How the hell did this Democrat shill get a job at Forbes? This is really unlike them. |
Posted on 09/10/2001 6:32:34 PM PDT by Utah Girl
It's the economy, stupid. That slogan guided former President Clinton's 1992 election campaigning and his focus during the period between his election and inauguration.
It is hard to know whether Clinton's single-mindedness led to the long-running boom. It's just as hard to know whether George W. Bush's (and Al Gore's) relative indifference caused the bust. But here we are.
Total employment dropped by about 1 million in August to 134.4 million. The unemployment rate popped from 4.5% to 4.9%.
Over the weekend, the Bush Administration responded by saying President Bush's energies will now be on the precarious economy. The president will take a more commanding posture in response to the downturn, which occurred in spite of (or because of, depending on whom you ask) the passage of Bush's tax cuts plan earlier this year.
The president's advisers have been told by supporters that if he does not act more aggressively to resuscitate the economy, it could threaten Republican hopes in the 2002 midterm elections and his political future as well.
"We need to let the president's tax cut, as well as the Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts, take full effect," said Jennifer Millerwise, a White House spokeswoman. "But the president also hasn't closed the door on any further tax cuts."
But patience may not rule the day on either side of the political aisle. Not with the economy's growth rate having shrunk from 5.7% during the spring of last year to 0.2% the same period this year. This is the slowest economic growth in eight years.
The first response to the surge in unemployment reported on Sept. 7 is for additional tax breaks. But with those proposals comes concern about the federal government's budget surplus, already dwindling due to the slowdown and, in part, the 2001 tax rebate sent to taxpayers this summer. The $38 billion 2001 rebate was hastily added to Bush's ten-year tax reduction plan, which was heavily backloaded to take effect more towards the end of the decade.
Some prominent Democrats suggest making the current tax rebates much broader. But they want them to go mostly to people who pay only payroll taxes that support Social Security and Medicare. These weren't eligible for the first round of rebates, which went to income tax payers. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) advocated that proposal on a Sunday chat show. "We'd want to do something to put money in people's pockets quickly," he said. Democrats estimate that 29 million people didn't receive the tax rebate because they didn't owe income tax.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) added that he would be willing to consider additional tax cuts, but only in the context of "restructuring those parts of the tax cut that have not taken effect"-- that is, those scheduled for after Bush's first term.
Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) has hatched plans to cut capital-gains taxes--despite Bush's objection--in the hope that such tax breaks will jolt the economy back to life. Of course, for such cuts to have effect, people need to earn capital gains first.
On the image front, the president will put more emphasis on economics rather than talk about his education plan values.
Both the administration and Congress will have to reconcile their new interest in tax cuts with bipartisan pledges not to touch the portion of the budget surplus generated by Social Security--which is now the only budget surplus extant. The White House and both parties in Congress are assuming that is not an option--for now.
The president is "always a believer in ideas that promote growth and protect Social Security, but he remains confident that the tax cut and rate cuts will get the economy going, and that's where he is," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said over the weekend.
The question is what those ideas are and if they are a little late in coming.
Related Links at Forbes.com
I would LOVE to find an accurate number that shows the actual number people who are unemployed. It would be even better if it were broken down into the number of people currently not working at all, people working part time who would prefer to be working full time, people who have retrained for jobs that pay less than the jobs they used to have, etc. etc. instead of just showing the number of people who are actually collecting unemployment benefits.
Perhaps someone out there in FREEperland might have some ideas about where I could find info like this?
I know the technical definition. I was simply relating what I saw.
How the hell did this Democrat shill get a job at Forbes? This is really unlike them. |
The press HAS helped talk down the economy and soon they will hang it squarely around the Presidents neck. I think this was the RAT plan as soon as they knew they had lost the election. They are out to BURY Bush and if it takes bringing this country to its financial knees, so be it! For the life of me, I don't know how the President can fight against the press/RAT combination. Its like fighting with one arm tied behind your back.
Unless we pull out of this tailspin and do it SOON, I'm afraid we lose BOTH houses of Congress in 2002 AND the Whitehouse in 2004. We simply look AND act like we have NO PLAN! I know the president went on TV Friday saying he has a plan but never gave details. If he was referring to the already in place tax cut, I for one, think it will not be enough to pull us out of this mess. To me it looks like the President is in a box built by the RATS and they have NO intention of letting him out. Retirement money, like mine, is going up in smoke at a breathtaking daily rate and I'm already retired! I get the old one-two punch. The total value of my account is dropping like a lead balloon and i have to take money out each month to live. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens next.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!Everywhere, you can hear the din of the doomsayers -- an oddball bunch who draw from the grimness an obdurate contentment and satiation; like a clump of fortune tellers, with fiery eyes and scowling brows plumbing the depths of their crystal balls, they herald darkness and despair.
"U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT JUMPS", proclaimed CNN, barely containing their glee as Friday's employment report was announced.
"UNEMPLOYMENT RATE JUMPS TO 4.9%", screamed CBSNEWS' MarketWatch website.
To hear the prophets of gloom and doom tell it, America is finished.
An economic curse has descended upon us, say the soothsayers of sorrow with melancholy tongues.
Our cornucopic days of roaring opulance and riches are behind us, forever lost, as misery and indigence awaits us.
In the minds of lefties, images of soup kitchens and unemployment lines stretching as far as the eye could see dance in waves of enchantment, as the rush of adrenalin transports them to Nirvana's very embrace.
Exaggeration and hyperbole, you say?
Some might think so.
But think again.
For, behind the long faces of solemnity with each new jolt in the unemployment rate; the feigned expressions of shock at the almost daily carnage on Wall Street, lies a thinly disguised narcissistic conceit, a ray of comfort, borne of a sense of "vindication", somehow.
Whether the gloomers and doomers admit it or not, their destructive resentment of wealth and achievement -- their implacable envy and pitiless grudge -- drives them to relish the bad news.
Donning their phony "populist" facade, the mission is to spread panic, to whip up hysteria into a lather, in hopes of provoking a mass stampede for the exits.
Their ultimate goal? A glaringly apparent desire to undermine confidence and faith in America itself; to cast a pall on Reagan's 'Shining City on a Hill'.
But here's something for the namby-pambys to chew on: America is coming back.
The notion that the most vibrant economy in the world can not and will not ever recover, that our people are condemned to slouch perennially in abysmal morass is the stuff -- not of realists -- but of cowards and milquetoasts.
American capitalism is irrepressible -- a pulsating force of unbridled dynamism; the focus -- not of evil -- but of boundless envy, the world over.
It survived the Carter administration -- what more need be said?
From the beginning of the year, the sequence of events remarkably parallel the situation Reagan inherited in 1980, differing only in degrees of severity.
Then -- as now -- the incoming GOP president grappled with the mess his predecessor so thoughtfully left behind.
And, then -- as now -- the fiercely disloyal opposition, unrestrained by notions of shame nor decorum -- were on the warpath as ever, attempting to blame the incumbent.
Little did the miscreant fools realize they unwittingly set the stage for Reagan to accrue all the credit when the economy came roaring back.
Fasten your seatbelts: History is about to repeat itself.
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This came from Forbes? This is the sort of general-interest magazine ignorant-journalist economics that one reads Forbes to escape. Ol' Steve is taking his eye off the ball if crap like this is making it through the editorial sieve at what used to be a fairly knowledgeable magazine about such matters.