<p>“Fair and Balanced” =- --doesn’t have to be the truth.
Fox “News” is 24 hour TV “talk radio”–nothing more, nothing less.</p>
<p>In any event, I can’t wait for the election. No matter who wins, the neo-con grip on the Republican party will be gone. Then maybe it can get back to it’s roots.</p>
<p>Investment Banking until recently.
Every decent college reported strong hiring the last few years so there were more jobs for educated folks. The obsolete people will continue to have problems. You can’t count on making a good living putting on lug nuts anymore–unless you can do it in 8 seconds for a Nascar team.</p>
<p>The current employment report still shows growth of 10,000,000 jobs 2002-2007</p>
<p>[Bureau</a> of Labor Statistics](<a href=“http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls]Bureau”>http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls)</p>
<p>Check total employment</p>
<p>I just love how during this time people still grasp at straws to claim that the economy is okay dokey…because barrons and ff say so, it must be all okay</p>
<p>and those people with no jobs and the plants closing and the airlines shutting down are just figments of the collective imaginations</p>
<p>only fox and barrons and ff are right and the rest of the millios who are jobless, who are losing their homes, who just got laid off, they don’t have a clue</p>
<p>and neither does the federal reserve, or even bush who himself said there was a slowdown</p>
<p>gosh, so many of us just don’t have a clue - guess we should watch fox more and get the “reel” fakts</p>
<p>If any of you are confused about the differences between Democratic/ Progressives and Republican/Conservatives, please read those two words ‘obsolete people’ and remember who said it. Nurses, mechanics, retail employees, people who do work with their hands and with dignity are ‘obsolete.’ Until you need one, of course. </p>
<p>But those who make nothing, create nothing, build nothing…who spend their lives pushing numbers around until enough dollars stick to their fingers to make themselves special…those who throw the ‘obsolete people’ out of work, or kick them off a pension plan they spent their lives building…those are the Overlords of Creation, the ‘Smartest Guys in the Room’…until the whole house of cards tumbles. Then they turn to the taxpayers, that great horde of ‘obsolete people’ to bail them out. They don’t lose a jottle of their contempt for those people but they sure love their money.</p>
<p>Barrons, this BLS publication explains why you see different numbers for what appears to be the same thing in different places on their site: <a href=“http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps08adj.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps08adj.pdf</a> Some numbers are seasonally adjusted, some are “smoothed” - all are estimates. Recent numbers are particularly prone to revision - compare the December 2007 numbers - 600,000 jobs “lost” due to the revision of the calculations of the survey. The numbers on the chart you link to do not match the latest BLS “adjustments”. And the “growth” varies from month to month. Going by the numbers on your chart, current employment is only up 8.7 million from September, 2002. (And since you seem to want this to be a referendum of GWBush, job growth is just 8.2 million in the 7+ years since GWB was inaugurated.) Your 10 million figure may be true if you pick the lowest point of the past 7 years and compare it to the highest. And what does that really prove? Do your guys take credit for every new job created, but blame someone else for every job lost?</p>
<p>How about we agree that there’s been significant growth in jobs and population ever since 1950? That didn’t end when GWB was elected. The population continued to grow after 2002, and the number of people working did too. But there’s fewer jobs now than there were a year ago, even with a growth of the population. All of the charts agree on that, right? There are more than a million more unemployed people now than a year ago, correct? And another 600,000+ more workers with only part time jobs. And the ‘recession’ Fox News’ Mr. Lott claimed was a liberal media lie actually is a fact - not many people are continuing to argue that point, are they? That was, after all, the subject of the thread.</p>
<p>The chart I was using went passed those adjustments through March 2008. It included all adjustments and even had a note to that effect. it’s their most popular chart–and the most updated. </p>
