LATEST TRANSPORTATION DATA REVEALS AN ECONOMY STILL STRUGGLING TO LEAVE BEHIND THE GREATEST DEPRESSION

Each month the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the Department of Transportation releases data collected about movement of people and goods conveyed by airplanes, trains, ships and pipelines. By putting that data into context, we can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the economy.



These charts reveal that perhaps we're in the early stages of lift off from the bottom.






It's getting worse for rail carriers.


And it's getting worse for sellers of scheduled passenger flights for domestic and international travel.


And it is clear that water haulers slipped between 2011 and 2014 after the 2009 lows.


When the poor aren't working, they can't travel hardly anywhere.

And when people are poorer, they don't fly and drive, they ride subsidized Amtrak.


As well, airline enterprisers have cut their flights, though this seems to be bettering.

And now let's look at the good. Natural gas consumption is up. Likely, this is a result of fracking for oil.

And intermodal traffic is way up.

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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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¡OH-LAY! ¡OLÉ! SPANISH POLITICIANS DECREE HEROIN AND HOOKERS LEGAL (AT LEAST ON PAPER)

According to Libertad, Spanish politicians will legalize prostitution and drug trafficking for the purposes of statistics in an effort to boost GDP on paper. In so doing, with a higher GDP, Spanish politicians can run bigger fiscal year deficits and still remain within 18-country Eurozone banking mandates as outlined in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) mandated by European Union politicians for the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).



Under the SGP, EMU member countries cannot have a fiscal year deficit greater than 3% of GDP nor can the cumulative political debt exceed 60% of GDP. Current Spanish GDP tallies to US$1.358 trillion (€1.062 trillion). Adding US$44.7 billion (€35 billion) worth of otherwise illegal drugs sales and illegal prostitute hook ups instantly will add 3.3% to Spanish GDP.

Adding heroin and hookers to GDP statistics would let Spanish politicians run a US$42.1 billion (€32.9 billion) fiscal year deficit and still abide by the SGP. The legally-sanctioned illegal prostitution and illegal drug industry would let Spanish politicians up their FY deficit spending by US$1.36 billion (€1.06 billion) and stay within the SGP of the EMU.

Overnight, prostitution and drugging would become an industry equal in size to electrical power generation as well as education. Each of the 19,773,438 Spanish males age 15 and over spent US$2,262.59 (€1,769.91) last year to party it up with street walkers and drugs.

Politicians always seize the opportunity to spend more of what they don't have in their never-ending quest to maintain their tenuous grip on power. As always, the greedy extend their grubby hands awaiting to get more of that borrowed spending.

Enjoy a groove tune by Lowell George and Little Feat.

There's whiskey, and bad cocaine. Poison get you just the same. 

And if that don't kill you soon. The women will down at the Spanish Moon. 

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PARTY OVER OOPS OUT OF TIME. YOU SHOULD HAVE PARTIED LIKE IT WAS 1999.

Everything most think they know about inflation is wrong, oh so wrong. Almost all suffer from a silly false belief that inflation means higher prices, rather than the reality that inflation leads to higher prices.

Writers from at least since 1810 through the early 1920s understood well what inflation means. However, today, few do. Most don't understand what is inflation because most don't understand banking and the financial system under which they live.

As I wrote in FALLACY FRAUGHT FORBES TRIES TO STOKE FEARS OF HYPERINFLATION, inflation is the growth of credit that outstrips the growth of output owing to credit being priced too cheap. 

The residential realty bubble of the 2000s renders a classic example of inflation. House prices soared because bankers created too much bank credit for everyone to buy houses.

And until the profit squeeze, which always happens during inflation leading to crisis, Americans could flip, re-fi, move up into ever bigger houses. Crisis came when incomes no longer could pay for taxes of all kinds (income, sales, property) as well as living expenses and mortgages.

Americans know that something is wrong at the bedrock of American life today. Americans whose adulthood journey began in the 1980s can tell you this is so.

If you were to work for the average hourly wage, how many minutes would you need to work to buy X where X is a gallon of gasoline, a gallon of milk, a kilowatt hour of electricity, a pound of burger meat and so on? Using the 1980 average wage worker and how many minutes, hours and days that worked needed to work to gain products, how do average wage workers of other years since compare to the 1980 average age worker? 

The tables of the embedded spreadsheet tell you these answers. This spreadsheet captures what Americans know about America.  

Have a listen as I explain how to understand the numbers and how to understand your reality, perhaps for the first time.

Who knew that with these jokers:

ll of us should  have partied back in 1999.


1999 from PRINCE on Myspace.

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