The MSM reports the U3 rate, but totally ignores the other five rates, particularly the U6 rate. And the MSM wonders why it continues to lose audience. Isn't it amazing how the true picture can emerge with just a little research?
But that's just my opinion.
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Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Arch Conservative
I'm sure when thousands of people get temporary seasonal jobs working at the mall for six dollars an hour King Barry and his merry band of court jesters will be singing the praises of his economic genius. Debbie Wasserman Schultz will probably have her ugly mug all over the boob tube talking about how great the economy is. [edited]
2 - Glenn Contrarian
Here goes ol' Warren again.
Again and again and again he points out the difference between the unemployment rate now and the unemployment rate when Obama took office.
Anyone with half a brain who had been paying attention would know that "when Obama took office" we were losing 700,000 jobs per month...and because Obama didn't snap his fingers and wave a wand to make it all better within two days what the previous occupant took eight years to screw up, well, THAT means that Obama's just worthless, don't it?
Obama faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression AND two wars when he took office, and has since dealt with the most obstructionist Congress since the Civil War...
...so gee whiz, why wasn't Obama able to get anything done?
He did, actually - because by August 2009 we were officially OUT of the recession. Here's some edjimication for you, Warren:
Again now, let’s step back and review the facts. Twenty-one months, straight, of private-sector job growth. This comes after eight million jobs lost in a recession that was in full blown when this president was sworn into office. A recession, that we now know, was contracting the economy, shrinking the economy by almost 9%, when he was taking office, when he was getting sworn in. The record since then has been one of stopping the bleeding, arresting the free-fall of our economy, preventing the second Great Depression in American history, and putting us back on a course towards economic growth and job creation. The problem, as you know, is the hole was so deep, that this recession caused and the job loss so significant that even though we’re now at nearly three million jobs created, private sector jobs created, since positive job growth began, that’s not nearly enough when you’ve lost eight million jobs in a terrible recession.
NOTE THE TWENTY-ONE STRAIGHT MONTHS OF PRIVATE-SECTOR GROWTH, Warren. The only significant losses we've had for nearly two years now is in the public sector - THAT, sir, is what's keeping the unemployment rate up!
THE CONSERVATIVES NOW HAVE MOST OF WHAT THEY'VE EVER WANTED - hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs have been cut, unions have been largely emasculated, our banking system is STILL largely deregulated (Dodd-Frank not being nearly what Glass-Steagal was), and under Obama Americans have had the lowest overall tax burdens in SIXTY YEARS - lower than under ANY Republican president since Hoover!
So...if conservative doctrine was right (deregulation, fewer public-sector jobs, lower taxes), then WHY isn't our economy booming? Could it be that conservative dogma is wrong?
Oh, no, NEVER could that be possible! Maybe it's, oh, no, it MUST be...there's DEMOCRATS in charge of the Senate and the White House - so it doesn't matter that the conservatives already have most of what they've always wanted, nothing will ever go right until they have EVERYTHING they ever wanted!
Just like Dubya had.
3 - Costello
Looks like more of Arch's trademark "wit" on display. [Personal attack deleted by Comments Editor] Can't wait to see what defenders race to support your misogyny
4 - Arch Conservative
Is it misogyny to say something ugly about Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann Costello? Of course not. That's just good fun huh. [Personal attack deleted by Comments Editor]
5 - Costello
Something that ugly, yes. I'd have fired that idiot drummer from Jimmy Fallon for his behavior. I'll bet $100, presuming you can even afford that much, you can't find me saying anything different. Put your money where your big mouth is.
6 - Glenn Contrarian
Arch -
So when I call Michelle Bachmann an idiot for making idiotic statements (which she has done MANY times), exactly how does that justify you calling Debbie Wassermann-Schulz a "f***ing c**t" and wishing her bodily harm?
7 - Cannonshop
"There are lies. There are Damned Lies.
And
There are Statistics."