<p>I’m not making this about Bush except to the fact that we have been in a nice long growth period that everyone but workers seems to want to deny. State governments outside stupid California and NJ found their coffers filling again and state colleges got more money than in the recent past. That’s a sure sign of a good economy. Now it’s going off mostly due to Wall Street’s usual shysters and some greedy home speculators and builders. This too shall pass.</p>
<p>barrons, what you don’t seem to get is we had a long period of prosperity because we borrowed more than we could pay back and spent more than we could afford.</p>
<p>That’s a false prosperity. Of course things are going to be great as we accumulate more and more debt and don’t have to pay it back. Whoops. We do have to pay it back.</p>
<p>Here is an example. What we used to call cash in the old days was money we had after debts. But during the last several years, cash became what you were able to borrow at a moment’s notice. One person has $20,000 in cash and no debts. Another could get a credit line, of $100,000 and borrow against it. He could now walk around and think, I have $100,000 in cash. Technically, I guess that person did, but after taking the loan into account his net worth was increased ZERO. </p>
<p>The guy who has $20,000 in cash and no debt is richer than a guy who borrows $100,000 and now has $100,000 in cash. Except during the last several years. In fantasyland.</p>
<p>Fundingfather posted:
I didn’t comment because I didn’t remember the ads. But I went back and googled “worst economy since Herbert Hoover” and you know what? I found page after page of right wing blogs (some scary, some creepy, some silly, some outright deranged, but all parroting a consistently self-righteous, sneering tone) repeating this assertion - some even specified a date on which Kerry allegedy made the statement.</p>
<p>But I couldn’t find any other evidence of the statement being made. Kerry did frequently say that the job-creation record of the Bush administration was the worst since Hoover - a claim which may prove to be true; with nine months to go, and headed the direction we’re going I couldn’t say it won’t end up to be accurate - but I can’t find any direct evidence that Kerry (or any other democrat) said we had the “worst economy since Herbert Hoover.” </p>
<p>I’m not saying it’s not true, FF - but I can’t find verification. Can you find me a direct source of information of the “worst economy” ads? Or other “dishonest” claims of the nature? If the reference was only to job creation, I suspect that the current administration will in fact finish up with the poorest job creation record in recent history over the full 8 year term.</p>
<p>so, its the dems fault for talking about the bad economy…not the repbicans for getting us into this mess in the first place…got it</p>
<p>love to witness the grasping at straws…oh lookie, some new jobs of there, but don’t look at all the people that just got laid off or the airlines going under, put them blinders one</p>
<p>And we still don’t know how bad the housing mortgage situation is…the latest report is there are more foreclosures in the pipeline but banks can’t process them quickly enough!</p>
<p>btw, Kudos to novelisto for coining the new word “jottle”–from jot and tittle, I guess? I like! :)</p>
<p>Every recent “good” economy was based on some sort of government spending and or gogus new product. The 80’s–deficits and high finance, the 90’s high tech and false hopes, the 00’s-real estate riches and deficits.</p>
<p>Whether we can afford to pay this back depends on how things go moving forward. Much of the personal debt will be wiped out and lenders will take the losses. The government debt will be slowly wittled down–or not. Right now it’s notoutlandish–just high. The tough years are ahead due more to required spending on benefits which might now be doable.</p>
<p>I think there is little proof that the recent deficits brought down the economy.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about government debt. I’m talking about mortgage debt, consumer debt, banks using too muich leverage, investment banks using too much leverage, etc.</p>
<p>Anyone with a pulse could borrow. Lending standards didn’t exist. This credit boom was not as big in the 80’s and 90’s.</p>
<p>“little proof” okey dokey…I remember a time when we weren’t in such debt…hmmmm</p>
<p>and if yo don’t call it outlandish, what do you consider outlandish then…</p>
<p>and putting the blame on SS and other benefits is laughable when you see the war debt that isn’t even counted properly, and is higher than the Prez wants us to know</p>
<p>trillions and trillions toward this war and what do we have to show for it…with no end in sight…and paying companies for failure…</p>
