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11-11-2007, 11:19 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tpb
Regarding the IBD/TIPP Poll cited above:
This illustrates what I alluded to in my post above.
It is a matter of FACT that the economy is thriving, and that all levels of the population are benefitting from the boom. It is also a FACT that the tax cuts are at very least correlative, and very probably, causative of the economic boom.
Yet what are the views as expressed in the poll cited above? That a large segment of the population sees the economy as shaky and denies the benefit of tax cutting. How could this happen? It happens because the media is bias, not only on matters of opinion, but in spewing propaganda which is contrary to FACT--in plain words, LYING.
A poll like this may not mean much, but the same thing happens on election day. A lot of good normal people get hoodwinked by the media into voting contrary to their own views and core values. And without that media bias and this conning of voters, the left in this country, with its anti-American positions and policies, wouldn't have a chance.
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Sorry...but that is right wing pro-corporate welfare political bias...
Here's the economy and the american worker
The American economy | Slow road ahead | Economist.com
Quote:
EVERYONE knows that America's economy is slowing. Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble, overall GDP growth has fallen back sharply. The biggest short-term uncertainty for the world economy is whether American consumers stop spending and drag the country into recession. But beyond the business cycle, another slowdown has received scant attention. America's potential rate of growth—that is, the pace at which annual output can expand without pushing up inflation—is also falling. By some estimates, it could drop to 2.5% over the next few years, which would be the slowest pace in over a century.
If that happens, the consequences will be serious. Tax revenues will grow more slowly than expected. Monetary policy will become harder to manage: as the 1970s showed, inflation can get out of control if central bankers do not realise that an economy's speed limit has fallen. Financial markets will be disturbed as conventional wisdom adjusts from an assumption of 3-3.5% potential output growth, and investors downgrade their expectations.…
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And this was a year ago...
Online NewsHour: Conversation | U.S. Jobs Go Overseas | February 14, 2007 | PBS
How about the lack of good paying jobs to buy those expensive houses?
Quote:
GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States: I would suggest moving back, because I'm about to crank this sucker up.
PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: The president was visiting a Caterpillar plant in Illinois recently, trying to drum up support for accelerating free trade by having Congress grant him so-called fast-track authority to negotiate new tariff reductions.
GEORGE W. BUSH: It's a topic of hot debate. The temptation is to say, "Well, trade may not be worth it. Let's isolate ourselves. Let's protect ourselves."
PAUL SOLMAN: The president is talking about a growing tide of opposition from the Democratic Congress and new members, like Betty Sutton of Ohio, whose district is hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs.
THEA LEE, AFL-CIO: This is not hypothetical any more, 200,000 jobs lost since NAFTA.
PAUL SOLMAN: Urging Sutton to crack free trade down was Thea Lee, policy director of the AFL-CIO.
THEA LEE: We represent American workers, and that's always going to be our top concern, is looking after their jobs, their wages, their benefits.
Thea Lee
Thea Lee
AFL-CIO
When you think about, what are the national economic interests of the United States? And is it necessary for us to go down a path which causes greater income inequality and maybe more poverty at the bottom?
Distribution of benefits
PAUL SOLMAN: We recently interviewed Thea Lee at the union's headquarters in Washington.
THEA LEE: The basic argument is this, that the set of rules, the framework of rules that we've put in place here in the United States, but also through the global trading system, has been very lopsided.
It's been very good for protecting the interests and concerns of the multinational corporations, so that they can move their production, their jobs, around from country to country with very few obstacles. And it's not so good for the people left behind.
PAUL SOLMAN: But the world is more prosperous than it's ever been, and America is more prosperous than it's ever been.
THEA LEE: Almost all the benefits are going to the folks at the top, and increasingly at the very, very top, like the 0.1 percent of the top of the income distribution.
PAUL SOLMAN: But there are economists out there who, maybe not publicly, but would say what we used to say in high school, tough noogies. You can't preserve the past. And we're in a period in history where certain skills are rewarded, and if you don't have those skills, you get hurt, but that's how it works.
THEA LEE: But I don't think it's quite as simple as that. When you think about, what are the national economic interests of the United States? And is it necessary for us to go down a path which causes greater income inequality and maybe more poverty at the bottom?
