Posted on 07/20/2010 12:57:14 PM PDT by JohnRLott
I tutor. Zero start up costs. Zero overhead. Gets me through month by month.
I would agree, except that money didn't come from us. It was borrowed from foreign countries.
However, the money to pay those loans back will come from us, our kids, and our grand kids, regardless of whether the economy has recovered.
Well, john, nobody asks what the 50 million Americans paying the bill think about giving unemploment bums another $100 billion so they can sit on their fat liberal/conservative asses and do nothing.
Sooner or later, Americans need to confont leftists, in dark alleys, in swamps, along trails in the forests. Fail to do that, you lose your country and your family. Then your children and their children will hate you for eternity.
Bush set so many free pass precedents for Obama I cant count them all. Making believe doesn't make them go away. Nor does it make it right just because it was Bush was doing it in 2008.
Obama didnt do stuff because Bush did stuff, but Bush gave Obama his endless excuses not me, I didnt get up and sell TARP for Obama to spend, that was Bush. It was Bush that worked with Pelosi 2008 on stimulus I not me. Bush bailed out GM so Obama could forever not me.
Because I'm still a functional member of society. I didn't WANT to be unemployed, I didn't WANT to spend all my savings to stay in the same place I've lived for 30 years. I don't feel I'm disabled. I WANT TO WORK! Does having no desire to go on permanent welfare make me some kind of freak?
This UI thing dragged on WAY longer than I ever expected. I've cut back to poverty levels, sold off all the toys, and until recently, still paid all my bills. Every day, Monday thru Sunday, I feel I've failed if I haven't gotten off at least one resume, per day. I haven't coasted. Most of us haven't. Those that do are the exception.
Conservative Americans are self-identified by what they do. They work, and they are proud of the ethic that puts them in the office, every day, and to be told that I'm "on vacation" makes me think Very Black Thoughts about a great many people.
It would be embarrassing to throw another clot, and be dragged off to the emergency room, when I can't pay. Why is that so hard to understand? I'm good at what I do, and even with a pump that is one day going to kill me, there is no reason, (except the lack of employment, the engineered collapse of the Oil Patch, HR children who would rather hire cheap amateurs than cheap professionals, over-regulation, racially biased quotas, overtaxed companies, etc....), for me not to be a profitable addition to any company that will give me a chance, for another 15 years...
Free pass precedents? Exactly what precedents did Bush set that no other President before him did? And since when do two wrongs make a right? This sounds like the garbage Obama and his administration spew on a daily basis. Obama inherited all of the problems and Bush is responsibile for everything that has gone wrong.
Obama didnt do stuff because Bush did stuff, but Bush gave Obama his endless excuses not me, I didnt get up and sell TARP for Obama to spend, that was Bush.
Obama voted for TARP while in the Senate and he pushed and got passed while President the second part of TARP to spend another $350 billion. And McCain voted for the first TARP and against the second part. Six Republicans voted to give Obama the money: GOP Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Dick Lugar of Indiana, Olympia Snowe of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio.
It was Bush that worked with Pelosi 2008 on stimulus I not me. Bush bailed out GM so Obama could forever not me.
Obama voted for these bills and the Dems controlled Congress since January 2007. And when you compare the deficits under Bush to those already incurred by Obama, there is no comparison. The Bush stimulus was $152 billion compared to the Obama porkulus bill of $787 billion. Obama gets no free pass from me no matter what Bush did and didn't do.
Good point. Not only did McCain vote for TARP1 but he suspended his campaign to get TARP1 passed. Within a week or so McCain was complaining about TARP1 as if he opposed it, only after the TARP polls went south on it.
Pointing out how Democrats supported these things in not a great defense for Bush, or McCain. It is very indicting and proves my point. Bush gave Democrats a free pass. Obama can always claim 'Bush did it first'.
Of course McCain voted against TARP 2. By then he knew he wouldnt get the money to spend as president, and it was very unpopular by then. No political upside.
Speaking as a businessman, business would not hire, nor want to hire just to provide jobs. Business hire to increase production based on demand. Currently demand is very weak, consequently more employees would be more of a burden than a benefit.
