Half of Americans can’t afford their house June 3, 2014, 1:58 p.m. EDT
Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.“Affordability issues are real and a major hurdle,” says Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, an industry group. Home prices have increased 20% over the past two years while wages have barely gone up, he says. “Only by adding more new supply, via housing starts, can home prices be tamed,” Yun adds. In fact, construction of housing units has averaged around 1.5 million a year for the past five decades, he says, but it’s likely to be less than 1 million in 2014.
What’s more, at least 15% of American homeowners (or residents of 78 counties across the country) were living in housing markets where the monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home requires more than 30% of the monthly median household income — long considered the maximum for rent/mortgage repayments. Housing costs above that threshold are “unaffordable by historic standards,” says Daren Blomquist, vice president at real estate data firm RealtyTrac. In New York county/Manhattan, mortgage payments represent 77% of the median income and in San Francisco County represents 70%.
1 in 5 Children Live in Poverty in U.S. June 3, 2014 – 1:09 PM By Ali Meyer Subscribe to Ali Meyer RSS
CNSNews.com) – One in five children under age 18, or 21.3%, are living in poverty in the United States, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
In 2012, there were 15,437,000 children under 18 years old, or 21.3%, who were classified in the “below poverty” threshold, according to the Census.
“The incidence of poverty rates varies widely across the population according to age, education, labor force attachment, family living arrangements, and area of residence, among other factors. Under the official poverty definition, an average family of four was considered poor in 2012 if its pre-tax cash income for the year was below $23,492,” according to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entitled, Poverty in the United States: 2012.
“The Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds form the basis for statistical estimates of poverty in the United States,” reads the report. “The thresholds reflect crude estimates of the amount of money individuals or families, of various size and composition, need per year to purchase a basket of goods and services deemed as ‘minimally adequate,’ according to the living standards of the early 1960s.”
“Persons are considered poor, for statistical purposes, if their family’s countable money income is below its corresponding poverty threshold,” the CRS states.
The Census has been tracking these data since 1959, when the percentage of children under 18 living in poverty was 26.9%. In 1964, when then-President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the War on Poverty, the percentage of children living in poverty was 22.7%. Since then until now, the percentage has decreased by only 6.2%.
“In 2012, over one in five children (21.3%) in the United States, some 15.4 million, were poor – both their poverty rate and estimated number poor were statistically unchanged from 2011,” said the CRS report. “The lowest recorded rate of child poverty was in 1969, when 13.8% of children were counted as poor.”
Summertime Blues: Teen Unemployment in Major U.S. Cities Tops 50 Percent June 2, 2014 – 4:16 PM By Penny Starr
(CNSNews.com) – A new analysisby the Employment Policy Institute (EPI) shows that unemployment among teens without a high school diploma is more than 50 percent in two of the largest U.S. cities.
Using U.S. Census Bureau data from May 2013 to April 2014, the analysis reveals that in Riverside-San Bernardino area of Southern California, the unemployment rate for teens ages 16 to 19 years old who don’t have a high school diploma is 54.2 percent.
In the Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Ore., metropolitan area, the unemployment rate from that population is 53.8 percent.
“These numbers are staggering,” Michael Saltsman, director of research at EPI told CNSNews.com. “Teens across the country this summer are missing out on valuable work experience as they continue to suffer through an extended period of high unemployment and difficult job prospects.”
Doctor Shortages Aren’t Just a Veterans Affairs Problem. They’re a Nationwide Problem.
The country is running out of physicians to treat a growing pool of patients.
Last week, an investigative report revealed that 1,700 veterans who wanted to see a doctor at a Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital were missing from an official waiting list, mirroring a tactic used at two dozen other facilities across the country to mask long waits for medical care.
A few hundred other people are missing from the Veterans Affairs system, too: doctors.
The Veterans Affairs Department is 400 doctors short, The New York Times reports. But the doctor deficit is not limited to the VA—it’s a nationwide problem.
Power Plants, Rate-Payers Brace for Obama Administration’s New EPA Regs Eric Boehm June 2, 2014 at 9:32 am
In November 2010, President Obama stood before reporters in the White House briefing room and offered a frank description of his administration’s chances of getting heavy-duty environmental regulations through Congress.
That was in the final days before Republicans seized control of the U.S. House in Obama’s first mid-term. Unable to get greenhouse gas emissions rules through a Democratic Congress, Obama acknowledged it would be far less likely in the soon-to-be divided government.
“I think there are a lot of Republicans that ran against the energy bill that passed in the House last year,” Obama said. “And so it’s doubtful that you could get the votes to pass that through the House this year or next year or the year after.”