I mean, we have more people in poverty than we did five years ago. And the median family income is lower, quite a bit lower, maybe more than $1,000 lower than it was five years ago. So it's not working for the majority of Americans.
Thea Lee
Thea Lee
AFL-CIO
The U.S. has been losing low-skilled jobs for decades now. Don't worry, say most economists. As those jobs go, higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs will be created, especially sophisticated new service jobs in which the US supposedly has an advantage.
New types of jobs?
PAUL SOLMAN: But isn't the stagnation of wages for most Americans perhaps a signal that they should be doing something different, that the jobs they're working at, the skills they've got, are not sufficient in the new global economy?
THEA LEE: These aren't people who are sitting around. They're retraining. They're fairly flexible. They're moving around when they need to, and yet they're still finding that they can't make ends meet.
PAUL SOLMAN: The U.S. has been losing low-skilled jobs for decades now. Don't worry, say most economists. As those jobs go, higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs will be created, especially sophisticated new service jobs in which the U.S. supposedly has an advantage. But recently...
THEA LEE: New kinds of services are tradable across borders that didn't used to be, things like legal research or...
PAUL SOLMAN: Reading x-rays.
THEA LEE: ... reading x-rays and so on. You're actually moving the bar as to which jobs are vulnerable to off-shoring up and up and up the income and education scale, until you're getting to folks who have advanced degrees and fairly high incomes.
And if you look at it this way, the U.S. is this wealthy, and the rest of the world is this poor, we could integrate our economies in a way that brought American wages down to Third World wages.
PAUL SOLMAN: Or at least get them up a little bit so...
THEA LEE: Yes, so that we meet down here. Or we could think about, what would it take to bring wages up? And maybe we should do it over a gradual period of time, so that we can build up the skills, in the rest of the world, and bring up their wages.
And one of the key issues, of course, for that is the worker-rights issue and the democracy and the human rights, that if the whole concept of globalization is for American companies to get cheap labor, we're going to end up down here.
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11-11-2007, 11:23 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Let's try American wages compared to the world...
Understanding globalization and the reduced wages in AMerica has never been grasped by the right..who listen to propaganda on the subject instead..
Globalization and American Wages: Today and Tomorrow
Quote:
Start with a couple of assumptions about the U.S. economy. Say that the labor force of the U.S. can be divided into workers (those who supply labor) and professionals (those who also supply additional skills, capital, and credentials). Assume further that there are just two sectors in the U.S. economy, call them apparel and aircraft. Workers and professionals can work in either sector. If this sounds unrealistic, remember that this is a story about what matters over a reasonably long period of time. While people obviously do not lose an apparel job on Monday and begin working at Boeing on Tuesday, in the relatively fluid American economy, people do switch across many economic sectors throughout their working lives.
Lastly, assume that producing each $1 of apparel takes a ratio of workers to professionals twice as high as producing each $1 of aircraft—that is, apparel is the more labor-intensive business.
Now, say that falling trade costs (a tariff cut for example) reduces the price of apparel imports. Since domestic producers must compete with imports, this means that the price of domestically produced apparel falls as well. Fewer domestic producers are then willing to make apparel, as falling prices make this a less attractive business. Imports rise to replace this lost domestic production. Lastly, and importantly, aircraft exports rise as domestic investment once ploughed into apparel looks for new opportunities and as U.S. trading partners’ greater specialization in apparel leads them to demand more aircraft from the U.S.
As domestic apparel production contracts, too many workers are displaced to be absorbed in the expanding aircraft sector at the going wage for workers. Remember that the ratio of workers to professionals was higher in the apparel sector, so each $1 of apparel production abandoned releases “too many” workers relative to professionals to be absorbed by a $1 increase in aircraft production. Even after absorbing all of the professionals released from the declining apparel sector, there will still be many former apparel workers not finding work in the aircraft sector at the going wage.
If these unemployed workers want a job, they must agree to a wage cut. Further, it is not just the unemployed labor that takes a wage cut—it is all workers economy-wide. Any incumbent worker in either aircraft or apparel not agreeing to this wage cut would be replaced with those unemployed workers. The process works in reverse for professionals, with the apparel sector not shedding enough of them at the going professional wage in order to meet the demands of the expanding aircraft sector. This imbalance bids up professional wages.
