By Dave Boyer – The Washington Times – Sunday, November 1, 2015
When President Obama signs into law the new two-year budget deal Monday, his action will bring into sharper focus a part of his legacy that he doesn’t like to talk about: He is the $20 trillion man.
Mr. Obama’s spending agreement with Congress will suspend the nation’s debt limit and allow the Treasury to borrow another $1.5 trillion or so by the end of his presidency in 2017. Added to the current total national debt of more than $18.15 trillion, the red ink will likely be crowding the $20 trillion mark right around the time Mr. Obama leaves the White House.
A new Rutgers poll suggests that New Jersey residents are as uninformed and uninterested as ever when it comes to state-level politics. PolitickerNJ decided to visit the Cherry Hill Mall and see whether people at one of South Jersey’s biggest commercial centers would buck the trend. JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
Indoctrinated: Some can recall a time when our campuses of higher education were zones where free speech thrived. That was another era, though. Today’s students want speech restricted. How did it come to this?
The results of a poll that should be shocking, but sadly aren’t, show that 51% of students favor their “college or university having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty.”
Oddly, 95% say that “the issue of free speech” is important at their college or university, while 73% believe that the First Amendment is “an important amendment that still needs to be followed and respected in today’s society.” Only 21% told the Buckley Free Speech Survey that it is “outdated” and “can no longer be applied in today’s society and should be changed.”
Maybe these findings are not so odd, after all. In today’s America, “free speech” and “First Amendment rights” tend not to include any expression that doesn’t conform to left-wing ideology.
Seven years ago, almost two entire college generations in the past, the Acton Institute observed, “Students at colleges and universities who articulate conservative and traditional views are at particular risk of bullying and indoctrination by campus administrators and faculty who are zealous ideologues.”
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: https://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/102715-777695-politically-correct-conditioning-starts-when-kids-are-young.htm#ixzz3psV4RWsp
It’s hard out there for a millennial navigating the housing market.
If you’re an American man or woman under the age of 35, there’s a historically large chance that you’re living with your parents. And if not, you’re very likely to be renting, and paying too much for the privilege. Only 34.8 percent of young adult households actually own their home, the smallest fraction since at least 1994, and among those who are forking over cash to a landlord, nearly half are considered “rent burdened”—meaning housing eats up around a third or more of their income.
And what about those who’d at least like to buy? Well, there’s a pretty good probability they’re getting boxed out of the market. On top of the challenges posed by tough post-crash mortgage standards, Bloomberg reports Thursday that prices for typical starter homes have been on a tear due to a lack of supply, and are now actually above their past bubbly heights:
Prices for the least expensive previously owned homes—properties at 75 percent or less of the median—were up 10.7 percent in August from a year earlier and now represent the only one of four price tiers to surpass the peak reached during the housing bubble, according to a housing index from CoreLogic Inc. The August pace was 5.9 percent above its pre-recession high in October 2006.
Why are cheap houses getting so expensive? Because nobody’s building them, for starters. In the years immediately following the recession, there was a sense among many urban planners and others in the real estate industry that developers would have to shelve their McMansion blueprints and start marketing smaller, more affordable new homes—possibly in slightly urban or at least walkable settings—in order to adjust to millennial tastes and finances. But that hasn’t really happened, even as more young adults have hit home-buying age. Instead, builders, convinced that all the market really craves is size, seem to have gone back to erecting large houses in far-out subdivisions. The median new home hit a record square footage in the first quarter of 2015, and shrank only slightly in the spring.
While support for Bernie Sanders among those in New Jersey’s general Democratic Party establishment is weak compared to support for Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, there is one group that seems to be “feeling the Bern” in New Jersey: Millennials. Alyana Alfaro, PolitickerNJ Read more
SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA
THE WASHINGTON POST |
WIRE SERVICE
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with the new school year starting, now there’s this: “selfie lice.” In recent days, the Internet has been abuzz with fear over the latest scourge to hit our borders, and it has to do with social media and those pesky little critters that tend to latch onto kids’ hair.
The concern is that gaggles of tweens and teens with smartphones are touching heads while snapping and sharing pictures of themselves, causing a rise in lice transmissions.
