Daily news sites

KSTP reports the story of a high school senior - suspended because of a Tweet - has people talking.


Rogers High School Senior Reid Sagehorn is accused of sending a Tweet, confirming allegations, that he did something inappropriate with a teacher at the school. His friends say it was only a joke, and now thousands of people have signed an online petition to get him back in class.

On Tuesday night many students and parents are planning to show up at the district as the School Board meets on unrelated business. They want to catch them before or afterward to talk about the ordeal.

Sagehorn could face felony charges. Police say another student admitted Tuesday morning, to helping create a gossip website that's linked to the mess. That website, called "Rogers Confession", gathered gossip and questions and posted, some of it anonymously, to Twitter.

"Free Reid" is what thousands of students, parents and community members are saying about the Rogers High School student, who is also captain of the basketball team. They want Reid Sagehorn's suspension, over an inappropriate Tweet, to be lifted.

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Fox News reports over seven in 10 Obama voters, and 55 percent of Democrats, regret voting for President Obama's reelection in 2012, according to a new Economist/YouGov.com poll.

Conducted to test the media hype about a comeback by 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the new poll found voters still uninspired by Romney, but also deeply dissatisfied with Obama who has so far failed to capitalize on his victory over 15 months ago.

The poll asked those who voted for Obama's reelection a simple question: “Do you regret voting for Barack Obama?”

— Overall, 71 percent said yes, 26 percent no.

— 80 percent of whites said yes, 61 percent of blacks said no and 100 percent of Hispanics said yes.

— 84 percent of women said yes, and just 61 percent of men agreed.

— 55 percent of Democrats said yes, as did 71 percent of independents.

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CNS Newsreports the marketable debt of the U.S. government has more than doubled--climbing by 106 percent--while President Barack Obama has been in office, increasing from $5,749,916,000,000 at the end of January 2009 to $11,825,322,000,000 at the end of January 2014, according to the U.S. Treasury's latest Monthly Statement of the Public Debt.

During the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, the marketable debt of the U.S. government almost doubled--climbing 93 percent--from $2,977,328,000,000 at the end of January 2001 to $5,749,916,000,000 at the end of January 2009.

During the time that Bush and Obama have been in office, the marketable debt of the U.S. government has nearly quadrupled, increasing by $8,847,994,000,000.

- See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/106-obama-has-more-doubled-marketable-us-debt#sthash.C43oip6R.dpuf

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The Hillreports President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would cost 500,000 jobs in 2016, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

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The following chart shows annual nonstore retail sales as a fraction of total retail sales (excluding food services).


Click to enlarge.

The growth trend is extrapolated out to 2050. I'm simply showing what the future will look like if the current trend continues. If 10% causes shopping mall pain now (which it clearly does), then what would 20% do in just 17 more years? Or 40% just 17 years after that?

A 4.2% growth rate means that the thing growing doubles every 17 years. In this case, that thing is shopping mall pain.

If you get stung by a bee and every 17 seconds you get stung by twice as many, how many minutes will it take before you realize that you're standing on a bee hive? How's that for optimism?

The following chart shows retail employees as a fraction of all nonfarm employees.


Click to enlarge.

Although there has been recent illusionary relative strength brought on by misplaced faith in the Fed to heal all that ails us, I fully expect the downward trend in red to continue. Further, I do not expect the blue trend line to offer any meaningful support to halt the decline.

February 26, 2013
The Death of the American Mall and the Rebirth of Public Space


Our older less prosperous economy is divesting itself of older less prosperous malls? Shocking.



Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart #1
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart #2

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/22/us-usa-stocks-netflix-idUSBRE99L1MO20131022

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Commentary by James Shott

Most Americans think that helping truly needy people, whether they live here or in some other country, is a worthy objective. Looking at charitable contributions as a benchmark, Americans are the most generous people in the world, giving $316.23 billion to charitable organizations in 2012, about 2 percent of GDP, according to Charity Navigator, and preliminary figures for 2013 indicate a significant increase to $328 billion.

Double those numbers and it still would not be good enough for the federal government, which believes that if private sources don’t relieve every semblance of suffering for every single suffering American, the government must step in and do the job better.

Except that government can’t do it better, never has, and never will.

Government’s failure to achieve better results than normal people doing what normal people do has never been a deterrent to wasting billions of taxpayers dollars in a futile effort to try one more time to do so.

The most notorious failure was Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” which began 50 years ago in Mr. Johnson’s State of the Union message. From the beginning of the war on poverty until 2013, local, state, and federal spending on welfare programs totaled $16 trillion, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, the United States spends nearly $1 trillion every year to fight poverty.

When the War on Poverty began, 33 million Americans were in poverty and the poverty rate was 19 percent. Today, approximately 46.5 million live in poverty and the poverty rate is 15 percent. Even though the poverty rate is lower than 50 years ago, because our population is much larger now than then, more people are poor today than in 1964. We have fought a long and expensive fight, and lost. Yet we still fight on.

President Barack Obama’s cause du jour is income inequality, and it’s significant other, the minimum wage. And now that “reforming” the best healthcare system in the world is well underway, he wants to declare war against income inequality.

In no free or relatively free economic system can there be income equality, for two reasons. First, inequality is a fundamental part of life. Some people sing better than others. Some are better athletes than others. And some people make more money than others, and that’s because some people are better at their job than others and deserve higher pay, and some jobs require more skill and training than others, and pay better.

So, like poverty, another area that will always exist, we will always have income inequality.

Far more important, however, is whether there is the opportunity to move up from the lower income levels, and that is an area that has been fairly stable, according to The New York Times, which reported last month that “the odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years….”

That means that people in the lowest quintile are not condemned to stay there, and people in the top quintile are not guaranteed to stay there, and there is substantial movement in and out of all quintiles.

It’s a favored piece of envy politics that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But the data tell a different story. From 1967 to 2009, the real mean household income increased for every quintile, which means the poor became richer, not poorer. Americans in poverty could afford more goods and services in 2009 than in 1967, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Other factors, like where people live, have an effect. Harvard University’s Raj Chetty reported “the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4 percent in Charlotte but 12.9 percent in San Jose,” and factors such as better primary schools and greater family stability also aid upward mobility, he wrote.

Larry Kaufmann, senior advisor at Pacific Economics Group, discussed findings of the Pew Charitable Trust, which showed that “Half of children born to parents with bottom-third income levels experience upward relative mobility when the parents remain continuously married; the figure falls to 26 percent when this is not the case,” he wrote.

The Pew study shows that the poverty rate among married couples is only 6 percent, and among married couples who both have full-time jobs the poverty rate is practically zero. The poverty rate among single dads and single moms, however, is much higher: 25 percent for single dads and 31percent for single moms.

Investor’s Business Daily Senior Writer John Merline notes that income inequality has increased faster since Mr. Obama took office than under any of the three previous presidents, and that inequality is now greater than at any time since the Census Bureau started recording it back in 1947.

The message from this is that to assist folks in moving up the income ladder, Mr. Obama should replace his administration’s policies that impede economic recovery, and seriously encourage the restoration of family values among Americans. That would accomplish far more than making people think they are victims, and fomenting division among Americans.



Cross-posted from Observations