THE OBAMA ECONOMY CONTINUES TO BE A DISASTER...

BigLouie's Avatar
It is my contention that Whirlaway is being dishonest in his screaming headline that the story he linked in has to do with Obama. In fact if you read the article and one that it references the story points out that what we are seeing in the economy is the result of a trend that started 30 YEARS AGO. No where in the article is Obama mentioned nor is there any indication that Obama is to blame for any of it. After reading the article you can easily come to the conclusion that no matter which party is in office, no one had been able to stop the trend.
JD Barleycorn's Avatar
Did it say that Obama has "very little" to do with the current situation or are those your words that you are trying to give by associating them with the article? We know the answer, those are your words. I will point out that Obama is responsible for more debt than all the presidents of the last 30 years and that doesn't sound like "very little". I love this Great Recession bullshit too. Sounds like someone found a good soundbite and now has to back it up with an article.

You have to love that other little thing you forgot. The writer mentioned 1980s and that is obviously your standard for saying something the writer didn't write. Go back and read that paragraph. In the early 1980s wages rose against inflation (inherited from Jimmy Carter) but then they fell only to rise stronger during the Reagan years (my emphasis). I don't see anything in there that supports what you wrote.

For a guy whose idea of debate is to cut and paste, you don't debate very well. Look up Bloom's Taxonomy; you have knowledge and some comphrehension but you are a far distance from synthesis and evaluation.
CJ7's Avatar
  • CJ7
  • 03-02-2013, 03:13 PM
Did it say that Obama has "very little" to do with the current situation or are those your words that you are trying to give by associating them with the article? We know the answer, those are your words. I will point out that Obama is responsible for more debt than all the presidents of the last 30 years and that doesn't sound like "very little". I love this Great Recession bullshit too. Sounds like someone found a good soundbite and now has to back it up with an article.

You have to love that other little thing you forgot. The writer mentioned 1980s and that is obviously your standard for saying something the writer didn't write. Go back and read that paragraph. In the early 1980s wages rose against inflation (inherited from Jimmy Carter) but then they fell only to rise stronger during the Reagan years (my emphasis). I don't see anything in there that supports what you wrote.

For a guy whose idea of debate is to cut and paste, you don't debate very well. Look up Bloom's Taxonomy; you have knowledge and some comphrehension but you are a far distance from synthesis and evaluation. Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn

Reagan inherited the aftermath of Carter, but Obie didnt inherit the aftermath of Bush .

makes perfect sense to republicans
cptjohnstone's Avatar
Reagan inherited the aftermath of Carter, but Obie didnt inherit the aftermath of Bush .

makes perfect sense to republicans Originally Posted by CJ7
STILL BLAMING BUSH
chefnerd's Avatar
Does anyone think it might have been that slow because of decrease of 6.9% in government spending? Imagine that, less spending by the government, but nobody is happy.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell...ter-heres-why/
Jewish Lawyer's Avatar
Does anyone think it might have been that slow because of decrease of 6.9% in government spending? Imagine that, less spending by the government, but nobody is happy.

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell...ter-heres-why/ Originally Posted by chefnerd
Wow - Obama runs up trillions in deficits and he gets credit for lowering government expenditures?
He is magic!
This is a pretty good video. It explains through animation the state of the economy and what can be expected over time.


http://youtu.be/euhkIesmW7E
Whirlaway you left out this part of the report:



The trend has been going on for 30 YEARS and I don't think Obama has been president for 30 years. Obama has little to do with the situation. If you read the report and the references in the report you will see that this is a very long term trend. Originally Posted by BigLouie
This is nothing more than a portion of something else. It has no relation to the OP's post. Don't be a cheap shot artist just because you don't understand the thread.
oden's Avatar
  • oden
  • 03-03-2013, 07:36 AM
Live in the real world. Save fiction for reading at bead time.
It is my contention that Whirlaway is being dishonest in his screaming headline that the story he linked in has to do with Obama. In fact if you read the article and one that it references the story points out that what we are seeing in the economy is the result of a trend that started 30 YEARS AGO. No where in the article is Obama mentioned nor is there any indication that Obama is to blame for any of it. After reading the article you can easily come to the conclusion that no matter which party is in office, no one had been able to stop the trend. Originally Posted by BigLouie
That "trend" was going on when the economy was doing well under Clinton, Reagan, and Dubya (for a while), as well. That "trend" was going on when the first Bush had a mild recession and the Great Recession started under Dubya.

Like it or not, Presidents get the credit and the blame for whatever occurs when they are in office.

We have borrowed an historic amount of money in the last 4 years under Obama and all we got was a tepid recovery that appears to be ready to slip back into recession. When we were making a slow recovery and unemployment dropped from about 10% to about 8%, the Democrats did what they could to credit Obama. Well, if it slips back to 9.5%, then Obama takes it on the chin - the same as any other President.

Sooner or later, Obama OWNS this economy. And if we don't start making better progress and SOON, the Dems are going to lose seats in the House and Senate in 2014 and, if the economy still sucks, they will get murdered in 2016.

Having said that, I have no idea what either party can do to fix the economy long term. The economy has spit into two groups. Those with education and technical skills and those without. That "trend" you are seeing is due almost entirely to education differences.