It’s now the year after the year after, but the situation is the same.
Today, the administration will see what it can accomplish without congressional approval. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce new policies designed to cut carbon emissions at American power plants.
Some details have already leaked out. The new regulations will vary by state, but each state will have to hit targets for carbon emissions—rather than previous EPA regulations that have set limits for specific facilities but never for an entire state or the whole nation—in a two-step process intended to reduce carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2030, the Washington Post reported.
Those mandatory reductions will be a heavy drag on the economy, according to a report issued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several other groups representing energy companies.
“They are working on really the most signification EPA regulation, or any regulation, in American history. Certainly, it’s EPA’s costliest regulation,” said Matt LeTourneau, director of communications for the U.S. Chamber.
The report uses a combination of sources in an attempt to determine what the Obama administration might have up its sleeve. The Chamber relied on a comprehensive emissions plan published by the National Resources Defense Council, which is working closely with the EPA to craft the new rules, and took into account international agreements the administration has made, such as the Copenhagen Accords.
If their prognostications are true, the Chamber expects the new EPA regulations to cost 200,000 jobs per year and as much as $51 billion in annual GDP. The changes also would cause electricity prices to skyrocket for individual consumers and businesses, according to the Chamber.
The high costs will be incurred because the new regulations target not only new power plants but also require existing plants be retrofitted or closed in favor of new forms of energy.
LeTourneau said nearly all coal-fired plants would be shut down, and even some natural gas power plants could face the axe.
Even with all those cutbacks, global emissions would be reduced by just 1.8 percent, the Chamber says, because most of the growth in emissions is coming from places such as China and India.
Tom Reynolds, a spokesman for the EPA, took to the agency’s blog Wednesday to respond to the Chamber’s report.
Reynolds said the EPA had gathered testimony from hundreds of groups, including many that are members of the U.S. Chamber, and promised more meetings after the new rules are announced. He said the Chamber’s report had significant holes because the group was working off assumptions and other sources, not the actual EPA regulations.
“The Chamber’s report is nothing more than irresponsible speculation based on guesses of what our draft proposal will be. Just to be clear—it’s not out yet. I strongly suggest that folks read the proposal before they cry the sky is falling.”
If the new regulations are as onerous as business groups believe, and if they are adopted into law without congressional approval, expect lengthy court battles over the issue. The Chamber was one of several groups to sue over the Affordable Care Act—which did have congressional approval—showing it is not afraid to take on the administration in court to delay or defeat costly new rules.
It likely will be years before any new carbon emissions standards for power plants are a reality, but the punch and counter-punch from the Chamber and the EPA shows the battle over messaging already has begun.
Eric Boehm is a reporter for Watchdog.org, a national network of investigative reporters covering waste, fraud and abuse in government. Watchdog.org is a project of the nonprofitFranklin Center for Government & Public Integrity
GDP Report Confirms We Now Have a $2 Trillion Obama Growth Deficit
Stephen Moore
May 29, 2014 at 1:15 pm
This morning’s depressing revised calculation of the growth of the economy in the first quarter of 2014 (-1.0 percent) makes it official: The Obama expansion is now $2 trillion short of where we would be if growth in this recovery had matched the Reagan recovery that started in 1982.
That is to say the average family would have about $5,000 more income each year to spend if it were not for this slow recovery. The Census Bureau reports that median household income is down by $1,800 since this so-called recovery began
Worse, investment plummeted in the first quarter of 2014 by 11.7 percent from the same period in 2013. That was the biggest decline since the recession ended in 2009. Without investment, businesses can’t grow and wages won’t rise. Capital investment by businesses is a strong leading indicator of future prosperity.
The administration was quick to blame the dismal numbers on the cold winter and blizzard conditions in the Midwest and Northeast. But he 2013 growth rate was 1.9 percent, and the rate has been less than 2 percent for more than a year. Under Reagan, the growth rate during the expansion was more than 4 percent.
There are strong signs the economy picked up steam starting in April, but the overall picture of a failed recovery plan is now unmistakable. We spent $830 billion on a stimulus stuffed with make-work government-jobs programs and programs to pay people to buy new cars, borrowed $6 trillion, launched a government-run health-care system that incentivizes businesses not to hire more workers, raised tax rates on the businesses that hire workers and the investors that finance businesses that hire workers, printed $3 trillion of paper money, shut down an entire industry (coal), and tried to regulate and restrain the one industry that actually is booming (oil and gas).
Is it really a surprise the government is underperforming and this is the worst recovery from recession in 75 years.Ideas do have consequences – especially bad ones.
