The Democrat Thread

[southsider2k5]

What exactly did you find interesting about it?

 

I feel 2K is way over the top conservative, and believes there is more risk in the S&P 500 Index than I believe there is, to the point he calls it gambling. I think the beauty of the S&P is that it never under performs the market, and is diversified in and of itself, as it represents only the top 500 stocks. I don't disagree that you should begin moving money out of it (and other stocks) as you near retirement, into cash or ultra safe investments, but the idea that you should be doing it for every year you are closer to retirement is absurd to me, and merely moves money into dead investments way too prematurely, that could have otherwise been compounding over the years.

 

If you plan on retiring at 65, when you hit 50-55, you can start moving money into conservative investments IF you are selling at near highs. If not, you have 10-15 years to wait for the S&P to rebound to begin the selling spree, and when the market rebounds, the S&P will NEVER miss the rebound. Since it's inception, the S&P 500 has NEVER taken longer than 10 years to rebound back to it's previous highs. Not once. Is there always a first time? I don't think there is for this, since it automatically re-balances itself into the top 500 stocks over and over again, so it will always ride the top of the market. And if the doomsday scenario does strike, and the market crashes and stays crashed, frankly, it doesn't matter what you were invested in, be it bonds, or straight cash at that point, it's over.

 

I think you missed the point. the SP shouldn't be your only investment. I love it as your stock investment. Your retirement should be well rounded and fairly conservative. Keep in mind that things like "one in a hundred year happens" are things that will probably happen once in your lifetime.

[Y2HH]

I think you missed the point. the SP shouldn't be your only investment. I love it as your stock investment. Your retirement should be well rounded and fairly conservative. Keep in mind that things like "one in a hundred year happens" are things that will probably happen once in your lifetime.

 

I misconstrued that somewhat, but still disagree for the most part. I'm not a fan of the bond market, never have been, though for FULL disclosure, I do put 5% of my 401k allocation into bonds.

 

I think the S&P500, in and of itself, is diversified enough that it doesn't matter to diversify more. I'm of the belief that if the stock market crashes and burns, bonds won't matter, either. There is no safe haven from that scenario. The S&P is THE representation of the US Economy as a whole (it's the ultimate US bellweather indicator), and if it falls to almost nothing...so did the entire US economy along with it, and in that scenario, bonds are just as worthless.

 

My current 401k allocation (@37 years of age):

70% S&P 500 Index (0.10% cost basis)

25% International Fund (0.64% cost basis), this cost basis bothers me, but it's the only international stock fund available in my 401k plan, and I don't want to ignore emerging markets

5% Core Bond Index (0.27% cost basis)

 

When I hit 50-55, those will begin changing, but I see no reason to do so in the near term.

 

I then have a self directed IRA that has rollover money from past jobs, in which I invest in individual stocks, stocks like Pfizer, Coke-a-cola, Microsoft, Merck, Verizon, etc. You can safely say I'm "all in" on the stock market, because as stated above, I truly believe if it falls, everything is going to fall along with it.

[StrangeSox]

Here's a much more detailed policy paper on expanding Social Security

 

http://growth.newamerica.net/publications/...social_security

[StrangeSox]

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett explains unemployment: they're all just a bunch of druggies!

 

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/3...eople-on-drugs/

[StrangeSox]

this is sad

 

In El Salvador, a young mother pseudonymously called Beatriz is pregnant and dying. She has lupus and is facing renal failure; the fetus she’s pregnant with is anencephalic, meaning it has no brain and will not survive once born. If she dies, she will leave behind a husband and their toddler. With each passing day, she gets sicker and sicker, and the chances of death increase. She needed a termination weeks ago; more delays could pose significant hardships, as the probability increases that she will have to be on dialysis for the rest of her life — not a reasonable possibility for a poor woman living in rural El Salvador. But because El Salvador outlaws abortion under any circumstance, Beatriz cannot terminate the pregnancy that’s killing her

 

The Archbishop of San Salvador José Luis Escobar, said, “it is my understanding that the mother of the child is not in an intensive care situation… For me, it is the baby in utero that is in more danger because there is a movement to terminate its life. Only God knows how long this baby that they want to kill will live.”

[StrangeSox]

first arrest for Utah's "ag-gag" bill that makes it illegal to secretly film agricultural operations. These sorts of films are how many animal abuses and other violations in the ag industry get brought to light, so of course they're now illegal.

 

http://truth-out.org/news/item/16082-first...e-public-street

[StrangeSox]

Senator Louie Gohmert;

 

Think about it, when your attorney general spent more of his legal career helping terrorists than defending the country, then you know we all have certain biases and lean certain ways.

