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Payroll employment increases by 321,000 in November; unemployment rate unchanged

like i said, i'm sure that 321,000 jobs is terrible somehow. just out of curiosity, how long have you been debunking job reports? i think i've noticed you in the monthly threads before, but i wanted to know a little more about your personal debunking history.

I suspect that a lot of people started doing this the first month that we had positive job growth after Obama took office.
 
If we divide a Trillion dollars by all of the jobs that this Administration claims that they have created with that stimulus... Then how much did each of these jobs actually end up costing the taxpayers per job?
The Obama stimulus act cost about $831 billion. Half of that was tax cuts. It is estimated that 1.6 million jobs were generated or maintained by the stimulus between 2009 and 2012.

If we mistakenly classify all of that spending as "going to jobs," we'd get $173,000 per year. Since it also went to infrastructure and other material goods, the spending is not all that bad.


How effective was the government with that redistribution?
Reasonably effective. Not perfect, but nothing is -- not even the most ruthlessly efficient private business is 100% effective.


Is it fair for the Administration to brag that these job number increases are a result of fundamentals enhanced by their superior economic policy decisions? Or should they just admit that these numbers were bought and paid for by the taxpayers?
1) The stimulus largely ended 2 years ago.
2) The administration doesn't credit November 2014 job numbers to the 2009 stimulus.
3) The numbers weren't "bought and paid for by taxpayers." In fact, public sector hiring went down for several years, and is well below 2007 numbers.


And how come no one is talking about how far these [inflated] job numbers are below the Administration's original projections?
Which projections?


Are the wonderful job numbers touted by the Administration the result of fundamental growth or are they marginalized by the expanding population growth and the resultant natural expansion of the jobs market?
Job numbers need to keep up with population. Population growth also didn't stop in 2007, and restart in Q4 2014.


When this Administration brags about all of these low level jobs being created, do they mention that most of them are going to those individuals that Obama is inviting across the open boarder?
Last I checked, undocumented immigrants aren't included in unemployment stats.

It also isn't clear these are all "low level jobs." From the BLS report:
• Professional and business services = 86,000 jobs, mostly high tech
• Retail = 50,000 jobs
• Health care = 29,000 including 7,000 doctors
• Manufacturing - 28,000 jobs
• Finance - 20,000 jobs
• Transportation = 17,000
• Food = 27,000

Sounds like a pretty good chunk of the added jobs are decent. They certainly aren't all low-wage, low-quality jobs.


Does anyone care that -- For Every One Job Added, Nearly 5 People Left the Workforce?
That statistic is rather out of date.

In January 2014, Jeff Sessions claimed 347,000 people left the workforce and 74,000 joined. He's ignoring how the average for a few years was closer to 200,000 per month, i.e. that December was on the low side.

That is certainly not the case now. The number of jobs created are about equal to those leaving -- including those who go to school, are disabled or retired. The number of discouraged workers didn't change in November, and labor force participation didn't change.

Nice try on the scare-mongering though.
 
like i said, i'm sure that 321,000 jobs is terrible somehow. just out of curiosity, how long have you been debunking job reports? i think i've noticed you in the monthly threads before, but i wanted to know a little more about your personal debunking history.

This jobs report is actually 1,060,000 better than the one six years ago when we were mired in a negative GDP swoon.

The debunkers as you call them will continue to be out in full force until Obama is gone.

Dems continue to lose the messaging war on every issue by not forcefully defending the these positive numbers
 
...
• Health care = 29,000 including 7,000 doctors

That's impossible. I had more than one conservative to tell me that all doctors were going to quit doctoring when Obamacare took effect.
 
...

Dems continue to lose the messaging war on every issue by not forcefully defending the these positive numbers

I agree, and that makes me wonder how they can be so incompetent.

Although there are slightly more people who identify with the dem part than the republican party, 90% of all the political facebook posts I see are made or "shared" by conservatives.

Are most liberals just too stupid to utilize the internet?

I also suspect that if dems became a little more propaganda savvy, they could destroy the reputation and trust in many conservative talking heads who have predicted all sorts of devistating consequences of liberal policies, that haven't come true.
 
I suspect that a lot of people started doing this the first month that we had positive job growth after Obama took office.

i'm simply stunned by this. next, you're going to tell me that the anti-war movement collapsed about the same time. there has to be some connection. let me think on it for a bit.
 
i'm simply stunned by this. next, you're going to tell me that the anti-war movement collapsed about the same time. there has to be some connection. let me think on it for a bit.

I didn't know that there was an anti-war movement.
 
like i said, i'm sure that 321,000 jobs is terrible somehow. just out of curiosity, how long have you been debunking job reports? i think i've noticed you in the monthly threads before, but i wanted to know a little more about your personal debunking history.

