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Your view: Food Stamps and Unemployment

Do you believe Pelosi about Foodstamps and Unemployment?


  • Total voters
    23
It doesn't just randomly fall, aggregate demand can rise or fall based on these factors
Exchange Rates
Distribution of Income
Consumer expectations
Imports/Exports
Government fiscal policy.

Why did it fall so suddenly in this case?
 
And i would still like to make sure we have hammered out that the government get's the money it spends on unemployment benefits from holders of dollars who are seeking to invest those dollars.
 
gosh, you mean, someone had stimulated demand artificially high?


well gee, i suppose the only cure for that is to do it again. :lol:
 
Anecdotal evidence! You can find an opposing example of anything, but one example isn't statistically meaningful.

:doh Of course! How could I forget? Anything that doesn't match what everyone else is saying is of course "anecdotal" evidence. :doh What oh what was I thinking? Silly me. :roll:
 
explain to you how a piece of antecdotal evidence may not be a perfect match for the story nationwide?


my pay went up quite a bit this year; obviously the economy is booming!!!

Your pay raise is not directly linked to the economy. Amount of people recieving foodstamps and welfare offices are directly linked.
 
hey, i made like, 55K more this year than last year; and last year i only made about 30K. obviously everyone in the country saw a 300% rise in real income, yes?

of course it was linked to the economy; i'm part of the economy. i literally spent, invested, or gave away 100% of that money.
 
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We are talking about aggregate's here, aka macroeconomics, not micro.
 
Individual and corporate debt, and a lack of faith in the market for consumers.

we have always had individual and corporate debt. why should it all of a sudden cause a crash of such seismic proportions?
 
We are talking about aggregate's here, aka macroeconomics, not micro.

yes that was my point; kaalstangs' claim about his office is irrelevant.
 
we have always had individual and corporate debt. why should it all of a sudden cause a crash of such seismic proportions?

There was a ****load of individual and corporate debt, that's why :lol:
 
There was a ****load of individual and corporate debt, that's why :lol:

:lol: you said it. something had caused the amount of personal and corporate debt to skyrocket way out of historical proportion and far beyond our capability to continue to maintain.




now. two questions:
1. what was that something?
2. what was the debt for?

:)
 
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I can't help but notice this has turned into, let's indirectly try and make a guy feel like **** for needing some help in a tough time thread.

So I will chime in. I will likely be using a little food stamps when my baby is born as the past year I went through a tough time, and I am trying to save up a great deal of money. I believe this is a slight abuse of the system but, not as full blown as most people go, in fact only my fiance could get them and even that is very little, probably just enough to buy pop, shrimp and whatever else baller ass food we want. Maybe crab legs?

However I digress, as well as jest. In all seriousness I do not see her math in it but it is very true it obviously puts money back into the economy and I would say she is definitely playing a political game. As for unemployment I am unsure about it because it isn't like no one is getting unemployment anymore and democrats will play the same games Republicans do about taxes, only instead of it being "even though you make less than $50k we are going to make you think you are getting taxed more" to "Even though your ****ed we are going to make it look like you are totally ****ed and will get no unemployment whatsoever."

I personally plan on drawing unemployment though for a week during plant holiday shutdown. If I can do it I'm doing it, the employer pays into it so there is no cause for alarm.
 
gosh, you mean, someone had stimulated demand artificially high?


well gee, i suppose the only cure for that is to do it again. :lol:

It depends on how far you feel the economy should fall ( due to demand reduction). If you feel the negatives of having economic activity drop off a cliff are less then having government artificially sustain demand for a period of time, then you would feel that such action is not a good idea. In you calculation would you include potential social costs, rather then just purely economic ones though. Imagine if the government actually tried to balance the budget next year. You would see 33% of federal government spending being cut. Drastic cuts to the military, social security, and medicare would be in order. Along with any potential human costs from those actions. Not to mention an increase in the economic slowdown as demand drops off a cliff.
 
:lol: you said it. something had caused the amount of personal and corporate debt to skyrocket way out of historical proportion and far beyond our capability to continue to maintain.

now. what was that something? :)

The housing bubble.
 
