Alan Gomez, USA TODAY12:08 a.m. EDT September 2, 2015
More than half of the nation’s immigrants receive some kind of government welfare, a figure that’s far higher than the native-born population, according to a report to be released Wednesday.
About 51% of immigrant-led households receive at least one kind of welfare benefit, including Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and housing assistance, compared to 30% for native-led households, according to the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.
Those numbers increase for households with children, with 76% of immigrant-led households receiving welfare, compared to 52% for the native-born.
The findings are sure to fuel debate on the presidential campaign trail as Republican candidates focus on changing the nation’s immigration laws, from calls for mass deportations to ending birthright citizenship.
Steven Camarota, director of research at center and author of the report, said that’s a much-needed conversation to make the country’s immigration system more “selective.”
“This should not be understood as some kind of defect or moral failing on the part of immigrants,” Camarota said about the findings. “Rather, what it represents is a system that allows a lot of less-educated immigrants to settle in the country, who then earn modest wages and are eligible for a very generous welfare system.
By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Tuesday, August 25, 2015
The economy is sluggish but growing and inflation remains low, painting a decidedly mixed picture for the federal government, the Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday, saying the fiscal situation is improving this year but will snap back by 2018 to swelling deficits and unsustainable debt.
The inflation rate is so low that Social Security beneficiaries probably won’t get a cost-of-living raise after this year, the CBO said. But tax revenue is up and spending has stayed pat, which is helping reduce the pool of red ink in the federal budget.
Combined, those numbers mean the government will run a deficit of $426 billion in fiscal year 2015, down about $60 billion from 2014 and marking the smallest deficit of President Obama’s tenure.
This is a picture of the suspected shooter, Vester Flanigan, who is also known as Bryce Williams. He is a former WDBJ7 employee.
By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
Updated 11:59 AM ET, Wed August 26, 2015
(CNN)Latest developments
• Law enforcement confronted Vester Flanagan on Interstate 66 and Flanagan shot himself, officials tell CNN. It is not clear whether he was killed or injured.
• ABC News reported that it has received a fax containing a 23-page manifesto from someone named Bryce Williams,the news outlet tweeted. The document has been handed over to investigators, ABC said.
In August 2014, 12 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard charged into 28-year-old artist Atena Farghadani’s house, blindfolded her, and took her to prison.
She had posted a satirical cartoon on Facebook to protest proposed legislation to restrict birth control and women’s rights. Farghadani has since been found guilty of “spreading propaganda” and “insulting members of parliament through paintings.” She has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Farghadani is one of millions of women whose basic rights are being ruthlessly violated. In countries like Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and Cambodia, women are struggling for freedoms most women in the West take for granted.
But American feminists are relatively silent about these injustices — especially feminists on campus. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American college campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world. Why not?
Today’s young feminist activists are far too preoccupied with their own supposed victimhood to make common cause with women like Farghadani.
WASHINGTON (AP) — For much of the economy’s fitful and sluggish six-year recovery from the Great Recession, analysts have foreseen a sunnier future: Growth would pick up in six months, or in a year.
That was then.
The latest Associated Press survey of leading economists shows that most now foresee a weaker expansion than they had earlier. A majority of the nearly three dozen who responded to the survey predict tepid economic growth, weak pay gains and modest hiring for the next two years at least.
Nearly 70 percent said they thought the economy’s growth would remain below its long-run average of 3 percent annually through 2017. The economy hasn’t attained that pace since 2005.
And if they’re right, don’t expect much of a pay raise: Fifty-eight percent of the economists think wage increases for the next two years will remain stuck below a long-term annual average of 3.5 percent.
What’s more, if growth doesn’t pick up from its modest post-recession pace of 2.2 percent a year, nearly six in 10 expect hiring to fall to an average of 175,000 jobs a month or below, down from its pace of 243,000 jobs a month for the past year.
At the start of the year, many economists thought falling gas prices and strong hiring would finally produce 3 percent economic growth for 2015 as a whole.
“We no longer have reason for optimism that the economy is going to accelerate,” said Mike Englund, chief economist at Action Economics. “The real question is, when is the next downturn coming?”
Stocks aren’t quite as immune to financial disruption in the middle of 2015 as they had been previously. The last major, comprehensive selloff was also in tandem with “dollar” disorder back last October 15. This time, the motion was more erosion than “event”; at least until the past week. Just like crude oil, stocks lost their momentum back in early May (and broader index price indications dating back to last July and the first “dollar” rumble) and had more or less been stuck like the yuan doing nothing until the open break recently.
