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YouTubeUnder Wednesday's order, the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation will each select up to three high-priority infrastructure projects that can be completed within the control and jurisdiction of the federal government. The effort is labeled as a "common-sense approach" to spurring job growth "in the near term." In practical terms, that means speeding up the permitting and waiver processes for green-building or highway projects to get the government out of the way. One of businesses' foremost complaints with government infrastructure projects is that the paperwork is too cumbersome and creates unnecessary delays, according to White House economic advisers.
Columbus Underground Messageboard » General Columbus Discussion » Everyday Chit Chat
National Recession / Recovery - News & Updates
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rus
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Posted 8 months ago # -
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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rus said:
You mean like throwing out the "constants" to tell the story you'd rather tell?High taxes and regulation are hindrances. Duh. Ideally the benefit derived from taxes / regulations outweighs the cost, but that's hardly clear in all cases. Like cap and trade. Like obamacare.
Put another way:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/7345664-452/white-house-bluster-hides-truth.htmlThere’s the nearly trillion-dollar stimulus that failed its goal of keeping unemployment from breaching 8 percent. ObamaCare and the new financial regulatory law have bureaucrats working overtime writing new regulations. That’s frozen investment by businesses large and small worried about the yet-to-be-determined costs of the new rules.
Obama and his advisers never flinch from anti-business rhetoric, further undermining investment. They rail about millionaires and billionaires but their tax proposals would hit small businesses earning far less than a million dollars.
Democrats sneer at the Texas job growth story by pointing out that a significant part of it is based in the oil and gas industry, revealing left-wing job-killing hostility to developing traditional energy resources. A study by the business analysis firm IHS Global Insight asserts increased offshore energy production could produce nearly 230,000 jobs, add $44 billion to the economy and provide nearly $12 billion in tax and royalty revenues to state and federal governments.
But documents released by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) show that the administration’s campaign against deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico caused 10 oil rigs to leave for better opportunities in waters off Egypt, Congo and other places — including Brazil where, ironically, Obama has promoted the ocean exploration he frustrates at home.
Meanwhile the administration pursues alternative energy jobs, though the New York Times reported this month that “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed.”
All the finger pointing, whining and passing the buck can’t hide the failure of Obamanomics.
The ability to perform proper data analysis requires the skill to throw out data that is irrelevant statistically from a case study. If you insist on keeping it in, you're not analyzing anything, you're just engaging in a religious exercise. If you don't see why an analyst would throw out the tax complaint variable, then you probably want to study the subject of statistics in further detail.
NR argued a very specific point as to what their ascertaining hindrances are holding back: trillions in investment. Since their analysis is squishy, your fall back position is, duh, of course taxes and regulation are a hindrance. That's like falling back to say, duh, or course the sun causes sunburns, when the problem appears to be one of someone baking in a tanning bed. I don't have to disprove that taxes or regulation are hindrances, I simply have to show that NR's analysis is worthless (which is easily done), and that therefore any conclusions drawn from it are also worthless.
As a expert systems guy once said, when you add more shit to a pile of shit, all you get is a bigger pile of shit.
ETA: Finding another piece of poor analysis on the internet isn't really difficult, btw. What takes real effort is finding pieces that are solid.
Posted 8 months ago # -
rus
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http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/01/obamas-jobs-program-if-the-cho
Needless to say, this sort of thing didn't work in the past to restart the economy or to seriously reduce unemployment when $800 billion was okayed for stimulating the economy back in 2009. A new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University suggests some reasons why. Authors Garrett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild surveyed 1,300 managers and workers at firms receiving money via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the official name of Obama's stimulus) and found that firms hired more people who already had jobs (47 percent) than people who were unemployed when they were hired (42 percent). The Mercatus study, touted as "the first of its kind" in surveying the effects of how such funds are actually used by employers, has its limitations for sure. But it drives home a disheartening reality about government's role in the economy: There's no on-off switch that Obama or anybody else can flip in the right direction.
