Brooklyn Mutt

“If an elementary school student has an excellent teacher even for a single year, it boosts their income by an average of about 2 percent per year. To put that in perspective, if we can find a way to raise gross domestic product (GDP) by 2 percent, you’re talking about nearly ending the Great Recession every year. By economic standards, it’s a huge deal.”

“Later when Seth bemoans the fact that normal people will be hurt by their actions, Emerson’s ferocious response is shocking both for its amorality and its kernels of truth.

“If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe that you’re necessary. And you are. People want to live like this in their cars and their big fucking houses that they can’t even pay for? Then you’re necessary. The only reason they all get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow. Fuck them. Fuck normal people.”

“The Times reports from the Santa school, where prospective St. Nicks are now being taught how to quickly assess a family’s financial situation before responding to children’s requests in such a manner that leaves them feeling cheerful, but not overly expectant. Some Santas plan to tell kids that times are tough even in the North Pole, while another strategy is to tell kids that not everyone gets everything they ask for.”

“But it won’t be funny when the [housing] bubble bursts and people start going bankrupt, taking banks down with them, and then the markets and then the dollar.”

“Today’s release of the most recent jobs numbers is yet another reminder that conservatives in Congress need to get behind legislation to boost job creation in our economy. At this point in an economic recovery — especially one following such a deep recession — we should be seeing upward of 300,000 jobs created per month, but the economy only added 80,000 jobs in October, although August and September’s data were revised upward by a total of 102,000 jobs. Still, the three-month pace of job creation is only 114,000. That’s woefully inadequate.

So what’s holding back more sustained job creation? The gap in demand caused by the collapse of the housing bubble and Great Recession means that big corporations are still sitting on several trillion dollars in cash, waiting for sufficient customers to spur higher investment, and job seekers are still waiting for investments trickle down into jobs.

But conservatives in Congress — who are determined to slash government spending where it is needed most in infrastructure and in support for state and local jobs, while preserving or enhancing tax cuts for the wealthy — are doing real damage.”

“It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other…These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.”

“It’s not much of a surprise, I guess. The American Jobs Act never had a particularly good chance of passing the House. But as of yesterday, it’s officially dead. Majority Leader Eric Cantor isn’t even pretending the two sides will work something out. “The $447 billion jobs package as a package: dead?” A reporter asked him. “Yes,” Cantor replied.”