The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
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Galloway NJ, New Jersey’s voters, especially Republicans, are enthusiastic about voting in next week’s midterm elections in which the economy and inflation are seen as top issues, according to a Stockton University Poll released today.
Continue reading Liberal Stockton University Poll Finds GOP Enthusiasm High for Midterm Elections
Voters say it’s “The economy, stupid”
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, a week before Election Day, nearly half of voters say inflation and the economy are the most important issues for them in this year’s congressional midterms.
Continue reading Economy, Inflation Top Issues for Midterm Voters
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Washington DC, President Biden celebrated Thanksgiving with his family in Nantucket , but if polls of his job performance and handling of issues like the economy and foreign policy are any guide, he didn’t have much to be grateful for.
Continue reading Not Much to Be Grateful for in Latest Presidential Poll Numbers
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Gallup poll taken Sept. 14-28, more than 1,000 Americans were asked “to compare your situation today with what it was four years ago. Are you better off than you were four years ago or not?” Even after 7 months of COVID19 lock downs a whopping 56% said they are better off. Just under a third (32%) said they were not.
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TRENTON NJ, As part of his vision, “The Road Back: Restoring Economic Health Through Public Health,” Governor Phil Murphy today unveiled a multi-stage approach to execute a responsible and strategic economic restart to put New Jersey on the road back to recovery from COVID-19. The multi-stage blueprint, guided by the Governor’s Restart and Recovery Commission and complementary Advisory Councils, plans for a methodical and strategic reopening of businesses and activities based on level of disease transmission risk and essential classification.
BY JONATHAN EASLEY – 02/19/17 12:00 PM EST
A strong majority of Americans say the U.S. economy is running strong, and most believe the upward trend will continue under President Trump, according to a Harvard-Harris poll provided exclusively to The Hill.
The survey found that 61 percent view the economy as strong, against 39 percent who say it is weak.
A plurality, 42 percent, said they believe the economy is on the right track, versus 39 percent who said it is on the wrong track.
Trump and congressional Republicans have claimed credit for the turnaround, noting numerous polls in 2016 that showed that many Americans wanted change in the nation’s capital. Democrats counter that former President Obama handed a healthy economy to Trump and point out that the unemployment rate has dropped under 5 percent. At a press conference on Thursday, Trump said he inherited “a mess.”
Among Republicans surveyed in the Harvard-Harris poll, 60 percent are satisfied with the economic trajectory, versus 23 percent who are dissatisfied. Only 33 percent of Democrats said the economy is on the right track, while 48 percent said it is headed in the wrong direction.
At 65 percent, Trump voters are the likeliest to say the economy is headed in the right direction.
“It’s really a surprising turnaround given how negative voters have been about the economy since 2009,” said Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard-Harris poll. “But jobs remains the number one issue and a lot of the change in sentiment anticipates tax cuts and infrastructure programs.”
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/320284-americans-brimming-with-optimism-on-the-economy
November 4,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, In 4 days, millions of Americans will go to the polls to decided everything from local ballot questions to the next President of the United States.
This year has been a busy one for tax policy. Throughout this year’s election, every major presidential candidate put forth a comprehensive tax plan (in some cases more than one), and at the state and local level, a number of tax policy proposals have made it on to ballots, some of which would be momentous if passed.
All of this can be difficult to keep track of and even harder to understand. The Tax Foundation has worked hard over the past year to provide Ridgewood blog readers and the media with the most accurate, timely, and accessible information possible on the tax policies being proposed.
To that end, here are 3 resources that we hope you and other taxpayers will find useful before entering the voting booth next week:
Published: Apr 28, 2016 10:25 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy sputtered in the first quarter, expanding at the slowest pace in two years as business slashed investment by the steepest amount since the Great Recession.
Gross domestic product, the sum of a nation’s economy, slowed to a 0.5% annual growth rate in the first three months of 2016, the government said Thursday. The U.S. had grown 1.4%, 2% and 3.9% in the prior three quarters.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gdp-slows-to-05-in-first-quarter-2016-04-28
Jeff Cox | @JeffCoxCNBCcom
Consumers have been the missing link in the U.S. economic recovery and are likely to remain so absent a major change in sentiment.
Despite the seemingly endless stream of Wall Street economists who believe the U.S. is about to snap out of its malaise, most Americans think the economy is bad and getting worse, according to several recent surveys.
One of the more glaring examples of how strong pessimism has become is Gallup’s U.S. Economic Confidence Index. The measure gauges the difference between respondents who say the economy is improving or declining. The most recent results are not good.
