Miscellaneous News. - Page 11

Originally Posted by tonton

Of course. China's claim to Taiwan is about as defensible as France's claim to Holland.

The beneficiaries include Midwestern lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who have traditionally supported the industry's legislative agenda on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) and Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.).

The head of the World Bank says China should revalue its currency but says that alone will not solve global trade and financial imbalances. World Bank President Robert Zoellick also praises China for lifting a half a billion people out of poverty during the past 30 years.

Zoellick says his institution agrees with many economists in the United States and Europe, and the International Monetary Fund that China needs to revamp its exchange rate to make global markets fairer.

He says at the same time, Americans and Europeans need to make structural changes to their economies, and do the opposite - save more and spend less.

He says cooperation instead of protectionism is required to avoid new shocks and damage already troubled global economy.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is set to testify Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on China's alleged manipulation of its currency. The committee Wednesday heard from a number of people, including economists, on possible proposals to push Beijing to stop the manipulation. That brought responses from another group of economists.

The congressmen heard that China undervalues it's currency, the Yuan, by as much as 40 percent to give its exported goods an unfair advantage on global markets. The committee heard several suggestions of what can be done to encourage China to allow the Yuan to strengthen. One was using retaliatory duties against China under World Trade Organization rules. But, in a conference call with reporters after the congressional hearing, American Enterprise Institute economist Phillip Levy said that may not be such a good idea.

Phillip Levy's colleague, economist Desmond Lachman agreed that China's currency valuation is the center of the debate, but he also said he finds there are at least two other issues of equal or greater importance.

"One is that in addition to the currency issue, there's a whole range of non-tariff restrictions that China is resorting to give itself an unfair, competitive advantage on stuff like domestic innovation, stuff of that sort that make it difficult to compete fairly with China," said Desmond Lachman. "So, it's not just the currency issue. That last point I would like to make is that beyond the currency issue, what it's really got to be looking at the imbalance with China as a problem of saving and investment, that there's an imbalance on that score as long as China is saving at a high level you're gonna have this imbalance persisting. And, we don't see much movement by China to take those measures that would boost domestic consumption that would lay the basis for bringing the global imbalances onto a sustainable path.'

Economist Desmond Lachman says the ideal policy would be for China to cooperate in hashing out a plan to reduce trade imbalances. That could be done, he says, over a reasonable period of time with China increasing the value of its currency while the United States took measures to increase its household savings rate. At the same time, Mr. Lachman says, China would have to take the measures needed to increase domestic consumption. Without working together, he says, would just lead to a train wreck in the not too distant future.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao are set to meet Thursday as the two countries spar over whether China needs to raise the value of its currency.

Mr. Wen told U.S. and Chinese business leaders on Wednesday there would be "major turbulence" in China, with corporate bankruptcies and increased unemployment, if the yuan appreciated by 20 to 40 percent "according to the requests" of the U.S. government.

But Mr. Obama said earlier in the week that the yuan was "valued lower than market conditions would say it should be." He said the U.S. would "continue to insist" on parity in trade between the two countries.

Mr. Wen said the U.S. trade deficit was caused by the "structure of Sino-U.S. investment and trade," not the level of China's currency. The U.S. has more than a $145 billion trade deficit with China through the first seven months of this year.

China tightly pegged the yuan to the U.S. dollar beginning in 2008, a move that made Chinese goods cheaper on the global markets. U.S. lawmakers and business leaders say this gave China an unfair trade advantage.

A House of Representatives panel is scheduled to vote Friday on legislation that would let U.S. Commerce Department officials impose tariffs on Chinese products entering the United States to help offset the trade imbalance.

Despite the contentious words about the currency valuation, Mr. Wen told the business leaders that he "fully believes" that all the disputes between the two countries will be resolved. He said the U.S.-China relationship "enjoys a bright future" and that the common interests "far outweigh our differences."

One of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever detected was probably targeting "high value" infrastructure in Iran, experts have told the BBC.

Stuxnet's complexity suggests it could only have been written by a "nation state", some researchers have claimed.

It is believed to be the first-known worm designed to target real-world infrastructure such as power stations, water plants and industrial units.

It was first detected in June and has been intensely studied ever since.

"The fact that we see so many more infections in Iran than anywhere else in the world makes us think this threat was targeted at Iran and that there was something in Iran that was of very, very high value to whomever wrote it," Liam O'Murchu of security firm Symantec, who has tracked the worm since it was first detected, told BBC News.

Some have speculated that it could have been aimed at disrupting Iran's delayed Bushehr nuclear power plant or the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

Originally Posted by jazzguru

Chrysler suspends workers caught boozing on tape

How'd you like to drive the car these guys built?

