From the Star Ledger:
N.J. gains almost 27,000 residents as Virginia closes population gap
New Jersey gained almost 27,000 residents in the last year, retaining its ranking as the 11th most populous state.
New Jersey was home to 8,938,175 people as of July 1, up 26,673 from July 1, 2013, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released today.
The state remained ahead of No. 12-ranked Virginia, which gained more than twice as many people, 55,944, and had a population of 8,326,289.
Across the Hudson River, neighboring New York, once the nation’s most populous state, fell to No. 4 behind Florida.
As of July 1, Florida was home to 19.9 million people compared with 19.7 million for New York. The Sunshine State grew by 293,000 while New York added 51,000 people during that period.
California and Texas still occupied the top two spots.
The remainder of the top 10: Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan.
…
Six states lost population: Illinois, West Virginia, Connecticut, New Mexico, Alaska and Vermont.
All are qualified homebuyers I hope.
They all came here for the welfare.
Jobless claims in at 280k this week, 4 week average down to 290,250. Solid numbers, a level that would be indicative of a much stronger economy than we seem to have.
Happy holidays ya’all. So who is at work today?
I got up early to bring my Mazda 6 into Maxon for a recall on the TPM system. Made a reservation on line on Monday. I received the robo confirmation from the service department last night and I drive up this morning and they are closed. Pure ghetto.
Thousands disappointed that the shooting near St Louis involved a suspect that pointed a gun at police.
Grim [3];
Solid numbers, a level that would be indicative of a much stronger economy than we seem to have.
Who you gonna believe, Obama (and Holder, Lois Lerner (IRS), et al.) or your own lying eyes/wallet?
Lib [4];
As I learned here, just another day at the salt mines…
Took my life in my hands to have dinner at the Short Hills mall last night. My BIL did a double take when Mike Keenan walked by the restaurant.
https://twitter.com/vision365/status/547556599221714944
@Vision365: Biggest drivers of our economy in Q2 and Q3 2014?
Fed spending on National Defense & Obamacare http://t.co/96OiSO2GTm
I was at the abomination of a Devils game last night. Before the national anthem, which was accompanied by police officers from both NJ and NY, they had a moment of silence for the two slain NYC cops. Then later in the game, they panned the camera for the jumbotron to a fat ass recently retired police sergeant and claimed him to be the hero of the game. Anyone want to guess how many years he worked? And the crowd ate the whole thing up and gave him a standing O. Anyone who says police (and teachers for that matter) are full of cr@p and sheepishly following an agenda that belongs to someone else. Baa!
Red states keep growing faster than blue states
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/12/23/red-states-keep-growing-faster-than-blue-states/
Moose,
Isn’t Keenan c0aching in Russia? Do they have a Xmas break? I just checked and he has a game that started 15 minutes ago? Are we thinking the same Mike Keenan?
“Red states keep growing faster than blue states”
Be careful what you post Toxic. Obama just might create additional policy to encourage minorities to have more kids.
David Stockman’s take on Q3 “growth”.
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/inside-q3-gdp-a-keynesian-puzzle-palace-where-spending-soars-income-stagnates/
Inside Q3 GDP: A Keynesian Puzzle Palace Where ‘Spending’ Soars, Income Stagnates
There is a lot to say about the latest GDP revisions, particularly as it relates to the breakdown of the measure in comparison with something besides itself. The headline was all that was needed to “confirm” the best economic growth in decades, though.
the baseline comparison of Q/Q was established for this “best growth in forever” in the feverish downward revisions of Q1. That makes it all the more difficult to tell exactly what GDP is saying about the economy. A full part of the downward revisions then were due to the high degree of uncertainty (meaning no prior data upon which to statistically model) surrounding healthcare spending.
That is the primary drawback of measuring economic progress from an expenditure standpoint. GDP treats all spending as roughly equal in terms of true growth when that is decidedly not the case. Government spending is the most egregious addition to the statistic, but perhaps only one step away is insurance, as in health insurance.
So what accounts for the 5% GDP, especially the huge upward revisions that have economists convinced that the economy has rarely been better? That historically miniscule uptick at the end of the chart above. Economic relativity.
