Today, the NYT paired two headlines, “New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step” and “Michigan Again Has Highest Jobless Rate”. Let’s look for a moment at the stories themselves to see if there is any conflict.
In the former, the writers admit the stimulus has been relatively useless at adding jobs, and admits that conservatives claim that the package was a waste of governmental funds, but still claims that a consensus of economists who have viewed the data insist that it is working (interesting definition of consensus). Apparently, the best way for the economy to quickly produce jobs is to throw even more pork at states, hope some jobs get produced, then let the results ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us.
But wait. In the second article, not only does Michigan lead the pack with a 15.6% unemployment rate, but 14 other states plus DC have double digit unemployment right now and unemployment has risen in 29 states in the last month. So, we see the numbers are not merely increasing of people out of work, we also see that the unemployment is spreading throughout the nation, rather than being concentrated in a few states.
So, when we combine the information from the two articles, we find that:
• A consensus of economists (other than conservatives) claim that the stimulus package, which was intended to provide jobs, is working,
• The jobless rate is increasing throughout the nation, with more than 20% of the states suffering an unemployment rate that was unimaginable only two years ago,
• Finally, my analysis is that the stimulus package was not really expected to provide jobs; instead, it was just a pig with lipstick.
November 21st, 2009 at 8:59 am
Both the bush tarp and obama stimulus moneys went primarily to making the suprabanking system and brokerages liquid so they could continue their trading and currency carry operations and pay their bills. It never trickeled down to Mainstreet outside of a few minor programs like “cash for clunkers” and keeping public safety and teachers on the job for states and counties. The suprabanking systmem went into survival mode and cut off new loans, reduced credit limits, and inceased interest rates and fees to retail customers, you and me. Only recently have a few banks like B of A and Wells Fargo and Nations Bank promised to offer access to some new products for joe sixpack if he has a job. If he doens’t he’s out of luck. Unemployement in some states has reached as high as 17%, though the average is a little over 10% nationally. Roosevelt started the CCC(Civilian conservation Core) to put young men into jobs, offer them training, skill, and team building sets and send some money back to their homes in return for building our national park infrastructure, and put environmental and agricultural conservation programs into practice which had never been done before. It was a success in my book, but it really didn’t create new free standing jobs in the private sector. This is the dilema, how do we fashion a government funded program that actually puts new jobs into the hands of free enterprise. Surely state Universities provide very good education to future generations of engineers, scientists, teachers, you name it, but how do we get the actual jobs?
November 21st, 2009 at 9:09 am
All you have to do is check out the 10,000 jobs created in Rhode Island’s 156th Congressional District to know that the stimulus is working.
November 21st, 2009 at 9:24 am
From what I have gathered, 1/3 of the stimulus went to states for their infrastructures, 1/3 went to paying debt, and 1/3 went to “shovel ready projects” which are government jobs and we will not see until 2010 or sometime thereafter. None of the money went to the private sector.
In comes Stimulus II. Combine this with the real healthcare cost of 2.5 trillion dollars, cap and trade which will cause further unemployment and raise electric bills, electric cars that democrats want to put a 125% tax on, and all the hidden taxes democrats have in the legislation they are proposing puts us on an unsustainable path which will collapse the system as we know it. Last week the chinese asked obama how he planned on paying for healthcare. The dollar is deteriorating because of these policies and none of the international countries have any faith in us economically.
Social security is destined to fail, the post office got a bailout and cannot compete with FedEx or UPS, Medicaid has massive fraud, cash for clunkers failed by enabling people to buy new SUV’s and pick-up trucks instead of fuel efficient vehicles, and the swine flu vaccination program was mismanaged. The amount of jobs obama and biden claim were created was a lie at best and cannot be verified or proven, and they’re not able to show us where 787 billon dollars went. Now they have a frontal assault on 1/6th of the economy.
Add to this the fact that 17 million Americans are out of work(which leads me to believe the real number is higher because the 17 million is based on unemployment records and doesn’t include the others that are part-time due to cuts and cannot collect, those that never filed because they quit instead of being fired, and those that are finished collecting but still out of work). With 17 million Americans out of work the democrats want to legalize 12-20 million illegal immigrants so it will be even harder for Americans to go back to work with more people to compete against. Why? So they can collapse the system even further by creating a one party system and have more tax money to collect.
I just don’t see how we are going to put an end to these devastating policies and preserve our country’s way of life…
November 21st, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“Only recently have a few banks like B of A and Wells Fargo and Nations Bank promised to offer access to some new products for joe sixpack if he has a job. If he doens’t he’s out of luck.”
ok … now back the truck up …
are you saying that a person has to actually have a job before a bank will loan them money?!!!!
that is crazy talk!!!
