This hasn’t been a good week for Mr. Obama. First there was the “Polish death camp” thing that wouldn’t go away. (Hey, I understood what he meant, didn’t you? But just try explaining it to the Poles…)
Today, there’s this:
Worst U.S. Job Data in a Year Signals Stalling Recovery
A dismal job market report Friday gave a resounding confirmation to fears that the United States recovery has markedly slowed, reflecting mounting evidence of a global slowdown.
The report, which showed the smallest net job growth in a year and an unemployment rate moving in the wrong direction, was a political game-changer that bodes ill for President Obama as he faces re-election.
It provided traction for his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, at a time when politicians have been deeply divided over the most effective way to strengthen the economy. And it put increased pressure on the Federal Reserve to take further action to stimulate growth.
The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 in April, largely because more people began looking for work. And there was more unexpected bad news: job gains that had been reported in March and April were revised downward…
Yow. Now the president knows how John McCain felt when the economy got shot out from under him. OK, not that bad. But still not good.
What do y’all think? Is it a blip, or a negative trend? Because I remain convinced that the health of the economy depends in large part on what y’all — all 300 million or so of y’all — think about it. Yeah, there are some things we can’t help, like the Euro mess, but largely we have the ability to stimulate the economy by ourselves. Hey, that sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not how I meant it. Or maybe I did. Talking about money stuff makes my mind wander…
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So you don’t think the economy depends at all on enormous deficits reaching a tipping point? We can all just wish it to get better if we eat our vegetables and click our heels together?
There are millions of variables that give us the economy we have. It’s when the government attempts to tinker with it that we get these results.
Doug, I said “largely.” The worst thing about this news is it will make people who were thinking about starting a business or adding back some employees stop, and wait. Again. Which leads to more bad news. This sort of thing feeds on itself.
I think the deficits are bad. But deficits don’t slow down the economy.
Several weeks back, our speaker at Rotary was an analyst or economist for one of the big banks in the Carolinas. I don’t remember him mentioning the deficits. But he DID talk about the fact that public sector cutbacks are dragging down the economy.
He said that the private sector was enjoying growth of about 3 percent, but overall was at 2 because the lesser amount of economic activity in the public sector was pulling it down…
And I wasn’t suggesting eating our vegetables. I was saying go out and BUY vegetables, and meat, and candy, and durable goods, and other stuff…
Right now, we are basically shafting savers with artificially low interest rates. Banks make money on the spread by charging 4% and paying nothing, like .4% Let interest rates rise a bit and people will really start to NEED to put money to work, they’ll need to invest and lend to make their return.
As for me, I’m refi’ing my house at under 3% in anticipation of future inflation. I’ll be borrowing money fo’ free!
“I was saying go out and BUY vegetables, and meat, and candy, and durable goods, and other stuff…”
You talking to us or the guys who don’t have jobs?
You think this number is bad, wait until they show the actual number showing unemployment, underemployment and those who have just given up all hope of finding a job.
Sadly, the stats on the economy “cook the books.” I’m not much on conspiracy theories (note that we know way more than I think we should about CIA and Special Ops missions—Can anyone in DC keep their mouths shut?). However, makes me wonder which stats are truthful.
I learned in college that the unemployment stats fail to include people no longer looking for work (simply gave up). During the last several decades the government has tinkered with the inflation rate stats so much that they don’t mean much—as anyone who buys groceries suspects every time they go to the store.
I think we all accept as fact too many things that are partially true at best. We need more investigative reporting and serious news articles and fewer stories by political and ideological hacks and fewer articles that don’t even skim the surface of the topic.
What am I missing? At least one of the Nazi death camps were in Poland.
@Tom Doody– I think the Poles resent the implication that they were responsible for the death camps. A preferred phrasing would be “Nazi death camps in Poland.”
It’s true there was a lot of anti-
Semitism rife in Poland when the war started, but the death camps were strictly a German idea. A good overall reference on death camps and other such cheerful topics is BLOODLANDS by Timothy Snyder.
“What do y’all think? Is it a blip, or a negative trend?”
