Tag: socialism

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How Awesome Would the U.S. Economy Be If It Were Set Free from Massive Government Regulations?

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How Awesome Would the U.S. Economy Be If It Were Set Free from Massive Government Regulations?

IImagine if the U.S.’s economy had grown an extra 1% every year since 1949 as a result from less strangulating federal regulation.

This is the thesis for a recent Forbes article by Rich Karlgaard, the magazine’s publisher and head writer. Using the concept of compound interest, along with an assertion that runaway federal tinkering and silly regulations have had a massive impact on the country’s economic growth over the decades, he gives a handful of answers to the question:

“Where would the U.S. economy be today without massive federal regulation?”

Here’s what he came up with:

The 2014 GDP would be $32 trillion, not $17 trillion.
Per capita income would be $101,000, not $54,000.
Per capita wealth would be $480,000, not $260,000. It would probably be higher than that, since savings rates might be higher.
The U.S. would have no federal, state or municipal debts or deficits.
Pensions would be solid. So would Social Security.
The trend of new entrants to The Forbes 400 would not favor entrepreneurs in software, the Internet and financial services but would be more broadly distributed across all industries. Electronic bits–money and software–are less prone to regulation than such physical things as factories, transportation, etc.
Faster, quieter successors to the supersonic Concorde? Cheap, safe nuclear power? Cancer-curing drugs for small populations? Bullet trains financed by private investors? Yes!
The U.S. would have the resources to fight the multiplicity of threats from abroad, from ISIS to hackers.

His conclusion is that when considering political leaders, those that are committed to less government interference should be preferred.

Furthermore, he wisely points out that it’s not a partisan idea, stating that Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton are examples of these types of leaders, whereas Truman, George W. Bush, and Obama are examples of precisely the opposite.

https://www.ijreview.com/2014/10/185794-americas-economy-look-like-without-silent-deadly-killer-astounding/

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Confidence in Obama on economy hits new low

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Confidence in Obama on economy hits new low

Confidence in President Obama’s economic policies has reached an all-time low.

Just 24 percent of Americans say they are extremely or quite confident in Obama’s plan for the economy, according to the CNBC All-America Economic survey released Tuesday. In June 2013, 33 percent gave Obama’s economic policies a thumbs-up, which was the previous record low.

Forty-four percent of Americans say they have no confidence in Obama’s economic policies, tying a previous record set in August 2012.

The lingering economic pessimism comes despite signs that the economy is growing at a solid rate and with the unemployment rate at its lowest level in six years. However, wage growth remains muted at best, leaving many Americans feeling as if the economy has not improved much at all since the recession hit.

The persistent discontent is also complicating Obama’s attempts to tout the economic gains under his watch in an effort to help Democrats hold off Republican challengers at the polls. At the same time, he acknowledges much of the lingering concern, pushing for initiatives like increasing the minimum wage and equal pay for women to further bolster Democratic campaigns.

Obama is facing broad concern about his economic policies from all groups. Just 45 percent of Democrats say they have confidence in his policies.

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/219978-confidence-in-obamas-economic-plan-hits-new-low

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Steve Wynn: I’m ‘more scared’ about US than China

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Steve Wynn: I’m ‘more scared’ about US than China
Jane Wells | @janewells

To rephrase a purported Chinese proverb: Steve Wynn lives in interesting times.

The casino magnate behind Wynn Resorts makes most of his money in Macau, China, and he’s worked closely with the Chinese government for a dozen years. However, gambling revenue across Macau has softened as the government has cracked down on what it calls illegal lending practices there, and as potential new anti-smoking rules threaten to turn off gamblers. Now, new tensions are rising on the heels of massive protestsin Hong Kong by residents who oppose Beijing’s efforts to dictate the candidates they’re allowed to vote for.

‘Everyone in China is pragmatic’

Is Steve Wynn bothered?

“I’m more scared about the United States than I am about China,” Wynn told CNBC this week at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. The protests in Hong Kong have “become sort of a party out there.”

Wynn said he believes the situation will be resolved: “Everyone in China is pragmatic and practical.”

Wynn said Chinese officials may be willing to bend in favor of protesters who want everyone to be able to vote on Hong Kong’s chief executive, though he seemed to think it’s less likely that Beijing will stop deciding who can run and who doesn’t.

