IAteYourMother
Lifer
- Nov 3, 2004
- 10,491
- 22
- 81
Don't forget - you have to also include the vague amount of time at the start of a presidency during which the new president is not responsible for economic conditions
Fern
Elite Member
- Sep 30, 2003
- 26,907
- 173
- 106
We're not better off, not appreciably anyway.
Like everything else, jobs losses will bottom out. Once businesses cut to the bone they stop cutting.
The private sectors jobs we have added are not encouraging IMO. The largest source of job gains is in healthcare. When we need healthcare it is damned important, but from an economic view point it is merely a consumer of resources, not a creator of resources or wealth (real GDP).
Basically, we've hit bottom and are still pretty much there. When I need to get back to my office at the top floor of the building and manage to stop the elevator from going down I don't consider it an improvement when I'm still at the B1 level 3.5 yrs later.
Everyone likes to focus on the Fortune 500 companies but small businesses are where it's at. Small businesses are still suffering, still going out of business. Many have been hanging on, using credit cards, homes equity loans and the like to hang on until the recovery appears. Every week/month one or more of them gives up and shuts its doors here where I live. There's only so long one can hang, and with nothing on the horizon to suggest positive change such closing will continue among small businesses.
We shot our wad to the tune of approx a trillion $'s with nothing much to show for it but some shiny new pavement on our roads and big hole in our debt. Right now we're lucky that the US can borrow can cheaply, but the bill is gonna come due one day. We will need repaving again long before that done under the stimulus will even begin to be paid off.
Home values are still down. Perhaps they were too high, but we've built up local & state govts based on a model of high R/E prices. That is unsustainable and transfers from the fed govt propping them up cannot continue. That crash is coming. I see nothing coming (e.g., big economic turn around or high R/E values) to forestall it. Cities/counties are already going bankrupt, others are seriously downsizing/cutting services to avoid it. I think this will accelerate over the next few years.
Reagan is said to have taken a strategy to 'starve the beast' in order to reduce the size of govt. I think the Democrats' approach will prove much more effective: Feed it all it wants. Eventually the food (borrowing) will run out and it will be on a crash diet like no one ever imagined. Sometimes nothing is as dangerous as a prayer answered.
Somebody needs to invent some awesome shizz real quick, something that will bring huge increases in productivity like the PC and internet did or I think we're screwed.
Fern
Like everything else, jobs losses will bottom out. Once businesses cut to the bone they stop cutting.
The private sectors jobs we have added are not encouraging IMO. The largest source of job gains is in healthcare. When we need healthcare it is damned important, but from an economic view point it is merely a consumer of resources, not a creator of resources or wealth (real GDP).
Basically, we've hit bottom and are still pretty much there. When I need to get back to my office at the top floor of the building and manage to stop the elevator from going down I don't consider it an improvement when I'm still at the B1 level 3.5 yrs later.
Everyone likes to focus on the Fortune 500 companies but small businesses are where it's at. Small businesses are still suffering, still going out of business. Many have been hanging on, using credit cards, homes equity loans and the like to hang on until the recovery appears. Every week/month one or more of them gives up and shuts its doors here where I live. There's only so long one can hang, and with nothing on the horizon to suggest positive change such closing will continue among small businesses.
We shot our wad to the tune of approx a trillion $'s with nothing much to show for it but some shiny new pavement on our roads and big hole in our debt. Right now we're lucky that the US can borrow can cheaply, but the bill is gonna come due one day. We will need repaving again long before that done under the stimulus will even begin to be paid off.
Home values are still down. Perhaps they were too high, but we've built up local & state govts based on a model of high R/E prices. That is unsustainable and transfers from the fed govt propping them up cannot continue. That crash is coming. I see nothing coming (e.g., big economic turn around or high R/E values) to forestall it. Cities/counties are already going bankrupt, others are seriously downsizing/cutting services to avoid it. I think this will accelerate over the next few years.
Reagan is said to have taken a strategy to 'starve the beast' in order to reduce the size of govt. I think the Democrats' approach will prove much more effective: Feed it all it wants. Eventually the food (borrowing) will run out and it will be on a crash diet like no one ever imagined. Sometimes nothing is as dangerous as a prayer answered.
Somebody needs to invent some awesome shizz real quick, something that will bring huge increases in productivity like the PC and internet did or I think we're screwed.
Fern
Nice obfuscations. I referred to the "Bush era" and often to the "Bush admin" and Repub congresses of the time. Other than a brief period from 2001 to 2003, Repubs controlled both houses from 1995 until 2007.
Repubs ran the show entirely in 2003, 2004, 2005 & 2006, Congress & Executive, which is when it all went into looting mode.
This whole "started before" routine is dishonest, to say the least. It is the responsibility of govt to see that speculative lending sprees don't happen, and the Repubs were worse than derelict during the Bush years- they were complicit.
WhipperSnapper
Lifer
- Oct 30, 2004
- 11,442
- 32
- 91
How are lawyers raking in federal dollars? Doesn't almost all of the income at large law firms come from private businesses?
I've never heard of a lawyer equivalent of Medicare or Medicaid and in the case of public defenders, they are severely underpaid and overworked to the point where they cannot represent defendants properly.
Where are these federal dollars that are going to the legal profession coming from? The only lawyers that receive government dollars are judges, prosecutors, and low-paid and overworked public defenders.
WhipperSnapper
Lifer
- Oct 30, 2004
- 11,442
- 32
- 91
How would Romney combat the budge deficit and national debt by lowering taxes? Where would the money come from?
How would Romney encourage companies to bring jobs back from overseas when other nations have much lower costs of labor and fewer environmental and labor regulations? Are you suggesting that Romney might pass laws that would <gasp> heavy-handedly encourage businesses to bring jobs back from overseas--tariffs for a zero-dollar trade deficit policy?
What is Romney's plan to fix our nation's health care system and is it some sort of a dressed up variant of, "Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly"?
What is Romney's plan to combat the top 5%'s theft of the wealth created by the bottom 95%? In other words, what's his plan to increase the amount of compensation workers receive for their labor and to decrease the amount of profit that corporations and other employers keep as profit for doing little actual work?
WhipperSnapper
Lifer
- Oct 30, 2004
- 11,442
- 32
- 91
Change is not always good. It depends on what you are changing to relative to what you are changing from.
I would agree that Obama is a corporatist and that we need to put a social democrat in the White House. But how is Romney any better than Obama? From what I can tell Romney's policies would just further increase wealth concentration amongst the top 5% of the populace while trying to transform the nation into a Christian Iran.
The choice is between a bad president and an even worse would-be-president. I'll take Bad over Disaster.
The Republicans cannot even acknowledge that real socialized medicine is far superior to our current system in spite of the mountain of real-world evidence in every other first world country. So, what good are they?
Dulanic
Diamond Member
- Oct 27, 2000
- 9,949
- 569
- 136
Well just ignore the fact that republicans created the majority of that unemployment and national debt... because that's what us republicans do. Live in a fantasy land where what we did doesn't matter, just that someone else can't fix it quite fast enough.
KlokWyze
Diamond Member
Personally I'm better off. Considering the losses happening under the president never-mentioned-by-the-right, we are much better off. Fuck bringing back the same policies that fucked all of us except the rich.
Insane that the GOP has ANY supporters. Unless all you are care about is hating gay people, preventing women from getting abortions and worshiping the wealthy.
Insane that the GOP has ANY supporters. Unless all you are care about is hating gay people, preventing women from getting abortions and worshiping the wealthy.
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