Personally I’m sick of the bullcrap and fake numbers that have come out of Washington for decades. With this latest group it began immediately with the notion of “created or saved” jobs. Then came the trickle-down stimulus bill that trickled into yacht payments and bonuses. So look at these charts.
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
And if you don’t like this, then read another depressing article here.
…and don’t forget Bush’s other dirty tricks. For example. People that turn hamburgers were reclassified as manufacturing jobs to cover up the true losses. Then when it all collapses they blame the collapse on bad loans. Bullshit! They were good loans before everyone lost their jobs. Put the blame where it belongs. Bush and the Republicans caused the mess. Obama and the Democrats didn’t fix it.
#21 That reminds me of this joke….
How You Can Spot A Republican..
A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”
The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.
“She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be an Obama Democrat.”
“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”
“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”
The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Republican.”
“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”
“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”
The trouble with Government numbers is that they base their statistics from unemployment applications. So many people lose jobs and are not eligible for benefits. Plus you have people just out of college who are way under employed or not employed in their field of education. I think its fair to say you can double the national figure in these times and it would be much more accurate. I think just the fact the economy is struggling has to tell a story of how people lack income to spend.
The official definition of employed in the household survey is pretty broad: any paid work at all during the survey period, even collecting cans.
You want to stimulate the economy? Stop taking all the money out of the private sector for government spending.
I have been doing the math and expecting the bleep to hit the fan for decades. The only question was when and it looks like we may now be past the point of no redemption without a lot of public agony including mine.
You don’t spend your way back to prosperity by soaking up all available resources for government projects nor by making business unprofitable.
If Obama and the Dems had given a one year tax moratorium with the 800 billion they blew and are still blowing it might have pulled us out though all the outsourcing pretty much means we as a nation are running on credit which is going to dry up.
Of course the Greens should be happy because that will put the end to imported foreign oil. We won’t be able to pay for it because nobody will take our money. Why should they? It’s just paper backed by nothing. Black humor.
Of course if you pack enough people into one room, wrap up in enough comforters, and maybe have a little heat that should limit the numbers that freeze to death in the large part of this country with subfreezing temps.
Sooner or later having an old house with a flue may turn out to be real important.
#21 By any previous standard Fanny and Freddy made and are still making bad loans because by any reasonable standard the people they are loaning money to buy homes can’t repay the amount of money loaned to them.
That was the entire idea behind what Frank and friends were doing with Fanny and Freddie. Loan money to people that couldn’t otherwise get a loan. Why couldn’t they get a loan? Because they didn’t have enough income to pay back the flipping loan!
You know what is doing best now? Apartments!That is what a lot of people who once had half million dollar homes can actually afford in high priced real estate locations.
If anyone with three working brain cells looked at the increase in the price of housing in many markets over the last few decades they would have known we were heading for a major crash because nothing I can imagine could sustain that kind of growth in real cost over the long term.
#20–freddy==I’d agree with you if I could but you are still missing what I think is pretty clear: a person spending their own money “cannot” waste it. I often buy crap so that I will stop thinking about whether or not I should buy it. Now, my “wasteful” price range is less than $100 and there IS NOT A SINGLE SUCH PURCHASE that I regret because I now no longer have to think about it even though I have: eg, a fondue pot for that special evening, eg, a 23 inch HDTV for whenever I want to watch it in addition to my 52 inch one. So, the rich guy spends millions on his boat that he uses one week a year. If he has the money and he gets “psychic benefits” no one can call that wasteful.
Not so with the government. The rich guy spends HIS money, the government spends OUR money. Huge deterministic difference that is valid.
So: concerning private people’s spending: you cannot call it wasteful. Concerning government spending: it just means you don’t like it.
Of course “waste”/”wasteful” is a label you can try to put on issues to shut down any further more insightful thinking about the subject. Words have different/multiple functions. No body calls someone/something else a gossamer. Gossamer is not a label. I don’t know why you would argue such a black/white definitional point.
I do know that I have seen small businesses and the people that work for them suffer in the last two years – and the government keeps on growing and taxing. Small businesses (<500 employees) generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade. One thing that would help is to lighten their tax burden so that they can grow during this economic climate.
Many small businesses get up to a 1/3rd of their net revenue taken away by taxes. Let the small businesses grow and the increase in volume should help alleviate unemployment and the economy at large.
Oh.. and bring back the Glass–Steagall Act that separated Wall Street investment banks from depository banks – that would help too. It existed to prevent the situation that we are in right now.
Approximately 50% of all jobs in America involve working for the federal, state, or local government or being contracted by said government. The vampire continues to feed on it's own arm driving up the national debt to new heights (after finishing the tasty civilian snacks of course).
Hos be working.
@ bobbo
Quickly – I generally agree. But you seem to be arguing that personal spending cannot be ‘wasteful’ – and there I disagree.
“So, the rich guy spends millions on his boat that he uses one week a year. If he has the money and he gets “psychic benefits” no one can call that wasteful.”
So his utility – is the ‘enjoyment’ he gets out of having the item. And that’s where the idea falls down. For three reasons
1) Enjoyment is relative (if everybody has the same boat) the enjoyment is less, as behavioral economics has shows.
2) Enjoyment is not absolute (you get diminishing returns).
3) Even if the person loves it – by his use of a limited resource, he has deprived others of its use.
All those ideas are fairly run of the mill behavioral economics. I just finished the ‘Economic Naturalist Field Guide’ by this guy…
http://www.robert-h-frank.com/book.html
The ‘waste’ argument – came out of a discussion about trickle down. I was trying to think how and why it may go awry.
The somewhat obscured question is – what are you trying to maximize? If you can’t answer that then you can’t really determine what is waste – because waste is relative to efficiency, and that can only be determined depending on what you are maximizing.
If you are maximizing for ‘happiness’ – then it’s fairly obvious that spending 250 million of a boat is sub-optimal, when a minimal amount of money would greatly enhance many peoples happiness (not least because they are at the bottom end of diminishing returns curve).
To be clear I’m not saying a person shouldn’t buy a 250 million dollar boat. I’m saying lets call a spade a spade. Well and trying to highlight the limits of ‘trickle down’. That it can be far from efficient (ie utility is lost) depending on what money is used for.
Maybe you’re not maximizing for ‘happiness’, if so I’d be curious to know what you are maximizing.
Some problems with government created “make work” programs are, on the one hand it’s just a scattershot attempt to employ people with no regard for market demand, and on the other you have the Public Choice question of how do the beneficiaries of these programs get chosen? In the first scenario you have a misallocation of resources because the government only cares about providing people with jobs (usually temporary), and doesn’t really care about what those jobs are for. In the second case, you have misallocated resources because it’s the groups with the most political influence who will tend to receive the benefit from the programs.