{"id":54127,"date":"2015-07-06T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T17:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=54127"},"modified":"2015-07-03T12:48:38","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T17:48:38","slug":"a-thousand-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=54127","title":{"rendered":"A Thousand Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there’s one thing I cordially detest about social media today, it’s the photo-memeification of all political debate. \u00a0On Facebook and Twitter, thousands of people can pass along a graphic, often wrong, frequently giggly\/snarky photo in lieu of understanding an issue or being able to state a coherent case.<\/p>\n

But sometimes they’re right:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been harping on the workforce participation numbers since 2011 – and they’ve just gotten worse.<\/p>\n

And the fact is, if we’re ever going to reduce that debt figure (which doesn’t, by the way, count all the other unfunded entitlements that are floating about in the ether in numbers that look like they should be expressing Zimbabwean currency), it’s going to take actual productivity<\/a> – which you’re not going to get when a huge percentage of your most-nominally-productive population are sitting idle, having given up hope that the economy will find a place for them.<\/p>\n

(“But Mitch”, someone will no doubt say, “the workforce number reflects the number of baby-boomers that are retiring!”. \u00a0Sure, some of it. \u00a0But the percentage of Americans over 65 who are at work has actually risen<\/a> – alone among the age groups – since the recession started. \u00a0And people drop off the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures after 70, so any retiring boomers will be out of the statistical picture momentarily, here…).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If there’s one thing I cordially detest about social media today, it’s the photo-memeification of all political debate. \u00a0On Facebook and Twitter, thousands of people can pass along a graphic, often wrong, frequently giggly\/snarky photo in lieu of understanding an issue or being able to state a coherent case. But sometimes they’re right: I’ve been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,64,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-president-obama","category-the-great-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54127"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54129,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54127\/revisions\/54129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}