{"id":498,"date":"2017-01-19T14:40:23","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T14:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.rev.mydaye.com\/?p=498"},"modified":"2017-01-19T14:40:23","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T14:40:23","slug":"the-us-economy-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"The US economy today"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I was looking at CSPAN today (yes, I should have been asleep) but the episode was about Pres Obama’s legacy on the economy.  They allowed callers to explain if their position is better today than before the Obama years.  Many of the people on one side of the table (you know who) said they are worse too.  The other side said pretty much the same thing but were positive about it.<\/p>\n

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ALL of the callers were in my opinion in more low-wage jobs.  People have to realize if you are farmer or a widget-turner you are never<\/u><\/b><\/span> going to be more prosperous than you are now.  Reason I say that is machines can always take your job, but for the moment you’re cheaper than the machine.  When the machine becomes cheaper you’re gone.  Think Wal-Mart, Amazon and many others – these are all low-wage jobs, even the lower-management is low-wage because they are all low-skill.  The SECOND Wal-Mart can put economical machines to stock shelves they will do that.  You already have to go to the self-checkout, so the check-out people are gone.  Amazon already has mechanical pickers, so if they could figure out a way to automate the few human-staffed jobs they will be gone.  FedEx and UPS used to hire thousands of seasonal workers during the Christmas rush.  This last year, I don’t think they hired anyone in their distribution centers, just drivers.  They have machines that do a better job than humans as deciding which line a package needs to go to for end processing.<\/p>\n

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The last thing I wanted to mention – the legacy for people is different than the economic legacy for companies.  People are probably no better or worse off (unless they were affected by automation) but companies have more money than they’ve ever had and so much of it is hidden from US taxation in foreign companies.  You want to talk about China being the problem to the US worker, I think it is the company for which these workers work.  When a store worker of Apple makes $15\/hr but sells an $800 phone, has no benefits or sick-leave, has a very low employer insurance contribution and frankly a retirement plan that has a bent toward the corporate employees — something is wrong.  Yes, the corporate employees are much more prosperous, but that number represents a very small amount of the employee number.  It is kinda like at Wal-Mart saying that they have high adoption of their heath insurance plan – yes, of the corporate employees who generally make more money than the average store worker.<\/p>\n

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This leads to me to big problem of the corporate economic prosperity – hiding their profits overseas.  Google and Apple alone moved their corporate entities to Europe and shelter their profits there.  I think everyone has heard about the Irish-Apple tax issue in which the European Union is ordering Apple to pay Ireland $14B in taxes because Ireland wooed Apple based on tax-abatements.  The EU does not allow that.  Good for the EU; now if only our government were as forceful.  Stop letting these companies relocate their HQs just to avoid taxes.  It would be a problem to our usual laissez-faire business fundament, but who cares at this point since those companies are screwing us.<\/p>\n

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So in case you are unclear – these companies have trillions – with a T – of dollars outside the country.  This is one thing President-Elect Donald Trump has said that must be done – repatriate this money or do not allow those companies function in the US.  But in my opinion do not lower the tax rate on this money, it should be the regular corporate rate.  The reason why our corporate tax rate is so how, is because companies should not make so much fucking money – they should share it with their employees and owners.  Not just storing it in banks that are paying 0% interest  – even remember some banks are charging for money storage.  It is absolutely funny when HSBC and the Bank of Scotland started charging for money storage rather than paying interest.  Then slowly every other big international bank did the same thing.<\/p>\n

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Is my economic situation any better, probably not.  I haven’t had a significant raise in years, but I have a house that is almost over purchase value (long since above water — YAH!) and my 401K is up in value and my personal IRA and stock purchases are making money.  This is the only way to generate wealth short of opening a tech business (or another business that makes money) – no restaurants by the way…they always fail.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was looking at CSPAN today (yes, I should have been asleep) but the episode was about Pres Obama’s legacy on the economy.  They allowed callers to explain if their position is better today than before the Obama years.  Many of the people on one side of the table (you know who) said they are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mydaye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}