The economy grew in the third quarter:
For the first time in a year, the United States economy grew, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. But even if a recovery is technically in the offing, job seekers likely will not begin to feel the benefits for months to come.
Gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the three months ending in September, a significant spike from a relatively shrunken base. The economy had contracted at annual rates of 0.7 percent and 6.4 percent in the second and first quarters of this year, respectively.
Robust government spending, exports, consumer spending — buoyed by auto purchases Congress’s now-expired cash-for-clunkers program — and housing helped finally push the measure into positive territory. Spending on consumer durable goods like cars shot up an astounding 22.3 percent at an annual rate, compared to a decrease of 23.3 percent the previous quarter.
Obviously, this proves what a failure Obama is. Had he only listened to bloggers, the economy would have grown twice as fast.
DougJ
You know who else grew the economy but was ultimately a failure?
WereBear
Where would we be now under President McCain and the Wingnut Veep?
I shudder at the thought.
r€nato
This improvement is due solely to Bush’s tax cuts.
Just like all that prosperity during Clinton’s two terms was due to Reagan’s tax cuts from over 10 years earlier.
(they really did say that, you know)
beltane
If he had only eliminated the death tax and outlawed abortion, GDP growth would have been at 666%.
calling all toasters
@DougJ: My first thought was W., but the answer is obviously Hitler and/or Sauron.
beltane
@DougJ: Was Hitler a good basketball player? This angle has not been explored adequately.
Mr Furious
Witness the George W. Bush Recovery!
Other
How about listening to Stiglitz? Krugman? Reich?
It’s true of course that the wealthy are doing much better. Heck, you did not have to wait for the GDP numbers – The Dow is up 50% since the stimulus.
The questions people are concerned about, at least some people, is jobs and median wages.
Of course, if you are unconcerned wit those issues, then of course, hip hip hooray!
r€nato
@WereBear: I cannot adequately express how that thought makes me shudder. We would be screwed in so many ways. He probably would have instigated another war by now, and Palin would be the rogue VP, running around the country for the next four years inciting culture wars while people were losing their homes and jobs.
Someone needs to do speculative fiction on this. It would be scarier than if you edited together all the murders in all six “Saw” films.
WereBear
That’s right.
I’ll never recover from George W. Bush.
Hann1bal
Oh, this is very good news for President McCain.
Comrade Jake
You know who else turned an economy around?
Hitler.
BlizzardOfOz
Just trust Dear Leader and don’t ask too many questions. He knows best.
IanY77
Actually, go on over to Billy Bob Don Surber’s place, and that’s exactly what he says.
Beyond parody.
Leelee for Obama
When I heard this this AM, I immediately wondered how many heads would explode on the Right, and then started thinking up all the wondrous crap they would come up with to give the credit to Bush/Cheney, Paulson, et al. Obviously, the tax-cuts came first, along with keeping the SEC from doing their jobs, the implosion of the housing market due to helping poor people buy houses they couldn’t afford, which, naturally will keep them out of the “good” neighborhoods for the foreseeable future and getting all those failing (109, so far?) banks out of the way. See how easy it is to show what a failure Obama is?
Blarrgh!
IanY77
OK, the block quote function didn’t work right. Basically, everything between “and that’s exactly what he says”, and “Beyond parody.” is quoted from Billy Bob’s site.
El Cid
Yeah, this tone on this blog of ‘fuck you for paying attention to what’s going on, shut up and let Obama work’ is starting to get a bit weird.
joe from Lowell
The stock marketThe rate of GDP growthThe rate of job growth is the real measure of Obama’s economic policy.John Cole
@Other: Why are you using a pseudonym.
@El Cid: Who told you to shut up?
Other
At least for some of us, job growth or preservation has been the most significant issue. Joseph Stiglitz said:
“GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one[.] It is time for our statistics system to put more emphasis on measuring the well-being of the population than on economic production.”
joe from Lowell
El Cid,
What part of “paying attention” includes predictions of a years-long period of GDP decline?
Brien Jackson
@John Cole:
Hush you, you’ll step all over their persecution complex.
Demo Woman
Unfortunately, jobs are always last to rebound. I do think that if Congress can pass a green jobs (Climate) package that will help with new job creation.
