Chicago Fed: Midwest Manufacturing Is Booming; Midwest April Auto Production Soars to 2007 Level

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The ChicagoFederal Reserve reported today that its Midwest Manufacturing Index increased 2.4% in April compared to March, following a revised 0.22% monthly decline in March. The April increase was the largest monthly gain in Midwest manufacturing activity since September 2003, more than 8 years ago, and brought the index to the highest level since June 2008, almost four years ago.   

Here are some highlights of manufacturing activity in the 7th Federal Reserve district that covers Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin:

1. Manufacturing output in the Midwest region rose 12% from a year earlier in April, more than twice the 5.8% increase in national manufacturing output over the same period (see chart).  In comparison, the overall U.S. economy (real GDP) grew by only 2.1% in the period from Q1 2011 to Q2 2012. 
         
2. Regional machinery output in April gained 11.5% from its year-earlier level, compared to a 6.6% increase in machinery output at the national level. 

3. Regional steel output improved 10.7% from its April 2011 level, compared to a 7.6% increase in national steel output over that period.

4. The Midwest’s automotive output increased by a whopping 28.2% in April from its year-ago level, compared to a 16.4% gain in national automotive output.  The index level of 99.6 for Midwest auto sector production in April was at the highest level since November 2007, indicating that the auto industry in the Midwest has now made a complete recovery from the effects of the Great Recession.  

MP: Midwest manufacturing output growth continues to lead national manufacturing output growth, which continues to lead overall economic growth measured by real GDP.  The lastest Chicago Fed report suggests that U.S. manufacturing, especially in the Midwest, remains at the forefront of the economic recovery measured by growth rates in output.  In another milestone for manufacturing, Midwest automotive production in April returned to its pre-recession 2007 level for the first time since the recession started in December 2007.    

IJ Helps Caveman Blogger Fight for Free Speech

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The Institute for Justice asks a very important question: "Can the government throw you in jail for offering advice on the Internet about what food people should buy at the grocery store?"
"That is exactly the claim made by the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition. In December 2011, diabetic blogger Steve Cooksey started a Dear Abby-style advice column on his popular blog (www.diabetes-warrior.net) to answer reader questions. One month later, the State Board informed Steve that he could not give readers advice on diet, whether for free or for compensation, because doing so constituted the unlicensed, and thus criminal, practice of dietetics. The State Board also told Steve that his private emails and telephone calls with readers and friends were illegal, as was his paid life-coaching service. The State Board went through Steve's writings with a red pen, indicating what he may and may not say without a government-issued license."
"But the First Amendment does not allow the government to ban people from sharing ordinary advice about diet, or scrub the Internet—from blogs to Facebook to Twitter—of speech the government does not like. North Carolina can no more force Steve to become a licensed dietitian than it could require Dear Abby to become a licensed psychologist."
"That is why on May 30, 2012, Steve Cooksey joined the Institute for Justice in filing a major free speech lawsuit against the State Board in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, Charlotte Division. This lawsuit seeks to answer one of the most important unresolved questions in First Amendment law: When does the government's power to license occupations trump free speech?"
Watch video above for more information.  

Dueling Consumer Confidence Reports

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1. Last Friday, Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan reported that its consumer sentiment index increased in May for the ninth straight month.  That set a new record for the most consecutive monthly increases in the history of the index going back to 1978.  It was also the most upbeat American consumers have been in more than fours years, since October 2007 before the recession started.  Bloomberg reported that "A record number of households said they'd heard better news on the jobs outlook, which combined with cheaper gasoline and an improving housing market may help sustain consumer spending and shield the economy from Europe's debt crisis."

2.  This morning, Gallup reported that its Economic Confidence Index held at -16 last week, the highest index level in the four-plus years of Gallup Daily tracking in the United States.

3. Also this morning, The Conference Board reported that its consumer confidence index fell to a five-month low in May, as Americans were less optimistic about current labor market and business conditions, as well as the short-term outlook.
What are we to make of these conflicting consumer confidence reports?  Perhaps it's a reflection of the weakness in survey-based measures of consumer confidence, or that surveys have large margins of error?  
In other news today, S&P reported that its Case-Shiller Home Price Index dropped in March by 2% to a post-crisis low.  Note that the Case-Shiller home price index is calculated based on a three-month moving average with a two month lag and is therefore based on home prices in January, February and March.  The sales and price gains I was reporting recently were for April, and those improvements won't be captured by the Case-Shiller index until next month's report. 

Center of Gravity in Oil World Shifts to Americas; It's the "Equivalent of a Category 5 Hurricane"

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As U.S. oil production ramps up, net oil imports have fallen to a 20-year low of 42.4% in 2012 through April.
The Washington Post reported recently on the new world energy map that is emerging, and it is no longer centered on the Middle East, but on the Americas:

"From Canada to Colombia to Brazil, oil and gas production in the Western Hemisphere is booming, with the United States emerging less dependent on supplies from an unstable Middle East. Central to the new energy equation is the United States itself, which has ramped up production and is now churning out 1.7 million more barrels of oil and liquid fuel per day than in 2005.

“There are new players and drivers in the world,” said Ruben Etcheverry, chief executive of Gas and Oil of Neuquen, a state-owned energy firm that is positioning itself to develop oil and gas fields here in Patagonia. “There is a new geopolitical shift, and those countries that never provided oil and gas can now do so. For the United States, there is a glimmer of the possibility of self-sufficiency.”

Oil produced in Persian Gulf countries — notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq — will remain vital to the world’s energy picture. But what was once a seemingly unalterable truth — that American oil production would steadily fall while the United States remained heavily reliant on Middle Eastern supplies — is being turned on its head.

Perhaps the biggest development in the worldwide realignment is how the United States went from importing 60 percent of its liquid fuels in 2005 to 45 percent last year (MP: Net oil imports have since fallen to a 20-year low of 42.4% this year through April, see chart above). The economic downturn in the United States, improvements in automobile efficiency and an increasing reliance on biofuels all played a role.

