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Only 115,000 jobs added in April; unemployment rate dips to 8.1 percent

Hare said:
Oops, Completely misread J-Mac's statement, my fault entirely.
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:) hard to admit, and few do it on this forum - props. :thumbs:
 
You know - this whole thing has me stumped.

If it's been, what, 4 or 5 years of this unemployment spiral. . . and we've only regained a small portion of the jobs that were once lost - what about those who weren't even *of age* when things bottomed out: what are they doing?

Aside that those who are unemployed aren't finding employment . . . what are these 'new people' to the employment circles doing at age 22 / 26 (etc)
 
Aunt Spiker said:
You know - this whole thing has me stumped.

If it's been, what, 4 or 5 years of this unemployment spiral. . . and we've only regained a small portion of the jobs that were once lost - what about those who weren't even *of age* when things bottomed out: what are they doing?

Aside that those who are unemployed aren't finding employment . . . what are these 'new people' to the employment circles doing at age 22 / 26 (etc)
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They're likely applying their youthful energy to exhaustion for buyer's-market employers, and at the expense of people in their fifties who are thus forced to take "early retirement" before their IRAs have matured to ever be of real retirement value.
 
Aunt Spiker said:
You know - this whole thing has me stumped.

If it's been, what, 4 or 5 years of this unemployment spiral. . . and we've only regained a small portion of the jobs that were once lost - what about those who weren't even *of age* when things bottomed out: what are they doing?

Aside that those who are unemployed aren't finding employment . . . what are these 'new people' to the employment circles doing at age 22 / 26 (etc)
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We actually have not regained any lost jobs. We have only lost more. With new folks entering the work force, we have to look at breaking-even on jobs at about 130K new ones per month minimum. Looking at where we where when this recession started, we are now at about 11.4%. We got folks who quit looking for work, and who stopped making house payments a year or more ago, but haven't been tossed yet because the banks expect they will at least mow the yard.

We are nothing but a bigger house of cards than we were 4 years ago.
 
Aunt Spiker said:
You know - this whole thing has me stumped.

If it's been, what, 4 or 5 years of this unemployment spiral. . . and we've only regained a small portion of the jobs that were once lost - what about those who weren't even *of age* when things bottomed out: what are they doing?

Aside that those who are unemployed aren't finding employment . . . what are these 'new people' to the employment circles doing at age 22 / 26 (etc)
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well, lots of them are moving back in with mom and dad and either unemployed or working part time at McD's.

This adminsitration has dicked this recovery all up. :(
 
Eighty Deuce said:
We actually have not regained any lost jobs. We have only lost more. With new folks entering the work force, we have to look at breaking-even on jobs at about 130K new ones per month minimum. Looking at where we where when this recession started, we are now at about 11.4%. We got folks who quit looking for work, and who stopped making house payments a year or more ago, but haven't been tossed yet because the banks expect they will at least mow the yard.

We are nothing but a bigger house of cards than we were 4 years ago.
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If Liberals are lucky, Romney can win, and when the house of cards fall, they can blame it on him.
 
You can only laugh at the irony here

The only Job boom I'm aware of in this country right now is in North Dakota for the oil companies & Obama had nothing to do with this. In fact he's trying to kill it in several ways with his fascist EPA trying to regulate them out of business
 
Dittohead not! said:
Amazing, just amazing all of the right wingers who expect government to be the solution to the problem.
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I'm one of those "right wingers" who realizes that the government won't solve our problems.

Private enterprise is solving the real problem by moving jobs to China as fast as possible.

Once blue collar workers are willing to accept jobs paying 30 to 40 percent less, some of those jobs might come back to America.
 
cpwill said:
Reducing the portion of resources being funneled through less productive venues and moving them to more productive uses increases net productivity.

:) glad to help.
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Reducing the amount of government spending does not equate to an increase in private sector investment. Companies have to believe that boosting their productive capacities will equate to greater sales, and therefore revenue. As it stands, investors are paying a premium (meaning negative yields) to ensure their returns are guaranteed.

So do tell! Why would an investor be willing to accept a negative return when they can move their investments into industries that are far more productive (not that i expect you to be able to answer it objectively)?
 
johnny_rebson said:
I'm one of those "right wingers" who realizes that the government won't solve our problems.

Private enterprise is solving the real problem by moving jobs to China as fast as possible.

Once blue collar workers are willing to accept jobs paying 30 to 40 percent less, some of those jobs might come back to America.
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hahaha, no they wont. China will just devalue their currency by 30-40% more....