-Samuel Clemens
Warren posted HIS statistics, and Glenn's posted HIS, and they're all too eager to call each other liars with 'em.
Neither one, of course, is willing to accept that the other might have information that alters the picture truthfully-but there you are, welcome to politics-as-a-sporting event.
I'm seeing two incomplete pictures that at first, look incompatible-I'd be fascinated to see what would happen if you stopped working from a pretext, took both sets of information, and examined them as a single whole, 'cause they're not actually contradictory.
You can HAVE grinding unemployment AND increases in GDP AND have listed increases in "Private sector Job growth"-it's one of those "Look at what jobs are growing", and it's also a bit of accepting the idea that while some areas of the economy are tanking, others are doing just fine, thanks.
Lemme put it another way: while the rest of the economy's been in the toilet for over two years now, Boeing's been hiring steadily, and we're building more airplanes now, than we were building before the sub-prime crisis hit. The money to build those planes HAS to be coming from somewhere-nobody but Uncle Sam ramps up production at a loss.
But, just because SOME sectors are doing well, it doesn't mean the rest of the system isn't tanking.
Also it might be worth something to check and see if that 21% job growth has crossed the line on job and labour losses from the initial crash and subsequent aftershocks.
(I don't have the answer to that, but at least hey, I admit it...)
There's a lot of exclusion in both sides of this argument, so let's try a new game-let's assume both Glenn, and Warren, are working from raw fact, and let's examine the raw facts they're using, not the spin, to see what the real picture really looks like...
8 - Glenn Contrarian
Cannonshop =
First Note:
I wrote recently that an economy based on libertarian economic philosophy - little regulation, little government interference, low taxes - CAN work...
...if we're willing to pay the price of having the kind of income inequality gap seen in most third-world nations (but NOT first-world nations). I had to explore the subject after seeing the Lamborghini and Maserati dealerships in Fort Bonifacio Global City here in Manila.
So please don't think that I'm so hidebound to Keynesian economics that I can't the benefits of other kinds of economic systems. Have you seen any other strongly partisan person on BC so willingly challenge their own cherished philosophy as I have (and I've done so more than once)?
I don't think you have. I'm not afraid to challenge my own beliefs and observations. I wish others would do the same.
Second Note:
The "lies, damned lies, and statistics" quote is tromped out every time difficult-to-refute statistics are presented. Be CAREFUL about depending on that quote so much that you miss the statistics that are really important.
Third Note:
I invite you, too, to tell us why it is our economy's not booming since we've cut hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs (during 21 consecutive months of private-sector growth), our banks are regulated FAR less than under at any time in the 50-odd years that Glass-Steagal was in effect, our unions are MUCH weaker than before, and the American taxpayer has a lower overall tax burden under Obama than at any other time in the past 60 years.
These are ALL cherished conservative goals, are they not?
The conservatives have always said this was the way to real prosperity, have they not?
So...WHY is our economy not booming, Cannonshop?
Hm?
9 - Cannonshop
Glenn, I have two years of junior college and no degree, work a blue-collar manufacturing job, and the best I can offer, is an admission that I don't have all the answers...
But I can take a stab at some of them.
First, we need to look at how the economy changed over the last forty years, from an economy that was focused on producing goods and selling them, to one focused on shuffling paper to create paper-profits. I suspect that's oen that falls into the "Boom" danger zone discussed in Hayek's writing, but as I'm not fully conversant with more than the bare bones on it, I can't be sure.
But I think, and it's only a Hypothetical now, that a big chunk of why the economy isn't booming overall, is that booms are short-term binges, with long-term consequences, and the consequences are either close to, or just past, the "Critical Mass" stage where it's no longer possible to hide them effeciently.
Think of it as a drunk, a functional drunk, living for years on "hair of the dog"-eventually the liver just kind of shuts down, esp. when all our hypothetical drunk's been consuming, are junk-food with only occasional, small, rare, healthy meals.
