"We have NOT turned the corner" ~ Mikloyd

[mikloyd]

This crap spewing from dubyas mouth on the economy will be revealed as crap prior to November.

Our economy is in TROUBLE.

This story is from the left side of things, but makes some very good points ...

The US must create 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population changes and the economy stabilized. July 2004's number of 32,000 is huge as far as warnings go.

The US thrives on cheap gas, but should our economy stumble to the point where OPEC goes to an EU based exchange ... buh bye ... hello MAJOR DEPRESSION #2

anyways ... if you can deal with a few left opinions, the article is quite a good read: http://www.alternet.org/election04/19473/

[aaahhh52]

:retard: :retard:

[Sazar]

meh... its not that bad :)

on the job front anyways...

I am more concerned about our massive debt burden (something neither dems or republicans do much about) and this adds to speculation which fuels volatility...

wrt jobs... yes I want more done no doubt... but its a hell of a lot better than it was last year or the year before :)

[mikloyd]

Bill Clinton left office with an economy in as good of a shape as it was at anypoint in any of our lifetimes.

In fairness to Bush, 9/11 was devistating to our economy, and the only reason it hasn't collapsed is because Greenspan is leaving the rates alone. If we keep shipping jobs to India and the Phillipines, no interest rate will be low enough.

Look at Japan, they have had zero interest for years now, and they are still struggling to keep their head above water. The dollar is already getting its ass kicked by the Euro, and Bush's words don't convince me that things will be alright.

[UDawg]

Bill Clinton left office with an economy in as good of a shape as it was at anypoint in any of our lifetimes.

In fairness to Bush, 9/11 was devistating to our economy, and the only reason it hasn't collapsed is because Greenspan is leaving the rates alone. If we keep shipping jobs to India and the Phillipines, no interest rate will be low enough.

Look at Japan, they have had zero interest for years now, and they are still struggling to keep their head above water. The dollar is already getting its ass kicked by the Euro, and Bush's words don't convince me that things will be alright.


The problem is the economy started its recession in 2000, before Bush was elected president.

[Sazar]

The problem is the economy started its recession in 2000, before Bush was elected president.

that depends entirely on whom you ask...

bush officials say it was before the bush admin got into office... many other economists say it was in 2001...

[Ninja Prime]

Fact #1: The economy has gained jobs every month for the last year.

Fact #2: The un-employment rate is the lowest since 9/11.

Fact #3: The down trend of the economy started under Clinton. It was compounded by 9/11.

Fact #4: The fact the the economy is gaining jobs and has the lowest un-employment since 9/11 shows that Bush's plan worked and pulled us out of the recession brought on by Clinton and 9/11.

Fact #5: You said "The US thrives on cheap gas" but your presidential hopeful and your liberal party won't let us drill for our own oil in the 2nd largest oil find in US history. Too worried about the frozen waste of nothing and effecting the mating habits of caribou.

[Ninja Prime]

that depends entirely on whom you ask...

bush officials say it was before the bush admin got into office... many other economists say it was in 2001...

So, you're saying in 2001 the day he got into office before any of his changes had been made or had any time to effect anything, the recession started... and it was Bush's fault? :rolleyes: :lame:

[Sazar]

Bill Clinton left office with an economy in as good of a shape as it was at anypoint in any of our lifetimes.

In fairness to Bush, 9/11 was devistating to our economy, and the only reason it hasn't collapsed is because Greenspan is leaving the rates alone. If we keep shipping jobs to India and the Phillipines, no interest rate will be low enough.

Look at Japan, they have had zero interest for years now, and they are still struggling to keep their head above water. The dollar is already getting its ass kicked by the Euro, and Bush's words don't convince me that things will be alright.

wrt jobs yes... wrt our national debt... no...

also wrt greenspan, he has had no choice but to leave the rates alone... nothing cept the last few months would have encouraged people in his position to RAISE rates because there was little pressure from inflation...

japan's issues are a lot different than the US's.. we don't have bad bank loans amounting to several billions of dollars...

the dollar's strength is a worry and while it is not a bad idea to let it slide a little to strengthen our exports, we import so much that @ the end of the day our negative balance is just getting wider...

