From NJ Digest:
NJ Residents Pay More in Taxes Than Anywhere in Nation, New Study Finds
New Jersey residents will pay more in taxes over their lifetimes than those in any other state, according to a recent study by Self Financial.
The analysis, titled A Life of Tax, estimates the average American will pay $524,625 in taxes over a lifetime, accounting for just over one-third of total earnings. However, New Jersey’s tax burden far surpasses that figure, with residents paying an average of $987,117 throughout their lives — the highest in the nation.
The study determined that this tax burden amounts to 54.3% of lifetime earnings, also the largest percentage among all states.
Here’s how New Jersey’s taxes break down:
- Property tax: $564,614 (highest in the nation)
- Income tax: $334,260 (6th highest in the nation)
- Personal spending tax: $54,961 (19th highest)
- Car tax: $33,282 (26th highest)
The report included property, income, sales, and vehicle taxes for all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Other locations with high lifetime tax burdens include Washington, D.C. ($884,820), Connecticut ($855,307), Massachusetts ($816,700), and New York ($748,199).
New Jersey residents will pay more in taxes over their lifetimes than those in any other state, according to a recent study by Self Financial.
Can we get a NJ DOGE team together?
We may pay more in taxes, but we are the smartest and most informed population in the country. And we are all incredibly gorgeous and hot! So, it’s worth it!
And we have Teresa Giudice and the Jersey Shore.
Fughedaboudit!
And unicorns! We have unicorns!
Ten 419
DOGE team will do sh1t. It’s all talk and going to burn the place down… like how twitter got destroyed.
I hope the swamp you are draining is preserved somewhere because the toxic waste that it’s getting replaced with will be far worse.
RentL0rd says:
November 29, 2024 at 10:31 am
“DOGE team will do sh1t.”
What could possibly compel you to deflect when presented with the information that one-party Dem rule has led to NJ residents being the highest-taxed in the entire country, especially when coupled with prior knowledge that we also have the worst, most decrepit infrastructure in the country? A normal person would simply say that’s terrible and change is needed. Only an epic stooge would feel the need to deflect for a Dem party that has completely failed law-abiding, tax-paying NJ residents. What a stooge!
Small Govt: So we are not handsome and hot?
We’ve discussed it many times here… property taxes in NJ would be drastically reduced if we could consolidate the 564 municipalities. Does Wallpack Twp. really need a police department and a police chief making $140,000 per year?
Yup:
https://youtu.be/RPwWU1O7W2M?t=103
Eddie,
Enforcers will always be paid. No Democrat or Repub is going to drain the swamp of the PoPo.
Some might take themselves out, however:
https://newjersey.news12.com/prosecutor-dover-police-officer-distributed-child-porn
When Musk becomes president these strikers will be sent to a labor camp on Guantanamo Bay to teach them a lesson. Hehe.
Protesting under the banner of “Make Amazon Pay.” employees have walked off the job across six continents in 20 countries, including the United States.
The strike is scheduled to last from Black Friday on Nov. 29 through Cyber Monday,
Dec. 2, the UNI Global Union announced, saying protests will be held in majors cities in the US, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and elsewhere.
The strike could cause customers’ holiday deliveries to be delayed, economic experts told ABC News.
The strike and protests are to “hold Amazon accountable for labor abuses, environmental degradation and threats to democracy,” according to the union.
Smallman,
I am not saying the NJ situation is not bad. I am saying DOGE by Ramaswamy – known to bank from peoples investments, and Musk with his lack of public policy experience, to make it far worse.
Phoenix, you are more right than you think.
This is from Christopehr Caldwell, NY Times.
Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.
In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.
Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Streeck (whose name rhymes with “cake”) argues that today’s contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, he reminds us, working classes in Western countries won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, of course, but that was in the nature of what Mr. Streeck calls the “postwar settlement.” What economies lost in dynamism, they gained in social stability.
But starting in the 1970s, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.
That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: “the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital.” They never broke the habit.
Very quickly their policies sparked inflation. Investors balked again. It took a painful tightening of money to stabilize prices. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side regime eased the pain a bit, but only by running record government deficits. Bill Clinton was able to eliminate these, but only by deregulating private banking and borrowing, Mr. Streeck shows. In other words, the dangerous debt exposure was shifted out of the Treasury and into the bank accounts of middle-class and working-class households. This led, eventually, to the financial crisis of 2008.