*cracks whip* ....boy
 
Aunt Spiker said:
You know - this whole thing has me stumped.
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:coffeepap

If it's been, what, 4 or 5 years of this unemployment spiral. . . and we've only regained a small portion of the jobs that were once lost - what about those who weren't even *of age* when things bottomed out: what are they doing?

Aside that those who are unemployed aren't finding employment . . . what are these 'new people' to the employment circles doing at age 22 / 26 (etc)
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cpwill said:
:doh

Resources being finite and having alternative potential uses, your post is Comprehension Fail.


Let me put it this way: let us say that in your gas tank, you put gasoline as prescribed by law, but also butter.
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Why would you put butter in the gas tank?

Now, let us pretend that your can can survive and run with the butter occasionally squirting through the pipes,
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OMG that makes no sense at all

but only so long as it remains below a certain critical mass.
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Is the butter radioactive?

Regardless of the cars' continued function,
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And only God knows what it is

it's efficiency will degrade as you increase the portion of the gas tank that you fill with butter, and its' efficiency will increase on the inverse.
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Well if it's radioactive you might blow up too if you add too much radioactive butter.
 
Kushinator said:
Reducing the amount of government spending does not equate to an increase in private sector investment.
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Good point. Since government derives it's wealth from magical money trees instead of removing it from the private sector in forms of taxation, borrowing, or inflation, wealth that the government does not spend will instead remain in the form of Golden Apples on the White House Lawn.

Companies have to believe that boosting their productive capacities will equate to greater sales, and therefore revenue. As it stands, investors are paying a premium (meaning negative yields) to ensure their returns are guaranteed.
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:shrug: depends on where they are at. Treasuries dipped net negative there for a while I think at the height of the crisis - and they probably will again when Southern Europe starts to slide and collapse. Certainly money-markets, cd's, and the like are below inflation, but then, that's not exactly where investors are storing all of their wealth.

So do tell! Why would an investor be willing to accept a negative return when they can move their investments into industries that are far more productive (not that i expect you to be able to answer it objectively)?
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Well, the willingness of investors to accept little to no return for security is not infinite. If an investor is willing to accept a real rate of return of (say) 0%, that does not mean that he will necessarily accept a real rate of return of -3%. Government debt being resources allocated to those portions of investment considered to be safest (though perhaps less since we got downgraded), those resources in the absence of being absorbed by government debt would be absorbed by the another investment considered to be on - par with the safety-for-return ratio. Except that this resultant increase in investment would push down return, thereby decreasing the investors willing to stay in it - pushing them on to the next higher level, which will degrade that return, and so on and so forth back up the pyramid.


Think of it as a pyramid of water, with the top couple of layers empty. The way to fill them is to simply push the water up out of the bottom layer.
 
cpwill said:
Well, the willingness of investors to accept little to no return for security is not infinite. If an investor is willing to accept a real rate of return of (say) 0%, that does not mean that he will necessarily accept a real rate of return of -3%. Government debt being resources allocated to those portions of investment considered to be safest (though perhaps less since we got downgraded)
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The last TIPS auction (5 year) resulted in a yield of -1.08%.

those resources in the absence of being absorbed by government debt would be absorbed by the another investment considered to be on - par with the safety-for-return ratio.
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Nope! It simply does not work like that. To base an argument around the notion of capital flowing as though it were in a vacuum displays naivety. In the absence of federal debt, and given our current economic situation (liquidity trap), we could expect excess investment capital to act as a catalyst to push interest rates down even further.

Remember, there is no instances of public debt crowding out private investment. If there were, we would be able to observe a rather dramatic increase in investment grade corporate debt yields.
 
Kushinator said:
The last TIPS auction (5 year) resulted in a yield of -1.08%.
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ah. I haven't been watching TIPS. Is that based off of current or projected inflation?

Nope! It simply does not work like that. To base an argument around the notion of capital flowing as though it were in a vacuum displays naivety.
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I know, I know, I keep forgetting... the magic money trees. I know.

In the absence of federal debt, and given our current economic situation (liquidity trap), we could expect excess investment capital to act as a catalyst to push interest rates down even further.
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really? goodness. that sounds almost exactly what I said up above. :)

absent the purchase of government debt, that capital will move instead to the private sector. investors around the world may be currently in a lower-risk posture, but they're not storing their cash in coin in a silo a'la Scrooge McDuck.

