More dismal employment #s

[BDKJMU]

Thur: 1st qtr growth was revised downward by Commerce Dept from an anemic 2.2% to an even more anemic 1.9% annual...

Yesterday:
-march and April's job #s were revised downward by the Labor Dept
-Unemployment ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%
-Only 69k new jobs created, fewest in a yr.
-Dow dropped 275, and is now negative for the year.

Way to go Obama...

[BlueHen86]

Thur: 1st qtr growth was revised downward by Commerce Dept from an anemic 2.2% to an even more anemic 1.9% annual...

Yesterday:
-march and April's job #s were revised downward by the Labor Dept
-Unemployment ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%
-Only 69k new jobs created, fewest in a yr.
-Dow dropped 275, and is now negative for the year.

Way to go Obama...

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

If only the GOP was calling the shots, they have the answers.

Let's face it, things suck right now and both parties need to shoulder the blame. The idea that it's the "other guys" fault only enables each party to keep blaming the other guy. Obama might lose in November, but I have no faith that Romney can fix things.

[Ivytalk]

Thur: 1st qtr growth was revised downward by Commerce Dept from an anemic 2.2% to an even more anemic 1.9% annual...

Yesterday:
-march and April's job #s were revised downward by the Labor Dept
-Unemployment ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%
-Only 69k new jobs created, fewest in a yr.
-Dow dropped 275, and is now negative for the year.

Way to go Obama...

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

If only the GOP was calling the shots, they have the answers.

Let's face it, things suck right now and both parties need to shoulder the blame. The idea that it's the "other guys" fault only enables each party to keep blaming the other guy. Obama might lose in November, but I have no faith that Romney can fix things.

Crap, 86, you're becoming downright boring. Mister pox-on-both-your-houses moderate. A combination of GannonFan
and UNI88 with an oatmeal chaser.

[BlueHen86]

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

If only the GOP was calling the shots, they have the answers.

Let's face it, things suck right now and both parties need to shoulder the blame. The idea that it's the "other guys" fault only enables each party to keep blaming the other guy. Obama might lose in November, but I have no faith that Romney can fix things.

Crap, 86, you're becoming downright boring. Mister pox-on-both-your-houses moderate. A combination of GannonFan
and UNI88 with an oatmeal chaser.

Both houses deserve a pox. They don't even try to work together. Screw 'em. Vote them all out!

[SeattleGriz]

Thur: 1st qtr growth was revised downward by Commerce Dept from an anemic 2.2% to an even more anemic 1.9% annual...

Yesterday:
-march and April's job #s were revised downward by the Labor Dept
-Unemployment ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%
-Only 69k new jobs created, fewest in a yr.
-Dow dropped 275, and is now negative for the year.

Way to go Obama...

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

If only the GOP was calling the shots, they have the answers.

Let's face it, things suck right now and both parties need to shoulder the blame. The idea that it's the "other guys" fault only enables each party to keep blaming the other guy. Obama might lose in November, but I have no faith that Romney can fix things.

I may be wrong, but believe if Romney is elected, the economy will turn around quickly. My basis for saying this is that many businesses seem to be worried about investing money, especially since Obama has come out with such a staunch "hate business" attitude.

Businesses don't know what will happen, so they are holding onto their money.

So yes, it is Obama, The Rookie's, fault.

[Cap'n Cat]

Thur: 1st qtr growth was revised downward by Commerce Dept from an anemic 2.2% to an even more anemic 1.9% annual...

Yesterday:
-march and April's job #s were revised downward by the Labor Dept
-Unemployment ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%
-Only 69k new jobs created, fewest in a yr.
-Dow dropped 275, and is now negative for the year.

Way to go Obama...

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

If only the GOP was calling the shots, they have the answers.

Let's face it, things suck right now and both parties need to shoulder the blame. The idea that it's the "other guys" fault only enables each party to keep blaming the other guy. Obama might lose in November, but I have no faith that Romney can fix things.

Meh, I don't know, guys. It ain't Obama's fault and it ain't the Conks fault, though Conks support the welfare system for big companies. Cap'n Cat is one of the very few people on this board who is in manufacturing and He can tell you a few things.