“Savage Speed” – A Look Inside Market Crash Statistics
Submitted by Salil Mehta via Statistical Ideas blog,
It was surely a frightening week in global financial markets. The largest 500 American stocks (S&P) dropped 6%. China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) doubled this risk, as it dropped 12%. Now there is an overall fear in the markets that we have not seen in years. While these perilous risk statistics should not be something new, thesurprising jolt this week provides a renewed opportunity to review crash measures within a broader context, to boldly target your portfolio.
Let’s look at the worst weekly loss for the S&P, in each month from 2007 through August 14 (or right up until last week). Geometrically approximated for symmetry. We see in blue that the distribution of this monthly “worst weekly loss” has generally been similar to the same ranked values from the past couple of years (2103/2014). Now towards the bottom of the chart we can better ascertain that the more severe “worst weekly losses”, were even worse in the years earlier than this (so 2007 through 2012).
We’ll prove out these numerical measurements here, but if you are dispassionate about the mathematics then don’t fear. Please just skim what is immediately below -and head straight to the first illustration afterwards- to continue reading. In October 2008, the worst weekly risk was -20% (this makes October the 24th worst month for “worst weekly loss” of 24 months in 2007/2008). Hence it is plotted in red ~98 percentile at the bottom of the vertical axis below. Not perfectly the 100th percentile (0% rank) due to probability math. Also in the same 2007/2008 series, the next worst month for the “worst weekly loss” statistic was the following month of November. That month saw a -9% change and being 2nd worst out of 24 means being ranked about 4% higher on the vertical axis, from where the -20% data is shown:
Global Trade In Freefall: Container Freight Rates From Asia To Europe Crash 60% In Three Weeks
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/23/2015 12:42 -0400
Three weeks ago, when we last looked at the collapse in trade along what may be the most trafficked route involving China, i.e., from Asia to Northern Europe, we noted that while that particular shipping freight rate Europe had crashed some 23% on just one week, there was some good news: at least the Baltic Dry index was still inexplicably rising, and at last check it was hovering just above 1,100.
That is no longer the case, and just as with everything else in recent months, the Baltic Dry dead cat bounce is now over, with the BDIY topping out just above 1200 on August 4, and now back in triple digit territory, rapidly sliding back to the reality of recent record lows which a few months ago we suggested hinted that much more is wrong with global trade, and the global economy, than artificially manipulated stock markets would admit.
Debt Is Good: For Funding The Greatest Participation Trophy Ever Created
Submitted by Mark St.Cyr,
As the capital markets from Shanghai to New York were melting down in ways hearkening back to the early days of the prior financial crisis – a period of time many would like to forget (or act) as if it never happened – the Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman decided it was time once again to weigh in with what will surely be viewed by the so-called “smart crowd” as a brilliant perspective on what ails the world: Not enough debt.
The title of his Op-Ed in the New York Times™ seemed to borrow directly from one of Wall Street’s most celebrated fictional characters Gordon Gekko when he delivered the now immortal line “Greed, for lack of a better word: Is good.” For Mr. Krugman however, there was no need of a “better word” qualifier. He came out blazing with what seems the only bullet in his arsenal as a cure-all for what ever the ailment might be (e.g., debt.) as he argues this view in his latest: Debt Is Good.
As I read, I found myself repeatedly either laughing, or with my head in my hands. What seemed lost on Mr. Krugman was the irony of not only his timing, but also the glaring front-of-mind examples real people, with real issues, currently have that are entirely interchangeable as to replace his call for action; and replace it with the actions they are currently living through. All of which are both suggested as well as endorsed by him and his ilk.
The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison Wednesday for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job.
John C. Beale’s crimes were “inexplicable” and “unbelievably egregious,” said Judge Ellen Huvelle in imposing the sentence in a Washington. D.C. federal court. Beale has also agreed to pay $1.3 million in restitution and forfeiture to the government.
Beale said he was ashamed of his lies about working for the CIA, a ruse that, according to court records, began in 2000 and continued until early this year.
“Why did I do this? Greed – simple greed – and I’m ashamed of that greed,” Beale told the court. He also said it was possible that he got a “rush” and a “sense of excitement” by telling people he was worked for the CIA. “It was something like an addiction,” he said.
