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Manufacturing represents 11% of the US economy today but it accounts for 70% of industry-funded R&D & employs 36% of the nation’s engineers.
a single man earning the average wage in his working life and retiring in 2010 at age 65 will have paid $294,000 in lifetime Social Security taxes and can expect to receive $265,000 in lifetime Social Security benefits.* Not what you’d call a heckova deal.
The Under-30s Should Demand an Opt Out of Social Security - Yahoo! News
Yeah, social security is a bit of a disaster.
The total economic cost of overweight and obesity in the United States is $270 billion per year while the cost in Canada is about $30 billion a year, a new study shows. The $300 billion total cost in the United States and Canada is the result of: increased need for medical care ($127 billion); loss of worker productivity due to higher rates of death ($49 billion); loss of productivity due to disability of active workers ($43 billion); and loss of productivity due to total disability ($72 billion), said the Society of Actuaries (SOA).
Cost of Obesity Approaching $300 Billion a Year
We need a national policy on obesity.
Alcohol saves lives on balance. Here’s why.
The NIAAA calculates that if all drinkers in the U.S. became abstainers, there would be an additional 80,000 deaths per year. Abstaining dramatically increases the risks of heart attack, ichemic stroke, and many other diseases and life-threatening conditions. 1 The CDC calculates that abusive drinking lead to about 75,766 deaths from all causes in 2001, a number that continues to decline. Therefore, these analyses indicate that moderate alcohol consumption saves more lives than are lost as a result of alcohol abuse.
health care costs for smokers were about $326,000 from age 20 on, compared to about $417,000 for thin and healthy people. The reason: The thin, healthy people lived much longer.
France has $36,500 GDP/Capita and works 1,453 hours per year. This equates to a GDP/Capita/Hour of $25.10. Americans, on the other hand, have $44,150 GDP/Capita but work 1,792 hours per year. Thus Americans only achieve $24.60 of GDP/Capita/Hour.
French: The Most Productive People In The World
Crazy that the French may be more efficient on an hourly basis.
Transportation space.
when you also consider the labor-force participation rate and the so-called “birth-death series” that measures business starts and failures, the real U.S. unemployment rate is now 20%.
A recent poll has shown that far more people are in agreement with the Occupy Wall Street movement than are opposed to it
CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...
click to see in full!
EPA’s own studies found that tighter rules could save 12,000 lives a year. But EPA also estimated businesses would pay up to $90 million to make the air cleaner.
LA, Riverside lead California in smog days | 89.3 KPCC
At that cost, it seems obvious that these rules should be implemented.
That’s 7500$ per life. I’d say that’s worth it.
Perry Is Right—There Is a Texas Model for Fixing Social Security - WSJ.com
This is a really cool article. Read the whole thing.
Highlights:
Rick Perry is pointing to three Texas counties that decades ago opted out of Social Security by creating personal retirement accounts. Now, 30 years on, county workers in those three jurisdictions retire with more money and have better death and disability supplemental benefits. And those three counties—unlike almost all others in the United States—face no long-term unfunded pension liabilities.
As with Social Security, employees contribute 6.2% of their income, with the county matching the contribution (or, as in Galveston, providing a slightly larger share). Once the county makes its contribution, its financial obligation is done—that’s why there are no long-term unfunded liabilities.
The contributions are pooled, like bank deposits, and top-rated financial institutions bid on the money. Those institutions guarantee an interest rate that won’t go below a base level and goes higher when the market does well. Over the last decade, the accounts have earned between 3.75% and 5.75% every year, with the average around 5%. The 1990s often saw even higher interest rates, of 6.5%-7%. When the market goes up, employees make more—and when the market goes down, employees still make something.
But not all money goes into employees’ retirement accounts. When financial planner Rick Gornto devised the Alternate Plan in 1980, he wanted it to be a complete substitute for Social Security. And Social Security isn’t just a retirement fund: It’s also social insurance that provides a death benefit ($255), survivors’ insurance, and a disability benefit.
Part of the employer contribution in the Alternate Plan goes toward a term life insurance policy that pays four times the employee’s salary tax-free, up to a maximum of $215,000. That’s nearly 850 times Social Security’s death benefit.
Being FAT is now illegal in Japan. ;) (by randomusername999)
Incomes today worse than in the 1997. Worst economic performance since the great depression.
median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.
Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.
“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”
Median household income for the bottom tenth of the income spectrum fell by 12 percent from a peak in 1999, while the top 90th percentile dropped by just 1.5 percent.
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