03 Economy – Page 106 – Public Intelligence Blog

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

How Much Would A Big Mac Cost If McDonald's Workers Were Paid $15 Per Hour?

The plight of McDonald’s minimum-wage workersmade headlines earlier this month when the burger chain published a much-maligned sample monthly budget, purportedly aimed at helping its staffers save money.

In recent days, armchair prognosticators have taken their concerns to the internet, wondering on Twitter and in comments sections whether they’d be able to afford McDonald's MCD +0.96% food if the company doubled its workers’ wages.

Arnobio Morelix, a student at the University of Kansas School of Business, found himself asking the same question, so he did some financial modeling based on McDonald’s annual reports and data sets submitted to investors.

Morelix’s take: If McDonald’s workers were paid the $15 they’re demanding, the cost of a Big Mac would go up 68 cents, from its current price of $3.99 to $4.67.

A Big Mac meal would cost $6.66 rather than $5.69, and the chain’s famous Dollar Menu would go for $1.17.

“Some folks online are complaining they will not pay $2 for their Dollar Menu, but the truth is that even if McDonald’s doubled salaries the price hike would not be 100%,” Morelix said. “I will be happy to pay 17 cents more for my Dollar Menu so that fast food workers can have a living wage, and I believe people deserve to know that price hikes would not be as high as it is often portrayed.”

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Continue reading “Eagle: If McDonald's Paid a Living Wage…..AND Served Healthy Food?”

2013/07/28

SchwartzReport: How Big Finance Has Killed US Economy Including Innovation

03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Ineptitude

This is a really good take on what is happening financially, and why it has a deadening effect on technological development. When immediate profit is your only priority, there are no correcting forces, and you slowly go off course in terms of wellness. Until you crash. We ask the wrong questions so we get the wrong answers. Author’s note: This post is based on papers presented and remarks made during a *conference panel I moderated featuring William Lazonick of U Mass-Lowell, Jan Kregel of the Levy Institute and Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO.

Big Finance Is Strangling Innovation
LYNN STUART PARRAMORE, Senior Editor – Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)

2013/07/25

Jim Clifton (CEO at Gallup): Unemployment will Get WORSE in 2014

03 Economy

Unemployment Will Get Worse in 2014

President Barack Obama gave a major economic policy speech yesterday. Here’s what he didn’t say, and probably won’t ever say: Businesses will not begin new, significant hiring this year or in 2014.

Business leaders around the country tell me they’re not thinking about new hires right now. Rather, their sole focus is on how to win new customers. Too few people know this, but employees follow customer growth, not the other way around. Most importantly, businesses want to survive. They’ve cut everything to the bone and stored cash, and they won’t risk anything until they experience customer growth. New hires don’t solve their problems.

. . . . . .

Bluntly, the jobs picture is not improving, despite what you hear in the news, and it will get worse. Yes, businesses are sitting on billions of dollars in cash and productivity gains and the stock market has been rallying. But those businesses are hoarding that cash because they still lack that all-important state of mind and spirit: confidence.

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2013/07/222013/07/22

Alessandro Politi: The First Financial World War

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of Peace

This article is divided into two parts: the first part will summarise the situation and propose solutions, explaining the analytical and geopolitical reasons behind the war, the main players and events, future evolution and political proposals; the second will set out the events in chronological form, in order to avoid including an excessive amount of detail in the previous part.

. . . . . . . .

Democratic politics has been kidnapped and intoxicated by the insidious totalitarianism of finanzcapitalism. If democracy is not capable of winning back its independence and freedom, we may only have the cold comfort of living in a science fiction world where financial zaibatsu control the planet and Blade Runner will seem like a children’s fairy-tale.

2013-07-19 Politi First Financial World War

2013/07/22

David Swanson: Deep Dissection of Trans-Pacific Partnership — The Most Evil Reprehensible Impeachable Act To Come Out of Washington in Recent Memory

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government

TPP: The Terrible Plutocratic Plan

By David Swanson

Remarks July 21, 2013 at an Occupy Harrisonburg (Va.) Event.
Make your voice heard here.

Thanks to Michael Feikema and Doug Hendren for inviting me. Like most of you I do not spend my life studying trade agreements, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is disturbing enough to make me devote a little time to it, and I hope you will do the same and get your neighbors to do the same and get them to get their friends to do the same — as soon as possible.

I spend most of my time reading and writing about war and peace. I'm in the middle of writing a book about the possibility and need to abolish war and militarism. I hate to take a break from that. But if we think trade and militarism are separate topics we're fooling ourselves.

New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman, a big fan of the supposed wonders of the hidden hand of the market economy says, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Continue reading “David Swanson: Deep Dissection of Trans-Pacific Partnership — The Most Evil Reprehensible Impeachable Act To Come Out of Washington in Recent Memory”

2013/07/162013/07/16

Winslow Wheeler: Graphics Lie — and Tell the Truth — Actual Pentagon Budget Part II

03 Economy, 10 Security, DoD, Ethics, Government, Ineptitude, Military

“If Congress goes along [by approving President Obama's 2014 DOD budget request], Pentagon spending levels will exceed any previous high by any other president in any year in peace or in war since the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, except for President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2008.”

“…current military spending is lapping at historic highs, not lows.”

How can that be? The explanation follows; it is also at Time's Battleland blog.

Correcting the Pentagon's Distorted Budget History

The Defense Budget Is Even Larger Than You Think: part two of two

Given the warped measures that high-spending advocates and the Defense Department use to calibrate past, present and future defense spending (described here Monday), it is important to find an independent, objective yardstick to measure Pentagon spending trends accurately.

Unfortunately, there isn't one.

If there were, this debate would be over, and I could retire.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department might be tasked with the job of finding one, but it actually plays a major role in devising the Pentagon's self-serving measures of inflation. The Office of Management and Budget has its own deflators that are only slightly different.

Both embrace the proposition that a large portion of cost growth in Pentagon spending should be counted as inflation: the Pentagon experiences more inflation than other agencies and should get more money-the argument goes.

In the 1980s, the Congressional Military Reform Caucus argued that the Pentagon should be held to an independent but analogous measure of inflation, and identified the Producer Price Index as most appropriate. Others, especially the Defense Department, disagreed.

The differences will not be resolved here, but the question remains: what would the Pentagon's budget history look like if it lived by the rules followed by most everyone else – especially the rest of the federal government, and the American economy?

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Graphics Lie — and Tell the Truth — Actual Pentagon Budget Part II”

2013/07/162013/07/16

SmartPlanet: The world peaked in 1978

03 Economy, 06 Family, 11 Society, SmartPlanet

The world peaked in 1978

A new study of global wealth says prosperity peaked around 1978, and we’ve been heading downhill ever since. New Scientist reports.

Governments have tended to build economic policies around gross domestic product (GDP), the sum of all monetary transactions in an economy. GDP has risen fairly steadily — and often dramatically — since the second world war, implying the world has become more prosperous. Critics point out, however, that GDP only tells part of the story.

For a more comprehensive measure — one that accounts for social factors and environmental costs — economists started using the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It adjusts expenditure in 26 ways to account for costs like pollution, crime and inequality, and for beneficial activities where no money changes hands, such as housework and volunteering.

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Category: 03 Economy

Eagle: If McDonald’s Paid a Living Wage…..AND Served Healthy Food?