What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

RobDownSouth said:

More good news for America (and bad news for AJ, Vetteman and Koalabear)...

Initial jobless claims lowest since April 2008

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Sean Renaud said:

Lets see what it is after they revise it upward. Every month they revise upward.

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Let's start with an observation. The states of this nation divide into two groups: the energy-makers and the energy-takers. The environmentalists dominate the politics of the energy-taking states, such as New York and my own wacky state of California. The energy-takers love the fact that they can import most of their energy, all the while keeping their environments pristine. In that sense, they have the best of all worlds. The energy-makers, such as Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Louisiana, West Virginia, and now North Dakota, freely allow the exploitation of their fossil fuel resources, and bear disproportionately the costs of such production. But they are also able to prosper from it as well, as shown by their generally lower unemployment rates and more robust economies.

I think that it would help prompt the self-indulgent energy-takers be more supportive of the nation -- more patriotic, in the truest sense of the term -- if the federal government eliminated the state tax deduction for federal taxes. After all, the governors of those states are already facing resistance to higher taxes. If the taxpayers of those states could no longer write off the state taxes, those taxpayers would become even more adamantly opposed to higher taxes.

Taking away the deduction for state taxes would thus force the "progressive" states into a dilemma: cut programs, or enhance revenues by increasing economic growth (which would have to involve easing regulations). But the former option would cost the progressive politicians a lot of support from their base.

I make this suggestion with a shudder: I hate to think of how much my own taxes would rise from such a change. But my sense of justice leads me to advocate it. It is simply unfair that the high-state tax states can force the lower-tax states to pick up much of the tab for the former's underperforming economies.

Depriving New York and California residents in particular of that deduction would help motivate them to pay more attention to the narcissistic anti-energy, anti-growth policies their leaders have chosen. It would help motivate the ordinary citizenry fight the environmentalists. New York could do like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere and let its shale reserves be tapped. California could do like Texas, Alaska, and Louisiana and let its offshore reserves be more thoroughly exploited, by at least allowing exploration for new reserves natural gas. But the political leaders in both states are largely opposed as things stand now.

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RobDownSouth said:

You have a point, nevertheless, the three month trendline is definitely and unequivocably pointing to lesser unemployment

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Since the failure of the company, Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-
technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.

Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal *e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra.

The documents reviewed by The Post, which began examining the clean-technology program a year ago, provide a detailed look inside the day-to-day workings of the upper levels of the Obama administration. They also give an unprecedented glimpse into high-level maneuvering by politically connected clean-technology investors.

They show that as Solyndra tottered, officials discussed the political fallout from its troubles, the “optics” in Washington and the impact that the company’s failure could have on the president’s prospects for a second term. Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-
energy technology.

“What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse. What they are talking about is ‘How are we going to manage this politically?’ ”

The administration, which excluded lobbyists from policymaking positions, gave easy access to venture capitalists with stakes in some of the companies backed by the administration, the records show. Many of those investors had given to Obama’s 2008 campaign. Some took jobs in the administration and helped manage the clean-
energy program.

Documents show that senior officials pushed career bureaucrats to rush their decision on the loan so Vice President Biden could announce it during a trip to California. The records do not establish that anyone pressured the Energy Department to approve the Solyndra loan to benefit political contributors, but they suggest that there was an unwavering focus on promoting Solyndra and clean energy. Officials with the company and the administration have said that nothing untoward occurred and that the loan was granted on its merits.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Why we're pretty sure Obama cannot "save" us...

He makes political, not economic decisions.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/solyn...2/14/gIQA4HllHP_story.html?wprss=rss_politics

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SaintPeter said:

I will chop my nose off and teach my face a lesson!

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4est_4est_Gump said:

I'm just giving the unthinking mob and the Republican Party what it thinks it wants...




Call me generous.

Now, thank me!

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Sean Renaud said:

Thank you. History has sown that the world as a whole and certainly America never goes back to the right. Sure the mood might change but name one civil right, one social program that hasn't become permanent?

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(AFP) - Brazil has overtaken Britain as the world's sixth largest economy, a London-based research group said Monday.

In its latest World Economic League Table, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said Asian countries were moving up while European countries were slipping down.

Brazil's population of about 200 million is more than three times that of Britain.
The Brazilian economy grew 7.5 percent in 2010, but the government has cut its growth projections to 3.5 percent for this year after the economy slowed in the third quarter.

The CEBR also predicted that the British economy would overtake France -- ranked fifth this year -- by 2016 and it said India, the world's 10th biggest economy in 2011, would move up to fifth place by 2020.

It says the US economy is the biggest, followed by China, Japan and Germany.

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PARIS, Dec 26 – The number of jobless people in France hit a 12-year high in November in the latest sign the French job market is deteriorating ahead of the April-May presidential election.

Labour ministry data issued on Monday showed that the number of registered jobseekers in mainland France rose by 29,900 in November to reach 2.85 million, up 1.1 per cent on the month and 5.2 per cent on the year.