As Mr. Streeck sees it, a series of (mostly American) attempts to calm the economy after the ’70s produced the system we now call neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism,” he argues, “was, above all, a political-economic project to end the inflation state and free capital from its imprisonment in the postwar settlement.” This project has never really been reconsidered, even as one administration’s fix turns into the next generation’s crisis.
At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life — masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings — and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.
Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be “free,” it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.
A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That’s another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.
Perhaps that is what blighted the West’s relations with Russia, where the transition to global capitalism “was tightly controlled by American government agencies, foundations and N.G.O.s,” Mr. Streeck says, and the oligarchs who emerged to run the government in the 1990s were “received with open arms by American corporations and, not least, the London real estate market.” To an Indian or a Chinese person, “free markets” established on these terms might carry the threat of imperial highhandedness and lost self-determination.
This insight gives us a context for understanding the persistent grievances of movements like Mr. Trump’s, and their equally persistent popularity. What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.
As we no longer have an economic policy that is managed democratically, it should not be surprising that it produces unfair outcomes. Nor should it be surprising that in the wake of the mortgage crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine and so-called Bidenflation, this unfairness would give rise to what Mr. Streeck calls “tendencies toward deglobalization” — such as those that emerged with a vengeance on Nov. 5.
The “global economy” is a place where common people have no leverage. Parties of the left lost sight of such problems after the 1970s, Mr. Streeck notes. They allowed their old structure, oriented around industrial workers and primarily concerned with workers’ rights and living standards, to be infiltrated and overthrown by intellectuals, who were primarily concerned with promoting systems of values, such as human rights and lately the set of principles known as wokeism.
It is in disputing the wisdom of this shift that Mr. Streeck is most likely to antagonize American Democrats and others who think of themselves (usually incorrectly) as belonging to the left. He, too, thinks that democracy is in crisis, but only because it is being thwarted by the very elites who purport to champion it. Among the people, democracy is thriving. After decades of decline in voter turnout, there has been a steep and steady rise in participation over the past 20 years — at least for parties whose candidates reflect a genuine popular sentiment. As this has happened, liberal commentators — who tend to back what Mr. Streeck calls “parties of the standard model” — have changed their definition of democracy, he writes: They see high electoral participation as a troubling expression of discontent, “endangering rather than strengthening democracy.”
This new, topsy-turvy idea of democracy comes with a new political strategy. The interests and agendas of standard-issue parties are increasingly reinforced by the media and other grandees of globalization. These actors have “fought against the new wave of politicization,” Mr. Streeck writes, “with the full arsenal of instruments at their disposal — propagandistic, cultural, legal, institutional.”
Mr. Streeck is probably referring here to the obstacles put in the way of so-called left-wing movements in Europe — Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise in France. But his observation applies just as well to so-called right-wing parties. At present, Marine Le Pen, whose party won the most votes in France’s national elections last summer, is standing trial for embezzlement before a court that may ban her from politics for five years. In Germany this month, more than a hundred members of the Bundestag requested a constitutional ban on the country’s fast-growing right-wing party the Alternative for Germany, ahead of national elections scheduled for February.
There are dangers, too, in the way partisan prosecutors, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, convicted Mr. Trump of 34 felonies involving bookkeeping, on a legal theory so novel that not one American in a thousand could explain what he had been convicted of. A majority of Americans effectively voided the conviction at the ballot box.
Mr. Streeck’s new book is not about Mr. Trump’s triumph. But his message (or his warning, however you choose to read it) is not unrelated: The left must embrace populism, which is merely the name given to the struggle over an alternative to globalism. With globalism collapsing under its own contradictions, all serious politics is now populist in one way or another.
Phoenix, this is another article by Christopher Caldwell that you would love.
If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” President Biden said during his State of the Union address on Thursday night. Europe is “at risk,” he added, as he welcomed Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, the newest member of NATO.
But Mr. Biden also said he remains “determined” that American soldiers will not be necessary to defend Europe. As a White House spokesman put it last week, it is “crystal clear” that the use of ground troops is off the table.