“I think the central government is willing to let everybody vote for the CEO, but they want to have some positive input on the nominations, so that whoever it is, the group of candidates, have some kind of mature, rational attitude towards the fact that it belongs to China,” Wynn said. “I don’t think (Chinese President) Xi Jinping and the central government are going to give up some level of control of their own country. It’s not part of that culture there.”

Wynn continues to praise the business climate in China compared to the United States: “The regulatory burden in China is infinitesimal compared to the crap we get in America.”

Wynn’s comments come as Western companies have come up against growing scrutiny from the Chinese government, including surprise raids, long investigations and growing fines in the name of “anti-trust” enforcement.

Wynn refused to comment on a slander lawsuit his company has filed against Jim Chanos—the suit alleges that the famous short seller intimated that Wynn has violated anti-bribing laws in order to succeed in Macau. Instead, he praised what he called “the most laissez-faire place on the planet at the moment” in China, and said Americans don’t realize how positive and aspirational the Chinese are about their own lives and their own government.

https://www.cnbc.com/id/102049852

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On its one-year anniversary, ObamaCare gets an ‘F’

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On its one-year anniversary, ObamaCare gets an ‘F’
By Michael D. Tanner
September 28, 2014 | 12:00am


This Wednesday will mark one year since enrollment in ObamaCare began. What began with the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov has ended with the health law’s supporters claiming victory.

It is true that some of the worst predictions have not yet come true. Yet. But in the last year we’ve also seen plenty of bad news for consumers, providers, employers and taxpayers.

A report card:

The Uninsured:Earlier this month, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services director Marilyn Tavenner testified that roughly 7.3 million people signed up for insurance through the exchanges. That’s down from early estimates of 8.1 million, because nearly 800,000 of those who initially enrolled have stopped or never paid their premiums. A bigger question is how many enrollees were previously insured and were just changing plans. Overall, the best estimates suggest that roughly 8 million people gained insurance under ObamaCare, but roughly half of those were enrolled in Medicaid (outside of the exchanges), which isn’t really health-care reform so much as adding people to government welfare. And it still leaves 41 million American adults uninsured. We spent billions to move the needle a tick.
Grade: C

Your Plan : Despite the president’s assurances to the contrary, roughly 6 million Americans were kicked off their insurance because their plans failed to offer a lengthy-enough maternity stay, didn’t provide sufficient drug and alcohol rehabilitation benefits or otherwise fell short of the insurance that federal bureaucrats thought that they should have. This includes more than 100,000 New Yorkers. Nearly all eventually found other insurance, but a new study from the National Center for Public Policy Research found that, on average, ObamaCare plans were worse than the plans they replaced, in terms of both providers covered and cost-sharing. A new wave of cancellations is about to begin as well. Those New Yorkers who managed to renew their noncompliant plans prior to the effective start date for ObamaCare last year should start receiving cancellation notices any day now. Some people may not even be able to keep the plans that replaced the plans they couldn’t keep the first time. In several states, insurers have dropped plans that they offered on the exchanges or even withdrawn from the market altogether. And if that was not bad enough, Americans with employer-based insurance may find out their insurance has to be changed starting next year.
Grade: F

Premiums: If judged against President Obama’s promise that health-care reform would save us all at least $2,500 through lower premiums, ObamaCare deserves an F. But premium increases have been less bad than expected, especially in states like New York that already had highly regulated insurance markets. Last year, New Yorkers in the individual market saw a reduction in their premiums, but only because the individual market was already in such terrible shape. In states where the individual market was not already dysfunctional, there were significant premium increases. This year, New Yorkers can expect premium increases averaging roughly 6 percent for individual plans and almost 7 percent for small business.
Grade: C+

https://nypost.com/2014/09/28/on-its-one-year-anniversary-obamacare-gets-an-f/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow

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46 percent of doctors give Obamacare a ‘D’ or ‘F’

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46 percent of doctors give Obamacare a ‘D’ or ‘F’

BY PHILIP KLEIN | SEPTEMBER 17, 2014 | 5:04 PM

Forty-six percent of doctors give President Obama’s healthcare law a “D” or an “F,” according to a new survey from the Physicians Foundation. In contrast, just 25 percent of those surveyed gave the law an “A” or a “B.”

