RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
An interesting article on the recovery.
What took so long?
By CHARLES GASPARINO
Posted: 10:13 PM, March 11, 2012
The US economy finally seems on course toward a sustained recovery — but why did it take so long?
Consider this analysis: Job creation is strong, while economic growth as measured by the gross domestic product will finally creep back to pre-2008 levels, something close to 3.5 percent.
That was not the takeaway from last week’s strong jobs report, but a prediction more than a year ago from Goldman Sachs analysts, possibly the best economics team on Wall Street.
The Goldman geniuses weren’t making it up, nor were they the only Wall Street types to predict incorrectly that 2011 would be a great year in which a rising stock market, higher corporate profits and increased consumer spending, would all translate into decent job growth and the final nail into the coffin of the Great Recession.
I bring this up not to show how some smart people got it wrong in 2011 (GDP growth was actually lower in 2011 than in 2010) and dampen last week’s good news about job creation. This recovery looks real; it was the third month in a row in which the economy produced more than 200,000 jobs. Overall unemployment held at 8.3 percent. That’s a great sign because the jobless rate doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for work — but does count them when they start looking again. Apparently, people are finding jobs as fast as they’re jumping back into the work force.
No, the bigger issue is what took the economy so long to recover.
President Obama and his supporters blame the mess left by the 2008 financial collapse, as businesses shed jobs at rates not seen since the Great Depression — and they have a point; it takes time to dig out of a hole that deep.
But Obama’s critics have a point, too. The administration’s policies helped delay the rebound and make it more tepid than it might have been otherwise.
You can begin with Obama’s signature first-term economic “achievement,” the $800 billion stimulus plan that was supposed to create all those shovel-ready jobs and stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent.
We all know how that turned out, with unemployment hovering between 9 percent and 10 percent until recently and GDP floundering such that even some Obama supporters have attacked the stimulus’ futility. Much of the money went to states to plug their budget deficits and reduce government layoffs; another bunch went for cockamamie green schemes floated by such politically connected companies as Solyndra.
As for all the shovel-ready jobs, the president himself has joked about how they weren’t as shovel-ready as he expected.
But Obama’s biggest economic mistake wasn’t just the wasted stimulus but a war on US businesses that continues today.
Even as evidence mounted that his stimulus plan wasn’t working, the president basically ignored the nation’s economic woes and spent most of 2009 and 2010 pushing for the least business-friendly mandate to come out of Washington in years — his universal health-insurance plan.
Timing matters. Obama wasn’t pushing a new mandate during an economic boom, when employers might shrug off the costs and ignore the uncertainty, but when, as he puts it, the economy was in the ditch. Instead of giving the private sector reason for hope, he gave it more to fear — so businesses retrenched, and the “recovery summer” the administration predicted for 2010 never came.
Nor did it come last year. Again, some problems were clearly out of the president’s control. The tsunami in Japan and the euro crisis both were drags on the global economy. But so were Obama’s policies.
Businesses react rationally when it comes to hiring more workers, and here’s what they’ve had to consider since 2009:
* A president who doesn’t miss a chance to bash “millionaires and billionaires” and who always talks up the “justice” of raising their taxes.
* A financial-reform law that raises costs so much that banks can’t afford to take normal business risks and lend to entrepreneurs.
* An administration that’s so hellbent on serving its union allies that it sues Boeing for opening up a nonunion plant in South Carolina, where unemployment is almost 10 percent.
Now that Obama’s in full re-election mode, he’s dropped the Boeing suit. But he’s still stalled the Keystone Pipeline, which would have produced some real shovel-ready jobs — and also more oil as gasoline prices rise above $4 a gallon. And while he’s put some anti-energy regulations on hold, nobody thinks he’s that likely to delay them any longer if he wins in November.
Bottom line: Anyone looking to give the president credit for the recovery needs to explain why it took so long — and to tell us what, exactly, Obama did to make it better.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinio..._so_long_gRS6zf9nGzqxedF5Y7d8TO#ixzz1oxZWcwDp
What took so long?