@ the end of the day the united states just spends WAY too much... from the government to the soceity... we are a people's who have grown up with a "debt is good" philosophy...

w/o incurring debts our standard of living would be a lot less than it is today and unfortunately we are so used to it that when things get bad... its likely to do so in a hurry and require drastic changes to curb our enthusiasm for spending...

[Sazar]

So, you're saying in 2001 the day he got into office before any of his changes had been made or had any time to effect anything, the recession started... and it was Bush's fault? :rolleyes: :lame:

point out where i have suggested that and i will respond...

[Sazar]

Fact #1: The economy has gained jobs every month for the last year.



dis-proven fact... bush's OWN officials say there have been 9 months of growth in the last 12 months... though not 9 consecutive...

Fact #2: The un-employment rate is the lowest since 9/11.

perhaps

Fact #3: The down trend of the economy started under Clinton. It was compounded by 9/11.

yes the down-ward trend started in the final year or so of clinton's reign... however under bush things were not exactly picking up mightily... 9/11 was a major blow though and thats a given...

Fact #4: The fact the the economy is gaining jobs and has the lowest un-employment since 9/11 shows that Bush's plan worked and pulled us out of the recession brought on by Clinton and 9/11.

consumer confidence under bush is far lower than it was under clinton, even now... bush's plan working is also an odd consideration because in the period he has been in office he still has a massive net-loss wrt jobs and also the worth of the jobs that ARE in fact created...

Fact #5: You said "The US thrives on cheap gas" but your presidential hopeful and your liberal party won't let us drill for our own oil in the 2nd largest oil find in US history. Too worried about the frozen waste of nothing and effecting the mating habits of caribou.

the US has too high a dependency on oil... drilling on national preserves should not be a solution to our dependency... whatever happened to bush's $10 billion initiative on alternative fuels and energy sources he touted (as did members on this board) ?

[mikloyd]

that depends entirely on whom you ask...

bush officials say it was before the bush admin got into office... many other economists say it was in 2001...
Yep!

As the market goes, so goes the economy. While the DOW was seesawing a bit in Clinton's last hours, the real dip happened in 2001 ... 1st in Q1 then again on 9/11.
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/intchart/frames/frames.asp?symb=djia&time=8&freq=1

I was more commenting on the state of the US debt, but the economy was still doing good even in early 2001.

I also fully acknowledge in large part that the economy is a free moving beast independent of the Commander in Chief. There are things that a CoC can do to help or harm this.

[mikloyd]

whatever happened to bush's $10 billion initiative on alternative fuels and energy sources he touted (as did members on this board) ?

I'll tell ya what happened ... Detroit wrote Bush some checks to STFU on that topic!

[mikloyd]

oh ... and one more point on the economy ... we still have a lot of bills to come on this totally non-controversial and popular war we are waging in the middle east.

[mikloyd]

The problem is the economy started its recession in 2000, before Bush was elected president.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/UNRATE

[Sazar]

mik... as it stands I don't think the economy is in THAT bad a shape... :cool:

its not great but come on man... you gotta admit we're not as badly off as we were in 2002/2003 :)

[mikloyd]

you gotta admit we're not as badly off as we were in 2002/2003 :)

No doubt ... but it's going to get worse before it gets better. Which is the point I based this thread on.

I just don't know why this isn't the #1 topic in the election. The ironic thing is that Bush tried to make this a big topic by claiming we HAD turned the corner. People just need to be aware more. Mainstream media has become so right wing its not even funny. A little dose of some news from the left would do us all some good.

What's wrong with MORE information and letting US make up our own minds?

[mikloyd]

Fact #1: The economy has gained jobs every month for the last year.
Fact #2: The un-employment rate is the lowest since 9/11.
Fact #3: The down trend of the economy started under Clinton. It was compounded by 9/11.
Fact #4: The fact the the economy is gaining jobs and has the lowest un-employment since 9/11 shows that Bush's plan worked and pulled us out of the recession brought on by Clinton and 9/11.
Fact #5: You said "The US thrives on cheap gas" but your presidential hopeful and your liberal party won't let us drill for our own oil in the 2nd largest oil find in US history. Too worried about the frozen waste of nothing and effecting the mating habits of caribou.
Fact #6: (contradicts various parts of facts 1-5) While employers have added 1.2 million payroll jobs this year, they have shed a net 1.1 million jobs since Bush became president in January 2001.