But a major driver has been the use of hydraulic fracturing. By blasting water, chemicals and tiny artificial beads at high pressure into tight rock formations to make them porous, workers have increased oil production in North Dakota from a few thousand barrels a day a decade ago to nearly half a million barrels today.

Conservative estimates are that oil and natural gas produced through “fracking,” as the process is better known, could amount to 3 million barrels a day by 2020. “We have a revolution here,” said Larry Goldstein, director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation in New York. 'In 47 years in this business, I’ve never seen anything like this. This is the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.'"

Markets in Everything. Or Not. No More Gender Based Price Discrimination in New York City

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WSJ -- "In New York City, 38 businesses have been hit this year for violating a little-known provision that has many pulling their hair: gender-pricing discrimination. The majority of violations so far this year—103—were issued to salons and barbershops.

The city's Department of Consumer Affairs began stepping up enforcement of the law last year, when it issued 580 gender-pricing violations to businesses, more than double the 212 doled out the year before. "We wanted to really send a strong message to businesses about this kind of illegal pricing, so we did a very focused sweep over the course of the year," said the department's commissioner, Jonathan Mintz. "That sweep was largely targeted at salons and barbershops and laundry and dry cleaning." The fines for first-time violations range from $50 to $200, while those for subsequent ones are $100 to $500.
"This is a very basic consumer-protection law and it is also a very basic civil-rights law," said Mr. Mintz. "I think there are completely legitimate reasons to charge different prices for different services and that one should be specific for what those reasons are," he added. "Reasons are not chromosomes."
While salons have received the most violations so far this year, in 2011 laundry and dry-cleaning businesses received 272 violations, compared with 269 for salons. In 2010, on the other hand, dry cleaners had only five violations, while "miscellaneous nonfood retail," which includes salons, had 207 violations."
HT: Managerial Econ Blog

Markets in Everything: Two, or Sometimes Even Four, Cell Phones per Person in Nigeria

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BBC News -- "If you must make a call to anybody's mobile phone in Nigeria, you need to be understanding and patient - it can be a very frustrating and annoying experience. In the first place, it takes luck for the call to get through, and when both parties are connected, there is no guarantee that you will hear each other or that the line will not drop after a few seconds.

A conversation which normally should not last two minutes may after several calls take 10 minutes and, believe me, both of you will pay for every second. Being very practical people, Nigerians have devised a way, though expensive, to ease the problem.
Why wait for government regulators who are believed to be more interested in the huge after-profit taxes accruing from the networks than the satisfaction of subscribers? So everyone who can afford it has a minimum of two mobile phones from different operators. Some have as many as four. They use whichever is operational at any given time."

Oil Prosperity Comes to Eagle Ford Texas

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Rapid energy development has brought new jobs, rising income and growing wealth to this historically low-wage, low-income area of Texas.

From the Dallas Federal Reserve report "Oil Boom in Eagle Ford Shale Brings New Wealth to South Texas":

"Oil and natural gas activity is booming again in South Texas. The 2008 discovery of the Eagle Ford Shale play has breathed new life into industry in the region, where many mature and declining fields have operated for more than 40 years. Perhaps the largest discovery of new oil reserves in the United States since Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in 1968, the Eagle Ford Shale extends over 23 South Texas counties (see map above).

Its southern edge begins near Laredo and trends northeast toward Austin, producing large quantities of natural gas. The northern edge—the formation is about 50 miles wide—follows a similar trend but produces oil. A central zone is rich in condensates, also called natural gas liquids, valuable to the refining and petrochemical industry on the Texas Gulf Coast.

The race to exploit these new South Texas reserves began in late 2008 and is primarily the result of recent advances that unlocked the secret of extracting natural gas and oil from shale. This new technology—along with favorable prices, existing infrastructure and ready access to the Gulf Coast refining and petrochemical complex—created the Eagle Ford Shale boom. Rapid oilfield development has brought new jobs, rising income and growing wealth to this historically low-wage, low-income area.

The Eagle Ford’s scale and speed of development proved so robust that they quickly overwhelmed previous efforts to comprehensively measure the economic impact. Recent data suggest that the oil boom’s impact on jobs, income and spending in the region has been profound.

Surging drilling activity has brought strong employment and wage growth to most of the counties in the Eagle Ford. Counties located above oil and condensate deposits, such as Dimmit, La Salle and McMullen, have experienced the greatest increase in employment and average weekly wages. Job growth was strong from 2005 to 2008, likely fueled by rising natural gas prices even before the Eagle Ford Shale play began (see bottom chart above).

Jobs in the region sank with the recession amid sharply dropping energy prices in 2009. From a low during first quarter 2010 to third quarter 2011, jobs grew at an annual rate of 5.9 percent, reaching 2.9 percent above the previous peak value. By comparison, during the same period, jobs statewide increased 2.4 percent and remained 0.01 percent below the previous high.

Generally, Eagle Ford counties represent about 2 percent of all Texas jobs. Since the beginning of 2010, the 15,773 net new jobs account for 6.9 percent of the state’s net gain during the period. While recent activity is impressive, more growth may lie ahead to meet demand. The scale of development has surpassed the capacity of local industry. Hotels, restaurants and gasoline stations are jammed with outside managers, crews and technicians. As the Eagle Ford matures and the local service industry expands, many outside workers may become local residents and employees.

Average weekly wages have grown markedly in most Eagle Ford counties.  For the 23 counties, the average annualized growth rate in the weekly wage during this period was 14.6%. By comparison, average weekly wages rose 6.8% in Texas, from $875 to $966, and 6.3% in the U.S., from $870 to $953. Given the strong growth in employment and average weekly wages in the Eagle Ford, seasonally adjusted total wages paid in its top five counties increased at an annual rate of 63.4% during this period, while the entire 23-county area saw a 25% increase."

