Unemployment Falls to Lowest Level Since 2008.

What does my portfolio have to do with you making the illogical or ignorant statement ""In general, if the indexes do not do well, individual stocks would do even worse"?

I agree it is hypothetically possible. But I cannot think of one year where there was a significant tax increase where revenues declined, can you?

 

So yeah so much for hope UE rates. Jobless claims up to 400k again.

 

Gunter glieben glauben globen... if Bernanke and the Fed hadn't rescued the banks and the stock market, and now the Euro, too, the DJ would probably somewhere between 3,000 - 4,000. And it may yet be.... As it is, Uncle Benny continues to provide good investment opportunities for those who know how to work a fraud as well as those who create one. And, there's more rumors of a "Quantitative Easing III" (Keynesian masturbation). Hey -- we're only $15.2 Trillion dollars in debt -- quite a bargain for a "recovery" of this magnitude, right? And there will be more debt and more "recovery" to come! Have a ball! But remember to put a little of all that cash you make into ammunition... you may need it to defend yourself before this Obamarama carnival leaves town....

 

It does. Post your portfolios, we can check back to see how many winners and losers you have in your portfolio 6 months from now. Individual stocks are driven on their own sector strength and weakness. In general, if the index is flat, individual stock would fare worse than the index, and losers always outnumber winners. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is so we can find out I'm talking about....

I can for variety of reason....Euro mess, US stagnant recovery, Iran war. Increaese tax rate do not always translate to increase in renenue.

Now, if you think that won't be the case, you better come up with something to convince me other than your trolling game. The economy does not always 2+2 = 4, that's only someting in your liberal ala dream land.

 

Delve into the literature post-1955 or so. That's roughly the point where theory began seriously distancing itself from the idea. The huge increases in processing power that came along starting in the 1980's then made looking for cycles in all manner of historical data possible and many did just that. Until the fact that nobody was detecting anything started to discourage people. So few professionals accept the notion of natural business cycles today that the belief is no longer considered mainstream. The natural state of an economy is slow, steady growth and expansion. Divergence in either direction means something has gone or is being done wrong and is a call for corrective intervention.

Economics is all at the margin. One could argue that the 7 million jobs that were lost to the Great Bush Recession were just a drop in the bucket compared to a labor force of better than 145 million. But of course, no one makes that argument. This is because the loss of a mere 7 million jobs at the margin is in fact a shocking and dramatic event, producing effects that virtually everyone everywhere considers to be completely unacceptable.

US consumers alone meanwhile lost some $15 trillion worth of wealth in 15 months as the result of equity and real estate market declines. And if you want to isolate ARRA, its net effect was about $150 billion in FY2009, $400 billion in FY2010, $150 billion in FY2011, $50 billion in FY2012, and trace amounts for a few years thereafter. But of course, ARRA wasn't isolated. TARP, the various Fed/Treasury facilities, and the ARRA-like stimulus packages of virtually every significant economy in the world -- right down to places like Thailand and Vietnam -- were all being run at the same time. These efforts had and hit different targets, and the effects of them all were additive.

Interesting to note of course that all of this went on within the paper economy. Real plant and equipment did not become obsolete. Actual homes did not suddenly go from upscale to ramshackle, nor was the number of people aspiring to live in those homes and to purchase goods and services suddenly decimated. All of the ultimately real effects in fact bled out of paper problems. Kind of makes you wonder.

Your assumptions concerning behavior of the Fed are awful. The Fed in fact is not and does not at all see itself as any sort of independent policy arm of the government. The Fed acts to complement the policies of the President and as necessary also the intents of Congress. See the run-up of the fed funds target rate prior to Reagan's inauguration and the cutting of it in anticipation of the arrival of Bush-43 for examples of the Fed acting already to accommodate the policies of an incoming President with views different from those of the one departing. The Fed's mission of promoting growth within stable price regimes is of course assumedly shared by all Presidents with any debate tne being limited to the exact nature of the steps most likely to contribute to that. The Fed is quite aware of and sensitive to its own unelected and therefore non-representative status versus that of the President. Any notion of the Fed as other than a team-player is quite a stretch indeed.