Essentially, by changing the structure of what an economy produces, globalization changes the relative demand for different kinds of labor, skill, and capital. In the example above, globalization pushed the domestic economy into demanding fewer workers and more professionals by tilting the structure of domestic production away from labor-intensive apparel and towards professional-intensive aircraft.
The most well-known outcome of this process is that the gross gains for professionals outweigh the gross losses of workers, hence the national economy sees net gains from trade.2 It is these net gains (which are much smaller than either the gross gains or gross losses) that constitute the argument in favor of global integration. However, it is (obviously) the gross losses that worry many workers about globalization, and this fear is utterly rational in light of economic theory.3
It should be noted that the (slim) majority of U.S. imports come from countries that are not that much poorer than the United States. This sort of trade (call it rich/rich trade) is not necessarily inequality-inducing in the way described above. However, a significant (and the fastest growing) portion of U.S. trade is with nations that are significantly poorer than the United States, and as such, the scenario sketched out above is (and should be) a real and growing concern to U.S. workers.
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And so it has been...cut backs in wages, benefits and the influx of illegals Bush has by keeping our borders unprotected allows the disparity between rich and poor to grow as the American middle class vanishes. |
11-11-2007, 11:24 AM
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Political Novice
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 9
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As a great man once said, "there you go again".
Consumer confidence is a matter of perception--which is strongly influenced by the left-biased media.
A weak dollar is by design, and is actually an economic good thing.
Outsourcing of jobs overseas also has done little or no harm, as unemployment is at historic lows in this country, and income and quality of jobs is generally better too. The world economy is integrative--meaning it's not like a pie where if somebody else's slice gets bigger, ours must get smaller. Rather, the pie keeps getting bigger and everybody benefits with more international trade.
Housing has NOT crashed. That also is a false perception which you and probably a lot of people buy into because of the propaganda spewed by the biased media. Housing SALES are down, not housing prices.
Despite an obvious increase in oil/gasoline prices and to a lesser extent food and other prices, inflation is extremely low and economic growth INCLUDING CONSUMERS' INCOME GROWTH is increasing at a much higher rate than inflation.
As you post illustrates, the crap put out by the media is wrong. The FACTS are that the economy is booming for virtually everybody--even though the biased media successfully convinces a lot of people otherwise.
Last edited by tpb; 11-11-2007 at 11:28 AM.
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11-11-2007, 11:25 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: May 2007
Location: "Cradle of the Civil War"
Posts: 2,119
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We're all biased, its whom your biased by.
__________________
"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." Thomas Jefferson
"The conservative movement has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement I grew up with." Pat Buchanan
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government"
Thomas Jefferson
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11-11-2007, 11:26 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,494
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Vanishing Middle Class
People's Weekly World - White-collar blues and the vanishing American dream
Quote:
Ehrenreich chastises the “blame the victim” philosophy that permeates career workshops, seminars, counseling, and job search literature. The line says that we are responsible for “everything that occurs to us,” and the unemployed are told that they need a winning or positive attitude. The author exclaims, “It seems mercilessly cruel to tell the people who have reached some kind of personal nadir that their problem is entirely of their own making.” This viewpoint, she adds, is very convenient for those with power who occupy the high-paying jobs. It is a “flattering way” to explain the success of the so-called winners while “invalidating the complaints of the losers.”
The above approach is used nearly everywhere that she went. On one occasion, Ehrenreich explains how persons came to a session prepared to blame their misfortunes on different factors such as the economy, inhumane corporate demands on their time, etc. They were steered away from such a discussion and thinking, and they were told, “It’s not the world that needs changing … it’s you” — the pro-corporate way of viewing their situation. “It is their fault, no one else’s.”
Ehrenreich discovered a rather ominous aspect of the modern job search — the active role played by fundamentalist religion. In recent years, there has been a massive growth in the overlap between business and religion, and thousands of businesses reportedly now have prayer groups and ministries. The author discovered that some churches were using networking events for the unemployed as opportunities for proselytizing. She concludes that maybe one of the functions of the religious revival sweeping America “is to conciliate people to an increasingly unreliable work world; you take what you can get, and praise the Lord for sending it along.”
