Unemployment Falls to Lowest Level Since 2008.

Fortunately for you, Congress has been compromising quite nicely.

 

There was no bubble prior to 2001.

Mr. Ownership Society and his people who completely controlled the government did nothing while the bubble blew up to absurd levels.

 

We must be watching different news.

 

Biggest Public Firms Paid Little U.S. Tax, Study Says


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/business/280-big-public-firms-paid-little-us-tax-study-finds.html

http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers50states/CorporateTaxDodgers50StatesReport.pdf

Get back to me when you figure out how much IRS collected taxes from taxi drives, hot dog stands, mom-and-pop stores....

Most Asians in California and Texas run their businesses literally entirely on cash based transactions. It's impossible to go after all them for every pennies that they make.

 

What the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read my post? Only morons base their hiring and firing decisions based on Obama. Demand is the only thing that makes those decisions. If a company gets dozens of new orders, what is the likelihood this conversation will happen?

CEO- "Walmart just called they want another 100,000 of our product. We can't meet that requirement without hiring new workers!!

CFO- "I think we should refuse the request from Walmart, Obama is president and all!!"

CEO- "Great point!! We almost made a huge mistake and took that order, when Obama is creating so much uncertainty. That could have led to disaster"

 

Only if the health of our economy means anything to you.

 

And only morons think that government intervention cannot have a negative impact on economic recovery and growth.

Way to oversimplify an incredibly complex business decision.

Anyway, not every decision to expand a business is this black and white. Even under optimal economic conditions there is risk and uncertainty inherent to any investment in plant and labor.

 

The point of my original post was that Obama did not deserve credit for economic recovery, and that it was down to natural market cycles. To then claim that Obama IS at fault for any bad things that happen is absurd. Obama has FAR FAR FAR less ability to control the economy than you are trying to make it seem. Can government influence the market, ABSOLUTELY!! Is Obama at fault for the bad economy over the last 4 years, not even close. Does he deserve credit for whatever recovery is currently happening? Similarly, absolutely NOT. I can't believe you disagree with that.


PS. Where we differ is that I don't attribute all bad in the world to government, where you and your ilk kind of do. You talk about how inefficient and incompetent government is, and then give it nearly mythical power. Government has some ability to influence the market, but it isn't that great, and it certainly isn't great enough to make business decisions for businesses. It may be one variable, but never the only one, and usually not the most important one.

 

Put a sock in it, Dan. The deficits are due to collapsing revenues and exploding emergency outlays directly resulting from the Great Bush Recession -- the worst economic collpase in 75 years, and a product of the sheer laissez-faire, free-market stupidity of two-bit Republican brains.

George W Bush: Wanted to be The Education President. Then The War President. Turns out he was just The Catastrophe President.

 

More than 30%, huh? Got a source for that? The Heritage Foundation doesn't count, by the way. In the meantime, why doesn't the loopy right-wing try to grasp the fact that while 9/11 was a terrible psychological shock, it had minimal economic impacts.

 

While I might agree with you that a president is often given too much responsibility for the economy, the experts here at PF disagree with us, and say Obama is directly responsible for the economy.

 

More BLS and wiki terminology nonesense.

BLS unemployment rate calculation is flawed.

The numbers do not add up.

The sample is biased.

Garbage in garbage out.

No one is buying this utterly bull(*)(*)(*)(*) anyomore and it's been proven.

I feel like I'm beating a dead horse now. It's getting boring.

 

Yes, the costs for Iraq and Afghanistan don't exist.

 

I should clarify this. I am well aware that government can have a significant influence on the market, I should have substituted the president for government. The federal reserve as the lender of last resort, as the body that sets interest rates, as the body that buys huge amounts of government bonds, etc has a great deal of power to influence the economy. Similarly, if the government decides to make a certain product illegal, they will have seriously effected the market for that good, especially if they use a lot of resources to enforce that illegality. For example, the government effects the market for crack cocaine a great deal. However, the presidents ability to impact the economy is pretty limited. He can make grand gestures, often with more symbolic power than actual power, which can effect confidence and other similar things, but the power of the president to control an economy IS vastly overrated. The president can only do so much, and only when you have a series of presidents over a long period of time, all following similar paths, do we see serious impacts on the economy. For example, the long term impact of neoliberal policies that were put into place under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush are clear to see. However that impact is spread over decades, and 4 presidents. One president is far less capable of making such a serious impact.

