Maybe the non-pivot should be renamed a pirouette, in honor of Rahm “Twinkletoes” Emanuel.
Brad Delong? Whew. Like Brad Pitt said in “Thelma and Louise,” “Stink on Stink.”
As Brad is a Berekely boy, any comments from Occams Beard?
But on this one Delong is right, which, I presume, is partly Neo’s point.
If Delong is commiserating Obama’s lack of urgency, it illustrates the left’s continuing education on all things Obama.
Remember the interview where Obama keeps laughing about America’s woes and the interviewer asked him if he was punch drunk?
“Kissing 10%”? Are they under laughing gas?
From my LinkedIn group newsletter, offering webinar on job searching:
– Official unemployment rate as of this writing: 9.9%
– True unemployment rate, including underemployed and those no longer seeking employment: 16.8% — or 1 in 6 workers
– Total number of people unemployed, underemployed, or involuntarily working part-time: 26.2 million
That’s official figures, guys. In my industry – firms are at 50% staff capacity, and even that is rare. One of top-10 giants HR who interviewed me (not for an actual position…for a “talent pool”) told me at the beginning of 2009 they had 73 employees, today – 35.
I have sinking feeling – ours are “the last days of Pompeii”.
“What this means, is that there is no way President Obama or his policies will enable the American economy to create jobs. Socialist nations usually have much higher unemployment than a capitalist nation (if a true capitalist nation even exists anymore). His policies to lean towards socialism.”
Reminds me of the old fighter pilot mantra when in trouble:: “Let’s do a 360 and get the hell out of here.” Of course I doubt that anyone in the Obama regime even knows a fighter pilot.
Piroutte. I love it.
Obama is all about smoke and mirrors. He hasn’t figured a way to fake it on unemployment so he doesn’t give it any visibility.
Does Washington care about unemployment?
Sure they do, and they’ll care even more as the November elections get closer and they begin to stare political castration in the face.
The problem is that they are out of options. They’d like to put together another stimulus package, but they have a couple of critical problems. The first is political: the package that they need will have many of the ideas that the Republicans put forward during the debate over the first stimulus. The Republicans will say, “We told you so,” and the Democrats will have to explain why they rejected those ideas then in favor of a package that they wrote. The second problem is fiscal: the US went broke a long time ago, and now everyone knows it. US treasury notes will soon lose their AAA rating, and foreign governments like the Chinese are telling the world that they won’t buy US treasury instruments like they did before because US federal spending is out of control.
The Obama administration and some in the Federal Reserve are toying with the idea of increasing the money supply by printing money. That will trigger inflation and devalue the wealth everyone has on hand. However, as we know from the Carter years, you can have inflation and recession at the same time. And, of course, if printing money is the way out of fiscal trouble, Zimbabwe would be the richest country on earth. When governments start to fix their economies by printing money, it’s a sure sign that the end is near.
Cutting regulation, especially regulations that increase the cost of business in the US, would help employment. So would cutting federal spending and business taxes. (Money spent on government takes resources away from the efficiencies of the private sector, where real wealth is created. In macroeconomic terms, money spent on government is overhead.) But for the Obama administration, those aren’t options.
Washington is stuck on stupid, and the rest of us are stuck with stupid.
Washington is stuck on stupid, and the rest of us are stuck with stupid.
You said it, brother.
The problem is that they are out of options.
This is the critical observation. Having money means you have options. Being broke means you don’t, as Greece is finding out now. The worrisome thing about Obama’s crazed spending is closing off America’s options, just like the options have been closed off to nothing-down borrowers who are now underwater. They can’t afford their mortgage payments, so they can’t afford to stay, but then they can’t afford to move either because they’d take a beating on a sale.
Thanks, Buraq. Now the whole country, even those of us who are financially prudent, get to share the subprime experience. Thanks also to the lower 52% of the IQ distribution for saddling us with this nitwit.
Just think of all the skill and talent sitting idle. Besides the declining standard of living, I don’t think i’ve ever seen such an assault on creativity and industriousness of a people. I guess those qualities are now racist too.
SteveH:
Industriousness is a classical American trait. We can’t have any more of that, now that America is just another nation and not exceptional.
We all need to embrace poverty and humility, since the white race is fundamentally evil.
Good comments above.
Occam’s Beard is correct: if the Democrats hadn’t wasted so much money on things that didn’t matter, we would have money that we could borrow to pay for another stimulus package. But they max’ed out the country’s credit cards.
SteveH and rickl have a good point: We seem to be living inside Atlas Shrugged. Good quality workers are not being utilized. Laying off workers is the worst use of a resource. Companies aren’t hiring older engineers, and we aren’t training scientists and engineers to replace what is being lost. Most young Americans avoid science and engineering: those fields are used by countries that make things.
