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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (51028)	1/23/2006 5:44:16 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

<<Watch a movie from the 1970s if you want an idea of how crappy the cars were that the Americans were making.>> Grace, now you're starting to lose credibility. Are hope you're not saying that US cars are better made today than in the 70's! Be very careful with your new Ford. Don't light a match near the bumper. It will melt along with the rest of the plastic body! LOL!

To: GraceZ who wrote (51028)	1/23/2006 6:07:52 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Watch a movie from the 1970s if you want an idea of how crappy the cars were that the Americans were making. My redneck friend says we are much poorer today than when he was a kid - could get a NEW 454 engine car that could out acccelerate a modern dodge viper for just a few hours work a week pumping gas at a gas station - cant do that today Grace. I never see young kids in dodge vipers - old Goldman sachs executives is all I see in them I watch the IRS income stats pretty closely as well as the Really? form of untaxed benefits but even if we simply look at wages you'll see that they've risen each and every single year in all five income quintiles as the inflation rate dropped steadily. My friend with that had that 454 - said he used to buy gas for 15 cents a gallon to fill it up - wages dont go as far as they used to eh? How does a gas station clerk of today afford a NEW dodge viper and the gas to race it every week? You said IRS right? look at this: nytimes.com Guilty Until Proven Innocent Published: January 20, 2006 The taxpayer advocate at the Internal Revenue Service told Congress last week that since 2001, the I.R.S. has labeled as fraudulent the tax returns of 1.6 million people and has frozen their refunds without notice, although most appear to have done nothing wrong. Overwhelmingly, the taxpayers are poor and are simply applying for a break created for them. Members of the staff of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the I.R.S., met in private yesterday with crime investigators from the agency. The committee's chairman then issued a letter to the Treasury secretary with the right goal: correcting the I.R.S.'s apparent failure to balance the rights of taxpayers against the need to fight fraud. But the issues raised by the frozen refunds don't end there. Congress should hold public hearings. The taxpayer advocate represents taxpayers whose problems are not satisfactorily resolved, then reports each year to Congress on the most serious problems encountered. According to the 2005 annual report, 28,000 taxpayers who asked the advocate for help last year turned out to have refunds that had been frozen by I.R.S. investigators because of a finding or suspicion of fraud, or a previous finding of fraud that resulted in an automatic freeze on subsequent refunds. The number of complaints was nearly double the number for the year before. The advocate, Nina Olson, had her office analyze a representative sample of 500 of the 28,000 frozen refunds. It turned out that 66 percent of the returns deserved the full refund, and 14 percent deserved a partial refund. The analysis also found that the median income of these taxpayers was $13,300 and the median refund was $3,519, which reflects a tax break aimed at the poor that's called the earned-income tax credit. These taxpayers typically waited eight and a half months for refunds that were, on average, about a quarter of their annual incomes. In a written response to Ms. Olson's findings, I.R.S. criminal investigators asserted that her sample had inflated the number of taxpayers wrongly accused of fraud. They based this assertion largely on the belief that innocent taxpayers "are much more likely" to pursue missing refunds than those who commit fraud. That misses the point. Many of the taxpayers involved - who may be poor, less educated and busy, and who may not speak English - are unlikely to confront the tax man, even if they have nothing to hide. The I.R.S. denied these people due process by determining fraud and freezing their refunds without telling them. The most stratospheric estimate for the questionable refunds sought by the poor is $9 billion a year, of which fraud is likely to be only a small part. And yet, as Ms. Olson pointed out, the I.R.S. devotes vastly more resources to refund fraud than to the millions of people who fail to file returns or who underreport their incomes, at a cost to the Treasury of an estimated $100 billion a year. Audits of high-income individuals have increased recently, but little headway has been seen against the illegal offshore sheltering of personal wealth that the I.R.S., in 2002, said costs the Treasury an estimated $20 billion to $40 billion a year. Tax policy during the Bush years has greatly favored rich taxpayers at the ultimate expense of the poor. Tax collection must not do the same.