What good that has come from Obamanomics? Hopefully, we all have relearned a painful lesson that government spending, congressional taxing, Treasury borrowing and Fed printing don’t stimulate the economy. The new GDP report reminds us these battle-tested economic strategies don’t work. For tens of millions of Americans, unfortunately, this is a lesson learned the hard way.
— Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of the New York Times bestseller An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of States.
Common Core critics speak out at forum in Ridgewood
MAY 29, 2014 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2014, 3:50 PM BY LAURA HERZOG STAFF WRITER
Christopher Tienken, an assistant professor of education administration at Seton Hall University, questions why some local control in education is being taken away.
This is why he studies standardized school reform, and why he came to Ridgewood High School (RHS) to speak on Tuesday.
“What I see is a whole lot of ‘one size fits all,’ trying to make everyone the same at the end of the day,” Tienken said. “These standards might be great for some. They might propel some schools forward. But that issue should be a local decision.”
Invited by Ridgewood resident and mother Terry Anzano to speak, Tienken gave a presentation titled “Standardized Schooling: Is It Necessary? Is It Effective?” to about 40 parents on Tuesday in the RHS library. Principal Tom Gorman, Assistant Principals Jeff Nyhuis and Basil Pizzuto, Board of Education (BOE) trustee Christina Krauss, Ridgewood Education Association president and RHS social studies teacher Michael Yannone, and a few other teachers also attended.
The presentation was about myths surrounding the national education standardization movement, including controversial mandates known as the Common Core State Standards, which will replace testing standards in New Jersey and 43 other states.
The debate over these standards, which were created by a group of individuals representing both the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, has become a well-known – but still confusing – subject.
New Jersey adopted the standards, which Gov. Chris Christie supports, in 2010. Ridgewood educators, who still design their own curriculums, completed any needed alterations to align lessons to the benchmarks. The district has also implemented a new, more involved teacher evaluation system that replaced Ridgewood’s old system, which administrators supported.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/education/common-core-critics-speak-out-at-forum-in-ridgewood-1.1025976#sthash.lhaVWXTo.dpuf
Thomas Piketty (Photo: IBO/SIPA/Newscom) Piketty’s Questionable Data Salim Furth, Ph.D May 27, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Thomas Piketty made some questionable choices in adjusting and presenting the data that underlies his bestselling economics tome, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Chris Giles, economics editor of the Financial Times newspaper, published a detailed list of apparent fudges in Piketty’s data.
Giles’ most explosive accusation is that Piketty chose data sources that were friendliest to his own preconceived ideas. For example, both the United States and the United Kingdom have two potential data sources for wealth: estate tax records and surveys of living households. In the U.S., Piketty uses the household survey, which showed rising wealth concentration. But in the U.K., he chose to use the inferior-quality estate tax data, which also showed rising wealth concentration. If he’d flipped both choices, he would have found falling inequality in the U.K. and steady inequality in the U.S. Giles is correct when he says, “Choices matter.” Giles’ estimates of U.K. wealth inequality in recent ecades are much lower than Piketty’s, and Piketty will need to defend his choices if we are to believe that U.K. wealth inequality has been rising.
Piketty presents data showing that wealth inequality rose slightly in Sweden from 2000 to 2010. But his “2000” data point actually is 2004 data, and his “2010” data point actually is an average of 2005 and 2006. When Giles used the data from 2000, he found that inequality actually fell slightly from 2000 to 2006 (the last year available). Perhaps Piketty had a good reason to use the years he did, but he has not offered an explanation.
These questionable choices have been reported as “errors” or “mistakes,” but the questions about Piketty’s data pertain to the choices he made, not the minor goofs. Historian Phillip Magness presents Piketty’s summary data on U.S. wealth inequality alongside its pre-1970 source. The graphs tell very different stories. Perhaps Piketty’s adjustments were valuable and moved the data in the right direction. But it is incumbent on Piketty to explain those adjustments, and it is incumbent on the reader to understand that the data was uncertain and incomplete to begin with and then was adjusted as the author believed necessary.
Even the best data on wealth distributions is uncertain. One of Piketty’s central ideas is that the amount and concentration of wealth has been rising steadily since 1980. He contends that the same economic forces are at work now and he projects the recent changes into the future. But if there is substantial uncertainty about each estimate and disagreement among data sources, then “trends” are highly subjective. As Yogi Berra may have said, “Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.”
So how should we read Piketty? As others have noted, Capital can be divided into three components: history, prediction and prescription. One can believe the history without agreeing with Piketty’s predictions about the future. And if Piketty’s predictions are correct, he’s still wrong to prescribe brutal, confiscatory taxation, because that would increase poverty and lower wages, especially in poor countries.