Remember, there is no instances of public debt crowding out private investment.
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:lamo

If there were, we would be able to observe a rather dramatic increase in investment grade corporate debt yields.
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Unless of course the flood into government debt was part of a general flight-to-safety :)
 
Blue_State said:
If Liberals are lucky, Romney can win, and when the house of cards fall, they can blame it on him.
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You just cited everything that is wrong with our government. Its all about how badly we can **** over the American people and who we can blame it on to get reelected. Viva
 
VanceMack said:
You just cited everything that is wrong with our government. Its all about how badly we can **** over the American people and who we can blame it on to get reelected. Viva
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I know. It is very sad. I want more parties involved in the process so it isn't so partisan.
 
cpwill said:
ah. I haven't been watching TIPS. Is that based off of current or projected inflation?
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:lamo

Really?

absent the purchase of government debt, that capital will move instead to the private sector.
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No, it will sit in reserves or in various money markets. With out a mechanism to put a hard floor to interest rates, they will move about as close to zero as one can imagine.

investors around the world may be currently in a lower-risk posture, but they're not storing their cash in coin in a silo a'la Scrooge McDuck.
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Which is a clear signal that government is not crowding out private investment.

Unless of course the flood into government debt was part of a general flight-to-safety
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You obviously do not understand what crowding out entails; from financial analysis of interest rates to end user investment sentiment, you really have no argument what-so-ever. Crowding out refers to expansionary fiscal policy that results in a rise in the real interest rate without an equilibrium increase that results in real output gains. When you begin to understand why a liquidity trap cannot be confused for crowding out, maybe then (and only then) you will be capable of having this discussion.

Until then....
 
Eighty Deuce said:
"Stimulus" was supposed to create private sector jobs. That's how Obama sold it. Not keep bloated state and federal governemnt payrolls intact.
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Firefighters, teachers and cops are bloated state payrolls? You do realize that the amount to federal agencies was really quite low?

He's either a liar, or a most incompetent jackass. As was the Democrat Congress that hoisted this giant turd on us.
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Okay, want to tell me how letting demand go off the cliff is good for the economy and jobs? Or will you cowardly flee from that like everyone before you?

I say that they are both liars and incompetent jackasses. And that those that support them do not care just so long as they get the gubmit teat to suckle.
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It's funny watching people like you complain about getting a tax cut.
 
OpportunityCost said:
The problem is the arena of deficit spending. We have been using it for so long its beginning to reach a no return point.
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Not quite yet. The problem with our deficit spending is we had a President and Congress who saw no need to stop deficit spending during the good years. Kenyes argued that deficit must end during good years to recoup the red ink. Bush and the GOP (and later Democrat) Congress saw no need for that. True, deficit spending boosted growth but it also boosted our deficit and debt. We've basically taken the bad parts of Kenysian economics and merged them with the bad parts of Supply Side.

I would argue every dollar the government taxes is a dollar that the provate sector can use more effectively and with better multipliers than the Fed. Using deficit spending to get around that economic reality is finally becoming untenable.
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I'd argue you're completely off your rocker. You are arguing that money spent on pet rocks, chia pets and nail salons are more effective then money spent on NASA, drug breakthroughs and applied materials research. Can the private sector use money better than the government on average? Yes. But can the private sector waste money on effectively useless **** that could better be used spent on research projects? Absolutely. Honestly, anyone who says that idiotic line to me has no understanding or history at all of what governments have produced in terms of wealth and commercially tangible products.

We have artificial demand propped up by government wages, programs because neither side of the aisle pays the least bit of attention to the Keynesian idea of cutting during boom and spending during bust, its spend no matter what the cycle is doing. That means we need to come up with another government spending model or just quit trying the one that is not working.
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That's probably true.

Are you suggesting that we should have been engaging in the Krugman school of thought that the stimulus should have been some monstrous 3 trillion dollar program? Because I dont think that would have passed politically on either side.
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No. As much as I dislike this notion, I think we should have actually enacted McCain's mortgage plan or something like it. Until we deal with the massive debt consumers have on their houses, we're going to see slow growth as consumers slowly deleverage. Virtually any amount of stimulus or tax cuts would have never worked when the issue is largely debt and reliable financing. It doesn't matter if the government spends $2 trillion on a stimulus program when companies cannot even get their lines of credit renewed for 30 days and when people cannot refinance their mortgages to reduce their debt. The ugly fact of modern capitalism is that it requires constant, reliable, predictable financing. Take that away and our economy is a falling house of cards. $2 trillion in spending won't fix that problem. This is why I mentioned the issue of direct lending as a "solution." That alleviates the issue of financing but in puts in place a far, far, far, far, far worse outcome down the road. The state essentially gets stuck with huge amounts of NPLs and the private sector gets addicted to cheap loans. That cannot keep going indefinitely as we're seeing in China and when it crashes, it will destroy your economy.
 
