Gallup: Unemployment drops down to 8.1%, lowest level yet.

Gallup -- 11.7%.

 

That depends. They may just have not foreseen a change in market conditions. Icebox delivery companies got killed by the invention of automatic freezers. That's not malinvestment. What would be malinvestment is a bubble created around icebox delivery futures on the assumption that the market will never change and people will want more and more frozen goods.

What makes them "good" companies? If they go out of business it's because they didn't foresee the change in market conditions. Good is subjective and has no relevance to economics. If a company goes out of business in a recession, then it doesn't have whatever is fundamentally necessary to attract enough people who think it is a good investment to keep it in business.

You haven't proven that they are unnecessary. Again, unnecessary is subjective. Apparently the people making the purposeful decisions to layoff and shut down business believe that it is necessary to protect what assets remain, or, perhaps, protect their future time. You, apparently, believe that you know better, but you don't explain how you arrive at this allegedly objective conclusion that what they deem necessary is really unnecessary.

Perhaps you could quantify the objective level of fear and panic so we can determine what is necessary and what is unnecessary. It should be easy for you to do, or the information easy for you to find as you know so much about how people should run their business concerns in a recession.

I haven't denied psychology at all. If you believe that I did, prove it. I deny that it applies to a diverse population consisting of millions of people spread across an entire country acting upon the intimate knowledge of their individual businesses the knowledge and uncertainty that they have surrounding market conditions, and their own particular tolerance of risk. You cannot prove that group psychology applies to them. You believe a few media folk and politicians when they tell you it's fear and panic and try to blame me for calling you out to prove it.

Individuals act. Groups do not. Your belief that you can argue logically is facially false.

Never denied it. Your accusation is facially false. I've said that business people are not acting according to group psychology, and I've said that business people are not cows. You have not proven that business people act in groups or that group psychology applies to them when they are not in a group. Saying that "all business people are in the group called business" does not make them a group upon which psychological actions can be measured. So far, you have not yet shown those objective measurements. The words of pundits, in case you aren't sure, are not objective measures. The writings of journalists who sometimes attempt to apply pop psychology that they learned in Psych 101 to some correlative information are also not objective measures.

Your implication that value determines the existence of assets is ridiculous. If a person has a house yesterday worth $500,000 and today it's worth $250,000, do you argue that he now has half a house or that the valuation must be wrong because he still has the whole house? The DOW measures how people subjectively value the assets (in a roundabout way) of companies represented on the DOW, not the existence of assets themselves.

Now you're just changing the subject in order to deflect.

That's *your* question which fits *your* moral principles. That's not THE question. There is no THE question. You can't even define "better" objectively; so I wouldn't even accept your question as a principle that I would consider to be good for me or anyone else.

 

Your assertion is that it's the money that creates wealth. If the job does not produce anything that anyone values, or values less than the cost of employment, then all I can gather from your argument is that we are better off because those people have money to spend.

Are they? If no one wants to buy what they make, then it's not wealth. If it costs more to make it than what people are willing to pay for it, then it's a misallocation of labor and other resources. It's a destruction of wealth.

So spending money creates wealth? Again, why don't we just print money to create an endless supply of fuel for wealth generation? No one should need to work at all.

Inflation is a general rise in prices due to an increase in the money supply. Since money is not wealth, the purchasing power of it goes down in relation to other goods when more money is created. Create enough, you get inflation.

But you said money is wealth. If that's the case, there can't be inflation due to printing it, and printing it is just the creation of more wealth. I'm just rewording your assertions.

Yes. Keynes was wrong. And again, I ask, if those people are just given a monthly check to sit at home and do nothing, why is that worse then they having a job?

 

you are formally disqualified from intelligent discussion.

 

Where?

I agree. It puzzles me why anybody would vote or support any of these failed politicians.

I disagree that taxes should be raised in order to pay off the debt.

Transferring wealth via government intervention does not prevent jobs being unnecessarily destroyed, it only puts job destruction off until a later date. The only thing which can prevent job destruction is real economic output. No net gain in economic output over time occurs due to government transferring wealth from some individuals to other individuals.

Your say-so is not good enough.

 

OK

Going concern but for the recession.

Unnecessary in that they are lost only because of the recessionary spiral.

The best way I can thing of is by looking at what was happening in the economy -- stock markets, housing markets, bank activity, GDP, layoffs, etc.

Just look at the stock market.

This is just semantics. The Dow didn't drop 7000 points because of one individual.

If you do not deny the psychology of fear, then why do you deny that fear motivates individuals to act in ways that as a group can be irrational?

I made no such implication. But this is my point. The guy didn't lose half his house. It became worth half as much only because of the actions of a group -- buyers and sellers in the housing market.

Not at all, it is quite illustrative of my point.

You don't have to. Those are questions society as a group decides.

 

In this thread and others.

Good for you. So does just about every Republican. Welcome to the Pass the Buck generation.

Transferring wealth or government transfers is not the only way government spending stimulates economic activity.