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The “progressive” label is back in vogue; politicians of the Left routinely use it to describe themselves, hoping to avoid the radical connotations associated with being “liberal” in the post-Reagan era. The irony in this is manifold, especially because the aim of the movement to which the name refers, the late-19th- and early-20th-century progressive movement, was anything but moderate.

If the progressive label seems less radical today, it is only because progressivism is less well known than its liberal progeny. It was initially an academic phenomenon far removed from American politics. Particularly in the post–Civil War American university, professors — many of whom had obtained their graduate training in German universities, and whose thought reflected the “intoxicating effect of the undiluted Hegelian philosophy upon the American mind,” as progressive Charles Merriam once put it — articulated a critique of America that was as deep as it was wide. It began with a conscious rejection of the natural-rights principles of the American founding and the promotion of a new understanding of freedom, history, and the state in their stead. From this foundation, the progressives then criticized virtually every aspect of our traditional way of life, recommending reforms or “social reorganization” on a sweeping scale, the primary engine of which was to be a new, “positive” role for the state. As the progressives’ influence in the academy increased, and growing numbers of their students sallied forth into all aspects of endeavor, this intellectual transformation gradually began to reshape the broader American mind, and, in time, American political practice. “A new regime in thought,” as Eldon Eisenach writes, “began to become a new regime in power.”

While many progressive academics helped effect this philosophical transformation, few, if any, were as influential as John Dewey. Through an immense and wide-ranging body of work, vigorous activism, and his many students, Dewey made a mark that was deep and enduring. Part of the reason for this was that he enjoyed an unusually long and prolific academic career. In 1884, Dewey received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, that seedbed of progressive academia where Richard T. Ely taught economics and helped cultivate future reformers like Woodrow Wilson, John R. Commons, and Frederic Howe. Over the course of his subsequent half-century career, Dewey taught mainly at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he held appointments in both philosophy and education, and published over 40 books and several hundred articles. In 1914, moreover, Dewey became a regular contributor to Herbert Croly’s The New Republic, the flagship journal of progressivism; he also played a more or less important role in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Federation of Teachers. During the New Deal, Dewey and his students helped shape the character of various programs, including the fine-arts program of the Works Progress Administration and the flagrantly socialist community-building program undertaken by the Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Dewey’s social theory continued to influence major political events even after his death in 1952. Lyndon Johnson not only delivered many speeches (including his signature Great Society address) that read, as James Ceaser has aptly noted, like “a grammar school version of some of John Dewey’s writings,” but professed his admiration for “Dr. Johnny.”

Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding. Like Ely and many of his fellow progressive academics, Dewey initially embraced the term “socialism” to describe his social theory. Only after realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly, Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change its name. “The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer,” Dewey declared, “is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism. The prejudice against the name may be a regrettable prejudice but its influence is so powerful that it is much more reasonable to imagine all but the most dogmatic Socialists joining a new party than to imagine any considerable part of the American people going over to them.”

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The cornerstone of this theory — the principle from which “Dr. Johnny’s” diagnosis of America’s shortcomings, and his prescription for its reform, proceed — is a new, “positive” conception of human freedom. Like Hegel, Dewey distinguishes between the “material” and “spiritual” aspects of human nature, and ranks the latter higher than the former. “The appetites and instincts may be ‘natural,’ in the sense that they are the beginning,” he explains in a 1908 text co-authored with James Tufts, but “the mental and spiritual life is ‘natural,’ as Aristotle puts it, in the sense that man’s full nature is developed only in such a life.” Although man’s instincts are natural in the sense of being spontaneous, man’s “mental and spiritual life is ‘natural’” in a different and higher sense — a teleological one. Like his instincts, man’s spiritual faculties exist in him from the beginning; unlike his instincts, however, they exist only in potential, in an inactive or undeveloped way. Man thus “cannot be all that he may be,” cannot realize his “full nature” and thereby achieve his “best life,” until he is able to develop his higher faculties properly and subordinate his lower nature to their rule — to the resulting “world of ideal interests.” A man so developed, the early Dewey declares, would be “perfect.” In short, for Dewey, as for Hegel, because individuals can become free only to the extent that they actualize their spiritual potential, true freedom is “something to be achieved.”

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When freedom is redefined in terms of spiritual fulfillment, the “problem of achieving freedom” radically changes. Freedom is no longer secured by constraining government interference with “the liberty of individuals in matters of conscience and economic action,” as Dewey notes, but rather by “establishing an entire social order, possessed of a spiritual authority that would nurture and direct the inner as well as the outer life of individuals.” The problem with limited government — with a government dedicated to securing the natural rights of man — is that it does not perform the more positive role of “nurtur[ing] and direct[ing]” the spiritual lives of the governed. Rather, it secures mere “negative freedom.” “Negative freedom,” Dewey clarifies, is “freedom from subjection to the will and control of others . . . capacity to act without being exposed to direct obstructions or interferences from others.” In practice, freedom understood as natural rights is “negative” because government puts individuals in the enjoyment of their rights (e.g., the right to acquire and use one’s property, to speak, to worship God according to the dictates of one’s conscience, etc.) primarily by restraining others — and, importantly, itself — from interfering with the individual’s right to make such decisions. While interference with individual decision-making is certainly not altogether illegitimate in a limited government, freedom is the normal case and restraint the exception.

