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

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richard_daily said:
What is with your obsession with dogs? Are you a furry? It would make sense.

Not into you that way, sorry.


And if you get a chance, let me know if you can find any republican presidents that created more jobs than Jimmy Carter.

Kthnx!
Click to expand...

Be proud YOU ARE A NIGGER!

BE PROUD!
 
richard_daily said:
What is with your obsession with dogs? Are you a furry? It would make sense.

Not into you that way, sorry.


And if you get a chance, let me know if you can find any republican presidents that created more jobs than Jimmy Carter.

Kthnx!
Click to expand...

None did, nor did any dem presidents. They are not allowed to run businesses while in office, lil Chihuahua.
 
vetteman said:
They had to hire a lot of cops to keep the peace in his mile long gas rationing lines.:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

He took the economy from 80 million jobs to 91 million in just four years. Republicans, who live their lives in crazyland, continue to tell a narrative of how Carter killed jobs though.

When facts don't back your argument ya'll just make up your own facts.
 
under Carter we had 18% interest rates

and

infaltion so bad, they called it BANANA!


so NIGGER, Tell us how good NIGGERCARTER was
 
mercury14 said:
Because job growth wasn't the only issue?

Here you all are, lying about facts again though.
Click to expand...

Hey NIGGER

You are teh LAST NIGGER still supporting teh NIGGER


Too Funny: GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert Nabs Name “American Jobs Act” After No Dem Files Bill On Obama’s Behalf…


Snooze you lose.

(The Foundry) — President Obama repeatedly asked members of Congress to pass the American Jobs Act last week. But when no Democrat filed Obama’s bill after he presented it to Congress, a conservative congressman swiped the name for his own legislation.

The American Jobs Act introduced in the House of Representatives looks quite different from the version President Obama outlined in his speech to Congress. Instead of hiking taxes on working Americans to pay for another stimulus, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) legislation offers a tax cut.
 
mercury14 said:
Love how the line of "Ben Bernanke is the most inflationary fed chair in decades" keeps floating through the Republican circles. He just keeps printing all that money!!!


http://timecuriouscapitalist.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fed-reserve-inflation-1.jpeg

http://timecuriouscapitalist.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fed-reserve-money-supply.jpeg


Turns out that Republicans are just lying again.
Click to expand...

mercury14 said:
Because job growth wasn't the only issue?

Here you all are, lying about facts again though.
Click to expand...

Speaking of liars, Hi MORON.
 
mercury14 said:
He took the economy from 80 million jobs to 91 million in just four years. Republicans, who live their lives in crazyland, continue to tell a narrative of how Carter killed jobs though.

When facts don't back your argument ya'll just make up your own facts.
Click to expand...

You go ahead and hold up the Carter Presidency as a paragon of Democrat governance, you know I do.
 
"Carter worked hard to combat the continuing economic woes of inflation and unemployment. By the end of his administration, he could claim an increase of nearly eight million jobs..."

Whitehouse.gov

8/4=2/12=167,000 jobs a month.

:rolleyes:

__________________
If you ask me, I think what we're experiencing isn't in fact closer to a "growthless" recovery than to a jobless one. Because GDP started to grow more than a year and a half ago, but with the exception of just a couple of quarters, growth has not been noticeably above its trend rate of about 2-1/2 percent a year. I don't rejoice at the news that we added 216,000 jobs in March. About a hundred thousand of that 216,000 is needed every month just to keep up with the growth in the labor force. At this rate of job growth, it would take most of the decade to replace the eight 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost in the recession.
Christina Romer
Chairwoman of Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors
 
A Tale of Three Cities

By 1943, it was clear that both Detroit and Houston were having a great war. Detroit’s massive car factories had all been converted to war production, and it was churning out tanks, jeeps, and bombers at a dizzying pace. The demand for wartime labor drew more than 300,000 migrants to Detroit, mostly from Appalachia and the South. In 1943, the population was approaching 2 million, and it seemed to be growing with no end in sight. But the race riots had revealed a sore festering beneath the surface, and there were others.

As early as the middle of the 19th century, Detroit had emerged as a leader in the Great Lakes maritime trade. It was perfectly positioned to capitalize on the Industrial Revolution, and soon was home to major industries producing machine tools, maritime steam engines, and horse carriages — the business in which William Durant, founder of General Motors, made his first fortune. Standardization of parts meant that many were interchangeable and could be used for a variety of things. When the gasoline engine was developed, Henry Ford put together his first automobiles largely from readily available components.