 

 

also the government is full of Muslim Brotherhood operatives.

 

http://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-rep-goh...ombing-suspect/

[StrangeSox]

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

He was tortured, beaten, and humiliated, and he remains in prison. Here is his story, in his own words.

 

The Marine guy asked questions and answered himself. When the man failed to impress me with all the talk and humiliation and the threat to arrest my family (since the [ ? ? ? ?] “was an obedient servant of the U.S.”), he started to hurt me more. He brought ice-cold water and soaked me all over my body. My clothes stuck on me. It was so awful, I kept shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. Technically I wasn’t able to talk anymore. The guy was stupid, he was literally executing me but in a slow way. [ ? ? ? ?] gestured to him to stop pouring water on me. I refused to eat anything; I couldn’t open my mouth anyway.

 

The guy was very hot, when [ ? ? ? ? ?] stopped him because he was afraid of the paperwork which would [result] in case of my death. He found another technique; namely, he brought a CD-player with booster and started to play some rap music. I didn’t really mind the music because it made me forget my pain; actually, the music was a blessing in disguise, I was trying to make sense of the words. All I understood was that the music was about love, can you believe it? Love! All I had experienced lately was hatred or the consequences thereof. “Listen to that, motherf***er!” said the guest, while closing the door violently behind him. “You’re gonna get the same s*** day after day, and guess what? It’s getting worse. What you’re seeing is only the beginning,” said [ ? ? ? ? ?]. I kept praying and ignoring what they were doing.

 

“Oh, ALLAH, help me. … Oh, Allah, have mercy on me,” [ ? ? ? ? ?] kept mimicking my prayers, “ALLAH … ALLAH … There is no Allah. He let you down!” I smiled at how ignorant [ ? ? ? ? ?] was by talking about the Lord like that.

 

Between 10 and 11 p.m. [ ? ? ? ? ?] handed me over to [ ? ? ? ? ?] and gave an order to the guards to move me to his specially prepared room. It was so cold and full of pictures showing the glories of the U.S.: weapons arsenal, planes, pictures of G. Bush. “Don’t pray, you insult my country if you pray during my national hymn. We are the greatest country in the free world, and we have the smartest president of the world,” said [ ? ? ? ? ?]. For the whole night I had to listen to the U.S. hymn. I hate hymns anyway. All I can remember was the beginning, “Oh say can you see …” over and over.

 

Between 4 and 5 a.m. [ ? ? ? ? ?] released me just to be taken a couple of hours later by [ ? ? ? ? ?] to start the same routine over and over. The hardest step is the first, the hardest days were the first days; with every day going by I grew stronger. Meanwhile, I was the main subject of talk in the camp, although many other detainees were suffering a similar fate; I was “Criminal No. 1,” and I was appropriately treated. Sometimes, when I was in the rec yard, detainees shouted, “Be patient. Remember Allah tries the people he loves the most.” Comments like that were my only solace beside my faith in the Lord.

 

[Then] [ ? ? ? ? ?] crawled from behind the scene and appeared in the picture: [ ? ? ? ? ?] had told me a couple of times before [ ? ? ? ? ?] visit about a very high level government person who was going to visit me and talk to me about my family. I personally didn’t take the information negatively; I thought he was going to bring me some messages from my family, but I was wrong. It was about hurting my family. [ ? ? ? ? ?] was escalating the situation relentlessly with me.

 

[ ? ? ? ? ?] came around 11 a.m., escorted by [ ? ? ? ? ?] and the new [ ? ? ? ? ?]. He was brief and direct.

 

“My name is [ ? ? ? ? ?]. I work for [ ? ? ? ? ?]. My government is desperate to get information out of you. Do you understand?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Can you read English?”

 

“Yes.”

 

[ ? ? ? ? ?] handed me a letter he obviously forged. The letter was from DoD and it said, basically, “Ould Slahi was involved in the Millennium attack and recruited three of the September 11 hijackers. Since Slahi has refused to cooperate, the U.S. government is going to arrest his mother and put her in a special facility.”

 

I read the letter. “Is that not harsh and unfair?” I said.

 

“I am not here to maintain justice. I am here to stop people from crashing planes into buildings in my country.”

 

“Then go and stop them. I have done nothing to your country,” I said.

 

“You have two options, either being a defendant or a witness.”

 

“I want neither.”

 

“You have no choice, and your life is going to change decidedly,” he said.

 

“Just do it, the sooner, the better!” I said.

(more at the link)

 

Disgusting. He has never received a trial, of course.

