patrick.net

Troy says

“The California State Teachers Retirement System needs nearly $4 billion annually on top of the $1.35 billion budgeted by Brown this year in order to be fully funded in 30 years.”

Okay then, let's say we do just enough to have it 75% funded in 30 years. That would be better than where we are now.

The next thirty years is the most expensive time for payouts (to the baby boom retirees) so worrying about having it 100% funded thirty years from now doesn't make sense. Not that it wouldn't be nice, but that's asking too much.

Even if it was 70% funded 30 years from now, and 80% funded 30 years after that and so on. Actually, even if it held steady, at the level it is now (relative to the next thirty years) that's sufficient. This was the reason for my question about how far out you go to take the net present value of increases in contributions.

The real problem is making sure that the funding level doesn't significantly decrease. But this is also one of the reasons that getting hung up on little fluctuations doesn't make sense. We don't have to totally freak out every time there is a recession or a big drop in the stock market (it's an investment fund). But at the some time, yes assumptions matter.

hey...the ignore button does actually work...!

400 pound Michael Moore says we have plenty of money. According to him, the federal government isn't broke and the states aren't broke. It must be very easy to be a liberal: See a problem, deny it exists, it therefore magically disappears.

709hannah says

you bring nothing of importance to the discussion. i can remember when i started reading patrick.net but many years ago there was a core group that were extremely smart and relevent….there seem to be a handful of idiots that have taken over most of the threads….too bad.

Another genius. Instead of trying to learn something, it's far easier to put anyone who disagrees with you on ignore. Wonderful. And people wonder why it's impossible to have a civilized debate anymore...

Maybe this is what the Duck Dude was looking for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw

RayAmerica says

400 pound Michael Moore says we have plenty of money. According to him, the federal government isn’t broke and the states aren’t broke. It must be very easy to be a liberal: See a problem, deny it exists, it therefore magically disappears.

Ray, you can't prove a point by simply insulting people. Your argument has both logical and factual errors.

Mr.Fantastic says

That’s nothing. I got elliemae to go off the deep end by simply using the word “faggot”, not even directed at her (though I did much later).

Congrats. Did you feel like a big man afterwards?

Mr.Fantastic says

I was pleasantly surprised at my skills, and continue to be. The fact that you’ve been following me around for 3 months ever since I exposed you for lying about your income further proves the point.

I'm laughing. Hate to break it to your obvioulsy fragile ego, but I've mostly ignored you after your trolling because painfully obvious.

So the question still stands. How much of the "imports" are parts from overseas that assembled together into something that become "exports" or domestic consumption and is this "manufacturing"? It's your post nomo, how about it? Why do you keep dancing around this? You keep making the claims, where's the beef?

bob2356 says

So the question still stands.

And its a good question. In my opinion the methods employed today are outdated and dont capture actual production made domestic. If HP production went up, it is assumed its all US domestic only and not international operations which it is.

Here is something off the headlines...

Medtronic resolves FDA warnings over 2 factories
FDA lifts warnings against 2 Medtronic plants, clearing way for new product approvals
The FDA cited the company in November 2009 and June 2009 over problems at facilities in Mounds View, Minn., and Juncos, Puerto Rico.

For all intend and purposes, Meds offshore Puerto Rico factory is an extension of US manufacturing and gets reported as part of US numbers. Had this been a third party, not owned by Meds, the inventory numbers (COGS) whould still be assumed to be US based, because it is assumed to be Meds production and not a third party.

Additionally, there arent any Govt reporting requirements which would provide dissecting such data. Mfg has changed over the past 10-15 years and Govt has not kept up with the changes. Supply Chain software has radically changed everthing. What you see today in the media are surveys and studies. But nothing is real time real data.

Mr.Fantastic says

tatupu70 says

I’m laughing. Hate to break it to your obvioulsy fragile ego, but I’ve mostly ignored you after your trolling because painfully obvious.

Yet in the past 2 weeks, you’ve come into FOUR threads where your first post was to try and get my attention. I thought you were happily married and straight.

Every post on here is trying to get your attention in your mind, isn't it? And I looked at my posts over the last two weeks and it showed that your were full of crap. Again.

ChrisLA says

Ray, you can’t prove a point by simply insulting people.

Insult? Just stating a fact. Michael Moore does tip the scales at 400.

People here have attributed the pension problem to various causes, but I will tell you another, and this is as interesting and major an economic phenomenon as some of the ones we have discussed recently regarding the seventies and eighties.

What this is really about is the population growth and economic growth leveling off. It is much easier to have a pension fund relatively well funded when the number of members is rapidly increasing and the economy is doing well (meaning tax revenues easily support the benefits).