Let's Repeal Deadly Prohibition On Kidney Sales

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From Reason' Matt Welch in the Boston Review:

"Every day, eighteen people die in the United States while waiting in vain for a kidney transplant, according to the National Kidney Foundation. The Department of Health & Human Services reports that more than 92,000 patients were on the kidney waiting list [updated as of today] (see chart above), but that only 16,812 transplants were made in 2011. That deadly math is part of the reason that, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 380,000 Americans are on dialysis, a punitively expensive and physically grueling death-postponement procedure. The imbalance cannot be meaningfully addressed via cadaver-harvesting alone.

So we know that maintaining prohibition—letting the law be guided by our moral revulsion toward placing price tags on human organs—will certainly increase the body count. We know that boosting the number of kidney donations from the living is the only real way to whittle the waiting list down. And we also know, from such procedures as egg donation, that legalizing monetary rewards is a guaranteed method for expanding the pool of living donors. Your morality may vary, but mine says that sentencing more than 6,000 people a year to an avoidable death falls well short of the Golden Rule. My inquest therefore concludes that the burden of argumentative proof on the legality of kidney sales should fall squarely on those who back the lethal status quo.

This is not some academic exercise. People are dying right now because we have let our revulsion at markets create serial prohibitions of consensual behavior, whether it’s buying and selling marijuana, sex, or kidneys. How many more people are we willing to let perish for this mistake?"

He was responding to the essay "How Markets Crowd Out Morals" by Michael J. Sandel in the same issue of Boston Review.

HT: Andrew Sullivan

Markets in Everything: Buy Your Wedding Toast

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1. Buy a 3-5 minute customized wedding toast for $149, written for the best man, maid of honor, parents of the groom or bride, etc. from The Perfect Toast.

2. For a cheaper alternative ($18-20), you can buy fill-in-the-blank templates from Instant Wedding Toasts, along with an interactive workbook to help you write the perfect, personal speech as the best man, maid of honor, etc.    

Environmentalism as Relgious Doctrine

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In his book "The Armchair Economist," economist Steven Landsburg explains why he is not an environmentalist:
"The hallmark of science is a commitment to follow arguments to their logical conclusions; the hallmark of certain kinds of religion is a slick appeal to logic followed by a hasty retreat if it points in an unexpected direction. Environmentalists can quote reams of statistics on the importance of trees and then jump to the conclusion that recycling paper is a good idea. But the opposite conclusion makes equal sense.  I am sure that if we found a way to recycle beef, the population of cattle would go down, not up. If you want ranchers to keep a lot of cattle, you should eat a lot of beef.

Recycling paper eliminates the incentive for paper companies to plant more trees and can cause forests to shrink. If you want large forests, your best strategy might be to use paper as wastefully as possible — or lobby for subsidies to the logging industry. Mention this to an environmentalist. My own experience is that you will be met with some equivalent of the beatific smile of a door-to-door evangelist stumped by an unexpected challenge, but secure in his grasp of Divine Revelation.

This suggests that environmentalists — at least the ones I have met — have no real interest in maintaining the tree population. If they did, they would seriously inquire into the long-term effects of recycling. I suspect that they don't want to do that because their real concern is with the ritual of recycling itself, not with its consequences. The underlying need to sacrifice, and to compel others to sacrifice, is a fundamentally religious impulse."

Five Money-Saving Websites

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Five new sites to help you save money, from US News and World Report.

1. Priceonomics - a price guide for everything (featured on CD).

2. Aisle50 - Like Groupon, but for groceries.

3. Dealupa - a single place to find the best daily deals, organized according to their quality and relevance to you.

4.  Carsabi - the ultimate online tool for used-car research.

5.  SpringCoin -- an automated, online debt-relief and debt- management website.

Ohio State Has 6.3 Full-Time Non-Teaching Employees for Every One Full-Time Professor

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From the NY Times article "Slowly, as Student Debt Rises, Colleges Confront Costs": 

"At a time of diminished state funding for higher education and uncertain federal dollars, Ohio State University president Mr. E. Gordon Gee [MP: Highest paid public-university college president at almost $2 million per year] says that public colleges and universities need to devise a new business model to pay for the costs of education, beyond sticking students with higher tuition and greater debt. 
“The notion that universities can do business the very same way has to stop,” said Mr. Gee, who is also the chairman of a commission studying college attainment, including the impact of student debt.
College presidents across the country are confronting the same realization, trying to manage their institutions with fewer state dollars without sacrificing quality or all-important academic rankings. Tuition increases had been a relatively easy fix but now — with the balance of student debt topping $1 trillion and an increasing number of borrowers struggling to pay — some administrators acknowledge that they cannot keep putting the financial onus on students and their families.
Increasingly, they are looking for other ways to pay for education, stepping up private fund-raising, privatizing services, cutting staff, eliminating departments — even saving millions of dollars by standardizing things like expense forms. 
Colleges can be top-heavy with administrators and woefully inefficient, some critics say, and some have only recently taken a harder look at ways to streamline their operations."
MP: Ohio State University might provide a good example of an institution "top-heavy with administrators" and other full-time non-teaching personnel. 
The chart above displays the number of non-teaching full-time employees at Ohio State, which totaled 21,178 in 2010 including 1,634 Executive/Administrative/Managerial, 11,143 Other Professional (Support/Service), 3,502 Technical and Paraprofessionals, 2,794 Clerical and Secretarial, 602 Skill Crafts and 1,503 Service/Maintenance, according to U.S. Department of Education IPEDS data.  In contrast, Ohio State employed 3,359 full-time faculty in 2010, for a ratio of 6.3 non-instructional full-time employees per one full-time faculty.  
A comparison over time at OSU and a comparison to other institutions would be illustrative, but the 6.30-to-1 ratio documented above would seem prima facie to indicate a high degree of "administrative top-heaviness/bloat."  It's also consistent with documented growth over time in administrative ranks at most public universities, see this CD post and this Goldwater Institute study, "Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education."

Energy Stimulus: Shale Gas Saved Consumers $250 Billion and Created Thousands of Shovel-Ready Jobs

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Click to enlarge.
The American Gas Association has just released a study titled "Identifying Key Economic Impacts of Recent Increases in U.S. Natural Gas Production." Parts of the Executive Summary and Conclusion appears below.   

Executive Summary: The recent success of shale gas and oil production in the United States coupled with only modest demand growth has resulted in measurable declines in domestic natural gas prices, which has benefited both gas customers as well as the overall economy. Lower natural gas commodity prices have in part:

• Led to savings of almost $250 billion for end-use natural gas customers over the past three years (see chart above)


• Provided a typical residential customer more than $175 in savings during 2010 alone


• Helped the average commercial customer to save more than $1,100 in their 2010 annual bill


• Contributed to the creation of 334,000 jobs in natural gas dependent industries during the past two years


• Contributed to an analytical vision that the shale gas revolution may be responsible for bringing a million new manufacturing jobs to this country by 2025


• Pointed to production activities of oil and gas in the United States that were responsible for nine percent of new U. S. jobs growth in 2011.

From the Conclusion:

Lower natural gas prices have also helped create jobs during one of the worst recessions on
record:

• Job creation directly tied to energy extraction and delivery accounted for about 150,000 new jobs in 2011


• Expansion of natural gas-dependent industries could lead to an additional one million manufacturing jobs by 2025

BPP@MIT Annual Inflation Rate Falls Below 2%

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The top chart above displays annual inflation rates based on daily online retail price data collected by the Billion Prices Project @ MIT, which just released data through April 30.  According to this real-time measure of major inflation trends in the U.S., inflationary pressures have been subsiding since last summer, and the annualized inflation rate fell below 2% at the end of April for the first time since early January 2010, more than two years ago.   

The bottom chart above shows that since January 2010, MIT's online price index has tracked the Consumer Price Index (NSA) pretty closely.  Despite the fact that the MIT online price index doesn't capture all of the items in the CPI, it's still a useful alternative measure of inflationary pressures in the U.S. economy, and gives us additional information about the trends in consumer prices and inflation based on real-time online retail prices.

Animation of Energy Prosperity Spreading Across Pennsylvania As Horizontal Drilling Takes Off

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Black diamonds are conventional vertical wells and red diamonds are horizontal wells.
Just out this afternoon from the EIA:

"Between 2009 and 2011, Pennsylvania's natural gas production more than quadrupled due to expanded horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing (see chart below). This drilling activity, which is concentrated in shale formations that cover a broad swath of the state, mirrors trends seen in the Barnett shale formation in Texas.

The animation above illustrates Pennsylvania's relatively recent transition from conventional vertical wells (black diamonds) to horizontal wells (red diamonds), drilled mostly in sections of the Marcellus, Utica, and Geneseo/Burket shale formations located in the northeast and southwest portions of the state. The animation also shows that as horizontal drilling increased, the number of vertical wells—which are typically less productive—fell, resulting in an overall decline in the state's new well count.
Historically, natural gas exploration and development activity in Pennsylvania was relatively steady, with operators drilling a few thousand conventional (vertical) wells annually. Prior to 2009, these wells produced about 400 to 500 million cubic feet per day of natural gas. With the shift to and increase in horizontal wells, however, Pennsylvania's natural gas production more than quadrupled since 2009, averaging nearly 3.5 billion cubic feet per day in 2011 (see chart above)."

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Chicago News

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Agriculture

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Csd-16/17 Agriculture Csd-16/17 National Report Israel 1/8 Agriculture Government Focal Points: Dr. Jorge Tarchitzky, Department Of Soil And Water Division

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Sweden Agriculture 3.1 The Common Agricultural Policy Since Joining The Eu, The Swedish Government Has Endeavoured To Realise An Agricultural Policy That Promotes

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U.s.panama Trade Promotion Agreement Benefits For Agriculture April 2011 Usda Is An Equal Opportunity Provider, Employer And Lender. To File A Complaint Of

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Agriculture - Crop Yields, Soil Erosion, And Soil Carbon Agriculture Crop Yields, Soil Erosion, And Soil Carbon

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Library Of Congress Classification Outline Class S - Agriculture (click Each Subclass For Details) Subclass S Agriculture (general) Subclass Sb Plant Culture

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2494 Federal Register /vol. 76, No. 9/thursday, January 13, 2011/proposed Rules Department Of Agriculture Food And Nutrition Service 7 Cfr Parts 210 And 220 [fns-2007

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71 Agriculture Agriculture Key Messages: Many Crops Show Positive Responses To Elevated Carbon Dioxide And Low * Levels Of Warming, But Higher Levels Of Warming

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Daytona Beach News Journal

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Daytona Beach News Journal April 21, 2007 Religious Leaders Offer Condolences In Wake Of Campus Tragedy Staff And Wire Report Why Did God Let This Happen?"

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Jonah Goldberg on the Asininity of Social Justice

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Here's an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's cover story in the current issue of National Review, "The Tyranny of Clichés," based on his new book with the same title (emphasis added):

"In 1840, the theologian Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio came up with the concept of social justice as a way to defend civil society from the ever-increasing intrusions of the state. Social justice, according to Taparelli, was the legitimate realm of justice beyond formal legal justice. Since then, the term has become completely inverted: “Social justice” has become an abracadabra phrase granting the state access to every nook and cranny of life. 

The only way for social justice to make sense is if you operate from the assumption that the invisible hand of the market should be amputated and replaced with the very visible hand of the state. In other words, each explicit demand for social justice carries with it the implicit but necessary requirement that the state do the fixing. And a society dedicated to the pursuit of perfect social justice must gradually move more and more decisions under the command of the state, until it is the sole moral agent.  

