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POPSWolframAlpha and True Knowledge I tested WolframAlpha and True Knowledge today. I found both very impressive they both gave me correct answers, Wolfram had a few problems but most probably because of traffic to the site They are not search engines, Wolfram computes answers not stock answers from a database but on the fly , True Knowledge had a more polished feel to it but I guess it has been around a bit longer. The detailed answers in WolframAlpha was impressive asking about the GDP of Australia and True Knowledge gave correct answers about OpenSim.
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POPSRupeetalk - Home loan, Personal Finance nline credit cards, home loans, personal loans, business loans, health & life insurance services from Rupeetalk, a financial portal in India advices Indian consumers on personal finance. It helps consumers choose the right product offered by various financial institutes.
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POPS80-Year Anniversary Of "Black Tuesday"
More commonly known as "Black Tuesday," October 29, 1929 was the last of four so-called "black" days which ushered in the Great Depression. In fact, the stock market collapse in the U.S. for at least one month after Black Tuesday. Eventually, the Great Depression grew into a worldwide financial calamity that lasted, by most conventional accounts, until the end of World War II. By 1933, the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) was cut in half. The Depression caused many farmers to lose their farms. At the same time, years of erosion and a drought created the “Dust Bowl” in the Midwest, where no crops could grow. Many traveled to California to find work, a subject written about by John Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath." Many others ended up living as “hobos” or in “Hoovervilles”, make-shift homeless encampments named after then-President Herbert Hoover. During the 1928 Presidential campaign, Hoover campaigned on a number of slogans, one of which was "Vote for Pros
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POPSBush or Obama: The Quiz 5. While Obama criticized Bush for "a doubling of the national debt," the federal debt held by the public went from 35.1% of GDP in 2000 to 40.8% of GDP in 2008 -- an increase of 16% as of fraction of GDP. What is it expected to be in 2016 under Obama's budget plan? 6. Obama criticized Bush for Guantanamo, military tribunals, wiretaps, troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and "signing statements." Which one of these Bush practices has Obama ended?
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POPSThe internal contradictions of ObamaCare Another major difference is that medical school is free in places like France. Here, doctors go to work with truly crushing med school debt that take years to pay down. Its hardly fair that they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in their education and could now be told they can’t expect the ‘doctor’ type compensation we’re used to seeing.
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POPSThe Road to Serfdom Paved With Taxes The VAT would be great news for the political insiders and beltway elite. A brand new source of revenue would mean more money for them to spend and a new set of loopholes to swap for campaign cash and lobbying fees But as I explain in this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the evidence from Europe unambiguously suggests that a VAT will dramatically increase the burden of government. That’s good for Washington, but bad for America. It’s worth noting that even if the politicians are unsuccessful in their campaign to take over the health care system, there will be a VAT fight at some point in the next few years. This will be a Armageddon moment for proponents of limited government. Defeating a VAT is not a sufficient condition for controlling the size of government, but it surely is a necessarry condition.
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POPSAt 10% Unemployment America Still Doesn't Have Enough Workers But of course, it's really not much a paradox at all. After years and years of a housing bubble, we have millions of Americans trained in some capacity relating to housing, and those skills are no longer needed. Concepts like this should shred anyone's notion of an output gap. Sure, American hands are underutilized, but if those hands don't have anything to do that's productive, can they really be considered unused "capacity." No, they can't. And this is the problem with big, macro-thinking. You can point to two GDP trendlines and say "Look, undercapacity..." but that totally ignores the ground level where real employees have to find jobs that they're suited for, and no amount of expansionary practice can change that problem.
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POPSEconomists Search for New Definition of Well-Being
"GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one," Stiglitz told the news agency Bloomberg in a recent interview. "So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP." In the model they unveiled last week in Paris, the academics recommend including other factors, such as sustainability and education. Significant Shortcomings Even the inventor of the gross domestic product measure, the late Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets, was aware that the classic method of computing GDP had significant shortcomings. "The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income," he said in 1934. This is because the growth rate says nothing about the distribution of wealth in a country, the state of health of its citizens or their life expectancy. The number provides no information about the cleanliness of rivers or the amo
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POPSBaucus Healthcare Bill True Cost: $2 Trillion
None was provided to them to make these estimates, so we still don't even know what's really in the bill! There are a host of other frauds being perpetrated on us right now by our government regarding health care. So let's get something straight about the high percentage of GDP (16-17 percent) devoted to healthcare in this country, because it is widely misunderstood. First, most of the excessive costs of American medical care are the result of government intervention. In fact proponents of socialized medicine anticipated that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid would create a crisis in health care, generating calls for reform. Their ready answer was just more of the same. We would all like to see costs of medical care come down. This country should move to reduce costs by removing the causes: excessive government intervention that distorts the market. The many ways government intervenes and the many solutions are beyond the scope of this essay, but that is the answer.