 

We certainly now how the Clinton tax rate increase put a damper on the revenue growth in the recovery he inherited, from 9% down to 7%. Then after the Gingrich/Kasich tax rate cuts growth went up into double digits. And after the Bush41 tax increases, the ones where the Democrats pledge to cut spending in return for tax increases and then nailed him next election for agreeing to them the "no new taxes", revenue growth fell to 2-3%.

 

Oh, boy! A cage match between two ardent liberal Leftists. One of them, Frodly, is the more pure socialist idealogue (an "Obama" figure). The other, 17th, is the self-appointed forum demi-god economist (a Federal Reserve "Bernanke" figure). Imagine the revealing entertainment if Obama the Ideologue ever had a confrontation with Bernanke the Manipulator... open a beer, make some popcorn, and get comfortable! This may be good....

 

New claims up to 399,000 and how much you want to bet they did everything they could to adjust them to be under 400,000.

 

Don't worry, they'll revise it next month like they always do. Usually on the weekend when they don't think anyone will notice it much.

 

Sorry your English sucks so badly. The phrase "only the Additional Child Care Credit" distinguihses it from the ordinary Child Care Credit that is non-refundable. It does not suggest except perhaps to assorted high school dropouts that there are no other refundable tax credits.

 

No, math whiz. An index represents the blended performance of its component entities. By definition, some entities will have performed worse than the index and some will have performed better regardless of the direction the index takes. Your confusion over such basic, elementary principles is difficult to explain.

They do except in La-la-land, and tax cuts always act to produce a net decrease in revenues. Everyone will agree that there are secondary national income effects that act in the opposite direction from the primary effects, but there is no case at all for the secondary effects of a change in income tax rates being more than about 30% of the primary effect even under the most favorable of circumstances.

LOL! The right-wing often appears incapable of thinking at all.

 

That is the only place they do, after both the Bush41 and Clinton tax rate increases revenue growth rates fell, they grew after the Reagan tax rate cuts, the Gingrich/Kaisch tax rate cuts and the Bush 43 tax rate cuts.

 

LOL - What we all know is the fact you contstantly repost the same bull(*)(*)(*)(*).

Year - Revenues - % chng
1991 1055.0 2.2%
1992 1091.3 3.4%
1993 1154.4 5.8% <- Clinton/Dem pass tax increase
1994 1258.6 9.0%
1995 1351.8 7.4%
1996 1453.1 7.5%
1997 1579.3 8.7%
1998 1721.8 9.0%
1999 1827.5 6.1%
2000 2025.2 10.8%


Year - Revenues 2005$:

Reagan
1980 1197.6
1988 1421.1
% growth revenues: +18.6%

Cinton
1992 1467.5
2000 2310..0
% growth revenues: +57.4%

Bush
2000 2310.0
2008 2286.8
% growth revenues: -1.0%

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200

 

No. I'm merely trying to fill up with the rock-hard facts that vast, ocean-like vacuum in your mind over what sorts of investment are actually reflected in the GDP calculations.

 

Progressive liberals love to talk on both sides of their mouth. They pro poors but they also pro-Bernanke and the bankers. How is that possible? If anything, Bernanke's near zero interest rate policy has hurt the poors more than anyone else. Ben "easing" policy since 2008 has wiped out billions of dollars of interest income for fixed income grandpas and grandmas, pushing inflation higher thus eating away Joe Average paychecks.

Good jobs Bernanke

 

Where do think businesses and individuals are getting loans from? Are they getting loans off the trees?

 

Thanks for proving my point once again revenue growth after being on a steep incline fell to only 7% after the Clinton tax increase. It should have hit double digit growth. They went to double digits after the Gingrich/Kasich tax rate cuts which for some reason you don't note on your chart. And revenues in 2000 were 2,025,191 and 2008 were 2,523,991 so run your numbers again. Better yet start in 2001 the last Clinton year budget were revenues were 1,991,082 and use 2007 the last Bush/Republican budget where revenues were 2,567,985

You do note how you own numbers don't match.

