Elizabeth: Fashion

Showing posts with label Fashion. Show all posts

Monday, November 29, 2010

This is awfully distracting Sept 10

WOW! I haven't seen a pair of shoes this hot in quite a while! NICE

what do you think?

oh and my next tattoo was going to be some kind of sun or something, but now I'm thinking about words. not just any words, but very powerful words

LIVE FREE OR DIE

Enjoy your weekend

Some good news about shoes feb 10

Having an argument/discussion with my very liberal Depression baby mother last night that actually stayed very civil. Instead of talking personalities (Nobama,Bush et al) we talked economic theories,and it worked out much better.

Perusing some of the news feed I get at work led me to the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, which in turn led me to this article. It explains why the jobs bill (HIRE-how much are we paying for someone in the White House to come up with the pithy (NOT!?) acronyms?) will not stimulate job creation that leads to economic growth, exactly the point I was trying to make at mom's last night.

The article (italic and bold emphasis added by me).
The link to Heritage

February 23, 2010

Senate Jobs Bill: An Ineffective Means of Reducing Unemployment

by James Sherk and J.D. Foster, Ph.D.

WebMemo #2814

Reduced investment and a drop in job creation--not increased job losses--have been the primary factors driving unemployment higher over the past two years. The original bi-partisan Senate jobs bill, the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act, did little to address this underlying problem. Instead the legislation was a vehicle for extending a number of separate taxes and spending policies that would otherwise expire.

For reasons unrelated to job creation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) side-tracked the HIRE Act by introducing his own partisan "jobs" bill. The Reid bill stripped the original bill down to two main provisions:

Suspending the payroll tax for companies that hire new workers in 2010; and

Increasing federal highway construction spending.

If enacted, this bill will do little to encourage new investment and hiring. Instead it will increase the debt, placing a further drag on private-sector investment, job creation, and the economy. Ultimately, Reid's bill will fail to achieve results at a lower cost than the original proposal.

Hiring Tax Credits Marginally Effective

Although the first major provision in Senator Reid's proposal appears to encourage job creation, it will ultimately fail to do so. The bill would suspend the 6.2 percent employer payroll tax on newly hired workers in 2010. Companies that keep these workers on their payrolls for at least one year would receive another $1,000 credit against their 2011 taxes. This proposal, however, would create few new jobs.

Jobs come from the creation of valuable goods and services by entrepreneurs. Companies hire when the additional earnings that a new worker creates by producing those goods and services exceed the cost of employing that worker. The payroll tax suspension would slightly lower the cost of hiring workers. As a result, it would probably cause some companies to hire workers they otherwise would not have.

However, suspending the payroll tax for one year would not create better opportunities to produce valuable goods and services; nor would it increase the earnings a new worker would create for his or her company. Simply reducing the cost of a potential job will not cause an actual job to emerge if consumers fail to signal that such a job should exist. As a result, most companies would not expand and hire permanent new workers.

Instead, most of the tax suspension benefits would be claimed by companies that already planned to hire new workers. Even in this recession firms are hiring new workers: 49.4 million workers were hired for new jobs in 2009. Suspending the payroll tax would cost billions of dollars, most of which was spent rewarding employers that would have hired new workers anyway. Indeed, when Congress passed a similar tax credit in the 1970s, that legislation created relatively few new jobs.[1] Why? Because the employers who hired new employees would have done so with or without a credit.

Even if the payroll tax suspension created the jobs, these gains would be offset by a similar number of job losses. The tax revenue foregone due to the payroll tax suspension will require an increase in federal borrowing by the same amount; borrowing that deprives the private sector of capital to use as it sees fit, whether for business investment or personal consumption. Thus, the primary effects of this tax are to reduce labor costs for certain employers and reduce the funds available to others.

Government Spending Depresses Job Creation

The new highway spending in the bill will also fail to create jobs for two reasons.

First, it does little to encourage private investment. The private sector creates net new jobs through the processes of entrepreneurship--investment, expansion, risk-taking, and seeking opportunity. Government spending does not encourage entrepreneurship because it only reallocates resources in the economy; it does not make potential business projects more likely to succeed. While government spending leads to directly observable construction jobs, it does not encourage additional private-sector investment.

Second, the increased federal highway construction spending will crowd out private spending, both consumption and investment. Analogous to the payroll tax suspension, the resources the government spends are taken from elsewhere in the economy:

Each dollar the government borrows is one dollar entrepreneurs cannot invest and that private individuals cannot consume.

Each $1.00 increase in government spending reduces private-sector investment by between $0.46 and $0.97 after two years and $0.74 and $0.95 over five years, with the balance coming out of private consumption.[2] Government spending substitutes for private spending, it does not supplement or encourage it.

