Posted on 04/12/2010 6:01:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown and the deep, long recession that followed, the decline of America has become the preferred intellectual preoccupation of the eliteleft, right, and center. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, has argued that the Obama administration's tepid response to the recession and the financial meltdown will sandbag the U.S. recovery. Historian Niall Ferguson has made the case that high debt and profligate spending will cause the downfall of a once mighty American empire. Harvard economist Ken Rogoff frets that the United States could become the next Greece. In January, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, once dubbed "l'Americain," delivered a blistering speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos that criticized the U.S.-led model of global capitalism.
SNIP SNIP
But the long-term decline of the U.S. economy has been greatly exaggerated. America is coming back stronger, better, and faster than nearly anyone expectedand faster than most of its international rivals. The Dow Jones industrial average, hovering near 11,000, is up 70 percent in the past year, and auto sales in the first quarter were up 16 percent from 2009. The economy added 162,000 jobs in March, including 17,000 in manufacturing. The dollar has gained strength, and the United States is back to its familiar position of lapping Europe and Japan in growth. Among large economies, only China, India, and Brazil are growing more rapidly than the United Statesand they're doing so off a much smaller base. If the U.S. economy grows at a 3.6 percent rate this year, as Macroeconomic Advisers projects, it'll create $513 billion in new economic activityequal to the GDP of Indonesia.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Happy days are here again...
I hope this “analyst” isn’t counting government jobs as employment.
I don’t know of any government job, save maybe something like NASA that actually creates any tangible wealth.
Anyone? Bueller?
Recovery bump for later..........
Bwawawawawawawawa! Write off bad debts. Really? Who did that? All that bad mortgage debt has been written off? Lord have mercy. The government has been printing overtime to prop up the bad debts and this clown thinks it has been written off.
He will either have to raise taxes, borrow more or monetize the debt (or some combination of all three).
Taxes will pull capital out of the economy at the very time it is needed most (a recovery both requires new capital for investment and usually creates it...but Obama's taxes will gobble it up just when it is needed most).
Additional borrowing and debt monetization will both shove interest rates up and that exerts a downward pressure on a economy (particularly when that economy is frail).
There is one other problem Obama poses for the economy...he is perceived (and rightly so) as being anti-business. This causes business managers and owners to be particularly cautious in their planning for growth. It is hard to plan when you don't know what new ideas Obama will try to implement but are confident that whatever they are, such new plans will not be good for business!
You are correct for not including a “barf alert” to this post. As with anything coming from Slate, the barf alert is a given...
The phony stock market rally is based on very low volume of stock traded...about 25% of the volume it once was.
You might be surprised to know that I am not entirely in disagreement with SLATE.
Compare the USA with most countries in the world ( even the so-called prosperous countries in Western Europe ) and you will see that we have it within us to recover from this recession.
And all signs point to an economy that is starting to pick itself up from the doldrums. This is DESPITE what this administration is doing.
So, I believe the economy will grow even with Obama’s damaging policies. But I will add two caveats :
1) It will grow MORE SLOWLY that what it would have because of all these business killing taxes, government control and regulations being added. But grow she will.;
2) Job growth will be VERY TAME. Don’t expect unemployment to reach the levels of what it was during the time of Bush, Clinton or Reagan. Which is BAD NEWS for the long term unemployed and for young people looking for work.
Precisely.
>>> Any comments on Post #15 above ?
I was for the economy before I was against it?
They are dumping the “Stimulus” money into Blue State budgets to keep them running. The Government is also hiring millions of people for temporary jobs, etc, in order to manipulate the employment statistics for the coming 2010 elections.
As far as the economy gaining based on Wall Street, Wall Street has been slowly increasing in total spite of what the actual economy has been doing. It fails to react to things that would have crashed the market in past years. What is missing are trade volumes. The market is merely based of the last few die hard traders and trade volumes is less than half of what it used to be and should be.
This is a completely false economy you are looking at through the media fog.
“I’m not familiar with Slate.
What are their leanings.........left, right, moderate, nonpartisan?”
Slate Editorial stance
Slate’s focus and editorial slant is politically liberal, as seen in choice of columnists, choice of and position on topics, and featured cartoon, Doonesbury. During the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, a significant majority of staff and contributors supported Democratic challenger John I’m “not familiar with Slate.
in 2008, Slate staff overwhelmingly favored
Democrat Barack Obama.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_%28magazine%29
Slate VotesObama wins this magazine in a rout.
Updated Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, at 2:23 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2203151/pagenum/all/
We’ve seen no such signs of a recovery around here. In fact, we’ve seen the exact opposite - everyone cutting back in the face of huge, continuing job losses, rising utility and tax rates, rising fuel costs and a pervasive fear of the future.
If the economy’s getting better, we sure as hell don’t see it.
There are now record numbers of kids still living at home with their parents when they should be out on their own.
They now include temporary work as if it were a full time career/job in their statistics, to make the numbers look better.
>>SeekAndFind wrote:
You might be surprised to know that I am not entirely in disagreement with SLATE.<<
(No surprise here.)
Sorry to hear that. What state and city do you live in ?
The reason I ask is economies also vary from region to region depending on state and local policies.
You can have the best President and Congress in Washington but still have state and local government that stinks.
Heck, even a great governor like Mitch Daniels can’t undo the stinkhole called Gary, Indiana.
Well then....there ya have it.
Thanx, hitting the “Slate Disregard” button...three, two, one.....boom.
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