Thursday, September 3, 2015

"REAL" GDP IS FAKE, BOGUS, CRAP. AMERICANS AND SCHOOL CHILDREN HAVE BEEN HOODWINKED FOR DECADES.

The formula for "real" GDP taught in schools:

nominal GDP ÷ base year GDP × 100

This yields "real" GDP in what was called "constant dollars." Supposedly, this "real" GDP is a measure goods and services of the current year deflated to the prices of a base year GDP. Base year GDP is merely the nominal GDP of the year chosen to be the base.

You can watch Sal from the Khan Academy teach the difference between nominal and "real" GDP on YouTube and then you can watch Sal teach the Constant Dollar method to calculate supposedly "real" GDP also on YouTube.

Under logical scrutiny, the concept gets exposed as mere hokum, bunko. Think about it. The base year GDP is inflated by whatever the inflation was for that year.

Before 1996, the BEA used the school method. From 1996, the U.S. Department of Commerce has used the chained-dollar method (see: BEA's Chain Indexes, Time Series, and Measures of Long-Term Economic Growth).

The BEA method for real GDP, though complicated, is hardly much different that school-method GDP. The new method uses the average of two successive periods of GDP. So year two of a chained-dollar average becomes the year one of the next chained-dollar average. The minions at the BEA believe this removes distortion that any year might cause owing to changes in composition of goods and services.

The math looks something like this:

"real" GDP = nominal GDP ÷ implicit price deflator

where the implicit price deflator = (current-dollar ÷ chained-dollar) × 100

and a chained-dollar = base period current-dollar measure × (chained-type quantity index number current period - chained-type quantity index number base period)


Anyway, chained-dollar "real" GDP is still as bogus as the chain consists of an averaged succession of already inflated GDP as the basis to deflate current dollar GDP.



Could you measure a length of a distance with a ruler that changes in size the farther you go? That is what academicians and the minions at the BEA claim you can do with their bogus method.

And today, that academician economists can't see this plain truth reveals how stupid they are, how weak their intellects are, how indoctrinated they are. Worse are the millions of idiot-like parroters who parrot the false belief of "real" GDP when they report on it.

Men were much smarter about money and banking from the years of the late 1870s through the 1920s. One such man was Edwin Walter Kemmerer who was known as "the money doctor." This is what Kemmerer had to say about inflation:

 


Kemmerer goes on to say:



Anyway, there is a method to deflate away inflation, which uses a metaphorical measuring stick kept at a constant length. That method is my method — the True Dollars™ method. It is the only real, true, legitimate method.

Both the constant-dollar method or the chained-dollar method rely on prices. Prices are an effect and not a cause. It's impossible for an effect to be its own cause.

It's impossible to deflate prices with past inflated prices.


Economists are idiots to believe otherwise. And guess what? They believe otherwise.



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Friday, July 24, 2015

ARE AMAZON AND WAL-MART LOCAL ECONOMY-WRECKING EVILS?



Comments left upon web pages can reveal how what many believe. Today, for a story about Amazon's recent stock run up, which has given Amazon a market valuation higher than Walmat I came across these gems:
"Cheap people support Walmart to knock out small businesses. Cheap and lazy people support Amazon to knock out Walmart and their peers. People who would have worked for small business owners would have been small businesses owners themselves have become Walmart employees. Now Amazon is taking over with their robots. Some people are going away indefinitely."

And this one:

"Everyone talks about supporting their local economy claiming everyone should be willing to pay more to support local economy. Always they say they hate cheap, job-killing imports, but then they buy from Amazon.
"I patronize Amazon because I can get things there that I cannot find sold in my local stores. I agree however, that Walmart and Amazon are part of the trend to destroy local economies. In the old days, you would go to a half dozen local businesses to buy supplies, which today, you can buy at Staples. Profits stayed local, in local banks. Today, profits go straight to the big Wall Street banks which are not interested in the small piddling deals offered by local economies."

Alas, these comments reflect a slew of false beliefs. First, in the days of money — coined metal by weight and fineness — during the growing seasons of farming, money was shipped to the money centers, deposited with money center bankers, who then lent against those reserves to speculators of all kinds.

Local economies would grind to standstills during those times. When harvest time came, money would be recalled from money center banks. Only then would the local economy see activity.

In the days of horse-and-buggy, the blacksmith, the wainwright, farrier, saddler, wheelwright, each held monopoly in their respective towns.

As everyone else had little capital, there were few wages to be had. Most children were stuck on farms, wage-less. Plowmen had to bargain with these skilled monopolists who held bargaining power.

With the advent of the automobile and factory production methods, first tools and then machinery — both are capital — replaced handmaking. Because of profits on that capital, wages could be paid.