Ehrenreich describes the futility and lack of return for most of her job search efforts. It is rare to even be contacted about a job. She laments about the “unshakable, godlike, magisterial indifference of the corporate world — that drives my fellow job-seekers to despair.” Finally, the author is offered a job, an insurance sales job with AFLAC, the company with the television commercials featuring an AFLAC-quacking duck. With the job, the insurance company offers the following: no salary, no benefits, no office, and no phones. She reports that AFLAC’s offer is somewhat standard for a “non-standard” employment market that employs over 30 percent of the American workforce. The author also reports that there are tens of thousands of jobs “like this available to corporate rejects and malcontents.” These jobs without benefits and with weak bonds to employers are being filled by a growing number of former corporate employees, managers, and professionals.
She finally throws in the towel after seven months and two job offers: AFLAC and a cosmetics firm. Ehrenreich describes herself as being “overwhelmed by a sense of futility,” and later learns that most of her fellow job seekers she had encountered gave up and settled for minimal survival jobs. And as the book describes it, a formerly upward mobile American middle-class continues its slide downward, and in many cases, into poverty-level existence.
In concluding, the author describes briefly what she learned from her experience and observes, “Something has happened that cuts deep into the social contract that holds us together.” Americans have been raised to believe that “hard work will be rewarded with comfort and security,” but this is no longer true. Many middle-class Americans are sinking into the ranks of those with lower income. Ehrenreich concludes, “If anyone can testify credibly to the disappearance of the American dream, it is the white-collar unemployed — the people who ‘played by the rules,’ ‘did everything right,’ and still ended up in ruin.”
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Destruction of the work ethic....from the employer standpoint. |
11-11-2007, 11:27 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,494
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Quote:
Originally Posted by basharp1
We're all biased, its whom your biased by.
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Not true...it's how you gather your data, it's how you look at what is happening in your area from all sources, including your eyes, and it's how you understand economic and government issues.
Not everyone is biased...some are self-educated and hold knowledge. |
11-11-2007, 11:28 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,494
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tpb
As a great man once said, "there you go again".
Consumer confidence is a matter of perception--which is strongly influenced by the left-biased media.
A weak dollar is by design, and is actually an economic good thing.
Housing has NOT crashed. That also is a false perception which you and probably a lot of people buy into because of the propaganda spewed by the biased media. Housing SALES are down, not housing prices.
Despite an obvious increase in oil/gasoline prices and to a lesser extent food and other prices, inflation is extremely low and economic growth INCLUDING CONSUMERS' INCOME GROWTH is increasing at a much higher rate than inflation.
As you post illustrates, the crap put out by the media is wrong. The FACTS are that the economy is booming for virtually everybody--even though the biased media successfully convinces a lot of people otherwise.
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Your sources? I see you talk the talk...how about information to back up your assertions? |
11-11-2007, 11:28 AM
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Political Mastermind
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,494
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tpb
As a great man once said, "there you go again".
Consumer confidence is a matter of perception--which is strongly influenced by the left-biased media.
A weak dollar is by design, and is actually an economic good thing.
Housing has NOT crashed. That also is a false perception which you and probably a lot of people buy into because of the propaganda spewed by the biased media. Housing SALES are down, not housing prices.
Despite an obvious increase in oil/gasoline prices and to a lesser extent food and other prices, inflation is extremely low and economic growth INCLUDING CONSUMERS' INCOME GROWTH is increasing at a much higher rate than inflation.
As you post illustrates, the crap put out by the media is wrong. The FACTS are that the economy is booming for virtually everybody--even though the biased media successfully convinces a lot of people otherwise.
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Oh, please.....you data for your assertions...is? |
11-11-2007, 11:32 AM
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Political Novice
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 9
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Which of my "assertions" are not eminently obvious?
Are you claiming housing prices are DOWN?
Are you claiming inflation is high or unemployment is not at historic lows?
These things have been in the news recently enough that there is no need for me to dig up the sources for you.
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11-11-2007, 04:01 PM
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Machiavelli Incarnate
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Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 10,405
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Quote:
Originally Posted by oceanbreeze
We quit watching the news back in 2000. If you can't see the media is brainwashing, good luck with life.
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So where do you get your news from?
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AMERICA LAND OF THE FREE HOME OF THE BRAVE--BECAUSE OF OUR CONSTITUTION.
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