Posted on 12/24/2011 9:13:17 AM PST by SeekAndFind
My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. Enjoy!
1. The overly optimistic unemployment forecast of the Obama White House. This may be the most infamous economic prediction in U.S. political history (helpfully updated by The Right Sphere). For the original January 2009 chart from White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, see here.
2. The real unemployment rate. The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this:
3. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for decadesnot. It is an oft-repeated liberal talking point, one that President Obama himself used in his populist Osawatomie Speech: The rich got richer the past 30 years while the middle-class went nowhere. In short, the past few decades of lower taxes and lighter regulation have been a failure. Or, rather, pro-market policies have been a failure … except that new research from the University of Chicagos Bruce Meyer and Notre Dames James Sullivan find that median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.
4. Inequality has explodednot. According to the MSM and liberal economists, U.S. inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the 1920s or perhaps even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. And to prove their pointthat the 1 percent has gotten amazingly richer in recent decadesthe inequality alarmists will inevitably trot out a famous income inequality study from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Pike. But why not instead look at wealthall financial and nonfinancial assetsinstead of income? It’s less volatile and a truer measure of all the economic resources at an individual’s command. Turns out that Saez has done research on that subject, too. And he even created a revealing chart documenting the ups and downs of U.S. wealth over the past century. It reveals a very different picture of inequality in America:
5. and 6. The underwhelming Obama recovery. When you compare the current recovery to those of the past, it looks pretty anemic. And it doesn’t matter if you look at GDP growth or unemployment (via The Economist).
7. America’s debt picture is worse than you think. If you factor in the long-term impact of rising federal debt on U.S. interest rates and economic growthraising borrowing costs and lowering tax revenueyou’ll find that federal debt could be almost 50 percent higher by 2035 than the estimates usually bandied about in the media.
bump
nice thread....
fascinating!
thanks SeekAndFind.
The new gold rush: Amid austerity, Greeks with shovels follow myths of long-lost treasure
By Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-new-gold-rush-amid-austerity-greeks-with-shovels-follow-myths-of-long-lost-treasure/2011/12/22/gIQAw7EyAP_story.html
Add these to the list from Zero Hedge:
Jobless Claims and General Employment Trends The Bigger Picture
Good stuff...kept for posterity.
And, what is graph #7 measured in? Percent of GDP?
Now go back to the 20’s and generate the graphs and maybe even Libtards would get it - well maybe not.
Right. This is where the Food Stamp President’s administration is hiding the data (like Michael Mann). Like Mann and the Global Warming scam, the unaltered (they call it un-normalized) data is always unavailable to the general public or any snoopy professional and you are supposed to accept their statistics and charts without question. Sort of like FDR. FDR manipulated the data and funding to ensure that just before re-election un-employment numbers plunged and happy days were here again.
Yep. It is distasteful and builds distrust with people willing to look behind the curtain.
I want honesty from my government. Is it too much to ask?
Perhaps it is because a million have gone back to Mexico.
The Left has been pushing the Gini coefficient. It’s very misleading and manipulable and doesn’t really say anything about an economy on the ground.
FR post:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2823746/posts
Good comments at site:
http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/#comment-3742
Gini Coefficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Not surprisingly Corrado Gini is a fascist and instituted much of fascistic thinking. The Left seems to always find itself knee deep in fascism. Why is that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Gini
bkmk
Btt
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