Labor

With the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare replacement now officially dead, it appears Senate Republicans will be unable to pass a repeal-and-replace bill before the Sept. 30 deadline announced by the Senate Parliamentarian arrives – though it’s impossible to rule out another long-shot plan gaining momentum in the coming days.

After the deadline, Senate Republicans would need 60 votes for their repeal-and-replace bill, effectively killing the repeal-and-replace effort, at least for now.

We've frequently argued that public pensions in the U.S. are nothing more than elaborate ponzi schemes being propped up by unrealistic accounting assumptions that make them seem more healthy than they actually are.  As it turns out, the State Budget Director of Kentucky, John Chilton, is coming around to our way of thinking. 

We've recently found ourselves frequently noting a rather bizarre new trend in which the mainstream media and liberal Washington D.C. establishment has turned its back on the Silicon Valley elites.  Just last week, even Hillary Clinton called out Facebook for allowing someone who may have been Russian buy a staggering $50,000 worth of political ads on their site...hopefully we don't have to explain the irony of that statement given that Facebook execs gave millions to Hillary's campaign.

By John Mauldin from Mauldin economics

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

Breath-taking differences in a vast country.

The Census Bureau released another data trove this week for 2016, based on the American Community Survey. Among many other data points, the survey details median household incomes by geographic location, such as by metro area, county, or state. And they show just how enormous the income differences in the US are from city to city.