What the biggest employment problem in the economy?

To be entitled to something means you are owed it. People are owed social security and medicare because they earned it. People receive food stamps because we agreed people in their situation will be given food stamps. They may not have earned the food stamps, that doesn't matter. Social security, medicare, and food stamps are entitlements, by definition. You're also entitled to vote for president, whether you earned it or not.

A gift is not given because it is owed. It is a thing willingly given because its owner chooses to give it. An inheritance is not an entitlement, it is not something owed. It is a gift.




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He produced sufficient value for his customers that they were able to award him a portion of their profits equal to $5 billion dollars, and still make money on the deal. The value they found was in the predictions of future events he produced.

This is in contrast to the folks who bet against Paulson and lost money to him. These folks, and the folks who invested in him, also made predictions. Their predictions were less valuable and betting on them was counter productive. Those folks lost money.





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So your entire "production" premise was BS. Got it


SEC decided to put this ghastly black comedy of a fraud case on the street for everyone to see. Just as Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger will never recover from the image of him (allegedly) waving his dick at a scared 20-year-old coed in the darkened hallway of a Georgia nightclub, Goldman may never bounce back from the SEC's brutal blow-by-blow account of how the bank conspired with a hedge-fund magnate to bend one gullible business partner after another over the edge of the subprime housing market.

Here's the CliffsNotes version of the scandal: Back in 2007, Harvard-educated hedge-fund whiz John Paulson (no relation to then-Treasury secretary and former Goldman chief Hank Paulson) smartly decided the housing boom was a mirage. So he asked Goldman to put together a multibillion-dollar basket of crappy subprime investments that he could bet against. The bank gladly complied, taking a $15 million fee to do the deal and letting Paulson choose some of the toxic mortgages in the portfolio, which would come to be called Abacus.

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

What Paulson jammed into Abacus was mortgages lent to borrowers with low credit ratings, and mortgages from states like Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California that had recently seen wild home-price spikes. In metaphorical terms, Paulson was choosing, as sexual partners for future visitors to the Goldman bordello, a gang of IV drug users, Haitians and hemophiliacs, then buying life-insurance policies on the whole orgy. Goldman then turned around and sold this poisonous stuff to its customers as good, healthy investments.

Where Goldman broke the rules, according to the SEC, was in failing to disclose to its customers – in particular a German bank called IKB and a Dutch bank called ABN-AMRO – the full nature of Paulson's involvement with the deal. Neither investor knew that the portfolio they were buying into had essentially been put together by a financial arsonist who was rooting for it all to blow up.



Goldman even kept its own collateral manager – a well-known and respectable company called ACA – in the dark. The bank hired the firm to approve the bad mortgages being selected by Paulson, but never bothered to tell ACA that Paulson was actually betting against the deal. ACA thought Paulson was long, when actually he was short. That led to the awful comedy of ACA staffers holding meeting after meeting with Goldman and Paulson, and continually coming away confused as to why their supposedly canny financial partners kept kicking any decent mortgage out of the deal. In one ACA internal e-mail, the company wonders aloud why Paulson excluded mortgages issued by Wells Fargo – a bank that traditionally created high-quality mortgages. "Did [they] give a reason why they kicked out all the Wells deals?" the quizzical e-mail reads.



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-feds-vs-goldman-20100426?page=2

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I'M SHOCKED YOU WOULD THINK THIS TYPE OF "CAPITALISM" IS PRODUCTIVE? OH RIGHT YOU "BELIEVE IN" MARKETS SELF CORRECTING AND REGULATING THEMSELVES TOO *Shaking head*

 

Because streets rarely break laws?




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Lots of countries have unions and manufacturing. For example, Germany. We have moved from a basic manufacturing economy to a service based economy.

 

It's not, all they are doing is legalizing gambling, there is no value created by these guys and their profits are just skimming. Wall street is a casino, nothing more really.