If the economy were truly taking off as is asserted monotonously and repeatedly, income would be among the first to show it – and not just compared to last year but comfortably aside historical periods where the economy actually performed and true wealth was created in abundance. Furthermore, and the real downside to GDP measurements of this type, there really isn’t any sustainable advance to be gained by making sure insurance companies generate more revenue at the expense of other more efficient means of economic distribution. Perhaps that is why even the most optimistic of credentialed economists are more pessimistic about Q4 (currently estimated back into the lower 2’s again).
This may, however, offer one compelling reason for the far worse state of retail sales and other “spending” metrics in real dollars. If a large marginal proportion of the population is spending money on health insurance that they never had before (or paying significantly more than in the past), they would certainly have far less discretionary income to spend elsewhere. In other words, far less people than expected shopped in November (and so far in December) because this year presented them with something like a huge tax increase. That supposition is made all the more appealing given how the BEA had to reconfigure the savings rate.
Not all spending is the same, especially when it is untethered to already-scarce incomes. Just don’t tell that to GDP.
So essentially a ton of people who might have spent money in retail establishments, were forced to spend it on healthcare where they never had to previously….all while wages remained flat.
But hey growth!
Buy buy buy!
TC [14];
Its no paradox; its simply a decline in standard of living. In the early 2000’s it was papered over by MEW. The mortgage bust almost put a stop to the spending. Then Obamacare forced a lot of peoples’ hand (or wallet).
Recommended minimum household income: $250,000+ in Manhattan depending on the number of children you have given private school costs $40,000+ a year and rent for a three bedroom apartment can easily go for over $6,500 a month in a decent neighborhood. If you avoid Brooklyn, you can comfortably live off $60,000 a year as an individual. – See more at: http://www.financialsamurai.com/the-top-5-cities-in-north-america-to-get-rich-and-enjoy-life/#sthash.eg9sOLZK.dpuf
At my desk…..
Libturd in Union says:
December 24, 2014 at 9:01 am
Happy holidays ya’all. So who is at work today?
You cant live in Manhattan on 250K income unless you bought a coop or condo pre 2003 or during short downturn of 2009-2011 or have a rent stabalized apt.
250K is imppossible in 2015 if you are buying a place at full market price or paying full market price rent. I would say at least 500K income
On the bright side, traffic was stupidly light this morning.
Is today a holiday?
At Maxon it apparently is.
Funny how health insurance is a penalty for many, especially prescriptions.
What’s the deal, you can go to Target, claim you have no insurance, and in many cases print out a coupon from the drug manufacturer, and routinely get medication for less than the cost using insurance?
My wife takes Relpax for migranes (my fault, admittedly), on insurance her monthly supply of 6 pills costs $60. Going to Rite Aid, with a print-out Relpax card, she pays $10. WTF?
My mother, who needs eye medication (forget the name) pays around $60 a month even with supplemental drug (whatever it’s called). My wife went online, printed out the card and told her to use it at the pharmacy instead. The pharmacist said they couldn’t accept the card because she had insurance, I told her to go back and tell them she didnt, the card was accepted, again, paying half the price.
When I was down in TX a few months back, I got an ear infection (probably from my wife yelling in it), so I go to the doc-in-a-box, get a prescription, walk next door to the Walmart. I hand them my stuff, they start to work on filling, the pharmacist tells me not to use my insurance card, because the Amoxycillin is on the Walmart $4 plan, which is less than my outrageous $20 co-pay.
My dog has a thyroid deficiency, and Spooky has no insurance. And we’ve been doing the $4 for 30 days program for Target for more than a year now. Before that, we were paying something like $40 for it.
What gives? I’d have to be a sucker to use my insurance.