 

Squirm and waffle this much every day? I suspect so. As has already been explained, plans to end the tax cuts early for the top 2% were scrubbed due to the Great Bush Recession. Plans to have them then expire on schedule were used in settling yet another reckless Republican hostage-taking incident. See what happens at the end of this year. Tax cuts = poof.

No, I was merely refering to statements made prior to the first of his two landslide elections to sketch out the history of Obama's plans regarding the tax cuts.

ARRA was a not some gimmicky quick-fix effort, but a well-considered two-year, multi-tiered program to 1) stimulate the economy with provisions such as direct aid to state and local governments and the largest two-year tax cut in US history, 2) bring assistance to Americans most severely impacted by the effects of accumulated Republican ineptitude and malfeasance through such means as expanded unemployment and food stamp benefits and health insurance subsidies, 3) create jobs directly through the funding of some 90,000 infrastructure projects all across the country while also funding programs to upgrade the energy-efficiency of thousands of public and private sector buildings, and 4) make investments in current and developing technologies that would provide the jobs of the future in such fields as health care, energy, the environment, and transportation.

It has been successful on every front. No serious person doubts that. The only nay-sayers are the hopelessly delirious, the deliberate evidence-deniers, and the loopy Magic-Wanders who believe that Obama should have cast a spell that put everything back on track and in the pink within a couple of days or weeks. Which one are you?

My position is no doubt entirely foreign to you in that it holds proposals to be good or bad not on the basis of who proposes them, but on the basis of whether they represent sound policy. The Tax Cuts for the Rich were abysmal, much worse than awful policy. Proposals prior to the onset of the Great Bush Recession to eliminate them early for the richest people were very good policy. The depth and scale of the ensuing Great Bush Recession made postponing that repeal unfortunate but certainly understandable policy. Resolving yet another hostage crisis by later agreeing to extend them for two more years with weakness from the Great Bush Recession still lingering in the background was further unfortunate but necessary-at-the-time policy. And of course Obama did get back more than he gave away in that deal.

So, did you know it was 23.1% and then LIED by claiming that it was a majority, or did you have no actual idea at all at the time and were just shooting your fool mouth off again by claiming it was a majority?

Well, at least since the time when uninformed right-wing dupes and palaverers started claiming that it had plunged to near-record lows.

Some of our most esteemed and highly selective institutions, actually. But that was quite a while ago now. There's been time for a fascinating, challenging, and of course rather lucrative 40-year career as an economist since then.

The fed does include them, but not in the big three of individual, corporate, and government. Those are published as an aggregate, with foreign and financial on the outside looking in. You specifically cited the big three, then pulled data for all five. This was most likely because you are a fumblefingers rookie who doesn't actually know what he is doing.

What is "beyond our means"? At the end of WWII, public debt was 120% of GDP. In Japan today, it floats around in the 170-190% range. The number here has recently been declining, falling back below 100%. 10-year Treasuries meanwhile closed yesterday at a flat 2.00%. There is obviously no shortage of people willing to invest in the US.

Yet again for the very slow on the uptake...

 

Perhaps. I prefer to not be spoonfed all of my information by the CFR-dominated mainstream media.

 

I don't even know what "CFR-dominated" means.

 

Not surprisingly, you got that one wrong as well There is no refundable credit for retirement savings as you had claimed. And it is only the Additional Child Care Credit that is refundable. As you perhaps fail to understand, there is also a plain-vanilla (non-refundable) Child Care Credit that can be claimed on Line 48 of the 2010 Form-1040. Refundable credits are all of course shown in the Payments section, beginning with Line 63 for the Make Work Pay credit that Republicans refused to extend.

 

I was referring to pay scales for federal workers that differ by locality for each grade. The intention there is to set federal pay at the levels paid in the local private sector for comparable work. There are often issues in even finding comparable work being done in the private sector though.

You appear to be using the words "industry" and "company" as if they were interchangeable. They are not.

 

How does this relate to the fact that the lowest quitntile forks over 16.3% of its income in federal, state, and local taxes? That is the point you are pretending to reply to.

If Bush had done fewer stupid things, fewer negatiive consequences of them would still be hanging around to point to. This whole freaking mess is now and always will be Bush's fault becasue it was he and his merry band of cowboy capitalists and laissez-faire free-marketeers who in fact caused it.

All of them make less than that and hence see payroll taxes taken out of ALL of their income. Meanwhile, $110,100 is pauper's pay to the wealthy. But they pay nothing at all toward OASDI on the hudreds of thousands of dollar that they make beyond that.

