Here’s some good news. Kevin Drum modified a graph from this LA Times story to clarify an inflection point. Cars are one of the few industrial products still made in the US, so some US jobs are being created or kept as the auto sector recovers, thanks in part to Kenyan Socialism.
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Villago Delenda Est
The entire basis of an economy is making stuff that people use, be it food, clothing, transportation, housing, entertainment.
Unless you can eat, wear, ride, live in, or be entertained by credit default swaps, they’re of no actual value at all.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
That’s actually a great graph. There is absolutely no way that inverted parabola was every going to recover without intervention. The left of that inflection point is almost a calculus class slope computation.
ericblair
@Villago Delenda Est:
The modern equivalent of “taking in each others’ washing” seems to be “selling securities and overpriced real estate to each other.” We can all be day traders! Every last one of us! Except the pizza guy, of course.
You’d think this little auto industry factoid might cause some problems in midwest battleground states for the travelling gooper freakshow, but that would require someone in the media to do their damn job, so we’ll see about that.
arguingwithsignposts
What is the similar graph for the banking industry, out of curiosity?
PurpleGirl
This is a good trend, I hope it continues. The automotive sector has been important for a long time.
arguingwithsignposts
Woah. It’s HuffPo, but speaking of speculating, this is positively creepy:
With even an appearance by creepy Phil Gramm.
Emma
@ericblair: I’ve come to the conclusion that it will take about 30 years of relentless assault to make a dent in people’s heads about this.
I’ve spoken to people who are working for $29,000 who are really opposed to raising taxes on the rich, and a large part of their worldview is that someday they could be rich and then they would have to pay more taxes and they don’t like the idea. Telling them it’s more likely they will be hit by a truck than winning the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes does not change their minds one bit.
Somehow a large portion of the American public lives on hopes and pr. And resents being told neither one will work.
ericblair
@Emma:
The US is the world’s prime producer of high-quality snake oil and has been for some time. I’m pretty sure it tracks the spread of 19th century evangelism, since it’s the same thing applied to money, but that’s an exercise for the reader.
I believe it was Bono that, paraphrased, explained the difference between the Irish and Americans: The American, when he sees a huge mansion on a hill, thinks to himself “I’m going to be the guy that owns that house one day.” The Irish, seeing the same mansion, thinks to himself “I’m going to beat the crap out of the guy that owns that house one day.”
Of course, the Irish got infected by American disease a few years ago. Maybe they’ll recover.
scav
Might not even be about the taxes they may save later. It’s also possibly about the reassurance that greed and selfishness, including greed and selfishness now, are morally good and justified, in fact, necessary. Some of their payoff is immediate. They desperately need that countervailing force to the remnants of community focus and care for others still present in their xian (and 1950s heyday) touchstones.
Steve
And yet Michigan remains a 50/50 state. I really cannot figure.
Bulworth
It may be good news but I can’t say until I hear what McMegan says about how many trillions of dollars each of those jobs costs, and health care costs, the tyranny of labor unions, etc.
//
arguingwithsignposts
@Steve: Because Abortion! Teh Ghey! The Depraved Poor! Shut up, that’s why!
JPL
@Emma: Talk radio and Fox news convinced they that the rich create jobs. When a friend mentioned that line to me, I said well you would think that after ten years of the Bush tax cuts, we’d have full unemployment. The new line is it’s the regulations and I ask which ones…
jwest
Emma,
The beauty of America is that the “rich” are a perpetually changing group. People with little means but a belief in themselves and a tolerance for risk can make a fortune, while others who have money can be wiped out overnight. No, it’s never going to be “fair” in your view and you will never be rich just because it’s your turn. But for those who have the guts and drive, achieving the dream is more than possible.
Luckily, there are rays of hope. Even those as hopelessly liberal as Villago are recognizing that economies are based on “making stuff”. Once this seed of logic takes hold, others in the Progressive community will start to realize that policies designed to stifle the efforts of people and groups (evil corporations) who want to make stuff might be counter-productive to the economy.
WereBear
That is worthy of being embroidered on a pillow.
Mark S.
@arguingwithsignposts:
Is there anything these assholes won’t bet on? It reminds me of that Seinfeld where Kramer and his idiot friends are betting on which plane flights will be on time.
None of this shit creates any jobs or produces anything of value. I say we let them go Galt and they can bet with each other on who starves to death first in Galt’s Gulch.
jibeaux
@JPL:
Re, regulations, may be a tad inside baseball but the NC lege was infested with Republicans last year and zaniness ensues when the yahoos get on the Rules Review Commission….
Steve
@jwest:
Yes, god forbid we do anything to interfere with the corporate agenda of moving manufacturing jobs overseas. That’s worked out so well for us.
schlemizel - was Alwhite
@jwest:
Yes, some of us here are old enough to remember how badly we suffered from 1934 through 1980 when there was high taxation, government regulation and healthy unions. It was awful! Then came 1981 & taxes were slashed, regulations gutted, unions demolished & everything was wonderful forever after – well except for those horrid ’90s when progressives raised taxes and stopped the governments assault on unions – yeah there were no jobs to be had at all then. Thank Gawd the people were smart enough to elect W who slashed taxes even further & really took a meat ax to regulations. Since then everything has really been perfect.
The makers have used the historically low taxes and lack of government oversight to bring full employment & a robust economy. Haven’t they?
sorry jerkwad – there is a small (in comparison to the galaxy) hole in your bullshit belief in the power of the ‘free market’ and your makers & takers bullshit is completely backwards.
Kane
The American auto industry is leaner, meaner, and greener than it was just a couple of years ago. Even with the bailout, I don’t think many expected the industry to bounce back as quickly as it has. Kudos to president Obama for having the courage to defend the auto industry when republicans were willing to let it die.