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POPSThe cost of supporting Israel
These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.” The billion-barrel SPR has cost taxpayers more than $134 billion so far. Making things worse, Israel gets “first
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POPSHere’s What Israel Is Really Costing American Taxpayers Want to know what's really sinking America? These have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001. The cost of supporting Israel increased drastically after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. U.S. support for Israel during that war resulted in additional costs for the American taxpayer of between $750 billion and $1 trillion. When Israel was losing the war, President Richard Nixon stepped in to supply the Jewish state with U.S. weapons. Nixon’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo, which cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion in lost GDP and another $450 billion in higher oil import costs. The 1973 oil crisis cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1.2 trillion. As a result of the oil embargo the U.S. government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.”
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POPS Podesta Says Value-Added Tax ‘More Plausible’ as Deficits Grow a Washington-based public policy group, is convening a meeting of economic policy experts Sept. 30 to discuss the long- term fiscal deficit. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in August that the budget deficit will be 11.2 percent of gross domestic product, the highest since World War II. Clinton, facing a deficit of 4.2 percent of GDP, pushed Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy to help trim the shortfall. “He passed it without a single Republican vote,” Podesta said. “It led to the longest period of growth in the United States history.” Ending Tax Cuts Podesta said Obama will begin by ending the upper-income tax cuts enacted under his predecessor, President George W. Bush. “Then you have to look at whether that gets you far enough of the way,” he said. On health care, Podesta expressed optimism that Congress will pass a health-care bill in the next couple of months even though so far none of the measures has won Republican support and Democrats . .
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POPSKeep telling yourself that offshoring was good for us US Tool, machine builder and other industrial companies on the brink. We have been lied to about globalization and the realization that we offshored our prosperity for temporary profits will eventually become undeniable to all. Sadly, it will come too late. This mess is a government greed vs. America's backbone and the backbone lost. Wake up people before YOUR industry is destroyed like American manufacturing was.
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POPSAdministration Privately Admits Cap-And-Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year: FOIA Documents So there you have it, from an internal Treasury Department document that cap-and-trade could generate federal receipts, i.e. tax revenue, in the range of $100 to $200 billion a year. Does that cost sound familiar to you? The Heritage Foundation has long predicted that: "The annual cost of emissions permits to energy users will be at least $100 billion by 2012 and could exceed $390 billion by 2035." This raises a whole other issue, that the $100 to $200 billion estimate by Treasury has no date or timeline of any kind. While Heritage follows the trajectory through to 2035, and even to 2050, the Treasury Department doesn't provide any further analysis or calculations. In a different memo, prepared by President Obama's transition team after the election, they throw this out there: "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation." That's another prediction offered up without any details as to . . .
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POPSWho Would the Teabaggers Hate More Than Obama - Reagan
From the article: The graph looks at total federal debt (blue line) and debt as a percentage of GDP (red line). Obviously World War II represented a significant period of the spending with the government taking on debt (much of it in the form of war bonds) to finance the war (see the redline which represents debt as percentage of GDP). This high debt load was unwound over the following decades. In 1981 this downward trend reverses and begins to rocket back upward. That upward trend is not arrested until 1994 when it flattens and starts a downward trend until 2001 when it starts to climb up again. During the 1980s the debt blossomed from $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion establishing a credit card bill so high (in comparison to near-term past decades) as to engender America with a "fuck it" attitude. The teabag argument that high deficit spending leads to inevitable tax hikes has credibility. George H. W. Bush who was the president immediately after this period was forced to
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POPSNew facts and new troubles for Mexico
The estimated million plus Mexicans returning to Mexico plus the many more who choose to stay home, when earlier they would have gone to the other side, means more pressure on the nation's development. In this situation the country's GDP shrunk nine percent in the first quarter and a bit over ten percent in the second one. Whatever fiscal and economic reforms the government has planned are still being planned. The president insists on using his power to fight a useless losing drug war and effectively sabotaged the economy by locking the nation down for a month so that we wouldn't get the flu. The country cannot provide opportunities to vast swaths of the population. Now there is another swath to add to the others: returning illegal immigrants and others. Vast numbers of young unemployed kids whose skills are mainly in how to break the law and profit by it somehow are swelling the populace of Mexico's provincial backwaters (where most illegal immigrants come from) quite outside the a
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POPS Dude, Where's My Mercedes? What would you do with $31,000? Only government would send stimulus checks to prison inmates. Government is not a competitor, it's a predator. This year, Washington will spend $30,958 per household. Signs of defeat…lead editorial from liberal Washington Post: Time to Dump ObamaCare FCC Diversity Czar "My focus here is not freedom of speech or the press…This freedom is all too often an exaggeration" NBC Exploits Kennedy to Push ObamaCare: 'National Sorrow Has Created Political Momentum Before' Brian Williams: "In Lieu of Flowers for Ted, Pass Health Care Reform!" ...better yet, to honor Mary Jo Kopechne's memory, let's not. rightklik.net
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POPSSteyn: It's About Moving America Left Stimulus hits a pothole Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He's spending your future. And by "future" I don't mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on "the rich," but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in "the richest 5 percent" before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama. But the silver-tongued salesman sails on.
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