November 21st, 2009 at 1:26 pm
“but how do we get the actual (private sector) jobs?” brian
could brian be learning?
ummmm … how about
lower taxes and fewer regulations?
November 21st, 2009 at 3:52 pm
we already tried that and the big boys took the money out as many billions of dollars in bonus’s. see their greed is paramount to even their imcompetence in putting a decent product out there that creates new jobs for joe and jane 6 pack. Most of bush’s tax cuts went to the top 15% of the socioeconomic strata. the very people who workers retirement pensions and played a lot of speculative games that ended in essentially a national bankruptcy, or reorganization if you will. bush didn’t even enforce the regulations on the books, so the big boys took further advantage and just gamed the unregulated system to the max, till it crashed again. if you put more red meat on the table the most aggressive among us will dive on it leaving nothing for regular normal working folk, unless you put some real rules in place to even the playing field, from the most aggressive.
November 21st, 2009 at 4:31 pm
That is my main complaint with you right wingers is you are shilling for the most aggressive, powerful, and rich among us constantly. You cherish causes that weaken workers, defraud them of their earnings and savings, and just feed their life’s wages up the food chain to the fat cats, the most aggessive among us. You champion causes that manipulate people’s fears and loathing, in essence shutting off their common sense and potential to again feed our system of enriching the rich. Sure its more complicated than that with our government sector and what private free enterprize we do have, the small family business’s and many entrepreneurs, most of whom get stomped out by the big boys. But all the same you are trying to enforce broken policies upon all of us that enrich the most aggressive among us. I want a different vision and leadership for our country, a different mindset if you will. Its not that your smarter than the dems, its that your willingly selling all of us out for the most aggressive among us. I don’t get why. They seem to implie you will get rich and powerful too, but few of you ever will. remember they control the commercial media machine and its constantly programming us 24 7 now along lines that don’t very much whomever is in power. Olbermann and Beck are just two sides of the same coin and the most aggresssive among us are accumulating them at ever faster rates. They don’t care: they sell to everybody, but they need you to be their feet on the ground to help them maintain their superior power over the rest of us.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Alright I’m going to tell you again my plan on how we can fix the economy. Maybe somebody “Brian” can learn something from it.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Part 1: Go to a Fair Tax of 18%
1. The 12 trillion dollars that we’ve thrown off shore will come back and more. We’ll start seeing this in a few months, but the true good of it will come as time goes on.
2. It will eliminate the tax on productivity. Thus making people invest more and work harder.
3. Give people more money so they can purchase more improving are economy. There is an imbedded tax on everything we purchase of 22%. At 18% things will go down in price 4%. Thus with no income tax people can purchase more made in American products and stores will hire more.
4. Education will improve, because now people can get a second job and work more to pay for college.
5. Allows people to live on only the basic things in life so they aren’t taxed. Thus people can save to start a business easier.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Part 2: Go back to a Gold Standard and eliminate the Federal Reserve
1. Eliminate inflation.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Part 2: Balance the budget with only 18% sales tax
1. Get rid of the Department of Education.
2. Get rid of Department of Energy.
3. No more Commerce Department.
4. Bring everything we keep back to the 2000 budget.
5. Get rid of all US bases in Europe.
6. Abolish the Department of Transportation.
7. Thank God no more EPA
8. Privatize Social Security, medicare, welfare, and medicaid. Replace it with investment in liquid accounts.
9. Cut the pork out of our military.
10. Revamp the Department of Homeland Security.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Part 4: Energy Reform
1. Drill everywhere with oil,coal, and natural gas.
2. Build 500 nuclear plants.
3. Abolish the Department of Energy.
4. Encourage investment into renewable energy such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Through private accounts.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Part 5: Immigration Reform
1. Eliminate birth rite citizenship to prevent anchor babies.
2. Mandate businesses to do immigration checks.
3. Tax them through Fair Tax.
4. Eliminate all there benefits.
5. Make english the official language.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm
oh yeah, going back to the gold standard and eliminating the federal reserve will surely fix our economy. Modern thinking here.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Part 6: Healthcare Reform
1. Massive massive malpractice reform.
2. Allow people to cross state lines.
3. Eliminate managed care.
4. Abolish medicare and medicaid through investment in liquid items that will produce revenue like geothermal energy.
5. Make it so insurance companies can only be able to receive profits through people accessing care not by purchasing it. Not that I support mandating business, but you can get them to by getting one insurance company to do this and the rest will follow.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Part 7: Education Reform
1. Go to a Fair Tax like I said earlier.
2. Let state and local government run it.
3. Establish a voucher system.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Part 8: Reform of the Law
1. Legalize drugs to make it so there are legitimate jobs in that.
2. Legalize prostitution so Americas working girls don’t have to go to jail.
3. Legalizing gambling helps.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Part 8: EPA reform
1. Abolish EPA to make it so all restrictions are done by the state and local government.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Part 9: Labor Reform
1. Unions do more harm than good, but allow them.
2. Abolish minimum wages and replace it with community standards. This makes it so small businesses can tell there mayor if you lower the minimum wage I’ll create more jobs.
3. Have local government run labor restrictions. So if some factories don’t like the restrictions they can just go to another town where restrictions work for them so they don’t have to leave US as a whole.
November 21st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Part 10: Trade Reform
1. Unrestricted trade works.
2. Tariffs are only good if you put it on everything compared to specific items.
3. 1% tariff to pay off debt.
4. The Fair Tax and all my other plans make industrial America more competitive.
5. Pull out of NAFTA.
November 21st, 2009 at 10:11 pm
first, i am a utopian socialist
second, obama took a country with 7% unemployment and a shaky economy
and gave us 15% unemployment and a collapsing economy
November 21st, 2009 at 10:25 pm
it is actually quite simple …
if you raise the cost of something, the less people will buy it.
if you make the cost of hiring employees more expensive, there will be fewer jobs. if you make the cost of hiring employees cheaper — by lowering taxes and decreasing regulations — companies will hire more people.
obama has managed to drive up unemployment … which means LOWER wages and benefits for the employees.
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:36 am
first you are no socialist. your as conservative as it gets along current conservative thinking. secondly you assume the most aggressive among us, those that do the hiring, will somehow hire more people when they can squeeze more profit out of the bottom line by not? Right now employers have squeezed a new 6.7 percent productivity(I think its double that) out of the employees they got with the layoffs and threat of more. That goes directly to their bottom line and they like the added profits. they are not humanists who want to just provide more jobs, they want more profits, just like you guys want more wins no matter what. your completely negating the human factor of greed, which the most aggressive among us are expert at assering “that right” they so cherish. so if you just lower taxes without any conditions, they will simply pocket the money, maybe speculate more which does add a few jobs here and there, and then shut down the speculations when they don’t pay off. so as you can now finally see, no its not simple at all.
November 22nd, 2009 at 7:05 am
Brian,
When our local businesses in CT have cut jobs (and they have cut many … including my wife) they have not done so because they are greedy and want more profits.
They cut the jobs because they are bleeding money and need to reduce their payroll or they will go under (as my wife’s company did … go under).
To increase sales and/or business, they need capital. This additional capital will allow them to produce more product, along with advertising for said product. This increased capital will allow the company to expand their business (to other products), which will force them to hire new employees to market these products or sell these products. Once the new products have been marketed and are being sold, new jobs will need to be created to help maintain the increase in productivity (this is happening with my wife’s new job.)
This leads to increased productivity, which leads to increased innovation, which leads to new products or product lines, which leads to new jobs (needed to maintain the new products or product lines.)
Continued in new comment …
Frank
November 22nd, 2009 at 7:16 am
Brian,
The reverse of post #24 is what has been happening over the last year or so.
People get very nervous about losing their job and, thus, cut back in purchasing items.
As an aside, watch out for “Black Friday” sales numbers. You can tell when companies are hurting by their discounts on Black Friday.
This cutting back in purchasing items (even going out to eat) causes business to lose revenues. This causes the businesses to produce less items (they won’t be sold, so why produce them), which causes the operating capital to lessen. Over time, this causes cutbacks in jobs and hours.
The devastating part is the pack mentality of this process. Worry about losing a job causes a cut back in purchasing, which causes companies to produce less items, which cause some job losses, which create panic among worker, which create less purchasing of items by the public, which create more panic among the companies, which create more job losses, which start the cycle going again.
The only way to break this cycle is to increase capital among the companies. Increasing regulations does not do this. Cutting taxes does this. When companies suddenly have more money with which to work, they begin to innovate (ever so slightly.) This creates an atmosphere that will slowly improve product sales and creation, as well as the jobs that accompany this improvement in sales and product creation.
Companies do NOT just deposit the extra money generated from tax breaks. They use this money to generate new products and new jobs.
Frank