By the way, Cavuto has already given Bush credit on the turn around in the market.
Leelee for Obama
@joe from Lowell: This! I am waiting for that lagging indicator to stop lagging already, and get a flippin’ move on. With a GDP in positive growth, things should be turning around for the work force situation in about 3-4 months, isn’t that about right? The Holiday season hiring would have helped a bit, but I’m not seeing it, likely because the season is predicted to be flat.
Jason
@IanY77: “My take is that at a cost of $600,000 per job created, an economic stimulus is the most inefficient was to start and economic recovery.”
Wow, he did write exactly that. Piss-poor English, as well. Lemme ask: if doing nothing would have been better, how did the recession start in the first place? How do you start something by doing nothing, in response to something that started in spite of doing nothing?
Other
@John Cole:
To avoid personality issues and to try and have a discussion about the policy.
If you think it is important, let everyone know. In essence, that will pretty much end my ability to participate in your threads.
I suppose that is the request here. I will respect your wishes.
Brien Jackson
@Other:
I’m as concerned with job growth as the next guy, moreso really, since I’m in my mid-20’s and starting out in a job market like this is going to hamper my earning power for the rest of my life, but I’m not sure how you’re going to get job growth without getting economic growth first.
jwb
@El Cid: “Yeah, this tone on this blog of ‘fuck you for paying attention to what’s going on, shut up and let Obama work’ is starting to get a bit weird.”
Um, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. At most the tone has been “don’t take teh stoopid seriously—wherever teh stoopid comes from.”
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: I really don’t get that tone at all from BJ. I don’t think anyone, frontpager or reputable commenter, is unaware of the problems facing the country. On the contrary, it seems that they recognize the severity of those problems and are critical of those who expect, or appear to expect, Obama to simply do x, y, or z and, thus, quickly fix everything. We have had eight years of the worst administration on record on top of 35 years of rightist BS leading up to it. I think that giving this administration a little space in which to work is reasonable.
geg6
I don’t pretend to be an economist of any sort. And I know these things are always anecdotal. But here’s my take on things.
1) In my job as student aid officer here, an important task is exercising what we call professional judgment. This basically means that, if a family’s financial situation has changed since the period of time covered by that year’s FAFSA, I can gather documentation, calculate a new expected family contribution, and perhaps provide more federal, state, or university aid for the student through a special circumstance review. As you might imagine, I have had a record number of special circumstance reviews this year even though we are a small campus (the university overall is swamped with them) and the unemployment rate in this area is lower than the national average. In my interactions with these families over the last few weeks, I have been pleased to find out that the unemployed parents for at least half of the SC reviews have managed to find new jobs, almost all of them as good or better than what they lost.
2) Our students who are in the 4-year programs at our campus (most of our students do 2 years here and then 2 years at the main campus) are required to do internships in order to graduate. Last year’s grads were having a terrible time getting them. This year’s seniors are reporting multiple internship offers. Since most of these internships have historically resulted in job offers, I have a good feeling about the job prospects for this year’s class.
Perhaps all of this is too localized to extrapolate across the state, region, or country. But I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in at least a year.
EconWatcher
If you’re arguing with wingnuts about Obama’s economic performance, you can leave them speechless with one question, if they know anything at all about economics: Explain how tax cuts and a spending freeze would have arrested the deflationary spiral we faced at the beginning of this year?
Tax cuts and a spending freeze–that was the Republican plan. Don’t let them forget it.
Tax cuts can stimulate in a normal recession, but not in a heavily deflationary environment. That really can’t be disputed. And cuts in government spending exacerbate deflation. Can’t really dispute that either. Their plan would have pushed us into prompt economic collapse.
I’m pessimistic about our near term prospects. We’re not out of the woods by any means. But we’d already be seeing the sequel to the Great Depression if the election had gone the other way.
Shawn in ShowMe
Is Tim Geithner still out to destroy the economy or has that meme fallen out of favor?
Leelee for Obama
Well put. It’s hard to sell “Things would be worse” to people who have lost their jobs, but that is the fact. I shudder often thinking about where we would be if McCain/Palin were in the WH!
r€nato
next they will say, ‘oh the recovery would have happened anyway! all this stimulus spending was unnecessary!’