First, corporations are lazy, profit-protecting welfare whores. Every company I have worked for, including the multi-billion dollar ones, leans on states and municipalities to fund "training" and hiring of new employees, thus burdening funds that could be used elsewhere for things such as infrastructure, one of the things corporations bitch and whine about. The dastardly fact of the matter is that they HAVE the resources to pay for training, they just choose not to invest because of the above.

Second see "First". Actually, there is a real "second". Many of these companies rely on temp agencies to staff their ranks, paying the people minimum wage or right above it so they do not have to offer benefits and etc. This way, they keep their expenses down and perpetuate the poverty class.

The company I work for now hires line workers from a temp agency, too, which pays them $9.00/hour. Some of these people have families and their wives/husbands work, too. No time for kids. Can't pay their bills. Even the full-time people only make a max of $10.50 an hour. Meanwhile, overhead fvks like me are pulling in $100,000+ and we wonder why our turnover rate is so fvcking high.

[CID1990]

Thur: 1st qtr growth was revised downward by Commerce Dept from an anemic 2.2% to an even more anemic 1.9% annual...

Yesterday:
-march and April's job #s were revised downward by the Labor Dept
-Unemployment ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%
-Only 69k new jobs created, fewest in a yr.
-Dow dropped 275, and is now negative for the year.

Way to go Obama...

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

No, it isn't that he is capable and won't.

It is that he is incapable and can't.

Hiring a guy with Obama's experience was along the lines of
hiring a bus driver to land a 747. His lack of experience was brought up before his election, but of course nobody wanted to hear that. Remember "Jesus was also a community organizer"?

It would be sweet to say "we told you so", but this is our country and should take more importance and its governance should carry more gravity than the petty divisiveness of the last several years.

Romney might not be the guy to guide the economy back onto the tracks, but his resume makes him eminently more qualified to take a shot at it than the guy currently on the job.


Also Sodomy

[BlueHen86]

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

If only the GOP was calling the shots, they have the answers.

Let's face it, things suck right now and both parties need to shoulder the blame. The idea that it's the "other guys" fault only enables each party to keep blaming the other guy. Obama might lose in November, but I have no faith that Romney can fix things.

I may be wrong, but believe if Romney is elected, the economy will turn around quickly. My basis for saying this is that many businesses seem to be worried about investing money, especially since Obama has come out with such a staunch "hate business" attitude.

Businesses don't know what will happen, so they are holding onto their money.

So yes, it is Obama, The Rookie's, fault.

I hope that you are right. But I doubt it. I think fixing the economy will require more than just a change of President.

Obama gets the blame because he is the President, it's his watch. But it's a team game, and the team can't win if the players are pointing fingers.

[Cap'n Cat]

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

No, it isn't that he is capable and won't.

It is that he is incapable and can't.

Hiring a guy with Obama's experience was along the lines of
hiring a bus driver to land a 747. His lack of experience was brought up before his election, but of course nobody wanted to hear that. Remember "Jesus was also a community organizer"?

It would be sweet to say "we told you so", but this is our country and should take more importance and its governance should carry more gravity than the petty divisiveness of the last several years.

Romney might not be the guy to guide the economy back onto the tracks, but his resume makes him eminently more qualified to take a shot at it than the guy currently on the job.


Also Sodomy

Dead wrong. Read mine and Blue Hen's posts, dork.

[BlueHen86]

Yeah, because it's all Obama's fault. He has the power to fix it, but chooses not to.

No, it isn't that he is capable and won't.

It is that he is incapable and can't.

Hiring a guy with Obama's experience was along the lines of
hiring a bus driver to land a 747. His lack of experience was brought up before his election, but of course nobody wanted to hear that. Remember "Jesus was also a community organizer"?

It would be sweet to say "we told you so", but this is our country and should take more importance and its governance should carry more gravity than the petty divisiveness of the last several years.

Romney might not be the guy to guide the economy back onto the tracks, but his resume makes him eminently more qualified to take a shot at it than the guy currently on the job.


Also Sodomy

I didn't vote for Obama, and don't plan on voting for him this time, so saying "we told you so" would be preaching to the choir. You can blame Obama if you want, but I suspect that the measures taken to fix the economy won't happen becuase the two parties won't work together to make the tough decisions necessary. They are too busy trying to get reelected to make the hard choices. Both parties share the blame for the current situation.

