Many times in offshore outsourcing centers like Bangalore. The press buries it. Notice how the great Target breach, never mentioned is Target offshore outsources I.T. and customer support to India.

Verizon does as well, in spite of strong union presence in Verizon, communication workers.

Let's just cut to the inevitable endgame - where should we all send our birth stats, SSNs, DNA samples, etc. to so we can skip any delays with this Obamacare website crap. Who gets it? The Philippines? India? Some dudes riding the busses in Pakistan? A terrorist in Somalia or Syria? Maybe some shell companies that own stock in Accenture that are based out of South America? Who wants it? Eh!?

Good to know Americans have to pass urine tests and have background checks that last for years (and still don't get hired) to work for US contractors or even crappy low-wage jobs, but our information is forcibly gathered by "our government" and given to people that owe us no allegiance. Fantastic! Wait, wasn't some Minnesota-based retailer just in the news for exposing data of 110 million customers to hackers or something (which is episode 101,000 in ID theft and corporate negligence/malfeasance)? No worries, the NSA I'm sure will keep an eye out for us, along with the DOJ, and FBI, and Chris Christie, and the MSM, and on, and on. Nothing to see here, our Founding Fathers would be so proud of what we have running the show, not like they would revolt against this cesspool of corruption or anything, no, certainly not.

I overview the employment report in excruciating detail and every month I am horrified. I am especially horrified because this should not be if we had any real representation in D.C.

We should not be having a jobs crisis 6 years after the start of the recession and the fact manufacturing imploded, well they can blame capital all they wish, but the reality is there is plenty of capital and credit. They simply want America to think shipping jobs overseas isn't a problem and very obviously it is.

When we, along with the Russians and others liberated the prison camps in Germany, the townspeople tried to say they didn't know. Yet there were railcars full of dead bodies, those who had been allowed to starve to death on the edges of town. You could smell the stench from the thousands of dead bodies in the camps wafting over the towns. They knew. And I think if most Americans think about it, they know damn good and well that one person can't live on Social Security today, even with Medicare, and if there are two one will often have enough serious health issues that neither can. You WILL need food assistance, you WILL have trouble living in any but the least safe and least expensive neighborhoods, you will very likely not be able to maintain a vehicle for long, etc.

Sit down and calculate it. $1,269 is the average monthly benefit. Medicare doesn't pay for everything, so unless your health is without problem untl the day you die, there will be from hundreds to ? out of pocket - medications? Dental? Aids to walk? If they send you to physcical therapy, there will be a bill for that co-pay, every little thing that comes along will take a bit more. Parking meters at the SS office...

Want a wake up call? Go try and rent something for $600 a month. I mean really go take a look at it, as if you were seriously going to have to live in it. You will be shocked at what you find, IF you can find such a thing around you. And if you are scared to go into that neighborhood now, think about when you have a walker. By the time you retire, it may be $1000 a month for the same place, but your SS check won't have grown by nearly that amount. Calculate what you have left and think about what your life would be like on that today, as rents rise all around you. Sure, you/they could move. Who will pay for that? Go to the food banks - look at the empty shelves. See if there is a meals on wheels program - and if they have enough people for the demand from just seniors. And we haven't even had the largest numbers of retirees yet.

Property taxes. Food. Clothing. Forget cable, take up birdwatching. Enjoy it, because they may be eaten sooner than you think. Hope you are renting, else when you need a new roof on the house, or the sewer unblocked, or ...? Just add up all the hundreds to thousands of dollars of expenses that you won't be able to pay when all you have is SS. Food stamps won't pay for toilet paper, btw.

My point is that one cannot live on SS alone, you must have other income. And just because SS puts you above the somewhat cruel poverty line, doesn't mean you can survive.

SS says about a third of people retiring have $!0,000 in assets or less. $10,000. That will very likely be gone in the first year, perhaps two. Then what?

About 50-75% of people moving toward not being able to work will find themselves in this position sooner than they think, I suspect. They have lost their jobs, their homes, and had to spend their retirement money to get through the past few years on the promise that things would get better. They didn't. And if they had to get a new job it very likely paid a third of what they used to make, with no retirement at all. At all. And those people are retiring by the thousands every day, ifi they are able, or if they have been unable to find work like so many, are grabbing a social security check as the first money they have been able to make in 5 years.

The latest jobs figures tell us a contining story - the population is increasing, the unemployment rate is going down because more people are leaving the labor market because there are not enough jobs. Yet it appears that this is not because seniors are leaving their jobs. They aren't, because they are scared to do anything else. Even working, however, over half of them are not able to save anything...just getting by and marching day by day toward likely poverty.

The pols, demos and pubs alike, are about to cut food stamp subsidies, TPP will ship even more jobs offshore, and if they have their way they will index SS to inflation (seriously? You really think your rent or house payment, or grocery bill, will be what it is today in 10 years? Not a chance).

Add that to the 50 million that are already in poverty. One of the things that infuriates me is hearing people talk about how people are "lifted" out of poverty by SS. Total horsecrap. Go try and live on that check and see if you think you are out of poverty. It simply does not provide even a minimal standard of living, at least not anything Americans are used to. You will have no heat some days, no food on others, and your life will very likely be drastically curtailed from what it is right now.

Unless we can switch to a diet of hope sandwiches for everyone, there are going to be at least 100 to 150 million really screwed people in our near future.

And I think that may well cost us a lot more than we might imagine.

Exactly!!! The labor force is shrinking for lack of jobs --- and not (as some people claim) because "baby boomers are shuffling into retirement."

http://bud-meyers.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-labor-force-is-shrinking-for-...

i read that a lot of manufacturing jobs are being filled by temp agencies, mostly as a way for the manufacturers to avoid union scale wages and benefits that would be due full time workers... however, BLS does not count those thus employed as working in manufacturing; rather, they are included in temp business services..

It seems government turned against the people with the start of the "Red Communist Scare" after WWII. Back then one could trust the government, but once the great communist witch hunt started, one could no longer. No surprise to me why so many conservatives want government out of their lives due to so much corruption and screw ups. Yet what America really needs is government to do their job again

There were 398,887 private manufacturing establishments of all sizes in the United States during the first quarter of 2001. By the end of 2012 there were 334,800 --- or 64,087 less from 12 years ago. Meaning, the U.S. has lost an average of 5,340 factories during each of those 12 years --- or almost 15 every single day since 2001.

Source: Bureau Labor Statistics:
http://www.bls.gov/cew/

ok, a full explanation of that graph is here...i should have noted that the housing component of the CPI was tracked by the red line, and the rest of the graph was irrelevant..

it was not so much that it is a perfect inflation adjustment, but that it was benchmarked to 2000 = 100, just as case-shiller is...there are two major benchmarkings of composite CPI indexes, some with 1982-84 = 100, some with 1997 = 100....i reset both types of CPI composites to 2000 =100 so i would be comparing apples to apples on the same graph