The findings come from a survey that was emailed to “virtually every physician in the United States with an email address on record with the American Medical Association” this March through June as the law’s major provisions were taking effect, and received more than 20,000 responses from doctors.

In their comments that were included (but kept anonymous) in the report, a number of doctors complained about the vast amount of bureaucracy that has been added to the medical profession.

“Get government OUT of healthcare,” one doctor wrote.

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Another wrote, “Repeal Obamacare.”

Another comment read, “I’m a Canadian physician practicing in the United States. The politicians and policy makers need to understand that government involvement in healthcare never works.”

https://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2553569

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Census data show poverty up, incomes down as NJ economic recovery lags

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Census data show poverty up, incomes down as NJ economic recovery lags

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014    LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2014, 12:48 AM
BY KATHLEEN LYNN AND DAVE SHEINGOLD
STAFF WRITERS

Despite a growing national economy, New Jersey’s weak job market led to lower incomes and a higher poverty rate in the state last year, the Census Bureau said Wednesday. Bergen and Passaic counties were hit especially hard.

Wide disparities

Households in North Jersey generally lost ground financially in 2013, while those in and around New York City fared better.

Median household incomes:

New Jersey

Bergen County: down 2.7 percent

Passaic County: down 1.7 percent

Hudson County: down 3.9 percent

Morris County: up 3.6 percent

New York

Manhattan: up 6 percent

Brooklyn: up 3.6 percent

Staten Island: down 3.3 percent

Nassau: up 1.7 percent

Westchester County: up 7.4 percent

The recession ended in 2009, but a wide range of census measures showed New Jersey was still feeling its effects in 2013. Food stamp use rose; the homeownership rate dropped. Families were more likely to delay having children or decide against paying private-school tuition.

Although one year’s census figures do not indicate a trend, New Jersey’s numbers have generally been tracking in the same direction since the recession. Offering some hope for a better 2014 in New Jersey, experts say a recent drop in unemployment, as well as a higher minimum wage, could mean that incomes have started to rise, and poverty rates to fall, this year.

But in 2013, median household incomes in New Jersey, adjusted for inflation, dropped by 0.7 percent, to an estimated $70,165, mirroring similar declines in surrounding states. New Jersey incomes, after inflation, have dropped 9 percent since 2000, and 6.8 percent from 2007, right before the recession hit.

Nationally, household incomes were essentially flat last year, at about $52,000.

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/census-data-show-poverty-up-incomes-down-as-nj-economic-recovery-lags-1.1090302#sthash.9U1HAsaX.dpuf

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This is why the government should never control the internet

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This is why the government should never control the internet
By Robert M. McDowell

Tomorrow is the deadline for the public to comment on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) attempt to regulate the Internet under the seemingly innocuous moniker of “net neutrality.” The architect of this movement, and the man who coined the term “net neutrality,” is Columbia law professor Tim Wu. Unfortunately, he has proved to be immensely influential among regulators.

Net neutrality rules have been sold for a decade as a way to keep the Internet “open and free” by keeping Internet service providers (ISPs), such as phone and cable companies, from blocking or degrading Web sites. Its advocates have argued that ISPs have an economic incentive to act anti-competitively toward consumers and competitors. In a common hypothetical they cite, ISPs would slow — or buffer — traffic for Netflix unless it unfairly pays for more access points, or “off ramps,” and better quality of service.

In truth, however, market failures like these have never happened, and nothing is broken that needs fixing. If consumers were being harmed by ISPs, ample antitrust, competition and consumer protection laws already exist to fix the problem. And major broadband providers have pledged, in their terms of service, to keep the Net open and freedom-enhancing. Why?  Because it is good business to do so.