Mr. Kristersson’s head must have been spinning. The prospect of further Russian incursions was the strongest argument that the United States relied on to draw NATO into the war, and to draw new members, like Sweden, into NATO. But if such incursions were a genuine concern, then ground troops would be an option for the United States and its allies almost by definition.
The rationale for NATO participation in the Russo-Ukrainian war is getting fuzzier at the very moment when one would expect it to be getting clearer.
This is a problem. Europeans, like Americans, are tiring of the war. They are increasingly skeptical that Ukraine can win it. But perhaps most important, they distrust the United States, which has done little in this war to dispel skepticism about its motives and its competence that arose during the Iraq war two decades ago. Unique though Americans sometimes believe their polarization to be, all Western societies have a version of it. As Europe’s “elites” see it, NATO is fighting a war to beat back a Russian invasion. But as “populists” see it, American elites are leading a war to beat back a challenge to their own hegemony — no matter what the collateral damage.
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
Since then, what Mr. Todd writes about current events has tended to be received in Europe as prophecy. His book “After the Empire,” predicting the “breakdown of the American order,” came out in 2002, in the flush of post-9/11 national cohesion and before the debacle of the Iraq war, to which Mr. Todd was fiercely opposed. Anglophone (his doctorate is from Cambridge) and Anglophile (at least at the start of his career), he has grown steadily disillusioned with the United States, even anti-American.
Mr. Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine, but his argument is not the now-familiar historical one made by the dissident political scientist John Mearsheimer. Like Mr. Mearsheimer, Mr. Todd questions the zealous expansion of NATO under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the neoconservative ideology of democracy promotion and the official demonization of Russia. But his skepticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine goes deeper. He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.
In interviews over the past year, Mr. Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.
And then the manufacturing base of the United States and its European allies proved inadequate to supply Ukraine with the matériel (particularly artillery) needed to stabilize, let alone win, the war. The United States no longer has the means to deliver on its foreign-policy promises.
People have been awaiting this moment for quite some time, not all of them as far from the corridors of power as Mr. Todd. Mr. Biden mentioned in his 2017 memoir that President Barack Obama used to warn him about “overpromising to the Ukrainian government.” Now we see why.
Mr. Todd contends that Americans’ heedless plunge into the global economy was a mistake. Parts of his case will be familiar from other authors: The United States produces fewer cars than it did in the 1980s; it produces less wheat. But parts of his case involve deeper, long-term cultural shifts perennially associated with prosperity. We used to call them decadence.
In an advanced, highly educated society like ours, Mr. Todd argues, too many people aspire to the work of running things and bossing people around. They want to be politicians, artists, managers. This doesn’t always require learning intellectually complex stuff. “In the long run, educational progress has brought educational decline,” he writes, “because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”
Mr. Todd calculates that the United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to law, finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it. (He asks us to consider the ravages of the opioid industry, for instance.)
As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.
Anglo-American family structures, for example, have traditionally been less patriarchal than those almost anyplace else in the world. As it has modernized, the United States has come to espouse a model of sex and gender that conjugates poorly with those of traditional cultures (such as India’s) and more patriarchal modern ones (such as Russia’s).
Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.
Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
For students of the Vietnam War, there is much in Mr. Todd’s book that recalls the historian Loren Baritz’s classic 1985 book, “Backfire,” which drew on popular culture, patriotic mythology and management theory to explain what had led the United States astray in Vietnam. Mr. Baritz concluded, “We are what went wrong in Vietnam.” Had Lyndon Johnson managed to impose his will on the Vietnamese, Mr. Baritz reflected, “an entire culture would have been utterly destroyed out of the goodness of the American heart.”
One is constantly reading in the papers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Western order. Maybe. But the larger threat to the Western order is the hubris of those who run it.
Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
Until some new consensus emerges, President Biden is misrepresenting his country in presenting it as stable and unified enough to commit to anything. Ukrainians are learning this at a steep cost.
I have noticed I have a lot more money available after selling my house in NJ last year. On the other hand I‘m now no longer one of the Elites and can’t brag about how high my property taxes are.
Biden crippled Ukraine from the beginning in not giving them the weapons they needed to win. Had Ukraine been able to inflict serious pain on Russia in the beginning things might be different. As for Putin not stopping at Ukraine, where is his next stop? I hear some say the Baltic states, if that happens then it s a NATO , US war. I don’t believe Putin is that reckless.
