n2doc
n2doc's JournalTrump is the least popular Christmastime President in the modern era
What do you get the billionaire leader-of-the-free-world who has enough power to have access to pretty much anything he could ever want? Well, in the case of President Donald Trump, he could really use a couple percentage points added to his approval rating.
Heading into the Christmas holiday, the former reality TV star had the worst approval rating in the history of modern polling for any president at this point in their first term. In fact, no other president in recent memory was even particularly close to Trump's levels of popularity.
The tracker from data-centric website FiveThirtyEight pegged Trump's average approval rating Saturday at just 37.1 percent. Dating all the way back to President Harry Truman in 1945, at Day 337 of their first term every president had an approval rating at least ten percentage points better than where Trump stands now at the same point in his first term, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is defying a grace period of sorts in which presidents are typically handed decent popularity from Americans at the start of their term.
more
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-christmas-least-popular-president-ever-757898
I hope I can quit working in a few years: A preview of the U.S. without pensions
TULSA — Tom Coomer has retired twice: once when he was 65, and then several years ago. Each time he realized that with just a Social Security check, “You can hardly make it these days.”
So here he is at 79, working full time at Walmart. During each eight-hour shift, he stands at the store entrance greeting customers, telling a joke and fetching a “buggy.” Or he is stationed at the exit, checking receipts and the shoppers that trip the theft alarm.
“As long as I sit down for about 10 minutes every hour or two, I’m fine,” he said during a break. Diagnosed with spinal stenosis in his back, he recently forwarded a doctor’s note to managers. “They got me a stool.”
The way major U.S. companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labor force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/i-hope-i-can-quit-working-in-a-few-years-a-preview-of-the-us-without-pensions/2017/12/22/5cc9fdf6-cf09-11e7-81bc-c55a220c8cbe_story.html
Just the way the 1% want it- work until you can't, then die.
Friday TOON Roundup 3 - The Rest
Bad
CONgress
GOP
Trumpers
Climate
Homeless
Net
Bitcoin
Priorities
Holidays
Gifts
2018 (gulp)
This old drug was free. Now it's $109,500 a year
For four decades, Don Anderson of Seattle has been taking the same drug to help control the temporary bouts of immobility and muscle weakness caused by a rare genetic illness called periodic paralysis.
"It's like putting a 50-pound pack on your back and standing up at the dinner table," Anderson, 73, said. "It's like wearing lead shoes around all the time."
The drug Anderson has been taking all these years was originally approved in 1958 and used primarily to treat the eye disease glaucoma under the brand name Daranide, its price so unremarkable that he can't quite remember how much it cost at the pharmacy counter.
But the price has been on a roller coaster in recent years — zooming from a list price of $50 for a bottle of 100 pills in the early 2000s up to $13,650 in 2015, then plummeting back down to free, before skyrocketing back up to $15,001 after a new company, Strongbridge Biopharma, acquired the drug and relaunched it this spring.
more
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-drug-price-20171218-story.html
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