Posted 8 months ago # -
kit444
Elsewhere
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rus said:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/01/obamas-jobs-program-if-the-choNeedless to say, this sort of thing didn't work in the past to restart the economy or to seriously reduce unemployment when $800 billion was okayed for stimulating the economy back in 2009. A new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University suggests some reasons why. Authors Garrett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild surveyed 1,300 managers and workers at firms receiving money via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the official name of Obama's stimulus) and found that firms hired more people who already had jobs (47 percent) than people who were unemployed when they were hired (42 percent). The Mercatus study, touted as "the first of its kind" in surveying the effects of how such funds are actually used by employers, has its limitations for sure. But it drives home a disheartening reality about government's role in the economy: There's no on-off switch that Obama or anybody else can flip in the right direction.
So the people who were hired weren't replaced in their old jobs? Seems like a big assumption.
Posted 8 months ago # -
rus
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kit444 said:
So the people who were hired weren't replaced in their old jobs? Seems like a big assumption.There's a lot of talk around about that study...
So while I certainly don't think we have evidence that the stimulus did nothing for employment at all, I do think there's reason to worry that it didn't do nearly as much as we'd want, or as advocates promised. The purpose of the stimulus was not to raise salaries for construction managers. It was to keep people from suffering the hell of long-term unemployment.
Posted 8 months ago # -
TomOver
herenowbeyond.org
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Whether in reference to 'the economy' or other systems, how about using the word 'change' instead of 'collapse' ?
People tend to associate the latter w/ sensationalism and alarmism. As many of you know, I have responded that way to peak oil, climate change, the looting of our treasury by the super-rich , and the dangers of casino capitalism, among other problems.
What do you think ? Effective engagement in our communities and in the political process amid economic and environmental crises requires inner peace ? Time will tell about the extent to which I'm mistaken, but for me peace of mind seems to involve accepting the likelihood our economy will never recover, at least not by conventional measurements.
What may work is a joyful acceptance of 'change,' not as masochists or sadists but as creatures amazed at being sentient in the first place, and honored to be part of a challenging process whereby humanity strives for continued development as a species.
The crisis-as-opportunity concept may seem trite, but peak oil and climate change may comprise a framework within which at least some of us may strive to be voluntarily a part of the ongoing process of our evolution as a species.
This may apply whether we're thinking in terms of slow, steady evolution according to Darwin's model, or the model of periodic, rapid spurts Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould presented.
Posted 8 months ago # -
Tony
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The ECONOMIC CYCLE RESEARCH INSTITUTE is predicting another recession is on it's way.
They have never been wrong in their existence, which has stretched for decades.
They have never put out a false warning.
" YOU HAVE NOT SEEN ANYTHING YET. THINGS ARE GOING TO GET A LOT WORSE "
Posted 7 months ago # -
Tony
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No kidding SHERLOCK...
http://news.yahoo.com/bernanke-says-economic-recovery-close-faltering-154824804.html
Posted 7 months ago # -
Tony
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The world has about 2 - 3 weeks before Greece goes BK.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44758520
The financial implications of this are going to make the mortgage meltdown look tame by comparison.
Get the Video Plugin If you can, you might want to squirel away some cash ( ON HAND ) not at a bank just in case.
Posted 7 months ago # -
gramarye
In Exile
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Re: Sky Falling:
Unless you think that the FDIC is going to default, then going into full-fledged Chicken Little mode is almost certainly an extreme overreaction, and subjects you to the risk of fire or theft of your paper cash hoard (though of course homeowner's or renter's insurance will hopefully help with that).
If you find it distasteful to deal with the consumer arms of large commercial banks that also have investment banking operations, then there are a number of smaller, local community banks that are still FDIC-insured and which will almost certainly be safer places for your money than keeping it physically within your home. You may also have access to the services of a credit union, which are oftne quite popular, though I've never used one. The Web interfaces of the larger banks tend to be better, however, so if you're of the younger generation that tends to do a significant amount of one's personal financial management online, a smaller, local bank or credit union may hinder that.