Boys and girls grew up and left farms for wages. Their living standards grew with gaining wages. Wherever capital sprung up, people's lives improved.

But wherever capital sprung up, the local economy monopolists — the blacksmith, the wainwright, farrier, saddler, wheelwright — lost hold of their bargaining power as their methods were replaced by machinery and partitioned methods.

Amazon and Wal-mart free up resources in local economies so that specialization can arise. Those who lose to Amazon and Wal-mart must find new ways to earn their living.

Everyone else who earns their living by another way get richer by spending less for the same products. Amazon and Wal-mart increase the profit for everyone else.

With more profit from the same effort, the beneficiaries of Amazon and Wal-mart now can spend their new found profit on same earnings in other ways, locally on new the products of new ventures, locally investing in those new ventures, or elsewhere.

It's odd how these Luddites fail to lament the rise of mechanized farm equipment, which led to the displacement of millions of Americans from working as farmers. Would they rather have Americans walking behind horse and plow, living at bare subsistence with meager earnings.

If Americans still lived that way, we wouldn't have the Internet, television, wireless smart phones and millions of other products. Living would resemble American life in the 1700s.


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Friday, May 1, 2015

STOP RAPING ENGLISH, PLEASE, SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR-ETTES.

Years of Oprah-zation has caused everyone to lose meaning of every word of English.

Here is a video of a girl claiming that everything which offends her constitutes her being raped.




While rape is a serious crime, perhaps one worthy of a lifetime in prison if convicted of such crime, the hyperbole over rape stirred up by pseudo-scientific academicians of women's studies programs in American universities and spread wider by social justice warrior-ettes  has so eroded the meaning of rape.

Meanwhile, back on March 7, 2013, workers at the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Department of Justice revealed reality. Rape rarely happens to Americans.

From 1995 to 2005, sexual violence against U.S. female residents age 12 or older declined 64 percent from 5.0 per 1,000 females to 1.8, and remained unchanged through 2010 (Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010). In 2010, American females age 12 or older experienced 270,000 incidence of sexual violence.

Sexual violence includes both rape —  forced sexual intercourse with penetration — attempted rape, and sexual assaults — fondling.  Attempted rape includes when someone merely shouts out "I'm going to rape you." Sexual assaults includes when someone merely shouts out "I going to grab your hot arse."

To put it into perspective, in 2010, if no American female reported more than one incident, two one-thousandths of one percent (0.00170624878) of the American female population would have experienced sexual violence, which includes verbal expression without any physical contact.
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Friday, October 3, 2014

YET ANOTHER EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES JOBS REPORT DURING THE GREATEST DEPRESSION OF ALL-TIME

Jared Bernstein, former Obama greenshooter Ph.D economist called it a "solid jobs report."

On November 1, 2007, near peak credit, Total Non-farm Payroll, which consists of about 80% of workers who contribute to GDP, tallied to 139,443,000 hired and working. The number of Americans hired and working plunged by almost 11 million to 128,692,000 by January 1, 2011. As of September 1, 2014, Total Nonfarm Payroll stood at 139,752,000




It has taken almost seven years, a whopping 80 months to gain a paltry 309,000 jobs.  

Total population has grown 12.89 million since January 2008. According to Wikipedia, 60% of Americans fall within the ages of 20 to 64. So, there are 7.73 million more working age Americans today than at peak credit and peak employment.

For every new job created for the economy, there are 24 new working-age Americans lacking jobs. Said another way, for every 25 new working-age Americans, only one gets lucky enough to land a job.

From the Obama Low to September 1, the jobs count has grown 8.59%, growing at a yearly rate of 2.22%. Yet, this rate is slower than the job loss rate from the Bush jobs peak of November 2007 to the Obama jobs low.

From the Bush jobs peak near the peak of the greatest credit bubble in world history to the Obama low of January 2011, jobs fell -7.71% falling at a rate of -2.44% a year.

Total job growth rings in at a bit more than two-tenths of one percent (0.22%) from November 1, 2007, to September 1, 2014. The yearly growth rate is a barely perceptible three-one hundredths of one percent (0.03%).

To give you more perspective, under the policies of Congress and Obama as well, rounded up, 3,862 jobs a month have been added since he Bush jobs peak of November 2007.

Who could claim this as a good jobs report but the dishonest or stupid?

Also, if you hear Obama or anyone else say there has been bla-bla months of uninterrupted job growth, either Obama or anyone else is lying. There have been seven months since the Obama jobs low, where Total Non-farm Payroll fell from the month before.
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Saturday, September 20, 2014

NAT GEO PUBLISHERS SAY YOU SHOULD FEEL GUILTY FOR BEING ALIVE MORE OR LESS

So today, I read a story by Dennis Dimick of National Geographic in which Dimick uses rhetorical deception to lull readers into accepting hints at eugenics and behavioral control.