I look at the BLS report and if I see something fishy, I say something.

Last month, I saw nothing fishy (in that the details generally supported the headlines), so I said nothing.

Now, do I trust the government numbers are designed to give an accurate representation? No. I do NOT think they are flat out lying (for one thing, they are not that stupid). But I think they set up their statistical analysis to paint a generally rosier picture then actually exists...no matter which party is in power. Especially for unemployment and inflation and to a lesser extent, GDP.

But since they are all we have (outside of ADP and one or two other lesser sources), I have to go with them.
 
This jobs report is actually 1,060,000 better than the one six years ago when we were mired in a negative GDP swoon.

The debunkers as you call them will continue to be out in full force until Obama is gone.

Dems continue to lose the messaging war on every issue by not forcefully defending the these positive numbers

Dems have been losing the messaging war for a long time now. think about this : we're the only first world country where you can be bankrupted just because you got sick. the Dems couldn't even message well enough to get us a public option. and not only did the Republicans get the plan that their side designed, they also got to get angry enough about it to win two elections while trying to repeal it five thousand or so times. now THAT is something.
 
I look at the BLS report and if I see something fishy, I say something.

Last month, I saw nothing fishy (in that the details generally supported the headlines), so I said nothing.

Now, do I trust the government numbers are designed to give an accurate representation? No. I do NOT think they are flat out lying (for one thing, they are not that stupid). But I think they set up their statistical analysis to paint a generally rosier picture then actually exists...no matter which party is in power. Especially for unemployment and inflation and to a lesser extent, GDP.

But since they are all we have (outside of ADP and one or two other lesser sources), I have to go with them.

but were you debunking the monthly reports regularly on message boards in the mid 2000s?
 
I didn't know that there was an anti-war movement.

there isn't much of one now. it used to be all the rage, though. i wonder if it's because the president is a Democrat now.
 
but were you debunking the monthly reports regularly on message boards in the mid 2000s?

No.

My interest in them did not start until after the 'Great Recession'. Like most people (it seems), I took them at more-or-less face value up until then.


If your question really is - did I knock them when Bush was Prez? No.

But I think GW Bush (and Obama) was a horrific POTUS and that both parties are worse then useless.
 
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No.

My interest in them did not start until after the 'Great Recession'. Like most people (it seems), I took them at more-or-less face value up until then.


If your question really is - did I knock them when Bush was Prez? No.

But I think GW Bush (and Obama) was a horrific POTUS and that both parties are worse then useless.

yeah, it's been a while since the two party duopoly produced good results for the US.
 
Straight up, I studied economics during the mid to late 1980's when I was in college, never worked in that field and lost all interest until the Great Recession.

It was only due to a personal survival need that my interest became renewed. In the fall of 2008 I was trying to figure out how all of this was going to effect my business, and trying to come up with a strategy to survive.

If there was any good that came out of this recession, it's probably that a lot of people started to become interested in economics and politics, for the same reason that I did.
 
Are you saying this 4+ Trillion dollar pumping of money into our economy since Obama took office was Bush’s fault.
Reserves held by the Fed aren't "pumped into the economy." They're pretty much sitting there, not doing much of anything, except making it cheap to borrow. It won't hurt the economy or the government's balance sheet, unless someone orders the Fed to sell those bonds and assets at a major loss.


Oh Really. Is that because she has -all of a sudden- realized that all of her previous votes in favor of pumping were wrong?
Apparently, it's because she believes that QE is no longer necessary, and unlike her predecessors, focuses more on factors like unemployment, discouraged workers, time out of work force etc.


In some perverted way, I can see why a biased defender of this Administration’s economic policies would make such a fringe statement…
I'm pretty sure imagep isn't an Obama defender.


Obviously, QE has a major effect on our economy. That’s the reason behind doing it in the first place. Right? Can we agree on that much?
Yeah, not so much.

It makes borrowing cheaper, but it is arguable that this wound up helping the economy much. It seems like it's not doing much except feeding another data point to the already-frazzled brains of equity traders.


Assets flowing from QE onto the Fed's balance sheet are now the equivalent of one-fifth of US GDP. Meaning, the FED is pumping money into the economy by buying bonds and treasuries to falsely prop it up, artificially stimulate it, and buy down inflation.
lol

You do realize that people have spent years claiming that this type of Fed activity will cause hyperinflation, right? Just checking.


At some point the negative downside to QE will start to creep in as the Fed tries to ween the fake ‘propped up’ economy off of the endless supply of money that the Fed has been, in effect, electronically printing.
The negatives will really only kick in if politicians force the Fed to sell the reserve assets at a loss.


Example: One clearly visible side effect of QE is Market Growth, not built on fundamentals....
There is a little bit of that, mostly that corporations can use cheap credit for stock buybacks. At the same time, companies are seeing record profitability, which obviously has some effect on stock prices....