Beale pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade. He perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as his lawyer acknowledged in a sentencing memo filed last week.
When Huvelle asked Beale what he was doing when he claimed he was working for the CIA, he said, “I spent time exercising. I spent a lot of time working on my house.”
He also said he used the time “trying to find ways to fine tune the capitalist system” to discourage companies from damaging the environment. “I spent a lot of time reading on that,” said Beale.
Man in critical condition after being shot by police in Ferguson
By Loic Hofstedt
Ferguson (United States) (AFP) – Tensions flared in the US city of Ferguson late Sunday as looters targeted at least one store following a day of somber remembrance to mark the anniversary of the police shooting of an unarmed black teen.
A crowd of about 50 people looted a beauty store in the St. Louis suburb and protesters grew confrontational late in the evening. There was no immediate word of any arrests.
Demonstrators had taken to the streets of Ferguson to mark the anniversary of 18-year-old Michael Brown’s death in a fateful encounter on August 9, 2014 with officer Darren Wilson.
The shooting — and a subsequent decision not to indict Wilson — led to violent unrest and set off nationwide protests and intense scrutiny of heavy-handed police tactics in a series of cases that ended in the deaths of unarmed blacks.
Sunday’s day of remembrance had been peaceful until a handful of protesters grew rowdy later in the evening. A crowd of about 300 people had gathered earlier to mark the anniversary, during which they observed four and a half minutes of silence and released two white doves.
Man in critical condition after being shot by police in Ferguson
Yamiche Alcindor, USA TODAY4:32 a.m. EDT August 10, 2015
FERGUSON, Mo. — A man was in a critical condition Monday after exchanging gunfire with police during protests marking the one-year anniversary of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer.
St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters the suspect is in a critical, unstable condition in a local hospital and undergoing surgery.
Speaking at a new conference, he said the shooting occurred after plainclothes detectives monitored an individual in the crowd who they believed was armed, and who was believed to have three or four armed acquaintances.
The suspect crossed the street and fired on the officers’ vehicle. Police returned fire and the suspect was shot, Belmar said.
Belmar said the shot man was involved in an earlier shooting nearby that involved two groups exchanging gunfire.
“There is a small group of people who are intent on making sure we don’t have peace. That’s unfortunate,” he said. “We can’t afford to have this kind of violence.”
He said there were probably six different shooters involved in the shoot-out that preceded the officer-involved shooting.
The eruption of violence came as tensions between police and protesters mounted during the night after a day of peaceful protests. Before the shots rang out, some protesters began screaming at the line of police. Officers then moved to close the streets and demanded demonstrators move off the road.
USA TO ISSUE MORE GREEN CARDS THAN POPULATIONS OF IOWA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, SOUTH CAROLINA COMBINED
by BREITBART NEWS2 Aug 2015
The overwhelming majority of immigration to the United States is the result of our visa policies. Each year, millions of visas are issued to temporary workers, foreign students, refugees, asylees, and permanent immigrants for admission into the United States. The lion’s share of these visas are for lesser-skilled and lower-paid workers and their dependents who, because they are here on work-authorized visas, are added directly to the same labor pool occupied by current unemployed jobseekers. Expressly because they arrive on legal immigrant visas, most will be able to draw a wide range of taxpayer-funded benefits, and corporations will be allowed to directly substitute these workers for Americans. Improved border security would have no effect on the continued arrival of these foreign workers, refugees, and permanent immigrants—because they are all invited here by the federal government.
Garland shooter bought pistol through ATF’s controversial gun running sting to track drug cartels
BY NICOLE HENSLEY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, August 1, 2015, 5:56 PM
A gunman killed during his attack on an Islamic prophet Muhammad art show in Garland, Texas, reportedly bought a pistol through a botched federal firearm sting.
Nadir Soofi bought a 9-mm pistol at a Phoenix gun shop in 2010, one report said, that sold illegal firearms through ATF’s heavily criticized Operation Fast and Furious to track firearms back to Mexican drug cartels.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee wants to know if that same pistol was used five years later in an alleged Islamic State-sanctioned shootout targeting right-wing blogger Pamela Geller’s event, according to a memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
The letter is addressed to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch from Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.
