But, but, but the stimulus was a complete failure that accomplished nothing. :sneaky:
But, but, but the stimulus was a complete failure that accomplished nothing. :sneaky:
ProfJohn
Lifer
- Jul 28, 2006
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Craig, you are full of shit.
There are no facts when it comes to Clinton and the balanced budget.
I have posted proof that Clinton had NO PLANS at all to balance the budget.
Clinton's first couple of budgets hardly included any deficit reduction in them.
His first couple of budgets forecast $200 billion deficits forever. Clinton planned to reduce the deficit to $200 billion and keep it there forever. It was not until after the Republicans took over that he finally produced a budget plan that would produce a balanced budget.
He did not even mention a balanced budget until AFTER the Republicans took over congress. Google his state of the union addresses and look for him to mention the idea of a balanced budget, you won't find it till 1996 his FOURTH address. Prior to 1996 all Clinton ever talked about was deficit reduction, but he NEVER talked about a balanced budget. And then magically in 1996 he decides "Now, it is time to finish the job and balance the budget." Why the change of heart? Could it be that Republican had taken over congress and forced Clinton into a deal to balance the budget?
Here is PROOF that Clinton had no plans to balance the budget prior to the Republican take over of congress.
Here is his 1996 budget that was submitted in Jan. 1995. Scroll down to page 14 and look at his projected deficits for 1995-2000 and notice that all of them are around $200 billion.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy96/pdf/bud96h.pdf
Now look at his 1997 budget, produced in Jan 1996.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy97/pdf/hist.pdf
It is like magic! In 1995 he can't balance the budget but a year later he can!! Wow what changed during that one year?
ProfJohn
Lifer
- Jul 28, 2006
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CPI doesn't work like that, exactly.
It is a broad based index that tracks the price of many items across the economy. It is not accurate enough to track the price of a t-shirt and how much the average American is paying for that shirt.
The lower tax burdens would mostly benefit those who are currently paying taxes. The lower classes would benefit by **gasp** actually having jobs and having money to buy things.
You're buying the "increased buying power" myth of the Free Trade Religion. Closing factories/call centers/software development houses and moving them to China or India might make the goods cheaper, but the former U.S. workers have almost no buying power and can't purchase any of these "cheaper" goods anyway. The remaining U.S. workers benefit in the short term, but pay more for social programs, have fewer customers at their businesses, and eventually can fall victim to the same offshoring methodology.
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Where is the Buick that is sold in China being made? Hint: It isn't America and will never be America.
Then those goods should be made here as long as possible. Americans need jobs, unless, of course, you like the growth in the public sector and paying for social programs.
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You're missing the point. This has nothing to do with manufacturing numbers.
We have a huge labor surplus in this country - millions of people are unemployed or underemployed and sucking on the public teat. The latter is a major complaint of the right wing. We pay able-bodied Americans to sit on their asses and pay the Chinese to make our consumer goods. Why do we do this? Is this sustainable? Is it even a remotely good idea?
ProfJohn
Lifer
- Jul 28, 2006
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Maybe if we removed the 10+ million illegals from this country we wouldn't have such a huge labor surplus??
BTW just over 10 years ago we were at 'full employment' and had been at that point for nearly a decade. Do you you really think that many jobs were sent off shore in the last few years?
Or could it be at that we are looking at employment numbers while at the bottom of the worst recession in decades and acting like the numbers will never get better?
BTW just over 10 years ago we were at 'full employment' and had been at that point for nearly a decade. Do you you really think that many jobs were sent off shore in the last few years?
Or could it be at that we are looking at employment numbers while at the bottom of the worst recession in decades and acting like the numbers will never get better?
Good luck on that one. Democrats want amnesty for votes. Republicans want cheap, exploitable labor and/or to be able to shoot illegals on sight. Look how much hassle it is keeping eVerify in place and funded, let alone getting punishments with teeth.
Like offshoring, illegal immigration is one of those things that only is a problem to the Middle and Lower classes and as such, won't be solved to their benefit.
There was an IT bubble. My in-laws live in the Southeast and 10 years ago, they were at our current national unemployment rate. Its worse now. Textiles and furniture were leaving in a big way back then and are pretty much gone now. These were $10/hr jobs, nonunion - nothing extravagant, but they paid the bills without Government aid.
Sure they'll get better, but the next one will be even worse. There is a growing shortage of livable jobs that anyone can do - a need that used to be filled by manufacturing. These jobs are needed to keep people on their feet and reduce the need for Government help.
Actually I dont know where there are made They most likely started as imports, but I would not be surprised if they manufacturing setup there now as chinas car economy is taking off. And there is nothing wrong with this. Just like there is nothing wrong with toyotas, hondas and bmws being made in the US. Trade is a two way street. A rising chinese middle class will be able to afford our exports.