****
Re: Mad-as-Hell Lost Generation:
I certainly understand the frustration of those who feel cheated by a system after they did everything that system asked of them, including going to college, maintaining a clean record, and getting good grades. A college degree is no longer the ticket to a middle-class life that it used to be, true. The disconnect between the cost of college and the benefits of college is definitely rising. I would ask several questions about that fact, however:
(1) Would a decline in the necessity of a college degree help or hurt the economy as a whole? College is not just expensive in financial terms, but also in terms of time: four (or five, or six, or more) years of a person's life. Meanwhile, only a minority of the country has ever gone to college. The primary value of most college degrees was always signaling, not actual career skills. (Scientific and professional degrees were and are the exceptions.) That signaling function has broken down *and* college has gotten more expensive, which creates a serious opportunity for a little Schumpeterian creative destruction.
(2) Is the decline in the market value of a college degree Wall Street's fault? How would one draw that connection?
I see the decline in the market value of a college degree largely as a function of phenomena that Wall Street didn't create, and which many financial professionals would in fact dearly love to alter: (a) many people are increasingly graduating college with their heads full of fluffy, left-wing intellectual gobbledegook and a bare minimum of functional verbal, analytical, and interpersonal skills; (b) college culture, and Gen-Y/Millennial culture in particular, emphasizes self-definition ("do what you want, be who you want") to such an extreme degree that it occludes the reality that part of getting a job is doing--at least in part--what someone else wants you to be. That's why they're willing to pay you.
On the financial side, the nondischargeability of increasingly onerous student loan debts may well be something one could attribute to Wall Street's political power. (The same applies to the longstanding inability to cram down first mortgages on primary residences, as well as the newer 2005 change to the law that prohibits modifications of car loans when the vehicle was purchased within the 910 days before the bankruptcy filing.) At most, you can say that Wall Street might have an interest in diminishing the value of a college degree so that the companies in which Wall Street invests can hire more college graduates at lower rates. As a whole, however, most investors would be absolutely delighted to be investing in companies staffed by highly paid professionals who actually know what they're doing, managed by highly paid professionals who also know what they're doing, in a company that's actually doing something profitable. Google has very little trouble raising capital.
*****
Re: Greece
As noted in one of the blog posts linked over on the Occupy Wall Street thread:
Today, our 8 largest banks are about 8% exposed to the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain). They can all default and pay zero cents on the dollar. Our total exposure (in the 5 largest banks) is $54 billion. That’s not chump change, but that’s not Lehman and AIG either.
More importantly, a Greek implosion could affect the liquidity of the financial system, even in America, but liquidity is one of the easiest things for the Federal Reserve to provide. (What it cannot provide is real employment or real productivity increases, since liquidity is only one small ingredient in those.) We have endured worse shocks than a Greek default within living memory; we were actually significantly more exposed to Latin America and to Southeast Asia during their respective currency crises. Greece is not a major export market for us, and Europe as a whole will still be there even if Greece is forced to leave the euro and/or default.
In real terms, Germany and our other major European trading partners will only be the tiniest amount poorer if Greece defaults. The Greek debts held by German (or British, or American) banks will become worthless, but then again, they're already priced as if they're worthless anyway, so the value is already largely lost. In fact, from the current status quo, Germany would actually be richer if Greece pays, not poorer if it defaults, since the status quo all but assumes a default.
Posted 7 months ago # -
Tony
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Shocking numbers...nearly 50 % of Americans reside in a home that receives government help now.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/05/nearly-half-of-households-receive-some-government-benefit/
Posted 7 months ago # -
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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Tony said:
Shocking numbers...nearly 50 % of Americans reside in a home that receives government help now.http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/05/nearly-half-of-households-receive-some-government-benefit/
UPDATE: Nearly half of the population lives in a household that has at least one member who receives some kind of government benefit. An earlier headline incorrectly suggested that half of American households receive some government benefit. Due to differences in household size that isn’t the case.
A home is not a household, and it's not shocking... but, cue the WSJ outrage over benefit programs, and that's not shocking either... (oh look, they even provide a helpful link in their article to a page giving a timeline of government's helping hands). Funny that they don't link the deep recession phrase to a page about financial mortgage chicanery reporting, but that would require them to do some.
