Obama Failure Thread Part V

You can still love cats and pound them with a snowball

Mine loves it


I think

 

This thread should never be off page number one.

 

If it ever does, we all know who to blame!

 

Unemployment ticks back up to 7.9% (if workforce participation was same as 08', it would be over 10%)

8,500,000 people have dropped out of workforce

GDP for 4th quarter shrunk -0.1%

 

And once again the biggest contributor to this insignificant increase was state and local governments shedding jobs

and this diddy

If we could get the government hiring and spending again -- stimulus - - we would be chugging along and seeing 3% growth ....

 

This "austerity" talk is nonsense on par with the "broken window theory" and "unemployment checks are effect stimulus":

http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...federal-fiscal-austerity-is-a-myth.htm?p=full

 

What would it be compared to 2006 before the GOP-led Great Recession began?

Oh, and not surprisingly you forgot to mention that the economy still added 157,000 jobs. I wonder why you didn't mention that...

And look how those Obama-loving socialists in the stock market actually liked the jobs data:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...futures-advance-before-employment-report.html

What a bunch of pinko commies. Check out this raging bolshevik from the article:

“You’re going to see this economy driven by capital being put to work,” Robert Lutts, president and chief investment officer of Cabot Money Management in Boston, which manages $500 million, said in a phone interview. “The glass is definitely more half full than empty today, and I think a lot of folks are still thinking it’s not half full. They’re wrong.”

Other facts that the article points out that you've missed are:

"...manufacturing in the U.S. expanded more than forecast in January, reaching a nine-month high, while confidence among American households unexpectedly rose."

More on why nobody but the whacko right is freaking out over the latest job numbers:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...-months-show-progress-in-u-s-jobs-market.html

Get a load of this Marxist-Leninist propagandist:

"The economy continues to turn over and create jobs on a long, steady path,” said Kevin Logan, chief U.S. economist at HSBC Securities USA Inc. in New York. “If the unemployment rate weren’t so high, growth might seem satisfactory because it’s slow and steady, but we’re still several millions jobs short of where we were when the recession started. The Fed would like to see things accelerate, probably closer to 220,000 jobs a month, which would be a sign of more substantial improvement.”"

More on the job growth numbers:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs-20130202,0,4826391.story?track=rss

In other words, GOP incompetence and irresponsibility in cutting taxes on the rich and starting a useless war drove us back to deficit spending after Clinton had at least partly gotten us back on track while bad right-wing laissez-faire economic policy and easy money by Alan "Mr. Bubble" Greenspan enabled massive fraud and incompetence in our private sector and all these factors combined to almost give us the Great Depression, Mk II that we narrowly avoided by classic Keynesian pump priming, although not enough of it to really kick-start the economy partly because right-wing economic know-nothings suddenly switched from cheering on GOP fiscal irresponsibility to being extremist deficit chickenhawks - a mass conversion that happened on January 20, 2009.

Now, we're in a pattern of slow but steady growth and slow but steady improvement in the jobs situation which, while certainly frustrating in its pace, is a massive improvement over what the GOP accomplished between 2001 and 2008, namely a Great Recession that wiped out over 8.5 million jobs. And the whacko right is now blaming Obama from not recovering quickly enough from the mess they themselves created while pointedly refusing to blame America's corporate executive class who have collectively been unable to create job growth here because all they're capable of is playing accounting games with their quarterly earnings numbers while frantically handing the keys to our economy over to the Chinese "Communist" Party leadership.

Righties also pointedly refuse to blame the GOP for their determined opposition to doing anything that would actually solve our problems and instead proffering "budgets" whose assumptions are so unrealistic, they are forced by sheer ridicule to change them and whose basic math still doesn't add up. Finally, right wingers have been reduced to demanding austerity but then blaming the government for following their own advice when the cuts on spending end up negatively impacting initial GDP numbers. And they wonder why they can only win elections in rural areas where religious extremism and racism triumph over sound economic policy. Go figure.

Why people who actually know something about economics aren't getting all worked up about the GDP number:

http://www.businessweek.com/article...eport-u-dot-s-dot-economy-is-primed-to-expand

http://news.yahoo.com/u-growth-seen-braking-inventories-government-weigh-060305476--sector.html

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/us-gdp-contracts-01-in-4th-quarter-20130130-00508#.UQnAWWdvHgk

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/five-reasons-the-gdp-report-is-misleading-2013-01-30

And remember, this is only the preliminary estimate. It will be revised and when it is so close to zero as -0.1%, the revision can go either way, even into positive territory and then the know-nothing righties won't even have that talking point anymore.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/n...-job-growth-like-Groundhog-Day-all-over-again

While job growth is tepid, this fanatical socialist in the article above points out that jobs data also get revised:

"Even more important, the last three months of the 2012 saw gains of 150,000 more jobs than previously reported, points out Brian Bethune, president of Alpha Economic Foresights in Wenham, Mass., in a written analysis. That means that estimates of economic growth and income growth are likely to be revised upward in the fourth quarter, he adds, and the economy had more momentum at the end of the year than previously reported."

So to recap, righties are desperately grasping at anything that seems like short-term bad news so they can try to maintain their woolly-headed economic beliefs that have been disproven by historical experience where, twice within living memory, right-wing economic policies have caused or almost caused economic depression. Is anyone at all surprised?

I didn't think so.

 

I barely read the article, just long enough to see that

1. It's just about federal spending, when kobranzilla SPECIFICALLY wrote about state'n'local
2. The article talked about overall federal spending increase coming in at 2%, which is clearly a CUT when adjusted for inflation and population growth.

