I’ll leave it to you to do the math. You don’t need a calculator, just a heart and a brain.
The annual U.S. military budget is almost $1 trillion — about $1.9 million every minute.
President Obama called on Congress Wednesday to approve $250 payments to more than 50 million seniors to make up for no increase in Social Security next year.
The White House put the cost at $13 billion (slightly more than 1 hour of war).
1 Billion–The number of hungry people in the world.
A year after the financial system was brought to its knees, a resurgent JPMorgan Chase reported a second consecutive quarter of surprisingly strong profit on Wednesday, solidifying its position at the pinnacle of American banking.
JPMorgan’s results — $3.6 billion in profit for the third quarter — fanned hopes on Wall Street that the nation’s financial sector was entering a new period of prosperity, despite lingering troubles.
and:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.‘s third-quarter earnings more than tripled from the depths of the financial crisis a year ago as higher trading profits offset a drop in investment banking.Goldman earned $3.03 billion in the July-September period, or $5.25 per share, easily beating analysts’ expectations of $4.24, the bank reported Thursday. Goldman also recorded $5.35 billion in compensation expenses.
The combined Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase quarterly earnings amount to $6.63 per hungry person. And the reason some of those folks are hungry is because:
Corporate earnings are up — mainly because companies have been cutting costs. Payrolls comprise 70 percent of most companies’ costs, which means companies have been slashing jobs. In the end, this is a self-defeating strategy. If workers don’t have jobs or are afraid of losing them, they won’t buy, and company profits will disappear.
Oh and by the way,
There were 344,000 foreclosure filings and banks re-possessed 88,000 homes last month.
Can’t say it better than this: Robert Reich—
In other words, this is all temporary fluff, folks. Anyone who hasn’t learned by now that there’s almost no relationship between the Dow and the real economy deserves to lose his or her shirt in the Wall Street casino.
Meanwhile at the Wyobraska Tea Party—
An AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the same rifle that a man carried to an Obama rally in Minnesota last month, was auctioned off and scores of tickets were sold, raising about $2,300, with another approximately $500 donated to the group.
