Intensive Purposes

Archive for the 'Money for Nothing' Category



Emergency War Funding 

Wow, apparently the house is rallyiing around Bush’s request for $80 billion in emergency war funding for Iraq. Thats about what we spent on education and health care _combined_ in 2002. Thats above and beyond our already huge military budget, which was $343 billion in 2002 (over 8 times spending on education). And don’t forget, our official military budget doesn’t include military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, I guess they file that under ‘Colonialism’ or ‘Spread the Democracy.’ I think at this point, weather you support the war (and the troops) or not, you should be questioning if all this money going to Iraq couldn’t be better spent in our own country.



US criticised over Aids conference 

Due to financial considerations, the US will have a large absence at the world AIDS conference this year.

I haven’t posted lots of stuff lately cause i don’t wanna preach, so I’m not gunna do that. If this makes you angry, now you know about it.

Full Story



Tax My ASS 

According to this story, Kerry’s wife, the wealthy Heinze ketchup barroness, paid about 15% of her 5 million dollars of income this year in taxes.

why are people always complaining that the rich pay more taxes? I paid 30% of my salary in taxes, and I sure as hell don’t fit into anyone’s description of rich (anyone that has access to the internet to read this anyway)

Full Story



Cost of War Withheld From Bush Budget 

Whats that you say? there’s a 7% increase in military spending? This may be good bad or neutral depending on your views, but here’s what they slipped by you: The huge military budget that we’ve set aside for the year doesn’t actually include money to be spent in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Gee, remember the good old days when you had to dig to find out what was going on in the world? Now even when you dig, it turns out that they are free to leave out whatever information they feel like.

Full Story

related post on last years budget.



Apple tops targets; shares drop 

I’m not from wall street, but doesn’t this seem odd to you that after beating “the street’s” predictions for earnings, that their stock would go down?

makes no sense.

maybe thats what stocks do in the after hours so they can shoot up the next day?

mmmm iPod.

some kid with a new ipod was complaining to my professor about how he failed a class and wanted to make it up before he moved to tokyo. i wanted to beat him up and take his ipod, doing myself, my professor and the entire university a favor.



kind of puts things in perspective… 

I don’t know about you, but these graphs make me pretty sick.

spending.jpg

MilitarySpending.gif
from this document thanks to a link on under reported



Your Economy needs Work 

I wonder if this is a sign of despotism:

Apparently the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official group that declares when a recession starts and ends, has decided that the only factor in determining a recession is how well companies are doing, not how well people are doing.

its funny, when you see old black and white movies about recessions, there are usually lots of people having trouble getting by. Its a good thing there are all these thriving businesses now, cause that means that mean ol recession ended way back in 2001.

Academics declare recession ended in 2001



The Economics of impending doom 

Well, we’ve hit a lot of the moral issues surrounding a war with Iraq on this site. So I thought I would change it up and approach this thing from an individual capitalist perspective.

If you haven’t noticed, the US economy is in the crapper. Unemployment is at 20 year high (my googling couldn’t come up with a URL, but this is the number i’ve heard tossed around from foxnews to npr). There is no end in site.

My opinion is that this economy WILL NOT turn around until the looming war question is settled. Companies don’t like to invest during a period of economic uncertainty, and neither do individual investors. Now some will argue that the war will create money. This “could” be true. IF the war goes according to plan. Yey! 2 years of economic recovery for the US. But what if it doesn’t?

The longer Governor Bush focuses on war with Iraq instead of economic stimulus the longer yours truly will sucking off the taxpayer tit. along with 10% of all the other Americans. btw, true unemployment is actually higher. Because the dept. of Labor does not include those that their unemployment benefits ran out and still haven’t found a job.

So I don’t really have a lot of opinions about all this as much as i’d like others to chime in on the economic damage that this potential war is doing to the US and world economy as a whole.