Omnes Omnibus
@r€nato: It is the business cycle. Things go up, things go down, then things go up again. If that is a problem for you, maybe you should had more foresight and been born rich, so shut up, you DFH.
/wingnut
Max
@Shawn in ShowMe: Rattigan’s leading the charge on that one this morning. Apparently, the entire economic crisis is Tim’s fault.
It is amazing to me that everyone is shocked that when he worked in NY, he advocated on behalf of those he served, and now, he’s in a different position, so he’s advocating on behalf of a different group.
From my view, right now, I bust my ass to do my job better than the competition, but if I were to take a job with the competition, I’d bust my ass to crush my current employer.
But hey, I’m an O-bot, what do I know.
joe from Lowell
@ Leelee for Obama:
In a healthy economy, yes. However, we need to keep in mind that job growth has been lagging economic growth for a couple of decades now, so I fear that job recovery will be anemic for longer than that, even as the economy continues to grow.
We need structural change in the economy, because it isn’t functioning right, even when it is strong. GDP growth isn’t a sufficient condition for this change, but it is a necessary one. You can’t channel stagnation into a more useful, decent direction; you can only channel growth.
r€nato
wingnuts, late winter 2009: “Stimulus doesn’t work!”
wingnuts, early fall 2009: “The economy is only growing because of the stimulus!”
wingnuts, summer 2010: “What recovery?”
wingnuts, winter 2010 (after yet another electoral humiliation): “The recovery would have happened naturally, without all the stimulus spending!”
El Cid
@joe from Lowell: What?
Morbo
@geg6:
Levitt and Dubner would like to invite you to help them write a chapter in their upcoming book Ultrasuperfreakonomics.
The Grand Panjandrum
I can tell you this, here in NH we have benefited from that stimulus money AND the business community has taken note of it. They had several infrastructures that were “shovel ready” and literally started withing days of receiving the initial round of stimulus spending. As a matter of fact a new bridge was going to be built between Lebanon, NH and White River Junction, VT that was part of the spending. It was in the papers here days after the bill passed and the money was distribute to the states that asked for it. It’s called preparation … if states didn’t have their shit together because the state and local governments were controlled by people “philosophically” opposed to the plan, then I say: TOUGH SHIT. Stop electing mouth breathing dumb fucks who want to spend your tax dollars bitching about Obama’s birth certificate and lying about death panels.
Recovery? Well here in northern NE we still have a way to go but things haven’t been as bad here as they have been in other parts of the country. Guess what? We have NOT ONE member of the GOP in the House and that sorry tired ass whiny bitch Judd Gregg is on his way out the door. Paul Hodes, my Congressman, will more than likely replace him AND another Democrat will more than likely take his seat. Yeah, all of us commie pinkos are gonna drink your GOP milk shake …
Dear GOP,
Here is some sage advice I got from my very first Platoon Sergeant: Lead. Follow. Or, get the fuck out of the way.
You lead this country into a ditch after more than a decade of running Congress. Your President and Congress damn near lead us into a financial meltdown that could have thrown us into another depression. Now, in opposition, you have NO legislation offered that has a snow balls chance in hell of seeing the light of day. You are a disgrace. You are the party of NO. So please heed the final piece of wisdom, and get the fuck out of the way until you can offer the country something other than NO, or policies that take from the working and middle classes and give it to the people who already have more than enough. You fucking lost. Now get the fuck out the way!
geg6
@Morbo:
LOL!
Leelee for Obama
@joe from Lowell: That makes sense, joe. Too bad though, cause we really need some job growth, pronto! What about the next stimulus money coming into play-isn’t that where the money is supposed to be going?
joe from Lowell
Well, Leelee, we’ll undoubtedly get some job growth.
r€nato
@Morbo:
I’m glad I’m not the only one supremely annoyed by those two.
John Cole
@El Cid: Again, who told you to shut up?
Capri
Here’s my anecdote- I think I can flesh it out for into an Uberfreakonomics chapter without too much trouble.
I drive on interstate I-65 2 or 3 times weekly. Last night I noticed that the semi trailer truck traffic on I65 between Indianapolis and Chicago was up markedly. Hadn’t been so heavy since the gas prices went through the roof last summer.