McDonald’s profits implode seemingly overnight plunging 30%. Next step? Service to be automated.
“Amid a historically slow economic recovery, 1970s labor-participation rates and stagnant middle-class incomes, we understand that people are frustrated. Harder to understand is how so many of our media brethren have been persuaded that suddenly it’s the job of America’s burger joints to provide everyone with good pay and benefits. The result of their agitation will be more jobs for machines and fewer for the least skilled workers.” Joe Killian
Minimum Wage Backfire
McDonald’s moves to automate orders to reduce worker costs.
Updated Oct. 22, 2014 2:26 p.m. ET
If there’s a silver lining for McDonald’s in Tuesday’s dreadful earnings report, it is that perhaps union activists will begin to understand that the fast-food chain cannot solve the problems of theObama economy. The world’s largest restaurant company reported a 30% decline in quarterly profits on a 5% drop in revenues. Problems under the golden arches were global—sales were weak in China, Europe and the United States.
So even one of the world’s most ubiquitous consumer brands cannot print money at its pleasure. This may be news to liberal pressure groups that have lately been demanding that government order the chain known for cheap food to somehow pay higher wages.
Anti-market and pro-socialist rhetoric is surging in headlines (see alsohere, here, and here) and popping up more and more on social media feeds. Much of the time, these opponents of markets can’t tell the difference between state-sponsored organizations like the International Monetary Fund and actual markets. But, that doesn’t matter because the articles and memes are often populist and vaguely worded — intentionally framed in such a way to easily deflect uninformed attacks and honest descriptions of what they are actually saying. In the end, they can all be boiled down to one message: socialism works and is better than capitalism.
While most of it comes from the Left, the Right is not innocent, since the Right appears to be primarily concerned with promoting its own version of populism, which apparently does not involve a defense of markets. “Build bigger walls at the border,” for example, is not a sufficient response to “All profits are evil!”
Instead of stooping to this level or simply resorting to “Read Mises!” (a more fitting response), we must show, yet again, that socialism — even under well-meaning political leaders — is impossible and leads to disastrous consequences.
The Necessity of Profits, Prices, and Entrepreneurs
Socialism is the collective ownership (i.e., a state monopoly) of the means of production. It calls for the abolition of private ownership of factors of production. Wages and profits are two parts of the same pie, and socialism says the profit slice should be zero.
The inherent theoretical problems of socialism all emanate from its definition, and not the particulars of its application. However, the supporters of socialism define “collective,” as no exchange of the factors of production. And without exchange, there can be no prices, and without prices there is no way to measure the costs of production.
In an unhampered market economy, the prices of the factors of production are determined by their aid in producing things that consumers want. They tend to earn their marginal product, and because every laborer has some comparative advantage, there is a slice of pie for everybody.
If technological changes make certain factors more productive, or if education and training makes a laborer more productive, their prices or wages may be bid up to their new, higher marginal product. An entrepreneur would not like to hire or buy any factor at a price that exceeds its marginal product because the entrepreneur would then incur losses.
Entrepreneurial losses are more important than many realize. They aren’t just hits to the entrepreneur’s bottom line. Losses show that on the market, the resources used to produce something were more highly valued than what they were producing. Losses show that wealth has been destroyed.
Profits give the opposite signal. They represent economic growth and wealth creation. A profitable line of production is one in which the stuff that goes into producing some consumer good costs less than what consumers are willing to pay for the consumer good.
As such, profits and losses are more than just important incentives, or cover in a conspiratorial capitalist class system; they are the only way to know that wealth is being created instead of destroyed in any line of production.
Under socialism, there is a single owner that does not bid factors away from some lines of production and toward others. Nobody is able to say, with any shred of certainty, that a particular tool or machine or factory could be used to produce something else in a more effective way. Nobody knows what to produce or how much to produce. It’s economic chaos.
Without Markets, We Can’t Know What or How to Produce
Profits and losses guide and correct entrepreneurs in the process of producing things they expect consumers will demand. Without this information, including the costs of production specifically, entrepreneurs cannot engage in economic calculation, the estimation of the difference between future revenues and the costs of production necessary to gain those future revenues.
Laborers are put to work in areas where they don’t have a comparative advantage. Farmers are sent to factories, and tailors are sent to the mines. Workers are in the wrong lines of production and have the wrong tools. Every morning, the economy looks like Robert Murphy’s capital rearranging gnomes just ransacked it.
