Posted by Tina
01-17-13 Our blog has been down for almost a week. Your comments have been posted at the edit page but they won’t post to the blog…nor will our articles. I don’t know if this message will post. i was working on it 6 days ago. Just wanted you all to know we’re okay and we hope to be up and running, possibly with a new format, very soon. thanks for your patience.
A number of stories in the news today are signaling a slowdown in the economy…possibly even another recession. So much for Obamas promised land assurances that spending money, bailing out unions, raising taxes and creating a big expensive bureaucracy or two will fix our economic problems.
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Charles Plosser said the central bank’s record stimulus risks a surge in inflation and may impair efforts by households to repair their finances.
“Attempts to increase economic ‘stimulus’ may not help speed up the process and may actually prolong it. … “Efforts to drive real rates more negative or promises to keep rates low for a long time may have frustrated households’ efforts to rebuild their balance sheets without stimulating aggregate demand or consumption,” said Plosser, who doesn’t vote on monetary policy this year. He has repeatedly criticized Fed easing for risking higher inflation and jeopardizing the central bank’s credibility, and said the latest stimulus steps do little to boost growth.”
Hmmm…stimulus does little to boost growth. Well that’s been my experience over the last four years, how about you? Our economy has bumped along the bottom. A few jobs have been created but jobs have been lost as well and, the number of new jobs created doesn’t keep up with the pace of Americans seeking to enter the workforce. It hasn’t been pretty. In other news…
Early during the fiscal cliff negotiations with Republicans last month, Obama had initially proposed extending the payroll tax cut, but he dropped that demand as the January deadline loomed. Many critics, including the Washington Post’s Suzy Khimm, warned that the fiscal cliff deal would result in the expiration of the payroll tax cut, and they were right.
And people noticed. The 2 percent increase in payroll tax is stinging middle-income workers. Someone making $50,000, for instance, will take home $76.92 less every month, or $1,000 per year. That’s a phone bill, a new pair of shoes or a night out. What’s more, because Social Security payroll taxes are split between employers and employees, business owners will pay more, too.
Meanwhile, workers of all stripes have been venting their frustrations on Twitter, with some who had supported the president saying they now feel duped by his oft-repeated campaign mantra of not raising taxes on the middle class.
Good grief! These are what we on the right call “low information voters”. Not only do they buy the garbage the left spews about conservative policy they also buy Obama’s lies about how his policies will work! Even their own experiences of friends or neighbors losing their jobs or going on food stamps doesn’t penetrate. Could it be that “poor education voters” is the bigger problem? There’s more:
The U.S. trade deficit expanded in November to its widest point in seven months, driven by a surge in imports that outpaced only modest growth in exports.
The Commerce Department report Friday suggests trade will drag on economic growth in the October-December quarter. A wider trade gap slows growth because it means Americans spent more on foreign products while U.S. businesses earned less in overseas sales.
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The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation.
Optimistic predictions by RAND in 2005 helped drive explosive growth in the electronic records industry and encouraged the federal government to give billions of dollars in financial incentives to hospitals and doctors that put the systems in place.
“We’ve not achieved the productivity and quality benefits that are unquestionably there for the taking,” said Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, one of the authors of a reassessment by RAND that was published in this month’s edition of Health Affairs, an academic journal.