When radical feminism meets aviation, a two minute lesson. Look at the comments:
https://youtu.be/buv3dPH5I5Q?t=4
3b,
Putin isn’t going to invade Germany, or Poland, or France.
But it is, if it takes till the last soldier, or a nuke to America, going to take Ukraine back.
Germany and it’s ilk need be on it’s best behavior after that. And they will. As they will know how America screwed them and all of the other European countries. Hell they might even switch sides, join with Russia, China and India with BRICS.
I sell something on Ebay I bought for 1200.00 dollars when I was married for 700.00 now. Government of America says you are guilty before innocent. Prove you paid 1200 or I am going to force you to pay tax. I don’t have the receipt, it was in the house the American government threw me out of. Fucccc YOooo.
I bought a Keurig coffee machine for 29 dollars shipped from Walmart. It feeds me the caffeine I need to survive. I bought an Air Fryer from Walmart for 35.00 that keeps me and my daughter fed. These are products, bought online, manufactured in China by NON LAZY people, shipped across the ocean, and delivered to my house. And I am supposed to hate these people?
No, I know where my enemies are. Right FU’cc’n here. Parasites. Overcharging for medicine you can buy in Mexico for 1 cent on the dollar. Extorting with fees, tickets, fines, taxes, and now, tariffs.
The enemy isn’t China, Russia, or Germany. It’s much, much closer. Just like the skanky slut I married.
So,
PLRFH, is he right?
Am I right?
4:38 and 4:41,
Quite dense but great reads, thank you. But does this Todd guy offer solutions? Don’t tell me crypto please.
There is certainly more to this weird story
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-paris-stowaway-delta-8aa781c5db56721464c04763373207d0
What part of “Putin isn’t gonna accept this” doesn’t this dolt get?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has suggested a ceasefire deal could be struck if Ukrainian territory he controls could be taken “under the NATO umbrella” – allowing him to negotiate the return of the rest later “in a diplomatic way”.
In an interview with Sky News’s chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay, the Ukrainian president was asked to respond to media reports saying one of US president-elect Donald Trump’s plans to end the war might be for Kyiv to cede the land Moscow has taken to Russia in exchange for Ukraine joining NATO.
To my brethren dwelling in the crisp, brilliant sunshine of NJ, it certainly does have a romantic flavor to it, does it not? And to all my brothers and sisters residing in various other locales, good morning to you all. It certainly is morning in America again!
Eddie
Just cut the malarkey and dump the Chex Mix on the lawn.
Your neighbors are hungry.
Phoenix,
The unicorns are mating now and tend to eat the Chex Mix, too. I’m thinking about crafting a type of feeder specifically for the youngsters. I’ll patent it as the Gen Z feeder where only their little mouths can get to it.
AOC is one of the top contenders for the democratic nomination in 2028. The Democrats are clueless. Why choose this ditz as their candidate.
3b says:
November 30, 2024 at 9:32 am
“AOC is one of the top contenders for the democratic nomination in 2028…Why choose this ditz…”
AOC reflects and embodies the leftward march of the modern Dem party, which is now virtually devoid of talent, competence and rational thinking. While AOC is most certainly an imbecile, who do the Dems have that’s any better — Tampon Tim, Fatso Pritzker, Shrillary, Gov HairGel, Sen Pocahontas, Weirdo Whitmer? The few relatively mainstream Dems have no chance to emerge in a party that was highjacked by Oblama and is becoming more and more a home for radically leftist women. Mike Bloomberg, arguably the most competent Dem in the world, was belittled and almost laughed off the stage when he ran in 2020. This year the Dems chose Tampon Tim over Shapiro for fear of alienating the leftist/antisemitic wing of the party. They got nothing!
Small, empty words.
I am no fan of AOC, but she has the charisma.
But if she is perfect for America or not will be decided based on how mich America is gutted in the next 4 years.
Now that Republicans have the power you can no longer run on hate. They need to deliver.
I am no fan of AOC, but she has the charisma.
That’s not charisma, that’s a dim-witted chick that a lot of men imagine in fuck-me pumps.
Now that Republicans have the power you can no longer run on hate. They need to deliver.
