The US Economy Is Not Awesome And It’s Not Decoupled - by David Stockman

What had the headline software giddy, of course, was the year over year comps, which were in double digits. Yet did the talking heads bother to note the deep hook in last summer’s data?

No they didn’t. Otherwise they might have seen that the two-year stack in July came in at a hardly fulsome 3.7% annual rate and that nominal private housing spending is still 7% below December 2007 and 43% below the early 2006 peak.

More importantly, they might have noticed that this is no longer your grandfather’s housing market. The US housing stock got way over-built during the Greenspan bubble and the incoming generation of home-buyers has gotten buried in $1.2 trillion of student debt.

So notwithstanding the mini-boom in multi-family apartment construction, the $380 billion annual rate of spending in July amounted to only 2.1% of GDP. That’s the same rock bottom ratio registered in July 2013, and is clear evidence that the housing needle has not really moved at all.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/09/david-stockman/the-us-economy-is-not-awesome/

Stanley Fischer Speaks——-More Drivel From A Dangerous Academic Fool

In fact, the only impact that free money market funding has on corporate America is round-about and perverse. 

To wit, it flushes money managers into a desperate quest for yield and provides stock speculators with endless opportunities to load up their trucks with zero cost carry trades, thereby driving the stock averages to lunatic heights.

As a result of this double-whammy, the C-suites of corporate America have been turned into glorified gambling parlors. The stock option obsessed executives domiciled there are endlessly and overpoweringly presented with the opportunity to sell cheap corporate credit to yield-hungry fund managers and use the proceeds to buyback their own over-priced stock or to acquire at a hefty premium the equally over-priced stock of their competitors, suppliers and customers, or any other company that Wall Street bankers happen to be peddling.

Again, as I demonstrated last week, after 80-months of the absurd proposition that money has no natural and inherent economic cost the pettifoggers who held forth at Jackson Hole betrayed no clue whatsoever that they are aware of the obvious:

On the margin, all of the gains in business debt since 2008 has been flushed right back into Wall Street in the form of stock buybacks and debt-financed takeovers.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/09/david-stockman/lets-tar-and-feather-him/

How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off the Public - by VDH

If there were not a Donald Trump, he would likely have had to have been invented.

Why did the illegal-immigration issue launch Donald Trump’s campaign? Why did his recent tense press conference exchange with Univision’s Jorge Ramos please even some of Trump’s liberal critics? What is it about illegal immigration that has finally turned off so many Americans?

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/illegal-immigration-finally-turned-off-public/

The Death of Discussion

As a foreign born American citizen, I can vouch for the fact that Americans have lost the art and practice of argument. That happened a long time ago in our present era. The country  was founded on argument by men who were able and willing to express their thoughts. We now live in a country where political correctness rules, restricted to the limits of what can be said as provided by the media and other speech police, to which most Americans submit.

That is pure TYRANNY - and most of us aren't even aware of that fact. We think it's just about being nice. "Can't we just all get along?"

Argument is not yelling at one another. It is presenting coherent thoughts with logic and facts to support your case. Unfortunately, most people have not been trained to process anything more than a phrase or a sentence. They simply cannot process a complete thought. Truly sad, but we must re-train all of us to do so. We have a long way to go, but we must do do!

If the person you’re arguing with says, “Where’d you get that?” to every study or stat you pull up, you’re arguing with the wrong person. I used to email the guy I was arguing with all the pertinent links from our previous discussion, but he’d never bother to read them. For a while I’d just say, “Wanna bet?” and put $100 on my hate fact. Now I just leave. I feel the same way about playing pool. I don’t like playing with someone I distrust to the point where we both have to call our shots. If the ball went in by accident, you admit it and pass the turn. If you’re going to pretend you did it on purpose, you’re not the kind of person I want to play pool with.

That’s what a good argument is. It’s a recreational activity that exercises your mind.

You’re not there to win. In fact, losing makes you smarter College graduates have been trained to avoid confrontation so much, they’re actually coming out dumber than when they went in. We face the same fate as a nation if we don’t start moving past “No, it isn’t.” Let’s collect some statements together and begin defining propositions. It’s fun.

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Poll reveals huge majority support mandatory deporting of illegals

Question: Just exactly whom does our government represent?

The headline from Investor’s Business Daily on their own poll uses the word “shock” – “Shock Poll: 59% Back Trump On Deportation of Illegals.”  But as Jared Peterson wrote on these pages yesterday, for the last two years, Rasmussen polling has demonstrated a huge gap between the overwhelming majority of Americans and the political establishment of the GOP on immigration policy.  The IBD polling, which mentions mandatory deportation, reinforces this stunning disconnect between politicians and the people they supposedly serve, a chasm that Donald Trump has spotted and used to his huge advantage.  IBD editorializes:

The latest IBD/TIPP Poll asked 913 adults coast to coast if they "support or oppose mandatory deportation of illegal immigrants in the U.S." Not surprisingly, 87% of Trump supporters back the proposal.

What's surprising is that 59% of the overall public does as well. Mandatory deportation gets majority support in all age groups except 18-24, every income group, among both women and men, at every level of educational achievement, and in rural, urban and suburban regions.

More interesting still is the fact that 64% of independents and 55% of moderates support deportation.

Even among Hispanics, the poll found 40% backed mandatory deportation — although the sample size is too small to make much of that number.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/09/poll_reveals_huge_majority_support_mandatory_deporting_of_illegals.html#ixzz3kVuP99c0
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​The surging ranks of America's ultrapoor

(And, of course, this has nothing to do with illegals lowering American wages - nonononono!)

By one dismal measure, America is joining the likes of Third World countries.

The number of U.S. residents who are struggling to survive on just $2 a day has more than doubled since 1996, placing 1.5 million households and 3 million children in this desperate economic situation. That's according to "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America," a book from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that will be released on Sept. 1.

The measure of poverty isn't arbitrary -- it's the threshold the World Bank uses to measure global poverty in the developed world. While it may be the norm to see families in developing countries such as Bangladesh and Ethiopia struggle to survive on such meager income, the growing ranks of America's ultrapoor may be shocking, given that the U.S. is considered one of the most developed capitalist countries in the world.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-surging-ranks-of-americas-ultrapoor/

Why Home Schooling? - by Sir Walter Williams

I gave Walter Williams the title of Sir a long time ago and greatly respect his writings - and most of all his wisdom in what is now largely a corrupt academia. - CL

Home-schoolers have a defense against this sort of meddling. The Home School Legal Defense Association is a nonprofit organization established to defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children. The National Home Education Research Institute provides educational resources and research for home-schooling parents. Its founder, Dr. Brian D. Ray, recently published "African American Homeschool Parents' Motivations for Homeschooling and Their Black Children's Academic Achievement." His findings are proof that home schooling is effective for not only white youngsters but black youngsters, as well.

Why Home Schooling?

http://cnsnews.com/commentary/walter-e-williams/why-home-schooling