63% of Americans Don't Have Enough Savings To Pay For a $500 Emergency

The car brakes go on the fritz. The refrigerator stops refrigerating. The dog gets his paws on a batch of chocolate chip cookies and earns himself a trip to the vet ER.

These are just three of any number of things that could go wrong during the course of the year. Recovering from any one will set you back about $500, which means these scenarios fall closer to the “undesirable inconvenience” category than they do the “massive calamity” one. And yet, nearly two-thirds of Americans do not have enough money in savings to cover the cost of a single one of these unplanned expenses.

According to a brand new survey from Bankrate.com, just 37% of Americans have enough savings to pay for a $500 or $1,000 emergency. The other 63% would have to resort to measures like cutting back spending in other areas (23%), charging to a credit card (15%) or borrowing funds from friends and family (15%) in order to meet the cost of the unexpected event.

Read the interesting, yet disturbing, Forbes report here:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-have-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/

With A Straight Face, US Government "Finds" Number Of Retiring 20-24 Year-Olds Has Doubled

Here's Bloomberg's summary of what the bureau found, broadly: Thirty-five percent of the U.S. population wasn't in the labor force in 2014, up from 31.3 percent a decade earlier. (You're considered out of the workforce if you don't have a job and aren't looking for one. That's distinct from the official unemployment rate, which tracks those out of work who are actively job hunting.)

Drilling down into the numbers reveals more about the shifts in the reasons some people forego a paycheck. In all age groups, for instance, more people cited retirement as the reason for being out of the labor force, and it wasn't just older people.

So far so good: who knows if this is true or not, but since it is a "scientific" study it probably can be replicated. Unfortunately, not in this case, because here was the punchline:

For Americans between the ages of 20 and 24, the share of those sidelined over the past decade because they were in school increased, unsurprisingly, during the decade that included the Great Recession. What's more unusual is that the share of 20- to 24-year-olds who say they're retired doubled from 2004 to 2014.

At this point we stopped reading for one simple reason: the fact that a "scientific" study can "find" that the number of 20-24 who have retired has doubled, shows that those conducting said experiment were simply said lunatics who had set up their experiment and null hypothesis incorrectly, had asked all the wrong questions, and worst of all, given themselves a "sanity check" and passed with flying colors despite something as glaring as this "finding."

Article here:  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-04/straight-face-us-government-finds-number-retiring-20-24-year-olds-has-doubled

Jim Karger

www.crediblyconnect.com

 "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

- Edmund Burke

Sent from my I-Pad

2015 Set A Record For Government Regulation

2015 was a record-setting year for the Federal Register, according to numbers the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., released Wednesday.

This year’s daily publication of the federal government’s rules, proposed rules and notices amounted to 81,611 pages as of Wednesday, higher than last year's 77,687 pages and higher than the all-time high of 81,405 pages in 2010 — with one day to go in 2015

2016 isn't shaping up any better.  Indeed, the New Year will likely set another ignominious record of government intrusion into our lives.  As far as the regulation of the employment relationship is concerned, keep watching.  We will do our best to report it here.

Article here:  http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/264456-2015-was-record-year-for-federal-regulation-group-says