The high school dropouts are doomed to make minimum wage or slightly above. We just don't have well-paying manufacturing jobs for high school grads any more. it will take a generation to get the manufacturing base back. Don't hold your breath.

Those with college degrees will live middle class lives or better - at least eventually. The economy sucks even for college degrees right now. We will have a service economy.

About the only "solution" Democrats offer is to simply take the money from the top half or third and give it to the bottom half. Sooner of later the folks in the top half wise up and stop putting out the effort. If the game is rigged, why bust you ass? And then you will be left redistributing smaller amounts of income.
BigLouie's Avatar
*sigh* here you go. In the link, it concludes:

"Job quality is rapidly emerging as a second front in the struggling recovery," the National Employment Law Project, a low-wage worker advocacy group, concluded in a study in August. NELP found that lower-wage occupations accounted for 21% of the recession's job losses but 58% of the recovery's job gains.
By contrast, midwage occupations made up 60% of the job losses in the recession but just 22% of the jobs recovered in its aftermath.
It links to another article which states:

The U.S. labor market was already in trouble before the Great Recession, the result of 30 years of growing wage inequality and shrinking numbers of good jobs
They link to another report which concludes:

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of good jobs to have increased in line with improvements in quality of the workforce. Instead, the share of good jobs in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. Our
estimates suggest that, relative to 1979, the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The standard explanation for the deterioration in the economy’s ability to create good jobs is that most workers’ skills have not kept up with the rapid pace of technological change. The good jobs
data, however, are not consistent with that view. If technological change were behind the decline in good jobs, then we would expect that a higher – probably substantially higher – share of workers with a four-year college degree or more would have good jobs today. Instead, at every age level, workers with four years or more of college are actually less likely to have a good job now than three decades ago. This development is even more surprising because the economy also has almost twice as many workers with advanced degrees today as it did in 1979.
We believe, instead, that the decline in the economy’s ability to create good jobs is related to a deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the income scale. The main cause of the loss of bargaining power is the large-scale restructuring of the labor market that began at the end of the 1970s and continues to the present. The share of private-sector workers who are unionized has fallen from 23 percent in 1979 to less than 8 percent today. The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage today is 15 percent below what it was in 1979. Several large industries, including trucking, airlines, telecommunications, and others, have been deregulated, often at a substantial cost to their workers. Many jobs in state and local government have been privatized and outsourced. Trade policy has put low- and middle-wage workers in the United States in direct competition with typically much lower-wage workers in the rest of the world.
A dysfunctional immigration system has left a growing share of our immigrant population at the mercy of their employers, while increasing competitive pressures on low-wage workers born in the United States. And all of these changes have played out in a macroeconomic context that has – with the exception of the last half of the 1990s – placed a much greater emphasis on controlling inflation
than achieving full employment. In our view, these policy decisions, rooted in politics, are the main explanations for the decline in the economy’s ability to generate good jobs.11
Unlike some, well all of you, I am not calling anyone names, just asking you to read the articles. Read this article. http://www.cepr.net/documents/public...bs-2012-07.pdf

The issue is not because of one party or another, neither seems capable of reversing this trend. In short you cannot blame Obama and his policies as you have.
JD Barleycorn's Avatar
Do you really want to go back and look at what Reagan inherited and what Obama inherited. Then we can flash forward to what EARNED Reagan an reelection landslide. Obama on the other hand still has an economy in decline and hasn't earned shit.

Just unemployment this time.
When Reagan ran for office the unemployment rate in November of 1979 was 5.9% and was 7.5% when Reagan was elected a year later.
When Obama ran for office the unemployment rate in November of 2007 was 4.7% and was 6.8% when Obama was elected a year later.

Conclusion: Reagan inherited a higher umemployment rate than Obama did but Obama inherited a higher trend than did Reagan. (+1.6%/yr vs +2.1%/yr)

Unemployment reached a high under Reagan of 10.8% in November of 1982.
Unemployment reached a high under Obama of 10.0% in October of 2009.

Conclusion: Unemployment peaked two years after Reagan was elected and one year after Obama was elected.

Unemployment was 7.2% when Reagan was reelected in November of 1984. Down from a high of 10.8% in November of 1982 (-3.6% or -1.8%/yr). Unemployment was 7.8% when Obama was reelected in November of 2012 down from a high of 10.0% in October of 2009 (-2.2% or -1.1%/yr).

Conclusion: Reagan was more successful in bringing down unemployment than Obama and in a shorter amount of time (2 years vs 3 years), (-3.6% vs -2.2%)

The calculation of unemployment changed in 1994 that had the effect of reducing the official unemployment rate by not counting the underemployed (U6)



Unemployment by county in 2008 (red is bad and blue is good)

BigLouie's Avatar
Do you really want to go back and look at what Reagan inherited and what Obama inherited. Then we can flash forward to what EARNED Reagan an reelection landslide. Obama on the other hand still has an economy in decline and hasn't earned shit. Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn
That may well be true but you cannot use the article that was linked in to support your claim/argument.
Yssup Rider's Avatar
That may well be true but you cannot use the article that was linked in to support your claim/argument. Originally Posted by BigLouie
that's a classic ploy by our pals on the scummy side of the street!