What is at stake in Giles’ critique is Piketty’s account of history. Piketty’s story makes broad claims about global trends in the 19th and 20th centuries. If the trends turn out to depend on making specific choices, interpolations and adjustments in his collection of data, then we might have to conclude that predictions are hard to make, even about the past.
The Economic History Lessons We Never Learned Stephen Moore May 27, 2014 at 12:00 pm
Are conservatives going to allow liberals to rewrite the history of the Great Recession, just as they so successfully did in writing the fictitious account of the Great Depression, which now appears in almost every American history text?
The central message of former Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in his new book “Stress Test,” is that the bank bailouts and the Obama stimulus plan saved us from a second Great Depression. President Obama recites that same line in nearly every speech he delivers.
This is what we call a counterfactual – what might have happened if we hadn’t done what we did. The left loves counterfactuals, because – like “climate change” – they are impossible to refute. No one can say for certain what would have happened in some parallel universe.
But getting the story right on this episode of history is a critical issue for American economic policy going forward. We let the left write the history books on the Great Depression and it was an Aesops Fable. Most Americans, my 12-year-old included, are taught that FDR’s New Deal ended the Great Depression and moved millions of Americans out of misery.
Actually as Amity Shlaes shows in her classic book “The Forgotten Man,” and Burt Fulsom in “New Deal or Raw Deal” nearly every government regulatory bureau and spending program conceive during the Great Depression only lengthened the misery and disrupted the normal healing powers of a free economy. Eight years after the New Deal was launched, the unemployment rate was still in double digits, and it was not until the start of World War II, when millions of young men were put in military uniform and the nation mobilized for a global war, that the Depression ended.
Which brings us to the Great Recession in 2008 and its aftermath. What is highly inconvenient for apologists for the Obama blitzkrieg of government programs and debt in 2009 and 2010 is that at the start of his presidency, Barack Obama laid out his own counterfactual of what would have happened without the deluge of federal spending and debt.
According to the White House’s own calculations, the economy would have been better off today if the government had done nothing, rather than borrow and spend $6 trillion. The unemployment rate WITHOUT the stimulus was expected to be 5 percent today. Instead it is 6.3 percent and in reality closer to 10 percent.
Another way to put this is that if the labor force had not declined AND we had the 5 percent unemployment rate Mr. Obama says we would have had without the stimulus, there would be at least 10 million more Americans working today.
So, considering we are still 10 million jobs short and $6 trillion further in debt, here is another counterfactual to ponder: How much faster would the economy be growing today if we didn’t have the carrying cost of $6 trillion in debt to contend with? Think if we had used this money to finance a 21st century tax reform or for transitioning Social Security to a fully funded personal account system that has real assets building up each year, not a vault full of IOUs.
All this is important to remember as Geithner takes his faux victory lap around the country patting himself on the back for pulling America out of the financial abyss.
President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, let the cat out of the bag in the earliest days of the new administration by saying the president should never let a crisis “go to waste.” This burst of honesty was an admission that the left used the financial crisis as an excuse to do all the things it had wanted to do for years — redistribute trillions of dollars to their voters, reregulate the economy, build massive green energy projects, refinance the Great Society welfare state, rescue the unions with auto bailouts, print money in the trillions, and when the economy fails to perform, blame it all on George W. Bush.
The real story of the financial crisis of 2008 was a massive real estate bubble facilitated by easy money from the Fed, government policies through entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that underwrite risky mortgage loans with near 100 percent loan guarantees, a Congress and White House that as Barnie Frank once famously put it “rolled the dice” on the housing market, and private banks, investors and home owners who got caught up in a speculation frenzy. Then we asked the bad actors such as Barney Frank to fix it. And now we’re repeating all those inane mistakes once more, with government again guaranteeing 90 percent of new mortgages, many with recklessly low down payments.
Here we go again. When we let the left write the history books, we never ever seem to learn from our mistakes.
Poland’s Walesa says the US no longer world leader
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s former president and Nobel Peace laureate, Lech Walesa, said Friday he plans to urge President Barack Obama to take a more active world leadership role when he visits Poland in June.
Speaking to The Associated Press, Walesa said “the world is disorganized and the superpower is not taking the lead. I am displeased..
The former Solidarity leader said that when he meets Obama in Warsaw, he wants to tell him that the U.S. should inspire and encourage the world into positive action.