What I find interesting is that the ones that were complaining about extending federal unemployment insurance extensions are now the ones complaining that what they wished for is making the other guy look better now. Also find it funny that many conservatives believed the dip from the holidays was a short term thing, and the slide wouldn't continue.

Even if Obama were to somehow get unemployment down to 4%, real unemployment would hover to at least around 7%. A meaningful recovery is not a bubble that you can just let burst 8 years down the road. There are several other factors as well that play into this that no matter whom the president was and what they were doing the recovery would be slower than many had hoped for.
 
obvious Child said:
It should be obvious why it didn't create jobs. 1/3 was tax cuts which were relatively small. They failed to create jobs for the same reason Bush's 2008~2009 tax cuts didn't work: too small. Secondly, and more importantly, the rest of the money went as block grants to states to use for certain projects to which the states largely ignored. What states did was take federal money to fund their existing levels of spending which they couldn't do with their actual tax revenues. State spending for the most part stayed roughly flat. That alone saved millions of jobs. But it did not create jobs. States were largely able to escape the kind of layoffs the private sector saw because of stimulus money. We're seeing increases in layoffs in the public sector now primarily because stimulus money is drying up. The way the stimulus was structured makes sense why very few new jobs were created. But it makes sense why we didn't see massive job losses on top of what was already happening in 2009 and 2010. The stimulus essentially prevented a massive drop in demand. It didn't increase demand on top of baseline projections. It merely held it there. You don't create new jobs by keeping demand flat. But you do save a lot by keeping demand flat. What stimulus opponents fail (intentionally or simply due to being economically illiterate) is that without a stimulus, states would have resorted to massive cuts in 2009 at the same time the private sector was shedding jobs. The multiplier impact of that many direct job losses upon indirect spending would have been huge. Demand would literally go off the cliff. I've asked numerous people how they think demand going off a cliff is good for jobs and the economy and I have yet to get an answer. Heck I don't even get insults tossed at me. They just run.
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More than 90 percent of the jobs created by this plan will be in the private sector. They're not going to be make-work jobs, but jobs doing the work that America desperately needs done: jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, repairing our dangerously deficient dams and levees so that we don't face another Katrina.

Transcript: Obama takes questions on economy - CNN.com
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So did Obama lie, make a mis-statement or a false statement? Had he told the folks getting laid off in the private sector that they would be paying to keep government workers employed, what do you think was going to happen? Lose 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate? They figured it out. Government workers unemployment has remained 5% or less through the whole crash, in April 2011 it was 3.4% and in April 2012 it's 3.7%. It's why, along with Obamacare, the Democrats got hammered so bad in 2010. Private sector workers were losing their homes after getting laid off while our government spent our money keeping government workers employed. The opposite of what Obama promise while stumping for the spending bill. Republicans need 19 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate to have a 60% majority in both houses, enough to make a Capon out of Obama with the ability to override any veto should Obama get re-elected. Myself, I think it's going to happen. I live in So Cal where unemployment is still tipping the scales at 11.8% and over 11% statewide.

If we laid off enough government workers to match the private sector our tax burden would be greatly reduced allowing the economy to grow. Generally, you get about 1/3rd of what you were making on unemployment, that means for every government worker we lay off we can sustain 2 more on unemployment. Use the link above to see where we need jobs improvement.

China's economic growth eases

By Annalyn Censky July 13, 2011: 10:15 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- While China's economic growth remains far faster than that of Western nations, it eased slightly for the second quarter in a row.

China's economy grew at an annual pace of 9.5% between April and June, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday. That marks a slight slowdown from the first quarter, when GDP grew 9.7% year-over-year.

Overall, China's economy has cooled significantly since the first quarter of 2010 when it was barreling along at an 11.9% pace.

China GDP: Economy cools to 9.5% annual growth rate - Jul. 12, 2011
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The stimulus created demand for goods alright........in China! Look at the dates. I'm sure they appreciate it, but it didn't do much for us.
 
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