But everyone is so myopic, they don't stop to think: When you have an economic system/model that basically requires population growth to work, you are in trouble when that growth slows down. To call it a ponzi scheme is overstating it, but it is a big factor here.

The public sector work force was growing for the past many decades but now the baby boom is about to go in to retirement, and the generations following it aren't much bigger (as was always previously the case), I'm sure there were many bright actuary types who saw this coming. But of course the politicians didn't want to plan long term.

But now that we are here, and also in a serious recession (relative to state tax revenues). Shrek and and his small hateful friends, hope that we just totally fuck the public workers over. I think there are solutions to this, and I hope that Brown and the government are up to the challenge of making the tough decisions. Part of the solution comes from contribution increases, part comes from small increases on the employer and state side contributions and part comes from implementing several of the reasonable suggestions from the above report.

Nomograph says

Don’t try to send people on wild goose chases all over the Internet because *you* want to know the ratio of domestic vs. imported parts in U.S. manufactured goods.
Don’t be so intellectually lazy. Go get the data, construct an argument, and then we’ll talk. I’m not here to prove your point for you.

Translate: They dont know but have a vested interest in pumping any misinformation that comes their way for their benefit. If you have a question, they say get lost.

A swindler by any other name is a swindler....

Nomograph says

I have a vested interest in manufacturing?

your vested interest is in RE.

According to your chart, SF county is already below 2009 for sold/sqft.

Obviously 2009 wasn't the bottom. I seriously doubt this year will be either.

So what is your explanation to the current sold $/sq.ft lower then your 2009 sold $/sq.ft?

http://www.redfin.com/city/9927/CA/Lafayette

bubblesitter says

So what is your explanation to the current sold $/sq.ft lower then your 2009 sold $/sq.ft?
http://www.redfin.com/city/9927/CA/Lafayette

According to the graph: the trend is still down. The tax credit sticks out like a sore thumb. We're going down for a while - no getting around that.

joshuatrio says

The tax credit sticks out like a sore thumb.

As was easily predicted - and obvious when prices started shooting up in Spring 2009. Obvious if you're not a duck:)

Mr.Fantastic says

It still pisses me off to this day that our administration spent that much money propping up the market, for THAT result.

That was the campaign promise of change. The biggest bail out in US history, if I am not mistaken.

What about inventory? In all three markets posted (SD,SF,LA) existing inventory is FAR lower this spring than in 2011. Supply is low, and demand is not necessarily going to be good this year, given the ongoing oil spike, dithering employment returns from last fall's faux recovery, and another round of tightening for lending standards coming up.

My guess is that fewer houses for sale = fewer home sales period. And we all know what that means in the long run...

Mr.Fantastic says

It still pisses me off to this day that our administration spent that much money propping up the market, for THAT result.

Yep, it didn't do much. Most of the homes on MLS now have "Price Reduced" next to every listing. The ship is sinking again and a lot of people don't like it.

So what if we had peak foreclosures in 2010, but when will that inventory hit the streets? Remember the subprime crisis and how every how was foreclosed on? According to Nomo's graph:

I remember all the inventory FOR SALE in the 2008-2009 time frame, but looking at the graph, where is all the inventory from 2009-2010?

Thank you for correcting the thread title.

Sorry for that oversized graphic, I can remove it if it's fucking up anybody's mobile device.

Here's a zoomed in version:

According to Clear Capital, SF Bay Area went from -4.5% to -4.0% quarter to quarter declines. In another words, it's slightly less bad due to February sales. Note that CC uses patent pending rolling quarters [that] compare the most recent four months to the previous three months. Without looking up their patent, by my calculations February was still negative. I still think seasonality will prevail and we'll see an uptick in the spring (April C/S SF Bay Area).

yeah, here's what the CEO said:

"The cost is justified to avoid the mental and physical disabilities that can come with very premature births, said KV Pharmaceutical chief executive Gregory J. Divis Jr. The cost of care for a preemie is estimated at $51,000 in the first year alone.

"Makena can help offset some of those costs," Divis told The Associated Press. "These moms deserve the opportunity to have the benefits of an FDA-approved Makena."

This confirms the 'money-or-your-life' logic of the medical industry that I harp on about.

Ah, who knew that the March of Dimes was in the tank now:

"The March of Dimes, which gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from Ther-Rx, celebrated the approval in a press release, saying if all women eligible for the shots receive them, nearly 10,000 spontaneous premature births could be prevented each year."

This is how pharmaceuticals gold-brick their expenses:

"To get FDA approval, the company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in additional research, including an international study involving 1,700 women, Divis said."

"International" probably means Russia, where medical trials are cheap and fast.

Then they get a 7 year period of exclusivity.