I disagree that it puts off job destruction when it breaks a recessionary death spiral preventing unnecessary destruction of business and jobs.

Neither is yours.

 

as opposed to you, who wants to take the money from others today, to subsidize government functions that you feel benefit you today.

 

your imaginative imagery might be nice in english class, but this ain't english class.

 

Actually the way we keep unemployment statistics for Obama isn’t any different than the way we kept them for Bush Jr. So this a transparent political attack on Obama with no merit.
Fact!:The last 3 months of Bush’s last term had a stock market collapse, a financial collapse, and a housing collapse. To not mention that is also part of a biased attack on Obama. Fact: By the end of his last term Bush was begging congress for a 700 billion dollar bailout for banks and in 2009 unemployment went up to 10% purely due to the fall out of the Bush economic collapse. . Obama didn’t inherit a recession from Bush. He inherited an economic holocaust. And the American people are not going to vote for Romney he’s just another version of Bush’s Policies.

Bush admitted he snapped the neck of the economy when he begged congress for a bailout. Yes he did
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AZjk-9DGm0&feature=related

 

The recession was over 2nd quarter of 2009. Obama inherited a recession and recovery.

 

Your simplisitic logic has nothing to do with the truth.

The problem is that it wasn't a recession.

The fallout from the Bush financial holocaust lasted for years after Bush was gone. The housing crises, the stock market crash the collapse of credit for years to come and the 10% unemployment in 2009 following Bush's begging for 700billion dollars to restore bad securities in the financial markets. The increasing rate of unemployment along with Bush’s tax cuts and his promise that we could fight two wars at once created massive budget deficits. None of these holocaust issues disappeared after Bush left office. But at least were at 8.1% unemployment. Much better than the 10% unemployment that the Bush wipeout left us with.

 

If I have not been clear, let me disabuse you of your false notion that I think most of what the Govt spends benefits me in any way.

But yes, unlike me, who wants to take money from others today, to reduce the deficit and debt that others will be burdened with in the future.

Time was "conservative" meant you believed in fiscal responsibility, and that tax revenues should be roughly equal to expenditures. That has changed, starting about 30 years ago.

 

It is not imaginary at all.

 

Obama took office in 1Q2009, not 2d Q. The economy was still contracting in 2Q2009. But it was contracting less, evidencing that the death spiral had been broken. June 2009 was about 6-7 months after Tarp and 4 months after the Stimulus was passed.

 

The housing bubble was predicted to burst in 2005, therefore it started before then, in the mid to late 1990's.

There were 120,000 new hirings in the month of March while unemployment claims were 357,000. Do the math.

 

except that you want to charge others a higher percentage than you to pay for it. You're all heart.

Yes, your boys co-opted the conservative label.

 

Is that why Obama hired the same old Goldman & Sachs advisory group that dictated Bush ?

Some people feed you crap and tell you it tastes better than the other crap. You believe it.

 

Mid to late 90s housing prices were not in a bubble but were below historical norms, though starting to grow.

By 2001, housing prices were starting to approach the upper levels within the historical range.

By 2003-4 prices were hitting ranges well above historical norms.

By 2005, as you noted, people were recognizing it was a bubble.

 

Why would that change my view?

Reagan and Bush were not "my boys." Though I did actually vote for Reagan.

 

Oh, that's right, I remember you volunteering to pay the highest tax rates.
Now go ahead, tell me that you already do, and that you would gladly pay more.

 

Not one quote or post of mine.

Proving the baselessness of your claim.

 

I will repeat:

The ONLY reason the unemployment rate is dropping is because people are giving up looking for work.

In December 2008, the civilian labor force participation rate was 65.6%. Today it is 63.8%.

So, if the participation rate was the same - the unemployment rate would be 10.7%!!!

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps09adj.pdf

- Multiply the current civilian noninstitutional population 242,604 (all figures in 000's) by the participation rate of Dec. '08 (65.6%) and you get a total civilian labor force of 159,148.

- Take that number (159,148 ) and minus the present number of employed (142,034) and that leaves you with 17,114 unemployed.

- 17,114 is 10.7% of 159,148.

The unemployment rate would be 10.7%.


PLUS - despite the fact that there are over 8 million more Americans now then there was on Jan.1, 2009 - there are over 1.6 million less people employed.


Obama has not gotten America back to work.

All he has done is gotten more Americans to give up looking for work.

 

I'm sure that you'll have no problem pointing me to it then.

It's not the taxes that are the problem, it's the spending. It is those who support debt spending solutions that are part of the Pass the Buck mindset.

In what way?

Government transferring wealth takes money from the private sector to preserve jobs now, which would have been used to create jobs in the future. There is no net gain in jobs due to government spending. Unless of course you are implying that government can create wealth out of nothing.

Non-sequitor. You claimed that "damage to the economy would be permanent" without providing any evidence to support your claim.

 

Read the thread.

I disagree.

Semantics.

I didn't imply it could.

What post are you referring to?