Now our hypothetical drunk, he's a bipolar SOB, but the habit pattern of BEING a drunk continues whether he's 'up' or 'down', get it? Doesn't matter if he's a conservative today, or a Liberal, he's doing the same unhealthy things, over and over again. Mortgaging the house for another bottle, say, selling off the tools in the garage to pay for a binge? Yeah, that fits, giving shit to his friends and picking fights too.
You like to bring up the high marginal tax era-but you seem to ignore the other factors that made it work-when the top rate was 90%, there were tax-breaks for domestic investments, like capitalizing small business ("Venture" capital investments), contributing to useful non-profits (Red Cross, for instance), and paying people to do work for you.
Most of those went before the rate was cut, the rest, as part of the deal that cut the rates.
Somewhere, moderation got tossed out. Same for so-called "free Trade", which also did not exist in that era, but has become a standard with BOTH parties of government since-with that focus, again, on paper profit.
Mnd that all this is hypothetical, but I think it's a start- just in the time I've been alive, our government's been paying industries to offshore, and providing a stick behind the carrot to drive them that direction-then using the wall-street gambling profits from papershuffling to show how the "GDP" has "Grown". I suspect it's a shell-game, we're in debt, the economic engine of the country's about three quarters dismantled and the parts sold off to fund booms scheduled to take place at or near election time.
Call it what it is: Socialism for the Rich, or "State Corporatism" (a polite term for Fascism).
Getting out of this is going to be tougher-in the 1980's, when you were a young man, according to some sources, 10-16% of college/university students were on a financial sector career path. That number jumped to over forty percent. We've had a couple generations of that, and it's been that bubble that's driven a lot of the problem, you can't have innovation when your best minds aren't studying the sciences, engineering, or medicine... and we've had a couple generations of that condition, with predictable results.
In terms of producing things of value that people want to buy, an MBA is pretty much a degee in useless knowledge, and our universities have been shitting them out by the basketful when what we needed were engineers, scientists, doctors...you know, people that know how to DO things.
I'm of the opinion that papershuffling is non-value-added, that a Service economy is a great way to starve, and that you only gain true wealth, by producing things of value to others-and derivatives or wall-street-betting aren't productive things to focus on.
Tracking with me here? It's going to take a LONG time to fix what's broken in our economy, Glenn, no magic bullet, no wave of the pen, is going to make it all better no matter HOW many times some blow-dried jackass stands in front of the Flag on a Podium and claims otherwise.
It's just a gut feeling mind you, but then, I'm not a demogogue when I don't want to be, I don't think the Parties have the answer-and I don't think the Government can do much to fix this either-it did a lot, imho, to break it, both in Democrat, and Republican hands, and if we let them, they'll fuck it up even WORSE, because the parties are tied to their platforms and their Ideologies and their Demogogues too much to be rational on their own, and they're both WAY too eager to try and bribe the populace with the long-emptied treasury.
Adn don't mistake me, I know damn well the Republicans have been doing it just as eagerly, and somewhat more disingenuously, than the Democrats have, they're both from the same pool of idiots that have bankrupted company after company and looted, defrauded, and destroyed investors.
It's just how they word the bonuses that changes.
10 - Arch Conservative
"So when I call Michelle Bachmann an idiot for making idiotic statements (which she has done MANY times), exactly how does that justify you calling Debbie Wassermann-Schulz a "f***ing c**t" and wishing her bodily harm?"
If you have to ask that question you obviously don't know who Debbie Wasserman Schultz is.
11 - Clavos
Have you seen any other strongly partisan person on BC so willingly challenge their own cherished philosophy as I have (and I've done so more than once)?
No, nor anyone so eager to, and adept at, blowing his own horn...
12 - roger nowosielski
... is this a case of (a) low blow(ing)?
13 - troll
...then WHY isn't our economy booming?
good question...here's what our renegade Keynsian says
14 - Baronius
"First, we need to look at how the economy changed over the last forty years, from an economy that was focused on producing goods and selling them, to one focused on shuffling paper to create paper-profits."