We’re absolutely on the road to economic recovery.
slag
I’m kind of with El Cid on the tone issue. But I haven’t been traversing the fringes of the blogosphere for a while now, so I’m not sure which exact areas are upsetting John’s delicate sensibilities. Here’s what I know:
1. Obama’s team made some early economic projections.
2. The state of the economy hasn’t exactly met said projections.
How much criticism Obama’s team deserves is debatable. But if I have an employee who doesn’t meet their stated goals, then I feel like I am at least owed an explanation. Rarely ever would it be a firing offense (stuff happens), but it’s important to see that the employee is learning something from the experience. And possibly modifying their behaviors according to changing conditions. And I haven’t seen much of an explanation or a willingness to modify behavior from the administration yet. So, if the O-team is getting serious criticism for the economy, I would suggest that at least some of it is deserved. In spite of 3rd quarter growth.
Cerberus
To the oh noes Obama crowd, this again is a good thing.
Is it small? Is job recovery going to take awhile to fix? Will there need to be many more investments into infrastructure and into the bottom layers of the economy (including say the big bill being passed now, health reform)?
Of course.
Because Bush fucked the shit out of the economy. Bush left the Great Depression on our doorstep with a tidy little bow. Nothing and I mean NOTHING is going to feel “normal” for a good long while thanks to his looting of the treasure for the Top 40 CEOs.
So slight bump to GDP?
Fuck, Obama is a miracle worker to get that out of the senate’s “bipartisanship through spending half on tax cuts” bullshit. They should build him a motherfucking space statue.
El Cid
@John Cole: No one told me to “shut up”, as perhaps to a blog owner that might imply some form of censorship.
So I would like to clarify that I was using the term in its looser sense, AKA, ‘I am tired of hearing X’. In a formal sense, your blog remains open to commentary.
I now return to my standard bitter tone.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“My first thought was W., but the answer is obviously Hitler and/or Sauron.”
Building all those evil machines of war did wonders for Mordor’s GDP. Lothlorien’s economy stagnated due to treehugging elvish environmental regulations.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Bartender, pour me a glass of what this man is drinking, and make it a double!
Shawn in ShowMe
1. Bomb Iran.
2. Stay the course in Iraq.
3. For all you poor people who can’t afford health care, I’m offering tax credits.
4. This recession/depression thing will work itself out. While we’re waiting, let me tell you about when I was a POW.
5. We’ll close Guantanamo as soon as we’ve won the war on terror.
6. I’m proud to introduce Secretary of State John Bolton.
7. Drill baby, drill.
Leelee for Obama
@Shawn in ShowMe: Thanks for itemizing my nightmares!
John Sears
I’m sorry but all the optimism every time we get an economic indicator that isn’t completely in the toilet is annoying. The job market is still *terrible*, the housing market practically doesn’t exist, and the stock market is the same shitty casino that it was before this mess.
Don’t get me wrong; none of that is Obama’s fault, and the stimulus package was a good, small first step.
But it’s way too early to call this ‘good’ news, I think. Though ‘less apocalyptic’ isn’t as catchy.
Brien Jackson
@slag:
Your employees don’t have to worry about what Congress will go along with.
Cat Lady
Obama was handed a huge steaming pile of shit in all directions, and he’s handled the challenge with good faith, grace, and humor while being attacked by the shitters and other non-contributing zeros for things he did but shouldn’t have; didn’t do but should have; can’t control but so what, shut up that’s why; or can control and attacked for exerting control.
All that said, I still think we’re all truly fucked. The CRE bombs are starting to go off, and I’m really afraid of that. GE alone has an $84B over-valued CRE portfolio, and every bank in the country has put off devaluing their own CRE portfolios, with another weak retailer season just ahead. If the Republicans were even close to being half-assedly serious about governing I’d worry about Obama’s re-election prospects in 2012, but they’re all a bunch of ridiculous clowns.
John Sears
@Shawn in ShowMe
Heh. I always figured we’d all be dead. McCain kept blathering on about the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia and such during the campaign, I swear half the time he doesn’t know what year it is. If you watched his appearances and so forth he repeatedly misunderstood basic geography too, and all year long he kept poking Russia and steely-eyed sociopathic Putin with a stick. This is the man who said ‘We are all Georgians now’ after all.
