Debate

The immediate response wasn't slight - the economy went from shrinking at a rate of 1.6% per quarter to weak growth, and that weak growth has persisted.

Compared and contrast with the progress of the Great Depression, where the economy started shrinking at the same rate and kept on shrinking at that rate fr several years until Roosevelt came in and started stimulating the economy.

It's waited quite a while so far, and the only way the pent-up inflation could get released would be if the government persisted with the stimulation after the economy had got back to running close to full capacity.

It's scarcely a house of cards, and it would only fall on President Romney - if the American people were silly enough to elect him and the Tea Party morons - if he were to succumb to the idiot policies that right-wing fruit cakes like Paul Ryan are advocating. Now that Mitt Romney has got the nomination sewn up, he thinks that he can drop the more moronic extreme right wing lunacies that he had to embrace to avoid antagonising the Tea Party, and move close enough to the middle of the road to have a chance of beating Obama.

Unfortunately, if he gets elected, enough Tea party morons may ride on his coat-tails into Congress to force through all the demented economy- wrecking legislation that Romney now thinks he can deny ever having endorsed.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen 


> James

You are so full of shit you make the outhouse jealous.

r

Actually something like this

Unemployment went up like a rocket from 208 to 2009, stabilised in

2009 when the stimulus spending got under way and has been declining slowly ever since. GDP tells the same story

With better targeted stimulus spending, unemployment would have fallen faster, and GDP would have risen faster, but the poor would have had to have got most of the benefit.

Actually, leaving the economy shrinking in recession is what does long term damage. Every business that shuts down is investment thrown away. Revive the economy after somebody has gone bankrupt, and they don't become non-bankrupt overnight.

Paying off the national debt doesn't destroy anything.

That what every right-wing nitwit likes to claim. It's ignorant nonsense but right-wing nitwits don't know any better.

The European mess that John Larkin warned us about here was about how the fecund Muslim immigrants were going to outbreed us white Christians and vote in sharia laws.

If he'd had the wit to run the numbers, he'd had realised that it would take several generations, and second generation immigrants act a more like the people they grow up with than their parents.

At the moment, the European mess that Merkel is having to cope with reflects the Greek unwillingness to pay their taxes, which hasn't got a lot to do with Muslim fertility.

John Larkin's memory is selective - he can remember predicting a mess, but he can't remember what kind of mess. Happily, I can remind him what he actually predicted. It won't do his vanity any good, but that is depressingly resilient, and capable of exploiting the most implausible justifications for self-congratulation

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

nd?

Read this; follow the links; educate yourself:

back end?

Don't be an idiot. Cuba, North Korea and China are communist regimes. The socialists and communists fell out around 1872, and Bakunin correctly predicted that the communist authoritarian approach would produce more repressive regimes than the capitalists that they were dealing with at the time. The socialists stuck with parliamentary democracy, and now do it rather better than you do in the US.

When was that? Before 1980 they were Rhodesia - run by white nitwits - and for most of the time since then it was a one party state under Robert Mugabe who didn't do well. At the moment it does seem to be moving to a slightly more civilised condition, but it's not exactly a modern socialist country, no matter how much you'd like to equate it with Sweden and Germany.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

iness.

r

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Obviously. You can't understand how anybody who isn't a moron could have a different take on economic reality than you do.

When you can write a book that sells as well as "The Shock Doctrine" you might be able to get away with calling her a moron. Until then reflect on the fact that she's a whole lot better at what she does than you are at what you do.

You aren't actually a moron, but the silly ideas you embrace about economic and politics do suggest that you've got a cognitive deficit that prevents you from performing at your full capacity over a significant range of human knowledge.

When, for instance, is is going to get through to you that socialism and communism are two very different political philosophies and confusing the two is roughly equivalent to confusing socialism and national socialism?

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The growth ever since is less than population growth plus inflation. We're still falling / shrinking, and falling behind. Median household income is falling faster now, in the recovery, than during the recession.

You're crediting Barack with the construction industry having laid off everyone they had to lay off, and banking the same. 2009 was a particularly cold winter, but it's warmed up since then. I thank Barack for that too. I think it was the golfing that did it. Or maybe his bowling.

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

That gives a pretty dismal jobs picture. You'll note that 600k people gave up on finding full-time employment and took part-time or temp. jobs.

Besides sampling error (one survey reports +873k, the other +114k)*, the other main reason for the anomaly is that auto sales are up, so scheduled plant shutdowns were cancelled.

(*) ADP reports +164k.

That might sound like good news until you ask why people would buy cars when median household income has fallen about $4k, medical insurance is up ~$3k, and plus food (+30% for me), and gas too.