Glad to see my tax dollars kept these failing companies afloat and these idiots employed for so long. They were only suspended AFTER they were caught on tape.

Originally Posted by Wormhole

One of my best friends is a retired GM assembly line worker. In the 80s & 90s boozing was the least of the problems Why do think US cars enjoy(ed) such a bad rep?. You believe that the gov purchase of stock made people drink on the job..??? Really???? And this is a new problem????

The 30-second spot, titled "A Good Idea Then and Now," uses 1963 footage of the late president arguing that tax cuts would serve as an economic stimulus. It's a message meant to bolster McMahon's position that the so-called Bush tax cuts, set to expire later this year, should be extended.

Edward Kennedy Jr., the late president's nephew, sent a letter to McMahon this week asking the GOP candidate to pull the ad, arguing that it "falsely implies" that JFK would have supported tax cuts for the same reason she does. "Using President Kennedy's image in your ad gives your tax position false legitimacy," writes Kennedy, who lives in Connecticut and is supporting McMahon's Democratic opponent, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Originally Posted by jazzguru

Government Motors Resumes Political Giving

Originally Posted by FineTunes

The 1960s and 1980s were periods of record sustained high growth, mainly due to the tax cuts and reforms enacted at the beginning of each decade by Kennedy and Reagan, respectively.

The JFK administration, against the advice of many economic advisers, began cutting taxes in 1962, starting with businesses. An investment tax credit encouraged investment and changes in depreciation costs lowered the cost of capital for businesses. The top corporate rate fell from 52 to 48 percent, and the top individual marginal tax rate fell from 90 to 70 percent. The empirical evidence shows that these tax cuts stimulated growth:

• Between 1962 and 1969, investment grew at an annual rate of 6.1 percent, far higher than the 3 percent annual rate for 1959-1962 and the 2.3 percent rate for 1969-1972, after the JFK tax reforms had been repealed.
• Real GNP grew 4.5 percent during the 1960s, higher than the 2.4 percent growth rate seen from 1952-1960.

The JFK tax cuts also provided proof of a counter-intuitive idea, that cutting taxes will not raise deficits:

• From 1962-1969, government revenue increased 6.4 percent a year, compared with 1.2 percent a year between 1952-1959.
• Indeed, after the '62 and '64 tax cuts, the deficit actually fell from $7.1 billion to $1.4 billion.

Originally Posted by john galt

So the Obamanation takes billions from taxpayers so a failed car maker can continue to pay its workers $73 an hour to continue building junk the market has rejected, then kicks a portion back to the lawmakers who stole it from us.

Tell me, what's the difference between organized crime and this government?

It's been one week since New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote that at General Motors, "the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs."

And he isn't alone. Appearing on NPR last week, Times senior business correspondent Micheline Maynard told listeners that the "hourly wage" of Detroit's union autoworkers had been driven up "towards $80 an hour."

Somebody at the Times needs to clarify the record, because the average United Auto Workers member is not paid $80 an hour. Or even $70. Not even close. Yet (thanks to the Times?) the issue has become a central talking point in the unfolding national debate about the future of America's automotive industry.

Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Make no mistake: The $70-an-hour claim represents a classic case of conservative misinformation. It's also a very dangerous one. The falsehood about autoworkers is being spread at a crucial time, when a make-or-break public debate is taking place, a debate that could affect millions of American workers.

Let's note that any suggestion in the press that most UAW workers earn, or are paid, $70 an hour is spectacularly dishonest. Period. (As one Daily Kos diarist pointed out last week, according to the UAW website, the base pay for a worker in a UAW plant is about $28 an hour.)

What that $70 figure (or $73) actually represents is what it costs GM in total labor expenses, on an hourly basis, to manufacture autos.

Do you see that there's a big distinction? General Motors doles out $70 an hour in overall labor costs to manufacture cars. But individual employees don't get paid $70 an hour to make cars. (The discrepancy between costs and wages is explained by additional benefits, pension fees, and health-care costs GM pays out to current and retired employees.)

Simply put, GM's labor costs are not synonymous with hourly wages earned by UAW employees. Many in the press have casually used the two interchangeably. But they're not.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio did perhaps the best job explaining the misinformation at play:

The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions. Rather, the $70 per hour figure (or $73 an hour, or whatever) is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM's total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers. [emphasis in original]

Originally Posted by FineTunes

The media myth: Detroit's $70-an-hour autoworker
November 25, 2008 3:12 pm ET

Originally Posted by john galt

Take it up with the NYT - you'll find the link is in my post.

