is the economy getting worse?

B_RedDude

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I don't think that the president is unconcerned about the national debt. Anyone with a brain is concerned about it. He just sees that there are higher priorities in the near term, but is sufficiently blocked by a political climate of ignorance in this country (meaning a certain portion of the electorate) and by the Republicans in Congress in doing what needs to be done to move this nation forward. I don't think that the debt is the fundamental immediate problem, so explain to me, in economic terms, how you believe this to be true.

Are corporations not investing and creating jobs principally on the basis of the national debt?

Incidentally, George W. Bush didn't seem to be too concerned with the national debt, and he was in office for eight years. He conducted two wars while massively cutting taxes.

The primary problem is the debt condition of the U.S. By virtue of that, the economy is sluggish.

Obama has no interest in addressing or fixing it; he never did.

He doesn't even understand it.

If we needed somebody to go organize a community, I would recommend Obama.
 
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MercyfulFate

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That's simply not 100% true.
According to Washingtonmonthly.com, more jobs have been created under the Obama Administration than the previous one. According to econpost.com, the quarterly GDP has rebounded. Plus the stock market is higher and the unemployment rate has gotten lower. Many of the ideas of the current administration are indeed working... but they are being met by much opposition who either think differently ideologically, are hell bent on protecting their excessive corporate profits with little to no regard to anyone, or are simply determined to play political games (at the expense of everyday citizens) to try and win the presidential election for their party in 2012. He's made mistakes... such as the stimulus. It should have been more than what was ultimately presented and geared towards revamping our nation's infrastructure instead of giving loans to big banks & Wall Street. He was also soft on Health Care Reform... he should have never backed down on the Public Option or some form of single payer system. Alas, we could be in a lot worse shape right now if we had other people running the show with the convoluted belief that lowering taxes for the rich (even though they are at record lows right now), Union busting and cutting funding from Medicare/Medicaid and Planned Parenthood is the way to save our Economy.

Also, according to CBS polls most people believe that our economy is in shambles is due to the previous administration and Wall Street - Just 8 percent say Obama is "most to blame" for the state of the economy. About 26 percent blame his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and 25 percent blame Wall Street. Eleven percent of respondents said Congress was mostly to blame. - http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/poll_Obama_GOP_062911_7am.pdf?tag=contentMain;contentBody

I don't put tons of stock in how much a President manipulates or fixes the economy. If their administration drives us into debt (Bush), then that's obviously their fault.

That being said, the jobs we've created are not all good. The unemployment rate as reported is a joke, and most people realize that. If you're on unemployment and have used up all your benefits, you fall off the rolls and are not reported. Many economists will tell you they think the unemployment rate is significantly higher, that it's 14-18%, not 9% or less.

This also doesn't account for people working few hours that desperately want more hours, or that work unpaid internships that still collect unemployment, or don't. I'm not sure if every unpaid intern in every state can get unemployment while having an unpaid job.

Real unemployment rate higher than federal figures - MSN Money - New Investor Center

I firmly believe, as do a lot of other people, that the economy is barely improving before another major downturn.

Personally I think Obama should have launched a New Deal type plan to get unemployment down. The problem is we have too much debt, and adding onto it is tough. We keep banking on the future, but things may never get better. We are a service sector country now, and that section doesn't produce any real goods. The mass jobs of the industrial age have died, my hometown is a product of that. The Irish/Polish/Italian/etc. immigrants back when came to cities and had factory jobs. My hometown is about 60/40 White to Puerto Rican, black, dominican and various other ethnicities. Problem is, they came here after the industry failed and factories ended up empty. Same as Pittsburgh, same as Detroit and the entire Rust Belt of the US.

Crime of course exists in these cities because the jobs aren't there. Racist white people blame the state of my hometown on puerto ricans, but I never would. One, I'm not racist and my upbringing afforded me the ability to understand other cultures like many of my generation. Two, the fact that the jobs are no longer there is why the crime exists. When there are no jobs, drug dealing and gang life is the only "opportunity".