“The point is not in having the States fix problems for us or fight somewhere, no,” Walesa said. “The States should organize us, encourage us and offer programs, while we, the world, should do the rest. This kind of leadership is needed.”
McDonald’s Workers Arrested at Protest Near Headquarters
More than 100 McDonald’s (MCD) employees and some labor and clergy members were arrested after protesting for increased wages near the fast-food chain’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois.
The event, the latest in a series of demonstrations by workers demanding $15-an-hour pay and the right to form a union, began at 1 p.m. local time yesterday, on the eve of McDonald’s Corp.’s shareholder meeting.
About 2,000 protesters, including about 325 McDonald’s workers in restaurant uniforms, stormed though the company’s campus entrance at Jorie Boulevard and Kroc Drive in Oak Brook, according to the organizers, holding signs that said, “We Are Worth More” and “My Union My Voice.” The Oak Brook Police Department estimated the number was 1,000 to 1,500.
Fournier: VA Scandal ‘One of the Lowest Points’ of Obama’s Presidency
By Andrew Johnson May 22, 2014 10:15 AM
President Obama’s poor handling of the mismanagement at the Department of Veterans Affairs could plague his presidency as an all-time low point, saysNational Journal’s Ron Fournier.
“The fact of the matter is the political response to this thing has been both dishonest and way too weak,” he said on Wednesday’s Special Report. “I think this may be one of the lowest points of his presidency.”
Fournier said not only has the Obama administration been misleading in its response to allegations of incidents of malpractice in VA facilities across the country that led to the death of several veterans waiting for care, but also that President Obama has failed to live up to his promise to improve the department.
“The president has known the VA has been a mess for a long time, and hasn’t done anything to get it fixed,” he said. “It’s gotten worse recently — at least for the last two years, we’ve known we’ve had these problems and nothing’s been done.”
He KNEW! Obama told of Veterans Affairs health care debacle as far back as 2008
The Obama administration received clear notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care — problems that have turned into a growing scandal.
Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.
“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying — and potentially denying — deserving veterans timely care,” the officials wrote.
The briefing materials, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the problems existed well before Mr. Obama took office, dating back at least to the Bush administration. But the materials raise questions about what actions the department took since 2009 to remedy the problems.
In recent months, reports have surfaced about secret wait lists at facilities across the country and, in the case of a Phoenix VA facility, accusations that officials cooked the books to try to hide long wait times. Some families said veterans died while on a secret wait list at the Phoenix facility.
Analyst says politicians who oppose Common Core are being rewarded at the ballot box
May 13, 2014
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Opposition to Common Core is proving politically beneficial, at least in the states of Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina.
PJMedia.com’s Tom Blumer writes in his latest blog, “At least a half-dozen victorious candidates in GOP state legislative contests in those three states … discovered that the key to motivating voters on their behalf was expressing genuine and vocal opposition to the federal government’s stealth imposition of the Common Core and testing regime in their schools.”
Blumer cites “a reliable longtime” activist who says Common Core opposition helped four Ohio Republicans win their primary races for the state House of Representatives last Tuesday.
“In the Buckeye State, Common Core polled as the number one issue of concern in the GOP primaries, even ahead of Gov. John Kasich’s authoritarian expansion of Medicaid,” Blumer notes.
The most stunning example of Common Core leading to political success was Tom Brinkman’s seven-point victory over incumbent Peter Stautberg.
“Brinkman’s trump card over the wishy-washy incumbent was his vocal opposition to Common Core,” Blumer writes. “Stautberg claims to have not taken a position (on the nationalized learning standards). My source calls BS on that; but in any event, convenient neutrality doesn’t cut it. It instead allows force-fed ‘Fed ed’ to become a permanent fixture of the educational landscape.”
Obama Grapples With Growing Dissent From Democrats on Capitol Hill
Disunity Grows in Run-Up to Midterm Elections
WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is encountering an increasingly resistant Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers in his party break with him on a series of issues in the run-up to the November elections.
On issues such as judicial nominees, the Keystone XL pipeline, taxes and trade, the fraying party unity is a sign that individual Democrats have reached a point where their own re-election needs take precedence over Mr. Obama’s goals.
It is a common election-year posture for lawmakers from the same party as the sitting president, especially one whose popularity has waned, as Mr. Obama’s has. But Democrats’ recent moves to demonstrate their independence are forcing Mr. Obama to compromise on an agenda already largely opposed by Republicans. And it comes at a point in his presidency when time is running short to accomplish his goals.
In the past week, Democrats have diverged from the White House over its insistence that the cost of extending certain tax breaks due to expire should be offset with tax increases and other measures, so as not to add to the deficit.