To your knowledge, is the income of wealthy people more likely to be derived from eared income or unearned income? Is Medicare tax currently applicable to any form of unearned income?

Learn to distinguish between an aggregate group and its individual members. Wealthy individuals derive more benefit per dollar paid from Medicare because they live longer and consume more medical services than the poor. The fact that the wealthy are less numerous than the poor and that cumulatively larger amounts are therefore spent on the poor aggregate than on the wealthy aggregate are not relevant. The wealthy are being molly-coddled while the poor are being stiffed. The wealthy need to pay more taxes in order to even things out.

Yes, it is. Too bad you didn't know it until I told you. And what is that, about the 40th thing you've had to learn from me in this thread? You should be paying tuition.

 

LOL. That would be gross private domestic investment. It includes residential investment (expenditures by households and businesses on dwellings and factories), non-residential investment (expenditures by businesses on tools and machines), and the net change in business inventories (goods produced to be sold at a later date). That's all that's in GPDI. Can you think of anything that all three of those things have in common? I'll help -- they all refer to REAL not paper assets.

Sorry. You've lost another one. It's quite a trend that's been developed here.

 

In third grade math, individual stocks cannot all do worse than their index.

Reading is fundamental. The 0/15 rates expire at the end of this year. That would be 2012. The 10/20 rates and the 3.8% Medicare surcharge are effective next year. Next year is projected to be 2013.

 

Sounds like 1977-79 and 1984-86. And between 2002 and 2006 (the problem years), what did they increase by? Was it 45% or so?

This is still a lie, and it will be no matter how many times you or some other rube or novice repeats it. The Bush admionsitartion had no concern over safety-and-soundness att the GSE's at all. Thgeir only interest was in chopping them down and handing market share and profit over to Wall Street. Privatize the mission. That was the extent of it. And of course, at the very hearings your stupid YouTube videos purport to represent, Rep. Frank asked Treasury Secretary Snow point blank whether he saw any crisis at all looming in the GSE's, and his answer was a flat no, far from it. Somehow, that part got edited out by the folks at Naked Emeperor though. What a freaking surprise.

 

Correct. In fact, all of life is characterized by uncertainty. People who are somehoiw paralyzed by uncertainty have no business being let out of the house in the morning, much less to go off and make decisions on behalf of some company.

Such a position requires a person who is comfortable with and adept at reconciling uncertainty coming at him or her from all directions. Apparently, such persons are in very short supply at the companies our right-wing friends are familiar with.

 

You aren't getting tired of blaming Bush are you?? And nothing is going to happen this year. It's business as usual. Obama will bend over to the rich as he has done in the last three years, the outcome will be the same. You can bank on that.

He also promised to raise tax on the wealthy...."spread the wealth around is good for everyone.." When would he able to fullfill that promise? Or you liberal sheep simply buy into his lies yet again?

Skip your boring copy & paste materials from central planning economy...

All central planing economy will ultimately fail. To think otherwise simply naive.

How many economic measures did Obama signed in the last three years? American Reinvestment & Recovery Act, Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, and what was the name of the legistation he just signed last month again? The Retard In Chief has so many economic stimulus bills that no one is able to keep track anymore.

Woah woah woah
Bush tax cut for the rich = Bush is baaaaaaad
Obama extended tax cut for the rich = Obama is goood + Bush is baaadd

Home equity underwater $752 billions as of Dec. Enjoy your American Dream homeowners.

I think Obama should raise tax on all savings accounts to make US consumers to spend all their money to help the economy. According to Keynesian econ theory, saving is a sin in central planning economy.

What now? You can't even remember your school name? LOL. Whatever that "unknown" school you attended to, my best guess is you either failed very badly on all of your finance/accounting classes or you haven't graduated at all. Otherwise, you should have know that all liabilties must be fully disclore regardless where they came from, GAAP standard.

17th is an economist? Liberal comedy gold!

Dear Mr. Misguided Liberal Economist

Are you aware that Japanese economy has been stagnated for more than 20 yrs? Do you want the US economy to head to that destruction path?

And btw, Treasury yields changing everyday. I don't think you fully understand how bonds market works. Once inflation kicks in, the yield could go up in heartbeat. Mindless liberals are trying to at spin anything to justify more government spending.

Care to include how much it has cost taxpayers to have a jobless recovery?