MikeJ
@jwest:
Except we have lower class mobility than soçialist countries like Sweden.
Davis X. Machina
@schlemizel – was Alwhite: You can’t refute a theology.
arguingwithsignposts
@Kane: One of the interesting things about watching “Top Gear U.K.” is how different the euro car market is, and how Ford, especially, has really built cars to target that market, with higher fuel economies, smaller, inexpensive cars.
I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers had really spent the last few decades building that market here if they would have needed a bailout.
jwest
Schlemizel’s suggestion that we return to the days when US manufacturing was bolstered by bombing the rest of the world destroying their factories and infrastructure would work, but I think there might be a public relations problem going forward.
Steve
@jwest: The argument that our post-war posterity was only because all the other countries were ruined has been so widely and thoroughly debunked that I have to conclude you simply have no interest in learning economics. Before you can be a lecturer you have to be a student, though.
superluminar
Ok so I hate to be this guy (ok, actually I’m fine with it) but the bitching about US manufacturing missing out to foreigners is wrong. Literally millions of people who wouldn’t have had decent blue collar jobs before now have them. I can’t for the life of me object to this. We need to find decent jobs in the west for those who lost out to do, and sadly we’re not there yet…
jwest
Steve,
So you’re attributing the post war prosperity to what? The superiority of US interpretive dance?
Cat Lady
@arguingwithsignposts:
Death panels! I’m sure our MSM will start dogging him on this any minute now.
flaneur
Is this the first Gary Numan reference on Ballloon Juice?
Steve
@superluminar: Just because we exported the manufacturing jobs doesn’t mean we exported the salaries, benefits, and workplace regulation that made them “decent blue collar jobs.” The entire reason corporations move those jobs overseas is because they don’t want to pay for “decent blue collar jobs.”
@jwest: Trade was a very minor portion of US GDP in the decades following the war. We weren’t getting rich because of exports. Not that bombed-out countries could have afforded to buy a lot of US goods, anyway. Like I said, educate yourself about economics.
Lurking Canadian
The beauty of being a right wing economist is that you can say, “But, if Obama hadn’t intervened with the dead hand of government, the recovery would have been even faster. The shallow slope of the recovery points to the failure of liberal policies.” You don’t need to prove it, you just need to assert it.
Or, as Davis X. Machina said:
Villago Delenda Est
That was Jefferson’s intention when he pushed hard for an estate tax, which he considered his greatest accomplishment.
That’s been undone by neofeudalist shitstains like you.
Emma
@jwest: The United States, as of at least 2009, has the least social mobility of any industrialized nation. http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=05&year=2009&base_name=is_europe_really_have_less_upw.
The faces and names of the rich may change; the wealthy don’t.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@MikeJ: We have a lower class mobility than almost every country in Europe. This change has occurred in the last 30 years.
Judas Escargot
@jwest:
Yep. They grow old and die. Then their kids get to be rich!
jwest
Estate taxes are a great idea if the goal is economic equality.
For those who prefer economic prosperity, it is a completely insane proposal.
Emma
@jwest: Oh lord. Now I know you’re just another one of the “I live on hope and pr” types. Any rich American dying today could leave $5,000,000 (yes, five million dollars) to his heirs without being taxed. Above that, the top tax rate is 35%. There are all kinds of deductions and trust arrangements, especially for spouses and charitable gifts. There’s a whole industry working to find possible loopholes, and they are often successful.
And no, there’s no evidence that the heirs go out and set up businesses and hire hundreds of workers. Most of them hive off to the French Riviera, or wherever the hell the rich and lazy congregate these days.
Villago Delenda Est
@jwest:
Once again, if you were the slightest bit familiar with the works of Adam Smith, he’d tell you that the accumulation of wealth to serve as capital is a societal goal, not an individual one.
But then again, you’ve never read Adam Smith. That much is obvious in your mindless recitation of parasite overclass talking points.
Villago Delenda Est
@jwest:
Fixed that for you.
Bulworth
@JPL: Whaddya mean,
“which ones”? It’s self-evident, which ones. Those ones. All of those ones. And all of those taxes Obama raised. //
TenguPhule
Please note Wallstreet and Banks, Making stuff up doesn’t count.
Eat the rich and make soup from their bones.
TenguPhule
The problem with old money passing down the tree is that it congeals and stagnates. Money wants to be free, it wants to fly from one hand to another and circulate round and round the merry go round of the country. Destroying big estates and trusts is part of the cycle of wealth creation. The old must die so the new can grow. We should be raising the estate tax, if anything, the trust fund babies need to be thrown down the cliff like the lion does to its cubs and only the strongest will rise up and be the better for it.
Jenny
This would have been three times as good, if Hillary was president!
steve
One of my profs at NCSU used to say this too, but it’s simply wrong. Intangible things like insurance (which a CDS is) can have value, even if they’re not wearable, edible, rideable, inhabitable, or entertaining.
I used to remind said prof that Switzerland had much higher GDP per capita than the US. They’re not exactly known for their food, textile, entertainment, automotive, housing, or other heavy industries.
Villago Delenda Est
@steve:
CDs, life insurance, etc, only represent the actual value of the stuff that does have true value, because labor was used to give it that value. The vile soshulist Adam Smith postulated this 235 years ago. This is true for gold and silver as well.
They have no nutrient value. You can live without them.
TenguPhule
To be fair, they built up a secretive banking empire over generations and backed by the most feared fighters in all of Europe.
Also, the wealth stealing Catholic Church pays them a pretty penny.
Spike
@arguingwithsignposts:
In the immortal words of Col. Nathan Jessup, “Is there another kind?”