Let us count the ways of inflation: While the CPI understates inflation Americans are living out the days of a contracting standard of living.
Americans are experiencing the impacts of inflationary pressures on their pocketbooks. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) used by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics does a poor job of measuring inflation because it uses derivative measures to reflect the price of things we can readily get. The most obvious example is the measure used to […]
Suppressing wages and increasing corporate profits: The tough math behind the current economic recovery.
It should come as no surprise that the stock market is a very poor barometer on the financial health of Americans. We think of the stock market as a temperature gauge on how well Americans are doing. If that is the case, the record breaking highs in the stock market should reflect a very happy […]
The financial feeding of the massively indebted American: Consumer credit owed hits record, permanently high gas prices, and feeding empty promises with food stamp outlays up 600% from 2000.
Americans are now fully engaged, once again, in their consumption ways financed by debt. To continue pretending that the middle class is not shrinking, massive amounts of debt are being pumped into the system once again. Total consumer debt has reached another peak but the reason this has peaked is very troubling. Over the last […]
Part-time nation: What does it say when a vast portion of our society is now working at part-time jobs? 2013 scorecard: Minimum wage restaurant jobs added: 239,000. Manufacturing jobs added: 13,000.
One of the more troubling pieces of economic data I have seen is that excluding restaurant and bar employment, we are actually down nearly 2 million jobs in the private industry going back to the start of this long drawn out recession. This is probably one of the narrowest recoveries in our nation’s history focused […]