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/12/can_you_pass_the_civics_test_that_might_be_mandatory_for_hs_graduation.html
Study: Minimum-wage hikes made the Great Recession worse for low-skill workers
http://www.aei.org/publication/study-minimum-wage-hikes-made-great-recession-worse-low-skill-workers/
By contrast, analyses of the EITC have found it to increase both the employment of low-skilled adults and the incomes available to their families (Eissa and Liebman, 1996; Meyer and Rosenbaum, 2001; Eissa and Hoynes, 2006). The EITC has also been found to significantly reduce both inequality (Liebman, 1998) and tax-inclusive poverty metrics, in particular for children (Hoynes, Page, and Stevens, 2006). Evidence on outcomes with long-run implications further suggest that the EITC has tended to have its intended effects. Dahl and Lochner (2012), for example, find that influxes of EITC dollars improve the academic performance of recipient households’ children. This too contrasts with our evidence on the minimum wage’s effects on medium-run economic mobility.
23- People on this board complain about the govt, but the insurance industry is an example of private industry gone wrong. Insurance industry is a joke. Why are we forced to have it again? Talk about a forced tax by the private industry pushed/lobbied through our govt.
We should all probably do the same when we have to head to the emergency room. Just tell them we don’t have health insurance. It’s so much cheaper that way.
grim says:
December 24, 2014 at 11:11 am
Funny how health insurance is a penalty for many, especially prescriptions.
What’s the deal, you can go to Target, claim you have no insurance, and in many cases print out a coupon from the drug manufacturer, and routinely get medication for less than the cost using insurance?
23 – I’ve heard that people find it cheaper to say that they don’t have ins. when they go to the emergency room too.
25- “What is the real purpose of minimum wage laws. I suggest that you all look carefully at the graduated income tax. I contend that by causing inflation the minimum wage increases actually are a stealth method of increasing tax revenues. And they hit the lowest of wage earners the hardest.”
https://www.aei.org/publication/obamanomics-trap-economic-nostalgia/
Modern Democrats, including President Obama, have much economic nostalgia for the immediate postwar decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, taxes were high, unions strong, incomes more equal. Workers made stuff. Here is the president back in 2011:
My grandparents served during World War II. He was a soldier in Patton’s Army; she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. And together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and over fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out. And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known. It was here in America that the most productive workers, the most innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth. And you know what? Every American shared in that pride and in that success — from those in the executive suites to those in middle management to those on the factory floor.
But then — to hear Obama tell it — came the Republican resurgence and tax cuts and deregulation. Goodbye to the Golden Age and hello to the Age of Inequality. But rather than dispute Obama’s take on the past 30 years (which I do here), I want to point to a new Minneapolis Fed study which offers a different view of the Golden Age:
The decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the region’s dominant industries faced virtually no product or labor competition and therefore had little incentive to innovate or become more productive. As foreign imports increased and manufacturing shifted to the American South, the Rust Belt’s share of manufacturing jobs and total jobs declined dramatically. Eventually the region’s manufacturers began to innovate, resulting in a stabilization of employment share at a significantly lower level. Our model suggests that this factor—lack of competitive pressure—accounts for about two-thirds of the Rust Belt’s decline in employment share. These results imply that vigorous competitive pressure in both product and labor markets is important for creating the incentives for firms to continuously innovate, create and grow, and that government policy should encourage such competition.
This very much syncs with what Ashwin Parameswaran has written:
The first half from 1945 till the 70s was a period when the pace of both product and process innovation was slow. As Alexander Field has shown, much of the productivity growth in the aftermath of the war came from exploiting product innovation that had already taken place during the 1930s. The damage done to the industrial base of the rest of the developed world meant that there was very little competition for American goods from foreign manufacturers. Most large American firms were also largely insulated from strong shareholder pressure to improve profitability. This combination of low import competition, low rate of entry by new firms and weak shareholder pressure meant that there was very little process innovation or cost control. It is not a coincidence that many view the 1950s and 1960s as a golden age of economic growth and stability. It was essentially a period when neither firm owners, managers or workers felt the threat of failure or even had the incentive to improve efficiency or control costs. It was a period of stability for all, masses and classes alike.
So it’s worth asking: When Team Obama looks at the US economy and thinks about dealing with its long-run challenges, does it really have a forward-looking model? And is the Obama administration adequately informing the American public that globalization and technology mean we’re not going back to the supposed Golden Age?
I don’t know what the big hubbub is in regards to the minimum wage. The cost is a drop in the bucket. It’s really just another decisive issue that the parties chose to separate themselves by. Much more good would come from reducing the size of government. That should be the unilateral focus.
32 – It’s a big deal because it amounts to buying votes with other people’s money.
Raising minimum wage as means to help the poor is pointless. It’s laughable.
Who are you and what have you done with Michael?
Tox: The U.S. was the virtually the only major world manufacturer that did not have its industrial complex decimated by WWII. Europe, especially Germany, and Japan were flattened, and a generation of young skilled labor was killed………the U.S. took advantage for 20 years. It ended…..there is nothing more complicated needed for the analysis……there was no competition at all, and then suddenly there was some……
Toxic Crayons says:
December 24, 2014 at 12:02 pm
https://www.aei.org/publication/obamanomics-trap-economic-nostalgia/
Modern Democrats, including President Obama, have much economic nostalgia for the immediate postwar decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, taxes were high, unions strong, incomes more equal. Workers made stuff. Here is the president back in 2011:
You are correct. It’s very simple really. The goods/services we’re talking about are not what true insurance is intended for. I have tried (usually successfully) to use the method of negotiating discounts upfront (paying cash) for a few years now.
There are very easy and obvious things that can fix the problems (which is HIGH COST) of healthcare.
grim says:
December 24, 2014 at 11:11 am
Funny how health insurance is a penalty for many, especially prescriptions.
What’s the deal, you can go to Target, claim you have no insurance, and in many cases print out a coupon from the drug manufacturer, and routinely get medication for less than the cost using insurance?
My wife takes Relpax for migranes (my fault, admittedly), on insurance her monthly supply of 6 pills costs $60. Going to Rite Aid, with a print-out Relpax card, she pays $10. WTF?
My mother, who needs eye medication (forget the name) pays around $60 a month even with supplemental drug (whatever it’s called). My wife went online, printed out the card and told her to use it at the pharmacy instead. The pharmacist said they couldn’t accept the card because she had insurance, I told her to go back and tell them she didnt, the card was accepted, again, paying half the price.
When I was down in TX a few months back, I got an ear infection (probably from my
wife yelling in it), so I go to the doc-in-a-box, get a prescription, walk next door to the Walmart. I hand them my stuff, they start to work on filling, the pharmacist tells me not to use my insurance card, because the Amoxycillin is on the Walmart $4 plan, which is less than my outrageous $20 co-pay.
My dog has a thyroid deficiency, and Spooky has no insurance. And we’ve been doing the $4 for 30 days program for Target for more than a year now. Before that, we were paying something like $40 for it.
What gives? I’d have to be a sucker to use my insurance.
I always loved the NFL meme of all its greatest players coming from Rust Belt backgrounds, like somehow they were a super race of people genetically wired to succeed at football. Truth is, they were just fat dumbasses who were good at taking orders (and beatings from their booze-addled, illiterate dads).
We are well and truly fuct. Kiss it all goodbye, Alice.
Malcolm Gladwell is right. Football will die, just like boxing.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229683
The Market Ticker
Halfway There Is No Answer At All
From the Wall Street Journal:
“””. In the opinion of Howard Safir, who was New York City’s police commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani , the trail of blame reaches even higher: “The [anti-police] rhetoric this time is not from the usual suspects, but from the Mayor of New York City, the Attorney General of the United States, and even the president,” he wrote online for Time magazine. “It emboldens criminals and sends a message that every encounter a black person has with a police officer is one to be feared.”. “””
Ah, but see, here’s the problem: If just one time, ever, a person is unjustly accused or evidence manufactured — that is, one single time you arrest or detain someone without cause you have sent the proper message that any such future encounter is to be feared.
Here’s why: Every arrest and detainment, from the routine speeding stop up, is made with the implied if not explicit threat of death.
Doubt me? How come all of those stops are made with a gun strapped to the hip — or out and in-hand?