For the last couple of decades, government and labor have increased the costs of doing business in this country. Manufacturing is where real wealth is created. Unfortunately, this country is getting out of the manufacturing business. Financial services companies used to hire a lot of people, but those companies can automate and will require far fewer people. And those industries basically move existing wealth around: they don’t create wealth the way manufacturing can.
Some will say: but look at the GDP. We are an economic powerhouse. OK, look at the GDP. It used to be a measure of what a country produced. Now it includes financial services (moving money around) and consumer spending. Walmart is a big part of GDP growth, towering over the GDP of most countries. But what does Walmart actually make? If I buy something made in China, why should that be part of GDP? Does it really make the country stronger?
I was on a van headed to the Atlanta airport a few years ago with a man who had come home to visit his family. Now he was heading to the airport to go back to his factory in China. We talked about the challenges of making things in this country, and the results of using manufacturing in emerging countries. At the end of the conversation, the businessman talked about the economic consequences of this, and he said, “Americans are going to have to get used to a lower standard of living.” Sad but true.
This is a good article about the true budget problem. It is written from a UK point of view but applies equally to the US.
Companies aren’t hiring older engineers, and we aren’t training scientists and engineers to replace what is being lost. Most young Americans avoid science and engineering: those fields are used by countries that make things.
True. Avoiding science and engineering is the smart thing to do, because scientists and engineers are treated like dirt. (See, for example, Derek Lowe’s blog In the Pipeline, which for years now has featured all too frequent posts on how many medicinal chemists have been fired by which company.)
Gaining qualifications in these fields take time, serious work, and foregone income, all in order to limit one’s longterm career prospects and earning potential. (How many CEOs have science Ph.D.s? Answer: very few. And, one who did was JackWelch — but, tellingly, he kept it a deep dark secret.) Kids know this, and stay away as a consequence. Much smarter to get a degree in, e.g., marketing, and then rent scientists and engineers as needed, much like construction workers.
My older son is naturally quite interested in science, but I’m discouraging him from pursuing it as a career. Agility and adaptation are key now. Under these conditions, the lengthy pursuit of qualifications in science or engineering (and now, medicine) is, sadly, equivalent to building an intellectual and economic Maginot Line.
Richard Says:
June 1st, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Washington is stuck on stupid, and the rest of us are stuck with stupid.
I remember this sign from one of the Tea Party protests…
You can’t fix stupid, but you can vote it out.
–
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Maybe the non-pivot should be renamed a pirouette, in honor of Rahm “Twinkletoes” Emanuel.
Brad Delong? Whew. Like Brad Pitt said in “Thelma and Louise,” “Stink on Stink.”
As Brad is a Berekely boy, any comments from Occams Beard?
But on this one Delong is right, which, I presume, is partly Neo’s point.
If Delong is commiserating Obama’s lack of urgency, it illustrates the left’s continuing education on all things Obama.
Remember the interview where Obama keeps laughing about America’s woes and the interviewer asked him if he was punch drunk?
“Kissing 10%”? Are they under laughing gas?
From my LinkedIn group newsletter, offering webinar on job searching:
– Official unemployment rate as of this writing: 9.9%
– True unemployment rate, including underemployed and those no longer seeking employment: 16.8% — or 1 in 6 workers
– Total number of people unemployed, underemployed, or involuntarily working part-time: 26.2 million
That’s official figures, guys. In my industry – firms are at 50% staff capacity, and even that is rare. One of top-10 giants HR who interviewed me (not for an actual position…for a “talent pool”) told me at the beginning of 2009 they had 73 employees, today – 35.
I have sinking feeling – ours are “the last days of Pompeii”.
From http://thehuntsvillepatriot.com/2010/05/the-ny-times-get-used-to-high-unemployment/ ”
“What this means, is that there is no way President Obama or his policies will enable the American economy to create jobs. Socialist nations usually have much higher unemployment than a capitalist nation (if a true capitalist nation even exists anymore). His policies to lean towards socialism.”
Reminds me of the old fighter pilot mantra when in trouble:: “Let’s do a 360 and get the hell out of here.” Of course I doubt that anyone in the Obama regime even knows a fighter pilot.
Piroutte. I love it.
Obama is all about smoke and mirrors. He hasn’t figured a way to fake it on unemployment so he doesn’t give it any visibility.
Does Washington care about unemployment?
Sure they do, and they’ll care even more as the November elections get closer and they begin to stare political castration in the face.
The problem is that they are out of options. They’d like to put together another stimulus package, but they have a couple of critical problems. The first is political: the package that they need will have many of the ideas that the Republicans put forward during the debate over the first stimulus. The Republicans will say, “We told you so,” and the Democrats will have to explain why they rejected those ideas then in favor of a package that they wrote. The second problem is fiscal: the US went broke a long time ago, and now everyone knows it. US treasury notes will soon lose their AAA rating, and foreign governments like the Chinese are telling the world that they won’t buy US treasury instruments like they did before because US federal spending is out of control.
