That is astonishing, I’m absolutely amazed so little money is being saved. I would have never guessed it to be so low.
Asked again:
Sam, are we in peacetime or wartime?
-Joe
I’m not surprised. Have you checked the interest rate on savings accounts at banks lately? A regular savings account (minimum $300) at Bank of America pays .5%, and a money market account (minimum $2500) pays only .7%. Not much incentive beyond “a penny saved is a penny earned”.
Another interesting datapoint:less than half of the households in US own any shares of stock at all.
You looking for some kind of semantic difference, as in a ‘wartime economy’? Or are you just looking to score a cheap debating point?
We are in a war, but it is a very different kind of war. Certainly it’s not an industrial mobilization type war on the order of WWII or even Korea or Vietnam. I fail to see whether or not defining the war on terror as a ‘war’ or not has anything to do at all with a discussion of the economy.
This thread has just proven once again that partisans on both sides will scour through the economic reports to always find something bad to pin on the other party. Back when the jobs numbers weren’t looking good, democrats had no problem beating Bush over the head with them. Then when the numbers get better, suddenly they are unimportant. Paul Krugman has spent the last five years writing columns predicting catastrophic deflation, then inflation, then deflation, then whatever the hell else he can try to pin on Bush. When Clinton was averaging almost 4% GDP growth and 5% unemployment, it was a ‘miracle economy’. When Bush does the same, it’s worth little more than a yawn and a claim that it’s only about average. If I post a cite to a right-wing think tank or economist boosting the economy, it gets ignored as ‘right-wing porn’ or some such. But if you post cites to left-wing economists, that’s just fine.
This is just a giant waste of time.
And now you’re going to take your ball and go home.
There’s a fucking shock.
It’s either wartime or it’s not. Pick one instead of jerking out of your ass whichever answer fits your current idiotic rant.
-Joe
Wouldn’t your OP be a fine example?
Finally a nugget of truth from you.
Why don’t you just make whatever point it is you’re trying to make, and leave the personal attacks for the pit?
If it was a personal attack I’m sure a mod will be along soon to take care of me.
Anyways, Sam is there a fucking war on or not?
Is it war time or is it peace time?
Are we on double-secret peace time?
Or are you going to just accept that you really stopped being part of the reality-based community some time ago?
-Joe
:dubious: What did you expect?
An excellent point Sam. Not that you’re entirely innocent yourself here, but a thread that lurches around the subject at hand beats the hell out of a thread that degenerates into name calling.
Just guessing, but I think this a response to your adulation of Reagan’s “largest peacetime economic expansion” or however you phrased it.
As for hissy fit – fine: take your ball home. You offered no cites or backup for your OP, as someone pointed out earlier. If the economy is so damned good, cite some economist who says so.
I really didn’t see that many people “doing flips” or other insulting contortions you characterized, but I did see some people questioning the OPs assertions. It’s called debating, Sam. Instead of a debate, what you’ve done is thrown out is some cheerleading, and then, if everyone doesn’t cheer, you declare all responders partisan bitches and leave. Real class.
I didn’t say I was leaving the discussion. I said it had turned into a giant waste of time.
You want cites? Fine.
U.S. Leading Economic Indicators Rose 0.9% in June
Federal Budget Deficit Expected to Shrink
Crude Oil Trades Near a Record as U.S. Manufacturing Expands
US Manufacturing Outlook Brightens
U.S. consumer spending rebounds by 0.8 per cent, factory orders up in June
U.S. Unemployment Rate Forecast
(Chart on cite shows forecast unemployment to be down to 4.71 by December)
Again, as I said before, I believe the deficit is too high, and that’s the fault of Bush. Spending should be at least 100 billion lower right now. But anyone who wants to take the available numbers and try to show that the economy is currently doing poorly has to do flips and twists to do so.
And again - if the major leading indicators were bad, how quickly do you think the Bush bashers on this board would be embracing them as a sign that Bush’s economic plan is a failure?
U.S. manufacturers’ outlook turns negative-report
U.S. GDP shows solid economy, despite concerns
We can do this all day.