 

So you wish to spend another $20 trillion in debt money on infrastructure and research? This means in 10 years we will have nearly $40 trillion in debt...perhaps annual debt interest payments of about $1+ trillion. We can't really create much more debt unless someone is willing to buy the debt and the higher the debt becomes the higher the interest rate might be forced. Then once you spend $20 trillion on infrastructure and research? and the government debt money stops flowing, then what happens to the economy and workers? What research are you thinking about?

IMO...the government creating more and more debt as SOP is political BS. Debt money should be used for emergencies...not SOP! And we don't have any national emergencies today...

 

Yes. When all you have left is a service economy, the only jobs left are those that must be done locally. Jobs like cleaning, gardening, waiting tables, preparing food, high touch jobs that pay nothing. These are the jobs we created by shipping our high paying jobs overseas. Ross Perot had it down cold. He was right. A giant sucking sound....

 

Your dodge is noted Bubs, lol

 

Agreed. But it also matters who bears the burden for increasing that standard of living. To live better, we need to do better. And the guy who's flipping burgers or running errands isn't producing anything more than the guy doing it 50 years ago. It's fair and necessary to ask him to do something different, something more valuable.




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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAHM9rXjdUo

just in case you are too young to remember...

 

Your question was answered.




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I agree and disagree; I agree that when people want more that person must 'ask him to do something different', to take personal actions to achieve more of whatever it is they desire. However, I also have no problem when people desire to 'flip burgers' their entire lives...this is their choice...

 

the debt is money owed by us to ourselves. the key is to understand it relative to capacity of the economy and gnp growth along with quality of life. We create money to fuel the economy. the only cost of money is inflation which is non-existent really and tied to commodity prices not money supply. Yes, lets just put everyone to work, get this nation a first class infrastructure and tell the fed and treasury to pay us interest for loaning them money they created in the first place. You do understand that all money is created by our government and the FED? it is a tool for us to use to make a better life for all of us. that is all money is good for.

 

Parsing words make for great debates but hardly passes for trying to find a solution. You say the word entitlement as if it is a slur when one gets something from the government because the people decided to give it to them but refuse to say the same thing when paris hilton gets milllions for doing nothing because her family decided to give it to her. The use of the word entitlement is a way of framing the debate around distribution of income so that one can caste shame and blame upon the recipients. Yet by letting Mittens give his kids hundreds of millions is just a gift...great sales pitch and it has worked because so many on the right actually think an heir is more entitled to millions or billions than an old lady is to SS or a desperately poor family is to some food stamps. And we think we are a Christian nation...right.

 

Population growth would support another theory, as well as the said 13/14% actual unemployed or underemployed people, that have quit looking for work.

 

I have no problem with his desire either. But that choice should be made with the realization that the value that role creates will be less significant each year. And therefore less worthy of compensation. It used to be a fry cook was a cook, it took skill and knowledge that not everyone had. Thirty five years ago less so. Twenty years ago, it was job pretty much anyone could do — even a kid in high school. Now we're replacing whole kitchen staffs with robotic ovens. Today many of those people literally contributes less value than a pile of gears and burners.

It's still that person's choice. But unless that person has other responsibilities or resources, he's not making the same contribution to society each year. And folks will resent his diminishing contributions.




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I did not.(*) I objected to your misusing the word. I still do. Doing so is misleading.

I do think there should be a higher bar for establishing or continuing costly entitlements provided by my tax dollars than for deciding what gifts people I have nothing to do with choose to give each other.





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"Chicken or the egg"....With experience, I can tell you most of the business ventures in my life, could not have got off the ground, under today's process. From the cost just to permit one, not excluding Local/State/Federal regulations, much less get it started in order to hire people, would not have been possible.

There are people that would try or start up in the US, with just a little more certainty on what was coming. Practically speaking, it's much more profitable to just build one outside the US and export your product into the US. As for the majority of business which hire 40 to 100 people, they are going to remain under 50. All US Business, including major corporations are on standby, not expanding, because of uncertainty, more so than a customer base.

 

lol, Sure it was Bubs...

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"But since 2000, the labor force rate has been steadily declining as the baby-boom generation has been retiring. Because of this, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago expects the labor force participation rate to be lower in 2020 than it is today, regardless of how well the economy does."