I never had much enthusiasm for Obama. I voted for him for one simple, easy to understand reason: I sincerely believe(d) that John McCain was/is mentally ill, perhaps senile, and if he was elected President we stood a significant risk of all dying in nuclear hellfire.
r€nato
@Cat Lady:
it is not the least bit unreasonable to give Obama his full first term to show results. He was handed a disaster on both the domestic front and foreign policy front. It’s taken him most of his first year in office to just plug the leaks and keep the ship afloat, so to speak. Actually that’s the economic/domestic ship… the Afghanistan ship is slowly sinking.
We could be pulling out of Afghanistan now if we hadn’t pissed away the last several years in Iraq. So whatever Obama does on Afghanistan, I’m not going to blame him unless he does something monumentally stupid, and it would be hard to top the stupid things the Bush administration did in Afghanistan/Iraq.
Walker
@John Sears:
++
All the optimists here clearly have not gotten their dose of CR today. GDP growth is inventory restocking and stimulus. Will see more of same in Q4 and then all bets are off for 2010. Indeed, the indicators for 2010 look very scary.
slag
@Brien Jackson: I want explanations. Not excuses. The difference is subtle, but an explanation includes at least some amount of “I kind of screwed up” while an excuse rarely does.
Kirk Spencer
If the economy grows at ~2.5% (real, annualized) per quarter job creation will be essentially flat. If it grows at over 3% you’ll see clear improvements in unemployment, with a caveat.
The caveat is that we’ve got a lot of people who have given up. That means if we’re seeing ‘good’ GDP growth we’ll have a period where people are getting jobs but the unemployment rate stays high. That’ll cause some confusion – administration opponents will point to the numbers, but everyone will ‘feel’ things are getting better. If it happens it will be analogous to the first half of 2008 — everyone ‘felt’ things were getting bad but the numbers said things were ok.
My predictions, for what they’re worth, are that if we weren’t going to see any stimulative effects in 2010 we’d be looking at that 2.5% through most of that year. However, I see three stimulative effects going into effect within the next six months, each of which will contribute to pushing us over the 3% line.
The first is locked. That’s the parts of the 2009 stimulus that were set to kick off in a delayed fashion – in 2010. I’m in the camp that says if they’d done it all in 2009 we’d be better off, but better late than never. The other two stimulus events are not ‘locked’ but I estimate they will happen.
The first of these is health care. We will see a bill but the details are still… murky. Point is, every variation of the current bills lead to a lot of money moving even if the ‘full’ effect doesn’t take place till 2013. Moving money is a good part of what a stimulus does. Now I’d rather see a good bill and see it go into effect in 2010, but I’ll live with a mediocre bill that enters later. Oh, a secondary effect from a decent public option: encouragement of entrepreneurs. If the worry of having health care is removed startup businesses will increase.
The second stimulus that’s not yet locked is what I call Son of Stimulus. I’m sure we’ll see it. I’m also pretty sure it’ll be narrowly focused (narrow for congress, that is) on jobs – sustaining and creating. That will somewhat artificially decrease the unemployment but will still have a stimulative effect on the economy.
The three combined will be enough to keep us over 3% for two quartes subsequent to their passage. I make that either 1 and 2 or 2 and 3 of next year. The sustained boost SHOULD be enough to get the economy running “on its own” again.
Thus by my projection we’ll see more jobs starting in 2010 with numbers pushing under 8% (maybe under 7%) by the end of the year.
Oh, for those wanting to catch the ‘returning employee’ float, watch the BLS reports for participating civilian labor force. That number is down to levels last seen 30 years ago. The reversal matters.
Bill H
Tell all of that good news about the “economy coming back to life” to the 530,000 people who filed jobless claims last week, or to the 18.8% of the work force that is unemployed. Tell that to the people who are included in the record number of people whose homes were foreclosed in the third quarter of this year. Tell that to the people whose interest rates on credit card balances current and promptly paid was just raised to 30% and more. Tell that to working men and women whose hours and wages are still being reduced. Tell that to holiday retailers who are not hiring seasonal workers because the holiday sales forecast is, at best, “flat.”
Pulling an unknown number of months worth of auto sales forward into a single month by means of a one-month subsidy and creating a down-the-road sales slump does not constitute economic growth. Creating a spike in home sales by means of a short term tax credit and low interest rates to artificially drive up prices and home sales by using the same methods that created the housing bubble in the first place does not constitute economic growth. More than 100 banks failed so far this year and many more on the brink is not economic growth.