OK, so I've done my monthly duty of actually reading one of your bullshit links that your google fu vomited up, without you having read and/or thought about it. See you in March.

 

Remember back in October when the right wing was claiming job numbers were being cooked? Turns out they were under reporting job growth. Not that any right wing talking head would retract their accusatory statements directed at honest hard working Americans that didn't deserve it

As for the economy as a whole I think there was some mass paralysis around 2011-2012 in employers and consumers based on a broken Washington and fiscal fears. A paralysis that unnecessarily delayed recovery.

I think people have become desensitized more recently. I think more people will just ignore the next rounds of Washington fiscal wars and they'll just go on with their lives producing and consuming, working and hiring

 

Federal spending is inevitably going to spike over the next decade, regardless of what our government does, as a huge population of baby boomers starts consuming medicare and social security. It has little to do with this congress or this president.

 

Ex squeeze me Dave, but “The best looking GDP contraction you’ll ever see” was specifically blamed on a decrease in Federal spending.

 

Let's see if Jack Welch goes the usual wingnut route of doubling down on the stupid.

Which hurts the House GOP's efforts at obstructionist brinksmanship. Americans aren't happy with anyone in Washington DC but the GOP in particular is already seen as a bunch of extremist babies by the American public, with 70% of Americans polled in November saying the GOP hasn't done enough to cooperate with Obama. Should anyone be surprised by this result when the GOP's strategy seems to be to convince everyone that they're so batshit insane they really will wreck the economy and increase unemployment if Dems won't give in to their extremist demands?

And their demands are extremist compared to the desires of the American people. Democrats and independents are more realistic on the measures needed to reduce the deficit. The November poll showed that a vast majority of each of those groups favors a mix of both spending cuts and tax increases while only 52% of Reeps favor that mix over just spending cuts alone. Congressional Reeps are apparently even more unrealistic and out of touch than their own party at large.

There's also the question of how long the corporate executive class will put up with this nonsense. So far, most of the CEOs have been too busy cooking their books, bustring unions and sending jobs to China to pay much notice but if it really looks like the Reeps will seriously try to tank the economy and that might cause the CEOs' stock options to drop, this game of economic terrorism will end pretty damn quickly.

 

So we've gotten tax increases, remind me again about the Democrat proposed spending cuts.

 

Not in the Krugman article in Kobranzilla's post that you quoted. In it, Krugman noted the drop in defense spending (which fell 22% as part of the September fiscal year end) which is explained here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...nding-dropped-22-last-quarter-and-shrunk-gdp/

The article above also notes that "had the Pentagon not cut back on spending, the economy would have grown at a weak but positive 1.27 percent pace."

Krugman also specifically states that "government purchases of stuff — mostly at the state and local level (emphasis mine), where the stuff in question includes hiring schoolteachers — has been in fairly rapid decline".

Even the "best looking contraction" post that you quoted said that inventory adjustments were also to blame in addition to defense spending, as quoted here in this article in that bastion of bolshevism, the Wall Street Journal:

"Frankly, this is the best looking contraction in GDP you’ll ever see. Stripping out defense and inventories, GDP growth accelerated to 2.6%, from 1.8%. Admittedly, if you strip out enough of the falling components, then obviously what’s left went up. But in this case these are one-offs. If this really was the start of a new recession, like the ones in 2001 and 2008, then we would expect to see GDP excluding defense and inventories falling too. Instead, the growth rate is accelerating. –Paul Ashworth, Capital Economics"

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/01/30/economists-react-best-looking-contraction-in-gdp/

 

I didn't quote anyone's article. I simply pointed out that the austerity excuse was a sham, a lie, and an untruth all rolled into a bullshit cow turd. Just like Krugman's partisan columns.

 

You mean these?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corne...ue-122-trillion-spending-cuts-patrick-brennan

Come on, TPFish, even the National Review acknowledges these cuts even if they do their level best to minimize and criticize them.

Dem willingness to entertain cuts isn't brand new, either:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/24/AR2011022405305.html

Bonus article:

More on GOP obstructionism here:

http://www.epi.org/blog/congressional-republicans-smothered-rapid-economic-recovery/

Desperate ad hominem attacks to start in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....

 

Why am I not surprised? Maybe because your idea of an economic argument is "I believe it is impossible, even for an incompetent clod like Obama, to spend nearly a trillion dollars and not have some positive impact on the economy." despite the well-established fact that it has. And that's your biggest problem. You start with what you want to believe and ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary instead of being reality-based and letting facts guide your opinions. And then you can't figure out why you constantly get schooled in here.

In other words, you've been proven wrong and have nothing left but name-calling.

Duly noted.

 

We didn't see any effect neg or positve. This type of "stimulus" is purely political. People are locked into payroll taxes and can't change their behavior based on a 2% holiday. The same is true when Bush cut us all a $2,0000 one time check.

 

"I believe it is impossible, even for an incompetent clod like Obama, to spend nearly a trillion dollars and not have some positive impact on the economy." - I'll stand behind that statement.

 

DINKs probably got less. To be honest I don't really remember what the rebate was, but $2k seemed right.

 

300.00 here-- you guys must be those 1%ers I keep hearing about.

(And you probably paid down debt with it too, where I bought my sweetie something nice for her birthday...)

 

Well, we know that the payroll tax cut apparently did bump consumer spending which maybe helped us recover a little faster:

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr592.pdf

But was it worth that bump? I mean, it did nothing to directly help the unemployed and it increased the deficit. I think it was a wash but it was too small an impact to really matter.

Will the expiration kill economic growth? Probably not...

http://www.nationaljournal.com/econ...-may-not-be-as-bad-as-consumers-fear-20130201

 

Well at least you got some "stimulus".