Posted on 09/05/2009 11:20:37 PM PDT by FreedomFighter1013
The national unemployment rate as reported Friday stands at 9.7%, about 15 million people or is it? In August, the total civilian workforce as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was estimated to be 154.6 million. However, that is down 0.16% from 154.8 million in August 2008. The decline of approximately 256,000 (rounding error) is highly unusual since the workforce population is ever increasing thanks to immigration and other factors (graduation, divorce or other catastrophe (e.g., Bernie Maddoff)). In August alone,1.09 million people entered the workforce according to the BLS.
Population growth in the U.S. is a given. (more)
(Excerpt) Read more at citizen5408.com ...
The ‘RAT plan to put people out of work really backfired on them. The dumbasses forgot that when you put people out of work, THEY AREN’T PAYING TAXES!
Then again, baby boomers are just beginning to impact the demographics as they are now starting to retire.
Cloward - Piven anyone?
Smoot Hawley, a tariff that amounted to a 60% tax on 3200 import items, kicked off the Great Depression the exact day political maneuvering ensured it would pass.
Big tax increases under Hoover and Rooseveldt, turned a stock market crash into a ten or more year depression that wrecked millions of lives, impacting the poor most of all.
Cap and Trade will amount to a huge tariff, and Health Care will amount to a huge tax increase.
The equation is very simple.
Huge tariffs or taxes, barriers to trade, will cause recession, at best, total economic collapse, at worst.
From where we stand right now, economically, recession might tip us over to another Depression, or even worse.
If Obama passes Cap and Trade, if Obama passes Health Care, it could break all the big banks, most of the little ones, and put the Great Depression in second place as the most catalclysmic event in human history.
If Obama keeps printing money, the dollar WILL devalue, and we will be stuck with rampant inflation, even hyperinflation.
These are givens, there is no other mathematical possibility.
The only question left is whether Obama is really this dumb, or else, is Obama an evil genius, knowing full well what will happen if his bills pass, and proceeding anyway, to achieve an objective he has kept secret.
The best case scenario we can hope for if these two bills pass and Obama keeps printing money, are wages holding steady, due to trade barriers, and prices rising astronomically due to dollar devaluation.
Id\f Obama isn’t trying to wreck the American economy on purpose, the solution is simple.
Increase tax revenue by cutting tax rates, and prevent hyperinflation by tightening the supply of base currency, not printing it by the helicopter load.
Even Kennedy recognized this.
The dollar is pretty strong right now, this can be achieved without undue pain.
In very short order we will SEE what Obama’s REAL agenda is.
That makes for one PISSED OFF electorate.
“The ‘RAT plan to put people out of work really backfired on them...”
They are also into fantasy regulation-essentially has the same effect as taxation...less employers
You really shouldn’t use the “official” number as the unemployment number. That number only counts people who are drawing unemployment benefits. The U6, which does try to count everyone, is around 17% but that doesn’t really count people like graduates or those on government assistance. I’d say the real unemployment rate probably lies somewhere between 16-22%
You do realize that hyperinflation would solve one major problem the economy has, right? It would kill the dollar and wreck the economy but it would also pay off every mortgage in the country. And given how fiscally responsible the Germans have been ever since Weimar, such a castastrophic experience might just be the shock to finally convince Americans that debt and fiat are bad policies.
Also, it is a mere simplification to say that Smoot Hawley caused the depression. I’m not exactly a protectionist but the Depression would have happened with or without Smoot Hawley and most economists believe that while it did severely aggravate it in Europe it did not do the same here in America. What happened here was the result of the speculative boom of the 20’s, which had been financed entirely on margin, having the bottom pulled out of it which led to surplus capacity in labor and machinery with no demand to utilize that surplus. Incidentally, that is the state of the economy now. We are in a deflationary depression and the government has lied to you.
Now, what Obama is doing is moronic but you must consider that the one thing that would be worse than hyperinflation is if this deflationary depression takes it’s full course because that will ruin a lot of people. Truthfully, there is no good way out of this. Americans binged on credit and idiocy for decades and now we’re getting our medicine. Hopefully, we’ll be able to still have a Republic when it all settles out.
that and the mass exodus of ICEd immigrants...
You do understand that Congress kicked off this ‘unemployment’ exercise with its Pension Relief Act of 2006!
No, it has actually been building for years. The average American household has thousands of dollars in credit card debt for one and some of those charges are for really stupid crap. Then you had the real estate bubbles in a few select areas of the country that soaked up so much capital and created much more capital (which was all fake and illusory as it was all overvalued) and what you have seen now is the bubble pop and that money simply evaporate from the market.