Additionally, Netflix produces upwards of 34 percent of the Net’s traffic at peak times. It can clog any pipe it touches. That torrent of traffic imposes delivery costs that Netflix would prefer to pass on to others. But the market is sorting out these growing pains as the open Net grows, just as it has successfully from the beginning. (My views on this subject long predate my affiliation with the Hudson Institute, but in the interests of full disclosure: Hudson receives financial support from media, technology and telecom companies, as well as foundations, including those on both sides of the net neutrality debate.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/14/this-is-why-the-government-should-never-control-the-internet/

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The Slow Decline of American Entrepreneurship


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The Slow Decline of American Entrepreneurship

Tim Kane / September 07, 2014

Start-up companies are the reason America’s economy is more innovative, prosperous and dynamic than the economies of other industrialized countries around the world.

New companies create roughly 3 million jobs every year, while existing companies tend to shed 1 million jobs. It is no secret why a healthy entrepreneurial culture is important.

Think of it this way: Roughly 1 in 10 U.S. companies are founded each year, and these young firms create 100 percent of all net new jobs. Even in gross terms, start-ups punch above their weight, with 16 percent of all new jobs created by start-ups. Older firms create fewer jobs per firm, but, on average, cut even more, for a net negative impact.

While start-ups have always played an important role in the U.S. economy, the extent to which they drive job creation was, until recently, under appreciated.

However, thanks to new data from the federal government, we are able to identify job creation across all firms according to their date of “birth.” Yet, as important as this insight is, the data, which only goes back as far as 1977, also shows an alarming downward trend: America’s entrepreneurship rate is declining.

START-UP JOBS AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL PRIVATE-SECTOR EMPLOYMENT

During the Carter administration, 14 percent of U.S. companies were start-ups.

That rate declined by one percentage point during the Reagan years, two points during the recession of the George H.W. Bush presidency, held steady under Bill Clinton, dropped a percentage point under George W. Bush, and then dropped two full points during the first term of President Obama.

We can only speculate why entrepreneurship is declining, but it seems that America’s economic culture is trending toward the European model.

In Europe, as well as Japan, large corporations are the norm, as are ample welfare programs and an erosion of familial bonds.

America’s history of entrepreneurship is strongly rooted in a culture of hard work and self-reliance. Unfortunately, bureaucratic regulations are growing at the same time start-ups are declining. Coincidence?

https://dailysignal.com/2014/09/07/slow-decline-american-entrepreneurship/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

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Fed: Under Obama, only the richest 10 percent saw incomes rise

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Fed: Under Obama, only the richest 10 percent saw incomes rise

By Jennifer Pompi – The Washington Times – Thursday, September 4, 2014

Under President Obama, the richest 10 percent were the only income group of Americans to see their median incomes rise, according to a survey released this week by the Federal Reserve.

The Fed data covered the years 2010-2013, during which period Mr. Obama constantly campaigned against income inequality and won re-election by painting his Republican rival as a tool of Wall Street plutocrats.

“Data from the 2013 [Survey of Consumer Finances] confirm that the shares of income and wealth held by affluent families are at modern historically high levels,” the report said in noting that the median income fell for every 10-percent grouping except the most affluent 10 percent.

Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/4/incomes-fell-most-families-past-three-years-while-/#ixzz3CQgqGYW4

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Companies find other ways to move offshore and avoid U.S. taxes

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Companies find other ways to move offshore and avoid U.S. taxes

AUGUST 31, 2014    LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 2014, 1:21 AM
BY ZACHARY R. MIDER
BLOOMBERG NEWS
THE RECORD

* Some firms have left the U.S. system not through inversions but through buyouts by investment funds

NEW YORK — There’s more than one way for a U.S. company to avoid taxes by claiming a foreign address.

Consider the business founded in 1916 as General Plate Co., a maker of sensors and controls for everything from Fords and Frigidaires to the spaceship that first carried Americans to the moon. While its top executives are still based in Attleboro, Mass., it’s now known as Sensata Technologies Holding NV of the Netherlands.

Sensata didn’t become Dutch by using the strategy known as “inversion” that has alarmed President Obama and that the U.S. Treasury Department and some Democrats in Congress are trying to curb. That technique, which involves reincorporating overseas without a change in majority ownership, has helped more than 40 U.S. companies lower their tax bills.

Instead, Sensata is one of at least 13 firms that have left the U.S. tax system through a sale to an investment fund, according to a tally by Bloomberg News. Although these companies have a combined market value of about $75 billion, this tax-avoidance strategy has gotten less attention in Washington than inversions and may be harder to discourage.