The Republicans ran on hate? The left was calling him H1tler and were disappointed that he survived a bullet.
This is classic. The guys who spread hate – with no demographic left behind, accusing the others of hate. The hypocracy!
Rent: The Dems were spreading hate as well, dismissing all the people that did vote as ignorant, uneducated, racist etc Some were of course. Interestingly enough in well educated, sophisticated Bergen Co NJ, Harris only beat Trump by 5 percent points. And, the breakdown of the vote shows, that Trump won in a number of educated, sophisticated, wealthy towns in Bergen County, and in some of the other wealthy towns, Trump did very well, and was close to winning in some of those towns. My point is it was not just blue collar uneducated people who voted for Trump. So, it was not only the blue collar non college people who voted for Trump.
There are obviously multiple facets to Trumpism and the raise of Trumpistan.
The point of the debate was AOC. I said if the far right cannot deliver be ready for the pendulum to shift left all the way to AOC.
As far as hate is concerned, all we need to look at is statistics on the raise of hate crime during the past Trump administration… and the immediate aftermath of comments he made in various scenarios.
And then to turn it on its head and accuse Democrats of hate is plain ignorant. Sure there are elements of it in both sides… but no where near the same levels.
And if you say the uneducated vote for trump predominantly – that is a fact. Not an insult nor something to gloat about.
If the Democrats want to win the next election, I suggest they get someone with a greater IQ than room temperature. AOC brings nothing to the table.
If IQ is how we choose presidents we would be in a far better place.
But I agree AOC is too far left for most Americans.
Regardless of politics, if you have seen AOC put together an argument and crush her opponent you will have to admit she is way smarter than the guy we just elected.
Full stop
RentL0rd says:
November 30, 2024 at 8:28 pm
But I agree AOC is too far left
I’ve never seen her do that. In fact, she refuses to debate anyone and I’ve yet to see a press interview where they ask her a tough question. You want to show me an example otherwise, I’m all ears.
Can I ask a very small question here that many people seem to be skipping over!
What should the GOP be doing in this interim?
GOP is gonna do what they do best. Use the money and influence from Billionaire Cryptocrats and print/route as much as money to keep they are well fed. JD/Vivek coming 4 years later as the ticket.
A Must see documentary on recent fintech lords and their beef with CFPB. Andreesen Horowitz and soon Elon. All they want to prey on the idiots that follows them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAFlRSftffc&t=964s
“muricans pay 13.00, Indians pay 2.13.
Trained puppets.
180 Indian Rupee equals
2.13 United States Dollar
From a forum:
Why is this not the top comment!!
Cuz get the family plan for just 180 rupees and split it with 5 friends. That makes it 36 rupees each!!
Free Youtube Premium, youtube music, youtube TV!!
Wayyy better than Spotify and the family plan is even better than the student plan!!
Another beautiful and brisk morning! What’s not to love? I noticed a lot of people were putting up Christmas lights even before Thanksgiving… an indication that optimism for the country has returned. That “transformation of America” thing didn’t work, common sense and logic prevailed. Water always returns to its natural level, even after the biggest storm.
And let’s be honest, Trump is already the president. That transition occurred in the wee hours of November 6th. World leaders have been coming to Trump, he hasn’t been seeking them out. And look at the work Trump has done appointing people in his cabinet, moving at a lightening fast pace. His son has been compiling a list of people for the last four years, listing those most qualified.
I would say Trump’s administration has already done more in the last three plus weeks than the O’Biden administration has done in four years. When your greatest achievement has been failure, that’s stunning. The O’Biden regime will be listed in the bottom five as being one of the worst administrations in America’s history. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has already cemented its legacy as not only one that holds the greatest comeback title but already acting a way that is Reaganesque in its vision and leadership.
It’s morning in America!
Fast Eddie,
I think you are right on all counts. Interestingly any opposition against President Trump is pretty tame compared to 2016. I think this is due to all the lies and corruption that took place over the past four years. From Russia, Russia, Russia, to inflation being transitory, to the southern border is secure, to Joe Biden is sharp as a tack, to there are more than two sexes, to men can have babies- Americans just had enough of the lies. Hopefully President Trump will be able to right the sinking ship. People do seem to believe things are going to improve quickly though.