The Polish film Brunet Will Call lampooned situations like this throughout the movie, with consumer and capital goods in the most unlikely places. A butcher pulls an automobile’s clutch cable out of his freezer, and gives it to the main character, who pays for it with information on the whereabouts of a double buggy for someone’s newborn twins (at the flower shop, obviously).
So the failure of socialism is not conditional on the culture, time, or place of the victims. Socialism is flawed at its core: the “collective” ownership of the means of production. As such, there is no way to enact a functioning, growth-inducing version of socialism anywhere. In practice, however, the theoretical problems of socialism give way to civil unrest, which is met with state force and results in a death toll higher than any official war ever fought.
Without profit motives to produce, quotas must be put in place. With quotas, even in the cases where workers don’t lie about their production, chaos still reigns. For example, if a nail production quota is based on the number of nails, workers produce a lot of tiny, unusable nails. A nail quota based on weight would encourage workers to produce massive, but still unusable nails — a situation lampooned by this cartoon in Krokodil during the 1960s.
Endless queues stretched across the USSR, filled with people looking for shoes even though shoe production in the USSR exceeded that of the US. The problem was all the shoes were too small, because shoe production was measured by number, with no regard for the sizes or designs consumers demand.
The Wake of Socialism
Some cases are funny; others are not. About seven million people died of starvation in the USSR just in 1932–33 (middle-of-the-road estimate based on manipulated data). The authors of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimate the deaths of close to 100 million people are attributable to communist and socialist regimes. That’s more than 200 times the number of US deaths in WWII (and a case could be made that their deaths are attributable to socialism, too).
Even today, in Cuba, the average wage is about $20 a month. In North Korea civilians are routinely rounded up by the dozens for public execution for the crime of watching South Korean TV smuggled into the country.
When people are hungry and unhappy, the state cannot survive if the people know others are better off. The state uses propaganda, misinformation, and censorship to make an already captive citizenry even more confused and submissive.
So count me surprised to hear fresh calls for socialism in 2015 — if the strong economic calculation argument and astronomical death toll haven’t turned the Left off of socialism, I don’t know what will. The idea is both bankrupt and deadly in both theory and practice.
Six years after the Great Recession ended, more children now live in poverty than during the recession says the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a group that strives to develop “a brighter future for millions of children at risk of poor educational, economic, social and health outcomes.”
In 2013, approximately 22% of all children living in the United States are in a household below the poverty line, an increase from 2009’s figure of 18% of all children living below the poverty line.
The Casey Foundation’s associate director for policy reform and advocacy, Laura Speer called the report “disturbing on lots of levels.”
Americans have become so “non-judgmental” that many people can no longer tell the difference between good and evil. We congratulate ourselves for being “nicer,” more sensitive and less prejudiced than past generations of Americans, but we don’t stop to consider how much more there is to morality than that. An America that isn’t full of good people won’t remain a good nation, nor will it remain strong and free over the long haul. Our country’s lack of morality has real consequences that are capable of eventually sinking us as a nation.
1) The Collapse Of Marriage: There used to be quite a bit of social stigma attached to getting a divorce or having a child out of wedlock. That’s no longer true and consequences for society have been horrific.
Although there is some dispute about the numbers, roughly 40% of marriages now end in divorce and “half of all children born to women under 30 in America now are illegitimate. Three in 10 white children are born out of wedlock, as are 53 percent of Hispanic babies and 73 percent of black babies.”
That’s important because children raised without a mother AND a father are statistically worse off in just about every area imaginable.
“Controlling for socioeconomic status, race, and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy-two percent of juvenile murderers and 60 percent of rapists come from single-mother homes. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced. A 1990 study by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that after controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared.
Various studies have come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, children from single-parent families account for 63 percent of all youth suicides, 70 percent of all teenage pregnancies, 71 percent of all adolescent chemical/substance abuse, 80 percent of all prison inmates, and 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children.
A study cited in the Village Voice produced similar numbers. It found that children brought up in single-mother homes ‘are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.’ Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.”
Instead of trying to reverse the crippling damage being done to our country by the collapse of marriage, we’ve chosen to degrade it even further by allowing same sex unions, soon to be followed by polygamous unions that will degrade the institution ever further. If it’s true that marriage is the bedrock of society, then our nation’s house is built on sand.
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
