The Cynical Economist

From SLATE
By Annie Lowrey

Law schools are manufacturing more lawyers than America needs, and law students aren’t happy about it.

During the recession, the logic was ubiquitous:The economy is terrible—better to wait it out! It is a three-year fast track to a remunerative, respectable career! It’s not just learning a subject—it’s learning how to think! Law school, always the safe choice, became a more popular choice. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of LSAT takers climbed 20.5 percent. Law school applications increased in turn.

But now a number of recent or current law students are saying—or screaming—that they made a mistake. They went to law school, they say, and now they’re underemployed or jobless, in debt, and three years older. And statistics show that the evidence is more than anecdotal.

One Boston College Law School third-year—miraculously, still anonymous—begged for his tuition back in exchange for a promise to drop out without a degree, in an open letter to his dean published earlier this month. “This will benefit both of us,” he argues. “On the one hand, I will be free to return to the teaching career I left to come here. I’ll be able to provide for my family without the crushing weight of my law school loans. On the other hand, this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News. This will present no loss to me, only gain: in today’s job market, a J.D. seems to be more of a liability than an asset.”

He is one of dozens of law students who have gone public, very public, to chastise the schools they elected to attend for leaving them older and poorer. One popular medium is the “scam blog,” where indebted,unemployed attorneys accuse law schools of being little better than tuition-sucking diploma mills. (Sample blog title: Shilling Me Softly.) The author of one popular, if histrionic, such blog describes his law school as a Ponzi scheme.

Others have taken, perhaps inevitably, to the courts. Kenneth Desornes, for instance, named his law school in his bankruptcy filing. He asks the school to “[a]dmit that your business knew or should have known that Plaintiff would be in no position to repay those loans.”

The students might be litigious—no surprise there—and overwrought. But they’ve got a point. The demand for lawyers has fallen off a cliff, both due to the short-term crisis of the recession and long-term changes to the industry, and is only starting to rebound. The lawyers that do have jobs are making less than they used to. At the same time, universities seeking revenue have tacked on law schools, minting more lawyers every year.

read the rest here

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Employers in U.S. Start Bracing for Higher Tax Withholding – “I’ve been doing payroll for probably close to 30 years now, and never have we seen something like this where it gets that down to the wire,” said Dennis Danilewicz, who manages payroll services for about 14,000 employees at New York University’sLangone Medical Center. “That’s what’s got a lot of people nervous. All we can do is start preparing communications with a couple of different scenarios.” Here goes the Christmas spending – down the drain….

Insider Selling Volume at Highest Level Ever Tracked – The overwhelming volume of sell transactions relative to buy transactions by company insiders over the last six months in key leading sectors of the market is the worst Alan Newman, editor of the Crosscurrents newsletter, has ever seen since he began tracking the data. Who the hell is selling? And who the hell is buying? The market is going up…So someone must be buying.

Fed Gears Up for Stimulus -Eyes Gradual Bond Buying of Several Hundred Billion Dollars; Doubts Linger. Vrooommm, Vroom… Pedal to the metal

NASA Confirms Water on Moon – Scientists report massive amounts of frozen water hidden below the moon’s darkest craters.

China to launch manned space lab around 2020 - China said on Wednesday it would launch a space lab to be manned for long stretches within about 10 years, a move it believes would bring it closer to the United States and Russia as powers capable of reaching the moon.

Chinese Computer Trumps US One as World’s Fastest – A newly built supercomputer in China appears poised to take the world performance lead, another sign of the country’s growing technological prowess that is likely to set off alarms about U.S. competitiveness and national security.

China is on path to ‘militarization of space’ – The Asian space race is moving along slowly, but steadily – and China is in the lead, with technology that could give it a military advantage over the US.

CBO Director Says ObamaCare Will Drive People From the Workforce – Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf said the most significant economic effect of President Barack Obama’s health care reform package will be to drive people out of the job market. He explained that people would choose not to work because they could subsist on the generous federal insurance subsidies and Medicaid payments contained in the health care overhaul. Why don’t we all just quit our jobs and wait for the government to cover our bills by printing and sending us  checks

A.I.G. Bailout Losses Hidden, Report Says – In early October, the Treasury estimated that taxpayers would lose $5 billion on their investment in A.I.G., in contrast with a earlier prediction of $45 billion. Gee… aren’t we lucky.

German Unemployment Dips to 18-Year Low in October – German unemployment fell slightly in October, dropping to its lowest level in 18 years as the impact of persistently strong growth in Europe’s top economy continued to filter through to the jobs market. Do you remember this headline from few months ago?- Merkel Backs `Decisive’ Cuts as U.S. Urges Spending

Teachers Spent $9M On Cosmetic Surgery in 2009 – The state-appointed authority overseeing Buffalo public school finances says taxpayer-covered cosmetic surgery rung up by the city’s teachers totaled nearly $9 million in 2009.

