From Stark
As the pulse of the U.S. economy quickens a bit, the reelection prospects for Barack Obama seem to be brightening too.
Here’s a report from the Los Angeles Times, suggesting that the improvement in the jobs picture, plus the mud-wrestling among GOP presidential candidates, is pushing Obama’s poll ratings well above their lows.
But Obama himself notes that the economic story will have some twists and turns before Election Day, and prosperity as we once defined it seems pretty far out of reach.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingerich appears eager to carry the mud-wrestling match into the next round. That’s not my opinion: It comes from Dick Armey, a prominent former Republican member of Congress. Over the weekend, Armey said Ginerich has been “taking a second-rate campaign into a first-rate vendetta” against Mitt Romney.
Politico provides a film clip of Armey’s comments.
Has anyone else noticed how the GOP candidates have scrambled to outdo one another in showing contempt for the “bailout” that headed off the collapse of the U.S. auto industry–even though that bailout began in the waning days of the Bush administration? People in the auto manufacturing states have noticed. Here’s a column from David Kolb at the Muskegon Chronicle.
The Democrats are going to stress this issue in the months ahead. The rhetoric required to win the South Carolina primary could come back to haunt the Republican Party across Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in November.
“A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55 percent. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: It appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non-institutional population increased to 242.3 million, meaning those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30-year low of 63.7 percent as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.” Zerohedge.com’s Tyler Durden
“Actual jobs outstanding, not seasonally adjusted, are down 2.9 million over the past two months. It is only after seasonal adjustments — made at the sole discretion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics economists — that 2.9 million less jobs gets translated into 446,000 new seasonally adjusted jobs for January and December.” trimtabs.com CEO Charles Biderman
People will in time figure out how the O is cooking the books on unemployment’s stat’s just as he has on the auto bailout even if his lap dogs in the press don’t want too, don’t ya know!
How does the saying go, you can fool all of the people some of the time & some all the time but….
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Some or all of that may be true. But I believe that when it comes time to vote, very few people do so on the basis of the statistics they get from the government via the media. People will vote based on their own community, their own job situation and that of their neighbors, their own stock portfolio, the value of their own home, etc.
When Obama took office, the global economy was undergoing scary spasms as the real estate collapse threatened to suck the entire financial system into a black hole. At this point, while joblessness remains high, the level of fear is much lower, as the stock market reflects.
We shouldn’t exaggerate this latest poll’s assessment of Obama’s chances. It is going to be a very close election.
“…despite the efforts of the administration and its willing accomplices in the media, the belief that the auto bailouts were a success is simply a myth. Leave aside the obvious point that the government still stands to lose billions of dollars on its investment as well as many billions more from the preferential tax treatment of the reorganizations. Not only was the bailout unnecessary to save the American automotive industry but the politicized bankruptcy process left both General Motors and Chrysler in a weaker competitive position than if they had simply reorganized in a standard chapter 11 process…. Todd Zywicki GMU Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law and a Senior Scholar of the Mercatus Center
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
John we agree my friend, the answer to the old saying of: are you better off today will be “THE” determining factor and not the spin of any politician(s), IMHO.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Not everyone agrees with Zywicki’s take on this or other issues. It seems to me that letting events take their course in the auto industry would have been a risky experiment. If that experiment had failed, that too would have been very expensive.
John, how many billions the taxpayers get stuck with is still in question, I have heard anywhere from 14 billion to over 20 billion (the 14 bil is from the president’s National Economic Council, BTW) but what was really wrong is allowing the tax payers to be on the hook in the first place.
GM’s bondholders were willing to take a 58 percent equity stake in the company in exchange for canceling their $27 billion in unsecured GM bonds. The tax payers could have been protected as a secured creditor. Obama instead got control of GM thus exposing the taxpayers to its liability.
But the really bad news is with that control we got the Chevy volt, a car that cost over 40k, that taxpayers are subsidizing by 10k, that will only go 38 miles with one charge if you are lucky (someone told me his would only go 18 miles) and tends to catch on fire, whose main customer is the government which means we get screwed that way too.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
But let’s not forget Chrysler:
U.S. loses $1.3 billion in exiting Chrysler..
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/21/autos/chrysler_government_exit/index.htm?cnn=yes&hpt=hp_t2
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
But lets pretend the taxpayer was made whole (which won’t happen due to complete incompetence) there is still the crony capitalism issue;
“The chief economic case against the bailout was not that huge infusions of taxpayer funds and special exemptions from bankruptcy rules could not make G.M. and Chrysler profitable. Of course they could. Instead, the heart of the case against the bailout is that it saps the life-blood of entrepreneurial capitalism. The bailout reinforces the debilitating precedent of protecting firms deemed “too big to fail.” Capital and other resources are thus kept glued by politics to familiar lines of production, thus impeding entrepreneurial initiative that would have otherwise redeployed these resources into newer, more-dynamic, and more productive industries. The “success” of the bailout is all too easy to engineer and to see. The cost of the bailout—the industries, the jobs, and the outputs that are never created—is impossible to see, but nevertheless real.” George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
OK I have have to give government motors some credit, they did have a good super bowl ad!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxFYYP8040A&feature=player_embedded
If only they have added some zombies; it would have been perfect!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
What was “really wrong” was allowing the U.S. economy and the world economic system to get to the point where Bush and Obama faced only bad choices. Bailing out big financial firms and car companies with our money was a bad choice. Letting those firms collapse might have been a bad choice too–and just as expensive, or more so, in its own way. Was there a way to bail out American workers (including bank etc. workers as well as auto workers) without bailing out their employers and their employers’ stockholders? Beats me.
One of the central points of anger toward Obama from Democrats and Republicans, was that the health care reform was too much like the Massechussetts system.
So… who’s the other name on the ballot going to be again?
Well John methinks you haven’t seen anything yet!
You talk about where it has got too but I’s afraid of where it’s is going even more!
The bad choices have only been compounding (by both R’s & D’s) due to our bad habit of kicking the can down the road and not really dealing with the beast waiting at our door!
Meet the beast:
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Our chickens will come home to roost cause we have been the one’s laying the eggs, don’t ya know!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America .
ABBOTT: Good subject. Terrible times. It’s about 9%.
COSTELLO: That many people are out of work?
ABBOTT: No, that’s 16%.
COSTELLO: You just said 9%.
ABBOTT: 9% Unemployed.
COSTELLO: Right 9% out of work.
ABBOTT: No, that’s 16%.
COSTELLO: Okay, so it’s 16% unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, that’s 9%…
COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 9% or 16%?
ABBOTT: 9% are unemployed. 16% are out of work.
COSTELLO: If you are out of work you are unemployed.
ABBOTT: No, you can’t count the “Out of Work” as the unemployed. You have to look for work to be unemployed.
COSTELLO: But … they are out of work!
ABBOTT: No, you miss my point.
COSTELLO: What point?…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2842517/posts
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
There’s nothing of substance standing in the way of Obama’s second term.
Romney can’t win on Not-Obama,
and there simply aren’t enough policy differences forthcoming.
People still remember the damage done by the last batch of Republican mis-fits
and their perverse style of governing that bankrupted us.
I was eating lunch with my 6-year-old and I asked her, “What is the 20th of February?”
She answered, “Presidents’ Day!”
I asked her: “What does Presidents’ Day mean?” and I waited for something about Washington or Lincoln.
She replied, “Presidents’ Day is when President Obama steps out of the White House, and if he sees his shadow, we have another year of unemployment!”
You know, it really hurts when hot coffee spurts out your nose!
http://media.patriotpost.us/humor/2012/02-07.html
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!