Products need to be made where they are best able to be produced. It is that simple. At one point in the time the US was a low wage country and we got the low wage crap jobs. We grew out of that. China and India will grow out of it as well.
The lack of manufacturing jobs does not mean there are now jobs. Services are replacing manufacturing jobs and those jobs on average pay better than manufacturing as well.
One reason we have such a high unemployment rate is because of the corporate tax plus the threat of it going up. I know that some big corps don't pay it, but the corporate tax is still a problem any way you look at it. If you got rid of the corporate tax, then personal income tax revenues would go way up and there would be more jobs. A ton of companies would outsource here, and the GDP would go through the roof.
I'm beginning to think a 23 percent tariff on China-made goods while reducing the income tax would also be a good idea.
Of course, manufacturing jobs aren't the best paying jobs, but through bargaining and playing their cards right, American workers could get paid a decent salary and unemployment would go down.
I'm beginning to think a 23 percent tariff on China-made goods while reducing the income tax would also be a good idea.
Of course, manufacturing jobs aren't the best paying jobs, but through bargaining and playing their cards right, American workers could get paid a decent salary and unemployment would go down.
hal2kilo
Lifer
- Feb 24, 2009
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The people who shop at Wal-Mart are the same people who have been voting against there own self interests since Reagan.
A 2 second Google search revealed that Buick opened a factory in China in 1998.
The Chinese Government has little interest in direct imports. They like foreign investment but they want the products made there. They're incredibly protectionist and it is working really well. You think that the Chinese are believers in the Free Trade Religion but really, they just exploit idiot Americans who believe these things.
Another tenet of the Free Trade religion. The only jobs that the U.S. has an advantage are those that absolutely require face to face interaction. Anything else is "best able to be produced" elsewhere. Indian and Chinese engineers are just as smart as American ones. Foreign manufacturing is just as good. Call centers overseas can handle customer service almost as well.
So when do we grow out of needing full employment? When do we grow out of having people who are hardworking, honest, but not that smart - employment for the masses? China will always have employment for the masses whereas we operate under the fantasy that everyone here can be a "knowledge worker" or some other paper pusher who adds little value yet somehow can magically afford first world prices.
LOL. This Free Trade religious belief is just as bad as St. Reagan's attempt to classify fast food work as manufacturing. Very little service work is high paid or even moderately paid. Most of it is stuff teenagers would have done 30 years ago - stocking shelves, cashiering, fast food - and its all part time, minimum wage.
Any service job that pays requires education. Not everyone can get that education due to various limitations. Further, there simply aren't enough high paid service positions to go around. And then you get into the situation where employers demand prestigious degrees where none are required or needed, just to filter applicants. The Universities love this. Qualified people without the education or means to get it are SOL.
And see above. Most of these high paid service jobs can be done overseas. Why hire an American when you can hire 200 Indians for the same price?
Just stop it! Stop making sense! If you want to get anywhere in this world, you'll need to learn how to tell people what they want to hear, even if it's total fantasy. Ronnie was one of the best at it, ever, so you'd do well to study his methods, figure out how to get them to borrow enough money to make it seem to work. Your descendants will be fabulously wealthy, theirs will get stuck paying the interest...
Consider the source.
For you, obviously. For informed people, people who don't ignore them for partisan reasons, there are.
No, you have tried to make a huge deal out of one irrelevant detail, for propagandistic reasons. Clinton had no projected end of deficit? Why, they his policy gets no credit!
Why, if Al Gore did not plan for things that happened on the internet, then his early backing of his development had nothing to do with them!
Part of the deficit reduction that made Clinton's able to reduce the deficit that wasn't planned was the dot com bubble. That made the finances do better than estimates.
It wasn't the only story - Clinton had a lot of other policies you dismiss.
You say there are no facts. Here's one, in response to your claim made many times that it was only the Republican Congress that led to a balanced budget: The first two years of his presidency, the Democrats controlled Congress. After 12 years of huge Republican deficits unlike any others the nation had seen in peacetime, The Democrats in the White House and Congress began to reduce the deficits - by about the same amount each of those two years as the next six leading to a balance budget.
But you have kept repeating the same misleading nonsense. His predictions not including some of the economic boon doesn't prove a thing on his deficits.
So, as usual, you are the one who fits your description.
Correlation or cause? Again, the *Democrats'* budget deficit reductions began the same amounts his first two years as later, when the economy did even better than they had thought - including with things like the benefits of the top 2% tax hike his first year that every Republican commentator said would cause the economy to crash wit skyrocketing deficits, unemployment, plummeting growth. This was a huge test of Republican economic ideology versus Democratic, and the Republicans were completely wrong.
