Business
- Written by: Eric J. Kiser
- Category: Business
I think I've figured out why the Social Security program is in so much trouble.
The population of this country is approximately 319 Million people - but not all of them currently contribute to the Social Security Trust Fund, otherwise known as the Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance Program (OASDI), via payroll taxes, so that means we need to do a little math before we find the problem. So bear with me.
- Written by: Patrick Julius
- Category: Business
JDN 2457223 EDT 16:10.
I'm sure you've heard this notion before: Government debt is “borrowing from the future”. We are “spending our grandchildren's money”, “squandering our children's future”. We are “leveraging our future”. Members of Congress insist that “if American families tightening our belts, government should as well.” Even the New York Times publishes this sort of argument. We hear it so often, I'm not surprised that most people seem to believe that it is basically true.
- Written by: Bob Danforth
- Category: Business
One problem any writer has who tries to deal with a subject that is both subtle and different from what the reader already thinks or knows is that, if the concept is different than the words needed to explain the concept either needs to be a pile of senseless jargon that the reader has a hard time remembering, or to carefully define common words and concepts to explain the subtleties they intend. Often they are the original idea mangled by misuse of others, sometimes it is taking a word of somewhat blurry definition and attempting to create a use that has more clarity at least by that particular writer. Personally, I prefer the latter refinement of what exists rather than inventing new. First, let me point out that those values I am discussing are derived from many sources; most directly from George Lakoff as each side represents the particulars of what he calls the "Strict Father Morality"(SF) and the other from what he calls "Nurtutant Parent Morality"(NP). As he points out, a great many people use these in different amounts in different aspects of their lives. Someone might treat their Family SF, their church NP, their Business SF, their local politics NP and their National Politics SF; they would be called Centrist politically, but so would a person that thought the opposite of that in every particular. And even that could be not fine enough grain as they could take different sides on different issues within each of those points. Lakoff has gone to considerable distance to point this out and calls them "Biconceptuals" and that most people may not be an even split, but will go to one side on many issues and the other on some others.
- Written by: Gregory Boyce
- Category: Business
A definition of Vulture Capitalism:
A thinly-regulated predominantly Western economic system that generates great amounts of revenue / wealth by preying on an ill-informed / under-educated proletariat via "aggressive" banking schemes and corporate raids that ultimately devours individual life-savings, while simultaneously enslaving a befuddled working-class to a lifetime of "banking servitude".
Read more: Contending with American Vulture Capitalism in the 21st Century
- Written by: Patrick Julius
- Category: Business
The images in this post are my own; one I generated from actual NASDAQ values over the last 25 years, the other I generated using a computational stock market model I coded in R. See if you can tell which is which. The model is not meant to predict actual prices—which is largely a fool's errand—but to model the overall behavior. Judge for yourself whether you think I succeeded.