At best, Dewey argues, such a government secures to every individual the mere legal right to realize his spiritual potential, a right that for many is essentially worthless. “The freedom of an agent who is merely released from direct external obstructions is formal and empty,” for unless he possesses every resource needed to take advantage of this broad legal opening, he will remain unable to exercise his freedom and thereby actualize his spiritual potential. While the law would “exempt [him] from interference in travel, in reading, in hearing music, in pursuing scientific research[,] . . . if he has neither material means nor mental cultivation to enjoy these legal possibilities, mere exemption means little or nothing.” In view of this situation, the perpetuation of limited government would consign many, perhaps most, Americans to a condition of spiritual retardation.

If mere negative freedom is to be transformed into what Dewey calls “effective” freedom, accordingly, negative government must give way to positive government. That is, the legislative power of government must expand in whatever ways are needed — and hence however far proves necessary — to effect a wider and deeper distribution of the resources essential to the actualization of every American’s spiritual potential. As Dewey presents it, and as subsequent political practice confirmed, this process is basically synonymous with the implementation of the positive conception of individual rights. In this new order, individuals are entitled to whatever resources they need to attain spiritual fulfillment. Because Dewey, like the progressives generally, regarded poverty as among the greatest constraints on spiritual development, a host of the new rights purported to enhance the material security of poorer Americans — e.g., the right to a job, a minimum wage, a maximum work day and week, a decent home (public housing), and insurance against accident (workers’ compensation), illness (public health care), and old age (Social Security). Most of these rights were enshrined in federal law during the New Deal. Because access to education at all levels and to fine art are no less essential to spiritual fulfillment, Dewey also advocated generous public provision of these resources — and indeed the provision of both was a hallmark of LBJ’s Great Society. Because all such resources are secured for those who lack them through the creation of new redistributive programs (which increase the burden on those who pay taxes) and the imposition of new regulations such as the minimum wage (which foreclose choices previously reserved to the individual), a politics of rights-as-resources inevitably erodes freedom in the founders’ sense.

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Enter SPM. The irony of its creation is more than a little hard to take. After decades during which leftists ridiculed conservatives and others who validly criticized official poverty measurements for excluding obvious items like the value of non-cash government benefits such as food stamps and traditional welfare from available resources, all of a sudden effective in 2009 the administration tasked the Census Bureau with developing SPM, which incorporates those and similar items into its measurement base.

But SPM, based on a study which had been gathering dust since the mid-1990s, additionally and arbitrarily deducts a number of expenses from income to arrive at a new “resource measure” which supposedly represents what is available to pay for “a basic set of goods that includes food, clothing, shelter, and utilities (FCSU), and a small additional amount to allow for other needs (e.g., household supplies, personal care, non- work-related transportation).” SPM then compares that new “resource measure” to a clearly higher poverty threshold than the bureau has officially used for almost 50 years (if you really have to know, SPM’s poverty threshold is “the 33rd percentile of expenditures on FCSU of consumer units with exactly two children multiplied by 1.2″).

So what are the expenses SPM deducts from income? Astute readers will begin to grasp the underhanded cleverness of the new measurement when they see the list: taxes (while adding back tax credits like the Earned Income Credit), work expenses, and medical out-of-pocket expenses.

Now let’s look at the bureau’s graph comparing where Americans fall under the official and SPM definitions:

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Since “low income” is defined as anyone whose “resource measure” is above but less than twice the defined poverty level, the SPM portion of the chart provides the support for AP’s assertion that 48% of Americans (rounded to “1 in 2″ for dramatic headline purposes) are either poor or low income.

SPM’s consideration of taxes will help Obama’s reelection campaign if (and I believe it’s more like when) the Census Bureau surprises everyone and releases its related report in October of next year instead of November, as it did this year, and attempts with media help to give it greater credibility than the official measurement. By far the largest tax low-income families pay is the payroll tax. In 2011, that tax was reduced by two percentage points. As a result, when next year’s SPM report comes out, millions of Americans will no longer be “low income” under its framework. I can imagine the campaign verbiage already: “Who first broached the idea of eliminating part of the payroll tax? Why, it was Barack Obama, who singlehandedly moved millions into the middle class in one bold move, undoing much of the damage of the past decade’s misguided policies.”

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It must be nice to be able to create your own customized measurement to arrive at the conclusions you want. Don’t be deceived, and don’t let your friends be fooled

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