oh hum, Obama doing the work. BENGHAZI!!!! Budget deficit on track for six-year low And the reality is, we’re witnessing deficit reduction at a truly remarkable clip. Every conservative complaint about fiscal recklessness and irresponsibility in the Obama era is completely divorced from reality.
That's great but the national debt is still at an all time high with a large portion of that happening under the Obama administration.
If I'm reading this right, the budget deficit for this year is going to be slightly larger than it was in 2008. Wasn't the deficit in 2008 a record at the time? How does this year's deficit compare to the federal deficit when then-Senator Obama said: I can certainly understand the attitude that this country has had more important issues than short-term budget deficits over the last five years, and I'm happy to see the downward trend, even if I would prefer it to be much faster. However, I think I'll pass on celebrating the fact that we're adding $450 billion in debt and committing ourselves to wasting an additional $12+ billion (we could fund NSF for two years on that!) per year to servicing this debt.
The President continues to do the work. January job gains show US recovery gaining greater strength WASHINGTON (AP) — A resurgent job market in January signaled that the U.S. economy is finally regaining the kind of strength typical of a healthy recovery — with hiring accelerating, wages rising and people who had given up their job hunts starting to look again. Freer-spending consumers and steady economic expansion have boosted hiring for the past three months to the most robust pace in 17 years. In January, employers added 257,000 jobs, after 329,000 in December and a sizzling 423,000 jobs in November, the government reported Friday. The November and December gains were much higher than the government had first estimated. ‘‘The labor market was about the last thing to recover from the Great Recession, and in the last six months it has picked up steam,’’ said Bill Hampel, chief economist at the Credit Union National Association. ‘‘The benefits for the middle class are now solidifying.’’ The average hourly wage rose 12 cents to $24.75 in January, a jump of 0.5 percent — the sharpest since 2008. In the past year, hourly pay, which has long been stagnant, has risen 2.2 percent. That’s well above inflation, which rose just 0.8 percent in 2014. The accelerating job and pay growth now make it more likely that the Federal Reserve will begin raising the short-term interest rate it controls by midyear. Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, predicts that the Fed will raise rates from record lows in June. ‘‘Employment growth is clearly on fire, and it is beginning to put upward pressure on wage growth,’’ Ashworth wrote in a research note. ‘‘The Fed can’t wait much longer in that environment, particularly not when interest rates are starting at near zero.’’ Indeed, investors responded to the better-than-expected figures by selling U.S. Treasurys, sending yields up, a sign that many think a Fed rate hike might be more imminent than they thought before. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.94 percent from 1.81 percent shortly before the jobs report was released. Stock investors appeared nervous about a Fed rate increase, which could pull down stock prices. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 60 points, or 0.3 percent, to 17,824. The unemployment rate rose last month to 5.7 percent from 5.6 percent. But that occurred for a good reason: More than 700,000 Americans — the most in six years — began looking for jobs. Not all of them found work, which swelled the number of unemployed. The influx of job hunters suggested that Americans have grown more confident about their prospects. Fueling the burst of hiring has been a pickup in economic growth and falling gas prices that offered Americans more money to spend. The economy expanded at a 4.8 percent annual rate during spring and summer, the fastest six-month pace in a decade, before slowing to a still-decent 2.6 percent pace in the final three months of 2014. There are now 3.2 million more Americans earning paychecks than there were 12 months ago. That additional cash tends to boost consumer spending, which drives about 70 percent of economic growth. Americans are feeling better about the economy. Consumer confidence jumped in January to its highest level in a decade, according to a survey by the University of Michigan. And consumers increased their spending during the final three months of last year at the fastest pace in nearly nine years. A more confident, free-spending consumer could lend a spark that had been missing for most of the 5½-year-old recovery. Americans have been largely holding the line on spending and trying to shrink debt loads. Signs that they’re poised to spend more have boosted optimism that the economy will expand over 3 percent this year for the first time in a decade. Companies that benefit most directly from consumer spending have ramped up hiring since the fall, when gas price savings began to pile up in Americans’ bank accounts. Retailers added 45,900 jobs in January, hotels and restaurants 37,100. Though jobs in those industries typically offer lower wages, companies have boosted pay as they have scrambled to fill openings. Hourly pay has risen 3 percent in the past year for retailers and 3.4 percent for hotel and restaurant employees. When the year began, 20 states raised their minimum wages, a trend that might have contributed to January’s sharp overall pay gain. Some companies, including Aetna and the Gap, have also announced wage increases for their lowest-paid employees. Construction companies have been a source of big job gains. They've added 308,000 jobs in the past 12 months, nearly 10 percent of the overall gain. Hiring is unlikely to remain at the blistering pace of the past three months, economists said, though it should stay solid. Mark Vitner, an economist at Wells Fargo, says shifts in how Americans shop might have given the job market a temporary lift. Online shopping has boosted warehousing, shipping and trucking jobs during the winter shopping season, Vitner said. The government tries to adjust for those seasonal changes, but its accuracy may be off, particularly because the trends are so recent. Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays, forecasts that monthly job growth will fall back to a still-healthy average of 225,000. That should lift wage gains to an annual rate of 3 percent by year’s end. ‘‘We do appear to have hit a new stride,’’ said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial.