Remember that detainment is not the same thing as walking down the street. The person detained is by definition not free to go; he or she is being accosted, and the threat of force is being explicitly used in an attempt to compel compliance.
This is not to say that you don’t need to arrest and detain people. That’s a necessary part of being a peace officer.
But — and this is what nobody is focusing on:
There must be zero tolerance for any unfounded detainment or arrest, and every single one must be treated and prosecuted as assault (or worse, if it escalates.)
The two officers executed in NYC were shot by a man who had no business being on the street. But law enforcement as a body is not blameless; they hold responsibility for at least one documented instance in which the shooter was unjustifiably harassed and threatened with arrest on a pretext generated unlawfully by a cop with his dog.
That’s documented in video that the shooter took — a recording that was unlawfully terminated by the officer involved as well. (It is established by the Supreme Court that you have a right to video and/or audio record any encounter with a law enforcement agency that takes place in public or upon your property.)
Beyond the violation of rights and instilling of justified fear of police (instead of cooperation with them) that this sort of assault generates there is a further and far-more-serious problem that such actions generate: Agencies risk creating a bunch of Han Solos who choose to shoot first.
Consider this: Due to the fact the cops are almost-never indicted for killing people when such is unnecessary and unjustified and every encounter includes the implied or explicit threat of deadly force every unjustified detainment or arrest risks generating someone who chooses to shoot first, judging that the next time the cop will shoot, justified or not.
There is no way to know how much of the shooter’s motivation came from that unlawful detainment but it’s entirely reasonable to deduce that it wasn’t zero. The cop who performed that act of harassment has blood on his hands and the entire department he works for, along with the DA in that jurisdiction, does as well for not bringing assault charges against that officer and dismissing him from the force.
It’s obvious that peace officers must in fact arrest people from time to time. It’s also obvious that every detainment or arrest comes with the implied or explicit threat of deadly force. That’s the price of having peace officers — it comes with that role in society.
But there is zero justification for any abuse of those powers. Ever. Not only does every such abuse violate someone’s rights it creates a reason in that person and everyone who learns of the event for them to not only refuse cooperation and shun any communication with said peace officers in the future it also creates a pretext for that individual and others to either shoot first or, far worse, shoot preemptively.
Irrespective of how you feel about cops and the law generally simply as a matter of arithmetic this is a battle that must never be fought because it is one that the police cannot win. To entertain or tolerate any of this crap is to advocate for the destruction of civil society.
For this reason we must have reform and all peaceful citizens must insist that it happen now.
We must insist that we have peace officers rather than law enforcement officers. A Peace Officer by definition is there to enforce that which is necessary to deter breaches of the peace — nothing more. A man selling something he lawfully purchased and owned to another person who can lawfully own and consume same is not breaching the peace. A man pointing a gun at someone, on the other hand, is and such an act is perfectly legitimate to meet with deadly force.
If we are interested in stopping the rapidly-deteriorating cycle of violence we must be honest about what has prompted the destruction of trust between peace officers and the public, starting with the redefinition of peace officers into law enforcement officers. We then continued by militarizing those forces and intentionally creating an air of intimidation they project onto the public, from their big honking SUVs (what do you need one of those for, complete with it’s sub-15mpg fuel piggishness and outrageous cost to the taxpayer, when a Prius will do just as well as a routine beat cop?) to commando-style outfitting and equipment.
We must reverse those changes, we must stop trying to claim that lawful acts such as being in your lawfully-parked vehicle while intoxicated constitute crimes such as “DUI”, we must prosecute each and every trumped up stop, detainment or false arrest, we must file obstruction of justice charges against every cop, DA and other person who tampers with or slants investigations, destroys or obscures evidence and we must apply the exact same standard for use of force to peace officers that we apply to civilians.
Further, these peace officers along with our Mayors, Governors and others must stop claiming some sort of “valor” or “distinction” simply based on their job; they are not first responders, you as citizens are. It is settled law that they have no responsibility whatsoever if they fail to protect you in any particular instance — even if said failure is due to their voluntary decision or intentional delay in response.
When — and only when — all of that happens then peace officers can expect the cooperation and trust of the public.