Originally Posted by FineTunes

should do some fact checking before you post

Originally Posted by john galt

The NYT did that. Read it yourself.

Originally Posted by john galt

So the Obamanation takes billions from taxpayers so a failed car maker can continue to pay its workers $73 an hour to continue building junk the market has rejected, then kicks a portion back to the lawmakers who stole it from us.

Tell me, what's the difference between organized crime and this government?

Einstein's theories of relativity suggest time is affected by how fast you're moving and how close you are to a gravitational field, like Earth's.

In everyday life, these time fluctuations are tiny. But now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., have measured them with unprecedented accuracy.

James Chin-Wen Chou and his colleagues used a pair of atomic clocks to demonstrate the relativistic changes. These clocks are based on the vibrations of an aluminum atom that's missing an electron. In one experiment, one of the clocks was 33 centimeters above the other. The higher clock experienced a slightly smaller tug of gravity, and ticked more slowly than the lower clock. In another experiment, one of the clocks moved at approximately 20 miles an hour compared with the other.

The difference in tick rate was small. Very small. Just 0.0000000000000001 percent different. The new results appear in the journal Science.

Originally Posted by MISTER CAPS LOCK

I DID, HOWEVER YOU DECIDED TO ALTER THE LINK AND POST IT AS A DIRECT STATEMENT OF FACT ie $73 AN HOUR. A SIMPLE SEARCH TO VERIFY IF THIS WAS CORRECT WOULD HAVE YIELDED THE SAME RESULTS THAT I CAME UP WITH.

Originally Posted by john galt

How the hell does one "alter" a link?

Would it have helped if I had written my response in all caps? Try this: TELL THE NEW YORK TIMES. I really don't care, Einstein.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.

Originally Posted by John Galt

Tell me, what's the difference between organized crime and this government?

Originally Posted by john galt

Great. Google's Einstein Quote of the Day Widget. With that distraction over with, must I answer my own rhetorical question?
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Galt
Tell me, what's the difference between organized crime and this government?

President Barack Obama is contending with the lowest approval rating of his 20-month presidency, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll finds.

The president's approval rating now stands at 42 percent an all time low in CNN polling and 8 points lower than where Obama was only three weeks ago. Moreover, 56 percent of all Americans think the president has fallen short of their expectations.

The president's sagging poll numbers couldn't come at a worse time for congressional Democrats, themselves facing a nine-point deficit in the so-called "generic ballot" question heading into the midterm elections. In fact, the president's approval rating is the same as that of President Clinton's in 1994 the midterm election year that saw Republicans wrest control of both the House and Senate.

In even worse news for congressional Democrats, likely voters say they are considerably more likely to vote for a candidate the president opposes than one he supports. On the other hand, 50 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a Tea Party-backed candidate while a third of Americans said Tea Party support would dissuade their vote for a candidate.

Still, the president can take some solace in the fact several past presidents have been beset by slumping numbers at the 2-year mark: In addition to Clinton, both Reagan and Jimmy Carter found their support at 42 percent at this point in their first term. Of course, Clinton and Reagan went on to big reelection wins only two years later.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

Can a bigger booze tax reduce disease, crime?

Cigarette taxes in New York would jump by $1.60 a pack under a tentative deal reached between Gov. David A. Paterson and legislative leaders, which would give New York the nation's highest state cigarette taxes.

(Reuters) - Adding a $1 per pack tax to cigarettes could raise more than $9 billion a year for states, health advocates said on Wednesday, and a poll released with the study shows Americans would support such a tax.

The poll, conducted by International Communications Research, found 60 percent of voters would support the tax to help struggling states and would prefer it over other tax increases or budget cuts.

"An increase in tobacco tax rates is not only sound public health policy but a smart and predictable way to help boost the economy and generate long-term health savings for states facing deepening budget deficits," said John Seffrin, chief executive of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

Originally Posted by FineTunes

New York Times:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_618961.html

U.S. would reap billions from $1 cigarette tax hike
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON | Wed Feb 10, 2010 2:42pm EST

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6194SD20100210

Let's see what effect raising Cigarette taxes will have.

Both are a good idea for raising money for the Feds and states--but not so much for the consumers.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

There are two things I find interesting and somewhat amusing in things like this:

1. Liberals and democrats often piously chastise others when there any suggestion about regulating what people can or can't do with their bodies (e.g., abortion, sex) but quite willingly seek to ban, tax or restrict the various things people can consume into their bodies.

2. The recognition that increasing the price of something (e.g., through taxation) leads to less consumption or use of that thing...revealing a correct understanding of basic economics, but a complete inability to recognize how this exact same principle affects other economic activity (e.g., taxing income, savings, wealth, productivity, employment, wages, etc.)

