===Subject: Sweden - Ship of fools
Seek and ye shall find! (See 1 below.)
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Disregard the propaganda belched forth by Obamanomics and look at the real statistical measurements. (See 2 below.)
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There is a new turkey being marketed this year and is a competitor to the "Butterball." It is called the 'Obamaball' and has these remarkable features:
a) It is an unusual turkey that plays golf.
b) It cannot stop gobbling.
c) It is constantly full of crap.
d) Though it prances as a turkey it really is chicken .
e) It constantly blames others for its misdeeds.
f) It is incapable of telling the truth.
g) It has a terrible temper.
h) It loves taking 'selfies' and standing in front of a mirror.
i) It's meat is mostly yellow.
j) It sells at a premium but is not worth it.
k) It constantly sticks it's beak into every problem imaginable and then makes them worse.
l) It was the first turkey to be awarded a Nobel Prize
m) It is hard to catch.
n) It has skinny legs.
o) It surrounds itself with a legion of other turkeys who are very loyal.
p) It spends all but November taking vacations.
q) It is married to another turkey.
s) It has a large ego and very small testicles.
t) It is of Muslim origin.
u) It never served in the military but acts like The Commander in Chief.
v) It is the first turkey known to shoot baskets.
w) It does not like to be challenged.
x) It actually taught Constitutional Law but apparently never read the document.
y) It is the first of its kind in a long line of other fowls
z) It considers anyone who would buy, serve and/or eat him 'stupid.'
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Dick
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1)
IRS Finds 30,000 Lois Lerner Emails, Enraging Conservatives
Five months after the Internal Revenue Service deemed that emails sent by former official Lois Lerner had been lost forever, the Treasury Department's inspector general told Congress on Friday that as many as 30,000 might have been found — and conservatives were outraged.
"Nothing they do surprises me," Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell told Newsmax of the latest development in the agency's targeting scandal of tea party groups. "Nothing they fail to do surprises me.
"I have no reason to think that this is everything," she added. "Now, what I would like to see them do is for the IRS to actually respond to all the subpoenas that have been issued to them by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the last year and a half.
"That would be the best thing they could do: just go ahead and answer all the subpoenas and do what you're supposed to do," Mitchell said.
Two top members of the Senate Finance Committee, Democratic Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, said on Friday that the Treasury's Inspector General for Tax Administration told them that it had had located data that might have included the Lerner emails.
The inspector general "has been able to recover some forensic data which may include documents the IRS believed were missing," they said in a statement. "This data may include emails to and/or from Lois Lerner which could be material to the investigation."
A Republican congressional aide told The Washington Examiner that the recovered data included as many as 30,000 emails that Lerner sent or received between 2009 and 2011.
The emails were found among hundreds of "disaster recovery tapes" used to back up the IRS' email system, according to the Examiner. The tapes contain at least 250 million emails.
"They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes," the aide told the newspaper.
Lerner, who retired in September 2013 because of the scandal, headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status from the groups. She was held in contempt for refusing to testify before Congress about the debacle.
In June, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified to Congress that the agency could not locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer had crashed that summer. They probably were lost for good because the disaster recovery tapes store data for only six months, he said.
Koskinen testified that they could only find 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency had pieced together those emails from the computers of 83 other workers, he said.
Emails of others Lerner supervised during that period also were lost, Koskinen said — and in a July federal court deposition, the IRS said that Lerner's hard drive was destroyed and recycled three years ago.
That ended any chance of retrieving the lost emails, officials said.
The IRS targeting scandal broke in May 2013, when the Treasury's inspector general found that the agency had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party, religious, and other conservative groups.
The screening generally involved lengthy delays and detailed requests for information.
The scrutiny started in 2010 and continued to just before the 2012 presidential election. Among the targeted groups were the Tea Party Patriots; True the Vote, the Houston group that combats election fraud; and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, a nonprofit political group advised by Republican strategist Karl Rove.
In their statement on Friday, Hatch and Wyden said that the inspector general was assessing whether the newly discovered data could be converted "into a readable format" and that it would provide it to the finance committee as soon as it is able.
The panel is among three congressional committees investigating the IRS. The others are the Oversight Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee.
"From the onset of our bipartisan investigation, we’ve remained committed to getting to the truth and ensuring that the IRS treats all tax-exempt applicants fairly," Hatch and Wyden said. "Though we are in the final stages of finishing our bipartisan report," they added, the inspector general "has yet to release its findings regarding the lost Lois Lerner e-mails at the IRS."
Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said his panel looked forward to examining the emails.
"Though it is unclear whether [the inspector general] has found all of the missing Lois Lerner e-mails, there may be significant information in this discovery," he told the Examiner. "The Oversight Committee will be looking for information about her mindset and who she was communicating with outside the IRS during a critical period of time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups.
"This discovery also underscores the lack of cooperation Congress has received from the IRS," Issa said. "The agency first failed to disclose the loss to Congress and then tried to declare Lerner’s e-mails gone and lost forever.
"Once again, it appears the IRS hasn’t been straight with Congress and the American people."
The latest wrinkle in the IRS scandal drew only ire from those who have been battling the agency over the unprecedented scrutiny.
"While this revelation is welcomed news, it underscores the fact that the IRS has impeded the congressional investigation into its targeting scheme," Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, told Newsmax. "We are hopeful that the information contained in the recovered emails will shed more light on the calculated scheme to unlawfully and unconstitutionally target conservative organizations in the run-up to the 2012 elections."
The center represents 41 organizations in 22 states that have sued the IRS and the Obama administration in federal court. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last month.
The ACLJ is planning an appeal.
Sekulow said that seven of those groups are still waiting for IRS action on their applications, "with one organization's application on-hold for nearly five years."
Mitchell told Newsmax that the discovery proved that both Koskinen and his predecessor, Douglas Shulman, should be prosecuted for perjury for their congressional testimony.
"These people have filed things under oath with the judicial branch of government — in our lawsuit and other lawsuits," she said. "They have provided statements to Congress. They’re totally dishonest."
The federal lawsuits Mitchell filed against the IRS in the targeting scandal also were dismissed last month.
"The judge dismissed our cases because he was confident that the IRS had stopped the targeting," she said. "It was a completely ridiculous ruling."
One client, True the Vote, will not challenge the decision.
"They just believe it's hopeless," Mitchell said, adding that the group "has been totally discouraged by the courts."
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2)"Secular stagnation" in graphics
Doom and gloom
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"SECULAR stagnation" is not a new idea. It was first popularised by Alvin Hansen, an economist and disciple of John Maynard Keynes, in the stagnant 1930s. Hansen thought a slowing of both population growth and technological progress would reduce opportunities for investment. Savings would then pile up unused, he reasoned, and growth would slump unless governments borrowed and spent to prop up demand. Following the economic boom of the 1950s, interest in the hypothesis dwindled. The theory is now popular again, thanks in large part to a 2013 speech by Larry Summers, an economist at Harvard University, in which he suggested that the rich world might be suffering from “secular stagnation”. Even as asset bubbles inflated before the financial crisis, growth in the rich world’s economies was hardly breakneck, suggesting a lack of productive investment opportunities. And there are a number of reasons to think it has since become harder to invigorate growth.
Adherents of the theory of secular stagnation emphasise different factors. Demography is one. An economy’s potential output depends on the number of workers and their productivity. In both Germany and Japan, the working-age population (those aged 15-64) has been shrinking for more than a decade, and the rate of decline will accelerate in coming decades. In Britain, the population will stop growing in coming decades while in America, it will grow at barely a third of the 1% rate that prevailed from 2000 to 2013. Population patterns affect investment and savings. Firms need a given capital stock per worker—equipment, structures, land and intellectual property—in order to produce a unit of output. If output growth is hampered by lack of workers, firms will need less capital. Ageing populations also mean that more people are saving heavily in order to fund their retirement, depressing consumption.
A propensity to save too much and consume too little has other causes than demography. Levels of income and wealth inequality across the rich world have been rising. The chart above concentrates on income and uses a number known as the Gini coefficient. In a hypothetical country with a coefficient of 0, everyone has exactly the same income; a nation with a coefficient of 1.0 is home to one extremely fat cat who takes everything. Because richer people are more likely than poorer people to save money than to spend it, rising inequality is also likely to dampen consumption and growth.
Adding to the squeeze on consumption, pay growth in the rich world has been throttled for several years now. Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries. That was less than the rate of economic growth over the period and far less than in earlier decades. Other countries fared even worse. Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all. And, critically, those averages conceal plenty of variation. Real pay for most workers remained flat or even fell, whereas for the highest earners it soared. Technological changes may deepen such polarisation. In a 2013 paper Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of Oxford University, analysed over 700 different occupations to see how easily they could be computerised, and concluded that 47% of employment in America is at high risk of being automated over the coming years.
All of these factors, combined with others such as fiscal retrenchment and cash hoarding by companies, have had the effect of forcing interest rates downward. Real government-bond yields have been falling for more than a decade, hinting that too much saving has too few places to go. Whether that proves the theory of secular stagnation right is an open question—some think the economy is only suffering a cyclical hangover from the financial crisis. But the usual tactic of reviving growth through lower interest rates is unquestionably much harder to pull off. What might? Some advocate increasing deficit-financed public infrastructure investment; others raising the retirement age which, according to some models, should encourage households to spend more and save less. Still others suggest more vigorous monetary stimulus in order to raise inflation, which would make more negative real interest rates possible. Enacting a wealth tax to separate the rich from their unspent savings is another possible response, as is penalising companies who don't spend their spare cash on wages or investment. Coming up with a world-changing technological innovation that creates a rush of new investment would be pretty helpful, too.
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