Such a "crowding out" effect is why countries in which the government spends heavily to create jobs have high unemployment rates. After all, government spending eliminates more jobs than it creates.

Low Job Creation Driving Unemployment Higher

To reduce unemployment Congress must first understand that the primary factor driving unemployment up has been a sharp drop in job creation--not increased job losses. From the start of the recession to the second quarter of 2009, job losses increased 8.7 percent while job creation fell 16.3 percent. Over that time the number of workers laid off at companies going out of business rose by 3.8 percent (48,000 jobs), and the number of workers hired at newly formed businesses fell by 10.4 percent (235,000 jobs).

This drop in hiring is unsurprising: annual private fixed investment has fallen by $313 billion since the recession started; a 20 percent drop. As long as business investment remains low and entrepreneurs hold back from starting new enterprises, job creation will remain low and unemployment will stay high. Research into past economic downturns suggests that low job creation will explain most of the net job losses throughout this recession.[3]

Recommendations to Congress

Reid's jobs bill would do little to reduce unemployment. Neither suspending the payroll tax for new hires nor increasing highway spending would notably raise the number of jobs in the economy. To lower the unemployment rate, Congress should create a better climate for entrepreneurs and businesses--without adding to the deficit. Congress should seriously examine a no-cost stimulus.

First, Congress should recognize that its threatened actions on taxes, health care, and cap and trade are creating an uncertain climate for businesses. In the face of these heightened, Washington-based uncertainties, businesses tend to hold off on expansions until the air clears and a more favorable economic environment begins to emerge. (YES YES YES a thousand times YES-I will continue to say this until I am blue in the face)

In addition, there are positive steps that Congress should consider, including:

Freeze taxes and costly regulations until unemployment falls below 7 percent;

Rescind the unspent stimulus funds;

Reduce unnecessary regulatory costs, such as repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act;

Reform the tort system;

Remove barriers to domestic energy production;

Suspend the job-killing Davis-Bacon Act;

Pass the pending free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama; and

Permit companies to bring foreign earnings to the U.S. without facing punitive taxation.

A cessation of threats from Washington combined with these positive measures would create a better business climate for entrepreneurs and encourage them to take risks, such as starting or expanding their firms. These recommendations would spur investment and meaningfully reduce the unemployment rate.

James Sherk is Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy in the Center for Data Analysis and J. D. Foster, Ph.D., is Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of Fiscal Policy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

[1]Robert Tannenwald, "Are Wage and Training Subsidies Cost-Effective--Some Evidence from the New Jobs Tax Credit," Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Economic Review (September/October 1982).

[2]Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Roberto Perotti, and Fabio Schiantarelli, "Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment," The American Economic Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (June 2002), pp. 571-589, and Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti, "An Empirical Characterization of the Dynamic Effects of Changes in Government Spending and Taxes on Output," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 117, No. 4 (November 2002), pp. 1329-1368.

[3]Robert Hall, "Job Loss, Job Finding, and Unemployment in the U.S. Economy over the Past Fifty Years," National Bureau of Economic Research Macroeconomics Annual 2005 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), at http://www.stanford.edu/~rehall/nberjobloss.pdf (December 16, 2008); Robert Shimer, "Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment," NBER Working Paper No. W13421, September 2007; and Michael Elsby, Ryan Michaels, and Gary Solon, "The Ins and Outs of Cyclical Unemployment," January 2007, NBER Working Paper No. W12853, at http://ssrn.com/abstract=959129 (February 23, 2010).

Again I say this is as plain as it could be-no PhD in economics required to understand.

Thanks for reading

Just when I thought it was safe again Feb 10

And now for something completely different

I promised you shoe porn-well how about the sublime and the ridiculous?

When I saw this picture of Anne Hathaway at the Armani Prive show, I practically leapt out of my seat with joy!

Not about the dress-it's only kind of meh; of course she is gorgeous and I do like the gray, but the shape reminds me of Star Trek!

BUT THE SHOES!!!!! OMG They are gorgeous!!!

They are platforms, to be sure, but such a sexy shoe! YUM MEE And if I'm not mistaken she's making fashion history by NOT showing her toes! Whoo hoo!!! The whole peep toe mess was getting really old, especially on boots (WTF?).

Ok-so that's the sublime-what about the ridiculous?

Just when I thought that maybe it was safe to love shoes again, this assaults my eyeballs

OMFG. Unbelievable!!! FUGLY FUGLY

What do you think?

