Or for the non-PC:-
Queens And Nymphomanics Training As Stewards = QANTAS 
We’ve had one quarter of “up”, but only on some measures. This might be a sign of better things or it might just be a temporary blip.
I don’t know why you think think this is true. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of corprations have been contracted by the US government to provide services in Iraq. Think Halliburton. In fact many of these company have been shown to have significant political ties to the current administration.
Money is flowing into these companies (isnt Halliburton up like 50% for the year? In Halliburton, and in other companies contracted to do work in Iraq, some of that money is used to create job.
My question is just how many jobs were created by this, and is it statisically enough to impact the higher economic growth we have see for this past quarter?
bcullman they have not done anything yet. They have not yet been paid.
Perhaps the note on politics and GQ should be reviewed by a couple of people. I’m sure there’s a factual way to discuss whether or not the economy is rebounding without trotting out the “Bush == Evil” pony again.
Whenever the government releases numbers they are “adjusted” which take into consideration the seasonal fluctuations. The actual numbers are only available if you dig through the backup reports. The policy is to put only seasonally adjusted numbers in the press releases to avoid misleading data.
I guess I am old-fashioned (at 66, I come by it honestly). IANAn Economist, so everything I say has to be taken with a large crystal of NaCl, but here is my take on this.
Big Bad Bill did one thing right and that is what kept the economy booming for most of his watch: he got rid of the deficit and made it easy to borrow money. But, but, but doesn’t deficit spending stimulate the economy? Well, yes in the short term, but only the right kind of deficit spending. The kind that is labor intensive. Like the WPA building the Penna Turnpike and the West Side Highway in NYC. If Dubya had decided to create a deficit by doing all those labor-intensive infrastructure things that aren’t done just because they are labor intensive, I don’t think the 4 million (or whatever the true number) jobs lost on his watch wouldn’t be there. And the infrastructure would not be crumbling. Instead he has taken a few hundred billion and put it where it would do the least good. Into the pockets of the people who have the least need to spend it.
Now the above might be seen–not inaccurately–to be idle speculation by someone ignorant of economics. But there is one more point, that again is only anecdotal (but what else is there in economics, since we cannot run the economy again with different policies) and that is the situation in Canada. As it happens around the same time that Bill took over in the US, a Liberal government replaced a so-called Conservative government in Canada. The conservative had given Canada the largest peace-time deficits in Canadian history and Liberal Prime Minister (and especially his finance minister who is now poised to take over as PM) immediately set out to reduce and eventually eliminate the deficit. Canada also boomed. But of course, Canada always boomed when the US does. But in the last three years an odd thing has happened. The US economy has tanked, but Canada has stayed buoyant. The US has gone from huge surpluses to huge deficits while Canada has continued to have huge (in Canadian terms) budget surpluses. Yes, in the last quarter, the US did well and Canada didn’t. SARS and BSE were severe blows that cannot be blamed on the Liberal government and had severe effects in Ontario, the motor of the Canadian economy. Come back in a year to see what ensues, but for the time being, I do believe that while the government cannot do everything about the economy and Bill (and Jean Chretien) did a lot right, Ronnie and Dubya did everything wrong.
Most of you have probably read my “I lost my job” thread, but to recap for the purposes of this thread:
On October 7th we had an all hands meeting where the president of the company told us our division grew 11% in the last quarter. Keep up the good work. I was laid off the next day along with seven other people. Our new VP has a habit of getting rid of people and bringing her own people in, and our new manager was under the impression that we didn’t have enough work to do.
Well… I’ve been keeping in contact with my still-employed friend. One project seems to have been completely abandoned. Data for large customers are not being processed in a timely manner. Work that had been done in a timely manner is now backlogged. There were two people writing Easytrieve Plus programs. When I was made redundant, that left only one. Seeing which way the wind blew, he gave his notice a few days ago so he can go back to his old department. Now there is no one in the department to to write reformat programs.
In short, work isn’t being done and people who are smart are looking elsewhere – in the case of the other programmer, this means that the backlog will only grow larger.
Management says they “have a plan”. In the meantime, work isn’t being done. It might take them six months to start acting effectively on their “plan”. One of our customers called my friend and asked her to have me call her ASAP so I can send her my résumé. As a customer, she is worried about getting her data processed, QA’d and loaded into the database. I’ve heard that other customers are similarly worried. Account Executives are worried that they will not be paid because their accounts are not being loaded.
Will it turn around? Probably. Eventually. Maybe.
Businesses think they can make more money by laying off workers. But this seems to be false economy when they basis of the business is not being done.
If you don’t wanna see the Bush=pony, better keep the Bush=good pony out of sight, cause the one tends to attract the other.
Scue me, it should read “If you don’t wanna see the Bush=evil pony”
Though I’ll go with Bush=pony, come to think of it.
Moved to GD.
-xash
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