When the original QE ended, the market withdrew and it stymied growth in the entire economy.
Yeah, not so much. The correlation is not as strong as your oversimplified graph suggests. In particular there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between QE and GDP growth. GDP growth stalled during QE2, went up after QE2 ended, dropped in Q4 2013 for no reason connected to QE, and so forth.
 
like i said, i'm sure that 321,000 jobs is terrible somehow. just out of curiosity, how long have you been debunking job reports? i think i've noticed you in the monthly threads before, but i wanted to know a little more about your personal debunking history.

I'm guessing since about January, 2009. But that's just a WAG.
 
Reserves held by the Fed aren't "pumped into the economy." They're pretty much sitting there, not doing much of anything, except making it cheap to borrow. It won't hurt the economy or the government's balance sheet, unless someone orders the Fed to sell those bonds and assets at a major loss.



Apparently, it's because she believes that QE is no longer necessary, and unlike her predecessors, focuses more on factors like unemployment, discouraged workers, time out of work force etc.



I'm pretty sure imagep isn't an Obama defender.



Yeah, not so much.

It makes borrowing cheaper, but it is arguable that this wound up helping the economy much. It seems like it's not doing much except feeding another data point to the already-frazzled brains of equity traders.



lol

You do realize that people have spent years claiming that this type of Fed activity will cause hyperinflation, right? Just checking.



The negatives will really only kick in if politicians force the Fed to sell the reserve assets at a loss.



There is a little bit of that, mostly that corporations can use cheap credit for stock buybacks. At the same time, companies are seeing record profitability, which obviously has some effect on stock prices....



Yeah, not so much. The correlation is not as strong as your oversimplified graph suggests. In particular there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between QE and GDP growth. GDP growth stalled during QE2, went up after QE2 ended, dropped in Q4 2013 for no reason connected to QE, and so forth.



That massive stack of stagnant reserves is putting downward pressure on interest rates.

It will continue to put downward pressure on interest rates for the foreseeable future.

The aspect of QE that drives down interest rates is here to stay for years.

Thats because the Fed is stuck with their MBSs purchases.

IF the FED sold them off they would cause a spike in interest rates and lose hundreds of Billions on their MBS purchases.

If they hold onto them and allow these Securities to mature then they are setting themselves up for a huge loss when Interest rates inevitably rise on their own

Then again, these are GSE Securities. How does a Security with underlying assets in default mature ?
 
like i said, i'm sure that 321,000 jobs is terrible somehow. just out of curiosity, how long have you been debunking job reports? i think i've noticed you in the monthly threads before, but i wanted to know a little more about your personal debunking history.

They're not terrible for the people who have jobs, but they're not the type of jobs the economy needs.
 
I'm pretty sure imagep isn't an Obama defender.

I'm definately not an Obama supporter, didn't vote for him either time. I could write pages and pages about the things that he has screwed up.

However sometimes I find myself defending him against BS arguments and claims.
 
I generally have no opinion about labour organisation. If workers choose to organisation, they should. I don't always agree with their tactics.

yep, we pretty much agree about that. i am pro union, because it is a way to ensure better jobs. however, there is nuance in every issue.
 
yep, we pretty much agree about that. i am pro union, because it is a way to ensure better jobs. however, there is nuance in every issue.

It can ensure people who have jobs keep their jobs. Whether it can or can't equate to better jobs is debatable.The labour market today isn't the same labour market of the early 1900s. Workers increasingly find that they don't really need unions. Some workers don't have a choice in the matter, but the ones who do aren't organised
 
It can ensure people who have jobs keep their jobs. Whether it can or can't equate to better jobs is debatable.The labour market today isn't the same labour market of the early 1900s. Workers increasingly find that they don't really need unions. Some workers don't have a choice in the matter, but the ones who do aren't organised

my opinion : the pendulum has pretty much swung in the other direction, and in an economy that is increasingly post labor, the power is mostly in the hands of employers.
 
my opinion : the pendulum has pretty much swung in the other direction, and in an economy that is increasingly post labor, the power is mostly in the hands of employers.

When has the power not been in the hands of employers? For the most part, employers have most of the power; however, business is not a one way street. The power can absolutely be in the hands of employers if employees find themselves without any leverage. In the early industrialised economy, employers could have taken advantage of low wage work because the industry (for the most part) was very low skilled, as sophisticated machines performed most of the work. This dynamic isn't much different today, as most of the jobs being filled in this economy is low wage work that requires very little skill.

This is probably one of the reasons why union participation rates are at all time lows, not just in the United States, but all over the world (except in Scandinavia). Today's workplace is increasingly individualised. When you're in a union, your productivity and performance is judged as a whole group. As an individual, you are judged on your own merits.
 
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