AMY DAVIDSON, - The New Yorker
Stephan: I was astonished to hear on television tonight that the nuns of America have been chastised by the Vatican and the bishops for paying too much time and attention helping the poor, and powerless, and not enough becoming involved with politics and trying to defeat marriage equality, and condemning homosexuals. Coming from an all-male hierarchy, a significant number of whom are either child molesters, or people who have covered up this molestation this comment reveals how deeply sick this institution has become. One wonders with which group -- the Vatican or the nuns -- Jesus would side? Frankly, these women are too good for the Roman Church in its present state of corruption.
The fight over contraception and health-care reform was portrayed as various kinds of wars-on women, on religion, between the G.O.P. and Obama-but it also included a skirmish in a longer fight within Catholicism, with the Vatican and bishops on one side and American nuns on the other. On Wednesday, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which for a few years has been conducting an inquiry into the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main association of American nuns-provoked, it said, by its discernment of ‘radical feminist themes
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SHANNON BOND and JASON ABBRUZZESE, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: This is a very interesting new trend. I think what we are looking at is a younger generation with less and less money to spend, as well as a growing sense that the way things are structured today is a recipe for disaster.
Young Americans are eschewing cars for alternative transport, leaving carmakers to wonder if this is a recession-induced trend or a permanent shift in habits.
For generations of American teenagers, the car was the paramount symbol of independence. But in the age of Facebook and iPhones, young adults are getting fewer drivers’ licences, driving less frequently and moving to cities where cars are more luxury than necessity.
Figures from the Federal Highway Administration show the share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s licence rose to 26 per cent in 2010, from 21 per cent a decade earlier, according to a study by the Frontier Group and the US PIRG Education Fund released this month. (Some US states allow 14-year-olds to get a learner’s permit to drive.) Another study from the University of Michigan showed that people under 30 accounted for 22 per cent of all licensed drivers, down from a third in 1983, with the steepest declines among teenagers.
At the same time, cycling, walking and public transport use rose among 16 to 34-year-olds from 2001 to 2009, the Frontier study said. This trend has probably been accelerated by the recession, which has seen young people lose jobs and suffer steep falls in […]
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ANISHA SEKAR, - US News and World Report
Stephan: Yet another aspect of the war on women, this one coming from the Federal Reserve.
Anisha Sekar is the vice president of Credit and Debit Products at nerdwallet.com
Recent events may have brought the debate over homemakers’ contributions back into the spotlight, but last month marked the one-year anniversary of a major - if unnoticed - salvo in the war on stay-at-home parents. Last year, the Federal Reserve declared that credit card applicants must use their individual income on the application, not their household’s. This seemingly innocuous pronouncement has resounding implications: homemakers cannot get a credit card without the breadwinners’ permission.
Statement implies that homemakers do not contribute to income
The Fed put out its statement to clarify a provision of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which sought to protect college students from getting too-high credit limits and digging themselves into debt. When the CARD Act was passed, students could apply for a line of credit and list their parents’ incomes as their own, thereby getting inappropriately high limits. The law intended to prevent students from borrowing against an income they did not earn.
As a remedy, the legislation required those under 21 to either list their own income - which, for most students, is too small to get a credit card - or enlist a co-signer, who is legally responsible for the debt.
All of this is innocuous enough. But […]
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Thursday, April 19th, 2012
JEN SOBOLEWSKI, - Bowling Green State University
Stephan: This is a very sad but, I am afraid, very realistic assessment of what is coming for Baby Boomers. The inability of Americans to see that collective action to support a social need is essential to a civilized nation is going to produce a number of social outcomes like this one. It is very strange and would seem incomprehensible to the Founders who, mostly, would be considered socialists today.
BOWLING GREEN, O. — Startling new statistics from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) paint a bleak future for the largest generation in history, the baby boomers, as they cross into old age.
Using data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses and the 2009 round of the American Community Survey, Dr. I-Fen Lin, an associate professor of sociology, and Dr. Susan Brown, a professor of sociology and co-director of the NCFMR, found one-third of adults aged 45-63 are unmarried. This represents a more than 50 percent increase since 1980, when just 20 percent of middle-aged Americans were unmarried.
Most single boomers are divorced or never married. In fact, one in three single baby boomers has never been married. Just 10 percent of unmarried boomers are widowed.
‘The shift in marital composition of the middle-aged suggests that researchers and policymakers can no longer focus on widowhood in later life and should pay attention to the vulnerabilities of the never-married and divorced as well,’ said Lin.
According to Brown, one in five single baby boomers is living in poverty compared to one in 20 for their married counterparts. Single boomers are twice as likely to be disabled, but they […]
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Thursday, April 19th, 2012
JEFF NIELSON, - The Street
Stephan: This will confirm what you may already suspect, and have witnessed in your own life, or the lives of your friends.
Click through to see the chart that illustrates the main points.
NEW YORK — In writing about the relentless collapse of Western economies, I frequently point to ’40 years of plummeting wages’ for Western workers, in real dollars. However, where I have been remiss is in quantifying the magnitude of this collapse in Western wages.
On several occasions, I have glibly referred to how it now takes two spouses working to equal the wages of a one-income family of 40 years ago. Unfortunately, that is now an understatement. In fact, Western wages have plummeted so low that a two-income family is now (on average) 15% poorer than a one-income family of 40 years ago.
Regular readers will recognize the chart below on U.S. average wages.
Using the year 2000 as the numerical base from which to ‘zero’ all of the numbers, real wages peaked in 1970 at around $20/hour. Today the average worker makes $8.50/hour — more than 57% less than in 1970. And since the average wage directly determines the standard of living of our society, we can see that the average standard of living in the U.S. has plummeted by over 57% over a span of 40 years.
There are no ‘tricks’ here. Indeed, all of the tricks are used by our […]
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