These buyouts mean profits for the U.S. private equity firms like Boston-based Bain Capital that orchestrated them. Bain earned more than $3 billion after it took Sensata public as a Dutch company in 2010, with an effective tax rate about one-tenth of some competing manufacturers.

Shifting to a foreign tax domicile “is looked at hard in every private equity deal,” said Joan Arnold, a tax partner at Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia. “They will be interested in what they can do to minimize taxes and maximize sale price.”

– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/tax-avoiders-get-creative-1.1078561#sthash.j4QYTjZn.dpuf

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Obama’s Naive Belief in Predetermined History

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Obama’s Naive Belief in Predetermined History
By Dave the Sage on August 29, 2014 • ( 1 )
– By Victor Davis Hanson –

In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.

He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the “right side of history.” He also chastises others for being on the “wrong side of history” – as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.

When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up “on the right side of history.” Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.

Obama often parrots Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But King used that metaphor as an incentive to act, not as reassurance that matters will follow an inevitably positive course.

Another of Obama’s historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn’t belong in the 21st century. At various times he has lectured that the barbarous aggression of Vladimir Putin or ISIS has no place in our century and will “ultimately fail” – as if we are all now sophisticates of an age that has at last transcended retrograde brutality and savagery. …

If Obama believes that evil should be absent in the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.

In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force will stop seventh-century monsters like ISIS from killing thousands more innocents.

https://theconservativecitizen.com/2014/08/29/obamas-naive-belief-in-predetermined-history/

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Obama’s No Jimmy Carter. (He’s Worse.)

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Obama’s No Jimmy Carter. (He’s Worse.)

James Carafano / @JJCarafano / August 10, 2014

Jimmy Carter has had a long-standing reputation as authoring the most ineffective foreign policy of any modern presidency.

To be honest, Carter deserves better.

When the man from Plains, Ga., moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, he came wearing the anti-establishment headdress. In particular, when it came to foreign and defense policy, Carter promised that his policies would be anything but business as usual.

America, Carter claimed, could do less in the world. So he planned to pull U.S. troops out of Korea. His foreign policy would be based on fostering “human rights” and talking peace instead of war.

From the beginning, however, almost no foreign policy initiative went right. While the Camp David accords eventually led to the 1979Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, they did not yield a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, because the Palestinians rejected them from the start. As war rages between Israel and Hamas today, the accords never delivered on the promise of delivering a road map to long-term peace.

Where Carter struggled most, however, was over relations with the Soviet Union. Moscow saw Washington’s post-Vietnam malaise as a clear sign that the American century had ended early. The Soviets went on the offensive in almost every corner of the globe.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan galvanized Carter in a manner that has been mostly forgotten. Most Americans recall Carter’s feckless decision to pull the U.S. team out of the upcoming Olympics in Moscow, a self-defeating gesture that accomplished little. But as his presidential term neared its end, Carter apparently decided he was tired of being a foreign-policy doormat for Moscow.

He declared the “Carter Doctrine,” warning the Soviets that he would protect U.S. interests in the Middle East “by force if necessary.” And he ordered the establishment of a rapid deployment force, which would be capable of delivering a massive U.S. military capability into the Persian Gulf.

Further, Carter ordered the development of new generations of military capability and even proposed increasing defense spending, which had been in free-fall since the end of the Vietnam War.

This burst of seriousness didn’t save his presidency. The poor state of the U.S. economy, coupled with the embarrassment of the hostage situation at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, crippled his re-election efforts. Still, Carter left office amid signs that he had learned from his mistakes.

A common joke among conservatives during the 2012 campaign was that if Obama got re-elected, Americans would see what Carter’s second term would have looked like. But Carter might have been a bolder president in his second term. Obama, on the other hand, clearly has not. His second-term agenda has lurched from embarrassment to failure and back again.

Further, Obama has shown no signs of acknowledging that his own policies have contributed much to the reversals he has suffered on virtually every front, from managing Moscow to the mushrooming threat of transnational terrorism.

In no corner of the world had Obama seen more setbacks than in the Middle East. And he is running out of time to clean up his mess before leaving office.