No one seems to know where the idea originated, but some point to the selfie-seen-around-the-world that Ellen Degeneres took at last year’s Oscars. That led to snarky comments online about how close those beautiful heads — Jennifer Lawrence! Brad Pitt! Julia Roberts! Bradley Cooper! — appeared to be to each other and speculation about what might happen if any one of them had lice.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten about this for a while but as the summer ended and people began to think about school again, comments from a pediatrician in Wisconsin who spoke about seeing a rise in lice cases among teens went viral. Soon, experts from across the country, from cities big and small, were weighing in and saying that they, too, were alarmed about selfie lice.
It sounds bad, but there’s no need to panic. Let’s separate fact from fiction. First, experts say transmitting lice while taking a selfie is technically possible, but since lice cannot fly or jump, they’d have to crawl, and that can take a while, so you’d probably have to be head-to-head with your gal pal for longer than a few seconds.
This past spring, Americans’ spending at restaurants surpassed their spending at grocery stores for the first time ever:
At the same time, a recent survey showed that “Among those [making $75,000 or more] who are not saving as much as they believe they should because of spending on lifestyle purchases, 68 percent blamed dining out as the main reason. Among millennials (ages 18-34), 70 percent blamed dining out.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. job growth slowed in August, but the unemployment rate dropped to a near 7-1/2-year low and wages accelerated, keeping alive prospects of a Federal Reserve interest rate hike later this month.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 173,000 last month after an upwardly revised gain of 245,000 in July, the Labor Department said on Friday. August’s gain was the smallest in five months as the factory sector lost the most jobs since July 2013.
The jobs count, however, may have been tarnished by a statistical fluke that has often led to sharp upward revisions to payroll figures for August after initial weak readings.
Indicating the hiring slowdown was likely not reflective of the economy’s true health, the jobless rate fell two-tenths of a point to 5.1 percent, its lowest level since April 2008.
In addition, payrolls data for June and July were revised to show 44,000 more jobs created than previously reported, bringing the average job gains for the past three months to a solid 221,000. Average hourly earnings increased 8 cents, the biggest rise in seven months and the length of the average workweek also expanded.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/22/2015 11:43 -0400
Perhaps it’s all the talk about across-the-board debt forgiveness or maybe the total amount of outstanding student debt has simply grown so large ($1.3 trillion) that even those with no conception of how much money that actually is realize that it’s simply never going to paid back so there’s no point worrying about, but whatever the case, the general level of concern regarding America’s student debt bubble doesn’t seem to be at all commensurate with the size of the problem.
And it’s not just the sheer size of the debt pile that’s worrisome. There’s also the knock-on effects, such as delayed household formation and the attendant downward pressure on the homeownership rate, and of course hyperinflation in the rental market.
Of course one reason no one is panicking – yet – is that the severity of the problem is masked by artificially suppressed delinquency rates. As we’ve documented in excruciating detail, if one excludes loans in deferment and forbearance from the numerator in the delinquency calculation, but includes those loans in the denominator then the delinquency rate will be deceptively low. In any event, as WSJ reports, even if one looks at something very simple like, say, the number of borrowers who haven’t made a payment in a year, the picture is not pretty and it’s getting worse all the time. Here’s more:
Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban says Hillary Clinton’s plan to curb growing student-loan debt will actually make attending college more expensive.
“[Hillary’s plan] stands a better chance of increasing the amount of money students owe than decreasing it,” Cuban said on his Cyber Dust app on Friday.
“Just as easy money led to the real estate bubble a few years ago, the easier it is to borrow money for college the easier it is for colleges to raise tuition. Tuition keeps going up because no matter how high they raise it, students can still borrow more to pay for it,” Cuban continued.
Cuban, who stars on ABC’s “Shark Tank” and owns the Dallas Mavericks, has for years warned of a “student loan bubble.”
“At some point, it’s going to pop,” Cuban told Business Insider in March.
So long to Ritzy and farewell to Cinderella Rockafella – the long tradition of the great British nightclub appears to be on the way out.
Even famous London dance-music clubs such as Turnmills, Bagley’s and The End have succumbed to a process that has seen the UK’s total portfolio of nightclubs shrink by almost half from 3,144 in 2005 to 1,733 a decade later.
The statistic from the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers (ALMR) is a signal not just of the effect of the smoking ban and the imposition of student loans but of a fundamental shift in the way a new generation chooses to spend its entertainment budget.
After a week listening to favourite playlists on Spotify, when friends on Facebook and WhatsApp have looked out so many other attractive weekend adventures that will make far better shots on Instagram, another Friday night at Mystique just doesn’t do it. And, as for pulling, there’s always Tinder.
