This is incredible. They are touting the automatic COLA increases, which have been around since 1975 from a law passed by Congress, as a Biden achievement! Biden had nothing to do with it, nor does he dole out anything, all it means is that inflation was the highest in 40 yrs 😂
▪️Annual COLAs are tied to the CPI-W index (urban wage & clerical workers) which is slightly different from the CPI-U (urban consumers), the headline number most people refer to. Increasing SS payments means that SS will just become insolvent quicker, it’s not a good thing!
https://www.ssa.gov/cola/
▪️On a related note, the CPI data for Sept came out yesterday and was again higher than expected. The CPI-U rose 0.4% in Sept, +8.2% year over year (YoY) which was a slight decline from last month, but there are lots of troubling signs that inflation will remain high.
▪️The last 2 months have been cooled mostly by steep declines in energy prices, and also used cars. But it’s doubtful energy will continue falling in the coming months, meanwhile price inflation in the broader economy has taken root.
▪️In the beginning of the inflation crisis, the shelter component helped tamp down the inflation numbers. Shelter is almost 1/3 of the CPI and was growing at ~2-5% for most of the past year, which helped the headline number stay at “just” 7-9%. But shelter is now rising.
▪️In Sept, shelter rose 0.7% and 6.6% YoY, the highest in 40 yrs. This also propelled the core index (excluding food & energy) to a 40 yr high. Shelter is a much stickier index and won’t likely come down quickly, meaning elevated CPI readings will probably continue.
▪️Food also remains high, +0.8% in Sept (11.2% YoY). Food away from home rose the most in 41 years! If energy increases again in the coming months we could see CPI actually go up and reach new highs, something few are expecting but would have giant repercussions.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
▪️This is a proposal that pertains only to graduate level nursing degrees, not undergraduate ones (which were never considered professional degrees). The proposal will have a 30-60 day public comment period next year, where groups can object, before the DoE will decide on it.
▪️This is about how much federal student loans someone can take out for a particular degree. The cap on graduate degrees is $100k ($20,500/yr), while a “professional degree” limit is $200k ($50k/yr).
▪️Under the new rule proposal, professional degrees include:
🔹Pharmacy
🔹Dentistry
🔹Veterinary medicine
🔹Chiropractic
🔹Law
🔹Medicine (including osteopathic medicine & podiatry)
🔹Optometry
🔹Theology
▪️The nursing degrees excluded are ones like master of science in nursing (MSN), doctor of nursing practice (DNP) and PhD in nursing. These degrees would be limited to $100k in federal student loans, like all other graduate degrees.
▪️These changes came from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s...
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
