INTERESTING TIMES

If at first you don’t succeed,
Try twice more
so your failure will be
statistically significant.
--Peter D'Adamo

I want to see a comparison of governmental expenditures or losses due to all forms of personal welfare, including student loans, family planning, housing assistance, medicare and medicaid (etc), relative to all spent/lost due to corporate subsidies, bailouts and tax breaks. The two warring sides in our politics tend to focus on one and are hard pressed to even admit the existence of the other. But both exist. Let's see the numbers from both of those sides, rechecked and compiled into a graph by someone who isn't on one of those sides. And let's tear them apart (lies!!!) and start over with new numbers, different sources. Let's see it at the federal and state level. And then let's talk about why it might be in our collective best interests to prevent both unwanted pregnancies and auto industry crashes. And go from there.

Our government, headed by a Shrub, continues to tell us not to worry, everything is fine, just KEEP SHOPPING whatever you do. Our mass media, owned by various large corporations who benefit from continuation of Shrub policy, would rather tell us about some movie star's sex life or drug habit. But in spite of the attempts to keep us in the dark, we are learning. The alarm went out a couple weeks ago that the unemployment rate has increased more than the estimates, and economists are also saying that we still haven't reached the "bottom" of the housing market. Here's an interesting site that suggests what they think is a more realistic statistical assessment of our situation. You can say anything you want with numbers, but I have less reason to mistrust this site than the Shrubbery.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data