When I see employment rising significantly and indebtedness decreasing and a major portion of the bad debt written off then I will believe that the economy is improving.
Yes, I know about the “jobs is a trailing indicator” thing. Jobs are a trailing indicator when they are not improving. That is not the case here; jobs are still declining, meaning that buying power is declining, home foreclosures are still increasing, and all parts of the real economy are still in a slide.
No, I don’t think the stimulus was a failure, I think it was too small and spent on too many nickle-dime projects. The Great Depression was defeated with things like the Hoover Dam, not with trivia like one-month “Cash for Clunkers” programs. We are trying to solve big problems with small answers. We have 535 legislators, each of whom wants his own program to get reelected on, so we get 535 rinkydink projects which create small, temporary local jobs.
We need big thinking, but that requires big people and all of the big people are in history, not in today’s government.
Cat Lady
@r€nato:
Agreed. I hope he decides to leave Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday and that’s really troubling me, but I trust him. I guess that makes me an O-bot, but I trust him to use the intelligence he has – his own, and the country’s – to make a careful considered decision from the options he has. Every single thing on Obama’s plate has no good options, just bad, worse and worst. I blame Bush.
WereBear
@Cat Lady: I blame Bush, too, and why not? He might not have started it, but he certainly presided over this endgame.
ericblair
@Cat Lady: All that said, I still think we’re all truly fucked. The CRE bombs are starting to go off, and I’m really afraid of that. GE alone has an $84B over-valued CRE portfolio, and every bank in the country has put off devaluing their own CRE portfolios, with another weak retailer season just ahead. If the Republicans were even close to being half-assedly serious about governing I’d worry about Obama’s re-election prospects in 2012, but they’re all a bunch of ridiculous clowns.
Yup. We let the (ahem) Free Market go hog-wild for a decade and ended up with possibly the largest misallocation of capital in history. This is still far from being unwound, and most of the financial industry is hell-bent on getting back to misallocating capital like they did in 2007. We’ve got trillions of dollars in real property that is essentially useless, and we’ve got millions of people trained up from jobs that don’t or shouldn’t exist. This is going to take a while yet, and is going to keep being painful to a lot of people who can’t afford it and don’t deserve it.
WereBear
By “might not have started it” I mean the whole pile of wrong economic assumptions that have been screwing everything up for thirty years.
The wars? He started them.
Kirk Spencer
@Bill H:
OK. Done. See, I’ve been unemployed for coming on 15 months now.
But “coming back to life” is not “fixed.” I agree we should have started this rise six months ago. I agree we should have spent more back then. At the same time, it IS getting better, finally. “We’re not there yet?” comes off as a whine – go for “what can we do to get there faster” if you want my support.
(If you want cheers from me, offer me a job.)
gopher2b
@Walker:
I think that’s right. Once the government stop propping up the housing market (with artificially low interest rates and credits), we will see a real correction there. That could easily set off another downturn.
Once that storm is weathered, we will return to solid and real growth. Both administrations (I say administrations because I have no doubt that Bush, the individual, did not understand one lick of what was going on) did manage to prevent a Great Depression.
El Cid
Like most people, I’m glad to see news that’s better rather than worse. What I really need is the day that I can relax and assume that situations like this will definitely (as opposed to hopefully, maybe, with enough hell raising) be addressed more or less correctly:
joe from Lowell
Addressing the structural issues that have been plaguing our economy since Reagan is, indeed, a bit deal, El Cid. It needs to be done. Barney Frank’s bill is a good start. We’ll see how that goes.
However, that is a different issue than the one addressed by GDP growth. The third quarter GDP growth isn’t going to stop suburban sprawl and global warming, either. That doesn’t mean we need to change the subject to suburban sprawl and global warming whenever good quarterly GDP numbers come out.
joe from Lowell
The performance of the economy has met Obama’s predictions. It contracted and is rebounding in almost exactly the time frame, and to almost exactly the degree, that the administration predicted.