Edited May 1, 2013 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

It's a 401(k) World and It Basically Sucks

 

I like the metaphor in Tom Friedman's latest column, arguing that we now live in a 401(k) world. But I wish he'd spelled it out in greater detail, because the problem with living in a 401(k) world is that Planet 401(k) is a pretty sucky planet. Here's the essential shape of 401(k) as a backbone of the retirement system:

 

— Poor people get absolutely nothing.

— Wealthy people who would have had large savings anyway get a nice tax cut that offers no meaningful incentive effect.

— For people in the middle, the quantity of subsidy you receive is linked to the marginal tax rate you pay—in other words it's inverse to need.

— A small minority of middle class people manage to file the paperwork to save an adequate amount and then select a prudent low-fee broadly diversified fund as their savings vehicle.

— Most middle class savers end up either undersaving, overtrading, investing in excessively high-fee vehicles or some combination of the three.

— A small number of highly compensated folks now have lucrative careers offering bad investment products to a middle class mass market based on their ability to swindle people.

 

Congratulations, America! Across a very wide range of products there's a strong case for a large dose of consumer sovereignty. People should buy the shoes and sandwiches and shirts they want. They should watch the shows they want to watch. Get the furniture and appliances they like, and pick their own hairstylists and their own favorite grocery stores. Tastes differ, so even though competition and choice will rarely lead to a perfect outcome it's going to lead to a much better outcome than trying to have a Shoe Commission tell everyone how many shoes they need and what they should cost and look like.

 

Middle class retirement savings isn't like that. We know roughly how much people need to put away in order to retire with a standard of living they'll be comfortable with. And we definitely know what kind of investment vehicles are most appropriate for middle class savers. And we have abundant evidence that left to their own devices a very large share of middle class savers will make the wrong choices. What's more, because of the nature of the right choices it's obvious that far and away the dominant business strategy for vendors of middle class investment products is to dedicate your time and energy to developing and marketing inferior products since the essence of superior products in this field is that they're less remunerative.

 

In other words: A disaster. What's needed is a much more forceful, much more statist approach to forced savings whether that's quasi-savings in the form of higher taxes and more Social Security benefits or something like a Singapore-style system where "private" savings are pooled into a state-run investment fund.

 

Now since we are in fact living in a 401(k) world, here's some advice. You've got to save a lot of money for retirement. More than you think. More than you want to. And you need to put that money in a broadly diversified low-fee fund. And you have to keep it there. Don't panic when the market plunged and sell. In fact, unless you're planning on retiring in the next decade don't even check how it's doing. Just buy and hold and shift into something less volatile when you're near retirement. Vanguard has these good Target 20XX funds that automatically shift you into less volatile products as you get closer to your target retirement date, allowing you to do even more ignoring of the state of your investments. Which is good. The only way for anyone to make any money managing your savings is to try and trick you into making trades you shouldn't make, or buying products you shouldn't buy.

[StrangeSox]

Can't understand why they are appealing this

 

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog...-plan-b-ruling/

[Balta1701]

I just submitted my first research grant proposal with me as principal investigator.

 

Shame it'll probably die this year thanks to the sequester.

[StrangeSox]

I've seen it said that a lot of research careers just won't start now because of the sequester.

 

In related news, we had the weakest new-jobs month in over seven months. Yeah! Sequester!

 

The fed is explicitly calling the current fiscal policy wrong. Even AEI is coming out and saying further cuts are stupid because we've already started to reduce the deficit by growing out of it (hey! some people have been saying this for years!)

Edited May 2, 2013 by StrangeSox

[Balta1701]

I've seen it said that a lot of research careers just won't start now because of the sequester.

I'm in that boat and trying to survive it. If I wasn't good with money or my postdoc didn't give my wife health insurance coverage, academia would have lost me.

[StrangeSox]

Yeah, better-said. They're not being delayed but being discarded in pursuit of something else.

[StrangeSox]

The systemic plight of labor

 

The ultimate Friedman kick in the balls, however, doesn’t come from his lazily meritocratic priors. Rather, it comes from his overarching metaphor: the idea that if you have a 401(k) plan, then you’re somehow in charge of your own destiny. Friedman might be right that we’re living in a 401(k) world, but if he is then he’s right for the wrong reason. In Friedman’s mind, a 401(k) plan is an icon of self-determination: you get out what you put in. “Your specific contribution,” he writes, italics and all, “will define your specific benefits.”

 

In reality, however, a 401(k) plan is an icon of futility and the way in which the owners of capital extract rents from the owners of labor. Yves Smith is good on this, as is Matt Yglesias, although the real expert is Helaine Olen: the 401(k) is a way for both your government and your employer to disown you, and to leave your life savings to be raided by the financial-services industry and its plethora of hidden and invidious fees. The well-kept secret about old-fashioned pension funds is that, for the most part, they’re actually very good at generating decent returns for their beneficiaries. They tend to have extremely long time horizons, and are run by professionals who know what they’re doing and who have a fair amount of negotiating leverage when they deal with Wall Street. Savers are always strengthened by being united: disaggregating them and forcing them to take matters into their own hands is tantamount to feeding them directly to the Wall Street sharks.