Fully 59 percent say the economy is “getting worse” against just 37 percent who say it is “getting better.” That gap of 22 percentage points is the worst since August, according to Gallup, which polled 3,542 adults. The index carries a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/14/most-americans-think-economy-is-getting-worse.html
Edward Luce
Western democracy faces no mortal threat but it is going through an acute stress test
When people strike comparisons with Hitler — or Munich — I usually reach for my earplugs. The same applies to the Great Depression. There is nothing on today’s horizon that compares with the Nazis or the mass privation that followed the 1929 stock market crash.
Yet there are echoes we would be foolish to ignore. Western democracy faces no mortal threat. But it is going through an acute stress test. On both sides of the Atlantic, people have lost faith in their public institutions. They are also losing trust in their neighbours. Co-operation is fraying and open borders are in question. We can no longer be sure the centre will hold — or even that it deserves to.
The most insidious trend is vanishing optimism about the future. Contrary to what is widely believed, the majority’s pessimism pre-dates the 2008 financial collapse. At the height of the last property bubble in 2005, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, said society could not long tolerate a situation where most people were suffering from declining standards of living.
“This is not the sort of thing that a democratic society — a capitalist democratic society — can readily accept without addressing,” he said. This came after several years of falling median income.
For most Americans and Europeans the situation is worse today than it was then. Many have since had their homes repossessed. Median incomes were lower in 2015 than when Mr Greenspan issued his warning. A majority on both sides of the Atlantic believe their children will be worse off than they are.
https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be952500-e7a8-11e5-a09b-1f8b0d268c39.html#axzz42pwgE9Xi
file photo by Boyd Loving
A poll released Monday shows New Jersey following national trends in residents’ gloomy assessment of their income and the larger economy. The study from Stockton University’s polling institute found that a majority of New Jersey residents feel their income has failed to keep up with increases in the cost of living. 55 percent of respondents described their income as “falling behind the cost of living,” while 37 percent said it was “just keeping pace.” JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
By AIMEE PICCHI MONEYWATCH September 1, 2015, 5:15 AM
By one dismal measure, America is joining the likes of Third World countries.
The number of U.S. residents who are struggling to survive on just $2 a day has more than doubled since 1996, placing 1.5 million households and 3 million children in this desperate economic situation. That’s according to “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” a book from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that will be released on Sept. 1.
The measure of poverty isn’t arbitrary — it’s the threshold the World Bank uses to measure global poverty in the developed world. While it may be the norm to see families in developing countries such as Bangladesh and Ethiopia struggle to survive on such meager income, the growing ranks of America’s ultrapoor may be shocking, given that the U.S. is considered one of the most developed capitalist countries in the world.
“Most of us would say we would have trouble understanding how families in the county as rich as ours could live on so little,” said author Kathryn Edin, who spoke on a conference call to discuss the book, which she wrote with Luke Shaefer. Edin is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. “These families, contrary to what many would expect, are workers, and their slide into poverty is a failure of the labor market and our safety net, as well as their own personal circumstances.”
To be sure, the labor market has been rocky for many Americans, not just the poorest. But changes in how employers deal with their low-wage workers have hit many of these poor Americans especially hard, such as the rise of on-call scheduling, which leaves some parents scrambling for hours and dealing with unpredictable pay.
Retailers such as Walmart (WMT) and fast-food companies increasingly are using sophisticated scheduling software that allows them to tinker with work schedules at the last minute, depending on their stores’ needs. That reduces costs for the employer, but it can make life difficult for employees, especially those with children and dependents.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-surging-ranks-of-americas-ultrapoor/
Aug 14, 2015
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, issued the following statement after the SEC announced a finalized pay ratio rule as required by Dodd-Frank:
“The pay ratio rule will do nothing to provide useful information to investors, improve our economy, or help struggling Americans find a job. What it will do is impose substantial costs upon American businesses and their shareholders, and make our capital markets less attractive for growing companies. We need to work to grow our economy and expand opportunity for all Americans—not create new red tape and regulations that do nothing to achieve those goal.
Garret also offered a special thanks to Ciaran, Jonathan, Michael, Allison, Catherine, Joe, and Kayla,all interns from his Washington, D.C. office, Garret said “for all of your hard work this summer! You did a great job, and I hope you learned a lot during your time on Capitol Hill.”
Which Cities/States Will Be The First To Default When The Economy Rolls Over?
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
What happens to local governments when the economy rolls over?
Though we’re constantly reassured the “recovery” that’s stumbled for five years has years of strong growth ahead, history suggests the “recovery” is due to roll over. Few recoveries last longer than 5 or 6 years, and the business cycle is graying fast: subprime auto loans are not exactly the foundation of “strong growth.”
So what might push the economy over the cliff? The strong U.S. dollar is crimping overseas sales and profits, the global economy is already recessionary, mortgage applications have dried up, auto sales are being driven by subprime loans, and the valuation bubbles in stocks and real estate are due for a breather, if not an outright reversal. Retail sales are flat, and with all these headwinds, growing profits by 10% to 20% a year becomes impossible for the vast majority of enterprises.