What they got wrong was the baseline economic situation from which these events took off. Unemployment went to a higher level than the administration predicted under their policies, because they assumed that it was lower than it actually was upon taking office.
slag
@joe from Lowell:
The unemployment disparity requires a serious explanation and possibly a modification of behavior. Without either of those things, continued criticism is entirely warranted.
The Saff
@The Grand Panjandrum: I would like to nominate you to be my spokesperson. I wish I could articulate my thoughts like that. That was awesome.
El Cid
@joe from Lowell: I haven’t made any specific disagreement with suggesting that GDP growth (as an immediate economic circumstance, rather than a philosophical posit) this quarter was not better news than GDP stagnation or decline. Not once.
I’m not changing the subject. I’m not avoiding any topic. It’s how I see things — lots of things are connected, lots of things are important, lots of things are on my mind.
I’m not a right wing freakazoid, I’m not a libertarian shit-head, and if you want to create a fake “joe from Lowell vs El Cid” fakeoff, go ahead. Not one of your comments has applied to me. Not one.
D-Chance.
A rubber ball will bounce once it hits the floor.
And after the hundreds of billions spent by the taxpayers, one would HOPE that we’d see an uptick before the next huge dip in the economy,which is bound to happen, given the market fundamentals still have not changed since the beginning of this recession a year ago.
Elie the Amateur
@ 41 Grand Panjandrum
YAY!!!!
Right on….
Elie the Amateur
Bill H
You have the government that you deserve —
Big ideas, big responsibility and big integrity….not something that the government has been known for in the last decade under the Republicans..
When O took office, he did not get to replace all the good ol boys with their many conflicts of interest and shrunken spines and gonads from licking the boots of the corporate interests, with his clean “Dream Team” with no conflicts.
He has had to work with the reality of what could be done given the people in place already,or who could work with the ones in place already – not the ones he wishes were in place. He also did not get to reinvent the financial and economic sectors to his specifications. His decisions and policy had to be supported by the existing reality if it were to ever get done. The stimulus, healthcare, everything has to be implemented in this reality — you get and work the best deal you can get…
That is always the case — unless there is a complete revolution, overturning the existing order. We did not have that.
If you ever have been hired to run a new department or organization, rarely do you get to replace everyone in it with people that see things just your way. If you are fortunate, after a while, you can replace or bring in a few key players and they can help you change things over — in time. That is just reality, so we have to work with it
Mister Colorful Analogy
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Damn. I don’t smoke, but I think I need a cigarette anyway. What you said, times eleventy. Bravo!
Gimme a break
Does everything have to be about your little internet fights John? This is getting pretty ridiculous. “HA HA HA Liberman’s gonna filibuster the health bill rofl!” the other day, now you’re jumping on a one-quarter uptick and apparently missing the part where it’s in large part due to the now-expired Cash For Clunkers program. My god John, is there a single opportunity-to-gloat-about-a-process-that’s-far-from-over that you’re capable of passing up?
Right, if only Obama has listened to those stupid “bloggers.” Yknow, all these professional economists who also happen to run blogs. Krugman and so forth, they’re just so shrill!
Grow the hell up.
Kayla Rudbek
@D-Chance.: On the one hand, at least I’m seeing more postings in my field. It would be even better if these weren’t ones I’d already applied to several months ago…i.e. the jobs are being re-opened after hiring freezes, etc.
Of course, all I need is one offer…
Gimme a break
@Brien Jackson:
Ahh, right. Always with the excuses. Obama is to be credited for his success and his failures – or the watering-down of what would otherwise be larger successes – rationalized because “Congress is mean!” Hey guess what? Congress was mean when he ran for President. He knew that was going to happen. It’s part of the job description and if he isn’t willing to go out there and twist arms and demonstrate a spine then he’s going to get punked. Yknow, like a situation where he waters down the stimulus with tax cuts to get Republican votes and then gets *3* in the entire Congress, does that maybe sound familiar? Obama setting himself up to fail by announcing he expected to get 80 votes for the stimulus in the Senate ring a bell? But I suppose by pointing out, yknow, “facts” such as those I’m just as bad as those mean gay bloggers who feel like they get to express opinions of their own.
Obama is not perfect and has clearly made mistakes and missteps at several points. I’m sorry that acknowledging something that simple and self-evident is too much for the black-and-white minds of Balloon Juice to handle.