 

A defeat man is desperate spining out of his corner. Try again....



A liar is liar is a liar.

 

Post your stock picks today would you? We'll check them in maybe 6 months from now and LOL at you.

 

The point would have been obvious to all but the least perceptive. It is this: The poorest quintile in fact pays quite a lot in taxes, and jerkwad claims that they are all a bunch of free-riding leeches are just more baseless right-wing BS.

Correct. Bush will forever rank among the very worst Presidents in US history, and a remarkably broad range of evidence will forever support such a ranking. Obama is meanwhile on the road to becoming one of our better Presidents. His second term could quite easily end up putting him into the Top Ten.

Once again, the rich pay Medicare taxes on a tiny (but soon to expand) portion of their incomes, then turn 65 and live longer while using more medical resources than do the poor. Both cumulatively and on a per dollar of taxes paid basis, rich people get more benefit from Medicare than poor people do.

Yes, a great many are. Thanks to an inheritance tax regime that has increasingly supported the concept of intergenerational wealth and the creation of a permanent wealth-class, the US has about the worst intergenerational income mobility of any developed country in the world. The odds of any child moving in his lifetime more than one out of ten bands away from the band he was born in are smaller in this country than almost anywhere. Simply put, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Not through merit or effort or the lack thereof, but by virtue of the circumstance of birth.

Here's another in what may very well be an endless series of necessary updates. No one receives any Social Security benefit who has not paid into the system. Indeed some people who have paid into the system for many years are still not allowed any benefit. To qualify for any SS pension at all, a person must have completed a minimum of forty (40) quarters worth of covered employment during which, of course, payroll taxes would have been withheld. Life and disability insurance insurance benefits for thios in covered piositions require fewer than forty quarters, yet not zero.

This phony excuse long ago got old. Bush's tax cuts for the rich were an example of class warfare. So was his urgings that productivity gains go more and more toward corporate profits and less and less toward any sort of wage increases. As the result of such class warfare, real mean income for the wealthy soared between 2000 and 2006 while that of EVERYONE ELSE declined.

It is also an example of class warfare when right-wing plodders march incessantly about falsely chartacterizing low- and moderate-income Americans as lazy, ignorant, shiftless leeches who contribute nothing to society and then bleed the system dry. Have you ever done that, by the way?

 

LOL!!! That doesn't say much for YOUR qualifications, does it. And as the thread is soon to be shut down anyway, I'll just note in reply that there aren't many less aware, less erudite, less competent claims and opinions about than those put forward by the one you seem so much to admire. I'll continue to wipe the floor with those confused and hapless claims and opinions here and wherever else they may be encountered.

 

You're not wiping the floor with anybody. You've been proven a misguided liberal and a liar multiple times in this thread. Your perpetual lyings and propapanda did not work then, and they do not work now. You better come up with new lies to entertain us, misguided liberals are always a part of the great shows.

 

The Council on Foreign Relations exerts a massive influence over the mainstream media.

 

LOL! Your misunderstanding knows no bounds. That post was not at all about individual investors, but rather about indiividual stocks and their performance relationship to indexes that they may be a part of, a relationship that from all appearances, you have materially failed to comprehend.

Hmmm. Seeing as there will be a 5% increase in my own capital gains tax rate in 2013 plus that pesky 3.8% Medicare surcharge going into effect, you can be quite sure that I will look through my portfolio for positions that have a capital gain, and unless some circumstance then mitigates to the contrary, I will sell those, tiptoe past wash-sale rules, and then reacquire the same or a similar asset. I will do this earlier than at the last minute, knowing full well that every other ratioinal taxpaying investor in the world will be following this same example of progressive liberal thinking, leaving just those inexplicable dummies who do not to lose a few shirts to the taxman.

 

Apparently we watch different CFR dominated media.