Where is the US economy headed?

A statement that supports what I have always said: there is no truth in the conservative media.

BEsides, there is plenty of truth in blogs and on the street. All the liberals knew in the 60s that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a farce. We also knew that unemployment figures were higher than those the government posted.

Maybe there was no one else to buy it and the cost of insuring an unoccupied building is horrendous.

The accounting profession was very good based on job opportunities during the period I worked or sought jobs. I was trained as an accountant, and worked as an auditor, but most of my career was in management positions.

My BS in Business Administration with a major in Accounting opened up many opportunities that I was able to take advantage of. I was the first Asian manager at Florsheim Shoe Company, and I hired the first woman auditor for that company.

I might have guessed that.

Now, that brings up a serious consideration. Is Fox news just a right wing lie tank or are the people at Fox so stupid that they fail to understand what they publish?

The government doesn't own the buildings that house post offices but has always leased them.

How many media awards did FOX News earn for their "balanced news"? It's now "we report, you decide." With people like okie unable to do his own research on facts, many are like him who follow Fox News.

I like this one about Fox News:

What this presents is a conundrum.

Our economy is based on continual expansion. The very premise at its foundation is false.

If we keep building office space, we eventually run out of businesses to fill the spaces.

Well, if the government is leasing buildings that have to be maintained and insured, the government is, at least, providing that level of employment. If the government removes itself from leased space in a depressed area, there
might not be a firm to step in to fill said space. Empty spaces cost more to insure because they are signs welcoming squatters and vandals.

Seems to me that there thinking behind the Fox story isn't very deep.

The accounting profession is a good place to work now because of the people eliminated from working in the field after the accountancy scandal. While some colleges are limiting the number of students admitted to the business major, accountancy is the area still open.

A somewhat interesting digression, but one thast has nothing to do with the content of my post to which you were presumably responding - the one you described as merely silly and indicative of some flaw in my character.

For reference I merely noted that the criticisms you posited earlier about management studies - that they were merely practical applications of principles learned in a "real" classical or liberal arts curriculum - were equally appliocable to many others. I also suggested that your own career in business may not qualify you to make such judgements about the merit or lack of it in management studies..

You are very quick with categorical assertions (often about issues in which you demonstrate limited knowledge) and regularly offer equally categorical, and often offensive, criticisms and characterizations of other posters here. Despite this you, yourself - in your posts - exhibit many of the strange and adverse traits of which you so liberally accuse others.

An example of a categorical factual error is found here;

The truth is that many large urbam post offices are in government owned buildings - federal office buildings and the like, as well as numerous purpose build structures designed and build by the Postal department itself, particularly the large sorting centers. I know this because Engineering companies I managed designed them and various additions to them under contract from the Post Office. It is true that many (perhaps even most ) local postoffices are in leased facilities, but roughly one fourth of them nationwide are in government owned facilities.

Not that this is very important, rather it illustrates the flaws in your rather odd, dogmatic approach to argument and your very liberal badmouthing of others here. This is something that doesn't do you any apparent good - it certainly does not help persuade others of the soundness of your views - and it degrades from the character of the dialogue here for everyone. I'll readily concede you aren't the only one here doing that, though you do it perhaps more consistently than others (except perhaps cicerone). Name calling, attacks on the motives and character of your interloqutor, and sweeping categoizations of others ("the right") is generally not an effecrtive form of either communication or persuasion. I wish you would stop it (I wish cicerone would stop it too, however, I have given up on that.)

LMAO, comparing the sewer to the cesspool - you're ugly and for a second opinion, you're stupid too; but, speaking professionally - you suck!

Do you know why students don't major in Accounting?

The report doesn't deal at all with Post Offices. It is not listed as one of the departments that has to report buildings or structures. The USPS is supposed to function as an agency that gets no money from the government.

That sounds like an intro looking for a punchline.

One of our mailmen told me that the most post offices are not owned by the government but are leased. I simply posted that to add to the discussion. I actually have georgeob on ignore. However, I often skim the posts of those I have on ignore . . . ignore is just a way of giving me the option to read or not to read.

He thinks he is lecturing me with what he views as his superior wisdom. Actually, there is always something out of kilter with his responses, so I keep him on ignore.

Is the matter of who owns the buildings used as POs important enough to verify the words of one letter carrier? If a letter carrier doesn't know, who does?

Let's face it, does anything anyone writes here matter? Is anything anyone writers here above the level of gameplaying?

Officially the post office is no longer a government agency, though like Amtrak, Freddie and Fannie it is. I am not a Post Office expert but I believe that if you talked to one that you would be told that the post office, like amtrak, years ago sold everything and then leased it back. At the time there was IRS rules that made this move advantageous for both the government and the private interests who purchased government property, though these have since been rewritten.

I was talking to the landlord of my local post office a few months back and she was telling me that it is leased on long term and at well above current rates for Square Foot, though a lot of parking is thrown in. The post office could in theory break the lease but it would cost a ton to do it.

What's the punchline?

First of all, I think there might be more to this subject than meets the eye, and I am not convinced that Fox was in error for reporting it. Rather than condemning Fox, I think it should merely serve to whet our curiosity to find out more. It seems obvious to me that the government does a fairly poor job of even knowing what it owns or leases. Here are a couple of interesting articles, neither of which promotes confidence in the idea that our government is managing properties efficiently. And I certainly don't see efficiency in the areas I frequent.
http://reason.org/studies/show/what-the-federal-government-owns
"Office of Management and Budget director Peter R. Orszag says the federal government owns “1.2 million buildings, structures, and land parcels” including “14,000 building [sic] and structures currently designated as excess and 55,000 identified as under- and not-utilized.”
This assessment, however, comes from an incomplete database built from inconsistent data managed mainly by the agencies themselves, each using its own inventory method, rather than an accurate, centralized inventory."

http://www.coburnforsenate.com/Newsletter20100217.aspx
■"President Obama is proposing to spend an additional $620 million in the next fiscal year for federal agencies to buy more land. This is on top of the $260 million allocated for land purchases this year."

You can't simply examine the words FOX used and compare them to the facts?

FOX's statement is NOT factual. You have no argument that it is factual. Trying to change the subject doesn't make FOX's statement factual. It only means you can't address the issue.

Simple question for you okie.
Where is the evidence that the federal government picked up thousands of new buildings? Without that evidence FOX's statement is not supported by anything and is not news. It is an outright fabrication. That makes it a lie since a news organization is supposed to check it's facts.

The source for their news report was Federal Real Property Council, which is supported by the government's General Services Administration. I did not have the time to read every page of the report, parados. Here is the link to the main page. Frankly, it looks like it would be a doctoral thesis to figure it all out.
http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104918