing today's nominal, non-inflated currency, so the unions would be out on the streets anyway.
3) Unless current domestic spending is inflation-protected (which I suspect but can't confirm), thus it would mean even more nominal spending at inflated values, which Greece can't afford either.
You can't print yourself real money. A politician may be able to sell inflated currency to his/her people better than non-inflated currency spending cuts, but it is the same thing in real terms.
When butter is $100 per stick and government employees are still paid at $20/hour, people will notice.
Here is the deal: According to the Tax Policy Center, if we cap itemized deductions at $50,000 and keep tax rates as they are today, we would raise $749 billion in tax revenue over ten years.
Moreover, according to the TPC's distribution table, 96.2% of the extra revenue would come from the top quintile, with 79.9% from the top one percent.
Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves.
Keynes wrote a book containing an argument (that many economists, but not all, disagree with). Keynes certainly did not provide data to back up his hypothesis in a scientific fashion.
The big question about government debt is when does it get to be too much? It will be too much when government debt buyers decide that the government will become unable to pay back the debt in the future without default (including inflation). This in large part depends on future private growth of GDP, which in turn a constant government tax rate turns into rising government revenue.
Post-WWII era US and UK were economies mending from the blows of the Great Depression and WWII. Everyone believed that the countries would be able to make use of the peace to have significant private GDP growth.
The question is whether the US today has the same opportunity for significant private growth as it did post-WWII. Some would argue that our economy is now too regulated, has too few highly-skilled workers, has too little legal immigration, and other reasons why private economic growth might never return to above 3% levels. I believe we could work on many of the causes.
Getting back to maximum debt levels, clearly many investors decided that Greece did not gave the capability of private economic growth required to pay off their debt, and thus Greece's borrowing costs went up dramatically.
"Austerity" is a silly term. Money spent by a government, although it shows up in total GDP, does not represent a true investment in capital that would raise future growth. A new road may be an investment, but its payback time could be so long that it actually has a negative NPV. Taxing a productive person in the middle of their life so that a non-poor retired person can receive Social Security may also be a negative investment (due to the deadweight loss of taxation).
One should also consider Keynesian economist Robert Samuelson's writing in "Full Employment after the War," in S.E. Harris, ed., Postwar Economic Problems, 1943:
When this war comes to an end, more than one out of every two workers will depend directly or indirectly upon military orders. We shall have some 10 million service men to throw on the labor market. We shall have to face a difficult reconversion period during which current goods cannot be produced and layoffs may be great. Nor will the technical necessity for reconversion necessarily generate much investment outlay in the critical period under discussion whatever its later potentialities. The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable--were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties--then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.
Well, it turned out that despite the massive decrease in US government spending after WWII, the private economy was ready to come back and did replace the government spending, and lead to significant private and total GDP growth.
Slashdot Mirror
But still some get fat while others starve to death.
This is 100% a political problem. In other words, people are only starving to death in countries whose governments do not allow the free market to work.
For example, most people in China were poor until free market reforms in the 1980s, and since then hundreds of millions of Chinese have left absolute poverty. If you go back to the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950's, China starved 20-30 million people to death through socialism.
Most people will never make it to higher education.
70.1% of 2009 high school graduates now enroll in college.
30% of people in the US have a bachelor's degree now (55% have "some college"), and at current growth rates, we are on target for over 50% of Americans having a bachelor's degree by 2050.
PBS member stations (and other non-commercial TV stations) are exempt from the CALM Act because the act only applies to commercial advertisements.
Except unfiltered audio power levels do not agree well with perceived loudness.
The ITU BS.1770 standard uses a spectral filter that a lot of research went into so that it agrees well with actual human perceived loudness.
Ad creators have known for a long time how to game simple compressors by putting more energy into higher frequencies where humans are more sensitive in terms of loudness.
it'll probably just be for the front pair, since that's what the average viewer uses.