There is no good way out of where we’re at now. Your best bet is to start growing vegetables and pray to God you have a way to pay your mortgage if you get laid off.
I think they thought they could merely raise taxes, as needed. My state (PA) still has not broken the stalemate on the budget, the governor is holding out for a ‘much needed’ tax hike. And incredulously many seem okay with the hike and blame the Republicans for holding it up.
Smoot Hawley was the trigger that began the domino style collapse of the leveraged economy of 1929.
Cap and Trade will have even more impact, as a tariff and as a pseudo-tax, on THIS overleveraged economy than Smoot Hawley did before the Great Depression.
What made the 1929 market correction so devastating was the repeated series of negative shocks to the market, including but not limited to the reactionary tariffs Smoot Hawley pushed foreign governments into, England’s step away from the gold peg, and the round robinS of currency devaluation that followed, and the long series of economy debilitating tax increases by Hoover then Roosevelt.
Start with the deflationary depression we are in now, add Smoot Hawley in the 2009 form of Cap and Trade, and the tax hike morass that “free” health care MUST bring, and where do you end up?
From that point, the rapid inflation, even hyperinflation from Obama’s current monetization of today’s debt, both public and private, will finish the US dollar off for good.
Deflate the economy till no-one has any dollars left, then raise prices until a loaf of bread costs $500, then $5000 of the dollars nobody has anyway.
If Obama passes Cap and Trade, our already damaged economy WILL receive a shock worse in magnitude than Smoot Hawley was in 1929.
If Obama passes “free” health care, our economy WILL receive barrier to trade shocks worse than the combined tax hikes of the 1930’s, ALL IN ONE BLOW.
If Obama continues to print and spend at his current rates, we WILL see Weimar style hyperinflation.
If Obama does all three, it cannot be and will not be an accident brought on by ignorance. It will be a deliberate series of acts PLANNED IN ADVANCE, and brought on our country by a Chicago thug, a 1960’s radical bomber, and George Soros, a hedge fund manager who already tried to force devaluation of five major world currencies, bilking the UK out of at least $1 Billion USD equivalent when he triggered and then milked the Pound Sterling devaluation AND the Asian currency crisis of the 1990’s.
In short, a global re-distribution of wealth of a magnitude and scale never seen before, with full malice aforthought.
If Obama wants to fix the economic problems we face today, he has only to look at the gross mismanagement of the 1930’s and lower taxes, decrease barriers to trade, and tighten, rather than grossly inflate, the base money supply.
If Obama wants to deliberately destroy the US dollar and US economy for decades, if not forever, he has only to continue down the path he is on right now.
How would hyperinflation pay off mortgages? Would people magically have millions of dollars? Would people not be forced to spend the dollars in their possession on food, at highly inflated prices? How would people afford to pay off these mortgages at the expense of keeping food on their tables?
Another thing that is seriously backfiring on the rats is the MSM rat attack on the US economy through scare tactics last Fall. The rat-controlled MSM attacked its own country’s economy for political gains with what were, at the time, wildly exaggerated TV news reports about the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The MSM made the Lehman Bankruptcy into a much bigger problem than it really was in a deliberate effort to scare the public and motivate people to vote for democrat candidates in November. Their idea was that if the voters were scared and nervous they would vote for “change” and vote for democrat candidates.
The Lehman bankruptcy was a serious matter but not the economic catastrophe that the MSM said it was. I was amazed at the language used by both the national news media and my local TV stations after Lehman went bankrupt: they were constantly using language like “economic meltdown”, “catastrophe”, “economic collapse”, and “a serious recession is starting”. All of this was to scare voters into voting for Obama and democrats, and to boost their ratings. The Lehman bankruptcy was a serious matter, because it made a lot of financial institutions distrust each other and caused one money market fund to lose a few cents on the dollar, but it wasn’t the huge catastrophe that the MSM said it was. Central banks stepped in immediately as expected and backstopped money market funds and stabilized the banking system. What created the bigger economic problems was the fear and loss of consumer confidence (caused partly by the exaggerated news reports) which caused more people to stop buying houses, cars, and other big ticket items. This loss of confidence was exactly what the rat-controlled MSM wanted for immediate political gratification in 11/08. The MSM worked hard to weaken the US economy, as they had been doing ever since 11/07 when they suddenly started talking incessantly about “declines in the housing market” and “a looming recession”, and all of their negative reporting worked. Their attack on their own country worked. We would have had a recession anyway, of course, but all the MSM scare tactics made the recession deeper and longer. Now the rat MSM wants to put the economy back together and go on its merry way with a democrat controlled congress and administration, but they’re finding to their dismay that it’s not easy to eliminate fear and rebuild damaged consumer confidence. It’s tough to restart a very sluggish economy. I find it greatly amusing and ironic the way rat-controlled newspapers are laying off the same bastards who attacked their own country’s economy for political gains, because they can’t sell enough newspapers during this recession.