Originally Posted by MJ1970

There are two things I find interesting and somewhat amusing in things like this:

1. Liberals and democrats often piously chastise others when there any suggestion about regulating what people can or can't do with their bodies (e.g., abortion, sex) but quite willingly seek to ban, tax or restrict the various things people can consume into their bodies.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

2. The recognition that increasing the price of something (e.g., through taxation) leads to less consumption or use of that thing...revealing a correct understanding of basic economics, but a complete inability to recognize how this exact same principle affects other economic activity (e.g., taxing income, savings, wealth, productivity, employment, wages, etc.)

Originally Posted by FineTunes

Hope that you are not implying that I'm a LibDem---NOT

Originally Posted by FineTunes

Your comments don't make any sense anyway.

This week, almost every big insurance company in Americaincluding Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Humana, Coventry, some Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates and othersstopped writing "child-only" policies in the individual market. ...

This drives up premiums for the healthy, encouraging consumers in turn to drop coverage, and eventually it leads to what's known as a "death spiral," the industry term for an insurer with rapidly increasing costs as a result of population changes in its coverage pool. The child-only market is a particular death-spiral risk because it is so small and unstable, which explains why so many insurers left in a stroke.

Originally Posted by john galt

Kids 0, Insurance 0 - The first fruits of ObamaCare



Conspiracy theory is that this is exactly want Obamacare seeks to achieve - eliminate private insurance in favor of a government bureaucracy.

Originally Posted by MJ1970

... I keep going back and forth between evil and stupid. The evidence isn't always clearly pointing either direction.

Independent voters helped sweep President Obama and other Democrats into office in the last two election cycles. But with less than six weeks to go before the 2010 midterms, independent voters are swinging decisively to the Republican side, according to a report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

According to the report, almost half of independent voters say they are planning to cast ballots for Republicans this year. Janis Nadler of Haverford, Pa., who was at an upscale shopping mall in a Philadelphia suburb, is one of them.

"I think there's a backlash, and I'm going to probably be part of the backlash of people who won't vote for the Democrats," he says.

or the third national election in a row, independent voters may be poised to vote out the party in power. The Republican Party holds a significant edge in preferences for the upcoming congressional election among likely voters, in large part because political independents now favor Republican candidates by about as large a margin as they backed Barack Obama in 2008 and congressional Democratic candidates four years ago.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Steve Caddle, who also works for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.

WASHINGTON With the U.S. midterm elections five weeks away, the Tea Party movement is already the big winner of 2010.

This anti-government, grass-roots Republican offshoot has rattled the party establishment making the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, the partys most prominent 2012 presidential possibility and has dominated the debate this campaign season.

The Tea Partiers believe they are on the cutting edge of a revolution: the future of politics, as Ms. Palin says. More likely, they are a short-term catalyst for Republicans and a long-term problem.

Nevertheless, their victories are impressive toppling the Republican Partys choices in Senate primary races from Alaska to Delaware, with Nevada, Colorado and Kentucky in between. Scores of candidates for the House of Representatives around the United States have embraced the Tea Party agenda.

The Tea Party agenda is not well defined, though it is anti-government, anti-spending, anti-immigration and anti-compromise politics. In a United States beset by a 9.6 percent unemployment rate and plenty of anxiety and anger, there is a receptive audience.

A number of Republican strategists say there is little evidence the Tea Party agenda will turn off voters. That observation may hold true for a midterm election, which is often a referendum on the incumbent party rather than a contest. But it may not apply if the party acquires power, or in a presidential election year. A number of the most prominent Tea Party candidates this year embrace views that may not appeal to swing voters.

More than a few House Republican candidates talk about privatizing Social Security and cutting back on support for Medicare. That will not sit well with senior citizens, a majority of whom are expected to vote Republican in November.

The Tea Partys official 10-point agenda, called the Contract From America, is not so incendiary, though calls for a balanced budget, a single flat tax rate and lower taxes, including those on capital gains and estates, are a challenging policy prescription.

This movement is not tolerant of dissent within the ranks, which may cause some other Republican politicians indigestion. For example, this year, the Tea Party took over the Maine Republican Party convention and adopted a platform that called for imposing a 12-year term limit for senators, ending the congressional health care plan, opposing abortion and abolishing the Federal Reserve Board.

For now, at least, the ground zero mosque in New York and threats to burn copies of the Quran are no longer front-page news. But Americans remain wary of Islam as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies investigate a growing list of attacks on mosques and threats to Muslims