Thanks for stopping by

You gotta laught jan 10

having one more cup of coffee before I head off on some errands, and I just had to bring you my take on an ad featured on the home page today-WTF? You saw and heard my rant on ugly shoes; but at least I don't have to look at them all the time. So here's the offending piece of business

You gotta laugh

cause this is one of the ugliest things I've seen in a long time, even on Sienna Miller. Speaking of Sienna Miller, do they REALLY think that females think this ugly POS will make them look like Sienna Miller? HELLO! WTF?

OK-didn't want to start the year with a rant, but I couldn't resist this one. Besides, I am laughing at it so it's all good.

What do you think?

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Cuffed Sandals? summer 09

From Piperlime, the Gap's online shoe store:

UPDATE: More for your viewing pleasure. After some additional thought I had an idea-maybe everyone thinks that women should be wearing ankle monitors? LOL-maybe the celebs who bought in to this trend!

What do you think?

Just to give you an idea of my taste and one of the only pair I saw at any price that I wanted to buy today:

I know, my heels are a mess-time for a pedicure!

So what do you think?

Losing my religion-notes on the latest Vogue Feb 09

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Subtitle-Notes on this month's Vogue

I guess you can tell that this is not about religion in the strictest sense, considering I categorized it in Fashion, Style, and Shopping. So if you are looking for a blog about spirituality or lack thereof, you are in the wrong place.

I received my new Vogue mag today, and was a bit excited to escape into the world of high fashion with both the editorial pages and the ads. However, I was immediately disillusioned when I ripped open the plastic and got a look at the cover. I'm sorry, but Michelle Obama does not belong on the cover of Vogue! WTF? I'll put aside my disgust at the non-stop ass kissing fest going on in the country these days and just focus on the facts.

Vogue is SUPPOSED to be a fashion rag; who gives a shit about the first lady (or Jennifer Aniston, who was on last month's cover opining about Angelina-puleeze-another story done to death!) What happened to models on the cover? Why are they so obsessed with "celebrities"? Do we really want to see this crap or what? I certainly don't. I look at and read Vogue to catch up on what is going on in the rarefied world of fashion. Of course I can't afford the designer duds pictured in its pages, but high fashion informs the clothes, shoes, etc that the rest of us wear, and I'm always on the lookout for the trends that will influence what we see in the stores in the coming months.Plus it is an escape from the everyday. So no celebrities, politicians etc!!!! (well maybe Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie are exempt; they'll always be models to me).

OK-getting to the list

WTF is Muiccia Prada thinking this spring? She must be out of ideas, because her collection is amazingly bad, except for one dress that I LOVE (leave it to her to surprise me with a good one)

The rest of them look like wrinkled paper bags so I won't waste your time.

And the shoes!!!! Why is it that designers show only skyscraper heels with ridiculously fanciful details and nonsense OR flat-as-a-pancake flats? Is there nothing in between? Don't answer that-it's really just a rhetorical question-but it still gets under my skin cause I love shoes!

Next up-jumpsuits!!!! Yeah, this will go over like a lead f**king balloon, even in the palaces of the rich like Bergdorfs and Neiman's. If the models don't even look good, and they look like they are ready for the Space Shuttle, then how the hell do they think they can convince anyone to buy them? My prediction-this trend has no legs, no legs at all!

White handbags! WTF? I was trolling around in TJ Maxx today and saw oodles of them, so I can't blame it entirely on the world of high fashion, but again I ask WTF? If I ever had the temerity to carry a white handbag, all the dirt in the world would stop what it was doing to jump on to it; and I'd probably spill some coffee on it just to even out the stains. Nuff said.

Last but not least-it seems that the hairstyle I am so patiently coveting is already here! Yes I am ahead of my time, but of course this means that by the time I get there it will be passe-how ironic. I really don't give a shit because I want just above shoulder-length hair even if Kate Moss and Gweneth Paltrow decide to go all extension on me, but I had to chuckle at the article. Oh well-they'll never know it was my idea first...

So-what do you think of this spring's trends, or any trends for that matter? Do you read the fashion rags, and if so which ones? (I pared mine down to Lucky and Vogue).

Let's talk fashion!

Color color color 9/29/08

div>I think I figured out a way to steal this-I hope it works.

Enjoy some Fashion Week colors! I'm partial to the blues and greens as always, but love that red wine also.

From Color coded: the twelve hottest shades of Fashion Week..so far

New York, London, and now Milan—yes, all the various Fashion Week dizzying arrays of rainbow colors have us already reaching for our sunnies. We picked our favorite color-concentrated moments below, from rich, bold hues like plum, hot pink, and neon orange to more muted palettes of coral, mustard yellow, lilac, and nude.

Plum Dandy