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Is the economy secure? We depend on credit from China and oil from Saudi Arabia. We are only as secure as they want us to be...
And, Monkyboy, I have no love at all for the GOP. I've never voted Republican in my life. But Will's point remains: the economy, at the moment, is in pretty good shape. Unemployment is at a generational low, inflation is non-existent, and the real value in terms of consumption possibilities of workers' income continues to rise. The only negative out there are high energy prices, but even that is still not bad compared to other parts of the world. Yes, housing prices are high, but they also represent a HUGE source of wealth/savings for many Americans, offsetting Rifkin's point about falling family savings rates. Sure, prices might collapse, but for now, housing equity gains offsets the need for other forms of savings.
That made me shoot coke out of my nose. Or at least, it definitely would have had I been drinking coke. Nice one.
Inflation isn't "near zero," it's crept back towards 4% lately. While houses do provide some savings, borrowing has increased faster, leaving America with a negative savings rate even factoring in home equity gains.
As for the unemployment numbers, they are subject to partisan manipulation. The economy actually lost over 1,000,000 jobs last month, but thanks to "seasonal adjustments," the Republicans came up with a "gain" of over 300,000 jobs.
Don't forget, the same guys who prepare the numbers on the economy are saying that Iraq is a stunning victory...
Hehehe. I love the scare quotes on "seasonal adjustments". Those meddling Republicans, always sticking their fingers in BLS ARIMA models.
The BLS has made some laughable assumptions to plug into their models lately. Economists challenging government numbers are rarer than televangilists questioning the bible...leaving us poor civilians to rely on the honesty of Bush, Cheney and Rove for economic forecasts.
I have one economic forecast:expect the BLS to revise its numbers shortly after the 2006 election.
Take a look at the unadjusted payroll series. There is always a big June-July drop in unadjusted employment.
http://www.bls.gov/data/home.htm
You can check the BLS yourself with either X-12,the Census program used to generate sa numbers:
http://www.census.gov/srd/www/x12a/
or (if the Census Bureau, too, is suspect) R, an open source statistics program:
http://www.r-project.org/
Now I've spent altogether too much time on this...
The unemployment number is the result of guesstimate formulas applied to survey data from a small population of American households. The BLS estimate has a self-admitted margin of error of +/- 500,000 workers. A few tweaks here and there in the data can result in large changes.
Check out the "statistics" the BLS put out during the Democratic convention last year. Surveyed companies showed an increase of 32,000 U.S. jobs for June, but the household survey(the numbers the unemployement rate is calculated from) showed a job growth of 650,000 for June...hehe.
Gotta love those "non-partisan" BLS guys. The poor Demos had to share airtime with the "glowing" economic numbers.
I ask again...anyone know of a recent study on the accuracy of the Bush BLS numbers?
Let's assume a government department run by Elaine Chou, former Heritage Foundation Fellow and wife of Republican Senate Whip Mitch McConnell, would never cook the books to make the economy look better than it really is. And let's assume that even though we lost 1,200,000 jobs in July, we actually gained 207,000 jobs. What kind of jobs were they? Here's the numbers from the BLS:
207,000 new jobs
-26,000 government jobs
That leaves 181,000 new private sector jobs created in July. What kind of jobs were those?
50,000 Retails Sales Clerk jobs
30,000 Food & Beverage Server jobs
28,000 Health Care jobs
12,000 Real Estate agent jobs
= 120,000 low-paying service worker jobs
What about the other 61,000 jobs "created" in July?
6,000 were for credit counselors, 8,000 were wholesale trade, 8,000 were for taxi and bus drivers, etc, etc.
In short, the numbers the Republicans are crowing about show that the American economy failed to create a single high-paying job last month.
How many 2005 college graduates started their careers at WalMart and McDonalds last month? That is a statistic I would like to see...
How's the new hat working out for you?
On the plus side, I can bake a potato(e) under it in less than an hour while keeping out Karl Rove's mind control waves...
I mean, I, for one, find it difficult to imagine the Democrats doing any better in terms of keeping spending down, creating jobs, "low paying" or otherwise, or making government smaller. The first and last are the really hilarious ones.
(We were better off when "The Democrats Were Running Things"? I see. I suppose that the internet bubble had nothing to do with that, and it was the fact that the President's party started with D?
Come now. Sensible people admit that apart from doing stupid things to ruin it (cf Nixon's price controls), Presidents really have little power over the economy directly. The business cycle ring a bell?
Do you seriously mean to imply that the late 90s economy is due to some action on the part of Bill Clinton or possibly his Democrat allies in Congress [though they weren't much in "charge"]? If so, could you share those deep insights with the rest of us, so we can see how Bush got it wrong by not doing whatever magic things Clinton did?)
(And the economy "lost" a million jobs between June and July?
Yeah, it did, in the unadjusted numbers. And here's the funny thing.
It did that between June and July Every year since 1995 (except 1999) - that's 9 of the 10 years available - and it probably did that even earlier, but BLS is only showing me data to 1995. Was it Bush's fault when the economy "lost a million jobs" in July of 1997? Or was it Bill Clinton's fault? Or... nobody's fault at all?
Go on. I can wait for the explanation.)
It's hard to imagine the Democrats could have done any worse...
With the "war" going so badly, the Republicans need the economy to be doing well. Expect sunny economic predictions to continue up until Novemeber 2006...