Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
Europe is the birthplace of Western civilization and the source of most of the trends and bodies of knowledge that define modernity. The average European speaks several languages versus sometimes less than one for Americans. They are, in short, a well-schooled people with vast accumulated wisdom.
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
In response to recent claims by the Obama administration and others that “millions of jobs” have recently been created, I examined the data here at mises.org to see if the claims were true. It turns out that job growth since the 2008 recession has actually been quite weak, and hardly something to boast about.
Nevertheless, our conclusions from these analyses tend to rest on the idea that job growth is synonymous with gains in wealth and economic prosperity.
We have been covering the consumption tax, pardon, endless spending black hole that is Obamacare for over a year, so we doubt it will come as a surprise to anyone that in 2015 healthcare was the second biggest use of US consumer funds, soaking up a record $1.9 trillion in real dollars, and more importantly for US economic "growth", the single biggest source of incremental spending by nearly a factor of two.
Last July, Cook County judge Rita Novak dealt Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel a bitter blow in his efforts to cut pension expenses.
“A Cook County judge will rule on the legality of a 2014 pension law aimed at reforming two of Chicago’s underfunded city retirement systems,” the Illinois Policy Institute wrote, in the lead up to the crucial ruling. “While the pension law included some much-needed reforms, such as an increase in the retirement age, if upheld the law ultimately would put Chicago residents on the hook for millions of dollars of tax increases.”