[Radix]

It is late in the day. I am surprised the Lance Romance did not post this first.

Robert Kuttner is clearly a Marxist puke. I have been busy today, but I could not let this Commuunist get away with this without pinging at least one person.

[Radix]

ping

[Archangelsk]

Bilge except for this:

In practice, global trade with few ground rules has exported more jobs than it has imported.

No perception of a turnaround in jobs means no election victory for the President.

[Asclepius]

America's trade deficit with the rest of the world continues to widen.

There is no trade "deficit." For every good or article that arrives on our shores, some unit of value has been transferred somewhere else. Hence, no deficit. If by trade deficit what is meant is that more goods are flowing in than are flowing out, this simply reflects the realities of a service economy, an economy where only six percent of us labor in manufacturing (yet we produce more manufactured goods than we ever have). We have the largest, most productive financial service sector in the world. But how does one account for the export of services? If we were to compare total imports-exports, manufactured goods and services, the so-called deficit would evaporate like the fog in an economist's brain.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

The so-called economic boom of the 1990s was due to cooked books and a stock market bubble......that's all.

Clinton's huge tax increase of 1993 payed off big time when the over-inflated markets delivered billions of hollow profits.

The unsustainable tax revenues were squandered by fat-cat greedy polititians at the federal and state level.

Considering the return of the business cycle, boom and bust, two wars and the horrific results of Sept. 11, the American economy has displayed miraculous strength.

[JNB]

The moron Paul O Neil when he was Sec of the Tresury sucked up to the banks too much, refused to back away from the strong dollar policy and took away new 30 year bonds from being issued. Sure, it was of great short term help to housing, but long term, those wreckless moves are going to be quite painful.

[alloysteel]

The one axiom from which all else is reasoned backwards: Bush is bad. Therefore, whatever policies he espouses are also bad. Empirical evidence to the contrary, even good short-term results, must inevitably lead to bad long-term disasters, some of which must be invented out of whole cloth, if necessary.

And 9/11 never happened, in this parallel universe.

[alrea]

Bush optimists contend that interest rates are going up because investors, sniffing a recovery, are shifting to stocks, leaving less demand for bonds. Dream on.

Jul-28-03 NASDAQ @ 1,740.59 VOLUME: 15,358,200

Oct-18-02 NASDAQ @ 1,270.13 VOLUME: 16,659,700

Sniffing my hiney; a bull already passed this journalist by. Demand? Folks probably are getting out of bonds to maintain principle as rates rise in a very obvious recovery.

[BushCountry]

Here is some more bad news, the numbers are looking up in every regard except employment (Unemployment typically lags the rest of the economy, since employers usually wait until a recovery is guaranteed before they hire new workers), in fact, it has been projected recently that the increase in GDP will be around 6.5% for next year. Company profits are up, durable goods are up, stock market up, tax rebates are in the mail, consumer confidence up, home sales up, consumer and business spending up, etc... Businesses, which cut spending on equipment and software in the first three months of this year, boosted such investment in the second quarter at a sizable 7.5 percent rate. That marked the biggest increase in three years. And, after six straight quarters of slashing spending on new plants, office buildings and other structures, businesses boosted this spending by 4.8 percent in the second quarter. The US service sector surprised experts with a fourth consecutive month of growth in July that helped fan hopes of a recovery, according to Institute for Supply Management. Demand for U.S. manufactured goods rose at the sharpest rate in three months in June as a solid rise in orders for long-lasting items joined with a small gain in demand for other goods, the government said Monday. Indeed, the survey shows that the percentage of CEOs saying they're worse off now than they were 6 months ago has dropped from 51% to 26%. Americans applied for mortgages to buy homes in near-record numbers the first week in August. Applications for mortgages to buy homes rose 6.9 percent in the week ended Aug. 1 to their second highest level on record.