Good news, mc mark, but I'm a bit confused. How can the US recovery be gaining strength when Obama was promising us 13 months ago that ending the extended unemployment benefits was going to send us back into a recession?
You are not a bit confused. You are a lot of confused. You think more of your party than the country.
Nobody said that at all. What Republicans did say would that it would cause mote people to work when in fact the opposite happened : the participation rate dropped, proximately caused by that refusal to extend benefits. And to refresh your memory, every positive bit of economic news for the last 6 years has been responded to by you and your republiBros with anger, pain, and tepid, plaintive reference to the participation rate not being high enough. Therefore I find mega awesome that the one initiative that they were able to actually enact (ui termination) had the erect of: lowering the participation rate.
What evidence do you have that I think more of "my party" (note: I'm not a Republican) than of my country? I am genuinely glad that the employment situation seems to be improving, and I wish it had happened earlier. I just find it incredibly convenient that mc mark wants to give all credit to Obama for continuing to "do the work" even though one of the biggest changes in the labor market in the past year was the ending of the extended unemployment benefits, something that Obama was categorically against, and which recent research (e.g., ) indicates may been a contributor to the improved employment picture.
Wow... Post of the day. Bush and his party drove this country like a freakin rent-a-car and handed off to Obama with a blown head gasket and low on gas. Bush and his party treated this country like a bunch of drunk college students partying in a hotel room and left a mess for Obama to clean up. Obama has done a great job on 'shyt detail' despite the resistance he meets...
So his ad hominem attack against me is the post of the day because Bush was a horrible president and you and he think Obama is making the best of a bad situation?
There has never been a 'perfect president' because you can't make all of the people happy all of the time. But considering the mess Obama was handed... He's been making chicken salad out of chicken shyt. And you people act like you would rather be eating chicken shyt. The alternative would have been John McCain... And if he would have won the presidency we would be eating chicken shyt and probably at war with North Korea or China. Conservatives like to elect war mongers for some reason to office.
The problem with this study, from my understanding, is that it can't explain the "why" - the authors admit this. The GOP argument has been that getting rid of benefits would force people to start looking for jobs, but that's not what happened in those states. Businesses started posting more jobs after the benefits expired, which doesn't necessarily make any sense from a causation perspective. What they did was compare the different states with different benefits levels. An alternative explanation for the results is that the benefits expired as the job market was picking up. The states with the longest benefits had the worst economic problems, so it would make at least some sense that they would get the biggest boost in jobs when things started improving. You'd see the results that the studied showed despite any lack of causation - but that's only one possible theory (that I just made up). I haven't seen any study that can explain the "why" of the results that the study showed. All that said, the extended unemployment benefits were intended to be temporary. Neither Obama nor congressional Dems really fought that hard to keep them this last time around, because I think everyone agreed it was probably time for them to go with the unemployment rate coming down so much. But they had to put up a show of a fight for political reasons. I still don't understand why they don't pass these kinds of things with automatic drawdown periods - automatically fade them out as the unemployment rate in each state goes down. That way, you don't ever have to vote to "extend" or "kill" them specifically.
Again with the "you people" or "your party" line of attack. I'm not a Republican or a conservative, and I didn't vote for John McCain, in large part because I agree with your assessment that we probably would be at war with NK (although I would have said Iran rather than China as second choice). It seems that your defense of Obama is that because things were worse when he took office than they are now, all criticism of his policy and approach is illegitimate, as if the only two paths we could possibly have traveled during the past six years were either the Obama path, or straight off a cliff.
Great post, Major. I particularly like your point in the last paragraph because I think it ties in really well to my original point. Obama's supporters have put him in a no-lose situation because they complain constantly about policies he might not really oppose (ending the extended unemployment benefits, the sequestration "cuts" he initially proposed and then signed) and continue to predict that they will lead to Armageddon, but then turn around and assign full credit to him even as improvements in the economy have correlated with (although as you note, not necessarily been caused by) these policies. When the economy improves "despite" sequestration or the ending of extended unemployment benefits or Congressional refusal to get on board with the latest Obama "middle class stimulus," we get to hear "just think of how much better things would be without Republican obstruction." This is, of course, impossible to improve. But whenever someone who opposes the Obama agenda dares to criticize any of his policies and suggests that things might have been better without them, we're called delusional because we can't prove the alternative scenario. The double standard is maddening.
I think this is true, but I think it works both ways. When there are bad economic numbers, the GOP blames Obama and his policies. When there are good ones, they say it was all despite Obama. Neither side doing it is at all constructive, but it seems be the reality we're stuck in, unfortunately. My favorite thought on this topic:
I have not read a substantial amount of your post to draw a conclusion of were you stand so my apologies with the 'You People' commit. My defense of Obama is because in my lifetime I can't remember a president being handed the ball with the country being in such bad shape and in a major war at the same time having to deal with growing radical groups. And considering McCain was the alternative _ I do think the path would have been straight off a cliff. And yea... I forgot about Iran. I threw in China because of McCain's fascination with invading Honk Kong.
ive seen a list of places and different countries mccain has said to bomb or invade it is substantial. i truly TRULY wish we could have a peak at this country if mccain had been running it for the last 6 years. i promise you it would be worse then where we are now. it pisses me of that some people cant see that.