The answer is pent-up demand--they've put off buying cars as long as they could, and now have no choice. They're buying smaller, cheaper cars. They'd probably buy used cars except the Barackolypse destroyed them, at taxpayer expense.

IOW, people are running out of options. They're getting desperate.

James Arthur

ck end?

The median doesn't address the shape of the distribution, which is always going to be bimodal with the workless in one hump and the employed in another. The median is a particularly misleading measure of such a distribution, but no doubt it suits your argument better than something more informative.

A not-all-that-plausible answer

And saved a few lungs in the process.

Another way of looking at the data is to note that GDP has been climbing steadily, if slowly, and unemployment has continued to decline - if slowly, and not far enough - so more people now have jobs and can afford cars. Precisely because more of them now have money that option has become accessible.

Presumably this reflects the behaviour of the top end of the distribution, rather than that of the bottom end who are still mired in the recession that Tea Party is so dead set on prolonging.

It doesn't suit your political prejudices, so you probably weren't even aware that the alternative interpretation was possible.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Why concentrate on the median? Household incomes don't fit a Gaussian distribution, and quoting the median in that situation is straight out of "How to Lie with Statistics".

Show us your base data

Actually that was Dubbya - the house price bubble blew up and burst while he was in power. Obama has just been stuck with the job of cleaning up the consequent mess.

Your political propaganda is a about as closely connected to reality as Jim Thompson's opinions. He's a pig-ignorant redneck while you are better informed but only about subjects that can be interpreted to fit your bizarre world-view. The nett results aren't all that different.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It was all the smoke he's blowing up MSM's ass.

d

The main stream media gets snowed by everybody who wants to get their story retailed. Obama has the luxury of sticking to the same story. Romney has suddenly got to be a lot less right-wing than he was when he was struggling for the Republican nomination - he's now hunting for undecided voters in the political centre-ground, rather than persuading the Tea Party nitwits that he's right-wing enough to represent them.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Strangely, they're inhaling it.

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Cheers! 
James Arthur

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Bill, it's awfully easy--and lazy--to spout rationalizations and accuse people of lying when you don't have any data, but you're not supported by the facts.

ident-obama.aspx

They link the Census data. Income by quintiles in table A-2, pg. 38.

Every quintile dropped and continues to drop under Obama EXCEPT the top quintile. So, our class-warfare "fare share" [sic] president is impoverishing the very people he purports to defend.

You're wrong.

James

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You can't expect any president to have much influence over the economy, especially a ex-lawyer who mostly plays golf and reads teleprompters. The time constant for wrecking an economy is measured in months, but the time constant for building one is measured in generations.

Obama and Congress are just adding long-term damage.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

...and it's causing them to have tingles running down their leg.

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Actually James is - in confusing median income with the state of the economy.

And your solution would be to stop the Kenynesian stimulus and let the economy get back to shrinking at 6% per year, as is did at the start of this recession and for three years during the Great Depression.

That really would do long term damage. It took three years worth of the New Deal to get the economy back to where it had been in 1929, and the premature cut-back in stimulation in 1937 stopped recovery for another year.

This is flat-earth economics, with about as much connection to reality astrology. And Nancy Regan's belief in astrology was no more daft than her husband belief in monetarism, but a whole lot less destructive.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You didn't post any facts, or pointers to them. And I didn't accuse you of lying, but of mis-interpreting your data.

He's scarcely impoverishing them himself - that's down to the Tea Party nitwits in congress who insist in continuing the Bush tax cuts for the rich while blocking any attempt to get stimulus money into the hands of people who can be relied on to spend it.

If their trickle-down logic were correct the top quintile wouldn't be the only one benefiting. And note that while the income of the top quintile is up by 1.6%, the income of the top 5% is up by 4.9%. Since the top 5% form a quarter of the top quintile, this rather suggests that that 1.6% rise is mostly concentrated in the top 5%

No. Just - justifiably - sceptical.The process of recovery from a recession is about rising GDP and rising employment. There's no rule that says that people getting back into work get the same wages that they used to get - labour loses bargaining power in a recession when there are more people out of work all chasing rather fewer jobs than there used to be, so if follows that the top end of income distribution - the employers with the capital to create the jobs - will cream off more of the rising GDP.

The fact incomes are dropping for pretty much everybody who isn't an employer doesn't mean that the economy isn't recovering, it just means that it's not yet recovered enough to restore labour's bargaining position.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Either Mike Terrell or James Arthur has a very poor grasp of anatomy. Or they both could be wrong, which is even more plausible.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen