There seems to be quite a fervor lately to blame Pelosi for all the democrat failings. Even some of the democrat Hollywood donors are taking shots at her. Do you think they will oust her from her position as House Minority Leader?
(Of course, the problem isn't Pelosi, but let 'em keep thinking that LOL!)
This was going to be the one. This would be the referendum on Trump. Not like the other special elections, of course. This is the one that the Democrats funneled all of their money and efforts into (I hear California donated more to this hometown race than Georgia did).
Chalk another one in the L column for the left. The candidate would not even answer a simple yes or no question if he would vote for Pelosi as leader. Kamala would have a field day with him, and then complain about being shut down for badgering him.
EasTexSteveSorry, Bob. Though a red state, District 6 isn't "deep crimson" by a longshot. Even though the dems spent 23 million dollars on a carpet-bagger candidate (and made him get engaged to boot) they lost their "referendum" against Trump.
The article " With state budget in crisis, many Oklahoma schools hold classes four days a week" says "Of 513 school districts in Oklahoma, 96 have lopped Fridays or Mondays off their schedules — nearly triple the number in 2015 and four times as many as in 2013. An additional 44 are considering cutting instructional days. . . ."
The article goes on to say the Newcastle school saved "about $110,000 out of its $12 million annual budget, savings that equal more than two teachers. The savings come mostly from shutting off building utilities on Fridays and from using less diesel fuel to run buses. Teacher salaries — the bulk of any district's cost — didn't change."
Holy crap! They just save less than 1% of the budget!
Teacher salaries were not impacted, because Oklahoma is already forty-ninth in pay and they are using the four day week to attract teachers - as opposed to a pay increase.
We have reached the point where we will sacrifice our children on the "Altar of Tax Cuts." Or to quote the article, David Pennington, superintendent in Ponca City, says "I can't even remember the last time we sat down and talked about what can we do that's good for kids. Our conversations are what are we going to cut next."
EasTexSteveOklahoma has the same problem Texas had at one time. That is, more individual school districts than it needs. The average district area in Texas is 260 sq miles, while in Oklahoma it's 136 sq miles. The state of Oklahoma is finding out this can be expensive. Many of these districts need to consolidate so they can cut their expenses.
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<...See MoreI have posted the graph at the bottom before, but things are getting worse. I had noted the seven year auto loans would leave buyers with negative equity that would lead to something similar to the housing bubble. Well the bubble is growing! Notice this from the article "This Toxic Trifecta for Auto Loans is Fueling #Carmageddon"
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Negative equity hits all-time record. The average negative equity in vehicles that were traded in for new vehicles during Q1 2017 has reached $5,195 per trade, the highest ever, according to Edmunds data, cited by AutoWeek. The percentage of trade-ins with negative equity has surged to 32.8%, also the highest ever! Average negative equity exceeded $4,000 in Q3 2013 and hasn't looked back.
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Add to that:
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The average new-vehicle loan term in Q1 2017 reached a record of 69 months, up from 64 months in 2011, according to Edmunds data. Terms between 73 and 84 months (7 years!) accounted for a record of 32.1% of all new-vehicle loans in Q4 2016, up from 29% a year earlier. Among used-vehicle loans, they accounted for 18%, up from 16% a year earlier.
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I call this stealing from the future. It is now clear that "unregulated" capitalism will always steal from the future and the consequences "be damned." The people doing this are hoping to be retired, and sitting on their patios with a cold one when the crash comes.
PS: This also suggests a glut of used cars in the future - with low prices - while the price of new cars continues to go higher by way of easy credit - easy credit because the bankers sell the loans and do not care if the loans fail.
You don't get it! Your legislature, both state and federal, meet every year to constrain your free will every more. There are reasons for this. It may be a population increase. It may be new technology. Or, as above, it may be a new understanding of an old problem.
Yet, your answer is "do nothing!" If it is not, tell us how you would prevent economic bubbles that even a child knows is destructive of lives and families.
First, if that happen the American economy would collapse. The wages have been stagnant since the 1980s. The only way the economy has been able to continue is by people borrowing the money. The current crappy economy is because most Americans are so in debt, they can borrow no more.