“Today I was reading some article from the Financial Times of London that called it “the Recession of 2007.” I’d never heard that phrase before. They claimed that the traditional indicators of economic slowdown started then. Has anybody else seen that sort of data?”
Yes, the indicators were screaming loud and clear in early fall 2007. If you look at the TED spread, the difference between the LIBOR [interest rates on interbank loans] and short term T-Bills, you see a significant spike in early fall 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ted-Spread.png
It remained high thru 2008 and then went apeshit in fall 2008. So yes, you could say most economists and competent investors started shitting themselves in 2007.
Now you probably couldn’t get a away with saying the recession started in 2007 because GDP, employment and other indicators weren’t yet flipping out. But it is just semantics in my opinion since once the TED spread spiked, those recession indicators were a foregone conclusion.
“I would agree, except that money didn’t come from us. It was borrowed from foreign countries.
However, the money to pay those loans back will come from us, our kids, and our grand kids, regardless of whether the economy has recovered.”
There is a bit of an irony going on with treasuries right now. First, about 28% of the debt is held by foreign entities as of 2008. This is probably lower now since the Fed started gobbling up a bunch. They held close to 50% 2 years ago and surely more than that by now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Estimated_ownership_of_treasury_securities_by_year.gif
The big irony is that individual savings has spiked to over 5% for the first time in decades and the banks have no place in the private sector to invest. This explains why we have have 10 year US bonds at an insane 3% (everyone wants in on them).
The banks in the US are taking our deposits and buying US debt and the rest of the world is piling on as well since as bad of shape we are in, we are the mosted trusted political and economic system in the world right now. Otherwise we’d be seeing the 10 year rates about 5%.
So we are, to a small degree, lending ourselves our own money in the form of savings accounts, pension funds, mutual funds, insurance, etc. The vast majority of the remaining debt is getting bought up by the fed to keep us at the zero lower boun, the profits of which (above operating costs) eventually have to be refunded back to the treasury anyway. Only about 1/4 of the debt is offshore.
Your statement is correct. However you can’t tell me that, somewhere some businesses wouldn’t hire if the wages were subsidized? IMHO it is better to have people doing something than giving them money for doing nothing. At a minimum I’d have them cleaning up and improving our parks and streets than
getting a check for nothing.
After several months on unemployment, it becomes welfare. What a great way to create another dependent class of DIMocRAT voters. Everybody needs help every so often, but 2 1/2 years?????? I would even say that if you are someone who voted for these destroyers you shouldn’t get squat.
So it obviously started during the Bush administration. It’s Obama’s problem now, because he has to deal with it. But is it his *fault*? How do you think the Stimulus Bill affected it?
“So it obviously started during the Bush administration. It’s Obama’s problem now, because he has to deal with it. But is it his *fault*? How do you think the Stimulus Bill affected it?”
Placing blame on an administration is not a serious thing to do in my opinion. I like to say that presidential administrations “preside” over good or bad economic times so I wouldn’t be so quick to say it is Bush’s fault or Obama’s fault. What can be attributed to them is policies they put in place to correct the problems but it is really hard to tell if those policies or some other factor corrected the problems.
You can see the unemployment trends in the first page graph on the right on the following link (it’s a pdf file):
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
You will notice that we started losing jobs at a significant rate in June 2008 at about 200,000 a month and this rapidly increased to almost 800,000 a month by the end of Bush’s term. Was this his “individual” fault? I would say no. I will explain a bit below.
Then you notice that by spring 2009 the jobs losses reverse course(even before the census hires) and start a trend to where they stop and we even have gains by spring of 2010 (census hires mainly). Now that all the census hires are gone, we are adding about 83,000 private sector jobs a month currently. Can this be credited “individually” to Obama? I don’t think so. Did the stimulus play any role in helping the economy? Yes, but a very tiny one.
In my opinion, to place blame on economic conditions you can’t just look at the president and administration that is in office when it occurs or is corrected. You have to go back in time, even decades and look at policies enacted by Reagan, Clinton, Bush I, Bush II, Obama and look at their policies as a whole to determine where to place the blame.