 

 

Add them all together, and to a first approximation you arrive at our current world, where pretty much no one relying on their 401(k) is actually saving enough for retirement. If you’re rich today, you’ll probably be fine when you retire. But if you’re someone who (in contrast to Tom Friedman) actually lives on your paycheck, then there’s almost no chance that your retirement savings will be enough, when the time comes. That’s not your fault: the reasons are deeply systemic. And as a result, the solutions cannot possibly be the kind of bottom-up schemes that Friedman is extolling. They have to come from the top: from real leaders, rather than jumped-up “thought leaders“.

[StrangeSox]

When Your Boss Steals Your Wages: The Invisible Epidemic That’s Sweeping America

 

Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money! But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.

 

Everardo Carrillo says that's just what happened to him and other low-wage employees who worked at a Southern California warehouse run by a Walmart contractor. Carrillo and his fellow workers have launched a multi-class-action lawsuit for massive wage theft (Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics) in a case that’s finally bringing national attention to an invisible epidemic. ...

 

Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A conservative estimate of unpaid overtime alone shows that it costs workers at least $19 billion per year.

[bigruss]

I'd like to know if that unpaid overtime is for hourly jobs or salaried jobs. Big difference between the two.

[StrangeSox]

I can't imagine warehouse employees like that are exempt (which has its own history of being broadened to cover more and more workers).

[StrangeSox]

Florida passes a law to speed up executions:

 

States across the country have spent the last few years reconsidering the wisdom of capital punishment. Over the past six years, five states have abolished the death penalty entirely, including Maryland just last month. But Florida, where the execution rate is second only to Texas, isn't having that conversation. Instead, Gov. Rick Scott ® is currently considering a bill passed by the legislature this week that would speed up executions in the state by limiting "frivolous" appeals by inmates and shortening the time they spend on Death Row. (Florida has about 400 people on Death Row, 10 of whom have been there more than 35 years.)

 

Called the "Timely Justice Act," the bill would create new deadlines for certain filings and force the state to move faster towards an execution after a ruling by the state supreme court. Florida legislators behind the bill believe it will save money (executions currently cost state taxpayers about $24 million each) and bring closure to victims, but legal advocates say that it's likely to do nothing but raise the possibility that Florida will execute an innocent person. They're on pretty solid ground with that argument, given that 24 people on Florida's Death Row have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.

 

 

 

 

[Jenksismyhero]

Has anyone done a study on the timing of those exoneration (or any on a national level)? I mean, I know that in the 90's and 00's DNA testing got WAY better, so over the last 2 decades you've seen older convictions overturned. Does that still happen with people convicted from, say, 2000 onward?

[StrangeSox]

Has anyone done a study on the timing of those exoneration (or any on a national level)? I mean, I know that in the 90's and 00's DNA testing got WAY better, so over the last 2 decades you've seen older convictions overturned. Does that still happen with people convicted from, say, 2000 onward?

Not DNA-related, but someone who was innocent by all reasonable accounts but was executed anyway.

Cameron Todd Willingham

 

The CP5 fall into this as well, as none of their DNA was on the crime scene, nor was any of the victim's on them, but they were still convicted. DNA testing is much older than 2000, and plenty of capital cases rely on questionable witness testimony and circumstantial evidence, not on DNA.

[Balta1701]

Has anyone done a study on the timing of those exoneration (or any on a national level)? I mean, I know that in the 90's and 00's DNA testing got WAY better, so over the last 2 decades you've seen older convictions overturned. Does that still happen with people convicted from, say, 2000 onward?

Who pays for the exonerating DNA testing when there are 2 witnesses saying the non-white guy pulled the trigger and the public defender's office just had 5% of its staff sequestered?

[Jenksismyhero]

Who pays for the exonerating DNA testing when there are 2 witnesses saying the non-white guy pulled the trigger and the public defender's office just had 5% of its staff sequestered?

 

The person with the wrongful conviction on his rap sheet?

[Balta1701]

The person with the wrongful conviction on his rap sheet?

Because people on death row have large incomes?

[Jenksismyhero]

You already have a legal aid team/public defender/private attorney representing you through the appeals process. If there was any chance of you being innocent that person/team would be doing everything they can to get your conviction overturned. Plus, DNA testing isn't really all that expensive. I had some testing done in a case for $100 bucks.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Jenksismybitch