So what does Dennis Dimick do? Repeatedly, Dimick uses the pronouns "us" and "we."

Someone should have told Dimick, there is no "us." There is no "we." There are only individuals.

First, Dimick tries to pluck the heart strings of his readers by opening with an unsubstantiated, but seeming fact of "There are more than 7 billion people on Earth now, and roughly one in eight of us doesn't have enough to eat."

After hitting his readers with unsubstantiated, wild guesses about the future head count (11 billion vs nine billion in the year 2100), cloaked in the garb of mathematical authority, Dimick lures in readers by suggesting that "we" need to have a talk about how we relate "climate change, energy, food supply, and freshwater" with population. Here, Dimick lays foundation for a call to behavioral control and eugenics.

Dimick follows up quickly with "..how many of us there are, how many children we have, how long we live, and where and how we live..." Instead, Dimick should have written: How many individuals there are, how many children individuals will have, how long individuals will live, and where and how individuals live.

Dimick continues his witchery by suggesting to his readers that his readers have been breeding like rabbits when he writes, "We've been on a big growth spurt during the past century or so... Now, there are about 7.2 billion of us...In recent years we've been adding about a billion people every 12 or 13 years or so." If this were so, Dimick is suggesting to his readers that another seven billion individuals shall be upon the earth by 2100, pushing total population to 14.2 billion, or 3.2 to 5 billion beyond his reported mathematical authority earlier in his story.

Of course, Dimick fails to mention Africans. Sub-saharan Africans are those contributing most to population growth with the fastest growing population. Demographers estimate the one billion one hundred and eleven million sub-saharan Africans who now live shall grow to 3.5 to 5 billion by 2100. Nigerians alone are expected to increase from 200 million today to 900 million by 2100 according to a story published by the Guardian on 18 September 2014. In short, Sub-saharan Africans should constitute almost all population growth through 2100.

One would believe that a magazine publisher with a long history of geographic reporting would have revealed how population growth has been proceeding in relation to geography. For details on African demographics, check out what World Population Review published.




And soon thereafter, Dimick commits another appeal to authority fallacy by citing the long discredited Thomas Malthus and an essay Malthus published in 1798 in which Malthus, failing to see productivity gains from technological advances, wrongly claimed that food production could only increase linearly while population would increase geometrically. Malthus could not envision giant combines that produce the work of thousands of men in only a few hours. Malthus could not foresee fertilizers, weed killers and computer-controlled irrigation.

Worse, Dimick mentions Paul Ehrlich, the foolish academician who lost a bet with Julian Simon over resource scarcity. Idiotically, Ehrlich believed prices would increase for copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten under his false belief that such materials would become increasingly scarce. Simon bet that prices would fall rightly believing that mankind would become more efficient in extraction methods and utilization methods.

After side-tracking readers with more academic foolery, Dimick gets to eugenics with  a suggestive call for reducing fertility — the number of children any woman bears in her lifetime — for each woman on the planet.

Then Dimick shames his readers in attempt to elicit guilt feelings by calling his readers "an elite crowd of Earthlings" who should feel guilty for having "reliable electricity, access to Internet-connected computers and phones" as well as leisure time to read Nat Geo since "one-fifth of those on Earth still don't have have access to reliable electricity" and "reliable lighting and cooking facilities ... remain beyond the reach of about 1.3 billion."

Dimick's glaring misuse of pronouns is his attempt to trick readers into feeling guilt about how they live, to agitate for population control eugenics and to agitate for behavioral control all in the name of the false Gaia goddess, Mother Earth.

Dimick fails to congratulate his readers for achieving their material progress through their willingness to adhere to law, commerce and property in spite of incessant attacks upon his readers from politicians. Dimick fails to give thanks for the ancestors of Americans — Anglo-Saxon-Normans — who set the bedrock upon which Americans through time have made their achievements, escaping poverty, in spite of their sabotaging politicians.

To be sure, mankind never has suffered a shortage of meddling intellectuals, those toadying lackeys always in awe of authentic, manly men who can gain the reins of power, intellectuals with their Church of Academia en vogue theories, which almost always get proven wrong in time. When not given a public forum to spew their foolery, these intellectuals always seem willing to work as bureaucrats and technocrats in petty attempts at tasting the crumbs of power by wielding the scepter of government regulation.

Perhaps Dimick needs Captain Kirk. In the episode from the original TV series Star Trek, "The Mark of Gideon," a race of overpopulated aliens immune to sterilization and pregnancy control abduct Captain Kirk hoping a virus Kirk carries in his body, Vegan choriomeningitis, will infect the aliens causing deaths.


