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

cebalrai said:

Yes what we're learned from lit's right wingers is that the market isn't a good indicator of the economy. Except when it's going down.

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“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1838

United States government debt now stands at $14.3 trillion, a sum nearly equal to our entire national gross domestic product (GDP). Sounds bad, right? Turns out, it’s worse. Much, much worse. According to a stunning new analysis by USA Today, the real total for America’s unfunded obligations is $61.6 trillion.

You see the government, unlike a business, is not required to count new liabilities when they are added to the books. Instead, “Congress postpones recording spending commitments until it writes a check.” This smokescreen allows the government to hide the true size of the hole we are in. “The (federal) debt only tells us what the government owes to the public. It doesn’t take into account what’s owed to seniors, veterans and retired employees,” explains Sheila Weinberg, founder of the Institute for Truth in Accounting.

Forget ObamaCare: Last year alone, Medicare added $1.8 trillion in new liabilities — Social Security, $1.4 trillion. These accumulating obligations swim just under the official numbers like giant, ravenous sharks.

And they’re just as dangerous. The $61.6 trillion in unfunded obligations amounts to $534,000 owed per household, “more than five times what Americans have borrowed for everything else — mortgages, car loans and other debt.” It is also rapidly approaching the GDP of the entire planet,($63.17 trillion, 2010 estimated). It goes without saying that we will never be able to pay such impossible sums.

Is it any wonder that captains of industry and finance are warning of very dark times ahead? Jim Rogers, chief executive of Rogers Holdings, recently told CNBC:

In the last three years the government has spent staggering amounts of money and the Federal Reserve is taking on staggering amounts of debt. When the problems arise next time…what are they going to do? They can’t quadruple the debt again. They cannot print that much more money. It’s gonna be worse the next time around.

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Abraham Lincoln was right — no foreign army could ever conquer the United States. But we are literally spending ourselves to death.

We are authoring, right now, our national demise; soon, perhaps very soon, our civilization will begin to disintegrate, as civilizations always do when burdened by such fantastical obligations: See the Roman, Spanish, Ottoman, British, and Soviet empires, for starters.

Let me tell you how it will unfold.

To save money, municipalities will begin cutting non-essential services — libraries, festivals, parades, and the like will shrink in size and scope. But that will not be near enough. Soon expensive “essentials” like police and fire departments will face severe cuts. Lights will be turned off at night to save money, and our cities will become literally darker and more dangerous places.

The federal government can avoid these kinds of harsh choices a little longer…but not forever. Soon national essentials — defense, infrastructure — will suffer from our empty coffers. ObamaCare will cause doctors to flee the profession en masse; medical care will become defined by scarcity, shortages, and outrageous expense. And eventually, the seniors, veterans, and teeming poor to whom we have promised the world will realize there is no world coming to them.

And then the violence will start.

This is but a prediction, true. In support, I can offer only the whole of recorded history.

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On June 10, Catherine Rampell at the New York Times presented what she thought was a seemingly inexplicable and troubling conundrum, which this column will clear up.

Spending on equipment and software has risen 25.6 percent in the last seven quarters, while companies’ aggregate spending on employees has risen only 2.2 percent.

Somehow, capital spending is growing faster and labor spending is growing more slowly than has been the case in almost every previous recovery on record.

...

In March 2010, Congress passed and Obama signed a certain law. Nicknamed “ObamaCare,” this law “will force most American business firms to offer government-approved health insurance to their employees or else pay new federal taxes for not doing so.” The legislation will apply to any employee “working 120 hours per month.”

But why does ObamaCare matter if it mostly won’t kick in for another 2 1/2 years? That’s easy, but clearly not well understood.

If you are running a business, you structure it and design your future plans based not only on the world as it is today, but also on what it may look like in the reasonably near future. You must prepare yourself for likely worst-case scenarios. The one relating to employment is that ObamaCare will survive legal and electoral challenges. Facing that possibility, you avoid hiring people. When looking at “man vs. machine” decisions, you choose the machine if it’s at all affordable. You do everything you can to squeeze productivity out of your current crew, even larding on extra duties and overtime if they can handle it.

Additionally, companies are run by human beings who, especially at smaller businesses, really hate to have to let people go (and of course, they, like their larger brethren, also must worry about unemployment insurance costs, wrongful termination lawsuits, and the like). If you believe that having additional employees around will become cost-prohibitive in 2014, you avoid hiring them today. Combine all of this with historically weak post-recession economic growth, and you have the perfect recipe for what has resulted: lackluster hiring, heavy use of part-timers and temporary help, and the aforementioned bias towards automation.