Social justice is a Trojan horse concealing a much more radical agenda. “Social justice” is a profoundly ideological term, masquerading as a generic term for goodness. In short, it is a tyrannical cliché, a seemingly benign truism that, like a pill with a pleasant protective coating, conceals a mind-altering substance within."

Commercial Loan Volume Back to 2007 Levels

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The chart above displays the volume of commercial and industrial loans at all U.S. commercial banks on a weekly basis back to 2000, through the first week of May, and shows that bank lending to small and medium size businesses has been steadily increasing since the fall of 2010.  Business loan volume has been above $1.4 trillion in every week since early April, which is back to the pre-recession commercial loan levels of November 2009 (see chart).  A year ago, commercial lending to businesses was growing at an annual rate of only about 3%, but since then business loan growth accelerated to double-digit levels starting last November, and now business loan growth has been about 13% since early February.

Commercial banks have been increasingly more willing to extend credit to America's small- and medium-sized companies over the last 18 months, as confidence about current and future economic conditions have been improving, leading to greater willingness by banks to take on credit risk.  It's an important economic milestone that bank business loan volume has returned to its pre-recession 2007 levels.    

I am the 'Beast' the Republicans want to 'Starve'

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"Starve theBeast" is the well-documented and radical 34-year-old plan that Mitt Romneyand the Tea Party endorses for deliberately bankrupting America.

ForbesMagazine:"On July 14, 1978 the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which would have cut all federal income tax rates by about one-third. A key witness wasAlan Greenspan who was the first Republican to articulate what came to becalled the 'starve the beast" theory'."

Alan Greenspan was also themost blamed for the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession.

The GOP's plan is basically this:

• Cut taxes on the rich,
• which in turn would reduce government tax revenues,
• and ultimately force cuts to programs for the poor and middle-class...programs the rich don't need (we are the "beasts" that the Republicans want to starve.)

Starving thebeast is a fiscal-political strategy of American conservatives to cut taxes in order to deprive the government of revenuein a deliberate effort to create a fiscal budget "crisis" that is intended to force the federal government to reduce spending (rather thanrestore tax levels). The short and medium term effect of the strategy has increased United States public debt rather than reducedspending.

We saw this vividly played out last year when the Tea Party Republicansalmost shut down the government, which resulted in having the United States'credit rating reduced.

The term "beast" refers to the government (the people) and the programs it funds, particularly social programs such asTANF, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, Pell grants and public schools; and does not usually refer to spending on military, law enforcement or prisons.

You heard all the Republicans presidential candidates rant and rave about thesocial programs during the debates.

"Starving the beast" was the premise behind the conservative fiscal strategy, but the growth of spending and deficits (even in the face of large taxcuts) has worn down some of its former supporters, according to syndicated columnist and former U.S. Treasury official BruceBartlett, in an article analyzing the origins and development of the Republican fiscal strategy.“Starve the Beast” - Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor (PDF)

The first rule of Starving the Beast? Don't mentionit. This is not something you can speak of in polite conversation, as an AndrewSullivan reader pointed out:

"This is the culmination of about a thirty year Republican strategy called “starve the beast,” by which Republicans have worked to reduce taxes and increase the national deficit as large as possible – all to create the supposed “deficit crisis” that we now face and to use that crisis to eliminate programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and a slew of other programs (EPA, SEC, Planned Parenthood, collective bargaining, etc.) that the Republican class has never been able to eliminate through the democratic process. This “starve the beast” Republican strategy has been openly acknowledged for years and I know you are well aware of it. And the Ryan “budget plan” is transparently an attempt to cash in on this long-standing political agenda."

RollingStone has a good article: How the GOP became the Party of the Rich - "Ronald Reagan put his tax planto work on behalf of the rich in a move that GOP Majority Leader Howard Baker called a "riverboatgamble". Reagan sold the country on an "across-the-board" tax cut that brought the toptax rate on the rich down to 50 percent. According to supply-side economists, the wealthy would usetheir tax break to spur investment, and the economy would boom.

Bruce Bartlett recalls, "We started talking about just cutting taxes and saying, 'Screw thedeficit.' We had this idea that if you lowered revenues, the concern about the deficit would bechanneled into spending cuts."

It was the birth of what is now known as "Starve the Beast" – a conscious strategy by conservatives to force cuts in federal spendingby deliberately bankrupting the country. As conceived by the right-wing intellectual Irving Kristol in 1980, the plan called for Republicans to createa "fiscal problem" by slashing taxes – and then foist the pain of re-imposing fiscal discipline onto future Democratic administrationswho, in Kristol's words, would be forced to "tidy up afterward."

Americans for Tax Reform, headed by Grover Norquist, used an instrument for enforcement – an anti-tax pledge signed by GOPlawmakers – which quickly evolved into a powerful weapon designed to shift the tax burden away from the rich.

Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax revolutionaries who seized control of Congress in 1994 moved to eliminate taxes on investment incomeand to abolish the inheritance tax. Under the final plan they enacted, capital gains taxes were sliced to 20 percent(now 15 percent with the Bush tax cuts) -- a tax cut that went directly to the top one percent of income earners.

"The capital gains tax cut alone gave the top 400 taxpayers* a bigger tax cut thanall the Bush tax cuts combined," says David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofPerfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else.

* See the Forbes400 List

From Occupy America in an article: "Where the Right WentWrong"- "Bill Moyers talked with conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, whowrote the bible for the Reagan Revolution, and worked on domestic policy for the Reagan White House, andwho also served as a top treasury official under the first President Bush. Now he's a heretic in the conservative circles where he once was a star. Bartlett argues that right-wing taxpolicies -- pushed in part by Grover Norquist and Tea Party activists -- are destroying the country's economic foundation."