That poor horse's body you keep beating, the same point over and over, that the early predictions, as he and Democrats were cutting the deficits, didn't account for some of the good numbers in the economy later. Oh my gosh, Eisenhower's space program didn't talk about a man on the moon, therefore his policies had nothing to do with it happening.
Little pieces of the horse being beaten, the irrelevant one fact you are trying to exaggerate into a phony point, that not every bit of the economy years later was discussed years earlier, so that it only would have been significant deficit reduction, rather than all the way balanced. Bug deal, it's irrelevant that they had other numbers for the economy, while slashing the deficit. It was a historic improvement either way to reverse the massive deficits - something many Republicans say the government doesn't do.
Their governments don't, historically.
And the same Republican Congress you claim deserves the credit for the deficit slashing was in power after Clinton with a Republican president - and the big deficits started up the first year and stayed (with only a third of the increases related to the 9/11 Security spending, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military increases). More falsehoods you are spreading.
Fact is, Republicans learned with Reagan, if you SAY you're the party of fiscal responsibility, you can get away with murder because people like you fall for it.
Without going into more detail that would be wasted on you, a couple fats you say don't exist for repeating:
- The deficits exploded under 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and Clinton greatly reduced the deficit annually, starting his first two years with Democrats in charge of Congress.
- The Republican Congress did not reduced the deficit more than Democrats had each year, while they pushed for huge de-regulation that in large part led to the crash.
(The last part on the cause is opinion).
- The Republican Congress you credit for Deficit reduction skyrocketed the deficit as soon as the President changed from Democrat to Republican.
You've ignored facts for many times, and you keep ignoring them.
"There are no facts..."
- Profjohn
Not for you.
And oh by the way, when's the last time the country had a balanced budget before Clinton?
The last year of LBJ's presidency, the Republican nightmare of the 'Great Society' that just happened to slash poverty rates by a third, while spending large sums for the good of the people, the moon landings, the Vietnam war with several hundreds thousand troops, and so on. Now, it wasn't magic - the Vietnam war did cause financial problems. But still, that's in great contrast to the Republicans' myths.
PJ's whole 'argument': While Clinton amazingly took the seemingly overwhelming deficits of the last 12 years, and slashed them annually down to zero, that doesn't count - what counts is that the early budget estimations for years later did not say how well the deficit reduction would go, so that's the 'proof' Clinton did not do anything good on the deficits, other than being forced to by a Republican Congress, ignoring the previous years of reducing it just as much with Democrats and the same Republican congress skyrocketing it back as soon as Bush took office.
Pathetic. That's him picking a conclusion - Democrats are the worse deficit spenders - and then finding some bit of trivia about the economic estimates and trying to say it's the whole story.
And he's been told all of this over and over and keeps on posting the same false myths and propaganda. And he's shown for his falsehoods again.
Some on his side exaggerate factors. Yes, Clinton benefited from the tech bubble. Yes, Bush came into office in recession. But they misrepresent the size of those factors.
The deficits have a lot more things - Clinton had a 'reduce government wasteful spending' program led by Gore, for example; Bush shot up deficits with a tax cut for the rich.
And so we see PH trot out the early budget estimates and try to pretend they 'prove' a lot.
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Albatross
Platinum Member
- Jul 17, 2001
- 2,343
- 5
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http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/05/can-china-s-economic-engine-jump-start-the-west.html
Well,maybe China it`s not so anti imports after all.Question is,what does America make that China might want?
Well,maybe China it`s not so anti imports after all.Question is,what does America make that China might want?
hal2kilo
Lifer
- Feb 24, 2009
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In the future when we look back in history, the disrespect for those who work with their hands will mark the beginning of the fall of this country from being a world power.
Trade balance doesn't have to be achieved in a bilateral fashion- it doesn't matter if we're selling to China, India, Uruguay or Burkina-Faso, just so long as we achieve something a lot closer to balance than what we have today. We've been badly abusing our position as the world's reserve currency, flooding international commerce with dollars, and that's bound to jump up and bite us in the ass, probably rather suddenly. Currency runs are the kind of thing that, once begun, tend to snowball rather quickly. A dollar could rapidly take on the value of a dime in the international market, which would leave us all royally screwed, given our dependency on foreign goods and energy...
Why do you think it was absolutely necessary to bail out the GSE's? Because their bonds were preferred by foreigners, who needed to invest their dollars and valued the implicit govt guarantee. Fail to honor that and watch anything dollar denominated turn into the international financial equivalent of the Plague...
Why do you think it was absolutely necessary to bail out the GSE's? Because their bonds were preferred by foreigners, who needed to invest their dollars and valued the implicit govt guarantee. Fail to honor that and watch anything dollar denominated turn into the international financial equivalent of the Plague...