Until then they have no right to expect any such thing irrespective of how often they bray to the contrary.
Xmass trivia.
How Ho, ho, ho and coal got incorporated into the act:
Back in the day when Kris Kringle rode down 42nd Street he’d say that as he threw coal to the bad girls so they could keep warm that night.
Leave me to my guns, dogs and rocket launcher. I’ll be just fine, without the intervention of law enforcement.
“…and rocket launcher.”
Is that for the Drones?
Just another weapon to lend variety to my arsenal.
#40… The problem is not about whether the guy with the rocket launcher will be fine — whether the potential targets will be fine or not.
#38 Joyce… Do you actually think that these guys (Rudy and Fox colleagues) mean it when they say, “respect police” or “respect soldiers”? They were silent when extreme right wing lunatics killed police, when Ted Bundy’s group drew guns on the feds, and when cops conspired against other cops. They stand to make a lot of money making a one-sided argument.
I’m hoping you mean Cliven Bundy and not Ted. I thought the serial killer Ted Bundy was a lone wolf type operation… didn’t know he had a whole group ;-)
But seriously: Of course I know they don’t mean it. There’s no hope in changing the psycho/socio-paths’ minds of those who get paid to shill on TV**. I hope the listeners/readers eventually change theirs.
**Just like you said “They stand to make a lot of money…”
https://njrereport.com/index.php/2014/11/19/your-commute-is-about-to-get-shorter/#comment-659972
There’s all kinds of money to be splashed around on people who advocate turning Amerika into a total police state.
While Kansas City and others gloat about their gigabit internet from Google Fiber, a small internet service provider in Minnesota is about to offer stupid fast 10-gigabit connections to consumers. US Internet just announced that the new service will be available to 30,000 households in Minneapolis next summer. It’ll be expensive, too, at $400 a month.
But wait, let’s back up to that 10-gigabit detail. That’s about ten times faster than Google Fiber, and gigabit ethernet is already a benchmark so impossibly fast it’s hard to imagine how any average consumer would use that much bandwidth. That said, Google is actively working on achieving 10-gigabit speeds too. This little local ISP from Minnetonka just beat them to it.
The ISP is advertising its new service as the “first 10 GB internet in the world,” and while that’s not necessarily true, the company’s offering 10-gigabit connections for households is certainly a first in the United States.
This all begs the question: Does anybody really need 10-gigabit internet? Those kinds of speeds are usually only used to link servers in data centers, and most home computer hardware would max out at lower speeds. In effect, nothing an average American would do on the web would ever require speeds that fast. A 10-gigabit connect would open up all kinds of new possibilities in terms of uploading video and even setting up servers in homes, though.
If anything, US Internet’s power play illustrates just how screwed up the broadband industry is in this country. While Comcast has been offering 50 megabit per second connections to consumers for $77 a month, US Internet has been offering 1 gigabit per second connections for $65 a month. That’s exponentially faster for $12 less per month. Now, building on that infrastructure, they’re going to increase speeds ten-fold and continue to offer cheaper speeds, relatively. It’s not so much that Comcast can’t do the same thing. The cable giant just won’t.
http://gizmodo.com/local-isp-offers-internet-speeds-10-times-faster-than-g-1674917397
It’s Christmas back on the east coast. Peace on earth, goodwill to Men.
Merry Christmas.
46- “And this is how capitalism is supposed to work. Except that in this country we have given up breaking up monopolies so this will last until they start to become a threat and then Comcast TWC will buy them for some obscene amount of cash and shut everything down to the current monopoly price and service level.
It’s this sort of thing that makes me believe that *all* infrastructure should be publicly owned.”
Merry Christmas you filthy animals!
And yet, sociali$t Norway had 10 GB to private individuals a year ago. And yeah, not to talk about Comcast, how is that working out for you capitalist America?
50- was supposed to be in quotations, but damn filter get blocking the message because of “sociali$t”. Rags, is this a prime example of the private industry working efficiently? Still think privatizing everything will solve the world problems?
My nephew’s gift to all of you.
http://www.checkmyprivilege.com/