So what happens to local governments when the economy rolls over? Tax revenues decline.
The consensus is that local governments are sitting pretty: sales and property values have risen smartly, pushing tax revenues higher, and the cost of borrowing money via tax-free municipal bonds has fallen. Nice, but these are all functions of expansion and rising tax rates.
The uneven nature of the “recovery” has left some cities and states more vulnerable to a downturn than others.Let’s catalog the various risk factors that might become consequential as the global and U.S. economies weaken.
1. Those dependent on foreign tourism. The weak dollar made America a bargain destination for the past decade. As the dollar strengthens and other currencies lose purchasing power, America is no longer a bargain–especially as job cuts decimate the number of people who can blow a few thousand dollars on overseas vacations to the U.S.
2. Auto manufacturing-dependent locales. Vehicle sales have been strong, and the cheerleaders claim sales will keep rising for years to come. Really? With what money? As soon as layoffs hit the marginal workforce and the subprime auto loan bubble implodes, vehicle sales will follow suit.
3. Cities and states that depend heavily on capital gains taxes. Once the current housing and stock bubbles deflate–or simply stop expanding–tax revenues from the enormous capital gains reaped in the past five years will wither.
4. Locales dependent on high income taxes. Given that most of the job growth of the past five years has occurred in low-wage sectors, adding jobs hasn’t boosted income taxes much. High income-tax states have jacked up rates on high-income earners, but there is no law of nature that says high-income jobs will survive a global downturn.
Rather, enterprises desperate to tighten operating costs will want to jettison high-cost employees first.
5. Local governments with enormous debt burdens. With interest rates low, municipalities and states went to the bond market over the past few years for “free money.” Once tax revenues plummet, the interest on all that “free money” will take a larger percentage of tax revenues, heightening the cost of new bond debt as buyers start adding in the risk of eventual default.
6. Locales with high fixed costs. These include high healthcare costs for homeless, elderly, government employees, etc., interest on all those bonds, government employee pensions, etc. The fixed costs only increase every year, regardless of tax revenues. Every local government with high fixed costs is in a tightening fiscal vice once tax revenues plummet.
7. Local governments with generous employee benefits and pensions. Once the stock market rolls over, the big capital gains that have funded public pension plans dry up, and the annual contribution has to be paid out of declining tax revenues.
Should interest rates actually rise, pension fund bond portfolios would plummet in value, too.
8. Local governments dominated by self-serving entrenched interests. That is, all of them: sclerotic, self-serving, entrenched interests resolutely refuse to accept any cuts in their swag. As tax revenues fall off a cliff, government managers will face a dilemma: they can’t cut costs because the self-serving interests have made that politically impossible, and they can’t borrow money for operating expenses.
That leaves defaulting on debt as the only choice left. And since that’s the only choice left, that’s what they’ll do.
The vice will close on some cities and states sooner than others, but it will eventually squeeze every city and state with declining revenues and rising fixed costs into default.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-12/which-citiesstates-will-be-first-default-when-economy-rolls-over
Economy no savior for Dems
Democrats are running out of time for an economic savior.
They have long predicted that an economic turnaround would be the elixir that helps them retain control of the Senate in November.
But with just a handful of big economic reports left before Election Day, the economic picture is largely in place. And while the outlook is bright, voters continue to hold a dim view of their own financial prospects.
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“There are still a lot of families playing catch-up,” said Jared Bernstein at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “It’s got to be awfully hard for the typical voter to figure out what Congress had done to help the economy move forward. It’s a lot easier to figure out what they’ve done to screw things up.”
Broadly speaking, the economy has made gains in the last several months. The unemployment rate has held steady or dropped every month for over a year, and new data shows the economy grew this spring at its fastest rate in more than 12 months.
But the good news isn’t resonating with the public.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this month found 71 percent of people blamed Washington for the economy’s woes, and dissatisfaction mainly fell on incumbents overall, rather than on a particular party.
That poll found roughly half of voters believe the economy is still in a recession, even though the economic decline ended in June 2009.
Similarly, Gallup’s index of economic confidence has remained unchanged for all of 2014. People are actually less confident about the economy now than they were in January, when the unemployment rate was nearly half a percentage point higher.
With just two months to go before the midterm elections, there are just a handful of major economic indicators due before ballots are cast, including a pair of jobs reports.
With so little time left, it appears increasingly unlikely that views will change enough to boost the chances of Democrats, who are trying to escape the gravity of President Obama’s flagging poll numbers.
Some researchers argue the economic recovery has not been felt widely, with the majority of the gains going to people on the top of the income scale.
Read more: https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/216287-economy-no-savior-for-dems#ixzz3C5WJ63Vb