This ain't your father's economy, but whose is it?

Chicago Sun Times ^ | 01/24/2006 | Mark Brown

[Willie Green]

I don't understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

That's easy...
Dubya has kept it afloat with over $2 Trillion of deficit spending that we'll never be able to pay back.

[MNJohnnie]

That's easy... Dubya has kept it afloat with over $2 Trillion of deficit spending that we'll never be able to pay back

Still spewing your hysteric nonsense I see Wille. Go take some Econ classes, Your ignorance on economics is positively embarrassing.

It's called ROBATICS you economic isolationist morons. You do NOT need as many people or facilities to produce cars. The economy is NOT stagnate. It changes every day and companies have to evolve to meet the changing technology. Part of the problem the USA had in the 1970s was it refusal to adopt to a changing economic environment. All this hysteria by the Economic Ignorant shows just how completely OUT OF TOUCH you all are about how the economy works. Jobs come, jobs go. It is the beauty of capitalism.

[MNJohnnie]

It's called CAPITALISM. Simply amazing how utterly stupid so many of the Junk Journalists are on how the economy works. Jobs come, jobs go. It is this desperate need to try and lock the economy in a stagnate bubble that demonstrates just how out of touch with basic economic reality the Junk Journalists are.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

Robatics?

Mechanized bats run the economy?
No wonder everyone is confused.

Who'd a thunk it?

[TheOracleAtLilac]

Pardon my ignorance, but

aside from health/elder care & govt., what are the current "growth" industries.

In years past they were easy to identify e.g. aerospace, computers, etc.
Not so clear today.

[RegulatorCountry]

"Mechanized bats run the economy?"

I've always thought stealth bombers look like headless, mechanized bats. Does this count?

[dead]

I don't pretend to understand the economy any more.

And I don’t pretend to understand Lithuanian opera.

The difference is, I don’t try to write an article about Lithuanian opera.

[RegulatorCountry]

"How can you be fair to the rest of the world and still be fair to our workers?"

Oh, so globalization is all about "fairness," huh? Just another wealth redistribution scheme, with us as the primary donors, as always?

When did it become written in stone that we *must* chase the absolute bottom dollar labor cost? The greatest prosperity the world has ever seen occurred in the United States over the past century or so. To listen to the most ardent globalists, you'd think this would be impossible, because there were protectionist trade restrictions in varying degrees throughout the period.

[Willie Green]

It's called ROBATICS you economic isolationist morons.

You stoopid 'tard. You misspelled "moroon".

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

Maybe nobody knew about the bats because they are stealth robats. I sure didn't know about them.

That might explain why economists seem more confused than New England weathermen.

[RegulatorCountry]

"Maybe nobody knew about the bats because they are stealth robats. I sure didn't know about them."

Well, since Greenspan's retiring, maybe we should start a new cargo cult, centered upon the mechanized stealth bats that run our economy?

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

I don't know.

I sorta like the idea of keeping it a secret.
It's fun to think that we know all about the Stealth Robats that run the economy and nobody else does.

I was never in a secret economics club before.

[USS Alaska]

"What worries me, I guess, is the nagging sense that we're living in a house of cards, and that the wind is about to blow.

Maybe I wouldn't feel this way if not for some uncertainty in my own profession right now, the newspaper business being a little hazy as to what the future holds."

Finally the truth. He is a liberal writer that doesn't want to work and is afraid that if his job gets whacked, he will be out on his dumbass. By his own admission, he has no clue about the economy, since he can't read a balance sheet, doesn't understand GDP, unemployment stats, household employment stats, the difference between average and median, the laffer curve and any other meaningful set of numbers or ideas that should explain economics 101 to him.

This idiot should not be allowed to write about the economy because he is stuck on stupid.

[Alberta's Child]

This article is littered with so many misleading and/or inaccurate statements that I wouldn't even know where to begin. But I'll give it a shot . . .

I don't pretend to understand the economy any more.

At least he gets his first statement right. He never did understand it, and now at least he's admitting that he can't pretend anymore.

I don't understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

If these were all such "good" jobs, then why don't people in journalism (which represents one of the lowest-paid careers in the country today) ever give up their jobs and go to work in a factory?

I don't understand how we can measure the economy in ways that don't seem to reflect the distress in the work force.

That's because total employment is one of the least accurate indicators of a nation's economic strength. China, which is supposedly taking all of these "good jobs" from us, is currently ranked around #120 in the world in per-capita GDP, which puts it right around such economic titans as the Dominican Republic and Gabon.

Maybe I wouldn't feel this way if not for some uncertainty in my own profession right now, the newspaper business being a little hazy as to what the future holds.

The fact that anyone even has the time to read the kind of crap that passes for "journalism" these days is the most telling indication that we are prosperous beyond belief.

But that world has almost disappeared. The railroad is just a shadow of itself.

Utter and complete bullsh!t, spoken with the intelligence of someone who believes that the railroad must not exist anymore because it no longer stops in his town. The railroad industry in the United States has set all-time records for car loadings just about every month for the last three years, and the biggest problem the industry now faces is that demand for freight railroad transportation in the U.S. is starting to exceed the industry's ability to move trains.

Workers all over the world are making cars today -- and doing it for less than our workers make. We're not just talking about Japan anymore, but Poland and Hungary and Turkey.

And Kentucky (Toyota), Ohio (Honda), South Carolina (BMW), Tennessee (Nissan), Alabama (Hyundai), etc. Maybe this moron should be asking himself why Ford is laying of 30,000 workers while all of these other auto producers are opening plants in the U.S. at a record pace.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I don't understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

Part of the problem are false statements like this one.

Ford still has tens of thousands of employees who don't do work. They're on the payroll because the union had this included in the contract. These aren't jobs.

Also the median wage is rising, not falling. It fell during the '90's when we had a blithering idiot for President but this wasn't news at the time.

[redgolum]

I don't know what we produce. I don't know what it is of value that we provide to the rest of the world.

Food. Nowhere on the earth has a shortage of lawyers so that has to be it.

[USS Alaska]

" I don't pretend to understand the economy any more.

And I don’t pretend to understand Lithuanian opera.

The difference is, I don’t try to write an article about Lithuanian opera."

Amen bro. The standard of living in the USA today is the best that it's ever been in the recorded history of man. Industries change and we adapt. The underlining reason that American's are the most successful is based on the Constitution and free market capitlism. Capitalism, by definition, means that the strong survive and the weak die. This means that some industries will pass from America, we don't make tvs, dvds, etc. We have other ways of revenue generation.

The doom and gloom crowd has always been {and will always be} with us. European countries are growing at 1.1% per year, and we are growing at 3 times that rate yet the msm calls this a bad economy.

[gipper81]

Longworth calls it "THE big puzzle." "How can you be fair to the rest of the world and still be fair to our workers? We're into a new era, and we haven't figured it out," he said.

The market will figure it out. Not these bozos sitting at their desks.

[TXBSAFH]

Truth hurts. He are afloat in a sea of debt. People stop using credit and home equity to live beyond their means the economy will go into recession in a fortnight. You can not borrow forever.