Sam, I like the way you’re presenting your arguments, because the only way to do this is to look at the stats and try to interpret them. I do look at it from a political point of view sometimes, but only to see if the next guy getting elected is going to have an easy time of it or not.
I didn’t think Bush would have an easy time of it, and despite being a Dem, I didn’t really regret too much that Gore lost in 2000, because I figured the next Prez was going to get socked by the economy. Which up until now has been the case.
Now the stats I look most closely at are the employment numbers, and within that the thing I watch most closely is manufacturing employment, because IMO it’s the most sensitive indicator of current economic conditions. Let’s take a closer look at this.
According to the latest employment situation report from the BLS (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm) “Manufacturing employment fell by 71,000 in July. Employment in this sector has declined continuously since July 2000. Most manufacturing industries posted job losses over the month.” Looking at some of the stats I like to use, manufacturing hours worked fell by .2, while overtime was steady. Of course from the above you can see that employment fell in this sector. It should be noted that employment in this sector has been on a flat to down trend for a long time though, even before this latest cycle, so you do have to take stats like that with a grain of salt.
One interesting thing, and the thing which makes me think the Prez will get the job boost he doubtlessly craves very soon, is the sharp rise in temporary help. To quote “Employment in administrative and support services rose by 85,000 over the month. Within its component industries, employment in temporary help increased for the third consecutive month, adding 42,000 jobs in July. Employment in this industry has grown by 122,000 since April.” Since companies tend to hire temporary workers first on a recovery, this is a good sign.
On balance, I do think we’ll get a recovery. Even Carter managed to increase jobs going into the 1980 election, in part because Volcker, the Fed chair at that time, refrained from raising interest rates in an election year, much as Greenspan has all but said he’ll do in this election. Right after that we went into the worst recession since the Depression, of course. It’s tough to extrapolate from a recovery prior to an election to something longer term. Experience tells me that such recoveries are best approached with a large dose of skepticism.
Nonsense. An ad hominem argument would have been, “Sam, you’re too dumb to see how wrong you are.”
I don’t recall writing anything above where I said you needed credentials to engage in debate in this thread. I was merely curious – after seeing how you asserted that your opponents “don’t really know anything” – as to what credentials you possessed to qualify such a statement. Anything beyond that is left to the individual reader.
Ad hominem means, “to the man”. It means attacking the person offering the argument, rather than the argument itself. That’s exactly what you did.