Once again, contrary to what you keep claiming, many of us will happily admit that we think the economy is finally starting to show signs of heading in the right direction. We’re also going to keep reminding you that we’re not there yet, no matter what some cherry picked indicator might say to you.
With that said, the deficit is still absolutely horrid and needs to be reigned in quickly, or all the economic indicators in the world won’t save us. Our current debt is over $50,000 per employed person. If my personal debt were that high, I’d stop spending more money than I earned, but then I’m not an economist.
This is the second time you’ve used that characterization in this thread. Who is this aimed at, specifically? I’m fed up with your “all you guys” characterizations of thread respondants. Either debate someone’s points, or admit you’re not debating – you’re witnessing.
I’m a Mod and, while I have no desire to take care of you, I will definitely point out that this statement is inappropriate in GQ.
In addition,
while not quite over the line, is doing nothing to promote reasoned discourse.
Keep your comments to the topic, please, and leave the insults for the appropriate Forum.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
It’s also inappropriate in GD, even when the Moderator is trying to get to bed.
In the first place, it took about two pages of this thread to get you to provide any cites at all, and nobody has attempted to dismiss the ones you finally did come up with solely on the basis of their source. Don’t holler before you’re hurt.
In the second place, as I noted earlier, it is misleading to compare late-90s employment figures with present ones. In the boom years, we saw strong employment indicators overall, including growth in reported payrolls, wage gains above inflation, and increasing numbers of people employed (as well as official unemployment levels below 5%). Since we’re not seeing trends like that now, it’s only reasonable to be skeptical about claims that employment must be doing fine, based only on the official unemployment rate.
And finally, it’s rather unbecoming of you to complain that “partisans on both sides will scour through the economic reports to always find something bad to pin on the other party.” You’re the one who presented this topic in the OP as a gleeful attempt at “Ha! Gotcha!” on critics of Bushonomics.
If you had simply asked “Are there significant signs at present of an improving economy?” or something like that, we could have had a thoughtful debate about that, and you would have had a right to tut-tut at anybody who tried to play partisan politics with the facts. But you’re the one who, right from the get-go, tried to spin your claims into a vindication of the Bush economic policies that you yourself admit are based on an indefensible amount of massive deficit spending. No fair trying to pull a rhetorical stunt like that and then blaming the other side’s “partisan politics” when your assertions get blown out of the water.
Faiir enough. I didn’t post them last time because i thought everyone knew them. They’re in the papers every day. Economic summaries are on almost every major news home page. Demanding cites for the leading economic indicators seemed to me to be like asking for cites that the Space Shuttle is currently in space. It’s part of the major news stream.
But in the end, it’s my responsibiity to provide them on demand, so I did.
Of course, in the 90’s we were in a serious tech bubble which drove up wages like crazy. Bush was the guy who had to pay the piper on that - a fact that made Clinton look better and Bush look worse, and yet was a completely external factor. But that doesn’t stop Democrats from praising Clinton’s economy and criticising Bush’s. Clinton also had the ‘peace dividend’, a global economy that was doing quite well, low energy prices, tons of public optimism and consumer confidence due to the end of the cold war and the tech bubble, etc. The wind was at his back. Everything the economy has gained under Bush has been in spite of the larger trends. A war on terror, a trillion dollars lost in the WTC attacks, the collapse of tourism, a weak global economy, skyrocketing fuel prices, and the collapse of the tech bubble.
Hey, I have consistently used the leading economic indicators in my debates on this issue, as far as I know. The thing is, when you’re willing to selectively grasp at or ignore various standard measures of the economy based on how they fit your desired political point, it becomes impossible to discuss the economy rationally. It’s complex enough that even in the best of times you can find *something wrong, and in the worst of times you can find something right.
This is a fair complaint. I should have not started the debate on such a tendentious foot, and by framing it that way I pretty much guaranteed that the other side would do some digging to come out in rebuttal. My bad.
Can we agree that tomorrow’s rlease of the July non-farm payroll numbers will be instructive?
Certainly they’ll be another solid data point.