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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

SPREADING WEALTH, INCOME INEQUALITY AND OTHER MANURE



1. It’s impossible to “spread wealth.”
Wealth is an instantaneous quality of something that arises during exchange and disappears as soon as exchange happens. Let’s say a retailer has a bicycle for sale and you have cash. When you sell your cash and buy the bicycle while simultaneously the retailer sells the bicycle and buys your cash, the bicycle becomes wealth.
As soon as you gain property (right of ownership) in the bicycle, the bicycle no longer is wealth. At most, the bicycle represents potential wealth.
Let’s say years pass. You have tired of riding your bicycle so you decide to sell it. Months pass, yet no one comes to buy your bicycle. Thus, your bicycle is not wealth. It lacks buying power. It’s worthless.
2. The phrase “income inequality” is a phrase of rhetoric. It labels a false concept that does not exist. Those who speak of it make appeals to others through jealousy.
Income means wages through time. Someone buys wages by selling skills through time. Any wage is a price. All prices arise from the great, infrangible, Law of Prices. The Law of Prices holds the winning bids of purchase and sale in the face of what is on offer set the price.
3. The claim that “[c]apital gains taxes and marginal rates are unfairly low” is bogus, mental fiction. Income taxation of any kind is immoral and amounts to a quasi-slavery. All anyone has is a limited slice of existence during infinite time. To tax one’s income is to tax one’s expressed skills through time.
As a labor (work), that is skills expressed through time is the poor man’s capital. Taking income (labor) amounts to taking a share of profits from that man’s own capital without having invested in that capital first.
Likewise, when politicians lay claim to tax capital gains, politicians are taking a share of profits without having invested in that capital first.
Without profit, there can not be any taxation.
Since labor is a kind of capital and thus since selling labor is a kind of capital gains, any taxation on either labor as capital or capital gains ought to be taxed at the same rate, however immoral doing so is. Income taxation is little more than political wage garnishment.
Since labor is a kind of capital, workers ought to have deduction and depreciation write offs for their expenses such as food expenses, transportation expenses, skills acquisition expenses and so on.
4. The real problem is not bogus “income inequality” it is politics, specifically CRONY POLITICS. Through crony politics, established players have created oligopoly markets, thus inhibiting competitors from entering markets, introducing innovation leading to superior efficiency, and thus more output, leading to lower prices owing to the Law of Prices.
All of the foregoing would render obsolete existing capital structures of extant players. Yet, through politics, large, established firms can protect themselves from their capital structures becoming obsolete.
The other aspect of crony politics sees established players using politics to have economic quantities of purchasing transferred to some and thus conferring upon them buying power. In so doing, added buying power pushes up prices in the face of extant output arising from extant capital. Again, of this arises from the inescapable and only law of economics, the Law of Prices.
Welfare programs like SNAP keep up food prices that would otherwise would fall in the absence of buying power as ever fewer poor could buy food. With less buying power, bidding on food would fall and thus prices would fall.
Food prices owing to SNAP, medical prices owing to Medicare and Medicaid, rent prices owing to Section 8, higher education prices owing to PELL — all of these are higher than otherwise would be if such welfare programs didn’t exist. Welfare keeps the poor poorer and keeps ever more poor.
Yet another way that Crony Politics infects all is through subsidy of inefficient capital. When producers seek and gain subsidy to stay in production, in so doing, all become worse off and products get made that otherwise could not get made, pulling away resources from other production, thus forcing up costs in other areas and even prohibiting the production of otherwise new products.
So the true problems are Crony Politics, Crony Governance and Crony Regulatory Capture. The problem rests in politics and governance rather than people in pursuit providing wanted products efficiently.
When exchange is not hampered by artificial restriction of supply, nor inflated by artificial giving of buying power, the righteousness of a free market prevails. Only through markets free from Crony Politics, Crony Governance and Crony Regulatory Capture can all benefit owing to efficiency.
5. We’re living in the 21st century. The goal should be to have the least governance as likely rather than the relentless pursuit of the most governance as tolerable. Government is mafia with better public relations.
For all to live better, all need enforced competition (freed markets) rather than regulated competition (political cronyism). All need regulated politicians (limited government). All need self-rule (freedom) and all need entrepreneurialism (capitalism).


6. Economics and Politics. If only many knew how these worked. No longer would many suffer from silly, indoctrinated false beliefs such as “income inequality.” Their eyes would become fully opened. Only then would they lay blame where it belongs. Only then could they rise up in action to stop the madness and evil that punishes many at the hands of the few tyrants abounding — politicians, politically-connected producers, welfare recipients.



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