More important, is the failure to understand human psychology, and you are not going to change that with the naive comment above.
I noted that we have had economic bubbles going back to "tulip mania" in about 1630. What it tells you is Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was right when he said humans are capable of "irrational exuberance."
Your plan is no plan at all, because you are pretending humans are always rational. They are not!
I am appalled by statistics that in Germany, the most successful European State, we have the highest level of savings in the history of Germany and the lowest level of investment since 1945. So, unless you have together - an aggregate investment policy and an education setting and a training setting that are in sink with investment, you are going to fail as a society.
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To give you a since of this problem world wide, another quote from Prof. Varoufakis
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Allow me to point out an interesting paradox that threatens our economy. I call it the "twin peaks paradox." One peak you understand. You recognize it as the mountain of debt.
But few people discern its twin. A mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and corporations too terrified to invest. Let me give you two numbers. Over the last 3 months (of 2015), the US and Europe has invested collectively 3.4 trillion dollars on all of the wealth producing goods like plants and machinery.
This sounds like a lot until you realize that 5.1 trillion has been sloshing around our financial institutions doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.
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It would be nice if we had a plan to make investments that would rid us of the debt, but we don't!!!
...See MoreI often point out that a question is not an argument. It is just a question! Referring to the mountain of idle cash belonging to the rich, "Frijole wrote, "Why is that a problem?"
This is just not that hard. I will turn to the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his article "The 1 Percent's Problem."
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Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they're thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price.
Let me run through a few reasons why. (I have edited the following and added list form)
1. when inequality has been reduced, partly as a result of progressive taxation—have been the periods in which the U.S. economy has grown the fastest. It is likewise no accident that the current recession, like the Great Depression, was preceded by large increases in inequality.
2. The relationship is straightforward and ironclad: as more money becomes concentrated at the top, aggregate demand goes into a decline. Unless something else happens by way of intervention, total demand in the economy will be less than what the economy is capable of supplying—and that means that there will be growing unemployment, which will dampen demand even further.
3. In recent years, the financial sector has accounted for some 40 percent of all corporate profits. This does not mean that its social contribution sneaks into the plus column, or comes even close. The crisis showed how it could wreak havoc on the economy. In a rent-seeking economy such as ours has become, private returns and social returns are badly out of whack.
4. The widespread sense by workers in the Soviet Union that they were being mistreated in exactly this way—exploited by managers who lived high on the hog—played a major role in the hollowing out of the Soviet economy, and in its ultimate collapse. As the old Soviet joke had it, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
In a society in which inequality is widening, fairness is not just about wages and income, or wealth. It's a far more generalized perception. Do I seem to have a stake in the direction society is going, or not? Do I share in the benefits of collective action, or not? If the answer is a loud "no," then brace for a decline in motivation whose repercussions will be felt economically and in all aspects of civic life.
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So there are numerous reasons to be concerned about inequality, and we are hearing this from one of the best economic minds of our era.
The Senat...See MoreThe investigation of the Trump/Russia connection is progressing even though many want the evidence to be made public *now*.
These investigations take a very long time.
The timeline of the Watergate investigation shows that the first report in the Washington Post of Nixon campaign involvement was in October 1972.
The Senate Watergate special committee was formed in February 1973.
The damning evidence that sunk the Nixon presidency didn't surface until John Dean and Alexander Butterfield testified in June-July 1973. They were both part of the Nixon administration.
Obstruction of justice charges were not passed until July 1974.
Odds are good that someone within the Trump organization will flip to avoid long prison sentences -- just as John Dean did.
Prepare to live under this dark cloud for many months.
Donald Trump is a habitual liar, and the thing about habitual liars is that they lie habitually.
In a testy exchange with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump insisted that he'd never gone bankrupt, and that claims to the contrary are a lie. That's the Trump magic right there: Lying about your business history is one thing, lying that your critics are lying about it is another.
Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of "putting a company into a chapter" without ever answering the implicit question: "Chapter of what? Moby-Dick?" The answer, of course, is the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, to which Trump has taken recourse at least four times over the course of his business career. The chapter in question is the famous Chapter 11, which applies to business bankruptcies. Trump proudly insists that he never has had recourse to Chapter 13, the personal bankruptcy code. This is his apparent justification for saying that he's never been bankrupt. But of course one of the purposes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy is to keep men such as Donald Trump out of Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
Trump's first bankruptcy was in 1991 after he borrowed a stupidly irresponsible amount of money to finance that monument to excruciatingly bad taste known as the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Trump is such a good manager that the casino's slot machines began failing during its first week of business. Never one to let reality stand in the way of his confidence, Trump had financed the $1 billion project largely with junk bonds, which meant very high interest payments. Trump did not make enough money to meet his interest payment and so was forced into bankruptcy. His ownership of the casino was diluted, and he ended up having to give back 500 slot machines to the company that had provided them.
Trump himself was on the hook for nearly $1 billion in the deal, according to the New York Times, a sum that exceeded his net worth. He was forced to sell a fair amount of his personal property, including a yacht, as well as the failing air-shuttle service he'd been attempting to launch for some time. As Boston bankruptcy attorney Ted Connolly put it, Trump used the bankruptcy proceedings to negotiate away his personal liabilities while leaving the business saddled with debt. Unsurprisingly, the casino endured further financial problems, including bankruptcy. Trump's ownership stake was diluted steadily, and he eventually was removed from the board. By the time of the casino's most recent bankruptcy — which is to say, the bankruptcy it currently operates in — Trump could plausibly say that it wasn't really his business any more, in spite of the fact that his name and face are all over it.
Trump's second bankruptcy came with his acquisition of New York City's Plaza Hotel. The great dealmaker did essentially the same thing with the Plaza that he had done with the Taj Mahal: He borrowed too much money, at rates he could not afford. And in much the same way that he has contemplated putting his abortion-loving sister on the Supreme Court, he made his then-wife, Ivana, president of the Plaza. Once again, Trump was unable to make his debt-service payments. Once again, he lost much of his ownership stake — 49 percent went to Citibank — and, once again, he found himself having to run for the doors as parties with deeper pockets and more managerial acumen took over to clean up his mess. In the case of the Plaza, that was CDL Hotels International, of Singapore, and Prince Walid bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi prince laments that he was twice forced to "bail out" Donald Trump, whom he describes as a "disgrace to the United States."
The Saudi prince laments that he was twice forced to 'bail out' Donald Trump, whom he describes as a 'disgrace to the United States.'
In 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a holding company for various Trump properties including the Taj Mahal and a riverboat-gambling company in Gary, Ind., went into bankruptcy, having acquired $1.8 billion in debt while raising only $130 million through an initial public stock offering. Same story: Trump had borrowed too much money, at a rate he could not afford (15 percent, in fact, which lets you know how credit-worthy the market deems Trump to be), and once again he was obliged to give up most of his ownership stake.
Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts was reorganized as Trump Entertainment Resorts . . . which promptly went bankrupt, filing for Chapter 11 protection in 2009. (That's right: Trump, who wants to be president of these United States, was in bankruptcy that recently.) Too much debt at an interest rate that he couldn't afford to pay? Check. Loss of ownership? Check. Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, both resigned from the board just before the bankruptcy filing, inviting unkind rodential-nautical metaphors.
It is no wonder that he's had his greatest success renting his name to Macy's and pretending to run a business on television rather than actually running a business.
So, those are the bankruptcies about which Donald Trump is lying. Trump also is lying about self-funding his campaign: Like any other politician, most of his money comes from donors. That famous fund-raising for veterans? The money is going into Trump's personal foundation.
Trump has repeatedly failed his business partners and lied about it. He has lied about self-funding his campaign. He has lied to his wives and his family. Given that he received a low-risk draft status because of a health condition that he does not have, he almost certainly lied to the military he seeks to command.
The thing about habitual liars is, they lie habitually.
If you're voting for Trump because you think he's a straight shooter, you're a bigger sucker than those chumps losing money on both sides of the table in Atlantic City.