The real value of this windfall can be seen in the stock's market cap, which rose to $600M. They've said:

"In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, company officials said by the end of 2013 its net sales from Makena could reach about $420 million - or about 90 percent of the company's net revenues."

and

"KV is paying nearly $200 million to Hologic Inc. to acquire the exclusive rights to the drug Makena. Hologic, a Massachusetts company, received FDA approval for Makena on Feb. 3."

Business as usual.

Our Big government giveth:

"The approval of Makena was based on a study of 463 women who had experienced a previous singleton spontaneous preterm birth. The study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, showed that compared to controls, treatment with Makena reduced the proportion of women who delivered preterm at less than 37 weeks. After adjusting for time in the study, 7.5 percent of Makena-treated subjects delivered prior to 25 weeks compared to 4.7 percent of control subjects."

http://www.pharmaage.com/2011/02/04/ther-rx-corporation-bags-fda-approval-for-makena/

and our Big Government taketh away. But other "Big Governments" don't have this problem. Canada, Japan, UK, etc. ride their medical service providers much harder than we do and they don't tolerate this crap.

Here, we're so riven by red vs. blue bullshit that the rent-seeking bastards can operate in shadows, cleaning up.

shrekgrinch says

even though the FDA does this kind of thing despite which party is in power?

I'm not here to defend the FDA, no. I've heard enough horror stories about it that this is not surprising, though it is a pretty salient example of how screwed up our profit-seeking system is.

We're basically paying twice the per-capita costs for less than half the care compared to real "Big Government" mixed-economy states, and it's this kind of bullshit that is inflating our costs.

"Big Government" isn't the problem, shitty government is. And we got a lot of that, thanks to the red-blue divide -- to defend myself from the reds, I've got to hold my nose for the blues.

We'll see won't we ?

The California money going in to pensions isn't the source of California's budget woes. But it's true that the budget problems make this the wrong time for upping California pensions costs any more than absolutely necessary.

If you were interested you could read my suggestions above. Increase member pay in. Minor increase of California's contribution (but maybe not until after budget situation is straightened out). Implement some of the more reasonable reforms that the Hoover report (and others have suggested) and then see where things stand.

Your right, feelings don't matter. I really don't care what the reason is that you have no sense of proportion when it comes to this problem. We all know that Brown will be addressing this, and you're right, there won't be tax increases tied directly to this. Let's just see what happens.

Prop 187 would have saved California from MOST of the money troubles that have destroyed it.

Troy says

marcus says

and now have less employment alternatives, they will decrease their compensation from what was promised

Thing is, I don’t think the public is going to vote to pay for stuff like this:
“CalSTRS’ formula, which is based largely on employee salary, age and longevity, tends to reward retirement at age 61½. For example, a teacher who has worked for 35 years, making $90,000 in her final year, could retire at age 62 and reap a $75,600 annual pension.”
http://calpensions.com/2011/03/07/budget-busting-pensions-spark-ballot-measures/
Now that’s a gold-bricked pension plan. Not going to survive in this environment, not at all.

Troy, how does the whole pension plan game work?

Is that 75k per year money that she paid in? Where does the money come from and how is it tied to our taxes?

Bap33 says

Prop 187 would have saved California from MOST of the money troubles that have destroyed it.

I remembered the days where I would have refuted you calling bloody murder....but I just did my taxes with ZERO exemptions claimed all year long and the IRS stills wants an addtion 2K out of my pocket. This spending spree has to stop somewhere.

If you sponsored my racecar you would spend the same amount of money, but it would be spent when and where you like, and your message would be proudly displayed on the sides on the car. A moving billboard, of sorts. A write off for advertising ,,,, hard to beat that! lol

marcus says

People here have attributed the pension problem to various causes, but I will tell you another, and this is as interesting and major an economic phenomenon as some of the ones we have discussed recently regarding the seventies and eighties.

What this is really about is the population growth and economic growth leveling off. It is much easier to have a pension fund relatively well funded when the number of members is rapidly increasing and the economy is doing well (meaning tax revenues easily support the benefits).

But everyone is so myopic, they don’t stop to think: When you have an economic system/model that basically requires population growth to work, you are in trouble when that growth slows down. To call it a ponzi scheme is overstating it, but it is a big factor here.

The public sector work force was growing for the past many decades but now the baby boom is about to go in to retirement, and the generations following it aren’t much bigger (as was always previously the case), I’m sure there were many bright actuary types who saw this coming. But of course the politicians didn’t want to plan long term.

I think this is mostly right. The boomer generation retirement was coming and what did they do? They LOWERED the retirement age and boosted benefits, without bothering to actually fund those new liabilities. Instead they just upped the assumptions of returns on that their huge pile of investments to the point where they assumed it would double every 10 years.

I would LOVE to have a retirement account that I could contribute to that is GUARANTEED by the taxpayer to double every 10 years, like you have. Hell, why can't every American? Simple reason is that they can't. It's magical thinking.