Cannon, I like your I-don't-have-all-the-answers approach. So let me flesh out this statement of yours. It's true that the US has shifted more toward a service economy, but there are a lot of caveats to that.
First of all, US agricultural and manufacturing output have increased over the last 40 years. The total number of employees is down, but we're producing more physical goods than ever before, if you ignore business cycles. This is particularly true in agriculture.
Secondly, service jobs aren't just pushing papers or flipping burgers. They include health care and education, two booming industries in which the US leads the world. Arts are in the service sector, and if you can stomach calling Hollywood movie-making "art", that's another important industry. And the financial world has suffered lately, but you've got to respect its size and scope.
Lastly, there are the little quirks in measuring manufacturing and services. Forty years ago, a manufacturing company had a mailroom and steno pool. They were all counted as manufacturing jobs. Now, Fed Ex and Kinko's take care of that. Specialization makes the services look bigger. And if you were publishing something on newsprint, you were manufacturing, but now you can publish 100x the information online, and you're in the service industry.
15 - Dr Dreadful
So Warren concludes that the MSM is spinning the unemployment figures. What momentous news. Somebody forgot to tell him that they've been doing so ever since they first decided that unemployment statistics were important.
Unsurprisingly, Warren then goes on to put his own spin on them.
16 - Igor
I was intrigued by Warren Beatty's (not the liberal actor) opening sentence, to whit:
"Yesterday (December 2, 2011) the MSM gleefully reported that the national unemployment rate for November was "only" 8.6 percent."
This is really scandalous! The whole MSM (the leftist bastards!) are lying, trivializing the 8.6 unemployment by characterizing it as "only" 8.6 percent. The filthy liars!
I wondered because IMO he was reading different media from me because I had NOT read anywhere that unemployment was "only" 8.6 percent, let alone everywhere, as the "MSM" usage would indicate.
Surely, I thought, since Warren used quote marks around "only" he must be quoting something he read. Since Warren didn't give a citation for his quote I did what any modern boy would do and plugged it into Google, and got about a page of stuff, not containing the modifier "only" until the BC article itself popped up, except for a comment in some other forum, namely,
Musclebuilder comment
But then going to the AP article itself it never said "only", the "only" seems to have been added by Mr. Hercules and then copied by Mr. Beatty.
What this tells me is that Warren Beatty (NOT the liberal actor), makes quotes up and is not to be believed.
Not only that, he doesn't even make up his own distortions. (He also appears to be a body builder, but I don't know what that means. Politically, anyhow. Maybe he's just a big Arnold fan.)
17 - Glenn Contrarian
Whooo...
I want to say 'good job, Igor', but I want to see Warren's reply first.
18 - Glenn Contrarian
Arch -
If you have to ask that question you obviously don't know who Debbie Wasserman Schultz is.
I do know who she is, and you're dodging the question...and everyone can see it.
I would call you a misogynist, but you obviously understand the logical pickle you put yourself in and you felt compelled to dodge the question since there was no right answer that would pull your fat out of the fire.
If I were in your position, I'd own up to having screwed up and I'd put it behind me. You'd find, Arch, that if you tried it, it becomes a lot easier to look at yourself in the mirror...because then you'd be holding yourself to the same standards you expect of other people.
19 - Igor
I'm interested if Warren Beatty (not the liberal actor) can produce something that says "only" in the MSM because I believe that the point of this article is that (1) the MSM is minimizing the unemployment rate to bias towards the administration, and (2) it's ridiculous to minimize the unemployment rate.
It looks to me like a classic strawman argument: first he falsely attributes a statement and then he demolishes it.
20 - Glenn Contrarian
Clavos -
No, nor anyone so eager to, and adept at, blowing his own horn...