<p>The booms in the 80’s and 90’s were based on easy credit to COMPANIES. Existing ones in the 80’s plus the S&L deals and easy credit to goofy startups in the 90’s. Only the recipients changed really. Easy credit and overextensions were the common threads. Have you already forgotten Pets.com and Homegrocer.com and Iwillbringyoulunch.com?? Talk about easy money for nothing. And the kids burned through it faster than anyone imagined.</p>
<p>At least the houses and condos now over built will have some value to people in the next few years.</p>
<p>Barrons, the late 90’s were not debt problems, the bubble was in equities.</p>
<p>The S&L crises was a debt problem, but this credit bubble blows that one away and every other debt problem for the 70+ years.</p>
<p>Users of the internet and communications benefit by the infrastructure buildup during the tech bubble.</p>
<p>The impact of running a deficit on the national economy is pretty simple. When the government borrows extra money it spends it, pumping cash into the economy. More cash gets put into the economy by that spending than gets taken out by taxes. Running that deficit buys temporary prosperity as the economy grows. But when the money has to be paid back, that takes cash out of the economy, as spending is less than the taxes paid. That depresses the economy. If the nation faces a short-term crisis, it’s OK to borrow - if you pay it back when things level out again. But when the nation engages in constant deficit spending in good times and bad - as it has under Reagan, BushI and BushII - eventually you reach the point where, as we see today, the interest on the national debt is more than the annual deficit. So even running a deficit can’t help the economy because the taxes paid are still less than the tax dollars spent back into in the economy. Interest on the national debt has risen to 9.2% of the budget - over $250 billion per year. Our nation could do a lot with that money - which isn’t even retiring principle, as the debt grows and grows. The economic growth of the Clinton years didn’t come at the expense of the nation’s future. The debt actually declined relative to the growth of the economy from the point BushI had taken it. But BushII’s tax cuts put us right back behind the eight ball, as he’s erased all the fiscal gains of the Clinton Administration. It’s not a small problem. There will be pain getting from where the three most recent Republican Administrations have taken us back to fiscal responsibility, and while doing that we won’t be able to afford to rebuild our infrastructure, deal with the Social Security problem, or actually improve the lot of the average American.</p>
<p>But that was the plan, wasn’t it? [Starve</a> the beast](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast]Starve”>Starve the beast - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Kluge, the public has to stop voting for these republicans. So far…</p>
<p>And I have to admit, Obama’s tax policies scare me.</p>
<p>Yes, OK the oversold equities which are just a financing alternative to debt. Same result. Too much money chasing too little real value. </p>
<p>And yes, they have learned to ramp up debt to hyperlevels through the creation of new debt instruments and a worldwide market for same. </p>
<p>The Clinton crash came just as hard to many people as any other crash created by whatever means. Reducing the deficit really did not help much now did it? It just makes some debt hawks feel better. Without the debt threat looming it’s hard to guess how much new spending might have been approved so it does act as a brake on that.</p>
<p>let me ask this question for those of you who don’t think the economy is REALLY in that bad a shape and “this too shall pass”…and you know who you are. I have a feeling YOU’RE not really impacted by any of this recession or whatever you want to call it. What will you be saying when things start affecting you? Work suddenly stops coming in like it has, paycheck is a little bit smaller, maybe a lay-off, income off a bit…spouse gets laid off or work there slows too…now the economy mess is starting to affect you too. Will you change your tune? I have a feeling a lot of what you guys are saying is because right now you are not personally affected. We’ll see what you say when it starts to hit home.</p>
<p>The Clinton crash was really a Greenspan crash. Greenspan thought everybody was going to put his/her money under the mattress because of y2k. So he increased the money supply at a very fast clip. Then he watched as the inflation indicators didn’t increase. The indicators didn’t increase because the excess money went into nasdaq stocks. Greenspan didn’t believe he could identify asset bubbles and the beginning of the bubble economy was established.</p>
<p>Clinton was more fiscally responsible than Bush.</p>
<p>That’s just a fact.</p>