Eyes on Trade of Public Citizen Watch has an opinion piece worth reading on the WTO and trade agreements, with some useful links. It’s our unfortunate duty here at EOT to have to read some truly mind-numbing trade law analyses of domestic regulation. For instance, have you ever really thought about whether electricity is a […]
What do you think of a job that use to pay $13/hr, three years latter paying that same person now $11/hour? What do you think of that same job having other people being paid $9.56/hr. It is a union hospital job cleaning rooms after the patient goes home. Cleaning as in washing walls, floor, beds, […]
Calculated Risk has graciously lent his template for our use, which I think is a winner. There is no good time to change the old template to new template. There is also no way to save the old comments as notified by haloscan and blogger. The old Angry Bear html is also much too different […]
On January 10 Moody’s, in concert with the other main bond rating firm, Standard and Poor’s, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody’s that the U.S. government “reform” Social Security and Medicare: “In the very long term, the rating could […]
“Taxation is in fact the most difficult function of government – and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory” Thomas Jefferson First, I apologize for taking so long to get back to this. But….I needed to work on some leads/songs (it’s not really work), get a new singer up to speed […]
Shadowstats has announced this tidbit. The Department of Commerce (DOC) has decided to discontinue its economic indicators service Economic indicators due to ‘budgetary constraints’. Shadow Government Statistics is pleased to announce that it will provide — at no charge tothe public — a continuation of the basic link service heretofore provided by the DOC’s Economics […]
38% of American families living below a more accurately drawn poverty line? 50 percentile (technically, mean third-quintile) family income for 2005 was $56,277. A plausible poverty line for a family of three (on the “minimum needs” table on p.44 of the 2001 book Raise the Floor) is $33,345 in 2008 dollars — if health care […]
Trade and inventories are treated differently in the GDP accounts. All other GDP data is the average of the three months data. But trade and inventories are the change from the end of the quarter to the end of the quarter. This is because we not not directly measure output. Rather, we measure consumption and […]
The New England Journal of Medicine has published an article on their analysis of prevention programs versus treatments. Indeed, some evidence does suggest that there are opportunities to save money and improve health through prevention. Preventable causes of death, such as tobacco smoking, poor diet and physical inactivity, and misuse of alcohol have been estimated […]
The Iraq project This article has some notions about the Iraq project that is thought provoking. The author must have been talking to buffpilot. In summary, the author stresses several main ideas. 1. The success of the surge, such as it is, relies totally on Mehdi’s cease fire in relation to toning down the Badre […]