Proper loudness for 5.1 channels source material typically yields proper loudness in the stereo downmix when using AC-3 audio coding.
There are some possible corner cases though, and some broadcasters measure both 5.1 and the stereo downmix for loudness.
So - does this new reg. limit total dB for N-channel systems?
Yes, BS.1770 does measure (spectrally filtered) power found in all channels (except LFE), with slightly higher weighting for left and right surround channels.
Until you take out the food industry we do not get an accurate picture.
All food production counts for only 8.75% of the industrial production total (source).
You might be happier to look at New Orders for Durable Goods (DGORDER).
Even though American manufacturing is in decline, America is still the world's largest manufacturer
How is American manufacturing "in decline"? We are producing about 7% more than in 2000, and are just 2.8% down from the all-time industrial production high in 2007 (coming up from a 15% drop from 2007 during the recession). (data)
People keep talking about the US losing its "power".
What the heck does that mean?
And frankly, do we really want "power"? I thought we wanted peace and prosperity.
What's interesting is that the table shows far worse performance for both which makes me question how accurate speed test is.
Indeed, who cares how fast you can push packets from a SpeedTest server to your home computer. That is really mainly a measure of your local loop speed, not your typical Internet speeds with real world applications.
What really matters is how fast you can get video from Netflix (or other sources) in a reliable, isochronous flow over a matter of hours to watch your movie.
Only wild-eyed lefties would imagine that the bulk of taxation actually advances civilization and fairness.
Moreover, most entitlement spending in the US does not mainly go to the poor. The bottom 20% of the income scale receive only 32% of benefit spending. The middle 60% of income receives 58% of entitlement benefits, and the top 20% of income receive 10% of entitlement benefits.
Hey there poor person, why don't you have your investments setup in IRAs and 401(k)s?
51.1% of US familes own stock - even 13.6% of families in the bottom 20% of income own some stock (source).ï
Getting rid of corporation and capital gains taxes would suit the rich very well indeed, as would moving towards higher VAT and lower income taxes. All of these things would push more of the tax burden onto the poor.
But most European countries have a less progressive tax structure than the US due to their large VATs, yet everyone seems to say these are workers' paradises...
Everybody is a nuclear NIMBY.
For just $1 billion, they can put it in MY backyard!
Whenever I travel in countries with high-value coins, I hate it! I do not want $1, $2, $5 coins jangling around in my pocket.
The reason why real wages are flat in the US is because of more employee compensation going to rising payroll taxes and tax-sheltered benefits.
Real average hourly total compensation is up 40% from 1972 until today.
US private industry employers spent an average of $28.80 per hour worked for employee compensation in June 2012. Wages and salaries averaged $20.27 per hour worked and accounted for 70.4% of these costs, while benefits averaged $8.52 and accounted for the remaining 29.6%.
My company makes hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese sales, something completely impossible to even conceive of before the 1990's.
Every new professional worker in Asia is a potential customer of a US firm.
My wife is a software product manager for a start-up that in part uses developers based in India (from a major Indian consulting company).
Employees in the US gather requirements and plan the development (product manager and dev leads). Very simple development tasks (often web-based UI elements) go directly to india. Slightly more complex dev tasks are "de-risked" by dev managers in the US (i.e. "use this interface", "use this data structure", etc.) and then communicated to India for development. The most complex development tasks tend to be done by US developers (one who is just out of college, but still more knowledgable than most of the Indian developers). Many QA tasks are also done in India.
Like any good manager, you have to know your employees' strengths and weaknesses, and maximize everyone's potential productivity by assigning the proper tasks to the proper people.
Empty threat? Why do you think we do the extra-judicial killing by drone!
One word: Overclockers!
The US is not expanding the total money supply much (at the "M3" level). Although the Fed is buying securities and pumping out money in that way, the Fed is also paying interest on excess reserves of banks held at the Fed, and banks are keeping most of their money at the Fed or on bonds.