I keep bringing up Social Security for a good reason. This is actually a reality based system, that needs some tweaking but is basically sound. Compare what SS did to what the CA retirement systems did when they saw the boomer wave coming. Greenspan & Reagan (setting aside the many bad things I could say about them), actually saved the system by raising the payroll tax and scheduling bumps up in the retirement age. And SS made NO assumptions about ponzi returns on investment on the surplus they ran.

marcus says

But now that we are here, and also in a serious recession (relative to state tax revenues). Shrek and and his small hateful friends, hope that we just totally fuck the public workers over. I think there are solutions to this, and I hope that Brown and the government are up to the challenge of making the tough decisions. Part of the solution comes from contribution increases, part comes from small increases on the employer and state side contributions and part comes from implementing several of the reasonable suggestions from the above report.

The public workers that are going to get fucked over are: 1) the ones that get laid off, and 2) The new hires. The senior workers are golden. The will fight to keep all the benefits promised them. The public will likely grow to resent them more and more, but it won't matter because it's unconstitutional to break the contract, and their is no such thing as a state bankruptcy. They already got theirs, and if people have to be laid off, benefits for new hires have to slashed to the bone, and poor people have to do with less so that firefighers can keep their $100K pensions, then so be it.

Sounds to me that someone is jealous of someone elses inheritance.

People in this country would gladly welcome a wealthy monarchy. Many would applaud and bow and courtsey secretly hoping that they would have their own "Cinderella" story.

It's only a small step away from our current situation. Dumb Teabaggers cheer as worker's rights are eliminated, while tax breaks for dead rich people are decreed, and tax breaks remain in place for the fat lazy idle rich hoping that one day they too will become fat lazy idle rich economic parasites. That's not going to happen. The 1% Country Club is closed to commoners. And with these tax breaks for the dead decaying fat idle rich economic parasites, The Club becomes even more exclusive and unattainable. These fat idle rich economic parasites protect their own aggressively.

The double/triple taxation argument is, frankly, silly. Currency is, well, current. It flows around. You tax income, and the rest gets spent on goods. Is the sales tax double taxation? Is the profit the merchant realizes from the goods triple taxation? Is the profit the manufacturer realizes quadruple taxation? When the manufacturer pays his employees is that quintuple taxation? When he pays his dividends is it sextuple taxation? When the dividend recipient dies is the estate tax heptuple taxation?

Well, you can make those arguments. Sure. I'll give you heptuple. But who cares? You kind of have to be stuck on some aesthetic of fairness to be outraged. Money's going to flow around, and you can't just say that once it's been taxed, that's it --no more! Taxes ain't fair. Full stop. You'll find no aesthetic beauty in them, and the search is stupid. Meanwhile, we've got a government to run --that's not an ideal state, but until someone invents utopia, it sure beats the alternative.

The best way to think about taxes is to first ask yourself how much is necessary. I think the U.S. probably needs to be taxing about 20% of GDP at the Federal level --which is within even recent historical norms. It's currently taxing about 15% with the Bush and Obama tax cuts in place. We are not, in point of fact, Taxed Enough Already. We're taxed less than we have been in decades despite a wildfire growth in defense spending since 9/11, demographic chickens coming home to roost, the passage of Medicare Part D funded entirely on deficit to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, and that stimulus which we really need to be weaning ourselves off of.

It's simply not a gap that can be fixed by closing our eyes and chanting "waste, fraud and abuse" or "tax cuts raise revenue."

Having figured out how much we need, one should then ask where it should come from. The disolution of the middle class is a worrisome trend for our nation, and might reasonably inform such deliberations. My quotation above was from Churchill. The problems of America today mirror the problems of Europe past, and might --god forbid-- require the intellectual bravery to step outside of ideological comfort zones.

simchaland says

People in this country would gladly welcome a wealthy monarchy. Many would applaud and bow and courtsey secretly hoping that they would have their own “Cinderella” story.

True dat. Tax concessions for the rich are supported by those who believe that someday they'll be amongst the rich people. This is why the lottery grows so quickly - especially during recession years.

As somebody who stands to gain significantly from any tax cuts to the inheritance tax... I say rack it back up! 55% sounds about right. Besides, you can dump 10k per person per year tax free, so these rich beyotches are already dodging as much tax as they can. If you have a wife, and 3 kids, each with 3 kids and a spouse, you can get rid of $300k a year tax free if you really try. (20k per family member if you both give 10k, which is 100k per family.)

2 kids with spouses and 2 kids, 160k a year tax free.

I'm all for the estate tax. We don't need to help the rich to be richer. If they get too MUCH richer, it's pitchforks and torches time. That's what their taxes go to.