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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (8338)	2/8/2004 12:08:05 AM
From: Patricia Trinchero	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

The Intelligence Commission Published: February 7, 2004 nytimes.com President Bush's new commission to review why the intelligence on Iraq misfired looks more like an effort to deflect attention until after the election than a genuine attempt to get to the bottom of the Iraq fiasco. Though dignified and bipartisan, the members lack the technical expertise to really unravel what was wrong with American intelligence and suggest how to fix it. And Mr. Bush withheld the mandate to get at the big political question they could answer: Did the administration hype intelligence to increase support for the war? The co-chairmen are appropriately of opposite parties: Charles Robb, a Democrat who married Lyndon Johnson's daughter and went on to be elected as governor and senator in Virginia, and Laurence Silberman, a Republican and retired appeals court judge who was a Reagan appointee. The other five members include Senator John McCain, a maverick Republican known to speak his mind; Lloyd Cutler, who was legal counsel for two Democratic presidents; Richard Levin, president of Yale University; and Patricia Wald, a liberal who was chief judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The only appointee with a deep knowledge of intelligence gathering is Adm. William Studeman, a former deputy director of central intelligence. This group lacks the stature and name recognition that would give its findings commanding credibility. Worse yet, it looks as if Mr. Bush, who chose not to allow a truly independent panel, will limit its mandate to a review of intelligence gathering and analysis. He has given the panel the authority to examine why the prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons stockpiles differ from what has been found and to evaluate intelligence on weapons programs in other countries. Mr. Bush did not ask the panel for an unfettered look at how his administration had presented the intelligence in making the case for war. By dodging that, the president leaves voters to find their own answers.

To: Mephisto who wrote (8338)	2/16/2004 6:48:29 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

Consumer Sentiment Worsens in February Fri Feb 13,12:46 PM ET NEW YORK - Consumer attitudes about the economy turned sour in the first half of February, reversing a trend toward greater optimism after the U.S. economy posted stellar growth in 2003. The University of Michigan's mid-month report on consumer sentiment for February dropped to 93.1 from 103.8 in January, according to people in the market who have seen the report. Economists had expected the mid-February sentiment index to inch slightly higher from its reading at the end of January. The median estimate of 16 forecasters was for a reading of 104.0. Michigan's consumer expectations index, which measures attitudes about the near future, was said to have fallen to 88.4 from 100.1 in January, according to the preliminary survey for February. The early reading on the current conditions index was said to have shown a decrease to 100.4 from 109.5 in January. The University of Michigan report is released only to subscribers. Consumer optimism had been improving in recent months as the economy expanded by a scorching 8.2 percent pace in the third quarter and a respectable 4 percent in the final quarter of 2003. The January University of Michigan reading of sentiment had marked the highest level since November 2000. While the consumer sentiment surveys are closely watched by financial markets, the near-term correlation between consumer attitudes and spending remains debatable. The Federal Reserve prefers to watch spending patterns rather than sentiment when evaluating the health of the U.S. consumer and the prospects of the economic growth. Consumer spending represents roughly two-thirds of the gross domestic product. story.news.yahoo.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8338)	2/16/2004 11:21:44 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs February 10, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST By PAUL KRUGMAN The New York Times Last Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered yet another disappointing employment report. Since there's a lot of confusion on this subject, let's talk about the numbers. The bureau actually produces two estimates of employment, one based on a survey that asks each employer in a random sample how many workers are on its payroll, the other on a survey that asks each household in a random sample how many of its members are employed. Most experts regard the employer survey as more reliable; even in the midst of the recovery, that survey has contained nothing but bad news. The household numbers look better, but not particularly good. For technical reasons involving seasonal adjustment, many economists expected the January report to show a one-time bounce in both measures. Yet employment as measured by the payroll survey rose by only 112,000 - well short of the increase needed just to keep up with a growing population. If employment were rising as rapidly as it did when the economy was emerging from the 1990-1991 recession, we'd be seeing monthly numbers more like 275,000. Taking a longer view, the payroll numbers tell a dismal story. Since the recovery officially began in November 2001, employment has actually fallen by half a percent, while the working-age population has increased about 2.4 percent. By this measure, jobs are becoming ever scarcer. The household survey, on which the official unemployment rate is based, tells a less dismal but far from happy story. (Why the discrepancy? We don't know.) The number of people who say they have jobs has risen since the recovery began - but has still lagged behind population growth. The only seemingly favorable statistic is the unemployment rate, which has recently fallen to 5.6 percent, the same as in November 2001. But how is that possible, when employment has grown more slowly than the population, or even declined? The answer is that people aren't counted as unemployed unless they're looking for work, and a growing fraction of the population isn't even looking. It's hard to see how this is good news. Other indicators continue to suggest a grim job picture. In the last three months, more than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks. That's the worst number since 1983, and a sign that jobs remain very hard to find - which is what anyone who has lost a job will tell you. One last statistic - not about jobs, but about wages. Since the last quarter of 2001, real G.D.P. has risen 7.2 percent. But wage and salary income, after adjusting for inflation, is up only 0.6 percent. This matches what the employer survey is telling us: America's workers have seen very little benefit from this recovery. In the light of these dreary statistics, President Bush's recent cheerfulness seems almost surreal. On Friday, he said that he was "pleased, obviously, with the new job growth." When Tim Russert asked in the "Meet the Press" interview what happened to all the jobs that Mr. Bush promised his tax cuts would create, he replied: "It's happening. And there is good momentum when it comes to the creation of new jobs." We expect politicians to place a positive spin on economic news, but to insist that things are going great when many people have personal experience to the contrary seems foolish. Mr. Bush's father lost the 1992 election in large part because he was perceived as being out of touch with the difficulties faced by ordinary Americans. Why is Mr. Bush - whose poll numbers are a bit worse than his father's were at this point in 1992 - running the risk of repeating his experience? The answer, I think, is that the younger Mr. Bush has no choice. He has literally gone for broke, with repeated tax cuts that have fed a $500 billion deficit. To justify policies that more and more people call irresponsible, he must claim that wonderful things are happening as a result. For a while, that famous 8 percent growth rate seemed to be just what he needed. But in the fourth quarter, growth dropped to 4 percent. And as we've seen, the jobs still aren't there. So Mr. Bush must put on a brave face. He and his officials must talk up weak economic statistics as if they represented stunning success, and predict marvelous things any day now. After all, they have to keep this up for only nine more months. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8338)	3/8/2004 7:24:21 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

