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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (271972)	2/4/2006 3:01:20 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1577538

"Take it for what it's worth, but don't expect me to believe you when you claim that more people choose not to work these days, then toss up a bunch of hand-picked data points that don't correlate with each other." Ok, why don't they correlate with each other? Because they are in different articles? Or is that just an assumption on your part? Sure, unemployment has been calculated the same way for years. Always with the acknowledged weakness of only counting those actively seeking work. Oddly enough, when people go for long periods of time with no success, they stop seeking full time employment and try other things. Usually consisting of doing odd jobs and maybe day labor. Or public assistance. Or crime. Case in point. In the early 1980's, the city of Galveston had an official unemployment rate of under 4%. Sounded good until you found out that over 25% of the city's population was on some form of assistance. All of the unskilled jobs filled as soon as they came open, and all of the job demand was at the Medical Branch, ANICO or the various research institutes. So that 25% was stuck with being hired by the day, when they worked at all. But, ok. We had a substantial job loss between 2001 and 2003. After net growth in jobs started to exceed net loss, the net gain in many months didn't meet the growth in population. You have to account for this somehow. Are you claiming that the population didn't really grow at that rate? How do you account for those facts? Just ignore them? You seem to be in denial over them.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (271972)	2/4/2006 4:27:43 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577538

Anyway, the unemployment rate has been calculated the same exact way for years. Take it for what it's worth, but don't expect me to believe you when you claim that more people choose not to work these days, then toss up a bunch of hand-picked data points that don't correlate with each other. Hell, it was a good report and taken in isolation it sounds like everything is fine. However, an economy does not work in isolation. There continue to be many disquieting aspects to this recovery. For an example, its taken nearly three years to get the unemployment rate from 5.5% to below 5% and that's because employment growth has been sub par. Plus, its been shown repeatedly that the recovery is creating mostly low income jobs. In addition, at this stage of the recovery, the job creation numbers should be at 250K per month or more. They are not even close. Over and over again, we have heard that its the consumer carrying the recovery. Why is that? Where is big industry? Why are they not expanding? And what happens when the consumer can no longer carry the economy as it now appears to be happening? And if things are so great why are federal revenue collections still at such a low rate? These are issues you are oh so willing to ignore while you tout the latest job report. Given your background, I don't expect you to be a genius when it comes to the economy but given the questionable data you've seen on this thread, I would have expected you to be a little bit more circumspect. Instead, like with everything else, you think the press, economists and people on this thread are trying to bamboozle you because they must be against Bush. What you don't understand is that the issues being raised would be raised under any president. The reality is the economic recovery has been very weak and sub par compared to other recoveries. The truth is Bush's performance in almost every aspect of this country's operations has been sub par since he took over. These are facts......instead you have chosen to see them as partisan attacks. Sadly, in your mind, you think that alleviates you of any responsibility. Let me suggest to you that big business has been MIA from this recovery for good reason.........they don't feel comfortable with the current trends in this country. However, like you, they won't say too much because they voted for Bush and they like the tax cuts. That's what I think is going on and it scares the hell out of me. Some of the best people in this country may have been co-opted.