So what am I getting at? We need real jobs, not temp jobs (also counted as jobs for unemployment, but very shitty), not unpaid jobs, real jobs.

Modern neo-conservatives will say FDR's new deal was a failure and that social security is falling apart, so point and laugh at FDR. FDR helped save this country through the New Deal and re-writing history is silly. Social Security, pensions and everything are suffering because governments have gone too far into debt over stupidity like wars.

The IMF is imposing austerity on whoever get loans, otherwise known as fuck the little guy. On top of that it's just using debt to pay debt, like paying your student loan with a credit card. Globalization and this world economy is a disaster. We as human beings have the ability to figure out a system that will allow everyone a decent standard of living, while allowing the rich to be rich. Corporations and the rich once paid a 90% marginal tax rate, and still managed to be rich. Now it's something like 30 some odd percent, and they STILL bitch. I will gladly pay for universal healthcare out of my taxes, and you and others may praise Obama for passing the healthcare act but it needs significant changes. Mandatory insurance WITHOUT universal healthcare or a true public option is cruel, and we're just handing money over to major industry again. As I saw in a PBS mini-documentary, Obama was held at hypothetical gunpoint by the HMO lobbyists and told "If you don't include mandatory healthcare and tone down the public option, we will fight this bill with everything we have". So I don't fully blame him, but it needs to be fixed.

Marginal Tax Rates, by Alan Reynolds: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty - One view that lower tax rates = faster growing economy


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...th-in-one-graph/2011/05/19/AGLaxJeH_blog.html - The other side

"Wealth redistribution, wahhhhh!" is BULLSHIT, because the Federal Stimulus was a redistribution of wealth, to those WITH money because they decided to gamble and they lost. Our economy is a joke right now, the repeal of Glass Steagall (Clinton's biggest failure to me) allowed the mergers of commercial and lending banks, and that was the death knell for the economy.
 
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D

deleted15807

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Is it possible to be in love with a bunch of guys on a political forum just on the basis of their political views?

Indeed it is :smile:

I don't think that the president is unconcerned about the national debt. Anyone with a brain is concerned about it.

The Republicans and dudinvestor are not the least concerned about the debt except as a way to push the government to the brink of disaster as a way of gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Please note the Defense Department is never mentioned as a source of savings. Any part of the government that protects the wealthy is safe. Any part that gets in the way of the wealthy (EPA and SEC) are to be gutted.
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
Grover Norquist

And Grover Norguist is the idealogical head of the Republican Party. And he is so far out there he would need a space ship with warp drive to make it back to Earth.
RNC chairman candidates must name their political hero, aside from Ronald Reagan, defend marriage, and reveal how many guns they own.

Top of the GOPs



That being said, the jobs we've created are not all good.

One big missing factor is:

‘Skills gap’ leaves firms without worker pipeline

I work for a major international company in Information Technology and over my many years in the industry I have watched millions of IT jobs go to Asians. Americans just have no interest in high tech. I hear about kids going to college and picking majors that have absolutely little job opportunity when they are done. And I'm like 'what the fuck'? How do they intend to support themselves? We have people working 80 hours a week because the talent just isn't there.
 
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B_RedDude

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How many U.S. residents trained to write code in the late 90s had their jobs shipped to India?

‘Skills gap’ leaves firms without worker pipeline

I work for a major international company in Information Technology and over my many years in the industry I have watched millions of IT jobs go to Asians. Americans just have no interest in high tech. I hear about kids going to college and picking majors that have absolutely little job opportunity when they are done. And I'm like 'what the fuck'? How do they intend to support themselves? We have people working 80 hours a week because the talent just isn't there.
 
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B_VinylBoy

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And jeez it's been 2 years and why hasn't he just waived his liberal socialist wand and made it all better? How hard can it be to undo a decade of damage? And to undo two wars?