Ask me next month. All I know is that it ain’t good for an incumbent. No president since the Great Depression has won re-election with a jobless rate higher than 7.4%, and this last U3 number has pretty much guaranteed that the number will be higher than 7.4%
Bryan the critical number is not the unemployment rate but the change in the unemployment rate in the two years before the election. Reagan won 49 states with an umemployment rate of 7.4%; FDR with an even higher rate. But both had declining trends that helped them.
Still, Obama is being hurt by the numbers at this point. Just as the Republicans planned.
“Still, Obama is being hurt by the numbers at this point. Just as the Republicans planned.”
So what you are saying is that if the Republican job creators would just hire more of the Democrats without marketable skills, things would be great?
I have an idea – every Keynesian should go out and spend $1000 dollars today and put it on their credit card. If all it takes is more deficit spending, why not cut out the government middleman?
I don’t know that what has ever gone before means much anymore. It appears everything is different anyway. No republican candidate ever got the nomination without winning SC …. until now, for example. We have the most uninformed electorate to date, as far as I can tell. Who knows what they will pay attention to, whether or not it will be a valid data point, and whether they will draw appropriate conclusions from it. I seem to be feeling rather cynical today, but I’m not putting a lot of stock in observations like “no president has ever been re-elected with unemployment over 7.4%.” I just don’t know that past observations like that still hold for our crazy world today.
“Still, Obama is being hurt by the numbers at this point. Just as the Republicans planned.”…bud
If this were humorous, I would LOL but there is nothing even close to being clever or comical.
How is it that the “money-grubbing”, “worshiping at the altar of the almighty dollar”, “greedy capitalists” Republicans and every other descriptive adjective relating to greed assigned to them by bud would actually want the economy to remain down so it would hurt Obama?
Really, this is over-reaching to the point of trying to scratch your butt with your elbow. Only a contortionist could accomplish such a feat.
I agree with Doug. bud, you want to spur the economy? Get your friends together en masse’ and go out and spend $1,000 at least once a month on things other than shelter, food, and clothing so we get out of the economic malaise that has engulfed this country.
Yeah, lets spend, spend, spend money we don’t have and when we can’t spend anymore, maybe the economy will magically recover and we use the beanstalk Jack planted to climb out of the deep recession. Fairy tales are still fairy tales.
“I agree with Doug. bud, you want to spur the economy? Get your friends together en masse’ and go out and spend $1,000 at least once a month on things other than shelter, food, and clothing so we get out of the economic malaise that has engulfed this country.”
Wasn’t this the Bush philosophy following 9/11? Get out the credit cards to end the recession?
@Tim
Yes. And it was a dumb idea.
You want more jobs? Remove all the impediments that make job creation more difficult: tax code, regulations, business taxes, etc. Create incentives to be productive and innovative, don’t attempt to manufacture debt-driven demand which will always result in a bubble.
I thought it was stupid as well. It felt as phony as anything I had ever heard.
Look, one of the great missed opportunities for this nation in the past 12 years — maybe THE biggest — was when Bush failed to use 9/11 to stir the country to back a real energy policy that would entail the U.S. no longer propping up bad guys by buying their oil.
It was a time to ask for sacrifice, and Americans would gladly have given it. Instead, we got, “Go shopping.”
All of that said, going shopping wasn’t the worst idea in the world, in terms of stimulating the economy to get over that shock. But it was just the wrong direction, the wrong tone, the wrong emphasis for the moment: “Run along and shop and enjoy yourselves, while our all-volunteer military gets the job done.”
@Doug–If a company needs a worker for a solid job, that company will deal with whatever minor impediments are in its way. Companies use this fiction of how they would create jobs if only the mean old government would get out of the way to try to gain the right to pollute, endanger workers and so on–all the while laying off as many as they can, and then some, since the stock price soars on layoff announcements…..
How does this removal of regulation jive with your concerns over the hiring of illegal immigrants?
@Kathryn
Illegal is illegal. If the illegal immigration laws were more strictly enforced, there would be more jobs for Americans, right? I would bet there’s plenty of construction workers out there looking for work. Any of those jobs done by illegals adds to the unemployment.
Or would you suggest that employers ignore the laws in order to hire more workers?