[Son Goku]

wrt jobs yes... wrt our national debt... no...

japan's issues are a lot different than the US's.. we don't have bad bank loans amounting to several billions of dollars...

I'm heading out, but there is another difference between the US economy and that of Japan. And this is wrt policy of lay offs and how the companies themselves deal with ecconomic downturns.

I'll preface this by saying that my father was born in 1925, and himself retired after working at a company for 45 years. In his day, this wasn't so unheard of, and the concept of job security, as well as company loyalty existed to a degree people don't tend to see it today...

I mentioned this to my ecconimics teacher last semester, and basically "why should people have a sense of company loyalty, to an establishment they feel will throw them to the wolves when it becomes convenient (aka when a ecconimic downturn is on the horizon). Why shouldn't they just look at the want ads a lot, for another job that makes a few extra bucks an hour, and give notice of resignation when they get something lined up?"

Of course there was once a concept of a work ethic in this country, which has well for intents and purposes disappeared... His comment was "yeah, there can be a downside to just about anything..."

We also went on to discuss matters in Japan, where for instance labor unions operate very different then in the United States. Needless to say, there's a concept of a corporate family over there, and when one market slows, a Japanese company can have a tendency to move off into other markets and re-loocate workers within the company...

[UDawg]

that depends entirely on whom you ask...

bush officials say it was before the bush admin got into office... many other economists say it was in 2001...


No it doesn't saz and you know this. I'm not even going to keep arguing this.

[UDawg]

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/UNRATE

Unemployment are not the initial indicator of a recession. If you knew this you would not have used unemployment numbers as part of your argument.


http://money.cnn.com/2001/11/26/economy/recession/
http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/22/news/economy/nber/
These two corrispond with each other.

Look at the GDP. It started falling before Bush took office. This means there was a trend already in place. There is no sane or and person not blinded by idealology that will say Bush caused the recession. It is a business cycle. The childish argument Mik is trying to make is just that.

http://www.home-mortgage-loan-refinancing.com/Mortgage01_22_04/Mortgage9M_Refinancing.htm

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3691

The list can go on and on. The trend is clear as a cloudless day of when the downward trend started.

[Rob_0126]

Fact #6: (contradicts various parts of facts 1-5) While employers have added 1.2 million payroll jobs this year, they have shed a net 1.1 million jobs since Bush became president in January 2001.

Is it Bushes fault that businesses decided to lay off so many people?

[saturnotaku]

Is it Bushes fault that businesses decided to lay off so many people?

Duh. :retard:

[DivotMaker]

Mainstream media has become so right wing its not even funny. A little dose of some news from the left would do us all some good.

Well, my BS meter just pegged out... :rolleyes:

[PsychoSy]

I wouldn't put much stock in your "facts", Ninja ...

Earlier this year, when the Bush administration was using some Enron-style arithmetic to jigger its 2004 employment growth estimates, Brad DeLong wrote a series of take-no-prisoners posts about the political disembowelment of the Council of Economic Advisors - the White House's in-house economic think tank.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000253.html

Under previous presidents -- both Republican and Democratic -- the CEA had a certain amount of credibility for the rigor and honesty of its work - as well as a certain insulation from the partisan cronyism that infests most of the federal government these days. Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, for example, both worked at the Reagan CEA (unfathomable when you think about it now, eh?!?) Professor DeLong, on the other hand, documented -- in painstaking detail -- the Bush II CEA's intellectual decline into a pliable tool of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Brad highlighted the willingness of the council and its chairman, Gregory Mankiw, to misrepresent their previous forecasts in order to spare Bush the embarrassment of having to admit his initial job creation target for 2004 couldn't possibly be met.

Well, we're given another demonstration of the intellectual collapse of the CEA, and the degree to which Dr. Mankiw is willing to prostitute himself to the greater glory of the Republican Party. He may not be the biggest harlot in the Texas cat house that is the Bush administration, but he's doing a hell of an imitation of the guy playing the piano in the downstairs parlor. Briefing reporters on the dismal payroll report for July, Mankiw apparently went to great lengths to try to sell the GOP's spin of the day, which was to stress the hefty jump in employment as measured by the so-called household survey (any intellectually honest economist will tell you straight to your face that the household survey is based on a poll of roughly 60,000 Americans while Payrolls on the other hand -- which showed virtually no growth last month -- are based on a completely different survey of employers.)