There’s a quick answer which mostly explains why these job-market and economic conditions are present. It’s not what Ann Curry apparently believes and wants her viewers to believe, which is that it’s some kind of unprecedented orchestrated exercise in corporate greed.

Five words explain businesses’ rational response: machines are exempt from ObamaCare.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

Tom Blumer
Pajamas Media

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busybody said:

HOPE AND CHANGE: Nearly Half of US Thinks New Recession is Coming: Poll.

What’s amazing is that this is happening despite all the happy-talk from the Big Media folks that we’ve been hearing since before Recovery Summer I. That seems to be starting to fade, though . . .

But hey, the recession hasn’t been tough for everybody: Pelosi’s wealth grows by 62 percent. “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress.”

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busybody said:

I actually read the long C n Pee you posted

It is actually quite illustrative, isnt it?

Especially THIS

Five words explain businesses’ rational response: machines are exempt from ObamaCare.


So

Can we call it

NIGGEROMICS yet?

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

The article is even better...

Welcome, welcome, to the machine...

__________________
Don't shoot me! Ahm just the passion play's Player Piano player.
A_J, the Stupid

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President Obama swept into office on a tide of Lincoln and FDR comparisons. A giddy press corps swooned every time he spoke; his cabinet was a ‘team of rivals’ like Lincoln’s. His mandate, the press said, was to be a transformative president, like FDR. The more sober said he would be a Democratic Reagan: just as the Californian led the country into a generation of conservative politics, so President Obama would lead Democrats into permanent majoritarian status.

This was the consensus of the mainstream press; it was also the opinion of the President’s inner circle. Based on that consensus, the President made the decisions which, if he fails of re-election in 2012, history will likely regard as the fatal mistakes of his term: he went along with the flawed and failed stimulus program the Democratic Congress put forward, and he pushed forward on health care reform before economic recovery was assured.

In reality, President Obama’s mandate was not to be a transformer; he was elected to conserve. In 2008 the independents who elected Obama by deserting the GOP were tired of the drama of the Bush administration and they were terrified by the financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers. What they wanted was another Bill Clinton: a calm and soothing figure who would feel their pain and tweak the New Deal/Great Society state model to make it a little more user-friendly and a little less bankruptcy prone.

Midway through 2010, President Obama looked less like Lincoln redux and more like a Clinton manqué. By the end of that year, the penultimate dissing of the President began; friends and foes began to ask whether President Obama might not be, gasp, the new Jimmy Carter.

Instapundit maestro Glenn Reynolds has been saying for some time that from where he sits, the Carter comparison looks like a best case scenario for this President. For all our sakes, I hope Glenn is wrong, but increasingly there’s another specter frightening the Obama administration: the ghost of Herbert Hoover.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

Yes, his skin color makes him bulletproof with the press.

We'll see how bulletproof he is outside of that 40% that are going to vote for him no matter what...

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busybody said:

^^^Lunatic NIGGER PROTECTOR



>>>>NIGGERBOMICKS

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Ulaven_Demorte said:

That offer of a wager still stands Cap'n..

It's beginning to look like you may even have a shot at that $20 payoff with Bachman officially in the race. *Cough* *laugh* *choke* Long odds, pays 2-1.

If you really believed half of the bullshit you C&P from the Thinker and NRO you would have jumped on that bet the first time it was offered.
I know you won't now, i just like making you refuse over and over.. Which excuse this time?

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rosco rathbone said:

Lit Political Bookmaking might cut down on the bullshit.

You aren't putting up enough money to have that effect, though. Add a zero.

I will hold the wagers.

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Ulaven_Demorte said:

If Cap'n Hayseed won't put up $10 he damned sure won't put up $100.

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rosco rathbone said:

Well the offer stands if he decides to nut up.

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rosco rathbone said:

Well the offer stands if he decides to nut up.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

Why bet?

He's only trying to distract us from the economy and the fact that we're closer to seeing a double dip than the Obamanation is to seeing their summer of recovery a few trillion dollars of debt later. So he want's to bet that Palin won't be the President.

She's not running. He's a real brain trust...

Not talking so much about the results of the Summer of Recovery though and we're still watching that ol' lagging indicator wondering when his employer's hiring is going to be reflected in the numbers.

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