– Team Mitt has a bit of a problem.
– It’s the rare feminist you will hear yelling, “Yeah, KILL HIM!” at a pee-wee football game.
– You’ll be shocked to learn that Ron Paul people have some rather terrible ideas.
– The best thing to come out of the Romney I’m a CEO and not a CEO at the same time is John Cole’s pieces about Glenn Kessler.
– And kids on bikes
– Team Mitt has a bit of a problem.
Actually, the US under the current administration has a bit of a problem:
Retail Sales Fall as Consumers Continue to Struggle
U.S. retail sales fell for a third straight month in June as demand slumped for everything from cars and electronics to building materials, a sign the economic recovery is flagging.
Retail sales slipped 0.5 percent, the Commerce Department said on Monday.
It was the first time sales had dropped in three consecutive months since late 2008, when the economy was still mired in a deep recession. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected retail sales to rise 0.2 percent.
“Evidence is increasingly clear that the U.S. economy is slowing,” said Jim Baird, an investment strategist at Plante Moran Financial Advisors in Kalamazoo, Mich.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48194314
And yet, the Obama team is focused like a laser beam on………..
……….. what Mitt Romney might or might not have been doing back when he was rescuing the SLC Winter Olympic Games, more than a decade ago.
Everyone has their priorities, I guess.
Actually, the US under the current administration
And the current Congress. Republicans in the House of Representatives promised we’d see some jobs. How many jobs bills have they passed?
The Diddler is back in the swing.
Didier got one thing right Public Lands are way too important to be mismanaged, which is why I’ll be voting for Goldmark.
Latest weirdness in the saga of the Sodo arena is Jean Godden putting her writer’s hat back on and getting a piece in Blethen’s Fishwrap today about the City Council having heard and accepted testimony to the effect that the Storm would just love to abandon Key Arena and move to Chez Hansen once it’s built. Apparently whoever provided said testimony wasn’t the Storm’s ownership, who when they found out wrote the Council stating that they’re pleased as punch with their present digs and would just as soon stay there, thankyouverymuch. The fact that Godden felt compelled to report all this to the public on her own would seem to indicate that otherwise the Council would have preferred the whole story never saw the light of day.
Hey, it’s Shallow Cogitations, I dig that blog. ;-)
You know the Obama re-election campaign is hitting home when the Romney campaign sends talking heads to demand that Obama apologize for using Romney’s own words and signed statements against him.
And Puddy and Serial show up to try to change the subject.
Now isn’t the time to let up. Demand that Romney release 20 years worth of tax returns, like his father did. Think of Grant pursuing Lee from Richmond to Appomatox – send Sheridan and the cavalry to cut him off, and then push hard with the main force!
Please note…in puddywhippedpussy world calling another commenter a whore and a prostitute (I fucking WISH I was getting paid for this) is not an “ad hominun” attack. Really…and Karl Rove is NOT a negative campaigner. Seriously. That’s what the puddywhippedpussy said. C’mon you guys…stop LAUGHING! That’s NOT NICE! Jeeeee-sus!! How roooooood! LOLOLOLOLOLOL
The stumblebum self-hating puddywhippedpussy ought to listen to THIS (as if the stumblebum self-hating puddywhippedpussy even KNOWS who the asshole Paul Weyrich is):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw
Weyrich was a founder of ALEC, the right-wing loonies who write much of the voter surpression legislation.
Don’t forget “ev” and “yd”.
# 2: Yep, the current Republican Congress (and the veto-happy Republicans in the Senate) have been so anxious to destroy American jobs in an attempt to keep the economy from a better recovery under the Obama administration, that their actions amount to treason. If our economy isn’t getting better, it’s because of them, plus some unrelated factors (Europe economic situation, etc.).
Republicans in the House of Representatives promised we’d see some jobs. How many jobs bills have they passed?
Gee, you’d have to ask Harry Reid but I think the number of House-passed jobs bills since the 2010 election that have not been acted upon by the Senate is well into the teens.
Glad you asked?
@ 6
Now isn’t the time to let up. Demand that Romney release 20 years worth of tax returns, like his father did. Think of Grant pursuing Lee from Richmond to Appomatox – send Sheridan and the cavalry to cut him off, and then push hard with the main force!
If only Obama would work this diligently on growing the economy.
Naw, what’s really important is figuring out just HOW rich a rich guy is.
Anyone think a prompt naming of a VP candidate would derail this Bain and tax-return idiocy?
@1
And we’re back to the bikini graph:
http://thepoliticalcarnival.ne.....ushs-mess/
The truth is that we’ve had 3 straight years of job growth. You’re going to have ups and down along the way. Your post really isn’t news.
Retail Sales Fall as Consumers Continue to Struggle. If people don’t have jobs or free money to spend, the economy will struggle. Democrats and union have been trying to improve wages and get jobs back in the states, but conservatives have obstructed EVERY proposal up forth. For example, ” Democrats offered a measure opening the door for a vote on the Bring Jobs Home Act (H.R.5542). But Republicans blocked the measure by 238-184.” I cannot name any thing the Republican have put forth that raises pay for workers. Owners pay, sure, but not pay for workers. Women’s unmentionable parts, but not pay for workers. And our conservative trolls are working hard to avoid the issue that THEIR side are blocking everything.
Like how they planted a story with Drudge about Condi Rice on Thursday?
Boy, THAT sure worked.
What JOBS bills, ya fuck?
How many?
When?
@11
Only if they name the Veep retroactively.
@ 12
If you’re going to use a graph, don’t be so disingenuous as to use one that’s three months old. Use one in which the most recent three months, in which job growth has fallen below that necessary to keep pace with the population growth rate, are included. Your graph would then show a clear stall and an economy tipping into a recession that Obama will have great difficulty blaming on a guy who has not been around for 3 1/2 years, particularly if it’s happening despite an increase in federal revenues.
If your savings account is growing at 0.25% and inflation is growing at 2.9%, is your savings really growing? You’re grasping, Michael.
@ 13
And why might people not have jobs?
Small Business on Obamacare: No Reason to Hire or Invest
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48000806
There’s uncertainty about:
1. What tax rates will be.
2. What Obamcare will do, cost-wise, to an employer who chooses to continue to cover his/her employees.
3. What policies a freshly re-elected Obama will put in place that will further stifle businesses for having had the nerve to invest in growth.
Dems are all over the map with their tax increases. There have been myriad proposals and test votes, ranging from surcharges on millionaires to higher taxation at income levels varying from $250K to $1M (unless I missed one).
People don’t know what to think.
Until there’s some clarity, expect this to continue. And as Obama flails, there’s far from clarity on much of anything.
@17
Fuck you.
I used to the graph to show, as I said in my commentary, that we’ve had 3 straight years of job growth. You’re never going to not have periods where job growth doesn’t go down. If it keeps going down, then yeah we have a problem, but three months of weak job growth after three three straight years of growth is just normal.
If my savings account beat the inflation rate for three straight years and then was below it for three months, I’d still be in the black.
@ 12
Your post really isn’t news.
I originally missed the irony of a guy claiming my post, with a link to an article dated today, wasn’t news, while using a link to data four months old in support of his point.
@ 19
@17
Fuck you.
Channeling Doctor Steve, I see.
First, I believe we are at around 27 months of job growth (the 24 months above the graph in your link plus the three months of declining growth since then), not three years.
It was the recession which ended three years ago. Productivity picked up before job growth began.
You can look at job growth in absolute numbers, without reference to population, and claim monthly increases as if it’s a net positive.
When looked at in terms of the percent of the US population in the workforce, which has fallen significantly despite your claimed job growth, your claims of job growth become a falsehood.
The US economy is producing more with fewer people in the workforce. Don’t expect much change without change at the top.
@ 21
Neglected to show my work:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000/
This is the workforce participation rate data from BLS.
If we’re growing jobs so well, Michael, how come so many fewer Americans as a percent of our population seem to have them?
@ 9
I think
Don’t tell me what you think. You’re a conservative who spends way too much time posting comments on a liberal political blog, which generally means that thinking isn’t one of your strong points. Do some homework. Start here.
the number of House-passed jobs bills since the 2010 election
First, you don’t get to include bills passed by the 111th Congress. The Republicans elected in 2010 didn’t take office until January of 2011.
