To a degree. The kind of damage Bush did is the sort that can last decades. And the Republicans before, after and during Bush have all worked hard to make the situation worse, and to make solutions impossible.
Things have really gone to the crapper since the Tea Party came to DC. Are you saying that’s actually Obama’s fault?
Well, at least this time we don’t have a cataclysmic housing/credit market collapse pushing us off our high perch like we did before. Banks just aren’t firehosing credit onto the market like they used to and people just aren’t buying stuff.
I mean, how much worse can it get? 
I don’t think we have the tools to know and understand whose “fault” it would be 8 years out. All that really matters, though, is that it will be Obama’s fault, politically.
On what basis do you say that? Certainly the political atmosphere seems worse, but is there evidence that the economy is significantly worse since the last election? If so, how do you pin that on the TP?
Almost every Republican signed a pledge not to raise taxes under any circumstances. That means those who created the pledge are involved in governance, Those people are the baggers, the funders and think tanks in back of them and the rich who want more to flow their way.
It is their drive . The baggers are small in number, but they are impacting in the financial backing of the candidates. That is a huge power.
We can not cut the deficits, in a meaningful way, without revenue. Therefore we can not cut the deficit.
They are the basis of gridlock. They refuse to bargain at all. I hope they all get voted out on their ignorant asses the next time they run.
I could be unemployed! Well…again.
Is Bush and or Obama to blame for this mess, maybe/maybe not but THESE “people” have to be held accountable for their part.
Well, this got sidetracked quickly, eh?
As to the OP - yes, there is doubt. If there was no doubt, the market sell-off would be much steeper. I’d put the odds of a second recession at 40% at this point - I’ve seen professionals cite figured between 50% and 33%. There are probably a few who think the likelihood is higher.
The jobs news, which was expected to be bad was actually surprisingly good. Up 170,000 last month. That slowed down the market drop for a bit.
Most of trading is done by super pre programmed computers that react in an instant to projected trends that it recognizes. Then it moves stocks at incredible rates.
Nitpick: not 170,000. 117,000.
If the economy is Obama’s doing, is it also not the doing of the Congress?
Since the Republicans took over the House, GDP growth has dipped, the unemployment numbers reversed the improvements seen in 2010, and the government came within inches of its first-ever default. The S&P is now below where it was on January 3rd when the new Congress was sworn in.
How is the Tea Party responsible? They have prioritized the boogeyman of runaway, unaffordable debt over the real and current problem of economic recovery. They played chicken with the good name of government securities, causing instability in the markets. They delayed the passage of a government budget for months, meaning that the government was unable to efficiently manage its contracts with private industry.
What I’m really saying is that if we want to hold politicians completely responsible for the state of the economy, let’s take a closer look at which party has done more reckless things that seem to be correlated with the current economic panic. It would seem to me that calling the credit of the United States into question is a more likely cause of the markets going down and the possible downgrading of our credit rating, rather than Wall Street waking up this week to realize that a stimulus bill was passed 27 months ago, or a health care reform bill was passed 19 months ago.
I was expecting much worse, based on Congress’ dithering. I’m half-expecting a super good jobs report next month, as delayed hiring kicks in.
Ravenman? It’s just history repeating.
The thought has passed my mind.
Which puts it below the level required to fill the jobs created through population growth. The only reason the unemployment number didn’t go up is because 200,000 people stopped looking for work.
Now, here in Canada we’re undergoing some ‘austerity’ measures and laying off government employees, which many of you think is a ridiculous thing to do in a recession. In our jobs report, the public sector shrank by 71,500 jobs.
But here’s the funny thing: The private sector created 94,500 jobs - which is about 7 times the per-capita private sector jobs creation rate as the U.S. is currently experiencing. And the private sector jobs were primarily full-time jobs in manufacturing, construction, retail and transportation. Good jobs.
So in our case, cutting government spending is actually resulting in a healthier economy. Our private sector responded by creating even more jobs than were lost in the public sector. Our unemployment rate is now 7.2%
So you’re saying that well-educated government workers are now getting jobs in manufacturing and retail?
Interesting…
Every small business owner I know said exactly what Sam said. He’s nailed it dead on. Obama, Pelosi and Reid have done nothing but burden businesses with financial costs having nothing to do with the function of business and continues to threaten companies with increased energy costs by way of carbon taxes.
Are you trying to say that the decrease in public sector jobs in this report is somehow responsible for the increase in private sector jobs? Layoffs in the public sector today translate immediately into an increase in private jobs? Huh?
If so, this is nonsense. I would say the increase in private jobs is more due to the stimulative spending by the government LAST YEAR. The government spent money to get the economy stabalized, and we are just now seeing the results of this spending in the private sector, as the recession is easing.
Could we have a cite for this? One that doesn’t tack “or saved” onto the number of jobs and has some actual data to back this statistic up? Because the last I heard, they still have no solid idea of how many were actually created or saved by the stimulus.
No, but I can see how poor wording on my part (saying ‘the private sector responded by…’) could give that interpretation.
Really? What evidence do you have for that?
I think our reasonably good economy has more to do with what government hasn’t done than what it has done. Government is remarkably quiet in Canada, and has been for some time. Our stimulus was dramatically smaller than the U.S.'s. Our government isn’t intervening in the economy to anywhere near the extent U.S. government has. Our regulatory agencies aren’t getting in everyone’s faces. No one is terrified of an entitlement explosion, because our retirement system is fully funded. Our debt is manageable, and our deficits low and falling quickly. There’s no prospect of large tax changes on the horizon.
Overall, Canada increasingly feels like it has a stable, even playing field, and that’s what ultimately drives investment and job creation. Our major risk is our economic ties to the behemoth to the south.
All the papers I’ve seen touted by people supporting the stimulus are simply updated estimates based on the same Keynesian models used to justify the stimulus in the first place.
The few papers that have come out that have looked at actual empirical data have not found anywhere near the number of jobs the proponents of the stimulus claimed. One peer-reviewed paper even found an outcome where 500,000 government jobs were created, and 1,000,000 jobs destroyed in the private sector as a result of the stimulus, for a net loss of jobs due to the stimulus package. To be fair that was just one of the outcomes within the range of possible outcomes in that paper, some of which resulted in a certain small amount of net job creation. But nothing near the ‘millions of jobs’ the stimulus proponents are still talking about.
Another paper out last year found that around the world, stimulus packages in countries with floating exchange rates and open economies largely failed, with multipliers near zero.