The lesson for the rat-controlled MSM is simple: always put your country first ahead of your own political agenda. Perhaps some rat reporters have learned this, but most lack the intelligence and diligence to figure out what really happened to our economy and learn this lesson. We had such a long economic expansion with only two mild recessions form 1982 through 2007, because Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 all had reasonably good economic policies and we benefited from a high level of commercialization of new technology during those years, especially biotechnology, cell phones, PCs, and the internet. During those 25 years, many American started taking a strong economy for granted and assumed we could never have a mega-recession or a depression. After this recession, hopefully most of the leftists reporters will learn not to take a strong economy for granted and not to attack their own country’s economy for political gains when a Republican is in the White House. But that’s probably too much to expect from the dumbed-down gang of MSM dolts who report the news to America. The more likely result to hope for is that a lot of Americans will stop believing the trash reporting from the MSM and stop watching their biased and dishonest “news” reporting.
You know, it costs 99 cents to purchase seeds at a CVS. Those seeds can grow lots and lots of vegetables. You must also understand that if we had a situation like Zimbabwe-Weimar where we were paying $10,000,000 for a loaf of bread (with that $10,000,000 being the equivalent of 50 cents today) then that $10,000,000 would easily pay the note on the average American’s $150,000 house. It would get paid off in a day.
It was just like after Frederic when all of the sudden the people who had gotten their mortgages in the 50’s and 60’s suddenly found that their insurance check paid down most of the value of their mortgage because of the inflation we saw in the 70’s. I also saw this work to great effect in Elena too and I’ve heard similar things from people in Houston about Alicia and you can apply this ad nauseum to any hurricane that hit in the late 70’s-early 80’s.
If you live on a farm or can grow your own vegetables then, yes, hyperinflation would leave you unemployed for a while and mean you’d have to grow your own food but the thing is, you could grow your own food. It’s not like it is unprecendented, there were victory gardens in World War II and such.
Now who would get screwed are the people who live in urban centers where growing your own food supply is not possible as well as where the climate won’t allow it. However, even with that you can certainly do without a loaf of bread for a day to wipe out your debt can’t you?
I am not advocating hyperinflation by any means because it would hurt our international position and because that’s what allowed the Holocaust to happen but I am just saying that with all the negative there would be that residual benefit.
Well people whose incomes inflate at a rate equal to the higher inflation rate can still pay for food and their fixed mortgage payment becomes smaller as a percentage of their inflated income. But if you have a variable rate mortgage this won’t work because the interest rate will go up with inflation. Inflation is going to go up as a result of high growth of the money supply intended to cause maximum economic growth to maximize tax revenues to pay for all our endless entitlement spending. I’m buying some of the gold ETF next week on the next dip in price, as an inflation hedge.
No, there were actual structural problems with the American economy. I might buy an argument that it triggered too soon but it was going to trigger eventually.
We have been overdue for a depression for 40 years. On the economic time scale it should have happened in the 1970s but did not because while stagflation was annoying it just happened to work out to economic stagnation rather than sustained contraction and people weren’t left with underwater mortgages, they got screwed if they bought then but those who had their mortgages only had a problem if they were laid off.
We are in this crisis because of the average American, who decided to finance a lifestyle they didn’t need and that they couldn’t afford on their own earnings on a mountain of debt and that whole “debt is good” culture pervaded society from the highest levels of government to the average shopper and even business got into the act even though common sense told everyone that shacks in Compton should not rightly be selling for half a million.
It is just like the 20’s. It was an economy built on debt and money that existed only on a piece of paper and now it is contracting back to its real value and that is what is screwing people. The first source of blame lies with anyone who lives in California for not realizing that they should not be paying such exorbitant amounts for real estate but in a larger extent, every American is responsible and because I was born in 1962, at the tail end, it is my generation (as a Boomer) who is responsible.
Our parents lived through the Depression and WWII and most of them never took debt unless it was for something they absolutely needed but most of us, racked up debt like it was our job. Well, the bill collector has come and he’ll keep working until all that debt is purged from our system.
What do they care? We will have Iranian style elections and Barack will still be here 7 years from now.
They will just ignore all peaceful protests.
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