Second, you don’t get to include bills whose only connection to actual job creation is the fact that some whacked out congress critter from Podunkville, Peonia decided to stick the word “jobs” in the title. For example, the Bureau of Reclamation Small Conduit Hydropower Development and Rural Jobs Act of 2012 doesn’t exactly qualify as a “jobs” bill.
You should know that you do have your work cut out for you. Republicans in Congress sat on President Obama’s proposed jobs bill, which generally means that they can’t pass any legislation that would contain any of the provisions in it. Otherwise, President Obama would get to claim credit for it, and, as Sen. McConnell says, job #1 of Congressional Republicans is to try to turn President Obama into a one-term President.
@ 22
I generally prefer this graph. For starters, it goes back to 1970, not just the past 12 years.
With that, it’s interesting to note that the highest labor force participation rate occurred during the Clinton years. Indeed, they occurred after Pres. Clinton and Congress raised the top marginal tax rate on all those so-called “job creators” who, according to Republicans, need to be mollycoddled before we’ll see an increase in the labor force participation rate.
@ 23
I answered the question that was asked. Regarding the two-month difference between the election and the seating of the current Congress, your point is noted.
If the question were posed differently I might have answered differently. You wanted the question, apparently, to be ‘How many jobs bills that Democrats like were passed by the GOP House in the current Congress’?
@ 24
Try massaging the graph you linked to, by altering units to changes in parcipation from previous year in percent. You don’t get the same peak in the Clinton years. What you get is a couple of spikes during his tenure in which the participation rate increased a little, and quite a bit during his tenure in whch the participation rate growth was zero. The most sustained increase was just after the Reagan tax cuts. Probably not what you wanted me to point out, tho.
“…GM is alive.”
Ah, the common HA refrain – Rujax and YLB in particular.
Indeed, on July 1, 2011, GM admitted on an investor conference call that it had substantially exceeded inventory targets. An article appearing on Barron’s on July 5, 2011 quotes Don Johnson, the VP of GM’s U.S. sales operations, who stated on an investor call that “[r]ight now we are at 122 day supply on full-size pickups. And this is slightly above where we would like to be. I acknowledge that our target is between 100 and 110 day supply but I think it’s important that people realize why we are there and what we may do about it.” Thus, GM acknowledged that its target was above the 100 vehicle figure that industry experts considered excessive, and moreover GM exceeded even its own excessive target.
During the three months following the Bloomberg and Barron’s articles, GM’s share price fell from more than $31.00 to below $20.00, far below the IPO price of $33.00.
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto.....2012-07-13
Alive and going back to the same dismissal of market reality that got them in trouble to begin with, apparently.
BTW I was in a Rairdon dealership last week (Kirkland) and asked about how many days of unsold cars they have in inventory. 33 days, across their system. Things in Seattle are going fairly well, and they probably do a better job managing their inventories than others. My guess, anyway.
I expect we’ll be hearing much more about this in months to come:
“The U.S. is one of the only industrialized countries with a hybrid system of taxing active foreign-source income,” that report, issued in December 2010, noted in its section on Tax Reform.”The current system puts U.S. corporations at a competitive disadvantage against their foreign competitors. A territorial tax system should be adopted to help put the U.S. system in line with other countries, leveling the playing field.”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/po.....uncilsid2/
Tapper, going where NBC won’t.
I also expect we’ll hear Romney, in a debate, ask Obama why he ignored the recommendations of his own commission. Good question.
Awful lot of US corporate money sitting overseas. At least it’s in cash or otherwise earning interest, albeit not doing anything to help American workers not currently in possession of a job.
I guess there’s always 2013. Maybe we’ll get to see Obama pivot to jobs yet again.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....that-s-why
Stunning…really just pitch-perfect!!!!
So today raw-money won’t release tax return because Theresa Heinz Kerry didn’t.
The “ketchup” defense??
raw-money’s campaign is hemorrhaging…they have to stop the bleeding or he won’t make it out of the convention.
@ 26(a)
I answered the question that was asked.
No, you didn’t. You told me what you think. I didn’t ask you what you think.
You wanted the question, apparently, to be ‘How many jobs bills that Democrats like were passed by the GOP House in the current Congress’?
I see. So, being unable to actually answer the question I did ask, you’re now trying to suggest that I asked a question that I didn’t.
First, I don’t give a damn what Democrats like or don’t like. I’m not a Democrat, and I generally hold Democrats in only slightly less contempt than I hold Republicans. That’s largely because Republicans are the ones who’ve completely fucked this country up, not Democrats.
I merely stated that simply sticking the word “jobs” in the title of a bill doesn’t make it a jobs bill. Or are you going to try to claim that the “Bureau of Reclamation Small Conduit Hydropower Development and Rural Jobs Act of 2012” really ought to be considered a “jobs” bill?
@26(b)
Try massaging the graph you linked to
Sorry, no, but I generally try to avoid “massaging” data solely for rhetorical purposes. I rather prefer to try and understand what the data is actually telling us.
by altering units to changes in parcipation from previous year in percent.
So, you think an ever-increasing labor participation rate is actually a good thing irrespective of any other demographic factors? See, this is why I generally prefer to not “massage” data for rhetorical purposes. When you do that, it usually just makes you look stupid.
Our suave “big thinker”, the cereal clownservative is again vying for the “most disingenuous right-wing ashole of the week” award.
The Corporate Controlled Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House and Senate perpetuate and continue those LEGISLATIVELY MANDATED tax policies. Those “loathesome” and anti-competitive
tax policies are making raw-money and his big-time pals waayyyyy richer or those policies would be gone.
President Obama did not legislate those tax policies and did not put them in place nor could he have done so because, as the serious constitutional scholar the cereal clownservative no doubt knows…the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama can LEGISLATE exactly nothing.
Nor can he or has he changed tax policy by executive order (JUST THINK of how much the republipigs like our mentally challenged buddies here would SQUEEEEEEEL had the President even TRIED anything like that).
So as usual…the asshole is full of shit (smelly pun intended).
@ 32
Go back on your meds, R.
Yes, R, Obama cannot legislate. But he can propose, agitate, cajole, pressure, and fund or withhold funding, in order to make his position felt on the legislative side of things.
Next time you celebrate Obamacare as one of his accomplishments, how about I point out how he can legislate exactly nothing and therefore, if you are being consistent, is due no recognition for its passage, Rujax? Would you like that?
@ 31
So, you think an ever-increasing labor participation rate is actually a good thing irrespective of any other demographic factors?
No, I do not.
But I do think that a precipitous decline is a bad thing, is not explained by demographics over the past three years, and flies in the face of the cheerleading Michael has done @ 13 about our three straight years (or 27 months) of job growth. We’re growing jobs and yet far fewer people are working them. Go figure.
http://crooksandliars.com/susi.....-intend-pr
Things we need to know about the Republican Party’s organized and systematic effort to purge from the voter roles millions of legal American voters who are likely to vote for Democrats.
@33…
the erudite cereal clownservative conventiently FORGOT (his memory must be as long as his dick) that HE brought up tax policy and blamed it on Obama…NOT the Affordable Care Act.
Typical. Can’t defend your position? Change the subject.
@ 36
And, Rujax wins. My forehead is hurting too much from repeated violent contact with the wall.
Whatever you say, Rujax. You da man.
…and you’re still a jerk.
Fuck Off.
@ 34
But I do think that a precipitous decline is a bad thing, is not explained by demographics over the past three years
Well, of course that decline in labor participation rate wouldn’t be attributed to demographic factors. That’s because the decline would rightly be attributed to the recession that was caused in no small part by the Bush Administration’s mismanagement.
If you’re just going to bewail the decline without having an intelligent discussion about the causes, then, frankly, go buy some cheese to go with your whine. You, like Gov. Romney, have become part of the problem.
We’re growing jobs and yet far fewer people are working them. Go figure.
First, let’s be precise: following a precipitous decline in the labor force participation rate, it has, over the past couple of years, or so, generally held steady. Second, what’s there to “go figure”? Job growth has kept up with population growth. There’s no mystery.
As for why there hasn’t been much job growth over the past couple years, that’s not much of a mystery either. Republicans in Congress, particularly those in the House of Representatives, seem to think that it’s possible to create jobs by passing a whole bunch of legislation that has no connection to actual job growth other than having the word “jobs” in the title.
@ 37
My forehead is hurting too much from repeated violent contact with the wall.
No. That’s what happens when you spend too much time “massaging” data purely for rhetorical purposes. You really only have yourself to blame.
