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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (14342)	10/30/2004 2:31:57 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Presidents don't create jobs, people do. You can't in one instant argue productivity increases and global wage arbitrage destroys jobs and then say it's all the President's fault a few minutes later without sounding just a little childish and partisan. I don't doubt for a second that you or people like you are having a difficult time finding a job that pays as much as the ones you lost when the tech bubble burst. My brother-in-law lost his IT job. His high salary was largely a product of a capital investment boom that could not be sustained and Y2K induced shortage of information technology workers. He will most likely never reach that level of compensation again in his lifetime simply because he insists in trying to compete with Indians making a fraction of what he makes instead of doing what he needs to do which is retrain to do something else. On a micro scale this is enormously painful, but on a macro level it doesn't necessarily end there. Someone other than him will train to do something else, will invent some other job. While individuals sometimes get stuck an entire population is unbelievably adaptable to change. Just as the US as a whole didn't suffer in the long run from moving off the farm to the factory and then out of the factory to the office. As for two people working, for most it is choice. I never doubted for a minute I'd work. I never had any intention whatsoever of staying home and being kept from working like my mother before me. We could live on my husband's salary or my salary alone, we choose not to. Now my sisters are a different story, of the four sisters I have, I'm the only one who has consistently worked. Two have advanced degrees which they use while deciding what to cook for dinner and have only worked very sporadically, another had a very short successful career in RE after her kids were grown and retired early and one has never worked outside the home. Right now I have at least half a dozen woman friends who are married to a guy who stays home with the children and I know at least two dozen single parents and single adults who live quite well with one income. To say you can't live without two incomes is absurd since so many people do live on one. They all have one thing in common, they all think they'd do a lot better if they made just a little bit more money. I know people who live on incomes from 12k a year to 250k so something is wrong with that picture. 3) There are more people in poverty that 4 years ago Yes, they keep raising the income floor that classifies people as living in poverty which puts more people in poverty while the living standard for people "living in poverty" continually rises. The poor haven't been getting poorer in nominal terms either, only in relative terms so what must really bother you is that someone is getting richer. Why? For the most part Americans have chosen to try to exact wage increases in the form of nontaxable health benefits. Until recently they were very successful in that strategy but this has backfired on them. Companies are increasingly not willing to shoulder the rapidly rising liability in health benefits. Attaching health insurance to employment will eventually end up costing a lot of people their jobs as the population collectively ages. Companies are still willing to give you work if you are 50 years old (I work for some of the biggest companies out there) but only on a contract basis where you carry those liabilities yourself. I've been warning people this would happen to them as they aged for years and they've been dismissing me as crazy.

To: mishedlo who wrote (14342)	10/30/2004 5:54:37 AM
From: ahhaha	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

The fact are these however: 1)In spite of population growth, Bush is the first president since Hoover to lose jobs on his watch. In the modern era Ford, Carter, and Reagan all "lost" jobs. 2) Bush is the first president EVER in history to lose jobs during "a recovery" During the brief recovery of the late '70s Carter "lost" jobs. Fact is, no president has the control you imply over these things. All presidents need a cooperative Congress or have you forgotten about that part of government. Even then, the people create jobs unless government prevents them from doing so because government has to conduct a war on wealth. 3) There are more people in poverty that 4 years ago. There are more poor people leaving poverty than at any other time in history. 4) Debt levels are unsustainsble Debt levels especially given the feverish real estate borrowing are at the lowest levels ever seen in comparison to the scale of transactions. The proof of that is exteremely low interest rates and non-existent C&I loan demand. Indeed, over the last 6 years we've had the greatest run down of debt in history and that's the important project loan debt, not trivial credit card irrelevancy. 5) Record all time high stimulus of tax cuts, tax credits, military spending, 1% interest rates, a housing boom, and round after round of cash out refis produced ZERO jobs relative to population growth. Fact is, the tax cut was paltry and worth about 1/10 of Kennedy's tax cut. That's all the 'crat Congress would allow. Blame them. Tax credits? That's a 'crat boondoggle where government misallocates resources. Not happening under Republicans. Military spending doesn't increase civilian employment because the military has all the civilian employees it needs at all times. The boom in housing has been mainly in resale. In construction, builders use cheap foreign labor, not lazy, expensive American labor. And, in spite of millions of jobs going to all sorts of foreigners job growth with solid footing is taking place here. What were Cinton's jobs? Superficial hire any damn fool at exhorbitant rates because they have some political angle jobs that were built on a false wealth debt binge. Bush inherited such a gross mess that was put together by a collection of total economic illiterates that it has taken 4 years just to right the boat. Bush had little to do with that righting. Americans don't want to get serious about tax cutting that would make American labor CHEAPER in comparison to foreign labor. So there is at best slow growth in jobs. This is usually how it works. The 'crats squander the wealth on social programs which then has to be fixed. By the time the fixing has been completed Americans are drunk again enough to play fast and loose with the suffering it took to put together the wealth, and so they put the 'crats back in power to bring back another economic disaster. In fact as I said before we LOST jobs. We should be losing jobs because the foreigners will do anything we do cheaper. Do you want to dispute that FACT? 6) The middle class is getting squeezed while the extremely rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The 'crats have been saying this for 50 years. By now the middle class should have ceased to exist, but IN FACT, the middle class is wealthier than it has been in all history as a % of anything and your useless life is easier than it ever has been. So what's your complaint? What's your secret agenda? Why are you brainwashed? Who is paying you to make these remarks? Now you tell me, which of those facts you dispute. All of them since all of them are absurd fictions that could be refuted by a sixth grader. If you do not dispute any, or even if you do, tell me when we are going to see job creation IN THE US, When you start seeing job creation you will start getting poorer, so you better not hope for what you think you want. You only want that because you think it will help you. Wrong, bud. Were jos gained during this "recovery"? They were gained in foreign lands. Do you have a problem with that? Yes, in India and China and Brazil perhaps. You do. That makes you a nepotist and a racist, but mostly another 'crat hypocrite who can't quite unwind all the contradictions that keep coming out and which miss the toilet. We lost jobs in the US. We gained jobs. I really do not care and nor does anyone else that is unemployed that some marvelous technology will creat jobs 2-5-10-20? years from now. Oh, I get it. You're unemployed because you lost a job that was a Clinton job, a hand out, and now we're hearing a lot of whining about your losing fat handouts for doing nothing. Why don't you go and create a job for yourself? Still looking for a handout? That fact does not make me long for 1940 1950 or 1970. It JUST IS. If it it is NOT "just is" them tell me where the F those jobs are that are being created other than part-time employees at Walmart or 68 year old clerks working at mcdonalds. Boo hoo bullshit, you gutless lying weakling hypocrite. You don't give a damn about them. That's a smokescreen. You better quit all that bullshit, boy, or the 'crats will stick it right up your ass and they will consider what they do, doing good. And, they will be happy that you have been taken care of.