The Obama administration and some in the Federal Reserve are toying with the idea of increasing the money supply by printing money. That will trigger inflation and devalue the wealth everyone has on hand. However, as we know from the Carter years, you can have inflation and recession at the same time. And, of course, if printing money is the way out of fiscal trouble, Zimbabwe would be the richest country on earth. When governments start to fix their economies by printing money, it’s a sure sign that the end is near.
Cutting regulation, especially regulations that increase the cost of business in the US, would help employment. So would cutting federal spending and business taxes. (Money spent on government takes resources away from the efficiencies of the private sector, where real wealth is created. In macroeconomic terms, money spent on government is overhead.) But for the Obama administration, those aren’t options.
Washington is stuck on stupid, and the rest of us are stuck with stupid.
You said it, brother.
This is the critical observation. Having money means you have options. Being broke means you don’t, as Greece is finding out now. The worrisome thing about Obama’s crazed spending is closing off America’s options, just like the options have been closed off to nothing-down borrowers who are now underwater. They can’t afford their mortgage payments, so they can’t afford to stay, but then they can’t afford to move either because they’d take a beating on a sale.
Thanks, Buraq. Now the whole country, even those of us who are financially prudent, get to share the subprime experience. Thanks also to the lower 52% of the IQ distribution for saddling us with this nitwit.
Just think of all the skill and talent sitting idle. Besides the declining standard of living, I don’t think i’ve ever seen such an assault on creativity and industriousness of a people. I guess those qualities are now racist too.
SteveH:
Industriousness is a classical American trait. We can’t have any more of that, now that America is just another nation and not exceptional.
We all need to embrace poverty and humility, since the white race is fundamentally evil.
Good comments above.
Occam’s Beard is correct: if the Democrats hadn’t wasted so much money on things that didn’t matter, we would have money that we could borrow to pay for another stimulus package. But they max’ed out the country’s credit cards.
SteveH and rickl have a good point: We seem to be living inside Atlas Shrugged. Good quality workers are not being utilized. Laying off workers is the worst use of a resource. Companies aren’t hiring older engineers, and we aren’t training scientists and engineers to replace what is being lost. Most young Americans avoid science and engineering: those fields are used by countries that make things.
For the last couple of decades, government and labor have increased the costs of doing business in this country. Manufacturing is where real wealth is created. Unfortunately, this country is getting out of the manufacturing business. Financial services companies used to hire a lot of people, but those companies can automate and will require far fewer people. And those industries basically move existing wealth around: they don’t create wealth the way manufacturing can.
Some will say: but look at the GDP. We are an economic powerhouse. OK, look at the GDP. It used to be a measure of what a country produced. Now it includes financial services (moving money around) and consumer spending. Walmart is a big part of GDP growth, towering over the GDP of most countries. But what does Walmart actually make? If I buy something made in China, why should that be part of GDP? Does it really make the country stronger?
I was on a van headed to the Atlanta airport a few years ago with a man who had come home to visit his family. Now he was heading to the airport to go back to his factory in China. We talked about the challenges of making things in this country, and the results of using manufacturing in emerging countries. At the end of the conversation, the businessman talked about the economic consequences of this, and he said, “Americans are going to have to get used to a lower standard of living.” Sad but true.
This is a good article about the true budget problem. It is written from a UK point of view but applies equally to the US.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article7142095.ece
True. Avoiding science and engineering is the smart thing to do, because scientists and engineers are treated like dirt. (See, for example, Derek Lowe’s blog In the Pipeline, which for years now has featured all too frequent posts on how many medicinal chemists have been fired by which company.)
Gaining qualifications in these fields take time, serious work, and foregone income, all in order to limit one’s longterm career prospects and earning potential. (How many CEOs have science Ph.D.s? Answer: very few. And, one who did was JackWelch — but, tellingly, he kept it a deep dark secret.) Kids know this, and stay away as a consequence. Much smarter to get a degree in, e.g., marketing, and then rent scientists and engineers as needed, much like construction workers.
My older son is naturally quite interested in science, but I’m discouraging him from pursuing it as a career. Agility and adaptation are key now. Under these conditions, the lengthy pursuit of qualifications in science or engineering (and now, medicine) is, sadly, equivalent to building an intellectual and economic Maginot Line.
Richard Says:
June 1st, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Washington is stuck on stupid, and the rest of us are stuck with stupid.
I remember this sign from one of the Tea Party protests…
You can’t fix stupid, but you can vote it out.
–