The rise of the machines led to an explosion of industry and a huge demand for unskilled labor. Between 1900 and 1930, Detroit was the fastest-growing city in the world. But soon, especially in the years after World War II, machines began to replace a lot of that unskilled labor. The ranks of the unemployed swelled — especially among blacks. In the 1950s and 1960s, large populations of idle young black men became a mainstay of neighborhoods such as Paradise Valley. Crime quickly became epidemic.

Race relations deteriorated, until they finally exploded in the riots of 1967. This time the trouble started with a police raid on an unlicensed after-hours bar that was packed with nearly 100 people. The police tried to arrest all of them, and a crowd gathered outside the establishment to protest. Most of those arrested were black, and the mostly black crowd became enraged and began looting. With all the velocity of sudden combustion, the violence turned into one of the worst riots in American history.

White flight began in earnest soon after and never abated. Court-ordered public-school desegregation encouraged the trend, and those who moved took the tax base with them. In 1973, Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young, an unabashed grievance-driven liberal who thrived on stoking the very tensions of race, class, and politics that were pulling Detroit apart. His highest priority seems to have been to show that he was the “m———r in charge,” as he would quaintly call himself: “M.F.I.C.” became his semi-official nickname.

Young’s administration bore more than a passing resemblance to Barack Obama’s in this sense: He used the machinery of government to attack the economic interests of his political opposition and extract benefits for his own supporters. As these policies drove his opponents’ political base out of the city, his own political base expanded proportionately. He apparently believed that increasing the political power of Detroit’s blacks was worth impoverishing the whole city.

Detroit’s transition to a majority-black city (the population is now more than 80 percent black) occurred just as the welfare programs of the Great Society started to destroy the black family. The Great Society was not merely an enormous disincentive to competition and self-reliance; it also disincentivized marriage by supplying the income that mothers used to depend on their husbands to provide.

Mayor Young presided over this disaster for 20 years. The city he left behind is a disheartening relic of its past. Of its 350,000 homes, more than 80,000 stand vacant, and the business-vacancy rate is 62 percent. As if that were not bad enough, many Detroiters enjoy whiling away the empty hours by setting empty houses on fire. Devil’s Night is a local tradition of vandalism and arson on a massive scale around Halloween. It was vigorously celebrated under Coleman Young, when it was common to have as many as 800 fires in the last days of October. Last year, there were more than 160 fires around Halloween, the drop due at least in part to the fact that the city has lost about a third of its population since 1993. City Hall is full of calls to tear down empty buildings, but there is no money even for demolition.

There was a time when Detroit’s problems were those of the auto industry, but the city is far past that now. Detroit has become the country’s capital of vagrancy and delinquency, and the most basic problem now is the breakdown of the black family. A staggering 80 percent of the city’s children were born to unwed mothers, a statistic that leads directly to the school system’s predictably high dropout rates. Detroit today has a functional-illiteracy rate (reading level below sixth-grade average) of nearly half, a level of illiteracy more characteristic of the Third World than of the First.

Detroit has entered the 21st century with perhaps the most deeply uneducated city labor force in the developed world. The results are predictable: Michigan’s statewide unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is among the highest in the country, and Detroit’s is even higher: It approached 30 percent during the depths of the recession. According to Bill Johnson, a reporter at the Detroit News, the city has become “an assembly line for criminals.”

The auto industry is much reduced. Part of the reason that Detroit’s powerhouse failed to meet the competition from Japan and Germany head-on in the 1970s and 1980s was its high degree of consolidation, which gave the Big Three and their unions enormous political leverage.

They used that leverage to extract protection from the free competition that might have saved both them and the city by forcing them to abandon failed business models and seek out new ones.

The automakers prevailed on President Reagan to strong-arm Japan into accepting “voluntary” export quotas, on the theory that Detroit needed only a few years to adjust to the new competitive climate. In truth, the Big Three were morbidly bloated and uncompetitive, and making poor-quality cars to boot: Open competition was the best thing that could have happened to them. Instead, their consolidated oligarchy and the political influence that went with it produced a form of state capitalism, and they continue to abuse their power to this day.