"Starve the Beast," is now being championed by Irving Kristol's son, Bill Kristol(a regular on Fox News) and Grover Norquist...cutting taxesand placing funds into positions where they will have little stimulative effect,which will in fact grow the deficit or remove the dollars from positions in which they could be used for social programs or other methods of helping the poor, thereby forcing the shrinkage of government byaiding the oligarchs." - An Open Letter to Bill O’Brien – Is That Round Table Still Open?, January 18,2012

From a doctoral dissertation entitled "Starving the Beast: Using tax policy and governmental budgeting to drive social policy," by AmyM. Hageman, Univ. Central Florida 2007:

"Strauss viewed liberalism as the crisis of modernity and felt strongly that the natural right of the gentlemen (e.g. the elite) must be protected to allow the gentlemen to rule as an aristocracy within a democratic society. Strauss also saw strong national unity as the key to a successful state. Neo-conservative theory also disdains welfarism and holds that governmental involvement in social problems should be limited, but that strong national security and defense are essential for a unified country. These tenets are fundamental to understanding why contemporary tax policy makers are focused on tax cuts that realign the equity of the tax system to favor the protection of the elite’s wealth and realign federal budgets to shift spending away from social programs that might benefit society’s vulgar."

Grover Norquist has always said of government, "I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Everyone, regardless of income level, can help starve the beast by drastically cutting consumption. This hits both Federal and State tax collection. By cutting consumption – or consuming ’smartly’, we actually do three things –save money, avoid paying both direct and indirect taxes, and create a downstream loss in revenue, which results in lower collection of corporate income taxes (and a loss of jobs, which is also a loss in government revenue and an increase in government social program spending--- and one step closer to ‘breaking’ the system).

The top 1 percent of American earners receive almost a fifth of the country’s income, according to Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists who study inequality.According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute the top 1 percent of Americans, by net worth, hold about a third ofAmerican wealth.

Compensation for chief executives at American companies grew 15 percent in 2011 after a 28 percent rise in 2010, part of a larger trend that has seen CEO pay skyrocket over the last three decades. Workers, on the other hand, have been leftbehind (especially those in the bottom 50% of the workforce.)

Despite previous claims that the Bush tax cuts would raise revenue, we now know the 2001tax cuts was an attempt to starve the beast at a cost of approximately of $1.35 trillion over 10 years while the 2003 tax cuts cost another $350 billion over 10 years. We also know that the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was pegged at $1.26 trillion through 2011 and theun-funded Medicare Part D prescription drug program stands at $272 billion so far.

In 2010 142.8million Americans filed tax returns. The year before about 59 million tax returns were filed with either positive or negative AGI that used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to completely wipe out their federal income tax liability.Read: Who Pays Taxes and Who Receives Government Spending?(PDF)

Last year 50% of all U.S. workersearned less than $26,364 a year. This is the bottom 50% that the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundations says only pays 3% ofall the [federal income] taxes. These are the people the Republicans say"should put more skin in the game".

But because half of our population makes such low wages, the bulk (if not all) of their earnings are spent on basicnecessities in consumption, which is also taxed in other ways. The Republicans want to impose a VAT tax that woulddisproportionately tax low income people more, who are already suffering financial hardship.

Those are the people -- those that need food stamps to eat -- the "beasts" that the Republicans want to"starve".

Reuters: “Starving the beast” is a favorite conservative strategy for forcing cuts in federal spending. The idea is to deprive the government of revenue in order to force spending cuts – and resistance to new taxes was a central feature of theSuper Committee deliberations in Washington.

In fiscal 2011, Congress provided the Social Security Administration with about $1 billion less than requested by President Obama. Those cuts forced the agency to make cuts that beneficiaries have noticed. It suspended mailing of the annual statement of benefits, and it shelved plans to opennew hearing offices to handle the backlog of disability claims, which has soared during the recession.

Europe is now in a recession. There was no debt crisis in Britain but it's now experiencing its first double-dip recession since the 1970s. Robert Reich says they can blame it on their austerity economics --"the bizarre view that economic slowdowns are the products of excessive debt, so government should cut spending. Germany's insistence on cutting public budgets has led Europe into a recession swamp. The danger here for the United States is clear. The Republicans have been demanding and getting spending cuts at the worst possible time -- and ignoring the economic and social consequences."

More people (with natural population growth) makes for "bigger government", and that's why taxation is necessary for domestic spending - which is needed to maintain programs like Social Security and Medicare, while maintaining what's necessary for the defense of thecountry and our infrastructure. The Republican's policies are putting thiscountry into a state of decay while just enriching a few at the very top.

No one is immune from catastrophe. Most of us get old. Anyone can lose theirjob and health insurance. Not everyone has the physical ability to work untilthe day they drop dead, especially if they have a labor intensive job. Anybodycan get seriously ill or become disabled. Many won't be considered for employmentafter they reach a certain age. Most American voters, even Republican ones,might need assistance at some time in their life. Only 1% of the population neednot worry about social safety nets, most of us are just trying to get by. It's ashame that so many people vote against their own best interests, and believethe Republican propaganda, when it's common knowledge the GOP is the party ofthe rich.

Mitt Romney "loves" Paul Ryan's budget plan, the Social Darwinismconcept of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves.

They squeezed all they could out of us for food, gas, housing andelectricity. Then they outsourced the jobs overseas. The jobs that are nowavailable don't pay a "living wage". And now they want to cut our verylast lifeline for existence.

The American people (and maybe you) -- are the "beasts" the Republicans want to"starve".

Editor's Note: After working for almost four decades, 56-year-old BudMeyers was laid off in 2008 and has now been unemployed for the past 3½ years.He is currentlysurviving on food stamps while pursuing a Social Security disability claim... a"beast" the Republicans want to "starve".

The Tragic Aftermath of the Great Recession

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Iexplain where Americans are today and what most of us actuallyearn...from the mean and greedy CEOs to the nice and polite kindergartenteachers.

Note: In the first part of this post I explain 'average', 'median', 'mean' and 'raw' wages...and what most of us actually earn...so you'll have a better understandingof where American incomes are right now in the tragic aftermath of the Great Recession.If you're familiar with this subject, just skip to Wherewe are Today to see all the statistics I gathered.