I’d like to see a Republican “jobs bill” passed out of the house which didn’t include as it’s major feature further tax cuts on the 1% and reduction of federal spending – especially spending which would support the poor and middle class which is most likely to actually generate jobs.
In other words, in the Orwellian world of Republican double-speak, a “jobs bill” is a “job-killing bill”.
Break out the popcorn..
When right wing nut Norquist attacks right wing nut Tom Coburn either
1) it’s fun to watch or
2) it’s a sign this country is dangerously spinning its wheels..
We can’t afford this crap any longer.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/1.....the_shark/
The graph showing employment since 1970 as part of the labor force might be a little skewed, especially in the 1970’s, as millions of housewifes entered the workforce in order to make up for the stagnation of wages since 1970 and the effect of rescessions on their husband’s incomes due to the rescessions of 1973, 1975, 1980, and 1992. Also, with more freedom, a larger percentage of the female demographic chose not to get married right out of high school or college, and to enter the work force instead.
@ 39
As long as we’re being precise:
65.7 65.5 65.4 65.1 65.0 65.0 64.6
64.8 64.9 64.9 65.1 64.9 64.6 64.6 64.7 64.6 64.4 64.5 64.3
64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.1 64.0 64.1 64.1 64.1 64.0 64.0
63.7 63.9 63.8 63.6 63.8 63.8
OK, that didn’t cut and paste well but it’s monthly labor participation rate in the past three years. I don’t see it leveling off. When you look at the BLS graph you don’t see it leveling off, either.
As far as reasons, there are plenty of fault points that can be assigned to all sides. Spending billions to ‘save or create’ jobs using incredible sleight-of-hand job-counting, paying off the UAW and topping off pensions of unions while letting the white-collar workers for the same company take it in the ass, going green and coincidentally lining the pockets of major donors, handing cash off to states and municipalities so they can avoid tough decisions…….none of those were GOP-originated bad ideas. They were just bad ideas, wasted money, and if it seems the GOP is obstructing more of the same, perhaps it’s because what’s being proposed is, er, more of the same.
Job growth in the past 27 months has not been enough to keep the labor force participation rate from progressively declining, and crowing about how jobs have been created each month during that period of time rings very, very hollow.
Meanwhile, did you see how much Mitt Romney might have earned in 1999?
Silly.
Roger Rabbit Is Still Alive!
I was away last week attending a Vietnam veterans’ reunion, then a lightning strike in Friday’s storm destroyed my phone system and damaged my computer (despite using a surge protecter). I’m using a public library computer to post this, and I have errands to run, so I can’t take the time right now to put you America-hating trolls in your proper place. But don’t worry, I’ll be back later to deal with you. Don’t go away, the fun is just starting.
I think the average IQ of the commenters here suddenly plunged.
@46 Learn to read a fucking clock. That actually happened at exactly 8:26 AM this morning.
MCKINNON: It’s absolutely possible. And just to give you an example of how distorted things are, Steve: The Koch brothers, by themselves, will spend more money in this election cycle than the entire presidential campaign of John McCain in 2008.
I’m guessing they’re really hoping that they get what they pay for.
Cereal: You can avail yourself of factual information the moment you run out of hot air:
http://www.oge.gov/displaytemp.....2147484464
“The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (EIGA) requires that candidates for the office of President of the United States file a Public Financial Disclosure Report (OGE Form 278) with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).[2] After the initial filing with the FEC, the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) reviews and certifies that the candidate’s report satisfies the requirements of EIGA.”
@ 49
You’re probably getting at something Romney-related but I have no idea what. Anytime you feel like penning a complete thought, that would be great.
Do you still want to see an Arab Spring in our country, and would you like to see happen to President Obama what happened to Colonel Quadaffi at the hands of an unruly mob, DD? Or was it the rape of women in public squares in Egypt that you would like to see in this country? How about civilians being slaughtered as has been occurring in Syria?
I really want to know which of the barbaric events you found so attractive that you want to see them repeated here, DD.
Once again, SerCon wants to get out of paying taxes.
Yet SerCon’s argument is
Let me see if I can follow the logic. A corporation DOES NOT want to pay it’s taxes. So America should change the laws so they DO NOT pay taxes and govenment cannot afford to pay cops and teachers and this will cause demand for their goods and services in America to increase so they will hire more Americans.
If the corporations PAID their fair share of taxes, then the govemrent could afford to pay teachers and cops and rebuild infracture. This would generate disposable income, and cause demand for all sorts of corporate goods and services in America to increase. Increased demand would cause corporation to hire more Americans.
So the exact opposite of Serial “Makes fun of the looks of African American girls and then claims it was a JOKE and he’s not a bigot” Conservative’s post would be more effective, if job growth was the real goal.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....76729.html
Heh. Look now for the “freedom loving”, “responsible” gun enthusiasts to turn on their favorite, what’s that term “honey badger” or “protector”, help me out here Michael..
And not for the racism..
@ 51
Dude, go to Apostrophe School. It’s like Hebrew School but you only need to learn one character.
You misunderstand the concept, NTfF.
Assume money has been earned by a US corporation by sales in another country and foreign income taxes have been paid. Why should taxes by paid a second time when the money is repatriated into this country?
Say it’s Apple. They earn a hundred bucks somewhere, and maybe 10-20% is taxed at the level of the country in which it’s earned. Why should Apple then pay another full income tax when the money is repatriated here? If so, and if Apple were to pay a shareholder dividend, and those dividends are then taxed, the money is taxed by the government three separate times.
Companies generally wish to pay a lower tax rate on money earned that has already been taxed elsewhere once before.
It’s not an unreasonable desire. Even Obama has spent some time looking at it and mentioned it in the SOTU. Here’s a nice reference on the topic:
http://www.brookings.edu/resea.....ings-pozen
You should try to understand more rather than just assume it’s about a complete avoidance of taxation, as I don’t think that companies expect to pay zero tax.
Heh.. Aaron Sorkin is the freaking best for handles!
Cantwell?
http://www.politico.com/news/s.....78504.html
Really?
Does she even have GOP opposition this year?
Help me out, please. Why is Cantwell a concern on this issue?
Could the company have been able to generate that foreign sale without the infrastructure, security, education, subsidies, regulations, and courts of America? America has a great commons of public infrastructure that taxes pay for and what has made it a great engine of commerce. Would that corporation have been able to create and grow the company to generate that foreign sale if they had started in Somalia or Colombia or Haiti?
Pay up and stop demanding corporate welfare.
56.
You mean that infrastructure that all of the previously paid taxes and fees collected from that company went to support? Please. This chicken/egg issue started with Elizabeth Warren, Obama picked it up yesterday, and now it’s being dutifully parroted by you.
You seem to misunderstand the concept of welfare.
Meanwhile, Apple’s doing just fine with all that money sitting offshore. Eventually the political winds will blow in a different direction and it will be repatriated at lower tax rate. Could happen now, but it would be at a political cost Dems don’t want to pay.
Next year. Apple can wait.
Yes.
And…You bring it up then get upset when people don’t agree with you?
@18 – you don’t get it. We enter into the worst recession and possible a mini great depression and your expectation is to turn around and have it solved over night. Isn’t that a little unrealistic. So things get better because of a stimulus program that not one Republican voted for and now more needs to be done but with no help from Republicans. This is going to be the same scenario 4 more years from now regardless who is president. So yes the past 3 1/2 years is due to the last brainiac. Allways will be GWB fault until we actually come out of it, hopefully within the next 10 fricken years.
@ 59
I’m actually OK, personally, with the money staying offshore for a few more years.
Once all that money comes back, some of it will be put to use in the corporations but a lot of it will be to retire debt and to fund special dividends or dividend increases.
By then I’ll be either semi-retired or retired and in a lower tax bracket once the money trickles down to me as a shareholder.
Here’s the thing: Congress could pass a law enabling repatriation at lower taxation subject to the monies being used for job-creating purposes.
Got that? Jobs created by the companies with some of the money if they want it back now.
There’s major resistance on the far-left side to any ‘corporate welfare’, and they see this as a giveaway.
NTfF, your own ideology is what’s largely responsible for keeping the money off shore. It’s not doing any good over there. There’s no requirement for the companies to bring it back – they don’t need it, not at current tax rates on top of the tax on it they already have paid.
So it sits. And you blame the other side for your own unwillingness to permit a deal to be struck.