You also have to look at other factors like Fed actions, morally questionable practices by Wall Street, currency manipulations by foreign entities like China, interational trade, mortgage lenders and even consumers.
The problem is that once you taken into consideration the volumes of policies enacted and circumstances involved you have an ocean of data and all you can do is shrug your shoulders.
The problem right now is that we are at the zero bound so traditional monetary policy of lowering interest rates is dead. All we have left is fiscal policy (stimulus bills, massive tax cuts, etc) and untraditional Fed actions (firing up the printing press, purchasing private assets like commercial paper, etc) to try to reverse unemployment.
The problem is that every action left leads to a higher deficit. If you pass another stimulus bill, you add to the national debt in the short term. If you pass massive tax cuts, you add to the national debt in the short term as well since you can’t make the necessary cuts in government in the short term, it would take at least two years to wind those services down (the same time a stimulus bill lasts).
Sorry to take so long to answer your question but to summarize, it would take a 200 page paper to go through all the policies that led to this problem and place the appropriate blame. 20 years from now it will take another 200 page paper to analyze all the policies put in place that hurt or helped the recovery.
As far as stimulus, I think we can do one of two things. Either enact massive tax cuts which will balloon the deficit in the short term and make cuts that will take a couple of years to offset them to help the long term debt...or
Enact a similar sized stimulus bill that will also balloon the short term deficit and make cuts for the long term debt.
1/4 of our current debt is still a lot of money, especially if it fails to buy us the recovery our leaders promised us when they borrowed it.
Thanks for your very well-reasoned and detailed reply. It’s always a pleasure to read an intelligent argument. Sloganeering seems to have replaced debate in much of our political discourse - sloganeering and insults. So, first, a thank you.
After watching Bernanke today, and seeing that the Fed is not inclined to change anything except to perhaps buy back some debt, I get the sinking feeling that there is no engine in the world powerful enough to change the world-wide economy unless it is the US. China is not interested in helping to “liberate” us from our crushing long-term debt. After all, they own it! It is their lever to force us to engage in trading practices that will continue to gut our manufacturing capacity.
As a small business owner, I find thatthe economic health of my business depends o n the psychological optimism of my customers. They are waiting for US businesses to resume hiring - and they know that business is sitting on the largest amount of cash holdings in our lifetimes. Obviously corporate finance seems to be no longer intersted in the econom,ic health of Main Street. They can make far greater profits by gambling with cash holdings than by hiring individuals to produce a product that must be marketed and sold.
Although it is true that private sector employment has been edging up ever since Jan 09, that fact is lost in the general sense of uncertainty and the need fdor unemployment extensions. Obviously, most Americans who work for a wage are hurting. At this point, I do not care about whether our short-term budget is balanced. I would rather see the American government dump money into hiring for infrastructure renewal and improvement. The single largest source of our expenditures goes into Defense, which has its own multiplier effects as it is distributed to contractors and military employees. I’d like to see a portion of the money that is sent directly to Iraq and Afghanistan spent here.
We need a 21st century infrastructure if we are going to compete with Asia and Europe. Right now, the one we have is falling apart and it will only get worse as state budgets are curtailed. While I dislike deficit spending, I even more dislike the harm that long-term unemployment does to our revenue streams in all businesses. Working people are tax-paying people. Non-working people are either collecting or are criminals. Either way, we have to pay.
I agree with your final suggestion. Stimulus spending may balloon the short-term deficit, but it will allow us to cut taxes in the next decade. If that doesn’t work, I suppose we could always go back to the tax policies of the Eisenhower administration. That period seems to be remembered with great fondness for its economic boom times.
Perhaps when we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we can have another post-war boom.
I think that unemployment insurance benefits are covered by employers' payments and run for 26 weeks only. After that payments to the unemployed are not from an insurance fund but from the taxpayers. If I am correct the extended benefits seem more like welfare than insurance benefits.
Of course our SRM would not want to be clear about anything like this.
Another change in standard language versus government language:
“Emergency” means it can be off-budget, straight on to the deficit/debt.
So instead of Federal Welfare Payments to new needy people, we are told about a vote for Emergency Unemployment Insurance Benefits.
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