Gore leaves car idling for one hour during speech; Opts for Swedish government jet over public transportation – Stupidity and hypocracy – as well as vanity – are, like it or not common human traits. I admit to some of them occasionally, but I don’t demand taxpayers to finance my stupid talks at dinner (yes, I love doing that). Here’s the deal Mr Gore: get out of my way, and I will keep out of yours.

EU plans for direct tax would lead to British referendum – The European Union’s plans to levy direct taxes on Britons and those in other member countries would amount to a “transfer of sovereignty” that would force the Coalition Government to hold a Europe referendum.

HSBC, JPMorgan Accused in Suit of Placing ‘Spoof’ Silver Orders – HSBC Holdings Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were accused in an investor’s lawsuit of placing “spoof” trading orders to manipulate silver futures and options prices in violation of U.S. antitrust law.

Blowing Bubbles forever – The Fed has been inflating asset prices as part of policy since at least the mid-1990s. The wealth effect is the primary mechanism, make people richer and they’ll spend more. So QE is there to goose asset markets. But this’ll end badly. And the next time the Fed won’t have any silver bullets left to kill recession.

During the communist era in Eastern Europe, consumer services and goods shortages were very common. From 1980 to the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of 1991, nearly every kind of food was rationed. Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually disappeared from state owned stores. While the gap was partially filled by non-state stores which started to appear in the mid 1980s, the prices in non-state stores were often 5-10 times higher than in state stores and were often out of reach for the general population.

Goods as electronics, cars, furniture….they were only a dream for the regular citizen.  There was such a shortage that there was a big black market for these goods. If you wanted them, either you buy them on the black market and get them immediately or you sign up in the legal queue list and wait for years to receive them.

You see to buy a car legally you had to make payments first for 10 year and then get it. To buy an apartment the wait was even lengthier. The problem was not that the people did not have the money to pay and buy the car or apartment at once with their savings, but the shortage of goods and services produced by the inefficiencies of the planned economies. Every single thing was produced by the government or supplied by the government bureaucracies. It did not work…

A very popular joke that was going around during that time period was this one:

I want to sign in the queue to buy a car. How long is it going to take to get one?”

“Ten years from today exactly”

“Morning or evening?”

“Why does it matter?”

“A plumber is coming to fix the leak in my bathroom  in the morning, so I have to be home “

Now think about this joke when reading the article below. You see, the people, who wait on the government to “fix things” for them are going to wait at least a few months from now to get them fixed.

The people who don’t wait on the government to come and help them, who do not see the government as the ultimate solution for every single thing, they will have it repaired in the next few days either by working on the problem by themselves or paying someone who know how to fix it to come as soon as possible…

If you haven’t watched the John Stosel documentary go and watch it here .

From NYT

Public housing is falling apart around the country, as federal money has been unable to keep up with the repair needs of buildings more than half a century old.

Over the last 15 years, 150,000 of the nation’s public housing units have been lost, officials said, as agencies have sold or torn down decrepit properties. An additional 5,700 units are pending removal from federal public housing programs.

In New York City, which has a three-year backlog of repair requests, the effects can be seen in places like Aixa Torres’s apartment on the Lower East Side.

The paint chips were the first to be dislodged, drifting like snowflakes from her kitchen ceiling. When water began dripping through the ceiling, forming a hole sometime this spring, she called her landlord, the city’s public housing authority.

A maintenance worker showed up to take a look, and repairs were scheduled.

A plasterer would come to fix the hole in May 2011. A painter would come to cover up the plasterer’s work in May 2012.

read the rest here

In the joke above the time to see a plumber was made to be 10 years on purpose, so the joke was funny, but when I read the NYT article and when I think about it…IN REALITY, EVEN IN COMMUNIST RUSSIA  A WATER LEEK DID NOT TAKE SUCH A  LONG TIME TO GET FIXED…May 2011, May 2012 WTF? Are unions involved in the work order, so it takes so long?

LOL coincidentally from the video recommendations in the previous post, I found a video with Ronald Reagan telling the joke above. Yep it was very popular joke in the 1980′s…

Dubai-based DP World is one of the world’s largest marine terminal operators, with 50 terminals and 11 new developments and major expansions across 31 countries.  From its latest report:

DP World continues to handle container volumes ahead of the levels reported in 2008 reflecting how resilient our portfolio was to the global declines in 2009. Volume growth in the third quarter has been driven by strong growth in the Asia Pacific, Americas and Australia regions as well as a continuation of returning volumes across Europe and a stabilization of volume growth in the UAE.”

I just want to see where the shipments are originated and where are they shipped and what kind of goods are shipped, who is buying and who is selling…Volume growth doesn’t mean that everything is good and dandy again, doesn’t mean we are back to pre-recession 2008 world…