Money's Too Tight |

Mortgage Bankruptcy?

October 26, 2011

U.S.A. home values have dropped about 30% since 2005, and one in five American home owners owe more on their homes than they are worth. That makes them bad credit risks, unable to move somewhere else to get a job, and if they fall behind they can lose the house and their credit rating. Second [...]

5 Ideas

October 18, 2011

1. Break up the too-big-to-fail financial monopolies. 2. Tax 0.1 percent on all stock and bond trades, and 0.01 percent tax on derivative trades to pay for the bailout and reduce the federal deficit. 3. Don’t allow companies that received public bailouts to lobby the government. 4. Tax hedge fund income at the same rate [...]

Scary Book: Part 3

October 18, 2011

I worked for 30 years at the part of the phone company that went from the Bell System to Verizon, and in between was called NYNEX and Bell Atlantic. Here was the deal, as I remember it. The guys at the top made more money that those of us towards the bottom, but everybody had [...]

Scary Book: Part 2

October 13, 2011

Here is my summary of Chapter 8 of Retirement Heist: In 1979 Victor A. Rice takes over as chief executive of Masey Ferguson, an old but struggling Midwestern farm equipment manufacturer, and changes its name to Varity. At this time the pension is over funded and the retiree health care costs were low. But Rice [...]

Scary Book: Part 1

October 11, 2011

Worse than a Stephen King book. I just finished reading Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers, by Ellen E. Schultz, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. I found it so disturbing (maybe because I’m 65) that I had to frequently stop and put it down. The short version: [...]

Scary Pie Charts

October 6, 2011

Here’s a link to some scary pie charts (and one scary bar graph) about wealth concentration in the USA. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five-wealthiest-one-percent/ In brief: the top 1% of America 1) own 40% of the nation’s wealth, 2) take home 24% of the national income, 3) own half of the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, 4) have [...]

Lots of People

October 6, 2011

Yesterday I joined thousands in lower Manhattan as the unions came out in support of Occupy Wall Street. As we left to march from Foley Square, near the courthouses, down to Liberty Plaza people were still streaming in. Here’s a picture from where I was standing with other members of my union, the CWA (in red) [...]

Verizon contract: Wall Street

October 3, 2011

We took a banner and some flyers today from the union office (Communications Workers of America) to the Occupy Wall Street people just a few block away in lower Manhattan and got a surprisingly friendly reception, both from the occupiers, and from people passing by. Verizon and the unions in the Northeast are in the [...]

Social Security: Going Broke?

October 2, 2011

No. In fact the current Kiplinger Newsletter, (September 23, 2011) a management forecaster, says its good for 25 years, and will run a surplus until about 2022. So why all the chatter about needing an overhaul? The current issue of Commentary magazine suggests an answer. Right wingers haven’t liked Social Security since it began in 1935 [...]

Whose Balanced Budget?

September 29, 2011

Everybody’s been saying it. If the average American family has to balance their budget then the federal government should balance their budget. But do we? If you have a mortgage on your home, a car loan, student loans, or really any kind of loan you are in debt. You are borrowing money. You are driving [...]

Lower Taxes = Jobs?

September 27, 2011

An article over a year ago (May 3, 2010) in Fortune magazine that the 500 biggest companies are making record profits. A quote from the second paragraph: “Amazingly, as consumers struggle, U.S. corporations are staging a nearly unprecedented comeback that’s largely escaped notice. The gargantuan, dispiriting job cuts that seem to dominate the news have [...]

Innovation = Jobs?

September 26, 2011

Andy Grove, chairman of Intel from 1987 to 2005 had an interesting article in the July 5-11, 2010 issue of Bloomberg Business Week, arguing that scaling — or ramping up production, rather than innovation itself creates jobs, and that the USA is losing its ability to scale or manufacture. Here are some quotes. ” . . [...]

Class War?

September 25, 2011

Here is an ad placed by Verizon on Friday, August 19, 2011 during the two week strike called by the unions in the northeast to force Verizon into serious bargaining. The Daily News is the newspaper most commonly read by Verizon employees in New York City. I care about this ad because I worked for [...]