It depends on how far you feel the economy should fall ( due to demand reduction).

:lol: yes, because if there is one thing that politicians are noted for, it's their maturity in accepting responsibility for falling economies.

If you feel the negatives of having economic activity drop off a cliff are less then having government artificially sustain demand for a period of time, then you would feel that such action is not a good idea. In you calculation would you include potential social costs, rather then just purely economic ones though. Imagine if the government actually tried to balance the budget next year. You would see 33% of federal government spending being cut. Drastic cuts to the military, social security, and medicare would be in order. Along with any potential human costs from those actions. Not to mention an increase in the economic slowdown as demand drops off a cliff.

well, let's see. what happened the last time in American history that the Federal government drastically cut spending and taxes in response to a recession?


oh, that's right; unemployment dropped rapidly and we saw amazing economic growth.


gosh, well, we don't want to repeat that again, now do we :)
 
:lol: you said it. something had caused the amount of personal and corporate debt to skyrocket way out of historical proportion and far beyond our capability to continue to maintain.




now. two questions:
1. what was that something?
2. what was the debt for?

:)

Idiocy was the cause, from the people taking on too much debt, governments taking on too much debt (Reagan admin, Bush2 and now Obama being the worst)

As for what the debt was for,

Homes people could not afford, cars they could not afford, new tvs they could not afford, wars they could not afford, expensive miltary fighter jets they could not afford, medical procedures they could not afford ( overall consumption they could not afford)
 
The housing bubble.

both questions (partially) answered in one: we had taken on amazing amounts of debt in order to buy ourselves a bunch of houses (and other consumer goods; get a second mortgage to take that vacation to the bahamas!) we couldn't afford. our demand was greater than our savings, and it passed our ability to continue to borrow to make up the difference.
 
Idiocy was the cause, from the people taking on too much debt, governments taking on too much debt (Reagan admin, Bush2 and now Obama being the worst)

As for what the debt was for,

Homes people could not afford, cars they could not afford, new tvs they could not afford, wars they could not afford, expensive miltary fighter jets they could not afford, medical procedures they could not afford ( overall consumption they could not afford)

and even that private consumption was fed nitrous oxide via government policy, on top of their own spending problems they helped turn the private sector into a nation of debtors too, did they not. ? :)
 
:lol: yes, because if there is one thing that politicians are noted for, it's their maturity in accepting responsibility for falling economies.



well, let's see. what happened the last time in American history that the Federal government drastically cut spending and taxes in response to a recession?


oh, that's right; unemployment dropped rapidly and we saw amazing economic growth.


gosh, well, we don't want to repeat that again, now do we :)

And which time was that?

Certainly not the Reagan admin. If spending was cut drastically federal government deb would not have increased as much as it did during his administration. Government debt is just as stimulative to the economy as private debt is. It is all good until the debt needs to be paid back of course
 
And which time was that?

Certainly not the Reagan admin.

absolutely not; reagan was betrayed by congress and didn't have either the strength or ability to stand up to them.

no, that was in the Harding and Coolidge administrations:

A depression not only harms millions of people. It leads to intense political pressure for more government spending, higher taxes and other assaults on economic liberty. So it’s important to get through a depression as quickly as possible. Which U.S. president ranks as the best depression fighter?

Not the fabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who came to power in 1933, since the Great Depression persisted until the federal government conscripted some 12 million men into the armed forces. Biographers and political historians hail FDR’s charismatic personality, his "Fireside Chats" and his political genius, but his tripling of taxes, his laws making it more expensive for employers to hire people, his anti-discounting laws, his large-scale destruction of food, the 700 industrial cartels he enforced, the monopolies he established, the frivolous antitrust lawsuits he authorized against big employers – these and other measures throttled recovery and prolonged unemployment averaging 17%.

America’s greatest depression fighter was Warren Gamaliel Harding. An Ohio senator when he was elected president in 1920, he followed Woodrow Wilson who got America into World War I, contributed to the deaths of 116,708 Americans, built up huge federal bureaucracies, imprisoned dissenters and incurred $25 billion of debt, for which he has been much praised by historians.

Harding inherited the mess, in particular the post-World War I depression – almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933, that FDR inherited and prolonged. Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, in their book Out of Work (1993), noted that the magnitude of the 1920 depression "exceeded that for the Great Depression of the following decade for several quarters." The estimated gross national product plunged 24% from $91.5 billion in 1920 to $69.6 billion in 1921. The number of unemployed people jumped from 2.1 million in 1920 to 4.9 million in 1921...

One of Harding’s campaign slogans was "less government in business," and it served him well. Harding embraced the advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and called for tax cuts in his first message to Congress, April 12, 1921. The highest taxes, on corporate revenues and "excess" profits, were to be cut. Personal income taxes were to be left as is, with a top rate of 8% of incomes above $4,000... Federal spending was cut from $6.3 billion in 1920 to $5 billion in 1921 and $3.2 billion in 1922. Federal taxes were cut from $6.6 billion in 1920 to $5.5 billion in 1921 and $4 billion in 1922. Harding’s policies started a trend. The low point for federal taxes was reached in 1924. For federal spending, in 1925. The federal government paid off debt, which had been $24.2 billion in 1920, and it continued to decline until 1930...

With Harding’s tax cuts, spending cuts and relatively non-interventionist economic policy, the gross national product rebounded to $74.1 billion in 1922. The number of unemployed fell to 2.8 million – a reported 6.7% of the labor force – in 1922. So, just a year and a half after Harding became president, the Roaring 20s were underway! The unemployment rate continued to decline, reaching a low of 1.8% in 1926 – an extraordinary feat. Since then, the unemployment rate has been lower only once in wartime (1944), and never in peacetime.

"The seven years from the autumn of 1922 to the autumn of 1929," wrote Vedder and Gallaway, "were arguably the brightest period in the economic history of the United States. Virtually all the measures of economic well-being suggested that the economy had reached new heights in terms of prosperity and the achievement of improvements in human welfare. Real gross national product increased every year, consumer prices were stable (as measured by the consumer price index), real wages rose as a consequence of productivity advance, stock prices tripled. Automobile production in 1929 was almost precisely double the level of 1922. It was in the twenties that Americans bought their first car, their first radio, made their first long-distance telephone call, took their first out-of-state vacation. This was the decade when America entered ‘the age of mass consumption.’"


Lord Tammerlain said:
If spending was cut drastically federal government deb would not have increased as much as it did during his administration. Government debt is just as stimulative to the economy as private debt is. It is all good until the debt needs to be paid back of course

a reporter once asked Keynes what happened in the long run when the government had to pay back all the massive debt it had incurred in his hairbrained schemes. John Maynard Keynes looked back and at him and replied that it didn't matter because "in the long run, we're all dead".

thanks, John. we here in the 21st century really appreciate that approach. :thumbs:
 
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and even that private consumption was fed nitrous oxide via government policy, on top of their own spending problems they helped turn the private sector into a nation of debtors too, did they not. ? :)

No one put a gun to the heads of the private sector saying borrow or I will kill you. They made their choices willingly, with just incentive from the fed (Greenspans fed by they way) that made borrowing an attractive propostion
 
No one put a gun to the heads of the private sector saying borrow or I will kill you. They made their choices willingly, with just incentive from the fed (Greenspans fed by they way) that made borrowing an attractive propostion

well it was hardly the fed tilting the market signals alone; but the government was altering the incentives pretty heavily there particularly in housing, was it not?
 
absolutely not; reagan was betrayed by congress and didn't have either the strength or ability to stand up to them.

no, that was in the Harding and Coolidge administrations:

Total debt levels in the US during the Harding and Coolidge admins was far lower then it is now, it of course was building up strong during their admins and reached a high a few years previous high a few years before.


Overall what we have here is a faluire to associate cause and effect

Cheap credit duriung the 20s leading to the great depression

Cheap credit during the 80-00's leading to the current economic crisis

Supply side economics tends to encourage debt increases through easy credit and as such is stimulative in the short run.


Now what major event followed their administrations (
 
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