The German government is a bit worried about the future. Unfortunitely the German economy is not doing well just as Trump returns to office and will be looking at Germany to pay more for defense. What will become of NATO and what will Ukraine have to give up in a peace deal? Germany has elections scheduled for 23 February after the current government broke down partly due to Trump being elected. We live in interesting times for sure.
Chad,
Germany hitched it’s wagon to America, which does nothing for them.
It will take them some time before they figure it out, I’m sure many of the people there already have.
Trump is so worried about BRICS he is threatening them with 100 percent tariffs.
That is real fear. He knows Americans can’t compete.
A large shift is coming.
Rent: I don’t know how you can say AOC can crush anyone in a debate. She is awful.
3b says:
December 1, 2024 at 11:04 am
Rent: I don’t know how you can say AOC can crush anyone in a debate. She is awful.
I can fix her. Hehe
Phoenix, more fuel for your fire… From the The Atlantic…
The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining.
But these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. (The term food desert was coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon.)
The high-poverty, majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is typical of the trend. In the 1960s, the area had more than half a dozen grocery stores, according to a study by the anthropologist Ashanté Reese. These included a branch of the local District Grocery Stores co-op, a Safeway supermarket, and independent Black-owned businesses such as Tip Top Grocery on Sheriff Road. By the 1990s, however, the number of grocery stores in Deanwood had dwindled to just two, and today the neighborhood has none.
A similar story played out across rural America, following the same timeline. Up until the 1980s, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store. Many, in fact, had two or more competing supermarkets. Now nearly half of North Dakota’s rural residents live in a food desert. (The USDA defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away in a rural area or more than one mile away in a city.)
A slew of state and federal programs have tried to address food deserts by providing tax breaks and other subsidies to lure supermarkets to underserved communities. These efforts have failed. More food deserts exist now than in 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession. That’s because the proposed solutions misunderstand the origins of the problem.
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.
The structure of the grocery industry has been a matter of national concern since the rise of large retail chains in the early 20th century. The largest was A&P, which, by the 1930s, was rapidly supplanting local grocery stores and edging toward market dominance. Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance.
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however, allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.
For the next four decades, Robinson-Patman was a staple of the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement agenda. From 1952 to 1964, for example, the agency issued 81 formal complaints to block grocery suppliers from giving large supermarket chains better prices on milk, oatmeal, pasta, cookies, and other items than they offered to smaller grocers. Most of these complaints were resolved when suppliers agreed to eliminate the price discrimination. Occasionally a case went to court.
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.
With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century.
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.
That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. It soon became notorious for aggressively strong-arming suppliers, a strategy that fueled its rapid expansion. By 2001, it had become the nation’s largest grocery retailer. Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. They began with a program of “self-consolidation”—centralizing their purchasing, which had previously been handled by regional divisions, to fully exploit their power as major national buyers. Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.
A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, hobbling bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent.
If you were to plot the end of Robinson-Patman enforcement and the subsequent restructuring of the retail industry on a timeline, it would closely parallel the emergence and spread of food deserts. Locally owned retail businesses were once a mainstay of working-class and rural communities. Their inability to obtain fair prices beginning in the 1980s hit these retailers especially hard because their customers could least afford to pay more. Those who could travel to cheaper chain stores in other neighborhoods or towns were especially likely to do so. (Food deserts were not, by the way, a consequence of suburbanization and white flight, as some observers have suggested. By 1970, more Americans already lived in suburbs than in cities. Yet, at that point, low-income neighborhoods had more grocery stores per capita than middle-class areas. The relationship didn’t begin to reverse until the 1980s.)
Why didn’t large chains fill the void when local stores closed? They didn’t need to. In the 1960s, if a chain like Safeway wanted to compete for the grocery dollars spent by Deanwood residents, it had to open a store in the neighborhood. But once the independent stores closed, the chains no longer had to invest in low-income areas. They could count on people to schlep across town to their other locations. Today, in fact, many Deanwood residents travel to a Safeway outside the neighborhood to shop. This particular Safeway has had such persistent issues with expired meat and rotting produce that some locals have taken to calling it the “UnSafeway.” Yet, without alternatives, people keep shopping there.
