This past weekend, I took my son Alex, 3 1/2, to the Los Angeles County Fair. Accompanied by my parents, who took me to the fair each year when I was a kid, I had an acute sense of the cyclical nature of life.
On the one hand, I could easily have eschewed the annual festivities. Thanks to a recent confluence of events that found me registering, smog checking and repairing my car within a 2-day period, I wasn’t in the market for $4 soft serve ice cream cones and $5 cotton candy.
It started as a gravel road called Mesa Avenue. In 1911, Mesa became Foothill Boulevard and was paved. Its first speed limit of 10 miles per hour was also posted in that year. That led to Claremont achieving a somewhat less than desirable reputation.
Like the tortoise beating the hare, the US stock market has been slowly and steadily inching its way up over the past few weeks.
Since touching an intraday low on June 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 index have all rallied more than 10 percent, according to CNBC. In fact, the Dow and S&P 500 have now risen for 6 consecutive weeks. It feels a bit like a “stealth” rally as volume has been very low and volatility, as measured by the CBOE volatility index, is at its lowest level in 5 years.
Vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan exemplifies the right wing of today’s Republican Party: reward the rich, penalize the poor, let everyone else fend for themselves. Dog eat dog.
Ryan’s views are revealed in the budget he proposed last March. It would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor, forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
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