Here's Mankiw ... spinning like an economic ballerina:

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7BD6ECEB89-540B-46F7-8FA3-72BFADF7D8FD%7D&siteid=google&dist=google

"You can't ignore some pieces of data and pay exclusive attention to others," Mankiw said. "The truth lies in between those two estimates."

The truth, however, actually lies somewhere else entirely - and it's not a place within easy reach of Dr. Mankiw's statement. What's more, there's no question the chairman knows this (even an incompetent economist would) and there's no evidence that Mankiw is incompetent, just intellectually spineless. The issue is not whether the household survey is inaccurate - all economic surveys are, up to a point. But Mankiw knows perfectly well that the household survey isn't designed to tell us how many jobs the American economy creates each month. It's purpose is to tell us what percentage of the American workforce is employed - using the special definitions applied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Cleveland Federal Reserve published a very clear, non-jargony paper on this topic just a couple of months ago here if you want chapter and verse ...

http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/com2004/05-15.pdf

But the "Cliff's Notes" version is roughly this:

1) Because the survey is based on a relatively small sample, the BLS uses a population estimate from the Census Bureau to extrapolate the survey into results for the national population. If the census estimate is wrong, the national results will be wrong, too.

2) Some results, however, will be more wrong than others. Because the unemployment rate (and a related measure, the employment-to-population ratio) have the Census Bureau's population estimate on both sides of the equation (the numerator and the denominator) they're less affected by an error in the census data. The estimate of total employed individuals, however, can be thrown be wildly off ...

This, as it turns out, is exactly what happened during the 2001-2003 period, when the payroll survey was showing huge job losses, while the household survey was showing moderate job gains. As the Cleveland Fed's PDF explains:

In its most recent review of the population, the U.S. Department of Census determined that it had overestimated the U.S. population for the period from 2000 to 2003 primarily because of unanticipated changes in net international migration patterns.

As a result, the BLS notes that the upward trend in the employment estimates produced by the household survey since the end of the 2001 recession is largely a function of this overestimate.

In fact, through the end of 2003, the accumulated overcount of the estimate of employment in the household survey was nearly half a million workers. (emphasis mine).

The household survey, in other words, was giving a reasonably accurate reading on the unemployment rate, a reasonably accurate reading on the employment-to-population ratio, and a downright bogus reading on employment growth. And the conservative economists (or pseudo-economists, in Larry Kudlow's case) who staked their credibility on trashing the payroll survey and praising the household survey (for something it was never designed to do) were shown to be the complete Bush-cheering partisan fools they truly are! They were totally wrong ... about as wrong as it's possible to be, in fact.

(For s---ts and grins, I visited the National Review's website to see what the supply-side nutjobs who congregate there might have to say about this issue - or about the employment report, for that matter. I found nothing - nada, nunca, zip, zippo, nein, naught!! Not a word, not even in The Corner - their circle-jerk blog!! Either the supply siders all took the day off, or they finally know what a losing argument is when they see one and made a fast exodus to Dick Cheney's "undisclosed" Motel-6-in-the-ground!) :D

Mankiw also knows - just as he knows the accuracy of the household survey as a job creation measure has been disavowed even by "Two-Face" Greenspan (who's also willing to put on the fishnet stockings for his political masters, but not at the cost of his own reputation). As the Great One himself told Congress last February:

“Having looked at both sets of data … it’s our judgment that as much as we would like the household data to be the more accurate, regrettably that turns out not to be the case.”

Mankiw's sin is a minor one, I suppose (at least when compared to misleading the nation into an unnecessary war, or revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative and a Pakistani Al-queda "double-agent", or fiddling the profit & loss statement of a major public corporation) but it demonstrates just how deeply the political rot has sunk into the intellectual muscle of the federal government, most particularly the CEA. Truly, to the Mayberry Machiavellis, policy means nothing. Politics -- and power -- is all ...

Perhaps that explains why they're in the flustercuck they're in now! :angel: