Does Anyone feel like Bailing

Originally Posted by Undertoad

You keep posting that graph. I don't think it means what you think it means.

So what do you think it means?

Or how about the chart that Happy Monkey posted, showing unemployment in a nose dive in 08 and slowing turning around?

The CBO also projects a 4% growth in GDP in 2011 and 4-5% annually over the next 10 years, based in large part, on the current economic plan.

Seems to me to be moving in the right direction....in part, because of short-term deficit spending.

So how do you stimulate jobs and economic growth?

Tax cuts? Tried that last decade at a cost of over $1 trillion...didnt work.

Leave it to the free market to correct itself?

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Well isn't that part of the problem HP? It may take this Congress from all parties to commit political suicide, which none of them are willing to do. Why? Power. They don't want to let it go.

Yes, I agree completely. I read an article that said the only way our budget problem will be solved is from a "youth revolution". Our budget problem will not be solved anytime soon.

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Yes, I agree completely. I read an article that said the only way our budget problem will be solved is from a "youth revolution". Our budget problem will not be solved anytime soon.

We absolutely need entitlement reform, but that wont fix a broken economy.

IMO, the long term economic problem requires a re-investment in R&D, emerging technologies, and as TW says...innovation. We have fallen behind China, India, and most developed countries.

Along with an investment in education/job re-training to have a better prepared workforce.

You have to spend money to make money.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Yes, I agree completely. I read an article that said the only way our budget problem will be solved is from a "youth revolution". Our budget problem will not be solved anytime soon.

I think we are just going to have to accept some really painful choices. But right now the Dems are not willing to spread that pain around and until they do the problems will persist and the real pain is only being delayed for a future date. There has been a lot of talk in the last week about a new real estate crisis, 1) a huge surge in foreclosures on the personal homes, and 2) a huge surge in foreclosures in the Commercial realestate.

Apparently a good percentage of those who got their loans "fixed" with the help of the Feds are going to foreclose anyway.

Check this out:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=123173050

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Redux

You have to spend money to make money.

That won't even come close to covering the future costs of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and debt payments. I agree with investing in those sectors but something needs to be done with our Mandatory Spending section in the future or will get exponentially worse.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

We absolutely need entitlement reform, but that wont fix a broken economy.

IMO, the long term economic problem requires a re-investment in R&D, emerging technologies, and as TW says...innovation. We have fallen behind China, India, and most developed countries.

Along with an investment in education/job re-training to have a better prepared workforce.

You have to spend money to make money.

I agree to a degree. But right now this Congress is out of control and not spending responsibly.

This idea of spending in "emerging technology" sounds like nothing more than a black hole where taxpayer dollars flow down and very little comes out of it. It makes for good political theater and speech but that will not fix the problems. This Congress has failed the American Public.

The stimulus program, while far from perfect (in order to attract 3 Repub votes to ensure passage in the Senate at the time) has had a positive impact on stopping or slowing down the short-term bleeding.

Economists across the spectrum have acknowledged that...you dont.

A long-term economic fix will still require more investment and that means short term deficits (5-10 years) for long term growth.

And the entitlement programs need to be addressed...but not while in a recession or on a shaky foundation and just coming out of one.

Unless you have a better idea.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

The stimulus program, while far from perfect (in order to attract 3 Repub votes to ensure passage in the Senate at the time) has had a positive impact on stopping or slowing down the short-term bleeding.

Maybe.

Economists across the spectrum have acknowledged that...you dont.

Economists across the spectrum do not agree with you. Believe that if you want to.

A long-term economic fix will still require more investment and that means short term deficits (5-10 years) for long term growth.

Economists do not agree. And the massive short term deficits which are developing are doing little to address the problems facing our nation today.

And the entitlement programs need to be addressed...but not while in a recession or on a shaky foundation and just coming out of one.

Why not? All this Congress is doing is thowing good money at bad. And a lot of it. They need to start over and come up with a new plan.

[Undertoad]

The graph means nothing. It is not useful information.

