If you’ve paid into Social Security, become injured or sick, and can no longer earn more than $1,130 a month, you can get a monthly subsidy from the Disability Insurance Trust Fund. As Bloomberg notes, in 1990 fewer than 2.5% of working-age Americans were "on the check;" by 2015 the number stood at 5.2%, with geographical "disability belts" appearing across America.
Something changed in 2000...
Republican control of all three branches of government in Washington DC has the nation's second largest labor union worried about what a Trump administration might mean for their already declining membership and corresponding union dues. In response, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which represents nearly 2 million government, health care, and building-services workers and wields an annual budget of $300 million, has taken steps to slash its budget by 30% in an effort to hoard cash "to fight-back against" Trump's "extremist-run government". Per an interna
Just over six years ago, in December of 2010, we wrote "Charting America's Transformation To A Part-Time Worker Society", in which we predicted - and showed - that in light of the underlying changes resulting from the second great depression, whose full impacts remain masked by trillions in monetary stimulus and soon, perhaps fiscal, America is shifting from a traditional work force, one where the majority of new employment is retained on a full-time basis, to a "gig" economy, where workers are severely disenfranchised, and enjoy far less employment leverage, job stability and perks than th
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
People were poor by today's standards, so why do people remember the plantation life fondly? The answer is simple: community, purpose, sacrifice and meaning.
Allow me to connect two apparently unconnected dots. Dot #1: The last sugar plantation in Hawaii is closing down, ending more than a century of plantation life in the 50th state.
As confidence and sentiment measures soar to record highs post-Trump, the real economy is just not living up to expectations. The Fed's own "National Activity Index" tumbled to -0.27 in November - the lowest in 3 months (and 4th consecutive economic contraction).
CFNAI dropped to -0.27 in November as two of the four broad categories of the 85 indicators in the index decreasing in November...