[kalm]

The problem is we haven't followed the Reagan plan:

Let’s look at the comparison between government purchases in the Reagan “Morning in America” recovery and the current recovery:

At this point in the Reagan recovery government spending had risen 11.6 percent; this time around it’s actually down by 2.6 percent. So if we had followed the Reagan track, spending would be almost 15 percent higher.

Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year, spending on the Reagan track would have meant more than $340 billion more in direct government demand, or more than 2 percent of GDP. Include the multiplier effect, and we would have expected real GDP to be something like 3 percent higher — and given Okun’s Law, the unemployment rate to be 1.5 percentage points lower, or something like 7 percent.

How does this compare with the Reagan recovery at a corresponding stage?

So what my calculation suggests is that if it weren’t for austerity, American style — the result of the failure to provide sufficient aid to state and local governments — we might well have an unemployment rate right now that was lower than unemployment at the comparable stage of “Morning in America”.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0 ... austerity/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BDKJMU]

The problem is we haven't followed the Reagan plan:

Let’s look at the comparison between government purchases in the Reagan “Morning in America” recovery and the current recovery:

At this point in the Reagan recovery government spending had risen 11.6 percent; this time around it’s actually down by 2.6 percent. So if we had followed the Reagan track, spending would be almost 15 percent higher.

Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year, spending on the Reagan track would have meant more than $340 billion more in direct government demand, or more than 2 percent of GDP. Include the multiplier effect, and we would have expected real GDP to be something like 3 percent higher — and given Okun’s Law, the unemployment rate to be 1.5 percentage points lower, or something like 7 percent.

How does this compare with the Reagan recovery at a corresponding stage?

So what my calculation suggests is that if it weren’t for austerity, American style — the result of the failure to provide sufficient aid to state and local governments — we might well have an unemployment rate right now that was lower than unemployment at the comparable stage of “Morning in America”.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0 ... austerity/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Bulls**t. Spending is down 2.6% under Obama?

"The White House is aggressively pushing the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, President Obama is tightfisted with taxpayer dollars. To back it up, the administration cites a media report that claims federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower years.

"Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years," Obama said at a campaign rally Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa.

The problem with that rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama's 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama's watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts.

It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.

Obama rests his claim on an analysis by MarketWatch, a financial information and news service owned by Dow Jones & Co. The analysis simply looks at the year-to-year topline spending number for the government but doesn't account for distortions baked into the figures by the Wall Street bailout and government takeover of the mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The MarketWatch study finds spending growth of only 1.4 percent over 2010-2013, or annual increases averaging 0.4 percent over that period. Those are stunningly low figures considering that Obama rammed through Congress an $831 billion stimulus measure in early 2009 and presided over significant increases in annual spending by domestic agencies at the same time the cost of benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Medicaid were ticking steadily higher.

A fairer calculation would give Obama much of the responsibility for an almost 10 percent budget boost in 2009, then a 13 percent increase over 2010-2013, or average annual growth of spending of just more than 3 percent over that period.

So, how does the administration arrive at its claim?

First, there's the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the official name for the Wall Street bailout. First, companies got a net $151 billion from TARP in 2009, making 2010 spending look smaller. Then, because banks and Wall Street firms repaid a net $110 billion in TARP funds in 2010, Obama is claiming credit for cutting spending by that much.

The combination of TARP lending in one year and much of that money being paid back in the next makes Obama's spending record for 2010 look $261 billion thriftier than it really was. Only by that measure does Obama "cut" spending by 1.8 percent in 2010 as the analysis claims.

The federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also makes Obama's record on spending look better than it was. The government spent $96 billion on the Fannie-Freddie takeovers in 2009 but only $40 billion on them in 2010. By the administration's reckoning, the $56 billion difference was a spending cut by Obama.

Taken together, TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie combine to give Obama an undeserved $317 billion swing in the 2010 figures and the resulting 1.8 percent cut from 2009. A fairer reading is an almost 8 percent increase.

Those two bailouts account for $72 billion more in cuts in 2011. Obama supported the bailouts.