In rural areas, the same dynamic means that Walmart can capture spending across a wide region by locating its supercenters in larger towns, counting on people in smaller places that no longer have grocery stores to drive long distances to shop for food. An independent grocer that tries to establish itself in a more convenient location will struggle to compete with Walmart on price because suppliers, who can’t risk losing Walmart’s business, will always give the mega-chain a better price. Indeed, during the height of the pandemic, when supply-chain disruptions left grocery manufacturers struggling to meet demand, Walmart announced stiff penalties for suppliers who failed to fulfill 98 percent of its orders. Suppliers complied by shorting independent grocers, who scrambled to keep staple products in stock even as Walmart’s shelves were full.
The problem of food deserts will not be solved without the rediscovery of the Robinson-Patman Act. Requiring a level pricing playing field would restore local retailers’ ability to compete. This would provide immediate relief to entrepreneurs who have recently opened grocery stores in food deserts, only to find that their inability to buy on the same terms as Walmart and Dollar General makes survival difficult. With local grocery stores back on the scene in these neighborhoods, chain supermarkets may well return, too, lured by a force far more powerful than tax breaks: competition.
The Biden administration has begun to connect the dots. Alvaro Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, has been an outspoken proponent of Robinson-Patman enforcement, and the FTC under Chair Lina Khan is widely expected to file its first such case in the coming months. But Donald Trump’s election casts doubts on the long-term prospects for a Robinson-Patman revival. Although the law has garnered support among some GOP House members, powerful donors are calling for corporate-friendly appointments to the FTC. Hopefully the incoming Trump administration realizes that the rural and working-class voters who propelled him to power are among those most affected by food deserts—and by the broader decline in local self-reliance that has swept across small-town America since the 1980s. A powerful tool for reversing that decline is available. Any leader who truly cared about the nation’s left-behind communities would use it.
Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
About the Author
Stacy Mitchell is a co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where her research focuses on economic concentration and the health of local economies.
Phoenix,
This one will give you nightmares….. Soon to be women + cops…..
https://aeon.co/videos/the-police-camp-where-tween-girls-enter-a-sisterhood-of-law-and-order
Hehe.
Don’t need any fuel. But the article is accurate.
Donnie’s got it all under control. America will be great again.
Head to your local dispensary or watering hole, watch the games.
I have no worries, the greatest man who walked the planet has got my back.
There is no God, but there is a Donald Trump. One with a bobble head that bobbles so quickly it can DOGE a bullet.
Hehe.
Hehe.
Men here are all soy boys, the women are actually stronger now.
https://youtu.be/MIYGFSONKbk?t=18
You need female cops by the way.
Male cops sit, plead, and beg young women for 30 minutes just to get them to provide a drivers license.
They dare not touch one, as they are routinely charged with assault by women.
Watch the videos. They are scared shite-less to do anything to them.
Then a female cop comes to the scene, acting all tough, ” getting the job done.”
In the comments, the male cops are laughed at, the female cops are praised.
Guess if you are a male cop, and wanna keep your job, put your kid gloves on and be very careful until tough lady cop gives you the permission to act in your role.
Phoenix,
Trump isn‘t really my guy, but after the last four years I‘m willing to see what he can do. Here in Europe Biden is viewed as an absolute joke. The main stream media have aided him at every turn, but the truth is he isn‘t as sharp as a tack. Other people in the White House (and perhaps outside of the White House) have been running the show.
Chad,
You only had two choices. Three if you consider abstaining.
Biden was terrible. Trump is nuts.
At least Trump is entertaining, while the other one has nothing functioning between his ears and has handlers running the country.
In Europe both should be seen as a joke, and as a warning to them that they best not hitch themselves to an out of control wagon that is only going to get worse as time progresses.
Yeah, there’s definitely something in the air that has a different vibe. Cultural things tend to build for years until all of a sudden, something just changes on a dime. Like a light switch has just been clicked.
We’ve dwelled in a tat and muffin top existence for far too long. Too undisciplined, too soft, too impatient, too selfish, too uncommitted and just unorganized in too many levels of society. Our kids are eating like shit, being exposed to too much shit and overall, we’ve quibbled over nonsense. We needed a major renovation, overhaul and cleansing. I believe we’re in the early stages of a substantial resurgence.
Fast Eddie says:
December 1, 2024 at 2:30 pm
I believe we’re in the early stages of a substantial resurgence.
You need a new CO monitor. Your current one is malfunctioning.
I believe we’re in the early stages of a substantial resurgence.
Not yet. First we have to go through 4 years of incompetence (Hegseth running DOD??, Patel leading the FBI??), grifting and score settling.
I think it was Churchill who said “you can always count on America to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
Biden pardons his son Hunter, despite saying in the past he would not. It’s his son, so I can understand why he did it.
Biden continues his lying ways and pardons Hunter.
He should be tried for treason.
Well said OC1. If you think cronyism and nepotism will lift this country you are naive. And the blatant nature of it will this crooked behavior will bring us all down. Can we fast forward 4 years already?
Merry Christmas Hunter Biden.
Any Jan 6 bitching is off the table. No moral authority.
3b – unfairly prosecuted by his own father!
3b says:
December 1, 2024 at 8:00 pm
“Biden pardons his son Hunter, despite saying in the past he would not…”
I think a little perspective is needed here. After all, Joe pardoning his crackhead son isn’t as bad as Joe lying about pardoning his crackhead son, which isn’t as bad as Joe disowning his crackhead son’s baby daughter, which isn’t as bad as Joe sniffing the hair of pre-teen girls, which isn’t as bad as Joe showering with his teen daughter, which…
Unconditional pardon too from 2014 until now. “not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted”.
Gun charge was from 2018, tax charges were from 2019.
What happened in prior years 2014, 2015, 2016 folks?
Ukraine, China, Kazakstan and Russia money changing hands for influence that Hunter was never charged.
Who gets a pardon next, has to be more coming?
..which is not as bad as Don turning this country into a monarchy.
‘murica.
Country of laws. Hehe.
More like country run by criminals that all pardon themselves, commit nepotism, have no moral backbones.
Great example you set for the rest of the world.
Founding fathers, you slave owners, look down from above at how things turned out from what you created.
Hehe. Peace out
I know you’ve been posting here for years. Since when have you gotten such a bug up your ass? Was it the election?
RentL0rd says:
December 1, 2024 at 8:48 pm
..which is not as bad as Don turning this country into a monarchy.
When are you and 3B, you know the “sensible” posters here, going to take umbrage with the name calling and other batshit crazy things others have said here for years?
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Sure, son. We made millions, it’s all good. But do me a favor, be careful with your coke usage, I had to do a promise a ton of favors to cover up the stuff you left in the White House.”
50 days until project 2025, get ready.
apparently, the pardon is applied to any and all crimes he may have committed over a broad time period. Preemptive pardons? He’s been hanging around the Cheneys for too long.
Fast Eddie says:
December 1, 2024 at 9:15 pm
50 days until project 2025, get ready.
Be careful what you ask for. Once you put your life into someone else’s hands you don’t know what is going to happen.
They might just come for you.
Bye Karen. What a princess. Hehe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1h484xe/racist_karen_kicked_off_airport_shuttle_for/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
8:56
If memory recalls, I’ve been here since 2008 and was there for the very first gtg.
I miss clot and make_money. While I disagreed with them sometimes, they brought good insights. Unlike all the loud farts now.
Now, the bug up my ass as you say, is a real, fact based, concern that Trump is gonna destroy this country I love. And all the yapping morons here are only bolstering the argument.
And, if you are wondering, other than macro economically, I have no skin in politics. As a business man, I may actually benefit from policies like Project 2025, or DOGE – but I know it will be at the expense of a vast number of others, including my kids careers and future.
In fact, I met JD Vance and had a long casual chat with him many years ago. Back when he was a decent man (power got to him). And believe it or not, I am 3 degrees separated from him.
So, yea… that’s the bug : truth and facts
What’s the bug up your ass?
Biden lied again. What’s new? They should all be in jail. Both parties. There’s really little difference between them.
( )( )===D – – pardon – – me – – –
Trump’s DOJ should be thrilled that Joe pardoned Hunter.
When Trump’s DOJ starts investigating the “Biden crime family” Hunter won’t be able to take the 5th.
He’s been pardoned! He can’t incriminate himself, so he’ll have to testify.
If he refuses to testify he can be thrown in jail (ala Susan McDougal).
It’s either a terrible miscalculation on Joe’s part, or he is 100% certain that the “Biden crime family” stuff is complete BS.