Most of what Obama has broken can’t be fixed. But he could give the next U.S. president a fighting chance by following Carter’s example and doing something.

Reversing the atrophy of American military capabilities would be a start. He could also work to build solid relations with the countries the U.S. will need to build a solid foundation for a Middle East policy. The U.S. needs a string of strong bilateral alliances from Turkey to Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, and Algeria to help restore stability to the Middle East and North Africa.

For now, however, comparing Obama to Carter is an insult to Carter.

Originally posted on the Washington Examiner.

https://dailysignal.com/2014/08/10/obamas-no-jimmy-carter-hes-worse/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

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CNN Poll: Trust in government at all-time low

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CNN Poll: Trust in government at all-time low
Posted by
CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser

Washington (CNN) – Four decades after President Richard Nixon resigned, a slight majority of Americans still consider Watergate a very serious matter, a new national survey shows. But how serious depends on when you were born.

The CNN/ORC International poll’s release comes one day before the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974. With the Watergate scandal escalating, the second-term Republican president had lost much of his political backing, and he faced almost certain impeachment and the prospects of being removed from office by a Democratic-dominated House and Senate.

There’s a big generational divide over the significance of the scandal, with a majority of those older than 40 describing Watergate as a very serious problem and those under 40 saying it was just politics.

The poll also indicates that the public’s trust in government is at an all-time low.

Just 13% of Americans say the government can be trusted to do what is right always or most of the time, with just over three-quarters saying only some of the time and one in 10 saying they never trust the government, according to the poll.

“The number who trust the government all or most of the time has sunk so low that it is hard to remember that there was ever a time when Americans routinely trusted the government,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said

https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/08/cnn-poll-trust-in-government-at-all-time-low-2/

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America’s Fed Up: Obama Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low, Poll Shows

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America’s Fed Up: Obama Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low, Poll Shows

BY MARK MURRAY

Two words sum up the mood of the nation: Fed up.

Six in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the state of the U.S. economy, more than 70 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and nearly 80 percent are down on the country’s political system, according to the latest NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll.

The frustration carries over to the nation’s political leaders, with President Barack Obama’s overall approval rating hitting a new low at 40 percent, and a mere 14 percent of the public giving Congress a thumbs up.

“We’re in the summer of our discontent,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “Americans are cranky, unhappy… It is with everything going on the world.”

See full poll results (.pdf)

Yet because this discontent differs – among Democrats, Republicans, and independents – Hart cautions that Americans still aren’t likely to be storming the polls on Election Day in November.

“We’re unhappy, but we aren’t coalescing around an issue,” he said.

Indeed, 57 percent of respondents told pollsters that something upsets them enough to carry a protest sign for a day.

“The public seems have moved beyond the plaintive cry of ‘Feel our pain!’ to the more angry pronouncement of ‘You are causing our pain!’”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/americas-fed-obama-approval-rating-hits-all-time-low-poll-n173271

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This Chart Proves the War on Poverty Has Been a Catastrophic Failure

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This Chart Proves the War on Poverty Has Been a Catastrophic Failure
Robert Rector / July 28, 2014

For the past 50 years, the government’s annual poverty rate has hardly changed at all. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty, roughly the same rate as the mid-1960s when the War on Poverty was just starting. After adjusting for inflation, federal and state welfare spending today is 16 times greater than it was when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S. How can the government spend so much while poverty remains unchanged?

The answer is simple: The U.S. Bureau of the Census official “poverty” figures are woefully incomplete. The Census defines a family as poor if its annual “income” falls below specific poverty income thresholds. In counting “income,” the Census includes wages and salaries but excludes nearly all welfare benefits. The federal government runs over 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012; roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (These figures do not include Social Security or Medicare.)

Of the $916 billion in means-tested welfare spending in 2012, the Census counted only about 3 percent as “income” for purposes of measuring poverty. In other words, the government’s official “poverty” measure is not helpful for measuring actual living conditions.

On the other hand, the Census poverty numbers do provide a very useful measure of “self-sufficiency”: the ability of a family to sustain an income above the poverty threshold without welfare assistance. The Census is accurate in reporting there has been no improvement in self-sufficiency for the past 45 years..

https://dailysignal.com/2014/07/28/index-culture-opportunity/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social