About Current Reported Wages

The latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) shows that the national average wage index for 2010 was $41,673.83a year before payroll taxes. The media parrots this number a lot (or somethingsimilar) all the time. It used to make me feel very bad because I struggled thevery best I could for almost 40 years and thought almost everybody else wasstill earning much more then me.

But don't let that number that the media reports fool you.

In keeping with the term "national average wage index," the Social Security Administration often loosely refers to the basis for the index as averagewages. The index is based on total compensation (wages, tips, and the like) subject to Federal income taxes, as reported by employers on FormW-2, divided by the number of tax filers.

The“raw” average wage (net compensation divided by total number of workers)was $39,959.30, according to the data from the Social SecurityAdministration.

An "average" is just one measure. The difference between a "median" and "mean"incomes: Median income is the amount which divides the income distribution into two equal groups, half having income above that amount, and half having income below that amount. Mean income (average) is the amount obtained by dividing the total income of a group by the number of people in that group.

The measure"median" is the wage "in the middle." That is, half of the workers earned below this level. The table here shows that the median wage is substantially less than the"average" wage.

The median U.S. wage in 2010 was just $26,363a year --- half of all workers earned below this level. As the SSA explained,"The reason for the difference is that the distribution of workers by wage level is highly skewed.”

So then, I didn't feel as near as bad as I did before. I was earning $16 anhour ($33,280 a year) as a union bartender in a Las Vegas casino (plus tips).And the cost of living was much lower than in other big cities, especially likein NYC, Boston, or San Francisco.

Let's look at an example of this reported average wage:

Imagine there are two employees working at a New York City hedge fund. If the pretty receptionist works full-time and earns theminimum wage of $7.25 an hour ($15,080 a year) and her boss, the greedy and meanCEO earns $1 million a year, the average wage in that hedge fund company would be$507,540 a year. That doesn't tell us very much, does it?

Now add two more employees into the mix of my imaginary hedge fund (picturedabove). Now we also have a janitor earning $10 an hour ($20,800 a year) and a securityguard earning $15 an hour ($31,200 a year). The "median income" atthat hedge fund would be the two middle incomes added together= $52,000 ÷ 2 = $26,000 for a "median income". Half the employeesearn more than $26,000 every year (the CEO and security guard) and half earns lessthan $26,000 a year (the receptionist and janitor).

The "average income" would be the total of allfour incomes ÷4 wage earners = $266,770 a year. Neither of those two examples for theemployees in that hedge fund paints a very clearpicture, does it?

* As an aside, because this hedge fund is defined as a "smallbusiness" *because it has less than 500 employees, even though grosses over $ 1 billion ayear in stock trades) theCEO will pay 20% less in taxes because of new legislation that was proposed.And because of the Bush tax cuts, that also means that the greedy CEO only has to paythe very same tax rate on his capital gains (15%) as will his young and pretty(and poor) receptionist earning the federally required minimum wage. This is NOT a truly progressive income tax system, and why OBama wants to tax those earning $1 million a year (like that mean and greedy CEO) 30% on everything over a million dollars a year.

Almost 66 percent of U.S. workers earned below "the average wage" because of income disparity. In other words, looking at the difference between average and median wage is two completely different ways to gauge the growing income gap.And the recession has only exacerbated the problem...and because of high unemployment.

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Where Americans are Today

Less than half of those wholost jobs during the recession were qualified to receive unemployment benefits.

And of those who did qualify, the Center on Budget and Prioritiescalculated that in the most recent year for which data is available, the average unemployment insurance recipientnationwide got a benefit that replaced less than half (47%) of his or herprecious earnings (The “replacement rate” ranged from 31% to 57% indifferent states nationwide.)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that currently there are 6.5million Americans receiving some form of unemployment benefit for an"average" of $295 a week ($15,340 a year) before taxes (Depending ontheir total adjusted gross income during the tax year, they could still be subjectto paying federal income tax on unemployment benefits).

About 12.5 million people are unemployed, meaning 6 million who are stillcounted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics receive no UI benefits at all. Atleast 8million Americans have already exhausted all their unemployed benefitswithout ever finding work again, and they are no longer being counted by the BLS(either as "marginally attached" or as "discouragedworkers", and aresometimes known as the "99ers".

The U.S. labor force is 154.6 million. According to the BLS, the U.S. now hasa record 88.4 million peoplewho are not considered part of the labor force. (The labor force "participation rate"was down to 63.6%) (Seemore here)

Now think about this: Thegovernment defines the poverty level as $10,890 for a single person, or $ 22,350for a family of four. And here is what most of us earn:

• 77.3 million earned less that $26,363 a year (the bottom 50% that pays little in federal income taxes)
• 55.8 million received some form of Social Security benefits (retirees averaged $14,760 a year and those with disabilities averaged $13,332 a year). If no other income, they would be excluded from paying federal income taxes if they earned less than $25,000 a year (which is most).
• 12.5 million are unemployed, but of those, only 6.7 million currently qualified and receive unemployment benefits (average $15,340 a year)
• 7.9 million Americans were only working part time but wanted full-time work.
• 3.8 million workers earned wages at or below the Federal minimum and made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers. (A full-time minimum wage job pays $15,080 a year).
• 6 million college and high school grads have no work history at all, and also aren't being counted in the unemployment rate -- and aren't receiving UI benefits (but they could be living on food stamps and in debt with student loans).
• 636,017 were homeless last year.
• 1.4 million Americans are employed at Wal-Mart in the U.S. (average wage is slightly above $8 an hour).
• 750,000+ Americans work for McDonalds in the U.S. (average wage is slightly above $8 an hour). Like every year, McDonald's and its franchisees hired 62,000 people for temporary summer jobs in the U.S. last year after receiving more than one million applications from desperate job seekers.
• 6 million people are under correctional supervision (jail, prison, etc) in the U.S.— more than were in Stalin’s gulags.
• 50,000 are in mental institutions. Sixty years ago, the United States had 322 state psychiatric hospitals that cared for more than 500,000 patients at any given time. In the most recent figures compiled by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute, from 2009, the states operated 208 hospitals that cared for fewer than 50,000 patients.)
• 100,152 died from suicide over the last three years, in part because of record long-term unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies. The suicide rate has gone up, and calls to the suicide hotline has increased by 33%. The annual rate is 10.7 per 100,000 nationally and 34.5 in Las Vegas. In a study conducted by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it found that in 2008-2009, some 8.3 million U.S. adults had suicidal thoughts in the previous year. About 2.2 million people reported making suicide plans in the last year. One million reported an actual suicide attempt in the last 12 months.