But gosh, isn't that the reason why everyone voted for Barack the Magic... shut your mouth!!! :biggrin1:

How many people trained to write code in the late 90s had their jobs shipped to India?

That's still a touchy subject for me. When I first moved to New York/New Jersey, within two years I was easily landing IT and web design jobs that paid at least $25-$30/hr (on temp work) and eventually landed me a career that started me out at $60K/year. For a single man living alone in Jersey, that was good money. That was in 2000, right before all hell broke loose.
 
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D_Davy_Downspout

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Nobody in Washington cares about the debt or the deficit. Neither should you. Hyperinflation is not around the corner, and there is no chance the US will default on it's debt.

This is all political theatre. Both parties have admitted they'll raise the debt ceiling, they're just going to use it to get concessions from the Democrats because they'll cave, and their goals aren't much different.

Nobody gives a shit about fixing the economy for you and me. The investment class is doing fine and that's who runs politics.
 
D

deleted15807

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How many U.S. residents trained to write code in the late 90s had their jobs shipped to India?

I don't know of any in my company or in the company I left which was another huge multinational company. 'Help desk' functions may have been 'shipped' but there were not really technical software designers and engineers. There are many many many Indians working in my company and the company I left. Even in the huge downturn they really only got rid of the people they didn't like.
 

D_Davy_Downspout

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New Economic Perspectives: Mark Halperin Was Right

It may not have been the most felicitous choice of phrase, but Mark Halperin’s characterization of Barack Obama was not far off the mark, even if he did get suspended for it. The President is a dick, at least as far as his understanding of basic economics goes. Obama’s perverse fixation with deficit reduction uber alles takes him to areas where even George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan dared not to venture. Medicare and Social Security are now on the table. In fact entitlements of all kinds (excluding the myriad of subsidies still present to Wall Street) are all deemed fair game.

To what end? Deficit control and deficit reduction, despite the fact that at present, the US has massive excess capacity including millions of unemployed and underemployed, a negative contribution from net exports, and a stagnant private spending growth horizon. Yet the President marches on, oblivious to the harm his policies would introduce to an already bleeding economy, using the tired analogy between a household and a sovereign government to support his tired arguments. It may have been impolitic, but “dick” is what immediately sprang to mind as one listened incredulously to the President’s press conference, which went from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Discussion of government budget deficits often begins with an analogy to a household’s budget, and the President continues that horrible pattern of misinformation. Obama challenged the view that the government might side-step the debt ceiling constraint by just paying “interest on the debt” and said:
This is the equivalent of me saying, you know what, I will choose to pay my mortgage, but I’m not going to pay my car note. Or I’m going to pay my car note but I’m not going to pay my student loan. Now, a lot of people in really tough situations are having to make those tough decisions. But for the U.S. government to start picking and choosing like that is not going to inspire a lot of confidence.
Let’s state it again: households do not have the power to levy taxes, to issue the currency we use, and to demand that those taxes are paid in the currency it issues. Rather, households are users of the currency issued by the sovereign government. Here the same distinction applies to private businesses, which are also users of the currency. There’s a big difference, as all us on this blog have repeatedly stressed: Users of a currency do face an external constraint in a way that a sovereign issuer of its currency does not.

This key point, which is persistently obscured in these discussions, is that if a government issues a currency that is not backed by any metal or pegged to another currency, then there is no reason why it should be constrained in its ability to “finance” its spending by issuing currency. Unfortunately, this elementary concept seems to have eluded the President and, presumably, the countless members of Congress involved in the debt ceiling negotiations.
...
Yes, it’s true that government deficits are not always good, or that the bigger the deficit, the better. The point the President and his equally misinformed economic advisors continue to ignore is that we have to recognize the macro relations among the sectors, much as a surgeon has to consider the impact of removing an organ from the patient in the overall context of how it will affect the rest of the body’s functioning. Blaming the deficit for our economic woes is akin to blaming the thermometer when it records a temperature from a patient suffering from the flu. They are both forms of quackery. To believe otherwise is to be, well, a “dick.” There’s no other word to describe it.

