Some Friday Happy News

This from "Some Assembly Required" -- please follow link and visit this website.
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Annual Checkup: Health insurance went up 9% last year. A family of four now pays $15,073 a year for insurance that pays only some of the costs of being sick. Try that on WalMart minimum wage. Explain to me again why we don't have, don't want, single payer national healthcare.

A More Perfect Union: A plethora of financial commentators are finally catching on to the fact that Europe's problem is not debt or fiscal irresponsibility, or even those lazy Greeks, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Italians... The problem is the trade balances, or rather the trade imbalances among the member nations. If a nation runs a negative trade balance (negative current account) it must borrow the difference in order to pay the bills. If the Eurozone was one big happy fiscal nation, like these United States, then the 'states' wouldn't have this problem. Sure, the US runs a deficit with the world at large, but nobody gets excited that Pennsylvania has an imbalance with Iowa. Either they gotta fuse, or dismember the euro.

Some Experience Required: The quickest way to change your mind about austerity programs is to suffer one.

Face It: Facebook has “inadvertently” been keeping track of every webpage you visit – even if you have logged out of Facebook itself. Imagine, tracking every webiste visited by its 750 million customers, every day. Imagine, if you possibly can, that it was done “inadvertently”.

Women and Children First: The order in which your city is likely to cut things in order to balance the budget without any of those horrid increased taxes is: Fire/lay off the people who provide the services. Cancel infrastructure repairs and improvements. Close the parks, pools, libraries, animal shelters, rec centers. Collect the garbage less often. “Modify” the health care benefits of city employees. Reduce public safety spending, close fire stations, cut police patrols. “Modify” pension benefits. Cut public health services. Cut spending on schools.

Bullies: Texas oil refineries want Texas school districts to pay for the pollution-control equipment the refiners are required to install. They claim they cannot afford to stop polluting the environment unless they get huge tax refunds. Win or lose, little Johnny should get an education.