as opposed to the conservative battlecry "yeah, corporations are making record profits, but they won't hire until obama is out!"?
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You can make money by investing, growing, expanding or... You can make money by cutting costs and expenses.
We have prolonged high unemployment just like the GD. "Vote Obama in 2012, things could be worse!" Once the double dip is apparent, the bottom will fall out of his polling.
Read an article on this unemployment rate that I thought was pretty interesting - because it went ahead and looked at where jobs were being gained/lost. Biggest gains? Mining/Professional services/Health Care Biggest loss? Government jobs. So I guess Obama shrinking the size of the government is now a bad thing.
I'm still waiting for "job creators" to do their "job creation" that Bush allowed them to do with his tax cuts. How can we have record unemployment when we have record low taxes? Surely we all know that such a thing can't happen.
A double dip caused by cutting off job creating initiatives and instead cutting spending to hurt the economy. That strategy failed in the 30's and it will fail again here. The American economy has been in denial for 30 years and is paying the price, and it's convenient to blame Obama in a obvious partisan attack. The truth is that the developing world offers more highly educated workers for less, and we've built a system that rewards companies for taking jobs and moving them over seas.
What got us out of the GD was not really government spending it was ww2. The fact the rest of the world got blown up and was in shambles from war and the US was in pretty good shape so we could make things the rest of the world wanted causing us to get out of the great depression. I think the stupidest thing done by many American companies was outsourcing. Take Dell for example. They started outsourcing their stuff to Asus. Slowly by slowly Asus started developing expertise in different areas and now well Asus will most likely put dell out of the business some day. Also low taxes don't necessarily help your UE situation. Look at Ireland with their tax loopholes. They have a 14% UE rate.
Tax cuts from 80% to 40% stimulates investment, but to cut from 38% to 35% just creates deficits. That's what Georgy did for us. That's what a guy like Perry will continue. Wait until we get a Republican in office, the real nightmare will be realized. The U.S. economy will be flat for another 30 years. At that point, India and China will have grown enough that their populations will want things like clean air and health insurance, and the cost of living will sky rocket there that they will want to make western level salaries and so forth. Then companies will come back to the U.S. But it will take a generation.
It was both Govt. Spending and WW2. Also a large part of WW2 was govt. spending. The facts are that govt. stimulus was working during the Great Depression, and when they cut it back, the depression got worse again.
This is what economies look like without any artificial booms creating wealth; no post war industrial boom, no dotcom technology boom, no low interest housing boom. I'm sure most of you are too young to remember the 'Stagflation' of the 70's when we went a decade without any growth in the general wealth. I would argue that the residual wealth that those booms did create trickled up to the wealthier stratas, those who could use their leverage during the booms to make huge profits and those who can squirrel away assets rather than spend them. Money has become locked up in investment accounts and is not circulating through the general economy. For this reason it makes sense to raise taxes on the wealthier classes, to spend on alternative energies, infrastructure and education. It makes US workers more competitive and gets money circulating again. Though we are in sort of a shale gas boom that's not enough to fuel the general economy, And you can't predict when or what the boom will be. What I would like to see is a boom in the productivity of American workers. If you could have an environment of low energy costs, ultra-efficiency from cutting edge technologies and an educated work force you might be able to save the middle class in the United States; and they would be spending consumers.
exactly, we are stuck in a stagnate period with no real growth in wealth. we made it worse by trying to create a housing economy based on debt. there is nothing politicians can do at this point until the economy reaches a new phase in growth
I'd be interested in seeing what would happen if the Austrians had their way, and just let cycles bottom out, if only because I think it would definitively shut them up about it. then again, people are crazy. 2008 onwards and there are still people fighting against derivative regulation? dear me oh my.
I think his point is that without the war, we would not have catapulted out of GD the way we did in history. So in that sense it was a condition that we can't replicate today. In fact, it's a condition we openly prevent today with our huge military budget and bases around the world. So I guess the moral of the story is to cut defense spending down to almost nothing, goad China into attacking all its neighbors, and we can start selling weapons to India, S. Korea, Japan, etc. to get out of this funk.
Even before we got into WW2 we were selling weapons to allies which boosted our economy. Other nations going to war basically created a stimulus. However if Hitler had decided not to invade Russia there is no guarantee the US would have won. Would the US really have used a nuke in Europe? In any case war is a terrible thing and rooting for war just to have stimulus would probably require some one like bush as president.
The economic cycle is man made. Of course the government can do something about it. If not why do we have countries that always have 10% unemployment whereas other countries have 5% unemployment?