The Republicans and the Heritage Foundation think that the people I listedabove "should put more skin in the game" when it comes to paying morefor federal income taxes, rather the taxing the rich a little more (because therich doesn't want to pay a "living wage".)

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor came out in favor of considering a tax increase onthese poor people. "We’ve got to discuss that issue,” the Virginia Republican told reporters.Eric Cantor (like all Republicans) remains opposed to any tax hike on Americans of ample means. The GOP leader explains: “I’ve never believed that you go raise taxes on those that have been successful.”

One in seven seniors in America -- some8.3 million people -- faced the threat of hunger, which rose for people age60 and older, mainly among those who are only earning one to two times the poverty level.Not only does theGOP want to "starve the beast", but they want to starve grandma too!!!

And the GOP would tax the homeless if they could find them.

Government is, and always has been, the best job creator. There are 1.7million Americans on active duty in the military. Thetypical pay in the military for an enlisted 20-year-old E-2 is $37,637 ayear. And there are 2.15million who are U.S. federal employees, not including postal workers (butincluding radical Republican members of Congress).

And what about federal workers? Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said, "Average government workers are now making $30,000 a year more than the averageprivate-sector worker." WTF?!?!?!?

But wait a minute...not so says Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Keefe: "Private sector workers earned average annual wages of $55,132....greaterthan the $49,072 earned by public sector workers." That's $6,060 less, not $30,000 more!(Ilearned that Mitt Romney is a compulsive liar.)

In 2010 Economic Policy Institute publisheda paper by professor Jeffrey Keefe, which supplied overwhelming evidence that public-sectorworkers, on the whole, earn less than those in the private sector. On average, full-time state and local employees areunder-compensated by 3.7%, in comparison to otherwise similar private-sector workers.

And besides, what is so outrageous about an annual wage of $55,132 anyway? Social-economicdemographics of the cities and towns within the states determines these wages.$55,132 in Boston Massachusetts wouldn't go near as far as a teacherliving in Springfield Massachusetts.

And from MassBudget.Org: "The issue of public and private sector wages is part of a larger economic trend in America and in Massachusetts.Over the past three decades, income growth has been much weaker than it was between the Second World War and the 1970s.Between 1979 and 2007, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans more than tripled. In 1979, the highest-incomehouseholds earned 22.7 times more than the lowest-income households; by 2007, they were earning 75 times more. During thisperiod, the average after-tax income of the these highest-income households grew by almost 5% annually while incomes of themiddle- and lower-income households saw growth rates of less than 1%. When education is taken into account, public sector workers with a four-year college degree or more (60% of the public sectorworkforce) are paid less, on average, than private sector workers with the same level of education.

What average wages look like, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Laborers and Movers - Median Pay $10.85 per hour - $22,560 per year - Less than high school
• Firefighters - Median Pay $21.76 per hour - $45,250 per year - High school diploma or equivalent.
• Kindergarten and Elementary School Teachers - Median Pay $51,380 per year - Bachelor’s degree
• Police and Detectives - Median Pay $26.45 per hour - $55,010 per year - High school diploma or equivalent.
• Post-secondary Teachers - Median Pay $62,050 per year - Doctoral or professional degree

Mitt Romney and the Republicans want teachers with Master degrees to earnwhat school bus drivers earns. Maybe the GOP would prefer that bus drivers taught ourchildren, seeing as those in the top 1% can send their kids to expensive privateschools. De-funding public education is another apart of theGOP's strategy of "starving the beast".

Now look at what the big shots earn:

• Corporate CEOS averaged $12.9 million last year (Mitt Romney earned $22 million). See what the CEOs earn, those who pay $1 an hour for cheap labor in India, Mexico, and China. And they aren't ashamed at all of their excessive pay.
• Hedge fund mangers - Collectively, this privileged class of traders did quite well for itself — raking in some $22 billion in compensation, according to AR Magazine. Topping the charts in hedge fund pay was John Paulson, who reportedly earned $4.9 billion.

And these guys (and gals), these "captains of industry" and"pillars of our community", pay a lower tax rate than a typical sheet metal worker or ateacher. (Polifactrates the claim true, so Warren Buffett wasn't lying.)

One such CEO, Ted Kelly of Boston’s Liberty Mutual insurance company, loudlycomplainedthat Massachusetts taxpayers are paying excessive taxes to support governmentworkers who get "high salaries and very rich benefits". At the time hehad already been halfway through afour-year stretch that had him takinghome an average $50 million per year.

In 2010, Liberty Mutual also pocketeda $46.5 million taxpayer subsidy to build a new office building in Boston whilemaintaining a private fleet of five corporate jets (described as their own privateAir Force). Notesthe Boston Globe’s Brian McGrory, Ted Kelly made “an unusual number of stopsat airports near Kelly’s vacation homes.” Liberty Mutual PR staff refusedearlier this month to comment on Kelly’s travel. They cited“security reasons.”

It's so odd that the ultra-rich multi-millionaires and billionaires would beso concerned about the salaries of kindergarten teachers, who are only earning a"median middle-class wage". If I were one of those mean and greedyCEOs, I was just relax and enjoy all my ill-gotten money and stop acting like abig selfish ass.