“Millennials favour experiences over stuff and nightclubs should benefit from that,” says Ramzi Yakob, senior strategist of the digital agency TH_NK. “But Millennials also realise that their time is the scarcest resource they have, so why would they spend their precious time revisiting the same experience every weekend?”
Posted: Jul 29, 2015 4:01 PM EDTUpdated: Jul 30, 2015 7:54 PM EDT
By Beth Galvin, FOX Medical Team Reporter
ATLANTA -As Georgia students get ready to head back to class, a disturbing study.
Researchers found preteens and teens – especially boys – with behavioral issues like ADHD are being prescribed anti-psychotic medications. They’re ending up on drugs typically reserved for people with brain disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Dr. Taz Bhatia, who founded the Atlanta Center for Holistic and Integrative Medicine, read through the study, and found the numbers troubling.
She says, “If you look at the statistics, it’s almost like 1.5 percent of our boys between the ages of 10 and 18 are on an antipsychotic medication.”
And researchers at Columbia and Yale Universities and the New York State Psychiatric Institute warned antipsychotic medications can cause major side effects, like a blunting of emotions and severe weight gain. And, unlike stimulants like Ritalin, antipsychotics are not FDA-approved for use in children with behavioral issues.
Dr. Bhatia, who goes professionally by Dr. Taz, says, “Nobody, whether you’re a mom trying to advocate for your child, or you’re a physician trying to decide what’s best for the child, nobody wants a child on a medication with long-term side effects that may even affect their development. Nobody wants that. We have to create a system that really digs and looks for other options for these kids.”
Dr. Taz acknowledges that some kids need an ADHD medication. But, she thinks it should be used only as part of a broader treatment plan that includes lifestyle and dietary changes and behavioral therapy.
So, what should you do if your child’s doctor is recommending a pill? Dr. Taz says, “My first recommendation would be to make sure you’re on the lowest dose of that medication with the fewest side effects.”
Next, Dr. Taz says ask what else you can do – along with the medication – to help your child succeed.
She says, “That’s where you and your doctor should be talking about sleep and diet, and (about) other things. Like, about school, and are they well-matched to the school they’re about to enter?”
Being the “cool kid” might seem ideal at school but it can land you in difficulties later on in life, according to a new study.
The work, “Whatever Happened to the Cool Kids?”, was published in the journal Child Development by researchers at the University of Virginia, and looked at the lives of more than 180 teenagers in America over a decade.
But the results might not be to the liking of those who want to rule the roost at their schools.
According to the study, teenagers who tried to act cool and were popular during their younger years had a higher risk of experiencing problems as adults, including alcohol and drug abuse, and becoming involved in crime.
So ‘cool teens’ – made popular in films by characters such as James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Rachel McAdams inMean Girls – may go on to lose out.
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.
Parents stay calm teenagers are not having sex …anymore
Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Jul. 23, 2015 3:15 pm
According to popular culture, today’s teens are a bunch of “hookup”-scarred heathens, trapped in a sordid world of casual flings with one another and exploitation at the hands of online predators. In reality, teenagers today are having less sex than they have for decades. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the number of (unmarried) 15- to 19-year-olds who’ve had sex dropped by 14 percent for girls and 22 percent for boys in the period between 1988 and 2013.
As of 2011-2013, 44 percent of teen girls surveyed and 47 percent of teen boys said they had sexual intercourse—compared to 51 and 60 percent, respectively, of their 1988 counterparts. Or, to put it another way, 4.3 million millennial girls and 4.8 million boys, compared to 5 million and around 6.15 million in the late ’80s. Congratulations, last of the Gen X’ers: you are better than the youngest of the millennial cohort at getting laid.
But kids these days are better about practicing safe sex: 79 percent of the girls surveyed and 84 percent of the boys said they had used some sort of contraceptive method the first time they had sex, with condoms ranking the most popular. In 1988, only 71 percent of male teens and 69 percent of female teens used contraception when they first had sex.
After condoms, the birth control pill and the pull-out method are now the most popular teen contraception choices. Fifty-four percent of 15- to 19-year-old girls surveyed said they had at some point been on the pill, which is similar to the 2002 rate; the rates of contraceptive-implant use (2 percent) and intrauterine device, or IUD, use (3 percent) were also relatively stable.
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