@ 59
You misrepresent what I stated. I am pointing out that we are still falling behind on the jobs picture if our workforce is shrinking despite the 27 months of job growth. That’s my point. Dems are allowed to point out job growth as a badge of honor, when the truth is the country is falling further behind in terms of workforce participation despite it.
It’s been three years since the recession ended. The labor force is still falling further behind. The growth is a myth.
It’s been three years. Somehow the claim that the GOP is responsible for the continued woes because we won’t pay for teachers and first-responders doesn’t explain it, does it?
There’s a need for policy change. Not just more temporary spending directed to labor entities with unions.
Looks like Obama and l’il Timmy Geithner have allowed taxpayer $$ to be used for hookin’ up with whores. Nice.
Why was this bastards name redacted??
Wonder what kind of retirement deal he got?
@50 Our resident Genius Troll compares President Obama to Qaddafi. I knew he had it in him if he just put his “mind” to it.
# 62: Sounds like another Republican smear campaign, trying to blame the President for every mis-deed of any government employee anywhere in the nation. Besides, the quotes mentioned here don’t prove that any federal funds were spent on these activities, only that a government-issued travel card was used. Recipients of such cards sometimes use them for travel and then reimburse the agency if the charges aren’t justified as necessary expenses – just like the way any company credit card is used.
And yet, we have a Lousianna Republican senator who was a client of a D.C. Madam but was not prosecuted, and still sits in Congress. And do we need to bring up the Republican campaign geared toward bringing young, wealthy Republicans men into the camp by taking them on a field trip to a lesbian-oriented theme nightclub?
Smells like the bulk of the dirty laundry is on your side of the fence.
re 50: Romney’s lack of financial disclosure is what I was getting at. I’m surprised that you could not surmise that yourself.
You seem to think that a laundry list of specific atrocities that you ascribe to the participants of the Arab Spring would be something instructive to me (instead of taking the obvious point that I made in the past of the internet being a form of organization against an oppressive government that the government could not contravene).
Following, though, is a link to an account of what happened to the Bonus Army in 1932. I’m sure you’ll thrill to the heroic antics of Generals MacArthur and Patton as the Bonus Army, much like the members of Arab Spring, get stomped by the military.
http://www.historynet.com/the-.....ington.htm
I do not find your deliberate obtuseness amusing or instructive.
@ 44
As long as we’re being precise
Lovely. You’ve leap-frogged over “precise,” and jumped straight into the realm of “pedantic”. In case you’re wondering, “pedantic” would tend to include “massaging” the data solely for rhetorical purposes and not for the sake of finding any interesting or illuminating trends.
OK, that didn’t cut and paste well
So, you don’t know how to use a text editor to reformat the data.
but it’s monthly labor participation rate in the past three years.
Well, except that, in terms of any leveling off, I clearly referred to the last “couple of years.” If you’re having difficulty keeping track of who said what, I suggest you use the scroll bar on the right side of your browser window.
To be precise, let’s consider the table as a whole. From January of 2002 through June of 2008, we see that the labor force participation rate dropped from 66.5% to 66.1%. Not much of a drop.
July 2008 through June 2010:
66.1 66.1 65.9 66.0 65.8 65.8
65.7 65.8 65.6 65.6 65.7 65.7
65.5 65.4 65.1 65.0 65.0 64.6
64.8 64.9 64.9 65.1 64.9 64.6
Here, we see the “precipitous drop” from 66.1% to 64.6%, or a drop of 1.5 percentage points. That drop continues, though less dramatically, over the first 6 months of 2010.
July 2010 through June 2010:
64.6 64.7 64.6 64.4 64.5 64.3
64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.1
64.0 64.1 64.1 64.1 64.0 64.0
63.7 63.9 63.8 63.6 63.8 63.8
Over the last six months of 2010 and through 2011, the rate is almost dead flat. There’s another brief drop in January of this year, yet the rate remains within a range of +/- .2 percentage points around the average. Variance over the last 18 months is +/- .3 percentage points overall.
The total drop over the last two years is .6 percentage points vs. a drop of 1.5 percentage points over the two prior years.
As far as reasons, there are plenty of fault points that can be assigned to all sides.
Well, actually, there really is only one plausible reason for the decline in the civilian labor force participation rate: lack of jobs. The ratio of unemployed persons to job openings has been well over 3:1 for quite some time. If we want to talk about things that caused this set of circumstances, then a litany of right-wing talking points about things that happened after the jobs were lost won’t quite make the grade–unless you want to posit the possibility of time travel.
But, of course, the last thing you want to do is have an intelligent discussion about the things that caused the recession in the first place. You’d rather dodge questions about Republican jobs bills all the while trying to blame President Obama for the anemic pace of the recovery all the while pretending that Republican obstructionism has nothing to do with that either.
@60 Everyone in the world except you knows lack of consumer demand is the reason for lack of jobs. Corporations have cash coming out of their ears. They’re using it to raise dividends, buy their own stock, and make acquisitions because they can’t put it to work in their own businesses. If they repatriated their overseas profits, it wouldn’t make any difference whether it was taxed 0% or 100%, because it wouldn’t create jobs for the same reason the $2 trillion of idle cash they’re sitting on here at home isn’t creating jobs. If you want to use tax cuts to spur the economy, then you must give those tax cuts to the middle class, because that’s where the consumer spending has to come from. Tax cuts or tax increases for the rich are irrelevant at this point. The rich have enjoyed their Bush tax cuts for 11 years now; if those tax cuts created jobs, we would have full employment instead of high employment, so please spare us the bullshit that we have to coddle the rich if we want jobs. As that was the justification for their tax breaks, we should make them repay those tax cuts, because they failed to deliver the promised jobs.
@52 Yeah, the Looney Right’s poster boy for gun rights is a child molester. The victim hasn’t been identified yet, the news only said she’s a relative; I wonder if she’s his sister. Too bad he wasn’t caught and locked away before he got his hands on a gun.
@ 60
Congress could pass a law enabling repatriation at lower taxation subject to the monies being used for job-creating purposes.
And what, pray tell, would be a “job-creating” purpose in this context? Investment in new plant and equipment? If that new plant and equipment actually automates some process that’s currently done manually, how would you characterize that as a “job-creating” purpose?
Got that? Jobs created by the companies with some of the money if they want it back now.
And how, pray tell, does one prevent this from becoming just another Solyndra?
The problems with jobs growth in this country have little to do with supply and a lot to do with aggregate demand. Providing firms with incentives to increase production isn’t a viable option when there isn’t enough demand for the products to support the increase in production.
That blog post could be the biggest bunch of horseshit I have read in a long long time.
@52
Sounds like a load of BS to me – just more character assassination and people trying to get their 15 mins of fame.
We will see what the courts say…
@71,
The courts said this
Alleged child murderer and admitted liar to the court, George Zimmerman, is also an alleged sexual molester.
Nobody.Could.Have.Predicted.
I see a whole lot of “alleged” in there.
If he is guilty, then its bullet to the head time.
If not, then so be it and let him live in peace.
All this BS talk outside of the courts is just pure noise, by people who dont have a clue.
In other #retroactive news today, Slick Willard M. Rmoney’s campaign released a new YouTube video ad, Political Payoffs and Middle Class Layoffs.
Perhaps you’ve seen it. No? Well now you never will. Seems the Slick Willard campaign was unaware that you can’t just appropriate the copyrighted material of others.
BMG Rights Management #retroactively retired the ad.
For those of you who have not yet had the opportunity to watch it and point and laugh, you can #retroactively enjoy the contemporaneous point and laugh over at BJ; New Romney Campaign Attack Ad Raises More Questions Than It Answers…
@73, Yeah. In our country you are innocent until proven guilty. Well, unless you are an unarmed black kid wearing a hoodie carrying Skittles and and iced tea and live near Zimmerman. Then you get popped in the chest by an admitted criminal liar.
More hilarity on Slick Willard Rmoney’s #retroactively retired ad, Political Payoffs and Middle Class Layoffs over at TPM.
Romney Camp Decries ‘Crony Capitalism,’ Can’t Name Single Ethics Reform To Stop It
Slick Willard Rmoney.
We really need to rewrite that headline. Something like:
Retail Sales Fall as Consumers Continue to Struggle To Find Places In Their Homes To Put All The Crap They Buy.
Or Maybe:
Retail Sales Fall as Consumers Discover That They Already Have Way More Stuff Than They Need.
