Category: The Great Recession
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It’s A Kind Of Retirement…
Tell a liberal “the workforce participation rate is at an all time low”. Their conditioned response will be “it’s because people are retiring!” And there’s a grain of truth in that. It’s just that many of them are retiring 10, 20 or 40 years early.
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Deja No
If you weren’t around – at least in a cognitive way – in 1984, then you have no frame of reference. You’ve only been through so many downturns, and so many recoveries. There’s been one traditional rule of thumb; the harsher the downturn, the more dramatic the recovery. There’ve been two exceptions; the Great Depression…
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Chanting Points Memo: “It’s The Retirees, Stupid!”
Every month for the past couple of years, I’ve been pointing out the nearly constant decline in the Labor Force participation numbers. With unemployment taken out of the participation numbers, the actual share of people actually working in the economy today is as low as it’s been since they’ve been tracking the numbers. The left…
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This Is Your Obama Recovery: A Long December Edition
Job creation – early-week major-media triumphalism notwithstanding – sputtered last month. Five people left the work force for every job that was created; that – not “recovery” – is why the unemployment rate “dropped”. Why call it a “recovery” at all?
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The American Chilton © Manual
It was almost 20 years ago that Newt Gingrich earned his claim to fame, engineering one of the most radical turnarounds in the history of American politics; flipping Congress to the GOP for the first time since the Great Depression. And he did it using one of the most radical techniques in the history of politics;…
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Blight of Day
Is Detroit’s new-found cause célèbre ignoring the past to cloud the future? George Clooney had the Sudan. Bono has Africa. Anthony Bourdain – and much of the American media – apparently has Detroit. In recent months, the city of Detroit has witnessed two narratives arise in Phoenix-like fashion from the economic ashes of the city, often in…
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Dead Skunk Plop
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Not as many people are filing for bankruptcy, only about 1 million people a year, down from an average of 1.5 million that has remained fairly steady for the past 20 years. There are 300 million people in the whole country, 80 million of whom are children that can’t…
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Our Innumerate Overlords
When Representative Ryan Winkler talks, people listen. And then the smart people snicker. He tweeted this yesterday: My favorite point in this op-ed: low wages do not cause poverty. http://t.co/jBfXzKYSiF. Only an economist could be so enlightened. — Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) September 8, 2013 Of course, he had the point of the op-ed all wrong.…
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Chart Your Own Recovery!
How many jobs a month do we have to add to bring the level of employment back to pre-recession levels? How long will it take to get back to pre-recession employment at current – or any – rate of job “creation?” Check it out for yourself! Hint – at the current rate (169,000 a month,…
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Bleeding Slower
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Fewer people are applying for unemployment. So there must more jobs, right? Yes, the article says: “The job market has also improved over the past six months. Net job gains have averaged of 208,000 a month from November through April. That’s up from only 138,000 a month in the previous…
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Canaries In Coal Mines And All That
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: There are companies that buy, sell and trade gold (major banks and investment firms, generally). The actual gold bars are stored by Comex, which stands for Commodity Exchange, and is part of the New York Stock Exchange. Remember the Bruce Willis movie where the bad guys faked bombs in…
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This Is Your Obama Economy, April Edition
The topline number has all the mainstream media bobbleheads a-tingling; unemployment is “down to 7.6%”. It’s wind in sails, of course; the labor participation rate has dropped to 63.3%, the lowest it’s been in ten years of measuring, and the lowest it’s been so far in this recession. Which means the actual share of the…
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EMT for the 313
Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus “We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes.” – City of Detroit’s motto. Those words were written in 1805 to memorialize a Detroit school burned to the ground. 208 years later, Detroit still hopes for divine intervention, this time from the Michigan capitol. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s proclamation…
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Just Keep Repeating To Yourself…
…that raising taxes in a recession isn’t face-palmingly stupid: “In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February (month-to-date) sales are a total disaster,” wrote Murray in a February 12 email to executives. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my (about) 7 years with the company.” The recent hike…
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NPR’s Relentless Cheerleading Might Make You Presume…
…that there’s a booming recovery underway. Maybe it comes from the same place the Administration’s Benghazi statements did. Because this is not what recovery looks like.
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The Democrats’ Big Lie
You see it in Presidential statements, in Bill Clinton’s pro-Obama ad, and all over the place: “Deregulation and tax cuts are what got us into this mess in the first place”. It’s a Big Lie, and they’re repeating it over and over and over, in hopes that they can lop off not only the low-information…
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No, You Are Not Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago
Not a freaking chance in the world. Three years and seven months into the Obama administration, there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that we’re living through the worst presidential exercise of economic stewardship since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rabid progressivism known as the New Deal locked the Federal Reserve-created, Herbert Hoover-enhanced Great Depression into place for…
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Unintended Consequences, Part I
It was four years ago this summer that we first started trying to take stock of the City of St. Paul’s new “vacant building” policy. Under this policy – passed in the spring of 2008 by the St. Paul City Council, with little fanfare – vacant homes that have been classified as Category II (needs…
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This Is Your Obama Recovery: May Edition
The economy created fewer than 100,000 jobs this past month – and the numbers for March and April have been revised down, to boot – but in fact May’s labor force participation rate “jumped” from 63.6% to 63.8%. However, the unemployment rate – the percentage of those 63.8% of the workforce that’s trying to work…
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This Is Not What Recovery Looks Like
Unemployment is way way way back up in February, says Gallup: Unemployment in the U.S. rose to nine percent in mid-February, up from 8.3 percent a month earlier, according to a new Gallup survey. The polling company said this suggests that it is “premature” to assume the economy will not feature prominently in the 2012 election season.…