 

Maybe we should go back to the good old days when tax rates were high and the corporations save their tax money by reinvesting into their company instead of just pulling everything out?

Uncertainty? lol

Regulatory Uncertainty Debunked, Part Infinity

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/regulatory-uncertainty-debunked-part-infinity


Misrepresentations, Regulations and Jobs


No hard evidence is offered for this claim; it is simply asserted as self-evident and repeated endlessly throughout the conservative echo chamber.



The table below presents the bureau’s data. As one can see, the number of layoffs nationwide caused by government regulation is minuscule and shows no evidence of getting worse during the Obama administration. Lack of demand for business products and services is vastly more important.





These results are supported by surveys. During June and July, Small Business Majority asked 1,257 small-business owners to name the two biggest problems they face. Only 13 percent listed government regulation as one of them. Almost half said their biggest problem was uncertainty about the future course of the economy — another way of saying a lack of customers and sales.

The Wall Street Journal’s July survey of business economists found, “The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies, according to a majority of economists.”

In August, McClatchy Newspapers canvassed small businesses, asking them if regulation was a big problem. It could find no evidence that this was the case.

“None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it,” McClatchy reported. “Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-9 and its grim aftermath.”



The latest monthly survey of its members by the National Federation of Independent Business shows that poor sales are far and away their biggest problem. While concerns about regulation have risen during the Obama administration, they are about the same now as they were during Ronald Reagan’s administration, according to an analysis of the federation’s data by the Economic Policy Institute.


http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/regulation-and-unemployment/?_r=0

 

Then continue to vote against the poor and for the rich. There is no real need to create a class of heirs whose lives are divorced from reality. It serves no purpose and it certainly does not reflect the values of the socalled conservative at all. If a conservative believes that everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and prove themselves by fire, competition and hard work, you should be for making sure every single child starts at the same place, zero. But lets face it, a conservative only wants the poor, the minority, the weak to start at zero. They adore white kids whose families gave them a chance to start the race a million, five million, 100 million, a billion steps in front of all those unworthy and untested mobs out there. It is a form of worship really, much like the serfs loved the lord and his family, god bless them, aren't they just so wonderful up in the castle? Maybe they will let us come to the ball this year darling.

I get it. Really I do. I live in an area filled with heirs of vast fortunes. I know exactly how hard it was for my friends who are heirs to Bloomingdale, Carhardt, Firestone, Wrigley and countless unknown fortunes to live. All of them proved their great grandfathers proud by opening up a little winery to pass their days or having a boutique store to pass their time or by letting some kids go to Catalina once in a while to tour the grounds. I am not saying they are bad people, I am just saying they serve no useful purpose and are not the result of their own labor, sweat or work. Yet they all preach the same thing. I deserve all this because my family is rich! And anyone who tries to take it from me is a commie. Imagine how much money one had to make selling bubble gum in the late 1800s to still have so much money that they own half of Pasadena, an entire island off Southern California, who knows how much of Chicago and still support tons of heirs in style. that is a lot of chewing. And you know what? The Wrigley fortune is mice nuts compared to the fortunes being created now.

 

The reason they'd have trouble getting off the ground today is that the majority of folks don't have relatively the money to spend to pay for the products and services.

Because virtually all of the growth of the nation's income has gone to the rich since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution.

 

Precisely. We built the world's best infrastructure with the world's highest taxes in the 50's, then we decided the give the very rich who profited the most from it, a free ride and let it fall apart. Now that we need to rebuild it for a new generation, the bastards don't want to pay their fair share. Eat the Rich.

 

I doubt any conservatives do, but if you find one please explain to him that in America no one starts at zero. If you accept U.S. citizenship you become entitled to free education, a voice in the political system, fire protection, health benefits, a public retirement system, environmental protections, police services and so much more. Anyone who believes an American starts at zero has never crossed a border and has no clue how far from zero you all are.

And someone who cares about people's bootstraps that much ... that's probably less due to a political position than to a foot fetish.





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