By CHARLES GASPARINO
Posted: 10:13 PM, March 11, 2012
The US economy finally seems on course toward a sustained recovery — but why did it take so long?
Consider this analysis: Job creation is strong, while economic growth as measured by the gross domestic product will finally creep back to pre-2008 levels, something close to 3.5 percent.
That was not the takeaway from last week’s strong jobs report, but a prediction more than a year ago from Goldman Sachs analysts, possibly the best economics team on Wall Street.
The Goldman geniuses weren’t making it up, nor were they the only Wall Street types to predict incorrectly that 2011 would be a great year in which a rising stock market, higher corporate profits and increased consumer spending, would all translate into decent job growth and the final nail into the coffin of the Great Recession.
I bring this up not to show how some smart people got it wrong in 2011 (GDP growth was actually lower in 2011 than in 2010) and dampen last week’s good news about job creation. This recovery looks real; it was the third month in a row in which the economy produced more than 200,000 jobs. Overall unemployment held at 8.3 percent. That’s a great sign because the jobless rate doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for work — but does count them when they start looking again. Apparently, people are finding jobs as fast as they’re jumping back into the work force.
No, the bigger issue is what took the economy so long to recover.
President Obama and his supporters blame the mess left by the 2008 financial collapse, as businesses shed jobs at rates not seen since the Great Depression — and they have a point; it takes time to dig out of a hole that deep.
But Obama’s critics have a point, too. The administration’s policies helped delay the rebound and make it more tepid than it might have been otherwise.
You can begin with Obama’s signature first-term economic “achievement,” the $800 billion stimulus plan that was supposed to create all those shovel-ready jobs and stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent.
We all know how that turned out, with unemployment hovering between 9 percent and 10 percent until recently and GDP floundering such that even some Obama supporters have attacked the stimulus’ futility. Much of the money went to states to plug their budget deficits and reduce government layoffs; another bunch went for cockamamie green schemes floated by such politically connected companies as Solyndra.
As for all the shovel-ready jobs, the president himself has joked about how they weren’t as shovel-ready as he expected.
But Obama’s biggest economic mistake wasn’t just the wasted stimulus but a war on US businesses that continues today.
Even as evidence mounted that his stimulus plan wasn’t working, the president basically ignored the nation’s economic woes and spent most of 2009 and 2010 pushing for the least business-friendly mandate to come out of Washington in years — his universal health-insurance plan.
Timing matters. Obama wasn’t pushing a new mandate during an economic boom, when employers might shrug off the costs and ignore the uncertainty, but when, as he puts it, the economy was in the ditch. Instead of giving the private sector reason for hope, he gave it more to fear — so businesses retrenched, and the “recovery summer” the administration predicted for 2010 never came.
Nor did it come last year. Again, some problems were clearly out of the president’s control. The tsunami in Japan and the euro crisis both were drags on the global economy. But so were Obama’s policies.
Businesses react rationally when it comes to hiring more workers, and here’s what they’ve had to consider since 2009:
* A president who doesn’t miss a chance to bash “millionaires and billionaires” and who always talks up the “justice” of raising their taxes.
* A financial-reform law that raises costs so much that banks can’t afford to take normal business risks and lend to entrepreneurs.
* An administration that’s so hellbent on serving its union allies that it sues Boeing for opening up a nonunion plant in South Carolina, where unemployment is almost 10 percent.
Now that Obama’s in full re-election mode, he’s dropped the Boeing suit. But he’s still stalled the Keystone Pipeline, which would have produced some real shovel-ready jobs — and also more oil as gasoline prices rise above $4 a gallon. And while he’s put some anti-energy regulations on hold, nobody thinks he’s that likely to delay them any longer if he wins in November.
Bottom line: Anyone looking to give the president credit for the recovery needs to explain why it took so long — and to tell us what, exactly, Obama did to make it better.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinio..._so_long_gRS6zf9nGzqxedF5Y7d8TO#ixzz1oxZWcwDp