You know what's also shocking. It's shocking that my parents had my 88-year old grandmother move in with them instead of shuffling her off to a nursing home. Thus, making themselves part of the 48.5% that live in a household that now has someone receiving social Security checks. Absolutely grandmother-fucking shocking...
Posted 7 months ago # -
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Recession Hits Ohio Millionaires Hard
By: Associated Press
Published: October 31, 2011The recession slashed both the number and earnings of Ohio millionaires, according to a newspaper's analysis of state tax returns. The Dayton Daily News reports Monday that the state in 2007 had more than 7,800 taxpayers with adjusted gross income of $1 million or more.
READ MORE: http://www2.nbc4i.com/news/2011/oct/31/recession-hits-ohio-millionaires-hard-ar-809338/Posted 6 months ago # -
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An Uneven Job Recovery Among the States
By FLOYD NORRIS
Published: December 23, 2011Figures released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that employment fell in five states over the last year. In only two states are there now more jobs than there were when employment peaked before the recession and credit crisis caused the sharpest decline in national employment since the Great Depression.
READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/business/economy/job-recovery-among-the-states-is-uneven.htmlPosted 5 months ago # -
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Unemployment Claims at 352,000, Fewest Since 2008
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON January 19, 2012 (AP)The number of people seeking unemployment benefits plummeted last week to 352,000, the fewest since April 2008. The decline added to evidence that the job market is strengthening. Applications fell 50,000, the biggest drop in the seasonally adjusted figure in more than six years, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week average, which smooths out fluctuations, dropped to 379,000. That's the second-lowest such figure in more than three years.
READ MORE: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/unemployment-claims-352000-fewest-2008-15392743#.TxhTQZg9noQPosted 4 months ago # -
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American economy not healthy yet, but it's healing
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer – 2 days agoWASHINGTON (AP) — The American economy may not be truly healthy yet, but it's healing. The 2.8 percent annual growth rate reported Friday for the fourth quarter was the fastest since spring 2010 and was the third straight quarter that growth has accelerated. Experts cautioned, however, that the pace was unlikely to last and that it's not enough to sharply drive down the unemployment rate.
Posted 3 months ago # -
News
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Strong 3 Months of Hiring as US Adds 227,000 Jobs
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON March 9, 2012 (AP)The United States added 227,000 jobs in February, the latest display of the breadth and strength of the economic recovery. The country has put together the most impressive three months of job growth since before the Great Recession. The unemployment rate stayed at 8.3 percent. It was the first time in six months it didn't fall, and that was because a half-million Americans started looking for work. In the past two months, almost a million have started looking.
READ MORE: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/economy-adds-227k-jobs-jobless-rate-unchanged-15884319#.T19wXlE9mjAPosted 2 months ago # -
pedex
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News said:
Strong 3 Months of Hiring as US Adds 227,000 Jobs
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON March 9, 2012 (AP)The United States added 227,000 jobs in February, the latest display of the breadth and strength of the economic recovery. The country has put together the most impressive three months of job growth since before the Great Recession. The unemployment rate stayed at 8.3 percent. It was the first time in six months it didn't fall, and that was because a half-million Americans started looking for work. In the past two months, almost a million have started looking.
READ MORE: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/economy-adds-227k-jobs-jobless-rate-unchanged-15884319#.T19wXlE9mjATalk about bad journalism, sheesh.
First, the economy almost always adds jobs in the first quarter, secondly 227,00 jobs is only 100,000 jobs above the workforce growth rate, thirdly the BLS report was once again pretty much summarily ripped apart and panned by the media and blogs.
Also no the unemployment rate did not stay steady, U-6 climbed and the labor participation rate continues to fall along with wages and housing prices. IOW there is no "recovery" and hasn't been since day one. Smoking some hopium and cherry picking some stats does not a recovery make. To date we've gone backwards to late 90's early 2000 levels depending on which stat you choose and all except college loan credit levels pretty much are continuing to tank.
Posted 2 months ago #
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