This is a good article. Read the whole thing...this is an excerpt.
 

hsarge

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I just watched the movie 'too big to fail' a second time. And it is scary to realize how close to the precipice we were. I can remember waking early that monday morning, hearing Lehmans had failed, reeling at word that BofA had bought Merrill, and they would all fail if AIG went down. I called my broker at home who took my call. She frankly said that she was not sure what might be viable. She even said that FDIC had no where near the funding to handle the banking demise if AIG failed and the failure would be worldwide. I sat there and thought ' Now I know how the guys in 1929, on the window ledge, felt'. I was fortunate that I had no debt or any margin calls. But I new those that did would be selling anything of value, killing even the best of companies. I really felt that we were at the gates of economic anarchy. What I can't understand is why Obama, Bernanke, and Gietner even wanted the job. Paulson and the aforementioned two, managed to stave off a cataclysm, and their reward is to be second guessed by ideologues. There is a quote by Gietner that Monday morning as he came out of the subway. 'look, they are all going around like things are normal. They don't know their whole economic system is collapsing around them. Hopefully most will not know, or know how many more mortgage interlocking swaps have yet to unwind. Growth really can't come until all of it unwinds. Hopefully we can follow the Japanese model of falling real-estate, low-no growth and low interest rates for 20 years. We scoffed a the Japanese when their bubble burst in 1989-90. We should be so lucky to have their outcome.
 
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spoon

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One way out? Legalize marijuana and create a massive industry for it. Clothing, materials, stores, everything will pop up. Sadly propaganda still wins over common sense.


i've thought marijuana/pot/maryjane/tree.........etc. should have been legalized ages ago. government could make a ton of money. but, they still have issues (government) if i remember it's being classed as a "gateway drug"
 

B_VinylBoy

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One way out? Legalize marijuana and create a massive industry for it. Clothing, materials, stores, everything will pop up. Sadly propaganda still wins over common sense.

I don't even smoke and I agree with this. In fact, I thought it was rather interesting when Barney Frank and Ron Paul both came up with a bill that would try to legalize it. However, there are too many people who benefit from marijuana being illegal... especially the owners of pharmaceutical companies & private prisons.
 

D_Davy_Downspout

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I just watched the movie 'too big to fail' a second time. And it is scary to realize how close to the precipice we were. I can remember waking early that monday morning, hearing Lehmans had failed, reeling at word that BofA had bought Merrill, and they would all fail if AIG went down. I called my broker at home who took my call. She frankly said that she was not sure what might be viable. She even said that FDIC had no where near the funding to handle the banking demise if AIG failed and the failure would be worldwide. I sat there and thought ' Now I know how the guys in 1929, on the window ledge, felt'. I was fortunate that I had no debt or any margin calls. But I new those that did would be selling anything of value, killing even the best of companies. I really felt that we were at the gates of economic anarchy. What I can't understand is why Obama, Bernanke, and Gietner even wanted the job. Paulson and the aforementioned two, managed to stave off a cataclysm, and their reward is to be second guessed by ideologues. There is a quote by Gietner that Monday morning as he came out of the subway. 'look, they are all going around like things are normal. They don't know their whole economic system is collapsing around them. Hopefully most will not know, or know how many more mortgage interlocking swaps have yet to unwind. Growth really can't come until all of it unwinds. Hopefully we can follow the Japanese model of falling real-estate, low-no growth and low interest rates for 20 years. We scoffed a the Japanese when their bubble burst in 1989-90. We should be so lucky to have their outcome.

Guess what? We've done basically nothing to prevent this from happening again, only next time it's going to be worse.

The big banks fucked everyone in their greed, and they'll do it again. It's their nature.