Strong GOP economy? Robert Freeman buried that GOP claim in ink, paraphrased below:
Millions of people have dropped out of the workforce; heckuva no good jobs, but thanks for the low unemployment rate. Meanwhile, three million high-paying manufacturing jobs went to China, and most new American jobs were low-paying service positions.
The Dow may be over 12,000, but it only indexes 30 stocks. NASDAQ, which tracks a broader collection, is 55% below its high.
Gross domestic product has gone from 5.6% to 1.6% in the last three quarters. Hello recession.
The trade deficit is over $800 billion a year, double the last year of the Clinton administration. Bush has added $3 trillion to the national debt, and so the US has to borrow almost $3 billion a day to keep functioning, mostly from foreigners. When he leaves office, Bush’s administration will have created more debt than all previous presidents combined! Finally, he gets to be #1 in SOMETHING.
Of Bush’s $1.6 trillion in tax cuts, 70% went to the top 20% of earners; the bottom 40% got a heckuva 5%.
The economy has stayed afloat this far due to the complete fiscal irresponsibility of this administration. Combine $11 trillion in home mortgage debt with home prices just taking their biggest plunge in 35 years, and guess what’s at the end of the road? The open arms of the Bush Bankruptcy Act.
The savings rate has fallen below zero and income inequality is the greatest since just before the Great Depression.
And a direct quote from Mr. Freeman:
“Any moron borrowing almost $18 trillion in five years can fake the illusion of prosperity. But even at that, Bush can still barely even muster the illusion. The facade is popping rivets like the Titanic just before it went down.”
Aimee New
Gooding
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2 comments:
Hmmmmm...
"The latest U.S. employment data supports our prior view that the U.S. economy has slowed in recent months, but will continue to grow at a reasonable pace. At the same time, however, those economists who have been forecasting imminent U.S. recession took one in the chops.
October job gains came in slightly weaker-than-expected, with a rise of 92,000 net new jobs. HOWEVER, job gains of the two prior months were revised dramatically higher! August’s reported gain of 188,000 net new jobs was revised to a strong 230,000 rise, while September’s initially-reported (and puny) 51,000 net employment rise was TRIPLED to 148,000 net new jobs!
The average hourly wage rose 0.4% (six cents) to $16.91 hourly, a rise of 3.9% over the past 12 months…versus the 2.1% rise in consumer prices over the same period. The average workweek rose to 33.9 hours from 33.8 in September. While seemingly insignificant, the gain in hours worked equates to ANOTHER 430,000 new jobs!
The combination of 1) a tight 4.4% jobless rate, 2) the 3.9% rise in hourly wages, 3) substantially higher gains in average worker incomes during the past year when including bonuses, stock options, and benefits, and 4) a sharp slowing in recent productivity gains suggest the Fed will remain on hold for some time to come…
Cameron, read my post on how truthful this government is (has been) in reporting to the American people. Everyone in Washington knows we are facing a huge meltdown, yet the rosy promises continue.
Now try the Bureau of Economic Analysis:
Despite a rising stock market and strong profits, the income of the typical working family has fallen farther behind rising prices each year for the past five years. Since 2000, the median family headed by someone of working age (65 or less) has seen its income drop 5.4% after adjusting for inflation. This represents a loss of $3,000 in annual income.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average of the stock market has returned to the record heights it achieved in 2000, just before the bubble burst and a recession set in. But how important is the index to the average person? Fewer than half of Americans own any stock at all, and the richest 20% of the population owns 90% of all stock market wealth.
As usual, most of the growth in wealth is to the wealthiest. In 1962, the wealth among the richest 1% of the population was 125 times that of the median household. Today, that ratio has risen to 190.
One cause of the growth in inequality is the meteoric rise in CEO pay, from 71 times the pay of the average worker in 1979 to 262 times it in 2005.
A second cause is the uneven distribution of tax cuts since 2001. The cuts were advertised as “across the board,” but in the end they gave a much bigger boost to the after-tax income of the highest earners (especially the top 1%).
Adjusted for inflation, the median earnings of full-time workers have fallen since 2001, even after Bush’s second round of tax cuts in 2003 were supposed to have jolted the economy. Some claim that wages grow slowly because people are getting fringe benefits, particularly health insurance.
For the bottom 20% of the workforce, wages fell by 1.9% from 2004 to 2005, despite the fact that only 24% of these workers even receive health insurance.
In the corporate sector, the share of labor compensation (wages plus fringe benefits) in total corporate income has fallen by 5.6 percentage points, while profits increased 7.8 percentage points.
The percentage of children not covered by employer-provided health insurance has been growing for the past five years and has now risen to two out of every five.
Fewer employees receive health insurance through their employers now than in the past, as coverage has declined from 61.5% in 1989 to 58.9% in 2000 to 55.9% in 2004. Less well-known is the fact that those who still receive employer-provided coverage are now paying a larger share of those insurance costs than ever before. From 1992 to 2005, this share has risen from 14% to 22%.
One of the few props to a weak economy has been housing, but a slowdown in this sector that will retard job growth has commenced. Last year, housing could be credited for creating over 15% of the year’s new jobs; this year housing-related jobs will account for less than 5% of the economy’s new jobs.
There has also been some bragging about recent job creation and the current 'low' unemployment rate. However, (see Why people are so dissatisfied with today's economy), unemployment remains higher than the 4.0% in 2000 and today's unemployment is artificially low because of a major withdrawal from the labor force. Job creation in this recovery lags behind every other recovery, and the only wage growth in this decade was based on the momentum from the 1990s recovery. That wage growth petered out as the recession took hold and hasn't resumed more than four years into the recovery.
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