Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 11, 2012A wake-up call for government in the USAThere is a federal law against telling a fib. An article in the Wall Street Journal says that a law against fibbing "makes it a crime to knowingly make a material false statement in matters of federal jurisdiction." So five years ago the government asked for a video from a marine biologist in California, a lifelong animal lover, who operates whale-watching boats; the video allegedly shows a captain of a boat whistling at a whale, defined as harrassment of the whale, which is illegal; the request was informal, not a subpoena; she supplied an edited video containing the sequence the government wanted, and now they've been accusing her of lying for several years, and so far it has cost her $100,000 in legal costs.
A year after she gave them the video, a dozen federal agents, led by an investigator from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and armed with a search warrant, entered her home and took away her files, photos and computers. I do not know whether they wore body armor and carried submachine guns, like the federal troops who raided the Gibson guitar factory in Nashville for the second time last year.
Don't the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives know that this sort of thing is the reason the people despise them? Do they do anything except sit around waiting for their pensions and their benefits? Or do they enjoy being despised?
April 11, 2012Um, here's part of the problem, folks.Cornelia Strawser, editor of Business Statistics of the U.S. in Washington DC, has written to the Wall Street Journal to say that one reason the recovery is so sluggish is that "Today the U.S. economy is not recycling as much of the value of its output back to the workers as it used to, and specifically as it did in the recoveries of the 1930s and 1980s."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported (Monthly Labor Review, January 2011) that "an unprecedented decline in labor share" of the value of nonfarm business output since 2000 explains most of the failure of labor compensation to keep up with productivity growth throughout the 2000s. Labor compensation is for all employees, including executives, and includes costs of health insurance and all other fringe benefits.
Strawser examined the data from corporations where depreciation allowances could be isolated from the calculations, and found that
The labor share of net factor income (net of depreciation) in such corporations was 84.1% for the five years 1929 through 1933, 81.1% in 1980 through 1984, 76.7% in 2007 through 2011 and only 73.8% in both 2010 and 2011.
In short, the right-wing economists are winning, like Thomas Sowell, who thinks, for example, that people who work in retail should be satisfied with very low pay because "half of them" are only part-time or temporary anyway. If we keep wages and salaries down, people will have less money to spend or save or invest, and the whole economy will slow down, but that's okay as long as the rich get to sit on their piles.
What happened to feeding the sparrows?