The Unrecognizable Recovery March 8, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST By BOB HERBERT The Bush crowd couldn't have been more pleased with the timing of the Martha Stewart verdict on Friday afternoon. The big news heading into the weekend was almost guaranteed to be the awful jobs report released by the Labor Department Friday morning. The White House needed a world-class distraction and the Stewart jury, eager to wrap things up before the weekend, obliged. It strolled in, as if on cue, with a verdict of guilty on all counts. Distractions don't get much bigger. The Labor Department report was as grim as faces on a bread line. Despite all the president's promises, the economy added just 21,000 jobs last month. No jobs were added by the private sector. The 21,000 additional jobs were all government hires. The report also showed that job growth in December and January was worse than previously believed. The January tally was revised from 112,000 to 97,000. The December count dropped from 16,000 to a pathetic 8,000. A number of demographic groups are getting absolutely hammered. A new study by Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, found historic lows in the reported labor force participation of 16- to 19-year-olds. According to the study, "The estimated 36.8 percent employment rate for the nation's teens was the lowest ever recorded since 1948." A more ominous finding was that over the past three calendar years the number of people aged 16 to 24 who are both out of work and out of school increased from 4.8 million to 5.6 million, with males accounting for the bulk of the increase. The Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project, in a joint analysis of newly released data, reported a disturbing increase in long-term joblessness. Unemployment lasting half a year or longer grew to 22.1 percent of all unemployment in 2003. That was an increase from 18.3 percent in 2002, and the highest rate since 1983. Among those having a particularly hard time finding work, according to the report, are job seekers with college degrees and people 45 and older. "The new data," said Sylvia Allegretto, one of the authors of the report, "show us an economy that is just not generating enough high-quality jobs to get highly educated and highly experienced workers back to work." The nation is in an employment crisis and the end is not in sight. The Bush administration has no plan, other than a continued ludicrous reliance on additional tax cuts. The White House continued to say on Friday that making the president's tax cuts permanent would be an important step toward solving the employment problem. What is happening in some sectors of the black community is catastrophic. The Community Service Society studied employment conditions among black men in New York City. Using the employment-population ratio, which is the proportion of the working-age population with a job, it found - incredibly - that nearly one of every two black men between the ages of 16 and 64 was not working last year. In the current environment, even apparent good news can have its troubling aspects. An article in The Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago indicated that Latino workers have been doing well, taking a "disproportionate share" of new jobs, especially in the construction and service sectors, since the economy began its recovery. The article referred to a demand for young, male Latino workers. It then went on to say: "Typical of them is Jorge Alberto, a 22-year-old Guatemalan, who doesn't speak English, didn't complete high school and had never held a job - until he slipped across the border into California from Mexico last year. In Los Angeles, `I found a job almost immediately,' he says, pushing a cart through the muddy lot where he and five other Hispanic men are laying the foundation for a house." Workers are facing these bleak employment conditions in a so-called recovery. What happens if we slip into another recession? A favorite metaphor associated with an expanding U.S. economy is "A rising tide lifts all boats." Right now, a lot of the boats have leaks, and they are taking on water fast. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (8338)	3/12/2004 7:52:01 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