There's also the question of how to treat the 2009 fiscal year, which actually began Oct. 1, 2008, almost four months before Obama took office. Typically, the remaining eight months get counted as part of the prior president's spending since the incoming president usually doesn't change it much until the following October. The MarketWatch analysis assigned 2009 to former President George W. Bush, though it gave Obama responsibility that year for a $140 million chunk of the 2009 stimulus bill.

But Obama's role in 2009 spending was much bigger than that. For starters, he signed nine spending bills funding every Cabinet agency except Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. While the numbers don't jibe exactly, Obama bears the chief responsibility for an 11 percent, $59 billion increase in non-defense spending in 2009. Then there's a 9 percent, $109 billion increase in combined defense and non-defense appropriated outlays in 2010, a year for which Obama is wholly responsible.

As other critics have noted, including former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the MarketWatch analysis also incorporates CBO's annual baseline as its estimate for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. That gives Obama credit for three events unlikely to occur:

--$65 billion in 2013 from automatic, across-the-board spending cuts slated to take effect next January.

--Cuts in Medicare payments to physicians.

--The expiration of refundable tax cuts that are "scored" as spending in federal ledgers.

Lawmakers are unlikely to allow the automatic cuts to take full effect, but it's at best a guessing game as to what will really happen in 2013. A better measure is Obama's request for 2013.

"You can only make him look good by ignoring the early years and adopting the hope and not the reality of the years in his budget," said Holtz-Eakin, a GOP economist and president of the American Action Forum, a free market think tank.

So how does Obama measure up?

If one assumes that TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie by the government as one-time budgetary anomalies and remove them from calculations -- an approach taken by Holtz-Eakin -- you get the following picture:

--A 9.7 percent increase in 2009, much of which is attributable to Obama.

--A 7.8 percent increase in 2010, followed by slower spending growth over 2011-13. Much of the slower growth reflects the influence of Republicans retaking control of the House and their budget and debt deal last summer with Obama. All told, government spending now appears to be growing at an annual rate of roughly 3 percent over the 2010-2013 period, rather than the 0.4 percent claimed by Obama and the MarketWatch analysis."
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0o ... p&fr=crmas" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[BDKJMU]

-2.6% my a**. This is what Krugman wrote in his blog: "...Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year...." Try about 3.8 trillion. Krugman is an idiot.

Since FY 2008' when the recession started, to FY 2012, fed spending has increased from about 3 trillion to about 3.8 trillion. That's an increase of about 27%. in 4 years:

[kalm]

-2.6% my a**. This is what Krugman wrote in his blog: "...Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year...." Try about 3.8 trillion. Krugman is an idiot.

Since FY 2008' when the recession started, to FY 2012, fed spending has increased from about 3 trillion to about 3.8 trillion. That's an increase of about 27%. in 4 years:

Uh oh...touched a nerve.

[youngterrier]

The system's been broken, we're no more or less f*cked than we've ever been

it will get way worse before it gets "fixed"

[Cap'n Cat]

-2.6% my a**. This is what Krugman wrote in his blog: "...Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year...." Try about 3.8 trillion. Krugman is an idiot.

Since FY 2008' when the recession started, to FY 2012, fed spending has increased from about 3 trillion to about 3.8 trillion. That's an increase of about 27%. in 4 years:

Uh oh...touched a nerve.

Goddammit, kalmie.

Next, they're quoting Dan Quayle.

[Gil Dobie]

-2.6% my a**. This is what Krugman wrote in his blog: "...Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year...." Try about 3.8 trillion. Krugman is an idiot.

Since FY 2008' when the recession started, to FY 2012, fed spending has increased from about 3 trillion to about 3.8 trillion. That's an increase of about 27%. in 4 years:

When the Obama campaign asked in 2008 if the American people wanted to continue the failed Bush policies, that when he spoke of change, he just wanted to add his name and make it the failed Obama-Bush policies.

[kalm]

-2.6% my a**. This is what Krugman wrote in his blog: "...Since government spending on goods and services is about $3 trillion a year...." Try about 3.8 trillion. Krugman is an idiot.

Since FY 2008' when the recession started, to FY 2012, fed spending has increased from about 3 trillion to about 3.8 trillion. That's an increase of about 27%. in 4 years:

When the Obama campaign asked in 2008 if the American people wanted to continue the failed Bush policies, that when he spoke of change, he just wanted to add his name and make it the failed Obama-Bush policies.