Yes, I'm sanctimonious. Yes, I'm too proud in my humility. But unlike most people here, I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong, and I'm not afraid to publicly check my own beliefs when I see something that calls those beliefs into question.
I'd love to see others here hold themselves to the same standard. It seems that OAR does, and I've seen enough to say with confidence that Doc has the wherewithal to do so as well - but he's wiser and careful enough with his words that he doesn't need to go blowing his own horn as I have. I should learn from him....
But do you? You have real integrity - I've pointed it out in your defense several times when others questioned your integrity - but integrity involves sticking to one's ideals, and insisting on doing what one is supposed to do.
Right?
But it's a different matter altogether to call your own ideals into question, to check to see if what you're doing is really what you should be doing.
I made the radical change from a strong conservative to a progressive liberal because I saw things that made me question my ideals...but I would be a base hypocrite if I no longer challenged my ideals whenever I see anything that calls those ideals into question.
Clavos, you have integrity and you have my respect - you know that. But I'm also asking you to challenge your ideals, and challenge yourself. When you read this, you'll probably just blow it off with a snort...but who knows? Maybe sometime when you're enjoying a quiet beer by yourself, lost in thought in the dark of night...just maybe.
21 - One American's Rant
Glenn,
I would blush if I knew the emoticon for that.
I don't really have anything to add here, except a quote from Wierd At in Amish Paradise - "I'm a million times as humble as thou art."
22 - Christopher Rose
Glenn - "I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong, and I'm not afraid to publicly check my own beliefs when I see something that calls those beliefs into question."
You forget, as always, to add the caveat that the above is only true when you are able to accept "something that calls those beliefs into question". On many points you are just simply unable to accept contradictory data, so your posture is just that, a pose.
I don't think you are more intellectually honest than others here, in fact I would say less than many, plus which you are so fucking proud of your empty posture it is just a little bit nauseating...
23 - Cannonshop
#14 Except that if you want a good doctor, Baronius, you better hope for the Pakistani, Chinese, or Indian Immigrant, if you want a good education, you're pretty much stuck looking offshore there too.
And the same for engineers.
and that's the key problem only now being noticed-they offshored manufacturing first, but it's also cheaper to hire those support folks-the tech support, engineering guys, etc. overseas.
It's that old saw, Baronius:
"A company that is willing to go to the ends of the earth for their people, will generally find they cost 10% of Americans, and do a better job."
ESPECIALLY in the service-sectors you mentioned.
Flat out, Baronius, we have a PROBLEM in this country-and if it doesn't get fixed, we're NEVER getting out of this hole, and all the statistical tap-dancing in the world isn't going to fix it.
24 - Glenn Contrarian
Chris -
Exactly how many articles have you written that called your own beliefs into question?
Let me guess: none.
Whereas just a couple weeks ago I did submit an article calling my own beliefs into question, and admitted that yes, an economy based on libertarian principles CAN work and CAN accomplish things that more socialized economies can.
Tell me, Chris - how many strong liberals would not only say such things, but even offer up unasked things that no progressive liberal would normally consider in the realm of possibility?
Not many at all...just as there are precious few conservatives who would sit back and write about how much good Medicare has done for the nation.
Chris, I get that you despise me (you'll probably deny it, but your tone and behavior say otherwise)...because you apparently can't conceive that YES, I just might be that intellectually honest. You're so busy thinking the worst, and by doing so you're clouding your own judgment.
25 - Christopher Rose
Glenn, how many articles that called your own beliefs into question and were interesting to read have you written?
Let me tell you: none.
I've no idea how many strong liberals would say such things, nor do I care.
And, no, I don't despise you, although you will presumably refuse to accept such information as it clashes with your belief.
I get that you think you are intellectually honest, but that isn't a judgement one can easily make about oneself and my experience is that you think you are but actually aren't.
I don't think the worst of anybody, I just try to take things as best I can understand them for what they are, not what they claim to be.
I'm fairly confident that here I'm not the one with the clouded judgement...