Thus little of the new Fed produced money is making it into bank loans (which is the most "high powered" money through multiplications of money loaned out, then loaned out again, etc.) Loans are tough to get right now and not many are being made.
Thus US inflation is under control (for now).
The long-term fiscal situation of the US government is not sustainable under current law, but I believe that most US government security buyers believe that the 14th Amendment will be held up with regards to payment of government debt.
There is also plenty of wealth in the US to still tax if push came to shove (compared to Greece for example). US future entitlement problems are easy to fix in theory, and the political forces in the US are far more likely to solve them than say the political forces in continental European countries.
But the truth is that as of March, the Fed was buying 61% of new US debt, so perhaps that is part of the reason for low rates as well...
What would happen with deduction limitation is that there would be a reduction in loophole-preferred private spending, such as financing very large houses with debt (mortgage interest deduction), and charitable spending.
The economic effects of deduction limitations would be very different than an increase in the marginal tax rate on labor or investment income (the latter would specifically make labor or investment less attractive).
Don't get me wrong - deduction limitation is only part of the solution. Gradually but significantly raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare would need to occur as well. And maybe we should have fewer useless wars.
So imagine Greece inflated its currency to pay off its debts...
1) It would still become more expensive for Greece to borrow because bond buyers aren't dumb, they will want the extra return to make up for the inflation, and in fact they will be spooked by significant inflation because they may think it could lead to hyper-inflation.
2) If domestic spending remained at current levels, it means real domestic spending decreasing, the same thing as decreasing today's nominal, non-inflated currency, so the unions would be out on the streets anyway.
3) Unless current domestic spending is inflation-protected (which I suspect but can't confirm), thus it would mean even more nominal spending at inflated values, which Greece can't afford either.
You can't print yourself real money. A politician may be able to sell inflated currency to his/her people better than non-inflated currency spending cuts, but it is the same thing in real terms.
When butter is $100 per stick and government employees are still paid at $20/hour, people will notice.
Here is the deal: According to the Tax Policy Center, if we cap itemized deductions at $50,000 and keep tax rates as they are today, we would raise $749 billion in tax revenue over ten years.
Moreover, according to the TPC's distribution table, 96.2% of the extra revenue would come from the top quintile, with 79.9% from the top one percent.
Keynes wrote a book containing an argument (that many economists, but not all, disagree with). Keynes certainly did not provide data to back up his hypothesis in a scientific fashion.
The big question about government debt is when does it get to be too much? It will be too much when government debt buyers decide that the government will become unable to pay back the debt in the future without default (including inflation). This in large part depends on future private growth of GDP, which in turn a constant government tax rate turns into rising government revenue.
Post-WWII era US and UK were economies mending from the blows of the Great Depression and WWII. Everyone believed that the countries would be able to make use of the peace to have significant private GDP growth.
The question is whether the US today has the same opportunity for significant private growth as it did post-WWII. Some would argue that our economy is now too regulated, has too few highly-skilled workers, has too little legal immigration, and other reasons why private economic growth might never return to above 3% levels. I believe we could work on many of the causes.
Getting back to maximum debt levels, clearly many investors decided that Greece did not gave the capability of private economic growth required to pay off their debt, and thus Greece's borrowing costs went up dramatically.
"Austerity" is a silly term. Money spent by a government, although it shows up in total GDP, does not represent a true investment in capital that would raise future growth. A new road may be an investment, but its payback time could be so long that it actually has a negative NPV. Taxing a productive person in the middle of their life so that a non-poor retired person can receive Social Security may also be a negative investment (due to the deadweight loss of taxation).
One should also consider Keynesian economist Robert Samuelson's writing in "Full Employment after the War," in S.E. Harris, ed., Postwar Economic Problems, 1943:
Well, it turned out that despite the massive decrease in US government spending after WWII, the private economy was ready to come back and did replace the government spending, and lead to significant private and total GDP growth.