China has no problem importing the things they cant make or cant produce. That is of course how trade works. And yes china does export quite a bit of low value products while they import quite a bit of high value products.
Foreign engineers can be just as good as US ones. That is reality. We will compete against them and there is no stopping that. You can bury your head in the sand, but those foreign engineers are not going away. They can work for US companies abroad or foreign companies competing against US companies. Take your pick.
And much of the outsourced IT work came back because it did not work out as well as planned.(time zones, language, rising labor costs overseas,..)
The world economy is moving to services as the primary job creator as manufacturing jobs are disappearing all over due to automation. This is not going to change either. We will all adapt.
Actually that was greenspan talking about the difficulties of classification of jobs. He used fast food as an example. Yes fast food takes several raw materials, processes them and produces a final product. It context it is a fine example.
Reality is services(nurses, mechanics, IT, plumbers,....) pay more than manufacturing on average. Services is far more than cashiers and burger flippers.
You are absolutely right there, Education is key. Those with education are doing much better in this recession than those without education. If you do not even graduate high school, things are really bad. If you have a degree from college unemployment is around 5% for that bracket( theoretical full employment).
Actually it is quite the opposite. Most of these high paid jobs have to be done here as the work is here.
Meh. Obviously, having a better education helps you to compete within a system. OTOH, when we're talking about systemic failure, as we are today, referencing that as a solution to our current problems is just more of the usual pablum from the right...
Having a better education somewhere down the road won't pay the bills today, no matter how much we'd like it to. And when the general level of education rises, employers just increase the educational requirements for the same job at the same pay, anyway... If enough people had college degrees, you'd need one to work at WalMart.
Having a better education somewhere down the road won't pay the bills today, no matter how much we'd like it to. And when the general level of education rises, employers just increase the educational requirements for the same job at the same pay, anyway... If enough people had college degrees, you'd need one to work at WalMart.
The unemployment rate in the US was only about 5% as little as 5 years ago. Even when everything is made in China, everyone had a job to do.
Yeh- largely overbuilding housing so we could sell them to each other, selling houses, financing houses, insuring houses, creating MBS and a lot of behind the scenes housing related activities... working at jobs that have since been offshored, too... And borrowing a lot of money on easy credit terms... like a refi cashout on the house to pay off the credit card bills that got run up from the last bout of unemployment when the tech bubble burst...
Heck, some people even put cash in their pockets closing on houses with liars' loans they didn't have a prayer of actually paying off...
Anybody and everybody can look good on borrowed money, for awhile, anyway...
Ownership Society, right?
ProfJohn
Lifer
- Jul 28, 2006
- 18,251
- 8
- 0
His policy gets no credit because there was NO policy!!!!!!
That was my entire point.
Clinton did not institute a plan to balance the budget. Clinton did not even think about a balanced budget. All Clinton wanted to do was raise taxes and increase some spending and get to what he thought was an acceptable budget deficit, which was $200 billion per year forever.
Read his first three state of the union addresses and see what he actually said about the budget deficit.
To pretend that Bill Clinton gets credit for the balanced budget is to ignore the ample historical evidence that Clinton had no plans to balance the budget prior to the Republican take over.
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Of course he had a policy, that included deficit reduction, a set of spending priorities to cut spending and waste in places, and increase spending in some places, including his tax increase on the top two percent that every right-wing commentator I've seen said would guarantee disaster for the economy - lower growth, skyrocketing deficits and unemployment.
It just so happened that his deficit reduction worked turned into deficit elimination with things like the tech boom. Regardless, reduction or elimination, it was the right direction.
Finally, after the 12 years of huge Republican deficits. It was huge for him to get that done. For Democrats to get that done, before Republicans got control and reversed it.
Your argument is like saying that Al Gore funding the development of the internet expecting 10 million people to use it an hour a week, and instead 50 million people use it 10 hours a week, mean that he deserves no credit for pushing its funding. "Look, right there in his estimates it says it won't be used as much as it was!!!! he had no plans for it to be huge!!!!"
If Apple computer predicted the iPod would sell less than it did, obviously it gets no credit for the iPod. "Look right at their own estimate that it would not sell like it did!!!!"
While the President's budget isn't the same thing ,it's not a coincidence that the deficits skyrocketed under 12 years of Republicans and then reduced each of 8 years to zero under Clinton - and for that matter, that they then shot back up as soon as the Republicans regained the Presidency. It's not exact the effects of their budgeting on how much tax revenue will come in with the economy's ups and down, but the result was remarkable, whether reduced or eliminated deficits.
Ya, 'there are no facts'
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