To: GraceZ who wrote (51028)	1/23/2006 6:12:24 PM
From: anachronist	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

I watch the IRS income stats pretty closely as well as the surveys that the BLS does on income and spending and it conflicts with the notion that wages aren't keeping up with CPI inflation over the last ten years. I don't think so: "Between 1979 and 2004, the median weekly earnings of a man between 35 and 44 fell 7.8 percent after adjusting for inflation, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For men between 45 and 54, their median weekly earnings fell 2.3 percent. A big reason for that decline, Zandi said, is the decline in manufacturing jobs due to global competition. Women during the same 25-year period fared considerably better. The median weekly earnings of female workers between 35 and 44 rose 20 percent, while they rose 25 percent for those between 45 and 54." But that was because of increased job opportunities and decreased discrimination Also: "At the household level, there has been a 30 percent rise in median income since 1967, according to data from the Census Bureau. But in the past few years, median household income has remained flat, and real median earnings have actually fallen for both men and women." But that is because of two worker families, not because paychecks are getting bigger Lots more interesting information here: money.cnn.com

To: GraceZ who wrote (51028)	1/23/2006 6:24:16 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

There is a stiff deflationary wind coming out of the East. Please tell that to GST Mish

To: GraceZ who wrote (51028)	1/23/2006 6:25:28 PM
From: Mike Johnston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

I believe incomes are not keeping up below 100K. The gap between upper and the middle class is growing wider. Deflationary wind is blowing from Asia's factories. Inflationary winds are blowing from gas stations, college campuses, dental offices, town halls, utility companies. Even grocery stores, hotels, sandwich and donut shops have a nasty smell of inflation. Over the coming years we will get used to hearing following words over and over again (repeat after me): plunge, bankruptcy, collapse, decline, inflation, debt, termination, default, foreclosure, layoff, delinquency, write off, bailout, eviction, repossession, upside-down, recession, train wreck, systemic and derivative collapse, failure, barter, closure, restructuring, crash, debacle, deficit, deflation, migration.

To: GraceZ who wrote (51028)	1/23/2006 6:44:15 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 110194

I watch the IRS income stats pretty closely as well as the surveys that the BLS does on income and spending and it conflicts with the notion that wages aren't keeping up with CPI inflation over the last ten years. The numbers of bankruptcies and levels of debt suggest otherwise. I offer several explanation that are probably part of it 1) Averages lie. Monstorous pay rates at the top end balance out 10 times as many people at the bottom end suffereing. 1000 people on the bottom end each lose a very important $100 to the guy at the top making $100,000 more 2) Medical expenses and divorices 3) People simply refuse to save and furthermore buy way more of everything than they can afford from SUVs to houses. SUVs are particularly stupid as they will eventually be worth zero over time. 4) Food is plenty cheap, possibly close to all time lows if you cook it yourself but people eat out too much in addition to just plain eating too much. Furthermore they have no idea how to shop when high purchase items like meat are on sale. Does anyone have a frezer anymore like my parents did? 5) Leverage - people are way over leveraged 6) Grace, you are not the average person. Period. It is possible to hugely overpay for houses and most recent purchasers have. Equating the % you pay on houses when you are in a high income group with some semblance of value to the average person, to those below average and struggling is not a valid comparison. One has to look beyond the averages and see what is actually happening in practice. I see rising bankruptcies, rising foreclosures, huge loss of jobs to india and China replaced by jobs at Walmart with lower pay and fewer benefits, with those at the top end doing very nicely with stock options, brokerage fees, and bonuses. The only reason things are not worse is the "deflationary wind" you spoke of. That deflationary wind is going to become a hurricane when people lose their jobs and their equity in a housing bust. The cure is not higher wages and protectionism but lower wages and lower prices. I have no freaking idea what they are going to do to put a stop on rising medical expenses but it is starting to be an enormous problem. Mish