The Chrysler bailout in 1980 was prologue to the bailouts of both Chrysler and General Motors in 2009. Over the course of several decades, the unions had managed to extract enormous pensions and health benefits for their retirees. The funds to back up these liabilities were fractional — that is, at any given time, the pension funds were required to hold funds equal to only a fraction of their liabilities. Even when competitive pressure finally forced the companies to learn how to produce cars as cheaply as their Japanese and German competitors, retiree obligations ensured that they still could not compete on price. They were soon insolvent.

On top of the retiree benefits, the United Auto Workers of America extracted enormous wage concessions during the boom years and refused to give them up when the industry faced withering competition. Supplemental unemployment benefits of 95 percent of wages are only one example of how the UAW strangled Detroit’s economy, and it is not the only union doing the strangling. A few years ago, the Detroit public-school teachers’ union went on strike to prevent the city from accepting a private gift of $200 million to build 15 charter schools. The city now faces a shortfall of more than $300 million, and schools are closing by the dozen.

The state has made things worse. Michigan’s approach to economic development involves heavy government intervention. For example, in the early 1980s, Detroit condemned 1,300 houses, 140 businesses, six churches, and a hospital to make way for a new General Motors plant.

Beyond that, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation offers a variety of incentives and tax credits to favored projects. In tax credits alone, the state has spent $3.3 billion over 15 years, invariably distorting the efficient allocation of the human and material resources that the state — and Detroit in particular — desperately need to be put to genuinely productive use.

Both the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit impose an income tax on top of the city’s property taxes. The state imposes a 4.95 percent income tax on businesses as well as a gross-receipts tax of nearly 1 percent. It is no wonder that when Japanese and German carmakers started opening plants in the United States, they avoided Michigan and settled mostly in the right-to-work South — including Texas.

...

The Texas oil boom continued for most of the 20th century. During the 1970s, the Houston Chronicle became widely distributed in Detroit, chiefly for its help-wanted ads. By the early 1980s, “black taggers” — cars bearing the black Michigan license plate — were a common sight in Houston. In the second half of the century, the size of the two cities’ population positions flipped. In the 1950s, Detroit had 2 million residents, Houston only about 700,000. Today, Houston has far more than 2 million residents, Detroit just over 700,000.

But Houston would suffer its own bad luck. In 1985 the Saudis abandoned their position as “swing producer” in OPEC and dramatically ramped up production, from 2 million barrels per day to 5 million barrels, in a matter of months. The price of a barrel of oil fell from an average of nearly $30 in 1985 to around $20 in January 1986 and then nosedived to under $10 by midyear.

For Houston, “it was a bloodbath,” recalls one former Shell executive. Profit margins had already been in the single digits, and businesses rapidly went bust left and right. In a matter of months, massive layoffs rocked the city. Real-estate values plunged, and Texas was sucked into the savings-and-loan crisis. The unemployment rate for the state as a whole jumped from 6.1 percent in September 1984 to 9.3 percent just two years later.

As soon as oil prices fell, the independent oil producers cried out for protection, much as Detroit’s Big Three had done just a few years before. But the largely Houston-based oil giants were international traders, so they fought against tariffs. Beset by these conflicting appeals from the oil sector, the government was paralyzed in its response — and, happily, did nothing. Unemployment rates in the city dropped quickly, reaching 5 percent in 1990.

More recently, Houston has benefited from a spike in oil prices, and for that Texans can thank Washington liberals more than Lone Star conservatives. Obama’s policies, and those of congressional Democrats, have significantly constricted the domestic production of oil, creating upward price pressure. These policies don’t benefit the environment a whit; the chief beneficiaries are the oil companies, which see windfall profits as the value of their reserves rises.

Texas likes to brag that it is “business friendly,” but it would be more accurate to say that it is, by both philosophy and force of circumstances, “competition friendly.” Like most states, Texas has an economic-development fund, but it’s a small one: Since it was created, the Texas Enterprise Fund has disbursed slightly less than $363 million. That’s one-tenth the amount Michigan has spent on economic development in recent years, and Texas has almost three times the population. In other words, the government of Texas spends about one-thirtieth as much per person on corporate-development projects as Michigan.

Texas has prospered from the fact that it is a right-to-work state. This is not to say that Texas is anti-labor, or even that it is anti-union. Many refineries in Texas are unionized. But Texas seeks to reward labor through the free market. In the words of one former Shell executive, “If you’ve got good management, people aren’t going to want to get unionized. And management has gotten smarter and smarter over time. That’s why the unions are in trouble.”

Houston weathered the storm nicely, in large part through a rapid reallocation of human and material resources. Diversification was the key. Before the bust, the energy sector accounted for about 80 percent of Houston’s economy; now it’s barely 50 percent. Of the 51 Texas companies on the Fortune 500 list, there are computer makers, airlines, retailers, gas-and-electrical utilities, food-and-grocery companies, construction companies, and a telecommunications company.

The Texas Medical Center in Houston is the world’s largest, employing nearly 100,000 people and receiving nearly 6 million patients per year.

The diversification of Houston’s economy has been particularly potent in heavy industry. For the state as a whole, employment in the oil-and-gas sector increased by 5.1 percent between June 2010 and June 2011, largely because of natural-gas projects made possible by “fracking.” Employment in heavy construction and civil-engineering construction, by contrast, increased 10.6 percent in the same period; in primary metal manufacturing, 6.6 percent; in fabricated metal products, 8.2 percent; and in machinery manufacturing, 11.9 percent. Meanwhile, the government work force contracted 1 percent.

Tolerance of cultural diversity has become a hallmark of Houston’s ascent, despite the state’s checkered history of race relations. Texans take individual freedom and individual responsibility very seriously, so meritocracy comes naturally to them. In the words of George Strake, one of Houston’s most venerated oilmen, “Everyone’s welcome here, so long as you’re willing to pull the wagon and not just sit in it.” That is perhaps why anti-immigrant feeling is not nearly as pronounced in Texas as it is in other parts of the Southwest. Like Detroit, Houston is minority white, but more diverse: Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, Hispanics 37 percent, and Asians (chiefly Vietnamese and Chinese) more than 5 percent.

Texas has managed to preserve something very essential about America, namely the frontier mentality, what the great Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach described as the “cult of courage.” Or, in the words of Mr. Strake, “Give me wide open spaces. Let me enjoy the good times, and don’t feel sorry for me in bad times.” Naturally, this leads to a certain vision of government: Defend our shores, deliver the mail, and get the hell out of the way.
Click to expand...
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/277078

COMITINI, Italy — With only 960 residents and a handful of roads, this tiny hilltop village in the arid, sulfurous hills of southern Sicily does not appear to have major traffic problems. But that does not prevent it from having one full-time traffic officer — and eight auxiliaries.

The auxiliaries, who earn a respectable 800 euros a month, or $1,100, to work 20 hours a week, are among about 64 Comitini residents employed by the town, the product of an entrenched jobs-for-votes system pervasive in Italian politics at all levels.

“Jobs like these have kept this city alive,” said Caterina Valenti, 41, an auxiliary in a neat blue uniform as she sat recently with two colleagues, all on duty, drinking coffee in the town’s bar on a hot afternoon. “You see, here we are at the bar, we support the economy this way.”

But what may be saving Comitini’s economy is precisely what is strangling Italy’s and other ailing economies throughout Europe. Public spending has driven up the public debt to 120 percent of gross domestic product, the highest percentage in the euro zone after Greece’s. In recent weeks, concerns about Italy’s solvency and the shaky finances of other deeply indebted European nations have sapped market confidence and spread fears about the stability of the euro itself.
Click to expand...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/world/europe/italy-austerity-plan.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

This last one is how merc thinks about an economy, but, in that, he is not alone...
 
Job creation matters less when inflation picks the wage slaves' pockets faster than they can refill them.


Ask Uncle Jimmy about the Misery Index.


And we're still waiting for that $50 he promised us in '76.
 
Wat_Tyler said:
Job creation matters less when inflation picks the wage slaves' pockets faster than they can refill them.


Ask Uncle Jimmy about the Misery Index.


And we're still waiting for that $50 he promised us in '76.
Click to expand...

Another keen observation.

I still remember those years...
 
We picked ours down by the river...




$5 equaled a six-pack (no carding) and a tank of gas, and then came Jimmy.

His brother made shitty beer...
 
Tricky Dick fucked gas. Jimmy turned around and fucked it again.


My father's Oldsmobile loved Sunoco 260.


PBR was much better.
 
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