Possibly: Analysts polled by Reuters Are Bat-Shit Insane.
Ha,ha, sounds like it should be on The Onion.
DEEP THOUGHT:
Rmoney’s bottom of the pack job creation record while governor of Massachusetts is better than his job creation record while being #retroactively retired at Bain Capital.
Team Obummer has a problem. GE outsourced 10,000 jobs and Obummer trumped Jefrey Immelt as his jobs CZAR. I documented it here on HA.
That’s gonna be great.
@77 You can never have too many stock shares. And you don’t have to store the stock certificates anymore, because everything is electronic now.
There are a couple of reasons why middle class families don’t have more stock. Too much “stuff” is one. Too much debt is another. But the biggest reason is because there’s no middle class anymore, only a debtor class. After decades of busting unions and pushing down wages, Republicans are amazed to discover their former customers no longer have the money to buy “stuff” from them anymore! Who could’ve foreseen that?!
“Less stuff, more stock” — that’s my motto. My idea of a good time is going shopping at the stock mall. Shares may all look to the same to you, but I can tell which are pretty and which are ugly. You just have to know what to look at! It’s called a “dividend check” and the bigger the better.
@80 Puddles,
Agreed! Immelt was a lousy choice to head Obama’s Job Council.
No SOB from one of these ‘global’ corporations should.
F*ck, Immelt’s head should be on a pike on Wall Street.
OWS!
noise….
I just read a fairly responsible piece of journalistic speculation about Obama’s “short list”. It doesn’t include the names frequently mentioned in the “news as entertainment” articles, such as Palin, Bachman, etc. It also doesn’t give any hint that Romney might be trying to create a “team of rivals”, by naming Newt, Cain, etc.
Only one woman made the list, the junior senator from New Hampshire who has held the office for less than two years. She seems smart, and seems to be what McCain was searching for, but didn’t get, when he named Palin. She might shave some points from Romney’s negatives with respect to the women’s vote. But the negatives for her is that she doesn’t ad any geographic diversity (both Romney and her representing New England states), and polling indicates she doesn’t up Romney’s chances of winning New Hampshire, much less any other state.
And that’s the problem. Of the dozen or so candidates mentioned (Pawenty, Christie, Rubio, and others), none seem likely to make a difference in their home state, much less nationally. In short, Romney has to choose between someone who can fire up the Tea-Party base (Rubio, Christie), but potentially lose him the election, or instead choose a quiet, steady candidate (Portman), who makes the ticket look like “boredom squared”.
Looks like he’s damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t. No matter whom he chooses, there will be lots of people who will point to that decision as being the lost opportunity of the campaign.
But in reality, it appears that Romney’s VP choice is really only an opportunity to make a mistake, with now positive upside. If Romney were considering his own campaign as an investment option for Baine Capital, he would consider it a “dog”.
Puddybud–
Romney is ropin’ the dope Obama.
Obama has gone hard negative waay too soon on issues Obama is so weak on…like job qualifications and working in the private sector actually creating jobs.
The loons on the left don’t even understand what Venture Capital is all about. It’s hysterical. Venture Capital firms help failing or highly under-capitalized businesses. The loons point to 22% of the Bain ventures failing. That’s actually a tremendous accomplishment.
Gee, how can taking risks and helping failing businesses succeed 78% of the time be thought of as a failure? Only when the idiot-in-chief truly believes private sector job creators didn’t do anything on there own. It was all the government that created the wealth!
obama has showed his true Marxist colors once again. That speech will be yet another poster campaign ad when Romney decides to take off the gloves. For now, let obama blow his wad and barely move the polls.
has anyone told obama the election isn’t until November?
rope the dope.
Private sector jobs created by obama==ZERO.
obama’s wealth–book about himself and his wife given a high salary job she was unqualified for.
@83 … drivel.
If thats how you wish to classify your post, then so be it.
roger rabbit says-
You are correct. People’s choices of stuff over investment has been a huge factor in the collapse of the middle class…especially when it’s stuff purchased with debt (future earnings). couldn’t have said it better myself.
Obummer has his outsourcing problem. What will Obummer and his minions say with this recent January 2011 announcement of Immelt. Remember GE paid no 2010 federal taxes while outsourcing… And Rahmbo deadfish Emanuel was there front and center!
And you libtards forgot!
Tsk tsk tsk!
@87 FUA-H. Look, Zimmerman clearly shot that kid and unless he strikes a plea bargain he’s going to do serious time in the state penn.
The prosecutor sought the testimony of that woman because the prosecutor thinks it is relevant to state of mind. Zimmerman’s lawyers argued that the testimony was not relevant and should not be released. The judge evaluated the arguments of both sides and ruled twice against Zimmerman’s plea.
Zimmerman is a lying scum. No, that’s not alleged he admitted to that ..in court.
Don’t y’all remember this GE Outsourcing activity?
No…
Well liberalism is a MENTAL DISORDER!
McCain’s 2008 oppo research file on Willard (R-Money) has been leaked..
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7858.....-Oppo-File
Comb for fun tidbits!
@92, Damn! How could that have happened? I thought Grampa Walnutz and his team luvved Slick Willard?
Page 11 McCain says
Oh! This is just GOLD!
Page 11
McCain says
A harsh punishment indeed for a member of a household of racists who just uh… robbed two parents of the life of their son..
Btw, I don’t believe firing squad is a legal means of execution in FL.
But those little niceties don’t seem to matter to asshats.
My computer’s back up. Vacation’s over, trolls! I can see the scar on my neighbor’s tree where the lightning bolt hit it.
Another Obummer friend Apple… Outsourcing the “i” in everything…
On Page 137 McCain says:
National Review’s Rich Lowry: Romney’s Conversion Story “Isn’t Very Compelling.”
“[Romney’s] accountof how he came to change his view on abortion – through the issue of stem-cell research – isn’t very compellingand he would probably be better off not talking about it at all. Fairly or not, people aren’t going to believe it.”
(RichLowry, “The Romney Speech,” National Review’s “The Corner” Blog,http://corner.nationalreview.com, 1/29/07)
Looks like the banksters finally succeeded in creating universal distrust of banks.
http://tinyurl.com/82fem7t
@82 – OWS bunch of rapists, thieves and hippies, and murderers. I don’t actually believe this, I just thought I’d say it because as established by Darryl it’s not biased or bigoted to say that.
Great battle fought here today, I give card to Roger Rabbit, even as he was at a crippled disadvantage.
But I hate to be the great optimist, I don’t think the economy is going to get better for many, many years, I don’t care who becomes president. I actually think it will get worse if Romney is elected, but that is my opinion. As Roger said, no middle class buying anything, and the fact that we don’t make anything anymore because we don’t want to pay for something made in America, no job needed to supply no demand. Bring on a Climate Change and things only get worse. We are doomed. Good Luck.
ahh, yes, we all knew YLBigot would chime with his usual “everything is about TEH RAYZE!”
If he’s guilty, then he is guilty – I dont give a fuck about his motivation, race related or otherwise.
too bad we cant line up the lazy fucks in society in front of a firing squad…something tells me you would be first in line.
@101 – scary when you read some of the people’s comments defending the banks and blaming the government. We are doomed. Bunch of stupid people out there.
@90
well now, sounds like MikeCubScout has access to all the court documents and has already tried the case and reached a judgement.
Whats next? you gonna tell us how you made $57 today on the stock market like the fool rabbit?
golf clap..
you mean having his brain flushed down the toilet 30 years ago?
I fully support globull worming: we need to thin the herd in the human race anyway – the lazy and the stupid gotta go!
bwahahahahahahhahh
@107, no, not really. You are what’s been flushed down the toilet for the last 30 years.
@108 – I agree, hopefully it will start in the Middle of the Country, like Kansas, Nebraska, the Idahos, Montana, and Wyoming. Those people do nothing but take up space. And Texas
ya, they do nothing, accept feed this country.
nice try, go back to home now…..
now now girlyman – dont get rogers brain confused with one of your shitty condoms…
@111 – feed the country? There will be no feeding going on.
@112 – no shitty condoms here, but it is unfortunate that your father fucked the wrong hole.
well fortunately he didnt take it up as habit and turn it into a “lifestyle”…
next……
@ 29
I expect we’ll be hearing much more about this in months to come:
[Stuff on territorial tax plans.]
Well, then, let’s start with an academic study on the subject:
‘Course the anti-intellectual right will dismiss this, but these are the same folks who have told me that, if I believe what the data is telling me, then I’ve lost touch with reality. It’s a topsy-turvy world, this world in which wingnuts live.
I would love to keep verbally slapping you around girlyman, but I have stuff to do…..
@115 – he probably should have, you probably have a bunch of siblings just as stupid as yourself. Is your daddy still without teeth?
@117 – don’t get hit by a lightning or a train.
“everything is about TEH RAYZE!”
The girl he molested said the family was racist but it’s interesting that you don’t care about the racism and you don’t care about an unarmed kid dying at a alleged racist’s hand.
You just care about your macho talking point about executing child molesters even though Zimmerman himself was probably a “child” when he started diddling the six year old girl.
It’s commendable that you disdain exploitation of the weaker by the stronger but so did this creep in his own twisted way:
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1026142720/tt1680114
Yes, that’s an actor playing him but read on if you dare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowtown_murders
@ 69
It’s legislation that would have to be drafted with bipartisan intent. It could take any agreed-upon form, I suppose. But if it doesn’t give corporations enough incentive to move the money, the money stays offshore. So, probably the Dems have to give some. The benefit to them is that the money IS taxable at some lower rate, so it’s more revenue flowing in and to whatever extent causing corporations to pay more tax dollars is important to Dems, they gain that.
As far as keeping the invested capital from becoming Solyndra, the big difference is that it’s PRIVATE capital, without government guarantees, which companies have the choice to repatriate, pay reduced taxes on, and then invest. Or not. Their choice.
If their choice becomes another Solyndra it is not wasted taxpayer dollars, it’s wasted shareholder dollars.
There’s a big difference.
Recall that Obama wanted some form of this. It was in SOTU. He probably still does but would be weakened if it looked like he caved. So, corporations hold the cards. Dems aren’t so far willing to play.
@106 Count Chocula,
Look, we get that you have the IQ of the contents of a filled colostomy bag.
If you had 2 dimes to rub together you’re just smart enough to have given money to Zimmerman.
Evidence of your being a lazy stupid F*ck:
“sounds like MikeCubScout has access to all the court documents”
Why, yes I do. How’d that happen?
Repeating, what I quoted to you @72 “Lester twice ruled against him.” The testimony of the George Zimmerman’s cousin alleging that the killer, George Zimmerman of an unarmed child, molested her for more than a decade will be used by the prosecution in the trial of the murder of an unarmed child.
Now, do yourself a service and STFU about the poor put upon killer of an unarmed child, George Zimmerman.
I was really looking forward to RR’s response to @ 88. Looks like instead he changed the subject @ 101.
@103
The people that got you into a mess are not the people to rely on to get you out of that mess.
We’re in a long-term contraction and both sides are saying and doing all sorts of stupid shit. We’ll come out the other side of this things in a decade or so and the nation will be a very different place when we do.
I’m on page 9 of McCain’s Oppo file of Romney and I’ve already lost count of Romney’s flip-flops and contradictions.
Here’s Hillary’s Oppo file on Obama from 2008:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.....k_page.png
@115 the idiot didn’t get what I was implying. The wrong hole was the vagina and the outcome of him.
You got to love the right wings admiration of being pro life when they have no respect for human life.
This morning we lowered our tracking of Q2 GDP growth from 1.7% to 1.4%. For some time now we have noted that our Q3 GDP call — which was already below consensus at 2.0% — had risks that were skewed to the downside.
After the latest round of data we have decided to lower our projection for Q3 to 1.5%.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/.....for-obama/
I tried to find a link that wasn’t a ‘right-wing echo chamber’, as Darryl put it, but the original info is behind some sort of paywall.
We’re at 1.4-1.7% growth at least for another year, and we’ll be at 8.2% unemployment and below natural population growth rate in job creation pretty much right up until election time.
On the bright side, the villain in the new Batman movie is called ‘Bane’, so Obama’s got that to work with. Who says all those trips to Hollywood didn’t pay off for The One?
I’m not a Geithner fan.
But this happened on his watch and it seems to have turned out well both for AIG and for the New York Fed.
(Reuters) – AIG has been repaid in full for the equity it contributed to Maiden Lane III, one of the entities created during the financial crisis to help rescue the insurer, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said on Monday.
In the weeks after AIG’s September 2008 near-collapse, the New York Fed created Maiden Lane III to buy collateralized debt obligations from AIG counterparties. The company contributed $5 billion and the bank put up $24.3 billion.
Last month, following a series of asset sales, the New York Fed loan was repaid. On Monday American International Group received its equity back, plus accrued interest. As of July 12, that amount was $5.56 billion, according to Fed data.
There still are assets left in Maiden Lane III and the NY Fed will get 2/3 of all future sales of them.
I’m sure Geithner deserves a lot of credit for how this has turned out.
JPMorgan was being generous.
Goldman Sachs cut its estimate to 1.1% growth.
How many months until it’s officially the Obama recession?
Nothings going to magically change around election time, regardless of who wins.
@ 131 Dim Bob,
How many months of low growth constitutes a recession?
More GOLD!
From page 127. McCain says
Update: Mitt #retroactively retired the Bain moniker “the KGB of consulting” in 1999.
and yet more GOLD!
From page 140. McCain says:
Slick Willard #retroactively came out against crony capitalism today in unspecified ways.
Which reminds me:
http://blogs.detroitnews.com/p.....jpg?9d7bd4
Meanwhile Libor. Geithner knew in 2007? Oh my! Kinda blows apart the crazed deranged databaze deala ylb’s screech! No wonder Obummer was so strongly for TARP Sept 2008!
“Who says all those trips to Hollywood didn’t pay off for The One?”
We can’t hide anything from you. The Bane character was added to the comic books in 1993. Christopher Nolan completed the story line in December 2008. It’s all part of the master plan to bring Islamo-socialism in the form of Sharia’ law to America, which The One conceived in 1961, while still in the womb, a few days before being birthed in a primative Kenyan hut. Clever bastard, huh? Or was that, “utterly incompetent”? Eh, whatever wingnut bullshit works for the moment, right, Bob?
@121
@ 69
It’s legislation that would have to be drafted with bipartisan intent. It could take any agreed-upon form, I suppose.
So the efficacy of this “law enabling repatriation at lower taxation subject to the monies being used for job-creating purposes,” derives from some bipartisan magic wand? Do you believe in unicorns as well?
But if it doesn’t give corporations enough incentive to move the money, the money stays offshore.
Really!? Gosh, one would never have guessed had you not said so. Exactly how would this legislation provide incentives to invest in enterprise that leads to job creation? Please, do try to explain this in terms of the fundamental economic forces involved.
As for my reference to Solyndra, I asked that specifically in the context of this statement:
Got that? Jobs created by the companies with some of the money if they want it back now.
That struck me as a rather declarative statement about the inevitability of job creation; all that’s necessary is for Congress to pass some magical law that makes it possible for firms to make profits where they currently don’t see a way to make profits with the cash they already have.
US corporations are already flush with cash and near-cash assets. Corporate profits have hit record levels the last three years. Why has this not resulted in an increase in employment? In the absence of an answer to that question, why would you believe that providing corporations with more domestic cash would magically result in new jobs?
The only thing that has even the possibility of working would involve exceedingly strict rules about the use of those funds; a set of rules so rigid and strict as to make any moral distinction between private and public funds a distinction without a difference; a set of rules so rigid and so strict that, for once, the word “socialism” could actually be used to accurately describe them; a set of rules so rigid and so strict that “bipartisan” would be impossible.
Hence, my question: do you believe in unicorns as well?
85. ev spews: “Puddybud – Romney is ropin’ the dope Obama.
Obama has gone hard negative waay too soon”
The cost of an early ad campaign intended to define your opponent? A few tens of millions.
Defining your opponent before he defines himself? Absolutely fucking priceless.
No wonder you whine about this in every thread. Your candidate has been defined, it’s over, and he is presently imploding, spending each day on defense. Your side’s talking heads and power brokers are taking up pitchforks and torches, they’re so damned pissed at your candidate’s incompetence. Your convention is going to be as much fun for you as going to a funeral. But it’ll be pass-the-popcorn time for everybody else. Heh. Sucks to be you, Klown. But I suspect you already knew that.
Tim Geithner and libor:
First, one wonders what Timothy Geithner might have done in addition to writing to the head of the Bank of England. Should Mr. Geithner have flown to London and shoved those recommendations down the fellow’s throat?
Second, is Puddy really complaining that the problem with LIBOR was a lack of government regulation? Really?! Will wonders never cease.
@73 “If he is guilty, then its bullet to the head time.”
Promise? I can already visualize what you rightwing fucks will be posting if he’s convicted. Which he will be; the only question is on what charge.
@123 “I was really looking forward to RR’s response to @ 88. Looks like instead he changed the subject @ 101.”
You seem not to comprehend that my comments @81 and @101 are connected. What’s missing from the stock market today is the middle-class investor. Having already been stripped of their retirement savings, they comprehend it’s a rigged game.
The moron uses a bloviating tool like Santelli..
Still can’t answer how the Libor is calculated. What a dumbass…
If that’s so why is he tied with Obummer with all that spending so far? The dial has barely moved.
Remember GE and Obummer. GE outsourced and Obummer loves him some Immelt. Oh yeah Obummer loves him some Apple too!
So sad so sad!
All you have to do is Google it moron.
Wait moron is too nice a term for your lunacy! Get a job fool! When is the last time you actually worked for a living? Wait… you were probably let go for lack of productiveness! Your databaze skillz surely suck! That’s a known fact!
See ya.
@140 “Should Mr. Geithner have flown to London and shoved those recommendations down the fellow’s throat?”
The answer would seem to be yes. It’s time to stop pussyfooting around with bankers. Line ’em up and shoot every tenth banker until they behave. Heh, just kidding, that’s an old Russian joke.
Yeah but progressives like Juan Gonzalez see it differently Roger DUMB Wabbit!
Yes, progressivism is a nasty activity!
Roger, honest statements like that are lost on Don Joe. He’s a leftist monetary moron!
@ 148
He’s a leftist monetary moron!
No, Puddy. “Leftist monetary” would be an oxymoron.
@147 WTF does that have to do with the stock market? It’s an entirely different subject. A legitimate one (except in your hands), but nevertheless, it has nothing to do with my comment that you quoted.
@145 We know how LIBOR is calculated. A cabal of bankers e-mail each other and say, “What do we want LIBOR to be today?” What these stupid fucks didn’t realize is that these kinds of e-mails always end up being read aloud in courtrooms to juries (civil and criminal).
@ 138
It’s not a belief in unicorns. It’s a belief that (probably not until after the election) there’s a shared interest in repatriation of the money. For the corporations, it’s money for anything from stock repurchases to shareholder dividends to acquisitions to expansion, subject to whatever agreement occurs. For the legislators it’s tax revenue at some level lower than is provided for if the money were repatriated under current Federal law, and there’s some way they can figure out to shoehorn job creation into the package. There’s something in it for both sides. How well it works, I suppose, would be based on how well the bill is written, just like anything else.
You might pose the unicorn question to The One. He’s the one who brought it up at SOTU, not me.
@ 139
The cost of an early ad campaign intended to define your opponent? A few tens of millions.
Actually, Obama has spent $100M since May on ads just in battleground states, 80% of it on negative ads for just that purpose. Worth it? We’ll see.
@136 Geithner is a Wall Street bankster and Obama is a Wall Street lackey. What did you expect? And the GOP’s solution to this is replacing Obama with a vulture capitalist? At least Obama believes in sharing the loot with the little people.
We learned today that Romney’s dad paid way more taxes and way more tithes to the Mormon Church than his son. The takeaway: Romney isn’t his dad.
@152 Yet another lame wingnut argument for the cockamamie idea that people with trainloads of money should be excused from paying taxes. Talk to me again about a tax holiday for corporations when I get one for my Social Security income.
@ 133
There’s a new definition of recession. Several months of slowdown, essentially, according to the NBER.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines recession as “a period of falling economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.”
So, it’s been a few months, and a couple more and we’re probably within the boundaries of a recession.
As an aside, using the newer definition of recession, the country was in recession at the time GWB43 took over from Clinton, as things had fallen from their peak in March, 2000.
That’s the tricky part with the new definition. We can apparently have a recession while the economy is still growing, if it transitions from growing nicely to growing, well, like it is right now. There just has to be a sustained decline from a better phase of economy.
Sorry, Barack.
@ 156
Talk to me again about a tax holiday for corporations when I get one for my Social Security income.
Er, you do. Your income isn’t taxed unless it’s above a certain level.
Oh, and your Social Security ‘income’ is money that’s paid back to you after you spent a career paying in. It’s payback more than it’s income.
That’s the way it ended up being practiced but the players weren’t supposed to collude like that.
Btw, the idiot Puddybud still hasn’t proved a damn thing about what Geithner knew and when he knew it.
Noooooo… The Banksters see themselves as businessmen running large enterprises. The Wall Street crowd considers Geithner a “regulator”.
Geithner is the guy on the other side of the table.
@ 152
It’s not a belief in unicorns.
You think it’s a good idea, but you can’t, for the life of you, describe exactly how it would actually work. If that’s not equivalent to a belief in unicorns, then what is?
You might pose the unicorn question to The One. He’s the one who brought it up at SOTU, not me.
“The One”? I’ve never seen an actual liberal deify Pres. Obama quite the way you wingnuts pretend. Part of that whole unicorn business, I guess.
More importantly, you started out, back in your comment at 29, referring to a news article about a “territorial tax system.” President Obama never proposed a territorial tax system, and has been consistently against the idea.
Since then, you’ve been all over the map, and the only thing you’ve managed to demonstrate is that you have almost no understanding of the nuances of a rather complicated policy issue.
Perhaps a little remedial study will help you out. Firms will not hire new employees unless hiring new employees will actually result in an increase in profits. Now, your homework question is: under what circumstances will hiring new employees result in an increase in profits?
@ 157
First of all, here’s the link to full discussion on the NBER web site. I have no idea who you’re quoting, but it’s not the NBER. Why don’t you provide a link?
Second, with a bit of added emphasis:
Your own source refers to “a period of falling economic activity”.
You said, “We can apparently have a recession while the economy is still growing.”
Wrong. A drop in the rate of growth is still an increase in overall economic activity. The rate of growth has to become negative before we can say that there’s been an actual drop in economic activity.
I must say, you do have a knack for tossing around terms and concepts that you really don’t understand. Is there a point when you’ll figure out just how ignorant you really are?
Everything Roger DUMB Wabbit… Progressives are not the champions of the middle class. They just want their votes to be in power.
No, the AP and others are proving it for all of us. I just stand back and read moronic twit ylb!
It’s your economy libtards. Deb Wasserman Schultz told us so in 2011. Live with it. Remember 2009 Obummer told us the recession was over. Live with it.
Progressives are not the champions of the middle class.
Right, ’cause liberal/progressive politicians kowtow to Juan Gonzales just like Republicans kowtow to Rush Limbaugh.
BTW, that’s “sarchasm.” No, that’s not misspelled. Sarchasm is the gap between the joke and Puddy’s ability to recognize it as such.
@ 162
Got it from NBER:
Business Cycle Dating Committee, National Bureau of Economic Research
July 17, 2003
This report is also available as a PDF file.
CAMBRIDGE July 17 — The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met yesterday. At its meeting, the committee determined that a trough in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in November 2001. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in March 2001 and the beginning of an expansion. The recession lasted 8 months, which is slightly less than average for recessions since World War II.
In determining that a trough occurred in November 2001, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity. Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began in that month. A recession is a period of falling economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. The trough marks the end of the declining phase and the start of the rising phase of the business cycle. Economic activity is typically below normal in the early stages of an expansion, and it sometimes remains so well into the expansion.
The link was through about.com but it’s off the NBER site.
It is a definition I have read before in several different pieces.
Sorry you are displeased with my lack of formality. This IS a blog, not a white paper. Does not diminish my point. We’re essentially on the cusp of a recession according to NBER definition.
@ 161
You think it’s a good idea, but you can’t, for the life of you, describe exactly how it would actually work.
We have US Senators and Representatives with the same problem in converting an idea to legislation.
It’s not my job to describe, exactly, how a concept would work, in practice. I need not prove myself to you.
There’s offshore money. Obama proposed coming up with a way to bring it back. He wasn’t specific either, and he’s closer to Congress than I am.
The mechanics of the legislation would be a tax rate low enough that corporations would repatriate but high enough that Dems don’t come off looking like they got rolled. That’s as specific as I need to be.
@ 167
The link was through about.com but it’s off the NBER site.
And, yet, still no link. You can copy and paste the text, but you haven’t figured out how to copy and paste the contents of the address bar?
July 17, 2003
If you follow my link @162, you’ll see that it’s dated September 20, 2010. Even if you are quoting the NBER, it’s clearly out of date. This after you’d said, “There’s a new definition of recession.”
Sorry you are displeased with my lack of formality.
It’s not your lack of “formality,” whatever the hell that means, You’re sloppy. You make consistent errors like, “We can apparently have a recession while the economy is still growing.” And, when pressed for evidence supporting your claims of fact, like, say, the number of Jobs bills passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives, you can’t be bothered to actually do the homework. You’re a typical Republican. To borrow a phrase that is purported to have been used in reference to Pres. George W. Bush, you’re all hat and no cattle.
Does not diminish my point. We’re essentially on the cusp of a recession according to NBER definition.
Except that you’ve demonstrated that you don’t really understand what the NBER definition actually means.
GDP growth has been anemic pretty much since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. You can see the data here. By your reasoning, we’ve been “on the cusp of a recession” for more than two years.
Sorry, but, “more than,” in my previous comment should be “nearly”.
@ 168
It’s not my job to describe, exactly, how a concept would work, in practice. I need not prove myself to you.
Except that the claim in question had to do with creating jobs:
Indeed, we were chastised for failing to support the policy idea on ideological grounds:
(Both statements taken from this comment: http://horsesass.org/?p=44743&.....15–I presume “Serial Conservative” and “bob” are different names for the same person, who, in all likelihood, uses two different computers and is too lazy to ensure that the screen names are the same.)
Now, if you want to chastise us for failing to support the policy idea given that you think the policy change would create jobs, then, yes, you really do have an obligation to explain exactly how this policy would actually achieve that objective. If you don’t, then your reproach is tantamount to chastising us for failing to believe that unicorns exist.
@ 169
By your reasoning, we’ve been “on the cusp of a recession” for more than two years.
2011 Q4 GDP 3.0%
2012 Q1 GDP 1.9%
2012 Q2 GDP 1.0 – 1.2%
http://www.calculatedriskblog......cking.html
By my ‘reasoning’, the above numbers indicate deceleration. Some estimates of Q3 are closer to 0.5% as a result of yesterday’s retail numbers.
If we end up with a downward trend between Q4 2011 and Q3 2012, I’d say that the NBER would likely term it a recession, although they won’t get around to it until December or so.
Q4 growth of 3.0% is not anemic. It’s at the upper end of sustainable without causing inflation. The anemia has been in 2012, and it’s hard to tie that to GWB43 after the end of the recession in mid-2009 and ’27 consecutive months of job growth’ as we have been reminded.
Obama owns this. His minions have said as much.
6/15/11 11:35 AM EDT
Democrats are ready to take responsibility for the state of the economy and they deserve credit for putting it on the right track, the party’s chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, said on Wednesday.
“We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place,” Wasserman Schultz told Mike Allen at POLITICO’s ‘Playbook Breakfast.’
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/s.....z20teFCFiW
By my ‘reasoning’, the above numbers indicate deceleration. Some estimates of Q3 are closer to 0.5% as a result of yesterday’s retail numbers.
We saw an even more pronounced deceleration from Q1/Q2 2010 and into Q1 2011 (source: NBER via FRED link posted in my comment @169). Why didn’t the NBER declare a recession then?
@ 169
You make consistent errors like, “We can apparently have a recession while the economy is still growing.” And, when pressed for evidence supporting your claims of fact, like, say, the number of Jobs bills passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives, you can’t be bothered to actually do the homework.
We CAN have a recession with a growing economy, according to NBER. It doesn’t have to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP anymore. It’s a bit of a paradox but it’s not my ‘error’. It’s a product of how they seem to choose to define a recession. 0.5% compared with 3.0%, over nearly a year, constitutes a downward trend, even if 0.5% is growth. Hence my statement. It’s not factually incorrect.
I’m under no obligation to ‘do the homework’ each and every time you make some demand. Realize that I’m in the minority here and a lot of others put me through my paces. I DO have a job, and a life away from HA. If I choose to respond to some but not others, it does not mean I am a slacker. What you call sloppiness I attribute to limited free time right now. Contrary to what some of the black-helicopter types around here allege, I’m not paid to be here, nor am I encouraged by anyone around me for being here and arguing alternative perspectives. I owe you nothing. Your demands border on silly.
Enjoy the sun, all.
Over the long run, we’re all going to be more prosperous if we live in a world where firms are allowed to locate work where it’s most efficient to locate it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/.....cord_.html
Note author.
Heh.
@ 173
We CAN have a recession with a growing economy, according to NBER. It doesn’t have to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP anymore.
You’re clearly not reading very carefully. The “two consecutive quarters” part is the part that’s changed. The “negative GDP growth” part hasn’t changed.
Why stop reading at the point you quoted? Try here:
And the reason Romney can’t actually run on his record? Because too many Republicans, you being a prime example, have their heads too far up their asses. If Romney runs on his actual record, he loses his base.
Rank and file Republicans are why this country is fucked up. Please take your head out of your ass. The rest of the country will thank you for it.
@ 175
You’re clearly not reading very carefully. The “two consecutive quarters” part is the part that’s changed. The “negative GDP growth” part hasn’t changed.
You are wrong.
Go to YOUR link @ 162. You won’t see any mention of negativity, just decline. Now, click the FAQ and read:
Q: The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER’s recession dating procedure?
A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. In 2001, for example, the recession did not include two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. In the recession beginning in December 2007 and ending in June 2009, real GDP declined in the first, third, and fourth quarters of 2008 and in the first quarter of 2009. The committee places real Gross Domestic Income on an equal footing with real GDP; real GDI declined for six consecutive quarters in the recent recession.
Q: Why doesn’t the committee accept the two-quarter definition?
A: The committee’s procedure for identifying turning points differs from the two-quarter rule in a number of ways. First, we do not identify economic activity solely with real GDP and real GDI, but use a range of other indicators as well. Second, we place considerable emphasis on monthly indicators in arriving at a monthly chronology. Third, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity. Recall that our definition includes the phrase, “a significant decline in activity.” Fourth, in examining the behavior of domestic production, we consider not only the conventional product-side GDP estimates, but also the conceptually equivalent income-side GDI estimates. The differences between these two sets of estimates were particularly evident in the recessions of 2001 and 2007-2009.
Bold emphasis is mine. A sustained decline can be a recession, if other factors support it. A change from 3.0% to 0.5% growth is a decline. Over four quarters it would be a sustained one.
I’ll acknowledge that the definition I used, somewhere above (I know, sloppy) isn’t the most up to date. Dunno when it changed because I think I read it only about a year ago. Maybe longer.
You should acknowledge that your insistence that negative growth is a requirement for a recession is incorrect.
@ 173
Contrary to what some of the black-helicopter types around here allege, I’m not paid to be here, nor am I encouraged by anyone around me for being here and arguing alternative perspectives. I owe you nothing. Your demands border on silly.
Now, this is funny. You want to be free to chastise us for not supporting your pet policy ideas, but me saying that you should be prepared to back that reproach up with some reasonably well thought out discussion of the policy details is just plain “silly”.
If you don’t like people pointing out your stupidity, then stop being stupid. To say that I’m being “silly” for calling you out for your stupidity only makes you look even more stupid.
@ 177
A change from 3.0% to 0.5% growth is a decline.
It’s a decline in the rate of GDP growth. It’s not a “a significant decline in activity.” The rate of growth has slowed, but the activity is still increasing.
Do you understand the difference? Do you understand the difference between “velocity” and “acceleration”?
@ 179
It’s not a “a significant decline in activity.”
Tell that to the 23 million who are employed to the extent that they would like to be employed.
You just jumped the shark.
@180
Tell that to the 23 million who are employed to the extent that they would like to be employed.
Why? They’re not here. You are, and you’ve clearly not understood what the NBER is saying.
You just jumped the shark.
Because, why? You say so? You were wrong. Be an adult, and admit your error. Don’t be a child and blame me for pointing it out to you.
Notice that the miserable dumbass doesn’t say what “the AP and others” have “proved”..
Sure sucks to be that silly shill Puddybud.