Author Archives: Larry Franz

Do You Want Fries With That?

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Most of the jobs lost during the Great Recession paid relatively decent wages. Most of the jobs added since then pay low wages.

From a report by the National Employment Law Project:

We find that three low-wage industries (food services, retail, and employment services) added 1.7 million jobs over the past two years, fully 43 percent of net employment growth. At the same time, better-paying industries (like construction; manufacturing; finance, insurance and real estate; and information) did not grow, or did not grow enough to make up for recession losses. Other better-paying industries (like professional and technical services) saw solid growth, but not in their mid-wage occupations. And steep cuts in state and local government have hit mid- and higher-wage occupations the hardest.

http://www.nelp.org/index.php/content/content_about_us/tracking_the_recovery

Same As It Ever Was

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Romney’s plan to fix the economy is the same plan offered by his predecessors (and his goal of 12 million new jobs is the number forecast by economists as normal job growth).

Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute:

The same exact playbook is there in 2006, as it was in 2004 and 2008, and as it is in 2012. Domestic oil production, school choice, trade agreements, cut spending and reduce taxes and regulations — it’s been the conservative answer to times of deep economic stress, times of economic recovery, times of economic worries, and times of economic panic. Which is another way of saying that the Republicans have no plan for how to actually deal with this specific crisis we face.

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/romney-will-solve-crisis-exact-same-gop-plan-2008-2006-2004

Paul Krugman (today’s best political columnist by far) concurs and offers a chart showing the pathetic history of job growth during the two terms of our last Republican president:

We should ask how the identical policies worked out in Bush’s two terms. And the answer is: zero job growth in term one (and a fall in private sector employment), one million in term two. Oh, and private sector employment lower when Bush left office than when he arrived.

083112krugman1-blog480

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/the-definition-of-insanity/

Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles

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That’s a headline you don’t see every day.

The Scientific American reports that a recent study indicates that eating probiotic yogurt (the kind with bacteria that assist with digestion) has beneficial effects in mice. They become leaner and healthier. Their fur is thicker and more shiny. The males have larger testicles and more success at reproduction. The females have larger litters and do a better job weaning their young.

An earlier study suggested that mice that eat probiotic yogurt handle stress better.

I’m not exactly a mouse, but I might add something to my diet.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=real-males-eat-yogurt

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2011/09/06/can-probiotic-yogurt-cure-your-psychiatric-ills/

Creepy

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Various news sources are reporting that someone was ejected from the Republican convention after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying “this is how we feed animals”. 

It’s not clear whether this occurred because of someone’s feelings toward blacks, women, CNN, or some combination thereof. This could have happened anywhere, of course, but what are the odds?

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/republican-officials-remove-2-attendees-for-deplorable-behavior-toward-cnn-staffer/

Why We Owe What We Owe

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Ezra Klein of the Washington Post discusses the national debt and why it’s wrong to blame Obama:

“If there’d been no Bush tax cuts, no wars, no financial crisis and everything else had been the same? Debt would be between 20 and 30 percent of GDP today, rather than almost 100 percent.”

Debt-graph-CBPP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/28/republican-national-convention-the-one-graph-you-need-to-see-before-watching/