No More Excuses on Jobs The New York Times March 12, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST By PAUL KRUGMAN As job growth continues to elude the U.S. economy, we're hearing two main excuses from the Bush administration and its supporters: that the real situation is much better than you're hearing, and that to the extent employment is lagging, it's the result of factors outside the administration's control. But after three years of extravagant promises and dismal results, the time for excuses has passed. Let's start with the real job situation. A number of readers have asked me about what Marc Racicot, who heads the Bush re-election effort, told Don Imus the other day. He claimed that those miserable job numbers are misleading, and that another survey presents both a more accurate and a much happier story. You can find the same claim all over the right-wing media. But it just isn't so. It's true that there are two employment surveys, which have been diverging lately. The establishment survey, which asks businesses how many workers they employ, says that 2.4 million jobs have vanished in the last three years. The household survey, which asks individuals whether they have jobs, says that employment has actually risen by 450,000. The administration's supporters, understandably, prefer the second number. But the experts disagree. According to Alan Greenspan: "I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate. Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow." You may have heard that the establishment survey doesn't count jobs created by new businesses; not so. The bureau knows what it's doing - conservative commentators are raising objections only because they don't like the facts. And even the less reliable household survey paints a bleak picture of an economy in which jobs have lagged far behind population growth. The fraction of adults who say they are employed fell steeply between early 2001 and the summer of 2003, and has stagnated since then. But wait - hasn't the unemployment rate fallen since last summer? Yes, but that's entirely the result of people dropping out of the labor force. Even if you're out of work, you're not counted as unemployed unless you're actively looking for a job. We don't know why so many people have stopped looking for jobs, but it probably has something to do with the fact that jobs are so hard to find: 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks, a 20-year record. In any case, the administration should feel grateful that so many people have dropped out. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, if they hadn't dropped out, the official unemployment rate would be an eye-popping 7.4 percent, not a politically spinnable 5.6 percent. In short, things aren't as bad as they seem; they're worse. But should we blame the Bush administration? Yes - because it refuses to learn from experience. Franklin Roosevelt, in his efforts to combat economic woes, was famously willing to try anything until he found something that worked. George Bush, by contrast, seems determined to try the same thing, over and over again. In 2001 the administration rammed through long-term tax cuts, heavily tilted toward the affluent. But employment didn't turn around, and by late 2002 many economists - including supporters of the original tax cut - were urging it to try something different. My own piece, "My Economic Plan," was fairly typical: I called for extended unemployment benefits, temporary aid to state and local governments, and rebates for low- and middle-income workers. Maybe this more or less textbook response to a depressed economy wouldn't have worked. But we'll never know, because the administration rejected all such proposals. Instead, it went for a clone of the 2001 tax cut - another big break mainly for those at the top. And once again this failed to deliver the promised jobs. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has mortgaged the nation's future. If all of his tax cuts are made permanent, they'll reduce revenue by at least three times the amount that would be needed to secure Social Security benefits at current levels for the next 75 years. No sensible person blames Mr. Bush for the onset of the recession in 2001. But he does deserve blame for the fact that all he has to show for three years of supposed job-creation policies is a mountain of debt. E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com