@ Brad – You are right about missing the opportunities after 9/11. We should have used the moment build a safe and efficient national passenger rail system, at least for the short haul routes. There’s no reason that I need to take an uncomfortable regional jet to get to Charlotte or Atlanta when I could be relaxing in the high speed comfort of a dining car or club car.
We also should have sold war bonds to raise money for going after AQ.
Doug, if people don’t have money to buy stuff it really doesn’t matter what kind of “incentives” you give businesses. They aren’t going to make stuff that no one is going to buy.
@Bud
So your solution is to give people money (from thin air apparently) so they buy stuff to create jobs.
Money NOT spent on dealing with over-regulation can be spent on innovation thus creating products people want.
BINGO! That’s exactly what the banking system does in conjunction with monetary policy put in place by the Federal Reserve Board and fiscal policy of congress and the president.
Doug – Maybe the Treasury department can just start selling printing presses on Amazon.com. Or bud could just keep writing checks, he must have money in the bank because he still has checks in the checkbook.
@Silence – You fly to Charlotte???
I’m curious as to what it would cost to produce a high speed rail system per mile. Back in the early 1980’s I worked for a highway construction company and it was $1 million per mile using concrete. This was for two lanes, the existing highway was used as the opposite lane traffic. Say it’s double that now for high speed rail, is it worth $200 million to get from downtown Columbia to downtown Charlotte? Then add in the cost of the train cars and the overhead to run that one line.
Drive to Charlotte – $20
Train to Charlotte – $300
Fly to Charlotte – $250
And how’s that working out?
@Doug– Sure “Illegal is illegal” but it’s still red tape to many. It’s illegal to pollute, to put your workers or the public at large at undue risk, to not pay or work your employees fairly, and so on. That is the sort of red tape folks decry.
@ SDII – I drive if I’m footing the bill. I fly if someone else is. I have to balance my time against the cost of flying out of CAE when it’s more expensive.
How much have we spent on airports, airplanes, parking garages, security, etc. I’ll bet that if you figured up all of the costs, trains could give air travel a run for its money. When you factor in the costs of a 9/11 type event, which run in the billions, rail would be a bargain. Nobody ever flew a train into a skyscraper.
Bud said, “if people don’t have money to buy stuff it really doesn’t matter what kind of “incentives” you give businesses. They aren’t going to make stuff that no one is going to buy.”
Then Doug said, “Money NOT spent on dealing with over-regulation can be spent on innovation thus creating products people want.”
I don’t think that changes Bud’s original point. There are plenty of products people want right now. I don’t think it’s a matter of having a deficit of wanting. If people don’t have money to buy the products they want, there will be no buying no matter all the money spent on innovation to increase the wanting.
That being said, I fully disclose I am no good at economics and I don’t have the answer. I just didn’t think that particular point followed from what Bud said.
Steven, the actual cost to drive one way to Charlotte is waaaaaay more than $20. Gasoline alone probably costs nearly that much. Then there’s all the hidden cost such as subsidizing our military to keep the oil flowing plus the wear and tear on a vehicle plus the risk factor associated with the probability of having a traffic crash. My guess is the cost is probably at least $75.
@ bud & SDII – Don’t forget that it’s cheaper to park at CLT than it is at CAE.
Interestingly, it will be considerably cheaper for us to fly to Frankfurt from CAE via CLT than it would be to fly out of CLT this summer.
Silence, I think you and SDII are talking about 2 different things. You’re talking about flying out of Douglas Airport vs CAE. SDII is talking about the transportation cost of going just to Charlotte.
OK, just to clarify for SDII – I fly THROUGH Charlotte, not TO Charlotte.
There will be no “recovery”, nor have we been in one. Saying “recovery” over and over doesn’t make it so. The Federal government has been cooking the numbers for inflation, GDP, CPI, and Unemployment for since the downturn in 2008.
We have reached the tipping point of the United States making virtually nothing in this country. Not making anything in this country means no jobs, lower and lower quality jobs, fewer and fewer jobs, lower tax base and more and more deficits.
The government compensates by printing money, creating it out of thin air. Never worked in history. The rest of the world know what we are doing and baling on the dollar.
Soon the dollar will collapse. Its value has drop significantly since Ben started printing money in 2008
The U.S. is over…