They have chosen to display it as percentage by decade, starting at the first year of the decade, not a useful frame of reference. This has the result of painting the 00s in the worst possible light. Why: because the decade started with a bubble that popped just after the decade began - and ended a year after the popping of another bubble.

Let's say you had a graph like this:



And you decided to measure this section of it:



The green line shows your growth. Great success!



But oh no, you wanted a negative narrative. Not a problem, just use the same distance between the red lines, and measure a different section of the graph:



Zero growth!



Also, they have chosen to graph number of jobs created - generally not the most interesting measure of employment, and useless to measure the state of the economy. For example, before the 50s-60s boom, unemployment numbers were low, jobs created high, but the poverty rates were often around 30%. The Times graph (I assume it's Times by its style) doesn't come close to giving us an accurate narrative on the state of things.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Economists across the spectrum do not agree with you. Believe that if you want to.

"New Consensus Views Stimulus Package as Worthy Step"

with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/bu...ulus.html?_r=1

"Obama stimulus reduced our pain, experts say"

President Obama's stimulus package saved jobs — but the government still needs to do more to breathe life into the economy, according to USA TODAY's quarterly survey of 50 economists.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/econom...stimulus_N.htm

Also economists at the Business Roundtable (representing big corporations) and the US Chamber of Commerce (representing small businesses) have said that the stimulus program, despite it not being their preferred program, has helped.

Even the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation has grudgingly agreed.

[TheMercenary]

Historically deficit spending has not worked. It failed for Hoover, Roosevelt, Ford, Bush, and even for the country of Japan. The only thing that goes up is national debt. It is Keynesian economics. Taking the money out of the pockets of the public and putting it into the pocket of the government to spend with reckless abandon is not going to get us out of this mess. Stimulus packages do not work in the long term.

[TheMercenary]

Falling flat
More evidence that America is experiencing a jobless recovery
Feb 5th 2010

A WEEK ago, Americans were told that their economy had expanded for a second consecutive quarter, and rapidly at that: output grew at an annual rate of 5.7%. This week, they are reminded that a return to growth has yet to benefit the jobless. The economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, a decline driven by the loss of 75,000 jobs in the construction sector. Economists had forecast an increase in employment of around 15,000. The unemployment rate, based on household rather than establishment data, showed a slight improvement, dropping from 10% to 9.7%, but nearly 15m Americans remain unemployed. As Larry Summers put it in Davos last week, the American economy is experiencing “a statistical recovery and a human recession”.

Several positive trends continued in January. Firms added 52,000 temporary workers and increased hours, just as they did in December, hinting at growing if cautious optimism. Employment rose in health, education and professional services, and retail employment grew by 42,000 in January, on a seasonally adjusted basis, after declining in December. Manufacturing employment also grew, by 11,000, the first increase since the beginning of recession. Analysts point out that the adjustment of the data is tricky around the holiday season, and actual underlying employment may have grown in January.

But many economists may view this release as more disappointing than the previous month's figure. The Labour Department published the results of its annual benchmark revision of previous employment data. Through the 12 months to March 2009, the American economy lost 930,000 more jobs than had been previously estimated. It now appears that over 700,000 jobs were lost in each of the first three months of last year, a significantly worse performance than originally thought. Meanwhile, data for the last two months of 2009 were revised to show a larger increase in employment in November, but a larger decline in December, for a net drop of 5,000 jobs relative to previous reports.

And while the employment-population ratio increased slightly from December to January, and off record lows, the problem of the long-term unemployed continues to grow. Just over 41% of all unemployed workers, over 6.3m workers, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.

Most troubling of all is the continued failure of economic growth to benefit the labour market. Employment fell by over 300,000 jobs during the last three months of 2009, despite strong expansion in GDP. The first quarter of 2010 is unlikely to show as big an output gain, suggesting that the pace of improvement in employment may be slowing, even as regular job growth has yet to return. And the situation may be more dire still; initial jobless claims have grown in recent weeks, indicating that what momentum there was in labour markets has been lost.

The January data will increase the pressure on the Senate to pass a jobs bill. The House of Representatives assented in December to a measure designed to boost hiring, worth $154 billion, and the president outlined a number of policies to encourage employers to hire in his state-of-the-union address and budget proposal. At the centre of the package is a $33 billion tax credit, available to firms that add employees or increase hours or wages. The policy may be just the kick firms need to take on new help. In the fourth quarter, labour productivity rose by 6.2% as businesses expanded output while maintaining lean payrolls. The government will hope to provide an incentive to begin handling rising orders with new workers, who will then use their earnings to shore up consumption and the recovery as a whole.

But with the revelation that labour markets early last year were far weaker than expected and the growing indications that the recovery will be jobless, the country's leaders may be wishing they had done more to boost the economy sooner. The longer it takes to achieve steady job creation, the more uncertain recovery will become.

http://www.economist.com/world/unite...ry_id=15473802

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Historically deficit spending has not worked. It failed for Hoover, Roosevelt, Ford, Bush, and even for the country of Japan. The only thing that goes up is national debt. It is Keynesian economics. Taking the money out of the pockets of the public and putting it into the pocket of the government to spend with reckless abandon is not going to get us out of this mess. Stimulus packages do not work in the long term.

Of course it worked for Roosevelt... in the first 3 years of the New Deal programs, unemployment was cut in half and the GDP increased at nearly a similar rate.

And this was well before ('32-35) any WW II spendng, so that old argument that it was war spending doesnt fly in light of the facts and data. It restored and rebuilt the economic base on which war-related industries were later created.

The others you list never applied such an economic plan.

What didnt work was Bush's $1 trillion tax cuts.

*shrug*
You just dont agree with all those economists in the articles I posted that the stimulus has helped...so they must be wrong.

Anyone who disagrees with you is wrong.....some things never change.

Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute has acknowledged it helped

The real economy also responded to the massive stimulus but remained heavily dependent on it. In the United States, growth during the second half of 2009 probably averaged about 3 percent. Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009.

but, in their opinion, is not the long-term solution.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

Of course it worked for Roosevelt... in the first 3 years of the New Deal programs, unemployment was cut in half and the GDP increased at nearly a similar rate.

And this was well before ('32-35) any WW II spendng, so that old argument that it was war spending doesnt fly in light of the facts and data. It restored and rebuilt the economic base on which war-related industries were later created..

Roosevelt boosted the top tax rate to the 70% range, unemployment was around 17%, and it was not until WW2 that things changed.

The others you list never applied such an economic plan.

Sure they did, in one form or another. It is all about thowing good money at an attempt to stimulate the economy. Bush tried it with tax rebates; Hoover increased tax rates significantly and inacted protectionist policies, and deficit spending was born. Japan is the model of deficit spending and stimulus packages.

You just dont agree with all those economists in the articles I posted that the stimulus has helped...so they must be wrong.

Anyone who disagrees with you is wrong.....some things never change.

You are no fucking different Pot.

Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute has acknowledged it helped

but, in their opinion, is not the long-term solution.

No shit. That is what I have been saying all along.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Roosevelt boosted the top tax rate to the 70% range, unemployment was around 17%, and it was not until WW2 that things changed.

Sure they did, in one form or another. It is all about thowing good money at an attempt to stimulate the economy. Bush tried it with tax rebates; Hoover increased tax rates significantly and inacted protectionist policies, and deficit spending was born. Japan is the model of deficit spending and stimulus packages.

You are no fucking different Pot.

No shit. That is what I have been saying all along.

I can agree to disagree w/o insisting that your approach is a failure....particularly before it has been fully implemented.

That is the difference between us.

Along with the fact that I dont feel a need to characterize anyone as Nazis, cunts, whores.... or calling other members liars...and prefer focusing on the issues.

And you still havent offered a better solution. Tax cuts? Leave it to the free market? Focus on short term deficit reduction rather than long term economic growth?